Council of Blades (28 page)

The primary cause of the headache was the sheer magni-tude of the task in front of them. The alliance of the minor Blade Kingdoms could muster quite a busy little army, but they were still greatly outnumbered by Svarezi's minions. The market had been scoured of mercenaries, and militia units were of doubtful utility.

Miliana refused to panic, and instead placed her faith in the fruits of Lorenzo's fertile mind.

As midwinter passed and astral-traveling scouts reported the concentration of Ugo Svarezi's regiments, Miliana convened a meeting in the Besotted Python's taproom. Eager as puppies, Miliana, Tekoriikii, Luccio and his watery princess sat at a table and watched as Lorenzo proudly unshipped a mighty roll of plans.

Dressed in a trim blue gown and her fine, impressive hat, Miliana steepled up her fingers and brightly await-ed Lorenzo's offerings.

"Well? So what have you invented?"

"Lots of things! We can dazzle the enemy with the products of our minds."

Luccio, Miliana, and the nixie princess all gathered around an excited Lorenzo. Tekoriikii sat in the wrought iron chandelier above, hanging his long neck down to stare this way and that as the young inventor proudly spread out the harvest of his genius.

There were drawings of earth borers, of reaping machines and rocket-assisted swords. There were smoke powder guns and spears and things with prongs. Lorenzo had even designed boots fitted with little wheels for rapid troop deployment: a hundred fantastic new inventions that would win him fame for a hundred thousand years. … And very little that would stop a horde of pikemen walking straight over Lomatra's walls. Overhead, Tekoriikii bobbed his plumes and fixed the diagrams with a puzzled yellow eye.

"Gronk nonk! Onkie-doodle gronk nonk!"

Lunch arrived; beans and sausages baked in a ceramic pot. Miliana heaved out a sigh and began to jam a spoon into their midday meal. Lorenzo looked avidly from face to face, wondering why he had not yet been overwhelmed with applause.

"But, don't you see? Can't you imagine what an army could achieve if it was equipped with all of these?"

The inventor rose up to his feet with an impassioned cry. "The wheel-boots, and the retractable stilts for fording streams alone should be enough to bring us victory!"

Miliana irritably ground her spoon into the beans.

"Lorenzo-we need a secret weapon-just one, or maybe two. We don't have an infinite number of hands."

Trying to help, Tekoriikii flexed his wings and wagged them hopefully.

"No, darling. We need something other than a flying machine-but thank you very much for offering…"

A delicate girl-face lifted up from its mobile fish tank and whispered shyly in Luccio's ear. The man listened, nodded in languid agreement, and then leaned back in his chair.

"Princess Krrrr-poka points out that if we can only pursue one major project, then it must cover as many of our weaknesses as possible." The slim young man made an elegant motion of his hand. "So, then, let us define what the strengths of our opponent are, and what our own weaknesses may be."

"Numbers!" Miliana excitably waved her hands. "We're outnumbered by about ten to one."

"Oh, numbers!" Lorenzo snapped his fingertips in Tekoriikii's astonished face. "Numbers are only people.

People we can handle. It's their magic that's a proble-"

"Ha!" Surging to her feet in triumph, Miliana pointed a finger right between Lorenzo's eyes. "So you admit it! Magic is superior to technology!"

"No it isn't! It just happens to be a problem here and now."

"So technology is weaker, so I'm the best!" Miliana crashed her hands together, everything else forgotten in a sudden rush of glee. "You said it… we all heard you!"

Miliana and Lorenzo flung themselves into an animat-ed argument. The firebird took the opportunity to claim Lorenzo's chair and help himself to his dinner bowl of sausages and beans.

Ignoring the activities of his friends, Luccio steepled his hands in thought.

"So what we need is something immune to an overabun-dance of enemy pike, cavalry, and crossbows.

Something that uses minimum manpower to tie up a maximum num-ber of enemy. Something proof against the normal types of battle spell." The courtier delicately plucked a sausage from the terra-cotta dinner bowl and lowered it into the nixie's mouth. "What can we create that will allow us to overcome a mercenary army ten times as large?" Luccio dabbled his fingers in his girlfriend's water tank. "Miliana? A list of common battle spells, if you please."

Abandoning her fruitless argument with Lorenzo, Miliana briskly ticked spell titles off against her fingertips.

"Well, there's magic missiles and minor projectile spells, heat metal, warp wood…"

"Hmmmmm… very good for fouling up arrows, wagon wheels and spears."

"Yes. Then there's your lightning bolt and fireball; poi-son fogs like stinking clouds and cloudkill… illusion spells, I guess…" Miliana crinkled her freckled nose in a scowl. "Anything bigger than that, and it's time to run like squealing weasels!"

Lorenzo, oblivious to the whole conversation, wonder-ingly lifted the lid from a pot of beans.

"Where do they make these things, anyway?"

"They bake them down on High Street." Luccio answered with a dismissive wave.

Miliana slapped at Lorenzo's hands as the inventor hit the pot a blow with the butt end of his rapier.

"Stop that!" she scolded, "You'll get beans on Tekoriikii!"

"But the pot's tough… it doesn't break!"

"It's not clay, its made from ground-up shells. If it was clay, the heat would crack it." Luccio took the bowl away. "Leave it alone and tell us what you want to do."

"Do? Do!" Lorenzo suddenly whipped papers aside and drew sketches directly onto the tabletop. "I know what to do!" Moving faster than a genie, the inventor had already settled on his plans. "Brilliant!

Luccio tell your girlfriend I'll need a hundred bags of sponges, and as many sting-ing jellyfish as her people can find."

"Right!" Luccio stuffed his head underwater and began to talk in a mumbling stream of bubbles. Lorenzo wrenched the man back out into the open air and contin-ued with his interrupted orders.

"After that, I want you to collect cart horses, shells, and all the spyglasses you can find. Miliana, I need the entire potters' guild and the wheelwrights' guild here within the hour."

"Right!" Luccio leapt to his feet, streaming water from his hair. "Anything else?"

"Some more beans?" Lorenzo held up his plate in dis-may. "Tekoriikii's eaten all of mine."

Ugo Svarezi stood overlooking the nighttime campfires of a mighty army. The whole bowl-shaped Valley of Umbricci had been turned into one massive military camp. The cooking fires curved high up the mountainsides where they twinkled in the dark like countless stars.

The stars twinkled because men moved between the onlookers and the flames; the army was on the move, leaving its fires burning as a decoy for any airborne eyes. Svarezi watched as his vanguard spurred off down the road, dark-skinned horse archers hired en masse from the hot lands far to the west. Behind them came artillery and wagonloads of hireling sorcerers; the heavy weapons were kept up at the blade edge of the march, ensuring quick deployment on the battlefield.

Svarezi was well pleased with his efforts through the months of wind and rain. He had snatched up minor kingdoms during winter lulls, picking them up like plums before his enemies realized he had struck. By stripping his conquests to the bone for ready cash, he had acquired a mercenary army virtually overnight.

Labor conscription had stripped the mines of metal; the enormous civilian casualties would breed back their numbers with time. For the moment, all that mattered was the short-term goal.

Now, with the harvest season about to begin, his ene-mies should be dispersed into their fields. Their armies would take many vital days to gather in from their winter quarters; Svarezi's troops would overrun the city-state of Lomatra in a matter of hours.

And with Lomatra gone, the scattering of still-inde-pendent towns would sue for peace. In less than a year, Svarezi would have accomplished what no other man had ever done; he would have welded the Blade Kingdoms into a single entity beneath a single crown.

The Akanal would lie before him like a kid for the slaughter. Decadent old kingdoms to the east-more squabbling city-states and pitiful Chondath lined the Vilhon Reach to the west-barbarian lands stretched on to the south. Within a few years, he could carve a bloody empire across the face of Faerun.

An empire ruled by one lethal, tireless king.

Tethered behind Svarezi, the black hippogriff Shaatra stirred. The creature winced as Svarezi curbed her with a glance before turning back to his waiting officers.

"What of the errant Sumbrian companies?"

"Orlando Toporello and his followers?" A lean Sumbrian officer-one of the new breed arisen over the ashes of the old-laughed aloud in scorn. "Our agents found him; he refused your gold and silver. He says that money defiles a 'true soldier's' hands."

"Then he will make a very poor mercenary." Svarezi slowly settled his black burgonet helmet on his head. Toporello's reticence was almost annoying; two thousand fully armored cavalry would bring a solid backbone to his army's rabble of riffraff from the west. "Forget him. He will need gold to feed his horses soon enough."

Chessentian free-lancers of Helyos's Renegades rode past along the road below, four thousand strong in articu-lated metal shells. They would be chaff before Blade Kingdom lancers in an all-out charge, but their sheer num-bers would serve to simply overawe most mortal enemies. They had a cruel streak Svarezi had come to admire. The prince of the Blade Kingdoms watched his vanguard thun-der down the valley road, then clutched a fistful of feathers from Shaatra's mane and swung up into his own saddle.

"Move the main body out immediately-pikes to the fore and crossbows at the rear." Shaatra shivered, arched and flapped her wings as Svarezi raked her sleek black flanks with his spurs. "Burn the Lomatran villages at will. Kill at need; they will offer peace soon enough. We'll have no need for Lomatra-or its fields-as a base for our swords."

Kicking at his hippogriff, Svarezi clawed aloft. The black shape swept low across an army teeming through the dark like countless ants. He framed himself against the dark, then faded out into the night on silent wings.

Their orders were to make a swift, unseen reconnais-sance, to check the dispositions of the Lomatran alliance, and to confirm that their troops were still not mustered.

The scout troop's commander had other, more ambi-tious plans. Who could forget the air commander Otorelli Lambruccini, who had alighted on the gates of Zutria so long ago? In a single swoop he had flung open the city gates and won a bloodless victory! There was not an air cavalryman alive who didn't cherish Lambruccini's tri-umph in his dreams.

A silent approach, a quick sweep up onto Lomatra's walls, and who knew what the results might be?

Looking back at the perfect arrowhead formation of nine hip-pogriffs to his rear, the commander felt cold shivers of anticipation ripple up his spine.

"Tekorii-kii-kii! Tekorii-kii-kii!"

A hippogriff screamed in fear; two more took frantic evasive action and collided in midair, spilling their riders free. The scout commander halted at his reins in fright, then felt his mount buck in pain as the hairs were plucked clean out of its tail.

A thunderbolt of orange raffia-work rattled gaily past, tossing plundered hairs into the breeze. Rustling its feathers in delirious abandon, the giant orange bird turned a lazy roll and pulled the helmet plumes clean off a rider's head.

Hippogriffs broke left and right; another pair climbed clumsily up toward the sun. Shocked almost to death, the scout commander ripped his composite bow out of its sheath and clumsily fumbled an arrow into place.

"Numbers one and six-fork left and right!" The young commander stood up in his stirrups, staring wildly at the bird. "Kill it quickly! It's some sort of predator!"

He took aim at the orange bird, led the target and made allowance for the wind, then felt his eyes cross as the fantastic bird opened up its beak and sang.

Tekoriikii was having an utterly glorious day. He had risen up to greet the sun, dancing high above the clouds while Miliana and his good friends marveled at him from below. The air was crisp, the skies were clear, and now a horde of bumbling enemies had come to offer him their tails. Singing for the pure joy of it all, the bird turned giddy circles as he whirred his way back home.

The effect of Tekoriikii's song on the air cavalry was nothing short of pure disaster. The leader's composite bow opened like a chrysanthemum flower as the music turned mere glue to water. Horn, sinew, wood, and bone all curled out into individual loops and springs, leaving the human staring at his weapon in dumbfounded dismay.

"It's a secret weapon! Fly for reinforcements!"

One glimpse at the flat fields all about Lomatra was enough. The green land was dotted with formations of troops-with wagons and haystacks in a strange, regular display. Turning sharply to the north, the hippogriff scouts fled back toward their army as a signal arrow puffed smoke from Lomatra's walls.