Part 19 (2/2)

Tirnemus and his entourage arrived moments before Troyatti's men escorted the Nansur officers onto the berm. The man smelled of wine and fried pork. Cnaiur told him to muster his men along the docks. ”If all is well,” he said, ”you will need to organize the embarkation.”

”Is all well?” the Baron asked with open apprehension. They could all smell it now.

Cnaiur turned his back on the man, waved for his Hemscilvara to bring the captives to the end of the quay. Their arms were bound behind their backs, which meant they had resisted.

He glared at the Nansur Generals as they were prodded forward. ”You had better pray these transports are empty ...”

”Dog!” old Baxatas spat. ”What do you know of prayer?”

”More than your Exalt-General.”

A moment of silence.

”We know what you did,” Areamanteras said, not without some caution.

Scowling, Cnaiur approached the General, pausing only when he towered over him. ”What did I do?” he asked, his voice strange. ”There was blood when I awoke ... blood and s.h.i.+t.”

Areamanteras fairly quailed in his shadow. He opened his mouth to answer, then tried to purse away trembling lips.

”f.u.c.king swine!” Baxatas cried to Cnaiur's immediate right. ”Scylvendi pig!” Despite his fury, there was fear in his eyes as well.

The gopas dipped and screamed in the air above.

”Where is he?” Cnaiur asked. ”Where is the Ikurei?”

None of the three said a word, and only Baxatas dared meet his gaze. At one point he seemed about to spit at him, but apparently thought better of it.

Cnaiur turned back to the nearest boat's approach. He looked down to the black water beyond the dock's edge, watched it slap about the pilings. He saw a branch reaching up from the murk, its forking tip waving just above the surface, like fingers ringed by foam.

The boatmen were shouting across the water. The transports were empty.

By mid-afternoon all the carracks and their escort of war galleys had been piloted into the harbour. Cnaiur kept the gates sealed, not willing to expose himself in any way until he had Conphas in his clutches. He had set Tirnemus and his men to join Troyatti in ransacking the city.

The Admiral of the Nansur fleet, a man called Tarempas, explained that the seasonal winds that so determined travel across the Three Seas had been unexpectedly favourable. He was far more worried about his return trip-or so he claimed. He was one of those restless, small-statured men who, given the way their eyes darted, seemed far more interested in their surroundings than their interlocutors. It was as though he continually sized everything up.

Some time afterward, the Columnaries in the main camp began rioting. They had caught word of the fleet's early arrival. When noon came without any official word, they organized a protest. Several times in the course of his travels across the city, Cnaiur had actually heard their commotion: raucous shouts followed by booming cheers. As much was to be expected from homesick men, he supposed, especially after nearly three weeks of internment.

Then word of their Exalt-General's disappearance leaked out.

With Sanumnis and Skaiwarra in tow, Cnaiur climbed the curtain walls overlooking the camp. Gaining the heights was like stepping from a calm grotto into the heart of battle, such was the clamour. A slum of hovels and tents extended from the wall's footings, filling a great swath of earth denuded by the milling of countless feet. The bare earth funnelled southward, drawn into a track running across abandoned fields to the Oras River, which wound blue and black behind hazy screens of trees. A vast mob had gathered along the westward regions of the camp, thousands of men in soiled red tunics, shaking fists at a thin line of Conriyan knights arrayed some hundred paces distant on the far side of a razed orchard. With the exception of their helms and masks, they looked for all the world like Kianene hors.e.m.e.n.

Sanumnis whistled in grim appreciation. ”Should we cut them down?” he ventured.

”Your men would be swallowed whole. You would simply be arming them.”

”Leave them, then?”

Cnaiur shrugged. ”I see no siege towers ... Just keep them hemmed in, away from their officers. Give a mob a head and it becomes an army. If they start forming ranks-if they remember their discipline-summon me immediately.”

The Baron nodded in what seemed grudging admiration.

Word arrived from Troyatti not long afterward. The Captain was in the city's crammed necropolis in the largely abandoned Kianene Quarter, where his men had apparently found some kind of tunnel. The certainty of it had coalesced long before Cnaiur found the man standing, s.h.i.+rtless, hands on hips, at the mouth of the half-ruined sepulchre.

Conphas was gone.

”It runs several hundred yards beyond the walls,” the Conriyan said in grim explanation. ”They had to excavate some to breach the surface ... Some.” He grimaced as though to say, At least he got his hands dirty At least he got his hands dirty.

Cnaiur studied the man for a moment, pondered the absurdity of Inrithi scarring themselves in the manner of Scylvendi. It made him seem more a man somehow. He glanced across the necropolis, at the leaning obelisks, sagging ash-houses, and leering images-all Nansur or Ceneian. He felt none of the dread that had prevented the Fanim from reclaiming this ground. Shouts echoed from the nearby streets: the Hemscilvara calling to one another.

”Call off the search,” Cnaiur said. He nodded to the entrance of the sepulchre. ”Collapse it. Close the tunnel.”

He turned to search the harbour, but the burnt-brick facade of a tenement obscured it. Conphas had orchestrated all this ... After so long with the Dunyain, he knew the smell of premeditation.

This would not be another Kiyuth.

Something ... something something ... ...

Without a further word to Troyatti, he galloped the short distance to the Donjon Palace. He strode through the ornate halls, shouting for the Scarlet Schoolman, Saurnemmi. He found the Initiate just as he stumbled from his chambers, eyes swollen from slumber.

”What Cants do you know?” he barked.

The insipid fool blinked in astonishment. ”I-I-”

”Can you burn wood from a distance? s.h.i.+ps?”

”Yes-”

A lone Conriyan horn pealed from some hidden distance-the signal Sanumnis was to use to summon him. There was some kind of emergency along the walls.

”Get to the harbour!” Cnaiur snarled, already running. As he rounded the marble banister, he caught a final glimpse of Saurnemmi, standing awkward and dumbstruck, clutching the front of his silk nights.h.i.+rt.

He rode hard to the Tooth, where the horn seemed to issue. It rang out three more times, metallic and mournful. He shouldered his way through the knights milling in the open mall about the Tooth's inner gates. Shouting men waved to him from the barbican's summit.

”Quickly,” Baron Sanumnis exclaimed as he crested the final stairs. ”Come.”

Leaning between the floriated battlements, Cnaiur saw that the Columnaries had abandoned their camp and were making their way north. He saw clots of them scattered across the distance, jumping irrigation ditches, filing through groves ...

”There,” Sanumnis said, clutching his beard with one hand and pointing to the first broad bend in the River Oras with the other.

Peering between black-boughed sand willows, Cnaiur saw a band of armoured hors.e.m.e.n riding in loose formation. They bore a crimson banner with a Black Sun halved by a horse head ... Kidruhil.

”And there,” Sanumnis said, this time pointing to the hills, past a series of green-mottled slopes. Though they marched in valley gloom, Cnaiur could see them clearly: ranks of infantrymen.

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