by Steven Brust
Rollondar looked at her, forcing aside the soldier’s instinctive distrust of such an undisciplined corps, and said, “Good.”
“Have you instructions?”
“Will you follow them?”
“If they suit us.”
Rollondar scowled but said nothing. He had the authority to order them away from the battle; anything else he must convince them to do. As he was considering this, he learned that the Breath of Fire Battalion, though moving uncharacteristically slowly, was now in sight, and a great battle-wagon had been sighted behind the waves of horsemen.
“What do you think, Warlord?” said Nyleth.
“I think that, as things stand, we can crush the Breath of Fire Battalion like closing our hand.”
“Well?”
“Well, Lord Adron is not one to put himself in such a position.”
“Therefore?” said Nyleth.
“I think the spell is real.”
“You do not think they will turn and attack the other gates?”
“It will be no small task for them to break the gates that are closed—they cannot do it before we reach them; I have troops keeping the paths clear, and our road is shorter.”
“Well, Excellency?”
Rollondar stared grimly out of the open gate. “As we said before, you must discover what the spell is and if, as I am now convinced, it is a threat, destroy it.”
“Very well.”
Rollondar turned to Roila. “Have you been listening?”
“Yes.”
“Can you beat a path through the battalion to reach the battle-wagon? Which is, I am certain, actually a spell-wagon.”
“Yes.”
“Then that will be your task.”
“Very well,” said Roila, and she returned to where the Lavodes waited, and said, “We have our task.”
Even as she spoke, a scant two hundred meters away Lord Adron e’Kieron, the rebel Prince, drew his forces up before the Dragon Gate and watched the approaching dawn. He stood before his spell-wagon—a wagon so large that it could, and, in fact, did, contain his tent; so large that sixteen horses were required to pull it. His officers were assembled before him, and he addressed them in these terms: “We cannot, in fact, achieve a direct victory here, but, fortunately, we do not need to. Now that we have stopped, and are within the correct distance, I will begin working my spell, which will take control of the Orb—in effect, making me Emperor, though we ought not to depend on our enemies laying down their arms upon this occasion.”
He accompanied this remark with a grim smile—a smile that was echoed by all the officers. He then continued, “Unlike His Majesty, I shall not be afraid to use the power of the Orb in battle, and I shall begin to do so at once. For, even as the Orb comes to me, bursting through walls in the Palace, flying over the city wall, I will be able to turn its power against our enemies—the closer the Orb comes to me, the more of its abilities I will be able to use. By the time it reaches me, the battle will be over.”
He took a breath. “There is some danger, to be sure; that is why the battalion must be ready, for we will be attacked the instant the enemy sorcerers realize what I am doing, and, if I am disturbed while I am working, we will lose everything.”
“How dangerous is it?” asked an officer.
Adron paused, as if considering whether to answer this question, or how much he ought to tell his officers. At last he said, “I have studied a great deal, and I know what I am doing, though, to be sure, there are always unknown elements in a spell of this magnitude. Yet I do not believe the spell itself will be dangerous—the energies of the spell will be directed at the Orb, which is, as you all know, a device designed, more than anything else, to accept and direct immense energies; indeed, the very method by which I hope to take control of it requires directing great energy straight at it, rather than at His Majesty or around the Orb, and so I will get past the defenses built into the Orb; in the same way, then, there will be, I believe, little danger from the spell itself.
“Yet that is not the only danger, for should the battalion fail, and should I be distracted before the spell takes effect, it will mean defeat for us, and capture and execution for me and, perhaps, for you as well, my officers. You perceive that I do not disguise the risks.” He shrugged. “Beyond that, unless something unexpected happens, well, I do not believe there is grave danger.
“But,” he added, “there is always the possibility of the unexpected happening, wherefore we must necessarily keep our guard up at all times. Do you all clearly understand what I am saying?”
They all did.
He took another breath. “Good. Are there, then, any more questions?”
One of the younger officers cleared his throat.
“Well?” said Adron.
“How long must we hold them?” said the officer. “That is, in order for you to have time—”
Adron frowned. “You must hold the enemy as long as possible. How could your task be anything else?”
The officer looked uncomfortable. “And yet—”
“Very well,” said Adron, giving forth a sigh. He calculated briefly, and his glance strayed to the battle-wagon behind him. At last he said, “Before the spell is ready, I shall need, I think, four and a half hours, or perhaps less.”
The officers looked uncomfortable, and many of them allowed themselves significant looks at the Gate where Rollondar’s forces waited. Adron, seeing this, added, “It may be that they will not attack us before that time.”
“Your Highness thinks not?” said one of the older officers.
Adron shrugged. “Rollondar is cagey and wise, but he does not know what I am doing. He may wait and try to discover what I have here, in which case there will be no attack until the spell begins to take effect.”
“Well, and then?” said another officer.
“And then it will already be too late. Perhaps half an hour, perhaps more, until all is over.”
“That is not so long,” said the officer.
Adron shrugged. “Any more questions?”
There were none.
“Then let us form ranks,” he said. “When all is ready, I shall begin the enchantment.”
At about this same time, Tazendra said, “It is demeaning to have to make one’s own klava.”
“How,” said Aerich, frowning. “Demeaning?”
“She means,” said Pel, “that it is humiliating.”
“I do not comprehend,” said Aerich.
“It is humiliating,” said Pel, smiling, “because it has been so long since she was required to do so that she has forgotten how.”
Tazendra grunted. “Well, that may be.”
“However,” added the Yendi. “I have not, and so if you will permit me—”
“Gladly,” said Tazendra.
As it happened, it was Aerich who ground the beans while Pel boiled the water. Some time later, then, Khaavren came down the stairs to the smell of good, fresh klava. For a moment he was confused to find no one there, until he realized from the soft sounds of conversation above that his friends were gathered in what had once been Aerich’s room.
“Hullo, my friends,” he called. “I will join you when I have poured a cup of klava.”
“Bah!” called Tazendra. “We have the pot warm up here, and a cup ready for you.”
There could be no answer to this argument, so Khaavren at once went back up the stairs to Aerich’s room, where he gratefully accepted his cup and sat in the chair that, by custom, had been his in the old days. He said, “My friends, do you know that it has been five hundred years since we have all been gathered together in the same place?”
Aerich nodded, “Let it not be five hundred years before we are so gathered again.”
Tazendra said, “These pleasantries are all very well, but I am burning to hear Khaavren’s plan.”
“How,” said Khaavren, “you pretend I have a plan?”
“You always have a plan,” said Tazendra sagaciously.
/> “And moreover,” said Pel, “Aerich indicated that you had one when he returned last night.”
“It is impossible to fool our Aerich,” said Khaavren.
“Well?” said Tazendra.
“Yes, I have a plan.”
“Ah, so much the better,” said Tazendra.
“Then let us hear it,” said Pel. “For I confess that I am as anxious as Tazendra to know what you wish us to do.”
Khaavren nodded, then paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. At last he said, “There will be a battle this morning.”
“Of this,” said Pel, “I am not unaware.”
“Nor am I,” said Aerich.
“Nor I,” added Tazendra.
“Well, that is where I wish to go.”
“That is your plan?” said Tazendra. “To fight in a battle? Well, I am entirely in accord with this idea. Yet, as a plan, I hardly think—”
“Hush, Tazendra,” said Pel amiably. “That is not Khaavren’s plan.”
“Oh,” said Tazendra, sounding disappointed.
Aerich maintained his habitual silence.
“What are you smiling about?” said Pel.
Khaavren shook his head, “It seems as if five centuries have simply vanished, and we are here as we always were.”
Aerich gave the smallest smile, Pel saluted, and Tazendra threw her head back and laughed.
“But go on,” said Pel. “Let us hear this famous plan.”
“Yes, yes,” said Tazendra. “Let us hear it.”
“It is very simple,” said Khaavren. “In the first place, you must know that Lord Adron is a rebel.”
“That is clear,” said Pel.
“And that, if he is defeated, he must be arrested.”
“That follows naturally,” said Pel.
“As Captain of the Guard, it is my duty to arrest him.”
They all nodded.
“His Majesty, in fact, has told me that I am responsible for this.”
They waited.
“What I do not understand,” said Khaavren, “is why it is necessary to await the end of the battle before arresting our friend the Prince.”
“Bah!” said Tazendra. “Does one arrest one’s friends?”
“Sometimes,” said Aerich.
“And yet,” said Tazendra. “To make an arrest, well, it is not much of a plan.”
“Tazendra does not comprehend,” pronounced Pel.
“My dear,” said Khaavren, “I speak of arresting him in the midst of a battle. That is, of finding a way past the lines of fine Dragonlords bent on slaughtering one another, and Teckla waiting to be slaughtered, and then meeting up with Lord Adron, and taking him away.”
“Oh,” said Tazendra. She considered. “That is rather different.”
“Indeed,” said Pel. He smiled. “It will certainly make an adventure, if we can do it.”
“If we can do it?” said Khaavren. “Cha! We are all of us together. What could stop us?”
“Well, I nearly think I agree with you,” said Pel.
“Come, Aerich, what do you think?”
“In truth,” said the Lyorn, “it does not please me to arrest His Highness, a man I revere, and a friend for whom I have no small regard. And yet—”
“Well, and yet?”
“For reasons that I cannot speak of, even to you, my friends, think we not only should, but must get to Adron, and arrest him, before he can—that is, as soon as possible. Indeed, I’d have proposed something like it myself, only, as I am no longer a guardsman, I have no authority to make arrests. But in Khaavren’s company, and with Khaavren as our Captain, well, I no longer have any objection to make.”
Khaavren nodded. Though he wondered at the dire hints contained in the Lyorn’s speech, he knew better than to ask about matters concerning which Aerich preferred to remain mute. He said, “And you, Tazendra?”
“How, me?”
“Yes. Do you like the plan?”
“My dear Khaavren, five hundred years ago, the four of us were near to facing an army of Easterners. Do you remember?”
“Why, yes,” said Khaavren. “As it happens, this event has not escaped my memory. What of it?”
“Well, since that time, I have often regretted that we did not have the opportunity to fight that army; it would have been a glorious thing.”
“And then?”
“This time, instead of an army of Easterners, it is an army of Dragonlords—moreover, an army of His Highness’s crack troops.”
“And so you are for it?”
“With my whole heart.”
“Then we are agreed?” said Khaavren.
“Agreed,” said Aerich.
“Agreed,” said Pel.
“Agreed,” said Tazendra.
“In that case,” said Khaavren, standing, “we must be on our way at once. It is dawn, and we must be past the wall before the battle is joined.”
As the Breath of Fire Battalion forms its ranks, we will turn our attention to a district of the City called Catchman Tower; so called because it was dominated by the slender spire of a tower built during the Twelfth Chreotha Reign by Lord Catchman. The tower, in fact, served no useful purpose, but, made of pale white stone polished smooth as glass, it was not unattractive. The district was not, in fact, in the Underside, but was rather just to the east, bounded by the Street of the Tsalmoth, and it was a short distance from the Street of the Tsalmoth that a group of urchins from the Underside, having ventured out of their district in the excitement of the night, were amusing themselves by throwing stones and other objects at a squadron of four guardsmen of the White Sash Battalion. We are not unaware of the ironic resonance that the contrived riot and the real uprising were instigated similarly—that is, by young people throwing things at the police. Yet it is significant that, in one case, it was the humiliation of rotten vegetables, while in the other, it was the far deeper humiliation of death, for, by chance, one of these stones, thrown by an unusually burly Teckla youth with a good eye, struck a guardsman named Heth square in the forehead with such force that he was killed on the spot.
Without consultation, the other three guardsmen left him there and set off in pursuit of the urchins, who had begun running upon seeing Heth fall. The guardsmen were faster and the distance was not great, but, turning into an alley, the urchins ducked into the first house they came to, which was shared by six families of Teckla, who worked at the clothing mill by the canal. It happened that the clothing mill had been shut down two days before, and so all of the Teckla were both frightened and angry. Upon hearing the commotion, they opened their door in time to see, not the urchins (who were hiding in a basement storage room) but six guardsmen with weapons drawn and blood in their eyes.
The Teckla, as will happen on occasion, were angrier at the intrusion than they were frightened at the guardsmen, and moreover, counting only those of a reasonable age, they outnumbered the guardsmen by some twenty-eight to three—they greeted the guardsmen, then, with sticks, brooms, kitchen knives, and whatever else was to hand.
The guardsmen, chased into the street, called for help, and it happened that help was available, for there were two other squadrons of four within earshot.
The Teckla called for help as well, and there were some hundreds of Teckla, as well as no small number of tradesmen of other houses, who were also within earshot.
The Five Hour Uprising had begun.
Chapter the Thirty-first
Which Treats of Uprisings
In General and Specific
With Special Emphasis on Their Effects
On Heroes and Brigands
In Providing Distractions, and
In Making It Difficult to Cross the Street.
IT IS COMMONLY BELIEVED BY the shallow and the ignorant that human attitude, character, and opinion is immutable. Even those who, in their own lifetimes, observe the wearing away of stone, the eroding of mountains, and the shifting of rivers, will go so far as to say that an entire group of people—
a thousand times more volatile than our stone, mountain, or river—is this way or that way, holds these opinions or subscribes to those beliefs; thus not only committing the error of seeing a populace as an organism not made up of countless and vital divisions and differences, but also failing to see that the opinions of masses of people, when subjected to sudden changes in their circumstances, can alter more quickly than the color of the Orb can respond to a change in the spirits of the Emperor. Needless to say, such people have only the most absurd and foolish explanations for the Five Hour Uprising that occurred on the seventeenth day of the month of the Vallista in Dragaera City and her surrounding districts.
For example, we have heard from one that it was a vast conspiracy on the part of the Jhereg—certain proof that that historian, who shall remain nameless, has yet to become acquainted with the Cycle. Another has suggested certain intoxicants accidentally making their way into the water supply—which gives us to wonder: Where exists this water supply unanimously drunk by Teckla and tradesmen, yet never tasted by the nobility? We have even heard it suggested that Adron himself deliberately worked for this end—Adron, be it understood, who had only the vaguest notion that there even was such a thing as a populace.
But leaving aside such theories, it is certainly the case that to see such a drastic change occur so quickly, and with so little warning, will, no doubt, surprise many readers; in fact, we should not be surprised to learn that some readers have thought that we ought to have better prepared them for so shocking a revelation, and that there are facts of which we have kept the reader ignorant, and that, in effect, we have ill-used the reader by withholding these statistics. To any such reader we tender our sincere regrets.
Yet those who hold these opinions ought to remember, in the first place, that nearly to a man, all of those who dwelt in the city at that time, even those who had—like the drops from the two-minute clock-fountain in the Lyorn Court—been predicting exactly such occurrences for centuries—and predicting them, be it understood, always for some day in the nebulous future—were taken entirely by surprise. Khaavren, in fact, who made it a matter of policy to be in touch with the pulse, as it were, of the city, had not expected the eruption as soon as, or with the violence with which, it actually occurred. The one exception, in fact, was Grita, who lived in the worst area of the city and consorted with all manner of shady characters, and had been working for some time to bring about exactly this result; although, as the reader will discover, even she was amazed at the suddenness and ferocity of the spontaneous outburst against order and decency that took hold of the minds of the population.