by Chris Bunch
We must speak more of my previous offer as soon as possible.
I will make the arrangements.
• • •
“Interesting’,” Yonge observed. “Thieves falling out, and all that sort of thing, isn’t it?”
There were five besides myself in the tent, Linerges, Yonge, Kutulu, Cymea, and Sinait. Both wizards had cast separate Squares of Silence, to prevent anyone from overhearing.
“Hardly surprising,” Sinait said. “Both Barthou and Scopas desperately want to save power for themselves and will align themselves with anyone to keep it.”
“It looks to me,” Linerges said, “they’ve got three choices: to try to hang on to what they’ve got by themselves, which doesn’t look possible from here; to link up with Tenedos, which they’d consider, except I don’t think he’d give them anything except a sacrificial knife if he wins; or get in bed with you, Damastes.”
“They made the offer before,” Sinait mused. “What makes them think he’d be interested in taking it this time?”
“Pure desperation,” Yonge said flatly.
“I’ll agree with that,” Linerges said.
I glanced around. Cymea nodded, as did Sinait. Kutulu considered carefully for a time.
“The simplest explanation that Yonge offers is the most likely, in my opinion,” he said.
“So we’re agreed,” I said. “What next?”
“I don’t think,” Yonge said, “we can ignore Nicias. It’s good for victors to show themselves to the people they’re going to rule … sorry, Damastes, that they’re fighting for, since you insist we’re all in this madness for the sheer nobility of the deed.
“I did my share of parades and things after I killed Achim Baber Fergana and took Sayana. But are things different here? Are we endangering ourselves by taking part in this banners and bullshit they want?”
“The review?” Linerges thought. “I can’t see how. I’ll arrange the army so that we can fight back, if we’re attacked in the city. We’ll keep our weapons ready at hand, and since we haven’t been able to afford dress uniforms, wear what we fight in. The citizens will never notice and think it’s a thrill they’re seeing real warriors equipped for the field.
“We can pull back if there’s any sign of danger early; then, if we’re hit in the center of the city, make for one of the parks and fight from there. Once we’re in that camp on the far side of the city, we’re pretty invulnerable.”
“What about magic?” I asked.
“All I’ve been able to sense,” Sinait said, “is the most minor of spells. They don’t seem to have any great magicians like we do, or Tenedos does. Have you found any signs, Cymea?”
“None,” she said. “And we’ve quizzed our brothers and sisters who’ve come to this camp.”
“I have a few agents in the city,” Kutulu said. “And I’ve read the Tovieti reports. Nothing of significance appears to be happening.”
“So it then becomes their play,” I said. “We proceed as if that note had never been written, and see what happens next?”
“That,” Linerges said, “appears to be the most obvious plan.”
“Why don’t I like it at all?” I asked.
“Nor do I,” Yonge said. “But there appears no other choice.”
• • •
The night before the review, an idea came.
“Cymea,” I began, “I would like you to do something.”
“Such as? I’m being suspicious,” she said, “because you’ve got that tentative note in your voice.”
“It’s very simple,” I said. “You’re in touch with the Tovieti in the city. I’d like to get a message to them. Please let Jakuns, Himchai, and Jabish know of it as well.
“When the army marches through, ask your brothers and sisters not to cheer too loudly for us, especially not anyone they recognize as one of them.”
“Why not?”
“Right now, nobody knows who the Tovieti are in Nicias, correct?”
“I’d guess not,” she said. “Or the warders would’ve arrested or killed them.”
“Let’s not have the brethren make themselves obvious, then. We’re just having a parade, and the war’s a long ways from being over. We might need them, need them while they’re still underground.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re becoming very devious, my love.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “Everyone else is already sneaky, and I’m just trying to keep up.”
“You show great promise at being a Tovieti,” she said. “Would you like a silk cord for your day of birth?”
I was proud of myself, and what Cymea had given me, that I was able to chuckle a little instead of losing my temper.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think you’ve had a good idea. I’ll tell Jakuns, and if he and the others agree, we’ll arrange for our brothers to just stand and stare when we go traipsing past.”
“They don’t have to go to that extreme,” I complained. “A friendly wave or two is quite acceptable.”
• • •
A delegation of Nicias’s tailors came, and Scopas was with them, dressed as they were, except his garments were far finer than any weaver could ever afford. He asked what I now thought of his offer.
“Exactly what form does it now take?” I inquired. “We want you, as before, to become supreme commander of the armies. Both armies.”
“What about Trerice?”
Scopas looked uncomfortable. “If he isn’t willing to serve under you, then … well, then, he’ll have to be replaced.”
“What about your other high officers? Drumceat? Taitu?”
“They’ll obey our orders.”
“Let’s discuss something else,” I said. “What happens after we defeat the emperor? Who rules Numantia?”
“Then will come your great reward. Barthou and I will create a third Grand Councilor. You. And the three of us will rule and return Numantia to its greatest days.”
I thought of asking why everyone talked about “returning” to better days, rather than rising to new greatness, but refrained. I temporized and told him I’d make some sort of a decision after we’d regrouped in our new camp.
Scopas returned to the others, trying to pretend that he was but one of them, evidently thinking everyone would ignore the four hard-eyed men who surrounded him, their hands constantly brushing their swords’ hilts. I hoped he had done a better job of appearing a nonentity leaving Nicias than he did here.
As for the tailors’ business … that gave us a bit of merriment. They’d been appalled to note the shabbiness of my soldiers and their motley attire.
“You propose to outfit all of us?” I inquired. “With only a few days until the Grand Parade? You must have more men and women skilled with the needle and shears than I thought. And I warn you, we don’t have great chests of gold.”
“Well, no,” their leader admitted. “And such a gift, even though you and your men certainly deserve that, nay, deserve to have the finest raiments sewn with golden threads, would bankrupt all of us.
“What we propose is to give each of your men a tunic and breeches like these.”
A man stepped out from their midst wearing a rather nattily cut maroon outfit, with slash-cut thigh boots. It wasn’t bad looking, but I wondered if its designer had considered what would happen when its wearer attempted to conceal himself in a forest.
“Interesting,” I said, neutrally.
“We can have our … not our, actually, but ones we have on retainer, or at any rate who’ve worked for us in the past and hope to work for us in the future … magicians duplicate this uniform, and have thousands, perhaps even a million in your hands within two, no, three days.”
I looked into the spokesman’s eyes. He was terribly sincere and meant the best, and I hated to do it to him.
“Sir,” I asked. “Do you know anything of magic?”
“No, well, not a great deal, other than who I can have quickly duplicate a design for my seam
stresses, or perhaps fabricate a different pattern of cloth from a sorcerous design … but no, not very much, not really.”
“When armies go to war,” I explained, “each side generally has wizards casting spells to do harm to the other side.”
“I knew that,” he said, a bit indignantly. “I’m not a complete dunce.”
“Each side also has wizards casting counterspells, to negate the others’ thaumaturgy,” I went on. The tailor looked puzzled.
“What do you think would happen to your finery, of magical origins, when a counterspell intended to cut through all sorcery is cast at an army?”
Someone snickered, and the tailor understood, turned red, and began stammering apologies for taking up my most valuable time. I bowed them out before I gave in to my own laughter.
But the idea of an entire army, suddenly stripped naked in the middle of a battleground, still amuses.
• • •
The Latane River spiders through Nicias, but most of the branches are narrow enough to be bridged. Two are not — the major branch, which most river traffic uses, on the east, which is also where the Imperial Palace lies and where my former mansion, when I was with Marán, was; and one on the city’s far west, along a peninsula almost a third of a league wide, a budding business district as the city has expanded.
We rode ferries across the Latane, formed up along the waterfront, and marched forth.
• • •
The parade was the strangest I’ve ever marched in, let alone led. Most parades are either held in peace or at the beginning or end of a war, not in its middle. Very few have an entire army participating, and that meant everyone, from cavalrymen to skirmishers to sutlers to blacksmiths to teamsters to camp followers, for we were leaving nothing behind us on the down. But mostly, I know of very few parades whose leaders were waiting to be attacked.
We were tatterdemalion and ragtag, with only a few of us in any sort of uniform, let alone a common one. Lasleigh, Baron Pilfern of Stowe’s fifty cavalrymen were an exception in their green and black, although even their finery was trail worn and shabby.
We marched in formation, but most hadn’t had much drill training, so the drums and trumpets may have been sounding one beat, but the marchers were holding to another. Around a million others, to be exact.
Some units marched well, some shambled. They say drill is the mark of a good soldier; yet the skirmishers, easily the most dangerous men in the army or anywhere else I could think of, were the worst of the lot, and the most disreputable looking, even if their clothes were clean, constantly hooting at a pretty woman or boy, asking for drink to be tossed them, and sometimes running out of ranks for a kiss, a drink, or a hasty bite of some viand, then marching on, chewing and laughing.
The crowds cheered, and the bands played, but here and there I saw men and women trying to appear uncaring. But when formations led by men like Jakuns, Jabish, Himchai, Ilkley, or other Tovieti came past, their fellows were hard-pressed to hold their calm.
I’m afraid I noticed too much and too little of the parade, constantly watching here and there, trying to tell if the scattered soldiery we passed were cheering us or waiting for the order to attack.
The parade went on and on, taking almost the entire day to wind west through the streets and across the bridges. Great riverboats waited at the city’s end and took us across the river to the open land where our new quarters were.
Nothing had happened out of the ordinary, and I wondered if all these years of chicanery and intrigue had made me into a nervous twitch.
But I forgot about it and went to work setting up the new camp.
The next day, in the middle of more than a million men trying to establish their new homes, a courier came, and said the Grand Councilors were pleased to announce a banquet to personally honor General Damastes á Cimabue, to be held at my convenience. A note was appended in Scopas’s handwriting:
Barthou and I are intending this as a small event that might give us a chance to discuss various interesting ideas, so it might be well if you’d only bring enough of your staff to fulfill ceremony and provide sufficient security. But let’s plan on this in the very near future, for obvious reasons.
“Now if it were me,” Yonge announced, tossing the note back across the field desk, “I’d bring two regiments of infantry, and that’d be for the main course alone. I don’t trust these bastards.”
“Nor do I,” I agreed. “But what do they think the army will do if they murder me?”
Yonge looked skeptical. “If you think that’s what’s holding them back,” he said, “you’re being your usual fool. Barthou and Scopas don’t know soldiering from shitting and have no idea what the army will do.
“Not that you do, either. Look at what happened when I killed Achim Baber Fergana. Do you think his army went mad with fury, tore their hair, and attacked me, wailing like frenzied loons? Hells no. They couldn’t wait to say how glad they were the rascal was dead, and they, and their sons, and their sons’ sons, and their sons of bitching sons would be delighted to serve me until the hoolieth generation.
“If you get yourself killed, most of these troops will make whatever convenience they can. Some’ll desert, some’ll do whatever their officers tell them, some’ll try to join the Peace Guardians or the Army of Numantia or whatever they now call themselves.
“The only people you can absolutely depend on is us, your immediate staff, plus morons like Svalbard who don’t know about self-preservation and other romantic fools.”
“You’ve made my day full of cheer.”
“Full of realism would be a better way to put it,” Yonge said. “But look, you really shouldn’t have anything to worry about. We have magicians who can see if there’s any spells being laid, don’t we? We have the Tovieti, who’ve got their fingers around the neck, I mean on the pulse, of Nicias, right? Including, I assume, some inside Barthou and Scopas’s palace. Plus you have the Snake Who Never Sleeps, who’s got to have friends among the warders and his usual worms wriggling about with their ears open, if worms have ears.
“Ask all of them if any plot’s being plotted, and if no one can say yes, we can go off to dinner with a clear conscience.”
“We?”
“Of course, we. I want to see if their food’s better than the emperor’s, and besides, who’d grudge a meal to the private secretary of the mighty General Damastes á Cimabue? You might need a hand with the dessert.
“Eh? There you have the fruits of my careful thinking. What have I missed?”
“Nothing,” I said slowly. “Nothing at all.”
• • •
There was no plot to be found. Sinait and Cymea agreed there was building menace to the south, but that was from Tenedos, as he made his laborious way toward Nicias. We must work matters out with the Council quickly, so we would be ready when he arrived.
I had Kutulu inquire about Trerice and their army, which was the least of my worries. Their forces were confined to camp, undergoing strenuous training, he told me, somewhat amusedly, so they’d not embarrass the Councilors as they’d done before.
So, although I had many more important things to do, I sent a note back, suggesting we assemble three nights hence.
• • •
I decided to indulge my peacockry and chose tight boots that came to mid-thigh, made of fantastically tooled leathers of various shades, the predominant color black, a matching hat with a white plume dropping almost to my shoulders, complementing my carefully brushed hair, a silk lace blouse with a frothy scarf, both in white, red trousers that flared above the knee, and a black cloak with red silk lining.
Cymea also wore black — a clinging suit with flaring sleeves and pants legs and high collar. But this seemingly modest description doesn’t allow for its wide buttons down the front that she only fastened from below her breasts to her waist. The buttons were ensorcelled and shone with spinning colors echoed in her disc earrings and necklace like a twisted silver rope.
“
You’ll note my nice, sensible shoes,” she said.
“Sensible?” They glittered like silver mail.
“They’re without heels,” she explained. “Easy to run in.”
“Ah.”
Cymea wore a suede belt, and from it hung her sheathed wand and a needle-like shortsword.
“I’ve also got a dagger on the inside of my thigh, so be careful how you grope, sirrah.”
I wasn’t unarmed either, carrying Yonge’s dagger hidden and my plain straight sword in plain sight. Concealed in a small pouch were two of the iron pigs I liked for throwing or hiding in my fist for a bone-shattering strike.
I’d decided to promote Svalbard to captain, and Yonge chose the same rank. Lasleigh’s men were the only bodyguard I’d take, and while they wore their finest, they were also fully armed.
I saw Sinait and Linerges talking at length, guessed they were taking other precautions.
Suddenly the thought came — all this worry and scheming was absurd. If I had a brain, I’d simply find an excuse to cancel the banquet.
But since we’d checked everything imaginable, and it was important to get along with our allies, I decided to proceed.
• • •
The palace had gone through three name changes within the last twenty years: first the Rule of Ten’s Palace; then, massively refurbished, it became the Imperial Palace. Now I noted it was called just the “Palace,” which was either tired, realistic, or cynical, depending on what the speaker thought of the current regime’s life expectancy.
There were few soldiers guarding the palace, no more than the required honor guard, which made me relax a bit more.
The palace’s chamberlain said a meal had been set for my escort, and so Lasleigh and his fifty, some licking their lips at the thought of doing real damage to royal cuisine, were led away.
The rest of us were taken, with babbling escorts and bowing retainers, through the main entrance and announced with trumpets into a great room on the palace’s second level. I knew this chamber well, for I’d suffered through many of Tenedos’s banquets here, not interested in the overly rich food and bored cross-eyed with the endless speechmaking.
It was a long room, very high-ceilinged, with three swinging doors leading to the kitchens at the rear. Above, on a small balcony about fifteen feet overhead, was a small orchestra, already playing. The banquet room could be enlarged or made smaller with sliding walls. Tonight, it held just one long table toward the rear of the chamber near the kitchens. Around the room were heavy carts with punch bowls, brandy, and wine, and servants swarming around them.
