by Andrew Post
“Don’t know. There’s six-gun ammo in that one over there, if you need it.” He noticed her empty holster. “Or a six-gun.”
“Where are Zee and Kylie?” Anoushka said, lifting one of many identical shiny-new revolvers from a straw-stuffed crate.
His armor creaked as he shrugged. “Haven’t seen them.”
“What about Ruprecht?”
“What about the dwarf?” Peter promptly countered.
After a moment, she said, “You didn’t deserve getting sent to Breakshale.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
“Long as he’s dead, I’m fine with that. He is dead, right? He didn’t get a second chance, allowed to help so long as he felt very bad about what he’d done?”
“No, he’s dead.”
“You?”
“Yeah, I did it. But we need to find the others. I think Mann O. Mahan’s team blew up the bridges. They might still be in the city.”
“They are. They’re across the street,” Peter said. “In the city gardens.”
“What?”
“Came in here, took some beer, some bullets, and went back across to the camp they’ve got going. Never saw me. Wish I’d known they had done the bridges—I would’ve dropped them like I did those,” he said, nodding at the heap of bushwhacked orcs behind Anoushka.
“Will you help me?” she said.
“What do you think I’ve been doing?”
“But will you help me with Mann? They might have Zee and Kylie.”
Peter dragged another bullet belt from the crate and draped it over his other shoulder. He walked past her, stepped over the dead orcs piled at the bottom of the stairs, grunted to bend and pick up his torch, and started upstairs. Anoushka followed the torchlight and the clicks of Teetee’s nails on the metal steps. She lost them on the brewery’s ground floor. She lit a match, found the door, and stepped outside. The berserker’s footprints in the snow didn’t cross the street to the garden’s wrought-iron archway but went down the street. She turned, but he wasn’t there. A moment later, she heard the crank gun’s long scream and the orcs answering with their own. “Fuck.”
Anoushka checked her new revolver and faced the botanical garden ahead.
The garden’s paved lane swerved between ancient, well-manicured trees and shrubbery trimmed into animal shapes. She could catch the light of a fire between branches. In the distance, she heard Mann O. Mahan’s gravelly, gargling voice.
“You’re gonna eat this shit off my boot. You can stare at it all you like, choosing what hunk to enjoy first, but this is gonna happen.”
Keeping low, Anoushka reached ahead of her to create a gap in the hare-shaped shrubbery she was crouched behind. Beyond, an open meadow had been cut into the center of the garden’s lawn.
The Blaggards stood circled around Mann. She counted. Eight. So maybe they hadn’t been the ones on the bridge—unless they’d recruited help along the way.
With a smear of horseshit steaming on his boot tip, the head Blaggard lifted his leg to bring the filth near the face of an orc. He was young, without the scars marking him warrior caste yet. Beaten and bloody, arms bound behind him, he sat on his knees, yellow eyes estimating the shit on Mann’s boot toe. He knelt and began eating. The Blaggards laughed, Mann the loudest.
Movement drew her attention—a greenhouse stood off to the side, in the corner of the garden. Smoke escaped through a broken panel in its roof. The frosted glass shack was glowing; a small fire burned inside. There was no definite sign of Kylie-Nae and Zuther, but she saw the silhouettes of two people sitting within.
“Is this really necessary?” someone said, drawing Anoushka’s focus back.
It was Ruprecht. He’d been given a dark riding cloak, which camouflaged him among the other Blaggards. Which dropped the Blaggard count to seven.
“They need to learn who’s boss,” Mann said. “Especially bucks like this one here. Got pride, sure, but he’s dumb as the rest.” He grabbed the orc by the back of the neck to press him harder against his manure-dipped boot. “Eat it all, greenie, or you can forget about dessert!”
One Blaggard upended a brown bottle, drained its dregs, and tossed it aside.
It crashed through the bushes—right next to Anoushka. It bashed against a tree trunk, shards raining down on her collar and stinging her neck. Blinking the flecks of glass and snow out of her eyelashes, Anoushka studied the seated silhouettes in the greenhouse. Rough shapes. The fire wasn’t throwing a strong enough light to give their edges any telling details. They could be some of the statuary in storage within the greenhouse, her friends, or some innocents the Blaggards had found hiding in the city.
She was outnumbered, outgunned. There was no other option. If Peter had chosen to help, maybe together, they could’ve overtaken them. But alone, her odds were slim. Stepping out of the bushes, she crunched out into the park’s central clearing, hands up.
One Blaggard did a double take, cast down his beer, and drew. “Hold it right there!”
The others followed suit, flinging back snow-dappled cloaks to drunkenly fumble their guns out.
Mann fired a round into the orc, dropping him into the mess he’d been eating, and drew a half circle of weak smoke, turning the warmed barrel toward Anoushka. “The elf.”
Ruprecht, behind Mann, eyes wide, clutched his borrowed cloak to his chest, as alarmed to see her as the others were.
“Bring her over here, boys. Check her good,” Mann ordered.
Keeping her at gunpoint several times over, the Blaggards cautiously approached, encircling her. One snatched her new revolver away and tossed it to Mann. Another squatted behind her, running his cold hands up one leg and down the other and taking away her boot knife.
“Are my friends okay?” she said.
“Inside, getting warm,” Mann said, thumbing over to the greenhouse. He looked past Anoushka, bloodshot bonk-eyes mistrustful. “Where’s our packhorse? And Big Boy, for that matter?”
“I haven’t seen Peter.”
“And our little Erik?”
“Him either.”
“All right, well, inside with ya. Come along.” It took Mann three tries to get it holstered. When he turned to guide Anoushka and the Blaggards toward the greenhouse, his trail of footprints in the snow wove a crooked path.
Ruprecht, in the ring of black armor around them, came to Anoushka’s side.
Walking on, she gave him a look hoping the bard would decipher: The Blaggards cannot be trusted. But if Ruprecht understood, she couldn’t tell.
Inside, each of the greenhouse’s planters lay overturned, black dirt and broken shards of clay flowerpots strewn across the cement floor. A radio was set in the corner, obviously stolen from some well-to-do person’s house. DJ Cliffy Cohen was introducing the next song, and it played. Mann lowered the volume when he passed. Giving Anoushka another shove, she turned toward the far end of the glass-roofed room, where the fire was. Kylie-Nae and Zuther. Their eyes lit up, but neither shot to their feet to welcome their captain.
“Lookie who I found!” Mann declared. He shoved Anoushka toward the fire, nearly into it. “Have a seat.”
Anoushka sat next to Kylie-Nae. She said nothing but put her hand on Anoushka’s knee and squeezed hard. Anoushka met her friend’s gaze, noticing how beat up she looked, how splashed with blood—both orc-black and red—she was. I’m okay, she mouthed. Mann’s crew remained standing, blocking the way out.
Pushed ahead by one of the Blaggards, Ruprecht came over near the fire and took a seat. He was shaking. The hand Anoushka had flattened was badly swollen, the skin so bruised in places it was shiny and black.
Mann hooked his thumbs on his breastplate’s side straps, eyeing the four of them over the fire. Anoushka expected the Blaggard would issue some small wave and that’d be it, seven Blaggards opening fire to kill them where they sat. But Mann struggled to sit in his unyielding armor and crossed his legs. His men did likewise, perching to either side
of him on overturned pails and vaselike flowerpots.
“You honestly didn’t see Mister Redmondt when you were traipsing about town?” Mann said, tapping a cigarette against his metal knee pad.
“No,” Anoushka said.
For a moment, only the sound of several people breathing was heard, along with the occasional gunshot in the city distantly.
“What about the necromancer?” Mann said and loudly burped. “Any sign of him? Any leads?”
“No.”
He struck a match, took a puff. “You seem edgy. About like the one next to you there. All I told her was she gives me excitations, and she goes and gets all weird about it.”
“We’re trying to take back a city,” Anoushka said, drawing Mann’s malignant eye away from Kylie-Nae. “We’re under a lot of pressure.”
Mann nodded. “Pressuring work. Big responsibility. Aye, aye.” He took out a blotted handkerchief and wiped the blood, brains, and shit from his boot and tossed the rag into the fire. One Blaggard coughed, trying to bottle his disgust at the smell. “Gotta blow off some steam,” Mann told Anoushka. “It’ll kill ya, holding on to it so tight.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
Mann said, arching an eyebrow Ruprecht’s direction, “Found the fop here hiding in the library, pissing himself in the poetry section. Looks like someone boo-booed his hand real good. Hold it up once, LeFevre. Damn. What’d you use, a hammer?”
“My six-gun.”
“Speaking of six-guns.” Poking his cigarette into the corner of his mouth to free up a hand, Mann drew the revolver Anoushka had found in the basement of the brewery. He studied it by the firelight. “Piece looks new. Found the cache, did ya?”
“Yes.”
“And you pieced it together, what it means, that New Kambleburg has all them guns sitting waiting in a building that isn’t the city watch’s armory?”
“During the raid, the sheriff and his men probably moved the armory’s stores to a place that wouldn’t be obvious for the orc—in case they couldn’t hold them off.”
“Maybe, but why do they bear the Committee’s stamp upon each and every one, hmm? Curious, right?”
“Maybe the Committee, finally realizing New Kambleburg is such a sitting duck this far south, decided the city should have better supplies to fight off the orcs next time they attempted to overtake them. They still failed, obviously, but it was a good idea.”
Mann smiled the entire time she spoke. “No,” he said when she was done, “that isn’t what happened. You’re grasping at straws, darlin’. Come on, you know. Out with it.”
“You’re working for Lyle.”
“Not the point I was getting at,” Mann said. He turned aside to his men. “Fetch our crate.” As his left-hand Blaggard moved away, Mann used the smoldering end of his cigarette to light a second. “So, go on, tell me why all them crates were in the barley-pop factory’s basement.”
“Orcs steal. The one outside that you were making eat shit off your boot was wearing a knight’s dress uniform belt.”
Mann sighed out his drag, contributing another layer of haze to the smoky room.
The Blaggard that Mann had sent off returned, dragging another one of the munitions crates by its rope handle. It screeched across the cement floor, and he set it near the fire.
Mann backhanded the man’s cheek and got up to pull the crate so it wasn’t close to the fire—its bright pine side was smoke stained. “Not so close, you fucking idiot.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Mann flicked his cigarette at the Blaggard to make it explode into orange sparks against his neck, the man squealing as embers tumbled down his armor’s collar. Mann sat again. “Stupid.” His bugging eyes swung toward Anoushka again, only the left actually training on her. “I didn’t wanna believe it either,” he said. “I really didn’t. It wasn’t until the Baron broke it down for me that it really sank in.”
“I don’t believe the Committee would help the War King.”
“But they are. They stashed all this,” he said, kicking the crate next to him, “and only the greenies and the Committee knew where it was. Our boys could’ve used it—shit, your lot could’ve used it—but it wasn’t for anybody but them.”
“No. I believe in Rammelstaad. And the Ma’am.”
Kylie-Nae’s hand on Anoushka’s knee tightened. Stop.
“And I believe in her too!” Mann bellowed. “As much as I believe she wants the orc to pose a challenge—and a formidable one. I guess I always kind of knew. I seen, years back, with my own godsdamned eyes, blackcoat ships ‘accidentally’ knocking crates overboard, big-ass ones. And before my old crew I’d been with—before becoming a bard—could snatch it up, here came a fucking orc tub and dragged them out. Out in the middle of fucking nowhere! Like they’d both sat down ahead of time and put an X on the map of where they’d be booting the shit in. Back then, I thought it was some mistake. Some enormous coincidence, some weird timing of them dropping the shit and the orcs finding it. But the Baron, well, he’s told me what’s going on. Still, though, I had an inkling. I fought it—same as I can see you are now. It’s all right. Shit’s hard to swallow; I understand. Takes time.”
“I don’t believe it,” Anoushka said. “And I never will.”
“You know, the funny thing about truth is it’s a lot like this beer here. You have one sip; then you want another. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the Ma’am had her nephews killed. Simply a way to buy favor. I mean, if she did, she spared them, really, in the end. Duke Titch is a boy lover, you know. Rather huge skeleton in the family closet. And it wouldn’t have been too long before he tired of the orphanage fetchings his men brought him for those conveniently up the hall from his bedchamber. Yeesh; gone and gave myself the willies.” Mann giggled. “Nasty business. But, either way, if she was behind the twins’ murder, it was rather genius. Look at how everyone acts. Like she was our ailing mother we’d do anything to help. Of course, really, she probably wouldn’t walk across the street to piss on a solitary one of us if we were burning to death. But that’s okay. Because it’s still love in a way, isn’t it? If something scolds us, even excessively, it means we’re cared for, hardhanded or soft.”
“It’s our realm, our home,” Anoushka said. “The Committee offers a contract on someone who is a threat against it, and we, as contractors—”
“The blackcoats, the knights, the contractors, everyone . . . We were all being tricked,” Mann cut in. “Ursula Stellen-Austenhoff owns all of the iron mines and the forests now since the snowies and the dwarves have bent a knee—or were encouraged to bend a knee. And what do you know: what are guns made of? What are ships made of? Huh, right? Funny how it all fits together neatly. Heartbreaking, I understand, it is. For people like us who grew up hearing the stories—about how it’s next to godliness to spend your life serving your realm. But it was all simply that: stories, make-believe, horseshit.
“If the Ma’am wants to help the enemy, who are we to do different? We can make it a proper challenge for her knights and soldiers and little drummer boys. Because it’s what she wants. We’re fighters. We fight. Why should it matter which side it’s for? We were freelancing before; we never saluted nobody. That doesn’t have to change. Even that: we called ourselves freelance, but did we ever work for anybody but the Ma’am? The county lords who were doling out the coin changed, but they were always under her thumb; each and every.”
“How much of this is you quoting Lyle, I wonder.”
Mann laughed. “Some, I’ll cop, sure. Fella’s smart. Used to be a godsdamn file clerk, if you can believe it.”
“So what’s the bottom line? Join or die?”
Mann shrugged. He told one of his men to turn up the radio. “I like this song,” he said to Anoushka. “Pretty amazing thing, the radio. Especially how we can get to hear the Ma’am up in New Delta City this far away in the south.” He leaned forward, adding, “Thank the gods they put that tower in the Error, eh?”
�
��Is that where he is?”
“Oh, I’m not one to tell stories outside of school. But, shit, who am I kidding? I kinda want to see you get him. You’ve come this far; be a shame for you to go home empty-handed.”
“We’re cut off. There is no going home.”
“Either way, you don’t strike me as the type to half-ass a contract. But that would mean cutting you loose with your pretty little head full of what you’ve now become privy to.” He put his feet up on the lid of the munitions crate between them. “Though, even if you do join, he might be a little sore toward ya at first, seeing how you killed his girl.”
“It was an accident, but yes.”
“Shame. Sweet lady. I considered Sharona one of my fellow stagehands for this big show, so to speak. Back when he applied to the scryers, she was the one who told him the rejection letter—which they wanted you to find—was a feint. The Committee fellas had plans for him. Well, not him specifically. It wasn’t as if he was raised, destined to become the Baron of Decay. But, like anyone fit for a job, he held the adequate credentials. A magickally inclined man with very little to lose: perfect for the part. A figure, an image that’d be more tangible for the people to pin their fears upon. See, the common man or woman, some farmer or fur trapper or shit-rake who doesn’t know anything about the world beyond their paddock fences or the end of their street or even their godsdamn nose, has an unclear fear of the orc. Besides the Ma’am’s fighters, none of the common folk have seen one up close. Therefore, they fear it because they’ve been told to; this heartless, faraway thing that wants to do us harm and is green and has got big ol’ teeth and talks funny and worships different gods from ours.
“But it wasn’t enough. To really hate something, or to make someone hate something, you take something familiar and say, ‘This sod right here, he doesn’t want to fit the mold. He wants to be different. He wants to be with the foreign uglies and do like they do.’ A hayseed understands deceit. A bumpkin understands hating their own—they’re good at that, once they have a finger to follow. They wait for the opportunity. Why else do the sheriffs drag the local pig fucker through the streets in broad daylight? Because hate is good for a community. Keeps us close-knit. And when the scryers offered Lyle a name, the Baron, and a whole slew of julas and a mud palace to call his own . . . well, the Ma’am had her pig fucker ready for his drag through the street. The biggest, most famous, most detested pig fucker you ever did see. One enemy that every man, woman, and child, regardless of their county, could get behind hating with every ounce of their little peasant hearts. You saw where he lived. And he plays it up, too. Almost too much so, ask me. But he likes the theatrics and the heat he’s getting, the bad press and the Ma’am going on and on about how much of a shit he is. Could call me envious; they’re using the word evil. One they usually only bring out for the headlines about Skivvit. Lyle gets to play the part, the best part, the most freeing part: the bad guy.”
