The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 3

Later, with the band muffled up in thickening cloud and the last of the daylight gone to a fading orange glow over the trees to the west, the march-masters set about building campfires. Tinder sparked and flared at intervals across the low open ground where the thirty-five coffles of slaves were huddled against the growing chill of night. Gerin watched the flames spring up, and counted—four, no, five of them among the slaves and another smaller one farther out where the overseer’s tents were pitched. None was close enough to cast more than the faintest radiance on the men in his coffle—a gleam here and there on a few pale, city-bred faces like Tigeth’s, the odd glint of an eye catching the light as someone turned their head. But mostly, the slaves made a rumpled and undistinguished mass of shadow in the gloom.

There was a faint, watery itching in Gerin’s eyes and throat. He felt suddenly, ineptly weak.

He forced it down. No time for that now.

Those march-masters not tasked with the fires began the lengthy business of feeding and watering their charges. They moved outward among the slaves in ones and twos, dealing out the odd casual kick or blow to open passage. The men overseeing Gerin’s coffle at least seemed in rough good humor as they went around, slopping cold stew into the shallow wooden bowls with reasonable attempts at accuracy, taking the trouble to hand out the chunks of stale bread rather than just throw them, here and there grunting the kind of gruffly soothing words you’d offer a well-behaved dog. Gerin put it down to Barat’s absence—with the troublemaker off the chain and left to rot, there’d be no more unwelcome attention from the overseers, and that had to be good. Now they could all, slaves and march-masters together, get on with the practical business of reaching journey’s end in peace.

Gerin forced down mouthfuls of the gelatinous stew, gnawed at a corner of his bread. He swallowed hard, breathed, swallowed again, and—

Abruptly, he was choking.

Choking—thrashing—flailing hard in his chains, so the manacles gouged at his wrists and ankles, and the men around him panicked back as far as their own restraints would let them. Clamor went back and forth.

“What the—”

“Look out, look out, he’s having a fi—”

“Fever! It’s the coughing fever!”

“Get him the fuck away from m—”

“Poison, poison!”

“Don’t touch the fucking food!”

“Spit it up, man. Spit it the fuck up!”

And then the new cry, the new terror. “Possessed, possessed! The Dark Court has him. Hoiran comes! Don’t let him touch you, he’ll break the chains like a—”

“Hoiran! Hoiran! Abase yourselves, it is—”

“Hoiran walks!”

“Back, get back—”

The march-masters arrived. Gerin was barely aware of them, vision torn back and forth in splinters as his neck spasmed front and side, front and side, front and side. The spittle was gathering in his throat—he coughed and spat desperately, felt it start to foam and blow on his lips. A dimly seen form stooped across him, a fist clobbered inaccurately down. The blow glanced off the side of his head. His spine arched, and he made deep snarling noises at the base of his throat. A second march-master joined the first.

“Not like that, you fucking twat. Get a grip on his—”

“Yeah, you fucking try to—”

“Just hold him still, will you!”

Someone got fully astride Gerin, tried to pin him down by the arms. He thought he recognized the march-master’s face from days earlier—hair grizzled and receding beneath a knitted wool cap, brow creased, and eyes worried. Another younger, angrier face loomed behind him and to the side. Deep in the fit and foaming, Gerin glimpsed the second man raising a fist wrapped in metallic knuckle-duster gleam. Saw the way he angled carefully for the punch. This one would break his face for sure.

Something thin and glinting whipped loosely upward in the night air, dropped down again over the younger man’s head—Gerin knew it for a length of chain. He dropped his Strov-practiced spasming like a peeled cloak, hinged furiously up against the grip on his arms, nuzzled into the older march-master’s neck like a lover.

He bit deep and hung on.

The march-master yelped and tried to smack him away. The younger man’s steel-loaded punch misfired, hit his struggling companion in the shoulder. Then the chain pulled taut, ripped him backward and tumbling away. Gerin locked his jaws on the older man’s neck, got his hands up to help the clinch. The other slaves on the coffle crowded about, prevented retreat. The march-master was bleating now, stumbling, trying to elbow a path clear. Flailing to get Gerin off him. The woolen cap got knocked askew on his balding head, then away, into the confusion. Gerin rode the struggles, felt his nose bloodied from a random blow, ignored it, ground and sliced and scissored with his teeth, worked at tearing a ragged hole in the man’s neck. Skin, sinew, tiny gobbets of shredded flesh and there, there, the tiny, wet-pulsing pipe of the artery. He spat loose, let go. The march-master staggered back, eyes wide on Gerin’s in the poor light, mouth gaping like a plea. He slapped a hand to the wound in his neck, felt the damage there, the swift pulse of his life running out over his fingers. Made a kind of moaning sound and fell over gibbering.

“Get his fucking bolt cutters! Now!”

It was the Rajal veteran, through gritted teeth as he sawed the length of chain link back and forth across the younger march-master’s throat. His fist were up and doubled about the chain in an attempt to keep the worst of the strain off his manacles—still Gerin saw how the veteran bled at the wrists from the pressure. The march-master thrashed and kicked, booted legs lashing out, trying to find purchase. But the dull metal links had sunk deep in the flesh at his throat, and his eyes bulged inhumanly large as he choked, filled with the desperate knowledge of his own death. Gerin darted in, grabbed the cutters from his belt. He wrestled with the unfamiliar angles of the tool, trying to make it bite on the edge of his ankle cuffs.

“You motherfuckers!” Heavy blow across his shoulder. “Get on the fucking ground, you piece of sh—”

Gerin staggered, did not quite go down. The third, newly arrived march-master snarled and slammed the club into him again, from the side. It put him in the dirt this time. The march-master stood over him a single hard-breathing second with club raised again—and was clawed down by the other men on the coffle before he could strike. An awful, wailing yell came up from the ground where he hit. Chained forms piled onto him.

“Cut me loose, son. Do it quick.”

It was the gaunt man, arms out-thrust. Gerin hesitated an instant, then fastened the bolt cutters on the man’s manacles. He heaved and twisted, forearms aching from the effort. For one sickening moment, he thought the cutters would not work. Then the manacle bent, and split, and tore.

“That’s it, that’s it,” the gaunt man almost crooning. “Guild-level iron, my arse. Look at that shit. Fucking skimp-shift Etterkal smiths.”

The second manacle went almost as easily, and then the gaunt man had snatched the bolt cutters from Gerin’s sweat-slick grip. He hefted them like a weapon. Gerin felt his mouth dry up.

“Come on,” the man snapped. “Hold ’em out.”

It was like his father speaking—Gerin obeyed in a daze. The gaunt man set the bolt cutters to his manacles, snapped each one open in turn with a powerful doubled crimping action. He did Gerin’s feet almost as fast, then his own. He tore off the broken cuffs, straightened up and laughed—a sudden, fierce burst of joy that had something animal about it. He clapped Gerin on the shoulder, almost flooring him again with the force of the blow.

“Fucking amazing, son. Never seen anything like that.”

Elsewhere, other men had laid hands on the other two march-masters’ bolt cutters and were now about the squabbling uncertain task of trying to free themselves or one another in the dark. The scar-faced Rajal veteran rose up, like something summoned, from the corpse of the man he’d killed. He tugged his chains loose from the red-raw gape of the march-master’s burst throat and offered them up. Gerin felt a shudder run up his spine at the sight. The veteran shook the chain impatiently.

“You two going to stand there congratulating each other all fucking night?” he growled, and nodded out across the gathered slave caravan to where the commotion was now general. “We’ve got a couple of minutes tops before someone with a sword gets here. Come on.”

Gerin followed the gesture, saw the truth of it. Dark figures waded about through the disarrayed coffles, trying to trace the source of the uproar. Most held up torches or brands pulled hurriedly from the campfires. Dim glint of blades unsheathed in their free hands.

The gaunt man set the cutters to the veteran’s manacles, broke them apart with no more effort than he’d needed before. The veteran jerked his hands impatiently free of the ruined metal, then bent and pulled each foot free of its snapped ankle cuff in turn.

Behind them, a shout split the night.

“There! Monkgrave’s coffle!”

“They’re… Get them! They’re loose! Fucking get in there and…”

Still bent over his ankle cuffs, the veteran twisted his head toward the voices. Gerin saw him grimace and nod to himself. Then he got carefully back to his feet, curled a hand around each freed wrist in turn and breathed in deeply, grunted as if surprised by something.

“You’d better get out of here,” he told the gaunt man.

“I, you, but…”

The veteran took the bolt cutters gently from him. “Go on. Take the kid, get up into that tree line quick, while you still can.”

“And you?”

The veteran gestured at the confusion around them, the other men struggling to free themselves in the dark. “Friend, if someone doesn’t buy us some more time, this is all going to be over quicker than a priest’s fuck.”

“Then I’ll stay, too.”

“You fight in the war?” the veteran asked, as gently as he’d taken the cutters.

The gaunt man hesitated. Lowered his head, shook it slowly.

“Reserved trades,” he said. “I was… I’m a blacksmith.”

The veteran nodded. “Thought it had to be something like that. Way you cut that iron. Look, there’s no shame in it. Can’t all be swinging the steel, you know, someone’s got to actually make the fucking stuff. But you got to know your specialty.”

He swung the cutters absently, feeling the weight in them. It made a sound through the air like a scythe. The blacksmith stared at him, and the veteran’s scarred features creased in something vaguely resembling a smile. He gestured with his newly acquired weapon, up to where the trees thickened toward forest.

“Go on, get moving, both of you. Head for the trees.” The smile became an awful grin. “Be right behind you.”

They turned from the lie, the impossible promise in his ruined face, and fled.

The scarred man watched them go. Yelled curses and stumbling behind him as the first of the sword-wielding march-masters kicked their way through to the scene of the revolt. His grin faded slowly out. Amid the chaos of men scrambling to be free, tugging at their chains, and screaming for cutters, he turned to face the newcomers. Two men, both wielding swords, one with a torch upraised. The veteran felt a muscle twitch, deep under the scar tissue in his face.

“You!” The first march-master saw him, lifted his torch, and peered. He pointed with his sword. “Get down on your fucking knees. Do it now.”

The veteran closed the gap with three swift paces, ignored the sword, got inside its useful reach before the march-master could grasp what was happening. He loomed over the man.

“We left them behind,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.

Moth-wing blur of motion—the bolt cutters, slashing in at head height.

The march-master staggered sideways, face torn open from the blow, one eye gone, socket caved in. The torch flew away in a splatter of sparks. The march-master made a broken howling sound, dropped his sword, and sagged to his knees. The veteran was already turning on his companion. The second man got the reverse swing of the cutters across his face as well. He fell back in fright, blood oozing from the gouges, sword clutched upright like some kind of magical ward against demons. In the fitful glow from the dropped torch, the veteran came on, snarling.

“Orders,” he said to the uncomprehending march-master, and hacked him in the head with the cutters, once, twice, until he went down. “They made us leave them.”

For a moment, he stood like a statue between his two felled adversaries. He looked around in the fitful torchlight as if just waking up.

The second of the armed march-masters was on his back, head twisted to one side, skull a ruined cup. The first was propped on his knees and one trembling arm, trying to hold his shattered face together with the other hand. Weeping, gibbering. The veteran spotted the man’s fallen sword, grunted, and let the bolt cutters fall. He took up the sword, hefted it a couple of times, then settled into a two-handed grip, whipped around and heaved it down on the injured march-master’s neck. Passable executioner’s stroke—the blade sliced spine and most of the neck, dropped the man flat to the ground. The veteran flexed, cleared the blade with drilled precision, looked down for a moment at the damage he’d done.

“We heard them screaming after us for fucking miles,” he told the man’s corpse.

More cries, the rush of something through the night air, a savage, incoherent yell. The veteran pitched about, saw the next march-master in mid-heave behind the downward slice of a morning-star mace and chain. The veteran seemed to just drift out of the way of the flail blow as if in a trance, let it come down and snag in the grassy ground. He stepped in close, like a newlywed to his bride, and swung the sword at belly height as the march-master struggled to get the morning star’s spikes back out of the ground.

“Some of them cursed us,” he grunted on the stroke.

The march-master screamed as the steel bit through leather jerkin and into the unprotected flesh beneath. The veteran hauled and sliced through, cleared the blade out under the man’s ribs at the back.

“Some,” he said conversationally, “just wept.”

Beyond the collapsing ruins of the man he’d just gutted, he faced three more torch-and-steel-equipped figures. They were holding back now, aware of the corpses of their comrades littering the ground, aware that something serious was happening here. They huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and stared.

But behind them, others were coming.

The veteran settled his grip on the sword, angled it toward the gathering march-masters, and jerked his head for them to come ahead. Torchlight painted him massive and flicker-shadowed behind the blade.

He made them a grin from his scarred and ravaged features.

“Do I look like a fucking slave to you?” he asked them.

And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.