The Incorruptibles

by John Hornor Jacobs

Genres: Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

In the contested and unexplored territories at the edge of the Empire, a boat is making its laborious way upstream. Riding along the banks are the mercenaries hired to protect it—from raiders, bandits and, most of all, the stretchers, elf-like natives who kill any intruders into their territory. The mercenaries know this is dangerous, deadly work. But it is what they do.

In the boat the drunk governor of the territories and his sons and daughters make merry. They believe that their status makes them untouchable. They are wrong. And with them is a mysterious, beautiful young woman, who is the key to peace between warring nations and survival for the Empire.

When a callow mercenary saves the life of the Governor on an ill-fated hunting party, the two groups are thrown together. For Fisk and Shoe—two tough, honourable mercenaries surrounded by corruption, who know they can always and only rely on each other—their young companion appears to be playing with fire. The nobles have the power, and crossing them is always risky. And although love is a wonderful thing, sometimes the best decision is to walk away. Because no matter how untouchable or deadly you may be, the stretchers have other plans.

Release date: August 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

ONE

We rode through fields burning like the plains of Hell – Fisk on the black, Banty on the roan bay, and me on Bess, the mule, leading a string of ponies. We came up from the delta and the lush watershed of the Big Rill through the edge of the farmlands. Settlers worked the fields, shovels in hand, throwing dirt on fallow fires. The farmhands looked lean and scrappy; poor folk, eking a living off the land.

‘The praefect orders another hunting expedition, they’ll be floating his body back to New Damnation,’ Banty said, low and through his teeth.

Fisk sniffed, glanced at the smoke billowing above us and then back out over the Big Rill’s sun-hammered silver. No one moves the way Fisk does. Slow and deliberate, each gesture languid and relaxed. Until it isn’t.

The Cornelian churned the wide waters of the Big Rill, brag-rags whipping in the wind, steaming upriver, while we kept pace. Fisk and I had picked up the escort contract from Marcellus out of New Damnation, but the proconsul’s tribune had saddled us with Banty, the greenhorn, who was good for nothing, except big talk and no action. The tribune wasn’t a bad fellow, but even good folks make mistakes.

Fisk watched the Cornelian, the sky, the land. He remained still but his gaze never stopped roving, his grey eyes bleached by sun and years in the elements. We’d been partners for the last decade and I still didn’t know anything about the man, other than scraps and pieces. Had a family once. Could shoot out the eye of a sparrow on the wing. Feared no man or vaettir. There would be no rest for Fisk until the stretchers were gone from the earth. He hated them with a passion wronged men reserve for gods, dangerous women, and whiskey.

Head-count conscripts milled about on the boat’s galleries, staring out into the West, no doubt scanning the horizon for stretchers, terrified. Up on the top deck, in the shadow of the pilot’s roost, stood an umbrella sheltering patrician women. The stacks, daemon-fired, blew ash and cinder skyward as if answering the flames of the fields.

Fire calls to fire, they say. I believe that.

From where I sat on Bess, I watched the other scouts – Sharbo, Ellis, and Jimson – riding the western shore, stirrup-high in fallow growth. No farms that side of the river, so close to the mountains. Stretchers come down, raiding.

Fisk said, slowly, ‘How d’ya come to figure that, Mr Bantam?’

Banty put a hand on his pistol, a Hellfire six-gun with imp rounds. Sure to sully his soul, but deadly.

‘I’ll kill him.’

Fisk glanced at the young man, taking in the rumpled uniform, the tight grip on his pistol.

‘You might be stupid enough, at that.’

I laughed at the pup’s posturing and watched as his face went through a series of expressions, from shame to embarrassment. Maybe some anger in there as well. When they’re as young and full of juice as Banty, you never know which way they’ll jump.

At the sound of my laughter, Bess showed gum and green teeth and turned her head to nip at my leg, but I swatted her with my hat. There isn’t anyone, anything, any animal, like Bess. Stout, indomitable, with feet that never slip, not on mountain trail or riverbed. She was the lead mule, the fountainhead, immovable and cantankerous and full of mirth. Behind us followed the string of ponies, bays and roans, dappled and skewbald. None would challenge her lead.

Except maybe Fisk’s black. That bitch was fierce.

Then Banty laughed too, barking a forced, childish sound, and said, ‘I almost had you there, Fisk.’

He was quiet, my partner, holding the black’s reins lightly in his big, rawboned hands. He watched the sky to the east of us, up high in the heavens, as turkey buzzards circled slowly above the plains.

He didn’t even turn when he said to Banty, ‘That’s right.’ He slowed the black and took a Medieran cigarette from his vest pocket. ‘You almost had me, Mr Bantam.’

There wasn’t any warmth in Fisk’s voice. But there was never any warmth in it, except maybe when he cooed to his horse and nuzzled the beast’s canescent neck, or rubbed down her flanks. She was a bitch and a brute, but his and his alone and valuable. Never could understand why he didn’t name her.

Banty kept talking. ‘He’s a devil for the hunt, Cornelius is. When we hit that thicket of quail, Fisk, you shoulda seen the look on his face. Like Ia’d done forgave him all his sins and he’d gone straight to Heaven.’

Fisk’s expression hardened. He wouldn’t shoot the boy, not now, not for foolishness alone. But Fisk’s a killer, natural born. I didn’t know much about the man after a decade, but I knew that much. With every bit of idiocy issuing from Banty’s mouth, he put his life in jeopardy.

Banty slapped his knee and laughed again. ‘Nice gun he’s got, though, ain’t he?’

‘It’s a nice piece,’ I said. ‘Real nice.’

‘Now that you’re with us, maybe things’ll be different,’ Banty said.

‘Possible,’ said Fisk. ‘Contract is to escort the Cornelian and to scout the territories she’ll be passing through. Doesn’t say nothing about hunting.’

Fisk had joined us at the confluence of the Big Rill and the Snake. He’d been south in Harbor Town to restock his ammunition from an engineer there. I don’t have no truck with engineers, for fear of the final disposition of my eternal soul, Ia help me, but Fisk and Banty – and it seems like every other able bodied man in the Hardscrabble Territories – does. Which means I have to be polite, and small, and humble as a saint. Show no aggression or some pistolero will give me extra breathing holes, which ain’t high on my list of priorities. Hellfire pistols – their upkeep and ammunition – are expensive, and men who’re moneyed well enough to afford them are usually prickly in their honor, or the appearance of it.

But I keep various sharp, pointy metal things on my person, and I’m good with a blade, and I can bring down a running rabbit at fifty feet with a sling. But there aren’t enough good deeds in the world that can counter-balance the taint you do your soul once you pick up a Hellfire pistol. Each bullet takes a bit of you with it.

Fisk thumbed a match into fire and lit his cigarette, which smelled of spice and brimstone and brown ladies on a tropical shore. Smoke is a vice that sullies your body, not your soul, so I’m not finnicky about it and enjoy a puff every now and then myself, Ia forgive me.

‘He’s highborn. A senator, with proconsular imperium. That’s big. And acting governor of the Territories, so I’ll remind you to watch yourself. But, it’s true, he’s mad for the hunt,’ I said. ‘With his cohort behind him, if he wants to hunt, he’ll hunt.’

Fisk did this thing with his eyebrow as he looked at me. Hard to tell what the man was thinking, other than he was thinking.

He turned the black to the east and rode out a fair distance.

‘There’s his private engineer to think about,’ Fisk said over his shoulder. He took a long draw off the cigarette, held it, and expelled the smoke that whisked away on the breeze. He spat loose tobacco into the dry grasses at his feet. ‘Shoestring?’

‘Yeah?’ I answered.

‘Believe I’ll outride a bit. Take a gander there.’ He nodded at the pinwheel of turkey buzzards, hanging in the sky like dead cinders on the wind.

‘Huh. Might be something. Might be just a lame shoal auroch.’

He nodded again and pulled his hat tighter on his head. Everything about him was weathered. The grey hat, the faded riding leathers and vest, his gunbelt.

He squinted at me and said, ‘There’s stretchers about.’ And then he looked back to the grey-washed plain. ‘I’ll catch up with you,’ he added, and rode off. We watched him go, up the far rise, over the slope and into the east where the buzzards wheeled under a big sky.

‘What’s stuck in his craw?’ Banty asked. Always talking, that one.

‘He’s just hard.’

‘There’s always hard men. Garrison’s full of them.’

‘Yep. You’re right there.’ I touched my forehead, my lips, my heart. ‘Ia save us from hard men.’

‘You believe that shit?’

‘Yes. Matter of fact, I do.’

Banty grinned then, and placed his hand on his six-gun. ‘Can’t deny you Ia. But if he gives a shit about us, he sure is doing a good job hiding his concern.’

Just a boy, playing at being a man. There’s nothing to do in the company of the faithless. Or the addle-brained. ‘Ia will keep us from hard men, stretchers, shoal beasties, and daemon-born. Never you worry.’

‘I’ll give you a full gold denarius if you can tell me how.’

‘Ia sends us our own hard men.’

Banty looked puzzled; then his expression clouded as he looked after Fisk.

We’d come out of the farmlands, into the dry flat plains before the foothills of the White Mountains, a wide expanse of wind-whipped shallow hillocks wreathed in grass. The Cornelian churned the waters, silvering its wake, while lascars in johnboats paddled ahead to plumb depth and search for rocky shoals and sandbars. The Big Rill was wide here, and shallow. The boat’s daemon-fired engine pumped a tilted column of ash and smoke into the brittle sky, and gunfire, like the crackle of cooking pig fat, echoed across the open spaces. The Senator was shooting again.

Ignoring that Banty had opened his mouth to speak, I threw him the ponies’ lead rein.

‘Watch for the skewbald mare. She balks at streams.’

I turned Bess to the east and followed Fisk.

TWO

He didn’t look at me when I brought Bess abreast his black, though she chucked her head and nickered and tried to pull ahead.

‘Thought I might tag along.’

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the buzzards.

It’s a big country, and the vast expanse of it calls for silence, at least from humankind, though I’m not quite human. Got enough dvergar blood for folks in New Damnation or Passasuego to look at me twice. To rough me up maybe, spit on me, if they’ve a mind to. Lynch me if I look funny at their women. Might be different if I carried Hellfire with me, if I was willing to tarnish that immortal part of me, but I won’t do that. Not for pride, or station. Not for rudeness.

Fire calls to fire.

Fisk seemed to sense what I was thinking because he tugged his carbine out of the long holster on the black’s flank and began feeding imps into it. He popped each one off his belt, thumbed the intricate wards to make sure of the round’s integrity, and slipped it into the chamber. The silver of the bullets was tarnished and black, but the warding was bright where it caught the light. When Fisk was done, he levered the action and unloaded and reloaded his pistol.

We rode, trotting through the long plains grasses. After an hour or so, we came upon a tangle of scrub brush and fragrant but stunted sumac trees. Fisk dismounted, and I followed suit.

He gave the black a small nosebag of oats, and I let Bess forage the sumac berries. She’s sure got an iron belly. Found her chomping brambles once, and I had to tug her away.

I tossed Fisk a hunk of jerked auroch tongue and some hardtack, and we both ate a little underneath the unbroken sky, watching those damned turkey buzzards circle and bank.

‘There’s something dead there, I think,’ he said.

I didn’t argue. ‘Most likely a lame calf or cow.’

‘Seems like.’

He dropped the hobble rein, pulled the carbine, and looked at me expectantly. ‘We walk the rest of the way?’

‘Yep.’

We strolled under the big sky, up a shallow rise, through the long shoal grass. Occasionally Fisk slowed and let me catch up, but before we reached the peak and could look down on the carnage there he’d broken into a run – a big ungainly lope, his spurs jangling with each footfall, his arms pumping even with the carbine clutched in his fist.

Fifteen or twenty of the shoal auroch sprawled in a disarray of lumps on the plain; woolly little hillocks. But that’s wasn’t what Fisk ran to. When I caught up, I saw the remains of the settlers.

At our approach, the buzzards erupted in a flurry of black wings and a stench of blood. But the corpses were pretty fresh. Probably no more than a day old. Hours maybe. The carrionfowl had only had time to take their eyes, lips, and other soft bits.

There was a boy, no more than eleven, a shattered rifle in his lap, an arrow through his throat, whose shocked, eyeless face was turned to the low, gunmetal grey clouds. There was a man, nearby, leaning against the carcass of an auroch, his mouth gaping wide in a frozen scream, his stomach split open. Wasn’t until I got closer that I saw he was holding his own tongue and liver.

Fisk hissed air through his teeth. ‘And this one.’

A man, spread-eagled over an auroch, his back flayed open.

He pointed. ‘They took his backstraps.’

Stretchers are many things, but I’d never heard of them eating a man. At least I’d never imagined they would. The man was skinny, though. Not much tenderloin on him.

‘Buzzards probably snatched up the straps. There’s a bloody mark on the ground over here.’

Fisk remained silent, his grey eyes scanning the bodies. There was a tenseness about him. At times like these I felt there was some doom waiting for us just beyond the next hill, and nothing Ia or the old gods or Hellfire pistols and daemonlore could do about it.

Still get that feeling, sometimes. There ain’t no bottom to the well.

Fisk squatted on his hams by the boy, looking at him, maybe trying to fix his image into memory, or maybe trying to get an idea of how the boy might have looked before he died, putting the puzzle of his face back together to honour him.

He reached out and snapped off the end of the arrow with the fletching.

‘It was Berith, I think.’

‘Who?’

‘That big red son of a whore.’

He turned the arrow in his hands, ruffled the feathers that’d been daubed with paint in a triangular pattern.

‘What, the stretcher from Broken Tooth last year? That his name?’

‘No. Just what I call him. Nobody understands their Ia-damned gibberish anyway.’

‘I’m curious. Why Berith?’

‘Just seemed like the sort of name a murderous arsehole would have.’ He stuffed the arrow haft in his belt. ‘And there was a big red-haired tussler at Fort Verrier by that name. This stuff reminds me of that son of a bitch.’

The sun broke through the cloud cover, sending a bright column of slanted light sweeping across the carnage. Fisk stood upright and raised his rifle.

The creature on the rise seemed to have just coalesced out of air, or risen up from the earth, a thing of dirt and grass, wind and sky, and the blood of settlers. He stood there, impossibly tall, long red hair whipping in the wind. All pointy ears and sharpened teeth. Vaettir.

Everything was silent but I could tell he laughed at us. And when he moved, it was a blur so damned fast I recognised an arrow in the air before even registering that the stretcher had moved. The first arrow stuck out of Fisk’s thigh, and then another drove into the ground at his feet. A figure appearing beside the vaettir Fisk called Berith, also impossibly tall, cradled something over his shoulder.

Even with the pierced leg, Fisk didn’t fall. He had the carbine up and firing.

The gun belched Hellfire, and there was a boom as the daemon was released inside the chamber, behind the bullet. In the half-lit, grey world of the plains, the muzzle-fire left an after-image of a winged horror, expanding and rising, loosed into the world. An imp.

You can’t hear their screams of joy at freedom, the imps, but you can feel them, and every shot tears at the air, beats at your ears and exposed skin – as damaging as lying in the too-hot sun. It’s an invisible pressure. The pressure of damnation.

And Fisk loosed them. If the stretchers were fast, Fisk was their equal, like light moving across water even while arrow-struck. One shot after another, he levered the rounds, his hands moving blindingly fast.

He stopped firing only when it was clear they were gone. Disappeared into the grasses, subsumed by sky, eaten by earth. Who knows how they move? They appear and disappear. They’re beyond man. Beyond dvergar.

‘Ia-damn. Ia-damn.’ He said it over and over. He was pale then, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the arrow wound or the after-effects of gunwork. I’d felt each of those rounds as they loosed. I didn’t like to imagine their effect on him. ‘Got to follow …’

‘No, you’re struck.’

‘You see that other one?’ Fisk tried to push me away. ‘Carrying something. Maybe a settler. Ia dammit, he took a settler.’

‘Nothing you can do about it. Here.’ I grabbed his arm and laid him down. He still clutched the carbine. No telling how many bullets were left or how much damage he’d done his immortal soul.

There wasn’t much blood coming from his leg, so it didn’t look as if he was going to expire from blood loss.

‘We gotta get back to the Cornelian. We’ll get this out.’

He groaned, pushed himself up off the ground and hobbled west, toward the White Mountains and our horses.

He stopped and turned to me. ‘Don’t let all this auroch meat go to waste, Shoestring.’

Opening my oiled satchel and withdrawing my longknife, I went to the nearest auroch, still warm to the touch. I took its tongue and liver and, moving to the next animal did the same. I harvested the carcasses until my satchel was full of meat, bloody, still warm.

Then I jogged to catch up with Fisk, the eyes and breath of the plains upon me.

THREE

Banty was wet and miserable by the time we returned to the Cornelian and the gurgling waters of the Big Rill.

The leaden clouds had opened up, the sun slipped behind the mountains, and the land was dark and rainswept.

Banty’d managed to start a fire and set up a lean-to in the lee of a bank break. The ponies, still tethered together, stood stamping and steaming on the sand. A johnboat lay on the shore, while a legionary and two lascars moved among the ponies with a feedbag.

We came into the firelight and Cimbri, the legion prefect, raised his whiskered head. He wore his oiled greatcloak and uniform. His phalerae from old campaigns, those brass and golden gilt plates indicating his rank and accomplishments, peeked from the open flaps of his coat – small, but conspicuous, and absolutely necessary to enforce his command, given his low birth. Cimbri’s wide-brimmed hat bore the crossed spears – two pila – of the classic Ruman legionary of old, before Hellfire and artillery had been introduced. A bragging stick was jammed into his belt alongside his six-guns and longknife. Cimbri looked as irritated as Banty looked miserable.

‘There you are, dwarf. Where’s the pistolero?’

By then I was leading Fisk’s black, who kept tugging at the reins and pulling away until I had to hobble her front legs. Fisk was awake, but he’d gone into some kind of muttering dream while his leg oozed blood. I keep a flask of cacique on my person for medicinal purposes – solely medicinal, on my honour. He had drained it the moment I’d handed it to him.

Cimbri noticed Fisk, slumped on the black, and raised his eyebrows.

‘Trouble?’

I hopped off Bess, and moved to help Fisk down. Cimbri stood up, kicked at Banty, and said, ‘Fool. Go help.’

We got Fisk under the lean-to and I retrieved the whiskey from the packhorse that carried what Bess wouldn’t. Fisk was delirious, almost insensible, but not quite far enough gone not to take a swallow. A man’s got to be pretty far gone not to swallow when whiskey is at hand.

I gathered up my barber’s bag, scissors and clean linens, pliers and hacksaws, and spread out them out on a scrap of clean canvas. I split Fisk’s britches from cuff to crotch and pulled the flaps out of the way. There was blood, but not too much of it, and it was doubtful he’d lose the leg. For a man doomed to perdition’s flames, he had been granted luck by Ia, that’s for damned sure.

A good amount of whiskey went into Fisk, and Cimbri and I both took long pulls from the bottle before I drenched his wound in liquor and pulled free the arrow shaft. He didn’t yelp or make a sound, but his eyes were open, looking straight into my face. It wasn’t an empty stare, but it wasn’t altogether with us, either. His body jumped some when the shaft cleared flesh. I followed the removal with another dousing of liquor, and wrapped his thigh in clean linens.

‘Those’ll have to be changed in the morning,’ Cimbri said. ‘You want to bring him to the Cornelian? We can have Miss Livia look after him. She’s schooled in bloodwork.’

‘Let’s just let him settle here before we get a highborn woman involved. Leave us a lascar and Banty.’

Cimbri nodded. ‘I’ll send back the lascar. Report?’

‘Stretchers.’

‘I figured that.’

‘Murdered a group of settlers just about an hour distant. Took one of them to Ia knows where.’

Cimbri glanced at Banty. ‘Take care of their mounts. Groom them, then half nosebags, each.’

Banty scowled, stood up, saluted. ‘Sir, yes, sir.’

He waited until Banty had reached the horses before saying, ‘That boy is a nuisance, and I’m sorry I saddled you with him. But he’s the youngest son of a rich equite out of Harbor Town. It’s my job to keep him out of trouble, and alive.’

‘Might want to keep him on the boat, then, rather than riding scout in stretcher territory.’

‘Hell, if he stayed on the boat, one of my legionaries would split him wide open in a matter of days.’ He laughed and tilted his head toward the whiskey bottle. ‘And the only thing he knows how to do is ride. And sulk.’

I gave him the bottle and dug around in Fisk’s vest pockets until I located the tin of Medieran cigarettes. Cimbri and I shared them sitting by the fire.

‘There’s more.’

‘What? The vaettir?’

‘They left a dead boy alone, but they took a man’s liver and tongue, and the backstraps of another settler.’

‘Ia be. That’s some gruesome shit. Why?’

‘Can’t be ’cause they give two damns about the shoal aurochs, I know that much. I’ve seen where they slaughtered thousands of the beasts, back when we were pushing west out of Fort Brust, nigh on a century past.’

Cimbri raised his eyebrows at that and looked me over. He knew my dvergar blood, but it was rare we talked about the differences between us.

He considered me for a while, smoking his cigarette. ‘So, why now?’

‘No idea. Fisk might know – he’s so damned wrapped up with them. Think they killed his family. Whatever the case, they’re getting more active. On the warpath.’

There was a groan. A cough. ‘Bullshit.’

We looked back at Fisk, who was struggling upright. I clasped his hand and pulled him up.

He grabbed the whiskey, took a long pull, and then patted his vest.

‘Ia-dammit, Shoestring. Gimme my smokes.’

I handed them over. He took out one and tamped down the loose tobacco on his wrist, very slow and deliberate, like he was drawing out his audience. Or it might have been that I’d dumped half a bottle of whiskey into him. And the cacique.

‘Was a message.’

Cimbri snorted. ‘They smart enough to deliver messages?’

Fisk nodded. ‘Hell, yeah, they are. Smart as you. Or me.’

‘That ain’t saying much,’ Cimbri replied.

Banty joined in. ‘I hear tell they’ve got a vaettir whore at Pauline’s in New Damnation.’ We hadn’t seen him come back, and now the pup’s voice was loud and eager. ‘Heard she’s got the sweetest pussy known to man, but they gotta keep her bound.’

Cimbri snorted. But he didn’t send the boy away.

Fisk lit his smoke from the fire and drank more whiskey. I hated it when the man went dissolute, but I imagine his leg hurt something fierce. ‘Just what I heard,’ Banty said. ‘Cornelius himself was smitten with her.’

Cimbri raised a hand as if to cuff him. Then stopped and lowered his hand. ‘Mr Bantam.’ His whiskers quivered with outrage. ‘You don’t talk about our charge in that manner.’

Banty ducked his head and covered his ears.

I felt a tad sorry for the boy, so ungainly and over-eager. A damned deadly pup with a Hellfire pistol. I said, ‘I heard the same thing too, but that’s just camp talk. If there was someone they were touting as stretcher pussy, must’ve been a tall whore they tricked out to look vaettir, but she weren’t no vaettir.’

‘How could you know that?’

‘Don’t argue with him, boy, green as you are,’ Cimbri said.

‘Just want to know how he could know that.’

Fisk shifted and stirred the fire with a branch, his leg sticking out at an angle. ‘Ain’t no vaettir woman gonna allow herself to be touched, not to mention fucked, by some Ruman. Highborn or not.’

‘How do you know t. . .