One didn’t want to get in an insanity fight with Winsen.
But Ben-hadad merely stared at him, unblinking. The moment stretched.
Winsen’s arm started trembling from holding the incredible tension. Then his whole back and shoulders shook from the pressure of holding the arrow drawn. Winsen wasn’t tall, but his bow, of which he was a master, required incredible draw strength.
Then Winsen lowered the bow to let out the tension with a grunt. “Point made,” he said. “I suppose there are times a crossbow could be handy.” Then he grinned at Ben-hadad.
“You can call her Grace,” Ben-hadad said.
“Grace?” Kip had asked. “Why not the Mighty Thruster?”
“You all are never going to let that go, are you?” Ben-hadad said.
“Never,” they said in a chorus.
But this day, Ben-hadad offered Grace to the heroic Blood Robe surrounded by the dead and wounded and impossible odds—offered it by pointing it at his face and speaking first. “Put down the spear, and live a slave,” Ben-hadad said. “Or hold it and die. You have a count of five. Four. Three. Two.”
The man screamed and charged. “Light cannot be—”
Ben-hadad’s heavy bolt punched through his armor and he pitched facedown.
One of the Nightbringers behind him in the circle went white as a sheet and grabbed his groin.
Ben-hadad cursed. “You thought it would be a good idea to stand directly behind a man attacking me? Nine hells, man!”
But the man didn’t crumple as a wounded man would. Instead he pulled at his tunic and trousers, and found a hole. He let out a little uncertain laugh. “Shaved my balls!”
His friends laughed. Ben-hadad just shook his head. “Be happy I didn’t use the fire bolt.”
He left them to their japes. War is absurd. Those men had lost friends in the last five minutes, and yet had forgotten it for a moment: woodsmen and farm boys once again, joking now about whether their friend’s balls had dropped.
And everywhere it was similar. People were playing out what were possibly the last moments of their lives as if they didn’t even matter. A woman darted past one of the mundane warrior Nightbringers under Antonius Malargos’s command. The warrior was smeared with blood, and he’d just sprinted across the fields to get to this chaos, death all around. His bloodlust was running high. She surprised him as she burst out of that tent. Did he slash?
Her life would be changed or ended in a decision that wasn’t made in his head but in his arm—or perhaps it was a decision that had been made in his heart in the months and weeks before this day. And he would be changed forever by this fraction of a second.
He would know himself to be the kind of man who murdered unarmed women, or the kind of man who hesitated where others did not.
He hesitated—and two souls were saved.
But everywhere it was the same. As if something in the human heart longs for chaos and finality, however violent.
The dregs of the Blood Robe army and its camp followers had been pushed into the river, and were still being pushed as Kip and his men approached.
The once-pristine water ran brown and red, churned mud and men returning to mud. The bank was so clogged with bodies you couldn’t see the ground for a hundred paces. Many men can’t swim, and almost none can when you strap half again their weight in armor to their bodies. Most of them had realized it when they reached the riverbank. But others panicking behind them had pushed, pushed relentlessly.
They’d shoved and stabbed and slashed and trampled each other.
And the Nightbringers had fallen on them pitilessly—desperate for vengeance on all these men who’d tried to kill them, who’d taken their homes and livestock and neighbors, who’d killed and pillaged and despoiled their hard and happy lives. Kip’s army fell on all these men, most of whom had thrown away their own weapons in order to run away faster, only to find no escape. All these men—but not men only.
The camp followers were huddled here, too: the crippled and sick and old and the traders and the merchants and the wives and lovers and their children and all who hope to live on the leavings an army produces.
It is impossible to spare the innocent and the partly innocent hidden at the back of the mob when you’re pushing the whole damned lot into the river, stabbing and trampling any who resist. Hard to spare them, even if you’re trying. Kip wasn’t sure most of his men were trying.
Some of the camp followers, not weighed down by armor or greedily hanging on to goods, would escape by swimming. But many had drowned already. It was only Kip’s arrival and a massive roar from Tallach that brought a relative quiet.
Finally Kip’s officers could make themselves be heard and obeyed. With a few moments to breathe and think, the survivors surrendered and Kip’s men left off their killing.
The survivors were seized and enslaved.
The Blood Robes and their followers looked no different from much of Kip’s army, and Kip’s men had a cast to their faces that said they’d be damned if any of these captives slunk away in the night and turned up at their fires later, claiming to have been on their side all along. So they notched their ears immediately, here, over the bodies of their comrades.
Smiths would later cauterize the flesh. Notches first.
The Nightbringers would leave the slaves here, give or sell them to the people of Dúnbheo. Otherwise, the captured would slow down Kip’s army, and serve it poorly. They would gladly become spies against their new masters.
But the Nightbringers wouldn’t be able to get rid of all of them. There were exceptions; there always were. One of Kip’s men would come forward. He had four children. His wife had been killed by the pagans. His extended family killed. He needed a new wife if he was to keep fighting, would take a slave if she hadn’t been roughed up too much.
There was no saying no to that, not without Kip’s alienating his own people. You could ask a man to die, but when he bared his heart to you, you couldn’t deny him what he and his fellows saw as justice.
As the dawn yields to day, one exception gave rise to others. One attempt at justice gave a hundred excuses for injustice. Other men need wives, too, sure, milord!
Forbidding the rape of captured women had taken a number of hangings to enforce—those hangings had raised eyebrows, too, letting Kip know he was treading a dangerous line. It had come down to explaining that they weren’t being hanged for raping slaves, but for disobeying a direct order. That made sense to the men in the nonsense that was war.