‘Say it,’ Balasar said.
‘I think you’re wrong, sir.’
Balasar took Eustin’s elbow and angled off from the street under a covered stone archway. A girl stood there, a cart of green winter apples at her feet, looking out at the gray-white rain and the foul, brown brook at the edge of the street. Balasar scooped up two of the apples and tossed the girl a wide copper coin before finding a low bench and nodding for Eustin to sit.
He handed his captain one of the apples and said, ‘Make your case.’
Eustin shrugged, bit the apple, and chewed thoughtfully for a long moment. A glance at the apple seller, and then he spoke, his voice so low it was nearly inaudible over the clatter of the storm.
‘First off, we haven’t got so much gold we can afford to spend all of it here. Having the men hungry, well, that’s one thing. But five legions is a lot of men. And there’s no cause for this, not really. Any of the other men did the thing, you’d take it out of their skins. And they know it.’
‘I half think you’re sweet on the girl,’ Balasar said.
‘I’ve got a certain respect for her,’ Eustin said with a grin, but then sobered. ‘The thing is, you’re not treating him like he was long-term, if you see. The story for the High Council is that once we’ve settled the Khaiem out, our man Riaan’s to hook these andat to our yoke. Tell the Lord Convocate otherwise, and it would be someone else leading this. But if that’s true, Riaan’s going to be around for the rest of your life and mine, and a damned important man at that. All apologies, but you’re dancing to his tune like you’re hoping he’ll kiss you.’
Balasar tossed the apple from hand to hand and waited for the flush of anger to recede.
‘I need the man,’ Balasar said. ‘If I have to bow and scrape for a time—’
‘That’s just it, though. For a time. None of the men are used to seeing you drink piss and smile. They’re waiting to see you crack, to see you put him in his place. It keeps not happening, and they’re wondering why. Wondering how you can stand the idea of a life licking that little prick’s boot. Time will come they’ll understand you aren’t thinking of him in the long term.’
Balasar needed a moment to think that through. He bit the apple; it was tart and chalky and squeaked against his teeth. He tossed the rest of it out into the street where the rain took it rolling downhill, white flesh and green skin in the dark water.
‘Do you think Riaan suspects?’ Balasar asked at length.
Eustin snorted. ‘He can’t believe the tide would go out so long as he was on the beach. The waves all love him too much to leave. But the men, sir. They’ll figure you’re planning to kill him. And if they do, they may slip.’
Balasar nodded. Eustin was right. He was acting differently than he would have had Riaan been a problem with a future. It hadn’t been difficult to let the Councilmen in Acton blind themselves to the poet’s character. Visions of godlike power, of magic bent to the High Council’s will, were enough to let them overlook the dangers. The captains, the men who spoke with Riaan, would be more likely to understand why he wasn’t to be trusted. They might well see what Balasar had seen from the beginning, even before he had made the doomed journey into the desert: that the andat were a dangerous tool, best discarded the moment the need had passed.
But, and here was the trouble, not a moment before that. If the poet failed him, everything was lost. He weighed the risks for a long moment before Eustin spoke again.
‘Let me send the girl away, sir. I’ll give her enough silver to take herself out into the farmland for half a year, and tell her that if we see her in the city, I’ll have her head on a pike for true. I’ll send the poet a pig heart, say we cut it out of her. The man that runs the comfort house’ll know. I’ll tell the men it was your idea.’
‘It’s a gamble,’ Balasar said.
‘It’s all a gamble, sir,’ Eustin said, and then, ‘Besides. He really did earn it.’
To the east, lightning flashed, and before the thunder reached them, Balasar nodded his assent. Eustin took his leave, stalking out into the downpour to make this one more tiny adjustment to the monumental plan Balasar had devised and directed. At the end of the pathway, the apple-selling girl sensed some slackening, pulled a hood up over her fair hair, and darted out into the city. For a time, Balasar sat quietly, feeling the weariness in his flesh that came from tension without release. He let his gaze soften, the white walls of the city fading, losing their separate natures, becoming different shades of nothing, like the shadows of hills covered by snow.
He wondered what Little Ott would have made of all this: the campaign, the poet, the wheels within wheels that he’d put in motion. If it came together as he planned, Balasar would save the world from another war like the one that had toppled the Old Empire. If it failed, he might start one. And whatever happened, he had sacrificed Bes, Laran, Kellem, Little Ott. Men who had loved him were dead and would never return. Men alive now who trusted him might well die. His nation, everyone he’d known or cared for - his father growing bent with age, the girl he’d lost his heart to when he was a boy shaking the petals off spring cherry trees, Eustin, Coal - they might all be slaughtered if he once judged poorly. It was something he tried not to consider, afraid the weight of it might crush him. And yet in these still moments, it found him. The dread and the awe at what he had begun. And with it the certainty that he was right.
He imagined Bes standing in the street before him, wide face split in the knowing grin that he would never see again outside memory. Balasar lifted a hand in greeting, and the image bowed to him and faded. They would have understood. All the men whose blood he’d spilled for this would have understood. Or if they didn’t, they’d have done it all the same. It was what they meant by faith.
When at last he returned to the library, one of his other captains - a lanky man named Orem Cot - was pacing the length of the room, literally wringing his hands in agitation or excitement. Balasar closed the door behind him with a thump as the captain bowed.
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘There’s a man come wanting to speak with you. I thought I’d best bring him to you myself.’
‘What’s his business?’ Balasar asked.
‘Mercenary captain, sir. Brought his men down from Annaster.’
‘I don’t need more forces.’
‘You’ll want to talk with this one all the same, sir. His company? They’re from the Khaiem. Says they got turned out by the Khai Machi and they’ve been traveling ever since.’
‘He’s been in the winter cities?’
‘For years, sir.’
‘You were right to bring him. Show the man in,’ Balasar said, then stopped the captain as he headed to the door. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Captain Ajutani, sir. Sinja Ajutani.’
It had become clear to Sinja shortly after his arrival in Aren that he had misjudged the situation.
The company, such as it was, had passed through the mountains that divided the Westlands from the lands that, while not directly controlled, had associated themselves with Machi and Pathai weeks before. The men were young and excited to be on the march, so Sinja had pushed them. By the time they’d reached Annaster, they were tired enough to complain, but there was still a light in their eyes. They’d escaped the smothering, peaceful blankets of the Khaiem; they were in the realm where violence was met with violence, and not by the uncanny powers of the poets and their andat. They had come to the place where they could prove themselves on the bodies of their enemies.
Besides Sinja, only a dozen or so of the higher ranks had ever been in battle. For the rest, this was like walking into a children’s tale. Sinja hadn’t tried to explain. Perhaps they’d be able to find glory in the soul-crushing boredom of a siege; perhaps they’d face their first battles and discover that they loved violence. More likely, he’d be sending half of them home to their mothers by midsummer, and that would have been fine. He was here as much to stretch his legs as to keep his master and friend the Khai
Machi out of trouble with the Dai-kvo.
He hadn’t expected to walk into the largest massing of military force in memory.
Galt was in the southern wards, and it was there in force. All through the Westlands, Wardens had forgotten their squabbles. Every gaze was cast south. The common wisdom was that Galt had finally decided to end its generations-long games of raid and abandon. It had come to take control of the whole of the Westlands from the southern coast up to Eddensea. There were even those who wondered whether it was going to be a good season for Eddensea.
Sinja had done what he did best - listened. The stories he heard were, of course, overblown. Men and women throughout the Westlands were in different stages of panic. Someone had seen a thousand ships off the coast. There had been agreements signed with Aren, but all the other Wardens and all their children were to be slaughtered to assure that no one would have claim to rule once the Galts had come through. There were even a few optimists who thought that Balasar Gice - the general at the head of this largest of all gathered armies - wasn’t looking to the Westlands, but gathering his forces to take control of Galt itself. He could overthrow the High Council and install himself as autocrat.
What it all came to was this: Any mercenary company working for anyone besides Galt was likely to be on the losing side of the fight. The collected Wardens were putting out calls for free companies and garrison forces, preparing themselves as best they could. The fees that Sinja was offered would have been handsome for a band of veterans and siege captains, much less for a few hundred foreign sell-swords one step up from thugs. And so Sinja had considered the money, considered the offers and the stories and his own best instincts, then quietly packed up his men and headed south to Aren to sell their services at a fourth of the price, but to the winners.
The men had grumbled. Wide, square Westland coins had been dancing in their minds. Morale had started to fail. So Sinja had paused in the Ward of Castin, made contact with a free company who’d taken contract there, and challenged their veterans to a day of games. Once Sinja’s men had understood and accepted his point, they bound their ribs and continued to the south. No one had questioned his judgment again.
Aren was one of the wards farthest to the south. Low hills covered with rich green grasses, towns of stone buildings with thatched roofs, elk and deer so wise to the ways of men that the bowmen he sent ahead to forage never caught one of them. Wherever they went, Sinja saw the signs of an army having passed - ruined crops, abandoned campsites with the ashes of a half hundred fires churned into the mud. But even with this, he had been shocked when they topped one of the many hills and caught first sight of the city of Aren.
No city under siege had ever seen so many troops at its wall. Tents and low pavilions were laid out around it on all sides, dark oiled cloth shining in row after row after row. The smoke of cook fires left a low haze through the valley that even the rain could not wholly dispel, the strange bulbous steam wagons the Galts used to move supplies and leave their men unburdened seemed as numerous as horses in the fields, and the squirming, streaming activity of men moving through each of the opened gates made the city seem like a dead sparrow overrun by ants.
His men set camp at a polite distance from the existing companies while Sinja dared the city itself. He entered the gates at midday. It wasn’t more than three hands later he was being escorted through the halls of the Warden’s palace to the library and the general himself. He’d surrendered his blades and the garrote he kept at his waist before being permitted to speak with the great man. Either Balasar Gice felt this unprecedented mass of men was too little for whatever task lay ahead of him and was grabbing at every spare sword and dagger in the world, or else Sinja was, for reasons that passed imagining, of particular interest to him.
Either way, Sinja disliked it.
Balasar Gice turned out to be a smallish man, mouse-brown hair running to white at the temples. He wore the gray tunic of command that Sinja had seen before when he’d been in the field as a young man fighting against the Galts or else with them. He might have been anyone, to look at him. A farmer or a merchant seaman or a seafront customs agent.
‘Bad weather for traveling,’ the general said, amiably, as if they were simply two men who’d met at a wayhouse. He spoke the Khaiate tongue clearly, his accent flavoring the words rather than obscuring them.
‘It’s always wet in the South this time of year,’ Sinja agreed in Galtic. ‘Not always so cold, but that’s why the gods made wool. That or as a joke against sheep.’
The general smiled, either at the words or the language they were in, Sinja wasn’t certain. Sinja kept his expression pleasant and empty. They both knew he was here to sell the use of his men, but only the general knew why the meeting was here and not with some low captain. Sinja opted to wait and see what came of it. Balasar Gice seemed to read his intention; he nodded and walked to a side table, where he poured them both clear wine from a cut-glass carafe. No, not wine. Water.
‘I hear the Khai Machi turned you out,’ the general said in Galtic as he passed a cup to Sinja. That wasn’t true. Sinja had told the captain that they were out from Machi, but perhaps there had been some misunderstanding. Sinja shrugged. It was too early in the game to correct anyone’s misconceptions.
‘It’s his right,’ he said. ‘Some of the men were causing trouble. Too long in a quiet place. I’m sure you understand.’
Balasar chuckled. It was a warm sound, and Sinja found himself liking the man. Balasar nodded to a couch beside the brazier. Sinja made a small bow and sat, the general leaning casually against the table.
‘You left on good terms?’
‘We didn’t turn back and burn the city,’ Sinja said, ‘if that’s what you mean.’
‘Do you owe the Khai Machi loyalty? Or are you a free company?’
The truth was that any silver he took would find its way back to Otah Machi’s coffers. The company was no more free than the Galtic armies outside the city. And yet there was something in the general’s voice when he asked the question, something in his eyes.
‘We’re mercenaries. We follow whoever pays us,’ Sinja said.
‘And if someone should offer to pay you more? No offense, but the one thing you can say of loyalty for hire is that it’s for hire.’
‘We’ll finish out a contract,’ Sinja said. ‘I’ve been through enough to know what happens to a company with a reputation for switching sides mid-battle. But I won’t lie, the boys I have are green, most of them. They haven’t seen many campaigns.’
It was a softening of these poor bastards hardly know which end’s the sharp one but the meaning was much the same. The general waved the concern aside, which was fascinating. Balasar Gice wasn’t interested in their field prowess. Which meant he either wanted them to lead the charges and soak up a few enemy spears and arrows - hardly a role that asked the general’s presence at the negotiation - or there was something more, something that Sinja was still missing.
‘How many of them speak Galt?’
‘A third,’ Sinja said, inventing the number on the spot.
‘I may have use for them. How loyal are they to you?’
‘How loyal do they need to be?’
The general smiled. There was a touch of sorrow in his eyes and a long, thoughtful pause. Sinja felt a decision being made, though he couldn’t say what the issue was.
‘Enough to go against their own kind. Not in the field, but I’ll want them as translators and agents. And whatever you can tell me of the winter cities. I’ll want that as well.’
Sinja smiled knowingly to cover his racing mind. Gice wasn’t taking his army North. He was going east, into the cities of the Khaiem, with something close to every ablebodied man in Galt behind him. Sinja chuckled to hide a rush of fear.
‘They’ll follow you any place you care to go, so long as they’re on the winning side,’ Sinja said. ‘Are you sure that’s going to be you?’
‘Yes,’ the general said, and the bare confidenc
e in his voice was more persuasive than any reasoned argument he might have given. If the man had been trying to convince himself, he would have had a speech ready - why this insanity would work, how the army could overpower the andat, something. But Balasar was certain. The general sipped his water, waiting the space of five long breaths together. Then he spoke again. ‘You’re thinking something?’
‘You’re not stupid,’ Sinja said. ‘So you’re either barking mad, or you know something I don’t. No one can take on the Khaiem.’
‘You mean no one can face the andat.’
‘Yes,’ Sinja agreed. ‘That’s what I mean.’
‘I can.’
‘Forgive me if I keep my doubts about me,’ Sinja said.
The general nodded, considered Sinja for a long moment, then gestured toward the table. Sinja put down his bowl and stepped over as the general unrolled a long cloth scroll with a map of the cities of the Khaiem on it. Sinja stepped back from it as if there were an asp on it.
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