The Heretic-eARC

by David Drake

  Kruso smiled his gap-toothed, ragged smile. “Aye, Capun,” he said. “Bet makem can tha.”

  “Sure, what do you want to wager?”

  “Thet four to yorn drei get mah.”

  “I’ll take that,” Abel said. “I know exactly how this breechloader works, you know.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Kruso. “But Ah hov practis.” He showed his right hand. Three paper cartridges were gripped between his fingers. So he’d learned Golitsin’s trick—or maybe been the one who taught it to the priest.

  Abel joined the crooked but unbroken line that had formed along the top of the levee. Took a breath. Let it out.

  He raised his hand, put it down. They began to trot down the levee’s slope into the basin, firing their rifles as they came.

  He fired. Pulled back the dog, flipped up the trapdoor breech on its hinge, flicked the percussion cap, the only piece remaining in the barrel, out. Loaded another cartridge. Closed the trap. Pushed the cartridge forward. Clicked the gun to full cock. Another shot. Then another.

  And again.

  And with each bit of practice, he was only getting faster at loading.

  The boards kept his feet from submerging in the paddy muck.

  He took another step. Fired.

  There was no reason to go quickly. The Redlanders were now truly not going anywhere. The Blaskoye leaders gave up the struggle to push their donts forward and dismounted. The others followed suit. Instead of attacking, they now hunkered down and used the donts for cover.

  Clever, Abel thought. A bullet whizzed past him. He gauged where the shot had come from, aimed, shot. Reload. Shoot. Reload again.

  To not have to worry about the endless task of feeding powder into the muzzle under fire was priceless. No stamping the ball in with the rod. No hundred eyeblink delay with a hail of lead about your head. Just this simple motion of reloading a papyrus cartridge. The flicking away of the cap and trace of burned residue.

  Some of the guns were jamming. That was no good, but it was happening in spots up and down the line. He took a quick look and saw this. But it did not look to be a problem most were having.

  It was not a problem he was having.

  He took aim at a big Blaskoye who was only partially concealed behind his dont. He must stand up to reload. There was no choice with his musket.

  The Redlander shoved in the cartridge and paper. He loaded the ball. Abel took aim. The Blaskoye lifted the ramrod. Abel fired.

  The tall Blaskoye dropped the ramrod and clutched his side.

  He fell over the dont, which must be dead, for it did not move. The rifle fell from his hands. He writhed in the mud in front of the dead dont, dying by kicks and spurts beside the dead beast that had borne him.

  Abel turned his sights elsewhere.

  Reload.

  Fire.

  The Scouts continued down the hill. And like rice at reaping time, the Blaskoye fell one after another, as if struck down by a scythe. There were only pockets here and there of Redlanders. Several had managed to get their donts in a circle and formed a dontflesh barricade of sorts. These diehard few would be tough to root out. More importantly, it would take time.

  And there was the threat, still lingering in Abel’s mind, of a flank attack to the East. Should the remains of the Blaskoye who had taken the arsenal decide to take to the Canal levee—victory could become annihilation, at least for the breechload companies of the Scouts.

  “Kruso, get your squad together and come with me. In fact, I’ll take all of Maday’s. Run get him, will you. Meet me on the levee.”

  “Aye, Capun.” Kruso saluted with his right hand, its pinkie finger missing from some Redland scrape of Scout and nomad, now lost in time.

  While Kruso went off to gather his men, Abel turned and made his way back up the hill, considering the gun. The Scout rate of fire was more than three times that of the Redlanders, especially in this situation. The Redlanders were terrified, trapped, probably running low on cartridges. Unable to comprehend what was happening to them.

  A breechloader versus a musket was murder for the musketeer.

  When he reached the levee top, he turned to see Maday’s troop, including Kruso’s squad, charging up after him. The donts were being handled by a group of younger Scouts serving as orderlies. All of them gripped rifles in one hand, a bouquet of dont reins in the others, and obviously wished desperately to take part in the action below.

  Abel separated out the reins of his own dont—he was back on the big stag Spet—from the clump in the trembling keeper’s hand.

  “You’ll get your chance,” Abel said to him. “Lots of them.”

  The boy, no more than twelve, looked up and smiled, both terror and longing in his eyes.

  Abel gave him a warm slap on the shoulder, then mounted his dont.

  The others soon arrived, and they mounted up as well. Then they were charging down the levee to the east, charging past the priests who were leaning against their wheels and watching like spectators at a carnadon feeding, and leaving behind them the frequent, steady gunshot pops and the screams of dying Redlanders. To Abel’s ears, the screams sounded more like amazement and outrage than pain.

  4

  They covered the two leagues to Garangipore at a fast trot, keeping the donts’ front paws on the ground. They’d pushed the animals to their limits this day, and they’d responded magnificently. But there were limits to even Scout dont endurance.

  They passed outlying farmhouses, abandoned for the duration, or at least showing no signs of life, until they reached an odd structure in the midst of a flax field. There was a single road that led to it—only a wagon track, but well trampled—and no road leading farther way. The building had the curious appearance of a tavern or inn from the village transported here into the middle of the country. Smoke rose from a chimney.

  Abel paused to gaze at the place for a moment, and his lieutenants rode up beside him. “What the hell is that?” he mused.

  Maday let out a short, sharp laugh. “That?” he said. “Why, that is an establishment known to most of the men of Garangipore, and several of the women as well, I’ll wager. It goes by several names, but most people know it as Truman’s Farm.”

  “And who is Truman?”

  “I think he is the late husband of the proprietress,” Maday said. “She’s called Eloise now, but I’m not at all certain if that is the name given to her by whatever parents spawned her.”

  “You’ve visited Truman’s?”

  “I have a cousin in Garangipore. We were practically raised together—he’s like a brother to me—so I come out and see him pretty often. And sometimes this is where we meet,” Maday said. “It’s a bar and whorehouse, sir. Mostly it’s a place for the town dandies to come out, get some tail, roll some bones, and pretend to be hunting—because that’s what they tell their wives. It’s true enough. Eloise keeps some flitterdaks grain-fed out in that field. She has a pair of pistols she’ll loan out to the boys to go shooting. The girls she keeps grain-fed and in the backrooms there. They aren’t local girls. She goes twice a year and picks up a new load down in the Delta. That’s the best time to come, if you know about it.” Maday nodded, lost in memory. “Yes, when Mama Eloise arrives with the new girls, it’s a hell of a time out here. Of course, everything’s double-priced that night, since every rich boy in town will be out bidding for a limited supply of unbroken females, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” Abel said. He nodded toward the building. “Look at the donts in the corral. How many do you make out?”

  “Ten, fifteen.”

  “Do you think some of Garangipore’s finest are laying low out here to avoid the Militia call-up?”

  Maday snorted. “Knowing them as I do, I would say most definitely.”

  “Let’s pay them a visit.”

  “Yes, sir!” Maday replied with a wicked smile.

  There were what looked like women’s robes arrayed on some wooden rails around the courtyard entrance of the b
uilding, but Abel saw that the robes had bodies in them, the slumped forms of dead women. The robes were bloody. In the courtyard, three men sat around a table. There were several pitchers of wine, several tipped on edge and empty, on the table. The men sat in slumped and woozy positions and did not rise when Abel and the Scouts rode up. Abel dismounted, unhitched his rifle, and—with Kruso and Maday along—approached the men.

  At several paces away, he could smell them, or rather the vinegar pungency of wine, and lots of it. There were two darker complexioned men who looked to be in their late teens or twenties. The other man Abel recognized.

  It was Edgar Jacobson.

  “Thank Zentrum it’s you, even if you are Scouts,” said Jacobson. “We thought it was them, coming back for more.”

  He doesn’t recognize me, Abel thought. Not yet, at least.

  Abel felt his hand move, of its own accord, down to the hilt of the obsidian dagger he wore thrust under his scabbard belt. His fingers worried at the smooth stone.

  “Them?” said Abel.

  “The Redlanders.” He took a long sip from his cup.

  “What happened here?”

  “They rode in—”

  “From which direction?”

  Jacobson motioned airily about his head. “Out there,” he said. “And Eloise was ready to arm up and fight, but I said, ‘Let me talk to them.’ So I went out to meet them. Probably saved my own life. The leader, this big oaf, with a beard black as the night, looks down at me from that dont of his and says something to me in that gibberish they speak. Of course I didn’t understand him and said as much. And what does he do but club me. I mean beat the hell out of me with his rifle butt, and then I fell down and they rode donts over me. Donts. I thought I was dead for sure, but I only got kicked and nipped. And I got up, and—”

  “Ran?”

  “There wasn’t anywhere to run, so I came back to the house here and hid in those shrubs over there.” He pointed toward the thorny plants that surrounded the courtyard. “Eloise came out at him with that silly blunderbuss of hers, and even got a shot off that winged one of the desert scum, but that only made him mad. He got off the dont, went over to her, knocked that pistol out of her hands, and put a knife to her throat. Then he pushed her inside and I didn’t see any more.”

  Jacobson shuddered, then took up his cup and drained the rest of the wine. He reached for a pitcher to refill it, found the pitcher empty, reached for another. Nothing there, either.

  “Thrice-damn it,” he muttered, and stared into the empty cup as if he expected it to fill up on its own accord merely because he wanted it to.

  It is not a difficult reconstruction based on available evidence, said Center.

  Observe:

  Rostov.

  Rostov followed by a retinue of Blaskoye. Rostov dragging an older woman, a woman with elaborately plaited brown hair and a liberal coating of kohl and makeup. She was lovely, still had a fine figure, and had obviously been exquisitely beautiful in her prime.

  She wore a low-cut linen wrap colored a deep blue-green. The fact that her neck and cleavage showed seemed to enrage and disgust Rostov.

  He burst into a room filled with at least twenty men, and about half that number of women, who were in the midst of serving or chatting up the men. Rostov’s men quickly invaded the room, flowing from behind him, and hustling everyone against an adobe side wall. Meanwhile two more disappeared down a hallway of the establishment and returned pushing more women, and several half-dressed men, into the main room, where they too were herded against the wall.

  Rostov threw Eloise into the trapped crowd. He then considered them all for a moment, and began to speak. His language was incomprehensible to them, and this showed on their frightened and bewildered faces, but Abel could understand what the Blaskoye said well enough.

  “You offend the gods. You are not worthy to be my enemy.” He pointed to a bead-covered window. “My enemy is out there. He will die, but he will go to the Gray Fields when he does. You—you men are fit only for the Dust, where all memory is lost, because there was nothing in your life worth remembering.”

  Suddenly, one of the men, a youngster dressed in a considerably gaudy outfit consisting of three colors, red, blue, and white, of intertwined wrapping robe, not to mention sandals with straps up to his knees, which were exposed, stepped forward with a handful of clay tablets.

  Barter chits, Abel thought. And a lot of them.

  “We can pay,” said the young man. “We all will pay you if you’ll leave us alone. This is worth a lot. Negotiable anywhere in the Land.”

  With a swift motion, Rostov knocked the chits from the man’s hands. They clattered to the floor, which was wooden plank, and not earthen, and two of them shattered.

  “What?” said the youth, stunned, bending to pick them up, “Something else then? Where they are? I know.”

  Rostov spoke to the youth, this time in accented, but intelligible Landish. “Yes, this,” he hissed. “Vehr are they, the vahrriors, the fighters?”

  The young man was still sweeping the shattered chit pieces together, trying to pick them up. “Depends on who you mean,” he said. “Militia, Scouts, Regulars—”

  Rostov stepped over the young man’s back, straddled him, then put his fingers into the man’s hair, pulled back his head. Quickly, he had the silver knife at the man’s throat.

  “Scouts,” Rostov said. “Dashian.”

  “I don’t know,” gasped the young man. “I only heard. Something. Rumor.”

  Rostov pulled harder. “Where?”

  “The levee,” said the youth. “The Canal levee.”

  Rostov smiled. Then, with a practiced motion, he cut the man’s throat.

  For a moment, he held the young man that way, facing the prisoners, showing the opened throat to them. It looked like an open, gurgling mouth, but lipless. Blood welled out, ran down into the festive robes. Rostov let the man drop, dead, to the floor.

  “Separate the men,” he said to one of his lieutenants. “Kill them. We have no time to cut off their balls first.”

  “And the whores?”

  “Cut them,” he said. He pointed to Eloise, who shied away, in terror tried to claw at the wall to get away. One of Rostov’s men grabbed her and pulled her to him and held her there. Rostov reached out and held her chin, taking in her face. He raised the knife. “Make it quick. Cut them here—”

  He pulled a wicked slice across her face from left temple to lower right jaw, passing over the brow ridge between the eyes.

  “—and here.” Another cut, this one across Eloise’s forehead.

  The slave cut, Abel thought.

  Blood welled, drizzled into her eyes. Eloise tried to raise a hand to wipe it, but was held fast. It flowed into her mouth through her twice-split lip and produced a distinctive gurgle when she screamed. Rostov backhanded her, hard, and she collapsed, unconscious. “If they resist, kill them.”

  The Redlanders went about their task, leaving the men alive so that they could watch what was being done to the women. Three of the twenty or so whores resisted and were stabbed to death. Rostov ordered their bodies taken outside and lashed to the railings.

  “I wish the Red God in particular to see what we have done in his name,” he said. “He has no eyes inside these Farmer caves.”

  Then, with all the women’s faces cut, and the women herded into a backroom, Rostov nodded. “We cannot waste powder and ball on this lot,” he said. “Bayonet them.”

  His men, ten strong in the room now, moved in on one Garangipore man at a time, culling their victims out like daks, for the slaughter. With fifteen Landsmen there, it might have been possible to act as a group and swarm their captors.

  No one tried it.

  It’s as if they’re waiting their turn, Abel thought.

  You will see the highest and lowest of men in war, Raj said. But these are in a state of shock, completely disoriented. Perhaps they are not to be blamed for being such grazers.

  I blame
them, Abel thought savagely.

  Raj laughed in his low growl. Oh, so do I, lad. At least a little.

  And then he was back in the courtyard, staring down at a drunken Edgar Jacobson.

  “These others,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “These are the Cremoy boys,” Jacobson said. “Twins, you know. They like to share. Everything, if you know what I mean.” He cupped a hand around his mouth as if he were spilling a secret. “At the same time.”

  “Why are you alive?” Abel said to them.

  “We had to get out of Garangipore. They were coming!” one of them replied drunkenly. “A few of us First Family boys, the ones who had donts ready and could ride, well, we left as fast as we could. Got out of there. Let me tell you, it was just in time, too. We saw half the place burning behind us. You tell him, Edgar.”

  Edgar shook his head. “I think he means more recently, Tab.”

  “Oh,” replied the Cremoy who’d been speaking. “Recently. Like just now?”

  Abel nodded.

  “Well, we were out hunting,” the man continued. “Had that other pistol of Eloise’s. We saw them ride in. Hid out in the flax.”

  “And the women?”

  “Oh, they’re in there,” Jacobson said, gesturing over his shoulder toward the entrance door. “We left them locked up, where they were put, you know. Safe. Left them there for their own safety.” He smiled and winked, or at least attempted a wink. It looked more like he was attempting to work a bit of dust out of one eye. “And ours.”

  “More like to give you time to loot the place and drink the wine,” Maday exclaimed. He lowered his rifle, spit out a stream of nesh juice from the wad he’d been chewing. He pointed the rifle at Jacobson. “Give me the pleasure to put this one out of my misery, Captain Dashian,” he said.

  That would be convenient, Abel thought.

  Jacobson looked up. “Oh, it’s you, Dashian. I didn’t recognize you. You’re as dark as a Delta man.”

  “Gunpowder residue,” Abel replied. He turned to Kruso. “What do you think?”

  “Eastways by northern run tha,” Kruso said. “Nah good.”

  “They’ll hit the Canal levee and find it easy going from there,” Abel said. “We’ll have to catch them.”