“Two weeks, then?” asked Parnigar, scarcely able to contain his excitement.
“Indeed, my friend—after all this time.” Kith-Kanan understood what these elves had been through. His own ordeals had been far from cheery. Yet how difficult it must have been for these dynamic warriors to spend the winter and the spring and the first few weeks of summer cooped up within the fortress.
“Fresh regiments are on the march to Sithelbec. The Windriders will leave in a few days, making their way westward. The dwarves of Thorbardin, too, are preparing to move into position.”
“But you wish your own presence to remain secret?” asked Kencathedrus.
“Until we’re ready to attack. I don’t want the enemy to suspect any changes in our defenses. When the attack develops, I want it to be the biggest surprise they’ve ever had.”
“Hopefully the last surprise,” growled Parnigar.
“I’ll stay here for a week, then fly west at night to arrange the rendezvous with the forces arriving from Silvanost. When I return, we’ll attack. Until then, conduct your defenses as you have in the past. Just don’t allow them to gain a breach.”
“These old walls have held well,” Parnigar noted. “The humans have tried to assault them several times and always we drove them back over the heaped bodies of their dead.”
“The spring storms, in fact, did us more harm than all the human attacks,” Kencathedrus added.
“I flew through some of them,” Kith-Kanan said. “And I heard Dunbarth speak of them.”
“Hail crushed two of the barns. We lost a lot of our livestock.” Kencathedrus recounted the damage. “And a pair of tornadoes swept past, doing some damage to the outer wall.”
Parnigar chuckled grimly. “Some damage to the wooden wall—and a lot of damage to the human tents!”
“True. The destruction outside the walls was even worse than within. I have never seen weather so violent.”
“It happens every year, more or less,” Parnigar, the more experienced plainsman, explained. “Though this spring was a little fiercer than most. Old elves tell of a storm three hundred years ago when a hundred cyclones came roaring in from the west and tore up every farm within a thousand miles.” Kith-Kanan shook his head, trying to imagine such a thing. It even dwarfed war! He turned his attention to other matters. “How about the size of the human army? Have they been able to replace their losses? Has it grown or diminished?”
“As near as we can tell—” Parnigar started to answer, but Kith-Kanan’s former teacher cut him off.
“There’s one addition they’ve had, it shames me to admit!” Kencathedrus barked. Parnigar nodded sorrowfully as the captain of the Silvanesti continued.
“Elves! From the woods! It seems they’re content to serve an army of human invaders, caring naught that they wage war against their own kingdom!” The elf, born and bred amid the towers of Silvanost, couldn’t understand such base treachery.
“I have heard this, to my surprise. Why are they party to this?” Kith-Kanan asked Parnigar.
The Wildrunner shrugged. “Some of them resent the taxes levied upon them by a far-off capital, with the debtors taken for servitude in the Clan Oakleaf mines. Others feel that trade with the humans is a good thing and opens opportunities for their children that they didn’t have before. There are thousands of elves who feel little if any loyalty to the throne.”
“Nevertheless, it is gravely disturbing,” Kith-Kanan sighed. The problem vexed him, but he saw no solution at the present.
“You’ll need some rest,” noted Kencathedrus. “In the meantime, we’ll tend to the details.”
“Of course!” Parnigar echoed.
“I knew that I could count on you!” Kith-Kanan declared, feeling overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude. “May the future bring us the victory and the freedom that we have worked so hard for!”
He took the officers up on their offer of a private bunk and enjoyed the feel of a mattress beneath his body for the first time in several weeks. There was little more he could do at the moment, and he fell into a luxurious slumber that lasted for more than twelve hours.
22
The mouth of the coal mine gaped like the maw of some insatiable beast, hungry for the bodies of the soot-blackened miners who trudged wearily between the shoring timbers to disappear into the darkness within. They marched in a long file, more than a hundred of them, guarded by a dozen whip-wielding overseers.
Sithas and Lord Quimant stood atop the steep slope that led down into the quarry. The noise from below pounded their ears. Immediately below them, a slave-powered conveyor belt carried chunks of crushed ore from a pit, where other slaves smashed the rock with picks and hammers, to the bellowing ovens of the smelting plant. There more laborers shoveled coal from huge black piles into the roaring heat of the furnaces. Beyond the smelting sheds rose the smoke-spewing stacks of the weapon smiths, where raw, hot steel was pounded into razor-edged armaments.
Some of the prisoners wore chain shackles at their ankles. “Those are the ones who have tried to escape,” Lord Quimant explained. Most simply marched along, not needing any physical restraint, for they had been broken as slaves in a deeper, more permanent sense. Each of these trudged, eyes cast downward, almost tripping over the one ahead of him in the line.
“Most of them become quite docile,” the lord continued, “after a year or two of labor. The guards encourage this. A slave who cooperates and works hard is generally left alone, while those who show rebelliousness or a reluctance to work are ... disciplined.”
One of the overseers cracked his whip against the back of a slave about to enter the mines. This fellow had lagged behind, opening a gap between himself and the worker in front of him. At the flick of the lash, he cried out in pain and stumbled forward. Even from his height, Sithas saw the red welt spread across the slave’s back.
In his haste, the slave stumbled, then crawled pathetically to his feet under another flurry of lashes from the guard.
“Watch now. The rest of them will step quite lively.” Indeed, the other slaves did hasten into the black abyss, but Sithas didn’t think such cruelty was warranted.
“Is he a human or an elf?” wondered the Speaker.
“Who-oh, the tardy one?” Quimant shrugged. “They get so covered with dust that I can’t really tell. Not that it makes much difference. We treat everybody the same here.”
“Is that wise?” Sithas was more disturbed than he thought he would be about the brutality he saw here.
Lord Quimant had attempted to dissuade Sithas from visiting the Clan Oakleaf estates and mines, yet the Speaker had been determined to take the three-day coach ride to Quimant’s family’s holdings. Now he began to wonder if perhaps Lord Quimant had been right to want to spare him the sight. He had too many disturbing reservations about the Oakleaf mines. Yet at the same time, he had to admit he needed the steel that came from these mines and the blades that were cast by the nearby smithies.
“Actually, it’s the humans who give us the most trouble. After all, the elves are here for ten or twenty years, whatever the sentence happens to be for their crime. They know they must suffer that time, and then they’ll be free.” Indeed, the Speaker of the Stars had sentenced a number of citizens of Silvanost to such labor—for failure to pay taxes, violence or theft against a fellow elf, smuggling, and other serious transgressions. The whole issue had seemed a good deal simpler in the city, when he could simply dismiss the offending elf and rarely, if ever, think of him again.
“So this is their miserable fate,” he said quietly. Quimant continued. “The humans, you know, are here for life—of course, a foreshortened life, in any event. And you know how reckless they are anyway. Yes, indeed, humans are the ones who give us the most problems. The elves, if anything, help to keep them in line. We encourage their little acts of spying on one another.”