She refused to meet his gaze. Instead, she answered Rebble as if he had been the one to ask the question. ‘A killer of women, was Ginial.’ She shrugged. ‘We knew about those ones.’
At that, Rebble shot Wareth a look.
Listar returned. ‘Nothing, sir. Like the others.’
Sir. How that word struck him, like a muddy stone to the chest. Wareth glanced away, past the blank faces with their eager animal eyes. He squinted at the towering column of smoke.
Rebble said, ‘Well, looks like we got us some volunteers. Right here, just waiting for us. Four of you, pick him up and take him to the fires – now now, soldiers, no need to fight for the privilege.’
As the woman moved to collect up one outstretched arm, Wareth said, ‘No, not you.’
Scowling, she stepped back a step.
Rebble edged close to her. ‘When the lieutenant talks to you, recruit, give ‘im your cat’s stare, and when he asks you something, hiss your words loud and clear. It don’t matter that he’s all bent and ugly. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘There,’ and Rebble smiled out through his snarl of beard, revealing startlingly white teeth, ‘now that didn’t pinch too much, did it? Just keep playing at soldier and who knows, you might climb up to become one. Maybe.’
Wareth’s new corporal, and personal strong-arm to the new lieutenant, was certainly enjoying his newly won privileges. With each day that passed, Rebble was sounding more and more like a veteran of many battlefields. Every army has a temper. Abyss save us if it’s Rebble’s.
With the body gone, the remaining onlookers wandered off. The woman alone remained, shifting weight from one foot to the other, not looking at anyone in particular.
‘Your name, recruit?’ Wareth asked her.
‘Rance … sir.’ She lifted her head then and fixed defiant eyes upon him. ‘Drowned my own baby. Or so I’m told and why would anybody lie? I don’t remember any of it, but I did it. Wet hands, wet sleeves, wet face.’
Wareth held her gaze until she broke it. That regard of his was something he had learned to perfect long ago, discovering how easily it could be mistaken for resolve and inner strength. Games of disguise. Wareth knows them all. Yet here he stands, his deepest secret known to us. So should he not feel free? Unencumbered? At last able to dispense with what so hungrily devoured all his energy, year after year, step after step in this useless life? The hiding, the deceptions, the endless pretence?
But no, a man such as Wareth, well, he but finds new hauntings, new instruments of torture.
Still, a rampant murderer stalking the camp will serve as a worthy distraction.
If only it did.
Still grinning, Rebble said to Rance, ‘Yes, it’s a dangerous thing, that speaking up.’
She grimaced. ‘You’re short on opinions, sir? Camp with the cats.’
‘Is that an invitation?’
‘Even you might not survive the night … sir.’
Wareth said, ‘Rance. We need squad leaders.’
‘No.’
Rebble laughed, clapping her hard on the shoulder, enough to make her stumble. ‘You passed the first test, woman. We don’t want them as are hungry for the rank. You got to say no at least five times, and then you’re in.’
‘Once will do, then.’
‘No good. You already said it twenty times in that pretty round skull of yours. You’d be amazed at what old Rebble can hear.’
‘They won’t follow me.’
‘They won’t follow anyone,’ Wareth said, still eyeing her. ‘That’s what makes it an adventure.’
Her sharp glare found him again. ‘Is it true, sir? Did you run?’
Rebble growled under his breath, but Wareth gestured the man to silence, and then said, ‘I did. Ran like an arse-poked hare, with the sword in my hand screaming its outrage.’
Something settled in her face, and whatever it was, Wareth had not expected it. No disgust. No contempt. Then what is it I’m seeing? Rance shrugged. ‘A sword that screams. Next time, I’ll be right there beside you, sir.’
The weapons and armour of the Hust were yet to be distributed. They remained in heavily guarded wagons, the iron moaning day and night. Every now and then one wailed through its burlap mummery, like a child trapped in the jaws of a wolf.
In her eyes he saw recognition.
Killed your baby, did you? Not knowing what to do with the damned thing, as it screamed and screamed. Not knowing how you could cope – not just that day, but for the rest of your life. So you took the easy way out. End the screams, in a tub of soapy water.
But the screams don’t end, do they? Unless, of course, your mind snaps, and it all vanishes inside. As if you weren’t even there. But for all that not-knowing, there remains a bone-deep terror – the terror of one day remembering.
‘Your killer’s killing men who hurt women,’ Rance said. ‘It’s what they all share, these victims. Isn’t it?’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Could be a woman.’
Yes. We think so, too.
‘I think you just joined the investigation,’ Rebble said.
‘What makes you think I want her caught?’ Rance snapped in reply.
‘That’s fine, too,’ Rebble answered, nodding. ‘We’re not much interested either. But the commander wants it all settled.’
‘When the last woman-killer is dead,’ she replied. ‘Then it will settle.’
‘Could be a few hundred men, maybe more,’ said Wareth, studying her, noting the redness of her hands, as if she had recently scalded them, and the guardedness that clenched her face. ‘Too many to lose.’
Rance shook her head. ‘Then tell him how it is, sir.’ Her eyes found his again, and indeed he thought of a cat. ‘Tell him how it’s the men who are cowards who hurt and kill women. Tell him about their small minds, full of dark knots and darting fears. Tell him how they can’t think past that first rush of blind rage, and how satisfying it is to just give up thinking altogether.’ Colour had risen to her face with her words. ‘Tell the commander, sir, that these dead bastards are worthless in any army. They’ll run. They’ll make trouble with us cats, looking for more women to bully and threaten. Better to see them all dead. Sir.’
Wareth glanced across at Rebble, and saw the man grinning, but it was a cold grin that could go in any direction.
Listar stood silent, a few paces away. Wife slayer.
Did she know? Of course she knows. Crimes are the meat of our conversations, and we’ll chew the gristle over and over again, in the belief that, with enough jawing, the flavour will change and the bitterness will go away. The sour misery of it all … listen! Just fade into nothing, will you? Oh, we’re a stubborn lot, especially with those faiths promising escape.
‘They ain’t all cowards,’ Rebble said, still grinning, but something was lit in his eyes.
She was sharp enough to notice and stepped back. ‘If you say so, sir.’
‘I do. More to the point, some killings, well, they just happen. In a red haze.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘That’s how forgetting and remembering becomes the worst part of it.’
Now, at last, Wareth saw the woman pale. ‘You have the truth of that,’ she said in a low, frail voice.
Then Rebble’s grin spread into a smile. ‘But me, I don’t have that problem. I remember every poor bastard I went and killed. The ones I meant to, the ones I didn’t. If I gave you all their names, would you know which was which? No. Nobody would. Because it really makes no difference to anybody, not even me. That’s my problem, you see. What I can’t remember, no matter how hard I try, are my reasons for killing anybody. The arguments, I mean, the ones that broke out and turned bad.’ He shook his head, showing an exaggerated expression of bafflement. ‘Not a single reason, not one.’
Sighing, Wareth looked away. Rebble’s new habit was making speeches, but none of them left a listener feeling at ease. Is there anything beneath all that, Rebble? Something you’re trying to
tell us? Something you need to confess? What’s stopping you?
Rance simply nodded in answer to Rebble’s words.
The tall, wiry man then turned and walked over to Listar. ‘Let’s go find the dead man’s tent, Listar, and see what’s to be seen.’ He glanced over at Wareth. ‘It’s almost tenth bell, sir.’
‘I know,’ Wareth replied. ‘Go on then, the two of you.’
He watched the two men head off towards the White Crag block.
‘Can I go now, sir?’
‘No. Come with me.’
She surprised him by offering no objection, and fell in at his side when he set out for the command centre. ‘Better you than him, sir.’
‘Just smile and nod, no matter what he says.’
‘I’d forgotten about Listar,’ she said.
‘Rebble figured you were looking to wound, I think. He didn’t like it.’ Wareth hesitated, and then said, ‘Listar isn’t a coward. He wants to die. He won’t take a guard at his tent at night, despite these murders. Every time we find ourselves standing over another body, he’s disappointed that it’s not him lying there at our feet.’
Rance grunted, but said nothing.
‘Not much longer now, I think.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve got a problem with desertions, Rance. And not enough old Legion soldiers to ring the camp. Besides which, the deal was freedom, only to win it we’d have to serve, but given the chance we’ll take the freedom and Abyss take the serving part. I think it will all fall apart.’
‘So why make me do anything? Just let me go back to my tent—’
‘You weren’t anywhere near your tent when looking at that body,’ Wareth observed as they drew closer to the larger cluster of tents at the camp’s centre. ‘Not if you’re in the White Crag block.’
‘I was just wandering, sir. They won’t accept me, you know.’
‘Who’s the worst of your lot, Rance, for making trouble with you?’
‘There’s one. Velkatal. She dropped six babies, then left them to run wild. Four were dead before coming of age, and the other two ended up in the mines and died in them. But to hear her tell it, she was the world’s best mother.’
‘Fine. Make her your Rebble.’
Rance snorted. ‘She’d be the first to mutiny under my command.’
‘Not after I inform her that whatever your fate, she will share it.’
‘So that is how you make squad leaders. And that’s why Rebble keeps you alive.’
‘It’s how we’re making squad leaders,’ Wareth agreed. ‘But as for Rebble, he started keeping me alive back in the pit. So, I don’t know his reasons, but there was no deal made that’s changed anything. At least, not that he’s told me.’
‘You never killed a woman, did you?’
‘No. Rance, there’re all kinds of cowards out there.’
She grunted again, her only response.
* * *
Fleeing the future seemed the most sordid of acts, and yet Faror Hend felt that she was making a habit of it. Two men haunted her wake, and the one pursuing her was, to her mind, the wrong man. At night, lying sleepless on her cot, with the tent walls slumping with the weight of the ice left by her breath, she could, upon closing her eyes, see a figure, tall and spectral, emerging from a vast, lifeless plain. He was walking towards her, hunting her down, and for all the monstrosity of the image, she knew that there was no evil in him. He was simply her fate, bound in promise, inescapable.
Yet in her dreams, when at last sleep found her, she saw Spinnock Durav, a cousin too close for propriety. She saw his youth, nearly a match to her own. She saw his smile, and basked in the wit of his sly words. He offered her an image, a possibility, that burned with mockery – the cruel, sneering kind. Though he stood close, she could not reach for him. Though she longed to take him, he was like a man armoured against her every charm. She would then wake, her soul heavy and cringing with the hopelessness of her desire. He had, after all, pushed her away, confessing instead his love for Finarra Stone, and the bitter irony of that revelation still tasted like ashes in Faror’s mouth.
With dawn streaking the east horizon, she would leave her tent, and set out in the direction of that growing light, drawn to its red slash, the fires of a new day’s birth. With each and every night a realm of ashes and despair, she fled into the light. An army encamped was a creature of routine, mechanical and obstinate in its witless, dull-brained way. It offered nothing new, no change in its surly, trudging mood.
Out past the pickets, facing on to a snow-smeared plain, she would stand, wrapped in her heavy cloak, and look for a figure, walking on foot, coming out of dawn’s blazing fire. New day, new life. Those who play at soldiers stir behind me, and before me, somewhere out there, a man striding out from a soldier’s end.
Mechanical things will break. Dirt and rust to bind the gears, millstones worn down, ratchets and brackets weakened by strain unto snapping. But some, no matter how carefully fitted the assembled parts, are destined to not work at all. And even then, look into the east, out on to this empty plain. There he walks, a broken cog, seeking a new routine. Husband. Wife.
I flee, but in truth, there is nowhere to run to. The future chases me, hunts me.
On this day, Commander Galar Baras had summoned her to join him in his staff meeting. She saw no reason for that. She was a Warden, not an officer of the Hust. More to the point, she needed to leave, to ride for her own company – back to Commander Calat Hustain, and Spinnock Durav.
Would Kagamandra be there as well? Hunched over some table, his vein-roped hand curled round a tankard, enwreathed in the smoke from the hearth, a grey figure with hooded eyes? Or was he in fact somewhere between here and the fort of the Wardens? And if so, which path would she take upon her return? Do I meet him? Or do I leave the tracks, journey at night and hide well during the day?
Such shame in these childish thoughts!
After some time, she turned about and made her way back into the Hust encampment. It was not the army she had expected to find. The machine might well rattle on, like the vast bellows of Henarald’s forge, all iron arms, wheels and cogs, but it was a sickly assemblage now.
The horror of Hunn Raal’s poisoning dwelt in Faror Hend’s mind like some vast fortress, isolated, rising from an island surrounded by forbidding seas. Every current pushed her away, and she was reluctant to fight that tide. Ambition was one thing. The desire for restitution held at its core a righteous cause. Sufficient for a civil war? She could not see that. But then, had not Hunn Raal sought to prevent such a war? With no legions to stand against Urusander’s, that civil war was as good as done.
Instead, the Hust Legion sought a rebirth. Walking into the camp, where men and women sat in clumps around morning cookfires, she could feel nothing of the surety that belonged to a military gathering. Instead, the atmosphere swirled with resentment, defiance, fear and dread.
These new soldiers were killing each other. Those that didn’t desert. They spoke of freedom as if it meant unfettered anarchy. It was a wonder to Faror that this camp had not already burst apart. She did not understand what held it together. Or, perhaps, I choose not to understand. How that, beyond all the resentment and fear, there can be heard a soft whisper, a voice filled with promises, yet strident with need.
The weapons of the Hust never shut up. Bound and wrapped tight, still they sing. Faint as a breath upon this chill wind.
If the prisoners fear, they also desire. And few, I wager, understand that this desire came not from them, but from the guarded wagons, from the stacks of blades and bundles of chain armour. From the greaves and vambraces, from the helms and their rustling camails. Voices whispering without end.
She fought against that terrible music. She did not belong here.
The command tent was directly ahead. Two Hust soldiers flanked the entrance. Muttering and something like soft laughter rained from them although they stood mute, faces impassive, and as Faror passed between them she foug
ht off a shiver.
Within, the quartermaster, Seltin Ryggandas, was crouched before a free-standing woodstove in the centre of the chamber, feeding it dung-chips. Captain Castegan – the last of the surviving officers of that rank, apart from Galar Baras himself – was standing near a portable table. He had been near retirement, a man whose weak bladder had saved his life the night of Hunn Raal’s visit, as he would not drink alcohol. It was clear, from his bent form and sunken expression, that he cursed his caution, although Faror suspected that Castegan’s deepest hatred belonged to all those in Kharkanas who had refused to let the Hust Legion follow its soldiers into extinction.
Galar Baras was sitting on a travel chest, half turned away from everyone else, and nothing in his demeanour invited conversation. To Faror’s eyes the man had aged beyond his years in the past few weeks.
Moments later, the officers drawn from the prisoners began arriving. The first man, Curl, had been a pit blacksmith, pocked by half a lifetime’s worth of burns from embers and spatters of molten metal. He was hairless, his skin black as Galar’s, with soft, blunt features that looked vaguely melted. Bland, empty eyes, pale as tin, slid across the others in the tent, hesitating only an instant upon Faror Hend.
Despite the brevity of that pause, Faror felt herself grow cold. Curl had killed his partner in the smithy in the small village where he lived and worked. He had then broken the man’s bones, battering the body through most of a night, until what he had left would fit easily into the forge’s brick-lined belly. For all the calculation in removing the evidence of his crime, he had not considered the black columns of smoke that poured from the chimney to settle heavy and rank upon the village, delivering the stench of burned clothing, hair, bones and flesh.
None knew what had motivated Curl to murder his partner, and he was not forthcoming on the matter.
Behind him came the one woman promoted thus far, from Slate Pit to the northwest. Aral was gaunt, her black hair streaked with grey, with a pinched, pale face and eyes that seemed capable of holding a world’s fill of malice and spite. She had, one fine evening, fed a dozen select guests her husband for supper. That her guests were one and all related to her husband made the deed all the sweeter, as far as she was concerned, and she would have happily included any or all of them as dessert. When Faror had heard the tale, from Rebble one night over a cask of ale, his telling had dragged her past horror into humour. But upon meeting Aral, all amusement vanished into the depthless darkness of her gaze.