The Barony of Ernos had been blessed in many ways, from the richness of its soil to the accidents of history and geography which gave it unthreatened frontiers and a ruling family noted for sagacity. The current Baroness Ernos was no exception. She’d inherited and maintained both her father’s efficient and well-trained army and his longstanding alliances with the neighboring Empire of the Axe, and she used them with considerable business acumen. Her relations with Axeman merchants were good, tariffs and taxes were low, and she allowed no brigands to take root in her well-settled lands. All of which, coupled with her capital’s location as the northernmost port on the Saram River, had conspired to turn Derm into a major trade entrepôt.
It would be too much to expect Rianthus to lower his guard anywhere, yet a palpable sense of relief had settled over the wagon train as they crossed into Ernos from Moretz. The duty schedule remained as arduous and the penalties for inattention as severe, but now the road-far better maintained than on the Moretzan side of the border-ran through rich, well-tended farmland and comfortable villages, not rough hills ideal for outlaw roosts.
Brandark was fascinated by a land where most villages lacked so much as palisades and not even larger towns had any serious fortifications. The chance of any Navahkan army’s reaching Ernos were slight, yet he shuddered at the thought of what one would do to those defenseless towns if it ever should. But the truly remarkable thing was that none of them seemed to feel any need to protect themselves from their own neighbors. He’d known from his reading that there were places like that, yet he’d grown to adulthood in Navahk, and even now, with the evidence before him, no Navahkan could quite believe in them.
Bahzell could. He could even see in this secure land the ideal to which his father aspired. Prince Bahnak could never have been happy ruling such a peaceable realm; there was too much of the hradani warlord in him for that, and Bahzell doubted, somehow, that his father had ever fully visualized the end to which he strove. Yet that was beside the point. Bahnak looked not to the reward of his labors but to their challenge, for it was the struggle he loved. The sense of building something, content in the knowledge that the task was worth doing.
In an odd sort of way, Bahzell understood his father far better now. Prince Bahnak would die of boredom in a world bereft of intrigue or the deadly games of war and politics. Indeed, he would regard the mere notion of such a world with puzzled incomprehension and laugh at the idea that things like altruism had any place in his life. He was a practical man, a pragmatic builder of empire! His reforms aimed simply at making that empire stronger, more self-sufficient, better able to withstand its enemies and conquer them when the time was right. Anything else was nonsense. Bahzell couldn’t have begun to count the times he’d heard his father declare that a man looked after himself and his own in this world. Those who tried to do more were bound to fail, and the sooner they did it and got out of everyone else’s way, the better!
Yet that was the same prince who’d raised his sons and daughters with the notion that they owed their people something, not the reverse. It was the commander who insured that the least of his troopers got the same rations, the same care from his healers,that any of his officers might expect in the field. And it was the father who’d raised a son who couldn’t turn his back on Farmah. No doubt he was heartily cursing that son for landing in such a harebrained scrape, but Bahzell could imagine exactly how he would have reacted had his son not taken a hand. The fact that Bahnak saw no contradiction in his own attitudes might make him less of the cold, calculating prince than he cared to think, but it also made him an even better father than Bahzell had realized.
Now the first wagons were inching through the gates of Derm amid the friendly greetings of the city guard. Bahzell strode along in his post beside the pay wagon, and he saw a few of those welcoming guards turn thoughtful when they clapped eyes on him. But Kilthan was well known here; anyone in his employ-even a murdering hradani-was automatically respectable until he proved differently, and he saw little of the instant hostility he’d met elsewhere. Wariness and curiosity, yes, but not unthinking hatred. The observation left him cheerful enough to forget, for the moment, the vague, troubling memories of the dreams which still made his nights hideous, and he found himself whistling as the cumbersome wagons wound through the streets.
Kilthan’s couriers had preceded him, and his local factor was waiting. The compound the dwarf’s trading house maintained just off Derm’s docks was larger even than his seasonal camp outside Esgfalas, for his wagons would be left here for winter storage when he took to the river. Bahzell knew from overheard comments that Baroness Ernos paid Kilthan a handsome subsidy to make Derm the permanent base for his eastern operations, and her motive became obvious as he watched the other merchants haggle for similar facilities. Just as Kilthan’s caravan served as a magnet to draw the others with him on the road, so his headquarters drew them into leasing winter space for their wagons . . . or disposing of them to local carters who would cheerfully sell them back-at a profit, no doubt-next spring.
Bahzell watched it all, making mental notes to share with his father, but then they reached the docks, and the sight of the river drove all other thoughts from his head.
The Saram had looked impressive from a distance; close at hand, it was overwhelming. Bahzell had seen the upper reaches of the Hangnysti, but they were mere creeks beside the Saram. The broad, blue river flowed past with infinite patience and slow, deep inevitability, and the thought of that much water in one place was daunting. He could swim-not gracefully, perhaps, but strongly-yet hradani and boats were strangers to one another, and he felt a sudden, craven longing to keep it that way.
Unfortunately, he had no choice, and he drew a deep breath and spoke sternly to his qualms as the train unraveled into its individual components. The largest string of wagons-Kilthan’s-rumbled gratefully into a vast brick courtyard between high, gaunt warehouses, and work gangs were already descending upon it. Bahzell joined the six other men Hartan had told to guard the pay wagon and shook his head as he watched the bustle engulf them.
Rianthus had told him Kilthan intended to spend no more than a single day in Derm, but he hadn’t quite believed it. It hadn’t seemed possible to unload, sort, reorganize, and stow so much merchandise away aboard ship in so short a time; now he knew the guard captain had meant every word of it.
Teams of hostlers joined the train’s drovers to unhitch the draft animals. Foremen with slates and sheafs of written orders swarmed about, shouting for their sections as they found the crates and parcels and bales whose labels matched their instructions. A full dozen local merchants circulated with their own foremen to take delivery of goods Kilthan had freighted to them from Esgan or Daranfel or Moretz, and a dozen more bustled in with new consignments bound further south or clear to the Empire. Squads of officers and senior guardsmen kept an alert eye out for pilferers, racing fingers clicked over the beads of abacuses, sputtering pens recorded transactions, fees, and bills of sale, and voices rose in a bedlam of shouted conversations, questions, answers, and orders. It was chaos, but an intricately organized chaos, and the first heaps of cargo were already being trundled off to dockside and the broad-beamed, clumsy-looking riverboats awaiting them.