Free The Death of Nnanji by Dave Duncan Page A

obligation of vengeance on both parties, so it was now Nnanji’s job to see that the dead men were avenged, and any Nnanji oath was automatically Wallie’s.
    “Did they use thunder weapons?”
    “We did not hear or see any, my lord. We guessed then, of course, that the Cross Zek land road was another trap. As soon as possible, Lord Nnanji took us all back there. They’d been ambushed, slaughtered to the last man. Their bodies had been stripped and left for the rats and ravens. If Lord Nnanji had led us all that way, we’d likely all have died.”
    Clearly Lord Shonsu would be visiting Zek and Cross Zek in the near future.
    “Who were these foes, though? Swordsmen or sorcerers?”
    “Sorcerers, without a doubt, my lord, so Lord Nnanji said. Or civilians using sorcerers’ thunder weapons. No sword cuts, no arrow wounds. They had holes in them, that was all.”
    So Wallie’s old nightmare of swordsmen trying to fight sorcerers armed with guns had come true at last. Even if the Kra coven had nothing better than the Vul coven’s smoothbore, short-barrel pistols, this was going to be very ugly.
    He reined in and dismounted. “Show me,” he said, taking Endrasti’s reins. “Pace it out. How far apart were the bodies?”
    They were not quite into the vineyards, still in the upland area of dairy farms, where cows slumped on the grass chewing their cud incuriously. Endrasti recreated the scene for him, using fences and even particular cows as landmarks. He conjured up a narrow, steep-sided valley, a deep cut winding through forested hills, with poor visibility ahead and none at all to the sides. Anything, he said, might be hidden in the trees and bushes above. Most of the bodies lay in order of march, as if they had died in a single volley, but a few had tried to storm up the crumbling sides and been shot down from above. Wallie questioned him hard on distance. How far from their victims had the bushwhackers been hiding? The most significant fact that he deduced was that the range had been too great for smoothbore handguns. The bushwhackers had been armed with long guns, so the Kra sorcerers, if they were the culprits, had invented the musket.
    “How many wounds per body, could you tell?”
    “Well… The crows had been at them, my lord. One or two, was most I saw.”
    “Were any of them ripped to pieces?” Back when Vul coven had conquered the RegiVul Loop, they had progressed to cannon loaded with grapeshot. The entire garrison of Gor had been wiped out with one such “thunderbolt”.
    “No, my lord. Lord Nnanji commented on that.”
    “Our losses?”
    “At Cross Zek twenty-six swordsmen, three porters, and a herald; worse than Arbo.”
    Thirty musket balls could not mow down thirty men. At least twice that many shots would be needed, and that meant either a far greater rate of fire than could be achieved with primitive muskets, or a much larger force. Considering that the enemy could not have known how many swordsmen they would have to deal with, the much larger force theory seemed more likely.
    The two men remounted and continued their ride.
    “Twice you mentioned somewhere called Arbo.”
    Endrasti looked at Wallie with dismay. “The massacre at Arbo, on Swordsmen’s Day. Honorable Rudere… You didn’t receive that dispatch, either?”
     
    The Tryst maintained a picket post at the edge of town. Wallie and Endrasti stopped there to change horses, so they were able to make good speed on the last leg of their journey to the lodge. He went straight to the Executive Block, tossed his reins to a waiting junior, and took the steps at the double. As was to be expected, Master Horkoda was still at his desk.
    Wallie barked out the news. “Lord Nnanji was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt last night, in Quo. Have his palace searched from turret to cellar and post double guards. He is coming home with an escort of around four hundred, led by lord Boariyi. His usual quarters must be made ready, and the