‘I know.’
He blinked. ‘You know of that?’
‘Every woman does, sir. The men were about to attack them – the cats of your pit so roughly awoken, pushed out into the morning light. You broke open the first bastard’s skull, dropped him dead, and that stopped the others long enough for you to send Rebble to the sheds. Gave the cats time to arm themselves. You saved lives that day, sir. Stopped rapes.’
Wareth looked away. ‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t think it all through, that’s all. Never liked the one I killed either.’
She shrugged. ‘Real cowards always think it through, all the way through, sir.’
‘Not if they see their chance at getting rid of a tormentor, which I did. I simply forgot about his friends.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘now at last I see the fear in you, sir. You’re frightened by the thought that you did the right thing, a brave thing. It doesn’t fit with who you think you are.’
‘If not for Rebble and Listar, I would have run,’ Wareth said. ‘Don’t let that tale live on in the camp, not among the cats, Rance. It wasn’t the way you’ve just told it.’
‘You first, and then Rebble and then Listar, sir. Us cats set you apart, sir. The three of you. You didn’t know it – not until now, I suppose – but you had the cats of your pit with you from that moment. Now, every pit’s cats know it, and they’re with you, too.’
‘You’re heading for disappointment, Rance. Warn them. Warn them all.’
‘We know you’re clever, sir.’
‘How? How do you know that?’
She studied him for a long moment, and then offered him a most peculiar and baffling smile, before rising to her feet. ‘I just thought I should let you know, sir, about them wanting to see me tomorrow. You see, I know they’re clever, far too clever, I suppose. Like you, only not like you. They see no value in wasting time. In any case, sir, you now have some time to think on finding a new sergeant to replace me. That’s what I was here to say, sir.’
He watched her leave the tent. What was all that? They’re not dismissing her. They wouldn’t do it that way. They have something else in mind. I’ll find out when she does, in the morning.
In the meantime, why didn’t I swing that conversation back to the careless cock?
This was what came of being exhausted. A dulled wit was blind to nuance, even the hint of possible innuendo, when it offered that narrow trail between empty charm and crass invitation. But then, how many years had it been since he’d last played such games? And what of Rance? Dreams of intimacy might feel deadly to a woman who took love into her hands, then drowned it. Abyss take me, these are venal thoughts. That I dare imagine her and me together – that I dare upend the world’s rightful order, to believe that either of us deserves such a thing.
Murderer and coward upon the one hand, child-slayer upon the other. Not for them tender moments, nor soft laughter, nor sweet pleasures. Not for them anything like love, or the wanting of happiness, and how deep the outrage, should they seek contentment.
No, these are the privileges of the innocent.
For surely they must be innocent, to desire for themselves such privileges, and then claim them as their right.
But for us who are guilty, the desire itself is a crime. That we should dare such things for ourselves, for whatever wrecked remnant is left in our lives.
Forget Rance. Forget anything playful. Eschew every soft thought, Wareth. Not for you and not for her. Not, indeed, for the new Hust Legion.
The weapons and armour can laugh for us, since they exist without guilt, and know nothing of blame.
His gaze strayed across to where his scabbarded sword hung from a peg in the centre pole. Barring you, of course. You know me too well. You delight in our reunion, if only to anticipate and then witness my final fall. How you will delight in orchestrating your vengeance. I know it is coming, old friend. And for all that I betrayed in you, why, I welcome it.
It was time to douse the lamps, and make of these walls something opaque and impenetrable. If there was one trait he did not share with other cowards, it was his utter absence of fear when in darkness. He knew it well as a state in which he could hide, silent, unseen.
Yet Mother Dark would strip that from us. Give us eyes to pierce any gloom. Many may consider that a blessing, an end to the fear of what cannot be seen, what cannot be known. Is it only fear that makes us pray for answers? What do we lose by not knowing? Not understanding?
Lamps doused, he sat on the cot, wishing that he were blind inside and out. Bless me with darkness if you must, but make it the blessing of not seeing. Do that, Mother Dark, and I will serve you. There are times, as you must well know, when ignorance is no enemy.
* * *
Galar Baras found Toras Redone standing near a shuttered window, shrouded in gloom. The window was one of the tall, narrow ones that looked out upon the forges. Its copper shutters were old and pitted, the edges of each slat rippled and uneven, and the faint glow coming through was the blue of a moonless night. He could see, by those liquid ribbons painted upon her, that she was naked.
Inactivity had softened her form. There was nothing visible of the hardness that came with a life of soldiering. Rolls of flesh sagged over the points of her hips, burying them deep. The drink had bulged her belly, which in turn emphasized the arch of her back beneath rounded shoulders. She stood in profile, curled, her breasts pushed out and resting upon the fat below them. The faint blue rows of light tracked her form like an arcane script, its style both melodic and drunken.
She had cut her hair short, which paradoxically made her head and face seem more feminine. After a long moment, she turned her gaze to him. ‘Galar Baras. Like the rising sun you were. Swift to touch on my intent, swifter still in striking the darkness from my hand. I recall falling to my knees. I recall eating bitter soil. You’d think it sweet, wouldn’t you? Wine and earth, or, rather, wine and dust. Whatever the poison, it must have been tasteless. Anyway, I cannot for the life of me determine what it was I found so bitter, so cruelly tart upon my tongue.’
‘Commander,’ said Galar Baras, ‘could we return to that morning, and had I truly comprehended what had happened, well, I might have hesitated … long enough.’
In swinging round to face him, the rows of blue script flowed as if painted on a silk curtain stirred awake by a draught. ‘I doubt that,’ she said.
‘Will you now return to us, commander? We have need of you.’
‘How will he see me now, do you think?’ She slowly raised heavy arms. ‘Not the woman he married, to be sure. The thing is, and I see it well in your eyes, you look upon all of this and imagine it soft as pillows. What you’ve yet to experience, lover, is the weight of it. Too solid to be a pillow, I assure you.’ She then reached out as if to accept his hand. ‘Come, let me show you.’
‘Toras—’
‘Ah! Is this the truth of it then? You imagine disgust in my husband’s face, and it twists you away from desire. Even the kiss of temptation proves suddenly sour. And what of wickedness? Did we not both delight in that? No longer, I see. Now you would stand before me, an officer with a duty to decorum, shouting your propriety with every crisp salute.’ Her hand beckoned him again. ‘Come along, lover, let’s dispel your fantasies and then we’ll be done with it, and you can beg again for my return to the Legion. Do this, Galar Baras, and I will reconsider my future.’
She was sober, or at least as sober as he might ever expect her to be. Grief, he supposed, had muted her habit of grand gestures. Or perhaps it was simply that there was more of her, the weight adding sloth to her practised indolence.
None of this should have attracted him. None of this should have awakened his hunger for her.
Seeing something in his gaze, or hearing the change in his breathing, Toras Redone smiled slyly. ‘At last, lover. Come to me. It is dissolution you long to caress. Others might deem that, well, sordid, but you and I, we understand each other.’
/>
He stepped forward, and then his hands were upon her cool skin. ‘Toras,’ he said, ‘I came here to speak to you of Lord Henarald.’
‘Cast him from your mind, Galar. He’s found his own dissolution.’ She brushed her lips against his, pressing more of her body against him. ‘If he hasn’t already, he will talk to you about smoke, and things left to waste.’
‘Yes.’
‘Him and us, Galar, we but worship different aspects of the same grisly god. The end of things will lure us, until in our lust we make an end of our world. It’s nothing but variations in scale. This … dissolution.’
He wanted to pull away from her. Instead, he drew her tighter into his arms.
She laughed. ‘Oh, Galar, how I’ve missed you.’
She had ever been, he reminded himself, good with lies. That all that she had said before her last statement had been true, he did not doubt. But Toras Redone’s world was a private one, with room only for herself. She would take visitors, provided they understood well enough to expect only what she offered.
So he mulled on the lie, even as his body fell into the motions of long held desires. She had indeed been honest, he discovered, in how she had described her new shape, and what in his mind had been soft as pillows now proved impediments to reaching her at all, in any place where pleasure might be found. Curiously, even this challenge proved alluring.
Later, Galar Baras found himself wondering which man he was: the one he both saw in himself and showed to virtually everyone else, or the man she made him into, with such knowing in her eyes, such recognition in her low laughter, that he felt himself reduced to … to a faint script, scrawled across her skin, riding every undulation and curve, every fold.
The night writes me upon her, in a language only she can understand. I stagger away, all meaning undone, all sense stripped away. Where, in this wretched love, is my reason?
He would return her to the Legion. The officers and soldiers would see him as a man of formidable powers, if not an unassailable will. And only in the occasional glance she would send his way would he be reminded of their hidden language, there upon its sweet vellum of stretched skin, unseen by anyone else.
Which man is the truth of me?
To that question, he had no answer.
* * *
As if even metal lips could somehow be soft, the Hust armour muttered like mouths pressed against flesh. But this was a cruel seduction. From the vambraces, from the chain and scale and greaves, came a sound like rain threading through trees, cold streams upon a forest floor, a chorus of whispering. With the helm fixed upon his head, Wareth listened to the faint imprecations and felt an uncanny chill ripple through him. There was something almost suffocating in the weight, with its cloying murmurs, as if he was in the embrace of a woman he did not desire.
Stepping out from his tent, he found himself facing Rebble. He too was armoured, and from the tangle of his wild beard there was the white flash of a rueful grin.
‘Like wearing your fears, isn’t it, Wareth?’ He then rapped knuckles against the scabbarded sword at his hip. ‘And this thing. Abyss take me but she’s eager for my temper.’
‘She?’
He shrugged. ‘As close as I’ll get, I suppose, to having a wife. Beautiful in hand until she cuts.’
Shaking his head, Wareth said, ‘I must attend a meeting with the captains.’
Rebble’s small eyes narrowed. ‘You’ll shadow Rance, then? Well, it was only a matter of time.’
‘What was?’
He glanced away, shrugged again. ‘For me, it’s out to the pickets. I need the walk, need to get used to all this weight. It’s the helm I hate the most – I got enough voices in my fucking skull.’
‘Find Listar for your patrol, Rebble.’
Rebble cocked his head. ‘For a coward, you’ve uncommon loyalty, Wareth. Makes you hard to figure. I’m not complaining, sir. Maybe the opposite, in fact. It’s something that gets noticed.’
‘Enough of that, Rebble. You’d be better off listening to your armour, and sword. There’s a battle coming, but it won’t be me in the front ranks. Remember that. Galar knows enough to keep me as far from the fighting as he can. But you, and Listar – and all the other officers and squad leaders – you’re heading into something else. My loyalty won’t put me at your side when that time comes.’
There was a momentary glint of something ugly in Rebble’s eyes, and then he smiled. ‘No one’s planning on your statue, sir. Not even a painted portrait, or a fucking bust or something. You’re Wareth, and we all remember that.’
Wareth nodded. ‘It’s well that you do.’
‘In any case,’ Rebble continued, ‘I looked for Listar but could not find him. But I’ll make another round, look in on his tent and whatnot. He should turn up.’
Wareth watched Rebble walk away. Soldiers were mustering for the breakfast bell. There was little conversation, and not everyone had emerged from tents wearing their armour, although a belted sword adorned every soldier in sight. Had it been as simple as that? Weapons to make these men and women into soldiers?
Setting out, Wareth rolled his shoulders against the permanent ache in his lower back. The heavy chain surcoat wasn’t helping matters, and the round-cornered plates of his shoulder-guards sat like tiles upon a slanted roof, pulling at the muscles of his neck.
He was used to the eyes tracking him as he walked through the camp. Contempt needed no words. The scabbard holding his sword was the same one Castegan had given him, and he found a perverse satisfaction in wearing that brand. He could see little of worth in Rance’s words the night before. The cats needed someone better. His actions upon that day of liberation had, in all likelihood, been a last spasm of decency, undermined in the next breath by unpalatable truths.
The memory of the shovel crushing Ganz’s skull was an echo that never quite left him, and in that manner, it persisted in the way of all things venal. He never saw it coming. No, Ganz was filling up with lust, charging the violence of his strength against women who could not match it. He’d shown the same against me. A thousand small slights to make my confession a weighty tome of reasons, justifications.
But the truth was, I saw my chance and took it.
He never saw it coming. That’s why I struck when I did. Old Wareth the coward, well, he’s no fool. An easy mistake to make, one supposes. But fear only paralyses in the possibilities, and on that day it lagged a step. The man was dead before my terror could even wake. Did I know that at the time? Did I, as Rance and the other cats might believe, act before the coward in me had a chance to stop me?
It was questionable, at least in his own mind, whether the distinction was in any way significant.
He approached the command tent. One of the guards, a regular, offered him a sneer, but said nothing when he passed by and entered the tent.
‘Lieutenant Wareth! Join our morning repast, will you?’
The speaker was Captain Prazek. Wareth had halted a stride into the chamber upon seeing the two captains at a table, breaking their fast with Rance. The woman sat stiffly, the food upon the plate before her untouched. A pewter cup filled with mulled wine was in her red hands, held close against her stomach, the steam rising to her face like a veil of smoke. The look she cast him was blank.
Dathenar had leaned to one side to drag another chair to the table opposite Rance, with the two captains positioned at either end.
Wareth remained standing. ‘My apologies, sirs. But your guest is one of my officers. I feel that I should be present if some issue of discipline is involved.’
‘Honourable sentiment, lieutenant,’ Dathenar said, while around a mouthful of food Prazek grunted agreement. ‘Now, do join us. We shall hope, by virtue of imitation and the pressure to conform, that the witnessing of taking food to mouth will incite in our guest the same inclination, thus putting us all at ease.’
‘She is perhaps wiser than we think,’ Prazek observed after making a scene of swallowing. ‘This sausage mocks th
e pretence. But,’ he added, spearing another piece, ‘I am assured that it lodges in the pit of the belly, and remains silent, if not unobtrusive, until the moment of its rebirth into the world.’
‘Hardly an image to encourage our appetites, Prazek,’ said Dathenar. ‘Unless you know more of the cook’s supply than do we.’
The chair awaiting Wareth was too elaborate for common camp gear, possessing curved armrests. ‘Perhaps,’ he said as he pushed himself down into the seat, which proved uncomfortably narrow, ‘we could discuss the reason for summoning Sergeant Rance.’
Prazek wagged the speared piece of sausage in the air. ‘But I assure you, lieutenant, that issue, despite its inherent complexities, is one in which a sated belly is advised. After all, we must find a means to twist crime into crusade—’
‘Vengeance into virtue—’
‘Obsession into ritual.’ Prazek frowned at the meat, and then slipped it into his mouth. He chewed.
Wareth looked from one man to the other. ‘I do not understand,’ he said.
Rance cleared her throat and then spoke. ‘It’s to do with the murders, sir. The investigation in which it seemed you had lost interest. It is why I visited you last night, to give you the chance to act before the captains did.’ She frowned across at him. ‘I was certain that you had found the killer, but for some reason you chose not to end things.’
Wareth studied her. ‘I gave up because it made no sense.’
She glanced away.
Abyss take me, I’ve been a fool. ‘How did you move the bodies, Rance? And what of your fear of the sight of blood?’
‘I can’t tell you, sir, about any of it, because I do not remember the murders. I simply awaken in my tent, with blood on my hands. I find my knife unsheathed, but thoroughly cleansed.’ She hesitated. ‘I scrubbed off what I could. I thought that it was that habit that finally betrayed me.’
But Wareth shook his head. ‘It seems we misread that obsession,’ he said, ‘and set upon it a much earlier crime.’
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