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The bridge, it was old, very old. Large and ancient stone blocks formed the arches which spanned the wide river. Mace, pick and monstrous talons had clawed these stones, scarred them, but only the surface. The heart of the stone, the strength of the bridge, survived.
Ragnar gave a chuckle when he saw the bridge. This was Geoff, he thought, this worn and defaced stone bridge. Its conquerors had used it, tried to destroy it, but the heart remained, the strength, and what had been destroyed would be rebuilt. He saw it in Hochoch.
Human-kind was returning to the Duchy, rebuilding, and repairing. These giants and the monsters which followed beside them, they destroyed and ravaged the land. That was their great weakness, this mindless destruction. At least in their homelands the giants built. Halls of wood, caverns of ice and stone. When they couldn't get slaves to work for them they would work for themselves. But here in these conquered lands they had slaves a plenty. Here they did not work, hunted only for sport, became lazy and cruel even by the standards of their own kind. The giants belonged in the hills and the mountains, not these lowlands.
"What?" Emiel asked, riding near on Ragnar's righthand side.
"Nothing." Ragnar said. "Just thinking, that is quite some bridge"
"That old pile of stone?" said Ted riding on his left. "I'm always surprised to see its survived the spring floods."
"Halt!" a voice commanded from out of the growing mist.
The fog had truly descended and they could see no more than a score of feet around them.
Ragnar brushed his hand against the grip of a hand-axe balanced for throwing which he kept along his saddle, but, before he could even choose to act or stay his hand, Emiel called out.
"No one is here." he said in a strong voice.
"It's too dark to see." the voice replied.
There was the sense of a presence, and watchful eyes, staring from within the surrounding fog, that followed them as they crossed from the roadway to the bridge.
The iron-shod hooves of their horses echoed strangely from within the tunnel of mist and fog which they rode through. Ted coughed, his throat tickled by the mist, and the sound was like that of some accursed hound barking from the depths of a distant hell.
Ragnar remained silent. Fog was a bane of his people. It ate the stars which guided their longships, shrouded the mountains, stranding those who dared such peaks and pathways till it chose to depart, and, according to the skalds, could steal a man's soul and hide it among the echoes of his voice. He had no fear of an honorable death but he had plans for his soul earning a place among the silver roofed halls of the afterlife, not caught for eternity among the cloudy depths of the fog.
It was with a great relief that the three riders passed from the bridge and back onto solid ground.
* * *
It was full dark and the misty fog obscured what little light the moons and stars provided. With the onset of the dark, the three riders had to dismount and lead their horses, crawling across the monster infested land when they most desired to be galloping to their destination.
Emiel led the way, though all three kept fairly close together. He unerringly picked a path through the overgrown and disused track of a road. Only the wandering patrols of orcs and goblins came this way.
Geoff, under its giant masters, had become only a series of isolated villages, manors or farms. The larger towns lay in ruins, the capital a burned-out husk, unable to support a population not directly tied to the land. The few slave farms which produced food sent all they produced into the bottomless stomachs of the giants.
Smaller towns became the dwellings of one giant clan or another. Their indolent masters letting the survivors of the invasion live as slaves to support them,,
There was little interaction between town and town. The old roadways became disused. The more destructive of the giant's servants burned and looted what their masters had not claimed or had left unprotected. The small freeholder, the backbone of the Duchy, those who had not fled, they faced not the overlordship of the giants but the mindless brutality of the ogres, orcs and goblins who infested the conquered land.
It was to one of these small, abandoned freeholds that Emiel led them. The family which had for generations farmed this land had fled before the oncoming terror. The sturdy house and some of the out-buildings had survived with only a casual amount of vandalism and malicious damage, done almost without thought by the orcs and goblins who routinely swept through this area. These patrols, in fact, often used this very manor to lair in when passing, especially on bright sunny days when the light of the sun brought a queasiness to the stomach, a weakness to the limbs and pain to the eyes.
The road leading to the freehold had vanished long ago. The three walked slowly across a field overgrown with wild grain now lying unharvested, broken stalked and rotting on the cold ground. It crunched underfoot and pulped at its base leaking a stinking ooze.
Ragnar had lost all sense of time. The fog made him uneasy. The mist was no doubt leaving a layer of rust among the steel rings of his mail shirt where the oil had rubbed off, and he was catching a cold.
"How much longer?" he asked Emiel quietly.
"Shhh..."Emiel hissed back. Then inching his way back to where Ragnar and Ted had stopped he said very quietly "Soon. We are near. This field is near the main house."
"Are we going right up to the house" asked Ragnar
"Of course not." Emiel answered. "but I need to see the house to get my bearings."
Ragnar shrugged. He had raided and ambushed in his past, but tonight all he wanted was a warm fire or a good fight, and it looked unlikely that he'd get either.
Emiel was an amazing guide.
When Talberth introduced them in Hochoch, he would never have believed that the small, neatly dressed dandy would be so at home finding his way in wild country in the middle of a cold foggy night.
They'd walked only another ten or so minutes when Emiel froze in his tracks ahead. Ragnar saw Emiel stop before he smelled the smoke for himself. Not just wood, but meat. Meat roasting over an open fire.
Ted came up beside him. "Something ahead." he stated.
"Looks like we have company." Ragnar said and slid his axe from the carry strap over his shoulder.
* * *
(To Be Continued)