David Drake: The Heretic

“Let’s pay them a visit.”

“Yes, sir!” Maday replied with a wicked smile.

There were what looked like women’s robes arrayed on some wooden rails around the courtyard entrance of the building, but Abel saw that the robes had bodies in them, the slumped forms of dead women. The robes were bloody. In the courtyard, three men sat around a table. There were several pitchers of wine, several tipped on edge and empty, on the table. The men sat in slumped and woozy positions and did not rise when Abel and the Scouts rode up. Abel dismounted, unhitched his rifle, and-with Kruso and Maday along-approached the men.

At several paces away, he could smell them, or rather the vinegar pungency of wine, and lots of it. There were two darker complexioned men who looked to be in their late teens or twenties. The other man Abel recognized.

It was Edgar Jacobson.

“Thank Zentrum it’s you, even if you are Scouts,” said Jacobson. “We thought it was them, coming back for more.”

He doesn’t recognize me, Abel thought. Not yet, at least.

Abel felt his hand move, of its own accord, down to the hilt of the obsidian dagger he wore thrust under his scabbard belt. His fingers worried at the smooth stone.

“Them?” said Abel.

“The Redlanders.” He took a long sip from his cup.

“What happened here?”

“They rode in-”

“From which direction?”

Jacobson motioned airily about his head. “Out there,” he said. “And Eloise was ready to arm up and fight, but I said, ‘Let me talk to them.’ So I went out to meet them. Probably saved my own life. The leader, this big oaf, with a beard black as the night, looks down at me from that dont of his and says something to me in that gibberish they speak. Of course I didn’t understand him and said as much. And what does he do but club me. I mean beat the hell out of me with his rifle butt, and then I fell down and they rode donts over me. Donts. I thought I was dead for sure, but I only got kicked and nipped. And I got up, and-”

“Ran?”

“There wasn’t anywhere to run, so I came back to the house here and hid in those shrubs over there.” He pointed toward the thorny plants that surrounded the courtyard. “Eloise came out at him with that silly blunderbuss of hers, and even got a shot off that winged one of the desert scum, but that only made him mad. He got off the dont, went over to her, knocked that pistol out of her hands, and put a knife to her throat. Then he pushed her inside and I didn’t see any more.”

Jacobson shuddered, then took up his cup and drained the rest of the wine. He reached for a pitcher to refill it, found the pitcher empty, reached for another. Nothing there, either.

“Thrice-damn it,” he muttered, and stared into the empty cup as if he expected it to fill up on its own accord merely because he wanted it to.

It is not a difficult reconstruction based on available evidence,said Center.

Observe:

Rostov.

Rostov followed by a retinue of Blaskoye. Rostov dragging an older woman, a woman with elaborately plaited brown hair and a liberal coating of kohl and makeup. She was lovely, still had a fine figure, and had obviously been exquisitely beautiful in her prime.

She wore a low-cut linen wrap colored a deep blue-green. The fact that her neck and cleavage showed seemed to enrage and disgust Rostov.

He burst into a room filled with at least twenty men, and about half that number of women, who were in the midst of serving or chatting up the men. Rostov’s men quickly invaded the room, flowing from behind him, and hustling everyone against an adobe side wall. Meanwhile two more disappeared down a hallway of the establishment and returned pushing more women, and several half-dressed men, into the main room, where they too were herded against the wall.

Rostov threw Eloise into the trapped crowd. He then considered them all for a moment, and began to speak. His language was incomprehensible to them, and this showed on their frightened and bewildered faces, but Abel could understand what the Blaskoye said well enough.

“You offend the gods. You are not worthy to be my enemy.” He pointed to a bead-covered window. “My enemy is out there. He will die, but he will go to the Gray Fields when he does. You-you men are fit only for the Dust, where all memory is lost, because there was nothing in your life worth remembering.”

Suddenly, one of the men, a youngster dressed in a considerably gaudy outfit consisting of three colors, red, blue, and white, of intertwined wrapping robe, not to mention sandals with straps up to his knees, which were exposed, stepped forward with a handful of clay tablets.

Barter chits, Abel thought. And a lot of them.

“We can pay,” said the young man. “We all will pay you if you’ll leave us alone. This is worth a lot. Negotiable anywhere in the Land.”

With a swift motion, Rostov knocked the chits from the man’s hands. They clattered to the floor, which was wooden plank, and not earthen, and two of them shattered.

“What?” said the youth, stunned, bending to pick them up, “Something else then? Where they are? I know.”

Rostov spoke to the youth, this time in accented, but intelligible Landish. “Yes, this,” he hissed. “Vehr are they, the vahrriors, the fighters?”

The young man was still sweeping the shattered chit pieces together, trying to pick them up. “Depends on who you mean,” he said. “Militia, Scouts, Regulars-”

Rostov stepped over the young man’s back, straddled him, then put his fingers into the man’s hair, pulled back his head. Quickly, he had the silver knife at the man’s throat.

“Scouts,” Rostov said. “Dashian.”

“I don’t know,” gasped the young man. “I only heard. Something. Rumor.”

Rostov pulled harder. “Where?”

“The levee,” said the youth. “The Canal levee.”

Rostov smiled. Then, with a practiced motion, he cut the man’s throat.

For a moment, he held the young man that way, facing the prisoners, showing the opened throat to them. It looked like an open, gurgling mouth, but lipless. Blood welled out, ran down into the festive robes. Rostov let the man drop, dead, to the floor.

“Separate the men,” he said to one of his lieutenants. “Kill them. We have no time to cut off their balls first.”

“And the whores?”

“Cut them,” he said. He pointed to Eloise, who shied away, in terror tried to claw at the wall to get away. One of Rostov’s men grabbed her and pulled her to him and held her there. Rostov reached out and held her chin, taking in her face. He raised the knife. “Make it quick. Cut them here-”

He pulled a wicked slice across her face from left temple to lower right jaw, passing over the brow ridge between the eyes.

“-and here.” Another cut, this one across Eloise’s forehead.

The slave cut, Abel thought.

Blood welled, drizzled into her eyes. Eloise tried to raise a hand to wipe it, but was held fast. It flowed into her mouth through her twice-split lip and produced a distinctive gurgle when she screamed. Rostov backhanded her, hard, and she collapsed, unconscious. “If they resist, kill them.”

The Redlanders went about their task, leaving the men alive so that they could watch what was being done to the women. Three of the twenty or so whores resisted and were stabbed to death. Rostov ordered their bodies taken outside and lashed to the railings.

“I wish the Red God in particular to see what we have done in his name,” he said. “He has no eyes inside these Farmer caves.”

Then, with all the women’s faces cut, and the women herded into a backroom, Rostov nodded. “We cannot waste powder and ball on this lot,” he said. “Bayonet them.”