Savage Legion

by Matt Wallace

  “Every one. It’s what passes for mercy in the Savage Legion. It’s just about the only mercy.”

  “Our taskers aren’t worried all this wine and humping like rabbits will dull their ‘Savages’ on the field?”

  “As long as they can stand they’ll serve their purpose. And if they can’t you’ll watch ’em hurled at the Sicclunan front line like rocks. The taskers and whoever thought this whole machine up, they know their business.”

  Evie accepts this, and though questions still form in her mind she leaves them unspoken for now.

  “I can’t believe any of us will live past tomorrow, not from what I’ve seen. What I see.”

  Spud-Bar throws back the entire cup of wine, ending it with a single gulp.

  “It’s the rare blade that goes unchipped round here, to be sure,” they admit. “But many will live. Many have lived far past one battle.”

  “Oh? Like who?”

  Spud-Bar waves their cup above their heads, motioning behind Evie, who turns to look.

  They sit apart from the others, around a table on a raised platform almost like a small stage. The loudest one is a stout man who must remember his fiftieth year with an increasing haze, with a great barrel of a torso and the legs required to prop it up. His mouth is more mustache than lips, and he both laughs and speaks with just the right corner of his mouth, as if the other side is paralyzed. He’s bouncing one of the chiffon-draped young men on his knee, urging him to drink from the mustached one’s cup.

  Seated beside him is a squat, ugly woman with tawny hair cut into the shape of a bowl. She’s laughing like an ass brays while cradling another one of the sculpted young men in her lap. The first thing Evie notices about her is that she’s missing her left hand. The stump has been fastened off with leather straps. Four slim dagger blades and one the size of a stiletto simulate the five fingers she’s lost. It’s obviously meant to be a joke, though Evie has no doubt it’s one that’s turned lethal more than once, especially judging from the dried, crusty dark flecks still clinging to the edges of most of the blades.

  The only one of them seemingly uninterested in the provided companionship is hunched over the end of the table, cradling a pint cup made of bone. He’s almost the size of the mustached one. The large, scarred arms that stretch from the sleeveless holes of the cloak he wears speak of time spent pulling sky carriages or loading ships at the port. Long tendrils of string curls fall from beneath the cloak’s hood. The only other feature Evie can discern is a bulbous nose and chin, as if they were features glued onto a comical puppet fashioned from sack.

  “Who are they?” Evie asks.

  “The closest thing the Savage Legion has to generals, I suppose,” Spud-Bar informs her. “We call them the Elder Company. That’s three of ’em sittin’ there, anyway. There are others scattered along the front with other Skrain companies and their Legionnaires. Every one of the Elders has seen twenty battles or more.”

  At first Evie isn’t convinced she heard the number spoken by Spud-Bar, but she also has no reason to doubt the armorist.

  “And they survived? Twenty battles under these conditions?”

  “Some more than others, and by their own means. The woman, Mother Manai, celebrated her twentieth by having that hand chopped off. Though you might argue it’s just made her nastier and more dangerous. The quiet one is called Bam. He may seem like a little child could shove ’im from his stool, but on the field he’s like a one-warrior battery.

  “Now, the one with the mustache you could sweep out temple steps with… that is Lariat. He’s not much with a sword, but his fists can break down bamboo walls. He was a skin-on-skin fighter before he came to us, brawling in alleys for prize and the like. Tomorrow’ll be his thirty-second battle as a Savage.”

  Evie’s stare sharpens on him as she tries to imagine such a feat.

  “So then, just sixty-eight more battles and Lariat can go home to his family, yes?”

  Spud-Bar’s lips tighten against the rim of the wine cup, but the reaction is brief and quickly suppressed.

  “That’s the decree” is all they say.

  “And what about you, Spud-Bar? When do you get to go home?”

  “My sentence was commuted from one hundred battles to serving as the Savages’ armorist for ten years.”

  “And how many years have you been here?”

  “Fifteen,” Spud-Bar says without the slightest hesitation or trace of rancor.

  Evie nearly chokes on her wine.

  “Don’t you think you should inform someone about the oversight?”

  Spud-Bar shakes their head. “It’s no oversight.”

  “Then… no one leaves. Not really.”

  “We all leave. Eventually. Just not the way we’d hope.”

  Evie suddenly doesn’t feel like drinking, let alone partaking in the mirthful madness exploding all around her.

  She’s not the only Savage attending the Revel who isn’t here to party. Evie spots several of the older people alongside whom she was indoctrinated. They’ve joined a larger group of the elderly and infirm at one of the other feasting tables. They all sit in silence, morose, eating little of what’s in front of them. Several look like they’ve been weeping.

  Evie stops drinking, trying to imagine that group with melee weapons in their hands, screaming war cries filled with rage and blood as they charge the shields and spears and axes of the Sicclunan front line. It’s the most absurd picture in her head, one that would inspire laughter were it not for the picture that follows, the one of piled-up wrinkled limbs and severed heads with shocked, twisted expressions on their withered faces.

  Spud-Bar not only takes note of Evie watching them, they can obviously read her thoughts.

  “Don’t look at ’em in pity,” Spud-Bar instructs Evie. “Doesn’t do no good, for you or them. Instead you gotta take ’em for what they are.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A warning.”

  Evie finally looks away from the doomed gathering around that table, searching Spud-Bar’s face for some kind of deeper meaning. “What’re they warning me about?”

  “Getting old. Don’t do it. It never ends well, no matter what happens.”

  Evie doesn’t believe that, chooses not to believe it, but she also can’t fault someone like Spud-Bar for arriving at such a conclusion. Evie can’t know how many such groups of helpless, frail, and doomed individuals they’ve watched suffer through the Revel, but she doesn’t imagine the number is small.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Laython barks over a score of conversation that have congealed into one unintelligible organism.

  The Savage assemblage quiets.

  All save the old-timers.

  Laython ignores their continued chatter.

  “The life of a Savage is eating, fucking, and fighting. Fighting is for tomorrow. Tonight you live the first two to their fullest. Because for most of you, all that’s left is the fight. There’s no coming out the other side. Not as the breathing, bleeding, shitting sacks of meat you are now, anyway. Whatever afterlife does or doesn’t await you, let’s make a pact here and now: There will never be a night to rival this one. This is when you revel. Tomorrow is when you die!”

  Most of them cheer, because it’s clear from the timbre of Laython’s voice that this is the moment for cheering.

  Evie just stares up at him, then at the faces of the men and women around her, certain she must’ve heard different words than all of them did over the last few moments.

  “Believe it or not,” Spud-Bar remarks, “he’s sharpened that speech to a razor’s edge from what it was years past.”

  Evie can only shake her head.

  As Spud-Bar pours them both another round, Evie continues to take in the sights and sounds of the Revel. A few tables down she spots another figure who stands apart from the crowd, this one a Savage, though he looks more like a valet for some highly regarded Gen. His shoulder-length hair, dark with just a few threads of gray, is meticulously kempt
and combed back. He’s tall and willowy and fragile-looking, as if she could knock him over with the rough jab of a single fingertip. Unlike the older ones, however, he doesn’t appear to be afraid, or even maudlin.

  If anything, he looks full of disdain.

  “Excuse me for a moment, would you?” she says to Spud-Bar.

  “I’ll save you some food.”

  Evie snatches up the nearest unattended cup still cradling wine and rises from the bench. She walks over to the willowy one’s table.

  “Not into celebrating our inevitable deaths?” she asks.

  His expression remains unchanged. “They aren’t celebrating death here, they’re celebrating life, in their own crude way.”

  “Then why aren’t you partaking?”

  “This is not life.”

  Evie nods, offering him the cup. “That’s a notion I’d drink to.”

  He looks down at the wine. “I… appreciate the gesture. I do. But I don’t drink.”

  “Fair enough.”

  One of the Elder Company, Mother Manai, shouts across the hall at them: “Is school in session, then, Professor?”

  The rest of the old-timers and their coterie share a round of laughter.

  Evie watches them, and then looks back at the willowy man speculatively.

  “Professor?” she asks.

  “Their invention,” he explains. “My war name, I suppose. I was a teacher, once.”

  “Where?”

  “At the University in the Third City. I belonged to a Gen of respected educators that stretches back all the way to the Renewal.”

  “What did you do to be sent here?”

  “I asked my students questions.”

  “Isn’t that a teacher’s job?”

  “I asked them the wrong questions,” the Professor says. “According to our illustrious Nation State, at least.”

  A golden-skinned boy of perhaps eighteen approaches them both then, amber chiffon wrapped around his waist and barely touching the middle of his thighs. He tilts his head, smiling silently, eyes drifting between the two of them.

  Evie can’t help but grin back, although she’s far more interested in the Professor in that moment. He seems deeply uncomfortable, averting his eyes from them both. She can see his face flush.

  “I think we’ll finish our conversation,” Evie informs the boy, who takes the hint and saunters away.

  “You really don’t partake, do you?” she asks the Professor.

  “I prefer an unclouded head,” he answers stiffly.

  “So tell me, what questions did you ask them? Your students?”

  “What do you know of Crachian history?”

  Evie shrugs. “I wasn’t the best student of the subject, I admit. I know about the Renewal, the chaos of blood feuds and nobility that came before. The serenity and efficiency that replaced it.”

  “Do you? Can you recite names? Dates? Specific incidents that marked the downfall of the noble houses?”

  Evie shakes her head. “Like I said, I wasn’t the best student.”

  “You’re as informed as any, I assure you. No such history is taught, at any level, in any Crachian house of supposed learning. You’re taught only what the Nation State wishes you to know, and what it wishes you to know is its way is right and just and the only way.”

  “And you’re telling me for asking questions about ancient history, you were sent here?”

  The Professor nods. “History, and the war we’ll be fighting tomorrow that’s scarcely mentioned within two hundred miles of the Capitol.”

  “Crache has enemies, like any great nation.”

  “Does it? Or does it make enemies? Is it protecting its borders, or expanding them?”

  Evie is no longer grinning, no longer playful in her questioning. She’s as intrigued as she’s been since waking up on a wagon with the Capitol at her back.

  “Imagine if you can,” the Professor continues, “that Crache and all its wonders, all its egalitarianism, is built on what it’s taken from others, what it has weaponized its least desirable citizens to help take from others.”

  “You asked your students these questions?”

  “I did.”

  “And for that and that alone you’re here now.”

  “I am.”

  “In a place the taskers swear is reserved for killers, rapists, and the condemned alone.”

  “Does any of that describe you?”

  “No. But mistakes are made. Acts taken out of desperation.”

  “That’s true. And yet here we both are.”

  Evie nods. “Here we both are.”

  Over the shoulder of the Professor, Evie spies the serving girl with the dying violet eyes leaving the tent hall, not through the main entrance, not through the slit for the servers, and not even through the pleasure curtain, but through a smaller opening far removed from the others and the crowd.

  It should be a wholly innocuous sight, just like that of the girl as Evie first saw her.

  Yet Evie feels a spike in her blood, a wave of warning that spreads to every part of her.

  She looks back at the Professor. “Thank you for talking with me. It’s been… enlightening.”

  “You’re a better student than you credit yourself,” he tells her.

  That restores the grin to Evie’s face, even if only for a moment.

  She leaves the Professor and walks away from the feasting tables, finding the same parting in the tent through which the serving girl disappeared.

  A moment later Evie emerges outside. It’s quiet, dark, and deserted, save for the noise from inside the tent and the exaggerated shadows dancing on its walls. Evie casts her gaze about, searching for the girl, but she’s gone.

  Several yards away from the tent hall a pile of stones forms a small dome atop the earth. Evie jogs over to it. Steps descend below the surface of the grassy terrain, leading to a single wooden door that’s open, just a crack. She slips down the short steps without a sound, peering through the opening in the doorway.

  A single amber candle flame lights the room inside, as well as pale moon rays allowed entrance by a tiny window in the stones just above the surface of the ground. It’s a wine cellar, barrels and casks stacked atop one another in tight quarters.

  Evie watches the serving girl dip a hand down the front of her dress and close her fist around the handle of a punch dagger she’s concealed there. The blade is no bigger than a badger’s tongue, but a razor edge catches the candlelight. The serving girl jabs down into the top of one of the barrels, twisting the tip of the blade to create a tiny hole in the wood.

  It is then that Evie sees the object held in the serving girl’s opposite hand; a small uncorked vial filled with a liquid as dark as pure anise extract.

  Treating the vial as if she’s pinched the neck of a poisonous snake just below its head, the purple-eyed girl carefully tilts it above the almost imperceptible hole she’s made in the top of the barrel. She allows just one drop to escape. It falls through the pinhole at a perfect angle, not even so much as staining its edges.

  Evie widens the crack in the doorway just enough to allow her slender frame to slip through.

  Then she slams the door shut behind her.

  Those dying violet eyes find her like the lash of a whip. The girl’s body tenses, her fist raising the punch dagger while her other hand corks the vial and places it carefully atop the barrel.

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to roll that entire barrel back to the Revel alone,” Evie says.

  “I’m stronger than I look,” the girl assures her in an even tone.

  Evie grins. “I certainly hope so.”

  The girl quickly turns away from the barrel so that she’s facing Evie. Her dagger-wielding fist flies, attempting to drive the blade through Evie’s throat.

  Evie ducks easily under the girl’s arm and steps closer against her. Their bodies are now less than a few inches from each other. To any casual, untrained observer what follows would look like nothing
more than playful struggling between them. It would take an expert in hand-to-hand combat to recognize the skilled feints, blocks, and strikes being traded and countered by both women.

  Evie is no longer fighting like a drunken vagrant lashing out in a brawl.

  And her opponent definitely does not fight like a peasant serving girl.

  Dodging an attempt to pierce her liver, Evie coils her arm around the girl’s, trapping it. Evie twists at the waist with surprising power, extending her right leg and pulling the serving girl over it, throwing her off-balance. Evie seizes the opportunity to drive her shoulder into the woman’s chest and force her into the wall of the cellar.

  Evie presses her there, shoving the wrist of her opponent’s knife hand against the serving girl’s chest. The weight of Evie’s forearm traps it there, the tip of the punch dagger’s blade now angled directly beneath its owner’s chin. The serving girl tilts her head back against the wall to prevent her flesh being punctured.

  The fight is over, for the moment at least.

  “Who are you?” the serving girl asks Evie, breathless. “What are you?”

  Evie grins, exhilarated despite the brief life-or-death struggle. “Someone and something very much like you, looks like.”

  The woman’s eyes darken. “You’re an agent of the Protectorate Ministry, aren’t you?”

  Her body tenses as if she’s preparing to renew the struggle, until Evie shakes her head emphatically.

  “No,” Evie assures her. “No, I don’t work for the state. I’m just here to find a friend, one I believe people like those in the Protectorate Ministry put here very much against his will, and very much against Crachian law.”

  The girl practically spits. “Laws in Crache bend like cheap blades. They’re meaningless.”

  Evie can hear the raw emotion in her voice.

  “You’re Sicclunan,” she says.

  It’s not a question.

  The woman nods.

  “A soldier?” Evie asks, and then shakes her head. “No, you’re too good. And you’re too self-righteous to be a hired assassin. Siccluna has its own Protectorate Ministry, I imagine.”

  “We are nothing like you.”

  “Close enough, by my reckoning.”

  Evie falls silent, thinking.