The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Chapter 273: Chapter266: What They Spend on Errands

The Anley ford

The rider came into the trees at a walk. He’d run the horse down; there was no cart left to catch. He could take the last of it slow.

Cray heard him stop. The hoofbeats slowed, then came the small wet sound of a mount stepping into the shallows at the head of the ford, and then a voice — easy, carrying, pleased with itself.

"Halder Cray." He read the name out and seemed ready to cross it off. "You settled your slate at the Drowned Cat. Paid what you owed. Well done — I’d have hated to leave your debts unpaid behind you, and now I don’t have to." A soft laugh. "You ran the wrong way, though. North was always north. There’s only the one road."

Cray, pressed into the dark behind a wall of armored steel with a gauntlet half over his mouth, made a muffled sound.

Arven set him down against a tree, out of the road, and stepped forward into it.

The horse tossed its head and sidled; it had felt the armor before its rider saw it. The cleaner peered into the dark at the shape that had come out of it — huge, plated, faceless — and his voice, when it came again, had shifted only a little. The job had one more step in it, that was all.

"Ah. Someone got to him first." He didn’t sound afraid just inconvenienced. "A rival hand, then. Or a brave fool. Whichever you are, this drover’s spoken for, by people you very much do not want having spoken. Walk him back to the cart, get on your knees, and there’s a chance — not a good one — I let you keep the knees."

"That’s generous," Arven said, through the helm. "I’ll match it. Get off the horse, tell me who sent you and where the wagons went, and I’ll make the end quick. That’s more mercy than your trade has earned in its life."

A pause. In the dark the cleaner was measuring the size of the nuisance.

"You’ve a mouth on you," he said, "for a man who doesn’t know what he’s talking to." He swung down off the horse, and he did it easily, and the ease of it warned Arven.

Because the moment his boots hit the ford, the pressure came off him — the weight of a man who’d kept most of himself folded away because a drover on a cart didn’t merit unfolding. It rolled out into the trees, cold and heavy and exact, and every Commando on that ground felt it land.

Grand Knight. One full rank above Arven, and the cleaner knew it the instant he let it show, and he smiled at the certainty.

"There. Now you feel it." He drew, and the blade came out and the darkness bent around the edge of it. "They sent me for a drover. A drover. Instead I get to learn what fool put on armor and stood in my road. Small mercies."

He came fast, and better than Arven. There was no pretending otherwise from inside it.

The first cut came at an angle the shield answered on instinct and barely worked; the force drove Arven back a full step through the shallows, water breaking white off his boots. The second came before the first had ended, aimed for the seam between shoulder plate and gorget, and it would have found the seam on a lesser man. Arven turned it on the shield’s edge by less than a hand’s width.

Grand against Master. On open ground, in a fair duel, with nothing else in the world, the cleaner won that fight nine times in ten. Both of them knew it in the first two seconds.

But it was not open ground and definitely not a fair duel. And there was a great deal else in the world.

"He’s mine the second he’s off you," Varro said over the channel, flat, the big gun tracking and unable to fire through the tangle of them. "Give me daylight."

"Line’s clean if he turns left," Daren said from the rise, over one held breath. "Turn him left."

Arven turned him left.

He couldn’t beat the man on skill and didn’t try. He used the suit instead — drove its full weight into a shield-check the cleaner had to answer or be knocked off his feet. The cleaner answered it, stepped, pivoted to keep his edge on Arven — and put his back, for a quarter of a heartbeat, to the rise.

Daren’s rifle spoke once, a flat crack the trees swallowed. The round took the cleaner high in the shoulder of his sword arm and spun him. The blade lost its line. And in that spoiled instant, Arven stopped defending.

He hit him with the shield — all of it, the full weight of a power-armored Master Knight behind a slab of layered plate, square into the chest. It lifted the cleaner off the ground and put him down on his back in the shallow water. A Grand Knight’s strength lives in his skill, his edge, and the room to use them. A shield in the sternum at that weight took the room, the edge, and most of the air with it.

He tried to rise anyway. Varro finally had his daylight.

Arven lifted a fist.

"No," he said, over the channel, and the gun held. "He talks first."

He set a boot on the cleaner’s sword wrist — and shot it — and leaned the suit’s weight through it, and the man went still. From the plain arithmetic of a power-armored knight standing on his ruined arm with four more guns in the trees.

"Who sent you. Where did the wagons go." Arven crouched, helm close. "You’ve got the length of my patience, which is short, and a squad behind me that would very likely make a sieve of you."

The cleaner looked up at the blank helm, then past it — the shield, the long rifle on the rise, the huge man-shaped tank standing over a gun that hadn’t needed to fire, two more shapes on the flanks. The contempt drained out of him and something worse came in. He was counting.

"You’re not a rival hand," he said, slow. "A rival hand sends one killer. You’re—" He stopped. His eyes moved over the armor, the seams, the low hum of five suits in the dark, the sheer make of it. "Five. In matched harness I’ve never seen. And that—" a fraction of a turn toward Arven, "—that’s Master, under the steel. A Master Knight. In armor. Sent for a drover."

"Answer the question."

"You don’t understand what you’ve just told me." It hurt him to laugh, and he laughed anyway. "They spend a Grand Knight to close one loose thread and call it extravagant. And you spend a Master Knight, four more, and machines like this, to fetch a cart driver off a road in the dark." His eyes came back to the helm. "What are you, that this is an errand?"

"You keep answering questions I didn’t ask." Arven leaned another fraction onto the wrist, and the breath hissed out of the man. "Who sent you."

He thought the cleaner would spit it out of spite — that was the usual way these broke. Instead the free hand moved. Not for a weapon; there was no weapon left. To his own collar, to a thing sewn into it. Arven had half a heartbeat to know the gesture for what it was.

"The Church closes its accounts," the cleaner said, "at both ends," and did it.

The cold came— a sudden hungry cold that pulled the warmth out of the ford, the air, the man himself, dragging it down into whatever had been stitched there against this exact moment. Frost bloomed across the shallows in a ring. The cleaner’s eyes went far away and then went nothing, and by the time Arven hauled the collar open there was a scorch-cold char where the working had been, a dead man.

Quiet, after that. Only the water, and the drover’s ragged breathing against the tree.

"Same word the reports use," Varro said, lowering the gun.

"He killed himself before I got a name. Rather than be held long enough to give one." Arven straightened and looked at the char, at the ring of frost already melting off the ford. "That’s not a hired sword. A hired sword runs,talks, or dies swinging. That’s a man who’d freeze himself hollow before he let one word reach us about who he serves." He looked toward the trees. "I’ve heard of one faith that trains that into people."

"Then we’ve got no name," Daren said, coming down off the rise.

He crossed the ford and crouched in front of the drover. Rellan’s rule was that fear doesn’t open a frightened man, so Arven reached up and unsealed the helm and let it fold back — and the thing that had come out of the dark was a face, tired and young and human.

"Halder. The man hunting you is dead. I’m sorry about your friend, and I need you to hear that you’re not next on anyone’s list, because there’s no one left to hold it." He kept his voice low and level. "But I need the road north. Where you unloaded. And I need you to tell me about the place. Do that, and there’s a place a long way from here where no one will ever put you behind a cargo you shouldn’t carry again."

Cray looked at the face, and at the melting frost where a Grand Knight had unmade himself rather than speak one word, and something in him gave away.

"North," he said, hoarse. "Past the Corran holding. Two more days up, to a drying-house on the high moor. I can drive it in my sleep." His voice cracked. "And the coldnesswas already there when we came, mister. We didn’t bring it. It was already in the place."