Grog II: Book 2 of the Ebon Blades Read online

  Grog II

  By RW Krpoun

  You can find my blog at: https://imadeitup.wordpress.com/blog/

  Dedicated to my wife Ann, and her brother ‘Brother’

  Copyright 2020 by Randall Krpoun

  All Right Reserved

  ISBN: 9798568413028

  Chapter One

  Burk was going on about the Red Guard. Again. Me, I would have preferred to practice in peace, but once Burk gets ahold of an idea there will be no silence until the topic is covered. Many things in my life have changed over the last few months, but Burk’s need to fill perfectly good silence with his thoughts hadn’t.

  While he rattled on I kept throwing javelins; I had reached the level of skill where I could throw hard and far, but not accurately. You don’t use missile weapons in the pit so both of us were coming to them as novices. We had learned the use of the crossbow already, but the crossbow was bulky and awkward, and both of us were looking for a suitable replacement. Violence being in my future was another thing that hadn’t changed, although the circumstances of the violence had.

  It didn’t help that we had been left to our own devices; our group had caught up with the Imperial party and accompanied it to Merrywine. The Imperial ‘party’ was huge, consisting of hundreds of people plus a full cohort of the Red Guard and another of regular Imperial infantry. I actually saw the Emperor once, at a distance of about three hundred yards, but otherwise it was just a slow trip.

  The Emperor had stayed briefly at Merrywine, which was becoming a pretty important supply point, and then set off to the northeast to command the Legions there. Before he left, Provine Sael met with him briefly, and our entire group was rewarded for our service; I don’t know what the others got, but Burk and I were appointed to the Red Guard, the Emperor’s personal guard. We would get half-pay for life, full pay if we ever actually served with the Guard. We now wore a leather bracer on our left forearms with the Guard crest upon it in order to show that we were Guardsmen on detached duty.

  Burk was delighted by this news; I liked it well enough, but it didn’t seem quite real to me. Plus the others vanished as soon as they got their rewards: Province Sael, whom we were supposed to be guarding, was closeted in the temple in Merrywine, Torl was out in the countryside hunting whatever there was to hunt (Tulg scouts by preference), and Hatcher and Hunter had vanished, leaving me and Burk to watch over the camp and entertain ourselves as best we could until Provine Sael called the group back together.

  There was no word as to how long it would be before Provine Sael found something for us to do, so we had applied ourselves to learning the use of javelins, sparring, exercising, and general waiting. Burk had devoted himself to the Guardsman’s Guide, the manual of the Red Guard, and I frequently thought about killing him.

  It had been an uncomfortable time so far: we were free to do what we wished, but that turned out to be less appealing than it sounded. Master Horne had kept us busy for our entire lives, and while we had some free time in the barracks, it was time that was clearly designated, and there were definite rules about what was and was not allowed. To be left with no other rules than ‘keep an eye on the camp’ was unsettling at best, and the situation did not improve with time.

  When I returned after gathering my javelins he was putting on his armor. “It’s almost time.”

  “All right.” I stowed the javelins in our cart and started buckling on my new breast-and-back, which I had purchased with some of my share of the money we had gotten from selling horses to the Imperial Army. “What should we do after?”

  He scowled. “I don’t know.”

  “I guess we could look for an escort job, like the old days.” Those ‘old days’ were only a couple months behind us, but often it seemed like forever.

  “But we have a job,” Burk ran a damp cloth over the toes of his boots to sharpen their shine. “Would it be proper to take other employment at the same time?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Especially since we’re getting paid by the Empire as Red Guardsmen, and by Provine Sael as bodyguards.”

  Our camp was outside the town walls as Merrywine’s population had doubled with the Imperial Army making it a supply point; our tents were inside the sentry lines of an Army supply dump so we didn’t have much actual guarding to do.

  We entered Merrywine through the southern gate; a few months ago we had served as auxiliaries to a mercenary band called the Barley Company and fought on the northern walls against an Ukar assault. It had been a good fight, hard and fast, and we both had tallied a goodly number of Ukar and reflected great credit upon the Ebon Blades, a proper barracks of the old school.

  The northern timber walls where we had fought had taken damage in the battle, and Imperial sappers were replacing them with stone walls.

  Inside the walls the streets were crowded; not many refugees had reached here from the Dusman invasion to the northeast, but there were still some left from the incursion we had defended against, and lots of people had come up from the south to try and make money off the war.

  Our destination was a street off the main market square; there, in a small open space between a carpenter’s shop and a tailor, an older Man, helped by a boy with a twisted leg, was setting up a puppet show.

  We had happened upon the show yesterday, and it had taken quite of bit of study to work out the purpose of the undertaking. As the man put the finishing touches to the stage, the boy limped through the crowd of children and apprentices which had gathered, gathering pennies; when he cautiously approached us, we each handed over a shilling.

  Then the pair ducked behind the dusty curtains of the stage, and the puppets came to life, executing all manner of complex discourse and intricate movements. Burk stood in his Noble Ukar stance, hands clasped in front of him so his Guard bracer showed (I was already thinking of it as his Guardsman’s Stance); I stood easy beside him, thumbs hooked in my belt.

  Neither of us were certain it was proper for High Rates of the Ebon Blades, a proper barracks of the old school, and Red Guardsmen besides, to be attending this sort of entertainment, so as a compromise we maintained a silent and professional countenance. That wasn’t that easy to do, as the show was both amazing and quite funny, but we managed.

  After a twenty-minute performance the lame boy limped around with the bowl, but the children and apprentices scattered quickly; Burk and I contributed another shilling each, and considered it money well-spent. We had plenty of money, and even more time on our hands.

  “So now what?” Burk muttered, glancing around the busy street. “It’s too early in the day to get ale.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Too bad there aren’t more puppet shows.”

  “That would be nice…why are they packing so fast?”

  I looked in the direction he was looking, and saw that the man and the lame boy were hastily dismantling the stage and packing it and their puppets and props into their handcart. “Maybe they have to get to another show. We could follow them, and see that one, too.”

  “Good idea.”

  The reason for their haste materialized before they were half done: a trio of grimy brutes in filthy undyed shapeless tunics and loose trousers, the uniform of field slaves everywhere. They weren’t wearing collars, although all three had a band of calluses on their necks from years of wearing iron bands.

  They swaggered up and stood between the half-dissembled stage and the cart. “Trying to dodge the street tax, puppet-man?” The speaker didn’t have the lower-jaw tusks, but his ears were spikey and at right angles to his skull. “You know we get half.” All three had stout lengths of wood thrust through the rope belts that held up their pants.

 
The puppet master stood with his head down, the lame boy hiding behind him. “There’s not much.”

  “Half of what you get is ours; we are the masters now, scum.” He spoke with the mouth-full-of-rocks slave patois: haf wad ya git de our’n; we masher now, scum. Master Horne had paid for a tutor to ensure that every Ebon Blade spoke clearly and properly, as that was sometimes mistaken for weakness and inspired a touch of over-confidence in our opponents.

  It was the boy: he was standing behind the puppet master, the pain on his face reflecting how it hurt him to see his master humbled. It brought me back to a time when I had had to enforce the Barrack’s displeasure on a red-haired shoemaker who had falsified his marker. His son had looked at me with that same look; Master Horne had let the shoemaker send the boy away, and the beating was professionally administered and well-deserved, but it still hadn’t sat well with me or Master Horne.

  I strode across the street to where the five stood by the handcart. “What is this?”

  “It’s none of your business, is what it is,” Spike-ears grinned at me. It nun ya bidness, that wat.

  I stand nearly seven feet tall, and I am much broader than a Man of equal height, not that I’ve met hardly any Men my height. I had started out my career in the pit as a pugilist, so when I throw a punch, it has both power and art. I hit him in the floating ribs, and Spike-ears slammed back into the handcart, which rolled a couple feet from the impact, dropping the ex-slave into the street.

  “I am a High Rate of the Ebon Blades, a proper barracks of the old school, and I do not tolerate disrespectful talk from field slaves,” I advised the two still standing. Each was six feet tall, but scrawny from heavy work on short rations, and both were wide-eyed at the sudden turn of events.

  Burk stepped up and pulled their clubs from their belts before grabbing Spike-ears by the scruff of the neck and jerking him to his feet. When looking at the pair of us Burk can appear short by comparison, but he is actually a couple inches over six feet tall and broad with muscle.

  “So: what is this?” I demanded of the wheezing Spike-ears.

  “We…collect …a…street-tax.”

  “Extortion,” Burk shook his head. Seeing my look, he explained. “They force the locals to pay or get hurt. I read that.”

  “Is that so?” I studied the three. The Emperor had just made a law that will free all slaves in eight years. Before the eight years is up any slave-owner who freed his slaves could deduct their value from his Imperial taxes. A lot of slaves had been freed already, and the number who had run away had increased drastically.

  “We’re free,” Spike-ears snarled. “Why do you care? His kind kept us in chains.”

  I glanced at the puppet master and his boy. “This ex…ex…this is no better than robbery. You’re lucky the Watch didn’t catch you.”

  “The Watch took heavy losses in the recent defense of the walls,” the puppet master noted humbly. “As did the garrison. They have a very small presence away from the wealthy residential district.”

  “Huh. Let’s have a look at your letters of manumission.” I was proud of that word; I had gotten it from my own letter.

  “We don’t need letters, the Emperor made us free,” Spike-ears was getting his breath back.

  Burk and I exchanged a glance. “Go about your business,” I advised the puppet master.

  “We enjoyed your show,” Burk added.

  “Thank you.” The man didn’t hesitate to resume packing.

  “This is our street,” Spike-ears muttered.

  “We’ve got eyes on us, but no one is being too open about it,” Burk advised, dropping into the mindset of an escort job.

  “So how is this ‘your’ street?” I asked Spike-ears, who spat into the gutter. I promptly knocked him sprawling. “When I ask a question, you answer, that is the rule, and you will mind your attitude.”

  Spike-ears hauled himself upright, glaring at his comrades, who were busy not looking at him or us. “We pay half to Broken Johnny,” he admitted. “He’s a big thing in this town, is Broken Johnny.”

  “So you’ve done this more than once? In broad daylight?”

  Spike-ears started to sneer, but caught himself. “It’s a tax: every day they do business, they pay.”

  I didn’t know what to say next, so I laid him out again to buy time. “What do you think?” I asked Burk.

  “It isn’t the way things should be done,” Burk rubbed his hairless chin, brow furrowed. “I don’t think we should stand for it.”

  “Exactly how should we not stand for it?”

  Burk thought on that for a moment, then bent down and hauled Spike-ears to his feet. “Where’s the money?”

  Spike ears dragged a pouch from inside his shirt and surrendered it. Burk shoved him into the nearest of the trio and looked in the pouch. “Huh.” He bounced it thoughtfully on the palm of his hand. “Ill-gotten gains.”

  “Criminal proceeds,” I agreed, having recently read that phrase.

  Burk gestured up the street. “All right, you three are going to give it back.”

  “WHA...” I was ready for that, and knocked Spike-ears flat before he could finish the word, following up with a good thumping for the other two as well.

  “It’s good to limber up,” I observed to Burk, who nodded as the three climbed to their feet.

  The people in the little shops did not know how to react as we marched the trio from business to business returning what had been ‘taxed’. The three were slow learners, and I had to administer several more beatings before we were through. Burk is deadly in a fight, but he never had much bare-handed training, so he was content to leave that chore to me. With his Standards I left him to the task of informing the shop people while I thought ahead to the next step.

  When the money-pouch was empty Burk tossed it aside. “Now what?”

  I was ready. “Now we help our fellow brutes find their way in the world; it can be confusing when you first get freedom.”

  “It’s only right. How do you plan to accomplish that?”

  “We get them jobs.”

  “We don’t want…” Spike-ears was a slow learner.

  The Legion recruit-master was a Centurion with five little brass spears sewn to his sleeve and a peg where his lower left leg should have been, a leather-faced, hard-eyed brute who looked like he drank vinegar by choice. “What you got here?” There was a faint slave patois twang to his speech, but his words were clear and proper.

  “Three new recruits.”

  “We don’t pay bounties anymore.”

  “We’re just helping some unfortunates find their way, brutes helping brutes,” I explained.

  “Hah.” He glanced at our Red Guard insignia. “Prolly runaway slaves.”

  “Many things are possible,” Burk nodded. “Still, they are eager to serve.”

  “We don’t want to enlist,” observed Spike-ear, who was still too mouthy despite being visibly battered.

  The Centurion beckoned to two Legionnaires in armor and armed with cudgels. “Get ‘em clean, fed, issued basic kit, and assigned a tent.”

  “I said…” Spike ears began, only to howl as the Centurion stomped his foot with the brass-tipped point of his peg, and then back-handed the ex-slave off his feet.

  “You two have something to say?” he demanded of the other two.

  Neither did.

  “We’re at war: the Dusmen are pushing south as we speak, and you are going to have the privilege of serving in the ranks of my beloved Legions for five years or until you are dead, whichever comes first. You will be trained, equipped, paid, and fed, and in return you will march and fight. If you do not prove to be worthy of service in the Legion, you will spend five years building roads and other useful tasks. You are currently more worthless than goat-dung, but when I am finished with you, you will be something approaching useful, and you will thank me for that. Until that time, you will speak only when told to speak, you will go only where you are told to go, and you will do only what y
ou are told to do. The Legion is fair: every recruit is equally worthless, whether they be Human or half-breed. Get moving.”

  As the trio were hustled off the Centurion turned back to us. “I hate runaway slaves; you have to beat them down a little further than free men.” He spat. “But I’ll make them into soldiers; I’ve made a lot of them into soldiers.”

  “It’s what they need,” Burk observed. “They were turning to crime.”

  “Sweat and a few beatings will cure them of any such ideas. The Legion has standards that must be met.”

  “Well, that was entertaining,” I observed, flexing my hands to settle my tactical gloves. “But it’s not even noon.”

  “Being free means a lot of empty time,” Burk nodded. We were back in town, heading towards the main square with no real purpose to our path. “We need something to do.”

  “Reading has not been a big help.” Burk was working his way through a book about the Empire when he wasn’t studying the Red Guard manual; I had purchased several books on war and military tactics, but was having slow going in the first one. Neither of us enjoyed reading much, but we both agreed that learning was important now that we were free.

  We walked around the square, looking at what people had for sale, very little of which was interesting, and even less was different from yesterday.

  “I suppose we could go back and work with javelins again,” Burk sighed as we completed our survey of the sights the square had to offer.

  “I guess.” The rest of the day stretched ahead of me like an empty plate. “I wish they had a pit here, we could get in a few matches.”

  “That would be good,” Burk nodded.

  “There you are.”

  We turned to the speaker, who was an unshaven Man with long greasy black hair shot through with gray, a stained bandage wound across his entire head, centered on a nose which seemed to make a smaller bulge under the dirty cotton than it ought to. He was wearing a fancy tunic and leggings, and had a ‘cat- gutter’ style sword at his hip. A pair of street toughs trailed him, mean-faced Men armed with swords and truncheons.