Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar Read Online Free PDF Page A

messages, and they’re all demanding them of me. Send me to Karse naked if you want. Please! It will get me out of here, but until you get twenty more clerks to replace me, you will damned well wait like everyone else! Sir!”
    Hallock rocked back slowly. He narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms, as the clerk sat down. After a long moment he replied, “I should damn well promote you for talking to me like that, son.”
    “There’s no need to wish a curse on me, sir,” the clerk replied. “I know what the gryphon did for you. We all do. But no news is no news. When I know something, there’ll be a runner sent for you.”
    Hallock frowned but had to accept it. “I’ll be making the rounds of wounded, then. But I’ll come back. Good luck.”
    The clerk didn’t even look up as he resumed scrawling notes on teetering piles of papers. “Same to you, sir.”
    Hallock caught himself rubbing at the wide scar on his forehead, then hobbled his way out into the mess of the encampment. Woods had been cleared on either side of the main trade road, which had become the main thoroughfare of a tent city—well, a city designed by a drunken mob, maybe. There were no straight lines to get anywhere, and tents clustered around every tree that was too heavy to clear cut. Ropework between those trees appeared to have been done by myopic giant spiders during fits of seizures, and anything from canvas to blankets had been strung up as shelter. The poor tinder gained from the smaller felled trees made the cook fires underneath the canopies smoke and struggle for life. The main local source for firewood was a nondescript sort of scrubby, scrawny bush with annoying short thorns. It grew all over for miles, except for a former Changecircle at the edge of the camp. No one wanted to even set foot on that Circle, even though it was set perfectly atop a circular mound that probably had the best drainage, and view, of any of this mud-ridden swamp.
    The most orderly part of the whole encampment was on either side of the wide road to the river’s edge, where the grain mill was. The miller moved in with a family in town, and volunteered his home as a command post. Most of the officer corps had settled into the mill tower, which was the tallest building for many miles around. The rooms above the grindstones served as operation planning rooms for security reasons. In truth, it was mainly because the rooms were warm, dry, and had fireplaces—some comfort despite the incessant grind of the millstones.
    Hallock should technically be in there now, but the drone of the mill gave him a headache. So did the thick concentration of junior officers arguing tactics, where they tried to justify staying inside where they were “needed.” Most of the staff at the mill mean well, but they didn’t seem to understand: an army can not be administrated—it must be led. After the southern border wars, the turmoil of the Storms and the strife the Changecircles brought, one leader after another retired from service. Few command veterans had stayed in field service after all of that. Stavern’s First, his commander of the Sixteenth Regiment, had been the most experienced field commander the Guard could send northward at the time. He knew the protocols as the woman’s subordinate, but he hadn’t known her well. She’d fallen when Hallock had. The morning that he’d been cut loose from the Healer’s tent and the yellow ribbon removed from it, he heard the horns sounding the mourning notes. She had been buried already.
    And here he was.
    A new stripe tacked on the sleeve.
    A new ribbon under the badge.
    Brevet promotion. First of the Sixteenth, Captain Hallock Stavern.
    A senior officer, maybe, but still one of the regulars in his heart.
    Filthy and unpleasant as the cantonment was, at least here he was with the Guard. He hadn’t gained his previous rank by nepotism or bribery, he’d gained it by genuinely believing in what the Guard could be, and his soldiers