Unholy War (38 page)

He stared at the Scytale, and then at her. ‘You know, you might actually be onto something.’ Then he stammered, because he’d not meant to sound so condescending, ‘I don’t mean
actually
, I mean—’

‘Al’Rhon.
Goat
. Shut your mouth, like so.’ She made a closing gesture with her finger.

‘Yeah. Sorry. Thinking before I speak isn’t my strongest point.’

‘Don’t feel bad. All men are brought up to think women are lesser. Then you fail to educate us, just to make sure. That you even know you are doing it makes you one of the most promising men I have met.’

He grinned at that, but instead of smiling in return her eyes suddenly misted over, as if something in his face had triggered a memory too sad to contain, and she began to cry.

He floundered uncertainly, then reached out and enfolded her, half-expecting to be pushed away, but she didn’t. It was an awkward embrace: she was so short she only reached his ribs, but she clung to him and sobbed until her tears had soaked his shirt. He murmured some stream-of-consciousness babble about looking after her, stroking her head, and all the time wishing he was manly enough to tip her head upwards and kiss her.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked eventually, as her weeping subsided.

‘For a moment, I saw my husband,’ she whispered, completely killing his ardour. She stepped away and he let her go.

She looked at me and saw her husband
… He had no idea what to make of that.

‘Life’s drum never stops beating,’ she said softly. ‘It is an old Lakh saying: I think I understand it now …
bhaiya
.’

17

Hermetic: Sylvan-gnosis

Ramon helped Severine Tiseme down from her wagon. The Pallacian girl was holding her belly and grimacing in pain. In the past month it had swollen up like the inflated pig-bladders the children kicked about his village in Silacia. She clutched at him as her legs wobbled.
She’s not built for suffering and discomfort
, he thought guiltily; Sevvie was many things, but not robust. She wasn’t exactly a survivor, and that worried him – one of many things troubling his sleep.

Death in labour was common enough in the masses, but it happened at times to magi too, despite healing-gnosis and the best of care. He tried to put that fear from his mind and smile for her, even though she had become incredibly tetchy of late. The romance between them was souring: most nights she wouldn’t even share a tent with him, let alone anything more – she had conceived this mad idea that he and Jelaska had some kind of affair going on.
Jelaska!
Apart from anything else, Jelaska was with Sigurd Vaas and Ramon had no desire to fall foul of the big Argundian. And paranoia was far from Severine’s only unattractive quality, he was finding out. But things hadn’t come to a head, and anyway, she was carrying his child.

‘Where are we?’ she asked breathily, clinging to his arm.

He pointed down from the hill-top to the vista below: there were twin islands in the middle of the floodplain, linked to this bank and the far one by giant causeways. Water boiled through arches beneath both roads. ‘Ardijah.’

She squinted diffidently, and wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s not very big, is it?’

‘It is too small for any of the maps we have,’ Ramon agreed. ‘But it’s a key point on a major trading route, linking Khotriawal Emirate to southern Kesh. It’s really just a place where the two ends of a bridge could be anchored and a causeway built.’

‘So what it’s generals call “strategic”, hmm?’

‘Very.’ He studied the water flowing past them, which looked like it was running lower than even a few days ago, well within the normal floodplain boundaries. The freakish conditions caused by the Shaliyah storm were finally fading as nature reasserted itself. But crossing anywhere but here was still out of the question.

Severine looked at the town longingly. ‘Can we go straight in, or do we have to kill someone first? I’d murder for a feather bed.’

‘You might have to.’ He glanced towards the command group. ‘I’ll go and talk to the Lesser Son.’

‘You should be nicer to Seth,’ she said. ‘They’re saying he drove off the Keshi at the crossroads all by himself.’

Ramon pursed his lips. That wasn’t how he’d heard it from Lanna Jureigh: a panicked reaction and a fluky spell after messing up the basics big-time.
I should have been there – or left Sigurd with him, or Bondeau, even Kip
. Any one of them would have handled it better than Korion had. And they’d lost the chaplain; he might’ve been useless, but he was still a mage.
What mage forgets to rukking shield?

‘If you can find us a bed, you can join me in it tonight,’ she said, her voice diffident. ‘If you still want to.’

‘Of course I still want to,’ he replied, unsure if that was entirely the case. He pecked Sevvie’s cheek dutifully and went to see what the plan was. Or rather, to make sure it was
his plan
.

The magi were gathered about Seth, staring down at the causeway and the two fortress-islands in the middle. Heads turned as he entered the gathering. Kip grinned, and Jelaska and Sigurd nodded a greeting. Bondeau looked at him sourly, the others had neutral expressions on their faces.

Ramon’s ambush for the Keshi had been a mild success: a few dozen of the enemy’s advance guard had been caught in a maelstrom of fire and lightning and burned to a crisp: death en masse, with no losses. As a result, the Keshi had certainly become more cautious.
But some of us should have been with Seth
… It’d been Ramon’s idea, and so it was his fault. He needed to rebuild credibility.

Seth looked hollow, as if the marrow from his spine had been bled away. He clearly would rather be alone, but generals had to be visible,
touchable
– and in obvious control of what was happening. There were subtle signs of a kind of grim determination forming as well, though, as if the soft, prevaricating part of Seth Korion was being pared away, revealing something brittle but harder beneath.

Right now, the young general was pointing towards the town across the causeway, where pennants were flying, and armoured men patrolling the walls. ‘There are two halves to this town,’ he started, ‘linked by a bridge – the northern causeway is too long to cross before they can close the gates. So how do we get in?’

‘If we had a couple more days,’ Bondeau said, ‘we could wait for the storm-water to drain away, which would leave us a plain we could cross, apart from the middle channel. Then we could attack the nearer keep on three sides.’

‘It’s no use talking about what we
wished
we faced,’ Jelaska sniffed.

‘At least it’s only Khotri men. They’ve got no magi,’ Seth commented.

‘We didn’t think they had magi at Shaliyah either,’ Sigurd observed dourly.

‘What did you see when you flew over the bridge-towers, Windmaster Prenton?’ Jelaska asked the Brevian.

Baltus gestured flamboyantly. ‘Just a bridge and a pair of close-packed walled towns at either end. There’re a lot of soldiers in a big camp on the other side of the river too.’

‘So even if we could take Ardijah, there’s an army on the other side?’ Seth asked anxiously.

‘If the Khotri don’t want to just let us march through, yes,’ Ramon replied, trying hard to keep from sounding sarcastic. There’d been an unspoken truce since the incident at the junction: both he and Seth knew they’d not performed well, but attacking each other would see Renn Bondeau pushing for leadership again, and neither wanted that. ‘We should talk to them,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m told that the Khotri don’t like the Keshi much.’

‘The Keshi aren’t “afreets” to them,’ Jelaska remarked, ‘but we are.’

‘What would we say anyway?’ Bondeau sneered. ‘Please may we move our army into your territory?’

‘Why not?’ Ramon replied. ‘We’re not invading – we’re just manoeuvring.’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Sigurd said. ‘Soldiers rape and pillage and kill people. It’s what they do. No one lets even their own army into their towns in peacetime if they don’t have to.’

‘All right, so let’s bribe them,’ Ramon suggested.

Seth looked exasperated. ‘With what, exactly? We’ve got nothing they’d want. We should attack.’

Wins one fight and thinks he’s his Daddy …

‘That causeway is wide enough for about ten men riding abreast,’ Baltus commented, ‘and it’s open to the entire gate-tower and surrounding walls. I don’t know about you chaps, but I don’t think I could shield a dozen arrows at once, or even one ballista – did I mention they have at least four of those positioned over the gate?’

‘How far behind us are the Keshi?’ Sigurd Vaas asked.

‘A day at most.’

‘Any bright ideas?’ Jelaska asked. ‘Because otherwise it’s a frontal assault down the causeway.’

As if drawn by a magnet, everyone turned to Ramon, even Bondeau, who looked ready to pounce on whatever he said.

Ramon rubbed his chin. ‘Let me talk to them. At least I might get an idea of what we’re up against – anything they say or don’t say will be instructive.’

‘Waste of Kore-bedamned time,’ Renn Bondeau swore.

‘We’ll see. I’ll need Storn; he can speak their language.’ Then he turned to Seth, as an afterthought, ‘Well, great leader?’

‘Very well. There’s nothing to lose, is there?’ Seth sounded tired.

Ramon frowned: the loss of Tyron Frand had clearly hurt Seth badly. He looked in desperate need of a new confidante.

Sevvie?
he wondered.
She’s a nob too … No, Seth doesn’t really talk to women. Lots of men can’t – we live such different lives
.

He put the thought aside for now; there was too much else to do.

*

Arranging the parley took an hour, with lots of waving white pennants and Storn shouting in Keshi from a point on the causeway about one hundred yards from the gatehouse. Initially they were dealing with guardsmen, then an immense and luridly dressed man arrived, surrounded by men in dark cloaks. Ramon fed Storn his lines and the tribune dutifully translated – which turned out to be not as easy as he’d hoped, for the Khotri dialect differed somewhat from Keshi.

‘Who’s the big guy?’ Ramon asked Storn as they awaited a reply to their last request.

‘He says he’s Vizier to the Caliph of Ardijah.’

‘Caliph?’

‘The ruling nobleman.’ Storn frowned. ‘I don’t think they mean to make a deal, sir. I think they know the Keshi are coming too; I reckon they’re planning to just delay us.’

‘Offer them gold.’

Storn’s eyebrow’s shot up. ‘Gold?
Our
gold?’

‘Indeed. We’ve got rather a lot of it.’

‘But—’

‘Seriously, Storn! We’ve got most of the Southern Expedition’s gold in our wagons, have we not? But we won’t have it for long if the Keshi catch us outside those walls.’ He considered for a moment, then said decisively, ‘Offer them fifty thousand.’

Storn’s eyes bulged. ‘That’s more than the annual wages of the army! You can’t give that away, not just for a talk!’

‘Of course not – but I can dangle it, can’t I? At worst it’ll make them want to extract it from us so the Keshi don’t get it.’ He pointed to the vizier in the distance. ‘Ask.’

Storn muttered and looked rebellious, but after a moment he shouted out a few phrases, all the while waving his arms about in expansive gestures – presumably to convey the magnitude of the offer, Ramon thought.

There was a startled yelp from the vizier, then he and the cloaked men went into a huddle. It took them a full minute to reply, but even in an unknown tongue, Ramon could hear the studied eagerness of the conman who thought he’d found an easy mark.

‘They say they’ll talk,’ Storn told him sulkily. ‘Four on each side, no weapons, and no more than one mage in our group. They propose sunset.’

‘And waste another half a day? Not rukking likely! Tell them we’ll parlay right now … and tell them I want to speak to the caliph himself as well as his vizier.’

There was a further rapid exchange, and this time Ramon could see when the Khotri agreement was reached. He looked over his shoulder to where the other magi were watching from the small rise above the beginning of the causeway. He closed his eyes, clutched his periapt and sent a mental greeting to Seth.

The general’s son sounded startled at the contact.
> There was some four hundred yards between them; it was a reasonable feat for a low-blood.

Ramon replied.
.> He rattled through the proposal as quickly as he could, but he didn’t mention the gold, nor why the vizier had agreed to the parley.
>

Seth replied snottily.

A sigh, then,

He closed down the link and turned to the tribune. ‘It’s on, Storn. Ten minutes.’

Time passed quickly as they brought up the men he’d chosen for the task: big, bluff Vidran, and the flankman Kel Harmon, a lean young man with fashionably long flaxen hair and a very high opinion of himself. He’d picked them specifically; they were Pilus Lukaz’s men, the best fighters in the cohort.

Ramon looked at Vidran. ‘Where are you from, Legionary?’

‘Midrea, sir, but I’m part Schlessen.’ Vidran took off his helmet and ran his fingers through his lank black hair. ‘That’s where the muscle comes from,’ he added with a grin.

‘Half-barbarian,’ Harmon sniffed.

‘And you are—?’ Ramon asked.

‘Pallas born and bred, sir,’ the flankman replied. ‘Tockburn District – best people anywhere.’

Vidran grunted, ‘Thieves and cut-throats!’

But as Ramon turned to scan the gate for activity he could see Vidran and Harmon exchanging wry smiles and hear the low banter.

‘When’s the enemy going to reach here, sir?’ Vidran asked, his voice relaxed.

‘Probably the day after tomorrow.’

Harmon grunted. ‘I’d have thought they’d all be back in Shally-wotsit, getting lammy.’

Ramon raised an eyebrow. ‘Lammy?’

‘Y’know. Lammy – pissed.’

‘Drunk?’

‘Aye, that. Lammy.’ Harmon laughed drily. ‘That’s if the Noories drink. Do they, Vid?’

‘The ones that ain’t Amteh fanatics do,’ Vidran replied, his eyes darting about. The big ranker was constantly watchful, Ramon noticed. ‘That’s most of them, I guess. Man’s gotta drink, yar?’

Harmon chuckled. ‘Too bloody right.’ Then the set of his muscles altered and the slightly nonchalant look on his face was replaced by something altogether grimmer. ‘Here they come, sir.’

Ramon whispered a silent prayer to Papa Sol as trumpets blared and the gates rumbled open to allow out an open palanquin bearing a man and woman, he in colourful Khotri robes, she in a black bekira-shroud, borne on the shoulders of four big men, naked to the waist and impressively muscled. They were trailed by the waddling vizier and one of the dark-cloaked advisors.