Due to the still unsettled conditions, when he rode the journey to the hold of the thoheeks, he rode armed and accompanied by a few also armed retainers. These men were skillfully separated from him at the ducal residence, and while he was awaiting his audience, well-armed ducal guardsmen disarmed him, led him to a secure if comfortable chamber and locked him in it.
Shortly after he had been fed, he was visited by the thoheeks, who came alone and seemed rather embarrassed about this imprisonment of a loyal vassal. “Look you, my boy,” he had begun, looking anywhere but at Stehrgiahnos, “I don’t like what I’ve had to do here, and I like even less what certain other men have in mind for you, do I obediently deliver you into their hands. Now what the Church hierarchy did to your sire and house was not right—legal, but not in any way moral—but neither was what you did in taking back your city, clapping asub-kooreeos who was only doing what his superiors had ordered him to do, after all, in a dungeon cell after terrifying him, and robbing him and hiring his troops out from under him.
“Now I know what your defense is going to be. Had that sad specimen of supposed masculinity stayed in ownership and control of the city, it would’ve fallen to the first warband that came along and would today be a charred, broken-walled ruin as so many others are now. But even so, you broke civil laws and your intemperate actions drove the previous kooreeos into such a rage that he suffered a fit and died on the same day that he heard the news. Therefore, his successor means to see you charged with and tried by a Church court for murder in addition to a plethora of other crimes. That trial will only be a mere form, of course; they consider you guilty of everything and mean to burn you or crucify you, after suitable torments and maimings and mutilations.”
The thoheeks ended by giving Komees Stehrgiahnos back all of his effects, adding a small purse of old, worn, clipped coins, plus a warning to ride far and fast and keep clear of the lands that had been his patrimony and, above all, to not allow himself to be taken alive by the Church or its agents. He regretted it, he said, but in order to maintain important relations with the Church, he would have to declare this son of his old friend outlaw and himself lead out a fast pursuit of him within days.
Only some week into his flight, the broken, outlawed komees found himself confronted by a dozen armed men as he rounded a brushy curve in a road. Without thinking twice, he snapped down his visor, unslung his shield, drew his sword and spurraked his horse into a startled lunge, determined to take as many of the bastards as possible down into death with him. He had cut down two and incapacitated yet another when a crashing blow of a mace hurled him down, out of his saddle, unconscious.
When he regained his senses, he was lying on the ground and looking up at an ill-matched pair of warriors—one thin and wiry, the other big and beefy, Mainahkos and Ahreekos by name. When he realized that his captors were bandits, not agents of the Church, he admitted to his recent outlawry and ended by being offered a place of command in the sizable force led by the two warlords. Stehrgiahnos had accepted.
X
Over the years, Stehrgiahnos had done what little he could to influence his commanders as to the merits of treating the inhabitants of places they did not have to take by storm and force with less than their inbred savagery. This did not, however, apply to Church-owned communities; on the evidences of what horror had taken place at a rural school for the training of priests, its farms and walled town, the renegade nobleman had been afforded evident respect and a generous degree of comradery by Mainahkos and Ahreekos, certain from the bloody signs that he could be naught save one of them, a true brother of the soul if not of birth or background.
His military training and vast experience had proved of inestimable value to the two warlords; the strict discipline that he and some few other once-noble officers and veteran sergeants had enacted and very harshly enforced had rendered the heterogeneous mob with which they had begun into a relatively more reliable and dependable force of troops.
Stehrgiahnos’ strong, compact, wide-ranging corps of dedicated sadists had marched from place to place, deliberately seeking out only Church properties, towns and cities, storming them without offering to treat, and visiting upon the miserable survivors of the stormings the ultimate in depraved atrocities. Then, after all of value or interest had been plundered, they invariably burned the places to the ground, with such few of their human victims as by then still lived left helpless to roast alive.
So many Church places fell to Stehrgiahnos’ corps that all of the as yet untouched places felt constrained to desert their smaller, less defensible habitations and join together in a few larger and stronger if less comfortable spots, not beginning to return to their holdings until the authority of the Council had begun to make its steel-clad presence felt throughout the former kingdom.
But when he had marched against the city that once had been his, the broken komees had been keenly disappointed, finding both it, his natal hold and the ducal city and hold to have fallen to some other band at some earlier time and become but sacked, smoke-blackened, ghost-haunted ruins.
When he had heard the entirety of the sorry tale from the lips of his newest slave, Thoheeks Grahvos had sat in silence, staring hard at Stehrgiahnos for a long while. Finally speaking with a gruff gentleness, he had said, “There’s an ewer over there on that commode, along with a brace of goblets, Stehrgiahnos. Pour for both of us, then take the chair yonder. I had thought that I had ferreted out everything about you and your past; I was wrong and I freely admit to the fact. You’ve had a hard, bitter time of it, haven’t you, lad?
“A man of your military antecedents would be of some great value to our army, but of course that’s out of the question so long as our Grand Strahteegos and Thoheeks Portos remain fixtures of it. Our old Pahvlos was bitterly disappointed that you weren’t at the least hung up on a cross; Portos would’ve had you crucified with an iron pot of starving mice strapped to your belly.
“However my feelings toward you have altered now, Stehrgiahnos, little else of what I earlier told you has; some of it cannot, like it or not. You still are a slave; I cannot free you, that was part of my purchase agreement, you see, nor can I sell you, though I may give you to anyone I wish if no money or goods or services are bartered for you. I’ll not be having you branded, but there will be a mark cut into your flesh; however, it will be so shaped and placed that it will pass as an old wound scar to the scrutiny of any who don’t know exactly what to look for and where to look for it.
“I’ll still be using you as my clandestine agent in certain matters for me and, through me, for Council. Between such assignments, I think you’ll be a body servant and bodyguard; in such a capacity you’ll not only be able to dress like the gentleborn man that you are, you’ll also be able—indeed, expected—to go armed. Anent that, before you leave this room, choose a sword that suits you from that rack over there; the dirks and daggers are in the drawer above. When you’ve regained your energy and strength, I’ll expect you to start exercising regularly with the palace guards, both ahorse and afoot, with and without armor. As I’m certain you know, you won’t be the first slave bodyguard; indeed, some noblemen will have no other kind.”
The Stehrgiahnos who responded to his master’s summons on a certain blustery winter day looked the part of a gentleman-retainer to the hilt. His ease of movement warned knowledgeable observers that he had worn a sword for many a year and presumably, therefore, could be expected to know well its use.