Forge of Darkness (Kharkanas Trilogy 1) (104 page)

Sensation was returning to the lieutenant’s right hand and she quickly changed grips, but her shoulder was throbbing and weak. She backed away.

The girl bared her teeth. ‘You armoured and all! Don’t run, you filthy murderer!’

Another rider came up behind Risp, but had to slow his mount since Risp’s dead horse blocked the alley. ‘Back up, sir!’ he snapped. ‘Leave the pup to me!’

She saw that he was one of the sergeant’s comrades, Bishim. His face looked almost black beneath his helm, contorted with rage. He slipped down from his horse and drew his shield to the ready as he advanced on the girl, pointing with his sword. ‘For Darav, I’m going to make this hurt.’

The girl laughed. ‘Come at me, then.’

Bishim charged behind his shield, slashing with his sword.

The girl somehow slipped past and then was clambering on to the man’s kite shield. Her weight pulled it down and she stabbed her knife into the side of his neck. The point burst out the other side in a welter of blood. As Bishim fell to his knees, the girl sliced through the biceps of his weapon arm and laughed as the sword clanged on the stones. Then she stepped over the dying man and advanced on Risp.

The lieutenant threw her sword at the girl and then ran, grasping the reins of Bishim’s horse as she went. With the beast between her and the girl in the narrow alley, she knew that she had a few moments in which to—

The girl used one wall to rebound from as she leapt to land astride the horse. Her knife slashed down and Risp felt her arm snap upward. Staggering, confused, she looked to see that its hand was gone, sliced clean off at the wrist, and blood was gushing out. Moaning, she fell back against the nearest wall. ‘Don’t,’ she said.

The girl swung round the horse’s neck to land in front of the beast, and then advanced on Risp. ‘Don’t? Don’t what? I’m a Bordersword. You attacked us. What is it you don’t want me to do?’

‘I was following orders,’ Risp pleaded, pushing with her boots as if she could somehow back through the wall behind her.

‘Draconus just kicked the wrong nest,’ said the girl.

Risp shook her head. ‘It’s not – we’re not what you think! Spare me and I will go with you to your commander. I’ll explain everything.’

‘Commander? You understand nothing about us. Today, right now, right here in this alley, I’m in command.’

‘Please!’

The girl stepped forward. She was pathetically scrawny, more boy than girl, and in her eyes there was nothing Risp recognized.

‘I’ll explain—’

The knife went into the side of her neck like a sliver of fire. Choking, she felt the blade turn, and then the girl sliced through her windpipe, and all at once Risp felt the back of her helmet slam into the stone wall as tendons were cut. Hot blood filled her lungs and she began to drown.

The girl stared down at her for a moment, and then moved off.

Risp tried turning her head, to follow her killer’s flight, but instead felt her head sink back down. She looked down to see the stump at the end of her right wrist. The blood had stopped spilling out. Soldiers survived worse. She could learn to fight with her left hand. Wasn’t easy, but she was young –
and when you’re young, these things are possible. So many things are possible
.

I doubt she was sixteen. If she was sixteen she’d have been off with the hunters. Fifteen
.

The need to breathe was a distant shout in her mind now, and she found it easy to ignore. Until black smoke rolled in, obscuring everything, and then it was time to go away.

* * *

‘We think she fell down the stairs,’ said the soldier.

Captain Silann studied the corpse of the woman lying at the foot of the tower steps. ‘This is Krissen,’ he said. ‘A scholar of highest repute.’

The soldier shrugged, sheathing his sword. ‘Life’s full of accidents,’ he said, moving off.

Silann felt sick inside. ‘Highest repute,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘What was she doing here?’ After a long moment he settled to his knees beside the body. Her head was tilted at an impossible angle; her eyes were half open, her mouth parted with the tip of the tongue protruding. Her hands were filthy with coal dust or the powder that sometimes came from old ink.

The soldier he had been speaking to earlier now returned. ‘None left alive in here, sir. Place was damned near abandoned as it was. It’s time to fire the keep.’

‘Of course.’ But still Silann studied the woman’s face.

‘Do you want we should take the body, sir? For proper burial, I mean.’

‘No, the pyre of this keep will suffice. Was there anything at the top of the tower?’

‘No sir, nothing. We need to go – got another village to hit.’

‘I know,’ Silann snapped. He straightened and then followed the soldier back outside.

On the keep road, just outside the gate, his wife had arrived with her vanguard. Her thighs were red with splashed blood, and Silann well knew the look on her face. Tonight there would be fierce lovemaking, the kind that skirted the edge of pain. It was, she had once explained, the taste of savagery that lingered from a day of killing.

‘Lieutenant Risp is dead,’ Esthala announced.

‘How unfortunate,’ Silann replied. ‘Do we have wounded?’

‘Few. Lost seven in all. There was at least one Bordersword in the village, a woman, we think, but we’ve not found her.’

‘Well, that’s good, then,’ he said. As her expression darkened he added, ‘A witness, I mean. That’s what we wanted, isn’t it?’

‘Depends on what she figured out, husband,’ Esthala replied, in that weary tone that he was all too familiar with: as if she were speaking to a dim-witted child. ‘Better some terrified midwife or pot-thrower.’ She turned in her saddle to survey the village below. Houses were burning in a half-dozen places. ‘We need to burn it all down. Every building. We’ll leave out a few of our losses, but with their faces disfigured. Nobody they might recognize.’ She looked across to Silann. ‘I leave all that to you and your company. Join us at Hillfoot.’

Silann assumed that was the name for the next village, and so he nodded. ‘We will do what’s needed.’

‘Of course you will,’ Esthala replied, taking up the reins.

She had refused to see her husband executed and Silann knew that among the soldiers that had been seen as weakness. But he alone was aware of how close she had been to changing her mind, and that still left him rattled. Lieutenant Risp’s death delighted him, since she had been the source of all this talk about executions and crimes; and it had been her troop that had brought back the carved-up head of one of Hunn Raal’s messengers. Silann still cursed the name of Gripp Galas, although it was a curse riding a wave of fear.

He watched his wife gesture and then she was riding down the road with her troop.

Glancing back, he saw smoke coming from the keep’s slit windows, and drifting out from the open front doorway. It was not as easy to burn such edifices as one might think, he knew, since they were mostly stone. He turned to the soldier at his side. ‘I trust you are confident that it will burn down.’

The man nodded, and then shrugged. ‘Nobody will want to live in it, sir.’

‘Let’s head down to the village, then, and be on with it.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘I want to look upon the lieutenant’s body.’

‘Sir?’

‘To pay my respects.’

* * *

Captain Hallyd Bahann, Tutor Sagander decided, was an unpleasant man. Handsome, with grey in his short-cropped hair, he had about him an arrogance that, for some odd reason, women liked. No doubt he could charm, but even then his commentary was sly and verged on cutting. It baffled Sagander that Captain Tathe Lorat shared the man’s tent. She possessed a beauty that left the tutor breathless, and looking upon her – the laughter in her eyes and the ever ready smile on her full, painted lips – it seemed impossible that she would delight in killing and, even more appalling, that she would keep in her company a daughter sired by her first, now dead, husband, and that then she would do … this.

They sat in the command tent, the two captains and Sagander, and Hallyd Bahann’s dark eyes glittered with something like barely contained mirth. At his side, Tathe Lorat was refilling her goblet with yet more wine, and the flush of her cheeks held its own glow in the faint lanternlight.

‘I see,’ she said in a slurred drawl, ‘that you are struck speechless, tutor, which must, I am sure, be a rare occurrence. Do you wonder at my generosity? Good sir, even now, behind you on the tent wall, we can make out the flames from the monastery. True, the monks fought with uncommon vigour and we took disturbing losses despite your betrayal, but this nest of Deniers is now destroyed, and for that we are pleased to reward you.’

‘It may be,’ Hallyd said, half smiling, ‘that the tutor prefers boys.’

Tathe’s perfect brows lifted. ‘Is this so, tutor? Then I am sure we can find—’

‘No, captain, it is not,’ Sagander replied, looking down. He sat on a camp stool, and with but one leg to anchor himself he felt poorly perched upon the leather saddle of the seat. The imbalance he felt in his body was like an infection, spreading out to skew the entire world. ‘Did none of them surrender?’

Hallyd snorted. ‘Why should the fate of the Deniers concern you now? You showed us the old tunnel to the second well. By your invitation, we visited slaughter upon the occupants of that monastery. However, I will assure you none the less. Not one knelt except to more closely observe the ground awaiting their final fall.’

‘And the Mother?’

‘Dead. Eventually.’ And his smile broadened.

‘Is it,’ Tathe asked, ‘that you do not find my daughter attractive?’

‘C-captain,’ Sagander stammered, ‘she rivals even you.’

Tathe slowly blinked. ‘I am well aware of that.’

There was something ominous in her tone and Sagander felt his gaze drop yet again.

‘We tire of your indecision,’ said Hallyd Bahann. ‘Do not think she will be unfamiliar with her purpose. She is no virgin and is indeed now well into her womanhood. We do not approve of consort with children and among our soldiers we count it a heinous crime punishable by castration or, in the case of women, the branding of their breasts. Now then, will you accept our offer or not?’

‘A most generous reward,’ Sagander said in a mumble. ‘I – I am pleased to accept.’

‘Go then,’ said Tathe Lorat. ‘She awaits you in her tent.’

As always, it was a struggle to climb upright, using his crutch like a ladder, and then tottering as he found his balance. Breathing hard with the effort, he made his way out of the command tent.

The stench of smoke filled the air, drifting down into the streets and alleys of Abara Delack. Here and there walked squads of Legion soldiers, still loud and boisterous in the aftermath of the battle, although more than a few could be seen who were silent, for whom the end of the killing saw a second battle, this time with grief. Sagander looked upon them all as savages, filled with brutal appetites and the stupidity that marked bullies. Every civilization bred such creatures and he longed for a time when they could, one and all, be done away with. A civilization for ever within easy reach of a blade had little to boast about.

No, the only hope for humility was in the disarming of everyone, and with it the end of the threat of physical violence. He knew he could well hold his own in a society where words alone sufficed, where victories could be measured in conviction and reasoned debate. Yet here, on these streets in this cowed village, it was the thugs who swaggered drunk on ale and death, their faces alive with animal cunning and little else. With them, he could win nothing by argument, since in the failing of their wits they ever had recourse to the weapons at their sides. Was it not Gallan who had once said ‘
At the point of a sword you will find the punctuation of idiots
’?

He hobbled towards the tent where awaited Tathe Lorat’s daughter. Shame had driven him to this, step by stuttering step. A hundred or more lives had been taken away this night, all by his own hand. In some ways, it would have been worse had he been whole, rather than the maimed, pain-filled wretch that he was now. Because then he would have no excuses, no justifications for the betrayals his wounded heart had unleashed. Still, he was committed to this path, and at its very end there would come what he desired most: vengeance against Lord Draconus and his pathetic whelp of a bastard son.

The Legion knew its enemies, after all.

Reaching the tent, he fumbled one-handed at the flap. A sound from within made him pause, and a moment later a long-fingered hand appeared to pull to one side the heavy canvas.

Ducking, Sagander hobbled inside. He found he could not look at her. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered.

‘What for?’ the young woman asked. She stood close and yet still in shadow. The lone lantern cast little light from its shortened wick. He could smell rosewater on her breath.

‘I am old. Since I lost my leg, ah, I beg you, do not mock me, but I am able to do … nothing.’

‘Then why accept me as your reward?’

‘Please, I would sit at least.’

She gestured to the cot. He kept his gaze averted from her as he made his way over to it. ‘I am no fool,’ he said. ‘Your mother knows you as her rival and would see you used, damaged even. Broken and dissolute. You must find a way to win free of her.’