“Either, both,” Kip said.
“The city might have made tunnels. If you took your time—and I mean years—you can dig and pump out the water and seal the tunnels with luxin and support them appropriately,” Ben-hadad said. “I mean, you’d be constantly fighting the roots and leaks in the wood and luxin. But it’s possible. The city has been here a long, long time. But to do it and then maintain it would require a permanent corps of drafters. Drafters of average ability? I’d say you’d need thirty or forty, which is expensive and very hard to keep secret. You can hide what one or five drafters do, but when you have forty, people wonder, people gossip, and spies find out.”
Ferkudi said, “Dúnbheo doesn’t have forty drafters. Thirty-eight, tops, in the whole city, and surely most of those would be tasked with defense, right?”
As far as Kip knew, Ferkudi didn’t have any ties to Dúnbheo, nor did he see the scouts’ reports.
“Why do you say that?” Cruxer asked before Kip could.
“Oh,” Ferkudi said, finger lodged up his nose. “You just cross-reference all the activation lists of the lords in the surrounding areas with lists of the Freeing, the Cwn y Wawr, and the Ghosts, take out those we know are dead, and those we guess have joined the White King. That’s why it’s fuzzy. We don’t how many joined the pagans, so we have an upper bound of around sixty-one, but not a lower bound. There’s a bit of unknown with how many drafters in the last ten years have been reported dead before their Freeing who might actually be alive—those records are weak, and don’t show place of birth. Then Satrap Willow Bough came through here three months ago and offered protection and great pay to any drafters who joined him immediately, so I’m also assuming that any refugee drafter would have joined up with him at that point, what with an army on the way to besiege Dúnbheo. But that’s why the number’s a guess. Irritating.” He flicked a booger into the fire. “What?”
They still hadn’t gotten used to how Ferkudi did that every once in a while.
And usually, they couldn’t harness those little moments of genius for things that mattered more than food and boogers.
“So, no escape routes from the inside out,” Kip said. “Outside in seems even more improbable. It would cost too many drafters to make it as quickly as you would want, especially to seize this city. Am I right?”
“It holds great symbolic and religious value to pagans,” Tisis said. “But still… no, I don’t think the White King would think dedicating so many sappers to this was worth it. One of his Lords of the Air might feel differently.”
The White King had split his armies, giving control of them to various commanders he called Lords of the Air. The Mighty thought the one known as Amrit Kamal was in charge of these besiegers, but their intelligence on that wasn’t good. The Lords of the Air would do anything for a victory; they were replaced immediately if they failed.
“Is there any way that any of you can see that we might buy victory without tomorrow’s battle?” Kip asked.
They all scowled at the map for a while.
Then Ben-hadad said, “If we simply go around the city and attack the besiegers’ own supply lines, we might starve out their siege without a fight.”
“Besiege the besiegers?” Conn Arthur said. “But if it takes more than a couple weeks, the White King can bring down part of his forces and besiege us in turn, in which case we lose every advantage we’ve built up to this point.”
“That would weaken the White King’s siege at Green Haven,” Tisis pointed out. “If Satrap Willow Bough used the opportunity to attack—”
“If,” Winsen said.
He was right. Audacity wasn’t the satrap’s strong suit. Kip couldn’t trust him to see and take advantage of what might be only a small opportunity. Nor did he want to put his raiders through setting and undergoing a siege at the same time; it was totally the opposite of what they’d done before.
“If we attacked the Blood Robes briefly and let their messengers through, they might be recalled, again without a fight,” Big Leo said.
“I like this thinking,” Kip said.
“There’s a problem with that,” Tisis said. “If you free the city in a clever way where the Blood Robes simply leave, that’s wonderful, and we’ll have done a good thing. But we’ll get no credit for it. It will just seem like Dúnbheo’s good fortune. We’ll get no new recruits, no funding, and no food except what we take at the point of the spear. You take food then, and they’ll hate us instead.”
She was right. Dammit.
They all chewed on the injustice of that, but no one disputed it was what would probably happen, not even Antonius.
“Curious world, isn’t it?” Kip said. “Seeing your foes driven away inspires more gratitude than cunningly having others draw those same men away. The charging in is all Gavin Guile, the cunning is Andross Guile. One of them is loved, and the other hated. Is that because men are so shortsighted or because we long to see those who hurt us be hurt themselves?”
“Some more one, some more the other, I’d hazard,” Ferkudi said. He had trouble identifying rhetorical questions.
“Also, Andross Guile is an asshole,” Big Leo said.
There is that. Kip grinned grimly. “So I have to let more men die so that their friends will be grateful enough to replenish my ranks of the dead and continue to support us and keep the rest of us alive. In other words, I have to be cunning enough to not be cunning.”
“The most important part of seeking victory is defining it first,” Tisis said.
“Shit,” Kip said. “And I had this really brilliant idea about how to get around the Blood Robes’ partial river blockade, too.”
“I’m sure you did, dear,” Tisis said.
“You know how they’ve set up the weirs to block the city from getting any fish?” Kip said.
“Are we going to use this idea?” Tisis asked gently.
“No,” he grumbled.
“Mmm,” she said. “We wait at your command, my lord. Despite the hour.”
“I’m mean, it was an ingenious idea,” Kip said. “You’d all be very impressed.”
Cruxer theatrically stifled a yawn. As if at a signal, everyone else stretched and rubbed their eyes. Even Conn Arthur blinked sleepily.
“I hate you guys,” Kip said. He waved his hand, and the battle order appeared on the map. “Study your positions, then go. Sleep fast. Conn Arthur, a word.” It was almost scary how well they worked together now. His commanders knew exactly what they needed to do and how and when.
In turn, he gave them a huge amount of autonomy. He’d even taken to rotating commanders over various elements, partly so that each understood the others’ duties and problems and speed, and partly so that the army wouldn’t splinter into factions. The common soldiers certainly had favorite commanders, but they trusted all of them.
They all soon left, except for Conn Arthur and Tisis, who withdrew subtly.
“Conn Arthur, we need to have that talk.”
“Which talk, my lord?”
“The one neither of us wants to have.”
The muscles in Conn Arthur’s jaw clenched.
Kip had had the other sections of the map brought in and assembled. He’d had to learn to get over his reflexive avoidance of inconveniencing his servants and subordinates. If someone needed to be wakened so Kip could think, even if it was only once in a hundred times that he came up with a stratagem or noticed an error in his plans, that one time in a hundred was worth waking them.