Red Country Read online

  He was the best man in the Company, and he was treated with scorn. Given the smallest command, the worst jobs, the meanest share of the plunder. He jerked his threadbare uniform smooth, produced his comb and rearranged his hair, then strode from the scene of his shame and out into the street with the stiffest bearing he could manage.

  In the lunatic asylum, he supposed, the one sane man looks mad.

  Sufeen could smell burning on the air. It put him in mind of other battles, long ago. Battles that had needed fighting. Or so it seemed, now. He had gone from fighting for his country, to fighting for his friends, to fighting for his life, to fighting for a living, to… whatever this was. The men who had been trying to demolish the watchtower had abandoned the project and were sitting around it with bad grace, passing a bottle. Inquisitor Lorsen stood near them, with grace even poorer.

  ‘Your business with the merchant is concluded?’ asked Cosca as he came down the steps of the inn.

  ‘It has,’ snapped Lorsen.

  ‘And what discoveries?’

  ‘He died.’

  A pause. ‘Life is a sea of sorrows.’

  ‘Some men cannot endure stern questioning.’

  ‘Weak hearts caused by moral decay, I daresay.’

  ‘The outcome is the same,’ said the Inquisitor. ‘We have the Superior’s list of settlements. Next comes Lobbery, then Averstock. Gather the Company, General.’

  Cosca’s brow furrowed. It was the most concern Sufeen had seen him display that day. ‘Can we not let the men stay overnight, at least? Some time to rest, enjoy the hospitality of the locals—’

  ‘News of our arrival must not reach the rebels. The righteous cannot delay.’ Lorsen managed to say it without a trace of irony.

  Cosca puffed out his cheeks. ‘The righteous work hard, don’t they?’

  Sufeen felt a withering helplessness. He could hardly lift his arms, he was suddenly so tired. If only there had been righteous men to hand, but he was the nearest thing to one. The best man in the Company. He took no pride in that. Best maggot in the midden would have made a better boast. He was the only man there with the slightest shred of conscience. Except Temple, perhaps, and Temple spent his every waking moment trying to convince himself and everyone else that he had no conscience at all. Sufeen watched him, standing slightly behind Cosca, a little stooped as if he was hiding, fingers fussing, trying to twist the buttons off his shirt. A man who could have been anything, struggling to be nothing. But in the midst of this folly and destruction, the waste of one man’s potential hardly seemed worth commenting on. Could Jubair be right? Was God a vengeful killer, delighting in destruction? It was hard at that moment to argue otherwise.

  The big Northman stood on the stoop in front of Stupfer’s Meat House and watched them mount up, great fists clenched on the rail, afternoon sun glinting on that dead metal ball of an eye.

  ‘How are you going to write this up?’ Temple was asking.

  Sworbreck frowned down at his notebook, pencil hovering, then carefully closed it. ‘I may gloss over this episode.’

  Sufeen snorted. ‘I hope you brought a great deal of gloss.’

  Though it had to be conceded, the Company of the Gracious Hand had conducted itself with unusual restraint that day. They put Squaredeal behind them with only mild complaints about the poor quality of plunder, leaving the merchant’s body hanging naked from the watchtower, a sign about his neck proclaiming his fate a lesson to the rebels of the Near Country. Whether the rebels would hear the lesson, and if they did what they would learn from it, Sufeen could not say. Two other men hung beside the trader.

  ‘Who were they?’ asked Temple, frowning back.

  ‘The young one was shot running away, I think. I’m not sure about the other.’

  Temple grimaced, and twitched, and fidgeted with a frayed sleeve. ‘What can we do, though?’

  ‘Only follow our consciences.’

  Temple rounded on him angrily. ‘For a mercenary you talk a lot about conscience!’

  ‘Why concern yourself unless yours bothers you?’

  ‘As far as I can tell, you’re still taking Cosca’s money!’

  ‘If I stopped, would you?’

  Temple opened his mouth, then soundlessly shut it and scowled off at the horizon, picking at his sleeve, and picking, and picking.

  Sufeen sighed. ‘God knows, I never claimed to be a good man.’ A couple of the outlying houses had been set ablaze, and he watched the columns of smoke drift up into the blue. ‘Merely the best in the Company.’

  All Got a Past

  The rain came hard. It had filled the wagon ruts and the deep-sucked prints of boot and hoof until they were one morass and the main street lacked only for a current to be declared a river. It drew a grey curtain across the town, the odd lamp dimmed as through a mist, orange rumours dancing ghostly in the hundred thousand puddles. It fell in mud-spattering streams from the backed-up gutters on the roofs, and the roofs with no gutters at all, and from the brim of Lamb’s hat as he hunched silent and soggy on the wagon’s seat. It ran in miserable beads down the sign hung from an arch of crooked timbers that proclaimed this leavings of a town to be Averstock. It soaked into the dirt-speckled hides of the oxen, Calder proper lurching lame now in a back leg and Scale not much better off. It fell on the horses tethered to the rail before the shack that excused itself for a tavern. Three unhappy horses, their coats turned dark by the wet.

  ‘That them?’ asked Leef. ‘Those their horses?’

  ‘That’s them,’ said Shy, cold and clammy in her leaking coat as a woman buried.

  ‘What we going to do?’ Leef was trying to hide the tense note in his voice and falling well short.

  Lamb didn’t answer him. Not right away. Instead he leaned close to Shy, speaking soft. ‘Say you’re caught between two promises, and you can’t keep one without breaking the other. What do you do?’

  To Shy’s mind that verged on the whimsical, considering the task in hand. She shrugged, shoulders chafing in her wet shirt. ‘Keep the one most needs keeping, I guess.’

  ‘Aye,’ he muttered, staring across that mire of a street. ‘Just leaves on the water, eh? Never any choices.’ They sat a moment longer, no one doing a thing but getting wetter, then Lamb turned in his seat. ‘I’ll go in first. Get the oxen settled then the two of you follow, keeping easy.’ He swung from the wagon, boots splashing into the mud. ‘Unless you’ve a mind to stay here. Might be best all round.’

  ‘I’ll do my part,’ snapped Leef.

  ‘You know what your part might be? You ever kill a man?’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Just don’t get in my way.’ Lamb was different somehow. Not hunched any more. Bigger. Huge. Rain pattering on the shoulders of his coat, hint of light down one side of his rigid frown, the other all in darkness. ‘Stay out of my way. You got to promise me that.’

  ‘All right,’ said Leef, giving Shy a funny look.

  ‘All right,’ said Shy.

  An odd thing for Lamb to say. You could find meaner lambs than him at every lambing season. But men can be strange that way, with their pride. Shy had never had much use for pride herself. So she guessed she could let him talk his talk, and try and work up to it, and go in first. Worked all right when they had crops to sell, after all. Let him draw the eyes while she slipped up behind. She slid her knife into her sleeve, watching the old Northman struggling to make it across the boggy street with both boots still on, arms wide for balance.

  When Lamb faltered, she could do what needed doing. Done it before, hadn’t she, with lighter reasons and to men less deserving? She checked her knife would slip clear of her wet sleeve all right, heart thumping in her skull. She could do it again. Had to do it again.

  The tavern looked a broke-down hovel from outside and a step indoors revealed no grand deception. The place made Shy come over nostalgic for Stupfer’s Meat House—a state of mind she’d never thought to entertain. A sorry tongue of fire squirmed in a hearth blackened pa
st the point of rescue, a sour fragrance of woodsmoke and damp and rank bodies unknown to soap. The counter was a slab of old wood full of splits, polished by years of elbows and warped up in the middle. The Tavern-Keep, or maybe in this place the Hovel-Keep, stood over it wiping out cups.

  Narrow and low, the place was still far from full, which on a night foul as this was a poor showing. A set of five with two women in the group Shy took for traders, and not prosperous ones, hunched about some stew at the table furthest from her. A bony man sat alone with only a cup and a wore-out look for company. She recognised that from the black-spotted mirror she used to have and figured him for a farmer. Next table a fellow slumped in a fur coat so big it near drowned him, a shock of grey hair above, a hat with a couple of greasy feathers in the band and a half-empty bottle on the wood in front of him. Opposite, upright as a judge at trial, sat an old Ghost woman with a broken sideways nose, grey hair all bound up with what looked like the tatters of an old Imperial flag, and a face so deep-lined you could’ve used it for a plate rack. If your plates hadn’t all been burned up along with your mirror and everything else you owned, that is.

  Shy’s eyes crawled to the last members of the merry company like she wanted to pretend they weren’t there at all. But they were. Three men, huddled to themselves. They looked like Union men, far as you could tell where anyone was born once they were worn down by a few seasons in the dirt and weather of the Near Country. Two were young, one with a mess of red hair and a twitchy way like he’d a fly down his back. The other had a handsome shape to his face, far as Shy could tell standing to his side, a sheepskin coat cinched in with a fancy metal-studded belt. The third was older, bearded and with a tall hat, weather-stained, cocked to the side like he thought a lot of himself. Which most men do, of course, in proportion inverse to their value.

  He had a sword—Shy saw the battered brass tip of the sheath poking out the slit in his coat. Handsome had an axe and a heavy knife tucked in his belt along with a coil of rope. Red Hair’s back was to her so she couldn’t tell for certain, but no doubt he was entertaining a blade or two as well.

  She could hardly believe how ordinary they were. How everyday and dirty humdrum and like a thousand other drifters she’d seen floating through Squaredeal. She watched Handsome slide his hand back and tuck the thumb in that fancy belt so his fingers dangled. Just like anyone might, leaning against a counter after a long ride. Except his ride had led right through her burned-out farm, right through her smashed-up hopes, and carried her brother and sister off into who knew what darkness.

  She set her jaw hard and eased into the room, sticking to the shadows, not hiding exactly but making no spectacle of herself neither. Wasn’t hard, because Lamb was doing the opposite, much against his usual grain. He’d strolled up to the other end of the counter and was leaning over it with his big fists bunched on the split wood.

  ‘Nice night you’ve laid on for us,’ he was saying to the Tavern-Keep, shedding his hat and making a fuss of flapping the water off it so anyone with a mind to look up was watching him. Only the old Ghost’s deep-set eyes followed Shy as she slunk around the walls, and she’d nothing to say about it.

  ‘Little on the rainy side, no?’ said the Keep.

  ‘Comes down any harder you could have a sideline in a ferry across the street.’

  The Keep eyed his guests with scant delight. ‘I could do with some sort o’ business turns a profit. Hear tell there’s crowds coming through the Near Country but they ain’t crowding through here. You looking for a drink?’

  Lamb pulled his gloves off and tossed them careless on the counter. ‘I’ll take a beer.’

  The tender reached for a metal cup polished bright by his wiping.

  ‘Not that one.’ Lamb pointed at a great pottery mug, old-fashioned and dusty on a high shelf. ‘I like something I can feel the heft on.’

  ‘We talking about cups or women now?’ asked the Keep as he stretched up to fetch it.

  ‘Why not both?’ Lamb was grinning. How could he smile, now? Shy’s eyes flickered to the three men down the other end of the counter, bent quiet over their drinks.

  ‘Where you in from?’ asked the Keep.

  ‘East.’ Lamb shrugged his sodden coat off. ‘North and east, near Squaredeal.’

  One of the three men, the one with the red hair, looked over at Lamb, and sniffed, and looked away.

  ‘That’s a distance. Might be a hundred mile.’

  ‘Might be more, the route I’ve took, and on a bloody ox-cart, too. My old arse is ground to sausage-meat.’

  ‘Well, if you’re thinking of heading further west I’d think again. Lots of folks going that way, gold-hungry. I hear they’ve got the Ghosts all stirred up.’

  ‘That a fact?’

  ‘A certainty, friend,’ threw out the man in the fur coat, sticking his head up like a tortoise from its shell. He’d about the deepest, most gravel-throated voice Shy ever heard, and she’d given ear to some worn-down tones in her time. ‘They’s stirred up all across the Far Country like you trod on an ant’s nest. Riled up and banded up and out looking for ears, just like the old days. I heard Sangeed’s even got his sword drawed again.’

  ‘Sangeed?’ The Keep wriggled his head around like his collar was too tight.

  ‘The Emperor of the Plains his self.’ Shy got the sense the old bastard was quite enjoying his scaremongering. ‘His Ghosts massacred a whole fellowship o’ prospectors out on the dusty not two weeks ago. Thirty men, maybe. Took their ears and their noses and I shouldn’t wonder got their cocks besides.’

  ‘What the hell do they do with them?’ asked the farmer, staring at the old Ghost woman and giving a shudder. She didn’t comment. Didn’t even move.

  ‘If you’re fixed on going west I’d take plenty of company, and make sure that company has a little good humour and a lot o’ good steel, so I would.’ And the old-timer sank back into his fur coat.

  ‘Good advice.’ Lamb lifted that big mug and took a slow swallow. Shy swallowed with him, suddenly desperate for a beer of her own. Hell, but she wanted to get out of there. Get out or get on with it. But somehow Lamb was just as patient now as when he did the ploughing. ‘I ain’t sure yet exactly where I’m headed, though.’

  ‘What brought you this far?’ asked the Keep.

  Lamb had started rolling up his damp shirtsleeves, thick muscles in his grey-haired forearms squirming. ‘Followed some men out here.’

  Red Hair looked over again, a flurry of twitches slinking through his shoulder and up his face, and this time he kept looking. Shy let the knife slide from her sleeve, out of sight behind her arm, fingers hot and tacky round the grip.

  ‘Why’d you do that?’ asked the Keep.

  ‘They burned my farm. Stole my children. Hanged my friend.’ Lamb spoke like it wasn’t much to comment on, then raised his mug.

  The place had fallen so silent of a sudden you could hear him swallow. One of the traders had turned to look over, brow all crinkled up with worry. Tall Hat reached for his cup and Shy saw the tendons start from the back of his hand, he was gripping on so tight. Leef picked out that moment to ease through the door and hover on the threshold, wet and pale and not knowing what to do with himself. But everyone was too fixed on Lamb to pay him any mind.

  ‘Bad men, these, with no scruple,’ he went on. ‘They been stealing children all across the Near Country and leaving folk hanging in their wake. Might be a dozen I’ve buried the last few days.’

  ‘How many of the bastards?’

  ‘About twenty.’

  ‘Do we need to get a band up and seek ’em out?’ Though the Keep looked like he’d far rather stay and wipe his cups some more, and who could blame him?

  Lamb shook his head. ‘No point. They’ll be long gone.’

  ‘Right. Well. Reckon justice’ll be catching up with ’em, sooner or later. Justice is always following, they say.’

  ‘Justice can have what’s left when I’m done.’ Lamb finally had his sleeves rolle
d how he wanted and turned sideways, leaning easy against the counter, looking straight at those three men at its far end. Shy hadn’t known what to expect, but not this, not Lamb just grinning and chatting like he’d never known a worry. ‘When I said they’ve gone that ain’t quite all the truth. Three broke off from the rest.’

  ‘That a fact?’ Tall Hat spoke up, snatching the conversation from the Keep like a thief snatching a purse.

  Lamb caught his eye and held it. ‘A certainty.’

  ‘Three men, you say?’ Handsome’s fussing hand crept round his belt towards his axe. The mood of the place had shifted fast, the weight of coming violence hanging heavy as a storm cloud in that little room.

  ‘Now look,’ said the Keep, ‘I don’t want no trouble in my—’

  ‘I didn’t want no trouble,’ said Lamb. ‘It blew in anyway. Trouble’s got a habit that way.’ He pushed his wet hair out of his face, and his eyes were wide open and bright, bright, mouth open too, breathing fast, and he was smiling. Not like a man working his way up to a hard task. Like a man enjoying getting to a pleasant one, taking his time about it like you might over a fine meal, and of a sudden Shy saw all those scars anew, and felt this coldness creeping up her arms and down her back and every hair on her standing.

  ‘I tracked those three,’ said Lamb. ‘Picked up their trail and two days I’ve followed it.’

  Another breathless pause, and the Keep took a step back, cup and cloth still limp in his hands, the ghost of a smile still clinging to his face but the rest all doubt. The three had turned to face Lamb, spreading out a little, backs to Shy, and she found herself easing forwards like she was wading through honey, out of the shadows towards them, tingling fingers shifting around the knife’s handle. Every moment was a drawn-out age, breath scratching, catching in every throat.