My ears pricked up at this. These women and their infernal secret societies are one thing; but now they had inveigled a brash fighting man in the person of Jaidur into their schemes. I saw that, and quickly enough, if you please.
At last I overbore Farris by saying around a goblet of the best Gremivoh, the wine favored by the Vallian Air Service in a voice I made as neutral as possible: “Anyway, I need you here to keep an eye on things and on the Empress Delia also.” Farris was a man whose life had been dedicated to the emperor and whose fanatical loyalty to Delia was a part of his makeup. “An army marches against us from the southwest and I’ve a mind to go out there and spy them out. Perhaps-”
“Aye, Dray Prescot,” quoth Delia, sharply. “Aye! And you’ve a mind to crack a few of their villainous skulls, too, while you’re at it. I know.”
“Mayhap, my love,” I said, unrepentantly. “Mayhap.”
So, the matter being settled, we passed onto a more detailed assessment of the situation, which was pretty fraught as I have explained.
Reports from our scouts indicated that the army had landed in Vallia on the coast of Kaldi to the west of the Island of Wenhartdrin. This gave the invading host a long distance to march, for they might have landed much nearer the capital, and I surmised that they hoped to pick up recruits as they advanced. Just how the honest burghers and farmers of Vallia would react to this hope remained to be seen. Certainly, the southwest had not, to my knowledge, shared the ambitions toward self-determination of the northeast.
In a direct line — as the fluttrell flies as they say in Havilfar — the invaders had six hundred and fifty miles to cover to Vondium. It seemed clear they would not march a direct line. At an average speed of ten miles a day — more or less — at which a spry army can march with its baggage and artillery and followers and all the rest of the baffling impediments that so slow up armies on the march, they would take better than seventy or eighty days. The latest reports gave their position as being at the border between Ovvend and Thadelm. They had come, therefore, roughly halfway. Estimates of their numbers varied enormously. This was partly due to the inexperience of some of our volunteer scouts and partly to the complexity of an army on the march, where thousands of followers confuse the eye. A sagacious Khibil, a paktun with many battle scars, had told me that he estimated the core of the army — the formed ranks of fighting men and the wings of cavalry — at fifty thousand. This was an army, therefore, of indeterminate strength, not so small as to be contemptible, and not so large as to be truly overpowering.
My reaction to that information had been to cast the net of scouts wider, suspecting another army marching parallel to the first. So far no confirming reports had reached me. Nath was white with fury at my decision not to take a single brumbyte from the Phalanx. And, because I would not take any pikemen from the files, the Hakkodin, who flanked them, would not be touched, either.
“But majister! We are the army — the heart and sinew and core. If we march out, now, in all our strength, we can crush them-”
“Utterly?”
“By Vox! Yes!”
“I think not.”
“But they are just an army — cavalry with zorcas and these white-coated hersanys, and infantry with nothing untoward in the way of weapons or formations. Fifty thousand! We will go through them as a cleaver goes through beef!”
“And you’re like to strike a bone, in the middle, Kyr Nath.”
The invading army flew no colors that had been reported to me. The hersanys present, those shaggy, six-legged, chalky-white riding animals, indicated there were contingents from Pandahem. And Phu-Si-Yantong had set his ferocious seal on the whole island of Pandahem, subjugating all its kings and rulers to his despotic sway. I wished him joy of it. He must be mad, for that seemed to me the only way to explain the ambitions he cherished. As for the good in him, that must lie so deep that Cottmer’s Caverns brushed the heavens.
“Well,” said Nath, breathing deeply and the whiteness denting the corners of his nostrils. “If I may not march my Phalanx, then, at the least, majister, let me come with you.”
With a sorrow tinged with affectionate amusement, I said: “And leave the Phalanx without the leader?
Come now, Nath, surely you see I cannot do that?”
He was in a cleft stick and he knew it, and the knowledge made him barge off with a parting Remberee and I did not doubt that his Relianchuns would skip and dance to his tunes and give their brumbytes in the ranks a little stick, also. Well, that is the way of it. He kept his men in fighting trim and I was unsure if I really did want him to hand over control of the Phalanx to somebody else. There were plenty of superb fighting men who could handle that immense and crushingly destructive mass of men with their pikes and shields and deadly onrushing force, naturally; but the sight of Nath commanding had power to instill perfect confidence.
The business of the day being settled for the time being, for alarums and excursions cropped up at any hour, I was free to give thought to what Delia had said about Jaidur. The notion in my mind that there must be more than one army advancing on Vondium had, for the moment, to be pushed aside. I left it with the thought that the mercenaries and the detachments from Hamal who had taken over the southwest had not obstructed the landing of the new army from Pandahem, and this argued they were in league and mutually assisting each other.
But, Jaidur…
As we sat to a private meal in what would be called our withdrawing room, with Delia superb in a long sheer laypom-colored gown, and I lounging in a white wrap, the whole small room limned with gold from the samphron-oil lamps, I found her as reticent on this as I had on other occasions touching the Sisters of the Rose. That secret society of women demanded much of their members, and had a hand in a great deal of what went on in Vallia.
“You know I am under vows, my heart.”
“I know. At least reassure me that Jaidur is — well-” I gestured helplessly. “That he is not likely to be chopped and eaten at any moment.”
Delia laughed. The line of her throat caught at mine.
“No, no, you hairy old graint. You worry too much over the children, and yet-”
“And yet they have been woefully neglected by me, I know. Some people, looking at our family, might well say they have turned out a thoroughly bad lot. Well, not Drak. I except him, of course, and, I suppose, Zeg, seeing he is fully occupied in the Eye of the World being the king of Zandikar.”
“A bad lot? We-ell… Lela bides her manners and is so mewed up with the SoR she hasn’t been home for-”
“I haven’t seen her since I got back-” I choked on my words, and seized up a crystal glass of best Jholaix — for we had unearthed a cellar full of the superb wine in a ruined wing of the palace — and drank it off, scarlet-faced, I have no doubt.
Gravely, Delia regarded me. Her gown slipped demurely from one rounded shoulder. The lamps caught flecks of gold in her brown hair. She looked gorgeous.
“From where, my heart?”
I swallowed down. Sudden, it was, sudden and quick and fierce, like a first love.
“From that world I told you of. That world with only one sun, and only one moon, and only apims.”
She caught her breath, and was still. And that was her only reaction. Then: “You have spoken to me of this strange world which boasts but one small yellow sun, and one small silver moon, and lacks any kind of humans save apims, without a single diff to make life interesting. And is it real? And is it-?”
“It is real. It is called Earth. And it is where I was born.” I reached over the table and took her fingers. They were warm, alive, trembling only a little. “And, my heart, it is many and many a dwabur away from Kregen, lost among the stars of the heavens.”
“Your home — is among the stars…”