The Grand Crusade (50 page)

Sayce’s eyes lit up. “You should have seen him with the Freemen, Isaura. These men of Oriosa came to pledge their fealty to him. They offered to spend their lives in his defense, and to further his cause. He accepted them and realized that he was responsible for them. He rewarded them for good acts and encouraged them. He made every one of them feel as if their lives were even more valuable than his, and that they were part and parcel of the Norrington Prophecy.”

Isaura heard Sayce’s words, but listened more closely to her tone. Will Norrington was dead, yet in speaking of him Sayce was happy. The memory made her proud. Just as Will Norrington had given of himself to the Freemen, he clearly had given to Sayce. Her love for him gave her strength despite his death.

That emotion was utterly foreign to her. She’d felt other emotions of similar intensity, but fear was the one she most commonly recalled. Fear of her mother’s wrath. Fear of the Oromise. Both of them were very intense, and she had nothing positive to balance against them.

Even the affection Nefrai-kesh had shown her evaporated from her mind as Hlucri arced the ring out into the distance. It vanished from sight, and with it went Isaura’s feeling of complacency. Aurolan used to feel right to her, but that was because it was the only place she had known. It was familiar, but it no longer fit as well in her life as it once had. She had been to the south. She had seen horrible things done in her mother’s name. She once would have thought she could

appeal to her mother to change things, but her mother groveled before the Oromise so obsequiously that Isaura wondered if her mother had ever been acting on her own or had always been a thrall to the creatures buried beneath the

earth.

Isaura took Sayce by the shoulders and turned the smaller woman to face her. “I have to ask you something. Don’t lie to me.”

“I would never.”

“Yes, you would. You see it as your duty. You want to escape for yourself and your child.”

Sayce nodded. “I would lie, but not now, not to you right now.”

“Is love why people in the south laugh?”

The Murosan smiled and raised a hand to caress Isaura’s cheek. “Oh, love can make you laugh, and it can make you cry and be angry and overjoyed and quiet and loud, serious and gay. It can make you do almost anything.”

“Does everyone in the south know love?”

“No, Isaura, they don’t.” Sayce’s voice softened. “But love is something to which everyone aspires. We write songs and poems and plays and stories about it. We work out great strategies to attract the notice of someone we favor. We arrange parties and celebrations and holidays as an excuse to spend time with those we love. Most importantly, though, when we find that special person, we make a life with him. We make a future and fill it with babies and even more love.”

Isaura pressed her lips together. A tear formed in her left eye and seared a track down her cheek.

“Oh, Isaura, what is it?”

Chytrine’s daughter swallowed hard. “I love my mother. I love Aurolan. No one loves me.”

“Someone will, Isaura, I know it.”

“I know it, too.” Isaura set her shoulders and exhaled slowly. “And that someone, I am certain, lives in the south. It is time, Sayce, that you and I go find him.”

In the dawn’s growing light, the battlefield looked different than it had in the twilight. The day before, as night fell, soldiers still stood and banners waved fiercely. There had been the clash of swords, the thunder of drums, and the endless keening of people in pain. Those sounds continued as night swallowed the bloody field, and the fighting drifted back toward the town of Merysval, but Alexia had not seen what had been left behind until dawn.

The battle itself had gone almost too easily. It paralleled very closely what she had related in her dreams to her aunt. Tythsai had retreated into Muroso and taken up a position around the village, then advanced into fallow fields to make a stand. The Aurolani had positioned themselves on an upslope, but they had been reduced to just under four thousand, with only nine hundred cavalry. The fields around Merysval were meant for cavalry, and once the Aurolani frostclaws had been eliminated, the rest of the army would be picked apart.

The sides met in a straightforward battle where infantry crashed into infantry and cavalry swept the edges, trying to turn a line. The Alcidese Iron Horse did manage to turn the Aurolani right wing, so Tythsai called a withdrawal toward the village. Alexia’s entire army pivoted to the left and center forward, and, while she could not envelop the Aurolani before they reached the village, she did manage to surround it. Nothing would be leaving that hamlet.

Nothing had, save for a legion of cavalry surrounding Tythsai. Less than half of them broke through the cavalry ring and sped northeast along the Zamsina road. Alexia would have preferred for thesullancirito have died right there, but her departure meant that much quicker of a collapse for her forces.

Not that their destruction was ever in question.

The fighting in the town had taken place by the light of burning buildings. Alexia’s forces had not fired the first of them, and when the larger buildings

went up, the twinned scents of oil and burning flesh combined in a black fog that drifted through the streets. Alexia could not hear people in the burning buildings crying out for help, but some soldiers did. Alexia hoped they were mistaken.

The Aurolani hid wherever they could in the town, forcing Alexia’s people to go house to house. She relied on the Yslin Guards and Jeranese Palace Guards to fight in such close quarters. As they cleared sections of Merysval, lighter infantry came in to hold the territory.

Arimtara fought along with the Yslin Guards and had been incredible. She smelled out ambushes and managed to destroy the attackers before they had a chance to do much damage. She would plunge into a building armed with nothing more than her taloned hands and emerge shortly after, bathed in gore and ready to move on to the next site.

The draconetteers hurt the southern forces the worst. They chose buildings that had good commands of wide streets and shot at soldiers trying to approach. Because they waited until the last moment, their fusillades would cut down a half-dozen, then they sniped at anyone trying to help fallen comrades. A dozen of them could pin down a whole legion.

Unfortunately for them, once their locations had been isolated, Perrine or another of the Gyrkyme could hit the place with a firecock. Just like the flaming munitions used at Fronosa against the Aurolani, these oil-filled pieces of pottery exploded in a shower of flaming fluid when the Gyrkyme dropped them. Once a draconetteer nest had started burning, the soldiers outside waited for their enemies to run, or let them roast.

It had taken almost until dawn to clear the town. Alexia’s eyes burned from fatigue and smoke. She rode back from Merysval toward her camp, slowly passing weary and bloodstained soldiers heading in the same direction. Beyond them lay the battlefield. As much as she wanted to look away from it, she could not, because she knew that the field would be a testament to how she had handled the battle.

That there were far more Aurolani dead than southern troops was a good sign, of that she had no doubt. Out there, across the plain, in little hollows and on little hills, bodies had been mounded. A small heap surrounded an Aurolani standard that leaned crookedly against bodies. She could imagine how gibberers had tried to raise it again, and how her people went after it in a back-and-forth battle that left the dead piled around what was now just a broken stick.

The white-furredkryalniricorpses were easy to pick out. Most of them had been slain at close range by arrows, with a few others dead by magick or more mundane and close-up methods.Allof the corpses had been beheaded, however. Thekryalnirihad been very difficult to kill in the past, and within the army a story started that suggested they could not truly die, so men systematically decapitated them. The heads would be buried at a crossroads and the bodies would be burned.

Most of the rest of the Aurolani would be left for carrion birds and packs of feral dogs. Vultures had already congregated on a hoargoun’s nose, picking at his eyes and lips. She watched, both fascinated and revolted, then wondered if, on her way back to Saporicia, she would find the hoargoun’s bones picked clean and bleached by the sun, still where they lay.

Soldiers moved throughout the battlefield, looking for comrades, bringing water to the wounded, or dispatching the wounded enemy. There was no passion in killing the Aurolani, just efficiency. It was less mercy than expedience, and a desire to stop their cries. Everyone knew they would have given no mercy to the southerners, so none was shown to them.

Other men and women moved across the battlefield, picking over the corpses for any valuables. They were not the folk of Merysval, but camp followers who had come out from Bacirro. Soldiers shooed them away from their own comrades, but many of the mercenary companies had no such sense of loyalty. For their part, the camp followers pointed out the living in hopes of a reward.

Crow came riding up from Merysval and reined in beside her. Smoke had smudged his face and blood had spattered one cheek. His silverwood bow rode in its saddle scabbard, but his quiver was empty. His sword, Hand, had seen limited action in the darkness.

“It looks as if your initial suspicions were accurate,” he said. “There were many people trapped in the buildings that were fired. Out to the northeast, in a gully they used for dumping their refuse, there are a lot more bodies.”

Alexia nodded slowly. “Any indication if the people were alive when the fires were lit?”

He shook his head. “Apparently not. Out in the midden the bones showed signs of having been gnawed. In a couple of the larger houses, the kitchens had big soup pots boiling and ovens with meat roasting. There’s little question what happened to the people of Merysval.”

“All along the roads we’ve found the remains of refugees in a similar state. Why would the people of Merysval be any different?”

“We had to hope, didn’t we?”

“That’s all we have.” Alexia’s stomach tightened. The Aurolani had been living off the land. She had no idea if they ate manflesh by preference, or just considered it when horse, cow, sheep, goat, and pig were all consumed. Cat, too, for that matter. They didn’t seem to like dogs, though she supposed the gibberers viewed themselves as closer to dogs than they did humans.

There had been no keeping the news of the consumption of human flesh a secret from the troops, and their reactions had been odd. The Alcidese soldiers, because of their tradition of ancestor worship, did all they could to make sure their dead were removed from the battlefield as fast as possible and buried well enough that the scavengers wouldn’t get them. Others, including some of the Nybali mercenaries, would roast themselves a gibberer or vylaen in recompense. They freely offered the meat around, but few partook. Many others did butcher

fallen frostclaws and consume them, but the most common action was to make sure the remains of those who had been eaten were burned in the hopes the fires would clean their remains of any Aurolani taint.

Just thinking about being devoured made Alexia shiver. There was a large difference between being bitten in combat and actually consumed. Biting in a fight she understood. It was desperate and yet brave at the same time, a savage and intimate attack. Consumption, however, was yet more intimate and, at the same time, irreverent. While she had heard Nybali shamans talk about how they were drawing the essence of the enemy into them, she rejected the idea. She felt it was just the ultimate insult: once you’d killed the enemy, you chewed him up and, in the end, reduced him to a stinking pile of excrement.

Riding up to her tent, Alexia dismounted and tossed the reins to a squire. The man likewise took the reins to Crow’s horse and led the two of them away. Warriors at the flap of her tent snapped to attention. She acknowledged them with a brief salute, then entered.

The flap fell behind Crow, and it took a moment for Alexia’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. She started, for over in the far left corner, Maroth seemed to materialize out of shadows. He stood there, unmoving and decidedly inanimate.

Crow rested hands on her shoulders. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to his doing that.”

“No, but I’m not inclined to complain.” Alexia frowned. Maroth had not actually traveled with them from Fronosa. When last she saw him, he’d been standing in the corner of the room where he had appeared at her father’s bidding. His chest had closed again and the scratches made on him by Myrall’mara had vanished. She’d left guards on the room and told them no one was to be admitted there without her express permission.

But that night, when her tent had been erected on the road, Maroth was there in his corner. So it had been on the road, and when she’d entered Merysval during the fighting, he lurked in shadows. Maroth had killed onekryalniribefore it could cast a spell at her, and had taken one draconette blast in the chest. She wasn’t sure how many other Aurolani creatures he’d killed, but the predilection of assassins to go sneaking about in shadows definitely put them at a disadvantage when he was around.

Alexia turned around and gathered Crow into a fierce hug, then stepped back and unbuckled her sword belt. “Was that battle too easy?”

“The glib answer would be not if you are the Aurolani. They lost over three regiments.” Crow removed his sword belt, then pulled daggers from the tops of his boots. “You’re thinking that Chytrine orchestrated this battle, this loss, much as she did the loss of Okrannel. She wants us overconfident and she wants you believing things will go as they have in your dreams.”

“Right, the dreams Ididn’t have.”

“That may be what she intended, but your dream didn’t involve fighting in the town, did it?”

Alexia shook her head, then doffed her coat of mail and let it rustle into a puddle at her feet. “No, in my dream we freed the town and the townsfolk were happy. This is more the sort of ending that Adrogans reported about Svoin.”

“I was thinking the same thing. It makes me wonder if Nefrai-kesh is now in command of the defending forces, and if he wanted to send us a signal. If he wanted to let us know that, no matter how bad it’s been before, it will get worse?”