head of this largest of all gathered armieswasn't looking to the
Westlands, but gathering his forces to take control of Galt itself. He
could overthrow the High Council and install himself as autocrat.
What it all came to was this: Any mercenary company working for anyone
besides Galt was likely to be on the losing side of the fight. The
collected Wardens were putting out calls for free companies and garrison
forces, preparing themselves as best they could. The fees that Sinja was
offered would have been handsome for a band of veterans and siege
captains, much less for a few hundred foreign sell-swords one step up
from thugs. And so Sinja had considered the money, considered the offers
and the stories and his own best instincts, then quietly packed up his
men and headed south to Aren to sell their services at a fourth of the
price, but to the winners.
The men had grumbled. Wide, square Westland coins had been dancing in
their minds. Morale had started to fail. So Sinja had paused in the Ward
of Castin, made contact with a free company who'd taken contract there,
and challenged their veterans to a day of games. Once Sinja's men had
understood and accepted his point, they bound their ribs and continued
to the south. No one had questioned his judgment again.
Aren was one of the wards farthest to the south. Low hills covered with
rich green grasses, towns of stone buildings with thatched roofs, elk
and deer so wise to the ways of men that the bowmen he sent ahead to
forage never caught one of them. Wherever they went, Sinja saw the signs
of an army having passed-ruined crops, abandoned campsites with the
ashes of a half hundred fires churned into the mud. But even with this,
he had been shocked when they topped one of the many hills and caught
first sight of the city of Aren.
No city under siege had ever seen so many troops at its wall. Tents and
low pavilions were laid out around it on all sides, dark oiled cloth
shining in row after row after row. The smoke of cook fires left a low
haze through the valley that even the rain could not wholly dispel, the
strange bulbous steam wagons the Galts used to move supplies and leave
their men unburdened seemed as numerous as horses in the fields, and the
squirming, streaming activity of men moving through each of the opened
gates made the city seem like a dead sparrow overrun by ants.
His men set camp at a polite distance from the existing companies while
Sinja dared the city itself. He entered the gates at midday. It wasn't
more than three hands later he was being escorted through the halls of
the Warden's palace to the library and the general himself. I Ie'd
surrendered his blades and the garrote he kept at his waist before being
permitted to speak with the great man. Either Balasar Gice felt this
unprecedented mass of men was too little for whatever task lay ahead of
him and was grabbing at every spare sword and dagger in the world, or
else Sinja was, for reasons that passed imagining, of particular
interest to him.
Either way, Sinja disliked it.
Balasar Gice turned out to he a smallish man, mouse-brown hair running
to white at the temples. He wore the gray tunic of command that Sinja
had seen before when he'd been in the field as a young man fighting