by EE Knight
Valentine was surprised to see the cross still there. It was a simple one, made of the same thick, wrought-iron bolted beams of the ceiling, and it hung down at an angle over the congregation, making Valentine think of a set of last rites he’d seen performed by Father Max over a dying woman in his youth. He’d held the cross before her face at just that angle. Whether that had been the original architecture or a recent change Valentine couldn’t tell.
There was too much activity to look at.
The Gray Ones, for the most part, filled the lower level. The church’s pews had been turned into benches to better accommodate them. A few clan leaders of the Deathring Tribe had their own furniture brought in, or perhaps it was permanently placed there, waiting for them, great perches like oversized Roman chairs.
The human soldiers inhabited the balconies, emblazoned with painted battalion symbols and specialist patches. The iconography was fierce, colorful, and oddly Midwestern, featuring hawks and foxes and coyotes and an out-of-place cobra. More humans sat upon the old altar riser, which projected out into the pews, though that part of it was empty for now.
Valentine marked the Gray Baron from his seat off to the Baron’s right on the main floor. He sat in a plain, high-backed chair, flanked by two flag bearers, human and Gray One, the Grog with what looked to be a red-and-black checkerboard design with a few spiky icons stitched in the square’s contrasting color, and the human holding the other, the modified tricolor of the Iowa State flag, featuring a pair of sharpened parentheses crossing each other—the locked bull horns, he’d heard them called, but it might also be stolen from a pre-2022 Chanel handbag.
Valentine thought he looked like something out of another age. He could see this man sitting on a smoky Tatar’s throne or commanding some cut-off Victorian regiment in Afghanistan.
He had a heavy, sloping forehead and a mountain spur of a nose hooked like a hawk’s talon. But even the oversized nose was nothing compared to the Pancho Villa mustache. It was like a curtain obscuring his upper lip and the sides of his mouth. It made his expression rather difficult to read; Valentine couldn’t tell if he was smiling or frowning.
A network of scars crisscrossed his face as though a maniacal game of tic-tac-toe had been played with an assortment of scalpels. Valentine had enough battle wounds to know they couldn’t have been accidental. Unless the Gray Baron had stuck his head into an oversized lamprey’s mouth, someone in his past had made a point of cutting him up into shreds.
Flanking him, discreetly behind the flags, were three Reapers.
Valentine had never seen Reapers like this. They were fleshy—he thought fat Reapers didn’t exist, it seemed the Kurians drained off calories along with the vital aura the Reapers transmitted. Despite the bellies and love handles, their faces shone hard and alert, yellow eyes watchful of the few empty square yards in front of the Gray Baron’s throne. Rich red, white, and black war paint striped their bodies in a series of Vs, and their claws and a band across their eyes were a deep blue.
The Gray Baron had a woman next to him, a rather hard-faced brunette with an athletic build. Her hair was piled up tight atop her head, bound together by a pair of stilettos in Asian hairstick fashion. Valentine wondered if the blades were just for show. She had her own stool, but chose to drape herself over the back of his chair, playing with his hair.
Next to the Gray Baron on the stage was a feeble-looking old Grog gone white and bent—Danger Close, Valentine guessed. He tried counting bullet wounds in the thick old hide and stopped after nine. He was attended by a bevy of six she-Grogs, wives, daughters, concubines, or some combination. They all carried little ceremonial working blades, like the skinning knives native tribes of the Arctic north use to separate seal blubber from skin.
A few Golden One representatives watched the celebration, stone faced. They stood apart from both the humans and the wild Grogs. The celebration was like some fantasy of a black mass. Grog warriors ran up with linked bags of netted heads, tossing them so the line hung over the massive cross at the front of the church.
A gong sounded, and the auditorium began to go quiet. From somewhere behind the curtained “stage” Valentine heard kettledrums pound slowly, a deep and thrilling sound that touched you in the pelvis. It grew louder, or perhaps the crowd grew quieter, and then the Gray Baron led Danger Close out on the platform projecting near the center point of the auditorium.
“My brothers ...” he began.
Danger Close repeated the words in a Gray One dialect Valentine more or less understood.
The Gray Baron kept it brief. The most auspicious season for war had begun.
Danger Close translated, but not exactly. He expressed the same sentiments, but in a Gray One idiom.
This would be another year of building and training. They would venture regularly to Springfield and the Missouri River, even to the outskirts of Saint Louis, yet fighting only when another sought to fight. Otherwise they would be peaceable, friendly, even helpful. A Gray One clan with a broken water tank? Fix it! Illinois bandits stealing cattle or goats? Drive them off and return the livestock. In time their legion would be thought of as a two-headed dragon, not just because one head was human and the other Gray One, but because one head was smiling upon friends, the other biting and rending enemies. Then would come a time of alliances, and in a very few years, the strength to whip the true enemies, the humans of the Ozarks. Addled by fevers, radiator-still whiskey, and backwoods religious monomania, an army with patience to gather and strike would crumble them like a hollowed egg.
They finished to applause and Grog stomps of approval.
Then some Gray One storytellers spoke, giving anecdotes of the importance of treating the seasons with respect. Not all could fight even at the best of times, and those who’d already won great glory fighting might wish to take a season off and enjoy their wives and increase their herds and teach youngsters the stern tasks of warfare so that they might survive to win their own glories and wives.
The storytellers met more approval from the main floor than from the balcony.
The Gray Ones had several stomping patters, and Valentine’s quick mind enjoyed puzzling them out. There was one for hearty approval, and another that might be characterized as a nod, and a quick one-two that asked for more of the same.
Then there was a display of captured weapons and torn-off service patches. Valentine felt a pang when he recognized a Zulu-Company patch and a Logistics Commando wagon wheel on a helmet, but he applauded with the rest of the humans.
“Trophies are great indicators of luck, to the Gray Ones,” Stock explained to the boy from Buffalo. “A poor year for trophies one year will make them more conservative about what they attempt when the next spring’s warmoon rolls around. A good year means they’ll be more aggressive.”
“Last year was a good one?” the kid asked.
“No, but it wasn’t our fault. Southern Command quit trying to supply Omaha or move into Kansas, and the days of them slipping recruiting teams up to Minnesota or the Dakotas are long over. The Baron thinks that Southern Command’s lost the will to fight, and wants to take advantage of it, but the Gray Ones will be hard to convince.”
Hoots and yelps broke out. Valentine saw Snake Arms step into the open space on the main floor. She had a rattlesnake wrapped around each arm.
“Snakes are big juju with the Groggies,” Stock said.
The kettledrums started up again along with something that twanged and the familiar scraping of a well-played fiddle. She began to dance.
It was a fascinating routine, as most of it played out from beneath her rib cage down. Her arms stayed statue-steady so as not to disturb the serpents, heads pointed out at the crowd, black eyes glittering. Her head moved as though on a gimbal-mount with her lower limbs, but the torso and arms opened and closed only occasionally.
The Gray Ones watched in silent reverence. Even the emotionless Golden Ones leaned forward in their seats.
Valentine could just hear the q
uiet rattle of their tails as she moved, if he really sought the sound.
After the dance came a combat display, Grogs wrestling, fighting with sticks, and finally swordplay. Valentine wondered if on their home world they used swords or if they’d adopted the weapons from machetes and such captured after 2022. Their fighting style, at least in this theatrical display, involved cuts and parries in precise, ever increasing tempo time. The Gray Ones in the audience became increasingly excited as the more furious blows and parries drew accidental blood.
After that came a bloody sacrifice.
Animals were slaughtered, starting with chickens and moving up to an ox and a captured eagle. They made a great show of presenting the eagle’s feathers to Danger Close.
“A few deaths prove that they’re serious about getting on the good side of all the invisibles,” Stock said. “Don’t let it scare you.”
He glanced closely at Valentine. Valentine looked down to see that some of the spray from the sacrificed ox had struck his shirt, peppering it in red.
By now the crowd was excited.
They brought a huddled line of shorn men and a few Gray Ones out onto the pulpit projection. Two of the proposed victims were brought in on stretchers.
“Bad head injuries,” Stock said. “Sometimes they’re considered prophets, but if they’re only barely responsive, they’re done away with.”
Men with riot guns stood behind, and the Baron’s three pet Reapers flanked the column and stood at its head.
Valentine recognized one of the sacrifices. It was Beach Boy, from Hole Three. He hadn’t seen him since the fight with Fat Daddy, though he’d heard he’d been put in another hole to stave off further fighting.
The Baron stepped forward, carrying a bamboo cane. A string with some weighted feathers hung from the handle end. He grabbed it by the base, and held it up over the first man in line. The feather just touched the top of the convicted man’s hands as the two Reapers held him, one at the ankles and one at the elbows, with the third behind.
“Raminov, knifed a man over cards,” Stock said to his party.
There was some hooting from the Gray Ones. A voice cried out from the balcony: I’d knife a man who was cheating at cards too!
Some applause and whistling broke out from the men, with a faint boo or “open him” shouted.
The feather moved on to a shorn Gray One behind him. Fierce growls broke out among the Gray Ones.
“No idea what he did,” Stock said.
The convict fell back. He gave one violent shrug. The fist of the Reaper behind him exploded out of his chest in a shower of blood. Valentine noted, rather coldly, that the Reaper had discreetly locked its teeth at the Grog’s shoulder and appeared to have its tongue wedged beneath one of the thick rhino-hide plates of cartilaginous armor.
The auditorium roared approval.
It was a revolting ceremony. Valentine decided it wasn’t so much a sacrifice, or an execution, as a final appeal. Valentine noticed the crowd went silent for some of the victims. Someone from the audience would shriek out a plea for mercy, and if that met with approval there was a great stamping of feet. The Baron never failed to heed the collective verdict, either way.
Valentine, tired and nervous and sick to his stomach, tried to keep his meagre dinner down. Hot-blooded killing was one thing, but execution as grand theater ...
He’d seen his share of executions. There were several combat-zone offenses that could get one shot, or a civilian hanged, in Southern Command military jurisprudence. He himself had been under a death sentence, thanks to escaping trial and the rendering of an in absentia conviction. Arguably, he’d performed them himself, as some half-awake sentry at one end of an unlit bridge was just as helpless against his knife as a chained convict. You didn’t execute men like this, in front of the next one in line with a holiday crowd roaring.
The feather moved over Beach Boy.
“He was in your hole, I think,” Stock said, looking at Valentine. “He’s in for shirking. They found him sleeping under a truck on his shift. When you’re forced labor, that’s it.”
Beach Boy was a silly little toady, certainly, but how many in the audience knew him by anything deeper than sight? Perhaps enough had seen him in the fields to know he played the fool, always with the softest jobs and gentlest duties, to better preserve his supple, scented skin for Fat Daddy.
“Give him another chance!” Valentine shouted.
The growls and angry murmurs grew louder.
“Chance! Chance! Chance!” some others began to shout. The chant picked up voices, and the feather moved on. Beach Boy looked skyward.
He could guess the thoughts of every man in the audience: if it was me up there, how would I take it? Tears? Pleas for mercy? Reasoned argument? A final mouthful of spit?
“Just like you, Valentine, trying to save a worthless little dicksicle like that,” Sergeant Stock said out of the side of his mouth.
The rest of the ceremony was mostly a blur. He was enlisted to carry the glass box with Snake Arms’s reptiles back to her trailer.
So, Graf Stockard knew his name. He must have seen a picture through Molly, or looked him up sometime or other at headquarters. Perhaps he’d even met him at some point or other before either of them knew Molly Carlson, and Stockard remembered and Valentine didn’t. Much of his life before becoming a Wolf had a vague, dreamy feel to it these days.
Stockard had whispered a few words about speaking to him in private. He’d used the word escape, at least Valentine thought so. The din of the Warmoon Festival as the sacrifices were offered to a successful summer of battle made the word difficult to pick out.
“Warmoon Festival’s going to last for five days. I think they’ll cut you off before then. My fertile period this month’s almost over.”
“Have they tried to breed you before?” Valentine said, slowly, as though thinking over every word.
“I’ll let you in on a secret, my lash-worn prince. About half the guys here are bent as jackknives. It’s kind of a haven for the rugged, outdoorsy ones.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They don’t like girls. They don’t like them so much, fucking’s about out of the question.”
Valentine pretended to puzzle it over for a bit. “Ahhh,” he finally said. “Men’s men.”
“Exactly.”
She murmured something into her pillow about being like Dorothy, all the men she met were missing either heart, courage, or brain.
Valentine heard Snake Arms’s door open and came into alarmed wakefulness. He sat up so quickly, he half-rolled her off the bed, where she was sleeping atop the sheet.
A flashlight shone in his face.
“Yeah, it’s Scar all right,” a man said.
The dazzling light made ghostly circles on his optic nerves and gave him an instant migraine.
“Whassat?” Snake Arms said.
“Baron wants to see ya, Champ.”
This time it was four who escorted him, two from Snake Arms’s trailer joining up with two more waiting outside. These men were neater and a good deal more alert than the Baron’s usual human soldiers who supervised the labor gangs.
They let him dress completely and didn’t put him in handcuffs, so perhaps the Baron was having some sort of private after-midnight celebration.
They brought him to a different part of the camp, in the wooded hills behind the church. They walked him on a pavement path big enough for a single truck up a hill and down into a hummock between two higher hills.
A glow of lights frosted the red oaks and maples. Valentine got the sense of some kind of compound. The planting of the trees did a good job of concealing it, but he suspected heavy fencing stretching off into the woods. It looked like someone had planted quick-growing, thorny trees of some sort along a double line of razor wire a few years back. The trees turned the wire into a messy tangle that was difficult to spot at night.
The ground flattened, and they came to a second line of fencing,
nice-looking iron railing, gated at the trail. Valentine smelled dogs, but didn’t see or hear them. His escort nodded to a sentry at a shelter and was waved in.
Valentine got his first look at the Baronial residence.
It looked like a hunting lodge or a small hotel set in the pretty wooded hills, with decorative rather than security lighting.
He passed under a threshold. The posts and lintels were covered with deep-burned Gray One markings, wedge-writing like cuneiform. Valentine recognized one for “victory” and one for “health.”
The inside was just as rugged. Slabs of limestone and great, river-smoothed rocks in a sort of hunting-lodge meets prairie-style that the Gray Baron seemed to favor.
He was taken into an office-cum-game room. There was a pool table with a low electric light hanging just above it and a dartboard at one end, and a great semicircle of bookcases high enough that they needed a ladder with a desk in the middle at the other. A beautiful button-backed leather sofa sat near a massive stone fireplace, partly in the office, partly in the gaming area.
The books looked dusty and not in any sort of order. Valentine wondered if they were just for show.
“Welcome to my home, Scar, isn’t it?” he said. Valentine nodded in reply. “Sorry to keep you up so late. I’m a night owl. Useless in the morning. Coffee?”
“Whiskey spirits?” Valentine asked.
“Not when I’m working,” the Baron said. “Sit.”
The woman he’d seen draped behind his chair shuffled papers.
“Chuckles here has three degrees,” the Baron said. “You know what a degree is?”
“Hot,” Valentine said, wondering if he looked wary enough.
“No, it’s a piece of paper that says you know better than someone who’s been in the field their whole life. But she makes everything I do look right on paper. Keeps the generals in Iowa happy. I don’t imagine you know any Iowa generals, but they expect the paperwork correct. Murder all you like, just file it in triplicate.”