know they’re going to lose.”
“They don’t have good water, but they aren’t dying from thirst either, and we”—Ternigan paused to sigh—“don’t have a great deal of food. When the farmers retreated, they burned their crops and collapsed their wells. They took to the countryside. If we send out parties to forage, they’re harassed by the locals. There’s no one to buy food from, and if there were, there’s reason to expect it would be poisoned. It will take time and fortitude. The traditional families are wagering that we don’t have those. We will have Nus, my lord. Don’t mistake me, the city will fall. And when it does, we’ll be able to make whatever terms we want in the peace.”
“I don’t want Nus,” Geder said. “I want Sarakal. Nus and Inentai and every garrison and farm in between. It doesn’t do me any good to come here and half win.”
Ternigan’s face pinched in, and he pressed the backs of his fingers to his chin. When he spoke, his voice was measured and careful.
“There are constraints, my lord, that are outside our control. However much I want to break the city today, the enemy is in a strong position. Even the most noble causes sometimes have to compromise.”
“How long?” Geder asked.
“How long for what, precisely?”
“How long before Nus falls?”
“It will be ours by winter,” Ternigan said without hesitation.
Geder sat, letting the silence stretch. Over the course of a minute, Ternigan’s expression went from uncomfortable to embarrassed to angry to a kind of petulant confusion. Geder smiled without meaning it.
“You’ll tour the city’s fortifications with me and Minister Basrahip in the morning,” he said.
“If you like, Lord Regent.”
“Good to see you again, my lord,” Geder said, standing. “I think it’s good that I’ve come.”
The walls of Nus stood grey and seamless on three sides of the city. The iron gates that gave the city its name rose to the height of ten men one atop the other, and great bands of the metal reinforced the stone so that the whole city had the sense of being a single great mechanism devised by a huge, inhuman mind. Which might, after all, have been true. The dragon’s road came to the sea here, and had since before the dragons fell. There had likely been a city in this place since before history itself began.
Though, as Basrahip pointed out, not before the goddess.
They rode in a company of twenty. Geder wore his black leather cloak against the morning chill, but pulled it off almost at once when the sunlight warmed them. Ternigan wore bright steel armor like a boast, Basrahip and his two fellow priests the brown robes that they always wore. And Geder’s personal guard. If there were assassins in the brush, they didn’t trouble the group. All around the city, Ternigan explained the difficulties of an attack. The long wings of the wall hung over the water and forced any approach from the sea to suffer under the defenders’ bolts long before they could come to shore. Here, the walls were topped with spouts to pour down stones or flaming oil. Here, the shape of the land itself forbade the siege ladders. There, a team of engineers might be able to tunnel under the fortifications and collapse them, and Ternigan had in fact begun the project, but it would take time. Weeks at least, months more like. The seawall couldn’t be surveyed, but Ternigan brought diagrams and maps with him to fill any time that wasn’t already rich with discouragement.
As the hours passed, Ternigan’s tone shifted from defensive to conciliatory as Geder began to understand the scope of the problem. Geder had helped to take and even briefly ruled the Free City of Vanai, and he realized now that the experience had set his expectations poorly. When he thought of taking a city, he imagined Vanai. Nus was no Vanai. It was one of the great cities of humanity.
When near midday they returned to the army’s main camp, the arrayed forces of Antea that had seemed vast as an ocean only hours before had shrunk in his view. They were the same men, the same horses, the same engines of war. What they weren’t was plausible.
“You see my situation,” Ternigan said as they dismounted. Geder’s thighs and back ached, and a sense of growing embarrassment sat in his gut as uneasy as the first pangs of illness. He nodded to Ternigan as he passed his reins to the groom, but didn’t say anything.
If