All over the city, similar groups of soldiers were imprisoned or penned up one way or another. None of them struggled terribly hard to free themselves.
When morning came and their guards told them to go, they came out blinking, dazed, and calling for their magicians. No one answered and each squadron of troopers searched until they found their lord—dead. The ghost handler’s face was a rictus of horror; he had met more terrible phantoms than his own. The fire-handler’s tank had clearly exploded. The master of wyverns had died with talons in his heart, and the earth-shaker lay buried under a pile of fallen masonry. The magician whose peasants had lived in fear of poisonous vapors and contaminated food lay twisted by internal agony.
Some silent and some openly rejoicing, the troops filed out of the city along the boulevard—most of them. One out of ten stayed behind. The sergeants later claimed they were missing in action, but they weren’t fooling anybody. The troopers all knew that a dead lord meant only that a neighboring magician would commandeer his land and serfs. They had preferred to take their chances with the outcasts of the city ruins.
“We have some new pupils,” Alea told Gar.
“I won’t teach anybody who doesn’t want to learn.” Gar frowned at the fifty troopers in different liveries who stood more or less at attention, watching him anxiously.
“Oh, we want to,” a sergeant assured him. “Anybody who can beat a magician so handily but find room to let the troopers live—well, whatever you’ve taught these city folk, we need to learn, too.”
“It was the clans who showed you mercy,” Alea pointed out. “The mercy that you taught them, lady! You’re not fooling anybody—everybody knows these city people used to spend most of their time fighting each other. Anybody who can convince them to stick together—well, maybe she knows something that can help the serfs.”
Alea looked up at Gar with a bright smile. Slowly, he nodded.
The new recruits had been training for two weeks when Alea asked, over the clan’s campfire one night, “What’s happened to Conn and Ranulf? I haven’t seen them for weeks.”
“Bored, I expect,” Gar said. “Their only reason for hanging around us was for amusement, after all.”
A maniacal laugh rang through the courtyard. Everyone leaped up, but it was only Corbin materializing in middance and crying, “Get a good night’s sleep and be up before the sun, people. You have another army coming.”
“Another?” Longshanks rose with a scowl. “Who this time?”
“Ten more magicians, each with fifty guards. Most of the soldiers are green, though—fresh from the plow and scarcely trained at all.”
“What we did to the last five hundred, we can do to five hundred more. Why do they march?”
“Oh, they’ve heard about you,” Corbin told them. “The ghosts who came with that last batch didn’t stick around, you know. They went back home and told the nearest magicians they could find. I gather some of them made it sound as though you’re planning an assault, and if the magicians wait too long, you’re going to explode out of your cities and conquer them a…”
“What nonsense!” Solutre said indignantly. “All we ask is to be left alone in our exile as we always have been!”
“Well, you can’t ask so little anymore,” Corbin told her. “The magicians grilled the soldiers who came back and found out that most of what the ghosts said was true—that your tribes have united, that you’re tougher fighters than any of the soldiers, and that every other one of you is a magician.”
“None of us is a magician!”
“By your standards, no,” Corbin acknowledged, “but by the standards of men who use the title to overawe the weak and ignorant, yes.”
“We can’t help what they call themselves,” Solutre retorted. “No, but we can show them up for what they are,” Longshanks said grimly, “ordinary men who happen to have an extra talent each.” He turned to the young folk. “Gawain, find that Hawk girl you’re sweet on and tell her what’s happening.”
Gawain blushed as the other youngsters set up catcalls and jibes.
“Stop,” Solutre said, not loudly, but they stopped. “There’s no time for that,” she explained.
“Axel, you go tell the Hounds,” Longshanks directed. “Manon, that Fox boy you’ve been eyeing…”
Manon leaped to her feet and turned away, not quite quickly enough to hide the reddening of her cheeks.
“Ander, you go to the Elks,” Longshanks directed. “Thall, you take the Badgers.”
The youngsters nodded and dashed away.
“All right, we’ll do as we did last time,” Longshanks told his people, “but we can’t use the same tricks—they’ll have heard about them and be ready. Any ideas?”
“If they’re coming with ghost-scouts, you’ll have to get the specters out of the way first,” Blaize said. “How about persuading the city ghosts to set up a clamor? When the soldiers start to charge toward it, their ghosts will speed ahead to see what it is, and your ancestors can hit them with a screaming match. That should scare the soldiers out of that street, and you can have decoys waiting.”
“Good thought.” Longshanks nodded. “What if they don’t scare?”
“Have wyverns waiting in the buildings on either side,” Mina suggested. “They can hit the soldiers so quickly that they won’t have time to shoot down the darlings.”
“Only a wyverneer could call her pets a darling,” Solutre said drily, “but it’s a good idea.”
“There’s that old foundation over on Third and Tenth that we covered up with boards,” a broad man said. “We could pile rubble on it, shoot at the soldiers from it, and when they charge us, yank away the boards.”
“Yes, and there’s that rotten pier down by the river!” a matronly woman said, eyes alight. “We can send a few canoes down to shoot at them, and when they crowd onto the pier to shoot back, they’ll end up in the water!”
Three others started to speak at once.
“I’m starting to feel left out,” Alea told Gar. “That’s just fine,” he replied, his face glowing. She eyed him askance. “What are you so happy abut?”
“It’s always a delight to see how well your students have learned,” Gar said.
The sentries were on watch all night, but they didn’t see anything until dawn.
“Three columns!” one called down from the highest building. Others on lower floors had to relay her cry down to street level. “They’re coming in on the Boulevard of the Elysian Fields, the Linden Tree Promenade, and the Broad Way!”
“Trying to cut three wedges off from one another,” Solutre grunted. “Don’t the fools realize they’ll have enemies to left and to right?”
“Probably do,” Longshanks answered. “Won’t do them much good, though. Bait the traps.”
The soldiers came marching down the boulevards with their magicians right behind them, watching for stragglers who might try to desert—a wise precaution, from the fearful looks the raw recruits cast about them (and some of the veterans, too). Each troop had assigned a lookout for the sky, watching for stones dropping and wyverns swooping. Even so, the soldiers marched with their shields over their heads; only the first rank held theirs in front.
Longshanks watched from the shadows of a second-story window. “We’ll do as we did last time—wait till they split up into search parties. Then we’ll start leading them into the traps.”
But these magicians had heard from the ghosts what had happened to their predecessors and kept their troops together: three magicians each on the Boulevard of the Elysian Fields and the Linden Tree Promenade, and four on the Broad Way, in the center. Their intermittent bickering showed their own nervousness—or perhaps only longstanding rivalries born of greed. When they did finally leave the boulevards, they left in a body.