THE FIRST SIGN, which I overlooked because I was not that fond of sweets, came the night Greffin announced berrycream tarts would not be available.
“But … we’ve always had berrycreams …” protested Arlean.
“Since when? Since you became librarian when Orite left?” Gerloc’s voice was calm, as if he were discussing the weather.
Arlean glared at the thin diver.
I went on eating the last of the buffalo stew. While buffalo was usually chewy, Greffin had clearly marinated it in something with the potency of acid, because it fell apart at the touch of a knife.
“Soon we’ll be eating ConFed rations,” sniffed Arlean.
“That’s better than foraging in the damps.” I kept my voice level.
“Too bad your taste didn’t improve with the cuisine.”
I tried not to wince at Mellorie’s low-voiced comment.
Gerloc cleared his throat loudly. “We still have wheatcakes.”
So I ate wheatcakes with sweet cream, noting loudly how much better they were than the delicacies of the damps, such as snake eyes and frond hearts.
The second sign came the first night Mellorie appeared on Jerlyk’s arm, not long after the fall harvest.
Outside, the wind was whining, and, now that the crops couldn’t use the moisture, a cold heavy rain beat against the old leaded glass panes.
Like me, Jerlyk had been a trooper with one of Odin Thor’s units—the one operating well beyond Halfprince. Unlike me, he hadn’t been cautious, and the armorer had reported his disappearance.
“ … and the colonel-general suggested I report here immediately,” Jerlyk told me. “We lost two guards on the run before mine doing their collecting.”
“Collecting? Collecting what?” I asked.
“Food supplies from the farming groups. That’s what the outlying units do now—police against the hill bandits and protect the farmers and the towns against the looters. In return, they ‘request’ a share of the crops.” Jerlyk was smallish, wiry, like me, but had jet black hair to go with the fair skin, and blue eyes that seemed to twinkle all the time.
“Is the looting that bad?” Mellorie leaned closer to him.
“It’s gotten worse. The harvest wasn’t that good …” Jerlyk’s voice trailed off.
I understood. “The farmers need winter hold-out and seed for planting, and they resent a supply levy?”
“Right.”
“But they wouldn’t have even that without the ConFed patrols, would they?” asked Amenda.
“No,” added Jerlyk between bites, “but they don’t think that way.”
They didn’t, and Jerlyk and I had a chance to find out the details much sooner than I had anticipated.
Four days later, we were in the Far Travel Lab, in uniform, standing before the colonel-general and Wryan.
“Troopers, we have a problem. Some of the farmers are hoarding far more than they need.” Odin Thor paused and cleared his throat.
I looked him straight in the eye. Jerlyk looked at the floor.
“We need the farmers to keep farming, but we need the surplus grain. That means we have to find out who’s hoarding.”
In no way did I want to dive and spy on the farmers, not so the ConFeds could destroy some poor farmer’s harvest and home.
“This isn’t the monarchy. We can’t just take their food,” continued Odin Thor. “If we do, they’ll revolt and throw in with the bandits. If we don’t let them know who’s in charge, and distribute the surplus food, we won’t have much of a society left by spring.”
Wryan nodded before speaking. “What is your overall strategy? To use the divers to find out the hoarders, and then make them an offer they can’t refuse?”
“Ahhhhhmmmmm,” coughed the colonel-general. “What … well … that is the general idea …”
“What do we have to trade?” pursued Wryan. “Technical support, which they don’t need … replacement parts, which have limited applicability.”
“Etheline …” I suggested.
“Etheline?”
“The old ConFed fort has tanks and tanks of it,” I noted. “And some of them aren’t in the fort itself. It would take some cleaning up, but
the farmers are going to need it for planting, even for heating this winter.”
“You’d better get that trading program set up quickly,” added Wryan.
Odin Thor looked puzzled, but said nothing.
“They could use old-fashioned stills to turn the grain we need to eat into alcohol, which would work almost as well as etheline.” She added quietly, “Some people are already close to starvation. Some of those supplies will have to be reallocated if you want to keep local support.”
The head ConFed nodded slowly as the implications sunk in. “Can you work with my staff to set up the details?”
“I would be happy to help there, Colonel. We need to announce that we will be helping the poorest and offering trades—”
“Above the supply levy,” insisted the colonel-general.
I could see that, because all the farmers would claim poverty and lack of grain to hold out for the etheline.
“—before we start officially scouting around.”
“I have to insist, Doctor, that at least my two troopers here start looking now. If we wait until the announcements are made to find out where the hidden stocks are, then we risk setting off looting between the farmers.”
The colonel-general made sense. I didn’t like it, but he made sense.
Even Wryan bowed her head to his logic.
“ … and I would like you two to ride the next steamer out to Llordian. You are not to reveal you are divers.”
I filled in the picture, not that I was particularly thrilled by the landscape. We were going to be tax-collectors. Tax-collectors have always had short life-expectancies in rural Westron.
“Colonel …” added Wryan.
“Yes, Doctor.” Odin Thor was already glancing toward the door.
“My people will be able to post notices about food distributions for the needy at an instant’s notice. I hope the redistribution effort will commence along with the collection and trading program.” Wryan’s voice was calm.
Odin Thor half-bowed. “I understand your concerns, Doctor. We wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“I do appreciate that, Colonel.”
He started to leave, then twisted back. “The steamers leave tomorrow for Halfprince. The base there will run you out to Llordian.”
“Yes, Colonel-General,” answered Jerlyk.
I nodded.
Odin Thor fixed me with a stare, but said nothing.
“Good day, Doctor.”
“Good day, Colonel.”
After he had left, Wryan looked at us both. “Sammis, you need to stay.”
Jerlyk glanced at me, then at the stern-faced doctor. “Then I will be leaving, Dr. Relorn.”
She nodded curtly.
Jerlyk didn’t quite double-time his way out.
I stood there, and she sat in her chair. Finally, she stood and walked toward one of the deserted consoles.
“You’re playing with flame,” I said.
“So are you. Why do you refuse to salute him? Or address him by title?”
“ME? Every time you call him colonel, he burns. His colonel-general rank is five grades above colonel.”
Wryan smiled. “He was never confirmed in a rank above colonel.”
“This business of posting notices … that was nearly a threat.”
“No. It
was
a threat, and one we can carry out, if necessary. Without more popular support, we won’t have anything. Odin Thor knows that.”
I almost took a step toward her. Wryan wore the same off-tan tunic and trousers she seemed to wear every other day. The makeup was gone. I hadn’t seen it in days. Now she wore her hair too short, but it didn’t matter. She still looked not that much older than I did—at least to my unpracticed eye.
“Sammis?”
Her voice was so soft I almost didn’t hear it.
“What?”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“No. She was dead. You knew that.” My words dropped like stones. I hadn’t told anyone. Who could I have told?
“Only because you already knew. You went back to confirm what your heart already had told you.” Wryan’s voice was gentle, almost as if she understood how watching Allyson die had hurt. I hadn’t known it would hurt. How stupid can you be?
“I can definitely see some things on Query from the undertime—only for a few years either side of the now. That was enough.”
“I can’t. I’ve tried. I can do it on Sertis, but not here. I don’t envy you that ability, not now.” She pursed her lips, then walked back to the console, still lit. “Are you sure you’re up to this spy mission?”
I shrugged. “It’s better than the alternatives.”
We both nodded simultaneously, and I wanted to laugh as we did
so. I didn’t, and neither did she, but there was a quirk to her mouth.
“You’d better go.”
So I did, wondering why I enjoyed talking to a woman four times my age.
FOUR CONFEDS STOOD in a rough square. Only one had a shredder. Two held handguns, and a fourth only a dress knife.
Rough groupings of bearded men, women, and a few children encircled them. Gaunt face after gaunt face stared at the four, edging forward, backing them up to the statueless pedestal. Since the town was Llordian, the missing statue had probably been the old emperor.
“Killers …”
“Hogs! Oink! Oink! Oink!”
“ … genlovers!”
I frowned at the last epithet, but Jerlyk, standing beside me in the shadows, winced. So did the ConFed with the shredder.
The crowd, salted with a few crones and one white-bearded man with a single arm who stood a head taller than anyone else, reacted to the gesture.
“Genlovers! Genlovers! Genlovers … !”
Jerlyk whispered, “Means gentry-lover. Toady for the gentry.”
“But why? Why the anger? We’re the ones they should be angry at.”
“Let’s talk about it later, Sammis.”
That made sense, because the tension in the town square was rising. If I appeared from nowhere and disarmed the ConFeds, then the crowd would kill them. I could still escape. The troopers couldn’t.
The sun was strangely hot, like midsummer, and the warmth from the white walls of the trade quarter and from the pavement underfoot created heat shadows on the eastern walls of the square. The too-thin people in their drab and faded clothes, mostly unwashed, stood unmoved by the heat.
I wiped my forehead. After a ten-day plus of snooping around, I knew most of the townies were hungry. They had nothing to trade to the farmers. The ConFeds were protecting the farmers not just from the bandits, but from hungry townies.
Crack!
A single rock slammed into the pedestal behind the ConFeds. The lead trooper leveled the shredder.
“Go ahead! Throw another rock! Just give him the chance to use that shredder. He’s a killer, and he’ll kill all your children. So throw another rock!” The screaming voice cracked, but it was loud enough to break the heat-trance that had settled over the crowd.
Unfortunately, the voice was mine. The words were fine, but while I was wearing an unmarked tunic, it still looked too military. Or too gentrified.
“Genlover!” spat a boy who could not have been eight.
“The ConFed tax-collectors! It’s them!”
“Bloodsuckers!”
Attention passed from the armed ConFeds in the square to the unarmed pair of ConFed tax-collectors in the alleyway adjoining the square.
“Now what?” hissed Jerlyk.
“I think we run.”
So we did.
“Get them … bloodsuckers! Bloodsuckers! Genlovers! Genlovers!”
“Genlovers … genlovers … genlovers …” The words turned into a chant as the mob crowded into the alleyway.
We sprinted straight down the alley, then past the near-empty fruit stand and the orange-haired woman who stared as we pounded past.
“ … to the right …” I mumbled, trying to angle for the ConFed guard station by the western end of the town nearest the Eastern Highway.
“Look ahead …”
Jerlyk had a point. Some of the mob had left the square by the avenue and would reach the next corner before we would.
“ … then left …”
“That’s a dead end …”
“ … climb …”
The low wall ahead, not even as high as my shoulder, would be easy enough to climb. Vaulting onto the flat section which turned out to be a covered storm drain, I glanced around. The other side was an empty yard, with empty racks that had once held lumber or timber—or something.
Some of the crowd headed around to cut us off.
“Down and out of sight, and dive. Out to the guard station.”
I jumped down by the nearest lumber rack. No one could see us, and the windows in the back of the building were both shuttered and closed. We broke out of the undertime behind in the narrow space between the old town wall and the guard station. I stumbled and scraped an elbow on the wall.
“Verlyt!”
“So what did you scrape?” I asked, in between deep breaths, as I tried to catch my wind and simultaneously navigate my way toward the guard station.
“Forget it!” snapped Jerlyk.
We came around the corner just in time to meet the other four ConFeds racing in from the south end of the avenue.
The lead trooper, still carrying the shredder, opened his mouth, then shut it, then opened it again before stammering, “What … how …”
“Just a little misdirection. We almost didn’t get clear.”
The lead ConFed shut his mouth without saying a word.
The one behind him, a wiry man with copper hair, grinned. “We owe you, and I’m real glad to let you know that. I’m Nylen.”
“Sammis.”
“Jerlyk.”
All the time we were talking, we were trotting toward the compound gate.
“Forcer! Forcer! Riot in the town!” yelled the man with the shredder.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
We were inside the compound, and the duty crew was already manning the guard towers and breaking out shredders and handguns. I found a projectile rifle thrust into my hands, and my way being directed toward a sandbagged position below the main guard tower.
To my left, the heavy wooden gate rolled shut. A pair of recruits began shoring it in place with the sandbags piled at each end. The post had been an old mail station, but somewhere along the line, someone had staked it out for military purposes, since it sat on the crest of a gentle hill at the western end of Llordian—the highest point amid the flat fields and sometime marsh grass.
I swallowed, listening to the shouting and muttering as the crowd flowed across the dusty parade ground toward the perimeter stockade. There didn’t seem to be so many people once they were out in the open—scarcely a hundred or so, and mostly women and children, with a few disabled troublemakers like the tall one-armed man. Not even a challenge for the twenty or so armed troopers.
“There they are! Hiding behind their walls and guns!” The one-armed man’s voice carried to the stockade.
One trooper lifted a projectile rifle. Before he could bring it to bear, a subforcer knocked it down and hissed something at the man.
“There they are! Protecting the rich hoarders and taking their cut while you go hungry! Look at them! They won’t always have guns!”
The crowd milled around, listening to the high-pitched voice of the agitator.
The sweat rolled down my face, turning dust on my skin into mud.
Buzzzzz … buzzzzz …
The black flies kept trying to land on my neck and bite, but I used a free hand to wave them away.
“See how they hide behind their guns! Do they look hungry? They aren’t hungry. They don’t have children who cry themselves to sleep.”
“No, they don’t have families any more. They already lost them!” That same stupid screaming voice again—mine. “At least you still have your children. At least we’re trying to keep you from being killed in your sleep!”
“He’s lying! Don’t listen. He’s lying!”
That was the wrong thing for the one-armed man to say. The crowd muttered, mumbled, and stopped.
“Why’d you say that?” demanded the subforcer who appeared at my elbow.
“Talk is cheaper than guns or bullets. And my family is dead.” I turned to look at him.
“You …” he snorted. “I might have known.”
At that moment, I nearly saw red. Bright red. But I just looked.
Finally, he looked to the side and walked away.
“Verlyt …” the oath was soft.
I glanced at the trooper beside me.
“Swashte will hate you for that.”
“Probably.” I didn’t really care. Wryan had been absolutely right. Odin Thor would lose the entire province without a shot if he didn’t get some food to those children. And soon.
As it became clear that the crowd had no intention of even halfheartedly storming the station, the senior forcer stood. “Stand down. First squad, hold the stockade. Purtell, deploy your men.”
I ambled over to the station to turn in the projectile rifle.
Jerlyk grinned as he followed me. “Big mouth.”
“Better than bullets,” I repeated.
Swashte, the subforcer I had glared down, was talking to the senior forcer, Gleddell, and gesturing in my direction. Gleddell looked bored and shrugged. Swashte headed toward me.
“Trooper, I don’t like your attitude. The senior forcer feels that you and I could use a little extra workout. Just to loosen up the muscles.”
I shrugged. “If you think so.”
“We could have a good match if you’re not afraid of getting messed up.”
“You sure that Gleddell doesn’t want a disabled subforcer?”
“Verlyt, you really do have a mouth, Trooper. You really do.”
I was tired of games. “What rules, Subforcer Swashte?”
“Just a friendly match, Trooper. Don’t need rules for that, do we?”
“Not for a friendly match, I suppose. But if you should trip and break anything, I certainly wouldn’t continue. What you do is up to you, of course.” I stepped back and stripped off my tunic and equipment belt.
Swashte did the same and thrust his tunic and belt at a youngster right out of training.
“Ready, Trooper?”
I nodded, slipping into a balanced posture, half-looking into the undertime to anticipate his attack.
Quicker than he looked, Swashte feinted with a straightened left arm, then threw a half-kick at my back knee.
I could have played with him. Instead, I broke his planted leg and snapped his arm. Henriod had taught me well, and I cheated.
“Verlyt!”
“Did you see that?”
“Hell-fired killer …”
Gleddell had turned white, as he saw Swashte writhing on the ground.
I half-bowed to the grimacing subforcer. “I regret our friendly match was so short. Any time you want a rematch, I’d be pleased to oblige you.”
Then I walked over to Gleddell. “I strongly suggest that Trooper Jerlyk’s and my mission here is complete.”
Gleddell shook his lank black hair off his forehead, ran his eyes over me as if he could not quite believe what he saw.
“Who are you?”
“Trooper Sammis, sir.”
He glanced at my unmarked uniform, then at the ground. “Two nice bits of work today, Trooper, three if I understand what Nylen told me. I don’t like any of them.” He paused. “I hope I never see you again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s all.”
I saluted him. It made him feel happier.
Everyone besides Jerlyk backed away as I walked back toward the barracks.