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Of High Crag he was not so tolerant. The home and heart of the Guild had to be destroyed. The warrior brotherhood backboned the resistance in the reoccupied provinces.
Ere ever he crossed the Scarlotti, el-Kader summoned Mowaffak Hali from Ipopotam and handed the Invincible the chore of reducing High Crag. Hali accepted the task with reservations. He doubted that it could be accomplished.
Mowaffak Hali was a thorough, methodical leader. He did not hurl the remnants of the Invincibles against High Crag's ancient walls. He gathered information and men of talent, and such additional warriors as he could obtain, for a slow, systematic reduction of the fortress. He built great engines. He employed miners. He did whatever needed doing to neutralize his opponents' advantages.
He might have succeeded had events elsewhere not compelled him to abandon the siege.
Far to the north, el-Kader had the misfortune to, at last, catch the elusive Greyfells.
The nearest town, Liston, gave the battle its name. The engagement was unusual. El-Kader amassed heavy cavalry for the first time in the Host's history. And Greyfells abjured the traditional western use of knights. Once el-Kader closed his trap and battle became unavoidable, the Duke ordered his horsemen to fight afoot.
Greyfells made his stand on the face and top of a rocky hill flanked by woods, with his pikemen and knights massed before his archers. The bowmen of Itaskia were renowned, and in this engagement justified their fame. While the pikemen, supported by disgruntled noblemen, valiantly absorbed charge after charge, the archers darkened the sky with arrows.
Had el-Kader not grown over-optimistic, had he not been overconfident, had he listened to his advisers and waited a few days till the whole of the Host had gathered, he would have obliterated the northern might. Liston would have been the battle memoralized as ending the resistance to El Murid's Second Empire.
But he did not wait, and he did not try getting behind his enemies. And still he came within a gnat's eyebrow of success. In the end, he simply ran out of ready bow-fodder before his foes collapsed completely.
Greyfells had the advantage of him in that his troops believed that they had nowhere to run. They believed they had to win or perish. And win they did—in the sense that they compelled el-Kader to withdraw.
The importance of Liston could be weighed only in its effects on the hearts and minds of men. The number of dead on the field was of no consequence. That Greyfells could do nothing but lick his wounds afterward meant little. That el-Kader had not committed his whole strength was overlooked everywhere.
The Host of Illumination had been turned.
Western armies could withstand its onslaught. El Mu-rid could be stopped.
The effect was magical. Enemies sprang from the earth. Some of el-Kader's allies changed sides again. Resistance stiffened everywhere.
El-Kader coped first by withdrawing across the Porthune, then by summoning every man he could from the south. The siege of High Crag, a project he cherished, he ordered abandoned. He drew strength away from Hellin Daimiel and the captains pursuing the growing guerrilla forces in the southern Lesser Kingdoms.
The summer campaign was in danger of collapse. He had to scatter his strength, flinging lesser armies here and there to stamp out sudden brushfires of resistance. He could not seize the breathing time to rejuvenate the Host and lead it in a grand, finishing surge northward, though he knew the Itaskians could no longer stop such a thrust.
Bin Yousif's Royalists were no help. They had adopted the tactics developed by the Scourge of God in the days when the Kingdom of Peace had been but a dream. There were thousands of Royalists now. They and their Guild allies were keeping the provinces in turmoil. Their raids were becoming ever more widespread, like the growth of a cancer.
There was a bright side to the summer. El Nadim and the armies of the east, receiving no instructions from Al Rhemish either, abandoned their futile siege of the Savernake Gap and turned their attention to the Empire's old provinces behind the Mountains of M'Hand. El Nadim integrated Throyes into the New Empire. He forced pledges of fealty from old eastern tributaries as remote as Argon and Necremnos. His legates collected caravans of tribute and battalions of mercenaries. His missionaries carried the Truth to the masses, and were well received.
El Nadim's successes amazed the Faithful. He was the least regarded of the generals Nassef had created. Now, suddenly, with only a few thousand men actually of Hammad al Nakir, with almost no fighting, he had recovered territories more vast than the whole west.
Some whispered that el Nadim had been successful because he was a true believer, because he followed El Murid's teachings in handling his foes. There were those who said that el-Kader's troubles were the Lord's punishment for associating with profiteers.
El-Kader ignored the whispers. El Nadim's successes pleased him. The tribute of the east could be used in the west. Two summers of fighting had left a lot of desolation.
He, too, was applying El Murid's precepts—to the extent that they won favor amongst the populations of the recovered provinces.
He drove his warriors and allies hard, extinguishing any resistance he could identify. He recovered several bridgeheads across the Porthune, but the enemy regained a couple below the river. Both sides retained isolated pockets within the other's territory. Their smaller allies remained evanescent in their loyalties, shifting allegiances with each breath of fortune.
Winter, the season of peace, set in. It became the season of negotiation, the time of secret treaties and not so secret betrayals. Always there was an agent of the Itaskian Duke around, ever with an offer of double-edged treason.
And still el-Kader had received no orders from Al Rhemish.
None that he considered genuine, anyway. None signed in the Disciple's own hand.
Order did come. From someone. He ignored them. They were not from his prophet.
Nassef's death had been the signal for the formation of new cabals, for the begi
It was a foreshadowing of the social inevitability of all revolutions, though Altaf el-Kader could not understand.
He saw a gang of stay-at-homes isolating the Disciple and presuming to speak in his name, perverting his pure vision.
He knew a cure.
He had a few words with Mowaffak Hali, a man he did not like but who possessed the specific for this disease. Hali agreed. Something had to be done.
Hali bore el-Kader no love either, but in this they had to be allies. He gathered a few tattooed white robes and rode for the capital.
He was shocked by what he found. The Disciple was a ghost of a man, drained, without spirit. His struggle with the evil within him was consuming him.
Mowaffak spent one afternoon with the master he loved, then went into the desert and wept. Then he instructed the Harish and returned to the west. He redoubled his prayers on behalf of the man who had been, in hopes he would be again.
The third summer of fighting began like the second, with el-Kader trying to avoid his old mistakes. He began by making big gains, but bogged down just thirty miles from the Silverbind and Itaskia the City. For four grim months he maneuvered, met the enemy, maneuvered, and skirmished in an area of barely a hundred square miles. Greyfells had spent the winter preparing, screening the approaches to Itaskia and the Great Bridge with countless obstacles and redoubts. El-Kader could not break through.