Warlord

* * *

'Ahh, firin' squad, ser?' da Cruz asked.

'By no means, Master Sergeant: by no means.' There was a wait; Raj remembered to turn and clap Foley on the shoulder. 'Quick work, Ensign,' he said.

The boy had been looking nausea-pale; he straightened. 'Thank you, sir,' he said, looking down at the shotgun and fumbling it open. It took several seconds for him to unload it. 'It's. . a good weapon, Gerrin- Senior Lieutenant Staenbridge got it for me.'

'Use it well,' Raj said; the youth snicked it closed and went to stand beside Staenbridge, accepting an arm around his shoulders with a grateful sigh. M'lewis came panting up with his arms full.

'Messer Captain, gots a bit,' he said. Quite a bit; three large wooden hammers, the sort used to drive vine- props, and several dozen stakes of turned hardwood the length of a man's forearm.

'Excellent, M'lewis,' Raj said, bringing his eyes down to the line of men against the wall. . eleven of them. Fifteen to fifty, East Residence born, you could see the mark of the streets on them. Eyes bewildered, eyes defiant, cringing.

'Master Sergeant,' he continued, listening to his own voice as he might have a strange sauroid calling in the forest. 'This laneway leads to the ford over the Torunavir, doesn't it? Passable for the Battalion?'

'Yes, ser. Bit more direct than the highway. Take a little longer, mebbe.'

'Excellent,' Raj said again. 'Have the men draw straws for a crucifixion detail, if you please. And a detachment to see nobody touches the bodies until tomorrow morning.'

Raj heard the Gruder brothers hiss in surprise behind him. The servants stared uncomprehending until the soldiers spread-eagled the first of them against the wall and brought up the stakes. They began screaming, then.

* * *

Raj walked into his tent; the table had been cleared and the flap lowered. Suzette sat in a folding chair under the single lamp, a snifter of brandy in one hand and a cigarette in the other, with a book open in her lap. Unspeaking, he walked to the sideboy and poured himself a stiff shot of Hillchapel plum brandy, tossing the clear liquid to the back of his throat. He followed it with another, motions as controlled as a machine, then threw the glass out of the tent, listening as it crashed and tinkled in the darkness outside.

'Raj?' Suzette said, closing the book and laying it aside. Some detached portion of his mind noticed the gold- leaf title on the spine: Gentry, Nobility and Estates of the Southern Counties.

He walked to her side, moving like one of the compressed-air automatons in the Hall of Audience, sank to his knees and laid his head on her lap.

'Suzette-' he croaked.

'Shhh,' she said, stroking his hair.

'What I. . had to. .'

'Shhh, my brave one. It'll be all right. Shhh, sleep now.'

* * *

Ten of the servants were still alive, spiked to the wall like butterflies in a specimen box, when the banner of the 5th Descott went by, twelve hours later.

Chapter Eight

Crash.

The volley rang out in crisp unison, and the boulder designated as target went pockmarked as seventy or eighty rifle bullets from First Company struck as one. Raj lowered his binoculars with a grim smile, scanning across the rolling plain. Second Company were hauling in out of a gallop five hundred meters ahead of their comrades and sliding to the ground, running for cover.

Crash. Their volley had the same mechanical perfection, and the clump of daggerbrush that was their aiming point disintegrated in a cloud of dust and fragments. The First was already remounted and pounding forward in line abreast, leapfrogging to a new firing line. Raj nodded to the signaller beside him; the man was using a portable heliograph, an affair of mirrors and lenses on a collapsible tripod. He began to click the slatted cover in coded patterns, setting pulses of reflected sunlight to the lip of a gully nearly a thousand meters away. The Captain raised his glasses once more; the erosion slash looked like a thousand others on the rolling plain, deserted, rimmed in saltbush.

Then it flashed and smoked, as Third Company popped their heads above the rim and opened up. Couldn't see them myself, and I knew they were there, Raj thought. Fourth and Fifth surged over the rim a moment later, mounted and sabers out. Without pausing to dress ranks or needing to they joined into a blunt wedge and charged, screeching exultantly. Shells burst ahead of them as the two 75s below Raj's hilltop command post bucked and roared. Grey smoke drifted in clumps across the scrubby plain smelling of brimstone, but the sounds of firing seemed to disappear into that endless waste.

'Not bad at all, Master Sergeant,' Raj said.

'Mebbe, ser. Mought wish the new men'd been with ussn longer, gots doubt about how steady they is.'

'Well, there's only one way to find out, isn't there?' he replied. 'Sound Regroup and Reform, trumpeter.' He stood in the stirrups and stretched; Horace took that as a sign to lie down, and Raj pulled firmly on the reins.

'Up, you son-of-a-bitch,' he said affably. The dog sighed and looked over its shoulder at him, mournful eyes and drooping floppy ears, tongue the size of a washtowel out and jiggling as he panted.

Horace was a premier product of the Hillchapel stud, but his sleek black coat put him at a disadvantage under the merciless southern sun. The peaks of the Oxheads were to their left and north, now; the last week since they crossed the passes had been a steady eastward trudge through the foothills, where great wedge-shaped spurs ran out into the steppe. Easier to put the road further out, from an engineering standpoint, but there was very little point in having a road without water and fodder for the men and beasts that travelled it.

'Water and fodder,' Raj remarked aloud as the Battalion formed up behind the colors.

'Messer Captain?' the guide sent out from the County Legate in Komar said, smiling.

He smiles a lot, Raj thought, looking at the rather dashing face, white teeth gleaming in the dark-tanned face against black point-trimmed mustache and beard. The guide wore an odd little cap with a fore-and-aft peak, wound 'round with a snowy white cloth whose end dangled down his neck and could be drawn across the face in a sandstorm. Muzzaf Kerpatik was a sleekly prosperous person, in his long light-brown jellaba and curl-toed boots, a Star medallion around his neck in silver and diamond chips, two amulets dangling from his belt, mother-of-pearl inlays on the scabbard of his dagger and the butt of his pepperpot revolver.

'Not much water or fodder around here,' Raj amplified. The 5th was drawn up in column of march; the command party took its place at the head. He held up a hand and chopped it forward.

'Battalion. .'

'Company. .'

'Platoon. .'

'Dressing by the left. . walk-march. . trot.' With a jingle of harness and a mass panting of dogs, the Battalion broke into motion, a single great blue-and-dun snake a thousand meters long coiling across the plain like some steel-tipped centipede of war.

Muzzaf nodded, stroking his beard; he was a travelled man, a man of affairs, who had been east to Sandoral, west to Kendrun, and to the capital several times. He looked about, seeing with a northerner's eyes. The southern slopes of the mountains were themselves dry, unlike the dense broadleaf forest of the other slope; open scrub, grass, a few glades of cedar or bottletree higher up. Down here was pasture, verdant enough in the winter rains, but drying out now, the carpets of wildflowers long gone. Already the sheep were being herded up the valleys and into the high meadows, vast bleating herds surrounded by mounted guardians. Several were in view from here; the land was not really flat, it rolled like the frozen waves of the sea, and from a ridgeline like this you could see a score of kilometers.

'Yet there is good trade in wool done here, Messer,' he said; his Colony-bred whippet kept pace with the