Zsuzsa and the Winter of Death

By James Powell
The bodies of the dead were all around her. This was no strange thing on a battlefield, of course – and despite her preference for healthier environments (gambling dens and shady back alleys, for instance) Zsuzsa had seen more than her fair share of battlefields. On most of them, however, the bodies of the dead did not try to bite your kneecaps – or rip your throat out.

Elves have hearts that lie slightly to the right-hand side of their bodies, rather than the central hearts of humans. Dwarves have thick skin in truth, not just in metaphor, but possess gill-like slits hidden beneath their beards, that help filter out the gasses that can occur deep underground; these slits are oh-so-easy to slide a knife into, if you know where they are. Fire Lizards have thick skin underneath even thicker scales, but a soft spot on the back, between the shoulder blades, where the scales overlap. You name it, and Zsuzsa Slatewalker can stick a dagger in its vital organs.

The dead had no vital organs.

Why was she here? She didn’t owe these people anything, and the farmers of the valley wouldn’t be in any position to offer her a financial reward for her help. It wasn’t even as if she could palm a reward from the enemy – unlike goblins, the walking dead had no tendencies towards gathering up shiny things. She was no use here; she should just leave the peasants to their fate. But no matter how many times she tried to latch onto that thought, she knew she never could.

“A compassionate thief is about as much use as a syphilitic whore,” Guildmaster Umbra had said to her. He was a pockmarked, wiry man who seemed to think that his half a dozen words of Latin made him a far greater and more original wit than the countless Guildmasters who’d chosen “Shadow” as their nom-de-crime. He tended to look at Zsuzsa in a way that made her suspect he’d much rather she’d chosen to become a whore, syphilitic or otherwise.

“I can take their money,” she’d replied, trying to strike the right tone between defiant and obsequious. Umbra despised thieves with no backbone, and he despised thieves who didn’t know their place. It was a tough balancing act. “I can steal from the Aristos, I can hurt them when I need to, just…” she floundered, trying to think of one perfect, eloquent way to articulate her realisation that not all Aristos were heartless bastards, and that not everyone with more money than her was an Aristo. “Only the ones who deserve it,” she finished, a little feebly.

Umbra had just stared at her as though she were simple. “They all deserve it,” he said, finally. And with that, she was out on her ear.

As she continued to stalk the battlefield, Zsuzsa’s attention was caught by a flash of green and red. Could the goblin corpses have started to reanimate, too? That was all they needed. But no, this goblin was breathing, and what she’d taken to be blood was a smear of red paint across its face, in the crude shape of a handprint. The goblin was chanting something in its harsh language, waving a rough-carved wooden branch over the corpse of one of the Briggs soldiers. The fallen guardsman shuddered, and then lurched into motion.

A goblin necromancer: a creature with the mental fortitude for magic that very few members of its species possessed, paired with all too typically goblin viciousness. Here was a truly terrifying enemy.

Zsuzsa grinned with delight. Finally: something she could stab.