western army, for that matter.
Corfe bent and picked up a helmet, turning it in his hands and wiping the dust away. It was high-crowned with a flaring neck-guard and long cheek-pieces. The helmet of one of the
“Merduk armour,” he said as the realization smote him. “But what is it doing here?”
“Trophies of war,” Passifal said. “Been here sixty years, since we threw back the Ostrabarian Merduks after they overran Ostiber. That was Gallican of Rone, if you remember your history. A good general. He beat them as they were approaching the Thurian Passes and sent twenty thousand of the black-hearted bastards to join their precious Prophet. The King staged a triumphal march for him here in Torunn, parades of prisoners and so on. And he shipped back a thousand sets of armour to display during it. When it was over they were dumped here and forgotten. Been here ever since. I had been meaning to get rid of them—we’re pressed for warehouse space, you see . . .”
Corfe dropped the old helm with a clang. “You expect me to dress my men up as Merduks?”
“Seems to me you haven’t a lot of choice, son. This is the best I can do. You’ll not find a better offer in the city, unless you can persuade the Queen Dowager to stump up the necessary cash.”
Corfe shook his head, thinking.
“It’s not honourable, sir, dressing up as heathens,” Ebro said passionately. “You should decline the command. It’s what they want you to do.”
“And what you want me to do also, Ensign?” Corfe asked without turning around.
“Sir, I—”
“We’ll take the armour,” Corfe said briskly to Passifal. “But we can’t let the men wear it as it stands; folk will think we’re the enemy. Have you any paint, Quartermaster?”
Passifal’s white eyebrows shot up. “Paint? Aye, tons of it, but what for?”
Corfe retrieved the helm he had thrown down a moment before. “We’ll paint this gear, to distinguish ourselves. Red, I think. Yes—a nice shade of scarlet so that the blood won’t show. Excellent.” He was smiling, but there was little humour in his face. “My men have no transport facilities. I’ll have them here within the hour and they can pick out their armour themselves. Can you have the paint waiting by then, Quartermaster?”
Passifal looked as though he had been let in on an enormous joke. “Why not? Yes, Colonel, the paint will be here. It’ll be worth it to see your five hundred savages dressed up in Merduk armour and splashed crimson.”
Again, the mirthless smile. “Not only the savages, Quartermaster. Ebro and I will also be donning Merduk gear.”
“But sir, we have our own,” Ebro protested. “There’s no need—”
“We’ll wear what the men wear,” Corfe interrupted him. “And I shall have to think up some sort of battle standard, since the regular Torunnan banners will, it seems, be denied to us. Good. All that remains now is to meet the General Staff and receive my specific orders. After that, we can begin to plan.”
“No waggons or mules, no transport for our gear,” Ensign Ebro said, a last-ditch effort.
Corfe grinned at him, unexpectedly good-humoured. “You forget, Ebro, that our command is composed of savage tribesmen from the mountains. What need have they of a baggage train? They can live off the country, and may God help the country.”
Passifal was watching Corfe as though he had just that moment recognized him from somewhere. “I see you intend to pick up the King’s gauntlet, Colonel.”
“If I can, Quartermaster,” Corfe said flatly, “I intend to throw it back in his face.”
“W hat a pretty picture a burning city makes,” Sastro di Carrera said, leaning on the iron balcony rail of the Royal palace. Abrusio spread out beyond his perch in a sea of buildings, ending almost two miles away downhill in the confusion of ships and buildings and docks which butted on to the true sea, the Western Ocean which girdled the known edges of the world. It was twilight, not because the day was near its long winter sleep, but because of the towers of smoke that shrouded the sun. Sastro’s face was lit by the radiance of the burning, and he could hear it as a far thunder, the mutterings of the banished elder gods.
“May God forgive us,” Presbyter Quirion said beside him, making the Sign of the Saint across his breastplate. Unlike Sastro, who was immaculately tailored, Quirion was grimed and filthy. He had lately come from the inferno below, in which men were fighting and dying by the thousand, their collective screaming drowned out by the hungry roar of the holocaust, the tearing rattles of volley-fire.
“ ‘And now,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘is Hell come to earth, and in the ashes of its burning will totter all the schemes of greedy men. The Beast, in coming, will tread the cinders of their dreams.’ ”
“What in the world are you talking about, Quirion?” Sastro asked.
“I was quoting an old text which foretells the end of the world we know and the beginning of another.”
“The end of the Hibrusid world, at any rate,” Sastro said with satisfaction. “And think of the prime building land the fire will clear for us. It will be worth a fortune.”
Quirion looked at his aristocratic companion with un-concealed contempt. “You are not King yet, my lord Carrera.”
“I will be. Nothing will stop me or you now, Presbyter. Abrusio will be ours very soon.”
“If there’s anything left of it.”
“The important parts will be left,” Sastro said, grinning. “What a blessed thing a wind is, to blow the flames out to sea and take with it those heretical traitors and rebel peasants in the Lower City who defy us. God’s hand at work, Quirion. Surely you can see that?”
“I do not like to ask God to intervene on my behalf; it smacks of hubris to assume that the Creator of the universe will think me, out of all His creations, worthy of attention. I merely try to further what I believe to be His divine will. In this instance, I needed two hundred barrels of pitch to set the Lower City alight.”
“A practical kind of faith you Knights profess,” Sastro said, raising his scented handkerchief to his face so that his mouth was concealed.
“I find it answers well enough.”
The handkerchief was tucked back inside a snowy sleeve. “So how goes the fighting then, my practical Presbyter?”
Quirion rasped a palm over the stubble on his scalp. “Severe enough at times. Your retainers have been acquitting themselves well since I stiffened their tercios with contingents of Knights. The trained Hebrian troops are better, of course, but they are distracted by Freiss’s men in their rear. He has three or four hundred arquebusiers holed up in the western arm of the Lower City cheek by jowl with the Arsenal, and they have had to tie up almost a thousand troops to keep him bottled in his bolthole.”
“What of the navy? There was a lot of activity in the Inner Roads this morning.”
“They were merely warping their ships off the docks; by now the fire will have swept down to the water’s edge. They tried a few ranging shots at the palace this afternoon, but the distance is too far. We have a boom across the Great Harbour covered by the forts on the moles; it should suffice to keep the navy at bay, and their guns out of range of the Upper City. Abrusio was built to be defended from a seaborne attack as well as from a landward one. That works in our favour. And the confined nature of the battlefield means that our disadvantages in numbers are not so apparent.”
“How far has the fire advanced?”
“As far as the Crown Wharves in the Inner Roads. It should almost be licking at the walls of the Arsenal itself. Mercado has had to set aside over three thousand men as firefighters, and another dozen tercios are overseeing the evacuation of the Lower City’s population. He is as hamstrung as a bull caught half over a gate.”
“His concern for the little people is laudable, but it will prove his undoing,” Sastro said.
“The little people are fighting side by side with the city garrison, Lord Carrera,” Quirion reminded him. “The population of the Upper City has remained neutral, but I would not place much faith in the nobles.”
“Oh, they’ll bend with the wind, as they always do. There’s not a great house in Hebrion—even the Sequeros—who will tangle with us now. And the Merchants’ Guild is being rapidly won over also. Gold is a marvellous comforter, I find, and the concessions that a future king can grant.”
“Yes . . .”
