The Military of Singhapura

“All government is based on the legal monopoly of violence.” So wrote Pramudya Tata Praja in The Civil Service and the State. When the laws and the arguments and the coins have all failed, the steel comes out. These, then, are the Military Orders of the Singha Adhiraj.

Like most things in Singhapura, the present arrangement descends from Samarskand. The ancient texts describe the Panchayudhaya, the Five Weapons: the Mace, the Sword, the Bow, the Discus and the Conch. The Conch was the messengers and the signallers.

Early Singhapura kept to those five faithfully, until actual wars forced a change. A campaign cannot be fought out of a book of ancient sayings. The Chapter system replaced the Five Weapons and has been refined since about the year 500 of Singhapura’s reckoning. It has room for ordinary troops and specialists alike; commanders may combine Chapters to suit a campaign; and every faction with an interest in the army holds a large enough share of it that none can take the whole.

Each Chapter is commanded by a Chaptermaster, the second-highest rank in Singhapura’s army. Above them stand the four generals, whom the Emperor appoints as he needs them. Some of those appointments have been brilliant and some have been disasters, and so over the last century an unwritten rule has grown up: nobody receives a general’s post unless he can defeat the sitting Chaptermasters in a series of war games.

Everyone knows that Singhapura’s armies win. Raskeshwara holds that this has less to do with clever generals than with what he calls the Flowing Chain: the Empire’s capacity to move men and supplies wherever it likes, to keep them fed once they arrive, and to keep them fighting longer than anyone else can. The quartermasters and clerks of Singhapura win it as many battles as its soldiers do. Your Grace will recall from the histories that the Temple’s crusade in the First Ebbing failed for want of a calendar, not for want of courage. The Empire has never forgotten it.

The Main Chapters: One Through Eight

Chapter One, the Standing Line, is the largest force Singhapura has and the spine of the army: archers, line infantry and reservists, carrying spears, bows and shields. When other Chapters run short, the Line hauls their supplies as well.

Every soldier serves at least five years, and a recruit from outside the Empire becomes a citizen at the end of it. Longer service brings land and a pension. For a great many people this is the only road upward, and the only road into Singhapura. The Line makes imperial citizens out of provincial farm boys faster than any law could.

Chapter Two, Hammerfall, is the heavy infantry, placed in the path of cavalry. Hammerfall recruits only from the Standing Line, receives far better equipment and training, and is full of men who intend to die in uniform one way or another.

Chapter Three, the Black Lightning, is the shock cavalry, drawn from the noble families. For a young noble who has made no name in scholarship or elsewhere, a term in the Lightning is the least he can do to be thought respectable. Three is an auspicious number in Singhapura.

They scout and fight on horseback in units of twenty-five called Lances, and many riders furnish their own horses and equipment. The Empire finds this very convenient. It takes hot-blooded young nobles, gives them enough chances at glory to keep them content, and teaches them to follow orders before they learn enough politics to do real damage. Your Grace will have seen much the same among the knights of the North.

Chapter Four, the Boiling Rock, does artillery, sieges, fortifications and heavy engineering, and many of its people are Taprobane mages. Between wars they oversee the great public works and see that imperial roads and walls are built to imperial standards. Its people move back and forth with the Stonemasons, so the men who bring down a city wall and the men who raise one are very often the same men.

Chapter Five, the Left Hand of the Law, is the army’s own Watch. They keep discipline and investigate anyone suspected of disloyalty. Their authority runs across every Chapter, and they may question and detain an officer of any rank. The rest of the army fears them and resents them for it. The Adhiraj’s household guard are almost always drawn from Chapter Five (this is the so-called Hand of Silk and Steel, although it has no designated name).

Chapter Six, the Iron Chain, manages supply, logistics and transport for the whole army. Most of its people come from the guilds, or are young men learning the trade in uniform before returning to commerce. Raskeshwara’s Flowing Chain rests upon this Chapter and upon the roads the Boiling Rock builds. In his words, without the Iron Chain the rest of the army is a great deal of expensive equipment sitting in one place.

Chapter Seven, the Water Bearers, is Singhapura’s navy. It began as a merchant fleet and turned military by degrees, and it is now the second largest Chapter. Ealdorfold has more ships spread over more water, and Lusia is better on the deep sea; the Water Bearers are still learning. Their River Ghosts, who specialize in water and mist magic and in landing troops from the water, are a great deal better than the rest of the Chapter’s reputation.

Chapter Eight, the Sin-Eaters, is the Chapter that frightens people most. Their only task is the destruction of magical threats to the Empire, and they are chosen from the bravest, the most violent, and those with the least wish to go on living. They are the only Chapter with no written code of honour, no anthem and no badges of rank. Their banner is plain black.

They field heavily trained Taprobane battle mages and many Judges and Arbiters of the Haugris Church, and I am told there are Temple of Eighteen monks among them who have set aside their robes for the fight. The first Sin-Eater Legion marched the year the Gray King came to Kusumadevi’s library, and the Empire has been demanding steel, leather and artefacts from its provinces to equip them ever since. Some of that steel passes through Daub.

The Specialist Chapters: Nine Through Thirteen

The specialist Chapters are smaller and cost more, and the Empire is far more careful about when it sends them out.

Chapter Nine, the Cobras, scout and sabotage beyond the borders. They recruit chiefly from frontier peoples, so that they may look and behave like the natives of places Singhapura does not yet formally rule. Daub is upon a frontier. Assume the Cobras know it well.

Within the Cobras sits a sub-Chapter called the Crows, who specialize in counter-spying and “longterm operations” - ie: becoming permanent parts of a foreign order, rather than being spies. Many sources do not list them at all. They recruit chiefly orphans and nobles who have lost their lands, and a good number pass through the University and emerge with magic for concealment and for finding things out. The Crows have outgrown their parent in everything but name, and I expect them to be a Chapter in their own right within a generation. The Merchants will have to find a new joke about being the Fourteenth. Your Grace will deal with a Crow sooner or later, although you will very probably never know it.

Chapter Ten, the Stone Lions, are the last line of defence for the places the Empire cannot afford to lose: elite heavy infantry in the heaviest armour there is, trained to hold their ground whatever it costs them. They now receive a good deal of magical training as well, and they are said to be unbreakable. That may be an exaggeration, but there are records of a handful of Stone Lions holding off hundreds while those they guarded escaped.

Chapter Eleven, the Paladins, began as an independent mercenary order, and Makaraasoka took them into the Empire because they were so effective. As the Haugris Church grew stronger they fell out of favour, and the Empire is now allowing them to dwindle and handing their duties to others. Your Grace knows the recent events better than this treatise needs to record.

The loss of the Paladins pushed the Empire to try magical specialist units in their place. First it gave the Stone Lions magical training. Then it took note of what the River Ghosts had accomplished in the navy. Finally it created the two newest Chapters.

Chapter Twelve, the Thunderclouds, are mages recruited from Taprobane directly after graduation, most of them specialists in lightning and fire. Their armour stores the rapid magical charges their work requires, and it glows while they fight. On several occasions the glow alone has ended an engagement before it began. They are intended to replace the Paladins.

Chapter Thirteen, the Special Affairs Division, is called the Heathens by everyone who must work near them. They are sent where soldiering will not serve and the Empire needs to be able to deny its part. They take special talents: practitioners of unorthodox magic, and people whose abilities are strange or outright forbidden. Talents the Sin-Eaters will not accept are said to end up here, especially powers the Church calls heresy. Almost nothing about them is public.

Other Forces

There are three further forces, Your Grace, of which you should know.

The Charter Knights are a mixed body. When a soldier’s term is done, or he has spent too long at the front, or he is judged too old or otherwise unfit, he is sent to the Charter Knights. The Empire puts him through a University course in law and ethics and sends him home as a warden of the city, to guard it and keep its peace. Charter Knights answer to the local Governors and Justices of the Peace.

The idea came from watching the North. Veterans there have always had to be paid off with land. While the North had plenty of land to go around, Singhapura foresaw natural limits and problems to this approach - a lord with more old soldiers than farms ends up with bandits, as Your Grace knows. Singhapura wanted something that would scale, and that would get some use out of the men besides. Hence the Charter Knights: a police and first-response force, paid from the public purse and put to work.

Every major city has its own division, with local insignia added to the standard uniform and some freedom to do things its own way. This makes it hard to say anything about them in general. Singhapura’s own Charter Knights have enough battle mages to stop almost anyone. The Charter Knights of Giridhora, when I last saw them, were of no worthy character.

Then there are the private guards of the guilds. The Merchants Guild keeps the largest, and it is nearer an expeditionary army than a body of watchmen. Inside the Empire these guards are bound by imperial law. Outside it they are treated as free agents, much like Lusian or Rosantic mercenaries.

Last, there is the Emperor’s Bitterness. The post is comparatively new. The Bitterness holds authority above every Chapter and every military rule. He investigates, prosecutes, judges and executes, all in his own person. He requires no warrant and no council, and he is held to be the Emperor’s own hand. To obstruct him is to obstruct the Emperor, and to raise a hand against him is to raise a hand against all of Singhapura.

The post is held at present by Mohandas Siege, formerly of the Order of the Sound of One Hand Clapping. I have seen him, with my own eyes, walk through the finest wards of the University as though they were cobwebs. The less I write of him in a book whose circulation I cannot control, the better.

Of What This Means for Daub

Daub keeps Charter Knights of its own, and the Paladins, and whatever mercenaries happen to be in town, and none of these would trouble a single Chapter of Singhapura for an afternoon. I do not say this to alarm Your Grace. Daub was never meant to hold against the Empire, and no sensible ruler of Daub would try.

I have written in the chapter on Daub what I would do with the Charter Knights, and I will only add that the Paladins’ decline in Singhapura is a matter of Church politics and not of their worth. Your Grace may raise them where the Empire has let them fall, and the Empire will not object, since it has had their replacements in hand for some years.

One last thing, and I say it as plainly as I can: keep Mohandas Siege out of Daub’s affairs. He is answerable to one man and to nobody else. He is not sent to solve a problem. He is sent so that the Empire’s will on that matter is never questioned again.

Folio XXIII · Other Records of Note

Transcribed by Victor Konara