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Silence ran free throughout the settlement; the guards had been quietly eliminated. Without looking, Bear massaged the cramp from his stiff, sore fingers and peeked timidly around the corner of a canvas tent. The weak moon was hiding himself behind masses of cloud and the night was almost pitch black; light from many fireplaces cast long, would-be startling shadows across the open space that lay between his band of warriors and the large wooden structure they were making for. The night was crisp and cold, as the nights in the hills often were, causing his weapon hand to become almost numb.
Reaching inside his pouch, Bear retrieved a small bone square and squeezed it, as he did so, a high-pitch creak issued from it, sounding just like a cricket. Answering clicks were heard from a patch of deep shadow behind a wood hut off to Bear’s right where Wolf and his half of the warriors lay hid, completely indiscernible, like mist in the darkness.
Light suddenly spilled forth from the large wooden building; two men staggered out into the night, wheeling and singing as they came. One peeled off towards a tent, but the other kept coming on towards them. As he passed the group, Bear caught a whiff of wine.
The man stopped right next to the warriors and turned his back to urinate on a tree. Bear quickly nodded at Finch, who stole over to the man and arching his head back slit the southerner’s throat, his blood poured black onto the dew stricken grass, another man never to return to the flower-clad downs of the south.
Finch soon returned to the group, after dragging the man’s corpse into a small copse of firs; his face was void of any emotion, be it anger or hate or disgust, completely and utterly void – the hillmen’s anger was now beyond any reasonable emotion and they all now danced in a steel-like, mechanised waltz of death.
Without a backward glance, Bear strode towards the closed door of the great building, only going out of his way to stoop and pick up a burning brand from a nearby fire. Like a host of locusts, the hillmen descended upon the building. Suddenly Bear tossed his flaming brand high up above the roof of the building.
It came crashing down and smote itself upon the thatching around the guttering of the building. Other hillmen lobbed their torches onto the roof and if the hillmen had stayed to observe, fires sprang up all over it and began to consume it.
All twenty-seven warriors rushed their way into the hall. Southerners sprang up from their seats, many to Bear’s silent, private approval still wore their weapons, at least it wouldn’t be too much of a massacre.
Bear’s musings were suddenly broken when a tall man took a long, drunken swipe at his head with a club. Quickly ducking the blow, Bear slammed his axe into the man’s torso. The hit landed across his chest and he fell crashing back onto a fallen table. Torrents of blood mixed with spilled wine as Bear crashed through the southerners.
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