“Looks Ksinallionese to me,” Alder said. Lady Kalira nodded agreement.
“Not Semman?”
“On, no,” all three agreed, “not Semman!”
Sterren sighed. “We’d better get out of here, then,” he said.
Nobody argued, and in five minutes the party had collected its belongings and retired to the porch, where the horses were waiting.
In another five, the Semmans were all mounted, the draft horses were hitched up, and Sterren and the magicians were all settled in the wagon, moving unhappily out of their shelter into the thin morning drizzle.
“Which way?” Hamder asked.
That, Sterren had to admit, was a very good question. With a shrug, he pointed north. “That way,” he said. He shook the reins, and the wagon led the way across a muddy brown cornfield.
After a few minutes he reined in his horses and held up a hand to signal the Semman outriders. They gathered into a little knot at the center of what was probably a pasture in the summer, but was now mostly more mud.
The others all stared at him expectantly, hunching against the thin misty rain.
Sterren hesitated, unsure of what to say.
“Well,” he said at last, in Ethsharitic, “here we are in Semma, and that’s the Ksinallionese army over there, and maybe the Ophkarite army as well. Your job is to drive them out of Semma. Go right ahead.”
The magicians glanced at one another, then back at Sterren, for a long moment before Hamder asked, “How?”
“How should I know?” Sterren said, irritated. “You’re the magicians, with all your secrets.”
“But you’re the warlord,” Annara pointed out, “and you’re the boss; you hired us, now tell us what to do.”
Sterren had dreaded this, and here it was. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I was forced into this stupid job and I don’t know any more about fighting a war than you people do.”
“In that case,” Hamder said, “I think we may all be in very serious trouble.”
“Why don’t we just go home?” Shenna asked. “We can’t do anything here! Look at all those people!”
In point of fact, the besieging armies were invisible from where Sterren’s party happened to be at that moment, but nobody bothered to correct her. Sterren had told them, on board ship, that they would be facing armies totaling about four hundred and fifty men.
“Not a one of those soldiers,” Sterren pointed out, “knows anything about magic. Not one! They’ve probably never even seen any magic; it’s all scarce as fish fur in this part of the world!”
“Well, we aren’t exactly Fendel the Great,” Annara retorted.
“No, but you’re magicians, and you all agreed to come here and fight this war. Now, let’s fight it! You, Emner, last night you were telling me you could levitate and that you have a shield spell and a way of dazing people?”
“Felshen’s First Hypnotic Spell,” Emner replied, “and Tracel’s Levitation, and Fendel’s Elementary Protection. But I’ll still just be one man against an army, and Felshen’s won’t kill anyone, or make them give up the fight. I can harass them, I suppose, but-”
“But nothing!” Sterren interrupted. “You’re forgetting the effect it will have on their morale to have a genuine wizard attacking them! These soldiers have never conceived of using magic to fight a war; you’ll terrify them!”
Emner looked doubtful.
Sterren was growing desperate. “Listen, I don’t expect you to destroy an army overnight, but this is what you all agreed to do, what you came here for, the reason we fed you all and transported you here and even clothed some of you.” Annara had owned only a single tattered purple robe; Lady Kalira had provided her with a decent change of outfit while aboard ship, so that she could clean and repair the gown with fabric, thread, and needle provided by Lady Kalira. She was wearing her own purple again at the moment, but she knew who Sterren meant. “I think you’ll find that it’s not as hard as you expect. Remember, it’s not just the eleven of us here; we have an army of our own inside that castle over there, with three fine officers who I’m sure will take advantage of any opportunity we give them.” Sterren was not at all certain of anything of the sort and actually expected his three officers to fumble every opportunity, but he knew better than to admit that. “Those people in the castle, hundreds of them, including dozens of innocent women and children, are depending on us!”
That was most likely true; he could easily picture Princess Shirrin watching from the castle windows for the triumphant return of her warlord hero. She probably expected him to ride up on a white charger, banners flying and trumpets sounding, rather than driving a battered Akallan haywagon.
“I can set some traps,” Annara admitted grudgingly.
“At least, while my supplies hold out. I’ll need some wax. And parchment, if you have any.”
“There!” Sterren said. “That’s more like it!” He looked at the others expectantly.
“If one of these witches or the warlock can push me once I’m airborne, I can levitate and go see what’s happening, or take messages into the castle,” Emner said.
The witches glanced at each other, but it was the warlock who said, “I ought to be able to manage that much. You’re weightless when you levitate, aren’t you?”
“Well, not really, not with Tracel’s,” Emner admitted. “There’s another levitation spell that makes you weightless, but I never got the hang of it.”
“Well, I can try it, anyway,” the warlock said.
“We can probably help,” Hamder volunteered, “as long as you’re in sight.”
“You can do a test run,” Sterren suggested.
That elicited a round of nods.
“We can... well, I can pick off enemy soldiers, strangle them at a distance, if we can find them away from the main camp,” Ederd said.
“Or drop rocks on them,” Hamder said.
Shenna wrinkled her nose in disgust, then admitted, “I can poison their water. Without touching it, I think.” She hesitated, then repeated, “I think, it’s a lot easier to just make their food go bad, if you can find out where they keep it and it’s not sealed in anything.”
All eyes fell on the warlock, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know how much I can do, here, but I’ll do what I can. Strangling from a distance, I might be able to do that. Easier, for me, to just stop hearts.”
A moment of uneasy silence followed this announcement.
“There!” Sterren said, breaking it. “You see? This shouldn’t be as bad as all that! There’s a lot we can do, and they won’t have any way to fight it, or even know what’s going on!”
A couple of the magicians nodded glumly. Nobody argued. Nobody displayed any enthusiasm, either.
Sterren decided to settle for what he could get. Enthusiasm might come later. A lack of resistance was enough to start with.
“What’s going on?” Lady Kalira asked, in Semmat. Sterren sighed and told her.
CHAPTER 20
Two days later, in a barn roughly a mile and a half northwest of Semma Castle, two of the witches were straining, watching or listening or using some other sense Sterren couldn’t guess at. The Semmans and the other magicians were waiting for something to happen. For himself, Sterren didn’t expect to know anything about it until the witches told him.
Both witches started suddenly, but that was nothing very new. They often reacted to unseen events while in perceptive trances.
Even with that warning, the bang a second or so later came as a complete surprise. Sterren had been quite sure he wouldn’t hear it.