Bastion Read online

  And all I’ve done for want of wit

  To mem’ry now I can’t recall

  So fill to me the parting glass

  Good night and joy be with you all.”

  Half melancholy, half celebration, Lita and Lena slowly played and sang this song that Mags had heard before, at one of Master Soren’s Midwinter celebrations. It appeared to be new to the locals, but Mags knew it was very old indeed; he’d been told it might go all the way back to the founding of the Kingdom. And as Mags happened to glance over at Jakyr, he could have sworn he saw a tear in the Herald’s eye.

  But if he had, by the time the applause died down, it had been surreptitiously wiped away.

  Lita and Lena strolled back to the table with their arms full of instruments, pausing frequently to say something to each of the people who stopped them to thank them for their performances. “Not bad for a greenie and a rusty old bag,” Lita said with some satisfaction when they finally got back to the others. “Not bad at all.”

  “If you can repeat that at will, I’ll have no problem getting cooperation,” Jakyr said dryly. “I expect you are going to be quite useful.” Mags couldn’t tell if he was being sincere, or trying for irony—or just hoping to spark annoyance in the Bard.

  Lita only raised one eyebrow at the backhanded compliment, then yawned ostentatiously. “That’s harder than driving,” she said. “I’m for bed.”

  “Us too,” Bear said, as Lena and Amily nodded.

  Lita headed for the rooms before Jakyr could say anything more, with the others following. Mags got up, then paused, and glanced inquiringly at Jakyr.

  “I’ll just have a beer, then be along,” the Herald said, his face unreadable again.

  Mags nodded. He took the side of the bed farthest from the door and left a rushlight burning.

  But he was hard asleep in moments and never heard nor felt Jakyr join him.

  8

  The remaining three days were identical to the last. The sky remained threatening, the air damply cold, and yet (thank the gods) there was no inclement weather. Lita and Jakyr did verbally snipe at one another, but they confined their acerbic comments to a couple of barbs in the morning, when they all rode out, and the evening, before everyone retired. Their stays at inns were also nearly identical to the first: decent, wholesome food and drink, standoffish silence from the locals until Lita and Lena played. Then there was a kind of reticent welcome. Once they shared a room with three beds in it. Once they all had cots in a room with a dozen lined up like a common barracks.

  The local folk, with the exception of the innkeepers and staff, seemed to regard them with guarded wariness, as if at any point they might all do something unsociable. It wasn’t strong enough to be called “dislike” and it certainly wasn’t overt hostility, but it was as if the locals mistrusted them. Except for Lita and Lena. Mags would have thought that this was because the two Bards were females, but they regarded Amily with the same wariness.

  “At least,” Jakyr commented, when Mags ventured something about it, “thanks to the Bards, we aren’t likely to be murdered in our beds.”

  “Does that happen often?” Mags asked with alarm.

  Jakyr shrugged. “I have never heard of it happening to Heralds or Bards, and I picked these inns on the best recommendations, but, yes, it does happen to travelers who might not be missed. Usually traders alone, with enough goods to make them worth murdering.”

  That didn’t make for an easy rest that night.

  Finally, on the third day, Jakyr brought them not to an inn but to a Guardpost. Like all such Posts it was a walled compound right off the road for easy travel. Very conspicuous even at a distance, since the trees had been cleared around it to prevent possible hostiles from using trees to get in over the walls, there were three plumes of smoke arising from three substantial chimneys, one at each end of the big building and one in the middle.

  Mags was very glad to see it, as the unmistakable timber walls loomed up in the distance. Finally there would be some faces that were friendly from the moment they rode up! It would be a blessed relief from the closed-in wariness of the locals. Even the scent of the chimney smoke on the air was a harbinger of comfort, part woodsmoke, part cooking food.

  And so it proved. From the moment they first came within view of the walls and the sentries got sight of the Companions, the distant figures waved a welcome. The Guardsmen on duty hailed them from the top of the walls as soon as they came within shouting distance, and by the time they entered the gates around the walled compound, there were several dozen welcomers waiting for them. There were plenty of eager hands waiting to take their packs, take the caravan around to the stabling area, and see to the Companions. Here, Mags had no fears about letting someone else tend to Dallen. Guardsmen knew very well what Companions were and spoiled them like favored children. Dallen winked at his Chosen as he followed three of the uniformed Guard around back to the stables.

  :Don’t eat yourself sick!: Mags cautioned, knowing that the Guardsmen were going to press sweet things on both of the Companions, probably more than they should ever eat at one time.

  :Me? Never!: Dallen said in mock indignation, flagging his tail as he pranced out of sight.

  The rest of the party was escorted to the main entrance. The building within the walls was two stories tall. All the windows could be shuttered and barred from within, and Mags knew that the shutters themselves were reinforced with metal plates, while the drop-down bars were solid steel. The exterior walls were stone, unusual in this area where most buildings were made of timber. Even the roof was of slates. Anyone who actually got into the compound would be unable to set fire to this building from the outside.

  Yet there was nothing foreboding about the structure; on the contrary, it looked very much like a comfortable manor.

  The main door, like the shutters, was sheathed in metal. Good luck taking it down with a battering ram.

  “You lot go find some beds. I’ll be with you, Mags, shortly,” Jakyr said, as they passed through the door, and went off on his own. Mags followed the Guard who had appointed himself as their guide to the guest quarters. The rest followed him.

  The guest quarters were upstairs, where the barrack rooms were, all by themselves in the center of the building and surrounded by the officers’ quarters. They comprised a block of rooms about the size of a highborn’s closet, ascetic but comfortable enough, on either side of a corridor that also served as an armory. But once he had picked one of the tiny rooms for himself, he left his pack on the bed and went looking for Jakyr; he ran into him in the hall. Jakyr was already looking for him.

  “Ah, good. We’re going to go meet with the Quartermaster and then with the fellow who’ll guide us to The Bastion, who also happens to be the one who oversaw storing supplies out there. Come along.” Jakyr headed off down the hall at a fast walk without bothering to look back to see if Mags was following; Mags made haste to keep up with him.

  All Guardposts were laid out on the same plan, so it was no problem to find the Quartermaster’s office. It was directly downstairs and in the same general position that the guest quarters were, which was (not at all coincidentally) near the central chimney. When a job requires that one have fingers that are not stiff with cold, it makes sense to put him near the chimney. On the other side of the chimney wall was the kitchen hearth and the ovens . . . which might make things uncomfortable in summer, except that in summer most of the long cooking moved out of doors to big ovens in the yard.

  This particular Quartermaster clearly had a passion for neatness. Every accounting book was lined up in military fashion in bookcases; every paper was squared up on the desk. The office was no bigger than one of the guest rooms upstairs, but it managed to seem uncrowded because of that very neatness.

  That worthy had been expecting them, knew what they needed before they even asked for it, and wordlessly handed over a small sheaf of papers before introducing them to a Guard Sergeant, who was likewise waiting patiently in the t
iny office.

  “This is Sergeant Milles,” the Quartermaster said, with the air of a man who didn’t like wasted words any more than he liked wasted money. “He’ll tell you everything you need to know.” The unspoken look of veiled impatience said what the Quartermaster did not say aloud for politeness: And now get out of my office, if you please.

  The Sergeant crooked a finger at them and took them to the Post library, where he already had maps spread out for their perusal. Guardsmen were generally not known for being great readers, so the Library was in a room that was barely big enough for the bookcases that lined the walls and the table in the middle. “This one is yours,” he said, handing a map that he rolled up to Jakyr. “I’ll guide you tomorrow, of course, but you should have your own map of the route in and out. There’re a lot of trails going in and out of that spot; there are always treasure hunters hoping to find a secret hoard somewhere in there. As a consequence, it’s easy to get lost until you know your way. This map is more detailed than the one you’ve been given, I expect.”

  Jakyr unrolled it and cast an eye over it with approval. Mags craned his neck to look over Jakyr’s shoulder. The map, insofar as he could judge, was the equal of any of those made by men whose business it was to draw them. It wasn’t as fancy as the one the Royal Cartographers did, but it was well made. “It is. In fact, this is excellent work. Yours?”

  The Sergeant shrugged, but he smiled. “A hobby of mine. Now, let’s sit down and I’ll show you the map of The Bastion itself.”

  The three of them pulled stools out from under the table and sat down on them. The Sergeant took weights and put them on the four corners of the map of The Bastion he had obviously made himself. The valley was roughly oval, and the Sergeant had detailed caves in the hills with blue paths.

  The moment Mags saw the map he could have cheered. The hills around the valley of The Bastion were, indeed, laced with a system of caves. Real caves. The Sergeant had made an effort to map as many of them as he could, but of course, he hadn’t been able to penetrate too deeply into most of them. “We had a lot to do and not a great deal of time to do it in, so I hope you’ll forgive me for not exploring more. My main concern was getting the supplies stowed for you, not mapping out things. And I’m not a surveyor, Heralds. I haven’t got the knowledge or the tools. I measured as best I could, but things could be off, and maybe by quite a lot.”

  “Anything is better than nothing,” Jakyr replied. He bent over the map and put his finger near one branching area. “So, I think I have your system worked out properly. These are the hay caves?”

  “Yes, here, here, and here.” Sergeant Milles tapped three marked with yellow spots of paint. “We laid in more than we think you will need, because some might spoil. We did our best to find the driest spots, but since none of us know caves all that well, it’s mostly guess and a lack of watermarks. We also laid in extra because hay is useful for more than feeding the horses. This is the straw cave, and this part here—” he pointed to a bulge to one side “—has a good base of sand. If you want to bring the horses down into the cave for an extended period of time, this will be good bedding for them and easier to keep clean than straw.”

  Jakyr nodded with approval. The Sergeant pointed out all the other storage areas and detailed how the stores had been put up, as Jakyr went over the Quartermaster’s list.

  “Now, here is what you’ll probably want to use as your living quarters, at least those of you that don’t use the caravan,” the Sergeant continued, tapping a section of the caves marked with a green dot. “What you can’t see on here is that with care, you can probably bring the caravan down as far as here and get it back up again. As you can see, you can easily reach all the provisions from this spot without going outside. There’s a water source in there, an actual ‘well’ of sorts right here. My personal feeling is that it is actually an opening leading to a deeper water cave. I wasn’t able to explore that, but I did test the water, and it’s sweet and good. Also, there’s a chimney crack here; the bandits built a firepit under it. I tested it, and it draws, so there’s no danger of waking up choking to death. Keep the fire going, and the heat should keep the opening up top free of snow.”

  “At the risk of having it drip right down into the fire, but I think we can put up with that,” Jakyr said with a slight smile. “Sergeant Milles, we are already indebted to you. You’ve done brilliantly by us.”

  The Sergeant, who was a lanky, dark-haired fellow with a baby face and was probably much older than he looked, nodded appreciatively. “It’s good to get a Herald up here; maybe with your entourage we can put a dent in the local pattern of being closed-mouthed and actually get something accomplished. That nest of bandits that holed up in The Bastion? They’d been there for decades. I’m fairly certain half or more of them were related to villagers around here, so of course, the villagers wouldn’t say a word about them. We only started getting somewhere when someone started a blood feud with someone else who was related to the chief. And even then, mostly we got half-literate messages and sketchy maps left stuck to the door with thorns or in the top of the feed bins.”

  Jakyr just nodded. “I’ve run up against that very situation before,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do, but you’re coming up against custom that dates back centuries, and that’s mighty hard to dislodge.”

  Mags nodded to himself. Now the situation with Cole Pieters was even clearer. The mine-kiddies hadn’t been related to anyone around the mine, so no one really cared a toss about them. Cole Pieters, meanwhile, had a lot of money, a lot of influence, and a lot of offspring he could arm up to cause trouble if anyone caused it for him. There were two powerful reasons why no one had ever done anything about the conditions at the mine. Anyone he hadn’t bought off—like the visiting priests, who were supposed to ensure that conditions were good for the orphans—he could easily have intimidated.

  “You recollect that situation over on Lord Astley’s lands with the mine full of slavey-kids?” he asked, wondering if the story had gotten this far—and if there was anything like the same situation.

  The Sergeant shook his head. “Too far away; there’re at least two Lords with holdings between us, two whole districts and Astley has his own Guardpost, he doesn’t use ours. The only time we ever hear of anything from that far off is when someone transfers here.”

  He recalled how Dean Caelen had said that this district was “not that far” from the mine where he had grown up. Too far away, hmm? I guess “not that far” is pretty relative when you’re sitting in Haven . . . Ah well, it wasn’t as if he needed his own story known in order to be effective here.

  The Sergeant rolled up the rest of the maps and handed them to Jakyr. “These are all for you, Herald. I’ve made maps that show your Circuit as being a series of spokes coming off of The Bastion, rather than the usual spiral you Heralds do. I think that will help you a fair bit. We’ll be off first thing in the morning; it’ll take us a good day to get to The Bastion. We’ll camp with you there overnight and leave you. After that, you know your own business better than me, I’m sure.”

  “I’d better after all these years.” Jakyr chuckled, and the sergeant joined him.

  “Beer?” Milles suggested.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Jakyr glanced over at Mags. “Go off and find that girl of yours, give her a tour of the Post or something. You know the drill around here. Meet me up for supper.”

  Mags laughed. “Yessir, I do,” he said, since at least a fortnight—or more—of his first days as a Chosen had been spent in a Post exactly like this one, recovering from the abuse and neglect he’d suffered at the hands of his master. Without that considerable rest period he would never have been able to make the trek to Haven; he wouldn’t have been able to sit Companion-back for more than a candlemark or two, and he never would have been able to endure the blizzard that shut them into another Guardpost. He still wasn’t sure how much time he’d spent there; much of it had been eating and sleeping in the first few days�
�the first time in his entire life he’d had a full belly and a warm, soft bed, the first time he had ever been completely clean, the first time he had ever owned clothing that wasn’t rags. The first time since he was a baby that people had been kind to him. “I’ll do that.”

  He went back up to the guest rooms—tiny little boxes all in a row on either side of the hallway, with comfortable but narrow beds that barely fit inside. Well, all but two, which were at the end, slightly larger and with larger beds that did fill the room. He found Amily in one of the little ones, staring at her pack in the gathering gloom as if she was trying to work something out.

  “Yer gonna go blind if ye don’t get a light,” he said, making her jump and squeak. He reached inside the door, and plucked the candle from its holder over the bed. There really was just barely enough room to move around the bed, not even enough for a table beside it. “You’d best close the shutters or it’ll get damned cold, even with a brick in your bed. I’ll get a light for you.”

  He went down the hall in time to meet the Guardsman who’d been sent to light all the main lamps and got a flame from him, then brought the candle back to Amily. She had closed the shutters as he suggested but was still contemplating her pack. “What’re ye doing, staring at the pack like that?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine what was in it that would make her look at it as if it held a snake.

  “Do you change for dinner here?” she asked, worriedly. “I didn’t bring anything nice.”

  He didn’t laugh at her; after all, she had been brought up in the Palace, where everyone turned up at dinner in fancier dress than they wore during the day. “No, it’s just like eatin’ at the Collegium. All ye do is make sure ye don’t come to table all over filth. Guards usually wash up good afore dinner, so I reckon we leave ’em the hot water an’ get a wash after. Water’ll have hotted up again by then.”