The next-highest level was’ lit with lamps and cressets. The invaders had apparently been using it as siege headquarters for the last few days, and it was here that they made their last, doomed stand.
Martuhn took the ringing hack of a thick-bladed hanger on the face of his target, angling the attack to the left and downward, while he drove the point of his sword into the man’s bearded and unprotected face. Another blade clanged onto the visor of his helmet and flashed momentarily before his eyes, then his peripheral vision recorded the sweep of a dragoon saber and his ears the gurgling shriek coming hard on the heels of a meaty tchunk. And then it was done. Five of the bravos lay dead or dying about the room and a big, black-haired man in half-armor stood with his back pressed against a wall. The crest had been raggedly shorn from atop his open-faced helm of eastern pattern, and he was just in the act of dropping a broken shortsword. Martuhn dropped his target, tossed his bloody sword to a trooper, then unbuckled and removed his helm. “What’s your name, bastard? Urbahnos, perchance?” The dark man drew himself erect. “Lord Urbahnos of Karaleenos, barbarian. What are you waiting for? Kill me.”
Martuhn shook his head. “My steel were too easy and far too honorable a death for the likes of you, pervert. Before he went to his death. Duke Tcharlz proclaimed you outlaw, and there awaits for you a short, wide, blunt stake, in Pirates’ Folly; that should tickle your buggering bum until you scream your rapture.”
Urbahnos paled to true ashiness. “Duke Tcharlz… d… dead? Then who… who rules?” Martuhn shrugged. “I suppose that I do, since all his retainers save me went down with him under the walls of Traderstown.” The Ehleen cleared his throat. “Then we should be able to come to a mutually profitable agreement, you and L You will be in immediate need of funds, of course, and I will be more than willing to pay a most handsome sum for my freedom and a passage up the Ohyoh. Five pounds of gold? Ten?” Martuhn spat at the Ehleen’s feet. “You are an outlaw, you pig, and as such everything you once owned is mine anyway. I loathe you and all you stand for. Moreover, you and your pack of hired dogs have here slain a number of my men, several of them friends—old and very dear friends, two of them. “Now, there are a number of cells below us that are dank, ever cold, slimy, and dark and constantly at least a foot deep in muddy water, so that the rats have to swim to get at you.”
Urbahnos had again paled; he gulped wordlessly, his fleshy lips trembling. “But,” Martuhn went on, “I think me I have a better place for you to bide until I’m ready to put you to death. I have it on reliable authority that you are a castrate. You are obviously strong, and such wounds as you’ve suffered this day are but mere scratches.”
Turning to a short, wiry, blood-splashed dragoon sergeant, the count said, “Byuhz, take this prisoner down to the docks, strip him to the buff, then turn him over to the overseer of one of the cable barges. It will do my heart good to think of the bastard pulling an oar for his keep.”
“B… but… but you cannot!” Urbahnos wailed. “I… I’m not a slave!” Martuhn shrugged.
“You are whatever I say you are, dog, and I say you’re a barge slave… until I’m ready to make you a corpse, that is.”
16
Empty of human life, save for occasional parties of mounted nomads clattering through the streets, Traderstown lay sacked and smoldering. The clans had taken such slaves as they wished of the conquered, then driven the rest out into the countryside beyond the camps and herds. The loot of the city had been incredibly large, rich and diversified, and no clansman or woman was not happy in the sharing-out.
But the war chief, Milo of Morai, was anything but happy. It had never been his intent to take and sack the city. He had only wished to use the threat of such to force from the townsfolk use of the cable barges to transport the tribe and its herds across the otherwise impassable stretch of muddy brown water. Now there were no longer any folk with whom to treat in the city. All the cable barges were on the eastern bank of the river—which meant that, in effect, they might as well have been on the moon—and so, too, he assumed, was every other bottom of any usable size.
True, some had been sunk at the docks or close inshore and he and the nomads might be able to raise a few and refloat them, but there were nowhere near enough to ferry many folk and their herds. Besides, not one of the nomads knew aught of sailing, so such boats as did set out without the firm support of the transriverine cables might well be swept clear down to the Inland Sea, if not to destruction on some sandbar or mudbank.
The tall, saturnine man thought hard on his possible alternatives, twisting idly on his finger the fine, ruby-set, golden ring which had been a part of his share of the city’s loot. At length he decided upon a plan that might work, were the commander who had headed the city garrison the kind of man he reckoned by available evidence. At least six centuries of weighing human actions and human nature backed his judgment.
Duchess Ann had never recovered her health after the cold and deprivations! of the siege of Twocityport. During her hated husband’s hurried embarkations, she had come down with what her physicians had at first diagnosed a bloody flux, but it had worsened, despite their nostrums and purges. Moreover, an infection of her lungs had also set in, complicating the matter. On his first, last and only audience with the hereditary duchess, Count Martuhn could feel Death in the chamber; he could smell it in the close, too warm air, could see it in the deep-sunk but fever-bright eyes of the woman. He dutifully knelt and kissed the trembling hand she held out to him from her place on the huge bed.
Her ladies had washed her and dressed her and arranged her hair and done the little that they could to impart healthy color to her face. They had even anointed her bed, body and clothing with rich scents and strewn the floor with a deep layer of flower petals, but still the mingled stenches of illness and medicines were more than evident.
Her first attempt to speak suddenly became a racking fit of coughing which bent her body almost double before it was done. When the attending ladies had wiped the bloody mucus from her lips and chin, she spoke in a husky whisper. “He is truly dead, Count Martuhn? You saw him die?” Still on one knee, Martuhn shrugged. “As good as, your grace; I saw Duke Tcharlz gather his surviving nobles and bodyguards and launch a charge into the very thickest of the nomad hosts. Very few of them came back, but he did not… and the nomads were taking no captives. And a sergeant of dragoons, Lee Byuhz, saw a nomad on a horse that he is certain was the duke’s charger that day. “So, yes, your grace, all the evidence points in the direction of the duke’s! death. But he died bravely, in honor, and he—“ He was cut off by the duchess’ cackling laughter, which was in its turn ended by another of those terrible fits of coughing. When once more her ladies had wiped away the red-and-yellow residues, she breathed. “Then I’ve outlived that evil monster, I’ve truly, truly outlived him; not by much, alas, for I’ll be dead meat inside a week myself. But I can now die content that that terrible man is burning in hell while vermin gorge on his rotting cadaver. “Count Martuhn, never speak the word of honor in the same breath with the accursed name of my late and unlamented husband. Although he fancied to use the word often in public, he never really comprehended its meaning, nor did he ever harbor in his body or his soul a scintilla of it. He possessed much, it is true, of one quality that you men put great store by: great physical bravery. Otherwise, he was base, treacherous, deceitful, murderous, lustful and rapacious.
“My poor old papa, frantic that his lands not be ravaged and sundered upon his demise, had me wedded to the man, despite my pleas and against the good advices of all his councilors. Papa gave Count Tcharlz his daughter and his trust, then the back-biting bastard had papa poisoned; I have always been more than certain of it.