“No sign here, sir,” said another.
“Let’s get out and find the bastard, then,” I instructed.
We split up, taking whatever route our hunches told us might lead to the justiciars. I left Ploster’s squad with the horses. I’d told them keep out of sight and try to kill any of our foes who tried to return to their animals. That left us only three squads to search with. I wasn’t concerned that we’d be tested by their groups of four or five men, but I was worried at the damage they’d do to the people of this village if we weren’t fast enough to find them and stop them. There weren’t many places they could go, since there were only two hundred or so buildings in the village. Our initial clash had produced noise, but so far there had been no sign of it producing an organised response. I was in the only group of six, leading Chant, Waxer, Beamer, Lamper and Weevil. They’d been with me throughout the fighting in Gold and I was pleased to be with them again on this journey to Blades.
“How’s the shoulder, Weevil?” I asked. There was no sign of the injury he’d received.
“I ripped the bolt out. There was no barb and it didn’t go deep.” He patted the thick plate of his shoulder guard and smiled evilly. We were harder to kill than other men and our wounds didn’t fester, but he’d likely want Maims to check out the damage later.
There was little time to waste – the scattered corpses on the street would soon be noticed, so we had to find as many of the justiciars as we could before they organized their forces into a more threatening group. We took the closest street, with Bolt’s squad choosing the same route. We split at the next turning and I chose the door to a nearby house, though it was more of a single-storey wooden hut with stone foundations. The door was open a crack and I pushed it open with my sword ready and shield held in front of me.
There was only death within. An elderly woman had been bludgeoned to death and a younger woman with her. Their faces were bloodied and their skulls had been crushed, the bodies left on the wooden floor as if they were no more important than the furnishings. The justiciars weren’t gentle if they didn’t get what they wanted. I backed out of the house before any of my squad could follow – there was no benefit for us to stare at what had happened.
The few streets looked empty. I had no doubt that some people had abandoned their houses and fled to the hills once they realised who had come to their village. Others would have found hiding places for themselves inside, foolishly hoping that their doors would dissuade the Duke’s men from searching within. There was a scream from a house just along from us. With no attempt at silence, we barrelled through the shallow, damp mud of the street. This door was also ajar, but I kicked it hard anyway. It racketed open, taking the man standing behind it by surprise. He stumbled forward, his mouth already searching for the words that would threaten whoever it was that had done this to him.
I had Leerfar’s dagger – my dagger – in my hand now, since it was a more suitable weapon for close-quarters combat in these confined spaces. Before I’d even seen who else was in this room, I’d plunged the blade into the ear of the off-balance man. I was strong, but I marvelled at how easily the weapon cut him. It came out from his skull easily too and the justiciar’s words of condemnation never reached his lips. I pushed his body aside in a powerful shove that hurled him several feet to one side.
I’d entered a room that was fifteen feet or so to each side. All of the family’s furniture was in here – the main room of these humble people. There was a man’s prone body slumped in one corner, clothed in the manner of a farmer. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. There were four other men in here, dressed in their armour and with their cocks on show. The woman of the house was face down over the table as one of them raped her. She made no sound and I admired her strength that she gave them no satisfaction. The rapist’s back was to me and he was reluctant to look, even though he’d heard the commotion. One of the justiciars was holding a young girl – less than sixteen I guessed. His hand was over her mouth to keep her quiet, but her eyes were tightly closed to block out the sights. She’d likely be raped after her mother and then slung in one of the wagons for the Duke’s pleasure.
My men were killers, but we were not murderers. I could not say that we were saints, but there was none of us who could tolerate what we saw. I crossed the room in two long strides and swung my dagger cross-ways into the rapist’s torso. The blow was savage and the blade went in to the hilt, while the force of my arm knocked him sideways onto the floor. Furious, I closed in on the next of the justiciars. He was fumbling at his belt in order to cover himself up. It’s strange what priorities a man has when he’s confronted by his crimes. I slew him before he could hide his cock and Waxer had already killed another by the time I had advanced on the man holding the young girl. Where before he’d had his hand over her mouth, the justiciar now had a knife to her throat.
“Fuck off or I’ll kill her,” he sneered with false bravado. I saw the girl close her eyes even more tightly as the blade pressed against her skin.
There was a blur of silver and the top half of the man’s head was shattered and smashed. There was an explosion of blood and he fell down silently, the blade of his knife failing to cut the young girl’s throat. Now that the man’s arms were no longer there to restrain her, she slipped to the floor and wept. There was another movement and her mother rushed over, wrapping her in her arms.
There was another exit to the room and Beamer put his head through the doorway. “It’s empty, Captain,” he called. We left the occupants to their misery and emerged onto the street once more. I’m sure we’d all been affected by what we’d seen – after hundreds of years aloof, we were becoming more upset by the horrors. I gave Waxer a pat on the shoulder to thank him for his quick sword arm and we continued our hunt.
Over the next hour, we looked in over twenty of the dwellings and killed another eighteen of the justiciars. They were given free rein to complete their duties with cruelty, but they did normally have constraints. Here, those constraints seemed to have been forgotten and we found men, women and children murdered, as if on a whim. I realised that in this village, out in the middle of nowhere, there was no-one to stop the excesses of these men. They’d become nothing more than bandits, sating their own lusts and forgetting about their duties. This was not a good day for them and we were not merciful, nor were we anything less than industrious in our efforts to root them out from wherever we could find them.
When I judged that we’d done enough, I had us return to the main street, where I’d left Ploster and his men. I saw that they’d taken the time to clear away many of the bodies, but there were more now, lying on the ground where they’d been hacked apart.
“These fuckers!” I exclaimed, kicking at one of the fresh corpses. I wasn’t normally given to displays of petulance, but I was unable to prevent myself. “How many’d you get?” I asked Ploster.
“We’ve had nineteen come this way. Including their captain,” said Ploster.
“Where is he?” I asked. For some reason, it seemed important that I be able to look at his face.
“His head’s over there,” Ploster told me, pointing to a round object near to a low stone wall. “There are other bits of him close by. He fancied himself as a sorcerer, apparently.”
I didn’t enquire further, nor did I bother myself with his head. It takes a strong magician to kill us and a much stronger one to ignore what Ploster can do. He wasn’t the greatest sorcerer that ever lived, but he’d been around for so long that he was no easy prey.
I was just on the brink of ordering my squad to resume the search, but Bolt’s and Maims’ squads returned within two minutes of each other. I had them report their numbers.
“We’re missing two or three of them,” I said. I was loath to let them escape, but it was dark now and I didn’t want to spend the rest of the night looking for them either, especially when they might have escaped into the surrounding fields. I was saved the effort.
The people of the village had started to dri
ft onto the streets a few minutes before the last of my squads returned. Word tended to get around fast in places like this and they’d come to see what was going on. Soon, the main street was packed with several hundred of them. Not far away, I saw the signs of a group pushing their way through to a place where they could see us. There were over a dozen men and women, dragging something bulky, which they dropped into the mud. A few of the group spat on the two corpses they’d brought with them.
“I did as you suggested,” said the bar keep, looking at me. There was something new in his face – pride mixed with something else I didn’t recognize. “It won’t bring my wife back, but I’m damned if I’ll let them do the same to another family. If they come here again, I’ll not sit idly by. Nor will any of us.”
“You’d best arm yourselves properly then,” I told him, meeting his gaze. “And put all of the bodies we’ve left onto those wagons and abandon them fifty miles from here. Or hide them in a cave somewhere.”
“We’ll find them where you’ve killed them and we’ll put them somewhere they won’t be found. Even if your Saviour never comes, we’ll not let this happen again.”
I nodded at his new-found certainty. I took my men into the tavern once more and we retired to the large room that had been given over for us to stay in. The bar keep didn’t have enough bedding for us all, but we were comfortable regardless. Even so, I don’t know if any of us slept. As I lay in the darkness, I had a single image in my mind that I couldn’t escape – that of the mother and her daughter, weeping and bereft on a rough wooden floor.
5
Farmers and soldiers have few things in common, except a requirement to be ready to go at first light. As we trooped out of the tavern in the coolness of the following morning, we were joined on the streets by farmers and their labourers as they made their way to the fields and grazing lands close by. I thought it odd that so many farmers had their homes in the village, since they usually lived on the land that they worked. I spoke to one man on the road as we set off.
“Why do you all live in the village?” I asked out of curiosity. “Are there bandits in the countryside?”
“Not bandits,” he’d replied. “There’re other things that live out there. They’ll take a man and his family at night and he’ll never be heard from again. We need to farm, but there’s none of us wants to die for it.”
We left him in our wake and ignored the road in order to make more efficient progress to the south-east. I asked Ploster what he made of the farmer’s words.
“There’re not many people in the centre of the Duke’s lands, Captain,” he said. “Only hundreds of miles of hills, with nothing to break up the monotony. Who knows what secrets lie out there?”
“Something like what killed the people from that other village and threw them into the well?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “We’ve not crossed this way for years. I’m damned if I can remember why we did it last time, but I do recall that even back then there was talk of beasts that lived in the dark. But there’s always such talk, away from the bright lights of the bigger towns and cities.”
He was right – there was always talk about deadly creatures, wherever you went. I’d put it down to ignorance and superstition, but then I’d also seen some of the Emperor’s more unusual pets and suddenly it didn’t seem like such a remote possibility that there could be something out here in the wilds, old and malevolent.
“I can see when you’re interested, Tyrus,” he said with a smile.
“Aye, that I am,” I confessed. “I don’t like not knowing. It’s always been a failing of mine.”
“I’m not sure that I’d describe it as a failing, as long as you don’t allow it to interfere with your reason.”
I acknowledged the truth of his words with a nod. “Perhaps one day, when there’s no-one left for us to kill, I’ll bring the First Cohort here and we’ll see if we can find whatever it is that doesn’t want to be found.”
“A day when there’s no-one left to kill?” he asked with a dismissive snort. “You’re looking a long time ahead.”
“I like to think about the future sometimes,” I told him. “Though I try not to hold myself to any plans I might come up with. If I don’t make promises to myself, it’s easier not to break them. Besides, what do you think will happen to us if there’s peace? None of us would know what to do with ourselves. What better for men like us than to travel the land, flushing out dangers where we find them?”
“You always did have a romantic streak in you, Tyrus,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve not seen sign of it for a long time. I’m glad to hear you’ve not lost it.”
His words came as a surprise. We sometimes don’t know that we’ve changed until someone points it out to us. Everyone changes gradually over time – it’s a part of growing older and wiser. If you see an old friend after ten years apart, you might seem like a completely different person to how they remember, even though you hadn’t noticed any change whatsoever in yourself because that change had crept up on you. To hear that Jon Ploster – a man I spoke to every day - had seen such a change in me, meant that it was a sudden, big shift.
“We’re all going back to what we once were, aren’t we?” I asked. “It’s as if we used the Emperor’s magics as an excuse to pretend we were different in the mind as well as in the body. It’s like a veil has been removed.”
“Who is to say that those magics didn’t force that change upon us, and hide the fact from us, in order that we would not resist? And that the Saviour’s radiance swept away that obscuring veil, so that the men we once were, are born anew?”
“The thought is an interesting one,” I said. “I wonder what will become of us over the coming few weeks and months, assuming we can survive that long.”
“Who knows indeed?” he asked. With that, our conversation ended for the moment and we marched in silence.
There was not much to note during the following ten days. The rains held off and we made excellent progress, since the ground remained firm underfoot and we encountered no threats or obstacles to slow us. The sky was dreary and there was wind, but otherwise our spirits remained good. On the twenty-third day after we’d left Gold, we stopped for the evening at a stone cottage, high up in the middle of nowhere. I’d seen sheep in the fields and thought it would do the men good if I were to haggle for some fresh meat.
The farmer was an old man – everyone who worked the land seemed to be in their later years, but he had two sons whom he planned to take over his lands when he died, not that he planned to do any dying in the near future, he assured me.
“What brings twenty-one soldiers to my farm, this evening?” he asked after we’d finally settled on a fair price for one of his sheep. I fancied myself as something of an expert haggler, but the farmer was as stubborn as they come and we eventually settled on a mostly fair price for one of his older livestock.
“We have business in Blades,” I told him.
For a while we skirted around the issue of whether or not we were the Duke’s men and whether or not the old man and his sons were in favour of their ruler. Honest folk don’t lie well and, once he’d reassured himself that we were no friends of Warmont, he began to wax lyrical about the problems faced by his family and other people he occasionally met.
“The Duke’s a bastard,” he told me. “I said he was a bastard as soon as I was old enough to speak and I think he’s even more of a bastard now that my knees creak and my joints ache. Why won’t the old fucker just die?”
“He’ll never die and he’ll never give up his lands. Willingly, at least,” I said. “He keeps himself alive with his magics and he has the backing of the Emperor. If his people don’t depose him, then you can be sure your sons will be telling the same things to their sons, and their sons after them. It will never end.”
“I believe you,” said the old man. “But the land will not plough itself, nor will trees cut themselves down, nor houses build themselves. If everyone were to become a soldi
er, even were they to win, what would there be left for them in the end? Starvation and murder, followed by the Emperor’s troops coming in their tens of thousands.”
“That may be the truth,” I admitted. “What is better? A quick death or an agonising and slow death, spanning generation after generation?”
“Those words are easy to say for a man who has wielded a sword for his entire life. I am no coward, nor are my sons, but we do not wish our name to vanish from the world. Who would remember our sacrifice, or give thanks that our line ended so that another’s might perpetuate?”
At one time, I might have listened to this man’s words and then discounted them as coming from someone who shirked away from making a hard decision. I don’t know if I’d ever seen the world as black and white – perhaps when I was much younger I had, but with age came the wisdom to recognize the infinite array of greys. I couldn’t dismiss what this farmer said – if he lost his sons, there would be no one left to carry his name. It could be that in the future, these two sons of his might marry and have many sons of their own, one of whom could become a great leader and win victories over the Duke and Emperor alike. Trying to guess what lies in the future becomes a game for fools. All we can try and do is influence it through our own actions and not worry over the untried alternatives.
“I think you should do what you feel is right,” I said after a time. “There is no one who can take away that choice, and no one who can say that your choice is wrong.”
“You talk well for a soldier,” he said. “If only every man who decided to join the army was capable of such rational thought, there’d be hope for us yet.”
He knew that we weren’t the Duke’s men, but I didn’t know if he was aware of exactly who we were. Our reputation preceded us in many of the places we’d fought, but I wasn’t conceited enough to think that the First Cohort’s infamy reached even as far as remote farms such as this one.
“There’s a Saviour come to these lands,” I said. “We fight for her. She has brought us hope where previously we had none. You may one day get the opportunity to see her and when you do, your sons may wish to pick up a sword and declare themselves as free men.”
Strength of Swords (First Cohort Book 2) Page 6