Eastern Marches, Stalheim
Second of First Seed, Year Twohundred Seventyeight of the Reckoning
Kurwin knelt down, and pulled the pair of strong shears from his belt. With his right hand he pulled up the belt of tattered leather armor, and then with his left he began cutting into the still-warm flesh. It parted before iron shears only reluctantly, the languid coursing of not yet cold blood swiftly filling the cavity he carved into the corpse. The process would have been swifter if he had returned to camp to sharpen the implements, but the dead didn't care if there was a bit of a sawing motion, or if the wounds were a bit jagged. After a half dozen firm strokes the piece of flesh came away, and the heavy barbed arrow with it.
Really he didn't know why the Guard insisted on these thick bladed arrows to use with the singing bows. The impact of a normal punch-tip into a foe with even diffident armor usually left them dead before they could flee, based on his decade of experience, and the barbs were meant to mangle. You didn't need to maim dead men. But they kept right on using them. Probably bureaucratic inertia. It certainly made cleaning up after these barbarians messy.
You had to cut them out, you see. That was why he was here. You get the shit end of the stick when people start camping, and you go out with the blood-shears. Gruesome work. Most new men got used to it though. Iron wasn't so cheap that you could afford to just leave it rusting in corpses of some goat-fucking pelt-wearing bearded numbskull who thought showing up and waving a pointy stick at peasants was a wise plan for personal profit and enlightenment. And since the arrows were barbed, well, sometimes you just had to cut out chunks of the men and burn the flesh off. A hell of a lot easier than individually slicing away the bits of gristle, organ, flesh, and fat which came if you yanked.
He stood, moving on to the next arrow studded body. Some of the raiders had taken a few to down, and so you had to work harder, or taken a shot to the skull or the chest, and you had to use a little hammer to break the bone so the arrow came away from where it was firmly lodged. If only these wild men would take a suffering hint and turn to more productive professions, like throwing themselves off of cliffs when the Guard cornered them. Then he wouldn't have to clean up so much.