Finally Ulric called his guards to remove the corpse, having first wiped his own sword blade across the bloody neck.
‘He angered me,’ he told the guards.
The Nadir chieftain left his tent and walked out under the stars. First the legendary axeman, then the warriors in silver. Now a bronze devil whose magic was greater than Nosta Khan. Why did he feel this chill in his soul? Dros was just another fortress. Had he not conquered a hundred such? Once past the gates of Delnoch, the Drenai empire was his. How could they hold against him? The answer was simple – they could not! One man – or devil – in bronze could not stem the Nadir tribes.
But what new surprises does this Dros hold? He asked himself.
He glanced up at the towering walls of Kania.
‘You will fall!’ he shouted. His voice echoed through the valley. ‘I shall bring you down!’
*
In the ghostly light of the pre-dawn, Gilad made his way from the mess canteen with a bowl of hot broth and a chunk of crusty black bread. Slowly he threaded his way through the ranks of men lining the walls until he came to his own position above the blocked postern tunnel. Togi was already there, sitting hunched and round-shouldered with his back to the wall. He nodded as Gilad squatted beside him, then spat on the whetstone in his calloused hand and continued to sharpen his long cavalry sabre.
‘Feels like rain,’ said Gilad.
‘Aye. It’ll slow their climbing.’
Togi never initiated a conversation, yet always found a point others would miss. Theirs was a strange friendship: Togi, a taciturn Black Rider of fifteen years’ standing and Gilad, a volunteer farmer from the Sentran Plain. Gilad could not remember quite how they had come into contact, for Togi’s face was scarcely memorable. He had just grown aware of the man. Men of the Legion had now been spread along the wall, joining other groups. No one had said why, but it was obvious to Gilad: these were the warrior elite, and they added steel to the defence wherever they were placed. Togi was a vicious warrior, who fought silently. No screams or war cries, merely a ruthless economy of movement and rare skill that left Nadir warriors dead or dismembered.
Togi did not know his own age, only that as a youth he had joined the Riders as a stable boy, and later had won his black cloak in the Sathuli wars. He had had a wife years back, but she had left him, taking their son with her. He had no idea where they had gone, and professed not to care overmuch. He had no friends that he spoke of and cared little for authority. Gilad had asked him once what he thought of the Legion officers.
‘They fight as well as the rest of us,’ he said. ‘But it is the only thing we will ever do together.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Gilad.
‘Nobility. You can fight or die for them, but you will never be one of them. To them we don’t exist as people.’
‘Druss is accepted,’ Gilad pointed out.
‘Aye. By me also,’ answered Togi, a fierce gleam in his dark eyes. ‘That’s a man, that one. But it alters nothing. Look at the silver men who fight under the albino – not one of them is from a lowly village. An Earl’s son leads them; nobles all of them.’
‘Then why do you fight for them, if you hate them so much’
‘Hate them? I don’t hate them. It’s just the way life is. I don’t hate anybody and they don’t hate me. We understand each other, that’s all. To me the officers are no different from the Nadir; they’re both different races. And I fight because that’s what I do -I’m a soldier.’
‘Did you always want to be a soldier?’
‘What else was there?’
Gilad spread his hands. ‘Anything you chose.’
‘I’d like to have been a king.’
‘What kind of king?’
‘A bloody tyrant!’ answered Togi. He winked but did not smile. He rarely smiled, and when he did it was the merest flicker of movement around the eyes.