Tomorrow, the Killing Read Online Free Page A

Some turned to crime, more to rattling tin cups on street corners. It started to look bad, the capital choked with the broken bodies of ex-heroes. Perhaps the wiser amongst the ministers began to wonder what would happen if their one time army decided to take up their old trade – a concern stoked when Roland Montgomery founded the Veterans’ Association, in large part to convince his former comrades to do just that. Reparations were starting to come in, for once the Crown’s treasuries were flush. It seemed prudent to give some modest percentage of the Dren’s money to the men who had won it.
    And thus was born the Private’s Silver, half from guilt, half from fear. A half ochre a month for every man who’d served until such time as they weren’t alive to claim it. Not enough to start a business or buy a house or feed a family. Just enough to die slowly, two to a bed in a slum tenement, out of sight of passersby. I thought it was a pretty crap exchange for what we’d given, and generally didn’t bother to go down to the tax office and claim it. But for most of my comrades it was near sacrosanct, weighed out of all proportion to its actual value.
    In the grand tradition of shortsightedness, the Crown had not bothered to consider what would happen when the war indemnity ran out, as it had some years back. With our coffers near to empty, the High Chancellor had started to call for taxing the Private’s Silver as regular income, a rather impressive bit of legerdemain by which the Throne would take back with one hand what it gave with the other.
    ‘The government fucks people – that’s what governments do. You shouldn’t need that explained.’
    Adolphus shrugged with a petulance inappropriate to his age and bulk. ‘Ain’t right that they forgot us so quick.’
    ‘First taxes, now time? What’s your encore? You going to track death to her lair, wrestle her into submission?’
    Adolphus dipped his head warily. ‘Shouldn’t blaspheme like that. She Who Waits Behind might be listening.’
    ‘She’s always listening, Adolphus – and she sets her own pace.’ I trampled my cigarette into the floor. It meant work for Adeline but it accentuated my point. ‘Course, you go mucking about with the Association and you might get her to double time it.’
    It was as good a line as any other to end the conversation on, and besides I had a full enough day left ahead of me. I left Adolphus to consider the error of his ways, or more likely why he had chosen to go into business with a gibbering asshole, and threaded the narrow stairway up to my grim, dingy room. Once there I changed back into my regular get up, and took a spare moment to fill my skull with pixie’s breath before heading back out into the street.
3
    T here wasn’t any part of soldiering I had great affection for, but if you put steel to my throat I’d probably single out that period where we weren’t killing anyone as being the least horrible. It was brief, lasting only the few weeks it took to transport forty thousand men from Rigus to Nestria and shove weapons in our hands. And it was still an awful, awful way to spend time – lost days in the hot sun practicing movements with pike and blade, off hours listening to the chittering of the other idiots stupid enough to have enlisted. But still, it was a hell of a lot better than what came after.
    We didn’t know it the morning of the Battle of Beneharnum, of course. We were all operating under the vague suspicion that having learned nothing more than to stand in a line and point our spears in the same direction, such would be all that was required. Our immediate superiors, no crack strategists themselves, encouraged this sort of thinking, indeed seemed to labor beneath it. A strange lethargy had spread through the ranks, from the officers, who drank and gambled and generally made asses of themselves, to our regimental drummer boy, who couldn’t keep a fucking one-two if our lives depended on it –