Wartorn: Resurrection

RASTAC (1)

DO THE SMART thing first. Next, the most economical thing. Then, the safest, the most self-fulfilling, and the thing that will most confuse your enemies, in that order. Failing everything, do the stupid thing.

These Isthmusers were as amusing as they were annoying. It was an orphan culture, after all. The Isthmus knew no indigenous human life. This land was merely a bridge between Southsoil and Northland. It was narrow strip of dirt abutted by a poisonous sea on one side and an unapproachable, coral-thick coast on the other. It should never have been settled. It was a road, not a destination.

As historical happenstance would have it, though, the Great Upheavals had rendered the Isthmus useless as a trade route. It wasn't that anything had happened to this miserable belt of land. No. Rather, the once mighty dominions of the two continents were no more, and thus the prosperous trade between them was finished. A Southsoiler had no need to go far north anymore; and as for the Northlanders, they were all barbarians now, too busy fighting cheap tribal wars amongst themselves to worry about the Isthmus or the Southern Continent beyond.

There was no profit in a Northland war. Those people had devolved into such depravity that they fought for honor, accolades, and the revered names of their warlords. Worthless reasons to fight.

Radstac fought, yes, but she fought for appropriate causes. One cause, actually. Herself.

The bodies were mounds. They stank, and they stirred feebly beneath blankets. The coverings weren't for warmth. It was still just barely summertime, but even here on the Isthmus, north of the perpetually gentle climes of the Southsoil, it remained quite temperate. The blankets were thick, black, and they cut the meager seeping sunlight that found its way through chinks in the cheap planks of the walls. The bodies under there, rolling in their own filth, were hiding from that light, from all light, from anything that would illuminate—and therefore remind them of— reality.

Radstac didn't spend time under blankets. She felt nothing, neither pity nor revulsion, for the marginally human creatures that had reduced themselves to such states. Addictions had to be chosen carefully, but there was rarely anyone to guide neophyte users. Normally they fell helplessly and randomly into their habits, and there they stayed, their physical existences turning to shit while their souls soared in glorious narcotic realms.

It ended in death, sure. What didn't?

Radstac didn't hide her leather armor and scarred bracers beneath a cloak. The accoutrements of her trade she displayed—not proudly, practically. Being a mercenary didn't begin and end with the talent and willingness to fight. Hardly. You had to hustle yourself. Someone had to hire you. For that they had to know you existed.

The durable leather about her upper body was marked by past blows that had landed on her. That she was still walking around inside the armor was something she wanted to advertise. She also wore dark leggings and kid-skin boots, a small, wickedly honed blade nestled in each, inside oiled sheaths, hidden from view. On her left hand she wore a black glove, more leather. It was a snug fit, customized by a superb Southsoil specialist. It had cost her more than a few coppers, but for the use she'd gotten out of it, it had proven to be a bargain. It weighed heavily, but she was very used to its heft. Used to the feel of the small gears and sockets beneath the leather surface.

On her belt she carried no weapon. Petgrad, this Isthmus city she'd come to, didn't forbid its citizens or visitors to carry arms, but the local police made a point of harassing those who did, particularly something like the heavy combat sword she favored. She had checked the sword at the Public Armory, a

civilized amenity only a city-state the size of Petgrad could offer.

Radstac had to admit the city was fairly sophisticated. It was large, well-maintained, its economy stable. It provided a health service for its citizenry, had a respectable standing military. The people weren't especially oppressed. A typical worker could live a decent life of reasonable years. By Isthmus standards, then, this was the pinnacle of culture.

Cities, of course, were bigger and better back home. Radstac's home, specifically, was the Republic of Dilloqi, located in the northern part of Southsoil. Dilloqi, a real nation, and the city of her birth, Hynсsy ... beautiful. Proud. Important. With an eminent history to back up its boasts.

That Dilloqi was in truth a splintered relic of the erstwhile Southsoil empire wasn't anything that needed to be dwelt upon. Dilloqi had resurrected itself from the ruins of the Great Upheavals, as had other lands of the Southern Continent. They abided now independently of each other. This wasn't the first time Radstac had journeyed northward to the Isthmus to sell her sword. The Isthmus was a fairly reliable source of petty hostilities between individual city-states. They bickered about farmland; they wrangled about the use of roads. They blustered and fussed and made ultimatums, and eventually they provided the wars that Radstac lived on—at least for a while. Conflicts played themselves out in rather short order here. No Isthmus state had the resources to wage sustained warfare.

That, it seemed, had changed.

The prepubescent boy, who had the overused look of a rental about him, led her deeper into the waste-smelling lair. He had appeared from the air when she stepped into the doorway of this establishment, the barest glint of silver showing in her palm.

She had surrendered one silver to the boy, who made the coin disappear the instant it touched his tiny fingers. She still held another in her palm and had more money in pouches no pickpocket would ever find.

Her eyes had virtually no color, just a tint of pale yellow to the irises. Those eyes, small in a twice-scarred face, roved her surroundings without appearing to move. Her bronze-colored features were what men would call handsome, rather than pretty. Not that she lost sleep wondering what men thought of her looks. Her hair was the red of rotting berries and hacked short. Another scar was visible across the rear of her skull, a line of white in the red.

It had cut through her helmet, a blow from a hulking swordsman, a death stroke. She had tumbled over the battlefield ground, rolling back onto her feet, and everything she saw then was a roaring blackness ... everything except the face of the giant as he clomped toward her. She had snatched a throwing knife from one of her boots and launched it. It entered his gaping mouth, skewered his tongue, and poked its barbed tip out of the back of his throat. She'd never learned who had carried her away from that field. She had woken in a surgeon's tent, her scalp being sewn.

No beds, no aisles, just mounds. The boy picked his zigzagging way nimbly, into darkness that now only hinted at the human shapes on the floor. She was alert.

One stirring heap, on her right, blanket rocking back and forth, rhythmically, too steadily—a step away, the boy passing it...

She pivoted. One boot heel came down on the right upper arm, just above the elbow. She drove the toe of her other boot into the mound's side, a toe reinforced by a wedge of iron under the kidskin. A rib broke under the blanket.

If it was just another mud-brained addict, the proprietors wouldn't care.

In the dark, low and ahead, she heard, "No sword." Which the hisser evidently thought meant she was weaponless. So be it.

She delivered another kick, one that would immobilize the lungs for a while, and hopped off. She caught only the vaguest glimpse of the boy vanishing, but where he'd been there was now a charging figure. Blade in fist.

Brute attack. It might have worked in the daylight, where the victim would see the armed shape looming and lunging and then freeze in fear. It might have worked here, in this stinking dimness, against someone who didn't have a decade of combat experience.

She snapped her left hand outward, fingers stiff and spread. The sound of sliding metal rang on the

foul air. The weight of her glove was redistributed.

Her right hand jabbed forward and punched the hand that held the knife, a hard painful shot, distracting the charger. But it was her left hand, of course, darting and singing a few thin notes of metallic mayhem as it shot through the air, that did the job. The two prongs—fine, solid, as sharp as anything she ever carried—were extended from the back of her fist. They each tore away a patch of her attacker's face. She did all this during another pivot that got her out of the way of the pouncing, bleeding, screaming figure that hurtled past and onto several of the mounds.

Into a crouch, sinewy legs splayed. Her hooks dribbled. The figure under the blanket to her right was gasping in excruciating pain.

Noises ahead still. The one who'd hissed 'Wo sword." Maybe there were others. Her charger was still screaming on the floor behind her, high-pitched, sounding nearly insane. She must have hit an eye. Stupid Isthmuser.

Her right hand flipped a blade up from her boot. It was a flat, thin slab of hammered metal, with no hilt. Made for throwing. Her fingers balanced it. She was holding her breath, listening to the dark, waiting to see what followed.

The boy reappeared, a little grey smudge in the robe he wore, a smooth face that would be inscrutable even in the best light. In some other part of the cavernous room foot-steps retreated, stumbling. The mounds, even those the charger had blundered onto, remained silent, making only their irregular twitches and jerks.

Radstac slotted the throwing knife back into her boot, but kept her glove's prongs extended. The specialist who had made the contraption had lived in a village nearby her home city of Hynсsy. He was a middle-yeared man, and he was dying, consumed from within by a corruption that ate the meat of him, leaving him a sack of yellowing flesh. He couldn't move about without the assistance of others, and so chose to rarely move from the worktable where he had invented her glove. She had envisioned the device, had struggled to explain it. It had, after all, come to her in a violently vivid dream of combat and so wavered in her mind.

The man had listened, eyes serene and protruding from a shriveling face. She talked, describing the imagined weapon she wanted this man to make. Every time she ran out of words, he made her carry on, until she was hoarse, until her vision of the dream device smeared into nonsense. Then he took her money, sent her away, called her back on the day he had promised to, and presented her with the glove. She had stayed on in that quaint little village for the two additional days the man needed to die. She wanted to attend the funeral rite. She had also entered his house by night to satisfy herself that nothing about the glove's workings had been committed to paper. She needn't have worried. The craftsman had never drawn a design in his life.

Radstac stared at the boy's dim outlines, letting herself breathe again, the breaths even and calm. She nodded and, leaving the blood-wet prongs extended, followed him farther.

SHE HAD DONE the smart thing by coming north for this war. She was a mercenary, and here was a great opportunity for work. The economical thing—next on her list of personal statutes—would be to find herself inexpensive lodgings. That could wait a watch or two, though.

She peeled the gummy, deep blue leaf away from its wax paper, bit away a third of it, and returned the rest to a secret pocket beneath her leather armor. The initial sensation was a profound ache in her teeth. Addicts—the truly lost ones, like those living underneath blankets in that users' den—had their teeth professionally removed or worried them out themselves one by one. They sucked their mansid leaves, occasionally gummed food, and avoided the light.

Weaklings.

Radstac clamped her molars together as the discomfort peaked and passed. She paused to lean on a wall, propping herself carefully, staying on her feet as the wave of gravity struck. She was pulled, compressed, elongated, resettled. Like the ache to her teeth, it passed. Equilibrium restored. Improved.

The street around her started to make sense.

She pushed off, walking her prowling walk. Petgrad was well populated, and its streets didn't seem to

tire. Some distance ahead, towers loomed. Squared shafts of stone and mortar, capped with decorative top pieces of metal. They were impressive, she admitted. No point in denigrating this city unnecessarily. She was here to sell her sword. With luck, she would soon be defending this place against... who was it? ... Yes, the Felk.

They were the aggressors in this; so went the news that the traders had brought back to the Southsoil. Radstac preferred fighting on the side of the antagonist, but here that was impractical. The city-state of Felk—and even the newly captured Felk territories—were simply out of easy reach. She had come to Petgrad by buying her way onto a wagon of like-minded Southsoil mercenaries who'd heard the sweet call of war. She'd made no friends during her travels, though one night she had fairly raped the wagon's hired driver, a bashful blond lad who'd shed his trousers at knifepoint, then done everything else quite willingly—and enthusiastically.

The aroma of war was on the southerly wind. Those Felk were sweeping southward. It was war like she had never seen in her lifetime. War as the Isthmus hadn't known it for hundredwinters, if ever. No feud this, no petty strife. The Felk had absolute conquest in mind. Any fool could see that.

She wasn't deterred by the panicky stories circulating about the Felk using wizardry to aid them in their campaigns. Magic was not feared on the Southsoil, though its practitioners were highly rare. After the Great Upheavals, wizards, once quite visible as healers, retreated into hermetic cloisters.

She had of course retracted her hooks into her leather glove, after wiping them meticulously clean. She had once fouled the tiny gears with blood. It hadn't happened since.

Most narcotics were not illegal in Isthmus cities. Substances were declared unlawful only when those in positions of power wished to profit from their distribution exclusively.

Radstac could have purchased her mansid leaves in the market. Could have laid out twice the silver for the three leaves she'd gotten at that fetid lair, paying the merchant's licensing tax for him. But the quality would have been mediocre. She didn't need to actually sample any of these legitimate leaves to know this. It was the way of things. Drag dens, like the one she'd visited, depended on the return business of addicts; addicts, having built up inhuman tolerances to every recreational poison in existence, required the highest potency. Thus, better profits were made by the lairs' proprietors—who got their product through the black market—than by licensed merchants in the marketplace.

Ah ... and it was fine stuff, she thought, still chewing the blue leaf. Clarity, clarity. The sense of things, unfolding all around her now.

As she walked, she didn't examine that thought that surfaced, that nagging one ... the one that said she only came north to the Isthmus because only here could she find leaves of this quality. After all, the mansid that the narcotic traders brought back to the Southsoil at the end of every summer were dry, stale, their potency gone. Mansid leaves did not grow anywhere but on the Isthmus.

The thought didn't last long. She turned off the street, into a pub. She ordered tea and took a table. Spirits were for weak people looking to be strong by killing those perceptions in themselves that proved, day after repetitive day, that they were powerless. She did not drink. Wine and the like provided an illusion of clarity, when in truth clarity receded with every sip, until everything became a false comforting lullaby.

The pub was fairly crowded, and that crowd was talkative. Radstac listened.

The landlord apparently didn't care for her taking up a valuable seat while drinking only her single cup of tea, which she nursed nearly an entire watch. When she finally grew tired of his malevolent glares, she crooked her finger at him, put her head close to his, and told him that blood that spurted from a suddenly opened heart was much darker than what one saw when, say, a face was sliced

wide. Then she smiled, which she knew was her most unnerving expression. The man hadn't come near her since.

In the meantime the effects of the small bite of the mansid leaf had mostly worn off. As with everything else about the narcotic, she handled the comedown ably.

"U'delph is a story. Something to frighten children. It makes no sense." The overdressed merchant sported ridiculous, elaborate facial hair—shaved here, waxed to points there. Must have taken him the better part of his morning to put his face together, and he was still old and ugly, despite the fine clothes.

Actually, Radstac thought, most of this pub's clientele looked to be on the affluent side.

Radstac had listened to the talk. It was dismaying. It was intentional blindness, not to see what was so surely coming. Sook was doubtlessly the next target for the Felk. It would put them one more city-state closer to Petgrad, though still some distance away.

"It's reliable news," said a man in a grey cowl. His voice was strong but neutral. Radstac hadn't been able to get a good look at his face, but his body was firm, and he moved in a way that spoke of sword training.

"Reliable." The merchant made it a contemptible word. "What does that mean?"

"It means credible, believable, trustworthy." His tone was as flat as before. The effect was droll, and a few titters rose among the assembled drinkers. A pair planted in one corner was playing a round of Dashes—one of those juvenile Isthmuser games of chance—as if to emphasize then-blasé attitudes.

The merchant's face moved in a way that caused the points of his mustache to sneer. "I know the definition, lad." Half to himself he muttered, "By the sanity of the gods, when I was a youth, we didn't handle our elders so." He took a swallow of beer, fixed the younger man again with scornful eyes. "What I question is the degree of credibility, believability ... and trustworthiness."

It hung there for a heartbeat, like a challenge.

"I don't bring the news personally," the hooded man said, utterly unruffled. "I comment on news we've all heard. Everyone, here in the city."

"To hear rumor and tradespeople's gossip is not to hear truth." The merchant pronounced this like he was quoting a verse of sacred wisdom.

Something flared red in Radstac's almost colorless eyes.

"And to spew shit like that," she said, a low growl that carried into every corner of the place, "is to say nothing."

She had sat still and quiet for quite some time now. She had come into this reasonably posh pub specifically to take the pulse of these merchants—these people who had much to lose if Petgrad were invaded and captured by the Felk. And now had heard enough.

Every head turned, including the one under the cowl.

Radstac pushed off her seat, standing, finally allowing her pent-up contempt to show on her scarred features.

"I can't make up my mind if you're all ignorant, out-right stupid, or just cowards."

"Now that's—" It was the landlord, lumbering over, not about to let her go on insulting his spending customers.

She whirled, reached out over the bartop, clamped his knobby pink nose between her thumb and a knuckle of her forefinger and twisted. He yelped, then disappeared below the level of the serving counter. If he rose with a weapon, she would know it before the top of his head came back into view.

She wasn't done addressing the assembly, and they were all still staring. Some had the good sense to look scared.

"The war news comes. You all hear it. It washes down from the north, no different than news of crop failures in other cities—stories you place great faith in, seeing how there's a potential for profit there for some of you. You know what you hear of the Felk is true. You know this war is categorically different from those you've known in the past. Different from those your grandmothers and grandfathers knew. This is a war beyond the scope of you childish Isthmusers. And yet it's real. And it's coming this way. Frightens you, doesn't it? Petrifies you. Because by the time the Felk reach here, they'll have absorbed the man-power and resources of gods know how many city-states. You'll be calling it the Felk Empire by then. And they've got magic on their side, and that's maybe most terrifying of all to you. They'll be unstoppable. Certainly more than a match for your army as it now stands. And you—you people of some wealth, maybe of some rank and power— what do you do? Sit on your asses, swill beer, and reassure yourselves that the danger doesn't exist. Stories for children you said, you pathetic fop?"

She might have spat then, might have hurled her cup into the faces turned her way. But her tirade had done nothing but make her disgust rise to a boil. They were still staring, still in shock. It was a fair guess that these merchants and landowners weren't often spoken to in this manner.

The landlord with the tweaked nose stayed out of sight as she marched out of the pub, using the exit that led to the latrine.

Evening had settled over Petgrad while she'd wasted time in the pub. Late summer light grew paler. High clouds were discussing the possibility of rain. Still, autumn was very near, maybe already here. It might be a winter war, depending on how long it lasted.

Insects buzzed out of her way as she emerged from the latrine stall.

She heard footsteps—someone not trying to move stealthily, someone waiting to use the pisser... or waiting for her.

He was turned from the spray of waning sunlight that spattered down into this unroofed nook alongside the pub. The grey hood showed only a solid jaw, the suggestion of lips twisted into something resembling a smile. He stood well, balanced so as to move in any direction, though the stance would appear entirely casual to a citizen's glance.

"The barkeeper asked me to see if you would give him his nose back."

"I dropped it in there. There's a hole in the floor, and it doesn't smell good down there."

"Well, Noseless Solly isn't such a bad moniker."

"Are we going to fight, fuck, or are you going to show me that face, you've been hiding and explain what you want from me?"

She smiled, that same disquieting expression.

He raised his hands, rolled the cowl off his face, and returned the smile. His was quite disarming. His face was what women would call rugged, not handsome. They stared a moment.

The moment lingered.

THE RUGGEDNESS OF his features, which offered soft bewitching blue eyes among hard planes and heavy bones, extended to his body as well. A solid physique, lean but wiry. Snaky muscles that coiled. Dueler's scars on the upper arms. Roughened hands.

Radstac liked how those rough hands handled her. She liked that Deo—so he gave her for his name—enjoyed being handled back. Males who imagined they were the unquestioned orchestrators of sex were the most tedious of partners ... unless they changed their attitudes under her not especially gentle ministrations.

Deo had brought her to this opulent room. Carpeted floors, frivolous and costly looking art on the walls. A monstrously big bed. They had made use of its entire surface.

He wasn't, evidently, a postcoital cuddler. She was glad of that. Being nuzzled and having useless declarations murmured at her once the event had... uncorked—so the

expression went—was irritating enough sometimes to cancel out the pleasure of the whole incident.

Neither, though, was Deo one of those that fled the scene immediately afterward—or, in this case, one that would evict her without delay. Instead, he climbed from the bed, stretched his naked body, pulling taut muscles even tighter, and padded over pale carpeting to a circular stone table where several colored bottles stood.

"What would make you happy?" His fingers lifted a varnished wood cup.

"Water."

He didn't give her a look, poured it, poured something dark purple for himself, and returned to the bed.

She took the cup and swallowed. She guessed him to be about her age, just at the start of his fourth tenwinter. His years hadn't been pampered; so his body attested. This room pointed to wealth, but he wasn't swollen and lazy. Wasn't like those wretched merchants in the pub, too afraid to even consider the possibility that their comfortable positions might be in jeopardy.

Deo had spoken against that one merchant, the one with the face hair. Well, maybe hadn't spoken against; more, he had acknowledged the legitimacy of the war news from the north. She had learned in that pub that Petgrad's military, despite the threat of the Felk, hadn't even been mobilized. Apparently this whole city was under a spell of obliviousness. It was infuriating, not the least because it was going to make it hard for her to find work here. She might have to push on farther north.

"Do you object to the word mercenary ... or should I find another?" Deo asked.

"It's a perfectly fine word. I can never get sell-sword past my lips without lisping it."

He drank. She could smell it. Something alcoholic, but it didn't reek; an undertone of berries to it.

"You've seen more than one campaign."

"And you've outlived a duel or two."

He looked at her scars; some were more dramatic than others. She looked at his, tiny white stripes across his sleek, hard arms. She never minded anyone looking. Some got terribly aroused by the sight of her mistreated flesh. Once one of this particular ilk had turned dangerous. He would never be so again.

Her clothes—everything, armor, boots, her leather glove and its hooks—were scattered from the doorway to the foot of the bed, along with Deo's cowl and underclothing. No weapons in reach. This didn't bother her.

Staying here in the city would be the safe thing to do. That was an article of her personal code, the rules she had devised, the rules that her particular life had taught her. They wouldn't work for others. Most people didn't pay enough attention to their lives, didn't try to understand the sense; they just muddled along, not even aware enough to see how easily it could end. How quickly. How simply.

She sipped more water. It was purer even than the relatively clean supply in the public cisterns. She stretched her supine body on the immensely soft bed, hearing a vertebra pop.

"I like that. The smile. The real one."

She floated her eyes toward him. Do the safe thing. The safe thing was to stay in Petgrad and wait until someone purchased her services. Striking north now was risky. So was crossing over to the Felk side to sell her sword. The Felk didn't need mercenaries, not at this point, not after they'd absorbed substantial troop numbers from their earlier conquests.

"I wasn't aware I was smiling," she said.

"Exactly. I also like your accent."

"We don't have accents. You do."

"Fair enough. It's very subtle. I've met Southsoilers, a lot of them. I've always wanted to hire one as a storyteller, just to hear that enunciation. Wouldn't matter in the least what the story was."

"Must be amusing to be able to afford a ... storyteller."

"Said I wanted to hire one. Didn't say I had the money."

This wordplay was, she thought, almost as enjoyable as the sex. How odd that was. And how fantastically rare. Good lovers almost never made good conversationalists. Deo drank more of his purple drink, lounging back on a few of the bed's abundant pillows.

"What is the matter with these people?" she asked, as if picking up a thread of conversation from earlier. "Those merchants in that pub... don't they realize a Felk onslaught is inevitable?"

"Do you actually think resistance could be successful?"

"I don't know. I don't make it my business to know. I don't hire myself out as an officer or a strategist. I'm a fighter. Personally, I'm quite successful."

"Always pick the winning side?"

Her barking laugh was, she knew, something like her normal smile—disconcerting.

"Hardly," she said. "But wars don't go on until every last soldier is slain. One head of state or the other surrenders or capitulates to terms, usually well before the slaughter gets irreversibly messy. I fight for whichever side hires me. I fight well. I fight till someone says stop. I don't win the wars or lose them. I participate."

His laugh was much warmer than hers. His blue eyes moved over her body again, not lingering on the scars.

"Everyone's afraid," Deo said. "Yes. Everyone. It's war, but it's not war that we recognize. You pointed that out yourself, rather articulately I thought."

"I thought so as well."

"I was in disguise at that pub for the same reason you were there—to sound out the views of the people. I've been doing it a lot lately and keep encountering the same thing."

"How can that be?"

"The people have good Uves here in Petgrad. We've had generations of reasonable prosperity. We like things stable, grounded. Why upset a good thing? This war, these Felk... they'll upset it. Most certainly. But the people won't face it."

"So"—her hand glided out, her finger tracing a vein along his firm shoulder—"I've wasted a journey here."

"Wasted?" He gave her a wry, mock-injured look.

"An unhired mercenary is somebody walking about with a sword and nowhere to stick it."

"Where is your sword?"

"Public Armory." She felt a yawn overtake her. The bed was ethereally soft and comfortable.

"You'd better go retrieve it, then." Deo's gaze pulled her drifting eyes back open. "I wish to hire you. I should also tell you who I am."

"Someone with the money to afford a mercenary, I hope."

"Yes. That. I am also Na Niroki Deo." He hadn't expected her to recognize the full title. "I'm the nephew of the premier of Petgrad."