The Wasteland Soldier, Book 3, Drums Of War (TWS) (37 page)

“The Marshals have left the Place of Bridges, Omar. Long lines of them are marching west.”

Omar hesitated. He saw the excitement in his scout.

“How many?”

“We counted four regiments.”

He nodded, dismissed the scout and walked slowly away, leaving the mechanic staring after him. He unclipped the oblong shaped black box hanging his belt and pressed a button.

“Hello?” said a voice, hissing with static.

“This is Omar,” he said. “Prepare the missiles.”

TWENTY EIGHT

The Map Maker watched from the cottage. He knew it was the one place he would be safe.

No one would think to search for him here. Not that anyone would search for him anyway. He was no one worth searching for. Pathetic and useless, even his blood had abandoned him. Stone and Nuria, his only friends, had left him behind. He had brought them into the promised land but they had fled. Sadie had loved him. She probably still did. He wondered what she would make of the name Harron. She had called him Doug, an invented alternative to the Map Maker. His child would soon emerge from her belly. Maybe it already had. But he could not go back. There was no way back. There was no way forward. He was beginning to understand the only answer that remained.

What had he done? How had he arrived here?

It was musty and cluttered inside the cottage and he saw dark patches of dried blood on the floor.

Death and more death.
No!

A pain gripped his chest and his brow dripped with sweat. He could feel the flare of stomach cramps. He had not experienced them in a considerable time; not since the city of Maizan, where he had been captured and brutalised. He knew fear sparked them. And he was afraid, miserable, alone and horribly afraid.

He shrunk from the window and retreated into a chair that creaked beneath his weight. He swallowed hard, an uncomfortable feeling in his throat. For a moment, he thought he was going to be sick. He doubled over and dry retched. He looked at his stumps and began to cry thick tears.

Duggan claimed that only thieves had their hands chopped off. Not prophets. He was no thief. But he was no prophet, either. He was a fool, a stupid fool. After all these years he had allowed himself to be tricked.

The Messiah, the Second Coming, the Bringer of Light …

No.

The overweight, bald, aging, handless fool …

He could hear singing from the Holy House. He listened with salty tears and remained in the darkness where he belonged.

Lannast.

She could not be his mother, it was impossible, he would not accept it; she was half his age. Yet she had steered him here, his inner voice, calling to him for a lifetime, across thousands of miles. He wasn’t from Chett. He wasn’t even from Gallen. He was a man of deception. Mosscar was his home; his bloodline was wreathed amongst its ruins. But Lannast wanted him for a singular purpose. To use him as a tool. Like the men in Chett had used him. He had mapped their desert city, street by street, building by building, even discovering the underground streets with the metal lines. He had spent his entire youth mapping the city, committing every aspect of it to paper and memory, only for them to steal it from him and toss him out into the wasteland to suffer at the hands of marauders and thieves and men like Stone; the drifter, the warrior, the wasteland soldier; a man who could steal his maps in one breath and behead the man who had brutalised him in the other.

Where was he? He needed Stone. Stone needed Nuria. The three of them should have remained together.

What would happen once the beacon was lit?

He already knew the answer.

Harron.

His people would come.

And hundreds would die.

He did not want Shauna to die.

Harron.

“It’s a stupid name, stupid, I hate it and I hate you. Get out of my head. Go away, go away.”

He was panting. He stumbled onto his feet.

Light the beacon, Harron.

“No.”

Callart awaits your signal. Our warriors grow restless. We must strike. We must taste their blood once more.

“I won’t do it and I can’t do it. I have no hands.”

You will do it, my son. Tonight. Now. Light it. Light it. Light it. Return to our warriors and lead them.

“You light it.”

Silence.

“Well? Why don’t you do it? Show yourself, Lannast. I’m not scared anymore. Not of you.”

He vaulted from the chair. Shook his head. Rubbed at his temples with his stumps.

“Get out. Get out. GET OUT!”

He dropped to his knees.

“You’re not my mother. You’re not my mother. You’re not my mother.”

The cottage door creaked. He tasted bile in his mouth. He spat. His stomach churned over. Dripping with sweat, he mustered the effort to push himself onto his feet.

The beacon will burn, my son.

Rondo was silent.

Albury had reasoned with the man, drawing upon the friendship they’d awkwardly shared since that first meeting, but a mask had come down upon the face of the Kiven emissary. He was now a captured soldier behind enemy lines; expressionless, eyes betraying nothing, and whatever had gone before was forgotten in an instant. Albury, visibly disappointed, instructed Boyd to question him, in a more vigorous manner, but the beating did nothing to break the man’s resolve. Boyd rubbed his bruised knuckles. Time was being wasted. Stone demanded to be allowed at him but Albury refused. He wanted his own people to handle this. Reluctantly, he ordered the man to be taken below for torture.

“Where’s he going?” asked Nuria, as they were escorted back into the hall.

“To pray,” said Boyd. “Governor Albury presides over a society where a man stands trial for the crimes he has committed and is found innocent or guilty by Holy men. He does not advocate torturing prisoners, the way his father had in the past, but he knows time is running out.”

Dangling from the ceiling of a basement cell, chains cutting into his wrists, Rondo said nothing as two men stripped off his shirt. Even if he confessed, he would be put to death, immediately or at trial. He gritted his teeth and grimaced as they sliced his flesh. He cried out as they pulverised his groin with clubs. He screamed as they burned his feet. He choked and sobbed as they took him down and plunged his head into a bucket of water. But he never spoke. He never said a word. Not one.

Upstairs, in the hall, Boyd was deep in conversation with Quinn.

“What do you think that’s all about?” said Nuria. “Do you think she’s telling him about Omar and the sickness weapon?”

Stone shrugged. “Do you think we should?”

“I don’t know. I want to help her,” said Nuria. “And I know you do. But what are we going to do about this weapon?”

“I was thinking about that.”

He motioned with his head. She followed him outside into the courtyard. It was night. The sky was filled with stars. Soldiers manned the walls of the compound. The town was lit by hundreds of fires.

Nuria folded her arms. “Well?”

“Let’s say this Omar is going to attack and use this … this sickness weapon … how will he do it?”

She thought for a moment. “You’re not going to get close enough to inject a soldier with it.”

“No, that’s what I thought, which means he has another method of deploying it.”

“A cannon?”

Stone nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. He places all this … sickness weapon … inside a container that will open on impact. Then fires it against the Marshals.”

“A cannon isn’t very mobile.”

“No, but they have vehicles in Kiven. Assembled on a flatbed, constantly moving and firing, it could be devastating.”

“He’s devious, this Omar.”

“He is.”

“And he claims you tried to kill him.”

“I don’t know anyone named Omar.”

He walked away, into the shadows, leaned against the wall of the compound. Nuria followed him.

“I’ve killed a lot of men, Nuria. But I don’t remember the name Omar.”

“Well, this is one you tried to kill.”

“I don’t leave them alive.”

They were both silent for a moment.

Nuria shivered. “You left one alive.”

Stone brooded. His brow clenched.

“It can’t be.”

“We were in Tamnica prison for a long time. Long enough for him to have made it across the sea and carved out a new life.”

“No.”

“Perhaps Omar is his real name. You never knew it, did you?”

“No.”

Foulness rippled through his stomach; his skin prickled.

“Think about how elaborate this plan is. You told me how he held the children hostage in Ford, using their own explosives against them. Albury said Omar is not Kiven blood. Where else could be from?”

He stood over the Cleric, on the harsh sands of Gallen’s Southern Desert, darkness all around them. The warlord of the Blood Sun tribe was alone, his vehicles destroyed, his men dead. The blood on his clothes belonged to Tomas, his corpse miles away, stabbed to death whilst Stone was held captive in a truck, helplessly listening to his only companion die.

“I should have killed him.”

“We did the right thing that night.”

He saw himself beat the man and plunge him into the fire, scorching his skin. He rolled the Cleric onto his back, the air thick with the smell of cooked flesh. The Cleric shook with fever and screamed in agony. He was dying. Then Emil emerged from the dark and crouched to heal him; poor Emil, who’d witnessed the Cleric slaughter her people one by one. Emil, a Pure One, a healer from birth. She saved him from infection and fever, deliberately leaving his body scarred and his skin rippled, now considered an outcast by his people.

“Death was too easy for him. He deserved to suffer. To look like the people he’d spent a lifetime killing.”

Stone wiped his hands over his face.

“I caused this. This is all happening because of me.”

She grabbed his arms.

“Don’t you fucking do that. You’re not responsible for that man. This is not your fault.”

His hand went to his revolver.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Now we know. And he knows you’re here as well. Nothing has changed. We go to Kiven and we kill him. But not just for Clarissa. For Tomas. For Emil. For all of them. We kill him, once and for all.”

He gazed longingly into her blue eyes. His hands curled around her neck. He tilted her head toward him. His lips pressed against hers. Nuria gasped, shocked at the kiss, shocked at the moment. Her pulses hammered. She could taste his scratchy lips, his tongue against her teeth, his saliva mixing with her own. Then he broke apart, too fleeting, her mouth naked without his, wanting him from that first moment, knowing there was something different about him, something that electrified every fibre of her. But he stared at her, startled at his primal response to her words. She searched for his brooding eyes in the gloom. She tried to speak, to find the right words, but she had none and he had none but they didn’t need any. He pulled her close a second time and kissed her more savagely, his arms holding her tight, his grip firm, her body shaped against him.

As they broke, his beard tickled her nose and her mouth curled into a tiny, lop sided smile.

She laid her head against his chest. He held onto her.

She said, “We have to go.”

He peeled away from her. Her cheeks were flushed. A few of the soldiers were watching them.

“Check on the vehicle,” he said.

He disappeared into the compound and strode past Boyd and Quinn. He went straight for the two men guarding the stairwell and struck the first one in the jaw, a crunching right handed punch, rocking him from his feet. He chopped the second one in the throat, and then flashed an elbow into him, putting him down. He crouched, wrestled the keys from them and unlocked the door. Boyd howled at him. Quinn grabbed her crossbow.

There was the sound of a scuffle as he floored the jailers.

Duggan stood outside the cottage. There was a stiff wind, cutting right through him and chilling him to the bone. He reached inside his tunic and took out his pipe. It saddened him the way he’d spoken to Quinn, to all of them. But they were making him look and feel useless and the laws he believed in unimportant. Without law, there would be chaos. How would that help anyone? He scratched his chin and put the pipe away. It wouldn’t be the same without her. He walked on, sword swinging from his belt. He looked around the village, blanketed in darkness. He saw his men on the hill, four of them, protecting the beacon. No message had arrived from Touron. He was inclined to tear it down. But Boyd had a plan of his own to execute so for now it stood.

His boots kicked up loose chunks of mud. How long it would be before they attacked? Were they going to wait an eternity for the beacon? Surely not. Then again, what did he know about Shaylighters? They had been no more than a pest through his lifetime, even during the war, conducting food raids on villages weakened by men taken away to fight the Kiven. Duggan could smell the oncoming war. He knew his sons would be conscripted. He had already lost Devlan. He could not bear to lose any more. But would it really come to that?

He didn’t trust the trade agreement or the man who’d presented it. Rondo was like no emissary he had ever seen. He had the look of a soldier.