Tonight, he only had half that many. Teams of his soldiers had been left behind, watching the roads to make sure no Caytorean bastard crept up behind them. Still more had been left at their bivouac, with the conscripts. If everything went well this morning, they would march forward and join up gloriously. If not, they would wait for stragglers and turn home for the main camp, with another defeat under the belt of the dispirited Eracian army.
Well, you could only die once. After that, everything was simple.
A fake birdlike call was the signal they waited for. With the eastern horizon blushing pink and orange, they rose and ran in total silence, trotting toward the sleeping enemy camp. Adam gripped his sword hard. He did not know how to use it.
His troops poured into the outpost. At first, there was no sound but the ripping of canvas and soft, wet sounds of men dying in their sleep. But then, someone shouted, and someone else screamed, a pan clattered, and then, it was total chaos.
Adam pulled a long hunting knife from the sheath on his left hip. It was his kind of weapon, a whore’s weapon.
Naked and semidressed Caytoreans rushed out of their tents, running into the flood of Eracians. Blood turned the soft ground into mud.
One of the men came at him. Adam sidestepped. The man tackled a crate and fell. Adam ran him through from behind. He stood there, amazed, staring. Killing was so simple, so mechanical. He felt no emotion.
He saw Beno nod at him and rush forward. Adam came after him, pretending to swing his sword.
With the sun barely half a disc above the teeth of the hills, the battle was over.
Adam stood in the center of the camp, panting, his uniform black with blood. He had killed two men. Veteran soldiers had fallen to his tricks. It was almost too embarrassing.
“Report,” he said in a barely audible whisper.
Shendor grinned like a lunatic. “Seventeen dead on our side. Hundreds of Caytorean mongrels gutted. We got some prisoners, too.”
Adam nodded. When you lacked in skill, you compensated with ferocity. “Show me.”
They had gathered the survivors on the west edge of the small camp. The enemy had all been blindfolded and had their arms bound in the front.
Lieutenant Beno commanded the small group of men guarding the prisoners. There was a strange shimmer in his eyes. “We take ‘em home with us, sir?”
Adam shook his head. “Kill them all. Cut their heads, load them on a wagon, and send them back to Caytor. Leave one alive so he can drive.”
A low murmur of panic erupted from among the prisoners. Eracians began beating them with spears.
Adam noticed Beno had paled. “What’s wrong?”
“Sir, we thought we would…take them back for interrogation. And maybe use them as hostages.”
“Did they leave anyone alive in the First Battle?” Adam spoke softly, a small dog with a big bite.
A shadow of pain crossed the lieutenant’s face. “No, they didn’t, sir.”
“Then it’s settled. Lieutenant Gerard!”
“Sir?”
“Dispatch a pair of riders with an order for the auxiliary to move. And send another to the main camp with a message to Commander Mali that she has a foothold in the Bakler Hills if she pleases to visit it.” Adam did his best to avoid the risk of having to write the message; he would not know how.
Gerard nodded. His three officers looked slightly stunned.
They had probably never hacked off a prisoner’s head before, he thought. The concept was probably alien to them. Border skirmishes were a good way of gaining experience, but they were horribly low on brutality.
But it was well said in Paroth never to invoke the wrath of a whore. Whores had no mercy.
The wagonload of severed heads departed several hours later. The neatly piled stack reminded Adam of cabbages.
Lieutenant Beno came to inform him of their spoils. The little camp was equipped with fresh stores for the front, with three carts full of crossbows, two carts of full armor plates, another loaded with wine casks, and a small field forge. It also had a stable with seven horses.
Adam’s head swam. He was on a roll.
“Issue those crossbows to all the men. They are to fire one or two bolts to get acquainted with the weapon. Use the enemy bodies as practice targets. Then, I want you to send scout parties as far as three miles away, in groups of four, all armed with crossbows, plus at least one archer. They will wear Caytorean uniforms.”
Beno and Gerard listened in perfect silence. After a while, Gerard gathered his wits. “How will we be able to recognize our men when they return from patrol?”
Adam rubbed his nose as he thought. “A sort of a password. And they are to approach with weapons sheathed and waving their arms. Otherwise, they get shot. I want two score on the watch at any given moment, crossbows in hand. And I want those horses out there, patrolling, as well.”
Lieutenant Gerard shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”
Beno nodded. “A bold plan, sir.”
Within several hours, the little camp was alive again. The bodies had all been neatly stacked against one of the picket lines, doused in vinegar to keep disease away while soldiers fired bolts at them from fifty and a hundred paces away. Almost two thirds of the force had crossbows now, in addition to their swords and knives.
Guards surrounded the camp in two circles. At least fifty scouts were prowling the fields with an order to kill anyone and anything that came across the hills.
Adam knew the shipment of heads would infuriate someone, whoever received them. He was not sure what kind of reaction his deed would spark, but he hoped it would stall the enemy long enough for the Eracian reinforcements to arrive. Or force them into an early attack with insufficient forces.
His lieutenants set the remainder of the force to hard work. Some started digging trenches around the camp, expanding the defensive perimeter. Others were busy cutting down a small grove of trees nearby, while a third group shoveled blood, debris, and body parts away from the middle of the camp. Lieutenant Shendor had suggested erecting a small tower to allow them a better view of the region. They were going to do it later that day.
Another unexpected trophy was three camp followers they found hiding behind a stack of empty crates. The women were scrawny and dirty and looked like peasant girls snatched from some village.
“We give them over to our men?” Beno suggested.
Adam went cold. “Release them.”
“Our troops would appreciate it,” Shendor piped in. One of the sergeants, Niso, had ventured close by and was grinning lewdly.
“They got new weapons, and there’s plenty of wine. That should do.”
The icy warmth he had felt from his men seemed to evaporate instantly. “They won’t like it.”
Something snapped inside Adam. “Any man seen cohorting with a whore will have his oysters cut off. Is that understood?”
Niso overheard him and paled. His grin gone, he shrewdly retreated.
Adam approached one of the women and placed a copper coin in her palm. “Go.”
The soldiers watched him with thick confusion clouding their eyes. They were not sure what to make of Captain Leech any more.
Being a captain was almost like running a brothel, he noted maniacally. It was a precarious mix of pleasure, fear, and deceit. You just had to make sure you were deft enough to balance all three.
Men started to drink too much too quickly. He would have no scouts for the third shift, he realized. Very fast, the casks of wine were put under guard. This evoked quite a lot of protest. But Adam brought a swift end to it when he ordered five random men to be lashed.
A grim atmosphere set on the camp, one of drunken sullenness, pride, and ecstasy of victory, and morbid horror and fear that their captain radiated. He was dangerously emotional and unpredictable.
His five hundred peasants and the rest of the regulars arrived the next day after noon. The camp got really crowded and even busier than before. While half the men slept or at
e off the ample reserves the Caytoreans had left them, the rest dug like grave robbers, turning the turf over almost a full hundred paces around the camp. The trenches were too wide for a horse to jump over and too deep for men to clamber in and out. The mounds of earth served as extra barrier against possible attacks.
In the fields, his scouts put the crossbows to good use. They shot three enemy riders and captured another two, who revealed no important information while they poured boiling lead onto their feet and smashed their fingers with a smith’s hammer.
There was no response from the main camp. Commander Mali had not yet deigned to acclaim his victory and march forth.
Adam spent his time patrolling the camp, too excited to sleep or rest. After flies started to swarm over the bodies, they were finally taken out and buried in a mound some distance away. The stench of death was everywhere.
The second day in the camp was uneventful. The men had gotten used to the grueling routine and worked without complaining. The crossbows sang, bringing down another six men, with one confirmed escape. He had no knowledge how many Caytoreans had actually managed to slip past his troops and spy on him.
From the moment they had arrived, the peasants started training for war. The real soldiers protested, but Adam ignored their jeers and taunts. He was not going to waste five hundred spears.
The peasants were made to march back and forth, veer to and from, dash, spread, regroup, turn about, all the little tricks and maneuvers that made the cardinal difference between a solid pike line and minced meat. The progress was extremely slow, since most men hardly knew left from right. Meanwhile, the regulars dug and shoveled. Adam could almost smile at the bitter twist of fate. Wine was rationed sparsely.
On the third day, he started to worry. After consulting with some of the border veterans, he learned that the wagon of heads must have reached an enemy position. This meant that there could be a massive attack within just a couple of days.
The digging and the training continued.
Then, on the fourth day, his troops sighted a large body of soldiers approaching from the north. Tension eased as friendly colors were recognized.
Adam stood just outside the camp, a crossbow in hand, waiting. Riding side by side, Colonels George and Marco and their female commander approached his little den warily, their faces expressionless.
“Welcome,” he said, voice dripping with haughtiness.
Mali nodded. “Busy, eh?”
“Here’s your foothold, sir.”
“What’s it called?” Mali asked, dismounting.
Adam smiled sadly. “I call it Virgin’s Blood.” As he relished in his macabre ingenuity, another scout arrived. The reinforcements had arrived just in time. An enemy five was thundering down the West Road, looking very pissed. They were less than half a day away.
Captain Leech smiled. A man could only die once.
CHAPTER 15
The street urchins proved to be valuable. They were not very accurate regarding the finer details, but they could sniff the atmosphere better than any hound. They told him of high tension running in the city, between the low- and highborn. The merchants and nobles were living in almost complete self-imposed sieges, which had started soon after the murders. The wealthy only moved when under heavy protection and leased almost all of their commerce outside Eybalen. The city’s lower circles were deeply suffering because of this, which only increased the mistrust. This gave the followers of Feor an almost free hand to incite against the rich.
Armin found this interesting. Could the Feor priests have paid assassins to murder a number of high-ranking city officials in orders to create distrust and panic? This seemed like a powerful motive.
Feorans—that’s what they called themselves—were a powerful, unstoppable phenomenon. He still dearly lacked almost any information of the Movement, but he had learned that it was a bright new religion promising ultimate freedom for nothing in return. It had started as an echo of a grudge against the old gods and soon flamed into a conflagration of zeal that had swept across Caytor. The rich had been completely surprised by the fever, totally unprepared to act against it. Arrests, curfews, even outright purges had not been able to suppress the burgeoning of the new religion.
Despite the obvious power, it seemed the fervor of the Movement was channeled outside Caytor, which made Armin doubt the priests had concocted the murders. He still lacked many pieces of the puzzle, but he believed that the Feorans were not the only culprits in the story.
After many talks with various petty officials all over the city, he had learned that Feorans were also zealously opposed to literature. They never wrote their dogmas down and even burned libraries when they could. Curiously, the scribes had also been threatened by other religions to never put down a word about Feorans into writing, lest the heresy spread into future generations. In this regard, the two sides seemed equally fanatic.
This frustrated Armin very much, because he lacked two decades of social progress in Caytor to help him understand the present. He knew all these events were related, only not how or why.
Armin reported his progress every week to the council. They seemed flustered by his lack of success almost as much as he was. Yet, they continued to pay, convinced he would unveil the mysteries.
Just as he was about to leave, one of the local officials called him to his office. “You are doing this the wrong way,” the stranger told him.
“Greetings. I’m Armin Wan’der Markssin,” the Sirtai offered.
“I know who you are. I’m Henrik. Nespos was my brother-in-law.”
“What can you tell me about Nespos?”
Henrik had closed the door of his office and sat opposite the investigator. His office was crammed to bursting with books of all kinds and heaps of documents.
“I married his sister seven years ago. He was a good man. Polite, accurate, very meticulous. Dedicated. He was a great explorer and chart-maker. He had sailed almost the entire coast of Caytor and Ichebor in the north.”
A spark exploded in Armin’s head. “Was Nespos anyhow related to…religious texts? Did he write books about religions or religious movements?”
The official frowned. “Not that I know of, no.”
Armin deflated. Another dead end. “Did he have any enemies?”
Henrik steepled his fingers. “Well, there was always some rivalry between explorers. But it was only good sportsmanship, nothing more. Nespos and his friends made sure they could each have a piece of glory. So when Nespos sailed north, another sailed south, and a third man went inland.”
“I was not able to talk to his widow yet,” Armin stated.
“Cybilla? Oh, she’s a difficult woman. You’ll be hard-pressed to ever get her audience. But I believe I can help. I’ll try to arrange something.”
“Thank you for your help.”
“I would like to know who killed Nespos. It irks me. My wife has nightmares. We need closure.”
Armin leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I need access to the city annals.”
Henrik did not seem surprised by the request. “What would you like to know?”
“Well, I am interested in learning more about this Feoran Movement. And I would also like to know about the business transactions the eight victims had prior to their death. The more the better. Do you keep such records?”
The other man sighed. “By law, we are obliged to document every single deal done by one of our members. But some of the deals are considered very secret and very discreet, and only guild members have access to them.”
Armin nodded. “I understand. But I would appreciate if you could help me.” He had, of course, on the first day of the investigation, asked for help from the council. But the clerks were not forthcoming with what was considered the guilds’ internal affairs before a complete stranger. His letters of recommendation did not help at all.
He had spoken with friends and relatives of many of the victims, spoken to their employees and colleagues. He had received lots o
f mixed and conflicting information. The guilds wanted the murders solved. But everything had a price.
“Let’s meet tonight, two hours after sunset. In the Black Swan Inn, by the Fountain of Heroes. Do you know where it is?”
Armin nodded. “Thank you.”
Armin left the House, swimming in new clues and leads. He had ridden in a chariot since the day of his almost death. He had not told his wives of the attempt on his life, not wishing to make them worry or make Inessa feel bad about not being at his side at the time. He had told the council about it, to which they had responded with shock and outrage. They had provided him with an escort, a well-trained assassin and bodyguard who also doubled as his coacher.
He was contemplating visiting one of Feor’s temples, but the followers guarded the places against intruders. Only the converts were allowed in. Even the City Watch did not meddle. After a botched raid called the Night of Red Lilies, there had been no more attempts to storm any of the shrines. Armin was not quite sure what had happened on that night, some five years ago, but the rumor spoke of blood running like summer rain and houses burning bright and orange in the night, a thousand tarred heads on pikes, a month-long blockade in the port. He had also heard of the event called the Night of Victory, but he was not sure who the victors were. No one readily spoke about it. And there were no scrolls to read from.
He hoped things would change tonight.
In the rich parts of the city, there were no Feorans. The old temples had their doors open, and people trickled in and out. But beyond a certain invisible line, no sane priest trod alone, without a heavy escort of armed men.
That evening, he met Henrik in one of the more respectable inns in Eybalen. The place looked rich, with incense burning in gilt sconces and handsome waitresses gliding to and fro, serving delicacies on tiny porcelain platters.
The Betrayed: Book one of The Lost Words Page 11