by David Drake
Then Abel was forced to gaze into the suffering eyes of von Hoff as the colonel pronounced judgment on his protégé. There was nothing von Hoff could do. Orders were orders.
Abel’s sword was brought forward. Von Hoff laid it next to a stone and broke it with a quick kick to the flat of the blade.
Abel was turned over to Timon for punishment. Friend or not, Timon did not shirk when delivering the one hundred lashes. He could not.
Then, with his back torn to ribbons, Abel was forced to complete the day’s march. He was put in ranks and did as his sergeant bid him. He was a private now.
And when the Progar campaign was done, he was nothing at all. For then Abel lay on the field of battle, a minié slug in his brain.
Projection sixty-eight point four percent accuracy, with a seventy-five percent accuracy on similar variations.
A private. So what? Abel thought. So I’m busted to ranks? And there’s a thirty-six percent chance I won’t be killed.
Even so, any chance of your death greater than fifty percent is unacceptable, said Center dryly.
To hell with our present purpose! Abel thought. Our purpose has always meant Center’s purpose, anyway. He did not preverbalize the thought, the way he did mind-speech that was directed at Center and Raj.
There was a place within Abel’s mind that he believed Center and Raj could not reach. It was a quiet, preverbal way of thinking. He’d tested them several times on it, and he was fairly sure he’d succeeded at keeping his secrets. He’d thought things he knew would always get a reaction from either Raj or Center, but not brought those thoughts to the edge of speech. No reaction. Abel called this place within himself the “Hideout.”
Still, he could never be sure that pretending not to “overhear” Abel’s innermost thoughts while in the Hideout was part of a long game by Center. Yet he believed this was not the case.
When he spoke directly to them, the words were always as if on the tip of his tongue. Not now. Despite his affection for his inner voices, he had spent years perfecting his ability to keep his thoughts from the presences in his mind. The truth was, in the past few years, and after all he’d been exposed to in the capital, they had begun to sound a bit old-fashioned to Abel. A relic of his childhood. As unreal as the Carnadon Man.
In his better moments, he knew this not to be the case, but there were times he couldn’t help pondering the possibilities.
This was definitely a train of thought Abel didn’t preverbalize. Raj and Center possessed the key to motor control of his muscles, both voluntary and involuntary, even if they did not subjugate his will. They could shut Abel down if they deemed it necessary.
Yet—
Center took me inside the mind of Bara. Now I know a person is dying in agony, not just an enemy.
Of course he doubted if Bara would give a damn in cold hell if their places were reversed and it were Abel nailed to the cross.
But that wasn’t the point, was it?
Will you stop me if I do it? Abel thought-spoke, this time aloud to the presences.
A man become a brute won’t be of much use to us, said Raj. Abel realized he was speaking to Center, giving Abel the benefit of hearing their reasoning together, which must normally take place in the millionth part of an eyeblink. After all, human instincts have to be part of the plan, or we’re no better than that benighted computer in Lindron.
A moment’s pause. A long moment.
Center had once told him: I am a fifth-generation artificial intelligence running on a one hundred gigacubit quantum superimposition engine. I complete more calculations per one of your eyeblinks than all the computers of the first millennium of the Information Age could produce together if all of them ran at full power for each of those thousand years. It would be best if you took my projections seriously.
For Center, a long moment was practically an eternity.
To disregard Center was to open the future. Since he was six years old, he’d lived with Center’s plan and his own destiny within it. To step away from that plan…was it madness?
Of course it was.
In the usual future of the Land, all roads led to Stasis. Freedom was an illusion. Zentrum shaped all.
But to do this one thing on his own, to do it because it was right and not because it was a means toward an end…
Couldn’t he have that chance as a man? Shouldn’t he?
Finally, Center spoke. No. I will not stop you, Abel.
Good then.
Abel quickly left ranks, spun around, and trotted back down the road south. They’d already marched a half a league, and it was a long way back.
All of the Hurthmen were still alive when he got there. Bara’s head was two elbs above Abel. The sun was risen fully now, and Bara was attempting to squeeze his eyes shut against it.
Too far to reach if I want to make a clean cut with a knife.
As Abel stood and considered, he could tell the passing ranks of Guardians were noticing him from the corners of their eyes, considering what this major might be up to.
There is no doubt whatsoever that that is what they are doing, said Center.
Abel looked back at the youth. Bara opened his eyes, saw Abel for the first time. He tried to say something, perhaps deliver a curse, but the crossbow bolt in his tongue prevented it.
In case you are wondering, Raj said, the best method is a bayonet strike through the stomach and into the heart.
Abel unslung his rifle from the strap on his shoulder. He let his pack drop to the ground in the same motion. With practiced speed, he removed the bayonet from its stowage under the barrel, pushed it into its socket, and twisted the stop pin into the slot on the locking ring.
Fixed.
He looked at Bara. The man was watching him now. Abel considered speaking, maybe attempting to explain, but there was really nothing to say.
He either gets it, or he’ll die confused. Either way, the suffering will be over.
Abel put a hand behind the butt of his rifle, and with a hard thrust did exactly as Raj had suggested.
Slicing into the stomach was not difficult, but the bayonet lodged in the thicker muscle of the diaphragm. The crucified man attempted to writhe away from the penetrating blade, but it was no use.
Abel gave another strong push. After the blade cut through the tough muscle, the going became easier. Abel pushed through, no doubt, a lung—and into the heart. A gasp from the stabbed man, nothing more. Abel withdrew the blade. It was followed by a gush of bright arterial blood flowing from the stomach wound, and Abel knew he’d struck home.
When he looked back up, Bara’s eyes were fixed in death.
It was a terrible sight. He’d seen many terrible sights in war and skirmishes. Yet this was one that Abel knew would join the personal, hellish collection that contained the special moments of horror that he could not forget.
I knew his name, Abel thought. I don’t know the others of these Hurthmen. But, curse it, now I’ve got to do the same to them.
He didn’t fool himself into believing any of them would be grateful.
He moved down the line and one by one pierced the crucified men. Only one gave him any struggle, and that was easily dealt with by a wicked twist, then rocking his weight back and forth on the rifle handle.
Soon they were all dead. Abel stood breathing hard. He’d moved quickly, and he was winded. Exhausted.
He had not slept in over a day.
A shadow fell across his back.
Abel turned.
On a large dont with a huge crest of feathers sat Colonel Zachary von Hoff.
Von Hoff held his mount, which the men called Big Green, still, and, with a hand to his own chin, considered Abel.
“I could have you flogged, Major, and sent to ranks,” he said. “I expect you know that.”
Abel nodded.
“I would even be within my rights to have you executed.”
Abel knew military law as well as anyone. What the colonel said was true. “Yes, sir
, you could.”
Again von Hoff was silent. He shook his head. “But could I do without the man who won the Battle of the Canal? That is the question.”
“That was my father, sir.”
“That’s not the way Joab Dashian tells it,” said von Hoff. “No, I think for my own purposes, I can’t you spare you, Major. Don’t be fooled. It is a selfish decision on my part.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now clean yourself off as best you can and go find a mount in the train. You look like you’re ready to collapse in that bloody dirt.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“Then you will join me at the vanguard,” he said. “I’ll require your counsel in the days to come, and any example you make by personally marching with the men is now complete.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We have more killing to do shortly, Dashian. Some in battle, but most of it is going to be pure murder.” Von Hoff glanced over at the crucified, now hanging heart-stabbed and dead. “It looks as if you’ve got a start at that.”
After another long look at Abel, the colonel spurred his dont and turned to the north.
Abel stood for a moment until his breathing was under control. He took the bayonet off his rifle, wiped it as clean as he could on one of the dead men’s thighs, and slid it back into stowed position. His tunic sleeves were bloody, but it would dry and flake away. He daubed it with a moistened handkerchief.
A thirty-six percent eventuality, said Center. Remarkable.
We roll the bones, take our chances, Raj put in with a low rumble of laughter.
Abel pulled on his pack and slung the rifle back over his shoulder.
Corpsmen marched by in their eights. More and more.
When Abel turned for a last glance at the line of crucified men, the blood on the ground and on their torsos and legs was already covered by a layer of dust kicked up by the sandals and boots of the passing Guardians.
PART TWO
The Penance
Six years previously
1
Treville District
The Village of Lilleheim
470 Post Tercium
Mahaut DeArmanville Jacobson had come to love Lilleheim. Ten years ago, she would never have predicted this would happen in a thousand lifetimes. Yet the little village three quarters of the way up the Escarpment had become her home. At first, she’d thought there was nothing that changed here, the same day just like the next. She’d come from Hestinga, which could at least call itself a town, maybe even a small city. Worse, she’d stepped, of her own free will—even if it had been the will of a rather naïve nineteen-year-old girl—into a marriage of epic awfulness.
For months she pined for Hestinga and her family’s little cottage of stuccoed wattle. She’d been raised in a mid-level military officer’s home, which meant, in Mahaut’s case, lots of love, lots of off-the-cuff training in weapons and tussling (especially with her brother, who was two years younger than she), but not very much prosperity. Yet, in so many ways, living in the town made up for this.
Hestinga had riches of its own: merchants, inns, a large temple, and a military garrison. Lilleheim had none of that. It was a farming center, a place to collect olives and olive oil, wine—and grain. Lilleheim owed its very existence to the enormous Jacobson granaries at its center.
Here there were hardly any tradesmen. Yes, there was a cobbler, old Tomy Biteberg, a bakery run by the family Krakauer with its twelve children. People bought their lamp oil from the olive farm run by Jurgen Danziger, the son of Horst Danziger, a man who’d been killed by the Blaskoye when they’d sacked Lilleheim two years ago.
And that was it. There was no store. For that, you had to travel to Hestinga, over a league and a half away. And of course, everyone in Lilleheim, everyone in Hestinga, and people throughout the Land, bought their grain from the Jacobsons. This was now Mahaut’s clan.
The Jacobsons were ancient First Family blood. They had settled the village and had ruled it for generations. A Jacobson ran the mill. A Jacobson owned the gargantuan granaries and silos. Her father-in-law, Benjamin Jacobson, held the land around the village for fifty leagues and more. Anyone who farmed it worked for Jacobson as a sharecropper. Anyone who owned their own plot and produced something beyond enough to feed a family had to deal with the Jacobson mill and granary.
Mahaut was married to Benjamin Jacobson’s second-oldest son, Edgar. Now she was a Jacobson herself, a land-heiress, as the title went, to be addressed by “your grace.”
She’d found that Lilleheim did change. There was the season of blossoms: figs, dates, pricklebrush, sage, columbines, and hyssop. There was the growing season with green grain yellowing to ripeness. And then the brown season after harvest, when the Escarpment had its own variations in color and texture when she finally took the time to look.
There were variations among the people, too. There was the surge of the children into the fields during harvest and planting, back to the Thursday schools each week, back into the village when not required at home, the more well-to-do into the school, the poor children learning a trade, or—more often—running wild through the village lanes.
Before, she’d made a weekly, sometimes daily, trip to Hestinga, where she’d led the Women’s Auxiliary to the Treville Militia. She had been a natural selection, growing up as she did in a military family, and also being First Family now by marriage. This had been her excuse to get away from Lilleheim, and she’d blazed a path like few women before her. She’d transformed those mothers, sisters, and wives into a true auxiliary that had done well in the Battle of the Canal. More than just well. They had used rocketry to trap the Blaskoye horde and push them into annihilation of breechloader rate of fire.
She’d kept her position and captain’s rank, but in the past few years had slowly allowed the leadership to pass on to others. She’d done this willingly. They were her lieutenants. They would do a fair job, and not let the Auxiliary fall back into its former sewing-circle ways. The Blaskoye raiders were still about, after all, even if they dared not show their faces in Treville.
Truth to tell, she had grown tired of the trek into Hestinga. As Edgar was more and more horrible to her, the other Jacobsons had rallied around her. Old Benjamin, who was a widower, and Edgar’s sisters, had come to depend on her first as the de facto mistress of the house, and now as one of the managers of the vast network of grain shipping and trading concerns throughout the land run by House Jacobson. To her surprise, she’d discovered a talent for the task. It was like commanding the Women’s Auxiliary, but on a vastly grander scale.
Otherwise, her future was limited. A musket ball had torn into her womb during the Blaskoye siege. She could not have children. But she adored her nieces and nephews, and there were plenty of them tearing around the Jacobson compound. At first, it had surprised her when they came to her with their hopes, their dreams—and their problems. Not any longer.
So she was not taken off guard when Loreilei Jacobson and Frel Weldletter came with the expectant look of those seeking advice into the Jacobson compound’s inner garden one afternoon.
Normally no one used the courtyard this time of day. Mahaut knew this well, which was the reason that this was when she usually got in her archery and knife-throwing practice. She liked to do this within the compound so that she could walk the two blocks from her office and be sure to get practice in daily. Her target practice with musket pistol and derringer she conducted a short distance from the village within a dry hammock. Sometimes she did not get to her range for a whole month at a time, although usually she did so weekly.
Within the Jacobson compound, she’d set a target up across the courtyard and was notching the arrow when Loreilei and Frel came bursting through a side door.
The two were trailed by a servant who was trying to stop them—and simultaneously to announce them—perhaps afraid the young people might step in front of a flying arrow. There was no chance of that. She had placed the target cattycorner to the side doo
r, and there was no line of flight that would catch someone near an entranceway. She would have been able to hold up in any case. Now she removed her notched arrow, set the bow down on a bench, and went to greet her niece.
Loreilei and Frel were each a little over fifteen years old now. They were two years away from a terrible ordeal that had almost thrown them into slavery for life. Both had been rescued from the heart of the Blaskoye sheikdom in the Redlands oasis called Awul-alwaha. Loreilei and Frel both bore the scars of their captivity. On each of their faces, cut across their foreheads, was a ragged scar. This was the mark of slavery among the Blaskoye clans.
Loreilei had been abducted from Lilleheim. Frel came from a very different place. He’d been born in the Redlands, the son of the chief of the Remlap clan. It was a clan that had not given in to the Blaskoye when all other tribes were capitulating. They’d taken the chief’s son and nearly destroyed his small clan as punishment. That same headman had died in the rescue of Frel. The boy had watched his father’s throat being slit before his eyes.
The rescue party had been made up of Scouts of Treville led by Abel Dashian. Among Abel’s men was a cartographer named Josiah Weldletter. He had befriended the old headman, named Gaspar, as much as anyone could, and had taken in the boy after his father’s death. Weldletter had kept his word, and raised Frel in his house. Weldletter and his wife had not been able to have a child, and over the past year, the couple’s pity for the orphan boy had turned to love of someone they now considered a son.
It hadn’t surprised Mahaut when Loreilei and Frel had been drawn together once again. After their ordeal in the desert, though, they’d been hurt in ways that only the other might understand. But now here they were together holding hands as they approached her across the courtyard.
Mahaut smiled at them both, but she felt foreboding in her heart.
This is going to be trouble, she thought. Of course they love each other.
“It’s wonderful to see you both,” she said to them as they approached. They both laughed, as if this were funny. She considered, removed the bow from the bench, and sat down herself. The two walked up and stood before her.