Legends of the Riftwar (60 page)

He was right to worry, Pirojil decided. Even if all of the captains were utterly reliable, incredibly competent and on top of the situation around them, LaMut was both too large and increasingly too small.

It was, he decided, a lousy day.

A particularly lousy day when you were wearing a pair of fresh new captain's tabs as heavy as lead weights that somebody had nailed to your shoulders.

A lousy day when you looked back at the more active periods of the war, when the castle's barracks were almost empty instead of crowded from floor to rafters, and when even the baronial soldiers in the Earl's service were far more concerned about where
the nearest Blues and Bugs were than they were with how much they hated their traditional local enemies.

Pirojil pulled his cloak about him as he rose. Then he walked out of the Broken Tooth Tavern into the stark, frozen whiteness of the lousy day.

It really was a lousy day when a man actually found himself happy to be outside in the cold.

Kethol stopped.

The only sound he could hear was his own breathing as stopped to look around the white-covered landscape. Old habits die hard, and he forced himself to listen to the sounds of the woods between breaths. He considered the absurdity of the moment, and reflected on the past as he listened to the breaking of ice in the distance and the faint sounds of a light breeze in the bare branches of birches and pines, oaks and elms.

Kethol had once, uncharacteristically, a long time ago, befriended a juggler.

The juggler had been a travelling performer who had been pressed into service in Lord Sutherland's forces during one of the cycles of wars with Keshians and rebellions from the locals that seemed to never stop in the Vale of Dreams. Said cycles of wars and rebellions in the Vale of Dreams being one of the reasons that Kethol, Durine and Pirojil always had the Vale as a fallback destination; there was always employment in the Vale, though if Kethol never had to face a load of battle-crazed Keshian Dog Soldiers again, that would be more than fine with him.

The juggler had been brought into service by one of Lord Sutherland's roving press gangs during a break of a few weeks between rebel attacks–the Kingdom had effectively outlawed slavery decades earlier, but labour gangs at the Keshian front were still a common thing; fortifications had to be rebuilt and men without convincing stories as to why they were trying to cross the border were considered renegades. Some were just unlucky, and a few of those might be cut loose when a company sergeant or captain was convinced the labourer was harmless. Kethol had always thought it a strange system; if he had been a Keshian spy, he would have been the most cheerful worker on the line, and been everyone's best friend. Eventually, he'd have been turned loose to do whatever it was he was to do. Those who attempted to escape and were killed in the process were idiots, solid proof they couldn't be Keshian agents. They were too stupid.

This time, however, the press gang wasn't bringing in labourers, but wall-fodder.

The juggler was obviously not a spy, but he hadn't had a compelling reason as to why he was hiking along a dusty trail in the foothills of the Vale, rather than travelling with a caravan or, at least, a band of entertainers. So, into the work gang he went. After a month, the sergeant in charge had cut him loose and against any reasonable logic, the juggler had decided to hang around. Perhaps he had grown to love camp food.

Kethol's company was manning a defence at the time, which meant guarding the work gang as much as looking for Dog Soldiers. He had come to know the juggler and when the young man had remained after being released from the work gang, Kethol had, for reasons he could never quite explain to himself, taken Kami under his wing. He had been enrolled in the ranks of the mercenary company Kethol was serving in, by a dubious sergeant who owed Kethol a favour.

Between sessions of Kethol trying to play swordmaster to the
poor, manifestly doomed sod–you would think that a man so dexterous while juggling could not possibly be so clumsy with a sword–the man had explained his own personal philosophy, such as it was, which amounted to, ‘when you don't know what to do, do what you
do
know what to do.'

Which sounded sensible, on the face of it.

Until he had discovered that, for Kami, that had meant that when he found himself frustrated with his inability to use a sword and shield he would take a few minutes and go off by himself or out into the night to juggle with whatever there was around–rocks and pebbles, if his juggling kit was not nearby–while he thought things out.

He had always come back relaxed, and ready to do his best during another lesson, and while he never did quite master even the most basic rudiments of sword work, he at least had good-naturedly put in a lot of hours working at it, and Kethol had found himself admiring the do-what-you-know philosophy, even if he wondered about its practicality.

Granted, it hadn't worked very well in the end for poor Kami, when the first Dog Soldier Kami went up against had feinted low and then slashed high, leaving his sword dropping from his fingers while his severed head tumbled through the air to land preposterously upright, a surprised expression on his dead face…

But at least it had given him some comfort and pleasure in the interim. If you did what you knew–or pushed what you knew just a little further–you could ignore, for the moment, that you were in over your head.

Which, perhaps, was why Kethol now found himself on a set of brezeneden, making his way–thanks be to Grodan, may his tribe increase!–more across than through the snow to the north of LaMut, a canvas bag over his shoulder.

Moving across snow on these brezeneden was something new to Kethol, but following tracks across the landscape was something
familiar, even when they were as deep as the horse tracks from Tom Garnett's departing patrol, and a trail that a blind man could, quite literally, have followed by touch.

He had left his money-cloak in his footlocker in the barracks, hoping any thief would find other, more inviting opportunities than his footlocker. He had half-concealed a small leather pouch of reals in a corner of the locker, hoping that a barracks thief would just take that and look no further; and then had donned his solid white, winter cloak.

When he crouched down with his cowl up, even if he didn't spread his cloak over himself and the dark canvas bag wrapped in a sheet almost as white as the fresh snow–he would look like a small drift that had accumulated over a rock, or a tree stump, or a fencepost.

Perhaps it was spending time with Grodan or looking at the brilliant reflection of the sun upon the snow, but he was coming to the judgment that those grey cloaks the Rangers preferred did make a sort of sense in this countryside. Most winter days were not blindingly white as it was today, but overcast, grey, cloudy, or snowing, and the landscape rarely stood in this stark relief of absolute white and black shadows under the trees. The neutral grey would be good camouflage in all manner of circumstances. For a moment he wondered if he might find such a cloak, then decided carrying a third cloak around was just too much to bear; besides, explaining to Durine and Pirojil why he'd taken to this new fashion might entail more talking than he had patience for.

After he had found himself beyond the first stand of windbreak trees, which had now acquired a mammoth windbreak snowdrift with a few green strands of pine needles sticking through on the leeward side, he had spread out his cloak on the snow and lain down upon it to rest for a few minutes–moving through thigh-high snow was hard and sweaty work–and when
he finally stopped panting, he had strapped the brezeneden to his overboots, and started to walk.

He now understood the origin of the brezeneden's name: ‘clumsy feet'.

It made sense.

Sure enough, after the first few dozen steps–during which he had carefully watched his feet–he had become cocky, and picked up his pace. Immediately after which, he had stepped his left brezeneden down on top of his right, and when he had lifted his right foot, his boot had worked loose from the leather bindings and he had plunged face first into the snow. Even after he had got back to his feet and perched himself on the brezeneden again–a struggle in itself–it had taken several long, cold minutes to remove his thick gloves, retie his right boot to the brezeneden, and slip his hands back into the blessed warmth of his gloves and move on.

It went better, after that–until the next time that he had stepped on his own, suddenly-broadened, feet and while this time the lacings had held, he had still fallen down in the snow. But after a while he thought he had the knack of it, although he suspected that there were some subtleties to using these things that Grodan knew, and wished the Ranger had shared with him.

He wondered, for a moment, whether to attribute those omissions to malice or to stupidity, and decided that Rangers weren't stupid. The Ranger didn't strike him as particularly malicious, either. It must have been the inability to explain it all in one quick talk. Or, it could merely have been the Ranger's odd sense of playfulness. He'd known men who found a great deal stranger things than this amusing.

Still, after a while, his feet started to learn how to avoid each other, and he was able to move at a preposterously fast pace, under the circumstances. The marks that his brezeneden made would probably be erased by the first decent wind, but even in
the absence of a stiff wind, the branch that he was dragging behind him would obscure them from all but somebody with the observations skills of a Natalese Ranger.

At a bend, he came upon the carcass of a horse, blood from the long sword wound in its neck having stained the snow a dark red.

The impressions in the snow made it clear what had happened: the horse had slipped on a patch of ice hidden beneath the snow, exposed by everyone riding the trail-breaker's path. The rider had been thrown into a nearby snow bank which had half-buried him.

Kethol shuddered. In his mind he could hear the sound of the cannon bone breaking, and nodded in approval at the footsteps that showed that the rider had braved the animal's undoubtedly desperately flailing hooves to cut its throat, quickly ending the doomed creature's pain. Retrieving the saddle had taken the work of at least a dozen men, judging from the footprints–the stirrups had probably got themselves caught beneath the horse, and several men had been required to lift enough of its bulk to slide it out.

They hadn't been disturbed during all this either.

The smoke puffing into the lazy air far in the distance suggested that the nearest farmhouse was probably more than a mile away, and the likelihood of any peasant having heard this relatively minor commotion was even smaller than one having been fool enough to venture out to see what had happened.

Which was fine with Kethol.

He drew his knife and set his gear aside and knelt in the packed-down snow next to the dead animal. It was small for a horse, which meant that it easily weighed six or more times what the largest buck deer that Kethol had ever taken had, and probably half again the size of that huge buck elk that had fed the company for a solid week up in Thunderhell.

A full field dressing would require more than one man's strength: he could break the breastbone, with enough effort; but it would take two or more men working together to spread the ribcage.

Still, the horse hadn't yet quite frozen. Even though he was panting and sweating with exertion when he had finished, he was quickly able to cut through the hide and flesh to expose the left rear hipbone. He wished he had thought to bring a small camp hatchet to break the bone free of the socket, but it was the matter of only a few minutes until he was staggering through the waist-deep snow, dragging the leg across the snow behind him towards a stand of birches that had managed to remain mostly unburied in the storm.

The storm had washed itself out around the stand of trees, leaving a small eastern hollow with barely a foot of snow in it, where he quickly cleared a spot to the icy ground. One of the long-fallen trees provided branches that snapped off in his hands and, with the aid of his dulled knife, chunks of wood, out of which he quickly built a fire.

Starting the fire took only a few moments–he didn't have to use the sheet of birch bark folded over in his rucksack, since the nearby birches provided plenty of that material, and he peeled a large strip off a wide bole, and with a few strokes from his flint-and-steel kit quickly built up a smouldering blaze. Then he ran back to the carcass to retrieve the rest of his gear, as well as leave more footprints.

He hacked off a hunk of horsemeat from the leg he had salvaged, and roasted it on the point of his knife over the fire, nibbling at it from time to time, rather than waiting for it to cook all the way through, out of impatience, rather than the pressure of time. Even if the patrol was unable to make a full circuit around the city, the breeze would blow the smoke away and even if they had to double back–as he expected they would–he would hear
them coming long before they saw the clumsily-butchered carcass, and make his escape with the bulk of the windbreak between him and any observation.

It wasn't bad, although Kethol had never really cared for horsemeat. A man who much cared what he ate should probably have picked a better profession than mercenary soldier, but he was surprised to find that he had worked up a serious appetite. He ate quickly at least a couple of pounds of the meat. The rest he threw in the fire.

He dumped more wood on the fire, then went back to the carcass and hacked off as much meat as he could at speed and buried the pieces in the snow at the far end of the hollow. Then he pissed on the snow nearby in several places.

He opened the canvas bag and took the pieces of Tsurani armour that he had stolen from the storeroom in the keep's basement–early on in the war, the Muts had apparently been as interested as everybody else in collecting and examining this curious armour–and scattered them about the clearing.

The Tsurani sword, removed from its black sheath, snapped satisfyingly when he set the point on the ground and bore down on the flat of the blade with his foot, and he tossed the body of the sword aside, scooping up the few inches of the point and tucking it into his pouch.

He peered out from the hollow, and listened.

Nothing. Nothing but a slight wind, and the far-off chittering of some bird, a feathery braggart that apparently wanted to let the whole world know that it, too, had survived the storm.

Dragging the branch behind him, he set off on his brezeneden, pausing only for a moment to drop the sword point next to the horse's corpse, then quickly making his way across the ridge, back towards the city. It would probably be a good idea to wait outside the city until dark. The cover of night would serve him well when he staggered back in.

He would have to bury the brezeneden in the snow outside the city, though. Pity. But now that he knew the trick, he would be able to make another set if the need for them ever arose, as he devoutly hoped it never would.