War in Tethyr (20 page)

Lying on her belly in the midst of a thicket of aromatic scrub that did little to keep the afternoon sun from prickling her back through her linen tunic, Zaranda surveyed the scene. Masamont was a collection of a hundred buildings or more, the largest and most central of which were built of stone, with peaked red tile roofs like the coastal towns. Like most of inland Tethyr, the surrounding countryside was flat. Fields green with the long summer's second crops, beginning to fill out, broke up the landscape, interspersed with lines of shade from windbreak trees planted along irrigation ditches and neat orchards of half-ripened fruit.

However,
flat
did not mean entirely lacking relief, like a gaming table in the parlor of a Cormyrean lord; the thicket in which Zaranda and her small band lay hidden topped a slight rise backed by a creek. The prominence from which the castle rose, three furlongs away, was too symmetrical to be nature's work. Zaranda guessed it was an artificial mound, a motte, built at some unguessable remove in Tethyr's lengthy past to provide better outlook and tactical advantage for whatever fortification was first raised upon it.

The manor itself was a bailey, pitched rooftops peeking over a twelve-foot dressed-stone wall, and a stone keep perhaps four stories tall sticking up from the center of it. "You're right," Janafar breathed to Byador. "It's a fortress."

Zaranda withheld a smile. The castle was a step or at most two above her own manor. It lacked flanking towers or crenelations and even at this range she could see that the dry ditch surrounding it was half-filled with trash. A fixed wooden bridge led to the gate, hinting that the baron's mechanics were not up to the task of keeping a drawbridge in repair. By her standards it was pretty weak beer. Yet she understood how invincible and intimidating it appeared to her untempered village warriors.

"I've seen enough," she announced quietly, and slithered back down to the stream. The rest of the party-Stillhawk, Shield, Balmeric, and the three trainees-followed.

Chenowyn awaited on the far side, on the edge of a brushy and neglected woodlot. Zaranda had let her come because Chen refused to be parted from her. The shrubs on the low ridge made her sneeze uncontrollably, so she had consented to watch the horses. She amused herself by making ripples and tiny splashes appear in the water by force of will.

Jumping across the creek, Zaranda gave her a quick frown. She disapproved of Chen's playing unsupervised with her wild talents.

"So what do you make of it?" Zaranda asked her trainees.

They looked at one another and then back at her with anxious eyes. No one spoke.

After a moment, Balmeric said, "We'll never cast it down with our ragtag army, lacking siege engines."

Zaranda pulled a long face. "I mislike 'never.' It's too big for my mind to hold."

"Zaranda will find something magical to do," Chenowyn pronounced proudly.

Zaranda grinned and ruffled her hair. "Magic isn't the solution to all problems. At least, not
my
magic. But there is a solution." She put hands on hips and looked challenge at the others. "Well?"

"Attack the flank," said Shield.

Balmeric uttered a bark of laughter. "A castle's flank? Ho, that's rich. Even so great a moon-calf as you can plainly see the castle's round."

"Zaranda says there's always a flank," the orog maintained stolidly.

"So she does," Byador said. "But Master Balmeric's right-how can a castle have a flank?"

"Not all flanks are physical," Zaranda said. "Attend me. Even you, Balmeric; you've not seen so much of siegecraft as I have. The thing about sieges is, they seldom end with a successful storming. Ladders and engines and mines aren't what win them."

"What does win them?" Janafar demanded, bursting with impatience.

Zaranda only grinned.

"Greetings, gentles," he said, sweeping off his hat and bowing long from the saddle. "I hight Fyadros, the Incomparably Wonderful Bard, and this is Zizzy, the Wonder Horse."

As if in greeting, the mare bobbed her head three times, making her forelock bounce, and thrice smote the wooden bridge with a dainty hoof. The guards gaped.

"What brings you this way, good bard?" asked one, too overawed by the splendor of this apparition to remember his obligation, as a member of a rural robber baron's entourage, to be rude and overbearing at all times.

"We seldom see the likes of you hereabouts," echoed his companion, similarly stricken.

"Indeed, that's evident by the quaint way your jaws hang down to your hauberks," the bard said. "What brings me is my whim, which rules with a hand of iron; I come from here, and there, and everywhere. Just now I feel the winds of adventure blowing me to Zazesspur, whence I shall take ship for the wondrous realm of Maztica."

The guards looked at each other. "Do you think," asked the one on the right, "that you could stay a night or two? We don't get much by way of entertainment out here."

"The village women hate us, the trollops," the other said. "They give us nothing we don't take at poniard-point."

"Indeed? Such strapping stalwarts as yourselves?" The bard stroked his long chin and looked thoughtful. "It could be that I might be induced to bide the night here, if nicely asked."

The guard on the right turned and bellowed for an errand boy to go and fetch the chamberlain. While they waited, Fyadros entertained the guards with improbable tales of a halfling who attempted intimacies with a firbolg maid.

At length the great oaken gates groaned open behind them. A slight middle-aged man in a black robe stood there. He had receding dark hair, white-touched at the temples, and a wisp of mustache. A dirty, skinny boy peeked past a gate valve behind him.

"I am Whimberton," the man said in a thin voice, "chamberlain to Castle Lutwill and the ever-glorious, to say nothing of -victorious, Baron Lutwill. Who might you be?"

"He's a bard," the guard on the right said.

"He has a Wonder Horse," added the one on the left.

"I am of course Fyadros, the Incomparably Wonderful Bard, and being of generous disposition only mildly miffed at not being recognized at once, seeing what a backwater this is."

"Of course I recognize you, good Fyadros," the chamberlain said smoothly. "It was only that poor light momentarily dulled my sight. What might I do for you?"

"Your guards hinted you might care to beseech me to pass the night within and brighten your dull and meaningless lives with my stories and songs, which are, it goes without saying, incomparably wonderful."

"Without saying," agreed Whimberton with a nod.

"He told us this great story," said the guard on the left. "See, this halfling fancied a firbolg wench, so he took a bucket-"

The guard on the right poked him in the ribs with the butt of his spear. "Enough! His Excellency the chamberlain don't want to hear that story! Least, not from the likes of you. You always get the punch lines wrong."

"Do not!"

"Do so."

"Be silent," Whimberton said conversationally, "or I'll have your backs scourged raw, roll you in rock salt, and heave you into the pigsty for the night."

"I could, of course, abide in night's jeweled pavilion, shaming the crickets with my songs," Fyadros said. The mare raised her head and whinnied as if in agreement.

"Be not hasty, fair Fyadros," said Whimberton hastily. For all his languid manner he liked a ribald ditty as well as the next man, and entertainment lay pretty thin on the ground, out here in the sticks of strife-torn Tethyr. "In the name of my lord and master, the ever-glorious and -victorious Baron Lutwill, I bid and beseech thee to enter these precincts, and stay and amuse us so long as your heart desires."

The bard looked thoughtful, then nodded. "I suppose I shall. Though 'amuse' is a paltry word for what I shall do to you."

"You're half-elf, aren't you?" the chamberlain asked, studying him through twilight. "We don't see many of them with such impressive mustachios."

"I have many attributes," Fyadros declared airily, "and every one is unique and wonderful. Shall we proceed within?"

"To a certainty. Follow the lout; he'll lead you to the stables."

"Ooh, I'm going to get you for this," Goldie promised
sotto voce
as they passed through the torchlit gate in the ragged boy's wake. "Zizzy, the Wonder Horse?"

"A spur-of-the-moment improvisation," Farlorn the Handsome replied in a murmur audible only to the mare's great rearward-swiveled ears. He gave a quick surreptitious scratch of his thumb tip to his upper lip, where the glue that held his false mustachios in place made him itch. "Now hush, lest you spoil our little game."

"They're in," she said, sliding down the back slope on her rump.

Stillhawk rose from where he squatted, watching star reflections at play in the creek. He gave Zaranda a look, which she steadily returned. Then he jumped onto his horse and vanished into the dark.

I know you don't like it, my friend, Zaranda thought. But you're likeliest to get through to summon the others. They mustn't go astray, with Farlorn and Goldie inside the beast's belly.

She glanced back to the top of the rise, where Byador lay alone keeping watch on the castle. She fought the impulse to climb up and rejoin him. He would not gain self-confidence until he bore responsibility alone.

So she was left with her thoughts, and Shield and Chen, who would not be parted from her. She was glad for the great orc's presence. His eyes saw farther at night than any human's, and if trouble found them she could ask for no better blade, or pair of blades, at her back.

Willy-nilly, she had come to trust him as she trusted Stillhawk, though the ranger still hated the orog.

Not that trouble was likely. That very morning Zaranda and her tiny band had watched the heavy wooden gates swing open and half Baron Lutwill's complement of soldiers march forth to begin collecting the increased taxes the posted parchments had announced. With forces much reduced the
soi-disant
baron had also perforce decreased his patrols, which were in any event predictable, throughout the countryside. And the people of Masamont tended to keep behind heavily barred doors by night, for fear of chance meetings with the baron's men, which seldom went to the towsfolks' advantage.

Still, there remained the small and gnawing chance that they had been seen and betrayed, or espied by magic, or that a tax-collecting band, returning for some reason unforeseen, might stumble across their covert. Just such random events had altered the outcome of half a hundred conflicts, from duels to the meeting of great armies. That was why Zaranda put so little faith in plans drawn elaborately up before the fact.

She sighed and sat down. Chen looked up at her and smiled, her pale, freckled face seeming lightly self-luminous in the last lingering light of day.

"Will you let me go with you?" the girl asked.

"No. We've talked this out before. You've not yet learned enough." Though the girl had been trying, painfully hard. It was as irksome to her quicksilver nature to toil laboriously to learn as it was natural for Shield. Yet she had done so with no less dedication than the orog.

"But how will I ever become a mage if I never put what I know into practice?" Chen wailed.

"That's a fair question. You cannot. And still-the time isn't now."

Chen expelled a huffing breath and turned away. Zaranda laid a hand upon her shoulder. "Now, come. Let's review what you've learned of the incantation that sends your foes to sleep. It's not infallible, and won't work at all against foes who are very powerful or mighty in magic. Yet, day in and out, it's one of the likeliest to save your life…"

Shield said nothing, but stood up with scimitars star-gleaming suddenly in his hands. Zaranda lifted up Crackletongue in its scabbard, which she had unbelted, and stood up more slowly.

The assault group picked its way carefully if not noiselessly through the brush. They were Protective Company volunteers and Balmeric's mercenaries, numbering fifty in all-half Zaranda's cadre-in-training among them. All had volunteered, but she didn't want to risk losing many of her best pupils; even victory could cost dearly. They had drawn lots for the honor of accompanying her.

It nearly broke her heart. They had no idea what they were getting into, not down in their guts where it counted. Many of them had by now seen combat with marauding bands, been wounded, seen comrades die. But battle against trained soldiers, even barracks sweepings such as would accept service with the likes of Baron Lutwill… she hoped the survivors did not look back in bitterness on their eager naivete.

The company dismounted and muzzled and hobbled the horses. Zaranda had as yet no true cavalry beyond herself. But after facing the horse-borne Tuigans, she mounted her own troops for mobility's sake, though they fought afoot.

Stillhawk was somewhere out in the night, prowling round the castle walls, alert for unforeseen events. He was nearly as unseeable, wrapped in his elven cloak and mastery of stealth, as if he'd had a spell of invisibility cast upon him. With nothing more to do, Zaranda wrapped her own cloak about her and settled in to sleep.