“Aye, and you’ve also got fine wines for us all, no doubt,” cracks a soldier with a goatee.
Dorrin rests his hand on the dark staff. “I don’t think he would be too happy if he didn’t get what he ordered.”
“Sure, and you’ve traveled this road from far Diev just to deliver a small cart?”
The staff is in Dorrin’s hands, and then at the guard’s throat, almost like black lightning. “My name is Dorrin. I am Brede’s smith, and you will let us pass. If you wish, you may escort us to him.”
“Dorrin… oh… shit…” mumbles the man in the rear.
“This here’s the Black smith…” The front guard swallows. “Ah… Fredo will escort you, master smith.”
“Thanks for nothing…”
Dorrin leaves the staff ready until the cart is rolling toward Kleth.
“The red-headed cat told Ralth you might be a-coming, but he never believed her,” Fredo chatters. “But I told him that mighty as the great Brede is, he can’t be doing it all without some help… and terrible as Kadara of the blades is, she’s not enough, either…”
Liedral rolls her eyes and looks at Dorrin. “They say that the High Wizard of all of the Whites is leading the hordes.‘Must want to trample us poor folks pretty bad, but I don’t see as why. After all, Spidlar’s a pretty thin country, leastwise compared to Certis or Gallos, and all we have are animals and traders. Course sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which”-Fredo laughs, and continues-“but our traders, leastwise, leave us be and mostly don’t raise levies or try to fatten their purses through taxes…”
More than half the houses in Kleth are deserted, some obviously so, with shutters fastened tight and planks covering unshuttered windows. Others are just empty, and a few have gaping doors and emptied interiors.
On the main road, a single store is open, more of a food stall than a market, and around it gather a handful of levies and blue-liveried cavalry. A handful look at the cart, watching as Dorrin and Liedral pass. After another three kays, they reach the houses on the southern side of Kleth that serve as barracks and headquarters.
“There be the headquarters place, where all the squad and section leaders meet.” Fredo gestures toward a larger house, with a split-slate roof and moss-tinged brick walls.
The smell of the stables wafts over them from the building behind the headquarters house, and Dorrin coughs. Idly, he wonders what that much manure would do for his herb gardens in the clayey soil of Diev. Liedral halts the cart in front of the doorway with a blue-coated sentry. After dismounting, Dorrin hands Meriwhen’s reins to the trader and steps up to the blue-coated sentry. “My name is Dorrin. If you would convey to Brede that-”
“I’ll be telling him immediately, master Dorrin. If you would just wait here.”
Fredo shakes his head. “If Ralth could see this… the headquarters guards treating the smith like a Guildmaster or a Councillor…”
“He is a Guildmaster,” Liedral whispers. “Everyone in Diev bows to him, and he hates it.”
“He hates it? A Guildmaster who dislikes respect, but o’course it wouldn’t be respect, would it, him being so young? It’d be fear, and no man with any self-respect wants to be feared, less he’s a bully, and your smith seems like a decent enough sort.”
“He’s more than decent. This sort of work is hard on him.” She stops as Dorrin returns and takes the mare’s reins, absently patting her on the neck.
A squad leader Dorrin has not met follows the sentry out, and Brede follows the squad leader. “Dorrin!”
“Brede. I have some of what I promised.” Dorrin gestures to the cart.
“Cirras will show you to the armory, where you can unload. Then he’ll help you stable your horses, and we’ll talk.”
“Kadara?” asks Liedral.
“She’s on patrol.” Brede looks back to the building. “I’ll see you in just a bit.”
“That would be fine.” Dorrin senses the many demands on Brede’s time.
“If you would follow me,” begins Cirras.
The armory is a barn behind the headquarters. Dorrin studies the forge and the slack tanks, including one containing an oily solution. The anvil has a larger horn than his and a wider variety of stakes for the hardie hole.
In addition to the armorer, there appear to be two strikers, and several boys. One is bringing in charcoal, another handling the bellows, and another one powdering some sort of ashes, presumably for a flux paste. The armorer sets aside the hammer and lifts the iron that will be a helmet off the stake form, placing it on the fire bricks, before he steps to the doorway.
“There are some weapons that go in the locked room,” Cirras tells the lanky armorer. “Made by master Dorrin for Force Leader Brede.”
Dorrin dismounts, but does not move to enter the armory.
The armorer nods to Cirras and steps around him. “Master Dorrin, I’m Welka, the Guard armorer here.”
“I’m glad to meet you.”
“I wanted to meet you… especially after I saw the stocks of those… devices…”
Dorrin looks down for a moment, then back up. “I’m not… not totally pleased about making weapons, you know?”
The armorer smiles wryly. “I can sense that. It’s good for us that you’re not. That shield you made Brede? What was it?”
“Black iron.”
“I thought as much. Too bad. That’s not something that can be taught, is it?”
“Not unless you can handle order.”
As they talk, Cirras and two armorer’s aides unload the eight canvas-wrapped packages and carry them through the iron- bound door into a back room whose mismatched timbers reflect hasty construction.
“Well… you do good work, master Dorrin. Right now, I wish you could handle edged weapons, but I’ve only met a couple of order smiths, and they couldn’t either. You seem somewhat… more… adaptable…”
“Much more adaptability may be my undoing,” Dorrin blurts.
“I won’t ask what’s in the canvas.”
“It’s probably better that way.” Dorrin looks at Liedral and the empty cart. “I guess.”
“Why are you doing this?” asks Welka. “If I might presume?”
“I owe Brede and Kadara… and I owe Spidlar for accepting me, and I feel bound to oppose chaos.”
“You take your debts seriously.”
“Very seriously,” adds Liedral quietly.
Welka nods to Dorrin. “Good to meet you, master Dorrin.” He steps back toward the forge and the half-turned helmet.
“Darkness…” mumbles Fredo. “Special he is, your master Dorrin, when the master armorer pays his respects.”
“The stable is this way,” suggests Cirras.
After unsaddling Meriwhen and unharnessing the cart horse, and sending Fredo back to his duties, the three walk across the packed clay of the yard to the building where they had met Brede. Cirras takes them past the sentry, and into a small anteroom with chairs.
“I’ll tell Force Leader Brede you’re here.”
After the young officer leaves, Liedral grins at Dorrin from her armless wooden chair. “You. are very important, master smith Dorrin.”
“I’m not that much of a master smith, just one who can twist Ms soul farther than most.” The chair creaks as Dorrin shifts his weight and looks toward the closed door.
“You really dislike building weapons, don’t you?”
“Yes. But I don’t see any alternatives now. Force is all that seems to hold chaos at bay. I don’t like that.”
Outside, the hoofs of another squad of cavalry echo against the closed window, as the troopers head out toward the field.
“Force or violence?” asks Liedral.
Dorrin smiles. “You’re right. Force doesn’t seem to be enough. It’s the violence I don’t like.”
“The world is filled with violence.”
“Recluce isn’t.”
“Do you think they sent you away to find that out?”
“I
t could be,” Dorrin says slowly, “but I think it was more because of my fixation on building machines.”
The door opens with a low creak, and Brede stands there. “I’m sorry it took so long.” He brushes the blond hair off his forehead and gestures toward the room behind him. It contains little more than a round table, a half dozen chairs, and an open cabinet with shelves stacked with various maps.
Brede waits until Dorrin and Liedral seat themselves. “What did you create this time?”
“A variation on the cheese cutters. These are designed to use on the river. I did eight sets, but the way the spring arrived, I decided I didn’t have time for any more.”
“The runoff is already dropping to normal flow.” Brede rubs his forehead. Finally, he looks at Dorrin. “I need your help.”
“How?”
“I want you to go with Kadara and set up your devices. I’m trying to organize things here.”
“Things are that bad?” interrupts Liedral.
“Yes. The Council has told me to defend Kleth at all costs There are no alternatives.”
“That’s so they can buy their way out if you can’t stop the Whites,” Liedral says. “Dorrin’s not exactly a warrior.”
“I know. Kadara can take care of that-”
“But you want me to see the Whites, and you think that might be able to figure out something else if I see them in action. Is that it?”
“Yes.” Brede’s eyes meet Dorrin’s.
Dorrin looks at the scratched wood of the table, then at Brede. “AH right. I don’t see that I can do less, but I need to gel back to the engine.”
“I’m just asking you to set them up the first time.”
“I understand.” What Dorrin also understands is that he is on the way to being at least a part-time combat engineer, an occupation not exactly suited to someone who tends to get blinding and incapacitating headaches in the commission of violence.
CXXXVIII
DORRIN’S BOOTS SKID as he steps onto the slippery ice in the shade of a boulder. “Darkness…” He catches himself on the rock, thankful for his gloves. A long scratch in the leather hints at what could have happened to his hand. To his left the river swirls, strongly, but without the turbulence of eight-days earlier, the major runoff time past.
Upstream, Dorrin knows, float the flatboats and barges of the Certan and Kyphran levies. The Gallosians will be plodding northward along the road.
Dorrin calculates, then waves to the figures across the narrow section of the river. Here the river is as narrow as it gets, a little more than three rods of smooth-flowing water.
“Is this about right?” asks Kadara. An archer stands by her elbow.
“If we put the first set up there”-Dorrin points upriver to a larger boulder-“and these here, and the third set down there… there’s a chance, at least. I’ll set them at different heights.”
The archer lifts her bow and releases the shaft that carries the light line across the river.
Dorrin carefully scrambles upriver to the boulder he pointed out. There he takes the midweight sledge from the makeshift belt sheath and the first of the black-iron stocks from his pack.
In time, the first stock stands firm, invisible black wires running a cubit or so above the water to another stock on the eastern side of the river.
They repeat the process twice more before a rider trots up. “The barges are coming, squad leader.”
“Take cover!” Kadara snaps. She gestures to the depression behind a stump. Dorrin eases into the space.
“Are you sure you want to stay?” she asks.
“No. But unless I get a better idea of how you fight, how can I design things?” He wishes he were not there. He is not a fighter, not a hero, and not even the staff behind him offers much comfort. His head begins to ache.
The handful of archers hide in their concealed pits, and the horse troopers ride downstream.
“More archers would help…” he whispers to Kadara. “Do you know how long- Never mind, we just don’t have that many.”
Dorrin understands. After two years, Vaos is barely a striker.
Then again, Vaos also loves horses.
The dark water, the empty dark water, flows between the apparently deserted banks of the river. Because the area is mainly used for grazing, few trees grace the banks. Dorrin and Kadara wait.
The river flows.
Around the gentle curve plows a dark-hulled barge, followed by two others. On the first barge, bearing the green banners of Certis, are archers, and perhaps a score of foot levies. The second barge carries archers and levies under a gold banner, presumably of Kyphros, while the third bears both banners and levies. There are no white banners.
Holding his breath, Dorrin waits as the lead barge nears the upstream wires, wires that should cut like knives.
Cut they do, as the first three archers are swept, bloody and screaming, into the dark water, but their weight momentarily drags the low wires down, where they catch on the barge’s hull. With the screaming, the Spidlarian archers rise from their pits and loose a volley at the barge. Archers from the second barge lift their bows.
Dorrin winces, ducking behind the stump, realizing that nothing is going quite as planned. Kadara releases one arrow, then another. Bodies fall from the lead barge, almost in slow, slow motion, as the barge struggles against the order-reinforced wires.
Sensing the fraying of the wire beyond the power of order to hold, Dorrin shouts, “Down!”
Kadara remains upright, nocking yet another arrow and aim-ing toward the barges. Beside her, Vorban also releases his arrows.
Dorrin stands, and lunges, knocking the redhead to the muddy ground.
“Bastard! You-”
“Stay down!” snaps the smith, as he rolls and yanks Vorban’s feet from beneath him. “Stay down!” The wiry man scrambles away from Dorrin.
Thwannnnngggg…
Like the invisible knives they are, the three wires part nearly simultaneously, and like giant iron whips, slice through water and back toward the second barge, which has nearly caught up to the slowed first barge. The black iron knives lash four archers into the water, then continue in their backlash.
“Aeeeeüü…”
As the recoil from the black iron wire slices Vorban into two asymmetrical sections, flames burn through Dorrin’s skull, and he sinks to the ground, arrows of pain slamming through his eyes. He shudders as silently as possible as his mind and skull are slashed by the unseen white whip.
When he finally straightens, Kadara has fired several more arrows into the barges. Levies dive from the first barge as it passes under the higher second set of wires, and three standing officers are sliced apart.
The rudderman of the third barge, seeing the disaster ahead, has managed to ground his vessel on the eastern side of the river, upriver and across the water from the bulk of Kadara’s squad.
The archers on the second barge flatten themselves on the deck, as do some of the levies. The second wires slice through those who do not. Another handful of arrows rains on those lying prostrate.
The first barge runs under the last wires, which clear the decks and then catch on the tiller post raised by the rudderman.
“Down!” snaps Dorrin, although he must force the words past the heavy hammering within his brain.
“Down! Now!” screams Kadara as she flattens herself.
The arrows from the Spidlarians cease as the third wires part explosively, gutting first the rudderman who caught them with the braced and raised tillerpost, and sweeping back across the second barge.
The tillerman on the second barge ducks, but some of the incautious levies who thought the first wires were the only wires are slashed by the recoiling wire whip.
After the wires pass, the tillerman on the second barge manages to swing the heavy craft shoreward, this time toward the western shore, where it grinds to a halt, less than a handful of rods from Kadara’s squad.
Of the nearly two score men originally upon
the barge, less than ten stagger shoreward. None make it more than a dozen steps from the barge.
The empty first barge wanders downstream, grinding over sand and gravel, but not quite catching.
The levies from the third barge, however, remain untouched, and form up on the far side of the river, using the barge as partial cover.
Dorrin looks at the bodies, and parts of bodies, bobbing in the water. He swallows hard, and puts his fingers across his forehead, trying to rub the pain away.
“Let’s go!” Kadara stoops to recover Vorban’s sword, belt, and purse, then continues downstream, exhorting her squad They carry four bodies, including Vorban’s, downstream and out to the dusty trail flanking the river. The main stone-paved highway runs a kay east of the river.
Dorrin follows, trying to stand up against the pain behind his eyes. Kadara has eight troopers from the dozen who had waited He clears his throat and spits the bile onto the riverbank.
“No way to get to them and really not much in the way of arrows left,” Kadara explains. “We’ll regroup farther downstream.”
A trooper looks wide-eyed at Dorrin, then back at the carnage in and out of the water. He looks at the black staff and the heavy sledge and slowly shakes his head.
Dorrin wishes he could shake his head, but with the pain of the trip-hammers behind his eyes, he is having trouble walking, let alone thinking. As they walk northward, Dorrin can hear hoofbeats as horses are brought to them.
With the mounts comes Brede. He looks down at Dorrin and the brownish specks on his boots.
Dorrin mounts Meriwhen. “The river slicers worked this time. They probably won’t again.”
“Why not?”
“All they have to do is put an iron post out front to catch the wires, and have everyone lie flat. A few will still get killed, but nothing like this.” Dorrin spits out the residue in his mouth onto the road.
Brede raises his eyebrows and turns to Kadara.
“We wiped out the first two. The third grounded on the far shore and saved the levies. We didn’t have any more arrows and were outnumbered about five or six to one. Where they” grounded we couldn’t get to them. We lost four-Vorban was one of them-to Dorrin’s gadget when the wires snapped. He warned us, but Vorban didn’t listen.“
Magic Engineer Page 48
