Page 54 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

Liir felt himself blushing. “I don’t deserve it.”

“You deserve it, son. You deserve the honor of it. I’m not a wordsmith, I can’t define the concept of honor. But I know it when I meet it, and I see by the look on your face you do, too.” He grinned almost sheepishly at Liir. His teeth were yellowing in this climate.

WORD ARRIVED THAT THE new leadership in the Palace was displeased with laxness at Government House, and requested the prompt execution of the Seventh Spear’s original mission.

Commander Cherrystone turned to Liir. Although chilly politeness often still marked their exchanges, there had come to be some measure of regard on both sides. Liir was often disdainful of Commander Cherrystone for his complicated moods—now a front for the Palace, now a critic of the system—but Liir practiced loyalty and obedience, virtues the Seventh Spear espoused and he shared. And he was grateful for the promotion, and the smarter braid on his dress habillard.

Some of the fellows resented the promotion, but they saw the point. Liir was unusually circumspect for a young man. Not in any obvious way a dangerous loner, Liir kept to the margins, befriended other soldiers only so far as was fitting, and he didn’t consort with the Quadlings beyond what the work required. He was the model of a military man at the start of his career, so far as anyone could tell. And since he had no social links with Quadling circles, he was a natural to enjoy what confidences might arise working in the Commander’s office.

“Sit down and let me rehearse an idea with you,” said Cherrystone one afternoon. Liir remained standing.

Bengda was a small community twenty minutes southwest of Qhoyre on the broad flat river known as Waterslip. In the days before the Wizard had mucked up the water table and wreaked havoc with a centuries-old way of life, the Bengda district had thrived in one of the few dry areas, humps of sandy hill on either side of Waterslip. A bridge between the cliffs had spanned the river. Over the years, with the harvesting of trees, the soil eroded, though. The hills lost height and subsided into the muck. Little by little the Bengdani villagers either left or took to the bridge. Now the hamlet of Bengda supported itself by exacting a toll from the ferries and commercial fishing vessels that used Waterslip as a highway between Qhoyre and points south.

“Entirely improper, of course,” said Commander Cherrystone.

“Surely they’ll stop if you threaten them with a fine?” asked Liir.

“They might and they might not. I hate to give them a chance to knuckle under, for it’s worth more to us if they resist. Can you sniff around and find out if they would?”

“I’m not the man for that job,” said Liir stiffly. “Begging your pardon, sir, you have more pull in that department than I do.”

“If I start talking, I’ll plant ideas in their heads.” The Commander spoke wearily. “It’ll work much better if it happens below ranks. Your expertise is needed, Liir. Can you put it about among the men that this information is of interest to me?”

Liir did, and came back a week later. The residents of Bengda were stroppy, at least by Quadling standards, but they would probably cave if presented with an order of prohibition or a bill of tax.

“That’s no good, then.” The Commander rubbed his elbows. “What they’re effecting is a kind of extortion of river merchants, really

. Perhaps I could charge them triple all that they’ve collected since we’ve been here. That would beggar them and they’d have to resist. Find out, will you?”

Liir returned and said that, begging the Commander’s pardon, he couldn’t really learn the answer to so specific a question without tipping the Commander’s hand. “Tip, tip, that’s the point!” roared the Commander, so Liir tipped.

The reply came back that the extended families of the Bengdanis would manage to come up with the triple penalty and that the bridge dwellers would stop levying the toll.

“Damn,” said Commander Cherrystone, and he had Liir send out a formal censure of the Bengda bridge dwellers with a public declamation and a request for a penalty twice what had already been posted as the triple penalty.

Bloody hell no, said the Bengdanis, in Qua’ati, of course. At least not yet.

They paid up what they’d collected and made no promise as to when the exorbitant balance could be expected.

“That’s that, then,” said the Commander. “Make sure the whole district knows about their resistance, Liir. This has to get back to the City or my reputation is, like everything else in this Quadling quagmire, mud.”

Liir did what he could, talking against the Bengdanis at the mess hall, the local gin pavilions, in the latrines even. It was uphill work now, for the Seventh Spear had become lax, and many men tended to think their Commander was getting high and mighty, not to say unreasonable. “He could just fork over a third of his own salary to his concubine, and she could find a way to get it to the Bengdanis,” they said. “Why scapegoat those poor buggers? Why make life so miserable?”

“It’s not ours to make life miserable nor to avoid misery when it’s required of us,” said Liir. “Have you whole lot gone to ground here? That says little about the military discipline we learned.”

“Lighten up,” they answered.

COMMANDER CHERRYSTONE TOOK LIIR under his arm and gave him the assignment to burn the village right into the river. “Tonight,” he said.

Liir’s face was stony. “Sir,” he said, “you know as well as I that it’s almost impossible to set anything alight in this climate. The moisture seeps into everything.”

“I’ve sent to the Emerald City for provisions to help,” said the Commander. “I’ve got six buckets of the tar of pulped Gillikinese maya flower, which would burn in a monsoon. Once night falls, you can paint the struts and supports of the bridge with it. Begin with the beams nearest the ends of the bridge, and paint high. Toward the center, paint low, closer to water level. Light the ends first—simultaneously—to create walls of fire on each approach, so the Bengdanis can’t escape that way. They’ll be crowded toward the center, and there’ll be time for them to consider what to do, to call for help, before the lower-lit struts burn up enough to imperil them.”

“Who will come to their aid?” said Liir. “They’re twenty minutes from Qhoyre.”

“In twenty minutes someone will hear them and, just as important, someone will arrive in time to witness their distress. That’s the important bit. I’ll see to that if we synchronize our timepieces.”

“Arrive in time to witness? Not to help?”

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