All of them watched Darya with varying degrees of awe and unease, as they’d done from the start. It was well known the Sentinels kept the dead in their swords—whichdead, and how dead they had to be beforehand, was the subject of youthful rumor and parental threat—but hearing the proof was new. So far, Tebengri, with their military background, had taken it the most calmly of the three. Gleda eyed Darya as though she were a good hunting dog that still might go for a hand at any moment, and young Eagan gazed at her with all the curious wonder he probably brought to pickled young mermaids and stuffed gryphons.
The smiles might show they were following the lecture, if they hadn’t just been responding to her expression.
But their spirits are more vulnerable, Gerant went on, and thus so did Darya.A bolt of lightning or an aetherstrike might leave them still standing, but itispossible to exploit one of the holes and yank their spirits outward into the earthly astral. That will leave the body disoriented, at least, and if you can sever the connection, they may both collapse. It is, however, very individual work and perhaps best used on their officers, such as they have.
“Ma’am…sir?” Gleda asked, gaze moving uncertainly between Darya’s face and the gem on her sword. “What about striking at their minds?”
Good question. Possible, possibly effective, but very dangerous. I have seen twistedmen made to turn on their foes, or groups to fall to their knees from phantom pain—but getting to that point means touching their minds, and that’s not always the sort of contact a mage can stand and retain their own wits.
“I’d think not,” said Tebengri, the wizard with the most experience with Thyran’s monsters. They grimaced, as if at a memory. “Better to focus defensively, then. Alroy will already be strengthening the walls, unless he and Hallis have both lost all sense, and there’s not much we can do directly there. I’d wager the three of us can prepare the field beyond, though—gods know there are enough rocks and branches there normally—and start the long-term encouragement of rain and fog. That will help with the walls, too, and we might be able to get a few more barrels of water out of it.”
“Is that important, your honor?” Eagan asked.
“Most important of all,” Tebengri said. “Hunger and thirst are the chief weapons of any siege—especially since I doubt the forces coming will manage treachery.”
Hunger, thirst, and gold, Amris used to say,Gerant added to Darya, and then added,and likely is saying now.
* * *
“They likely won’t have gold,” said Amris, facing the ranks. Four hundred eyes stared back at him, set in faces of all genders and ages from fifteen to fifty, and that moment was another that might well have come from his past. Some, particularly among the career soldiers, watched him with suspicion: Who was this stranger from outside the ranks, and why was he leading the training that day? Others, particularly among the rawer recruits, had more wonder in their expressions. Rumors had already started about Amris’s origins, and not all were far from the truth.
All were afraid, and all tried not to show it.
Amris went on. “And you all would know better than to take it, if they did, or any other bribe they might offer. If you’ve not read the histories, I’m sure you’ve talked to those who have. You know what they’ll do if we don’t stop them here, how much wealth will avail you, and how long any safety they offer you or yours will last.” He searched the crowd, focusing on faces at random for just long enough to make them flinch, then moving on. “If you know not, there are many who can tell you. Believe them.”
The crowd was quiet. Thyran had done this much of their work for them. No human would betray the fortress, save perhaps one whose mind was a match in hatred for Thyran’s itself.
Hallis stepped forward. “We’re already working against hunger and thirst. The well’s in no danger of going dry, thank the gods, and we have some stores here already. When you’re not trading or getting the walls ready, you’ll be stretching your muscles by lifting and carrying, or you’ll practice your knifework butchering pigs or goats, or you’ll help build rain barrels. No job’s below us. Not any of us. The civilians are gone, and there’s no rank here that isn’t the army’s or the gods’.”
As many in the crowd glanced—some subtly, some failing at subtlety, some not bothering—at Amris, Hallis added, “For orders, Amris, like the Sentinels, the mages, and the priests, is a first lieutenant. They’re not regulars in this army, but they’re experts about what we’re facing, and you’ll listen to them unless I say otherwise.”
Some muttering arose from that announcement, but less than Amris had feared. Classing him with the mages and priests had put him on known ground. He saluted Hallis, right hand pressed in a fist against his shoulder, and then did the same to the assembled soldiers. The woman who’d gotten directions from him was there in the crowd, he saw, and so were Isen and two of his stable hands.
“First watch,” Hallis went on, “recruit training, groups of twenty.” He rattled off a list of five names—the officers who’d supervise. “Stay here. Second and third cohort, you’re with me. We’ll get the landscape out front ready for our guests. Fourth and fifth, you join Amris on the walls. Outer, then inner. Dismissed.”
He strode off, and forty soldiers broke from the crowd to follow him. Amris went the opposite direction, found the pile of prepared supplies, and picked up one of the great barrels. It reeked of fat, and the weight was almost more than he could handle. That was all right—that was, indeed, encouraging.
“Two to a barrel,” he told his troops, “and any empty-handed when those are gone, pick up spears or arrows. The Dark Lady gave us fire and steel, and it’s best we be generous with Her gifts.”
Chapter 30
On other nights, nights that now seemed a hundred years ago themselves, Darya had sat in the Lonely Wolf’s taproom. The other patrons had mostly given her wide berth, but sometimes she’d gone with another Sentinel, or soldiers worldly enough to approach friendship, and often there’d been a minstrel, though the skill of those had ranged widely. There’d always been spirits, and their quality had been a constant—rougher than you got closer to the cities, but clean and sharp.
The spirits were gone, taken up to the walls in case their defenders needed to start fires or doled out to the herbalists in case they ran out of salves for wounds. Most of the furnishings had vanished too. The owners had taken the curtains, the candlesticks, and the flatware. The army had grabbed the tables and chairs, moving them into the stack of potential emergency firewood. War stripped buildings with the efficiency and thoroughness of a good hunter butchering prey.
But beer was actually useful for very little in war, and old Colton hadn’t been able to get the barrels onto his wagon. His son was in the army and had issued a general invitation—“If we empty the kegs, we can use ’em for other things, so we’d truly be doing a good deed, aye?”—and so Darya, Branwyn, and Katrine sat cross-legged on the tavern floor, soldiers around them and crude clay mugs of beer in their hands.
“It’s a bit sad, isn’t it?” said Katrine, looking around at the bare walls.
“We’ve all drunk in worse places,” said Darya.
“But we didn’t remember any of them being better,” Katrine replied. “Or I didn’t.”
“No,” said Darya, “no, you’re right,” and thought of Amris’s face as the two of them had walked through Klaishil. She sighed, not wanting him in her mind, and looked around at the local talent.
There was a slim honey-blond man by the door who looked a little like an assassin, which had its appeal. A new recruit across the room was older than most of his fellows and had an impressive mane of black hair and a damned fine chest, from what she’d noticed walking by him at training. The knight was a strapping young man, although she’d always found Tinival’s sworn irksomely earnest.
She wasn’t without choices.
