The captain shook his head. ‘Right now I’m half-tempted to join them.’ He glanced around. ‘Where’s Kanhtuk? He speaks their gibberish. We need to tell them to get down the road and find some food besides long pig.’
The men returned and one said, ‘There’s some livestock in back: chickens, a dog, and some horses!’ Another rider came up and said, ‘There’s cattle in the field, Captain!’
With a laugh, the captain dismounted. ‘Take the horses for remounts. And let’s slaughter those chickens. Get a fire going.’
Men ran to do as they were bidden. The captain knew the beef would have to go to the Queen’s quartermaster, but he and his men were going to have some chicken first. At the thought of hot chicken his stomach cramped. He had never been so hungry in his life.
As men started killing chickens, the captain shouted, ‘And slaughter that dog!’
He felt relief they had found food. How a land that looked so lush could be so devoid of anything to eat was a mystery. They had found gold and gems, fine cloth and items of rare beauty, everything that was usually hidden, and no food. Throughout his life as a soldier, those who ran took their gold and jewelry, valuables of every stripe, with them, but they didn’t carry off grain, flour, vegetables, and fowl. Even game animals were scarce, as if they had been driven away. It was as if the enemy were retreating and taking everything they could eat with them. It made no sense.
The mercenary captain sat down as a man emerged from the house holding bottles of wine. He greedily drank down the wine and absently wondered how long he could have resisted joining the Jikanji at their feast.
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he realized he was free not to worry about that pass for a few more days. In the distance he heard the barking dog fall silent with a single whimper, and the squawk of chickens as their necks were wrung.
EIGHTEEN - Delay
A loud rumble came through the floor.
Lysle said, ‘Are you planning to blow up the entire city, Jimmy?’
James looked at the others in the gloom of the warehouse and quietly said, ‘Probably.’ He looked at his brother in the dim light of a single lantern. For two days his soldiers had been making forays into the sewers, gathering information, marking the progress of the fighting above, and coordinating the defense of the city. One of the things James had known was that the demon’s magic would probably result in a quick entrance into Krondor. Rather than have everything committed to the walls and nothing inside, therefore, he had sacrificed the lives of hundreds of soldiers so that the enemy would think the city heavily defended, only to discover that once inside Krondor the battle had only just begun.
Between coordinating the defense from his underground command post and eating and sleeping only briefly, he had gotten the opportunity to know his brother. He found a sadness in realizing that as he neared seventy years of age, he had only spent hours with his brother. He knew that Lysle was a murderer, career thief, smuggler, and panderer, and guilty of as many crimes as a dung heap had flies, but in Lysle he saw himself, had he not chanced to encounter Prince Arutha so many years before. He had told Lysle about that meeting, catching sight of the Prince in the street as he sought to avoid being caught by Jocko Radburn’s secret police, and how later he had saved Arutha’s life from an assassin on the rooftops. That act had led to Jimmy the Hand, boy thief, becoming Squire James, and here, nearly fifty years later, James, Duke of Krondor.
James sighed. ‘I could have used you many times over the years, had I known I could trust you.’
Lysle laughed. ‘Jimmy, in the short time I’ve known you - what? three visits in forty years? - I’ve come to love you like the brother that you are, but trust? You’re joking.’
James laughed. ‘I suppose. Given the chance, you’d have had me hung for treason and you’d be Duke of Krondor.’
‘Probably not. I never dreamed of ambition like that.’
The two men heard another dull thump, and one of the guardsmen said, ‘That must be the abandoned warehouse in the mill district, down by the river. We stocked two hundred barrels in there.’
Since before the siege, James’s men had been moving through the city, leaving barrels of Quegan fire oil in strategic locations. ‘You should have seen the defense of Armengar,’ James told the guard. ‘That city was a defender’s delight and an attacker’s nightmare.’ He made a wavy motion with his hand, like a snake moving through grass. ‘No street longer than a bowshot without a curve in it. Each building with no windows at street level, heavy oak doors that could be bolted only from inside, and every rooftop flat.’
The soldiers smiled and nodded, as one said, ‘Archery platforms.’
James said, ‘Absolutely, so the defenders could move from rooftop to rooftop via long planks they pulled along after them, while those below were exposed to arrow fire every step of the way. When Murmandamus and his troops were in the city, Guy du Bas-Tyra fired twenty-five thousand barrels of naphtha -’