Wartorn: Resurrection

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.