Wartorn: Resurrection

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-blase 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.