Robert Asprin - Wartorn Obliteration

Despite the furor and carnage, Bryck and Quentis had little trouble staying out of the chaos after that first night. They had hunkered there inside that shut up shop, listening to the violence outside, holding tightly to each other. Time became fluid, imprecise, and that ambiguity was its own special sort of fright.

But the time did pass, and the battle did drift away, and the Felk didn't trample their way into the shop. Bryck and Quentis stayed there until morning, until the primitive comforts of light and warmth returned. When they emerged, they saw the bodies, smelled the blood. Radstac and Deo weren't among the corpses. Bryck found himself thinking suddenly and very vividly of Setix, the man who had changed his mind about joining the Broken Circle and who Bryck had ordered killed. He couldn't regret the necessity of that act, but it was one more death, and there was so much death.

He wiped his eyes. Revenge against the Felk. For so long it had been the only motive urging his life forward, allowing him to go on living, rather than choosing to join Aaysue and his children. It was a good motive. The Felk deserved their destruction. But a better reason for living was perhaps the desire to live for something, for someone.

He and Quentis went to ground. And stayed there.

Later they learned of the rebel actions against the Felk, of the standoff at the Registry. Someone emerged from the mobs surrounding the building, someone of calm and reason and extreme pragmatism, and a negotiation between the two parties followed. What resulted was Jesile's agreement to submit himself to a beheading, with the understanding that the remaining soldiers would lay down their arms and be treated to thorough floggings, after which they would be set free.

Jesile, the erstwhile Felk governor of Callah, was by all accounts quietly heroic about his fate. The crowds that gathered to see him dispatched didn't cheer, either before or after the deed.

When later on the bloody-backed soldiers were turned loose, the people of Callah found themselves faced with the business of ruling their own city once more. It was, to the surprise of many, a daunting challenge.

It was at this time that Bryck and Quentis at last emerged from hiding. They walked the streets of the stunned city. People were trying to resume their normal lives, but for the lunes since war had come, the concept of normalcy had shifted radically. Callah was still an isolated city. They had no news of the war. They had learned from the former garrison soldiers that the wizards in residence at the Registry had indeed all died suddenly and inexplicably.

These Callahans were of course the dregs left behind after the Felk conscription efforts, the very young and the oldish. It now fell to them to reestablish a local government. Foodstuffs still had to be transported in from the city-state's surrounding farmland. A police force needed to be recruited. The Callahan economy had to be stabilized, and the Felk-issued scrip eliminated.

Bryck didn't involve himself in any of these matters. He accompanied Quentis back to her home, where she'd lived with her cousin Ondak before joining the Broken Circle. The house had been broken into and ransacked, but it hadn't been burned, as some parts of Callah had. Ondak wasn't there. She and Bryck settled in together, cleaning the place up, and waited and watched as the city reclaimed itself.

Bryck had noted the Broken Circle's sigil freshly drawn and slashed on many surfaces throughout the city. He heard also songs being sung, those revolutionary verses that Deo and Radstac had been spreading in the taverns.

There were lean times in the days that followed. Irregular supplies of food meant hunger, and that led to panic in some, violence in others. The new self-regulating Callahan government had to deal with these problems. Bryck and Quentis merely survived, concerning themselves with their small personal needs.

They eventually met up with Aquint, who, it turned out, had been the one to negotiate the garrison's surrender at the Registry. Cat was with him, naturally, and the two were busily involved in some enterprise that neither would speak of directly.

"Have you seen Ondak?" Quentis asked.

"No," Aquint said. "But I know where Radstac is."

"Nievze was able to cast his spell, evidently," Bryck said.

Aquint nodded. "We found a safe place that night. I watched him. It was... fascinating. It drained him almost to death. I wonder if its effect was as widespread as he claimed."

"I have to believe it was. I think we all have to believe that."

They didn't talk any further about the Broken Circle. Aquint planned to remain in Callah. If Bryck and Quentis intended to do the same, they would all have to meet for a drink some evening, Aquint said. Then they parted.

Bryck and Quentis sought out Radstac at the room she'd taken. Her left leg was bandaged, but if the wound was causing her pain, she didn't show it.

"Deo's dead," she said in that hard flat voice of hers. She seemed indifferent to Bryck and Quentis's company. "He fought with enthusiasm, and he died with his eyes open. I'll be going south in a few days. When I reach Petgrad, I'll tell his family about him."

"Then what will you do?" Bryck asked.

Radstac regarded him with eyes that were almost colorless. "Keep going south. I'm going home. I'm done with your Isthmus." Something moved underneath that accented voice, something hinting at a sorrow that might or might not have been profound. They left her there in that room.

Eventually word of the outside did reach Callah, in that way before Far Speak that news had always traveled. There was unfettered movement on Isthmus roads once again, as there hadn't been in some while. Travelers and traders and returning soldiers brought the word. The Felk war was done. The Felk themselves were done, as would-be conquerors. Their wizards were all dead, and their army had met with a mixed force of southern Isthmus militaries that had smashed the Felk at what was being called the Battle of Pegwithe Plains.

The one responsible for uniting those various armies against the Felk, the premier of Petgrad, had died in the fighting, it was said, as had the general of the Felk army. There was no reliable word of what had happened to the Felk ruler, Matokin, but he was evidently no longer in power in that northern city.

This news reached Bryck and Quentis in the same manner it did everyone else in Callah, and along with everyone else they celebrated the war's end.

Bryck found himself quite comfortable with Quentis and their living arrangements. They were lovers and, more, had settled into an easy daily rhythm with one another. It was emotional as well as physical. They had learned each other's basic predilections and day by day worked out the more niggling details of their relationship. It occurred to Bryck after Callah's major crises had been alleviated by its new government that he had no intention of leaving the city. Certainly there was no U'delph to go back to; but more than that he had a fondness for Callah now that he hadn't had before. These people had risen up against their oppressors. They had proven their character.

He went unrecognized as the leader of the Broken Circle, of course. Very few had ever seen his face, and the few original members of that group who he encountered did not give him away. People spoke of the Broken Circle often, but already these were becoming fanciful stories and romantic exaggerations, precursors of folklore.

It was generally assumed, even by the least devout, that the gods had had a hand in the war's ending. The deaths of all those wizards was surely proof of that. More, it was proof that those gods had not been on the side of the Felk.

"I'd like to ask you something," Quentis said one day. They were at home. Her old vendor cart had been lost, but she'd had a new one built. She and Bryck took turns pushing it through the streets, peddling an assortment of small wares. Callah's population had been reinvigorated by the return of the surviving native men and women who'd been conscripted into the Felk army.