Arms-Commander

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “They probably will,” said Saryn sourly. “We’ll just have to see, though.”

  The locals, in brown leathers, with brass-trimmed breastplates, were reined up across the main road a good hundred yards before a junction in the road. The left road—the main road—headed into Duevek. The well-maintained but narrower way led uphill to the elaborate walled stone villa and outbuildings, all with shimmering red-tile roofs. The middle track skirted the base of the hill and doubtless rejoined the main road northwest of the town.

  As the guards reached a point about forty yards from the armsmen, Saryn called out, “Guards, halt! Staggered formation!” Then she eased the gelding to the shoulder of the road to allow the guards, already staggered, a clear field of fire.

  In a lower voice, Hryessa turned in the saddle, and ordered, “Ready arms.”

  “You’re blocking the road,” Saryn called.

  The squad leader stationed at the west end of the formation glanced at the parley flag, then at the armed squad. “Parley or not, you’re not welcome.”

  “We’re on our way to Lornth to meet with the regents.”

  “Anyone can offer a parley flag. That doesn’t mean you’re friendly. Those weapons, small as they are, don’t suggest friendship.”

  Saryn refrained from pointing out that, if the Westwind force had not been friendly, they certainly wouldn’t have ridden up without attacking. “We didn’t go to arms until you blocked the road. We’re not fighting each other. That was ten years ago. Westwind and the regents have a treaty,” Saryn said politely. “Now…if you block our way, that breaks the treaty.”

  “The regents don’t say how we run our lands. The only place you’re headed is back to the Westhorns, if you can make it.”

  “Are you telling me you—or your lord—refuses to honor the treaty and a parley flag?”

  “You aren’t coming any farther into Lornth.”

  “We are,” Saryn said. “We have the duty and the right to talk to the regents.”

  “You only honor conditions when it suits you.”

  Saryn had a good idea where that had come from. “We honor those who hold to them, not those who use them to attempt poisoning and murder.” Her words made no impression, not that Saryn would have expected it.

  “I have my orders. Nothing you say will change that.”

  “That may be. But I don’t think your successor would like to explain how you lost an entire squad in a few moments. Undercaptain, or squad leader,” Saryn said. “You have two choices. You can let us pass peacefully, or you can let us pass over your dead body.”

  “You’re women. There’s nothing special about you.” He shouted, “To arms!”

  “Fire!” snapped Saryn.

  Before he could spur his mount forward, the squad leader slumped forward in the saddle. So did the six riders in the front rank.

  “Charge!” ordered someone from the rear of the body of armsmen.

  “Fire!” Saryn ordered again, the black currents around her amplifying her voice, even as she drew the first of her three short swords.

  Another rank of armsmen went down, with the exception of two men partly shielded by the squad leader’s mount, which had half reared. In moments, the arrows sleeting across the space between the two forces had reduced those in brown to a mere handful. Even so, that handful charged the guards.

  “Charge!” ordered Hryessa.

  In moments, the guards had swept though the remaining brown-tunics, and had reversed their mounts. Saryn had held her ground, concentrating on the second group of Lornians, now breaking clear of the orchard and less than a hundred yards away. “Captain! Attack from the south!”

  “Archers!” snapped Hryessa. “Line abreast on me!” The captain gestured.

  Not all of the Westwind archers caught the command, but twelve managed to get into formation.

  “Fire!”

  The roughly three volleys that the guard archers loosed were enough to halve the number of able-bodied attackers even before they were within fifty yards.

  Saryn found two Lornians aiming their mounts directly at her. She forced herself to wait until they seemed almost upon her before throwing her first blade, smoothing the flow and using her order-skills to guide the weapon, even as she drew the second and parried the wild swing of the oncoming Lornian, then back-cut across his neck before he could recover.

  The melee that followed lasted less than a tenth of a glass, and by the end, every one of the brown-clad Lornians was either dead or wounded severely enough to be unable to fight.

  Saryn reined up and studied the road. Close to forty dead and wounded. For what? She scanned the road up to the villa, but it remained empty. The locals had clearly received orders to attack, or to keep the angels from reaching Lornth, if not both. She could see the hand of the Suthyans in that, but why would a local lordling throw in with Baorl? Or were matters that unsettled in Lornth?

  Hryessa rode over and reined up. “We’ve secured the area, ser.”

  “What are our casualties?”

  “Three slashes. None that serious. For all the fancy uniforms, these boys weren’t that good. The blades aren’t bad.”

  “Pack them up.”

  “We’ve recovered most of the shafts and arrowheads, but some will need to be reworked.”

  “What about our mounts?”

  “Two won’t make it.”

  “Take the ten best of their mounts. Use two for replacements, and load the rest with the blades and anything else of value. Let’s find one of the survivors who looks to be able to take a message back to his lord or whoever. Then we need to be moving out.”

  “Still to Lornth?”

  “It’s looking more important than even the Marshal thought.”

  “I don’t care for that, ser.”

  Neither did Saryn. “We need one of the riding wounded.”

  “There are only two. They’re over by the banner.”

  Saryn turned and rode the twenty or so yards to the left side of the road, almost opposite the west end of the orchard that had shielded the second group of attackers.

  The two men in brown leathers were the only Lornians still horsed. Both were weaponless. One was black-haired, and both hair and beard were shot with white. Blood oozed from a crude dressing around his lower right arm, and a thin slash ran across his forehead. The other looked young enough to be his son, but with pale red hair and a strong nose, he in no way resembled the older Lornian. Pain contorted his face as he held a crooked lower right arm in place with his left.

  Saryn reined up several yards from the pair, flanked by Westwind guards with blades in hand. She looked at the older armsman. “You are free to return to your lord and to tell him the price he has paid for dishonoring the parley flag—and for consorting with the enemies of both Westwind and Lornth. You can take your friend here with you.” She inclined her head toward the fresh-faced Lornian.

  “The Lord of Duevek will not be pleased, Angels.” The dark eyes flicked from Saryn to Hryessa and back to Saryn.

  “That is possible. We’re not pleased with your lord. Nor will the regents be pleased with him. That makes us even. Now…ride back to your lord and tell him to send retainers to remove these carrion and clear the road. You can also tell him he should be glad the regents have a treaty with Westwind, because, otherwise, he’d have suffered far worse. We’ve only taken the mounts necessary to replace those injured by his attacks—and the weapons used against us.”

  “There are far more armsmen in Lornth than angels in Westwind.”

  “That is very true,” Saryn replied. “You lost forty men. We lost none. You attacked first. The last time that happened, when Lornth attacked Westwind, we lost thirty, and you lost thousands. Think about it. In fact, you and your lord should think very hard about it.” Saryn felt the conflict boiling within her. Given the Lornian male arrogance, she wanted to slit the man’s throat on the spot as much as she needed him to convey the message. Given what might lie behind the walls of th
e villa on the hill, she had no intention of delivering it personally. Yet she could sense the swirling of both order and chaos around her. At least, that was the way it felt.

  Abruptly, the man’s eyes widened, and he swallowed once, then twice. “Yes…Angel…I will tell him.” He swallowed again. “Might I go…?”

  The younger man turned white and swayed in the saddle, then stiffened in greater pain, clearly because he’d moved the broken forearm.

  “Go.” While firm, Saryn’s voice contained as much resignation as anger, and she watched as the pair started up the narrow road toward the villa. “What was all that about?” Then she turned to Hryessa. “One moment, he was all bluster, and the next, you’d have thought I was like the engineer when he was using the laser.”

  The captain’s lips quirked into an ironic smile. “You looked much like the engineer, and a bright blackness gathered around you. It’s fading now.”

  “You don’t seem all that worried.”

  “You are an angel, Commander. All of you true angels have such moments. That is a mark of the angels.”

  Saryn wondered about that, but introspection could wait. “We need everyone to mount up and get moving.” She pointed to the narrow middle road. “We’ll take the narrow track around the town, not the main road. I don’t imagine we’ll be exactly welcome right now.”

  “They were stupid,” Hryessa said.

  “That’s because it’s been years since we really exerted any force over Lornth,” Saryn pointed out tiredly. “People who are raised to think women are worthless have a tendency to forget what conflicts with their beliefs.”

  “This lord will not forget.”

  But how many others are there who already have?

  As Saryn urged the gelding forward, she turned back for a moment to see if anyone followed, but the road was empty, except for the dead and wounded. For a moment, she looked back at the hillside and the villa occupying it. If one had to live in Lornth, there were worse places. Set on the hilltop and open to the Westhorns, there would be cool breezes most of the year, and the river wasn’t that far. Duevek itself wasn’t a bad town…

  She shook her head. She doubted she’d ever see either Duevek or the villa again, because she certainly wasn’t going to return the way they’d come. That would be asking for even more troubles she didn’t need.

  XXIV

  Lornth stood in the middle of a valley entered through a gentle pass in the rolling hills and on the higher ground west of the river. As Saryn rode closer to Lornth in late mid afternoon, the already-small holdings grew even smaller, with the space near the cots filled with gardens or crowded pens for livestock. A cat watched from under a scraggly bush, and a nondescript brown dog tied to the post of a rickety porch kept barking as the squad passed, but no one left the cot to investigate. Then the packed-clay road changed into a stone-paved highway—about two kays out from where the randomly crowded cots with their tiny plots were replaced by dwellings whose stucco was a pink so pale it looked white, especially under the bright spring sunlight. The larger dwellings had courtyards with walls finished with the same pinkish white stucco.

  As Saryn neared the first of the more-permanent-looking stucco dwellings, a dark-haired and pregnant woman froze in place and almost dropped a shirt she was hanging on a line when she caught sight of the guards riding toward Lornth. Ahead and rising above and to the west of the modest dwellings and structures of the town was a taller redstone tower that Saryn recognized as part of the palace complex. As the guards approached the town proper, they were assaulted by a series of odors, most of them unpleasant, if not revolting, all emphasized by the warm stillness of the air. The side of the road to Saryn’s right held a stone-lined sewage channel, with pools of filth along the bottom, a stark contrast to the cleanliness of Westwind.

  Once they were into the town, Saryn saw that the side streets were narrower and darker than she recalled, if paved irregularly, and all had sewage channels on both sides. Some of the larger buildings lining the wider main avenue were of the same reddish granite as the tower and the palace walls. The scattered handfuls of people along the streets reacted in different ways, some gaping, some retreating into the shops, and some remaining apparently oblivious as the guards rode past.

  Beyond the small square in the center of the buildings, marked by a pedestal and a statue of Lord Nessil, the avenue narrowed for the three-hundred-odd cubits it continued, flanked by taller, more ornate dwellings, before ending at what passed for a green. On the far side of the green, two hundred cubits away, rose the wall and the palace complex beyond it, all constructed of a pale pink granite.

  Saryn gestured for Xanda to take the road that circled to the right around the patchy grass of the green. As she and the guards followed the standard-bearer, once again it struck Saryn that Lornth was still little more than a big town and a keep with a low wall, hardly that defensible. Was that because Lornth was far from the borders with other lands? Or because it was that poor? Were the regents powerless to exact enough in taxes for a more impressive capital? Tariffs was the local term, Saryn reminded herself.

  A set of wooden but ironbound gates in the ten-cubit-high wall around the palace and its outbuildings stood open, if guarded by four armsmen, two on each side. As Saryn raised her arm to order the Westwind contingent to a halt before the open gates, a young armsman—an undercaptain from his uniform—burst out of the guard house just inside the gates and came to a halt in the space between the gates. His eyes took in Xanda and the parley flag. Then he looked to Saryn.

  “I’m Saryn, the arms-commander of Westwind. I came to see the regents.”

  “Ah…yes, Commander.” The undercaptain paused. “Were they expecting you?”

  “No. I would doubt it. When we discovered what the regents should know, it wouldn’t have made much sense to have sent a messenger when we would be here almost as quickly.” And we’re not about to have sent a single messenger through Lornth, anyway.

  “I don’t…”

  “We’ll wait here,” said Saryn with a smile. “You can go request instructions.”

  The young officer glanced at the thirty armed women, then back at Saryn. “It might be best if you entered the courtyard and waited inside while I check on where you’ll be billeted.”

  Saryn could sense no scheming and no malice in the young officer, only apprehension and worry. In that, in a vague way, he reminded her of Dealdron, although she suspected that Dealdron might well be more perceptive than the Lornian, officer or not. “We can do that.” She turned to Hryessa. “Have them ride through and form up inside and to the right.”

  “Yes, ser.”

  The undercaptain watched as the guards rode through and reformed on the stone pavement that stretched across the front of the palace. Then he walked swiftly across the uneven paving stones toward a smaller side door, avoiding the main steps—only six, Saryn noted—that rose to a modest receiving archway. Beyond the archway was a set of brass-bound double doors. The undercaptain walked to the lower door to the right of the steps and disappeared within. With the main body of the palace rising some three stories, the building stretched perhaps two hundred cubits from end to end, with the redstone tower centered in the middle, but at the rear.

  “You took him off guard, Commander,” observed Hryessa.

  “He recovered. I don’t think he’s ever seen so many armed women before.” Light as Saryn’s voice was, she was concerned. They had arrived without being observed, or if they had been, word had not been passed to the regents or the palace staff.

  “You’d think someone would have reported our nearing the city,” said Hryessa. “We’d have known if thirty armsmen approached Westwind.”

  “You would think so,” replied Saryn. “If they did, no one told the guards.”

  While they waited, Saryn studied the front courtyard of the palace, an expanse of unevenly laid cobblestones a good seven hundred cubits across the front and with perhaps a hundred cubits between the wall and the mou
nting blocks at the base of the wide stone steps leading to the main entry. The area behind the palace proper was also paved, with a series of two-story outbuildings set before the rear wall of the complex, presumably stables, barracks, and workshops of various sorts. Scraggly grass had sprung up between the cobblestones, imparting a ragged look to the courtyard, and the lowest line of stone on that part of the north side of the outer walls of the palace bore the greenish sheen of moss or lichens. Outside of the gate guards, Saryn saw only two other individuals—armed doormen standing at the top of the main steps, one on each side of the entry archway.

  After a time, the small door beside the base of the main entry staircase opened, and the undercaptain hurried back toward Saryn and the guards. With him was another armsman.

  The undercaptain halted well short of Saryn. “The Lady Regent bids you welcome to Lornth. There is ample room on the main floor of the second barracks for your…troopers. The adjoining stables offer enough vacant stalls for your mounts, and there are quarters on the second level for your officers, Commander. Lady Zeldyan would like to offer you quarters in the palace. Once you have refreshed yourself, she would like to greet you personally.”

  “Thank you, Undercaptain.” Saryn inclined her head. “If you could direct us…”

  “Squad leader Cardaryn and I would be most happy to do so.”

  The undercaptain understood a commander’s concerns because he walked beside Saryn as the armsman led the way around the north side of the palace. The second barracks were those in the rear at the far west end, and while they appeared well tended from outside, it was clear that no one had used them recently. Once Hryessa was satisfied, and Saryn and the guards had stabled and groomed their mounts, the undercaptain and Saryn walked across the rear courtyard to the nearest door. She carried her own saddlebags.

  “This is the south wing of the palace, where guests are housed,” offered the undercaptain, opening the brass-bound door. He led the way up a flight of steps and turned to the right. The wooden floors creaked under his boots. “Your chamber is at the end on the left.”