Darza looked through the bars of the jail-wagon. The
skeletal horses pulling the wagon were galloping in sync. It was unsettling. He
considered escape, using his considerable force to try prying a corner open.
The hunched figure on top of the coach was undoubtedly dead. Its ankles had
flaps of desiccated skin showing beneath the thin pants. Darza the Bloodletter, they called him, over twenty years ago, when he
was alive. For twenty years, he'd been without purpose. A unique thrall to some
low-life vampire. In life, Darza had been a chaos knight, leading a small group
of marauders to map and plunder. He was hoping they'd find some obscure mountain pass that would lead them straight to a vulnerable target. He'd taken his thirty or so men and wandered
the land, moving from farm to homestead and back, putting the torch to
everything it would reach. When they crossed the border into Sylvania, they
were ambushed and Darza was not killed instantly. He became the plaything of
his master. When his master was politically outmaneuvered by a rival, Darza was
put on trial. He had no idea what a trial was. The men of the North only engage in trials of flesh. This was a trial of words. He was sat down in a chair
and was told that he was guilty of politics and was being punished by banishment.
To some human city. It was already destroyed, he only had to collect some
rocks. Sounded stupid. Sounded easy. He was assigned a team.
*sigh* The team. He looked at the others in the wagon. Vyet
the Necretard, he was called by his new captor before being sent off. Vyet had tried to raise a host of corpses,
and he succeeded. But they turned on each other, and Vyet. His master was,
unfortunately, present, and was assaulted. He'd been given quite a scar, so
this was to be his redemption. Then there was Buford. Some kind of bum, found
living in a crypt, but not eating anything. He simply had nowhere else to go. He should have been skinned alive, crucified, and left outside the crypt. If his kind were
unwanted, why was he not made to be an example to others? Ugh. And Clovis. Some
kind of political malcontent, but of such low breeding that his blood was
unworthy of consumption, and it pleased his captor slightly more to send him on
a petty quest a thousand miles from home than to stab and re-animate him. Lastly,
Ned. Apparently he kidnapped some protected merchant's daughter for some
reason. If the merchant's master couldn't protect his spawn from one ugly
living man, he should find a new master...
The city loomed in the mist before him. He saw a massive stone wall which, while old, did not seem necessarily abandoned. In fact, it looked
like there may have been movement on the parapets. The cart stopped and the back door
dropped, releasing the prisoners. The five men piled out, and stood there.
Darza walked to the front of the cart. The skeletal horses must have been some
kind of temporary undead. As he watched the pair, the jawbone dropped off the
nearest one, hitting the cobblestone streets with a spray of tooth-shards. Khorne-forbid he could get a mount like a true knight of chaos. He
turned to his "team" and took off his helmet, revealing an empty eye
socket and a massive gaping wound on the lower jaw, like a second smile.
"You. Follow me. Obey or die. I care not for any of you."
He spit on the ground, a wad of black liquid, to emphasize his point. Good pep
talk. As they entered the city, they passed by the dried corpses of several
people amidst the abandoned houses. Each looked to have died a horrible death by unknown hands, wielding unknowable weapons. He looked back at the dead eyes of the driver. "Bring him
too." The pathetic necromancer gestured and did some kind of foul
incantation and four corpses trudged behind the group. He looked at the
necromancer and put his helmet back on. "I find them guilty. Of weak
will. The conquest of the Penal Company begins now..."
Darza chuckled and entered the city gate.
No comments:
Post a Comment