rejoin the Nentians, you will not apologize; is that clear? That would put us further in the Nentians’ debt. The Hathrim are to blame for being duplicitous. You will say only that you will do your best to mend the situation.”
They all nodded and assured her it would be done.
“Any idea who that houndsman was?” Numa asked.
One of the stonecutters nodded his head. “That was Jerin Mogen.”
“That was Jerin Mogen? Is he lavaborn?”
“He is.”
“And Hearth Sefir, too?”
“Yes.”
“How many lavaborn do you think they have?”
The stonecutters looked at each other and shrugged. “Twenty?” one guessed. “Thirty or forty?”
“This is not going to end well,” I said. “They’ll have no problem setting us on fire.”
“We should let the tactician know,” Numa said. “Maybe we can convince him to hold off on the attack and think about it.”
“He needs siege weapons at the very least,” Tarrech agreed. “If he sends men in there now, they’ll be mown down.”
But there was no dissuading Ghuyedai. He wanted all nations to get involved in lancing the boil of Gorin Mogen, and to do that, Nentian blood had to be spilled defending against an invasion of Nentian soil. He was eager to be about the spilling, but the men he was going to send over that trench would not realize their role was to die; they were going to march, trusting that their general had a plan to win the day, and the horror of it grew in my mind. They would die because of a failure in diplomacy. The wording of the Sovereignty Accords required the blood of a defending army against an invading army to trigger the other countries’ participation, the thinking at the time being that no one wanted to be drawn into a war over minor skirmishes or the work of pirate raiding parties, but now I was beginning to see the practical application of it here, and my stomach churned with sourness. Ghuyedai would cast away these men’s lives like stones into the ocean because that would get him what the viceroy wanted.
“Give us that passage across the trench now, if you please,” he said after the stonecutters had briefed him on the defenses they’d built for the Hathrim. “We’re crossing before sunset.”
The way we saw it, we had little choice but to accommodate him. The Triune Council wanted to aid the Nentians without risking our people, and the tactician’s request qualified. The stonecutters worked in concert with Tarrech, each blessed by the earth goddess Dinae, and their combined efforts ensured that none of them had to strain. Outside of the salted zone bordering the trench, they shifted enough earth to fall into it and fill it for about twenty feet across, smothering the oil and thereby allowing an army to pass over it in narrow columns. It would have taken men with shovels an hour or more to accomplish this, but the stonecutters and juggernaut completed it in a couple of minutes, though it left dust hanging in the air for much longer. The result was a scalloped section of earth on our side of the trench that troops would dip into before rising up to cross the new land bridge. Ghuyedai gave two orders: the conscripts were to march on the city under the leadership of one of his officers, and Nasreghur was to take a company of men back to Hashan Khek with the stonecutters in tow and his preliminary report.
The setting sun warmed the right sides of our faces as we faced south and watched the Nentian conscripts cross the trench. They were armed with shields and spears. My personal belief—a nonmilitary opinion, admittedly—was that they should be armed with full pikes if they wanted a chance against the houndsmen, but perhaps they felt safer with shields.
Tactician Ghuyedai did have a company of pikemen, I noted, but he kept them in reserve along with his regulars. The ranks of spearmen marched across the trench and I kept waiting for it to ignite, all my muscles tense, but it remained cold and quiet. And so remained the city of Baghra Khek in the distance. No houndsmen formed up outside the walls unless they were mustering on the far side of the city where we could not see. No Hathrim infantry emerged to challenge the oncoming army, and we heard no alarms or saw any sign of activity from the walls. It was as if the Nentians marched on an abandoned fort.
That changed once they got into bowshot range. A