Excerpt from "The Cold Kiss of Steel."

oon he could see the village up the road in the distance.  As he drew closer he could smell it too.  It reeked of festering sewage and something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on.  The closer he got to the village the stronger the stench.

Gareth could see enough of the village now to tell it was made up of buildings built on each side of the road to King’s Realm.  A traveler did not have much of a choice but to enter the village or take the inconvenient way around through dense forest.  Someone travelling with a cart of goods would be forced to travel through the village.  He imagined it was built that way on purpose to force travelers to do business with the merchants living there. 

On the left side of the village entrance was a large stable.  Gareth imagined a great deal of the sewage he could smell was coming from pens that were not cleaned as regularly as they should be.  Black dots darted about to the right of the village entrance and Gareth could now see a wood structure that reached 20 paces into the air.  The top of the structure was a long beam supported by two thick poles.  Two indistinguishable shapes hung from the structure and were too distant to make out but each one looked to be roughly the size of a large deer.  The black dots danced about the shapes as well as in the air above the structure.  He could hear the faint cawing of crows as he drew near.

He was downwind from the village and the odor had grown so bad he could taste it in his mouth.  It made his eyes water.  He suddenly identified the other smell he could not distinguish earlier.  It was the stench of rotting meat.  Back on his parent’s farm, the offal from slaughtered sheep would smell that way if it was left out too long before being buried.  Gareth put his hand over his mouth and nose to avoid the brunt of the unpleasant aroma.

He could now distinguish the shapes hanging from the wood structure and was disgusted to find they were emaciated human bodies, hanging from the neck.  When he drew closer he stopped to look at them.  The lips had been eaten away and the eyes were nothing but empty sockets picked clean by the crows.  The birds continued to fight each other for the best bits of meat.  Both bodies were naked and appeared like they had been male.  He could not be certain though, as where their cocks should have been, instead were large gaping holes from which a huge crow was feeding.  The skin of the bodies had turned brown with rot and thick ooze dripped into a rank puddle on the ground beneath them.  Gareth had seen dead people before but never in this bad of a condition.  He shivered with revulsion as he wondered why these men were displayed in such a fashion.

“Not a pretty sight, is it?” a man said off to his right.

Gareth turned and saw a tall man with pitted skin and a large, bulbous nose that seemed to take up half his face.  He was standing to the side of the village entrance and a building that looked to be a jail.  The man wore a chainmail coif that covered all but his face.  On his body he wore a sleeved chainmail haubergeon that ended at mid-thigh.  Over the haubergeon he wore a yellow surcoat emblazoned with a large black X on the front.  The wood shield he wore with sword at his hip was painted in the same yellow and black pattern.  His pants were thick black leather and he wore black knee-high boots.  By the manner of his dress he appeared to be the village constable.  Not waiting for a response, the man continued talking.

“That’s what we do to thieves here.  You best watch that your hands don’t stray while you enjoy your visit to our humble little town.  See that man on the right?  He claimed he was a noble.  Nothing noble about him now, is there?”

The way the man with the pitted skin looked at him made Gareth feel guilty, though he had never once considered stealing as a means to get food.  His mouth was suddenly dry and he hoped begging was not a crime in this village, as well.

“So what brings you here?  You planning to stay long?” the man asked Gareth.

At first he found it hard to speak and then the words worked their way out of his mouth.  “I’m on my way to King’s Realm to join the Service.  I’m just travelling through.”

The man smiled at him in an effort to be hospitable, his teeth brown with decay.  “Feel free to shop with the merchants while you’re here.  It’s been a hard summer and the town can use the coin.”

Gareth’s optimism of getting some food sank and he entered into the village.  The road that had been grassy most of the way from his parents farm had been trampled free of vegetation and was muddy from waste water, piss and shit; not all of it from animals by the look.  Many of the village’s inhabitants wore wooden clogs strapped to their shoes to protect them from the sludge that had once been the road to King’s Realm.  A row of twenty or more buildings made up the village with an equal number on each side of the road.  The buildings mostly two- and three-storeys tall were cramped together with little space between them.  Lean-to shacks had been erected in these narrow spaces by the poorer citizens of the community.  The buildings housed shops providing just about every service imaginable.  Besides the jail he had seen at the village entrance, there was an inn, a butcher, a bakery, a church, a brewer, a fuller, a tailor, a blacksmith, a brothel and a market.  Most of the buildings were made from dark timber and whitewashed wattle-and daub capped with tawny thatched roofs.  A sprinkling of the dwellings had stone foundations, but most were built on raw earth.  As the buildings ascended each subsequent storey was bigger than the previous; the frontage extending three or more paces forward with each level. The three storey buildings jutted out so far; when two of them faced each other they almost formed an arch over the road.  The bottom storeys were occupied by shops while the upper ones were living quarters for the owner and other renters.

The village was bustling with people; the majority of them looked haggard and worn, their dirty clothes matching their faces.  A good number of the villagers wore yellowed linen caps that had once been white and long tunics brown and unwashed.  In front of just about every building there were beggars sitting with outstretched hands, hoping for handouts.  Children could be seen playing with one another oblivious to the filth; some of them running naked in the muck.  This was Gareth’s first trip outside of Burgonet, which for the most part was a well-tended and wealthy town.  In all his life he never dreamed a place could look more despicable.  He said a silent prayer to Lunaria asking that King’s Realm be nothing like this.