by Tom Lloyd
‘Mind if we drop this? Ain’t exactly a happy subject for any of us.’
‘The Greensea?’
Despite himself, Lynx felt the memory like a claw inside his gut. ‘For a time,’ he said in a half-whisper.
‘So you’re one of them?’
The condemnation in her voice was enough to make his fists tighten, but Lynx was no stranger to it and he relaxed quick enough.
‘Never one of them,’ he said firmly. ‘There was some real fighting to be done there too, at first anyway. I had no part in what came after.’
‘Easy enough to claim, that.’
He looked her straight in the eye. ‘You want to see the scars on my back, I’ll show you. Ain’t ashamed of what I did in that war, I’ll tell you now. Won’t bloody defend what others did either, but in So Han they don’t whip a man for liking the killing too much.’
That stopped her short at least. This part of the Riven Kingdom hadn’t seen the worst of So Han’s violent spasms of conquest. There wasn’t the hatred ingrained in the very earth that he’d find in the Greensea or the Hand Valleys if he was ever stupid enough to visit them.
So Han was the westernmost of the so-called warrior republics, nestled in the lee of the mountains off which most of the rivers in the area flowed. The Greensea lay to the south of So Han, a prosperous scattering of principalities around the shore of that inland sea, while the Hand Valleys was the long region to the east through which mountain rivers flowed and merged. The victories there had been swift and accomplished – the brutalising of the population seemingly a punishment for not proving enough of a challenge.
‘You clearly learned your trade there well enough,’ Pellow said, a smaller note of antipathy in her voice. Lynx could tell her enthusiasm for it was waning. ‘You still live by the sword and the gun.’
‘Sometimes it ain’t so easy to escape your past,’ Lynx muttered, ‘and yeah, I was good at the fighting. Wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, but I’m good at it still. It was a war at first, you had men out there looking to kill you and you knew your purpose. Might’ve been the goal was a crock of shit, but I didn’t know that at the time, was just a stupid kid with dreams of glory. Been in a few more since … well, since I came east, but none of ’em you could much call a war. Handful of skirmishes over some small slight – no real cause to fight for or sense of purpose.’
She had no questions after that and Lynx found himself sitting alone, morose and brooding on times past.
Must be ten years since the start of the war, he realised sourly. And look at the world now, just a little more broken and miserable than before. So much for the Shonrin and his grand vision. Hope he’s enjoying his life stuck up that miserable bloody mountain.
Lynx groaned and stood, stretching expansively. One day, mebbe, I’ll go and try to kill him, even if it does mean going back to that place.
Finally deciding he was capable of something real to drink, Lynx shifted his mage-gun and other valuables with him to the bar. He knew what people were looking for in a guard, or anything else Lynx was capable of. Slumped in the back room was hardly the best advertisement, while at the bar he would be in view of all the shopkeepers and traders heading in for the evening.
Sit upright and look big, Lynx told himself as he found a quiet corner where he could sit at the bar, out of the way but in view for the curious. Folk want a man who looks dangerous, but ain’t causing trouble or drinking too hard. Not sure I’m capable of either of those right now anyway.
After receiving a stern look his late mother would have been proud of, Lynx found himself nursing a battered tankard of beer while the evening trade filtered in. First the town’s shop boys and apprentices clattered in, then their masters and mistresses once everything was locked away. Towns like this flourished on the travelling routes, Lynx knew, so he was unsurprised when the door opened again and the smell of horses and dust heralded more strangers to town.
He was careful not to stare at those when they arrived, knowing they wouldn’t want to deal with hiring extra guards until they had rooms secured and the weight off their feet. Slowly the room became filled with a gentle babble of noise and the smell of stew. Lynx let it all flow over him, pulling out one of his most treasured possessions from the bag at his feet; a leather-bound book from the heyday of the Riven Kingdom.
It was an account, of sorts, retelling an adventurer’s travels across the kingdom and as far as one man could travel into the east. It was a story unlike most Lynx got his hands on – a meditation on that supposed golden age as much as it was an account of the adventurer’s journey, but also a descent into madness and back as he encountered the five gods and beings from no known mythology.
He let himself sink into the much-read tale and time passed without him being aware of it. Only the arrival of a bowl of stew and a corner of peasant’s bread distracted him, whereupon he carefully put the precious book away and set about his food.
The noise behind him edged up a notch, the pair of serving girls under Mistress Pellow’s supervision moving a step brisker to keep up with a busy day’s trade. Belatedly Lynx remembered it was Feastday, the end of the week, when evening would see prayers or merriment depending on each individual’s particular bent.
Most likely it’s Ulfer getting the thanks here, given those Brothers of the Oak outside, Lynx realised. He glanced down at the bag where he’d just put his book with all the care most reserved only for mage-cartridges. So here’s to you, Lord of the Earth. Our man here seemed to like you when he met you, so that’s good enough for me.
‘Hello, sailor,’ came a breathy voice in his ear. ‘Sitting all alone?’
Lynx snorted and continued to eat his stew. ‘I don’t pay for it.’
‘What I’m paid for,’ the unseen woman continued in an amused voice, ‘you wouldn’t want.’
Lynx turned and paused. He’d seen more than a few tavern whores in his time and most weren’t anything close to pretty – certainly not after a few years of a job that wasn’t easy – so this woman had them all beaten.
He smiled at her, somewhat awkwardly given his lack of practice in recent months.
‘Think I was a bit hasty there,’ Lynx said as the woman tilted her head and let her loose hair cascade over one shoulder. With an easy smile, twinkling reddish eyes and smooth brown skin, she was a sight indeed – sufficiently arresting that it took him a moment to notice her clothes and realise she wasn’t a whore after all.
‘Still not what I get paid for,’ the woman said, grinning quite unconcernedly at the desire in his eyes. ‘But buy me a drink and you might be in the right direction.’
Lynx looked her up and down: a short-sword on her belt, a stiletto strapped to the outside of the archer’s bracer on her left arm. What she didn’t have was a uniform, just a sleeveless tunic that showed off her bare arms.
‘Depends if you’re recruiting,’ he said, sounding gruff as he got a hold of himself and started to think straight. ‘I’ve seen that one before – a woman merc there to tempt boys into joining.’
‘Sorry, friend, but you ain’t been a boy for a few years now,’ she said, not in the least offended. ‘Maybe I’ve had that effect once or twice, sure, but it still ain’t what I’m paid for.’ She offered her hand. ‘I’m Kas.’
‘Kas? What sort of a name’s that?’
She shrugged. ‘Kasorennel, if you must know, but you white people butcher names something awful, so the Cards mostly just know me as Kas. All except the boss when he’s pissed at me. Then he remembers how to pronounce it.’
‘Just Kas?’
‘Yup. We all go by one name in the Cards. You know how it is, more’n a few with a past they’re keen to avoid.’
Lynx nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, reckon I can appreciate that. The Cards?’
‘Our company.’ She nodded off behind her, where the bulk of the room’s noise was now coming from. ‘Anatin’s Mercenary Deck, but everyone calls us the Cards, o’ course.’
Lynx nodded. There were more
than a few variants on a deck of cards, more than he’d heard of no doubt, but if you spent enough time around soldiers you got to know several. The Mercenary’s Deck was just a twist on the Soldier’s Deck found in every army across the Riven Kingdom. In his experience, the sight of one was a good indicator that you were about to be fleeced for everything you had.
‘Sounds like you’d all be great under pressure, then,’ Lynx grunted as he returned to his drink.
‘Hey, you ain’t introduced yourself yet,’ Kas said, nudging his arm without an indication she’d noticed his attempt at a joke, ‘or offered me a drink.’
‘I ain’t interested in joining the Cards,’ Lynx repeated. ‘I’ll buy you that drink, since you asked so nicely, but I’m not joining your company.’
Kas slipped on to the stool beside him, leg brushing his just enough to make him very aware of her warmth and scent. He focused on his drink. Friendly and beautiful she might be, but his experience of mercenary companies warned him off – however long it was since he’d been with a woman.
‘From what I hear, you’re not the most popular in town right now,’ she said softly. ‘And you’re looking for work. Well, we’re hiring. Is anyone else?’
Lynx took a long swig. She had an easy way about her, likeable. It didn’t seem to fit that well with a mercenary and certainly wasn’t making it easy for him to ignore her. A life on the road was a lonely one and Lynx knew all too well that most of those who walked alone were bastards, mad or broken in some other way.
Broken was something he was intimately acquainted with, but not so broken that the loneliness of the open road was always craved. Kas had an air of immediate familiarity about her, of friendship where there was none, and that made him both wary and faintly giddy.
The mercenary rapped her knuckles on the bartop. Her calloused fingers, marked with a half-dozen scars, declared she was either an inattentive cook or had been in the fighting game a while now. ‘Another beer, please.’
A tankard was deposited in front of Kas and Lynx stared at it for a moment before sighing and reaching for his coin purse. She raised the tankard and knocked it against his.
‘Cheers then, even if you still haven’t told me your name.’
Despite himself, Lynx smiled. ‘Cheers,’ he echoed and took a long drink. ‘Name’s Lynx. Just Lynx.’
Kas stared at him for a moment. ‘And you thought “Kas” was odd? Bloody westerners.’
Lynx nodded. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
Chapter 3
The evening wore on and despite everything Lynx found himself slowly relaxing and enjoying Kas’s presence. They talked principalities they had travelled through, wars they’d fought in. She hadn’t been old enough for the Greensea or any other So Han campaign, he was glad to hear. Instead she’d been growing up in a fishing port well to the south, away from the chaos up north until a fool called Sener Robern had started his strange crusade down there. It had been a few more years before Kas was dragged in, when a raiding party descended upon the port while the fishing fleet was out.
Her cousin had been one of those taken, but the villagers had been lucky and met the company Anatin served in as they followed the raiders. They’d hired the mercenaries with all they could and joined them in attacking the raiders’ camp, their numbers tipping the balance. Kas bloodied her knife twice that grey morning and signed up with the company in the afternoon, with the rest being history.
Not long after, it turned out, she and Lynx had been on opposing sides of a fight. A struggle over import levies that one of the largest Militant Orders, the Protectors of Light, had waded into. The merchant guild had been forced to hire every mercenary they could get their hands on, but Captain Anatin had rightly judged the Protectors of Light to be the safer side to join.
‘Nasty fight on the hill, that was,’ Kas said grimly. ‘Wasn’t looking forward to the order to take the wall that day.’
‘You weren’t looking forward to it?’ Lynx exclaimed. ‘There were three thousand of you! I had a bloody good view from that wall and we sure as dammit weren’t expecting to last the hour.’
Kas raised an eyebrow. ‘Truly? Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to kill you that day then.’
‘You’n me both, was only a hundred of us left before that self-serving shit surrendered.’
She laughed. ‘Restless Banesh, I’d forgotten that! We were all shitting ourselves; someone had said you had over a thousand in reserve there and elementals bound into the wall. We thought we never stood a chance, then it turned out your reserve had run away a week before!’
She finished her tankard and waved for another one. ‘Right, time for a game I reckon. Come on, few friendly hands of Tashot.’
‘I ain’t playing cards when I’m outnumbered.’
‘Oh balls,’ she said with a dismissive wave, ‘it’s too early to play for high stakes. It’s just a copper game for the next few hours. You fleece the locals before decent folk’ve gone to bed, you ain’t so welcome in town no more. Trust me, we’ve had that happen enough. It’ll be all childish fun until the respectable folk go and we’ve just got the boys who want to join up.’
‘And then you get ’em running up debts to make sure they join?’
She frowned at him. ‘Then, I see if I can find a decent man and take him to bed. We ain’t card sharks, we’re mercs. We drink hard and play hard. Coins not promises, okay? We start claiming debts scribbled on slips of paper, folk complain to the town council and they’ll have those Knights of the Oak to back ’em up. That’s trouble we don’t need for a few shop boys. What money they bring to the table they might lose, but that’s a life lesson for ’em.’ She winked. ‘And little boys ain’t much fun to cheat, so unless one of ’em is too full of himself, the boss demands a fair game.’
Lynx was still half-stuck on the image of Kas finding a man to take abed and just found himself nodding along to what she was saying. Her next beer arrived and Kas slipped nimbly from her stool, heading a few steps back to her company before pausing to glance back at him.
‘You coming?’
He sighed. ‘Fine, I’ll sit in on the game. Ain’t joining your company, though.’
‘No one’s asking you to.’ She smiled. ‘We’ve got a job, though, which is more’n you’ve been offered so far tonight. Might be worth hearing what Anatin has to offer.’
‘I’ve had enough of mercenary work,’ Lynx growled.
‘Ah, but this ain’t battle, just escort work. Bit we’d need you for anyway. Us professionals will take on the rescue.’
Lynx signalled for another drink and stood as well. ‘Rescue?’
She shrugged. ‘Some girl got kidnapped, aye. Two-bit baron trying to force her into marriage. Father wants her back, simple as that.’ She batted her eyelids at him and gave a mock simper. ‘Ah, the romance, rushing to the rescue of a damsel in distress.’
Lynx hesitated. This really was the last thing he wanted, but he was more than aware of how short his welcome in this town would be, and the locals were keeping well clear after the previous night’s foolishness.
‘You said I’d just be escort?’
‘A girl can dream,’ Kas said, grinning. She started walking again and called over her shoulder, ‘Don’t forget your big gun now. We wouldn’t want you to leave that behind.’
The rest of the company had caught her words during a lull and Lynx received a few smirks as he walked over, but most were focused on the game. The table was covered in a variety of goblets and tankards, half-finished platters of food, cigars and pipes – with a space in the centre reserved for a spread of large playing cards. Despite the amount of drink they had clearly consumed, those mercenaries still in play were devoting all their attention to the face-up cards.
‘Make room, Varain,’ Kas announced cheerfully, prodding at the shoulder of the nearest man. He scowled but, with all the precision of an army of cats, the mercenaries on the near side of the table shuffled around until there was space for two chairs to be added.
‘Teshen, count us in,’ she called to the dealer, letting Lynx squeeze his oversized frame into the modest space that had been made and draping her legs over his thigh as she sat herself.
The dealer passed over two stacks of copper coins of varying sizes and origins without looking at either of them. Kas tossed him a silver coin in response and Lynx did the same once he saw the coin dropped into a horn cup, realising that was the winner’s pot.
At one end of the oval table sat a tall, greying man in a worn blue tunic that had once been of the highest quality. The man had the characteristic scar of a sparker burn running over his cheek and right ear. The cigar jammed in one corner of his mouth contorted the jagged white lines of scarring, but failed to hinder his cheerful narration of the game to the three shop’s apprentices sat opposite.
Those three, Lynx saw, all bore a marked similarity to each other – cousins, he guessed. All dressed in similar grey shirts, their green jackets hung in a careful row on pegs behind. Their pale cheeks were pink from an evening of drink, the one still in the hand chewing furiously on his lip as he tried to ignore the mercenary’s monologue.
Aside from Anatin – as Lynx assumed it was him talking so freely over the game – they were as varied a mix as you’d likely find in any mercenary company. A small, scarred weasel of a man with long sandy hair and a scrappy beard sat in the lee of one of the biggest men Lynx had ever seen – a very pale north-easterner he guessed, hairless as a eunuch but astonishingly trim for one of his size. Far taller than Lynx, he was at least as broad but had none of the press on his belt that Lynx was all too familiar with.
Two white women, one dark-haired and tall, one white-haired and squat, occupied the far side of the table with the shop boys, while a scowling black man puffed angrily on a cigar on the near side. Teshen, the dealer, was a burly long-haired white man who sat hunched and perfectly still, one hand hovering over the deck. Before him were five cards. One lay face down to appease Banesh, God of Chance and Change, while a Five and Jester of Blood lay with a Four of Stars and Eight of Tempest.