Captain's Fury (59 page)

He walked around to the young officer's front, saluted, and slapped him sharply across the mouth.

Crassus blinked and stared at the First Spear in perfect shock. It hadn't been a gentle slap. Blood trickled from the young man's lower lip.

"Crows take you, sir," Marcus said quietly. "You are a Legion captain. Not some teenage bride mooning over her husband off to war. Get off of your ass and lead, before more men wind up like your brother."

Crassus just stared at him blankly. It occurred to Marcus that it was entirely possible that no one had spoken so to the young man in his entire life.

"Stand up," Marcus growled. "Stand
up
, sir."

Crassus stood up slowly. Marcus faced him, and banged his fist to his chest in another salute.

Crassus responded in kind. He studied Marcus for a moment, nodded slowly, and said, his voice very quiet, "Half strength, no meat, no water."

"Aye, sir."

"The Guard?"

"I spoke to their First Spears, sir. They're in worse shape than we are. For all practical purposes, we've got the only Knights on the field. The Guard used a different model of helmet than we did, without the crossbars on the crowns, and those hafted scythes went through them like paper. They've got fewer wounded but a lot more dead."

"Send runners to the Senator and the other captains," Crassus said. "Inform them that I've prepared a pavilion for him, his staff, and the other captains, and that it is ready to receive him immediately."

Marcus went on about following his orders, though he was ready to allow the Canim to kill him, if only they promised to let him get a few moments of sleep first.

Chapter 47

Troops surged from concealed positions beside the road, a dozen Canim and twice as many men in the worn gear of the Free Aleran Legion. One moment, no one was in sight, and the next a formidable array of weapons was pointed directly at Tavi's chest.

"Well," Tavi said, his tone impatient, as he reined his nag to a halt. "It's about bloody time."

One of the men had begun to speak, but he blinked and simply stared at Tavi, evidently surprised to be so addressed. Tavi studied him for a moment and decided that he was the most advantageous point of attack. If he didn't manage a successful verbal assault with the first pickets around Mastings, it might take him hours or days of waiting to get to Nasaug, and he doubted his mother and Araris would have that long.

"You," Tavi said, pointing at the man, then indicating the wooden baton thrust through his belt. "Centurion, I take it?"

"Yes," said the young man. "Yes, I'm—"

"Don't you people watch the back door as closely as the front? Bloody sloppy."

The man's face turned red. "Now, see here. You are intruders on a Free Aleran causeway, and as such I am placing you under arrest in accordance with general order—"

"I don't have time to listen to you cite phrase and paragraph, centurion,'

Tavi said, his tone striking a fine balance of impatience and authority, all of it absent of malice. "Lead me to Nasaug at once."

One of the Canim, a warrior Cane decked in the dark red-black steel plate of his caste, narrowed his blood-colored eyes and growled in Canish to one of his companions, a raider. "Spit him on your spear. We'll see how much talking he does then."

Tavi turned and stared hard at the Cane who had spoken. Their battered group was not calculated to impress, and consisted of one mounted but unarmored man on a horse who had seen better days, and one rickety wagon drawn by a pair of shaggy mules, driven by a Marat girl, and carrying an unclad Cane and a wounded traveler. They could hardly have passed as bandits, much less anyone of importance enough to demand an audience with the Canim's leader, and if Tavi allowed the warrior Cane to treat them as petty vagrants, they would doubtless be tossed into a cell to languish through being passed from one officer to the next, up the chain of command, and the entire enterprise of the last several weeks could come to nothing.

Varg could probably establish his credentials in fairly short order, but Tavi's instincts warned him not to ask the Cane to do so. Varg had agreed to follow and support him until they reached Nasaug—but only so long as Tavi behaved in a fashion appropriate to a leader. Among the Canim warrior caste, leaders did not detail matters of personal precedence to their subordinates. They established such guidelines themselves. It was how one became a leader in the first place.

Tavi had to establish himself, by himself, at once—and when it came to dealing with a Cane, actions undeniably spoke far more than words.

So, without another word, Tavi swung down from his horse and stalked over to the Cane, staring hard at his eyes. Tavi stopped about six feet from the warrior, and said, in the wolf-warrior's own snarling tongue, "Say that again, please. I didn't hear you."

The warrior Cane rested one hand on the hilt of his sword. "Do you want your blood to stay where it is
sochar-lar?"

"Will it take long for you to talk me to death?" Tavi asked. "I can't help but wonder why you, a warrior, are out here leading a group of makers and monkeys, guarding a back road. Badly. Are you too useless for an actual fight?"

The Cane let out a snarl and moved, sword sweeping from its sheath as he leapt at Tavi.

Tavi hadn't expected quite
that
strong a reaction, but he'd been ready to move since the moment he'd dismounted. He borrowed speed from the wind and slowed everything that happened, drawing his sword to meet the Cane's, pulling strength from the earth and twisting the whole of his body, hips and shoulders and legs, to strike against the Cane's weapon with all the force he could summon.

The Aleran
gladius
rang against the bloodsteel of the Cane's sword, and shattered it in a scream of tortured metal. The Cane staggered, thrown off-balance, and Tavi bulled forward, low, sword sweeping in a cut aimed at the back of the Cane's armored leg.

The Cane jerked his leg clear of the blow that could have severed tendons and rendered him immobile, and Tavi rammed his shoulder into the Cane's belly with all the power of his body and furycraft, actually lifting the huge wolf-warrior clear of the ground, before slamming him to the earth on his back. The Cane's breath exploded from his lungs in a croaking snarl, and before he could recover, Tavi had seized one broad ear in an iron grip and set the tip of his sword against the Cane's throat.

"I am Rufus Scipio," Tavi said calmly. "Captain of the First Aleran Legion. Defender of the Elinarch. I have faced the massed ranks of your army alone and unarmed. I killed the Bloodspeaker Sarl by my own hand. And," he added, "I beat Nasaug at
ludus
. I have come to speak to Nasaug, and you will take me to him."

The warrior Cane stared at him for several seconds. Then his eyes flicked to one side, and he tilted his head slightly, baring his throat. Tavi released his grip on the Cane's ear, and returned the gesture, more shallowly. The Cane's ears twitched in what Tavi had come to recognize as a motion of surprise.

Tavi lowered the sword and backed away without letting his guard down. Then he sheathed the weapon and nodded to the Cane. "Get up. Let's move."

The Cane growled as he pushed himself up but tilted his head to one side again and gestured to the other Canim there. He turned to the Aleran centurion, and said, in mangled Aleran, "I leave the post in your care, centurion."

The centurion looked from the Cane to Tavi, his face full of questions, but he saluted the Cane, Aleran style, and began giving orders to the other men there. The Cane growled to his countrymen, and the Canim fell into a loose formation around Tavi, who mounted his horse again and pulled it up next to the wagon.

"How is he?" he asked Varg quietly, looking down on Ehren's ashen face.

"Sleeping," Varg replied. The Cane held steady the quill that still protruded from the slit in Ehren's neck, allowing him to breathe.

"Aleran," Kitai said, a note of reprimand in her voice. "If I must drive the wagon, it would be courteous of you to let me handle the fighting."

Varg's ears flicked in amusement.

"Next time," Tavi told her. He glanced at Varg and arched an eyebrow in silent question.

"Your grammar is terrible," Varg said. He glanced up at the warrior Cane, as he signaled his men, and their group and its new escort started down the road. "But you make yourself understood,
gadara
. Calling him 'useless' may have been more than was necessary to goad him."

Tavi grunted. "It is an insult word to your kind?"

Varg snorted again. "Rear-area duties such as this are often assigned to overly aggressive young warriors, to temper them. They often resent it."

Tavi nodded in understanding. "I'm just glad I didn't have to kill anyone to get through."

"Why?" Varg asked.

Tavi glanced back at the Cane. The question had been delivered in a neutral, almost casual tone, but Tavi sensed that there was more to it than that, in Varg's mind.

Varg's chest rumbled in a low, pensive growl. "You begin to understand us, I think,
gadara
. And perhaps I begin to understand you."

"That," Kitai said in an acerbic tone, "would be remarkable."

They reached Mastings in the midst of the afternoon.

The Canim, Tavi saw at once, had turned the city into a veritable fortress, with multiple ranks of earthworks and palisades surrounding a solidly crafted curtain wall, leading up to full thirty-foot siege walls around the town itself. The outermost wall was lined with both Free Aleran and Canim troops, and at the gate they were challenged by another warrior Cane. The leader of their escort went forward to speak with the sentry, and Tavi paused, looking around.

The conversation between the two Canim became animated, but no louder. The Cane at the gate beckoned an older Aleran man over, and the three of them met in a quiet conference. The man glanced at Tavi and frowned, and Aleran sentries on the wall began to gather in, overlooking the group at the gate.

"We've attracted attention," Kitai noted under her breath.

"That was the idea," Tavi replied.

Ten minutes later, no one had come to speak to them, but a runner had been dispatched toward the city, and a rider had left the gates, riding hard toward the north.

Another half hour passed before a group of horsemen emerged from Mastings and made their way through the extra defensive walls until they finally reached the outermost wall. As they did, Tavi squinted at the outer wall, then at all the positions on the inner wall, where thousands of uniformed figures stood on guard.

"Kitai," Tavi breathed quietly. "Look at the guards on the second wall, and farther in, and tell me what you see."

"To put the Legions off their guard," Tavi said quietly- "The scouts would never have gotten this close to the city, to see through it. They'd report back that the city was heavily occupied, and the Legions would count on twenty thousand troops at least being behind the city walls. Under observation. Safely located. Then Nasaug could bring the actual troops in unexpectedly.'

"Nasaug is not planning on fighting a siege, as we thought," Kitai said.

"No. He met us in the field, probably before we could dig in." Tavi shook his head. "Crows, he's good."

Varg growled thoughtfully. "You beat him at
ludus?

Tavi glanced back over his shoulder at Varg. "During a truce to allow him to recover the bodies of his warriors. His game on the skyboard isn't as strong as it could be, and he underestimated me."