by RW Krpoun
Burk, in keeping with Standards, snapped into his Guardsman stance, while I just eyed the newcomer, my thumbs hooked in my belt. “Who are you looking for?”
“Two big brutes who interfered with our tax collections.”
I looked over the pair behind the speaker. “Why don’t you take these two and go someplace else?”
“You owe Broken Johnny money.”
“Are you Broken Johnny?”
“You can call me Hook. I speak for Broken Johnny on this matter, and many others.”
“Well, Hook, you can piss off, and so can Broken Johnny.”
All three stared at us, clearly surprised, and then Hook smiled gingerly. “I get it: things have been changing fast here, and you’re not up to speed. You see, Broken Johnny says what goes on in the streets here. Where money changes hands in the street, Johnny gets his cut. Those brutes you ran off were employees of Johnny’s.”
“So what?”
He stared up at me as if I was speaking a foreign language. “What do you mean, ‘so what’? If Johnny gives the nod, you’ll be floating down the river.”
“I’ve floated down a worse river,” I shrugged. “You can tell…”
“Where is this Johnny?” Burk interrupted.
Hook grinned again, in the manner of a man whose face hurt, which his apparently did. “If Johnny wanted you to know how to find him, you would already know.”
“Hiding,” Burk snorted. “If he exists at all.” He grabbed a fistful of Hook’s expensive tunic and jerked him up onto his tiptoes. “Take us to Johnny.”
The pair of thugs drew their truncheons and started towards Burk, only to stop as I stepped forward, flipping the leather flap securing my sword in its back-mounted scabbard and twitching my shoulder so it slid free. My sword is an old-style longsword intended to be used either one or two-handed, often called a bastard sword. It was bit longer than the average longsword, a little over four feet of blade with strong crossguards that stood out five inches. Hunter had told me it was special, but he hadn’t said in what particular; all I knew was that it was lighter than most blades its length, and stronger than any sword I had ever used before.
I flipped it through a few basic warm-ups, figuring the sight of a sword nearly five feet from point to pommel being spun like it was a twig would give them pause; Master Horne always said that fights could be won on small things.
It had the desired effect: the pair stayed put, fingering their sword hilts and scowling; to my left Hook started to paw at his sword, thought better of it, and managed a strangled laugh. “You want to meet Johnny? Fine with me, but you’ll be sorry.”
Burk let go of Hook. “Lead on.”
“Do you have a plan?” I muttered as Hook and his men led us away from the square.
“No. Do you?”
“Nope. But I don’t have any other ideas for what to do today, either.”
We wound our way through the back streets until we found ourselves in the rear courtyard of a big building that had partially burned down, and was now partially re-built; it looked like it had been old and run-down before it caught fire.
Hook gestured at stone steps leading down to a cellar door. “There you go.”
“Go tell Johnny to come out and talk,” Burk assumed his Stance.
Hook cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t give orders around here.”
“Maybe Johnny will come up when he hears you screaming for help,” Burk shrugged.
Hook jerked a hand at one of his men, who headed into the cellar. “You are running up quite a tab, tusker. I’ll enjoy seeing the bill collected.”
Burk ignored him.
A short while later Hook’s man re-appeared, followed by a couple of toughs with a more competent air about them, and then a slender unarmed man in a silk doublet and hose; this latter had a neatly-trimmed mustache and goatee, and his blonde hair was clean and cut close to his head.
We brutes are hairless, and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have hair; Hatcher spends a great deal of time talking about hair and the care of said hair, so I expect it must be a matter of considerable importance.
The blond man studied both of us for a moment before speaking. “They call me Broken Johnny; I take it that you’re the ones who ran off my brutes earlier today?”
“Why do they call you Broken Johnny?” I asked after waiting for Burk to say something.
Johnny grinned and shook his head, then held up his left hand, which was encased in a green silk glove: the fingers were frozen in a sort of claw gesture. “Legacy of a bad decision. Would you care to guess what that decision was?”
“That they didn’t kill you?”
His grin became genuine. “Exactly! I expect you aren’t the sort to make that kind of error.”
“Not often.”
“You know, Hook, when I came up here, I was wondering what sort of madness had overcome you to intrude into my time in this manner, but I see now you exercised good judgement. Do you know who these two are?”
“Just two big brutes wearing a blacksmith’s shop.”
Johnny waved his good hand at us. “Grog and Burk, High Rates of the Ebon Blades and more recently appointed members of the Red Guard for unspecified services that, I have heard rumored, involved a long trail of corpses.”
Hook eyed us warily. “Two of Horne’s best?”
“The very same, and why he sold them is a matter for serious conjecture. Purchased as bodyguards by a priestess who by all logic should now be dead, and now both free and honored.” Johnny turned and eyed us speculatively. “And here you are amidst my latest business venture, costing me money and inconvenience. Why is that?”
For a moment I couldn’t think of why; this had just sort of grown out of nothing. “What your brutes were doing was wrong.”
“Ah.” Johnny nodded seriously. “I am being lectured on morality by killers.”
I had to consider what he said and his tone for a moment to get his point. “If you don’t like it, feel free to piss off.” It was weak, but I am not clever.
Weak or not, Johnny’s eyes flashed and his bodyguards tensed. “You seem rather confident despite the numbers.” He waved his claw-hand to indicate the building behind him.
I shrugged. “Your nitwits wouldn’t pee without you telling them where, and you know that if the dance starts, you won’t live long enough to see us fall.”
He nodded slowly, no humor left. “You seem rather committed.”
He was wrong: we were as purposeless as a runaway wagon on a downslope. “Well, we are now,” I admitted after a pause.
“That street pays no taxes,” Burk rumbled. “Nor puppet shows, either.”
Johnny looked a touch confused at that, but he shrugged. “They say that compromise is the mark of reasonable gentlemen, so let us agree that that street is free and clear, and that the practice of the arts shall not be subject to crass mercantilism. Will that lead us away from this dreary business of threat and counter-threat?”
“Why don’t you walk us out of this courtyard?” Burk suggested.
“Well, that wasn’t boring,” I observed when we had left the thugs behind.
“Criminals extorting honest people is not proper behavior,” Burk muttered angrily.
“I’m pretty sure he had men with crossbows in the upper part of that building.”
“He did, but this entire matter is just a naked defection of the law.” Burk shook his head and thought. “Not defection, detection. No, not detection. What is the word?”
“’Disregard’?” I suggested after a moment’s consideration.
“Yes, disregard of the law. We are Red Guardsman, and we have taken an oath.”
“I’m not sure that would make it legal to go back and kill him and the guards we would have to go through to get to him. I don’t think extortion-ing people is a hanging offense.”
“Well, let’s tell the Watch about this, at least.”
“That’s sensible.”
“There�
�s nothing that we can do,” the Watch duty Serjeant sighed, slouching in his chair behind a desk covered with papers. He was a big man, but now stooped with age and carrying a large ale-born gut. “We’ve half the usual number of Watchmen, and double the problems; worst of all is that those of us who remain are lamed up from the fighting on the walls, or old-timers called back from retirement.”
“What about help from the Legion?” Burk asked.
“All they have here is cadre training recruits, and quartermasters pushing supplies forward from the riverhead. I would offer to swear you in for as long as you are here, but if you two stir up the like of Broken Johnny and then leave, we would be in even a worse position. Our only hope is that the war ends soon and these criminals head south for easier pickings.”
Outside the Watch station Burk stopped and stared into nothing.
“What?”
“We need to do something.”
“I don’t see what we can do: we’re not Watchmen, and killing Broken Johnny will stir up a large mess; Provine Sael is bound to hear of it, and you know she would not approve.”
“All right, don’t kill Broken Johnny. What about Hook?”
I thought on that. “Broken Johnny couldn’t let that pass. He would come after us.”
Burk snorted. “Let him. His men wouldn’t pass muster as Low Rates.”
“Still, that leads us right back to explaining dead men to Provine Sael.”
Burk snarled and started walking. “This is not proper.”
“I agree. And having Broken Johnny come after us would be better than all this waiting. But we have to answer to our mistress, and she does not like killing.”
“Unnecessary killing,” he corrected me.
“True. But she is smarter than us, which means we would need a very good excuse for every corpse.”
We walked in silence for a bit. “As Hook pointed out, there’s always the river,” I said slowly. “Criminals disappearing would not cause a fuss, at least not one that would reach the ears of Provine Sael.”
“Moving a body through town would be tricky,” Burk mused. “But it is a good idea.”
We got stew and bread at a small café, and brought food for supper and breakfast before heading back to our camp. We worked out with chunks of wood, field stones, and buckets of water to keep up our strength and conditioning, and then ran two miles around the perimeter of the camp carrying packs with sixty pounds of sandbags to maintain stamina.
After washing off the sweat and doing some laundry, I returned to working with the javelins; it was nearing sunset when I returned to camp, where Burk was shining his spare boots and leather gear to a high gloss, in keeping with his Standards. He was scowling at the rag, and buffing like he was trying to burn in the shine.
“They look about as good as they’re going to get,” I observed as I laid out our simple supper.
“I know. I already polished them twice.”
“What’s on your mind?”
He put his boots down and spread the rag across them to protect the shine. “When I was a slave, I thought about being free a lot.”
“I know, you never shut up about it.”
He ignored that. “But the thing was, I never felt bad about things, the world, you know. Because I was a slave. Now I’m free, I have a job, money, even a title.” He slapped his bracer, which he never took off except to sleep. “But I feel more like a slave right now than I did when I was a slave.”
“Why do you feel like a slave?” I sawed a loaf in half lengthwise, and pried the top off the jar of salted butter.
He jabbed a finger towards town. “Tomorrow Broken Johnny’s men are going to be making the rounds, performing extortion. If I can’t stop that, what good is this bracer? What good am I? When I was a slave, I had a purpose, and took pride in the performance of my purpose. Now I’m free and scum like Broken Johnny ignore the law.”
I thought about this as I smeared butter on the bread. His exact words didn’t really make sense as he said them, but in my bones I could feel the truth. “You feel like we’re letting an escort job go without a fight.”
“Exactly. Slave or not, no one took an escorted person away from us. From any of the Ebon Blades. But now they’re doing it in front of us.”
“We’re not getting paid.”
He knelt and stirred the coals, adding some wood scraps. “Nobody paid us back then; we fought for the honor of the barracks.”
“Well, they paid the barracks, but I see your point. But we can’t just go kill Broken Johnny, we agreed on that.”
“Yeah. But tomorrow I’m going to make the rounds, too, and I’m going to break the bones of anyone I catch collecting. The Watch won’t get involved with the criminals, you saw that, so they won’t interfere with me.”
I started slicing cheese. “Johnny isn’t going to take that lightly.”
“No, he’ll send armed men.” He grinned evilly. “Even Provine Sael cannot complain about self-defense.”
“She’ll still have something to say, and Johnny won’t come himself.”
He nodded grimly. “I know. I can’t work that part out. But I’m still going to do it.”
“We need to think on the money.” I set the fry pan in place over the growing fire and rubbed some lard on the bottom. “Giving it back could get the people who accept it in trouble, like they were taking sides. Today shouldn’t be a problem, but tomorrow is going to be different: tomorrow we are going to have a lot of eyes on us. We can’t keep it, because that would not be proper.” I started slicing a potato into the pan.
Burk sliced strips off a haunch of salt beef and put them in with potato slices, adding a bit more lard as the fry pan began to pop and sizzle. “This having time on our hands is nothing but trouble. I feel like we’ve been abandoned.”
I nodded, digging out another potato. “It is a sore subject with me. They just handed us money and say ‘make sure you’re here in a week’. That’s not proper organization. Not so much as a hint as to what should be done in the meantime. I like an afternoon off now and again, and time to train, but this is just not how you treat skilled employees.”
“I just know Hunter or Hatcher could come up with a good plan,” Burk shook his head.
“They’re not anywhere handy, that is for certain.”
We cooked in silence, and ate the proceeds while lost in thought.
I was cleaning the frying pan with sand when Burk slapped his knee. “What if we gave the money to a good cause?”
I thought about that. “What cause?”
“They were collecting aid for the refugees at the temple, and the Church has its own guard force; if Johnny was dumb enough to try something with them to get the money back, he would ride a noose quick.”
“That’s clever,” I admitted. “I think we have a real plan.”
Chapter Two
I caught the red-haired thug on the jaw with a backhand swipe and he went down, spraying blood and tooth fragments, but even as he dropped the short Man I had thrown into the wall landed on my back, getting an arm around my neck while he pawed at my eyes with his other hand. The big blonde thug was coming at me with his cudgel ready, and it sounded as if Burk had his hands full, too, but I didn’t have time to look.
Our plan had started well: we had left collectors with broken bones all over the poorer quarter, but the trouble started when Johnny didn’t send armed men after us; instead, he sent groups of thugs armed with nothing more than clubs. We beat the first two groups of four men each, but the third group was six veteran brawlers who fought like they were getting paid very well.
I caught the man’s wrist as he pawed at my face, trying to find my eyes, and he promptly clamped his teeth on my right ear, sending an electric bolt of pain shooting deep into my skull. I roared with shock and agony and hurled myself backwards, hearing boards splinter as my back-rider was crushed between the building and my armored bulk. Blood poured down my neck as he released my ear; twisting, I speared my right elbow back
once, twice, three times into his ribs, feeling the bones flex and hearing the air explode out of his lungs.
Releasing his wrist just in time, I blocked a cudgel-swing aimed at my head, but the impact numbed my left arm from the elbow on down. Hurling myself forward, the back-rider falling away, I grabbed the blonde’s unwashed collar and head-butted him in the temple, the sound of our skulls meeting resembling a board being beat against a tree. The impact sent stars flashing through my vision, and the thug dropped like he was pole-axed.
Staggering a little, I tried to see how Burk was doing, and if any other foes were coming at me, not moving nimbly or thinking too clearly. Red-hair was back on his feet, his chin and beard slick with blood and looking a bit dazed, but he was still willing. I brought my fists up, my left arm still not fully recovered, and waited for him to make the first move.
A sudden shriek like a bull would make, if a bull screamed hard enough to rupture its lungs, made both of us stagger back; as I did so I caught a glimpse of a shocked Burk releasing a semi-conscious thug whom he had been choking with a truncheon.
Apparently the noise was some arcane act created by none other than Provine Sael, who was standing in the center of the lane glaring at the group of us, hands on her hips and one booted toe tapping angrily. Two Temple guards in full war harness stood a little behind her, taking in the scene with professional detachment.
Provine Sael (Provine being a title, not her name), our last owner as slaves and first employer as free brutes, was a Dellian, standing about five feet tall; she was very pretty, with a fine-boned face and thick silver hair worn in a combed-back crest atop her head and shaved to a close burr on the sides. A diamond sparkled in a stud in her left nostril, and blue fire flashed from the gems mounted in silver that hung from her long, pointed ears. The colored part of her eyes were gold, and she had little horn nubs growing midway between her eyebrows and her hairline; when she was nervous or troubled she would rub the horns, but she didn’t like people to see her do it. Otherwise she looked like a slender, elegant female Man who was a little shorter than average.