“Help me,” said the second man.
“You smell that?”
They’d limped their way among the corpses. The shape of battle could still be seen, as the dead lay in scattered lines across the field, which hadonce been a pasture for goats. On one side, the bodies trailed away, where the ranks had broken and men were hewn down in the rout a few hours before.
“I smell rain,” the second man said. “And dead people. Help me, would you?”
The first man, the taller of the two, bent and hauled his friend to a standing position. This second man, short as his friend was tall, grunted on his wounded leg. It was unlikely that he could stand unaided, let alone travel any distance on foot.
“Smell that?” the first man asked again.
“I told you, it’s corpses,” the short man said. “We don’t got a lot of time. They’ll be back soon.”
“Listen.”
“Shut up, would you? I need help.” The short man coughed, a harsh, painful sound. “Won’t last long, we keep going this way. What’re you listening for?”
“I don’t know,” the first man said. “Thought I heard something.”
“Hunters?”
“No, I thought… I thought it was singing.”
The short man cursed. “You’re in worse shape than I am.”
An hour of limping and creeping through the flooded plain led them to a slope below the road. The short man pointed. “Look. The marker. What’s it say?”
A stone road-marker rose over the slope of the highway, the only thing still standing on the field.
“I can’t read it,” the first man said.
“Just as good,” the short man said. “Not like it’d help us get out of here any faster.”
The tall man began stripping things from the nearest body.
“You hear?” the short man said, lying with his shattered ankle spread out before him, watching as the taller man continued. “Emperor’s declared a new era, with this war.”
“There’s always war,” the first man said. “Sovereign declares a new era whenever they want. Always got some fancy name, enlightenment or peace…”
He spit to the mud, buried his arm in a piece of armor that wouldn’t come off. The body was missing a leg, and the head had been removed. He ignored it, covering himself with drying blood as he tried to pry the armor away. “Always war,” he repeated, grunting. “Musta been someone important, they took his head like that.”
“They say it’s the coming of the Age of Plagues, is what this is,” said the second man. “The monks. Say it’s desolation.”
The armor finally came free. A belly-guard. Straps cut through, bent and mangled from a fall. The tall man sighed, dumped it with the rest. “’Spect they’re right.”
“Don’t seem to care much, uh.”
“Do you?”
The short man shrugged. “I’m alive. Got both my feet ’n my hands. It is what it is.”
“Is what it is,” the taller man agreed.
Soon the moon had risen. The tall man gazed up through patches in the clouds, and they made their way across the road. An abandoned hut lay wilting at the edges of the field; it might give them shelter. He shivered in the creeping dark. To him, it seemed that all at once, all light had been extinguished. A chill passed. “Hey. What’s that?”
A small shape in the field – a young girl hopping from corpse to corpse, holding something in her hand. He couldn’t make it out. The girl moved with an eerie calm despite the carnage all around.
“One more step, one more step…”
