Miphon emerged from the green bottle after three days; Ohio and Blackwood, more cautious, waited for five. All were relieved to find Selzirk had not been destroyed, but more than a little annoyed to find that they would now be delayed while Hearst masterminded the defences of the Harvest Plains.
Nevertheless, they soon found compensations. For Miphon, it was a relief to be no longer travelling; he was able to resume a wizard's true life of study and meditation. For Blackwood, Farfalla's palace offered the solace of solitude, which, in a bustling city like Selzirk, was a considerable privilege indeed.
The rewards for Ohio were rich, as Hearst made him responsible for buying in stone and shipbuilding timber from the Chenameg Kingdom. While Ohio was not exactly corrupt, he found that a certain fraction of the money which passed through his fingers stuck to them -a process which happened so easily that he was almost able to persuade himself it was accidental.
For Hearst, there was an unexpected reward in that Farfalla, a master of Sunoya Dance – a mind/body training system perfected in Selzirk, and unknown to the world at large – was able to teach him physical and mental disciplines which slowly began to give his left hand the bladeskills which had once been possessed by the right.
And so the days passed, with spring becoming summer – and disaster fast approaching.
Hearst's plans for the defence of the Harvest Plains included new military roads, new castles, new ships, a guild of assassins, a courier service, and chains of watchtowers able to signal with windmill-style vanes during the day and with fire by night. All this cost money, but the Harvest Plains were rich.
Combined with the formation of a militia, the construction of new armouries, and, if necessary, the recruitment of a few legions of mercenaries from the Chenameg Kingdom, Hearst's plan would give the Harvest Plains a strong defence against both the Orfus pirates and more traditional enemies, namely the Rice Empire which lay to the south.
The only thing wrong was that Hearst would never have time to put these plans into effect, because the enemies of the Harvest Plains fully intended to strike before the stone and timber from the east was assembled into castles and ships.
Hearst had spoken of Elkor Alish as being disarmed, but this, of course, was far from the truth. Hearst had spent too long in the company of wizards, and had spent too much time exploring the memories left to him by the wizard Phyphor; he had acquired something of a wizard's contempt for the weapons of men.
Alish was no stranger to the ways of war; his experiences in the Cold West had given him mastery of the mixture of bribery, flattery, fear, diplomacy, brutality and generosity needed to hold together a mercenary army.
The seaport city of Runcorn, complete with its armoury, its treasury and its ships of war, was under his command. Using Prince Comedo as a figurehead, he could pretend when necessary to be a servant of the Favoured Blood. Under his leadership were men from Dybra, Chorst and the Lezconcarnau Plains, eager for a share of the wealth of the Harvest Plains.
Alish was persuaded by necessity, that most unrelenting motivator of men, to make the best use of these resources. During his confrontation with Hearst, Alish had seen Hearst destroy a document summoning the Rovac fleet to Argan. Unfortunately, what Hearst had destroyed was only a copy – the original ink had been despatched by ship to Rovac the day before Hearst manifested himself in Runcorn.
Alish had no doubt that the Rovac fleet would arrive in due course. Accordingly, it was vital that, as a minimum, he obtained control of the Greater Teeth and the Harvest Plains, as he had boasted of these conquests as if they had already been made.
The Greater Teeth, those cliff-built islands where the Orfus pirates had their lairs, were too strong for Alish to take without help from a death-stone. So he tried diplomacy.
The chief pirate, Menator, proved ready to negotiate. The capture and control of the island of Stokos had stretched his fleet and his manpower to the limit; an alliance would give him a better chance of making the conquests which his own followers, in turn, had already been promised.
And so it was that an alliance was made between these two- warlords who, between them, commanded lands, harbours, northern strongholds, infantry, a substantial body of cavalry from the Lezconcarnau Plains, and a strong fleet.
Menator and Alish, two sagacious and experienced warriors who had both on occasion been bruised by overconfidence, did not simply launch an onslaught against the enemy. Spies told them Hearst was still in Selzirk, which suggested their best move was to capture a city intact and hold its population hostage.
The city which fell to them was Androlmarphos; the garrison commander and other key officials were bribed, the garrison itself incapacitated by poisoned food, and the city walls commanded by marauders from the sea before the general population had time to realise they were under attack.
Following the capture of the city, an orgy of rape, looting and torture might reasonably have been expected, but nothing of the sort took place. Alish and Menator restrained their men. Apart from their desire not to compromise the hostage-value of the city, they did not want to see it casually destroyed as they were now empire builders in their own right.