Glen Cook - With Mercy Towards None

"Will he really come?" another asked.

"Someone will. My old teacher called it historical inertia. Nothing can stop it. Not even the deaths of Nassef and El Murid."

"Many men will die, then."

"Too many, and a lot of them ours. The Disciple doesn't know what he's doing."

He tried. He tried bravely and hard, and won no support anywhere. And he went on, his mission driving him mercilessly. His guards began to fear he was obsessed.

Finally, he admitted defeat. There would be no help while the Lesser Kingdoms were not directly threatened. He returned to the camps.

He was in el Senoussi's encampment when Harish assassins found him again. Three teams attacked together. They slew his bodyguards. They slew half a score of Shadek's men. They wounded Haroun twice before el Senoussi rescued him.

"Dismiss me, Lord!" the old man begged. "My failure cannot be excused."

"Stop that. It couldn't be helped. Ouch! Careful, man!" A horse trainer was dressing his wounds. "We have a savage, determined enemy, Shadek. This is going to keep on till we're killed or we destroy him."

"I should have seen through them, Lord."

"May be. May be. But how?" Haroun grew thoughtful. The attack had shaken el Senoussi, yet he seemed more upset because it had happened at his camp than because it had happened to his king.

El Senoussi, Haroun recalled, was an appointee of King Aboud's, a lifelong functionary. He'd spent decades shunning blame and appropriating credit. "Forget the Harish, Shadek. They're like the weather. We have to live with them. Meantime, we have fires to put out." The assassins had started several. Billowing smoke still climbed the sky.

The log blockhouse that was the camp's bailey, and a hutment against the palisade, stubbornly resisted the firemen. The swiftness with which the flames had taken hold bespoke careful preparation.

"Why did they go to the trouble?" Haroun wondered. "They could have killed me if they hadn't wasted the time."

"I don't know, Lord."

The answer came three hours later.

A sentinel called, "Invincibles!"

"Here?" Haroun demanded. "In Tamerice?" He peered over the stockade.

Horsemen were coming out of a nearby wood. They wore Invincible white.

"Must be a hundred of them, Lord," el Senoussi estimated. "The fires must have been a signal."

"So it would seem." Haroun surveyed the encampment. Women and children were moving provisions into the charred blockhouse. They looked scared, but were not panicking. El Senoussi had drilled them well.

"Lord, escape while you can. I only have eighty-three men. Some of them are wounded."

"I'll stay. What good a King who always runs away?"

"He's alive when his moment comes."

"Let them come. I was trained in the Power." He spoke from bravado and frustration. He wanted to hit back.

El Senoussi backed away. "A sorcerer-king?"

Haroun saw the fear-reflections of the kings of Ilkazar gleaming in the man's eyes.

"No. Hardly. But maybe I can blow a little smoke into their eyes."

The Invincibles knew what they were doing. Their intelligence was perfect. Their first attack penetrated the stockade despite Haroun's shaghûnry and a ferocious defense.

"They're getting through where the hutment burned," Haroun shouted. He whirled. El Senoussi was barking orders. Warriors grabbed saddle bows and sped arrows into the throng in the gap, but the Invincibles entered the compound anyway.

"Go to the blockhouse, sire," el Senoussi urged. "You're just one more sword out here. You can bedevil them with your witchery from there."

Haroun allowed himself to be guided through the tumult. He saw the sense of Shadek's argument.

He was more effective from the blockhouse. He did little things and quickly betrayed individual enemies. The Invincibles gave up.

"That was close," Haroun told el Senoussi.

"It's not over. They're not going away. They're circling the camp."

Haroun looked over the palisade. "Some are circling. Some look like they're going for help."

"You'd better leave tonight, Lord."

It was the practical, logical, pragmatic course, but Haroun did not like it. "They'll be waiting for me to try. Or for somebody going after help."

"Naturally. But would they expect us to attack? They believe their own reputation. If we sallied without trying to get away... "

"It might confuse them because it doesn't make much sense."

"It does if it gets you away, Lord."

"I don't understand you, Shadek."

"Don't try, Lord. Just go. And send help."

Haroun fled during el Senoussi's third sally. He went afoot, creeping like a thief, grinding his teeth because his wounds ached. He trudged doggedly through the night, ignoring his pain.

Dawn caught him fifteen miles northeast of the encampment. That put him just twenty from Tamerice's capital, Feagenbruch. The nearest refugee camp was more than forty miles away. He decided to try the capital.

It was risky. Tamerice's nobles might be so timorous they would ignore this compromise of the kingdom's sovereignty.

If they did react, though, they would make independent witnesses to an agression. Tamerice and its neighbors might assume a more bellicose stance toward El Murid.

That chance was worth the risk. El Senoussi's was only an interim encampment. Its loss would not constitute a significant defeat.

The Invincibles wanted to destroy him, not the camp, anyway. The big, important camps they would like to raid were all in the far north.

Haroun was known in Feagenbruch, and not well liked. He had aggravated the lords of that city with his importunities before.

He used his wounds, youth, and title to obtain entree. He spoke well while explaining to the king's seneschal. He spoke even better once shown into the presence of the king himself.

"It's an outrage, Majesty," the seneschal opined. "We can't let such arrogance go unchallenged."

"Then gather what knights you can muster. Lead them yourself. Cousin," the king told Haroun, "accept my hospitality while this temerity is being rewarded."

"I thank you, Cousin," Haroun replied. He smiled softly. Indirectly, the man had recognized his claim to the Peacock Throne.

At week's end news came that the Invincibles had been defeated and harried back into the Kapenrung Mountains. El Senoussi's people had survived.

The shock waves of the incursion would, in time, course throughout the Lesser Kingdoms, stimulating the growth of animosity toward El Murid.

The Lesser Kingdoms were small and often impotent, but each was jealous of its independence and sovereignty.

Nationalism was stronger there than in the larger kingdoms.

Haroun met a man while he was waiting for the news.

It was an inconsequential thing then, but in time would shape the destinies of kingdoms.

Bored with Tamerice's squalid palace, which was a hovel compared even to Haroun's own boyhood home, he began sampling the excitements of the spring fair set up in the meadow north of town.

One afternoon he was watching the swordswallower when he sensed the approach of a wrongness. He could identify no positive threat. That puzzled him. Usually his intuition was more precise. He looked around.

He had come without guards. If ever there was a time for the Harish to strike, this was it. He damned himself for taking an unnecessary risk.

He reached with his shaghûn's senses.

That godawful palace... Tamerice's rulers were a barbarous lot. Unlettered thick-wits disguising themselves in the trappings of noblemen. Feh! The only conversationalist there was a treasury clerk hired out of Hellin Daimiel...

Only one individual stood out of the crowd of lean farmers and ginger-haired city folk. Short, fat, brown, apparently of Haroun's own age, he was an obvious alien. There was a hint of the desert about him, yet Haroun could not recall ever having seen a fat poor man there.