Trumpets of War

VI

Mainahkos Klehpteekos and Ahreekos Krehohpoleeos had risen fast and high from their origin as common irregular troopers in the first, almost extirpated army ofthen-Thoheeks Zastros. That both men were incredibly savage and completely unprincipled had helped them to so rise, that they owned an ability to organize and lead men like themselves and were often inordinately lucky had helped even more.

During the long years of howling chaos in the Kingdom of the Southern Ehleenohee, they and their heterogeneous packs of deserters, banditti, unhung criminals, shanghaied peasants, city gutter scum and stray psychopaths had signed on as mercenary forces to quite a few warbands of the battling lords. Occasionally, they had actually given the services for which they had been paid, but more often they either had deserted en masse or had turned their coats at a crucial point of a battle, especially so if such ongoing conflict showed signs of being a close contest.

At length, so odious had their well-earned reputation become that no lord or city—no matter how desperate—throughout the length and breadth of the sundered realm would even consider hiring them on in any capacity. At that point, they proceeded to follow their natural inclinations, becoming out-and-out predatory ruffians, the leaders and their lawless followers at war against all the world.

Then, at long last, Thoheeks Zastros returned from his lengthy period of exile in the demon-haunted depths of the deadly swamps that surrounded and guarded the sinister Witch Kingdom . He brought with him a witch-wife from that land of dragons, magicians and sorcerers and marched back and forth across the lands, raising as he went an army much larger than the one he had led to defeat, years before, on the bloodsoaked field of Ahrbahkootchee.

With King Fahrkos and all his family dead in their gore in his blazing palace, the returned Zastros had had himself declared High King—a new title for the Kingdom of the Southern Ehleenohee—and crowned, then his forces had begun to scour the lands for warriors and men of the proper ages and degrees of soundness to serve in the huge army he was forming for the invasion of the Kingdom of Karaleenos and points farther north. At length, he led out his half-million and more on a path of supposed glory that would lead finally to a muddy, unmarked grave on the banks of the Lumbuh River for him and no grave at all for the bodies of the untold thousands of men and animals the bones of which would litter his line of march.

With the new High King, all of the nobility of warring age and a large percentage of both city and rural commoners on the road of conquest behind the Green Dragon Banner, Captains Mainahkos and Ahreekos had found themselves in a pigs’ paradise. Now they were able to prey not only on travelers and villages, unwalled towns and isolated holds, but on walled towns and smaller cities, as well.

They descended upon these now all but defenseless smaller cities like a pack of starving winter wolves upon so many sheepfolds; they behaved in their usual fashion—conduct that might have been called bestial, save that it would have shamed any wild beast. With all the onetime garrisons gone north with High King Zastros, the old men, women, boys and assorted cripples seldom held out behind their walls and gates for long, and when scaled by the forces of the bandit warlords, those walls shortly enclosed a slice of veriest hell on earth for all who had dwelt therein.

No female above the age of six was safe from the lusts of the marauders, nor did the perverts spare boys. The elderly and the very youngest were generally cut down at the beginning of an intaking with callous strokes of blades and stabbings of spears, and thus were they the luckier citizens, for it was after the first flush of bloodthirst was sated that the true horrors commenced.

After all visible wealth and goods had been plundered, then were the luckless inhabitants savagely tortured to extract possible hiding places of more loot, and torture for definite purpose often led to torture, maimings and indescribable mutilations for no purpose at all save the satisfaction of causing agony and hearing screams and pleas. Some of the pack delighted in such atrocious obscenities as forcing hapless sufferers to imbibe of unholy broths seethed of portions of their own bodies or those of spouses and children. Brutal men would gouge out eyes, rip out tongues, slice off breasts and sexual organs, noses and ears and lips, smash out teeth, sever leg tendons, then leave the bloody, croaking, flopping things to roast in the blazing ruins of their homes.

Of a day, however, a broken nobleman who had joined the bandit army to avoid starvation had words with Mainahkos and Ahreekos and slowly convinced them of the sagacity of those words. For all that they and most of their followers were now become wealthy beyond their former wildest dreams of avarice, each succeeding victory had cost and was costing them at least a few men, while men of fighting age or strength or inclination were become almost as precious as emeralds or rubies in this land stripped of warrior stock by High King Zastros’ strenuous impressments and recruitings atop the civil war and its years of carnage. Moreover, the few scattered survivors of witnesses to the intakings and occupations and burnings of the stinking charnel houses that the two warlords and their band had made of every city that had fallen to them had moved fast and spread the terrible word far and wide. Now, every walled enclosure within weeks of marching time had been forewarned and was doing everything possible to strengthen its existing defenses and had resolutely put aside any previous thoughts of trying to deal with the marauders on any near-peaceful basis.

So, although it went hard against the grain, the two warlords had begun to rein in their savages and even resist their own natural impulses and inclinations somewhat. They began to deal gently—gently by their personal lights, of course—with the inhabitants of any place that opened the gates without a Fight or showed a willingness to treat.

Mainahkos and Ahreekos even took it upon themselves to move against and either recruit or wipe out numerous smaller bands of their own ilk lurking about the countrysides. Then they began to recruit from the tiny garrisons remaining in a few of the larger walled towns and the smaller cities. Slowly, their howling pack of human predators began to metamorphose into a real, more or less organized, savagely disciplined army.

Therefore, by that day, now three years in the past, that they had appeared under the walls of the ducal city of Kahlkopolis—the onetime seat of the Thoheeksee of Kahlkos—the few straggling hundreds of ill-equipped, sketchily armed bandits that they had been in the beginning were become an impressive and very threatening sight indeed.

All classes of infantry marched in the ranks, fully armed and equipped. Heavy cavalry rode at head and tail of that column, with light cavalry on the flanks and van and riding close guard on the baggage train and the awesome siege engines, the large remuda and the beef herd. Only elephants were lacking, and this deficiency was partially alleviated through the use of old-fashioned war-carts as shock weapons and archery platforms—the

stout, reinforced cart bodies with scythe blades set in the wheel hubs, the big mules all hung with mail, the postillions fully armored having proved quite effective at the tasks of harrying and smashing in infantry lines for long years before the elephants had been trained for warfare.

The last Thoheeks of Kahlkos, one Klawdos, was by then nearly a decade dead, a casualty of the civil war. His wife and young son had disappeared during disturbances shortly after his demise, and the ducal city was just then being held by a distant cousin of the mostly extinct ancient line. The man was a bastard, with scant claim to any scintilla of noble heritage and even less to military experience.

Therefore, when this poseur ordered the gates of the city to be slammed shut and barred, the walls to be manned by the pitifully few men he owned to defend them, those still living of the ducal council of advisers did the only reasonable thing—they murdered him and left the city open to the overwhelming force outside.

Since then, Mainahkos had been thoheeks in all save only name; he had seen to it that that ducal council had all quickly followed their victim into death, by one means or another. He had been teetering upon the very verge of declaring himself Thoheeks Mainahkos Klehftikos of the Duchy of Klehftikos and the City of Klehftikopolis (for, as he and his men had become at least marginally “respectable,” he had adopted the new surname, and now no man who did not desire a messy, agonizing and brutally protracted demise ever recalled aloud the powerful warlord’s original cognomen, Klehpteekos—“the Thief”, and riding to Mehseepolis to demand legal confirmation of his title and lands of the council of the Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee .

He and Ahreekos had both chanced to be out of the city when the boy, son he claimed of Thoheeks Klawdos, came nosing around, in company with some tall, arrogant dotard. But they had both been gone beyond recall by the time the would-be thoheeks had returned, and he had had the fools who had allowed their escape to be flayed alive and then rolled in salt for their inordinate stupidity; those tanned skins still hung in prominent places on the walls of his hall of audience, a silent, savage, ever-present warning to his followers.

On a summer’s day, Mainahkos sat at meat with his principal officer-advisers and his longtime partner. Ahreekos had never bothered to change his cognomen, still reveling in being known as “The Butcher,” although he was become so fat that he no longer did or could do much fighting of any nature. The topic of the discussion around that table was that army which they had been warned was marching upon them from Mehseepolis, in the east-southeast.

In answer to a query directed at him by Mainahkos, the heavy cavalry commander, one Stehrgiahnos—who had been born and reared the heir of avahrohnos, though his father had fallen at Ahrbahkootchee and Stehrgiahnos himself had forfeited title, lands and nearly life itself in an ill-timed rebellion against King Fahrkos, the failure of which had seen him declared outlaw and a distant cousin confirmed to all that which had been his—set down his goblet and patted dry his lips, moustaches and beard before saying somewhat cautiously, “My lord, it might be as well to at least essay a meeting with the senior officers of this army. After all, my lord’s claim to this city and thoheekseeahn should be as good as that any other might make, for he has been a good lord since he has held the city and lands, and, although not related to the ancient but now probably extinct house, he does own the support of at least some of the people of Kahlk—ahh, that is to say, of Klehftikos.”

Mainahkos frowned, sniffed, sneezed and wiped his nose on the wine-and-food-spotted sleeve of his fine linen shirt, considering the suggestion.

Ahreekos shoved aside what little was left of the whole suckling pig on which he had feasted, drained off a half-liter mug of beer, belched thunderously twice, broke wind just as thunderously, then nodded his agreement with the cavalry officer, giving no more thought to his grease-glazed beard than he did to the flies that crawled on and in it and buzzed about his face.

“Stehrgiahnos, he’s right, you know, Mainahkos. From whatall my scouts done told me, that army a-coming against us ain’t one like I’d of cared to face three, four years ago, when we was at full stren’th. And they got them elephants, too. My boys see’d three of the critters, and you know fucking good and well it’s gotta be more of them.

“Look, why don’t we send out Stehrgiahnos here and a couple more fellers of his stripe and let them palaver with the strahteegos of that army some, huh? Ain’tno fucking thing to be lost by that, is it?”

Pausing briefly to lift a bulging buttock and again break wind, he then continued, “Look, Mainahkos, old Thoheeks Grahvos and them over there in Mehseepolis is making new thoheeksee andkomeesee and vahrohnosee andopokomeesee right and left and up and down all over the place, I hear tell, and like Stehrgiahnos just done said, you got you about as good a claim as anybody’s got to thishere city and duchy. Hell, yourclaim’s a fucking lot better nor most, you’re sitting in it, holding it, and you been doing it for three fucking years, too.

“So it could be, when you look hard at ever’thing, if you allow as how you’ll stand ahind Thoheeks Grahvos and his Council and all them, won’t be no battle or war at all and you’ll wind up as the real, legal thoheeks. And if ever’thingdon’t work out, we can always fight after we done talking.”

Mainahkos sat picking between his discolored teeth with a cracked and very filthy thumbnail for a while, his gaze fixed on a blue fly that had wandered into a dollop of hot-pepper sauce and looked to be in its death throes. Taking a mouthful of wine from the heavy gilded-silver goblet, he swished it about briefly, then spat it out onto the once-fine carpet beside his chair, guzzled down the rest of the wine, and sat rolling the stem between his greasy hands as he announced his decision.

“Hell, you right, Ahreekos, and you too, Stehrgiahnos, ain’t no fucking thing gonna be lost by talking with them bastids, maybe a whole damn lot to be gained, if things comes to go right with that talking. But I still want the levy raised and marched out at the same time, too. And I want word sent over there to old Ratface Billisos and Horsecock Kawlos to bring in ever’ swinging dick what they can lay claws to from the western and northernkomeeseeahnee. And tell them to bring all the mounts and supplies and beeves they can beg, borrer or steal, too. If it works out that we have to fight, I wants ever’thing I can get on our side.”

It was a long, slow, very frustrating march for the army led by Grand Strahteegos Komees Pahvlos Feelohpohlehmos. Only three days out, the captain of pioneers died of heart failure after being bitten by a watersnake while supervising the strenghtening of a bridge; the headeeahtros reported to Pahvlos that fright or heart failure must have killed the officer, for an examination of the front half of the dead serpent had determined it to not be a poisonous one at all, though a rather large specimen of its kind.

At the next wide river, several very long, massivekrokothehliohsee were observed by the scouts, and Pahvlos insisted that the dangerous, armored horrors be caught on land or in the shallows and speared to death before he would allow men or beasts to use the deep, difficult ford. One of the scaly monsters was found to be more than seven and a quartermehtrahee long, its tooth-studded jaws and head being every bit as long as the strahteegos was tall. Officers and not a few others pried and cut out huge, pointed teeth for souvenirs, and the white meat from the thick, muscular tails became a part of the evening’s rations—a welcome change from bread and beans and stringy beef for those lucky enough to get some of it.

A week farther along the abdominable roadway, the scouts sent back a galloper to report that at some time in the recent years, a colony of beavers had built a long, high, thick dam that had turned a small vale that the road had crossed into a spreading lake. A study of the map showed Pahvlos that if he backtracked for three or four days, he would be able to cut another road that would eventually lead him to a place from which he could reach his objective by way of a cross-country march of seven or eight additional days.

Rather than waste so much more time, he marched on and went into camp on the marshy shore of the lake, then set his pioneers, artificiers and as many common soldiers as were needed to break apart and tear out the beaver dam. When the most of the water had drained away, the hard-worked pioneers probed what had been the bottom muck and marked the roadway so that sweating, cursing companies of pikemen could scoop up and shovel away the stuff to reveal the fitted stones beneath it. This way, the delay was only two days, not twelve.

Farther on, the van had just passed yet another in the seemingly endless succession of overgrown, burned-out village ruins when, from the direction of a slighted hold atop a small, steep hill, a head-sized stone was hurled in a high arc that brought it down squarely atop a trooper, smashing in the helmet and the skull beneath it. The van prudently retired out of supposed range and sent a galloper back to alert the main column. Even as they sat their horses with a small copse blocking sight of the vine-grown, damaged walls, they could clearly hear the rhythmic creaking as the engine which had thrown the heavy stone was rewound.

Then, up the road, preceded by the furious clash and jingle of metal on metal, the pounding of many hooves and the squeaking of leather, came Grand Strahteegos Komees Pahvlos, his staff, his bodyguards and a hundred heavyhorse . The lancer officer rode out to meet his commander and rendered a terse report of the incident and his response to it.

Pahvlos nodded once. “Good man. I’ll remember you. You’re certain your trooper is dead, then, up there?” He pointed with his chin at the twisted form that lay on the road ahead.

“He’s not moved a muscle since we withdrew, my lord,” was the sad reply. “And no man could have survived such a buffet, not even for a minute.”

The Grand Strahteegos nodded once more, then turned to those behind him.” Galloper, my regards to Lord Sub-strahteegos Tomos Gonsalos. Tell him that I want his Number One and Number Two regiments up here at the run.” As that rider saluted and reined about, the old man was already snapping out instructions to another galloper, this one being sent to order up several of the lighter engines of the siege train. An officer of the heavy horse was ordered to take a strong patrol in a wide swing completely around the partially wrecked hold and determine if there might be bodies of troops hidden where they could not be seen from there on the roadway. The new-made captain of pioneers was ordered to seek a nearby site for a night camp and begin to pace off and mark the lines of a defensive ditch and mound for it.

Within an hour’s time, the two regiments of pikemen were beginning to regain their breath where they knelt or squatted in formation at the side of the road, the snaps of whips and the shouted obscenities and curses of the teamsters could be heard approaching with the wagons which contained the pieces of the dismantled engines, and the patrol of heavy horse had just returned, all red-faced and dusty-sweaty.

Their captain lifted off his helm and peeled back the mail-sewn padded coif as he approached. Drawing rein before the Grand Strahteegos, he saluted and said tiredly, “My lord Strahteegos, yon’s wilderness around here, all of it, not a field’s been worked in years, and the only life to be seen the whole ride was deer, wild turkeys and the like.”

“What does that pile up there look like from the other side?” demanded Pahvlos. “More damaged or less?”

“Less, my lord,” was the answer. “Although vines have engulfed it too, it looks to be sound beneath them, but although I had two men dismount and creep quite close through some dense brush, they could neither see nor hear anything from within the ruined hold.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Pahvlos in dismissal. “You’ve done well.”

Chief Pawl Vawn of Vawn chose this time to leave the huddle of mounted staff and ride up until he was knee to knee with the Grand Strahteegos. “Lord Pahvlos . . . ? You do mean to camp here and attack in the morning?”

“Most astute, Lord Pawl.” Pahvlos nodded. “Yes, that’s my intent. It will soon be too dark for accurate engine work, and my experience with night attacks has shown them to be extremely tricky with results that are inconsistent. I think a dawn attack will be best. Besides, in the night we may be able to judge by the number of firelights just how many men may be facing us in there.”

“I have a better way than that to tell you how many they are, Lord Pahvlos,” said the Vawn. “But it were better to wait until full dark to do it.”

“Oh, no,” snapped the commander. “You and your forces are too precious to the army to risk even one of you getting killed sneaking into that pile and then out again. It won’t be all that difficult an assault in the morning, anyway. Look you, man, there are two breaches in the walls, and those gates look rickety as hell, to me, so much so that we may not need a heavy ram to burst them in, only a light, rope-slung one. With your archers and the engines to keep the bastards down or dodging, the pikemen ought to be able to go up there and into the place with minimal losses, if any.”

Vawn shook his head. “Lord Pahvlos, I was not thinking of sending a man in, but rather a prairiecat.”

The Ehleen shrugged. “What would that accomplish, man? Yes, the cat might well kill or injure a few of them and so upset the rest as to keep them sleepless through the remainder of the night, but they’d probably kill the beast in the end.”

“No, my lord,” said the Horseclansman chief, “I can instruct the cat to remain unseen and to not attack unless attacked, to count the two-legs inside and bring that information back to me.”

Grand Strahteegos Komees Pahvlos still could not bring himself to fully believe even that humans could communicate through the mind only, much less that they could thus carry on two-way conversations with dumb beasts, but he had seen and heard and experienced enough in past months to seriously undermine the foundations of his doubts.

As the dawn was beginning to streak the eastern sky with rosy red and orange, Captain Chief Pawl came to the bustling scene boiling around and about the pavilion of the commander. He was admitted at once and he found the old Grand Strahteegos fully clothed and armored and looking as fresh as if he had had the night’s sleep that Pawl knew he had not.

Setting down his cup of watered wine, Pahvlos asked, “Well, did the cat return safely?”

Pawl Vawn nodded. “Yes, my lord, Deerbane is in camp once more. He says that there is no recent trace of any save one two-legs in all of that place. He saw that two-legs, watched him from hiding for an hour or more. He says that he limps badly and only has one eye and that there are some strange peculiarities in his mind. Before you order the attack, my lord, why not send a herald? I’ll go myself.”

“No, you won’t,” said Pahvlos, with finality. “I went through all this yesterday, as I recall. You Horseclanners are too valuable to me to risk the unnecessary loss of even one of you. Lancers, on the other hand, are expendable; I’ll send a lancer officer and we’ll see how many nonexistent men he can spot.”

A creamy-white silken square rippling from his lance shaft, young Poolos of Apahtahpolis, ensign of lancers, rode back from the hold at a fast amble.

“Well, boy?” snapped Pahvlos. “One at least of the bastards spoke withyou, we could hear your voices if not your words. What did he have to say about why he had us attacked yesterday? 1hope you’ve made him aware that we have a full, field force out here.”

“My lord,” replied the young man, “the man who bespoke me styles himself A hrkehkooreeos toi Ahthees and—”

“The Archbishop of Hell?” asked Pahvlos with patent disbelief. “Do you think you might’ve misunderstood him, Ensign?”

With a sigh, the young officer replied, “No, my lord, rather I think that the poor man is quite mad. By his speech, he is a nobleman, but he is dressed in rags and old, ill-kept armor, with not even a patch to cover his empty right eyesocket.”

Pahvlos turned to glance sharply at Pawl Vawn, who simply smiled.

“How many besides him did you see, Ensign?”

“Not a one, my lord. I ... my lord, I think that he may be the only living soul in that ruin,” answered the lancer officer. “As to why a stone was loosed yesterday, he said that no man could pass through his lands without paying a toll.”

Pahvlos overrode the justifiable objections of his staff and insisted upon riding with his bodyguards just behind the second widespread skirmish line of pikemen as they converged upon the battered and vine-grown hold. As they drew nearer, they could begin to see details through one of the breaches in the wall, enough to be able to tell that the interior building stiii showed traces of the fire that had partially consumed it at some long-ago time.

As they had departed the roadway, near to the site of the previous day’s killing, the slamming of an engine arm against its rope-padded crossbar had heralded the arcing flight of another stone, but this time it was fully expected and, its flight being watched, the men closest to where it looked about to land simply moved out of its way.

After that, the Horseclansmen had maintained a steady drizzle of their black-shafted arrows on the place to make certain that a man would need to risk his life in order to service an engine. And no more stones or other missiles had been directed at the lines of assaulters.

When the pikemen were almost under the very walls, a signal stopped the flights of arrows, then a dozen of the assault troops entered through each of the two breaches, unbarred the splintered gates and thus provided a way for the horsemen to ride into the weedy courtyard.

Aside from an arrow-quilled medium engine, the only signs of man in the courtyard were a small vegetable garden to one side and a line of weathered, yellowed skulls rattling loosely on the rusty blades of as many warped, leaning spear hafts.

“All right,” sighed Pahvlos, sitting his warhorse beside the engine, “you officers break up your pikemen into groups of three or four and root that madman out, him and anyone else you can find. Try to take him alive, but don’t lose any of my men in order to do it. And be very careful inside that ruin, too—your armor won’t help you if a floor breaks through or the roof caves in on you.”

But a full hour of thorough searching produced only a trail of fresh blood-spatters leading to a wall of bricks that gave every feel and appearance of being as solid as was any other surface in the ruin. To an offer of one of Guhsz Hehluh’s officers to have his men fetch back pioneers’ tools and start taking down the stretch of wall, the strahteegos shook his white head.

“No, Lieutenant, certainly not. This place is but barely standing intact as it is; you start tearing away at the masonry and we’ll all have it down around our ears. I guess we’ll just have to give up and leave the poor lunatic here to tend his pitiful garden and howl. But we will render that engine useless before we leave.”

“Wait, my lord,” said Pawl of Vawn, who had ridden in during the prosecution of the search with a few Horseclansmen and a brace of the prairiecats. “Let me send these cats in there—they’ll find him and, likely, a way to get to him, too.”

Deerbane and his litter-sister, Hookclaws, moved cautiously into and through the place of moldy smells and charred, rotting wood and the aura of old death on big catfeet, the larger cat leaving his mental imagery of the previous night’s foray into this place on the surface of his thought to help to guide his sister in the stygian darkness. Even so, there were several near-mishaps as rubble loosened from its previous lodgments by the incursions of the pikemen fell and brought more down with it. Deerbane remembered the scent pattern of the two-legs that they sought and Hookclaws took it from his mind and they cast back and forth, up and down, until, by chance, they found another way to get behind the wall at which the blood-drop trail had ended; a low opening, it was, and so situated that a two-legs never could have or would have found it.

With blazing torches held high and with dirks out and ready, the small party filed through the section of wall opened from within by Deerbane’s insistent clawings at the bolt. After only a few short paces along slimy slates on which could be seen a line of blood spots, they were confronted by a flight of stairs too narrow for more than one man at a time to climb, and even that one needs must climb sideways, his armor often scraping the stone walls on either side.

When the spiraling way wound past a long bricked-up arrow slit, Pahvlos guessed that they were inside a portion of the outer defenses themselves, possibly within the ancient, original tower keep which had been the basis around which most present-day holds had been built.

At amehtrah-square landing by another such bricked-up slit, a great gout of blood was to be seen on the floor and the print of a hand was smeared in blood on the rough granite wall.

From up ahead, Hookclaws, who had preceded them, mindspoke back to Pawl Vawn, “Chief of Vawn, there is no danger here in the den of the two-legs. His only sword has a broken blade and he himself will soon go to Wind, so if you would exchange noises with him, you must make haste to this place.”

Pawl turned back to Pahvlos and said, “My lord, one of the cats is above. She says that the madman is there, but that we are in no danger from him; his only weapon is a broken sword and he himself is quite near death of his wound. She thinks he might die, in fact, before we reach there do we continue so slowly.”

The room was not overlarge, though larger than many of the old-time tower-keep chambers Pahvlos had seen, and the number of men so crowded it that the strahteegos sent a half-dozen back to wait on the narrow stairs. The furnishings were seen to have once been very fine, but now dust, mold, dry rot, vermin and lack of care had had their destructive way. The filthy old mattress, now stained anew with red blood, strained against the half-rotten ropes that supported it on the massive bedframe of carven and inlaid fruitwoods, even the all-but-negligible weight of the skeletal figurewho lay upon it in his rags and dirt and matted hair seeming to be almost all that the strands could bear.

Where not covered by a nearly white and filth-clotted beard, the face of the man could be seen to bear hideous scars, looking less like battle scars than the evidences of brutal torture. One eyesocket gaped empty, and the constant ooze from it was thickly caked on the cheek below it. The arms and legs seen through the verminous rags were pipestick-thin and also festooned with scars.

oneof the legs showing that it had been mangled and had healed crookedly and a bit shorter than the other.

Pahvlos gazed down at the man lying there with the half of a black arrow shaft jutting out beside his neck, just behind his right clavicle, his breath coming raggedly, noisily, his lips and bearded chin all shiny with frothy blood, gobs of the stuff bubbling up from his skewered lung to ooze out between his broken, rotted teeth. The strahteegos thought that the man looked to be about of an age with himself. “Poor old bastard,” he muttered aloud, “you’ve really had a rough time of it, haven’t you? But you’ll not suffer much longer, now.”

He was startled, then, for the lid of the remaining eye quivered, then opened to reveal a pupil as dark as his own. The lips moved, but only a gargling, choking noise came forth. With obvious effort, the bony arms got the torso up far enough for the dying man to clear his throat and mouth of the gory mess that clotted it, but he was too weak to spit and therefore had to let it just run from out his mouth and down into his beard.

Fixing his single eye upon the old officer beside his bed, he slowly nodded, saying in the cultured patois of the Southern Ehleen nobility, “Thank God you have come, my lord Strahteegos Komees Pahvlos. I’m dying, and it is not good to have to die alone, without family. My family—Mehleena, all the children, even my infant grandchild—all are dead now, no more pain for them. But it is good that you, at least, are here now. You were always as much a father to me as you were to our Pehtros, may God rest his gallant soul and let me see him soon in His heaven.”

“Oh, Christ!” Pahvlos gasped, clenching a thick bedpost for support, the names that had issued together from that bloody mouth having told him who, against the witness of his eyes, this must be. “But . . . but you cannot be him! Old man, are you trying to tell me that you are Iahnos Kahtohahros, Vahrohnos of Ippohskeera, he who was my youngest son’s battlemate and who wed my Pehtros’ widowed bride? No, you cannot be!”