Kell's Legend

committed murder and atrocity? It didn’t make sense. Slaughter all the bakers, who would bake bread for the soldiers? Murder the whores and dancers, who then to provide entertainment? Soldiers marched on their stomachs, and fought best when happy. Only an insane general went on a pointless rampage. Kell had seen it once before, during the Days of Blood. Bad days. Bad months. Kell’s mouth was dry at the thought. Bitter, like the plague.
    The Days of Blood…
    A dark whisper. In his soul.
    A splinter. Of hatred. Of remorse.
    You took part, Kell. You killed them all, Kell.
    Visions echoed. Slashes of flashback. Crimson and shimmering. Diagonal slices, echoes of a time of horror. Screams. Writhing. Slaughter. Whimpering. Steel sawing methodically through flesh and bone. Worms eating skin. Eating eyes. Blood running in streams down stone gutters. Running in rivers. And soldiers, faces twisted with bloodlust, insanity, naked and smeared with blood, with piss and shit, with vomit, capering down streets with swords and knives, adorning their bodies with trophies from victims…hands, eyes, ears, genitalia…
    Kell swooned, felt sick. He forced away the terrible visions and rubbed a gloved hand through his thick beard. “Damn you all to hell,” he muttered, a terrible heaviness sinking through him, from brain to stomach, a heavy metal weight dragging his soul down to his boots and leaking out with the piss and the blood.
    “You look ill.” Kat placed a hand on his broad, bear-clad shoulder.
    “No, girl, I am fine,” he breathed, shuddering. And added, under his breath, “on the day that I die.” Then louder, “Come. I can see a tunnel under the tannery.”
    “That’s an evil place,” said Kat, pulling back. “My little brother used to collect the piss-pots used in the tannery; he caught a terrible disease from there; he died. I swore I would never go inside such a place.”
    “It’s that, or die yourself,” said Kell, not unkindly.
    Kat nodded, and followed Kell and Nienna down the street, all three crouching low, moving slowly, weapons at the ready and eyes alert. As they approached the tunnel, an incredible stench eased out to meet them: a mixture of gore and fat, dog-shit, piss, and the slop-solution of animal brains used in the bating process. Kell forced his way inside, treading through a thick sludge and coming up grooved and worn brick steps into a room hung with hides still to be stripped of hair, gore and fat. They swung, eerily, on blood-dried hooks. There were perhaps a hundred skins waiting for the treatment that would eventually lead to water-skins, armour, scabbards and boots. Kell stepped over channels running thick with disgorged brains.
    “What is that?” gagged Nienna.
    “When the skins arrive, they need to be scraped free of dried fat and flesh. The tanners then soak skins in vats mixed with animal brains, and knead it with dogshit to make it soft.” He grinned at Nienna, face demonic in the gloomy light where shadows from gently swinging skins cast eerie shapes over hisbearded features. “Now you can see why you were so lucky to be accepted into the university, girl. This is not a place for children.”
    “Yet a place where children work,” said Kat, voice icy.
    “As you say.”
    They moved warily between swinging skins, the two women flinching at the brush of hairy hides still strung with black flesh and long flaps of thick yellow fat. At one point Kat slipped, and Nienna grabbed her, hoisting her away from a channel filled with oozing mashed animal brains and coagulated blood.
    “This is purgatory,” said Nienna, voice soft.
    Kat turned away, and was sick.
    As Kell emerged from the wall of hung skins, so he froze, eyes narrowing, head turning left and right. Before him stood perhaps twenty large vats, four with fires still burning beneath their copper bases. This was where excess flesh and hide strips were left to rot for months on end in water, before being boiled to make hide glue. If nothing else, this place stunk the worst of all and Kell was glad of the cloth he held over his mouth.
    Then Kell turned, frowning, and strode towards a vat containing the foul-smelling broth and hoisted his axe. “Are you coming out, or do I come in axe-first?”
    “Whoa, hold yourself there, old fellow,” came an educated voice, and from the shadows slipped a tall, athletic man. Nienna watched him, and found herself immediately attracted; something the dandy was no-doubt used to. His