He sniffed the air. Maybe it was a trifle warmer, although not nearly warm enough to stop him from shivering, much less to melt the snow. Possibly it was just the stillness of the air that made it seem less bitter. Nothing short of the miraculous appearance of the hot summer winds that blew across the Jal-Pur desert could melt the snow quickly enough to open up the city of LaMut and stop things from falling apart.
A miracle would be nice.
Where was the goddess Killian when you needed her? Probably stretched out on a blanket spread on the warm sand at some beach outside of Durbin, sipping a tall, cold drink, and chuckling, from a great distance, at what she had done to LaMut. Tith-Onaka was probably on the next blanket along, and whether he was laughing with her or scowling at her was something that Durine wouldn’t have wanted to guess; the soldiers’ god had a mean sense of humour.
A commotion from the smithy down the street caused Durine to hurry his pace.
Flashes of easily half a dozen different tabards – including, he noticed with some relief, the grey tabards of LaMutian regulars – showed in the gaps between the cloaks of the soldiers gathered around the open door. There seemed to be a little pushing and shoving, but nothing violent, not yet.
Durine had some sympathy with the soldiers’ eagerness to get inside. If you absolutely had to be out in the city on such a cold day, and were trying to avoid a tavern out of a reluctance to be part of a throng of too many soldiers crowded together drinking too much beer, one of the obviously warm places to find yourself was a smithy. A soldier could always conjure up a reason to visit a smith; a belt to be mended, a dagger to be sharpened, a new binding needed on a sword hilt. Anything would do to keep a man warm before the forge’s fire for half an hour or so.
A fight inside a smithy, though, was likely to be rather worse than one in the Dangling Keshian Tavern next door. Tavernkeepers were used to such things, at least as far as not providing a plethora of heavy metal objects that could easily come to hand as improvised clubs. Blacksmiths had different expectations, and different priorities.
He pulled back his cloak to expose his rank tabs, and gently elbowed his way through the crowd of soldiers, and through the door.
Damn. Karris, the bristle-moustached captain belonging to barony Benteen, was facing off Captain Kelly, of Folson Company. Beyond the workbench that served as a sales counter for the smithy stood the smith, watching carefully, his ropy-muscled arms flexing slightly as he waited, his hair and loose shirt soaked with sweat, his hammer resting on a massive anvil. Both apprentices continued to work the bellows on the forge, kicking sparks out of the forge and onto the rough-hewn floor of the shop with each alternating down stroke, pausing only occasionally to feed another chunk of scrap iron into the stone vat half-buried in the coals. Work would go on – on whatever it was that the smith was about to cast in the boxy mould that waited next to the forge – while the captains argued. To Durine’s practised eye it looked as though the smith would pick up that hammer and return to work, as soon as the metal was ready. He might use it on whichever captain came across the workbench, but otherwise he wouldn’t intervene in the argument. Unlike your average inn or crockery shop, there weren’t a lot of breakables in a smithy. And, moreover, at this point the two captains were merely talking.
It hadn’t passed Durine’s notice, the night before, that the two captains didn’t like each other much, and Durine didn’t know if the problem was personal, or a projection of the rivalry between their respective barons.
It could have been both, of course.
‘Please,’ Kelly said, an unnatural-looking smile threatening to strain little-used facial muscles to the point of spasm, ‘I’ll be more than happy see that my own needs are met after yours, my good friend, Captain Karris.’
His voice was too loud, but he wasn’t quite shouting.
‘Only if you insist, Captain Kelly,’ Karris said, every bit as loudly, ‘although I hope you don’t.’ He fingered his moustache. ‘My only need is to have my broken stirrup rebrazed, and while I’ll need it for the next patrol – and the saddler will need an hour, perhaps, to stitch it back into place – my next patrol will have to wait until the roads are open, and I think the need for a working poker for the hearth in Barracks One is greater, at the moment, than mine is for a stirrup.’
The poker in question lay, bent almost double, on the counter, next to the broken brass stirrup, but Durine was more interested in the way that the various soldiers in the shop were watching the two captains argue, though there was something more than a little strange about the argument.
For one thing, this discussion was taking place at this smithy down in the city, and not at the smithy in the castle courtyard, where the needs of both officers and enlisted men were typically seen to. Perhaps the castle smith was too busy with other things, although what they might be, Durine couldn’t imagine.
For another thing, this argument-that-sounded-more-like-foreplay was taking place in front of a crowd of soldiers. Durine could count on the thumbs of one hand the number of times he had heard officers willingly try to openly settle even minor differences in front of the rank and file. An officer might fight a duel at sunrise with other officers as seconds and witnesses, but most would rather be trampled by incontinent cattle before they’d break discipline in front of their men.
Kelly noticed Durine, and gave him a quick, chilly nod before turning back to Karris with his painfully-forced smile. ‘My friend, if I don’t let you go first, I’m not sure I’ll be able to forgive myself.’
Karris gave a very theatrical shrug. ‘No, please. After you, my dear Ben.’
Kelly raised a finger. ‘You know, if I were to go first some people might think that you’d chosen to go second merely for the pleasure of lingering in the comfortable warmth of the smithy.’
Karris nodded at that. ‘Yes, some people might be so foolish as to think that.’ An idea seemed to occur to him. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘what you and I should do is to take ourselves to the Dangling Keshian, and talk about old times over a mug or two of good dwarven ale until both of our projects are complete.’ He turned to one of the nearby soldiers. ‘Silback, stay here, please, with, with …’
‘Haas,’ Kelly said, indicating one of the Folson soldiers. ‘Haas will wait with him.’
‘… stay here with Private Haas, until the stirrup and the poker are mended, and then the two of you can come and fetch us from the Keshian.’
‘Sir.’ Silback drew himself up straight, his face utterly expressionless.
Kelly turned to Durine. ‘Ah. Captain Durine. Congratulations on your much-deserved brevet,’ he said.
Karris joined him in the nod. They were all chums now. ‘Yes, yes, yes, congratulations, indeed. Would you care to join us?’
Durine nodded, and the crowd of soldiers parted as the three of them made their way out into the cold.
‘Well,’ Kelly murmured to Karris, his genial smile frozen in place, ‘I think the point has been made, you treacherous son of an unknown father.’
Karris nodded and clapped a hand – just a bit too hard to be really friendly – upon Kelly’s shoulder. ‘I can only hope it has,’ he replied softly, ‘you catamite. Let’s put an end to this charade; I know you’re eager to drop your trousers and bend over for anybody who can put the word “lord” in front of his name.’ Still smiling, he clapped his other hand on Durine’s shoulder. ‘And what do you think, you oversized pile of shit in an undersized bag?’
Durine forced a smile to his own face. ‘I think the lesson has been taken, here and now,’ he said. ‘How long it will hold is another matter.’
Both captains nodded in unison, then Ben Kelly sighed. ‘We do what we can, eh?’ The three moved along the street, away from any soldiers who might hear. Kelly continued, ‘If his baron ends up as Earl, I’ll be finding another earldom to seek service in, or take up a freebooter’s life, anything rather than serving for one day under this bastard as Swordmaster –’
‘The f
eeling is mutual,’ Karris said. ‘And not just because of the way that the left flank of the line collapsed in the Battle of the Forest because you insisted on keeping your company in reserve.’ The tone was still even, but there was more than a little heat buried beneath it. ‘But for now, orders are orders, and we’ve too many men with as much cause to hate each other, so we will do the best we can to keep things quiet. Even if it means turning my back on this Kelly in the tavern, knowing that he’d spit in my beer.’
Kelly nodded. ‘Only if I didn’t have time to unbutton my trousers,’ he said with a humourless smile. He preceded the other two up the snow-packed steps to the front door of the tavern, not quite banging his head on the sign that displayed a cartoon of a Keshian dangling from a gallows.
‘After you, my dear Captain Karris.’
‘No, after you, my friend, Captain Kelly.’
Durine just walked through the door and let the two of them work out which would follow.
Here and now, things were holding together, and they probably would at least long enough for the captains to share a mug of ale and have their smithing done, and while some of the soldiers would perhaps find it even stranger than he did as to how a fireplace poker had found itself suddenly bent almost double, or a brass stirrup had been broken during a time when its owner wasn’t going anywhere near a horse, he could at least hope that, for now, they would take the point of this little charade, and model their own behaviour on that of their captains.
Beyond that?
Durine shook his head. The captains couldn’t be everywhere at once, even if all of the rest had got the point, just as these two had.
Just a matter of time, was his guess.
• Chapter Eight •
Confrontation
THE TAVERN SMELLED BAD.
Exactly how, Pirojil couldn’t quite say. Certainly it didn’t smell bad in any objective sense; quite the contrary: the scent of the lamb leg simultaneously being unfrozen and cooked on the spit in the hearth filled the tavern with an absolutely mouth-watering, savoury aroma. It got better every time the thick-set woman tending it turned the spit, and then immediately splashed the upper surface of the meat with a couple of spoonfuls of the garlic-laden wine-and-spices mix from the wooden bowl on the stool beside her.
Despite her nervous glances over her shoulder towards the clumps of soldiers, it seemed peaceful enough, though, if you just looked at it. But it smelled wrong.
The group of Morray soldiers gathered around three tables at one end of the Broken Tooth pointedly ignored the Verheyens at the other end, without even a muttered comment or glare at how their positions put the Verheyens nearer the warmth of the hearth.
Half a dozen of the mercenaries had also taken their orders to ‘go down into the city proper’ as meaning ‘go down to the nearest tavern and eat and drink’, and both the puffy-faced Milo and the mad dwarf Mackin had been at it for a couple of hours, judging from the pile of gnawed chicken bones on the table in front of them, and the way that Mackin’s eyes seemed to have trouble focusing.
Pirojil picked an empty table in the strikingly unoccupied centre of the room. When Milo gave him a quick nod of greeting, Pirojil beckoned him and Mackin to join him. The unlikely pair rose and staggered over, Mackin splashing more ale on the floor than probably remained in the huge earthenware mug that he clutched in his thick-knuckled fist.
‘Greetings, Pirojil,’ Milo said. ‘Joining with the common ruck for a quick beer?’
‘Yeah.’ Mackin laughed and more collapsed into the stool than sat down on it. ‘Didn’t think we’d be seeing much of the three of you, now that you’ve got yourselves such cushy billets.’ His improbably large mouth twisted into a leer. ‘You seem to be spending as much time with that Lady Mondegreen as with the Baron, eh?’
Well, that wasn’t true, and why that should matter to Mackin was something that Pirojil didn’t want to know any more about than he had to, although Mackin’s frequent patronage of the human whores upstairs was a matter of some ugly barracks humour among the other mercenaries – as long as the dwarf wasn’t present. Most of the time, you could rely on a mercenary not to get involved in a fight when there wasn’t any pay in it, but there were always exceptions, and Mackin very definitely was one: he was known to take more than a little umbrage when his unusual preferences were made a matter of jest. He was probably the only dwarf between Dorgin and Stone Mountain who preferred serving as a mercenary to living with his own kind, and he was probably the only dwarf on the entire world of Midkemia who thought human women were attractive to look at, let alone bed. Then again, Pirojil considered, they didn’t call him ‘Mad’ Mackin out of whim.
‘I’ve spent a little time around her, yes, although that’s just been a matter of orders and duty.’
‘She is easy on the eye, though.’
Pirojil shrugged, though for a brief instant he tried to imagine what it must be like to be Mackin. For an even briefer instant he tried to imagine himself with a dwarf female, then, when his stomach began to get queasy, pushed aside the thought. Like most men, he preferred to bed with his own species. He was beginning to wonder if he had cursed himself with an image he might never lose, when the tavernkeeper poked his bald head out of the back room. Pirojil caught his eye and signalled for beer, wondering idly whether it was going to be the horrid local brew or the much better dwarven ale.
Mackin said, ‘Your new duties must be keeping you busy. Haven’t seen much of you since the brevet.’
‘I’ve been busy, and that’s a fact,’ he said.
He thought about it for a moment, and decided not to go into detail that was none of their business, and would sound like bragging, anyway, despite the fact that his one wish, right now, was that the snow outside would melt and that the three of them could just ride out of this city.
‘It seems quiet here,’ he said.
Milo smiled over his beer. ‘Too quiet.’ He jerked his chin towards the stairway to the cribs upstairs. ‘I don’t hear any squeaking floorboards and haven’t seen much of anybody going upstairs to blow off some steam. They all just keep drinking,’ he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, ‘and I’m not too drunk to notice that a couple of the Verheyen men keep looking toward the door.’
‘Like they’re expecting somebody, maybe?’ added the dwarf.
That possibility hadn’t occurred to Pirojil, and it should have. The fact that he wasn’t used to this sort of thing was only an explanation, not an excuse, and Steven Argent was the sort much more interested in results than either explanations or excuses. Pirojil raised an eyebrow at the dwarf.
‘Yeah.’ Mackin grinned, revealing a missing tooth. ‘You’re right!’
Pirojil was glad the dwarf understood the significance of the raised eyebrow, so now maybe he’d explain it to Pirojil. There were times when Mackin assumed scratching your backside was a signal or a sneeze was a message, just as there were times he’d start up a conversation with empty air.
The dwarf nodded as he said, ‘They’re probably waiting for enough others to arrive so that they can settle some business with a nice little advantage – say two-to-one, or three-to-one.’ He drained his mug and pounded it on the table, shouting for more. With evil glee he whispered, ‘It should be a good show.’ Then he lost his smile and indicated some other mercenaries at the far end of the room. ‘At least, it should be a good show from that table over there where Filt and them others are, near enough the back door to get out if things get too interesting, rather than right here, in the middle, where we’re likely to get trampled underfoot.’
Milo nodded agreement. ‘Best to be ready to find a table to crawl under.’
Pirojil would agree with that under normal circumstances, but as he was now an officer of the Earl’s court, the circumstances were anything but normal. He had to figure out how to keep this brawl from erupting. The best thing to do was to get one or the other side to leave, to find some other place to drink. There were at least nine taverns in lowe
rtown, after all …
Pirojil’s head was beginning to ache. This business of having to think about more than himself and his two companions was turning into a brain-twisting business. Yes, there were nine other taverns, and every one of them was almost certainly filled to the rafters with equally twitchy soldiers from all the different baronies. Pirojil wasn’t idiot enough to think that the Verheyen-Morray feud was the only one around. Although he didn’t have the details on what the issues were between Folson and Benteen, or Morray and Mondegreen or any of the other pairs of baronies you could name might be about. Issues were issues, and rivalries were about whatever you decided they were about when you decided to pull a blade and cut someone up, and the only thing Pirojil knew was he could do nothing about the issues, but he was supposed to try to keep people from cutting up one another.
Until things had quietened down, the urgency of all those rivalries had been suppressed by the immediate matter of fighting the Tsurani and the Bug; besides, most of the troops spent most of their time in the field, with ample space between them, not crammed together into the same city, let alone the same barracks buildings.
Finding some sort of overall solution was the responsibility of the officers, and if the officers had any better idea to ease tensions than sending off-duty troops out into the city, they surely would have done that, rather than –
Oh. He was an officer now, at least in theory, although his cloak concealed his new rank tabs at the moment.
Bloody hell.
He thought about it for a moment. ‘Stay here.’
‘You giving orders now?’ asked Milo.
‘Just do it, Milo; we’ll argue about it later.’
The balding, watery-eyed man blinked several times, then nodded as he reached for his mug. ‘That we surely will, Pirojil. That we surely will.’
Pirojil rose and walked over to the table of Morray men. Two of them nodded, and one of them frowned.
‘Aren’t you one of those freebooter privates who are supposed to be watching the Baron, so that that asshole Verheyen doesn’t have him killed?’ the man asked. He was a barrel-chested man, with little hair on his head besides his thick black beard, although his neck and forearms were covered with a thick mat of the stuff. The sergeant’s stripes on his tabard were weathered and faded.
The Complete Legends of the Riftwar Trilogy Page 54