The Autumn Republic (13 page)

It never came. When she opened her eyes again, she could see the distant figures of the Adran artillerymen busy reloading. “What are they aiming for?” she asked.

Adamat frowned. “I don’t know.”

Another salvo followed, and Nila strained to see where the cannonballs were landing. The artillery seemed pointed straight at her. She had no idea how far a cannon would fire, but why would they fire at all unless they were going to hit something?

“I don’t think they’re firing at anything,” the Wings’ colonel suddenly said. She sounded surprised by her own outburst. “There’s no chance they would overshoot us at that range and…” She fell silent as more of the Adran cannons opened fire.

Nila twisted her head. Was that the sound of muskets? To the south, a low cloud of black smoke hung over the battlefield, and she heard a sudden roar: a hundred thousand voices as the Kez lines charged.

The battle had begun.

It would end soon enough for her. The cuirassiers were still advancing at a trot, but they would charge momentarily. They couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards away. She looked down at her right hand and tried to will the fire to come. She had to go down fighting. She couldn’t let herself be killed like a commoner. Not now. Not after everything she’d been through.

Her hand began to feel warm, but nothing happened. She concentrated harder. Bo had said she was powerful. Surely she could do something.
Anything!

A cry went up among the Wings’ infantry, and Nila looked up, her concentration broken, to see that the cuirassiers had suddenly changed direction. The whole group had turned west. The Wings’ colonel watched with mouth agape as the cuirassiers trotted parallel to the Wings’ line, just out of rifle range. The Wings’ colonel barked orders, shifting her men to protect that side of the camp.

The Adran cuirassiers continued on, swinging wide of the camp and then even wider of the Wings’ front lines.

Nila didn’t understand. Were they going to flank the Wings’ front line? Then what about the lancers that Adamat had seen? Where the pit were all these cavalry going?

She didn’t understand until she caught sight of the Adran artillery. Their crews had stopped firing over the Wings’ camp and had readjusted to face south, toward the Kez lines. General Hilanska’s Adran infantry swiveled along with the artillery, moving forward to take up positions not
against
the Kez front, but
beside
it.

A messenger on horseback arrived at full gallop and reined in beside the Wings’ colonel.

“Orders from Brigadier Abrax!” the messenger gasped. “Swing your men around and prepare to act as auxiliary to the front lines. The Adran attack was a ruse. General Hilanska is no longer in command of the Adran army and they will fight on our side!”

The colonel gave orders to a nearby captain and then grabbed the messenger’s horse by the bridle. “Who the pit is in charge, then?”

“Why, Field Marshal Tamas. He has returned.”

Nila swayed on her feet, feeling suddenly weak. Tamas was still alive? And he was in command? Maybe, just maybe, she would survive this day.

“Nila,” Adamat said kindly, “your arm is on fire.”

She looked down to find a blue nimbus of flame surrounding her right hand and engulfing her arm to the elbow. She waved her arm to put it out, and then, experimentally, she touched her thumb and forefinger together. The flame sprang back up around her fist.

To the south, an audible crash rose above the artillery and musket fire, and she looked to see that three battalions of Adran cuirassiers had just slammed into the Kez flank.

A
damat couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. Field Marshal Tamas wasn’t merely alive, he was
here
?

Tamas must have taken the command from Hilanska. That meant that the Adran forces, including the Wings of Adom, could now present a unified front against the Kez.

Adamat’s heart fell as he dwelt upon that thought. The Kez still outnumbered Adro by at least four to one, and now that they battled on the open plains, it would be an easy thing for the Kez to spread their superior numbers and engulf the smaller Adran army.

The bulk of the battle was now hidden in the low cover of black musket smoke, obscuring the southern horizon as if an entire city were afire. To the southwest, Adamat could see the Adran cuirassiers struggling to disengage themselves after a successful charge at the Kez flank. Kez auxiliaries were already advancing at a double march to cut off the cuirassiers’ escape.

To Adamat’s horror, the auxiliaries continued to fan out, stretching impossibly far beyond the edge of the Wings’ lines. The Kez must have been expecting Hilanska to take care of the Wings’ flank, and now that the ruse had been betrayed, they had commanded several brigades forward to take care of the job.

And they would do so easily. Even if all those auxiliaries were untrained and unequipped, they more than made up for it in bulk. They would collapse the Wings’ right by sheer manpower.

Beside Adamat, Nila had taken to snapping her fingers, igniting her arm and then putting it out again with Privileged sorcery. She had stopped watching the battle and seemed completely enthralled in her own experimentation. He noticed that the Wings’ colonel had taken a long step away from her, and he did the same. Nila – by her own admission – didn’t have any idea what she was doing, and Adamat didn’t care to find out how many charred corpses it took for most Privileged to figure it out.

The Adran cuirassiers finally pulled themselves away from the Kez flank and fled before the advancing auxiliaries. They had left an enormous dent in the side of the Kez infantry, but their own numbers had suffered, and they retreated to the northwest to lick their wounds.

The auxiliaries slowed when they realized they would not catch the cuirassiers and swung around to march against the Wings’ flank. Adamat, even with his unskilled eye, could see it would end in disaster. He hoped that Tamas was planning on sending more reinforcements to this side, because it couldn’t get much worse.

Adamat swore to himself under his breath. Why had he let that thought enter his head? Of course it could get worse.

It just had.

A brigade of Kez auxiliaries had just broken off from the main body and was marching straight for the camp. Another brigade soon followed, and Adamat realized that nothing but the Wings’ colonel and her one brigade of green troops stood between the camp and the Kez.

Even if they managed a strong defense, it would still be a slaughter. The Kez infantry wouldn’t turn away at the last moment. They would overrun the camp defenders, kill any followers, loot and burn the camp, and then turn to attack the Wings from behind.

The Wings’ colonel gave a rapid succession of orders. Messengers sprinted toward the front, and the companies wheeled from the north to face this new threat.

Adamat drew his cane sword and clutched it tightly in one hand. He immediately felt silly. What would a cane sword do against musketmen with bayonets fixed? He thought to ask the colonel if there was a spare rifle he could use, but she dashed away suddenly, shouting orders at a nearby captain.

That left Adamat alone with Nila. The girl Privileged was still flicking her fingers, sparking blue flames along her arm.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Trying to get this to work,” she answered, not looking up. Another snap of the fingers and the blue flame erupted around her hand. She shook the flames out with a look of frustration.

“Do you think this is the best time for that?”

He noticed that Nila was paying close attention to where she positioned her fingers when she snapped them. Each new try she moved them slightly, and then attempted a quick combination of snaps, rubbing her thumb against first her forefinger, then her middle finger.

“I might not get another chance.”

“Well, look,” Adamat said. He knew what she was thinking.
Make it work. Save everyone with her newfound sorcery.
But of course she couldn’t learn to use her sorcery in just a few moments, and the very idea of the girl trying seemed incredibly absurd. As absurd as him standing here with his cane sword drawn. “We need to get as far toward the back of the camp as we can. Once the fighting starts, we could make a run for the Adran lines. Then we could… Ah!”

A jet of flame shot from Nila’s hand and traced a finger of blackened earth across the ground twenty paces away, nearly setting fire to a nearby corporal.

Nila gave a scream – half startled, half victorious. “I’ve got it!”

“What? You haven’t got it,” Adamat said. “Do you even know what you did?”

Nila held her off-hand away from herself gingerly, pointing toward an open patch of ground between two nearby tents. She brushed her thumb across her forefinger, then touched it gently to her pinkie. Flame erupted from her dominant hand – not a thin tendril this time, but a gout that seemed to spring up from the ground, setting fire to the grass and rising five or six feet in the air, traveling from her to the spot she’d pointed at as if following a line of lamp oil.

“All right,” Adamat said. “I’m impressed.” “Terrified” seemed a better word for it, but Adamat didn’t think the girl needed to hear that. She didn’t know what she was doing. Who knew what an untrained Privileged was capable of? She might be able to set fire to the entire enemy army, but could she keep from doing the same to her allies?

He wondered if he should head toward the Adran lines. If Tamas was back, Adamat would need to report everything that had happened over the last several months. But during a battle wouldn’t be the best time.

At least it might get him farther away from the approaching Kez auxiliaries.

“Nila, we should…”
H
e trailed off. The girl was gone. He cast about, then spotted her sprinting, skirts in hand, toward the Wings’ rearguard and the Kez auxiliaries beyond them.

What was she doing? She couldn’t possibly think she could help. She was just rushing off to get herself killed.

Adamat looked toward the Adran lines. He could make it. The Adran command tent was less than two miles away. He could get there and report to Tamas, and maybe manage to send some help this direction.

The girl wasn’t his responsibility. She was Bo’s, and Adamat owed Bo nothing.

With a curse, Adamat set off after Nila.

Nila shouldered her way through the line of soldiers preparing to defend the Wings’ camp and ignored their yells as she scrambled over the fortifications and ran toward the enemy brigade.

A little voice in the back of her head screamed at her to turn around and run the other way. What the pit was she doing? She was running straight to her death. Even if she could replicate the fire, she couldn’t possibly use it to destroy an entire brigade. She might take a few of them with her, but they’d gun her down and trample her body into the mud. She wasn’t going to do any good out there.

But she ignored the voice and kept heading toward the enemy.

The voice in her head changed tactics.

You’re going to try to kill people. These are human lives you’ll be ending. You’re not a warrior. You’re a laundress. They’ll die in an inferno, burned alive, and the screams will haunt you the rest of your life.
 

But
, she argued,
if I do nothing, then the Wings’ mercenaries will die. The infantry will be overwhelmed and all their noncombatants will be put to the sword.

That’s what they’re paid to do
.

Nila slowed, no longer convinced she had the strength to do what was necessary. What would Bo say? Wouldn’t he tell her to stop being a coward and learn to act like a Privileged? Hadn’t he also said that courage was overrated? Contradictory bastard.

She suspected that in this situation he would tell her she was an untrained bloody fool about to get herself killed.

Nila came to a stop. She was about fifty yards in front of the Wings’ lines and the enemy advanced toward her, churning forward like a machine. She could hear the calls of their sergeants and the
thump-thump
of their march in time with the drums.

“Nila!” Adamat snatched her by the arm and pulled her back toward the Wings’ lines. “We have to go.”

She shook him off, a terrible weight settling in her stomach. It was too late. The Kez were less than a hundred yards off. The Wings would open fire soon, regardless of her presence. She and Adamat would be cut down by the barrage. She’d gotten both of them killed.

“Step back, Inspector,” she said. She dropped her skirt and moved forward a couple of paces. She tried to open her body to the Else, the way Bo had showed her, to make the flow of the sorcery come smoothly. Her hands trembled fiercely as she raised them both, with her left hand pointed toward the Kez brigade and her right hand raised above her head. It struck her how theatrical the pose was, and that it was completely unnecessary.

Bo would have approved.

She brushed her thumb across her forefinger and willed the Else to flood the world at her command.

Nothing happened.

She had done it wrong. Her hands shook uncontrollably now. It would be impossible to make the proper connection. Her body had betrayed her, and now she and Adamat would die for it.

Her breath was suddenly squeezed from her, as if she’d been stuck through the stomach and lungs with a lance. A gasp tore itself from her lips and she fought against the dizziness that followed, and when she thought the pain had become unbearable, fire suddenly showered the world.

It spread out from her in a cone like a wave of pestilence, leaving nothing but cinders in its wake. She watched it spread toward the enemy lines and suddenly, without warning, blackness claimed her.

Adamat dashed forward just in time to catch Nila as she fell.

He watched, stunned, as the wall of flame rolled toward, and then over, the Kez brigade. The screams reached him a moment later, but by the time the flame had washed over the advance elements of the Kez infantry, they had already been silenced. Charred skeletons decorated the landscape, twisted horribly from the heat. When the flames finally died, over three-quarters of the brigade had been reduced to ash.

Adamat pulled his gaze away from the spectacle and lifted Nila in both arms. She was a small woman, and were he ten years younger, it would have been easy enough to hurry back to the Wings’ lines. As it was, he struggled to trudge back with his burden, feeling every old ache and wound as he did.

Several infantry dashed out to help him get over the earthen barricades. One of them took Nila from him.

“Get her as far away from the fighting as you can,” Adamat said, following the soldier back into the camp. They hurried through the tents until they reached the eastern edge of the camp, closest to the Adran lines, and the soldier lay Nila on the ground and sprinted back for the front.

Adamat held a hand over the girl’s mouth, and then put a finger to her neck. It took him a few moments, but he was able to find a pulse – albeit a weak one.

He ransacked a nearby soldier’s tent for a sleeping pad and blankets and made the girl comfortable. He didn’t want to smother her, but it might be a good idea to conceal her, just in case the Kez broke through the enemy lines. Once he’d finished with that, he stole an officer’s chair and climbed on top of it to try to get a view of the battle.

A perpetual cloud of powder smoke made it impossible to see anything in the field to the south. The Adran artillery thumped away without rest, and their irregulars were moving into position. It couldn’t be going all that well if they needed their irregulars already. It looked as though several companies of Adran infantry had broken away from the front closest to the Wings and were marching double-time to reinforce the Wings’ camp.

Adamat was considering Nila’s unconscious body, wondering whether he’d have the strength to carry her all the way to the Adran lines and – hopefully – safety, when he turned to the west where Nila had scorched the earth with her sorcery.

The remnants of the brigade she had burned had turned tail and fled without hesitation. From where he was, he could still see them running, and it looked like their own officers were shooting them to try to turn them back.

Good for morale, Adamat imagined.

The
S
econd
B
rigade was certainly wavering. Their advance had slowed to a crawl and they seemed hesitant to move across the roasted remains of their comrades.

Immense figures – twisted hulks of muscle swathed in black – burst from the Kez lines and raced across the charred plains toward the Wings’ infantry. They brandished pistols and forearm-sized knives and they beckoned to the auxiliaries behind them to follow. Wardens, at least twenty of them. They’d tear apart the green Wings infantry all by themselves.