I keep forgetting I'm supposed to actually pay my Battle Brothers
Rick Nipples' last ride
Four dead. Four from a company of ten. Excellent Log, worm soup. Dietmar the Geldling, worm salad. Wolfgang Silkworm, some sort of delicious worm entrée, which he might appreciate. Reiner, worm dessert. They talk about survivor's guilt but no-one tells about you survivor's malice. At camp, watching that grinning blackguard Rick Nipples drink and breathe air meant for better men is as maddening as it is exhausting. Night falls, and I try to count the stars to keep my mind off wondering if I could feasibly jam an entire skillet handle into his earhole.
There may be a time, I think, when the land our descendants travel over runs small despite its vastness; when the night that now belongs to wolves and animate dead becomes as commonplace as draped tapestry. In stars, the wolves see loping gods; the dead, sepulchral torches in a gravecold pit. Us, bright horses for breaking, dreaming of spinning astrolabes like spurs and hung parchment charts for roughspun livery; owl and bat and comet song as muted muzzlesnorts.
The land that carries us makes jest of human whims, but perhaps one day our descendant's whims will shape it. They will smile once, and dance two jubilant steps before the floor beneath them gives way to waiting hells free now to spread across an earth too mapped to offer wild hope, ushered in by bowing devils with smiles as wide and icy as yon mountains that even now remind us - decorated with the frozen corpses of cartographer's hires - that the harder you try to place a singer's accent, or strain to puzzle out the passing strange timbre of his song, the less you listen to what he's trying to tell you. Sometimes, he sings: leave well alone.
That's if any of this dickless lot end up with descendants anyway. Not one of them raised a word of complaint when we were hired to find a necromancer's castle. Now, a few moans in the night that sounded for all the world closer to a constipated piglet than any kind of undead, and suddenly their faceflesh turns all puspale to a so-called man at the thought of touching corpses. Now, not a whinnying pissinfant among them wants to lift a quivering finger to help bury Excellent Log.
I'd bury him myself, of course, but someone has to count out the gold and I don't reckon the band would appreciate it if their wages were speckled with Log's vermillion colon juice. It's just proper and right that someone else do it. He deserves a decent burial.
We eventually settle on kicking him into a river and, after making a note of the location to remind ourselves never to eat the local fish, make our way back to Kobmanhaven.
We deliver Hakon the councilman's idol of fertility as soon as we return. The bag of coin he hands us in return might have felt heavier under different circumstances, but our arms were still warmed from dragging our dead and injured away from the last fight, and the coin now seemed poor recompense. Still, with few other towns for miles, we'd have to stay friendly with the locals here. I find myself shooting Thilmann a glare when I sense he's about to shake the councilman down for more coin.
It turns out a prudent choice. We'd done enough around here that Kobmanhaven now saw us as allies. We'd also vowed early to make some mates in this part of the world, and so the next rounds of ale feel well earned. Thilmann even cheers up, after bellyaching for a spell about how his favourite hobby (running up on local farmers then booting them in the shins and running off again before they noticed what had happened) was now off-limits to him.
As was becoming our grim routine at that point, our first stop post-tavern is to recruit some more bodies, though yet again we can only afford to hire the dregs. First is Bjarne. He'd fled some backwater two-latrine town after being caught stealing hosen from a washer's line, never having made it to either one of those two latrines before his gammy bladder betrayed him; a pox on both his trousers and his pride. Telling us this was, of course, his first mistake. The boys promptly name him Slackbladder, Jason Of Stathingham headbutts him into the dirt when he insists on us using his given name, helps him up again, and that's that. Welcome to the band, Slackbladder.
Next up is Markward, previously a fisherman by trade. He wears a little embroidered badge that read "ask me about the time I strangled my wife"* so of course none of us do. He had his own throwing net, so that was all the lore we needed.
Eight of us, then. Not ideal by any stretch, but coin being as stretched as it was, it'd have to do. We'd heard tell the local merchants had got a fresh delivery of throwing spears in - a good way of helping the lads punch above their weight, so I hand a few out, and give Slackbladder a bow to replace the potato peeler of a dagger he'd had previously. After selling the gear we'd gathered from the last fight, I take a risk on another hire - a local historian named Dogpollock who'd decided he wanted to see some action close up. It's not a moment after I hand Dogpollock his hiring fee that I realise I've buggered the calculations. Now, our coffers total less than a third of a single day's wage for the company. I tell the boys Dogpollock joined up for free while he's out of earshot, and set about finding us some work quicksharpish.
The good news is that it doesn't take long to find a merchant willing to pay 700 crowns to guard his next shipment. The bad? The caravan's bound for Heuweiler - two days north. I'll likely have some deserters on my hands before the journey was done, I think, if not a knife in the back. I ain't proud of it, neither. I'd take an arrow in the bowels for any of these men, and losing even one would feel like losing a part of my soul.
Lol. Lmao. Rofl. Fuck off then, Rick Nipples.
We're paid as soon we reach Heuweiler. Under normal circumstances, I'd consider being more frugal with the coin, as to not end up in a hole again. That said, we'd be laughing so hard at Rick Nipples threats about how much we'd regret his leaving that we were all very thirsty. Pub it is. Nice place, too. I think we're going to like it here.
* Markward's backstory in the game reads "It was after he strangled his wife that he lost all interest in the fishing trades". I did not editorialise this. Please do not attempt to cancel me for promoting the ancient and storied art of spouse strangling.