Chapter 1006 — The Chessboard
Blade of Dawn · Page 3 of 4
A Typhon officer in black light armor and a heavy coat walked across the still-hot battlefield, the earth muddy and cold underfoot. The Cecil explosives had turned over almost all the soil on this hill; everywhere the eye fell there was ugly black earth and shattered stone, and between the clods seeped black-red blood not yet congealed, or fragments of human remains mixed in. Only a few corners of the hillside still showed patches of white where the snow had not melted — and those whites, set against the black and red, stood out almost painfully.
The stench in the air was enough to turn the stomach — the officer was a veteran of many battlefields, yet the smell that hung over this ground was one he had never met elsewhere; it was not only the reek of blood, but much else besides, sharper and more foul.
Soldiers bustled nearby: some sorting and salvaging what supplies could still be used, some gathering up the bodies that could still be gathered, some drawing out the prayer books they carried and intoning blessings and requiems to their own gods. The officer frowned, stepped past these men at their work, and walked on.
At last he stopped beside a great boulder blackened by shellfire — or perhaps it was no boulder but a ruined fortification — where a man on the verge of death lay, huddled like a writhing clump of mud between snow and blood.
The officer crouched and looked at the Typhon soldier struggling for breath. From the insignia left on his clothing, he judged him a member of the 11th Regiment of the National Knight Order, a knight of low rank — the soldier lay in the dirt with so many wounds that they could no longer be counted, only a great deal of foul blood gluing him to the earth around him. The fatal wound was a great tear in chest and belly, perhaps from a flying shell fragment, perhaps from a shard of sharp stone; whatever the cause, it had plainly ended the man's life.
In fact, a "normal" human would have stopped breathing long ago.
The officer lowered his head, his gaze passing over the wounds, and among the fouled blood he saw small writhing granules of flesh and tendrils — the nauseating growths were stretching out in vain, as if trying to close the wounds, to gather back the blood that had been lost. But the effort was doomed; judging by the ever-weaker writhing, this "gift of the gods" had clearly reached its end.
Perhaps sensing someone nearby, or perhaps in a final rally before death, the next second the soldier on the ground, about to breathe his last, suddenly opened his eyes. His clouded, mad eyes glowed a frightful blood-red, yet he still managed to make out the figure before him, and a weak voice came from his mouth: "Sir... sir..."
The officer looked at him and said softly the words he had said so often these days: "Hold on. The medics are coming."
"No... no need..." the soldier murmured, his head swaying with a motion almost imperceptible. "The Lord is calling me... already calling me..."
The officer watched him without expression, listening to the muddled whisper of a man at death's door, offering no comfort, no further encouragement.
The soldier's murmur grew fainter and lower, but suddenly a spark of light rose in those blood-red eyes; his last strength seemed to gather itself, and fixing his gaze on the officer beside him, he asked again and again, as if deranged: "Did you witness it? Did you witness it... did you witness it..."
The officer looked at him and said slowly: "Yes. I witnessed it."
The soldier seemed to relax at once, as though his last wish had been granted, and the light in his eyes dimmed swiftly — whether it was the light of madness and distortion or the radiance of humanity, it dimmed all the same. His sunken chest squeezed out the last breath, carrying with it a sigh: "I feel... a little cold..."