Stones and Blood

Blood soaked the mud.

Calder Vane dragged Dog's Hunger through it, the battered blade carving a black wound across the field. His boots slurped through muck that had swallowed better men whole. The rain came down in knives, slicing through armor, skin, and breath alike.

Behind him, the dead steamed. Ahead, more waited. They always did.

Calder spat, tasting iron and rot. His hands ached. His ribs ached. Somewhere in the ruins ahead, another debt twisted itself tighter around his throat. Another grave waiting to be dug.

He rolled his shoulder, feeling the scar tissue pull.

The sword shifted against his back — heavy, patient, hungry.

Same as him.

No gods here. No banners, no brotherhood. Only promises made when the blood was hot and stupid, promises that refused to rot properly.

The wind screamed across the Greyward Marches, dragging the stink of death with it. Calder lowered his head and walked straight into it, boots sinking deep, shoulders set like a siege tower.

There was killing to be done.

There was always killing to be done.

The first arrow hissed past his ear.

Calder twisted low. Mud splattered up his cloak.

The second arrow found his shoulder — a tearing gouge, shallow but bloody. He grunted, baring his teeth. The mist closed in tighter. Shadows flickered at the broken walls ahead.

He moved fast, without elegance. Dog's Hunger came off his back with a dull roar of steel.

Another shadow charged — a scrawny man with a club wrapped in chains. Calder sidestepped the swing and caved the man's face in with the pommel of his sword. One brutal downward smash — bone crunched, teeth scattered into the muck.

No pause. No breath.

Another enemy lunged from the left, low with a hooked blade aiming for Calder's ribs. Calder pivoted hard, catching the weapon across his vambrace with a sharp hiss of steel, and drove an elbow into the attacker's throat. The man gurgled, stumbled — Calder slammed Dog's Hunger down through his skull with a wet, chopping blow that nearly split him to the teeth.

Breath steaming, Calder turned.

More were coming.

Three this time.

Good.

He charged them before they could brace, boots pounding through the sucking mud. The first swung a battered axe — Calder knocked it aside with a snarl and shoved his boot into the man's knee. Ligaments tore. The man screamed and folded. Calder buried the sword into his chest and ripped it free sideways.

Blood sprayed. Dog's Hunger sang low and ugly.

The second foe hesitated. Calder rammed his shoulder into him, driving the man back into a broken pillar hard enough to snap bones. Before the man could recover, Calder seized him by the hair and slammed his face against the stone until it stopped being a face.

The third tried to run.

Always one.

Calder threw a knife — a rough spin, half instinct — and caught the man just below the shoulder blade. He fell screaming into the mud. Calder stalked after him, slow, deliberate, uncaring of the freezing rain now lashing across the field.

The man begged in a broken voice, words bubbling out through mud and blood. Calder said nothing. He yanked the knife free, planted a boot on the man's neck, and drove Dog's Hunger down, cutting short the noise.

The rain drowned it all anyway.

Calder stood alone again, breathing hard through clenched teeth.

Steam rose from his blood-slicked armor. His muscles ached, old wounds pulling, new ones bleeding freely down his side.

Good.

Pain meant you were still alive.

He wiped his blade across the dead man's jerkin and shoved it back into its harness with a grunt. He turned toward the ruins — half a shrine, half a tomb now.

Somewhere in there, better men had died thinking they were fighting for something.

Now it was just a pile of broken prayers and corpses.

Just another place to bleed in.

Movement — quick and sharp — snagged Calder's eye.

More scavengers. More carrion crows in human flesh.

Five of them this time. Spread out. Shields lifted. Short blades gleaming dully under the stormlight.

A real squad this time.

Not rabble.

Calder tasted blood as he grinned. His jaw ached from it.

The first two moved in tandem — a feint left, a thrust right. Good technique, bad timing. Calder let the left man close, caught his blade against his vambrace, and twisted brutally. Tendons popped. Calder smashed his forehead into the man's face, feeling cartilage collapse.

The second man stabbed — Calder rotated on his heel, catching the thrust under his arm, locking it. He wrenched the blade free from the man's fingers and drove it into the side of his neck.

Spurts of hot blood fountained over Calder's chest.

He barely blinked.

The third man tried to shield charge him. Calder sidestepped and rammed a heavy iron-toed boot into the side of his knee — hyperextension, ugly and final.

The man screamed. Calder silenced him with a thrust low into the gut and up through the ribs.

The last two broke and ran.

Cowards.

Calder threw his knife — low, dirty — it buried into the back of one, dropping him in the mud. The other made it to the edge of the mist, disappearing into the gloom.

Calder didn't chase.

He wasn't paid for purges.

Only survival.

By the time he reached the shrine proper, Calder's cloak was heavy with rain and blood. His breathing was ragged. His fingers cramped around the hilt of Dog's Hunger as if the sword were the only thing tethering him to the world.

The shrine offered little shelter — just broken stones and eyeless statues drowned in moss. Calder staggered inside and dropped heavily against the remnants of an altar.

He drew the flask from his belt. Rotgut whiskey burned down his throat and across the arrow wound in his shoulder as he poured it directly into the gouge.

Teeth clenched, he wrapped a filthy strip of cloth around it. A rough knot. A bad patch.

But it would hold.

For now.

The storm howled around him, battering the stones, rattling the last broken prayers nailed to the walls.

Calder closed his eyes for a breath. Just one.

Another shape moved outside the shrine's threshold.

Low. Silent. Waiting.

A hunter's patience.

But Calder was older. Colder.

He rose without a sound, Dog's Hunger already gripped low and ugly in one hand.

The debt wasn't waiting anymore.

It was hunting him.

And Calder Vane was tired of running.