Steven Erikson - Forge of Darkness

The girl swung round the horse’s neck to land in front of the beast, and then advanced on Risp. ‘Don’t? Don’t what? I’m a Bordersword. You attacked us. What is it you don’t want me to do?’

‘I was following orders,’ Risp pleaded, pushing with her boots as if she could somehow back through the wall behind her.

‘Draconus just kicked the wrong nest,’ said the girl.

Risp shook her head. ‘It’s not — we’re not what you think! Spare me and I will go with you to your commander. I’ll explain everything.’

‘Commander? You understand nothing about us. Today, right now, right here in this alley, I’m in command.’

‘Please!’

The girl stepped forward. She was pathetically scrawny, more boy than girl, and in her eyes there was nothing Risp recognized.

‘I’ll explain-’

The knife went into the side of her neck like a sliver of fire. Choking, she felt the blade turn, and then the girl sliced through her windpipe, and all at once Risp felt the back of her helmet slam into the stone wall as tendons were cut. Hot blood filled her lungs and she began to drown.

The girl stared down at her for a moment, and then moved off.

Risp tried turning her head, to follow her killer’s flight, but instead felt her head sink back down. She looked down to see the stump at the end of her right wrist. The blood had stopped spilling out. Soldiers survived worse. She could learn to fight with her left hand. Wasn’t easy, but she was young — and when you’re young, these things are possible. So many things are possible.

I doubt she was sixteen. If she was sixteen she’d have been off with the hunters. Fifteen.

The need to breathe was a distant shout in her mind now, and she found it easy to ignore. Until black smoke rolled in, obscuring everything, and then it was time to go away.

‘We think she fell down the stairs,’ said the soldier.

Captain Silann studied the corpse of the woman lying at the foot of the tower steps. ‘This is Krissen,’ he said. ‘A scholar of highest repute.’

The soldier shrugged, sheathing his sword. ‘Life’s full of accidents,’ he said, moving off.

Silann felt sick inside. ‘Highest repute,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘What was she doing here?’ After a long moment he settled to his knees beside the body. Her head was tilted at an impossible angle; her eyes were half open, her mouth parted with the tip of the tongue protruding. Her hands were filthy with coal dust or the powder that sometimes came from old ink.

The soldier he had been speaking to earlier now returned. ‘None left alive in here, sir. Place was damned near abandoned as it was. It’s time to fire the keep.’

‘Of course.’ But still Silann studied the woman’s face.

‘Do you want we should take the body, sir? For proper burial, I mean.’

‘No, the pyre of this keep will suffice. Was there anything at the top of the tower?’

‘No sir, nothing. We need to go — got another village to hit.’

‘I know,’ Silann snapped. He straightened and then followed the soldier back outside.

On the keep road, just outside the gate, his wife had arrived with her vanguard. Her thighs were red with splashed blood, and Silann well knew the look on her face. Tonight there would be fierce lovemaking, the kind that skirted the edge of pain. It was, she had once explained, the taste of savagery that lingered from a day of killing.

‘Lieutenant Risp is dead,’ Esthala announced.

‘How unfortunate,’ Silann replied. ‘Do we have wounded?’

‘Few. Lost seven in all. There was at least one Bordersword in the village, a woman, we think, but we’ve not found her.’

‘Well, that’s good, then,’ he said. As her expression darkened he added, ‘A witness, I mean. That’s what we wanted, isn’t it?’

‘Depends on what she figured out, husband,’ Esthala replied, in that weary tone that he was all too familiar with: as if she were speaking to a dim-witted child. ‘Better some terrified midwife or pot-thrower.’ She turned in her saddle to survey the village below. Houses were burning in a half-dozen places. ‘We need to burn it all down. Every building. We’ll leave out a few of our losses, but with their faces disfigured. Nobody they might recognize.’ She looked across to Silann. ‘I leave all that to you and your company. Join us at Hillfoot.’

Silann assumed that was the name for the next village, and so he nodded. ‘We will do what’s needed.’

‘Of course you will,’ Esthala replied, taking up the reins.

She had refused to see her husband executed and Silann knew that among the soldiers that had been seen as weakness. But he alone was aware of how close she had been to changing her mind, and that still left him rattled. Lieutenant Risp’s death delighted him, since she had been the source of all this talk about executions and crimes; and it had been her troop that had brought back the carved-up head of one of Hunn Raal’s messengers. Silann still cursed the name of Gripp Galas, although it was a curse riding a wave of fear.

He watched his wife gesture and then she was riding down the road with her troop.

Glancing back, he saw smoke coming from the keep’s slit windows, and drifting out from the open front doorway. It was not as easy to burn such edifices as one might think, he knew, since they were mostly stone. He turned to the soldier at his side. ‘I trust you are confident that it will burn down.’

The man nodded, and then shrugged. ‘Nobody will want to live in it, sir.’

‘Let’s head down to the village, then, and be on with it.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘I want to look upon the lieutenant’s body.’

‘Sir?’

‘To pay my respects.’

Captain Hallyd Bahann, Tutor Sagander decided, was an unpleasant man. Handsome, with grey in his short-cropped hair, he had about him an arrogance that, for some odd reason, women liked. No doubt he could charm, but even then his commentary was sly and verged on cutting. It baffled Sagander that Captain Tathe Lorat shared the man’s tent. She possessed a beauty that left the tutor breathless, and looking upon her — the laughter in her eyes and the ever ready smile on her full, painted lips — it seemed impossible that she would delight in killing and, even more appalling, that she would keep in her company a daughter sired by her first, now dead, husband, and that then she would do… this.

They sat in the command tent, the two captains and Sagander, and Hallyd Bahann’s dark eyes glittered with something like barely contained mirth. At his side, Tathe Lorat was refilling her goblet with yet more wine, and the flush of her cheeks held its own glow in the faint lanternlight.

‘I see,’ she said in a slurred drawl, ‘that you are struck speechless, tutor, which must, I am sure, be a rare occurrence. Do you wonder at my generosity? Good sir, even now, behind you on the tent wall, we can make out the flames from the monastery. True, the monks fought with uncommon vigour and we took disturbing losses despite your betrayal, but this nest of Deniers is now destroyed, and for that we are pleased to reward you.’

‘It may be,’ Hallyd said, half smiling, ‘that the tutor prefers boys.’

Tathe’s perfect brows lifted. ‘Is this so, tutor? Then I am sure we can find-’

‘No, captain, it is not,’ Sagander replied, looking down. He sat on a camp stool, and with but one leg to anchor himself he felt poorly perched upon the leather saddle of the seat. The imbalance he felt in his body was like an infection, spreading out to skew the entire world. ‘Did none of them surrender?’

Hallyd snorted. ‘Why should the fate of the Deniers concern you now? You showed us the old tunnel to the second well. By your invitation, we visited slaughter upon the occupants of that monastery. However, I will assure you none the less. Not one knelt except to more closely observe the ground awaiting their final fall.’