M McNally - The Sable City

After moments that seemed much longer, Zeb’s leftenant appeared over him. He shouted for a tourniquet, then knelt and clamped both hands around Zeb’s arm.

“It could be worse,” the Leftenant said. Zeb looked at him with the one eye he still had open.

“How do you figure, sir?”

“Well…they could have shot me.”

An Axman, Mollka by name, appeared with a torn strip of tent cloth and set about tying it tight around Zeb’s upper arm just under the shoulder. Despite the Leftenant holding the arm as steady as he could, the grinding of pulverized bone elicited a choking groan and Zeb’s heels scraped against the ground.

“Molly,” Zeb said. “After they cut my arm off, I am going to beat you with it. Soundly, sir.”

Mollka grinned as he worked. “I doubt it not, laddy.”

“Five!” another Axman shouted from nearby. “Not but five of them! What by the Ennead was the point of that?”

“Only five stayed and fought,” the Leftenant said. “Another half-dozen ran off toward the manor.” He exchanged a nod with Mollka, gently released Zeb’s arm and patted his left shoulder. The Leftenant stood up and along with the men looked in the direction of the manor house. Zeb found that by turning his head sideways and looking along the ground between their legs he could just see the place himself.

The once grand stone house of some Larbonnese noble had suffered under the siege almost as much as had the surrounding yard. Glass and shutters were gone but the windows had been covered with canvas to obscure what was being done under the gabled roof from the view of the Daulic works across the ravine. That had been obvious anyway, from the noise. Over the last week since the arrival of an Ayzant artillery battalion on the ridge top, the brawny men had been tearing out interior walls and floors, tossing mortar and refuse out to turn the whole building into a hollow shell. Then three days ago, after dark and with no torchlight, straining mule teams had arrived bearing on two great wagons two long, dark shapes under sailcloth, which were in turn muscled within the house through holes bashed in the back wall. Night before last, the sweating artillerymen had borne heavy chests up the ridge and inside, and finally last night they had come rolling barrel after barrel.

Now with at least a half-dozen Daulmen already inside the building, a stream of swarthy artillerymen could be seen fleeing out the back and away with all haste, red cloth trousers flashing.

“They’re going to fire the powder kegs,” someone said, and the Leftenant sighed.

“This is going to be very loud.”

“Does anyone feel up to carrying me down into the hole?” Zeb asked.

Across the distance came the dull bang of a handgun and the men all flinched, but it was followed only by shouting and the clash of arms, echoing from the hollowed-out cavern of the manor. There was a clear, pained scream.

“The redlegs have all cleared out,” someone said. “Who is it at that?”

“Maybe the Daulies are fighting over who gets to light the fuse.”

Men fingered their axes and crossbows, but no one felt like rushing toward a building that might ignite explosively at any instant. It seemed to have gone quiet over there anyway. A minute passed that seemed much longer.

“Who’s this, then?” someone said.

The men watched a figure exit the manor and approach but from his position Zeb could not see who came, and he was becoming too lightheaded to ask. The voices of his companions were making little sense to him.

“Is that a Destroyer?”

“No, they wear black plate with spikes.”

“That is part of a helmet, right? Not your man’s face?”

“What’s with the birds?”

“Good gods, is that a woman behind him?”

“That’s a Farthest Westerner, else I’m an elf.”

The Leftenant stepped to the front of the band, the others moving aside for him. Zeb saw the subject of speculation arrive, and was himself perplexed.

In addition to too many wounds and more than enough battle, Zeb had seen a great deal of armor over his military career. Leather cuirbolli, plate and chain, banded and splint. Scale and studded. Spiked and hobnailed and bronzed. But he had never seen anything quite like that adorning the man who stepped up to face the Leftenant.

It was beautiful, in its way, and altogether more complicated than seemed strictly necessary. It was composed of angular pieces, light blue to a dark gray and laced together with reddish cord, oversized at the joints to turn aside any thrusting or cutting blade. It covered the fellow almost from head to toe. Decorating the chest, arms, and legs were single rows of stylized images of white birds, little herons or cranes with wings that seemed to flutter as the man strode forward. At his waist were two sheathed swords, black pommels with matching diamond-pattern designs, one sword much longer than the other. On his head was a great helm with long neck guards extending around a banded steel dome, framing a leather half-mask of grinning lips and a pronounced, hooked nose, above which the man’s own dark eyes were set deeply beneath his brow, and at a slight tilt. They flashed about at the Axmen before settling on the Leftenant in their fore. The stranger stopped and undid the cords at one side of his half-mask, dropping it to hang free from his helmet and revealing a full face of olive complexion and indeterminate age, with a hard line of mouth framed by a long, wispy black mustache. He spoke with a thick accent.

“Zay-bu-ron Baj-an-if.”

Zeb would have winced had he not been doing so already. A few of his fellows glanced at him, but at least none of them actually turned around and pointed.

“Pardon me?” the Leftenant asked.

Everyone’s attention was on the swordsman, though the fellow was not alone. Two more people had followed him from the manor and now reached the cluster of men, one a frowning Ayzant in the silver armor of a Kingsman and the spiked helmet of a sergeant, carrying a large mace. The other now drew many stares from the Axmen who had been staring only at each other for weeks.

She was a woman and pretty, though she could have been far more so. She was as Far Western as the swordsman with fine narrow features and eyes at a graceful tilt under thin, jet black brows. But she was garbed rather rudely in a battered, shapeless brown coat from throat to thighs, with patches on the elbows matching those on the knees of worn cloth leggings. She wore gray woolen socks and strapped sandals with wooden soles that clopped even on the bare ground. Finally her hair was just a fright, a tangled mass of inky black, unkempt and unacquainted with a brush.

The swordsman said something in a foreign tongue to her, barked a command really, and she spoke in halting Codian. That language was close enough to Kanalborg Common to be understood by the Axemen.

“Is one of you men called as Zebulon Baj Nif?”

No one, bless their hearts, said anything. Neither did they glance again at Zeb, who for his part continued to bleed quietly.

The Ayzant sergeant started bellowing, in Zantish naturally, which of the group Zeb alone understood as he knew the related Ghendalese dialect. His Leftenant did not turn around to ask Zeb for a translation, but with a sigh Zeb started speaking anyway, from habit.

“He says they have it from Colonel Rierden himself that this is the post of the platoon of Leftenant Kagsfold, under whom is ordered the soldier Zebulon Warchild, who himself has knowledge of both the Zantish and Codian tongues.”

Zeb blinked.

“So, I’ve pretty much just given myself away then, haven’t I?”

Indeed, the woman frowned at him and stepped forward. Zeb liked to think his fellows might have moved to obstruct either the swordsman or the sergeant, but they politely if uncertainly moved aside for the woman. She knelt and looked closely at Zeb’s arm. Her face and neck could have stood a washing, Zeb noticed, though of course so could his.