There was no profit in a Northland war. Those people had devolved into such depravity that they fought for honor, accolades, and the revered names of their warlords. Worthless reasons to fight.
Radstac fought, yes, but she fought for appropriate causes. One cause, actually. Herself.
The bodies were mounds. They stank, and they stirred feebly beneath blankets. The coverings weren't for warmth. It was still just barely summertime, but even here on the Isthmus, north of the perpetually gentle climes of the Southsoil, it remained quite temperate. The blankets were thick, black, and they cut the meager seeping sunlight that found its way through chinks in the cheap planks of the walls. The bodies under there, rolling in their own filth, were hiding from that light, from all light, from anything that would illuminate—and therefore remind them of— reality.
Radstac didn't spend time under blankets. She felt nothing, neither pity nor revulsion, for the marginally human creatures that had reduced themselves to such states. Addictions had to be chosen carefully, but there was rarely anyone to guide neophyte users. Normally they fell helplessly and randomly into their habits, and there they stayed, their physical existences turning to shit while their souls soared in glorious narcotic realms.
It ended in death, sure. What didn't?
Radstac didn't hide her leather armor and scarred bracers beneath a cloak. The accoutrements of her trade she displayed—not proudly, practically. Being a mercenary didn't begin and end with the talent and willingness to fight. Hardly. You had to hustle yourself. Someone had to hire you. For that they had to know you existed.
The durable leather about her upper body was marked by past blows that had landed on her. That she was still walking around inside the armor was something she wanted to advertise. She also wore dark leggings and kid-skin boots, a small, wickedly honed blade nestled in each, inside oiled sheaths, hidden from view. On her left hand she wore a black glove, more leather. It was a snug fit, customized by a superb Southsoil specialist. It had cost her more than a few coppers, but for the use she'd gotten out of it, it had proven to be a bargain. It weighed heavily, but she was very used to its heft. Used to the feel of the small gears and sockets beneath the leather surface.
On her belt she carried no weapon. Petgrad, this Isthmus city she'd come to, didn't forbid its citizens or visitors to carry arms, but the local police made a point of harassing those who did, particularly something like the heavy combat sword she favored. She had checked the sword at the Public Armory, a
civilized amenity only a city-state the size of Petgrad could offer.
Radstac had to admit the city was fairly sophisticated. It was large, well-maintained, its economy stable. It provided a health service for its citizenry, had a respectable standing military. The people weren't especially oppressed. A typical worker could live a decent life of reasonable years. By Isthmus standards, then, this was the pinnacle of culture.
Cities, of course, were bigger and better back home. Radstac's home, specifically, was the Republic of Dilloqi, located in the northern part of Southsoil. Dilloqi, a real nation, and the city of her birth, Hynсsy ... beautiful. Proud. Important. With an eminent history to back up its boasts.
That Dilloqi was in truth a splintered relic of the erstwhile Southsoil empire wasn't anything that needed to be dwelt upon. Dilloqi had resurrected itself from the ruins of the Great Upheavals, as had other lands of the Southern Continent. They abided now independently of each other. This wasn't the first time Radstac had journeyed northward to the Isthmus to sell her sword. The Isthmus was a fairly reliable source of petty hostilities between individual city-states. They bickered about farmland; they wrangled about the use of roads. They blustered and fussed and made ultimatums, and eventually they provided the wars that Radstac lived on—at least for a while. Conflicts played themselves out in rather short order here. No Isthmus state had the resources to wage sustained warfare.
That, it seemed, had changed.
The prepubescent boy, who had the overused look of a rental about him, led her deeper into the waste-smelling lair. He had appeared from the air when she stepped into the doorway of this establishment, the barest glint of silver showing in her palm.
She had surrendered one silver to the boy, who made the coin disappear the instant it touched his tiny fingers. She still held another in her palm and had more money in pouches no pickpocket would ever find.
Her eyes had virtually no color, just a tint of pale yellow to the irises. Those eyes, small in a twice-scarred face, roved her surroundings without appearing to move. Her bronze-colored features were what men would call handsome, rather than pretty. Not that she lost sleep wondering what men thought of her looks. Her hair was the red of rotting berries and hacked short. Another scar was visible across the rear of her skull, a line of white in the red.
It had cut through her helmet, a blow from a hulking swordsman, a death stroke. She had tumbled over the battlefield ground, rolling back onto her feet, and everything she saw then was a roaring blackness ... everything except the face of the giant as he clomped toward her. She had snatched a throwing knife from one of her boots and launched it. It entered his gaping mouth, skewered his tongue, and poked its barbed tip out of the back of his throat. She'd never learned who had carried her away from that field. She had woken in a surgeon's tent, her scalp being sewn.
No beds, no aisles, just mounds. The boy picked his zigzagging way nimbly, into darkness that now only hinted at the human shapes on the floor. She was alert.
One stirring heap, on her right, blanket rocking back and forth, rhythmically, too steadily—a step away, the boy passing it...
She pivoted. One boot heel came down on the right upper arm, just above the elbow. She drove the toe of her other boot into the mound's side, a toe reinforced by a wedge of iron under the kidskin. A rib broke under the blanket.
If it was just another mud-brained addict, the proprietors wouldn't care.
In the dark, low and ahead, she heard, "No sword." Which the hisser evidently thought meant she was weaponless. So be it.
She delivered another kick, one that would immobilize the lungs for a while, and hopped off. She caught only the vaguest glimpse of the boy vanishing, but where he'd been there was now a charging figure. Blade in fist.
Brute attack. It might have worked in the daylight, where the victim would see the armed shape looming and lunging and then freeze in fear. It might have worked here, in this stinking dimness, against someone who didn't have a decade of combat experience.
She snapped her left hand outward, fingers stiff and spread. The sound of sliding metal rang on the
foul air. The weight of her glove was redistributed.
Her right hand jabbed forward and punched the hand that held the knife, a hard painful shot, distracting the charger. But it was her left hand, of course, darting and singing a few thin notes of metallic mayhem as it shot through the air, that did the job. The two prongs—fine, solid, as sharp as anything she ever carried—were extended from the back of her fist. They each tore away a patch of her attacker's face. She did all this during another pivot that got her out of the way of the pouncing, bleeding, screaming figure that hurtled past and onto several of the mounds.
Into a crouch, sinewy legs splayed. Her hooks dribbled. The figure under the blanket to her right was gasping in excruciating pain.
Noises ahead still. The one who'd hissed 'Wo sword." Maybe there were others. Her charger was still screaming on the floor behind her, high-pitched, sounding nearly insane. She must have hit an eye. Stupid Isthmuser.
Her right hand flipped a blade up from her boot. It was a flat, thin slab of hammered metal, with no hilt. Made for throwing. Her fingers balanced it. She was holding her breath, listening to the dark, waiting to see what followed.
The boy reappeared, a little grey smudge in the robe he wore, a smooth face that would be inscrutable even in the best light. In some other part of the cavernous room foot-steps retreated, stumbling. The mounds, even t
hose the charger had blundered onto, remained silent, making only their irregular twitches and jerks.
Radstac slotted the throwing knife back into her boot, but kept her glove's prongs extended. The specialist who had made the contraption had lived in a village nearby her home city of Hynсsy. He was a middle-yeared man, and he was dying, consumed from within by a corruption that ate the meat of him, leaving him a sack of yellowing flesh. He couldn't move about without the assistance of others, and so chose to rarely move from the worktable where he had invented her glove. She had envisioned the device, had struggled to explain it. It had, after all, come to her in a violently vivid dream of combat and so wavered in her mind.
The man had listened, eyes serene and protruding from a shriveling face. She talked, describing the imagined weapon she wanted this man to make. Every time she ran out of words, he made her carry on, until she was hoarse, until her vision of the dream device smeared into nonsense. Then he took her money, sent her away, called her back on the day he had promised to, and presented her with the glove. She had stayed on in that quaint little village for the two additional days the man needed to die. She wanted to attend the funeral rite. She had also entered his house by night to satisfy herself that nothing about the glove's workings had been committed to paper. She needn't have worried. The craftsman had never drawn a design in his life.
Radstac stared at the boy's dim outlines, letting herself breathe again, the breaths even and calm. She nodded and, leaving the blood-wet prongs extended, followed him farther.
SHE HAD DONE the smart thing by coming north for this war. She was a mercenary, and here was a great opportunity for work. The economical thing—next on her list of personal statutes—would be to find herself inexpensive lodgings. That could wait a watch or two, though.
She peeled the gummy, deep blue leaf away from its wax paper, bit away a third of it, and returned the rest to a secret pocket beneath her leather armor. The initial sensation was a profound ache in her teeth. Addicts—the truly lost ones, like those living underneath blankets in that users' den—had their teeth professionally removed or worried them out themselves one by one. They sucked their mansid leaves, occasionally gummed food, and avoided the light.
Weaklings.
Radstac clamped her molars together as the discomfort peaked and passed. She paused to lean on a wall, propping herself carefully, staying on her feet as the wave of gravity struck. She was pulled, compressed, elongated, resettled. Like the ache to her teeth, it passed. Equilibrium restored. Improved.
The street around her started to make sense.
She pushed off, walking her prowling walk. Petgrad was well populated, and its streets didn't seem to
tire. Some distance ahead, towers loomed. Squared shafts of stone and mortar, capped with decorative top pieces of metal. They were impressive, she admitted. No point in denigrating this city unnecessarily. She was here to sell her sword. With luck, she would soon be defending this place against... who was it? ... Yes, the Felk.
They were the aggressors in this; so went the news that the traders had brought back to the Southsoil. Radstac preferred fighting on the side of the antagonist, but here that was impractical. The city-state of Felk—and even the newly captured Felk territories—were simply out of easy reach. She had come to Petgrad by buying her way onto a wagon of like-minded Southsoil mercenaries who'd heard the sweet call of war. She'd made no friends during her travels, though one night she had fairly raped the wagon's hired driver, a bashful blond lad who'd shed his trousers at knifepoint, then done everything else quite willingly—and enthusiastically.
The aroma of war was on the southerly wind. Those Felk were sweeping southward. It was war like she had never seen in her lifetime. War as the Isthmus hadn't known it for hundredwinters, if ever. No feud this, no petty strife. The Felk had absolute conquest in mind. Any fool could see that.
She wasn't deterred by the panicky stories circulating about the Felk using wizardry to aid them in their campaigns. Magic was not feared on the Southsoil, though its practitioners were highly rare. After the Great Upheavals, wizards, once quite visible as healers, retreated into hermetic cloisters.
She had of course retracted her hooks into her leather glove, after wiping them meticulously clean. She had once fouled the tiny gears with blood. It hadn't happened since.
Most narcotics were not illegal in Isthmus cities. Substances were declared unlawful only when those in positions of power wished to profit from their distribution exclusively.
Radstac could have purchased her mansid leaves in the market. Could have laid out twice the silver for the three leaves she'd gotten at that fetid lair, paying the merchant's licensing tax for him. But the quality would have been mediocre. She didn't need to actually sample any of these legitimate leaves to know this. It was the way of things. Drag dens, like the one she'd visited, depended on the return business of addicts; addicts, having built up inhuman tolerances to every recreational poison in existence, required the highest potency. Thus, better profits were made by the lairs' proprietors—who got their product through the black market—than by licensed merchants in the marketplace.
Ah ... and it was fine stuff, she thought, still chewing the blue leaf. Clarity, clarity. The sense of things, unfolding all around her now.
As she walked, she didn't examine that thought that surfaced, that nagging one ... the one that said she only came north to the Isthmus because only here could she find leaves of this quality. After all, the mansid that the narcotic traders brought back to the Southsoil at the end of every summer were dry, stale, their potency gone. Mansid leaves did not grow anywhere but on the Isthmus.
The thought didn't last long. She turned off the street, into a pub. She ordered tea and took a table. Spirits were for weak people looking to be strong by killing those perceptions in themselves that proved, day after repetitive day, that they were powerless. She did not drink. Wine and the like provided an illusion of clarity, when in truth clarity receded with every sip, until everything became a false comforting lullaby.
The pub was fairly crowded, and that crowd was talkative. Radstac listened.
The landlord apparently didn't care for her taking up a valuable seat while drinking only her single cup of tea, which she nursed nearly an entire watch. When she finally grew tired of his malevolent glares, she crooked her finger at him, put her head close to his, and told him that blood that spurted from a suddenly opened heart was much darker than what one saw when, say, a face was sliced
wide. Then she smiled, which she knew was her most unnerving expression. The man hadn't come near her since.
In the meantime the effects of the small bite of the mansid leaf had mostly worn off. As with everything else about the narcotic, she handled the comedown ably.
"U'delph is a story. Something to frighten children. It makes no sense." The overdressed merchant sported ridiculous, elaborate facial hair—shaved here, waxed to points there. Must have taken him the better part of his morning to put his face together, and he was still old and ugly, despite the fine clothes.
Actually, Radstac thought, most of this pub's clientele looked to be on the affluent side.
Radstac had listened to the talk. It was dismaying. It was intentional blindness, not to see what was so surely coming. Sook was doubtlessly the next target for the Felk. It would put them one more city-state closer to Petgrad, though still some distance away.
"It's reliable news," said a man in a grey cowl. His voice was strong but neutral. Radstac hadn't been able to get a good look at his face, but his body was firm, and he moved in a way that spoke of sword training.
"Reliable." The merchant made it a contemptible word. "What does that mean?"
"It means credible, believable, trustworthy." His tone was as flat as before. The effect was droll, and a few titters rose among the assembled drinkers. A pair planted in one corner was playing a round of Dashes—one of those juvenile Isthmuser games of chance—as if to emphasize then-blasé attitudes.<
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The merchant's face moved in a way that caused the points of his mustache to sneer. "I know the definition, lad." Half to himself he muttered, "By the sanity of the gods, when I was a youth, we didn't handle our elders so." He took a swallow of beer, fixed the younger man again with scornful eyes. "What I question is the degree of credibility, believability ... and trustworthiness."
It hung there for a heartbeat, like a challenge.
"I don't bring the news personally," the hooded man said, utterly unruffled. "I comment on news we've all heard. Everyone, here in the city."
"To hear rumor and tradespeople's gossip is not to hear truth." The merchant pronounced this like he was quoting a verse of sacred wisdom.
Something flared red in Radstac's almost colorless eyes.
"And to spew shit like that," she said, a low growl that carried into every corner of the place, "is to say nothing."
She had sat still and quiet for quite some time now. She had come into this reasonably posh pub specifically to take the pulse of these merchants—these people who had much to lose if Petgrad were invaded and captured by the Felk. And now had heard enough.
Every head turned, including the one under the cowl.
Radstac pushed off her seat, standing, finally allowing her pent-up contempt to show on her scarred features.
"I can't make up my mind if you're all ignorant, out-right stupid, or just cowards."
"Now that's—" It was the landlord, lumbering over, not about to let her go on insulting his spending customers.
She whirled, reached out over the bartop, clamped his knobby pink nose between her thumb and a knuckle of her forefinger and twisted. He yelped, then disappeared below the level of the serving counter. If he rose with a weapon, she would know it before the top of his head came back into view.
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