by Andy Graham
“Sir, yes, sir.” Malakan gasped. The VP let go and he sucked in a throatful of clean air.
“One, what is your name?”
“Malakan, sir—”
A twitch of an eyebrow silenced the rest of that sentence.
“Where’s Brennan?”
“Dead. He—”
“Single words, Malakan. Do you not understand that or should I get my men to carve it into your face?”
One pulled a heavy-bladed knife from his belt. It was not far off being a short sword.
That was two questions. One yes answer, one no. Which should I answer? A misunderstanding could see bits cut off. Fortunately, Randall took the silence as Malakan’s reply.
“Good.”
“Yessir.” Was that one word?
“Where’s Brennan?”
“Dead.”
“How?”
“Shot.”
“By whom?”
“Orr.”
“The corporal? The ex-10th legionnaire from Ray Franklin’s patrol?”
“Yes.”
“Bastards. Treacherous bastards, the lot of them. I’ll have that legion disbanded. Forget decimation. I’ll unimate them.” A smug smile slid across his face.
“Yes.” Unimate? That was slang for a single man’s right hand, right? Malakan wanted to ask. That would use too many words. He hopped from foot to foot again. Nobody said he couldn’t do that. A stare from one of the guards stopped Malakan midhop.
“What about the rest of the Unsung I sent?”
“Dead or tied up.” Malakan’s heart rattled against the inside of his ribs. That was more than one word. The guards had noticed and one was fingering the edge of his blade. Randall, the P, thankfully, had not.
The blaze of anger in Randall’s odd-coloured eyes faded into a sudden cold suspicion. “Everyone else is dead but you’re not? Why is that? Did you desert your unit?”
“No!”
“Are you a spy working against me?”
“Sir, no!”
This time the VP did notice the two words. Malakan’s arms were wrenched roughly up his spine by one of the guards.
“I like to keep promises when I can, Private. We’ll start with your fingers and then come up with something more creative.”
“Strap him to the belly of one of the choppers,” the major suggested, half-turning. One blue eye winked at Malakan. “Then take him for a ride.”
“Perfect! Good idea, Henndrik.”
“Or you give him to me,” Major Henndrik continued. “Five minutes would do it. Alone.”
Simultaneously, Malakan saw Randall shudder and the pink triangle of Henndrik’s tongue flick along his lips. “No, please I can help! I’m from here. I can get you in. I know the secret ways. They won’t be able to hide from me. I look like them, too! That’s an advantage, surely?” Malakan was practically sobbing as he rushed the words out.
“That was way more than one word, son,” the guard holding Malakan’s arms said. Malakan squealed at a tearing pain in his elbow.
“Thirty-five,” the VP said absentmindedly. “But he has a point. Release him.”
Henndrik shrugged and continued looking through a series of maps. As the blood rushed back into Malakan’s arms in a painful surge, the VP sat in the one chair in the room.
“You have one minute to tell me your plan. And if I don’t like it, I’ll have you strapped to the roof of the chopper, not the belly, and get the pilot to crash you in the ashes of Chester’s home.”
Malakan sucked in a bellyful of air and spoke with an acute, adrenaline-sweet awareness that his life depended on what he said next.
The patch of the floor where Captain Lacky had died had been scrubbed clean, too clean. The service crew had worked on the floor until they had taken the varnish off. The resulting patch looked as if it had then been bleached for good measure. Chester took a hesitant step around it to her window, reminded for one brief instant of the way she would avoid the Cracks in the floor as a child, the ones that would leak into your leg and eat out your bone marrow. The new glass smelt of the foam the mop-bot had used to weaken the old window. That had to be her imagination, surely?
Outside, a few officers milled around on the grass, their long morning shadows reaching across the police cordon. Chester had never been sure why a heightened police presence after the event was useful. Always seemed a bit too postmature to her. She chuckled, self-indulgently — it was the logical antonym for premature, after all — and turned on her boot heel. Glass shards ground on the floor. Glass was worse than sand when it came to clearing up. Though not as bad as the mess Randall Soulier seemed determined to leave.
“There are two choppers missing?” she asked, repeating the news the legionnaire on the other side of her desk had just told her.
And got the same answer. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t know who took them?” She was desperate not to shoot the messenger, itching to shoot someone.
The sub-corporal from the 6th Legion had a shock of red hair that made his entire head look like a clown’s nose. He seemed to pick up on his field-marshal’s mood and eyed the door longingly. “No, ma’am. We suspect the Rivermen may have something to do with it.”
“Why the 10th Legion?”
“They’re the ones who think doing stuff like this is OK. They’re notorious for it and they were given a lot of free rein under President Laudanum’s . . . presidency. And—”
“What?”
The sub-corporal kept his gaze fixed on a point just past Chester’s ear. He seemed to be locked in an internal dialogue: the child trying to weigh up his options — risk the punishment for a lie or risk the punishment for telling the truth. He went for the latter.
“It makes sense it’s the 10th. They’re really unhappy with the vice president, ma’am. They think he had something to do with Bethina Laudanum’s death. And” — the sub-corporal rushed the words out as if he felt that the quicker he delivered the news, the less problematic it would be if it was the wrong thing to say — “and, the 10th know the VP’s gone after Ray Franklin. Ray was one of them, a moody git by all accounts, but still one of them. They protect their own, even in death.”
“What?” Chester wasn’t sure if she was irritated by what the man was saying or because she hadn’t thought of that last phrase herself.
The sub-corporal’s eyes were practically closed in the brewing fury of the military’s most senior officer, a woman who had just narrowly escaped an attempt on her life. “That’s what they’re saying now, ma’am: protect the living, revenge the dead, fuck the VP in his head.”
“Out!” she screamed.
“Ma’am.” The sub-corporal fumbled a salute and sprinted for the door.
As it slammed closed behind him, she had a momentary expectation that there was going to be a knock on the door as one of her aides came to enquire after her.
Nothing.
Not even a tap. Neither was there the distant rumble, snatch of laughter or slam of a door that you occasionally heard in a large building like the Brick Cathedral. There wasn’t going to be enquiry after her, at least not by anyone she trusted. Jann Rainehoff, her PA, had been murdered by the VP. Captain Lacky, who in an impossibly short time had made himself indispensable, had also been killed by the same man. Bethina Laudanum had been hung by that bastard. And to make it worse?
Chester grabbed Beth’s red leather diary off her desk. Part of her wondered how the diary had survived with no more than a blackened scorch mark across the cover. Most of her was furious. Furious with the man who had made her mother chop her daughter’s big toe off. Furious with Bethina for not realising the depth of the VP’s depravity. But above all, furious with herself.
She was old and stale. She had made the hard decisions that had won the Second Great Trade Conflict for Ailan, and had been living off that glamour for years. She’d dragged up progressively older traditions from the bargain barrel of history, basking in the martial glory of previous civilisatio
ns, cherry-picking the bits that didn’t fit her world view and culling the rest. Renaming soldiers legionnaires, bringing back salt rations and a milder form of decimation, the push to have the Sword of Brettia and the Dragon of History reinstated on the Ailan flag.
She’d won the hearts and minds of her troops with her brand of retribution and rewards. She’d dazzled the wealthy with her prepared speeches in the Forum, taken pleasure in getting one over the overpaid and overprivileged, the type of people who paid other people to cut their food for them and forced parents to cut toes off their kids. Her missing toe was itching now, the unbearable red-hot itch that brought with it a compulsion to scratch it. “The itch is all in your head, you soft idiot!”
She hurled the diary across the room. It hit one of the dials, which shattered in a tinkle of glass. Her rage pinched her temples with talons. “Calm down, you fool.” She grabbed the edge of the table. “You’ll give yourself an aneurysm. Be honest with yourself. What’s really bothering you?”
Much as it made her want to gut the man alive, Randall Soulier’s assassinations of Jann Rainehoff, the woman Chester thought she had loved, and Bethina Laudanum, her oldest friend, weren’t what irritated her. The loss, though tragic, was the price you risked if you played politics. The real issue was that she hadn’t acted on her instinct sooner. And worse, the legions were now taking the law into their own hands. Chester wasn’t sure she had the power to stop it anymore.
She was a figurehead on a beached ship. A warrior had no place in peacetime.
Two tiny puddles of tears were forming on her desk, between hands that still had black under her nails, soot, grime and Lacky’s blood. “And I’m crying.”
A gust of air thumped against her new windows. Warnings be damned, she opened one-half of the glass wall. The wind howled into the room, cooling the sweat on her brow and scattering papers across the room. It blew across the freshly scrubbed patch on the floor and rifled through the pages of the diary she had thrown. It turned them over in ones, twos and clumps. With the wind still tugging at her, Field-Marshal Chester straightened her uniform.
The flicking pages stopped. One page was held down by a thick fabric patch Chester had been using as a bookmark. It was one of the new ones: a tree stitched in golds and greens. A way of marking out those loyal to her, a way of remembering Bethina and her Folly Tree, the tree she had hung from.
The tree twinkled at her in the fresh daylight, the way Beth’s eyes had twinkled when it finally dawned on her argumentative opponents that Beth had been backing them into a corner all along, the way the starlight must have twinkled off Beth’s polished shoes as her corpse spun on the rope. Chester stood there for a long time. Her mind a tangle of thoughts that ranged from the searing pain she still remembered as her toe was sawn off, through the choices now facing her, to the two half-brothers currently wreaking havoc on her adopted country, and the theft of the two—
“Helicopters,” Wu-Brocker said. “Look, two of them.”
The blades of her scalpels twirled and spun, sending shards of brilliant blue light flitting around the room.
The Famulus screamed. Her throat was ragged. Her face a sheet of crackling pain. “My skin, my skin. My god, it hurts so much. So much.”
“God? I thought you worshipped ‘Mother Nature and her children, the elements’? Funny how enough pain will challenge the values of even the staunchest believer. Look.” A gluey smile forced its way onto Wu-Brocker’s wax-dummy face. “Isn’t the light pretty?”
The blade inched closer. Too close. Out of focus. It was too close to see. This time, when the Famulus screamed, she passed out into the filthy, nightmare-ridden sanctuary her brain had built out for her, the one she’d built as Wu-Brocker carved out what was left of her eye.
Watching, from the corner of the VP’s underground hideout, his Wolf’s Lair, wrapped in shadows and cobwebs, his dirty orange smock as still as a shroud, was Benn-John. Baleful eyes were fixed on Wu-Brocker as long dormant memories twitched. His fingers stroked the scars on his neck, and, for the first time in decades, his mouth wrapped itself around words other than Benn, John, Left and Right.
30
Corporal Orr's Legend
One minute Orr, Lukaz and the Hoyden were wending their way through the forest, the next they were standing at the base of the Lion’s Crest. Not a single tree dotted the slope that angled up at the sky, nor bush, nor blade of grass. Instead, it was covered by the shimmering whiteness of countless lion’s tooth flowers in seed. It belonged in a painting of a park, not the treacherous woods of the Donian Mountains.
“Legend has it this place was once flat,” Lukaz said. “A would-be-conqueror of our tribes ripped up the trees to build a fortress. He brought a real lion with him and slaughtered it before the battle as an offering.” A breeze untangled the remaining early morning fog and rippled through the flowers. They bent and curved in the wind, as if they were sighing, as if they knew what was coming. “He should have brought two lions. The land gorged on his blood and swelled into this hill.”
The air was filled with the rattling sound of rifles being checked. The clunk of magazines being loaded. The hiss and sheen of a whetstone on a blade.
“Legend has it the Devil under the mountain ripped up the trees from the plateau where the Angel City now stands. It became the home for the first of our peoples. ‘Keep the underbelly of the mountains quiet,’ He said, ‘and I will look after what lives in the woods that cover it.’ He left the Lion’s Crest as a reminder of the deal.” Lukaz scrubbed a hand through his hair. His fingernails left red marks on snow-coloured skin beneath. “Our ancestors thought that was a good deal. Our ancestors’ children discovered the salt that has been our livelihood, their grandchildren, this gwenium.” The foreign word sounded clumsy on Lukaz’s tongue. “But had the sense to leave it where it was.” The pink tint to his eyes was lighter in the morning sunlight. Almost transparent.
“Legend has it that when the hill turns a red that doesn’t fade with the sunset, our people will fall.” He plucked a lion-tooth flower, pursed his lips and blew. Half of the spores drifted away in the air to leave a half-moon shape. “Odd how these things only grow here. You won’t find a single flower anywhere else in the entire mountain range. Not in the Ailan half or the Mennai half.”
Orr squinted into the light that was just breaking over the top of the Lion’s Crest. “I guess we’d better make these bastards bleed in the trees, not on the hill then.”
“Why are you doing this, Baris? Turning against your people?” Lukaz laid the flower back on the ground.
What to say? Was this the time to recount the tale of the town he had been born in? New Town had stood on the disputed border between Ailan and Mennai for centuries, to the point that it split one family’s house in two. They could cook in one country and crap in another without ever stepping outside. The town had been wiped off the map, literally, by blood-drunk Ailan legionnaires not ten years ago, and then the records altered so the town wouldn’t show on any maps. Was that why he was doing this? Revenge? Or was it because his time was up? That this malignancy festering inside him would eat him one cell at a time? Or, maybe, it was something else.
“Legend has it,” Orr said softly, “that there was once a man who was a complete bastard to people who had shown him more kindness than he deserved. Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?” He pulled his revolvers from their holsters. Not his. Kayle’s. They would never be his. He had them on loan as part payment for a blood debt.
“That’ll do for me.”
“You sure the Hoyden will follow my orders?”
“They follow me, as much as any of us follow anyone. You beat me on the Dawn Rock last time you were here. That’s the way it works up here.”
“Old-school, I approve.”
“I’m so glad. I can die easy now.”
“Oh no, you don’t.” Orr gripped Lukaz’s arm, a surge of adrenaline burning through him. “Kaleyne died hard. We all die hard.” The Donian gathe
red around the two men. Lean and angular. Armed and violent. A hurricane made flesh. Orr had never felt so at home.
“In which case, Baris Orr, you’d better tell us the plan.”
An Unsung lieutenant shielded his binoculars from the glare of the morning sun and said to his second, “What are the Donian people doing?”
“Don’t know, sir,” the corporal replied. The unshaven man was fiddling with a ring on his middle finger. It was shaped like a bullet. The lieutenant was willing to bet there’d be another bullet dangling off the half-visible chain that hung around the corporal’s neck.
“These folk are peasants,” the corporal said. “This bunch we’re facing call themselves the Hoyden. They’re like some gang or something. They call this hill the Lion’s Crest, too. Got some story about a devil living underneath it.” The corporal spat into the grass as if to say that was what he thought about that. “Guess these Hoyden think they can take us on in a face-to-face fight.”
“A devil?”
“Yessir.”
Spores drifted past the ranking officer’s nose. They smelt of sulphur. All these mountains did. Brimstone his old man had called it. As in fire and. Dad had retired to the Mennai countryside to keep chickens. Wanted fresh eggs. His son had inherited a platoon of men with brains the size of chicken eggs, most of which were rotten.
“Some of the guys say the Hoyden still use bows and arrows.”
“Arrows are sharp, Corporal.”
“Bullets are quicker, sir. And we got more of them.” He slapped the ammo pouches on his legs and belt. Other legionnaires had bandoliers and backpacks of bullets, one even had a mini-shell belt wrapped around his helmet.
The lieutenant raised his binoculars once more. There was a twist of worry in his belly born of more than just the bullet fetish. As the image focused into one circle, he said, “This is almost too good to be true. The way they’re marching over the hill in full view.” He added the last bit to make sure his corporal knew what he was talking about. The man was probably fantasizing about slobbering on his bullets and sliding them into someone’s orifices.
