Illian’s crossbow bolt smacked into the sergeant’s breastplate just left of the sternum. At such close range it had little difficulty penetrating armour and bone to find the heart.
“And you, Honoured Citizen?” Frentis called to the young officer, now gaping at the fallen sergeant, the tears streaming from his eyes making him appear no more than a child lost amidst a field of dangerous strangers. After a moment he mastered himself sufficiently to retrieve the bugle from the sergeant’s body. The call he sounded was faltering and thin, but evidently sufficiently clear. As one the Varitai laid down their weapons and stood in ranks, every face expressing no more emotion than a stone.
“Can you heal so many?” Frentis asked Weaver as the healer appeared with his freed Varitai.
Weaver gave a soft laugh, surveying the neat ranks of slave soldiers with his now-habitual sad smile. “You talk as if I have a choice, brother.”
? ? ?
New Kethia burned. Tall columns of smoke rose from its close-packed streets, most of the fires seemingly concentrated around the docks where a number of ships could be seen drawing away from the harbour. They were all low in the water, one so heavily laden it capsized on reaching the harbour mouth, tiny antlike figures scuttling over its hull as it rolled in the waves. To the south a long line of people were streaming from the city gates, Frentis’s spyglass confirming the vast majority as grey-clads, stooped and burdened with various household items, dragging wailing children in their wake, confusion and fear on every face.
“They might’ve waited till we got here,” Draker grumbled.
“One less battle to fight,” Frentis said. They had encamped amidst a large collection of ruins on a low plateau just under a mile east of the city, Thirty-Four naming the place as the site of Old Kethia, destroyed centuries before in the Forging Age. The former slave returned from his reconnaissance in late afternoon, he and Master Rensial having been sent ahead in the morning.
“It seems news of our victory had a dramatic effect,” Thirty-Four reported. “The governor hatched a plan to execute every slave rather than allow them to fall into our hands. Given that the city’s slaves outnumber the free population by a factor of two to one, this proved an unwise course of action. The riots have been raging for three days, thousands have died, more have fled.”
“The slaves hold the city?” Frentis asked.
“Only a quarter.” Thirty-Four pointed to a district that appeared even more shrouded in smoke than the others. “Lacking arms, their losses were heavy. We picked our way through to contact their leaders.” He turned to Frentis with a smile. “It seems they have heard much about the Red Brother, and are eager for his arrival.”
“One less battle,” Draker muttered, getting to his feet.
? ? ?
“Why was this done?”
The body hung from a pole in New Kethia’s main square, the feet reduced to blackened stumps, stomach torn out, and the face frozen in an agonised scream. Despite all the mutilation visited upon the corpse Frentis could still recognise the features. I’ll suffer every torment for a thousand years, Varek had said. From the state of him Frentis doubted he had lasted more than an hour.
New Kethia’s Deputy Treasurer, a pinch-faced black-clad who seemed equal parts baffled and terrorised by his continued survival, had to cough several times before finding the voice to speak. “The Empress’s orders,” he said, the tone wavering despite his efforts to master it. “They arrived before he did.”
Didn’t like what he said to me, Frentis decided, feeling an odd sense of disappointment. Varek had seemed so determined, it would have been interesting to see how far his quest for vengeance would have taken him. But he was one of just several thousand corpses littering this city, bloating in the sun and birthing clouds of flies that swarmed amidst the burgeoning stench. Thousands of stories snuffed out before the ending.