“All right,” he said at last, standing in front of them with his left hand resting on his hilt and the cloak thrown back from his shoulder. “My name is Esmond Gellert.”
A slight murmur. He noted it without the pleasure it might have brought him a few months ago. He’d always been proud of the fame he’d won as a competitor in the Pan-Emerald Games—if not for undying fame, why would men go through the rigors of the palaestra? Now it was like his appearance, something he noted with cold objectivity, a tool to be used. And some of them will have heard about the war on the mainland, too.
“You know—or you should, if you’re paying any attention to anything besides booze, dice and pussy—that there’s war coming. Probably with the Confeds.” Another low murmur. “I’ve fought them myself, not too long ago; so have these men with me.” He indicated his own followers with a toss of his head. “They’re tough, yes, but they’re not ten feet tall, and they bleed as red as any man when you stick ’em. The King wants this unit ready to fight, and by the Gods, it will be—or we’ll all die trying.”
He nodded at the last murmur. No use saying anything more; they’d be waiting to see if he was real, or all mouth.
“For starters, we’re going on a little route march. Fall out in campaign order in twenty minutes. Dismissed!”
* * *
“Faugh, this stinks,” Enri Lowisson said.
“Think of it as the smell of money,” Adrian said, chuckling with delight.
The cave was halfway up the side of Gunnung Daberville, the main volcanic peak that loomed over the port of Chalice. From the entrance you could see down past jungle and orchard to the city itself, the bastioned wall, the near-circle of the drowned caldera that made up the harbor, and over miles of sail-speckled water beyond. It was what lay within that interested him, however, down into the depths of the fumarole that twisted like a frozen intestine into the depths of the mountain.
Thirty feet overhead the ceiling of the cavern was not of the same pockmarked gray-green rock as the rest of the cave. It was brown instead, lumpy . . . and it moved as the chitterwings nesting there for the day stirred uneasily at the light and heat of the party’s torches. A soft pattering left gloppy white stains on the floor, adding to a layer that was probably four feet deep at least. That was the source of the rancid, ammonia-harsh stink that had several of the party breathing through pieces of their tunics.
“The stuff we need, the saltpeter, will be concentrated in the lower levels of this,” he said, kicking at the hard dried surface of the chitterwing dung that covered the ground. “We’ll dig it out, cart it down lower, then leach out the saltpeter in a system of trays and sluices.”
“That will cost,” Enri warned.
He looked backward, and Adrian nodded. The way down was near-as-no-matter roadless; if it had been easier, farmers would have come to dig the dung out for fertilizer, as they had with several caves lower down. The chitterwings went out in huge flocks at night, to feed at sea on tiny phosphorescent fish. At dawn they returned, to sleep, and to breed and nest in season—most of the females had tiny young clinging to their belly fur with miniature claws right now.
“It’ll be worth it; there’s more here than we’ll need in a generation.” He looked downslope as well, and suddenly a tracery of drawings was overlaid on it.
so, Center said. and so.
Adrian started and came back to himself, conscious of the curious stares Enri and his men were giving him.
“There’s a way to make it easier,” he said. “See how this ridge curves away down to the foothills?”
“Building a road?” Enri said. He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s practical.”
“No, what we’ll do is build a trackway,” Adrian said. The words tumbled over themselves at the series of silent clicks just behind his eyes; suddenly Center’s drawing made sense. In fact the principle . . . Why haven’t we thought of this before? he wondered. It would make so much easier.