“I am the Ultor.”
“The Ultor?”
“It means avenger,”
Scar put in helpfully.
“I know what it means,” spat the Boss. He was a big man, and
ugly—not the honorable ugliness of a bad nose handed down through generations
or a complexion speckled by a life of labor in the sun, but a vicious ugliness
built on years of cruel expressions etched into the skin through use and habit.
He had the barrel chest and large, round, rigid gut of many a life-long soldier
gone to seed, swathed in a tatty woolen robe—not the hides of his swordsmen,
but fine woven garment worked through with red threads in some sort of motif.
The Ultor wondered if he’d killed its original owner.
“—want your opinion I’ll ask for it,” the Boss was telling
Scar. He turned back to the Ultor, “Now what’s your name?”
“I no longer have a name. I am the Ultor. I am a sacred
avenger. I may not rest—”
“Yes, yes, fine, but what was your name before you were the Ultor?”
The Ultor clenched his jaw and said nothing.
“Well, who are you here to get revenge on, then? Me? Did
Maduan send you?”
“I don’t know Maduan, or you. I have no business here,” the
Ultor assured him. “I only require safe passage on my way.”
The Boss barked out a laugh, and all the swordsmen laughed
along. Their voices echoed off the cliff walls surrounding the village. None of
the other villagers laughed.
They’d brought him to the village center after they’d
captured and bound him, and made him wait in the dust while they built a large
fire in front of the town well—a hot spring, by the smell of it. The odor of
sulphur almost overwhelmed the grassy scent of the dung-fueled bonfire. In case
the commotion of his failed
escape hadn’t roused them, swordsmen went around and cried up the whole
town, gathering them all to watch the spectacle.
“Your way?” the
Boss said. “There’s no way past here.
This is Govan, the end of the road. The ugly mole on the hairline of the world.
There’s nothing past here but rock and sky.”
“To the east,” the Ultor agreed. “I’m going west.”
“Going—?” The Boss frowned. “You’re going toward the
sunrise, you mean? Where the sun,” he mimed it out, his left hand arcing up
into the air (Left-handed, the Ultor
noted), “comes from at the start of the day? You’re going that way.”
“No. I follow the sun to where it sets. West.” The Boss just
looked confused. “I came from the east, over the mountains, and I am going—”
“No one comes over the mountains,” the Boss interrupted.
“I did.”
“Nonsense! No one comes over the mountains. It’s
impossible!”
“Nevertheless,” was all the Ultor replied.
The Boss leaned forward in his chair, the one they’d brought
down and set out like a throne in front of the wood house. “Tell me the truth,”
he murmured in a confidential tone. “You heard about the gold, hmm? You came to
make your fortune? I understand—truly I do.” He looked over the assembled
crowd. “Would you believe I was actually born in his stinking pile of a
village?”
It hadn’t actually occurred to the Ultor that he might have
been born elsewhere, but he sensed his input wasn’t really required.
“It’s true. Right here in this hole. I left as soon as I had
the chance.”
As soon as they could
get rid of you, the Ultor thought.
“I traveled the world, I trained as a warrior. I met a few
of your kind—fine soldiers.” The Ultor bristled at being compared to a perfuga, but said nothing. “I made
myself into the kind of man these sad goatherders could never dream of. And do
you know what I learned along the way? That gold … is valuable.”
He laughed a huge, belly-shaking laugh. The Ultor glanced
over the assembled crowd, wondering how many of them even spoke enough Ugasic
to follow this little monologue. He noticed a young girl, maybe ten years old,
murmuring to a trio of greybeards—translating.
“Can you imagine,” the Boss continued, “living in a
stinkhole so backwards, so utterly idiotic, that no one even knows what gold
is? You can scoop it right out of the river in there,” he said, hooking his
thumb toward the
cave. “They don’t even use it for money.”
“So you came back with a few of your friends,” the Ultor
said, “and educated them.”
“You can scoop it right out of the river,” the Boss
repeated. “But then—you knew that, didn’t you.”
“I’m just passing through.”
The Boss laughed again, though the Ultor heard no mirth in
it. “Your lie is ridiculous. The gods made these mountains as the wall of the
world. You may sail around them, but no man comes over them alive.”
“I am no man. I am the Ultor.”
He heard the little translator echo the word, Ultor. The greybeards listened, and
watched, and said nothing.
“And I supposed your magic Ultor powers got you into the
village. Hmm? Past my guard?”
“I climbed down the cliff.”
The Boss sighed the sigh of a man dealing with idiots. He gave
Scar a signal, and two of the swordsmen were seized and disarmed—the gate
guards, the Ultor guessed. While Scar searched them, the Boss turned back to
the Ultor.
“I don’t understand why you won’t tell the truth. Obviously
you heard about our gold, probably from Maduan. You came up the mountain,
bribed my guards to let you in—and then what? You found the gold too hard to
steal from the storehouse? You only came to get the lay of the land, for some
army to follow, perhaps?”
The two accused guards landed in the dirt beside the Ultor.
Scar showed the Boss what they’d had on them.
“I don’t understand,” the Boss said. “There’s nothing here. How
did you get past them?”
“I climbed,” the Ultor repeated slowly and deliberately, “down
the cliff.”
“Do you know them? A friend or an old brother at arms?”
The Ultor was having trouble keeping a lid on his anger. “I
don’t know them, or you, or this village. I came over the mountain, from the
east, and I crawled down the cliff for food and a mount.”
“Well. Of course I’d like to know exactly how you came here,
and everything else, but if you insist on keeping to your lies,” he shrugged, “what
can I do?” To Scar: “Them first. Theirs was a betrayal.”
As Scar plunged his sword through first the one guard and
then the other, a few of the villagers screamed or cried out. None of them had
any idea what was happening. None but the little translator and her trio of
greybeards.
The Ultor began calculating—wait for Scar to get close, ram
a shoulder into his solar plexus, and then … And then …
“Wait!” a voice rang out. Scar stopped and looked around.
It was the little translator. She stepped forward and cried
out, “I demand justice!”
The Boss looked incredulous. “I’m killing him, girl! What
more justice do you want?”
One of the greybeards asked her something, but she ignored
him. “Vengeance should be mine! He should die by my father’s sword … and by my
hand!”
A murmur really should have gone through the crowd at that,
but none of the crowd understood a word. The greybeard pulled at her robe,
demanding something, but she paid him no mind. She was no more than a child,
but she stood there, demanding the right to kill him, as if she were the
tallest warrior in the village. The Ultor honored her spirit, if not its aim.
The Boss guffawed, and for the first time all night he
sounded genuinely amused. He looked the little girl up and down, and beckoned
her forward. “You’re going to kill him?”
“It’s my right. And my duty, as his only remaining family.”
The Boss considered her. “Where’s his sword?”
Scar brought it forward, the sword
with the missing jewel on the hilt. So there was someone, after all, left
to mourn the man on the mountain. Scar handed the sword to the girl, and she
dragged it over to the Ultor. Just a little slip of a thing. She could barely
lift the sword—but she did. She lifted it high above her head and pointed it
straight at him.
He knew he could rush her and knock her down; but then what?
There were still eight more swordsmen surrounding him and he was unarmed and
tied up. The Ultor cannot die.
But as the child arced the sword down toward him, he wasn’t
sure how he wouldn’t.
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