The cunning man’s tent was overfull, and the soldiers had started lining the wounded on the rough ground outside it. The low chanting and uncomfortable weight of the air that felt like the oppressive hour before a thunderstorm were familiar enough. Someone was on the edge of death, and they were trying to coax him back for another chance at living, at least until the next fight. Karol went down the line of wounded men, smiling at each, telling them they’d done a good job, making light of the wounds they’d suffered and encouraging them to laugh through their pain. And in the back of his mind, a small quiet voice made evaluations. Dead. Crippled. Will recover. Won’t recover. Dead. Dead.
Most of them were Timzinae—likely ten out of every dozen—but here and there a Tralgu or a Jasuru lay in the dirt alongside them. Karol himself was one of the only Firstbloods, and he could feel an exception being made for him. Yes, he was like the Anteans, but he was different. He was their Firstblood. He was all right.
He paused by a young Timzinae boy he remembered from his calmer days when he’d been running the gymnasium in Suddapal. Another attempt at retirement that hadn’t gone well. The leather-bound hilt of a great knife protruded from the boy’s belly, and blood soaked his sides. The nictatating membranes covering his eyes were locked closed, but his eyelids were open, giving him the eerie aspect of being both seeing the world and not. It took Karol a moment to place the boy’s name.
“Caught a memento there, Salan,” the mercenary captain said.
Salan forced a smile. There was blood on his teeth, and his breath came in gasps. “A good knife.”
“Looks it,” Karol said, kneeling beside the boy and making a show of considering the blood-soaked hilt. “Fine workmanship. Take care of it, and you’ll get a lot of years out of a blade like that.” Might recover, he thought. Might be dead already.
“Wish it was someplace else,” Salan said. “Like to take it out.”
“No, that’s not true. You keep that right where it is until the cunning man gets to you.”
“Hurts though.”
“Knife doesn’t hurt,” Karol said. “It’s the damned hole that hurts. As soon as that steel stopped cutting you, it started holding your blood in. I can’t tell you how many men I’ve seen who would have been fine pluck out a weapon like that and bleed to death instead. Taking it out’s a damned sight more dangerous than putting it in.”
Salan nodded and put his black hands around the wound, as if promising not to let anyone take the knife out of him. Karol nodded and clapped the boy’s knee.
“Did we win?” Salan asked as Karol stood.
“Hell yes, we did,” Karol said, glad that he didn’t have to lie to say it. “You just stay there and wait your turn. And don’t get impatient. We don’t rush the cunning men for pinpricks and scrapes.”
“Be all right with me if they rushed a little, sir.”
“I’ll mention it to them,” Karol said with a smile. Probably live, he decided. Probably.
Before setting up shop in Suddapal, Karol had worked with perhaps half a dozen Timzinae. A couple years of garrison work in Maccia and Nus. A Kesheti prince named Unlil Soyam who’d hired his company to hold the left flank in a massive honor battle. A brief partnership with Sanis Sorianian before she’d retired. That Suddapal was a center of the Timzinae race hadn’t been a point for or against it. He’d decided to settle there in the end more for the coffee than the races that made up the fivefold city. The last year hunkering down in the vastness of Kiaria had given him a deeper respect for them. In the deepness and dark of the stronghold, the Timzinae fighters had been thoughtful and professional and no less disciplined than a Firstblood troop.
There were always incidents, but the commander of the siege had treated them with courtesy and respect. All in all, it had left him feeling better about roaches as a people. Not that he’d stopped thinking of them as roaches, but they made jokes about Firstbloods barely being civilized enough to take their pants down when they pissed. That kind of joking was all in fun, after all. And kinder than half the shit that spilled out of Cep Bailan’s fat mouth.
All in all, Karol’s time with the Timzinae made the part that came next that much more pleasant for him.
Most of the prisoners were disarmed, stripped, and tied neck to neck by a Jasuru Karol had worked with a time or three who had almost certainly been a slaver at some point in her career. The knots were tight enough on them that too much struggle kept the blood from their heads but didn’t outright kill them. It was a pretty piece of ropecraft. The great prize was in a little shack they’d put up for the purpose. And the priests—there’d been two of the bastards—were already char and meat on the fire.
Karol entered the shack and nodded to the guards. They each made their salute and left. A small tin lantern hung from the roof, though there was more light leaking through between the boards than the flame provided. The prisoner was on his knees and naked as a babe newborn. His arms were bound behind him, and his ankles as well to keep him from standing. He was shivering, maybe from cold, maybe from shock. Hard to say. Somewhere along the line, someone had thrown an elbow across the man’s nose and splashed it over until the tip pointed off to the right somewhere. Blood and spit soaked the ornate mustache, and deep bruises mottled the man’s arms and legs. Karol sat on a three-legged stool.
“Well,” Karol said. “Here’s a turn, eh? Fallon Broot, yeah?”
The prisoner’s gaze swam up to him, floated for a moment, and the man nodded. Karol nodded back.
“Yeah, I remember you. You’d not recall me, I wouldn’t think. Not sure we ever met to speak to. I was in Camnipol… Lord, years ago. Around the time of that unpleasantness in Anninfort. There was a thing, eh? Believe I saw your manor house. It had the… the little grey tower? Yeah? On the eastern side.”
Broot’s nod started slowly and then had a hard time stopping.
“Nice place,” Karol said. “Not as showy as some of the others, but dignified. I liked it.”
“My thanks.”
“Come up in the world since then, though, haven’t you? Protector of Suddapal. There’s a hell of title. Whole city under your protection. Or five, I suppose. Depending how you count it.”
“I serve… Severed Throne.”
“Course you do, course you do. Thing is, I don’t. My plan, just between us, was never to serve anyone in particular again. Train younger men, send them off to fight. That was my angle. It was your people brought the fight to me.”
Broot struggled to breathe through his broken nose, coughed, and spat out a huge dark clot of blood. It lay on the dirt, a red so dark it approached blackness, shining wet in the candlelight. The prisoner didn’t speak.
“Truth is I came to like Suddapal. And Antea? Well, I didn’t used to have much against it, but it’s gone out of its way to complicate my daily life. Killed a fair number of my friends, besides. Took their babies to prison back in Camnipol. Put good men and women didn’t have anything to do with any conspiracy one way or the other into chains. That just seemed mean, now. Didn’t it to you?”
“I…”
“And them priests you’ve got? They’re some kind of Kesheti cunning men, ain’t they? Way I heard it, they got poisoned voices or some such. Get in a man’s head and just spin it all around.”
“Blessed,” Broot said, “of the goddess.”
“Never much held with that sort of thing myself,” Karol said, taking a pipe and a pouch from his belt. “Tobacco? It’s stale as dirt, but it’s what I have.”
Broot didn’t say no, so Karol lit the bowl, drew on it until the smoke was as rich as the thin leaves would allow, and then placed the stem of it between Broot’s abused lips. The prisoner breathed in and out through his mouth, the smoke curling up around his face. Karol smiled and took the pipe back.