One Chapter Challenge

by Jason Walters

A Doomed Army…
A Genocidal Empire…
An Unconquerable City…

At the edge of the known world, two desperate armies struggle for the right to siege a city that has never been taken. Terrible magics are unleashed and the fate of empires hangs in the balance. Highdome and his misfit crew of cutthroats, monsters, and mutants don’t care. They just want to stay alive. But when sorcery backfires and the fury of the Vast White desert itself is unleashed, the men and women of the Red Regiment must look inside of themselves to find the strength to survive. Only courage, brotherhood, and the mysterious force known as the Murderer’s Edge stands between them and total destruction!

Chapter One:

Murderers

Northern al-Muttaqiina Mountains, Year of the Ascension 327

Sometimes you just know when something bad is about to happen. They offer you all of the usual reasonable assurances: you’re being led by a military genius, you’ve got possession of the high ground, strength in numbers, and so forth. It all sounds pretty good too. But back in the center of your head, way back where you really live, that little subhuman monster part of your brain is scuttling desperately about in the darkness of your skull, cringing and hiding in fear from the inevitable. It knows. You know too, even if you’re far too frightened to admit it to yourself – or, worse yet, to anybody else.

You’re screwed, and your whole rotten crew is screwed with you. Or at least you’re about to be.

“Give me the spyglass Highdome,” whined Abdul. “You’re hogging it again.” Abdul is always whining. Well, that isn’t entirely fair. He only whines when he isn’t leering, complaining, stealing, sneering, or getting ready to stab someone in the back for an imaginary insult to his equally imaginary honor. This makes sense being that he isn’t exactly the greatest warrior ever to crawl out of the Vast White. A backstab is about the best he can hope for. He’s ready to do it, too. The man has more daggers in his burka than a back alley dog has fleas using its scraggly ass for a smorgasbord. And he’s the best native tracker we could find.

I sighed, focused the spyglass on another spot further along the opposing ridge, and tried to ignore him. He wasn’t that hard to put up with, really. After nearly 30 years as a professional mercenary, murderer, scout, skirmisher, thief, scrounger, drunk, and generally useless layabout, they’re really isn’t too much I can’t put up with.

Except maybe getting screwed by an employer in broad daylight.

The Padisha’s army had been filing into the valley below in dribs and drabs for days, mainly in large squads of three to four dozen men. These were for the most part Bedune tribesmen like Abdul: hard-bitten, tough-as-nails sand rats in flowing brown or black robes with fanciful whiskers that flowered abstractly from their weathered faces. Most of them weren’t professional soldiers per se; but Abdul’s people haven’t survived out in the desert for untold centuries by being soft. They’re as tough to kill as everything else out on the roasting, permanently forsaken edge of Man’s Empire.

Each Bedune probably started out his journey with at least six of the god-awful oversized camels that are the only reliable beast of burden in this region. But by now most of them are down to one or two, with the others eaten along the way. The foul things are his transportation, his currency, provide milk for his children, and, if absolutely necessary, food for his table. Out here a man’s wealth is measured by the size and quality of his camel herds. The loss of one is a financial disaster. The loss of three or four is an unthinkable ruin. So the scrawny, sun-bleached tribesmen have been left with no choice but to win at this point; which, now that I think about it, has probably been The Padisha’s plan all along. It’s one hell of a motivation. Without the spoils of war their own wives won’t welcome them back into their own tents.

Each group of Bedune, logically enough, seems to have been assigned some specific purpose well in advance. The first few in kept their distance, carefully observing our (stupidly) fixed positions, undoubtedly drawing up some decent maps and diagrams before sending a bunch of runners back to The Padisha’s war caravan. Horsehead – Broken One, Archon of the Wastes, Master of the cities of Cassia and Myrrh, Lord of the Riders in Indigo, snappy dresser, and all around terror to those unfortunate enough to get in his way – did absolutely nothing to stop them. Nothing. All part of his master plan, you see. Right into his trap. So it only stood to reason that he would do something particularly impressive when the second wave of around a dozen squads, each containing hard-looking bastards dressed in rags dyed exactly the same horrible pizzle yellow shade as the Vast White (which is only white from a distance, you see) arrived, leisurely dismounted, and then promptly vanished into the waste in broad daylight. This is the same grand generalissimo wizard who, only a month before, I had seen absolutely pummel the town of Saffron with giant balls of fire that tumbled, one after another, down from the heavens. Except this time he calmly and pointedly did nothing.

“Ah-hah!” I thought to myself at the time. “They’re falling right into the Bossman’s clever trap.”

But, a week later, there were probably ten thousand men spread out in the valley below, their activities clearly visible through my spyglass. Some were strapping on lamellar armor, others practicing their archery – not that they need a lot of practice, as they were already incredibly good. Another group was assembling complicated siege equipment out of poles and rope they must have dragged out here from half way across the world.

“Oops!” Horsehead was probably thinking. “Where did that army come from?”

Still, my faith wasn’t entirely shaken.

“Well,” I remember saying to myself, “Highdome old sod, that mutant offspring of a bodybuilder and a draft mule that you call Bossman will certainly show them some of that old-time deadly wizardry now! More balls of tumbling fire. Rains of giant man-eating lizards. The dead rising from their graves to consume the living. Yes indeed: it’s going to be quite a show.”

Nothing doing. Save for the standard mano-a-mano sniping and dueling betwixt flankers, nobody had made a substantive move against the enemy since he drifted in all leisurely-like. No probing raids, no clever midnight ambushes, and no nocturnal assassinations of enemy sheiks. No real attempt at reconnaissance, either. Nothing a clever 13-year-old might have tried. Nada.

The whole thing stinks. It reeks of ego, arrogance, and underestimation. It smells of too many victories too easily won: a scent that nearly always means that defeat is hiding around the next corner like a mugger getting ready to pounce on a cocky, drunken nobleman. It smells like dead friends.

A familiar, horrid scream from above interrupted my fatalistic musings: an al-Baqara and her rider. I removed my helmet, a battered Imperial salade, so that I could scratch my perpetually chafed and sunburned head. The desert is no place for a bald man. I hate wearing the damn thing during the day; it makes my brain feel like it’s cooking slowly in a stew pot. But it beats an arrow between the eyes, that’s for certain. Well, I didn’t need to look up. No, that’s not really true. I didn’t want to look up. It would remind me that I was probably on the “right” side of this war, which (in my arrogant opinion) generally means the losing side. The meanest bastards always seem to win at this sort of game.

The al-Baqara cried out once again in its horrible, amplified woman-being-violated way. Its rider, a Bedune wytch-man or rahaq, probably wasn’t going to do anything while he was up there except look scary in his black, flowing robes and massive purple veil. Fair enough. But an al-Baqara made you shudder just to look at it. At some point it must have been an attractive, normal sized woman… until somebody with a nasty turn of mind tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a giant bird. Arms rendered impossibly thin, then stretched ten feet in either direction to form wings. Lovely, smooth skin somehow transformed into frayed, bat-like wings that flutter raggedly behind the al-Baqara, like morbid banners being flown by a dead army. Its legs broken then reformed so that they bend backwards and can fold up underneath its elongated body. Its feet transformed into massive, three-toed claws.

But the thing you remembered most about an al-Baqara is its pair of massive, oddly perfect breasts. They’d do any wooden mermaid mounted to the front of a warship proud. Its misshapen head, on the other hand, possessed just enough of the shadow of its former beauty to make it truly, utterly terrifying. It screamed and screamed and screamed out of a row of razor-sharp shark’s teeth, swooping and flapping about the sky like some sort of satanic ex-wife. All of this horror is compounded by the fond, intimate way in which the rahaq caresses the poor doomed thing’s torso every so often, like a suitor patting his beloved’s hand during dinner. It’s almost domestic.

Abdul was practically humping my leg by this point. Maybe he was really curious about the enemy’s troop movements. Maybe he just wanted to look at the al-Baqara’s naked chest. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other, but his bad imitation of a horny dog made it nearly impossible to concentrate. I’d already seen about as much of the Padisha’s army as any halfway sane man would want to see anyhow. He was welcome to it. I stepped down from my perch on the earthworks, gingerly handing him the instrument with both hands. He accepted it just as carefully. Abdul knew that the strange devise wasn’t at all magical, but anything dragged down to the toenails of the world had to be worth a small fortune. Plus, since I was kind of an officer, he wanted to stay on my good side.

The rahaq turned his mount about in a lazy arc, banking his hellish bride against the darkening, purple sky. He’d probably caught a glint off of the spyglass. Only officers had those. My blood ran cold through my veins. Reaching into the folds of his billowing robes he withdrew a dark circular object, took careful aim, and hurled it toward the earth. A moment later a tail like a feathery corkscrew sprouted from the rear of the tumbling object, enabling it to control its rapid descent. Then a nail-toothed maw opened up at the thing’s front to emit a piercing, unholy wail of despair and doom.

“Blitzscreamer!” I yelled down the line. Various trench corporals quickly took up my cry. Then I tackled Abdul into the sewage filled ditch below. The two of us went down in a tangle of limbs as the living projectile struck the ground nearby. The explosion that followed was deafening. We were lifted several feet off of the earth, and then flung down like a petulant child’s rag dolls as dust, rock, and mud fell around us on all sides. Neither of us bothered to get up as, a moment later, hundreds of bits of spinning bone shrapnel whizzed directly over our heads like a swarm of deadly bees.

“By the Tyrant, I am unmanned!” screamed a voice further down the trenchworks. The Blitzscreamer must have struck dead on at the bottom of our fortifications, sending tiny bits of itself along the line at waste level. It was a nasty weapon, some sort of magycally summoned hell-thing with bones made of steel and bowels filled with explosive gas. Its voice was intended to awe and shock men on the ground so that they forgot to dive for cover. Fortunately, that part of its devil magic didn’t always work.

High above us the Pasha’s wytch-man pumped his fist in the air. He howled his cruel victory cry down at the ground-pounders below, his dark and brooding voice soon joined by the inhuman cries of his hideous mount. Their joy was short lived. A streak of fire shot up from the earth below, missing them by only a few Imperium. It exploded into a ball of fire that engulfed both rahaq and al-Baqara in white-hot flame. Thoroughly singed, they turned and limped back toward the relative safety of their own lines, leaving a trail of smoke behind them as they went.

“Who sent that up,” asked Abdul, peeking his head up over the edge of the trench. “Skulker or Maestro?”

“Neither.” I helped the Bedune scout to his feet. “I haven’t seen Skulker in days. Odds are he’s hiding in the back of a cave somewhere in the box canyon, hoping the Lieutenant has forgotten about him. Maestro couldn’t turn water into pizzle, let alone pull off a spell as miraculous as that. That leaves either Virago or one of Horsehead’s pet wizards. Since it was actually helpful, my bet is that it was Virago.”

Abdul nodded thoughtfully. Like most Bedune men he was instinctively uncomfortable with any woman who was taller, tougher, and more frightening than himself. Unlike most Bedune men he was willing to deal with it, which is probably why Virago hadn’t castrated him yet. It sure wasn’t because he kept his hands to himself.

I slapped the swarthy little man on the back, and then departed for the slightly more favorable location of our camp. If anything new was happening in this miserable debacle of a war it was probably happening back there. Watching our side getting blown to meaty pieces by satanic, perverse warlocks in black pajamas had gotten old the second it had started.

As you’ve probably guessed by now literature isn’t exactly my first love – nor penmanship my primary craft. I never wanted to be the Regiment’s Keeper. I got drafted into the position a few days ago when my predecessor sort of fell over with an arrow through his head. Old Brushle. He’d always been a careful sort (a good trait in a professional murderer), gingerly planning ambushes or working out moderately competent strategies based on the Regiment’s hundreds of years of records. As for me, I always enjoyed reading them by the firelight after a hard days march as a sort of accompaniment to whatever rotgut the local heathens were brewing (fat chance of that down here in the mirthless desert) and whatever nasty weed they were smoking (actually, a good deal better in that department). Reading about what some officer or grunt did in the swamps of far Legocia back in the time of the Mageocracy, or how some epic battle went way back when the God Tyrant himself used to take the field in the infancy of the Empire, now that’s good, exciting stuff! Not like this sad, sandy trench warfare. Some of it really was well written, even. I never, ever wanted to write the damn thing myself though. It seems more like a wyzard’s job. Useless and self-important-like, with a need for discretion, diplomacy, and other such things that life hasn’t equipped yours truly with much of. Well, to hell with that. If some Imperial functionary reams the Captain out when he turns this semi-literate garbage into the Great Library in Throne, then that’s his damn problem. I tell things like they are, bury me face down if I don’t.

Anyhow, Old Brushle wasn’t a bad or soft sort. He’d killed more men with the point of his sword then he’d had hot lunches, and probably felt a lot more excited about those lunches. Like I said, a pretty good murderer; but his writing style was, well, a little dry, with a lot of attention paid to what he supposed his reader was interested in. Being a bit more of a realist, I don’t suppose anybody much reads these things at all. They get transcribed, the get numbered, and then they get buried in some back room in the sub, sub, sub basement of the Imperial City where all of those careful, diplomatic words are promptly turned into a nest by some hardworking rat or other. Which is right and natural, if you want the truth.

Not that I’m likely to get in much trouble for being too glib. It’s exceedingly possible that I will become exceptionally dead in the next few weeks, assuming the quality of Horsehead’s generalship doesn’t improve dramatically. So unless the God Tyrant (may-he-reign-eternal) decides to reanimate my dingo-chewed corpse, I figure I’m pretty safe. Which brings me back to Old Brushle. He wasn’t, as you may have guessed, the most compassionate fellow you were likely to run into. But I think that what happened in Saffron was just a little too much for him. He didn’t say too much about it in the last chapter, which if you ask me is a dead giveaway for such a detail-mongering scrivener. I don’t think he had ever seen death done in such a wholesale way. He was more of a retailer, so to speak. Horsehead, however, has a bit of the old school fire-and-brimstone showman in his nature. He also wasn’t in a very good mood that day, even for one of The Broken, which showed up in the…. I suppose you would call it “quality” of his work. There wasn’t much more than ash, building foundations, and indistinguishably charred corpses left by the time we marched down to that village.

So when a guy snaps, he snaps. A lever gets pulled down in his mind. He’s seen enough of this life, thank you very much, on to the next one. I figure that’s what happened, because I can’t think of another reason why that careful, meticulous bookworm would hop over the side of his trench to make a dead man’s run with a spear at a couple of hundred bow-welding Bedune hard-cases. He didn’t get 15 Imperium before one of them put a shaft straight through his left eye.

It was a bad day for everybody, but most especially for me since I got “promoted” to his job. I suppose there is some sort of increase in pay but, again, I don’t suppose it will matter much unless they bury me with the cash. Somehow I just don’t see the grave detail letting that happen.

Still rubbing my sunburned noggin, I made my way through the final half-dozen rearward trenches, climbing over or squeezing between sharpened rows of stakes as I went. A shame, really. When we arrived here the upper part of this small valley (really more of a canyon, to be honest) had been genuinely lovely, filled with olive and palm groves. Now they were every last one of them gone, burned for firewood or turned into sharpened stakes to buy the men in the trenches a few precious moments should the Pasha’s army get this far. More importantly, all of that wetted timber would give Horsehead, his advisors, and his extremely unfortunate (one way or the other) harem a chance to make a run for it should they wake up one afternoon to find that several thousand angry, gold toothed desert cutthroats have stopped by for brunch.

Up and along the none-too-steep sides of the canyon were dozens upon dozens of small caves that had been carved by hand directly into the soft limestone. My guess is that they’re used as housing for those few weeks out of each year when harvesters come down out of the mountains from Salt to gather their annual crops. I’m certain they make passable enough dwellings in the late fall, when the weather in these parts begins its sudden, catastrophic drop from one of this clime’s seasons to the next: “hotter than hell” to “colder than hell.” That’s my clever translation from the local vernacular for the sake of posterity. Unfortunately for all concerned, it’s currently that season which we soft people from the north romantically refer to as summer, but down here is quite rightfully thought of as an excellent time to stay indoors and smoke hashish. Unfortunately for the local economy (so to speak), that season lasts nine months out of the year.

Possessed by such dark and gloomy thoughts as I was, I almost missed Morlock and Waif silently practicing their odd killing art upon a high, flat-topped boulder that lay just in the shade of the cliff. Slowly and quietly they moved together in a perfect synchronicity, one like a miniature version of the other, their long hooked outer swords crossing their short stabbing blades every so often as they rehearsed a dozen or so of the hundreds of moves which Morlock’s people are known for. If one knows about them at all, that is. They’re almost unheard of unless you have spent some time in the sewers of Throne. Which isn’t exactly something your average farmer from East Skuggley wants to do, either.

Waif was dressed in loose flowing white robes which covered her entire body save for her hands and eyes, which was something you had to do if you were a woman among the Bedune (not that Virago did, but that’s a different manner). Morlock was covered completely in light brown strips of ragged cloth, his eyes camouflaged by an enormous set of darkened goggles. It made him look kind of like a giant beetle armed with a weird set of cutlery. He couldn’t tan, of course; so keeping the sun away from his flesh was a matter of life and death. It also meant that he smelled pretty bad most of the time. Only Waif would get within five Imperium of him. Even at night his stench was a dead giveaway, which is probably why the two of them hadn’t been sent out on one of their usual throat slitting expeditions into the enemy’s officer’s tents.

Now, to your less fancy murderers like myself, Salvatore, or Ploughboy, a sword is kind of like a mace which has the happy advantage of being sharp. First you get yourself a nice, heavy, thick blade. Then you sharpen it until you can shave with it. Finally, you hack your way through opponents like a mad butcher who’s put off all his work until the night before Spring’s Festival, taking a few thoughtful moments out here-and-there to deflect your opponent’s blows away from such unfortunate spots on your person as your head, groin, and gut. You’re not really out there to do anything dramatic, epic, and kingly as lopping off arms or heads. Breaking bones is the name of the game. Crack a man’s skull, or shatter his weapon arm, and he’s none too likely to get back up while the fight is going on. You can move onto the next customer, so to speak. Not much to it; until that fatal day you get unlucky. That day tends to come sooner rather than later. Salvatore is the only really old murder I’ve ever known, which makes him either the luckiest guy alive or the least lucky depending on your…. cosmological view, I suppose it would be. When they finally get him he’ll have a lot to answer for, that’s for certain.

Your smart fighter is, in my humble opinion, not all that eager to get up close and personal with his opponents. This is a lesson you learn mighty quickly in the killing professions. It’s why a nice long spear, while tricky to wield, is always better than a sword if you have the strength to use one. A heavy crossbow combined with thirty yards of open field on a warm sunny day is better still. A deep concealed pit lined with sharp stakes along a lonely path is my personal favorite. “Not very sportsmanlike, Highdome,” you are undoubtedly thinking. But the farther away I am from some well-armed teenage conscript, crazed tribesman, or mounted noble, the happier I am. And the older I get to be.

Morlock is a fancy murderer, though, with all sorts of extravagant ways of doing his devil’s work. Morlock’s crazy cleaver is heavy and sharp enough to use as a standard cutting weapon in battle, but you can’t stab with it and its balance is all off. Your hooked sword, sharp on one end but blunt on the other with a curved tip which bends back towards its wielder, isn’t a practical weapon because as requires years of training to really use properly. It takes a nomadic warrior culture, like his or like those Bedune desert rats down on the plains below, to produce a Morlock. Though they’re generally strong and good with a bow, farm boys just don’t have that kind of stuff in their hearts. Your standard military unit trains a new recruit for a month or two then sends him out to get killed. For that purpose simple weapons – broadsword, crossbow, and spear – are the best. Your modern army doesn’t spend years training a green kid to be a soldier, not when there are a dozen more where his sorry ass came from. But a tribal elder will.

Anyhow, the hooked sword, known as a bokkon (or at least Morlock’s is), has a wickedly sharp tip with a barb on the end so the wielder can swing it underneath his opponent’s weapon, get it behind him, drive it into his backside, then pull the unlucky bastard forward onto a short stabbing weapon called a kukri. These are really personal weapons, made in matching sets based on the user’s height, weight, and fighting style. The bokkon can also be used to disarm an opponent by hooking his blade, forcing it to the ground so that the kukri can deliver its last respects. Sometimes Morlock just shocks his opponent with a few seconds of really fancy swordplay that involves, among other things, throwing the ridiculous looking thing over his head in an arc and then catching it behind his back. While the silly bastard is watching this display all slack jawed-like, Morlock drives the kukri into his heart. Like I said, fancy. Plus anybody that stupid needs to be dead.

On top of all that, Morlock has an entire code of behavior to govern his every waking moment. This is a pretty strange way of doing things, especially when you’ve been raised in lightless tunnels filled with rotting human sewage like he was. If you’re Morlock, you get up before sunrise to bathe in the coldest water you can find (fat chance out here). Then you practice with your silly hooked weapon until the sun peeks its blazing noggin over the horizon. You sit quietly and stare at a bug or a blade of grass until the cook practically throws your ration of slop into your face. You (Morlock that is, not me) then spend your day trying to look calm no matter how badly your officers, your friends, and life in general tries to tick you off. When it gets dark, you go out into the woods and spend a few leisurely hours sneaking up on squirrels, rabbits, and the like to show off what a stealthy gutter urchin you are. Which, when you get good at it (and Morlock is very, very good at this), makes for a much better stewpot than otherwise. Even out here in the Vast White, where there is naught to catch but lizards, snakes, and insects the size of kittens. Which, I might add, aren’t so bad with a sprig of fire-baked garlic if you boil them to soften ’em up a bit first.

Now, I’ve known a few fancy murderers in my day, some of them even partway decent at the killing profession. Morlock is better than all of those guys by more than half, so you have to give him his due, but none of them had a pet girl catamite as an apprentice. Not that Waif is a bad companion. She’s tough, smart, and pretty handy in a fight for somebody that weighs 90 decaDrach wet. She also doesn’t say that much, as opposed to Virago, who always says that much even if you’re just asking her to pass the wineskin. Still, it still isn’t right to bring a child along on these sorts of ventures, even if you are just trying to teach her the family business. There’s only so much that one of tender years should see before they have to. Not that I had any choice in the matter myself, but I have to point out that there ain’t any way that Morlock is her father. Maybe, being raised in a sewer, he doesn’t know his rights from his wrongs. Which is why his girlfriend is actually a girl, if you get my meaning.

Not for the first time I shook my head and clumped off, wondering what to make of the two of them. They were a peculiar pair, bound under most circumstances to attract unwanted, as well as unfriendly, attention from the local rubes. Traveling with the missing-teeth-and-facial-scars crowd certainly cuts down on the odds of a random lynching by frightened farmers or a burning by the hometown Carnifax, but other problems came along with it. Like getting killed by terrified, desperate Bedune tribesmen being driven forward by a mad sheik with the help of flying sex perverts.

Even with such darkling thoughts under my brow, I once again paused to consider the natural beauty of the canyon Horsehead had, for better or worse, shoehorned his ratty, hard-bitten mercenary army into. It was a wide, sandy basin with a small stream running through its center, its walls studded here and there with fruit bearing trees (all gone into the cooking fire now) or lovely little yellow desert flowers. The stream, which had been turned a muddy brown by the passage of countless boots, wound down from the near mythical city of Salt in the al-Muttaqiina high above. It was brackish yet drinkable, as mysterious in its origins as any oasis is in the great, dry wasteland that is the Vast White, as obscure as the city which gives it birth. Salt: the ultimate goal, the paramount reason for this sad, doomed military melodrama that my friends and I have become two-bit players in. You know all of this, of course. But in all my years of murdering I’ve never seen nor heard of its like. Two armies of half-dead men lead by all-powerful blockhead lunatics, turning the desert into a graveyard for the right to lay siege to a city that has never in all of mankind’s tired history been taken by force. What’s not to love?

Why not retreat back out into the wastes and let the Padisha’s army smash itself against Salt’s impassible walls for a few months, then attack whatever pitiful remnants is left from behind? Why hasn’t it occurred to the enemy to let us do the same? “Abrax save us from madmen, fools, geniuses, and generals,” as the old saying goes. I know why, of course. It’s pride, pure and simple. Any fool could see that. Still, a man should count his blessings. Never in my wildest nightmares did I think I’d get a chance to bitch at posterity for my rotten luck. So I might as well make the pit into an olive, as the Bedune are fond of saying.

I crunched my way up the hillside to the section of shaded sandstone caves that the Regiment has called home for the last couple of weeks, stopping now and again to pick up an interesting rock. I’m sure a prospector with some real time on his hands could have a field day out here. There’s quartz everywhere, entire veins of it jutting here and there straight out from the canyon walls just begging for a pickaxe to the face. Even a simpleton knows that where that milky white stone shows her lovely head silver, gold, and even more valuable metals can’t be far behind. Jade, onyx, and other such semi-valuable stuff is spread pell-mell across the valley floor. It’s almost as if some kind of practical joke is being played on us by that vengeful father-god the local heathens worship. If the ninnies on both sides of this pressing military issue would only make themselves scarce, I’m betting the boys and I could spend a pretty pleasant winter here mining.

Shortround, Skulker, and Salvatore had set up a sort of shade structure in front of their cave. It’s just too damn hot during the day to hang around inside of one of the shallow little limestone ovens (though they weren’t too bad at night). They’d used some spare bedrolls, spear shafts, and rope which they’d obviously stolen from some quartermaster or the other to make a crude porch, and were cheerfully throwing a game of con for whatever small coins they still had in their possession. Or, to be more specific, Skulker and Salvatore were gambling their own money while Shortround, who wasn’t allowed to own money, gambled with mine. This didn’t matter one fig to me, as he would win anyhow. Whatever magical skills Skulker had they didn’t extend to gambling.

Opening the flap, I unceremoniously plopped myself down on a pile of rags, my long legs extending right into the middle of their game. This got me some hard stares all the way around. It wasn’t exactly comfortable in their little hovel of a portico, but compared to most of the accommodations available in the valley – namely none – I might have well have been lounging in the God Tyrant’s palace back in Throne.

“If you wanted in, Highdome, you could have just asked.” muttered Salvatore, his voice its usual charming old man’s blacklungish rasp. “I was just about to teach these two storks the meaning of the word ‘impoverished,’ I was.”

“They’re mercenaries,” I snorted, “so they don’t need a lot of teaching when it comes to being bums. It’s their natural state. Plus Shortround would have won anyhow like he always does. I’ve done you a favor is all, old man.”

He wasn’t amused. “Maybe I’ll do you the favor of leaking out your life’s blood, Highdome.”

Salvatore casually fingered an enormous dagger that had come out of nowhere, while also shooting me a jaundiced, bloodshot look that would have sent most strong men scuttling back in terror. It was pure blackened hate, liberally spiced with homicidal malice, and wrapped in an ugly blanked of ignorant madness. It was also his normal drunken facial expression, so I wasn’t really all that impressed by it. Shortround and Skulker simply fisheyed him, as the cat was now out of the stewpot.

“Have you been drinking in direct defiance of the Great Southern Archon’s most specific orders, soldier?” I demanded. I gave him a look just as mad-psycho-spooky as the one he had given me. I had some small experience with looking dangerous myself. All three of them glanced away with a scowl like wet three marsh monkeys trying not to look guilty. “If so, what is it, where is it, and where did you get it from, anyhow?”

Skulker pulled an enormous leather canteen out from beneath his robes, tossing it to me without further comment (not that he was prone to lots of them). Its stopper was a plug of palm wood that had been carved into the shape of a hollow-eyed, grinning skull. The creepy thing came out with a suspiciously loud “pop” when I pulled it loose from its bunghole. The canteen was filled with some still-fermenting sugary slop mixed with yeast, stolen presumably from some baker’s workshop back in Myrrh. The concoction smelled like something I wasn’t quite prepared, or maybe not consciously willing, to put my finger on. In spite of that I was just desperate enough for a drink to give it a try. I put my mouth to the bunghole and took a long, hard pull. When my stomach didn’t immediately send the swill back up, I took yet another.

For a brief frightening moment I think I went blind. Then my whole body broke out into a cold sweat from the top of my bald, sunburned head to the tips of my blister-encrusted toes. An already abused brain did a small somersault inside of my thick skull. I suppose it was the rotgut’s way of warning you about what a real man’s hangover could be like. I tried to breathe, but instead just got dancing faeries of light behind my eyes as my wits begrudgingly agreed to allow my eyes access to my head. I tried again and was rewarded with a choking, gurgling sort of noise that slowly turned into violent cough. I evened this out with another, smaller belt of the evil juice.

“The night before they butchered the last of the camels for food I paid the stable a little visit.” Skulker’s voice was murmuring confidentially in my ear, even though he was five feet or so from me. “I milked several of the mares, and then mixed their issue with a quarter of pulped dates which I liberated from the Lieutenant’s personal pantry. The cork’s my own invention. The left eye has a tiny, one-way valve that allows gas to exit without air getting in. Pretty good, huh?”

“Oh,” he added, “I might have cast a minor spell to help speed fermentation along a wee more quickly. Well, maybe not a minor spell exactly….”

“This batch only took about a week,” Shortround interrupted enthusiastically in his little girl’s voice, “but we’ve got a half dozen more buried around the canyon. Aging-like.”

“Aye, they’ll be powerful killing strong by the end of the month.” added Salvatore, “Then we’ll sell them to those bastard Argonii Death’s Head troopers on their payday for a tidy sum. They’ve been moaning about the lack of hooch to anyone who can understand them since we, uh, ‘sacked’ Saffron. The Donkey turned that place into such a pit, there wasn’t any way to find out if some clever heathen had built himself a still somewhere in a barn or if some merchant was passing through with a load of wine from the south. This stuff will send even those fat, flaxen-haired fools for a loop. See if it doesn’t! It’s copper in the belt, see if it isn’t!”

The three of them grinned their gap-toothed smiles at me like naughty apprentices off to spend their wages in a brothel. Unable to speak, I just nodded. Alcohol was damned hard to come across in Bedune lands, what with its consumers being proscribed by religious law to a particularly nasty sodomistic death and all. Of course, such things don’t make much difference to an invading army of starved mercenary killers lead by a psychotic demigod. Every blistered day is a march-or-die kind of proposition, which leaves remarkably little time to develop a sophisticated appreciation of local custom.

I sipped at the thick, soupy substance again. It wasn’t so bad once you got used to it…. actually, it was kind of good. Earthy-like. A happy kind of warmth spread over my sunburned body, chasing away a far less congenial heat that had become my constant companion over the last six months. Skulker hadn’t mentioned it, but maybe he’d distilled the humors out of some of the smoke that the locals favored for this evil concoction. That would account for all the faerie light and numbness and whatnot. Using my free hand I grappled the wall of rags behind me, slowly pulling myself into a standing position using a series of desperate handholds. Finally I stood on my feet, swaying a little with a bad case of rubberlegs.

“Well then lads,” I gasped. My voice sounded distant and funny in my own ears. “I’ll have to take this contraband with me, lest it fall into the hands of the uncouth common soldier. Being an officer and Keeper and all, I must now climb to my lofty quarters for the proscribed purpose of recording the day’s vital impressions for Imperial posterity. Let’s hear no more about this clear violation of the God Tyrant’s will, may-he-reign-eternal.”

“May-he-reign-eternal!” the three criminals intoned, as reverent as a clutch of penitent monastics.

With as much dignity as was possible under the circumstances, I gathered my ragged cloak about me, taking my leave while simultaneously trying to keep my boots from tripping over one another. Outside the sun was not forgiving. Not in the least.