Sharps (29 page)

The men in front – there were women too, Giraut realised – still hadn’t moved. They were looking at the soldiers as though they’d never seen anything like them in all their lives. It’s like a mechanism, Giraut realised; if we stay perfectly still, they won’t move either. But a movement from us will set them in motion, like a cam tripping a sear and releasing a spring. It’d be a terrible mistake, the worst possible, to assume we’re dealing with people here. There’s nothing there to be reasoned with. It’s mechanics, and chess. And we can’t stay here for ever.

Or perhaps they could. Time seemed to have slowed down, and the fear – it hadn’t gone away, no chance of that, but it had mutated into a fierce, painful concentration. Giraut could have sworn his sight and hearing had improved; he could see details of their faces and clothes, hear the barking of a dog in the far distance. He heard a woman in the group facing them laugh, and immediately he thought,
It’s all right, they’re going to let us pass
. Then he saw a man stoop down and pick something up. Maybe it was something he’d dropped. But he straightened up and took a step forward, then swung his right arm behind his back and brought it over his shoulder in a wide arc. Giraut saw something looping towards them through the air. Whatever it was, it fell well short; there was a chunky sound, as of a mason’s hammer hitting stone. Several people in the crowd cheered, as if some sort of victory had been achieved. He heard Tzazo say, “Steady,” in a deeply unhappy voice; and then it was almost as if he was inside Tzazo’s mind, as if the young lieutenant was thinking with Giraut’s brain rather than his own.
They’re unarmed
, the thought ran,
they’re civilians, just a rabble. They won’t stand firm against a charge by armed soldiers. They’ll run, and everything’ll be fine
.

Giraut could follow the reasoning, but he knew it was wrong. He wanted to shout
No, stop
, but his mouth wasn’t working. He felt the decision crystallise in Tzazo’s mind.

“On three,” Tzazo said. “Keep together, all of you. One …”

The thrower had stooped for another something-to-throw. “Two,
three
.” Giraut did manage to make a sound, but before it could become a word, he felt a terrific shove in the small of his back and discovered he was running, just to keep from being trodden on.

The thrower held his fire. Behind him, the crowd was moving strangely; those in front trying to back away, those behind pressing forward for a better view. The thrower swung his arm. Giraut watched; a speck became a shape, which became (of all the stupid things) a pickled walnut jar, just like the ones they had at home. Well, of course (it grew as it looped), they all come from the Western Empire, that’s where all walnuts come from. It seemed to hang in the air as its velocity decayed. It began to drop. Giraut turned his head away. He heard a crack, and something whizzed past his face, making it sting.

He looked up. The side of Tzazo’s helmet was smeared with red dust and shiny liquid; vinegar, he realised, from the jar. Tzazo didn’t seem to have noticed. The crowd was trying to squash itself flat: front row scrabbling to get away, middle jammed up against the back, who were still trying to get forward.
No, stop
, Giraut thought; it was like being on a runaway cart, heading straight for a wall. You idiot, don’t you realise, we’re going to
crash
?

Then his chin hit the back of Tzazo’s helmet, and something impossibly heavy and hard slammed into his back. He felt his ribs flex, as all his breath was squeezed out, like water out of a sponge. He tried to breathe in, but his lungs were too empty. Some kind of liquid splashed into his face, straight into his open eyes. He couldn’t see. The obstruction in front gave way, and he lurched forward. Something hit him in the face. It hurt so much he couldn’t think.

Here we go again, Suidas thought.

Just before impact, he turned as sideways as he could get, taking the force on his shoulders. That had been an early lesson (what to do if you’re in the second rank), and because it was purely instinctive, it gave him time to think. Space was going to be the problem; all squashed up together, you can’t do a damn thing. The only answer was to make space, by any means necessary.

Purely by chance, the impact shoved his right hand down and across his waist. His fingers bumped against the hilt of the messer, snuggled under his belt. There wasn’t a conscious moment of decision, when he resolved to draw. It was as though someone had grabbed his hand and closed it round the hilt, and then his arm took over.

He didn’t look down, because he didn’t want to take his eye off the action. Directly before him was the turned back of some Permian, in a blue coat; the same Permian, presumably, who was standing on his foot. He didn’t need to look in order to press the point of the messer against the blue coat, and push firmly. He heard a scream, which he assumed was the consequence of his action; then the blue coat gave way. He tugged sideways to free the messer, and as it came loose the momentum lifted his arm into a good position for striking. He was looking at the side of a man’s head; a bald summit with grey slopes. He hit it good and hard.

Giraut was face to face with an old man. He was yelling something. Then a blade split open his head, and he died.

There was a sort of convulsion in the crowd – something was happening, but Giraut couldn’t see what it was – and it flexed inwards, like a chest breathing in. No longer supported, the dead body came loose and flopped forward, landing on Giraut’s shoulder. He blinked (his eyes were still messed up with the hot, sticky stuff) and tried to wriggle the dead thing off him, as if it was a spider. Then someone must’ve kicked his shin. He lost his footing and fell forward, banging his head hard against a head, which screamed. He grabbed with his left arm, caught hold of something that squirmed and flexed, but not enough to dislodge him. He was standing on something uneven and soft, and that was moving too.
The floor’s made of people
, he thought, and the idea was utterly ridiculous.

Phrantzes was completely out of it for a second or two. When he opened his eyes, he saw a fist coming straight at him. Amazingly, he managed to get his head out of the way. The puncher barged up against him, overbalanced and went forward, but there wasn’t enough room for him to fall.

He saw Iseutz screaming, putting her hand in front of her face. A Permian was swinging a messer – not at her, particularly, just generally, like a man cutting back brambles; but she was in the way. Then Addo stepped neatly in front of her, filling the space the Permian needed for a decent swing. His hand, rather than the blade, hit Addo on the shoulder; he got a grip on the Permian’s arm, he was wrestling for the messer, and the Permian was trying to shake him off. A woman howled somewhere. Beside him, a Blueskin was trying to get his sword out of its sheath, but there wasn’t room.

A hand appeared from nowhere and dragged obscenely across his face. He closed his mouth around a fingertip and bit as hard as he could.

When Suidas realised what the problem was, he could’ve laughed out loud. The reason why the crowd hadn’t broken and run when Tzazo made his charge was that they had nowhere to go. They were backed up against a wall. Tzazo was trying to compress a solid.

He only found out because he’d cut a hole in the crowd.
For crying out loud
, he thought, staring at the wall. Then a woman tried to grab hold of his face, and he had to deal with her.

Now what
? he thought.

It didn’t help that it was too dark to see more than a few feet ahead, and then only general shapes rather than specifics. The path he’d cleared with such effort was closing up, leaving him stranded, away from the others. He heard a woman screaming, and it sounded like Iseutz’s voice. He felt the familiar-from-theold-days brief, sharp internal pain that registered the loss of a member of the company, followed by the surge of concentration as his mind automatically suppressed the fact. I’ve got to get out of this, he thought. Forward and back are out, which leaves sideways.

Suddenly he felt very, very tired. He had no idea how far the crowd extended, to left or right, so he made a conscious decision: to go right, because he was right-handed and it’d be easier to swing. As he lifted the messer he could feel its hilt pressing on the start of a blister. Some people wore gloves, for that very reason, but he didn’t like to. You didn’t have so much control in gloves.

A man with a beard turned his face towards him and shouted something he couldn’t catch; he seemed angry rather than scared, as though something was Suidas’ fault. That was obviously absurd. The hell with it, he thought; the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll finish. He picked his target, and swung.

Suidas Deutzel hadn’t wanted to go to war. He was fifteen, and his uncle had given him to understand that if he worked hard and learned the business, he could in due course expect to inherit the yard, the horses and the wagons. It was a solid, comfortable future, and he was looking forward to it.

Because of his previous experience, they’d put him in the transport corps. Fair enough. Since the military had also requisitioned the horses, the wagons and the drivers, there was a sort of logic to it. His uncle was furious, of course, but consoled himself with the thought that young Suidas would probably be all right. After all, he wasn’t likely to come to much harm carting barrels of flour to supply depots well behind the lines.

But General Carnufex, in one of the most brilliant coups of the War, cut off and utterly destroyed the Aram Chantat brigade that had been harassing the supply lines. The Permians sent away for a replacement, which eventually arrived, from wherever it was the Aram Chantat came from. They were a different sect from a different tribe, and they didn’t interpret their orders in quite the same way. Instead of targeting the strategically significant supply routes that brought food and equipment to Carnufex’s Fifth Army, they went off on long, drifting raids in the Debatable Land and even into Scherian territory. These adventures didn’t achieve much of military value, and the losses and disruption they caused were within acceptable perameters. The general had more important things to think about, and delegated the job of dealing with them to divisional level. Nobody at Division was sure whose responsibility it should be; it didn’t quite fit in with mobile defence in depth, quick response didn’t want to know, and highway maintenance objected angrily that they were engineers, not knights in shining armour. Eventually, the commission floated gently down as far as the desk of a junior colonel on the transport staff, who lacked the authority to do anything about it.

At the end of the wall was an arch. He stumbled through it into a long, narrow rectangular courtyard, where he collided with a set of steps. He howled and fell forward, landing on his forearms. He knew by the pain that he’d skinned his knees and elbows; his first injury of the evening.

He dragged himself to his feet, but the effort used up the last of his strength. He scrabbled in the dark till he found the messer, then sat down heavily on the bottom step. I shouldn’t have to do this any more, he thought; I served my time, finished my tour and came home. But something must’ve gone wrong, because here I am again: in Permia, on my own, with a messer. It’s like I’ve never been away.

He ought to get up, start running, but he couldn’t. The skinned knees were a valid excuse. Stay here, catch your breath – he knew he was doing all the wrong things, disobeying a direct order from his brain, which could only lead to disaster; but what the hell. A lifetime spent trying to do the sensible thing in order to stay alive, and look where it’d got him.

Someone was coming. He grabbed for the messer, couldn’t find it, panicked until his fingers closed round the hilt, like a young man too much in love reaching for his girl’s hand to make sure she was still there. Back to business, he thought. He kept perfectly still.

“Come
on
,” said a voice in the dark. “Please.”

Suidas grinned like a cat, waited so as to time it exactly right, then said, “Watch out for the step.”

He heard a sharp intake of breath, then a yelp. By then, Addo was close enough for Suidas to see his face. “Suidas?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God.”

Addo stood up straight. He had something in each hand: a messer in his right, Iseutz’s wrist in his left. He’d been towing her, like a grain barge. “What about …?”

Suidas shook his head; the customary office for the dead. “What happened to you?”

“I’m not sure, really,” Addo said, in a vague sort of voice; but the blade of the messer drooping forgotten from his hand gleamed wet in the moonlight. “What do we do now?”

“Excellent question.” He leaned forward a little. “Iseutz? Are you all right?”

Addo answered for her. “She’s a bit shaken, but not too bad. We saw a bit of a gap, and made for it.” He drew in a deep breath, then let it go. “We really ought to get away from here,” he said.

“Fine. Where did you have in mind?”

“Well, back to the …”

Suidas shook his head. “The Guild house was under siege when we left,” he said, “so we’d be mad to go back there, even if we knew the way. We can’t go to the authorities, because I don’t think there are any, not any more. There’s supposedly a coach waiting for us somewhere, but I haven’t got the faintest idea where. I’m covered in blood, and I think you are too, so we’re not exactly inconspicuous. Until further notice, we’d be wise to regard anybody we meet as a dangerous enemy.” He paused, then added: “Well, then. In our shoes, what would Daddy do?”

“Get out of the town as quickly as possible, I guess,” Addo replied, in a too-tired-to-fight voice. “What do you think?”

“No idea. I’m lost.”

Addo was quiet for a moment; then he said, “Well, this yard points north.”

“Does it?”

“I think so. I only got a quick look at the map, but I’ve got one of those see-it-once-and-remember memories. I
think
we’re pretty close to the northern edge, so if we just keep going, we should be fine. We’ll know soon enough, because there’s a canal. If we cross that in the next half-mile or so, we’re on course.”