The Stricken Field - A Handful of Men Book 3

by Dave Duncan

  The trumpets sounded and the consuls in their purplehemmed togas led in the procession, trooping in from the west door, dividing behind the Red Throne, and circling around. Bronze and gold flamed in the bright spring sunshine flooding down through the great dome. Marshal Ugoatho shone in gold armor and scarlet-crested helmet; his replacement as legate of the Praetorian Guard was very nearly as splendid. The impress in a simple chiton was enough to draw breath from every man present under the age of eighty, and most of the others, too. Shandie in purple mounting the Opal Throne . . .

  Consul Eerieo was a new appointment, and a nonentity. No one could imagine why the imperor had chosen such a nincompoop to run the Senate for him.

  “One gets you ten he makes a botch of the invocation,” Mosrace muttered. He had no takers, and Consul Eerieo made a memorable botch. After all that, it was with a strong sense of relief that everyone sat down again to hear what Emshandar V had to say on this, his first formal act as imperor.

  “Honored Consuls, your Eminences . . .” His voice was strong, and quite audible. He wasted no breath on preliminaries. He threw the facts before them like gruesome relics.

  The truth was much, much worse than the rumors, and the Great Hall seemed to grow colder and colder as the report unfolded.

  Without the slightest provocation, the Impire’s boundaries had been violated by both goblins and dwarves. Four legions—the IIIrd, IXth, XVIIth, and XXIXth—had ceased to exist, with hardly a survivor to tell the story. The immensity of the disaster was stunning. As an augury of the new reign, it could not have been worse. As a portent of the millennium, it was terrifying. With the old man barely cold in his grave, the young Emshandar, who had been Shandie, the darling of the army, was telling of twenty thousand dead. And what of the civilians? In harsh, unemotional tones, he read out lists of towns and cities sacked.

  All around Umpily, hardened, cynical old politicians were sobbing. Some of their distress came from patriotism, but many of those men were learning of their ruin, of herds and lands and wealth destroyed. The towns of Whileboth and Mosrace both were mentioned—devastated. The implications were even worse than the facts. The news must be weeks old. What had happened since? How close were the vermin now? Destruction and looting must be continuing even as the imperor spoke.

  Old Ironjaw was mumbling obscenities, his ancient face as pale as chalk.

  The litany of disaster drew to a close, and silence fell. Shandie turned a page. This young imperor was a strategic genius, wasn’t he? Enrapt, the Senate waited to hear his response. It was impressive.

  “We have set in motion the following countermeasures . . .”

  First, he said, the Home Force, the four legions always stationed around the capital, had been regrouped to build a wall of bronze across the northern approaches to Hub—the Vth, XIth, XXth, and XXIInd. A sigh of relief rustled through the Rotunda. The capital itself was safe, then.

  “Wall of bronze!” Ironjaw roared, in a voice like a rusty windmill. ”The vermin have eaten four legions already!” The comment had been too audible—faces turned and grimaced when they saw who had spoken.

  The imperor continued unperturbed. “Recruitment to replace the losses has already begun. Substantial reinforcements are on their way. From the Mosweeps we have summoned the VIIth, and the XXIIIrd from Lith. The Ist is already marching up from the Ilrane borderlands, and the XIVth will cross from Qoble as soon as the passes open. We have sent to the Guwush theater for the IVth, VIIIth, XVth, and XXIVth. The IInd, normally charged with garrisoning the shores of Westerwater, has been ordered to retake Pondague Pass and cut off the goblins’ supply lines. You need have no fear that we can repel the invaders with this massive response!”

  Flimsy applause flowered amid the senatorial benches and then withered into silence. Umpily had raised his hands to join in the clapping when realization came to him also.

  Massive? It was altogether too massive. The cure sounded far more dangerous than the disease. How many legions? If Emshandar-who-had-been-Shandie thought he needed half the Imperial Army, then the danger must be close to mortal.

  At Umpily’s side, old Whileboth reeled to his feet. “Idiot!” he screamed. “Twelve legions? No man has ever attempted to control twelve legions!” The cracked old voice echoed through the Rotunda, too plain to be ignored. The imperor swung around on his throne and glared up at the heckler, his face flushing scarlet. The assembly muttered as it recognized Ironjaw. Umpily cowered away from the maniac and tried to hide his face in the folds of his toga.

  “Idiot, I say!” the old soldier bellowed. “You are stripping the whole Impire of its defenses—the jotnar and djinns and gnomes and elves will be right on their heels! How can you provision twelve legions? What supply lines do goblins need? How long until your orders arrive in Guwush? How long for those legions to march across Shimlundok?”

  Umpily worked it out as everyone must be working it out: a thousand leagues at seven or eight leagues a day . . . four months! And they could not even begin until the orders reached them.

  Consul Eerieo sprang up, but his words were lost in the sudden tumult.

  Ironjaw tried to say more, stopped in apparent surprise, and toppled forward over the noble lords in front of him, slithering to the floor. They bent to his aid and then recoiled. Umpily heard the appalled whispers. Whileboth was dead.

  In the shocked hush that followed, Shandie resumed his speech as if nothing had happened. “Turning to financial matters, we lay before you the following proposals . . . ” He began to outline expenditures enormous and taxes unbelievable. Julgistro had always been one of the richest contributors to the Imperial fisc, but it would not be contributing now.

  Why did he not mention the Almighty? Why did he not explain that the Impire was safe because it was guarded by the greatest army of sorcerers Pandemia had ever known? Umpily wanted to jump to his feet also and shout the good news, but of course he could not speak of the Almighty.

  The speech ended. There was no ovation, only horrified whispering. While the imperial couple and the officials trooped out, peers and senators remained slumped in their seats as if dazed. Four legions destroyed! Innumerable cities burned. Two invading armies still at large. Ruinous taxation.

  And months until Shandie could assemble the gigantic force he seemed to think he required.

  It was the coming of the millennium!

  If the imperor had expected his response to soothe the nation, then he had gravely miscalculated. If he had deliberately set out to ignite a panic, then he had succeeded very well.

  3

  Dwanis was a drab, gray land, drained by the Dark River, brooded over by the grim Isdruthud Range on one hand and the even greater North Wall on the other. The straggling convoy of wagons had entered the realm of the dwarves through massively fortified gorges. Phalanxes of border guards had questioned, inspected, and grudgingly allowed it to pass.

  Thereafter it had continued its snaillike progress over rutted, stony roads. Dwanish was more populated than the northern reaches of the Impire, but still bleak and stark. Its farms were lonely patches on the bleak moors, its towns squalid huddles of cramped cottages without pattern or plan. Trees were rare, flowers nonexistent. Except for waterwheels and windmill sails, everything was made of stone. Slag heaps of ancient mineworkings blighted the landscape and the air stank of smoke. Spring was an affair of mud and slush and bitter wind.

  By and large the inhabitants ignored the caravan, or stared with surly, unfriendly eyes. Even the tiny children seemed uninterested, except when they caught sight of the two goblins or the young jotunn. Then they would run screaming home to their hovels.

  Shandie had taken up wagon driving to keep himself from brooding over the fate of the Impire. As far as he knew, the invading armies must still be looting and destroying, for he had no information except,the negative certainty that the Covin had not intervened. Warlock Raspnex had detected no major sorcery, so the war remained mundane. The legions would be marching, and the imper
or was not there to lead them. Weeks were slipping away in waste and worry.

  Shifting from global view to personal was no improvement. Shandie could see no progress in his pitiful campaign against the usurper. Umpily had been captured; Acopulo had arrived in IIrane and then fallen silent. King Rap had stopped communicating, also. The counterrevolution seemed to be over before it had begun, and the remaining conspirators were resolutely marching into a trap in Dwanish. There seemed to be no way to accomplish what they had come to do without blundering into disaster.

  One afternoon he was urging his weary ponies across a very boggy meadow. All Dwanishian rivers flooded in springtime, filling the air with a stench of mud. He was startled out of his black reverie by an apparition scrambling up on the bench beside him.

  Young Gath was still growing at an incredible rate, visibly taller than he had been back at Kribur. His odd assemblage of clothing was worn to rags; pipestem wrists protruded from the sleeves. He walked as if his boots pinched his feet. Yet, way up there, under a mop of golden hair, his face was still absurdly boyish, despite the jotunn jaw beginning to emerge from childhood softness. He perched on the seat, adjusted his long limbs into position, and smiled nervously down at the imperor.

  “You want me, sir?” His voice never strayed from its adult register now.

  “I do?”

  “Well, you will. You’re going to hail me as I go by. I mean, you were going to.”

  Shandie forced a welcoming smile and scratched his bushy black beard as he disentangled that information. “I still can’t understand how you do that! It’s a paradox!”

  “Dad used to say that, too,” Gath admitted glumly. Shandie winced. The lad must be just as worried now about his father as he was about his sister.

  “Well, never mind. What do you think of beautiful Dwanish?”

  “I never knew the world was so big! Mom says most of it looks better than this, though.”

  “It certainly does. Er . . . I expect you miss your friends back in Krasnegar?”

  “I miss Kadie! And my friends, I suppose. Yes.”

  “Boys or girls?”

  Gath’s pale face blushed bright red. “Both.”

  If he was trying to put the lad at ease, Shandie thought, he was doing a horrible job of it. “I wonder why I was going to call you, though?”

  “You want me to tell you, sir?”

  God of Madness! Conversations with Gath were like no others. “Might save time.”

  “You were beginning to think you needed some fresh ideas, you said . . . will . . . would have said, I mean.”

  “Yes. Well, that’s true. Do you like puzzles?”

  The boy shrugged uncomfortably. “Not much. I either can’t do them at all or I see the answer right away. No fun.”

  The imperor chuckled. “I don’t think you’ll see this one right away. It’s got the warlock baffled, and the other sorcerers. I’m only a mundane, but I’m supposed to have a knack for strategy, and I’m stumped, too. Maybe if I explain it to you, it’ll help me see it better myself.”

  Day after day, in pairs or larger groups, Shandie had been debating with the sorcerers, arguing over the problem awaiting them in Gwurkiarg. Talking about sorcery was agony for them, but gradually he had gathered up all the hints and slivers they had been able to confide. He prided himself that he had now gained an overall knowledge of sorcery that few mundanes in history had ever matched. It wouldn’t hurt to enlighten the young jotunn, also, and talk out the problem.

  After all, the preflecting pool had recommended Gath to him. Perhaps there was more to the prophecy than that miraculous rescue from the goblins’ tortures. And Raspnex still felt the kid might be useful somehow.

  “You know a lot of it already. We must enlist the help of the Directorate without alerting the Covin. If Zinixo does not have agents actually within the Council itself, he will certainly have spies near it. He has a compulsive greed to enslave every possible sorcerer into his army. He craves vengeance on his uncle Raspnex and on your father, which puts you and your mother at risk, too, of course, because he is madly vindictive. This little caravan of ours would be a real prize for him.”

  He paused for comments, but the clear gray eyes waited solemnly for him to continue.

  “Do you know all this already—what I’m going to say?”

  “Pretty much, sir,” Gath said politely. “But you want to talk it out.”

  “Er, yes.” Feeling oddly foolish now, Shandie continued. “And we assume he wants to get hold of me, too, although he may be managing all right without me. So if he ever finds out where we are, then he’ll probably strike with everything he’s got. And that’s plenty!”

  Sorcerers could detect sorcery in use. That was the crux of the danger. A sorcerer could escape detection only by doing nothing. The stronger his power, the less detectable he was in action, and the better he could detect others. Even if Zinixo had no votaries nearby, the Covin could probably sense power being used almost anywhere in Pandemia. If Zinixo’s agents were present and could be detected before they alerted their master, the effort of silencing them and liberating them might itself be detected . . .

  “This was your father’s idea, you know! He was the one who invented the new protocol. He suggested we spread the word by telling mundane authorities, like the Dwanishian Directorate. Trouble is, we’ve picked the most difficult one to start with.”

  “Dwarves are hard-headed you mean, sir?”

  “True, but also this is Zinixo’s home territory. He’s certain to have left a watch on it. Worse, there’s no fast, easy road out for us afterward.”

  Gath thought about that for a while, scowling. “Where do we go next?”

  They would be lucky to go anywhere except to Hub, as captives. The imperor cracked his whip over the team to encourage the little ponies, which were game enough, but tired by a long day. “Likely the Directorate will want us out of here as fast as possible, and that means down the Dark River, to Guwush, or Nordland.”

  Those cagey, hard-headed dwarves might just try to turn the fugitives in, of course, hoping to win the usurper’s favor, but that was not something to worry a kid with.

  “Or sell us to the Covin?” Gath was there already. “Er, yes. It’s not easy to betray a warlock, though.”

  “You didn’t mention loyalty spells, sir?”

  “What about them?”

  “Our sorcerers don’t have loyalty spells on them, and the Covin’s do. So ours can see theirs even when they’re not doing anything.”

  “You know, that had slipped my mind. Who told you that?”

  “Oh, I’ve been talking to the goblins . . . and Master Wirax. And the warlock.”

  Shandie should have guessed that any son of Rap’s would be likely to have brains and an interest in sorcery. He wondered if the boy perhaps knew almost as much as he did.

  “Good for you! Carry on.”

  “Beg pardon, sir. The pinto has a stone in its front right shoe.”

  Shandie directed his attention back to the team, doggedly plodding over their shadows in the mud. Lead left did have a faint limp, but it did not seem anything to worry about. “He’s probably just tired. Couldn’t have picked up a rock in this muck.”

  Gath said nothing, and his silence said much. “Tell me,” Shandie said.

  “You stop and one of us goes and gets the rock out.”

  “Which one of us?”

  The young jotunn clenched his big jaw for a moment, suddenly reminiscent of his father. He stared straight ahead at the ponies. “If I try to, you tell me to stay here and you go, to see if I’ve told you the truth. If I say you’re going then you send me.”

  “You can see both futures?”

  “Yes, sir.” Then he blurted, “And one where you really lame that pony, too!”

  Shandie reined in. “I’ll do it,” he said, and jumped down into the bog. The shaggy pony was a walking swamp and balked at letting him lift its leg. There was indeed a rock in the little shoe, as he disc
overed when he had cleaned the foot enough to locate it. By the time he slopped his way back to the wagon, he was coated in mud from collar to toes. He thought he detected a gleam in the gray faun eyes looking down at him, and wondered if he had just been manipulated into making a certain adolescent’s day.

  With much whip-cracking and horrible sucking noises from the wheels, the wagon began to move again. Shandie hoped the dwarves had some dry shelter in mind for the night. They had been known to pitch camp in worse terrain than this.

  “Let’s hear some more of your ideas.”

  “Sir!”

  “I mean it! You talk for a while.”

  Gath squirmed, then said, “Well, Moon Baiter says that just because the Covin is all-powerful doesn’t mean that every loyalty spell has that much power in it. So if we—our sorcerers, I mean—can corner one of theirs by himself, they may be able to free him if they all act together. And if they’re lucky the Covin won’t hear them. Warlock Raspnex said he’d sooner drop plate armor in chapel service, sir, but he admits it may be possible.”

  “It’s not a comfortable prospect,” Shandie agreed, amused at the breathless telling.

  “If we could get them into a shielded building, like that cottage at Kribur where we met with Death Bird and the general—then it would be safe, wouldn’t it?”

  “But we can’t count on them being so stupid.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Can you suggest any other plans?”

  Gath chewed his lip for a minute. “I gotta question.”

  “Let’s have it, then.”

  “Why walk into their lair at all, sir? Why not just write them a letter?”

  “It’s a very good question!” Shandie said, thinking that it was an unexpectedly cold-blooded one from a fourteen-year-old. “I did write letters to Caliph Azak. I might have tried it here, too, except events sort of swept me up and brought me. And dwarves are just about as stubborn as fauns . . . What’s wrong?”

  “I’m part faun!”

  The young pup had actually clenched his fists! His faun part would matter greatly to him, of course, especially now. “Nothing wrong with that and nothing wrong with being stubborn,” Shandie said. That was not much of an apology! Could it be that his all-over coat of mud was rankling him a little? ”Anyway, the Directorate knows the warlock by sight and will certainly listen to him. They may be impressed by having an imperor ask for help. Or they may throw me in a dungeon, of course. We’re even thinking of having your mother accompany us. Krasnegar isn’t quite a neighbor, but it’s a sovereign state. That’s our plan, and we know it’s about as safe as lion shaving. If you’ve got a better idea, then I’d love to hear it.”