'You chose wisely, I think,' Noto Boil said. 'Given what awaits Hurlochel, he displayed impressive calm a few moments ago.'
'And well he should,' Paran said, 'since he's not coming with me. You are.'
The fish spine speared through the cutter's upper lip. A look of agony supplanted disbelief. He tore the offending needle from his lip and flung it away, then brought up both hands to clench against the pain.
His eyes looked ready to clamber from their sockets.
Paran patted the man on the shoulder. 'Get that seen to, will you? We depart in half a bell, cutter.'
He sat on a kit chest, settled back slowly, until the give of the tent wall ceased, then stretched out his legs. 'I should be half-drunk right now,' he said, 'given what I'm about to do.'
Hurlochel seemed unable to muster a smile. 'Please, Captain. We should decamp. Cut our losses. I urge you to abandon this course of action, which will do naught but result in the death of yet another good soldier, not to mention an irritating but competent company cutter.'
'Ah, yes. Noto Boil. Once priest to Soliel, sister goddess of Poliel.'
'Priest no longer, Captain. Disavowed hold no weight with the ascendant so abandoned.'
'Soliel. Mistress of Healing, Beneficence, the Goddess that Weeps Healing Tears. She must have let loose an ocean of them by now, don't you think?'
'Is it wise to mock her at this threshold, Captain?'
'Why not? How has her infamous, unceasing sorrow for the plight of mortals done them any good, any at all, Hurlochel? It's easy to weep when staying far away, doing nothing. When you take credit for every survivor out there – those whose own spirits fought the battle, whose own spirits refused to yield to Hood's embrace.' He sneered up at the tent roof. 'It's the so-called friendly, sympathetic gods who have the most to answer for.' Paran glared at the man standing before him. '
Hood knows, the other ones are straightforward and damned clear on their own infamy – grant them that. But to proffer succour, salvation and all the rest, whilst leaving true fate to chance and chance alone – damn me, Hurlochel, to that they will give answer!'
The outrider's eyes were wide, unblinking.
Paran looked away. 'Sorry. Some thoughts I'd do better to keep to myself. It's a longstanding fault of mine, alas.'
'Captain. For a moment there… your eyes… they… flared. Like a beast's.'
Paran studied the man. 'Did they now?'
'I'd swear it with one heel on Hood's own foreskin, Captain.'
Ganoes Paran pushed himself to his feet. 'Relay these orders to the officers. This army marches in four days. In three days' time, I want them in full kit, dressed out with weapons bared for inspection, ready at noon. And when we depart, I want to leave this camp clean, every latrine filled in, the refuse burned.' He faced Hurlochel. 'Get these soldiers busy – they're rotting from the inside out. Do you have all that, Hurlochel?'
The outrider smiled, then repeated Paran's orders word for word.
'Good. Be sure to impress on the officers that these days of lying round moping and bitching are at an end. Tell them the order of march will place to the lead post the most presentable company – everyone else eats their dust.'
'Captain, where do we march?'
'No idea. I'll worry about that then.'
'What of the High Fist and the others in that tent?'
'Chances are, they won't be up to much for a while. In the meantime-'
'In the meantime, you command the Host, sir.'
'Aye, I do.'
Hurlochel's sudden salute was sharp, then he pivoted and strode from the tent.
Paran stared after him. Fine, at least someone's damned pleased about it.
A short time later, he and Noto Boil sat atop their horses at the camp's edge, looking downslope and across the flat killing-ground to the city's walls, its bleached-limestone facing a mass of scrawls, painted symbols, hand-prints, skeletal figures. This close, there should have been sounds rising from the other side of those walls, the haze of dust and smoke overhead, and the huge gate should be locked open for a steady stream of traders and hawkers, drovers and work crews. Soldiers should be visible in the windows of the gate's flanking square towers.
The only movement came from flocks of pigeons lifting into view then dipping back down, fitful and frantic as an armada of kites rejected by storm-winds; and from the blue-tinted desert starlings and croaking crows lined up like some nightmare army on the battlements.
'Captain,' the cutter said, the fish spine once more jutting from between his lips – the hole it had made earlier just above those lips was a red, slightly puckered spot, smeared like a popped pimple – 'you believe me capable of assaulting all that is anathema to me?'
'I thought you were disavowed,' Paran said.
'My point precisely. I cannot even so much as call upon Soliel for her benign protection. Perhaps your eyes are blind to the truth, but I tell you, Captain, I can see the air roiling up behind those walls – it is the breath of chaos. Currents swirl, heave – even to look upon them, as I do now, makes me ill. We shall die, you and I, not ten paces in from the gate.'
Paran checked the sword at his belt, then adjusted his helm's strap. '
I am not as blind as you believe me to be, cutter.' He studied the city for a moment, then gathered his reins. 'Ride close to my side, Noto Boil.'
'Captain, the gate looks closed, locked tight – we are not welcome.'
'Never mind the damned gate,' Paran said. 'Are you ready?'
The man turned wild eyes upon him. 'No,' he said in a high voice, 'I am not.'
'Let's get this over with,' Paran said, nudging his horse into motion.
Noto Boil spared one last look over his shoulder, and saw soldiers standing, watching, gathered in their hundreds. 'Gods,' he whispered, 'why am I not among them right now?'
Then he moved to catch up to Captain Kindly, who had once dangled an innocent man from a tower's edge. And now does it all over again – to me!
She had once been sent out to hunt down her younger brother, tracking him through half the city – oh, he'd known she was after him, known that she was the one they'd send, the only one capable of closing a hand on one scrawny ankle, dragging him back, then shaking him until his brain rattled inside his skull. He'd led her a wild trail that night. Ten years old and already completely out of control, eyes bright as marbles polished in a mouthful of spit, the white smile more wicked than a wolf's snarl, all gangly limbs and cavorting malice.
He had been collecting… things. In secret. Strands of hair, nail clippings, a rotted tooth. Something, it turned out, from everyone in the entire extended family. Forty-two, if one counted four-month-old Minarala – and he had, the little bastard. A madness less imaginative might have settled for a host of horrid dolls, upon which he could deliver minor but chronic torment to feed his insatiable evil, but not her brother, who clearly believed himself destined for vast infamy.
Not content with dolls fashioned in likenesses, he had constructed, from twine, sticks, straw, wool and horn, a tiny flock of forty-two sheep. Penned in a kraal of sticks assembled on the floor of the estate's attic. Then, from one of his own milk teeth, newly plucked from his mouth, he made for himself the likeness of a wolf fang and then, with tatters of fur, the wolf to which it belonged, of a scale to permit it to devour a sheep-doll in a single gulp.
In skeins of demented magic, he had set his wolf among the flock.
Screams and wails in the night, in household after household, unleashed from terrifying nightmares steeped in the reek of panic and lanolin, of clopping hoofs and surges of desperate, hopeless flight.
Nips and buffets from the huge roaring wolf, the beast toying with every one of them – oh, she would remember the torment for a long, long time.
