A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  “When?” she asked.

  Gabriel’s eyes met hers. “Now? In fifteen minutes?”

  “I’m fairly certain I’m pregnant,” she said.

  His smile was a great reward, and a great relief. “I wonder how that happened?” Gabriel asked.

  “I wonder,” she answered.

  “Venike, if I can arrange it,” he said.

  “Oh!” she said. She knew that she had just been slotted into a military logistics program.

  He looked at her carefully. “Actually, it will be useful in many ways,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s a relief,” she said. She was daring to be annoyed at him.

  Gabriel propped himself on his elbows. His chest was on hers, and she was, damn him, starting to be interested.

  “Sweet, you know...” He shrugged. “Now is as good a time as any.”

  “So kind,” she murmured, considering murder.

  “Listen! If you marry me, this will be our life. Every act is on the public stage. You were a laundress. Everyone will know. If you had lovers before me, everyone will know. When you get married, it’s a matter of public policy. I will use our marriage to draw the Venikans to me. I need them. I need their banks to finance my wars. You think you are a laundress, but when I look at you, I see the same talent that I see in Sukey and Michael. You can organize. You can plan and execute. I can’t fight Ash alone. If you marry me, you marry the war against Ash. You get promoted straight from bed warmer and queen’s laundress to Planner of Everything.” He shrugged. “And marrying a commoner is excellent policy just now, and God help us if I entangled myself with someone like the Earl of Towbray.”

  “Michael’s father,” she said, just so he’d know she was keeping up.

  “Just so,” he said, with the patronizing smile she despised.

  “Do I get to read the plan?” she asked.

  He ran his slightly rough tongue across the palm of her hand, and then across one of her nipples. “Right now?” he asked.

  She sat up and pushed. “Yes,” she said.

  He sighed. “Couldn’t I just explain?” he asked.

  * * *

  He left her reading the plan when he, fully dressed in velvet, silk, and wool, went down the ladder to a waiting boat and was rowed ashore to meet the sultan and his great magister. He made it clear that this was not a city where women went on diplomatic missions, and she accepted that, without arguing, although it came into her head to mention that Pavalo had had no trouble taking her seriously. It might have been a spat, and she didn’t mean to inflict them on him.

  Not too often.

  So she listened for him going down the side, and began to read.

  Before she finished the first page, her hands were locked over her belly in fear.

  * * *

  The sultan awaited them on a divan, and Al Rashidi lay on a daybed piled high with pillows. The sultan rose as they were escorted in by twenty turbaned knights in magnificent mail and plate armour covered densely in silver-inlaid verses of the Koran.

  Gabriel went forward and bowed deeply, and Pavalo Payam spoke for him. To save time, he was approaching the sultan only as the Red Knight. Emperors and sultans could waste weeks on protocol.

  But the sultan’s Etruscan was strong and accurate, and so was Gabriel’s, and after a few stiff exchanges of remarkably flowery compliments, they were on the meat of the matter: sea monsters and war.

  The sultan was remarkably well informed.

  After several more exchanges, Payam bowed. “In the name of my master, I say, our M’bub Ali has met your Kronmir. They are two of a breed. Need I say more?”

  The sultan glared, but Payam looked like a warrior who had faced the not-dead without flinching and could handle a sultan.

  Gabriel breathed deeply and settled into the cushions that had been brought.

  Al Rashidi never rose. And whenever Payam looked at the old magister, tears came into his eyes.

  But when the formal interview was over, they were escorted across the city; that is, Ser Michael, Ser Giorgos Comnenos, and Gabriel Muriens and Morgon Mortirmir. They entered a fine courtyard of a set of low buildings that appeared to have been constructed of white marble, and heard the call to prayer from a minaret. The faithful went to pray, and Gabriel laughed to Michael.

  “Here we are the infidels,” he said.

  “You always were,” Michael said.

  And later, after sherbet, they were led into Al Rashidi’s chambers by Payam, and seated in good Venikan chairs.

  “I’m afraid this is for those who can enter the aethereal,” Al Rashidi said.

  Michael and Giorgos bowed and went out into the yard with Payam, to practice together one more time.

  Al Rashidi’s palace was as magnificent as any Gabriel had seen, and he had, thanks to the alliance, seen more than most. It was an endless vista of inlaid surfaces, floors, walls, and ceilings in an endless profusion of parquetry, intarsia, ivory and ebony and every colour in between.

  The magister himself awaited them with a bow in the center of a courtyard whose flags were inlaid marble. Every stone was different, every symbol different.

  Morgon was almost unable to speak, and he gawked like a tourist.

  “You are like a god,” he said.

  Al Rashidi’s head snapped around. “Blasphemy,” he said. “But the flattery is still sweet to me. And you will become greater than I, unless you are killed. Now come. My time is short.”

  “Why?” Gabriel asked.

  The magister turned. “That is worth answering,” he said. “I should have been dead a long time ago—perhaps a year.” He shrugged. “Unlike my brother Harmodius and this young phoenix, I have studied the necromantic arts.” He smiled bitterly. “I took one of the parasites to keep me alive. This morning, I killed it. Now I will be gone by sunset.”

  Gabriel, who seldom swore, said, “Sweet Christ,” aloud.

  Al Rashidi shook his head. “No oaths,” he said. “What I did is a great sin. I can only hope that what I did is reckoned against what we must do.”

  Gabriel thought this way every day. “I’m not the one to make that call,” he said. “But I too hope that we do is reckoned against what we must do.”

  Mortirmir was too young, despite his intelligence, to understand. “Why not keep the parasite?” he asked. “If you can control it?”

  Al Rashidi nodded and stroked his hermetical beard. “Payam asked the same,” he said. “First, because I lack your arrogance, and I’d never be sure that the Odine were not tricking me. Even now, it seems possible that my every word is known.” He shook his head. “Tell me no plan. I will show you one thing. It is my gift to you and your allies. And I offer one piece of advice, from my own master, whom they killed.” He looked at Gabriel. “When you have defeated the Odine, kill all the dragons.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  Mortirmir nodded too. “This is what Harmodius says.”

  “You hesitate, Red Knight, and yet I tell you that I see into their minds, and they plan the same against us.” The old magister did not appear to be dying. He appeared to glow almost white with vitality.

  Gabriel shook his head. “We would not even be ready to strike without the dragons,” he said.

  Al Rashidi nodded. “Listen, then. You are the culminations of more than a hundred years of planning, you and your friends. We have known the dates since Dame Julia plotted the stars and the gates, almost a hundred and sixty years ago. You say the dragons have helped us, and I say...”

  Gabriel almost lost his concentration. “You know the dates?”

  Al Rashidi waved a hand as if this were of no moment. “Please,” he said.

  He paused, and led them into the room. It was his palace, and there was no passage; one moment they were in his courtyard, and the next, in a room.

  The room was covered in tiles, and each tile was a magnificent shade of blue with gold letters and devices, and no two tiles were alike.

  “...I say that if the dragons were
our allies, they would have already given you what I am giving you now, as my last will.”

  And with that, he began to unravel a working of such complexity and puissance that Gabriel, who knew the workings of Harmodius’s innermost mind, was staggered, and Morgon moaned aloud.

  He taught them, symbol by symbol, until the whole magnificent tiled room and all its workings were fully installed in their palaces, and all the meanings of all the tiles explained.

  It was not just a single working.

  It was a set of nested workings that contained a great many substrata of knowledge about the necromantic, and a whole library of knowledge on the Odine. In learning, Gabriel learned the dates on which the gates would open, and even a simple map of where they led.

  Gabriel read it, imbued it, gnosticated it. He swallowed it. As there was no time in the aethereal, he and Morgon did not hurry.

  And finally, in the dying light of the great man’s life, he asked, “If this is the great working against the Odine...where did it come from?”

  Al Rashidi nodded. “It is another good question, Red Knight. Once there was a man who sought to cheat death. And even as he sold his soul to them, he sold them to us. Always, every side has a double agent. Always, there is division in the enemy camp. Every race has a traitor. Every camp has spies.”

  “And the dragons defeated the Odine ten thousand years ago?”

  Al Rashidi shrugged. “That’s what they tell us.”

  Morgon thought differently. “How much power does this require?” he asked.

  He seemed eager to try his hand.

  Al Rashidi bowed. “A very large amount of ops. You cannot be interrupted while you cast. The result has an effect on the texture of reality. Of course, this is true for every great working. But in this case...”

  Gabriel looked at Morgon and then opened his memories of Master Smythe at the standing stones. Al Rashidi played the memory several times, examining the flaws in his recollection.

  “It is, as near as I can see in another palace, the same working.” He rubbed his long beard, as if stroking a cat. “Now I am truly puzzled, Red Knight.”

  “Is there any way that I could have...researched this working, based on what I witnessed?”

  Mortirmir interrupted. “Yes, by the rood!” he said. “Look at this, and this!” And he played back Gabriel’s memory, a disorienting experience inside Gabriel’s own head.

  There was a brief hiatus, as Mortirmir, in a tone almost insufferable for its arrogance, explained how, exactly, his team had cracked the cough and the coded workings they’d built to defeat it.

  Al Rashidi did not attempt to slow him, but listened to the end.

  “This method you have developed is not just trial and error,” he said.

  “No, Master. All hermetical workings begin in theory. We attempt to identify the theory, and once that is identified, we eliminate hypothesis until we are left with...actuality.” Morgon looked at them as if they were both students. “The theory here is obvious, is it not?”

  Al Rashidi managed to smile and not be offended that a seventeen-year-old student was lecturing him. “Go ahead. Show me.”

  Morgon shrugged. “I confess I’m aided by knowing that Kronmir’s lady friend, who was taken, refers to the taking in the plural. And this...the theory is that there is no Odine. There are merely a myriad of the worms, each of which must be dealt with as an independent entity. As if the whole, while greater than the sum of the parts, loses power in being identified as parts. In this lies the theory.”

  Al Rashidi was looking at the edifice of his magnificent tiled working. “Yes,” he said. He had begun to burn a bright white, and his face was losing shape. “I leave this effort in good hands,” he said. “That you are infidels is of no matter. We must rise and fall together as humans. I have planted the tree, and look, it has already grown mighty. I will not cross Jordan, but by the thousand names of Allah, let the Odine tremble. Let the dragons tremble. Let the Kraal and all the creatures of the Wild tremble. Morgon Mortirmir, I charge you with my dying breath—accept my blessing and all that goes with it. In your hour of triumph, remember that there must be justice. And perhaps even mercy.”

  The old man’s face shone like the moon, and almost like the sun. He turned to Gabriel. “I am sorry,” he said.

  Gabriel shrugged. “I know what is to come. Even if we triumph.”

  Al Rashidi spread his arms. “Is it possible?” he asked, not Gabriel, but something indefinable. A broad smile crossed his face, and his whole being turned to light. It seemed to Gabriel that his last sound was a laugh of pure pleasure.

  But Gabriel was already running from the dying man’s palace, towing Mortirmir by an aethereal hand.

  “Wait!” Mortirmir cried, like a looter in a burning treasure house. “Wait! Everything is here! Hundreds of years of work are about to be lost!”

  Gabriel had been trapped near the collapse of a palace before. It was the most frightening end he could imagine, but even so, Mortirmir’s plea had effect.

  Like looters, with little knowledge of what they were taking from a great galley of art, each of them took the room closest. Gabriel’s was a niche, and he stripped it and duplicated it inside his own palace almost without analysis, although he noted that it seemed concerned with water.

  And then, exactly as with Father Arnaud, the place gave a flare of light and began to dim, and things began to move in the corridors.

  Mortirmir stood, stricken. “I do believe...”

  Gabriel didn’t have time, even in the timeless aethereal, to explain.

  “Shut up and follow me,” he said, and the corridor dimmed again.

  He reached out for Blanche. Even in another palace he could feel her, and even as he found her, he also found the golden cord that attached him to Amicia, even now. He laughed even as the walls grew faint.

  “Your turn to save me,” Gabriel said, holding the golden lifelines of love and pulling Morgon after him.

  * * *

  Amicia was in the abbess’s garden, which was full of beds. In fact, every open space in the fortress had beds; the beds of hundreds, thousands of suffers from the cough.

  Amicia was not working. That is to say, she carried bedpans and smoothed brows, she helped clean pus, she brought cool cloths and read aloud and said the office of the dead. In fact, in the two days since the army had marched from the inn to Lissen Carak, she had not slept. But neither was she working hermetically. Harmodius and her own abbess had begged her not to, and she obeyed.

  But it was hard, watching weaker practitioners with vastly smaller stores of ops work the cures until they ran out of any form of Umroth ivory or any other bone of the not-dead. Every knight with an ivory dagger hilt had turned his precious weapon in, and those hilts, rigorously tested, had then been ground fine. The resulting powder formed the basis of complex, tripartite hermetical workings that unraveled the cough and allowed the patient’s own body to complete the work of healing, if the sufferer was not too far gone.

  They were just about keeping pace with the plague. New cases came in as fast and they sent people, healed and immune, back into the world. The cured people were themselves part of the plan, because they took the tidings home, so that village after village knew that a cure was found and knew where to send the sick, and where to send every scrap of ivory from Ifriquy’a, every needle case and every sword hilt and every pricker and every eating knife and every sewing awl...every tool ever made of the stuff and sold in Harndon; but people were still dying, and the northern Brogat was the worst hit.

  Harmodius himself was already in Harndon. The city had stores of ivory.

  None of it was going to reach her in time. Gabriel had promised to send from Ifriquy’a, and Harmodius from Harndon, but she knew that Miriam’s supplies were exhausted, and that in a day or perhaps two, people were going to die just because Lissen Carak was too far away.

  And still she restrained her powers. She knew that her skin now glowed all the time; that h
er access to potentia seemed to increase every day whether she used it or not.

  The queen and Miriam begged her not to pass into apotheosis, because they needed her powers.

  Harmodius begged her, because he said that in the moment that she began to pass, Ash would attack her.

  He’d held her hand and said, “You are the most valuable of us.” He smiled. “But you would be the first to tell us not to sacrifice the Brogat and Jarsay to save you.”

  It was a strange existence. She ate a hurried supper of fish, watching her luminescent skin generate light even as she wondered why her digestion was suddenly so bad. Bad digestion seemed the very antithesis of apotheosis. The thought made her smile, and wish she had Gabriel to tell it to.

  And then he was there. Pulling at the tether that bound them.

  “Your turn to save me,” he said, so clearly he might have been sitting at the refractory table.

  She went into her palace and took the golden thread bound to her finger and pulled gently, and she felt him come.

  Even in the real, she could see him for a moment, and Morgon Mortirmir behind him in a long dark tunnel.

  “Thanks,” he said cheerily. “Where are you?”

  * * *

  “Lissen Carak,” she replied.

  Gabriel nodded. “And my brother?”

  “Passed westward with the Faery Knight, Tamsin, and the army,” she said. “Why did we never consider communicating this way before?”

  “I hadn’t imagined love as a strategic commodity until now,” Gabriel said.

  “Ash is attacking N’gara,” she said. She was fading already.

  “Gavin will stop him,” Gabriel said cheerfully.

  And she was gone.

  Gabriel came to his senses in Al Rashidi’s study. He was ravenously hungry and it was dawn and he had been under for almost a full day. A servant gave him water.

  Mortirmir went to the sofa, but Al Rashidi had been dead for long enough that servants had taken the body to be washed.

  “He was a great man,” Mortirmir said. “Harmodius came to him when he was my age. Al Rashidi was old even then.”

  Gabriel, who held most of Harmodius’s memories, smiled.