The War God's Own wg-2

by David Weber

  "I'd say you're right about that last bit, at least, Milord," Harkon said. "The scum who follow Sharnā have never cared to meet us in battle, and certainly not in anything like equal numbers. They only outnumbered us by three to two here, and if they'd known what we were, they would have bought a lot more swords to help them out."

  "They've certainly avoided this sort of thing in the past," Kaeritha agreed.

  "Aye, and Sharnā's not exactly noted for keeping faith with anyone," Bahzell pointed out. "He'll send his own worshipers to their deaths and laugh unless there's after being something of special value for him in keeping 'em alive, from all I've heard. Like as not the notion of setting them on us without warning them would actually amuse him."

  "But that doesn't mean he doesn't really want to stop us-or you, or the two of you, or even the three of you, counting Wencit," Brandark said. The Bloody Sword rubbed the tip of his truncated ear for a moment, then grimaced. "Phrobus! If I were Sharnā, I'd want the whole lot of you as far away from my plots as I could keep you."

  "Which only emphasizes the importance of our not letting him get away with delaying us," Wencit put in, and Bahzell nodded.

  "My very own thought. But what to do with this lot in the meantime?"

  He twitched his head at the miserable prisoners. The fact that Tomanāk's Code protected them from abuse by their captors didn't seem to have made them feel a great deal better, and he didn't blame them. The code wasn't binding on the Royal and Imperial courts, and brigandage was a hanging offense.

  "I don't see any option, Milord," Harkon said almost apologetically. "We'll have to take them along at least until we meet one of Sir Maehryk's patrols. I don't think they'll slow us, though. We only lost three horses, and our scouts rounded up all of theirs from their camp to replace the losses. Maybe the local magistrate can get more about their employers out of them. Once they're face to face with the courts-and the hangman-they may decide to strike a deal and turn King-Emperor's evidence."

  "I'm afraid Harkon's right about taking them along," Kaeritha said. "But we might be able to get just a tad more information out of them. While I would never encourage anyone to violate the Code, this-" she held up the scorpion "-puts a different color on things." Bahzell looked at her quizzically, and she shrugged. "They don't necessarily know that working for Sharnā doesn't change their status. As servants of Tomanāk it would never do for us to actually lie about that, but if they just happened to get the notion that the Code doesn't protect those who give their allegiance to the Dark Gods, well-"

  She shrugged again, and Bahzell gave an evil laugh. Vaijon and Harkon looked at her as if they weren't certain they'd heard correctly, and Wencit only shook his head, but Brandark sighed. The others looked at him, and he raised one hand to wag an index finger under Kaeritha's nose.

  "Bahzell is clearly a bad influence on you," he told her severely. "The very idea of a champion of Tomanāk suggesting such a subterfuge! I'm shocked-shocked!-that you could so much as think such a thing!"

  "Oh?" Kaeritha's dark blue eyes glinted challengingly. "Does that mean you disapprove?"

  "Of course I don't disapprove-I'm a hradani, Kerry! I just can't help wondering how Tomanāk is going to react to this."

  "Oh, I've a notion he'll grow accustomed," Bahzell said, reclaiming the scorpion and dangling it in front of him while he considered it once more from all angles, then he grinned. "Now what do you suppose would be the best way to begin?" he mused almost dreamily. "Should we let Brandark be showing this little bauble to them one by one while he plays with his knife, or should old Wencit be after making sure they've seen his eyes and then give them all a lecture at once?"

  Kaeritha's plan worked to perfection. Unfortunately, the surviving hired swords truly didn't know much about the people who'd hired them. No brigand in his right mind would have admitted he'd known he was working for Sharnā, yet Bahzell was inclined to believe their protestations of ignorance. Somewhat to his surprise, Kaeritha agreed, for their anger-and fear-when they discovered the truth seemed completely genuine. Any mercy they might have anticipated from the courts would evaporate instantly if they were proven to have knowingly served the Dark, and they appeared desperate to offer any information they could in an effort to buy some sort of clemency.

  Only they didn't actually have any true information. The few who weren't regular out-and-out brigands were mercenaries of the sort Tomanāk did not approve of, and none had asked many questions when they hired on with their now deceased employer. Nor had they been told they were waiting for a single, specific target. They'd thought they were going to pillage anyone who happened along, and they hadn't even realized the travelers were in Tomanāk's colors until the first crossbow bolts were fired. The only thing all of them agreed on was that the man who'd hired them had been accompanied by an inner cadre of ten others, all of whom had appeared to be seasoned fighters… and none of whom had survived.

  It wasn't much. In fact, it was worse than nothing in many ways, for it simply confirmed that Sharnā was involved without providing a single additional hard fact. But at least they knew now that their enemies knew enough about their plans to attempt to stop them, and that lent a new urgency to their journey. They decided to press on as quickly as possible in hopes of reaching Dwarvenhame before Sharnā could organize something more effective than a botched ambush. And while none of the attackers they'd killed or captured had borne the dog brothers' telltale scorpion tattoo, they couldn't be positive the assassins wouldn't be called in. Given that fact, Kaeritha agreed with Bahzell that it would be wise to avoid any town or city. It was easier to watch one's back in the wilderness than among an entire town worth of people one didn't know from Hirahim's house cat and, as Bahzell had demonstrated, sneaking up on a Horse Stealer hradani in the open was a difficult task, at best.

  The champions transferred their prisoners to one of Sir Maehryk's detachments at the first good-sized, permanent village they passed, but they barely even slowed down to turn them over. The detachment's senior knight seemed a bit miffed by their haste, but none of their own companions so much as complained, despite their longing to spend at least one night under a snug roof. There were a few wistful sighs when they circled Esfresia itself without even entering the provincial capital, however, especially when the clear, cold weather which had accompanied them from Lordenfel decided to disappear. There were no fresh blizzards, but the sun vanished. The temperature actually rose a bit, but the rising humidity which came with it only made the damp cold bite even deeper, road conditions were miserable, and they were plagued by dense fog and frequent flurries of wet, soggy snow for days on end.

  Their pace slowed once they'd passed Esfresia, and not simply because the roads were worse. The ambush had inspired Sir Harkon to put out scouts, and the wretched visibility restricted the distance at which those scouts could stay in visual contact with the rest of the party. A part of Bahzell longed to overrule the knight-commander, but he couldn't. Not only was Harkon right about the need to have someone sweep for enemies, he was also the senior member of the Belhadan chapter still present, and Bahzell was not about to undercut his authority simply because he wanted to move a little faster.

  The trip from Esfresia to the Dwarvenhame Tunnel was the shortest leg of their journey so far, little more than thirty-seven leagues, but it seemed much, much longer. The terrain changed once more as the land began to climb towards the eastern mountains, and the high road passed through forest as dense as anything in Vonderland. Trees pressed in on either hand, further aggravating the scouts' problems, and the first few leagues east of Esfresia were particularly hard going as the horses pushed through the deep snow. It took them the better part of three full days to cover barely thirty miles, and Bahzell began to despair of reaching Hurgrum before midsummer.

  Fortunately, conditions began to change on the fourth day. The deserted villages with which they had become all too familiar disappeared, and they saw little of the abandoned pasture lands which had stret
ched across Landria and southern Landfressa. There were more farms, with stout, winter-tight barns and brick silos, but it was clear that most of those living in the towns they passed now had other things on their minds than farming. The high road was clearer than it had been since Lordenfel, and teams of woodsmen were busy in the forest through which it passed. Ox-drawn sledges laden with trimmed tree trunks moved steadily along beside the road, all headed east, and Kaeritha smiled when Bahzell wondered aloud at seeing so much industry in such bitter weather.

  "Think about it," she suggested. "What's the one thing folk who live underground have the least of?"

  "Ah?" Bahzell scratched an ear, then nodded. "Trees," he said.

  "Exactly. Dwarvenhame is as greedy for forest products as Purple Lords are for gold, and these people make an excellent living supplying them. And not just with lumber or pitch or turpentine, either. Dwarves have a deep craving for fine woodwork, but it's not something they're particularly skilled at producing. And this is a good time for these people to do their timbering. There's less need for farm labor, and without rivers big enough to float logs down, winter actually makes it easier to move them. Timber sleds move much better over snow."

  Bahzell nodded again, though he remained bemused by the shouts echoing through the forests from the labor gangs. The occasional crashing thunder as trees came down and the cheerful profanity bellowed by drovers as ox teams leaned into their harnesses were a far cry from the icy, deserted silence he'd seen further south, yet he still felt taken aback initially when the locals called out cheery greetings as he and his companions passed. It was good to once more find themselves among people who felt secure enough to greet them, yet after their earlier experiences, and especially after the botched ambush, it seemed unnatural for these people to view any large, armed band with anything other than wariness, regardless of whose colors they wore.

  But a little thought helped explain the difference between the attitudes of these industrious foresters and the inhabitants of the largely deserted towns and villages. Landfressa's foresters, like those of Vonderland, were a hardy and independent lot, and most were hunters as well as loggers. There were undoubtedly dozens of bows in their work camps, and given the probable skill of those bows' owners-not to mention the fact that woodcutters were inevitably accompanied by extremely sharp axes-only fools would offer them violence. Besides, however valuable timber might be in Dwarvenhame, it wasn't exactly something brigands could seize and ride off with.

  Not that there weren't plenty of other temptations to lure potential raiders, for Kaeritha had been right about the relationship between Landfressa's humans and the dwarves of Dwarvenhame. Winter might have frozen them for now, but in warmer weather dozens of brawling mountain streams ran down to the northernmost tributaries of the Greenleaf River. They were too shallow to be used for transport, but every town the travelers passed boasted its own holding ponds, as if an army of beavers had descended upon the land, and Bahzell and Brandark marveled at the scores of waterwheels those ponds served. Many were idle now, but some still turned, and it didn't need a hradani's ears to hear the sounds of hammers, saws, chisels, and other tools coming from the large brick buildings clustered about them. Among hradani, waterwheels were used only to drive the grinding stones of grist mills, but these people obviously used water to power a whole host of other tools, as well, and Bahzell watched in fascination as they passed an open-sided structure where a water-driven saw as tall as many men slabbed enormous tree trunks neatly into planks and timbers. Neither he nor Brandark had ever imagined such an improvement on the slow, laborious saw pits their own people used, yet the fact that the locals seemed totally unaware that winter was supposed to be a time when the pace of life slowed until the spring thaw was almost more bemusing to them.

  The humans in their party seemed to take that in stride, but then, with the possible exception of Wencit-who, as a wild wizard, might or might not be properly classed as a "human" to begin with-they were all citizens of the Empire. Bahzell and Brandark were not, yet the comments their companions let drop told them that busy as all this seemed to them, it was commonplace to the others. Indeed, compared to the more populous provinces further south, all of this bustle and industriousness, however impressive to two barbarian hradani, was downright rustic.

  That was an almost frightening thought for Bahzell. His father had worked for years to build a place where merchants and artisans could survive and prosper, and the result had been to make Hurgrum crushingly superior to her foes. By hradani standards, Bahnak's realm was incredibly prosperous, able not only to feed and clothe its people but to arm them and equip them for war with weapons of their own manufacture. It had been an enormous achievement, one which had played a decisive role in Bahnak's rise to the threshold of empire, yet the prosperity and productivity of this area which Bahzell's human friends clearly regarded as a backwater dwarfed all his father had achieved. It put the wealth and power of the Empire of the Axe into stark perspective… and made him realize how incredibly far his own people still had to go.

  Or, rather, those busy, productive towns made him begin to realize the length of the journey to which Prince Bahnak had committed his Horse Stealers. It took their arrival at the western end of the Dwarvenhame Tunnel to make the realization complete.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "Phrobus!"

  Brandark's soft-voiced curse, rich with wonder, expressed Bahzell's own feelings almost perfectly. The Horse Stealer glanced at his friend, but only briefly, for the sight before them wouldn't let him look away for long.

  The stonework of Belhadan and the Empire's roads had been marvel enough, but this was the first time the hradani had seen the work of dwarvish engineers untouched by the influence of any of the other Races of Man, and they knew it. No one could have looked at the western face of the Dwarvenhame Tunnel and not known it, for no one but a dwarf could have conceived and executed such a project.

  The entire face of a mountain had been sliced away to create a sheer, vertical wall of smooth rock eight hundred feet high at the least. There was something merciless about the perfection of that sweep of stone, a purity of line and plane which nature could never have produced. It had been imposed by a hand and eye which thought in straight lines and the consummation of function, and it loomed above the puny mites at its feet with a majestic severity too intense for beauty.

  The mouth of the tunnel itself was a black dot against that vast backdrop. Only as they approached its portcullis-fringed maw and the flanking bastions carved from the rock to either side of it did its size truly become apparent. Those bastions were garrisoned, as was the battlemented traverse work cut to overhang the full width of the gate. Sentries looked down on the travelers from embrasures, murder holes for heated oil and banefire, and arrow slits, but the duty officer must have been warned they were coming, for the stocky dwarf only raised his axe to Bahzell in salute and waved them past.

  Truth to tell, Bahzell had paid the guards little heed, for his attention was riveted to the tunnel itself, and he felt a fresh sense of awe as hooves clattered on the hard-paved approach and he strode under its massive vault. As a rule, he disliked underground spaces. He wasn't exactly claustrophobic; it was just that most caves and tunnels made someone his size feel hemmed in. But the Dwarvenhame Tunnel was fifty yards across, with a stony roof so high above the roadway that it seemed to float suspended rather than press down upon him, and a reassuring breeze flowed through ventilation shafts on silent feet of chill, fresh air. The light within was dim compared to the daylight without, but it was much brighter than he would have expected. Wall-mounted lanterns burned every twenty yards, and even though they lacked the reflectors he'd seen in places like the Belhadan chapter's training salle, they threw powerful spills of illumination along the tunnel. It took him several minutes to realize why, and then he inhaled sharply.

  They didn't require reflectors because the walls themselves served as reflectors. The stone wasn't simply smooth; it was polished a
lmost to the quality of a mirror, without a single tool mark to mar its surface, and he shook his head in baffled wonder.

  "What?" Wencit asked quietly from beside him, and Bahzell turned his head. The wild wizard's eldrich eyes looked eerier than ever in the subdued lighting, floating like twin pools of witchfire under his brows. Their shifting glow was so bright Bahzell thought he could almost have read by it, yet not even that unnatural sight could distract him from the odd sense that the tunnel didn't truly exist. That it couldn't exist.

  "The walls," he said after a moment, his voice soft, almost hushed, as if he felt some compulsion to speak without the tunnel's creators overhearing him. "There's not a tool mark on 'em."

  "No, there isn't," Wencit agreed, turning to cock his head and consider the walls himself. He studied them almost critically, then shrugged. "Actually, I think this may be even better than some of the work I saw in Kontovar," he mused. "Of course, it's been a while. I suppose my memory could be playing tricks on me."

  Bahzell swallowed, jarred by the casualness of the wizard's tone. He could forget Wencit's age and reputation for days on end-or no, not forget so much as set them aside or fool himself into thinking he'd come to grips with them-and then some offhand remark would drive the old man's sheer antiquity home like an arbalest bolt. Like now. No one else in the world could possibly refer to twelve hundred tumultuous years as "a while," yet to Wencit of Rūm, that was precisely what they had been.

  For an instant, Bahzell was terrifyingly aware of the age and knowledge-and power-riding peacefully along at his side. This was the man who had strafed Kontovar. Who had fought the Lord of Carnadosa himself, and all his inner council, to a standstill in the first, desperate days of the war which had doomed the Empire of Ottovar. Whose protection had prevented the Dark Lords from pursuing Kontovar's refugees to Norfressa to make an end of them. Bahzell Bahnakson was not a man who felt awe easily, but there was not-could not be-a more perilous being in all the world, and for just that instant, a fear-touched awe was precisely what echoed through Bahzell's bones.