He’d promised Liddy no more trouble. But he’d promised her a good life, too. What do you do when one promise runs head first into another? He’d no choice. Had to do this. For Savine, for his family.
That, and the thing he didn’t really want to think about—how the axe felt so right in his fist as he gripped it tighter than ever.
“They’re late,” grunted Sarlby.
Broad turned to look at him, the glint of moonlight in the corners of his sunken eyes and on the edges of his loaded flatbow. “Coming to something when you can’t rely on folk to come timely to their own ambush.”
“Shhhh,” hissed Judge.
Broad shifted back into the shadows as he heard the faint sound of hoofs, rattling harness, grind of carriage wheels.
The fear sharpened, and the excitement underneath it, creeping up his throat as lamplight glimmered on the rotten tree stumps, gleamed on the puddles in the road, caught the sharpened logs of the collapsing fence and the long shed with its fallen-in roof.
The pulse thudded in his head as the first riders came through the trees into the open. Soldiers with lanterns, hint of red uniforms, helmets and breastplates gleaming. A dozen, maybe. Then a wagon of some sort. A big, black, weighty shape pulled by a team of six.
The beam of a lantern came stabbing towards the trees as one of the riders turned, Judge’s tattered silhouette frozen before they all shrank into the bushes. Broad heard laughter, saw the lamplit smoke of breath as he held his own. That same feeling he’d had in the trenches in Styria, waiting for the order to charge, desperate to go.
The horsemen kept moving. The big wagon lurched after on the rutted road. More riders followed. Six more, maybe? That was all.
Broad eased closer to Judge. “This right?” he whispered, hardly able to make the words for the tightness in his throat. “They can’t fit three-dozen prisoners in that one wagon.”
“I’ll take care of the planning,” said Judge, wet teeth gleaming in her smile. “You get the killing done.”
“Wait up!” came floating from the road, and the column clattered to an awkward halt. The officer at the front swung from his saddle, held up his lantern, beam flashing on the logs scattered across the track. Where Broad and the others had torn the sawmill’s fence down a few hours before.
The wagon was still grinding forward in spite of its driver hauling on the reins, crowding the horsemen into a milling, grumbling mass. Sarlby brought up his flatbow, calmly settled the stock against his shoulder. Someone drew a sword with a soft scrape of steel, exciting to Broad as a lover’s whisper. He felt a sudden urge to roll his sleeves up. Important to have a routine. But it was too late now.
“Ready…” he heard Judge say in a snarl that brought the ugly tickle in his guts to a throbbing ache. “Ready…”
There was a flash like lightning, the great scar through the forest lit brighter than day, the broken teeth of the stumps casting strange shadows, the outline of men and horses frozen for an instant before they were flung tumbling in a spurt of fire. A crashing explosion clapped off the trees, a whizzing like angry wasps, flicking and pinging in the undergrowth. Something thudded into the trunk beside them in a spray of splinters.
Sarlby ducked down.
“Fuck!” someone hissed.
“Yes!” screamed Judge, standing up and throwing her fists into the sky.
Broad was already running. Towards the lamplight, the plunging horses, the swelling cloud of smoke. Pounding across the clearing for the road and the sawmill, the black world bouncing, the quick breath hissing through his gritted teeth, the eagerness boiling up his throat, setting him on fire.
His boot hit something in the darkness. Stump or root or rut. It spun him around, he fell and went sliding on his face in the mud. Near cut himself on his axe. Maybe he did cut himself. He was up again, running again, towards the flickering, smearing lights. Towards the great wagon. One of its six horses looked to be dead, the others had dragged it from the road, plunging in the traces, left it leaning against a stump with one wheel uselessly spinning, driver slumped in his seat.
Broad dashed around it, axe raised, ready to strike, then ducked back from flailing hooves, spraying mud. A horse was rearing and screaming and biting, maddened, flanks wet with blood, a dead man bouncing after it, one boot caught in the stirrup and his breastplate all riddled with holes.
Someone was screaming, rolling, wreathed in fire. His lantern must’ve got shattered in the blast, sprayed him with burning oil. A soldier dragged himself up, helmet all skewed, twisted face sticky red, trying to draw his sword. Broad’s axe smashed the side of his head in.
“What happened?” someone shouted, stumbling from the smoke. Red jacket. Gold braid. An officer. “You!” he shouted at Broad. Outraged. Not understanding. “What is all—”
Broad’s axe caught him right between the eyes, knocked his hat off and snapped his head back, arms flung wide as if he was offering a hug. He flopped into a puddle, blood flooding from the slice out of his forehead.
“Ambush!” someone screeched. “Ambush!”
A rider came at him, sword raised. Broad reeled away, caught his horse in the face with his axe. It lurched sideways, toppled. The rider fell under it, yelling something. Broad hacked at him, missed and chopped deep into the horse’s flank. The man tried to swing but trapped under the horse there was no venom in it, his sword just bounced off Broad’s leg. Broad stepped on the soldier’s sword arm, raised the axe high and stove his breastplate in with a hollow clonk.
He heard something behind him. Coughed. Groaned. Head hurt. He was lying on his face. Someone hit him? Tried to shake it off. Closed his hand around the cold shaft of the axe. Staggered up.
Everything was a sparkling blur. Writhing shadows. Smears of light. Lenses must’ve got knocked off. Only then he realised he’d even had ’em on. Shadows flickered and stabbed. He could hear Judge’s voice. A demented shriek. “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!”
A horse thundered past. He heard its hooves, felt the wind of it. He lashed with his axe, hit nothing and spun right around, nearly fell.
Someone was screaming. “No! No! Please!” And then they were just screaming. Was it him? No, he had his teeth clenched, moaning and snarling through them, not even words, just heaved breath and sprayed spit. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t see. Prickling with sweat under his new breastplate.
Had a feeling two writhing shadows was one man stabbing another but he’d no idea who was who. There were no sides. Only those doing the killing and those getting killed.
He saw a man-shaped shadow against flames, stepped towards it, raising the axe high.
“Woah!” Hard to tell, but looked like the man was cringing back, holding up a hand. “Woah, there, Bull!”
Bannerman’s voice. Broad could just about recognise it through the ringing in his ears. Took an effort to lower the axe. Far more than to swing it. Felt heavy now. Hard to breathe, chest aching.
He squinted into the darkness. Started casting about for his lenses, bent over. Near tripped on something. A corpse, maybe. A horse, still weakly kicking.
He could hear someone whimpering. Judge’s voice as well, dripping menace. “Open this fucking carriage or we’ll crack it open!”
“Here you go.” Halder pressed something into Broad’s palm. His fingers were hurting now. A bunch of numb sausages. He was scared he’d crush his delicate little lenses in his hands. Held them to the light, squinting, almost right up against his face. Wiped them, wincing, finally fumbled them back onto his nose.
Dead men. Dead horses. Mud and blood, black in the light of fires from spilled lamp oil. That acrid smell of Gurkish sugar and charred meat he remembered from the sieges. He’d thought he never wanted to smell that again. Now he dragged it into his nostrils like a connoisseur might nose a glass of wine. Burners stood about, with their bright new arms and armour. Sarlby, grinning, empty flatbow over his shoulder.
Broad’s head was throbbing. He touched his fingers to the side of it, tips c
ame away red. Good thing you’ve a thick skull, Liddy would’ve said, and May would’ve laughed. But Broad couldn’t see their faces. As blurred as if the lenses had slipped from his memory.
“Your men are dead!” Judge was screaming at the wagon. Broad saw now it was more like an armoured carriage, slit-windowed and covered in iron plates. “Might be one or two rode off, but they don’t want any more of what we gave ’em. Help’s hours away. So I’m going to count to three, fucker, and if this carriage isn’t open, I’ll bring my cannon up here and open it the hard way. One!”
“All right!” came a muffled voice from inside. “I’m coming out.” There was the squeaking of bolts being drawn and the carriage’s iron door clattered open. Judge’s men started forward, dragged someone out. A small man in neat clothes, balding hair all messed-up and a bleeding cut on his scalp, some sort of case in his hand. Or no, chained to his wrist with heavy manacles.
“Thought it was prisoners,” grunted Broad, frowning at him. “Off to Valbeck to be hanged, you said.”
Judge shrugged. “I say all kinds o’ things.”
“You bloody fools!” the man spluttered, staring wide-eyed at the wreckage. Like all this was as unbelievable as things falling upwards or the sun not rising in the morning. “Don’t you know who this belongs to? Don’t you know who I work for?”
Judge only grinned. “You’re the new manager of the new Valbeck branch of the Banking House of Valint and Balk.” The man’s face slowly fell, outrage turning to fear, and fear to disbelieving horror. “You’ve come to take up your position after I sentenced the last manager to hang and burned the last bank down. Unless I’m much mistook, you’ve brought funds for the building work, and look here…”
Two Burners clambered from the carriage, dragging a weighty chest with them, the sound of money jingling inside as they threw it on the scarred ground and started to smash at the lock with axes.
“This was about money?” Broad was having trouble thinking with the throbbing in the side of his head. Maybe he always had trouble thinking. He watched one of the Burners rooting through the pockets of a soldier’s mangled corpse. Must’ve been close to the cannon when it went off. He hardly had anything left you could even call a head. “What’s the bank got to do with anything?”
Judge stuck her lips out in mocking pity. “You really don’t see too good, do you? Valint and Balk are the fucking enemy! Just as much as the king, or the owners, or the Closed Council, or the Open. The worst o’ the lot, ’cause they hold the purse strings. Why d’you think the very first thing we did in the uprising was torch the bank?” Judge scooped coins out of the chest and let them drop jingling back. “Every one o’ these is a soldier for the cause, Bull Broad. Every single one.” Her eyes rolled towards that case the manager had chained to his wrist. “What’s this?”
“Nothing you’d want,” he said, hugging it to his chest.
Judge raised her chin so she could scratch at her rashy neck. “I long ago tired o’ men explaining to me what I want.”
“It’s of no value!” he whined, voice getting higher and higher, making Broad’s head ache worse and worse.
“If it’s of no value, why’s it locked to your wrist in an armoured carriage? Where’s the key?”
He stared back. “The whole point is I don’t have one.”
Judge patted him on the cheek. “Don’t worry. I do.” And she slid her cleaver out. “Little help here?”
Two Burners seized hold of the manager from behind and dragged him down beside a tree stump while Sarlby caught the case and the wrist it was chained to, started wrestling it towards him.
“No!” squawked the manager, struggling desperately to keep it hugged to his chest. “You don’t know what they’ll do! Wait!”
“For what?” said Judge, laughter in her voice. “The House o’ the Maker to open and great Euz to spring forth wreathed in fire? ’Cause that’s what it’ll take to stop this.” Sarlby finally tore the case free, braced his feet against the stump and dragged the manager’s arm across it by the chain while two other Burners held him, the bracelet cutting white into his wrist. A third raised a lamp high so no one missed anything, his eager grin lit from above.
“I find you guilty of offences against the people,” said Judge. “Of usury, false dealing and profiting from misery. Of delaying the Great Change. And most of all, of selling your arse to those twin plagues Valint and Balk.”
“No!” whimpered the manager, eyes bulging. “Please!”
Judge weighed the cleaver. “Where’s the best spot, you reckon?”
Sarlby shrugged. “Between his hand and his elbow?”
“How dare you joke, Sarlby, this is a solemn fucking occasion.” And Judge brought the cleaver whistling down. There was a sick thwack. The manager gave a sobbing wail. But the blade didn’t even cut through his sleeve, let alone his arm. It just bounced off.
“Shit,” said Judge. She took the cleaver in both hands, arched all the way back and swung it down with all her strength. Another thud, another howl, and it bounced off again, gouging the stump a little. Broad rubbed at the sore bridge of his nose. His head was pulsing.
“Who’s in charge of keeping this sharp?” Judge held her cleaver up to the flickering firelight while the manager of the Valbeck branch of Valint and Balk sobbed and whimpered. You could see the bones in his wrist were broken. His arm was crooked as an old twig. But decidedly still attached. “Sarlby? My cleaver’s blunt.”
Sarlby watched the whole business with an expression of weary boredom. The kind they’d all had in Styria, by the end, after bearing witness to a procession of horrors. “What am I? A knife-grinder?” The manager started howling again.
“Fuck!” snarled Broad, and his axe took the man’s arm off just above the wrist with a meaty thunk, spattering everyone around the stump with blood.
Sarlby fell back, the case tumbling free, the manager’s severed hand flopping loose in his lap.
“That’s got it!” called Judge as Broad’s axe smashed the case wide open with three more savage blows.
The manager took a great whooping breath as he stared at the blood welling from the stump of his arm, then the axe split his skull and cut his shriek off dead. Broad dragged it free of his ruined head, stood there with teeth bared, looking for something else to hit.
One of the two men who’d been holding the manager scrambled away. The other shrank back, eyes wide. Broad stood a moment longer, every muscle flexed tight, then with a roar that made them all flinch again, he flung the axe down and it bounced away across the road.
There was a pause, everyone staring. Then Judge gave a little giggle. “Ouch,” she said, her eyes wide and her pale face dotted with blood, black in the lamplight. “Always knew you belonged with us. With me. To me.”
Sarlby tossed the hand away and shook the contents of the case onto the muddy ground. “Just papers,” he grunted, holding up a sheaf of documents. Judge started leafing through them by the flickering light of one of the fires.
“Deeds and contracts and legal whatever-the-fuck.” She started to drop them into the flames, paper covered in swirling calligraphy blackening and curling as it caught light. “Won’t be worth shit when the Great Change comes, eh?” And she grinned up at Broad, letting the rest slide from her fingers into the fire. “Once our very good friends the Brocks throw down the king, we can decide afresh who owns what, who owes what.”
Broad stood staring at the banker’s corpse, his eyes a little crossed like he didn’t much approve of the gaping wound in the top of his skull. Felt like something he’d seen happen. Not something he’d done himself. He put a hand to his head again. It was hurting worse than ever. Damn, he needed a drink. But he knew it never helped. Quite the opposite.
“Look at you, you poor thing.” He felt Judge catch his face, drag it towards her so he had no choice but to stare into her gleaming eyes. “Is it right, is it wrong, what have I done, and blah, blah, fucking blah. You done worse to better men, I’ve no dou
bt, but the truth is, there’s no answers to those questions that mean a thing. Sooner you stop pretending and let go of all that shit for good, the better for you, the better for me, the better for everyone.”
“I have to go,” whispered Broad. He’d sworn no more trouble. “I have to tell Lady Savine… to send more weapons.” Like that could ever change things for the better. “I owe her.” Not even sure who he was talking to. “She saved my family.”
“Nice story. She could put it in her next fucking pamphlet.” Judge picked up the fallen officer’s hat and knocked out the dent Broad’s axe had made. “But don’t try to trick a trickster. I don’t think you care a shit about your debts. Or even about your family. I think you know there’s a fight coming, and you can’t stand the thought o’ being left out. I think you’re like me.” She perched the hat on her riot of red hair, back to front, and opened her eyes very wide. “Only happy when you’re bloody.”
Broad stood staring. The best judge of character, she’d said. Knew men better than they knew themselves.
“What about this lot?” Sarlby was asking, hands on hips as he frowned at all the dead men.
“We’re Burners, ain’t we? If in doubt, burn it.” Judge waved Broad away with a queenly waft of one red-stained hand. “Have it your way. Tell your precious Lady Savine she’s got a deal. I’ll speak to the Weaver. Messengers’ll wriggle out to every crew of Breakers in the Union. On the last day of summer, the king’ll have an uprising to make Valbeck look like a birthday party.” She stuck her lips out in a pout. “I almost feel sorry for the poor bastard. He’ll have no friends left to fight the Young Lion. Now off you pop.”
“Just like that?” whispered Broad.
“If I’m about one thing, it’s freedom. Why have a fucking bull if you keep it chained? We both know you’ll be back.” She turned away, giving a sly grin over her shoulder, and tipped that dead man’s hat at him. “Some men just can’t help ’emselves.”
A Meeting with Destiny
Savine had attended several parades with her parents and never much enjoyed them. They had always struck her as a lot of pompous guff, and her father’s grumbling about the waste of time and money had hardly helped.
The Trouble with Peace Page 41