The Tyranny of Shadows Page 10

  Choson tightened his lips, but bowed and bade her good night. He stood, putting on his gauntlets, then crossed to the door. He stopped with his hand on the handle. From about his belt, he took a coin purse and placed it on a shelf by the door beside a black cooking pot.

  “Thank you for the soup,” he said over his shoulder, and he pushed open the door and leaned into the wind that swept toward him.

  He left her cottage and made deep impressions in the snow across the village to his soldier’s adjacent encampment. The light coming from Yiseyo’s window behind him darkened a little—he imagined she was peering through it to watch him. His armor gleamed red in the torches illuminating the path to the gate.

  Choson approached the village gate, outside of which his soldiers stayed. The gate was a thin, flat patchwork of iron and timber, and it was connected on either side with a solid palisade that ringed the village. The wind came in uneven gusts so that every few moments, the gate would swing outward a few inches, then smack against the timbers of the palisade.

  A voice called out, and the huge gate, groaning, swung open to allow Choson through.

  “Thank you, Kang-Yu,” he said to the gatekeeper.

  He descended from the village to his camp amid the evening war-drills. Twenty plate-armored men and women sparred with blunted, practice greatswords in the firelight. With each blow, they shouted “Hagh!” in unison. They repeated the same motions a few times over as Choson headed toward his tent. Around a smaller fire, separate from the main group, Choson’s Lieutenant Jun was sparring vigorously with two soldiers. Choson stopped to watch. Jun took on both soldiers at once, all three of them wielding light and thin greatswords. With great energy Jun leapt away from their advance, then parried first one sword and then the other. They clashed again and again in the same manner. Though the two soldiers varied their assault, coming at Jun together or separately, suddenly or carefully, Jun always evaded and batted aside their blows. Then, in one great whirling swing, Jun struck both soldiers across their breastplates. His opponents paused, looked down at their breastplates, and then back up at Jun, blinking. Jun spotted Choson and sauntered up to him, sword still in hand.

  “Captain! Join us.”

  Choson held up a hand and shook his head. Jun was slightly shorter than Choson, with a ceaseless smile and well-shaped features. He stood now, as he often did, with the flat of his sword resting on his shoulder so that the tip pointed up and behind him. Choson suspected Jun’s habit of standing that way was born either of a desire to appear taller, or to appear eternally at ease. Likely both.

  Jun said, louder this time, “Come on, Captain! I want a challenge.”

  A small crowd of soldiers gathered behind Jun. Choson leaned to look past Jun at the growing group of spectators, then back at Jun’s jaunty expression.

  “Back to your tents,” Choson said to those gathered. Then, to Jun, “Come with me.”

  The soldiers dispersed and Choson led Jun to his tent, holding open the heavy canvas sheet at the entrance to let Jun in ahead of him. The inside was lit by candles, some of which blew out as the wind that came in with them whipped across the table. Choson followed Jun inside and watched him re-light the extinguished candles. Still with that swaggering posture and grin, Choson thought. He sees all as a game to be played and won. Just watch as he takes this rebuke with a serious face then goes back to the same behavior.

  Choson sat across the table from Jun, and their eyes met. Jun’s face fell to see Choson’s stern glare.

  “You have been frightening Yiseyo again,” Choson said.

  “It’s all true. I do not mean to—”

  “Whatever you meant to do, she is now raving about Mordenari! I wonder that she does not check under her bed for them at nights if she believes half of what you tell her!”

  “She’s no fool. She has stories of her own. It is she who convinced me, when I heard how many times she has heard a tale such as mine.”

  “I do not care if Verandert himself steps out of the storybooks to dance for the King, you are not to scare the poor old woman,” Choson said. “These villagers believe the stories of wolf-shaped Wittewolders that will swarm up the mountain and take children as it is. Yiseyo is too fragile of mind. She has enough worry without your Mordenari obsession.”

  “So if it were true I would be forbidden to tell her?” Jun said.

  “It is not, so it matters not.”

  “I know what I saw!”

  “Enough. No more. That is an order, Lieutenant,” Choson said.

  “I apologize. I wish that you saw as I did,” Jun said bitterly.

  “I wish the same for you. What meaning does the turtle crest hold?” Choson said, pointing to the front of Jun’s armor. “Why do you forget your family’s tenets? The turtle is humble, thoughtful, and protective.”

  “We were given the wrong families, Captain.” Jun nodded at the design on Choson’s clean and polished armor: the wolf crest. “The wolf is power, duty, and leadership.”

  “Would that we were brothers, then. As your elder brother rather than your Captain, perhaps you would then listen to me. You are on dawn watch, Jun,” Choson said.

  Jun began to protest, but Choson silenced him by holding a hand up.

  “You envy the tenets of the wolf because you do not understand. The power comes from the pack. Leadership is obligation, not freedom. Only in necessity does the Yon family aggress.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Tomorrow you will visit Yiseyo and dispel her fears.”

  Jun’s mouth drew thin and his eyes did not meet Choson’s, but he nodded tightly. Choson turned his attention to maps and letters on his table, shuffling them around. Jun did not leave, but shifted slightly where he stood, his lips still thin.

  “You have been dismissed, Jun.” Choson did not look up from the table. “Yet I sense you are bursting to say something despite my reprimand.”

  Jun said quietly, pleadingly, almost like a pouting child, “I know what I saw.”

  I wonder, Choson thought as he looked up, if I let him speak until he is done, will he leave the matter be? Or will he take my listening as encouragement, and go on spinning his tales?

  Jun stood before Choson, defiant and unmoving. Choson sighed. Jun would never relent, so Choson let him speak.

  “I know I saw a flash of blue, the instant before I was struck,” Jun said.

  “I was struck senseless myself one, and I do not remember the hours before,” Choson said. “The memory of the blow is imagined.”

  “Us being sent here for asking questions was not imagined.”

  “A coincidence,” Choson said. He maintained an even tone, but felt a growing urge to snap at Jun. “Yiseyo needs us here.”

  “You’re wrong. The King sent us here the moment I spoke of blue flashes. Yiseyo needs us now as little as she always did. Goru-Sen is the only change that accounts for this. Your trust in the King—”

  “I do not question my King!” Choson yelled as he surged to his feet.

  The two men held each other’s gaze for a few long moments, the only sound the whipping of the wind against the canvas of the tent.

  “Leave me,” Choson said. “Think on what I have told you during your dawn watch.”

  “Would that we were brothers,” Jun said bitterly before turning away. He muttered as he left, “No brother of mine would be so foolish.”

  Anyone else would hang for that, Choson thought as Jun pushed the canvas aside and let in the wind, which blew half of the candles out. Choson sat again, his hands limp on the table before him. He did not re-light any of the candles, and gradually more of them were spent as he sat in the deepening gloom.

  Any other soldier would not be allowed to say such things, he thought. There is no discipline left to me that will reach Jun. It was easier when we were Lieutenants together, when the work was simple and the orders were sound. I never spoke against his idle talk of the Mordenari in those days, Choson thought. That was all it was then. Idle talk wh
ile we drank and sang after duty.

  The strain will pass, he thought. As all strain does. Soon we will leave the village, and soon Jun will cool that head of his and earn Captain. One cannot be the superior of another when you are like brothers.

  ****

  Early the next morning, Choson passed the village and approached the trader’s tent. It was of heavy, smooth, purple-dyed cloth and had embroidered golden patterns at the edges. What manner of trader is this that has come to a simple village? Choson thought.

  The tent was outside Yiseyo’s village and on the opposite side from Choson and his soldier’s camp. Two heavily armed guards stood by the entrance of the trader’s tent, a man and a woman, both wearing sleek leather armor and a variety of gold-chain necklaces.

  Choson made to enter the tent, but the guards stepped in his path.

  “What do you want?”

  “Stand aside,” Choson said, and he began to move past them.

  The guards lay their hand on their weapons, and Choson stopped.

  “Shall I return with my soldiers?” Choson asked.

  The guards exchanged a glance touched by smirks, then stepped aside with defiant slowness. Choson felt a cold shock in his stomach, and then a hot, uneasy feeling prickled his neck as though a spider crawled across it. Be calm, Choson told himself. There is nothing to fear from these two. Despite that, the image of their smirk lingered in his mind along with the prickling feeling as he entered the tent.

  Inside, the trader sat with a straight and elegant posture as he scribbled neat figures on a slate. His hair shone with the oil that slicked it back, and his small black eyes looked down his thin nose, darting across the slate with the suddenness of an insect.

  “We have not met,” Choson said.

  “Why does that sound like a rebuke?” the trader said, his voice reedy and as oily as his hair.

  “It is.”

  “What a shame that good manners are dying out.” The trader handed Choson a slip of paper. “My permit, a summary of the wares, and their sources.”

  Choson read the paper quickly. “Weapons … ornaments … jewelry … the wares you carry are too fine for these folk. They have little grain and even less coin. What has brought you this far from the normal routes? Why not go on south to the Veldenlands?”

  The trader fixed his eyes, cold and small, on Choson’s for a moment.

  “Perhaps some in the village have come into coin of which you know not.”

  “If that is the case, they should hold onto it. They have much debt in taxes to the King.”

  “That,” the trader said, “is why you are here, is it not?”

  “What?”

  “Extortion. Sanctioned by the King, yes, but extortion by another name—”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am a simple trader.”

  “You had best move on to a wealthier village or you will have to answer to me.”

  The trader said in a suddenly sharp voice, “If you arrest me, you will be breaking your own law.”

  “I have your permits, but my instincts have never before failed me.”

  There was a moment of silence. The trader looked at Choson straight on, as a slow, cheerless smile spread across his face. It was an unsettling movement, as languid as a cat’s tail, contrasted by the cold stillness of his eyes. His smile, at its fullest extent, did not fade as he looked back down at the slate and continued marking figures.

  “It was nice meeting you,” the trader said.

  Choson left the tent and saw immediately that the guards were not there. A new, hot pang struck his chest, and he felt as though his insides turned to water. He hurried through the village, though his heavy plate boots slipped on the ice. None of the villagers were anywhere to be seen; every door was closed. As he drew close to the village gate he saw it had been left unguarded and wide open.

  “Close the gate!” Choson called, though he could see none nearby. “Someone must close the gate!”

  He did not know what the danger was, nor was he truly certain there was any. It could be nothing, he told himself. His gut churned to think of the trader’s cold glare, the guard’s smirk. Perhaps it is my imagination, he thought. But if something happened now, while the gate hung open and his soldiers were not ready …

  Please, let nothing happen.

  Some of his soldiers emerged from their tents as he came to the camp. He continued to call out, and ordered his soldiers to rise with all haste. Panicked muttering broke out as more soldiers emerged. Choson strode to Jun’s tent, steel boots sinking into the crisp snow. He peered inside. Jun was not there.

  Choson beckoned to a nearby soldier. “Where it the Lieutenant?”

  “I have not seen him, sir,” she said.

  “Find him, quickly. He was on dawn watch and should be back by now.”

  She bowed and left. Choson walked over to the center of the camp, for there he could see up to Yiseyo’s village in the gaps in the rocky path. The gate still yawned wide open. Choson stared at it with the feeling that something was strange about it, though at first he could not place it. The wind picked up and whipped a nearby banner and bent the rod it hung upon. The gate was still. It did not move with the wind.

  “Someone has jammed the gate open!” Choson called. “Where is Kang-Yu?”

  In the scramble for weapons and armor, many seemed not to hear him. Some nearby soldiers told him they knew nothing of the gatekeeper.

  Choson ran up to the village, sliding and stumbling, and came to Yiseyo’s door with his chest heaving for every breath. He rapped urgently on her door. Almost immediately, she opened it a crack, then let him in.

  “Have you seen Kang-Yu?” he said.

  “I have seen him,” Yiseyo said. Her voice quivered, and small tears shone in the corner of her eyes.

  “Where?”

  “Slipping away from the village … gold chains around his neck,” she said in between sharp breaths.

  “But why?”

  The distant blast of a war trumpet stopped them both dead. A few breathless moments passed, and then is sounded again. It was a brass horn with a rasping edge to its note, and Choson knew the sound well. A cold, sinking dread gripping his heart.

  “Slavers,” he said. “Lock the door behind me.”

  He tore from Yiseyo’s house and down the slope to the camp, where already the soldiers were armed and forming neat ranks on flat ground in front of the camp. Choson had worried before about managing so many soldiers in the previous weeks, but now they seemed so few.

  Fool, Choson thought, slavers always send scouts. You delayed too long in seeing the trader. You would have known what he and his guards were if you had not been so lax. Kang-Yu will hang for betraying his village.

  Choson reached the front of his soldiers, the pitiful few that amounted to three ranks deep in all. Then came the sounds of the approaching force, their marching and their calls that echoed widely, and the clashing of weapons on shields. There would be hundreds of them, and Choson had only sixty. Jun was not among them. How far down the slopes had Choson’s dawn watch sent him? Enough of that, Choson thought. He would have seen the danger and must be circling back. He will join us soon. We need his skill and valor.

  The slavers started to mount the ridge ahead, milling about and yelling and whooping. Many were wild and unkempt men with tangled black hair and makeshift weapons: crude spears and clubs, with slings and bags of sling-stones at their waists. Others wore plate or mail and waved swords that gleamed in the morning light. The closer they drew, the more Choson felt the snaking of clammy dread and fear twisting his gut. He needed Jun here. They were outnumbered. The slavers were now all upon the flat, and Choson gestured for his soldiers to back up a few paces and space themselves thinner. The two forces stood forty paces apart.

  “Where is your leader?” Choson called.

  The front lines parted, and a tall Gweidorian woman wearing gold jewelry strode to the front holding a crossbow. Even at a distance Choson could se
e the litheness of her gait, and the air of arrogance she bore.

  “This was once my village,” she called. “When I was a girl.”

  “Is that so?” Choson said.

  “But they came and took me. They filled my head with twisted ideas. Do you know who I mean by ‘they’?” she called.

  “I do not care to know. What do you want?”

  “Liberation.”

  She shouted an order to those behind her, and half of her force split away and climbed the slope to the village. Even now, Choson and his troops were outnumbered. They should have stood at the gate, Choson should have known to prepare better. He was not quick enough. Jun was not there with him.

  “Do not harm the villagers,” Choson shouted. “I order you, stop!”

  “Those who come willingly will not be harmed. They are family, after all,” she said with a sneer that was plain in her voice.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am who they made me.”

  She barked an order, and the slavers charged. As the shouting and whooping host drew closer, Choson and those around him held steady, with weapons and shields raised. Those slavers dressed in plate came in first and smashed into the shield wall of Choson’s troops like a wave breaking on a ship’s hull. There was a great clamoring of yelling and clashing of steel. In the tangle of bodies and weapons pressing forward on them, Choson and his troops were forced back, separated and pummeled by the sheer weight of the bodies. Choson brought his sword down on the join of the neck and shoulder of an unarmored man, and blood erupted from the wound and covered those nearby. He swung again, cutting into a forearm that held high a spear. While the other soldiers were pressed on all sides by writhing, struggling enemies, Choson carved a space about himself in the crowd. A filthy man came at Choson with a spear, keeping it between them so that his body was out of reach of Choson’s sword. Choson grabbed the end of the spear and pulled on it. As he pulled, he thrust his sword forward and impaled his attacker.

  On the battle went, and the snow beneath their feet became drenched with blood and turned to red slush. Choson suffered blows that dented his armor or knocked him back, but there was always a soldier nearby to pull him to safety. The exertion and pain of injury sent waves of exhaustion rolling over him, and though his arms tired he struck true with his sword on any that approached. Soon his muscles strained to swing his sword, the world went dark and his hearing left him for short, terrifying moments, and winking stars danced at the edges of his vision. The enemy tired too, and their attacks were timid. As the crowd thinned, the soldiers and the slavers kept each other at bay, none chancing further injury.