The Infiltrators Page 8

  Pitkins watched Vilizen closely, and it seemed to him that perhaps his passionate objection had been the result of his misreading Zolgen’s intentions, thinking that he wished to stage a quarrel.

  “It beats sitting in chains all day,” Zolgen replied softly, which seemed to take Vilizen off guard, though only the subtlest of hints could be seen in the shrewd man’s face.

  “Where are our friends—our compatriots, Vilizen? You know we’re both as good as dead, should we ever leave this place. Do what you will. I will teach . . . but only under certain conditions,” he said, looking carefully at Pitkins.

  Pitkins’ icy stare was his only invitation to state his proposals.

  “I will only teach you and your ten highest-ranking officers. Not one more. If I am going to part with this knowledge, it shall only be to the most worthy.”

  Pitkins eyed his fellow officers. Few would dare question him now. Not only did his rank exceed theirs, but few wanted to test the temper of a man who had just suffered such tragedy.

  “And I have my condition for you, Varco,” Pitkins began. “If you so much as injure me or one of my chosen officers, I will lift the Sogolian ban on torture for your sake and your sake alone. We will slowly cook you over a fire. Even Varco pain tolerance has its limits. And I will first strip you and starve you for five days to ensure you do not cheat torture with one of your Varco herbs. Do we understand each other?”

  “When do we begin?”

  Pitkins knew the condition about limiting the instruction to his ten highest-ranking officers was symbolic rather than practical. In reality, the Sogolians had little use for the highly sophisticated empty-hand techniques, called Gicksin, that the Varco thrived on. Gicksin was for the realm of assassinations and ambushes. Sogolians prided themselves on their mastery of open combat, where their heavily armed force faced its enemy with swords, axes, and other instruments to determine mastery of the field.

  Such engagements were seen as the height of folly by the Metinvurs, though Pitkins had to grudgingly concede that the Metinvurs’ army was only slightly inferior to the Sogolians’ in open combat. Even this “conventional” army was shrouded in secrecy. Some said all Metinvurs were soldiers and that they could be called away from their blacksmith, accounting, and cobbler shops with an hour’s notice to suit themselves up in armor and march to battle.

  Others said the army was made up of those who didn’t quite make the cut in Varco training but were seen as too valuable to be executed. Still others said that the army was by bloodline and that the two oldest males of every soldier were pressed into the military at age eight, trained in conventional warfare until age eighteen, and then released into the civilian population but required to train periodically throughout the year and to always be on call for war.

  Pitkins suspected the truth involved some mixture of these elements, and he couldn’t help being impressed by the results. The Sogolian army was made up of men offered as boys to the army by their fathers, usually by the age of twelve. Rigorous martial training ensued until the boys reached manhood at seventeen, at which point they were given the choice of retiring into the civilian population or serving in the military as their full-time career.

  The latter choice resulted in a binding contract that required a minimum of twenty years’ service before retirement became possible—albeit difficult. Only after a full thirty years’ service did a soldier earn the right to retire at his own discretion. Those who performed exemplarily achieved entry into the Nikorians, the most elite unit of the Sogolian army, of which Pitkins was general.

  To a Sogolian, loss of one’s weapon on the battlefield was seen quite similarly to the way capture was seen by the Metinvurs. The Sogolians viewed such a man as having already died in combat. Thus, rather than focusing on empty-hand combat training to increase the chances of survival in such an unfortunate situation, they armed themselves with a variety of weapons, in order to have numerous replacements.

  It was not unusual for a Sogolian soldier—and particularly not for a Nikorian—to have several large daggers attached to his person in various sheaths, ready to be drawn and used immediately in the event he lost his main weapon.

  Pitkins was one of the few Sogolians who realized that, while there was certainly some logic to the Sogolian combat strategy, it was a bit rigid and overly inspired by antagonism to the Metinvurs and a desire to excel in areas where they faltered.

  Pitkins had lost his sword in combat multiple times, and though he had managed to use a secondary weapon to recover his sword he knew that the gods themselves had surely intervened in several close encounters where he had managed to sever the large artery of a Metinvur who was strangling him and only needed a second or two more to render him unconscious.

  Thus, it was with relish that—after a protracted period of mourning for his late family—he emerged from his grief and threw all his energy into learning Gicksin.

  Progress was painfully slow. The use of various parts of the feet as though they were hands, the intricate grips, the meticulous body positioning all combined to make study of this science a physically and emotionally challenging endeavor. Three hours each morning and three hours each evening, the men gathered for studious observation of Vilizen’s and Zolgen’s demonstrations, followed by merciless repetitions of each technique, sometimes stepping up into the thousands.

  But after three years, Pitkins found himself almost romantically in love with the fluidity and cunning of the techniques and found to his chagrin that it worked against his vow to find and kill the slayers of his family.

  After a full nine years of training, Zolgen informed Pitkins that, while study of Gicksin was indeed a lifetime discipline, he had reached such a high level of sophistication that his further advancement would merely require the continued practice of the techniques but not further instruction.

  Zolgen and Vilizen then requested, as a gift for the knowledge they had imparted, a small portion of a particular herb so that they could end their lives honorably. Pitkins reluctantly agreed, admitting to himself that he also would not desire a long life in captivity, and by the next day the only two Metinvurs for whom he had ever felt anything besides murderous rage were dead.

  As time marched onward, the obstacles to his revenge became practical rather than sentimental. It was not too long afterward that he was framed for treason and banished from the kingdom. He took this as a sign from the gods that revenge was not the plan for his life.

  But today, as he ran madly and aimlessly through the woods, he was beginning to question that assumption. His lessons with Mr. Simmers were nearly the only thing to break the merciless monotony of his life. He crafted few swords because he had noticed a new breed of men in the City of Sodorf.

  They were pompous, extravagantly dressed, and yet not from the nobility. Their uncouth pronunciation and grammar identified them immediately as rascals. Men who had made themselves rich in the city’s flourishing underworld of Smokeless Green.

  Yet, as a man who had been surrounded by combat and violence for most of his life, he easily perceived traits that set these men apart from the average rascal roaming the street searching for an easy pocket to pick.

  Violence—even justified violence—left its traces in a man’s eye, just like a man’s diet leaves its footprint on his waistline and muscles. But cold-blooded murder left not only a more pronounced, but very different, mark. Pitkins was used to seeing the hard, somewhat unfeeling eyes of his veteran Nikorians, and they were markedly different from those of a civilian.

  But his exposure to Vilizen and Zolgen had given him his first opportunity for prolonged exposure to the eyes of men who have killed all manner of victims—armed guards, businessmen, politicians, soldiers, wives, even children. Sometimes he could see Zolgen’s eyes glowing as he demonstrated a particularly nasty neck or spinal break, and he knew Zolgen’s mind was flashing graphic reminders to him of just exactly what it looked like when that technique was applied to completion.

  He ha
d seen too much of Zolgen in the eyes of the men approaching his shop asking for swords, and he had told such men that he had no swords currently for sale.

  They usually began to argue, swearing they had direct knowledge that so-and-so had recently purchased one, but Pitkins’ eyes had drilled into the pupils of such customers as he repeated icily, “I have no swords currently for sale.”

  He had long ago concluded that the shedding of human blood initiated one into a bit of a brotherhood. Many times, he had remarked to a civilian that a man they had both been speaking to was a killer, and virtually every time the civilian responded with derision, saying that “you can’t judge a sword by its sheath.”

  Pitkins had never wasted time arguing with such men. He only repeated his observation whenever given the chance as a kind of experiment. In the end, he had concluded that less than one in a hundred civilians could recognize the eyes of a killer, while killers themselves never failed to recognize their own.

  It was this that had ended any further argument from the young rascals who had invited Pitkins’ icy gaze, for they too knew that they were staring into the eyes of a man well-versed in shedding blood.

  Though it succeeded in getting them off his property, it worried him that he was beginning to accumulate enemies by the week. Then, just a couple of weeks ago he had stopped receiving visits from anyone.

  Initially, he was relieved at the subtraction of this annoyance, but this was promptly replaced by a boredom so intense he almost felt like placing ten swords on his back and walking through the worst parts of town yelling out “swords for sale!” like a common peddler. Then, he began to worry that the sudden cessation of visitors might be the prelude to an attack or threat of some kind.

  Though it had not yet happened, it had caused him to go galloping home a couple of times to check on Donive. While relieved to find her and the pets safe and sound, it had lately triggered questions from Donive: “What’s wrong, honey? Are you thinking about the past? Have you had trouble with anyone lately?”

  He had attempted to shrug these questions off with humor: “No, I just miss your sweet face, babe,” he would tell her. “Plus, with Lookout here, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Lookout was the name they had finally settled on for the stray cat they had adopted. Pitkins sometimes teased their Great Dane, telling him, “Mervin, you better watch out, or Lookout will steal your job as guard dog.”

  Mervin would bark happily, wagging his tail, as if to say he would be honored to step aside for someone of Lookout’s caliber.

  Lookout was like nothing Pitkins had ever seen. He stayed close to Donive constantly, and if anyone ever approached the house, Lookout began meowing ferociously, sometimes ten minutes before the visitor was even within sight.

  He often put himself between any visitor and Donive and would only step aside if rebuked harshly. On one occasion, Pitkins found a dead coyote outside the henhouse with claw marks all around its neck, and even though the coyote had managed to nudge the door open enough to where Lookout could have entered and eaten a few chicks if he had the inkling, all animals were found safe and sound within.

  At night, Lookout could often be seen checking the windows, with a malicious glow in his eyes that Pitkins thought could be an even greater deterrent than Mervin’s 180 pounds.

  When Pitkins petted him affectionately and said, “You’re the official guardian of this house when I’m gone,” Lookout had purred with an intensity that suggested his comprehension of the statement went well beyond what was expected.

  Pitkins continued his aimless sprint through the woods, now stripping his shirt off, as it was thoroughly saturated and dripping with sweat, while his mind processed all the random memories of both long ago and the recent past.

  It had only been today that he had fully ceased denial of a change in Mr. Simmers’ eyes that he had noticed quite some time ago. His polite, unassuming, low-key, seemingly transparent demeanor had caused Pitkins to first tell himself that almost every rule had its exceptions, and Richard surely was one, as everything else about his demeanor belied the content of his eyes.

  And sometimes it seemed as though even his eyes themselves changed, as if he had built-in curtains that normally blocked a part of his soul that he did not wish others to see. But today, while he witnessed his uncannily masterful interpretation of Winds of Death, he had seen Zolgen’s eyes in the figure before him.

  Pitkins, who had been sprinting at full speed for twenty minutes, was beginning to feel some stiches in his side.

  And when he had mentioned the man who embarrassed him at grappling, he knew right away this man was associating with a Varco agent.

  In spite of the mastery he and his ten chosen officers had acquired at Gicksin, it had never spread through the Nikorian ranks, much less those of the general army.

  It has to be a VARCO!!

  But why is Mr. Simmers associating with a Varco, and why are his eyes acquiring the look of a murderer?

  His first instinct was to cut all ties with Richard. After all, he didn’t need the money. But he was immediately reminded of the extreme melancholy caused by his recent boredom.

  Shut this guy out, and you’re going to be counting cracks in the floor at your shop or counting weeds in your yard.

  Just as Pitkins stopped his pointless run and bent over to catch his breath, something caught his eye.

  He turned and looked and saw a large bird leaving the forest. His mind immediately told him it was a pholung, but he dismissed that as preposterous. It was too far away to tell. Plus, he hadn’t seen a pholung in years. It was well known they did not live in Sodorf.

  He glanced again and barely saw a speck in the sky. While he subconsciously noted it was traveling towards Selegania, his mental filter did not condescend to bring that detail up the chain of command to be analyzed by Pitkins’ conscious mind for potential relevance.

  Somehow, the only message that reached Pitkins’ conscious mind was that the next time his curious student left his shop he would follow him. He needed to learn more about Mr. Simmers.

  Chapter 14

  Righty was feeling conflicted as Harold transported him towards a gigantic cumulonimbus. It looked like a mountain, and as he drew nearer it seemed one moment to resemble Halder’s face and the next Pitkins’. He pierced the cloud before there was time to determine whether either was an even remotely objective observation or if his mind was having fun toying with his perception.

  Pitkins’ praise still resounded in his ears but so did his hostile questioning about the ranch hand who had whipped him in grappling.

  He seemed angrier than me at that SOB, and he’s not even the one who got whipped by him.

  Pitkins sure must have had an ax to grind with somebody and seemed almost desperate to hear of anyone who might know or be connected with those people.

  But how could a sloppy description of a man’s fighting style get Pitkins so interested? If there is someone, or are some people, he’s aiming to settle a score with, could their fighting style really be so unique as to identify them?

  And what was the phrase he had used? “Wicked beyond imagination”? Maybe Pitkins has led a sheltered life. Maybe if he knew some of the rough sorts I know—

  He stopped himself there as he realized something about Pitkins that Pitkins had also realized about him. The eyes. Pitkins had seemed like a soft-spoken, overly trained instructor who, while a wellspring of knowledge about combat, surely couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, hurt a fly.

  But today had been the first time he had seen a different texture to those eyes. In the moment of his fury, while asking endlessly about the curious ranch hand, Righty had gotten the impression he was looking into the eyes of a killer.

  Every assumption he had held about Pitkins’ incapability of violence had gone out the window in that split second with as much certainty as if he had just seen Pitkins cleave a man in two.