Havemercy (12 page)

“You keep talking about the war,” William said, “and about the mountains and those others, the Ramanthines. But I don’t understand. Who are the villains?”

“I . . . well,” I said, turning to the table of contents in the front of the book and stalling for time. “I’m not sure. It’s not exactly that simple.”

“Oh but there must be villains,” William insisted. “It isn’t a proper story without them. Papa always does the villains with a scary voice, but Mama says it hurts her throat, and she pretends like there aren’t any in the stories she reads me. Does it hurt your throat too?”

“No,” I said, reaching for another book that might have the answer I was looking for. “It’s not that. I only think that there may really not be any villains in this story in particular. It all depends on what side you’re coming from.”

“Or whose side of the table you’re sitting on,” said the Margrave Royston from where he was standing in the doorway.

“Oh,” I said, and stood, brushing dust off the backs of my trousers and fighting away the urge to rub my nose with the back of my sleeve. (Such behavior was countrified, vulgar, and unacceptable, said the Mme; only sometimes I forgot myself, and there was no kerchief handy.) “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”

I thought at first that the Margrave must have caught a fever from being out so long in the downpour the same way I’d caught a cold, but on that second day, as he showed no particularly feverish symptoms, I realized that what he’d actually caught was the memory of a purpose.

It changed him, chased the darkness from his eyes. He shook his head as though he’d only just remembered. “I’m sorry, I forgot. It happened before you were born. The last time we attempted diplomacy with Xi’an, William, our ambassador had some bad eel, which caused him to be ill all over the Ke-Han warlord’s favored niece.”

“He threw up?” William asked, with scandalized delight.

“Yes,” the Margrave said, looking very serious. “She thought it was an attack, poor creature, and defended herself with a knife.”

William was now looking at the Margrave Royston as if he were the last slice of chocolate cake at dinner.

He was not so absent a man that he did not notice the attention. “Have you run out of stories already, William?”

“Yes, well—” I couldn’t help speaking up, since I was feeling somewhat responsible in the first place. “You see, we’ve read most of them before.”

“Yes,” William said sullenly, “we have,” as if it were the worst fate in all the world. Part of me very much agreed with him.

“What, even the one about Slipfinger the Penniless?” the Margrave asked.

“And his fifteen different adventures,” I confirmed.

William scuffed his toe against the carpet, and added under his breath, “Which weren’t so different, not really.”

“Well, after the tenth they do tend to get a bit similar,” the Margrave agreed. He took a moment to look around the room, half of its shelves miserably empty and the dusky sunlight sinking low just outside the lone, squat window. For a moment I thought he would reject it and be lost to his fog just from the sight, but then, to my surprise, he stepped inside and clasped his hands before him. “If you’d like, William, I could always tell you about Cobalt Range.”

That was the most famous battle in the past fifteen years, and William’s eyes widened enormously. “Were you there, Uncle Roy?” he asked, all his sullenness forgotten.

“More or less,” the Margrave said.

“Would you like a seat?” I asked, admittedly eager to hear the story myself.

“If it’s no trouble,” said the Margrave, who seemed to have only just realized there was but one comfortable chair in the entire room.

“Papa broke the other one,” William said sagely. “He was very angry.”

“He’d lost his favorite horse,” I explained, then drew up the chair for the Margrave. I caught him looking at me with a curious expression—I couldn’t understand it—but by the time I’d thought to look again for any clues to the puzzle, he wasn’t looking at me at all, turning instead to helping William scramble up beside him on the chair. I sat at his feet, knees drawn up to my chest.

“Are you quite all right down there?” the Margrave inquired. “Surely—though this is the country—there are other chairs to be had somewhere about the place.”

“Hal enjoys sitting in strange places,” William confided.

I felt my ears grow hot, and knew without having to see them for myself that they were as pink as my cheeks.

The Margrave cleared his throat; not entirely in disapproval, I thought, but it hardly mattered, as I was still blushing. “Is that so?” he said. “To each his own, it would seem.”

“Tell the story, Uncle Roy,” William pleaded, and I was grateful for the distraction.

“Which story was that? Oh, yes, Cobalt Range.” The Margrave closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed—not entirely happily, but with a certain pleasure in remembering. “Yes. Ten years ago, almost eleven. It was only my second campaign, and the first had hardly given me any experience at all. Now, a curiosity of the mountains is that no one wants to fight there for long. Though the higher ground is what counts, of course, in a battle, it’s a lot of mean, close-in fighting. You can’t get any space to fight, trapped like that, and space becomes very important when, well”—he paused, with a glance at William—“when there are a frightful amount of explosions going off all at once.”

“Brilliant,” said William happily, and the Margrave looked relieved. If he’d been worrying over William’s appetite for violence, he needn’t have done. Mme was often chasing him away from Cooke when he told his stories of terrible riding injuries and horses with broken bones.

“On the other side of the Cobalts,” he went on, “there is a valley. Imagine it like this: The Ke-Han city closest to our mountains is like a blue bowl, carved deep and smooth into the earth.” He spoke of it like a beautiful thing, respect lighting his eyes and touching his voice, though I thought that where the Ke-Han were concerned every man was a barbarian and in no position to be concerning himself with beauty.

“Now, this city of theirs,” the Margrave went on. “We thought that if we could push them back to it, get out of the mountains and into the open space, those of us with . . . particularly useful Talents—skills that were doing no one any good all pinned together as we were like sardines in a can—the fighting would end more quickly. And we did need it to end, because while much of our battle magic was rendered useless by proximity, theirs was doing just fine, and many men were dying.

“No one quite understands the Ke-Han magic. We do know that it’s something unique, feral and uncultivated when compared to ours. Something to do with the elements, though, and they seem particularly fond of wind. I think they focus on that because they know our air force—the Dragon Corps—is so vital to our successes past and present.

“Seven days they hammered at us with everything they had. The Reds took it the hardest, being commanded to fight no matter what, and most of them with no knowledge of magic save what their grandmothers had told them about the Well.” He shook his head, as though the memory was painful for him, but it was clearly an old hurt, long since healed over, and nothing that I recognized of that deeper hurt with which I was already familiar.

“They’d only spared twelve magicians on the Cobalts, and there were two and a half times more than that against us. Their leader was a man named Jiro, and he was clever, as much as I hated to admit it. He was going to keep us holed up in those mountains until we died of starvation, or ran out of soldiers, or both.”

“What about the dragons, Uncle Roy?” William’s mouth hung halfway open as though he were under some spellbinding enchantment.

“I’m getting to them, nephew of mine,” the Margrave said, poking the end of William’s nose with a heretofore unseen affection. Then he looked at me.

I swallowed, feeling peculiar—as though I were under some kind of enchantment myself. I tucked my knees in closer to my chest.

“We moved just after noon,” he went on, and this time his eyes did not leave my face. “Waiting until night would have given us better cover, but those dragons you love so much, young William, aren’t worth piss in the daytime. Pardon my vulgarity. By then the Ke-Han had done us so much damage that they’d grown complacent—assumed they’d already won the battle. There were the eight of my fellows left, along with the Fourteenth Company of Reds and a handful of the Ninth. The rocks were sharp and loose from over a week of near-constant assault, and pushing down through the mountain passes became like sliding on an ever-shifting sea of shale. One of our members had a Talent for concealment; this may very well have saved all our lives.

“Intelligence and more than an appropriate amount of guesswork told us that the Ke-Han were operating from an elaborate network of tunnels in the mountains. Of course, those tunnels were the only spot on the whole damned mountain—don’t tell your mother I used that word, William—where wind hadn’t hammered the rock to death. We slipped into the tunnels silent as shadows, the other magicians and I, while the Reds advanced farther into the city. We’d been promised air support if the dragons could untangle their wings from their asses in time. If they weren’t there by nightfall, then it wouldn’t much matter, either way.”

He sighed, rubbing his long fingers over his forehead as though he were suddenly weary, though in a moment it passed and I was left wondering if I’d been seeing things. I still didn’t understand Margrave Royston and his all-too-mercurial moods, but he smiled with far more teeth than strictly necessary, and it was better than the resignation from days before.

“It all went wrong in the tunnels. Jenkins knocked over some rock-rabble shrine, and released some damned wind spirit that started howling like fury. Of course the Ke-Han woke up, came pouring in from every direction; it was like being trapped in a rat warren. We ended up racing for our lives. By some miracle we ended up outside. I—I went last, collapsed the entire setup behind us.

“By then, of course, we’d caused such a ruckus that the city below was sending off alarm fireworks, bright red like fire in the darkening sky. Our colors.

“With the element of surprise lost, many of us no longer had anything to lose. The sun was dipping below the edge of the mountain range at our backs; in a few hours it would stain the sky as red as the soldiers’ coats. We descended into the city, Ninth Company at our backs and the Fourteenth with me in front.

“I . . . operate better if there isn’t anyone in the way, you see, as it wouldn’t do any good to go blowing away our allies.

“I don’t remember who it was who started singing the anthem, low and rolling. It moved through our battered little platoon like a wave until we were shouting it to the skies, song punctuated by blasts of rock and the shouts of our enemies. We made it nearly to the gates before they’d mustered almost enough of a force to greet us. We’d caught them off guard, remember, and most thought our campaign in the mountains quite over and done with.

“Jenkins died with a spear in his throat; it was a terrible way to go. And that’s—Well, that was when I lost my temper and blew a hole in the cerulean wall surrounding the city. Nearly killed myself in the process, interestingly enough, as there’s only so much a magician can do with his own Talent before it starts to tug at his blood, and the wall was built with a very old magic. Still, it seemed like we might almost be massacred then and there, after all, with the Ke-Han screaming bloody murder with their deep-throated war cries, and crashing their enormous war gongs, and pouring out from behind the city walls like an endless stream of ants.

“Then the dragons came.

“It started as a high whine, like the whistle of a kettle. Then the sound changed, became akin to that of the wind spirits that had rushed through the tunnels earlier that morning. It was, of course, the sound of wings, metal and magic, beating the air—and turning the tides of battle, I like to think. They covered the sky, streaking copper and silver, platinum and gold, flashing their bellies and glinting ferociously in the moonlight. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in all my life.”

“Do they really breathe fire?” William asked.

I realized my mouth had been hanging open and closed it abruptly.

“In a way,” the Margrave answered, and his eyes lost the distance they’d gathered with his story. “The city certainly burned, I know that much.”

“It’s a mechanism,” I said. My throat was dry, my tongue no more useful to my needs than a rock. “I . . . I think,” I added, very soon after that, for this was the Margrave’s story, and surely he knew better than I.

“Indeed, it is that,” the Margrave confirmed. “A complicated business—another story entirely—and perhaps one I’ll tell you tomorrow. What do you say?”

“Please,” William said, though he never liked to use the word unless he was coerced or tricked into it. I couldn’t help but smile. “Is that really your Talent, Uncle Royston? Blowing things up?”

“Ah,” the Margrave replied. “That’s . . . well . . . in a way. It’s very hard to explain.”

“Will you explain that tomorrow, too?” I was grateful for William’s questions, since they were the ones I wanted to ask for myself but couldn’t. I tried not to look too eager for a favorable reply.

“Indeed,” the Margrave said. It wasn’t the first time I found him watching me—as if he could see my wishes because I was very poor at hiding them. “I think, nephew, that I shall.”

That night I dreamed of the war cry of the Ke-Han, and Margrave Royston in the tunnels at Cobalt, at that time scarcely more than my own age, much as I would have dreamed of any favorite roman. When I woke, I was almost disappointed to recall it had no bearing on my life at all.

THOM

Chief Sergeant Adamo and Airman Balfour met me at the door. From within, I could catch wisps of a melody—one I didn’t recognize—as picked out on the keys of a piano. I could smell, too, the scent of the clove cigarettes certain professors and Margraves of the Basquiat smoked.

Above all that, though, was the smell of fire.

It wasn’t simply something as commonplace as the sulfurous gasp of a match struck or a candle lit. It was real fire, the killing kind, the sort that ripped through cities and trapped children in their little rooms—fire hot enough to melt metal—and the thick, dark smoke groaning at its heel, cruel and suffocating. I didn’t like fire of that unpredictable, violent nature. I had my reasons for that, too.