Warlord

water coming from within where fountains played in courtyards.

'This Messer Bougiv Assed's house?' he asked, conscious of the two squads at his back, and the light wagon that had once been an officer's coach.

'Yes, it is! And the Messer will not be amused at this intrusion.'

'Fuck 'im,' M'lewis said casually. 'This is t'place, dog-brothers.'

Troopers dismounted, one rattling the gate. ' 'Tis locked, Warrant,' he said.

'Ye, slavey,' M'lewis called up to the window. 'C'mon down an' open it.'

'Out of the question!' indignation hardened above fear.

'Ar. Well, yer bastids heard the sumbitch,' M'lewis continued.

'Right yer are, Warrant,' the trooper said, holding the rifle muzzle a handspan from the lock. ''Ware bouncer.'

The others led their dogs to the wall. The rifle blasted, with a chung! — ping of parting steel and a diminishing whine as pieces of soft lead and tempered metal bounced off stone. M'lewis dismounted and cradled his weapon in his arm, kicking the tall doors in as the broken lock rattled.

'Allays wanted to do that,' he said, flashing a gold-toothed grin. 'Kick in a Messer's door, that is.'

'Tired a' pickin' t'locks?' one of the others asked. They formed up and tramped in his wake, gawking around at the carved-stone and fabric splendors.

'Hoo, Spirit!' M'lewis whistled. There were lords of ten thousand acres in Descott County who had nothing half so fine. Of course, back home the gentry counted wealth in livestock, dogs, fighting men, weapons and stout walls; all difficult to steal. . from Descotters. 'Nao, I don't pick locks. T'wives and daughters lets down ropes fer me; pow'rful tirin', befer I gits around to stealin'.'

A stout middle-aged man in expensive nightclothes came stamping down the stairs; the guards following him with lanterns and pistols slowed to a stop as they saw the dozen helmeted soldiers staring about the foyer of the mansion.

'I am Messer Assed,' he said in a tone of furious control. 'Who do you think you are, soldier, breaking in here! Your officer will have you flogged, flogged.'

'I doubts it,' M'lewis said tranquilly. The broad friendliness of his smile did not alter, even as he flipped the rifle up and poked it into the aristocrat's stomach. 'Allays wanted t'do this, too. . Now, I thinks I's the man wit' t'gun, an' my officer sent me here. Fer one-' he looked down at the pad tucked into his belt. 'El-ect-ri-cal gen-er-ator. Befer,' he added genially, 'we starts knockin' down yer outbuildin's fer the timber.' A wink. 'But don't'cher worry yer heart, Messer, I gots a government receipt, right here.'

* * *

'Careful with that, yer arseface,' da Cruz said.

The jar that was being manhandled off the wagon was taller than a man and nearly as wide as it was tall; even with six troopers on the stout handles the thick terracotta walls of the storage vessel made it an awkward burden. It had been full of olive oil until recently, and the smell was as disagreeable as the slipperiness.

'Ye got it?' he asked, looking down into the hole. It had been dug at a steep slant down into the silt, kept from collapsing with wicker basketwork propped on sticks. The man head-down in it was a gunner, you could tell that by the dark-blue trousers with the red piping up the seams, and by his arrogant contempt for anyone not initiated into the mysteries of his art.

'Mmm-hmm,' the artilleryman said, 'that's got her.' He raised a voice muffled by the dirt. 'Murchyzen, get off your useless butt and send the wire down.'

There was an arm-deep trench running downhill from the pit; at the head of it a piece of wooden pipe showed, running up from the base of the hole below. Another gunner had been squatting, smoking his pipe and watching the civilians and cavalry troopers working with the enjoyment any soldier felt when someone else was pulling the detail. Now he rose and carefully lifted a length of cable; it was braided copper, the outside coated with a sap gum that was shiny and flexible, although a bit tacky in this heat. The end for a meter back had been stripped of insulation and unbraided into a fan of bright metallic strands, each one wrapped around a half-dozen big percussion caps, the type used to fire muzzle loading artillery. The gunner shook it slightly, making a clinking sound something like a sistrum.

'Ya dicking around again, Murchyzen?' the man in the pit asked with dangerous patience.

Da Cruz looked at the detonators with loathing; he had worked as a quarryman in his youth. Until his father was blown into assorted gobbets by a misfired charge; they had found his boots with the feet and sections of calf still in them. But the commander had asked him to see that the fougasses were done properly, and by the Spirit they would be.

'Here it comes,' the gunner said, wrapping a cloth around the detonators and feeding the cable down the wooden pipe; for all his casual familiarity, he did it with a craftsman's deft gentleness. The Master Sergeant craned his head to watch the gunner in the fougasse pit working. Once the cloth-wrapped tip of the cable showed through the man spread the wires out across the canvas below him like the roots of a tree, pinning them in place with pieces of bent twig. Finished, he grunted satisfaction and called over his shoulder:

'Now the powder.' Ten one-kilo cotton sacks, coarsegrained propellant charges. Whistling tunelessly, the gunner ripped each with a diagonal slash of his knife-bayonet, then turned them over and tapped them gently into place with the pommel. When he had finished he stroked the lumpy surface and wriggled out backward, squatting on his hams and blinking in the bright sunlight.

'Yer needs that many detonators?' da Cruz said, handing him a canteen.

The artillery sergeant was a wiry man, about forty; from Chongwe Island, by the accent and the blond hair that stood out against a skin tanned almost as dark as a Descotter's. He rinsed his mouth out and spat, then poured half the contents over his head, to join the sweat-runnels through the dirt on his bare chest.

'Na,' he said. 'Two or three ought to do her. But I figure, what they hell, we got 'em, why not use them?'

Blue eyes met black, and da Cruz nodded in complete agreement. One thing you learned in this business was that it rarely paid to get too subtle, and it never hurt to kick a little harder than you needed to, just in case.

'Let's slip it,' da Cruz said, once the gunner sergeant had had a chance to catch his breath; even if you hated explosives, it was always a pleasure to watch a good professional at work. The civilians attached to the detail were unloading the barrels and smaller jugs that would be poured into the large one to make the load of the flame- fougasse; liquid bitumen, tar, naphtha, sulphur, and the thick green vile-smelling oil rendered down from the greasy flesh of the avocat fish.

'One of my fav'rite occupations, slipping it in,' the sergeant said. The troopers were manhandling the huge jar over to the hole. 'Ah, friends?' They looked up. 'You know, there's an earth lip around the powder, so even if you dropped that it shouldn't hit hard enough to set off the detonators, but all the same I'd appreciate it if you put her down, you know, a might soft.'

* * *

'Amazing!'

Raj looked up from the lip of the bunker; a man was picking his way towards them across the tumbled earth of the trench line. A tall man, as tall as Raj, dressed in expensive cotton-drill khaki and a wrapped headdress; fifty, with sun and wind stamped into his flesh and salt-and-pepper beard. A pistol was strapped high up on his right hip, and Suzette had her arm tucked through the crook of his left. She was wearing elaborate Court riding-dress, complete with a wig of blond braids.

'Messer Falhasker,' Raj said in a neutral tone. Although it was dubious whether he deserved the title; self- made wealth rather than inherited, and mostly in trade at that. 'Good day, Messer. My thanks for your assistance.' Which had been valuable; the merchant had organized his riverboat crews to help with the construction, donated every scrap of sailcloth in his warehouses for sandbags and even had them sewn up by the hundreds of women textile workers who spun and wove the fine cotton he traded up from the Drangosh Delta.

The Delta was the heartland of the Colony, and the land from which Falhasker's mother had come; she was the daughter of a prominent merchant house of Al-Kebir. . a politically prominent family; the Colonists did not share the Civil Government's prejudice against traders.

'We're all in this together,' the merchant said; Suzette gave his arm a slight squeeze. He nodded to the scene