“Yeah. Sure.” I shook my head. “Problem is, we’re fixed on staying. At least for a short piece.”
“Aye. Well then, I’d tread lightly, lad.” Sir Alaric turned to the barkeep. “Oy, Sweet Billie, could you set me up a push and a shove?”
“Coming up, Red.” Sweet Billie trudged for the bar.
Sir Alaric turned back. “What are you hauling?”
“Nothing but a few old friends in dire need of help. One’s in a bad way.” I held up my hands. “Not plague, mind you. Consumption. Seems odds are long he’s going to make it.”
“Hrmm…” Sir Alaric fingered his jaw. “Wants to die on dry land?”
“Under a roof. Lolling back. Feet by a crackling hearth.”
“Don’t we all? Hmm… Well, I suppose Haeskenburg’s as good a place as any fer dying.”
“We’re a mite short on coin.” I licked my lips.
“No matter.” Sir Alaric waved a hand. “Only inn in town burned down. Might be you could squat? Plenty of abandoned houses idling away to nothing.”
“If there’s a section of town deemed safe?” Lady Mary leaned in.
“We’re lucky the whole town ain’t been razed.” Sir Alaric shook his head. “Damn scourgers. You seen ‘em, aye?”
“Yeah.”
“Aye, quite the show.” Sir Alaric’s eyes twinkled in the lantern light. “And what is it you be wanting of me?”
Sweet Billie set down a flagon and whiskey tumbler.
“We need lodgings. Private. Safe. Tonight. Now, if possible.”
“Safe, huh?” Sir Alaric took a pull. “Tall order.”
“I’ve a drowning ship I’m willing to part with. Some arms and armor. Used, but newly acquired.”
“Well, I’m no merchant to be haggling. Naught but a busted-down old law-man out of his league and on his last legs.” He glanced at Yolanda’s hilt. “Had a fine hand with a blade, if I recall. Still know which end to hold?”
“When I ain’t sober.”
“Well, then, lad,” he set a coin on the table, “have another round on me.”
…argued vehemently with the Hochmeister to order father to return, but he adamantly refuses.
I know not how much longer I can suffer his venomous presence…
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 6.
ABRAHAM COUGHED OUT, a sharp seal-like staccato, jagging through the dim confines of the Ulysses’ hold. Up to our ankles in sloshing water, Lady Mary and Stephan and I huddled round a table strewn with maps.
“Do you trust this Sir Alaric?” Stephan asked.
“Yeah, I do.” I looked over as Abraham’s cough died down. He hadn’t gotten anything up, hadn’t improved, but he was still breathing. Whether that was blessing or curse remained yet to be seen, though I knew where the smart money was. “Sir Alaric’s a solid bloke. Always treated me well back when, and I was naught but a lowly squire.”
“What of Uncle Charles?” Stephan asked.
“Uncle Charles trusted him. Wouldn’t have dragged our arses halfway across the continent otherwise.” I couldn’t help but stare at the stretcher Abraham was destined for. My back ached just thinking of it. “Do I trust King Eckhardt, though? First off, I don’t know him. So there’s that. And secondly, he’s a bloody king.” My feelings on kings, lords, queens, or anyone with the power to grind folk under boot heel bent generally toward the negative. It was based on my long and varied history of getting personally and professionally fucked over, under, and through by those in power. I laid a crude map on the table and smoothed it out. “There’s the old keep to the east.”
“No one has dwelt there in years,” Lady Mary said.
I glanced up. “You’re only making my case stronger.”
“We’ll need to eat,” she countered.
“Fine.” I threw up my hands. “Why not hole-up in some abandoned house in town? Sir Alaric said there’s—”
“And have that Nazarene maniac burn it down while we sleep?” Stephan crossed his arms. “When word gets out about Abraham—”
“Word?” I stabbed a dagger into the corner of the map. “Who’s gonna squawk?”
“No one.” Stephan set Abraham’s copy of the Talmud across one of the map’s sides. “But word always finds a way, brother. You know that. And as Lady Mary said, Abraham will need the clean water, food, and lodging Sir Alaric promised. Not to mention it would be better to have a palisade wall between us and this Nazarene character.”
“That’s debatable.”
“That Abraham shall need to eat and drink?” Lady Mary frowned.
“No. The other one.” I stabbed another dagger into another map corner. “Jesus, you’ve both lived with nobility.”
“Have you lost all faith in humanity?” Stephan asked.
“Assuming I once had it?”
“And what happens when Slade finds us?” Stephan said. “Having allies against that fiend would prove a blessing.”
He was right about that, too. Assuming our allies were willing to stand tall against that bastard-fuck. “I don’t like it.”
“None of us likes it,” Lady Mary frowned.
I had nothing to say to that, nothing witty, anyways, so I just grumbled and pretended to study the map.
“So,” Stephan straightened, “the Schloss is our best bet.”
“For Abe.” Glaring, I leaned in, lowered my voice. “Just to be clear, we’re all going to risk life and limb on account of one man. One dying man, yeah? Cause that’s what we’re doing. Putting all our eggs in one basket, hucking it off the roof, and hoping for omelets.”
“He’s a good man,” Stephan countered.
“Yeah. And good men die every day, brother. More often than not, that’s the very reason.”
“Then you might live forever,” Lady Mary scoffed.
“Clever,” I admitted. “But it still doesn’t mean we should slit our own throats to join him—” I slashed a finger across my throat as a breeze blew in.
The hatchway was open.
I turned. Shit. Of Course. It had to be.
Ruth, Abraham’s wife, stood atop the gangway. “Ahem, I…” She was a petite woman with long black hair, delicate, pretty in a plain way, under normal circumstances. And these weren’t those. The toll our voyage had taken had left her a gaunt, wide-eyed, salt-scaled wraith somewhat akin to the rest of us, but worse. Ruth never slept, hardly ate what little we could fish up, and did the full tally of worrying for her three charges. She staggered to the bottom of the gangway, clutching the banister for dear life. “I merely wished to … to gather cloaks for…”
“Pardon.” I stepped toward her as she clawed a pair of cloaks from a peg. “Lady, I—” I called after but she scrambled up and out and didn’t look back. “Think she heard?”
“Does she have ears, brother?” Stephan deadpanned.
“Fuck off.”
“What is it you’d have us do, Sir Luther?” Lady Mary chimed in. “The ship is sinking. We have no food. And there are no other ships.”
“Look here.” I tapped a forefinger into the map. “There’s a pass through these mountains. The Kriegbad. To the east. We could head round the town—”
“Snowed in til June.” Lady Mary crossed her arms.
“So we bring shovels. Mattocks.” I slapped the table. “Dig our way through.”
They both glared at me.
“I told you I’ve a bad feeling about this place,” was all I said.
Lady Mary scowled. “Perhaps you were expecting sunshine and roses?”
“I won’t abandon Abraham or his wife or children,” Stephan said quietly. “We owe him that. We owe them that.” He looked me in the eye. “You owe them that.”
“Fuck off.” I looked away.
“Say it.”
“Fine. Yeah. Sure. I owe him. Owe him big.” I yanked the two daggers from the map and let it curl its way back up to a foregone conclusion. “I know it.”
“Then we make the best of it here,” St
ephan said. “For the now but with an eye to moving onward as soon as feasible.”
“As long as feasible means as soon as Abe’s wearing dirt.” I snatched a glance up the gangway, expecting Ruth standing there, glowering down, lips trembling, plotting justifiable homicide, but it was just an empty wind.
…once thought impossible, yet he scars the family name, the family honor, the family legacy.
I find I have grown to hate him…
—War-Journal of Prince Ulrich of Haeskenburg
Chapter 7.
THE KID WAS BOUND cruciform across a wheel as wide as I was tall. Its weathered grey wood had split in long gaping cracks. It looked to have stood there some time. The kid? Relatively new. He was pushing thirteen. Maybe. A ragged, bedraggled thirteen wrung clean of any of life’s joy, compounded with interest by the more than usual fare. Half-starved. Filthy. Sick. The stark white of rib gleamed against vermilion as his back was excoriated lash by bloody lash.
The knight, the thug, plying the lash, knew his trade.
Intimately.
The sun peeked crimson over the horizon as we trudged single-file through the gates of the Schloss von Haesken. The gates, nigh on ten-feet high, like the rest of the Schloss, were unimpressive on a middling scale. They creaked, trembled, shuddered, yawning closed behind.
Not much to the Schloss, truth be bare. A lopsided three-story wooden keep off to the southeast, a stone chapel to the northeast, a barracks and stable south. Makeshift tents and litter choked up most of that yard, and it all stank to high heaven of humanity.
The wheel and the kid stood propped upright on a scaffold, front and center to it all.
“Oh, my dear lord…” Lady Mary stopped short.
“Just keep moving.” I adjusted my grip on the makeshift stretcher. Abraham lay on it, wrapped in ragged blankets, eyes closed, snoring, oblivious. The lucky prick. “Stephan, for God’s sake, don’t—” I turned but it was too late. “For fuck’s sake.”
Stephan had abandoned our column, peeling off, marching for the crowd packed round the wheel. An attack of conscience. I read it in the set of his chin, his shoulders, his every movement as he strode with that quiet, dignified, refined purpose that so often caused us all to falter.
“Wanna switch spots?” I grumbled down.
Abraham didn’t answer.
The crowd of wraiths stood at attention with bated breath, watching a show whose final act was etched in stone. The show was state-sanctioned murder. The cast were five knights and one doomed kid. The kid was a natural.
“Where’s Stephan going?” Ruth blinked.
“To get us all killed,” I answered.
A few heads on the edge of the crowd turned our way. Impotent, wild-eyed glares. Folk yearning for a target softer than the one earning their ire. Sometimes, a crowd rears up on its hind legs and if it can’t gnaw an itch, it gnaws the next best thing.
“Stephan—” I bit back another ineffectual curse.
But Stephan was knifing through those simmering glares, pushing past bodies, toward spectacle’s end. He glanced back, offered a nod then jostled on.
My brother, patron saint of all fuckers fucked or in the process of being.
I could see the kid’s parents huddled off to the side. The mother was a mess. I couldn’t blame her. Ruth gathered Joshua and Sarah, both crying, huddled to her side.
“Karl.” I glanced back.
We set Abraham down.
“You two,” I hissed. “Take him.”
Avar and Chadwicke set down the sea chests and hustled forward. “Get him inside,” I hissed. “Keep moving.” I took a breath, loosened Yolanda in her sheath, ushered Ruth and her kids past. “Don’t stop for anything.” I set a hand on Karl’s shoulder. “Get them inside.”
Karl grunted something that might’ve been assent or regret and hustled along. The outskirts of the crowd parted before him which was a fair canny thing for it to do.
“Is it a death sentence?” Stephan hollered as he approached the scaffold.
Shit. I double-timed it, shouldering folk aside. “Pardon. Excuse me. Get the fuck out of my way—”
“Eh…?” The thug paused mid-stroke, the lash whipping off blood and flecks of flesh. He set his tiny pig eyes on Stephan. Thug was a large man. Thick at the shoulder and neck. A man who’d worked at the pell a fair time and knew his trade. Which in his terms meant bullying, beating, and fucking over anyone lower than him on the lordly ladder. He cupped an ear. “What the hell you barking about?”
“I asked if the child was sentenced to death.” Stephan could be subtle when he wanted. This wasn’t one of those times.
The crowd started to simmer and grumble assent though it didn’t take to a boil as most of the folk present weren’t as dumb and/or masochistically righteous as my idiot brother.
“Child? Wot?” Thug stuttered so flummoxed he vomited a jumble of sounds that could be construed neither as sentence nor word. A second knight, wearing an eye-patch, started jawing something in the big fucker’s ear I couldn’t hear and would’ve bet an arm and leg I didn’t want to. The big fucker grinned at Eyeball, teeth lighting up in an ogrish grin. He pointed at my brother. “C’mere, you runty little fuck!”
Silence from the crowd.
All eyes on Stephan.
Could’ve heard a pin drop if the ground wasn’t churned mayhem. A rabbit darted from under the scaffold and bolted off. Jesus, even rodents were smarter my brother.
“What’s the charge?” Stephan stood his ground.
“Huh?” Thug coiled the lash up, length by bloody length.
“What crime did the boy commit to warrant such a flogging? A serious crime, no doubt.”
“None of yer business,” Thug sneered artlessly as he stepped off the scaffold, dropping a yard and landing with relish and a thud. “And who the fuck are you?” He strolled forth, muck sucking at his boots.
Folk fought back. Away. Wholly abandoning their newfound savior.
I fought upriver through the current.
“Stephan!” I hissed, an arm’s length away. “Shut the fuck up, and let’s go.”
“Eh, wot?” Thug straightened, eyeballing me, feeling the texture of corded lash between thumb and forefinger. “Best listen to yer friend, boy.”
Lady Mary appeared at Stephan’s side and interposed herself between him and Thug. “Sir Knight, you are—”
Thug swept her aside with one meaty paw without breaking attention on Stephan. “Your whore always do the jawing for ya?” He glared down, hands opening and closing on that lash. “Don’t like mouthy wenches.” He smirked. “But I know how to keep ‘em quiet.”
The kid on the wheel sputtered red and gurgled something. No one paid him any heed except his mother, wailing by his side, picking ineffectually at his bindings. But all was suddenly dim, distant, sheathed behind a curtain of barbed menace.
“The lad’s paid his debt, whatever it was, and then some.” Stephan stood toe-to-toe with Thug if not eye-to-eye. Thug fair towered over him. Three other knights jostled forward, weapons clattering, each one dropping off the scaffold like turds from a horse’s arse. Eyeball kept watch from on high.
The crowd was dispersing. Fast.
“Is he a thief?” Stephan demanded.
“Aye. A dirty rotten thief.” Thug bumped Stephan with his chest, forcing him back. “And we flog thieves here.”
“And you’ve accomplished that.” Stephan pointed. “Look! Can you not see? Any more’s a death sentence. It may already be.”
The kid’s head drooped, a bulbous knot at the end of a flaccid rope.
“You tryin’ to educate me?” Thug bumped Stephan again. He was coming close to doing what he was going to. I could see it in the grit of his teeth, the clench of his jaw, the furrow of his lone cyclopean brow.
“I seek only to save a life,” Stephan said. “What good is killing him? Who’s to take care of his family in coming years should he die? Or with him a cripple?”
The crowd seem
ed collectively to pause its retreat and take notice of Stephan once more. From a safer distance.
“Shoulda thought on that a’fore he went stealing bread.”
“A hungry belly overrules even the most law-abiding heart.”
Thug opened his mouth in retort, but his gears ground to a halt. Public speaking, debate, rational thought … not this bloke’s strong suit. Lady Mary clambered from the mud and made to push forward when I grabbed her elbow, pulling her behind. I caught her eye. Shook my head ever so slightly.
For once, she listened.
“Please. Sir Knight,” Stephan’s hook and hand came together in prayer, “allow me to see to his wounds. To treat them. I have some small modicum of skill. So that he might go on, heal, and further serve your lord throughout his meager days.”
Stephan’s eloquence was lost on the big dope, and I could see it coming before he did. Stephan’s weakness? He sees the world through the eyes of a man of honor, compassion, loyalty. Like him. Which means two things. One: he thinks others see the world the same way. And two: he’s always dead wrong.
Thug took his shot, raising the lash and bringing it down across Stephan’s face, ripping a gouge from temple to jawline and blinding his left eye—
Except that he didn’t.
Cause I shoved my idiot brother aside and caught the lash on Yolanda, short-blading her two-handed. The lash cracked to a halt around the blade, and I yanked it from Thug’s grip, ripping the big bastard off-balance.
Now me? I see the world through the eyes of a shit. Of a man of cowardice and fear and dishonor. So I knew exactly what was coming. How it was coming. When it was coming.
A few in the crowd grew the stones to jeer.
Thug stood flustered at the loss of his toy and the catcalls from the crowd. He groped behind for his sword as I slid forward, snaked a boot behind his and shoved him back with the flat of my blade. He tumbled to the muck as Eyeball leapt from the stage and stomped forward.
The other three followed suit.
“Oy!” Eyeball hollered, drawing a curved blade. He wore an eye-patch with a red-eye emblazoned across it. A garish piece. He hissed low. “Back the fuck off.”
The Last Benediction in Steel Page 4
