The camp was spread over half a league, and it was already starting to smell. Horse shit, man sweat, woodsmoke, and lamb grease had combined to form a sharp-sweet scent that the Knife had come to associate with war. Here in the Rive section it was especially bad. For some bloody-minded reason known only to themselves, Rive Company had taken to burning horse turds as fuel. Rive Company had been formed three months earlier in Spire Vanis from volunteers and veterans of the city's Rive Watch. Through no coincidence whatsoever they numbered seven hundred. Marafice Eye hadn't been present when the decision to burn horse turds had been taken, but he guessed it had little to do with a shortage of fuel and more to do with camp politics.
Rive Company was directly upwind of the grangelords' encampment, and they gifted the grangelords with the smell. It was the way it had always been in Spire Vanis: that old, bitter rivalry between the grangelords and the watch. The grangelords held and sheriffed the land outside the city and the watch policed it within. Nothing, not one wormy apple or tin spoon, entered Spire Vanis without passing the inspection of the watch. And no one, not even Garric Hews or the High Examiner himself, could gain access to the Surlord without being escorted into his presence by the watch.
The grangelords resented those two facts with such intensity they all but frothed at the mouth like rabid dogs. Power was theirs. They were the ones with the wealth, the land, the titles and the private armies so misleadingly named hideclads. Outside the city they were as good as kings. Within it they were reduced to supplicants-by baseborn, lowbred thugs, no less. That was what galled them the most. Marafice stretched his lips into a tight smile. They were his men the watch. Good men, hard-fighting, hard-playing, down-to earth. They weren't having roasted game bird for breakfast, that was for sure. It would be porridge with a dollop of lamb's grease-and a chunk of blood sausage if they were lucky. They were well-equipped though. Marafice himself had made sure of that. He wasn't about to send his brothers-in-the-watch to war unprepared. All seven hundred had Rive Blades, the blood-tinted swords fired in the Red Forge. The Knife had wrung money from the Surlord to pay for their pikes, and when he hadn't been able to wring more he had paid for their plate armor himself. It had cost him the entire dowry he had received from Roland Stornoway for the pleasure of marrying his eldest daughter. That, and half the savings he had on account with the tight-lipped priests of the Bone Temple. It wasn't fancy stuff like the Whitehog's, but it was solid, and if a lance blow landed just right it might make the difference between broken ribs and disembowelment.
Reaching the edge of the cliff, Marafice reined in his horse and dismounted. He was free of the camp now, hidden from hostile glances by a crop of spindly weed trees and some evil-looking thorns. Below him lay the great expanse of the Wolf River, its waters brown with tannin. Trees and bushes uprooted by an earlier thaw had log jammed to form an island midstream. Some kind of waterfowl perched atop one of the upturned root balls, but Marafice didn't know enough about birds to identify the breed. Abruptly he turned. The updraft tunneling along the cliff had chilled his dead eye.
Cover it, advised the very few people who dared speak to him about the loss of his right eye. Have a bridle maker cut out a patch and strap it over the socket. He had nearly done just that, but something had stopped him. Some kind of fool pigheadedness that he had come to regret but would not now reverse. For better or worse it had become who he was. The hollow socket repulsed him, and he had not willingly looked in a glass in three months. On his worst nights he suspected that his exterior now accurately reflected what lay within. People had always thought him a monster. Now he had become one.
The strange thing was that sometimes he thought he could see through his missing eye. In his dreams he saw further. The colors were deeper and the edges as crisp as a line drawing. Even after he woke he was sure the eye was still in place … right until the moment when he reached for the water pitcher and poured himself a cup. It spilled. It always spilled. He could see well enough over distance, but those small judgments close to the body betrayed him every time.
Marafice rubbed the socket with his gloved fist. The coldness was hard to get used to, the chill so close it could freeze his thoughts. Damn Asarhia March. Her foul sorceries had robbed him of the skin of his foot and an eye. She had killed his brothers-in-the-watch, too. Five of them, blasted against the hard granite of the Bitter Hills.
Enough, he told himself. What was done was done. He was Marafice Eye, Protector General of the Rive Watch, the Surlords declared successor, and husband to Liona Stornoway, Daughter of the High Granges. He had gained more than he'd lost, and you could not say that about most men.
True enough his new wife was a high-strung slattern whose belly was currently swelling with another man's brat. But she was rich beyond reckoning and she had the very great fortune of being horn into one of the five Great Houses of Spire Vanis.
Stornoway could give Hews a run for its money. It was older than Hews, claiming an ancestor of the Bastard Lord himself Torny Fyfe, and although it could not match the sheer number of surlords spawned by House Hews, it more than made up for it in wealth. Stornoway held the two most important high passes south of the city, and all goods coming north across the mountains were subject to its tariffs. That, canny management of its holdings and rumors of Sull gold made Stornoway a byword for untold riches in Spire Vanis. The scale of the wealth took some getting used to. What did a butcher's son know of baudekin, emeralds, ambergris, perfumed cushions, and gilded prayer books? What did he care? Power was what counted. That Stornoway gold would need to work. Arms, fortifications, horses, guards, bribes: those were the only things it was good for.
Marafice squinted into the eastern sky. Behind the stormheads the sun was rising. It was time to move out.
He returned to camp quickly, signaling to the hornsman to call arms. Jon Burden rode to meet him and together they inspected Rive Company as it formed ranks.
Helmets, Marafice thought dryly. I should have forked out for some matching sets.
The men of Rive Company were lean and hard and cloaked in red. Those who were wearing birdhelms looked frightening enough to appear in children's nightmares. With their feces entirely covered by steel likenesses of the Killhound of Spire Vanis they could no longer fully rotate their necks and moved like being, awakened from the dead. A good third of the seven hundred did not possess birddhelms and wore whatever they could beg, borrow or scavenge. Many wore stan-dard pothelms forged from black iron. Others had full visored helms complete with crests they had no rights to and leathers they had no need for. One man sported a helm with two enormous bullhorns forged to the sides, and another wore something that looked suspiciously like a wooden bowl.
"Weadie," Marafiea called out to the man.
Will Weadie was in the process of binding his horse's tail to prevent it from flaying in the charge. Tall and veiny with a nose that was beginning to wart, Weadie was pushing fifty. Marafice remembered training under him as a new recruit. Weadie had been second to the master-at-arms, Andrew Perish, who was also amongst the seven hundred here today.
"Sir." Weadie rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
"Is that a wooden bowl on your head?"
"Aye, sir." Weadie knocked on the crown, producing a hollow rap. "I drilled the holes meself and me sister made the straps."
''You should have come to me. I would have seen you got something better."