Queenie offered a skin of wine. Froggie tried to sheathe his sword, but the blade was bloody and he didn’t have a hand free to wipe it. Queenie put the wooden teat between his lips and squeezed, perfectly judging when to let up.
Froggie swizzled the unmixed wine, cleansing his mouth of dust and the stench of barb blood. He spewed out the first mouthful, then let Queenie take his sword so that he could drink at his own greedy choice.
Queenie ripped the kilt off a warrior’s corpse and rubbed at the tacky blood on the blade. “You chop bastards good, boss-man,” she said. “You chop them real good!”
* * *
Half the town of Kascanschi was in flames or in ashes; most of the rest would burn before daylight.
“Thank Hercules and the luck of a soldier that the wind was from the east,” Froggie muttered. “If it’d changed, the temple would’ve toppled right on top of us here.”
He glanced at the huge mound of bodies and added, “It wouldn’t make much difference to the barbs, would it?”
“Who gives a fuck about barbs?” Glabrio said. He reached out to scratch his left forearm, covered with tarry ointment the girls had daubed on it.
Glycera grabbed his hand and chittered, stopping him from disarranging her bandage. Glabrio clucked apologetically and put his right hand back on his knee. He’d forget in a moment and try to scratch his burn again.
Slats came from where he’d been interrogating the prisoners. His head pecked back and forth, more like the play of raindrops on a pond than an animal looking about him.
Froggie wondered whether the bug’s sense of smell was the same as a man’s. If it was, then no wonder he looked about ready to collapse. You never really got used to the smell of a battlefield. Especially not one where there’d been fire.
“They talked?” Froggie said. He supposed he should’ve been overseeing the questioning, but he’d decided to sit on a low pile of bodies instead and get his breath back for a while.
“Yes,” the administrator said. “I cannot believe it, Centurion Froggie. The warriors with axes were mercenaries from another planet. A rival Guild was interloping on our claim. We’ve been granted development rights here, but they’d put in a survey team before the Federation Council made the assignment. They had found a product so valuable that they were violating Guild rules to reverse the assignment!”
“Do tell,” Froggie said. He started to laugh at Slats’ earnestness, but a fit of coughing broke him up instead.
“They were engineering a massacre of our pacification team!” Slats continued. “It would appear that the natives had been responsible. Their Guild would have bought the development rights from ours at a low price, and no one would be the wiser . . . but I would be dead!”
“It happens to everybody sooner or later,” Froggie said; though “later” could be a long time if you were a Guild slave, and maybe longer than . . .
He looked to where the foreigners had been interrogated. They’d captured six of them alive, which was doing pretty well under these circumstances. Two of them had been hoisted with their wrists and ankles tied together so they hung belly down over a slow fire. The first pair had talked. If they hadn’t, well, there were four more.
Naw, life was better. Even as a Guild slave.
“The product is a drug,” Slats said. He kept his head rigid and avoided Froggie’s eyes. “Three-Spire is in the pay of the rival Guild. The Commander is addicted to the drug which Three-Spire supplies to him.”
Glabrio’s face changed from dreamy somnolence to full, focused awareness of the world around him. A battle like the one just past could put a fellow, even a veteran, into a numb place that he might not come out of for days.
“Are we the only ones left?” he demanded. “Have they chopped the rest of the legion?”
Slats looked shocked. “I do not know,” he said. “Centurion Froggie took my communicator—”
“To keep you from putting us deeper in the hole than you’d done when you called in the last time,” Froggie snapped. He was coming back up from the gray depths too. “Don’t worry, I’ll give it back when I’m good and ready to.”