“We’ll do ’er that way, Cap’n,” Ox called back with an evil grin.
“What do you think?” Hook-Beak asked Commander Narasan. “Should we let those bonfires go out?”
“Why don’t we keep them going until the fort’s finished?” Commander Narasan replied. He smiled faintly. “It’s an old Trogite saying: ‘Don’t let the customer see the product until it’s finished.’”
“I’m hoping that the customer won’t care much for the looks of our product, Narasan. Then maybe he’ll go shopping someplace else.”
“Let’s go find Longbow,” Rabbit suggested to Keselo. “We should probably let him know that the Maags have finished tearing the stairway apart and that Narasan’s people are starting on the fort.”
“Good idea,” Keselo agreed.
Longbow was coming down from the north rim, and Keselo and Rabbit went on up to meet him. “The Maags have finished, Longbow,” Rabbit told his friend. “Now Narasan’s people can start on the fort.”
“Good,” Longbow said. “Will they let the fires go out now?”
“Not until the fort’s finished,” Keselo replied. “Commander Narasan wants to hide what we’re doing from the enemy.”
“It works both ways, Keselo. They can’t see us, but we can’t see them either.”
“We’ve noticed that too, Longbow,” Rabbit agreed, “but the cap’n didn’t want to argue with Narasan about it. When you’ve got Maags and Trogites living together in the same camp, everybody needs to walk softly. Oh, I almost forgot. The cap’n sent word to his cousins, and Skell and Torl should be joining us in a few days.”
“That might not be such a good idea, Rabbit,” Longbow said dubiously. “If the creatures of the Wasteland find some way to get around us, the Domain of Zelana will lie unprotected.”
“You really think a lot of her, don’t you?” Keselo suggested.
“This is my home, Keselo, and I live but to serve Zelana. When I was younger, I thought I could avoid her and spend my life in the hunt for the creatures of the Wasteland, but when she called, I found that I couldn’t refuse her.”
“She seems to have that effect on people,” Keselo agreed.
“Some people rule by force, but Zelana rules by love. Love can be crueler than force, but it works better,” Longbow observed.
“I’ve noticed,” Rabbit added, “and the little girl’s even worse.”
Longbow smiled. “Oh, yes,” he agreed, “but delightful still, isn’t she? How long’s the building of the fort likely to take?”
“I can’t say for sure, Longbow,” Keselo replied, “but I’d guess that they’ll probably be finished by late tomorrow afternoon if they work on through the night. Then we can let the fires go out, and come morning on the day after tomorrow, the enemies will be able to see what we’ve done up here, and I don’t think they’ll like it very much.”
Gunda, Jalkan, and Padan supervised the construction of the fort, and, as was his habit, Jalkan bullied the soldiers under his command outrageously. When he wasn’t cursing them, he was slashing at them with a limber switch.
“That one wouldn’t last a week on board a Maag ship,” Rabbit told Keselo. “The crew would probably band up and feed him to the sharks.”
“Unfortunately, sharks are a little hard to find out on dry land,” Keselo replied.
“What is it that makes him so unpleasant? His men are working as hard as all the rest are.”
“He used to be a priest,” Keselo explained, “and the priests of Amar seem to enjoy flogging those who are beneath them.”
“If he was having so much fun as a priest, why did he join the army?”
“It’s a long story,” Keselo said shortly.
“We’ve got all kinds of time right now, Keselo,” Rabbit said. “That Jalkan fellow sort of rubs me the wrong way. If he started switching me the way he’s doing to those soldiers under him, he’d get a knife in his belly. Why does your commander let him get away with that?”
“I don’t think Jalkan will be with us much longer,” Keselo said. “Commander Narasan’s reprimanded him a few times already. Jalkan’s family was once quite prominent in Kaldacin, but they eventually became very corrupt. Jalkan couldn’t bear the idea of doing honest work, so he eventually joined the priesthood of the Amarite faith—the last refuge of the scoundrel. He won’t talk about his years in the church, but there are a few rumors floating about. If those rumors come anywhere close to what he was really up to, he should have been imprisoned—or even executed. Evidently, he became involved with some professional criminals, and he was making tons of money. When the head of the church found out about his little enterprise—and about the fact that Jalkan wasn’t sharing his profits with the church—the ‘most holy one’ expelled him from the church and even went through the Damnation Ceremony. That put Jalkan back out on the street again, and he used the last of his profits to buy himself a commission in Commander Narasan’s army. We’d all be much happier if he’d move on, but he doesn’t seem to want to leave.”
“If it bothers you all that much, why don’t you have a little chat with Longbow?” Rabbit suggested. “We’ve got lots and lots of arrows now, so we wouldn’t really miss one all that much. I’d say that your Jalkan fellow would look a whole lot nicer with one of Longbow’s arrows sticking out of his forehead.”
“Now that you mention it, he probably would,” Keselo agreed. “We’d all be terribly sorry, of course, but we could give him a nice funeral—and maybe even wait for a half hour or so before we started to celebrate.”
“A half hour sounds about right to me,” Rabbit agreed with a wicked little grin.
The fort went up rapidly, and, following Sorgan’s example, Commander Narasan’s men worked on through the night by the light of the bonfires on either side of the gap.
When the sun rose, Narasan put fresh men to work, and as Keselo had surmised, the Trogites were finishing up as the setting sun painted the western sky.
“Go tell Sorgan that we’re finished, Keselo,” Narasan said. “He might want to have a look.”
“Yes, sir,” Keselo replied smartly. He went down the back stairs of the fort and found Sorgan in the Maag encampment at the head of the ravine. “The fort’s completed, Captain Hook-Beak,” he reported.