"He was captured," the sergeant in command finished, "by the Princess Rylla and Colonel Verkan's wife, Dalla."
He and Ptosphes and Harmakros and Verkan all shouted at once. A moment later, the roar of one of Alkides's eighteens was almost an anticlimax. Verkan was saying, "That's the girl who wanted me to stay out of battles!"
"But Rylla can't get out of bed," Ptosphes argued.
"I wouldn't know about that, Prince," the sergeant said. "Maybe the Princess calls a saddle a bed, because that's what she was in when I saw her."
"Well, did she have that cast-that leather thing-on her leg?" Kalvan asked.
"No, sir-just regular riding boots, with pistols in them."
He and Ptosphes cursed antiphonally. Well, at least they'd kept her out of that blindfold slaughterhouse at Fyk.
"Sound Cease Fire, and then Parley," he ordered. "Send Uncle Wolf up the hill again; tell Balthames we have his pa-in-law."
They got a truce arranged; Balthames sent out a group of neutrals, merchants and envoys from other princedoms, to observe and report. Bonfires were lit along the road up to the castle. It was full dark when Rylla and Dalla arrived, with a mixed company of mounted Tarr-Hostigos garrison troops, fugitive mercenaries rallied along the road south, and overage peasants on overage horses. With them were nearly a hundred of Sarrask's elite guard, in silvered harness that looked more like table-service than armor, and Sarrask himself in gilded armor.
"Where's that lying quack of a Mytron?" Rylla demanded, as soon as she was within hearing. "I'll doctor him when I catch him-a double orchidectomy! You know what? Yes, of course you do; you put him up to it! Well, Dalla had a look at my leg this morning, she's forgotten more about doctoring than Mytron ever learned, and she said that thing ought to have been off half a moon ago."
"Well, what's the story?" Kalvan asked. "How did you pick all this up?" He indicated Sarrask, glowering at them from his saddle, with his silver-plated guardsmen behind him.
"Oh, this band of heroes you took to a battle you tried to keep me out of," Rylla said bitterly. "About noon, they came clattering into Tarr-Hostigos-that's the ones with the fastest horses and the sharpest spurs-screaming that all was lost, the army destroyed, you killed, father killed, Harmakros killed, Verkan killed, Mnestros killed; why, they even had Chartiphon, down on the Beshtan border, killed!"
"Well, I'm sorry to say that Mnestros was killed," her father told her.
"Well, I didn't believe a tenth of it, but even at that something bad could have happened, so I gathered up what men I could mount at the castle, appointed Dalla my lieutenant-she was the best man around-and we started south, gathering up what we could along the way. Just this side of Darax, we ran into this crowd. We thought they were the cavalry screen for a Saski invasion, and we gave them an argument. That was when Dalla captured Prince Sarrask."
"I did not," Verkan's wife denied. "I just shot his horse. Some farmers captured him, and you owe them a lot of money, or somebody does. We rode into this gang on the road, and there was a lot of shooting, and this big man in gilded armor came at me swinging a sword as long as I am. I fired at him, and as I did his horse reared and caught it in the chest and fell over backward, and while he was trying to get clear some peasants with knives and hatchets and things jumped on him, and he began screaming, 'I am Prince Sarrask of Sask; my ransom is a hundred thousand ounces of silver!' Well, right away, they lost interest in killing him."
"Who are they, do you know?" Ptosphes asked. "I'll have to make that good to them."
"Styphon will pay," Kalvan said.
"Styphon ought to; he got Sarrask into this mess in the first place," Ptosphes commented. He turned back to Rylla. "What then?"
"Well, when Sarrask surrendered, the rest of them began pulling off helmets and holding swords up by the blades and crying, 'Oath to Galzar!' They all admitted they'd taken an awful beating at Fyk, and were trying to get into Nostor. Now wouldn't that have been nice?"
"Our gold-plated friend here didn't want to come along with us," Dalla said. "Rylla told him he didn't need to; we could take his head along easier than all of him. You know, Prince, your daughter doesn't fool. At least, Sarrask didn't think so."
She hadn't been fooling, and Sarrask had known it. "So," Rylla picked it up, "we put him on a horse one of his guards didn't need any more, and brought him along. We thought you might find a use for him. We stopped at Esdreth Gap-I saw our flag on the Sask castle; that looked pretty, but Sarrask didn't think so…"
"Prince Ptosphes!" Sarrask burst out. "I am a Prince, as you are. You have no right to let these-these girls-make sport of me!"
"They're as good soldiers as you are," Ptosphes snapped. "They captured you, didn't they?"
"It was the true gods who made sport of you, Prince Sarrask!" Kalvan went into the same harangue he had given the captured officers at Fyk, in his late father's best denunciatory pulpit style. "I pray all the true gods," he finished, "that now that they have humbled you, they will forgive you."
Sarrask was no longer defiant; he was a badly scared Prince, as badly scared as any sinner at whom the Rev. Alexander Morrison had thundered hellfire and damnation. Now and then he looked uneasily upward, as though wondering what the gods were going to hit him with next.
It was almost midnight before Kalvan and Ptosphes could sit down privately in a small room behind Sarrask's gaudy presence chamber. There had been the takeover of Tarr-Sask, and the quartering of troops, and the surrendered mercenaries to swear into Ptosphes's service, and the Saski troops to disarm and confine to barracks. Riders had been coming and going with messages. Chartiphon, on the Beshtan border, was patching up a field truce with Balthar's officers on the spot, and had sent cavalry to seize the lead mines in Sinking Valley. As soon as things stabilized, he was turning the Army of the Besh over to his second in command and coming to Sask Town.
Ptosphes had let his pipe go out. Biting back a yawn, he leaned forward to relight it from a candle.
"We have a panther by the tail here, Kalvan; you know that?" he asked. "What are we going to do now?"
"Well, we clean Styphon's House out of Sask, first of all. We'll have the heads off all those priests, from Zothnes down." Counting the lot that had been brought in from the different temple-farms, that would be about fifty. They'd have to gather up some headsmen. "That will have to be policy, from now on. We don't leave any of that gang alive."
"Oh, of course," Ptosphes agreed. "'To be dealt with as wolves are.' But how about Sarrask and Balthames? If we behead them, the other Princes would criticize us."
"No, we want both of them alive, as your vassals. Balthames is going to marry that wench of Sarrask's if I have to stand behind him with a shotgun, and then we'll make him Prince of Sashta, and occupy all that territory Balthar agreed to cede him. In return, he'll guarantee us the entire output of those lead mines. Lead, I'm afraid, is going to be our chief foreign-exchange monetary metal for a long time to come.
"To make it a little tighter," he continued, "we'll add a little of Hostigos, east of the mountains, say to the edge of the Barrens."
"Are you crazy, Kalvan? Give up Hostigi land? Not as long as I'm Prince of Hostigos!"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I must have forgotten to tell you. You're not Prince of Hostigos any more. I am." Ptosphes's face went blank, for an instant, with shocked incredulity. Then he was on his feet with an oath, his poignard half drawn. "No," Kalvan continued, before his father-in-law-to-be could say anything else. "You are now His Majesty, Ptosphes the First, Great King of Hos-Hostigos. As Prince by betrothal of your Majesty's domain of Old Hostigos, let me be the first to do homage to your Majesty."
Ptosphes resumed his chair, solely by force of gravity. He stared for a moment, then picked up his goblet and drained it.