by Matt Wallace
Neither Jochi nor Burr offers any citation.
“Can you, Lexi?” Stru asks, and if she didn’t know better she’d think he was as amused as Jochi by this turn of events.
“No, I cannot. And trust me, Senior Councilman…” Lexi glances at Taru, the two of them sharing the weights of five sleepless nights beneath their eyes. “…we looked.”
Councilman Jochi actually laughs. It’s brief and restrained, but it’s enough to draw daggers from Councilwoman Burr’s gaze.
Stru, meanwhile, is nodding thoughtfully and enough to jostle every inch of loose flesh hanging from his skull.
“Very well,” he proclaims, finally. “By the laws of Crache and the subsets of our own Gen Franchising doctrine, many of them laid forth by this very Council, I must overturn our previous decree. Gen Stalbraid’s franchise will remain in good standing until such time as the fate of Brio Alania can be invariably determined.”
Lexi bows at the waist, a most ancient custom rarely observed anymore save for the most formal of state functions, but one that feels right to her in that moment.
“My Gen thanks you, Councilmembers.”
Councilwoman Burr is already standing from her seat to adjourn. Steam is practically rising from her skin, and Jochi watches his fellow councilmember fume as she stomps off with unmasked pleasure.
Senior Councilman Stru remains focused on Lexi. “You should bear in mind, the Protectorate Ministry may see fit to resolve this matter by presenting new facts.”
“If they do so, it will have to be in open session, and in that case I look forward to sharing whatever information they feel is pertinent. And answering any charges to the best of my ability.”
Stru smiles, and in that moment Lexi regrets the harsh words she spoke of the man.
“I imagine you do,” he says, kindly. “I imagine you would.”
He rises with concerted effort, although he does so unaided.
“Good day, Te-Gen. This session stands closed.”
“Good day, Councilman.”
Lexi bows once more to Stru, and then to Jochi, who dips his round chin in return with a cattish grin.
“And please give Councilwoman Burr my deepest respects. She departed so abruptly.”
She turns and begins descending the steps that end just before the chamber doors, Taru taking smaller strides than they need in order to keep pace with their much slighter charge. The Aegins guarding those doors pull the heavy stone slabs open upon their approach.
“Congratulations, Te-Gen,” Taru says quietly, and only for Lexi’s ear as they exit into the Spectrum corridor.
She shakes her head. “It’s a minor victory, if at all. And temporary. We found holes in their laws. They’ll find or make new ones to circumvent those holes. That’s the point of the whole damn thing.”
Taru frowns. “I do not like words as weapons. They’re devious.”
“Yet you helped me wield them well in those Council chambers, my friend. Thank you.”
“It is all in service, Te-Gen.”
“Brio’s father had a keen eye for loyalty. He chose well in you. I am only sorry it’s taken having Brio pulled from us for me to see it.”
Taru has no answer for that, or perhaps the feelings Lexi’s words stir make it too much to speak.
Taru swallows hard, changing the subject. “What will Te-Gen do next?”
Lexi draws in a deep, thoughtful breath. “I’m not sure what else can be done by us here. We have to trust our friend will send word somehow and soon, and that her word will carry news of progress.”
“I am not one for waiting,” Taru says.
“I used to be quite good at it. It was expected of me. I find my taste for it souring now, however.”
“That was before, Te-Gen.”
Lexi halts briefly, looking up at her retainer. “Before what?”
There’s no hint of irony when Taru explains, “Before you became the pleader of Gen Stalbraid.”
Lexi says nothing to that, slowly taking back up her stride. A moment later as they near the Spectrum lobby, she looks back at Taru with a strange smile on her face.
Pleader.
Her mother would approve.
Lexi allows herself the briefest moment to enjoy the thought before she returns her gaze to what lies ahead.
“Come along,” she bids Taru. “We have food to pick up, and people waiting for us in the Bottoms.”
“Yes, Te-Gen,” her retainer affirms without even attempting to hide their enthusiasm.
BURIED ON THE BATTLEFIELD
FOR THE FIRST AND ONLY time as a Savage, Evie feels herself pulled from a deep, restful sleep by the blaring of half a dozen rousing horns.
It’s before dawn, and the cold of the morning is the kind that bites through flesh until it finds the bone beneath. Evie has never been the kind who wakes easily, and the earlier the worse. This morning, however, she finds the world comes into focus quickly and sharply. The reality of what’s to come in the next few hours is palpable, like blood on the tongue.
She may be more than the drunken bar brawler she presented to the Aegins who arrested her, to Laython and the taskers and the rest of the Savages, but Evie has never fought in a war before.
War. She turns the word over and over in her newly conscious mind. Back in the Capitol, in any of Crache’s shining cities, none of the people with their well-fed lives would even be able to reconcile what is going on here, what the Savages are being prepared to do. Evie has never been as naive as the oblivious, content masses, but even she couldn’t have conceived of how vast the machinery of this silent conflict seems to be.
The knowledge that she is now part of that machinery settles like a dull blade in her gut. The idea that her first battle in that supposedly nonexistent yet very real war may very well be her last is more sobering than the coldest water.
She rubs the crusted sleep from her eyes, a sickly bluish-green color filling her vision for a moment until she pulls her hands away. Evie blinks in sudden horror and slides back against the rough ground, splaying her fingers in front of her. Her hands are pocked with strange discolored shapes, and for one wild, forgetful moment Evie rubs them together in a frantic effort to remove the stains.
Then it comes spilling through the cobwebs of half sleep, the memories of being force-fed the blood coin and the sight of the resulting runes on the other Savages.
The other Savages, like me, she tells herself, and the thought almost brings on a new panic.
In that moment it’s all too real, and Evie has to arrange her body in a cross-legged position and assume a meditative state over her mind to help calm it.
You’re here with a purpose, she reminds herself. Stick to that purpose. Remember your training. Remember you’re not one of them, not really.
Calm slowly cascades down through her torso and limbs, filling her body and reining in her sleep-addled emotions. Evie quickly dresses and outfits herself with the gear she’s scrounged for the fight. Upon exiting the tent she finds her fellow Savages in ruins, most of them either running around lost and frantic or deathly ill from the Revel. Evie walks past a young woman vomiting wine into the mud, feeling for her, but in no fit state to play nursemaid to anyone, least of all herself.
She spies the older people gathered around a burning fire, awake, yet quiet and sullen. The rest of the camp ignores them.
Laython walks among the tents, throwing back flaps and shouting within.
“We muster in five minutes! Any one of you still sleeping I’ll butcher in their bedroll like a diseased piglet!”
The Elder Company is in no particular hurry. Lariat leads Bam and Mother Manai through the center of camp like a slow ceremonial procession, a junkyard triumph of the vagrant elite. They may be ragged and armed with weapons a B’ors tribesman would shun, but to watch them strut through the mud you would think they were Skrain field generals on the crest of a final, war-winning victory.
Evie is surprised to see that Lariat’s torso is bare
, except for a series of leather straps and buckles. Together they form a harness that extends over his shoulders and down both his arms to his fists. Embedded in the leather at every joint are short curved blades surrounded by jagged barbs. His elbows, his shoulders, every knuckle of his fists, even his hips have been adorned with weapons to make a strike from them lethal.
As if that weren’t enough, he’s fisting the horizontal grips of two katars, their triangular blades extended down a foot-and-a-half from his fists.
Go with what works, I suppose, Evie thinks to herself.
She finds Spud-Bar at their tinker’s wagon from hell, frantic Savages besieging Spud-Bar in these final moments for a weapon, any weapon to see them through the morning. Evie is already outfitted for battle, or at least as outfitted as anyone can be in this makeshift legion, but she asks the armorist if they can spare a dagger.
“Why do you need two daggers?” Spud-Bar asks her, nodding at Evie’s long knife.
“In case I want to stab them more than once,” Evie answers without missing a beat.
Her flat, humorless tone more than anything else makes Spud-Bar laugh.
“Take mine.” Spud-Bar unsheathes a beautifully flared blade from their belt, extending its bone handle to Evie. “The rest of this trash is… well… you know. Trash.”
Evie accepts it gratefully. “You’re sure?”
Spud-Bar nods, their voice darkening. “Just bring it back to me and I’ll consider it well spared. You understand?”
Evie nods, sheathing the blade securely through her belt.
A group of new faces makes their way past the armory wagon. There are almost a dozen of them, young men and one woman. The woman looks just old enough to be Evie’s mother’s age, and she walks at the head of the group as if she’s their leader. They all have blankets or pelts draped over their shoulders to ward off the cold, but the bodies Evie glimpses beneath are all well shaped and heavily tattooed, the many unfamiliar symbols and animal tableaus obscured by the webs of blood coin runes staining their flesh. Most of them have shaved their scalps except for long, dark topknots of hair, or a single strip down the middle of their heads. Beneath the blankets and pelts they’re clad in little more than loincloths and boots with fur tied around the calves.
They look and carry themselves like seasoned warriors, a rare sight among Savages, from what Evie has thus far seen.
“Who are they?” Evie asks Spud-Bar.
“They’re B’ors.”
“I can see that. I meant I haven’t seen them in camp, or at the Revel.”
Spud-Bar shrugs. “They keep to themselves. Live apart. Eat apart. Never seen ’em step foot in the Revel.”
“My whole life I’ve heard about what fierce fighters they are.”
“Oh, they are that. I promise you. You’ll be glad of ’em on the field.”
“But if they’re that good, why waste them in the Savage Legion?”
Spud-Bar shrugs. “Never could tame ’em, I suppose. Oh, we conquered ’em right good. Took their land, what little they had that wasn’t land. Killed ’em by the thousands. But the B’ors wouldn’t be slaves or conscripts. They’d rather die, to a man, given the choice. So they send a few of ’em here now and again. Though they’re always careful not to give any one fighting force too many from a B’ors tribe.”
“Afraid they’d try to take over?” Evie asks.
“Oh, deathly certain of it,” Spud-Bar answers, definitively.
Laython’s voice cuts through. “You all have one minute… exactly one mother-lovin’ minute… to muster at the ready, or I’ll leave you where you stand, only in more pieces than I find you!”
Evie takes a deep breath, exhaling what feels like ice. She realizes she doesn’t want to leave Spud-Bar. She feels the safest she’s felt since being carted from the Capitol when she’s near the armorist. Spud-Bar is like a tether in a snowstorm.
“I got no advice worth givin’ ya,” Spud-Bar says, seeing the hesitation in Evie. “Alls I can say is, whether you live or die is up to you. If you want it bad enough out there on the field, you’ll live. If you give up, even for a second, well, I’ll have to forge myself a new dagger.”
Evie smiles, just a little. “That sounds like worthwhile advice to me.”
Spud-Bar shifts uncomfortably. “Yeah, well…”
“Thank you,” Evie says quickly. “For the dagger.”
“No worries. Any soul who appreciates good steel, y’know?”
Evie nods, and they leave it at that, no further good-byes or well-wishes.
She musters with the rest at the edge of camp, Laython riding large circles around them astride a giant beast of a horse, corralling them.
“Dyin’ time, children!” he calls to them when he’s certain their full force is massed. “Let’s go meet your executioners!”
The Savages don’t march, but rather shuffle in a loose formation. Surrounded by taskers and with Laython leading them, they slouch off to meet their fate.
Evie sees them arriving just as the Savages are funneled out of camp: the Skrain, resplendent in their iron scales of armor, the Crachian ant painted on the breast. Their mounted riders carry poleaxes with sweeping three-foot blades. Their foot soldiers march in perfect formation, gauntleted fists toting horse-cutter spears. All of them carry curved swords of the finest steel sheathed from their hips.
Before she turns away, looking to the field ahead, Evie’s final thought is how she’d give her left hand for just one of the Skrain’s weapons.
The Savages mass atop a hill several miles from their camp’s perimeter. Laython and his taskers herd them like cattle from astride their hulking horses, constant jets of steam pouring from their nostrils.
“Spread out!” Laython barks at them, revving his mount and knocking several Savages over as he rides straight through their tightly bundled ranks. “Form a skirmish line! It don’t have to be pretty, just spread the fuck out!”
Laython’s armor is black leather and obviously custom-made for his massive, near-seven-foot frame. It appears to be dozens upon dozens of pieces, like scales, tightly laced together from neck to toe. The clublike mace he wields has been fashioned from black wood to match his armor.
Evie plants herself at the crest of the hilltop and lets the others fan out around her. As the Savages form their jumbled skirmish line, Evie watches several small groups carrying what look like giant octagonal wheels. They load them onto the twenty-foot trebuchets spaced far apart on the line. Each section of the octagons are hollow, with a door just large enough to stuff a full-grown man or woman inside if they were to curl into a ball. Evie watches as their bearers open each of the small doors and leave them that way.
Many of the Savages who are then forced into the human cubbyholes and shut inside belong to the group of elderly and infirm whom Evie identified at the Revel.
Among them, Evie spots the Professor, lazily grasping a short sword with more patina on its blade than steel. No doubt it’ll shatter upon first impact. The entire left side of the Professor’s face is swollen and purple with bright veins of red. She wonders briefly and idly if they beat him out of spite or necessity.
As he tucks himself without complaint into one of the octagon compartments, Evie feels a hollow pang of regret deep in her gut. She’d wanted and hoped for the chance to ask him if anything he’d said to her the night before was the truth.
Not that she could’ve trusted the answer, of course.
Evie has chosen a short single-bladed ax whose haft is crowned with a wickedly edged, rust-covered spike. The underside of the ax head is sharply curved to a deep hook at the end; it’s designed to grip the top of shields and tear them down, exposing the shield bearer to a lethal blow. Evie meticulously sharpened every edge, wrapping the rough wood of the haft in cattle cord to help secure her battlefield grip on the weapon.
Most of the armor gifted to the Savage Legion is fit only for scrap. Piecing together an entire suit, or even half of one, proved to be an impossible ta
sk. The best Evie can do is triple layer her torso with heavy wool undergarments and wear two pairs of thick leather trousers (she bartered the former articles, won the latter in a game of “de-fanging the snake” by disarming her opponent of their knife twice in a row). She scrounged a broken helm from Spud-Bar’s armory, well constructed but for a shattered right faceplate. With Spud-Bar’s help, Evie chipped off the remaining pieces and replaced them with a solid square of steel from a breastplate with enough holes in it to have ended half a dozen of its owners.
After thoroughly inspecting the entire pile, not a single Savage shield proved to be anything but a storm of splinters and a piercing wound waiting to happen. Evie hadn’t the time or the materials along the march to fashion a proper one. She was able to salvage a leather gauntlet that almost completely covers her forearm, along with enough pieces of slim scrap steel bars to line it like a skeleton. Evie has also chosen a long knife to carry in that hand; she’ll use them to deflect the strikes of spear and sword.
Evie looks around her. No, they’re not an army, but she sees more fighters than victims. She’d expected to look on faces of fear and panic and even dread, and yes, she sees those expressions, although far, far fewer than she would’ve ever imagined. Most of the faces are twisted into masks of war, teeth bared and eyes slit and breath coming in heated gasps.
Perhaps they’ve convinced themselves that if they can survive the next few minutes then they can survive. Perhaps it’s as simple as wanting to make it to one more Revel.
Evie doesn’t know, can’t know, and the time for existential questions is over before she even realizes it.
It’s like watching the sun come out. The Sicclunan army appears on the horizon across the valley all at once, a wave of crimson shields and metal helms. Evie begins counting from the far left, makes it to almost two hundred, when Laython’s voice calls down the line.
“Make yourselves ready!” he instructs them all. “And be light on your feet, Savages!”
Evie realizes she’s almost panting. The fire in her blood is speeding up everything, her breath, her heart, the thoughts and images in her head.