The Widow's House

Entr’acte Captain Karol Dannien

The mountains in the north of Elassae were black crags. The great slabs of stone lay one against the other like some titanic act of violence had been petrified mid-cataclysm. They channeled even the gentlest wind into howling gusts that came from any direction, or all of them. There were just enough wild goats surviving on the low grey scrub to attract a healthy population of mountain lions. The tracks and paths through the sharp valleys were challenging for pack mules, and anything wheeled was worse than useless. The water tasted sharp and mineral.

Karol Dannien had fought in the flatlands of the Keshet and at the Bloody Gate of Lôdi, the swamps south of Kaltfel and the iced-in harbors of Hallskar. In almost thirty years of paid violence, only the Dry Wastes had been a less hospitable stretch of land and worse ground for a battle of any size. But God hadn’t asked his opinion, and so there it was.

The aftermath was mostly confined to a pair of slightly less steep inclines. The Anteans, spurred on by the shouting and hectoring of their priests, had charged the high ground, and Karol had had his men roll rocks down at them to break their ranks, following with a charge of his own. It had worked, but it hadn’t been anything like pretty. The first clash had come just after dawn, and Karol’s men were still hunting down the last of the fleeing Anteans when dark came on. He wasn’t worried about a counterattack. The mountain lions could pick up the slops for all he cared. Probably be a nice change from goat meat.

Cep Bailan, his second this godawful endless campaign, stepped out of his tent and stretched his arms out to the sky like the Haaverkin was gathering the whole world to his fat, tattooed belly. Karol hunched deeper into his coat.

“Heat’s finally breaking,” Cep said. “And past time for it.”

“You’re too far south. Your kind should stay north of Sarakal.”

“That’s only true,” Cep said and slapped his massive chest. “But sometimes you sad little bastards need our help.”

Karol sighed. Cep was a brilliant man in a fight and a good leader before a battle, but the long months in the dark halls of Kiaria had been too long in close company. Every night had ended in another volley of insults and crudeness, and after a half season in the dark hearing the man rain abuse on Karol’s imagined mother, sisters, and lovers, it was hard not to think some of the joking had teeth.

“Do we have to do the first part again?” Cep asked, plodding after Karol. “I don’t know why you do this. It isn’t like they don’t know they’re hurt. Not like you’re going to tell them anything different.”

“They’re my men,” Karol said.

“If you need to keep saying it, it starts not sounding true,” Cep said. Karol promised himself for the thousandth time that he’d never work with a Haaverkin again. “You go on ahead. I’ll meet you with the prisoners. The men don’t like it when I see them injured.”

“You laugh at them.”

“They’re funny.”

“Go be sure Chaars has enough men to set up a watch.”

Cep scowled, the tattoos on his face warping. He stamped off down the incline, intentionally making his way across the paths of the black-chitined Timzinae soldiers still carrying the wounded and the dying from the battlefield. Karol sighed. The man truly was a child. But he was good at being sure the other side fell and his own didn’t, and that forgave a lot.

The cunning man’s tent was overfull, and the soldiers had started lining the wounded on the rough ground outside it. The low chanting and uncomfortable weight of the air that felt like the oppressive hour before a thunderstorm were familiar enough. Someone was on the edge of death, and they were trying to coax him back for another chance at living, at least until the next fight. Karol went down the line of wounded men, smiling at each, telling them they’d done a good job, making light of the wounds they’d suffered and encouraging them to laugh through their pain. And in the back of his mind, a small quiet voice made evaluations. Dead. Crippled. Will recover. Won’t recover. Dead. Dead.

Most of them were Timzinae—likely ten out of every dozen—but here and there a Tralgu or a Jasuru lay in the dirt alongside them. Karol himself was one of the only Firstbloods, and he could feel an exception being made for him. Yes, he was like the Anteans, but he was different. He was their Firstblood. He was all right.

He paused by a young Timzinae boy he remembered from his calmer days when he’d been running the gymnasium in Suddapal. Another attempt at retirement that hadn’t gone well. The leather-bound hilt of a great knife protruded from the boy’s belly, and blood soaked his sides. The nictatating membranes covering his eyes were locked closed, but his eyelids were open, giving him the eerie aspect of being both seeing the world and not. It took Karol a moment to place the boy’s name.

“Caught a memento there, Salan,” the mercenary captain said.

Salan forced a smile. There was blood on his teeth, and his breath came in gasps. “A good knife.”

“Looks it,” Karol said, kneeling beside the boy and making a show of considering the blood-soaked hilt. “Fine workmanship. Take care of it, and you’ll get a lot of years out of a blade like that.” Might recover, he thought. Might be dead already.

“Wish it was someplace else,” Salan said. “Like to take it out.”

“No, that’s not true. You keep that right where it is until the cunning man gets to you.”

“Hurts though.”

“Knife doesn’t hurt,” Karol said. “It’s the damned hole that hurts. As soon as that steel stopped cutting you, it started holding your blood in. I can’t tell you how many men I’ve seen who would have been fine pluck out a weapon like that and bleed to death instead. Taking it out’s a damned sight more dangerous than putting it in.”

Salan nodded and put his black hands around the wound, as if promising not to let anyone take the knife out of him. Karol nodded and clapped the boy’s knee.

“Did we win?” Salan asked as Karol stood.

“Hell yes, we did,” Karol said, glad that he didn’t have to lie to say it. “You just stay there and wait your turn. And don’t get impatient. We don’t rush the cunning men for pinpricks and scrapes.”

“Be all right with me if they rushed a little, sir.”

“I’ll mention it to them,” Karol said with a smile. Probably live, he decided. Probably.

Before setting up shop in Suddapal, Karol had worked with perhaps half a dozen Timzinae. A couple years of garrison work in Maccia and Nus. A Kesheti prince named Unlil Soyam who’d hired his company to hold the left flank in a massive honor battle. A brief partnership with Sanis Sorianian before she’d retired. That Suddapal was a center of the Timzinae race hadn’t been a point for or against it. He’d decided to settle there in the end more for the coffee than the races that made up the fivefold city. The last year hunkering down in the vastness of Kiaria had given him a deeper respect for them. In the deepness and dark of the stronghold, the Timzinae fighters had been thoughtful and professional and no less disciplined than a Firstblood troop.

There were always incidents, but the commander of the siege had treated them with courtesy and respect. All in all, it had left him feeling better about roaches as a people. Not that he’d stopped thinking of them as roaches, but they made jokes about Firstbloods barely being civilized enough to take their pants down when they pissed. That kind of joking was all in fun, after all. And kinder than half the shit that spilled out of Cep Bailan’s fat mouth.

All in all, Karol’s time with the Timzinae made the part that came next that much more pleasant for him.

Most of the prisoners were disarmed, stripped, and tied neck to neck by a Jasuru Karol had worked with a time or three who had almost certainly been a slaver at some point in her career. The knots were tight enough on them that too much struggle kept the blood from their heads but didn’t outright kill them. It was a pretty piece of ropecraft. The great prize was in a little shack they’d put up for the purpose. And the priests—there’d been two of the bastards—were already char and meat on the fire.

Karol entered the shack and nodded to the guards. They each made their salute and left. A small tin lantern hung from the roof, though there was more light leaking through between the boards than the flame provided. The prisoner was on his knees and naked as a babe newborn. His arms were bound behind him, and his ankles as well to keep him from standing. He was shivering, maybe from cold, maybe from shock. Hard to say. Somewhere along the line, someone had thrown an elbow across the man’s nose and splashed it over until the tip pointed off to the right somewhere. Blood and spit soaked the ornate mustache, and deep bruises mottled the man’s arms and legs. Karol sat on a three-legged stool.

“Well,” Karol said. “Here’s a turn, eh? Fallon Broot, yeah?”

The prisoner’s gaze swam up to him, floated for a moment, and the man nodded. Karol nodded back.

“Yeah, I remember you. You’d not recall me, I wouldn’t think. Not sure we ever met to speak to. I was in Camnipol… Lord, years ago. Around the time of that unpleasantness in Anninfort. There was a thing, eh? Believe I saw your manor house. It had the… the little grey tower? Yeah? On the eastern side.”

Broot’s nod started slowly and then had a hard time stopping.

“Nice place,” Karol said. “Not as showy as some of the others, but dignified. I liked it.”

“My thanks.”

“Come up in the world since then, though, haven’t you? Protector of Suddapal. There’s a hell of title. Whole city under your protection. Or five, I suppose. Depending how you count it.”

“I serve… Severed Throne.”

“Course you do, course you do. Thing is, I don’t. My plan, just between us, was never to serve anyone in particular again. Train younger men, send them off to fight. That was my angle. It was your people brought the fight to me.”

Broot struggled to breathe through his broken nose, coughed, and spat out a huge dark clot of blood. It lay on the dirt, a red so dark it approached blackness, shining wet in the candlelight. The prisoner didn’t speak.

“Truth is I came to like Suddapal. And Antea? Well, I didn’t used to have much against it, but it’s gone out of its way to complicate my daily life. Killed a fair number of my friends, besides. Took their babies to prison back in Camnipol. Put good men and women didn’t have anything to do with any conspiracy one way or the other into chains. That just seemed mean, now. Didn’t it to you?”

“I…”

“And them priests you’ve got? They’re some kind of Kesheti cunning men, ain’t they? Way I heard it, they got poisoned voices or some such. Get in a man’s head and just spin it all around.”

“Blessed,” Broot said, “of the goddess.”

“Never much held with that sort of thing myself,” Karol said, taking a pipe and a pouch from his belt. “Tobacco? It’s stale as dirt, but it’s what I have.”

Broot didn’t say no, so Karol lit the bowl, drew on it until the smoke was as rich as the thin leaves would allow, and then placed the stem of it between Broot’s abused lips. The prisoner breathed in and out through his mouth, the smoke curling up around his face. Karol smiled and took the pipe back.

“Now, Lord Protector. Why don’t we talk a bit about the city we’re both so fond of, eh? Seems like the forces there must be mighty thin to have the man in charge of the place leading the forces in the field. Or was it just that you felt all cocksure and glory-hungry?”

Broot swallowed. Karol took a small, thin knife out and started cleaning the dead tobacco from the bowl.

“All right,” Karol said. “Better if I’m specific, then. How many men do you have defending the city, and how are they deployed?”

Broot rolled his jaw, stretched his thick neck. His gaze came up to meet Karol’s. The white of his left eye was all bloody red. Karol tamped in a fresh wad of leaf and lit it, knowing before the prisoner spoke the sense of what he would say, if not the precise words.

“I will never betray my men,” the prisoner said. “And you will never defeat the Lord Regent.”

Karol took a long, slow draw on the pipe, nodding thoughtfully, then took the small cleaning knife and the pipe of burning tobacco, one in each hand, leaned forward, and did something terrible.

It took a few minutes for Broot’s breath to slow. The screaming turned to a long, high whine broken only by the ragged gasps when he drew in breath. His cheek and shoulder were pressed against the ground, and bits of dirt stuck to his eyelid. The ropes dug into his neck and his face darkened with blood, but not so much as to kill him or let him pass out.

Karol threw the ruined pipe to the corner and leaned back on his stool. “Truth is, I don’t greatly care whether you tell me. Do or don’t, I’m still taking that city back, and all the ghost tales you’d care to tell about your great and powerful Lord Regent don’t mean piss t’me.”

The whine shuddered. Karol sat forward with a sigh and wrenched Broot back up to squatting. He ran a finger along the rope around the prisoner’s neck, putting enough slack in it that the blood could flow again.

“You got any brothers or sisters? Children?” Karol asked, his tone conversational. “I got a brother lives in Daun. No children I know of, so I call it none. I’m guessing you’ve got some family back in Antea. Hell, maybe even a lover on the side. Friends. Favorite dogs. What my father used to tell me, whatever a man loves, that’s what you grab him by. Not a kind man, my father, but not a stupid one either.”

Broot was weeping now, snot and blood running out his ruined nose. His eyes were pressed closed. There was fresh blood on his belly.

“Here’s what you can do for me,” Karol said, his voice losing its false gentleness. “You picture them. All of them. And you picture everything you’ve done to the people under your fucking protection happening to them. Because when I am done with you, we will roll back every step you bastards took to get here. All the way back to Camnipol. I will find that little grey tower again, and I will bring every soldier I’ve got that’s lost a son or a mother or any loved thing along with me. And you think right now on how that day’s going to be.”

“Please…” Broot said, and then didn’t go on.

“We’ll have back for every last thing you broke. Every child you took. Every slaveman’s lash. All of it,” Karol said between clenched teeth. “And we’ll show your Geder Palliako what war looks like when he isn’t winning.”