The coastal road formed a funnel and brought the conflict to a stalemate. The more Lucius withdrew, the tighter his ranks formed. Even with the greater numbers, no envelopment was possible for the Cynizia. But, the more they withdrew, the further they were from protecting Rackvidd.

Blue cloaks dotted the fields. Where budding crops should have stood, the ground had been sown with blood. “Move the injured back! Fresh men to the front,” Lucius shouted, marching up and down the line of men, himself between them and the Cynizia. The ranks of soldiers rolled on themselves, the formation twisting and coiling to cycle the soldiers. Each of them gripped their weapons and panted for breath. The shield wall waved like grass in the wind while those behind collapsed to their knees and tried to squeeze drips of liquid from their waterskins.

The doctor took a second in command position of sorts, snapping orders at the men on how to line up the injured and what to do for base treatment. It weakened the force, but drew out of it those most likely to break and rout. In time, they would return to combat, but not for Rackvidd.

Lucius had thought the Cynizia would do the same, and in part, they did. But only half. He lost sight of their leader, Erdro Karekale. The lord of the Black Keep vanished back to his siege camp amid the distant thumps of cannons. My pupil knew perfectly well what the noises were, those drums in the distance. For the foot soldiers, it was the work of the gods, or at least a divine beast.

Over the heads of the Cynizia contingent set to block him off, Lucius stared at the city walls. In his mind was born the first of his military innovations. The spark of it, the nucleus of ideation. He knew that marching on the Cynizia forces alone would be his destruction. If Lord Raymi opened the gates, and they did not throw themselves into the fray, they too might be crushed and the gates forced. Only together would the mountain men be slaughtered.

And Lucius had no way of speaking with the city defenders.

Of course, no innovation comes wholecloth and without precedent. During his education, I had once told him the legend of General Tallymund who, in the Wolf Hunter wars between the Sun’s Alliance and Skaldheim circa 250 CC, devised a code of trumpet blasts and colored flags. This was in a time before the trolls had so thoroughly diffused through the tundra. For an entire season, General Tallymund had used his remote signaling to communicate with his subordinates, even while they were dispatched across the plains, maneuvering to capture the barbarian host and maintaining the natural advantages as they were.

This drove the invading king of chiefs mad, until he hatched a counter plan and captured one of the flag bearers. Under duress and torture, that man divulged the code. The king of chiefs thought he had pulled a great trick upon General Tallymund, for then he was privy to the communications. He watched and he listened and when the time for their charge was nigh, the king of chiefs had already aligned his army to break the men of the central plains.

Except, the vanguard came to their flank, from a group who should have been the reserves. A mere day after their code had been intercepted and wrung free, and without recombining his forces, General Tallymund had snuck out new orders right under the nose of the king of chiefs. Needless to say, the northerners were slaughtered.

I had meant the story to teach him the dangers of bad information. Had the king of chiefs prolonged the war, continued to deny decisive combat, the Sun’s Alliance would have crumbled to famine; their grain trampled, stolen, or burned by his marauding all while an easy retreat to Skaldheim existed. The king of chief’s temper drew him into the conflict, to match wits with General Tallymund. Instead, a single piece of information eluded him, and spelled out his demise.

The southerner had privately told his commanders, and them alone, an additional command. Should he fly a black flag first, all subsequent commands were to be inverted. To charge was to retreat. left was right, and so on. Thus, the Sun’s Alliance ripped through an unprepared flank, penetrating a host many times their size.

The Vassish had a rudimentary set of universal signals, but it lacked the granularity and specificity to communicate something like, “In two hours time we must attack simultaneously.”

Lucius began to devise a means of full language communication in code. A means of rendering flag motions to letters and from letters into words. This was not something he could implement that day. Much too many issues and nuances existed in the problem.(1)

This is, of course, because Lucius had next to nothing to do while menacing the Cynizia. He turned the problem over in his head all while scowling at his foes and daring them to loose an arrow at him. One rogue did just that, missed, and Lucius didn’t flinch as the shaft stuck in the ground some feet beside him. Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed it, but the Cynizia saw only a fearless warrior.

A day of siege can be a truly boring event. For as much as some men on both sides wished to charge and to destroy the enemy, the Vassish had the obvious sense to wait for their last few score of soldiers to catch up. By the time the sun hung high overhead, the duties of care for the injured had been handed over to the slightly less injured, and those unfit to fight ferried themselves away. They alleviated the burden, lightened the load, and handed over a fair deal of food and water too.

Far from bad information, Lucius found himself with no information and not enough soldiers to break the siege. Part of him wished to retreat further, behind a bend in the road and have his troops bed down in anticipation of a nighttime raid, but he feared that Lord Raymi might issue forth an attack at any moment. In truth, it was the mountain men who had the moment to not just rest, but to continue their counter attack, whatever it might be. Lucius at this time, had no inkling what Erdro Karekale’s stigmata was, and thus could not imagine what their aim was.

To his surprise, they sent a rider out beneath a white flag. An older man who dismounted and showed no weapon but a sheathed honor blade. “My lord has sent me to ask for your surrender.”

Lucius stared back at him, unable to believe the words. “Then you must be a jester’s apprentice.” His men laughed.

The negotiator’s face darkened. “I hear you are a gambler, Solhart.”

“I am.”

The horseman twisted in his saddle and pointed his thumb at the city beyond. More lines of smoke had replaced the first to dwindle out. Helmets glinted between crenelations. “How much will you gamble that we won’t break the walls of Rackvidd?”

Lucius stuck out his chin and said. “Three.”

“Three? Three what? Lives of your men?”

“To do that requires you have three extraordinary stigmata. One to break the walls. A second for your fleet to pierce the harbor. And a third to synchronize them. You began your siege with what? A few hundred men? Perhaps if I hadn’t arrived here, you might have expected more to join your cause and swell your ranks, but you can’t wait for that. So if you break the walls now, the full might of the garrison will come down on you with us at your backs. You’d be crushed. You wouldn’t dare unless the fleet could aid you.”

The negotiator stroked his chin thoughtfully and grinned. “Who says we don’t? We chose this strategy, did we not?”

My pupil grinned back. “That’s what makes it a gamble, right? If your lord wants to gamble, ask him if he’ll gamble his life. I’d happily face him man to man. That is, if that little cut I gave him doesn’t hurt too bad.”

The negotiator stuck his chin out, glaring down his nose. “We already killed your leader, Tyrion Reed–”

Lucius spat on the ground. “Insubordinate. Got what he deserved.” His men stopped laughing.

“This is for all of you!” the negotiator shouted, turning his gaze to the ranks of soldiers behind Lucius. “If you wish to keep your lives, you need only give us his head and walk away.”

A most dangerous proposition.

The time for words had passed. Lucius turned and ripped the spear from the hands of the nearest soldier. While the man blinked back at him, he spun. The negotiator knew at once what that meant, and he yanked upon the reins. The horse reared as Lucius took leaps forward. Heels to the belly, the man bolted. Lucius threw the spear. The steel head arced. It ripped through cloak and flesh. The Giordanan slumped in the saddle. The horse bucked and galloped, frenzying from the smell of blood. He toppled, falling from his seat and hitting the trampled road.

Lucius shook his hand out and turned back to his men. He marched half the line, looking into their eyes. Once he spotted a man he could use, a squad leader from the auxiliaries, he spat out, “Crucify the corpse. Put it on display.”

This later came to be known as Solhart Cipher, though the precise encryption changed as needed. For the first five years its use spread without change, but later in life he sent out new encryption keys nearly monthly.