The guard braced his posture in bitten-off protest. “Respectfully, sir, I’m posted on the inner perimeter until midnight. Since this dandified errand boy requires a servant, will you hear my advice? Assign him somebody’s unseasoned page. Preferably one with an insolent tongue that’s deserving a stiff round of punishment.”
“Just make sure he knows how to clean a man’s boots,” Mearn remarked from the sidelines.
The watch captain lost his breath to astonishment, then struggled not to laugh at the stilted discomfort of the soldier caught in the breach. “I understand your position,” he said, straight-faced. “By all means, we don’t pander to mincing state guests.” He nodded dismissal to his disaffected veteran. “Return to your post with my compliments. ”
Relieved at vindication, the heavyset guard grinned in parting. “Be sure the daisy attends his own horse. He’s already told me our grooms aren’t fit to pluck the arse end of a goose.”
Left with the watch captain and two inimical senior officers, all of them thankfully strangers, Mearn held his ground, wary. His airs and affectations in fact bought no immunity. This strike force was not warmly disposed toward strangers, nor did it welcome unannounced couriers who impinged with a claim of hospitality.
“You will leave all your weapons with us,” the watch captain instructed, stretching the hard muscles of his forearm. Moonlight snagged on the links of his mail as he leaned his massive weight over the table. “No one here knows you. We don’t leave men armed who aren’t vouched for.”
Mearn said nothing, but yanked loose his sword belt. He knotted the ends of the leather around the scabbard and, in masterful presumption, pitched his offering toward the seated officers; as if all his life, any man near him would naturally scramble to vie for the favor of his service. To judge by the fast reflexes of the brute who received the catch, his best chance was to stay on the offensive and discourage too close a scrutiny.
Before the captain could phrase a demand for his dagger, Mearn blistered back in disdain, “Since I’m not an assassin, will you insist that I eat with my hands?”
Any competent killer would use a noiseless garrote before steel; a fine point the watch captain was shamed to concede since the dagger remained in Mearn’s custody.
The first throw fell to s’Brydion wiles, that freewheeling complaint proved a grating embarrassment in this bastion of prideful authority. No more argument ensued as a page boy was rousted and assigned the mean task of dogging Mearn’s presence in camp. The steaming horse and its troublesome rider were dispatched straightaway to the picket lines, to long-suffering sighs of relief.
Granted limited autonomy and a precarious state of safe-conduct, Mearn adopted the sneer he liked best to intimidate crews on the decks of his brother’s war galleys. Cardplay had taught him the elegant fine points of intimidation without the crude bluster of exertion. In one withering glance, he sized up his escort, a swaggering, lanky boy of sixteen who tripped over his own feet at each step.
Since braggarts typically feared contradiction, Mearn spun on his heel. He tugged his mount in the wrong direction, his blunder a certainty since the wind in his face carried no tang of manure.
The boy plucked at his sleeve, then flung back as Mearn bristled.
“Don’t touch me, whelp.” In sterling offense, Mearn faced forward and continued on his way. The page followed. Three dozen strides passed before the boy raised the nerve to correct the displaced orientation.
By then, the s’Brydion envoy had finished his count of the tents, and by swift extrapolation, set a crude limit on the strength of Alliance numbers. This force kept no camp followers. Servants and support troops were pared to a minimum, and an overheard scrap of conversation had informed that even the healer bore arms. More than one shelter’s ridgepole displayed trophy scalps, clan braids knotted together like rope, or wound in the blood-crusted thongs the living man’s wife would have tied in before battle.
Enraged and grieving, Mearn came at last to the picket lines. This division was light horse, the animals all prime, kept glossy with grain and condition. By contrast, the hack he tied up and rubbed down was thin and straight shouldered, an eyesore of a livery horse outclassed by its neighbors.
The page boy fatuously pointed this out.
Mearn ignored him. By clan belief, all things alive were made equal, no animal given more worth than another, and no man’s life valued above either. Moved to cross-grained annoyance for the boy’s townbred ignorance, he fixed his whole attention on tending the tired gelding’s legs.
Just like the chained dog spurned by the free one, the snubbed page inflated his boasting to compensate.
Mearn did not comment. Thin features cast to indifferent disdain, he listened and absorbed each stray fact the boy spouted. By the time the gelding was cooled, fed, and groomed clean of sweat, he had cataloged a major array of tactics used in past raids against Red-beard’s clans in Rathain. When the page boy wound down, he ventured laconic opinion that as yet, he remained unimpressed.
Done with the picket lines, his saddle and the Hanshire horse cloth slung over his shoulder, he pursued his quest for a meal. At the cook’s tent, a well-placed disparagement sent the boy inside to fetch bread and jerked meat. Mearn waited, sharp-eyed and observant on the sidelines, overhearing stray phrases and talk from the men who came and went about unnamed business.
“…give the forest-slinking lizards their comeuppance,” a pikeman said, chuckling.
Through a lull in the breeze, a companion enlarged on the story, his gestures expansive and vehement. “…for what they did in the bogs. Let them suffer Dharkaron’s fell vengeance for all eternity…nothing else but a tenday of sharpening weapons. Have blades in our band could split hairs with a cat’s breath behind them…”
Low talk from another quarter cut in between gusts of wind. “Man, they’ll be swept up like leavings. No chance…other troops moving in through the mountains…them surrounded, and clan scalps enough to make felt to restuff our Lord Mayor’s upholstery.”
Riled as a cat doused in rainfall, Mearn capped the blaze of his temper. Bit by bit, patient, he assembled each garnered fact. Under Alliance orders to sweep northward, these crack Etarran troops held a crown disposition to hunt down free clansmen in Tysan. Stung pride would be vindicated. Having suffered and bled through laid ambush in the wetlands, these men were rested and hot to take down the barbarian vermin who had abetted the Shadow Master’s clean escape. Nor were their officers anything less than prepared for the tricks cornered clansmen could mete out.
Mearn had quartered the camp. As s’Brydion knew war, he recognized excellence. After five seasons spent plowing the forests of Rathain for Jieret Red-beard’s unscrupulous breed of scout, they were hardened veterans, lethally practiced at keeping a near to invisible presence.
He ate what the page brought, suborning racked nerves to assuage his body’s demand for replenishment. Emerged from a seamless tempest of thought, he laid down the wild card hand he had cut from the cloth of desperate courage and chance.
“I’m tired,” he announced without preamble. Lest the flustered page seek a superior officer to ask for bedding and shelter, Mearn caught the boy’s wrist with insistent fingers. “I won’t sleep under canvas. Too smelly. Fetch me a blanket. I’ll choose my own place set out of the wind, where I won’t scratch from picking up head lice.”
Once the blanket was found, he crossed the camp again, the saddle and cloth still carried across his left shoulder. He took painstaking minutes to cut and skin a green willow branch. With that oddment in hand, he acquired a seemingly limitless enthusiasm for exploring the brush between tents. He poked under bushes. His vexing, erratic course wound in circles around a structure of tight-lashed canvas, then stalled into another confounding silence.
The page grew rebellious. “That’s the supply and the armory,” he volunteered in exasperation.
“I do have a nose, whelp.” Not to be hurried, Mearn extended his search and turned over each
leaf on the ground. “One can’t be too careful. Tracking dogs might have pissed here.”
“They’re kept caged in wicker,” the page disallowed.
Since Mearn had detected neither barking nor whines, he made chill conclusion that this company practiced the headhunters’ cruelty of cutting the dogs’ vocal cords to make them run silent.
Scarcely able to mask his shudder of distaste, he unloaded his saddle, folded his lean frame in the blanket, and lay down full length on bare earth. “Good night.”
“What?” The befuddled page glowered.
“I said, good night.” As a final eccentric foible of privacy, Mearn arranged the crusted saddlecloth with its bold Hanshire blazon over his exposed head and face.
The page stood at a loss with his mouth open. As Mearn’s breathing steadied, then slowed to soft snoring, the boy paced, kicking stones in bilious frustration. His orders to watch this high-handed courier included no avenue for relief. Nor was an officer nearby to consult or say where his irregular duty left off. The boy stood; he deliberated; he went foot to foot in sore doubt. Finally, resigned, he sat down in the brush to keep boring vigil. The prospect of watching a prig sleep through the night underneath the ripe felt of a saddlecloth seemed a stupendous waste. Where a man might lodge a complaint among peers, a boy could do little but sulk and endure the injustice.
Hours crawled. The watch changed. The last wakeful men retired to their tents. The courier from Hanshire did nothing but lie in unmoving, oblivious quiet, while the page leaned his back on a sapling. Tired, he dozed once or twice. The final time he opened his eyes, the brush over his head rang with the chirps of spring sparrows. Dawn had broken. Through a pearl haze of fog, men stirred, seeking breakfast or the latrine ditch. The page stretched, rubbed his eyes, and through the complaint of stiff muscles, ascertained his charge had not strayed. The courier’s boots and spurs still poked from the blanket. Naught else had changed; the red-and-black saddlecloth remained creased like a tent over his insufferable, swelled head.
The page endured privation in eye-watering discomfort, then finally gave in to bodily need and relieved himself in the brush. The Hanshireman slumbered on, oblivious. The sun rose, melting the streamers of mist and unveiling a day like a chisel-cut diamond. The camp was fully aroused before an irritable petty officer sent by the watch came inquiring to see why the courier had failed to make an appearance.
“He’s asleep, still.” Grouchy and feeling unjustly martyred, the page boy tossed a pebble just shy of the blanket. “Probably lies in silk sheets until noon in that decadent city he comes from. You kick him awake. He has thankless manners.”
The petty officer stroked his clipped beard. He eyed the manshaped muddle of horsecloth, saddle, and blanket with visible trepidation. Then, touched to a sudden, chill plunge of intuition, he stepped forward and stamped his booted foot with full strength onto the courier’s midriff.
Sticks snapped. The blanket collapsed, sagged in folds that revealed the form underneath to be nothing else but an artful arrangement of twigs and dry grass.
“Murdering fiend!” the officer gasped. “The confounded dog was a spy!” He elbowed aside the gaping page and raced headlong to raise the alarm.
The Etarran camp erupted like a nest of kicked wasps, but not to a wild stir of noise. Men reacted in a chilling, oiled flow of discipline, tearing down tents and searching through every nook and cranny of packed baggage. Twenty minutes after the stunning discovery, the officer of the day watch stood in straightlaced formality and delivered the raw news to his captain.
“The man’s not in camp, though his horse, his sword, his saddle and cloth are still here. The outlook is no good. He slit the tent canvas with a dagger and crawled into the armory. All the tactical maps are taken from the locked chest. He snatched an excellent sword, then caused enough mischief to make us all choke in embarrassment.”
“Sabotage?”
The officer swallowed. “Yes sir.” He shifted huge shoulders under his mail, braced his nerve, and recited the list. “All the steel broad-heads were cut from their shafts, and the fletching stripped off the arrows. Sword blades were unwound at the tang and separated from their hilts. At the horse lines, we found all the bridles cut apart. We’d fix them with string, but no one in camp can find a damned bit for his horse, or a girth that has any buckles.”
“Embarrassment, you say?” The captain stabbed his eating knife upright in the crust of his scarcely touched bread loaf. “I call it mayhem. ” His eyes narrowed with thought and a chilling, leashed temper, he snapped his strong fingers, causing the page who knelt by his elbow to jump. “Go. Fetch my parchment and seal.”
Then he leveled his blue eyes at the duty officer, and said, “You’re not finished?”
The man caught under scrutiny fidgeted, the sweat rolling from under his steel helm. “No, sir. The kennelman claims the meat for the dogs was tainted. At least, since he fed them, every last one’s fallen sick.”
The account suffered a break as the page boy returned, bearing the troop commander’s lap desk and the tied leather bundle which protected the state seal with its sunwheel blazon of authority.
“Keep talking, man.” Resigned to the setback that spoiled his breakfast, the captain unburdened the page boy. His hard fingers flipped open the lap desk. “If our scouring of the clans is no longer a surprise, the other troops have to be warned. You can talk while I write.” He accepted the wrapped packet containing the sunseal, then paused, his frosty brows snagged in a frown.
“Something wrong, sir?” The duty officer blotted his moist face.
The troop commander showed his teeth, an animal response to murderous fury as he snatched up his knife and slashed the thong ties. The rolled leather fell away and revealed an old knotted root left in place of the sunwheel seal to attest crown authority. “Why, that slithering get of a snake! For this, I’ll see his entrails torn out by dogs and his scalp taken under my dagger!”
The page boy launched into panicky excuses. “The lock wasn’t loose on your coffer, sir. No papers were missing.” Then the damning worst, from the lips of foolhardy innocence. “Whoever stole the seal from your things had to know just where to look.”
“Be silent.” The captain fingered his steel, his temper leashed through hardened experience, and his slate-colored eyes fixed back on the man whose report was unfinished, and whose perspiring features showed inordinate lack of surprise. “There’s more?”
“Yes, sir.” The forbearing sigh this time seemed to rise from the harried man’s boot soles. “The groom on the picket lines was given a requisition order, sealed and signed in what looks to be precise forgery.”
“What did that groom give, say quickly.” No idiot, the troop captain thrust to his feet. “The facts are by far more important than the blame.”
The reporting officer braced himself. “Six horses, half of them saddled and bridled, and the last three apparently on lead reins. We’ve examined the tracks. The creatures were roped in pairs. The dawn patrol saw someone they believed to be ours, leaving with remounts in tow. He carried packeted orders under your wax seal, and we can’t fault them, the sunwheel blazon was genuine. A short distance from our outer line, the trail scouts say the horses slowed down. Then their tracks diverge to all points of the compass.”
“You tried dogs?” said the captain, not truly expecting the obvious had not been covered.
“First thing, sir.” The watch officer rubbed his moist hands on his surcoat. “The two bitches well enough to stand up lost the scent next to the picket lines. That’s where the groom said the rogue mounted. We can follow that horse, but that’s wasted motion.” This spy had proven inventively clever. He had likely climbed from one saddle to another before he sent the loose horses packing.
“All right,” said the captain, all ironbound purpose. “I want action. Now. Each one of those horses will be tracked and brought in, I don’t care if their trail leads through Sithaer itself. Every man will be questioned. If any
one saw this traitor’s face clearly, I want his detailed description. Next, we assume he’s barbarian blood. Why else steal the tactical maps, if not to send word to the enemy? We’re marching north anyway. Last night’s little blunder just lit the fires under our order of march a bit hotter. At the end, we’ll face men who are warned and desperate. By the Light, if there’s justice, our line sentries are going to stand front and center when we close with the murdering fugitives.”
A searing, short pause, as the captain recalled the humiliation that he had no seal for his orders. Nor could he verify his dispatch to Avenor to send formal complaint of the infamy.
“Damn the motherless, slinking little weasel!” he exploded in livid heat that promised a reckoning in bloodshed. “When we net his close kin, I will personally sew their damned scalps as a fringe on my saddlecloth. ”
By noon, sweating in the humid spring warmth that chafed blisters under gambesons and made chain mail weigh like poured lead, the men ran down the last horses. Not one bore a rider. The spy’s tracks were not found, though the hound couple which survived the morning’s bout of poisoning whuffed and milled in baffled circles. They sprawled on their sides, muddied and panting, while their irritable handlers persisted. The next hour entailed the miserable, wet labor of leaping across hummocks and scouring the verges of the waist-deep, dank pools in the fenland. Sedges and cattails waved in the wind. Half-budded maples trailed lichened branches and tough roots into the peat black waters of the sinkholes. Hard effort flushed nothing but otters and the flap of displaced crows. Nothing moved but the high-flying hawk, while clouds gathered and plumed like combed silver overhead and threatened more rain before nightfall.
In due course, the search was called off. The guileful courier had left no trace of his passage, and his clanblood relations would inevitably receive the premature warning of trouble.
The setback raised grumbles, but no loss of morale. These were seasoned fighters who had marched against clansmen before. They knew to expect balking tricks and sly tactics that time and again deferred victory. This campaign might go hard, but the ending was assured. Without ships, the barbarian enclaves in south Tysan were doomed, soon to be reaped by the vengeful steel of Lysaer’s Alliance of Light.