As I relate this now, I realize that I make it sound as if this process came about organically, as if a group of two hundred strong-willed men of disparate backgrounds can somehow make decisions without any central direction. The fact is that I’ve noticed this tends to happen in groups of which I’m a member: without any conscious intention, I somehow manage to get men to acquiesce to a course of action that aligns with my own thoughts on the circumstances. It didn’t seem to matter that I was one of the lower-ranked members of the group; in fact, we’d all been warned that our previous rank would be of no consequence in the Corps. This was one of the few firm precepts that had filtered down to us from the officer who had founded the program. There were several officers among us, but they’d been forced to remove their epaulets as a condition of being accepted as a Scout. We were all starting from scratch.
As these two hundred men were among the best in the entire army, we had in this group experts in sword-fighting, knife-fighting, boxing, wrestling, archery, tracking, mountaineering, scavenging, trapping, signaling, horsemanship, swimming, tanning, and a dozen other skills. For the next three months we learned as much as we could from each other of every one of these arts. Rodric, now fully sober and having no interest in shooting his bow, was perhaps the most apt student of all of us. He threw himself into every new pursuit as if his life depended upon its mastery, and perhaps it did. I was glad to be assured of having him in my unit.
At the end of three months, a young officer arrived at the camp, having just been assigned to oversee the Scouting Corps. Having expected to find the camp in chaos after three months without leadership, the young man, named Henrik, was so astounded by the organization of the training and the wide-ranging proficiency of the recruits that he demanded to know who had taken charge of the operation. Either the men genuinely weren’t aware of the influence I’d exerted or they intuited that I’d prefer to remain anonymous; in any case, the men all denied that any single individual was responsible, which had the effect of impressing the officer even more.
Henrik was a bright young man, though, and by observing the way men deferred to me, he quickly got a sense of what had happened. Two days after his arrival, he called me into his tent.
“You seem to have had a coalescing effect on the recruits,” he observed dryly.
“They are competent men,” I answered. “They recognize a good idea when they hear it.”
“Good ideas have to come from somewhere.”
“Many of the men have made shrewd suggestions.”
“And you have, perhaps, encouraged these suggestions while subtly revealing the faults in other proposals?”
“No more than any of the others.”
He smiled. “You’re a curious sort, Konrad. Particularly for a pikeman.”
I gave a respectful nod.
“Look, let’s dispense with pretense. You’ve been a leader to these men. I don’t know your reasons for feigning modesty, but it’s a strange enough phenomenon that it makes me uneasy. Most men pretend to be in charge when they are not. What is it you are angling for?”
I began to protest, but seeing the disapproval in the man’s eyes, I changed tacks. “It is true that I’d rather not be seen as a leader at present.”
“You fear the burden of command?”
“No, sir. But I have made a promise to a comrade. He signed up for the Scouts on the condition that we be assigned to the same unit. If I were to be promoted, I fear that would be impossible.”
“Who is this man? I don’t like the idea of men entering my Corps with such attachments.”
“It’s nothing unwholesome, sir,” I said. “Simply an agreement we’ve made. His name is Rodric.”
Henrik’s eyebrows went up. “The archer?”
“He is known as such,” I said.
“Well-known, I should say. I’ve been observing him. In two days he has not picked up a bow.”
“He is even more reluctant to make a spectacle of himself than I am. Between you and me, he’s confessed to me that he is worried about demoralizing the other men. I have seen him shoot, and no man can approach his skill.” All of this was true, after a fashion.
“Well, you two will make a fine pair. A leader who will not stand out and an archer who will not shoot. Far be it from me to separate such a pair. I’ll make a note of it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you, Konrad.”
I turned to leave.
“One more thing,” he said.
“Of course, sir.”
“I’m in charge of this Corps now,” he said. “Anyone attempting to undermine my authority will be dealt with severely.”
“I should expect no less, sir. You’ll have no trouble from me.”
*****
Two weeks later, I was assigned to a squad with Rodric and four other men. There was Sylvain, who could climb a sheer rock wall like a spider, Artok, who could tame a wild horse with a word and a gesture, Byrn, who was as deadly with a rapier as Rodric had once been with a bow, and Samu, who could track a hare across ten miles of forest after a three-day rain. For my part, I was not the best at anything (except perhaps archery, if I were to credit Rodric’s claim of being ruined), but I was given a promotion and made the leader of the group.
If I were to tell you all of our adventures over the next year, I should never get to the end of this tale. Suffice it to say that being a Scout was everything I had imagined and more; were it not for my pledge to Beata, I might very well have made a career of it. I had barely known the other four members of our squad, but after a week we were like a family. Our first assignment was to report to a rendezvous point near Keskeny to await further orders, but by three days after our arrival it became clear that no one was going to meet us. I got the impression the squads had been dispersed at more or less equal intervals along the frontier with the expectation that requests for information would somehow get from the officers in the field to our commander and thence to us, but the logistics of this communication network had not been worked out. We were like a collection of individual nerve clusters that no one had bothered to attach to a brain. Out of boredom more than any other motive, I ordered our squad to cross a mountain pass some twelve leagues north and survey the plain on the east side of the range for Barbarok activity.
To our amusement, we encountered another squad whose leader had decided on the same course of action. We coordinated our efforts and then each reported back to a different outpost, they to the north and we to the south. When we reached the outpost, we received news from another squad, which had taken the initiative to perform reconnaissance to the southeast of us. In this way, a sort of de facto system of communication and coordination of efforts came about; we learned to work together in the same sort of seemingly chaotic but surprisingly effective way that a colony of ants locates supplies of food. Henrik did his best to manage us, but our squads moved faster than any messenger might, so in the end his office was reduced to a sort of clearinghouse for information. Despite all this, we were surprisingly effective as a collective; if it weren’t for ominous events transpiring elsewhere, historians might some day have pointed to the formation of the Scouting Corps as the event that finally began to stem the tide of the Barbaroki.
My squad traveled up and down the range, usually keeping to the eastern edge of the Videki Basin, but occasionally crossing through one of the high passes near Asztal or Tavacska to reconnoiter on the far side of the range. Not being a combat unit, we avoided fighting as a rule, but we saw as much action as I had as a pikeman. Sometimes we would come across enemy scouts that needed to be captured or killed to avert dissemination of the secrets of our own troop movements; occasionally we dealt with bandits or mercenary bands. On a few occasions we encountered enemy encampments that were so poorly defended that we executed hit-and-run raids just to remind them they were in a war. On one of these occasions we inadvertently prompted the enemy to surrender, forcing us to deal with thirty-eight prisoners.
Du
ring that year, Rodric never had occasion to pick up a bow. We’d been haphazardly supplied with weapons and other equipment at the end of our training, but there had been a shortage of bows, so Rodric had surrendered his to me, favoring the dagger and the rapier. Artok and Samu carried bows as well, so we were sufficiently armed, since we rarely engaged in pitched battles. I’m certain that the men wondered why I’d seen fit to appropriate the trademark weapon of Rodric the Archer, but they had the wisdom not to ask. Rodric didn’t complain, and he did his part for the squad, and that was enough.
As I’ve intimated, although our primary role was to gather and disseminate information, we made ourselves useful in whatever way we saw fit. One of these was to hamper the work of the enemy’s own spy network, such as it was. After our initial successes in anticipating the Barbaroki’s movements, they began to send men over the passes to pull the same trick on us. Most of these passes would not permit the passage of a horse, so the Barbaroki’s natural advantage was negated, and they had nothing like our (comparatively) well-organized Scouting Corps. They simply found men who could move quickly through the rocks and sent them out by the dozen, one at a time, trusting that a few would eventually return with some useful information. Since the formation of the Scouting Corps, however, squads like mine traversed the passes frequently, and we were better trained at both stealth and detection than these clumsy Barbarok spies. We were empowered to execute spies where we found them, but we found this unsporting; generally we would either provoke the man to combat so he could be killed honorably or, if he were in no shape to fight, strip him of his equipment and release him into the wilderness with at least a slim chance of making his way back to his comrades.
Despite the dearth of coordination between squads, the Corps proved such an effective barrier to the enemy’s spies that they soon changed tactics. A favorite ploy was to dress up a spy in the uniform of a captured janissary officer, coaching him to claim that he had escaped a Barbarok camp or for some other reason had gotten separated from his unit. It might be supposed that the Barbaroki’s complexion and lack of facility with Keleti would quickly expose the ruse, but the janissaries are such an amalgam of cultures that a Barbarok in a janissary uniform is essentially indistinguishable (at least to the typical Scout, who has had a provincial upbringing) from an Eszaki or Lealtoki.
I should expound on one other point: as might be expected, the sudden prominence of the Scouting Corps was not looked upon as a welcome development by the bulk of the army’s command structure. Many divisions had their own scouting units, and these were as a rule better equipped, better trained and better organized than the squads of the Corps. They were also far less effective, owing primarily to their strict adherence to a hierarchical command structure. As I’ve noted, the effectiveness of the Corps was largely due to our chaotic method of operating. Information flowed between squads organically without having to filter up and then back down the chain of command; we were used to fending for ourselves and thus were not dependent upon distant depots for resupply; and the enemy could never predict our movements because we rarely knew a day in advance where we were going.
It must be admitted, too, that not every squad was as diligent and conscientious as my own. Some men, finding themselves free to do as they please after a period of army discipline, are given over to their baser natures. A few squads, particularly those in the far north, which had minimal contact with other units, were little more than bands of brigands, raiding towns and assaulting merchant caravans under the pretense of rooting out spies. Stories of these renegade Scouts permeated the country and sullied our reputation within the janissaries.
It is against this background of suspicion and prejudices that occurred my fateful encounter with an officer named Bertrek at a narrow pass just south of Asztal. We were returning from a reconnaissance mission in the southeast, having failed to locate a Barbarok force of several hundred said to be encamped somewhere in the area. At this point we had had no contact with the main body of our army nor any other Scouts for five weeks; as far as we knew, the nearest division was some fifteen leagues to the northwest. My squad was camped beneath an overhang about half a mile south of the pass. Having pulled sentry duty, I sat on the edge of a bluff overlooking the trail. It was the best vantagepoint available, as I could see the approach to the pass several hundred yards in both directions. Below me lay a narrow stretch of trail that disappeared behind massive rocks to my left and to my right. The intermediate span of trail was thus hidden from me on both sides; I would be able to see an intruder coming a long way off, but before they came into bow range they would be out of view for some time.
It was nearing nightfall when I saw a lone figure approaching from the western side of the pass. Before he reached the stretch of pass that was hidden from my view, I thought I glimpsed in the fading light the colors of a janissary uniform. The light continued to dim while the man was hidden, and I considered to myself the possibilities: if my perception was correct, he was either an officer or a Barbarok spy posing as an officer. A janissary officer had no business being at this pass at this time of night, or at any time for that matter. He was either lost or a deserter. If he were a spy, he was returning from a mission, perhaps with information regarding the location and disposition of janissary troops.
I considered letting the man pass and following him to his destination, but thought better of it. We hadn’t reconnoitered the area northeast of the pass; if we ran into enemy troops we might lose the man and whatever information he held. Better to detain him and determine his identity and mission. As he emerged from behind the rock wall, I hailed him. He stopped short, producing his own bow. I saw now that he did indeed wear an officer’s uniform.
“Who is that?” he called, trying to hide the fear in his voice.
“Janissary Scout,” I called, leaning over the bluff so that he would see my form against the twilight. “The raven comes with the north wind.” We had been provided with a challenge phrase, to which an officer (or other Scout) would reply with a specific answering phrase. The code was changed monthly, and the new pair of phrases would be communicated to the various squads the same way as any other sort of information, by chance meetings and occasionally planned liaisons. Officers in the field were supposed to receive the new password within three days by some combination of messenger, semaphore and heliograph. The more remote units would often be a password or two behind, requiring additional precautions to be taken to verify their identity. It was an imperfect system, but it worked fairly well, at least as well as the Scouts were concerned.
As I’ve said, though, there was a tendency among the officers in other units to disdain the Scouting Corps, and one result of this was a stubborn refusal among a fair proportion of them to learn the latest passphrases. It was, generally speaking, a cheap sort of rebellion, as most of them rarely had cause to prove their identity; they were like the dandies in the cities of the West who, imagining themselves to have advanced beyond the need for arms, look down on the janissaries, whose vigilance protects them from harm. Aware both of the arrogance of such officers and the Barbaroki’s uncanny ability to exploit any weakness, I waited for the man to respond.
“I’m the adjutant of General Janos of the Fourth Division,” the man declared. “I’ve come to summon the leader of your squad to speak with the general.”
I considered his claim. The name of General Janos was certainly well-known among the Barbaroki. I had no way of knowing if the Fourth Division was nearby. For that matter, the general had no way of knowing there was a squad of Scouts near this pass; it seemed unlikely he would send an officer to find us on a hunch. The man’s complexion was impossible to discern in the dim light, and his accent was difficult to pinpoint.
“In that case,” I said, “the general will have supplied you with a password.”
“What’s your rank, Scout?”
“As far as you’re concerned, I’m His Eminence the Supreme Emperor of This Pass. Give me the password or fall wh
ere you stand.” I nocked an arrow to emphasize my point.
He hesitated, clearly agitated. “Enough of this,” he said. “I’ll meet you where the trail widens ahead.” Beneath the affected arrogance in his voice, I heard fear. But was it the fear of a spy in the hands of his enemy or the fear of an officer who faced censure for failing to take the simple precaution of learning a password? He took a step forward.
“I don’t recommend that,” I said, drawing my bow taut.
He continued walking. If he broke into a run, he’d have complete cover within ten seconds.
“Last chance,” I said. “Stop there or take an arrow.”
He started running. I put an arrow in his shoulder.
The man cried out, falling to his knees, and at that moment I had the sickening sensation that I’d shot an officer of the janissaries.
Chapter Five
There could be little doubt as to the man’s position: a spy would have kept running, knowing that being apprehended meant death.
I climbed down from the bluff, working my way down the steep slope in the direction the man had been traveling. I skittered down to the trail and ran back toward the spot where the man sat crouched, an arrow protruding from his right shoulder.
“You son of a whore,” he whined, “you shot me! Do you know who I am?”
“I suspect you’re General Janos’s adjutant,” I said. “Let’s get you back to my camp.”
The Brand of the Warlock Page 4