“We are not both stupid,” Block said, and Tilda pressed her teeth together so hard that it made her jaw hurt.
Dugan looked at the dwarf sourly, and folded his arms. “You know what?” he said. “I was going to explain things for you, but as you are such a clever little man I am sure you will figure it all out along the way.”
With that the renegade legionnaire turned and strode off at his long stride for the near end of the bridge over the river, where the two uniformed soldiers were waiting in chain mail and tall, conical helmets. The Miilarkians looked with some surprise after Dugan before flicking their reins. The two horses moved forward and followed behind the renegade from habit.
The guards wore cloth tabards over their armor, orange with yellow griffin standards emblazoned proudly on the chests. The design matched what must have been the Trellane family banner on the barracks flag beyond the bridge. Both men had long swords on their hips and their shields were of normal footman’s size rather than the tall tower shields of the Legions. Each held a spear which they crossed as Dugan approached. He halted and gave a short bow while the Miilarkians reined up behind him.
“Greetings, travelers,” one of the guards said in Codian, though his accent was not typical of the rest of Orstaf. “Please state your reason for seeking entry to the domains of the Baron Trellane.”
Dugan threw an arm back at the dwarf, and started speaking with a thick Orstavian accent that better matched his present appearance.
“Behold, tsers, the Captain known as Block, of the Miilarkian Islands,” Dugan boomed like a herald. “Esteemed servitor of the mighty Trade House of the Deskatas. This Captain has private words for the ears only of your baron, and must speak in person to his Lordship right away.”
Chapter Six
South of the Trellane barony in Imperial Orstaf, and beyond the southern peaks of the Great Girding Mountains lie the realms of Old Daul, the Kingdom of the River Nan.
From north to south along the western border of Daul with the grim and tangled wilderness known as the Vod Wilds, lie the highland province of Heftiga, the fertile forest valleys of ancient Chengdea, and finally the sultry delta of Nanshea. It is there that the great river empties into the Noroth Channel separating the continent from the hard-scrabble coast of Kandala to the south. There on the Nan’s open mouth is the city the Daulmen have long called Larbonne, though its foundations date from a time long before Daul, or the Empire of the Code, or any other country had its name on a map. Once upon a time that city was Ribin, one of the great Channel ports of the ancient Ettaceans, the very first among the Norothian races of Men to make of themselves a nation.
The Ettaceans were long gone of course, and by the look of things in the city of Larbonne, the Dauls might not be long in following their forebears beyond the veil of history.
The war between Daul and Ayzantium, the River Kingdom’s less-than-neighborly neighbor to the southeast had lasted for nearly three decades, raging or simmering from season to season and year to year. What had been constant was the slow grinding down of Daulic power, from the loss of her knightly host on the Icheroon to the siege and fall of Roseille, Larbonne’s sister port to the east. That had been followed by the Zantish occupation of the Chirabis peninsula between the two ports.
Now in the twenty-eighth year of the war, the Ayzants had come to the last sliver of Daul’s coastline, and invested her last great port. Through spring and summer they had seized the docks and much of the lower city, trapping the remnant of the Daulic garrison in the sprawling castle complex atop three hills. There, towers and curtain walls of beige sandstone rose atop older Ettacean works of gray granite that had stood witness to a multitude of battles, defenses, and occasional massacres, ever since men first decided that this was a good place to live, and other men thought they were right.
Yet all was not well among the invaders either. Governance in Ayzantium rested on a tripartite divide of Royalist Kingsmen, Dragon Cultists, and the Fire Priests of Red Ayon, and the army was likewise a tenuous merger of differing interests and authorities. Further, three decades of war and foreign occupation had dissipated the blood of Ayzantium’s sons, and so a large portion of the host besieging Larbonne was not Zantish at all, but were rather mercenaries drawn in most part from the petty and squabbling Riven Kingdoms. One such unit, chartered from Kanalborg, was an outfit called Rierden’s Axes. It had a paper strength of almost a regiment, though after six months in Larbonne it surely fielded less men than that. Colonel Rierden had not been reporting his losses to his Ayzant masters, in the hope that at the conclusion of the campaign he and his survivors would be overpaid.
Such subterfuge was possible as the Axes had been broken up and parceled out in platoons for months, scattered around gaps in the siege lines in small groups, some of which had not seen an officer of their own above Leftenant rank in weeks. One such band had found itself stationed for the last ten days near the far northern end of the lines, where the Ayzants’ slapdash fortifications anchored on the river before wrapping east around the land-side of the city to reach the water again at the scorched remains of the dockyards to the south. On a flat- topped ridge separated by a sharp and deep ravine from the taller central hills where the defenders hunkered in their beige stone works stood the shell of an old Daulic manor house, into which an Ayzant artillery unit had been trying to emplace a battery for a week. As recently as a season ago the manor had been surrounded by gardens and rows of ornamental spruce that were all gone now, leaving the ground torn and gaping, Such trunks and limbs as were not hauled off by the Ayzants for fuel now formed a spiky log-and-abatis barricade atop the edge of the ravine, facing the castle walls high above.
A squad of sixteen Axes held the salient where the barricade met an old stone wall that ran off in the wrong direction to be of any use to the besiegers. Some Ayzant officer had ordered them not to tear down the wall and shift the stones, though no one knew why. Camp for the axmen was a cluster of tent-halves and lean-tos erected in the hollowed-out bowl where once a surely magnificent tree had grown. The craterous hole was deep and close enough behind the barricade that the occasional plunging arrow or bolt from the Dauls across the way had only killed one man and wounded two over the last ten days. By way of return fire, Rierden’s Axes had shouted a great deal of profanity in Kanalborg Common.
Shortly after dawn on the Seventeenth Day of Eighth Month, narrow sunlight plunged the ravine into shadow even as it made the Daulic wall across and above shine with a warm golden hue. A man with dirt deep under his fingernails and in his bushy black hair crawled out from under a torn tent-half in the bottom of the hole, looking like a sleepy mole groping out of its burrow. He negotiated the small pile of equipment before the shelter, consisting of ring-mail armor with the links sown onto a long leather jerkin crusted with old sweat, a helmet of Ayzant origins with the spike broken off, hobnail boots, a crossbow with a worn stock, and of course a battleaxe. The man stood up slowly to grunt and stretch in a patched, colorless tunic with threadbare sleeves, and faded-blue cloth trousers that threatened to slide to his knees as his suspenders were undone beneath the tunic. He yawned deeply, and probably would have belched if he’d had anything significant to eat or drink lately.
“Axman Zebulon Baj Nif,” said a voice from nearby. “Your appearance is a credit to the military professionalism of Rierden’s glorious Axes. As, I am sure, is your odor.”
Zeb grinned and scratched the scraggly beard on his chin, blinking in the meager sunlight until finding his Leftenant sitting with two of the other boys around a cold fire pit, above which was nevertheless suspended a dented iron coffee pot. They lit no fires at night, and had not seen any coffee in a week at least. Yet the pot still waited hopefully, hanging from a taut rope between two Daulic swords driven into the rocky ground.
“Is there any coffee?” Zeb asked, which someone asked every morning. He was answered as always with groans and curses. The men all spoke Kanalborg Common as that city was the theoretical home of the unit, though their native tongues numbered nearly as many as all the various principalities, theocracies, colonies, and simple warlord strongholds lumped together as The Riven Kingdoms. Zebulon Baj Nif, for one, was a native of the old Danorian colony of Wakminau. Kanalborg Common was something like his fourth or fifth language, though after two years with the Axes he could rend the air with its curse words like a native.
“Permission to unleash a python, my Leftenant?” Zeb asked, scratching now at his groin.
“Denied, due to lack of same,” the blonde Leftenant said dryly. “But you may walk your garter snake up to the top of the pit as you like. And piss out, you Minauan savage.”
“Toward the enemy, to make my Colonel proud.” Zeb saluted before working his suspenders into place and turning to put his boots on.
