Captain's Fury (Page 45)

Tavi sat quietly. It was worse, this calm delivery of fact, than any of Arnos’s previous sneers and glowers. He bowed his head before it, the way a man might when faced with the inevitable cold of winter’s first wind.

"You are already dead," Arnos said. "Dead enough to be of no more use to your patron. Dead enough to be no more threat to me." He glanced away from Tavi as if he was suddenly no longer significant enough to notice. "You’re dead, Scipio. It is over."

The wind coach tilted as it began to descend, back to the Guard-occupied walls of Othos.

"From here," Arnos said, "we can proceed in an agreeable, civilized manner-or we can do it the hard way. May I take it that you will cooperate? It will make things much easier upon your men."

Tavi didn’t look up. He simply said, "Very well."

"You see, Navaris?" Arnos murmured. "He can be reasoned with."

Tavi sat quietly and left his head bowed.

It made it easier to conceal the smile.

The coach landed in the Othos town square, now standing empty of anyone but legionares of the Guard. As Tavi watched, a full century of legionares rushed out to form up in ranks facing the coach-a personal retinue, like his own perennially proximate gang of Marat riders, if somewhat more numerous. The legionares snapped to attention as a valet hurried out to open the door of the wind coach.

Tavi and the two large singulares exited first. The two men stood on either side of him. At one point in his life, he mused, the presence of such large men so obviously skilled in the arts of violence would have intimidated him quite effectively. Given, however, that the taller of the pair still came half a hand short of Tavi’s height, and given both his training and his more recent but mounting knowledge of furycraft, the most that they managed to do was elevate themselves in his thinking to the first targets he would need to deal with, should the situation devolve.

When Arnos emerged from the coach, flanked by his other singulares, Tavi fell into pace beside him. His escorts were taken off guard by the confident motion, and wound up trailing him by a step, more like attendants than anything else.

"Senator," Tavi murmured, nodding with a polite smile to the centurion of Arnos’s personal guard. "It occurs to me that a certain amount of reciprocity might be called for."

Arnos glared up at him for a moment, and Tavi imagined the man torn between continuing the amicable facade and ordering his singulares to beat him senseless. "You’re in no position to demand anything."

"Nor do I make any demands," Tavi replied. "I simply wish to point out that you are quite correct. I’m beaten and politically dead."

Arnos stared at him as they mounted the stairs to the house he’d claimed, and his eyes narrowed in suspicion. "You have some point?"

"The people of Othos," Tavi replied, arching a brow at Arnos. "You have what you want. There’s no need to carry through with the executions now."

"Oh, I don’t know," Arnos said, his tone conversational. "Setting an early example might well smooth things down the road. I should think the fate of Othos would do a great deal to inspire the folk of other villages to be more active in their resistance of the enemy."

"Or inspire them to turn their hands against you."

Arnos shrugged. "Freemen out here have little in the way of capability to do our forces any harm. They are virtually without furycraft." Arnos gave Tavi a chill little smile. "Imagine what that would be like. Scipio."

Tavi regarded the man steadily for a long moment. Tavi’s assignment to the First Aleran as a Cursor and spy for the Crown had never been intended to go on for so long. A lot of people had seen his face in the capital, and sooner or later someone must have twigged to the identical facial features of Rufus Scipio and Tavi of Calderon.

Arnos was Lady Aquitaine’s creature. Offhand, he couldn’t think of anyone else with both enough intelligence resources to obtain the information, and motivation to share that fact with Arnos. It was an educated guess, but Tavi felt fairly confident of it.

For the immediate future, though, it hardly mattered where Arnos had gotten the information-it only mattered that he did have it, and therefore knew that he could strike at Tavi’s patron by visiting harm on Tavi. "You’ve gotten what you wanted. Those people have done you no harm, Senator."

"Nor given any help. I owe them nothing."

"And that’s reason enough for you to murder them?"

Arnos shook his head once. "This is a war. The innocent die. They are killed by battles, caught in fires, they starve, they grow sick. It is unavoidable. No commander worth the rank lets his mind be distracted by such things."

"Ah," Tavi murmured. "Quite distracting, humanity."

Arnos let out a bark of laughter. "Please. Your heart bleeds no more than mine does. How many tears did you shed for the officers over you who died when you took command, hmm? How many men did you order to their deaths? How many bodies of the innocent have you seen during your stay here-and how long has it been since the sight of them made your gorge rise?"

Sudden, red rage flashed through Tavi at Arnos’s words, but he suppressed it savagely. It was a near thing. Two years in the field had killed hundreds of the men he commanded and exposed him to depths of suffering he could never have imagined only a few years before.

"You are the same sort of creature I am, Scipio, or Tavi of Calderon, or whoever you imagine yourself to be. You simply serve a different master."

Tavi frowned at the man steadily. Amos was unruffled and, unless Tavi was mistaken, he was entirely sincere.

How could any sane person be so callous? The lives Arnos directly destroyed would not be the only blood on his hands. The repercussions would be shattering. Disease would run rampant. Children would be orphaned. Stead-holts would be decimated, their harvests stifled for lack of labor. The shortage of food would drive men into brigandage and murder. Other men would kill for vengeance, while the women and children, as in all wars, suffered the most. The furies in the area, thrown out of balance by all the deaths of those wielding them, would devolve and go feral, causing even more problems and endangering anyone who crossed their paths.

Tavi had seen it on a much smaller scale around towns and villages engulfed by the war. It was a nightmare. If Arnos continued this way, the first snows of winter would fall upon a land of death and decay presided over by fat, croaking crows.

How could the man even conceive such a thing?

Tavi blinked. The answer was simple.

He didn’t know.