Chapter Five: Part Four

Continued from Chapter Five: Part Three...

Digger whipped his sword to guard. He pointed it first to his left, backing away in case the enemy showed himself. The laughter sounded from his right then, however, and louder. He turned to face it. “Gods, how many?”


“There are few left in the world,” Silk said. His voice sounded serene. Twig looked at his face. Silk still smiled, looking toward the one standing in the flames of the barracks. “One is too many.”

“What are they?” Digger asked.

“They are Scarpy,” Silk said. “You know of Tetch Slander and the Scarpy. These are they. They came for me, just as you predicted that they would.”

Twig wondered what Silk’s crime really was. The Holy Assassins—the Scarpy—the classiest killers hunted Silk. When he found his own footing, Twig wondered if perhaps he would want Silk’s scalp too.

“Gods preserve us,” Digger said. He kept his voice strong and gripped his sword in both hands.

“Hold fast—here he comes,” Silk said. He brought his own sword to be on guard. The Scarpy in the barracks leapt out. Remnants of flame clinging to the oils of his skin, he began running the hundred yards from the barracks toward them. Silk and Digger stood to wait for the Scarpy. Twig had no such patience. Darting first sideways, and partly concealed in the dark—though he knew that the Scarpy could see heat—Twig ran toward the hot Scarpy. The Scarpy’s body generated the campfire heat Twig had been feeling. All Scarpy had blue and hairless bodies, tightened with muscle. This specimen, naked from the fire, stared with its glowing eyes straight at big Silk. The Scarpy had his head lowered, the small horns in his forehead pointed at Silk like a charging bull. Sparks dribbled like spittle from between his pointed teeth.

He ignored Twig. Until the last second, the Scarpy stayed intent on Silk. Somehow, Twig’s quiet charge in the dark shadows passed the Scarpy’s notice. Twig was not sure why. He pressed his advantage, however. Coming at an angle, Twig planted a foot in front of the Scarpy’s. The Scarpy gave a bestial scream that morphed to an obscenity. The Scarpy began to fall. In the middle of the Scarpy’s dive, Twig rotated to knee the Scarpy in the chest. He shoved the heavy body of the Scarpy gracelessly sideways. The Scarpy fell into a jagged hole in the bars of the near bear pit. A scream like a burning hawk escaped him as his side was pierced by several of the jagged ends of the bars on his way to the bones of the bears. A belch of fire lit the pit when he hit the floor.

“Do you think he’s dazed?” Digger said, running up to Twig.

“You can thank the man, boy,” Silk scolded.

“He will not keep for long,” Twig said. “We should run.”

“It’s a bit hard to run from them,” Silk said.

“It is harder to fight them,” Twig said.

“Damn it,” Silk said. He hocked and spat. “I always tried to keep on the same side as them during the War.”

“That is prudent,” Twig said. At the sight of the Scarpy going down, the laughs of the other Scarpy in the Gorge changed to howls and insults. Probably the insults were witty and profane. The thick Scarpy accent obscured what they said exactly. The voices all approached. “This gorge is fitted with explosives. If they are triggered it will cause a cave-in. The Scarpy will be crushed.”

“But probably not killed,” Silk said.

“They may be killed,” Twig said.

“How can we help?” Digger asked.

Twig looked at the young man’s face. He had urgency to do in his eyes. Impotency made him nervous. They would merely get in the way, however. The mechanism was supposed to be triggered by three people, but only Twig knew where the three triggers were.

“Run if you want to live,” Twig said. Digger looked uncomfortable at the command. “Give me your bow and a knife.” Twig took his cloak off and traded it for Silk’s bow and quiver of arrows.

“You’re in for a flailing if this goes otherwise than you say it will, boy,” Silk said. He took the cloak and handed over the bow, however, and produced a knife from somewhere. “Come on, lad. Let’s leave him to his arena.” Silk turned and jogged back to the zigzagging road up the wall of the Gorge.

Twig turned his back to them. He slung the quiver of arrows onto his back, tightened its strap. The knife he stuck under some of the straps on his leather sleeve. The snowy ground stretched flat from him. The building where the bears had been bred stood to the right—the stable to the left. Behind the breeding building the wall of the gorge loomed up, sheer and straight. Ancient mining equipment clung to its face, dirtying the clean stone. Among the catwalks and cranes hanging on the wall a series of cleverly placed charges, based on the Scarpy design, could be triggered to make the whole stone face crumble and bury the Gorge in stone. There were three triggers. Three Zombies were meant to light them at the same time. They were hidden.

Motion caught his eye. He looked toward the breeding building. Someone jumped from the roof. Orange-glowing eyes stared at him. A second Scarpy, walking toward him. A third ran around the stable, his eyes visible in the shadows.

“Well, cold one, we know what to look for now,” the lead Scarpy said.

Twig swung his foot back and drew an arrow. He looked at the wall of the Gorge, recalling the triggering process. It should take three people. Now he looked at it, he wondered if he might have thought of a way to do it by himself. The idea seemed ludicrous, though. He had no idea how to execute it.

He would need some rags.

Continued on December 21...

Chapter Five: Part Three

Continued from Chapter Five: Part Two

The quarrying cranes and buildings had stood there since beyond history, slowly decaying. No stone had been cut there since the old days. It had been cold and empty for centuries when the Zombie Corps had built a complex in it. The Zombie Corps complex was three buildings and a series of pits. One of the buildings was a barracks for the Zombies. A second, more luxurious building was a stable for the steeds bred in the third building.

Standing on the edge of the Gorge, with the wind whipping his cloak around, Twig looked down into the shadowy Gorge at the three buildings. The Gorge yawned some hundred and more feet deep, swallowing the buildings. The low-angled sun hardly reached the bottom of the Gorge. The snow-covered roofs of the buildings rose just high enough to be easily seen. Cranes, gurneys, and catwalks clung to the far wall, ancient and mostly broken but built well enough to have held themselves together for all the long years. Twig could see through the dark to the series of pits in front of the luxurious stable. He knew that the dark obscured the sight of the pits and the hefty iron grates over them from Digger. Digger stood next to Twig and looked down into the Gorge.

“Why here?” Digger asked.

“It is secret,” Twig said. “It is defensible.”

“It’s a daft place for a cavalry,” Digger said, raising his eyes. Twig had told him the day before that the Zombie Corps Cavalry Regiment made its base Cankerous Gorge. “Horses couldn’t get out easily.” Nor could they get in easily either. Silk was just finishing tying his horse to a near tree with Bones and Digger’s horse. They would descend on foot.

“The Zombie Corps Cavalry does not ride horses,” Twig said. He began the walk down the narrow, zigzagging road cut into the wall of the Gorge. Digger followed. Silk did as well, looking around as if entering a site of some architectural interest.

Silk had spoken a great deal over the last couple of days. He mostly told war stories, with a creepily joyous attitude. He enjoyed many of the details that implied horrific details. He told a story of destroying a dam to take out an enemy camp, though there had been a town nearby that was also flooded—he told a story about killing a war chief in single combat, but never mentioned what happened to the war chief’s soldiers—he said he caused a landslide that blocked a canyon road to stop an enemy supply chain, and never mentioned whether it cut off supplies from anyone else. Rather than malicious, he seemed ignorant of the unintended effects of his actions. Twig thought that almost seemed worse.

He had fallen in with strange company.

“It looks abandoned,” Silk said. It did look abandoned. None of the buildings had any light coming from them. No heat either. Even before, with his old senses, Twig had felt the heat rising from the pits and the building where the steeds were bred. The artificers had somehow crossbred polar bears with the fire impelled from an explosive powder manufactured by the Scarpy. And, for good measure, the underemphatically named sparking bears had also been given a crown of spiking horns. The resulting fire-breathing bears made the Zombie Corps Cavalry steeds. Twig would have had one. A bear named Frango. Twig did feel a little heat from somewhere in the complex, enough for a fire or two. It was nowhere near enough for even one sparking bear.

Reaching the end of the zigzagging way down, the three of them walked across the Gorge. Now down in the shadows they could see a little better. The floor of the Gorge had been filled with gravel and earth so that the Zombie Corps buildings could have a flat foundation. The nearest building was the barracks. It loomed like an artless block in the shadows. Snow piled against it—jagged icicles draped its every surface, their surfaces rough with windswept frost. A dead silence only a quarry could conjure pressed into every space. It smelled of ice and concrete. Heat like a campfire came from somewhere ahead—Twig could not be sure where.

As they went toward the barracks they passed some of the pits. Some of them had the iron bars broken from within—mangled to make a hole big enough for a bear to pass through. Digger looked down into the pits.

“Bears?” he said. “They ate each other before they escaped. They were enormous.”

Twig went to look. The bears should have been released long ago, put into the stables to wait for deployment with their Zombie Corps riders. When he saw into the pits it confirmed that they had not been ever let out. Skeletons lay on the floor of the pit, their bones gnawed. The bars on top had been broken from within. Some of the bears got away, but none had ever been freed from outside. Twig walked past every pit to check them. All held the gnawed skeletons of enormous, horned bears. Not all of them had broken bars.

“This is not a good place,” Digger said.

“The Zombie Corps would have freed the bears,” Twig said. He walked with haste to the barracks, determined to find the campfire and ask for information.

The door to the barracks had chains on it—ancient chains and a rusted lock. It felt as if the campfire warmth came from inside the building. There must be a window broken through which the intruder had climbed. “Let me,” Silk said, approaching the door. Before the big man could get near, Twig raised his foot to kick. He thrust it at the middle of the two chained doors. They flew in, the handle of one breaking away from the wood. “Well, never mind,” Silk said.

They walked into the barracks, Twig leading the others. Silk hefted his big sword onto his shoulder, his black composite bow and arrows slung on his back—Digger with his long straight sword—Twig clutching his cloak around his shoulders.

A long hall yawned from the broken doors. Snowflakes blew into the shade around Twig’s black cloak, scattering across the dust-covered wooden floor. Open doors led off the hall to both left and right, leading into two long dorms. Boots had disturbed the dust in the hall.

“Can’t be older than two days,” Digger nodded to the boot prints. A cold draft brushed Twig’s right cheek. He went to the nearest of the four doors leading into the dorm on the right. The room, when he entered it, had more light than the hall—every few feet on the far wall a tall window looked out on the sparking bear stable. The glass of several windows lay shattered on the floor. Snow blew in across the bunks filling the room, in two columns and many rows. The boot prints busied the floor around some of the bunks.

“That window got broke in,” Digger said, pointing at one of the windows. The glass scattered into the room from the window. “That one there got broke outward, though.” He pointed at the window next to it, where the glass scattered out onto the snow. “That’s somewhat destructive.”

Silk had come into the dorm through the next door down the hall. He crouched, his sword resting on his neck, and scrutinized the boot prints in the dust. Digger walked toward him. “What can you see, eh? The lad had some business made him run about in here,” he said, pointing with his sword point at the footsteps. “Moved hither and yon like a sparrow building a nest.”

Twig agreed. At a glance, the boot prints—large and solid—described a man with a task to finish. He’d gone around the room twice and back and forth from the window several times. Twig glanced at the shadier corners. Paper-wrapped packages hung between the rafters, tacked up gently. Twig assessed them and began thinking about them. He’d never seen them before. They smelled chalky and salty—faint, but Twig smelled it.

The warmth like a campfire came from near them—almost in the room. Someone might have built a fire on the second floor. Twig looked at the warmer spot of ceiling. He took a step toward the stairs to the higher level.

The spot of warmth moved.

“Did you hear footsteps?” Digger asked, looking to the ceiling. Silk looked up from the footprints in the dust at the ceiling as well. He caught sight of the paper packages in the shadows. They made him frown.

“Scarpy?” he said, his voice bending to a question.

A sound came from the floor above: like a peal of laughter that had been held in for a while by a voice shredded from years of smoking. Silk stood. “Out of this building! Get out!” he shouted, running to the broken windows. Digger followed. Twig hesitated, unsure what to expect.

The footsteps on the floor above stopped at the end of the building. Twig heard a pop, then a sparking sizzle, moving at a walking pace toward him. He had no memory of any such noise. It frightened Silk—already outside the building. Twig turned and ran out of the room, opting for caution. Before he had reached the snow, the sizzle hit the first package in the rafters. Twig barely made sense of the rush of burning burst from the packet. Flash like lightning—heat like sunburn—pressure like a thousand punches knocking him off his feet. The effect multiplied the cloud of fire from the first packet hit the second. The expanding fireballs built upon each other. The building caught on fire—it splintered before the rushing orange cloud.

Twig almost got out of the broken window. The invisible force slammed into his back. He lifted off his feet. Amid a fog of burning air, he flew out of the building. The crush disoriented him. He only found his feet again when he whumfed into the snow. A heat wave blew over him. He kept still for a second, letting the noise of the explosions go over his back. Keeping motionless, he waited in case more explosions occurred. None did. He heard only the rumble of the barracks behind him burning, and a chuckle. Raising his head, Twig looked through the shadows. In the firelight, Silk smiled at Twig’s prone body, standing at a safer distance from the crumbling barracks.

Such a peculiar man, Twig thought. Twig got to his feet and walked toward Silk. He looked back over his shoulder at the burning barracks. It crumbled in on itself in the snow. The shade around it looked darker against the bright, orange flames eating the building’s two stories.

“Look, in the fire,” Silk said, pointing with his sword. Twig came to stand next to Silk—Digger stood a little further away, the fire reflected in his eyes. Unaffected by the inferno, a slim figure strode to a gaping hole in the second floor wall. The flames licked his muscled body—they hid his face. He held his hands close to them as if they comforted him like beloved hunting dogs. On reaching the gaping hole he paused, looking down at Twig, Silk, and Digger. A deep laugh broke the night. Twig knew the creature’s nature. One of them caused enough threat. He needed no companion to worry Twig. But answering laughs broke from the Gorge, behind them and on either side.

“Lord of Chaos,” Digger swore.

Continued on January 18...

Chapter Three: Part One

Continued from December 9, Chapter Two: Part Four

A couple days passed, and Silk and Digger spent them resting.

With a half-eaten apple in one hand, Silk stood in front of a board covered in relics from the War: wanted posters. The War went everywhere, changed everything. It’d been one of those confusing wars—no one knew for sure what side they fought for day to day. It got confusing after only a few years. The War had lasted for forty years. When Silk had been growing up, an urchin on the far southern docks, the War was already old. Just the War. It didn’t need a name. Probably the history books would call it something, but no history books had been written about it yet.

No one ever knew what side they fought for, no one except the choice few like Engelkind and the gods. Failing in that certainty, there was a certainty about what sides fought the War. On the one side stood the gods themselves: Ythig and his pantheon, ruling from castles and leading vast armies who believed the old stories and stood by how the way things had been for all recalling. The gods defended themselves against an insurrection: a coalition of atheistic men rallying to cry that mankind had outgrown the gods. Ironically, when that coalition of rebels lost their leader, the person who replaced him was a god. A new god—a god who never appeared in any old story. People took it as a sign that they would win.

And they had won. The coalition of men, led by the new god Kunig and his warlords—Engelkind being first among them—defeated the gods and threw them from their keeps. The gods lost the War.

Silk inhaled cigar smoke around a bite of apple. The War’s outcome was so monumentally impossible. The whole of Eardbána—the only known continent in the world—took on a greyish cast. No parades or celebration marked the end of the War. Quietly, the new regime established, and the population went along with it. The new god, Kunig, assumed rule in the south, and Engelkind and his armies moved into the greatest fortress in the middle belt of Eardbána. The most pivotal warchiefs who had supported the gods took up abode in the northland of Wildhagen. Kunig declared them exiled. Ythig and the old gods disappeared. Folk presumed them also exiled, but rarely inquired because they feared Engelkind’s secret police.

 The gods had lost the War. The concept could hardly be understood. Perhaps the impossibility of it affected men—perhaps the feeling that the gods no longer watched them made more of them turn bad—perhaps fewer people chose to police each other any longer. Silk thought it was because Wildhagen had become a no-man’s land. The only real authority there was the exiled King of Wildhagen, who stayed in hiding because his power was now illegal. Whatever the reason, boards for wanted posters had more posters than ever. Engelkind offered most of the rewards. Many stated that the reward would be paid forward regardless of the criminal arriving dead or alive.

Silk blew a smoke ring at the poster-covered board. A handful of the posters were slashed through. They had the highest rewards and names Silk recognized. Brillig Oxley—Strags Curran—Gerick Cham—all of them vicious murderers, highwaymen destined for the gallows. They had been war heroes, for what side didn’t matter. Now they were wrong-minded psychos. This was the effect of the War. These men could not recover.

Digger walked up next to Silk and looked at the board with him. They stood for a moment with some town folk walking past behind them. Silk blew out a lung of smoke.

“How did you become sheriff here?” he asked.

“I go where the wind takes me,” Digger said.

“That’s sort of ridiculous.”

Digger shrugged.

“How long are you going to stay here?” Silk asked.

“Well,” Digger said, drawing out the word. “That rather depends on you, as it happens.”

“Does it?”

“Aye. As per preparing to become the Wiga, I’m obliged to learn from anyone who can beat me in a fight.”

“Is that a fact?” Silk said, scratching his cheek and raising an eyebrow.

“Aye. A tradition passed down through the ages.”

“I hate tradition,” Silk said. It was true, though he respected magic. It sounded like one of those magical contracts, like the legend about how the gods had declared that Engelkind could not be killed. A legend, most said, though the now eighty year old warlord gave the tale some credence. The gods made magical promises like that sometimes and men lived with the consequences. Some things could not be negotiated. The gods had a tricky way of declaring things that would happen no matter what.

Digger shrugged again. “Tradition means little to me one way or the other.”

“You’ve never gotten around it, though,” Silk said. Digger shook his head. Silk looked close at Digger’s calm expression. Digger’s eyes had a touch of resignation in them, as if he had tried to outwit the tradition and had failed. The look on Digger’s face made Silk think the consequences had been grave. It must be strange to live a life with a destined place in the world. Silk took joy in little, but he did find a great deal of comfort knowing that he made his own tomorrows.

Digger smiled and looked at Silk sideways. Such a child. Silk puffed on his cigar. He turned back to the board of wanted posters.

“These posters that have been slashed—the outlaw was caught?” he asked.

“For these here, I caught them,” Digger gestured at a handful in the corner. “Some of those were caught by locals or by travelers or mercenaries,” he pointed with an open hand to several others. None of them that he had pointed to so far had very high reward. “These,” he pointed at the three with the highest rewards—Oxley, Strags, and Cham. “These men turned up dead on the highway into the north.”

Silk smiled. “No one has tried collecting a reward for them?” He thought he knew the answer but he asked it anyway.

“Some have tried ,” Digger said.

“You didn’t give them the money,” Silk said, more a statement than a question. He smiled around his cigar.

“They weren’t up for hunting these brigands,” Digger said. “Anyway, whoever it was that killed them is still roaming the hills.”

“Do you know anything about him?” Silk thought he knew a little more himself about this vigilante. Van Vleidt said that Silk would find the vigilante useful. He wanted to know what Digger knew anyway.

“He’s stuffing these in the mouths of the outlaws’ corpses,” Digger took a little piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Silk, “wrapped around a rock.”

Silk took the piece of paper. Come and get me, it read in simple, straight letters.

Continued December 13...

Chapter Two: Part Two

Continued from December 3, http://lithnmark.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapter-two-part-one.html

By then it was late morning and his big cigar had nearly burned to the stub. His walk had brought him through the brown streets, over the dusty cobbles, to Súthende’s main square. The square had two fountains, both empty of water and partly full of dead leaves and snow. Between them stretched a chessboard made of red and white flagstones, each square five feet to a side. The fight would be in the middle of the chessboard, Silk my lad. He sat on the low wall of one of the fountains, finishing his cigar and sipping the bottle of wine.


Near the other fountain the keeper of the wine shop looked around, trying to be non-descript. Silk also saw two of the bookies he’d seen that day. They exchanged nods then went to different hang-out spots—one to a café and the other sat on a templeyard wall and began whittling a piece of wood.

Flicking the last end of his cigar onto the cobblestones, Silk determined to spread the rumor wider. He wanted more coverage. Just one more will probably do.

A pub stood over-looking the square. Go there—talk to the lass behind the bar. The ground floor had no wall keeping traffic out, and people wandered in and out of the low, dim room. Silk ordered some stew and coffee at the bar from a woman with dimples, dense braids, and shrewd eyes.

“I know your face,” she said after he’d ordered his food. “I saw you fight down Southland way in the spring festival rings. You dropped a man three times your size.” Silk grinned at her. He was sure she exaggerated, but he didn’t mind. “I heard you’re bragging you’ll fight our sheriff.”

“I heard that rumor,” Silk said. He lowered his voice, forcing her to bend toward him over the counter.

“You’ll not fare well in fisticuffs with our sheriff,” she said, though she looked him up and down, thoughtfulness in her eyes. She seemed less sure of the statement because of his presence here before her. He stood taller than everyone else in the pub.

“No. I’ll do well. It’ll be the best fight you ever saw,” he said.

“You’re a bit cheeky, ain’t you?”

Silk smiled. Yes, he is a bit.

He waited for his food at a table near the front, where he could be easily seen from the street. The sky cleared as the morning turned to afternoon, though the air bit with chilly stagnation. The barmaid whispered his identity to everyone who came ordered something. Folk walked past outside with their murmurings and gesturings, confirming to each other that the rumors were true: Silk was there. It made him smile. He smiled a lot these days. The freedom of his new life choices pleased him, he supposed. New life. New direction. Yes.

When the stew came he took his time chewing through it. The crowd nearby increased and tried hard not to look at him as news spread that he was himself. He liked the sound of their inane chatter. It soothed him to have so much noise filling his ears; it kept his thoughts subdued. The stew gone, his cigar gone, Silk crossed his legs in the wooden chair where he sat and asked for a cup from the barmaid. She brought it to him.

Looking out at the square and the slowly growing crowd there, Silk finished his bottle of wine.

He had a long history with the Wiga. They’d always taken opposite sides in the war. During the War, that he and the Wiga would oppose each other was on a very short list of reliable facts of life. They opposed each other on everything. If Silk’s leaders commanded him to infiltrate some forest with an impenetrable maze of traps then the Wiga had made the maze—if Silk designed the most fool-proof plain of attack ever devised then the Wiga found the pinhole that could bring it down—if the Wiga’s reputation as a drinker had one short-coming it was Silk’s reputation being just as impressive. In all the years they had spent fighting, Silk had never met the Wiga face to face.

He liked the idea of meeting the Wiga this way. Single combat—hopefully not quite to the death. Should be a bit of a lark.

Silk sat for about an hour after the last drip of wine had dried from the bottle. The bookies had started shouting odds and things like that. The milling people had turned into a full crowd. They seemed to have an instinct that the middle few squares of the chess board in the middle of the square ought to be reserved for the fight and they avoided those flagstones. The temperature had started dropping. Dusk approached. The sky filled again with clouds. Silk smelled coming snow.

A thin, faraway-eyed youth, his fiery-red hair grown long past his shoulders, stood nearby, watching the milling crowd with the slow expression of someone used to seeing more than other people. He wore old brown leather, dirty wool dyed blue, and linen clothing—not rich clothing but well made and durable. Judging from the sheer wear in the clothes he had traveled a great deal, but judging from how clean they were he had not traveled recently. Silk called him over. Without smiling, but cordially, the youth came to Silk’s table.

“What’s your name?” Silk asked him.

“I’m called Digger,” Digger said.

“Sit with me, Master Digger,” Silk said. Digger sat at the wooden table. “I’m called Silk Golinvaux.”

“I know,” Digger said. He took a thoughtful, even tone, exerting more energy in listening.

“What are your talents, Master Digger?” Silk, with his legs, crossed one over the other, met Digger’s faraway eyes. Digger stared right back. A sort of cloud seemed to fill Digger’s eyes. Not something visible. Digger’s pupils were as dark as anyone’s. They had something about them that drew attention once time had been taken to look closely at them. Silk could not, unlike with most other men, immediately guess Digger’s thoughts. It would take some education of Digger’s tells before he could be easily read.

“I’m a fairly good fighter,” Digger said.

“Can you command a crowd?” Silk asked. “I need a herald. But I know no one in town.”

“I am a fair orator. The townspeople here respect me—they’ll listen if I talk. I can act your herald,” Digger said.

“I’ll pay you,” Silk said.

“Of course you will,” Digger said. He fell silent, neither asking how much nor asking what to say. He did smile—a small smile—a suggestion to keep talking. Digger would listen. Silk felt somewhat bemused to be invited to speak. It was almost as if Digger thought he controlled the situation. Silk saw nothing to control. He explained what he wanted anyway.

“Have you seen any of the fights at the Mayfair Bazaar in the south?” Silk asked.

“Aye,” Digger said.

“Do you think you could talk like those heralds?” Silk asked. Digger nodded. “Good. Do you have any familiarity with my history?” He had to ask. Many people knew it.

“I’ve had many a military history lesson,” Digger said. “My father followed your career.”

“Did he?”

“Aye.”

“And who is your father?” Silk asked, because it was polite. He didn’t especially care. “Would I have heard of him?”

“My father is the Wiga, him that you’re planning to fight now.”

Silk smiled. “How does that suit you?”

“Suits me fine,” Digger said. He stood. “I’ll act as your herald. You’re ready now, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Silk stood as well. He and Digger walked into the square. Folk caught sight of them and started nattering. “You have no argument if I challenge your father to a fight?”

“You care?” Digger asked.

“Not especially. Another man might have.”

“I have no reason to expect him to appear,” Digger said, his tone still flat.

“Bad blood in the family, eh?” Silk asked. He never understood bad blood in families. He didn’t have a family so he lacked context. He tried to understand. He could pretend to understand. He failed to truly grasp it.

“A bit,” Digger said. They’d reached the center of the chessboard in the middle of the square. “He left me and me mum when I had only just turned twelve. I haven’t seen hide of him since.”

“Poor dear,” Silk said without feigning much sympathy. He came to suspect as he spoke to Digger that lying to him about anything would serve little advantage.

Digger smiled back to Silk another odd smile. This time the faint expression bespoke of a complex set of emotions—resignation, resentment, mingled with small amusement and triumph. Silk felt he might have missed something. The smile seemed only partly from the mention of Digger’s father.

Digger raised his voice and—projecting rather than shouting—announced Silk to the crowd.

Continued on December 7...