Elias Torble —even for a slaver— was a pig. He liked throwing his weight around and he liked hurting things. This was why he so enjoyed working for the king of Turalee. One who worked for the king of Turalee got lots of opportunities to throw his weight around and hurt things.
This evening, Elias was riding snug and warm in his great wagon and hurting a dall bitch. They were the best because they started out so proud. Only the ones free-born, mind, never the slave-born. This particular one had been some punkins to her tribe until the raid a few weeks agone, but she was breaking nicely.
Elias figured that by the time they reached the capital she’d be ready for the kings stable, and wouldn’t it be a feather in Elias’ cap to present a suitably trained dall priestess in full regalia.... With careful fingers, the slaver parted the bloody, fawn colored fur of a full breast, wanting to place the barbed needle just so. The trick was to cause the maximum pain without leaving a mark. The king hated marks, but loved docile females. Ever so carefully, Elias parted the fur and thumbed the nipple aside. There, right at the base—
The wagon lurched to a halt, sending Elias tumbling and the needle skittering. “Well troll shit!” he exclaimed over the howling of the ruined bitch. “That’s going to leave a mark for sure!” A scarred breast would drop her price nearly fifty gold imperials! Somebody was going to be flayed out of this!
The wagon door banged like a thunderclap as Elias lurched out and onto the ground. Gods, it had gotten cold all of a sudden! He was still turning to berate the poor driver when the red glow caught his attention. Blazing bright as a star a little ways up the road was a single red spark. too small for a lantern, too bright for a firebug. What could it be?
Driver and bitch momentarily forgotten, the slaver ventured forward to take a look, noticing with a shiver that the air was growing colder by the second.
The light resolved itself into the right eye of a strange, bare chested figure atop a nervous palomino horse. A strange figure holding a cavalry lance, the broad head of it reflecting the ruddy glow.
“Guards!” Elias’ voice was higher to his own ears than he liked, but there was something about that figure. Like a demon. An angry demon. Only now did Elias realize where the cold was coming from. “Guards!”
Storm heeled the horse forward, eyes never leaving the greasy fat man on the road. He could hear commotion out in the darkness and back along the train, but ignored it for now. “Did I hear right?” he inquired softly in horribly accented Turaleean. “You’re a slaver?”
Elias hesitated, fear plucking at him with bony fingers. And while he hesitated, he felt his guard —twenty hardened mercenaries with not an ounce of human feeling among the lot of them— closing in behind him. The red-eyed demon facing him didn’t seem to notice, sitting his horse easily.
“That’s right,” Elias’ voice boomed into the night, brazen with returning courage. “I’m the king’s master slaver on the king’s business.” He paused to allow the title to seep in. “Now unless you want to occupy a cage with the rest of the vermin, you’ll stand aside and allow me to get on about my business!”
Out in the darkness the corporal turned his head a bit without averting his eyes. “Here it comes,” he whispered for the benefit of those who hadn’t seen The Tairn in action. But what came next even he hadn’t seen before.
Storm regarded the fat slaver without expression or movement, but deep within him something had happened. Something had changed. For the first time since the Adair quarries, he was angry — truly angry. Not the normal battle rage of the soldier, nor the honor/fear/pride frenzy of the warrior, but an implacable rage that consumed his entire will.
For most men such anger would spell doom, for anger is destructive, and soldiers are trained to avoid it. It causes mistakes — rash judgements. But not in all. In some rare few the battle rage is so perfect, so honed, so all encompassing that they become machines. The anger turns off the humanity, strips away the passion, leaving behind only the killer, the training, and the computer that is the brain. Braedonnal Storm was such a man.
It was this facet of him that had kept him whole and sane through the marshaling and the relocations. Long enough to see his parents beaten and dead. Long enough to find an old Indian squatting beside a mesquite fire in the desert. It had saved him from the bilge crews when the psychs had found what they’d termed his ‘destructive imagination’. It had carried him unscathed through the disastrous and pyrrhic debacle of the Adair quarries.
Sitting ramrod straight in the saddle, he gave neither the anger nor the reason behind it any more thought than his breathing. That part of him that would consider such things was gone — not even a memory, for he was angry on a level even he couldn’t understand, and within himself everything had gone cold and flat.
Atop the ridge, well behind him, two faces mirrored the cold as they felt the last part of themselves that was him wink out.
“Do you hear?” Elias shouted, spittle spraying. “Clear the road!”
Some things Storm had not told his new friends, even the world tree, for they were secrets locked so deep within him that he, himself didn’t dream of them, and even the oldest hadn’t thought to look where they were kept. He didn’t really feel them or think about them, but they were a part of him no less than his sense of duty.
In the last bad days of the alliance, when humanity had struggled to supply the elite of the warriors against the K’trin’al invaders, certain... measures had become necessary so as to provide adequate numbers of troops and supplies. Whole populations were rounded up, “for the good of the state,” and placed in labor camps or training facilities.
Those who did the rounding up weren’t called slavers, of course. Relocation officers, EarthGov had termed them. People weren’t enslaved, they were emplaced. The difference was less obvious to the emplaced. They went where the men with guns told them to go and did what the overseers with guns told them to do.
Failure to obey meant either instant death or loss of citizenship. And since only citizens were allowed the consumption of precious resources, that loss was tantamount to a sentence of death by starvation. In some cases, so-called slackers were beaten to death by frightened mobs unwilling to risk sharing the punishment that was sure to follow. Sometimes those mobs missed a child.
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It was as an emplaced person that he’d gone to the city where he’d lost his parents. It was as an emplaced person that he’d come to the mountains where he’d met the grandfather. It was as an emplaced person he’d met his boyhood companion — his brother. It was as an emplaced person he’d become a soldier.
He’d been a slave. Humanity on a scale unheard of in history had been enslaved. And as slaves, they had been sent forth to places in the sky where the earth couldn’t be seen with orbital telescopes, to kill and be killed in numbers that dwarfed belief.
He wasn’t thinking about any of this, however, as he sat the nervous horse and stared calmly down. He wasn’t thinking that he hated slavery with a purity sharp enough to cut diamonds. He was just angry.
“Slavers,” he finally repeated, so softly that only the horse could hear. A rime of frost grew along the lance with the words, racing up the shaft from his white-knuckled hand. “Wouldn’t you just fucking know.”
“This is your last warn—” The lance exploded through Elias’ chest and out his back without slowing noticeably, shattering his spine and plunging through the chest of his guard captain, hurling both men backward — pinning them together like lovers and staking them to the cobbles of the road. The pistol cracked, filling the night with smoke and light, and then he was among them with the combat knife.
He fought in utter, businesslike silence, with all the skills gleaned from a hundred different races, seven years of intense training, and fifteen years of genocidal warfare.
Leaping from the horse as it bore down upon the knot of guards, combat knife held tight against his forearm, leading edge out, he began the dance that the Lyrrans who’d first seen it had named entropy flower. Every movement had a purpose and every movement began the next And with every movement, something broke or someone died.
Knives and swords flashed and sought him as he moved, but the training of a hundred battles within burrows, caves, and the tunnel-like confines of starships had shown him how to know where his body was and where it could be touched and how to avoid that.
Following the needle of his concentration, sharpened to utter clarity, his body was a sword, his momentum a cudgel. His body killed a man with his left hand as the knife in his right followed a forearm block to open a throat. But he wasn’t really with it.
Body and consciousness had separated, flowed apart. He was killing the fourth man in advance of where the stroke fell, ordering the movements that would bring the death and then moving on to the next, leaving the mechanics to the automaton that his flesh had become.
The throat-cut guard convulsed, reeling backward, and Storm rode the convulsion far enough that the sword striking for his back gutted his attacker’s already dead comrade. A reverse snap kick shattered the knee, and as that one went down, the combat knife was waiting.
On the ground, rolling beneath a horse, Storm slapped at the fetlock with an open hand, sending the beast buckjumping into its fellows, stiff-arming its rider in the throat as he fell. The crunch of cartilage would have been sickening had anyone human been listening. Still rolling, the death-rattle only so much noise, he swept the legs of another confused guard, combat knife waiting for the fall. He hamstrung another as he stood, searching for more riders amid the panicked melee.
Too slow, the body was catching up... there! A surge and a leap and he broke a rider’s neck as they fell together, flipping the limp corpse into the path of another rider as that one intersected the blade of the passing knife.
The savagery of the attack was too much for the remaining men, whose salaries had been cut off by Elias’ death in any case. They took to horse and fled for their lives.
“Horse!” Storm spoke for the first time since his attack, voice brittle. Sandahl was there and the man leapt to his back, kicking him into pursuit of the fleeing guards without a backward glance.
Out in the darkness all was silence. Even the wolves were stunned.
Three times the corporal tried before he managed, “oh gods. Oh gods.”
* * *
The sylvans were the first to venture forward, picking their way hesitantly down the shallow hill. The slave train was devoid of movement, only the quiet wailing of the slaves in the darkness giving hint that anything still lived.
The master slaver lay where he’d fallen, pinned to his dead guard captain, a shocked expression burned forever into his doughy face. Between them, strong as they were, the little birds couldn’t pull the lance free of the cobbles. Eleven more guards lay dead of their wounds, the remainder having fled in panic.
“A farmer’s knife,” they heard the corporal mutter behind them, shaken to the core. “Fit only to cut beets. That’s what that fool Beltran said. A farmer’s knife. And aye, but ain’t this a grand crop o’ beets, for look at th’ red of ‘em will ye now?”
“Der yer suppose,” one of the troopers wondered aloud, prodding a dead guard with a boot toe, “that this yere Tairn feller got sommat pers’nal agin’ slavers?”
* * *
Again it was the sylvans who first moved to see to the slaves. They found the dall priestess in the lead wagon, blood welling from the needle buried in her breast. She snarled at them, no doubt thinking one enemy replaced by another. Swallow pulled the needle free and spoke some healing words over the wound as Thrush Dancing cut her free.
“The slavers are dead,” Thrush Dancing told the confused dalleh in western forest dall. “You are free.”
The priestess didn’t move, unwilling to believe in such an improbable rescue. As like, her mind told her, no more than another method of torture, for hope could be as sharp a weapon as any needle. She watched the two sylvans through slitted eyes, awaiting her chance to break free of them all.
Not having any reason to trust the dalleh, and not caring for the look they were getting, the sylvans backed out of the wagon, moving to the next.
The other wagons contained only supplies and a few breeders. The rest walked, chained together like draft oxen and dragging supply carts. And like draft oxen, most took quite some time to realize their freedom once it was given.
Having released the slaves, The Tairn’s party set about gathering plunder, horses chief amongst the spoils. The dead guards were relieved of their burdens of wealth and equipment, and the wagons gathered together at road’s center with some thought to kindling a bonfire before moving out. All but the master slaver’s wagon. The dalleh still hadn’t come out, and none but would venture near with her in there.
Most of a span had passed before the dalleh did appear in the wagon’s doorway, and even then it was with caution, disbelief, and a sturdy sword held awkwardly in her hands.
The Tairn’s party, having finished their plundering, had gathered together beside the road to await the return of their leader. This was the improbable sight the priestess beheld from within the doorway. Almost, she turned to reenter the wagon, half convinced she was living some sort of nightmare. But that couldn’t be. In her wildest delirium, she could never conceive of a group such as the one she now beheld.
Clothed once again in her own garb, headdress firmly in place, she moved away from the wagon, giving the rescue party a wide berth. Nose wrinkling, she sought out a particular scent. She found it and followed it to the dead master slaver and the lance that had killed him. She looked from the bodies to the impossible knot of rescuers and then back again, utterly confused.
A noise from behind and she spun about. It was only one of her tribe, also newly freed and armed. Once more she looked to the knot of rescuers. There were well more than five hands of man children clad in the armor of Turalee among them, and yet none sought to disarm the dall warrior. This was all too strange. The warrior began to tell her of the battle, for he’d been witness to it from back among the supply carts.
The strangeness multiplied tenfold. A tesheelah had freed them, the warrior insisted. A death spirit who’d killed over half the slavers in the blink of an eye before pursuing the remainder out into the darkness.
Well a tesheelah would explain man children, sylvans, and weres all running together in a pack where nothing else could hope to, but it would hardly explain why the slaves had been freed. Killed and consumed was more to be expected of such a one.
“It’s nearly morning,” one of the man children approached to address her in halting dall. Ah, he was a mage. “You’d best be out in the grass by then if you don’t want to be recaptured.”
“Why?” She swept a hand around her.
The man mage shrugged. “You’d have to ask The Tairn.”
“Tairn,” she tasted the strange word. “And what is a Tairn?”
“What indeed? I’d like to know myself.” And he turned away to rejoin his comrades.