Chapter Twenty-four

The red-bearded warrior to Hansen's right in the broad, sunlit bowl of Mirala's Assembly Valley turned and stared.

"Got a problem, friend?" Hansen asked in a voice as emotionless as stone. He was uneasily aware that the fellow was a member of King Wenceslas' household, with a dozen battle comrades within spitting distance . . . while Hansen was alone.

As usual, and more or less as he chose, he guessed.

"Naw, no problem," said the other warrior. He was a little taller than Hansen and a little bulkier, though he carried no more flesh than was necessary to clothe his heavy bones. "Only I saw you before. At Heimr Town."

"I was there," Hansen agreed. The guy who'd shouldered him on the cart, then backed off.

Redbeard wasn't looking for a fight, but he too knew that he had a lot of friends around him. He was going to get answers. The best way for Hansen to respond was openly, as a friendly stranger who didn't notice the threat implied by the situation itself.

A petty chieftain on the Speaker's Rock droned about the traditional freedoms of Mirala. There were over a thousand men in the valley. The whole male population of the district, slave and free, was summoned to a war assembly. Only a few hundred of the crowd were warriors, though, on whose skill and arc weapons the speaker's 'traditional freedoms' would depend when Venkatna came.

There would be more slaves than warriors present if the Mirala District marched to meet the Empire. Feeding and dressing the warriors; setting up shelters and polishing battlesuits.

Not infrequently rushing into the battleline if their master fell, trying to succor him in a whirl of carnage where the accidental touch of an arc weapon would be instantly fatal to a rag-clad slave. Hansen could never figure out why they did it, why anybody followed anybody.

Least of all why anybody followed Commissioner Nils Hansen; though they did, and though they'd died in windrows following him. . . .

"Right, I thought so," Redbeard said. His tone lost a trifle of the cautious veneer. "Only I thought you was with King Young . . . and he decided he'd rather be a baron for Venkatna than a king on his own, didn't he?"

Hansen smiled. Denying a former place in Young's entourage would lead to other questions—and there wasn't any need for it. Redbeard had just given Hansen a background that he didn't even have to lie to claim.

"If Young didn't want t' fight those bastards in Frekka, then I figure there's people who do," Hansen said. "I joined Lord Salles and then he went over. So I came here."

"You came the right place," Redbeard said after a brief pause. "I guess they'll get done jawin' sometime soon."

He thrust on his right hand. "I'm King Wenceslas' sideman," he said. "My name's Weatherhill, but ever'body calls me Blood."

Hansen clasped Blood's proffered forearm. He remembered doing the same thing with Lord Salles in the timeless present.

A different speaker was prating now, a king of fifty hectares named Kawalec. He looked the same as the previous man; his words were the same mush of nonsense and braggadocio; and if there was a distinction at all, it was that Kawalec's voice had a nasal twang which made it even more unpleasant than was guaranteed by the pointlessness of his words.

In the north of the continent was a watercourse called the Assembly River. It meandered through sands and stagnant marshes without ever getting anywhere.

"My name's Hansen," Hansen said. At Blood's raised eyebrow, he added, "The name's been in my family a long time. It doesn't mean my parents thought I was a god."

If they thought anything at all. Nils Hansen had been raised in a State Creche, but no one in the Open Lands would understand that.

Hansen didn't really understand it himself. If you were going to create a child, you didn't throw it away like a lump of wet clay for the State to mold . . . did you?

Blood pursed his lips. "How good's your armor?" he asked.

"The best," Hansen said; knowing that Blood would discount the flat truth of the statement by one or even two levels. "It's a royal-quality piece."

Blood smiled slightly. Every guy lies about how good his battlesuit is, and how good he is in bed. "Right," he said. "But if you left King Young and then got out of Peace Rock in a hurry besides, I don't guess you've got much of a personal train, do you?"

"Too true," Hansen agreed. "I'm here with two ponies, my armor, and my traps. Not so much as a slave t' boil my breakfast."

Blood pursed his lips again. "No fooling?" he said, mentally knocking the quality of Hansen's battlesuit down another couple stages. "Well, when all this bumf is over, I'll take you over and interduce you t' the king. He's not a bad guy t' fight for . . . though ye mustn't worry much about what he says after a couple cups in the evening, he don't mean nothing by it."

Hansen smiled slightly at the assumption that everybody had to have a formal place in the structure. There couldn't be individual do-gooders who just wanted to help remove a tyrant. People had to be fitted into place, for their own good and for society's.

Aloud he said, "I wouldn't mind that."

Blood, having just recruited another warrior for his master's entourage, looked around him in satisfaction. The places immediately beneath the Speaker's Rock were held by warriors. The score or so of nobles attending the assembly sat on stools on the rock itself.

"I'd take you t' see Vince right now," Blood said, "only he's waiting t' speak himself. All this talk is bullshit, but it's like putting on your best clothes on assembly day, y' see. Somethin' you gotta do."

He grinned at the ranks of warriors. "We're going t' stuff this empire bullshit right up Venkatna's ass. We'll roll right over them Frekka nancy-boys."

"I'd like to think that," Hansen said soberly. He'd seen armies of individuals like this meet trained soldiers before. . . .

Hansen faces a Syndic in gold armor and a pair of his bodyguards. Three meters separate the lines. Men to either side of Hansen shout and wave their arcs, but they do not close and the Syndics wait also, trusting in their greater numbers.

To Hansen's right flank, the shouts have given way to screams and the rip of battlesuits failing under the onslaught of multiple arcs. The shock troops which Hansen trained are rolling down the enemy line like a scythe through wheat.

The Syndic turns to run. Hansen lunges. A bodyguard in pale green stripes blocks his path. Hansen's arc shears through the bodyguard's chest. Blood and metal bubble away from the cut. . . .

"Hey?" said Blood, his voice a mix between anger and surprised fear. "What . . . ?"

Hansen forced a smile. Memory had frozen his visage. He felt as though the skin over his cheekbones should crack like icebergs calving from the face of a glacier.

"Sorry," he said. "Just thinking."

"I guess you were . . . ," Blood said in something more than agreement. "Look, you don't like our chances? Look at these guys. And there'll be more when we march, not less. They're comin' from all over, just like you. Ever'body who hates the West Kingdom."

Another speaker rose on the flat prow of rock overlooking Assembly Valley. He was thin and abnormally tall, wearing a cloak of gray fox skins as lustrous as the seas of the far north.

"There's good men here," Hansen said, "and a lot of them. But they'll fight as so many men, and Venkatna's troops will fight like one man. And that'll be all she wrote. . . ."

There was a commotion on the Speaker's Rock. Kawalec, the kinglet who had just spoken, was refusing to give way. "I'll not be followed by a merchant!" he shouted nasally. "And a foreigner besides!"

Two of the other nobles assisted King Lukanov to his feet. Lukanov led the district because of his age. No member of Mirala's nobility had a real edge an the others by wealth or number of retainers. Nobody was sure how far seniority alone would go in a highly-charged situation like the present, but there wasn't a better alternative to the fat, wheezing old king.

"I come from far away, that is true," the tall outlander said. His voice rang from the distant rim of the bowl. "But I am a prince among princes in my home, and if I buy and sell there—"

The Mirala kinglet scrunched away from the full shock of the foreigner's glare.

"—then some of the things I bought are the fifty warriors I've brought with me here. Can you say the same, Master—" the civilian honorific a deliberate insult "—Kawalec?"

A claque of warriors shouted bloodthirsty approval from the base of the Speaker's Rock. Kawalec must have had retainers present in the crowd, but none of them were foolish enough to call attention to themselves.

Lukanov waddled to the front of the rock. "I arranged, the order, of the speakers," he said. His shortness of breath broke the statement into three portions, but they were clearly audible.

He waved his heavy walking stick in the direction of the local kinglet, while the stranger stood coldly aloof. "Kawalec, milord," Lukanov said. "You've had your say and we've listened. Now be seated while others speak."

Kawalec nodded curtly to Lukanov and quickly took his stool again. He pointedly ignored the foreigner, but the incident had shaken a sense of self-worth Hansen would have judged to be impregnable. The mercenary claque had called for Kawalec's skull as a drinking cup, but the glance of the bearded stranger had an even greater impact.

"Lords of Mirala," the tall man said. "Lovers of freedom. I didn't journey from far Simplain to tell you of your rights, or of the wrongs that this upstart Venkatna has done others and plans to do to us. We all know that—that's why we're here."

He looked behind him at the seated nobles, then swept the crowd in the valley dished out of the mountainside by an ancient glacier. "I will tell you instead what we must do to safeguard our rights and end Venkatna's wrongs. If we wait here for the emperor to come in the spring, then we will win the battle or he will win—"

King Wenceslas leaped up from his stool. "We will win!" he shouted. "We will win!"

"And we will win nothing," the stranger continued. His voice carried over the shouts of a hundred warriors mouthing responses of rote pride and rote patriotism.

The shocked crowd quieted. "Because he will come again," the tall man resumed. "And again, milords and princes; and again, until finally he gains the day and we are all as dead as the defenders of Heimrtal. That is what will happen if we let Venkatna fight his war."

The Assembly Valley buzzed like bees swarming. The emotions were mixed, but no one cried a denial of what they all, warrior or civilian, knew in their hearts to be true.

"What we must do," the stranger continued, "is carry the war to Venkatna. Defeat his army beneath the walls of Frekka. Raze his palace, kill him before he can call upon the resources of his subject states to raise an army twice the size the next time. Venkatna has no son. If we break him and his army now, we break the West Kingdom back into a score of small states like our own."

"What's Simplain know about what we got to do?" Blood shouted unexpectedly from beside Hansen.

The tall man turned and looked down at Blood.

"What do I know?" he asked in a voice that crackled like a crown fire. "Then ask a warrior who has fought against Venkatna already, as none of you in Mirala have done."

He pointed into the crowd like a sniper aiming. "What do you think we should do, Lord Hansen?" he boomed.

Hansen met the cold gray eye of the figure on the rock above him.

"We should strike straight for Frekka," Hansen said. His voice seemed to fill the bowl of the valley. "Just as you suggest, Lord Guest."