The Heretic Kings Read Free Page B

built to impress. Were it ever to become deserted, the poets said, men of later generations might suppose that it had been reared up by the hands of giants.
    East of the city were the parade grounds and training fields of the Fimbrian army. Hundreds of acres had been cleared and flattened to provide a gaming board of war upon which the Electors might learn to move their pieces. A hill south of the fields had been artificially heightened to provide a vantage point for generals to regard the results of their tactics and strategy. Nothing that ever occurred in battle, it was said, had not already been replicated and studied upon the training fields of Fimbir. Such were the tales that the tercios of the conquerors had engendered over the years and across the continent.
    A cluster of men stood now on the vantage point of the hill overlooking the fields. Generals and junior officers alike, they were clad in black half-armour, their rank marked only by the scarlet sashes that some wore wrapped beneath their sword belts. A stone table that was a permanent fixture here stood in their midst, covered with maps and counters. Coprenius Kuln himself, the first Fimbrian emperor, had set it here eight hundred years previously.
    Horses were hobbled off to one side, to mount order-bearing couriers. The Fimbrians did not believe in cavalry, and this was the only use they had for the animals.
    On the training fields below, formations of men marched and counter-marched. Fifteen thousand of them, perhaps, their feet a deep thunder on the ground that had hardened with the first frosts. A cold early morning sunlight sparked off the glinting heads of their pikes and the barrels of shouldered arquebuses. They looked like the massed playthings of a god left lying on a nursery floor and come to sudden, beetling life.
    Two men strolled away from the cluster of officers on the hill and stood apart, looking down on the panoply and magnificence of the formations below. They were in middle age, of medium height, broad-shouldered, hollow-cheeked. They might have been brothers save that one wore a black hole where his left eye should have been, and the hair on that side of his head had become silver.
    “The courier, Caehir, died at his own hand last night,” the one-eyed man said.
    The other nodded. “His legs?”
    “They took them off at the knee; there was no saving them. The rot had gone too far, and he had no wish to live as a cripple.”
    “A good man. Pity to lose one’s life because of frostbite, no more.”
    “He did his duty. The message got through. By now, Jonakait and Merkus will be in the passes of the mountains also. We must hope they meet with better luck.”
    “Indeed. So the Five Kingdoms have split. We have two Pontiffs and a religious war in the offing. And all this while the Merduks howl at the gates of the west.”
    “The men at Ormann Dyke; they must be soldiers.”
    “Yes. That was a fight. The Torunnans are no mean warriors.”
    “But they are not Fimbrians.”
    “No, they are not Fimbrians. How many of our people are we to send to their aid?”
    “A grand tercio, no more. We must be cautious, and see how this division of the kingdoms goes.”
    The Fimbrian with the unmutilated face nodded fractionally. A grand tercio comprised some five thousand men: three thousand pike and two thousand arquebusiers, plus the assorted gunsmiths, armourers, cooks, muleteers, pioneers and staff officers who went with them. Perhaps six thousand in all.
    “Will that be enough to save the dyke?”
    “Possibly. But our priority is not so much to save Ormann Dyke as to establish a military presence in Torunna, remember.”
    “I find I am in danger of thinking like a general instead of a politician, Briscus.”
    The one-eyed man named Briscus grinned, showing a range of teeth with smashed gaps between them. “Kyriel, you are an old soldier who sniffs powder-smoke in the wind. I am the same. For the first time in living memory our people will