Miranda turned towards the exit and whispered to Alenca, ‘You asked that youngster to stir things up?’
‘I thought his timing was perfect.’
‘You are a very dangerous man, my old friend.’
‘Now we wait,’ said Alenca. ‘But I think we’ll have a full agreement tonight, and I cannot see any other course of action than the one you suggest.’
As they walked back towards Miranda’s quarters, she said, ‘I hope so, and I hope my plan works. Otherwise we must ready the Empire for war against the most belligerent warlord in your history.’
Two hundred men stood ready, honour guards from four of the nearest estates in the province, answering the call of the Great Ones of Tsuranuanni without hesitation. They were arrayed in two groups, each under the command of a Great One awaiting orders from Miranda. While peace had reigned throughout the Empire for more than a generation, Tsurani discipline and training remained unchanged. These were tough, determined men ready to die for the honour of their lords’ houses.
Miranda and a dozen Great Ones walked slowly up the ridge to where she had first caught sight of the Dasati dome. She spoke softly, ‘Everyone ready?’
Men nodded and glanced at one another. Not one living Great One of the Empire had seen any sort of conflict: the last Great One to die in combat had done so in the Riftwar, more than a hundred years ago. These were scholarly men, not warriors. But these magicians were those best able to bring incredible power to bear if the need arose.
Slowly the thirteen magic-users, arguably the most powerful practitioners of the arcane arts, moved up the hill. At the rise, Miranda actually stood up on tiptoe to peer over, and then she said, ‘Damn!’
Before them was an empty vale, the only evidence of Dasati occupation being a large circle of blackened earth where the sphere had been.
‘They’re gone,’ said one of the younger magicians.
‘They’ll be back,’ said Miranda, turning her back. Taking a breath, she said, ‘I suggest you spread the word to every house in the Empire, that every village and farmstead, valley and dell, every isolated nook and cranny be inspected, searched, and searched again.’ She looked at every face nearby. ‘They will be back, and next time it won’t be a small dome. I think next time they’ll be coming to stay.’
JOMMY FROWNED.
Sitting under a canvas cloth hastily rigged to provide shelter from the pitiless rain, he hugged his knees to his chest, he said, ‘But what I don’t understand is why?’
Servan, huddled next to the young officer, replied, ‘We don’t ask why; we simply follow orders.’ They sat on a hillside, overlooking a distant cove: a vantage point that prevented anyone from arriving without being noticed. The problem for the moment was that the rain shrouded the area and lowered visibility to the point at which someone was required to sit close by; in this case, that someone was Servan, and Jommy had been selected to sit with him.
His dark hair matted wet against his forehead, Jommy regarded his companion. In the last few months his slender face had aged dramatically. An arduous life on the march had drained pounds from his youthful frame, while days in the sun and sleeping on the ground had given a tough, leathery quality to his skin. The court-bred noble who Jommy had come to know well over the last few months had been replaced by a young veteran embarking on his third campaign in as many months.
Never friends, the two, along with their other four companions – Tad, Zane, Grandy and Geoffry – had come to appreciate one another as reliable colleagues. In the relatively short time since they had been unceremoniously taken from the university at Roldem and cast into the role of young soldiers of rank, they had received an intensive tutelage in the realities of military life. To Jommy’s unending irritation, Servan had been appointed senior for this campaign, which meant Jommy was expected to follow his orders without question. So far there had been no hint of reprisal for the mischief Jommy had inflicted on Servan during the last operation, when Jommy had been appointed senior, but Jommy just knew it was coming.
The two young officers had been detailed to a position low in the foothills of the region known as the Peaks of the Quor, a rugged, mountainous peninsula jutting northward from the eastern side of the Empire of Great Kesh. About a hundred men, including these two young officers, had been deposited on this beach a week earlier, and all Jommy knew was that a landing was expected here, though the exact identity of the invaders had not been shared with the young officers. All Jommy knew was they wouldn’t be friendly.
Jommy also had aged, but as a farm youth and caravan worker, already used to a harsher life than his companion, he revealed less dramatic evidence of his recent experiences. Rather, his already cock-sure brashness had evolved into a quiet confidence, and his time spent with the other young officers from the university at Roldem had taught him a fair dose of humility; all of them were better at something than he was. Even so, one part of his nature remained unchanged: his almost unique ability to see humour in most situations. This one, however, had tested his limits. The downpour had been unrelenting for four days now. Their only source of warmth was a fire built in a large cave a mile up a miserable hillside, and the enemy they had been told to expect had shown no evidence of arriving on schedule.
‘No,’ said Jommy, ‘I don’t mean why are we here. I mean why are we here?’
‘Did you sleep through the Captain’s orders?’ came a voice from behind them.
Jommy turned to see a shadowy figure who had approached undetected. ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he complained.
The man sat down next to Jommy, ignoring the fact that half his body was still outside the scant protection offered by the make-shift shelter. ‘I wouldn’t be much of a thief if I couldn’t sneak up on you two in a driving storm, would I?’ he replied.
The newcomer was only a few years older than them, yet his face showed premature ageing, including an unexpected sprinkling of grey hair in his dark moustache and beard, a neatly trimmed affair that revealed a streak of vanity in an otherwise chronically unkempt and slovenly person. He was nearly as tall as Jommy, but not quite as burly, yet his movement and carriage betrayed a lean hardness, a whipcord toughness that convinced Jommy he’d be a difficult man to contend with in a stand-up fight.
Servan nodded. ‘Jim,’ he acknowledged. The young thief had somehow managed to get caught up in the same net of intrigue that had bought Servan and Jommy to this lonely hillside. He had put in an appearance the week before, arriving on a ship with supplies for what Jommy had come to think of as the ‘Cursed Expedition’.
Servan and Jommy were both currently serving in the Army of Roldem, though Jommy came from a land on the other side of the world. Servan was nobility, royalty even – somewhere in line to be king, should perhaps ten or eleven relatives expire unexpectedly. Yet they were now assigned to what could only be generously called an unusual company, soldiers from Roldem, the Kingdom of the Isles, Kesh, and even a contingent of miners and sappers from the dwarven city of Dorgin, all under the command of Kaspar of Olasko, former duke of what was now a province of the Kingdom of Roldem. Once a hunted outlaw with a price on his head, sometime over the last few years he had managed to rehabilitate his reputation and now had special status with both Roldem and the Empire of Great Kesh. His adjutant was a Roldem captain named Stefan who happened to be Servan’s cousin, which also made him another distant cousin to the King of Roldem.
The arrival of the newcomer had revealed another puzzling aspect of this expedition. Jim was one of half a dozen men who were not by any stretch of the imagination soldiers, yet were billeted with the soldiers, sent out on