Prayers in Steel

CHAPTER ONE

The woman’s slippers were silk, that much he could tell, and embroidered with seed pearls. There was no way to know what color they might once have been, since her feet were soaked to the ankles in blood.

Blood was spattered across her hideously expensive dress, as well. He could still see portions of that one’s original color. He’d have called it a cream, if forced to call it anything. Hard to be certain in flickering torchlight. But it wasn’t the dress, nor the woman, nor yet the carnage around her that she’d caused that his eyes kept sliding back to. It was the slippers.

For the life of him he couldn’t say why.

A hundred imperial troopers lay messily dead all around the young woman facing him, their armor and flesh rent and torn as if they had fought an enemy ten times their number and a hundred times their skill. Jaga had seen and caused death for most of his life. He could read battle-sign as well as any three of his men. The imperials had been caught wholly unawares, and had almost certainly died all at once. Which was impossible, of course, but there were all the corpses to tell him he was wrong. It was hard to argue with decapitations, torn off limbs and spilled intestines.

Jaga’s eyes fell once again on the woman’s slippers. He felt a shudder coming on, and suppressed it ruthlessly. He’d never got used to the sight of violent death, though he had learned early to throw on a mask of indifference. But those slippers. Those bloody, hideously expensive slippers…

Torches bathed the fortified imperial encampment in a shifting, untrustworthy light, but there was more than enough illumination to reveal the extent of the slaughter – and the small smile of satisfaction on the Roumnan princess’s beautiful, cold face. She stood alone among corpses, swaying slightly, with a small smile of what Jaga had to call satisfaction on her beautiful, delicate face. The kind of smile you might wear when a tricky or difficult task is finished.

“What the fuck is this?” muttered Arle, Jaga’s second in command, who pitched his voice low enough not to be heard by the Roumnan witch, or the troops behind them. They had both pulled their horses up short when the slaughter inside the imperial encampment had become evident. Arle rubbed at the stump of his left arm, as he sometimes did when he was unhappy. “They were supposed to be sleeping, not decomposing.”

Jaga shook his head slightly and nudged his horse through the open gate of the encampment. It snorted, disliking the stench of blood, but it did not balk.

“Jaga Khun,” the witch said, looking up from the blood and corpses. “Perfectly on time. I appreciate that in a servant.”

“I’m not your servant, princess. I’m a hireling. You wanted an army, and you have one. For as long as you can pay, of course.”

The princess arched a brow and tilted her head. “You doubt my word?”

“I seem to recall that we were supposed to collect you from a camp full of sleeping imperials. Yet here we are, collecting you from a slaughterhouse. Perhaps I misunderstood your words when I agreed to them originally. Or perhaps they were relayed imperfectly.”

Anya frowned. “You will find your pay in my tent, Jaga Khun. The iron chest. Have your men collect the rest of my belongings and saddle my horse. Or do hireling not do such things?”

“We do what we are paid to do, princess. Nothing less and nothing more. Which is why you turned to us to begin with, is it not?”

“You are a clever man, Jaga Khun. Try not to be too clever.”

“Would you like us to do anything with the bodies, princess?”

She pulled a ring from her finger and tossed it up to Jaga, who caught it in a leather gauntleted fist. He didn’t have to look at it to know it was worth a fortune. “Put that in the commander’s mouth,” she told him. “Then burn the encampment.”

Jaga passed the ring to Arle who, efficient as always, took command of the situation. Jaga turned his horse around and walked it back out into the breezy Wyeth night. The stench of death and dark magic had begun to turn his stomach. The twenty troopers selected by Arle to collect the princess passed him and entered the encampment. Many gave him questioning looks on the way. He ignored them.

The wind came from the north, from the Kash, and so it was a brittle thing, drying the land even as it chilled the night air. It was the signal that autumn was coming. The end of the growing season was nearly here – though precious little by way of crops was grown in Wyeth, nor had been for years. Farmers in Wyeth could and had survived much. Droughts, floods, crop plagues. Worse. But they hadn’t been able to survive a decade of war and chaos. Plows rusted and blades were bloodied. Green Wyeth had slowly turned red as the landsmen had fled, or died, leaving behind villages abandoned or in ashes, and leaving the land to mercenaries and bandits, to men of the sword. To men who dealt in death.

Men like Jaga himself.

And now, it seemed, to women such as the Roumnan princess. The Roumnan witch.

Would Wyeth change its color once again? mused Jaga. Wyeth the Black? Wyeth the White of Bones?

“Try not to think too much,” the witch said. She was quiet in those bloody slippers.

Jaga looked down and gave her a long, grim look. As big as he was and as small as she was, him sitting astride his warhorse and her flat-footed in slippers meant for marble tiles, he should have felt some advantage. Every advantage. He did not. And if she felt disadvantaged, not a sliver of it showed on her unnaturally pale face.

“They were supposed to be sleeping, not dead,” he said to her.

“I’m sorry if you were misinformed.”

“You’ll bring down the wrath of the empire on my troop. Roumney and Ardesh as well.”

“I’m not paying you to polish your sword.”

Jaga raised a meaty arm and slowly pointed a thick finger back toward the encampment. “I wouldn’t have accepted any payment at all, had I known it was connected to that.”

“Try not to think too much,” she said again. “There is method to my madness, Jaga Khun. You’ve taken my coin, and now you must take my word.”

He locked eyes with her. His “Do I?” was unspoken, but communicated clearly nonetheless.

“You have no choice now,” she continued, or replied. “The die is thrown, and I am the only chance you have of living long enough to see what face is uppermost when it comes to rest. And if you try to betray me, I will kill you and all your men in a fashion that makes what I did to those imperials seem like sweet mercy.”

Jaga looked away first, because he realized he believed her.

“There are two men out there,” she said after a short pause, pointing her chin towards the night-veiled rolling hills a little way to the northeast. “They are both hiding in an abandoned village beside a stream, a quarter-league distant. One is a hireling of mine, and the other is an imperial scout. They will not be together. Have your men collect them both. Alive.”

“Need it be said that your hireling shouldn’t be killed?”

“He may be reluctant to continue his employment after this evening.”

Jaga tried, and failed, to keep his mouth shut. “I know just how he feels,” he said, and nudged his horse away from her.