Hell's Foundations Quiver (31 page)

She remembered that day. Remembered the day her father Greyghor had done the hardest thing a father could possibly have done and watched, his arms around his sobbing daughter and younger son as his eldest child was murdered before his eyes. He'd turned Stefyny's bloodied, broken face against his filthy coat, holding her with implacable strength to keep her from looking, and his face had been carved from Tairohn granite.

Stefyny didn't understand about heresies and blasphemy, or about jihads. She only knew her world had been destroyed, that she was always cold, that she was always hungry, and that her father grew thinner by the day as he passed half of his own inadequate food to his two surviving children. No, she knew one more thing: the Church in which she'd been raised, which had taught her to love God and the Archangels, to love her family, had decided she and everyone she'd ever known were unclean and evil.

And that she was going to die.

It wasn't something a ten-year-old was supposed to know, but the past few months had taught her many things a ten-year-old wasn't supposed to know. They'd taught her to be terrified of anyone in a purple cassock, anyone in the purple tunics and red trousers of the Army of God. They'd taught her to hide behind the larger bodies of adults, hands clamped over her mouth, eyes huge when the camp guards drove the inmates out of their pitiful barracks with clubs and fists and whips and selected someone who would never be seen again.

Now she trudged through the snow, shivering under the multiple layers of too-thin clothing wrapped about her small, emaciated body, dragging the bucket in both hands, and tried to ignore her hollow, aching starvation. No one had ever explained to her that children were more vulnerable to hypothermia than adults, but the adults shivering around her knew it. And so, whenever someone died in one of the barracks—and God knew that happened all too often—and the bodies were stripped before the guards were notified, their clothing was distributed first to the children. It was little enough, but amidst the horror their lives had become, the inmates of Camp Chihiro clung to their own humanity. They would shiver, they would freeze, they would lose fingers and toes to frostbite, but whatever extra clothing, whatever scraps of food they could find, would go first to the children, then to the weak, and only last to the strong.

Greyghor Mahlard was no longer among the strong, and so he lay on his pallet in the barracks, watched over by eight-year-old Sebahstean with his pinched, frightened face, and hollow eyes, while Stefyny clutched all the courage within her and walked straight towards the kill line.

She knew what it was. They'd all been told when they first arrived, and anyone who might not have paid attention had seen it demonstrated since. It was marked with whitewashed wooden posts, although there were no rails or fence. Fences weren't needed with the rifle-armed troops in the guard towers under orders to shoot anyone who stepped across it. They'd done that just the day before yesterday. Stefyny had no idea what the man who'd tried to cross the kill line had thought he was doing, and no one had asked. They'd simply dragged his body away afterward and dropped it into one of the long trenches waiting among the other unmarked graves outside the camp's perimeter.

Stefyny knew the same riflemen were watching her now, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that her father was sick, probably dying, and that a ten-year-old girl had learned too much about what inadequate food did to someone who was ill.

*   *   *

“Crap. She's not stopping.”

Private Ahntahn Ruhsail's voice was as bitter as the icy wind when he saw the dark-haired girl trudging steadily towards the neat line of posts. The outer layers of the rags wrapped around her fluttered on that same wind, and though he couldn't see it from his place on the guard walk that circled the tower's enclosed top, he knew the cloth wrapped around her face was clotted with ice where her breath had frozen. It was a far cry from his own warm coat and the fleece-lined gloves and thick, knitted muffler his mother had sent him. She was a small, thin child, like all the others in Camp Chihiro—she couldn't have weighed much over forty pounds, fifty at the outside—and the bucket she dragged with her was half her own size. God only knew where she'd gotten it. It looked like one of the slop buckets used by the inmates drafted to clean and maintain the guards' barracks.

“What in Langhorne's name does she think she's doing?” Private Stahdmaiyr growled beside him.

“How in Bédard's name am
I
supposed to know?” Ruhsail shot back. His eyes were bleak as he gazed down at the girl, seeing the determination in those thin shoulders. “Whatever she's doing, she's not stopping, though.”

“Oh, shit.”

There'd been a time, Ruhsail knew, when Stahdmaiyr would have felt quite differently. A time when the other private's fervor and passionate faith—the same passion which had led him to volunteer for his present duties—would have been silently urging the girl on. When the old cliché that nits made lice would have been all the justification he needed. In fact, he'd said that very same thing when he'd returned from Sarkyn.

On the other hand, that had been before Sergeant Mahthyws and Sergeant Leeahm got their throats cut in their own barracks without a single soul seeing or hearing a thing. Stahdmaiyr's enthusiasm for smiting the heretic seemed to have cooled quite a bit since then. There were plenty of other guards, and plenty of inquisitors, whose ardor
hadn't
cooled, though. Who would happily have accepted the duty about to come Stahdmaiyr's way. Once upon a time, one of them might even have been named Ahntahn Ruhsail, but
his
ardor had cooled even before the cleansing of Sarkyn. Smiting the heresy, fighting the spawn of Shan-wei for the soul of God's own Church, giving all he had to serve the Archangels—that was one thing. What happened here at Camp Chihiro was something else entirely, and he'd found his soul lacked the iron to embrace that something else.

But that didn't change the standing orders, and Ruhsail found himself guiltily and unspeakably grateful that Stahdmaiyr was the tower's assigned marksman for the day. Of course if Stahdmaiyr screwed up, it would be Ruhsail's duty to finish the girl off. He prayed it wouldn't happen, but even as he prayed, he promised himself and the Archangels that if it did, he would make it as quick and as clean as he possibly could.

Stahdmaiyr checked the priming on his rifle, then leveled it across the chest-high railing designed specifically to give the guards a steady shooting rest, and cocked the lock. The orders were clear enough. There were to be no shouted threats, no orders to go back the way an inmate had come. The kill line was exactly what its name proclaimed, and if anyone violated it, the consequences were to be visited upon him with no warning, no attempt to turn him back first, as a salutary lesson to his fellows. So the private settled in behind the rifle, his sights tracking the little girl as she marched steadily, unwaveringly towards her rendezvous with his bullet.

Three more strides, Ruhsail thought, his face like stone and his heart like iron. Three more strides and—

“What the
fuck
d'you think you're doing, Stahdmaiyr?!”

Both privates jumped so sharply that Stahdmaiyr almost squeezed off the shot. Then they whirled as Corporal Shain Fahbyan came storming out of the warm guardroom behind them. His dark face was like a thundercloud, and his eyes nailed Stahdmaiyr like matched arbalest bolts.

“I asked you a question!” he snapped.

“B-but … but—” Stahdmaiyr stammered, then stopped, looking imploringly at Ruhsail from the corner of one eye.

“One of the inmates is about to cross the kill line, Corp,” Ruhsail said. In fact, he noted without seeming to look away from Fahbyan, she already had.

“So?” Fahbyan demanded.

“Standing orders.” Ruhsail's anger and disgust at those same orders turned his reply curt, almost choppy, and Fahbyan's jaw tightened.

The corporal propped his gloved hands on his hips and looked back and forth between the two privates.

“That's a kid.” His voice was flat. “It's not somebody trying to rush the line. It's not an escape attempt. Not even somebody old enough to know what the hell he's doing. It's a frigging
kid
.”

Ruhsail and Stahdmaiyr looked at each other. Ruhsail understood exactly what Fahbyan was saying, but all three of them knew it made no difference. Orders were orders, and if they weren't followed.…

“Let her go,” Fahbyan continued in that same flat voice. “Let the Fathers deal with her.”

“Uh, whatever you say, Corp,” Ruhsail said.

The noncom gave them both one more glare, then stepped back into the guardroom and slammed the door behind him. The privates looked at each other again, then drew deep breaths, almost in unison. They turned back to the compound below where a small, shivering girl child had just crossed the kill line without drawing a single shot, and as they did, Ahntahn Ruhsail felt a deep, complex stab of relief and guilt. Relief that she hadn't been shot, relief that she hadn't become yet more innocent blood on his own hands, and relief that he and Stahdmaiyr were covered by Fahbyan's orders.

And guilt that
he
hadn't been the one to make that decision.

*   *   *

“Father.”

Kuhnymychu Ruhstahd's head turned sharply at the single word. Brother Lahzrys Ohadlyn had stopped in mid stride and was looking to their left. Father Kuhnymychu followed the direction of the lay brother's gaze and felt his jaw tighten.

The ragged child had obviously seen them, as well. She'd stopped for a moment, and Father Kuhnymychu could almost physically feel the fear radiating off her like another, even icier wind. But then her spine stiffened, she turned, and she walked directly towards them.

Father Kuhnymychu watched her come and wondered why none of the guards had fired. But only for a moment, because deep inside, he knew exactly why they hadn't.

Her rag-wrapped feet crunched through the crusty snow bordering the path between the camp's buildings. She stopped, a few feet from them, and peeled the frost-stiffened cloth away from her face, and her gray eyes were huge in a gaunt, thin face. Her nose was misshapen, her bloodless lips chapped and split and crusted with scabs, and there was a century of bitter experience in those ten-year-old eyes as she looked up at them silently.

“Well, child?” he snapped.

Father Kuhnymychu hadn't meant to speak, but those silent eyes drew the words out of him like pincers. He shuddered deep inside as that thought went through the back of his brain, for he'd seen pincers used in deadly earnest all too often over the year just past.

“My father's sick.”

The soprano was as thin as its owner, yet there was steel at its heart. There was fear—Father Kuhnymychu could hear it—but there was no hesitation. This child knew exactly what she was doing, what she was risking, and she'd chosen to do it anyway. It didn't matter whether it was courage or desperation—or love—or if there was any difference between those qualities. She knew, and the steely determination in that thin, shivering body touched Kuhnymychu Ruhstahd with shame … and something very like envy.

“And why do you tell me this?” he heard his own voice say.

“Because he needs food,” she said flatly. “Hot food.
Good
food.”

*   *   *

Stefyny stared up at the tall, dark-eyed under-priest. She could tell he was a priest or an under-priest, because his priest's cap bore the brown cockade of his rank, and she tried not to show her terror, for that cockade was edged in the purple of the Order of Schueler. His face was as unyielding as the winter's cold as he looked down at her, and something even colder ran down her spine. She didn't know why she hadn't been shot crossing the kill line, but her shrunken stomach clenched within her as she smelled the half-remembered scent of hot food drifting from the mess hall behind the two warmly clad, well-fed men.

They're going to kill me
. The thought ran through her, yet she never looked away.
They're going to kill me for trying to save Daddy's life. But I don't care. Not anymore
.

*   *   *

Anger stirred under Father Kuhnymychu's shame. He was God's priest, consecrated to the Inquisition, sworn to eradicate heresy and to smite the heretic with the full power of Schueler's sword. His faith and determination, his courage, his dedication to God's will filled him with holy fire, fit to meet any challenge the Archangels might send him! How
dared
this ragged urchin—the very spawn of heresy, or she wouldn't have been here in the first place—
challenge
him this way? For that was what she'd done. In just eight words she'd defied every one of the Inquisition's actions—and him—and he felt his right hand clench into a fist and started to raise it.

“
Do not despise the wisdom of childhood
.” The words of the
Book of Bédard
flashed unbidden through his mind. “
Childhood is a canvas, pure in its innocence, awaiting the brush of experience. In time, that canvas will become the portrait of a life and the growth of a living soul. But that portrait may be rich with color, filled with the texture of joy, or gray and ugly, shrouded in the bleakness of despair. It is your responsibility to guide that brush as God would have it guided. Nor will the guiding leave your life, your faith, unchanged, for a child's eyes see what adults do not. A child's gaze is unblinkered by preconception, and children have not learned to look willfully away from truth. Do not be deceived! That searching gaze, those fearless questions, are God's gift to you. A child's questions require answer; answer requires explanation; explanation requires thought; and thought requires understanding, and so even as they ask, they teach. Learn from them, treasure the opportunity God has given you, and remember always that whenever one teaches, two learn, and there is no greater joy than to learn together
.”