He was big, naked from the waist up, and cooked out of his fucking skull. Word was the Dren passed out breath to their commandos, some sort of mass-produced junk. It was a source of great wonder for us, how they were able to get their hands on narcotics, given that our own commissary usually couldn’t provide us with bread. The man towering over me must have been saving up his rations. The veins in his neck pulsed, and the whites of his eyes had swallowed their irises. He carried a self-made mace in both hands, a fence post with a whittled handle and a half-dozen long nails hammered through the business end.
A spearhead peeked out suddenly from beneath his breast, a flap of skin carried along the end – one of my boys looking after his commander. The Dren failed to notice he’d just been murdered, whirling around with such force that he tore the half-pike out of its wielder’s hands, the butt passing over me. He didn’t scream, I remember – he must have been really far gone. I lifted myself out of the muck and started putting my sword into his head, and after the third or fourth time he finally caught up to the reality of the situation, and dropped to the ground.
I was gonna say something to the man who’d saved me but he’d already moved on, and I decided it would be best to repay the good turn. I caught a flash of Adolphus’s bulk off to the side of me, uncharacteristically hard pressed. I had a curved knife near the size of my trench blade swinging from my hip, and I unsheathed it and planted it into his attacker, through the sternum and up into his heart.
In the storybooks people are always recognizing each other on the battlefield, even find time to say a few words of challenge. But in my experience a mêlée consists of little knots of soldiers backstabbing each other, watching for any opportunity to overwhelm a straggler. The best men in the unit were wiry bastards with roving eyes, wild dogs on the watch for weak prey. In a ditch Adolphus’s size was a quasi-virtue at best, too big for subtlety and an easy target for any man with a crossbow – he did his best work above ground, where he had room to maneuver. Even still he seemed at half speed, as if slow to waken to the seriousness of our situation.
‘Get your fucking head together!’ I screamed, the limit of my wise counsel, events making further discussion impractical. There were fresh targets a plenty, all keen for our little corner of heaven. One of these seemed to have turned his ankle coming down, and he struggled to right himself. I was behind him, and made sure that he didn’t. Never even saw it coming, the lucky bastard.
Taking a trench is a tricky business – send too many men at once and they’ll get bogged down by sheer weight of numbers. Send too few and you risk the enemy defeating them in detail. You have to time your waves right, assault in pulses of movement, breaking the line then clearing out resistance. The Dren had it down to a science, to a fucking science – the very moment you thought things were starting to swing your way, another pack of gray-clad troopers dropped into your home. In theory, the spell-slingers should be raining down fire on anyone making their way to our lines, but I sincerely doubted they’d stuck through the artillery barrage. Either way they didn’t seem to be proving much of an impediment to the enemy’s flow.
At some point I’d picked up a hatchet, and I tangled it in the defenses of a sharp-looking officer, hook-nosed and stern-eyed. In another life he might have been a priest, banging a pulpit till his voice gave out. In this one he fell for a feint and I buried the ax in his chest. It stuck when I tried to pull it out, and a spray of blood got in my eyes and my mouth, and so I said fuck it and left it where it was.
The trenches consisted of wide rectangles traversed by narrow, crooked lanes, the layout dispersing us so that a lucky artillery shell wouldn’t wipe out half the platoon. It also made it damn near impossible to get much of a sense of the ebb and flow of the battle. Still, I was pretty sure we weren’t winning. Corpses lay thick on the ground, more of them than us, but still too damn many of us. There was pressure moving on our right – they’d cleared out a section of the line and were bottling us up. I could feel the survivors getting antsy, losing heart.
‘Keep it solid, boys,’ I yelled. ‘We’ll have back-up here in a moment!’ A lie as sure as any I’d ever told, but there was nothing else but to believe it.
The next wave hit us, hit us hard, and I could feel the line waver. Trying to follow the arc of the battle I very nearly lost my place in the thick of it, trading blows with a young Dren whose skill belied his age before the chaos pulled us apart. By the time it was over we were down to a skeleton crew, and I knew there was no way in hell we were going to last another attack.
Calloway was a decent sort, been with us eighteen months or so. Nothing particularly special about him – not to me, I mean, though I’m sure his mother thought differently. He was a hell of a scrounger, he could dig up a bottle of wine from ground that had been picked clear by rats and men alike, and he wasn’t slow to share. I guess I’d say I liked him, though truth be told after four years as an officer I didn’t think in those terms. Anyway, he’d shouldered his burden as long as we’d asked him to, and as my gaze roamed over the men who remained, I didn’t spend any particular time checking after him. He stood bent over his weapon, exhausted and near broke like the rest of us, and then his half-pike was in the mud and he was off.
Not a man alive wants to be the weakest link, but curiously, no one gives much of a shit about being the second. Which is to say that once the initial grunt loses his water and breaks out, it’s open season and there’s not much can be done about it. The men of ‘A’ company, veterans of a dozen major battles and hundreds of minor engagements, turned tail with every ounce of energy they had left. I did my best to rally them, yelling threats and exhort-ations, but I was never much of a speaker and no one was in the mood to listen anyway. At one point I was pulling a fleeing man off a ladder, and then I wasn’t doing much of anything.
Later, as the frantic events of the day congealed into something resembling a narrative, I would recognize the gap as being the product of a black-powder bomb detonating a few yards off. But that was later. At that moment I was gone, snuffed out like a candle.
Time passed.
My eyes offered two distinctly separate views of reality, and it took a while to reconcile them. I was lying face up, and the mud was a greedy thing, ever hungry. By the time I’d managed to right myself our collapse was all but complete. A pair of Dren, the first scouts from the next wave or slow stragglers from the last, landed feet first in our ditch, and they didn’t seem in no mood to parlay.
It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself lost on the battlefield, my odds slipping from bad to nil. Always before an immutable presence had my back, shoulders like a bear and a blade keen as winter.
He’s dead, I thought, and it cut through even the immediate haze of the fight, his corpse buried amongst the mounds of surrounding bodies, vacant eyes open at the sky, food for the rats. When I caught him out of the corner of my eye, despite everything, I almost laughed with joy. It took a moment to put together why his back was turned, climbing up the trench ladder.
‘Adolphus!’ I screamed.
He was halfway out but he turned back to look at me, looked right at me, saw me looking back at him.
Then he was gone, up over the side, and I was alone.
When I got my focus back where it belonged it was damn near too late. Only a desperate sideways leap saved me from the full force of the attack, and even so it cut through my armor and ate out a solid few ounces of flesh. The world swayed around me, tilting like the deck of a ship. I threw myself at the one who’d injured me. Sometimes you get lucky with that – a man gets too quick to thinking he’s got you. This one didn’t though – he gave a step, knowing time was on his side. His comrade sidled to my left, streaked with mud from the neck down, but clear-eyed and ready. They knew what they were doing, and I was tired and wounded. I’d played out this scenario on the other end enough times to know where it was leading.
It was chance that saved me, blind random luck. One tried for a cut to my head an
d we caught our blades against each other, and his fractured straight down the middle. Dren steel was tough as the men who wielded it, but mass produce a half-million of anything and I guess you’ll come up short a few times.
For a singular second we both recoiled, shocked at the development, then I split his neck down into the spine. Too far down, an amateur’s mistake. He collapsed and carried my weapon with him, and I had to wedge my foot against his chest and pull with both hands to get it free. If his second had reacted quick enough he’d have had vengeance right there, but the sudden shift of equilibrium was too much, and he hesitated until I could turn my full attention on him. He wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t good either, and I managed to mop him up after another half minute.
Everyone was dead, dying, or gone, the strange vagaries of combat aligning to ensure a moment of surreal tranquility. If you could ignore the screams of the wounded that is, and I’d had long practice at that. Our defenses had collapsed completely – the next wave of Dren would be able to occupy the position without drawing a blade, and from what little I could tell things were even worse to our right. The scaffolding was well used and sturdy. It had held for the rest of the platoon. It would hold for me.
I don’t know why I stayed. Wasn’t any sense of duty, Śakra knows. I was an ant, and no ant suffers under delusions of their own importance. The battle was lost, me sticking around wasn’t going to salvage anything. Wasn’t pride neither – I’d run before when it had made sense, I’d do it again without any regrets.
I guess I’d say I was just tired. Tired of the whole thing – the weather and the rats, the blood and the shit, death all the time, death everywhere. Maybe the runners had been braver than me. Four years I’d been doing this. Can you imagine? Four fucking years.
The pause lasted only a moment. Then a squad of them came out from the defile to my right, and the window slammed shut, and I readied myself for the end.
The transport trench was too cramped to allow them to swarm me, and I wedged myself into it. The hilt of my trench blade was slippery with mud, or maybe brain, I wasn’t sure. The last of my black-powder grenades was in my other hand – worse came to worst I figured I could set it off and take a few with me. They were thinking the same thing I guess, because they were slow to get moving.
But not too slow. One went off, rashly as it turned out, tripping over the outstretched hand of a corpse, stumbling toward me headfirst. A quick chop creased his brain pan, but it didn’t do anything to slow his momentum and I had to scramble backwards to keep from falling. A second followed close on the first, and we struggled awkwardly in the narrow, and then he was dying at my feet. After that they got hesitant. A few words in clipped gutter Dren that I couldn’t make out and they fell back. Grabbing a missilist, I assumed – no point in losing anyone else.
Dimly I realized that they were taking longer than they should have, that if they were out of black powder they could have just stripped one off the dozens of surrounding corpses. In different circumstances I might have wondered about it. As it was the observation itself represented the absolute apex of what I was then capable – drawing conclusions was as far beyond me as the sky is to a fish.
A soldier came into view, blue trim faint beneath the layer of mud. I blinked away the dust in my eyes and looked again. Still blue trim. My first thought was that I’d gone crazy – no way there were any of us left. I realized belatedly that he was saying something to me, screaming it, and I struggled to make out what it was.
‘Bess,’ I yelled back finally, dragging the day’s password from some hidden corner of my mind.
He bobbed over to me, the mud barely covering his parade-ground polish. ‘We thought they’d taken this sector.’ Silver clustered on his lapel, but he was young. By Prachetas he was young, too young and too excited to have been at this long.
‘What are you . . .’ I stammered. ‘How did you . . .’
‘Make it through the mud? Some new trick of the sorcerers,’ he said. ‘Real hush-hush. They didn’t tell anybody it was coming – firms up the terrain into something you can move over. Marched two companies right around their flanks. Broke their sides while you boys held them.’ The rest of his unit started spreading into our trench. Their uniforms were fresh blue, and they went about their business with a purpose. ‘Buck up, soldier!’ The officer slapped me on the back. ‘You’ll get the Star of Maletus for this – I’ll put you in myself. What’s your name?’
He stood next to a pile of corpses nearly as high as his knees. Behind him a Dren bled out from his gut, frothy pink bubbling out his lips. He begged for water with the rain falling on his face, until one of our reinforcements finished him off.
‘Adolphus,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Adolphus Gustav.’
‘Gustav, huh? Hell of a fight, soldier. Hell of a fight. Why don’t you fall back? We’ll take care of the clean up. Get yourself some rest – the Firstborn knows you’ve earned it.’
Whatever had carried me through the day was gone, even the memory of it, and I was so tired I would have collapsed right there, used the nearest body as a pillow. But the boy officer helped hoist me up, and I managed to make it back to the support trench, and from there the next half mile to headquarters.
It was some kind of victory. The flower of ‘A’ company lay dead on the field. The survivors were only barely that – I doubted two in three would ever see service again, so utterly had three months at Aunis wrecked their bodies and snapped their minds. Then I altered my assessment. The Empire needed men. The remnants would be scraped together and thrust into action soon enough.
I found my best friend huddled with the scattered remains of a dozen platoons – refugees from the madness of the battlefield, one spot of blasted earth as good as any other. His eyes took up most of his head. They’d passed out hot rum, but his hands shook terribly, and he couldn’t bring the cup to his mouth. He stared up at me without a glimmer of recognition, mute and uncomprehending. I commandeered a greatcoat from the nearest corpse and wrapped him up in it.
No man is all one thing or another, an undiluted well-spring of bravery or a broke-down craven. I don’t know what a hero is, but I’ve met a lot of cowards, and Adolphus isn’t one of them. Nine days out of ten he was the furthest thing from it, cold as tempered steel and savage as the frost. But that day . . .
That day he wasn’t.
I figured whoever they gave the Star of Maletus to was pretty well guaranteed a free ticket back to Rigus, and I was pretty sure Adolphus could use it more than I could. That was part of it. But most of it was that I didn’t want a fucking medal, didn’t want any part of legitimizing what they’d done. What I’d done. Corpses and corpses and corpses, and they pin something shiny to your lapel and you puff out your chest and tell them it was an honor. Even now I think about it and my fists clench and I start gnashing my teeth.
Of course, it didn’t end up mattering. It was two weeks before the announcement came down that Adolphus was to receive the Star. A week before he’d taken a bolt in the eye during a routine patrol, and that was the end of his military career, invalided home.
We hadn’t spoken of it since. There hadn’t ever been a reason. There wasn’t a reason for it that night either, beyond the common instinct to spark fire with those things we’ve decided we love.
44
I spent that night in the apartment in Offbend, the same as I had the evening before. As a rule I don’t do that, and morning had barely broken through the windows when I was reminded why.
Footfalls up the stairs pulled me awake, loud with an even rhythm, four or five men moving with purpose. I figured whoever was coming could kill me as well in bed as out, and I pulled the covers up around my ears.
A little while later I was on the floor, somewhat the worse for wear. The three men standing over me came from that branch of law enforcement that swell knuckles on jaws. Though insistent I dress they took my attempts to stand with great umbrage, and were quick to display their displeasure. Their leader waited in the
doorway, just out of sight, though I was pretty sure I recognized the outline.
They let me get my pants on before he came into the arc of the light, which was kind of them. I hadn’t thought there was enough left of me to be scared, but as it turned out my reserves are somewhat deeper than I’d realized.
Crowley was an ugly man, had always been so. He was squat and hard and walked like something whittled from oak. His eyes were shellfish slits through which the world filtered. As a point of pride, the freeze keep their uniforms spotless, unblemished sheets of ice gray, but Crowley’s was wrinkled and scuffed. The mystical gem carried by every agent, the Crown’s Eye, was a small blob of silver swallowed by the fat of his neck.
But you didn’t look at that – you looked at the scar that ran down the length of his face, that split his mouth into two deformed halves, curled his lips like a scrap of paper thrown on a fire. It was an old scar, but it would never heal. It had become his distinguishing characteristic, the quality marked by any observer, over and above his innate unsightliness. In that sense I thought I’d done him a favor, that night three years past when I’d carved out the discolored line from his flesh – though I didn’t imagine he saw it that way.
How does a man forget about a man who wants to kill him, especially a man who’s tried? Volume, in short – there were a lot of people who could match Crowley’s loathing of me. Maybe not quite – my ex-colleague had a real flair for hatred. But still, if I went around worrying about everyone who wished me in the ground, I’d never find time to add anyone new to the list.
‘Hello, Crowley.’
He didn’t answer.
‘All smiles, I see.’
Again, nothing. Crowley didn’t seem to see me. ‘I’m to take you to Black House,’ he said, but dully, as if repeating something he didn’t quite understand. If there was one thing to be said for Crowley, and there might not have been, it was that he was predictable. Predictable in his fury, predictable in his swift recourse to savagery. The man I’d known wouldn’t have been able to keep a smirk off his face, or his hands off mine. I guess I’d cut him deeper than I’d intended – deeper than I’d realized at the time, at least.
Tomorrow, the Killing lt-2 Page 26