The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (129 page)

‘You shut up, y’arsehole!’ Crossfeet gave him a look like he might tear him with his teeth. ‘Whatever happens tonight, the Union’ll be here tomorrow. More o’ those bastards than ants in a hill. The Dogman too, and you know who the Dogman’s got with him?’ He grinned, eyes going huge as he whispered the name. ‘The Bloody-Nine.’ Beck felt his face go hot. The Bloody-Nine had killed his father. Killed him in a duel with his own sword. The one he had sheathed beside him now.

‘That’s a lie,’ squeaked Brait, looking scared to his bones even though they had weapons and the prisoners were trussed up tight. ‘Black Dow killed Ninefingers, years ago!’

Crossfeet kept giving him that crazy grin. ‘We’ll see. Tomorrow, you little bastard. We’ll—’

‘Let him alone,’ said Beck.

‘Oh aye? And what’s your name?’

Beck stepped up and booted Crossfeet in the fruits. ‘That’s my name!’ He kept on kicking him as he folded up, all his anger boiling out. ‘That’s my name! That’s my fucking name, you heard it enough?’

‘Hate to interrupt.’

‘What?’ snarled Beck, spinning round with his fists clenched.

A big man stood behind him, a half-head taller’n Beck, maybe, fur on his shoulders glistening with the rain. All across one side of his face, the biggest and most hideous scar Beck had ever seen, the eye on that side not an eye at all but a ball of dead metal.

‘Name’s Caul Shivers,’ voice a ground-down whisper.

‘Aye,’ croaked Beck. He’d heard stories. Everyone had. They said Shivers did tasks for Black Dow too black for his own hands. They said he’d fought at Black Well, and the Cumnur, and Dunbrec, and the High Places, fought beside old Rudd Threetrees, and the Dogman. The Bloody-Nine too. They said he’d gone south across the sea and learned sorcery. That he’d traded his eye willingly for that silver one, and that a witch had made it, and through it he could see what a man was thinking.

‘Black Dow sent me.’

‘Aye,’ whispered Beck, all his hairs standing up on end.

‘To get one o’ these. A Union officer.’

‘Reckon that’s this one.’ Colving used his toe to poke at the man with the tattered sleeve and made him grunt.

‘If it ain’t Black Dow’s bitch!’ Crossfeet was smiling up, teeth shining red, bandages round him reddened too. ‘Why don’t you bark, eh, Shivers? Bark, you bastard!’ Beck could hardly believe it. None of ’em could. Maybe he knew that wound in his gut was death, and it’d sent him mad.

‘Huh.’ Shivers jerked his trousers up so it was easy for him to squat down, boots grinding the dirt as he did it. When he got there he had a knife in his hand. Just a little one, blade no longer’n a man’s finger, glinting red and orange and yellow. ‘You know who I am, then?’

‘Caul Shivers, and I ain’t fucking scared of a dog!’

Shivers raised one brow, the one above his good eye. The one above his metal eye didn’t shift much. ‘Well, ain’t you the hero?’ And he poked Crossfeet in the calf with the blade. Not much weight behind it. Like Beck might’ve poked his brother with a finger to wake him up of a frosty morning. The knife stuck into his leg, silent, and back out, and Crossfeet snarled and wriggled.

‘Black Dow’s bitch, am I?’ Shivers poked him in the other leg, knife going deeper into his thigh. ‘It’s true I get some shitty jobs.’ Poked him again, somewhere around his hip. ‘Dog can’t hold a knife, though, can it?’ He didn’t sound angry. Didn’t look angry. Bored, almost. ‘I can.’ Poke, poke.

‘Gah!’ Crossfeet twisted and spat. ‘If I had a blade—’

‘If?’ Shivers poked him in the side, where his bandages were. ‘You don’t, so there’s the end o’ that.’ Crossfeet had twisted over, so Shivers poked him in the back. ‘I’ve got one, though. Look.’ Poke, poke, poke. ‘Look at that, hero.’ Poked him in the backs of his legs, poked him in the arse, poked him all over, blood spreading out into his trousers in dark rings.

Crossfeet moaned and shuddered, and Shivers puffed out his cheeks, and wiped his knife on the Union man’s sleeve, making the gold thread glint red. ‘Right, then.’ He made the Union man grunt as he jerked him to his feet, carefully sheathed his little knife somewhere at his belt. ‘I’ll take this one off.’

‘What should we do with him?’ Beck found he’d asked in a reedy little voice, pointing at Crossfeet, moaning softly in the mud, torn clothes all glistening sticky black.

Shivers looked straight at Beck, and it felt like he was looking into him. Right into his thoughts, like they said he could. ‘Do nothing. You can manage that, no?’ He shrugged as he turned to go. ‘Let him bleed.’

T
he valley was spread out below them, a galaxy of twinkling points of orange light. The torches and campfires of both sides, occasionally smudged as a new curtain of drizzle swept across the hillside. One cluster must have been the village of Adwein, another the hill they called the Heroes, a third the town of Osrung.

Meed had made his headquarters at an abandoned inn south of the town and left his leading regiment digging in just out of bowshot of its fence, Hal with them, nobly wrestling to stamp some order on the darkness. More than half the division was still slogging up, ill-tempered and ill-disciplined, along a road that had begun the day as an uneven strip of dust and ended it churned to a river of mud. The rearmost elements would probably still not have arrived at first light tomorrow.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ said Colonel Brint, rain dripping from the peak of his hat.

‘Me?’ asked Finree, all innocence. ‘Whatever for?’

‘For looking after Aliz these past few days. I know she’s not terribly worldly—’

‘It’s been my pleasure,’ she lied. ‘You’ve been such a good friend to Hal, after all.’ Just a gentle reminder that she damn well expected him to carry on being one.

‘Hal’s an easy man to like.’

‘Isn’t he, though?’

They rode past a picket, four Union soldiers swaddled in sodden cloaks, spear-points glistening in the light of the lanterns of Meed’s officers. There were more men beyond, unloading rain-spoiled gear from packhorses, struggling to pitch tents, wet canvas flapping in their faces. An unhappy queue of them were hunched beside a dripping awning clutching an assortment of tins, cups and boxes while rations were weighed out.

‘There’s no bread?’ one was asking.

‘Regulations say flour’s an acceptable substitute,’ replied the quartermaster, measuring out a tiny quantity on his scales with frowning precision.

‘Acceptable to who? What are we going to bake it on?’

‘You can bake it on your fat arse far as I’m— Oh, begging your pardon, my lady,’ tugging his forelock as Finree rode past. As though seeing men go hungry for no good reason could cause no offence but the word ‘arse’ might overcome her delicate sensibilities.

What looked at first to be a hump in the steep hillside turned out to be an ancient building, covered with wind-lashed creeper, somewhere between a cottage and a barn and probably serving as both. Meed dismounted with all the pomp of a queen at her coronation and led his staff in file through the narrow doorway, leaving Colonel Brint to hold back the queue so Finree could slip through near the front.

The bare-raftered room beyond smelled of damp and wool, wet-haired officers squeezed in tight. The briefing had the charged air of a royal funeral, every man vying to look the most solemn while they wondered eagerly whether there might be anything for them in the will. General Mitterick stood against one rough stone wall, frowning mightily into his moustache with one hand thrust between two buttons of his uniform, thumb sticking up, as if he was posing for a portrait, and an insufferably pretentious one at that. Not far from him Finree picked out Bremer dan Gorst’s impassive slab of a face in the shadows, and smiled in acknowledgement. He scarcely tipped his head in return.

Finree’s father stood before a great map, pointing out positions with expressive movements of one hand. She felt the warm glow of pride she always did when she saw her father at work. He was the very definition of a commander. When he saw them enter, he came over to shake Meed’s hand, catching Finree’s eye and giving her the slightest smile.

‘Lord Governor Meed, I must thank you for moving north with such speed.’ Though if it had been left to his Grace to navigate they would still have been wondering which way was north.

‘Lord Marshal Kroy,’ grated the governor, with little enthusiasm. Their relationship was a prickly one. In his own province of Angland, Meed was pre-eminent, but as a lord marshal carrying the king’s commission, in time of war Finree’s father outranked him.

‘I realise it must have been a wrench to abandon Ollensand, but we need you here.’

‘So I see,’ said Meed, with characteristic bad grace. ‘I understand there was a serious—’

‘Gentlemen!’ The press of officers near the door parted to let someone through. ‘I must apologise for my late arrival, the roads are quite clogged.’ A stocky bald man emerged from the crowd, flapping the lapels of a travel-stained coat and heedlessly spraying water over everyone around him. He was attended by only one servant, a curly-haired fellow with a basket in one hand, but Finree had made it her business to know every person in his Majesty’s government, every member of the Open Council and the Closed and the exact degrees of their influence, and the lack of pomp did not fool
her for a moment. Put simply, whether he was said to be retired or not, Bayaz, the First of the Magi, outranked everyone.

‘Lord Bayaz.’ Finree’s father made the introductions. ‘This is Lord Governor Meed, of Angland, commanding his Majesty’s third division.’

The First of the Magi somehow managed to press his hand and ignore him simultaneously. ‘I knew your brother. A good man, much missed.’ Meed attempted to speak but Bayaz was distracted by his servant, who at that moment produced a cup from his basket. ‘Ah! Tea! Nothing seems quite so terrible once there is a cup of tea in your hand, eh? Would anyone else care for some?’ There were no takers. Tea was generally considered an unpatriotic Gurkish fashion, synonymous with moustache-twiddling treachery. ‘Nobody?’

‘I would love a cup.’ Finree slipped smoothly in front of the lord governor, obliging him to take a spluttering step back. ‘The perfect thing in this weather.’ She despised tea, but would happily have drunk an ocean of it for the chance to exchange words with one of the most powerful men in the Union.

Bayaz’ eyes flickered briefly over her face like a pawnshop owner’s asked for an estimate on some gaudy heirloom. Finree’s father cleared his throat, somewhat reluctantly. ‘This is my daughter—’

‘Finree dan Brock, of course. My congratulations on your marriage.’

She smothered her surprise. ‘You are very well informed, Lord Bayaz. I would have thought myself beneath notice.’ She ignored a cough of agreement from Meed’s direction.

‘Nothing can be beneath the notice of a careful man,’ said the Magus. ‘Knowledge is the root of power, after all. Your husband must be a fine fellow indeed to outshine the shadow of his family’s treason.’

‘He is,’ she said, unabashed. ‘He in no way takes after his father.’

‘Good.’ Bayaz still smiled, but his eyes were hard as flints. ‘I would hate to bring you pain by seeing him hanged.’

An awkward silence. She glanced at Colonel Brint, then at Lord Governor Meed, wondering if either of them might offer some support for Hal in reward for his unstinting loyalty. Brint at least had the decency to look guilty. Meed looked positively delighted. ‘You will find no more loyal man in his Majesty’s whole army,’ she managed to grate out.

‘I am all delight. Loyalty is a fine thing in an army. Victory is another.’ Bayaz frowned about at the assembled officers. ‘Not the best of days, gentlemen. A long way from the best of days.’

‘General Jalenhorm overreached himself,’ said Mitterick, out of turn and with little empathy, behaviour entirely characteristic of the man. ‘He should never have been so damn spread out—’

‘General Jalenhorm acted under my orders,’ snapped Marshal Kroy, leaving Mitterick to subside into a grumpy silence. ‘We overreached, yes, and the Northmen surprised us …’

Your tea.’ A cup was insinuated into Finree’s hand and the eyes of Bayaz’ servant met hers. Odd-coloured eyes, one blue, one green. ‘I am sure your husband is as loyal, honest and hard-working as ever a man could be,’ he murmured, a most unservile curl to the corner of his mouth, as if they shared some private joke. She did not see what, but the man had already oozed back, pot in hand, to charge Bayaz’ cup. Finree wrinkled her lip, checked she was unobserved and furtively tossed the contents of hers down the wall.

‘…our choices were most limited,’ her father was saying, ‘given the great need for haste impressed upon us by the Closed Council—’

Bayaz cut him off. ‘The need for haste is a fact of our situation, Marshal Kroy, a fact no less compelling for being a political imperative rather than a physical.’ He slurped tea through pursed lips, but the room was held so silent for the duration one could have heard a flea jump. Finree wished she understood the trick, and could rely on her every facile utterance being given rapt attention, rather than endlessly chewing on her usual diet of sidelinings, humourings and brushings-off. ‘If a mason builds a wall upon a slope and it collapses, he can hardly complain that it would have stood a thousand years if only he had been given level ground to work with.’ Bayaz slurped again, again in utter silence. ‘In war, the ground is never level.’