Strength of Swords (First Cohort Book 2)

by M. R. Anthony

  “She’s in there,” said Ploster, telling me something I hadn’t wished to hear.

  I didn’t bother to ask him if he was sure - it would have been a waste of time to bother. I couldn’t feel anything myself, but the radiance of the old Saviour was something that I only felt in close proximity. If this new one was held within the Duke’s walls, I didn’t think I’d know about it.

  “His cells must be filled with children,” I said. For a reason I couldn’t explain, I was sure that we were looking for a child.

  “He must bring them in from all parts of his lands,” said Ploster. “I wonder how many he feeds on now.”

  “Too many,” I said. “Come on, let’s go back and wait for the rest of us.”

  We returned to the Blacksmith’s Arms. It was very early morning, but none of the others had yet returned, so we waited impatiently for them to arrive.

  “I didn’t want to see the inside of his keep again,” I admitted.

  “It looks like we have no choice,” Ploster said.

  The door opened and Chant came through, followed closely by Waxer.

  “Nothing, Captain,” said Chant. “Except soldiers looking for trouble.”

  “Did they find any trouble?” I asked.

  “Not from us, though a few of them tried. Took all my willpower to stop myself from spilling some guts.”

  “Good work,” I said. None of us tolerated being goaded or bullied and I could see that Chant and Waxer had been left on edge by something.

  Eyeball arrived. His squad was staying elsewhere and he’d only come to report his progress, or rather his lack of.

  “Feels like I’ve been round half the city and back again. Not a fucking thing,” he said.

  “She’s in the keep,” I said. There was no surprise, nor, I was pleased to see, fear or concern.

  “The Duke’s going to shit himself when he finds she’s gone,” said Waxer.

  “He might not even know what he’s keeping,” said Ploster. “She may have been a random find, brought in by the justiciars. It’s our ill luck if it’s so. We should wait until we are all here before we speak of our plans.”

  I sent Eyeball away to his squad. “It’s too late to act tonight, more’s the pity,” I told him. “Bring your squad here when it’s full dark tomorrow. Stay out of sight until then.” He saluted and left.

  Other men arrived and I sent them away too. It was still an hour before dawn when I’d finished passing on my orders to all of the squads who’d been out searching. I was pleased that there had been no incidents or fighting that would have brought attention upon us. My men had always been professional and I could have picked mostly any twenty from the First Cohort and expected similarly exemplary behaviour.

  With orders given, we settled down to wait. I expected it to be an interminable one and I was not mistaken. The sun came up and the sounds of normal daily bustle came through the large window in our room. We spent the time looking below, though there was little to see that was interesting, beyond movement and activity to draw the eye.

  Tobe appeared several times, bringing food and some manner of sticky orange fruit juice. We ate and drank out of politeness, not wanting him to think that his hospitality wasn’t welcome. On his second visit to our room, at around mid-day, I noticed a sheen of sweat on the man’s forehead and he had his damaged hand pushed beneath his tunic. After he’d left I told Chant to go and fetch Maims.

  The two of them returned in less than an hour and I called Tobe up to our room. When he arrived, his face was even paler than it had been earlier.

  “Want Maims to have a look at it?” I asked. In reality I wasn’t asking a question.

  “No, Tyrus,” he said. “Really it’s all right. Some days it pains me more than others.”

  I could see that he feared the treatment as much as he feared the symptoms. At least one was a known quantity. Surgery wasn’t something that any sane man would willingly submit to, unless there was no alternative. I’d seen army doctors hack away at gangrenous limbs for thirty minutes at a time, their bone saws blunt and useless. I’d seen what happened to badly-sewn wounds after they’d festered for a week. Even thinking about it brought the memory of the smell to my nostrils, and my mind’s eye saw the mixture of pus and blood oozing through imaginary stitches under the pressure of a fingertip.

  “Just let him have a look, Tobe. Please,” I said. “Maims is as skilled as Corporal Grief with a needle. We don’t have butchers in the First Cohort.”

  Reluctantly, Tobe entered the room fully. He pulled his hand from beneath his clothing and presented it to Maims for inspection. The other men tried to feign indifference, but they were interested and peered over to see what the hand looked like. I watched as well. We all had a genuine fondness for Tobe, since the Blacksmith’s Arms had been our drinking hole of choice for a number of years, and none of us wished him to perish for want of some proper treatment.

  “The damage to your bones has left them vulnerable to infection,” said Maims after only a few moments. “There is such an affliction here now, spreading into your hand. If you leave it, the pain will become worse and it’ll happen soon. Eventually your arm will become black and the pain will be so great that you will spend your days and nights screaming in agony until the infection claims your life. I have seen this before and I don’t think you have longer than months.”

  “Fuck, well that’s not good news, is it?” said Tobe, pretending that he wasn’t especially concerned. He was fooling no one.

  “I can treat it now,” said Maims, unrolling a small leather pack which contained his tools.

  Tobe stammered for a few seconds. “Will I lose the hand?” he asked.

  “Not all of it. Those three fingers and half of the palm down to the wrist.”

  I’d seen surgeons who needed to turn their patients into objects, so that they themselves wouldn’t become worn down by the constant pains that their work produced. Maims had been a soldier for hundreds of years and was so used to death that he didn’t need to shy away from it, and it allowed him to retain a sympathy for those he treated. He put an arm around Tobe’s shoulder.

  “Ten minutes and it’ll be done,” he said. “Today the pain will be great, tomorrow it will be much less and I promise you that in three days there will be less pain than you feel now.”

  “You’ll only have a finger and thumb left to grab your barmaid’s tits with, though,” said Bolt unhelpfully.

  Tobe seemed grateful for the distraction. “She’d cut the rest of the hand off if I tried,” he said. “And my good one as well.” He giggled and I recognized the sound as that of a man trying to distract himself from a terrible choice in front of him. Then, he seemed to steel himself, drawing himself up and taking in a deep breath. “Do it he said. And do it now, before I change my mind.”

  Maims pulled out his knife. It was gleaming silver steel with a curved edge and I knew it to be wickedly sharp.

  “Try this one,” I said, tossing him my dagger without warning. He caught it by the hilt, almost without looking at it in flight. He looked at the runes along the blade and immediately laid his own knife to one side. He took something from his unrolled pack and rubbed it vigorously over the metal.

  “Durnot root,” he told Tobe, though all the rest of us knew what it was. “It’ll clean anything off this blade that might introduce a new infection, and its residue will help stem the flow of blood.”

  Tobe gulped and nodded. I could see his uncertainly and his feet began a slow walk backwards. I didn’t like what I had to do, but there was no choice for it. I got to my feet smoothly and took hold of Tobe, pinning his good arm against his side and putting a hand over his mouth. He was an old man, but he was strong and he struggled to be free.

  “A few minutes and it will be finished,” I said, trying to be reassuring. It wasn’t something I’d ever been good at and his struggles continued.

  With a look of sadness, Beamer gave me some assistance and between us we managed to get him over
to a table and pressed his damaged hand onto the wooden surface. Tobe grunted in pain and I could tell that even the effort of trying to clench it into a fist was too much agony for him to bear. Still, he thrashed and he struggled and it was all that Beamer and I could do to keep him from moving too much for Maims to make the cut.

  “Come on Tobe,” said Lamper. “Don’t be daft, you old twat. It’ll be over in two minutes.” He was trying to be sympathetic in his way and it seemed to work. The fight went out of Tobe and Maims pulled the bar keep’s hand into a position where he could get the necessary leverage to cut away the part that he needed to remove. Maims was a battlefield surgeon, and was an expert at working under duress. Without taking more than a glance, he used one of his scalpels to open up a wide flap of skin over Tobe’s palm. A deep, bright line of red appeared, quickly turning into a steady flow. The man went rigid immediately and his back arched, but we were able to keep him in position. He screamed through my hand, but I managed to suppress the noise. We didn’t want anyone coming to see what the commotion was.

  With the flap opened, Maims put the scalpel onto the table and picked up my dagger. He used the blade to push the skin to one side, working blind through the concealing shroud of blood. With a grunt of effort, he pressed down hard in what I knew would be the right place. There was a grisly crunching sound as sharp steel cut efficiently through ruined bone, and Maims knocked the severed fingers and half-palm onto the floor with a sweep of the blade. Tobe screamed again and this time the sound didn’t taper away as he poured his energies into his voice, in the hope that it would draw his mind away from the damage that Maims had just done to his hand.

  Maims was stitching immediately. I marvelled at his skill and deftness, since he was able to accurately pull the flap over the bloody wound and begin sewing it into place without being able to see what he was doing because of the quantities of blood which came forth. Tobe’s scream had ended and he had his head down, while he wept at the pain.

  The stitching was over in less than five minutes. Maims produced a cloth from somewhere and wiped away the thick of the blood from the wound and I could see the closely-spaced lines of the thread where it wove in and out of the part of Tobe’s hand which remained.

  “It’s best to leave some blood on there, rather than cleaning it entirely,” said Maims. “In my experience, it cuts down the chance of further infection. It should be swabbed away in three days, the first time the bandages are changed,” he continued. I didn’t know whose benefit he was speaking for, since Tobe was beyond caring at that moment.

  Maims pulled out a roll of bright, white cloth. I was faintly surprised that he carried it still, since we of the First Cohort no longer spilled blood when we were wounded. I guessed that the bandages were a link to the past – a habit that no surgeon was able to get out of.

  Within another two minutes, Tobe’s half-hand was thickly wrapped in the clean cloth. Blood soaked through in one place, appearing as a wide pink dot, that grew to the size of a coin. It grew no larger and Maims watched it for a few moments, before he nodded to himself in satisfaction.

  “That’s you done, Tobe,” he said. “Just remember to wipe your arse with your other hand for the next couple of weeks.” It was necessary for a battlefield surgeon to have a certain sense of humour. Both Corporal Grief and Slicer had a similar appreciation of bleak jokes. It went with the job.

  Tobe was in no position to respond, but his weeping had subsided and he now groaned rather than screamed. I realised that he had an inner strength, like we all do. Once you can overcome the fear, you sometimes look back and realise that the fear itself was the worst thing. If Tobe had not found the courage to let Maims cut away the infection, then his fear would have condemned him to greater pain and death.

  Beamer crouched down next to Tobe’s bed and gave him a pat on the head. “Good lad,” he said. There was nothing patronising in the way he said it, but our host was unable to give a coherent response.

  After that, there was nothing else to keep us occupied. Tobe lay in pain on his bed for a couple of hours, before hauling himself weakly to his feet and shuffling from our room, telling us that he had a business to run. He was in no fit state to do anything, so I hoped his barmaid would earn her keep. I hadn’t really wanted to do any talking in front of Tobe anyway, so I felt a modest relief that he’d left us.

  “Will he get better?” Chant asked Maims.

  Our appointed surgeon shrugged noncommittally. “It was a clean cut. The Captain’s dagger cut cleaner than my own would have done. There’s always the chance that bad luck will bring another infection and Tobe is an old man. Strong, but old.” He left it at that and we didn’t press him further, knowing that it would be pointless to try and pin him down to a definite yes or no.

  Eventually, after what seemed like days rather than a single afternoon, the darkness began to close in. We all got fidgety, me included and we paced the wooden floor like caged animals. I was conscious that the sound of our boots would be audible below, but it wasn’t enough to force me back to my seat. The other men I’d brought with me to Blades arrived. Their timekeeping was good and we didn’t need to wait long until everyone was gathered. I could feel the excitement building and could see it in their faces. Gold had only been a month ago, but even this comparatively short break left the men thirsting for more excitement. It wasn’t a wanton lust, but it was the desire of men who knew they had something important to do and who wanted to get it done as soon as possible.

  “What’s the plan, Captain?” asked Scratch. “We going to knock on the Duke’s main gate and ask to be let inside so that we can kick him in the balls?”

  “Nothing so complicated as that, Scratch. We’re going to break in through the sewers.”

  “Ah fuck, not sewers,” said Leaves. “I’m tired of smelling like other people’s shit. I spent three days in a drainage pipe in Gold. I swore never again.”

  I smiled. “You sound like you’ve got plenty of experience, then. The perfect man for the job.”

  After that, I provided an outline of the plan. There was some grumbling, but there always was. I permitted it and the men never took it beyond the stage of muttering. I think it gave them comfort. Like any plan with many unknowns, there was the potential for numerous things to go wrong. That was fine – if it came to it, we could see how many we could kill on our way in and out. There was nothing at all that was going to stop us from trying.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  8

  An hour later, we clustered on the bank of the Dracks river, deep in the shadow of the Duke’s keep. There was a pipe here, from which dribbled a steady stream of effluent. It dropped from the five-feet pipe onto a stone ramp, where it flowed sullenly into the dark, cold waters of the river, to be washed away for the other people downriver to deal with. Such pipes emerged from the river bank at regular intervals, dispensing their cargoes of waste from the city’s latrines and drainage holes, but this single pipe was the one that interested us, since I knew that it served the keep. There was no one visible, either up or downriver. Few people had any interest in the place we were standing.

  I’d feared the waste might be knee-deep, but luck smiled upon us and the mixture of piss and shit hardly came up to the ankles of our boots. The smell was rough, but nothing we couldn’t handle. Had there been a lot of recent rainfall, I was sure there would be a torrent flowing from here and I reflected that I’d prefer to wade through it as it was, rather than fighting through fast-flowing waters.

  There was a circular metal grate over the entrance to the pipe. It was bolted in place at four points and showed signs of rusting. I grabbed one of the bars and gave it an experimental pull; it was as solid as I’d expected it to be.

  “Linster, Grids, you get that side,” I said, indicating two men at random. “Chant, you get this side with me.”

  There was a sinister whisper as four long-bladed swords were drawn quietly from their scabbards. We didn’t pause and set to the task of leve
ring away the grating, by pushing our swords between the metal bars and the stone pipe and then hauling at them. Any normal weapon would have snapped quickly, but we did not use normal weapons. I pictured the look on the Emperor’s face if he learned that we’d used his prized weapons to lever away the grille from a shit pipe. And lever it away we did. The bolts were strong, but we were stronger. I felt the muscles bunch in my arms and shoulders as I heaved with all my strength, seeing the exertions of the other men reflected in their faces and the cording of their arms. There was a snap and both of the top bolts cracked out of their sockets at the same time. After that, it was just a matter of pulling the grating outwards from the top until the pressure sheared away the bottom two bolts. There was some noise, but not an excessive amount and it was quickly over.

  One-by-one, we ducked our heads and filed inside, with Ploster in the lead and me three behind him. If the darkness outside had been impenetrable, in here it was absolute and melded to a throat-grabbing stench that none of us appreciated. After we’d stumbled a few dozen paces forward, I saw a faint, blue light appear ahead of me, as Ploster conjured up an illuminated globe, which bounced in the air ahead of him, casting shadows madly along the length of the pipe where we stooped. I was the tallest man and struggled to minimise my contact with either the sides or the top of the pipe. I wasn’t afraid of dirt, but there was a thick layer of it around most of the circumference and I had little desire to put my hands in it, nor to get it in my hair. I was sure that a few of the men would have loved to make some wisecracks at my expense, but they weren’t stupid enough to make unnecessary conversation.