Passifal was watching Corfe as though he had just that moment recognized him from somewhere. “I see you intend to pick up the King’s gauntlet, Colonel.”

“If I can, Quartermaster,” Corfe said flatly, “I intend to throw it back in his face.”

NINETEEN

“W hat a pretty picture a burning city makes,” Sastro di Carrera said, leaning on the iron balcony rail of the Royal palace. Abrusio spread out beyond his perch in a sea of buildings, ending almost two miles away downhill in the confusion of ships and buildings and docks which butted on to the true sea, the Western Ocean which girdled the known edges of the world. It was twilight, not because the day was near its long winter sleep, but because of the towers of smoke that shrouded the sun. Sastro’s face was lit by the radiance of the burning, and he could hear it as a far thunder, the mutterings of the banished elder gods.

“May God forgive us,” Presbyter Quirion said beside him, making the Sign of the Saint across his breastplate. Unlike Sastro, who was immaculately tailored, Quirion was grimed and filthy. He had lately come from the inferno below, in which men were fighting and dying by the thousand, their collective screaming drowned out by the hungry roar of the holocaust, the tearing rattles of volley-fire.

“ ‘And now,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘is Hell come to earth, and in the ashes of its burning will totter all the schemes of greedy men. The Beast, in coming, will tread the cinders of their dreams.’ ”

“What in the world are you talking about, Quirion?” Sastro asked.

“I was quoting an old text which foretells the end of the world we know and the beginning of another.”

“The end of the Hibrusid world, at any rate,” Sastro said with satisfaction. “And think of the prime building land the fire will clear for us. It will be worth a fortune.”

Quirion looked at his aristocratic companion with un-concealed contempt. “You are not King yet, my lord Carrera.”

“I will be. Nothing will stop me or you now, Presbyter. Abrusio will be ours very soon.”

“If there’s anything left of it.”

“The important parts will be left,” Sastro said, grinning. “What a blessed thing a wind is, to blow the flames out to sea and take with it those heretical traitors and rebel peasants in the Lower City who defy us. God’s hand at work, Quirion. Surely you can see that?”

“I do not like to ask God to intervene on my behalf; it smacks of hubris to assume that the Creator of the universe will think me, out of all His creations, worthy of attention. I merely try to further what I believe to be His divine will. In this instance, I needed two hundred barrels of pitch to set the Lower City alight.”

“A practical kind of faith you Knights profess,” Sastro said, raising his scented handkerchief to his face so that his mouth was concealed.

“I find it answers well enough.”

The handkerchief was tucked back inside a snowy sleeve. “So how goes the fighting then, my practical Presbyter?”

Quirion rasped a palm over the stubble on his scalp. “Severe enough at times. Your retainers have been acquitting themselves well since I stiffened their tercios with contingents of Knights. The trained Hebrian troops are better, of course, but they are distracted by Freiss’s men in their rear. He has three or four hundred arquebusiers holed up in the western arm of the Lower City cheek by jowl with the Arsenal, and they have had to tie up almost a thousand troops to keep him bottled in his bolthole.”

“What of the navy? There was a lot of activity in the Inner Roads this morning.”

“They were merely warping their ships off the docks; by now the fire will have swept down to the water’s edge. They tried a few ranging shots at the palace this afternoon, but the distance is too far. We have a boom across the Great Harbour covered by the forts on the moles; it should suffice to keep the navy at bay, and their guns out of range of the Upper City. Abrusio was built to be defended from a seaborne attack as well as from a landward one. That works in our favour. And the confined nature of the battlefield means that our disadvantages in numbers are not so apparent.”

“How far has the fire advanced?”

“As far as the Crown Wharves in the Inner Roads. It should almost be licking at the walls of the Arsenal itself. Mercado has had to set aside over three thousand men as firefighters, and another dozen tercios are overseeing the evacuation of the Lower City’s population. He is as hamstrung as a bull caught half over a gate.”

“His concern for the little people is laudable, but it will prove his undoing,” Sastro said.

“The little people are fighting side by side with the city garrison, Lord Carrera,” Quirion reminded him. “The population of the Upper City has remained neutral, but I would not place much faith in the nobles.”

“Oh, they’ll bend with the wind, as they always do. There’s not a great house in Hebrion—even the Sequeros—who will tangle with us now. And the Merchants’ Guild is being rapidly won over also. Gold is a marvellous comforter, I find, and the concessions that a future king can grant.”

“Yes . . .”

The steady roar of the flames mixed with furious exchanges of arquebus fire made a collective wailing which at a distance seemed like Abrusio herself crying out in agony because of the inferno gnawing at her bowels. Warfare on this scale had not been seen west of the Cimbrics for twenty years, but now the Five Monarchies were being ripped apart by internal dissension and religious struggle: civil war in everything but name.

There were rumours that Astarac was going the way of Hebrion, the nobles fighting to depose the heretic King Mark and elect one of their own to the throne, helped, of course, by the Inceptine Order and the Knights Militant. And Torunna, as well as being menaced by the vast Merduk army which had lately been stalled at Ormann Dyke, had uprisings of its own to contend with. And Almark’s king was dying—perhaps dead already—and was said to be intent on leaving his kingdom to the Church.

Quirion sighed. He was at heart a pious man, and a profoundly conservative one. Deeply convinced though he was that the Church was in the right and had to snuff out heresy wherever it took root—even were it to sprout in the palaces of kings—he did not like to see what he considered to be the natural order of things so disrupted and torn apart. Sastro now . . . he relished any anarchy which might further his own ambitions, but the Presbyter of the Knights in Abrusio would rather have been fighting heathens on the eastern frontiers than slaughtering folk who, at the end of the day, believed in the same God as he.

It was a feeling he kept to himself and scourged himself for at every opportunity, flying as it did in the face of the directives issued by the Pontiff in Charibon, God’s direct representative on earth. He was here to obey orders which in the last analysis were equivalent to the will of God. There could be no shirking of such a burden.

T HE fire hurtled through the narrow streets of Lower Abrusio like a wave, a bright tsunami which exploded the wooden buildings of this part of the city into kindling and ate out the interiors and the supporting wooden beams of those structures which were composed of yellow Hebrian stone until they toppled also. A dozen massed batteries of heavy culverins could not have bettered the destructive work, and the efforts of the soldiers-turned-firefighters in General Mercado’s command to stem the onset of the flames seemed pointless, drops of maniac effort swamped in a sea of fire.

They were busy demolishing a wide avenue of houses southwest of the front of the conflagration, hoping thereby to form a firebreak which would starve the flames of sustenance. Engineers had laid charges at the cornerstones of all the buildings and were busy detonating them in a series of explosions which blasted the smoke into concentric rings, like the ripples of a stone-pocked lake.