A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  “Let’s end them first,” she said.

  “I can’t let you inside their reach,” Kronmir said. “And our horses are not protected. I think that the loss of the horses would be the start of the end.”

  “You have a plan?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I do,” he said. “And if you are still recovering by this time tomorrow, I’ll assume it is safe to tell it to you.”

  She managed half a smile. “You are too kind,” she said.

  * * *

  They made no real camp. No fire, no beds. Each took turns lying quietly. Kronmir didn’t trust the duchess enough to sleep, and he suspected from her breathing that she didn’t sleep either. Yet nonetheless he was rested in the morning and ate his garlic sausage ravenously.

  Giselle ate too. “I want coffee,” she said suddenly.

  He smiled, and then frowned as tears came to her eyes and she turned away.

  She turned back, rubbing her face with a grubby hand. “I want something,” she said. “I have not wanted anything since...they...tried for me.”

  Kronmir was fascinated. “You keep calling the thing they.”

  She shrugged. “I felt them. They are...a mare’s nest of thought. Of will. Worse than a single will.” She shook herself. “I have no experience with which to compare...it is not enough to say I was violated. I was...taken.”

  Kronmir had both their horses tacked. He’d prepared hers to keep her talking. He didn’t like the way his spare riding horse was acting. The gelding was tossing his head and rolling his eyes and there was something he didn’t like, and Kronmir listened to horses. He looked carefully, and listened, and calmed the gelding.

  Then he walked back to Giselle, and sat with his back against a great old tree, facing her.

  “You were not taken,” he said.

  She looked at him with a spark of anger in her eyes.

  “It will grow more important to you as the days pass,” he said mildly. “What story you tell yourself about yourself. I think that thing almost defeated you, and it left you with doubts, but this is what I saw. I saw you fight it. I saw you take action to save yourself, to the best of your abilities, and I saw you hold some ancient evil back long enough for me to get the medicine into you.”

  She was gazing into his eyes like a lover.

  “This thing has undermined your image of yourself. It has told you a story that you are starting to believe. It is still in you, still working. You can defeat it with will. Your will.” He stood up.

  She looked away, hiding her eyes. “I dislike being taught by men,” she said.

  He shrugged, and took no offence. “Imagine me a woman, then,” he said. “Let’s ride.”

  * * *

  He led them up the next ridge. The ridges were beginning to come more frequently, like wrinkles in a blanket, and he had a notion that the not-dead would stay in the valleys. The not-dead, as far as he could observe, did very little, and only when they were touched by the will. Climbing took effort. They seemed to exert as little effort as possible. Or perhaps, their masters were the ones saving effort.

  And, he thought, they depended on sight very heavily. And didn’t seem to be able to see in the dark.

  Kronmir turned to his companion. “Do you have access to power?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “None,” she said. “You do know how rare it is here? Magister Petrarcha represents a level of power we haven’t seen in five generations. It is much more common in Ifriquy’a and Nova Terra.”

  He nodded. She spoke naturally, in complete thoughts.

  “There are better ways of travelling these ridges,” she said suddenly. “If that’s your plan.”

  He smiled. “Lead me, then.”

  She took him at his word and cut her horse in front of his, and took a much steeper route for almost an hour. It wasn’t brutal; it merely killed conversation and took them up a deep gorge littered in rocks tossed down both slopes like a child’s playthings. Most of the rocks were bigger than the big gelding; smaller rocks rolled under their feet, making the footing treacherous for human or horse.

  But two-thirds of the way up the little valley, a path appeared at the base, winding between boulders, fitful at first and then bolder and wider.

  “Really just a cattle path,” she said, and examining a round cowpat. She dug in it with a stick, exposing the fly eggs, her reins across her left shoulder. “Four days old,” she said. “Maybe five days old.”

  They went along the ridge for several miles, and the mountains rose ahead of them and to the north.

  “You plan on going all the way to Arles?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’m doing or what I’m looking for.”

  She nodded. “That’s the everyday life of being a ranger,” she said. “We have to cross the valley at some point. There’s a stream—quite a deep stream. There’s a stone bridge. The next ridge is higher, as you can see, and ten leagues long. After that—” She shrugged. “After that, it’s mountains and mountain forests.” She met his eye, and hers were clear. “It’s more than a hundred miles to Arles and we only have food for two days.” She frowned. “And at some point, we have to go over the big mountains, and that means one of the passes.”

  He was watching the valley floor. “We can steal food,” he said. “What do the not-dead eat? They aren’t dead. They are still alive.”

  She shook her head. “No idea.”

  “I need to catch one and kill it,” Kronmir said. “Perhaps more than one.”

  She took a breath. “It doesn’t trouble you that these are people, who have had their minds taken over?”

  He thought for as long as it took his horse to reach down, pluck a tender shoot from an old stone wall, and chew it. “I suspect it would be better to tell you that it doesn’t trouble me,” he said. He watched her carefully now. “But the truth is that I cannot cure them, and I do not know them as people, and this is my mission, and it must be done.”

  “What if there is a way to save them all?” she asked.

  Kronmir shrugged. “Perhaps. If there is, Harmodius or Petrarcha will find it. I won’t. But I can help them by learning the parameters of the threat. By gathering intelligence. This is what I do. We need to know what kills them.”

  “Whatever kills the living,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Give me your hand,” he said.

  She extended her hand willingly enough.

  He took the pricker, four inches long, a needle of steel, from his knife scabbard, and stabbed the palm of her hand.

  “Ow!” she spat. “Damn you!”

  He withdrew the pricker, which had gone right through her palm like a stigma. “Ow?” he asked.

  “Fuck,” she said. She sat staring at her hand. As she stared, it began to heal. Before her eyes.

  “Oh Huntress!” she said.

  “You are afraid?” he asked.

  “Yes, damn you to seven hells!” she spat.

  He nodded. “You are recovering.”

  She turned. “You think so?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said simply. Simple lies were better.

  They rode down the steep slope, both of them skilled riders who could manage the ground. They emerged from cover carefully, about three hundred paces from the bridge. Almost immediately they came to the corpses.

  Kronmir rode along, looking down.

  Mostly they had been dogs. A few had been goats, and two had been children, although the desiccated corpses were like unwrapped mummies, something of which Kronmir had a little experience.

  “This is how they end,” he said.

  She dismounted, and he readied his weapon. Just in case.

  She rolled the girl child over. She had had long, chestnut hair, and it was still bright, and had a ribbon in it, an incongruous horror over the skull-face and shriveled lips drawn back from her healthy teeth.

  He moved among the corpses.

  “All about the same weight,” he said.


  She was already working to bury the two dead children.

  He joined her.

  The graves were shallow, but then, there wouldn’t be any scavengers for some time. They both washed in the stream, and he looked down into the water and saw trout in the mountain stream.

  “You think this is about will?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” he said. “That is, no, I don’t perceive that you or I have the will to resist these things. But in the state in which you are now, yes. And you are winning.”

  “And you are an expert,” she said.

  He shrugged. The both remounted, watched the valley carefully, and rode for the next ridge. There was a road on the far side of the bridge, and it was deeply trodden. She looked at the tracks, and he turned his head away.

  “So many,” she said.

  “Mitla?” he asked.

  “No. If it were Mitla, there’d be a river of not-dead,” she answered. “This is a thousand people and as many animals. I don’t know...I’ve never had to track a horde. But not fifty thousand. Saint Michael protect me.”

  “Fifty thousand people,” Kronmir said. He considered. “This thing has to be stopped before it gets to the cities,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You have a plan to stop it?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “Not yet.”

  * * *

  They made it to the end of the next ridge before daylight failed them, and the ridge ended in a cliff with a view over a dozen miles to the mountains rising like a wall, a great slope rising, grass covered above the tree line, to a high pass far above them that contained the road to Arles.

  A steady stream of beings, smaller at this distance than ants, toiled up the immense slope toward the pass. From his vantage point, Kronmir could only see them as a thin black thread, but given the distance, it was a matter for awe.

  And at their feet was the tail of the immense snake of not-dead. A column that covered a mile or more, fifteen or twenty wide; animals and men and women and children all intermixed. They walked in step, all together, so that the entire column seemed to bob in unison.

  “Ten thousand people,” he said.

  “Your math is very good,” she said with some asperity.

  They picketed their horses and sat with their backs against two different trees.

  “Trust me yet?” she asked.

  “Almost,” he said. He got up, fetched a shovel, and walked around their clearing, looking at trees. Finally he chose one. He began to dig.

  Later, they shared cheese and bread. The bread was stale and delicious. The cheese was marvelous.

  “I don’t want to die,” she said.

  He made no reply beyond a smile.

  “Do you mean that if I were to surrender to it, I would become one of them?” she asked quietly.

  He shrugged. “I really have no idea. I suspect it has...allies. I have no notion of what bargain you can strike with it. I believe it is still...aware...of you.”

  Her eyes widened in the last light. “Do you? Won’t it send some of its people for me?”

  He nodded. “I hope so.”

  She let her eyes meet his. “I am your bait?” she asked.

  Kronmir thought a moment. “Yes,” he said.

  * * *

  An hour later he heard the whooshing sound again, louder and closer than the first time, and he rolled out of his blankets and moved to his tree, but the sound diminished.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it appears that it hunts by sight, even at night. We are being hunted. It knows where we are. It wants you.”

  Her eyes shone in the darkness. “Fuck,” she said.

  Kronmir smiled, and went to check his trap and man his station. He watched a long time, and saw nothing more.

  * * *

  They came when the sky was just beginning to whisper of a coming day. They were not very quiet, and three of them went into his net trap immediately.

  The rest went straight for him, not her. He was lying with his head on his saddle, and the first not-dead, a big man-at-arms in armour that still appeared shiny and well kept, swung a heavy poleaxe at his head.

  The weapon passed through his head and struck the saddle.

  The simulacrum vanished.

  Kronmir leaned out from the branch of his tree and put a dart behind the man’s ear, and the man fell, skin blackening, eyes already blank.

  There were almost a dozen of them coming into the clearing.

  Giselle had a little bow, no longer than one of her legs and bent in an almost ridiculous curve. She’d strung it when he’d explained the situation, and now she began to put arrows into the not-dead.

  She hit. It was superb shooting; six arrows loosed, six shambling warriors struck. One, shot in the throat, crumpled and went down.

  The others kept moving.

  So did Kronmir. He racked his crossbow and loosed it into the least-armoured foe, who froze, began to turn black, and fell.

  The only sound was his breathing and her grunts as she pulled and loosed. Her bow was very powerful; some of her shafts blew right through her targets’ chest cavities to emerge in red-brown ruin from their backs.

  Another fell.

  They surrounded his tree.

  But their attempts to climb would have been humourous if the situation had not been so dire.

  One fell into the pit he’d dug.

  Giselle began to improve at downing them. She was forty feet away, on a platform she’d built herself in the crotch of a huge tree, well off the ground.

  Eventually, they were all accounted for. They were eerie in their silence, and their teamwork was perfect; four of them would cooperate perfectly to thrust the fifth one up into the tree where Kronmir sat. But they were not good at simple muscular coordination. And they had no distance weapons.

  Except the writhing grey worms. And those seemed to reach about two feet from the eyes and mouth of the host.

  Kronmir took his time, experimenting. When the attack was over and the last active one down, he examined those who were left. He had four in various states of injury, and he expected it to take his foe a little while to process its little defeat.

  He cut the throat of one. It continued to struggle until all the blood had pumped out of it, and then a little while after, and then its eyes rolled back and it collapsed and began to desiccate—a year’s drying in a hundred heartbeats.

  He made notes on his wax tablets.

  He tried three poisons on a second. He had darts prepared, and he stood by his net trap and shot into it—shot a dart, waited, made notes. Shot another dart. Made more notes. Used the third dart.

  He took the dead thing’s poleaxe and pulped the head of the fourth one.

  It came for him. He was surprised, and it was fast, and almost had him.

  Giselle’s sword severed the thing’s hand on the forestroke and cut the tendons behind the leg in a wrap blow, and then her pommel caught the thing’s chest and knocked it flat. Hamstrung, it could not rise, although it tried.

  He bowed to her. “You didn’t say you were such a blade,” he said.

  She smiled. “You didn’t ask,” she said. “Trust me now?”

  “Since they attacked,” he said. “Our enemy didn’t attack until it could no longer hope for your conversion. It is very subtle.” He looked at the squirming thing at his feet, which had once been a strong man, a farmer, perhaps a father and a husband and a son.

  “The spine,” she said. “Why?”

  “No idea,” Kronmir said. “Stay back,” he said, as a grey worm erupted from the thing’s severed neck. It was thicker, and as it emerged it hydra’d. But it had no more reach than the other worms, and he pulled her back as she stared, fascinated.

  “That is disgusting,” she said.

  Aiming carefully as the half-aethereal thing thrashed, he shot with his crossbow and missed. It took him three bolts to sever the worm at its apparent bas
e in the creature’s spine.

  Severed, it vanished.

  It was growing toward full light, and Giselle was looking out over the far valley.

  “We need to go,” she called. “Now.”

  He backed away from the corpse and ran to her side.

  Out in the valley, a phalanx of not-dead was raising dust on the road. They were marching in lockstep, headed their way.

  Kronmir had the horses saddled. He shot the last not-dead in the net, a simple dart with the black poison. It unmade rapidly.

  “I was going to take one back,” he said, as he mounted.

  “Huntress,” she said. “You are a cruel bastard.”

  “I almost forgot that they could track us by just one. And that its worm, if I understand, could take the horse.” He looked back. “But they take time to inhabit a new host. Time for the worm to grow? I’m inclined to believe that the new worm can’t hydra until it has matured in the host.” He shrugged.

  She spat.

  “So much to learn,” he said.

  They rode along the ridge, down into one valley and then another, backtracking the way they had come as the sun rose higher. Always, a little cloud of dust betrayed pursuit.

  “They are moving fast,” Kronmir said.

  “They are angry,” Giselle said.

  Kronmir watched another moment. There was a raven or a crow far off, but rising. “I don’t think it is anger. Curiosity, perhaps?”

  They rode on, moving as fast as they could without exhausting their horses, riding on the main road to Mitla. They rode into early afternoon, over one of the great ridges through the woods, but then they cut down the ridge to the open road. The sun was descending but still hot, and nothing seemed to move or breathe except the rising dust cloud to the north.

  They’d lost time in the woods. The dust was close—less than a mile.

  Giselle changed horses, and so did Kronmir. He took a moment to feed his mare from a nose bag.

  “I am waiting,” he said to her. “I want to see them more closely.”

  She took a deep breath. “Very well,” she said.

  The horses ate. One defecated on the road in a typical horse display of normalcy, and then the dust rose, and the silent not-dead were running at them, five hundred paces away.