At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  “The strength to know there’s worse things than starvation, darling.”

  At least they weren’t dying of thirst. Even the shit-laced waters around the camp were better than the cracked flesh and bloodied organs that came without. She thought of an old man she had seen in the followers’ camp, not long after the Emperor’s death. This one was already dead, but he was a shriveled thing. He and his dog—and the dog, still howling.

  She shuddered. The stores were breaking down. Portions were becoming scarcer and scarcer and there were rumors of hoarding.

  And still the wagons grew scarcer still. Men looked for them on every horizon, but it seemed as if their own country had abandoned them.

  Civilization, she had always said. Too much of it was the real killer. Give her the woods and she would never starve.

  Some did not need even that luxury. The Zuti, by every truth there was, should have ground them all up and spit them out and rendered the whole of their petty squabbles to nothing years ago. Truth be told, they puzzled her. As she looked out on her own kind—and that, in and of itself, a laughable note—she could not help but think the Marindi had somehow failed themselves. The Zuti were a people that hailed from a continent of sand and glass, or so the sailors said. A land of fire and brimstone, if the priestly sort were to be asked. Either way, it was not a thing one found bounty in. If they could survive that, well, it was no wonder they had taken over the continent’s west coast. The only real wonder was that they had been stopped.

  Unconsciously, she glanced behind her, looking for sign of their own southerner. The man had a way of disappearing for hours at a time, only to show up at the worst. She still didn’t know what to make of him, good or bad. But he earned her respect by being the one soul to utterly avoid talking to her of Rurik. A boon, to be sure.

  But names had a power. Usuri had taught her that. She bit her tongue as they crossed an open path, and a killer moved into it.

  Chigenda caught them half-way to the stores, a disheveled-looking baker held by one arm. When he reached them, he gave the boy a shove forward and folded his arms against his bare chest. The boy looked first to the Zuti, rubbing his arm, then to the befuddled pair before him. He licked thin lips, made thinner by the lack of food.

  “Essa,” he murmured.

  “Voren.”

  “Lord,” Rowan groaned. “Don’t tell me our dear Zuti has made you his voice now. You do still speak, don’t you, Chigenda?”

  The brown man’s lips spread into a pale imitation of a smile.

  “Well, at least he’s not deaf. Yet. Probably.”

  “Voren?” Essa repeated, ignoring the others. She did not like the nervous tick to his eyes.

  “I-I was looking for you. He was there. At-at camp I mean. Your camp. C-came to t-tell you…”

  “Little man much speak me like dis,” the Zuti said crossly, leaning over his ward. “Is funny, no?”

  Essa scowled at him. Voren took an unconscious step in her direction.

  “Something’s happening. Lindie said she saw armed men in camp.” Lindie was one of the other workers at the stores. She was skittish, like Voren, but Essa had not found her prone to overreaction.

  Rowan rolled his eyes. “All the men in camp are armed, child. It’s part of war.”

  “Weapons drawn, Rowan. With eyes what like fire.”

  Cousins exchanged a look. As one, they turned to Chigenda. The Zuti was staring off into the camp, scrutinizing the crowd of Gorjes still jeering between the tents. “Heard no ting. But people—dey move. Little men. Little sword.”

  “How many?”

  Without looking at them, the Zuti tapped one finger against his temple. “That is ting. No move as one. Many little men. Each to self, each own way.”

  As if to prove his point, a shout rose in the distance—but in a gathering so large, this was not an unusual occurrence, and it was quickly lost to the other sounds of camp.

  Armed men. As Rowan said, there were always armed men. And with Tessel’s recent incursions in the night…who was to say what their purpose was? It could have been another brawl. Or a grudge. There were more than enough of those to go around.

  There were many things it might have been. But few could make so stark a turning of Essa’s stomach.

  Rowan apparently shared her feeling.

  “There is a foulness on the air. Let us to camp, little birds.”

  * *

  Chaos. The dagger kissed air. Tessel seized Frechauf by the wrist, to wide eyes. Then he cracked his knuckles on the side of the assassin’s head. As they shrugged off the moment’s confusion, many of the other nobles produced smuggled steel as well and swung at anyone close at hand. Cries shattered the sanctity of the temple, mingling with the moans of the sick and the dying.

  Rurik froze. They will kill you. If you do not fight, they will carve you like a piece of meat regardless. But he was the only one who seemed unable to react.

  A scattered roar went up as the captains scrambled to meet the traitorous nobles. Rurik heard their cries rumble further still. Pordill was shouting. The men at his side shoved at the other nobles, shoved at the captains and at Rurik. They tried to shout down the chaos but blood had already fueled it. Metal rang beyond the door even as the old wood slammed shut.

  Rurik saw steel. He knew he should flee or fight with tooth and nail, but his hands were as meat dangling from the hooks of his arms. In the shuffle for Tessel’s life, one of the nobles knocked him aside even as Pordill fled past, he and another man making for the door. Bonsweid—the farmer—surged in turn, to meet the oncoming nobleman.

  Boderoy was dead by then. Rurik nearly stumbled over his corpse. Another of the captains staggered into Rurik, and as he pushed him back into his fight, sense jarred the would-be corpse to mind.

  Tessel spun between four other men, dagger in one hand, club in the other. There was no sign of where he had gathered the club, but between the two, Tessel was as a whirling dervish. Every time a man garnered the courage to strike, he struck faster, harder, and first, driving them back.

  There was a pounding at the doors. Shouts. Sick men wavered and howled, uncertain as to whether all was real or nightmare. Tessel’s trusted captains moved to aid him, or died in the effort—two more already lagged back, nursing knife wounds. Somewhere, Vogel of Caslau had snatched up a sword, and though one-armed, he still threw himself into the fray with abandon, but Rurik could see blood streaming. Soldiers moved with shield and sword and drove the nobles before them, but they were as disorganized as any, having been the first fallen upon, and now, shock had ruined them.

  No guns at least, Rurik noted. No guns, and only thin layers of cloth and leather to protect the lot.

  With a cry, Rurik launched himself at the noble squaring off with Vogel. In hindsight, a poor move. The cry alerted the man, and he twisted just in time, catching Rurik square in the jaw with a hard jab of his elbow. Rurik was shunted aside, clattering against the table. But it gave Vogel the chance he needed to plunge steel through the assassin’s surcoat.

  Death was a strangled cry. Its final circle closed upon them.

  * *

  Blood was in the streets. Armored men rattled down the lines between the tents and pitched battle in the frost.

  At first, Essa couldn’t make sense of it. Shouts preceded steel, and she assumed there had been a brawl. Then came the screams. The ring of blades. She stepped from the circle of their tents into a world consumed by war. Raid, she thought. That is, until she saw the stables.

  Gorjes poured through the camp in a stampede, and true to the herd, none seemed to know from what they were running. Alviss, waiting for them at the campsite, had taken charge as soon as Essa and the others reached him. With a few confused Gorjes, Gunther and Marvelle among them, he set a ring about the camp, kicking the fire into ashes and waiting for the screams to find shape.

  Essa slipped past at the baying of a distant horse. Starlet, she thought. Gods above, they’re killing the horses. Chigenda twis
ted at the last moment, and he saw her, but she put a finger to her lips and he looked first beyond her, then he turned away again without a sound.

  The nearest stables weren’t far from Witold’s share of the encampment. Outside, a stable boy lay amidst a pile of hay, quiet now. Skewered. Bloodied. With a face warped not in fear, but shock. She knew the wide eyes, the vacant, gasping part of the lips. Two stab wounds had taken him quickly in the chest. Dagger thrusts. Swift. Messy. Someone had walked right up to him, with a smile or a wave, and stabbed him through the heart.

  Nor was he the only one. Stalls had been hacked open. The horses were gone. Stablehands were scattered among the mud and the stones, blood pooling between them. Some still groaned. Most didn’t.

  Dead children, tossed to the mud. She didn’t scream. It seemed too far beyond that. She waded through the bodies of the dead, and never said a word. Steel answered regardless.

  * *

  When Rurik was a boy, one of his father’s rare gestures to his children was to take them all to hunt. Only rarely did he catch anything, though his brother Isaak almost always flushed a deer. Some people had all the luck.

  One day, they happened upon another hunt in progress. Having forsaken their horses for the day—to young Rurik’s ever-lasting complaint—they moved low and silent to the earth, mimicking their father and his wardens. Through the brush they heard a low howl, and the gnashing of many teeth. Rurik was scared, but Ivon goaded him. Isaak teased him. Their father motioned them on.

  In a clearing of the woods, a large old elk had been separated from its herd. Bent to the earth, it kept backing up with the large rack of bone protecting its fore. From wolves, as it would happen—four large hounds, all matted and grey, circling and waiting for their chance. The elk already limped. Kasimir pointed out the blood. Rurik felt sick to watch it.

  Time and again the beast warded their attempts to assail it, but time slowed it, time wore it, and time undid it.

  A joke, Rurik surmised—the things people think of when death faces them. Tessel was the elk. The nobles were his wolves.

  Even the greatest brawler was but a man. And all men tired.

  One man twisted him. Another stabbed in. Tessel turned his club for a backhanded swipe and caught the enterprising assassin clean across the nose. From the blood, Rurik judged he broke it, too.

  But the motion left him open. Vogel turned to him even as Rurik lumbered to his feet, fingering the welt already growing across his numb and shuddering vision.

  The blade pierced him through the side. Tessel grunted and staggered under the force of it, but held his ground. As other daggers loomed, he coiled and stabbed that blooded traitor down. The rest seemed to lack that one’s fire, at least before the warding wave of steel that Tessel brought to bear, but they had his hate, and they had time.

  Blood stained Tessel’s tunic. Wear creased the lines of his face, and though his blade still danced, when he tried to rise to full, the weight of the blow struck against him became apparent.

  The general winced, and wilted. But still he stood. Two men advanced on him, but so did the soldiers and the captains. Only Huwcyn Ibin held before them, wielding one of the soldiers’ swords. It was he, ever the practical man, who made the call above the din: “The Bastard bleeds. Run you fools, run!”

  * *

  Fire spread quickly, despite the water-soaked canvas. Tightly packed, the tents were ample fuel to the leaping sparks. Essa moved with one of the bucket teams, heaping water onto the swell until the food stores were secure.

  Voren sat at the edge of the blackened disasters, hands raw and flaked. He did not watch her. He did not even say a word. His own tent had caught as he tried to save the stores. Nothing had been lost to him, so far as she could tell, save the flesh it took to pull his living from the tent.

  It was the death that stilled him. Essa could understand that. It stilled her too. Yet he still breathed and that—that was something she could build on.

  She bound his hands with some of the torn canvas strips. She poured water in his wounds and sat him upright, ordering him to remain. Numb nods returned. Not enough. She set a knife in his lap before she left him.

  Then she put herself to the hunt.

  Ash drifted on the wind. It reminded her of Lieven—of broiling streets and wailing wives; of crumbling walls and bloodied eyes. Death. Every breath was a choking struggle against it, built on others’ ends.

  Alviss and the others were trying to save the Gorjes’ camp—a flailing effort, she gathered, by the lack of well water. Captain Haruld had come with a dozen other men and ordered them to it. Then he had gone, barking orders too few seemed to hear, and even she could no longer catch his sound.

  And they—they were too far, the fires too fast.

  Some were less fortunate than others.

  Rurik was in there somewhere, too. She looked to Pasłówska, where the crowds ran thickest. Too far. Trying not to think of him, she moved into the west, where the shouts were faintest and the tracks the heaviest. Mud held the truth of their passing.

  Yet there she saw her second sign of disillusion. Beyond the stakes and trenches of their camp, there was no fear. Or at least, no flight. Prostitutes gawked from their hide-lined homes, painted lips drawn wide. Swindlers craned over ragged carts. Dogs howled as the beggars hid.

  But there were no fires, and no one fled. No blood swam the camp followers’ lanes—just the same old spring chill. Her hands knotted against the implication.

  They asked her questions as she passed, but Essa never parted with a word. A horse whinnied on the horizon, and the plains held black and brown specks against the dappled green.

  In the distance, Starlet, with a dead man dangling from her stirrups.

  * *

  In Tessel’s fall, there was a glimmer of another man—an older man, but every bit as brash, rounding the world on a braying steed, as everyone and everything descended into death around him.

  There was so much blood.

  He staggered against the altar, dropping his club as he clawed the sheets, struggling just to keep upright. The last of the nobles loomed over him, ignoring the pleas of his fleeing partner. “This is for my brother,” the man snarled, as he raised another dagger high. Only Vogel‘s shoulder kept it from the fall, jolting Frechauf into the spears of the guardsmen.

  Tessel rolled so his back was against the altar, that he could see savior and assassin both, and slid to the cobbles.

  The soldiers stammered after Huwcyn and the last of his conspirators, even as the doors to the temple shrieked. Men in surcoats appeared in the leaking daylight, blades in hand. Nobles’ men, all of them. Blood seeped at their feet, for the guardsmen Tessel had left on the door had been hacked down. The soldiers skidded, stopped; forward led only into the arms of death. Huwcyn shouted to his saviors. The count’s son flung himself into their ranks and disappeared into the sun. For a moment, the soldiers lingered, stretching arms and legs as if to charge.

  If they had, they would all have died.

  But the sound was greater than the fury. Eyes on the dais, the men-at-arms slipped back the way they had come, and the soldiers chased them to the door. From beyond, the noise spilled back into their desecrated hall, and all knew that the disease of madness had spread far.

  It was all coming apart. In the camp, there would be only confusion, and if the nobles had the foresight to kill Narve, it could well fall to massacre. Rurik, however, joined the other captains around Tessel. “Kill them,” the man spat. Blood flecked his phlegm, his eyes narrow slits. “Hunt the bastards. I won’t—I won’t have them go.” But he howled like a man damned when Vogel pressed a heavy hand against his side. The captain’s brows knitted, and he twisted on his fellows.

  “Get a medicus. Now.”

  * *

  A bullet was the end of the thief. Or, if it wasn’t, it had jarred him enough to let Starlet do the rest.

  Saltpeter cracked sharp through the air as Essa bent to the body. Blood—still wa
rm—reddened the tips of her fingers. What was left of the man’s face was tranquil, but it was enough.

  She knew him. In memory, he rode stoically. Astride a horse, the man had been as any other, tending to his master’s needs, brandishing colors and steel wherever war beckoned. There was no name with it. No deed. Just—a face.

  Essa closed his eyes and turned back toward the camp. Horses grazed among the pastures, nibbling at those buds untouched by frost. The shouts had dimmed, fallen silent.

  A pair of riders broke from the western gate, riding hard. One could fall. Slumped in his saddle, she could see red spraying from between clenched fingers. On their saddles, she caught glimpses of silver rattling out of the bags. Blood money. Earned and paid.

  There were lions on their chests. Yellow lions. Cullick’s lions. The omen stilled her.

  In memory, she saw the young man’s lord. A hold, not far from Verdan. Lenesby. That was the man’s name. One of Witold’s banners. One of Ivon’s retinue.

  Noble men killed peasant men. Peasant men killed noble men. The stench of both drowned in ash as they died on foreign soil. Blood, like the winter, was never done as soon as one might think.

  A body tumbled from its saddle with a groan, as his partner shouted to the sky.

  Flames flickered off the steeples of the town, as Essa leaned into the muck. Brown eyes swam in it. They mingled with the blood and were lost. Dark hands—her hands—shook against her breeches.

  She knew where the killers had come from. Voren had warned her.

  Yet she had never thought to warn him.

  * *

  “To hell with it. You—sew. You—speak,” Tessel snarled. He snapped at each in turn.

  As the doctor bent to his work with needle and thread, Vogel sagged. “Thirty-some dead, ser. Half again that number bloodied. They caught us unawares. Stabbed men as they ate. Most the dead was gone before we knew what was what.”

  Rurik winced for his general as the needle yanked back through the skin. Thoughts of limbs and blood and war set his stomach burbling. Tessel only grunted. Once they had gotten him off the floor of the church and staunched the initial bleeding, he had come around well enough. An open-air tent had since been staked outside the doors, and Tessel had insisted he be taken there, where he might better survey the damage.