The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) (24 page)

Night fell, and there was no moon, or what moon there was remained hidden behind the great peak of the mountain, which blocked some third of the horizon from Haven, that part that the trees did not swallow themselves. In the meeting hall, there was only Sten, alone and awake. Ekho and Orick had come back from a scouting mission and they had seen the final preparations. The kenku swords were sharp.

They were prepared. It was the night before a battle, and Sten did not sleep before he fought.

He did not need to sleep, but to rest. And rest could be found best not in the bed but in preparation—the sword and scabbard, the shield, the armor, piece by piece by piece, each placed on the council table, where there was room for all of it at once.

When was the last time Sten wore the full suit, instead of just the chain mail shirt, itself protection enough against the ruffians of the city? He could not remember, but perhaps it did not matter.

Perhaps it would be different from those times, enough so that when he put on the armor he would once again feel the pride he’d felt, before he realized how compromised he’d become, too compromised to keep wearing the symbol of his dead grandfather’s pride, the fallen empire’s honor.

Or perhaps it would not. He had tried to redeem himself before, and still had not. Too many had died, and he remembered their names.

If the night lasted long enough, he would recite them all, starting with the first:

Navia, he said, his voice low in his throat. He wanted to repeat her name again—always he wanted to repeat it—but that was not the rules of the ritual. Each name, uttered only once, so that no name would be more important than any others. And so to move on, and quickly.

Goren the Great. Veng the Battle-Weary. The dwarves of Kal-Hall, Borne and Morgren and Puddlen. His first company, after—

He cannot let himself repeat a name. Cannot admit that he valued some more, that he sent others to their deaths easier, would have traded them sooner if it could have kept some other alive.

And also what he would do to win the battle. And what he had done.

The meeting hall was nearly dark, lit only by a candle, the dimmest and slowest-burning Sten could find. He had ordered lights out for the night, and fires extinguished, despite the cold, as the kenku were advancing, would arrive in the village by midday at the latest.

Should they arrive earlier, while it was still dark, Sten did not want them to be able to see into the village while he and the others were unable to see out. Better the villagers sleep one night cold and frightened then forever with an arrow through their beds.

Julian and Rolf—

He started with the sword, even though it was the part of his armament that needed the least attention. It was the sword he wore every day, that had accompanied him everywhere he went since Spundwand had first given it to him, that day long before when the dwarf had taken Sten out of the refugee camp, out of the
orphan’s tent within that camp. The sword had been too big for him then—he was just a child—but still the dwarf began to train him in its uses. Not sword fighting, not yet, as that was no skill for a boy, and anyway his muscles could not have learned their tasks so soon. Instead, Spundwand made the boy carry the sword, first just an hour a day, then more and more as he aged, until by the time Sten was a teenager the weight of the sword disappeared when it was on his belt or his back, as unnoticeable as the weight of his legs or his arms.

From then on, the only time Sten felt the weight of the sword was when it was absent, and even then it was the missing weight of a phantom limb, a hole in himself to reach for, to worry at.

When the sword was clean and sharp and ready, Sten slid it back into the scabbard, placed it back on the table. Then it was in his hands again, then strapped to his belt.

It was the night before a battle, and Sten did not want to miss any part of himself. Perhaps he would sleep with his sword on. Perhaps it would not be the first time.

If he slept.

He would not sleep. He never sleeps, if he can help it.

Sten’s armor did not have the same pedigree, but it was well-crafted, had served him well, through
long campaigns in the eastern swamps against the yuan-ti—and there he lost Torvald, son of Tor, and also Tor—and in the running battles in the streets of the fallen cities, first Wardgate and Redstone, then Middlenight and the other cities of the old interior, and then Hal and Breck, and Marcus and Marcus and Marcus, three different men with the same name, the same or similar doom, all dead in a row.

And each of the battles a victory. And each of the battles and more paid for in silver and gold, coins that paid for his armor, for the repairs needed after a drake tore through its chest-piece, or after arrows soaked with acid disintegrated its leggings.

Spundwand had been at Sten’s side through all the years of fighting, and the dwarf had no trouble calling them successes, but Sten did not see them the same. All of them were petty fights, squabbles between warlords and merchants and governors unfit for the thrones they sat upon, seats that once held great men upon them in another age. There were no great battles to be fought, no great wars to be won. There was only the life of the mercenary, and while he had lived it without complaint—had enjoyed its many rewards, of small fame and some gold and enough women—he also begun to grow old, and in his bones he could feel how weary he was of the fighting, and of the death he’d caused, both with his sword and his commands.

If his plan succeeded the next day, but Magla and Mikal and Ekho and Imony fell, then would it still be a win? What if Nergei and Luzhon and Kohel and Padlur, the other children of Haven, what if they died in the fight? Even the Old Stargazer, already past his fair allotment of years, even he should not have to end his long life because of Sten’s mistakes, and yet that was the burden of the command, was the reason Sten lifted his shield to check its straps and said Braden and Victor and Yarwen and on and on, the task of cleaning his armor long done and still there were more names, still there were more mistakes to keep close, to put on as he put on his armor, strapped his shield tight to his arm.

He had not carried the names as long as he had carried the sword, but nearly so.

Every fight brought another death, executed by an enemy but caused only by himself, who brought the men and women in his command to the killing grounds upon which they fell. He remembered their names, spoke them in order to keep them fresh, to never let them lose their weight, as his sword did.

It had been a long time since he wore his armor, and it was heavy too, but it was nothing compared to all those losses, all those lost friends cut down in his command.

Tomorrow would bring the battle, and tomorrow there would be more names for him to carry.

Sten did not know where they would fit. He did not know how he would find the space.

Or rather. he did know, but he wondered how much more of himself there was left to carve out, how much more he could empty his spirit to make room for theirs.

It did not matter. He would pay the price to remember them, as they had paid the same to follow him, even unto their deaths.

“My little Brickboots,” said Imony, seated at a table with Spundwand.

“Imony, I have told you many times: Dwarf folk do not take kindly to being addressed as ‘little.’ ” Spundwand was, as was his ritual before combat, downing ale at an inn. Imony—absent through most of the preparations of the town, preferring instead to charm the little children of Haven with games and songs—had joined him. Her own rituals were obscure to those who knew her. She remained an empty vessel for them to fill with their assumptions about the eccentric.

“I’m sorry, Brickboots. It is merely that I love you so.”

“Be that as it may, Imony,” said Spundwand. He stared absently. She stared with great intensity. They stared, together, at the hearth. “What do you see when you watch a flame, Imony?”

“I see the dance of combat, my dearest,” she responded. “I learn. I learn from the way a flame spreads over a fresh log. I learn from the graceful licks of fire that rise and shimmy. I learn to dodge a blow to the body with a simple giving way of the leg. I learn to rise like a cinder and let an arrow fall below me. And you?”

Spundwand was ashamed of his answer, but had enough ale in him to speak truthfully: “A flame makes me think only of dinner, Imony. Only of meat turning on a spit, browning and blackening. Getting tender.” Imony laughed and, when he had passed through his reverie, so did Spundwand. “You were a child when we first met, Imony.”

“And you an old man. And now I am an old woman.”

“And I remain an old man. But you are not that old,” said Spundwand.

Spundwand remembered his introduction to Imony. Sten was still a boy back then. She and Sten were companions—the son of the captain of the guard and the daughter of a merchant, a trader of goods who thrived because he dared to travel farther than any other, dared the borderlands to the west of the continent. Imony was a good friend to Sten, but even then was more than a little enamored of the older dwarf. She followed him everywhere, got into trouble just to see if he would be the one to save her
from a bully, or chase her after she stole an apple in the market. Sten told Spundwand once that she had said she was in love with Spundwand because she loved his beard.

When she reached an age where travel became an option, Imony would go with her father. She took a half-dozen three-month journeys west with him and returned with stories of the new mountains she saw, the creatures her father’s guards had killed, the strange cities she had been to. And she spoke of a school where they taught men to fight without weapons. Her father would trade linen there, getting ink, parchment, and brushes in return. She loved the place and spoke of it often. One day, her father returned from a trip west and told Sten that she had asked to stay. The teachers there found her able to face the rigorous nature of the training, even though she was not a lean or tall girl. She nevertheless had the balance and the will to thrive. She defied their expectations and they were, by temperament, of a mind to favor any who defied their expectations.

So Spundwand and Sten expected to never see Imony again. A lifetime passed. Sten’s father passed. Sten became the soldier that his father was. Spundwand became the companion to Sten that he had been to Sten’s father. When they landed in the city many years later and began attending the combat competitions,
the last person they had expected to see was Imony. But one day, there she was. Sten would not have recognized her as she would not have recognized him. To Spundwand, too, she was only passingly familiar—he had known so many in his lifetime, drank with so many, fought with so many—but to Imony, Spundwand was exactly as she had remembered.

“Will we live tomorrow?” asked Imony.

It was a question Spundwand had heard many times before. Countless soldiers had asked him that over the years. Many had found their answer at the point of a spear or a sword. The procession of dead ran through Spundwand’s mind.

“Will we, Brickboots?” she asked again.

“I never answer that question, child. I have answered it in the past, and was not happy with the results. I do not like to lie.”

“Does it matter, Brickboots, if we live or die?”

“It matters to me if my friends live or die,” he said. “But I am not in a position to guarantee either outcome, Imony, and therefore remain without opinion.”

A dour mood had fallen over Spundwand and Imony. She was not one to dwell in a dour mood, though. “Perhaps a dance,” she said.

Spundwand shook his head. “The people in here are not, I expect, in the mood for a dance, Imony. They are not hardened by years of combat. They sit
here and they drink because each of them expects to die tomorrow.”

“And if they brood over that throughout this night, then that is exactly what they will do, Brickboots.”

She stood up and walked to an open space in front of the hearth. A few of the hunters were in the inn drinking—the ones who Magla had not frightened off—and she grabbed one from a barstool and spun him out with her. She demanded music, and eventually, someone was able to produce an instrument. She demanded others join her, and somehow managed to convince others to do so.

They did not stay up late in a revelry. Eventually, Magla entered the inn—she had spent the dusk and early night continuing to drill her best archers by an enchanted light created for her by Mikal—and when she saw men she knew were expected to help defend the town the next day, she stared with an intensity that sent them all home.

Spundwand did not dance. But he watched. And when he had decided it was time to go to sleep, he first grasped Imony’s hand and squeezed it. And he kissed it gently before ushering her to her own room.

T
he makeshift walls were set. The makeshift guardians, too, were prepared. By the time the sun rose on the day all believed was the day the attack would come, the villagers of Haven had pulled themselves from their beds—so much more difficult to do in the unnatural cold that had a firm grip on the land—earlier than even a farmer was used to. Magla had insisted the archers prepare. Sten had insisted those swords and spears be sharp and ready.