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"And the League cavalry?" Trag asked.
"We'll see," the war leader said, taking a bite of half-raw civan. "True, the iron heads had more guts than these worthless Southerners, but there can't be many of them left. I doubt there's anything to the rumors, but we'll see. And if there isn't, we'll send some of the youngsters out to K'Vaern's Cove to see how it's defended. If it looks weak, or if they're begi
Not, at least, until I've taken K'Vaern's Cove, as well ... and made my position as paramount war leader something more permanent, he added silently. He didn't say it aloud, although that wasn't because he distrusted Trag. His older ally knew all about his plans, he was sure, despite the fact that they had never openly discussed them, and if Trag had disapproved, one of them would already be dead.
"All right," Trag said after only the briefest moment, "but be warned. Hungry or not, those damned K'Vaernians have always been too tricky to make me happy."
"I can't believe we've gotten this close without these idiots even guessing we're here," Honal said.
After being ferried across the river, the cavalry had taken back trails up to a point just outside Sindi. Thanks to the reports from the Marine long-range reco
Sindi, the undisputed queen of the upper Tam, had originally been built on the south side of the river, but it had long since spread to both banks, taking its impressively fortified walls with it. Before the Boman came, it had been surrounded by vast fields of barleyrice, which the constant rains were rapidly destroying, now that no one tended them any longer. But its true wealth had lain in the fact that it had controlled the only bridge across the river for hurtongs. The bridge itself was a massive stone construction at the heart of the city, wide enough for four pagee or twenty warriors abreast, whose completion, generations before, had really begun the history of Sindi.
Although Sindi had drawn most of its wealth and power from its position on the Tam, the city was actually located at the confluence of three rivers. A smaller stream, the Stell, flowed into the Tam on the western side of the city, where the road to D'Sley crossed it on a narrow stone bridge and then continued on through spreading fields to the distant jungle. The third river, the Thorm, joined the Tam just upstream from the city, flowing down from the northeast and eventually becoming u
The cavalry troopers had turned progressively more grim as they drew closer to the destroyed cities which had been their homes, but Rastar wasn't worried. He knew they were fully focused on their target, and he was confident that they understood the mission brief. Which seemed to be working out almost perfectly-so far, at least-he told himself, because Honal was right. The Boman clearly didn't have a clue that they were anywhere near. Before the barbarian invasion, there would have been Sindi cavalry patrols this far out to spot them, or at least workers in the fields, but now there was nothing at all on the north side of the river beyond the city gates themselves. All of the field huts had been burned, and nothing moved here but an occasional basik.
So far, so good.
"It's a hurtong to the gates," Rastar said. "Clande, your group will stop here and hold. Get the surprise set up along the trail, and don't let anybody we may have missed sneak up behind us, or we're all pocked."
"Yes, Rastar." The young cousin might have argued once that rear area security was hardly the job of a warrior. But the only survivors of the League of the North were those who'd learned the lessons which had made their survival possible, and the hotheaded "warrior" who would once have argued was one with last season's rains.
"The rest of you," Rastar went on, sweeping Honal's subordinate officers with his eyes, "remember why we're here, and don't get too enthusiastic. It's not like there's all that much we can really do if they're hiding inside the city, after all! We'll make a charge at the gate and see if that works. It probably won't, so we'll put some grapnels on the walls. When they start throwing their damned axes, shoot a few of them-but don't, for the gods' sake, let them realize how effective the rifles and revolvers are. When they get their shit together, we back off and taunt."
"We've heard this before, Rastar," Honal said patiently and squinted up into the gathering light as the morning drizzle began. "Let's go."
The last prince of Therdan looked at his cousin and nodded.
"Let's all be charming lures, shall we?"
"Absolutely," Honal said. "Sheffan! Front!"
"Julian," Gu
"Pahner here."
"The cavalry are starting the demonstration, Sir."
"Good. Give me an update if the situation changes."
The massive gates shrugged off the thunderous explosion with scarcely a quiver.
"Oh, very nice," Rastar said. "They should be convinced they're impregnable now."
"Yes," Honal agreed. "And so far, we haven't even lost anyone."
That, Rastar knew, would change as soon as the sun rose above the eternal clouds. Already, the Boman could be seen on top of the high wall, ru
"Time to call them back," Rastar ordered.
"Got it."
The high call of the glitchen horn rang out through the rain, signaling for the cavalry to pull away from the walls and out of ax range, and Rastar watched with an approving eye as his troopers obeyed.
"Now to do the real work," he said with a grunt of laughter.
"They're taunting us," Mnb Trag said.
"Yes," Camsan agreed. "But why are they taunting us?"
The Northerner cavalry had been at it all morning. Their initial attack had been a complete failure-the bags of gunpowder had barely even scratched the gates. But the small band hadn't given up, though precisely what the idiots thought they could accomplish was beyond Camsan. They'd been riding around the walls and hurling taunts at the guards for the last few hours. No scatological or genealogical detail had been left out of the suggestions which could be clearly heard on the walls, and the taunts were working, judging by the furious anger of his warriors.
"They want us to chase them," Camsan said, "so we won't."
He turned to look back over the city with a proprietary eye. Although it had taken some damage in the sack, it was still the crown jewel of the upper Tam, with rank on rank of low stone houses rising up the central hill to the citadel. Whatever else anyone could say, he had taken Sindi, and the horns of that hated bastard Cant. Nobody was going to take either of those accomplishments away from him, and he'd already decided that Sindi would make an appropriate capital for the new, powerful empire which would shortly replace the weak and gutless shit-sitters who had dared to challenge the Boman clans.
But his contemplation of the future was interrupted when Trag gave a handclap of negation.
"I don't think you have that choice," the older chieftain told him, and pounded on a merlon of the granite wall with one false-hand. "If you sit here much longer, looking like you're afraid to face a couple of hundred League shits in the open, you might not have a position by tomorrow."
"That bad?" the war leader asked his adviser. Trag grunted, and as Camsan turned to look at the warriors around them, he was forced to admit that his ally might have a point. "All right, take the Tarnt'e and go chase them down. There was never a group of cavalry Boman couldn't run into the ground-not even old, worn out Boman," he added with a grunt of laughter, but Trag didn't join his amusement.
"I don't think that will work either," he said somberly. "If I go out, by the time I get back, you'll have been deposed, and Knitz De'n will have taken your place."
"But if we do what De'n wants and storm K'Vaern's Cove head on, it will be the death of thousands of them," Camsan said. "Do they want that?"
"No," the older chieftain said, "but most of them figure it'll be someone else who does the dying. Besides, what they really want, most of them, is to return to their villages. But we made this stupid pact to destroy all the cities of the south, which means they can't go yet, so they want to destroy K'Vaern's Cove and get it over with. They're frustrated, and that's why they want to gut these iron head pukes."
"Don't they realize that the iron heads wouldn't be riding around out there all by themselves unless they wanted us to come out and chase them? There has to be a reason they want to lure us away from the city, Mnb."
"Of course there does, and most of our warriors know it. But if they can't burn K'Vaern's Cove to the ground, then killing these Northerners will have to do. They know perfectly well that the Northerners want them to come out from behind the walls, and they don't care. At least it would be an honorable battle. Besides, there's only three or four hundred of them."