The Humbled (The Lost Words: Volume 4)

by Igor Ljubuncic

  “How do we win this war, then?” Lucas asked suddenly.

  Jarman stepped away from the noise.

  “I do not know,” he whispered, ashen-colored snow crunching under his boots. “Ewan?”

  Lucas pointed with his head. The boy was standing in hip-high snow just past the last row of tents. He did not seem to mind the chill, his shoulders sagging with only a thin shirt speckled in old blood. The lad had not changed it since that day he’d waded into the enemy lot and butchered them with his bare hands. Bought them all a few days of respite. Maybe saved them all.

  “We must not push him,” Lucas warned, as if he knew what Jarman wanted to suggest.

  Jarman bunched his fists, released them. His fingers tingled with cold, or maybe chagrin. Within hours, the scouts would probably report the enemy tide approaching again, and they would be forced to break camp and start their torturous journey once again, sleepless, hungry, hopeless.

  Jarman almost wished it to end. He was miserable. He hated the uncertainty. He hated having to hear the bugles cry into the night, hated watching men limp through slush and slip on ice, with no one stepping up to help them, hated seeing horses butchered for meat, their red innards smoking in the winter mornings. He hated the crushing despair, the stink that not even the cold could smother, the borderline violence in every set of eyes.

  “We must do our best to protect him,” he said.

  “Even if it means dropping our shield around Amalia?” Lucas countered.

  Jarman hesitated, then nodded. If Calemore won, none of them would matter. “Y…es.”

  Lucas glanced at him. “Maybe you have learned something in this strange place after all.”

  “If we win the war, do we just…leave?”

  Lucas stepped past a horseshoe of wagons forming some symbolic defense around a regiment’s tent space. Several soldiers were shoveling fresh snowfall off the tarps; another was oiling the axles. More men huddled in the lee behind, gambling with strips of cured meat, an acrid gray smoke from a small ring of fire biting at their faces.

  A couple of sentries walked past wearing wide-soled shoes. They had found those with the Naum soldiers, and apparently, they helped men move so much more easily over the soft drift.

  Lucas waited until they were gone out of earshot.

  “We cannot remedy everything. We can’t make peace. We tried to help these people unite. It is up to them to make the best of it. If we win, the land will be torn, the people poor and miserable. The old rivalries and wounds will remain. But that’s something King Sergei, Amalia, the High Council, and all the rest of them will have to resolve, just like they did before the northern threat emerged. The realms were always a place of strife and grief. Ever since the first war.”

  Jarman swallowed. His own throat was sore a little, and he hoped he wouldn’t catch any nasty continental illness. “I still haven’t figured out anything about the death of that Caytorean, Rob.”

  “What about our half-Sirtai friend?”

  Jarman was taken aback. He had not spent any thought about that man. But he was always around, always seemed to pull through all the fighting and misery. He might be an asset, and his magic would be valuable. But Jarman hesitated approaching him. He did not know what he was doing here, and he didn’t want to risk a confrontation until he knew more.

  As if you have time for that, you fool.

  “Do you find anything odd about Gavril?” Lucas pressed.

  Jarman stopped walking, and instantly, the cold slithered round his ankles. “No.”

  Lucas motioned for him to keep moving. “Then I guess you are not yet ready for your first tattoo.”

  A dumpling of anger flared in the pit of his stomach. “Let us win this war. And go home.”

  The older wizard snorted. “Then I will ask you again. How do we do that?”

  Jarman glanced around. Ewan was gone.

  I am just a child playing a game of adults, he thought with a great sense of worthlessness, the words from his friend and tutor biting deep. Maybe this revenge is not just about killing the criminal. Maybe it’s about me becoming a better man, a better wizard.

  So what should he do? Try to engage Princess Sasha? Approach Ewan, demand he sacrifice his soul? Resolve the mystery of Rob’s death? That would tell him a lot, he knew, but he just wasn’t as good an investigator as his father. The moment he admitted that, the easier it would be for him.

  He really hated the uncertainty. He hated the realms. Everything was so imperfect. There was no closure to anything, just the prolonged suffering, prolonged human selfishness and pettiness, even when faced with total destruction. Nothing seemed more important than private little feuds and the dark little desires in people’s hearts.

  With no brilliant answers coruscating in his mind, he kicked through the snow, walking farther away from the filth and stench and chaos, but he knew, no matter how far he went, he could not escape them. The war had him.

  CHAPTER 43

  Mali watched the squad of horsemen approaching her force, with deep suspicion. Not northerners, for sure. A blessing. But after so long without seeing a friendly soul outside her own troops, she felt alarmed.

  Being alone in the world was a terrifying experience. Now, not being alone was equally stressful.

  They were coming down the road, Somar at their back, all right. So it would seem they were Eracians. Her patrols reported the squad to be friendly, but they had not yet intercepted them, just followed them at a safe distance, crossbows and horsebows laid across the pommels of the swords, waiting.

  Mali was standing in what used to be Ecol before the northern forces had scourged it clean. Most of the houses remained, but the furniture, tools, and weapons were gone. Her own troops were stripping rooftops and using the thatch and supports for kindling. At least they were warm.

  Since the ambush at the river crossing, she judged any strange phenomenon with a heightened sense of paranoia.

  Six men—riding almost leisurely down an iced, abandoned road, the leather-sleeved shins of their horses kicking snow, spears aimed at the puffy sky—were nothing to worry about.

  On the contrary.

  Her eyes glared south, at the former Athesian forts, now just empty husks, howling with the wind. Fields of discarded gear, tents, and tack, picket stakes poking through the white crust, their sharp edges blunted by heaps of the snow’s woolen cover. A manor house that had seen better days, scaffolding creaking, swayed and squeaked whenever a gust picked up, an eerie and loud noise in the silent city. The mining camp gaped its broken teeth and eyes at her. She thought she could see human bodies, frozen leftovers and bones, scattered across the sheared rock and inside the pits, half covered by snowdrift.

  Closer still, every building was an ambush point. Mali almost expected angry northerners to jump through dark windows, waving axes and swords at her. She expected to find beggars moaning at her, dogs and rats snarling when she passed by a narrow alley. But the absolute absence of life remained, making her edgy and frightened. Even the presence of what was left of her and Finley’s troops did little to diminish the graveyard ambiance that infused Ecol.

  How she had survived the bridge disaster was still rather unclear to her. One moment, she was standing on the groaning structure, another she was drowning in icy water, too dark to see, so cold it made her swallow involuntarily, made her chest spasm in agony, made her vomit even before she had air to heave.

  Her troops had rescued her, but hundreds had died; hundreds more had caught lung fever and died in agony days later. As she knelt in the mud, hacking, spitting bile, Finley kept on fighting, and the enemy pressed its attack. Soon, she was forced to swallow her misery, ignore the tremors in her muscles, ignore the bluish tinge of her skin, and plunge toward death once more, killing, trying to avoid being killed.

  They had won, in a way, with half the men and women dead. The bridge was gone, and they couldn’t head across the river for another hundred miles. Hardly the outcome she had desired.

>   The northern army was long gone. By the time she and the remainder of her troops had recovered and reached Ecol, the enemy had probably gained a two-week lead on her, maybe more. She was probably not going to be able to find them again before the spring, let alone stop them or even mildly hamper their advance. The snow and the scarcity of food had put a halt to any enthusiasm with her soldiers, replacing it with stupor and weariness. No one wanted to march anymore. They were too tired.

  She had been defeated.

  It was her fault. She had grown too cocky in her early successes. She had underestimated her opponent. When commanders did that, men died aplenty, and sometimes they died too, taking their shame to the grave. Somehow, she had survived when so many others had not.

  The foreign squad was coming closer. It had passed in the shadow of one of the empty forts.

  Mali lowered the looking glass, wiped the extra grease from her brow and the bridge of her nose. She handed it to Meagan. It was the girl’s personal tool, with an inscription, not a standard army trinket.

  We wait, she told herself, nervous, fidgety.

  Alexa shuffled over, her breastplate smeared in ash to keep from shining and to keep the frost away. Her girls were snow veterans since the previous year, and they had all learned the little tricks needed to survive.

  “You look like shit,” her friend whispered.

  “Is it my hair?” Mali flicked her soggy, filthy growth.

  “It’s your attitude,” Alexa admitted, pursing her lips.

  Mali nodded. “I need time.” She looked back toward the brown line slicing through the snow. The small squad had been stopped, and her women were disarming the riders. She heard a crunch of boots. Finley approached, his breath misting, a cup of something hot in his gloved hands.

  “My men found a hidden cellar full of goodies. We’ll have onions and turnips for another week or so. But we really need to decide what we should do, because we’ll have to start rationing food even more strictly than before.”

  I have been defeated. The decision is obvious, Mali reasoned. “What do you say?”

  Finley rubbed his ear. “I’m so bloody tired,” he said in a low voice so no one could overhear him.

  Mali shared his sentiment. Every day, it was harder getting up in the morning. The cold sapped all energy; the bleak, abandoned city sapped their spirit. And the bridge failure had made them all too aware of how small and weak and underequipped their little army was. Reminded them all of their insignificance. You could wrestle with the weather and squeeze fresh morale from the soul if you tried hard enough, but you couldn’t fight your own worthlessness.

  The six horsemen were coming on foot now, surrounded by two dozen wary women. They had their swords out, and their crossbows were aimed at legs and kidneys.

  Mali sighed, steeled herself. Her own retinue spread in front of her and the other officers, forming a human shield. Mali flexed her fist a few times, streaming flesh blood into her fingers. But she didn’t feel like drawing her sword even if they tried to kill her. Of course she would, she wanted to live, but the effort was unfathomable.

  The lead rider stopped. “I am Lieutenant Holger of the Second Division, Second Army. I was sent to seek Commanders Mali and Finley. Do I have the honor?”

  There was a wave of excited, hushed talk among the troops nearby, rumor spreading like wildfire. They had been isolated from the rest of the world for so long, seeing these six Eracians was almost a miracle.

  But Mali couldn’t let any emotion show.

  “At your service,” Finley chirped before she could say anything. So she just squirmed idly.

  Holger reached under a layer of thick black fur and produced a sealed message tube. He extended his hand and waited for one of the privates to snatch it from him. Carefully, a girl soldier knelt, unwrapped the hide, and popped the lid, aimed toward the ground. Nothing sinister came out, just a rolled length of oiled paper.

  The private handed it to Mali. She held the paper open, the edges curling annoyingly. Finley’s face intruded in her vision. She could hear his breath, the one clogged nostril whistling away, and she could smell him, smoke, pig grease, months of bad hygiene.

  So much had happened while she had labored north to Emorok and here. The world had gone by, briskly, without waiting for her return.

  Apparently, there was a new monarch in Eracia. One Lord Bartholomew, formerly of Barrin.

  He was calling them home, away from the madness and killing and the northern menace.

  He was planning his own war, it seemed. In the spring, the Eracian army would march west, against the nomads, to exact vengeance for the desecration of Somar and the suffering of the people. In so many words, this was going to be another Vergil’s Conquest, it seemed, and she had the privilege of taking part in slaughtering and raping the nomad tribes.

  Wonderful.

  Someone hawked and spat, adding glory to the event.

  “So we won eventually,” she said into the terse silence around her. At least something good had come out of this miserable affair. Half of Eracia had been spared the wrath of the northern army, and the capital city had been liberated. The land had a ruler once again. It had law. It had discipline. It had meaning. The sorry, ragtag army that had been raised to handle the catastrophe was now an experienced, well-honed body of troops, maybe even better than the ones she had led during the border skirmishes. Twenty-one years of shame, erased.

  If she went to Somar now, she would be hailed as a hero. She would bask in glory and flattery and attention. Going home meant hot food, hot baths, proper shits, a normal life. For her, it would be a return to her old life, her crimes long gone and forgotten. She did not have to be a nobody in Windpoint. Well, that place probably didn’t exist anymore. She could maybe retire, or lead the army training.

  No, wait, she figured. I will find myself in the nomad country, killing people once again. It would be all the fun of the past year and a half, and then some.

  But then, even that war would end one day. And the monarch would let them go home finally, take off the uniforms, and put the swords away. Only somehow, she envisioned the white horde of the northern army coming back after having ravaged and ruined all of the realms, coming back to settle that one last score, to destroy the one scrap of land they hadn’t touched yet.

  Mali would have to lead her girls once more and for the last time, fight this huge, invincible army, until she ran out of troops, luck, or both. Until she died.

  Fuck.

  At this point, all she wanted was to see her son. She missed James badly. And he was growing up without her, in the clutches of some expensive Caytorean lady. That couldn’t be good for him. She had to see him before war tore them apart forever.

  Maybe even now, he was leading his own forces against the northern menace somewhere in central Caytor. Maybe he was retreating, or pursuing the foe from behind, like she had been doing.

  The near drowning at the bridge had shaken her. She was no longer a young woman. She was pushing her luck. She could die at any moment, and it would be a great pity if she died before seeing those she loved one last time.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Major Nolene will see to your accommodation.” That also meant a thorough investigation of all he knew. Mali didn’t wait for anyone to respond or say anything else. Pretending to be busy, she pushed back through the crowd and went to wrestle with her own thoughts.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Alexa said, approaching.

  Mali slid off the coal wagon, dusting her numb rear of snow. “Do you?”

  Alexa stopped walking. “Yes, I do. And I am coming with you.”

  Mali smirked sadly. “Again?”

  Her friend shrugged. “What the fuck am I supposed to do at my age? I’ve followed you for the past twenty-odd years. A few more won’t make much difference. At least we’ll be together, and I miss that boy as much as you do.”

  Mali scooped up some old snow, its wind-blasted texture sharp and unpleasant against her skin. �
��How are we going to justify our departure? We can’t just vanish like the last time.”

  Alexa looked behind her. Four female soldiers were standing about fifty paces away, uncomfortable yet alert, watching their commander. Mali waited. “A reconnaissance mission.”

  Mali snorted. “One that requires a battalion commander and her deputy to leave the main body?”

  The blond major inclined her head. “Does anything else make any sense in this bloody war?”

  Mali left the mining gear behind and started walking toward her friend. The snow chattered under her soles, making guttural, incomprehensible accusations. “No, it does not.”

  “You can relinquish your command to Finley. You can appoint one of the girls to lead the Third while we’re gone. And we should probably take your curly northerner with us in case we come across some of his fellow countrymen.”

  Mali dropped the snowball, her fingers tingling with pain. “We head for Pain Daye.”

  Alexa nodded. “That was the last place James wrote to us from. Let’s hope he is still there.”

  Mali was about to respond when something tugged at the corner of her eye, a curious detail. Distracted, she veered away, toward the heap of old stone and broken timber blocking a mining shaft. There had been a major engagement here, sometime in the last year, she figured. Athesians fighting the northerners, maybe. Or some other army clashing with its foe. She had no idea. Lieutenant Holger might know something about it.

  What drew her attention was a rib cage. It could have been a boar, only it was ten times the size, with huge spears rising like bent swords from the ground. Part of it was still buried, and she didn’t want to stir the cover, didn’t want to know what else she might find underneath. But those ivory spears frightened her ever so slightly. What kind of monster was this? Did those northerners use some strange beasts no one had ever seen? She had heard of the Borei using large siege animals, but she had never seen one. Besides, what would the Borei be doing this deep in the realms?