Abban resisted the urge to smile as Hamash struggled to his feet, his face pale and bloody. He had chosen his drillmaster well.
Looking pale and dazed, blood running down his face, Hamash stumbled after as they limped over to the first squad. Another tan-veiled drillmaster stood at attention before them. His bow to Qeran was so low, his beard nearly touched the ground.
They walked the line, Qeran calling each man forth, treating them no differently than slaves on the auction block.
‘Flabby,’ Qeran noted of the first, pinching at his arm, ‘but a few months of gruel and carrying stones as he runs around the city walls would cure him of that. Perform the first sharukin.’ The man began to sweat, but he complied, moving slowly through the series of movements.
Qeran spat in the dust. ‘Pathetic, even for a khaffit.’
‘What was your profession before you answered the Deliverer’s call to sharak?’ Abban asked the man, taking out his ledger and pen.
‘I was a lamp maker,’ the man said.
Abban grunted. ‘Were you master or apprentice?’
‘Master,’ the man said. ‘My father owned our business, but left me to train my sons.’
‘What difference does this make?’ Qeran demanded, but Abban ignored him, asking several more questions before moving to the next in line. He was so thin his bones showed through his skin as he stood in his bido. His eyes squinted as they came to stand before him.
Abban held up three fingers. ‘How many?’
The man squinted harder. ‘Two.’ There was doubt in his voice.
Abban took several steps back, and the squinting stopped. ‘Three,’ the man said more decisively.
Qeran gave the spindly man a shove and he fell onto his back in the dirt.
‘On your feet, dog!’ one of the tan-veiled drillmasters shouted, whacking at him with a spear butt, and the man quickly got back in line.
‘This one does not even belong here, much less among the Deliverer’s elite,’ Qeran said.
Again Abban ignored him, still facing the man. ‘Can you read? Do sums on a bead lattice?’
The man nodded. ‘I can, when I have my lenses.’
They continued on thusly, Qeran pinching and prodding the men as Abban interrogated them. Some few were ordered to stand apart from the others, a group of potentials for Abban and Qeran to choose from.
They approached one who stood a head and more higher than all the others, his chest broad and his arms thick with muscle. Abban smiled.
‘You will not want that one,’ one of the drillmasters advised. ‘He is strong as a herd of camels, but he cannot hear the signal horns – or anything else for that matter.’
‘You were not asked,’ Abban said. ‘I remember this one. He was one of the first to answer the Deliverer’s call. What is his name?’
The drillmaster shrugged. ‘No one knows. We simply call him Earless.’
Abban made a few sharp gestures, and the giant left the line to stand with the other potentials.
There were over a thousand Kaji kha’Sharum in the capital. When the dama sang the curfew from the minarets, they had barely seen half of them. They culled from the potentials as they went, but still there were more than fifty men following them. Abban and Qeran took these into the pavilion, testing and interrogating them further until the group was narrowed to twenty, then ten, until at last they agreed upon four, including the deaf and mute giant.
Qeran argued against the giant. ‘A warrior who cannot hear the horns is a liability.’
‘In alagai’sharak, perhaps,’ Abban agreed, ‘but as the dama’ting have their tongueless eunuchs, I can make good use of a man who will never overhear anything he shouldn’t.’
They returned the next day after court, spending every moment until sundown inspecting, testing, questioning, and arguing until satisfied. Six times, Qeran threatened to quit if Abban overruled him on a particular man.
‘Go, then,’ Abban said over the seventh, a pit dog from Sandstone. He was a powerful brute, but his eyes were glassy with stupidity, and he could barely count his fingers. ‘I will not have idiot soldiers.’ The brute glared at Abban, but Earless towered behind him, arms crossed, and he thought better of speaking.
Qeran glared at him, but Abban glared right back. At last, the drillmaster shrugged. ‘Would that you had such steel when you were a boy, I could have made a man of you.’
Abban smiled and gave a slight bow. ‘It was always there, Drillmaster. Just not for battle.’
‘You have a good eye,’ Qeran offered grudgingly in the end, as he looked over his ten new recruits. ‘I can make warriors of these men.’
‘Good,’ Abban said. ‘Tomorrow we will go to the Majah khaffit’sharaj and begin again.’
It was another day to vet the Majah, a third for the Mehnding. It went more quickly after that, the tribes shrinking in size as they went down the line of pavilions in the training ground. The smallest was the Sharach with only three dozen full dal’Sharum and barely a hundred kha’Sharum.
‘We passed over hundreds of better men in the Kaji,’ Qeran noted after they had selected the best the Sharach had to offer. Like many of the older warriors, trained before Ahmann united the tribes, Qeran was fiercely loyal to his own and would prefer the majority of his recruits share his blood.
Abban nodded. ‘But the Sharach are masters of the alagai-catcher.’ Indeed, they had watched the Sharach warriors drilling with the weapons, long hollow spears with a hoop of woven steel jutting from the butt end to loop around the neck of a demon or man. A lever near the crosspiece could quickly widen or constrict the hoop. There were sharusahk forms to leverage the weapon, keeping control of the victim.
‘I can teach the weapon well enough,’ Qeran said.
‘Well enough is not good enough, Drillmaster,’ Abban said.
The drillmaster showed his teeth. ‘I taught the Deliverer himself to fight. That is not good enough?’
Abban was unimpressed. ‘You taught him much, but the dama taught him more, and it was blending the two that gave him true mastery. Ahmann studies the sharukin of all tribes now, and you will, too. You will teach these men, but you will also learn all they know. The Nanji spear and chain. The Krevakh ladder techniques. Everything. And if you are not up to the task, I will find one who is.’
‘I can learn the tricks of lesser tribes,’ Qeran growled.
‘Of course,’ Abban agreed. ‘And improve many of them, no doubt. I chose the greatest living drillmaster for a reason. You will make the least of these men more than a match for any kai’Sharum.’
Qeran seemed mollified by that. Sharum were such simple creatures. A bit of lash with a compliment at the end, and they were yours.
‘I cannot teach them the secrets of the dama that kai’Sharum learn,’ Qeran admitted.
Abban smiled. ‘Let me worry about that, Drillmaster.’
A wooden palisade had gone up around Abban’s compound by the time he and Qeran marched in the 120 kha’Sharum. The stakes were planted deeply and lashed tight to give no sign of what went on behind them, but they were carefully worn to look haphazard and weak. The wards along its length were strong, but painted with no artistry – nothing to draw attention to what might be going on behind.