Widowmaker Read online

  And that, once all the high-sounding reasons were set aside, was why he had decided to see all the surviving prisoners as dead as their victims.

  No. Not just see them dead. For the sake of his men and their honour, to keep a feud from being needlessly called against them; and for the sake of his own honour, no matter what might come of it afterwards, he had to do this himself.

  But he would do it cleanly. None of the impalements or guttings or elaborate knife-work favoured by other lords on the grounds that a lengthy, painful death made for a better example. Whether the road into the darkness was a long or a short one, dead was dead, and the meaning of that death would be unmistakable.

  If his eye was good and his arms steady, Bayrd knew that there would only be as many sweeps of the blade as there were men to receive them. Isileth would do the rest. From the day he drew the weapon out of a crevice in the rock far under where Dunrath’s rebuilt walls now stood, no whetstone had ever touched it; and even after all those years one still wasn’t needed now. The taiken was no heading-sword – its balance was wrong, for a start – but the grey steel’s bitter edges, keen enough to shave hair from an arm, would be more than enough for however many cuts were needed.

  * * * *

  “Ten of them,” said Marc ar’Dru at his elbow, so perfectly answering the question taking shape in Bayrd’s mind that he stared in shock for a moment.

  “What?”

  “I said, ten prisoners. Nineteen were killed during the fight, eleven got away.” He eyed his lord, Companion and friend with something that might have been poorly-concealed disapproval. “That’s what you wanted to know, wasn’t it?”

  “I…” Bayrd gathered himself together as he might have brought an unruly horse under control between knee and heel and bit. “Yes. Yes, it was.”

  “The men know. And Bayrd…they know too.” Marc’s disapproval was no longer concealed at all. He didn’t like what was about to happen. “All of them. About what you have in mind.”

  “They should have thought of that earlier.” The words came out in a disciplinary snap from the old days, when Bayrd was a Captain-of-Ten and Marc ar’Dru nothing more than one more subordinate. Keep your opinions to yourself, was the caution riding under the words. At least in public. It’s nothing to do with you, but this is something I have to do. Don’t make it any more difficult…

  Marc picked up on the warning at once, because his voice lowered to a private murmur. “You don’t like this any more than I do,” he said quietly from the side of his mouth. “So why go through with it at all?”

  “Because if I don’t, they’ll be back.”

  “Will they?”

  “If not these, then others.” Bayrd glanced at them, looking for shame, remorse, some mitigating emotion besides the condescending defiance stamped on every face like a seal into wax. “I know men like these. Men like ar’Diskan, like…dammit, Marc, like far too many we both know! If I don’t do something severe, they’ll ride off full of false penitence, and then they’ll say ‘Talvalin has a soft heart. He’s too honourable for his own good. He’ll cut you down without a second thought so long as it’s in a fair fight, but if you’re taken prisoner, you’re safe.’ Do you want that?”

  “They won’t—”

  “They will!”

  “Bayrd, you sound like a man trying to convince himself.”

  That stung, perhaps because Bayrd had reached the same conclusion without help from anyone else. “Maybe so. Because you’re right. I don’t like it. But I don’t like seeing my peasants slaughtered either. If they want to try killing someone, then let them try it with armed men of their own rank. Or can you live with the thought of…of old Youenn Kloatr from Redmer, hung up by the heels as if he was a dead rabbit on someone’s tally-sheet?”

  Bayrd’s left hand slapped against Isileth’s pommel, and the sword seemed to shift uneasily in its scabbard like an excitable hawk under its hood. There was a faint creaking of leather, a faint ringing of metal, as if the hawk had strained briefly against the restraining jesses and stamped one belled, taloned foot. All of it might only have been from the pressure of Bayrd’s hand.

  And then again, it might not.

  If the tales were to be believed, a gortaik’n blade had what sometimes seemed a will of its own. Its owner would carry it in situations where it might easily be drawn; it would be drawn in situations where it might easily be used; and it would be used in situations where it could best fulfil the purpose for which it had been made.

  The killing of men.

  “Some of the men have given that thing another name,” said Marc softly. “They’re calling it the Widow Maker.”

  “Are they?” Bayrd drummed ironclad fingertips against the longsword’s guard, making a tiny clinking sound that at least had an honest source. “I must be growing older, Marc. It’s not as easy to insult me as it was.” He glanced down. “Widowmaker let it be…”

  A wash of translucent azure flame splashed from the metal of the long hilt, to lick and gutter over the armour that backed his gauntlet. Both men stared at the fat sparks that crawled like incandescent bumblebees over the black-lacquered plates, until Bayrd closed his fingers and squeezed a drizzle of blue fire out from between them as though he held a fistful of grapes. It crackled briefly on the air and faded from sight, leaving only the hot purple after-track of its passage glowing within their eyes.

  Marc ar’Dru flinched and wiped dazzle-born moisture from the corner of one eye. “I thought,” he said, blinking, “you were able to control yourself better than that.”

  “Mostly, yes.” Bayrd raised his hand and held it in front of his face as if studying something strange, and in a way, he was. Had it not been for the Talent of sorcery, that hand had no business being on his wrist any more.

  Then his gaze shifted to Marc, and his eyebrows drew together in a frown directed less at his Bannerman than at something only he could see. “But sometimes no. Be as righteous as you like, but don’t fling that righteousness at me. Not while you don’t need to worry about its consequences. If you need to wait until Mevn’s been forced to straddle all forty of a gang like this before you think to do something about them, then do it. Just hope they cut her throat afterwards.”

  Marc went red, then white, and his hand began a twitch toward the hilt of his own sword before he stifled the movement. “That was hardly—”

  “Hardly something you like to think about, Marc-ain my old friend.” Still glowering, Bayrd leaned forward in Yarak’s saddle. Only a consideration for their honour, their rank – and for more than ten years of comradeship – stopped him from seizing Marc ar’Dru’s war-mask by the laces to either side of its iron chin, the old army way of a half amiable, half irritable superior driving home a point. They were no longer in anyone else’s army, he reminded himself abruptly. They were kailinin-eir, men of respect, both of them past thirty and with their dignity to consider.

  “I suggest,” he finished, sitting back hard in his saddle before the way his mind was tending made him say or do anything worse, “that you start giving some thought to such things. Maybe that way you’ll never have to face the reality. I have. It smells like burnt pork. I knew the people who smelled like that. I knew them by name, to take beer with, to…

  “Marc, you know all this. I was their lord. They thought I could protect them. They might have thought I would come galloping up to save them. They might have thought it right up to the moment when the roof fell in and they began to burn. The Keepers of Years can call this mess what they like. A border incident...?” His mouth curled downwards as though the words tasted foul.

  “No. It’s a war. And if it goes on, I might have to smell that stink again. But,” he turned his head to study the prisoners once more, “at least I won’t smell it because of them.”

  Paying Marc ar’Dru no further heed, Bayrd dismounted and flung Yarak’s loose reins towards the first of his retainers within reach, not troubling to see if they were caught or not. “Which clans?”
he asked one of them, and again, his tone of voice suggested that he had little interest in the answer. The man to whom he had spoken rattled out a list of names, most just House or Family titles.

  Bayrd nodded, recognizing some of those names. It was much as he had expected. Further probing might have revealed what allegiances those houses had formed to give their actions some semblance of legality, but that didn’t matter any more.

  There was only one that caused him a moment’s hesitation. Ar’Kelayr was a clan from his own past – or at least at one remove from it. Lord Vanek ar’Kelayr had been Gerin ar’Diskan’s rival in that race to claim the domain of Dunrath, and because of that had been, in a twisted way, responsible for Bayrd’s present situation. He found the coincidence an odd one, slightly uncomfortable in the echoes it stirred. But nothing more than that.

  He had neither the time nor the inclination to find out who else might be responsible for what had happened; not when there were ten murderers before him, all of them taken red-hand and guilt-proven. The frenzy of their defence when the trod caught up with them had indicated well enough that they had better reason to avoid capture than just the horses and the thirty head of cattle running with them. They had plenty of identifiable plundered goods in their possession – foolishly already divided up into shares – to confirm it.

  Bayrd knew there were enough ears – and loose mouths – around that some sort of speech was probably required. Some explanation for what was about to happen. But he found himself strangely unwilling to waste breath on swine like these, any more than Master Dwayl the headsman of Durforen bothered clarifying why he was about his lawful business. That would all have been dealt with days before.

  In this case, it was hours rather than days, but the condemned men should still know why they were to die. And if they didn’t, thought Bayrd sombrely, then it was far too late to learn. Even so… He bowed his head slightly, acknowledging them as kailinin; they deserved that much respect at least, not for what they were so much as for what they had been.

  “I am the Clan-Lord Bayrd Talvalin,” he announced in a voice clear enough to carry to where the unseen ears of a spy might be listening. There were always spies nowadays, even if they were not always in human form…

  “I administer the rights of high, middle and low justice in this domain, to grant mercy or withhold it as I see fit. You are all miscreant thieves and murderers, condemned by witness, by proof and by your own actions. What can you say in your defence?”

  That confirmed his intention as much as anything short of a summary killing – though this was going to be summary enough to raise eyebrows from Datherga all the way to Cerdor. The words were not quite the usual formal phrases, but their meaning was clear enough. Nothing the prisoners might say could alter their fate unless he willed it, but they had a chance to justify their actions for posterity – if there was any justification possible.

  For a long time none of them spoke, but now that he was close enough, Bayrd could see the ice of arrogance start to freeze each face. Young faces, all of them. The faces of men who had not been warriors, not even passed eskorrethen, when the keels struck the shore eight years ago. And now look at them. Little lords of Creation, one and all, proving how much power they possessed by killing their unarmed inferiors.

  Or those someone had told them were inferior.

  The ten kailinin didn’t understand what he meant by asking them to explain themselves. For men like this and a killing like that, there was no explanation necessary. They stared at him, and as Bayrd returned the stares he realized that he was looking at total incomprehension, mingled with a sneering hate so intense that the reason for it was beyond him. It was not just the hatred of men who knew they had been beaten, or men who knew they were about to die. There was something deeper, something uglier, something he had never encountered before even when facing the most fanatical Prytenek lord’s-man.

  “I am the kailin-eir Dyrek ar’Kelayr, and we all know you, ar’Talvlyn,” said one of the young men at last. Bayrd gazed at him, his face expressionless. Yes. He might have expected something from this one. The father was notoriously difficult to get along with, even among his allies. Why should the son be any different?

  “If you know me—” he began, and was cut off short.

  “We do not recognize you, turlekh,” snapped young ar’Kelayr. “We do not recognize your right to judge us. You have forfeited all rights, even to respect.” Instead of a bow of respect, or the deep Third Obeisance merited by clan-lord’s rank, he spat expressively on the ground at Bayrd’s feet, defying him to do anything worse than the death already hanging over them all.

  Neither the spitting nor the deliberate use of the old form of his name insulted Bayrd at all. What fuelled a slow burning of anger in his brain and behind his eyes were the implications of that one word, ‘unblood’. They knew who he was, but that didn’t matter.

  It was who and what his wife was that concerned them. That was where the hate came from. She was an Elthanek, like those they had burned. Worse, she was an Elthanek sorcerer, whose presence in an Alban high clan was a canker corrupting the purity of its blood.

  Bayrd set his teeth to keep back a pointless response that would be no more than a waste of breath. He had seen and heard all this before, in Drosul. Daykin of Kalitz had been behind some of it, a part of his complex plotting to gain support for himself and strip it from his rivals. Allegiances had fluctuated like the wind crossing a field of standing grain as one faction strove against the next, and Daykin reaped the benefit of the harvest. It had set him on the road to empire, and even without the Albans at his back – the only people he could really trust, although he never trusted them enough to know it – he might still get there. If he lived long enough.

  There had been much talk about purity of blood, about whether the people of one of the little city-states was superior or inferior to the people of the next, and that superiority was never reckoned in a sense that counted swords or wealth or knowledge. It was more like the desire of children to be members of this gang rather than that, for no other reason than one faction claimed to be better and some of the others believed it. And now the children were learning the old tricks again. Bayrd wondered who was teaching them.

  For these ten savage children, it was an attitude too well ingrained for them to unlearn.

  At least they wouldn’t plead for mercy. They would more likely try to spit in his eye when their turn came. But it would not be honest courage prompting the defiance. Just their contemptuous awareness that he had once been almost as good as them, and had chosen to throw it all away.

  “Marc-an ar’Dru?” he said, deliberately turning his back on the prisoners.

  “Lord?” said Marc, saluting much more formally than usual. He was still smarting from the earlier rebuke, and making no secret of what he thought.

  “You’re my Companion and my Bannerman,” said Bayrd. “My advisor. Advise me.”

  “Advise…?”

  “As I see it, there are four options. One, I execute all of them. Two, I execute five, taking a life for a life, but being sure to do nothing against the son of a high-clan lord. Three, I find out the murderers and execute them, without fear or favour and regardless of who ar’Kelayr might be, then let the rest go free. Four, I release them all. I’m a lord known to be even-handed in my judgments. What should I do?”

  Marc was eyeing him as though he had taken leave of his senses; as if the topic had never come under discussion before, rather than prompting a near-fight less than ten minutes ago. And he felt sure that there was some crooked reasoning behind Bayrd’s question.

  He was right.

  A high-clan lord, even one who had only attained the rank as recently as he had, didn’t need advice on matters like this. Or second opinions. Or support, either tacit or verbal. A high-clan lord did as he pleased in his own domain, so long as it didn’t interfere with other high-clan lords. But a lord who wanted his judgments and the reasons for them to be understood
as clearly as possible might, just once in a while, explain them.

  “You’ve beaten them,” said Marc after a moment’s thought. “We know it. They know it. You’ve won. But if you kill them all, they’ll just be dead.”

  “So I should let all of them go? Or just the ones protected by their fathers’ rank? What about the guilty ones?”

  “They deserve to die.”

  “All of the guilty ones, then. The high and the low together. So. And which ones are they?”

  Bayrd saw a muscle twitch in Marc ar’Dru’s cheek, and knew he was bringing home to his Bannerman all the complications which Marc had so blithely dismissed when they weren’t his official problem. Which of them indeed? The ones who fired the thatch? The ones who barred the doors? Or the ones who would talk for wearisome hours about the value of their warrior’s honour, even though they stood by and didn’t stop what was happening?

  Of the ten men on their knees before him, which of them had done what? And what amount of torture would be needed to find out?

  “How would you measure guilt, Marc?” asked Bayrd quietly. “Tell me. I need to know.”

  * * * *

  Bayrd had sincerely considered releasing every one of them. For all his righteous anger, the prospect of a multiple killing in cold blood turned his stomach even when he had the law on his side.

  And Marc was right. To be defeated, and to know they had been defeated by so despised a creature as they considered him, would probably be a worse punishment than death. Adding clemency to that would pour salt in the wounds of their pride far more than any physical pain he could inflict. And not hurting them would enhance his own reputation much more than killing ten children, even though they had proven themselves as cruel as children could be.

  But that was all before he caught something he hadn’t been meant to see.

  It was a shift of expression, nothing more. Because he happened to be looking in the right direction, Bayrd had caught a certain spiteful satisfaction mingled with the hatred in the eyes of Dyrek ar’Kelayr, the only one among all of them who had spoken. He was a slim youngster, no older than twenty, handsome in his red and blue crest-coat with the scarlet enamel of its eagle-heads sparkling bravely in the sun. He was the sort who should have been guilty of nothing more than breaking half-a-dozen lovers’ hearts. Not of torching a building and listening unmoved to the sounds as the five people inside it burned alive.