Conqueror

the VIP entrance within the royal enclosure. They made their own way out the main doors, as the Guards countermarched back to the walls and settled into position again. Footsteps echoed, with most of the sound- muffling human bodies out of the barn-like structure. Banners hung limp above their heads in the still, musky air. The bronze clamps that held ancient energy-weapons to the walls were green with verdigris; the lasers themselves were as bright as the day reverent hands had set them there, down to the stamped 591st Provisional Brigade on the stocks.

'What do you know, Howyrd,' Ingreid Manfrond said, lowering his voice slightly as they walked out past another line of guards onto the portico. 'His Maybeness actually made a decision without countermanding it.'

'Wrong, Ingreid,' Howyrd Carstens replied.

His friend wore the fringed jacket and tweed trousers of an off-duty noble, the leather strips ending in gold beads; there were gold plaques on his sword-belt, rubies on the elaborate basket guard around the hilt, and his spurs were platinum. The sword-hilt and the hand that rested on it had both seen real use. Carstens was in the green-grey-black uniform of the General's Dragoons, with Colonel's insignia.

'He must've settled something with the grisuh last night,' the officer said. 'This was to confirm it publicly. And he chickened out; probably afraid we'd hack him to pieces on the Seat.' A rare occurrence but not entirely unknown in Brigade history.

They paused and lit their pipes, two gentlemen with gray in their beards and long clubbed hair talking idly in the shade of the portico on a hot summers day, beneath one of the three-story columns hewn in the shape of a Federation assault landing boat. Ushers came and returned their revolvers: nobody but the Life Guards carried firearms inside the Hall.

The parade square ahead of them was five hundred meters on a side; the black bulk of the Palace behind them, the four-square Cathedron of the Spirit of Man of This Earth to their left, with its facade of glass mosaic, and the Iron House of War to the right. Dead ahead to the north was a gap, where the road ran down off the artificial mound into the main part of the city. Canals were as numerous as roads, and the houses were squat two-story structures with few exterior windows but a good deal of carving and terracotta-work painted in bright colors. Carson Barracks was the only major town in the Western Territories built wholly since the Brigade arrived down from the Base Area two centuries after the Fall.

The low-sunk defenses were a lip in the earth from here; they'd been modernized a century or so ago. Carson Barracks didn't really need walls. It stood at the center of several thousand square kilometers of marsh and bog, hardly a hectare of it capable of bearing a man's weight and much of it quicksand. Melancholy wastes of swamp were visible from where they stood, with only the arrow-straight causeway and canal that led north to the railhead on solid ground near the Padan river to vary the landscape. Waving reddish-green native reeds, the green-green Terran variety, an occasional glint of water through the thick ground-haze. The air stank of vegetable decay and the sewage that drained into the swamp and moved, very slowly, downslope toward the river.

Not many Brigade members lived in Carson Barracks by choice, although duty brought many there for a time. Most of the permanent population were slaves, or administrators drawn from the old native upper classes.

'It's probably a good thing fuckin' Forker waffled again,' Ingreid went on. 'The only thing he could make up his mind on would be to sell us out to the civvies.'

'Yeah. What we ought to be doing is mobilizing. You remember my cousin Henrik?'

Ingreid rubbed his bearded chin. Hairs caught in the thick layer of horny callus that ringed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand where it controlled his sword.

'Bit younger than you? Had a captaincy in the regulars, then killed. . shit, what's-his-name-'

'Danni Wimbler's son Erik.'

'— over a woman, had to make tracks. Good man, as I remember.' Ingreid snapped his fingers. 'I do remember. He's the one cut the head off that Stalwart chief at, oh, up near Monnerei.'

'Yeah; good man, but no luck. The grisuh killed him on Stern Isle.'

'Spirit of Man of This Earth download his core,' the other man said.

Howyrd touched a lump of blessed agate he wore around his neck. 'Yeah. Thing is, one of his men lived, knocked out by a shell. Got shipped out on a slaver after the grisuh caught him, then pirates jumped the ship and sold crew and cargo in Tortug. This guy, Eddi, he killed a guard and stole a sailboat, turned up half-dead. . anyway, he told me about the fighting. More like what a sicklefoot pack does to a herd of sheep. The Squadron wasn't any accident. Ingreid, we ought to be mobilizing. Right now.'

The other noble shook his head. 'Damned if I thought we'd ever be running scared of the civvies,' he mused.

'More like running scared of this Whitehall.'

'Think he's really got the Outer Dark workin' for him?'

They spat and made a gesture with their left hands. 'Ni, he's just one grenade-on- toast of a fighting man,' Howyrd said. 'They say when he had some Skinners fighting with him, he hung one for killing a civvie trooper, then rode into their camp alone-and they made him a blood-brother or something.'

Ingreid winced. 'I fought the Skinners once. In maybe a hundred years, I'll want to do that again.' He shook his head. 'Tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to hire and outfit another regiment of guards, and start buying powder and lead, and check that all my tenants-in-chief and freeholder-vassals have their rifles ready and their swords sharp. And I'll tell everyone I know to do the same, down to the petty-squires and fifty-hectare men. And if Forker doesn't like it, Forker can go suck a dead dog's farts. He's not going to have me drowned in my bath like he did Charlotte Welf.'

Carstens sighed and knocked the dottle out of his pipe against his heel; the spur jingled sweetly as he did. 'Watch out you don't get a native uprising,' he cautioned. His friend was wealthy even by the upper nobility's standard, but he would have to squeeze his serfs fairly hard to support an extra twelve hundred men and their dogs and gear.

'Then we get practice whipping peon butt,' Ingreid snorted. 'Heretic bastards deserve it, anyway. They're all civvie-lovers, from the ploughboys to the so-called gentry-whatever they say to your face. He's no better,' he went on, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the Palace. 'Books, librarians, it's enough to make a real man puke. Outer Dark, he's got to look at some book before he knows what hole to put it in. If he's got anything to put.'

'Yeah, and I've got to waste my time and my regiment's back on the border,' Howyrd said.

'They're not coming by land?'

'Ni. Nothing but rocks up there, or swamps worsn' this.'

As if to counterpoint his words, a distant honking roar came out of the reedbeds. A hadrosauroid herd by the sound; the big grazers had been preserved around Carson Barracks for hunting and as emergency food supplies. Hadrosauroids ranged up to four or five tons each, and they flourished on the reeds. Howyrd flipped a finger at an entirely different sort of sauroid tooth hanging on his amulet chain, a curved cutting dagger serrated on both sides and long as a woman's hand.

'Only there's still a lot of big meat-eaters around there, so you have to build palisaded camps. Not enough cleared land or farmers for major campaigning; most of what the civvies've got there is tribal stuff, mercs. Naw, when they come, they'll come by sea.'

Grooms brought up their dogs, big glossy mastiffs standing chest-high to a tall man at the shoulder. A squad of Carsten's dragoon Regulars rode up as escorts for their colonel, armed with rifle, broadsword and revolver; they had the worn look of a weapon that fits a man's hand easily when he reaches. Ingreid's guards were in the buff and gray of his household regiment; half the hundred-man detachment were dragoons, half heavy cavalry on Newfoundlands, with steel back-and-breasts, helmets, arm-guards and thigh-tassets. They carried twelve-foot lances as well as the usual swords and firearms, and the long slender ashwood poles stood like a steel-tipped thicket above the square.

'Off to see Marie?' Howyrd said.

Ingreid gathered his reins. 'No such luck. Marie Welf tells me that I'm old enough to be her father-my sons are older than her-and I should go looking for a nice widow of forty with tits like pillows if I want to marry again.'

They exchanged a look. Whoever married Marie Welf would be technically an Amalson, and eligible for the Brigades elective monarchy. Those elections were settled by weight of shot as often as numbers of votes, but that