Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

“Cut me loose, son. Do it quick.”

It was the gaunt man, arms out-thrust. Gerin hesitated an instant, then fastened the bolt cutters on the man’s manacles. He heaved and twisted, forearms aching from the effort. For one sickening moment, he thought the cutters would not work. Then the manacle bent, and split, and tore.

“That’s it, that’s it,” the gaunt man almost crooning. “Guild-level iron, my arse. Look at that shit. Fucking skimp-shift Etterkal smiths.”

The second manacle went almost as easily, and then the gaunt man had snatched the bolt cutters from Gerin’s sweat-slick grip. He hefted them like a weapon. Gerin felt his mouth dry up.

“Come on,” the man snapped. “Hold ’em out.”

It was like his father speaking—Gerin obeyed in a daze. The gaunt man set the bolt cutters to his manacles, snapped each one open in turn with a powerful doubled crimping action. He did Gerin’s feet almost as fast, then his own. He tore off the broken cuffs, straightened up and laughed—a sudden, fierce burst of joy that had something animal about it. He clapped Gerin on the shoulder, almost flooring him again with the force of the blow.

“Fucking amazing, son. Never seen anything like that.”

Elsewhere, other men had laid hands on the other two march-masters’ bolt cutters and were now about the squabbling uncertain task of trying to free themselves or one another in the dark. The scar-faced Rajal veteran rose up, like something summoned, from the corpse of the man he’d killed. He tugged his chains loose from the red-raw gape of the march-master’s burst throat and offered them up. Gerin felt a shudder run up his spine at the sight. The veteran shook the chain impatiently.

“You two going to stand there congratulating each other all fucking night?” he growled, and nodded out across the gathered slave caravan to where the commotion was now general. “We’ve got a couple of minutes tops before someone with a sword gets here. Come on. ”

Gerin followed the gesture, saw the truth of it. Dark figures waded about through the disarrayed coffles, trying to trace the source of the uproar. Most held up torches or brands pulled hurriedly from the campfires. Dim glint of blades unsheathed in their free hands.

The gaunt man set the cutters to the veteran’s manacles, broke them apart with no more effort than he’d needed before. The veteran jerked his hands impatiently free of the ruined metal, then bent and pulled each foot free of its snapped ankle cuff in turn.

Behind them, a shout split the night.

“There! Monkgrave’s coffle!”

“They’re… Get them! They’re loose! Fucking get in there and…”

Still bent over his ankle cuffs, the veteran twisted his head toward the voices. Gerin saw him grimace and nod to himself. Then he got carefully back to his feet, curled a hand around each freed wrist in turn and breathed in deeply, grunted as if surprised by something.

“You’d better get out of here,” he told the gaunt man.

“I, you, but…”

The veteran took the bolt cutters gently from him. “Go on. Take the kid, get up into that tree line quick, while you still can.”

“And you?”

The veteran gestured at the confusion around them, the other men struggling to free themselves in the dark. “Friend, if someone doesn’t buy us some more time, this is all going to be over quicker than a priest’s fuck.”

“Then I’ll stay, too.”

“You fight in the war?” the veteran asked, as gently as he’d taken the cutters.

The gaunt man hesitated. Lowered his head, shook it slowly.

“Reserved trades,” he said. “I was… I’m a blacksmith.”

The veteran nodded. “Thought it had to be something like that. Way you cut that iron. Look, there’s no shame in it. Can’t all be swinging the steel, you know, someone’s got to actually make the fucking stuff. But you got to know your specialty.”

He swung the cutters absently, feeling the weight in them. It made a sound through the air like a scythe. The blacksmith stared at him, and the veteran’s scarred features creased in something vaguely resembling a smile. He gestured with his newly acquired weapon, up to where the trees thickened toward forest.

“Go on, get moving, both of you. Head for the trees.” The smile became an awful grin. “Be right behind you.”

They turned from the lie, the impossible promise in his ruined face, and fled.

The scarred man watched them go. Yelled curses and stumbling behind him as the first of the sword-wielding march-masters kicked their way through to the scene of the revolt. His grin faded slowly out. Amid the chaos of men scrambling to be free, tugging at their chains, and screaming for cutters, he turned to face the newcomers. Two men, both wielding swords, one with a torch upraised. The veteran felt a muscle twitch, deep under the scar tissue in his face.

“You!” The first march-master saw him, lifted his torch, and peered. He pointed with his sword. “Get down on your fucking knees. Do it now.”

The veteran closed the gap with three swift paces, ignored the sword, got inside its useful reach before the march-master could grasp what was happening. He loomed over the man.

“We left them behind,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.

Moth-wing blur of motion—the bolt cutters, slashing in at head height.

The march-master staggered sideways, face torn open from the blow, one eye gone, socket caved in. The torch flew away in a splatter of sparks. The march-master made a broken howling sound, dropped his sword, and sagged to his knees. The veteran was already turning on his companion. The second man got the reverse swing of the cutters across his face as well. He fell back in fright, blood oozing from the gouges, sword clutched upright like some kind of magical ward against demons. In the fitful glow from the dropped torch, the veteran came on, snarling.

“Orders,” he said to the uncomprehending march-master, and hacked him in the head with the cutters, once, twice, until he went down. “They made us leave them.”

For a moment, he stood like a statue between his two felled adversaries. He looked around in the fitful torchlight as if just waking up.

The second of the armed march-masters was on his back, head twisted to one side, skull a ruined cup. The first was propped on his knees and one trembling arm, trying to hold his shattered face together with the other hand. Weeping, gibbering. The veteran spotted the man’s fallen sword, grunted, and let the bolt cutters fall. He took up the sword, hefted it a couple of times, then settled into a two-handed grip, whipped around and heaved it down on the injured march-master’s neck. Passable executioner’s stroke—the blade sliced spine and most of the neck, dropped the man flat to the ground. The veteran flexed, cleared the blade with drilled precision, looked down for a moment at the damage he’d done.

“We heard them screaming after us for fucking miles,” he told the man’s corpse.

More cries, the rush of something through the night air, a savage, incoherent yell. The veteran pitched about, saw the next march-master in mid-heave behind the downward slice of a morning-star mace and chain. The veteran seemed to just drift out of the way of the flail blow as if in a trance, let it come down and snag in the grassy ground. He stepped in close, like a newlywed to his bride, and swung the sword at belly height as the march-master struggled to get the morning star’s spikes back out of the ground.

“Some of them cursed us,” he grunted on the stroke.

The march-master screamed as the steel bit through leather jerkin and into the unprotected flesh beneath. The veteran hauled and sliced through, cleared the blade out under the man’s ribs at the back.