The Infiltrators (10 page)

Zolgen faced an internal struggle. Few
things in this universe present more contradictions than the Varco
rules governing capture. They were not written down anywhere,
because there were no official rules.

Any captured Varco agent who then was
rescued or escaped by his own cunning had to report the situation
immediately to his superior officer, upon which he would be taken
into custody until trial.

At his trial, it would not be the
burden of an overworked prosecutor to present meticulous evidence
of the agent’s guilt to a neutral jury while simultaneously
sidestepping a host of snares such as hearsay or evidence obtained
without a proper warrant.

Quite the contrary, it would be the
agent, without any counsel, who would stand before a jury of twelve
peers seeking to convince them beyond a reasonable doubt that his
capture had not been the result of incompetence or treason and that
his escape or rescue had not been the result of collusion with the
enemy.

Before the hapless agent stood before
these twelve hard faces, they were admonished in the most ardent
language by the king himself to keep in mind the strong likelihood
of the agent’s guilt or treason. If the agents found the
defendant’s case of innocence so compelling as to find him not
guilty, the defendant was far from free.

Only if the king himself expressed his
agreement with the jury’s decision would the defendant once again
be allowed to resume his services to the crown. This rarely
happened, and it was rumored in fact that nearly half the time a
jury found in favor of a defendant the king then had both them and
the defendant executed for treason and conspiracy.

As a result of these rigorous steps to
prevent cowardice and treachery, Varco agents were often
recommended by their superiors to commit suicide in the unfortunate
event they were ever taken captive by men that they were not likely
to escape from quickly.

Supervising field agents who were aware
of a prompt escape from enemy captivity often looked the other way,
but if the secret got out amongst multiple agents it was usually
too risky for the supervisor to risk not detaining and reporting
the unfortunate agent.

Well aware of these harsh methods to
ensure both competence and loyalty throughout the Varco ranks, the
Sogolians often found little incentive to keep Varco captives
alive. Their resistance to torture was legendary, and like a
captive cobra that is peacefully milked a hundred times before
unexpectedly delivering a death bite to its handler, Varco were
considered unpleasant captives to keep around, due to the short
duration for which any lock, shackle, or bond could refrain them
and prevent them from attacking their captors.

Pitkins had been a bit unpopular in his
decision to keep Zolgen and Vilizen alive, but an odd hunch that
defied logic so clearly not even he attempted to explain himself
rationally told him one day they would be useful.

Zolgen had been in captivity for years,
and by now he knew there was certainly going to be no rescue party.
He had seen several Varco attempt escape only to be impaled on
pikes as a warning to the others. Even if he miraculously did
manage to escape, he knew he stood little chance of convincing both
the jury and the king that he was not incompetent. The general rule
of thumb was that if you were held captive for six months or more
before “escape” your chances of being cleared of both incompetence
and corruption charges were effectively nil.

What could be the harm in teaching
techniques to a worthy adversary? It would allow him an enjoyable
respite from his chains from which he was currently only freed
about once a month to be doused in cold water while ten crossbowmen
surrounded him at point-blank range.

“I’ll do it,” Zolgen said.

A wave of silence descended upon the
group, no one, not even Pitkins, having expected this answer, yet
only one or two of the most cynical guessed that Zolgen’s motives
had little to with his concern about Vilizen’s fingers. Truth be
told, Vilizen had been largely to blame for Zolgen’s current
capture, his aim with a blowgun having been just slightly off,
cutting the carotid, rather than the larynx, of an approaching
guard, whose ensuing blood-curdling scream brought a whole host of
Sogolian guards, who overwhelmed Vilizen and Zolgen, albeit at
great loss.

“TRAITOR!” shouted Vilizen.

Men grabbed the hilts of their swords,
like wagon passengers gripping their seats in preparation for a
rough patch of road. Faux quarreling amongst Varco was a known
diversionary tactic. A few of the Sogolian officers had been narrow
survivors of it, having thought their help was needed to break up a
bloody fight between two Varco only to discover them fighting as
one a half-second later and severing the throats of the intervening
Sogolians.

Pitkins watched Vilizen closely, and it
seemed to him that perhaps his passionate objection had been the
result of his misreading Zolgen’s intentions, thinking that he
wished to stage a quarrel.

“It beats sitting in chains all day,”
Zolgen replied softly, which seemed to take Vilizen off guard,
though only the subtlest of hints could be seen in the shrewd man’s
face.

“Where are our friends—our compatriots,
Vilizen? You know we’re both as good as dead, should we ever leave
this place. Do what you will. I will teach . . . but only under
certain conditions,” he said, looking carefully at
Pitkins.

Pitkins’ icy stare was his only
invitation to state his proposals.

“I will only teach you and your ten
highest-ranking officers. Not one more. If I am going to part with
this knowledge, it shall only be to the most worthy.”

Pitkins eyed his fellow officers. Few
would dare question him now. Not only did his rank exceed theirs,
but few wanted to test the temper of a man who had just suffered
such tragedy.

“And I have my condition for you,
Varco,” Pitkins began. “If you so much as injure me or one of my
chosen officers, I will lift the Sogolian ban on torture for your
sake and your sake alone. We will slowly cook you over a fire. Even
Varco pain tolerance has its limits. And I will first strip you and
starve you for five days to ensure you do not cheat torture with
one of your Varco herbs. Do we understand each other?”

“When do we begin?”

Pitkins knew the condition about
limiting the instruction to his ten highest-ranking officers was
symbolic rather than practical. In reality, the Sogolians had
little use for the highly sophisticated empty-hand techniques,
called Gicksin, that the Varco thrived on. Gicksin was for the
realm of assassinations and ambushes. Sogolians prided themselves
on their mastery of open combat, where their heavily armed force
faced its enemy with swords, axes, and other instruments to
determine mastery of the field.

Such engagements were seen as the
height of folly by the Metinvurs, though Pitkins had to grudgingly
concede that the Metinvurs’ army was only slightly inferior to the
Sogolians’ in open combat. Even this “conventional” army was
shrouded in secrecy. Some said all Metinvurs were soldiers and that
they could be called away from their blacksmith, accounting, and
cobbler shops with an hour’s notice to suit themselves up in armor
and march to battle.

Others said the army was made up of
those who didn’t quite make the cut in Varco training but were seen
as too valuable to be executed. Still others said that the army was
by bloodline and that the two oldest males of every soldier were
pressed into the military at age eight, trained in conventional
warfare until age eighteen, and then released into the civilian
population but required to train periodically throughout the year
and to always be on call for war.

Pitkins suspected the truth involved
some mixture of these elements, and he couldn’t help being
impressed by the results. The Sogolian army was made up of men
offered as boys to the army by their fathers, usually by the age of
twelve. Rigorous martial training ensued until the boys reached
manhood at seventeen, at which point they were given the choice of
retiring into the civilian population or serving in the military as
their full-time career.

The latter choice resulted in a binding
contract that required a minimum of twenty years’ service before
retirement became possible—albeit difficult. Only after a full
thirty years’ service did a soldier earn the right to retire at his
own discretion. Those who performed exemplarily achieved entry into
the Nikorians, the most elite unit of the Sogolian army, of which
Pitkins was general.

To a Sogolian, loss of one’s weapon on
the battlefield was seen quite similarly to the way capture was
seen by the Metinvurs. The Sogolians viewed such a man as having
already died in combat. Thus, rather than focusing on empty-hand
combat training to increase the chances of survival in such an
unfortunate situation, they armed themselves with a variety of
weapons, in order to have numerous replacements.

It was not unusual for a Sogolian
soldier—and particularly not for a Nikorian—to have several large
daggers attached to his person in various sheaths, ready to be
drawn and used immediately in the event he lost his main
weapon.

Pitkins was one of the few Sogolians
who realized that, while there was certainly some logic to the
Sogolian combat strategy, it was a bit rigid and overly inspired by
antagonism to the Metinvurs and a desire to excel in areas where
they faltered.

Pitkins had lost his sword in combat
multiple times, and though he had managed to use a secondary weapon
to recover his sword he knew that the gods themselves had surely
intervened in several close encounters where he had managed to
sever the large artery of a Metinvur who was strangling him and
only needed a second or two more to render him
unconscious.

Thus, it was with relish that—after a
protracted period of mourning for his late family—he emerged from
his grief and threw all his energy into learning
Gicksin.

Progress was painfully slow. The use of
various parts of the feet as though they were hands, the intricate
grips, the meticulous body positioning all combined to make study
of this science a physically and emotionally challenging endeavor.
Three hours each morning and three hours each evening, the men
gathered for studious observation of Vilizen’s and Zolgen’s
demonstrations, followed by merciless repetitions of each
technique, sometimes stepping up into the thousands.

But after three years, Pitkins found
himself almost romantically in love with the fluidity and cunning
of the techniques and found to his chagrin that it worked against
his vow to find and kill the slayers of his family.

After a full nine years of training,
Zolgen informed Pitkins that, while study of Gicksin was indeed a
lifetime discipline, he had reached such a high level of
sophistication that his further advancement would merely require
the continued practice of the techniques but not further
instruction.

Zolgen and Vilizen then requested, as a
gift for the knowledge they had imparted, a small portion of a
particular herb so that they could end their lives honorably.
Pitkins reluctantly agreed, admitting to himself that he also would
not desire a long life in captivity, and by the next day the only
two Metinvurs for whom he had ever felt anything besides murderous
rage were dead.

As time marched onward, the obstacles
to his revenge became practical rather than sentimental. It was not
too long afterward that he was framed for treason and banished from
the kingdom. He took this as a sign from the gods that revenge was
not the plan for his life.

But today, as he ran madly and
aimlessly through the woods, he was beginning to question that
assumption. His lessons with Mr. Simmers were nearly the only thing
to break the merciless monotony of his life. He crafted few swords
because he had noticed a new breed of men in the City of
Sodorf.

They were pompous, extravagantly
dressed, and yet not from the nobility. Their uncouth pronunciation
and grammar identified them immediately as rascals. Men who had
made themselves rich in the city’s flourishing underworld of
Smokeless Green.

Yet, as a man who had been surrounded
by combat and violence for most of his life, he easily perceived
traits that set these men apart from the average rascal roaming the
street searching for an easy pocket to pick.

Violence—even justified violence—left
its traces in a man’s eye, just like a man’s diet leaves its
footprint on his waistline and muscles. But cold-blooded murder
left not only a more pronounced, but very different, mark. Pitkins
was used to seeing the hard, somewhat unfeeling eyes of his veteran
Nikorians, and they were markedly different from those of a
civilian.