Sentry Peak by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

he’ll fight us, sir?” asked another crossbowman, this one a yellow-haired fellow whose liege lord was probably still looking for him.
    “I hope he does, by the gods,” George answered. He’d had some serfs on his own family lands in Parthenia, but holding Detina together under the rightful king came first for him. “If he doesn’t run away himself, we’ll run him out, and we’ll smash up his army while we’re doing it.”
    “What about Thraxton’s magic, General?” a soldier asked him: another blond likely to have come out of the north. He sounded a little nervous. Serfs, even escaped serfs, often had reason to be nervous about northern nobles’ magecraft.
    But George just laughed—a deep, rolling chortle that made everyone who could hear him look his way. “I doubt you’ve got much to worry about,” he said, which made the crossbowmen and pikemen close by laugh again, too. “If Thraxton’s magic were half as good as he brags it is, those bastards in blue would be down in the Five Lakes country by now, instead of us pushing on them. Besides, it’s not like we haven’t got mages of our own.”
    He waved to the gray-robed contingent of scholarly-looking men on assback accompanying the long columns of crossbowmen and the blocks of pikemen and the squadrons of unicorn-riders at the army’s front and wings. Most of the soldiers nodded, relieved and reassured.
    George wasn’t so sure he’d reassured himself. The southron mages just didn’t look like men of war. They looked as if they would be more at home as healers or stormstoppers or diviners or fabricators who helped the manufactories in the southwest turn out the crossbows and quarrels and spearheads and catapults without which a modern army couldn’t go about its murderous business. And the wizards had excellent reason for looking that way. Almost all of them were healers or stormstoppers or diviners or fabricators. They’d had to learn military magecraft from the ground up after Grand Duke Geoffrey chose to contest Avram’s succession.
    Things were different up in the north. The tradition of military magecraft had never died out there, as it had in the south. Instead, northern nobles used the sorceries that had helped their ancestors win the land to help hold down the serfs those ancestors had conquered. In the early days of the war, they’d embarrassed Avram’s armies again and again.
    Doubting George knew one reason he’d risen swiftly through the ranks was that, as a Parthenian who’d held serfs, he’d known some of the northern spells and how to block them. He’d never systematically studied sorcery, as Count Thraxton and some of the other northern commanders had, but he’d never panicked when it was used against him, as, for instance, Fighting Joseph had when Duke Edward’s magic cast a cloud of confusion on the southrons and let him win the Battle of Viziersville despite being outnumbered worse than two to one.
    A scout on unicornback rode up to General George. Saluting, he said, “Sir, there are stone fences up ahead with northern men behind them. They started shooting at us when we got close.”
    “Are there? Did they?” George said, and the scout nodded. The general rapped out the next important questions: “How many of them? Is it Count Thraxton’s whole army?” Eagerness coursed through him. If Thraxton wanted to make a fight of it this side of Rising Rock, he’d gladly oblige the Braggart.
    But the rider, to his disappointment, shook his head. “No, sir, doesn’t look that way, nor even close. If I had to guess, I’d say they were just trying to slow us down a bit before we go on into Rising Rock.”
    “It could be.” George looked ahead, to Sentry Peak in the northwest and Proselytizers’ Rise due west but farther away. “Maybe they’re buying some time to let their army pull out. All right.” Decision crystallized. “If they want us to shift them, we’ll do the job.” He pointed toward the center, off to