«Well, Brora Lanthal's son,» said Pelthros finally, then paused again. «You are a-a-thorough man, indeed.» He was apparently trying to find some way of phrasing a compliment, when the countess as usual stepped in (although Blade noticed she kept her eyes averted from the heads).
«A good spectacle indeed, Your Majesty,» she said. «And perhaps some day soon we shall see all your enemies both here and abroad in a similar state. That would be an even better spectacle.»
One of these days, thought Blade, Larina was going to overreach herself in seeking for dramatic comments to make at key moments, offend the King, and see all her hopes go up in smoke. Meanwhile, however, she provided a certain amount of entertainment in a situation that promised little besides a long, grim struggle.
CHAPTER 17
With the King resolved to move against Indhios, it became possible to send orders instead of merely advice to all the people Blade had previously alerted. Pelthros, to his credit, did not resent Blade's having jumped the gun. In fact, when he heard what Blade had done, he delivered several fulsome sentences declaring Blade's wits to be as sound as his arm and appointed him a High Constable of Royth.
This made Blade the equivalent of a general and made it possible for him to go right on giving orders, which he did. Fortunately, most of the people to whom he gave them did not resent his sudden promotion. They respected him, even though they might have second thoughts about King Pelthros.
Putting three Brigades plus the Royal Guard on the alert meant twenty thousand regular soldiers available for whatever was needed. This, Pelthros decided, included cordoning off the whole city and conducting a house-by-house search for weapons. Inevitably, this meant confiscating an immense quantity of swords, cutlasses, daggers, pikes, and rusty armor from thousands of peaceable citizens. This in turn led to incidents, some of them fatal to one or both sides. And of course, riots then broke out, and by nightfall a good part of the soldiers were patrolling the streets, keeping High Royth calm, rather than marching out of the city toward the camp of the Ninth Brigade.
Blade was not entirely surprised that the King's zeal for action outstripped his judgment about what action should be taken, but he was entirely unhappy about it. As the sunset turned the range of hills beyond the city purple, and the smoke spiraling up from burning houses in the waterfront district obscured the seascape, Blade sat with Larina on a high balcony of the palace and toyed with his gold cup and silver tableware. An ample meal-roast chicken stuffed with chestnuts and raisins, venison pastries, fresh bread, fruit, and bottles of wine-covered a black marble table between them. Blade had not eaten anything substantial since the night before and should have been demolishing the meal at a great rate. But the uncertainty that still dominated the situation was knotting his stomach and making it impossible for him to eat and barely possible for him to sit still.
Finally, he could sit no longer; he drained his wine cup and stood up. «King Pelthros has done one wise thing so far in this crisis. He has made me a High Constable» His voice was bitter, so bitter that Larina neither smiled nor threw back a witty remark. «I am going to take advantage of that.» He began to stride back and forth, even less able to remain motionless now that he was planning, talking in a low voice.
«The key to the whole situation is still Indhios. The conspiracy will live until we take off its head by taking off his. And the most likely place for Indhios is the camp of the Ninth Brigade. That camp hasn't been taken. It hasn't been attacked. It hasn't been besieged or even properly patrolled! The local troops and the Guard are all too busy fighting some poor wretch of a shopkeeper over his grandfather's halberd! We don't even know that the Ninth Brigade isn't marching on High Royth at this very moment! If it is, there's nothing to stop it but a few cavalry patrols. And once it's through the gates and over the walls, the citizens that Pelthros' damned foolish orders have alienated will join it, and we'll finally have the popular uprising we couldn't have had otherwise!» He was so furious at Pelthros' obstinate folly that he let his voice rise almost to a shout.
With an effort he controlled himself. «A small force of picked men, disguised and heavily armed, might be able to make it into the camp and kill or capture Indhios. After that, I doubt if the Brigade's officers will move on their own. They'll probably try to make terms. If Pelthros has any sense, he'll at least cashier them all.»
Larina smiled knowingly. «And you will be leading this small force? I might have guessed it.»
Blade shrugged. «As I said, I'm a High Constable of Royth. I should be able to find arms and horses for fifty men without anybody asking stupid questions. Could you call two of your guards, Larina? I would like to send messages to Captain Tralthos and Brora.»
No matter how many orders a general gives, it still takes a certain amount of time to pick fifty good fighting men, equip them, and brief them for a complex and dangerous mission where any one of fifty things could go disastrously wrong. Although Blade did his best, he could not be in six places at once. It was nearly midnight before he led his force out of High Royth. They passed out through the West Gate, the same one he had passed through from the other direction as a chained prisoner only a few months before, and moved out on the Royal South Road at a canter.
When they were safely clear of the rich men's villas and scattered farms that clung to the fringes of the city, they turned sharply back to the west. Although the road narrowed almost to a trail, they kept on without slackening their speed. The raid was a desperate project at best; it would be simple suicide in daylight. By the road they were using, the camp was no more than three hours' ride west of High Royth, which should with luck give them two full hours of darkness for their work.
Blade's estimate was close enough. The chimes in the camp's shrine to Myonra, the war god, were chiming the third hour as they stopped their horses just in sight of the camp but beyond the ranges of its sentries. The turncoat soldiers were apparently concentrating entirely on defending their camp and not bothering to send out patrols, even foot ones, to cover the surrounding roads. This was a mistake, and Blade intended to take full advantage of it.
The light of the moon and the torches in the camp made it fully visible. It was a rectangle two hundred yards by three hundred, with rammed-earth walls eight feet high surmounted by a row of wooden palisades rising another five feet and sliced through all along their length by arrow slits. Inside, the tents were arrayed in smaller rectangles, each company with its own defined space, and in the center bulked the larger, permanent buildings. A whitewashed shrine, a red-painted hospital, the black squat arsenal and forge, with clangings and smoke floating up from inside it, the green-painted storehouses. In the very center was a small, square building whose gilded ornamentation blazed in the light reflected from numerous torches burning inside it and also those carried by the cordon of sentries around it. That cordon of sentries meant only one thing to Blade-someone or something important was inside that building. And there could be only one person that important in the camp-Indhios. He turned to Brora and grinned savagely.
«Ready.»
Brora nodded and pulled out a black hood and a length of rope. In a few moments Blade and Tralthos were hooded and bound with knots that would instantly slip apart the moment they exerted a little force. Then one of Brora's own men bound and hooded him, one of Tralthos' sergeants took the lead, and the whole cavalcade clattered down the hill, making as much noise as possible with hoofbeats and jangling equipment and whoops of joy.