“Very well, Tharnatus,” he said at length. “Let it be the dog brothers. And let it be soon. I’ll wait for the sluts, if I must, but I want that whoreson’s head to piss on in front of my father’s court!”
“And you shall have it, My Prince,” the priest murmured, then raised his head and smiled as a sound echoed down the hall behind him. He and Harnak turned to the open doors, and the sounds grew louder-and terrified. Pleas for mercy and the desperate, panting sounds of struggle floated through the doors, and then two cowled priests thrust a twisting, fighting figure through them.
The girl was young, no more than fifteen or sixteen, just ripening into the curves of womanhood and clad only in a thin white robe, and her arms were bound behind her. Her ears were flat to her skull, her eyes huge with panic, as she fought the binding cords, but there was no escape, and a dozen more priests and worshipers followed into the temple.
The captive’s pleas died in a strangled whimper as she saw the huge scorpion and the altar it crouched above. She stared at them, terror gurgling in the back of her throat, and then she threw back her head and shrieked in horror as her captors dragged her kicking, madly fighting body forward.
“As you see, My Prince,” Tharnatus purred through her hopeless screams, “your business here tonight can be mixed with pleasure as well.” He reached into his robe to withdraw the thin, razor sharp flaying knife and smiled at the crown prince of Navahk.
“Will you stay to share our worship?”
Chapter Twelve
Patchy frost glittered in shadowed hollows, but clear morning sunlight touched the city’s stone walls to warm gold as Kilthan’s wagons creaked and rumbled towards Derm. The road sloped steadily down to the city’s colorful roofs, the Saram River swept around its western flank in a dark blue bow, gilded with silver sun-flash, and the final line of rapids and cataracts foamed white less than a league above the bustling docks. The sails of small craft dotted the Saram’s broader reaches below the city, lush farmland stretched away from the river in both directions, and the mighty, snowcapped peaks of the Eastwall Mountains towered far beyond it.
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.