“I don’t think I need to wake him,” she said. “He’d only say it was my choice, in any case.”
One or two of the archers chuckled at the truth in that.
“And he’d say he would go with you. We both would. You’ve been the best leader the Free’s ever had, Yulan. Just two men dead in all the time you’ve been captain. You’ve made us rich, you’ve kept us alive, you’ve outgrown what happened at Towers’ Shadow. But perhaps you need to go back there. If so, we’ll go with you. Of course we will. There’ll be time enough for tilling the earth after one last ride.”
“Someone’s coming,” Hamdan observed casually. “Doing it clumsy and alone, so not a worry.”
From the gathering darkness, a slight figure emerged clutching a leather parchment case in both hands before him, with a spear folded into the crook of his arm. It was the youth who had guided Yulan down from this ridge earlier, to Creel’s tent. Who had been at Creel’s side in the fighting the day before. He stood there outside the circle, uncertain.
“Well?” Yulan asked, already guessing the answer.
“Lord Creel sent me,” the youth said hesitantly.
He held out the scroll case, as if it were some badge or pennant that would explain everything. Which it did, in its way.
“He says I’m the contract-holder. I’m to go with you.”
As he stretched his arms out, his spear slipped from its lodging at his elbow and fell to the ground. He hurriedly bent to retrieve it.
Akrana snorted. “So we’re riding with children now?”
The newcomer blushed with either anger or embarrassment – perhaps both – as he straightened.
“I’m not a child,” he protested, but even he did not sound as if he entirely believed it.
6
On The Road To Harvekka
On the road to Harvekka, men – the King’s men – had been gathered. They had been gathered and stripped of their clothes and hung from gibbets. An old cart track curved away from the cobbled road, and there, at the point where the two separated, twenty freshly made gallows were clustered. A nasty little copse.
They had been big men, most of them. Warriors. Armsmen of the King. Strong-limbed, but now loose and reduced by death. Birds had found them, and taken from them much that was soft. Eyes, and lips; cheeks and tongues. Manhood. Time and the weather had begun to remove what the birds had not yet claimed. A darkening and a diminishing and a rotting was under way.
Morue, Mistress of the School, looked up into one of those corrupted faces. It was difficult to say, in the dimming twilight and through the mask of corporeal decay, but she thought she had known the man while he lived. Not a warrior this, if so; a tithe-tallier. A scratcher with quills in the King’s service. If it was indeed the man she remembered, he had been rather timorous, but lively of mind. Possessed of a wife and three children – and where might they be now? she wondered. Harmless in himself, but a burden to those who drew his attention. They had taken the opportunity of revolt to unburden themselves. The tithe-tallier hung there amidst the swordsmen, his discoloured corpse swaying very slightly beneath the gentle breeze.
Morue turned her horse away and moved on towards Harvekka. Angers, once set free, found many places to set their claws. It was in their nature. It was also profoundly regrettable, but that which was regrettable could not always be prevented. Sometimes it might even be necessary, as a purgative.
She would have commanded her Clade escort – multitudinous, as befitted the times – to cut down the corpses and give them burial or cremation, had the day not been short and their destination still a long hour away. They had left Armadell-on-Lake with the dawn, and would not reach Harvekka before darkness was gathering. A draining journey, more normally completed in two full days. But the School, and therefore she as its mistress, was required to be in all places at once during these fraught days. She had, long ago, been told that the sandfolk of the distant south used the same word, with an obscurely different inflection, to mean both change and danger. It was not an absurd idea.
By twisting about in the saddle and scanning the horizon, she could have counted three titanic columns of dirty brown-black smoke climbing the sky. The sharp, dry scent of them was draped across the land. The village of Surmet was burning, half a dozen miles inland. Behind, towards Armadell-on-Lake, the jetties and float-houses along a stretch of the Kurn River were still smouldering, as they had been for three days now. Ahead, something was on fire in Harvekka.
The road at last began to descend from the low hills and twist its way down on to the coastal lowlands where Harvekka stood. A man awaited them there, at the first sinking of the track. His feet rested on the cobbles, his backside on the thin grass. A long sword lay across his knees. He was carefully weaving strands of grass into a cord or bracelet. He had a handsome face, though it was dirty with soot and perhaps blood.
The front half of his scalp bore only a dense, dark stubble. From the rear half woven braids hung, matted and heavy, to his shoulders. Each braid was weighted with a single stone bead, some of them white, some black. It was a style affected by the corsairs of the Mule Isles, but this man was no corsair.
In the roadway before him lay a body. Another was in the grass behind and beyond him. His horse, its mane braided and beaded just as his hair was, stood close by that second corpse, quietly cropping the meagre sward. Its reins hung loose. He had not bothered to tether or hobble it.
Morue raised a hand to halt her retinue. She let her horse advance at its own leisurely pace until it drew close to the man at the roadside. It stopped then, not at her command but because it did not like that body lying in the middle of the road. It had little experience of the dead; until recently, at least.
The man looked up. The beads in his hair tapped gently against one another.
“Mistress,” he said placidly.
“Sullen.”
He rose, letting that meticulously crafted rope of woven grass fall away, taking his sword in one hand and the halter of Morue’s horse in the other. Looking into his face, now that he was close, Morue could see that there was indeed blood on his cheeks. Not his, of course. It was never his. The man who commanded the School’s Clade had a gift for shedding the blood of others, and preserving his own.
“What happened here?” she asked him.
“Robbers. They’re a plague in these parts now. They thought me just another straggler, easy of the taking. I did try to convince them otherwise, but… well, as you see.”
“You should have brought some of your men with you,” Morue muttered, a trifle irritated. She could guess just how little Sullen would have exerted himself in the avoidance of violence. “If you had been accompanied, there would have been no need for this.”
Sullen shrugged. “I thought you might appreciate discretion, so I came alone.”
The Mistress of the School exhaled wearily through her nose and stared ahead, down the road. Beyond the yellow, brown, green patchwork of fields, gridded by irrigation channels and canals, Harvekka was an irregular encrustation upon the coast. She could see, now, that the tower of smoke there was rising from somewhere near the docks.
“Is the city safe?” she asked.
Sullen looked that way too. He patted the flat of his sword against his leg absently.
“Safe enough. The rebels have won; the King’s men are dead or gone, hiding or turning their coats. What happens next is getting decided.”
Which is why I’m here, Morue did not need to say.
“Good.” She glanced back over her shoulder, to ensure that none of her companions, none of Sullen’s own Clade men, were within earshot. “And what of other matters? What of the other matter?”
“They’ve not been found yet,” Sullen said flatly, as he said almost everything. “It is… frustrating.”
“Frustrating? If we don’t find them, and soon, ruin follows.” She flicked an arm out towards the city on the shore. “Everything might burn. All that’s happened these last few months will
have been for nothing, and will be as nothing to what comes after. So, yes: frustrating. You might call it that, Sullen.”
She was distracted by an abrupt groan, tenuous, like a thought only partway become sound, rising from the longer grass away from the road. She saw a dark shape there, moving very slightly. Without that faint movement, she would not have seen it at all, or would have thought it just a rock. As she watched, and as Sullen turned to look, an elbow crooked up out of the grass. Someone trying, and failing, to lift himself up.
“It seems one of your assailants survived your acquaintance,” Morue muttered.
“No,” said Sullen. “He’s dead, sure enough; just hasn’t understood it yet. I loosed his guts from his belly. Please excuse me for a moment, Mistress.”
He strode towards the crippled man, hefting that long blade.
Morue averted her eyes, watching the smoke rise from Harvekka. Sullen was a regrettable man. Profoundly so. But necessary. So she chose to believe.
7
House-Dog’s Puppy
Creel’s contract-holder – Drann, his name had turned out to be – was no great rider. No rider at all, really. Yulan was not surprised. Farmers such as this boy’s family must be might have a horse for hauling a plough or a wagon, but not for riding. That would be a waste when they seldom had anywhere more than a few miles away that needed the going.
Probably ridden a plough horse’s broad back now and again as a child, Yulan would guess. Just as probably, never laid foot or buttock on stirrup or saddle. As a result, he was no doubt already, less than a day out from Creel’s camp, being assailed by a wide range of discomforts. Yulan wondered if the youth knew just how far those discomforts might in time ascend towards the heights of real pain.
It was a poor choice on Creel’s part, this selection of contract-holder. The lord must have had his reasons – he was seldom short of them for anything he did – but this journey would be fast and hard, which meant Drann would find it, and the Free, unforgiving. For all the preoccupations crowding Yulan’s head, he could spare a little corner of it to feel briefly sorry for the boy. He had the look of a hoper, a longer. One of those who thought the Free something wonderful. Something for him. He would discover the untruth of that soon enough. Of them all, Hamdan was the only one who might give him a welcome, and that would be for reasons to do with other times, other people. The Free was no place for hopers.
Especially not ones who really could not ride with even the slightest hint of grace. Or facility, Yulan thought wincingly as Drann swayed one more time in the saddle, or confidence, stability; without any attribute, in fact, that might be of value in a horseman save a certain mulish persistence. He would fall off eventually. That, or he would aggravate his long-suffering mount beyond its patience – and they had given him the most imperturbably patient one they had to hand – and it would be off and away, flinging him into a gully and racing for freedom. After a couple of hours, Yulan beckoned Akrana, and when she drew up alongside him, he whispered blunt instruction to her. Without comment, she trotted on ahead, and without explanation, without even looking at him, attached a cord to the halter of Drann’s horse, and led both it and him on the end of that tether.
Yulan could read Drann’s indignation in the stiffness of his back and his refusal to so much as look at Akrana, as if she might disappear should he ignore her for long enough. Poor lad. No doubt more than a little unsettled by her, too. No shame in that. Yulan had known great warriors, great bluff oafs, to be cowed by Akrana’s cold and haughty indifference. She tended to leave folk feeling drenched in chill contempt merely by looking at them.
Between Yulan and Drann rode Kerig and Wren, side by side.
“I’ll not have a thing to do with goats,” Kerig was muttering. “They’re foul, stinking beasts with the temperament of spoiled children.”
“You’ll have a natural affinity for them, then.”
“Oh, steady me before my laughter pitches me off this nag.”
“Why are you so cruel to me?” Wren moaned with a petulance that Yulan recognised as playful, flirtatious. “We’ll have enough land that you’ll never need to see my goats. Not even hear them. Why can’t you just let me have what I want?”
“Because I don’t want a wife who smells of goat,” Kerig muttered darkly.
There was a muffled thump as Wren punched him playfully in the shoulder. You might think the excitements of Creel’s camp had never happened, that no harm had been done, to hear the two of them chattering.
But then Kerig laughed, and the laugh turned into a hacking cough, and then into a long, gloomy silence. The harm was still there, in more ways than one. Kerig had reached deep into the entelech in his attempt on the Weaponsmith, and paid the price. It would be days before he was hale and hearty again, and even then some small part of him, his vigour and life, would never return. That was how Clevers did what they did.
And it would be more days before Yulan allowed him to think he was forgiven his indiscretion. He knew why Kerig needed the Weaponsmith dead. He approved it, as a cause. But not when it endangered all of the Free. Not when it set personal desire over duty to the company. Some things had to wait until later, until there was no one else to be caught up in the turbulent wake of debts being settled. Yulan would have one or two of those debts to settle himself, even after Callotec was tidied away.
That, of course, was the grit in Yulan’s eye. The nagging, accusatory whisper deep in his skull, probing away in there as it searched for weakness. He had allowed these eleven people – twelve, if Drann counted – to be caught in the wake of his own debt. They all thought they had some stake in setting right what had happened at Towers’ Shadow, in the name of the Free and its honour. Yulan had never shed the notion that the debt, and the penance it required, was his alone. Yet he was their captain, and they chose to follow him now; thus he must lead, and must bring them home safe to White Steading. That must be his entire purpose, and he set his mind to concentrating upon it to the exclusion of all else. The Free had made him who he was. He owed it, its every man and woman, everything. There was nothing he would not do to bring it and its people safely to its final willing dissolution.
Drann could hardly believe that he rode with the Free. A house-dog’s puppy amongst wolves. Not just any wolves; the wolves, whose like had never been seen. He only hoped that he could get through the day without coming loose from atop his lurching horse and cracking his head open on the ground before their very eyes.
Wolves and monsters. He could hear the constant creak and rumble of the wagon that bore the Clamour, grinding along at the rear of the little column. Pebbles cracked and popped beneath its iron-shod wheels. Drann had still not seen the face of the driver – Hestin, he now knew she was called – for it stayed all day in the shadow of her leaf-made hood. He had heard not a single word, no sound of any kind, emerge from that shadow. Not that any of the Free seemed inclined to talk to him, or around him.
He had somehow expected banter, even merriment. Adventurers embarking upon a new adventure should give some little sign of excitement, surely? Apparently not. The mood was subdued, purposeful rather than anticipatory. Kerig and Wren teased and taunted one another a little. Once or twice, Drann had met Hamdan’s eye and received a more or less warm smile or nod from the archer. Other than that, he had to confess, he did not feel entirely welcome. It was disappointing.
“Stop there, boy,” Creel had shouted.
Drann’s heart had trembled at the cry. He should never have been there, in that tent, witnessing those exchanges. Terrible punishments would follow, he was certain.
“You’re the lad who didn’t run away, aren’t you?” Creel said, squinting at him.
It did not seem a hostile regard. Not yet, anyway.
“Yes, sire,” Drann managed to say.
“The one who lay on top of me when some whore’s whelp was trying to gut me. The one who felled himself with a tree.”
Drann nodded.
“What are you do
ing here?”
“He… the Captain wanted to know where your tent was,” said Drann, as if that explained and excused everything.
Creel grunted. He pulled a sheet of parchment from inside his jerkin and spread it on the little table. He unfolded a small square of leather, to reveal a smear of black ink. Carefully, he rolled the ball of his thumb in the ink and then pressed it to the bottom of the parchment, leaving a smudged, indistinct print there. Then he took a ring from his left hand, delicately gathered ink upon the embossed design that adorned it and made that mark too.
“Might be you saved my life, up on that knoll yesterday,” the lord of Mondoon said, just as Drann was starting to hope he had been forgotten or dismissed.
“I don’t think so, sire.”
Creel glared at him.
“Idiot. Wit-short peasant. A lord muses that you might have saved his life, and you dispute it? Did your mother raise a buffoon? If she was here, she’d scold you for such wanton spitting in the face of fortune, wouldn’t she? She should. She should.”
“Yes, sire,” agreed Drann, far too alarmed and bewildered to think of anything more apt.
Creel rummaged amongst the sacks in the corner of the wide tent. Drann could hear the clinking of coins, stirring in their beds. The lord of Mondoon produced a tubular case. He rolled up the parchment he had marked and slipped it inside. Then he strode over and slapped it against Drann’s chest, holding it there expectantly until Drann recovered himself sufficiently to grasp it himself.
“Might be you saved my life,” Creel repeated gruffly, “so you get to be my contract-holder to the Free. It’s a reward, of sorts, though it remains to be seen whether you’ll thank me for it. But there’s this: the contract-holder gets a little taste of the prize, once the work is done. A very little taste, mind you. Big enough to make a farm boy happy, though. His whole family, most like. Now do you think you saved my life back there?”
The Free Page 7