Hansen unlatched his suit. He opened the heavy clamshell with hysterical strength that belied his exhausted weakness of moments before. The snowy air was a club, but his body was already shuddering.
The smell of burned meat was even worse when he jerked open Shill’s battlesuit.
Shill’s eyes were closed, but his nostrils flared as he breathed.
He wouldn’t be breathing long. The wounds were cauterized by the arc that made them, but the shock of the high voltage and double amputation would certainly be fatal.
Freemen rode in to join the warriors at the moment of victory.
“Furs!” Hansen screamed. His voice cracked. “Furs! Here! Now, goddam you!”
“Fin’ly broke my way,” Shill whispered. He was smiling. “Didja see him go down? I killed the fuckin’ Lord a Thrasey!”
A freeman leaped from his pony and draped his cloak over Hansen’s shoulders. Hansen snatched it off and tucked it around Shill, still cradled in the back half of his armor.
Maharg knelt beside them. “You all right, sir?” he asked. “You all right?”
“Old Shill fin’ly . . . ,” Shill said.
His eyes opened. The old man’s pupils were a brilliant blue that Hansen hadn’t noticed before.
“Old Shill fin’ly had some luck!” Shill gasped.
His chest arched. A convulsion drove the remainder of his breath out in a long rattling cough that continued several seconds after the light had gone out of the blue eyes.
Maharg shook Hansen by the shoulders. “Sir?” he said. “Are you all right? You’re crying.”
Chapter Twenty
“Well, Lord Golsingh,” said the warrior named Audemar, “if you pass your right to Thrasey’s armor, then the suit should properly go to me.”
“We’ve been over this, Audemar,” Golsingh said. His voice was so quiet that Hansen barely heard it over the scrunch of his spade.
“He shouldn’t be doing that,” Taddeusz grumbled. “It isn’t a warrior’s business to work with his hands.”
“He did a warrior’s business this day, foster father.”
Hansen freed another block of turf. A pair of slaves set it on a tarpaulin with three others. They lifted the edges of the cloth to carry the lot to the growing mound.
Hansen positioned the spade, then slid it down through the sod. He wriggled the T-handle to clear pebbles caught among the grassroots.
“But when Lamullo fell,” Audemar said, “I was the senior warrior in the left division. Therefore I should have the leader’s share of booty taken by the—”
“Shut up, Audemar,” Taddeusz said.
“Lord Malcolm sits at my left now in banquet, Audemar,” Golsingh said. His tone was growing sharper and thinner, like a blade being drawn from a cane scabbard.
There weren’t any proper stones with which to raise a mound here, but turf would last as long. More fitting for Shill, besides. Shill hadn’t had the harshness of rock; but he’d endured nonetheless.
“Ah, sir?” said Maharg. He looked older now, but that might be only exhaustion. “Would it be all right if I, ah . . . if I dug one myself?”
Hansen straightened, leaving the spade upright in the cut. He gestured toward the handle. “Keep the corners square,” he said, massaging his lower back with both hands.
He looked around critically. “We’ve probably got enough by now.”
There were thirty slaves lifting sod for the mound, but the straggling rectangle Hansen had cut in the prairie was twice the area of what any of the others had managed. Well, the slaves were working because it was their life to work—and their lives if they didn’t. Hansen cut sod because—
The mound was two meters high, an oval proportioned eight to three across the axes, much like the proportions of a sleeping man.
“Hope he likes it,” Hansen said.
Maharg levered the strip of turf loose and stepped back so that the slaves could remove it. “Shill?” he said. “I dunno.”
The young warrior knuckled his forehead. The fine hairs on the back of his right hand had crinkled when the surge of an opponent’s arc overloaded his battlesuit. “I never figured North’s Searchers’d, you know, be interested in Shill.”
He looked at Hansen. It wasn’t just exhaustion: Maharg had aged. “Nor me neither,” he added. “Though with the new armor, that might change. Thanks to you.”