Chapter Thirteen

Some of the chaotic crowd eyed Hansen, but that was normal interest rather than doubt about his presence here in Heimrtal.

Kings Lukanov, Wenceslas, and Young had come as envoys of the Mirala District to treat with Emperor Venkatna. None of the three knew every member of the other entourages, and there were hundreds of warriors from the imperial army besides.

No one thought that Hansen was out of place. The short wolfskin cape which he wore over gray velvet emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and compact strength. His thick wrists bore the calluses of long practice in a battlesuit, and he moved with the stiff-legged arrogance of a warrior.

A warrior, or a mammoth-killing sabertooth.

No, he wasn't out of place. Heimr Town was a scene of blood and destruction; precisely where Nils Hansen belonged . . . especially since Hansen was the root cause of the desolation himself.

An imperial servant blew notice on his twisted brass horn. Warriors in the crowd moved closer to the court Venkatna had set up in the marketplace on Water Street, where merchants bartered with the citizenry of Heimrtal in former days.

No more. Though the houses surrounding the marketplace had burned, the heavy timbers of the ground floors still remained. Imperial troops had nailed Heimrtal's warriors there, bodies dragged from the battlefield dead as well as men who had surrendered when the Heimrtal line collapsed.

Some of the latter were still alive. Night would take care of that, when the air dropped below freezing. The only warmth the victims had was that of the posts smoldering at their backs.

"Lord Nettley, step forward!" called a strong-lunged usher, one of the bureaucratic entourage which accompanied Venkatna even on campaign.

Not bureaucrats alone, however. The only warriors in armor in Heimr Town now were imperial troops, and there were enough of them to handle any trouble the Mirala delegation might want to start.

Venkatna wore red silk brocade and a puff-sleeved jacket rich with gold embroidery. Six champions in battlesuits stood beside and behind the emperor where they could protect him from sudden attack. More warriors were stationed along the rear of the marketplace and at the edge of the circle cleared in front of Venkatna.

The imperial troops had reverted to painting their battlesuits with personal colors. A generation before, the professionals of the West Kingdom buffed their armor to bare metal and went to battle in the white, with only the rank badges flashed on their helmets to differentiate the units of their disciplined mass. . . .

Marshal Maharg's helmet is marked with seven chevrons, alternating black and yellow. His gauntlets glow dull red with the weight of current flowing through them as he withstands the attack of two Solfygg champions.

The servos in the joints of Maharg's armor have been robbed of power to feed the defenses. He steps backward anyway, fighting the whole mass of his battlesuit. He is a true champion; worthy of his father, worthy of Nils Hansen, his father's greatest friend.

"Maharg, I'm—" Hansen shouts. Breath flays Hansen's lungs with knives of ozone. The skin of his right arm feels as though it has melted into the charred suede lining of his battlesuit. His legs stride forward in slow motion.

Maharg moves like a cat killing. He shunts full power into a thrust that blows one opponent's circuitry in a dazzling fireball. The remaining Solfygg warrior carves through Maharg's backplate.

"—coming!" shouts Hansen as he strikes, too late for anything but revenge.

A man jostled Hansen's left elbow.

When the horn sounded, the delegation from the Mirala District came out of the shock to which Heimr Town had reduced it. Warriors pushed to the front of the crowd. Hansen sat on an overturned wagon from which one could see over the armored bulk of the imperial guards. King Wenceslas and his entourage determined to take the wagon as a vantage point.

Hansen was still in a waking trance as he turned toward the warrior who pushed him. Whatever was on Hansen's face was enough to throw the other man back like a hammerblow. Wenceslas and his warriors settled around Hansen like snow drifting across a waiting lynx.

"Lord Nettley," Venkatna said. "You have proved yourself our faithful servant many times in the past."

The emperor's voice lacked the deep-chested fullness that his usher had shown a moment before, but it snapped with stone-hard authority. He sat on a stool. Though the piece was light and could be folded for travel, Hansen noticed that it had five short steps below the seat.

"Nettley? That little booger?" grumbled the warrior who'd bumped Hansen. "Bloody traitor, that's what he is."

"Left his rightful lord two summers back," agreed another of Wenceslas' attendant warriors. "Then led Venkatna back t' his home here to gut it, he did."

Nettley was a solid-looking man in his thirties. He moved well. If Hansen had been putting together an army, he would have hired Nettley without concern . . . so far as competence went. Nettley was very much the sort that a wise leader kept an eye on.

Venkatna was smart enough to know the risk of treachery. The ruins of Heimr Town proved the emperor was ruthless enough to obviate the risk as well.

"Kneel, Lord Nettley," Venkatna ordered. "In the name of the powers which the gods have vested in me as their vicar on Earth—"

The immediate crowd hushed so thoroughly that the cries of women in the background soughed through the marketplace. Over a hundred of them—freeborn, not slaves until disaster engulfed the Heimrtal levy the previous afternoon—were being marched off toward Frekka in chains.

"—and before the assembly of the people, I name you Duke of Heimrtal and Mayor of Heimr Town, with the rights of high and low justice without reference to custom or the authority of the elders—"

The crowd gasped. The man beside Hansen blurted to Wenceslas, "You don't have that authority, Vince, and you're a king!"

"I don't have a thousand warriors to call from Frekka when the freeholders get up in arms against me, either, Blood," King Wenceslas replied bluntly.

"—and the right to administer all land within the district as imperial land, beneath my authority," Venkatna concluded. "Rise, Duke Nettley."

Imperial troops cheered. Battlesuit speakers amplified the voices of armored warriors into terrifying threats. No one else in the crowd made a sound. When the shouts died away, the keening of the women could be heard again.

A warrior near Hansen mumbled a curse.

Hansen absorbed the scene as if none of it touched him emotionally. He was gathering data. The way his hands flexed as if toward a gun butt when the women cried meant nothing to the men around him.

"Isn't a bloody lot left t' be duke of," the warrior called Blood whispered.

Most of the district's freemen were unharmed; even some of the warriors would have fled to the woods and escaped instead of trying to face Venkatna's professionals. Nettley would have no difficulty finding willing tools to promote into the seats of the fallen lords, just as the emperor had found Nettley to replace the late King of Heimrtal. . . .

The new-made duke stepped out of the circle. His face was smug and gleaming with sweat.

"I have here," the emperor continued, waving a document from whose wax seal fluttered ribbons of blue and crimson, "a petition from the Mirala District, in the names of Lukanov, Wenceslas, and Young—"

"Bloody well about time!" said a warrior under his breath.

"—requesting, I should almost say demanding, a meeting with me," Venkatna said. "Regarding what they term 'the traditionally free relations of their district with the West Kingdom.' "

King Lukanov, an old man and so fat that he seemed to balance his weight on a briar-root walking stick, tried to enter the cleared circle. An imperial warrior stretched out his arm to block the aged monarch.

Lukanov squawked. Wenceslas cursed under his breath, but he'd had the judgment not to move before he was invited to do so.

Venkatna tossed the document behind him. An aide caught it in the air, but the meaning was clear.

"Their petition is denied," the emperor said flatly. "The gods have appointed me vicar of all the Earth."

He stood up and continued in a sharp, carrying voice, "My friends from Mirala can see around them how I deal with those who oppose the gods' will. They can talk to Duke Nettley to learn how I treat those who support me in North's great enterprise, the bringing of peace to all corners of the Earth. Next spring, my armies and I will meet them in Mirala, and we will see whether they have learned the lesson from others, or whether I will have to teach them myself."

Venkatna clapped his hands.

"This council is dismissed!" the usher cried. Horns blew a raucous discord.

Wenceslas turned and stalked off through the dispersing crowd, his face white with rage.

"That stuck-up sonuvabitch!" growled one of the warriors tagging along in the petty king's wake. "Who does he think he is!"

Hansen's face was as still as a cocked gunlock. That question was an easy one to answer. Where you might get an argument was over whether the sonuvabitch was right.

He wasn't right if Nils Hansen had anything to do with it.

Venkatna spoke briefly with his aides. A courier handed him a document tied with the crimson ribbon of the chamberlain's office, and a pair of body servants folded the portable throne. The emperor's bodyguards spaced themselves in a circle around him; more alert, not less, in the clamor of the thinning crowd.

Queen—it would be Empress now—Esme, flanked by a pair of armored warriors, walked past the overturned wagon on her way to her husband. Behind her followed a mixed group of male slaves and well-dressed young women. A hitch in Esme's step reminded Hansen of King Lukanov a few minutes earlier.

Venkatna broke off his discussion and strode over to his wife. "Darling!" he said as he gripped Esme's arms. He kissed her on the forehead, just beneath her wimple. "You shouldn't be walking around like this. You should have waited in the tent."

Esme indeed looked slight and cold, despite the bright sunshine and the cloak of white bearskin which she wore. She smiled toward her husband with genuine happiness and said, "No, no, dearest. It does me good to get out. And—"

She half-turned and gestured toward the women whom the slaves were herding into a line abreast, facing the emperor.

"—I wanted you to see the selection of girls I've made while it's still daylight," Esme continued. "Only the six on the left are virgins, but I thought the other four were too interesting not to include. Lamps and torches do so blur the finer points, don't you think?"

One of the women was sobbing. The others stood silent. Their faces reflected a range of expressions from interest to wide-eyed shock like that which Hansen had seen on a man he'd gut-shot.

"Well, they're all very nice, Esme," Venkatna said with a cursory glance toward the women. "Very nice, I do appreciate it. But actually, I think I'll start back immediately with the vanguard. You see—"

"You won't be riding all night, dearest," the empress said sharply. "You'll sleep somewhere, won't you?"

Venkatna flashed a perfunctory smile. "Yes, quite right, my darling."

He looked past Esme's shoulder again. "The two in the middle, shall we say? They'll do nicely."

He stepped back from his wife and waved the document from his chancellor. "What I wanted to tell you, though," he said, "is that Saxtorph says he's succeeded in finding slaves who can work the Web as it should be worked! He's waiting for my return before he gives them a serious test, though."

Esme turned her head. She looked at the envoys from Mirala, already striking their tents and loading impedimenta onto draft mammoths. "As you think right, dear," she said. "But those fellows over there mean you no good, and you know it."

Venkatna laughed in loud triumph. "I want them to get home, dearest. Fear defeats more enemies for me than I've had to face in open battle. And it saves me potential subjects, recruits for—"

He looked at the bodies nailed to ruined walls, stiffening and still moaning.

"—my armies."

"As you say, dear," Esme said. "But I don't think the Mirala District will come without a fight."

The empress glanced around the marketplace. Her eyes met those of Nils Hansen, sitting alone now on the wrecked wagon. He smiled at her.

A smart woman. Hansen didn't think Mirala would give up without a fight either.

If he could arrange it, that would be a fight the imperial forces lost. . . .