De Gex shook his head, too a-mazed to feel the horror of his predicament. “They say necromancers hold in thrall those whom they have brought back to life,” he said, “but I never thought it would work this way.”
“To me a more apt similitude is the way a priest enslaves the minds of his parishioners,” said Oyonnax. “But that is neither here nor there. I have lost count of the number of times some courtier has minced up to me and claimed he was enthralled by my beauty, wit, or perfume; of course it always turns out in the end that they are not enthralled at all. Still and all, I have often wondered what it would be like to have a thrall; and as you have so much hectored me, ever since we were children, about the prospects of my immortal soul, I can’t think of anyone who more deserves it. Know that your empty coffin shall be interred with all due ceremony in the family mausoleum at Gex. Where Edmund de Ath shall lie one day, there’s no telling; and where his soul shall end up is my secret.”
Winter Quarters of the King’s Own
Black Torrent Guards Near Namur
MARCH 1696
“SERGEANT SHAFTOE REPORTING as ordered, sir,” came a voice from the dark.
“I have got a letter addressed to you, Shaftoe,” answered a different voice from the dark—a college-cultivated voice. “As a training exercise, I thought we might sally forth in search of some source of light, so that I could do something other than run my fingers over it.”
“Captain Jenkins’s company gathered some brush on their ‘training exercise’ this afternoon, and are burning it yonder.”
“Ah, I phant’sied I smelled smoke. Where the devil did they find something to burn?”
“A wee sand-bar in the Meuse, three miles upstream. We’ve had our eye on it for several weeks. The French had not got to it yet, lacking swimmers. But Captain Jenkins’s company has a man who can dog-paddle, when he has to. Today, he had to. He got over to this sand-bar with a line, and stripped it bare while the French watched shivering, and threw stones, from the opposite bank.”
“That is the sort of initiative I look for in the Black Torrent Guards!” exclaimed Colonel Barnes. “’Twill serve them well in the years to come!”
The conversation to this point had been transacted through a wall of mildewy canvas, for Colonel Barnes was on the inside, and Sergeant Shaftoe the outside, of a tent. The sentences of Barnes were punctuated by thumping and clanking as he got sword, boot, peg-leg, and topcoat on. The tent was a ghostly cloud under starlight. It bulged at one end as Barnes pushed his way out through the flaps; then he became perfectly invisible. “Where are you?”
“Here.”
“Can’t see a bloody thing,” Barnes exclaimed, “it is an excellent training exercise.”
“You could be living in a house, with candles,” said Bob Shaftoe, not for the first time.
Indeed, Barnes had passed most of the winter in a house up the road from this, the winter camp of his regiment; but some piece of news from England, recently received and digested, had prompted him to vacate, to take up lodgings in a tent among his men, and to begin referring to everything they did as a training exercise. The change had been much noted but little understood. They’d not taken part in anything like a military engagement since half a year ago, when they had participated in King William’s successful siege of Namur. Since, they’d done naught but live on the land, like field-mice. And since the trees and brush had all long since been cut down and burnt, and the farms trampled to unproductive mud-flats, and the animals hunted and eaten, living on this land required some ingenuity.
The brush-fire was, as both men knew, on the opposite side of a swell in the earth, where Captain Jenkins’s company had made its camp. To get there, they had to walk through the camp of Captain Fletcher’s company, which in daylight would have taken all of thirty seconds. With a lanthorn it might have taken a minute or two. But the Black Torrent Guards’ last candle had vanished several days previously, and in the most ignominious way possible, viz. nicked from Colonel Barnes’s coat-pocket by rats when he ventured out to use the latrine, and carried away to be eaten. And so the passage through Captain Fletcher’s company’s camp was, as both men knew, to be an infinitely gradual shuffling and sliding through a three-dimensional labyrinth of tent-ropes and clotheslines. It seemed an opportune time to speak of difficult matters—for there was no way, in darkness, to look someone in the eye.
“Err…it is my duty to inform you,” said Bob, “that private soldiers James and Daniel Shaftoe are absent without leave.”
“Since how long?” asked Barnes, sounding interested, but not surprised.
“That might be debated. Three days ago, they claimed they had come upon the spoor and tracks of a feral pig, and requested leave to hunt it down. They vanished over the horizon, in the direction of Germany, not long after permission was granted.”
“Very good—an excellent training exercise.”