The Last Coin

Sergeant Vell read the contract twice, which was once more than she read most contracts, and then she set it down on the company table and said the thing she was being paid not to say. "It's a grave we're being hired to dig. Ours." The captain did not argue with her. That was the trouble with Captain Orro — he never argued, he only waited, and his waiting had a weight to it, and the weight was thirty-one soldiers who had not eaten well in two months. The Last Coin was a small company and an old one, and old small companies do not get the good contracts. They get the contracts that have been turned down so many times the fee has swollen up fat with everyone else's fear. "Tell me what you see," Orro said. "Properly. That's why I keep a sergeant." So Vell told him, because telling him properly was the job, and the job was the only thing in her life she had never once done badly. "The Iron God's road," she said. "A pilgrim road, eleven leagues, up the Karran valley to a shrine nobody's seen in a generation. The temple in Karran-town wants the road guarded — wants an armed company to walk it end to end and hold it open for forty days so the pilgrim season can run. Standard escort work, on the face of it. We've done forty of these." She put one finger on the contract. "Here's what's not standard. The fee. It's four times escort rate. Temples don't overpay; temples are the stingiest paymasters under the sky. A temple pays four times rate when it has already tried to hire the job three times at single rate and watched three companies say no." "Or," said Orro, "when three companies took it and didn't come back to complain about the wage." "Yes," Vell said. "Or that." The fire spat. Outside the company found whatever supper two months of thin contracts had left them, and the sound of it came through the wall — low, tired, the sound of soldiers who knew a fat contract was on the table and were waiting, the way soldiers wait, to be told whether to be glad. "The road's been walked back from," Orro said. "Don't look at me like that, Vell, I do read them too. The temple's own clerk let it slip. Pilgrims have gone up the Iron God's road every season for four hundred years and most of them have come down it again. It's the last two seasons that have gone wrong. Two seasons, the pilgrims walk up and the road keeps them. No bodies. No survivors. No bandits' boast, no monster's spoor, nothing a scout can bring back and name. The road simply stopped giving people back." "And the temple's answer to a road that eats pilgrims," Vell said slowly, "is to send it thirty-one more people, in matching colours, walking in a line." "The temple's answer is to send it people who can fight whatever's doing the eating. That's us. That's the entire trade, Vell. We are the company that gets sent at the thing nobody understands." Orro leaned forward, and the firelight did his scarred face no favours and he had long stopped caring. "Four times rate. Forty days. It feeds the company through winter and it puts coin by, real coin, the kind we have not had in this company since the Hallow contract. And here is the part I will say once and not again, because you are my sergeant and you have earned hearing it straight." He held her eyes. "If we turn this down, we do not feed thirty-one people through winter. Thin contracts and a hard season — Vell, you have buried soldiers. You have never yet had to watch them starve. I am asking you which grave you would rather we walked toward, because there are two of them on this table, and only one of them pays." Vell looked at the contract. At the fat, frightened, four-times fee. At the eleven leagues of a road that had, two seasons running, declined to return what was sent up it. She had been a soldier twenty-two years. She had learned, in the first two, that there was no such thing as a job with no grave at the end of it — there was only the job where you chose the burying ground yourself, and the job where something else chose it for you. "I'll want to pick our scout," she said at last. "Not the temple's. Ours. Someone I trust to walk a league up that road and turn around — actually turn around, Sergeant's order, no heroics — and come back and tell me true what the road is. Before the whole company sets a boot on it. The temple wants forty days; they get the company on day two, not day one." Orro studied her a moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. "That's a yes," he said. "That's a yes to the scout," Vell said, and stood, and reached for the contract, because somebody in the Last Coin had to be the one to fold up the fat frightened thing and carry it, and it had always, for twenty-two years, been her. "Whether it's a yes to the road depends entirely on what the scout doesn't see."