Interlude: Congregation I

“Eighty-four: the only sensible solution to a maze is to not enter the maze.”
– “Two Hundred Heroic Axioms”, author unknown

His son’s back was already a raw, bloody wound but Akil Tanja did not allow his arm to slow or weaken. Lady Aquiline was watching with those cold Slayer eyes, and would take even the slightest hint of mercy as an excuse to cast doubt on the validity of the punishment. The five-tailed whip – Blood’s Scourge, men called it, one tail for every founding line – no longer ripped wounds when it struck Razin’s back. All there was to be ripped open had been, by now: the Lord of Malaga only sent blood spraying, coating his own arms and face. Only three more, now, until the last had sounded. Fifty one in total. Ten for the Pilgrim and ten for the Champion, those who stood closest to dawn. Ten for the Binder and ten for the Slayer, bloody hands joined in prayer. Ten for the Brigand, warring alone, and one more after that to atone. With each old verse his hand struck again, until at last it was done. Razin remained kneeling in the snow before the eyes of every captain in the host, half-naked and bleeding. Akil’s eldest son had not wept nor screamed, and for that the Lord of Malaga felt a twinge of pride. That he’d remained conscious as well spoke well of his mettle, for the lord had seen older and harsher been break under the scourge.

Much had been lost, failing to take the streets of Sarcella waiting on the other side of the river, but perhaps some things gained as well. Razin could learn, if he lived, and through the savagery that’d just ended the Lord of Malaga had ensured he would. He glanced the Lady of Tartessos, standing surrounded by a ring of steel-clad captains, and she inclined her head in concession after matching his gaze. The undeniable harshness of the flogging had ensured she could not further contest the affair, as he’d meant it to. The Lord of Malaga, Akil Tanja of the Grim Binder’s Blood, raised the bloodied scourge he’d tormented his heir with to the sky and a hush fell over the assembly.

“Fault was incurred straying from the light of the Heavens, and from that light no succour will be given,” he called out. “Through the flow of ancient blood, let this dishonour be washed away.”

Shouts of approval came from Akil’s own captains, for Razin’s grit in suffering the scourge had redeemed him partly in their eyes, but from the officers of Tartessos there came only cold silence. Those captains sworn to Holy Seljun – in practice, to no one at all – offered only sparse cheers. Too many of their fellows had taken hard losses fighting the Army of Callow for them to be willing to lean towards Malaga over Tartessos openly. Akil passed the red-slick whip to his attendant and resisted the urge to wipe his son’s blood from his hands. Razin, brave to the end, tried to rise to his feet and walk away on his own terms. But pain and blood loss had robbed him of the strength and he immediately stumbled. The Lord of Malaga quickened forward just in time to catch him, resting his heir’s arm on his shoulder and holding him up.

“Father,” Razin croaked. “I-”

“Silence,” Akil ordered. “Rest.”

He passed on his son to his sworn swords, knowing they would lead him away to a tent far from prying eyes. Honour and law dictated that no priest could tend to wounds inflicted by Blood’s Scourge, and no doubt Lady Aquiline would keep watch on Razin to see if either was bent to ensure his son lived. In this, at least, she had been outplayed. Akil had in his service a binder who had studied with the mage-healers of Ashur, and there was no dictate concerning the works of sorcery. An invitation would be made for one of Lady Aquiline’s own sworn men to observe the proceedings, to ensure she could not even strike through rumours without dishonouring herself. Akil watched his son being carried away and mourned for the fool of a boy. He had other children, some who like him had been born with the Gift and so held true chance to inherit the Bestowal of their honoured ancestor the Grim Binder. Yet he’d named Razin heir over them even if he was blind to sorcery, or rather because of it. His eldest son felt that absence sorely, and it had lit a flame in him to always seek to achieve more. No other of his get shared that fire, no matter their other talents. But the need to prove himself had made the boy exceed both his authority and capacity, in Sarcella. The scars that would mar his back for the rest of his life might be the lesson he’d needed never to do so lightly again.

Or the failure might break him, and the Lord of Malaga would have to look to a new heir.

“He was not without courage.”

Lady Aquiline Osena, of the Silent Slayer’s Blood, strode past his sworn swords without a second look and stood by Akil’s side to cast a cool gaze at the same boy she’d tried to have killed today. The Osena were reputed to be a taciturn lot though Aquiline had the forked tongue of snake when she put it to use, which was often. The cleverness of a serpent as well. Before the assembly of captains she’d feigned mercy and offered for Razin to be punished only by the rod, pretending it mercy when it was either scheme or murder. Three blows by a wooden rod would have been the due of every captain in the host, if Akil had not instead grit his teeth and himself requested the Blood’s Scourge. The captains of Tartessos would have beaten him half to death by themselves, regardless of his private entreaties. And the consequence of making those entreaties to his own captains and those sworn only to the Holy Seljun would have been… dangerous. Forbidding his own officers from striking blows would have been the same as saying the lives of Tartessos soldiers were worth more than theirs, and the unaligned captains would have required either heavy bribes or rough intimidation to agree. The choice would have been, in the end, between effectively surrendering command of the army to Lady Aquiline or letting his son be beaten to death in broad daylight.

And now the same woman who’d schemed this would bandy words with him, when Razin’s blood still flecked his father’s beard.

“My tolerance has limits, Osena,” Akil harshly replied.

“As does mine,” Lady Aquiline said, tone cold as ice. “Your whelp lost near four thousand soldiers flailing at the Third Army and nearly got my right hand killed after stealing the command from her. Do not pretend this is of my doing, Tanja. The boy should have died for this outrage and the thorny oaths he passed on to us.”

In Levant, it was an old story that the enmity between the lines of the Silent Slayer and the Grim Binder found its source in the hatred those two great heroines had held for each other. Some even said that hatred came from their struggle over the affections of the first Grey Pilgrim, though Akil did personally believe that piece of the tale. The truth was that the bad blood came from over a century of fighting over who should own the lucrative orchards and mines in the valley of Lusia, which was located at the edge of the dominions of both Malaga and Tartessos. The last time there’d been longer than a few months without an honour feud being fought over the valley was under Yasa Isbili’s reign, and in those days Akil’s grandfather had been young. The Lord of Malaga had not been please to know his own soldiery would fight alongside Lady Aquiline’s, but there’d been no other choice. The Marave of Alava took orders from no one, those fucking blustering madmen of the Champion’s Blood, and the feuds between the Ifriqui of Vaccei and the Osena of Tartessos made those of his own line look like playful tussles. The Brigand’s Blood saw no dishonour in poison or ambush, as Lady Aquiline’s two younger brothers had learned the hard way.

“Honour was restored,” the Lord of Malaga briskly dismissed. “Why do you seek me out, Aquiline?”

“Trouble,” the hard-eyed woman replied. “I have word from further south.”

“Then speak it,” Akil said.

The Lady of Tartessos gave their surroundings and meaningful glance, and Akil conceded the point with a nod. To his own tent they moved, leaving swords sworn to either idling in the snow. He made certain to formally offer her hospitality and have her accept it, lest honour allow her to use any words spoken here to her advantage.

“There was a battle in southern Iserre,” Aquiline said, once the rituals were seen to. “Hasenbach’s twenty thousand marching up from Tenerife met the Spears of Stygia on the field.”

Ill news and boon ones, all at once. Akil had never counted on Procerans fools enough to be duped by the League to truly be of use in the battles to come, and that the Stygian phalanx was not following his army was pleasing to hear. Slaves they might me, but the Spears of Stygia had a daunting reputation. If the First Prince’s southern army had been crushed however, the situation in Iserre was fast worsening

“Whose victory?” he asked.

“Draw,” Lady Aquiline said. “The phalanx bloodied the fantassins but Arlesite cavalry routed Stygia’s skirmishers and struck at the back of the Spears. They both limped away with losses but in good order.”

Akil would have asked her how she knew this, if he considered it even remotely likely she would tell him. The amount of detail offered was impressive, nonetheless.

“Where are they limping to?” the Lord of Malaga said.

“And there is the trouble,” she said. “The Procerans are now two weeks’ march behind us. They broke through the Stygian defence.”

Akil did not believe that any more than she truly did, by her tone. Procerans were not unskilled at war, for all that his people liked to diminish the worth of their blades. Their foot was match for any of Levant’s save perhaps heavy armsmen led by Blood, and as a rule their cavalry made sport of the Dominion’s if not outnumbered. Which Procerans very rarely were. They were hardly helpless babes, even facing Spears of Stygia, but cracking the slave-phalanxes would have been a bloody toil for anyone. If the twenty-thousand had been in shape for an orderly march this soon, either the Heavens had smiled or the Stygians had let them pass.

“The Tyrant,” he said, “is about to turn on us.”

This was not unexpected, for the Bestowed ruler of Helike was a dangerous lunatic, but the swiftness of that betrayal was inconvenient. The secret missives detailing the movements of the League’s armies and the assistance of the Helikean cataphracts in hunting down the Army of Callow had been well worth what was given in return – reports on the situation in Salia and the war against the Dead King – but it now seemed the offered ‘secret alliance’ was to come to an end. Of the bargain being revealed, Akil had little worry. He would not have accepted it otherwise. The Tyrant of Helike was breaking the most fundamental of the League’s laws by treating with foreign powers, as it was the sole prerogative of his Hierarch. His own allies would turn on him like hungry dogs, if it came out: he’d been at war with most of them a year ago, and that kind of slaughter was not easily forgot.

“We had our bargain’s worth,” Lady Aquiline said. “We’ve avoided battle with the League and the cataphracts slowed the Callowan columns. If my second had been left to her command, the Third Army would still be contained in Sarcella instead of days away and –”

“Enough,” Akil said. “Razin acted dishonourably, and for that was scourged. But if you intend to insist your Captain Elvera would have beaten the Black Queen, we will settle that claim blades in hand.”

The Lady of Tartessos smiled sharply.

“Can the Binder’s Blood afford another disgrace so soon?” she said, hand falling to the pommel of her blade.

Akil was unimpressed. She might be over a decade younger, but he was no steel-swinger to be made less by such a thing: he was a binder, first and foremost, from the line of greatest practitioner of that art there ever was. Age was power gained, not lost.

“Test me, Slayer whelp,” he smiled back, just as sharp. “See what comes of it.”

“A poor host, to offer threat,” Aquiline mocked.

“A poor guest, to give me cause,” he said.

A moment passed, and if not for the laws of hospitality he thought she might have drawn on him. But honour demanded truce, and so truce held.

“We cannot pursue the Callowans,” Lady Aquiline stiffly said. “We must first extricate the Procerans, lest the League kill them all.”

Neither of them had seen the need to plainly speak what they suspected. If the twenty-thousand soldiers of the Principate had been allowed to pass, it was so that the armies of the League of Free Cities could encircle all the other hosts marching across Iserre. Such a strategy would have been weakened, if the Proceran host remained behind it and able to strike at its back.

“I would not test the Black Queen without Bestowed at my side, regardless,” Akil admitted. “The Peregrine himself sent warning of her power.”

The Lady of Tartessos discreetly made the Mark of Mercy with her fingers, as he did, for while she might be vicious wretch even she knew the respect due to the living breath of the Pilgrim’s Blood. Even out on the outskirts of the Brocelian Forest it was known that the man who should be the Holy Seljun of Levant was not the one sitting the Tattered Throne.

“Then battle is delayed,” Lady Aquiline stated. “Lord Marave must contain the remainder of the Callowans up north and join with the reinforcements from Salia. After we’ve secured our own Procerans we can all of us together force a decisive clash.”

In northern Iserre, Akil Tanja of the Binder’s Blood thought. It would end in the furthest reaches of the principality, near the border with Cantal.

“Soon,” the Lord of Malaga said.

“Soon,” the Lady of Tartessos agreed.

—

The sun was setting over the battlefield, and the Army of Callow was once more victorious.

Parts of it, more accurately, Marshal Juniper thought. The First and Second Army had been reunited under her overall command, along with the Order of the Broken Bells, but the other two columns she’d sent off had yet to arrive. Fortunately, the Legions of Terror under Marshal Grem had bolstered her numbers to the extent that the forty-thousand strong of the Lord of Alava would be reluctant to clash with their allied commands. And this Lord Marave had been, at first, which made the last fortnight of continuous skirmishes rather interesting. In the distance, barely visible now that sunlight was dying a slow death, Levantine archers and slingers were withdrawing in good order. So were the companies of crossbows and regulars that the Hellhound had tasked with simply driving them back, knowing by now there was no point in trying to force a larger battle with the Dominion army. One day out of three, over the last two weeks, the Levantines had aggressively initiated a skirmish and refused to withdraw unless either heavy casualties or a large deployment by the Legions and the Army forced them into retreat.

The Levantine cavalry had attempted a few raids, at the start, before Marshal Grem nailed them with a munition-sown field and Juniper wiped out half their exposed skirmishers with a swift charge of the Order of the Broken Bells. Since that blow the Dominion riders had remained to guard the flanks of their skirmishers. Until today. Grandmaster Talbot had sallied out to turn back a charge that very nearly caught Juniper’s supply train by surprise – she now suspected the Levantines had used a last night’s snow storm to sneak a few hundred horse ahead of her army and hidden it behind low hills until she approached. In practice there’d been little fighting, for the moment the knights of Callow hit the Levantine horse it had scattered without giving much of a fight. But getting the columns in marching order afterwards had taken most of the afternoon, which she suspected was what Lord Marave had been willing to trade around a hundred cavalry for. This was not a strategy of attrition, she’d made the calculations. In both skirmishes and cavalry clashes, her force came out ahead in casualties by a moderate but noticeable margin. Which meant, she thought, that the Dominion was willing to bleed to slow her down.

Interesting, she thought once more.

The orc began the short trek war council tent she’d left to have a look at the battlefield herself, knowing she would be awaited inside. Banners flew above the cloth pavilion, more than there would have been a year ago. Catherine’s own, the silver balance on black that soldiers had taken to calling the Crown and Sword. Yet also the cracked bronze bells of the Order, and the gold Miezan numerals set on Fairfax blue of the First and Second Army. Lone among those, like a crow among birds, Lord Black’s personal banner flew the wind. Sheer dark, not a speck of anything else. It was telling, Juniper had thought, that alongside their own banners the Legions in Procer flew the Carrion Lord’s and not the Tower’s. The inside of the pavilion was warmed by braziers and illuminated by magelights, and for now emptied of the usual swarm of officers that would usually buzz around seeing to one task or another. Inside were seated two people, at the long table covered with the map of central Procer, the only other two who could be considered alongside her to have a real say in how this campaign was conducted now that the Deadhand had gone with the Fourth Army.

Marshal Grem One-Eye glanced up at her entrance and inclined his head the slightest bit. No a tooth bared, of course. As Marshal of Callow she was a peer, not an inferior or a superior, and Grem was famously disinclined to the kind of subtle posturing many of her kind fell into when jostling for dominance among assembly of equals. Mother had spent years trying to get a snarl out of him and never got more than a rare disapproving flash of fangs, Juniper remembered, and the pang of sorrow lingered beyond the span she allowed the memory. The other’s eyes remained on the map, the Lady-Regent of Callow frowning as she tried to match words on a letter to some marked location in Iserre. Vivienne Dartwick brushed back a long lock of hair and sighed, the royal seal of the Kingdom of Callow that hung from her neck moving as she did. Juniper moved the chair across the table from her and lowered her frame into it, ignoring the moaning creaks of the wood.

“Milenan must be using a different name than the one our own maps use,” the Lady-Regent said. “Otherwise it makes no sense.”

“Proceran cartography is famously imprecise,” Marshal Grem said.

“Particularly on the subject of borders,” Dartwick drily commented.

The other orc’s lips quirked, though Juniper was less than amused herself. Dartwick might be convinced she could squeeze Prince Amadis Milenan for information as long as the right prize was dangled, but the Hellhound had doubts on how reliable what they got out of him would be.

“I take it the walk cleared your mind,” the Lady-Regent suddenly said, looking up.

“It did,” the Hellhound grunted. “I don’t think this is about our columns anymore.”

One-Eye leaned forward with interest, but it wasn’t him Juniper needed to sell on this. Vivienne Dartwick was the one with the last word, these days, much as it irked the orc to even think it. The fact that Adjutant had looked to the Callowan for the final word when Juniper had come forward with the proposal for the Proceran campaign had driven that nail in hard and loud – whatever it was that’d lost the Deadhand yet another hand, it had changed things. And not just, the Hellhound thought, that she was nearly certain Dartwick no longer had a Name.

“Then what is it about?” the Lady-Regent asked, eyes considering.

“This isn’t attrition,” Juniper said. “They’re not winning that fight, not at the casualty rates we’re trading.”

“They’re exhausting us,” Marshal Grem noted. “The Legions have been on campaign for most a year now, even for veterans morale is fraying. And a lot of your soldiers are green, Marshal Juniper. They won’t hold up as well as Levantine foot under that kind of pressure. It might not matter they have less soldiers, if they have more in fighting fit.”

“I considered that,” she said. “And there is a sense to it – delay giving battle until they’ve brought us to the brink, and engage only after my other two columns have been dismantled by their other army.”

“But,” Dartwick said.

“They’re taking too many risks,” Juniper said. “That strike with the cavalry, today? That was an escalation in recklessness. I believe we’ll see the pattern hold up the longer they’re in pursuit.”

“The only gain from that was slowing us,” Marshal Grem calmly said.

There was a pause.

“You believe there’s a Proceran army headed our way,” One-Eye concluded. “Through Cantal, most likely, descending toward us following the lakes. We’re being softened up before they pincer us.”

“I believe they want to win the war in Iserre before the Grand Alliance moves north as a whole,” Juniper said. “And to do that they need to force a decisive battle, soon.”

“The Tyrant of Helike passed information indicating that most of the principality of Hainaut has fallen to the Dead King,” Dartwick frowned. “And the Lycaonese are steadily losing ground.”

The boy-king of Helike had been willing to cut a deal offering quite a bit of useful information, after failing to kill Juniper. Mostly useful in how to remain out of the path of the League’s armies, but the latest reports out of Salia and the war against the Dead King were of some importance. That he’d asked for detailed assessments of the Proceran and Levantine armies in exchange had been judged an acceptable price by Dartwick, and Juniper agreed. Anything making him more inclined to attack the Great Alliance than them was of some benefit.

“Procer can’t afford a long war down here,” Juniper agreed. “Attrition, defeat in detail – they’ll take too much time. If they’re not done here within two months, there’s a decent they lose the northern Principate. So they need us crushed, quick.”

“And large enough an army to intimidate the League into a truce, if not a treaty,” the Lady-Regent murmured.

Marshal Grem peered down at the map, and his face tightened.

“Not one decisive battle,” he gravelled. “Two. They smash us up north, smash General Bagram and the Princekiller further south and then link up to face the League.”

“We can’t keep marching north, then,” Juniper said. “We’re giving them exactly what they want.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Dartwick said, head cocking to the side.

Marshal Grem One-Eye grinned.

“We march back south,” he said. “And find out who’ll blink first, between us and the First Prince.”