“See here,” one said as he ducked gratefully behind the thick wood. “How are we supposed to see whatever-it-is if we’re huddling behind here?”
He started to rise. Adrian clamped a hand on his shoulder and pulled him down again; sheer surprise helped him, since the Confederation nobleman couldn’t imagine that an Emerald would lay hands on him.
“You—”
BWAAAAMMP.
The sound was louder than thunder, louder than anything Adrian had ever heard, loud enough to stab pain into his ears. He’d been expecting it. The other men there had not. Esmond’s sword flashed out in a movement too fast to see except as a blur. One or two of the Confederate nobles threw themselves down with their hands over their ears; another turned and ran for the villa, tripping on a chair leg and lying sobbing and beating his hands against the ground. Most of them simply stood and stared at each other. Audsley, the ex-general, gathered himself, shook back his shoulders to settle his mantle, and walked around the edge of the barricade.
He stopped, staring at the forward part of the logs. Holes had been gouged into them; he ran his little finger into one, and pulled it back with a jerk.
“That’s hot,” he said. “What is it?”
“A ball of lead, like a sling-bullet, my lord,” Adrian said. “Hurled by the daemonic force of the ancient formula’s mixture. And that is a hundred feet from the bursting. If a man was closer . . .”
He smiled and spread his hands. Audsley and the others moved towards the place where the jar had rested. A knee-deep hole had been gouged in the soft black dirt, and bits of sod flung all over this corner of the garden. The front of the oak tree gleamed cream-white, the bark scarred and blasted away. Bits and pieces of the armor on the scarecrow stakes were scattered about; one helmet was embedded in the tree itself, three inches of the plume holder driven into the living wood. Audsley examined a mail shirt, putting a gingerly finger through a hole in the iron links.
“Well . . .” he said.
“Consider, my lord, catapults throwing dozens of such vessels into a tight formation of infantry,” Adrian urged. “Still more into cavalry.”
“Yes, I do see,” Audsley said. A grin stole across his lined, weathered face. “Redvers, I thought you were wasting our time, but you weren’t. Brilliant, man—brilliant!”
The nobles gathered around Wilder Redvers, slapping him on the back and laughing like men reprieved from death . . . which might well be what they were. Adrian turned, feeling the pressure of eyes on his back. Esmond was standing by the barricade, looking at the havoc the bomb had wrought and then at the sword still clenched in his hand.
* * *
“What exactly am I supposed to be doing out here?” Esmond asked, looking back over his shoulder. “You’ve got your infernal machines to tinker with, but I should be back in the city.”
“Don’t worry,” Adrian said. “She’s a lot safer with you gone than she is with you there.”
Esmond nodded gloomily. “The question remains.”
They were two days travel out of Vanbert’s outskirts, and an hour’s travel down a gravelled road that turned off the military highway west of the city. They’d been travelling on Redvers land that whole hour; past slave villages, wine presses, an alum mine, past fields where the yellow grain was mostly reaped and stooked, past pastures and orchards where green fruit swelled . . . and now they were turning into the paved laneway that led up to the villa of Wilder Redvers, one of many he owned. It was a handsome building, a simple rectangular block with a portico of pillars in front and the usual formal gardens behind; to the front was a stretch of close-cropped pasture dotted with trees, and the cypress-lined driveway.
“Two things,” Adrian said. “First, most of the higher-level staff here are probably Emeralds. I need you to deal with them.”
“Why? You’re just as much an Emerald as me.”
“But I’m not a victor of the Five Year Games, and I don’t look like Nethan the Great returned,” he said. “By the Goddess, brother, I think you’re blushing.”