The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (242 page)

‘Even if life weren’t aggravating enough to begin with,’ said Ferring, who was out of the game and had been sitting with his boots up on the table for the best part of an hour. Ferring had the most unnatural patience with doing nothing.

Pauth eyed him. ‘Your boots are pretty damn aggravating.’

Ferring eyed him back. Those sharp blue eyes of his. ‘Boots is boots.’

‘Boots is boots? What does that even mean? Boots is boots?’

‘If you’ve nothing worth saying, you two might consider not saying it.’ Bolder nodded his lump of a head towards the prisoner. ‘Take a page out of his book.’ The old man hadn’t said a word to Lorsen’s questions. Hadn’t done much more than grunt even when they burned him. He just watched, eyes narrowed, raw flesh glistening in the midst of his tattoos.

Ferring’s eyes shifted over to Wile’s. ‘You think you’d take a burning that well?’

Wile didn’t reply. He didn’t like thinking about taking a burning. He didn’t like giving one to someone else, whatever oaths he’d sworn, whatever treasons, murders or massacres the man was meant to have masterminded. One thing holding forth about justice at a thousand miles removed. Another having to press metal into flesh. He just didn’t like thinking about it at all.

It’s a steady living, the Inquisition
, his father had told him.
Better asking the questions than giving the answers anyway, eh?
And they’d laughed together at that, though Wile hadn’t found it funny. He used to laugh a lot at unfunny things his father said. He wouldn’t have laughed now. Or maybe that was giving himself too much credit. He’d a bad habit of doing that.

Sometimes Wile wondered whether a cause could be right that needed folk burned, cut and otherwise mutilated. Hardly the tactics of the just, was it, when you took a step back? Rarely seemed to produce any truly useful results either. Unless pain, fear, hate and mutilation were what you were after. Maybe it
was
what they were after.

Sometimes Wile wondered whether the torture might cause the very disloyalty the Inquisition was there to stop, but he kept that notion very much to himself. Takes courage to lead a charge, but you’ve got people behind you there. Takes a different and rarer kind to stand up all alone and say, ‘I don’t like the way we do things.’ Especially to a set of torturers. Wile didn’t have either kind of courage. So he just did as he was told and tried not to think about it, and wondered what it would be like to have a job you believed in.

Ferring didn’t have that same problem. He liked the work. You could see it in those blue, blue eyes of his. He grinned over at the tattooed old man now and said, ‘Doubt he’ll be taking a burning that well by the time he gets back to Starikland.’ The prisoner just sat and watched, blue-painted ribs shifting with his crackly breathing. ‘Lot of nights between here and there. Lot of burnings, maybe. Yes, indeedy. Reckon he’ll be good and talkative by—’

‘I already suggested you shut up,’ said Bolder. ‘Now I’m thinking o’ making it an instruction. What do you—’

There was a knock at the door. Three quick knocks, in fact. The Practicals looked at each other, eyebrows up. Lorsen back with more questions. Once Lorsen had a question in mind, he wasn’t a man to wait for an answer.

‘You going to get that?’ Pauth asked Ferring.

‘Why would I?’

‘You’re closest.’

‘You’re shortest.’

‘What’s that got to fucking do with anything?’

‘It amuses me.’

‘Maybe my knife up your arse will amuse me!’ And Pauth slipped his knife out of his sleeve, blade appearing as if by magic. He loved to do that. Bloody show-off.

‘Will you two infants
please
shut up?’ Bolder chucked down his cards, levered his bulk from his chair and slapped Pauth’s knife aside. ‘I came out here to get a break from my bloody children, not to mind three more.’

Wile rearranged his cards again, wondering if there was some way he could win. One win, was that too much to ask? But such a rotten hand. His father had always said
there are no rotten hands, only rotten players
, but Wile believed otherwise.

Another insistent knocking. ‘All right, I’m coming!’ snapped Bolder, dragging back the bolts. ‘It’s not as if—’

There was a clatter, and Wile looked up to see Bolder lurching against the wall looking quite put out and someone barging past. Seemed a bit strong even if they’d taken a while to answer the door. Bolder obviously agreed, because he opened his mouth to complain, then looked surprised when he gurgled blood everywhere instead. That was when Wile noticed there was a knife-handle sticking from his fat throat.

He dropped his cards.

‘Eh?’ said Ferring, trying to get up, but his boots were tangled with the table. It wasn’t Lorsen who’d been knocking, it was the big Northman, the one with all the scars. He took a stride into the room, teeth bared, and crunch! Left a knife buried in Ferring’s face to the cross-piece, his nose flattened under it and blood welling and Ferring wheezed and arched back and kicked the table over, cards and coins flying.

Wile stumbled up, the Northman turning to look at him, blood dotting his face and pulling another knife from inside his coat, and—

‘Stop!’ hissed Pauth. ‘Or I kill him!’ Somehow he’d got to the prisoner, kneeling behind the chair he was roped to, knife blade pressed against his neck. Always been a quick thinker, Pauth. Good thing someone was.

Bolder had slid to the floor, was making a honking sound and drooling blood into a widening pool.

Wile realised he was holding his breath and took a great gasp.

The scarred Northman looked from Wile, to Pauth, and back, lifted his chin slightly, then gently lowered his blade.

‘Get help!’ snapped Pauth, and he tangled his fingers in the prisoner’s grey hair and pulled his head back, tickling his stubbled neck with the point of his knife. ‘I’ll see to this.’

Wile circled the Northman, his knees all shaky, pushing aside one of the leather curtains that divided up the fort’s downstairs, trying to keep as safe a distance as possible. He slithered in Bolder’s blood and nearly went right over, then dived out of the open door and was running.

‘Help!’ he screeched. ‘Help!’

One of the mercenaries lowered a bottle and stared at him, cross-eyed. ‘Wha?’ The celebrations were still half-heartedly dragging on, women laughing and men singing and shouting and rolling in a stupor, none of them enjoying it but going through the motions anyway like a corpse that can’t stop twitching, all garishly lit by the sizzling bonfire. Wile slid over in the mud, staggered up, dragging down his mask so he could shout louder.

‘Help! The Northman! The prisoner!’

Someone was pointing at him and laughing, and someone shouted at him to shut up, and someone was sick all over the side of a tent, and Wile stared about for anyone who might exert some control over this shambles and suddenly felt somebody clutch at his arm.

‘What are you jabbering about?’ None other than General Cosca, dewy eyes gleaming with the firelight, lady’s white powder smeared across one hollow, rash-speckled cheek.

‘That Northman!’ squealed Wile, grabbing the captain general by his stained shirt. ‘Lamb! He killed Bolder! And Ferring!’ He pointed a trembling finger towards the fort. ‘In there!’

To give him his due, Cosca needed no convincing. ‘Enemies in the camp!’ he roared, flinging his empty bottle away. ‘Surround the fort! You, cover the door, make sure no one leaves! Dimbik, get men around the back! You, put that woman down! Arm yourselves, you wretches!’

Some snapped to obey. Two found bows and pointed them uncertainly towards the door. One accidentally shot an arrow into the fire. Others stared baffled, or continued with their revelry, or stood grinning, imagining that this was some elaborate joke.

‘What the hell happened?’ Lorsen, black coat flapping open over his nightshirt, hair wild about his head.

‘It would appear our friend Lamb attempted a rescue of your prisoner,’ said Cosca. ‘Get away from that door, you idiots – do you think this is a joke?’

‘Rescue?’ muttered Sworbreck, eyebrows raised and eyeglasses skewed, evidently having recently crawled from his bed.

‘Rescue?’ snapped Lorsen, grabbing Wile by the collar.

‘Pauth took the prisoner . . . prisoner. He’s seeing to it—’

A figure lurched from the fort’s open door, took a few lazy steps, eyes wide above his mask, hands clasped to his chest. Pauth. He pitched on his face, blood turning the snow around him pink.

‘You were saying?’ snapped Cosca. A woman shrieked, stumbled back with a hand over her mouth. Men started to drag themselves from tents and shacks, bleary-eyed, pulling on clothes and bits of armour, fumbling with weapons, breath smoking in the cold.

‘Get more bows up here!’ roared Cosca, clawing at his blistered neck with his fingernails. ‘I want a pincushion of anything that shows itself! Clear the bloody civilians away!’

Lorsen was hissing in Wile’s face. ‘Is Conthus still alive?’

‘I think so . . . he was when I . . . when I—’

‘Cravenly fled? Pull your mask up, damn it, you’re a disgrace!’

Probably the Inquisitor was right, and Wile was a disgraceful Practical. He felt strangely proud of that possibility.

‘Can you hear me, Master Lamb?’ called Cosca, as Sergeant Friendly helped him into his gilded, rusted breastplate, a combination of pomp and decay that rather summed up the man.

‘Aye,’ came the Northman’s voice from the black doorway of the fort. The closest thing to silence had settled over the camp since the mercenaries returned in triumph the previous day.

‘I am so pleased you have graced us with your presence again!’ The captain general waved half-dressed bowmen into the shadows around the shacks. ‘I wish you’d sent word of your coming, though, we could have prepared a more suitable reception!’

‘Thought I’d surprise you.’

‘We appreciate the gesture! But I should say I have some hundred and fifty fighting men out here!’ Cosca took in the wobbling bows, dewy eyes and bilious faces of his Company. ‘Several of them are very drunk, but still. Long established admirer though I am of lost causes I really don’t see the happy ending for you!’

‘I’ve never been much for happy endings,’ came Lamb’s growl. Wile didn’t know how a man could sound so steady under these circumstances.

‘Nor me, but perhaps we can engineer one between us!’ With a couple of gestures Cosca sent more men scurrying down either side of the fort and ordered a fresh bottle. ‘Now why don’t you two put your weapons down and come out, and we can all discuss this like civilised men!’

‘Never been much for civilisation either,’ called Lamb. ‘Reckon you’ll have to come to me.’

‘Bloody Northmen,’ muttered Cosca, ripping the cork from his latest bottle and flinging it away. ‘Dimbik, are any of your men not drunk?’

‘You wanted them as drunk as possible,’ said the captain, who had got himself tangled with his bedraggled sash as he tried to pull it on.

‘Now I need them sober.’

‘A few who were on guard, perhaps—’

‘Send them in.’

‘And we want Conthus alive!’ barked Lorsen.

Dimbik bowed. ‘We will do our best, Inquisitor.’

‘But there can be no promises.’ Cosca took a long swallow from his bottle without taking his eyes from the house. ‘We’ll make that Northern bastard regret coming back.’

‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ grunted Savian as he loaded the flatbow.

Lamb edged the door open to peer through. ‘Regretting it already.’ A thud, splinters, and the bright point of a bolt showed between the planks. Lamb jerked his head back and kicked the door wobbling shut. ‘Hasn’t quite gone the way I’d hoped.’

‘You could say that about most things in life.’

‘In my life, no doubt.’ Lamb took hold of the knife in the Practical’s neck and ripped it free, wiped it on the front of the dead man’s black jacket and tossed it to Savian. He snatched it out of the air and slid it into his belt.

‘You can never have too many knives,’ said Lamb.

‘It’s a rule to live by.’

‘Or die by,’ said Lamb as he tossed over another. ‘You need a shirt?’

Savian stretched out his arms and watched the tattoos move. The words he’d tried to live his life by. ‘What’s the point in getting ’em if you don’t show ’em off? I’ve been covering up too long.’

‘Man’s got to be what he is, I reckon.’

Savian nodded. ‘Wish we’d met thirty years ago.’

‘No you don’t. I was a mad fucker then.’

‘And now?’

Lamb stuck a dagger into the tabletop. ‘Thought I’d learned something.’ He thumped another into the doorframe. ‘But here I am, handing out knives.’

‘You pick a path, don’t you?’ Savian started drawing the string on the other flatbow. ‘And you think it’s just for tomorrow. Then thirty years on you look back and see you picked your path for life. If you’d known it then, you’d maybe have thought more carefully.’

‘Maybe. Being honest, I’ve never been much for thinking carefully.’

Savian finally fumbled the string back, glancing at the word
freedom
tattooed around his wrist like a bracelet. ‘Always thought I’d die fighting for the cause.’

‘You will,’ said Lamb, still busy scattering weapons around the room. ‘The cause of saving my fat old arse.’

‘It’s a noble calling.’ Savian slipped a bolt into place. ‘Reckon I’ll get upstairs.’

‘Reckon you’d better.’ Lamb drew the sword he’d taken from Waerdinur, long and dull with that silver letter glinting. ‘We ain’t got all night.’

‘You’ll be all right down here?’

‘Might be best if you just stay up there. That mad fucker from thirty years ago – sometimes he comes visiting.’

‘Then I’ll leave the two of you to it. You shouldn’t have come back.’ Savian held out his hand. ‘But I’m glad you did.’

‘Wouldn’t have missed it.’ Lamb took a grip on Savian’s hand and gave it a squeeze, and they looked each other in the eye. Seemed in that moment they had as good an understanding between them as if they had met thirty years ago. But the time for friendship was over. Savian had always put more effort into his enemies, and there was no shortage outside. He turned and took the stairs three at a time, up into the garret, a flatbow in each hand and the bolts over his shoulder.