The Legend of Broken

to the man, however, they see that his body is still writhing, and they pause — an action quickly revealed as a mistake. With a rushing roar, something approaches from out of the Heavens, and a thunderous crash throws up a mass of sod and dirt before their horses, who rear up, screaming in rare fright as the officers and their companion take in the sight of the shaft of an enormous bolt: eight feet long and yet another in diameter, its iron head has sunk deep into the ground. It is one of the deadliest weapons hurled by ballistae.

Arnem looks up at the battlements, enraged and bewildered, to see that the several operators of the engine of war are busily dropping boulders the size of small pigs down upon the man who was attacked by his supposed comrade and thrown from the walls, and whose little chance at continued life is soon crushed, literally, by men he would ordinarily have had every reason to trust.

“You’ve come far enough, Sentek,” the soldier with the white banner calls, as he joins the crew of the ballista. “Do not mistake our intentions by the color of this standard. It was all I could lay hands on, and I thought that the blood that covers it might at least give you pause, if not cause your immediate withdrawal. Given that neither resulted, we were forced to fire. I take it that you are Sentek Arnem?”

“I am,” Arnem answers, not wishing to display the full anger he feels at the pallin’s impertinence, which is as likely the result of lunacy as of disrespect. “I will not ask your name, although I should like to know why a soldier of Broken has lost all respect for rank, if he recognizes it!”

“Oh, make no mistake,” the man says. “I have the greatest of respect for you, Sentek. As I did for that man. But we have had a great deal of trouble determining just who has fallen victim to the foreign demons who are stealing the very souls of Broken. That fellow, for instance — we were old comrades, and even older friends. Recently, however, he’d fallen victim to the disease being spread by unholy forces throughout this entire area. As for you and your men, it was impossible to say with certainty. If some of our own legion have fallen victim to it, why not some of yours, as well?”

“Fallen victim to what, Pallin?” Niksar asks.

“It is a devastating and yet peculiar disease,” the pallin on the wall answers, as if he were discussing a morning’s drill. “At first, very painful — the blood, you see, is somehow stolen from the body, and exchanged for molten metal.† The pain is horrific, and the sufferer becomes enslaved to whomever can stop it. Which, we’ve seen, are the agents of foreign kingdoms, the demon traders. The afflicted continually try to open the gates and allow such enemies in. They’ve even sought the help of the Bane.”

All is silence, on the road below; finally, Akillus murmurs, “The man is a lunatic. Plainly, completely — a lunatic …”

“Sentek Arnem?” the man on the wall bellows. “Our own commander — an old comrade of yours, I believe, Sentek Gledgesa — has agreed to come out of the city to speak with you. But I warn you—”

“‘Warn’ him?” Niksar seethes. “Warn the commander of the Talons? I’ll have the man’s tongue out—!”

But Arnem only replies: “You warn us of what?”

“My comrades are, as you have seen, particularly accurate with their weapon. I would recommend you speak to our sentek alone — with your aide, of course — and that your men attempt no tricks.”

Arnem knows what his answer must be. “Very well, then.”

“One final thing,” the soldier shouts. “Sentek Gledgesa’s vision is gone, but our healers seemed able to stop the degeneration there. His own daughter will guide him out, and what applies to him, applies to her. The girl’s speech has been stolen, but our healers have kept her alive.”

“A daughter …” Arnem murmurs softly. “Gerolf has a daughter …?” Then he shouts: “Tell your commander that he and any dear to him will be safe with me. I believe that he will understand that. I shall meet him halfway between here and the gate.”

“You are as wise as your reputation states, Sentek Arnem,” the soldier replies, saluting casually. And at that, the echoing sound of heavy iron locks being thrown becomes audible, and Arnem’s men look to see a smaller doorway, just large enough for a man upon a horse, opening in the greater structure.

Before moving forward, Arnem turns to Niksar. “If, for any reason, I do not return, Reyne — I shall need you to get the men back to Broken.”

“But—” Niksar protests haltingly. “He has told us you are to bring—”

“I’ll take the old man, instead; if Gledgesa is in the desperate condition he describes, he will be of more use …” Arnem does not reveal his true reason for taking Visimar to meet Gerolf Gledgesa, a reason that he suspects the old man may guess at: for the truth is, the two officers, Arnem and Gledgesa, shared the duty of escorting the Kafran priests during their ritual mutilations, so long ago; and both were present, the day that Visimar’s leg was severed and the man himself left to die on the edge of Davon Wood …

{viii:}

As Arnem and Visimar move up the road toward the walls of Daurawah and the figures of Gerolf Gledgesa and his daughter, who have appeared on horse and pony, respectively, from out of the smaller doorway in the great port’s western gate, the old man remains silent, and slowly reins his mare, against her will, off the Ox’s pace, until he is riding some twelve to fifteen feet behind the sentek. The cripple knows what must be going through the commander’s mind: for no man of integrity can face the decay and death of a friend, particularly a friend alongside whom he has faced death on a score of occasions, without a deep sense of wretched sadness and of his own mortality. Visimar therefore does not burden the sentek with practical pressures and details at this moment. Time will press, soon enough — in truth it is pressing, already; but not so hard that the last meeting of two good men can justly be curtailed or tainted.

The three horses and one pony finally stop their painfully slow progress when a space of perhaps ten feet separates them. The young girl next to Gledgesa (a delicate, once-pretty child, Arnem supposes, who now wears bandages and scarves wrapped around her neck, as well as from the top of her skull to her lower jaw, beneath which the windings are tied tight, leaving only the upper part of her face, particularly her lovely, light eyes, open to view) reaches up to rein in her father’s giant, dark stallion to a stop with the lightest of touches; and as soon as the horse has halted, his rider grins beneath two eyes covered by a soft silken bandage. Arnem’s heart sinks far deeper when he sees what has become of his old friend: the same signs of living decay that he and his troops have so often observed during their current march eastward cover Gledgesa’s once proud, powerful body, beneath his elegantly appointed leather armor.

A formidable warrior sprung from that rare breed of seksent that combines handsome features with an equally well formed and hugely powerful body, Gledgesa had originally been a mercenary, who had indeed come from the lands northeast of the Seksent Straits to Broken because he was tall enough to pass for a respected worshipper of Kafra. Arnem had met him some twenty years before this morning, when both young men had been selected, as a reward for valor, to move from the regular army to the Talons. But, although they had risen together — Gledgesa ever the fiery-eyed, intrepid warrior who delighted at being first into any enemy’s front line, while Arnem, although no less fierce, was a more even-headed soldier who could comprehend the full range of threats posed to his men — it had always been plain from their complementary natures that, while each was consistently showered with glory, Gerolf Gledgesa had come to Broken for money, not laurels: after all, a kingdom, the patron god of which delighted in the amassing of wealth, had seemed ideally suited to a mercenary. Gledgesa, like many a similar aspirant, had not ultimately found the rumors of Broken’s boundless wealth to be accurate; or rather, he had found them to be so only if the aspirant was willing to subject himself to the tenets of the Kafran faith and state. And so, Gledgesa had elected to leave the Talons and take command of the unique Ninth Legion, composed wholly of fast-moving freilic troops, most of them lightly armed cavalrymen tasked with making themselves available along the entire eastern frontier of the kingdom — where the possibilities for seizing prize monies and goods happened to be most abundant.

During the time that he commanded the Ninth, Gledgesa slowly became estranged from the rapidly rising Arnem, each of the two men explaining the drift by citing their new duties and physical distance; but there was another and far truer cause for the estrangement, one that went back to the beginning of their comradeship before the Torganian war, and that involved the shared duty that, as time passed, both men found increasingly difficult to