Delmond acquired a stunned expression. Shel considered it a moment, and filed it away under “Mothers/stepmothers, wicked, extreme caution when dealing with.” “Right,” Shel said. “Meanwhile, your surviving nobles will be cared for and ransomed as per the usual procedure. Fortunately, we have had a good number of offers for them. Your surviving infantry will spend a month at labor in Minsar, by way of reparation for the damage they’ve caused to Talairn territory, and they’ll then be released. Who knows, some of them may want to stay with us afterwards. A poorly fed looking lot, they are.
“You, however, will have a meal tonight and a meal in the morning, and then we’ll give you the statutory skin of water and bag of bread and meat, and a horseman will take you ten miles back into your borderlands so that you can start walking home. You might get there by midsummer, if you don’t dawdle. The collar stays on, by the way. Flying back home in bird or bat shape wouldn’t give you nearly enough time to reflect on the error of your ways.”
Delmond turned a wonderful color of puce, drew a long breath, and began saying dreadful things about Shel’s background and parentage. He was just starting to hit his stride when a soft moaning noise began radiating from near the tentpole. Ululator was shivering slightly, just enough so that you could see the patternwelding in the metal shift and move, as if the steel breathed, and the howling got louder. It was like the sound a tomcat makes when threatening another tom…except this was louder, and the threat was absolutely personal, like the angry note in your mother’s voice when she works out why you’ve been in the bathroom with the door locked for so long.
Delmond abruptly gulped and went silent. “I think you should moderate your language,” Shel said. “Howler has been known to get out of my tent at night and go about her own business — I wouldn’t go so far as to say her ‘lawful occasions’; the things she does aren’t always strictly legal. But I always pay for the funerals afterwards.”
Delmond was now sitting very still.
“So that’s the way it’s going to be,” said Shel. “Azure Alaunt, as a constituted herald of the Dominion, say you now: Is the disposition within the law?”
“It is within the law,” said the herald, looking with slight nervousness at his employer.
“Fine. I will now hear any formal protest of the disposition.”
Delmond fought first for air, then for words, and after a moment, he burst out, “None of this would have happened if you had not had magic on your side! It was not horses that bore you down the hillsides at us, but devils! We will find out where to get such demons of our own, and then we will crush you where you—”
“They come from Altharn, mostly,” said Shel mildly. “A nice little stud farm up there. I own it. We crossbreed our black Delvairns with the mountain ponies, and there’s rumored to be a secret ingredient in the mixture…possibly goat. Don’t think you’ll have much luck with them, though, Delmond. They bite, and you just have to put up with it…because it’s their spirit that makes them so surefooted.”
“Spirits!” cried Delmond, turning to Azure Alaunt. “Did you hear that? He admits it, they were spirits, familiars!”
Azure Alaunt glanced ever so briefly at Shel — an expression of utter hopelessness that his master did not see, and that made Shel wonder if, at some much later date, he should offer the man a job.
“Mmmm,” said Shel to Delmond. “Not your usual level of response. Things must be getting tough down at the WalMart.”
Delmond went rather darker than puce. It was not considered in the very best taste to refer inside Sarxos to a player’s “real life” outside. The game was supposed to be a relief from “outside,” after all, a place where the players could leave the pressures and mundanity of their lives, and experience something bigger and more exotic in company with many others intent on the same thing. But then lots of things happened in Sarxos that were not strictly “by the book,” a fact that the game’s creator apparently took as an indicator that the game was progressing correctly, and was in fact becoming its own place, its own self…something slightly alive. And anyway, Delmond had bent a fair number of the rules himself in this engagement. Turnabout was fair play, Shel thought.
“All right,” Shel said. “The disposition is made. Talch?” The guard reapppeared. “Take him out and feed him. Then lock him up in a baggage cart for the move up the road — not one of his, one of ours. Who knows what little surprises he’s got built into his own equipment. Have the regulation beggar’s bag ready for him in the morning. And what the heck, why should we be stingy? Throw a lump of hard cheese in it.”
Shivering with rage, but silent now, Delmond was taken out. Azure Alaunt paused on the threshold of the tent and said, “A word in your ear, lord, if I may…”
Shel nodded.
“His mother is not a safe person to offend. If harm should come to her son on the road — your own play could be damaged.”
Shel sat quiet for a moment. “Boldly spoken,” he said then. “And possibly even true. I take your warning at its face value, Azure Alaunt.”
The herald bowed and slipped out of the tent.
Shel sat still for a moment more, chewing his lip in a thoughtful way. “A little twitchy, that lad,” said Alla, getting up and stretching.
“Maybe. Come on,” Shel said, getting up as well. “Let’s have the baggage people get this tent down, and get ourselves up the road to Minsar and our dinners. We’ve done a good day’s work.”
Alla nodded, and went out of the tent.
A moment later, Shel went out into the near-darkness, too, and walked off a short distance through the red sticky mud, trying to find a solid spot. Finally he found one, a place that by some magic had not been completely poached into mire by the thousands of hooves, and looked southward at the first moon, the smaller one, now floating low over the mist.
He turned to look north, toward Minsar, between the wooded hills. In the moonlight, the upward-reaching tips of the pine trees were slightly paler than the rest of the branches: polished matte-silver as opposed to the slightly tarnished silver and shadow-black of the trees. It had just turned spring in the South Continent, and by daylight you would correctly see the color at the tips of the conifers as that particular shade of new young green. Elsewhere would be the thin faint veiling of green on the opening buds of the oaks and maples; everything shone fresh and new. The fields were dazzling in the mornings; besides the yellow of nevermind in the grass, and the white of the South Continent daisy that comes after the snow, there was other whiteness, too — the new lambs, bouncing around on unsteady legs in the new spring sunshine, astounded and overjoyed to be alive. So when you got the news that somebody like Delmond was at your borders, about to cross over and stamp everything into a bloody pulp — the villages, the people, the lambs, and the daisies, everything that mattered and many things that hadn’t, until now — you got cranky, and you stood up to defend the place.
Shel had started doing that, much to his own surprise, some while back. Shel rarely saw daisies except at the florist’s down the road, and had never seen a lamb that wasn’t in plastic-wrapped pieces at the supermarket meat counter, but in Sarxos he had come to know what flowers, and livestock, meant to country people, to the smallfarmers and smallholders among whom he had moved. And when he had first “settled” and made this part of Sarxos his home-away-from-home, and someone else in Sarxos had come along, intent on taking the livestock, and killing the people and the daisies — not even out of need, but out of what that person considered political expediency — Shel had said, “The hell with that,” and had started raking together an army.