by wildbow
“When our front line breaks, the mass of people between this position and the enemy front line will disappear, and we will simultaneously drive the primordials forward, into enemy lines. The stitched who have been fighting are running hot, the people giving them orders are tired, less focused, and less organized. The primordials will tear into their lines, as any good warbeast might. The difference here is that the primordials mandate a specific, overwhelming response. Ordinary bullets and weapons shouldn’t put them down.”
He was telling us his strategy?
He didn’t expect to let us go before it mattered. Even if we ran or had absolute free reign to act as we wanted from this moment onward, I doubted there was much we could do, except maybe keep the primordials from being set free, or set them free earlier. None of those scenarios boded well for Jamie, Lillian, and me.
“Lillian could tell you how dangerous this is. You’re playing with fire, using the primordial life like this.”
“I’m aware of the dangers,” Mauer said. “I’ve worked with it before. On both sides of the conflict.”
I frowned. It was so strange to see him in this context. Outside of Brechwell, maybe, and the time we’d had tea with him on first meeting, I’d never seen him simply conversing. In both of those places, he’d been acting.
Had he reached his limit, was he catching his breath from the command of a city-sized rebellion, here in this sanctuary, where the walls and heavy wagons blocked out some of the outside noise?
“The Battle of Foster,” Jamie said. “You were there when the small Academy was studying Primordials.”
“Yes,” Mauer said. He turned, and cranked a knob on a tank below a kettle, before reaching for matches. He lit the tiny gas stove, then started filling a kettle. “When we’re children, we believe our parents are invincible, capable of anything. Then reality hits, we see their flaws. Foster was when reality first came knocking, for me, the Academy and Crown were like parents to me. Foster was a schism between Crown and Academy. Well, a subset of Academies. Two months of lead-up, and it ended very quickly.”
“What happened?” Jamie asked.
A kettle, now filled, was perched on the stove.
“That doesn’t matter. But I was there for the duration. It wasn’t what broke my loyalty to the Academy and the Crown. That came later, after I saw the incidents repeat and become a pattern.”
Even now, in these close confines, with no need or pressure to manipulate or win us over, taking a break from rallying the crowds and commanding a small army, he still modulated his voice, chose his words with care, suggesting just how natural his skill with it all was. I was getting wrapped up in the words, craving to know more about Foster and his origins, pulled into his spell.
But with the word ‘pattern’, I thought of my best friend Jamie, of Gordon, of Hubris, of Lillian. I could see the pattern emerging, I could see where it went, and that thought kept me from getting cozy.
“A pattern punctuated by what they did to your arm?” I asked.
“Something always brings it home,” Mauer said, meeting my eye.
The look and the words made me want to get up out of my seat and leave. As a prisoner of war, I didn’t have that option.
“Fray tasked me with looking after the primordial creatures for a reason,” Mauer said, leaning back. “The nobles, assuming you’re telling the truth, pose a greater threat. I’ve seen others on the battlefield. I anticipated meeting one at most, not—”
“Four,” Jamie said.
“Six if you count the Twins as two pairs,” I said.
“If we ignore the ones who were chasing you, what do you expect will happen?” he asked.
“They infiltrate your lines, they kill us, your lieutenants, or you, if not everyone,” I said. “Given the chance, they might even make it look easy.”
He didn’t even blink at that. “What does it take to kill them?”
“Lillian knows,” Jamie said. “But she’s in the care of your doctors.”
“In terms of men with guns, then,” Mauer said. “How many?”
“Forty, at the very least,” I said. “Might give you good odds, if they know what they’re doing. But if things go south, I don’t think there’s a nice middle ground where half the men die and you hurt the nobles. If your men start dying, they all die, toppling like dominoes. Those creatures are like bolts of lightning, they’ll strike one target and carry on through while the rest are still getting their footing.”
“I’m not going to give you good soldiers,” Mauer said.
Give us?
“I’m not going to give you forty men, either.”
He was turning us back around and sending us into open combat with the Twins, damn him.
I might have resisted, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I’d been willing to get shot to buy Lillian and Jamie a chance. This was something similar, but it was a killing deferred, out of view of the crowd.
“Win-win for you,” I said. “You keep Lillian, so you have us on a leash if we succeed, and if we fail, then the Twins are at least distracted and the Lambs are removed as a threat.”
“Is that a problem?”
I shook my head. When I looked up from the table, he was staring at me, scrutinizing me.
“It’s not a problem,” I said, in case he was waiting for a verbal answer.
“You’re so resigned to it,” he said. “At an age when you should be playing ball in the streets, fawning over girls, sneaking drink from your parent’s cabinets to share with your friends, and counting change to buy candy from the store.”
“My girl has a hole through her stomach, and she’s lying in your medical tent or wherever,” I said. “My best friend is gone forever, and someone wearing his face is sitting three feet to my left. My other friends are hours away, or are lying dead in a house a short distance away, being cremated as the house burns up around them.”
Why am I telling him this?
Why is he even showing an interest?
“I know soldiers who couldn’t put the gun away, even after it left their hands,” Mauer said. “I could be one of them. So many men who couldn’t stop fighting, or who were afraid to. Prisoners? Same thing. Finally freed, somehow escaping getting netted by the Academies and subjected to one torture or another in the name of advancement, they don’t know themselves without the stained, black-and-white striped prisoner’s tunic. I’ve seen it with parents, the ones with hard children, where the child takes so much attention that whole days pass where the mother or father don’t think for themselves. Only for the job. The child grows up, the job is no longer needed, and the parent, like the prisoner or the soldier is—”
“A shell,” Jamie said.
Mauer took the kettle, a small jar, and a mug from spaces to his right, putting loose leaf tea into the mug before pouring himself a cup.
I knew a lot of tea drinkers, and the fact that he hadn’t served or even offered us any tea was as good as a cardinal sin. I couldn’t think of a better, more vulgar way to give the two of us the middle finger and say ‘we are not friends, here’.
“Don’t think that you’re something special, or that any connection exists between us,” Mauer said. “I’ve seen so many others walk this path, I have no sympathy for you any more than I have sympathy for them.”
There it is.
He’d been telling the truth, that he’d asked the same questions, he’d been a soldier, he’d lost his identity, and he had rebuilt it.
He’d climbed the mountain, and now he was looking down on others who were still climbing and faulting them for not having the strength he did.
“You still spared me,” I said.
“The anger is there. Genevieve Fray talked about it. You’ve already made the decision to turn your back on the Academy and Crown, I think. You don’t really want to hurt me. If I turn you loose, what happens? A high chance you die. If you cross that hurdle, there’s a high chance you get that last, tiny push, and you turn on them.”
If I can climb the
mountain…
He finished, “…and a small chance you turn on me. Can I roll those dice? Should I?”
“You did,” I said. “And something tells me there’s more to it.”
He smiled, sipping his scalding tea. The look in his eyes, though, was back to that darkness, without the light of fire reflecting in the orbs. I well and truly believed he didn’t give a damn whether we lived or died.
He wasn’t going to share.
“Ten men,” he told us. “You’ll get the equipment you need and want. Stanley will take you out to the fringe of the battlefront. The men I sent out to recruit with orders to hunt the nobles are going to have heard about the bounty I offered, or they’ll want away from the front line. Whatever their reason, you’ll ask for help, and they’ll offer it. You’ll find tired men, dregs, and drunks, some less capable of following orders than dogs. I’ll assume the Twins will be waiting for you?”
I nodded.
“Do what you can with the nobles. When you come back, don’t come straight back or retrace your steps. By the time you’re done, the primordial beasts will be loose. If you head straight back, you may run headlong into their mouths. Your Lillian should be waiting for you, and you can see how she is.”
I nodded once again, glancing at Jamie.
The prospect of going up against the Twins again spooked me. I was willing to admit that to myself.
Fear and pain were things I could master and mold with wyvern flowing through the capillaries of my brain. But, as with my inability to fight, as with the lies, there was always the possibility that an external force or ingrained habit could do the molding for me, leaving a deep, powerful impression.
“Death looks over everyone’s shoulder,” Mauer said. “One eye on what they’re doing, one eye on his watch. There’s nothing special about your Death. Yet you let it rule your life. You’ll find yourself so free once you realize how little power it has.”
“That’s a pretty goddamn shitty thing to say to someone who’s friend just died,” I said.
Mauer’s eyes were still dark and penetrating as he stared at me, unflinching. “How many of my friends and colleagues do you think died tonight, Sylvester? Some at mine, indirectly. Some at your hands, directly. Some at the Nobles’.”
“And it doesn’t bother you?”
“I’ve been bothered for so long and to such depth that even those deaths can’t be put into perspective,” he said, and his voice was cool, cold, and disaffected, “I could kill every last noble and every last demented doctor who perverts something that should be good, and I don’t think it would be any better than a drop of water to a man dying of thirst. I could keep fighting until every last soldier is dead and my weapons broken to pieces, and I would claw at my enemies with my fingers, until those fingers were worn down to nubs.”
“That sounds like madness, not greatness,” I told him.
“The difference between the two, Sylvester, is that if it were madness, I would have to, and I would be remembered for it. But I don’t have to. This war can be won, and if I see my way to the end of the fight, then I will be remembered as great.”
He paused, holding up his steaming mug, before continuing, “The Academy is big, and fighting it requires a character that is incapable of giving up the fight. I have the character. A small part of the reason I spared you is that I think you have it too. If you’re willing to recognize it.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. It felt like a compliment and an insult at the same time, and he’d delivered it with conviction. Not in the way he’d addressed a crowd, but to me as an individual.
His words rang in my ear as I turned away, leaving the wagon with our soldier escort.
Jamie fell into step beside me, glancing my way.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Jamie said.
“He already did,” I said. “After we arrived at the camp, before he took us to his wagon.”
“Don’t give any more ground, then,” Jamie said.
I nodded.
The soldier led us forward, one hand on each of our shoulders, steering us as we navigated a crowd that got thicker with every few steps. I could smell sweat and fear, mingling with smoke. The heat of the crowd and torches melted the precipitation that was still at the razor’s edge between snow and rain.
Jamie and I were steered into an alley, where soldiers were sitting against the wall, staring at the ground between their feet, weapons propped up around them or sitting across their laps. Men and women, people with body modifications, Brunos, and people with barely any physical changes at all.
“We need soldiers for a special mission,” Gene said. His voice had a ragged edge to it, as if his throat had been damaged at some point in the past. “There’s a bounty. Five year’s worth of pay, Mauer says.”
Heads raised. I could see interest in eyes.
“Hand up if you’re interested,” Gene said. “Chance to get away from this, you’re hunting through territory that was deemed safe with past patrols, looking for a single unit.”
Slowly, one by one, they raised their hands.
“Nobles,” I said, loud enough to be heard. “Two of them.”
I saw the reaction. Hands dropped. Others flinched in surprise.
“The children are coming with us?”
“Shush. That was the boy Mauer was talking to, ten minutes ago.”
“I thought he was an enemy? He was an enemy, right?”
“They were,” Gene said. “Mauer turned them around. We get help finding who we’re looking for and taking them out, in exchange for healing the kid’s friend.”
I could hear the commotion, and a part of me registered it, taking note of particulars. Another part of me was thinking on another level.
Adam, who I’d met yesterday, was here. The Bruno who’d actually been decent to me. He was looking at me as if I was something alien.
Pick ten, I thought, looking them over. I could read the clues and the cues, and identify the troublemakers, the drunks, the people who were on their last legs. There were people who were strong, and people who had been malnourished for much of their lives, living in this city I was growing to hate so much.
It was a deeper challenge from Mauer, echoing our parting exchange, turning the table so I was now in the position of being callous.
Pick ten, knowing there was a good chance they would die, picking this particular fight.
Previous Next
Counting Sheep—9.11
I looked over grown and not-yet grown men and women, my mind leaning into a perspective where I could focus more on details, the little clues.
The man who sat close to me had longer hair and a scruffy beard, hands bearing a mix of fresh blisters and new calluses, his nose red and running, his face padded at the edges and features creased like someone five years older than he was. A drunk. He likely worked whatever job he could find to earn money and then subsisted off of that money as he slumped off into long binges. The way he sat against the wall suggested he had no plans of standing up and rejoining the fight. Any light I saw in his eyes was because of the potential money. He would work only as hard as he had to in order to get that money. A surly and tractable character otherwise.
A young woman with decorative bony ridges at the cheekbones and the bridge of her nose was staring at me with yellow eyes. Her arms and legs had been both tattooed and modified to be a half-foot longer each. Lean with muscle, I could put her in the same mental box as the ‘Brunos’. Where they were loaded to bear with muscle and sheer mass, she was lean. I could imagine her crawling on the outside of a ship in construction or up the face of a building.
But as I searched her, I could see her expression shift a fraction. The bony ridges at her nose hid the wrinkling there, but her upper lip pulled up. A snarl, or an indication of disgust. The tension in her shoulders gave the rest away: she wouldn’t listen to me. I had no idea why she seemed to instinctively react that way to me, but I did know that I could pick her, get her a gun, and we
would effectively be two Lambs and nine individuals, with her as a tenth individual doing her own thing.
I took a few seconds for everyone in the alleyway. Throughout, I was trying to look for the balance. She has kids. He’s a fighter with a mean streak. He’s unhinged. That one won’t stop shaking long enough to hold a gun without dropping it, let alone aim it.
If I picked the decent, cooperative, competent individuals, and I was potentially killing them. If I picked the dregs and the useless assholes, I would be going into the fight with only what Jamie and I brought to the table and ten liabilities with guns.
“I get to pick them, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Gene said. “Don’t take too long.”
Mauer’s timeline, I reminded myself. In a matter of minutes, the front line could give way. He had a strategy, and Jamie and I were now cogs in a machine comprised of people.
“Hands up again, let’s see everyone who’s interested,” I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the chaos in the street behind us. The fighting at the front line wasn’t all that far away.
In the space of the alleyway and the people in the street just behind Gene, Jamie and I, a good forty hands went up.
“If you could describe yourself as a bastard, keep your hand up!” I said, “Otherwise, put it down!”
I saw confusion. Only a very small few hands went down. Adam, the Bruno who had helped me out yesterday, wasn’t among them. Surprising.
Didn’t help to narrow down the numbers, not really.
I ran my hand under my hood and over the top of my head, damp hair running between the fingers. My scalp still hurt where the Baron had picked me up by my hair.
“If you’ve ever killed, stand up,” I said.
Four people stood. The drunk I’d observed earlier was among them, joined by a man with a broad belly and tattoos covering his exposed skin, a scrawny man who sported a tattoo at the neck that was obviously a gang identifier, likely from prison, and a surly looking bastard with an obvious untreated medical condition at the neck, akin to a goiter.
“You two sit down,” I said, pointing at the drunk and the scrawny gang member. I then indicated Tattoo Belly and Goiter, “You two, come stand behind me.”