The money was gone, and with it the luxury of food. Geneviève had been riding north for three days, her stomach twisting like a knot of vipers. Thrunbor's new armor was a marvel of engineering: the plates slid over one another like dragon scales, the weight was perfectly distributed across her shoulders and no longer bore down on her aching back. But one cannot eat steel.
The road climbed toward the Pale Sisters, a limestone mountain range that shone like exposed bone under the moonlight. It was a no-man's-land, contested between the impoverished nobles of Bretonnia and the things that crawled out of the bowels of the earth. Geneviève chewed on a bitter root she had plucked from the roadside, trying to cheat her hunger. Her decision to spend everything on equipment had been necessary, but now she was paying the price. A knight who faints from hypoglycemia is about as useful as a glass sword.
It was her horse that warned them first. The destrier's ears swiveled back, and a shiver ran through the animal's powerful muscles. Geneviève stopped her mount. She closed her eyes inside the helm and inhaled through the slit. The cold mountain air carried a sickly sweet and pungent smell. Musk. Wet fur. Excrement. And then, a sound. Chitter-chitter. A frantic squeaking, like a thousand fingernails scratching on stone.
Further ahead, the road passed through a narrow gorge, dominated by the ruins of an ancient signal tower. Geneviève felt a vibration at the base of her skull. Detect Evil. It was not a precise compass, but a sudden nausea warning her when something unnatural was near. And that nausea was strong.
Geneviève did not charge blindly. She dismounted, tied the reins to a twisted pine, and advanced on foot, silent despite the thirty kilos of metal on her back. The pig fat on the joints and the Dwarf's craftsmanship made her steps heavy but stealthy.
She peered over a rock. In the gorge, a wagon of pilgrims of the Goddess Shallya (the goddess of healing and mercy) had been overturned. The bodies of the monks, dressed in white, were scattered on the gravel, stained with red. Over them, a teeming mass of gray fur and naked tails moved frantically. Skaven. Rat-men. The nightmare of children, the plague that nobles pretended did not exist. There were about twenty of them. Filthy Clanrats, armed with rusty blades and yellow teeth, tearing at the clothes of the dead and fighting over loot. In the center, a larger Packmaster, wearing stolen armor badly fitted and holding a whip, barked shrill orders.
Geneviève felt rage rising, cold and lethal. Shallya was a goddess of peace. Killing her followers was an act of cowardice that deserved only extinction.
She drew her new sword. The blade left the scabbard with a silken whisper, not the metallic clatter of the old weapon. It was perfectly balanced. Geneviève stepped out of the shadows. She shouted no challenges. The time for words was over.
The first Skaven died without even knowing what had killed it. Geneviève decapitated it with a horizontal slash so rapid that the creature's head rolled away while the body still took a step forward. The pack spun around, squeaking in terror and fury. "Man-thing! Kill-kill!" shrieked the Packmaster, cracking his whip.
The Skaven threw themselves at her like a tidal wave of fur. In the past, with the old armor, Geneviève would have had to worry about exposed joints, about rotten straps. She would have had to parry every blow. Now, she simply walked through the storm. The rats' rusty blades bounced off Thrunbor's tempered plates with sharp sounds, ting-ting-ting, without leaving even a scratch on the dark burnishing. Geneviève was a monolith.
She swung the sword in a deadly arc. The masterwork blade cut through flesh, bone, and boiled leather without slowing down. Two Skaven fell, opened from neck to groin. A braver Skaven jumped onto her back, trying to slip a dagger into the neck slit. Geneviève did not panic. She threw her elbow back, and the reinforced point of the vambrace smashed the creature's skull with a wet sound.
The Packmaster, seeing his underlings slaughtered by that black iron golem, decided to intervene. He was fast, high on warpstone, with eyes glowing with green light. He lunged forward with a two-pronged spear, aiming for the slit of Geneviève's helm. The strike was precise. Geneviève saw it coming. Instead of parrying, she sidestepped. The spear screeched against the side of the helm, sending sparks flying, but the visor held. Geneviève's neck absorbed the impact without breaking.
Geneviève let go of the sword with one hand and, with a movement the old armor would never have allowed, grabbed the shaft of the enemy's spear. The rat squeaked in surprise, trying to pull the weapon back. But Geneviève's grip was that of a farrier holding a bucking horse steady. With a violent yank, she pulled the Packmaster toward her. The rat stumbled. Geneviève brought her armored forehead down onto the beast's snout. Headbutt. The sound of breaking bone was nauseating. The Packmaster collapsed, stunned, black blood dripping from his broken nose. Geneviève raised her shod boot and ended the threat with a definitive stomp to the chest.
The rest of the pack fled, scattering among the rocks like cockroaches exposed to light. Geneviève remained alone amidst the corpses. Her breathing, thanks to the new breastplate, was regular. She no longer panted like a broken bellows. She felt intact.
She wiped the blade on the fur of a dead rat and sheathed the weapon. She approached the overturned wagon. There were no survivors among the monks. But Skaven are looters, not just killers. Geneviève rummaged through the pouches of the dead Packmaster. She found a small bag of Imperial gold coins (likely stolen from another traveler) and, wrapped in a greasy rag, a piece of hard, moldy cheese.
She looked at the cheese. It smelled of rat. She looked at the coins. They were stained with blood. Her stomach roared, painfully. Geneviève took the coins. They were needed for the horse, for oil, for survival. War costs money. Then she took the cheese. With a small knife, she scraped away the moldy and greasy outer part until only the hard yellow heart remained. She lifted her visor, looking around to ensure she was alone. She ate the cheese. It tasted of despair, but it gave her the strength to stay on her feet.
As she chewed, she noticed something sticking out from under the corpse of an elderly monk. It was a brass scroll tube, sealed with the wax seal of the Dove of Shallya. She picked it up. The seal was broken. The Skaven had opened it, but probably didn't know how to read or had discarded it because it wasn't food. Geneviève unrolled the parchment. It was not a prayer. It was a map of the border region, with red marks hastily drawn around a mining village called Karak-Azgaraz (a Dwarven stronghold) and a note written with a trembling hand: "The fever is not natural. The water is poisoned at the source. Send help before the quarantine fails."
Geneviève reread the note. A magical disease. A poison. Skaven in the area. She closed the parchment and tucked it into the rigid case on her belt. Karak-Azgaraz was two days' walk to the east. Dwarves do not like humans meddling, and they hate Bretonnian knights even more. But there was a sickness to stop, and Geneviève had just discovered that her hands could burn away poison.
She mounted her horse again. The shadow of the Pale Sisters stretched over the valley. Her stomach was still half empty, but now she had a direction. "Let's go," she said to the horse, her hoarse voice booming inside the new helm. "It looks like we have a job."