Chapter 2: Dead Men Pledge, Dead Men Rise
The dead stood in perfect silence.
That was the thing that got under Leliana's skin the most—not the blood drying in dark rivulets down her forearms, not the ash that had worked its way beneath her fingernails and into the creases of her palms, not even the bodies she'd left cooling in the bunker behind her. It was the silence. A thousand soldiers, risen and waiting, and not one of them drew breath. No shuffling of feet. No rattle of armor. Just the hollow echo of her own heartbeat, loud in her ears.
She walked through them like a woman wading through a graveyard. Their eyes followed her—those cold blue flames that had nothing to do with life and everything to do with her. She felt the weight of their attention, the way it pressed against her skin like a second layer of ash.
Xander stayed three paces behind. Close enough to reach. Far enough to give her room.
The surviving mercenaries knelt in a row at the edge of the camp, wrists bound behind their backs with strips of leather cut from goblin harnesses. Seven of them. She'd counted eight earlier, but one had bled out while they were dragging him across the corpse-strewn ground. Nobody had bothered to stop the bleeding.
She stopped in front of the first man. Middle-aged, balding, a belly that spoke of too much stolen ale and not enough running. He wouldn't look at her. His eyes were fixed on the ground, on the bones and the blood and the little pieces of charred fabric that might have been someone's shirt.
"You," she said. "Name."
He didn't answer.
She crouched down, grabbed his chin, forced his face up. His eyes were brown, watery, rimmed with red. He smelled like piss and fear.
"I asked you a question."
"Gerrold," he said. His voice cracked on the second syllable. "Gerrold of Marrow's Bend."
She let go of his chin. Stood. Moved to the next man. Young, maybe nineteen, with a face that still had some softness to it. He was crying. Silent tears tracking through the dirt on his cheeks.
"Name."
"Piet. I didn't—I didn't want to—"
"Shut up."
He shut up.
She moved down the line. Most of them gave her names. Some gave her pleas. One spat at her feet and called her a cunt, and she broke his nose with the pommel of her knife and left him there, bleeding into the mud.
Then she reached the last man.
He was big. Broad through the shoulders, thick-necked, with a face that looked like someone had taken a hammer to it and then decided the result was an improvement. A scar ran from his left eyebrow down to the corner of his mouth, bisecting his lips and giving him a permanent sneer.
She knew that scar.
She knew the way his breath hitched when he was excited, the way his fingers felt when they dug into her hips, the way he laughed when she screamed.
Her vision tunneled. The ash-stained world narrowed to a single point, and that point was his face.
"You," she whispered.
He looked up at her. His eyes were pale gray, almost colorless. For a moment, there was confusion in them. Then recognition. Then fear.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, fuck."
She heard herself speaking from a great distance, like the words were coming from someone else's mouth. "What did you say your name was?"
"I didn't—"
"Tell me your name."
He swallowed hard. The cords in his neck stood out like ropes. "Cutter," he said. "They call me Cutter."
"Cutter." She tasted the word. It was bitter. "You remember me."
He nodded. His whole body was trembling now, a fine vibration she could see in the way his shoulders shook, the way his bound hands clenched and unclenched behind his back.
"You remember the post," she said. "The one in the square. The one you tied me to."
"I was just—we were—it was orders—"
"You remember how I screamed."
His face twisted. He was trying to find words, trying to shape excuses, but all that came out was a thin, keening sound.
She remembered the post. She remembered the rope burn on her wrists, the splinters in her back, the way the sky looked—gray and indifferent—while he pushed inside her. She'd bitten through her own lip trying not to give him the satisfaction of hearing her scream, and then she'd given it to him anyway, because the pain was too much to hold inside.
She remembered his laugh. That wet, grunting laugh, right against her ear.
"You held me down," she said. Her voice was flat. "You held me down and you fucked me while I screamed. And then you and your other mercenaries passed me around like a bottle of cheap wine."
Cutter was crying now. Fat tears rolling down his ruined face, mixing with the snot running from his nose. "I'm sorry," he blubbered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't know—"
"You didn't know what? That I would survive the assault?”
"It was that witch Everly who gave you to us,” Cutter pleaded. “She said you were our reward.”
"It was not her right to give me!”
She was shaking. Not with fear. With rage. It was a hot, red thing, coiling in her chest like a serpent, and it had been sleeping there for twenty years.
She drew her knife.
"Mistress." Xander's voice, low and careful. "Do you want me to—"
"No." She didn't look at him. "I want to do it myself. But not yet."
She turned away from Cutter. Faced the other mercenaries, the ones who were still kneeling in the mud and the blood and the ash. They were all watching her.
"You heard what he did," she said. "You know what he is."
None of them spoke.
"You're all going to die today," she said. "That's not a threat. That's a fact. The only question is how."
She paused. Let the silence stretch.
"But I'm going to give you a choice. A small one. A meaningless one, maybe. But a choice."
She gestured at Cutter with the point of her blade. "Him. The one who calls himself Cutter. If any of you want to live—really live, not just die slow—you can kill him. Right now. With your bare hands if you have to. I'll let you go. You walk north, you don't look back, and I never see you again."
The mercenaries stared at her. At each other. At Cutter, who had gone very still.
"Or," Leliana continued, "you can refuse. And you can all die together. That's the choice."
Silence.
Then Gerrold, the balding one, spoke up. "We can't kill him. Our hands are tied."
She looked at him. Then at Xander. "Untie them."
Xander didn't argue. He walked down the line, cutting the leather bindings with quick, efficient strokes. The mercenaries rubbed their wrists, flexed their fingers. None of them moved toward Cutter.
"Time's wasting," Leliana said.
Piet, the crying one, stood up. His legs were shaking. He looked at Cutter, then at the knife in Leliana's hand, then back at Cutter.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
Then he lunged.
Cutter saw him coming. He scrambled backward, tried to get his feet under him, but the ground was slick with gore and he slipped. Piet landed on top of him, fists flailing. The other mercenaries watched. Some of them looked sick. Some of them looked hungry.
Piet got his hands around Cutter's throat. Cutter clawed at his face, his arms, his eyes. They rolled in the mud, grunting and gasping, and Leliana watched with something that wasn't quite satisfaction.
It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.
Cutter was stronger. He twisted, got Piet underneath him, drove an elbow into the younger man's face. Piet's nose crunched. Blood sprayed. Then Cutter was up, staggering toward the trees, and Leliana's patience snapped.
She raised her hand.
The dead moved.
They caught Cutter before he made it ten feet. Skeletal hands closed around his arms, his legs, his throat. He screamed—a high, thin sound that cut off abruptly as one of the dead soldiers drove a rusted sword through his spine.
He dropped.
The dead stood over him, silent, waiting.
Leliana walked to where he lay. He was still alive. She could see it in his eyes—that flicker of awareness, that animal knowledge that death was coming and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
She knelt beside him. Put her lips close to his ear.
"The worst thing I ever did," she whispered, "was let myself believe I could forget you and your kind. But I never forgot. Every time a man touched me, I felt your hands. You took something from me that I never got back."
He tried to speak. Blood bubbled at his lips.
"You took it," she said. "And now I'm taking it back."
She drove her knife into his throat.
The blood was hot. It sprayed her face, her chest, her hands. She didn't flinch.
She stood up. Turned. Faced the remaining mercenaries.
"You," she said to Piet, who was still on the ground, clutching his broken nose. "You get to live. Go north. Don't stop until you can't see the smoke anymore."
He scrambled to his feet, but he didn’t run. He just stared at Leliana—in awe of her.
She turned to the others. "You didn't lift a finger. You watched. That's the same as doing it yourselves."
Gerrold opened his mouth to protest. She didn't give him the chance.
"Kill them," she said.
The dead surged forward.
Xander watched it happen. He didn't look away. He'd seen worse, probably. Done worse, maybe. But his face was hard as flint, and he didn't flinch.
When it was over—when the last mercenary had stopped screaming, when the last body had stopped twitching—Leliana turned to him.
“It seems that the young man wishes to stay with us,” Leliana said to Xander as she eyed Piet. “Wise choice.”
Xander smirked. “I think he has a crush on you.”
Leliana a didn’t smile. Her eyes burned as the looked at Piet again. “Make sure he gets some armor and some good weapons.” She then added, “And after he bathes, he should come to my tent so I may talk to him in private.”
“As you wish,” Xander obeyed. But his usually calm voice now burned with a spark of jealousy.