Still more days. Now the scouts of the mountain clans were moving out beyond the Mountains of Hoga, watching Lord Desgo's army. Some obeyed their orders and lived to bring or send back word of the enemy's strength and position. Others disobeyed, tried to launch attacks of their own, and did not come back.
It was just under a month after the raid when the scouts reported that Desgo's army was on the march. The first reports had it marching north. King Embor was all for moving Draad's assembled army in the same direction.
Blade had other ideas. «That is what Desgo will be expecting us to do. Therefore we should not do it.»
«What do you suggest, Blade?» said the king. His eyes were red, his hair grayer than when Blade had first met him, and his voice edged with both exhaustion and anger. «Is there anything else to do, that will not let Desgo come through the passes and burn and kill in Draad? I do not want to live to see that!»
«None of us do, father,» said Neena. «Think that, and let my husband speak.»
Blade continued. «What I suggest is that we march our army south, toward the Pass of Kitos. It is the largest of the mountain passes and the closest one to the emerald mines. Desgo can march his whole army through it quickly. Elsewhere he would have to use two or three passes, or else send his army through very slowly. Both would be dangerous, since we could attack him before he could reunite his army.»
Blade's finger stabbed at the deerskin map on the table in front of them. «Also, on our side of the Pass of Kitos is a stretch of open land nearly a day's march wide. There is plenty of room there for Desgo's army to maneuver and fight its battle as a single force. Anywhere else in Draad, he would risk fighting with his army split up and not knowing the land, against an enemy who knows the land very well. Desgo will see this open ground as the best place to fight his battle, and sooner or later he will come there. Why not by the most direct route?
«I agree,» said Neena, «Lord Desgo deserves fifty filthy names. But he is not a fool, and anyone who thinks otherwise certainly is!»
«Very well,» said the king. «We shall take the risks. Certainly it gives us a better hope of a victory that will give us many years of peace. But I shall pray to the gods with all my strength, Blade, that Lord Desgo is only as wise as you think he is, and no wiser!»
Lord Desgo's army marched north, with Draad's scouts watching it. Draad's army marched south, unwatched. At Blade's suggestion King Embor had all the passes patrolled so that a cockroach couldn't have gotten through, let alone an enemy scouting party. Those patrols added up to a good many warriors who would not be available for the battle in the south. Yet they would not be wasted, if they gave Draad the advantage of surprise.
Those weren't all the warriors Blade was planning to detach. When Lord Desgo's army was well through the Pass of Kitos-if it came that way-another force of warriors would slip into position on either side of the pass. They could strike at Desgo's rear, or ambush his army as it tried to retreat from Draad.
Eventually they reached the forests on the edge of the open land around the Pass of Kitos. The ambush party split off and marched up into the mountains on either side of the pass. The rest of Draad's warriors settled into concealed camps in the forest, with nothing left to do but wait.
They had to wait ten days. King Embor seemed to age a year during each of those days, gnawed by fear that he had doomed ten thousand of his people by following Blade's advice. Blade and Neena found it best to avoid him.
Then on the eleventh day the word came through-Lord Desgo's army had swung about, and was approaching the western end of the Pass of Kitos. On the thirteenth day it entered the pass. By evening on the fifteenth day it was camped on the open land to the east of the pass.
That was the evening when Blade and Neena climbed a tall tree on the edge of the forest and looked out upon their enemy. The campfires of Desgo's army made a long ragged crescent across three miles of land, a flickering orange crescent blurred by the rising mists of evening.
«They will be nearly three to one against what we will have on the field tomorrow,» said Neena. «I hope fighting in the open against such odds is not the kind of folly the gods hate, so that they will punish us for it.»
«It could be,» Blade admitted. «I would not be thinking of it under other conditions. But you know all that I have taught our warriors that they did not know before and which will be a surprise to Desgo. Our warriors are also strong and well-rested, while Desgo's men have marched fast and far on sore feet and growling stomachs. We will move faster than they can tomorrow. I think the gods will not call our battle a folly.»
«I hope not,» said Neena. Then she smiled. «Shall we go back down, or would you take me here, in the branches with the wind in our ears?»
«I think we will go back down,» said Blade with a chuckle. «I would not care to go down in the chronicles of Draad as the warrior who on the night before his greatest battle fell out of a tall tree while embracing his woman and smashed himself into small pieces on the ground!»
The next day, Blade fought his battle.
Lord Desgo formed his army in a wide shallow line a mile wide but only a few ranks deep. This formation had worked well enough in the past against opponents with no answer to the stolofs. It might not work so well now.
«Lord Desgo probably knows that as well as we do,» said Blade. «But he has not had time to train his men in any new tactics, so he will not try them. If he did, his army would fall into confusion and he would be even worse off. He will try what has worked in the past, and hope for the favor of the gods and enough skill and courage in his warriors.» He did not add that Draad would have to hope for exactly the same things in order to be sure of victory. Neena probably knew that just as well as he did.
It was a misty morning. Blade counted on that for some help. The mist was not thick enough to permit real surprises, but it would be useful for the first of his planned tricks.
The army of Draad marched out of the woods in the same wide thin line as the enemy. To stretch a mile, Draad's warriors had to be spread even thinner than Trawn's. Blade's first trick was intended to conceal that fact.
The warriors with regular weapons formed the first rank. Behind them moved a thin second line, all the stolof killers together. With each of them marched a helper-wife, concubine, trusted servant, sometimes a son or a-en a daughter. These helpers carried the extra sprayers. the heavy sacks of throwing pots, everything that would weigh down or slow down a stolof killer. When the time came for them to charge, the stolof killers would dash forward like black stalkers on their prey.
Behind the stolof killers came a whole mass of people. Every man for miles around who could put one foot in front of another was there, and a good many women and older children. There were gray-bearded grandfathers, youths just learning weapons, craftsmen of all kinds, workers from the emerald mines under their overseers, wives, midwives, and courtesans. There were nearly ten thousand, of them, outnumbering the actual warriors Blade and Embor had brought to the field.
Perhaps five hundred of these ten thousand could use some sort of a weapon with any skill Lord Desgo wouldn't know that. As Draad's army marched out of the morning mists toward him, it would look twice as strong as it really was. Desgo would lose any hope of overwhelming the enemy by sheer weight of numbers and become cautious. By the time Desgo discovered that he'd been tricked, it hopefully wouldn't matter. Blade intended for the nobleman to have too much else on his mind!
King Embor marched with the warriors of the front rank, Blade with the stolof killers, Neena among the civilians to the rear. Neena also kept an eye on the dozen captured meytans that were being led forward, carefully concealed among the civilians. They also had their place in Blade's plans.