Not Exactly The Three Musketeers

by Joel Rosenberg

  Three, maybe. Four, no. But it could be far more than that.

  Erenor had worked out at least some of it as he threw his blankets to the side and rolled quickly to his feet. He shot a quick glance toward his own bag. It was packed, ready for a quick grab-and-run; the only thing left behind would be his blankets, and blankets could be gotten elsewhere. Erenor might not have been much more than an apprentice wizard, but he was a master of the quick getaway.

  "When it starts, I want you to take Lady Leria and sneak her out of here, into the woods. If we win, if we survive, you rejoin us. If we don't seem to, you can either safely convey her to Biemestren or you can bet your life that none of us live to hunt you down." His lips tightened. "The lady is under our protection, understood?"

  Erenor nodded. "Yes, Lord Pirojil," he said.

  Lord? Without thinking, he backhanded Erenor across the face, and stopped himself with his sword half out of its sheath.

  No. This wasn't the time for that. If he lived through this night, then he would settle up with Erenor for his impudence. Nobody had ever called him Lord, ever, and nobody had called him Lordling for more years than Pirojil liked to think about. And then, his name had not been Pirojil. Pirojil had been the name of his dog. A loyal animal.

  Erenor wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. "No offense was intended," he said. "But you have to understand that those of us who learn much about seemings learn to see past the surface, past the way things seem." Erenor held himself with more dignity than Pirojil could have managed under the circumstances. "You perhaps should look beyond the surface more often, Pirojil," he said, his voice quiet but unwavering.

  Pirojil tried to just let it go, tried to ignore it, strained to ignore the blood rushing in his ears.

  He didn't hear Durine come up until the big man cleared his throat.

  "I count twelve," Durine said, "and they're moving slowly toward us through the fields." He shook his head. "Perhaps this is the time we saddle up and ride out of here fast as we can."

  If they could saddle the horses quickly, if Lady Leria was as good a horsewoman as noblewomen usually were, they would still have to ride down the road across the top of the berm, because horses would surely stumble and fall if they tried to gallop through the soft dirt of the fields. And that would make them adequate targets, at least.

  But one or two would probably get through. Kethol was out there, and he would have his longbow ready.

  "Wake the lady," Pirojil said. "You first, then Erenor, then her, with me to bring up the rear. I'll take your crossbow and your pistols."

  Durine eyed him levelly. He knew as well as Pirojil did that the last man out wasn't going to make it out.

  "You should," Erenor said quietly, "learn to look beneath the surface, to accept what is." His voice took on a note of command. "If they attack us all at once, they'll overwhelm us, but if they run away in fear, in terror, can you cut them down?"

  "With pleasure," Durine said. "How do you propose to frighten them so?"

  Erenor's answer was a quiet stream of words, first so low-voiced as to be unintelligible, then rising in volume and timbre. There was a logic and a grammar in the words he spoke, but as each syllable fell on Pirojil's ears, it vanished from his mind, gone where a popped soap bubble goes.

  Wrapped in light so bright it should have blinded Pirojil but somehow didn't even hurt his eyes, the wizard grew larger, his form changing as he did so.

  It should have burned Kethol's eyes into his head, or at the very least left him dazzled, unable to see, but it vanished immediately, replaced by a huge glowing beast, easily three manheights tall.

  It looked more like a large, misshapen bear than anything else, although it was easily twice the height of any bear Kethol had ever heard of, and no bear could be that white, so white that it glowed in the dark. And its face was long, like a wolf's, with teeth the size of hunting knives protruding over its lower lip.

  It opened its mouth with a roar that was loud enough to be deafening, and took two staggering steps toward where the dozen attackers stood, frozen in terror.

  Kethol was frightened enough to piss down his leg - that wasn't the first time that had happened to him, and if he survived the night, odds were it wouldn't be the last - but his fingers had nocked another arrow, and without even thinking about it, he had taken aim, and let fly again, his blood and bones knowing that it would fly flat and straight to its target. He didn't even wait for it to hit before he had another arrow in hand, ready to be nocked.

  Kethol looked for Miron among the attackers for a scant heartbeat, then cursed himself for that stupidity.

  Any target would do. He was leading a stocky man who was scurrying back toward the road when his target shouted and pitched forward, screaming in pain. An arrow or bolt could kill as well as a sword could, but it was the rare shot that knocked a target down immediately.

  Kethol picked another target, and let fly again. The monster, whatever it was, wherever it had come from, could wait. It wasn't doing anything but standing there and roaring at the retreating figures. None of it made sense, but it wasn't Kethol's job to make sense. It was his job to nock arrows and send them singing off into the night, seeking flesh.

  He bent his arm and his mind to his job.

  Chapter 18

  Brutal Necessity

  Dawn threatened to break all golden and peach over a sea of bitter oats dotted by islands of corpses. Pirojil considered the stocky man in a peasant's rough tunic who lay on the ground in front of him, the fletching of a crossbow bolt barely protruding through the back of his jacket.

  Well, he was probably as dead as he looked, and Durine was back at the farmhouse with the two survivors they'd taken captive, but it didn't hurt to make sure: Pirojil lifted the hunting spear he had taken off another of the dead men and thrust it carefully into the peasant's back.

  It was like stabbing a side of beef. No reaction. No life.

  He moved on to the next one.

  In the gray light before dawn, dead men lay scattered about the field, their blood and their stink already drawing flies. Pirojil would have to decide what they were going to do with them. There was a strong temptation on his part to leave them to rot where they lay. That's what they had done in the old days, when they'd ridden with the Old Emperor on his Last Ride, cutting through any opposition, leaving clotting blood and shattered bone in their wake.

  Those were good days, in their way. Blood didn't bother Pirojil. Neither did the shit-stink of dead men.

  But it could be argued that leaving a trail of bodies behind them, here and now, was liable to cause more trouble than it stopped.

  He heard Erenor's footsteps on the ground behind him. More tentative than Pirojil's; noisier than Pirojil's and much noisier than Kethol's, as though the wizard took special care to step on the plants only in the noisiest possible way.

  "Do you have another one of those spears available, Master Pirojil?" Erenor asked.

  He didn't look like some huge shaggy monster in the gray light before dawn. He just looked like a tired man who had had too little sleep and too much exertion of late.

  Pirojil's eyeballs ached. He had some sympathy for that, although he didn't think of himself as the sympathetic type.

  He grunted and gestured toward where another spear lay on the soft ground a handsbreadth away from the outflung arm of another dead man. "You can have that one. There's another over that way," he said.

  He had expected Erenor to take the spear and himself back up the slope to the ruins, but instead the wizard took it up and thrust it clumsily into the dead man he'd taken it from, and then walked toward where another body lay.

  That was the last one. The dead were all dead, and Pirojil could turn his attention to the living without having to worry about an injured enemy at his back.

  Erenor cleared his throat. "All in all, it seems to have gone better than it could have," he said.

  Pirojil nodded. "By rather a lot."

  "Where I come
from," Erenor went on, his lips perhaps tightening a trifle, "it's considered good manners for all, from the rudest serf to the most effete noble, to offer thanks to one who has been of some ... serious assistance."

  Pirojil found himself smiling at the wizard's impertinence. But, still, he had a point. "Thank you for helping to save all of our lives, yours included and in particular."

  Erenor cocked his head to one side. "Hmm ... Master Pirojil, it occurs to me that a warrior such as yourself would be more grateful for my having helped save the life of Lady Leria - as her welfare is your responsibility, is it not?"

  His contribution to their survival had clearly gone to Erenor's head. But Pirojil had overreacted to Erenor's slip of the tongue last night, and even though he was sure Erenor was taking advantage of that, seeing how far he could press the advantage, Pirojil didn't have the stomach to slap that smile from his face.

  Or maybe it had had something to do with the violence of the early dawn. You couldn't be a soldier and not be able to handle death close-up. It wasn't possible to be a warrior if you let yourself be obsessed with the memories of the cries of the dying, of the smells of the dead, of the expressions on the faces of the legions of men you had cut down with sword and knife, with bolt and bullet.

  People reacted in different ways. Durine made a fetish of not caring, while Kethol thought of dead enemies as he did of dead game. Tennetty had actually enjoyed the bloodletting, and Pirojil had always found it vaguely disgusting the way she would smile and shake almost in orgasm at each kill.

  But you couldn't be a human being if it didn't get to you at all. There was something more perverse in those who felt nothing than there was even in those who liked it.

  "Is it not?" Erenor repeated.

  Pirojil shook himself out of his reverie. "Yes, it is. It very much is my responsibility, and I'm grateful that you made it possible. Of course, your own life was on the table as well, wasn't it?"

  The wizard nodded emphatically. "That it was."

  "And if the peasants had simply ignored your seeming, if they had charged upslope and stuck their spears into the hide of the monster - "

  "I would have been very, very uncomfortable," Erenor said. "For but a few moments, until I died." He brightened. "So may I thank you and your companions, Master Pirojil, for saving my life? It's not an important life, to be sure, and it's obviously none too precious to any of you, but it is, after all, the only one I have, and I'm rather fond of it, and would like to continue to cling to it for as many years as possible."

  Pirojil knew Erenor was trying to get a laugh out of him, but he let himself chuckle nonetheless. "Your thanks are accepted, Erenor," he said.

  He wasn't sure why, and he wasn't sure what the terms were, but it felt as if he'd just struck a bargain.

  He used the butt of the spear as a staff to help him up the slope. There were two survivors among their attackers. Both stocky peasant men, both wounded - one with Kethol's arrow still stuck through his thigh - both securely bound. Durine's blunt fingers were surprisingly good with knots, and it was easy to lash a couple of thumbs together if you didn't much care about the health of the thumb.

  Lady Leria watched, her eyes wide in horror. That was understandable; nobility - well, female nobility, at least - didn't have to get used to blood and pain, except maybe during childbirth.

  And it was going to get worse.

  Pirojil heard Kethol making his way up the path from the stream before he saw him. Dressed in a fresh tunic and trousers, he carried his wet clothes in one hand, while his free hand stayed close to the hilt of his knife, not his sword. He was still wearing his woodsman's leather buskins, not his boots. Pirojil smiled to himself. Under pressure, Kethol had reverted to type.

  He was still a warrior, and there was still nobody Pirojil would have preferred at his back in a fight, but Kethol had been raised a woodsman, and in some ways that was what he would always be.

  Well, it wouldn't take long with his feet in the stirrups for Kethol to remember the virtues of hard-soled boots over the buskins, and maybe by then he'd be thinking like a warrior again.

  "Kethol," he said, "why don't you and Erenor take the lady and the horses up the road to where we hid the carriage? We'll want to get moving before it gets much lighter." And, unspoken: none of us want to see what we're going to have to do with the two captives.

  He and Durine waited, chatting idly, until Kethol and Erenor had led the horses and the lady well down the road before they turned to the captives.

  That was a trick he had learned from Tennetty, back during the conquest of Holtun. Always get two captives, if you can, and then let them sit and think for a while before you start in on them.

  In a real battle, it didn't much matter most of the time. Foot soldiers - peasant conscripts, particularly - wouldn't know anything of any importance about the enemy's plans, and Ellegon was far, far better at scouting out an army's disposition and strength than even the cleverest spy.

  But, every so often, there were some things you needed to know, and there were ways to make people tell you those things.

  Durine would do it without hesitation, but...

  Pirojil knelt down before the closer of the two - there really wasn't much to choose between the two of them - and drew his belt knife. It was shorter than most such knives - when Pirojil needed a blade with a reach, he used his sword - and it was single-edged rather than double, but it was shiny and sharp, and came to a threateningly narrow point.

  The peasant was a blunt-faced man, his beard ragged and untrimmed, although his hair had been bowl-cut not long ago. His nostrils flared as he drew in what air he could, probably more from fright than from pain.

  His wound - or, at least, the only wound Pirojil could see - had been the arrow to the back of the leg that had hamstrung him as neatly as a sharp knife blade could have. Hamstringing was one of the classic ways to prevent the pursuit of somebody you didn't want to kill, and it was an old slaver's trick for preventing slaves from running off. Until he could find a Spider - Spidersect seemed to have a put a charmed circle around most of Holtun; even the sisters of the Hand were conspicuous by their absence - he would be hopping on one foot or crawling.

  Pirojil moved the knifepoint closer to the widening eyes, and slipped it carefully down the cheek, under the thong that bound the gag in place. A quick twist and the thong parted easily. Pirojil waited for the peasant to spit out the gag, then beckoned Durine for the water bag.

  "Here," he said. "Your mouth is dry, and you've lost blood." He lifted the horn spout to the bloodied lips. "Drink all you want, and we can get more if you like."

  Yellowed teeth clamped down on the spout, and the peasant sucked eagerly, like a child at its mother's breast.

  Pirojil took the bottle away. "We need to know who you are, and who sent you."

  Durine loomed above, growling. "I hurt him first," he said, his voice a gravelly rumble. "I hurt him lots. Then he talk."

  "No, no, we don't want to hurt anybody. We just need to know some things." He turned back to the peasant. "You have a name?"

  "Horolf. Horolf Two Fields they call me."

  "So, Horolf Two Fields, why were you and your friends sneaking up to kill us last night?"

  "No, no, it was nothing like that." He shook his head half hard enough to shake his ears off. "We heard -Wilsh heard about raiders, bandits, encamped on the ruins of old Marsel's farm, and we figured to capture them for the reward. Really, Lord, we had no idea it was you."

  Pirojil shook his head. There were about a dozen things wrong with that story, beginning with how easily it came to the peasant's lips.

  But mainly it was preposterous. A bunch of peasants trying to attack sleeping bandits? That was like a bunch of rabbits gathering to ambush a wayward hunter. Certainly, peasants would be afraid of bandits - but that was what the local lord was for, and the reward for leading local armsmen to the capture of a gang would be significant, and could be gotten without risk.

  Durine
slapped Horolf across the face, once, hard.

  "No, please," Horolf whined. "I've told you what you wanted to know."

  Pirojil shrugged as theatrically as he could. "Well, we only need one. I'll deal with this one; you take the other."

  Durine fastened one huge hand on the front of the other peasant's tunic and lifted him easily to his shoulder, then walked out of sight, around the bend down the hill toward the stream.

  Pirojil shook his head. He really disliked this, but he had done things he disliked more before, and he probably would again.

  There was nothing fun about torture, but he wasn't going to go back on the road without knowing what this was all about. "It's a pity," he said. "Not that we have anything against bandits like yourself, mind, but if you're going to lie to me, we'll just see if you and your friend have any coin on you, and then go about our business."

  "Please, Lord. You can look in my pouch. I don't have so much as a copper half-mark on me. None of us have much of any hard money. We mostly trade-"

  Pirojil sighed. "That's just what a bandit would say, after he'd swallowed his gold." He shook his head. "I've dealt with your type before, but I've never fallen for it. You dress up as peasants and waylay travelers. Well," he said, drawing his knife, "we'll soon see what you've got in your stomachs, won't we?"

  A scream came from over the hill. "I think my partner picked the wrong one," Pirojil said. "You look to be the leader; you've probably got a full ten gold marks in your gullet."

  Durine walked back down the path, cleaning his knife and hands of blood with what had been the other peasant's tunic. "Nothing there," he said. "Nothing except the stink of bread and onions in his gut."

  "No," Horolf said. "Please. I beg of you, please."

  Pirojil ignored him. "Help me stretch this one out. He looks like a kicker to me."

  "No, Lord, no. I'll tell the truth. It is gold, but we are not bandits. We didn't want to kill you. We just came for your gold."

  Pirojil looked up at Durine. Nobody else would have seen the way Durine held himself still, to prevent himself from reaching for the money vest that held all their savings.