Chapter 16
Rue
Although mercenaries are paid to fight, they spend only a tiny fraction of their time actually fighting. The average life expectancy of a mercenary is lower than in most professions, but if they were to go into battle every day, few would be expected to last more than a week or two.
The great majority of a mercenary’s time is spent waiting.
Travelling comes a distant second. Fighting a very distant third.
And all that waiting needs filling with distraction.
Which in part accounts for how good mercenaries are at taking prisoners.
A prisoner who can be ransomed provides money, and money is the reason most mercenaries claim to do what they do.
A prisoner who can’t be ransomed provides entertainment, filling those empty days when there would otherwise be nothing else to do but sharpen blades and think about the battles to come.
All of this explained the ready availability of nets among the sell-swords swarming towards Rue, and the well-practised encirclement manoeuvre they employed.
In the old days nobody would ever think of charging at a Kindness, especially not if they were just hired blades hoping to get paid.
But these were new days, and times—as Sharp had always liked to say—are a-changing.
Plus, while there were no Kindnesses who might be called young, there were perhaps only two older than Rue, and neither of those by more than a year or two.
With the corpse of one of their commanders advancing jerkily from the rear, charging the old woman ahead of them turned out to be the much-preferred option.
Rue had seen cultures where the old were respected, but the larger the groups into which humanity clumped itself, the smaller the circle of old men still afforded that respect became.
Most of the elderly were seen merely as useless eaters.
The wisdom of age, it turned out, had an increasingly short period in which it held value.
In the modern era, experience was viewed more like fruit, quick to soften and rot.
“Shit.” Rue let Isik’s corpse collapse. Maintaining it was occupying too much of her attention. She sized up the young man heading the pack, his long legs devouring the distance between them.
A crow swooped low between Rue and the enemy, unleashing a mournful caw.
And in the closing moments Rue admitted that the wisdom of age, at least the wisdom of her age, had been severely lacking in this instance.
She had allowed herself to be wrapped up in the strangeness of the Morrigan’s blessing, and had swiftly bought back into the myth of her order, and now she was heartbeats away from being embarrassingly trampled into the dirt of the one-horse town where she should have ended her days staring toothlessly into the embers of her cottage fire.
The youth tried a sliding tackle, which Rue sidestepped with minimal effort.
The next man, a hefty, bearded fellow, slapped at her knife hand with the flat of his blade.
Rue, understanding that they intended to capture rather than kill her, took advantage of her predicament and spun inside his reach, stabbing the man twice in the neck and using his body to shield her from the flood of mercenaries passing on both sides.
For a few frantic moments Rue slashed and moved, cutting away reaching fingers, ducking beneath attempted grapples.
She made sure that the wounds she dealt were deep and well placed.
Even as they bled, the mercenaries had sufficient discipline to remember their orders.
A shield slammed into her back, staggering her, a kick to her thigh almost put her on the ground, the hilt of a sword grazed her skull.
The necromancy that had stood Isik back on his feet, even though Rue had stopped his heart perhaps an hour earlier, now turned inwards, shoring up what the ageing body it inhabited could not. Where she should have shattered and fallen, Rue endured.
“Whoresons.” Rue spat her blood into the dust as the mercenaries backed beyond the reach of her knife.
Half a dozen kept retreating through the ranks of their comrades, clutching wounds that might kill them and that certainly would keep them from this fight or any other for weeks to come. Two men, the bearded brute and a narrow, corn-haired youth, lay in the dirt, the younger one still convulsing.
The first net hit Rue from behind, folding over her.
“Should have opened with that.” She threw it off as she’d been taught, but it had hooks that snagged her left arm even as two further nets came at her from the front.
It didn’t take long before she lay beside the two men that the mercenaries’ pride had killed.
The nets held her while strong hands bound her more effectively with lengths of rope.
After that they took her shoulder-high in an ignominious procession back to the doorway where their leader, the woman, Gressa, stood frowning.
They hung Rue on a hook that had once supported the antlered skull of a plains elk that Tamaster Sams had pretended to have hunted down in his youth.
From her uncomfortable perspective, heels half a yard above the ground, Rue had a good view of the old mayor’s “dining hall,” which was just the largest room of his modest house.
Gressa paid Rue scant attention, instead turning her back and returning her focus to a set of maps spread across an oak table.
Three other commanders joined her, all of them dwarfing the woman but showing by their body language that hers was the opinion that mattered most. The men, one Rue recognized from Isik’s crew, glanced uneasily in Rue’s direction from time to time while Gressa jabbed at various objectives on the maps.
From her position on the wall Rue could feel the dead around her.
Isik and the others had been brought into the house and left in the root cellar.
Gressa had ordered the corpses be bound hand and foot, and a guard set on the cellar door.
She’d raged at her underlings’ fear when some hesitated to touch the bodies.
If necromancy was more than a parlour trick, she had shouted, then necromancers would rule the continent.
If death magic triumphed over swords and spears, the warlord would have populated his court with practitioners of the art or mastered the unclean sorceries himself.
But no, Lord Sunder had placed half the world beneath his heel with military might, and unless the cockless cowards currently questioning her orders wanted to feel Gressa’s own military might, they would do as they were told, and quickly.
Rue hung in place and said nothing. Long ago she had been taught the value of waiting.
Stop. Wait. The fact that they’d stuck her on the wall like a trophy spoke of their contempt.
Gressa had seemed an able commander, but here she was revealing plans as if she were the villain from some shadow play, spilling her secrets before the hero who would inevitably escape with them.
Rue watched the room with sour eyes. She had only herself to blame.
She’d been drunk on power, too filled with her own return from death to recognize the truth of Gressa’s words.
Necromancy had its place, but it didn’t win wars.
She’d stridden out into Pye’s only street thinking she was walking the same path of fifty years ago.
Mercenaries wouldn’t have stood before a Kindness back then.
No man would—not for mere coin at least.
Ignoring the tightness of her bonds, Rue reached out with the necromancy wrapped around her core and, closing her eyes, sought for options.
Immediately she became aware of a source of power close at hand, perhaps in the same room as her.
The thing had a necromantic reek to it. Not a corpse, but something pure and contained.
Save for the artefacts that could, very rarely and at great peril, be discovered where the Academy catacombs threaded among the outer fringes of the deadlands, Rue had never sensed its like.
The thing was of no use to her, though, locked away from her influence within the intimidating shell of its own power.
Rue broadened her search. Apart from the bodies in the cellar there were others, farther off, dumped behind the mayor’s privy hut at the back of his now chickenless yard.
Tamaster Sams himself was there, along with his wife and two sons.
Three others had been added to the heap.
Old women these, strange champions of the village to have fallen in its defence.
Perhaps they had put themselves between the mercenaries and what they wanted.
Their grandchildren most likely. Rue knew their names, though she couldn’t say how any more than she could explain how she knew the number and disposition of the dead.
Seven bodies, neither bound nor broken. Gressa was right, though.
Unless the mercenaries were so filled with horror that they chose to run, seven corpses would not defeat them.
The peasants were neither armed nor armoured, and even if Rue could put weapons in their hands she doubted her ability to coordinate their use.
Currently the limit of her power seemed to be to return the dead’s anger to their fleshy remains and set them loose in the desired direction.
“Who sent you?” Gressa’s sudden approach shook Rue from her exploration.
The woman had turned from her maps and planning to confront her prisoner.
“You look like a peasant but you talk like one of those witches that got outlawed way back. They called them…” She snapped her fingers, as if seeking to surprise the name out of herself.
“Kindnesses,” supplied the oldest of her three subordinates at the table.
“Kindnesses,” Gressa repeated. “That’s a stupid name.”