Havemercy (40 page)

Completely fucking empty.

I sat on the examination table before my legs got too shaky and I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall, grinding my teeth against the insistent throbbing in my shoulder and smack over my ribs.

The Rittenhouse was nearest, was what Compagnon said, and with Raphael still running point on recon, I’d just have to wait there by myself while he got the meds out of their nice restful sleeps. Compagnon had a terrible sense of humor, though, and when the door opened a minute later, him saying he’d run into someone in the hall who could keep watch over me, I didn’t need to open my eyes to know who he was talking about.

I couldn’t even smell the professor over the stench on my own flesh—cooked meat and charred coat and silver buttons sizzling where they’d hit my skin—but I knew.

The door swung shut with a quiet snick, and the professor breathed in deep.

“Might not want to use your nose there,” I said idly, voice dull with the effort of controlling the pain. “Burnt flesh ain’t so pretty.”

He made a soft, useless sort of sound in the back of his throat, and I cracked open an eye.

“You just going to stand there?” I asked.

Even laid up as I was, functioning on only the most basic levels, it really amused me how the professor could go on looking so shocked after so long.

That galvanized him into moving forward, at least. There was something strange in his eyes—not pity, else I would have hit him and pain be damned—but something for certain. It stayed there, green and strange and bothering me when he sat down on my good side, even when he reached out to touch me, maybe to pat my hand, then seemed to think better of it. Some people just like to feel useful, especially the most useless of them all.

There wasn’t anything the professor could do here and, for once, even he knew it.

“What happened?” he asked at last. His voice wasn’t rough or dream-slurred or nothing, so I knew he hadn’t been sleeping again. He didn’t sleep much lately. The raid sirens and I saw to that pretty well.

I shrugged, only I couldn’t shrug and I’d forgotten. Instead I swore until I ran out of things to curse, and body parts to curse them with, then leaned back against the wall again, breathing none too easily. I thought I’d give th’Esar a piece of my mind on moving out our resident meds, but then I remembered the professor and that, if he really was a rat and I played my cards right, he might be able to do it for me.

Except when I tried to focus on what might be the best way to go about it, my thoughts shifted, refused to come together like the mismatched pieces of the jigsaw puzzles that Evariste did in the common room when no one else was around to entertain him.

I gave up in exasperation, as apparently I’d got the ability to be clever knocked out of me along with the air when I’d been hit by bits of burning Ke-Han building.

I sighed loud and frustrated, then felt a cool hand against mine.

I opened both eyes.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s the thing. I could tear down the bastion all on my lonesome, amount of pain I’m in right now, so I don’t want you asking any dumb-ass questions about how I’m feeling or what happened or anything like that, okay?”

He nodded, pale concern and a willingness in his face like he didn’t know what he’d done wrong or what he could do to make it right. “All right.”

“If you’re going to be here, then you talk to me, distract me from pulling your head off, ’cause you’re closer than the bastion by a long shot.”

“Oh,” he said, and I could practically hear him thinking, even when I closed my eyes again and I couldn’t see it. “Well, Luvander won the game of darts in the common room today.”

“Luvander cheats,” I answered. “Everyone knows it.”

“Well, then, they must have let him win,” the professor amended. “And there was some commotion over who had used the gas burners in Raphael’s room to make grilled cheese.”

If this was the kind of information he was feeding th’Esar, I thought, then we wouldn’t have any kind of a problem on our hands anytime soon.

“I think it was Magoughin and Merritt,” he finished, going all quiet at the end like he’d finally realized he was babbling on about nonsense no one in their right mind would have anything to do with caring about.

I let the silence fester, shifting infinitesimally against the wall ’cause I couldn’t just sit still with all this fire and metal in me. I smelled like the burnt-out hull of a building, everything scorched beyond recognition. I smelled like death.

“Shit,” I said into the quiet, and the professor’s hand went tight where I’d forgotten it was on mine. He had big hands, but I knew that from before, when I took him up with me on Have. He was hurting me. I wanted to go to sleep, and I wanted the medics from the Rittenhouse to get themselves into gear. “I hate fire.”

“I—Oh,” he said, pretty damn stupidly. “So do I.”

I wondered why he’d ever let me take him up into the air without putting up more of a fight if he hated it that much, but he’d won something out of me for not asking the fucking stupid question I’d been expecting: What sort of airman hates fire, that kind of shit, and I just wasn’t in the mood.

“It spreads very quickly from house to house, on the Mollyedge and in Molly especially,” he continued.

“Yeah,” I said, and I don’t know what I’d got into my head, whether it was the burn, or my coat melting into my shoulder, or the fact that I hadn’t got more than catnaps for longer’n I could remember, but I didn’t stop talking there like I should’ve. “My brother died in a fire like that. Guess it was about—well, a long fucking time ago, that’s for sure. I mean, I must’ve lost track of how long it was.” That was a pretty lie, and no mistake. “His name was Hilary. He was goin’ on four and he used to eat fireflies. I don’t know. I think he thought they’d make him glow.”

I felt him go very still, like even though he didn’t have any special skills toward reading me, he could still sense he was on real thin ice here. Maybe he knew me better than I thought, or maybe he just understood that men like me didn’t talk about this kind of thing to just anyone.

He was right, any which way he was thinking. I hadn’t said a word about Hilary since Hilary’d died.

I opened my eyes again, and slid down the wall a little so our faces were nice and close. “You tell anyone what I just said, I don’t care if they wear a crown, I’ll kill you first.”

“Oh,” he said, looking real white and a little sick, like I’d figured out his biggest secret. “Oh, no, of course not, I wouldn’t dream—I’ll forget you ever mentioned it.” He swallowed hard.

The professor looked a little shaky, the way he had when he’d clambered on down off Havemercy’s back, only there was that same electricity in his eyes that had given me the idea in the first place.

“Good,” I said. “Just so long as we’re clear.”

By the time the meds got there, I was half-out, the professor breathing slow and steady by my side. My eyes were closed and, what with burnt flesh and the rest of my skin too hot for thinking, I don’t know if he stayed with me the whole rest of the night. Knowing him, he probably did.

ROYSTON

We traveled only the first day on horseback. The rest of the trip was made on foot, and it took a little more than a week and a half—nearly two by the time we’d met with our commanding officers and our garrison of Reds—to arrive at our side of the Cobalts. The path we took was a necessary one, looping back through the foothills and twisting around, until we were well shot of Thremedon herself. If we hadn’t been forced to take such a meandering route, we might have made it in five days, but it wasn’t speed that was of the essence. It was our own victory.

I had some recollections from a few years back, when I’d been on the front just the same as now, but it was always such a shock to be reminded that the Cobalts were so aptly named. They were high and jagged and faded off into the clouds, and they were indeed very blue, at least until the ice caps made them very white. If I hadn’t been about to be killing the men who lurked just on the other side of the range, I would have taken the time to drink in the sight of them. The first time I’d come here I’d been too young and too nervous to make proper note of them at all.

The way we were deployed was quite clever. It was a strategy developed after too many years spent fighting—well over a hundred by now—and one that had been only slightly modified by the advent of the Dragon Corps, whose service was invaluable but also limited to the night, because of what enormously obvious targets they’d have been in the daylight. Because they were so deadly and so precise and caused such destruction on so massive a scale, we avoided skirmishes in the nighttime. And so it was that we were able to engage the Ke-Han on two fronts: the more common form of warfare, between garrisons of Reds and Blues augmented by the particular specialties of magicians during battle days, then the more recent form, which took place only at night and was signaled by the howling, shrieking wind that had once worked against Volstov’s air force, and the subsequent explosions that meant it no longer did.

The captain in charge of my Reds was a man who’d been no more than a common foot soldier when last I’d been to the Cobalts. I was always pleased to be able to recognize a face. It meant that a man I’d once known, however brief our period of acquaintance, had managed to keep himself alive and well for as long as I had, and it fostered a certain heartening camaraderie. The captain’s surname was Achille, and as he explained it, he’d risen very suddenly in the ranks after a disastrous rout in which half of our generals had been killed and he’d proved himself quite the master at rallying half-starved men with no magician at all behind them.

“You’d be surprised what starving men and starving dogs are capable of,” he said, over our first dinner.

“Hardly,” I said, remembering the disasters in which I myself had been involved. “Shall we do our best not to arrive at such dire straits?”

“Indeed,” Achille said, “I’ve been doing my best these days to accomplish just that.”

We reminisced together for only a short period before it grew dark and Achille quiet.

“The dragons come sometime past midnight,” he said, with a faraway look. I wondered what sort of man he might have been if the war hadn’t claimed his quick mind and ample imagination and, I acknowledged privately, ample stubbornness. “If you listen, you can hear them from miles away.”

Our garrison was marked in midrange territory and housed by one of the old mountain forts. As far as any of us knew, the entire trouble with the Ke-Han, which by now spanned the course of several life-times, hadn’t arisen out of thin air but rather from an age-old border dispute. Since before most could remember, there had been mountain forts on our side and the Ke-Han—originally a nomadic people before they built their city of lapis stone—patrolled the Cobalt border during the summertime. Each country was eager to stake its claim to certain lands just beyond the mountains, but since the range proved such an excellent natural barrier, it was generally considered that east of the Cobalts began Ke-Han land and west of it was Volstov’s.

Stories varied as to whether it was the Ke-Han who broke the entente by building their tunnels. One popular legend in Thremedon ran that a captain of a midrange mountain fort heard with his unbelievably keen ears the echoing sound of stone being blasted away by the ancient Ke-Han nature workers and immediately began drill work of his own to meet them in the middle. Another story had it that a group of overexuberant Volstovic patrolmen accidentally killed two Ke-Han warriors in a moment of zealotry or, perhaps, confusion. What Ramanthine history books I’d managed to gather over the years stated that the Ke-Han were always seeking to expand their empire, and the Ramanthines had been their next great conquest. Volstov had inherited their war with the Ke-Han: an unexpected parting gift from our conquered Ramanthines. Then, if a man truly wanted to drive himself mad, there was the matter of the Kiril Islands, which the Ke-Han had taken from Volstovic control while the Esar had been occupying himself with the conquest of the Ramanthines.

I had no opinion as to which of these stories approached the truth more closely than the other. Likely it was none and things had escalated more gradually, until some misunderstanding or even accident brought things to a head and brought us all to such an interminable length of fighting.

It was madness, and neither side would step down until the other had been annihilated.

I wrapped my coat closer around me—the sort of coat all magicians wore when they were sent to Cobalt deployment: a burnished wine red with ermine lining and an abundance of white fur around the throat and wrists. It was comfortable, at least, and very warm, for mountainside temperatures had the unreliable habit of dropping quite suddenly once the sun set.

As I understood it, and as Achille had confirmed for me as we went over our approved plans for battle, the emperor in his lapis city was all but crushed. Achille himself had been leading a garrison of Reds when the wall was torn down, half by magician work and half by the tail of two crushing dragons—Compassus and another whose name I could not remember. It was the farthest that any dragon had ever made it into the city before, and the men seemed to take this as a sign. In fact, it was commonly held among the soldiers, who were farther removed from the troublesome goings-on at court than even I had been during my stay at Nevers, that our next battle might even be the one in which we claimed final victory as our own. Whether or not I could join them in this anticipation, I wasn’t yet convinced.

All I knew for certain was that, after the dragons hit the lapis city this night, all the Esar’s forces were to come down on the city at once.

Our plan—the Esar’s plan—was that we should take this city for our own. If all went according to plan, we would be able to take the Ke-Han emperor as our prisoner of war, toppling his throne and bringing an entire people to their knees.

Admittedly, there was a certain excitement buzzing with the cold in the air. I couldn’t help but allow it access to my own blood, for we all wanted this war to be over. And I knew that, if nothing else, we were doubtless on the verge of something colossal—though I couldn’t be sure if it was our own victory or something as yet unforeseen.