The Free

by Brian Ruckley

  “Subterfuge or bribery, I’d guess,” Yulan went on. “Caradon’s walls never counted for much, but you still didn’t have the numbers or the machinery to get past them. I thought you’d be about that business for another week or two at least.”

  “Bribery it was,” Creel grinned. “Nothing like a lost cause and a silver-pledge to change the allegiance of folk with nowhere to run. It was a good investment. Turns out their treasury was well stocked. And I took a lot of prisoners, most of them inclined to play friendly now I’m a victor. I look to have added a Clever to my household, which is always —”

  “Who? Who’s the Clever?”

  “You’ve half an idea already, I can see. I didn’t even know he was in Caradon, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when you know things I don’t. Anyway: the Weaponsmith.”

  “And you brought him here?”

  The urgency in Yulan’s voice was startling. The Captain of the Free leaned forward, set both hands flat on the table. All that easing of the mood was undone in an instant, as if it had never been.

  “Yes, of course,” Creel said, as puzzled at the change in Yulan’s demeanour as Drann was. “Why —”

  But the question went unfinished. Yulan surged to his feet, turning even as he did so. His chair went flying backwards. The table rocked and shuffled sideways. Yulan ran. The guards in the tent’s doorway had to leap from his path as he vanished, out into the camp.

  Creel of Mondoon stared after his disappeared guest, his eyebrows raised and his lips pursed in surprise. Then he sniffed, and snapped at his guards: “Get after him, then. See what’s afoot.”

  The command was given with such sharp authority that Drann felt himself included by it. As Creel’s men sprinted in pursuit of Yulan, he followed. It was that or be left alone with the warlord of Mondoon, and that did not appeal.

  He felt ears, soft beneath his heels, as he started to run. He skidded on them, and almost fell, just as Creel snapped out: “Stop there, boy.”

  4

  The Bloody Man

  As a child, Yulan had distinguished himself in but one way from his peers in the rude Massatan village that was his home, at the edge of the sands: he could outrun any one of them. Fleet as a desert gazelle. That was what his proud parents said, in any case. Nonsense, but loving of them to say it. Upon such distinctions are the petty hierarchies of children built, and his pace had won him a perch near the top. He could still remember with the sharpest clarity, as it was his fortune and burden to remember almost everything, how it had felt: those dust-pounding legs, the near-desert sun beating on scalp and neck, the hot air plunging in and out of his chest.

  In later life it took rather more to mark yourself out from other men. He had done so in sanguinary fashion, but the bloody man he became had more than once been grateful for the speed inherited from the child he once was. He had run, on occasion, for his life. Today, more lives than just his own might be forfeit if he did not reach Kerig before word of the Weaponsmith’s presence did.

  The camp and its motley inhabitants slowed around him, even as he moved ever faster. It, and they, became a succession of glimpses, still and stiff. A strewing of rocks around which he must flow as fast and smooth as any mountain stream. So flow he did.

  Through a thicket of tree stumps, where Creel’s men had felled a copse to make their half-hearted palisade. Between lines of tethered horses that snorted and stirred at his fleeting presence. Across – a single long, leaping stride – the ashen, smoking remains of a campfire. Between two men talking to one another; crying vague abuse in his wake.

  Another man emerged, stooping, from a tent too suddenly to avoid. Yulan barged him over, staggered, recovered himself and surged on.

  He was running for the ridge where he had left the others. Where, he could hope, they still rested and bickered and ate. That it was a vain hope became apparent very quickly.

  He saw another figure darting between the tents. Coming in from the edge of the camp, and running as if it mattered. It was not Kerig, but that did nothing to ease Yulan’s worries.

  “Akrana,” he shouted, and she came to an abrupt halt, her pale hair loose and fluttering about her face. Trotted to meet him.

  “Weaponsmith’s here,” she said levelly. No hint of breathlessness. “The lads who brought us horse-feed mentioned it. Kerig’s gone for him.”

  “Which way?”

  She pointed into the heart of the camp.

  “Wren?” Yulan asked.

  “Hamdan’s trying to hold her back. Might manage it for a little while longer, but after that…”

  She did not need to finish the sentence. Nothing would keep Wren from Kerig’s side for long; she was his wife, and like him a Clever. Hamdan could not possibly stop her if she chose to go. Not if she reached for the entelechs.

  “Get back there and help him,” Yulan snapped at Akrana. “Nobody else comes into the camp. Tell Wren I’m bringing Kerig back. Promise her that.”

  Akrana nodded, turned, and raced for the ridge. Yulan ran in the direction she had pointed.

  Sound told him where to go before sight did. Screams and shouting. Then smell. An unmistakable hint of bitter smoke. Overlaying that, almost smothering it, the rich, warm smell of upturned earth, filling the air with an entirely unnatural strength and depth. That – the earth scent – was Kerig, without a doubt. And it told Yulan that he was probably too late. Likely as not, the worst was already happening.

  Other men were already heading in that same direction. Drawn to the mounting tumult like buzzards to a corpse. Yulan pushed past them. He burst into a space more open than most of the camp. A tent, large and red and flagged stood at one end of it.

  Kerig was down on one knee, his sweating face contorted by effort and concentration, his hands plunged wrist-deep into the ground. Yulan sprinted at him, but looked towards that big circular tent Kerig was facing. It was burning. Not fiercely yet, but that would come soon. It was the source of the screaming. Men were running with buckets of water. Others were standing, staring in horror or amazement at Kerig, the tent or both. They did not know quite what they were seeing, Yulan was sure, but they knew enough to be afraid. Or appalled.

  Yulan’s mind spun, and he – his self – was almost separate from it, floating above the blur of its movement, letting it run like a wheel. Thoughts were raised and tested and forgotten with his every stretching, desperate stride. As it often did when he most needed it, the rush of detached calculation left behind it a single conclusion for him to seize upon. It might be too late to prevent disaster, but if not, there was only one thing he could do that might change the course of events.

  He threw himself at Kerig. Reached for him and hit him about his shoulders, hard enough to fling him sideways and down, tear his hands up out of the ground in a spray of soil. He held on as they rolled and ended on his knees, pinning Kerig across the chest.

  “What did you do, you pig-fucking idiot?” Yulan hissed.

  Kerig was too disoriented, too shaken by the sudden rupture of his focus upon the entelech, to respond with more than a formless mumble. His earth-stained hands were shaking beneath Yulan’s weight. Trying, as if with a life of their own, to dig themselves back into the soil. Whatever the Clever had been attempting, it had been potent. Costly.

  Yulan shifted so that he could look to the tent without lessening his hold upon Kerig. Flames were racing up its canvas flanks, flinging out curls of black smoke. It was falling in on itself, causing the crowd milling about to shrink back. Kerig was a Vernal Clever, not an Aestival, so the fire was probably not his doing; not directly, at least. Perhaps someone had knocked over a lamp. But what emerged from the tent assuredly was the fruit of his labours.

  A man came staggering out, clad in loose cloth leggings and tunic, with a tied belt of seal hide. That put his home somewhere on the Narbonan shore, most likely, and made him a confederate of the Weaponsmith.

  The man’s clothes, and the skin of his face, were overlaid with a net of thin, thorned
stems. Like green veins, exposed by flaying. Where those stems reached his face and hands – just the tips of them, for they would have writhed up from his feet, out of the earth – they had drawn blood. Trails of it marked his cheeks. Beads of it pricked his hands and brow. The sharp-toothed creepers binding his legs were withering and tearing with his every lurching step; shredding his clothes, and no doubt the skin beneath.

  Wild eyes gleamed out from beneath the stems clasped like a clawed hand across the man’s face, frenzied by fear and pain. They found Yulan and Kerig and sharpened to a stare of pure anger.

  “Don’t do it,” shouted Yulan at once. “Do you know who we are?”

  He shaped the cry carefully, making it hard and commanding but with only a hint of threat. The effort was wasted. There was no sign that the man so much as heard him. At least one of his ears was torn and loose, ripped by the briars, but Yulan knew that was not what deafened him. It was the fury into which his terror had been transformed. A fury that left Yulan with a rapidly diminishing store of options.

  “It’s over,” he snapped at the man, knowing it would not be enough.

  He was aware, imprecisely, of other figures emerging from the tent. Men falling or staggering out as it folded down in a crackle of flame and exhalation of smoke. He spared them none of his attention; that, he kept fixed upon the Narbonan closing on him and Kerig. The man fumbled at his belt and produced a serrated knife from its sheath. His thorny bonds kept browning and falling away, now that Kerig’s exertions had been interrupted. His paces were becoming longer, more certain. More purposeful.

  Yulan lifted his weight from Kerig. He did not rise, but swivelled to face the Weaponsmith’s man. He dug his right hand into the loose earth Kerig had disturbed and closed his fist about a handful of it.

  “Somebody stop him,” he shouted.

  A last, futile attempt to forestall the inevitable. The audience had grown, but none showed any sign of intervening.

  In his mind’s eye, Yulan saw what was going to happen. As with the past, so with the future: he could often see it with great clarity. He played the scene out in his mind, in the space between heartbeats. Gave the world, or fortune, just another moment to avoid it. But the world chose not to. If Yulan did nothing, Kerig was a dead man; that, he could not permit. He squeezed his handful of soil. Tensed his legs. Then moved.

  He pushed off on his right leg. Flung the soil at the man’s eyes. As the Narbonan spluttered and grimaced, Yulan seized the wrist of his knife arm and forced it wide. Put a hard blow, with the heel of his hand, into his temple. As the man reeled, his legs going soft, Yulan hit him again, on his breastbone. Air fled the man’s lungs in a great rush. He fell.

  The suddenness of the violence broke the poised moment. Others rushed forward – Creel’s guards, onlookers – and crowded round the fallen man, pushed Yulan backwards, filled the space between him and the burning tent with a mass of bodies. He spun and hauled Kerig, by the collar, to his feet.

  “You with me?” he shouted into the Clever’s face.

  Kerig blinked, nodded mutely.

  Yulan pushed Kerig away. The Clever was dazed and unhelpfully sluggish. Yulan drove him through the maze of the camp, like a tutor shepherding a brawling, bewildered student towards discipline.

  5

  Blood And Gold

  Wren knelt at Kerig’s side as he lay in fitful slumber on a worn blanket. She dabbed at his brow with a folded cloth. Yulan knew her to be amongst the greatest of the Free’s Clevers, capable of extraordinary and terrible things, yet her face now was nothing but gentle concern and love. She was the best of them, Yulan suspected. The least flawed. For all that he liked Kerig, he had never thought the man entirely worthy of her devotion; less so than ever, now that he had ventured all their lives for the sake of his own vengeance. But then, Yulan knew less of this sort of love than he would have liked. Desire and passing passion, yes, but not the rooted, pervasive thing Kerig and Wren shared.

  It was evening. Yulan could not delay any longer. He had set Hamdan’s six archers as a watch along the side of the ridge, all of them looking down upon Creel’s camp. That was where trouble would come from now, if it was coming, and Yulan had already given it more time to emerge than was wise. Hamdan and Akrana sat with him beside the fire. Staring silently, as they had been for an hour or more, into the low flames. The air carried the first faint premonitions of autumn chill on it these days. The year was turning.

  Hestin paid little heed to warmth or cold. She was wrapped in her cloak of leaves, small and quiet, sitting behind Yulan and leaning against his back. She was not asleep. She hardly ever slept, poor shackled thing that she was. Her charge, the Clamour, was unstirring in its cage on the wagon, beneath that great concealing canvas. It did not sleep either.

  “We cannot stay here,” Yulan said reluctantly. “Not now. Creel will do what he can to calm things, but it won’t hold. He’s got a truce flag flying over his own tent down there, and Kerig’s trampled it.”

  “In good cause,” Wren muttered without looking up from her husband’s prone form.

  “In his own cause,” Yulan snapped. “He promised me – promised me – he would set the Weaponsmith aside so long as he rode with the Free. Debts get settled only when we go our separate ways. That’s always been the rule. It’s how the Free survived.”

  “Well, it’s finished now, isn’t it?” Wren said. “The Free?”

  She did not sound angry or indignant. She knew, as well as any of them, what Kerig had risked. That she would forgive him for it, defend him in it, was only as it had to be, given her nature.

  “Maybe,” Yulan murmured.

  “Maybe?” Akrana echoed him.

  She leaned forward, resting elbows on knees, regarding her captain with sharp interest. Of course. Amongst them all, she was the one least willing to yield what the Free had given her. She was not done with killing yet, Yulan knew. She would never be, for she sought to heal the wounds of her past with it, and that was a task without an ending. Save her own death.

  “Maybe,” Yulan repeated. “I’ve taken another contract with Creel.”

  Hamdan swore, not angrily or bitterly, just in surprise.

  “All my plans for a contented dotage not needed yet, then? Such good plans, they were.”

  “The contract’s mine,” Yulan said. “I’ll fulfil it, and if there’s a purse at the end of it, that’ll be shared amongst you all. I don’t need, or want, any of you to come with me.” He sighed. “But it’ll be your choice. I owe you that.”

  He had their full attention now. Wren had ceased her ministrations and sank back on her haunches, watching Yulan intently. Hamdan was frowning. No matter how he might deceive others, Yulan had never been able to hide his cares or worries from Hamdan. Whether because they were both Massatan, or because they were true friends, the archer saw through every veil.

  “Call your boys in, Hamdan. They need to be a part of this too. Everyone should hear it, choose for themselves.”

  Hamdan twisted round and sent a soft, two-noted whistle into the gloaming. One by one the archers appeared and took their place around the fire. All close to Hamdan.

  “So, I’ve taken a contract,” Yulan repeated when they were settled. “The last I’ll ever take. After this, we all walk away from White Steading with our shares, the charter’s burned. The Free’s at an end. You can all ride for White Steading now, to join up with the rest. That’s what you should do, I think.”

  He paused, watching the firewood glow and smoke. This was the moment he had deferred; the choice he did not truly want to offer. The burden of Towers’ Shadow, and the duty towards that place, was his. So it had always seemed to him. He had neither the right nor the cause to require others to share it. But he owed them honesty, these people who had followed his every command these last few years. The closest thing to a family he now possessed, with all the subtle tensions and human oddities the comparison implied.

  He owed them a choice, and his reluctance to
speak of it was not because he resented that, or doubted it. No, it was because he knew what was likely to come of it. He knew these people too well.

  “The contract is to take, or kill, Callotec,” Yulan said quietly. “He’s running for the border, at Towers’ Shadow. I’m going to stop him.”

  And no one said anything. Few of them had been there, at Towers’ Shadow. Wren had not even been one of the Free then. Kerig and Akrana had been back at White Steading, he ministering to the grave, lingering wounds she had taken on the day Merkent died. Hestin and the Clamour too. But Hamdan, and some of these six archers, had been there. It did not matter. By memory or report, they all knew what had happened at Towers’ Shadow. They all knew with absolute certainty, as Yulan did himself, that their captain would die alone, if that was what was needed, for the sake of this one last contract.

  *

  Yulan’s memories of the few days it took the world to rid him of pride were as clear as any he possessed; clearer, since they were engraved upon his mind with a precision only regret and guilt could achieve. Dry and dusty days, they were. Days when each sunset put blood and gold on distant clouds, but each morning brought only clear skies and none of the rain for which land and people alike yearned. So it had been for better than two hundred sunsets, two hundred morns. Drought, then hunger, then dying. People dying by the dozens, then the scores, across great swathes of the Hommetic domain.

  The School had put a stop to that in the heartlands of the Kingdom. Their Clevers staved off the worst extremities of suffering for those the great and the powerful thought worthy of salvation. Such worth was not recognised along the kingdom’s southern bounds. There, in the fringes of Yulan’s homeland, no help was offered to blunt the cruelty of that hard year. No Clevers came to call up rain, or fruitful bounty. What came instead were swords and iron-shod horses and men seeking battle. The Free were amongst them.