One thing was for damn sure—I was tired of having weapons pointed at me.
“Why don’t you go get one of your leaders to talk to me?” I asked. “Like I said, I am looking for some people. I need to make sure they’re still alive first.”
“How about you just stand right there and be quiet?” ordered the woman.
I frowned. “What? Are we going to stand here all day? That doesn’t seem like a very good plan.” My tone was still reasonable, but I was running out of patience.
“Why don’t we just put her in with all the other newbies and sort it out later?” said the man.
“You mean at the jail?” asked the woman.
“Yes.”
“Hmm, that isn’t a bad idea. Why don’t you go get her weapons? Then we can be done with this.”
Okay, that’s enough, I thought. The conversation was not going well for me, and I really couldn’t afford to rot in a jail cell.
In one smooth motion, I drew my short sword and activated my vib-blade ability. The bronze blade arced up and forward, neatly cutting the end off the male guard’s spear. The moment I had moved, the wary female guard had stabbed at my chest. I parried the blade to the side with Eneus in my other hand. Then I slammed the butt of my spear into the arch of the guard’s foot, and cut her spear haft with my short sword on its return swing.
I kicked forward, knocking the off-balance guard to the ground, and air skated to one side before a couple arrows hissed through the space I’d just been occupying. My eyes narrowed, and I crouched to spring forward. Finding the archers quickly might be tough, and taking them out without killing them would be harder, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t really fault them, but I couldn’t just let the guards try to kill me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to kill them, either. I just needed into Soron. Murdering guards would be bad.
“That’s enough! Archers, stand down too!” shouted a woman’s voice. The simple instruction carried such authority; I couldn’t help but pause and watch as a big, middle-aged Terran woman walked towards us. She bore a huge sword on her back and moved with the casual grace of a career warrior. Her armor was painted with strange blobs of green and brown—I thought it was kind of ugly, but intriguing. If I weren’t so wary, half expecting to be shot by an arrow, I might have looked closer.
My shoulders were so tense that they’d probably stop an arrow. I hoped the new woman would make the situation better. Giving up my weapons was never going to happen, but I couldn’t run away, either. I definitely couldn’t afford to sit around in a jail cell for however long they’d keep me there. Fighting had been kind of stupid too. I vowed not to attack in the future if the people I was dealing with were not enemies and I could avoid it.
“Captain!” called the male guard. “We were working to apprehend this person when-”
“You were working on getting yourselves killed,” muttered the larger woman, coming to an abrupt halt. I eyed her warily.
“We had the situation in hand, Captain,” said the female guard, stressing the title with badly disguised dislike.
“Cathy, I know you have a problem with me, probably because you wanted a promotion and the town hired a mercenary instead. Well, if this situation is any evidence, they made the right choice.” She gazed pointedly at the stick the guard held that had once been a spear. “This woman you were questioning could have killed both of you so fast you wouldn’t have even known what happened.”
“No, we were—” Cathy began saying.
“The fact you can’t recognize this is exactly why I’m your boss right now.” The big woman, Mourad’s, voice was entirely matter-of-fact. “You could have handled this worse, but you could have also handled it better.”
Mourad gestured to me. “You there, woman with the spear, come with me. Let’s go find out if your friends are in town. We might have suffered an attack, but that doesn’t mean we will act unprofessionally to travelers. Right, Cathy?”
“I can’t believe this! She attacked us!” Cathy’s eyes were wild, and her hand crept towards her bronze short sword.
Mourad took two quick steps forward, and effortlessly swept the angry guard’s feet out. She kept her eyes on the guard at her feet but spoke to everyone when she said, “Any of you guards that might want to think less of Cathy after I just knocked her on her ass, I want to say something to you. First of all, Cathy actually fought the raiders last night, and she still has the strength and spirit to do her job here. Second, not a single one of you would have fared any better against me, so if you give the sergeant here any grief, I’ll knock you even harder for it.”
I blinked at that and decided I liked Mourad. Her gruff leadership style was definitely different, but I committed the approach she was using to memory in case I ever needed it.
“You may be able to beat me, but the council will hear about this!” Cathy snarled. “Knocking me down doesn’t make you right.”
Mourad calmly replied, “You are correct. But I was fighting the raiders last night too, and I’m one reason Soron is still standing instead of destroyed. That fact is what makes me right. I’m also right because I just watched the whole conflict here, and if this woman had extended her arm all the way, she would have cut your throat as well as your spear. She only attacked when you began threatening to lock her up.”
The big, armored guard captain turned to the male guard who hadn’t said anything for a while. “Trend, please escort this woman to the town center. Introduce her to Plejia and find out if her friends are still in town. Keep an eye on her.”
“Yes, Captain,” replied Trend, snapping off a quick salute. After a brief hesitation, he asked, “Aren’t you going to come along, Captain? Since she’s so dangerous, wouldn’t it be better if you were with us?”
“I normally would, but half the town is burning. Among all the problems on my list, this one is not ranking very high.” She pointed at me and said, “You, what is your name, girl?”
“It’s Nora, Auntie,” I said on reflex, adding the ancient address of respect for an older woman.
Mourad frowned, then smiled. “You won’t cause any problems will you?”
“Not if nobody tries to lock me in a jail cell,” I said and added, “for no reason.”
“Okay, good. Follow the guard here. It’s obvious you are orb-Bonded or a mage, but don’t cause any trouble. It will not go well for you,” Mourad warned. “This place wouldn’t still be standing unless we had some good fighters here.”
When the woman turned, dismissing me, I noticed that the sword on her back was made of blessed steel. She wore it openly. The older woman’s manner, the level of respect she commanded, and her age made me figure that she was one tough customer. Middle-aged warriors did not openly carry blessed steel weapons without being able to use them.
“Come along, please,” said the male guard I’d first met, Trend.
I nodded and followed him after sheathing my short sword. My back itched between my shoulder blades. It was likely that I was still being watched, probably targeted. In hindsight, maybe attacking the guards really hadn’t been the smartest thing I could have done. Fighting through the town was not the best way to make friends, and probably wouldn’t have been possible in the first place.
What was wrong with me? I was orb-Bonded, but this was Berber! People in Berber were constantly fighting monsters or bandits or even Ludus itself. Some of the strongest fighters on the planet passed through this country.
Was I cursed to always either cower or make bad decisions without thinking? If I couldn’t figure out how to act as a new orb-Bonded soon, I really might die. Maybe I’d deserve it.
I seethed at myself, thinking dark thoughts as I followed Trend into Soron.
Careless Words
Now that I was in Soron, following Trend, the damage looked a lot worse than it had from a distance. Entire homes had been burned to the ground, and craters blasted out of the earth served as grim evidence that magic had been used in the battle.
Signs of suffering were everywhere. Townspeople still rushed about trying to extinguish fires. Here and there, walls collapsed and rubble moved as it settled. A few craters had been blown from the earth, and unnatural patches of ice glittered on the sides of structures.
I’d seen similar things before as the result of magical battles, but nothing on this scale. Even after my experiences in Dingeramat, my stomach still dropped out a bit.
This was real. I wasn’t a small town gang girl in Bittertown anymore. No, I was an orb-Bonded adventurer, and I’d just walked into a Berber town on the edge of the wilderness that had suffered an attack. What in the rotting hell had I been thinking, attacking the guards earlier? It had seemed like a good idea at the time to rely on my strength, but now I understood my arrogance. Truly, even surviving Dingeramat had been a fluke.
As I dodged a crater in the road, acrid smoke from a burning building washed over me. I watched my foot placement as I ran through my encounter with the guards over and over again in my mind. No, maybe lack of strength on its own wasn’t the problem. Fighting my way through a town to meet someone was dumb any way I looked at it. A fact that would have been common sense before I’d been forced to leave Bittertown—before my life had been turned upside down. What was it the guards had said? I’d looked dangerous, powerful, but they hadn’t thought I looked trustworthy.
That realization hurt. People that knew me generally trusted me, but I hadn’t had a lot of experience with strangers. As much as it pained me to admit, maybe my social skills were lacking. Every time I ran through the previous encounter, I had to admit that if I’d been better at talking to people, maybe seemed friendlier, I might not have had to draw my sword.
I might be slow, and I might not be clever, but I was not a coward—at least not for long. Now that I’d recognized my weakness, it was time to work on it, and there was no time like the present. I was not going to enjoy this. Fighting was much simpler than small talk.
Stifling a groan, I sighed, then asked Trend, “So your name is Trend?” I carefully kept my face neutral, hiding my wince. This was already painful.
“Yes,” he said.
Great. Now what? I thought. I said, “Uh, I seem to have come at a bad time.”
“You could definitely say that,” said the guard.
I felt my face burning. Oh, Creator; kill me now. I didn’t understand how I could feel so self-conscious while talking to a man I had easily overpowered just a few minutes earlier. I shook my head and stopped trying to force a chat.
As I continued through the town with Trend, I studied the faces of the townspeople. Most were blank, obviously in a state of shock. A wailing mother hugged the lifeless body of a little boy nearby. The scene hit me hard. Women were supposed to protect children, but especially little boys. How senseless. Without really thinking about it, I muttered, “Who would do this sort of thing?”
“Rotting murderers and thieves, that’s who.” The sudden heat in Trend’s voice caught me by surprise, but then considering him as a resident of Soron, much less a guard, he’d probably be furious.
“Who were they?” I asked.
Trend stared ahead and clenched his jaw. His nose twitched, and I realized that he actually was fairly attractive, in a bearded, gruff sort of way. Not my type, though. Then again, just the fact he wasn’t a good time boy made him not my type.
That thought generated a wave of sadness, but I recovered quickly. I had realized a long time ago that I would probably never get married. I had no desire to be a first wife, and most women probably wouldn’t want a woman like me as a second or even a third wife. I’d probably be difficult to deal with, and lower the reputation of their family.
“They were probably slavers,” Trend finally said.
Since he’d decided to speak, I snapped my eyes forward and listened. Getting caught staring would have made me feel even more awkward. “Slavers?” I asked.
“Yes, at least the attack fits the general pattern of slaver attacks over the last ten years. They came at night and would have completely annihilated us if not for Vairie Petrov, the town’s benefactor. She settled here a few years ago and added most of her personal armswomen to the town guard. Mistress Petrov also added security and had enough money to hire people like Captain Mourad. Some of the town elders thought Mistress Petrov was paranoid. Well, they aren’t saying so now.”
“What happened?”
“We were attacked in the middle of the night. At first, it was really confusing what was going on. This was when most of the prisoners were taken. If the attackers had just been dark adventurers, they would have run away once we started defending the town, but they’d stayed to fight us. That meant they were probably professional slavers. They must have had a quota, or had been hoping to take most of the town.”
“I’ve heard about that sort of thing. There’s the male group, the female group, and the Mo’hali group, right?” I asked.
Trend glanced at me as we walked. “Are you from nearby?”
“Bittertown.”
“Ah, that explains it. News of the male group hasn’t spread far yet. That one’s new. Yes, you’re right.”
I shook my head. “It still sounds strange to me that there would be a bandit group made of men.”
“Why?” asked Trend.
“Because men don’t really have to do anything other than sitting around and looking handsome,” I said absently. “There are three times as many women as men. Why would there be a group of criminals that are all men?”
Trend frowned at me. “It’s true that the slavers seemed focused on abducting men last night, probably because they sell for more. In fact, female captives were probably only taken to sell to dark adventuring groups. I’ve heard they send them into dungeons to trigger all the traps or draw out monsters.
“But male bandit groups or slavers are not entirely unheard of. As you probably know, on Earth, men are more commonly soldiers, guards, construction workers, all that sort of thing. Some Terran men that are transported to Ludus don’t adjust well, and attract other Ludans that are unhappy or angry.”
“Angry? Don’t adjust very well?” I frowned. “What is there to adjust to? Men can just stand around and find some go-getter woman who wants to be a first wife, then just get taken care of, fathering children. In fact, it’s probably actually better for men to just stay home and keep out of the way.”
“You mean men should just focus on their families instead of doing dangerous, unnecessary things like becoming a town guard to protect others? It doesn’t make any sense for men to put themselves in harm’s way, right?” Trend asked.
“Yes, exactly.” I heard the words come out of my mouth as I said them. Rot. I whipped my head around, but the damage had been done.
Trend stared forward, clenching his jaw. In that moment, I knew that I’d failed at my own social skill training. I cursed myself a fool and only barely resisted kicking a rock in frustration. Why in the rotting hells had I said that? I thought about my hard-working, compassionate father and felt guilty. What would he say if he’d heard me just now? I’d definitely spent too long with the Jackals.
The awkward silence between Trend and I grew, so I went back to studying the damage to Soron. I watched the male villagers helping rebuild, and thought about what I’d said, how I’d dismissed them. Some of the men were wounded, and I wondered if they’d been involved in the fighting. There was a lot I still didn’t know about the situation, that was for sure.
I spent the remaining time walking to the center of town in silence, trying to imagine a world where groups of male criminals were normal. Like the stories of steel buildings my father had told me in the past, I just couldn’t imagine a world where people cared about women dying in combat. Female lives were not worth all that much on Ludus, a fact I’d understood my entire life.
How would I do in a world like Earth? How would I react to people trying to keep me safe? Probably not very well, I thought. Quietly staying home just would never be for m
e, and I regretted my hasty words to Trend a second time.
My father had once told me that we can’t fix something until we know it’s broken first.
My social experiment had failed, but now I had identified a weakness. I made a mental note to address it over time. Despite the obvious cold shoulder I was getting from Trend now, I felt comfort in the knowledge that I’d learned something valuable.
Price
Waiting in a fancy office while Trend technically kept me under observation was becoming more awkward with every minute that passed. The fact I wore armor and carried a spear only made the situation feel stranger still. In the town’s administration building, the destruction to the rest of Soron would have seemed a distant, imagined thing if not for the harried, disheveled people rushing everywhere.
When we’d first approached the building, a few other guards had challenged us, and Trend had relayed Captain Mourad’s orders. After that, we’d made our way to a waiting area, and had been standing around ever since.
I was seriously beginning to wonder if I could even realistically expect someone to see me after the town had been attacked, when an older, businesslike woman entered the room. Her pace was brisk, her eyes sharp, and her expression polite but direct. She wore loose, flowing dark pants and a yellow top with frills at the neck. I could only see the tips of her shoes, but they looked very well made. It was hard to judge her age because she obviously took care of herself, but I placed her somewhere in her middle years.
Without being told, I knew this woman was someone in charge, a fact that was confirmed when she said, “My name is Plejia Green. I am majordomo to Vairie Petrov, the de facto major of this town. My time is valuable. All I know about you is that you just came to town, and Captain Mourad sent you here. I assume this means you were a pain in the ass, but I sincerely don’t care. Hurry up and tell me what you want.”
Mitigating Risk Page 20
