Murder in Lamut. Joel C Rosenberg
they probably weren’t worth breaking.
‘Excuse me,’ Durine said, politely turning his back as he unbuttoned his own trousers.
A stream of piss steamed and smoked in the chilly air for an improbably long time.
‘With all the places to relieve yourself,’ Pirojil said, ‘did you really need me to be a witness?’
Durine buttoned his fly. ‘Well, truth be told, I always do prefer to have you or Kethol at my back when I’m occupied handling something this large and delicate, but no, I figured we ought to talk.’
‘So, talk.’
Durine shook his head. ‘I don’t like any of this. Playing bodyguard to an officer is one thing – you don’t have to worry about your own soldiers trying to knock him off –’
Pirojil’s eyebrows rose and he gave Durine a fish-eye.
‘All right, you usually don’t have to worry about your own soldiers trying to knock him off, just about enemy troops bothering him while he’s busy running a battle. I like doing bodyguard stuff.’ He patted his waist.
Pirojil nodded, though he did not meet the other’s gaze. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to. It was just a reflex for him, after all this time, with both Kethol and Durine: they automatically divided the world into fields of fire; it had saved their lives more than several times.
‘I know,’ Pirojil said. Bodyguard duty usually meant some extra coins, and the meals tended to be better, and while you were near enough the front not to get bored, you were also not so close that you had to worry about somebody leaping out at you while you were harvesting a bit of loot. ‘Not the sort of thing I would have volunteered for, but I don’t remember being asked to volunteer, do you?’
‘So why us?’
‘I don’t know, although I have some ideas. For whatever they’re worth.’ Pirojil shrugged. ‘I don’t think it’s because the Swordmaster thinks we’re better than his own troops.’
‘We are.’
Pirojil couldn’t help but grin. ‘Well, I think that, and you think that, and Kethol thinks that we’re better than they are – but I’m willing to bet that the locals don’t think we are.’
‘Their problem.’
‘No. Our problem. What we are is uninvolved, which is good.’
‘Good?’
‘Good for us. We’re not expected to take sides in local rivalries, which means that we can expect not to have our throats cut for making the wrong move at the wrong time.’
‘So you like this?’
‘I didn’t say that. The bad part is that we’re uninvolved –’
‘You said that was the good part.’ Sometimes Durine was just too slow. Not that Pirojil would complain; Kethol was worse.
‘It’s good and bad,’ Pirojil said slowly, patiently. ‘Most things are. The bad has two parts: someone might try to cut our throats for just being in the way.’
‘Nothing new in that.’
‘And we’re expendable.’
‘Nothing new in that, either.’
‘More so than usual.’
‘Ah!’ Durine nodded, finally understanding. ‘Politics.’ He said it as if it was a curse.
‘Politics.’ Pirojil nodded. ‘Look at it from the political angle. If Baron Morray, say, falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck, the Earl can either treat it as an accident, or as our fault. If it’s an accident, well then, there’s no political problem, and Luke Verheyen isn’t to blame – nobody is.’
And that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
‘Sure. But if it’s not an accident – if, say, the Baron was murdered – then whose fault is it?’
‘The murderer’s?’
Pirojil wasn’t sure whether to groan or laugh. ‘Sure: the murderer. And who is the murderer? Verheyen, the hereditary enemy, who is eyeing the earldom every bit as much as Morray is? Or the three freebooters who, upon a careful search, will of a certainty seem to have too much money on them?’
‘So what do we do?’
‘The obvious: we try to keep Baron Morray from falling off his horse and breaking his neck while we’re on patrol, or falling down the stairs and breaking his neck when we’re at Morray and Mondegreen. We get him back to LaMut intact and breathing, and hope to be relieved of this duty there. If somebody tries to kill him, we stop them; if we can’t, we be sure to capture at least one assassin alive, and make sure he is able to tell who paid him, which won’t have been us.’
‘And if we can’t?’
Pirojil just frowned at him. That was obvious. ‘We kill everybody within reach, grab their horses and anything of value they have on them, and then we see if we can outrace the price on our heads.’
‘And what do you think are our chances of that?’
‘Sixty-sixty –’
‘Optimist.’
‘– on a good day.’ Pirojil arched an eyebrow. ‘If you have a better alternative, don’t sit on it – trot it out and let’s talk about it.’
Durine shook his head. ‘No. I’ve no better idea, and that’s a fact.’
‘Then we go with –’
‘Mount up,’ sounded from below. Tom Garnett’s voice carried well. ‘We’re wasting daylight.’
‘We’d better get down before they leave without us,’ Pirojil said.
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Durine nodded, and his massive brow wrinkled. ‘But I see what you mean. Very clever of the Swordmaster, eh?’
‘Eh?’
‘I mean, if somebody does manage to kill Baron Morray out here, or if he does have a fatal accident, wouldn’t the Swordmaster know that we’d be blamed and would have to run for it?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘So he wins either way.’
Pirojil had to nod. The Swordmaster would win, either way, at that. A dead baron wasn’t an insuperable problem – the war had been almost as lethal for the nobility as it had been for the common soldier – but feuding barons getting the idea that assassination was acceptable was another thing altogether. Much better to blame the three freebooters, who had had no connection with any nobility faction. Someone would make it obvious they had just decided to kill and rob the Baron themselves – and whether Pirojil, Kethol and Durine were killed, captured, or escaped was immaterial; that’s what the official story would be.
Maybe Durine wasn’t really so stupid after all.
The Swordmaster surely wasn’t.
Shit.
They were only an hour south of Mondegreen when the Tsurani attacked.
There was no warning, at least none that Durine noticed, not even in retrospect. Neither Kethol nor Pirojil had any, or they would have given a signal.
One moment the company was riding, in two ragged columns, down a farming road, a frozen, fallow field of hay on each side, and the next moment, dozens of black-and-orange-armoured soldiers were swarming out of the ditch where they had lain, hidden beneath a layer of hay.
Durine spurred his horse into the soldier who, broadsword in his hands, was making for Morray. The horse ploughed into the Tsurani, knocking him down, while Durine leapt to the ground on the far side.
That was the