“By whom?”
“I don’t know. It was dark, and they approached me outside my brother’s house.”
He was lying about that, Dainyl knew.
Herryf paused, then asked, “What was this message of great import?”
“Some of the growers to the north think that the Cadmians are there to take their lands.”
“How would they do that?” Herryf shook his head. “Some people will believe anything.”
“Sir, they say that the Cadmians will keep searching until they find weapons and rebels. Then whatever growers where they’re found will be accused of supporting the rebels and sent to the mines, and their lands put up for sale, or maybe just turned over to the council. The colonel spent a lot of time with the guilds and the director…”
Herryf frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Alectors don’t care that much about lands or trade. Why would they… ?”
“Sir, I didn’t say it made sense. That’s what some of them feel.”
About that, Dainyl could sense, Benjyr was absolutely convinced.
“I’ll have to talk to Majer Vaclyn. He won’t listen, but I’ll have to talk to him.”
“What about the colonel, sir?”
“There’s no point in that, except to alert him. He’d deny anything. If the alectors aren’t involved, he would say that they weren’t. If they are, he’ll say the same.”
‘Two more miners escaped yesterday,“ Benjyr said quietly.
“How? There’s an extra company of Cadmians guarding the mine road.”
“No one knows. They were missing when they were mustered to march back to quarters. Every span of the mine was searched.”
“They must have been hiding somewhere, and then they escaped the stockade after dark.” Herryf glared at the captain. “This sort of thing makes us look incompetent, and it adds to the illusion that there is some sort of overwhelming force against us.”
“But… sir… you reported…”
“I reported we needed an additional company of Cadmians to deal with the escapees, and that, in time, unless we got a permanent addition to the compound, the escaped miners would present a problem. I wish I’d never made the report. I was told—told, mind you, Captain—that I was reporting an insurrection and to expect a full Cadmian battalion and a Myrmidon observer.”
Behind his Talent-shield, Dainyl frowned. That was what he had been told by the Highest, and he had conveyed that to Herryf in one fashion or another, but Herryf seemed to be telling Benjyr the truth about what he had reported to the marshal—or the Submarshal.
Herryf stood. “I need to walk around the compound, to be seen. You might as well accompany me.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the captain.
Dainyl waited until they had left before slipping out of the study and the headquarters building.
32
From the saddle of the chestnut, as the company headed westward, Mykel glanced across the ramshackle sheds and run-down holder’s dwelling that served as a base for the Fifteenth Company. They had spent almost a week patrolling in and around Jyoha, without ever seeing a rebel or an escaped mine prisoner. That might have been because Fourteenth Company and Dohark had captured the few that were careless or less adept at avoiding the Cadmians.
Fifteenth Company had seen plenty of hoofprints, but neither the horses that made them nor the men who rode those mounts. In following tracks and patrolling the roads, they had lost two mounts to the poisoned stakes in the concealed pits in various lanes and roads, and two troopers had been injured when the mounts went down. Four others had been stung by nightwasps and had turned up with fevers and welts the size of a man’s hand.
“I’ll keep fourth and fifth squads with me,” Mykel said to Bhoral, confirming what he had told the senior squad leader earlier. “After I talk with some of the crafters in the village, we’ll look at that lane that winds up toward the ruins of the old sawmill.”
“Still don’t understand that,” replied Bhoral. “They built the sawmill, and the Myrmidons burned it down? Why would they do that?”
“That’s one of the things I’m going to try to find out.”
He’d already tried talking to some of the crafters and found out next to nothing, but he’d kept looking and listening, and now he was ready to try again.
Short of the town, Bhoral and the first three squads split away, and Mykel and his smaller contingent continued westward. The fields on each side of the lane into Jyoha were filled with plants, supposedly all sunbeans. The beans were actually oilseeds that, when pressed, provided a golden oil that was used for lamps across Dramur. Some was shipped to Southgate as well, according to the grower who had leased the run-down and near-abandoned holding to Third Battalion. Mykel had seldom seen any workers in the fields, but the sunbeans didn’t seem to require much care, and that might have been why they had displaced other crops.
The houses on the east side of Jyoha were one story and of mud brick, unlike the cut-stone dwellings in Dramuria. The roofs were of faded red tiles. Some houses had been plastered with stucco, then washed with pastel colors, mostly blues and greens; but that had been sometime ago, for the wash had faded, and the red showed through, giving the walls a pinkish tinge.
The three women doing wash by a well looked away as the Cadmians neared, and another mother scurried out from a small one-room dwelling and scooped up a bare-bottomed toddler and carted her back into the mud-brick hut, closing the warped plank door firmly.
Several men stood on the dusty porch of the one tavern in Jyoha, whose doors were closed. Two stared at Mykel. He looked back until they dropped their eyes.
Mykel reined up outside the chandlery, then turned to Dravadyl and Vhanyr, the fourth and fifth squad leaders. “Ride around the village and see if you can spot anything interesting. Swing back here in half a glass.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Try not to shoot anyone.” Mykel offered a wry grin. “We don’t need any more pits dug in the roads.”
“We won’t—not unless they shoot first,” replied Dravadyl.
The captain dismounted and tied the chestnut to the hitching post, two squat pillars built of mud bricks connected by a rusty iron bar. He crossed the narrow porch and stepped into the chandlery, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness. For the last few days, he’d stopped there every day and bought something, usually some item of provisions that he turned over to one squad leader or another. After dismounting and tying the chestnut to the rail, he made his way inside.
A man not that much older than he was stood in one corner, rearranging some cotton shirts folded on a corner table. In a village as small and as isolated as Jyoha, the chandlery carried far more items than it would in Dramuria, but fewer of each. Mykel didn’t recall there even being a chandlery in Faitel, not that he’d ever seen.
“Good morning, Harnyck,” Mykel offered.
“Morning, Captain.” The man’s voice was even, neither friendly nor unfriendly.
Mykel walked to the case that served, after a fashion, as a cooler, where he selected a small round of hard yellow cheese. Holding it up, he asked, “How much?”
“For that one, seeing as it’s you, Captain, two silvers.”
“Since I don’t want special treatment, Harnyck,” Mykel bantered back, “how about one.”
“You’re not talking like a good Cadmian officer, Captain. That’s the kind of bargain a smuggler would force on a father needing milk for a starving bairn.”
“I’m glad you think so highly of me. A silver and two.”
“You give me one and three, and it’s yours.” Mykel threw up his hands. “What can I do? One and three.” He fumbled in his wallet, then extracted the coins. Harnyck took them.
“I was wondering if you could help me.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Information. Not about people. About the town.”
“Might be able to help.” The man refolded a shirt, brushing off a small cobweb and setting it back on
the table. “Might not.”
“What did people grow out east before the sunbeans?”
“They tried the casaran trees, but the soil’s not right. What nuts they got were too bitter. Not even the oldest nag would eat fodder with them in it. Then they tried wheat corn, but the rust got it. The growers like the sunbeans because they don’t take much work until harvest, and you get two crops a year here.”
“You know what happened to the old sawmill?”
“The Myrmidons burned it. No secret about that. Old man Baholyn decided the pines in the hills would make good cheap timber, and he bought out the lands to the west. Didn’t pay more than a few coppers a stead square. Once he had the land, he built the mill. He’d been running it a quint less than a year, sending timber to Dramuria, and coins were flowing in here for the first time ever. Then two pteri-dons dropped right out of the sky. One of those big alectors walked up to him and told him to close the sawmill and to stop cutting the timber.” The chandler laughed. “Baholyn bowed and said he would. You don’t argue with them.”
“No, you don’t,” Mykel agreed. “But why did they burn it?”
“He closed down for a week, maybe two, and then he started running it at night. He did everything at night, even carted the cut timbers and planks down to another barn on the edge of town. I guess he figured that nothing would hap-pen if the place looked closed during the day. He got away with it for another quint. Then the pteridons came back and turned their lances on the mill. The Cadmians from Dra-muria were here, too, and they surrounded the town. Ba-holyn hid somewhere. The big alector had the troopers gather everyone in the square, and he made it real clear. The town turned over Baholyn, or there wouldn’t be any town. Gave everyone a glass. Said that every quarter glass that passed after that, they’d torch another house, and they’d start with the biggest.” The man shrugged. “Took a glass and a half before Baholyn’s daughter told ‘em where he was. Her place was next. They flogged him in the square till he was dead, and then they burned his body to ashes.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Not quite ten years.”
“What do people here think about the guano mine?”
“It doesn’t do us much good. The soil here isn’t that good, and we could use the bat shit here, but folks can’t pay what they will in Southgate or wherever they ship it.”
“What about the miners?”
“They say some of them escaped. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Has anyone seen any?”
“No. Don’t know anyone who has. Leastwise, no one who’s talked to me about it.”
“We keep finding tracks of horsemen around Jyoha, but I can’t say that I’ve seen more than one or two people riding. Most use carts or wagons—or walk. Who are the riders?”
“Don’t know as I could say, Captain.”
“I don’t mean names,” Mykel said with a laugh. “I meant… Are they young bloods, the younger sons of growers, riding around because they’ve golds and little else to do? Or are they raiders? Or these rebel miners that everyone talks about and no one seems ever to have seen?”
“Can’t say as I know.”
Mykel laughed. “I know. No one knows, but you’ve prob-ably got a better idea than most How about a guess, Harnyck?”
“Don’t have enough growers around here for bloods. Land’s too piss-poor for even one seltyr. Same’s true for raiders. Same’d seem to be true for rebels, as well.”
“So… who are we talking about?”
“Seems to me, Captain, that you’re doing the talking.”
“You’ve got me again.” Mykel waited.
“Lots of smallholders don’t have coin, can’t pay their land rents. Can’t stay there, neither, or the growers’d catch ‘em and send ’em to Dramuria for a judgment. They’d have to work it off in the mines. Even if they paid off one, there’d be another waiting. Law says you can’t take their land if they spend at least one night a week there. Doesn’t say how long on that night.” Harnyck smiled, brittlely. “What else are they going to do?”
Mykel had the feeling that the chandler was telling the truth, but only because he’d chosen his words carefully. The captain wasn’t sure that he’d learned much of anything when he left the shop. Outside, he only waited a few moments before the two squads returned.
“What did you see?” Mykel asked after he mounted and joined Dravadyl. Followed by the two squads, they rode away from the square and toward the stone bridge over the small creek on the west side of Jyoha.
“Nothing we haven’t seen before. We get the looks that tell us to go away. People keep away, and it’s like any other small town, far as I can figure. Did you have any luck, sir?”
“Not really. The chandler said the Myrmidons burned the sawmill. They also flogged the owner and burned him in the square back there. They told him to close it. He ran it at night.”
“Stupid. You don’t mess with alectors.”
Mykel nodded.
The arched bridge was barely wide enough for two mounts abreast, and the sound of hoofs echoed dully on the stones. Once past the bridge, Mykel ordered, “Scouts out! We’ll take the lane to the left.”
“Scouts out, sir!”
The narrow lane showed few signs of travel, except by livestock, probably the small sheep that were among the few domestic animals besides horses resistant to the night-wasps. Less than five hundred yards up the lane, the meadows ended, replaced by low trees, the tallest no more than head high, and all set amid a forest of large stumps.
After rising gently for another hundred yards, the lane leveled and brought them out onto a flatter area, one without trees. It had been the sawmill site. The ground still held depressions that once might have been wagon tracks, and on the left were the ruins of the old sawmill.
Mykel let his eyes rove over the rains. All that was left were the stone sides of the dried-up millrace and the mud-brick walls of the foundation, both blackened from the flame of the skylances. The sunlight glinted off glassy parts of the rained brickwork. Nothing grew around the foundations. The nearest clumps of grass were ten yards from the blackened foundation.
“Ten years ago? Just ten?” asked Dravadyl. “Looks like it happened a lot longer ago.”
Mykel thought so, too, but he knew that the chandler had not been lying.
“Hoofprints here, sir!” called one of the scouts at the south end of the open space. “Squad-sized. Some group as before, looks to be.”
Mykel rode forward to where the scout waited. “How old?”
“Not today. Hasn’t rained since we been here. Could be a week. I’d say more like three-four days.”
“We’ll follow them and see what we can find.”
For a glass and a half, Mykel and the two squads fol-lowed the tracks—carefully—with the pace slower and slower as the lane became a path that turned into a trail through more of the low trees, growing between the stumps of old-growth pines and firs.
“This must have been where they were cutting the trees,” mused Mykel.
“Pretty large ones, sir,” replied Vhanyr, who had moved up to ride with Mykel and Dravadyl. “Like those over there.”
Mykel looked more closely. The shorter trees and seedlings ended less than half a vingt ahead. Beyond that, the taller old-growth pines rose like a brown-and-green wall. The smallest of those giants was thirty yards high.
“Look sharp!” he called to the scouts.
The trail ended in a clearing beside the creek short of the forest to the south. Whoever they had been tracking had used the clearing as a campsite, with cookfires, long since cold.
“They forded the creek and headed into the forest,” reported Dhozynt, the fifth squad scout. “Do you want us to follow them?”
“Not today,” Mykel said. “We’ll head back.”
He wasn’t about to take just two squads into a massive forest he didn’t know, not when they’d had more than enough problems on relatively clear roads and trails. If Ma-
jer Vaclyn wanted that, the majer would have to show up and lead the company into the woods.
Just looking at the giant pines gave Mykel an uneasy feeling, as if there were something beyond. He laughed, softly. There was—a group of rebels with mounts and hostile intentions toward him and his men.
He forced himself not to look over his shoulder as they started the ride back to Jyoha. He would send a report to the majer about what the chandler had said—that the riders were poor men who were trying to keep their lands in bad times.
33
The morning was chill, not so bad as the time Dainyl had been in Blackstear and his breath had been frozen fog—that had been during what the locals had called late spring—but the day promised to be clear. In the early light, the peaks of the Murian Mountains stood out against the silver-green sky when Dainyl crossed the courtyard, wearing his blue flying jacket as he made his way to the officers’ mess.
As always, the pair of local Cadmian officers avoided even looking at him as he seated himself. The steward brought him an ale immediately. He sipped it slowly, thinking about what he had overheard and the patterns revealed by Majer Herryf’s latest reports. Most important of all, while escape attempts had continued, the pattern of those escapes had changed. Far fewer mals were diving off the bridge or trying to climb the stockade. Despite the use of more Cadmians as guards, a greater fraction of the escapees was vanishing without a trace. Both Sturwart and Donasyr had tried to conceal that the escapes had risen significantly in the past few months. Was that because they didn’t want more Myrmidons coming to Dramur? Or because they didn’t want to lose control of the mine to the growers? From his observations, it was also clear that neither the local Cadmians nor the landowners had anything to do with the escapes.
The steward returned with a platter and a basket of bread, slipping them onto the table silently. Dainyl took another swallow of the ale before trying the heavily fried egg toast.
Using Talent to boost his hearing, he listened as he began to eat.
“… still wonder why he’s here…
“… hear that they sent the captain who found those rifles out to chase the escaped prisoners… Jyoha’s the ass end of the east…”
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