southwest Vallia, to that rast Strom Rosil Yasi. Kov Vodun kept up an unceasing barrage of contumely against our enemies, and lusted after returning and hanging every last one from the tallest tree branches he could find.
A number of invasions had been launched through his province. We had resisted and now, with Kov Vodun to prod us into action, we felt the time was ripe for us to return in strength and kick Yasi and his foul henchmen out of our land. The trouble was, and this trouble explained our experiences after
“If we can clear all the southwest,” I said, “it will free our hands for the sterner tasks ahead.”
Kov Vodun snapped erect. “Sterner tasks, majister?”
I sighed. Trust me to say the wrong thing.
“Only in matters of number, kov; not in anything else.”
“I see.”
A prickly customer, Kov Vodun Alloran. Very popular with the ladies, with his tales of guerrilla action from the hills. Alloran had done well at the Battle of Kanarsmot, and afterwards in that fraught action to take the fortress where Inch had rejoined us. Kov Vodun Alloran had been chosen by the Presidio, with the blessings of Prince Drak and the Lord Farris, to lead the Army of the Southwest to liberate that area of our land.
“Very well,” I said. “My mind is made up. You have the nucleus of the forces earmarked for you-”
“The most of which were taken away!” said Alloran, with a prickly nastiness. He had regained a very great measure of his own self-esteem since escaping from his kovnate and fighting with us here. I nodded.
“That is true. And, no doubt, that is why the Prince Majister contracted to engage paktuns. You will have a tidy army, Kov Vodun, to lead into your kovnate.”
He moved his shoulders under the armor and the polished iron caught the light and glittered. “There is the matter of the Fourth Phalanx, majister. I was promised the Fourth, and one wing was taken from me and flown north. I now have only one Kerchuri, and it is in my mind I should take a Kerchuri from the Fifth.”
My old blade comrade Nath Nazabhan had been busy, and besides finishing the raising of the Fourth, he had started the Fifth. Now a phalanx is a wonderful engine of destruction and the pikemen in the files, the brumbytes, of whom there are 10,368, are flanked by the axe and halberd men, the Hakkodin, of whom there are 1,728. There are also strong bodies of archers, and lads to strew caltrops and run with chevaux de frises. A whole lot of men are locked up in a phalanx.
I stirred the piece of paper on my desk. In Drak’s handwriting the composition of the proposed Army of the SW stared me in the face. Drak had written down: “One Kerchuri.” A Kerchuri is a wing of the phalanx, one-half. I looked up at Alloran.
“Two Kerchuris, kov?”
“Aye, majister, two.”
“But the Fifth Phalanx is green raw.”
“Their Ninth Kerchuri is ready. And, by Vox, by the time I have marched them a sennight or so they’ll smarten up!”
“You would leave Vondium with only the Tenth Kerchuri?”
“You need, with your permission, majister, archers to defend city walls.”
That was only half true.
I wondered if he was going to bargain his paktun archers, these Undurkers, for the Ninth Kerchuri. It was, in my view, no bargain at all.
I said, “What do your spies report of the strength and composition of Strom Rosil’s army?”
“Scattered,” he said at once. “He will have time to scrape his men together before I reach him, of course, after the initial breakthrough battles. He has something of the order of thirty thousand he can concentrate with reasonable speed.
Give him two of the Moons of the Twins and he will have fifty or more.”
I stirred Drak’s list again.
“If you move with speed, you can catch him before he concentrates his full strength.”
“That is my plan.”
“And the composition?”
Alloran smiled. “Mercenaries of varying quality. A normal mix of infantry and cavalry. He has also masichieri and aragorn. They hardly count.”
I looked up suspiciously. “Never underrate those rasts.”
“I am thinking, majister, of First Kanarsmot.”
“We surprised them there.”
“And I,” said Kov Vodun, “shall surprise the cramphs again.”
The decision I was being called on to make was your everyday, normal, ulcer-breeding decision facing emperors. If I allowed Kov Vodun to take the army as listed by Drak, less those units detached for duty in the north, plus the Ninth Kerchuri, there would be a skeletal force left in the city. I looked up. I know my face must have looked like a chunk of granite dredged from a thousand-season-old wreck. The Southwest had to be cleared, the risk accepted. He could take a full phalanx, the Eighth and Ninth Kerchuris. The commands would mesh. Get the job done fast. I told him my decision. Then I said, “Very well. You will take upwards of forty thousand. That should suffice.”
His down-drooping lids lifted, then he smiled, and nodded his satisfaction with what he had salvaged.
“The original army was to have been upwards of sixty thousand, majister. But I will do what I must with these straitened circumstances.”
Just as I was thinking this was a damned boorish way of carrying on, he added, “And I give you my thanks, majister.”
“May Opaz go with you and guide you in the forthcoming battles.”
So off he went with his paktuns and in came Enevon Ob-Eye, my chief stylor, a man whom I trusted and who had a head for figures and lists, and the warrants were prepared.
“You leave the city perilously undefended, majis.”
“Aye, Enevon. But while we attack in the north and attack in the southwest, we have the cramphs off balance. They’ll be too busy defending themselves to attack us here.”
The heavy atmosphere in the room during the interview with Alloran seemed to have gone with him. Enevon reported that the swarths I had ordered collected were stabled in the sleeth’s stables at the merezo, and the lads of the racing track were caring for their new charges. My experiences in the Humped Land with those damned swarthmen had convinced me a few regiments of swarth-mounted cavalry would not come amiss.
So, as you will see, I was in the thick of this paperwork and caring for it only insofar as I worked for Vallia and Delia. I just could not twine my thoughts around the whereabouts and well-being of Delia. She was off with the Sisters of the Rose, doing marvelous and secret wonders, and no doubt having a tremendous time. As ever, unless I felt that peculiar sense of urgency and disaster, I would not request a Wizard of Loh to go into lupu and spy out Delia’s whereabouts.
During this period both Quienyin and Bjanching paid a courtesy call on me. Oh, they were both up north; but their ghostly apparitions showed up in my room, and this comforted me considerably, as you may well imagine. Paying polite visits by these supernatural means, and taking it all as a matter of course, came with an all-standing kind of refresher to me, even if to them it was all in the day’s business. One visit gave me immense pleasure. Silda, Seg’s daughter, called on me. She couldn’t stop, she said; she was on her way through. I did not inquire. She was about business for the SoR, that was clear. Silda had grown more beautiful than ever, a bright, charming, happy girl who mentioned the death of her mother just the once. She was also very strong-minded. I could see that. There was in her much of Seg’s greatness of character, and also a deal of her mother’s outgoing warmth which in Silda was not inevitably brought to disaster. If I had to choose a daughter-in-law — and, by Vox, I did not have to, not with Drak making up his own mind! — there was no one I could think of to surpass Silda Segutorio. She said her brother, Dray Segutorio, was now a hyrpaktun and had only just learned of the troubles afflicting us. He was on his way home.
“The quicker he gets here the better. We need every trained professional we can lay hands on. And I’m not talking about mercenaries. Young Drak has-” And I stopped. I would not too openly criticize Drak in front of Silda. I had seen the way her eyebrows went up, and the purse to those delectable lips, the flush of color along her cheeks.
