* * *
"By the Dog," the mercenary officer said. "Has the King sent us a pretty boy for a party?"
"The King has sent me here to command," Esmond said. "Name and rank."
The mercenary turned crimson. "I'm Donnuld Grayn, and I command here now that Stenson's dead, by the Dog!"
Esmond rested his hands on his sword belt and looked the man up and down. By his accent he came from Cable, ancient enemy of the Solingians-not that that mattered much, these days-and by his looks, scars upon scars, he'd been in this profession most of his thirty-odd years. And from the look of his bloodshot eyes. .
"Are you usually drunk this early?" he said. "Or are you just naturally stupid?"
"Ahhhh," the man said eagerly, his hand falling towards his sword hilt. "I'll see your liver and lights for that, you mincing Solingian basta-"
The growl broke into a yelp as Esmond's thumb and forefinger closed on his nose and gave it a powerful, exactly calculated twist. As he'd expected, the mercenary forgot all about his steel and lashed out with a knobby fist.
Esmond's own hand slapped it aside, and his right sank its knuckles into his opponent's gut with the savage precision of the palaestra. As the man doubled over, the Solingian stepped to one side and slammed another blow with the edge of a palm behind his ear. The mercenary dropped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut and lay wheezing at the victor's feet.
The victor looked up; there were a crowd of Strikers looking on, together with some of the camp followers and children that crowded the barracks. Some were smiling, some glaring, most wavering between the two.
"You!" Esmond said. "Name and rank, soldier."
The man stiffened. "Eward, sir-file closer, second company."
"Eward, get Captain Grayn to his quarters-he needs to sleep it off. Trumpeter," he went on, "sound fall in."
That took far too long, and he had to detail some of his own men to push the noncombatants out of the way. When it was finished there were about four hundred men standing on the pounded clay of the parade ground; it was surrounded on three sides by barracks, and on the fourth by a wall. Esmond paced down the ranks of the sweating, bewildered men, pausing now and then.
Not bad, he thought. About half-and-half javelineers and slingers. They all had linen corselets with thin iron plates sewn between the layers of cloth, shortswords, and light open-face bowl helmets. Most of them looked to be in reasonable condition, and King Casull certainly wouldn't be wasting his silver on deadbeats. From what he'd heard, a lot of them would be men who'd left the Emerald cities for reasons of health, or on their relatives' urgent advice; but war and the Confederacy had left a lot of broken men in the southern lands.
"All right," he said at last, standing in front of them with his left hand resting on his hilt and the cloak thrown back from his shoulder. "My name is Esmond Gellert."
A slight murmur. He noted it without the pleasure it might have brought him a few months ago. He'd always been proud of the fame he'd won as a competitor in the Pan-Emerald Games-if not for undying fame, why would men go through the rigors of the palaestra? Now it was like his appearance, something he noted with cold objectivity, a tool to be used. And some of them will have heard about the war on the mainland, too.
"You know-or you should, if you're paying any attention to anything besides booze, dice and pussy-that there's war coming. Probably with the Confeds." Another low murmur. "I've fought them myself, not too long ago; so have these men with me." He indicated his own followers with a toss of his head. "They're tough, yes, but they're not ten feet tall, and they bleed as red as any man when you stick 'em. The King wants this unit ready to fight, and by the Gods, it will be-or we'll all die trying."
He nodded at the last murmur. No use saying anything more; they'd be waiting to see if he was real, or all mouth.
"For starters, we're going on a little route march. Fall out in campaign order in twenty minutes. Dismissed!"
* * *
"Faugh, this stinks," Enri Lowisson said.
"Think of it as the smell of money," Adrian said, chuckling with delight.
The cave was halfway up the side of Gunnung Daberville, the main volcanic peak that loomed over the port of Chalice. From the entrance you could see down past jungle and orchard to the city itself, the bastioned wall, the near-circle of the drowned caldera that made up the harbor, and over miles of sail-speckled water beyond. It was what lay within that interested him, however, down into the depths of the fumarole that twisted like a frozen intestine into the depths of the mountain.
Thirty feet overhead the ceiling of the cavern was not of the same pockmarked gray-green rock as the rest of the cave. It was brown instead, lumpy. . and it moved as the chitterwings nesting there for the day stirred uneasily at the light and heat of the party's torches. A soft pattering left gloppy white stains on the floor, adding to a layer that was probably four feet deep at least. That was the source of the rancid, ammonia-harsh stink that had several of the party breathing through pieces of their tunics.
"The stuff we need, the saltpeter, will be concentrated in the lower levels of this," he said, kicking at the hard dried surface of the chitterwing dung that covered the ground. "We'll dig it out, cart it down lower, then leach out the saltpeter in a system of trays and sluices."
"That will cost," Enri warned.
He looked backward, and Adrian nodded. The way down was near-as-no-matter roadless; if it had been easier, farmers would have come to dig the dung out for fertilizer, as they had with several caves lower down. The chitterwings went out in huge flocks at night, to feed at sea on tiny phosphorescent fish. At dawn they returned, to sleep, and to breed and nest in season-most of the females had tiny young clinging to their belly fur with miniature claws right now.
"It'll be worth it; there's more here than we'll need in a generation." He looked downslope as well, and suddenly a tracery of drawings was overlaid on it.
so, Center said. and so.
Adrian started and came back to himself, conscious of the curious stares Enri and his men were giving him.
"There's a way to make it easier," he said. "See how this ridge curves away down to the foothills?"
"Building a road?" Enri said. He shook his head. "I don't think that's practical."
"No, what we'll do is build a trackway," Adrian said. The words tumbled over themselves at the series of silent clicks just behind his eyes; suddenly Center's drawing made sense. In fact the principle. . Why haven't we thought of this before? he wondered. It would make so much easier.
The problem was he knew the answer to that. "Thought was not to be sullied with the base, contemptible concerns of men whose lives were warped away from virtue by cramping labor. ." Which, in effect, means anyone who isn't an absentee landlord; not something that would have come to him before Raj and Center took up residence in the rear of his mind, but it was his own thought.
"We'll lay down two rails of hard wood, spiked to cross-ties," he said. "Carts will run down it, on flanged wheels. When they're empty, they can be hauled up easily."
Enri winced. "Oh, that will cost. Sawyers, carpenters, the metal for spikes, all that cordage. ."
"No, it'll turn a profit," Adrian said. "What we extract will still leave the sludge good for fertilizer, and think of what that fetches in the gardens around the city."
Enri brightened. "And, of course, the King will pay. . eventually."
* * *
"Interesting!" the blacksmith said.
Well, thank the Gray-Eyed Lady for that! Adrian thought to himself. At least I'm not getting "but such a thing was never done in the days of our fathers" so often here.