Robert Adams - Champion of the Last Battle

“The remainder of this day and all of tomorrow, Kahndoot. After that, you have my permission to drop a few hundred-pound pebbles on him, quill him with arrows, pepper him with slingstones or whatever you wish. So send for some more sawdust and canvas, and tell those who support these dummies to either not stand so close or to borrow a helm with both visor and beaver. If there are none easily available, have a few fetched from the keep armory.”

“ How many rounds, Counter?” growled Erica Arenstein in a rage. “Twenty-seven, you say? Dammit, you fool, that’s more than a quarter of our entire remaining stock of ammunition! And how many of those were clean misses? Hell, I knew I should have sent Horseface Charley back up, that or gone myself. At least he and I can hit what we aim at with consistency.”

“Wal dang it, I hits ’em, too, Ehrkah!” Counter asserted heatedly. “I swan, I seen ever man jack of them Kuhmbuhnuhs go down, evun heerd one the bugguhs scream oncet, kinda real garglylike scream, too.”

Erica reflected on that. She had never before known Counter to lie to her, so he should not be starting now. But if only three shots from Horseface had kept the Kuhmbuhluhner garrison down off the walls and towers all of the day before yesterday, why should Counter Tremain have to shoot more than a score of them yesterday? Unless ... unless they had begun to suspect that something was going on below that bluff.

But when she broached her suspicions to Brigadier Maklarin, suggesting that the work be expedited, he just shook his snowy head. “Doctor, there is no way to do it faster. We own a limited number of artisans, for the one thing; for another, latticework of the strength and quantity we require is not quickly woven. This is Tuesday; the attack date chosen is this Friday. If they have not already found us out, I doubt that they will within the next two days.

“No, my dear doctor, just give each of your riflemen one more tour of duty up there, then you all will be free to go south or wherever you wish with my blessing and that of all the Skohshun nation.”

“I cannot truly attest that he is improving in any way, Lord Champion,” said Pah-Elmuh, “for still I cannot contact any portion of his mind, I only can report of observations. For one thing, he no longer seems to be losing flesh as he did for so long. For another, I am certain that his body must move itself at times when I am not there or not awake to see it done, for his muscles now seem to have regained a bit of tone, and twice now I have returned from nighttime errands or calls to find him in different positions on his couch and with his coverlets all disarrayed or even thrown from off him. This all bends me to the belief that King Byruhn may yet recover of his injuries and reign on the throne of his fathers.”

The Kleesahk had been mindspeaking, but Bili’s grunted reply was spoken aloud. “The sooner the better, say I, Pah-Elmuh. It can’t be soon enough for me. I like not this extra work piled upon me, willy-nilly. New Kuhmbuhluhn, New Kuhmbuhluhnburk and New Kuhmbuhluhners should all be ruled over by one of their own, and I give you fair warning, when once the siege is broken and these damned Skohshuns hied back to their northern glen, Chief Bili of Morguhn is gone, too, whether or no King Byruhn be recovered. Let the royal council elect a New Kuhmbuhluhn nobleman to be regent ... or the new king. I, my wife, my children, my stallion and all my condotta who wish to do so will be headed first for Sandee’s Cot, then east, toward our various homelands. I have seen me enough mountains to last a lifetime long, or more.”

Undaunted, in the strength of his vastly superior weapons, by the two reserve regiments—actually, in practice, training commands—of pikemen and the half-troop of light cavalry, Jay Corbett finally set up his headquarters in the spacious, stone-built house of Earl Devernee, bringing in a couple of heavily armed squads to garrison it and leaving Gumpner in charge of the camp and their hostages.

In the absence of the hostage earl, Corbett quickly noted, Lady Pamela Grey—Earl Devernee’s half sister—seemed to rule over the glen rather competently, in his stead. He was impressed with his less-than-willing hostess, mightily impressed. He found her to be intelligent, quick-witted and, when she wished to be so, charming. She also was very strong-willed, with a keen and deeply embedded sense of justice and morality—of what was right and what wrong, by her standards.

Her son, who served as Corbett’s guide and companion as the officer searched the nooks and crannies of the glen for any sign of Erica and her Ganiks, shared her strict senses of justice and honor, of responsibility and duty. The grave, one-legged, fourteen-year-old combat veteran was, in Corbett’s mind, a thoroughly admirable young man, a credit to his mother, his dead father and his people; but he could not but wonder if Ensign Thomas Grey would ever come to rue and regret so early a loss of childhood, so sudden a transition into the responsibilities of maturity. He sincerely hoped not.

A week of searching and of questioning Skohshuns of all stations and ages, civilian and military, of both sexes, at last convinced him that Earl Devernee had indeed spoken the full truth at their initial meeting—Dr. Erica Arenstein and the Ganiks she now led had departed the glen long weeks ago, bound for the field army. Now he must march fast in the wake of the wagon train that had borne them southeast, but he wanted to arrive unannounced, without the large and powerful Skohshun army being apprised that he was bound toward them.

This matter could have been simply enough handled by the shooting of every horse in the glen, but to do so he and his two squads would have been obliged to penetrate some of the narrow, twisting defiles quite deeply and would likely have had to fight their way back, killing or wounding a sizable number of theoutraged Skohshuns in the process, so he chose an easier method of achieving the same end ... or so he then thought.

During the night before the departure of him and his two squads from the house of which Lady Pamela Grey was the temporary chatelaine, he tried several times to mentally frame the words he would say to her in parting, telling her of just what he must do to protect his command, to provide security on the coming march; but each new speech rang lamer than the one preceding it in his mind, and when at last the morning came, he simply thanked her for her courtesies and bade her farewell.

When he released Earl Devernee, however, he laid it flat on the line to the nobleman. “Mr. Devernee, I’m now going after Dr. Arenstein and her party.”

“Do you know the road, General Corbett?” the earl blandly asked. “If not, I can supply you with a few guides.”

“Thank you, but no,” Corbett grinned in reply. “You have already supplied me with a fine map from the office in your house. My compliments to your military cartographers—they do first-class work with primitive equipment.”

The earl nodded once. “Thank you, sir. You are, of course, more than welcome to the map. I know well that you could easily have taken much more, had you so desired, slaying anyone, everyone who might have opposed you.”

“I’m a soldier, Mr. Devernee, not a bandit,” said Jay Corbett. “And while killing is often my job, it seldom if ever has been my pleasure. But I have my command to protect, too, Mr. Devernee, and so I am serving you fair warning that any messengers you try to send on ahead of me to give your Brigadier Maklarin word of my approach will be most harshly, most fatally, dealt with—not of my desire, for I admire you and your people, but of my necessity.

“Further, because I know that you will try to send gallopers, and my warning here be damned, I’m going to make it as difficult as I can for you and for them. I have seen every inch of the glen and the steeps that surround it, and while it might be just barely possible for a skilled rider on a very surefooted mount to get over those steeps in a very few places, it would take a drooling lunatic to try it to begin, and when he reached the outside, he would have lost a goodly bit of time, for I would be well on my way.”