Evil for Evil Read Online Free PDF

felt an urge to apologize. “I can’t remember,” he said. “I was in the
     fighting …” He paused. Something had just occurred to him. “Did we win?”
    The man shrugged. “Search me,” he said. “Get a hold of my arm, come on.”
    The man hoisted him up and caught him before he could fall down again. “This way,” he said. “Get you on a cart, you’ll be
     all right.”
    “Thank you,” Miel said. The man grinned.
    It was only a dozen yards or so to the cart, which was heavily laden with more stuffed sacks and sheaves of weapons. The man
     helped Miel to sit up on the tailgate. “You bide there,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
    Miel watched him walk away; the slow, measured stride of a man at work. After a while he couldn’t tell him apart from the
     others.
    He knew that this sort of thing happened, of course, but he’d never actually seen it before. Once a battle was over, he left;
     pursuing in victory, withdrawing in defeat. What became of the battlefield after that had never really been any business of
     his. He knew that people like this existed, companies of men who went round stripping the dead. As a member of the ruling
     classes, he understood why they were tolerated. There was a convention, unwritten but mostly observed, that in return for
     the harvest they buried the dead, tidied up, made good generally. They put the badly wounded out of their misery, and — that
     would explain it — salvaged those likely to recover and returned them to their own people in exchange for money. It was, he’d
     heard, strictly a commercial decision as to who they recovered and who they didn’t bother with. Apparently, a damaged knee
     meant he was still viable. So that was all right.
    He made an effort, told himself to stay still. Before he closed his eyes (how long ago was that? He sniffed; not too long,
     the dead hadn’t started to smell yet), everything had mattered so much. The battle; the desperate, ferocious last stand. If
     they’d won, the Mezentine Fifth Light Cavalry presumably no longer existed. If they’d lost, there was nothing standing between
     the enemy and the four defenseless villages of the Rosh valley. Last time he’d looked, it was important enough to kill and
     die for; but the man with the mustache didn’t know and didn’t seem to care, so perhaps it hadn’t mattered so very much after
     all.
    An unsettling thought occurred to him. If they’d lost, the resistance was over and done with. In that case, they wouldn’t
     be there anymore to redeem their wounded. But the Mezentines would pay good money for him, if these people found out who he
     was. On balance, it was just as well the man with the mustache had appropriated his expensive boots. The armor wasn’t a problem,
     since it was captured Mezentine. Jewelry; it took him a moment to remember. All his life, as the head of the Ducas, he’d been
     festooned with rings and brooches and things on chains round his neck, till he no longer noticed they were there. Luckily
     (he remembered) he’d sold them all to raise money for the cause. There was still his accent, of course, and the outside chance
     that someone might recognize him, but he knew he was a lousy actor. Trying to pretend to be a poor but honest peasant lad
     would just draw attention.
    Still, it would have been nice to find out what had happened. It had always struck him as unfair that the men who died in
     a battle never got to know the result; whether they died for a victory or a defeat. If anything mattered at the point of their
     death, surely that would. He reassured himself that he’d find out eventually, and in the meantime there was nothing he could
     do. Well, there was something. He could take his armor off, and save his preservers a job.
    Force of habit made him stack it neatly. Not too much damage; he was glad about that, in a way. They had, after all, saved
     him from dying painfully of hunger and exposure on a hillside covered with dead