by Janny Wurts
Spring 5923
XIII. Double Bind
Since the outbreak of Shadow that disabled The Hatchet, rumour swept the length of the front lines as the Sunwheel host marched across Lanshire. The stiff debates sown by the dedicate captains became argued down through the ranks, until even the equerries who polished the courier’s spurs and oiled the wet boots of superiors felt entitled to an opinion. Talk thickened in the silken tents of the brothels and livened the raucous tongues of the women who muscled the war camp’s laundry. Even the snotty grooms at the horse-lines spoke their minds. Disputes bred as swiftly as dice games and lice, with no agreement beyond proven fact: that the Spinner of Darkness sought refuge under the heretic law that made Havish the entrenched haven for blood-lines with renegade talent. Crown rule used the pernicious force of arcane knowledge and allowed malign sorcery the freedom to flourish.
The True Sect priesthood assigned to the vanguard were too lofty to speculate. They crushed curiosity and inquisitive supposition with platitudes to uphold the wisdom of the Light’s doctrine. Staunch principle insisted the High King’s heretical nest must be purged. For the grace of salvation, the morally faithful must destroy the grand minion of evil, the Master of Shadow himself.
The troop surgeons complained differently as they stitched up the horrific injuries only encountered on the field of war. As healers beset with rife cases of flux and the broken bones caused by brangles over the whores, supply concerned them, and the dearth of dry quarters, camped for days on end in spring’s chill, windy rains. Diseases broke out where the men huddled in griped knots, coughing from the smoky fires fueled by dampened peat. The officers fretted, chapped red from their rounds, while the sergeants on the night rosters strode splashing through the morning’s dense fog to make their reports at division headquarters.
‘Damned swamp, this place, all blighted furze and soaked bracken,’ carped the day’s subordinate to the ascetic officer appointed the second in command under The Hatchet. ‘It’s hellish unnatural that nothing here ever dries out.’
‘Don’t think to whine, donsie!’ the superior snapped, gold braid clothed over ill temper. ‘Priests think hell’s black minion’s holed up like a fox. Just finish the job. Else we’ll be stuck on these forsaken downs chasing yon sorcerer’s trail until summer-time breeds stinging flies. There’s a rife misery you won’t soon forget.’
‘Tell you this,’ a field captain warned, ducked in to thaw his numbed hands at the brazier. ‘We’ll have deserters if the men are pushed harder, skin-wet and dripping.’
‘You’ll lose them to fever, first,’ the master healer corrected. A dolorous man with a blade nose and eyes pouched from decades of worry, he poked up the coals, and lamented, ‘Infection, too, from poisoned wounds since our last linen bandages have spoiled with mildew.’
But his formal protest to the high command was brushed off, replaced by the next complaint: of a surgeon’s corps cloak of red wool, stupidly misplaced by a scatter-brained assistant.
‘Dock pay from the negligent fellow for carelessness,’ The Hatchet’s quartermaster snapped. ‘His lost uniform’s probably turned inside out, warming another man’s back to the profit of some furtive black marketeer.’
‘The cold nights are brutal enough to show lenience,’ said the crusty supply deputy who issued the replacement. ‘That garment may save us a treatment for chilblains, or spare some poor bloke from an untimely grave.’
The petty infraction seemed beneath remark, overshadowed by action as a clever sequence of feints drove the mounted messengers to lathered horses. Outbreaks of Darkness shuttered full daylight in several locales, an upheaval that rattled routine for a week before pooled information raised the suspect fact that the strikes all occurred the same day. While more urgent dispatches criss-crossed the heath, the searches earned nothing but tangles with Havish’s skirmishers, who struck with the cunning of forest-bred scouts, caused havoc, and melted past reach. If such gadfly bites culled the unwary recruits, the damage compounded when vengeful pursuit bogged down amid trappy country. Chase patrols blundered through grottos and seams, where arrows from cover left more littered dead, or burdened their squads with the prostrate wounded.
The losses mounted with each savage foray, until the harried troops received The Hatchet’s orders to stand down under provocation. Slap-dash sallies that wasted sound men were suspended. The stung companies regrouped, their tattered morale whipped back into resolve by the Light’s priests, who tempered fresh grief into fury with claims that the Spinner of Darkness abetted the High King’s defenders.
The western line rested, while the east flank licked its wounds. Mauled worst by Elkforest’s clansmen, whose relentless ferocity hammered against the on-coming threat of the Sunwheel encroachment, the outlying camps struggled hardest to cope. Too many critical casualties stressed the shortage of healers. The overworked surgeons’ corps foundered in despair on the day the outriding patrol encountered the stray, afoot in the open country and clad in the red cloak of service. Set under question, the fellow explained he had wandered for days, unhorsed by a fall in a gulch.
‘My unlucky mare broke her neck.’ Sorrowfully soft-spoken, he lamented the precious remedies lost with his saddle pack.
The troop captain’s rigorous interrogation became disrupted by the harassed surgeon, who barged in blood-spattered, and pounced on the dubious find like a terrier. ‘Mercy’s gift to us, don’t waste opportunity! Attach the laggard to my corps immediately!’
The east flank’s slit-eyed captain lounged his laconic bulk in a camp chair, legs outthrust and boots crossed at the ankle. ‘You’d ignore the risk? The wretch could be a spy. Or a cutthroat deserter with a lying tongue. At least wait for my trackers to find his dropped horse, and to make sure the message sent back from that pigeon doesn’t turn up a stolen mount.’
‘In this benighted country, hard up by the wastes?’ The frazzled surgeon flung up gaunt hands and rooted at his tufted hair. ‘Are you blind? I’ve got too many septic gut punctures from those barbaric willow-stick traps. The horrific screams from the pain should inform you. If you send that trained healer back to whatever troop’s negligence lost him, or waste his skill over fool questions, you’ll have five dead who could have been saved by the grace of this one, kept idle.’
The captain brandished the witch-hazel toothpick just unclenched from his nut-cracker jaw. ‘Very well. He’s all yours. I’ll still run my cross-checks. If your cripples expire because he’s inept, or if he slinks off after nightfall, I’ll hold you to blame, with your malingerer tagged and bagged through a bountymen’s vermin hunt.’
The head surgeon proffered no thanks but snagged his unkempt conscript by the shirt front and hustled him off. The pair left the tent to a rattle of jargon, with volleyed references to the griped fevers and wound rot that ravaged the terminal case-load.
An hour installed with a needle and gut thread disclosed that rare man whose calm expertise was indispensable.
‘Pox on our field captain’s rabid distrust,’ the head surgeon gushed, all but fit to swoon as he watched a neat closure expertly wrapped in gauze dressing. ‘You say you extracted a splinter of bark? How did my probe come to miss that?’ Then, astonished, he sucked a breath in epiphany. ‘Truth, man! You’re Sight-gifted? Praise to the Light if we haven’t snagged us a fancy temple-trained talent!’
The newcomer grunted, perhaps an affirmative as he bent to the lamp and passed his knife blade through the flame.
‘Versed in hygiene, too.’ The surgeon sighed with rapture. ‘Well! That patrol better find themselves a dead horse.’ He laughed, sarcastic enough to threaten in jest, ‘If they don’t, I’ll have to clap you in irons to secure your work for the duration. Your soldier’s not screaming, how not? We’re flat out of poppy for painless sleep, and I see that he hasn’t passed out.’
The narrow, neat hands sheathed the cleaned blade through a methodical recitation.
Which list of herbals plucked wild on the heath dropp
ed the head surgeon’s jaw. He clicked his teeth shut and clapped the stranger’s thin shoulder. ‘Damn the captain’s suspicions, I’m grateful for the outright miracle. You’re a bit starved for rations, I think?’ Beak face swivelled, he bellowed to an assistant, ‘Run to the cook tent and fetch a hot meal.’ Turned back, incandescent, he hauled his new recruit erect. ‘We have another at death’s door down here. Shag the benighted division you hailed from! Consider yourself reassigned.’
The provost’s patrollers back-tracked, meantime, and found the neck-broken hack crumpled in a gulch too steep to be scaled without rope. As townsmen, they never questioned the oddity that in spring, the carcass was not mobbed by vultures. When the second inquiry’s response came days later, the dispatch reported no theft from the horse pickets at Barish or from the temple reserves kept stabled behind the lines at East Bransing.
By then, the raffish outsider was shaved, his tattered clothes mended and cleaned. Merit had earned his colleagues’ respect, though his quiet nature eschewed gregarious company. The arduous days dropped him with the rest for exhausted sleep on the fusty cots in the corps tent. He showed no furtive intention to bolt though others who shared his billet complained that he cried out from tormented nightmares.
‘Who doesn’t dream badly?’ the chief surgeon dismissed. ‘Everyone screams from the horrors we treat, and no thanks at all to the ghastly traps set by barbarians to murder our faithful.’
The grinding routine erased lingering doubt as the hard cases died, and the fight to save the drastically injured demanded relentless attention. The new man shared the butt of the same gruesome jokes, deemed as honestly luckless as the next wretch tossed the short straw for war-time service.
And the day arrived in the first, cloudless heat before the hardwood trees budded: another critical messenger bird winged across Lanshire on a homing flight to the west…
…this pigeon alighted in its birth cote at Barish, no temple-fledged creature, but dispatched from Whitehold through the secretive relay run by Koriathain. The unkempt crone who serviced the birds creaked up the ladder in the cobbled yard, crooned fondly, and coaxed the pigeon onto her palm with cracked corn. The packet removed from its leg held a scroll and two wrapped slivers of crystal, promptly passed on to the highest-ranked Senior in residence. The commands inscribed by the Matriarch’s pen saw out-bound birds sent, bearing orders: these flew east to Bransing, and southeastward to the sisterhouse at Backwater. Another pair was released to wing south, one for the covert enclave at Ostermere. The other bore one of the imprinted quartz fragments designate for an initiate sequestered at Deal.
More than pigeons set the Prime’s will into motion. The fastest horse in the stable sped a mounted enchantress to Lanshire. She carried the second duplicate quartz, refashioned with volatile spells. Dressed in a courier’s leathers and cloak, this one travelled without baggage, her purse lined with gold to bribe temple remounts. As bearer of urgent news for The Hatchet, she rode fifty leagues in two days.
Her arrival at the Light’s stationed garrison in Torwent did not find the Supreme Commander of Armies snugged into the officers’ residence. Astride again, saddle-sore, the sister left before dawn with the dedicate relay bound for the front lines. Two more days pounding astride through rough country, with breathless pauses every few leagues to exchange mounts overtook The Hatchet’s personal staff, encamped amid the taupe straggle of war tents pitched on the open heath.
Fresh from the horse-lines, and damp to the skin, the Prime’s emissary found the field’s command post deserted. Mud-splashed and weary, she slapped her lathered crop on her boot and cursed in the snarling teeth of the bobcat that glared, stuffed and collared, to discomfit visitors at the entry. Trained to analyze detail, the sister sized up the belligerent personality that her Matriarch tasked her to influence. Advanced into a gloom spiked with raw astringent and cinnamon, her step scraped on a rush mat, its striped chevrons frayed by the aggressive gouge of countless hobnailed boots. The Hatchet mapped his tactics on a stout sand-table, moulded topography affixed with trim lines of plug counters, carved horses and flags. The studded camp chairs were leather, empty and shoved in acute disarray as if their last occupants had been flushed like game-cocks from the thickets of conference. The weapons racks at the walls showed rifled pegs, the vacancies for swords and cross-bows and maces overshadowed by more preserved specimens: a falcon, transfixed by an arrow; two facing hares frozen with legs in steel traps. Above these hung a flayed pit viper, nailed to a board. The triangular head had been mounted intact, with the venomous fangs extended.
A cough from a callow equerry challenged the sister’s invasive survey. Peevishly correct in The Hatchet’s cream livery, except for skinny knuckles sooted with boot-black, he informed, ‘You must wait for a summons. The Light’s Supreme Commander is engaged in the supply tent.’
‘Taking a routine inventory?’ The sister gathered her spattered cloak, eyebrows raised in contempt. ‘Stand aside, please. I will seek his lordship directly.’
The equerry broke into a macabre smile, quite at odds with the polishing cloth worried between nervous fingers. ‘Not an inventory. His Lordship’s ranked captains are in forced attendance.’
The Koriani sister side-stepped the warning. On determined course, she braced to barge into a punitive reprimand for theft or a whipping for some worse infraction.
‘The Hatchet is shooting rats,’ the equerry called in her wake. ‘Do take extreme care if you interrupt him.’
The Hatchet sighted down his cocked cross-bow, elbows clad in an immaculate white jacket braced atop an upended ale cask. The same barrel also supported the trophy row of his morning’s carcasses. Careless of stains from leaked blood and urine, he took aim on his next quarry: another rodent, ferociously tracked by the rustle as it crossed the tent’s floor and scurried behind a bulwark of oat sacks and crates.
Nary a twitch marred the commander’s nailed focus, or his cracked smile of anticipation. One eye squeezed shut and the other bright grey as buffed armour, The Hatchet mused, ‘So, then. The black little sorcerer nipped to the left, cut east, and abandoned my chariot. He’ll pay for the sabotaged spokes he left broken.’
The furtive rat ducked to the right, masked yet by the stockpiles.
‘Better,’ The Hatchet chortled. ‘Our tracker’s report confirmed his next dodge. The slinker nipped south. Since the diviners sniffed out a sly use of talent, that places the fugitive Master of Shadow midway between Torwent and Scarpdale.’
The rat paused to gnaw. Fixed on the hackling scritch of its teeth, The Hatchet detailed his seniormost officer, ‘Centre guard’s captain! Stage your line into a three-sided square. Form up an anvil wedge, faced inside to engage and distract before capture. Both wings, on my mark! First advance, the right flank. Drive and close in, men! Let’s choose which direction this varmint jumps. Ready, the rear-guard! Move at quick march and charge. Clap the lid on my trap, while the left skirts in fast to cut off a northward escape.’
Movement converged from several directions: the odd flicker of gold braid pocked the sepia gloom, encased under mildewed canvas. Lit by smoke-hazed, paned lamps with tallow dips, the jumbled sacks and baled goods cast sprawled shadows and muffled the clipped strings of orders to the poised men. Wrapped in stalker’s silence, pale surcoats flitted between the odd gaps. Then an unseen signal raised a vigorous clangour of tin spoons against mess bowls and cups as the the appointed beaters advanced.
The rat bolted. It jinked and doubled back. A manic dart threaded the gap between the centre line officer’s boots. Panicked and squeaking, it darted for the crannies beneath the pyramid stack of ale casks.
‘Hah!’ The Hatchet squeezed the trigger. ‘Let that sly bender of Shadows eat this if he tries to flee through our middle!’ The cross-bow whapped in triumphant release.
The loosed quarrel nipped between the supplies, creased a dangling hide to a wisp of shaved hair, and skewered the rat in mid-flight. Impetus pinned its last throes in puffe
d dust to a burlap flour-sack.
The Hatchet crowed. ‘Nailed the slinking bastard, straight on!’
To the clatter of flat-ware and scattered applause, the martinet bounced from his sniper’s crouch and laid down his discharged weapon. He strutted past the ranks of his straight-faced men, who watched his progress riveted. Several turned apprehensively green as The Hatchet laid claim to the twitching carcass. He spun, absorbed by his grisly prize, and his juggernaut stride rammed him up short, nose to chest with the sisterhood’s messenger.
The tin-pot fanfare faltered abruptly. Which fallen hush stranded a blindsided officer, caught swearing in anxious dismay from behind the baled hides.
‘Who let in the skirt?’ The Hatchet snapped, chin tipped upwards, the better to strop his steely glare over the female intruder.
Revolted to censure in turn, she raked her cowled gaze over the limp victims impaled on the barrel top. ‘This is your puerile excuse for amusement?’ As the storehouse tent echoed with stifled gasps, the frosty female appended, ‘Your cowed underlings don’t challenge your pathetic tactics, I see.’
The Hatchet rocked on his toes and tossed the shafted corpse off to his left hand, that his bloodied right might capture her glove for the flourished mockery of a kiss. ‘Not a frivolous play, that’s your girlish presumption.’
The woman snatched back her clamped wrist in affront.
‘Are you bruised, then?’ The shark’s grin widened. While seamed, wind-burned skin crimped the glint of hard eyes, The Hatchet declared, ‘I am hunting a rat with the temple’s war host, and you’ve poked your nose into my field drill. A fighting man’s game. Therefore, don’t try me with a lame story. You’re not my routine courier, snip. Let me hazard a guess. Koriathain?’