"Remind me to do something nasty to both of you," Wencit replied. "But not right now. Why don't we get the lot of you inside so you can at least be warm when it happens?"
"That," Brandark said with feeling, "sounds like an excellent idea. Of course," he went on in a more wary tone, eyes narrowing as he considered the wizard, "the last time we ran into you in a blizzard, there were forty or fifty dog brothers and a pair of dark wizards—one of them a priest of Carnadosa, as I recall—camped out in the middle of it. I trust you're not here to reprise that performance?"
"No, no!" Wencit assured him with another grin. "I happened to be in Axe Hallow on business of my own—business which, I'm sure you'll be relieved to know, had nothing at all to do with either of you—when this little squall blew in. Since you hadn't turned up before dark fell, I thought I should come looking for you, that's all."
" 'All,' is it?" Bahzell murmured. He studied the old man thoughtfully, but Wencit only grinned more broadly, and the hradani decided to let it drop. Wencit of Rūm was a law unto himself, and Bahzell no more believed he'd just "happened" to be in Axe Hallow than he did that the sun would rise in the west tomorrow morning. On the other hand, he'd had ample opportunity even in the brief time he and Brandark had spent working with the old man to rescue Lady Zarantha to realize Wencit would tell him as much as he wanted him to know and no more. Bahzell would have expected that to infuriate him, given the traditional hradani attitude that the only good wizard was a dead one and his own lack of patience, but somehow it didn't. He supposed that could be because if anyone had ever earned the right to be mysterious, Wencit was certainly that anyone. Only four white wizards had survived the Fall of Kontovar. One of them had been driven quite mad, and two more had been permanently drained by the White Council's desperate, self-immolating counterstrike against the Lords of Carnadosa. Only Wencit had survived with his power intact to protect the exodus to Norfressa by the last, decimated wave of the Fall's survivors, and he was probably the only reason anyone had survived to flee. Under the circumstances, he was entitled to a few quirks.
"Well," the Horse Stealer said after a moment in tones of elaborate patience, "you're the one as knows just how far we are from the blasted city, Wencit. So if it's no bother, I'm thinking it would be a kindly thing for you to stop sitting on your arse and show the rest of us. In a manner of speaking, of course."
"Oh, of course!" Wencit chuckled, and turned his horse back the way he'd come. "If you'll just follow me," he invited. "And do try not to get lost."
In fact, they'd been barely half a mile from the city's western gate when Wencit found them, and Bahzell didn't know whether to be grateful that they'd had so short a distance left to go or disgusted that he'd been prepared to spend a miserable, icy night that close to the shelter he'd been unable to see. He decided to settle for gratitude, and craned his neck back to stare up at Axe Hallow's walls as the party approached them.
Since its founding, the capital had expanded mainly to the south and east, where there was room for homes and businesses and merchants could take advantage of the Kormak River and its canal system. The successive rulers who had made Axe Hallow the greatest city in Norfressa had insisted that the fortifications must be expanded to cover each outward bound of the city limits, however great the expense, and the expansion had gradually replaced all the other original gates. Only West Gate remained, but there was nothing at all wrong with it, despite its age. The outer wall stood more than tall enough for its battlements to vanish into the wind-blown snow, and massive, hexagonal towers flanked the gate itself. Under normal conditions, the dark stonework must look harsh and forbidding; tonight, the warm yellow light spilling out of West Gate's cavernous gullet and the towers' arrow slits promised a welcoming oasis, and Bahzell heard Vaijon's horse whinny in relief as they headed for it.
The gate was fully manned, blizzard or no, and the Horse Stealer studied the guard detail closely. The sentries looked half frozen, but they examined the travelers alertly, and though there was no challenge—probably because of Wencit's presence, Bahzell decided as he watched the wizard nod to an officer in passing—the guards clearly knew their business. And well they should, for these were troopers from the Royal and Imperial Army, not regular city guardsmen.
The sentries looked back at him and Brandark with equal curiosity, and he wondered what these Axemen made of them. The Empire's borders had no direct contact with any hradani land, but defensive treaties with the Border Kingdoms along its frontiers had brought its army into occasional contact with hradani brigands, raiders, and even one or two armies of invasion over the centuries. Bahzell had never personally faced Axemen in battle, but he'd talked to grizzled veterans who had, and they'd always spoken of the Royal and Imperial Army with profound respect, even fear. Given their choice, they probably would have preferred facing Axemen to a charge of Sothōii windriders, but it would have been a very close thing.
No other infantry in the world could match the army of King Emperor Kormak. Even before the annexation of Dwarvenhame in the middle of the last century, a quarter of the Empire's population had been dwarvish. The rest of its people were predominately human, but it had a healthy leavening of all the races (except, of course, hradani), and the unprecedented intermixing—and marriage—among the various Races of Man which had stemmed from the Kingdom of the Axe's status as the main port of refuge for Kontovar's escapees continued to hold true for the Empire. Compared to the Sothōii, the humans with whom Bahzell was most familiar, most humans in the Empire were relatively short. There were obviously exceptions, like Vaijon, but few of them would have been at all happy at the thought of engaging hradani-sized enemies on a one-to-one basis.
That was why the Royal and Imperial Army did its best to see to it that its personnel never had to do something like that. It was hardly surprising that the Army was infantry-oriented, given the Empire's strong dwarvish component. Yet even though the Axe Brothers—the elite bodyguard and personal retainers of the King-Emperor—took their name from the great daggered axes they wielded in battle, that traditional dwarvish (and Horse Stealer) weapon was restricted solely to their ranks. Dwarvish axemen had always been fearsome opponents, but the army which had been built by the hard-bitten professionals of the Royal and Imperial officer corps, most of them graduates of the Emperor Torren Military Academy right here in Axe Hallow, was even more frightening.
Bahzell's father had always insisted no organized force was ever outnumbered by a dis organized one, regardless of the numbers, and the fact that he'd managed—finally—to hammer that axiom through the skulls of his Horse Stealers accounted for their ability to crush Bloody Sword forces which had often enjoyed a numerical advantage of two to one or even more. Yet Bahzell nursed no illusions. For all of his father's reforms, an Axemen army would have smashed Prince Bahnak's alliance as easily as he had defeated Navahk and her allies.
The Empire's infantry were exhaustively drilled in the sort of formation fighting alien to "barbarians" (like traditional hradani warriors) who insisted on fighting as individuals. Even among Prince Bahnak's troops, that fundamental individualism persisted on an almost instinctive level which only harsh training and harsher discipline could counter. But no Axeman infantryman thought of himself that way; all of his training focused on the need to fight as a member of a mutually supporting team carefully organized to maximize the effectiveness of its members.
The Axemen's primary maneuver unit was the thousand-man strong battalion. Composed of ten hundred-man companies, each of ten ten-man squads, it formed the heart of the tactical formation known as a "torren," after the Kontovaran Emperor, who had formalized it. The two or three battle lines of a torren resembled nothing so much as a huge chessboard built out of blocks of infantry, each of whom left a gap between itself and the units on either side of it which was exactly the width of its own frontage. The line behind it was arranged in the same formation... but offset so that each of its units was immediately behind one of the gaps in the first line. The torren could be adopted by units from battalions down to the squad level. In fact, it was most common for a battalion to break down into company-sized blocks, but size as such hardly mattered, for that apparently simple formation was the secret of the Army's success. It was also, as Prince Bahnak had discovered when he began evolving his own tactics for his Horse Stealers, much less simple than it seemed, and only superbly trained troops could make it work.
For those who could employ it, the torren provided unparalleled battlefield mobility. Its square blocks could march in any direction equally well simply by changing facing, and the gaps in each line allowed units to fall back under pressure, knowing there would always be friendly units ready to cover its flanks. Or the front line could be used to hold an enemy while the second charged through its gaps to administer successive shocks to the opponent. For that matter, less sophisticated troops often saw the spaces in the torren as opportunities to break their enemies' formation and stormed forward into the gaps only to have the torren's second-line battalions charge into their own flanks.
But as if the torren's tactical advantages weren't enough, every Axeman infantryman was also issued a thigh-length chain hauberk, a steel breastplate, and steel greaves to protect his legs. That was far better than most armies—like those of the Empire of the Spear, which relied upon feudal levies for its military manpower—could manage. Even the wealthiest Spearman baron or count would have found it difficult to match the standard-issue armor of the Royal and Imperial Army, yet excellent as their armor might be, the most important defense of "the King-Emperor's mules" were the tall, cylindrical shields designed to protect them from throat to knees and to overlap into an impenetrable defensive wall in close formation.
Protected behind those shields, they engaged their foes with light spears and shortswords. Their spears could be thrown as they charged, showering an opponent with a deadly hail of missiles as they closed, but they were used as hand-to-hand weapons just as often, with each man thrusting out through the narrow gap between his shield and that of the man to his own right. The length of his spear gave him a reach few sword-armed foes could match, but even when it had been cast at the enemy or broken, no one could get at him past his shield as long as his unit's formation was unbroken, and his shortsword was designed for thrusting. Little more than eighteen inches long, it was deadly in the hands of a well-trained veteran.