Ollery. Just a big man in a packed Bracite market, his satchel heavy with paper packets and clinking jars. One more tradesman in a crowd of civilians, even though he’s a head above locals and fellow Pals both. A curiously innocent look on his face as he peruses the stalls, like a man choosing some gift to take home for his wife. As the sun sinks and evening draws on, though, the long shadow of the Butcher stretches out from wherever he plants his feet. Some things can’t stay hidden.
“Chief,” Cosserby said. “Here, see this. What do you think?”
He had a lacquered box cupped in his hands. Atop it, a mannikin the size of his littlest finger was moving smoothly through some sort of sword drill, or possibly dance. When Ollery bent his head to it, he could hear the faint click of clockwork within.
Ollery squinted. “How do they get it so small?” He’d found the artificer, along with Lidlet, pissing away the last of their coin on souvenirs.
“I know,” Cosserby said enthusiastically. “Bracite artifice is rather remarkable. Do you think she’ll like it?”
The Butcher wanted to tell Cosserby that, yes, Banders would be delighted by it. Endlessly acquisitive as she was, she’d watch the tiny automaton, enthralled, for all of a minute, then mostly forget about it until she bartered the thing to someone else. And she would not, in any way, like Cosserby more because of the gift. Not that she didn’t like Cosserby. Banders liked most people. But she didn’t like Cosserby in the way that Cosserby wanted her to like him. Wanted wretchedly and obviously, to anyone except Banders.
Ollery came very close to saying that if Cosserby just flat out asked, then Banders would probably go upstairs in one of the various knocking shops around here, and they could get the whole business done, and that would be it. Banders wasn’t sentimental about sex. For her it would just be business as usual between them after that. But Cosserby obviously felt liaisons needed to be special and lasting and important to all concerned. He didn’t want to be one more notch on the hilt of Banders’s knife. And so he wouldn’t just ask. He’d try to wrangle and buy and erudite his way into her affections, and Banders’s affections were like a sieve.
The Butcher just grunted, a masterfully neutral response. And, because Cosserby was good at hearing what he wanted to, the man smiled and agreed that Banders would like the thing very much.
The woman in question had abandoned them earlier in the day, after loading Lidlet with an enormous bag of tall candles. Ollery would ask why Banders wanted candles, but he could be absolutely sure that somewhere in Forthright Battalion was a clerk or quartermaster or scholar who had a desperate need for exactly these candles, and would trade goods or favours equal to twice their value to get hold of them. That was Banders’s peculiar genius and, if she profited from it, so did the department. And a few hours without Banders’s constant talk and ability to get people in trouble was probably to everyone’s benefit.
Even as the happy thought crossed Ollery’s mind he heard shouting from across the crowded market. Familiar shouting, as though the world had caught up and remembered that he, Ollery, must always be given a hard time. Banders shouting because something had gone wrong, which was a sound as endemic to the army as baton-fire.
He had a good vantage over the heads of the crowd, and there they were, Banders, of course. Maric Jack, who was a man every bit as much trouble as she was. And Masty. Of all of them, Ollery was only really disappointed with Masty.
But they were very definitely being chased. A knot of locals forcing their way through the crowd, lashing out at anyone who got in the way. And a curious sense of odd pathfinding going on, because Jack was leading the way, and he was heading straight for Lidlet, while the ugly pack of pursuers was scrabbling at the hem of Masty’s cloak.
Jack cannoned into Lidlet and knocked the candles from her arms, and then the locals had caught up with all of them. Masty flinched away from them desperately, and Banders turned and smacked one right in the face, sending at least one tooth flying. Ollery caught the flash of a knife and swore.
Someone slammed into the attacker before the blade could go home. Or at least slammed into him and Banders both, knocking them aside. Cosserby, of all people, grabbing the assailant’s arm and invoking Palleseen writ by ordinance and paragraph. The knifeman – now with his knife spun away who knew where – picked the artificer up and thew him into about seventeen other people.
Someone else made a game try for Masty then, but Banders flashed past and slugged him too. Then someone else – just some random Bracite with a dislike of uniforms – had kicked Banders’s legs out from under her and it was all on. Because there were hundreds of locals around them, and there were at least dozens of Pals, and the uniform and the training and the innate arrogance made up for the numerical disadvantage. And some of the locals were fighting each other, and so were some of the soldiers, because it was that sort of day.
Ollery saw Lidlet lunge towards the Bracite who’d kicked Banders, and Jack actually tackled her to the ground, the pair of them going down in a tangle of limbs. Lidlet sat up, and Masty had the privilege of seeing her expression turn from an extremity of fury to utter pale terror to horrified gratitude. She ended up clinging to Jack – and he to her – like two wrecked sailors with a single plank between them.
Banders had come up swinging, and somehow Cosserby was on his feet too – his spectacles hanging off his ears in two pieces, so probably not much of a net gain in the fight. Right then, though, Banders was up for taking on the whole world. Fists raised in a proper pugilist’s stance, like she was competing for the honour of the department, turning left and right on her heel, feinting at anyone who got too close and trusting Cosserby with her back. Her mouth was open, challenging each and every one there to a drubbing.
Masty was just standing there, his eyes terribly wide. Ollery wondered whether he was seeing the brawling now, or some fighting from back then. The howling and the screams as he was dragged through these same streets, six, seven years old, surrounded by foreign uniforms. A man who owed a death to these streets.
Someone hit him. Just some opportunist who saw the uniform, not even the face over it. Masty took a clumsy blow across the cheekbone and staggered backwards, tipping. Lidlet caught him. She grunted as she took his weight, holding onto him with iron hands because otherwise they might be turned to aggression, and Ollery knew exactly how that would go. Jack was trying to put himself in the way of the attack, and got a fist in the gut for his pains, then an elbow across his head when he conveniently doubled over.
Two men had one arm of Banders each, which gave her the secure anchor she needed to kick a woman in the chest with both feet, sending her victim smashing through a fruit stand and into the slipper merchant it backed onto. Then Ollery had closed the distance, a huge hand slapping across the head of one of Banders’s escorts, and the other man getting an exact mirror image of the move, a brutal economy of motion. Banders, her face mottled with emergent bruises, leaned briefly into him.
“Oi, Chief,” she said. “You got your business done then?”
“Why is it always you, Banders?”
“Innocent, Chief, I swear. It was Masty this time.”
Masty shrank from Ollery’s louring stare, and at that point the shooting began.
To the credit of the soldiers it was mostly overhead, pitched to strike stone chips and deface carvings. Ollery saw a woman’s shoulder explode in blood and bone, though, and a man pitch backwards with half his head gone, vengeance or poor aim equally murderous in the close-packed crowd. The brawl became a rout in short order as everyone who could started forcing their way left and right and away of the block of uniforms moving through the market. Provosts, half with levelled batons and half clubbing anyone who got within reach.
Lidlet let out a great ragged breath. She rested her chin on Masty’s shoulder, shaking with frustrated rage.
“Oh damn.” Cosserby’s voice was quite distinct now the tide of the crowd was receding. The man was holding a collection of splinters and cogs that had formerly been a clockwork musical box.
“What’s that?” Banders asked blankly. “Looks expensive.”
“It was, rather,” Cosserby agreed, and then the provosts arrived.
Their officer was an old man to just be Cohort-Monitor on this sort of post. He looked about – the corpses, the trampled, the damage to property – and wrinkled his face.
“Who’s senior here?” he demanded. Ollery shifted slightly, drawing the eye.
The provost Cohort froze. Ollery went still, too. Trying to place the face, mostly. And realising that, no, he didn’t know it. It wasn’t one of those faces, because none of them were likely to be turning up here any time soon. But was there a resemblance? A father, a favourite uncle?
He didn’t know, he realised. Too long ago, too many faces he’d done his best to scrub from his mind. But this man knew him, and there was only one reason that might be.
The officer had a rod out from his belt, slotting a tableth to it with trembling fingers. His eyes were wide. “You,” clipped out of his almost-closed mouth. “You. It’s you. It’s you. You. Murderer.”
He shot, right into Ollery’s face. Or at least did his best. Masty was in arm’s reach of him and got an arm under the man’s wrist, pushing up. The spittle of energy from the rod killed another epic stone hero on the walls and Ollery lived. Lived, with his face set and expectant. Someone else who owes the world a death.
And the provost’s own men were demanding to know what he was doing, and the man came back to himself, slammed down the lid of his military discipline again, closed his face. Only his eyes left, to stare hatred at the big man in front of him.
“Arrest the lot of them,” he said. “Brawling. Disgraceful.” As though there wasn’t a live weapon in his hand and a new scar on the stonework to show for it. “Get them out of here.”