The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (10 page)

“
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, not 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.