Havemercy (41 page)

Be prepared for all eventualities.

I repeated this phrase to myself every time I threatened to get ahead of myself, and wished that those around me would attempt to be as circumspect as I was struggling to be.

I sat with Achille in his captain’s quarters—the highest room in the mountainside fort, reserved for captains and magicians alone—waiting to hear the sound of the dragons sleeking through the distant air. I thought for a brief moment of Hal, for I was always stealing such private moments to think of him, and wondered how I might have told this story to him if we were together in the warm room at Castle Nevers, with William on my knee and Hal’s eyes bright with firelight as he sat at my feet. I longed to have him at my side for a brief and impossibly selfish moment, until I remembered just how Hal would have suffered here. No; this was the sort of tale I’d bring back to him, and then I could allow myself to tangle my fingers with his and glean all my comfort from being so close.

Yet I would never have been able to do the moment justice with mere words. There was no describing the Dragon Corps.

It was true that we heard them before we saw them, and Achille and I went quickly together to the window, throwing it open. The evening was cloudy and dark, perfect conditions for flying, and almost half an hour passed, the wind changing constantly, before we saw anything.

We heard them more than saw them when they were at last overhead, the forceful boom of their bodies pounding too quickly through the air for us to see anything more than a momentary flash of silver dark in the filmy moonlight. They always rode in threes.

The wind they left in their wake shook the very building to its core. I almost imagined the Cobalts themselves being sent crumbling because of the disturbance in the air. Our side gave a great whoop of national pride to hear them pass overhead, and I could feel that pride replace the excitement, the air now stirred to a fever by the beating of the dragons’ mammoth metal wings.

“Fuck,” said Achille reverently. “Fuck me if they aren’t the most beautiful things in all of Volstov.”

“I agree with you,” I said, with the faint offerings of a smile, “and thus I’m afraid I must decline your suggestion as to the rest of it.”

He laughed and clapped me on the back and called me, somewhat affectionately, the greatest Cindy this side of the ocean.

I managed little sleep for myself that night, and what rest I did manage was laced through with nervous anticipation, the sound of the dragons in the air, and the explosions that shortly followed their arrival. I’d forgotten how reverberant such things sounded through the long, complicated system of tunnels the Ke-Han had twice used to overpower us; I’d forgotten how loud it could get, how bright, how nightmarish. I was losing my touch, I told myself wryly, and had best reacquaint myself with the peculiar sensation of having the ground shake like an earthquake beneath my feet by the time I was thrust into the thick of things long before this hour on the morrow.

There was also the troublesome matter of my headaches.

They had come and gone all throughout the trip, and while I told myself they were no more than my way of adapting to the shift in temperatures and altitude, I knew this for the flimsy lie that it was. Quite simply, they’d begun before I ever left for the Cobalts at all. The first, unprecedented and dizzying, had occurred during my exile, and it had taken all my skills at playacting to hide from Hal how greatly it distressed me.

Now, the only man I had to hide it from was myself—and the entire rest of my garrison of Reds, their captain, and the Ke-Han Blues. It was only a headache. I’d been getting them since the night before my return to the city, and I’d managed to find ways to function despite the discomfort. Undue stress could have brought it on, or my own entrenched fear of returning to battle.

Yet it was accompanied by a certain mind-numbing lack of equilibrium, as if someone had quite suddenly jerked the world out from underneath my feet and I was left to suffer through a maddening spin of blindness. I’d never suffered such headaches before, and there was absolutely no warning for them—merely a sudden onset of pain, pinching sharp at my temples, followed by that whirlwind of confusion.

If I were to suffer from such a headache during the battle to come as I was suffering with more and more frequency these days, I did not want to think of the possible ramifications—not only for myself, but for my entire garrison as well.

A combination of my headaches and thinking about my headaches kept me up most of the night. So it was that I rose early and joined Achille for breakfast, both of us talking with sparse, low words that anticipated too many possible outcomes.

“We’ll take their tunnels,” Achille said. “Use their strongholds against them. We’ve been working out the system the past year now and we’ve finally got it figured. We send a distraction up one side of the mountain to keep them busy, and meanwhile the rest of us from all the other positions take our mark through the tunnels and advance on them. Before they know it, we’ll all be out. And, the way they’re depleted, there won’t be any stopping us.”

He was repeating the plan to comfort himself.

I, too, was doing much the same, mouthing this speech of his that I had memorized.

It was a simple plan, a good plan. There was no foreseeable reason why it shouldn’t have worked.

But the unforeseeable was what undid us in the end. The Ke-Han had been waiting all this time, waiting for us to grow cocky, and we’d done exactly that. We couldn’t have suited their plans better than if we’d been working with them toward their own victory.

In some ways, it was my own fault. That is not to say that I was egotistic enough about my vital position among our Reds and the other magicians along with us, but one must always accept responsibility for his own actions, and in that way a great deal of the fault was my own. The troublesome headaches—I realized it too late—hadn’t been my own private suffering, but rather the indication of something much larger involving many more than myself.

There was no such thing as a singularity. It was what we’d learned first as magicians. It was the most important truth of who we were and what we did, and I’d forgotten it as swiftly as a dragon’s pass through the air.

My headaches were no more mine than they were harmless, and once we’d passed through the tunnels to the other side, that much became painfully evident.

The first sign was that the distraction wasn’t working as it should have been. Achille had sent several magicians with a detachment of Reds to aid it in hanging together, but the magicians were the purpose, all with Talents made for flash and destruction.

When we exited the tunnels, we should have been able to hear the results of our ruse, or see them at least, great colorful fireworks and rumbling earth, or even the warrior cries of the Ke-Han that indicated battle was at hand. There was none of this reassuring evidence, however, and I felt an uneasiness heavy in my chest as I caught myself scanning the jutting blue rock face of the Cobalts, which were stony and impassive and gave nothing away.

The uneasiness spread throughout my arms and legs, too swift to be the onset of anything that I could tie back to a simple worry about our progress. No, this was entirely physical, and I occupied my mind with trying to gauge exactly how bad it was and how I might be able to go on standing so long as we kept moving. None of the others seemed to be exhibiting any discomfort, and I thought that even if we couldn’t hear the various noises indicating that our distraction was under way, that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t. It was quite possible that the men and magicians on the other side were at that very moment experiencing the full flush of victory.

Then Alcibiades collapsed.

He’d been a soldier before he was a magician, and the latter was only due to the Esar’s deciding some fifteen years prior that any man with a Talent fighting in the war would damn well learn to use it whether he wanted to or not. Still, he had some skill with water—once he’d got past his initial prejudice—and though we’d never interacted for any particular length of time, he was a singularly competent man.

Achille called us all to a halt with a silent gesture, signaling for someone to check on our fallen comrade. Marcelline, standing closest to me, adjusted the warm collar of her coat with fingers that shook almost imperceptibly.

“Do you feel it?” she asked, but I had no idea to what she was referring.

I shook my head. She looked a little green against the white and red of her clothing.

“That’s what I mean,” she said softly, more because it seemed as though she couldn’t bring herself to speak any louder, rather than any caution toward being overheard. “There’s nothing there.”

I thought that perhaps she meant the wind, and certainly it was odd the Ke-Han hadn’t begun to attack us with it yet. Then her eyes rolled up toward the back of her head, white and startling. I caught her before she hit the ground.

Someone shouted the warning, and even as I felt the headache begin like a battering ram at both of my temples, I turned to see the Ke-Han forces coming in from all sides, closing the net of the trap we had walked right into.

Out front, I saw a great gushing blast of water come exploding from the rock. There were veins of sulfurous hot springs running below the Cobalts, and I guessed that they were what now spewed forth from the land beneath us, scalding the men from the second midrange fort and giving our men some time to rally around a common point. I wondered if perhaps Alcibiades had regained consciousness, after all; this seemed something I should feel pleased over, if only I could bring myself to feel anything at all beyond the pounding in my temples.

I couldn’t. Rather, it was more like what Marcelline had been describing, an absence of that familiar, constant presence—my Talent—which left me feeling vulnerable and hollowed out as a man made from straw husks. It was akin to the strange, flooding loss of strength I experienced when I had a fever.

I should have moved, or tried to do my duty as both a soldier of the realm and a magician of the Basquiat, which made the code all the more important: I must necessarily do whatever was in my power to stop the Ke-Han’s advance. As a magician, whatever I had in my power was considerably more than the average man, and as such I knew that the soldiers had come to depend on our help, our protection.

As far as I could tell, however, after that first show of defiance from Alcibiades, everyone seemed to have been taken with the same affliction as I, for I saw no telltale rumbles of destruction, nor streaking jets of fire. Instead, the Ke-Han rallied around their injured, then surged forward once more, blue coats the very color of the mountain rock.

I placed Marcelline on the ground behind me, for I would need both my hands free, and even as I wavered on my feet, I drew a deep breath to draw on the place where my Talent rested, hidden deep within. My stomach gave a lurch in revolt against what I found there, and at last I understood what Marcelline had tried to warn me of.

There was nothing there.

It was as though someone had gone into my chest and scooped out something infinitely more vital than my heart or stomach, and the sensation brought me to my knees.

I heard around me all at once the clang and crash of metal as used in battle, the hoarse cries of men I’d known and eaten with as they fought on, despite the sudden onset of our debilitating handicap.

Achille wasn’t in plain view, for even my vision had blurred distressingly for me, as though, with the absence of what anchored me, everything else was falling apart. Maybe I was falling apart. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I had no way of knowing.

The world went white in from the edges, erasing the scene before me as surely as if I’d lost consciousness—not a blackout, but a whiteout—with the sharp, blinding force of a lightning bolt.

Everything that followed was a blank, clean slate.

When I awoke, I was in a tent that, from the lack of light streaming in through the fabric, must have been in the garrison at the foothills.

I ached all over, and the headache pounded still in my head, as though it wished to force my eyes from their sockets. Something smelled very strongly of blood. I sat up at once—a grievous error, as nausea rolled through me so that I had to lean over one side of the cot I’d been placed on to divest myself of the meager contents of my stomach. In a streak of wild luck, someone appeared to have placed a pan there for exactly that purpose.

To my right someone chuckled weakly, more of a pathetic coughing than anything else, and I lifted my head—slowly this time—to examine my surroundings. Alcibiades lay prone on the cot next to mine, nose like the prow of a dying ship and bandaged quite heavily about the head.

“Where are we?” I said, and swallowed to work the saliva into my mouth, which felt as dry as sandpaper. My throat hurt as though I’d been shouting.

Had I been shouting?

It took him a very long time to reply—so long that I thought he’d fallen asleep. When he did speak, the sound startled me and set all my nerves jangling as though I were a high-strung horse. “Base camp, med tent. ’Til we get moved, anyway.”

“Ah,” I said, and surrendered my head to the cool softness of the pillow below it. There were troublesome thoughts floating across my skull, but not a one of them seemed strong enough to break through the red haze of throbbing in my brain. “We’re to be moved?”

“Soon as possible,” said Alcibiades, in the same scratchy voice as mine. “Head doctor, she nearly had a fit when she saw us.”

I didn’t feel as though there were anything visibly wrong with me, and that surely the head doctor of a medical unit during wartime would have seen a great many terrible things. “Am I missing a leg?” I said at last, as it was the only thing I could think of, and might have gone a long way toward explaining why I couldn’t feel either one of them.

“No,” he said, without a trace of humor in his voice. “It’s because we’re magicians.”

I overlooked the contempt in his voice as he said this last, because it had set something else turning in my mind, like a great, if slow-moving, waterwheel.