by David Drake
The Redlander seemed almost . . . vulnerable, so revealed. But then he started to raise his weapon, a wicked-looking bow, already nocked with arrow.
Abel fired the carbine.
The man flinched, caught in the chest. The bow fired—directly into the neck of his mount. Purple-brown blood erupted. The beast, enraged by the arrow, reared, spun—then charged off into the dust. Had he made a kill? There was no way to know.
He drew his blunderbuss pistol.
Whizz!
A shot streaked nearby, whistling death.
The one you hear—
But Abel couldn’t complete the thought. A scream, and behind him a Blaskoye with a raised scimitar charging toward him. It was all Abel could do to get the dragon aimed and fire. The other fell backward in the saddle as if he’d been pushed on the chest, then slid off the rear of his beast as if he’d merely fallen asleep.
Now a roar from behind, which it took Abel a moment to realize was the sound of his own charging men. They swarmed around him. After a moment, he pushed his beast forward, toward the village. Back through the front of his lines again and—
Out of the swirling dust and smoke.
The remainder of the Blaskoye were caught in the pincer of the Regulars and the Militia. They rode about in confusion, terror, rage.
And entirely in vain.
Another reload and he was ready, but then the shouting, manic voice of Joab screamed an order. The order taken up by his officers, passed along.
“Cease fire!”
Abel realized that Joab’s men had been about to shoot directly into his, Abel’s, advancing line.
“Bayonets!” he heard his father shout. “Forward!”
The Regulars, drilled daily on such orders, obeyed without hesitation, moving at an inexorable slow trot.
His own men were still running pell-mell. But it didn’t matter now. The Blaskoye were caught, surrounded. Hornburg and his dont riders struck, along with Joab’s cavalry. Then the foot soldiers closed in.
It was bloody. It was hard fought.
And within half an hour, it was over. All the Blaskoye were either dead or unhorsed and captured.
At least so Abel thought. For suddenly, just as the last of the mopping up had seemed to be accomplished, there came a cry from the village, and the renewed bellow and scream of donts.
He tried to locate the source.
The low cry of a bone horn. Two. Three. The Blaskoye instrument of war.
They want us to look, find them, to see.
And he whirled toward the village—
And did see.
Blaskoye on dontback, perhaps thirty or so, riding out, riding directly toward them, toward the assembled forces of Treville.
And no Blaskoye with a drawn musket.
Only with a gleaming knife, each taken from some scrapyard of the Redland sandpits and worked to sharpness. Each knife held at a neck.
The neck of a child.
On they rode, closer.
Is that—? Can they really be—?
Aye, it is, Raj growled. Aye, it is.
They were using the village children as shields. Among the Militia and Regulars, carbines whirled, hard eyes aimed.
And then the guns lowered. The riders came on.
They slowed but slightly. Enough to allow the lines to part.
They parted not far from Abel, and he saw the Blaskoye riders.
These were not run-of-the-mill warriors. Anyone could see it who had eyes. First, they did not wear mere loose garments, but linen tunics, red sash belts, and legwraps, all very similar to the uniform of the Scouts. They wore turbans of iron red, so there was no mistaking them for Scouts, however.
Most of all, their faces were swirled with tattoos. Angry welts that looked more burned into place with firebrands than inked with charcoal-coated thorns.
The one who rode in the lead was not the largest, but there was something about him that seemed to bristle more than the others. Perhaps it was the fact that he held an actual silver knife.
No, not silver, said Center. It is steel and chrome. The surface is an electroplated coating of chromium. Very curious.
Whatever it was made of, it gleamed against the throat of a little girl, dark-haired, who looked about terrified. A bead of blood like gemstones had formed where the knife had already sliced into skin.
“You!” shouted Abel. “You, silver knife!”
At this, the Blaskoye turned and looked about furiously.
Abel pointed the dragon pistol at him. It was reloaded. Somehow he’d done it in the turmoil. It was cocked and ready to fire.
The Blaskoye met Abel’s gaze. He did not flinch, but returned it as hard and as void of mercy as it had been delivered.
Then he smiled, and with a kick, urged his dont on. Through the lines they went and up the hill.
The women, Abel thought. They won’t see in time. Won’t know.
He turned and galloped after the Blaskoye. But it was too late.
A crackle of fire. Two, three Blaskoye fell. As did their hostages.
And then a cry of anguish, of horror, as the Blaskoye drew near and the women saw what they had done.
That was when, at an order from the one with the silver knife, the Blaskoye drew their carbines and, keeping their children in hand, raised the guns and fired into the crowd of mothers, sisters, and wives, armed, but unable to shoot, held back by a compassion that proved their own undoing.
The Blaskoye rode through the hole they had blasted in the line of the woman auxiliaries. And then they were up the hill and away.
The Scouts are out there, Abel thought. They’ll get them.
I wouldn’t be so certain, Raj said. A gang like that will have considered that possibility. They may have an alternate route.
Indeed, said Center. The Scouts cannot be everywhere, and this one, the leader, is one who can guess where they have stationed themselves and avoid it.
He’s the leader? Silver knife?
Chrome. Yes. Psychometric observation of his subordinates’ comportment confirms to a high certainty this status.
I want to kill him.
Of course you do, lad, said Raj.
I will kill him.
To this, Raj did not answer.
Then Abel rode up the hill to the women and saw what the Blaskoye had wrought. A dozen lay wounded, dead, or dying.
Among these was Mahaut. Her right leg and a portion of her belly had been laid open by a minié ball. She was still alive, but Abel did not think she could survive such a wound. He dismounted, knelt beside her.
Was there a watersack canteen nearby? Yes. He pulled one from a dead body, brought it to Mahaut.
“I live,” she said.
“Yes,” he answered. “Drink.”
He drizzled water over her lips, and she licked them.
“The girl,” she said.
“Yes,” said Abel.
“He had her.”
“Yes,” said Abel.
He dripped another bead of water onto Mahaut’s lips, and she coughed blood. He took off his scarf and wiped the blood away from her lips so she could draw in a ragged breath. There was nothing he could do about the groin, the gut.
“My niece,” she said. “A Jacobson. But still. Mine. Loreilei.”
“Oh,” he said.
“My husband?”
“I don’t know,” Abel said.
“Fuck,” she said as a wave of pain hit her. “Fuck, fuck.”
And then her head fell to the side and she was unconscious, bleeding her life away.
Abel set her down and remounted. The men of the Militia were beginning to catch up with him, and the surviving women were gathering around. When he had a sufficient number in earshot, he called out to them.
“We will follow,” he said. “We will find them. We will stop them. And we will not stop until we take our children back.”
It took only until sunset. The circling kill-flitters showed the way.
They lay
in a pile on the side of a defile that led upward toward the Escarpment proper, and at first it had looked to Abel like a pile of dak carcasses, the sort he might see in the butcher’s yard before a feast day.
But these were not daks.
Abel wondered for a moment why here, why he—the one he now thought of as Silver Knife—had chosen this spot. The path did not seem to grow any steeper here. There was no particular landmark. It was only a gravel-filled gulley.
Then Abel turned around and looked back into the Valley.
There was a clear sight of Lilleheim below.
He must have shown them the village before he ordered them slain, Abel thought. One last glimpse of the home they would never see again.
Yes, Center said. That is how it was. He offered no further deductive reasoning beyond this pronouncement.
And they are all here? All these children of Lilleheim?
No, Center answered.
No?
The count is wrong for that. There is one missing.
Which one—
But he already knew the answer.
The Jacobson girl. Silver Knife had kept her. As a taunt.
Yes.
3
Observe:
Mahaut did not die.
There were times she wished she had. The pain was impossible, especially after the shock wore off and her body grasped in its thoughtless but no less living manner the completion of agony, the outrage, that had been perpetrated upon it. For days she lay in all-clenching hurt, half-comatose, half-inflamed suffering. Her eyes were closed, her teeth grinding.
There was the smell, as her body rotted, for company. Always the moment when any who visited her, even those prepared, those who knew what to expect, flinched at the stench.
Except for the Scout. He had come with her brother to visit and had seemed not disgusted by, or piteous, but—this was the strange thing—angry. Angry that this was happening to her.
It was a feeling she shared.
“I will not let this happen again.” She’d heard his voice in her delirium, wasn’t even sure whom he was speaking to. To her it sounded like a dialog, but with one listener and speaker located in such a way that he was impossible to hear.
I am dreaming, she thought at one point. A fever dream.
But such lucid moments were few and far between.
“There has to be something, thrice-damn it. I can’t let what happened to my mother go on and on in the Land, bring needless death to—”
A pause.
“Yes, she does look a bit like her. What of it?”
A pause.
“I do not expect to save every person, or every woman. At least not at first. Just her.”
A pause.
“I am aware she is married.”
A pause.
“Why don’t you just consider it an experiment? You foresee no long-term imbalances, so let me do this with the knowledge you have given me. In exchange, I will see to those breechloaders.”
A pause.
Then a laugh. And something else he’d said, something she later couldn’t believe she’d heard, had to believe was blurred by her fever into incomprehensibility. “Anyway, Zentrum is the local enemy. Zentrum works for death, even if he doesn’t know. I want to work for life. I couldn’t save my mother, so let me save her.”
Then curses and orders to servants. The others, the servants, responded to his voice; it was no longer a one-way overheard dialog, but the words she remembered were his.
The Scout is caring for me. He has taken me as his charge.
“I want all of these bandages boiled, do you hear me! Better let me do it, as a matter of fact. I do not want the wound touched without instruments that have not been boiled. Not once, not ever. I will set my Scouts on you if you do it. You know they are one step away from a Redlander. They might boil you alive.
“And I will provide salve for the wound. Take this nightmare sludge away and bury it. Better yet, feed it to the carnadons at the lake. They are getting to be a menace, and it will kill them straight off!
“Yes, I’ll be consulting with her physician, as well. He won’t give you any trouble about following my orders after he and I have a good talk. I’ll tell him about my Scouts, too, and their very large cook pot.”
She rotted. But only to a point. Something was strong within her, something that was not her will, but was a blind urge to overcome, to thrust out the creeping death. She took no credit for it. She often just wanted to die.
And she received the new bandages every day of impossibly clean and white linen—no cloth in the Land had ever been so well-washed, she thought—and the salve the Scout had concocted and brought.
So many others died of much less, and she believed for a time that she was undeserving, that being alive, getting better, was punishment. It was punishment for letting him, the one who had shot her—oh, she remembered the squinting eyes, the careful aim, she knew him—take the girl.
Take the girl alive into the Redlands.
I should have shot Loreilei, Mahaut told herself. And if not with the gun, well, then I was close enough to even put an arrow in her eye.
Better her niece were dead than what lay in store for her in the Redlands.
And so Mahaut had taken her own healing as Zentrum’s judgment upon her, as the punishment of the Law for the stupid mistake of believing that the Blaskoye would have any mercy whatsoever. That if he did not release the girl, he would at least have the decency to kill her on his way out.
But he had not done so.
And then the pain of her wound slowly abated from mind-burning to endurable. The smell lessened in pungency. The maggots the Scout lieutenant had so carefully picked from her flesh week after week one day did not return. And the scar tissue began to form its jagged welt of remembrance.
And it was the Scout who told her that the ball was still within her, that he could not extract it without risking her death.
Then the other news: that the ball had likely destroyed her womb. That it would be a miracle if she could have children now.
The dreams began. Of the minié ball pushing through her flesh. Pushing deeper, deeper into her, like some unholy nishterlaub seed that had been planted deep.
No. The Blaskoye’s seed. His loathsome seed. And in the dreams, she was pregnant with the Redlander’s bastard. A creature, not a child, a parasite that ate her from within. That whispered to her from the inside, where only she could hear, “I am his, and you are his, and you will take me to him, drag yourself to him, so that I can be born, so that he can draw me from you as he might a weapon from a wound.”
Edgar, her husband, had taken one look at her and had not returned to see her. He was rumored to have journeyed to Garangipore to see about a crop on family land there and oversee the transfer of grain to the barges. She supposed she was still married to him, that he wouldn’t cast her off in this state. She was certain the family had told him about her now barren womb.
Her mother and father could not bear to witness what had happened to the one they had known as an innocent child, and had only occasionally visited after an initial flurry. Only Xander, her brother, came and kept coming. And the other, the lieutenant. Abel Dashian.
Why?
She’d asked herself that several times, and had no answer. She had even asked him, at one point demanded, that he go and never return. But he hadn’t answered, and he hadn’t obeyed.
Finally she had told him about the dreams. She’d told him in hopes that this would disgust him, make him hate her for a traitor to both womankind and to the Land, to Zentrum Himself.
But he’d only listened and nodded.
“I think I understand what it’s like to have thoughts, things you can’t control, rattling around in your mind,” he’d said.
And she’d asked, “How could you?”
And he’d answered, “Oh, you might be surprised.” But had said no more on the subject. “What will you do when you get better?” he’d asked.
Edgar? She’d been bought cheap. Her father’s position and a not inconsiderable dowry from her mother’s family had been the attraction. Those must have been the prime attractions, for she’d always known herself to be not homely, but boyish in her ways. This she blamed on her father and her brother, for drawing her in on the play battles, the fights with wooden swords and knives, and most of all the archery and the sharpshooting. It hadn’t helped when they found that she was by far the best shot in the family.
And she blamed her mother for letting them do it. For never sitting her down and telling her that this is not what young ladies do. For perpetually believing she’d outgrow her urge to—
Say it.
To fight. To battle. To overcome a foe. To conquer within the small domain she ruled.
These were not the sentiments a woman should possess. Not in this town, in any case, military brat or no.
She knew what she ought to want. To beguile. To ensnare. To fulfill. To complete.
These were the traits of a woman.
She’d worked at it, become competent in the arts. Dress. Comportment.
But she never stopped beating the boys at their own games, and liking it.
Until the one came along who put a bullet in her gut and showed her that she could not beat all boys at all games.
For a while, she’d believed she’d met her match in Edgar. He had not put up with her willfulness, had showed a cool disdain for her uppity nature.
And yet he had clearly liked her, and liked her a lot—to the point she’d had to fight him off before the betrothal, claw him away, until she was ready for it, for him in that way.
“Nobody ever denies me,” he’d said. “But you deny me, and it just makes me long for you more.”
And so they’d gone on with him insulting her, and yet always returning, and driving off the few other suitors who had had the temerity to risk this one, the carnadon girl who would bite your head off as soon as look at you if you dared to suggest she was weak or changeable or was any other of the traits that made up and defined a woman.