Free Get Her Back (Demontech) by David Sherman

either. Have you seen him?”
          Guma shook his head. “I haven’t seen or heard any musician since I arrived here.”
          Haft looked a question at Lieutenant Balta.
          “I’ve asked my men about the musician,” Balta said. “No one has seen or heard one.”
     
          Nomad warriors were spotted around the Bloody Axes’ designated encampment area. They were obviously guards even though the Skraglanders weren’t inside an enclosure. In addition, they were likely observers who would report everything they saw to Nagusi. And everything they heard. So far, there was no evidence that any of the High Desert Nomads except Itzuli spoke a language other than their own. But they needed to know for sure. To that end, Lieutenant Balta and Sergeant Korona told their men to wander about and say insulting things within hearing of the guards.
          The men didn’t need any further instructions, they knew how to get a rise out of soldiers—or barbarians. Every one of the Skraglanders spoke some of at least two other languages, among them they spoke a score or more. They intended to speak all of them in the hearing of the guards.
          “When we’re through here,” Hegyes said with relish to Asztalos when the pair had wandered within ten feet of two of the nomads, “I’m really going to enjoy chopping the heads off some of these barbarian nomads. Beginning with these two.”
          He said that in Skraggish. Asztalos repeated Hegyes threat, but in Matigule. He gave the two nomads a friendly smile. They smiled back, and gave no indication that they understood what the two Skraglanders had said, or even that they had spoken two different languages.
          Thirty yards away, Kes and Parduc stood facing each other in conversation a few yards from a knot of three nomads.
          “Don’t look now,” Kes said in Bostian, his voice pitched to easily carry to the nomads, “but that one behind your left shoulder? The word is, his sister is working as a pleasure girl for the Low Desert  Nomads.”
          “You mean the ugly one, the one whose mother can’t keep  her skirt down and her knickers on when she’s near a Dartmutter.” Parduc managed to get the words out in Kondivian.
          “Hey, you heard that too!” Kes exclaimed in Frangerian. “Then it must be true.”
          Elsewhere, Halasz and Acel slowly wandered past a guard.
          “Have you ever seen such a pathetic excuse for a warrior?”  Halasz asked in Bostian.
          “Never, not in any of my wanderings through this whole wide world,” Acel averred in a version of the Zobran dialect spoken in the Penstons. “They’ll be so easy to kill when Sir Haft gives the order that even children could wipe them out.”
          Kevekoto declared in Ewsarkan, “Do you know that when the warriors of this clan get too close to another clan, the other clan makes them lay down so they can piss on them?”
         “Yes, I know about that,” Lovag said in Apianghian. “And be careful that you don’t drink water that any of them offer you, not even if it’s been boiled. After the other clans piss on them, these warriors have to gather the liquid, and that’s all they’re allowed to drink!”
          Kevekoto shook his head. “Disgusting. These people are simply disgusting.”
          “They are that,” Lovag agreed. “They’re so disgusting that I wouldn’t bed one of their women with your manhood!”
          And on and on, different Bloody Axes speaking in a score or more of languages, all in easy hearing of the guards, and moving on to speak close to others. By the time they finished, each of the guards had heard insults in at least seven or eight languages. None of them gave any indication that they had understood a single word spoken for their benefit.
          Soon after, satisfied that the warriors watching over them didn’t speak any of the languages