“That level of policy is beyond a pup like me. My job is to do what I can to make sure the regiment operates successfully.” Pinkus Ghort returned. “All taken care of, Pipe. What do you think? Scheme? Or surrender to the soldier’s favorite whore and get some sleep?”
“The whore can wait I won’t pass out for another hour. Why don’t we separate the possible from the impossible and eliminate the wishful thinking of the fools who believe in their God-given right to tell us what to do. Maybe we can amaze the world.”
“You need to calm your ass down. Titus. Tell him. Three sorcerers at al-Khazen, Pipe. One of them a bigger bugfucker than the assholes who kicked the snot out of you in Brothe.”
“Captain Ghort puts it crudely, but he’s right. Three Sorcerers. Worth consideration, Colonel.”
“You’re right. We have to take them into account They’ll be waiting for us. Unfortunately, I don’t have much experience with that sort of thing. Do you, Pinkus?”
“Zip. I make a point of avoiding that kind of shit. Which ain’t so hard ‘cause it seems like it’s mainly a Praman kind of problem.” Else noted a subtle shift in Consent’s stance. Titus knew about Sonsa, then. What else had Stewpo passed along? Too many people knew too much about Else Tage. “The Special Office is a Praman problem?”
Ghort snorted, “Oh, hell yes! I bet you can’t find a bigger carbuncle on Hellalawhosis’s ass.”
“Maybe. But that isn’t really the point We need to figure out what to do about the ones at al-Khazen.”
“Not really.”
“What?”
“I just realized, we don’t need to worry about shit, Pipe. On account of, Grade Drocker is gonna tell us what to do.” Titus Consent said, “A solid point Colonel. We won’t be in charge.”
“Wrong. I’ll...”
Ghort said, “Pipe, stop for a while. Get your ass to sleep. Let’s worry about shit after they tell us how much of it they want us to eat.”
***
THE CITY REGIMENT ENTERED CALZIR ON A DAY CONSIDERED holy by all four religions claiming the Holy Lands as home. A coincidence. The calendars coincided only once each fifty-six years.
Hard little knots of ice whipped around, stinging cheeks. It was winter. Winter in a land with an old reputation for winter cruelty. The land presented a cold and barren face. Otherwise, Calzir’s defenses were fantasies. They were the imaginings of adolescents. Despite examples brutally made earlier, every lesser noble or warlord encountered proved willing to swear allegiance to almost any name put before them. Many expressed a willingness to convert if they could retain their livings.
Ghort observed, “They’ll change back if things turn to shit down south.”
There was little south left. The coast lay just eighty miles beyond Pateni Persus. Else nodded. “You notice that there aren’t many people around?”
“Yep. And I don’t think they’re all hiding in the hills. They ran off to al-Khazen. They think the sorcerers can protect them.”
“Maybe they will.” Else dealt with local chieftains by accepting oaths, taking hostages, and extracting supplies. He took his time. Grade Drocker did not hurry him. Drocker wanted more information about the enemy, too.
Else also hoped to find out what other columns were doing. The Emperor was supposed to get very busy throughout eastern Calzir.
Else asked, “That black crow still with us?” He meant Drocker. A Brotherhood force of four hundred was on the same road, behind the city regiment, but the commander of all Patriarchal crusaders insisted on traveling with the Brothen force.
“I keep hoping. But every time I drop back to check the rear, there he is. With his little flock. You got to give the fucker credit for determination.”
Else did. He was glad that there were not many crusaders like the Special Office sorcerer. “You think he’s prescient?”
“He’s who? Keep the words small enough for a country boy to handle, Pipe.”
“Can he read the future?”
“Like an astrologer, or something?”
“Exactly like that.”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I was wondering if that might not be why he’s sticking close. Maybe he sees us stumbling into something and wants to be here when it happens.”
“Shit You’re getting scary, Pipe. How about you stop thinking so much about all the bad shit that can happen. Think about us finding a hoard of Praman gold we can steal and use to buy us a villa stocked with a troop of eager whores.”
“I have a woman.”
“You can suck the fricking joy out of any dream, can’t you?”
“You may be right. I become overly narrow, practical, and literal sometimes.”
“Sometimes. You do tend to be.” Sarcastically. “Bad upbringing.”
“Your whole family the same way?”
“Pretty much.” There had been no frivolity in the Vibrant Spring School. Seen through a western eye, all al-Prama took everything too seriously.
***
THE VEDETTES OUT FRONT MISSED THE CALZIRAN HORSEMEN hidden in a brushy valley to the left of the line of march. The scouts were overconfident and lazy, not to mention disinclined to range afar in the cold. The vanguard behind paid the price.
The van consisted of young horsemen from the Five Families. They were in constant competition. They did not want to embarrass their families in front of their rivals. They did not run. The attackers, no professionals themselves, broke off when help came up from farther back.
Grade Drocker arrived as Else walked over the bloody snow. The sorcerer announced, “They were Calziran horsemen. Inexperienced. But trained and led by Dreangerean Sha-lug.”
Else agreed. But not out loud. Piper Hecht would not know that
“Shit,” Ghort said. Do we know what they had for breakfast?”
Yes, Else thought. Most likely. But he just tried to look eager to learn from a man who had fought Pramans before.
Drocker’s health remained fragile. He could not shake that cough, though the blood Gledius Stewpo feared had yet to show in his spittle.
Drocker was not inclined to teach. Nevertheless, he did explain, “The attack was classic Sha-lug. From ambush. On an exposed flank. All out, with saddle bow and javelin. But true Sha-lug would not have fled so soon.”
“A useful lesson,” Else said. “Pinkus, see to the dead and wounded. I need to have a few words with whoever was in charge of the scouts.”
“That would be Stefango Benedocto.”
Drocker tagged along behind Else. Stefango Benedocto turned out to be the son of a cousin of Honario Benedocto. He believed the tie would avert his commander’s wrath. It did. There were practical limits that Else had to accept.
Grade Drocker killed the man. Without a word. In front of a hundred witnesses, some of them Benedocto. By sorcery, using a spell that made Benedocto’s brain leak out through his eyes and ears. Drocker men announced, “The Special Office doesn’t care who your uncle is.”
“Another valuable lesson, Pipe,” Pinkus Ghort said when he heard about the incident. “That should do wonders for morale.” This once he was not being sarcastic.
Soon afterward Else learned that Drocker was no longer with the regiment.
Ghort said, “He just hung around until somebody gave him an excuse to make his point.”
“That would be my guess.”
“It worked. Even the most useless of these assholes are beginning to realize that this business is as serious as a hot poker up the shit chute.”
“It won’t last.”
“Now you got to be the pollyanna and always look on the bright side?”
“You’re not going to be happy with me no matter what, are you?”
“Ain’t that my job?”
There were more skirmishes. The Calzirans were not caught unprepared again. Else knew what to expect. He prepared accordingly.
***
ELSE’S NIGHTS WERE NOT HAPPY. HE FELL ASLEEP WRESTLING his conscience. Logic suggested tha
t he ought to get the crusader forces bogged down. But the city regiment was just a fraction of the invasion, and isolated. The Emperor’s forces faced the hardest fighting. That was where the overseas troops had landed. The Patriarchy’s closest allies were advancing down the west coast of Firaldia, but most had not yet reached Alameddine, let alone Calzir. The city regiment advanced on an inland route, with Brotherhood troops and contingents from minor principalities close behind. Confusion of command was the order.
God was the answer. God was always the answer, whatever the question might be. Else needed only to trust in the Will of God. All would turn out according to His Plan.
Else feared he was not a good Praman. He could not surrender to the will of the night. Each evening, once the regiment went into camp, Else studied maps and intelligence reports, looking for a way to fail Sublime without discrediting himself.
Had he been sent to Firaldia, expected to fail, so that failure would devour him? Which meant that Gordimer wanted... That math did not work out. Else thought he knew Gordimer. Gordimer was subtle enough to put a potential rival out where death might overtake him. But would he do that to Else Tage? Else could not imagine Gordimer seeing him as that serious a threat
Else chose to temporize. He would serve Brothe. How better to serve Dreanger than to soar in the councils of Dreanger’s foes? Pinkus Ghort turned up. “The Deves want to see you, Pipe.”
“They say why?”
“Nope. I’m not one of their pals.” Ghort glanced around, making sure no nearby shadow harbored anything unfriendly. Constant, unconscious examination of the local scene was second nature in the west
“Not even a hint?”
“No. I assume it’s news from al-Khazen. The vedettes found some Deves beside the road, bickering about whether or not to light a fire.”
Ghort did a quick pantomime wherein the freezing-our-asses-off party battled the smoke-will-get-us-killed party.
The weather was miserable and getting worse. Today, there were several kinds, all cold. Bitter winds reminded Else that he had spent last winter cozily tucked into prison. Sleet became snow, falling thickly. There seemed to be a thousand ghosts behind the curtains of white, loping parallel to the road south.
The Instrumentalities of the Night became ever more active as the regiment approached al-Khazen.
The regiment had not yet moved five miles that day. But Else was in no hurry. He was out here alone with a mob of unblooded and poorly trained soldiers likely to panic at their first glimpse of the elephant. It was imperative that they avoid heavy pressure unless the Brotherhood of War joined in.
Else ordered camp to be made at a site less than an hour ahead. He wanted to visit with the new Deves.
31. Andorayans Far from Home
Svavar hated life. Svavar hated Firaldia. Svavar hated the bandit mercenaries of Ochska Rashaki’s company. Most of all, Svavar hated the Instrumentalities of the Night. He was ready to lie down and find peace.
Shagot slept twenty hours at a stretch, now. Or more. Although his spans of awareness and activity now sometimes stretched out, too. He could be furiously active for twenty hours before he collapsed into a sleep deeper than any coma.
The lone spark in the darkness of Svavar’s existence was his confidence that Arlensul stalked these cruel foreign hills beside him. Each day she let him glimpse her from the corner of his eye, or slipping into shadow ahead if the band was making one of its rare moves.
The rogue Chooser wanted him to know she was there. Was she guardian or death sentence? Or just a tool? The Arlensul of myth was obsessed with vengeance.
Svavar felt no empathy for Arlensul. She wanted him filled with nothing but an abiding resentment of his horrid immortality so powerful he would be her ally when her hour came.
Asgrimmur Grimmsson was not a brilliant man. Given time, though, he worked things out. In these mountains, taking the Emperor’s shilling while giving little in return, he had time to brood and hatch ideas.
Svavar, the Imperial mercenary, was in no way the Asgrimmur Grimmsson sturlanger who had tagged along after his big brother a few hundred years ago. This Svavar bestrode the boundaries of the Realm of Night, slowly becoming the thing he hated, tiny fly on the verges of the shoals of the Instrumentalities of the Night. As had been the case a million times before, never noticed by those involved, he was drifting toward becoming something more than a man.
And the exiled daughter of the All-Father was easing his path.
Not one man in a million ever learned that there mortals might become something more. Godhead itself was there for the man who enjoyed the will and the luck.
The one in a million seldom recognized the role of chance. A great sorcerer might devote his life to grasping ascendance and kill himself in the effort. An ignorant barbarian like Svavar might succeed just by not knowing any better. Shagot’s enchanted head once graced a shaman determined to become one of the Instrumentalities of the Night. The Instrumentalities already out there used him, manipulating him through his ambition, in an age when a warmer world was sloughing the rule of ice and both gods and men were simpler.
Svavar developed a sense for Arlensul’s whereabouts. It worked better than his sense for Shagot. He felt the cold and the empty, the hatred and the despair, that were the essence of Arlensul the Exile. Not normally interested in the feelings of others, Svavar nevertheless wondered what it might be like to swap war stories with the daughter of the Gray Walker.
***
SHAGOT DEVELOPED A DISCONCERTING HABIT OF MOVING FROM the coma state to full awareness in a blink. Svavar was roasting a slow, stupid hare betrayed to him by Arlensul. Shagot popped up and roared, “What the hell is going on?” as though he had not been in another world completely for the last twenty-six hours. “There’s something wrong.” He ignored the two feet of snow that had not been there before.
“It’s that asshole Ockska,” Svavar said. “He don’t want to do what he’s supposed to. Rabbit will be ready in a bit.” Svavar knew Shagot was not thinking about Rashaki.
“Huh?” Shagot took a moment to orient himself. “He isn’t watching the pass anymore?”
“It isn’t that, Grim. Since you went to sleep we had three messages from Vondera Koterba. The Emperor wants us to move down past al-Citizi and cut the east-west road. Not to block it, just to intercept messengers.” Svavar spoke softly so Rashaki’s intimates would not hear. “He says he’s holding out for a bigger payoff. I think he’s afraid to show us what a stupid ass he really is.”
“He defied orders from Koterba and the Emperor both?”
Svavar relaxed slightly. Shagot had been diverted from a strangeness surely to do with Arlensul.
Shagot wolfed down more than his share of the hare. As he cleaned his fingers, he said, “I need you to back me up, little brother.” He produced the monster head and the enchanted sword forged in the time before time.
Members of the band, scruffy bandit scum rather than real soldiers, gaped as Shagot strode toward Rashaki’s hut. Shagot shattered the feeble door. Inside, he removed the head of one lieutenant and the face of another before saying, “You defied the Emperor’s command.” His tone was soft, gentle. It betrayed no strain. It was the tone of a man disinterestedly asking the price of a sack of turnips. He kicked his surviving victim for bleeding on his leg.
Ockska considered the old head, the bloody sword, and Shagot. “I thought we could get more money.”
“The Emperor is an honorable man. He keeps his word. He expects you to do the same. It’s time for a leader who will do his job.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Good. Good. You’re a reasonable man, after all. You won’t find me a harsh captain. And my brother and I will move on soon. Little brother, help our lieutenant rise so we can shake hands on the new arrangement.”
Rashaki was an average size man who had made himself leader by being more clever and hard than the others, rather than through sheer wicked brawn. “Are you the Emperor’s s
pecial agents?”
“Something like that,” Shagot admitted. He drove the ancient sword into Rashaki’s chest. Svavar held Rashaki for the strike. “Though we serve a power higher than any ephemeral lord of the earth.”
Ockska heard that before the light went out of his eyes. He believed because he saw what no one else could see.
Rashaki’s surviving lieutenants quickly reported the change to the rest of the band. No one argued. Everyone recognized that agents of the night walked among them. Svavar knew Rashaki’s lieutenants harbored the same thoughts that Rashaki had before the bronze sword relieved him of a need to think. Play along with the mad foreigner. It would be no trouble to murder his brother, then him, once demonic sleep reclaimed him.
Shagot counted on the Old Ones to get him through. If he thought at all. Svavar trusted Arlensul. Arlensul was immediate and real and had a vested interest in sustaining the Grimmssons.
The band moved out. The snowfalls were no less vigorous down there in the warmer foothills. They melted and created mud as though mud was a treat favored by all gods great and small.
The first six days of the new administration produced four coup attempts. The conspirators all died horribly. Some were mutilated and drained of blood before they moved against the Andorayans.
The day Shagot killed Ockska Rashaki the band numbered eighty-eight, counting all bodies but those of the sad handful of slatterns who followed the band with their snotty-nosed brats. When the band moved into the position Vondera Koterba desired they numbered sixty-five. Most of the missing had deserted, along with their women and children.
The band disrupted Calziran communications for two months. Lone riders and small groups just did not get through. Prisoners went to Ferris Renfrow somewhere to the east. He paid excellent bounties. Life was no daydream but neither was it awful. And it showed promise of getting better.
Svavar soon realized that he was running things. Shagot the Bastard was this wild berserker thing he could conjure up at need. Daily administration and decision-making were his. And he did well. He held the band together. He got it through its assignment without another death, and with only four more desertions.