The men at the Bridge Gate had all of their attention on a magnificent retinue of knights and armoured men-at-arms entering the city. Harmodius looked at it from under his hood, trying to make out the blazon and guess whom the lord might be – not anyone he had ever seen at court. A tall man, heavy with muscle.
The guards clearly wanted no part of making the decision to let the giant and his men into the town. Nor did they have any attention to spare for solitary old men riding out.
The knight commanding the retinue did, though, and turned to watch him as he rode by. His glance sharpened – and then the Lieutenant of the Lower Gate appeared, armoured head to toe and holding not a wax tablet and stylus but a pole-axe, with four more knights at his back. The foreigner stiffened, and Harmodius rode past him while he was distracted.
Through the gate, down the slope past the lesser merchants who were only allowed to display their wares outside the walls – in the Ditch, as men liked to call it. He rode past the mountebanks, the players, and the workmen building bleachers and barriers for the Whitsunday Play.
He pursed his lips and touched his heels to the horse’s flanks, and the mare, delighted to be out in the spring and bored by the pace, sprang forward.
Harmodius cantered along beside the market and continued past the outer ring of homes, the poorest still associated with the city, and past the first fields, each surrounded by a ring of rocks and old, painstakingly cleared tree stumps. The soil here was not the best. He cantered along the road for a further half a mile, pleased with his horse but still in the grip of fear, and came to the bridge.
Still no one challenged him.
He crossed the first great span, stopped, spat into the river, and worked two powerful spells while he was safe in the bright sunshine at the centre of the bridge. Hermeticism functioned best in sunlight; while most workings of the Wild couldn’t cross running water without enormous effort or the water’s Hermetic permission. There was no power on earth that could take him in bright sunlight, in the middle span of flowing fresh water.
And if there was such a power, he had no chance against it anyway.
Then he went the rest of the way across and took the road north.
The Behnburg Road, East of Albinkirk – Robert Guissarme
Robert Guissarme was tall and cadaverously thin despite his intake of mutton and ale. Men said that his appetite for food was only exceeded by his appetite for gold. He called his company of men a
No one knew much of his birth. He claimed to be the bastard son of a great nobleman, whom he was careful never to name – but he was known from time to time to lay a finger to his nose when a great man passed him on the road.
His sergeants feared him. He was quick to anger, quick to punish, and as he was the best man-at-arms of his company none of them wanted to cross him. Especially not right now; he was sitting fully armed on his charger, in deep fog, looking at a pair of peddlers who had passed them the night before, and who now stood in the middle of the road. They had been carefully butchered, flayed, and then set on posts in the road so that their heads seemed locked in endless screams of abject agony.
Since yesterday, he had pushed his convoy north-west along the bad road that connected Albinkirk to the east – to the Hills, and then over the mountains to Morea, and the land of the Emperor. He’d started his convoy in Theva, the city of slavers, and had pushed his men so hard that their horses began to fail. As for the long chain of slaves that was their principal cargo – he no longer cared much whether they lived or died. They had been entrusted to him in Theva; a long line of broken men and women – some pretty, some ugly, and all with the blank despair of the utterly beaten human being. He’d been told that they were a valuable consignment, being skilled slaves – cooks, menservants, housemaids, nurses, and whores.
His company had treated them well enough on the long trip west. Well enough, despite the frowns of the Emperor’s Knight – a pompous bastard too proud to share his meals with a mere
But when they passed Behnburg, the last town before Albinkirk, and found the town’s garrison and population huddled within their walls in fear of un-named terrors, he’d started to hurry west, leaving the rest of the spring flood of merchants to hurry along in his wake. A dozen with wagons and good horses had paid him in gold to stay with his convoy.
