Sentries stood shivering on guard duty around the ring of the great human encampment. The great bulk of Sithelbec was practically invisible in the gray anonymity of the twilit gloom. The fortress walls loomed strong; they had been tested at the cost of more than a thousand men during recent months. Darkness came like a lowering curtain, and the camp became still and silent, broken only by the fires that dotted the darkness. Even these blazes were few, for all sources of firewood within ten miles of the camp had already been picked clean.
Amid this darkness, an even darker figure moved. General Giarna stalked toward the command tent of High General Barnet. Trailing him, trying to control her terror, followed Suzine.
She didn’t want to be here. Never before had she seen General Giarna as menacing as he seemed tonight. He had summoned her without explanation, his eyes distant ... and hungry. It was as if he barely knew that she was present, so intent were his thoughts on something else.
Now she understood that his victim was to be Barnet.
General Giarna reached the high general’s tent and flung aside the canvas flap, boldly entering. Suzine, more cautiously, came behind him. Barnet had been expecting company, for he stood facing the door, his hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword. The three of them were alone in the dim enclosure. One lamp sputtered on a battered wooden table, and rain seeped through the waterlogged roof and sides of the tent.
“The usurper dares to challenge his master?” sneered the white-haired Barnet, but his voice was not as forceful as his words.
“Master?” The black-armored general’s voice was heavy with scorn. His eyes remained vacant, and focused on something very far away. “You are a failure—and your time is up, old man!”
“Bastard!” Barnet reacted with surprising quickness, given his age. In one smooth movement, his blade hissed from its scabbard and lashed toward the younger man’s face.
General Giarna was quicker. He raised one hand, encased in its black steel gauntlet. The blade met the gauntlet at the wrist, a powerful blow that ought to have chopped through the armor and sliced off the general’s hand. Instead, the sword shattered into a shower of silver splinters. Barnet, still holding the useless hilt, gaped at the taller Giarna and stepped involuntarily backward.
Suzine groaned in terror. Some unbelievably horrible power pulsed in the room, a thing that she sensed on a deeper level than sight or smell or touch. Her knees grew weak beneath her, but somehow she forced herself to stand. She knew that Giarna wanted her to watch, for this was to be a lesson for her as much as a punishment for Barnet.
The old man squealed—a pathetic, whimpering sound—as he stared at something in the dark eyes of his nemesis. Giarna’s hands, cloaked in the shiny black steel, grasped Barnet around the neck, and the high general’s sounds faded into strangled gasps and coughs.
Barnet’s face expanded to a circle of horror. His tongue protruded, and his jaw flexed soundlessly. His skin grew red-bright red, like a crimson rose, thought Suzine. Then the man’s face darkened to a bluish, then ashen, gray. Finally, as if his corpse was being seared by a hot fire, Barnet turned black. His face ceased to bulge, slowly shrinking until the skin pressed tight around the clear outlines of his skull. His lips stretched backward, and then split and dried into mummified husks.
His hands, Suzine saw, had become veritable claws, each an outline of white bone, with bare shreds of skin and fingernails clinging to the ghastly skeleton. Giarna cast the corpse aside, and it settled slowly to the floor, like an empty gunny sack that catches the undercurrents of air as it floats downward. When the general finally turned back to Suzine, she gasped in mindless dread. He stood taller now. His skin was bright, flushed. But his eyes were his most frightening aspect, for now they fixed upon her with a clear and deadly glow. *
Later, Suzine stared into her mirror, despairing. Though it might show ten thousand signs, to her it was still devoid of that which meant all to her. She no longer knew if Kith-Kanan was even alive, so far distant had he flown. In the ten days since General Giarna had slain Barnet, the army camp had been driven into furious activity. An array of great stone-casting catapults took shape along the lines. Building the huge wooden machines was slow work, but by the end of winter, twoscore of the war machines would be ready to rain their destruction upon Sithelbec.
A hard ground freeze had occurred during the days immediately following the brutal murder, and this had eliminated the mud that had impeded all activity. Now great parties of human riders scoured the surrounding plains, and the few bands of Wildrunners outside Sithelbec’s walls had been eliminated or driven to the shelter of the deepest forests.
Wearily Suzine turned her thoughts to her uncle, Emperor Quivalin Soth V. The mirror combed the expanse of the frozen plain to the west, and soon she found what Giarna had directed her to seek: the emperor’s great carriage, escorted by four thousand of his most loyal knights, was trundling closer to the camp.
She went to seek her commander and found him belaboring the unfortunate captains of a team sent to bring lumber from a patch of forest some dozen miles away.
“Double the size of your force if you need to!” snarled General Giarna, while six battle-scarred officers trembled before him. “But bring me the wood by tomorrow! Work on the catapults must cease until we get those timbers!”
“Sir,” ventured the boldest, “it’s the horses! We drive them until near collapse. Then they must rest! It takes two days to make the trip.”
“Drive them until they collapse, then—or perhaps you consider horseflesh to be more valuable than your own?”
“No, General!” Badly shaken, the captains left to organize another, larger, lumbering expedition.
“What have you learned?” General Giarna whirled upon Suzine, fixing her with his penetrating stare.
For a moment, Suzine looked at him, trying to banish her trembling. The Boy General reminded her, for the first time in a long time, of the vibrant and energetic officer she had first met, for whom she had once developed an infatuation. What did the death of Barnet have to do with this? In some vile way, it seemed to Suzine that the man had consumed the life force of the other, devoured his rival, and found the deed somehow invigorating.
“The emperor will arrive tomorrow,” she reported. “He makes good time, now that the ground is frozen.” “Splendid.” The general’s mind, she could see, was already preoccupied with something else, for he turned that sharp stare toward the bastion of Sithelbec. * * * * *
If Emperor Quivalin noticed any dark change in General Giarna, he didn’t say anything to Suzine. His carriage had rolled into the camp to the cheers of more than a hundred thousand of his soldiers. The great procession rumbled around the full circumference of the circular deployments before arriving at the tent where the Boy General kept his headquarters.
The two men conferred within the tent for several hours before the ruler and the commander emerged, side by side, to address the troops.
“I have appointed General Giarna as High General of the Army,” announced Quivalin, to the cheers of his men, “following the unfortunate demise of former High General Barnet.
“He has my full confidence, as do you all.” More cheers. “I feel certain that, with the coming of spring, your force will carry the walls of the elven fortress and reduce their defenses to ashes! For the glory of Ergoth, you will prevail!” Adulation rose from the troops, who surged forward to get a close look at the mighty ruler. A sweeping stare from their general, however, held them in their tracks. A slow, reluctant silence fell over the mass of warriors.