B3Ch64- Hale (Patreon)

The last pitch up to the staging ground was frozen scree, and Hale took it a boot at a time, testing each step before he trusted it. Sixty feet below, the valley of camps threw up its cookfires and its noise. Up here there was just wind and the crunch of his own weight and the moon coming over the shoulder of the peak. It wouldn't be a bad sight if it wasn't so damn cold.

He came over the last fold, and there they were.

Six men in a dish of rock out of the wind, no fire and only the moon to light the way. Nobody was talking much. Parker sat with his back against stone and his eyes half shut, not asleep. Carter had his gear laid out on a strip of hide and was going over it with his fingers in the dark. Habits were hard to let go. Garrick was a shape at the lip of the dish, watching down into the valley, still as the rock. Tran had a flask going quietly around, which was the only thing moving.

Hale had walked into a hundred nights like this. The quiet before was always the same. The nerves never really went away. People just learned to hide them better.

"About time," Garrick said, without turning around. "Thought maybe you'd gotten lost."

"Slower than I used to be." Hale found a seat on the cold stone and took the flask when it reached him. Tran's own filthy pear brandy, cut with something. He drank and felt it go down like a coal. "Christ, Tran. What'd you put in this?"

"You don't want to know," Tran said, warm. "I traded with one of those coastal lords' quartermasters for the fruit and made it myself."

"Tastes as if you made it in a boot. You don't have to do that anymore, you know."

"Oh, it's not that bad. You've gotten too used to drinking what Lord Harold makes. You've gotten soft."

Hale paused and looked at the flask thoughtfully. "You know, you might be right." He passed the flask along to Carter, who took it without looking up from his kit.

That got a low laugh from them before it got quiet again. Each of them relaxed in the company of men they had known for most of their lives.

It was Parker who cracked it open, eyes still half shut. "You know what this reminds me of."

"Ohhh here we go," Carter said, jovial. "Back down memory lane."

"Reminds me of the Song Be. Sitting on a hill in the black waiting on a bird that was late, and Private Hale here white as a sheet 'cause it was his first real fight."

"I was nineteen," Hale grunted.

"You were a baby." Parker's grin was audible. "Youngest in the platoon, and they hand him a rifle and put him on the worst piece of dirt we had. Every op, there's Hale, out front, catching hell before all of us. Man had rounds part his hair twice before he could grow a proper mustache."

"And then when they did shoot him, he left us all there," Garrick said, from the lip. "Only smart one of us. Went and got a degree while the rest of you were still eating dirt for a living."

"Got the degree, and the spooks came and found me anyway." Hale took the flask back for a second pull. "Traded one bad idea for a worse one."

"At least it led you to Margaret," Tran said it like an old joke, which it was. "All those years and I still don't know most of what you did between Saigon and here."

Hale closed his eyes and relaxed back into the frozen ground. "That's kinda the idea, Tran. Besides, I try to forget most of it. A lot of good and bad memories there."

"See, I kept my life simple." Tran spread his hands, the moonlight catching them. "I moved what needed moving. Booze, smokes, a case of C-4 nobody wrote down that time. You boys never once asked where it came from."

"We asked," Parker said. "You just lied."

Tran snorted. "Had to maintain the story."

"We just needed a token asian for the group to make us seem inclusive," Carter agreed. He'd set the last piece of his kit down, finally, and leaned back. "And then at Loc Ninh you decided to stick it out with us. That, I remember."

Nobody said anything to that for a second. Tran turned the flask in his hands and didn't drink.

"You all owed me money," he said finally. "That's all."

They all laughed at the old joke. Hale looked around the cutout at them — Garrick had gone off to SOG after their time together and done two tours of the worst kind of work; the two centurions down at the low end of the rock. They had been part of their original platoon. Good men all, and they had stayed in contact constantly after they parted ways. Parker and Carter, who'd been too dumb to quit and stayed in long enough that they'd both made First Sergeant in the same battalion, two old men arguing over whose company was better. And Tran. And him. One platoon, thirty years ago and a world ago, scattered to the four winds and somehow raked back into the same fold of rock.

"We were all used up, but this place has been good for all of us," Hale muttered, and it came out more candid than he meant it. "Every one of us. I was pushing seventy on Earth. Bad knee, bad back, bad sleep. Worse memories." He rolled the flask between his palms. "And now look. I feel forty. Better than forty. I can run a mountain and fight at the top of it and do it again the next day." He paused before continuing. "I married the one woman I would never have been allowed to on earth. Gravesend has been more of a blessing than a curse. I'm glad I picked up the phone when you called, Garrick."

"Amen," Carter said.

"Best shape of my life and I earned none of it," Parker said. "God's got a sense of humor."

"But now the fighting's actually worth something, not for the worthless politicians from before," Hale grunted, low. "Here—" He tipped his chin down at the valley. "At least it means something. Even if it's the same work."

Garrick made a sound that was agreement.

Down at the low end of the rock, one of the two centurions shifted. It was the quieter of the pair, the one who'd run a woodshop in his retirement.

"Riddle me this, Batman," he said. "And nobody take it wrong. We all defensive of Lord Harold. He has done well by us all."

Hale grunted. "Go on."

"Is this one right?" The centurion turned his cup in his hands and looked at it instead of at them. "Not the war. The war's coming, I know that. This is going to be an ugly fight. We have a plan, but we all know it's going to get cocked up." He looked up. "How justified are these killings? I trust Lord Harold, but no one is infallible."

They kinda went still, but their faces turned to Hale. He never knew how it ended up. He was the youngest of all of them, but somehow they ended up looking to him for leadership. Hells, Garrick spent a year as his squad leader. He remembered the man running him till he puked. He remembered the man throwing a grenade at him as a joke. Parker once bought him a girl on a night out in Vung Tau, and he was too drunk to say no. He got caught with Parker by the MP's for being out one night past curfew, and Tran had to come bribe the MP's to let them go. He was the youngest of them all, and somehow, he suspected he ended up living the most life of them all.

Garrick came off the lip of the rock and joined the circle.

"I'll tell you this." Garrick's voice was very low and very even. "I spent two weeks down in that valley with my best people, in their camps, in their tents. I watched these men. I swear to you on Gravesend itself, every name on that list has earned every bit of what's coming to them. There's one who keeps human beings in a pen like split wood and picks from it at night for sport. There's another I watched take a girl and cut her throat when he was done, and it wasn't his first. Another is planning to strike his neighbors when they take their armies north. I read the letters myself." He didn't raise his voice through any of it. "If Harold hadn't drawn up the list, I'd have made it myself. I'd be down there tonight either way. That solid enough for you?"

The centurion held his gaze a moment, then nodded slowly. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, it is. You know how it is, Garrick. I'd be down there with you all through all of it. We just all need to find a way to sleep better at night."

"Good enough for me too," Carter said quietly. The other centurion said nothing and nodded once.

Tran passed the flask to the centurion, and the man took it, and that was that.

"So what's yours, then?" Parker said to Hale, stretching his legs out. "We know our targets. What's the Colonel's target?"

Hale grunted, and it wasn't a happy one. "I won't be joining you tonight."

"Course you're not." Parker's grin came back. "Lazy son of a—"

"He’s going to see Colonel Halloran," Garrick said.

Parker's grin dropped off. Carter looked up from where he'd started stowing his kit, shock on his face.

"No shit? Halloran's here?" Carter said.

"Somewhere down there. Runs his own adventurer guild now." Garrick sat back down, slowly. "He's employed by some coastal money-lord. A few thousand adventurers on his books. The man couldn’t stand to not be in charge of something."

"Harold wants to recruit him." Hale rubbed the back of his neck. "Still don't know how he retired a two-star. Guess he did some good things in Lord Harold's past life that made him stand out." He grimaced. "And I'm the one who gets to go ask, on account of I already know the son of a bitch."

"Oh, we all know him." Garrick's mouth twisted. "Stuck-up asshole. Remember, he wouldn't take a report unless you stood at attention to give it? In the field? Standing tall for the sniper's convenience—"

"Made a kid re-blouse his boots under fire once," Carter said, disgusted and delighted at the same time. "Rounds coming in and he's inspecting a trouser."

"He polished his brass every day," Parker said.

"I remember." Hale had a small, flat smile on now. "Hard to forget the pompous ass. After he tried to give me an article for conduct unbecoming."

"But—" Hale held a hand up before anyone could join in. "Harold wants him. And Harold hasn't been wrong yet. So I'll go shake the man's hand and see if I can make it happen." He shrugged. "I don't have to like him, and this time I'll be in charge of him."

Garrick chewed on that a second. "How d'you even get near him? You know he will be sleeping in the most defended portion of the camp."

Hale's smile changed. And it became a good deal less civilized.

"I'm going to walk into his tent," he said, "and say hi."

Garrick laughed, a short and surprised bark. "There it is. Bout time the real you came back out. I keep telling them," he said to the others, "you were never built for the command stuff. The mug in the tent, the staff, the standing around being called Colonel. Put a knife in his hand and point him at a tent and that's the man I served with."

Hale looked at him thoughtfully. "I don't know about that; I see it differently. Our tunnel days are over. That man was part I had to play," he muttered.

Garrick raised an eyebrow.

"I love it," Hale said it plainly, and let the surprise show in his voice. "The command. All of it really. I never thought I would; I always hated officers. Thought I'd hate every hour I wasn't out front." He turned the flask in his hands. "Those few years I spent teaching in university. Learning about the Legions. The manuals, all the theory. I read it my whole life and never got to see if any of it was true." His voice had dropped without him noticing. "And here I get to find out. Every day I get to test some new aspect. That's — I don't have a word for what that is. This place has given me some of the most wondrous times of my life."

Then Tran said, "You just like that people carry your gear now."

Hale laughed, and it broke them.

"Well," he said. "It’s not that I like seeing others carry my gear. I just like telling you to carry it."

"Man had a valet take his pack off his back at the fort," Tran told the centurions, gleeful. "Never touched the ground. Colonel now. Doesn't lift his own—"

"You'd take one in a heartbeat."

"I'd take three. I'd have one just to carry the other two." Tran was grinning ear to ear. "I earned the chance to be soft. The new kids need to earn it too."

Hale drank to that, and passed it on, and looked up.

The moon had climbed. It sat clear of the peak now, and the valley below had gotten quieter, cookfires burning down. Not long now. He could feel the men around him feeling it too, the way they began to tense unconsciously. All of them retired from violence and called back to service.

He got to his feet, and they got to theirs.

Tran caught his arm before he could turn for the trail. He pressed something into Hale's hand — a small flat vial, warm from being carried against a body, the liquid in it near-black in the moonlight.

"From the Count's stock," Tran said, low, just for him now. "The stuff he set aside for emergencies. It's good for one strike." His thumb closed Hale's fingers over it.

"Still up to your old habits, Tran."

Tran didn't let go of his hand yet. "Be careful out there, Marcus. I'd hate to lose any more friends."

"Always am." Hale put the vial away inside his coat. "You lot watch your own necks. Garrick — Don't get clever."

"I'm always clever," Garrick smiled back at him. "Tends to get me in trouble."

Then the goodbyes came; they were ugly and full of love. Carter caught him in a grip that nearly cracked a rib and pounded his back twice. Parker gave him a hand and quickly kissed him on the cheek and retreated before the retaliation could land. Tran got both arms around him and held it a beat too long.

"Try not to trip on the way down, old man," Parker said. "Be a hell of a thing, break your neck falling off a rock."

"If I go down there and get my throat cut," Hale told them all, "Kill Halloran for me before Marge does it."

"Her fury would be scary," Garrick murmured. "She'd kill me for allowing it to happen."

And then went their separate ways, splitting off the rock in twos and ones toward their own sections. The moon watched it all and shone all the more brilliantly because of it. Hale stood at the lip and looked down at the valley. It would all change after tonight.

He grunted and headed down the trail. "Maximum effort."

The Iron Order at least had a smartly laid out camp. Kinda annoying about a guy he didnt like.

He came down off the scree into the tree line above their ground and lay flat on his belly in the snow for the better part of an hour, just watching. As excited as he was to be doing work like this again, his heart rate stayed low. He had already spent some time watching the camp, but now he was just confirming things were still the same.

Halloran had a picket line out past his ditch, two-man posts, and they rotated on a timely increment. Somebody down there ran a good watch and made men keep to it. He was pretty sure the people on watch had a decent perception skill as well.

He came off the slope in the shadows between two cookfires that had burned down to coals, moving from the fat shadow of a supply stack to the fatter shadow of a wagon, and when he stopped moving, he froze, no shifting, no adjusting. His stealth perk hummed like a held breath — people didn't expect decent stealth skills from soldiers, but he found it interesting that no matter what role you were. If you were smart. You could still find a way to do damn near anything you wanted if you set your mind to it. The system was kinda elegant in its own way.

The near picket had two men in it, and one of them was talking. Hale couldn't make out the words- something about the cold, and the other one grunting in agreement. He palmed a stone off the ground, weighed it, and threw it further into the dark past the far side of their post, where it knocked against a water barrel and rolled.

Both heads turned. The talker went quiet, and one of them stepped out toward the sound, hand on his spear.

Hale gathered mana into his legs. It was something he had been working on. A way to immediately enforce your will with your mana and force it into your body. He had mostly earned command perks, but there were some he had earned with his experimentation with mana on his own. This one allowed him to quickly reinforce his body for quick, immediate movements, then disperse the mana. He came up out of his crouch and crossed the gap behind the picket in three strides that made no more sound than a cat, and he was into the shadow of the tent line before the sentry had finished checking out the water. The mana escaped back out of his legs and his heart rate didnt change.

He let himself have a small moment of joy about it. He still had it. Slower than he used to be, but the hands remembered the work even when the knees complained.

Then he was just a man in a camp at night, and he started to wander.

He wandered a good while, and he took his time about it. He kept to the seams. He learned the layout of the place, where the lanes ran, where they dead-ended, where a picket could see and where it couldn't. Where the exits were. Twice he heard boots approaching, folded himself against a tent wall, and let the men pass close enough to touch. Neither one looked. Why would they? It was their camp.

He found the followers' quarter down at the low end, near the water and the cook fires, the cooks and the porters and the mule-handlers, the people who fed an army and allowed it to operate. He always found it amazing how people dismissed support staff as inconsequential. Their tents were smaller and set closer, and nobody stood a watch over them. Hale slipped in among them, found a lean-to where a man's spare clothes hung to air out, and helped himself. Why the man was airing them out in the frigid cold he didnt know, but he would help himself to the man's stupidity. He changed fast in the dark between two tents, rolled his own coat tight with the vial still snug against him and tucked the bundle up under a wagon where he could find it again. Or leave it. It didn't matter to him. Call it professional pride.

Then he walked back out into the camp with his shoulders down and his chin up, in the open now. A new personality adopted. A tired cook going somewhere, looking busy, and nobody looked at him at all.

That was the better disguise. The stealth perk hid you from eyes, but if you were caught, the game was up immediately. A dirty coat and the right walk hid you from eyes and allowed a great deal more subtlety. He memorized the camp as he went, and the more he walked, the more it puzzled him.

These were adventurers, and they weren't. The gear was too good and too uniform — somebody had kitted these people out of one purse, and a deep one at that. The tents stood in rows dressed off a line. The latrines were downwind and dug properly. There was a smithy going low even at this hour and a mess that had fed everyone. Free companies didn't live like this. These people didn't operate like normal mercenaries. These people had been broken to a routine. They lived like a regiment. Fed, warm, looked after. You didn't spend on people like that unless you cared what became of them. Somewhere under the pomp was a man who saw to his own, and Hale wasn't entirely pleased to find he approved. Harder to hate a man once you'd seen that.

An adventurer was an irregular. The whole point of the role was that the System paid them to go do the mad, solitary, unmanageable work no line of soldiers could — go down the hole, clear the den, take the quest nobody sane would take, and come back stronger for it. Or die and wait in a queue to come back. That was what they were for. You didn't line them up in ranks.

Did they even have quests running? He couldn't tell. But he'd have laid money Halloran ran them like regulars — mustered them, drilled them, sent them out in companies to clear ground and come home to a bell. It was the man all over. Take the most independent fighting force the world had and turn it into something to be inspected.

Which meant either Halloran knew something he didnt, or Harold knew something Hale didn't. He didn't like not understanding something like that. Was there a way to fit adventurers into a line of battle? It was something to discuss with Harold.

The center of the camp was a big campaign tent with a lord-captain's standard drooping over it in the still air, and that was where the discipline sharpened up even more. Two proper patrols were working the ground around it. They walked tight, no bunching, and they moved on a timely interval — one crossed the front of the tent and thirty seconds later the next crossed behind it, and their eyes studied the shadows. Somebody down here at least knew his business. Hale drifted past the mouth of the lane like a cook with no interest in the place and memorized the layout.

Thirty seconds front to back. That was a gap, if you made one.

Whelp. Time to make one.

He drifted off to the near cluster of sleeping tents, a dozen of them pitched close where a company had bedded down. He could hear men snoring inside, and he crouched at the first one like a man fixing a bootlace and worked the corner stake out of the frozen ground with his fingers. Then the next, and the ones on the other side, easing the tension out of the lines so the tents were barely up. Two tents, three, working down the row, and nobody inside stirred.

There was a coil of rope by the supply stack forty feet off. Easy to get to, hardly any watch on it — Hale had picked the softest corner of the camp on purpose. He carried the rope back low along the ground and made it fast to the loosened lines, one after another, tying them all onto the length of rope. Then he trailed the rope out behind him, backing away into the dark, twenty meters of it, until he was well clear and in the shadows between two wagons with the cluster of tents tied to the rope in his hands.

Then he hauled on it.

The tents came down all at once, canvas collapsing over the men inside them in a slither and a whump, poles kicking loose, and then the yelling started — muffled, furious, panicked, a couple dozen men fighting cloth in the dark and none of them knowing what had hit them. A voice bawled for a light. Another swore that something was on him. Somewhere a man got a leg free and put it through his neighbor's ribs, and that started its own argument. Good, clean chaos, and he smiled. He had almost forgotten how much he enjoyed this work.

The near patrol peeled off toward it, both men breaking their nice tight interval to go sort out the noise. And the gap opened up in front of Halloran's tent exactly where Hale had known it would.

He dropped the rope and went. He enforced his will onto his mana and, in one hard silent rush across the open ground, he slipped through the flap of the lord-captain's tent and let it fall shut behind him.

Inside, it was warm and empty.

A brazier burned low. There was a campaign desk, a camp chair, and a chest with a good lock. Off to one side, a curtain hung across the back quarter of the tent to wall off a sleeping space. Hale looked at the curtain and figured the man was behind it, asleep or near it, and would keep staying that way for a little bit yet. The yelling outside was still going. Nobody was going to be in here for a few minutes yet.

There was a ledger open on the desk and a decanter beside it, and Hale went to the decanter first, interested. A man could tell a lot about another man by what he drank. He had better try it out. Just so he could know him better is all. He pulled the stopper and smelled it, and it was gooood — a proper dark spirit, aged in some kind of nutty barrel, none of the paint-stripper of Tran's boot brandy. He poured himself a finger of it into the lord-captain's own cup and tried it. Quietly groaning to himself, it was better than good. Hell, maybe Tran was right. Maybe he had gotten soft.

He'd drunk worse things than this out of worse cups in worse places and been grateful for them. And now here he was in an enemy's tent judging the man's drink. Getting soft. Or getting some taste, finally, after years of not being allowed any. He took another sip and decided he could live with it either way. He had earned a little softness in his life. Look at Margaret. He caught himself weighing the decanter by eye, thinking he ought to pocket it and bring it home for Marge to try. He could live with a little more softness in it.

He sat down in the camp chair, put his boots up on the corner of the desk, and read the ledger with the cup resting on his chest.

Neat handwriting, everything squared away. A very army-style of writing with everything in caps. There wasn't much of note in the ledger so far, but what it did say was that Halloran sold his swords to the highest bidder. There was the coastal money-lord's retainer contract, a fat number paid quarterly, and there was other work bought and sold, contract by contract. A mercenary's ledger, no way around it. The man would fight for whoever paid.

But Hale read on, and he'll be damned, the work itself was good. "Huh," he muttered at the page. "Look at you, you old bastard." He didn't much enjoy finding it. Halloran had taken his company and sent it into the Blackjaws to clear monster dens. They had even killed a named monster. There were jobs on the books for killing things that had been terrorizing villages, and jobs for opening roads. A slow, careful delve into the region, mapping it a valley at a time. Whatever else the man was, he wasn't spending his people on nothing. He was using his people well on jobs that would eventually make them stronger.

And there, tucked in the back of the ledger, forum notes. Someone in the Order had been copying out how-to-earn writeups for perks. Hale read a few and got quiet. Those were Harold's notes on perks, or he was a monkey's uncle. The Iron Order had been following Harold's breadcrumbs for months.

Hale took an appreciative sip and turned another page.

The point of a blade touched the side of his throat.

Hale didn't flinch. He'd half been waiting for it. He kept his boots on the desk and his cup on his chest and only let his eyes come up.

"Losing your touch there, Colonel," he said. "Or Lord-Captain. However you'd like to be called these days."

"Who are you?" The voice behind the blade was low and clipped, very controlled, with an educated Irish lilt to it, even angry. "And how in the world do you know who I am?"

The blade didn't move off his neck, but the man came round the side of him, keeping it there, until he stood where the brazier light could reach his own face and he could see Hale's. Older than Hale remembered and grander with it — a big handsome ruin of a man with a general's bearing he'd clearly never set down. He studied Hale's face, and Hale watched him not recognize him. For half a second Hale was nineteen again — boots wrong in the mud, this man's voice peeling the skin off him while the rounds cracked past, scared witless and swallowing it down. The man who owned that memory looked right at him and saw a stranger. Something within him was disappointed by that. 

"I don't know you," Halloran said at last. "I've a fine memory for faces, and I don't know yours. So I'll ask the once more. Who are you?"

Hale grunted. "Course you don't know me. Funny how that goes, isn't it. A moment that's nothing at all to one man is etched into the memory of another." He tipped the cup a half-inch in salute. "You were the worst commander I ever served under, Halloran. The very worst. And you haven't the first idea who I am." He murmured to him.

Something moved behind the man's eyes.

"You served under me," he said slowly. "You were one of mine. You were in the First Infantry." The blade came off Hale's throat by a hair as the thought took him. "You were one of my men?"

Hale reached up with a hand and pushed the sword the rest of the way off his neck. Halloran let him. The man was more curious now than careful; a careful man never lets curiosity win. And at the end of the day Halloran was a vain man.

"Put it down," Hale said. "If I wanted you dead, you'd have been dead an hour ago and never known the difference. Wasn't hard to get in here. Your camp's a beauty from the outside and a sieve from the inside, and that's a thing you never quite learned, is it? Not on Tet." He took a sip. "Poor camp security, Lord-Captain. Costs less than you'd think."

The controlled facade in Halloran's face cracked, and the temper came up through it. "You know nothing about me."

"I know everything about you." Hale leaned back into the man's chair and got comfortable in it. "Educated at a school your father couldn't afford and never let you forget it. Commissioned young. Passed over the first time and it near killed you, so you learned to be the kind of officer boards liked. Which is different from the kind soldiers like and respected. You made your stars on ground you didnt fight for. You've a wife you divorced and a son who doesn't call, and a chest full of ribbon for a war you spent as far behind the wire as your rank would let you. Sure, you saw some combat. But it wasn't by choice." Hale watched it land, word by word. "You retired a two-star. Should I keep going? There's more I could tell you."

Halloran had gone pale under the grand ruin of his face. "That last — that's classified. That was sealed. Who are you?" The blade came up again, but his arm wasn't sure of it now. "You're not military. No soldier talks the way you talk. No soldier knows the things you know."

"You're still an idiot," Hale said, almost kindly. "Thirty years and you're still focusing on the wrong problem. You were a political animal, Halloran. You always were. Bright enough to climb. Never bright enough to solve."

Halloran went still, and something in him sharpened — the fear draining off, the intelligence coming up. "And what does that make you?" he said softly. "Thirty years on, and you're a man who gets handed a knife and pointed at a tent in the dark. Someone's still doing the pointing. Only now you've the wit to call him lord and call the leash loyalty. We're less different than you'd care to think. I kept my brass shining. You keep your master's."

Hale laughed, a real one. "Ha. There he is." He lifted the cup an inch. "First true thing you've said all night. I like you the better for it."

"I have had," Halloran said, and his voice shook with it, "quite enough of you sitting in my chair, drinking my whiskey, insulting me."

Hale rolled his eyes at the ceiling of the tent. "We both know I'm right, so let's not do the wounded-general bit; it's late. It's a new world, Colonel. New life. Second one, for both of us. I'd think we're old enough and far enough from home to be honest about who we actually were." He turned the cup slowly in his fingers. "The first time you and I ever met, I was a private, and you dressed me down in front of my squad over the state of my boots with the rounds still coming in. You made a nineteen-year-old kid re-blouse his trousers under fire so you wouldn't have to look at a wrinkle." He shrugged. "To me, that was a moment I've carried for years. To you—" he spread a hand— "it was a Tuesday. You've no memory of it whatsoever."

"I was an officer." Halloran drew himself up, and even confused and half-dressed in his own tent, the reflex was iron. "I had standards to uphold. A command reflects its commander. If a man could not keep his uniform, then—"

"More like an image to maintain," Hale said it flatly.

"Why are you—" Halloran stopped, and started over, and Hale could see him trying to get his feet back under him. "Why are you here?"

"Ah. Now that's the right question. Took you a while." Hale glanced round the tent — the neat cot, the OCD desk, the standard drooping in the corner with the lord-captain's colors on it. "I'm here because my lord wants to recruit you. God knows why. Though I'll be honest with you, Halloran, I'm half of a mind to walk back up that mountain and tell him you wouldn't take the offer. You'd not fit our command structure worth a damn, and my lord hasn't the patience for the little games you play. He'd have you sorted inside a week, and then where'd we be?"

Halloran's eyes narrowed. Hale watched him do the math, watched him try to understand.

"Your lord," Halloran said. "So you're Vayle's man. Or Calder's. There are precious few lords on this peninsula worth the name and fewer still with the shitting stones to send a man into my tent in the dark to do this." He said it half to himself. "It's one of those two. It has to be. Maybe Lord Boyle?"

Hale laughed, and he had to set the cup down on the desk so he didn't spill the man's good drink.

"Shit," he said, wiping his eye. "Oh, that's good. I needed that. Thank you." He got himself back. "You've truly no idea, Colonel. No idea in the world what my lord is willing to do. You think we are here for a summit? To discuss a campaign and decide on its leaders?" He shook his head and stood up from the chair, and Halloran took a step back and half-raised the blade again out of pure animal sense. Hale ignored it. "Come on. Follow me."

"Follow you where?" Halloran snarled at him.

"Up to your own perimeter tower." Hale bent, scooped Halloran's coat off the cot where the man had left it, and threw it at his chest. "And don't forget that. It's cold as sin out there, and you're going to want to be able to feel your hands."

Halloran caught the coat against himself and stood holding it, the sword low and forgotten in his other hand, looking at Hale like a man who'd woken up in the wrong life. Then, he shrugged into the coat and followed.

Outside, the collapsed-tent racket had mostly sorted itself, men still swearing and re-pitching by torchlight down the row. The near patrol had re-formed and one of them turned at the tent flap and put a hand out and started to say something, spear coming up.

"He's with me," Hale said sarcastically.

The patrolman looked past him at his lord-captain — at Halloran, coat half-buttoned, hair wild, plainly rattled. And Halloran, so far off his balance he was running on manners alone, gave the man a short, distracted nod. It's fine. Let it be.

The spear went down, and they walked through.

They crossed the camp to the edge of it in a silence Hale didn't feel any need to fill, and climbed the ladder up into the corner tower. Hale put the two sentries out of it with a jerk of his thumb and a "Go on, take five, warm up," and to his mild delight they looked to Halloran, and Halloran, God help him, nodded them out too. Then it was just the two of them on the high platform with the whole black valley spread below.

Halloran pulled his coat tight and glared out at the dark.

"Right," he said. "I'm here. It's perishing. I've let you march me out of my own bed to the edge of my camp. So. What in the name of God am I meant to be looking at?"

Hale didn't answer right off. He tipped his head back and looked at the moon, riding clear and high now over the shoulder of the peaks.

"What time do you make it, Colonel?" he said. "Two? Quarter past?"

Halloran glanced up at the moon, hard, the old field habit rising through the temper before he could stop it. "Quarter past two," he said. "What of it?"

Hale nodded, satisfied. There was a soldier in there under all the brass.

"No more games." Halloran's voice had dropped, and the refinement in it had gone from grand to grim. "I've indulged you a great deal further than I indulge most men. You'd not have woken me, and dressed me, and marched me up here past my own sentries if your lord wanted me in the ground. A corpse recruits no one. So it's an offer you've come with, and a threat behind it; you've not yet settled which I'll need before I'll take it." He pulled the coat tighter. "What are we doing up here?"

Hale tipped his head, granting it. "Mostly right."

"Look there." Hale lifted his chin at a camp, down the valley a little more, well dug in behind its ditch and its stake line, torches burning steady on a double watch. "That camp. Whose is it?"

Halloran followed his eyes, and his face went rough.

"That's Lord Sethric's."

"And do you know," Hale said quietly, "what that man does?"

Halloran was silent a moment. When he answered, the formality was all gone out of it. "Some of it. More than I'd like." He looked out at the dug-in camp. "Likely more than I know, and I've made it my business not to know. He pays through the coastal lord I've contracted to. His coin's been in my ledger, if you must be so crude." His jaw worked. "It doesn't spend the same, but I've told myself it does." He was quiet a moment. "You want to know why I raised the Order? To do the thing right, perhaps for once. All those years I sent other men's sons up the hill, drew my pay, and called it the job. This time I swore I'd feed mine, and clothe mine, and bring mine home. Try to find my son maybe…" The grand voice had gone to nothing. "And here I stand taking a monster's coin to manage it. I have to take care of my people. Tell me how else a man does that up here."

"My lord knows all of it," Hale said. "Every bit. Not only the some you claim to know— the whole godforsaken total. He knows Sethric keeps human beings in a pen. And unlike you, Colonel, my lord will not take that man's coin, and he will not stand in a valley beside him for the sake of politics." He looked out at the torchlit camp. "So tonight, this valley gets a cleansing."

"What," Halloran said, alarmed, "do you mean, a cleans—"

The far end of the valley came apart.

A camp two miles off went up all at once in a hard white flash; a whole cluster of tents was simply gone, and a half-second behind the light the sound reached them, a concussive crump rolling up the cold air. Then the screaming started, thin with distance, and under it the ring and clash of blades, and then all across the valley the alarm horns began to sound, one and then another and another, camp waking camp, the whole floor of the place lighting up torch by torch.

Halloran had grabbed the tower rail with both hands. "What in the name of God is going on down there? What is that—"

"Time to decide what kind of man you are, Halloran." Hale hadn't moved. He stood at the rail with his hands loose and his voice level. He let the man look at the burning valley and hear him at the same time. "That's the whole point of this, I think. Right now, tonight. Are you still the political animal? Still chasing the next promotion, the next set of ribbons to put on your chest?" He watched a second camp erupt down the valley, closer. "Did it make you happy? On Earth. When it was done, and you were old. Did you retire proud of the man you'd been? Would your ex-wife have been proud of the man you were? Your son? At the end. Were you happy with the man you were?"

Halloran said nothing. His knuckles were white on the rail.

"You've a chance here," Hale said, gentler now, "to do a thing that matters. An honest thing you could be proud of at the end of it all. Instead of drawing your pay from animals like the one down in that fucking pit."

And Hale watched the man's face, watched him understand at last, the math finally making an equal sum.

"Calder," Halloran breathed. "Count Calder. The potion lord. The one who came in last with a legion at his back. Dug a fortress in an afternoon. We all watched him do it." He turned from the burning dark and stared at Hale. "You're his. He’s doing this?" He whispered.

Hale nodded once, calm, and picked his cup back up — he'd carried the man's drink all the way up the ladder, and he took a slow sip of it now, watching the valley burn. One thing he and Harold swore religiously by: couldn't let good drink go to waste.

Then he lifted a hand and pointed at the sky. Something quickly blotted out the moon.

"Look there, Colonel."

Something came down out of the inky black sky.

It slammed out of the sky like a rocket, a single lance of light dropping fast and steep out of the dark over the peaks, and it slammed into Sethric's dug-in camp. The whole camp exploded in a bloom of alchemical fire that turned the snow orange. The stake line, the ditch, the ring of sleeping soldiers. Fire poured over the lot. Even a ways off and high on the tower they felt the heat of it roll over them in a wave, a wash of summer across their faces in the dead of the mountain night. It was a glorious show of power.

A great whoosh of wings passed low overhead, the downdraft of it flattening the standard on the tower and stealing the breath out of Hale's lungs — and was gone again into the dark before either of them could look up at it.

"What in the hell," Halloran shouted, and his voice had cracked, "was that?"

Hale watched the fire chew through the camp, and he took another slow pull of the man's good whiskey, and he let the quiet sit before he answered.

"Every lord in this valley," he said, "thinks Count Calder came up here to bargain. To trade and to flatter and to jockey for a chair at a table, like they're all still back on Earth playing at politics, like there's a promotion board somewhere keeping score. Like this is a democracy." He leaned over the rail and spat, deliberately, down into the dark. "There isn't. There's no board. There's no seniority. There's no waiting your turn. Out here it's the oldest rule there ever was, the one all that ribbon and rank was invented for — might makes right. That's the law on this peninsula. The people in those slave pens understood that better than anyone else, and tonight everybody else finally gets to see it."

Below them the valley burned, and the clash of combat could be heard in multiple places. The horns had become one long unbroken wail from end to end of it.

"And MY lord," Hale said, "is the rightest man in this valley. He'll take the goblin war, and he'll run the Velthari war. All of these lords here will fall in line, or they will fall to my Legion." He turned from the fire, finally, and looked Halloran full in the face in the orange light. "So. Last time I'll ask you. Whose side are you on, Colonel? When the sun comes up on this valley, and everyone left standing has to choose — what kind of man are you going to turn out to be?"