The Infiltrators

by Daniel Lawlis

  “A day that’s only half over holds as much promise as a day that’s just begun.”

  “In that spirit, let’s begin,” Righty said, taking a peak at the afternoon sun before stepping into Pitkins’ sword shop.

  “All right, let’s see your progress. I know it’s hidden somewhere,” Pitkins said.

  Righty was standing barefoot on the mat wearing a loose pair of pants he had brought with him.

  Suddenly, quicker than a snake strike, the sword slipped from Righty’s sleeve into his hand, extended fully, and was then brought into a labyrinth of seemingly spontaneous—yet precisely calculated—movements.

  “YES, that’s IT!!” Pitkins said, his eyes glowing with zeal, as he watched his student flawlessly embark on the third of The Five Death Dances, the present one being Winds of Death.

  It was as if Righty didn’t even hear. There was no pause in his movement. No nod of acknowledgment. He had stepped foot into an alternate plane of reality, where no one and nothing existed except for him, his sword, and the enemies whom he was currently slaying with brutal efficiency.

  “HUAAAA!!” Righty shouted out in precisely the correct moment upon executing a circular stroke with so much force Pitkins doubted a fully grown oak tree could have withstood the blow.

  Next, a dazzling display of single-handed, figure-eight sword spins commenced while Righty’s other limbs tended to other matters, such as launching gale-force side kicks, poking out eyes, and ripping out throats.

  Pitkins watched the unbelievable display before him commensurate incredulity. Richard Simmers was a phenomenal student, and he had always considered both his discipline and innate talent top-notch. But what he was witnessing right now was something otherworldly. The man before him—surely capable of dispatching twenty competent swordsmen, should they enter this dojo at this very second—was not the same Richie he had seen just last week.

  Any hint of stiffness. Gone. Any hint of self-doubt. Gone.

  He was witnessing pure art manifesting itself via a human medium as if Righty was nothing more than a conduit for some divine force currently present in the room.

  And yet, there was a certain maleficence in Righty’s interpretation of the dance that seemed more violent than even its name suggested. It was as if somehow Righty had entered a different dimension, acquainted himself with the blackest of spirits, and summoned its furious energy to be used at his own pleasure.

  When Righty finished the sequence, he made eye contact with Pitkins for a brief moment before bowing respectfully. In that moment, it seemed that Pitkins had caught a glimpse of a demon, but a second later he was looking into the calm, humble eyes of the sweat-soaked, heavily breathing hulk of a man in front of him.

  A brief moment of silence ensued, as if some magic from the demonstration still lingered in the room and would vanish disdainfully upon being defiled by the sound of human speech.

  Pitkins approached Righty with slow, respectful steps, maintaining solid eye contact.

  He placed a hand on each shoulder.

  “You could become one of the greatest warriors who ever lived. Your skills defy any purely natural explanation. Not just practice. Not talent—it isn’t a pure enough word for what you possess. You have been given the gift of untricht. That’s a word from my mother country that means death and destruction.

  “Tell me, friend, with what aim do you seek to progress so far in the arts of combat?”

  “I’ve got a family to protect, sir. I’ve got a ranch to protect. And, I’ve got myself to protect.”

  Pitkins continued studying him.

  “Sir, if I do have the gift of untricht, I have yet to see it applied to the grappling arts. A fellow at my ranch yesterday whipped me pretty good.”

  “Oh?” said Pitkins, chuckling slightly. “That’s kind of you to train with your men. Are there bandits about?”

  “There’re rumored to be. Some of the ranch hands worked there long before I bought the place, and they say that years ago bandits used to attack ranch owners that refused to pay ‘protection money,’ as they called it. They’d kill cattle, kidnap women, do whatever it took to make sure they got paid.

  “According to the stories, the ranchers started to fight back. Those wars were years ago, and they drove the bandits away, but ranchers have passed down some of the combat arts to their workers over generations as a tradition. My men were real deadly with the crossbow by the time I met them. They’ve learned quite a thing or two about the sword lately, thanks to you.”

  “But some fellow there whipped you in grappling, you say?”

  “‘Whipped’ is putting it nicely. A lion slapping around its cub might not even suffice to describe how lopsided this wrestling match was.”

  Pitkins chuckled good-naturedly. “Do you remember anything in particular that he did?”

  “Well” (Righty retracted his sword and put it back inside his sleeve), “it went something like this. I came forward to grab him.” Pitkins then imitated Righty’s movements.

  “And then he just kind of dropped to the ground and—” Righty attempted hopelessly to imitate the way Halder had collapsed into a ball, rolled towards his legs, and begun using legs and arms interchangeably to wrap up and off-balance Righty.

  If snow had started falling on a blisteringly hot sunny day, Righty would have been less surprised by the sudden chill that overcame Pitkins’ erstwhile warm demeanor.

  His eyes bore into Righty’s, and while Righty maintained his gaze, he didn’t exactly find it a pleasant endeavor.

  “Have I said or done something inappropriate?”

  Pitkins shook off the chilly exterior quickly, seeming a bit embarrassed in the process and quickly muttering, “Sorry, it’s not you.”

  “Well, sorry I can’t show you better what he did, but the next step was—”

  Righty then demonstrated as best he could how he was then dragged down into a vicious choke.

  He stood up, dismayed to see the icy exterior had returned.

  “Who is this guy?” Pitkins asked with only thinly veiled fury.

  Righty had never felt overly worried about saying too much in Pitkins’ presence, because Pitkins was typically a man of few questions who seemed to highly value privacy, but this sudden inquisitive streak could be just a few steps away from uncomfortable territory about who Mr. Simmers was, what he did for a living, and how he managed to travel here so often.

  “You don’t like him either!” Righty said, with a bit of a chuckle. “And you ain’t even the one who got whipped by him!”

  Pitkins’ exterior softened again slightly, but not as much as the first time.

  “I don’t know anything about him really other than that he offered to start training the men. We had a contest yesterday to get to see who will get moved up to Ranch Guard, and this guy just cleaned house. I embarrassed myself in front of all my men by challenging him to a grappling match, and after everyone saw how he handled me I figured I had two choices—fire him or hire him as combat instructor.”

  Pitkins was studying every square inch of Righty’s countenance with an intensity he didn’t particularly care for.

  With total absence of the usual comradery that was typically in Pitkins’ tone, he told Righty icily, “Find out who this man is—most importantly, where he’s from. There are few men who use the combat movements you just described. Most of them are wicked beyond your imagination.”

  Righty gulped.

  Chapter 13

  After Righty left, Pitkins went into a deep melancholy. Though his body was still his mind was traveling, turning back page after page as his mind went hurtling backwards through the book of his life.

  Having heard the news of his wife and children’s grisly demise did little to brace him for the sight of it as he went galloping away from camp. Sogolian tradition demanded that if the head of the household survived a murderous attack on his family, the bodies of his family should be left untouched for five days, in order to give him the opportunity to pl
ace their bodies in caskets and spare them the dishonor that could be brought about by an outsider handling such a tragic scene.

  He had to urge his horse to new limits of speed and endurance, as the fifth day was closing in by the time he neared his home. The local sheriff greeted him somberly as he came galloping up to his house, and he immediately beckoned the armed guard surrounding the house to retire.

  Pitkins was not mindful of the receding witnesses as he shrieked out in horror at the sight of his beloved Aithne. No longer visible were the twenty armed guards, whose cold corpses had long since been extracted by the sheriff and his men. But Pitkins had already heard of their demise.

  As he neared his wife—who still adorned a large pike, looking dignified even in this most undignified of circumstances, as if to tell her husband she had lost her life but not her pride—his mind suddenly came back to the present. He was sitting cross-legged in his dojo in the Sogolian warrior meditation pose, and he was dripping with sweat.

  Suddenly, he screamed out loud, as if the scream he had just heard in his mind now echoed back from the past. He stood up and went sprinting out of the dojo, his memories closing in fast, his feet doing everything to outrun them.

  The Metinvurs didn’t exactly have to leave behind their business card to let him know they were to blame. He knew he had been a target of the Varco for years, and though he kept his family moving around a series of secret, heavily guarded locations, he somehow knew this day would come. He had lived it in so many nightmares before it actually came that as he stood before the mangled bodies of his family he spent a moment in shock unsure as to whether this was yet one more nightmare warning him of the inevitable.

  No one had led the Sogolians in battle to more victories against the Metinvurs than he, and he never failed to see through their covert warfare attacks. When a priest, noble, general, or some other important person died under suspicious circumstances he always ordered the most exhaustive of investigations, and if there was any evidence the Metinvurs were to blame he would lead a retaliatory invasion into their country.

  Only when a Metinvur city was surrounded by trebuchets ready to lob flaming boulders into it could they be lured into open combat and out of the realm of shadowy assassinations. It was a strategy no other Sogolian general dared employ, for it was known from centuries of conflict that the Metinvurs preferred to kill the general of an army, or his family, rather than defeat the army itself. “Defanging the cobra” was what they called it, and he bitterly experienced first-hand the aptness of the metaphor, as the Sogolian army was subsequently paralyzed by its general’s incurable grief and malaise.

  He had sworn to the god Leol to one day personally kill each and every Varco agent responsible. While his subordinate generals recommended they kill every Varco captive in retaliation, Pitkins took a different path. He approached one of the Varco, a man named Zolgen, and ordered him to teach the Varco’s combat secrets. While the Sogolians were the Varco’s equal or superior in open combat in general, and in sword fighting in particular, it was well known that in the arts of hand-to-hand combat and ambush attacks the Sogolians were their lowly inferiors.

  “Never,” Zolgen told him.

  Pitkins grabbed a heavily restrained Varco captive named Vilizen and told Zolgen, “Will you watch your compatriot be cut to pieces one at a time,” extending the man’s pinky finger.

  Pitkins sensed some hesitation in Zolgen. “You know that, even if we released you, you would be dead, since your colleagues would suspect you have been turned into double agents.”

  Zolgen faced an internal struggle. Few things in this universe present more contradictions than the Varco rules governing capture. They were not written down anywhere, because there were no official rules.

  Any captured Varco agent who then was rescued or escaped by his own cunning had to report the situation immediately to his superior officer, upon which he would be taken into custody until trial.

  At his trial, it would not be the burden of an overworked prosecutor to present meticulous evidence of the agent’s guilt to a neutral jury while simultaneously sidestepping a host of snares such as hearsay or evidence obtained without a proper warrant.

  Quite the contrary, it would be the agent, without any counsel, who would stand before a jury of twelve peers seeking to convince them beyond a reasonable doubt that his capture had not been the result of incompetence or treason and that his escape or rescue had not been the result of collusion with the enemy.

  Before the hapless agent stood before these twelve hard faces, they were admonished in the most ardent language by the king himself to keep in mind the strong likelihood of the agent’s guilt or treason. If the agents found the defendant’s case of innocence so compelling as to find him not guilty, the defendant was far from free.

  Only if the king himself expressed his agreement with the jury’s decision would the defendant once again be allowed to resume his services to the crown. This rarely happened, and it was rumored in fact that nearly half the time a jury found in favor of a defendant the king then had both them and the defendant executed for treason and conspiracy.

  As a result of these rigorous steps to prevent cowardice and treachery, Varco agents were often recommended by their superiors to commit suicide in the unfortunate event they were ever taken captive by men that they were not likely to escape from quickly.

  Supervising field agents who were aware of a prompt escape from enemy captivity often looked the other way, but if the secret got out amongst multiple agents it was usually too risky for the supervisor to risk not detaining and reporting the unfortunate agent.

  Well aware of these harsh methods to ensure both competence and loyalty throughout the Varco ranks, the Sogolians often found little incentive to keep Varco captives alive. Their resistance to torture was legendary, and like a captive cobra that is peacefully milked a hundred times before unexpectedly delivering a death bite to its handler, Varco were considered unpleasant captives to keep around, due to the short duration for which any lock, shackle, or bond could refrain them and prevent them from attacking their captors.

  Pitkins had been a bit unpopular in his decision to keep Zolgen and Vilizen alive, but an odd hunch that defied logic so clearly not even he attempted to explain himself rationally told him one day they would be useful.

  Zolgen had been in captivity for years, and by now he knew there was certainly going to be no rescue party. He had seen several Varco attempt escape only to be impaled on pikes as a warning to the others. Even if he miraculously did manage to escape, he knew he stood little chance of convincing both the jury and the king that he was not incompetent. The general rule of thumb was that if you were held captive for six months or more before “escape” your chances of being cleared of both incompetence and corruption charges were effectively nil.

  What could be the harm in teaching techniques to a worthy adversary? It would allow him an enjoyable respite from his chains from which he was currently only freed about once a month to be doused in cold water while ten crossbowmen surrounded him at point-blank range.

  “I’ll do it,” Zolgen said.

  A wave of silence descended upon the group, no one, not even Pitkins, having expected this answer, yet only one or two of the most cynical guessed that Zolgen’s motives had little to with his concern about Vilizen’s fingers. Truth be told, Vilizen had been largely to blame for Zolgen’s current capture, his aim with a blowgun having been just slightly off, cutting the carotid, rather than the larynx, of an approaching guard, whose ensuing blood-curdling scream brought a whole host of Sogolian guards, who overwhelmed Vilizen and Zolgen, albeit at great loss.

  “TRAITOR!” shouted Vilizen.

  Men grabbed the hilts of their swords, like wagon passengers gripping their seats in preparation for a rough patch of road. Faux quarreling amongst Varco was a known diversionary tactic. A few of the Sogolian officers had been narrow survivors of it, having thought their help was needed to break up a bloody fight between tw
o Varco only to discover them fighting as one a half-second later and severing the throats of the intervening Sogolians.