by David Drake
“Nothing can help them.” He smiled, still looking at the gun. “But it doesn’t have to be me who does it.”
The colonel’s conclusion does not follow, Center said in his impersonal voice. He makes a utilitarian argument for his inability to effect change, but from that argument it would follow that it is better if he is in charge of the extermination to minimize pain and suffering.
The man’s wrestling with his soul, said Raj quietly. He’s run up against the trouble with that sort of thinking.
Utilitarian philosophy is normally sound. It is that which is often deemed practical, with end justifying means.
It’s that kind of thinking from Zentrum that’s left this world wallowing in Stasis, with children dying from the measles and mumps, and men with ideas kicked to the stones. It isn’t cowardly to want to escape from doing evil.
I was not accusing the colonel of moral weakness. I was merely pointing out the logical contradiction in his argument to justify self-slaughter.
Abel found himself wanting something he’d never desired before. For a moment, he wanted to share Center. To show the colonel what a future would look like with no Zachary von Hoff.
Can I? Is it possible?
No, Center replied. You were conditioned during your proximity to the capsule which brought us to this world. Your mind was tuned on a quantum level, beyond mere rearrangement of neurotransmitters. Raj and I are with you in a very real way. We could not be with the colonel in such a manner unless he were to come within several paces of the capsule.
Show me, then.
Acceptable. Observe:
Cold.
It’s a cold he’s never felt before. Beyond the cool of a winter evening in the Land. Breathtaking cold. And there is snow. He’s never seen snow before, has known of its existence only from scrolls. Now he understands it at a bone-deep level.
And it is hard to breathe. Almost as if the air has given out. He is not walking particularly quickly, but every step is a struggle.
He looks behind and sees a line of men following. What was supposed to be a flanking attack has instead turned into a death march to escape the weather and an enemy in pursuit.
Abel looks down at his hands, uncovered, growing blue, and doesn’t recognize them. They are a brown color, many shades darker than his natural hue even with a full tan. He turns over his palms. Lighter skin there. He is a black man.
You are Captain Leonard Fowlett of Third Battalion Wednesday Company. The men following you are the remains of your entire unit.
I haven’t counted them, but there can’t be more than thirty or forty left of a hundred, Fowlett/Abel thought.
Chambers Pass. This is what it had come to, where they had come to. The headwaters of the River when it wasn’t a frozen hell of snow and ice as it was at present.
Fowlett knew it was a fool’s errand going in. The company was not equipped for snow. But it was the natural element of the enemy.
Brilliant. Fucking brilliant.
Colonel Vallancourt, now a general. Promoted from the rockfucking First. Always sure he’s the smartest guy in any room. Always certain he’s right.
Well, this time he wasn’t right. It was only the latest of a series of stupid blunders on this bloody, benighted campaign. Oh, the Corps would win, all right. That was apparent from the start. But to pay this kind of price, when it should have been relatively easy. To lose so many of my men.
To die in this cold hell.
Chambers fucking Pass.
A man comes huffing toward him, plowing through the snow. It is the young lieutenant, the trustworthy one with the platoon taking up the rear guard.
Breathless, he arrives, stands before the captain. Tries to speak, but cannot.
“Easy, man,” says Fowlett. “It takes time to catch your breath in this thin air.”
The young lieutenant nods, takes a moment to get his breath under control.
“They’ve caught up with us, sir,” he gasped. “We couldn’t hold them. They’re using . . . I don’t know what to call them. Things that slide over this white horror we’re wading through.”
“Skis,” Fowlett said. He’d read about them, somewhere. In some impossible children’s tale of the frozen north. He turned his gaze back down the snowy valley which they had been heading up in their attempt to escape.
Hunted.
There, not far away, perhaps a few hundred paces. Brown and black dots, moving impossibly fast. Men walking—no, men sliding—on the top of the snow.
“Form ranks!” he called out. His weary men moved to obey.
Even after all this, the stupid losses in an insane charge on the walls of Orash. The repulse. The counterattack. After all this, Wednesday men had fight left in them. But it was so cold.
The flight. The cold.
A night of hell. Men dying standing in their own tracks. Dying of cold.
Yet the ones who remained pulled together into a ragged line, their sergeants’ shrill voices goading them once more into battle formation, two deep.
Across the valley floor from him, the black and brown dots grew larger. No longer dots, but forms with arms and legs. Men. Gliding over the snow like magical beasts.
“Tell them to hold fire!” he called to his first sergeant. “Wait until those cursed rockfuckers are in range.”
We can’t waste the little ammunition we still have.
The enemy drew closer. Closer.
Then stopped.
They stopped well out of range.
What the cold hell . . .
Someone was forming them into a line. They raised their rifles.
They’re out of range. Don’t they know the chance of hitting us is one in a thousand?
But the rifles weren’t aimed at Wednesday Company. They were aimed at the sides of the valley, the steep slopes packed with snow.
The enemy fired. It was ragged fire, no discipline there. And they were shooting into snow.
For a moment, he laughed. Blood and Bones, was this some sort of joke?
He couldn’t understand why they did it, but he didn’t need to. The enemy would have to reload. His entire unit was armed and ready. He would charge. Even bounding through snow, they would come into range.
He would rout those rockfuckers after all!
That was when he heard the rumble. It sounded like distant thunder, but Fowlett didn’t recognize it. He’d only seen his first rain six days ago. This—was outside his knowledge.
The rumble grew louder. Where was it coming from? What was it?
He looked wildly around.
The walls of the little valley—were they shifting? Was the snow itself on the move?
It was.
Then the rumble became a roar, and he understood.
The enemy would not have to shoot them. No, the snow would take care of that.
He watched the avalanche approach. Some of the men turned to run. But the other side of the valley was avalanching as well. There was nowhere to run.
He tried to brace himself. Tried to be ready. But the snow hit him like the punch of a giant. So cold. Flung, churned. Nothing but white, white, white in his vision. Pulled in opposite directions.
He felt his right leg break at the thigh.
Pulled, yanked, turned.
Finally he came to rest. His eyes were still open. Darkness. Wet when he blinked. He couldn’t get his hands free to wipe them, couldn’t move at all. He struggled, but it was no use. Was he upside down? Right side up? How deeply was he buried? There was no way to tell.
He knew he was freezing to death, because the cold didn’t seem to bother him anymore.
But then Fowlett realized he wasn’t going to die from the cold after all.
No, it would be suffocation.
There was no air here, except what he brought with him in his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move and he couldn’t breathe.
Cold hell. He’d sworn by it a thousand times, not realizing it was real.
And now he
was there.
Cold hell was Chambers Pass.
* * *
“No, you can’t help them, and you can’t help yourself out of obeying these orders. But it’s the Goldies who’ll suffer if you leave us, Colonel. Third Brigade in particular.”
“You can’t know that,” answered von Hoff with a shrug. “I’m just a man. Men are interchangeable. By the will of Zentrum, that’s how the system is designed.”
“Colonel, don’t ask me how it is I come by this, but I know for a fact that they will give the Third Brigade command to Colonel Vallancourt.”
Von Hoff looked away from the pistol, turned to Abel and laughed, as if Abel had made an absurd joke. “No, I don’t think so.”
Abel met the colonel’s gaze, slowly shook his head. “It’s true. It will be Vallancourt. I know this. It’s practically a done deal.”
“Absurd. How do you know it?”
“I can’t tell you, but it’s from a source I completely trust.”
For a very long time, von Hoff held Abel’s gaze. “Who are you?” he said. “No one your age at the time could have won the Battle of the Canal. What do you see? What are you?”
“A man, like you,” Abel answered. “But sometimes I know things. The way I knew how to use the breechloaders Golitsin made. This is another one of those times.”
Von Hoff looked into Abel’s eyes a little longer. Then he dropped his gaze and reached for the pistol. He carefully removed the firing cap and lowered the cocked hammer. Then he pushed the gun abruptly away. It skittered across the table, but did not fall off.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t visit a plague like Vallancourt on the men. I just can’t.” He looked back to Abel. “And you’re sure?”
“Almost certainly matters are going to align in such a way that he’ll get the command if you’re gone.”
The crooked smile slowly returned to the colonel’s face.
“Back when Vallancourt and I were both in the Academy, I looked at that First Family dolt and said to myself, ‘Someday, Zachary, your life is going to depend on him, on something he does or does not do. What will you do then? Will you accept that fate can be that cruel?’ I even thought about killing him at one point.”
“Is that true, sir?”
“I always figured he would be the death of me, through one or another of his incredible fuck-ups. It would be justified self-defense.”
Von Hoff took up the pistol, pushed back from the table, and slid the dragon back into his waistband.
“Damn Vallancourt to cold hell,” he said—but with resignation, not anger, and with the same crooked smile on his face. “Now he’s gone and saved my life.”
PART FOUR
The Toll
Six years previously
1
Lilleheim
Treville District
470 Post Tercium
There had been no report from Jephta Marone in over a month. This was not good news, as far as Mahaut was concerned. It probably meant he had found out something and was following up on it.
Meanwhile, grain promises-to-buy were wildly shifting. The trend was falling for Lindron-bound mixed grain and rising for Bruneberg-bound wheat and Delta rice, but that changed almost daily when the runner came in with the previous day’s numbers from Garangipore. Mahaut didn’t need a special investigator to tell her what was happening.
The Guardians were at their war games in Lindron. Sixteen thousand men, a town’s worth, were on the move. Anyone who knew exactly where the Guardians would be could make a tidy sum off the information. This was because the grain promissory notes were guesses at what offers to buy in a certain location would be. Cascade-bound grain, meanwhile, was in freefall. Unusually good harvests—from the fields of Progar, no less—had flooded the markets of Bruneberg with grain. A few years ago, Progar was a meat supplier. Its grain production was mainly confined to barley, and not much at that. Now it seemed they’d shifted over to more water-hungry wheat.
If it weren’t for the large carrying distance from Progar to Lindron, and the fact that all shipments would have to be landed and ported around three sets of cataracts, she might fear for House Jacobson prospects in Lindron itself.
Anyway, thank Zentrum for the Guardians and their war games.
Mahaut, Solon, and Benjamin were bent over a scroll comparing the Garangipore House offers with what they knew were in the Lilleheim silos when the messenger from Hestinga arrived.
He was carrying a reed basket on his back. It was held on by two dakleather straps over his shoulders. Mahaut recognized him as one of the warehousemen from town. He dealt in imports, mostly from up-River, and specialized in the cheaper, lesser quality pottery from Cascade.
The fine stuff, the expensive stuff, was made by the artisans in Lindron, of course. Yet Bruneberg had street after street of kilns many times larger than all of the one-man shops of Lindron combined. The Lindron porcelain was for Firsts and those who emulated them. The Bruneberg potteries, which were controlled by a House Dupree, House Ziman, and House Weatherby cartel, turned out cups, pots, and pitchers for everyone else.
The front clerk had brought the warehouseman back to the granary offices. He was a known and trusted merchant—and one who usually had a lot of good-natured bluster to his attitude, if Mahaut remembered rightly. Now something was wrong. Instead of confidently striding through the door, the man hung back. Benjamin look up, considered him.
“Come in, Master Knopf. Don’t stand there like a post. You know you’re welcome here.”
The warehouseman shuffled across the threshold.
“Why don’t you lay your burden down and sit? Have some wine. Daughter, can you pour him a cup?”
Mahaut moved toward the pitcher, but Knopf held up a hand. “No, please, Land-heiress. Not now.” He gulped. “I have something to . . . show you.”
“Well, what is it?” Solon said briskly. “We are a bit busy at the moment.”
“I’m very sorry to interrupt, but I thought . . . you would want . . .”
He took the basket from his shoulders and set it down in front of him. He unclasped the latch and, with a resigned sigh, opened it up.
“We received a shipment from Lindron yesterday.”
“Lindron? I thought you only dealt Bruneberg pots, Master Knopf.”
“Business has been good, so we’ve been branching out, me and the missus. She’s been after me for years to deal in the fine stuff. Thinks it’ll sell in Hestinga as well as anywhere. Well, we took the chance, and she was right, she was. We started off with those porcelain half-elb cookpots, and damn me to cold hell if they haven’t been going out as fast as we can get them in.”
“Interesting, but what does this have to do with House Jacobson?” said Benjamin. “You know I don’t care who a man trades with as long as he gives me a fair deal.”
“I know, I know, Pater Jacobson,” Knopf replied. He paused, as if to gather his wits. “Yesterday, Pater, we got in an order of more of them half-elb cookpots, about a thousand this time, and some plates in there, too.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “Anyway, in the middle of the cookpots, packed in there with the straw and such, the boys in the warehouse found something. Something in place of a pot, if you know what I mean—” Knopf pulled a canvas sack from the open basket. “This,” he said.
“What is that?” Solon asked. “A rotten Delta melon? Is it some kind of practical joke or something, Knopf?”
“I wish it were, Land-heir, sir. I wish it were. No, there was a scroll attached.” Knopf patted his tunic, pulled a small roll of papyrus from an inner pocket. “Here it is.”
Mahaut took it from him.
“Read it, Daughter,” Benjamin said. He was staring at the sack, and his eyes had grown cold. Mahaut unrolled the scroll.
On pain of your own life, deliver this to Pater Benjamin Jacobson, House Jacobson, Lilleheim. Say it is in payment for killing a son. Tell him that cold hell awaits him and his house.
“Open it,” sai
d Benjamin.
“I . . . I don’t like to,” said Knopf. “It’s just . . . I don’t want to be the one . . .”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Mahaut said. She took the bag from him. It was heavier than it looked. She put a hand under the bottom and pulled back the top—
And almost dropped the contents in shock.
It was a head. A human head. A man’s head.
The skin was desiccated. The hair was stringy and filled with a dandruff of flaking chips of dried blood.
She’d grasped the bottom with the neck stump to one side. Now she took it by the neck stump, so she could hold it upright.
The eyes were closed. The mouth was sewn shut.
Benjamin Jacobson let out a cry of anguish.
“What is it, Father?” Solon asked.
“My friend,” said Benjamin, moaning. “It’s my friend.”
“Who? Who is that, Father?”
“Abram.” Benjamin began to sob. “My friend. My old friend.”
It was Abram Karas. He had been the Jacobson House Factor in Lindron. Benjamin Jacobson’s best friend from childhood, and long-time chief of staff in Lilleheim until Solon had reached maturity.
After that, Karas had been given the important posting at Lindron, where the largest share of Jacobson grain was sold, where deals were made, and he was also the overseer of a large portfolio of House Jacobson loans to Lindron merchants and investments in Lindron real estate.
This was the severed head of Abram Karas.
It’s either retribution from House Eisenach, Mahaut’s shocked mind told her, or someone willing to go to any length to provoke a Family war.
Her father-in-law recovered himself sufficiently to look Knopf in the eyes. “This is not your fault, Knopf, and we don’t hold it against you. Thank you for your troubles. See Dillard, and he will reimburse you for—”
Then a sob rose in Benjamin’s throat again. He shook his head, unable to speak. Knopf, taking the hint, bowed and exited, leaving the basket pack behind. Mahaut carefully covered the head again with the sack and set it down inside the basket.
Solon put a hand on his father’s shoulder. Benjamin stood silent, staring at the basket pack. His jaw was clenched so hard his face trembled.