Adams, Robert - Horseclans 04 - A Cat of Silvery Hue (v1.0) (html) by A Cat of Silvery Hue (v1.0) (html)

Author:A Cat of Silvery Hue (v1.0) (html) [Hue, A Cat of Silvery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

None of the noble Vawnpolitan rebels had known Drehkos Daiviz well. There was not that much contact between the minor nobility of neighboring duchies—this was a long-established custom which was designed to prevent inbreeding of noble houses and to assure the certainty that komeesee, vahrohnoee, vehrohneeskoee and city lords owned allegiance to but a single thoheeks.

But, of course, ill gossip always traveled like wildfire, so most of the surviving noble rebels had heard of the ne'er-do-well wastrel scion of the House of Daiviz, who had offended both Kindred and Ehleenee by marrying a woman of common blood whose kin worshiped neither Sun nor Son, then had spent the most of his life squandering her fortune on harebrained commercial ventures. But they had difficulty in seeing anything of the luxury-prone, self-centered profligate of rumor in the person of the frighteningly competent, masterful man who led them now.

Before Drehkos' fortuitous arrival, the three nobles of Vawn had been at an utter loss as to how to even try to defend the city they had so recently wrested from its rightful owners, while instigated and led by Kooreeos Mahreeos. Word of his disappearance—dead or captured, no one could say which—during the frightful debacle under the walls of Morguhn Hall and, even worse, of the entrance into Morguhn of Confederation Regulars had sapped their resolve and rendered them almost as panic-stricken as the commoner Vawnpolitans and the hordes of refugees flooding in from Morguhn. They had been promised and had expected instant and continuing victory. For was not the only True God with them? But the Holy Crusade had been broken in Morguhn, with the very flower of its forces extirpated. And, facing unbeatable odds, their backs were truly and irrevocably to the wall, with now hostile duchies to north, east and south, and grim death to the west.

A bare seventy years prior to the ill-starred rebellion, Vawn and its neighbors to north and south, Skaht and Baikuh, had for the most part been the uncontested domains of certain fierce tribes of mountain barbarians, whose constant and bloody raids on the lands of Morguhn, Duhnkin and Mahntguhmree had at last impelled the High Lord's armies to advance along a wide front, driving the mountain men, foot by bloody, hard-fought foot, out of their ancestral hill country—which, because it was difficult to farm and because the Karaleenos Ehleenee had been sowers and reapers rather than herders, had never been previously subdued.

Subsequent to the conquest, recently arrived Horseclans had been settled in the three duchies carved from most of the conquered lands. These clans were every bit as fierce and warlike as the mountain tribes, as the raiding parties which eluded the patrols of troops and strongly garrisoned western forts learned to their sorrow. But the dispossessed were a stubborn breed, and nearly twenty years of frequent and disastrous defeats were required to convince them that the foothill lands were irredeemably lost.

But they had neither forgotten nor forgiven. Their descendants crouched now in their mountains,

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