Strength of Swords (First Cohort Book 2)

by M. R. Anthony

  “You’ve done nothing but complain since we left Gold,” said Beamer mildly.

  “And I’m only just getting warmed up,” Weevil assured us, with a smile on his face.

  “Great,” muttered Chant, loud enough for us all to hear.

  I chuckled and we set off to the north. With our reduced numbers, we were more vulnerable to the unexpected than we had been on our journey here, so I took us a good distance from the road. It wouldn’t bode well for us if we blundered into a group of soldiers, or if Lord Trent’s men happened by. Out in the country there was a chance we would come across outlaws, but the risk seemed preferable to the alternative. There were few groups of bandits that would bother attacking us anyway and even fewer that we wouldn’t be able to slaughter with ease. That’s just the way it was – the lawless always picked easy targets and there was nothing about us which said we were anything other than a bunch of murderous bastards ourselves.

  We’d travelled for a little more than half a day and it was mid-afternoon. The road was far to the west and I did my best to copy the route we’d come to get here in the first place. I knew the lands, but I lacked the almost inhuman ability to find my way around in the way that Lieutenant Craddock could. I didn’t fear that we might get lost as such, but I wanted to travel as quickly and efficiently as we could. It wouldn’t have served our purposes if we spent an extra week blundering our way around the north as I tried to get us to Gold. I didn’t even know if Lieutenants Craddock and Sinnar would still be where we left them, which would mean spending even more time looking to see where they’d gone to.

  The air was clear and though there were a few clouds above, they didn’t threaten rain and scooted along as if driven by a brisk wind that we on the ground couldn’t feel. We followed the straight floor of a valley between two moderately-high hills. There was a stream, but it was easy enough to walk alongside without getting our boots wet. Weevil came up behind and asked the question which I’m sure they’d all been dying to ask. It wasn’t that I discouraged questions from my men – far from it – so I didn’t know why it had taken anyone so long to open their mouths.

  “Captain?” he asked.

  “What is it, Weevil?”

  “That thing that the Gloom Bringer took from the Duke?”

  “This vial?” I asked, drawing it from my clothes and holding it up for him to look at. He stared at it as we walked and I could see him struggling to focus on it owing to the rise and fall of my stride.

  “That’s the one,” he said, as if there’d been several such vials. “What is it Captain? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I don’t mind you asking,” I said. “It is my belief that this vial holds the life energies of Gagnol the Blackhearted.”

  “You mean what the Duke stole from Gagnol when they had their falling out?” he asked.

  “The very same thing,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’s all very magical, Captain,” he said, stumbling to find the right words. “But what did the Gloom Bringer want it for? And why do we want it? Is it what you had us kill her for?”

  “There’s more than one reason we killed the Gloom Bringer,” I said. “This vial was one of those reasons, but also because she killed thirteen of us. And we killed her because I thought we could,” I admitted. While it appeared that the Gloom Bringer had acted without treachery after we’d made our deal with her, I didn’t know for sure that she’d have let us leave the keep alive. She might have used her sorcery on us before we’d left the Duke’s chambers, after she’d gained some sort of perverse satisfaction in seeing that we trusted her. I didn’t know and I owed her nothing, so I’d have tried to kill her in any case. There was no way she could communicate what we’d done to the Emperor while we were cutting at her, so our attack would have no specific repercussions. I refused to call our actions a betrayal, since we’d been manipulated all along and it had resulted in several deaths amongst my men.

  “What’s so important about the vial, though?” asked Beamer. The other men had gathered in closer so that they could hear the conversation. A couple of them nearly tripped over each other’s feet as they craned to listen.

  “Gagnol was an evil fucker, but he was also enormously powerful with it,” I said. “If the Emperor wanted these life energies, then I feel that the vial would be better off in our hands.”

  I spoke the truth, but I wasn’t telling them everything. As soon as I’d seen the vial, I’d known what I wanted to do with it. The idea was as potentially dangerous as it was fanciful – if anything came of it at all. I considered leaving things at that and not telling the men anything more. After a moment, I realised that it would be dishonest and almost disloyal of me if I didn’t let them know. I trusted them all implicitly and I had no doubt that they’d follow the path I set us on.

  I looked at Ploster to see him looking at me as well, his expression unreadable. I wasn’t sure if he’d seen the same potential in the vial as I had. Ploster was an astute man and in many ways, we thought in the same way. Or at least, we often reached the same conclusions, which implied a certain similarity in how we approached questions and problems.

  “There’s more to it than me wanting the vial just to deny it to the Emperor,” I said at last. “We came to Blades in chase of a lie. The Duke tricked us into coming. I don’t know how far Malleus was involved, or if he just took advantage of our arrival to snare us into doing his dirty work for him. Either way is unimportant and the fact remains that there is no Saviour. She is still gone – killed by Leerfar and lying dead.”

  At that point, I realised that I didn’t know what had happened to the Saviour’s body. Corporal Grief had sewn up her wounds so that the men wouldn’t see what damage had been inflicted upon her. However, I hadn’t given any instructions about what to do with her remains. I had been so filled with hope and belief that there was a new Saviour, that I’d treated the corpse with the same lack of interest as I usually did to the dead. It had always been my feeling that once you are gone, there’s nothing left behind and while I afforded a certain respect to the remains of the fallen, I didn’t revere them as some men did.

  “Don’t you think the Saviour will come again, Captain?” asked Bolt. He looked almost distraught at the notion.

  “I don’t know, Bolt,” I replied. “There is a possibility that a new Saviour will come to replace the old, but how can we be sure? The hope might well be lost for another hundred years or more. Or there could be a new Saviour born thousands of miles away and living in fear of discovery.”

  “I can wait a hundred years,” said Weevil. There were sounds of agreement and approval from the others.

  “We made our vows,” I said. “And as far as I’m concerned, her death doesn’t break that vow. But it has changed things greatly. I do not wish to spend another decade, or a hundred years or even a thousand, hoping that I can survive long enough to see a new Saviour come to the lands.”

  “Nor me,” said Grids. “It feels like we’ve waited long enough for something to change for us. And then it’s all gone in the blink of an eye. A soldier’s life is never fair, but we all hope for a lucky break every now and again. I can’t stomach the thought that the future holds nothing for us.”

  I nodded at his words. In his way, he’d stated exactly what I’d been thinking. I’d not really had the opportunity to scrutinise the thoughts that swirled around my head, but I’d anticipated there’d be plenty of time to do so on the journey back to Gold. At the very least, I’d have been able to speak to Ploster and see if he had any input, though I knew I was kidding myself with that: Ploster always had input.

  “This vial,” I said, “could be the key to unlocking our future again. Or it could be nothing. However it ends up, I feel that while we have it, there is a chance for us to alter the past and thereby change the future.”

  “But what are we going to do with it, Captain?” asked Eyeball.

  “We’re going to try and bring the Saviour back,” I announced. There was silen
ce and I could see the news sinking slowly into the men who clustered around me. “I refuse to accept that I’ve failed in my duty to our lady, and I refuse to wait another hundred years to see if there’s a new Saviour, who may find herself killed long before we even hear about her existence. The time for us is now and we must pursue every opportunity. Only if we fail will I prepare myself to wait, free from my mind’s constant tormenting questions about whether or not I could have done something different or better.”

  None of them spoke for a while, though I knew what questions would be pushing their way onto their tongues. Beamer was the man who asked.

  “Captain? What if it works, but she comes back, you know, different?”

  “Evil, like Gagnol, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Like Gagnol, only with the Saviour’s powers as well. All rolled up into one and as powerful as both of them combined. Won’t we be trapped by our vows and have to serve her still? Even as she tells us to murder in her name? Or makes us do the same sort of stuff as the Duke used to?”

  “A vow is words and meaning,” I said. “I made my vow because I wanted to change and to become something different – greater – than I had been. We’d descended into the pit, all of us and I made my promise because I wanted to climb out of it. If the Saviour comes back like Gagnol, then the words of my vow hold true, but the meaning will not. Once the meaning is made irrelevant, so too will be my promise.”

  “What will we do then, Captain?”

  “At that point, we’ll do everything we can to kill her again. We’ll have no choice.”

  What I didn’t tell them was that if she had the powers of both Gagnol and Saviour, she’d be able to see the betrayal in our hearts and we would never get close enough to kill her without being destroyed first. The greatest of prizes carry the greatest of risks I told myself, though at the same time I wondered if it was my own determination to absolve myself from failure that was making me act as I did. Even when your conscious mind makes a logical decision, I have found that we can often ignore it, or convince ourselves that the logic we present ourselves with is false. I hoped with all my being that I wasn’t making that mistake.

  Now that the men knew what I planned, they fell into silence as they considered my words and we carried on, picking up the pace again. The day remained clear and we made good progress, though the grass was longer than I remembered it which made each step feel a little more laboured than I would have preferred.

  That night, we settled down to sleep under the stars. The darkness came quickly and the white pinpricks glimmered overhead as we lay on grass that seemed to have retained a large quantity of moisture in spite of the clement weather. I’d hoped that we could have found somewhere sheltered in which to stop, but fortune hadn’t smiled on us and we were forced to camp in the open where a fire would have been inadvisable. Sleeping in the open is a romantic’s dream, but the reality isn’t such a pleasure. I think most would prefer to be asleep in the warmth, somewhere comfortable and safe instead of on an exposed moor in the middle of nowhere. That is not to say that there was no romance within me at all, but it had become tempered by the years of hard reality. I like to think that somewhere far underneath it all, the wishful soul of a young man burned to be free again.

  “Maybe we should have stopped on the way out of Blades and bought some supplies,” said Chant.

  There were a number of uncomplimentary responses sent in his direction at his statement of the obvious. In reality we could have stopped as we’d made our escape, but such was my preoccupation at the possibilities offered by the vial that I hadn’t given the matter the attention it deserved.

  “I bet old Tobe’s sold our packs by now, the greedy old sod,” offered Beamer.

  “Yeah, I hope the rest of his hand falls off,” said Weevil. There was some malicious-sounding chuckling at that suggestion, though I knew they weren’t being serious.

  “Perhaps he’ll have to close the Blacksmith’s Arms for a while. Until he gets better. Given what’s just happened, he might be better having his doors closed for a little while anyway,” Grids said.

  “I wonder what’s going to happen to Blades now that we’ve killed the Duke,” said Bolt, clearly wanting me to provide some input.

  “There is no easy answer to that,” I told him. “We’ve introduced chaos to order and it would be a foolish man who thought he could predict what will happen in the coming months.” I spoke these words little realising that the chaos we’d introduced would end up paling into insignificance against what was to come. They say that ignorance is bliss, but I always liked to know what was coming, no matter how difficult the future might be. Alas, the choice is never ours to make.

  “Think we can take Blades before the Emperor gets to it?” asked Beamer. The men had probably assumed that Malleus would have an army on the way to impose his rule.

  “I am not sure if we have the men or the resources yet,” I replied. “And don’t forget that the Duke’s men are already marching for Gold. They may reach it without ever finding out that their ruler is dead. We might fight them and lose, before they discover they were fighting for nothing.”

  “It sounds like the only thing we can count on is that there’ll be more fighting for us. Lots more fighting.”

  “Can you remember a time when it was different?” I asked.

  “It seems like forever,” said Weevil. “But one day it’ll settle down and then I’m going to marry me a wife.”

  “Which of her two heads are you going to kiss first on your wedding day, then?” asked Eyeball.

  “Piss off, will you? She’ll be a wonder to behold, mark my words.”

  “I reckon a mouldy loaf will look wondrous to a starving man, but that don’t mean it’ll taste good.”

  Their words washed over me. I had to marvel at their ability to switch so easily from the uncertainty that lay ahead. I suppose we can’t all pursue every thought and worry to its conclusion. Ploster had warned me that I should stop doing so and I heard his words, but struggled to change. I had always felt that I must be as well-prepared for everything as I could be. It had become clear that it was fear of failure that influenced much of how I thought and ultimately, how I acted. It was as if I was a puppet, dancing a jig for the invisible hands that tugged at my strings. I hated the notion and just thinking about it made me ever more determined that I would have some sway over events. Not simply to placate my own weaknesses, but so that I could do the best for my men.

  The following day we started early and headed due north. There was no sign of rain, but there was a cold edge to the air, which I would not have expected to feel. I put it down to a night in the open and led us at a pace which was split between a fast walk and a half run. We could keep going in this way almost indefinitely and in the past, we had outlasted cavalry units that had tried to keep pace with us. A horse would beat us for speed, but we had no need to rest.

  There were more hills, more valleys, more streams and the occasional river. The land was so fertile around here that it seemed a shame that its potential had been wasted. Admittedly, much of it was too steep for easy ploughing, but hard-working folk can always find a way if they are given the opportunity. In the distance, we occasionally saw a plume of smoke rising from behind the hills, suggesting that there were some people who had committed themselves to a life outside the cities, but these were few and far between. They were probably at the subsistence level, rather than producing the kind of surpluses that are needed for a population to grow.

  “Twenty-eight more days of this, eh Captain?” asked Beamer.

  “Let’s see if we can do it in twenty-six,” I said.

  “It didn’t feel like we were holding back on the way out,” he replied.

  “We were, but only a little. There’s always room to push yourself a bit harder. There’s no Saviour, but I would like to return to the First Cohort as quickly as we can.”

  “We may be an ugly bunch of bastards, present company excepted of course, but I do find I m
iss one or two of them.”

  I laughed. “Only one or two?”

  “Well, maybe a couple more. It’ll be good to get back with our boys again. I like to be with the numbers, rather than acting alone. It’s why I joined the army,” he said.

  “I thought you joined the army because you were a dirty criminal trying to escape the long arm of justice?”

  “Have you been speaking to me old mother again, Captain?”

  “She died centuries ago, Beamer. She’ll be turning in her pit to hear you protest your innocence.”

  “She was always proud of me,” he said. “No matter what I did. Not that I was a murderer or anything like that. Just a young lad who was badly led.”

  We ran on, the miles vanishing beneath our feet as our boots pounded their incessant rhythm across the empty countryside. There were few birds in the sky and little sign of wildlife. Truth be told, I wasn’t overly interested in birds or creatures that hid in dens and warrens. Occasionally one of the men shouted that he’d seen a fox, or a certain type of bird. I would glance over, but it was only out of habit. It’s not that I was bored – far from it. I was a man who loved the open road and the journey to my destination, but on this occasion I was eager to see the end of my travels. Gagnol’s vial bounced heavily with every stride, a constant reminder to me that it was there.

  I pushed us onwards after darkness had fallen, trying to drag us closer to our destination through every means I had available to me. It was only when I heard someone fall that I drew us to a halt.

  “Anything broken?” I asked Ploster.

  “Nothing, Captain. I just caught my foot on something.”

  I should have counted myself lucky that this lesson had been taught cheaply. It would have been my fault if Ploster had injured himself so badly that we’d had to leave him to limp his own way north. If we’d been very unlucky, we might have found ourselves carrying him and that would have added days to the journey.

  As it came about, Ploster’s tumble had taken place in a good place for us to stop. The ground was level and there was a low, rocky outcrop which jutted upwards and provided a shelter of sorts. It’s not that there was any wind, but you always feel safer when you’ve got something to protect your back. I saw no harm in the men setting a fire, and had to suppress something that was close to shock when they managed to conjure one in about two minutes.