"No. You can find out who your friend is and kill him. I'd just as soon sleep in a bed tonight, anyway."
Wa'llach nodded. He finished dressing and rearming himself and dragged the bodies into a corner. He went through the dead men's pockets, and looked over their weapons.
Wit stepped forward when Wa'llach took his old dagger out of Al's belt. Wa'llach looked at the blade for a moment, and then made a sour expression and threw the dagger into a far corner of the room. "Take this one," he said, handing Wit another one of the dead bandit's knives. "Steel is a little better, and I think the grip is going to fit a little nicer in your hand."
Wit took the weapon and tried the grip. Wa'llach was right. He put it in his belt.
Wa'llach picked up Lou and the leader's sword. He carried him over to the window and rammed the sword through his chest and into the wall, holding him upright. The head immediately rolled forward, and Wa'llach groaned. He found another one of the bandit's knives, stood on a chair to reach Lou's head, and stuck the head in place by pinning Lou's ear to the wall with the knife. Wit supposed that someone approaching the inn from outside would see the silhouette of a man standing. Wa'llach went outside to confirm this, and reappeared shortly, apparently satisfied.
Wit dragged a chair behind the bar and sat in it. Wa'llach strapped the sword from his bundle over his shoulders, and traded the hammer that he normally carried on his belt for one of the extra daggers. He put the chairs back in their normal places, and took a position behind the door, out of view of the windows.
Presently, hooves and wheels sounded outside the inn; a cart or carriage came to a stop and people dismounted. Wa'llach slowly took the axe out of his belt and drew the sword. He moved precisely, showing no inclination to look at the window. Wit could barely keep himself from running over to see who was coming.
Footsteps approached and the door slowly opened. The first person through the door was a tall, burly man with scars on his face, carrying a heavy mace; he was followed by Johnny who had ridden off to fetch the others; last was an old dwarf with a long metal hook in place of his right arm, holding a sword in his left.
There was a still moment as the newcomers took in the scene. Then Wa'llach stepped forward and beheaded the tall burly man with a one-handed swing of his axe and stabbed the dwarf in the back with the sword. Johnny turned around in time to see Wa'llach stab him in the chest.
The old dwarf turned around slowly, and then fell to his knees, blood dripping out of his mouth. "Wa'llach…you bastard!" he murmured, before Wa'llach, laughing heartily and staring into his eyes, brought his axe down, splitting the old dwarf's skull in half.
The second floor of the inn had nothing but empty rooms, and Wit deposited his pack in one of them. He looked at the bed for a second, before walking back down to the main room.
Wa'llach had gone outside to put away the horses and search the carriage that they had driven. Wit walked into the kitchen and found the pantry. The first thing that caught his eye was a half of a meat pie, but it suddenly occurred to him that some, if not all, of the other half was inside one or more of the many dead bodies in the inn. He picked up the pie, stepped over the body of its maker to get to the back door, and tossed it into the night.
The stove was still smoking and Wit got the fire going again. He dragged one of the bodies outside, went into the main room and got a bottle of wine from behind the bar. He had a long drink and went back to the pantry. He found a large piece of bacon, some potatoes, mushrooms, and a squash of some kind. He put a pan on the stove, took a cleaver off a hook, and starting with the bacon, began to chop things into somewhat random sizes and toss them into the pan. When everything was done, he watched it sizzle and drank wine.
Wa'llach carried a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, and two plates into the main room, and Wit followed him with the pan. Wa'llach had moved all the bodies into a pile in the far corner. They sat at a table and ate.
Wa'llach filled his glass of liquor and stared into a candle flame. "Orcs… they're some of the toughest bastards I ever rode with."
Wit shoveled a bit of bacon, potato and squash onto a piece of bread, chewed slowly, and cast a deliberate glance at the pile of the dead. "Riding with orcs…I might have thought that even you would draw the line at that, how did it come about?"
"I told you, about their fondness for livers?"
Wit nodded.
"There's bands of them that will go into the frontier for them, attack whatever settlements they could find, kill anyone standing, and take their liver. They'll seal them up in barrels until they have all they can carry and then head back to their lands."
"And you just went up to those people and asked if they needed a hand?"
"Well, we ran south with fifty dwarves of the mountains after us, and they picked up another seventy men of the plains. There wasn't more than twenty of us, dwarves and skirbits, left at the time. Finally, we find a little mountain range, and get ourselves a bit of a nook that we think the horde chasing us might miss. Rest up, while we saw if they went past us, and then try to get out of there fast, not that we had anywhere to go." He shook his head and drank. "Of course, the place we find has nearly a dozen orcs hiding in it. They dropped three of us—one with a death-stick, two with swords—but we got two of them with our knives. It's a nasty fight in a close space—and no one wants to make too much of a racket on account of the army outside. Orcs had seen them coming, and taken to the hills to get out of their way. So we end up talking, to avoid a fight where whoever lives gets to battle over a hundred rested troops…figure that in the end, we've all got the same problem—and maybe there's a way out that helps us all. The army chasing us don't know about the orcs, or our exact position, and we figure that our position won't get any better. We set an ambush and killed them: the orcs got the livers, and we got to sleep safe."
"As safe as you can be around orcs."
"Oh, they were as pleased as a ghoul in a battlefield, and we didn't worry about them none. They had over a hundred livers in a day's work. And despite what you hear, they were brave, decent sorts. Most of them had been soldiers—they were much happier taking livers from warriors killed in battle than getting them out of children and old people in villages…well, either that or children's livers weren't as good for their purposes, we never did get their language very well.
"Anyway, it had happened on our way down, we had learned of a nearby lord who had grown rich making wine. We ask our orcish friends if they'll pay him a visit with us—we take the wine and gold, they take the livers.
"Now, that went off better than we could have hoped—killed another eighty men, and seized a castle with a cellar full of wine and no army within a month's march that could lay siege to it. If we had a problem, it was that the damn orcs had more livers than they could carry.
"They spent a week eating them, happiest folks I've ever seen. Then they got us to help them cart the rest back to their lands. Apparently, the main orcish army isn't keen on these sorts of raids, and we got into a scrape with them, but put them down rather hard. We held up outside one of their cities, while they traded the livers for death-sticks, bullets, and who knows what all else, picked up some more orcs, and then we snuck back into the Alliance and went to work again.
"We went on like that for three nice, fat years. No one ever quite believed that we would ride with them, and no one was ever quite ready for us. They fought like cornered dragons, and never asked for anything except the livers.
"But that's what did them. The first few trips, they would eat them only when we were safe, to celebrate a victory. But by the end, they were eating more than they were carrying back, and that wasn't the worst of it. Either they were happy as could be, but hardly more use than if they were sleeping, or they were a nervous wreck just waiting to get their hands on more. It wasn't that we ever feared for ours, it was that riding with them, fighting with them, we weren't safe. Now, with other types of folks we would have killed them, taken their things and moved on, but e
ven at their worst, it's never quite safe to make a play on an orc. They were always cagey about how many bullets they had with them, and even gone on livers, or twitching from wanting them, there was always a chance they could get you with a bullet that you didn't know they had.
"So, we waited until they were full up, and ready to go back. We had let word get back to one of the mountain clans that wanted the most to kill us, and led about thirty of them into a nice little ambush. Cut out their livers and bring them back to our friends—we know them well enough to know that they'll find someplace they feel safe and eat the lot of them straight away. When they were nice and happy and calm, we killed them, quick and quiet as we could."
"Who was he?" asked Wit, pointing to the dead, one-armed dwarf.
Wa'llach shrugged. "An idiot."
"Why did he want to kill you?"
"Took his gold, cut off his arm. I didn't think he'd be pleased about it, but to slave as a blacksmith for a hundred years until he had enough to hire those dogs to kill me…" Wa'llach chuckled. "He might have taken it a little too far."
"So you just met him one day, thought 'Here's a guy with too many arms and too much gold, why don't I lend him, or rather take from him, a hand?'"
Wa'llach laughed. "There was a little bit more to it than that…but nothing important."
"Tell me."
"Well, the dwarves make the best weapons, everyone knows this. Now, for thousands of years—since before even the mages of men, dwarves, and dragars cast the rite of gold—the humans of the lowlands have traded with the dwarves of the mountains for weapons. And the Lords of Humans have always been particular about who we sold to, and the great dwarves have always obliged them on this point. Now, your more open-minded, liberal dwarf, if you will, always took exception to this, and so, for as long as anyone can remember, there have been those who defied the Lords of Humans, and the Great Dwarves, and gave their weapons to whoever had the ale and meat to get them: whether they were a lord, or a bandit, or a lunatic, or all three at once.
"Time was that there were two clans who mainly handled the forbidden trade—the one was mine, the Zwiegleshafts, and the other was his, the Monogaurgs. Now, we have always taken our work seriously and will put just as much work into a sword for a lowland bandit as we would for a great dwarven prince. They, on the other hand, would use the cheapest metals that they could get away with, and trade blades that would never hold a point and break after a week. Now, their wretched practices might have been their own problem, but your bandits don't go much for telling one dwarf from the other so the end of it was that their shoddy craftsmanship depressed the value of our goods. I think, as a wizard of the Order, wise in these matters, you can agree with me that that was most unjust?"
"Of course, had you appealed the Order, we would have unfairly Bound you for selling weapons to criminals. There you were, a victim of your own open-mindedness and integrity."
"Exactly!"
"I almost want to weep. Whatever did you do?"
"We did what anyone would have done, of course: laid an ambush, killed the ones who fought back, and took everything that we could carry. He was one of their leaders, so I chopped off his arm…"
"As one does…"
"…so that people would know not to trifle with us."
Day was starting to break. They packed their things, left the inn, and gathered their horses. After riding for two hours they entered a town, where Wit told the chief about the violence at the inn. They watered their horses and had left before anyone had time to ride back to bury the bodies.
Shortly after noon, they reached another town, and Wit decided to stop for the day. He went to his room and lay down, and was almost immediately unconscious.
He dreamed he was back in the village where he had killed the bandit. The thin chief and the woman with the blood-stained dress were frantic: there was a horrible monster outside of the town; Wit followed a group of villagers who were going to kill it.
Wit came across the beast and was utterly terrified. It had the body of a lion and a woman's face—but when it opened its mouth it revealed three layers of razor sharp teeth. Its tail flicked behind it, bristling with venomous spikes; the beast smiled at him and Wit understood that it could shoot these spikes from the tail with deadly accuracy. Wit could hear the hunters in the distance—the beast had him dead to rights, and he lowered his weapon.
The tail flicked; the uncanny face flashed its razor smile; teeth caught the light. The hunters grew closer; the beast looked at Wit expectantly. Suddenly, he realized that it was looking to him for protection, for guidance. "Come," he said, and he ran and ran, with the terrible beast following him, through roads and cities and hills, away from the cries of the hunters.
Wit awoke in the middle of the night, the inn having fallen asleep hours before. He was not sure what to make of his dream, but it suddenly occurred to him that it was his dream, the bandit's dreams having finally left him. He lit a candle and read Phreer for an hour before falling asleep again and waking shortly before dawn.
13
The scaffold loomed above him, higher than a hill, orcs swarming its rickety platforms like it was nothing. The sky was cloudless, searing, but a steady rain fell to the dust: the sweat of the workers patching stones into place.
"Take hold!" a one-eared woman hollered. Along with a dozen others, Joti grabbed tight to the rope, which was thicker than his wrists and as coarse and spiny as a bed of thistles. "Heave!"
He leaned into the rope. The others did the same, grunting, bare shoulders bunching. Straining with all he had, Joti's stomach felt like it would burst from his skin. With a final grunt from the haulers, the stone block inched forward, rumbling over the long logs laid beneath it. Somehow, they dragged the enormous block to the base of the statue and fell into the dust, chests heaving.
Joti had barely caught his breath before the one-eared woman called them to the next block. They were barely into the day and he was already exhausted, legs trembling before he even started pulling. They finished the block, flopped in the dirt, were summoned to the next.
This time, Joti faltered to one knee. The one-eared woman strode over him and booted him in the ribs. Joti cried out and tucked into a ball, arms clamped over his head to protect it at all costs.
"Back on the line, weakling," the woman said. "If your meat can't work, it'll feed those who can."
He scrambled upright before she could hit him again. The stone ground forward inch by inch. He found his place on the line, grabbed the rope, and heaved.
After a while, the fog on his mind grew as dense as when he had first been brought to Ankin Drog.
They got a break at noon. Most of the slaves spent it slumped in the shade while the legs and waist of Graband the Heavy-Handed looked down at them in disapproval. Just as Joti's muscles were starting to stiffen up, they were summoned back to work. By mid-afternoon, when they were relieved from duty, he was so tired he could barely walk to the tunnels they held the slaves in.
He slept until someone shoved him awake for dinner. This was a lump of what they called bread: a yeasty, puffy lump that tasted like dirt. He didn't like it, but he was so hungry he would have eaten his own hands. He missed pig's milk almost as much as his family.
He slept again. The one-eared woman bawled them awake shortly after dawn. Joti was so sore he wanted to cry. The rope had grated his palms raw. He tore strips from the shins of his breeches and wrapped them around his hands. Heaving at the stones that day, he thought he would die. By day's end, he wished he had.
The first week was the worst. Between the work and the heat, he vomited multiple times each shift. This didn't earn him a moment's break: he had to press on, retching as he strained against the rope. Only when they finished log-rolling a stone into place was he allowed to sway over to the water carrier's buckets and rinse out his mouth.
Guards watched them at all times. One soldier, a tall Gru named Ukkad, watched Joti for minutes at a stretch, smirking whenever he faltered.
Those who fell and stayed down were kicked and beaten. If they didn't get up, they were hauled away. Sometimes they came back. Mostly, they didn't.
Joti knew he had to find a way out before he fell for good, but his mind didn't have the strength to pick up the question. Besides, he was watched all day, and locked in the tunnels all night. After his shift, he hardly had the energy to totter to his sleeping pallet, let alone to run or dig.
There was no way out.
His eighth day on the site, as Joti pulled on the rope with the others, men cried out in panic from the scaffolds. The slaves dropped the rope and scattered from the base of the statue. Sixty feet up, workers dashed along the scaffold. Grit showered downward as a massive pulley pulled free from its moorings. A carved stone the size of a wagon punched through the scaffolding, dragging the pulley behind it. Three workers fell along with the collapsing wood, wailing all the way down. The stone hammered into the bare ground. The pulley whumped down beside it, crushing two men as they laughed at the good fortune of having avoided the falling stone.
After the dust settled, guards jogged in to poke at the corpses. Satisfied the mangled bodies were dead, they ordered a group of slaves to haul them off to the wozzit troughs.
A bald man stomped over from the stone building across the street, pointing to the wreckage of the pulley. "Oy! Whose work is this? How many ears do I have to cut off before you worthless grubs learn to tie a knot?"
He paced across the grounds, interrogating the taskmasters, spitting and cursing. The one-eared woman called a long break.
Joti seated himself in the dirt next to a rail-thin Gru man whose white hair was falling out in patchy clumps. The shade of the statue stretched over them, protecting them from the withering summer sun.
Joti nodded up at the scaffolds. "Who is this for, anyway?"
The patchy-haired man scowled at him. "What are you, some kind of grass-eater? That's Graband the Heavy-Handed."
Students of the Order Page 17
