Art of War Read online

  “Diamonds? You’re an idiot,” Mama Gil said. “Ain’t no diamonds here. This is war, not a country ball.”

  “Is this war?” I asked. It seemed to me that mostly it had been driving a wagon so far. Nothing to write home about, if I’d been able to write, that was.

  “Blackwing don’t care for wealth. They only care for serving their master,” Peralli rustled. “Whatever’s in that box, it serves her master’s purpose. And his purpose is war.”

  “Our purpose,” Mama Gil said. She clinked her fat rings together, reminding herself of the little bit of the world she’d managed to gather to herself. We were hired hands, not Blackwing. She was a gaudy fool.

  Peralli gave her a look that said he’d enjoy doing to her whatever it was he’d done to them dogs. I looked away.

  Three idiots, scraps of disbanded companies seeking work on the edge of a war that wasn’t going to be over any time soon. Been going on for a century or more. Life choices had been simple in the valley: you farmed or you went soldier. I could have stayed a farmer, if I’d had the energy. Could have been a tailor when my folks got me the apprenticeship, if I’d had the will to stick it. Could even have been a father if I’d had the balls to stick around and answer the scowls of both sisters. Not to mention the fury of their pa.

  Now, I had to wonder whether I’d got myself mixed up in a cess pit that didn’t need stirring. I hadn’t any real fighting skills, not really, and I hadn’t Mama Gil’s way with the horses neither. Mama Gil had said that I’d just been brought along because I had a pretty face and, sometimes, I wondered if she was right. I didn’t fit in here.

  The box was bad news, and everyone felt it. I looked down at me knuckles, the ones I’d tapped against the box. Just wanted to see if it was hollow. Best not to think about it. Best not to look at my hand. The colours were wrong. Greens, browns. They smelled bad, soured milk and baby shit. Keep them hidden. Tucked away.

  “Alright. Far enough.”

  I reined in the horses and was glad to be able to jump down from the driver’s seat. The stink of onion perfume on Mama Gil’s neck hadn’t been worse than the old tobacco on her breath, but it wasn’t just her odours. I’d been able to feel the box at my back. Day by day, I’d got used to it, feeling like it knew I was there. Ahead of it. Watching me.

  Stupid thing to think about a box.

  “This place is a shit-sty,” Mama Gil said as she began to uncouple the horses. We’d rolled right into the centre of a little town, a nowhere place of bean-farming, corn, and heavily fortified walls. A front-line fortification between Clear and Adrogorsk. Mama Gil never liked any place we wound up. Maybe that was why she joined up with Captain Narada. Serve a Blackwing captain, see the world, fight the Deep Kings. Right.

  “Andlass.” Peralli rustled. “Frontier town. Nearest enemy outpost is forty miles east.” He was scanning the little crowd of locals who had rolled up to offer us things. Cakes, wine, meat on sticks. The town was fortified, and the people here were well used to soldiers rolling in and out. There’s a way with soldiers, a casual kind of knowing you might as well make the best of things, but beneath it, the town was tense as a cat. They knew that soon the fighting was going to engulf them for real. People were going to die.

  People had already died.

  Living and dying, over a box. Drudge rangers had tried to take it from us, twice, on the journey east. Bodies stinking in the dirt for nothing but a box. It was the way of war. Somewhere, a general in his finery wrote numbers into a log-book, the tallies of the dead and the nearly dead. And he dipped the end of a sausage in mustard and just before he passed the morsel into his mouth, he wondered whether he could get away with not providing any reinforcements to replace the casualties. If he didn’t, he could afford gold tassels on his next uniform. And then he would eat his sausage, and enjoy his mustard, and someone like me got orders to drag a box halfway across the states.

  The box stood alone in the centre of the town’s marketplace. Peralli did the work and the horses, uncoupled, moved away with all the speed that four legs could muster. As they clopped away, I noticed that their hindquarters afflicted with some kind of sickness. Mottled green and brown flesh where fur had fallen away in patches. Must have been a trick of the light, but I’d have sworn they was steaming. Couldn’t be. Trick of the light.

  Captain Narada stood watching the box. She was fierce, scarred, and brutal as winter starvation. Every bone stood out, bulging eyes trying to escape her face. Escape was what she’d offered me, freedom from the dumb corn-daughter that had let me plough her fields for a year, not to mention her equally ploughed sister. Corn-girl had been accommodating. Her sister had been the same, and it was bloody bad luck that they both missed their bloods the same month.

  I wasn’t even sure you could get two girls into that way in one month, but then they’d been teaching me an awful lot of other things as well. I still didn’t believe in the magic spot they talked about. If it was there, I’d have found it.

  The captain was sad. You wouldn’t see it, behind all that ink and spit n’ grit, but there was something missing. Something broken. You saw that a lot in the older fighters. Only, you didn’t see many older fighters. The war didn’t go easy on anyone when age started slowing them down.

  “You three,” Captain Narada said, snapping from sad to stern in a grasshopper’s leap. “You done good. Good work. Good job. Done good.”

  She blinked a few times. She didn’t seem all that together, but I dunno what I ever expected from a Blackwing captain. She looked us over. Thinking. When her mismatched eyes settled on me, I couldn’t have felt smaller. They roamed on.

  “Gil, you’re discharged,” she said. She stood there in silence. Mama Gil looked like she didn’t know what to say. We’d never had to fall out at the end of a day before.

  “Permanent like?” Mama Gil asked.

  “Yes.” Narada said it as though it were insignificant. A trifle. That she hadn’t just dragged us all out here to a war-torn frontier for nowt.

  “You said we’d make a quarter each,” Mama Gil said. Nervous. You had to hand it to Mama, she had balls the size of coconuts under her skirt. We’d all got taken on with the promise of cash, but I’d not have been able to ask for it. Not direct.

  “There’s a satchel on my horse,” Narada said. Bored. Barely glancing up, as though a fly had got past the nets. “Take whatever you think’s fair. All of it, if you want.”

  Mama Gil’s tongue ran across sticky-purple lips. More than the quarter we’d been promised? Was it possible? She was already imagining the bloodstone earrings, the silver, the opium. She practically ran. Narada looked to Peralli.

  “I have another task for you,” she said. “When she’s done taking her share, go get my horse. I want you to ride as fast as you can back west. There’s a small town we passed through, Valengrad. Go there and await further instruction.”

  Peralli was a killer, and spirits alone knew what he’d done with those dogs. But he listened, blank-faced and dead-eyed, and when she was done talking, he turned and walked away. I hadn’t liked Mama Gil and her clutching hands. I had definitely not liked Peralli and his grave-dust whispers. But now, I stood alone with Blackwing Captain Narada, and that was worse. How would she dismiss me? She stood looking at me for a moment, and as her mis-coloured eyes regarded me from beneath the corvid tattooed over her face and the scabbed, cracked flesh across it, I saw her properly for the first time. Not as an employer, to be obeyed, or as a servant of the Nameless, to be feared. As the person she should have been in some other life. She was younger than I’d realised. A handful of years past twenty. Dark hair, cut at the jaw. Not a natural prettiness, but the snub nose and buck teeth could have worked for some unambitious clerk.

  “You come with me,” she said. My heart did a little shudder in my chest. Was all well and good imagining her without that bird inked onto her face, but that wasn’t the story we were living in.

  Captain Narada led me away from the box, which she d
idn’t seem to care she’d simply left, abandoned on its wagon in the middle of the market. She moved with slow purpose. Soldiers filled the streets, whether from the steady garrison or the company that had just rolled in, and townsfolk was doing their best to persuade them to part with a coin or two. Narada paid them no attention, looked upwards as she walked.

  “Beautiful sky, isn’t it?” she said.

  She’d said little to me that wasn’t an order or a reprimand since she took me on. I didn’t know how to respond. Narada almost looked happy looking up into the fading sky. Maybe this was the spot the girls had been going on about.

  The setting sun soaked the western horizon peach and amber, colour bleeding to colour. To the east, the lingering blue was dense, stately. No stars yet. All three moons rode high tonight, and that rarest of occurrences was taking place; all three had waxed to fullness. I’d been so preoccupied worrying about the rotting knuckles that I’d barely looked up all day. I almost glanced down at them now but caught myself in time. No point worrying at something you can’t fix. I’d said that to the corn-girls.

  Narada led me to an inn. A common place, nothing fancy, but clean enough considering that soldiers tramped mud in every day.

  “Sit,” she said. I didn’t want to. I didn’t like what was happening. It hadn’t felt so exposed when Mama Gil and Peralli were around, but alone with the captain, I felt cold. Isolated, though the inn was busy with drinkers. I sat.

  “Ma’am, may I be excused?” I asked. Instantly regretted it.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll need you, later on. Have a drink.”

  We ordered drinks. Summer ale, citrus flavours. I decided that whatever she needed me for was going to be deeply unpleasant, so I might as well at least get drunker than shit so as she wouldn’t scare me so much. The bar-boy brought the beer, but Captain Narada ordered liquor, drank it neat from a tin cup. She didn’t talk to me, just knocked it back like it were water. Tough constitution, that girl. My head was swimming before hers, and in the absence of conversation, I hadn’t nothing to do but drink anyway.

  “Your hand bothering you?” she asked eventually. I’d forgotten to keep it beneath the table, and she’d seen the green and brown mottling spreading out from my knuckles.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. Pulled down my sleeve. Captain Narada snorted, a little drunk snort of derision.

  “`Course it’s something.”

  She peeled down one of her long gloves, showed me. Hand and forearm were swamp-dirt green from finger to elbow. The smell rolled out, and drinkers at other tables suddenly took notice.

  “Shouldn’t have touched the box,” Captain Narada said. “I did tell you. But then, the boss told me as well, so I guess we both done fucked that up. It won’t be the thing that kills you, though, if you’re worried `bout that.” That didn’t make me feel any better.

  “You think the drudge will come overrun the border?”

  “No, I don’t,” Narada said. “There’s a whole lot of them. More than anyone realises, truth is. They’re coming, but they’ll not be the ones to kill us. We got the cargo, and that’s going to change everything. Change the fucking world. Cheers to that.”

  She raised her cup. Didn’t wait for me to clink it before she slugged it back.

  “What’s the cargo?” I said. I hadn’t meant to ask it. I realised even as the words left my lips that she was hardly going to spill her master’s secrets to me.

  “It’s the end,” she said. Secrets be damned, it seemed. “Or the start off it, anyway.” She leaned in very close, close enough that I could see every pore on her face. She spoke in a drunk whisper. “It’s the heart of something from the void. Something very evil, very ancient. We’ll open the box tomorrow and let it free.”

  I had no idea what a voidling was, but I suppose at about that point, I probably began to understand. I were never a smart one, but I looked at Captain Narada’s darkened arm and hoped that Mama Gil was making the most of her money. By now, she’d be spending it on tawdry, second-best silks.

  Somewhere after the fifth, or maybe seventh, cup of beer, I found that the captain’s hand was somewhere it shouldn’t have been, and despite the booze, she was a woman and I’d always had a thing for women who weren’t too fussy. She led me up the stairs and told a bunch of soldiers to get out of their room, and they done it right away on account of her being Blackwing. They gave me fearful looks as they went by, maybe sympathy. She dragged me across to the bed, and there I had a moment of real fear, but then she was pressed hard up against me and the fear dissolved into a desperate, time-shortened desire. She kissed with the lack of skill that says that this was the first time she’d ever kissed anyone, but there was something that excited me about her efforts. She’d not done the other bits either, but she was a fast learner.

  Afterwards, she didn’t lie in the bed but, instead, stood looking out the window at the moon-bright sky. Her skinny body was speckled with scars, a real lot for someone so young.

  “Come back to bed,” I said. “You’ll catch a cold.”

  But she didn’t. Didn’t say a single word to me, just stared out at the midnight sky as though it were the last time she’d ever get to see a moon or a star. She dressed without looking at me, but it wasn’t shame or regret. She’d simply stopped paying me attention, like she’d forgotten I was there at all. Maybe in the act of lovemaking, she’d paid just as little. When she was dressed, she belted on her sword, then went to the mirror and brushed her hair vey carefully. Got the collar of her jacket straight, brushed down the sleeves. Readied herself to look her best. Took a deep breath, and out she went.

  The dawn was cold, the blankets rough, the night fading into memory. Bells were ringing, battle-bells, the call to arms. Voices clamoured in the streets, and they all said one thing only: war is here. My first thought was to find Peralli and get behind him, but he was gone, and it wouldn’t have helped anyway. The inn was empty, not even the landlord had stayed. The streets flowed with human rivers. People were fleeing.

  “The drudge are coming,” one man nearly screamed at me. “Half a million of the bastards. Half a million drudge. And they’re bringing Kings!” He was swept away by the current.

  I could have joined them, I suppose, but I knew it wasn’t going to make a difference. A timeless sense of lonely acceptance had taken over me. I found myself back in the market square, where the box sat on its wagon bed. Captain Narada sat alongside it, watching the swollen moons.

  “Is it true?” I said. “The Deep Kings are going to come here?”

  Narada didn’t take her eyes from the moons.

  “Here. North. South. Everywhere. They’ve made these new creatures. They— It doesn’t matter. It’s not relevant.”

  “Why did you pick me?” I asked. Captain Narada looked at me, and spirits, but she was young. Everyone was young that morning.

  “I needed a pretty face,” she said. “You’ve done what I needed you for. You can go now, if you want to run.”

  I saw everything in her expression there. The fear. The burden of knowledge. The weight of responsibility.

  “Is there any point running?” I asked. Narada looked at me a moment, then shrugged.

  “No.”

  “Will Peralli get away?”

  “I doubt it. He’s a good fighter, and the war will need good fighters, even after today. But no. I gave him the chance, but unless he sprouted wings during the night and flew then…no. But I thought I might as well give him the chance.”

  We sat in silence for a while, shared a smoke. The bells clanged, clanged, clanged, and people passed by with arm-loads of possessions or shouldered bows, pikes, as they headed to muster around the walls. I couldn’t help playing with my fingers. The rot had spread across my hand, into my other fingers, along the veins in my wrist. One of my fingers came away, painless, rotten through. I dropped it onto the floor. It didn’t seem to matter anymore, and in a way, I was glad that it wasn’t my own stupidity that was going to kill me.

&
nbsp; “And you?” I said. “Why are you here?” But the crow inked across Narada’s face told the real story there, and she didn’t need to answer me.

  “Help me open it,” she said. We jumped up onto the wagon bed, and Narada did something that caused the black-iron box to groan. It took both of us to pry away the lid, and I felt my remaining fingers and my palms sizzling, burning against the cold metal. When it was done, and exposed, we sat back down. I’d never seen anything like it before. Maybe no living man had. I could already feel the wrongness of it, the raw power and magic beginning to emanate. Poison in the air. It was huge, and alive, and it silently promised me oblivion.

  I could have stayed with the fattening corn-daughters, but I’d never done anything to make their lives better. I could have played a different game, maybe, tried to be a better man. But here I was, at the end of the world, and although I was as scared as I’d ever been in my life, there was a dismal satisfaction to knowing that everyone else was going to die with me. A selfish thought, maybe.

  Narada reached out and took my hand. The moons all looked very, very bright. From the voidling’s heart behind me, I dreamed of terror and screaming and the hatred of living things. Somewhere distant, a general dipped a sausage in mustard and looked at the day’s reports. More soldiers or gold tassets?

  Above us, the sky buckled. Flexed. Howled a long, sonorous cry of anguish as reality began to twist and turn.

  “Is this really war?” I asked.

  “It’s not war, no,” she said. “It’s only misery.”

  The weapon ignited, and nightmare blossomed incandescent and burning as the sky began to tear itself apart.

  The Last Arrow