The general shook his head. “Not now, Captain. Not with all this nonsense going on. I want a battalion here, spaced out around this mob. I want crossbowmen stationed on the slopes of the Teeth and on some of those buttes. You’ll have to scale some of them and let rope ladders down. No threats, mind, Tharius Don doesn’t want this flock of nothings injured. Nonetheless, we won’t take chances,” and he grinned his predator’s smile, hard as iron, his gray, pitted skin twitching as though insects were crawling on it.
Only when all that business was attended to did he go on out onto the plain and to the tent his aides had set up at the foot of one of the buttes, protected from the wind. Evening was drawing down, and the cookfires were alight. They bloomed around him like stars, many nearby, fewer farther away, only a scatter at the far horizon and beyond, showing where the stragglers were.
A large fire marked the hill where Pamra Don’s tent stood. He looked at it for a time, scornfully, then sent word to the commander of the troop guarding her. He wanted the woman brought to him tonight. As soon as he had eaten.
He had not finished when they brought her, carrying the child. He pointed with his chin at a chair across the tent, far from the fire. The soldiers escorted her there and stood at either side, calm and alert. General Jondrigar stared at her over his wine cup, waiting for her to say something. Prisoners always said something, started pleading sometimes, or offering themselves. Pamra Don said nothing. The child stared at him, but Pamra was not even looking at him but at something else in the room. The general swung his head to follow her line of vision. Nothing. A bow hung on the tent pole. His spare helmet. His spare set of fishskin armor, with the wooden plates. She wasn’t looking at those, surely. Nodding in that way. Seeming to murmur without actually making a sound. He went on chewing, suddenly uncomfortable.
“You can go,” he muttered to the soldiers. “Wait outside.” For some reason he did not want them witness to this . . . this, whatever this was. Not rape. Even without Tharius Don’s command, he would not have done that where anyone could see or hear him. Not good for discipline. When the men had gone, she still did not seem to see him.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked her at last.
She turned toward him eyes that were opaque, almost blind. They cleared, very gradually, and she focused upon him. “I . . . they said you were General Jondrigar.”
“Do you know what I am?”
“You … no. I don’t know.”
He rose to walk toward her, leaning forward a little, thrusting his face into hers. “I am Lees Obol’s right arm, his protection, leader of his armies. …”
Her face lit up as though by fire. She leaned forward, across the child, to take him by the shoulders, and by surprise. He could not remember a woman ever having touched him willingly. Aunt Firrabel, of course, but only she. And now this one. Where she touched him burned a little, as though he were pressed against a warm stove, and he could not take his eyes from hers.
“General Jondrigar,” she said, “the Protector of Man has need of you. Lees Obol has need of you.”
Of all the things she might have said, only this one could have been guaranteed to draw in his whole attention, focused as by a burning glass upon a radiant point. He lived for nothing but to meet the Protector’s needs. Who could tell him what those needs were better than his own eyes, his own ears? Still, her eyes burned into his own with a supernatural glow. Perhaps some messenger had conveyed something to her. Perhaps the soul of Lees Obol had spoken to her.
“What need?” he gurgled, barely able to speak. “What need has the Protector?”
“The Protector has been misled by evil men,” she said, fulfilling all his fears and hopes at once. Had he not suspected plots against the Protector? Had he not prayed to forestall them all? “They have told him that the fliers are more important than men, have told him some men are more important than others. They have made his great title a trivial thing.”