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The One Road – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The One Road

David Guymer

‘Hey!’ Vogel Hornbroom climbed onto the smoothed wooden plank of his seat and waved his arms vigorously above his head. ‘He-ee-ee-ey!’ he yelled, still flapping his arms to the other wagon as it clattered into view.

It came around the same bend in the road where Vogel’s had left it, emerging from behind the dark, heavy leaves and crooked branches like Hysh peeking out from behind a cloud. Its sideboards were colourfully painted – a well-armed band of travelling players, perhaps – but wind, rain, Hysh, and the general hostility of the realms had bleached the once-bright colours. A pair of lanterns swung from wooden frames either side of the cabin, just behind the driver’s board. Two more jangled amidst the mass of tack worn by the two palfreys drawing it along.

A single, fearful-looking woman sat in the high seat with the reins. She was wearing a tough, waxed coat with the hood drawn up over a mail coif. It was getting too dark for Vogel to make out much of her features. The red ember of the pipe stem in her mouth revealed the shape of a face, the glint of silver in her hair, and no more. She clutched the amulet around her neck and looked away. Her wagon rolled on.

‘Pox take you!’ Vogel screamed as the sadly coloured vehicle trundled out of sight. ‘May your seasons always be cold! May your plantings always lie in fallow soil!’

The clop of the palfreys’ hooves and the creak of the wagon’s axle faded. The light from the lanterns crept away more slowly, as though dragged along after the wagon by chains.

Vogel sat down heavily and cursed.

Whatever you do, the Freeguild soldier at the Festermere Realmgate had warned him, speaking in the incredibly bored tones of one who had delivered those words a thousand times, do not stray from the road. Vogel, too, had heard the warning before. He knew the Dreadwood was dangerous, of course. Where wasn’t? But Thyrian grain sold in Greywater Fastness for twenty times what Vogel could make for it in the Living City, making it well worth the longer journey and the added risk. Nothing grew in Greywater, it was said, hard as that was for Vogel to imagine. It was bounteous in only three things: guns, foes, and coin. His grim-faced, amulet-clutching troupe mistress, however, had evidently heard the same warning and taken it firmly to heart. Vogel wished he had been as attentive, but familiarity, he feared, had made him careless.

Well, there was nothing else for it. A common seller of grain he might be, but he was hardly unaccustomed to fending for himself on hazardous roads. Holding onto the high, castle-like sides that ran around the driver’s seat, he peered over the side.

‘Thorns,’ he swore.

The wagon had rolled twenty or thirty yards into deep forest and gone over a thick root. It would be a job to get the front wheel back over it again. What was more, it was uphill all the way back to the road from there. At least the horse had come through unscathed. The roan mare looked winded and a little shaken. She cropped anxiously at a bit of lichen growing on the side of the tree with her ears flat to the side of her head. She had attracted a few emerald-coloured wisps of fairy-light. She whickered nervously, swatting at them with her tail, but the woodland spites seemed more curious than malicious for the time being. It could certainly have been worse. Vogel sat back while he weighed his options.

He doubted he would be able to push the wagon back onto the road on his own. He liked to think himself a strong man, but he had a few rings around his trunk these days, and tired more quickly than he used to. He briefly considered stamping on the trapdoor under his seat and rousing his passenger, somehow still sleeping off a hangover in the cabin below, but quickly dismissed the idea. The duardin had brought nothing but bad luck since Vogel had hired him and his axe for the journey. In hindsight, that should have come as no surprise. His introduction to the fiery duardin had, after all, been the aftermath of a tavern brawl which the duardin had himself started by throwing a Sigmarite priestess across a table and spilling a pair of grizzled ogor mercenaries’ drinks. At the time, Vogel had thought that the priestess’ loss was his gain; the duardin was clearly battle hardened, which was invaluable on the road, but he wondered now if a few of the curses that the woman had called down on him hadn’t stuck.

There’d been the shouting match that the duardin had got into with the guards at Festermere Realmgate, for instance. The punitive inspection of Vogel’s cargo that those same guards had then decided to perform had resulted in him being separated from his caravan and having to ride through dusk to catch up. Would the horse have spooked the way it had otherwise? Would Vogel have been dozing at the reins instead of being alert to a perilous bend in the road? He thought not.

The snap of a branch under something’s foot made him look up. His heart thumped against his breastbone as he scanned the darkening forest. He didn’t breathe for what felt like minutes. The spites buzzing around his poor horse’s mane appeared to have multiplied since the last time he looked, but the forest otherwise was quiet and still. Unnervingly so. The road beyond had turned a putrid, algal green under the light of Ghyran’s moons. It was so near that Vogel could almost imagine himself leaping to it from the top of his wagon. Some instinct kept him from trying it. The innate wood-lore that was present in some degree in everyone born and raised in Ghyran told him that to set foot in this forest would almost certainly mean his death.

That same instinct compelled him to pick up the musket he had left propped up in easy reach against the sideboards and point it into the forest. His aim shook. The firearm slid in his sweating palms. He swallowed the lump in his throat and tried to calm his nerves, but the soldier’s warning ran around inside his head.

Do not stray from the road…

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