‘Has Redmask given you leave to ride to battle?’
Toc shrugged. ‘He’s said nothing either way, which I suppose is leave enough.’
‘It is not.’ Torrent backed his horse away, then swung it round to ride to where Redmask sat astride his Letherii mount beyond the rough line of readied riders.
Settling back in the strange boxy Awl saddle, Toc examined once again his bow, then the arrows in the quiver strapped to his right thigh. He wasn’t much interested in actually fighting, but at the very least he would be ready to defend himself if necessary. Ill omens. Clearly Redmask was indifferent to such notions. Toc scratched at the lurid tissue surrounding his eyeless socket. I miss that eye, gift of High Derail in what seems ages past. Gods knew, made me a real archer again-these days I’m damned near useless. Fast and inaccurate, that’s Toc the Unlucky.
Would Redmask forbid him his ride this day? Toc did not think so. He could see Torrent exchanging words with the war leader, the unmasked warrior’s horse sidestepping and tossing its head. True enough, how the beast comes to resemble its master. Imagine all the one’eyed dogs I might have owned. Torrent then wheeled his mount and made his way back towards Toc at a quick canter.
The scowl had darkened. Toc smiled once more. ‘Swords unsheathed this day, Torrent.’
‘You’ve said that before.’
‘I thought we might start over.’
‘He wants you out of danger.’
‘But I can still ride with the army.’
‘I do not trust you, so do not think that anything you do will not be unwitnessed.’
‘Too many nots there, I think, Torrent. But I’m feeling generous this morning so I’ll leave the reins loose.’
‘One must never knot his reins,’ Torrent said. ‘Any fool knows that.’
‘As you say.’
The army set out, all mounted for the moment-including the dog-masters-but’ that would not last. Nor, Toc suspected, would the force remain united. Redmask saw no battle as a singular event. Rather, he saw a collection of clashes, an engagement of wills; where one was blunted he would shift his attention to resume the sparring elsewhere, and it was in the orchestration of these numerous meetings that a battle was won or lost. Flanking elements would spin off from the main column. More than one attack, more than one objective.
Toc understood this well enough. It was, he suspected, the essence of tactics among successful commanders the world over. Certainly the Malazans had fought that way, with great success. Eschewing the notion of feints, every engagement was deliberate and deliberately intended to lock an enemy down, into fierce, desperate combat.
‘Leave feints to the nobility,’ Kellanved had once said. ‘And they can take their clever elegance to the barrow.’ That had been while he and Dassem Ultor had observed the Untan knights on the field of battle east of Jurda. Riding back and forth, back and forth. Tiring their burdened warhorses, sowing confusion in the dust-clouds engulfing their own ranks. Feint and blind. Dassem had ignored the pureblood fools, and before the day’s battle was done he had shattered the entire Untan army, including those vaunted, once-feared knights.
The Letherii did not possess heavy cavalry. But if they did, Toc believed, they would play feint and blind all day long.
Or perhaps not. Their sorcery in battle was neither subtle nor elegant. Ugly as a Fenn’s fist, in fact. This suggested a certain pragmatism, an interest in efficiency over pomp, and, indeed, a kind of impatience regarding the mannerisms of war.
Sorcery. Had Redmask forgotten the Letherii mages?
The vast level plain where the enemy waited-the Awl called it Pradegar, Old Salt-was not magically dead. Redmask’s shamans had made use of the residual magic there to track the movements of the enemy army, after all.
Redmask, have you lost your mind?
The Awl rode on.
More than swords unsheathed this day, 1 fear. He scratched again at his gaping socket, then kicked his horse into motion.
Orbyn Truthfinder disliked the feel of soft ground beneath him. Earth, loam, sand, anything that seemed uneasy beneath his weight. He would suffer a ride in a carriage, since the wheels were solid enough, the side to side lurching above the rocky trail serving to reassure him whenever he thought of that uncertainty below. He stood now on firm stone, a bulge of scraped bedrock just up from the trail that wound the length of the valley floor.
The air’s breath was sun-warmed, smelling of cold water and pine. Midges wandered in swarms along the streams of ice-melt threading down the mountainsides, slanting this way and that whenever a dragonfly darted into their midst.
The sky was cloudless, the blue so sharp and clean compared to the dusty atmosphere of Drene-or any other city for that matter-that Orbyn found himself glancing upward again and again, struggling with something like disbelief.
When not looking skyward, the Patriotist’s eyes were fixed on the three riders descending from the pass ahead. They had moved well in advance of his company, climbing the heights, then traversing the spine of the mountains to the far pass, where a garrison had been slaughtered. Where, more importantly, a certain shipment of weapons had not arrived. In the grander scheme, such a loss meant little, but Factor Letur Anict was not a man of grand schemes. His motivations were truncated, parsed into a language of precision, intolerant of deviation, almost neurotic when faced with anything messy. And this, indeed, was messy. In short, Letur Anict, for all his wealth and power, was a bureaucrat in the truest sense of the word.
The advance riders were returning, at long last, but Orbyn was not particularly pleased by that. They would have nothing good to say, he knew. Tales of rotting corpses, charred wood, squalling ravens and mice among mouldering bones. At the very least, he could force himself once again into the Factor’s carriage to sit opposite that obnoxious number-chewer, and counsel-with greater veracity this time-that they turn their column round and head back to Drene.
Not that he would succeed, he knew. For Letur Anict, every insult was grievous, and every failure was an insult. Someone would pay. Someone always did.
Some instinct made Orbyn glance back at the camp and he saw the Factor emerging from his carriage. Well, that was a relief, since Orbyn was in the habit of sweating pro-fusely in Letur’s cramped contrivance. He watched as the washed-out man picked a delicate path up to where stood Orbyn. Overdressed for the mild air, his lank, white hair covered by a broad-rimmed hat to keep the sun from pallid skin, his strangely round face already flushed with exertion.
Truthfinder,’ he said as soon as he reached the bulge of bedrock, ‘we both know what our scouts will tell us.’
‘Indeed, Factor.’
‘So… where are they?’
Orbyn’s thin brows rose, and he blinked to clear the sudden sweat stinging his eyes. ‘As you know, they never descended farther than this-where we are camped right now. Leaving three possibilities. One, they turned round, back up and through the pass-’
‘They were not seen to do that.’
‘No. Two, they left the trail here and went south, perhaps seeking the Pearls Pass into south Bluerose.’
‘Travelling the spine of the mountains? That seems unlikely, Truthfinder.’
‘Three, they went north from here.’
The Factor licked his lips, as if considering something. Inflectionless, he asked, ‘Why would they do that?’
Orbyn shrugged. ‘One could, if one so desired, skirt the range until one reached the coast, then hire a craft to take one to virtually any coastal village or port of the Bluerose Sea.’
‘Months.’
‘Fear Sengar and his companions are well used to that, Factor. No fugitive party has ever fled for as long within the confines of the empire as have they.’
‘Not through skill alone, Truthfinder. We both know that the Edur could have taken them a hundred times, in a hundred different places… And further, we both know why they have not done so. The question you and I have danced round for a long, long time is what, if anything, are we going to do regarding all of that.’
