The Savior - eARC

by David Drake

  “Get out of my house.”

  “Please do not make this difficult, sir.”

  “Get the cold hell out of my house, please, before I kill you.”

  “There are six weapons, two rifles, and a pistol, trained on you at the moment,” the voice replied. “I will uncover a lamp and show you.”

  “It will show me where to shoot,” said Joab. “Now get out.”

  “Very well,” said the voice. “Hector!”

  A movement to the right of Joab. He turned and fired his pistol at the sound. Before he could drop again and attempt to escape, something hard hit him from behind.

  A white sheet of pain in his skull.

  Joab awoke to find himself tied to one of his own kitchen chairs. Before he opened his eyes, he collected his wits, remembered where he was, and tested the bonds. They were very tight, cutting into his wrists and ankles.

  Someone had lit a lamp on the table, and Joab’s captors were revealed.

  They were wearing the Gold and Tan of Guardian Corps, with an orange sash that also marked them as priests.

  So they really are security service, after all.

  Which meant this was more than some idiotic kidnapping attempt.

  These men were professional bastards.

  “What the cold hell is going on?” Joab said. His head throbbed, but he ignored it. “What do you want?”

  A tall, thin man with wispy, thinning hair sat down across from Joab at the table. When he spoke, Joab recognized the voice he’d heard before in the darkness. “Commander, I’ve been sent to take you into custody and present you for court-martial in Lindron.”

  “On what charge?” Joab said in outrage.

  There’s more to this than I’m seeing, he thought. Calm down and let the man spill as much as possible.

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” the man replied. “Just be assured my orders come from the highest levels.”

  “My superior is your superior, unless I’m mistaking those uniforms. That man is General Josiah Saxe,” Joab said. “Has the general ordered this?”

  “General Saxe is on campaign in Progar,” said the wispy-haired man.

  “So what right to do you have to barge in like this and assault me?”

  “We only assaulted you in self-defense, Commander. You were about to shoot us.”

  “Damn right I was. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “This attitude will be taken into account at the tribunal,” the man replied with a faint smile. “Commander, I must warn you that anything you say can and will be used in your prosecution.”

  “Again I ask you, what is the charge?”

  “All will be made plain in Lindron.”

  “I’m not going to Lindron until I find out what this is all about.”

  The man’s smile returned.

  The smile of a carnadon about to pounce on a clueless dak, Joab thought.

  “Oh, but you are, Commander. In fact we are leaving tonight.”

  “Blood and Bones, I’m not!” Joab began to shout. “Help! Somebody help me!”

  The man shook his head sadly and motioned to one of his compatriots. Another hard clout on the back of the head that left Joab’s ears ringing. He didn’t pass out this time, but nausea rose in his stomach.

  “Please don’t try that again, Commander,” the man said, “or we’ll be forced to take more drastic measures.”

  “Like kicking the cold hell out of me and tying me to a chair?”

  “Like killing your friend, Prelate Hiram Zilkovsky. We have him, you see. Both of you are to stand trial.”

  “Zilkovsky? The chief prelate of Treville? By what authority do you believe you can do this?”

  “Again, I cannot comment on this.”

  “It had better be Zentrum Almighty himself if you have Zilkovsky.”

  “Please do not add blasphemy to the charges, Colonel Dashian.”

  “You should hope that authority is ironclad, because if I don’t tear your skin from your bones, you can be sure Zilkovsky will. He’s a man you cross at your peril.”

  “Your rancor is misplaced. I’m doing my duty,” the man said. “All of us are. Following orders.” He raised a pistol and pointed it at Joab’s chest. “Now we’re going to untie you, and you will follow me out your back entrance to my wagon.”

  One of the others, a muscle-bound pallid man who looked as if he’d spent more time in the practice arena hefting weighted, dummy weapons than on a field of battle in the hot sun, took out a knife and slit the ropes from Joab’s legs and then his wrists. “Get up, you rockfucker,” he grunted into Joab’s ear.

  Joab turned and snapped at the pale man’s face with his teeth. He was lucky enough to catch a piece of chin, and clamped down.

  Dig deep, this may be the only chance you have.

  The pallid man screamed in pain, and Joab snatched the pistol from where it was tucked in the man’s waist belt.

  He let go of the pale man and simultaneously kicked him into the two men standing behind him. With another quick motion, Joab upended his kitchen table and sent it toward the wispy-haired man seated across from him.

  That was four engaged. Two more to go. Joab whirled around with the pistol, seeking a target.

  There, by the door, the one with a jagged scar across his face.

  “Stand aside or I’ll shoot you down like so much dakmeat,” Joab said. Iron tang and goo in his mouth. Joab spat and a glob of skin from the man whose chin he’d chewed landed with a splat on the floor of the kitchen.

  The scar-faced man stared at Joab and then stepped to the side.

  Where was the other? Maybe in the other room? Maybe in the back standing guard?

  Doesn’t matter. I have to get out of here.

  Joab made for the door that led to his living room. He’d go out the front.

  This time the blow to his body felt as if it had been delivered from the inside out. Pain erupted in his back, his left arm—

  Joab spun around.

  Behind him, the wispy-haired man stood with a pistol aimed at Joab. Its muzzle was smoking. Joab looked down at his side. Blood flowed from his forearm and hip. The ball must have gouged a path through both of them.

  Then yet another flash of intense pain, and all was blackness once again.

  He awoke trussed hand and foot with something heavy over him. The smell told him it was a blanket of dak wool. There was a rattling sound, and he shook back and forth. Even in total darkness he knew where he was: in the bed of a wagon. He was being carted away to Lindron in the dead of night.

  He tried to call out again, but discovered his mouth was stuffed with rags and a rope tied over to keep them in place. Even with this, he could manage a muffled yell, and he did so until his voice gave out. With each jolt of the cart—if that’s where he was—a lance of agony travelled through his side where the bullet had gouged its path. After a long time, blood loss and fatigue overcame him.

  He awoke to the sun, as his covering was thrown back. He tried to sit up, but it was no use. He was trussed at the knees and elbows as well as wrists and ankles.

  He did manage to roll over, however. And on the other side of him lay a man whose eyes were wide with shock and terror.

  Joab recognized him immediately. This was the prelate of Treville, Hiram Zilkovsky.

  Joab tried to speak, but, of course, he remained gagged. At least now, with the rug removed from on top of him, he did not feel as if he were suffocating while attempting to breathe through his nose.

  The cart hit a rut and there was a clatter behind them. Joab looked down the bed of the wagon.

  Something odd, as if all of this weren’t dreamlike enough. There in the back was a bent-up piece of metal or something beyond either. It had a pyramidal shape and stood perhaps three elbs high and as many wide at its base. Joab recognized it. It was a piece from the Treville nishterlaub warehouse.

  He’d heard Abel referred to it offhandedly as “the capsule” several times. A capsule containing wh
at, Joab did not know.

  Why had they brought this along, of all things?

  The cart trundled on, each jolt painful to his wound, his joints aching to move, his tongue jammed into the back of his mouth, his throat desperate to swallow.

  What in Zentrum’s name was going on?

  Joab knew better, but he began to wonder what the charges against him could possibly be, and how he would answer them.

  He knew this was a fantasy. There wasn’t going to be any real trial. There wasn’t going to be any real anything. He was well and truly fucked.

  That much he might come to terms with.

  But what hurt him the most, what he feared he might never get past if it were true, was his sneaking suspicion that he would never see his beloved Treville again. Or his son.

  2

  Orash

  Progar District

  The Guardian Corps buried their dead and burned the Progarmen for two days. And then they marched on Orash.

  Abel had been prepared to face a siege, possibly a long one despite the few defenders remaining. Ambush and trickery. Unexpected mountain weather. What he found left him stunned.

  Orash was a city of death.

  Center, did you know this would happen?

  It was always a strong possibility. There was no reason to discuss it until now.

  Because you thought I might try to do something about it?

  That was one factor.

  Fuck you.

  Difficult.

  * * *

  The Progar militia was in the city—about fifteen thousand survivors—but any thought of defense had collapsed when they’d marched through the Orash gates after the battle at Fish Pens. Two days later, the Corps arrived and encamped on the Plains of Orash. Almost immediately, the gates of the city opened and a man rode forth on one of the smallish, wiry donts the Progarmen preferred.

  He approached over the plains and was in sight for a long spell. He rode slowly, holding aloft a fluttering white cloth fixed to a bayonet.

  “What in the name of Zentrum?” said von Hoff after he’d been called to observe the approaching militiaman.

  Von Hoff sent Abel and Muir, commander of the Second, out to bring the man in.

  His name was Paulus, and he called himself the leader of “Bigelow’s Boys,” the largest of the Progar militia divisions, he claimed. He all but surrendered in his first breath.

  When the general heard this, Abel saw von Hoff noticeably cringe.

  Paulus seemed to be in a hurry to give up everything as quickly as possible and return to the city, but von Hoff forced him to stay and negotiate the exact terms.

  Throughout the talks, there was a haunted look in Paulus’s eyes that did not seem to Abel to come from military defeat alone.

  He looks as if someone has reached inside and pulled out his soul, Abel thought.

  Von Hoff ended up demanding that the Corps would need more time before they entered the city and accepted the formal surrender of arms. Von Hoff was careful to have Paulus repeat the exact timing of the surrender von Hoff offered: two days hence at dawn.

  “You understand that things might not go well for you after that,” von Hoff told the man. “The Abbot of Lindron does not deal mercifully with heretics. Any we find guilty of heresy, we have orders to kill.”

  “Yes, I understand,” the Progarman said with a distracted air of resignation.

  “Do you truly, Captain Paulus? I will carry out those orders.”

  Suddenly a sob shuddered through Paulus’s body. He shook his head and stared at the floor. “What does it matter now?” he said, as if to himself. “Many of us are ready to die.”

  Von Hoff was exasperated. He repeated his previous directive very carefully. “Captain, I’m giving you two day’s advanced warning. Do you understand me? I’m trying to tell you that your militia must not disband and flee the city. That would make it much more difficult to find and execute the guilty.”

  Paulus looked at him with a gaze of empty despair.

  Von Hoff leaned over the negotiating table, shook Paulus by the shoulders. “Listen to me, Captain. We will have our hands full preparing to administer Orash. There will be no patrols of the city exits for the next two days.”

  He may as well be shouting: “I want you to get out while you can” at the top of his voice, Abel thought.

  “I understand if we flee individually you will not stop us,” Paulus said. “I’ll pass this along. I don’t think it will make much difference. Most of us have lost our wives, our children. Everything. We’re prepared to die.”

  “What do you mean ‘lost your wives and children’?”

  “You will see.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I cannot…I cannot speak of it. You will see.”

  Von Hoff sat back, shook his head. “All right then, Captain, you evidently have no intention of allowing a poor general to wash his hands of any of this. Dawn on the day after tomorrow it is. You will open the gates in unconditional surrender, and we will take control of the city. There will be firing squads.”

  “Yes, sir,” Paulus said. He looked over at his dont, staked nearby. “I will be going now.”

  “Stay, man. Surely we can stand you a drink before you’re off,” von Hoff said, but Paulus appeared not to hear. He strode numbly over to his mount, climbed into the saddle, and rode back across the plain at the same funereal pace that had brought him to them.

  At dawn two days hence, true to his word, von Hoff marched the Corps in through the city’s main gate.

  What was that awful smell?

  The militia were not there to surrender. For a moment, Abel feared ambush.

  No. There is no organized resistance in this place.

  The Guardian vanguard marched slowly forward. Then they saw that there were Progarmen about. Individually, in small groups. Here, sitting on stoops and hanging their heads, there, walking about in twos and threes, each man with empty eyes, were the Progarmen. A few appeared to be scavenging, or desolately looking for something, at least.

  And the smell was intense. He’d walked among dead bodies for the past two days, but even that was nothing like this, nothing like—

  “Blood and Bones, turn around!” It was the voice of one of von Hoff’s command staff. He’d happened to glance around behind to see if all were following correctly, and so was the first to glimpse the bodies.

  They hung like peppers from the city walls, clumped in layers five or six people deep. Many had been gutted or shot, but most had been left to choke to death. There were women, women old and women young. There were old men. There did not seem to be any children, however.

  That is not a good thing, rumbled Raj.

  It looked as if a few of the hanged people had managed to escape their bonds, slip a noose, and scramble down. These lay beheaded at the base of the wall, stacked in separate piles of heads and bodies.

  There were dont hoof prints everywhere on the dusty ground.

  Now Abel understood the smell. Death seemed to hang visibly in the air. Insectoids rattled, swarming to their meals.

  Timon, who stood beside Abel, seemed to crumple like a stone wall that suddenly gives, its mortar undermined by weathering. Until this moment—in fact as long as Abel had known him—Timon had been rock steady in all circumstances. Even when he’d been shot in the arm, he’d barely flinched, and he was enduring the first painful stages of healing stoically. But this was too much for him.

  He began to gasp. He tried to catch his breath, but could not. Abel moved to shore him up, and saved his friend from falling to the ground. Instead Timon bent over with his good hand on a knee. He gasped heavily until he finally caught enough of his breath to stand up.

  “They aren’t here,” he said, when he could speak. “The children aren’t here.”

  “I see that.”

  “They’ve been taken as slaves. That’s where they are, isn’t it, Abel?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Timon wiped his eyes,
shook his head. “That’s what it is,” he said.

  “Yes, Timon.”

  “What kind of God lets that happen?”

  If only you knew.

  Timon didn’t wait for an answer. He began to nod, as if a new thought had come to him. His smiled a terrible smile.

  “No,” he said. “This was the plan all along. The question is: What kind of God makes this happen.”

  “The Blaskoye did this.”

  “No,” Timon said with an angry laugh. “The Blaskoye are a tool.”

  Abel nodded. “Yes.” He put a hand on Timon’s shoulders. “Maybe some of them got hidden. Maybe some escaped. Let’s go look.”

  With no one offering to surrender and no challenge, the Guardians streamed into Orash by unit, each ordered to find billets within a ten-block radius of the gate. A few moved to beat up lingering Progarmen, but soon gave up. There was no sport in it. There were many empty dwellings. Von Hoff immediately deployed a detail to take the hanged bodies from the wall and sent workers and wagons to clean up the decapitated corpses. All were taken to an area of dry ravines a half league from the city, and—most importantly—in a position that was lower than the city’s water supply. There was some attempt to powder the dead with lime, but there were too many and the supply soon ran out. Most were left in the gulches to rot.

  Landry returned from completing this task somber and red-eyed. He spoke only with monotone short replies for several days after.

  An inter-brigade security detail was set, and these guards managed to contain the sacking of Orash to petty looting. Pickings were lean, in any case. The Blaskoye had already done a good job of stripping Orash of wealth.

  The men of Progar docilely accepted their new masters. When von Hoff ordered them back to their work and took many away in work groups, most of them seemed relieved.

  They were still technically under death sentence, but no one, even the chaplains, had the stomach for the task just yet. It could wait. These men weren’t going anywhere.

  Many of them seemed like sheep waiting for the slaughter, perhaps even longing for it.

  After having won so decisively, this did not seem much of a victory.

  Timon spent several days searching for survivors—and not in vain. There were some living women, and a handful of children. They emerged from hiding places when the need for food and water drove them out.