Now that’s going to leave a mark on someone, Merch thought with an unpleasant smile. And if it should happen that a bunch of traitorous bastards turn up to collect their rifles and find a platoon or so of infantry waiting for them, won’t that be sad?
There were still a lot of ways this could go south, she reflected as the Sunset Hills appeared below her. Given her own preferences, she’d pounce the instant they had enough evidence to identify the key players, but Sharleyan had other plans. Merch understood the empress’s thinking, and she agreed it was time to draw out the traitors in Sharleyan’s nobility and … eliminate them once and for all rather than deal with a fresh crop every ten or twenty years. She just couldn’t help worrying about how many innocent people might get hurt in the process.
That concern explained her presence here this evening, actually.
* * *
The weather was marginally better in Cheshyr than in Swayle. But it was only marginally better, and coal cost more in Rydymak than in Swayleton. Or, rather, the citizens of Rydymak had far fewer marks in their pockets when it came time to pay for it.
Things had gotten a little better of late, though. No one had any more money, but Lady Cheshyr had managed to get some of the coal originally destined for the steamers in the Gulf of Dohlar diverted to Cheshyr Bay. She might not have much money, but she clearly still had friends in Cherayth, and she’d made that coal available to her people for barely a tenth of its market price. Unless they couldn’t afford even that much, of course … in which case, it was free.
There was a reason the people of her earldom loved Karyl Rydmakyr.
Sergeant Major Ahzbyrn Ohdwiar understood that. He’d known Lady Karyl—Lady K, she’d been to the entire regiment, then—for the better part of thirty years. Ohdwiar was a muscular, dauntingly fit forty-five-year-old, with black hair, very dark brown eyes, a scarred cheek, and a limp. He’d been born with the first two; the scar and the limp he’d acquired fighting under Styvyn Rydmakyr in King Sailys’ army. Twenty-six years he’d given the Army, until the training accident that finally retired him. He’d drifted then, until he washed up here, in Rydymak, where his old CO’s widow had taken him in, put a roof over his head, and found him a comfortable semiretirement as an “armsman,” even if he was to crippled up to be much good.
Of course, he reflected as he pushed himself through the two hundredth push-up, there was crippled and then there was crippled.
He went right on pumping, lowering himself smoothly—spine absolutely straight—until his nose just touched the floor, and then pushing himself equally smoothly back up again. Despite his limp, he really preferred jogging for cardio exercise—one of his cousins was a Pasqualate healer who’d helped design his own personal exercise program over a decade ago—but that was out of the question after his “training accident.” And so, like most of the other “crippled” armsmen who’d drifted into Rydymak, he did his exercising in private.
Fortunately, despite its draftiness, Rydymak Keep had indoor plumbing and Chisholmian winters guaranteed that its communal bathhouse was efficiently heated. Well, it had been designed to be efficiently heated, anyway, since that was the only way to keep it from freezing solid four months out of the year, and with the influx of good, Glacierheart coal it was heated once again.
He finished his exercises and came to his feet, stretching carefully as he cooled down and already contemplating the bathhouse’s welcome. This late at night, he’d have it all to himself, unless Clairync Ohsulyvyn or Dynnys Mykgylykudi—both of whom he’d known for the better part of twenty years—drifted in. Zhaksyn Ohraily, on the other hand, was a mere babe in arms, barely thirty-eight years old. Because of that, he got the late-night duty outside Lady K’s chamber door, while the creaky old bones of his elders got a good night’s sleep.
Ohdwiar chuckled and opened the door from his small sleeping chamber into the barely larger sitting room attached to it, reaching for the towel he’d hung across his single chair before beginning his nightly calisthenics. He’d just—
“Looking for this, Sergeant Major?”
Ohdwiar froze at the totally unexpected soprano question. Then he stepped through into the sitting room and reached out to accept the towel from his equally unexpected guest. He gave her a less-than-approving look, but she only smiled impishly, and her blue eyes—even darker than Dynnys Mykgylykudi’s—twinkled mischievously.
“I’d not like to sound like I was complaining or anything, Seijin Merch,” he said ever so slightly repressively, “but there’re reasons a man’s quarters have doors. Doors with locks, now that I think on it.”
“Well, of course they do, Ahzbyrn. I wouldn’t have anything to pick if they didn’t!”
Ohdwiar sighed. Estimating any seijin’s age was probably pointless, but he was reasonably certain Merch O Obaith was a very young example of the breed. He’d known too many young smart arses not to recognize one when he saw it.
For that matter, he’d seen it looking out of his own mirror at him for far too many years, now that he thought about it.
“I suppose that’s true,” he said rather than any of several rather pithier utterances which suggested themselves to him, and toweled his sweaty, graying—and thinning, damn it—hair dry. “And would it happen you’ve not dropped by just to practice picking my lock?”
“Aren’t you happy to see me, Ahzbyrn?” She managed to put an edge of wistful longing into her tone. For that matter, it looked as if she’d actually gotten her lower lip to quiver.
“As a mist wyvern in springtime, lassie,” he assured her.
“That’s better, then,” she said with such earnest relief that, despite himself, he chuckled.
It had been her companion, Seijin Cennady, who recruited Ohdwiar and the others for their present duty, but ever since they’d arrived here in Cheshyr Bay, Seijin Merch had been their primary contact with the seijin network which served Their Majesties. He had no doubt she was death incarnate on two feet. That was true of every seijin ever born, as far as he could tell. But she did remind him of his long dead wife. Not physically—Mahrglys had been a tall woman, towering at least five inches higher even than Seijin Merch, who was scarcely a midget, with golden hair and gray eyes. But under the skin … there the two of them were so much alike it hurt sometimes.
“Seriously, My Lady,” he said, using the honorific he knew irked her, and not simply because it irked her. She was a seijin, for Langhorne’s sake! “I’m guessing there’s more to it than a social call?”
“Yes, there is,” she acknowledged, hopping up to sit tailor-fashion on his rickety desk. He regarded the arrangement with trepidation, having discovered some time ago that Seijin Merch was just as solid and muscular as she looked. “I’m here mainly to visit with Lady Karyl, really. I have a couple of messages for her from Her Majesty, and another from Earl White Crag. While I was here, though, I thought I’d check in with you and the other gray lizards.”
Ohdwiar snorted. He wasn’t sure which of the seijins had dubbed him and his companions the “gray slash lizards,” but the truth was, he approved. It was the sort of backhanded compliment an old soldier appreciated.