The Heroes

dampened his fury by imagining the smirking heads of Mitterick’s staff impaled on the pikes of Black Dow’s army. Not the most patriotic pastime, perhaps, but among his most satisfying.

It’s an upside-down sham of a world in which men like these, if they can be called men at all, can look down on a man like me. I am worth twice the lot of you. And this is the best the Union has to offer? We deserve to lose.

‘Can’t win a war without getting your hands dirty.’

‘What?’ Gorst frowned sideways. The Dogman was leaning beside him in his battered coat, a look of world- weary resignation on his no less battered face.

The Northman let his head tip back until it bumped gently against the peeling wall. ‘Some folk would rather keep clean, though, eh? And lose.’

Gorst could ill afford to strike up an alliance with the one man even more of an outsider than himself. He slipped into his accustomed silence like a well-worn suit of armour, and turned his attention to the nervous chatter of the officers.

‘When are they getting here?’

‘Soon.’

‘How many of them?’

‘I heard three.’

‘Only one. It only takes one member of the Closed Council.’

‘The Closed Council?’ squeaked Gorst, voice driven up almost beyond the range of human hearing by a surge of nerves. A nauseating after-taste of the horror he had felt the day those horrible old men had stripped him of his position. Squashing my dreams as carelessly as a boy might squash a beetle. ‘And next …’ as he was ushered into the hallway and the black doors were shut on him like coffin lids. No longer commander of the king’s guards. No longer a Knight of the Body. No longer anything but a squealing joke, my name made a byword for failure and disgrace. He could see that panel of creased and sagging sneers still. And at the head of the table the king’s pale face, jaw clenched, refusing to meet Gorst’s eye. As though the ruin of his most loyal servant was no more than an unpleasant chore …

‘Which of them will it be?’ Felnigg was asking. ‘Do we know?’

‘It hardly matters.’ Kroy looked towards the window. Beyond the half-open shutters the rain was getting heavier. ‘We already know what they will say. The king demands a great victory, at twice the speed and half the cost.’

‘As always!’ Mitterick crowed with the regularity of an overeager cockerel. ‘Damn politicians, sticking their noses into our business! I swear those swindlers on the Closed Council cost us more lives than the bloody enemy ever—’

The doorknob turned with a loud rattle and a heavy-set old man entered the room, entirely bald with a short grey beard. He gave no immediate impression of supreme power. His clothes were only slightly less rain-soaked and mud-spattered than Gorst’s own. His staff was of plain wood shod with steel, more walking stick than rod of office. But still, though he and the single, unassuming servant who scraped in after him were outnumbered ten to one by some of the finest peacocks in the army, it was the officers who held their breath. The old man carried about him an air of untouchable confidence, disdainful ownership, masterful control. The air of a slaughterman casting an eye over that morning’s hogs.

‘Lord Bayaz.’ Kroy’s face had paled, slightly. It might have been the very first time Gorst had seen the marshal surprised, and he was not alone. The crowded room could not have been more dumbstruck if the corpse of Harod the Great had been trundled in on a trolley to address them.

‘Gentlemen.’ Bayaz tossed his staff carelessly to his curly-headed servant, wiped the beads of moisture from his bald pate with a faint hissing and flicked them from the edge of his hand. For a legendary figure, there was no ceremony to him. ‘Some weather we’re having, eh? Sometimes I love the North and sometimes … less so.’

‘We were not expecting—’

‘Why would you be?’ Bayaz chuckled with a show of good humour that somehow managed to seem a threat. ‘I am retired! I had left my seat on the Closed Council empty once again and was seeing out my dotage at my library, far removed from the grind of politics. But since this war is taking place on my very doorstep, I thought it would be neglectful of me not to stop by. I have brought money with me – I understand pay is standing somewhat in arrears.’

‘A little,’ conceded Kroy.

‘A little more and the soldier’s veneer of honour and obedience might swiftly rub away, eh, gentlemen? Without its golden lubricant the great machine of his Majesty’s army would soon stutter to a halt, would it not, as with so much in life?’

‘Concern for the welfare of our men is always uppermost in our minds,’ said the marshal, uncertainly.

‘And mine!’ answered Bayaz. ‘I am here only to help. To keep the wheels oiled, if you will. To observe and perhaps, should the occasion call, offer some trifling guidance. Yours is the command, Lord Marshal, of course.’

‘Of course,’ echoed Kroy, but no one was convinced. This, after all, was the First of the Magi. A man supposedly hundreds of years old, supposedly possessed of magical powers, who had supposedly forged the Union, brought the king to his throne, driven out the Gurkish and laid a good section of Adua to waste doing it. Supposedly. Hardly a man noted for a reluctance to interfere. ‘Er … might I introduce General Mitterick, commander of his Majesty’s second division?’

‘General Mitterick, even sealed away with my books I have heard tales of your valour. An honour.’

The general fluffed up with happiness. ‘No, no! The honour is mine!’

‘Yes,’ said Bayaz, with casual brutality.

Kroy charged boldly into the ensuing silence. ‘This is my chief of staff, Colonel Felnigg, and this the leader of those Northmen who oppose Black Dow and fight alongside us, the Dogman.’