The Death of Nnanji: The Seventh Sword Book Four

by Dave Duncan

  There was a disturbance at the back. Vixini’s head approached over the rest as he pushed through the tight-packed crowd, looking puzzled and embarrassed. “My lord?”

  “Here is someone you have met before.”

  Even more perplexed, Vixini saluted the reeve.

  Yoningu did not respond. His perpetual grin widened. “The last time I met you, swordsman, you badly needed your ass wiped.”

  “Honorable Yoningu, as he was then,” Wallie explained to his scarlet-faced stepson, “denounced me that day and very nearly sent me to the fish.”

  “Thank the Goddess I did not succeed. my lord, how may I be of service? As loyal swordsmen of the Tryst, the entire garrison of Gra awaits your orders.”

  “Start with a shady table and some wine,” Wallie said.

  The efficient Yoningu obliged in spades. The courtyard was delightful, the chair comfortable, the wine delicious, and the serving maid an eye-filling distraction. Only after she had floated away, with a tantalizing backward smile, were the two swordsmen free to start reminiscing. Imperkanni had still been reeve of the temple guard when Wallie and Nnanji returned to Hann with Nnanji some years ago, but by then Yoningu had grown tired of the static life and wandered off to found his own band of frees. When the Tryst found him, he had sworn on eagerly as an inspector, which was basically a free sword with the backing needed to do a proper job of regulating larger garrisons. Later he had agreed to serve as reeve of Gra.

  “The stone scabbard gets us all eventually,” he explained.

  He knew nothing of the revolution at Plo and reacted with outrage to the news.

  “How many men do you have here?” Wallie asked, remembering the ferocious resistance he had met when he tried to recruit from Imperkanni’s band on that fateful day long ago.

  “Not counting juniors, six hundred, forty-two, my lord.”

  “And how many might be interested in helping me with a brief war?”

  “Seven hundred, thirteen, my lord.”

  Obviously Wallie could not strip the town of swordsmen altogether. He explained his plan and was relieved to see Yoningu nodding in approval, for the former free sword had traveled far more widely in the World than he had. “Ingenious,” he said. “Of course you can’t expect every contingent to arrive on the same morning, but as long as you have established a safe bridgehead, a few days’ delay should be no problem, or even an advantage.”

  “I know very little about Soo or the Mule Hills. You don’t happen to have any men from there, do you?”

  “Men, no,” he said, and bellowed, “Novice!”

  A boy appeared faster than a rabbit could jump out of a hat.

  “Fetch swordsman Nostra, at the double,” the reeve said, making the lad vanish as fast as he had come. “Are you planning on taking any horses?”

  “That will depend on the crossing, about which I know sweet nothing. But I hope to muster about two thousand swordsmen. Outfitting that many with mounts would be a nightmare.”

  “You’d hope there would be livestock in an area called the Mule Hills. Seriously, hundreds of my lads will be eager to come. How many can you take?”

  “How many can you spare? I am well supplied with Fourths and Fifths, and by now we are all pretty much agreed on tactics, signals, and so on. I will leave a few with you to explain to your contingent.”

  “In that case I can lend you a hundred and a half,” Yoningu said. “’Twill do some of my middle ranks no harm to go back to wrestling drunks for a while. If I put on a red kilt, could you pretend not to notice my facemarks?”

  Wallie joyfully assured Yoningu that he was more than welcome to join the army. He could, in fact, be second-in-command until they met up with Joraskinta, hopefully outside Plo. The weakness in his plans had always been that he might find himself burdened with castoffs and rejects, but he knew that swordsmen trained and supervised by this Seventh would be outstanding.

  Soon after that, Swordsman Nostra arrived, puffing and heated after running under the midday sun. She was young and attractive; her salute was crisp. Yoningu called for wine for her and told her to bring over a chair. She confirmed that she had come from Soo.

  “I was quite young, my lord. When our father died, my mother brought us back to her parents, here in Gra.”

  So at last Wallie could ask the questions that had been troubling him for weeks. “How big is Soo? How big are the docks? How long will it take us to get there?”

  Nostra’s answers were concise and carried conviction. About five hundred people, she said, engaged mainly in the horse trade. The men rounded up wild horses, broke them, and exported them, so the quay was well maintained and would take at least two fair-sized vessels. The ruby mines were on the Plo side of the watershed, but the Soo Reach offered better market access. The Mule Hills name was a joke for gently rolling grassland—good horse country, except rather arid in summer. To march an army across to the Soo side? Maybe four days, she thought. Her father had allowed two days on horseback.

  “Is there a marked trail?” Wallie asked, thinking about ambushes. He doubted that the sorcerers’ chemistry was capable of producing detonators for land mines yet.

  Nostra hesitated. “I do not know, my lord. My father used to grumble about water holes.”

  Wallie noted that he had just been tactfully warned twice of a major problem he might have overlooked. “Worth remembering,” he acknowledged. “And how long will it take us to get there?”

  “My brother’s a sailor…” She thought for a moment. No one would ask about travel time to a place as small as Soo, so she would have to calculate from larger destinations nearby. “About seven weeks, my lord.”

  Wallie nodded. It was coming together. He turned to Yoningu. “So if I leave a couple of high ranks and a pair of adepts with you, can you organize the hundred-fifty you mentioned and ship out in a week? What’s the next large city downstream?”

  “Dumo. Two, three days if the wind doesn’t shift.”

  “I’ll head straight there. But I’d like you to send someone to recruit at the smaller places in between, to enlist another ten or twenty agile young metal swingers. You can pick them up when you reach Dumo. I’ll try to stay five or six days ahead of you. We’ll aim for a rendezvous at Soo in eight weeks: Lorimers’ Day or Shipwrights’. We’ll need each contingent to bring its own rations, plus two canteens per man. I think we should rely on hiring local mounts for our scouts, and the rest of us can hoof it over to Plo. With somewhere between one and two thousand men behind me, I think I can teach the Kra coven not to go murdering swordsmen and heralds.”

  He noticed the longing in Nostra’s eyes and winked to Yoningu.

  “Can you cook, swordsman?” he asked her. If he hadn’t had seven swords marked on his forehead, she’d have challenged him on the spot. He laughed. “But I dearly need someone with local knowledge. Reeve, can you spare her?”

  “Go pack, swordsman,” Yoningu told her.

  Chapter 6

  As the sorcerer had promised, Reeve Pollex received his orders. Try as he might, he could not work out how Kra communicated with the bottler, but it obviously did so. Every evening, the man would appear and tell him what he had to do the next day: buy eight teams of oxen, train the cavalry, enlarge the wharf at Cross Plo, build larger paddocks over there, start moving horses across plus men to guard them, build a larger jetty and derricks to lift heavy cargo, order tents…

  Order five thousand colored ribbons so we can tell Plo from Fex and our men from the enemy.

  A steady stream of gold from the temple financed all this work, with only a modest fraction of it helping to fund the reeve’s retirement. Pollex found himself working harder than he ever had in his life. He barely had time to keep the queen happy, which was important because she had the king’s ear and in theory the king could fire him. But soon his spies warned him that he had help from a certain young footman, and that took some of the pressure off.

  On Carters’ Day, as he left the queen’s bedroom, v
ery early in the morning, he found a witness out in the corridor, leaning against the wall and watching him with amusement. No one had any right to be there at that hour. The lute hung on his shoulder identified him instantly. Even a minstrel should not be in that part of the palace, and the king would be outraged if he ever learned that this man was.

  “You!”

  “Not necessarily,” the sorcerer said with all his usual mockery. “I am sometimes me and sometimes not. Underneath it all, however, I am Grand Wizard Krandrak of Kra, and I have come here to lead your army to victory. In case you are tempted to try anything foolish, such as your duty… Show yourselves, lads.”

  Two sorcerers in brown robes swished into view around the corner. They each had a thunder weapon, held two-handed, pointed downward.

  “Please don’t think I don’t trust you, because I don’t,” Krandrak said. “This is as good a place to talk as any. The Tryst will arrive at Soo in about two weeks. Today we shall begin active defense. Send out the muster notices to Fex and the minor garrisons. How many horses have you taken across so far?”

  “Six hundred, as you ordered.”

  “Good boy. Today you will lead five hundred fighting men across. Each must carry a canteen and three days’ rations. They may bring a blanket, because nights get cold under the Dream God. My helpers and I will require another twelve saddle mounts, ten pack horses, and a light wagon. Bring spares in case any go lame. I intend to reach Soo in two days, so you will have to move.”

  “And what exactly are five hundred fighting men going to do when they get to Soo?”

  “If you have to ask that, Pollex, you are more a fool than I took you for, hard as that is to believe.”

  Lord Pollex gritted his teeth and said nothing.

  By afternoon he was afloat in the lead ship of a small fleet, heading across the River. In practice that meant going either upstream or downstream and then back again, but that day the wind was blowing against the current, which should make the crossing fairly easy. He had chosen his five hundred swordsmen with care, putting them under the command of Lurdako of the Fourth, who was his most favored henchman since the death of Grundrimp. Like him, Lurdako had been born without a conscience.

  The sorcerers had loaded some very curious cargo, including a shiny brass cylinder mounted on its own wheeled carriage. Pollex could guess what that was, of course. Remembering what a single shot from a handheld gadget had done to Grundrimp, he could not imagine what use that giant killer would be. A man could only die once, whether he had a finger-sized hole through him or was blown to pieces.

  Krandrak, now properly dressed in a blue hooded robe and wearing his correct seven feather facemarks, had chosen to ship out with the cannon, so Pollex boarded right behind him, hoping he might be entrusted with some of the sorcerer’s plans. He did not expect to approve of them. For the first hour or so, the wizard conferred in low voices with underlings, but later he settled into a corner of the deck near the bow, shaded by a spinnaker from the blazing midsummer sun, sitting on a comfortable-looking chair that must have been brought along especially for him. There he munched on a packed lunch, sipped wine, and beckoned for Pollex to join him.

  “Your men are all bound by the third oath, vassal?” he asked with his customary smirk.

  “They are. Every one of them is sworn to obey to the death. They will even jump overboard if I so command. But understand this, sorcerer: if they overhear you calling me what you just did, then it is very unlikely that their oaths will hold. They would turn on me like rabid dogs.”

  “Rabid dogs are exactly what we shall need, but I do understand your nervousness. There are some gem mines just inland from Cross Plo, and a few temporary horse-hunter camps toward the Soo side, although those are probably not in use at this time of year. If you send a band of men to such a place with orders to kill every living thing present and burn the buildings, will you be obeyed?”

  “Including women and children?”

  “Including caged song birds and goldfish.”

  Pollex despised squeamish people, but he had to swallow hard before he said, “Yes. If I specifically order that.”

  “You will specifically order that. You are to turn the Mule Hills from here to Soo into a desert, is that clear? The Tryst must not find one scrap of food or drinking water on its march. Its swordsmen are to arrive exhausted, weakened by hunger, and crazed by thirst, so that they will stagger up to our guns to die.”

  As if to emphasize the point, the shadow shifted for a moment, letting the sun blaze down on them.

  “Guns? Like that brass thing? Why so big? You expect them to line up like fence posts?”

  Krandrak stared at him with open contempt for a moment. “Whatever the queen sees in you certainly can’t be your sparkling intelligence. You must have some compensatory facility. That little toy of mine will shoot a ball through a stone wall, but—as you so astutely observed—we do not expect Lord Shonsu to bring stone walls with him. Some of those crates contain cannonballs that will burst into flames when they strike. Just one of them will turn a ship into an inferno, understand? You will also find sealed leather bags full of rusty nails, packed in horse dung. Those burst in flight and arrive like metal hail. They will rip platoons of swordsmen to mincemeat. You know why the horse dung, vassal?”

  Pollex just shook his head.

  “Because a wound contaminated with horse dung, even a tiny puncture, will lead to death by lockjaw. Our purpose is not just to put the Tryst to flight. We must wipe them out to the last man, no survivors. I expect the news will filter back to Casr in time.”

  The tiny settlement known as Cross Plo had been transformed. The few permanent inhabitants had disappeared; Pollex did not know how or where to, and certainly did not want to know. The dilapidated jetty had been replaced by a major pier, capable of unloading horses and oxen. A small tent city had sprung up in the background. This side of the Mule Hills lacked running water, and the grass had been scorched to tinder by the summer sun. The danger of wildfire was perfectly obvious to a swordsman—Sutra 423 specifically mentioned it—but apparently sorcerers could see it for themselves, for the ground had been deliberately charred to black for a mile or more back from the shore, and the air stank of burning.

  Pollex slept on the ground with his men that night and tried not to think of what must happen when they arrived at Soo the next day.

  Chapter 7

  Wallie’s battle plan collapsed in ruins when Triumph docked at a small town named Ivo, one day before the army was due to start arriving at Soo.

  He called in at Ivo to provision, because a little place like Soo would be unable to feed an invasion of two thousand hungry swordsmen. Food was going to be problem, for whatever the calendar said, the sun was behaving as if this were midsummer. Until the harvest was gathered in, many larders would be bare.

  Very few of the swordsmen who had sailed with him from Ki Mer were still aboard. He had unloaded the rest during the last eight weeks to lead and train the various contingents that he had requisitioned. Even the low ranks had gone, because they had accompanied their mentors ashore. The only man aboard below the rank of Third was Novice Addis. Officially he remained because Vixini did, and Vixini because his own mentor, Filurz, did, but Wallie could see the boy was sulky at being singled out, and blamed his parentage for it. He was being paradoxical, because he knew perfectly well that his parentage was the only reason he hadn’t been left back home in Casr. Although Wallie could still not quite understand his reasons for bringing the lad along, it still felt weirdly right that Nnanji’s son should be present when the Tryst avenged its dead.

  The absent middle ranks had been replaced almost entirely with Thirds, so the ship was now full of strangers. Filurz and a couple of others were trying to shape them into a team, but that was an almost impossible job when they had nowhere to drill or fence. Even learning their names well enough to shout orders in action was no simple task. Wallie was going to land at Soo with an unknown, unorganized for
ce. He hadn’t foreseen that weakness in his plan. There were others, as he rapidly discovered.

  Ivo was a town of plastered walls and thick, heavy-browed thatch roofs. Its docks showed no special facilities for handling livestock, so it did not compete against Soo in the horse trade. Almost all the vessels in sight were tiny fishing boats, but there was a higher dock for larger ships, and the traders’ booths along it all seemed to be offering ceramic ware, so the town might have grown up near a deposit of good clay.

  The moment the port official came aboard to extort docking fees from the captain, Wallie went ashore. He should have waited for clearance, but no one argued with a Seventh, especially a swordsman Seventh. He glanced around to see if there might be a swordsman in sight, and was astonished to see three of them striding along the dock towards him, two reds and a blue. A town as small as Ivo couldn’t possibly justify having a seventh as reeve. Of course an aging seventh might decide to retire to his birthplace and accept a posting as honorary… no, this man was no geriatric. It was Yoningu, reeve of Gra.

  Wallie chuckled. Efficient as ever, Yoningu had overtaken him on the River somewhere and would no doubt complain about wasting time waiting. As they drew closer, he saw the expression on the reeve’s face and knew he had been mistaken. Not even the scar dragging up his mouth could make that glower into a smile. Yoningu stamped to a halt and rushed through his salute. He barely gave Wallie time for his response.

  “They know we’re coming!” he snapped. “They got there first.”

  “Soo?”

  “Soo is gone. The buildings have been burned, the dock ripped apart, and the people massacred. Vultures are feeding in the street.”

  Oh, Goddess! About five hundred inhabitants, Swordsman Nostra had guessed. Vultures in the streets meant no survivors to chase them away, and probably no sorcerers lurking in ambush, either, although that must be confirmed. “Go on!”