David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Ceto didn’t look around, but the peg-legged older fellow he was showing the sapphire ring to did. He carried too much of his weight around his waistline, but he still had the shoulders of a powerful man. The two knives thrust under his orange-silk sash had simple, serviceable blades…but they’d been forged from steel, not iron, and their bone scales were yellowed by frequent use.

Garric would have recognized the leader, Vascay, even without Gar’s memory. The other men were mostly bigger, younger, and more heavily armed, but this fellow was in charge.

Garric noticed the glance; he nodded in response. Vascay made no overt reaction, not even a raised eyebrow, but his face tightened minusculely above his grizzled, short-cropped beard.

The brain-damaged Gar wouldn’t have met another man’s eyes. Garric shrugged mentally. Well, the whole band would learn shortly that things had changed.

“You’ve got my ring there, Ceto,” Garric said in a clear voice. “I’ll take it back now, if you please.”

Ceto turned in amazement which changed swiftly to anger. He folded his right hand over the ring, protecting it at the cost of preventing him from drawing his sword. He reached for a dagger in his bandolier. Garric’s left hand caught the bandit’s wrist.

“Hey, what’s got into Gar?” cried the fat cook. The horn was bringing more men out of the forest. They were calling too, curious about why they’d been summoned.

Ceto tried—vainly—to free his knife hand. He snarled, “Sister take you, you—”

Garric punched him in the pit of the stomach, between the flapping halves of his armored vest. Ceto’s face went white; his legs wobbled, and he sank to his knees.

Garric was breathing hard. His whole body shuddered with awareness of what he’d done and the dangers in what might come next. Ceto had tensed his belly muscles against the blow he saw coming, but Gar’s arm had the strength of a mallet.

“Watch he doesn’t bite!” a bandit shouted. “Is he foaming at the mouth?”

Garric started to unfold the fingers of Ceto’s right fist. Vascay touched the back of Garric’s hand, and said, “I’ll take care of the ring.”

Garric was ready to flare out in any direction. “I found—” he said, straightening in a surge of fury.

“Hold him,” Vascay said. Men grabbed Garric’s arms from behind. Tint was chattering on the edge of the encampment.

Garric hunched down and brought his arms forward, swinging the men holding him against one another. The fellow to Garric’s left shouted as he lost his grip. Other bandits grabbed Garric, tearing away his makeshift garment. He went over backward in a pile of men.

“I said hold him, Sister take you!” Vascay shouted. “I didn’t say kick him, Ademos! Now settle down all of you!”

Garric said, “All right, all right,” and let himself relax. Two men were holding either arm. Several were on his legs though he couldn’t see them because of the fellow sprawled across his torso.

Vascay looked down with a bland smile. He held the ring between thumb and finger of his left hand; the sapphire was a glitter too small to have color.

“Let him up, then,” Vascay said to the men holding Garric. “He’s ready to behave.”

Ceto had put both his hands on the ground. He was trying to rise, but he still couldn’t breathe properly. His face was twisted, and his lips formed curses that he lacked the strength to utter.

“But boss?” said the man with the horn, one of those on Garric’s arms. “He’s gone mad, hasn’t he?”

Vascay glanced back at Ceto, his expression friendly in a mild fashion and his eyes as hard as chips of jasper. He’d hooked his right hand negligently into his sash where it half covered a knife hilt.

“I’m not mad,” Garric said, trying to get his breathing under control. “I’m just not in a good humor. But yes, I’ll behave.”

“What’s going on?” asked one of a pair of latecomers just arrived from the forest.

His companion cried, “Hey, Vascay! Is that what we come for? The ring, I mean?”

Vascay thrust his boot out—not quite a kick, but a thump that got the attention of the man on Garric’s torso. “I said, let him up, Halophus,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice, but the mild previous tone was beginning to congeal into something much harder. “Toster, Hame—all of you. Let him up .”

The bandits released Garric, grunting as they got to their feet. The stubby redhead who’d been holding Garric’s right ankle scrambled away. That would be Ademos. He was the one who’d just kicked Garric; a frequent sport of his when poor Gar wore this flesh.

That was a matter for another time. Garric sat up, set a foot behind him, and stood with his arms crossed in front of his chest, a show of coordination that he correctly assumed Vascay would notice.

He bent to retrieve the ground sheet. Vascay stepped on a corner of the canvas, pinning it to the ground, and instead tossed Garric a tunic draped over a guyline anchoring an overhead tarp. “Try one of mine,” Vascay said. “It ought to fit.”

He grinned, and added, “The way the weight’s distributed is a little different, of course.”

The tunic was close-woven linen with vertical stripes of brown and cream; a well-made, attractive garment which indeed did fit Garric as well as anything in the palace wardrobe. He raised it, bunched, above his head, then slipped it quickly down to cover him. Under the circumstances, he didn’t want either to cover his eyes or bind his arms any longer than necessary.

Vascay chuckled. “Nobody’s going to stick you while you’re dressing, boy,” he said.

“By the Sister!” snarled Ceto, finally on his feet. He reached for his sword. “ I’m going to stick him any way he comes!”

“That’s not how we do things here, Brother Ceto,” Vascay said calmly. “We’re civilized men, remember, driven to our present straits by a tyrant’s exactions rather than our own vicious natures.”

Ceto snarled a curse. Garric tensed to jump. The chine of Ceto’s swordblade sang against the lip of the scabbard as he drew it.

“Ceto!” said Vascay.

He was smiling. His knives were in his hands: the left one held low with the edge upward for a disemboweling stroke, the right one beside his ear ready to throw, blade vertical and the hilt in Vascay’s palm.

“Rules, Brother Ceto,” Vascay said, mildly again. None of the other bandits had drawn their weapons; some were deliberately holding their hands out where they could be seen to be empty. “We don’t fight among ourselves, remember?”

“Gar’s not one of us!” Ceto snarled; he slammed his sword back in its sheath, however. “He’s an animal!”

Garric took a deep breath. He didn’t know what the situation he’d stepped into was, but he knew there was one. The politics of this band were probably less complex than those of the royal council, but the sanctions for mistakes were likely to be quicker and more final.

“Captain Vascay,” he said, giving the leader a half nod, half bow. “Tint and I found the ring we’re here searching for. Ceto robbed us.”

Toster was nearly as tall as Garric and much heavier; only part of his weight was fat. “What is this?” he asked in puzzlement. “What’s Gar doing talking like that?”

“When Ceto kicked me in the head…” Garric said, raising his finger to his bruised temple. It struck him that Gar’s unkempt bush of hair might have prevented a cracked skull in all truth. “I regained my faculties.”

“The animal tried to take the ring away from me after I’d found it,” Ceto said. “I knocked him down—and I’ll do it again, Vascay, whether you like it or not!”

Garric waited silently. In his experience, you didn’t threaten a man like Vascay. If you wound up with that sort as an enemy, you’d best deal with him quickly—and not turn your back until you had.