Conqueror

Actually, staying on here was either a pointless gesture or cowardice. He didn't think the High Colonel was a coward, but it was a pity he'd decided to stay if he was merely stupid. Raj wanted all the unimaginative Brigade officers possible active in their command structure.

Derison inclined his head. 'Your orders, sir?' he said.

'My orders are to convey you to East Residence,' Raj replied. Derison senior seemed taken aback, but a flash of interest marked his son's face. 'You'll be given honorable treatment and allowed to take your household and receive the revenues of your remaining estates.'

He'd also probably be shunted off to a manor in a remote province after Barholm had shown him around to put some burnish on the victory celebrations, and his sons and younger retainers politely inducted into the Civil Government's armies, but there were worse fates for the defeated. All Brigaderos nobles who surrendered were being allowed to keep their freedom and one-third of their lands. Those who fought faced death and their families were sold as slaves.

'In fact,' he went on, 'I'd be obliged if you'd do something for me at the same time.'

Derison bowed again. Raj reached into his jacket. 'Here's the key to Old Residence,' he said. 'Please present it to the Sovereign Mighty Lord with my complements, and say I decided to send it to him in the keeping of a man of honor.'

The Brigadero looked down at the key-which was usually, for ceremonial purposes, left in the keeping of the Priest-and fought down a grin.

'Colonel Staenbridge,' Raj went on formally.

'Mi heneral?'

'See that these nobles are conveyed to suitable quarters in the Old Palace, and guarded by our own men with all respect.'

'As you order, mi heneral.'

Courtesy to the defeated cost nothing, and it encouraged men to surrender.

And now to work, he thought.

* * *

'Have any of you ever heard the story of Marthinez the Lawman?' Raj asked.

He stood looking out of the Old Palace windows down to the docks. The gaslights were coming on along the main avenues, and the softer yellow glow of lamps from thousands of windows; both moons were up, the fist-sized disks half hidden by flying cloud. The picture was blurred by the rain that had started along with sundown, but he could just make out the long shark shapes of the Civil Government steam rams coming up the river, each towing a cargo ship against the current.

No complaints about the Navy this time, he thought. Have to look up their commander. The room was warm with underfloor hot-air pipes, and it smelled of wet uniforms and boots and tobacco.

Raj turned back to the men around the semicircular table. All the Companions, some of the other battalion commanders, and Cabot Clerett, who couldn't be safely excluded.

'Ah, Marthinez,' Ehwardo Poplanich said. Suzette nodded. Her features had the subtle refinement of sixteen generations of East Residence court nobility, able to show amusement with the slightest narrowing of her hazel- green eyes. The rest of the Companions looked blank.

'Marthinez,' Raj went on, pacing like a leashed cat beside the windows, 'was a Lawman of East Residence.' The capital had a standing police force, rather an unusual thing even in the Civil Government.

Someone laughed. 'No,' Raj went on, 'he was a very odd Lawman. Completely honest.'

'Damned unnatural,' Kaltin said.

'Possibly. That's what got him into trouble; he blew the whistle on one of his superiors who'd taken a hefty bribe to cover up a nasty murder by a. . very important person's son.'

Nods all around the table.

'Well, it would have been embarrassing to bring him to trial, so he was thrown in the Subiculum.'

That was the holding gaol for the worst sort of criminal. Usually the magistrates eventually got around to having the inmates given a short trial and then crucifixion or hanging or fried at the stake, depending on which crime had been the last before their capture. On the other hand, sometimes they just lost the name in the shuffle. A lifetime in the Subiculum was considerably worse than death, in most men's opinion. Sometimes the loss was deliberate.

'As you can imagine, he wasn't very popular there. Four soul-catchers'-kidnappers who stole free children for sale as slaves-'decided they'd beat him to death the very first night, since he'd put them in there.

'But,' Raj went on with a carnivore grin, 'Marthinez was, as I said, a fairly unusual sort of man. When the guards came in in the morning, the soul-catchers mostly had their heads facing backward or their ribs stove in. Marthinez had some bruises. So they took him away to the solitary hole for a week, that's the standard punishment for fighting in the cells. .

'And as they were dragging him off through the corridors, he shouted: You don't understand! I'm not trapped in here with you. You're all trapped in here with me!'

'He made,' Raj concluded, 'quite a swath through the inmates until Ehwardo's grandfather pardoned him and made him Chief Lawman.'

Raj halted before the central window, tapping one gauntleted fist into a palm. 'General Ingreid thinks he as me trapped.' He turned. 'Just like Lawman Marthinez, eh?'

Kaltin nodded. 'I don't like losing our mobility, though,' he said. Which was natural enough for a cavalry officer.

Raj went on: 'Kaltin, it's not enough to beat the Brigade. Believe me, you can have a good commander and fine troops and win battle after battle and still lose the war.'

hannibal, Center said. Raj acknowledged it silently. He was still a little vague on precisely when Hannibal had fought his war-it didn't seem like pre-Fall times at all-but Center's outline of the campaign had been very instructive. Cannae was a jewel of a battle, as decisive as you could want. Even more decisive than the two massacres Raj had inflicted on the Squadron last year-except that Hannibal's enemies hadn't given up afterwards.

'To win this war, we have to do two things. We have to get the civilian population here to actively support us.'

There were snorts; Raj acknowledged them. 'Yes, I know they've got no more fight than so many sheep, most of them-six centuries under the Brigade. But there are a lot of them.

'Second and most important, we've got to make the Brigade believe that they're defeated. To do that, we have to get as many of them as we can in one spot; all the principal nobles and their followers, at least. And then we have to kill so many of them that the remainder are convinced right down in their bones that fighting us and death are one and the same thing. The best way I can think of doing that is persuading them to make head-on attacks into fortified positions.'

Gerrin raised a brow. 'That assumes they will,' he said. 'I wouldn't. I'd entrench a large blocking force and send a mobile field army to attack our forward base in the Crown and mop up the areas we marched through.'

Raj snorted. 'Yes, but Gerrin-you're not a barb.' He jerked a thumb out the window. 'According to the latest intelligence, Ingreid has about a hundred thousand men rallying to his banner; that's most of the regular army of the Brigade, and all of their first-line reserves.

'First, remember that the Brigade are a minority here. They're going to be worried about native and peasant uprisings, the more so since we've occupied Old Residence-which doesn't mean anything of military importance by itself, but the people don't know that. They'll be impressed.

'Second, they're stripping their northern frontier. The Stalwarts and the Guard will be raiding, even in winter. Especially since the Ministry of Barbarians is subsidizing them to do exactly that.'

He went to the frame and ran his hand across the map of the Western Territories at the latitude of Carson Barracks, a little south of Old Residence.

'Most of the Brigaderos live north of here; it was the first area they overran, back when, and it's where most of them settled. The southern part of the peninsula was conquered more gradually, and the barbs are very thin on the ground there. So they'll be anxious about their homes and families in the north, looking over their shoulders,