The False Martyr (33 page)

Even now, he could not
believe the orders he gave. It was one thing to order an
unnecessary attack on a superior force in the middle of the day,
but at least, they’d had the element of surprise. The soldiers had
been scattered, unprepared, unarmed in many cases. An attack deep
in their own territory when they weren’t even at war was the last
thing they’d expected. Jaret and his men probably could have used
that surprise to kill or capture the entire company, but rather
than press that advantage, he had ordered his men into this stable,
herded them to the back, and left the doors open wide. They’d
killed just enough of the soldiers on their way to ensure that
their fellows would be motivated by revenge, but not nearly enough
to shift the advantage to their favor. Then they had retreated and
given their enemy the only thing they needed to ensure a victory:
time.

“
Build a barricade,” Jaret
heard himself yell. “Stack the bales here. Higher. Now those
barrels.” He found himself pointing to a cluster of barrels in a
storeroom behind them, but why? Building a barricade meant that
they planned to stay, to fight an overwhelming force in a stable
with absolutely no means of escape. It was idiocy, a waste of
lives, yet another risk that he could not possibly justify. There
had been such an inexcusable number of such decision over the past
week that he should have been disqualified from leading a blind man
across the street, but that did not stop him from issuing more,
from directing his men in the exact placement of every barrel, each
bale of hay, bag of grain, crate, stall door, shelf, and rack. And
it did not stop them from listening.

“
That one,” Jaret yelled,
pointing to a final barrel that had been left in the storeroom. It
had a red flame stenciled on it to indicate that it was filled with
lamp oil. “Put it there, in the middle. Hurry. Turn it. Yes. That’s
it. Now get back.” The legionnaires obeyed the orders without a
second of hesitation. He could not imagine why. His orders should
have caused reasonable men to mutiny, to slit his throat and be
done with him. But the legionnaires looked at him with reverence,
with awe even more for the Order-blessed escapes that seemed to
deliver them from each of his follies.
A
soldier who relies on luck gets killed half the
time
, Commander Rastabi used to say. Jaret
could only imagine that it was time for the coin to fall the other
way.

At his urging, the
remainder of the legionnaires, twenty men, scurried over and around
the barrels and bales, landing behind the barricade just as a
volley of crossbow bolts thudded into the wood before them. A dozen
of those men swung bows from their shoulders and notched arrows to
return fire.

“
Hold!” Jaret called. “Let
them come.” He wanted the words back as soon as he said them, but
it was, somehow, not his decision. Whatever force was controlling
him wanted the soldiers to charge without fear, wanted nothing to
weaken them or diminish their numbers. Jaret could only imagine
that it had decided to remove even luck as a possible means of
escape.

Another volley of bolts
hit the barrels as the legionnaires waited. “Forward!” a voice
called from before them. Jaret spared enough of a glance to see a
wall of shields charging toward them with spears ready to spring
from between the gaps. That wall would be their end. He could see
everything that was about to happen. The barricade was slapdash. It
was top heavy, unstable, and in no way fortified. As soon as the
soldiers hit it, it would collapse back on Jaret and his men.
They’d be buried under their own wall, defenseless, captured or
dead – not that there was a difference.

Jaret should have been
terrified. He should have been running. His men should be
surrendering. He felt nothing. He watched, calm as a man sitting to
tea, as even his men grew nervous. They looked at their commander,
waiting for the orders that would spring the trap that must be
present in such an inexplicable strategy. Their anticipation grew,
eyes widened, breathes quickened, grips tightened on weapons. They
knew just as well as Jaret what would happen when the soldiers hit
the barricade. Still they waited, trusting their commander far
longer than they should. Yet even the most reverent man will
abandon his faith in the face of death, and the legionnaires were
no exception. One by one, they realized the truth. Their faces
fell. There was no trap. There was no plan. There was no escape.
They turned to run.

Somehow unconcerned, Jaret
turned to watch them go and found the only other man who seemed
unfazed by what was happening before him. Lius, the small, bald
monk they had rescued, watched his certain death unfold as if he
were trying to solve a mathematical problem written in the air. His
eyes darted, tongue crept out, hands twitched, brow furrowed. He
was about to be crushed by a falling barricade, to be trampled,
speared, handed to the Emperor and his henchmen, but there was only
strict concentration. It looked as if he were not even in the
stable with them, as if he were somewhere far away, considering a
vexing, but insignificant, calculation. Then his countenance
changed. His eyes cleared, attention returned, breath caught. He
looked at the soldiers building to a run, to the barricade that
would never stop them, and seemed, only then, to understand. But he
did not run, or cower, or hide. He stretched his shaking hand to
the ground and clutched a stone without even looking. He lifted it
and threw.

Jaret watched the rock fly
over the barricade, felt his confidence redouble as if a single
stone cast by a scrawny boy might stop fifty men in armor. It did
not. It fell harmlessly into the charging formation mere strides
from the barricade, did not even strike one of those soldiers, did
not disrupt the formation, dent a helm, or unsteady a shield. It
missed entirely. Yet, Jaret felt nothing, no loss, no sense of
defeat, no fear or doubt. They were done for, as good as dead, and
he felt nothing but unshakeable certainty.

Around him, the
legionnaires broke ranks, tried to escape the trap that their
commander had set for them. It was too late. The luck had run out.
Their faith was unfounded. Their commander had led them to nothing
but their deaths.

Jaret did not watch them
go, did not join their pointless retreat. Embracing the end, he
turned to watch it come just in time to see the rock come flying
back out. Kicked by a soldier, it shot between the pounding feet
and interlocking shields, struck an oozing barrel just below a trio
of quarrels, and skipped off a horseshoe in a line of sparks. The
last thing Jaret remembered was wondering why the ground around
those sparks was wet.

The explosion shook the
stable. Jaret was flung back. A bale covered him, shielding him
from the fire behind. It broke apart as it fell, lost its
structure, and landed on him in a pile of musty sweetness as he was
smashed to the ground. The air left him.

Jaret came up sputtering,
head spinning, ears ringing. He spit hay, gasped for breath, and
nearly fell back again. Strong hands kept him up. Legionnaires on
either side lifted him to his feet while the remainder formed
around with swords drawn. His chest was tight, each gasp a dagger.
His head spun, back spasmed, arm hung lifeless. His hair was wet,
brow dripping red onto his nose and down his cheek. But the pain
was far away, blocked still by the same force that bottled his
emotions and freewill.

He looked up through hazy
eyes at a fire rising to the beams above. Its heat pounded him from
ten paces back as the legionnaires pulled him away. He could sense
their fear as they searched for an escape, coughed and gasped
against the smoke, shielded their faces from the heat. Behind them
was a wall, before, a tower of flame that spread like water across
the hay lining the stalls to their sides. The soldiers were gone,
lost to the fire, but the legionnaires were just as trapped.
Delivered from the sword and into the fire. Jaret almost wished he
could take the former.

“
Here,” a voice yelled
from behind them and to the side. “There’s a door.” It was the monk
again. He was barely visible in the doorway of the storeroom where
they’d found the barrels. Already, legionnaires were piling past
him into the room as he motioned them through.

The legionnaires carried
their commander toward the door in what was becoming too frequent a
ritual. As they went, Jaret felt his bones pulling back together,
his skin stitching closed, his head clearing. The gift that
Thagaskuila had given him remained – the creature who had tortured
him had a poison that caused incredible pain but also healed any
injuries; Jaret had been exposed to so much of that poison that it
still burned in his blood and still healed any injury within
seconds – and he was soon aiding his men, coughing and gasping,
through a door in the side of the storeroom – his own smoke-scoured
lungs seeming to heal between breaths.

As the last of the
legionnaires pushed through the door, Jaret heard the stable groan.
He looked back and watched fire fill the room behind. A wave of
cinders, smoke, and scalding air rushed through the doorway into
his back as he leapt through the door. His skin crisped, hair
withered, and shirtsleeves burst into flames. It was as much pain
as he had ever known, but he did not cry out, did not panic, did
not recoil or react. He leapt through the door and was immediately
tackled by one of his men and rolled on the ground to extinguish
the flame.

By the time they had
dragged him clear, the blisters had disappeared from his arms,
neck, and face. A moment later, they were not even red. The men had
seen it before, but they marveled still. Some of them said words of
prayer, others curses. Their commander was not only the luckiest
man alive, he was indestructible.

Without knowing why, Jaret
led his men – not a one had been seriously injured – around to the
front of the stable. A few of the soldiers were there, but they
were in no condition to fight. They were black with burns, missing
limbs, riddled with shrapnel, burning and broken. They crawled,
pulling themselves across the ground on their bellies as if they
might escape the fire that rose from their clothing, consuming them
even as they sought an escape. They were dead already. The best of
them would not live through the day. They would die in agony,
howling and crying. Death was the best thing the legionnaires could
do for them.

Jaret tried to give the
order to spare these men their suffering, to send them quickly to
the peace of the Order. The whinny of a horse caught his attention
instead. He turned in time to see a trio of officers leap into
saddles. Arrows from the two nearest legionnaires took one of them
before his horse found its stride. The others were gone, galloping
at full rein down the road away from the farm. The legionnaires,
arrows notched, looked anxious, as if they hoped to
follow.

“
Leave them,” Jaret heard
himself say. “Give peace to any who aren’t already dead then find a
place to sleep. We’ll stay here for a couple of days.” Even as he
said it, he could not believe the words. The men riding away were
certain to bring an entire army with them, and it was unlikely to
take them two days to do so. He and his men needed to be on the
move, needed to be as far away from here as possible before the
hunt continued. Yet he found himself walking toward the house like
the warlord he used to be rather than the fugitive he had
become.

As he walked, he tried to
make sense of what had happened.
The
oil
, he realized. The crossbow bolts had
cracked the barrel, started a stream, and the spark had ignited it.
It had blown just as the soldiers arrived. The barrels around it,
the crates and sacks, had gone with it, spewing nails and wood and
fire onto the soldiers. And Jaret and his men had been protected by
the bales of hay. It was another miracle, another case of an
incomprehensible strategy delivering them unscathed from what
should have been a disaster. But it hadn’t been a miracle. It
hadn’t been luck. It had been the monk.

He had thrown the stone,
had known what would happen. And the other battles had been the
same. In every one – even the one where they’d saved him – the monk
had done something. At the time, his actions had seemed
inconsequential, silly even. Jaret would not have noticed if not
for the oddity, but in each case, he had changed the course of what
had followed. Just as today, it was the monk who had turned
disaster into victory. Somehow, Jaret had not made the connection
until now, but it was there, and it was time for him to understand
it.

He turned to call. The
monk was already behind him, matching his stride toward the
house.

#

Lius wanted nothing more
than to sit, but he knew that as soon as he hit the cushion he
would be asleep, so he remained standing even as the man who, for a
few brief minutes, had been Emperor motioned him toward a chair. He
brushed the soot from his tattered robe instead and realized the
futility of it. He had been wearing the same garment for ten days
now. It was so covered with grime and salt and stink that it could
stand on its own. His hands – and face, he was sure – were not much
better. He had tried to wash them when there was water, but they
never seemed clean for more than a few minutes.

Always a prissy,
particular boy, it may have been the dirt that bothered Lius most
about what his life had become. In the Hall of Understanding,
cleanliness was an obsession. The Order, as its name suggested, was
found in order, in structure, in organization and uniformity. Those
who sought the Order’s mysteries were typically compulsive in their
need for that structure, and Lius was no exception. If he’d had
time to think about it over the past week, the state of his robes,
his face, his very life would have driven him insane.