“Stay there,” the wizard said. “You won’t want to see this.”
Dewan stiffened and looked up at the old man, while pity fought with contempt for room on his face. “You are like a king,” he said softly. Which king was not specified. “You can command death by war, by assassination, by execution—but you’d as soon not watch it happen.” Aldric had told him once about a killing before Dunrath; about how Gemmel, master of theoretical swordplay, had been shocked and horrified to see his theories put to practical use. This was the same. Dewan straightened up and shrugged the wizard’s hand away, then turned around. “Maybe if you watched, if they
all
watched once in a while, you and they would be less free with such commands in the future.” The ponies were still immobile, still frozen by whatever spell had been laid on them—as incapable of escape as prisoners trussed for the block. Or soldiers drawn up in line of battle. You’ve lived among the Albans for too long, he told himself, to be so concerned about the fate of a pair of nags. But still he gripped Gemmel’s shoulder as the wizard had gripped his. “You gave the command, old man. It’s only right that you should look at the consequence. So look. I said,
look!”
He swung Gemmel around by main force just as Ymareth’s huge head descended on its prey. At least the attack was merciful, for neither pony could have known what happened with each head chopped off at the neck like someone swatting the blossoms off dandelions. One instant they were alive and whole, and the next… not. Even the blood which gouted onto the snow was no worse than the mess which followed a successful hunt, nor the wet ripping noise of rending tissue any more dreadful than the sound of dogs at their meat. No, not dogs—cats. Ymareth ate with all the dainty fastidiousness of a feline—or a certain young Alban of Dewan’s acquaintance.
There was a few minutes’ digestive silence as Ymareth swallowed down the last fragments and considered their flavor. Then a lance of yellow-white fire billowed from its mouth, scouring away the last residue of blood and flesh from the dragon’s teeth. Dewan understood now why it did not have the foetid breath of a carnivore; any stink was seared away by that cleansing gush of flame— which was just as well.
“Now,” said Ymareth, and even though the words were unheard, forming as they did within the Vreijek’s head, Dewan could detect a well-fed satisfaction in the dragon’s tone. “Now, gather that which thee might need, and mount to my neck.”
As he bent again to lift the pack of gear and armor to its accustomed place across his shoulders, Dewan hesitated and braced his weight against his knees until the pounding heartbeat in his ears had once more died to a murmuring of blood. A cold sweat had broken out across his forehead, and there was a hot throb of pain running down the very core of his left arm. For just a moment the world gyrated around him, mocking his self-imposed stability with its movement, and then grew still again. Dewan ground his teeth until his jaws ached and drew himself upright again with such a shudder as the Albans said was caused by someone walking across a grave. He no longer found that superstition funny. Not now. Dewan ar Korentin had begun to realize what it might be like to die.
For the tenth—or was it the hundredth?—time, Aldric swivelled half-around in Lyard’s saddle to glance back at the men who kept him company. This glance, like all those others, made him feel no easier. It was certainly not the kind of company an Alban gentleman would prefer to keep—rather the sort of company that he personally would have made considerable efforts to avoid— had he the choice, which he hadn’t. It was not Bruda, not even glowering Voord with his killer Tagen at his elbow, but the half-score of heavy cavalry who made up the honor guard for this group of staff officers and adjutants—the gold insignia were staff, the silver not— and thus gave credence to their supposed rank. Their armor was the foil lizardmail of
katafrakten
, and that in itself was what Aldric found unsettling, ridiculous though the feeling was. But he had ugly memories concerning
katafrakt
armor and about the demon-sending Esel who had filled such armor when he—it?—had been sent by Duergar Vathach to kill him. Those memories were only six months old—nothing like old enough for him to live easily with them. Not yet.
It was not merely the escort which disturbed him, for all that. Even granted that, apart from Bruda, he wore the most senior insignia of the little commissioned-officer squad, at the back of his mind Aldric knew that the bars and triangles and diamonds were only badges, only insignia which he had no right to wear. If put to the uttermost test they would be no protection. No protection at all. Even wearing the things made him feel uncomfortable.
At least the armor which in part bore those rank-tabs was comfortable enough. Senior officers, Bruda had taken pains to inform him, did not wear issue harness like an enlisted trooper. Their armor was tailored for them with the same care as a fine suit of clothing— indeed, with more care: unlike cloth, metal and leather was unforgiving of careless measurement. It didn’t stretch… For all that what he wore now had been assembled from available parts rather than forged especially for his limbs and body, it was—he conceded reluctantly—as good a fit as his own beloved black
an-moyya-tsalaer
. Right now, in very truth it was a better fit altogether, for what with one thing and another he had lost maybe twenty pounds in weight and it showed. Alban full harness had a tendency to hang loose when it didn’t fit its wearer properly, and Aldric’s harness would have hung very loose indeed just at the moment.
This was red-enamelled, rather than lacquered black; it was made of small plates and splints, but linked by strips of mail rather than the lacing of lamellar; and yet for all the differences, it was not so dissimilar after all. Except for the helmet. The Drusalan officer’s high-crowned
seisac
had a peak, a neck-guard and cheek-pieces like the war-mask of its Alban counterpart; but everything fitted so much more closely that it was claustrophobic just to think about it. And it had a nasal. That nasal bar had made Aldric squint for nearly three days now, so that he was playing host to the mother and father of all splitting headaches—although he was generous enough to admit that if he came out of this particular venture with his head split by nothing more permanent in its effect, he would be more than happy.
The roads were busier than Aldric had expected they might be; either the Empire was in less internal trouble than he had been led to believe, or its citizens were making a laudable and convincing attempt at normal life. Only one thing disturbed him a little, and that was the reaction of ordinary folk to the military presence of which he was perforce a part. He had seen something similar before, in Alba, when he had ridden as an
eijo
. But there, though timid, people had responded with no more than cautious, courteous, mannerly respect. Here it was just fear.
Not knowing the meaning of all the insignia splattered in gold metal and colored enamel on his helmet, over-robe and armor, he was half inclined to ask somebody on that first day of the ride to Egisburg. Then the inclination died. He was
hanalth
, and that rank was made plain by two horizontal bars beneath an inverted triangle surmounting a diamond made of two more triangles joined base to base. All in gold. And that was all he needed to know. All he really wanted to know. For the rest, whether they meant he was pretending to such rank in an elite, heroic regiment of cavalry; or in the political police whose action squads might execute a man for treason when his only crime was to empty rubbish wearing a ring bearing the Emperor’s—or more likely the Warlord’s—likeness still on his finger, thus insulting them by implication, Aldric had decided that ignorance in such matters was best.
But there was one matter in which he remained most interested, and moreover most secretive—it was not something he intended drawing to the attention of his companions. Once, twice, maybe three times he had sensed—and then seen—a mounted figure far off on the horizon. Maybe he was wrong, and maybe he was just guessing, but he did not yet need a scholar’s spectacles and was still ready to swear that it was the same person every time. A long-glass might have confirmed that notion one way or another, but Aldric had none in his gear and though Voord carried one—a good one, Navy issue—he was the last person the Alban was going to ask. And maybe he
was
wrong, anyway; he could fathom no reason why a solitary rider would want, or dare, to shadow a column of heavy cavalry.
Aldric had once heard Gemmel use a word which described how he was feeling, and the word had stuck somehow in his memory.
Paranoia
. It was an odd, cumbersome, unAlban word, but once its meaning was explained it described exactly how he felt right now—how he had felt ever since the Imperial military had begun to take an interest in him. Nervous and suspicious of everything and everybody which didn’t have an instantly discernible motive.
But why shouldn’t someone else be riding this road? Egisburg was a large city and there were many more reasons to go there than—than his own. And any reluc-tanace to get too close to Imperial soldiers was scarcely[* *]grounds for suspicion; it was, rather, something to be applauded as laudable caution. For himself, he would as soon have the breadth of a province—at the very least— between himself and Voord at any time.
Except that he had given his word to help in this enterprise—given it not only to Goth and Bruda, who were only foreigners after all, but to Rynert as well. He was the king’s man and it mattered not a whit that he had been pledging himself only in the very vaguest sense. A given word was a given Word, and a Word given was a word honored. Even if it did complicate his life exceedingly. He would hold to that Word to the best of his life’s ability.
But he would have dearly loved a friend nearby— Gemmel, Dewan, someone,
anyone
—just to confide in now and then.
Lord General Goth had been right in his remarks about how close Egisburg was to the Emperor’s part of the Empire—a distinction which he made clear with a sardonic smile that Aldric thought would have looked more at home on the jaws of a wolf. The Alban had
seen
a wolf grin just like that and he knew exactly what his thought meant.
By the straight Army roads it was two, or maybe three days ride from Goth’s fortified headquarters; certainly no more. The journey would have been still quicker had they used the Falcon courier routes, but those of course were forbidden even to senior officers. And still more to those only pretending to such a rank.
Throughout that last long afternoon, four cold hours that were at one time crystalline clear and at another blurred by falling snow, Egisburg coalesced from a smudge on the horizon to the hunched, jagged reality of a city. Even then, it was only as evening folded its gray wings about them that they had their first clear view of the place which they hoped to enter—and leave—unseen and unscathed. Aldric sat up very straight in his saddle, aware that the sporadic conversation at his back had died away. It was scarcely surprising; but it did suggest that the reputation of the Red Tower carried a degree of weight even with the Secret Police.
There were larger fortresses in the world, he knew that—and had no doubt of the knowledge, having seen some of them. Datherga, Segelin, Cerdor, even his own hold of Dunrath was bigger than this; and they in their turn would be dwarfed by some of the Imperial fortresses, like the Grand Warlord’s recently completed citadel at the heart of Drakkesborg. But for all their size, none of them could have looked so forbidding to intruders.
He had expected a slim spike of masonry, maybe something like that in the old story of the Elephant Tower which he had loved so much as a child, or like that which the holy men of Herta were said to build and in which they could hide from sea-raiders. The Red Tower of Egisburg was none of these. Somebody, once, long ago—at least two hundred years, if he was any judge of fortified architecture—had decided that they would build themselves a strong place here at the junction of two rivers. A “castle,” as the Drusalans would have said. And this somebody had spent lavishly, un-stintingly on the great keep that would be the core of his fortress; so lavishly that he apparently had no money left to do more. There were no curtain walls, no river-fed moat, no outer defences at all.
But there was the Tower,
From base to rampart it was two hundred sheer feet of worked granite, and its stones were sheathed in the thick glaze which gave the place both its name and its coloration: a deep, vivid crimson that was unpleasantly like the hue of fresh-spilled blood. It reared starkly against the iron clouds like the tower Aldric remembered from his dreams, distorted by an errant swirl of snow; and at the same time an amber ray from the setting sun stabbed from the west over his right shoulder and seemed to lick against the stonework. For that brief instant, until the rent in the overcast closed again, the tower glistened with a sheen that was almost sticky. Aldric would not have been surprised to smell the sweet, salty tang of new blood. And within his borrowed armor he shivered just a little.
The Red Tower’s history was such that its name was used beyond the Empire as a threat to frighten naughty children. Beyond, but never within. Within the Empire, such threats frightened more than children. For within the borders of the Empire, the Red Tower’s threat was real.
Aldric’s guess had been right. It was to have been the most splendid, the most imposing and the most impregnable fortress in Drusul; and then the money ran out. No one but historians and scholars even remembered its builder’s name now; he had been disowned by his infuriated family for committing the near-capital offence of squandering inherited wealth, and they wanted nothing more to do with him. He had died an unmarried, childless, nameless old man.
Eighty years passed, and the tower became a fortified residence for the hereditary Overlords of the rapidly growing new city-state of Egisburg, a place made rich by the traffic passing along its twin rivers and by the ironworks which were already passing into proverb. “As good as Egisburg steel” had been a token of approval more than a century ago. In those days the Sherban emperors had been more tolerant of autonomous city-states than they were now.