Blood Road

by Amanda McCrina

  South of Tasso at a distance of perhaps ten miles, the sea had eaten the desert down to bare rock at the shoreline. In the moonlight, Torien saw the long black finger of a cove cutting inland through sandstone cliffs. He heard waves crashing on jagged rock. Distantly northward, across the dark sand, he could see the harbor lights at Tasso.

  They rode along the cove on the narrow shelf of sand under the cliffs. He was riding at Stratto’s side, the young Espere at Valle’s. The ship, rising and falling gently on the swell below the cliffs, was small and single-masted, shallow enough on the draft to be moored quite close along the shore. It was no bigger than the boats which came up the river to Vessy, and besides passengers and crew it must carry stores for a six-day ocean voyage. He said to Stratto, “How many of us are swimming?”

  “We’ll change ships at Istra.”

  “Istra’s still a long way to swim.”

  “We’ll leave the horses.”

  There were four men waiting for them at the foot of the cliff where the ship lay moored. They had a small driftwood fire burning on the sand: the cliffs trapped the sea wind, and it was cold rather than cool. The men were wrapped in cloaks. Stratto raised a hand in greeting. None of the men returned it. They stood waiting and watching. Torien had a glimpse of one man’s face in the firelight. It seemed familiar, though he could not place it.

  Stratto swung from his saddle. He flung his reins to one of the men. “Take the horses,” he said. “We’re putting out.”

  Metal rasped on leather. Torien saw the flash of a sword in the firelight. The man who stood closest took Stratto’s head off with one swipe of the blade. He felt the blood spray. Head and body tumbled to the sand. He kicked the black horse’s ribs and clung to the saddle-horns as the horse lurched forward. The saddle leather was slippery with Stratto’s blood. The swordsman caught him by the arm. He slid from the saddle with the swordsman’s fingers around his elbow, hitting the sand on his hip and shoulder. Pain burst through his shoulder, down to his fingertips, and just for a moment he lay stunned and winded, blinking at Stratto’s body across the sand. The swordsman stood over him, blade raised. He forgot the pain in his panic. He rolled away as the blade came down, and he heard the wet crunch as the blade bit sand.

  He hauled himself on his elbows across the sand and caught at one of the burning sticks and pulled it from the fire. Sparks raced up the cliff face, ash drifting like black moths. He flung himself onto his back, facing the swordsman, the stick in his bound hands. There were hoof beats coming up out of the darkness. The swordsman fell at Torien’s feet with a spear through his unprotected chest.

  Valle slid from his saddle to retrieve the spear. He braced the body with one foot and jerked the spear up and spun on his heel and let fly again, in one smooth motion. Torien snatched up the dead man’s sword. He held it between his knees and ran his wrists over the upturned edge of the blade until the ropes slithered away. Valle had drawn his own sword and was fighting the two remaining men at once. He had killed one of them by the time Torien got to his feet. The other was backing away. He had his sword toward Valle, and in the firelight Torien saw the tattoo on the back of the sword hand.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Valle paused, sword raised.

  “Put down the sword and you live,” Torien said to the signo.

  The signo dropped his sword at once. He went to his knees on the sand. The firelight was on his face, and Torien recognized him: the signo had looked at him hollow-eyed across the stable yard on his first day at the fort. “Please, Lord. It was orders.”

  “You knew to wait for us here?”

  “The Commander knew, Lord.”

  “How?”

  “He had the Lieutenant under examination, Lord.”

  “Tarrega?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Had,” Valle said. He was standing very straight, his chin up, his face blank. In the firelight, his eyes were dark. “The Lieutenant is dead?”

  The signo did not say anything.

  Valle said, quietly, “Is he dead, signo?”

  “He was alive when we left, Lord,” the signo said, “but that was a week ago this morning.”

  Valle turned abruptly on his heel. Torien went after him. “Valle.”

  “The boy is hurt badly.” Valle was sheathing his sword. His hands were steady, but even so it took him a moment, when he had wiped the blade, to catch the tip of the blade on the slit of the sheath. “I will need your help.”

  The young Espere lay sprawled on the sand a little way up the shore. He was unconscious, and in the moonlight his face was white. His left arm was gone below the elbow. The same stroke that had taken his arm had gouged his side above the hip. Valle checked the pulse and said to Torien, “Take his feet.”

  They carried him between them over to the fire, avoiding the bodies of the signi and Stratto’s body. They laid him on the sand with his head up toward the cliff, his feet toward the water. His skin was very cold. The front of his tunic was soaked through with blood. Valle cut away the tunic with his knife. Then he wiped the knife and put the blade on the coals. He looked up at the signo, who had not moved from his knees. “More wood if you can find it,” he said. He was speaking very quietly and calmly. To Torien he said, “There is wine in the packs, and bandage cloth.”

  For a while, they were busy and silent. Valle tied a tourniquet above the stump of the arm and rinsed the wounds with wine. Torien held the unconscious lieutenant while Valle dressed the gash under his ribs. By then the signo had built up the fire quite large, and the heat was pushing into their faces. Valle took his knife from the coals and sealed the stump of the lieutenant’s arm with the flat of the blade. Afterward, Torien laid the lieutenant back down on the sand and felt for the pulse under the lieutenant’s jaw. The pulse fluttered faintly against his fingertips. The lieutenant’s throat was cold. Torien shrugged off his cloak and put it over him. His shoulder twinged with the movement. He had forgotten it in adrenaline and then urgency. He closed his left hand and found there was no feeling in his fingers.

  Valle was watching him. “You are hurt?”

  “Nothing.”

  Valle handed him the wine-skin. “Drink.”

  Torien took the skin. There was blood on his hand—Stratto’s blood, spattered on his hand and his arm and along the left side of his body. He swallowed a quick mouthful of wine and gave the skin back to Valle. He got unsteadily to his feet and went down to the water and knelt in the shallows to rinse the blood away. He sat for a while afterward with his eyes closed, his arms limp at his sides and his fingers dug into the pebbly sand, the warm saltwater lapping gently over his knees.

  The lieutenant would die. He had been weak already from the beating and water deprivation, and he would be dead by morning. Perhaps he would never regain consciousness. That would be the most merciful. That would be more merciful than waking to realize his father had sent the men who had killed him. It had been done unwittingly, perhaps, but that would be small comfort to the dying when the dying was sixteen years old and willing for his father’s sake to undergo a Guard examination. Perhaps in that case he would accept that his father had sent and killed him. Perhaps he would defend the decision. Torien did not understand. He wondered if Alluin might. Alluin joked about his father, but that was because deep down he had never figured out how not to care, and to joke was the only way he knew how to pretend.

  Valle had come down beside him in the shallows. “I have given instruction to the signo for the boy’s treatment,” he said. He held out Torien’s bundled sword belt and the knife in its sheath. “I told him we would send wagons from the fort. It would kill the boy to ride.”

  Dawn had lit the sandstone gate wall white and pale pink against the gray western sky. It was not yet the end of the fourth watch, and there were braziers still burning on the wall. The body was visible on the wall from some distance across the sand. It hung by the wrists, stripped and sunburned, from one of the merlons
of the walkway atop the wall, between the gatehouse and the southwestern tower.

  From the foot of the wall, Torien could not see detail enough in the face to recognize it as Tarrega’s body. He was glad for that—glad to think of it objectively only as a body, not as Tarrega’s body. Valle did not look at it. He rode up close under the gate wall. The gate doors were closed. The watch had seen them coming for a while, north and west across the open sand from the cove, but they had been riding with the dawn light at their backs, and Torien did not think the watch had seen their faces. One of the guards called down from the gatehouse for the watch word. Valle said, “Open in the Emperor’s name.”

  Several helmeted heads peered down at them from the wall in a sudden flare of torchlight. Valle slipped his seal ring on its chain from his neck and slung it up over the wall onto the walkway. “Open the gate.”

  There was murmured conferral over the ring. There was no further challenge. The gate doors creaked inward ponderously. The thoroughfare stretched before them empty and dark down to the headquarters. It was two hours until muster, and the barrack blocks were silent. The captain of the watch was coming out from the gatehouse. It was not Chareste. He had Valle’s ring in his hands. He was cupping it gingerly on his palms, as though it were delicate or dangerous. “Sir,” he said to Valle. He did not seem to notice Torien. There was a corporal’s braid on his shoulder and mingled fear and awe in his face. He was a junior officer of a frontier garrison, and he was common-born, and most likely—to his own knowledge—he had never lain eyes on a Guardsman before. His neck muscles twitched as he suppressed a first inclination to bow. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t expect—”

  “Is Commander Espere in his quarters?”

  The corporal swallowed. “Commander Espere is with the prisoner, sir.”

  Valle dismounted and dropped his reins. He went up into the guardhouse without another word. Torien slipped quickly from his saddle. “Which prisoner?” he said to the corporal.

  The corporal noticed him now and recognized him. Torien saw the confusion flit on his face: they would know by now that Commander Risto and his adjutant and his signi had been killed by Mayasi on the Road. He saw this pass in an instant over the corporal’s face and resolve itself into a hasty salute. “The Lieutenant, sir—Lieutenant Chareste.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Valle had taken a torch from a bracket in the common room. They went down through the cell row—Valle ahead with the torch, and Torien following, and the corporal bringing up the rear. Valle glanced back over his shoulder. “Is the Commander alone with the prisoner, Corporal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come here, Corporal,” Valle said.

  He was standing in the low doorway at the bottom of the steps. He put his torch up and tested the shut door once, gently, with his hand and shoulder. He said to the corporal, “He knows your voice?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell him there is a message come up from the harbor. Tell him the messenger will speak to none but him.”

  The corporal went down to the door, nervous but unquestioning in his eagerness to please the Guardsman. He pounded a closed fist on the door. “Commander Espere—sir. Urgent message from the harbor, sir.”

  Espere’s voice came muffled through the door: “I will be in my office presently.”

  “The messenger can’t wait, sir, and he won’t give the message to anyone but you.”

  “He may wait in my office, or he may return when I am unoccupied.”

  “The messenger comes under the sign of the Boar,” Valle said, quietly.

  “He is under the sign of the Boar, sir.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then there was the rattling of a chain and the scrape of wood on stone. The door edged inward. Valle kicked it wide. “Well done, Corporal,” he said. He drew his sword and ducked through the doorway. Torien followed him, drawing his own sword.

  Espere backed away. He had his belt knife in his hand. He lifted his chin and drew the blade across his throat with a flick of his wrist. He sank noiselessly to the floor. The knife slipped from his fingers and hit the floor and lay spinning to stillness on its haft.

  “Corporal,” Valle said, into the silence that followed.

  “Yes, sir.” The corporal’s face was gray in the torchlight. He was looking at the body and the spreading blood.

  “You are witness that it was suicide. This will be of importance should there be necessity for a court martial.”

  The corporal swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

  Torien sheathed his sword. He went over to the table. Chareste was on his back on the tabletop, arms and legs spread, wrists and ankles chained one to each trestle. There was dried blood crusted on his brown face. There were wide, purple bruises in rows across his ribs. He tilted his head back against the tabletop, looking at the doorway. He saw Torien. “Commander Risto,” he said. He spit blood and tried to smile.

  “Don’t speak,” Torien said. With a hand on Chareste’s arm, he looked up at the corporal in the doorway. “Unchain him.”

  “I don’t have the key, sir. The Commander gave orders. No one else was to handle the prisoners.”

  Valle sheathed his sword and crouched beside the body, slipping the key ring from Espere’s belt. “You know which key?”

  The corporal opened the cuffs at Chareste’s wrists and ankles and gave the key ring to Torien. “I’ll bring the surgeon, sir.”

  “And a detail for the body, Corporal.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The corporal’s footsteps faded away up into the cell row. Valle went over to pick up Espere’s knife. He wiped it with his sword-cloth and held it by the blade between his thumb and forefinger, tapping the haft on his palm. He was not really paying it any attention. He circled the room slowly—each time, without looking at it, managing to avoid the pool of blood which had spread over the floor at Espere’s throat.

  “He said you were dead, sir.” Chareste had relaxed his head and shoulders against the tabletop. He spoke with his eyes closed. “Said it was Lieutenant Tarrega’s work—said that was why—”

  He was having trouble with the words. He shifted and grimaced on the tabletop. “Don’t speak, Anzo,” Torien said.

  “He’s innocent, sir—the Lieutenant.”

  “I know.”

  “It was for the boy,” Chareste said, “for the signo. Wanted him out of here. Didn’t know how else. Wasn’t about the Mayasi—wasn’t treason, sir.”

  “I know,” Torien said. “Don’t speak, Anzo. There’ll be time later.”

  “Coward,” Chareste said, with effort. “Could have eased it for him. He wouldn’t let me ease it for him. I should have eased it for him. Coward.” There were tears at the seams of his shut eyelids. “I should have eased it for him, sir.” He shook with the suppressed tears. He drew a deep breath and gasped, hands flying up to his chest by reflex. He spit another mouthful of blood.

  Torien leaned over the table and spread Chareste’s arms, bracing them against the tabletop. “Lie still,” he said. “Lie very still, Anzo, and don’t speak.” He held Chareste’s shoulders in his hands, pinning Chareste’s arms under his arms, and he prayed for the surgeon to come. Surely it did not take so long. Surely the corporal had gone first for the surgeon and afterward to raise a detail for the body.

  There were footsteps down the stairs. The surgeon came into the room, a slave boy at his heels. He saw Espere’s body slumped at the fire pit. His steps slowed.

  “The Lieutenant, Doctor,” Torien said. “The Commander has no further need of your services.”

  “Sir.” The surgeon came over to the table. He did not say anything about Espere. “I will look at him now, Commander.”

  Torien let go Chareste’s arms. The surgeon felt Chareste’s ribs carefully under his hands. He motioned to the slave boy. The boy put the surgeon’s bag on the stool beside the table and dug in the bag and gave th
e surgeon a glass bottle of some liquid. The surgeon unstopped the bottle and tipped it onto Chareste’s tongue. The room was busily silent, and Torien was conscious very suddenly of his own uselessness. He backed away from the table. Someone touched his arm. He started, blinking into Valle’s face. “Walk with me,” Valle said.

  They walked together up into the cell row. “Tell me exactly what you promised the tribes at the mines,” Valle said.

  “That I would see Espere before a court martial in Choiro.”

  “And later. You spoke with them privately—the Asano and the Mayaso both. You did not offer simply to kill him?”

  “You know that would have done them no good.”

  “I know it as they know it. And they will know you returned to the fort and Espere is now dead without trial.”

  Torien stopped in the row, suddenly clear-headed. “They’ll think I killed him?”

  “You can tell whatever story you want of his death. They know we will be looking for a pretext to take the mines by force. It does not profit the Empire to leave the mines in their hands now that our puppet Idran is dead. What is to stop you from swearing before the Senate that Espere died on the Road with an Asano spear in his back? That is what they will think.”

  There were boots tramping down the row, coming down from the common room. The corporal and his detail went past, saluting. Torien did not return the salute. “I left hostages, Valle.”

  Valle was silent.

  “I’ll ride for the mines tonight,” Torien said.

  “You are the ranking officer here, and you are noble blood. It would not be wise to put yourself in their hands.”

  “Our only hope is to give them the truth, and it’ll be best coming from me—as the ranking officer.”

  “Some of them will listen to you. Some of them will be willing to believe you do not mean to use his death against them. Many of them will not. Even among the Asani, not all are eager for peace. Many see peace as disgrace. Why else do you think they would stand aside and let a watch captain kill their chieftain? They can kill you just as easily, or hold you to ransom. Even the more moderate among them will recognize you are too valuable a bartering piece to squander. The radicals will think you are a sign from God that their cause is just. Then it will be full-scale war.”