A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  “They will come at our settlements this way, and the southern Sossag villages. There aren’t patrols out of Ticondonaga to stop them anymore.” The irk shrugged and passed the pipe. Again, it wasn’t passed to her, but to Aneas, who took it and drew deeply.

  “Without you, I won’t have the swords to make a fight of it,” Aneas said.

  Lewen shrugged and took the pipe back. “You don’t now, my friend. Six or more Rukh?”

  “I can’t let it go. He’s headed for Squash Country.” Aneas paused. He wasn’t braiding her hair anymore. “I think he’s headed for Thorn’s Island.”

  “Tessen says the same.”

  Aneas grunted. “I only know because of Looks-at-Clouds. Who seems to know Orley better than the rest of us.”

  “The bacsa does what the bacsa does. It is a saying among the Huran.” Lewen inhaled his smoke again. “I can be at N’gara in five days.” He shrugged. “The first two times Orley sent men—or whatever he has now—west, I let you talk me into staying with you. But now there’s four or five hundred of his dark creatures lose in the north woods.” He blew out and a smoke ring formed. “Or more. I cannot fathom how his adherents gather.”

  Aneas touched Irene’s shoulder. “Do you have a leather thong?” he asked.

  She resented being touched. She lost her flirtatious smile and writhed.

  Lewen cut a thong from the top of his leggings. His knife was very sharp.

  Aneas took the thong and put it in his mouth. Then, when it was wet with saliva, he put it in her hair. She wanted to cry out with disgust.

  Lewen read her well. He laughed. “When the deerskin dries, it shrinks,” he said. “Otherwise, they fall out of the hair, even hair as spectacular as yours.” He was laughing at her. “I confess I never thought to meet the porphyrogenitra by Cold Lake.”

  She turned her head away so as not to look at him. He was alien, and ancient. His Archaic was flawless. He should have known better. All of them should.

  “Perhaps among your kind insolence is normal,” she snapped, before she could think.

  He stood up. “No, Irene. I recollect how to bow and what to do at a court. This is a different kind of wilderness. You did well today. Why spoil it?”

  Aneas waved. “Never mind all this. I’m thinking that you could get Gavin to send me...” He looked at her.

  He was wondering whether he could trust her, and it stung.

  “Never mind,” she spat. She stood up. “I’m just a cook. I don’t need to be included in your councils.” She took a step away, head high...

  An owl hooted.

  And another.

  The reaction was instant, like a fire catching on birch bark. Everyone in camp lunged for something. She saw de la Mothe throw a haubergeon over his bare skin, and Cigne was stringing her bow.

  Thunder rumbled.

  Lewen was gone when she turned her head.

  “Damn. I’ve been had.” Aneas paused only a moment, snapped up his belt axe, and looked at her. “Go to your pack and lie down,” Aneas said. His voice was very clear, low, calm.

  He was speaking to her as if she were a child.

  “Go now,” he said.

  The owl hooted, and right in front of her, Lantorn made an animal sound and a dozen of Tall Pine’s warriors who had stayed with them followed him at a lope. They were silent as predators, and they ran north. Somehow, their painted silence and animal ferocity chilled her.

  To her left, Cynthia shrugged into her mail. And then carefully buckled on her sword belt, which also held her quiver.

  Nothing else seemed to be happening. For a moment, Irene wondered if this was their idea of a practical joke. She turned her head to look at Aneas.

  He was gone.

  She looked back for Cynthia, who had been nice to her, and the Alban girl was also gone. The air was calm and warm, and thunder rumbled again in the west, and the sky there was unnaturally dark.

  She turned all the way around.

  Nothing moved. No birds sang, and no squirrel chittered. There was no breeze.

  Then she was afraid.

  She went to the shelter and lay down where she’d been told, with the packs.

  She didn’t even have a knife.

  But Looks-at-Clouds’s axe was on a strap by the bacsa’s pack. Irene took it. It made her feel better.

  She could see the fire, and the pots, simmering away.

  Beyond the fire, she could see the next shelter, and to her left, a narrow patch of woods. Her eye was drawn to it.

  It sparkled. The woods sparkled.

  She looked away and looked back.

  It still sparkled.

  Then the patch of woods flashed white, like a scene lit by lightning.

  And went dark.

  She blinked, rapidly, but the woods were the same.

  Thunder rolled, very close. The black clouds from the west were piled very high, and the still air was heavy, warm, and felt like danger.

  Somewhere to the north, there was a scream.

  Irene discovered that she was biting her own arm. She grew angry with herself.

  There was another pulse. This one she felt. She had almost no hermetical talent, but she knew when there was potentia in the air, and the air was rich with it, like the smell of fish in a fish market.

  Suddenly there were more screams. Or perhaps war cries. They were high-pitched and desperate, and went on. It sounded like hundreds of voices, and they were very close.

  And then a loud bang.

  And another.

  She saw the bogglins before she heard them. They stopped at the first fire trench to eat the pot of food. They were spindly and dark brown, and their wing cases were slick and shiny as if they had been oiled. They looked very small, to her, after two days with Krek.

  Irene knew they were not on her side.

  Even then, a few feet from monsters who would eat her, she wondered what her side was, now.

  Another scream.

  And then a horn note.

  She could feel her heart thudding in her chest. She was lying on her side, and her body felt heavy. When the bogglins stepped around the frame of the structure, they would see her. She wished she had a dagger. She knew how to use a dagger, and she knew how to quickly and neatly end her own life. That was basic training, in the palace.

  She drew in the most silent breath she could manage.

  The nearest bogglin upended the bronze pot, and the four quarters of his head divided, and he sprayed something at his mates. He made a noise, like sniffing.

  And then he had an arrow sticking out of his abdomen. He took several steps, with an extra leg out to catch himself each step, and then he was facedown, with the bronze pot incongruously on his head like a stew-filled helmet.

  And the bogglin behind him saw her. It threw down the hardtack it had in its two upper hands and drew a long knife and chittered.

  The other bogglins—hitherto just legs, to Irene—whirled, and one grunted and fell.

  There was chittering behind her. She heard it through the shelter wall.

  A sudden darkness fell across the camp. A wind hit—an immense gust, strong enough to drop a tent.

  All the little wigwam shelters held.

  Thunder crashed, very close.

  Irene got to her feet. She was not going to die lying down. She had the axe. And they were all around her. She didn’t think bogglins could swim.

  She darted to the right, out from between the shelter and the fire, just as the sheet of rain hit the camp. It was like a living thing, visible, fast as a snake, tall as a palace, and the trees swayed before it. A few fell, and their crashes were lost in the sound...

  Where, just moments before, all had been silent, now all was noise. There was noise everywhere, a soundless sound—of rain, thunder, high wind, and terror.

  Irene swung at the first one she saw, despite her disorientation. She hit something and then she was past. Something cut her—she felt the cut and swung again, and lightning pulsed to comple
te her sensory overload. More pulses than she could count.

  Her feet were on sand, and she kept going, although movement was difficult. She had forgotten how cold the water was, but she cared nothing for it. She ran a few strides in the water and leapt.

  The shock of the cold went through her despite her shock.

  She swam anyway. She swam for what seemed like a freezing eternity, and the force of the rain backed away, and the lightning pulsed more slowly, and the thunder was merely loud.

  She still had the axe. She held it near the head, and swam, even as the cold began to chew at her, and she wanted to let the axe fall from her increasingly numb fingers.

  She heard a horn, and another.

  Something was very wrong with her. She felt tired—too tired. Too tired to swim.

  She turned in the water and a wave of pain struck her from her lower left leg.

  I’m cut. Badly cut.

  Another horn blast.

  She swam.

  And swam.

  It was cold and she knew she’d lost blood. Too much blood, and she had time to be afraid...of the blood loss, of whatever lived in the water, of what blood attracted, of the men and monsters and everything that was against her.

  But then she thought, By the Imperial Purple, I am not going to die here.

  She focused her not inconsiderable will on swimming. The storm was moving away with amazing rapidity. There were stars to the west, and directly overhead, a little orange light.

  Nice light by which to die.

  She was not going to die. She managed to get herself back into shallow water. She had never been so cold. She was only fifty paces from the camp, and a long, almost beautiful curl of blood, lit by the last sunlight, trailed away from her left leg and out into the lake.

  She turned her head away.

  She had a shift on.

  She had garters.

  She knew what to do.

  She made herself ignore the blood. And the sleepiness—it was corrosive. That was the end. She knew it. She had never been closer to death, not even with assassins killing her maids.

  I will not die here.

  She unbuckled the garter despite her numb and curiously unwilling hands. She moved it lower on her left leg.

  God, or the Virgin, sent her a stick. A healthy, strong piece of oak, under her rump. She pulled it out—flotsam from some old beaver dam—and slipped it through the garter, and twisted.

  It hurt.

  Sweet Mary, mother of God, Holy Virgin, pray for us now and in the hour of our death.

  The blood flow all but stopped.

  Her heart was beating very, very hard.

  The garter was stretching. But it was woven silk—one of her own things, scarlet silk from home. That thought strengthened her, that here, in the Wild, she had the imperial red of her home to save her life.

  Porphyrogenitra.

  I will not die here.

  She sat in the icy water, and the rain fell on her. She was ten feet off shore.

  The blood stopped.

  The horns sounded again.

  Maybe ten paces away, a monster burst from the lakeside undergrowth. It was naked, with enormous, almost caricaturist testicles. It was more than ten feet high, and it had a dozen arrows in it. It roared its rage.

  Bertran de la Mothe stepped out of the woods behind it and shot it from very close.

  It turned.

  Ricard Lantorn shot it from the other side, a range of perhaps twenty feet. The sound of his heavy quarter-pound arrow going home was the meaty sound of a man’s fist striking another man in a boxing match.

  The giant’s head turned from de la Mothe to Lantorn.

  He took a great stride.

  Lantorn looked startled. Afraid.

  De la Mothe put another arrow into the giant, and it stumbled.

  Lantorn drew an axe from his belt and threw. It was not a small axe, and it struck just above the groin and the axe head went deep into the thing’s vitals. They exploded out of his abdomen, a cascade of guts where its severed abdominal muscles no longer held them in.

  Irene kept hold of her garter and the stick. But she found the axe under her where she’d dropped it in her fumbling for the garter. She was trembling—shaking.

  The giant fell.

  A bolt of lightning fell from the sky and immolated de la Mothe. It left an imprint on her retinas.

  Lantorn winded his horn immediately, and three more horns sounded back.

  “Help!” whispered Irene.

  There were bogglins moving in the brush, just a few yards away.

  Lantorn sounded his horn again and ran.

  A second bolt of lightning sliced through the rain and blew a tree to fragments, but Lantorn rolled like an acrobat. He pulled his axe from the writhing giant’s corpse and threw it again in one step, killing a bogglin. Then he drew the short, broad-bladed sword and cut straight from the draw into a second bogglin, and the others broke. They skittered back.

  Strong hand came under Irene’s armpits and she was hauled to her feet.

  A heavily muscled Outwaller pulled at her. She slumped—and the Outwaller swept her off her feet and threw her over his shoulder.

  She screamed.

  Lantorn was ten paces away, and every one of those paces was filled with brown bogglins.

  From her position on the Outwaller’s shoulder, she could see the horns growing from his head. She opened her mouth to scream.

  * * *

  She awoke with a fire almost by her face.

  She was naked. Lying by a fire.

  Her injured leg was dead. Not even pins and needles in it.

  She fought the whimper in her throat.

  There were horned men all around her, and she could smell the bogglins, and she was cold, and terror went all the way through her.

  Irene feared rape and degradation. For herself, and because she was porphyrogenitra and degradation of her body was degradation of the empire, or so she saw it.

  I will not let...

  One of the horned men came and stood over her. He didn’t laugh, or mock her. She had never seen one of them close, and he was big, his muscles curiously twisted as if in a mockery of the way a strong man might look. Like a tree that had endured too many storms.

  Despite the terror and blood loss, her head was clear. Or perhaps because...

  The antlered man’s head was too small for his frame. The antlers were incongruous, and there was dried blood where they sprouted from his head.

  His face held no expression. His eyes were dead.

  He knelt and put a hand between her legs.

  She spat at him. It was the only resistance she could make.

  He hit her.

  And then he was gone. He was on his face, lying with his arms spread in the wet pine needles, an arm’s length away. He still said nothing, but merely lay at the feet of a taller, bigger antlered man. Worshipping.

  “No,” the Stag said. “Mine.”

  Irene’s gorge rose, and she vomited into the fire. The Stag was a foot taller than his creature, with slabs of flesh that might have come from different muscled animals and the rack of a great hart of sixteen tines atop his head.

  She was so weak she simply slumped back. Somewhere deep in the recesses of her head, she thought, I have lost so much blood; perhaps if I open the tourniquet, I will die.

  The antlered men were all bowing to the Stag.

  Irene’s left hand went slowly down her thigh to her knee.

  And her left hand found the buckle.

  My curse on you, Gabriel Muriens. And on you, Stag man.

  Perhaps she whimpered.

  He crossed the clearing in two strides and his vast, naked foot came down on her hand, crushing her wrist.

  “You are mine,” his voice said. It was a chillingly normal voice. The sort of voice of a councillor or a wise soldier. “Your life is no longer yours.” He knelt slowly by her, as if his knees were stiff.

  He wore armour—good armour, the
steel of Mitla with precisely rolled edges. She had time to notice it all, because everything moved so slowly. His armour was all brown and rust at the edges.

  Close up in the firelight, he stank like carrion.

  Her gorge rose again, because close up, she could see that the armour was fixed to him. There were pins into his flesh and bone, and they bled in rivulets onto the steel.

  His eyes were like any man’s eyes. They were brown, and sad, and full of pain.

  He leaned closer. She could smell the blood, smell fear and old meat and dead things.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He put a hand on her face. There were iron plates fixed to the back of the hand. With sinew.

  She screamed.

  He put a hand on her mouth. And another over her heart, on her breast. He was kneeling on her broken wrist and the pain was excruciating and then...

  He stood up.

  He looked down at her.

  The pain was gone.

  And there was something in her head. Something black, like an egg.

  “A princess of the empire!” he said. “Oh, Lord Ash, you have sent me a wife.”

  * * *

  The morning after the attack on the camp. Aneas had healed the wounded, and they had buried the dead.

  His dreams were unpleasant, but that had happened before. He wished for the comfort of veteran captains like Turkos or Tall Pine, but they were far to the east by now, or so he had to hope, and he made do with Mingan, who was as young as he was himself. He knew that he had won the ambush by Cold Lake. But the loss of Irene made him feel that he had failed, and his hatred of Kevin Orley now seared him with a burn of personal failure.

  Mingan laughed and suggested that perhaps youth made them stupid enough to succeed.

  Aneas took no comfort in that, but he didn’t stop the pursuit.

  They had been climbing for so long that Aneas had lapsed into the pure misery of moving too fast for comfort. He knew he was moving too fast. He knew that he didn’t have the swords to face the horned men. He knew he had made all the wrong decisions.

  He knew that he had lost Irene. Lantorn had seen her taken.

  Since the loss of his mother, nothing had affected him like her loss. It was a failure of his knighthood.

  He had begun to like her, and had been responsible for her.