Tomorrow, the Killing (3 page)

Rabbit was, by contrast, basically what you’d expect in a one-time infantryman and present-day thug. A series of wooden blocks stacked atop each other, the topmost a mass of scar tissue and tattered cartilage. Beaming through that last was a smile which held firm in sunshine or storm, when cutting a throat or disposing of a body. His nickname was a product of the sort of caustic humor common in the ranks, for if ever there was a man who bore less resemblance to the gentle lapin, I had trouble imagining him.

‘What’s with the monkey suit, Lieutenant?’ he asked.

‘On Sundays your wife and I have dinner, and I like to look my best.’

Rabbit laughed, belly juggling on his sturdy frame. ‘I never married.’

‘That’s too bad. Everybody should have a wife. Then again, I suppose long years of barracks living, cheek and jowl with the creamy bud of Rigun manhood, might have given you an aversion to the fairer sex.’

Roussel started at that, mad eyes inching their way toward trouble, but Rabbit stole his thunder by laughing again, laughing and shaking his head in a friendly sort of way. ‘I forgot how funny you are, Lieutenant.’

‘Only when you’re around. Once you leave I go back to drinking myself silent. While we’re on the subject, mayhap you could enlighten me as to when exactly to expect your retreat. The bar isn’t open yet, and anyway we keep a pretty exclusive entrance policy.’

‘Come on now,’ Hroudland said. ‘We’re all soldiers.’

‘Did the High Chancellor start another war while I wasn’t looking?’ I smiled something that wasn’t that. ‘Either way, I think I’ve put in my time – which means whatever the hell you may be, Hroudland,
we
aren’t anything at all.’

This was too much for Roussel. He tightened his fingers around the hilt of the short sword he had thus far, through an astonishing act of will, managed to keep sheathed.

‘None of that,’ Hroudland said, having spent enough time with the boy-sized lunatic to know without looking he was trending towards violence. ‘The lieutenant was only joking. He likes a good joke, the lieutenant, and we like the lieutenant, so we don’t mind. The lieutenant’s a smart man, real smart – and he knows we’re looking out for him and his interests, knows without the Association to make sure the Crown played straight, they’d strip us of everything we got, and see us out in the street.’

‘I’m not sure I’m so savvy as you think.’

‘Then it’s a good thing we stopped by to educate you,’ and for the first time a hint of steel edged itself into his voice.

‘That reminds me, Hroudland. I’m behind on my dues.’ I reached into a back pocket and came out with a tarnished bit of copper, then flipped it to him. ‘That ought to cover it – in perpetuity. Don’t imagine there’ll be a need to come round again.’

Hroudland looked at it for a moment, deciding whether or not to push his play, but whatever their purpose was in coming here, it hadn’t been to start a quarrel. And anyway, between me and Adolphus he probably figured he didn’t have the brawn to chance it. So he closed his hand around the coin and put it away with a smile. ‘We weren’t here to see you, Lieutenant – that was just a happy accident. We’re here to see the chief.’ He gave Adolphus a friendly nod. ‘And the Hero of Aunis knows he’s welcome at a meeting anytime he chooses to show.’

He gestured to his boys and they followed him out. Rabbit had the same steady grin he’d worn the entire time, that he’d have continued to wear if things had gone in another, less amiable direction. Roussel looked like a child who’d dropped his sucker, sad to have lost what would likely be the day’s best chance to make something bleed.

I rolled up the cigarette I hadn’t been able to smoke at the general’s, and added in a little dreamvine for wise measure. Adolphus stood mute, his face red and anxious. For someone I had once seen break a man’s back between his hands, he had a real dread of interpersonal conflict.

‘What the fuck were they doing here?’ I asked finally.

‘Just checking in. Wanted to see what I thought about this new bill the Throne’s jammed down our throats.’

‘Is that what they told you?’

‘You don’t believe it?’

‘If Hroudland told me we’d see sun tomorrow, I’d take my winter coat out from storage.’

‘They aren’t all bad. Rabbit’s a friendly enough fellow.’

‘He get those scars being friendly?’

‘They’re soldiers,’ Adolphus said, imbuing the last word with a reverence that turned my stomach. ‘Just like us.’

‘Spare me the brothers-in-arms bullshit. They impressed a fifth of the population – you think maybe a few bad apples crept in?’

He shrugged, not wanting to argue the point, but I wasn’t willing to let it go. ‘You remember what happened the last time the Association had any power?’

This was enough to calcify his vague sense of dissent. ‘Roland Montgomery was a good man.’

‘With some bad ideas.’ It was an unfortunate coincidence that had brought him to my mind twice in the span of as many hours – or so I thought to myself at the time.

‘He was right about standing up for ourselves, not letting them take advantage of us,’ Adolphus said. ‘The Throne’s got no business trying to tax our pensions.’

The war ended and a couple of hundred thousand men were dumped unceremoniously onto the streets of Rigus. Men wounded in mind and body, lacking practical skills beyond ditch-digging and murder. Some turned to crime, more to rattling tin cups on street corners. It started to look bad, the capital choked with the broken bodies of ex-heroes. Perhaps the wiser amongst the ministers began to wonder what would happen if their one time army decided to take up their old trade – a concern stoked when Roland Montgomery founded the Veterans’ Association, in large part to convince his former comrades to do just that. Reparations were starting to come in, for once the Crown’s treasuries were flush. It seemed prudent to give some modest percentage of the Dren’s money to the men who had won it.

And thus was born the Private’s Silver, half from guilt, half from fear. A half ochre a month for every man who’d served until such time as they weren’t alive to claim it. Not enough to start a business or buy a house or feed a family. Just enough to die slowly, two to a bed in a slum tenement, out of sight of passersby. I thought it was a pretty crap exchange for what we’d given, and generally didn’t bother to go down to the tax office and claim it. But for most of my comrades it was near sacrosanct, weighed out of all proportion to its actual value.

In the grand tradition of shortsightedness, the Crown had not bothered to consider what would happen when the war indemnity ran out, as it had some years back. With our coffers near to empty, the High Chancellor had started to call for taxing the Private’s Silver as regular income, a rather impressive bit of legerdemain by which the Throne would take back with one hand what it gave with the other.

‘The government fucks people – that’s what governments do. You shouldn’t need that explained.’

Adolphus shrugged with a petulance inappropriate to his age and bulk. ‘Ain’t right that they forgot us so quick.’

‘First taxes, now time? What’s your encore? You going to track death to her lair, wrestle her into submission?’

Adolphus dipped his head warily. ‘Shouldn’t blaspheme like that. She Who Waits Behind might be listening.’

‘She’s always listening, Adolphus – and she sets her own pace.’ I trampled my cigarette into the floor. It meant work for Adeline but it accentuated my point. ‘Course, you go mucking about with the Association and you might get her to double time it.’

It was as good a line as any other to end the conversation on, and besides I had a full enough day left ahead of me. I left Adolphus to consider the error of his ways, or more likely why he had chosen to go into business with a gibbering asshole, and threaded the narrow stairway up to my grim, dingy room. Once there I changed back into my regular get up, and took a spare moment to fill my skull with pixie’s breath before heading back out into the street.

T
here wasn’t any part of soldiering I had great affection for, but if you put steel to my throat I’d probably single out that period where we weren’t killing anyone as being the least horrible. It was brief, lasting only the few weeks it took to transport forty thousand men from Rigus to Nestria and shove weapons in our hands. And it was still an awful, awful way to spend time – lost days in the hot sun practicing movements with pike and blade, off hours listening to the chittering of the other idiots stupid enough to have enlisted. But still, it was a hell of a lot better than what came after.

We didn’t know it the morning of the Battle of Beneharnum, of course. We were all operating under the vague suspicion that having learned nothing more than to stand in a line and point our spears in the same direction, such would be all that was required. Our immediate superiors, no crack strategists themselves, encouraged this sort of thinking, indeed seemed to labor beneath it. A strange lethargy had spread through the ranks, from the officers, who drank and gambled and generally made asses of themselves, to our regimental drummer boy, who couldn’t keep a fucking one-two if our lives depended on it – which, as it turns out, they did.

I was a private back then, the lowest rung on a long fucking ladder. It wasn’t a position that much suited me. We’re all dancing on strings, but I prefer mine less visible. It’s impossible to maintain even the common pretense of free will when every drop of your energy is spent at the discretion of men you never see, who seem as far above you as the Firstborn and his siblings – albeit possessed of a good deal less wisdom.

We’d been drawn up in formation since morning, packed against each other while the artillery corps wasted small mountains of iron in a futile effort to annihilate the opposing forces. The Great War would see a dramatic expansion of the role of cannon in combat, recent industrial advances having allowed for their mass production. Of course, you could build all the culverin you wanted, didn’t mean much without anyone who knew how to aim them. It was one thing to show an illiterate peasant how to swing a piece of metal at his Dren equivalent, another to provide him with the training necessary to correctly sight ordnance. As the conflict progressed and the gunners had time to perfect their craft, cannon fire would come to be as deadly as the plague, and the whistling of shot would be enough to send a brigade of stout-hearted men diving for cover – but that day was far off. The soldiers manning our batteries seemed half-blind or fully retarded, and there was probably no safer place in Nestria than that occupied by the army some half-mile distant. For once the Dren were equally incompetent, and a solid hour passed while shot and metal shards buried themselves in the mud a few hundred yards in front of us.

If you’re hoping for a treatise on military history, you’re shit out of luck. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what it was about Beneharnum that necessitated the death of ten thousand men, why this particular stretch of earth needed to be watered with blood. I suppose it was as good a place to die as any, and I never heard a man put six feet down complain about the spot.

Certainly the officer who gave us our orders did no great job of explaining the situation. He looked the part at least, seated atop a white destrier and gesturing dramatically with his cavalry saber, though with the artillery duel going on no one could hear a word he said. I assumed he’d been exhorting us to die for Queen and Country, and though I’d never met the old bitch and wasn’t mad for what I’d seen of her kingdom, a half-hour later I nevertheless found myself in the front rank of her army, leaning against the twenty-foot spear I’d wedged into the ground and waiting to march on to death.

Next to me Adolphus was doing the same, though the sapling seemed insufficient for his bulk. In light of future events it’s tempting to imbue our early relationship with more than casual importance, but the truth is back then he was just another face in the regiment, albeit one set substantially above the rest. I didn’t know much about him and didn’t want to – it didn’t make sense to get too close to anyone, given the reasonable likelihood of their demise. You could hear the hills in his argot, a country boy grown up slinging mud or diddling cows or doing whatever the fuck farmers do, I dunno. He’d told me the first time he’d left his village was when he’d joined up, as anxious to get out of the provinces as I’d been to leave the slums.

The artillery barrage finally ended. Adolphus let a spiral of saliva fall to the ground. ‘Hell of an overture.’

‘Gorgeous,’ I responded. Tough as scrap iron, the two of us. If we hadn’t been holding our weapons you’d have seen our hands palsy.

We had good reason for it. The front row was not an ideal spot as far as safety was concerned. The rest of the line had been drawn by lots, but the two of us had volunteered, meaning we drew double pay and more importantly, by my lights, had a shot at getting noticed by the brass. I hadn’t enlisted to spend my time at the bottom of the post – I wanted to make a name for myself, and that wouldn’t happen if I spent my service cowering in the back.

Of course, my hopes for future advancement were contingent on surviving our encounter with the enemy, and as the drummer boy began to beat out an uneven rhythm I realized that was pretty fucking far from a deadlock. There were five rows of men with too much wit to take our place in the vanguard, and they fell in behind us, pikes straight in the air. Scuttling in lockstep across the battlefield, our ungainly hedgehog joined a hundred-odd others stretching out along either side of us, surely as curious a migration of bipeds as ever graced the surface of the Thirteen Lands.

Battles are often conceived of as duels between generals, a chess game played out in real time, and we pawns no more than the instrument of their designs. ‘The Twentieth took the hill,’ read the histories, a minor escapade barely warranting its single sentence. But let me tell you, if you were a member of the Twentieth you’d feel a hell of a lot different about the whole thing. ‘What hill?’ you might well find yourself asking, ‘and where the hell am I taking it?’

In the front ranks of a vast agglomeration of men, the dust from their footfalls kicking up around your eyes and the hum of their breathing drowning out any other sound, you’d be lucky to recognize the approaching incline. And that’s before you even hit the enemy, and your focus sharpens down to a pinprick. I’ve been in a lot of battles, and rarely in any of them did I have the faintest idea of what was going on. It’s enough to know there’s a man watching your back, and to spend any leftover energy watching theirs.