Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Oh no, you're thinking about it all wrong. The ranger dagger is much better, because it's such a good story. When you wear that, you'll always have something to start a conversation about, makes it more likely for one thing to lead to another." Haniel winked, Chattiel grinned, and Haniel almost felt embarrassed for him.

  Gondorf was lukewarm about the match, at first, having a low opinion of the captain of the guards and thinking that the public exhibition was tacky, but he came around to it when he realized that it was his best shot at starting to build up the stake he would need for a rematch with Misty Mountain.

  Gondorf met Haniel and Bronzino outside of the amphitheater on the night of the match. Haniel left them talking together and went over to the bar. She scanned the bottles behind it and bought a heavy one, with a long, hand-sized neck.

  Bronzino looked at it questioningly when she came back to them.

  "I had a hankering for," she paused to read the label, "skirbit mint cordial, what can I say?"

  They laughed at her.

  Bronzino pointed out Chattiel and Phiblus sitting in the front row. Gondorf's eyes flashed. "What's that dagger he has?"

  "Oh, he says that he took it from some ranger, who he is inexplicably proud about having sent to his death," Bronzino said, a little absently.

  Gondorf's hands opening his cases were a blur. Bronzino looked at Haniel.

  "Don't," she said.

  Bronzino's nod was hollow-eyed and terrified.

  No one noticed Gondorf string the bow, but when he raised it with a nocked arrow, there was a commotion. Haniel did not think that the guard lurching towards them would get there before Gondorf took his shot, but she knocked him down with a sucker punch anyway.

  Gondorf's arrow went through Chattiel's eye and out of the back of his head. Haniel broke her bottle of mint cordial over Gondorf's skull and he fell over unconscious.

  She jumped up on a bench brandishing the broken fragment of the bottle and screaming at the top of her lungs: "Everyone stand back! No one touch him! This man is now the property of the Order until he has compensated Us the gold damage of the life of a wizard!"

  "All the gods, Hanny," said Bronzino "he'll be Bound for the rest of his life, and then some."

  Haniel shrugged as Gondorf was carried to the tower. "He didn't really have other plans—not good ones, anyway."

  34

  Joti didn't move, but it felt like he'd stumbled. "Taken captive? By who?"

  Shain shrugged. "Their enemies, I would presume."

  "How? How did they let this happen?"

  "Most likely, the dwarf was drunk. Or they just ran into some bad luck. What does it matter?"

  He supposed that it didn't, but it felt like it should. "But what happened?"

  "Anjak was heading to rendezvous with them for the last time before our approach to the town. They never showed up. He went looking for them and found them being hauled away toward the castle. There's nothing we can do. They'll be safe behind their walls long before we can catch up."

  "So we'll break into the walls."

  Shain gave him a disgusted look. "No, we will go home."

  "But they've been captured!"

  "Which only proves they're too incompetent to ally with."

  He flung his arm in what he thought was the direction of the town. "We promised to help them! How can you let them rot in gaol?"

  "Because I have no appetite for suicide. Regarding our deal, we promised them we'd help them raid the town. We made no promises whatsoever about breaking them out of imprisonment."

  "If we don't kill the dragar, he'll tear down the wall. The Alliance will be defenseless against the raids."

  Shain gritted her teeth, exposing her fangs. "Even before this, the plan was a desperate measure. This has cost us nearly every advantage we had. We have no more wizard. No more dwarf—who, although morally worthless, is also extremely dangerous. And most damagingly of all, no more element of surprise."

  "You think they'll torture them. Get them to reveal we're coming."

  "Wit and Wa'llach were taken. By who? These aren't orc lands. This is the Alliance. Bandits? Not impossible, but a wizard and his pet slaughter-dwarf would have already escaped from common bandits. I think they were taken by the very people we're after—and that they had a wizard of their own. Do you understand what that means?"

  "That we need to kill him?"

  She pressed her lips together. "If they have a wizard, by the time we reach the castle, they'll have already broken Wit. Discovered his treachery and ours. At best, they'll be awaiting our arrival. At worst, they'll have Bound him. If they've done that, there's nothing we can do to free him."

  Joti stood there numbly, the cold of the wind groping its way through his clothes. A few days ago, he hadn't even known the wizard or his foolish quest. He'd given up the Orange Lady for nothing? And the No-Clan—the vaunted No-Clan; hunters of dragons, rangers of the border, tricksters of peace—they were ready to give up after the first trouble from the enemy?

  If they walked away, then so would he. He'd go back to the plains, or a mountain somewhere far away, where he wouldn't even know when their borders burned and burned.

  He lifted his head. "Look into the future."

  Shain's left eyebrow bent upward. "What?"

  "The future of this place if we go. See it."

  "If I was an eyelock, I'd be at home smoking delightful powders, not freezing my ass off in this forest so wretched even the humans don't want to live in it."

  "You don't need to be an eyelock. You just have to face the truth. If we walk away, they'll tear down the wall here. The Orange Lady will gather her full horde and storm into the heart of the Alliance. And everything will burn."

  Shain darted a look at Nod, who'd been listening to everything in her typical silence. Nod gave a slight tilt of her head in a way that meant nothing to Joti. Shain closed her eyes. Joti felt as if a shudder passed through him, but he didn't think he'd moved. He held up his hand to check for shaking. Another quaver rolled through him, stronger yet, but his hand didn't so much as twitch.

  He glanced up and gasped. He was falling forward, but forward was down, into a hole cut through the fabric of the world. He flailed his arms and passed through. Below him—or maybe it was in front of him—bodies lay in red stains in the grass, a carpet that stretched across an entire field. Some were orcs, but most were humans, with a speckling of dwarves and dragar. Fires burned up the spires of churches and raced across the roofs of the houses. And everywhere, the crows wheeled and landed, walking up the faces of the dead to peck away at eyes and tongues.

  He lurched backward like someone had grabbed the back of his coat. He threw out his hands. He was back in the snowy forest. Across from him, Shain opened her eyes slowly. She reached inside her coat, withdrew a leather flask, and drank. When she finished, Nod reached for it. She took a long pull and nodded.

  "Yeah," Shain said. "Fucking wizards. Well, let's go take a look."

  "And if we find them?" Joti said. "What then?"

  "We fill their lives with regrets."

  ~

  "I'll give them credit for one thing," Shain grumbled. "They know how to make stone do what they want."

  She hadn't said what she was referring to. She didn't need to. The castle at Youngkent rested against the base of the cliffs like a crouching god. Its outer walls were twenty feet high. The towers were as tall as any of the monuments he'd seen in the dusty Gru city. And the wall behind the fortress stretched from one end of the narrow pass to the other, sealing it off completely.

  Joti shifted his weight from his left hip to his right. They were, at that moment, lying flat on a shelf of rock too wind-blasted to grow anything more than a few weeds and long-dead flowers. The town spread below them, wedged into the pass. Joti couldn't tell how many people lived there; a lot, but not the most. Plenty of smoke rose from plenty of chimneys and he could smell it on the wind. The roofs were as steep as the blades of hatchets, allowing for no more th
an a dusting of snow to cling to their shingles. The windows were as thin as arrow slits.

  Nod had found the trail, of course. What she hadn't found was a way down from there into the town. But they weren't there to strike. Not yet. As Nod sketched out the lay of the fortifications, Shain muttered to herself under her breath. Joti searched the streets for a sneaky route to the castle, but the thoroughfares were too orderly for proper skulking. In fact, so was the entire town, which looked less like something that had grown and more like something that had been decreed.

  He shifted his hips again. "What do human gaols look like? How will we know where to find them?"

  Shain chuckled. "The first of several good questions. I suppose you thought we'd leap over the walls, crunch a few skulls, then grab our marks and be on our way?"

  Joti had thought more or less exactly that, but he didn't suppose that it would be the best idea to disclose that. "So why don't we bribe one of the soldiers for the location? That's the humans' greatest weakness, isn't it? A thirst for gold that makes dwarves look like teetotalers?"

  "That would be one option, yes. However, locating our targets might be the least of our challenges. How do we get over the castle walls? How do we infiltrate whatever dungeon or tower they've got them clapped inside? For that matter, how are we to move about in a settlement where we'll be attacked on sight?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Then it's a good thing I do. I just wanted to make sure that you appreciate the scale of my cleverness. Now let's get off this wretched rock and show these fools what true kidnapping looks like."

  ~

  Joti crunched through the snow, Shain to his right. Ahead, two lanterns burned at the fringe of the darkened town, their sheltered flames placid against the driving wind of the night. There were no walls or gates on the northern approach to Youngkent. They apparently thought the southern end was the only one worth defending, and they were probably right, considering that's where the orcs came from.

  But a pair of guards kept watch on the north end, and took their task seriously enough that rather than being installed in a little house with a nice warm stove, they were out in the cold, the breath steaming from their scarved mouths, stomping their feet whenever they threatened to grow numb.

  One of the guards glanced at Joti. The orcs were bundled against the night to the point where their faces and bulk would be obscured, but Joti's pulse doubled.

  He murmured, "You're sure this is going to work?"

  Shain laughed. "No."

  "Then why aren't we doing something better?"

  "Such as heading back to the Peak of Tears? That was my first idea, but some brilliant young thing convinced me otherwise."

  He was quiet for a moment. "Maybe I should stop having ideas."

  They were now too close to talk more, or even to turn back without being pursued by the guards, who were watching them with the low-level intensity of a cat who's spotted a bird on a roof it can't get to. They carried a short sword on one hip and a sounding horn on the other.

  "Greetings," Shain said, putting on an accent that was a startlingly good impression of Wit's. She stopped a few feet from the guards and motioned to the sleeping town. "Have you by chance seen my sister come through here? She's gravely ill, and I fear that in her delirium, she wandered off from our camp."

  The guards exchanged a look. The older of the two sniffed against the cold. "Tall 'un? Nearly so much as you?"

  "Correct." Shain took a half step closer. "Not half as pretty, though."

  The guard grinned, exposing a mouth that was half teeth and half gaps, and leaned in for a better look, holding his lantern high and to the side. Nearly her entire face was hidden in scarves, but his jaw dropped wide open,

  Shain brought up her left hand and blew into her closed fist. Pink powder billowed into the guard's face; he gasped and tried to yell, but nothing came out. Joti tried to do the same to the second guard, but the man reeled back. A bit of the powder reached his face, but most swirled away into the air around them.

  The man inhaled, reaching for his sword with one hand and his horn with the other. Shain rabbit punched him, staggering him, then hit him again. He dropped into the snow. Giving Joti an evil look, Shain reached into her coat, tapped more powder from a small pack, and sprinkled it over the half-conscious man's eyes and nose. His face slackened immediately.

  "If you're not too busy attempting to ruin everything, would you mind dragging them from sight?" She watched as Joti reached for one of the guard's ankles. "Might want to wipe off your hand first. Unless you want to collapse unconscious in the middle of a break-in."

  Joti swore softly and scrubbed his hand in the snow. While he relocated the two humans to a wooden shed on the side of the nearest building, Shain moved to the lantern hanging from its iron post, stepping between it and the darkness to the north, then repeated the motion twice more.

  The two of them moved into the shadow of the building. The air smelled like smoke and snow. After a minute, a bulky figure jogged forward from the darkness, followed by the remainder of their troop.

  Shain greeted them silently. Nod, whose build was lean enough to pass for a human woman, if a particularly tall one, had already bluffed her way into Youngkent shortly after dusk, employing a gruesome-sounding cough to dissuade the guards from getting too close to her. She'd scouted a path to the castle, leaving trail signs behind her in the snow and scratched onto the occasional unpainted wooden wall.

  Shain led them onward at a brisk walk, splitting them into groups of three to five that might look slightly less suspicious if someone were to throw open their shutters and glance down into the street. Nod's path took them away from the lights, zigzagging through alleys filled with snow and frozen refuse. Now and then Joti glimpsed the castle rising above the city. Where were the other guards? The alarums and clanging of warning bells? Something inside him stirred, urging him to forget about the mission and start stealing things and bashing people instead—it was like they wanted to be raided—but he smiled to himself and hurried on.

  The trail ended at a barn a few blocks from the empty space outside the castle walls. The inside was almost completely dark. It smelled like damp wool and sheep pellets.

  "Wait here for the signal," Shain said.

  Gogg raised his hand. "What's the signal?"

  "If it goes well, a screech owl." Shain flipped a bone whistle from around her neck. "If it goes poorly, lots of screaming."

  She tapped Joti on the shoulder and opened the door. The look she gave him on the way out was sober, almost regretful. Joti tried to look soldierly. Outside, Shain hesitated for just a moment, as if reading the night, then headed toward the castle, sticking close to the shadows of the buildings. As they neared the cobbled plaza ringing the fortress' curtain walls, Nod emerged so abruptly Joti almost screamed.

  Shain clasped the other Marshal's hand. "Were you able to get anything?"

  Nod gazed at her with an unreadable expression. "Insulted that you think you need to ask."

  "Oh, your talents are great. The problem is that the world isn't. Sometimes even the greats are made to fail."

  "I didn't. Southeast tower. That one there." She pointed to a dark finger of stone rising from behind the curtain wall, then got out the map she'd drawn earlier and indicated it there as well.

  "Well done. Have you found us an entrance?"

  Nod motioned to the front gates, which were most thoroughly closed. "Too good to knock?"

  "I'd hate to wake them this late at night."

  "Side door." Nod pointed to where the north end of the wall butted up against the cliffs. "No outside handles. Not even a lock. Barred from inside."

  "Meaning that if we want to get the rest of our lads in here, we'll have to open it from the inside. Over the wall?"

  "Easier than going under."

  "You always get snippy right before a raid," Shain muttered, though she was smiling. She flipped her pack around and undid its drawstring. "Good thing I brought my
hook."

  Nod shook her head. "Sentries up and down the whole wall. Like they're expecting something. You throw a hook over, and they'll hear it."

  "Shit. Well?"

  "Door's right next to the cliffs. Could try scaling them, drop down onto the wall from above."

  "If that's the best we've got, then we'll have to make the best of it." Shain turned to Joti. "Has it occurred to you to wonder why I brought you along?"

  He rubbed his chin. "Because my legs are shorter and you know you can outrun me if they chase us?"

  "That would be your secondary virtue. Your primary asset is you're the best shot we've got. Cover us while we scale the cliffs. If we get a sentry on us, it's your job to ensure they don't have time to say a word."

  "Shoot them square in the brain? That isn't an easy shot."

  "Can you do it or not?"

  Anger crept up his neck. "I won't let you down."

  Shain nodded and backtracked a block, then headed north, walking parallel to the wall beyond the rows of darkened shops. A pair of young men sat on a stoop, laughing and passing a bottle back and forth. They went quiet as the three bundled orcs passed by them, watching from the corners of their eyes. As Shain neared the end of the block, their laughter rang out anew.

  The cliffs hung over the buildings ahead. Shain stopped at the edge of the buildings to watch the walls. The silhouettes of sentries stood bundled in their cloaks. Now and then they stirred to pace across the battlements, making their rounds before returning to their original spot.

  Shain observed two circuits of this, then crossed the dark ground between the edge of the city and the cliffs hemming it in. Joti brought up the rear, weaving through the rocks and boulders littering the grounds. The cliffs here were perfectly sheer, impossible to climb, but immediately in front of the curtain wall, the slopes eased back to something that a mortal might be able to scale.

  Shain stopped fifty feet from the wall. A narrow door was set in its face, looking impossibly sturdy. Shain took a long gander at the cliffs, then nodded to Nod, met Joti's eye, and pointed at the ground. Joti kneeled in the shadow of a boulder and nocked an arrow, keeping the tip low where it wouldn't glint in the light of the lanterns further down the wall.