The Way Into Chaos (38 page)

Long afternoons were spent trying to devise effective tactics Peradaini spears and bows could use against The Blessing. The problem was that the grunts were too strong and quick to fight in the field. They leaped astonishing distances, threw men around like firewood, and attacked in a fearless frenzy.
 

One on one, a man with a large, sturdy shield and a long spear might kill one—if he was lucky—but to do it without being bitten as well? In large groups on an open field, volleys of arrows might be effective, if the imperial archers could be trained not to aim directly at their enemy but to loose them in orderly rows like sheets of rain. Tejohn had a dim view of the chances that tactic would be happily received. Once the bows had done their work, it would fall upon a square to take on the survivors, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about that.
 

Worse, those tactics were feasible during the daylight hours only. The best option he could come up with after dark was to fight them from within a holdfast with high walls and well-manned towers. But while that might allow human beings to kill grunts in large numbers, as a long-term strategy it was a plan for human extinction. The holdfasts simply couldn’t protect and sustain a large portion of the empire, and every human left outside the walls was a potential enemy recruit.

The truth was, human soldiers weren’t mobile enough to fight The Blessing on their own terms. Every engagement would be at the whim of the enemy, without the option for retreat. That meant the soldiers themselves would have to be like holdfasts, but how could they somehow transport walls and towers on a campaign? Could they wear enough armor to cover themselves completely with steel?
 

Tejohn couldn’t quite envision how that would work, even if the units could afford the iron. In the end, his thoughts always returned to the king and his deadly spell.
 

The empire has always relied on its scholars; we just don’t like to admit it.
 

As much as he hated to
acknowledge
it, he ended each day resolved to follow through with the king’s plan: to make his way to Splashtown, where the Tyr Finstel would have to be convinced, somehow, that the fate of humankind relied on letting Tejohn borrow a cart for the trip to Tempest Pass.
 

From there, it meant training scholars in this new version of the Gift so they could destroy grunts at a wave of the hand. It would change warfare forever, giving hollowed-out madmen like Doctor Rexler the means to slaughter honest fighting soldiers by the hundreds, but they would have to deal with that later, after The Blessing was utterly wiped out.
 

If that was even possible.

There was still the hope, which was so faint Tejohn refused to speak it aloud, that Ghoron Italga, the scholar prince at Tempest Pass, might have a way to turn the grunts back into people.
 

That night, after Reglis and Arla had played their usual songs, Tejohn agreed to sing one, much to their surprise. Of course it wasn’t “River Overrunning;’ instead, he chose a song that had been old-fashioned during his campaigning days, “The Flock Wanders Far Afield.”

After he finished, the two were silent. Then Reglis said, “My tyr, a newborn lamb can hold a note better than you.”
 

They laughed, Tejohn included. But beneath that laughter, he could see the question in their expressions: how had a man with so little skill at music become so famous for a single performance?
 

“With luck, we’ll see Caarilit tomorrow. If the commander allows, we’ll use his mirror to find a tyr willing to loan us a cart for a trip to Tempest Pass. Then we can start to turn the tide against the grunts.”

“It can’t be soon enough,” Reglis said, then added, “my tyr.”

The long days of their trip--and the evenings by the campfire--had made them comfortable with each other. “Do you have someone in mind, Reglis?”

He shrugged, staring into the fire. The young man’s massive brow was furrowed in anger and he stared at the flames as though he intended to punch them. “My father lived in the town south of Samsit. Lives. I meant to say ‘lives.’ The grunts have gotten that far by now, don’t you think? He swore he would never take shelter with Peradaini soldiers...with all due apologies to you both.”

“I need none,” Arla said quickly.

“Neither do I,” Tejohn said.
 

“He must be one of them by now,” Reglis said, his voice hollow. “Along with his brothers and... I hate to think of it. I’d almost rather he was dead. I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s true.”
 

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Arla said. “Monument gives us ten thousand ways to endure.”
 

Tejohn shut his eyes. The image of Laoni fleeing in terror from a pursuing grunt, children in her arms, came to him hard. “I wish we had ten thousand and one.”
 

Arla was watching him carefully. “My tyr, your family should be safe across the Straim, shouldn’t they?”
 

He shrugged. “They should be across the river, and I hope it is a safe haven for them.”
Everything is dangerous.
“Song knows what has happened to any of the people we knew back in the civilized world. It’s possible your father had a fright powerful enough to drive him into the safety of the fort after all.”
 

Reglis bowed his head as though accepting a compliment.
 

“How did you meet your wife?” Arla asked. “If it’s not to forward of me to ask, my tyr.”
 

Before this long journey, Tejohn would have bristled at such a question from one of his soldiers, but without Arla, he could not have survived in the Sweeps. He had to acknowledge an obligation to her, if a small one. It felt a bit like friendship, and friendship permitted personal questions. “It’s not a story I tell often,” he admitted. “A freed debt child becoming the wife of a tyr...”

“It sounds like a play.” Reglis couldn’t suppress a grin.
 

“A bad one.” Tejohn was glad to see the young captain smile so quickly after the previous topic of conversation. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t sure where to start the tale.
 

“Who freed her?” Arla asked, reading his hesitation.
 

“I did.” Tejohn looked at their smiles and shrugged. “I told you it would make a bad play. But the real thing wasn’t so simple. She was an Italga servant who went west to be part of the newly built Freewell holdfast. She was a babe in arms then, but when she was five, she was given to Doctor Rexler. He’d already been hollowed by then, and the things he did to his servants... Well, you wouldn’t put it on a stage for the Evening People to see.
 

“But after the battle at Pinch Hall, everything was in turmoil. Tyr Freewell was still alive, and Rexler’s servants would normally have gone to him, except King Ellifer forbade it, ordering him to march home without a retinue. Everyone treated the Freewell servants as though treachery was contagious. No one would take them in. Finally, they were brought to me: I was the man who slew Rexler, so his orphan servant children were presented to me as spoils of war. I ordered Laoni and her brothers to clean my boots, then declared their debt settled and set them free.”
 

“That was kind of you,” Reglis said.
 

Arla glanced over at him, obviously irritated. Tejohn spoke before she could respond. “No, it wasn’t. At the time, I was still overcome with grief and rage. The battles were over, the war won, but I was furious that I would not be allowed to keep killing. This was three months before the Festival when I sang--I told the Performance Master I was going to do a tumbling routine; did you know? I looked fit enough and he took me at my word. That Fire-taken song was the only way to get the pain out, and no Performance Master in the world would have let me anywhere near a stage, not with my voice.
 

“Anyway, I didn’t give a thought to a couple of orphaned servants with no family and no way to care for themselves; they could have been Fire-taken right in front of me and I wouldn’t have blinked. Luckily, the priests discovered what I’d done and took them in, caring for them until they were old enough to find apprenticeships. Laoni became a baker.
 

“When she came to me, fourteen years later in the Palace of Song and Morning, I’m embarrassed to say I had forgotten all about her. She and her husband opened a bakery in Peradain, and—”
 

“Husband?” Arla said.
 

Tejohn spread his hands. “My wife loves me, but not as much as she loved him. He was... Ultimately, he was a fool. He gambled all on his charm, and eventually he lost. But they came to see me together. She had created a special red cake in my honor, to thank me for having that tattoo cut from her wrist. And I had no idea who she was.”
 

“How was the cake?” Reglis asked.
 

Tejohn kept his face carefully neutral. “Extremely sweet. There’s nothing an old soldier likes more than to be commemorated with something incredibly sweet and almost insubstantial.” Arla and Reglis laughed, and he felt oddly pleased. “I was honored, of course, but I felt guilty, too. I began dropping by there often.” Once again, he was unsure how to continue the story.
 

“Then,” Arla continued, “the charming fool got himself knifed in a married woman’s bedroom.”
 

“It was gambling debts, actually,” Tejohn corrected her. “He fell from a roof while running from casino thugs. I loaned the money to Laoni to help her settle his debt, and I kept going there for little cakes, and just to talk. Eventually...” He shrugged.
 

“My tyr, you are torturing us with your pauses,” Arla said kindly. “Eventually, you realized you cared for her.”
 

“At first, I cared for the idea of her,” Tejohn admitted. “Few tyrs ever get to choose their wives, but I had no lands, wealth, or influence at court. No one wanted an alliance with me. I could do as I liked. And the truth is, I had always been known for one thing: grief. I was the man who went to war, who made the Evening People weep with a song, and who had become the first honorary tyr, all because of the way my wife and child died. I didn’t want to be that person for year after grinding year, living alone in perpetual mourning. I wanted a life.
 

“And the more time I spent with her, the less interested I was in the idea of her and the more I liked her as a person. The Finstels frown on relationships between people with so much distance in their ages, but I didn’t live in Finstel lands anymore. So, two years and a day after her husband died, we had a small ceremony in the Palace temple, a widow and widower trying again.”
 

“That’s a nice ending,” Reglis said. “I like that ending.”

“Sure,” Tejohn said. “If you stop the story there.”

“I had a younger man once,” Arla said. “There were fifteen years between us, and he was as nice as you please.”
 

“But then you found out he had another woman,” Tejohn said, partly to return the charge she’d made against Laoni’s first husband.
 

“No, I found out
I
was the other woman. I swear, I’d be Watch Commander today if I hadn’t buried an arrow in his backside.”
 

Tejohn laughed. “You were lucky he was facing away from you.”

“One of us was lucky,” Arla answered, “but it wasn’t me.”

Reglis laid his hands on his knees. “That’s a thought that’ll keep me up for a long while. I’ll volunteer for first watch.”
 

“Not so fast,” Arla said. “It’s your turn.”
 

He sighed in a resigned way. “I nearly married. My father arranged it--that’s how it worked among my people, even for the common folk. When we were children, our parents would arrange a marriage, and those two families could be friendly with each other and do business. Except that doesn’t really work inside the empire. Anyway, she likes to order people about and she sings like a bleating goat. Once she learned I was taking up the spear, she convinced her father to break it off. The empire does nothing for soldiers’ widows, after all.”
 

“You took up the spear to get out marriage?” Tejohn asked.
 

“No,” Reglis said, “but it was a happy side benefit. My father was...displeased, you could say. He’s forbidden me to marry anyone else, and I’ve honored his wish. So far.”
 

“What about your almost-bride?” Arla asked.

Reglis smiled. “She married someone else twelve days later. I understand they are very unhappy together. And my father feels...” That was a sentence he could not finish.
 

“When this is all over,” Tejohn said, “we could return to Samsit and I would be willing to talk to your father about this.”

Reglis seemed startled. “My tyr...”

“If you wish it, of course. You would know if talking to a tyr of the empire would improve things between the two of you or make them worse. But I wouldn’t bully him or order him to do anything, obviously. I’d talk to him honestly about soldiers and their families.
 
If you wish it.”
 

“I would, my tyr.” Reglis bowed his head. “If—”

“No ‘if,’ Captain,” Tejohn’s voice was calm. “There’s no reason to assume the worst.”
 

“Thank you, my tyr.”
 

Arla smiled at him. Tejohn said, “Are you going to ask me to talk to Commander Gerrit about making you a Watch Commander?”
 

“No, my tyr,” she said, and he believed her. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Well, after all this”--Tejohn waved at their camp—”you both deserve a promotion. But don’t think I’ve forgotten that you volunteered for first watch, Captain.”
 

Tejohn settled onto his bedroll. It had felt odd to tell that story, but good, too, like correcting an old mistake. He should have trusted these two soldiers sooner. He should have been kinder.