Warlord

idea of what they were doing.

'The Skinners won't listen to anyone else, and they're the only force in reach,' he said, mostly to himself. 'The Forty Thieves have the line of march pegged'-that bunch of guardhouse rejects and throat-cutters really could do reconnaissance now that M'lewis had put the fear of the Spirit into them-'but only the Skinners can intercept them.'

Unless he committed his only reserve battalion of regular cavalry. . but the roll call of battles won by the last man to commit his reserves stretched back beyond recorded history. Here's where I start cursing sending Kaltin and Gerrin both, he thought. Then: It was the right decision. We can't have them catching us like a pinyata between two sticks.

'Suzette?' he called. She came through the curtain in her riding costume, holding the Colonial repeater carbine and thumbing a last round into the tube magazine through the gate above the lever. 'Sorry, darling-you're staying behind this time. Officer of the guard!'

'Get me Colonel Menyez.' Cavalry snobbery be damned; Menyez would have to hold the fort, and send the two columns south. Poplanich would be his second. . and if I'm ever in a position to do it, we're going to have a regular table of ranks and establish permanent brigades, he decided. Damn the political risks. We need formations that are used to working together.

Chapter Nine

Four men are just right for this, Raj thought.

Not a squadron of Poplanich's to clank and clatter in the night, though they were shaping to be good battlefield soldiers. Just himself and da Cruz and two of the Scouts, for quiet work in the dark. One was a cousin of M'lewis's, a little rat-faced man everyone called Cut-Nose, because most of his had been removed with something sharp; the other was a silent hulking brute called Talker from the northeast border of Descott, on the mountainous fringe of Asuaria County. The battalion rolls listed their former occupations as vakaro and sauroid hunter; offhand, he judged Cut-Nose for a sheep-stealer. Talker had the eyes of someone who just liked to kill-people by preference, though sauroids would do at a pinch. If either had come calling back home he'd have had the vakaros whip them off, or hang them for the County's peace. Both rode with an easy slouching seat, reins knotted on their pommels and eyes never still; their rifles they cradled in their arms, and both weapons had rawhide sleeves shrunk onto the forestocks.

And Spirit, but it's good to be doing something myself for a change, he thought.

It was very quiet in the hour before dawn, somehow blacker than deep night. Dew beaded the dogs' coats to the breast as they pushed through a rustling cornfield, chill on the soaked cloth of trouser-legs. Their way led through the last of the coastal plain, foothills heavy with fruit-orchards where springs welled up at the foot of the escarpment. Water rippled in stone-lined ditches beside the road.

Da Cruz reined in beside the general. ''Tis thissaway, ser,' he said quietly, nodding at a rutted cart-track that led up the face of the limestone ridge that loomed at a sixty-degree angle on their west.

'This way's quicker.'

The holographic map hovered over his vision at every turning, and beneath it he picked out the trail better than his eyesight could have done; somehow Center looked through the darkness even though It had only his vision to use. He remembered the visions It had shown him, of the floating satellites that had been Its eyes before the Fall. They could have looked through absolute darkness or deepest cloud. . Not for the first time, he wondered how an angel came to be condemned to the cislunary sphere of Fallen corruption.

The hillsides ran upward in steep scree-clad illex and whipthorn, then leveled off into a plateau; once a herd of wild grazing sauroids fled in honking, hissing confusion and a little later a wild boar held the way against them for an instant.

One of the troopers hissed a little through his teeth at the commander's certainty, and Raj smiled silently to himself. 'That way,' he said, cutting his palm over the fields.

There are advantages to having a legend, he thought.

* * *

'Cowards!'

Raj let his voice roar out over the patio, as the dogs picked their way in among the broken glass and rubble of the Squadron manor's courtyard. Horace stepped delicately over a Skinner facedown in a pool of vomit, and up the steps, not even looking aside when two Skinner hounds growled and raised their hackles at him. A human leg was hanging by a cord around its ankle from the wrought-iron balcony above the main entrance; judging from the bits and pieces scattered around, they'd hung whoever it was off alive and then used him for target practice until the body fell apart.

'You cowards hide like old women!' Raj shouted again. 'Your ancestors die again with shame to see you run from battle!'

Roars and grunts answered him as troll-figures stirred amid the doors and shrubberies. A squat shape appeared on the balcony and jumped down, long gun over one shoulder.

'Eh, sojer-man! Neck-stretcher!' The banter was less friendly than usual. 'What you want, eh? Tu peti lahpan hilai kouri ahvent nus coup, you little rabbit, run away before we get skin-mebbe we skin you now, eh?'

'I want you to fight, Juluk,' Raj said, leaning over. 'Or is killing farmers and drinking all Skinners can do?'

The chief grunted. 'No Squadron men here-all run away,' he said a little defensively.

Raj lifted one hand from the pommel of the saddle to point behind and to the left, southwest. 'There are two thousand Squadron troops there, moving fast to the east-no more than three kilometers away. I ask you again, Shef Juluk Peypan-will you fight, or just sit here drinking while better men do battle?'

The Skinner chief grunted again and leaned on his long rifle, making a motion with one hand. Three of his men leaped to dogback and pounded out of the courtyard; others were moving about, readying gear and kicking their dogs to wakefulness. Then they gathered around the little group of Descotters, staring with the steady hungry gaze feral dogs gave guard-hounds. Barely half an hour passed before the scouts returned, shouting in Paytoiz. An exultant yell went up from the assembled warriors, and a deafening chorus of howls from their hounds. Juluk had been standing with a hunter's patience, both hands on the rifle and one foot crooked behind the opposite knee; now he straightened and unhooked a flask from his belt.

'Today we doan' skin you, sojer-man,' he said, holding it up.

Raj took the ceremonial drink, fighting not to cough.

Gah. Juluk had really done him honor; not looted wine or brandy but arak, the date gin spiked with red pepper and gunpowder that was the Skinners' own favorite drink.

'I'll piss out this sauroid-gall on your grave,' he replied politely. 'Now, can you keep the Squadron troops off my men's flank, while we fight our battle?'

'Hoya-hey!' The chieftain laughed, and the others joined him in a barking chorus. 'Six hundred Real Men against only two tens of hundreds of long-hairs?' he chortled, using the Skinner's slang term for any of the western barbarians of the Military Governments. 'We chew their bones! We kill them all, take their dogs and cattle and guns, fuck their women, burn their houses! Hoya-hey, it is a good day to die!'

He pulled at one long drooping mustache, leering up at the Civil Government commander. 'You come with us, kill long-hairs?' he said. 'You got balls enough to fight like Real Man, sojer-boy?'

Raj looked up at the eastern horizon; the sky was paling slightly behind the distant mountains. On the other hand, I can kiss goodbye to any chance of controlling these wild men if I don't, he thought.

'Can you girls fight like me?' he said.

Juluk swung onto his hound. 'Fray hums!' he shouted, shaking his rifle in the air.