The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (62 page)

“What does being a Wynd have to do with anything?” said Linciard, incapable of leaving well enough alone.

The Houndmaster smirked.  “You've never been to Daecia, never seen the Palace.  Like Corporal Kelfar said, you haven't been scoured.  You can't understand what it means to us, to be seen—known—and called to service.  To claw your way back to life.”

“Back...?”

“Twenty years ago, I was a prisoner—caught fighting the Empire in Krovichanka.  I was taken to the Palace, where I gazed upon the Risen Light, and it gazed also into me.  And I saw the folly of my ways.  The spirits—what had they ever done for us?  They were neglectful parents, and weak.  We mixed-bloods weren't people to them, just swordfodder in their stubborn resistance to the Empire.  But the Light, ahh...”  His gaze slid upward, a weird expression of rapture crossing his heavy features.  “The Light knew me.  It accepted me.  It had a use for me—a place, a tailor-made design.  And here I am, doing its work.”

Linciard stared.  The Houndmaster's words seemed to have triggered something in the others, for they stared at the table or their cards or thin air with that same dazed expression.  Warily, he prompted, “You were Krovichankans?  You mean, the ogre tribes?”

Houndmaster Vrallek blinked and looked toward him, ruddy eyes still unfocused.  “Voryeshki people, Hesseljak tribe.  Renkurr there is a Leshya-Naanja, the greenies.  Mixed-bloods, obviously.  Full ogres can't bear the Light.  It kills 'em.”

“Why?”

“How should I know?  They're Dark-hearted pikers, following their Dark-loving beast-lords, so that must be part of it, but so was I back then.  Some people...even when you pry their eyes open, they can't be shown, so they just burn up in his gaze.  Poof, ashes.”

“The Emperor?”

“Who else?  He's the Prime Scion of the Light.  What he sees, it sees.  What it wants, he wants.  Anyway, you keep asking questions like this, you'll find out soon enough.”

“Maybe he should ask Sergeant Rallant, eh lieutenant?  Eh?”

That was Corporal Kelfar.  Vrallek gave him a reproving look, but Linciard felt the name like a finger trailing up his spine.  He had barely seen Rallant at all this week, and when he did it was only in passing, with Rallant never meeting his eyes.

And there was the headache.  He'd had it like a beast clawing at the inside of his skull for the first few days, but it had tapered off into a feeling of hollowness and the persistent memory of Rallant's fingers on his neck.  The nip of his nails.  Magnetic...

He shook it off and reached for his mug.  Alcohol was the only thing here that helped, because he had no taste for the toyboys on display.  Too young—probably below conscription age, thirteen or fourteen.  He hadn't gone for that even when he was their age.

“Is that how it was for all of you?” he said.  “Prisoners brought to the Palace?”

“Hardly.  Most volunteer.”

“What?  Why?”

“Why are you in the army?”

Linciard frowned, but Vrallek was regarding him levelly, no sneer on his ruddy face, no sign of mockery.  “I was drafted,” he answered.  “Most Wynds are.  Went into the Border Corps when I was eighteen.”

“Did you want something else?”

“Well...I don't know.  It was better than working in the lumber-mill, I guess, except for all the Corvish shooting at us.”  Blood on the axe-head.  Blood on the fallen leaves.  “There's not much work in Wyndon but logging, mining...  Trapping, maybe.  Ground's too stony for farming.  Suppose you could say the Gold Army is the border's main employer.”

The burning palisade.  The bloody footprints in the snow, the little bodies...

He grimaced and tried to look away, but they were always there behind his eyes.  Like the man in the pit, mouth crusted with red, flesh stiff from frostbite but still alive.  Looking up at him and the axe in his hands, and smiling.

He took a long drink.  Swallowed.  Stared into the mug.  Said, “It's...not a bad life.  Better over here in the Crimson, though.  Cleaner.”

Vrallek made a faint, rough noise that might have been a chuckle.

“Why?  What does it have to do with anything?”

“Perhaps it doesn't,” said Vrallek, and his gaze had definitely cleared, for the look he fixed on Linciard was sharp with interest.  “You're an odd one for a Wynd.  Thought your folk were all about family, camaraderie, us-against-the-outsiders hog-crap.”

“And that would mean I belong in the army?”  Linciard shrugged.  “Yeah, we hate the shit out of our enemies, and yeah, a lot of us jumped at the chance to strike back, but...”  He trailed off, realizing suddenly that all of his brothers and cousins had joined up—many of them before the official recruitment age.  His father and all of his uncles had been soldiers too, and their fathers before them.  All who were still alive were up there in Wyndon, fighting on for the Gold Army or working in the army's mills, the army's mines, the army's camps.  That was life in the backwoods, at the border.

He was the only Linciard who had left.

Pikes.  I'm weird and I didn't even know it.

But he had known, hadn't he?  He'd watched his comrades rush off after the bloody footprints, axes in hand, shouting taunts and war-cries while his steps slowed.  While he took note of the size of the tracks they'd followed, barely the width of his palm.  “You're saying I'm not like you?”

“You're not a team player.  Sure, you talk a good line, I'll give you that.  A grin and a friendly word will get you far.  But you've got the eyes of an outsider.  Must be why the captain likes you.”  Vrallek smirked.  “He's an odd fish too.”

Fallen from the Light?
Linciard wondered, remembering Sarovy's exile.  To judge by his reaction to the priest, though, the captain was still faithful—as faithful as the specialists.  Maybe he had seen the Light at the Palace but been rejected.

No wonder he can't remember.  That must have hurt.

Abruptly the door from the brothel's main hall swung open, letting in a crowd of new voices.  Linciard looked over like the specialists and saw familiar faces everywhere: the men from the third and fourth sections of his Lancer Platoon, apparently just off-shift.  In the back, trying to herd the mob, was Corporal Vyslin.

“No offense to you lot, but that's my team right there,” said Linciard, pushing up from his seat.  Houndmaster Vrallek waved him away, and the specialists closed ranks behind him as he made for the lancers.

Specialists elsewhere were rising, flashing coins to snag the attention of the prostitutes as if afraid the newcomers would make off with them.  More ladies and young men in gauzy bits of nothing followed the lancers in, simpering and preening.  The Velvet Sheath had an extensive and well-paid staff due to its spot by the Civic Plaza, and Blaze Company's presence certainly hadn't caused a drop in business.

Linciard caught Vyslin's eye as he tried to arrange tables for his men, and the corporal grinned and beckoned.

Then a blond head interposed between them, and Linciard groaned inwardly.

“Sir, we should talk,” said Jonmel Stormfollower.

His earnest face was strained, so it was something important—at least to him.  At this point in the day, though, Linciard would rather have thrown him through a window than listened.  It was probably a gripe about Vyslin or the Drixi or the local women not consenting to marry him, the same complaints all the Jernizen had.

Except he vaguely remembered that this one had a girlfriend.  A prostitute, yes, but one who saw him regularly, even during her off-time.  Though perhaps the boy was deluding himself.

“Problem?” he said as he reluctantly let Stormfollower lead him out.  They breezed through the fine-furnished entry-hall, with its divans full of cooing showpieces and the men negotiating their virtues, past the heavily-armed Gejaran mercenaries at the door and into the faded day.

“What is it?” said Linciard, but Stormfollower looked around the cobbled street warily, then beckoned him away from the door and the bubbly glass windows toward where the brothel abutted the Truncheon Tavern.  Linciard sensed eyes from above and looked up to see one of the brothel's women leaning on a balcony, expressionless.

Then they were at the gap between buildings, and the Jernizen soldier halted and said, “Shadows, sir.”

“Shadows,” Linciard echoed, automatically tensing.

“You were looking to make a deal, right?”

Linciard nodded.  For the past few days, he had been putting out his displeasure with the captain for cutting off his funds, and a few of the foreign soldiers had taken the hook.  Cautious references to extra cash-flow, queries as to his devotion to the Light and the Army, oblique mentions of favors...

Not all that different from the specialists' grilling, just from the other end.

But not all of the conspirators were subtle.  Case in point: Stormfollower.

“My girl Dhalyar says she could maybe get them to talk to you, but they don't trust you.  They want you to do something for them first.”

“Like what?”

“Get information.  They know the priest came over.  He's got orders from the General, right?  They want to know what those are.”

“And what, tell you?”

“They say you can whisper secrets to any shadow that's not warded-up and they'll hear it.  They can probably hear us right now.”

That put the hairs on the back of Linciard's neck up, and he cast a sidelong look down the alley.  There was nothing to see—it was kept clear for access to the trash-lot behind the tavern—but its gloom suddenly chilled him.  “Are you serious?  Just whisper it to any shadow?”

“Yessir.  I've seen it work.  Whispered into a corner and a piking silver coin fell out.”

Linciard resisted the urge to cuff him upside the head, or slam him into the wall and declare an arrest.  The fact that the Shadows could listen anywhere made every step they took outside of the garrison incredibly dangerous, and the idiot boy had kept that knowledge to himself.  These turncoats couldn't see the knives past the gleam of the coins.

I have to act like them.  Have to learn more...

“So they'll drop me some money when they hear it?”

“Guess so, sir.”

“And Dhalyar, she's in closer contact with them?”

Stormfollower shrugged.  He had a broad, open face, which made his protectiveness and prevarication easy to read.  “Don't think so.  She just trades secrets like we do.  Pikes, she said I can pay her in secrets.  Do you think I should do that?  I don't know the exchange rate on secrets—sometimes they pay silver, sometimes it's just tin—so maybe she's thinking she can cheap me?  Or is it a discount?”

“I don't know the going price for sexual favors—“

“They have a list.  I memorized it.”

He looked so proud of himself.  Part of Linciard felt terrible about this.  He knew the Jernizen had rough lives; they were all younger sons or bastards, disowned by their fathers and left to fend for themselves in a kingdom that considered them disposable at best and verminous nuisances at worst.  That this lot had chosen to become Imperial soldiers rather than outlaws was a mark of their good intent—their desire to be citizens of
somewhere
, even if it wasn't their home.  It made Linciard feel weirdly parental.

Didn't mean he didn't want to drown the boy in a rain barrel.

“Just...do what you can afford,” he said.  “Are you still trying to marry her?”

“She said I'd have to quit the army first.  I said hoi, being in the army is what makes me an Imperial citizen.  She said that's not gonna matter soon.”  He leaned closer and whispered, “I think they're up to something, Lieutenant.  You'd better get on their good side.”

“Sergeant,” Linciard corrected automatically.  It took all his strength not to squint into the shadows for eavesdroppers.  They were there; he knew that now.  He couldn't even pretend he didn't.

“Sergeant, right.  See, sergeant?  It's the best option.  The Imperial Army's been good and all, but the Shadow Cult's the boss around here.  We're just squatting on their turf.”

Treason, blasphemy and soliciting the same.  Curse it, Stormfollower...

“I'll see what I can do,” he said.  “In fact, I'll start now, before I end up in debt to the specialists for drinks.  You go on in, enjoy your free time.”

Stormfollower grinned fiercely.  “Yessir.”

A trade of salutes and the younger man skittered for the brothel entry.  Linciard watched him go, then turned for the garrison house.  If he was right, they needed to ward up more than just their headquarters; they needed magical defenses everywhere they usually went, from the council house to the plaza to the Velvet Sheath itself.  The captain had been conservative with their arcane resources, expecting an attack from without, but Linciard couldn't imagine the Shadows laying siege.

No.  They were already working their way in.

*****

Pleasantly soused, Specialist-Sergeant Presh wobbled up the stairs to the second floor of the Velvet Sheath, carrying the key to the sea-green door.  Through other doors he heard the faint sounds of laughter or groans, some of which he recognized: his fellow specialists, who had preceded him here due to his post-shift meeting with the other mages.