2.12. Red Cloth
Seth’s hand tightened at the wooden haft. He hissed air out and slammed the edge home, point-first.
He planted his foot on the shovelhead and stomped it the rest of the way into the rootpacked dirt. The crunchy shifting noise joined the chorus of shoveling soldiers all across the field, their silhouettes growing sharper against the pine-needle sky as the sun lurked below the horizon.
Before their heroic final stand against the abomination from beyond the deathspell, it turned out, the village of Shaheill had a lot of digging to do.
From the north gate, yellow-ribboned volunteers carted freshly felled logs and sharpened them to points with the clopping of axes. Further out, by the trenches that were already finished, Ofelia directed the traffic of wheelbarrows loaded with earth and sod to cover the boards they’d laden over the pit traps.
The coverings were thick enough to easily hold a human’s weight. The blackfeather’s bulk would smash through them, though, and send a limb toppling into a pit of timber spikes. It seemed brilliant to Seth, and the quantities of sweat they were shedding was surely dear enough that the al Ydrises wouldn’t have directed this activity as some plot to get everyone’s mind out of the dull, spreading dread left by each elapsing hour.
But Tiago, where he stood atop the village’s palisade, was frowning.
Seth staked his shovel vertical into the ground and waggled his tin canteen. Its thin, hollow slosh sent him to the spigot at the edge of the field they were carving. He passed Undersecretary Simon al Teremi, who had been charged with going door-to-door seeking able-bodied cowards and was corralling one now with gentle mercilessness.
“Take the cloth, Ochoa.”
“I can’t—I’ve never even—I’ve only drilled, ever.”
“You have me beat then, goodman. My last muster day was a decade ago and I scheduled a meeting that day to get out of it.” Simon lifted the pale man’s arm and tied the badge to his bicep. “Look, this is the easiest bit. It’ll be beat to shit by the time it’s our turn. All they’re asking of us is to be brave. Just do whatever that scary porcelain doll girl tells you to do.”
Ochoa looked to Ofelia, who was handing out her own stock of assignments, and it was lucky timing, because Simon’s hands were shaking so badly it took him an extra try to tie the cloth off.
Seth topped his canteen up and approached. “I’ll take one of those. Go Team Red. Rah-rah.”
Simon glanced at him as Ochoa shuffled away. “You’re one of the Verdugo’s sons?”
“I’m Seth,” said Seth. “And I’m here for a cloth and a pointed stick.”
Simon chuckled. “Here we are, then, Seth. No pointed stick quite yet, but we’ll love this enthusiasm when it comes time.”
Ofelia stared at the cloth, as Simon handed it off to Seth and Seth tied it to his wrist. “You’re really doing this.”
Seth’s forearm, thin as it was, required a double-bind to secure the fabric. “You don’t need to sound so surprised.”
“I don’t sound like anything,” Ofelia said. “I work very prudently to be as monotone as possible, for the sake of my aesthetic.”
“Well, yes. I am really doing this.”
“It’s a bitter waste of your value if you die, Mr. il Gutierre,” Ofelia said. “Rather like placing a splendid mouser in a swimming competition with an eel.”
“That is the craziest fucking metaphor I’ve ever heard, Ms. al Ydris, and it won’t stop me.”
“Oh, you needn’t stop.” Ofelia’s willowy fingers brushed the knot he’d tied to himself. “Just don’t die, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Good.” Ofelia smiled vaguely. “I would miss you very much.”
“Feeli!” Tiago was descending the palisade. He waved his arms at her. “They found the sorcerer!”
“Ah, Saints.” Ofelia broke into a jog back toward the clustered village streets. “Come on, Seth.”
By the time they’d arrived at the sorcerer’s house—a bungalow that ought to be quite pretty, with dried vines tangling its window and peeling paint on the door—a crowd had gathered. At its fore stood Anna al Ydris, her goliath arms crossed. Little redheaded Riccana and two fellow hermandati were tugging a stubbly, threadbare man out of its darkened interior. “Goodman, come on. Please just see her.”
The sorcerer staggered out the rest of the way, swatting the hands that bore him like they were insects landing on his shoulders. “Off me. Off me, damn you all. I’m going.”
“You’re the Shaheill sorcerer,” Anna said. “Robert il Magnard.”
“Yes. I am a sorcerer, yes.” The man’s bloodshot eyes clambered up Anna then dropped back down to her boots. “Worst fucking thing that ever happened to me.”
Anna’s stone face showed little pity. “Your Legion is calling you again to serve, Robert.”
“I’m not fit,” he mumbled.
“Stand up. Stop muttering.”
Robert made a credible effort at both. “Said I’m not fit, Madam Verdugo. I’ve got a hangover.”
“You won’t, by the time you’re needed.”
“By the time I’m needed I intend to be drunk, Madam Verdugo.” Robert laughed, high and cracked; he sounded like a gamefowl getting run over. “I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t look at it, I can’t fight it, I can’t do a thing. Cut my fucking head off and be done.”
Anna looked about ready to do just that. Tiago intervened from past the great black scabbard on her back. “Have you forgotten the spell?”
“Have I forgotten. Got your fucking fancy ink crawling around all over your fancy arm and you think you know how magic works. I haven’t fucking forgotten the spell, boy. I dream the spell. I’ll forget my father’s name before I forget the spell. It’s everywhere. Over everything. Like looking at the sun too long. They brand it to the inside of your skull.”
“Don’t be pathetic, il Magnard.” Anna’s murani fangs were showing now. “You’ve got a pension and a house so that the Legion can depend on you for these situations.”
“Aye, a pension. A pension and a jumpy neighbor who pretends he’s not being paid threebrace a week to blow my brains out if I hold my hands out wrong. A pension and a head full of—” Robert’s poeticism tripped over his enlarged liver. “Of shit. Shit and blood.”
“If you won’t serve for the Legion,” Tiago said, “then you—”
“You made a match out of me!” Robert spat a discolored lob into the dirt at Tiago’s feet. “And now you want me normal? To eat three squares and tiddly-um down to the shops and go hmmm I wonder what’s at market today? You expect me to hold a lover with these hands? A child? A fucking job? A fucking life? When all they have to do is—”
His hands shot up and forward. A ringing out of screams and shouts. Tiago ducked, lunged, slide tackled the man to the ground, and wrenched those gnarled weapon-hands behind Robert’s back.
“See?” Robert’s cracked cry was suspended halfway between laughter and weeping. “See? Let me up. Let me saintsfucking up, boy.” He struggled to his feet, though Tiago stayed at his back, still pinning his arms. “You ruined me. You colorless bastards. You made a match out of me and you sent me home to a paper world, and I’m still burning.”
Tears cut through the grime on his face.
“I’m still burning,” he sobbed. “What the fuck do I do?”
“We can’t put him out there, mother.” Ofelia led the al Ydrises (and Seth, who was tiring of being and Seth) to the muster yard, where the wagons from Tondarre were unloading men and materiel. “He’s a tripwire. There’s no using him.”
“I fucking know that, girl.” Anna spared a common glare for Feeli, a rare target. “That’s two or three fireballs down.”
“Two,” Tiago the optimist said. “Man looked too sallow to squeeze out a third for us.”
Anna stopped in her tracks at the muster yard gate, staring at Tondarre’s meager dozen who were stowing their road cloaks and weapons onto the pile. “This is the garrison from Tondarre? This is it?”
Riccana held a message printed beneath a United Territories letterhead, the Legion’s phoenix feather emblem split in half on its seal. “This came with them.”
“What’s it say?” Tiago asked.
“If I could read it, I’d tell you, sir.” Riccana extended the letter to him. “But you're dealing with a rhubarb farmer's daughter here, I'm afraid.”
Tiago gave the letter his dour review. “The Corregidor’s office sent as many as were possible.”
“Of course he did.” Anna hacked an acrid laugh. “That bundled-up bedwetter needed half his men to wipe his ass and check under his bed for unlit. They have any sorcerers in Tondarre?”
“Not since last year, apparently,” Riccana said. “The man moved further south to be with family. The sorceress from Lam’s Hob is here. She passed her fire test.”
Ofelia, who’d been put in charge of gathering and testing the sorcerers, leaned into her mother’s pointed ear. “On the third try.”
Anna scoffed. “That greenhorn’s never seen a seraph that wasn’t in Saint Selene and the Naughty Bugleboy.”
Seth knew that book; it was one of the ones he’d stolen when he taught himself to read. The seraph on the page had looked like a goat stapled to another goat and had given him nightmares for a while.
Anna turned from the concerned blue eyes of their their counterfeit Chief Hermandat. Her habitually slouchy shoulders slouched further. “It’s not adding up,” she whispered. “It’s not. It—”
With a burst of energy she departed the yard, leaving her retinue in uneasy silence.
“I suppose I’ll go see our stripling sorceress,” Ofelia said. “She’ll be fine for a fireball or two.”
“Will that be enough?” Riccana asked, her voice pounded flat by anxiety.
Tiago said nothing.
“We’ll get more,” Ofelia said. “We’ve hours to go. Mother’s just mothering.”
“I’m sure there’ll be more.” Riccana removed her helmet and looked into its bowl as though there might be a regiment or two of footmen to be found there. “There’s sure to be more from Mortauk, at least. Mortauk likes us.”
“Never been to Mortauk,” Tiago said. “They fight well, you think?”
“Oh, no,” Riccana said. “Bunch of shrinking pansies. The Shaheill Claypots obliterate the Mortauk Militia every time we play ‘em at Scrim.”
Tiago crooked a brow. “The Shaheill Claypots?”
Riccana adopted a look of overplayed offense. “Well, what would you name them?”
Tiago gave this sober, serious thought before answering. “The Shaheill Saints, maybe. Steal their alliterative thing.”
“I reckon that's pronounced illiterate," said illiterate Riccana. "And we can't be the Saints. It’s heretical.”
Tiago laughed in a way Seth had never heard, all warm and eager. A way that you certainly wouldn’t laugh, in Seth’s estimation, if you were making it a point not to care about the person you were laughing for. “How is that heretical?”
“Then if we lose the other team’s beaten the Saints.”
“You told me you never lose.”
“The Shaheill Slayers,” Ofelia offered.
Riccana frowned. “Shit,” she muttered. “That’s pretty good.”
“I’m gonna…” Seth hesitated. “Maybe I should talk to her. Anna, I mean.”
“Bad idea,” Tiago said.
“Do we have room for good ideas tonight?”
“Guess not.”
Seth followed Anna to where she stood, huddled, staring down a darkened street as early-riser candles and mitelamps sent pinprick lights into the pre-dawn. He approached the Verdugo with the slow care he’d give a wounded bull.
She snapped around, eyes burning stars. “Get the fuck back, il Gutierre. I told you.”
“I’m staying back,” Seth said. The simmering animosity on Anna’s face, as intimidating as it was, certainly beat the blank defeat she’d worn in the muster yard. He needled, just a little: “No way this is ten strides. You’re not so good at judging distances when you’re Anna, I think.”
She spat on the ground. “I don’t want your scent in my nose, il Gutierre.”
“I’ll take a bath as soon as the blackfeather’s dead, how’s that?” He folded his arms. “That was a nice speech you did. Reckon you got them ready.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “There’s no ready for this. But it’s better to die with the hope that you’ll—”
She stopped cold. Her eyes dilated to burning white slits. She pointed to the cloth tied to his elbow. In a low, dangerous voice she asked:
“What the fuck is that doing on your arm, Seth il Gutierre?”