by Leo Carew
“You would not, though, lord,” said Gray calmly, tugging off his boots. “Your very great strength is also the thing which may lead you to overreach yourself. You commit and do not look back. You would be too compelled by the effort to ask Vigtyr to relent. You see it as a test for yourself.”
“Gray, you aren’t listening to me,” said Roper vehemently. “I do not need you fighting my battles.”
“As soon as you no longer need my service, lord, dismiss me.”
Roper gave a frustrated grunt. “You’re almost as stubborn as Pryce.”
“I admire him very much.”
Silence fell between them: the most uncomfortable that Roper had known with his friend. He stared into the fire, a little shocked by his own anger. It took him some moments to realise that he still bore the scars of Uvoren’s treatment of him last year. Any hint of patronising, or control, or interference, and Roper would bristle. That and the hunger, he supposed. Everyone was snappish.
While the legates made their preparations for battle, Gray abstained from these sober tasks. He arranged himself cross-legged, a sack of fresh venison before him, and used a long knife to unroll the flesh into thin strips, which he dripped over a drying rack like wax. Presently, Sigrid came to collect his efforts, looking down at her husband. “You don’t want to try and sleep?” she asked.
“I won’t sleep tonight,” he replied. “Better to stay busy.”
Gray’s wife was as strikingly beautiful as Keturah claimed, with high cheekbones, skin like pale silk, white-blonde hair and eyes the blue of daylight. She looked from Gray to Roper and Keturah, tightening the corners of her mouth and narrowing her eyes kindly in her equivalent of a smile. “My lord and lady,” she said. “How good to see you both.” The pair of them rose and embraced her.
“Thank you for the last time, my dear,” said Keturah, employing the fond Anakim greeting. “I see your husband is happier with domestic duties than mine.”
Sigrid just beamed at Keturah, saying nothing. Roper made a note of this moment as evidence he could present later for Sigrid’s awkwardness.
Keturah recovered the conversation. “I fear he keeps himself busy so that we shan’t have too long in each other’s company. He thinks I talk too much and has been hoping you’ll convince me of the benefits of silence.”
Sigrid laughed. “I’m not sure I have any particular wisdom to bestow.”
“Tell them what you told me, my love,” said Gray, still absorbed in his task. “There’ll be a lot of silence tonight. It is as well that they appreciate it.”
“If you wish to hear,” said Sigrid, settling onto her knees.
“I’ll listen to anything at the moment,” said Roper.
Sigrid looked thoughtfully into the fire. “We might start with why we are here. I think it is to learn. To learn you must listen, and to listen you must be silent. I have tried to live my life by that, and after a while you start to see how violent words can be: even pleasant ones. Imagine a perfect moment in a forest.” Roper did. He was in the freyi, Keturah’s head in his lap, the starlight piercing the leaves. “You might remark to one another how wonderful the moment is. But by doing so, you shatter it. You restrict the experience. Words define, enclose and categorise. You should let the silence speak. You are sharing the experience just as much in the quiet as you are with your words. Part of the wonder of that moment was its silence, and the fact that you were purely in it, and not analysing it with your companion.
“Does that make sense?” she said, looking up between Roper and Keturah.
Roper felt his opinion of Sigrid shift somewhat. It was true, there was nothing awkward about her steady blue gaze. “I suppose so,” he answered her, thinking.
“Not to me,” said Keturah, bluntly. “If everyone were to live this way, would the result not be that everyone has less fun talking? And that you are more likely to discover that you are dissatisfied with your company?”
“It depends what you value in company,” said Sigrid. “But I am not advocating that everyone stops talking. Merely that we should find time for silence too.”
But not now, thought Roper. Not before battle.
“Is there more?” asked Keturah.
“Start with that,” said Sigrid. “And perhaps eventually you start to realise how powerful words really are. Silence creates contrast. It is something to set against words and make them weightier. And contrast is one of the roots of pleasure.
“But you know much of this already, Lord Roper,” she added. “Do you not find the same value in a battlefield? Living right at the moment; the freedom and pleasure of that. The contrast, which puts your life at home in perspective and makes the sweet moments sweeter and the moments you might have called dull, peaceful. The flood of emotions which battle unleashes, and the comparison of that with the usual banality.”
Roper was intrigued. The legates had ceased their preparations to observe Sigrid, and she looked around the hearth. “I must return to my tasks,” she said, getting to her feet and picking up the drying frame of venison. “Good luck tomorrow, all of you.”
The legates murmured their thanks and good night, and Tekoa rose to excuse himself, saying he would try and sleep.
“Peers, before you go,” said Roper. “So you know what tomorrow will be like. We will let Lincylene be an example.” His face assumed regret. “They have resisted us and refused our demands, and they must receive no mercy whatsoever. I know it seems brutal. I know it seems almost like possession, and your honour will protest. But tomorrow we will kill every living thing within those walls. Nothing survives. Nothing.” He looked up at the cold stars for a brief moment, and then back at his commanders. “Do you understand?”
They nodded.
“Till then.”
24
The Weapon
The last few days had been greatly disturbing for Bellamus.
It was late, and he sat by the fire in the Cobweb. He and Stepan each clutched a cup of spiced ale, rain tapping at the windows. Every time the door was opened with another message for the spymaster, a waft of cold, damp air would make the candles shudder. Their last visitor had been Hrothweard the physician, who had inspected Bellamus’s ruined eye beneath the poultice and murmured his amazement that there was no sign of infection. Bellamus was not terribly surprised: fortune had always been on his side. He found that he kept missing objects as he tried to pick them up, but mostly found this amusing.
“I saw an odd figure skulking around today,” said Stepan.
“Mmm?” grunted Bellamus, with little interest.
“Very tall: too big for a Sutherner, I’d have thought. He was at the end of the street, cloak up over his head, and I shouted at him. He turned the corner, and when I followed he was gone. I couldn’t see him anywhere.”
“One of our Anakim messengers,” Bellamus suggested. “Unndor, or that other one, Urthr.” It could not be Garrett, whom Bellamus had sent out of Brimstream on a task as soon as they returned. He was furious with the hybrid, and would no longer be left alone with him.
“Behaving oddly, if it was one of them,” said Stepan. He pulled a woollen blanket about his shoulders and inspected Bellamus, clearly mystified by the lack of interest. “What have you been up to in that barn?” he asked.
Bellamus sipped his ale. He listened to the wind moaning outside and could hear the squeal of rusty hinges that it set in motion. “I have discovered something,” he said.
“Oh yes? This is all very mysterious,” said Stepan, comfortably. “What is it?”
“A weapon,” said Bellamus. “And I’m not sure whether to use it.”
“Are you going to explain?”
Bellamus took another sip. “I suppose I am.” He nodded thoughtfully to himself and raised a hand to touch the poultice over his eye. “You remember what our erstwhile innkeeper said about Slave-Plague? That it doesn’t affect us, only the hybrids?” Stepan was nodding. “Well he was right. I tested it myself. I went to one of the diseased hybrids,
gave it every opportunity to infect me, and it didn’t.”
Stepan gave a disbelieving laugh. “Are you serious?” And when he saw that Bellamus was, he amended: “Are you insane?” He gazed at his friend for a while and Bellamus would not meet his gaze. “Why would you do that?”
“Because imagine if the part of a hybrid that is vulnerable to the plague is its Anakim part,” said Bellamus. “I had to know. By trying to infect myself, I confirmed it wasn’t the Suthern part. And after that, I just needed to test that it does infect the Anakim.”
“Great God,” said Stepan, softly. His eyes shone white in the gloom. “That’s why you wanted live Anakim prisoners. I thought you were going to try and turn them into informants, like the others. But you’re experimenting on them with this plague!”
Bellamus nodded. “Yes I am. That is what I have done.” He stared into his cup for a time. “And I am ashamed.” The fire cracked loudly. “That is not something I say very often. But I am ashamed, because my suspicions were right. The Anakim are vulnerable to Slave-Plague. The legionary I exposed to it is in that barn now, dying.”
“Oh my God,” said Stepan, softly. There was a long pause. “This is so new,” said the knight, evidently trying to find some angle from which to approach the huge subject. “In every way. From you; as an idea… I have never heard of anything like this before. Why did you do it?” he finally wondered. “I’ve never seen you be cruel to prisoners before. Even when you are recruiting one of your spies… you have used underhanded tactics, I know, but always obeyed your own code. I remember you telling me about blackmail, and misdirection and outrageous deceit, but you’ve always drawn a line before we’ve come to anything like this. Your interrogations are so civil. Never torture, or using loved ones as leverage, effective as those things would have been. For all people say you have no scruples, and would do anything, I’ve never seen the evidence of that. Was I wrong? Or has something changed? And why?”
“You weren’t wrong,” said Bellamus. “I have been truthful. I have never threatened loved ones, or used coercion or torture, though I resisted for mostly selfish reasons. The gain seemed too small, the suffering too great, and it would have felt unpleasant. And now this… This is different to me. It is vile, what is happening to the legionary through there.” Bellamus nodded through the wall of the Cobweb, as though they could both see the barn gleaming darkly in the rain. “A good man, in the wrong place at the wrong time. I pity him. But once I’d had this thought, did I not have a responsibility to investigate it? I knew that I might have found a weapon that could win this war. To develop it, one of our enemies had to die badly. Would it not have been wrong to ignore that opportunity? Is the experiment I have done so much worse than the scores we killed raiding that weapons shipment?” He finished, looking hopefully at the knight.
Stepan looked away. “It seems worse,” he said.
“I agree it seems worse, but when I think on it, there is no real reason why. He is dying badly, but no worse than someone injured in battle who gets the fever. And this is more necessary than that. Think how many people could be saved. Albion could be saved! To have shielded myself from these experiments, when I knew the difference it could make, would have been… cowardice.” He spoke the word bleakly into the fire and drained his mug. “I have been searching for so long for ways that we can fight this enemy. We are so outmatched. I have developed so many weapons to try and lend us an advantage.” He gestured futilely across the room to the inventions scattered over his table. Bellamus himself was not much of a craftsman, but he had ideas, and there was no shortage of skilled manufacturers at Brimstream to execute them. He had considered how best to advantage a Sutherner against an Anakim, and settled mostly on poison.
Poison was not troubled by Anakim-bone plates, or their great size and strength, and he had developed a dozen methods of administration. On his desk lay an unusually sharp quill, which could write after a fashion (well enough, he reasoned, to convince an illiterate race), but its ink was a fast-acting poison extracted from foxgloves. Next to it lay a glove with a concealed pouch on the back, accessed by pulling a tiny thread that unleashed powder to be blown in an enemy’s eyes and blind them. Beside this, an innocuous staff, the lower half of which had been wrapped with lead and expertly painted and sculpted to resemble the wood. It was slim enough that someone might be tempted to raise an arm to ward off the blow, and that arm would be folded in half. There were candles that gave off an awful eye-watering fume when burnt. Bellamus was most proud of a book, the cover of which was loaded with a spring mechanism concealed in the pages. When opened, it emitted a gout of lime-powder to corrode the eyes and mouth. As the Anakim could not read, he had even titled the book: The Most Poison Pages, by Bellamus of Safinim. Subtitled: Do not open under any circumstances.
“These are toys,” said Bellamus dismissively. “I may be able to arm the Thingalith to the teeth, but it will make no real difference to this war. The plague might, though. It might be devastating.”
“But what now?” asked Stepan. “You have found this weapon—a plague that will only affect our enemies. Are you going to unleash it on them? Kill tens of thousands with disease?”
“Those Anakim have to die anyway if we are going to win this war,” said Bellamus.
“On the battlefield!” declared Stepan, as animated as Bellamus had ever seen him. “With honour, man to man. Not cut down by this dreadful illness.”
Bellamus smiled sadly at his friend. “You have a knight’s view of conflict, my brother. I am of more humble origins. If I do not use this weapon, I cannot see how we will stop the Anakim subduing all of Suthdal. If we fight them only on the battlefield, then we will lose every time.”
“So you say, but have we not done well so far?” asked Stepan. “Are they not growing hungrier, and wasting men and time before the walls of Lincylene? And we have just stopped the Unhieru from joining the fight, or at least delayed them. I don’t see that we are losing yet. I don’t think we have to resort to this.” He finished, sitting forward in his chair to stare imploringly at Bellamus.
“The Anakim are soldiering on,” said the upstart, quietly. “I thought contaminating the water might slow them more, but our enemy is too adept at living from the land. I thought the lack of progress might make them surrender to their heartsickness, and go back north, but some will keeps driving them onwards. We are losing, Stepan. We have not weakened that army enough, and by the time Earl Seaton gets here with his forces, he will find the Anakim army is still near unstoppable in the field.” He stood to refill his mug, offering more to Stepan, which the knight refused. “But I have not yet decided what to do. In spite of all that I have said, I cannot bring myself to unleash this on the Anakim. Not quite.”
“But you might?”
Bellamus gave a tiny heave of his shoulders. Stepan sat back in his chair and drained the rest of his ale, staring at the empty cup for a moment before rising to assemble a plate of food. Bellamus picked up the pile of messages at his side, each delivered in some ingenious way. Some concealed inside eggs, their shells softened with vinegar, opened with a flint blade, and then rehardened with cold water once the message had been inserted. The one he held now was written on silk and had been sewn into a pair of leggings. He smiled faintly to himself as he remembered an unfamiliar cloak he had found here the day before. He had torn it to scraps, looking for a concealed message, before one of the Thingalith had appeared saying he thought he might have left his cloak on the table and had Bellamus seen it? Bellamus had promised to replace it.
Looking down at the silk he recognised Aramilla’s cypher. He glanced up at Stepan, still piling cold meat onto his plate, and quickly produced the frame with which he could decipher it. He had finished reading the message and hidden the frame in the stack of papers, just as Stepan turned around and returned to his chair. He knew he was failing to keep the shock of what he had just read from his face, but Stepan seemed distracted. He was not looking at Bellamus, and spoke at las
t in a miserable and defeated voice.
“I want to go home, Captain.”
“Home?” asked Bellamus, distracted. “Is it the plague?”
“No, no,” said Stepan, hurriedly. “It is nothing you’ve done. But when I went north last year, I thought it would be for a campaign. A few months at the most. I’ve been away from my wife, God bless her, and my estate for more than half a year. I believe in the work we do here and you know I’m loyal to you, Captain. Lord knows I wouldn’t have survived our retreat from the Black Kingdom without you, none of us would. But this isn’t what I thought I was getting into. I thought there might be an end in sight long ago. I thought we would be fighting in the open, on the battlefield, not in the shadows. I miss my wife. I miss my dogs, I miss sowing the crops and I keep thinking about the apple-harvest last year, and how that was. We’d put down a dozen saplings and I want to see how they’re doing. I have no word of how things are, because although I can send messages to Ede, she can’t know where I am to send them back. And the Black Legions will be done with Lincylene soon, and they will move south. I want to be at home, and be with my wife and my servants when the Anakim war machine stomps over our lands.”
Bellamus listened miserably. Stepan was the closest he had to family at that moment. Crossing borders, driven by ambition and hunger, this speech made him consider for the first time what it was costing him. Then his resolve solidified a little. Stepan’s idea of home sounded so romantic because he was a knight with an estate and future. Bellamus had nothing like that. He had to be here, working at his deadly trade, if he wanted hope of any such future.
“I see all that, Stepan,” he said. “And I can’t disagree, or blame you for a word of it. This is a long, bleak struggle. No doubt your life would be a good deal better in that fine home you describe, with your wife. Go, if you must. Go. I won’t stop you. I owe you my life, too; you have more than paid your debt to me. All I can say in return is that I have come to rely on you.” Stepan fidgeted unhappily. “I would miss you greatly, both for your company and your skills. You are needed here, too, where you can make a difference. But that mustn’t stop you, if you feel as you have said.” Bellamus had abandoned his family when he was fourteen. He could navigate a sexual relationship with a queen without feeling any emotional investment whatsoever. And he lost so many comrades in this conflict that he rarely diverted energy into bonding with them any more. Somehow, though, he had come to rely on this knight, and he realised how alone he might feel if he were gone.