guarding, then shifted his gaze to Magic. Magic stared right back at him. Kesh had been very careful to hide his remaining string of leya, but every soldier in the cadre suspected he carried coin. Really, the ginnies had protected him. He gathered up the rest of his trifling possessions and spat to get the sour taste of bad wine out of his mouth. 'Where do I go?'
'You can leave your things here.'
'I'll keep them near me and my little guardsmen, if you please.'
'Heh, heh! Come this way. Be careful where you step.'
Twist held a rushlight that steamed off more smoke than flame. The sergeant of their cadre had opened his bedroll in the empty council house in the very village whose inhabitants had-only one night before-sought to overcharge Keshad and Zubaidit for accommodations in those same quarters. The rest of the cadre had lain down to rest on the entry porch, where they could move out quickly if need be.
It was this cadre Kesh had been absorbed into earlier that day when the mounted men had captured him on the road. They'd have killed him if he hadn't possessed that cheap tin medallion, the one he'd looted off the corpse of the man Bai had killed. But he had looted it, and so he was alive. Others weren't so fortunate.
The village was little more than a posting station with buildings strung along the road like beads. Each building was a business with an open front, an awning sheltering an entryway partly floored in earth and partly raised up as a floor of wooden planks. The strike force running ahead of Kesh's cadre had decorated these porches with the corpses of the village folk who had lived and worked within. The sight of these slack forms greeted Kesh as he and Twist trudged toward the west-facing sentry post. There was an innkeeper Kesh remembered, a jovial man who had scoffed at their attempts to secure housing for a lower price; he had been stripped of the fine sea-green scalloped silk robe he had been wearing, and sprawled on his entry porch in nothing more than a sleeveless shift as pale as a death shroud. Here was the kindly seller of rice, an old woman with a bent back now softened and straightened in death. The aura of torchlight revealed more personal details: One had a slashed throat, while the other seemed unmarked but no less dead for all that. He hoped they had died quickly.
Twist had a sickness lodged in his chest, something nagging and snotty, and the man breathed with a rattling intensity and paused now and again to cough up gunk and spit it out. He did not glance at the bodies. To him they were chaff, nothing important. Along with the others in the cadre, he had ransacked the village at sunset, complaining bitterly all the while that the strike force had carried away everything both valuable and portable, although naturally heavy household goods remained, things impossible to haul under these circumstances.
Had these folk been alive, Kesh could have passed them without a moment's thought, but they were horribly dead. Bai's words nagged at him. Was it possible that if they had acted more quickly they could have saved these hapless innocents? No, they would only have been killed as well. Had they slept the night in the council hall, they would be dead, too. These reflections allowed him to walk behind Twist without showing any sign of revulsion. If the others suspected he was not one of them, they would kill him, and he was determined to stay alive.
Laughter came from one of the porches. A group of men were joking, calling out bets. One of the men was stretched out atop a body, humping busily.
'Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!'
'He'll go on twenty!'
'No, on twenty-five!'
'Whoo! Whoo! Twenty-two! Heh! I win!'
With a chorus of laughs and shouts, coin changed hands.
Kesh averted his eyes and kept walking as he whispered thanks that the poor victim was not screaming. Ahead, the village ended in fenced gardens, livestock sheds, and a pair of granaries on stilts. A tent had been raised just outside the last shed, although it was little more than a lean-to of canvas rigged out from the shed's cantilevered roof. A trio of men stood at attention beside a small fire, guarding both tent and shed.
'Who sleeps there?' Kesh whispered.
'Eh! The lord does.'
'The lord?'
'He don't usually stop by us, but there's somewhat afoot. Anyway, he don't like to be disturbed by the likes of us. So, hush!'
It was middle night, more or less. There was no moon. Kesh stumbled more than once before they clambered back on the road 'downstream' of the shed. The road here ran fairly straight, with a long view back into the village and its emptied buildings. In an open meadow lay the ruins of the old Ladytree, fallen into a massive tangle of trunk and branches that no one dared cut up. In the darkness, the new sapling, no more than two years old, wasn't even visible.
They walked a little farther on the pale surface of the road until they came to the road's intersection with a wide gravel path that pushed straight through the woods toward the distant uplands. The path's beginning was marked by one of the three-span gates that marked a temple to Ilu, the Herald, though it was too dark for Kesh to see any buildings in all those trees and brush. Just ahead, the road began to curve. Here in the middle of the roadway stood two sentries.
'Heh! About time!' said one, a burly man with his hair shaved down against his head.
'What was all that noise?' asked the other.
'Just Rabbit,' said Twist, wiping his nose.
The burly man cackled. 'Eh! He wouldn't know what to do with a live one, eh? You ever get to wondering just what he did do to get run out of his village?'
Twist spat. 'Did you ever think I don't want to know? Eh?'
Kesh felt sick, but he said nothing, made no expression, just waited.
Fortunately, the pair headed back for camp without any further discussion. Kesh's companion settled into a comfortable stance, feet shoulders'-width apart and weight canted onto his spear.
The ginnies slept, a heavy burden in their sling. Kesh shifted nervously as he looked back toward the camp, wondering what he ought to do. There were thirty-six in the cadre. He'd counted three times: eighteen mounted and eighteen walking on their own feet; he made the thirty-seventh. A sergeant led them, but who their commanders were Kesh could not tell. In general, the southern towns were councilled, so he wasn't sure how one could tell a 'lord' apart from a well-to-do council member, although there must be signs and customs that spoke of such things. In his travels in the empire, he had dealt with merchants who were agents for lords, of whom they spoke in only the most formal of terms. But lords in the empire were a different beast, set apart, isolated. Nor could he ask Twist to explain it to him, lest Kesh seem too ignorant of things the others took for granted. As the old saying went, better keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, than open it and be known as an impostor.
It was so quiet. The horses had been strung up on a line near the council house, visible from here by the distant glimmer of light from a single lantern hung at the porch. The mascot dogs who accompanied the cadre were tranquil beasts, and he supposed they were now sleeping. In truth, it was the look of the men with whom he marched that agitated him.
Like Twist. The man's jaw had been damaged and healed wrong. He was missing two fingers. He had a net of lash scars on his back. He carried himself with the bravado of a man who relishes a fight over nothing.
A figure appeared on the road out of the darkness and loped up to them in that gangling, hopping way he had.
'Eh, there, Rabbit,' said Twist. 'Finally remember you have sentry duty?'
'Heh. Heh. Yah.'
Like this one, who tolerated the others calling him 'Rabbit' and who had a way of grinning at unseen sights that made Kesh think he was unbalanced, and who was capable of the most grotesque acts, things Kesh had not thought anyone could force himself to do. Like what he had just done. All Kesh could think of was that if the woman, or man, was dead, then there wouldn't have been any pain.
'How long have you been on this road?' he asked Rabbit, because the silence was making him twitchy.
Rabbit fished a strip of dried flesh out of his pouch and chewed on it before answering. 'Eh. Since I was kicked out of m'mam's village and forced to take cover up in the hills. There I found some who were more like me than otherwise. Comrades, you might say.' He hawked and spat, then wiped his mouth clean. 'Let me see. That was ten years ago now, I'm thinking.'
Kesh whistled. 'That's a long time. How old are you?'
'Oh, I'm a Goat, sure enough. You work it out.'
