Deadsmell turned to Balm.
‘All right,’ the sergeant said. ‘I’ll go find Kindly.’
Shortnose had been cut loose. The rest agreed it should be him, and he went and found Flashwit and Mayfly, and a little while later Saltlick joined them. None of them said much, but it was clear that Shortnose was in charge. He didn’t know why but he wasn’t in the mood to argue anyway so it was him whether he wanted it to be or not.
He led them into the press of the regulars, where soldiers melted from their path and with eyes all hollow and haunted tracked them as they went past.
Maybe they’d been harnessed like oxen, but that didn’t mean they weren’t paying attention to whatever was going on around them. Most of it wasn’t worth chewing on, but sometimes some unguarded comment hung around and then, when something else arrived, it came back, and things started making sense.
They weren’t oxen. They were heavies. And word had reached them that Shorthand had a broken skull and probably wasn’t going to last the night, and that a squad of marines had been ambushed, with one of them down but luckily not dead. Looked like the one who busted Shorthand’s head got himself gutted by a marine, but at least two more attackers had gotten away.
There weren’t just two of them, Shortnose knew. Two with crossbows, aye, stolen from a wagon. At least seven others with them, though. Fist Blistig’s gang of thugs.
Every army had them. They were only trouble when some fool put ’em all together in one place, and Blistig had done just that.
Head-breaking a heavy? And from behind, too? That needed answering. Shorthand had been a knot in the saw of the Stumpies. He’d blunted a lot of teeth on that saw. Bad luck about the fingers, but cutting wood’s a dangerous business, almost – Shortnose frowned – almost as dangerous as being a heavy.
Too bad that Blistig wasn’t with his crew when they found it. They wouldn’t have killed him, though. Just let him watch as they waded into his gang, disarming them and breaking arms and legs, with at least one stamp-down from Mayfly crushing a fool’s pelvis, making him squirt in both directions. Aye, it would have been great for the Fist to see when Saltlick found one of the stolen crossbows and tried to jam it butt-end first down a thug’s mouth. Things tore and snapped and broke but he got it as far down as the middle of the throat, which was something. They left it there.
Shortnose and Flashwit just used their fists and pounded faces into bloody pulps, and that took a lot of punches, but the only people looking on were regulars and eventually those regulars just started walking again, since there was nothing else to be done.
Somebody blindsided a heavy. That wasn’t done. Ever.
But even Shortnose was surprised when a regular, a sergeant leading his squad past, looked down on the bodies of the thugs, and spat at the nearest one – no real spit, just the sound, the stab of his head, clear enough to take its meaning. And Shortnose looked across to Flashwit and then Saltlick and they nodded back.
Just as the heavies weren’t all oxen, the regulars weren’t all pack-mules. They’d seen, they’d listened. They’d made up their minds. And that was good.
Better that than killing them all, wasn’t it? That’d take all night. Or even longer .
‘Found him, Fist,’ said Captain Raband.
Kindly turned to Balm. ‘Pull everybody back now – this is between me and Blistig, understood?’
The sergeant nodded, and then hesitated. ‘Fist? You’re going to kill him, ain’t ya?’
‘Sergeant?’
‘Well, sir, it’s just … if you ain’t gonna, cause of some rules or something, a word to Throatslitter, or Smiles who’s in Tarr’s squad, or—’
‘Marine, listen well to what I’m about to say. Unless you want to see one of your marines executed, you will not touch Fist Blistig. Am I understood?’
‘Begging your pardon, Fist, but come the sun’s rise, we’re all gonna be crawling, if that. So that kinda threat don’t mean much, if you see what I mean. We got us a list under Blistig’s name, Fist, and we’re expecting you to carve a nice red line right through it, starting with him.’
‘You are talking mutiny, Sergeant.’
‘Ugly word, that one, sir. What did the Bridgeburners call it? Culling . Old Malazan habit, right? Picked it up from the Emperor himself, in fact, and then the Empress, who did the same.’
‘As she sought to do with the Wickans, Sergeant, or have you forgotten?’
‘Aye, easy to get carried away, sir. But tonight we’re talking one man.’