Wartorn Obliteration w-2

by Robert Asprin

  "What entitles you to a larger meal than the rest of us are enjoying?"

  Radstac balanced the tray on one hand, her right. She was already planted into a ready stance. It was still possible that with enough groveling soldierly behavior she could extricate herself from this.

  The sergeant's tone was surly; but there was something else playing beneath his voice and a particular glint in those minute eyes.

  "I asked you a question."

  Which was significant in itself. Though this man was of rank, he wasn't yet enforcing that status. He was asking her a question.

  "I'm especially hungry," Radstac said, lacing something tacit into her voice as well.

  A small stub of tongue came out of that thick face to lick the sergeant's lips. "Are you...?" They were unseen here, behind the tent.

  Now it was almost comic. Radstac shifted her stance just slightly, still balanced but now posing herself provocatively. She let her mouth move slowly, sensually. It was all caricature. But evidently effective.

  The sergeant's breath caught. Then he heaved his heavy chest. "I could overlook this."

  "You could," she agreed.

  "But I need something to make me forget."

  "Show me what I need to do."

  He did, eyes widening in surprise at the ease of this. His hands moved hastily, and he drew himself out of his trousers, holding his hardening shaft proudly and nervously.

  It wouldn't be so much to do this thing. But Radstac had no assurances that this would be the end of it.

  "Why," she said, eyes lowering, then lifting, "I see I've mistaken you for a man. How embarrassing."

  That thick face reddened. It was a trite vulnerability she'd targeted, but this sergeant was acting out the clichй perfectly. Trying to hold up his undone trousers with one hand, he snatched a knife from his belt. It fumbled slightly clearing the sheath, but he swung it, a fast arc for Radstac's throat.

  She was faster. Elbow moving, hand flashing upward. She batted the blade cleanly out of his hand, reversed the movement, and pounded her open gloved palm hard across his mouth.

  "So, you try to rape me, then kill me. An interesting use of your authority, Sergeant. But not, I think, something your superiors would approve of. Why would they believe me, you ask? All I need do is give you a hard shove, and you'll stumble back into sight of that squad circle with your trousers dropped halfway down your legs and your lip bleeding. I'll follow, calling out for help. Then... well, then we'll see. Maybe you'll emerge the hero after all."

  All the while she was twisting her left fist where she'd seized the front of his tunic. The fabric wound tighter and tighter, and his face reddened more. It would have been easier just to have loosed the prongs from her glove and have done this annoyance. But easier only in the simplest sense, in the shortest term.

  Very quickly the sergeant saw reason, and Radstac went on her way. She had spilled nothing from the tray.

  * * *

  She turned past a row of stationary wagons, their beds loaded with standard ordnance and guarded by a disinterested unit of Felk. Nevertheless, a few of the male soldiers eyed her as she went by. With her chopped short hair the color of spoiling berries, the white scalp scar across the back of her skull and the two other scars marking her bronzed face, she didn't represent the unimaginative man's ideal of womanhood. Not that she cared a bugger. Sex was a sport in which one seized one's prizes, and playing that sport violently and decadently was perfectly within the rules. In her life she'd had her share of playing.

  As she walked, Radstac let out a low tuneless whistle. She paused, then repeated it an octave higher. As she neared the flap of a tent, the same atonal melody was returned. Dusk was making pink of the west, where full surging clouds were rallying. It was already too chilly for her Southsoil tastes. Among this Isthmus's many failings was its inhospitable climate, particularly now that autumn had taken firm hold. She slid a hand inside the canvas flap and, sweeping her small eyes behind her a final time, stepped into the tent.

  "Ah, supper! My savory fowl, so delicately sautйed, spiced with flavors exotic and perhaps narcotic—here at last!"

  Deo smiled up at her. He was cross-legged on the canvas floor, sword arranged beside him, tunic undone to the middle of his breastbone, exposing the stitches that held together the precise shallow wound across his nicely molded chest. Radstac had given him those stitches. It was only fair. She'd given him the wound as well.

  "And if you don't want that," she said, flourishing the laden plate, "there are these slops instead."

  "Now, it doesn't look so bad as all that, does it? Give it here. See, it appears thoroughly edible. By which I mean, of course, that neither of us shall die from eating it. The fowl I was talking about? There's a dining hall in Petgrad that serves it. A very choice bird. Difficult to hunt. Even harder to cook properly. But when it's done right—and oh, it was done so very right there—then it was a meal to rhapsodize over. A culinary joy better than your average buck and cork. In fact, better than your better than average—"

  Radstac squatted opposite Deo. "Food and sex. Weaknesses of royalty."

  "Of all creatures walking about on two or more legs, I should say."

  "Indeed. But it's only the lofty that can so completely confuse the two."

  "Nonsense. To compare is not to substitute. Thus..."—Deo picked a sliver of moist meat from the plate, popped it in his mouth, swallowed—"and thus." He leaned and planted his lips smartly and briefly atop hers. "There. Two categorically different experiences. But both of the senses."

  She let a small droll smile tighten a corner of her mouth. "And how do they compare?"

  "Oh, you are decidedly the more rewarding weakness."

  "Most kind."

  They ate off the plate together, without utensils, sitting with their legs folded beneath them, their knees touching. Radstac didn't bother telling Deo about the incident with the sergeant. This tent was not being used at the moment and so was their temporary hiding hole. But even its dubious safety wasn't something they could allow themselves to enjoy for long. Over the past days they had ranged furtively across the massive encampment, alighting here and there, stealing water, stealing food, snatching a watch or two of sleep. It was relatively easy to go unnoticed amidst all these units. As with any undertaking of such scope, some disorder must result. For her and Deo it was a matter of stealth, of diligence. It wasn't a difficult thing to be just two more soldiers among so many others, among this grand Felk host.

  But, of course, they were not Felk, nor captured soldiers inducted into the ranks. They were the two who had attempted to assassinate this army's topmost commander, General Weisel.

  Actually, Radstac conceded, credit where credit was due. It was Deo who had fired that crossbow bolt that—so the avid scuttlebutt went—had so nearly found its target. Truly it had been a magnificent shot. Miraculous. Or... almost so.

  "It looks like time to take that thread out. You haven't been scratching at it?"

  "In the noble family of the premier of Petgrad," Deo said, fastidiously licking his fingers clean, "we learn not to scratch our wounds from a very young age."

  "How very wise. Unbutton that tunic the rest of the way. I'll barely be able to see what I'm doing as is."

  It wouldn't do to light a lamp in here. Nights were safer for them than days in this camp, but every caution had to be strictly observed. Radstac peered closely at the line of gashed flesh. She had inflicted it and done so neatly. A cosmetic wound. It had served to fool the searching parties that were hastily mounted following the failed assassination of Weisel. Deo had pretended to be a scout, newly returned from the field and wounded by bandits. The Felk searchers had found Radstac tending to that very convincing wound. Then, during the ongoing commotion, the two of them had slipped away.

  She snipped the stitches one by one, removed the bits of thread. Deo was admirably stoic about it. Nephew of Petgrad's premier he might be, but he was no coddled noble; so she had concluded some time ag
o.

  "Radstac," he said when the last binding thread was cut. The wound had closed tidily. The light inside the tent was almost gone. They were shadows to each other, familiar hinted shapes. She had her ungloved hand to his chest, atop the healing slash.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "We have to get out of here. Out of this camp."

  "You don't want another shot at Weisel, then?"

  "I do. I do. But I won't get it. Not now. He'll be guarded. It'll be impossible."

  In truth this whole venture had been impossible, Deo's self-appointed quest to assassinate the Felk war commander. It was vastly improbable that they'd made it as far as they had. Deo's bolt had almost caught the general. Almost...

  "I agree," she said.

  "Then we must go."

  She lifted her shoulders, a silhouetted fatalistic shrug. "That's a nice thought. But I don't think we can simply stroll our way out."

  "No. We go out the way we got into this camp."

  "By being Far Moved? And how do we convince one of those Felk wizards to accommodate us?"

  Her hand was still to his bare chest. One of Deo's hands rose now and closed gently over her fingers. "I think we might find a willing accomplice."

  * * *

  The leaf was gummy, blue, and it came away from the wax paper in a slow peel. A moment after her teeth had bitten it through a third of the way up from its stem, pain—intense and expected—flared through those same teeth. Radstac bore it. She could not imagine ever not being able to handle that special pain. But if ever that day came, if ever she was tempted, as longtime addicts oftentimes were, to have her teeth pulled from her skull in order to eliminate that initial discomfort, that was the same day mansid would have defeated her, the day she would have lost her will, her strength, her dignity. If it came, her life as a professional mansid addict was done. All that would remain ahead would be the squalid, pathetic, debased existence of any hopeless amateur leaf user.

  But, coincidentally, on the arrival of that hypothetical day, Radstac would open the veins down both her arms and have done with it.

  She wasn't careless. She wasn't stupid. She respected her particular addiction, and she had sufficient faith in herself to cope with the powerful needs roused by the stimulant. Mansid, after all, brought clarity. She was very clear about its purpose and capacity in her life.

  She was even clear that she was now consuming two-thirds of a leaf, when a quarter-lune or two ago she'd only needed half. Bodies contrived to build up tolerances. She understood this. There was a mathematics about it, a physical equation. It was one she'd worked many times before.

  The pain had left her teeth. The other initial disorienting effects had passed. The clarity was enveloping her. Mansid grew only on the Isthmus, and so Radstac came to this wretched land, to fight its wars... and to find her leaf.

  She pressed the remaining third of the blue leaf back onto its paper and made to tuck it into the pouch under her armor.

  "No... no... no... please—I—I'll—I—"

  Radstac hadn't needed the preternatural clarity of the mansid to see the need riding this Felk wretch so earnestly. Yet she would be hard pressed to identify the specific telltales. This soldier certainly appeared functional. He wasn't one of those toothless horrors that lay under a blanket out of the light and gummed leaves, with no other purpose left in life. But something in his comportment, in his eyes that focused intensely on irrelevant objects, in the slow gliding shadow of his being... something gave it away.

  Nonetheless, she might have been wrong. But she wasn't wrong. And here was the proof. Dangle a leaf before a creature who desires its effects more than air to breathe, and watch the response. How entertaining. And tritely predictable. Amateur.

  This was one of the units assigned to transporting food and equipment. Supplies were Far Moved, quite an expedient method of keeping an army provisioned. Actually, with that advantage alone, the Felk were fairly godsdamned overwhelming. It was such a mammoth undertaking. Full conquest of the Isthmus. But if weapons and rations and probably even fresh troops could be instantaneously conveyed to the field, to any place the active army might be, then the Felk's mobility became an unchecked force.

  The odd thing about that, however, was that this army had for the past three days been standing fast. No movement. It remained in a state of readiness, as if anticipating the order to mobilize, but no such word had come. Both Radstac and Deo had eavesdropped on and interacted fleetingly with these Felk soldiers, enough to garner the rumor that General Weisel, following the failed try on his life, had either gone into hiding within this camp or quit it altogether. Certainly the Felk war commander could have had himself Far Moved to wherever he liked. It would be the prudent action, at least until his would-be assassins were apprehended.

  Radstac had stalked and separated this soldier from his fellows. He wasn't one of the robed wizards, just a regular troop member, one of this army's list makers and invoice checkers. The two of them were huddled behind a great stack of sacked grain, received through one of the portals and not yet distributed to the mess corps. They were out of sight. She had lured him along with a few obvious seductive flourishes. But, having brought him here, she had used the mansid leaf rather than the promise of her body to capture his full attention.

  She certainly had it now.

  "Oh?" she murmured. "Did you want a nibble?" Her smile, she knew, was unnerving. She treated him to it, there in the murky diffuse glow of the camp's many cooking fires.

  "I do." There was terrible longing there, worse than the desire the most foolish romantic felt for his object of affection. It wasn't properly said that one could love mansid. Addicts didn't love their narcotics. But need, if it wasn't purer or truer than love, was at least occasionally more damningly powerful.

  "I could give you a taste," Radstac said.

  "Please."

  "But why should I? Can you answer me that?"

  "Because—because..." Desperate search for words to express that great need.

  "No, none of that. Not why you want it. I know why. Tell me why I should give you what you want."

  He was two tenwinters old, thereabouts. He was slim, slightly spindly, a callow face, anxious eyes. He licked his lips repeatedly as his mind worked.

  "What can I give you?" he finally asked, fairly panting it.

  Radstac nodded.

  He gushed with increasing promises of money he didn't actually have on his person at the moment. She gave him free rein, letting him wear himself out. His desperation mounted as each of his offers was met with silence. She still held the bitten-off piece of leaf in view. The soldier's eyes were fastened to it. He gave a last rasping sigh of frustration, then asked, "What do you want, then?"

  "Transport."

  "What?"

  She again made to tuck the leaf away.

  "No! Right. Right. Transport. What and where?"

  "Myself. To someplace other than here."

  "That can't be done," he breathed.

  This time she reached into her pouch beneath her leather armor, extracted a full intact leaf. Turned it in the weak light.

  "This is quality you dream about," she said. "This isn't weak marketplace rubbish. This is the real stuff. A full leaf of it? Of real quality? Imagine how long this would last you."

  He was doing the arithmetic as she watched, nervous eyes fixed intently. "But—it isn't—I can't..." Heartbroken voice, forlorn gaze.

  Radstac brought out a second leaf.

  Something was strangling inside him. "We... we transport out the wounded. After an engagement we're very busy. But right now, when it's quiet, we just receive supplies. There's very little going out."

  "Someone will be traveling with me," she said as she took out a third leaf.

  His gnawing aching need was almost palpable. But it took a fourth leaf to finalize the arrangements for her and Deo's escape.

  * * *

  It was a matter of clever official lies. But in the end, it was o
nly a matter of that one Felk soldier's vulgar want.

  The wizards paid them no mind, other than to perfunctorily instruct the two of them on the proper procedure while moving between the portals. Walk a straight line toward the far portal exit point. Do not deviate. Do not linger. Keep eyes focused ahead and ignore the disorienting surroundings.

  Radstac couldn't remember if she'd visited the Isthmus city before. It was in the northern reaches, but it was entirely possible that at some stage in her mercenary past she had either fought for or against the city-state.

  It wouldn't have been her first choice of destination. And it certainly wasn't Deo's. This magic-abetted excursion would put them deep inside Felk-held territory, far behind the southward advancing lines. But they didn't have the luxury of choosing where they went. Staying here meant risking, at every moment, being discovered as impostors. Or, much worse, as the ones responsible for Weisel's attempted assassination. Better then to go. Go anywhere.

  Deo gave her a furtive assuring nod, as they stood side by side, waiting for the magicians to coordinate their efforts with their distant counterparts. Deo was affecting confidence and ease, for her benefit and probably for his own, a means of bolstering himself up for the unknown perils ahead, for whatever they would find when they reached the occupied city of Callah.

  The watch was late. Night was heavy over the camp, overcast obstructing the stars. It was cool enough to bring out gooseflesh on Radstac's arms.

  "Are you ready?" Deo asked her unnecessarily, his voice a whisper.

  "I am." She frowned. Then understood. Deo knew what this jaunt was costing her. She had paid in the only currency possible. Deo was accustomed to wealth, to access to vast resources. But coin wouldn't have bought them this passage. Only an addict's cravings could have persuaded a member of this Felk army to arrange for an illegal transport, all while a search was still in progress for whoever had tried to murder this same army's general.

  Still, it was quite a fee she was paying. Those four full mansid leaves were her last. All she had now was that last pitiful little piece... and the effects from what she'd chewed earlier. The fantastic clarity of that was still with her, but it was lessening incrementally, wearing off.