Heat radiated from the inferno behind them, but the fire sucked air through the tunnel rather than pushing smoke into it. Bianca sayed at the rear keeping the troops nearest her from rushing forward and causing a crush. Luckily those deeper in the tunnel weren't aware that she had lit their exit on fire. If the company met organized resistance at the other end they would be trapped like rats in a hole and wiped out to the man.

The first waves came out of the tunnel in a rush, forming quickly into a wedge under the shouts and kicks of the file leaders. They spread out at a trot clambering over the mine workings and shoving overturned carts and unused bracing timbers into an improvised fortification. Fortunately the enemy's fanatical attack on the city was working in their favor and no enemy troops opposed their exit. Even with things going as well as they could it was nearly a half hour before Bianca and the rear elements emerged from the old aqueduct, soot stained and exhausted. Whatever horses and baggage they had salvaged, a dozen beasts and one of the small cannon. We would need to resupply mounts, food and almost everything very soon.

That assumed they were alive to resupply of course.

Bianca climbed up onto the embankment beside the captain. Her scouts were already assembled, leading a few of the precious horses. The Captain was peering southward with a brass bound spy glass, though with night falling and the smoke from the city and the pyre it was difficult to see too much.

"They are coming," the Captain declared, "damn it."

"Sir?" Bianca asked. The Captain handed her the glass. She peered through to see the flagging warhorss hammering across the burning plain, apparently having broken contact with the enemy.

"Where are the dwarves?" Bianca asked, but she saw them, thrown across saddles burned and beaten.

"Calli's heart?! So few?" she demanded.

"Get mounted, we are going to have to find our way out of here before they realise we are gone."

“This is the most hare brained scheme I’ve ever been a part of,” Bianca complained, brushing irritably at the cloud of mosquitos that seemed to manifest wherever she went. Torm cast her a sidelong look. He seemed untroubled by the mosquitos, while this immunity was annoying, Bianca found that the image of mosquitos trying to beat their beaks straight on tiny anvils after trying to bite through his plate mate was strangely cheery.

“You wen’t through the tunnel at Palona,” he pointed out.

“Yes but…”

“And set that tannery on fire to stink the garrison out of Soledai.”

“I suppose…”

“And didn’t you deliberately wreck that merchant ship so you could…”
“Well I..”
“And weren’t you one of those that took that hot air balloon over that cathedral when..”

“Yes yes, fine,” Bianca conceded, crossing her arms defensively and trying not to sulk. A moment passed but she was unable to control herself.

“It is still a pretty hare brained scheme,” she added petulantly. Torm unslung a dwarven watchglass from his saddle and extended it with a series of clicks.

“Well, I didn’t say you were wrong,” he agreed. The night was black as pitch, there was no moon and scudding cloud obscured most of the stars. Even so, they could make out the silver line of the Wadi Ira river a mile and a half away. At this time of year it was nearly a mile wide, and that was still only a third what it would be after the monsoon rains began. That could be any moment of course and if the Company of the Silver Swords was still on this side of the river when that happened, they were all going to die.

“Nice of them to carry torches,” Torm observed, nodding towards the river. The soldiers of the Priestess-Queen were patrolling the banks, their positions clearly visible as clusters of bobbing flames. Fucking amatuers, Bianca thought her lip curling up in a sneer. She would have whipped any of her scouts that was damn fool enough to suggest patrolling at night while carrying a torch. Not only would the flame trumpet your position for miles around, but the bright light would burn your night vision away till you were half blind. She would have whipped them, then found them some other line of work, preferably far away from her.

“Small mercies and all,” Bianca observed, leaning forward on her saddlebow. There were hundreds of torches, ranged along the dark bank of the river for miles in both directions. There must have been a thousand of them out there, every one of them filled with a fanatical desire to stop the Silver Sword from crossing the river. A larger cluster of flames was centered around a large palisaded fort, its ramparts dark against campfires. It looked like a flaming jewel on a string of beads, a rather more romantic description than the reality of slit latrines and horse pickets, unwashed flesh and the reek of sacrificial fires.

It had been a long retreat from Palona. Nearly three months of endless retreats, desperate delaying actions, and occasional half routs when the crafty enemy got the better of them. Of the thousand men who had broken out of the siege, there were now just over four hundred survivors. There were another hundred or so survivors of other mercenary groups who had been more or less informally joined to the company, folded in as their own numbers fell to death and desertion. They were exhausted, tired, hungry, and only pushing on because the Priestess-Queen offered no quarter beyond a knife over the sacrificial altar. Bianca took a wine skin from her saddle and unstoppered it. She lifted it to her lips and swallowed half the remaining volume. The wine was sour and tasted of leather and vinegar.

“You still have wine?” Torm asked in obvious shock. He had thought no one had wine, had thought no one had water for that matter, given the dry country and lack of chance to forage. Bianca handed the flask to Torm without a word and the knight tipped it upward and drained it. His face twisted at the taste but he chose not to comment. There were many things more unsatisfactory than the wine. Bianca twisted in the saddle and looked back over the party. Twenty one knights sat on their exhausted and saddle sore mounts, the great destriers looking haggard and half starved. The men didn’t look much better, their eyes hooded in the dark, their faces gaunt with weeks of eating whatever could be scavenged, meals and sleep taken, as often as not, in the saddle. Most of the Silver Sword were infantry, and those footsore bastards complained constantly that the cavalry got to ride around while they tramped over half creation. Their sore feet might make them complain, but the cavalry were called to the charge at all hours, harrying and harassing the enemy so the infantry could break away to reach the next ridge or get across the next stream. Bianca couldn’t see the infantry but she knew they were out there, crouching in the dry water courses and waiting for the signal to move out. Speaking of which… she drew the dwarven chronometer from her shirt by it’s leather cord and opened it. Nearly time. As if summoned by the thought, a figure on a boney nag emerged from the darkness at the base of the bald. Black Ryann, one of the company’s two wizards, trotted up. He was a handsome man in an irritatingly suave way, normally his expression was one of amused arrogance but tonight it was set with a strain that made him seem half a skull.

“Ready?” the wizard asked without preamble. Torm nodded, and Black Ryann lifted his hands and said something in a word that sounded like the way salt water burned your throat when you were drowning. The air seemed to tremble then go still. Ryann seemed to shrivel, almost falling from the saddle. Bianca drew her sword silently.

“Go.”

Marduk lifted his tunic and pissed on the grass, sighing with relief as the pressure of an evening’s wine on his bladder eased. He idly scratched himself as he did so, staring out into the darkness. He hated it here, he had hated it almost everywhere the Blessed Queen had sent him. Dusty garrisons overseeing sullen peasants, boring sieges where the lice seemed to swarm like locusts, the occasional battle where he did his best to keep his head down and avoid shitting himself. Hunger, privation, and dust, these were the sacrifices he bore for the Blessed Queen, the cost for his admittance into one of the Twenty Three Lesser Heavens. He shook the last few drops free and dropped his tunic, reaching into his satchel for the pouch of betelnut that soothed his nerves even as it destroyed his teeth. His hand froze half way to his lips as he saw something that his mind couldn’t quite comprehend. There were horsemen coming out of the long grass, rushing silently towards him. Not quietly. Literally silently. His eyes told him that a score of horsemen were charging towards him, but without the pound of hooves and the shouts of the riders, his mind refused to admit that this was real. It wasn’t until they were less then twenty feet away that he finally managed to recover from his bemusement. He dropped his betlenut and opened his mouth to scream, before he could utter a sound he was being borne forward, spitted on the end of a lance that had punched silently into his chest.

The cavalry were through the open gate before the alarm was raised. They swept silently in, splitting left and right by detachment. Six of Torm’s men leaped from their saddles securing the gate. The rest drove on into camp, silently crashing into the knots of men spilling from tents of painted canvas. Bianca reigned in her horse and leaped from her own saddle. She pulled a lantern from her saddlebag and sprinted up a set of stairs to the fighting platform on the inside of the palisade, taking the steps three at a time. A bleary eyed soldier stumbled upright and Bianca’s sword licked out, running him through. She twisted and kicked the dying man, allowing gravity to drag him off her blade and tumble into the gateway below with a thud. Reaching the top she waved the lantern vigorously. For a long moment nothing happened, then she saw an answering flash of light as the infantry companies began to advance at the trot. Sound crashed into existence behind her as the bubble of magical silence Black Ryann had summoned failed. Screams and alarms rang out, seeming impossible loud after the prolonged arcane silence. She could see the infantry now, coming at a jog, shields slung and swords drawn in three columns, the central one was of shorter stockier figures, dwarves with heavy mail and two handed axes. Bianca sucked in breath as the infantry reached the wall, the first column went through to support Torm and his men in subduing the fort, the second column formed a defensive box around the gate, while the dwarves set to work with their axes. They began to chop at the base of the wall with the enthusiasm of expert lumberjacks They began to rip down the wall, breaking it into six foot sections and spreading out in both directions.

“Bianca!” She whirled to see Lieutenant Gantz standing within the gate, his helmet under his arm. Judging by the sounds, resistance in the fort was well and truly collapsing, the wave of infantry turning the tide that Torm’s men had held back.

“There are no boats!” he called. Bianca cursed and ran down the stairs. The Priestess-Queen had given orders that all boats on the Wadi Ira were to be seized to prevent the mercenaries who had defied her rule from escaping her domain. For the most part they had been burned, the Queen’s soldiers liked to burn things, but the Captain had assumed there would be at least a few boats in the fort. She sprang to Gantz' side and they moved through the chaos of the fort. The dead were everywhere, bodies sprawled where lances or sword had laid them low. Here and there piles of supplies had been gathered, sometimes into improvised barricades, many of which were smashed and scattered. Untended fires smouldered and wounded men whimpered until their hurts took them or someone gave them a quick soldiers mercy.

“Fuck,” Bianca remarked as they reached the river bank. Two dwarves were already there guiding three mules that were piled high with rope of every kind, yard after yard of it hung in huge coils. The sound of fighting in the fort had died away, but the alarm had been raised and the men who had been patrolling the bank were beginning to draw in, slowly crystalizing around them.

“Get me some light line, the lighter the better,” Bianca called. Without asking for clarification one of the dwarves produced a coil of thin rope, the sort of thing that might be used to weave a net. Bianca made a loop and tied it around her waist as she kicked off her boots and tossed her weapons into a pile.

“Keep it coming,” she instructed, then dived into the Wadi Ira and began to swim.

Bianca’s arms and legs burned. Stoke, stroke. Her lungs burned and her limbs trembled.

Stroke, stroke, stroke.

There was no way to tell how far she had come, the world was nothing but water as far as she could see.

Stroke, stroke.

The weight around her waist was intolerable, she had no idea how much rope she was towing, but it grew heavier and heavier.

Stoke, stroke, stroke.

If she failed, and fail she must, she knew she must drown, doomed to dangle dead from the end of a rope like fishbait.

Stroke, stroke, stroke.

What arrogance had possessed her to try this, of all the hare brained schemes she had been a part of, she was going to drown herself in the middle of a river while the whole company died defending a half destroyed fort. Stroke, stroke. Maybe she should… her chin struck a rock and stars exploded across her vision. Bianca went under and sucked in a lungful of water as she tried to scream. Her feet went down and to her shock found mud beneath them. She thrust herself upright half screamed half vomited, muddy water pouring off her. Legs, exhausted from a swim of over a mile, refused to hold her and she fell face first into the shallows again. The terrible idea occurred that she might drown in the shallows within feet of the shore. Groaning she dragged herself forward, pulling herself hand over hand up over the mud until she lay gasping on the beach.

“Keep moving… that is the key…” she told herself, then rolled onto all fours and crawled up the beach until she reached the thick wall of twisted trees which marked the high water point. Untying the knot around her waist was impossible, so she drew a knife from her belt and cut it free. Then, with an enormous effort she tied the rope around the tree. Soaked and shivering, she drew her scouts lucifer from a leather pouch around her neck. Exactly how the lucifer worked she didn’t know, it was some kind of alchemical device, but she dutifully crunched it’s glass bulb into a pile of leaf litter. There was a stink of chemicals and then a flash of light as the trash caught fire. For a long moment nothing happened and Bianca began to fear that the the Company had been driven from the fort and annihilated. Then the rope went taut, the line lifting out of the water as it took up the strain. In her mind’s eye Bianca could see the company lifting lengths of palisade into the water, the enemies very walls providing improvised rafts, see men pouring on board and beginning to pull themselves along the line, hand over hand. Would they be able to get everyone across before the surprised enemy managed to rally and counter attack? Well, Bianca figured she could just lay here until she found out.

Torm chopped into the neck of a zealot, the acolyte's wild eyed stare and wide smile stricken upon his face as his head flew onto the stones. The knight didn't slow or retreat, in fact stepping forward to run the next poor sod through. It was a strange thing, Torm thought to himself in the back of his mind, as he blocked the swing of a falchion and riposted. You could tell a true believer from a man driven to join by circumstance as they died. There was a look in their eyes that showed they were ready to be embraced by the divine, or they still had ties to this life.

Another corpse fell, wet with blood. Sir Christoph and Heraculus guarded his flanks as the knights and dwarves waded into the disorganized masses, more to distract the priest queen's stunned forces than any real hope of victory. Behind them, the silver swords and what dwarves could be spared shoved palisade walls down and broke them into manageable sections. The word had come up the line Bianca had gone in the drink, either thrown or jumped in herself, he didn't know.

A horn sounded in the distance, followed by another. A third, louder one rang behind them on the northern beach of the river. Their time was running perilously short, but Torm felt the hair on his neck stand on end, and he knew magic was being worked. He blocked an axe aimed at his skull, and as his eyes were cast skyward, the stars were obscured to the north. He didn't know what was happening, but he could hear the wind howling. A hand grabbed his shoulder, and he raised his free arm in a guard as a voice shouted in his ear. It was Aljazrad the Mamluk.

"The Captain orders retreat, Lieutenant!" He cried over the din in his heavy accent.

They should have been on their steeds, but the Captain had ordered the dismount so they did not get left behind. The destriers would be the most complicated river crossing, but Torm would soon realize he needn't have worried. At least not on the horses. The dwarves had concocted a cunning and quick solution, carving out the extra palisade logs to trap air and slipping them between the horse's legs front to tail, and tethering the steeds to the rafts so they could swim with added buoyancy. Not an ingenious device, for the knights had been forced to do something similar with leather bags, but clever nonetheless to use the logs for the same fashion. It was the disciplined retreat that was the real problem.

Some fanatics had swung round behind, cutting off their retreat with a thin line of queen botherers. Torm pushed a burly soldier away with a rough shove, before flipping his sword and raising it blade first in the air; a signal the dwarves understood. Their lieutenant, Tostig, had his dwarves begin a chant that showed they acknowledged the order. Torm couldn't rightly command the dwarves, but they knew he had an idea and saw the wisdom in it. Immediately the dwarves backstepped as one. "HOOO HOOO HOOO HOOO" shouting with each step, and the cavaliers retreated behind the line, the stout warriors spinning around immediately.

Now the knights under Torm were faced with the flanking line of foes, and the dwarfs held the onrushing horde back, now backstepping again as Torm and his men spearheaded into the slim line of foes. The tall and powerful armored infantry smashed into them, cutting a swathe and eating through them like acid thrown at a wool blanket. They did what they did best, and the dwarfs held the immeasurable tide back with their impenetrable defense. Makrazid struck a man on the head with his mace so hard, Torm was in awe at the steel head reaching the man's ruined neck. Sir Gerold ran the spike of his hunting spear into the groin of a short zealot, and he squealed like the boars Gerold was so fond of hunting.

The priest-queen's flanking force, armed like militia and low in number, were slaughtered and broken. The knights cleared the path, and what Silver Swords remained on the beach supported the infantry with arrows and quarrels as the dwarves and knights made it to the rafts. The water was cold and dark, and the river never slept, but with the priest-queen's forces nipping at their heels, the last of the Silver Swords pushed off, and slowly made their way to the opposite embankment.

There were five hundred and twelve men and ninety seven dwarves when the Silver Swords mustered on the northern bank of the Wadi Ira the next morning. They drew up in four infantry companies, joined by Torm’s cavalry and the dwarven engineers under Cadger. Since the fall of Palona they had lost over three hundred men, almost all in the continual rearguard between Botan and the Wadi Ira. The Captain read their names out without emotion, giving them the simple five word epitaph: they died in the south. With the names of the dead recorded, he pronounced their contract with the League at an end, citing lack of reasonable support, and declared the Silver Swords a free company once again. Throughout the entire ceremony the soldiers of the enemy were visible on the other bank, furious but impotent to cross. The Captain turned to face them and spat a glob of spit into the water. As it hit, the dimpling seemed to magnify, and within seconds the skies had opened, rain pouring down hard enough to sting. The monsoon had come.

“Bianca, Torm,” the captain called, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. Some of the men were already raising the sections of timber they had used as rafts into make shift rain shelters. Bianca trotted over, carefully wrapping her pistols in oil cloth to keep them and their powder dry. Water streamed down the old man’s face in rivulets, though if it bothered him he didnt acknowledge it.

“I want you and half of Torm’s knights to go on ahead. We shouldn’t be more than two weeks march from the Fan Cities, but scout the land and see if you can find any preliminary leads on contracts. The rest of us will march to high ground tomorrow and lick our wounds for a few days, then follow along.”

“Sir maybe we should take a wizard, what if we…” Bianca began but the Captain cut her off with a curt shake of his head.

“I can’t spare Black Ryann in case we run into trouble, and we have wounded enough to keep Naambi busy, you will have to manage without magic, at least until we can recruit another wizard,” the captain declared.

“Yes sir,” Bianca acknowledged.

“You had better get moving, a few hours of this and the whole world will be mud,” the Captain said.

It didn’t take a few hours. By the time they were on the trail there was mud everywhere. Bianca’s six scouts spread out in a fan ahead of them and picked their way through the jungle, winding their way up the low laterite escarpment that formed the northern bank of the Wadi Ira. Although he had been right about the mud, copious amounts of red brown sludge that seemed to be sliding down on them from every direction, his assertion about their being a trail was a bit optimistic. The best Bianca could find was what seemed to be a game path through the jungle and that was rapidly being converted into a stream. All around them broad leaved plants hammered with the sound of rain slapping foliage. It was like being surrounded by drummers in a constant drum roll.

“How do people fight in this?” Torm demanded as he forced his great warhorse to leap another fallen log, then coseted it as the breast’s hooves struggled to find purchase.

“Normally people don’t fight in the monsoon,” Bianca told him as she finally reached the top of a low ridge. Visibility was poor but she could make out the shape of a curving valley ahead of them. She shook what seemed like a gallon of water from her broad brimmed leather hat, succeeding mostly in dumping it down the back of her poncho.

“Are there any cities between here and the Fan River?” Torm asked as they started down the far slope into the valley. Bianca shook her head then called for one of her scouts to mark the crossing point for the company.

“We don’t have good maps for this far east, not beyond the coast anyway. We might have marched along the river to Onarang, but I hear the Priestess controls it. If she were feeling spiteful we might have met a column on the way up.”

“Yes well thank goodness she isn’t spiteful or anything,” Torm said as he coseted his nervous steed down over some mudslick rocks.

“The way we are going…” Bianca began but bit off the sentence without continuing. Torm arched an eyebrow and immediately cursed and wiped monsoon rain from his eyes.

“Well the locals dont go far from the river, they say a curse lies on the land between here and the Fan,” she admitted reluctantly, looking out over the rain drenched valley ahead.

“Well fuck,” Bianca observed. Torm turned to glare at her but didn’t bother to comment. The river which had sprung into existence overnight was more the sufficient. It gurgled along the valley bottom, brown and glutenous with red laterite and half decomposed leaf mould. Here and there the top of a tree waved above the flood, drawing little ripple lines that showed the speed of the current in long tear drops. Rain continued to fall like hail, dappling the waters in a shifting hiss. Torm was irritated that a river had managed to sneak up on them without the scouts noticing but Bianca felt this was a little unfair. The rain was the problem. Bianca had heard of the monsoon of course but neither she, nor anyone else in the company had properly appreciated what it meant for inches of rain to fall within hours. The upper fingers of the Fan had gathered almost unimaginable amounts of water and were channeling it, and the rich nutrients it carried, down towards the river deltas near the coast. Which was great for the crops, but not so great for mercenaries trying to cross the rapidly flooding landscape. It was particularly not good for Bianca and Torm, who had awoken this morning to find a mile wide river between them and the rest of the company with no way of getting back to their comrades save a long and uncertain march up into the hills in search of a ford.

“It looks to me like you are on the wrong side of the river,” a shapeless apparition observed. Torm had his sword half way out of its scabbard before he recognized the acid tone of Black Ryann. The wizard’s physical form was on the other side of the river, but apparently his mental one was somewhat more amphibious. He hung a foot or so above the ground, a shimmering distortion in the rain. It made Bianca slightly queasy, which was more or less the way the flesh and blood Black Ryann made her feel come to think of it.

“Well it looks to me like I have all the horses,” Torm replied, clearly in no mood for the wizard’s airs. That was true insofar as all the cavalry, both heavy and light, was with Torm and Bianca although the truth was that the rest of the company had scores of pack horses with them.
“The Captain wants to know if there is any chance you can cross the river upstream.” This was clearly directed at Bianca but the scout shook her head emphatically.

“Three days until maybe we could ford, and even then it would be risky,” she cautioned. Ryann was silent for a long beat, presumably while he conferred with the captain. Three days was a guess but a conservative one, if the rain continued, as it was reputed to do, they might find themselves racing a rising river all the way back to the head waters.

“We cannot wait for a week in this weather, you are to head east and try to find a boat to cross over, there will be something before you reach the delta,” he told them, then his shadowy form flickered and vanished. Bianca did not know much about magic but she knew that, like everything, it was more difficult in the rain.

By midmorning they had climbed onto a low ridge and pressed on through the downpour. At least up here, where the soil was thinner, there was less mud for the horses to slip in. Bianca began to worry that if they didn’t find somewhere dry soon they might have to start worrying about hoof rot. Mercifully the jungle was also thinner, seeming to tend more towards massive ferns and slumping banyan trees, rather than the thicker growth closer to the river bed. The scouts went out in a screen, three moving ahead, one on each flank and two in drag, though the possibility of attack in such weather seemed remote. Not that you could take that for granted of course, the company had once surprised an enemy force in a sandstorm and completely obliterated it before the enemy even knew they were under attack, no one had any desire to pay the karmic debt on that one. They were about to call a halt to make what miserable lunch they could when one of the scouts, a dour man named Smiley, came racing back along what passed for a trail.

“Trouble?” Torm demanded as the scout reined in his soaking mount.

“Maybe, some kind of stone structure ahead, there are people, maybe fighting,” he reported breathlessly. Torm and Bianca exchanged glances. Neither wanted to blunder into a fight, but getting out of the rain seemed a risk worth taking.

The structure appeared to be the ruins of a temple, or perhaps some kind of fortress. Large stone tigers flanked a crumbled wall that was overgrown with bougainvillea and passionfruit vines, the invasive roots slowly prising apart the dark river stones. Inside was a half collapsed pagoda which must have been magnificent in its day but was now overgrown, its formal gardens hardly distinguishable from the jungle outside save for an unusual regularity in the color of its flowers. A score of men were spread out around the gate. A were in finery of riotously colored silk, now sadly disheveled for being thoroughly soaked. They sat atop astride gorgeously caparisoned horses that seemed to drip with gold and bright jewels. The remainder were among the most muscular men Bianca had ever seen, huge and rippling with corded muscle. An oil or animal fat of some kind must have been smeared across their hairless physiques because the rain beaded on them. They wore only black trousers and white turbans that were probably much more impressive when they weren't soaking wet. They carried scimitars that looked like they weighed as much as Bianca did in a way that suggested they knew how to use them. Clearly the peacocks were in charge and the turbaned warriors were their muscle. Two of the thugs rushed forwards towards the gate, blades raised over their heads. One of the stone tigers seemed to ripple, then abruptly pounced on the two men, dust exploding from the plinth as it tore free. The first man was crushed out right and the second was batted into the air like a toy by the swipe of a stone paw, huge sprays of mud flying up where the tigers legs churned the muddy earth. The unfortunate warrior flew through the air and smashed into the wall with a crunch of bones that Bianca could hear even over the rain, his unnervingly limp body slithering slowly down the wall. As abruptly as it began the tiger froze in place, a new found snarl on its bestial face and one paw raised mind swat. It seemed to sink a few inches into the mud, as lifeless as any other statue. By some miracle or trick of fate the rain chose that moment to slacken.

“Your sorcery will not avail you heretic!” one of the silk clad men called in a language close enough to that of the South that Bianca could follow it, though she suspected that the word she translated as ‘heretic’ was closer to ‘most unclean and polluted apostate’ or some such.

“How long can you keep it up?” the sodden nobleman demanded. As if in answer a bolt of lightning struck from the sky and blasted a crater in the mud ten paces from the fellow, causing his horse to shy and throwing him to the dirt. Enough men turned to see what had become of their commander that they caught sight of the approaching mercenaries through the drizzle.

“Ware!” one of them screamed and ran forward with a blade raised. Bianca raised her empty palms as she and Torm reigned in.

“Whoa, we have no quarrel with you,” she shouted back in her best Southern. The approaching thugs slowed, though probably more due to the fact that they saw they were facing more than a score of mounted soldiers than to Bianca’s words.

“Identify yourself!” the nobleman squealed as he pulled himself from the mud and drew a scimitar so encrusted with gold and jewels it must have been a struggle to lift. He looked vaguely ridiculous and clearly knew it, his face controrting with rage made hotter by his humiliation.

“We are mercenaries, from the Company of the Silver Sword,” Torm called as the thugs flowed towards them to create a loose front.

“Mercenaries?” the pompous noble asked. He was clearly very unhappy to find an unexpected variable in what was clearly already an unstable situation. Bianca gripped her reigns tight as her horse nickered in response to the tension and the smell of humans prepped for violence.

“Mercenaries?” another voice demanded. A woman with dark curly hair and an alabaster complexion way out of place in the South had popped up from behind the wall, standing atop a portion of a ruined gate house. She was beautiful even wrapped in saris that had been ruined by rain and dirt.

“I’ll pay you a thousand pai in emeralds if you exterminate these cretins,” she declared cheerfully. There was a world of difference between hiring a professional mercenary company and paying off a handful of street toughs. There were contracts to sign, rates of pay and length of service clauses, victory bonuses, compensation for casualties, logistical agreements, and a hundred other particulars to be worked out. Unfortunately the noble either didn't understand this or was too scared or angry to care.

“Kill the heretic’s lap dogs!” he yelled, waving his sword at Torm’s troops. The bare chested thugs charged without a second thought.

“Gods below!’ Bianca shouted and pulled her pistol from her saddle. Torm’s men were lowering their lances but there wasn’t space enough to charge. Bianca’s pistol clicked wetly as she pulled the trigger, being as thoroughly soaked as everything else. Howling with frustration she pitched the weapon into the face of the onrushing thug. He batted it away with an arm and staggered a step towards Torm. Lykurgus kicked out, his mighty hoof connecting with the thug’s neck with a wet crunch. The man stumbled away and collapsed to the ground, blood bubbling around a crushed aorta. The rain surged into downpour again as the thugs hit the line of horsemen. The knights thrust out with their lances, using them as simple spears. Two or three of their attackers went down screaming. A javelin flew at Bianca, scraping a bloody gash down its flank. The horse reared and she was suddenly tumbling, slamming on her back in the wet ground. A thug hacked down at her but she rolled aside, passing beneath Lykurgus. The thug followed but caught a cut across the eyes from Torm’s now unsheathed sword. He went down screaming. Bianca’s hand scrabbled for a discarded lance as she came up. One of the mounted nobles was charging, deep and entirely justifiable reservations on his face. Bianca set the butt of the lance in the mud a moment before the horse impacted it. There was a metal on meat sound as the horse spitted itself so forcefully that the lance bent and shattered, showering Bianca with splinters as she rolled away. For a few seconds the trail was a chaos of screaming men, horses, mud, and blood and then, as abruptly as it had begun, it was over. Not one of the turbaned men was left alive though several of the mounted nobles were fleeing off down towards the river. The pompous man was backing away, terror written clearly on his face.

“You don’t understand this woman is a …” the boganvillea vines snapped out like bullwhips, wrapping around the fellow at wrists and waist. Three inch thorns drove into his body and he was yanked from his feet, howling in agony as blood spurted from the constricting tangles. He vanished into the mass of purplish flowers which continued to thrash and convulse. The screaming went on for a long minute as blood ran from the base of the wall to mingle with the mud. The woman, looking haggard but extremely pleased with herself, jumped down from the wall. She removed a necklace of emeralds from around her neck and tossed them at a bemused Torm, who caught the glittering prize without apparent effort.

“Well that went well.”

Torm caught the glittering necklace incredulously, unnerved by the torture followed by the extreme display of wealth. He gave it a cursory glance, and satisfied the bejeweled cord was at least in the vicinity of what was promised, he sequestered it away on his person as he stared at the dark woman. She was indeed beautiful, but there was something off-putting about her, even without the displays of magic he saw mere minutes before. The adrenaline had worn off, and now he felt fatigued and a tad acerbic. First things first, however.

"Bianca? We might-" He began, but she was already moving. The lieutenant set her scouts to comb the area in case there were any tribesmen or thugs lying in wait, hoping to strike when all was calm. They rushed to follow orders, one scout pouring the last of his water flask over his head as he moved.

"I better go make sure." Bianca said with a skeptical eye, reining her horse in close to Torms, before she leaned in conspiratorially. "Can you... handle things here?" She asked pointedly, eyeing the dark woman.

Torm gave a sardonic: "We'll see..." response, and motioned that she could go ahead. She gave him a look, and then set her horse at a canter, disappearing into the brush with her men. Torm called for his knights to make a perimeter around the temple, but a few remained behind the make certain the dead were truly dead. Torm set Lycurgus forward at a walk, the massive warhorse a scant meter from the mysterious woman, who had bent over to search for something in the tunic of one of the attackers. A man with a brass circlet around his great forehead, now caked in blood.

"Who are you?" He asked her, not impolitely, but his tone showed he did not view her as a damsel in distress, either.

"Calliope," she said without pause, pocketing something and drawing herself back up. When she looked at him, he felt like he was staring into the eyes of a serpent.

"Just Calliope?"

"If I told you my surname, would you recognize it? Are you a local to these parts?" She deigned to ask casually.

"Good point." He conceded, but she was dodging the true question.

"And I take it you're a knight of the northern realms?" She asked, at ease as if everything was under her control, and he was but a puppet on her string.

"What gave it away? My armor or my haircut?"

She smirked, and gingerly grasped Lycurgus's bridle. The horse shied away and nickered, uncomfortable at her presence but not yet ready to defend himself. "That, and your beast here. He killed a man with the deftness of a Zhaipurian duelist. You handled him skillfully as well, I'm not often impressed."

"I'll remember that," Torm remarked dryly, looking past her at the ostentatious and loudly dressed corpses. Opals, emeralds, lapis and lazuli, and even red diamonds shimmered under the every shifting light of the sun as it tried to peer through the canopy. Calliope glanced over her shoulder.

"The baubles? Much of it is real, though that is small issue compared to what you might be able to gain elsewhere," she remarked cryptically. Torm was about to ask her meaning, when he saw a great shape moving amongst the bodies. He flinched, only to realize the sinuous thing was a python of immense length. It slowly slid up her body, before resting upon her deceptively dainty shoulders. It's tongue flicked out lazily, and she scratched its throat gently, smiling at it as if it were a favored pet.

The rain had returned full force by the time Bianca completed her sweep. Already it was getting hard to make out any tracks, even muddy footprints becoming indistinct puddles. As nearly as Bianca could make out the posse of men they had more or less accidentally killed had been pursuing a single individual, probably the wizard, and cornered her at the abandoned temple. Or she had lured them here of course. If there was another force out there, they were clearly far ahead of it, rushing on to try to claim their prize. It was unlikely that the gaudily dressed aristocrats had abandoned the safety of an army to chase after someone who was clearly very dangerous, though one never could tell what a noble might take it into his empty gilded head to do. There seemed little point in putting out pickets in conditions where visibility was so bad but, eternally an optimist, Bianca stationed two men to the east along what had recently been a dirt track and was rapidly becoming a muddy stream. That was the most likely direction for any reinforcements to approach. That accomplished she returned to the temple where scouts and knights alike were cheerfully pillaging the dead and stacking their corpses against one wall. There was little hope of burning them and less hope of burying them but with any luck they would move on before the stink became too bad.

Calliope and Torm had retreated into the half ruined temple to get out of the rain. It was an off putting place to say the least. The roof of the pagoda was supported by massive pillars that had been carved with startling life like serpents that seemed to twine around them, wedge shaped heads striking at the ceiling. The stone floor had been polished smooth by centuries of bare feet, common pathways creating slight troughs in the stone. The overall impression was that of tentacles striking out of a calm sea. The walls were worse, at least those sections not overgown with the thorny bougainvillea that threatened to engulf the place. Every square inch of the walls had been covered with bas relief carvings that seemed to depict some ancient and bloody epic. A figure of a many armed goddess with four breasts seemed to be doing most of the killing, though in some panels she herself was killed or at least badly wounded by various combinations of what might have been gods or demons, their faces carved into leering masks of teeth and tongues. In the corners the carvings were crowded with piled bodies, as though the carnage had been swept out of the way or else the sculptor would have no room for the action. Bad it would have been under normal circumstances but Calliope, or Torm, had kindled a fire out of pieces of broken furniture and the flickering light danced across the carvings, making them seem to twist and writhe.

“Charming place,” Bianca observed, leaning close to look at a carving of the Goddess biting the head off a demon while pleasuring herself with one of her other hands.

“Jemel-Sha draws few worshipers, even here where ever rock has a score of devotees,” Calliope replied. “Her temples are always in the wilderness for to invoke her name too close to your home is said to invite disaster.”

“She is a war goddess then?” Bianca inquired, coming over to the fire and sitting herself down, allowing the heat to begin to dry her sodden clothing. Calliope made an equivocal so-so gesture with her left hand.

“In the Fan Cities it is always hard to know, sometimes it seems every god is the god of everything, and if they aren’t they have an avatar who is. Sometimes two avatars of a single good will even go to war. I doubt anyone has a coherent theology of it all. Jemel-Sha is a goddess of war, but also of entropy, rebirth, purification, renewel.. well renewal in the same way forest fires bring renewal.”

“Is that why you came here? To pray for forest fires?” Bianca asked. Calliope laughed but it was a cold and mirthless kind of a laugh.

“I came here because it was the only place I could think of to make a stand, even then the Seven Pricks would have had me if it hadn’t been for your timely intervention.”

“Seven Pricks?”

“I guess they are technically called the Seven Princely Advisors,” Calliope explained, “but usually people just call them the Seven Princes, or the Seven.. I guess they are the Six now that you kicked Curman Ji’s teeth in, may Jemel-Sha feast on his balls.” This last statement was made with a curious gesture in which Calliope kissed her finger tips then touched them to her forehead, then her heart. Bianca assumed this was some kind of religious gesture. The scout drew her pistol and cracked open the frizzon, laying it down facing the fire so the heat might dry the sodden powder, though the White Lady alone knew how she was going to keep it dry once she went back outside. From context Curman Ji had been in charge of the hit squad they had wiped out in front of the temple.

“You have my thanks for that,” Calliope added, though it sounded somewhat like an afterthought.

“It seemed like you might have had it covered,” Torm observed, eyeing the sorceress out of the corner of her eye. Calliope grimaced.

“Those men you saw were Thugee,” Calliope explained, refering to the muscular types rather than their perfumed overseers. “They train them to hunt down priests and wizards, they are resistant to magic, a combination of mental conditioning and warding tattoos.”

“You still seemed to be holding your won,” Bianca pointed out, remembering the animated stone tiger disemboweling one of the men on the path. Calliope grimaced slightly in the firelight, admitting to any kind of weakness obviously hurt the woman.

“You have to sleep sometime,” she admitted.

“Why were they after you in the first place?” Bianca asked, changing the subject though potential not to one any more pleasant to the sorceress. This brought on another smile, though there was something different in this one.

“I was the Prince of Shivapor until those seven pricks fomented a rebellion,” she admitted.

“Prince?” Bianca asked with a cocked eyebrow. Calliope waved the distinction away.

“In this dialect Prince is applied to men and women both, it is a male noun but they apply it to anyone who is… princing I suppose. By the same token you are Prince if you rule regardless of your actual birth. Oh they care about caste of course. There are as many castes as there are gods, though broadly they break down into priests, nobles, warriors, artisans, and farmers. Not that this is determinative you understand, there are warriors who are princes, even an artisan in Kalingareae, I think he used to be a shipwright? You get enough power and they will hold their nose and dine with you despite you ‘ritual impurity’ or whatever,” Calliope explained. Bianca shruged her shoulders. She had visited many lands during her career with the Silver Swords and found the complexities of local life and religion to be both baffling and largely irrelevant.

“You aren’t a local I take it?” Bianca asked, more for something to say than from any real sense of interest. Calliope was pale and looked more like Torm racially than she did any of the bodies piled up against the temple wall. It had taken a moment for Bianca to notice that, not because it wasn’t obvious, but because she was used to the Company which held men and women of every nationality not to mention dwarves who were not human at all. Homogenous populations were not something that was part of her mental architecture.

“Oh Stars no, I’m from Betony, came out here a few years ago working for a spice trader and decided I could do better,” Calliope said. A wizard travelling with a spice trader who set herself up as a queen in only a few years? There was certainly a great story there. Come to think of it wasn’t Torm from somewhere near there?

“So what are you planning to do now? I doubt these Seven Pricks are just going to let things go,” Torm said, taking a drink from a waterskin which he passed to Bianca. She took a drink as well and was pleased to discover the water had been cut with palm wine, an old cavalryman’s trick to keep the dust from choking them. Calliope leaned forward, her eyes dark and predatory.

“Well now that I have met you, I was hoping to pay you a small fortune to help me take my city back…”

Needless to say there was a heated debate. Bianca, Torm, and their sergeants had tried to keep it quiet, but soon both companies were whispering amongst themselves, and the men had even mixed, some groups of cavaliers and outriders forming small groups to discuss the merits of stalling the rendezvous to perform an ill-advised and untenable coup for a dark witch in the hopes they are rewarded gratefully. Torm wasn't necessarily against it, but when Bianca began to turn in favor, he started listing off all of the reasons for how inadvisable it was. After verbally jabbing at one another, Bianca brought up that Torm simply did not like she was from his home principality, and despite his groan of denial, he had to admit that was a small bit of the truth.

While there were plenty still against the notion, Torm throwing his hands up at that was like a signal of defeat, which was not the effect the Commander wanted nor intended, but by the time he realized it, everyone had tentatively reached the conclusion that they were going to accept her vague offer, and that set the stage for their furiously laid war plans. Calliope was more than willing to help, taking juice from a strange local fruit and drawing them a basic map of the city state, Shendi-Nugata. To Torm's surprise, it looked like a great circle, bisected by a large river. Bianca and Calliope swapped a few words as Torm studied the map, and he was confronted by the two of them after his contemplation.

"What?" He asked.

"We have come up with a plan," Calliope declared before Bianca could open her mouth. The scout commander glared at her, and Calliope shrugged as if to say 'I'm the employer, after all.' Calliope bade Torm to follow her, and Bianca tailed them until they were at the opposite end of the Temple, in what appeared to be an old shrineroom. A dogheaded daemon figure upon a central dias. One of Jemel-Sha's many pets, she casually explained after they gave it a curious look. The entire temple complex was disconcerting to Torm, but Calliope's plan was far, far worse...

---

Torm rode at the head of a thee man column, the knights, cataphracts, and mamluks under his command with their lances held high in parade fashion. They only had two banners, and so Equites Artabazos and Sir Rüdiger held the standards aloft, flanking Torm as he led the men up the dirt road toward the magnificent walled city of Shendi-Nugata. As soon as they had left the treeline, Torm had been idly watched by the southern continent's equivalent of serfs tending the farms of wheat, maize, rice, and millets that surrounded the central hub. In the distance, black smoke lazily wafted from Shaudee-Khai, the local volcano. Its tip was just visible over the tree line, being rather short and stout for a volcanic mountain, Calliope informing him it had grown fat from the many sacrifices over the years.

"I'm no farmer, but my father was." Torm breathed, raising an eyebrow. He was the only man without his helmet, to signify his status as the leader, if their formation didn't give it away. "I didn't think this soil would be arable for long term use in a jungle like this."

Small streams that looked almost natural snaked out from under the walls to give the fields a verdant river-valley look, but looking longer than a short glance showed it was all cultivated by man. Oxen with immense horns lumbered across the field to his left, pulling the iron plows, guided by the peasantry as other men and women walked amidst a half flooded field with their pants legs rolled up, picking some arcane crop Torm was unfamiliar with.

"A gift from Shaudee-Khai," Calliope whispered from behind him. Torm glanced behind his armored shoulder to see the woman's glittering eyes from beneath the shadow of her cowl. The slim beauty still unnerved him, but he was not about to let her out of his sight and infect his men, so he insisted she ride upon Lycurgus with him. "The volcano enriches the soil. The earth is young, and easily cultivated. There is always a method to the madness of myths."

"So you don't believe in the spirit of the volcano? The daemons and gods?" He asked her.

"I did not say that..." She remarked, as a half-naked man sprinted across their vision, heading for the front gates to announce the arrival of the iron-clad northerners. Torm just hoped Bianca and her scouts were performing well on their end.

"Now is the time, sir Draufkrieg." Calliope told him, and he sighed, before he reached down and took the auroch horn he kept to signify his command, and placed it to his lips. The horn sounded, and a loud, reverberating boom echoed across the fields. Even from a kilometer off, Torm spotted the figures of distant archers on the wall. The walls themselves were colored clay orange, his noted, and even they were adorned with jewels. Far above the reach of a man, of course.

"Not like the parade grounds back home," she teased.

"Shut up... m'lady."