Wartorn: Resurrection Read Online Free PDF Page A

last night?"
    Cat favored him with a level stare before his gaze returned to its normal pattern of scanning the immediate environs.
    "I think you had enough fun for both of us."
    The boy always had a proprietary, vaguely disapproving attitude toward the older man. Rather than being offended, Aquint found it amusing.
    "That's right. You don't drink, do you?"
    "I'm a thief," Cat said, bluntly. "A thief has to keep his wits about him more than a businessman ... or a soldier."
    It was an old conversational argument between them. Stretching all the way back to the day they had first met.
    Aquint had been running his freight-hauling business in Callah, with an unadvertised side in smuggling
    and black marketeering, back in those not long ago days before the Felk had come and captured the city. A patrol of city constables had come into his warehouse in pursuit of a cutpurse who had eluded them in the crowds outside. Aquint had sworn to them that there was no one on the premises other than himself and an alley cat he kept around to chase vermin, blandly ignoring the quick glimpse he had caught of a young sinewy boy slipping through his door just ahead of the patrol. After the constables had moved on, Aquint had expected the lad to vanish back into the city streets and alleys. Instead, the boy had remained and become his inseparable shadow. When asked for a name, he had simply shrugged and said, "I'm your cat... just like you told the patrol." And Cat he had been ever since.
    When Aquint went into the army, Cat had followed, though he was never actually officially enlisted. Whether the other soldiers thought of him as Aquint's son or bed partner, they kept their opinions to themselves, simply ignoring the boy as they did the other camp followers who traveled with the army in their southward sweep. That army had come out of the Isthmus's northernmost city-state, Felk. It had moved south, capturing Aquint's home of Callah, then the neighboring city of Windal... then farther on, to U'delph.
    "For once, I'll have to agree with you, Cat," Aquint said, darkly, sipping at the water while he stared straight ahead. "It doesn't take much in the way of wits for a soldier to do what we did yesterday. In fact, the fewer wits, the better."
    "Don't start again," Cat hissed, looking at him sternly. "You said more than enough last night. They don't like critical talk in this army."
    "I'm sorry, but it makes me sick," Aquint insisted. "That wasn't a battle. By the madness of the gods, it was butchery."
    "It's the job of the generals to make decisions and issue orders," Cat said.
    "That pitiful garrison folded in a matter of two watches. After that, we could have accepted their surrender and claimed the city-state. There was no reason to go to the extremes that we did."
    "It's the job of a soldier to follow those orders," Cat said. "That's how an army is run. If every soldier tried to make their own decisions and plans, it wouldn't just be ineffectual, it would be chaos."
    "Are you saying you approve of what was done?" Aquint asked.
    "I'm saying that my approval doesn't matter... and neither does yours. Even if you had been consulted about the battle plan—"
    "Which I wasn't."
    "—which you weren't, you would have been overruled. You couldn't change it then, and you certainly can't change it now that it's over. All your complaints and criticisms can do now is put you in jeopardy if you insist on voicing them."
    Aquint drew a deep breath and blew it out. The lad was articulate for a thief who'd haunted Callah's streets and alleys.
    "All right," Aquint said. "You've made your point. I'll try to keep my mouth shut."
    "It may be a little late now," Cat said. "You mouthed off last night enough to get arrested for treason. I only hope you satisfied Sonya."
    "Sonya?"
    Cat favored him with another prolonged stare.
    "The little corporal from Third Squad," he said. "The one with the muscles and the bad teeth. She was your companion there under the bushes last