“Your family must send us someone less sarcastic,” Pope Amen said to him in half-decent Grasshopper. “You can pass your message on to the next Wilddog relay rider tomorrow. Then you can start riding home to tall-grass country. Your family can send us your replacement when you get there.”
He stopped looking at the man and spoke to the Wilddog rider. “You can be home tomorrow, and relay my message to Hadala from there. It will get to him quicker that way. We can’t give arrest powers to a Wilddog in Grasshopper country. We do deputize you to arrest Nauwhat anywhere else you may find him. There will be a reward for him. Spread the word on that.”
He turned to the second Grasshopper. “You must chase Hadala all the way to Ol’zarkia if you need to. Give him a copy of the same message. If he’s not already obeying it and coming home by the time you catch up with him, you can read aloud to his men paragraph seven. It excommunicates all Hadala’s followers who do not disband and desert at once. Arm yourself, but try to get help from your sharf in making the arrest.” He then looked pointedly at the maker of the sarcastic remark.
“When you see a man you can’t control about to take the law into his own hands, you might as well save yourself embarrassment and put the law in his hands yourself.”
The man—having already been fired—answered back: “Nevertheless, Your Holiness will be embarrassed when I tell Sharf Eltür you said that.”
Brownpony glared at him for a moment, then broke out laughing. “All right, you can come back here after you pass the message for Bråm to the relay. Someday we’ll need an insolent rider with a gift for blackmail.”
Grandmother Grasshopper raised insolent colts and children. “Maybe I’ll come back, and maybe I won’t,” the relay rider said.
Chuntar Hadala’s war party and ammunition train traveled faster than anyone expected. The moon was nearly full again in the late days of July, but when it left the world dark, setting before dawn, Blacktooth could see distant points of light on the eastern horizon. They looked like fires. Would farmers keep night fires burning? Nimmy knew that a relay messenger had come from the west with a message for Cardinal Hadala on the 28th. The messenger had seemed surprised to find Cardinal Nauwhat with the train. Of course, the Cardinal Secretary had left Valana two days late, and by night, so that no one in the city could be sure of his destination or whereabouts. The messenger left again, but the effect of the message on the cardinals was to command a forced march. The troop rode eastward until midnight.
The next morning, the sun arose above the distant hills where Nimmy had seen points of firelight in the night. Beyond those hills would lie the sprawling glep settlements of “the Valley.” After a fast breakfast of biscuits and tea, the militia rode on toward them.
Two days later, near sundown, the Grasshopper sharf with a war band overtook them from the west. The militia had already camped for the night. After conferring with the cardinals, Major Gleaver ordered the wagons arranged in a defensive array and the men to take cover in expectation of an attack.
“This is crazy, Nimmy,” Aberlott said. “They are allies.”
“Just don’t obey any order to shoot. I’ll talk to them.” Blacktooth walked out of the defensive position and went to meet the Grasshopper warriors as they approached. He could hear Major Gleaver yelling at him to come back, and he stopped once when a Nomad raised a rifle at him; Demon Light spoke a word, and the rifle was lowered. He recognized the monk and beckoned him on.
A bullet struck the ground near Blacktooth’s feet. The report came from behind him. The Nomad who had lifted the rifle lifted it again and returned fire. Nimmy looked back in time to see one of the lieutenants standing beside Gleaver drop his pistol and fall to the ground.
“For God’s sake, stop shooting, you fools!” Nimmy yelled.
“I’ll try you and hang you!” the major yelled back.
Behind Gleaver stood Chuntar Hadala, looking grim.
Sharf Bråm lingered just beyond gunshot range, and he sat there for several minutes while the monk came up to him.
“You remember me?” Blacktooth asked.
Bråm nodded. “But what is the Pope’s servant doing with these men?”
“I’m not the Pope’s servant now. My master left Valana without me.”
“Yes, I knew that. I took him south to meet Dion. He thought you abandoned him. Did you?”
“Not intentionally. I was not in the city when the Palace exploded. When I came back, he was gone and I was drafted into the militia.”
“You seem not to have been told the news.”
“What news is that, Sharf Bråm?”
Demon Light, unable to read for himself, handed the monk a letter. Blacktooth read it with mounting dismay, looked at Eltür, then back at the cardinals.
“This must be the same message Cardinal Hadala got.”
“You go tell him what it says, and ask him. Then tell him if he continues east, I shall not arrest him if he travels alone.”
“Alone? I don’t understand. What about Cardinal Nauwhat?”
It was Eltür’s turn to be surprised. “Is he here? Then they can travel east together. The rest of you will stay here.”
“I don’t understand. They seem to be expecting you to attack.”
“They expect me to arrest them. Doesn’t the message say that? What they don’t know is that I already sent a messenger to the Texark border guard. The enemy knows you’re coming, and he knows why. The only way Hadala can keep the guns from the Hannegan is to give them to us. And the only way the cardinals can escape from me is to surrender to the Hannegan’s border guard. Then the rest of you go home. Remind them what Høngan Ösle Chür did to Esitt Loyte. We can do as much for them, if we have to arrest them.”
The letter Blacktooth had read said nothing about handing the cardinals over to the Hannegan, but he chose not to argue. When he returned to the camp, everyone was watching him and Ulad was waiting to seize him. At the last moment, he changed direction to put a group of recruits between himself and the spook sergeant. He spoke quickly to Aberlott:
“The sharf has orders from the Pope to arrest the cardinals. If we resist, we are all excommunicated. And the enemy is ready for us, because Bråm warned them we were coming. Tell the men, especially Sergeants Gai-See and Woosoh-Loh. Tell them to pray, and let Hadala see them praying.”
He tried to get to the cardinals before Ulad got to him, but the giant was fast. He arrived in a headlock and was forced to his knees. Sorely Nauwhat since joining the expedition had seemed anxious to avoid Blacktooth, and he now hurried away. Chuntar Hadala bent over the monk. He was a glep himself, his skin dappled with various shades of brown—a common mutation—but he was a handsome man in spite of it, with a goatee and a long mustache that had once been golden.
“Well, Brother, tell us about your conversation with the Nomad warlord,” said the Vicar Apostolic to the Watchitah Nation.
“Your Eminence won’t shoot the messenger?”
“Nobody sent you as a messenger!” the cardinal snapped. “And the major may yet have you shot. Just tell us what you found out.”
“Have you seen the fires in the east at night, m’Lord?”
“Yes, they are our people’s beacons. They know we’re here.”
“So does Texark. The sharf warned them you were coming. The fires belong to the cavalry.”