Braylar took a seat alongside Hewspear, and while there was an opening near Mulldoos, I thought it prudent to choose one between Vendurro and Lloi. As Hobbins promised, Syrie was there almost immediately. She dropped off four mugs of ale with the Hornmen and made her way to us. It was obvious she was her father’s daughter. She had the same height and angles, with just enough womanly cushion to pad the straight lines. Her arms were bare, shoulders rounded with small muscles from a lifetime of carrying trays. Luckily, her nose must have come from her mother.
She set her tray down on the table and tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. “You two look thirsty enough, am I right? What can I get you?” She smiled, and while she wasn’t the kind of girl to immediately excite the loins, I could see someone forgetting she was forgettable, especially if she kept smiling like that. I wondered if my mother had ever had a smile that did the same; if so, she never used it on me.
Braylar said, “We are thirsty indeed, lass. What would you suggest?”
“Going to a different inn. But seeing as you’re here, I’d say the ruddy ale. It’s no good, but better than anything else the Canker brews.”
I asked, “Who is the Canker?”
She tilted her head back toward her father. “Called on account of his cheery disposition. So, two ruddy ales then?”
Braylar nodded. I nearly asked if they had any casks of wine, but I doubted someone lovingly called Canker knew how to discern good grapes from bad. I inquired after cider, which elicited a laugh from Mulldoos, but Syrie’s smile never wavered. “It’s as thick as oil, and half as tasty, but it’s there if you’ll have it.”
I opted for the ale.
Braylar asked, “Is the fare as fine as the drink? If so, I don’t think we could miss an opportunity to sample some.”
“The Canker cooks as well as he brews, true enough. But tonight my brother’s in back, and he’s a fair hand. We’re serving some capon brewet or civet of hare. The ale compliments neither, so you can’t go wrong.”
“Then some of both, yes?”
“Both it is. Back soon enough.” She headed into the kitchen, skirts swishing.
Mulldoos bit off the corner of his thumbnail and spit it onto the floor, glaring at me the whole time. “Bad enough we got to deal with your dog at the table, but now your scribbler, too? Almost enough to put me off my drink.”
Hewspear laughed. “The largest army assembled would fail in the attempt. I doubt very much a crippled girl and a reedy scribe are up to the task.”
Lloi leaned over to me. “Don’t take no offense, bookmaster. The boar’s got no love for man nor beast, so you’re in fulsome company.”
I wasn’t sure if she intended Mulldoos to hear, but he clearly did. “Your savage folk should have cut the tongue in place of the fingers, done us all a favor.”
Lloi was about to respond when Braylar held his hand up. Syrie arrived with our mugs and set them on the table. “You’re free to spend your money as you please, but if you’ll be drinking for long, I’d recommend the pitchers. Cheaper on the whole. The Canker would just as soon I served empty mugs and charged twice as much, but that won’t stop me from speaking my piece.”
Braylar replied, “Honesty, integrity, and beauty, all in one girl.”
The prettying smile again. “You repay my truth with lies, but I can’t fault you for the exchange.” She winked and moved off to another table.
After taking another swig, Braylar wrinkled his nose. “It might actually be worth paying twice as much for an empty mug.”
I took a drink, and the ale was like bitter silt. Ruddy indeed. But that didn’t stop Vendurro—he tipped his mug up as if it contained the finest elixir on earth, then elbowed me in the ribs. “Guessing you never had cause to ride with the likes of us before, huh?”
I nodded and he said, “The bloodletting, well, that will tweak your dreams some, until you stop noticing. And the cursing and farting, no shortage of that, and that’s no kind of pleasant to deal with. But the hardest thing to get used to is ale that tastes like it came straight from a donkey’s cock. But that’s soldier swill, son. So best get accustomed.” He wiped some foam off his lip and said, “Guessing, too, you haven’t seen Cap put that nasty flail of his to good use yet then either?”
Hewspear flashed him a look brimming with warning and wrath, but Mulldoos went one better. “Best shut your hole right quick. Son.”
Vendurro held his hands up, supplicant. “Easy, easy. I wasn’t going to go on about the… unnatural bit. Just talking about the captain and his flail spinning bloody circles around someone, is all. That’s all I was getting at. No need to go hostile.” He looked at Glesswik. “Remember Vortnall, Gless? Remember that?” He rapped on the table. “That was some kind of something, eh?”
“Graymoor.”
“What?”
“Wasn’t Vortnall at all, but Graymoor.”
Vendurro was drunkenly dubious. “You sure?”
“Graymoor.”
“Huh. Could have sworn it was Vortnall.” He elbowed me again. “We were at a tavern—good one, too, with some of the plumpest barmaids you ever seen—and the captain there, well, he took to his drink like a man dying of thirst. Drank his share and mine and yours and more besides. Our rooms were all at an inn, other quarter of the city.” Vendurro stopped, looked at Glesswik. “You sure it was Graymoor? Vortnall had those really narrow streets, and I seem to recall—”
Glesswik hit him on the arm and almost sent him off the bench. “Tell the bloody story.”
“Whoreson.” Vendurro steadied himself and laughed. “So, we all left to go back to the inn, all save the captain. Mulldoos and Hewspear, the rest too, they were already there, bunking down. Mulldoos here, he sees me come into the inn, charges up to me, saying, ‘Where’s the captain?’ I say, ‘Drinking, I’m thinking.’ Mulldoos, getting real angry like he does, says, ‘You left the captain alone? Drinking? Go fetch him.’ I protest that the good captain wasn’t one to be fetched by the likes of me, nor no man, when it came to it. But Mulldoos spins me around by the shoulders and kicks my backside, saying, ‘Go fetch him or spend the next tenday digging latrines.’ Now, seeing as how we were in a city, I almost asked if he got permission from the mayor for those new latrines, but I kept that to myself.”
Glesswik burped and added, “Good thing, too. You’d still be digging them.”
“True enough. So off I went. But I wasn’t about to go fetch the captain by my lonesome, so I pull Glesswik with me. It was late then, after curfew, and the streets were mostly deserted. Watch should have been out patrolling, but if they were, we saw no sign. We round a corner, getting near the tavern, and not too far ahead of us, we see four street toughs barring the captain’s way. Now, not sure how it is where you’re from, but in Graymoor and most cities like them in these parts, the street toughs like to arm themselves with lash balls. Long piece of leather, one end looped around the wrist, the other tied to a weight of some sort. Sometimes iron in the shape of an egg, sometimes a small bag full of lead pellets, sometimes a little stone wheel, like a tiny millstone. Quick, quiet, easy to hide, and more than capable of cracking a bone or three. Handy in a street fight, not handy for much else.
“Now, these toughs, they drop their lash balls, practically in unison, like they been practicing the move for effect half their years, thinking they got themselves an easy mark, lone man staggering. The captain, though, he starts to laughing, looking at the weights and the leather lashes, laughing like they popped daisies out of their sleeves. Hand on his knee to steady himself, he’s laughing so hard. Then he straightens and says something we can’t hear. Gless and me, we start sprinting, but before we even make it halfway there to help, the captain rips that wicked flail off his belt. Flips the handle up with one hand, snatches it out of the air with the other. Most nights, he does that smoother than silk, but that night, he caught it on the belt hook some.
“But the closest tough, he hadn’t been expecting much in the way of resistance, he’s slow to react. He whips his own weight around on the end of his lash, but the captain’s already slipping left, takes the weight a glancing blow on the temple. Then he whips his flail around, taking off the top half of the tough’s head. Another tough moves in, lash ball coming down, but the captain steps into the blow, catches the leather with his free forearm, ball spinning around, and the captain’s flail is on the move again, coming down hard. Snaps the tough’s collar bone like an old broomstick. Drops him like a stone. But the lash was still wound around the tough’s wrist, pulled the captain off balance some before he wrenched if off the tough’s arm. The other two, if there was any time to bludgeon the captain bloody, that was it. But they seen enough. Both tear off into the dark, lash balls trailing behind them like tails, not looking so tough after all.
“Now Gless and me reach the captain. The boy he broke is sitting in the dirt, cradling his busted shoulder, spit bubbling on his lips, saying please over and over like it might do some good, eyes full of the wide fear of one about to be murdered. The captain is staring down at him, flail in one hand, a look in his eyes I couldn’t quite read. Gless asks if he wants us to kill this one, or give chase to the others, clearly expecting to hear yes to one or the other, maybe both. The captain ponders for a moment, then says, ‘No. Let them run. Let them run.’” Vendurro did a fair imitation of Braylar. “‘And as for this one…’ he leans over, the wicked heads of his flail dangling just in front of the not-so-tough, who closes his eyes and sets to mumbling some prayer or other. Then the captain tosses the lash ball into his face; he cries out as if struck a mortal blow.
“When he finally opens his eyes, the captain is already striding toward the inn, Gless moving fast to keep pace. I look down at the dumb prick, can’t resist saying, ‘You got more luck than any low bastard deserves. It was me you tried thieving, you’d be as dead as dirt.’
“I catch up, Gless and me flanking Cap, looking into the shadows for anything else that might want to tussle, but it’s quiet. Halfway to the inn, Gless asks the captain what he said to the toughs, just before pulling his flail, and I admit curiosity got me to wondering too. Cap was wiping the blood off the cut on his temple, stops and looks at Gless like he’s daft, then says, remembering—well, why don’t I let the captain here tell it?”
Glesswik rolled his eyes. “Awfully big of you.”
“Remember what you said, Cap?”
Braylar swallowed before replying, “I told them I’d never seen such tiny flails before.”
“That’s right. Just like that!”
The whole table laughed, and after the merriment died down, Glesswik looked at the captain. “I never did understand why you let that one live. The one on the ground, that is. Seemed… out of character, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“Uncharitable, Sergeant Glesswik. Most uncharitable.”
“Oh, I mean no offense, Captain. None at all. Fact being, it’s actually a compliment of sorts. You’re the hardest plaguer I ever met. Not so much nasty as just… hard, like I said. Half the reason we follow you, I’m thinking. Anyone in this company would die twice for you, if they could, because they know that if anyone crosses us, that’ll be the last thing they do, maybe their whole family, too.”
Hewspear ran a finger around the rim of his mug. “I believe what the good sergeant is getting at is that it isn’t your affable demeanor or endless ribaldry that endear you to the men, but your absence of mercy for those who oppose you.”
Mulldoos laugh-snorted. “Ribaldry, he says.”
“My apologies, Mulldoos. I’d forgotten your intolerance for weighty words.”
“Only intolerance I have is for windmills like yourself.”
“A windmill doesn’t spin simply to hear itself spin. It performs a service.”
Mulldoos said, “Then I stand corrected. You and the windmill got nothing in common.”
While Lloi remained generally quiet, the Syldoon continued telling tales, often punctuated by a curse or a shove or some expectorating. I looked over at the Hornmen a few tables a way, and their behavior wasn’t much different, and might actually have been worse. These exchanges must be what passes for friendship among the soldiering kind, at least when primed with ale.
One Hornman in particular seemed to have upended more cups than the others. His speech was slurred around the edges, and his cheeks and nose looked almost painted red. Earlier, I noticed that he nearly came to blows with one of his own. Now, returning from relieving himself, he brushed shoulders with a man heading in the opposite direction. This seemed inconsequential enough, but the Hornmen grabbed the other patron by the shoulders and slammed him into the wall.
Another Hornman jumped up and pulled his comrade off, though it took some prolonged and intense encouragement to persuade him to return to the table.
The scene nearly convinced me to wait, but my bladder couldn’t have been more full, so I planned as circuitous a route as possible around the Hornmen table and made my way outside. After returning a short time later much relieved (again skirting the Hornmen table with due care), I discovered the Syldoon in the middle of another… lively discussion.
Drawing on a disquieting wealth of experience with death and dying, they were arguing the worst way to go. Vendurro volunteered drowning, especially under ice. Mulldoos countered that burning trumped it, and described a corpse he’d seen with blackened skin broken open in fissures, revealing the pink flesh beneath, like a hog that had been roasting too long. Lovely. Glesswik described a man he’d seen pressed to death in a public square, the administrators turning the screws of the device extra slow, screams carrying on for half a day before the end.
After a pause, as everyone at the table was imaging that awful ending, Vendurro said, “Oh, that’s rough. To be certain. But seems like we ought to be excluding torture and the like. Not really in the spirit.”
“In the spirit? Gods be drunk! What are you going on about? Why should we exclude them?”
Vendurro looked up from his mug. “Those are designed to cause damage. Usually slow. Got no other end.”
“And weapons do?” Glesswik asked. “No, the captain mentioned dying slow from a spear in the gut, you didn’t say nothing about that. You whoreseon—you’re just bitter yours wasn’t worse, is all. You’re a bitter little bastard, you are.”