And everywhere it was similar. People were playing out what were possibly the last moments of their lives as if they didn’t even matter. A woman darted past one of the mundane warrior Nightbringers under Antonius Malargos’s command. The warrior was smeared with blood, and he’d just sprinted across the fields to get to this chaos, death all around. His bloodlust was running high. She surprised him as she burst out of that tent. Did he slash?
Her life would be changed or ended in a decision that wasn’t made in his head but in his arm—or perhaps it was a decision that had been made in his heart in the months and weeks before this day. And he would be changed forever by this fraction of a second.
He would know himself to be the kind of man who murdered unarmed women, or the kind of man who hesitated where others did not.
He hesitated—and two souls were saved.
But everywhere it was the same. As if something in the human heart longs for chaos and finality, however violent.
The dregs of the Blood Robe army and its camp followers had been pushed into the river, and were still being pushed as Kip and his men approached.
The once-pristine water ran brown and red, churned mud and men returning to mud. The bank was so clogged with bodies you couldn’t see the ground for a hundred paces. Many men can’t swim, and almost none can when you strap half again their weight in armor to their bodies. Most of them had realized it when they reached the riverbank. But others panicking behind them had pushed, pushed relentlessly.
They’d shoved and stabbed and slashed and trampled each other.
And the Nightbringers had fallen on them pitilessly—desperate for vengeance on all these men who’d tried to kill them, who’d taken their homes and livestock and neighbors, who’d killed and pillaged and despoiled their hard and happy lives. Kip’s army fell on all these men, most of whom had thrown away their own weapons in order to run away faster, only to find no escape. All these men—but not men only.
The camp followers were huddled here, too: the crippled and sick and old and the traders and the merchants and the wives and lovers and their children and all who hope to live on the leavings an army produces.
It is impossible to spare the innocent and the partly innocent hidden at the back of the mob when you’re pushing the whole damned lot into the river, stabbing and trampling any who resist. Hard to spare them, even if you’re trying. Kip wasn’t sure most of his men were trying.
Some of the camp followers, not weighed down by armor or greedily hanging on to goods, would escape by swimming. But many had drowned already. It was only Kip’s arrival and a massive roar from Tallach that brought a relative quiet.
Finally Kip’s officers could make themselves be heard and obeyed. With a few moments to breathe and think, the survivors surrendered and Kip’s men left off their killing.
The survivors were seized and enslaved.
The Blood Robes and their followers looked no different from much of Kip’s army, and Kip’s men had a cast to their faces that said they’d be damned if any of these captives slunk away in the night and turned up at their fires later, claiming to have been on their side all along. So they notched their ears immediately, here, over the bodies of their comrades.
Smiths would later cauterize the flesh. Notches first.
The Nightbringers would leave the slaves here, give or sell them to the people of Dúnbheo. Otherwise, the captured would slow down Kip’s army, and serve it poorly. They would gladly become spies against their new masters.
But the Nightbringers wouldn’t be able to get rid of all of them. There were exceptions; there always were. One of Kip’s men would come forward. He had four children. His wife had been killed by the pagans. His extended family killed. He needed a new wife if he was to keep fighting, would take a slave if she hadn’t been roughed up too much.
There was no saying no to that, not without Kip’s alienating his own people. You could ask a man to die, but when he bared his heart to you, you couldn’t deny him what he and his fellows saw as justice.
As the dawn yields to day, one exception gave rise to others. One attempt at justice gave a hundred excuses for injustice. Other men need wives, too, sure, milord!
Forbidding the rape of captured women had taken a number of hangings to enforce—those hangings had raised eyebrows, too, letting Kip know he was treading a dangerous line. It had come down to explaining that they weren’t being hanged for raping slaves, but for disobeying a direct order. That made sense to the men in the nonsense that was war.
But a leader can get away with only so many nonsense orders before his men doubt his judgment, and that was poison.
And the unintended consequences piled up.
Having forbidden the rape of the slaves only made them more appealing as wives. One man somehow got permission to marry a slave wife four separate times. No one was sure what happened to the first three; Kip suspected murder but couldn’t prove it. Kip had the man gelded and relieved of his hands, then notched and sold.
Kip was revered. It made him uncomfortable. It was a fool’s gold. It wasn’t real. It was an image they projected onto him. But some images are more helpful than others. They still saw how young he was, some of them.
Kip couldn’t let himself be revered as some kind of holy child. Children could be fooled. Those who were too coarse to understand how love and obedience can be paired needed to learn fear.
So Kip had reinstituted the old tradition of the Year of Jubilee. It had been subverted before by the Ilytians and thence in the rest of the satrapies, but it was at least an established principle—it had a history—and the good or ill of it all came down to enforcement.
If one is to barter against human nature, one might as well make the best deal one can. The Year of Jubilee came every seven years, at which time slaves were freed.
They’d found a mention of which year it had last been celebrated and from there decreed that the tradition had lapsed rather than been broken. Thus, a slave-wife taken now would be freed five years hence on Sun Day. As a free woman on that day, she would be free to divorce her husband then. Any children she bore would be hers to take with her, and the husband would be liable to give her one-tenth of what he made in a year or a goat, whichever was more.
‘This is the best I can do?’ Kip had asked Tisis.
‘During a war, when passions are hot?’ she’d said. ‘This is better than I thought you’d get.’
His idealism had also meant his army got a fraction of what they might have for selling the slaves. Each slave’s contract now stipulated they would be in servitude for only five years. Every trader used that fact to bring the price down, though Kip knew that none of them intended to free the slaves in five years. He couldn’t free the slaves immediately lest they take up arms against him again; he couldn’t keep the slaves himself; but the slaves he sold would be slaves forever—unless Kip lived, and unless he won, and unless he was around in five years with enough power to enforce his will.
How did I become a slave trader?
And why was he so idealistic, when Jubilee had been tried and had failed before?
It wasn’t just that Kip had grown up in Rekton, where they had no slaves and the institution didn’t seem to fit naturally with all the people under Orholam’s being equal. It was more than that. Every slave woman he looked at reminded him of his mother: bereft, cast off, disgraced, despised, vulnerable to abuse and thereby somehow a lodestone to those who would abuse her. Her saw her in every enslaved woman’s face.
I couldn’t help you, mother. I couldn’t heal you. But maybe I can keep these women from being hurt as much as they would be.
Tallach snorted, and Kip realized they hadn’t seen Lorcan yet, though signs of his passage through the Blood Robe camp were evident in the destruction everywhere. Doubtless Conn Arthur wanted to see if his brother still lived.
Kip dismissed Tallach. He and Cruxer got down into the mud and blood to do more work. There was always more.
“Ferkudi,
” Kip said, seeing a child weeping amid the bodies. Tisis had not yet arrived with the healers. “Use your brain for me, would—Dear Orholam! What happened to you?!”
“What?” Ferkudi asked as Kip and the rest of the Mighty turned to him. Blood was streaming down the back of his head. He touched his neck and brought back the fingers wet and red. “Oh, I thought I was just real sweaty.”
He patted the top of his head with no apparent alarm, then tipped it toward Kip.
“Bullet graze me?” he asked.
There was a new furrow across almost the entire top of his head, crossing the other scar, drawing a line almost from ear to ear.
“Sweet Orholam, man, how flat is the top of your head?” Big Leo asked.
“Flatter now,” Winsen said.
“Thanks for telling me,” Ferkudi complained. “Now it’s starting to sting. It didn’t sting before you told me.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have stuck your dirty fingers in it,” Ben-hadad said. “Don’t you know anything?”
“What’re the odds it knocked any sense into him?” Winsen asked.
“Ben, you take him in a moment and get him some help, but first, Ferk, I got a job for you,” Kip said.
“Sure, sure, ouch,” Ferkudi said, still poking at his scalp.
“How much would it cost one widow to house and feed… eh, ten orphans?”
“Ages?” Ferkudi said. “Teenaged boys eat more and what not.”
“Come up with an average. With housing included.”
“More than ten children per house would make it cheaper per child,” Ferkudi said.
“Efficiency isn’t the point,” Kip said.
“Well, then, wouldn’t one or two children per widow be better?”
“Fine, efficiency is part of the point.” Kip stopped speaking as he saw the gate opening to the city. “What is that? Anyway, figure it out, Ferk. And talk to Verity and tell her we’re feeding these kids tonight and until I say otherwise. She’ll complain. But they’re kids. Now what’s this at the gate? I need you Ghosts for another five minutes before you extricate. And someone go find my sword and Cruxer’s spear. We had to throw them down to mum the panic back there.”
“Love that spear,” Cruxer said.
It was best to get the will-casters out of the night mares as quickly as possible, but there were armed men facing off at the gate.
Kip jogged over there. It wasn’t the most majestic entrance he’d ever made: one unarmed man on foot surrounded by drafters mounted on great elk and weird horses.
But the city’s forces weren’t terribly impressive, either. The conn was mounted on an emaciated stallion that looked exhausted just holding him on its back. No one else was mounted, but they did have weapons, and there were several hundred of them from what Kip could see.
Kip’s men, despite not having any orders, hadn’t let the conn or his people through.
Bless ’em for having sense and feeling empowered to make tough calls.
At the sight of the night mares and the Mighty, Kip’s men moved back.
Kip went to stand before the columns. “Conn Ruarc Hill, is it?” he asked.
“So I am. And you are?”
“Really?” Kip asked.
The man licked his lips. He looked well fed, though he had bags under his eyes. His men looked starved.
Kip didn’t judge him for that, though. A starving leader could make bad decisions, so when numbers were large, it was a pretentious suffering to starve alongside your men. He did judge him, however, for being an asshole to men whose weapons were still bloody and bloodlust high—men who were here to rescue him, no less.
“Glad you came to greet us, but you didn’t need to bring all these men,” Kip said. His own men had been smart enough to stop the column before it got out of the gates. If Conn Hill was going to attack, he was going to have a bad time of it.
“We came to help clear the heathen Blood Robes from the field of battle and hunt down those who’ve fled.”
“You have no cavalry,” Kip said. “The Blood Robes are well fed and have a good lead on your men. Hard to hunt those who are faster than you.”
“Perhaps, then, we could help with those tasks that are nearer the walls,” Conn Hill said.
“Ah, you mean the claiming of slaves and plundering the camp,” Kip said. “The meager rewards for the blood my men have spilled while you sat safe behind your walls.”
The man went red. Desperate, then, perhaps not entirely an asshole.
The conn said, “We have a claim to the takings here. We have suffered. You fought them for one morning. We’ve fought—”
“Go back into your city, Conn Hill, and—”
“This is outrageous! I am conn of the most revered city in Blood Forest, and you are what? A bastard son with a few soldiers? I demand—”
Nope, not just desperate. Also an asshole.
“Conn Hill! Let me remind you…” Kip interrupted.
The Mighty’s rage had been fading like the last thrumming notes of a lute’s battle song. But impudence and insolence and insult to their Kip threatened a reprise of their favorite bloody verse.
Kip walked close to the man and lowered his voice so none could overhear it. The man himself had to bend over in his saddle to the unmounted, vulnerable Kip. Kip sometimes liked subverting power dynamics. “Let me remind you, there’s more than one way to liberate a city.”
Then Kip turned his back on him. He didn’t look back, but he was no fool. He looked at Cruxer’s eyes. They would signal of an impending strike.
None came.
Kip turned and mounted one of the great elk gingerly.
“Go back into your city!” Kip shouted. “Go talk it over with your elders or just take a good long drink of water, and come back here and try again. Think about flies and vinegar versus honey. Oh, and one thing, Conn Hill. My army is many things: bold, unconventional, fierce, fleet, frightening… oh, and not least, victorious.”
The Nightbringers within hearing roared at that.
“But one thing we are not, and this is very, very important: we are not heathens.”
Conn Hill snarled and sawed on his reins savagely, nearly making his horse trample his nearby men. The rest of his threadbare army withdrew behind the walls with him.
“What was that last little bit?” Cruxer asked. “Not heathens?”
Kip said, “Dúnbheo is actually where the Chromeria got the idea of voting in a promachos in times of crisis, except they call him a conn, a chief. Ordinarily the city rules itself through a Council of Divines—a title they take seriously—and they only appoint a conn for limited tasks. Conn Hill was appointed until ‘the heathens were banished from before our walls.’”
“So you just stripped him of office.”
“Oh, only the Council of Divines can do that,” Kip said with a grin.
“But you made it irresistible for them to do so.”
“He was a dick.”
“There’s more than a little Andross Guile in you, isn’t there? You’re changing, Breaker,” Cruxer said.
“And not only in good ways,” Kip said.
“The old Breaker never would have made an enemy for no reason.”
“Not for no reason,” Kip said. “Sometimes the quickest way to make friends is to make the right enemies.”
“You’re not telling me this was all part of some grand plan?” Cruxer said.
“Not grand. Not even really a plan. I just saw an opportunity. And he was being a flesh protuberance.”
“That’s my old Breaker,” Cruxer said with a smile.
“This’ll be a few hours,” Kip said. “Have the men keep a watch. Ghosts, you can dis-integrate. Mighty, with me, I’m afraid there’s a bear we need to help bury.”
Chapter 67
‘Iron White’? What a load of shit. She ought to cross that one off her list right now. Karris didn’t even dare lift her teacup, lest Teia see her trembling. The debriefing about the assassinations and Ironfist’s
fury had left her more fragile than her own porcelain. Ironfist!
Ironfist, either dead now or made an enemy. Either was unspeakably terrible. Ironfist’s brother Tremblefist had, before all his training with the Blackguard, once killed five hundred men in a night and earned the moniker the Butcher of Aghbalu. Ironfist had bested that man in single combat. Him, as an enemy?
Yet how could Karris hope instead that one of her best friends had been killed in the tumult she’d triggered in Paria?
For Teia’s part, the young woman sat with her legs crossed like a lady, back straight, daintily holding her cup without a hint of nerves. Before, Karris swore she’d always sat like a man, legs planted wide, ready to launch into action. Now she’d figured out that presenting oneself as a lady is simply another game, and she was playing it as a mock.
A mockery of Karris herself? Or was it the more innocent mockery of the fine furniture and fine porcelain and, yes, even fine tea?
But the young woman’s eyes were terrible. Teia was changing before Karris, a shaking chrysalid, and Karris guessed that both of them feared what was going to emerge from that black cocoon.
“You can be mad at me for fucking up,” Teia said. “I did. But don’t you dare—don’t you dare—flinch after what you had me do.”
Something about her combative tone actually settled Karris. She knew how to deal with fraught situations, with screaming men, angry women. The mask slammed back in place. “Sugar?” she asked, lifting tiny tongs from the tray. “The Ilytians use superviolet lattices to craft a single large crystal into fanciful shapes for the decadently wealthy. This kind is called a halo.”
“Thank you,” Teia said, confused, offering her cup.
“I think it looks like a puckered arse.”
From ladylike and pretentious to vulgar. It was a verbal hip throw. Teia seemed to have no idea what to do with that.
“Which is how I feel every day, Teia. I’m making big gambles all the time. Not because I’m reckless. I’m not. But because we’re weaker than anyone knows. You loused up? Fine. Maybe so did I.”