The Legend of Broken (41 page)

Even so, Arnem is able to see the mob are strangely moving past pain, almost as if their sickness is destroying their ability to sense that most potent of physical influences. And, faced with this degenerated behavior among what are, after all, subjects of Broken who must, until very lately, have been no more mad than himself, Arnem finds himself spurring the Ox off to some little distance from Visimar and Niksar, and at the same time—almost thoughtlessly, and by the light of a Moon that has now made its way up over the hills and valleys—searching for the silver clasp that his wife placed in one of his inner pockets before the Talons’ triumphal march out of Broken. When he finds it, he withdraws the thing, and gazes down at the stern, one-eyed face and the portentous ravens it artfully depicts; then, without considering what he is doing, he actually addresses it:

“And so, great
Allsveter,
” he murmurs, repeating the term that he has sometimes heard his wife murmur when contemplating the thing. “Was it you who inspired a brave young man to end his misery thus?”

Replacing the clasp in his deepest pocket, Arnem shakes his head to clear it of nonsense; but then he hears the discreet voice of Visimar:

“Are you troubled enough to address the gods of old, Sentek? Fearing, perhaps, that Kafra has betrayed his own people?”

Quickly looking to see that Niksar has chosen to bury his grief by personally taking charge of the
Wildfehngen
units, Arnem glares at the old man harshly. “Nothing of the kind. The object is a meaningless token from my wife, to whom my thoughts turn before any battle, particularly so strange an engagement. Make no more of it, old fool.”

“As you will, Sixt Arnem,” Visimar replies; and then he breathes heavily with concern. “But I fear I must tell you that matters in the home you long for may be growing as wretched as they are here. For the rose fever in Broken, it seems, is spreading …”

Arnem’s face reveals clear bewilderment. “And how come you to know this?” the sentek asks, making ready to join his aide.

“I should almost enjoy telling you that I have employed sorcery,” the cripple replies. “But we have no time for childish games. You shall simply have to trust that I know it—and, it may interest you to know, I have at the same time received further proof that my master yet lives.”

“Truly?” Arnem replies, his interest showing plainly. “I pray so. For, by the look of things, we shall require the keenest of minds soon.”

Visimar eyes him carefully. “Why should the ‘sorcerer,’ the ‘heretic’ Caliphestros, have any interest in serving the needs of Broken? And how
could
he serve them, in a way acceptable to the rulers of the great kingdom?”

Before Arnem can answer, he receives an urgent request for leadership from Niksar. “I believe that he shall, when he realizes, as we all soon must, what is truly at work in this land.” Then the balled spurs go into the Ox’s side, and Arnem is away. “Reyne!” he shouts. “Ride out to join the left claw with Akillus, and I shall do the same with the right! Let us finish our work quickly, and then push our foes back toward Taankret—let the
Krebkellen
be completed!”

As the Ox passes before the infantry
Wildfehngen
—knowing, as such warrior mounts ever do, the importance of the moment and his role in it—the infantry formations begin locking their great, convex
skutem
shields
†
about the sides of their three
quadrates,
while Arnem continues to call out his orders with such authority that not a man misses a word: “Remember, Talons—although I wish no death to befall these people, my concern for your own lives is far greater; and should you find yourselves in peril, I shall not begrudge you a wounding or even a lethal blow—however diseased your enemies may be!”

A roar goes up from the
Wildfehngen,
who have been unleashed; and the great machine that is this part of Broken’s finest legion sets to work:

High as their emotions are, they never outstrip discipline. Akillus and Niksar’s left
fauste
of horsemen make quickly for the townsmen, who show the ferocity of madmen collected into throngs: there is no order in their violence, only raw rage, and it is not long before the Broken horsemen have encircled and pressed them into the oncoming foot soldiers. Despite these predictable results, however, a wave of surprise runs through the men of Niksar’s command: for some of the townsmen—those who appear the most afflicted by whatever illness has taken hold of their community—simply keep coming at the soldiers, even after sustaining wounds that would make seasoned warriors flee outright. A few of them seem to notice these wounds so little that Sentek Arnem’s order against inflicting grievous injury must be violated in several cases, so that the maddened townsmen can at least be disarmed—and such disarming, it becomes clear in these several cases, means the taking off of a hand or a limb. Yet even these terrible injuries cause little or no discouragement.

From the baggage train, where he enjoys the youthful protection of the
skutaars,
Visimar sees this development by the light of the Moon; but the sight gives the old man no amusement or solace.

“Too deep,”
he murmurs, repeating his phrase of earlier in the evening.
“The Holy Fire has burned too deep into them …”
Then, aloud, he calls out: “Ernakh!” Turning, he asks of the young men: “Where is Sentek Arnem’s
skutaar,
who is called Ernakh?”

Within a few moments, the dark-haired marauder youth is rushed before Visimar, who seizes the lad’s shoulders, as if to shake urgency into him.

“Find your mount, son,” the old man says. “Get to your master, and tell him this: the disease has progressed too far, and many are insensible to pain. As soon as there is a separation between the townspeople and his men, he must retreat with haste!”

“Retreat?”
another
skutaar
calls. “You are mad, indeed, old father, to think that the Talons need retreat before such useless fools!”

“Do as I say!” Visimar commands, keeping his attention fixed on Ernakh, and rightly sensing that the youth enjoys a more serious nature than his fellows. “Your master will thank you when all has finally become clear.” As the boy leaps atop a nearby horse, Visimar turns to the other young men. “And the rest of you—begin moving the equipment of the
khotor,
even before your commanders return!”

Visimar keeps his still-keen eyes fixed on the white and grey forms of Niksar’s and Arnem’s mounts on the distant field, and the speeding Ernakh riding fearlessly into the violence—and how expertly, the old man thinks, how naturally and with what seriousness does the marauder boy move atop a horse and among men engaged in a fight that is becoming increasingly deadly! The cripple sees Ernakh reach Sixt Arnem’s grey, deliver his message, and receive acknowledgment from the sentek. Almost immediately, the wagons and pack animals of the baggage train begin to move quickly eastward along the darkness of the Daurawah Road, while Visimar remains behind, quietly but desperately urging speed upon Arnem and his men.

It is, in the end, an unnecessary entreaty; for, just as effectively as they have thrashed and herded the townsmen back toward Esleben, the Talons are able to break the
Krebkellen
formation, form into well-ordered lines of retreat—two abreast, now, rather than four, for speed’s sake—and return past the spot where Visimar is waiting, all long before their opponents can follow. Some Talons bleed from lucky blows scored by the Eslebeners, but most are simply sweating and bewildered; yet they never slow their double-quick march along the Daurawah Road. Arnem, for his part, draws up beside Visimar, breathing hard and allowing the Ox a moment to revel in his reunion with the old man’s mare.

“Well, cripple, Kafra knows how you could tell as much, but they were beginning to seem beyond—or better say
below
—human: the most grievous wounds imaginable, taken as though they were scratches!”

“I would be surprised if your golden god has any sense of why all this is so, Sentek. It will be my unhappy duty to explain it to you—but let us get your men well away from the evil of Esleben …”

Arnem will not take to the Daurawah Road until the very last of his wounded—all, thankfully, sound enough to ride and march—depart; and Visimar, for his own reasons, will not start without the commander. The appearance of the eagle owl he called Nerthus has proved beyond doubt to the acolyte that the pestilences at work in Broken have spread throughout (although each in different parts of) the western kingdom, likely for the same reasons that caused their appearance further east, in and about Daurawah; and he must make the sentek see that
all
the towns along the route that they are traveling, where they had thought to find welcome, provisioning, and forage, must now be avoided.

{
vii
:}

Despite the Talons’ dispatch of the threat at Esleben, questions about the future of the campaign upon which the legion had embarked became more nagging as the force marched east to Daurawah. The enemy had been sickened townsmen, after all, Broken’s own farmers, millers, and traders, many of them women, fighting at the behest of some madness or even of Death himself, who had forced them to dance his deadly round.
†
Whatever the case, the work there had not been truly fit for such peerless troops as the Talons, and each of them has come to this realization by the time Akillus and his scouting parties report that Daurawah is close; and the mood among the men has grown somber at best. Is this because, after several days of unusually warm, bright weather, the third morning of the soldiers’ march looks, to judge by the dim light and a damp chill in the mist, to be strangely muted? Perhaps; but muted, too, are the sounds of Nature’s world, and they only lessen as the column nears the Meloderna River, an Unnatural, unharmonious development that even Visimar cannot (or will not) explain.

And as the grey light slowly increases and the walls of Daurawah grow closer, it indeed becomes apparent that even the relief and comfort that it was once hoped the port would offer will be denied to Arnem’s men: for the western gates of the place, which no man can ever remember seeing closed, are not only shut, but barred from within and sealed from without. The lack of activity before the northern and southern gates, meanwhile, which front the sharp bend in the Meloderna created by the Cat’s Paw’s emptying into that larger, calmer river, suggests that those portals are similarly sealed—and soon, sounds begin to emerge from within the port’s walls that explain why:

They are the sounds of human beings whose bodies may still walk this Earth, but whose minds are already crossing the Great River, or have completed that journey and arrived in
Hel
‡
itself. Such are mournful noises, as if those who make them have some faint recognition of what has befallen them, and of how irretrievable the loss has been.

It is not, therefore, any fear that the men of Broken’s Ninth
Khotor
(the legion that has for over a century guarded Daurawah and the eastern frontier of the kingdom) or some even larger mob of ordinary townspeople will be disgorged from the tightly shut city gates that slows the pace of Sentek Arnem’s Talons as they march steadily toward the walls of the port; rather, it is simple dread of what sights must accompany such terrible sounds as emerge from the place in greater volume with every step they take that holds the soldiers back. It is as if Daurawah—sitting, on its landward side, at the end of a long hillside road, one flanked by inexplicably empty pastureland that ends at the thick strips of forest that line the low banks of the two rivers—has become a place entirely unto itself, one which does not even notice the approach of five hundred soldiers, an event that would ordinarily call for great clamor, either of alarm or welcome. But on this dismal morning, the echoing cries of pain, woe, and confusion continue unabated until the Talons are well along the road leading up to the main gate; yet when they finally halt, it is neither some great increase in the port’s uproar nor a sudden silence that stops them. Instead, the wind—which has been out of the west and at their backs since before dawn—abruptly shifts for but a few moments, so that it comes in off of the wide Meloderna beyond Daurawah, stopping each soldier before he has received any such order to halt. For this wind carries with it the smell of burning human flesh, the stink of hundreds of bodies, which no fire could be large enough, if built within the port’s walls, to burn quickly; not without risk of setting entire town districts afire …

“So many bodies …”
Visimar muses through his cloak, which he holds about his nose and mouth. “Matters are already at far worse a pass than even I thought they could be …”

He has brought his mare beside Arnem’s mount, and on the sentek’s opposite flank, as always, is Niksar. “What can we do, Sentek?” the linnet asks. “Daurawah’s gates are nearly immune to violation—and the men of the Ninth are unlikely to let us get close enough to try.”

“Nor would such an attempt bear any fruit, in all likelihood, Reyne,” Arnem replies. “For, as you say, they are much like Broken’s gates—the eight or ten feet of oak at the bottom of each is wholly sheathed in iron plate. And so we will wait. They do not seem to have noticed us: we must observe what happens when they do. In the meantime—” Arnem turns to the men behind him. “Akillus. Dispatch parties of your men down to each of the riverbanks. See if anything has transpired there, or in the water itself …”

Without a word, Akillus signals to several other linnets of scouts, each of whom takes three or four men and makes with typical speed for the Meloderna and the Cat’s Paw at the most approachable points in the steep riverbanks. It requires deft horsemanship, as well as longer periods than the sentek would have thought, for the scouts to return; and few words pass among those who remain as they wait. It is only when they hear the sound of a commotion emanating from one particularly obscure stretch of riverbank, as well as atop the walls of Daurawah, that any general murmuring goes through the officers and ranks of the Talons. When the other scouts reappear, Arnem realizes with aching dread that it is Akillus himself who has raised the alarm; and the commander does not rest easy until he sees his most reliable set of “eyes” finally emerge from the great trees and heavy undergrowth.