The Free

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The Free Page 11

by Brian Ruckley


  “He can run longer, and faster, than you or me or any one of us,” the Clever went on. “Think deeper and sharper. Kill a man quicker, quieter. Most things, most deeds, Yulan’s better at than anyone you’ve ever met, farm boy.”

  “If you say so,” said Drann, cupping his bowl of soup with both hands contemplatively.

  He had hoped for beer, to quell the nervous, queasy agitation that his encounter with the Clamour and Hestin had left rattling around in his stomach. Ordeller stood there, even now, over at the counter, tapping a new cask of the stuff. The ape was perched atop the counter, leaning down, extending its long lips to touch the tap even before Ordeller had got it in place. She pushed the animal away now and again, but her shoves lacked conviction.

  As it turned out, the Free adhered to a strict sobriety when working under contract; a fact that surprised Drann, who in his brief attachment to Creel’s army – and despite the old warlord’s strictures – had seen more drunkenness than in all his previous years. He did not know whether he was expected to now share in the Free’s self-denying discipline, but it seemed the safest course. So he made do with soup, and the warmth of the fire crackling in the grate.

  “Takes someone special to lead a hundred… well, to lead a hundred of us,” Kerig mused. “Being the kind of folk we are, most of us.”

  “A hundred?” Drann said. He was distracted and wary of antagonising anyone else tonight, but not so much that he would refuse the chance to learn of the Free. He had never found wariness a natural or easy companion. “I didn’t know you were so many.”

  “Ha. You thought it was just us few you’re lucky enough to ride with?”

  “Well, no. I know there’s —”

  “There’s better than a hundred. A dozen Clevers, fifty or so fighting men. Almost the same again working for a wage: stewards, traders, housekeepers, armourers. And then there’s plenty like Ordeller, just for the watching and for being sure there’s a friend around wherever we beach ourselves.”

  “Kerig, close your mouth, for the love of mercy,” snapped Wren. “Have you gone soft-headed, to think this boy needs to know every secret of the company?”

  Kerig frowned, and shrugged. “Not telling him secrets,” he said, a little sulkily, but he did have the grace to look regretful.

  Drann guessed it was his improving health that had loosened his tongue. The Clever’s cheeks had recovered a lively hue, and his eyes glinted with restored vigour. It had, apparently, made him want to talk; to give that bodily renewal a voice. Drann just happened to be the closest pair of open ears. He was not foolish enough to take it as a sign of acceptance.

  Wren extended a long finger, rested its tip atop one of the crudely carved beetle pieces and fixed Kerig with a meaningful gaze.

  “What?” he asked.

  “If you paid more heed to the game, instead of wasting breath on the boy, you’d not be losing.”

  She slid the wooden beetle to its new position on the board and sat back. She looked satisfied. Drann had no idea whether Kerig was really losing. He had never played a game of Land in his life. It was not meant for the likes of him. His gaming hadn’t gone beyond the throwing of knuckles on a plate, and even at that – which as best he could tell was entirely a matter of luck – he had lost a good deal more than he had ever won.

  “He’s distracting me,” Kerig muttered, hooking a thumb towards Drann.

  “It’s not the boy doing all the talking,” Wren said.

  “I’m not a boy,” said Drann quietly. “I’m seventeen years old.”

  Wren smiled at him.

  “Of course you’re a boy. There’s nothing wrong with being a boy. It just feels that way because of the company you’re choosing to keep.”

  Two great boulders rested against one another, like wearied men slumped shoulder to shoulder. Their posture left a gap between them, at their base. A window, through which Yulan stared, stretched out on his stomach. What he saw troubled him.

  There was, as he had expected, a sentry posted above Callotec’s camp. Only the man’s head and shoulders were visible, projecting around the side of an overhanging slab of rock. A careless eye might easily have read them as merely a part of that rock.

  The watcher was sitting not quite atop the ridge – wise, as he would have been too easily sighted there – but just a little way down its flank, presumably above the spot where his comrades were camped. What troubled Yulan was that he could not see that camp. The floor of the canyon running along the foot of the ridge was clearly visible. But where he took Callotec to have pitched his tents, down there amidst the scrub that lined the Old Threetower Road, there was only a great obscuring bank of sickly grey fog.

  It pooled limply, utterly unstirred by whatever breeze reached there. Like a pale scar on the night’s air. Tendrils of it – thinner and more sharply coherent than any fog had a right to be – rose up the walls of the canyon, twining themselves amongst the rocks and crannies. Yet even they did not move, did not rise or fall or drift. They simply clung to the slopes as if anchoring themselves.

  No fire smoke climbed out of that fog. No sound escaped it. Yulan had seen no other mist since leaving Curmen. The weather was not fit for the making of such a vapour. It did not belong. It could only be the work of a Clever.

  He had seen such workings before. They were most easily achieved using the Autumnal entelech, and Wren had done so in service of the Free. To conceal, confound and confuse; just as was intended here and now.

  Reason enough to be troubled. More than troubled. There were not supposed to be any Clevers with Callotec. So Creel had said. So Yulan had believed. When you fought Clevers, no plan could be relied upon with certainty. No ruse could be trusted to work. Others had learned that to their cost often enough when facing the Free.

  His ambitions for the night rearranged themselves, and fixed with narrow precision upon the unfortunate sentry perched above the fog’s fringes. He had no intention of venturing down into those obscuring mists, so he needed someone else to tell him what lay there. He needed a tongue.

  Yulan twisted, looked up the ridge’s backbone. The forest of kite strings was barely visible now, no more than a suggestion of movement in the dark air. Somewhere there Hamdan would be watching and waiting. The archer was as safe a pair of eyes and hands as could be wished for, even when prey to remembered grief.

  Unspent grief. Not that there were many other kinds, in Yulan’s experience. It might diminish, or slumber, or even transform itself into something else, but it was seldom entirely extinguished. Any echo of its first cause might be enough to give it a stir. An echo such as a youth whose age matched that at which a son had died.

  Yulan remembered Hamdan’s son. Not well – he had only met him once, years ago – but enough to know that Drann was not greatly like him. Just alike enough in years to call up an instinctive sympathy, perhaps even affection, in the archer. Yulan had seen it in Hamdan’s eyes almost as soon as Drann walked into their camp. It was another reason for his regret at Creel’s choice of contract-holder. Others might not mark it, hidden as it was by Hamdan’s customary good humour, but Yulan could see it clearly: the rising of buried pain. He felt it too, on behalf of his friend.

  But Yulan also knew Hamdan well enough to know that nothing – no memory, no sorrow – would distract him from whatever was needed tonight. Their shared origins in the dry, vast Massatan lands through which the Hommetic Kingdom’s imprecise southern border ran had inclined them towards friendship from the start; better than a dozen years of shared service in the Free had made it deep, and fortified it with trust and reliance.

  Yulan edged sideways, out from the concealing shelter of those boulders. Bent almost double, fingertips brushing over the rocky ground, he worked his way forward, eyes never straying from the dim outline of the unsuspecting sentry up ahead.

  “Used to be many more than a hundred, of course,” Kerig murmured. “More than five times as many, back in the wild days before the Hommetics crowned themselves. Tha
t’s why Crex and his line were always fond of us; the Free did more than any other company to put the first of them on the throne, way back then.

  “Precious thing, royal gratitude. Only thing that stopped the School snuffing us out like they did, one by one, all the other free companies. Not that they haven’t tried, now and again.”

  “But you’re fighting against Crex now,” Drann frowned.

  “Times change,” Kerig said with a shrug. “The buttocks burnishing the throne change. Crex was losing what little mind he ever had, if you ask me; becoming an inconstant friend, if you ask Yulan. You know where we were two years ago, almost to the day?”

  Drann shook his head dumbly.

  “Fifty miles deep into the Empire, just twenty of us, hunting slavers who’d stolen some of Crex’s subjects. Fighting the secret little war between Kingdom and Empire that neither’ll admit to, and neither wants to use their own folk to fight. We lost two men that day, the only ones who’ve died under Yulan; killed ten times that many and more. And when we come back to Crex, he robs us of half our prize because he’s somehow got it into his soft head that those we didn’t kill bribed us to let them go.”

  This was what Drann wanted to hear more of: the fell deeds of the Free.

  “Is that when the Clamour ate an Orphanidon?” he asked eagerly.

  Kerig looked at him as if he had drooled soup down his chin.

  “What?” The Clever grimaced.

  “The Clamour doesn’t eat people,” Wren said with mock gravity.

  “Oh,” said Drann.

  “And we’re not idiots enough to carry it deep into the Empire,” Kerig said, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, we only took the field against Crex once it was plain he’d lose. Yulan’s always known how to pick the winning side in a fight. No better man to lead us, like I said.”

  “He’s no Clever, though,” Drann said. “Yulan, I mean.”

  “Ha,” laughed Kerig. “No, he’s not that. Captain of the Free’s never been a Clever. Not once in the eighty years of the company.”

  “Sulleman Var,” Wren said placidly as she pondered the choices the game board offered her.

  “What?” blinked Kerig.

  “Sulleman Var.”

  “Oh. Yes, all right. There was one once. But only once, and not for long. Before our time. And the exception doesn’t change my point.”

  “Does a bit, I expect,” Wren smiled. “What was your point, anyway?”

  “Never you mind. You just try to find some move or other to save yourself from humiliation. Point is that there’s precious few Clevers would make a decent leader of something like the Free. Do you even understand what it is we do?”

  “Clevers?” Drann said. “You… make magic from the entelechs.”

  “We make magic from the entelechs.” He imitated Drann’s northern accent. “Horse’s piss. You, the air you breathe, the fear or lust or joy you feel, this table’ – he shook it for emphasis, which earned him a foul glare from Wren as she reached to keep the Land pieces from skittering across the board – “everything’s made from the raw stuff of the four entelechs. Everything is a pattern arising from them. You understand?”

  Drann nodded. The soup was cooling in his bowl, but he paid it no heed.

  “So what we do,” Kerig went on, “is make new patterns. We take the formless entelechs and give them form. Thing is, it’s a river that flows both ways. For us to put more pattern into the world, some has to be lost. Something has to go back. And the place that pattern’s lost from, more often than not, is us. Our bodies, our minds, our souls. Know what that means?”

  Drann shrugged.

  “First, we’re mean with our magics. Inclined to the selfish. You’ve met Akrana. Hibernal. Mighty talented. Could unmoor the seasons, overturn the day’s light, if she wanted. She’s too fond of her life and vigour to do it, though.”

  A warning hiss from Wren, sharp as a snake, made Kerig flinch.

  “Anyway,” he continued, with less enthusiasm, “not good traits for a leader, selfishness, meanness. Second, we don’t last long. No Clever’s ever lasted more than six or seven years in the Free. Too punishing. We die, or we turn our shares in for coin and go off to live a slower, quieter life. What little life we’ve got left once the Free’s done with us.”

  “Why do it then?” Drann asked quietly.

  “Ha!’ Kerig leaned back in his chair. “Because life’s meagre fare in these parts, unless you’re a royal or rich as one. So long as we’re in the Free, we go where we want and do as we please, because we’ve a hundred of the fiercest, most fearful friends you could ever wish for, and none’d dare gainsay us. If we live to leave the Free, we still go where we want and do as we please, because we’re rich. That’s why we do it. Wouldn’t you, if you could?”

  Drann did not know the answer to that.

  The guard would be an Armsman, if Callotec had any sense at all. The King’s elite cadre had been as fine a set of warriors as any outside the Empire, outside the Free, until it was scattered and devoured by the last few months of fighting. Callotec would almost certainly have gathered up a few of that elite in his flight, and was unlikely to trust any but one of them to stand watch over his encampment.

  It took two years to train an Armsman. Yulan had never had a day’s formal training in his life; but he had spent better than half that life doing violence to others. Not practising or miming the deed, but doing it. Its methods and necessities were as much a part of his body as muscle and bone. He dropped on to the reverse haunch of the ridge, finding a long, low path that brought him across sharp rocks and then back up to a place where he could climb, slow and careful as a stalking cat, above the Armsman’s station. He lay there for many steady heartbeats, spread-eagled upon the flat crown of the low crag below which the man was keeping watch. He was, for that span of time, alone beneath the immense star-strewn sky, the wind rushing over him. It felt good.

  He measured his movements forward to the lip of the crag in the smallest of increments. As he went, he felt softly for any loose pebble or rock fragment tucked into a crevice. There were few, but he only needed one. When he found it, he folded it into the palm of his hand and eased himself on.

  He poised himself at the edge of the overhang, balanced against the wind, looking down upon the sentry ten feet or so below him. The man was sitting on a rock, blowing into his hands to warm them. Tongues of that malign mist reached up close to where he sat, lying thick and sluggish.

  Yulan flicked his little stone out into the darkness. It tick-ticked invisibly amongst the scree and boulders. Not loud, but loud enough. The sentry came at once to his feet and set one hand to the hilt of his sword, the other to the horn hanging at his belt. He took a pace forward, bending to peer out into the night.

  Yulan dropped on him. He fell on to the man’s shoulders and back, locking an arm about his neck, and knocked him down. Their fall made more noise than he would have liked, but it could not be helped and changed nothing of consequence. He already knew time would run against him in this.

  They writhed and rolled together in the darkness, on the high, hard ground. The Armsman was strong; Yulan was stronger. He kept a tight, crushing lock about the man’s throat, and held the wrist of his sword arm firm. He could feel the panic in his captive’s increasingly desperate struggles. Legs scythed back and forth over the ground as if mimicking flight. With his free hand, the Armsman at first tried to push himself up, but finding Yulan’s weight too great, he clawed and pulled at the arm around his neck. That availed him no more, so he began to scrabble for the horn. Yulan let him do so. The man would have no breath to wind the thing even if he freed it.

  As they slid lower, their legs, now entwined as Yulan sought to quieten his prey, reached and then sank into a tendril of the mist. Here at its very upper limit the vapour seemed all the more unnatural, for it was not – as it should have been – fraying and wisping away on the air, but dense and formed. Like milk contained in an absurdly shaped glass vessel.

>   The Armsman’s resistance was ebbing. The strength of his arms slackened; the flailing of his legs diminished and became erratic, driven more by fading instinct than urgent will. The horn, released from his belt, slipped from numbing fingers on to the ground. Yulan had no time to savour his imminent victory, however. Just as the Armsman’s vigour dwindled, the mist suddenly acquired a vigour of its own.

  He felt its touch, even through his boot. Foot and ankle of the leg that had sunk furthest into the mist were abruptly held, as if they had plunged into sucking, gripping mud. And the grip was tightening. The Armsman was not yet entirely subdued, still weakly stirring, so Yulan could not spare a hand to drag himself away from the fog. He tried to kick the trapped leg free, but that only strengthened its bonds, for the mist resisted and reacted and thickened. It was not trying to drag him in, merely to hold him; and that it did, sure as a snared rabbit.

  Yulan sensed the fear flickering into life at the very edge of his awareness, but paid it no heed. The time was not yet come when fear might serve him. His mind worked in its fast, calm way. Callotec had clearly acquired the aid of at least one highly accomplished Clever. The mist had not taken hold of Yulan’s opponent. It must recognise him in some way. Know him. To make a cloud such as this was not the work of an untrained walking-witch or a novice. The School, like as not. And that was one enemy he would not – could not – set the Free against in open conflict.

  He lay still, acceding to the mist’s restraint, and put all his weight and strength into crushing the sentry towards unconsciousness. Gradually, the man stopped moving. Went limp in Yulan’s embrace. He did not soften his hold for long moments yet, counting off heartbeats until his experience told him his victim was safely dulled but not yet irreparably harmed. Once sure of that, he rolled away.

  That twisting did nothing to break his leg free of the mist’s grasp. It twisted with him, coiling like solid smoke around his ankle. Yulan sat up and pulled a knife from its sheath at his calf. He did not know whether he would have dared to reach into the mist, had it been high enough to hide that knife, but was grateful the decision was not needed.

 

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