by David Weber
“And our friend Bronzehelm? Is he as...suitable as we’d hoped?”
“I believe so.” Varnaythus leaned back in his chair, stapling his fingers under his chin. “He’s more devoted and loyal to Borandas than we’d estimated—quite a bit more, to be honest. But he’s nowhere near so resilient as Baroness Myacha seems to be. I think we’re going to have to be as careful to avoid using the art to...shape him appropriately as I was afraid we were, but I also think he’s going to be even more amenable to suggestion with the appropriate enhancements.”
Sahrdohr’s smile would have done credit to a shark, and Varnaythus smiled back. Sir Dahlnar Bronzehelm was Baron Borandas’ seneschal, responsible for the management and administration of the baron’s household here in Halthan. He was also one of Borandas’ closest confidants, and he’d been with the baron for the better part of thirty years. Very few people could be better placed to subtly shape Borandas’ views, which didn’t even consider how valuable a listening post within the North Riding he could become. It would have been far more convenient if they’d been able to use the art to...modify his existing loyalties and views, but there was too much chance of a mage noticing that sort of tampering. Especially if the mage in question was so inconsiderate as to be both a healer and a mind-speaker. Fortunately, there were drugs which could produce the same effect, albeit more slowly and gradually. Even better, that slow and gradual process was virtually indistinguishable from the fashion in which anyone’s opinions might naturally come to change over time. There was some risk, of course—nothing could completely avoid that when one was was forced to deal with a mage—yet the probability that even as strongly gifted a mage as Brayahs would notice their meddling would be far, far lower than the chance of his detecting the art.
“And Thorandas?” Sahrdohr asked.
“I haven’t had an opportunity to come within reach of him yet,” Varnaythus admitted. “Hopefully I’ll manage that before ‘Talthar’ is scheduled to leave. In the meantime, though, judging from what I’ve been able to pick up about him from the more open minds here in Halthan, I’d say our original impressions are probably fairly accurate. Borandas clearly relies heavily on his advice—that was obvious from the way his aura peaked each time I mentioned Thorandas’ name. I think it’s safe to say he trusts his son’s judgment in most ways, if not all.”
“That fits pretty well with everything I’ve heard about them here in the Palace,” Sahrdohr agreed. “And I had an opportunity to drop his name into a conversation with Shaftmaster day before yesterday, which led to a couple of interesting tidbits. For one thing, Sir Whalandys made it pretty clear that most people think Thorandas is a sharper blade than his father...and that Baron Borandas realizes it.”
“Really?” Varnaythus cocked his head thoughtfully. “That’s helpful, especially if Cassan’s right about Thorandas’ attitude towards the hradani. He has to be as well aware as his father that at the moment the North Riding holds the balance between Tellian and Cassan on the Great Council. The question is how he’s likely to react when he realizes just how thoroughly this Derm Canal is going to scramble all of the traditional balances of power here on the Wind Plain. If he’s as prejudiced against the hradani as Cassan and Yeraghor think, that’s bound to play a role in his evaluation of the new...realities, shall we say? And that’s going to have an effect on the advice he gives his father about it, now isn’t it?”
“Exactly.” Sahrdohr’s smile was even thinner than before. “And if Sir Dahlnar starts giving the same advice?”
“Especially if he comes slowly and gradually to share Thorandas’ concerns, yes.” Varnaythus nodded. “Not too quickly, though. Borandas may not be the very smartest man in the entire Kingdom, but he’s not exactly a fool, either. He’s going to think twice—more likely three or four times—before he steps into any sort of arrangement with Cassan. For that matter, Thorandas isn’t going to be in any hurry to forget how badly Cassan burned his fingers last time he and Tellian squared off.”
“No, but I’ve had a thought about that.”
“What sort of thought?” Varnaythus’ tone was a bit cautious, and Sahrdohr chuckled.
“It’s not that inventive,” the magister assured his superior. “But that’s the second interesting tidbit I got from our good Chancellor. According to Shaftmaster, Thorandas is in the market for a wife. In fact, Sir Whalandys approves of that; he thinks it’s past time Thorandas settled down and started breeding heirs of his own. Unfortunately—from my esteemed superior’s perspective, at any rate—Sir Thorandas seems rather taken with Shairnayith Axehammer.”
“He does?” Varnaythus’ eyes narrowed, and Sahrdohr leaned back and raised both hands.
“That’s what Shaftmaster seems to believe, at any rate, and he’s not very happy about the notion.”
“I can see why he might not be, given how enthusiastically he’s been supporting Tellian at Court,” Varnaythus observed in a tone of considerable understatement. Then he frowned. “I can see why he might not be,” he repeated, “but I didn’t pick up a hint of anything of the sort from Cassan the last time I was in Toramos.”
“Maybe he isn’t aware of Thorandas’ thinking,” Sahrdohr suggested.
“Cassan?” Varnaythus barked a laugh. “Trust me, if Shaftmaster’s right and Thorandas really is looking in Shairnayith’s direction, Cassan knows about it, all right. He’d never miss something like that, especially where Shairnayith is concerned! In fact,” his eyes narrowed again, “that could be the problem. He dotes on the girl, after all, and it could be that he’s perfectly aware of the opportunity and simply chooses to ignore it. If he’d been in any rush to marry her off, they could have managed it long ago, I’m sure. There have to have been plenty of other offers for her by now, at any rate. She’s—what, twenty-two?—for Carnadosa’s sake! Do you seriously think nobody’s even so much as tested the water where a prize like her is concerned?”
“Maybe there’ve been quite a few offers and he simply hasn’t thought any of them were worth accepting,” Sahrdohr pointed out. “She’s his older daughter, after all. As you say, that makes her the kind of prize that doesn’t come along often. That’s a political token a man like Cassan isn’t going to be in a hurry to use too soon!”
“That’s true enough,” Varnaythus acknowledged. “But she’s a deep one herself, and the Lady knows she worships the ground her father walks on. The possibility of a direct marriage alliance between the Axehammers and the Daggeraxes?” The wizard snorted. “She’d have to recognize the potential advantages Cassan could wring out of that! And short of Yurokhas himself—and Fiendark knows Yurokhas would never marry an Axehammer—where’s she going to find a better marriage than to the North Riding’s heir?”
“Agreed. On the other hand, the consequences would be fairly obvious to just about everyone,” Sahrdohr pointed out, “and the Great Council would have to approve the marriage.”
“If Borandas approved it, he, Cassan, and Yeraghor between them would have a clear majority.”
“And would Markhos be foolish enough to let it go through, anyway?” Sahrdohr challenged. “He’d have to assent, too.”
“If he were around to do the assenting,” Varnaythus pointed out in turn, his voice soft. “If he wasn’t—if the Great Council happened to be acting as regent to a minor heir—then that wouldn’t matter, would it?”
“No,” the magister said slowly.
“So if Cassan and Yeraghor were to decide this marriage would be a good idea, and if Thorandas is as receptive to the notion as your good friend the Chancellor seems to be suggesting, then we might just have found another argument to help sway Cassan to our thinking about the best way to deal with the Crown’s unfortunate support for Tellian’s little project, mightn’t we?”
The two wizards gazed at each other through their linked gramerhains and slowly, slowly smiled.
Chapter Thirteen
The membership of the council of war no longer struck its participants as bizarre, altho
ugh there were moments when any one of them was likely to feel as if he’d fallen into some sort of fever dream. On the other hand, those moments were no longer as common as they had been, and they were becoming steadily less frequent.
Not that anyone expected they were ever going to disappear entirely.
“Well, I suppose we should get started,” Sir Vaijon Almerhas said, looking around the spacious wooden table.
That table sat in one of the stout stone buildings which had blossomed along the new, Axeman-style high road between the Escarpment and the equally new Lake Hurgrum over the past few years. They were obviously of dwarvish design and construction, their stones laid without mortar yet cut so precisely it would have required a sledgehammer to drive a knife blade into any single joint. One of the by-products of enjoying the services of Silver Cavern’s strongest sarthnasiks, Vaijon reflected, was that Chanharsa could turn (and had turned) several thousand cubic yards of rock into perfectly uniform, impossibly precisely “cut” stone blocks without so much as turning a hair. Driving the tunnel clear up through the Escarpment had provided them with what was literally a small mountain of building material, and hradani and dwarvish work crews had made good use of it.
These buildings had been constructed specifically to serve as the central military base for the Ghoul Moor campaigns, however, which meant they had very lofty ceilings for any dwarvish designed structure. Sothōii tended to be tall, and Vaijon was taller even than most of them, but even he tended to feel a bit undersized when he looked up at the meeting chamber’s twelve-foot ceilings and nine-foot doorframes. Rooms sized for Horse Stealer hradani had that effect on most people. Of course, heating them could be a tad difficult, especially in a north Norfressan winter, as Vaijon had discovered over the past several years. Fortunately, the dwarves who’d designed these buildings had pronounced opinions on things like comfortable winter temperatures and they’d built heating ducts into the concrete foundations when they poured them. In fact, they’d gone even further and used some of the water power tapped from the lake to drive fans that circulated heated air through ceiling ducts, as well.
Which was one reason he had Sermandahknarthas building the Order of Tomanāk its own properly spacious—and comfortably heated—hall back in Hurgrum, as well. With luck, they’d have it finished before first snowfall and he’d finally spend a winter in Hurgrum without icicles hanging from the tip of his nose.
At the moment, however, brilliant sunlight spilled down from a sky like polished lapis lazuli, dancing on the enormous lake’s sapphire water, and the chamber’s windows were open to admit a cooling breeze. Distant shouts drifted in with the breeze as construction crews continued their unending labors, and he could hear a leather-lunged hradani sergeant counting cadence from the drill square beside the nearest block of barracks. Bhanak Karathson’s Hurgrumese had learned the value of discipline, training, and drill and used it well. Now they were teaching it to the rest of the Northern Hradani, and if the new Confederate Army remained short of the smooth, polished perfection of the Royal and Imperial Army’s demonstration drill teams, Vaijon would have been perfectly willing to match its battalions against any regular Axeman field force. They were certainly better than any non-Axeman infantry he’d ever seen, and he found that a very comforting thought just at the moment.
Although he was the second youngest person present, Vaijon was, by common consent, the council’s moderator. In no small part, that was because his background was probably the closest of that of any of its members’ to something approaching true neutrality. An Axeman by birth, he came from outside the millennium-long hatred and mutual bloodletting of Sothōii and hradani, and as a champion of Tomanāk by training and choice, he served the Judge of Princes. As such, he and the members of his chapter of the Order of Tomanāk were sworn to strict neutrality in any confrontation between princes or kingdoms so long as the God of War’s code was not transgressed.
More than that, he commanded the one force which could tell any of the proposed expedition’s other commanders they had no authority over it. And while the Hurgrum Chapter of the Order was going to provide the smallest single component of the campaign’s field force, it was also the most disciplined and highly trained. For the last couple of campaigns, it had been used as often as not as what Prince Bahnak had referred to as the expeditionary forces’ “fire brigade,” and no one in his right mind would care to get on its bad side. That reflection brought Vaijon a sense of satisfaction he occasionally found a bit difficult to prevent from sliding over into complacent pride, and as he considered the other senior officers gathered about the table, he reminded himself (in a mental voice which sounded remarkably like Bahzell Bahnakson’s) to not get too full of himself. All of those other officers were at least as experienced as he was, at least where campaigns and battlefield maneuvers were concerned, and there were some dauntingly powerful personalities seated around that table. Some fairly prickly ones, for that matter...which was one reason he had no intention of mentioning that another reason Prince Bahnak and Baron Tellian had selected him for this particular assignment was that he’d developed something of a talent for herding cats over the last few years.
Hurthang Marahgson, Bahzell’s fourth cousin and the senior member of the Hurgrum Chapter, sat directly across from Vaijon. Hurthang stood “only” two inches over seven feet, but he was quite possibly even stronger than Bahzell. And while the symbols of Tomanāk might be a crossed mace and sword, Hurthang disdained such puny weapons in favor of the great, two-handed daggered axe from which Clan Iron Axe took its name. Of course, he normally wielded it one-handed, which Vaijon found just a bit flamboyant even for a Horse Stealer. At the moment, however, Hurthang looked a little uncomfortable (although only someone who knew him as well as Vaijon did was likely to notice it) in his resplendently embroidered, finely woven green surcoat. By choice, Hurthang preferred attire as practical and plain as his cousin Bahzell’s, but his wife Farmah had spent much of the winter working on that surcoat for this very meeting, and a warrior who could have—and had—glared unawed into the very teeth of death had been powerless to resist the calm insistence of the mother of his child.
General Yurgazh Charkson sat to Hurthang’s right, and his expression and body language were a bit on the stiff side, Vaijon judged. Hopefully, that stiffness was only temporary, and Vaijon suspected it had more to do with the unanticipated nature of his elevation than to anything else. Yurgazh had worked well as one of Prince Barodahn’s subordinate commanders the previous year, and he was a known quantity to everyone else seated around the table. Still, of all those present he was the closest to a “self-made man,” a former free sword mercenary who’d fought his way to his present rank and position through sheer guts, ability, determination, and—even in Churnazh of Navahk’s service—integrity. The remarkable thing, really, wasn’t that he’d won the trust of his former adversaries following Navahk’s surrender, but that he’d survived under Churnazh.
Prince Arsham Churnazhson, seated beside Yurgazh, looked like a man who wasn’t entirely happy to be there. On the other hand, he didn’t look like someone who was unhappy to be there, either. There were greater depths to Arsham than Vaijon had anticipated before Navahk’s defeat, and while it seemed evident that defeat still stung, Navahk’s new prince was a practical man. And a prudent one, which was the only reason he’d survived Prince Churnazh’s reign. Certainly his paternity didn’t explain that survival, at any rate!
Arsham was still referred to by his own people as “the Bastard,” but however odd it might have seemed to an Axeman, the appellation had always been a title of respect in Navahk. A title, indeed, which specifically separated him from his father’s reputation for tyranny...and one which could only have made Churnazh even more suspicious of him.
Among hradani, more than any of the other Races of Man, rape was an unforgivable crime. Hradani women, with their immunity to the Rage, had provided most of what little stability and order hradani society had managed to cling t
o for too many centuries for that particular outrage to be tolerated. Those in a position of power might get away with it—for a time—but no known rapist could ever hope to command the true loyalty of any hradani city-state or clan. Yet also among hradani, unlike too few of the other Races of Man, rape imposed no stigma upon its victim...or upon any child born of it. For that matter, children in general were unspeakably precious to hradani, with their low fertility rates, and they were often too busy rejoicing in any child’s birth to worry over minor details like establishing its precise paternity. So while there was enormous shame in Churnazh’s rape of Arsham’s mother, there was no shame in Arsham’s birth, and the fact that his mother descended in a collateral branch from the previous ruling family of Navahk gave him a claim to the throne in the eyes of his subjects which neither his late, unlamented father nor his fortunately deceased half-brothers could ever have enjoyed.
Of course, that same claim had been one of the reasons Arsham had been very, very careful never to dabble in politics during his father’s lifetime. He’d spent his time with the army, instead, which had posed potential problems of its own, given how Churnazh himself had used the army to slaughter his way to power. That was one reason Arsham had always preferred field commands which kept him well away from Navahk, and his father had been perfectly happy to keep him there. He’d still managed to become dangerously popular with his troops, yet he’d also made it abundantly clear—to his father, at least; his half-brothers had been less inclined to believe it—that he had absolutely no interest in the throne of Navahk. The fact that he’d been Churnazh’s best field commander had probably helped his father’s willingness to let him keep his head, Vaijon thought. And then there’d been the minor fact that his mother and his legitimately born older sister had been comfortably housed in Navahk...where they stood hostage for his good conduct, not to mention dissuading him from seeking vengeance upon his mother’s rapist. That was something Churnazh had carefully never discussed with him openly, but Arsham had never been a fool and it wasn’t as if Churnazh hadn’t made examples of far too many of his enemies’ families in the course of his reign.