Conqueror

Forker swallowed vomit. He mopped at his raw nose and looked wildly about. More were riding out behind him, out of the eerie forest of native whipstick trees that covered the land on either side. The officer of his household troopers barked orders to the handful of guards who'd remained, and they closed in around the carriages, pulling the rifle-muskets from their scabbards. Hammers clicked as thumbs pulled them back, the sound loud and metallic in the insect-murmurous night.

'Halt,' the leader of the cloaked men said.

'In. .' Forker began, hacked, spat, spoke again: 'Ingreid Manfrond promised me my life!'

'Oh, General Manfrond didn't send me to kill you,' the man said, grinning in his beard. 'The Lord of Men just told me where I could find you. Killing you was my own idea. Don't you remember me? Hereditary Captain Otto Witton.'

He rode close enough so that the riding lanterns on the coach showed the long white scar that ran up the left side of his face until it vanished under his hairline. It was flushed red with emotion. His dog crouched, and he stepped free.

'Just a little matter of wardship of my cousin's daughter Kathe Mattiwson-and her lands-and she was promised to me, and she wanted me, you bastard. But you assumed the wardship and sold her like a pig at a fair, to that son of a bitch Sliker. Get out of there.'

Forker found himself climbing down to the roadway without conscious decision. Thin mud sucked at the soles of his gold-topped tasseled boots.

'An, ah, an honorable marriage-'

'Shut up, you little shit!' Witton screamed. The scar was white against his red face, and his sword hissed out. 'Now you're going to die.'

The houseguard captain stepped between them. 'Over my dead body,' he said, calmly enough. The tip of his own sword touched the roadway, but his body was tensed for action the way a cat's does, loose-jointed. There were hammered-out dents in his breastplate, the sort a full-armed sword cut makes.

'If that's how you want it,' Witton said.

He looked to the men sitting their dogs around the carriage. 'But it'd be a pity, the Brigade needs all the fighting men it can get-this little Civvie-lover will be no loss, though.'

'The Brigade doesn't need men who'd let their sworn lord be cut down by thirty enemies on the road,' the retainer said. 'He may be a cowardly little shit, but we ate his salt.'

It said a good deal for the situation that Filip Forker ignored the comment. Instead he squealed: 'That's right-my life is your honor! Save me and I'll give you half my lands.'

The captain looked over his shoulder at Forker, expressionless. Then he turned back to Witton.

'A man lives as long as he lives, and not a day more,' he said. 'Sorry to miss the war with the Civvies, though.'

'You don't have to,' Witton said. This time his grin was sly. 'An oath to a man without honor is no oath. We won't overfall your gold-giver with numbers. I'll challenge him here and now; you can be witness to a fair fight.'

He stepped closer and spat on Forker's boot. 'I call you coward and your father a coward, and your mother a whore,' he said. 'You've got a sword.'

The guard captain stepped back, his face clearing. Both men were wearing blades, neither had armor, and they were close enough in age. If the former monarch was weedy and thin-wristed while Witton looked as if he could bend iron bars between his fingers, that was Forker's problem; he should have been in the salle d'armes instead of the library all those years.

Forker looked around; the code said a man could volunteer to fight in his place, but it wasn't an obligation. Some of his men were smiling, others looking away into the night. None of them spoke.

'It's time,' Witton said, thick and gloating. He raised the blade. 'Draw or die like a steer in a slaughter chute.'

'Marcy!' Forker screamed, falling to his knees. There was a sharp ammonia stink as his bladder released. 'Marcy, migo! Spare me-spare my life and everything I have is yours.'

Witton's smile turned into a grimace of hatred. Forker shrieked and threw up his arms. One of them parted at the elbow on the second stroke of Witton's earnest, clumsy butchery. The stump of the arm flailed about, spurting blood that looked black in the silvery light. That jerked the attacker back to consciousness, and his next blow was directed with skill as well as the strength of shoulders as thick as a blacksmith's.

'Book-reader,' the warrior said with contempt, standing back and panting. Thick drops of blood ran down his face and into his beard, speckling the front of his fringed leather jacket.

The dead man's servants came forward to wrap the body; it leaked blood and other fluids through the rug they rolled it in. Forker's mistress looked on from the second carriage; she raised the fur muff that concealed her hands to her lips and stared speculatively over it at the guard captain and the heavy-set assassin.

Witton spoke first. 'I hope you don't feel obliged to challenge,' he said to the guardsman.

The retainer shrugged. 'We were contracted, not vassals. He fell on his own deeds.' A wintry smile. 'I guess there won't be much trouble finding a new berth for me and my guns.'

His expression grew colder. 'Although if I catch those pussies who bugged out before we got this far, I don't think they'll ever need another gear-and-maintenance contract as long as they live.'

The fog had turned to a light drizzle. Witton lofted a gobbet of spit toward the body the servants were pushing into the carriage. The wolfhounds in the traces whined and twitched at the smells of blood and tension, until the driver flicked his whip over their backs.

'Can't blame them for not wanting to fight for Forker,' he said.

'Fuck Forker,' the guard captain said. 'My contract was with him, but theirs was with me.'

Witton nodded. 'You can sign up with my lot,' he said. 'I'm down twenty rifles on my assigned war-host tally.'

The guardsman shook his head. 'Wouldn't look good,' he said. Witton grunted agreement; a mercenary's reputation was his livelihood. 'We'll head back to Carson Barracks, somebody'll sign us on for the duration, maybe the Regulars. Figure the call-up'll come pretty soon anyway, might as well beat the rush.'

He turned and called orders. His men eased back the hammers of their rifles and slid them into the scabbards on the left side of their saddles. There was a moment's pause as one man bent in the saddle and grabbed the bridle of the dogs pulling the baggage wagon, turning it around, and then the fading plop of their dogs' paws.

Witton waved the carriage with Forker's body onward. They'd take it back to his ancestral estates for burial, although even in this cool weather it'd be pretty high by then. He had no problem with that, after his second-in- command down the road made a search for the getaway chest with the money and jewels Forker would undoubtedly have been carrying. He looked up at the second carriage. The woman there lowered the fur that hid her face and gave him a long smile. The maid cowering beside her was obviously terrified, but Forker's ex-mistress was a professional too, in her way. Huge violet-colored eyes blinked at him, frosted in the fog-blurred light of the moons.

And quite spectacular. Well, the little bastard had been General, no reason he should settle for less than the best. He wiped at his face, smearing the blood, and smiled back while his hands automatically cleaned and sheathed his sword.

* * *

'This should be very useful indeed,' Raj said.

The estate was well off from the army's line of march, in a district of rolling chalk hills. There was little cultivation, but the ground was mostly covered with dense springy green turf, and grazed by huge herds of sheep and large ones of cattle; pigs fed in the beechwoods on the steeper slopes. Evidently the land hereabouts was held in big ranching estates and yeoman-sized grazing farms rather than let to sharecroppers; the manor they'd just taken was surrounded by outbuildings, great woolsheds and corrals and smokehouses, a water-powered scouring mill for cleaning wool and an odorous tannery off a kilometer or so. The cured bacon and barreled salt beef and mutton would be very welcome. The herds would be even more so, since they could walk back to the main force.