by Matt Wallace
Lim fishes the thick hide binder from within Taru’s armor and removes it. He stands, groaning and spitting blood onto the street. Lim untwines the binder’s cord and peels back the flap, peering inside.
This time his sigh is heavy and accompanied by the faint sound of gargling.
Kamen Lim upends the binder and pulls its edges apart, shaking it above Taru. Sheafs of parchment begin flitting out between the leather folds.
Taru begins thrashing anew, seemingly still intent on stopping him despite the retainer’s untenable predicament. The pile of Aegins only press the combined weight of half a dozen bodies down harder on Taru.
Kamen Lim begins laughing. It’s not a mocking or contemptuous sound. His laugh is rueful, almost admiring.
“I swear, I wish you were on our side,” he reluctantly admits, shaking his head.
“Undeclared aren’t allowed to become Aegins,” Taru reminds him.
“Yes, well.” Kamen Lim closes the binder and tucks it under one arm. “The world is an imperfect place full of imperfect people.”
“I am inclined to agree.”
“Help our stubborn friend to their feet and secure manacles around their wrists,” Lim orders the other Aegins.
The swarm of hands roughly pulls Taru from the grit of the street. This time the retainer doesn’t fight them.
“You seem like a fair man,” Taru says to Lim as the Aegins shackle the retainer’s wrists together. “I’m afraid you take orders from corrupt people.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but neither am I a complicated man. I’m good at what I do and my family also eats and is sheltered in winter. That’s where it begins and ends for me.”
With that, Kamen Lim drives an elbow into Taru’s nose. The force isn’t enough to break bones, but it does rim the retainer’s nostrils with blood and draw tears from their eyes.
“That makes us even,” he says.
Taru sniffs and blinks away the salty discharge, staring down at Lim passively.
“As I said, you’re a fair man.”
BORN ON THE BATTLEFIELD
THE VEST IS THICKLY ARMORED, its leather the dusky yellowed russet color of blood drying in sand. Emblazoned on the chest in a deep, bloody crimson is a sparrow in flight. The sparrow has a single white eye, and lines the same color trace its plump body and capelike wingspan. Sirach presents it to her inside the armorist’s wagon.
“I had it made for you,” she says to Evie. “It was high time to make it official, Sparrow General.”
Evie is dubious. “You don’t think this a little wasteful under our current circumstances?”
“I think it wholly necessary, and for the same reason. We’re going into battle against a superior enemy. There’s conquering the body and then there’s conquering the mind. They know your name because you inspired this rebellion. They need to see that you’re quite real, and leading that rebellion to their doorstep. And it’s not only the enemy’s mind that needs conquering. This will help you win the minds of those men and women out there who need a Sparrow General behind whom they can rally.”
“Fair enough,” Evie relents, more than a little exasperated. “You’re as dangerous with words as you are with blades, you know that?”
Sirach bows as if she’s been thoroughly complimented. “Siccluna teaches you to use every weapon at your disposal.”
Evie pulls the armored vest around her thick, woolen battle tunic, securing its strap at her right shoulder with a gloved hand. She’s already wearing her sword in its scabbard, and a matching dagger, both of them Sicclunan weapons.
Sirach is clad in light leather armor designed for the most amount of maneuverability. The leather has been dyed the same wilted violet color of her eyes. She also wears a curved Sicclunan saber, but her half-moon daggers are sheathed beneath each arm in scabbards hung from her shoulders.
“Are you ready, General?” she asks Evie.
“Please, I’ll wear the sparrow, but stop calling me that.”
Sirach doesn’t try to stifle her grin. “Whatever you say.”
The two of them emerge from the armorist’s wagon to waiting war columns of Sicclunan soldiers, B’ors warriors, and rogue Savages. They’ve struck camp and are mounted, armored, and armed for battle.
The Elder Company approaches the duo. Mother Manai smiles brilliantly at Evie and presents the stump of her right wrist. A finely honed single spike designed for lethal thrusting has replaced her usual makeshift finger blades. It is fastened to her wrist and shoulder by leather straps, equally well tooled.
“What do you think?” Mother Manai asks Evie. “I think the master armorist took a likin’ to li’l ol’ me.”
“I think you’re ready to take on the Skrain all by yourself,” Evie says.
“Ya’ve got a bird on ya,” Lariat chides her.
She looks up the gruff old man, dozens of knuckle-size blades strapped to his every joint effectively turning his entire body into one lethal fist. The razor-edged triangle blades of his katars are casually shoved through his belt and other than the leather strops crisscrossing his chest his torso is bare and exposed.
Evie shakes her head. “You will never make a soldier, old man,” she launches right back at him, “and I’m eternally grateful for that.”
Lariat laughs, his mustache dancing above his upper lip.
“It’s very becoming for a General,” Diggs assures her.
“Thank you.”
Evie looks from them to Bam, ever expressionless and still hiding beneath his hood. He does, however, reach out and tap a finger against her chest and the sparrow’s eye there.
“I like your bird,” he says quietly.
“Thank you, Bam.”
“It’s time,” Sirach informs them all.
“Then let’s not be late!” Lariat hollers loud enough to be heard by the ranks.
The de facto commanders jog to the head of their columns and lead the army out.
They don’t have far to travel. The Skrain have drawn their battle line a mile from the eastern road and five miles from the garrison keep and the Crachian border. They seem determined to keep the Sparrow General’s Savage Rebellion from ever touching Crachian soil.
Evie and her combined forces mass a hundred yards across the valley from the enemy line. Their rogue Savages serve in their usual capacity as vanguard. Everyone knew that this battle would hinge one way or another on Savages fighting Savages.
In fact, they can’t even see any columns of Skrain for all the Legionnaires gathered in front of the Crachian line in their usual jumbled, frothing, chaotic formation, as if they are a single organism undulating in heat. Many of the Legionnaires with their half-faces painted blue are also wearing bright red bands of cloth around their neck.
“Is that what we look like from this side?” Lariat asks Sirach.
“Uglier when you were over there, but essentially, yes,” she informs him.
Lariat guffaws through his nose. “Well, yer first mistake was always waitin’ for us ta come ta you.”
He coils his gnarled, scarred pugilist’s fists around the horizontal handles of his matched katars, drawing them both, and holding his arms aloft with those deadly triangular bladed extensions of his hands effectively turning his arms into swords.
“Savages!” he growls fiercely and loudly with every bit of breath from his lungs. “I want my heads!”
The rogue Legionnaires raise whatever weapon they’ve been issued, be it sword or ax or mace, and cry their bloody intentions across the field at their former brothers and sisters.
Mother Manai grips Evie’s shoulder briefly with her remaining hand, then draws a large, gleaming, finely forged rendition of her favored meat cleaver fashioned for her by the same Sicclunan armorist who made her spike.
“I think that armorist does fancy you,” Evie says to her.
Mother Manai winks at her, and the old woman says no more. This is not a time for good-byes.
Evie looks from her face to Lariat’s, then
Bam’s.
“Die well,” she bids the three of them.
Lariat laughs. “What else do we do, little Sparrow?”
By now the Skrain and Savage Legion taskers know what’s coming, and they’ve ordered their Legionnaires to advance, hoping to make as much ground as possible before the field is cut off.
“Bring me their fuckin’ heads!” Lariat yells down the line, and hundreds of howling blue-rune-covered faces surge across the valley.
The rebel Savages aren’t marching, they’re charging, and their Legionnaire counterparts soon pick up their pace to match that ferocious speed. The Skrain are visible up and down their battle line now, armored scales blazing in the sun. Their Savages should be able to wrap around the smaller force of rogue Legionnaires like a snake once they meet, but the sheer animal energy of Evie’s Savages makes the odds appear slightly more even despite the disparity in number.
After the two armies of Savages clash there’s no telling them apart, not if you’re watching from either side’s battle line. There’s no stoic holding of the ranks to counterpoint the feral attack of the Legion. This is war without technique or pretension or mechanical unity. This is the chaos of human nature given form, and it is an ugly, horrific thing to witness. Bodies are being shredded and torn apart everywhere there is to look. Savages don’t retreat, they don’t regroup, and neither side is going to be recalled from this fight. They’re battling to the last of them and they know, and the brutality of their fight is a reflection of that.
Evie doesn’t want to watch, but neither can she justify looking away. She is responsible for this. She committed to this course of action, and if she’s not there in the midst of it she must at least see it through.
In truth, the battle of the Savages lasts no more than fifteen minutes. Such unrestrained combat easily breaks bodies not packed in armor, but the sheer violence of the encounter makes it feel like what they’re witnessing goes much longer.
Neither side wins, not really. The Skrain’s Legionnaires do not overwhelm the smaller force. They are two wildfires lit to meet and snuff each other out, and that’s precisely what happens. The fighting is soon reduced to small pockets of groups, then single combat here and there. Even those are only the final, weak throes of a dying giant.
When the fighting ceases, the field is littered with bodies covered in as many splatters of blood as blue runes. Only a few stragglers, most of whom appear gravely injured, are still stirring among the carnage.
She looks to Sirach, whose expression is as grim and serious as Evie could’ve ever imagined it.
Neither of them says a word.
Across the valley, the Skrain march forward, spears and swords and shields and armor all gleaming brilliant and majestic. They are three thousand strong and four columns deep, waves of well-trained, well-armed cogs forming a perfect killing machine, aimed at the heart of Evie’s depleted rebellion.
Her forces do not advance, however. They simply hold their position, waiting, despite the fact that much of their line is exposed and vulnerable to frontal assault.
The Skrain enter the killing field of bodies, stepping over dead Legionnaires with long-practiced indifference and efficiency.
Then, above the crunching chorus of steel joints on the march, a lone scream rings out from within the Skrain ranks.
It doesn’t halt or even slow the march, and there’s no visible disturbance from where Evie and Sirach stand. Then a second scream rings out, and perhaps it is Skrain soldiers delivering death blows as they move. A flash of steel armor, however, accompanies the next scream, as one of those Skrain soldiers appears to be sucked down by the earth itself. Then a scream that must belong to Lariat rings out like thunder as he and the rest of the Elder Company spring from the ground and begin hacking and slashing into Skrain legs by the half dozen.
The dead rise, or so it appears to those observing the battle from a distance. Half the fallen Savages awaken and sit and stand up, some attacking the Skrain with blades and bludgeons while others drag them down to the ground as though their arms are reaching up from a lonely grave. It’s as if the Skrain have marched into a field of living weeds hungry to coil around their legs and feed them to the soil.
Soon the Skrain advance has halted almost completely, and the portion of the columns that continue are suddenly caught between the rebel line and their own soldiers skirmishing with what they thought were dead men and women. It’s not only the Savages under Evie’s command; many of the Legionnaires who fought for the Skrain have risen to attack them, all those Savages wearing bright red cloth around their necks.
Many of the Legionnaires have truly fallen, and given to the earth they remain. Spud-Bar quietly gathered and converted as many small groups as the span of one night allowed, and those groups absorbed others before the dawn, but their numbers only totaled slightly more than a third of the Savage ranks belonging to the Skrain. Their battle would be pantomime, pretending to hack and maul each other to death, and a grand show they did stage for the Skrain. The rest of the Legionnaires knew nothing of Evie’s plan, and there was no sparing them from it, or Evie’s Savages from their weapons.
What’s left, however, is more than enough to do what Savages are conscripted and trained by the whip to do; rise like chaos itself in the ranks of the enemy and scatter them to the winds before the real strike closes its fist.
Sirach draws her sword. “The Sparrow General!” she calls down the line, and every Sicclunan on horseback and on foot surges forward.
The B’ors warriors act as vanguard, rushing ahead of the Sicclunan infantry and Special Selection soldiers, though Sirach’s forces are right on their tribal companions’ heels. They fall on the exposed Skrain still forming ranks.
Evie and Sirach, joined by several dozen reinforcements, rush past that skirmish to aid the Savages fighting in the heavy midst of Skrain. They begin slashing their way through soldier after soldier, doing their best to alleviate the pressure on the Savages risking the most by attacking from within the Skrain’s own closed ranks, giving the surviving Savages a chance to regroup. Those ranks are soon thinned out and displaced across the battlefield, the Skrain’s march all but obliterated. They find themselves being attacked from all sides, the chaotic shock of the situation disintegrating the unity that make the Skrain such an effective force on the field, reducing them to fighting soldier-to-soldier.
Evie meets a Skrain sword with her own, quickly enveloping its blade in hers and crushing her body against the soldier’s breastplate. With their swords trapped between them, Evie unsheathes her dagger and rams it under the soldier’s raised right arm. As the soldier reels from the puncture wound, Evie steps back, pulling her blade free and thrusting it through the Skrain’s throat. Retracting the blade just as quickly, Evie lowers her head against the spray of blood that stains her hair to the roots. By the time she’s raised her chin the soldier has fallen to their knees, clawing at their neck as they collapse to one side.
The moment Evie turns from the fallen foe, what feels like a tree trunk smashes into her blade, nearly knocking the sword from her hands, and Evie off her feet. She quickly regains her balance and chokes against the sword’s handle, raising the blade defensively only to watch as the thick end of Laython’s blackwood mace snaps the blade cleanly in two.
He towers above her like a demon made of shadow, almost every inch of his body covered in black leather armor as thick as rhinoceros hide. His helm is molded to the features of his face, and two crooked horns rise at asymmetrical angles to complete the awful visage. The eyes beneath that helm smolder at her.
“I didn’t like you the moment I laid eyes on your worthless, skinny ass!” he spits at Evie.
“The feeling was mutual,” she assures him before rearing back and winging her dagger at the singularly exposed flesh of his neck.
Laython swings his mace with a growl and bats the blade away in midair, but Evie is already charging headlong into him. She lets loose a feral war cry and rams what’s left
of her broken blade into his guts, aiming for the large portal vein she knows lies beneath.
Unfortunately for her, barely half an inch of steel penetrates his armor.
Laughing, Laython jams the butt of his mace against Evie’s forehead. The blow raises a giant knot there. Its impact causes a flash of light to fill Evie’s gaze. The next thing she’s aware of is lying on the ground.
Evie blinks the world back into focus just in time to see the end of Laython’s mace blot out the sun. She rolls to her right and is showered in the shredded earth the mace raises when it hits the patch of land she was occupying a sliver of a moment before. She springs to her feet, never before so agonizingly aware of how empty her hands are. Her entire head is reeling, and angry hornets seem to fill the space between her temples.
Laython swings his mace again, and Evie ducks underneath its arc, the wind current raised by the weapon and the power behind it enough to sting her ears. She sidesteps and ducks several more swings, backpedaling after each feint, not quite running away, yet at a loss as to how to engage the giant tasker. She finally runs out of road as half a dozen Skrain and Sicclunans clash inches from her back.
Evie has no choices left. Laython raises the mace high and brings it down in an overhead swing. She quickly steps forward and ducks under his arms, avoiding the mace and closing the distance between their bodies. Pressed against his armor, she reaches up and digs her fingers into his throat, clawing at his neck with the overgrown edges of her nails.
She’s able to draw blood before Laython takes the mace at both ends and brings its haft against the small of her back, crushing her between the weapon and his armor. The air is forced from her lungs, and her spine and ribs feel as though they’re about to shatter. Her grip on his neck goes slack as her feet are lifted from the ground. Evie’s eyes close and she gasps for breath, wriggling in vain. Laython’s grip is like steel jaws being wound closed by sky carriage pullers.
His laughter is the sound of many hells reaching up to swallow her whole. “You made an adorable little plan, but it’s not enough. You’ll never cross the border. You die here, all of you.”