Antiagon Fire

52

By seventh glass on Solayi morning, Quaeryt, first company and the imagers, and the three regiments Skarpa had selected from Southern Army were formed up some two hundred yards north of the gray stone wall that separated Kephria from Bovaria. The air was chill, the sky a hazy gray. To the right, and nearest to the River Laar, were Quaeryt and the imagers, with first company drawn up close behind them. In the center of the rutted road was Fifteenth Regiment, with the mounted Sixth Regiment behind them, and Twenty-sixth Regiment farther back.

Skarpa was mounted beside Quaeryt with a squad from Third Regiment to his left and slightly behind him. The remaining three regiments from Southern Army and Nineteenth Regiment were standing by, but on the outskirts of Geusyn.

“There’s still no one on the walls,” said Skarpa. “And no clamoring or alarms from the south.”

“They may not be worried. They can’t see cannon or siege engines.” They may not even know that we’ve used imagers to remove walls. And even if they’ve heard stories, most people wouldn’t believe them.

“Proceed, Commander,” ordered Skarpa, nodding as he issued the order.

“Undercaptain Khalis! Clear the underbrush!” ordered Quaeryt.

“Yes, sir!” The young undercaptain concentrated. A swathe of underbrush more than a hundred yards wide and fifty deep vanished. Instantly, a thin white mist appeared above the ground where the bushes had been.

“Undercaptain Threkhyl! Forward!”

“Sir!”

“Remove the first section of wall.”

“Yes, sir.”

Barely had the acknowledgment left the undercaptain’s mouth when a white flash obscured the gray stone barrier for an instant. When Quaeryt could see, an opening a hundred yards wide, from the ground up, had appeared in the stone. Beyond the middle of the opening was a stretch of gray stone pavement that looked to extend hundreds of yards south, almost to the edge of the harbor.

Quaeryt glanced to Threkhyl, who swayed slightly in his saddle. “Drink some watered lager! Now!”

His eyes went back to the opening in the wall. Beyond where the stone wall had stood was a welter of huts and hovels, through which wound twisted paths. The newly created and paved road had cut through a number of those dwellings, and dust swirled up through the chill morning air, made even colder by the imaging. Several women were screaming … and people were scrambling out of the ramshackle dwellings and hurrying southward toward the more solid structures around the harbor.

Quaeryt hadn’t known what to expect, but he hadn’t anticipated what he saw.

But you should have known! Aliaro wouldn’t have built the wall right beside good houses. On the other hand, there was no sign of a nearby barracks or post, unless the wall sentries or guards were based in a modest gray stone building set against the shore wall just before the corner where it turned out into the waters of the River Laar.

A horn blared, and the troopers of Fifteenth Regiment moved forward at a trot, blades and bucklers at the ready. Not a single Antiagon armsman moved forward to meet the advancing Telaryn troopers, but the scattered screams grew more numerous as the troopers moved down the stone-paved road through the scattered dwellings and the remaining parts of some huts toward the center of the port town.

“Forward,” ordered Skarpa.

“First company! Forward!” repeated Zhelan.

“Imagers! On me!” added Quaeryt.

Skarpa was careful to set the pace so that Fifteenth Regiment continued in advance of him and first company, although that caution seemed scarcely necessary as the inhabitants of the run-down taudis fled willy-nilly.

In less than a quint the Telaryn forces reached the north end of the harbor, which effectively began with the stone wall that extended out into the river. A handful of men in maroon uniforms fled from the gray stone building at the corner of the wall. One ran for the river and jumped into the water. The others began to run toward the center of the town.

“Not exactly brave defenders,” noted Skarpa.

“Unless there’s a garrison on the south side of Kephria, there may not be any at all,” replied Quaeryt, surveying the north end of the harbor.

Against the south side of the river wall was a stone pier, at which were moored several small craft. One of them was filled with water and resting on the river mud. The shoreline angled eastward downstream of the river wall, forming the northern side of the small harbor, but there was no river wall or seawall on the northern end, just a muddy flat stretching southeast, and flanked by a boulevard paved with uneven and cracked stones on which Quaeryt certainly would not have wished to drive a wagon.

“Company halt!” Quaeryt ordered, since Fifteenth Regiment had also halted.

Several of the buildings bordering the northeast side of harbor were little more than roofless charred structures whose walls had weathered into featureless gray.

Not even rebuilt from the fires set by Kharst’s imagers?

Farther south were dwellings and shops that had seen better days, and then the remaining intact warehouses, as well as a row of shops, a chandlery, and possibly an inn or two.

A courier galloped toward Skarpa, reining up. “Sir, Subcommander Meurn requests permission to continue.”

“Have him take the city. No one is to be harmed unless they attack or offer resistance.”

“Take the city. Harm no one unless they attack or resist. Yes, sir.” The squad leader nodded, then turned his mount.

Quaeryt watched for a moment as the foot troopers moved forward, followed by Dulaek’s mounted, and then by Fhaasn’s foot.

“Did you expect this?” asked Skarpa.

“I didn’t think there would be that many defenders. I told you that. I didn’t expect that there wouldn’t be any … or so few as to amount to none.” Quaeryt paused, then added, “The Antiagons have scarcely been using Kephria as a port. That’s what it looks like, anyway.”

“Waste of a good harbor.” The submarshal shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense.”

“In a way, it does.” Quaeryt readjusted his visor cap. Even in the chill of a southern winter, he tended to sweat where the edges of the cap met his head. “The autarchs wanted to keep Bovarian traders and trade out of Kephria. I’m guessing about that, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“But why?”

“Most ships that likely once ported here were more interested in trading with southern Bovaria. I’d guess the Bovarians built the Great Canal to take advantage of that. Aliaro’s father was probably afraid that the Bovarians would take over Kephria, and he didn’t want more Bovarians here. So he built the wall to keep them out. The Bovarians couldn’t afford a war, or didn’t want to send an army that far from Variana. So they built Ephra, and most ships stopped porting here because they couldn’t pick up Bovarian cargoes.”

“He put up that huge wall to stop traders? How could he have known that Bovaria wouldn’t try to tear it down?”

“He didn’t. I’d wager that a regiment was probably posted here for at least several years. Long enough to discourage the Bovarians from bringing an army down here.”

Skarpa shook his head.

A glass later, another messenger, this one from Dulaek, reported that the port, such as it was, had been secured and that mounted squads from his fourth battalion were patrolling the streets. Shortly, thereafter, Meurn reported that the fort beside the main pier had surrendered.

“We might as well ride down there and see what the fort is like,” suggested Skarpa.

Only a handful of men were out, and all of them were graybeards or older, standing on porches or looking from open windows, watching as if they could not believe they were seeing the green uniforms of Telaryn riding through Kephria.

From a closer perspective, under the high thin overcast, Kephria looked even more tired than it had from a distance, everything seeming even grayer and worn. The southernmost pier, the main pier, looked to be the best, constructed of sold gray stone and extending close to five hundred yards out into the river … or the Gulf, since there wasn’t a clear demarcation of where one began and the other ended. Not a single craft was moored there, but Quaeryt could see several vessels under sail heading southwest, either out along the Gulf to the open sea or to Liantiago. Neither of the two nearest vessels, from their rigging, looked to be warships.

He reined up and studied the pier. The gray stone was worn, chipped, and stained, clearly weathered and old. The bollards were not only weathered, but the wood appeared wormy and rotten in places. The mooring spaces closer to the shore looked not to have been used in some time, and when Quaeryt looked more closely at the water, he could see why. The water there was less than a yard deep, suggesting that the inner part of the harbor had been silting up for years, if not decades.

Then he turned his attention to the fort, a square stone structure constructed on a raised knoll just south of the main pier. The walls formed three sides of a rectangle, with a small building with a slate roof comprising the rear east wall. The wall facing the river and the Gulf was only some twenty yards long. He couldn’t see how many cannon ports there might be, but he doubted there were more than half a score.

“I’m going to ride out on the pier for a moment,” he told Skarpa.

“Make it quick. You still could be a target.”

Quaeryt did strengthen his shields before he eased the mare down the center of the pier. He only rode out far enough to see the gun ports. At first he thought there were ten, but then he realized that seven of those appeared to be boarded up on the inside, although he wouldn’t have been able to tell that if he’d been much farther away. Shaking his head, he turned the mare and rode back to rejoin Skarpa.

“What did you see?”

“From a distance, there are ten ports. Seven are blocked.”

“A sham. Like everything else here.”

“It might not have been once.”

“They just fired at Bovarian ships to keep the Bovarians thinking that they had a large garrison here,” said Skarpa.

“Where are their real troopers?” asked Zhelan.

“They have to have some. We ran into a regiment’s worth of them on the way up the Aluse,” replied Skarpa. “Khaern said they had a regiment northeast of Hassyl.”

“That would make sense. That’s near the border with Telaryn,” said Quaeryt. “Aliaro might be relying on those Bovarian High Holders we chased into Antiago as protection here.”

“But why wouldn’t they have some troopers here?” asked Zhelan. “They built the wall.”

“Troopers cost golds. Antiago isn’t that rich a land.” Quaeryt was surmising from what he’d seen years earlier and from what he’d read. “The Lohan Hills are inhospitable and the southern coast is almost a high rocky desert. The area around Hassyl is fertile, and so are at least some of the lands from east of Suemyran to Liantiago. Most of the wealth comes from the sea, with their traders.”

“They’ll have troopers and Antiagon Fire when we near Suemyran,” predicted Skarpa.

“Not too much nearer, I’d wager,” replied Quaeryt. “Aliaro seems to have neglected this part of the north.”

“Kephria, anyway,” said Skarpa. “Once we’ve got everything settled here, we’ll need to talk to the people before we go any farther.”

Quaeryt couldn’t disagree with that.