The Savior

by David Drake

  Timon had a first-rate mind—Abel soon saw as much in class—but despite both of them being the cream of the crop, the two hardly spoke to one another their first year. It seemed the dislike was mutual.

  Then, during the second year at the Academy, Abel ran up against a cabal of cadets—his fellow students—who ran a secret game of carnadon baiting and fighting in the Tabernacle pools at night. They’d made a small fortune in barter chits taking bets on the action from locals.

  Abel admired carnadons for what they were: ferocious creatures, never sated, born predators that would kill a man as easily as they could a grazing riverdak. Even so, he hated to see them suffer. The cadets doped the pool water with a scent gland cut from a carnadon female in mating state. Confined in a small enclosure and exposed to such a stimulus, the carnadon males were sure to tear one another apart.

  The ring of cadets had tried to draw Abel in, offering him a piece of the action if he kept his mouth shut, but he let it be known he was opposed to what was going on with the carnadons. He gave them a week to end their stupid games or he’d turn them in.

  Timon was also against the fights, but on religious grounds. The carnadon was the symbol of the priesthood, of power in the Land. They were Zentrum’s beasts, not man’s.

  In the end, the cabal was outed not by Abel or Timon, but a stupid mistake of their own making. They shorted the pay of the black-market purveyor of female scent glands. He’d sent a goon squad to get the barter chits from them. The cadets had made short work of the goons, killing two of them—the cadets were Guardians in training, after all—but the bodies had to be explained. Under interrogation, one of the leaders broke and spilled the whole sorry operation. He was allowed to leave the Academy and return to the Regulars. The other leaders of the gambling cabal were ejected from the Academy in disgrace.

  The remainder of the ring couldn’t believe one of their own had ratted on them. Instead, they decided that Abel and Timon had betrayed them all. In an attempt to frighten and intimidate Abel and Timon, the remaining members of the carnadon ring had announced the fact that they would take revenge out of Timon and Abel’s hides.

  Bad idea to announce your intentions beforehand.

  The gang caught Abel and Timon on watch duty at the lower pools one day, and attacked. Timon’s First Family upbringing included years of martial training, and he’d served as a Regular officer in Lindron’s border force. Abel had been the captain of the Treville Scouts. Both were prepared and on the lookout.

  It hadn’t been much of a fight.

  When it was done, four attachés were injured, two with broken limbs, and one had fallen into a pool and been torn to shreds by the Tabernacle carnadons—a fitting fate if ever there was one. After an official inquiry, Timon and Abel had been not only let off the hook for the death but also commended for trying to save the man at their own risk.

  From that day on, Abel and Timon had one another’s backs. Grudgingly, slowly, their trust grew into real friendship over the next two years.

  What Abel had taken for aloofness in Timon was actually a devotion to justice that Timon took to extremes. Though he was quite religious, Timon also hated dishonesty and the lies of the hypocritical faithful as much as he did slacking off when it came to the Laws and Edicts of Zentrum. Abel had to admit Timon walked the walk better than anyone he’d ever met. Yet Timon’s coldness was a fact of his personality.

  Abel had not been surprised when Timon chose interrogation as his specialization during fourth year at the Guardian Academy. Being an Athanaskew, he’d gotten the assignment he wanted. Since then Timon had risen to second in command of the secretive Tabernacle Security Service, a special Guardian-priest joint force. He’d been serving there when he’d heard about the coming Progar campaign. Timon had pulled every string he could to get assigned to a fighting unit somewhere. Being an Athanaskew, his request had been granted.

  Which was good for us, Abel thought.

  He had recommended Timon for the position, and von Hoff, who remembered Timon from his days at the Academy, had backed Abel’s choice.

  Abel had himself been ordered to a position on Guardian planning staff in the Tabernacle. It was a plum assignment, he had to admit. He’d served for a year before being appointed district military commander of Cascade upon the recommendation of his boss at planning, Colonel Zachary von Hoff. “There are a dozen senior men, but none of them have orchestrated the destruction of five thousand Blaskoye mounted riders,” he’d said. “Now go clean that place up.”

  * * *

  Timon, for the most part, conducted his dark business bloodlessly. Much of the pain that was his stock-in-trade was brought about by pulling bodies into unnatural positions with hemp ropes and woodblock pulleys. Abel had seen Timon use other methods, however: thin obsidian knives to jam under fingernails and toenails, and smoking hardwood sticks with red coals at the end for the puncturing of eyes.

  All the stakes, ropes and pulleys, and other accouterments of the Corps interrogators had always seemed overly elaborate to Abel.

  Sadistic, Raj said. But effective to a degree.

  Decadent coercion is a common end product of utilitarian social structures within autocracies, Center put in. Coercion is meant to be employed in an impersonal manner for societal purposes only. Yet individuals cannot intentionally give pain to others without personal motivation and personal cost. As the psyche is scarred, evil easily becomes an end in itself. That such practices asymptotically culminate in acts of cruelty is readily apparent within the Seldonian calculus for any who care to make the computations. These involve the integration of a Series A longitudinal for n equals any numerated inter-ethical valuation units with a latitude of Series B—

  I’m sure you’re right, Center, but please let me just take your word on the math.

  Timon and Abel had maintained their friendship after graduation, and taken an interest in one another’s careers—so much so that Timon had gotten special permission for Abel to accompany him on what he said was an “interesting” interrogation of an accused murderer.

  That time, it was the fire coal stick that led to a confession and the location of the murder weapon—a reaping sickle that had been used to take off the head of a lover of the accused man’s wife.

  “The stick is for show,” Timon explained to Abel. Timon and Abel stood by a brazier of coals some distance from the accused. Timon was reheating his coal stick for a final round of questions after waving it closely before the eye of the accused. He glanced back over his shoulder at the sweaty little man tied to the interrogation chair. “Mostly for show.”

  “Have you ever actually gone through with it? Put one in an eye?”

  “Yes,” Timon replied, after a pause. “Putting out an eye is one of the initiation requirements for first-year men in the Security Service. We pay the ones we do it to in barter chits. Pay them very well, I might add. Truth is, we have to turn volunteers away.”

  * * *

  Timon and his men used a spot near Abel’s own bedroll in the command area to conduct the interrogation. There was an irrigation ditch nearby filled with quickly flowing water. It served as both a threat for dunking and drowning, and as a source of white noise to mask screams. The Progar men were lying on the ground. Each was bound hand and foot to two stakes of about a fist’s thickness, one an elb from the head, one a similar distance below the feet. The stakes had been deeply planted in the soil by Timon’s enlisted team, who had metal-bladed posthole diggers for the task. The use of metal posthole diggers by the military had ancient sanction. They had been declared a weapon by Edict of Zentrum.

  The stakes were outfitted with wooden pulleys through which ran ropes tied to the subject’s bound wrists and ankles. The apparatus was obviously constructed by the book, and Timon’s squad went about their task with a ruthless efficiency.

  The pulleys had a ratchet action, and the ropes on the Progar men had been drawn tight enough to suspend them a finger’s width off the ground. It looked terribly
painful to Abel. Bones and cartilage would begin to separate as the ropes grew taut.

  When properly erected, the device is quite capable of pulling a man bodily apart, Center intoned. Joints separate before their containing tissue entirely gives, so it is possible to stretch without breaking—

  That’s really all I need to know right now, thank you, Center.

  A younger man with black hair and a sunburned face was the first to capitulate. He turned out to be the son of the commander Abel had shot dead. The young man—he was eighteen—was as angry at being captured as he was swimming in pain.

  Timon noticed, and seized on this immediately.

  “Your father sold you cheap,” he said to the young man. Abel translated into the Northern patois. These men were from a section of Progar called Hurth, and the patois was known as Hurthish. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Abel translated.

  When the man didn’t answer, Timon signaled his assistants, all specialist noncoms. The rope tension was smoothly taken up a notch.

  The young man cried out, bit his lip in an attempt to control himself, but there was no standing this kind of pain.

  Timon leaned down and abruptly shouted into the young man’s ear. “I said, you know that, don’t you?”

  Abel mechanically translated his words.

  “Yair,” the man croaked out, his speech slurring into the Hurthish for “yes.”

  “Your old man was a fool, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?”

  Timon didn’t wait for a translation, but signaled that the ropes be pulled tighter.

  A moment of hesitation from the Hurthman, and then the words tumbled out. “Yair and curse his thrice-damned bones!”

  “You have a family back home.” Timon framed it as a statement.

  “Yair. Dar left Mar and the girls, and brung us down here. Now he’s got himself killed.” Tears welled in the man’s eyes, not merely from the physical pain. “What is Mar to do?”

  Timon turned to Abel. Abel gave him the gist of what had been said.

  Timon nodded. “And you did it for this.” He threw a sack to the ground beside the Hurthman. The bag had been found in the saddlebag of one of the donts. Inside were clay promissory notes. These were finger-length clay tablets etched with debt tallies and promises to pay, then the etched glyphs hardened by fire. Barter chits. The money of the Land.

  Timon upended the bag and let one of the chits fall into his palm, and another onto the ground. He held the chit before the young man’s pain-widened eyes. “For this, your father made your mother a widow. I don’t blame you for cursing his name.”

  As Abel translated, Timon slowly squeezed his hand into a fist. The barter chit in his grasp shattered. This was quite a feat of strength. Barter chits were almost as hard as stone. Timon opened his hand and scattered the shards that remained onto the ground.

  The Progar man burst into a shower of curses.

  After he had cursed himself hoarse, Timon smiled, emptied the purse, and stomped the remaining chits to smithereens.

  “Well, now all that is done.” Timon leaned down close once again. “I’m going to ask you some questions. For each one you answer truthfully, I’ll have my men let out a notch on the ropes. But I warn you, I’ll know if you lie. And when you do, they’ll pull those ropes all the tighter.”

  Timon sat down casually beside the stretched man and tossed the empty bag aside.

  “Do you understand?” he said.

  Abel left this untranslated. He figured the Hurthman got the idea of what was being said.

  “Yair,” the young man answered.

  “Good,” said Timon. He nodded to his men, and took the smallest amount of pressure off the ropes.

  The Hurthman began talking in harsh gasps, but spilling out information. Abel translated as rapidly as he could.

  The ambushers were a mercenary militia unit from Progar. They had been sent south by one of the oligarchs of Orash, Progar’s capital city. It only took a bit more stretching at the rack before Timon had extracted the oligarch’s name: Bigelow. The Progar District military commander had long since lost control of most militia units, if he had ever had it to begin with, and that control had gone to the local strongmen who ran the district. Bigelow was one of these men.

  Even in Progar there had been news of the Guardian Corps’s muster. Many in Progar had been anticipating a police action. Nishterlaub materials and methods had long been a staple of life in Progar, so far was it from Lindron. Lately there had been experiments done even with weapons. For years, most of Progar had lived in the knowledge that it might be smited—it was only a matter of when. Now that time had evidently come.

  The attackers had been paid to travel south and find out all they could. The mercenary group was to observe—and to harass and slow the Guardians if the chance presented itself—if, and only if, they could get away without being caught. They had placed their faith of a sure escape in the accuracy and range of their metal crossbows, and it had cost them.

  A crossbow made entirely of metal except for the stock—a nishterlaub item, forbidden by Zentrum. A crossbow could be made of wood; when there was an alternative to metal or technological change, it must be used.

  After the fight was over on the rise in the barley and the prisoners were secure, Abel had had trouble getting anyone to pick up the vile things from where they’d been stacked on the ground. He finally allowed his men to tie the crossbows on one of the Hurthish men’s dont and lead it into camp, minimizing the time any must be in contact with the nishterlaub metal of the bows.

  So the Hurthmen made their night attack silently with iron crossbows and then retreated to the hill as a rallying point for flight. From the looks of their underfed mounts, they had come down along the grass-bare Escarpment, avoiding settlements and fields.

  Center’s voice cut into the vision in Abel’s mind. It is highly likely that the route took them through the Redlands itself. Observe:

  Sunburnt face, sunburnt body previously pale from Northern climes. The young Hurthman had a name. It had been woven into his dont’s saddle to mark it as his property.

  Center had, of course, noticed and recorded.

  That name was Bara. Bara was also the Hurthish word for a type of small and harmless cliff-dwelling flitterdak.

  Bara had always hated his name.

  His own father had given it to him. To call your only son after a weak and easily frightened nothing of a cliff-hanging creature was low and mean. This may have been the first thing, but it wasn’t the last thing his father had done to humiliate him—that was thrice-damned sure.

  On the way south, they’d climbed up the Escarpment trail it seemed forever, breathing their own dust and that their donts and pack animals kicked up. Bara rode in the front, just behind his father.

  The band was made up of men who lived on the lower portion of the Escarpment in the village of Hurth from which the region took its name. The Hurth clans made part of their living by gathering the eggs of flitterdaks and their carnivorous cousins, the flitterdons, which nested among the Escarpment crags.

  The Hurthmen made the other part of their living by engaging in forbidden trading with the Redland barbarians.

  This was the reason Bigelow had used them. He needed men who could travel unmolested down Redland paths to spy on the Guardians, and yet who would not look and act like barbarians once they came back into the Valley. So he’d hired a Hurthman militia.

  Now they were almost at the Valley Rim. Bara rode behind his father in the line of donts climbing the secret and dangerous paths.

  Dar always with his back to me, and expecting me to trot right along, my nose to his ass, curse him. I’m eighteen; I’m my own man, thrice-damn him. I should never have come. I should’ve put my foot down.

  Should’ve. Hadn’t.

  But when they returned to Hurth, things were going to be different.

  Bara wasn’t sure how he would accomplish this, but he was determined to strike out on his own, find some
other way to make a living. Maybe he would make the frightening decision to move to the provincial capital of Orash itself, find some kind of work there. Or find another trade in Hurth itself. It was a town, wasn’t it, even if only a small one?

  They had crested the Rim and ridden a short ways into the Redlands when, seemingly out of nowhere, a force of Redlanders appeared. They were at least fifty strong, warriors of the Miskowski tribe led by a Blaskoye noble from the look of it. The Miskowski wore russet robes, practically the same color as the surrounding Redland terrain. The leader, however, wore white robes edged with blue, the garment of the Blaskoye sheiks. Nowadays no tribe traveled or traded without its Blaskoye overseer sent by the Council of Law-givers and its new chief—a Blaskoye named Kerensky.

  I’m my own man. I can turn around now. I don’t have to get involved in this.

  His father smiled that crooked smile of his and stretched out a hand as one of those Blaskoye rode up. The Blaskoye leader grasped his father’s arm in greeting.

  They would have a royal escort through the Redlands.

  I’m still on the Rim. I can turn around now, go back to Mar and tell her I’ll have no more to do with Dar and his heresies. Him treating me like the Blaskoye treat them Miskowski, like slaves.

  Then his father motioned Bara and the others forward with a flick of his hand.

  Curse him. I can go back now. I will!

  But he didn’t.

  Because he was more afraid of his onrushing choices than he was of the Redland wastes. He may be a Valleyman, but he knew the way of living in the Redlands well enough, knew how to act. The Redlanders treated the Hurthish traders with at least some measure of respect. Here he could be sure of not being taken for a rube, as he might be in Orash. Or as the new village idiot, as he might be in Hurth.

  Here in the band of his father, Bara felt safe.

  Wretchedly unhappy, but safe.

  Safe from the unknown future.

  Interpolation complete.

  * * *

  Accurate to the ninety-five point six percentile, Center intoned. Abel snapped out of his vision of the Hurthman’s progress. It had lasted, in real time, only the blink of an eye.