‘I was following orders,’ Risp pleaded, pushing with her boots as if she could somehow back through the wall behind her.
‘Draconus just kicked the wrong nest,’ said the girl.
Risp shook her head. ‘It’s not — we’re not what you think! Spare me and I will go with you to your commander. I’ll explain everything.’
‘Commander? You understand nothing about us. Today, right now, right here in this alley, I’m in command.’
‘Please!’
The girl stepped forward. She was pathetically scrawny, more boy than girl, and in her eyes there was nothing Risp recognized.
‘I’ll explain-’
The knife went into the side of her neck like a sliver of fire. Choking, she felt the blade turn, and then the girl sliced through her windpipe, and all at once Risp felt the back of her helmet slam into the stone wall as tendons were cut. Hot blood filled her lungs and she began to drown.
The girl stared down at her for a moment, and then moved off.
Risp tried turning her head, to follow her killer’s flight, but instead felt her head sink back down. She looked down to see the stump at the end of her right wrist. The blood had stopped spilling out. Soldiers survived worse. She could learn to fight with her left hand. Wasn’t easy, but she was young — and when you’re young, these things are possible. So many things are possible.
I doubt she was sixteen. If she was sixteen she’d have been off with the hunters. Fifteen.
The need to breathe was a distant shout in her mind now, and she found it easy to ignore. Until black smoke rolled in, obscuring everything, and then it was time to go away.
‘We think she fell down the stairs,’ said the soldier.
Captain Silann studied the corpse of the woman lying at the foot of the tower steps. ‘This is Krissen,’ he said. ‘A scholar of highest repute.’
The soldier shrugged, sheathing his sword. ‘Life’s full of accidents,’ he said, moving off.
Silann felt sick inside. ‘Highest repute,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘What was she doing here?’ After a long moment he settled to his knees beside the body. Her head was tilted at an impossible angle; her eyes were half open, her mouth parted with the tip of the tongue protruding. Her hands were filthy with coal dust or the powder that sometimes came from old ink.
The soldier he had been speaking to earlier now returned. ‘None left alive in here, sir. Place was damned near abandoned as it was. It’s time to fire the keep.’
‘Of course.’ But still Silann studied the woman’s face.
‘Do you want we should take the body, sir? For proper burial, I mean.’
‘No, the pyre of this keep will suffice. Was there anything at the top of the tower?’
‘No sir, nothing. We need to go — got another village to hit.’
‘I know,’ Silann snapped. He straightened and then followed the soldier back outside.
On the keep road, just outside the gate, his wife had arrived with her vanguard. Her thighs were red with splashed blood, and Silann well knew the look on her face. Tonight there would be fierce lovemaking, the kind that skirted the edge of pain. It was, she had once explained, the taste of savagery that lingered from a day of killing.
‘Lieutenant Risp is dead,’ Esthala announced.
‘How unfortunate,’ Silann replied. ‘Do we have wounded?’
‘Few. Lost seven in all. There was at least one Bordersword in the village, a woman, we think, but we’ve not found her.’
‘Well, that’s good, then,’ he said. As her expression darkened he added, ‘A witness, I mean. That’s what we wanted, isn’t it?’
‘Depends on what she figured out, husband,’ Esthala replied, in that weary tone that he was all too familiar with: as if she were speaking to a dim-witted child. ‘Better some terrified midwife or pot-thrower.’ She turned in her saddle to survey the village below. Houses were burning in a half-dozen places. ‘We need to burn it all down. Every building. We’ll leave out a few of our losses, but with their faces disfigured. Nobody they might recognize.’ She looked across to Silann. ‘I leave all that to you and your company. Join us at Hillfoot.’
Silann assumed that was the name for the next village, and so he nodded. ‘We will do what’s needed.’
‘Of course you will,’ Esthala replied, taking up the reins.
She had refused to see her husband executed and Silann knew that among the soldiers that had been seen as weakness. But he alone was aware of how close she had been to changing her mind, and that still left him rattled. Lieutenant Risp’s death delighted him, since she had been the source of all this talk about executions and crimes; and it had been her troop that had brought back the carved-up head of one of Hunn Raal’s messengers. Silann still cursed the name of Gripp Galas, although it was a curse riding a wave of fear.
