South of the Trellane barony in Imperial Orstaf, and beyond the southern peaks of the Great Girding Mountains lie the realms of Old Daul, the Kingdom of the River Nan.
From north to south along the western border of Daul with the grim and tangled wilderness known as the Vod Wilds, lie the highland province of Heftiga, the fertile forest valleys of ancient Chengdea, and finally the sultry delta of Nanshea. It is there that the great river empties into the Noroth Channel separating the continent from the hard-scrabble coast of Kandala to the south. There on the Nan’s open mouth is the city the Daulmen have long called Larbonne, though its foundations date from a time long before Daul, or the Empire of the Code, or any other country had its name on a map. Once upon a time that city was Ribin, one of the great Channel ports of the ancient Ettaceans, the very first among the Norothian races of Men to make of themselves a nation.
The Ettaceans were long gone of course, and by the look of things in the city of Larbonne, the Dauls might not be long in following their forebears beyond the veil of history.
The war between Daul and Ayzantium, the River Kingdom’s less-than-neighborly neighbor to the southeast had lasted for nearly three decades, raging or simmering from season to season and year to year. What had been constant was the slow grinding down of Daulic power, from the loss of her knightly host on the Icheroon to the siege and fall of Roseille, Larbonne’s sister port to the east. That had been followed by the Zantish occupation of the Chirabis peninsula between the two ports.
Now in the twenty-eighth year of the war, the Ayzants had come to the last sliver of Daul’s coastline, and invested her last great port. Through spring and summer they had seized the docks and much of the lower city, trapping the remnant of the Daulic garrison in the sprawling castle complex atop three hills. There, towers and curtain walls of beige sandstone rose atop older Ettacean works of gray granite that had stood witness to a multitude of battles, defenses, and occasional massacres, ever since men first decided that this was a good place to live, and other men thought they were right.
Yet all was not well among the invaders either. Governance in Ayzantium rested on a tripartite divide of Royalist Kingsmen, Dragon Cultists, and the Fire Priests of Red Ayon, and the army was likewise a tenuous merger of differing interests and authorities. Further, three decades of war and foreign occupation had dissipated the blood of Ayzantium’s sons, and so a large portion of the host besieging Larbonne was not Zantish at all, but were rather mercenaries drawn in most part from the petty and squabbling Riven Kingdoms. One such unit, chartered from Kanalborg, was an outfit called Rierden’s Axes. It had a paper strength of almost a regiment, though after six months in Larbonne it surely fielded less men than that. Colonel Rierden had not been reporting his losses to his Ayzant masters, in the hope that at the conclusion of the campaign he and his survivors would be overpaid.
Such subterfuge was possible as the Axes had been broken up and parceled out in platoons for months, scattered around gaps in the siege lines in small groups, some of which had not seen an officer of their own above Leftenant rank in weeks. One such band had found itself stationed for the last ten days near the far northern end of the lines, where the Ayzants’ slapdash fortifications anchored on the river before wrapping east around the land-side of the city to reach the water again at the scorched remains of the dockyards to the south. On a flat-topped ridge separated by a sharp and deep ravine from the taller central hills where the defenders hunkered in their beige stone works stood the shell of an old Daulic manor house, into which an Ayzant artillery unit had been trying to emplace a battery for a week. As recently as a season ago the manor had been surrounded by gardens and rows of ornamental spruce that were all gone now, leaving the ground torn and gaping, Such trunks and limbs as were not hauled off by the Ayzants for fuel now formed a spiky log-and-abatis barricade atop the edge of the ravine, facing the castle walls high above.
A squad of sixteen Axes held the salient where the barricade met an old stone wall that ran off in the wrong direction to be of any use to the besiegers. Some Ayzant officer had ordered them not to tear down the wall and shift the stones, though no one knew why. Camp for the axmen was a cluster of tent-halves and lean-tos erected in the hollowed-out bowl where once a surely magnificent tree had grown. The craterous hole was deep and close enough behind the barricade that the occasional plunging arrow or bolt from the Dauls across the way had only killed one man and wounded two over the last ten days. By way of return fire, Rierden’s Axes had shouted a great deal of profanity in Kanalborg Common.
Shortly after dawn on the Seventeenth Day of Eighth Month, narrow sunlight plunged the ravine into shadow even as it made the Daulic wall across and above shine with a warm golden hue. A man with dirt deep under his fingernails and in his bushy black hair crawled out from under a torn tent-half in the bottom of the hole, looking like a sleepy mole groping out of its burrow. He negotiated the small pile of equipment before the shelter, consisting of ring-mail armor with the links sown onto a long leather jerkin crusted with old sweat, a helmet of Ayzant origins with the spike broken off, hobnail boots, a crossbow with a worn stock, and of course a battleaxe. The man stood up slowly to grunt and stretch in a patched, colorless tunic with threadbare sleeves, and faded-blue cloth trousers that threatened to slide to his knees as his suspenders were undone beneath the tunic. He yawned deeply, and probably would have belched if he’d had anything significant to eat or drink lately.
“Axman Zebulon Baj Nif,” said a voice from nearby. “Your appearance is a credit to the military professionalism of Rierden’s glorious Axes. As, I am sure, is your odor.”
Zeb grinned and scratched the scraggly beard on his chin, blinking in the meager sunlight until finding his Leftenant sitting with two of the other boys around a cold fire pit, above which was nevertheless suspended a dented iron coffee pot. They lit no fires at night, and had not seen any coffee in a week at least. Yet the pot still waited hopefully, hanging from a taut rope between two Daulic swords driven into the rocky ground.
“Is there any coffee?” Zeb asked, which someone asked every morning. He was answered as always with groans and curses. The men all spoke Kanalborg Common as that city was the theoretical home of the unit, though their native tongues numbered nearly as many as all the various principalities, theocracies, colonies, and simple warlord strongholds lumped together as The Riven Kingdoms. Zebulon Baj Nif, for one, was a native of the old Danorian colony of Wakminau. Kanalborg Common was something like his fourth or fifth language, though after two years with the Axes he could rend the air with its curse words like a native.
“Permission to unleash a python, my Leftenant?” Zeb asked, scratching now at his groin.
“Denied, due to lack of same,” the blonde Leftenant said dryly. “But you may walk your garter snake up to the top of the pit as you like. And piss out, you Minauan savage.”
“Toward the enemy, to make my Colonel proud.” Zeb saluted before working his suspenders into place and turning to put his boots on.
“You suppose Colonel Rierden’s getting any coffee up at headquarters?” one of the men sitting by the Leftenant asked. His officer looked at him sourly.
“Soldier, is this your very first day in the army?”
Zeb chuckled, and made his way up the side of the great hole sheltering the small camp. Rough steps had been kicked in the dirt wall, but he was still obliged to grab the occasional remnant of tree root poking out of the side to get to the top. Once there, he took a moment to relish a deep breath, freed for a moment by a breeze from the tang of men who had been sleeping in mud for weeks.
The view from the ridge had surely been lovely this time last year, but the siege had left Larbonne splayed like a beaten animal. Cobble-stone streets that had been swept daily once upon a time were now choked with refuse. The faces of homes and shops gaped like toothless mouths with the windows and doors bashed in, and only torn earth remained where trees and hedges had once been tended. A pall of smoke hung over the town this dawn, n
ot just from a multitude of cooking fires and kitchen wagons but from several great conflagrations spread around the place. They were kept burning day and night by the Ayzant Fire Priests in reverence to their incendiary god. From the ridge top, Zeb could see at least five great columns of roiling black smoke, all feeding the pall that flecked the riverside with dark ashes like falling snow.
Stepping up onto the barricade of tree trunks and sharpened branches that lay along the ravine’s rim, Zeb wondered how long it would be before somebody returned to haul all of this wood away to feed hungry Ayon as well, and what exactly the men were supposed to do for shelter after that. With the height of the Daulic citadel across the ravine, only the combination of barricade and camps-in-holes shielded the men stationed here to any extent from long, arcing bowshots. Given the distance an archer could scarcely draw a bead on any one man, but they had not needed to do so when the besiegers had been packed close together. Looking to his left Zeb noted that the barricade extending all the way to the manor house was still empty. There had been a battalion of Ayzant infantry posted along there until a week’s worth of losing as many as a dozen men a day to sniping had convinced their absentee commanders to draw them off to the other side of the ridge. This left no one but the Axes on post, but it was not as though the Dauls were about to clamber down their walls, slide down the far side of the ravine, climb back up this one, and actually attack here.
Such were Zeb’s thoughts as he stepped to the end of a log and started to undo the drawstring of his trousers, looking at the top of the wall across the way with no particular concern. He heard a hiss below his perch and thought - snake? - with more appetite than worry, and leaned out to look down into the blue eyes of a man with a face brown with mud, a tight leather skullcap on his head. He was pointing a gun up at Zeb.
It was a matchlock. The pan flashed and Zeb had just started to throw his arms forward when the charge flared. There was a flash, a bang, and a lead ball the size of a walnut tore into Zeb’s right elbow, passing out the other side.
Bone splintered and blood spattered Zeb in the face but there was a brief moment before it hurt. Stumbling back off the barricade he managed to bawl “Handgunners!” before his heel caught a branch and he went over backwards, left arm wind-milling and right flopping at an unnatural angle. He crashed to his back and as his ruined elbow banged the ground a rushing sound filled Zeb’s ears as though he had a seashell up to each. The blue sky above shimmered in his sight like a blanket strung up to have the dust beaten out of it.
Zeb screamed in no language and cursed in three or four.
It was a point of more chagrin than pride to Zebulon Baj Nif (“Warchild” in his native tongue), that he had received many, many wounds on as many battlefields over his martial career. This was not Zeb’s first encounter with pain so brutal and absolute that his body wanted to eschew consciousness rather than deal with it. But now, as then, a part of Zeb knew that escape from the moment would likely be fatal. Clenching his teeth against more screams, he centered himself until the sky stopped shimmering, drew in and released a long breath that at least took the roaring in his ears away with it, if not the fire in his arm.
He could hear again. Shouts from the Axes in the hole and grunting Daulmen dragging themselves up and over the barricade. Then he saw one, maybe the fellow who had shot him but probably not, as this particular mud-spattered figure in leather jerkin and breeches held a still-charged handgun. It was a crude device, no more than a short pipe on a wooden stock, with a pan requiring the shooter to touch it with a smoldering fuse rather than a mechanical lock with a match and trigger. Strange the detail Zeb noted at present, as the shooter pointed the weapon at him. But only for a moment. The half-dressed man turning much whiter than his dirty undershirt in an expanding pool of his own blood did not look like a threat. The shooter passed by Zeb to level his weapon at someone else down in the hole.
Before the powder in the pan hissed Zeb drew up one leg and kicked the fellow in the knee, or at least pushed against it with the bottom of his foot. It was enough and the man staggered as his gun discharged in a welter of white smoke, the ball passing harmlessly sideways. The fellow growled, baring teeth starkly white against the mud coating his face for concealment in the night. He dropped the gun and pulled a long dirk from his belt. Zeb had the man’s full attention now, and he uttered the first and likely last Daulic phrase that came to mind.
“Biera ephso vus tatte. Ven otre.”
Beer, if you have it. Wine otherwise.
The fellow raised an eyebrow, but also his blade. Zeb closed his eyes and heard a piercing impact, though he felt nothing. He opened one eye and saw the Daulman stumbling backwards with a crossbow bolt buried in his forehead. The man toppled off the barricade and down into the ravine.
The Axes were there, boiling angrily out of the hole to fall on the Dauls with shouts and hacks. Handguns were fired but there was no time to reload, and dirks fared poorly against the double-headed battleaxes favored by Rierden’s men. There was scuffle and clash during which Zeb laid prostrate and bled, managing to do no more then slowly move his left arm across his chest to grip his right hard above the ruined elbow. Even the slight motion of his arm against the ground sent a new wave of blaring pain over him, swimming the sky and making air hiss out between his teeth like a kettle.
After moments that seemed much longer, Zeb’s leftenant appeared over him. He shouted for a tourniquet, then knelt and clamped both hands around Zeb’s arm.
“It could be worse,” the Leftenant said. Zeb looked at him with the one eye he still had open.
“How do you figure, sir?”
“Well…they could have shot me.”
An Axman, Mollka by name, appeared with a torn strip of tent cloth and set about tying it tight around Zeb’s upper arm just under the shoulder. Despite the Leftenant holding the arm as steady as he could, the grinding of pulverized bone elicited a choking groan and Zeb’s heels scraped against the ground.
“Molly,” Zeb said. “After they cut my arm off, I am going to beat you with it. Soundly, sir.”
Mollka grinned as he worked. “I doubt it not, laddy.”
“Five!” another Axman shouted from nearby. “Not but five of them! What by the Ennead was the point of that?”
“Only five stayed and fought,” the Leftenant said. “Another half-dozen ran off toward the manor.” He exchanged a nod with Mollka, gently released Zeb’s arm and patted his left shoulder. The Leftenant stood up and along with the men looked in the direction of the manor house. Zeb found that by turning his head sideways and looking along the ground between their legs he could just see the place himself.
The once grand stone house of some Larbonnese noble had suffered under the siege almost as much as had the surrounding yard. Glass and shutters were gone but the windows had been covered with canvas to obscure what was being done under the gabled roof from the view of the Daulic works across the ravine. That had been obvious anyway, from the noise. Over the last week since the arrival of an Ayzant artillery battalion on the ridge top, the brawny men had been tearing out interior walls and floors, tossing mortar and refuse out to turn the whole building into a hollow shell. Then three days ago, after dark and with no torchlight, straining mule teams had arrived bearing on two great wagons two long, dark shapes under sailcloth, which were in turn muscled within the house through holes bashed in the back wall. Night before last, the sweating artillerymen had borne heavy chests up the ridge and inside, and finally last night they had come rolling barrel after barrel.
Now with at least a half-dozen Daulmen already inside the building, a stream of swarthy artillerymen could be seen fleeing out the back and away with all haste, red cloth trousers flashing.
“They’re going to fire the powder kegs,” someone said, and the Leftenant sighed.
“This is going to be very loud.”
“Does anyone feel up to carrying me down into the hole?” Zeb asked.
Across the distance came the
dull bang of a handgun and the men all flinched, but it was followed only by shouting and the clash of arms, echoing from the hollowed-out cavern of the manor. There was a clear, pained scream.
“The redlegs have all cleared out,” someone said. “Who is it at that?”
“Maybe the Daulies are fighting over who gets to light the fuse.”
Men fingered their axes and crossbows, but no one felt like rushing toward a building that might ignite explosively at any instant. It seemed to have gone quiet over there anyway. A minute passed that seemed much longer.
“Who’s this, then?” someone said.
The men watched a figure exit the manor and approach but from his position Zeb could not see who came, and he was becoming too lightheaded to ask. The voices of his companions were making little sense to him.
“Is that a Destroyer?”
“No, they wear black plate with spikes.”
“That is part of a helmet, right? Not your man’s face?”
“What’s with the birds?”
“Good gods, is that a woman behind him?”
“That’s a Farthest Westerner, else I’m an elf.”
The Leftenant stepped to the front of the band, the others moving aside for him. Zeb saw the subject of speculation arrive, and was himself perplexed.
In addition to too many wounds and more than enough battle, Zeb had seen a great deal of armor over his military career. Leather cuirbolli, plate and chain, banded and splint. Scale and studded. Spiked and hobnailed and bronzed. But he had never seen anything quite like that adorning the man who stepped up to face the Leftenant.
It was beautiful, in its way, and altogether more complicated than seemed strictly necessary. It was composed of angular pieces, light blue to a dark gray and laced together with reddish cord, oversized at the joints to turn aside any thrusting or cutting blade. It covered the fellow almost from head to toe. Decorating the chest, arms, and legs were single rows of stylized images of white birds, little herons or cranes with wings that seemed to flutter as the man strode forward. At his waist were two sheathed swords, black pommels with matching diamond-pattern designs, one sword much longer than the other. On his head was a great helm with long neck guards extending around a banded steel dome, framing a leather half-mask of grinning lips and a pronounced, hooked nose, above which the man’s own dark eyes were set deeply beneath his brow, and at a slight tilt. They flashed about at the Axmen before settling on the Leftenant in their fore. The stranger stopped and undid the cords at one side of his half-mask, dropping it to hang free from his helmet and revealing a full face of olive complexion and indeterminate age, with a hard line of mouth framed by a long, wispy black mustache. He spoke with a thick accent.
“Zay-bu-ron Baj-an-if.”
Zeb would have winced had he not been doing so already. A few of his fellows glanced at him, but at least none of them actually turned around and pointed.
“Pardon me?” the Leftenant asked.
Everyone’s attention was on the swordsman, though the fellow was not alone. Two more people had followed him from the manor and now reached the cluster of men, one a frowning Ayzant in the silver armor of a Kingsman and the spiked helmet of a sergeant, carrying a large mace. The other now drew many stares from the Axmen who had been staring only at each other for weeks.
She was a woman and pretty, though she could have been far more so. She was as Far Western as the swordsman with fine narrow features and eyes at a graceful tilt under thin, jet black brows. But she was garbed rather rudely in a battered, shapeless brown coat from throat to thighs, with patches on the elbows matching those on the knees of worn cloth leggings. She wore gray woolen socks and strapped sandals with wooden soles that clopped even on the bare ground. Finally her hair was just a fright, a tangled mass of inky black, unkempt and unacquainted with a brush.
The swordsman said something in a foreign tongue to her, barked a command really, and she spoke in halting Codian. That language was close enough to Kanalborg Common to be understood by the Axemen.
“Is one of you men called as Zebulon Baj Nif?”
No one, bless their hearts, said anything. Neither did they glance again at Zeb, who for his part continued to bleed quietly.
The Ayzant sergeant started bellowing, in Zantish naturally, which of the group Zeb alone understood as he knew the related Ghendalese dialect. His Leftenant did not turn around to ask Zeb for a translation, but with a sigh Zeb started speaking anyway, from habit.
“He says they have it from Colonel Rierden himself that this is the post of the platoon of Leftenant Kagsfold, under whom is ordered the soldier Zebulon Warchild, who himself has knowledge of both the Zantish and Codian tongues.”
Zeb blinked.
“So, I’ve pretty much just given myself away then, haven’t I?”
Indeed, the woman frowned at him and stepped forward. Zeb liked to think his fellows might have moved to obstruct either the swordsman or the sergeant, but they politely if uncertainly moved aside for the woman. She knelt and looked closely at Zeb’s arm. Her face and neck could have stood a washing, Zeb noticed, though of course so could his.
“You are wounded.” she said.
“That is what they tell me. I am trying not to look at it.”
“It is very bad.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
The woman spoke over her shoulder and the swordsman snapped an answer. The Westerners’ language between themselves was a rush of short vowels, similar in sound to what Zeb had heard a time or two from an excitable half-Zokuan bartender he knew in Bowgan, the only Far Westerner he had ever met. Zoku, the Celestial Empire of Cho Lung, and the islands of Ashinan were the three fabled realms located far, far to the west of Noroth and Kandala, beyond even the Miilark Islands and all the way across the vastness of what was accurately known as the Interminable Ocean.
“Lie still,” the woman said.
“Well, if you insist…” Zeb began, but stopped with a sharp intake of breath as the woman laid one cool hand on his forehead, and jammed the fingers of the other into the shredded remains of his right elbow.
The seashell roar returned, the rising sun blazed and washed out the sky, and a wall of pain allowed not even a peep through it. But it was only for an instant, and then Zeb felt as if all his remaining blood was draining out of his body and sinking into the ground. The pain went with it, but so did his awareness. He felt himself sliding into a void.
“Are you…are you a priestess?” he managed. The last thing Zeb could see, and that but dimly, were the woman’s two narrowed eyes. He heard her voice in the darkness.
“No.”
The Sable City Page 12