The Iron Wars Read Online Free PDF Page A

should answer Albrec’s questions.
    “But
what
are you?” Albrec asked plaintively.
    The man called Joshelin glared at him. “What is that, a riddle?”
    “Forgive me, but are you a soldier of Almark? A—a mercenary?”
    The man’s eyes lit with anger. “I’m a Fimbrian soldier, priest, and this is a Fimbrian army you’re in the midst of, so I’d be watchful of words like ‘mercenary’ if I were you.”
    Albrec’s astonishment must have showed in his face, because the soldier went on less brusquely: “It’s four days since we picked you up—you and the other cleric—and saved you from wolves and frostbite. He’s in the cart behind me. He was less beaten up than you. He still has a face, at all events, just lost a few toes and the tips of his ears.”
    “Avila!” Albrec exclaimed in joy. He began to scramble down from the cart again, but Joshelin’s hard palm on his chest halted him.
    “He’s asleep, like you were. Let him come to himself in his own time.”
    “Where are we going, if not to Charibon? Why are Fimbrians on the march again?” Albrec had heard rumours in Charibon of such things, but he had dismissed them as novices’ fancies.
    “We’re to relieve Ormann Dyke, it seems,” Joshelin said curtly, and spat into the snow. “The fortress we built ourselves. We’re to take up the buckler where we set it down all those years ago. And scant gratitude we’ll get for it, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re about as well trusted as Inceptines in this world. Still, it’s a chance to fight the heathen again.” He clamped his mouth shut, as if he thought he had begun to babble.
    “Ormann Dyke,” Albrec said aloud. The name was one out of history and legend. The great eastern fortress which had never fallen to assault. It was in Northern Torunna. They were marching to Torunna.
    “I have to speak to someone,” he said. “I have to know what was done with our belongings. It’s important.”
    “Lost something, have you, priest?”
    “Yes. It’s important, I tell you. You can’t guess how important.”
    Joshelin shrugged. “I know nothing about that. Siward and I were told to look after the pair of you, that’s all. I think they burned your habits—they weren’t worth keeping.”
    “Oh God,” Albrec groaned.
    “What is it, a reliquary or something? Were there gems sewn into your robes?”
    “It was a story,” Albrec said, his eyes stinging and dry. “It was just a story.”
    He crawled back into the darkness of the shrouded cart.
     
    T HE Fimbrians marched far into the night, and when they halted they deployed in a hollow square with the baggage wagons and mules in the middle. Sharpened stakes were hammered into the ground to make a bristling fence about the camp, and details were ordered out of the perimeter to collect firewood. Albrec was given a soldier’s cloak and boots—both much too large for him—and was sat in front of a fire. Joshelin threw him cracker-bread, hard cheese and a wineskin, and then went off to do his stint as sentry.
    The wind was getting up, flattening the flames of the fire. Around in the darkness other fires stitched a fiery quilt upon the snow-girt earth, and the loom of the mountains could be felt on every horizon, an awesome presence through whose peaks the clouds scudded and ripped like rolling rags. The Fimbrian camp was eerily quiet, save for the occasional bray of a mule. The men at the fires talked in low voices as they passed their rations out, but most of them simply ate, rolled themselves in their heavy cloaks and fell asleep. Albrec wondered how they endured it: the heavy marching, the short commons, the snatches of sleep on the frozen earth with no covering for their heads. Their hardiness half frightened him. He had seen soldiers before, of course, the Almarkan garrison of Charibon, and the Knights Militant. But these Fimbrians were something more. There was almost something monastic in their asceticism. He could not begin to imagine what they