Bayaz sounded calm, but his hands were trembling. Trembling badly. He looked haggard, ill, old, like a man who’d dragged a cart ten miles. Logen stared at him, swaying silently back and forth, the sword dangling from his hand.
“So that’s Art, is it?” His voice sounded very small and far away.
Bayaz wiped the sweat from his face. “Of a sort. Hardly very subtle. Still,” and he poked at one of the charred bodies with his boot, “subtlety is wasted on the Northmen.” He grimaced, rubbed at his sunken eyes and peered up the road. “Where the hell did those horses get to?”
Logen heard a ragged groan from the direction of Blacktoe’s fallen mount. He stumbled towards it, tripped and fell to his knees, stumbled towards it again. His shoulder was a ball of pain, his left arm numb, his fingers ripped and bleeding, but Blacktoe was in worse shape. Much worse. He was propped up on his elbows, legs crushed under his horse right to the hips, hands burned to swollen tatters. He had a look of profound puzzlement on his bloody face as he tried, unsuccessfully, to drag himself from under the horse.
“You’ve fucking killed me,” he whispered, staring open-mouthed at the wreckage of his hands. “I’m all done. I’ll never make it back, and even if I could, what for?” He gave a despairing laugh. “Bethod ain’t half so merciful as he used to be. Better you kill me now, before it starts to hurt. Better all round.” And he slumped back and lay in the road.
Logen looked up at Bayaz, but there was no help there. “I’m not much at healing,” snapped the wizard, glancing round at the circle of blasted stumps. “I told you we tend to specialise.” He closed his eyes and bent over, hands resting on his knees, breathing hard.
Logen thought of the floor in Bethod’s hall, and the two princes, laughing and poking. “Alright,” he muttered, standing up and hefting the sword. “Alright.”
Blacktoe smiled. “You were right, Ninefingers. I never should have knelt to Bethod. Never. Shit on him and his Feared. It would have been better to die up in the mountains, fighting him to the last. There might have been something fine in that. I just had enough. You can see that, can’t you?”
“I can see that,” muttered Logen. “I’ve had enough myself.”
“Something fine,” said Blacktoe, staring far up into the grey skies, “I just had enough. So I reckon I earned this. Fair is fair.” He lifted his chin. “Well then. Get it done, lad.”
Logen raised the sword.
“I’m glad it’s you, Ninefingers,” hissed Blacktoe through gritted teeth, “for what it’s worth.”
“I’m not.” Logen swung the blade down.
The scorched stumps were still smouldering, smoke curling up into the air, but all was cold now. Logen’s mouth tasted salty, like blood. Perhaps he bit his tongue somewhere. Perhaps it was someone else’s. He threw the sword down and it bounced and clattered, shedding red specks across the dirt. Quai gaped around for a moment, then he folded up and coughed puke into the road. Logen stared down at Blacktoe’s headless corpse. “That was a good man. Better than me.”
“History is littered with dead good men.” Bayaz knelt stiffly and picked up the sword, wiped the blade on Blacktoe’s coat, then he squinted up the road, peering through the haze of smoke. “We should be moving. Others might be on their way.”
Logen looked at his bloody hands, slowly turning them over and over. They were his hands, no doubt. There was the missing finger. “Nothing’s changed,” he mumbled to himself.
Bayaz straightened up, brushing the dirt from his knees. “When has it ever?” He held out the sword out to Logen, hilt first. “I think you’ll still be needing this.”
Logen stared at the blade for a moment. It was clean, dull grey, just as it had always been. Unlike him, it showed not so much as a scratch from the hard use it had seen that day. He didn’t want it back. Not ever.
But he took it anyway.
PART II
“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.”
Joseph Brodsky
What Freedom Looks Like
The point of the shovel bit into the ground with the sharp scrape of metal on earth. An all too familiar sound. It didn’t bite in far, for all the effort put behind it, as the soil was rocky hard and baked by the sun.
But she wasn’t to be deterred by a little hard soil.
She had dug too many holes, and in ground worse for digging than this.
When the fighting is over, you dig, if you’re still alive. You dig graves for your dead comrades. A last mark of respect, however little you might have had for them. You dig as deep as you can be bothered, you dump them in, you cover them up, they rot away and are forgotten. That’s the way it’s always been.
She flicked her shoulder and a sent a shovelful of sandy soil flying. Her eyes followed the grains of dirt and little stones as they broke apart in the air, then fell across the face of one of the soldiers. One eye stared at her reproachfully. The other had one of her arrows snapped off in it. A couple of flies were buzzing lazily around his face. There would be no burial for him, the graves were for her people. He and his bastard friends could lie out in the merciless sun.
After all, the vultures have to eat.
The blade of the shovel swished through the air and bit again into the soil. Another clump of dirt tumbled away. She straightened up and wiped the sweat from her face. She squinted up at the sky. The sun was blazing, straight above, sucking whatever moisture remained out of the dusty landscape, drying the blood on the rocks. She looked at the two graves beside her. One more to go. She would finish this one, throw the earth on top of those three fools, rest for a moment, then away.
Others would be coming for her soon enough.
She stuck the shovel into the earth, took hold of the water skin and pulled the stopper out. She took a few lukewarm swallows, even allowed herself the luxury of pouring a trickle out into her grimy hand and splashing it on her face. The early deaths of her comrades had at least put a stop to the endless squabbling over water.
There would be plenty to go round now.
“Water…” gasped the soldier by the rocks. It was surprising, but he was still alive. Her arrow had missed his heart but it had killed him still—just a little less quickly than she had intended. He had managed to drag himself as far as the rocks, but his crawling days were over. The stones around him were coated in dark blood. The heat and that arrow would do for him soon, however tough he was.
She wasn’t thirsty, but there was water to spare and she wouldn’t be able to carry it all. She took a few more swallows, letting it slosh out of her mouth and down her neck. A rare treat out here in the Badlands, to let water fall. Shining drops spattered onto the dry earth, turning it dark. She splashed some more on her face, licked her lips, and looked over at the soldier.
“Mercy…” he croaked, one hand clasped to his chest where the arrow was sticking out of it, the other stretched weakly towards her.
“Mercy? Hah!” She pushed the stopper back into the skin, then tossed it down next to the grave. “Don’t you know who I am?” She grabbed hold of the handle of the shovel, the point of its blade bit once more into the earth.
“Ferro Maljinn!” came a voice from somewhere behind her, “I know who you are!”
A most unwelcome development.
She swung the shovel again, mind racing. Her bow was lying just out of reach on the ground by the first grave she had dug. She threw some dirt away, her sweating shoulders prickling at the unseen presence. She glanced over at the dying soldier. He was staring at a point behind her, and that gave her a good idea where this new arrival was standing.
She dug the point of the shovel in again, then let go and sprang forward out of the hole, rolling across the dirt, snatching up her bow as she moved, notching an arrow, drawing back the string in one smooth motion. An old man was standing about ten strides away. He was making no move forward, was holding no weapon. He was just standing, looking at her with a benign smile.
<
br /> She let the arrow fly.
Now Ferro was about as deadly with a bow as it’s possible to be. The ten dead soldiers could have testified to that, if they’d been able. Six of them had her arrows sticking out of them, and in that fight she hadn’t missed once. She couldn’t remember missing at close range, however quickly the shot had been taken, and she’d killed men ten times further away than this smiling old bastard was now.
But this time she missed.
The arrow seemed to curve in the air. A bad feather maybe, but it still didn’t seem quite right. The old man didn’t flinch, not even a hair. He simply stood, smiling, exactly where he’d always stood, and the arrow missed him by a few inches and disappeared off down the hillside.
And that gave everyone time to consider the situation.
He was a strange one, this old man. Very dark-skinned, black as coal, which meant he was from the far south, across the wide and shelterless desert. That’s a journey not lightly taken, and Ferro had rarely seen such people. Tall and thin with long, sinewy arms and a simple robe wrapped round him. There were strange bangles round his wrists, stacked up so they covered half his forearms, glittering dark and light in the savage sun.
His hair was a mass of grey ropes about his face, some hanging down as low as his waist, and there was a grey stubble on his lean, pointed jaw. He had a big water skin wrapped around his chest, and a bunch of leather bags hanging from a belt around his waist. Nothing else. No weapon. That was the strangest thing of all, for a man out here in the Badlands. No one came to this god-forsaken place except those who were running, and those sent to hunt them. In either case, they should be well armed.
He was no soldier of Gurkhul, he was no scum come looking for the money on her head. He was no bandit, no escaped slave. What was he then? And why was he here? He must have come for her. He could be one of them.
An Eater.
Who else would wander the Badlands without a weapon? She hadn’t realised they wanted her that badly.
He stood there motionless, the old man, smiling at her. She reached slowly for another arrow, and his eyes followed her without any worry.
“That really isn’t necessary,” he said, in a slow, deep voice.
She nocked the arrow to her bow. The old man didn’t move. She shrugged her shoulders and took her time aiming. The old man smiled on, not a care in the world. She let the arrow fly. It missed him by a few inches again, this time on the other side, and shot off down the hillside.
Once was a possibility, she had to admit that, but twice was wrong. If Ferro knew one thing, and one thing only, she knew how to kill. The old fool should have been stuck through and bleeding out his last into the stony soil. Now, simply by standing still and smiling, he seemed to be saying, “You know less than you think. I know more.”
That was very galling.
“Who are you, you old bastard?”
“They call me Yulwei.”
“Old bastard will do for you!” She tossed her bow down on the ground, let her arms drop to her sides so that her right hand was hidden from him by her body. She twisted her wrist and the curved knife dropped out of her sleeve and into her waiting palm. There are many ways to kill a man, and if one way fails you must try another.
Ferro had never been one to give up at the first stumble.
Yulwei began to move slowly towards her, his bare feet padding on the rocks, bangles jingling softly together. That was very strange, now she thought about it. If he made a noise every time he moved, how had he managed to sneak up on her?
“What do you want?”
“I want to help you.” He came forward, until he was just over an arm’s length away, then he stopped and stood, grinning at her.
Now Ferro was fast as a snake with a knife and twice as deadly, as the last of those soldiers could have testified, had he been able. The blade was a shining blur in the air, swung with all her strength and all her fury behind it. If he had been standing where she thought he was, his head would have been hanging off. Only he wasn’t. He was standing about a stride to the left.
She threw herself at him with a fighting scream, ramming the glittering point of the knife into his heart. But she stabbed only air. He was back where he had been before, motionless and smiling all the while. Very strange. She padded round him, cautious, sandaled feet scuffing in the dust, left hand circling in the air in front of her, right hand gripped tight round the handle of the knife. She had to be careful—there was magic here.
“There is no need to get angry. I am here to help.”
“Fuck your help,” she hissed back at him.
“But you need it, and badly. They are coming for you, Ferro. There are soldiers in the hills, many soldiers.”
“I’ll outrun them.”
“There are too many. You cannot outrun them all.”
She glanced round at the punctured bodies. “Then I’ll give them to the vultures.”
“Not this time. They are not alone. They have help.” On the word “help” his deep voice dropped even lower.
Ferro frowned. “Priests?”
“Yes, and more besides.” His eyes went very wide. “An Eater,” he whispered. “They mean to take you alive. The Emperor wants to make an example of you. He has it in mind to put you on display.”
She snorted. “Fuck the Emperor.”
“I heard you already did.”
She growled and raised the knife again, but it was not a knife. There was a hissing snake in her hand, a deadly snake, with its mouth open to bite. “Ugh!” She threw it on the ground, stamped her foot down on its head, but she stamped on her knife instead. The blade snapped with a sharp crack.
“They will catch you,” said the old man. “They will catch you, and they will break your legs with hammers in the city square, so you can never run again. Then they will parade you through the streets of Shaffa, naked, sitting backwards on an ass, with your hair shaved off, while the people line the streets and shout insults at you.”
She frowned at him, but Yulwei did not stop. “They will starve you to death in a cage before the palace, cooking in the hot sun, while the good people of Gurkhul taunt you and spit on you and throw dung at you through the bars. Perhaps they will give you piss to drink, if you are lucky. When you finally die they will let you rot, and the flies will eat you bit by bit, and all the other slaves will see what freedom looks like, and decide they are better off as they are.”
Ferro was bored with this. Let them come, and the Eater too. She wouldn’t die in a cage. She would cut her own throat, if it came to that. She turned her back on him with a scowl and snatched up the shovel, started digging away furiously at the last grave. Soon it was deep enough.
Deep enough for the scum who’d be rotting in it.
She turned around. Yulwei was kneeling down by the dying soldier, giving him water from the skin round his chest.
“Fuck!” she shouted, striding over, her fingers locked around the handle of the shovel.
The old man got to his feet as she came close. “Mercy…” croaked the soldier, stretching out his hand.
“I’ll give you mercy!” The edge of the shovel bit deep into the soldier’s skull. The body twitched briefly then was still. She turned to the old man with a look of triumph. He stared back sadly. There was something in his eyes. Pity, maybe.
“What do you want, Ferro Maljinn?”
“What?”
“Why did you do that?” Yulwei pointed down at the dead man. “What do you want?”
“Vengeance.” She spat out the word.
“On all of them? On the whole nation of Gurkhul? Every man, woman and child?”
“All of them!”
The old man looked round the corpses. “Then you must be very happy with today’s work.”
She forced a smile onto her face. “Yes.” But she wasn’t very happy. She couldn’t remember what it felt like. The smile seemed strange, unfamiliar, all lop-sided.
“And is vengeance all you think of, every min
ute of every day, your only desire?”
“Yes.”
“Hurting them? Killing them? Ending them?”
“Yes!”
“You want nothing for yourself?”
She paused. “What?”
“For yourself. What do you want?”
She stared at the old man suspiciously, but no reply came to her. Yulwei shook his head sadly. “It seems to me, Ferro Maljinn, that you are as much a slave as you ever were. Or ever could be.” He sat down, cross-legged on a rock.
She stared at him for a moment, confused. Then the anger bubbled up again, hot and reassuring. “If you came to help me, you can help me bury them!” She pointed over at the three bloody corpses, lined up next to the graves.
“Oh no. That is your work.”
She turned away from the old man, cursing under her breath, and moved over to her one-time companions. She took Shebed’s corpse under the arms and hauled him over to the first grave, his heels making two little grooves in the dust. When she made it to the hole she rolled him in. Alugai was next. A stream of dry soil ran over him as he came to rest in the bottom of his grave.
She turned to Nasar’s carcass. He had been killed by a sword cut across the face. Ferro thought it was something of an improvement to his looks.
“That one looks a good sort,” said Yulwei.
“Nasar.” She laughed without amusement. “A raper, a thief, a coward.” She hawked up some phlegm and spat into his dead face. It splattered softly against his forehead. “Much the worst of the three.” She looked down at the graves. “But they were all of them shit.”
“Nice company you keep.”
“The hunted don’t have the luxury of choosing their companions.” She stared at Nasar’s bloody face. “You take what’s offered.”
“If you disliked them so much, why don’t you leave them for the vultures, like you have these others?” Yulwei swept his arm over the broken soldiers on the ground.
“You bury your own.” She kicked Nasar into the hole. He rolled forward, arms flopping, and dropped into the grave face down. “That’s the way it’s always been.”
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