Swords & Dark Magic (3 page)

Slim came back from the doorway and slid along the bar rail to lurch to a halt opposite Swillman. “Give us one, then. I’ll be good for it.”

“Since when?”

“Them’s soljers, Swilly. Come from the war—”

“What war?”

“T’other side of the mountains, o’course.”

Swillman settled a gimlet regard on the ancient whore. “You hear anything about a war? From who? When?”

She shifted uneasily. “Well, you know and I know we ain’t seen traffic in must be three seasons now. But they’s soljers and they been chewed up bad, so there must be a war. Somewhere. And they came down from the pass, so it must be on t’other side.”

“On the Demon Plain, right. Where nobody goes and nobody comes back neither. A war…over there. Right, Slim. Whatever you say, but I ain’t giving you one unless you pay and you ain’t got nothing to pay with.”

“I got my ring.”

He stared at her. “But that’s your livelihood, Slim. You cough that up and you got nothing to offer ’em.”

“You get it after they’ve gone, or maybe not, if I get work.”

“Nobody’s that desperate,” Swillman said. “Seen yourself lately? Say, anytime in the last thirty years?”

“Sure. I keep that fine silver mirror all polished up, the one in my bridal suite, ya.”

He grunted a laugh. “Let’s see it, then, so I know you ain’t up and swallowed it.”

She stretched her jaw and worked with her tongue, and then hacked up something into her hand. A large rolled copper ring, tied to a string with the other end going into her mouth, wrapped around a tooth, presumably.

Swillman leaned in for a closer look. “First time I actually seen it, y’know.”

“Really?”

“It’s my vow of celibacy.”

“Since your wife died, ya, which makes you an idiot. We could work us out a deal, y’know.”

“Not a chance. It’s smaller than I’d have thought.”

“Most men are smaller than they think, too.”

He settled back and collected a tankard.

Slim put the ring back into her mouth and watched with avid eyes the sour ale tumbling into the cup.

“Is that the tavern?” Huggs asked, eyeing the ramshackle shed with its signpost but no sign.

“If it’s dry I’m going to beat on the keeper, I swear it,” said Flapp, groaning as he slid down from his horse. “Beat ’im t’death, mark me.” He stood for a moment, and then brushed dust from his cloak, his thighs, and his studded leather gauntlets. “No inn s’far as I can see, just a room in back. Where we gonna sleep? Put up the horses? This place is a damned pustule, is what it is.”

“The old map I seen,” ventured Wither, “gave this town a name.”

“Town? It ain’t been a town in a thousand years, if ever.”

“Even so, Sarge.”

“So what’s it called?”

“Glory.”

“You’re shitting me, ain’t ya?”

She shook her head, reaching over to collect the reins of the captain’s horse as Skint thumped down in a plume of dust and, with a wince, walked—in her stockings as she’d lost her boots—to the tavern door.

Huggs joined Wither tying up the horses to the hitching post. “Glory, huh? Gods, I need a bath. They should call this place Dragon Mouth, it’s so fucking hot. Listen, Wither, that quarrel head’s still under my shoulder blade—I can’t reach up and take off this cloak—I’m melting underneath—”

The taller woman turned to her, reached up, and unclasped the brooch on Huggs’s cloak. “Stand still.”

“It’s a bit stuck on my back. Bloodglue, you know?”

“Ya. Don’t move and if this hurts, I don’t want to have to hear about it.”

“Right. Do it.”

Wither stepped around, gripping the cloak’s hems, and slowly and evenly pulled the heavy wool from Huggs’s narrow back. The bloodglue gave way with a sob, revealing a quilted gambeson stained black around the hole left by the quarrel. Wither studied the wound by peering through the hole. “A trickle, but not bad.”

“Good. Nice. Thanks.”

“I wouldn’t trust the bathwater here, Huggs. That river’s fulla pig shit and this place floods every spring, and I doubt the wells are dug deep.”

“I know. Fucking hole.”

The others had followed Captain Skint into the tavern. There was no shouting from within—a good sign.

The shorter, thinner woman—whose hips were, however, much broader than Wither’s—plucked at the thongs binding the front of the gambeson. “Sweat’s got me all chafed under my tits—lucky you barely got any, Withy.”

“Ya. Lucky me. Like every woman says when it’s hot, ‘Mop ’em if you got ’em.’ Let’s go drink.”

The soldier woman who walked into the bar didn’t look like the kind to give much away. She’d be a hard drinker, though, or so Swillman judged in the single flickering glance he risked taking at her face. And things could get bad, because she didn’t look like someone used to paying for what she took; and the two soldier men who clumped in behind her looked even uglier to a man like Swill—who was an honest publican just trying to do his best.

The woman wasn’t wearing boots, which made her catlike as she drew up to the bar.

“Got ale,” said Swillman before she could open her mouth and demand something he’d never heard of. The woman frowned, and Swill thought that maybe these people were so foreign they didn’t speak the language of the land.

But she then said, in a cruel, butchered accent, “What place is this?”

“Glory.”

“No.” She waved one gauntleted hand. “Kingdom? Empire?”

Swillman looked over at Slim, who was watching with a hoof-stunned expression, and then he licked his lips and shrugged.

The foreign woman sighed. “Five tankards, then.”

“Y’got to pay first.”

To Swillman’s surprise, she didn’t reach across and snap his neck like a lamp taper. Instead, she tugged free a small bag looped around her throat—the bag coming up from between her breasts somewhere under that chain armor, and spilled out a half-dozen rectangular coins onto the countertop.

Swillman stared down at them. “That tin? Lead?”

“Silver.”

“I can’t make no give-back on silver!”

“Well, what do you use here?”

He reached down and lifted into view his wooden cash tray. Its four sculpted bowls held seven buttons in three different sizes, a few nuggets of raw copper, a polished agate, and three sticks of stale rustleaf.

“No coins?”

“Been years since I last seen one a those.”

“What did it look like?”

“Oblong, not like yours at all. And they was copper.”

“What was stamped on ’em?” asked the short, bearded man who’d sidled up between the woman and Slim. “Whose face, I mean? Or faces—three faces? Castle in the sky? Something like that, maybe?”

Swillman shrugged. “Don’t recall.”

“One of these should do us for the night, then,” said the woman, nudging one of the silver coins in Swill’s direction.

“A cask of ale for you and meals, too, that would be about right.”

He could see that the woman knew she was being taken, but didn’t seem much interested in arguing.

The bearded man was eyeing Slim, who was eyeing him back.

The other man, leaning on the rail on the other side of the stocking-footed woman, was big and stupid-looking—Swillman could hear his loud breathing and the man’s mouth hung open.

Probably too dumb to understand what was going on about anything, from that empty look in his eyes and those snaggled teeth, yellow and dry jutting out like that.

Drawing the first three tankards, Swillman served them up. A moment later, two more women soldiers clumped in.

Slim scowled and did her usual shrink-back when people she thought of as competition ever showed up, but the bearded man just went and moved closer. “Keep,” he said, “give this sweet lass another one.”

Swillman gaped, and then nodded. He was already drawing two more tankards for the new women—gods, they were all cut up and bruised and knocked about, weren’t they just? All five of ’em. Addled in the heads, too, he suspected. Imagine, calling Slim a sweet lass! Bastard was blind!

The loud breather startled him by speaking up. “Seen no stables—we need to put up for the night. Horses need taking care of. We want somewhere to sleep under cover. We need food for the ride, too, and clean, boiled water. Is there a drygoods here? How about a blacksmith? Anyone work leather and hide? Is there a whetstone? Anyone selling blankets?”

Swillman had begun shaking his head with the very first query, and he kept shaking it until the man ran down.

“None of that?”

“None. Sorry, we’re not on, uh, any road. We see a merchant once a year, whatever he don’t sell elsewhere by season’s end, we can look at.”

Slim drained her tankard in one long pull and then, after a gasp, she said, “Widow Bark’s got some wool, I think. She spins something, anyway. Might have a blanket to sell. The stable burned down, we got no horses anyway. We got pigs, and sheep a walk south of here, near the other end of the valley, but all that wool down there goes into the next valley, to the town there—to Piety.”

“How far away is Piety?” the bearded man asked.

“Four days on foot, maybe two on horseback.”

“Well,” the breather demanded, “where can we sleep?”

Swillman licked his lips and said, “If it’s just a dry roof you’re looking for, there’s the old keep on the hill.”

They’d dug one of the pits too close to a barrow, and from one end of the rectangular trench old bones tumbled out in lumps of yellow clay. Graves and Snotty stared down at them for a time. Splinters and shards, snapped and marrow-sucked, and then Graves scooped up most of them with his shovel.

“We’ll bore a hole in the mound,” he said.

Snotty wiped his running nose and nodded. “I’m thirsty.”

“Let’s break, then.”

“They going up to the keep?”

Graves lifted the mud and bones and tipped the mess onto the ground opposite the back pile. “I expect so.” He set the shovel down and clambered out, then reached back to pull the boy out of the hole.

“They was looking at us as they went past.”

“I know, boy. Don’t let it bother you.”

“I don’t. I was just noticing, that’s all.”

“Me too.”

They went over to broach the second cask of water, shared the single tin cup back and forth a few times. “I shouldn’t have had all that ale earlier,” said Graves.

“You wasn’t to know, though, was you?”

“That’s true. Just a normal day, right?”

Snotty nodded. “A normal day in Glory.”

“I’m thinking,” mused Graves, “I probably shouldn’t have put up the rags, though. Soldiers can count that high, mostly, if they need to. Wonder if it got them thinking.”

“We could find out, when we get back to the bar.”

“Might be we’re not done afore dark, boy.”

“They’re soljers, they’ll stay late, drinking and carousing.”

Graves smiled. “Carousing? That’s quite the imagination you got there.”

“Taking turns with Slim, I mean, and getting drunk, too, and maybe getting into a few fights—”

“With who?”

“With each other, I guess, or even Swillman.”

“Swillman wouldn’t fight to save his life, boy. Besides, he’ll be happy enough if the soldiers pay for what they take. If they don’t, well, there’s not much he can do about it, is there?” He paused, squinting toward town. “Taking turns with Slim. Maybe. Have to be blind drunk, though.”

“She shows ’em her ring and that’ll do.”

Graves shot the boy a hard look. “How you know about that?”

“My birthday present, last time.”

“I doubt you is—”

“That’s what her tongue’s for, ain’t it?”

“You’re too young to know anything about that. Slim—that wretched hag, what was she thinking?”

“It was the only present she had t’give me, she said.”

Graves put the cup away. “Break’s over. Don’t want them t’drink up all the ale afore we get there, do we?”

“No, sir, that’d be bad.”

The sun was down and the muggy moon yet to rise when Flapp went off with Slim into the lone back room behind the bar.

Huggs snorted. “That man’s taste…can you believe it?”

Shrugging, Wither drained her tankard and thumped it down on the bar. “More, Swilly!” She turned to Huggs. “He’s always been that way. Picks the ugliest ones or the oldest ones and if he can, the ugliest oldest ones if the two fit the same whore.”

“This time he’s got it all and no choice besides. Must be a happy man.”

“I’d expect so.”

Captain Skint had gone to one of the two tables in the bar and was working hard emptying the first cask all by herself. Dullbreath sat beside her, mouth hanging open, staring at not much. He’d taken a mace to the side of his head a week back, cracking open his helmet but not his skull. Hit that hard anywhere else and he’d be in trouble. But it was just his head, so now he was back to normal and his eyes didn’t cross no more. Unless he got mad. As far as Wither could tell, there’d be no reason for Dullbreath to get mad here and on this night. This place was lively as a boy’s Cut Night after three days of fasting and no booze.

She and Huggs glanced over when a man and a snot-faced boy came into the bar.

“He ain’t so bad,” Huggs said. “Think he’s for hire?”

“Y’can ask him.”

“Maybe I will. Get his face cleaned up first, though.”

“Them two was the diggers.”

Huggs grunted. “You’re right. Could be we can find out who did all the dying.”

Wither raised her voice, “You two, leave off that table and come here. We’re buying.”

The older man tipped his head. “Obliged. And the lad?”

“Whatever he wants.”

Sure enough the boy moved up to stand close beside Huggs, wiping at his nose with a dirt-smeared forearm. His sudden smile showed a row of even white teeth. Huggs shot Wither a glance and aye, things were looking up.

A life on the march sure messed with the bent of soldiers, Wither reflected. Camp followers were mostly people with nothing left to lose and lives going nowhere, and plenty of scrawny orphans and bastards among ’em, and so a soldier’s tastes got twisted pretty quick. She thought the older man looked normal enough. A grave digger like every other grave digger and she’d met more than a few. “Swilly, more ale here.”

The digger was quiet enough as he drank and he showed plenty of practice doing that drinking.