The Misrule series Box Set

by Andy Graham

  “Gift wrapped,” the corporal said, with a leer. “Like a Midwinter present under the tree. Covered in pine needles and smelling of soap.”

  “Very poetic.”

  “My ma likes saying stuff like that.”

  “I’d keep sentiments like that quiet if I were you. The Unsung don’t do poetry.” They didn’t really do words, either.

  “Yessir.” The corporal glanced over his shoulder but none of his colleagues appeared to have noticed.

  On the top of the hill the locals knew as the Lion’s Crest, another line of Hoyden marched into view, bold as you like. “We’re coming for you,” that line said as they disappeared behind a fold in the hill. A few seconds later another line appeared. The wind carried snatches of screams and shouts and challenges to the waiting Unsung. Some of them were twitching and shuffling, making cruder jokes than normal, laughing harder than needed.

  “Why would they march straight down our throats?” The question was more for himself than his corporal. The Unsung seemed to be recruiting anyone who could walk, and then promoting anyone who could talk at the same time. Another line appeared. These ones carrying what looked like spears. One had a distinctive curve to it. Surely that would make it useless for throwing? Are they planning to close in and hack and slash their way to victory? That makes no sense. As was the fact that: “They’re giving up the higher ground,” he said to himself.

  The corporal heard. “We got superior firepower and more men. More bullets, too.” He licked his lips and said, in that way men do when they think they have Information rather than Gossip, “The men are getting twitchy, sir. We should do something.”

  Another line of warriors broke the top of the hill. They were doing nothing to hide themselves. Sunlight twinkled on knives and buckles like the stars that were fading into the dawn.

  “Though there’s lots of the fuckers, sir.”

  “More than I was expecting, yes.” He scratched at his chin. Clean-shaven this morning. “Standards start at your jaw,” he’d been told in Basic Training a lifetime ago. “Standards finish at your feet. Keep the first clean and the second fit. Do what you’re told and you’ll do well.”

  He’d done well. Would have liked to make the jump to major but was happy to be leaving the legions with the same number of limbs he’d started out with. He was a few months short of retirement. Had wangled a transfer of his pension to his wife should he die before her, had to be drawing that pension first, of course, and had a daughter who had just started stepping out with a rookie. Most of him was proud of that. Part of him remembered what he’d been like as a raw recruit: young, dumb and filling women full of c— He buried the rest of that thought, unwilling to follow it to its sticky conclusion. Didn’t seem right given the thought had started with his daughter.

  Back then, though, the lieutenant had had great standards: fit feet and the shiniest jawline in his intake, shaved till it glowed every morning and as fragile as an anvil. His safety-glass jaw. He hadn’t coined the nickname, but he liked it. The smile creasing his face faded as another line appeared on top of the hill. They were slightly more ragged than the previous ones, but still very much there.

  I’ll give them a ten count.

  On seven, another line staggered into view. They were framed against a boiling pillar of grey cloud that rose into the rose-tinted dawn sky. Not quite a Hell Sky but not far off.

  His radio crackled, the harsh sound at odds with the birdsong and rustle of leaves around him. The message was from command: the VP was impatient. Between the lines the message also said that Randall Soulier was a deluded idiot with no experience of warfare beyond reading comics and watching other people die. That much was plain. That much could never be voiced for fear of summary execution.

  No matter how much he wanted to, the lieutenant didn’t sigh. He was a professional. He didn’t complain. He was good at his job. And he only spent a second regretting Field-Marshal Chester taking her eye off the military ball in recent years. After all, in a couple of months, he was free of the farce the legions, and this country, were becoming.

  Mennai, he’d go to Mennai. His dad loved it there. Would be good to be close to family again. Nicer place for grandkids than Ailan. The government was less obsessed about a time they’d been an empire and more interested in making the future great for anyone who was prepared to work towards that goal.

  The corporal was watching the Hoyden march over the hill, twisting that bullet ring around his finger. Curving lines rippled through the flowers on the Lion’s Crest that parted like waves before the warriors. The lieutenant had taken his daughter to the seaside when he’d been a sub-corporal. The water had rippled in the same way as the lion’s tooth flowers. The sun had warmed his cheeks, and the little girl, all sixty centimetres of her, had warmed his heart. The two of them had gone back recently when she’d told him her new man might be the One.

  The radio hissed white noise at him.

  “Starts at the jaw and ends at the feet. Other than that, do what you’re told,” he whispered and made his choice. “Get the men together, Corporal. There are too many of them” — he ignored the unshaven man’s comment of “peasant bastards” — “and the shortest route to the Angel City is over the Lion’s Crest. I also don’t want that many warriors behind us if we can slip past them.”

  “Sir.” The corporal saluted with the grace of a drunk trying to find his mouth with a bottle, and headed off to marshal the troops.

  Troops? Thugs who should be on death row. Not troops.

  The corporal pointed at the hill with his middle finger, the one with the bullet ring on it, and grabbed his crotch. The Unsung laughed. The corporal stopped pointing and flew the eagle instead: the middle-finger salute beloved of the legions. The Unsung cheered and the lieutenant sighed, his professionalism exhausted. “Whenever you’re ready, Corporal.”

  “Sir, yessir, sir.”

  He scratched at the angle of his jaw. It was bristly. He’d missed a bit. Damn it. He was not superstitious, but even so, that was not good. It was sloppy.

  A ways ahead of him, the warriors’ incessant march over the top of the hill continued.

  Baris Orr bent double. Hands on his knees, chest heaving as he sucked air into his burning lungs. Around him, his line of Hoyden were lying on the ground. Spores from the Lion’s Crest flowers floated above them, flecks of sulphurous white in the blue sky. He forced himself upright. He was leading these men now. He had to be the example, just like Captain Aalok had been to him. It worked. One by one the men and women stood. Above them, Lukaz’s line of Hoyden were sprinting up the hill as if the Devil that had staked claim to this lump of earth was stabbing a pitchfork at their heels. They slowed just before they reached the top, formed up into a ragged line, and marched over the brow of the hill, determined to be seen.

  (And they were seen, the lieutenant had his binoculars fixed on the Hoyden, trying to work out what they were up too, puzzled by the way the warriors disappeared in the undulating hill, ignoring the sound of the surf and the tinkling laughter of his daughter that flirted with his memories, watching the shape of the lines of warriors, seeing again the distinctive curved bend in a spear, seeking the solution that was screaming: ‘the answer’s as obvious as that tufty bit on your jaw you missed this morning,’ but he’d missed the greying hairs and he couldn’t see this either. That made him nervous.)

  As the last of the Hoyden, each man and woman carrying a branch hewn from a wolf-bark tree to look like spears, disappeared from view, Orr said to his men, “They’re over. Ready?”

  “I’m so tired my cock’s gone numb,” one said.

  “Your wife told me there’s nothing there to feel, anyway.” A second grinned.

  “Your daughter never said that about me.”

  A red-flash of anger crossed the face of the second. “That’s too far.”

  Orr pushed the man’s spear tip down. “Banter. That’s all. Drop it. Save the rage. You’ll need it.”

  “Yes, Baris
.”

  Orr’s grin was sharp, bordering on skeletal. “Ready?” They nodded. “On three. Three!”

  “Ailan bastard,” one shouted as Baris disappeared in a cloud of spores.

  The Hoyden followed his lung-busting dash up the hill. Ten times they’d done this already and Orr was getting a shaky feeling in his legs. He had a breathless memory of Captain Reza Aalok and his up-downs, the drop and sprawl followed by a leap back up to standing. There was no physical punishment worse than Aalok’s up-downs, especially done in full kit. Hill sprints were like a stroll. Just a stroll. A stroll. He forced that thought into his head and the air into his acidy legs. Nascimento and the others needed time. Orr didn’t have much time left, so he might as well give it to his friends. Just shy of the hill’s brow the Hoyden slowed, organised themselves, made themselves as big as they could and crested the brow noisily.

  The line stopped as one and took in a breath that sucked the movement out of the world.

  The Donian Mountains spread out, rugged and daunting, endless. Grey peaks glared at the clouds. The clouds in turn tried to throttle the mountains. Green was everywhere — dark, light and golden — drowning the rock. The air was so fresh it stung his nostrils. The morning was alive in a way that the grey, particulate-filled air of the Gates would never be. The spine of mountains that straddled the border between Ailan and Mennai was as brutal as it was beautiful.

  About one kilometre away, past a labyrinth of trees and rocks were the sleek shapes of the Unsung choppers. Machines he had all so recently flown in. Lukaz and his line of Hoyden were crawling round the front of the hill, out of sight of the Unsung. The man with the bendy spear-branch was holding it against his groin, making bent cock jokes to his exhausted but cackling audience. Baris could hear the next group thumping up the hill behind him. Thirty people pretending to be three hundred. It was killing them. But judging from the twitchy, nervous activity from the Unsung camp, it was working.

  The Hoyden next to Orr ripped his top off and waved it from the end of his rifle. The scars in his chest were shaped to look like a thunder god hurling lightning and hail. “Who wants to live forever? I want to live now!”

  And for what felt like the first time since he had been a child, Baris Orr felt the red mist lift from his eyes and saw the world for what it gave you, not for what it took from you.

  He raised the revolvers, Kayle’s big irons, and pumped two rounds into the air. Yelling obscenities at the Unsung and their love for their people, the Donian line tumbled down the hill.

  Two gunshots thundered into the air.

  “What the—” The Unsung corporal wiped a line of spittle from the edge of his mouth.

  “Revolvers. Big ones, by the sound of it. Ready?”

  “Yessir.”

  “We can’t wait any longer.”

  (“Otherwise the tide will come in and cut us off from the shore, isn’t that right, Daddy?” his daughter said to his younger self — the one with the jawline that was still a line and not a curve. “Yes, clever girl. Just like your mum. We need to go.”)

  “Was that an order, sir?” the corporal asked.

  For a second, the lieutenant wondered if he’d been thinking aloud, and then gently pushed the old memories that he had polished until they shone like new bronze, and the fresher, brighter ones of his now grown-up daughter away. He had a job to do. A retirement to earn. He checked his rifle. “Take four squads and go left. Go carefully. They’re up to something. Order four units to go right.”

  “You staying here, sir?”

  “Straight up the middle.”

  The Unsung broke as ordered. The lieutenant pulled out his binoculars. His fingers were hot and sweaty in his gloves. He saw the same bent spear cresting the brow, and realised what the Hoyden were doing.

  From his vantage point on the brow of the Lion’s Crest, Orr saw two blocks of Unsung break left and right. The remaining four squads, made up of twenty-four thugs, bullies, cons, perverts and the rest of the sweaty scrotum of society, were headed straight for the hill.

  “They fell for it. I don’t believe it,” he said to the man on his left.

  The scars on the man’s chest glistened with sweat. “I spent some time in your cities. If I’d known then how dumb you Ailan legionnaires really were, I could have got rich with my custom salve made of birds’ teeth.” He bared his own, filed, piss-coloured teeth. “That cream’ll fix whatever ails you, keep your pecker up all night and do the dishes.”

  “You’d leave poorer than you arrived,” Orr replied. “Our democracy doesn’t believe in buying things we can take.”

  “What are they doing now? Did they get lost?”

  At the edge of the clearing, the Unsung that had split left and right sprinted back to the main group. There was a flash of light from what Orr assumed was a pair of binoculars. The Unsung, en masse, headed straight towards the hill.

  “I think, my friend,” Orr said, “that we’ve been rumbled.” He shoved the revolvers back in their holsters and wiped the sweat off his hands. “At least we held them up a little. That’s gotta count for something.”

  Lukaz’s line of Hoyden were crouched in a natural trench just off the top of the hill. His pale skin was almost invisible in the Lion’s Crest flowers. Orr’s eye fell on the wonky spear-branch. Had that given them away? No matter. “They’ve figured it out, Lukaz.”

  “Good. Running’s overrated.” He joined Orr, spitting out bits of flower.

  “Call the rest and let them know what they’re up against.” The Unsung spread out in two long lines. It looked like they were so arrogant they weren’t even going to bother to try and flank the Hoyden. “They’ll advance to the point they have a good shot and then open fire.”

  The Hoyden and Baris Orr stood on the hill and waited.

  “They’ve got an Unsung legionnaire up there.”

  “Who, sir?”

  “Baris Orr, I think.”

  “The kid who used to be in the 10th Legion before the 13th?”

  “Kid?” The lieutenant raised one eyebrow at his subordinate.

  “Sir, sorry, sir.” He jerked his bullet ring on and off his finger. “What are they doing, sir?”

  Through the binoculars, the Hoyden, if that was what these Donian really called themselves, lined up alongside Orr. Their figures were ringed by flecks of gold from the sun.

  “Waiting,” Lieutenant Safety-Glass Jaw said.

  “For reinforcements?”

  “For us, I think.”

  “When do we get air support? Choppers could take them out.”

  “No choppers. We’re low on fuel.”

  “But . . .” The younger man licked his lips. “Shouldn’t these Hoyden be running?”

  “Welcome to the real world, Corporal.”

  Baris Orr unholstered his pistols. “I’m not going to insult you by telling you that this is your last chance to run. You won’t. You’ll stand and fight until this hill runs red.”

  Mutters of assent spread through the Hoyden.

  “But we will lose this fight.”

  “No!”

  “We will win.”

  “Chicken-hearted.”

  “They can’t fight.”

  “Spineless Ailan bastards.”

  Orr held up a revolver and the Hoyden fell into an uncomfortable silence, some glaring at him, others watching the cautious advance below them. “Those ‘chicken-hearted, spineless Ailan bastards’ will stop the moment they get within shooting distance. They have superior firepower. They will win.” Baris’s emotionless tone quieted even the chest-slapping from the man with hail-shaped scars etched into his body. “Once they kill us, they will move onto the Angel City and butcher everyone there.”

  “We can take some of them out,” Scar-Hail said.

  “Some, yes. Not all.”

  That flash of binoculars again. The Unsung slowed. Their leader was good, Baris thought. But why isn’t he trying to flank us? To save time or because he doesn’t trust his men?r />
  “What do we do?” Lukaz asked.

  Thirty pairs of eyes looked at Baris, not the Unsung, not Lukaz, Baris Orr. A man who up until very recently had been one of their oppressors. A wash of burning pain ran through his belly. Whether that was the cancer eating him from the inside out, or the sudden sense of responsibility and pride in men that looked up to him, he didn’t know. He plumped for the former. “You trust me?”

  Nods. Yes. With my life.

  “Run.”

  Shakes. No. Not in my life.

  Might as well have told Nascimento to chop his own dick off.

  “Go back to your families. You’ll be needed there. I want two men to stay with me. We’ll hold them here.”

  “What’s to stop them from bypassing us?” Lukaz asked.

  “Even with a good leader, getting a bunch of amateurs through these woods will take too long. They’ll be worried about us picking them off from the trees, too. The woods are ours”— Ours? It didn’t take long for a man who had shunned society for so long to claim ownership of one that worked for him — “and they know it.”

  “We can pick them off on the way back,” the man with the piss-coloured teeth said.

  “You’re the best fighters the Donian have. We can’t disregard the Unsung parachuting men directly into the Angel City.”

  “The Devil’s Breath will pluck the choppers out of the sky.”

  “The legions are dispensable. Politicians and legionnaires both know it; only the former remember it. Drop enough people in, some will get through. The rest get condolence letters sent to their families.”

  A thick silence settled across the top of the Lion’s Crest. The clouds that had clogged up the early-morning sky were lifting. They left a blazing morning sunshine that was warming Orr’s jacket. He’d have to be careful. He’d burn his scalp if he stayed out for too long. He chuckled, as if that was going to be a problem.