The Fell Sword (64 page)

Speaker of Tongues smiled.
Men are so easy to use
, he thought.
I will make them animals, and then they will be fit to live in the Wild.

He swirled his great cloak of wolf skins and vanished.

All the warriors cheered, and the Ruk bellowed.

Kevin Orley would have liked to have been satisfied. But he couldn’t help but wonder why the sorcerer didn’t pause to heal his wounded. And
his
memory of the taking of the town was untouched.

Thorn left his men with a slight shudder of revulsion, rather like a surgeon closing a jar of leeches, and returned through the
aether
to his place of power.

He then passed a day in casting and watching. The first of his special moths was about to hatch, and he had to catch it at just the right moment to finish its accession of power. Or so he told himself, while another part of his great and web-filled mind confessed that he simply wanted to be present when his creation hatched.

He watched Ghause and the Earl. He watched her dance naked, spending power like water. He watched her cast, and was annoyed and transfixed and transformed. He sent more moths, and then more still, to observe her from every possible angle in every possible part of her life.

Sometimes he heard her speak his name. It was as if she was already calling to him, over the leagues that separated them.

He watched her subsume a witch woman, and he groaned with pleasure.

She was, in her earthy way, much more complex than he had imagined, and much more powerful, and he chuckled and increased the power of his own wards.

He looked to his defences in case of material attack against her husband.

He watched other scenes, as well, through other moths and other beasts – but what they told him was not enough to build a whole scene. His creatures in Harndon gave him fragments of a picture that he couldn’t understand – a sea of angry faces in fire-lit darkness; the Queen shouting at a young woman. The Queen weeping. The Queen, reading old parchment.

And in the subterranean corridors beneath the old palace, his other creatures were all dead. He had lost every moth, every rat, every living thing that he had created or recruited, seduced or suborned to enable him to read his own notes – or Harmodius’s notes.

In the safety of his island, he’d begun transforming other creatures – some badgers, for example, as underground spies – but he had nothing when he needed it, and this caused him immense frustration. Even the cats he had used to maintain his spells binding Harmodius were lost to him – killing mice and roaming the castle corridors, their feline minds locked against him.

Without context, his moths alone were not useful, and he cursed the time it took to move them over vast distances and the power he had to expend to monitor them. Moths could take two months – and several generations – to reach their targets.

His attempt to plant moths on the Red Knight had failed, and all the insects he sent west to watch his nearest neighbour – the famous Tapio, who had refused to be his ally in the spring – were dead.

Thorn stood and thought in unmoving, superior indignation. If Tapio killed his sendings, then the arrogant irk was going to continue to keep his distance, or worse.
Why will the Wild not unite?
he asked himself.
Because each individual seeks only his own good
. Thorn sat in the dark, watching the chrysalis case of a caterpillar as long as a man’s arm, embedded in the corpse of a man, and nodded to himself.
I will unite the Wild by force, and save it. If they cannot see to benefit of my idea, I will shove it down their foolish, ruggedly individualistic throats.

Unbidden, the picture of the Red Knight standing against him at Lissen Carrak, and seizing control of his boggles, rose before him. ‘You are just some parvenu merchant’s son trying to ape the manners of his betters.’

He tried to focus his rage the way he would focus power for a working. His father had been a merchant – what of it?
I will be God
, he thought at the distant figure.
And you will be nothing.

He managed his hate – massaged it and relived each petty humiliation of the siege – he dwelled on the moment in which he mis-sited his trebuchet batteries, and he savoured how completely he’d been out-thought the night of his great attack.

He took all that hate, and channelled it into the caterpillar like a man giving a scrap of wool to a scent hound.

When he was done, he felt lighter by the weight of much fear. It was a powerful working – akin to the spell he’d thrown on the men who had raped Nepan’ha. Hermetical workings that altered the internal reality of the sentient mind were so delicate that manipulatting the life force of a moth was child’s play by comparison, but he was beginning to see how he could perform such miracles.

After a while, he ceased his efforts to monitor the world, and turned to his preparations to deal with the Earl.

Near Osawa – Giannis Turkos

The men who surrounded them were all Outwallers – all Northern Huran and Kree, with topknots and dyed deer-hair in bright red. But they had crossbows – heavy, steel-bowed weapons, all new made.

It was the crossbows that decided Turkos, although his decision was almost too fast to be described as thought.

Even as they emerged from the shadows to gloat over their prisoners, he reared his horse – his precious horse, that he loved, Athena.

She reared obediently, and her broad stomach and long neck took all six of the crossbow bolts meant for him. And because she was all heart, she landed on four feet and continued forward after her iron-shod forefeet crushed the skulls of two warriors.

And then she fell.

Turkos landed on his feet and drew the heavy sabre he wore – as long and heavy as an Alban knight’s sword, but slightly curved and with a reinforced point that added authority to every cut.

Two more warriors fell – one with an arm cleanly severed and the other with the whole side of his face caved in from the backbone of the blade – cheekbones shattered, jaw broken.

His reckless charge into their midst created more chaos than he had any right to expect – one Kree put a heavy bolt into a Huran from behind in his haste to engage the foe. But these weren’t boggles – the older warriors were already recovering, drawing weapons, or standing clear and taking aim.

Turkos threw his best offensive working from the amulet at his neck. It was a sheet of lightning that flickered blue in the sunlight, and he laid it like a carpet, running close to the frozen earth, as his grandfather had taught him to. Men with protections wore them high, and no one can ignore a sharp blow to the ankle.

The warriors fell like puppets with their strings cut.

None of them were injured in any meaningful way, and it was the only hermetical protection he had. But knocking men down changes their view of a fight, and the veteran warriors began to consider sheer survival. He dispatched the man who fell closest to him, a sloppy blow that nonetheless buried his point in the man’s skull.

A warrior near to him got to one knee and reached for him, and he seized the man’s arm as the
armatura
taught and broke it and slammed the pommel of his sabre into the man’s face, knocking him unconscious and waiting for a crossbow bolt between his shoulder blades. He whirled – his time of grace was over, and he was praying to God and Jesus and the Virgin Parthenos and all the legion of saints—

The old man had put an arrow in the nearest Kree, and the rest of them were mere crashing noises running into the woods.

‘Best ye get on my horse,’ the old hunter said. He managed a laugh, but it was obvious he was shaken. ‘Glad I didn’t try an’ rob you,’ he said.

Turkos put the point of his sabre carefully on a dead man’s deerskin coat and leaned on it and breathed. He felt as if he’d run a mile.

Athena gave a great kick, and sighed. Bloody foam poured out of her mouth, and she died.

Turkos sat on his haunches by her and wept. He had a long cut across the base of his left thumb and he could see the layer of fat beneath the skin – where had that come from? And there was something in his lower leg. And Athena was dead. He had to discover her death anew, three or four times, like a man touching the stump of a missing tooth. He didn’t want her to be dead. He didn’t want to have sacrficed her.

‘Do you think there is a paradise for animals?’ he asked.

The old hunter nodded. ‘Lady Tara has a place for animals,’ he said. He looked around. ‘We should keep moving.’

Turkos mastered himself, but his eyes were hot and full. ‘I loved that horse,’ he said.

‘Then look for her in Tara’s fields, running with the deer and the foxes – no predators and no prey.’ The old man was all but chanting the words. ‘Now get your arse on my horse and let’s ride.’

In an hour they made the first of Osawa’s outposts, and Turkos gave the password and the alarm was sounded, and mounted messengers went off to the villages of the Southern Huran with news of the coming attack. With a day to prepare, none would be taken by surprise.

Turkos returned to the ancient wall tower at Osawa to read months’ worth of news as quickly as he could manage. But attempting to prepare a small fortress for siege by a vast and better-armed army precluded examining much beyond the surface knowledge that the Emperor was a prisoner of the Duke of Thrake, and that his immediate commander, the Logothete, was dead.

While his precious store of mangonels were winched onto the walls and corner towers, he read the two most recent dispatches.

The new Megas Ducas was an Alban mercenary, and – Turkos read the most recent dispatch several times with growing excitement – he was marching towards the border with an army. He – Giannis Turkos – was ordered to collect his mobile garrison and march to meet the Megas Ducas, escorting any fur merchants in Osawa and surrounding villages and their wares.

Of course he was. He was intent on protecting the Empire’s share of the fur trade.

Turkos read both dispatches one more time and then stood at his work table, a dirty bandage around his left hand which was held high in the air to stop the flow of blood, while with his right he tried to write as small as ever he’d learned from the monks in Eressos. He wrote the detailed dispatch in the latest code he had available and sent off four copies, one each for all the birds in the tower. As the last great black and white messenger bird soared away, he closed the shutters of his office against the cold and walked down the curving interior steps to the ground floor, where the hunter lay napping on the guardroom bed.

Turkos woke him. ‘I’d let you sleep, but you’ll want to be gone before the fighting starts,’ he said. ‘Here’s your gold,’ he added, and extended his hand to clasp the hunter’s, ‘and here are my thanks.’

The old man smiled sleepily. ‘I won’t miss the show,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take the gold.’

Later that afternoon, the first war canoes slipped ashore a few miles north of Osawa. A Kree chief stepped out of the first canoe and received Big Pine’s arrow in his throat, He died, thrashing, in the icy water. Big Pine’s war party screeched—

—and the war began.

Part Two

The Winter War

Chapter Thirteen

North of Liviapolis – Mag

W
hen the army marched north from the parade ground, they marched in their new white wool cotes with their best weapons and gear, and they made a fine show. Most men had water in their canteens, and the provident had a length of sausage and some hardtack in their scrips.

They marched away west, up the road to Alba, and the further they went, the more men worried.

Mag had never held any kind of command before. She had the natural power of an older woman – the wisdom that comes with the end of youth’s ambition, plus a little more from her hermetical talents. She had led the altar guild of her small town, and she had helped manage supplies in a castle under siege.

She had sixty women and a dozen lances under John le Bailli, her lover, under her command. She had lost sleep over their preparations. The wagons were loaded to the tops of their steep, outward-jutting sides, and the carts were loaded, and there were water casks and spare sewing needles and tents and mess kettles and dried meat and thread and horseshoes—

None of that caused her a moment’s concern. She could read, and she could write well enough.

But when the train – fifty great wagons and twenty carts and sixty-six mules – passed under the arch of the palace gate and rolled noisily into the gathering dusk, she felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life. She clung to le Bailli’s hand when he mounted the lead wagon box with her in a very uncommanderly way, and he smiled at her in the dark and kissed her lips.

‘I’m terrified,’ she muttered.

Le Bailli laughed. ‘It does me good to see it, woman of wonders.’ He leaned back to stretch his legs and ease his back, caught his spurs on the wagon’s front boards and almost fell off.

She guffawed.

He laughed with her.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Command is easy when you are young, and harder and harder as you get older.’

‘Oh, shut up with your scary philosophy,’ she said, and hugged him a moment. ‘What have I forgotten?’

‘Spare earwax?’ he asked.

For a moment she fell for it . . .

. . . and then she swatted him.

He laughed. ‘Put it away. Whatever you have forgotten, we will now live without.’ He looked back along the line of wagons. ‘How many are new?’

‘All but six,’ she confessed. The wagons had been built at the Navy Yard to hide them from prying eyes – she’d used hermetical means to hide them still further.

‘Best military wagons I’ve ever seen. He’s spent a great deal of money on this,’ le Bailli said.

Mag nodded. ‘Yes.’

Le Bailli nodded. ‘You’re a company officer and I’m a lowly corporal. I don’t need to know, I’m sure.’ He grinned. ‘But by God, woman, it seems we’re marching into the mountains in winter. What’s he doing?’

Mag laughed. ‘He’s being himself. Mysterious, arrogant, and probably victorious.’ She kissed le Bailli. ‘We’re about to pass the gates, Corporal. Go defend my wagons from the enemy, before I use your handsome body for a distraction from the stress of command.’

‘Anytime,’ he said, and gave her a little interest on the investment of her kiss before stepping off the wagon into the saddle of his horse, who grunted as if to disapprove of all this showmanship.

Mag’s convoy rolled into a camp prepared by Gelfred’s men – stakes and lines laid out for tents, and a strong picket of cavalry covering their arrival. When the army arrived half an hour later, they found their tents up and most messes had cooked food waiting.

The Morean volunteers ate their hot food, slept in their prepared tents, and didn’t desert.

And the next morning, they rose before dawn in the foggy cold, and marched away over the mountains towards the Green Hills.

The weather was superb. The roads were frozen and hard, but the sun was bright, and every man was mounted.

On the third day, as they jogged along at a fast walk over rolling downs full of sheep and cattle, the army passed corpses – little knots of men.

Ser Michael turned to Ranald Lachlan. They were climbing a tall ridge dominating the main road into Thrake. Mountains rolled away to the north and west. Off to the north-west they could see the looming walls of Kilkis, which the Albans called Middleburg. It was a mighty fortress dominating the crossroads where the North Road and West Road met. At the foot of the fortress sat the last town east of the Inn of Dorling.

Lachlan was watching the hills the way a man watches his love pull her dress over her head. With both love and lust. ‘My hills ain’t far,’ he said. He looked down at the dead man – stripped naked, and already dead white – on the ground. There were patches of snow.

‘Gelfred caught their outposts asleep,’ Ser Michael said. ‘I heard it this morning in the command meeting.’

‘Blessed Virgin,’ Ranald said, and crossed himself. As a man who had been dead, he took the deaths of others very seriously.

‘Captain – that is, the Duke – says we’ve a clear run until we encounter his scouts,’ Ser Michael said.

‘Sweet Christ,’ Ranald said. ‘Poor Andronicus.’ He laughed aloud, and that particular laughter spread like wildfire as the army raced across the hills, headed north. ‘Tom and I thought the Castellan at Middleburg would hold against us.’

Ser Michael shrugged. ‘He didn’t. I don’t know the story, but the gates were open and the Duke expected it.’ He looked back. ‘I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s been planning it for months.’

Ranald nodded. ‘Aye. He’s a canny bastard.’ He caught Michael’s glance and put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Michael, lad, he’ll plan as carefully for your da.’

Michael spat carefully in a patch of snow. ‘Ran, I don’t know what I want for my pater. I’m not convinced I shouldn’t ride away and leave him to his dungheap.’ He touched the favour he wore at his shoulder. ‘I have other concerns than him.’

Ranald fingered his beard. ‘Aye. As do I.’

It was Michael’s turn. ‘Don’t fret – he’ll knight you. Just give him an excuse. Ranald, I know him. He chancy to cross, he’s the devil when he’s angry, he’s as vain as a popinjay and he loves to show us all how smart he is – but he stands by his friends.’

Ranald nodded, obviously unhappy. ‘Aye, that’s what Tom says.’

‘We’ll have a fight in the next ten days.’

‘Or we’ll all freeze waiting for it,’ Ranald said. ‘But aye.’

There was no break for midday food. The whole column rolled along and took the north fork in the Imperial road without pausing under the walls of Kilkis – and now they were marching along the old legion road. Instead of marching west over the last pass into the Green Hills, they continued north, passing well east of the Dragon’s Mountain and crossing the Meander River at a stone bridge so ancient that Ser Alcaeus dismounted, read the inscription, and laughed aloud. He cantered along the jingling column – men were eating in the saddle, and the Nordikans, who were probably the worst riders, were leaving a trail of uneaten food – dropped sausages and cheese – and they roared with laughter at each other’s riding. Men fell off. They all drank steadily.

Alcaeus reined in by the standard. ‘I know why you left Darkhair and half the Nordikans,’ he said. ‘By our avenging lord – how many wagons of wine do they have with them?’

The Red Knight grinned. ‘A better question would be – what will they be like when we run out of wine?’

Ranald leaned out over his cantle. ‘What did it say? I’ve crossed the Stone Bridge in the Hills a hundred times. I can read, but I can’t read that!’

Alcaeus nodded to the Red Knight. ‘A few of us can still read Old Archaic,’ he said. ‘For such a grand structure – out here in this waste of green grass and rock – you might expect an oration from the Empress Livia—’

All the educated men nodded.

Alcaeus straightened his back where the tug of harness and four days in the saddle grated on his hips. ‘It says “Iskander, Deckarch of Taxis X Nike, and his mess group built this bridge in fourteen days.”’

Tom Lachlan and his cousin turned their horses to look back, and for a moment, the whole command group – Ser Milus, and Nicholas Ganfroy, who was four fingers taller and a much better trumpeter, Bad Tom and Ranald, Toby with his master’s spare warhorse and Nell, who had suddenly started to look more like a woman and less like a skinny irk, Father Arnaud, Ser Alcaeus and Ser Gavin and the Megas Ducas himself by Ser Gerald Random nursing his ankle – all sat in their saddles, munching sausage and contemplating a three-arch stone bridge built by ten soldiers in fourteen days.

‘They conquered the world, or most of it,’ the Duke said.

Bad Tom spat some sausage rind. ‘I would ha’ loved to fight them.’ He nodded at his cousin. ‘They’d hae gi’en us a mickle fight. Kiss the book on that.’

The Duke gave his largest man-at-arms a crooked grin. ‘I don’t know if they were great warriors, Tom,’ he said. ‘They built great roads and bridges and made damn sure they weren’t outnumbered when it came to a fight.’

‘Oh,’ said Tom, losing interest. ‘How do you know that?’

‘They left books behind,’ the Duke said. ‘And I read them.’

Liviapolis – The Princess Irene

‘What!’ The princess lost control of her voice very briefly and shrieked like the girls selling fish on the docks.

Lady Maria stood her ground with the long practice of a wife, a mother, and a courtier. ‘The army has marched away, Majesty.’

Irene put her bare feet into sheepskin slippers – even in the grip of terrified rage, she could not help but notice how unseemly it was that a princess born in the purple birthing room of the Great Palace would wear peasant slippers to keep her feet warm. The ancient floors of the palace had hypocausts, and should have been warmed by furnaces in the lowest cellars. But none of that had worked for many years, and only rats lived in the tunnels that had once funnelled warm air.

‘Do you mean that my barbarian heretic has taken
my
army and marched away without informing me?’ she spat.

Lady Maria nodded and curtsied deeply. ‘So it would appear, Majesty.’

‘Leaving me naked to the traitor?’ Irene said. She was wearing only a thin linen shift in a very cold room, and the concept of being naked before her enemies was rather real and immediate.

‘Acting Spatharios Darkhair remains with more than half of the Nordikan Guard. There are two maniples of the Scholae in the palace and our walls are manned.’ Lady Maria curtsied again. ‘The new sailors in the Navy Yard have been paid, and are armed. We are not utterly wretched.’

Irene went to the great arched doors that gave on her balcony. There was snow in the air, but she looked north, towards the tall mountains of Thrake. ‘What is he doing?’ she asked.

Lonika, Northern Thrake

A black and white bird the size of a large dog alighted on the arm of a green-clad man. He was sitting on a fretting horse in a field of snow studded with snow-covered pines, and the weight of the bird on his arm threatened his seat, but he managed it. He slipped the message cylinder out of the bird’s harness of wool yarn, fed it most of a chicken, which act left him covered in bloody scraps, and then tossed the bird as high as he could manage into the air for the return journey to the city, more than a hundred leagues to the south.

Jules Kronmir read the message with what passed for panic on his face, which was registered by the very slightest downward twitch of his mouth.

He turned his horse and raced over the first snow of the season for the Palace of Lonika.

Aeskepiles sat across a big oak table from Jules Kronmir, drinking good cider and scowling.

‘We have to kill him,’ he said with a shrug. ‘You need to convince Duke Andronicus.’ He read the message again.

‘Andronicus is convinced that the only way to deal with the usurper is to meet him in the field.’ Kronmir raised his cup and drank. ‘Pray do not delay in taking this to the Duke, Magister. Time is everything.’

‘You are so reserved, Master Kronmir, I can’t decide what you are saying.’ Aeskepiles stretched his booted legs out towards the open hearth. ‘I hadn’t expected to spend a winter in Thrake,’ he admitted. He tossed the small confession on the still water of the spymaster’s face.

Nothing rose to the surface. ‘Would you do me the kindness to take this news to the palace?’ asked Kronmir, displaying a deliberate patience, like a parent with a child.

‘An hour won’t hurt the cause. I never get a chance to speak to you, and yet you are at the heart of our organisation in the city.’ The mage leaned forward. ‘Is there anything you need?’

Kronmir thought for a moment. If he was frustrated at the magister’s delay, he hid it well. ‘I wonder if you could make me some small devices,’ he asked.

Aeskepiles shrugged. ‘Most men exaggerate the capabilities of hermetical devices,’ he said. ‘And I don’t make fire-starters. What would you like?’

‘I’d like to have the ability to warn an agent. Something like a ring or a pendant that would buzz, or grow warm or cold. Preferably something that would be utterly inconspicuous.’

Aeskepiles drank more cider. ‘Warn them for what purpose?’

‘So that they could escape. You must know that one of my best messengers was taken. I lost only one agent, but in the process of warning the others I was very exposed.’