“I’m about ready to kick your ass, soldier! Your position here as tactical liaison is finished! Are we clear?”
It was a dangerous line to go but Roric saw the knight nod. “Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant colonel’s face was splotchy—mostly from fear. It had taken every ounce of his authority to regain control under the extraordinary circumstances.
“We don’t know what happened out there,” the lieutenant colonel shouted again, this time to everyone present. “Whatever it was, it happened to Miskatoll’s engines and troops as much as it did our own. Odds are it was some neutral force. It could be weather for all we know.”
“Weather my ass. That was witchcraft.”
Stroud’s opinion was popular. Echoed mutters of “holomorphy” flapped around the open tent. No one wanted to stay and guard a haunted bridge much less a place where they had seen the fiber of reality twist and snap like a shaken rug.
The sudden stillness north of the river and the faint gray plain that most of the men had seen only from a distance had demonized the region.
Less than an hour ago everything was normaclass="underline" as normal as ordnance exchange on the front line could be. The danger, though extreme, had been categorical, comprehensible, able to be planned for.
But now, even though no trace of the enemy force remained, a host of unclear suspicions beset the men. Everyone wanted out. Now.
“FB!” shouted the lieutenant colonel.
A thin man in light leather armor whose straps flapped from tightly cinched buckles and who still wore his gas mask pushed up like a bizarre hat on the top of his head had been waiting for the call.
He had pulled a hooded bird from one of several cages. It perched on a stand at the ready. The falconer’s hand was poised, clutching a pen, ready to scribble the words on a tiny roll of paper.
As the officer dictated, the falconer wrote. When he was finished a cruestone was snapped into the hawk’s exposed skull through a hole in its hood. The FB then removed the hood and turned the bird loose. It flapped madly for the Iscan High Command, blind, driving powerful muscles toward release from the fire that filled its brain.
The lieutenant colonel had made his decision. Roric hoped secretly that it was the wrong one, that Saergaeth’s tactics would not be hampered.
“Fire the bridge!”
It was the decision everyone wanted. But the lieutenant colonel had made his point. He could have had it either way. He had not caved in to pressure. He had not buckled under Stroud’s verbal barrage. It was his decision alone. He had considered the pros and cons, measured the tactical advantages of a bridge versus a barrier. He had removed his ego from the scales and everyone in the pavilion knew it.
The demolitionists turned and headed for the bank.
Roric watched them go with mute nausea. His eyes burned. His stomach felt like it had turned to slime, liquefied by the caustic stench of the wasteland. He held his head in one hand and sobbed brokenly.
The lieutenant colonel ignored it.
“All right soldiers, saddle up! SOP! We move for the Noose in under twenty!” He began barking.
Everyone moved but Roric Feldman. He sat on a field trunk holding his head.
Garen stood beside him with his hand on his shoulder. He had already called for a medic twice. No one was coming. Roric’s tears were diminishing slightly. He was clutching, pulling himself together.
“I remember when I was a boy,” he hissed. “My father talked about the blight.” He wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve. “Do you remember it?”
Garen nodded. “King’s Rot,” he said stiffly.
“King’s Rot,” said Roric. “Only seen during Nathaniel Howl’s reign.”
“That was different,” said Garen softly. “White mold on the ground . . . smut in the fields—”
“Was it?” Roric hissed. “Was it different? Maybe it’s the same only worse. Maybe this is Howl Rot.”
Garen seemed to swallow with difficulty.
“What are you going to do?”
Roric rose shakily to his feet. “I’m going back to Kennan Keep,” he whispered. “I’m going to ensure Bendain’s Keep falls to Saergaeth. I’m going to make sure this war turns out right. I’m telling you so you can transfer your fealty to another house,” said Roric. He looked away.
It was an outdated rubric, a formality extended to an honored member of one’s personal guard. It had been done in days of old as a way of allowing the warrior class to disentangle themselves from political crisis—leave before the assassins arrived, disavow any ties to a doomed line. It was a courtesy. A final charitable act.
Garen looked toward the bridge just as the wires went live. Heavy steel charges filled with hülilyddite flowered, as yellow and bitter and poisonous in their eruption as the acid that gave them life.
Blocks of white stone cartwheeled amid catastrophic debris made weightless by the transcendent moment of concussion. Small bits of mortar and chunks of broken rock turned into deadly projectiles. Nuggets of bridge fell like hail in profusion.
An amber-gray cloud drifted west with the wind, a haze that once connected two sides of a river.
The demolition team knew their business.
“Lord,” said Garen softly. “There are no other houses to go to.”
Roric looked at the captain, startled, suspicious.
“You mean to—?”
“I mean to serve the Duchy of Stonehold,” said Garen with simple candor. “And the Feldman House . . . to its end.”
A ripple of doubt clouded Roric’s face for a moment, then disappeared as he saw that Garen meant what he said. He felt like weeping anew but didn’t.
“All right . . . all right.” He looked at his shoes, nodding ridiculously as a father might nod to his son, allowing him to accompany him somewhere dangerous despite his better judgment. “If that’s what you want.” He cleared his throat of the last trace of the burning fumes. “If that’s what you want . . .”
CHAPTER 19
Some claimed Ghoul Court was a pornocracy without the reach of Isca’s city watch. It was the lair of people who made their living off atrocities: parnels, hippospadians and magsmen. Blink-fencers hawked stolen eyeglasses in the street while small-time crooks distributed cigarettes loaded with powdered aspirin.
Pavement nymphs performed services up against the moldering foundations of huge brick warehouses or in congested alleys where flying buttresses provided shelter from the rain. They painted their faces with colorful designs meant to ward off the bortghast rumored to haunt the corner of Knife and Heath.
Flesh-tailors from Bloodsump Lane arrived promptly for abuse at the hands of their masters. They lolled in green-lit second-story dens, staring from odd angled positions where they had fallen into chairs and filthy beds. For hours they would look at grungy plaster surfaces where flies and roaches outmaneuvered gravity, tasting the walls for flecks of organic spew.
Zane Vhortghast was a common specter here though no one called him Zane. In the Court he went by Peter Lark, a minor manipulator of the threads. He led a charmed life despite his disconcerting connections to thugs and underworld guilds. If anyone paid him enough it was known that he could produce a body like magic, floating in the Bragget Canal before dawn the next day.
He wasn’t a big fish but he wasn’t a guppy either. He passed with disturbing anonymity through the Court. Only those that knew him classed him as a dangerous man. But that was the spymaster’s desire, to go unnoticed while still being “plugged in.”
Zane kept a small apartment in the Court for show. He never slept there but took some time every month to embellish the charade.