Red Country (61 page)

He spun, black shape in the window as a man slipped into the attic, knife in his teeth. Savian lunged at him but the haft of the mace glanced off his shoulder and they grappled and struggled,
growling at each other. Savian felt a burning in his gut, fell back against the wall with the man on top of him, reached for the knife at his belt. He saw one half of the mercenary’s snarling
face lit by firelight and Savian stabbed at it, ripped it open, black pulp hanging from his head as he stumbled, thrashing blindly around the attic. Savian clawed his way up and fell on him,
dragged him down and stabbed and coughed and stabbed until he stopped moving, knelt on top of him, each cough ripping at the wound in his guts.

A bubbling scream had started downstairs, and Savian heard someone squealing, ‘No! No! No!’ slobbering, desperate, and he heard Lamb growl, ‘Yes, you fucker!’ Two heavy
thuds, then a long silence.

Lamb gave a kind of groan downstairs, another crash like he was kicking something over.

‘You all right?’ he called, his own voice sounding tight and strange.

‘Still breathing!’ came Lamb’s, even stranger. ‘You?’

‘Picked up a scratch.’ Savian peeled his palm away from his tattooed stomach, blood there gleaming black. Lot of blood.

He wished he could talk to Corlin one last time. Tell her all those things you think but never say because they’re hard to say and there’ll be time later. How proud he was of what
she’d become. How proud her mother would’ve been. To carry on the fight. He winced. Or maybe to give up the fight, because you only get one life and do you want to look back on it and
see just blood on your hands?

But it was too late to tell her anything. He’d picked his path and here was where it ended. Hadn’t been too poor a showing, all told. Some good and some bad, some pride and some
shame, like most men. He crawled coughing to the front, took up one of the flatbows and started wrestling at the string with sticky hands. Damn hands. Didn’t have the strength they used
to.

He stood up beside the window, men still moving down there, and the shack he threw the lamp on sending up a roaring blaze now, and he bellowed out into the night. ‘That the best you can
do?’

‘Sadly for you,’ came Cosca’s voice. ‘No!’

Something sparked and fizzled in the darkness, and there was a flash like daylight.

It was a noise like to the voice of God, as the scriptures say, which levelled the city of the presumptuous Nemai with but a whisper. Jubair peeled his hands from his ears, all things still
ringing even so, and squinted towards the fort as the choking smoke began to clear.

Much violence had been done to the building. There were holes finger-sized, and fist-sized, and head-sized rent through the walls of the bottom floor. Half of the top floor had departed the
world, splintered planks smouldering in places, three split beams still clinging together at one corner as a reminder of the shape of what had been. There was a creaking and half the roof fell in,
broken shingles clattering to the ground below.

‘Impressive,’ said Brachio.

‘The lightning harnessed,’ murmured Jubair, frowning at the pipe of brass. It had nearly leaped from its carriage with the force of the blast and now sat skewed upon it, smoke still
issuing gently from its blackened mouth. ‘Such a power should belong only to God.’

He felt Cosca’s hand upon his shoulder. ‘And yet He lends it to us to do His work. Take some men in there and find those two old bastards.’

‘I want Conthus alive!’ snapped Lorsen.

‘If possible.’ The Old Man leaned close to whisper. ‘But dead is just as good.’

Jubair nodded. He had come to a conclusion long years before that God sometimes spoke through the person of Nicomo Cosca. An unlikely prophet, some might say – a treacherous, lawless pink
drunkard who had never uttered a word of prayer in all his long life – but from the first moment Jubair had seen him in battle, and known he had no fear, he had sensed in him some splinter of
the divine. Surely he walked in God’s shadow, as the Prophet Khalul had walked naked through a rain of arrows with only his faith to protect him and emerged untouched, and so forced the
Emperor of the Gurkish to honour his promise and abase himself before the Almighty.

‘You three,’ he said, picking out some of his men with a finger, ‘on my signal go in by the door. You three, come with me.’

One of them, a Northman, shook his head with starting eyes round as full moons. ‘It’s . . .
him
,’ he whispered.

‘Him?’

‘The . . . the . . .’ And in dumbstruck silence he folded the middle finger on his left hand back to leave a gap.

Jubair snorted. ‘Stay then, fool.’ He trotted around the side of the fort, through shadow and deeper shadow, all the same to him for he carried the light of God within. His men
peered up at the building, breathing hard, afraid. They supposed the world was a complicated place, full of dangers. Jubair pitied them. The world was simple. The only danger was in resisting
God’s purpose.

Fragments of timber, rubbish and dust were scattered across the snow behind the building. That and several arrow-shot men, one sitting against the wall and softly gurgling, hand around a shaft
through his mouth. Jubair ignored them and quietly scaled the back wall of the fort. He peered into the ruined loft, furniture ripped apart, a mattress spilling straw, no signs of life. He brushed
some embers away and pulled himself up, slid out his sword, metal glinting in the night, fearless, righteous, godly. He eased forward, watching the stairwell, black with shadows. He heard a sound
from down there, a regular thump, thump, thump.

He leaned out at the front of the building and saw his three men clustered below. He hissed at them, and the foremost kicked the door wide and plunged inside. Jubair pointed the other two to the
stairwell. He felt something give beneath the sole of his boot as he turned. A hand. He bent and dragged a timber aside.

‘Conthus is here!’ he shouted.

‘Alive?’ came Lorsen’s shrill bleat.

‘Dead.’

‘Damn it!’

Jubair gathered up what was left of the rebel and rolled it over the ragged remnant of the wall, tumbling down the snow drifted against the side of the building to lie broken and bloody, tattoos
ripped with a score of wounds. Jubair thought of the parable of the proud man. God’s judgement comes to great and small alike, all equally powerless before the Almighty, inevitable and
irreversible, and so it was, so it was. Now there was only the Northman, and however fearsome he might be, God had a sentence already in mind—

A scream split the night, a crashing below, roars and groans and a metal scraping, then a strange hacking laugh, another scream. Jubair strode to the stairs. A wailing below, now, as horrible as
the sinful dead consigned to hell, blubbering off into silence. The point of Jubair’s sword showed the way. Fearless, righteous . . . He hesitated, licking at his lips. To feel fear was to be
without faith. It is not given to man to understand God’s design. Only to accept his place in it.

And so he clenched his jaw tight, and padded down the steps.

Black as hell below, light shining in rays of flickering red, orange, yellow, through the holes in the front wall, casting strange shadows. Black as hell and like hell it reeked of death, so
strong the stench it seemed a solid thing. Jubair half-held his breath as he descended, step by creaking step, eyes adjusting to the darkness by degrees.

What revelation?

The leather curtains that had divided up the space hung torn, showered and spotted with black, stirred a little as if by wind though the space was still. His boot caught something on the bottom
step and he looked down. A severed arm. Frowning, he followed its glistening trail to a black slick, flesh humped and mounded and inhumanly abused, hacked apart and tangled together in unholy
configurations, innards dragged out and rearranged and unwound in glistening coils.

In the midst stood a table and upon the table a pile of heads, and as the light shifted from the flames outside they looked upon Jubair with expressions awfully vacant, madly leering, oddly
questioning, angrily accusatory.

‘God . . .’ he said. Jubair had done butchery in the name of the Almighty and yet he had seen nothing like this. This was written in no scripture, except perhaps in the forbidden
seventh of the seven books, sealed within the tabernacle of the Great Temple in Shaffa, in which were recorded those things that Glustrod brought from hell.

‘God . . .’ he muttered. And jagged laughter bubbled from the shadows, and the skins flapped, and rattled the rings they hung upon. Jubair darted forward, stabbed, cut, slashed at
darkness, caught nothing but dangling skin, blade tangled with leather and he slipped in gore, and fell, and rose, turning, turning, the laughter all around him.

‘God?’ mumbled Jubair, and he could hardly speak the holy word for a strange feeling, beginning in his guts and creeping up and down his spine to set his scalp to tingle and his
knees to shake. All the more terrible for being only dimly remembered. A childish recollection, lost in darkness. For as the Prophet said, the man who knows fear every day becomes easy in its
company. The man who knows not fear, how shall he face this awful stranger?

‘God . . .’ whimpered Jubair, stumbling back towards the steps, and suddenly there were arms around him.

‘Gone,’ came a whisper. ‘But I am here.’

‘Damn it!’ snarled Lorsen again. His long-cherished dream of presenting the infamous Conthus to the Open Council, chained and humbled and plastered with tattoos
that might as well have read
give Inquisitor Lorsen the promotion he has so long deserved
, had gone up in smoke. Or down in blood. Thirteen years minding a penal colony in Angland, for this.
All the riding, all the sacrifice, all the indignity. In spite of his best efforts the entire expedition had devolved into a farce, and he had no doubt upon which undeserving head would be heaped
the blame. He slapped at his leg in a fury. ‘I wanted him alive!’

‘So did he, I daresay.’ Cosca stared narrow-eyed through the haze of smoke towards the ruined fort. ‘Fate is not always kind to us.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ snapped Lorsen. To make matters worse – if that were possible – he had lost half his Practicals in one night, and that the better half. He frowned
over at Wile, still fussing with his mask. How was it possible for a Practical to look so pitiably unthreatening? The man positively radiated doubt. Enough to plant the seeds of doubt in everyone
around him. Lorsen had entertained doubts enough over the years but he did what one was supposed to, and kept them crushed into a tight little packet deep inside where they could not leak out and
poison his purpose.

The door slowly creaked open and Dimbik’s archers shifted nervously, flatbows all levelled towards that square of darkness.

‘Jubair?’ barked Cosca. ‘Jubair, did you get him? Answer me, damn it!’

Something flew out, bounced once with a hollow clonk and rolled across the snow to rest near the fire.

‘What is that?’ asked Lorsen.

Cosca worked his mouth. ‘Jubair’s head.’

‘Fate is not always kind,’ murmured Brachio.

Another head arced from the doorway and bounced into the fire. A third landed on the roof of one of the shacks, rolled down it and lodged in the gutter. A fourth fell among the archers and one
of them let his bow off as he stumbled away from it, the bolt thudding into a barrel nearby. More heads, and more, hair flapping, tongues lolling, spinning, and dancing, and scattering spots of
blood.

The last head bounced high and rolled an elliptical course around the fire to stop just next to Cosca. Lorsen was not a man to be put off by a little gore, but even he had to admit to being a
little unnerved by this display of mute brutality.

Less squeamish, the captain general stepped forward and angrily kicked the head into the flames. ‘How many men have those two old bastards killed between them?’ Though the Old Man
was no doubt a good deal older than either.

‘About twenty, now,’ said Brachio.

‘We’ll fucking run out at this rate!’ Cosca turned angrily upon Sworbreck, who was frantically scratching away in his notebook. ‘What the hell are you writing
for?’

The author looked up, reflected flames dancing in his eyeglasses. ‘Well, this is . . . rather dramatic.’

‘Do you find?’

Sworbreck gestured weakly towards the ruined fort. ‘He came to the rescue of his friend against impossible odds—’

‘And got him killed. Is not a man who takes on impossible odds generally considered an incorrigible idiot rather than a hero?’

‘The line between the two has always been blurry . . .’ murmured Brachio.

Sworbreck raised his palms. ‘I came for a tale to stir the blood—’

‘And I’ve been unable to oblige you,’ snapped Cosca, ‘is that it? Even my bloody biographer is deserting me! No doubt I’ll end up the villain in the book I
commissioned while yonder decapitating madman is celebrated to the rafters! What do you make of this, Temple? Temple? Where’s that bloody lawyer got to? What about you, Brachio?’

The Styrian wiped fresh tears from his weepy eye. ‘I think the time has come to put an end to the ballad of the nine-fingered Northman.’

‘Finally some sense! Bring up the other tube. I want that excuse for a fort levelled to a stump. I want that meddling fool made mush, do you hear? Someone bring me another bottle. I am
sick of being taken fucking lightly!’ Cosca slapped Sworbreck’s notebook from his hands. ‘A little respect, is that too much to ask?’ He slapped the biographer to boot and
the man sat down sharply in the snow, one hand to his cheek in surprise.

‘What’s that noise?’ said Lorsen, holding up a palm for silence. A thumping and rumbling spilled from the darkness, rapidly growing louder, and he took a nervous step towards
the nearest shack.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Dimbik.

A horse came thundering from the night, eyes wild, and a moment later dozens more, surging down the slope towards the camp, snow flying, a boiling mass of animals, a flood of horseflesh coming
at the gallop.