Free Web NovelChapter 187: The Sorting
Gal POV
The jaghun commander found Gal and his men where the street from the south gate opened onto the wider avenue. His horse was lathered, and he didn’t slow it all the way down before he spoke.
"Residential district, two blocks north and east."
He pointed past the nearest building. "Anyone with a trade skill goes to the square. Don’t let your riders kill workers. Military-age men without a skill are yours to deal with."
He pulled his horse east before Gal had finished taking it in.
Nasan watched him go. "So nothing worth taking," he said.
"No," Gal said.
He looked at his arban. Seven riders including himself. He looked at the gate, the smoke from the fire compound still thick to the south, the sounds of fighting two streets north and shifting.
"Chaqu on the group when we have one. Nasan, you watch the buildings. Orkhon, with me."
Orkhon said nothing. He turned his horse north.
The residential district started where the streets narrowed and the buildings pressed closer on both sides. Timber and plaster, two stories, the kind of construction that housed craftsmen’s families and minor traders.
Two of the buildings near the entrance had their doors already broken open. Before Gal had gone fifty meters he could hear the specific sounds ahead. freёwebnoѵel.com
Four riders from a different arban had driven people from two buildings into the cross-street at the block’s east end. Eighteen or twenty people pressed at the far wall, and two of them were spread out lifeless on the ground.
The four riders were working through the group from the west, moving along it.
Gal drove his horse forward at pace. Orkhon came alongside without being told.
He reached the four riders before they went through the middle of the group. The nearest one looked up, saw Gal coming fast, and didn’t move out of the way.
"Those are assigned to be sort out," Gal said. "Get out of this district."
The rider looked at him. "You’re not on my jaghun."
"Torghul’s order, any craft workers go to the square." Gal held the man’s eyes. "Get out."
"There’s nothing here worth for the sorting," the rider said.
He looked back at the group.
Gal pressed his horse into the man’s animal from the side, a full shoulder-check that shoved the man’s horse back two steps. The rider grabbed his reins and turned on him, one hand going to his saber.
Gal’s knife was already out. He pressed the flat of it against the rider’s wrist before the saber had cleared its ring.
"Out," Gal said.
The other three riders had stopped.
The one with Gal’s knife against his wrist looked at it, then at Gal’s face, then let go of the saber grip.
He pulled his horse back and rode out the street. The other three followed.
Gal put the knife away. His left forearm had taken the impact of the shoulder-check against his own horse’s neck, and the bruise was already working through the muscle.
He flexed the hand once and looked at the group at the far wall.
Orkhon had moved up beside them and turned his horse to face west. Nasan was on the east side of the group.
Chaqu had already dismounted and was pulling a broad-shouldered man out of the crowd by the arm, the man’s palms dark at the knuckles and stained black in the creases the way hands got from ironwork over years.
The two people on the ground were a man and an older woman. The man had a shaft through his throat. The woman’s neck had been cut.
Gal looked at them for a moment, then looked at the people still standing.
"Move them north," he said to Chaqu. "This street connects at the next cross."
They went.
The captives group grew block by block.
Chaqu and one of the other riders worked the buildings on each side, Chaqu going in first and coming out with whoever was inside, the rider at the door keeping anyone from slipping out while Chaqu worked the interior.
Some buildings gave one person. Some gave five.
From the second building east of the cross-street, a woman came out with three children holding her coat and didn’t resist being moved into the group.
A man from the building beside it had a loom frame visible in the front room, and his hands showed the thread-groove calluses that came from years of weaving. Gal nodded and Chaqu put him in.
At the next block, two more arbans were working the buildings on the street to the west, their voices carrying over the rooftops whenever they flushed someone toward an exit.
The smoke from the building one street further west had thickened, and the light in the lane had the particular flat orange that meant the fire there had fully taken hold.
The group reached the small square at the next intersection with twenty-six people in it.
Gal looked them over from horseback while Nasan moved his horse along the square.
"There’s a large one," Nasan said, pulling up beside Gal. "From the third building. Second rank."
Gal looked. freeweɓnovel.cøm
The man was tall, broad through the chest, in a merchant’s coat that sat awkwardly across his shoulders, too narrow there, the seams pulling. His hands rested at his sides with his fingers slightly curved, the way hands rested when they were used to holding something heavy and kept the habit even empty.
The right forearm showed thickening, the bow callus that came from years of drawing, running from the wrist toward the elbow in the specific place a composite bow’s string found the arm.
The man was looking at the riders’ positions, not at the people around him.
Gal rode to him.
He stopped his horse close and looked at the man’s hands, then at his forearm.
The man said something in Bulgar and held up both hands palm-outward, the merchant’s gesture.
Gal reached down and gripped the man’s right arm and turned it faced up. The callus was thick and old, the skin darkened along the whole length of it.
Garrison work, not merchant work.
The man understood that the answer had already been given.
He tried to pull his arm back. Gal held it, leaned from the saddle, and put his knife into the man’s throat at the left side.
The man made cried and went down on his knees, both hands going to his neck. He fell sideways without ceremony.
The square went quiet in a way it hadn’t been.
The weaver was looking at the ground. The woman with the children had her arm around the nearest one.
An older man toward the back of the group had stopped moving entirely and was watching Gal with sharp.
"Keep sorting," Gal said to Chaqu.
Chaqu went back to work.
In the next ten minutes three people changed what they were claiming.
Two of them were telling the truth. One had calluses from rope-work consistent with a rigger, and the tools in his building confirmed it when Nasan went back to look.
Another had burn scarring up both forearms from furnace work.
The third wasn’t telling the truth about his trade, but wasn’t a garrison soldier either, hands too soft for either. Gal put him in the group and moved on.
The captives group had thirty-one people by the time they reached the north border of the residential district.
The craftsmen’s quarter started on the other side of the cross-street. The buildings were larger there, workshop-scale, the streets wider to accommodate the movement of goods.
The forge scent came through the smoke, specific and heavy.
From the nearest building, thirty meters north, a door had just closed. Gal had seen it pull shut as his horse reached the intersection, the movement quick, someone inside watching and pulling back when the arban came into view.
"Might be an ambush waiting," Nasan said.
"Then we wait," Gal said.
Chaqu looked at the quarter’s entrance. "We should keep this position and wait for a couple more arbans to join us."
Gal looked at the civilian group behind them. Thirty-one people, two of his riders managing them from horseback.
"Take them back," he said to the nearest rider.
"Both of you. South square, give them to whoever’s running the sorting."
He looked at the pair.
"Move fast."
The two riders turned the captives south and started pushing them back down the street.
Gal looked at the quarter ahead, at the closed door, at the five riders he had left.
The door stayed closed.
