Roper wanted to know more but, as they sat, the legates began to demand his attention. He helped himself to a breakfast of boiled oats while they fed him their most recent information. It had been four days since their victory against the Sutherners and, in that time, Roper had given the Suthern horde space. Though it was only the cavalry who had been engaged in strenuous fighting, his men had all marched hard both before and after the attack. Some were still recovering from the wounds they had sustained, while most of the Sutherners had barely exerted themselves in their last encounter. Before the two sides met again, Roper wanted his men as fit as possible. In the time they waited, short rations would drain the Sutherners of energy and make them more vulnerable to disease.
But there was another reason he gave the Sutherners space. Roper had reasoned that in order to negate the enemy’s superior numbers, he would need an advantageous position from which to fight, where their flanks were well protected. He knew that Lord Northwic’s response to losing his supplies would probably be to retreat to the more reliable harvest provided by the sea. So tethered, that was where they could be destroyed and Roper had asked Tekoa to locate just such a battlefield at the coast.
If the battlefield could be found and the Sutherners persuaded to use it, Roper had dared to feel confident of victory. He had dared to look past the next battle, and forward to how he was to re-enter the Hindrunn afterwards without Uvoren eradicating him and his soldiers. The Hindrunn’s Outer Wall was riddled with cannon and crowned with all manner of siege-breaking weapons. The wall itself was solid granite, one hundred and fifty feet in height and fifty feet in depth at the base. It would be guarded and manned by thirty thousand warriors, every bit as ferocious and professional as the ones under Roper’s command and, with its full fury unleashed, would atomise Roper’s forty thousand.
When Roper had voiced these concerns to Gray, he had not received much sympathy. “Stop worrying about the Hindrunn, my lord,” Gray had said sternly. “If you consider anything other than the next battle, it will be the end of you, me and the Black Kingdom as a whole. You have badly wounded the Suthern army; they will be exhausted and malnourished and perhaps even diseased, but never underestimate the danger of the wounded beast. They will have nothing to lose. They will outnumber us by thousands. They will not be conservative. They will try and overwhelm the legions and you must be equal to the task, or all we have achieved so far will be for nothing. Forget the bloody Hindrunn.”
“I can’t, Gray. I know I should and I try, but all I can think about is that fortress and the man who holds it.”
“You are not thinking about the Hindrunn,” responded Gray. “Not really.” His expression softened a little. “I have tried to warn you about this. This is why you must do away with your hatred; it will overwhelm you in the end. What occupies your mind is Uvoren, not the fortress he controls. Why do you want to be the Black Lord?”
“To serve,” said Roper, automatically. Gray waited. “And perhaps because if I fail, I will die. It is also my purpose; my function in this world.” Gray waited. “And maybe to defeat Uvoren.”
“If you do not consider what drives you, you will not notice your own flaws. It is clear that you hate Uvoren and with that I have a great deal of sympathy. He is bad for the country, and hatred is the hardest emotion to control,” acknowledged Gray. “The advantage of acting through hatred is also its greatest disadvantage: there is no goal to achieve. No matter how successful you are in humiliating or perhaps killing Uvoren, your hatred for him will never dissipate. You can ignore fear and it will pass as you grow used to it. Grief will heal. Triumph will fade away, no matter how you try to hold on to it. But hatred will burn undimmed. It is like revulsion: a base reaction to everything you hold most in contempt. You cannot make yourself forgive when it is not in you. You must change who you are, so that those things that make you despise Uvoren are no longer hateful to you. Forget the Hindrunn, my lord. It is what it is.”
There speaks a man preparing for death, thought Roper, though he said no more. He thought Gray was right and his obsession with the fortress was based on his hatred of Uvoren; but he could not forget the Hindrunn. After dark, as the men around him lay still and silent, Roper stared at the sky, his mind dwelling on towers, walls and weapons. It felt like a canker within his mind, swelling and hardening as he explored it. It was invincible. It had been constructed as the foremost bastion of a paranoid race against an overwhelming enemy, and somehow Roper had to take it. His unbreakable home had turned against him and become a malignant presence in his mind.
Tekoa had started speaking, disturbing Roper’s reverie. “My men have discovered a battlefield for you, my lord.”
“Tell me,” said Roper, using his teeth to gouge a sticky clump of oats from the bowl of his bone spoon.
“Thirty leagues from here; a place called Githru. To get there, we must pass through the crossroads of Harstathur, which the poets have been claiming would be auspicious. They tell me Harstathur is the site of some nebulous
