“You need to train your men to deal with armoured knights, too,” Garet added. “A man encased in armour can be hard to kill, and neither the Defenders nor the Hythrun have much experience fighting them.”
“But he’s easy enough to disable. Just knock him of his horse and jump up and down on him for a while. That’ll knock the fight out him.”
Tarja smiled. “I’ll let you inform the troops of that sage piece of tactical advice.”
Damin shrugged. “It sounds silly, but it works. Have you any idea how hard it is to get up wearing a suit of armour? Hell, they can’t even mount their horses without a block and tackle rig. Knock them on their backs and thrust your sword through the eye slit. Works like a treat. But the knights aren’t our problem. The true problem lies with Hablet and the Fardohnyans if he puts his artillery at Jasnoff’s disposal.”
“Cannon, you mean?”
Damin nodded. “I’ve never seen one myself, but I’ve spoken to a few who have. The only thing in our favour is that Hablet guards the secret of what makes them work as if it’s more precious to him than all his children put together. I suspect he’ll find it a lot easier to give away his daughter than his precious cannon.”
“I’d heard rumours of an alliance,” Garet added, taking the waterskin from Tarja. “But nothing substantial. I’ve also heard rumours that the reason Hablet guards the secret so closely is because his cannon are notoriously unreliable, inaccurate, and just as likely to kill the cannoneers as they are the enemy. Hablet’s weapon is his enemies’ fear of the cannon, not the cannon themselves.”
“Even if that’s true, I don’t want to face cannon fire with swords and arrows.”
“Even without cannon, if there is an alliance, Fardohnya could attack from the south,” Garet pointed out. “We can’t afford to split our forces.”
He said
“We’ll need time,” Tarja agreed with a frown. “Until we gain control of the Citadel, the Defenders we can put in the field are barely half the number we need.”
Damin nodded in agreement. “I can spare another three centuries of Raiders, but any more than that and Krakandar Province will begin to look a little bit too inviting to my neighbours. I can always send to Elasapine, if worst comes to worst. Narvell would send me five centuries of his Raiders if I asked him nicely. I imagine that many Hythrun troops garrisoned in Bordertown would make Hablet think twice about sailing up the Glass River.”
“Narvell?” Tarja asked.
“Narvell Hawksword, the Warlord of Elasapine,” Damin explained. “He’s my half-brother. My mother’s second husband was his father.”
“How many husbands has your mother had?” Tarja asked.
“Five, the last time I counted,” Garet remarked, obviously surprising Damin with his knowledge. He looked at the Warlord and shrugged. “I run the Defender Intelligence Corps, my Lord. I’m supposed to know these things.”
“Then you should know she might have married again, by now. She had her eye on a very rich Greenharbour gem merchant when I saw her last.”
Tarja shook his head in amazement. It was rare for Sisters of the Blade to marry or have more than one or two children. Only the farmers of Medalon, for whom children were a convenient source of cheap labour, tended towards large families.
“But even with a thousand Hythrun raiders, we still need the Defenders in full force,” Tarja pointed out with a frown, getting back to the problem at hand. “At the moment, we’ve got your seven hundred Raiders and about six thousand Defenders here, and that’s less than half.”
“How many longbowmen do you have?”
“Five hundred. The rest are still at the Citadel. Why?”
“I’ve been watching them train. I doubt if I could draw one of those damned bows.”
“We train them from boyhood,” Tarja told him. “They’re selected from the cadets and they grow up with their bows. As they get stronger, the bows get longer, until they can draw a full-sized weapon. They’re very good, I’ll grant you, but they’re irreplaceable. You can’t just hand the bow along to the next man in line when a longbowman falls. And even with the others still at the Citadel, they number less than fifteen hundred.”
“We can use them to our advantage. Assuming Hablet doesn’t arm the Kariens with cannon, your longbows out-range any weapon they can bring to bear against you. Kariens consider the bow and arrow a peasant weapon. They have archers, but nothing of the calibre of your longbows. If we concentrate on protecting
“And your mounted archers?” Garet asked.
“We’re hit-and-run specialists,” Damin shrugged. “Any man of mine can fire three arrows into a target the size of an apple at a gallop in under a minute, but our bows are short-range weapons. There are too many Kariens for that sort of tactic.”
“What about the rebels?”
Tarja shrugged. “Another thousand at the most. Most of them have never held a weapon. Jasnoff can field an army of over a hundred thousand with the Church supporting him. With the Fardohnyans as allies... I’m not sure I can count that high. I suppose they could pray for us.”
“Never underestimate the power of prayer,” Damin warned. “If Zegarnald, the God of War, takes our side, we should do well. And we’ve yet to hear from the Harshini.”
Tarja did not argue the point. He had no faith in Damin’s gods.
“I thought the Harshini were incapable of killing?” Garet asked.
“There’s plenty of ways to frustrate the enemy without killing him.”
“I suppose,” Tarja agreed, a little doubtfully. “Maybe they could bring their demons and scare the Kariens to death.”
“If the Kariens bring their priests with them, we will need the protection of the Harshini and their magic,” Damin warned. “When Lord Brakandaran returns, we will know more.”
Tarja frowned at the mention of Brak. “He’s been gone more than five months. What makes you think he’s planning to return at all?”
“He’ll be back,” Damin assured him.
“I wish I shared your confidence.”
The fact was he wanted to see the Harshini rebel very badly – and not simply because he needed to know what help the Harshini could offer in the coming battle. Brak would know if R’shiel lived. Months had passed since she had vanished, quite literally, but he had seen enough wounds in his time to know that hers was fatal. Yet the Harshini were magical creatures and R’shiel was half-Harshini. A small spark of hope still burned in him that she had somehow survived Joyhinia’s sword thrust, but as the days, weeks and then months passed with no word from her, his hope was fading.
“Is something wrong?”
Tarja shook his head. “I was just thinking of someone, that’s all.”
“The demon child.”
“I wasn’t thinking of her in those terms,” Tarja said wryly. “But I was thinking of R’shiel, yes.”
“Her fate is in the hands of the gods, my friend,” Damin reminded him. “There is nothing you can do about her. On the other hand, there is something we can do about those damned knights.”
“What did you have in mind?” Garet asked, a little suspiciously.
“They’re looking a bit too comfortable for my liking. I think we should wake them up.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
Damin laughed. “It means putting aside your damnable Defender’s honour for a time and learning to be sneaky.” He climbed to his feet and dusted off his trousers. “We need to do something about their supply lines, for one thing. What about it, Commandant? Are you with us?”
Tarja glanced at Garet curiously, knowing there was much more to Damin’s simple question than whether or not he wanted to attack the Karien camp. The older man studied them both in silence for a moment.
“I’ll not be a party to anything thing that reeks of stupidity,” he warned, climbing to his feet and handing the looking glass back to Damin. “That also includes your ludicrous scheme for replacing Joyhinia, Tarja. Come up with something workable, and I’ll back you to the hilt. But what you are planning is insane. And I plan to die in my bed a very old man.”
