To see the khotor of Sixt Arnem’s Talons, as well as the two hundred and fifty of Bane tribe’s best warriors, put their full commitment to the task of preparing an attack on Broken, under the direction of subcommanders so expert in their various trades that their like could not be found for hundreds of miles in any direction from the city on the mountain (as well as from Davon Wood), is to watch men and women assembled and readying themselves to do in the best manner possible the most fearsome work, the most awful work, that humankind ever undertakes. For, as Caliphestros explains to those about him, it is only when the essential violence of war combines itself with the arts of learning, of construction and experimentation, of the conditioning and steeling of the body and the mind — as well as with that finest of arts, discovery—that war connects itself to that in Man which is, in truth, both superior and moral. Are these qualities not better attained through other activities? On the greater number of occasions, quite probably so; indeed, this may perhaps be a universal truth. But, like the rain for which Caliphestros waits so impatiently yet confidently on the Broken cavalry training ground, as he mixes his strange brew of materials taken from bogs and mines deep within the Earth, war will visit the lives of all men and women, eventually. And it is in the question of how closely each armed force does or does not labor to connect its practice to those other, nobler studies, rather than allowing it to be confined to mere bloodshed, that will determine any army’s true if relative morality (or lack thereof).
Such connections have rarely been in evidence so completely as they are during the relatively few (but ample enough) hours that the Bane warriors and the Talons spend on the cavalry training ground below the southern walls of Broken, during the first night, the following day, and the second evening following their arrival, in preparation for their advance, under cover of darkness, on the walled city. The men’s and women’s activities would not seem, to those who have witnessed or read of various great clashes of arms through the ages and around the known world, particularly exotic: those Bane (and they are not the majority of their contingent) who have at least some experience on the backs of horses are taught by the Broken cavalrymen to handle the smaller ponies with ease, and to coordinate their movements with larger Broken cavalry fausten. This group is led by a restored Heldo-Bah, never so cured of doubt as by action. Together, Bane and Tall riders will provide the attacking army with that single element that besieging forces too often ignore and lack: mobility, the ability to test the enemy for points of strength and retreat from and report on their positions, and doing the same if they find weaknesses that can be exploited rapidly. Yet it is in a third role, that of a diversionary force, that cavalry plays perhaps its greatest role during any siege; and Caliphestros lectures Heldo-Bah until the latter cannot stand to hear another word from the old man’s mouth on just what part the allied and especially the Bane cavalry shall play, along these lines.
The overall task of the horsemen is, in short, is to breed in the enemy from the start a constant sense of imbalance, unhappy surprise, and, in general, the confusion that destroys coherence of command and movement. As for those Bane who will remain afoot, they study how to integrate their own actions into the attack under the overall tutelage of Linnet Taankret: how to play a part in the Mad King Oxmontrot’s famed Krebkellen, which, like the movements of the cavalry, would seem to less imaginative commanders than Sixt Arnem to have no place in a siege; but, as Yantek Ashkatar is quick to see (much to the satisfaction of both Arnem and Taankret), it can, if its deployment is reimagined.
Nor is it only as students that the Bane have important contributions to make to the great enterprise they will undertake with their former enemies. For, as we have already seen in the annihilation of the First Khotor of Lord Baster-Kin’s Guard, the Bane have their own methods of confounding and deceiving an enemy, ways long considered deceitful and illegitimate by the soldiers of Broken, in that they did not rely on the direct confrontation of warrior against warrior, army against army. Yet they are far from such baseness, as Taankret, Bal-deric, Crupp, and even Arnem himself (to say nothing of the rest of the sentek’s officers and men) now learn, primarily — in this as in all such matters — through explanations offered by Caliphestros and Visimar. And once more, it is Akillus — ever willing to modify the tactics of his scouts, and in many ways the cleverest of Arnem’s contingent chiefs — who can see the one-legged acolyte and his legless master’s point that the khotor of Baster-kin’s Guard that holds the city against only half again as many besiegers may be vulnerable indeed, if any and all “tricks,” or more properly, deceptions, are employed against Baster-kin’s deceits. Such deceptions are not at all debasing to the attackers, the attacking force is taught, whereas deceit serves only to dishonor those who stoop to its use; in this case, the Merchant Lord’s willingness — even determination — to conceal the many troubles facing his kingdom, as well as his own desire to achieve dishonorable goals, personal and otherwise, under the guise of safeguarding the realm.
After all, Akillus argues during Arnem’s first dinner mess on the cavalry ground, one need only consider how many truly disreputable deceits Baster-kin has already employed during this campaign: for how “honorable” was it to send the Talons into an area he had every reason to believe stricken by at least one deadly disease, and then dispatch his own Guard’s First Khotor into what was thought a safe, perhaps the last safe, region of Broken’s southern province, to attack the Bane and steal any glory that Sentek Arnem and his Talons might have gained from their original task of attacking the Bane? These are not the actions of a truly honorable man, Akillus insists; and soon, all of Arnem’s staff are forced to agree. (And this is why I, your narrator and guide, have written here of the “Battle” of Broken, marking off the word battle in a manner that may seem mocking, but is meant only to warn: to state plainly that to expect, in what remains of my tale, the kind of blind and brutal clash of arms and men that most readers associate with the word battle, rather than an example of an employment of wits to cleverly remove the unjust from power, would be a grave mistake.)
Yet how, then, can Caliphestros, who has more reason to despise Lord Baster-kin than does anyone in the allied camp (with the possible exception of his companion, Stasi), call the Merchant Lord “the last good man in Broken”? Because, as he explains at this same meal, in a very real sense his lordship has been and remains just such: even his willingness to arrange the death of his own feckless son Adelwulf, to say nothing of his plans to destroy the Fifth District and the Talons, as well as take Isadora Arnem to wife, have grown, in his lordship’s mind, out of a true belief in his own patriotism and desire to strengthen the kingdom by strengthening the clan Baster-kin: the two are one and the same, an assertion that, as matters stand, is hard to deny.
It is this realization that begins to eat into the deepest part of Sixt Arnem’s soul when, during the last hours of his own and Ashkatar’s combined forces’ time on the field below Broken, he listens to Caliphestros, Crupp, and Bal-deric explain the final stages of their construction of their unique group of ballistae. Some of these are fairly ordinary machines of war, easily built; but some are such devices as no Broken soldier has ever before seen, designed less to simply batter and destroy than to deliver, in a deceptively gentle manner, Caliphestros’s equally remarkable missiles: missiles made, not of stone, but of humble clay containers, which are now filled with that legendary ingredient that the ever-gloomy Heldo-Bah has declared both a myth and the future cause of the now-fully-coordinated allied force’s undoing: the fire automatos.
By this point, the greater part of the force is already moving northward, up the last stretch of mountain path and toward the walls of Broken, in the very dim light of approaching dawn: a dawn that is occasionally augmented by shards of lightning, which is accompanied, at shorter and shorter and shorter intervals, by loud claps of mountain thunder. And if it should seem strange that, even in the midst of all such activities and achievements, Arnem’s mind should be so preoccupied with thoughts of Lord Baster-kin’s apparent treachery, it needs be remembered that more than the lives of the sentek’s wife and eldest son are now threatened. So, too, is the principle that allowed the sentek to order his once-troubled life, and to make sense of all the fearsome violence that he has both engaged in and led during the years since he first joined he army of Broken: the soldier’s code of duty, no small part of which is the unquestioning faith that his superiors’ wisdom and morality need not only never be questioned, but must be worthy of trust.
However, the sentek soon does force himself to shake free, even of such confusing thoughts; and again fixes upon his goal: “There is no changing course, now,” he tells his assembled officers. “Nor am I unaware or ungrateful of all that each of you has sacrificed, both for this undertaking and for my wife and son, who, for all I know, may be in Baster-kin’s custody — or worse — even as we speak. Therefore, let us away to our men — or a rather, to our men and women …” Taking on a more congenial tone as the two men depart the field, Arnem inquires of the former seneschal of the clan Baster-kin, “Have you noticed, Radelfer, the great ease with which certain of the Talons intermingle with the women warriors of the Bane?”
