"If it takes four days, then it takes four days," he said now, and gave Festian a cool look. "No doubt your men require your guidance, Sir Festian. Don't let us detain you."
"Of course not, Milord," Festian replied through gritted teeth, and turned his horse back down the Gullet.
Shod hooves clattered on bare stone, but Bahzell Bahnakson hardly noticed. His attention was on the banner—a crimson axe on a field of black—that still flew above the crude fort called Charhan's Despair. For all his confident words in Hurgrum, he had been far from certain Garuth would be able to obey his orders. Now, as a dozen hradani jogged towards him from the rough-piled stone walls, he knew the Horse Stealer captain had.
He handed the lead rope of his own mule to one of Garuth's men, then stood back, breathing deeply. His calf and thigh muscles seemed to quiver, as though his feet still rose and fell in the ground-devouring lope of the Horse Stealers, and he squatted in a series of deep knee bends to ease the sensation as he watched the rest of the column move past him. The chapter's twenty novice Bloody Swords staggered drunkenly as they covered the last few yards. They were far more exhausted than their Horse Stealer brethren—although, he noted with a certain smugness, even the other Horse Stealers looked tireder than his fellow Iron Axes—but that was understandable enough. The Bloody Swords might have the same inherent endurance, but they lacked the training. They were small enough to ride horses, and so their muscles hadn't been built up by a lifetime spent learning to outrun cavalry on their own two feet. The twenty-odd leagues from Hurgrum to the foot of the Gullet had been a brutal ordeal for them... and not a lot better for the Horse Stealers, Bahzell admitted privately. It would have been bad enough under ideal conditions; with the rudimentary roads covered in mud and the need to cut cross-country in several places, it had been infinitely worse.
At least they'd been able to make things a bit easier on themselves. Not even Horse Stealers wanted to run sixty miles in armor if they could help it, and so they had loaded their personal equipment on mules. Each hradani had started out with two of them. By now their gear was on the second and the poor beasts drooped with exhaustion, but they raised their heads as they realized the pounding journey was drawing to a close at last. Some of Bahzell's warriors were already unfastening packs to get at their armor and weapons. Others had sagged down to rest, but Hurthang was chivvying them back to their feet and pointing them at their own mules. Bahzell was relieved to see him handling the Bloody Swords exactly as if they were Horse Stealers. Apparently running sixty miles with him in eleven hours and then climbing halfway up the Gullet in six more was enough to erase even the stigma of being born a Bloody Sword.
More hooves clattered, and he looked up as Brandark, Kaeritha, and Vaijon rode up the last, steep bit of the trail. The two humans looked wan and drawn, and hardened riders though they might be, all three of them undoubtedly felt as if someone had beaten them with flails. Vaijon had looked a little doubtful, as if he thought he was being made the butt of someone's joke, when Bahzell insisted that each of them start with a string of four horses. Now he knew better, and he bit back a groan as he slid down from the saddle. Kaeritha and Brandark stayed where they were, and Bahzell grinned. From Kaeritha's expression, she had no intention of ungluing herself from that saddle until she knew she was someplace where she wouldn't have to climb back into it again.
"Are we here?" Vaijon croaked.
"We are that," Bahzell agreed, and jerked a thumb at the crudely built fortifications. "Charhan's Despair," he said.
"Why is it called that?" Kaeritha asked.
"According to the tales, Charhan was a Horse Stealer clan lord when first the Sothōii wandered into these parts. They weren't so very fond of our folk even then, I reckon, for they were after doing their level best to kill us all, but they'd much the same problems as now, for there weren't so many ways we could be getting at one another. Well, to be making a long story short, the Sothōii threw an attack down the Gullet. There were too many for Charhan to be stopping them in the open, so it was here he made his stand. You should ask old Thorfa to sing you the tale if you're wishful to hear it. It's chock full of all manner of heroic deeds, but even Thorfa will tell you as how they're all made up by them as wasn't there to see."
He fell silent, watching the last of the column come up, and Vaijon frowned.
"But why is it called 'Charhan's Despair'?" he asked.
"Um?" Bahzell turned back to him, ears cocked
"I asked why it's called 'Charhan's Despair,' " he repeated, and this time Bahzell smiled grimly.
"I said it was here he made his stand, Vaijon," he said quietly. "I never said as how he stopped 'em, for he didn't. They rode right over him, and over all his men, and when they'd reached the bottom of the Gullet, why they rode right over the rest of his clan, as well. That's why it's naught but a legend amongst us, you see, for there wasn't a one of his people at all, at all, as lived to tell what truly happened."
Chapter Thirty-One
"What banner did you say?"
Sir Festian stared at the muddy, sweat-soaked scout in disbelief, but the man only shook his head stubbornly.
"I saw what I saw, Sir."
"But—" Festian began, then stopped. Yarran was a good man, one of his best. If he said he'd seen something, then he'd seen it... however impossible it seemed.
The scout commander chewed on that unpalatable thought for several seconds, then dismounted and handed his reins to an aide.
"Show me," he ordered, and Yarran nodded and led the way down the trail.
At fifty-six, Festian was getting long in the tooth for this sort of thing. His wind wasn't what it had been, and the joints were getting a bit stiffer of late. But he forced himself to keep up with Yarran and smiled crookedly as their riding boots scraped on rock or sucked in mud. Scouting on foot's not exactly the sort of job any Sothōii relishes, he thought. I think most of us would mount up to go take a piss... assuming we could get the horse into the privy with us!
He almost laughed at the thought, then scolded himself for letting his attention wander this close to the enemy. He shook his head, concentrating on making as little noise as possible as Yarran led the way around another bend. Then the scout's hand waved urgently, and the two of them slipped off the trail and into the cover of one of the many boulder piles the long-vanished river had heaped up in the bends of the Gullet.
"There," Yarran said quietly, and Festian felt his eyebrows rise as he followed the scout's pointing index finger to the crude fortification.
Not surprising they stopped here, was his first thought. The trail widens out enough to let us deploy more strength, but then it pinches in... and they're right atop that nasty slope. He tried to remember what the hradani called the place. He knew it had a name—enough skirmishes and battles had been fought here to make him that familiar with it—but he couldn't recall it. Something's Despair, wasn't it?
He brushed the thought aside and sat back on his haunches in the concealment of a large boulder, rubbing at a patch of dried mud on his cuirass, and stared at the banner flying above the roughly built walls. Not the crimson-on-black axe of Hurgrum, but dark forest green, bearing a crossed sword and mace in gold.
So Yarran was right. But what the Phrobus is the Order of Tomanāk doing here? And Order or no, those are damned well hradani on the wall below it!
He grimaced, then nodded to Yarran.
"All right. Keep an eye on them, and I'll send a few more men down to watch your back and act as runners. Don't go getting yourself into any fights, but if those bastards do anything—anything at all except sit right where they are—you get word back up the Gullet fast. Right?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Good!" Festian patted the scout's shoulder and turned to scramble back up the trail.
"The Order of Tomanāk ? Your man's mad—or drunk!" Sir Mathian declared.
"He's neither, Milord," Festian said tightly, "and I saw the banner myself—with these." He indicated his own eyes with a sharp, angry gesture. "Whoever or whatever is under it, that's Tomanāk's banner down there!"
Mathian recoiled as he finally recognized the fury boiling behind Festian's mask-like expression. The two of them stood face to face under an awning one of Mathian's aides had managed to rig between two boulders while clouds of gnats swarmed in the humid afternoon sunlight. A nice, cool breeze blew across the Gullet at right angles, but the steep walls kept any breath of it from reaching them. The barren crevice was like a steamy oven, just the sort of place to exact the maximum discomfort from a man's armor, and the Lord Warden's red face was soaked with sweat.