It was the sharp edge that he dragged across Sawtooth’s throat, cutting through to the spine. The barb’s blood was coppery in the firelight.
Glabrio twisted and flung Sawtooth on the ground behind him to finish thrashing. Bending, he wiped the daggerblade on the barb’s kilt. Over his shoulder he asked, “Is the river all right, Froggie?”
“Dis, no! the river’s not all right!” Froggie said. “I want him buried deep enough nobody’s going to find him till we’ve shipped out of this place. I want the ground smooth so you don’t see there’s a grave there, too!”
Glabrio stood and sheathed his dagger with a clack of the guard against the lip of the tin scabbard. “Sounds good to me, Froggie,” he said.
Froggie grimaced. “Caepio and Messus,” he said to the pair of men nearest, both of them members of the First Squad. “Get your shovels out and give him a hand.”
Queenie stepped over to Froggie and held his hands as she touched cheeks, the right one and then the left. That was what the barbs did instead of kiss; they didn’t really have lips, just a layer of skin over their mouth bones.
“You great boss-man!” she said. “We proud we be in your flock!”
Froggie patted her. “Hey, Marcellus!” he said to the guard from the Fourth Squad who was watching the excitement. “All of you who’ve got the duty—you think the barbs are going to pop up out of the campfires? Turn your heads around or you’ll find ’em decorating somebody’s lodgepole!”
Glabrio chose a patch of ground without many roots and started breaking it with his mattock; the rest of the squad was getting its tools out, not just the two troopers who’d been told off for the job. That was more people than you needed to dig a hole, but they were making a point that Froggie could appreciate.
Slats had vanished. Very slowly, he raised his triangular face around the edge of the tent again. Froggie smiled, raised his hands to show that they were empty, and walked over so he could talk to the administrator without shouting. Slats trembled, but he didn’t run screaming toward the back gate the way Froggie half expected him to do.
“I was . . .” Slats said. “I . . .”
The bug turned his head around so that he was looking over his left shoulder, then repeated the gesture in the other direction. As if that had been his way of clearing his throat, he resumed, “Centurion Froggie, was that action necessary?”
“Yeah,” Froggie said, “it was. Or anyway, it was going to be necessary before long. I figured it was better to take care of it out here where there wasn’t anybody to watch. Right?”
“Hey, Top?” Glabrio called. “What about this?”
He held up Sawtooth’s lavaliere, dangling on the tip of his finger. It winked in the firelight, except where tacky blood covered the metal.
“Hercules, bury it with him!” Froggie said. “If the barb deserted, he wasn’t going to give us his gadget first, was he?”
He turned to the administrator again. “How about it, Slats?” he said. He didn’t touch his swordhilt or do anything that might be taken as threatening; the poor bug was set to shake himself apart already. “Do you agree?”
“Centurion Froggie,” Slats said finally, “I trust you to keep us all safe if it is possible to be safe. But the next time, the next time . . .”
He did his spin-your-head-around-twice trick again.
“The next time, Centurion Froggie, please warn me so that I know not to be watching!”
* * *
Tatius and Laena were talking in low voices at the corner where their guard posts met. They heard the crunch of Froggie’s boots and moved apart, each down his own stretch of palisade. Froggie didn’t mind the guards chatting on duty if it didn’t get out of hand.
Which it wouldn’t, so long as Froggie made a pass around the posts once or twice each night. He didn’t even have to speak.
A couple—or maybe it was a pair of the girls—sat in the shelter of the carts and shared a mug of something. Guild rations were pretty good, but the troopers had learned to supplement them from whatever was available locally. The wine here was first-rate, though the barbs made it from a root that looked like a beet.