Iktis rode out in the mist and drizzle of a cold, gray dawn seven days later, looking not a bit like the foppish bravo who had for so long befriended Neeka. The garishly billed hanger—chosen weapon of bravos and city ruffians—was gone from his side to be replaced by a heavy saber, old but well-kept. His trousers and overshirt were of plain, practical linen canvas, his thigh-high boots and leather cloak were oiled and wax-impregnated to shed water. The hanger, the stones prized out and the gilt silver wire of the hilt replaced with brass, hung sheathed on one side of his pommel, balanced on the Other side by a light axe. Saddlebags and a bedroll encased in oilskin were lashed behind the high-cantled warkak, along with water bottle, food wallet and a plain, open-faced helm. On the road, mounted on his war-trained piebald mare, he would look like simply another independent Freefighter riding from one contract to the next.
Neeka could not repress a shiver of dread and apprehension as she saw the strong and efficient, but quiet and unassuming man put booted foot to stirrup, swing aboard the mettlesome mare and ride out of the courtyard of Lady Rohza’s hall.
However, by the time Shireen Mahsohnyuhn departed through that same gate with a party of westbound Ahrmehnee merchants of the Frainyuhn and Grohseegyuhn tribes, both dread and apprehension had been replaced with dull resignation tempered with self-loathing—even as she feigned passion in Lady Rohza’s bed and embrace, she loathed herself for placing more value upon her life than upon this utter degradation of her body and soul, loathed herself even more than she loathed the ugly, perverted, grunting creature who tried so desperately to deny her own femaleness.
And that was why she leaped so eagerly at the opportunity to go west when it was offered. She had been unaware until she actually reached Vawn Hall that the Lady Mehleena practiced the same hideous perversions as had the Lady Rohza. But over the long years, as Mehleena drifted further and further into religious fanaticism, poured more and more of herself into planning and preparing for a true, armed, violent—and predoomed to failure—rebellion, she had eschewed sex of any variety; moreover, as she became aware of Neeka’s undeniable talents and her ability to kill or cure without a subject’s knowledge, the fat woman began to respect her tame witch to the point of fear.
When Tim finally returned to the
thoheeks
suite, he carried with him a keg of brandy and a bundle of old polearms which had hung on the walls of the entry foyer for nearly thirty years. The suite, spacious as it was, looked crowded already, what with a half-dozen middle-aged Freefighters and as many Ahrmehnee grooms under Master Tahmahs; Brother Ahl and Mairee and her father, Sir Geros; a burly man with a thrusting sword and a Confederation-pattern dirk belted about his beginning of a paunch and beside him a younger man of similar build and identical armament. But what riveted Tim’s attention when once he had dumped his burdens and looked about were the physician, Master Fahreed… and the person who stood beside him.
The majordomo, Tonos, chose the three fastest runners from among the young men of the hall and sent each off to one of the three hall villages; it was all he could do, as only the two northern warhorses were left in the stables and he knew better than to attempt to mount either of the stamping, head-tossing, eye-rolling beasts. Then he and his picked band of menservants armed and set themselves to the pleasurable job of butchering all other servants—male and female—not definitely known to be loyal to the lady and the True Faith.
He decided to start in the kitchens with that arrogant bastard of a meat cook, Hahros, and his adopted son/ apprentice, Tchahrlee, the both of them loudly self-avowed pagans. But such was not to be.
The kitchen, when they reached it, contained no living men. The pantries had been partially looted and Mitzos, the storeskeeper and a good Christian man, lay face down in his own blood with his head stove in. In the bakery, only two or three foot-trampled loaves were left of the day’s baking and the baker, Kristohfohros, was huddled before his ovens with an iron spit run clear through his chest from front to back.
But the most horrible sight was come upon in the caldron room. The legs and hips of a man hung limply over the rim of a huge soup caldron, flesh and clothing smoldering in the heat creeping up the sides of the vessel from the coals beneath. When they at last got the body out of the soup, they discovered it to be Leeros, the pastry cook. There was no wound in his flesh, so they could only assume that he had been forcibly drowned in the boiling broth.
From his fruitless search for horses, Tonos already knew the stables to be empty of Tahmahs and his godless crew as well as of any save the two warhorses. Therefore, he and his murderers carefully surrounded and ever so carefully crept closer to the house of Sir Geros, their reverent bloodlust well-tempered by the knowledge that this quarry was a warrior of storied skills and valor and likely to be armed, as well. But when finally they kicked open the door and burst into the neat rooms, only an old, white-muzzled boarhound lay regarding them with rheumy eyes, his tail slowly thumping a welcome. Raging with frustration, Tonos jammed the broad, knife-edged blade of his wolf spear into the body of the aged, inoffensive dog again and again and again. Then he turned and stomped out of the tidy house.
In the rear courtyard, the pack claimed their first human victims—old Gaib, the hall farrier, and Hail, his strapping but seriously retarded son. Caught in the open, unarmed save for the drawknife he had been sharpening, Gaib was easily struck down, yet he rose again, his lifeblood gushing out, when he saw the mob stalking his childlike son. Lifting the heavy honestone, wooden cradle and all, he hurled it with such force as to smash the ribs and spine of one of the men. Then, hurling his rapidly dying body onto the back of another, Gaib bore him to the ground and had pulled the drawknife almost through the neck before the stabbing spears and hacking swords finished him.
Tonos ruthlessly thrust his spearblade—bloody with the gore of the father—deep into the belly of the towheaded son, then stood laughing as the boy stumbled about, screaming piteously, until be tripped on his own guts and fell sprawling into the gory mud. When one of the white-faced men stepped forward, his sword raised for a mercy stroke, Tonos pushed him back.
“No! Let the heathen halfwit die as did Father Skahbros… slowly.”
Then they went on in search of more prey.
Mahrkos Kahnstahnteenos sat up and yawned widely, scratching at his hairy chest and reflecting that rural life was not so bad after all… not when the alternatives included the distinct probability of dancing a
kahlahmahtzeeos
at the end of a rope. City-born and -bred, he had had no slightest intention of leaving the city of his birth, until his mother had caught him having his way with a younger half brother and he had, in a rage, slain both of them. Only a few jumps ahead of the law, he had stolen a mule and ridden west and north to fade from sight in the—to him huge—metropolis which was the capital of the Principate of Karaleenos.
For five years, he had plied various trades—footpad, sneak thief, pimp, hired bravo—anything requiring muscle and ruthlessness rather than wit. Then, one drunken night, he had thrown a drover into an inn fire after an argument over the favors of a pretty boy. But such things were not unusual happenings in the low places he frequented, and after the drovers had quitted the city, his life might have continued as usual, had he not compounded matters past mending by slaying the innkeeper—a full citizen—as well.
He had been languishing in the city dungeon for long weeks, awaiting trial and the certainty of either a quick hanging or the slower death of a sentence to quarry, mine or road and fortress building, when a burly jailor and two well-armed city guards fetched him from his cell to throw him, still weighted by his heavy fetters and chains, into a bare chamber some four levels up from his place of confinement
Shortly, three men—gentlemen by their dress, manners and speech—entered by a door in the opposite wall. All three wore steel helmets, with beavers up and visors down so as to completely cover their faces and impart a muffled, booming quality to their voices.
“Fagh!” snorted one of the men. “He stinks! He stinks worse than the others even. Let’s get this done with quickly. My stomach can’t take much more of the stench.”
“Please… please, my… my lords.” stuttered Mahrkos, blubbering, “I… I didn’t mean to kill im! As God’s my witness, I dint. I… I jest thought…”
Another of the helmed men waved a gloved, beringed hand in a curt gesture, saying, “We are not interested in what goes on in your sewer of a mind, you pig. Speak when your betters tell you, not before.”
The speaker turned to the third man and said, “The bastard’s name is Mahrkos, no one seems to know his family name… if he had one… and he has not volunteered any. From his accent, I’d imagine he’s from farther south, but he’s lived here about five years, I’m told. He burned a drover alive and strangled an innkeeper, a citizen.”
“He’s to hang, then?” asked the third man.
“Oh, no,” replied the second, grimly. “Just look at the shoulders on him. The mines need men of such strength, the quarries, too. Why he might even live ten years… if he doesn’t prove too intractable.”
Mahrkos shuddered and whimpered, wetting his filthy rags in his terror. Lost in horrible mental imagery of all he had heard of the mines and quarries, and picturing himself enduring the agonies of the drawn-out and hideous death such a sentence represented, he was deaf to the first questions put to him. It was not until one of the gentlemen put half an inch of swordpoint into his arm that he again became aware of just where he was.
Carefully wiping the tip of his ornate, bejeweled smallsword on a corner of his voluminous cloak, the second man said, “Answer the questions, you whoreson, or you’ll suffer for it! Are you of Ehleen stock or barbarian? Do you reverence God or something else? If we could free you from prison, would you go where you were told, do as you were told, kill whomever you were ordered to kill, so long as you were well paid?”
And so, within a few weeks, Mahrkos had found himself among some eightscore other hard cases, gathered from all over the principate and beyond, living in tents pitched in the forest of some duchy south of the capital. For two hellish months, they had undergone intensive military training at the callused hands of grizzled veteran soldiers and a few nobles, these always masked or helmed.
Mahrkos had always thought of himself as tough, dangerous and cruel… but that had been before he learned the true meanings of those three words in that woodland camp. Not all of the men who started finished. In the beginning, some ran away from the harsh discipline and unaccustomed labor under pitiless taskmasters. Those who were run down and killed were the lucky ones; the others were—in the full and horrified sight of their erstwhile fellows—slowly whipped to death, impaled or crucified on a beam lashed to a tree near the camp latrine. Tormented by hunger and thirst and pain, pecked at by crows, they sometimes took three days to die; but still they hung there and it was only when the stench became too bad that the cadremen hacked through the ropes and, after sinking hooks into the rotting cadaver, had the corpse’s former comrades drag the carcass off and dump it in a pit. No one ever got away clean, and, after a few examples, no one tried.
At the end of two months, the survivors of the original number were divided into three groups of between forty and fifty men each, then Mahrkos and two other bully types were placed in charge of the contingents. Slowly, a few men at the time, traveling in various ways and under various guises, the hundred and fifty bravos were funneled westward, laying over for long or short periods in many out-of-the-way places, often in woodland tent camps, sometimes in tiny villages, sometimes in towns or just outside them.
It had taken them the best part of three months to circuitously cover the distance to the far western Duchy of Vawn in the foothills of the Misty Mountains. There, the hundred and fifty had been reunited one last time, for two nights and a day in another wood, but this time without tents. Then two of the helmed nobles had come riding in, trailed by three men who rode barefaced. None of the bravos had seen any of the three before, but they did not need to know them to know immediately just what they were, not after two months of hell.
The voice booming from within the metallic confines of the helm sounded almost inhuman. “Allright, you gutterswept scum, gather closely about. These men,” he languidly waved at the three, hard-faced men sitting their mounts beside him, “are Deemos, Plehkos, and Ahreestos. They will henceforth be your commanders and will own the powers of life and death over you. They will march you to the villages in which you will be quartered until the weapons skills you have been more or less taught are needed.
“Arms will be provided you eventually. Until they are, you will drill and practice with wooden substitutes. You
will
drill and practice, you swine, practice and drill, for you may think you are warriors now but you are not A bare tenth your numbers of first-class soldiers would go through you like a dose of salts, would make blood pudding of the lot of you. It takes years to make soldiers out of first-grade material, which you poor shits certainly are not. But we have invested money and effort on you, nonetheless, and we will see to it that you give us at least a bare minimum return on our investment.
“Insubordination of any sort will be considered mutiny and will be dealt with harshly and fatally. These three captains will choose four sergeants and one senior sergeant to assist them. Orders from these sergeants will, in the absence of the captain, be considered as binding as if they came from the officer.
“Understand, please, if dimwits like you can understand, you are here without legal leave in a basically hostile duchy. It will be as good as your life to go wandering about the countryside, not to mention the danger your capture by the local barbarians would cast all the rest into.