A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  He came to the first opening in the trees and stopped.

  Lantorn came up behind him and gave a grunt.

  They were high. How high was hard for him to say. Below him, the Adnacrags rolled like a carpet—a wet and bumpy carpet, but it was all laid out below him.

  An eagle turned circles, and it was below him.

  Aneas opened his chart, and looked at it, and a tiny nimbus of hermetical power flickered over his sweaty eyebrows.

  Lantorn made a face.

  Looks-at-Clouds put a hand on his shoulder. “Look there,” s/he said. “The Inner Sea.”

  And indeed, beyond the line of cloud, and the eagle, and the lower mountains and the farther lakes, there was a ribbon of blue to the west and north, a ribbon that faded into the horizon. The Outwallers exclaimed at the wonder of it, pointed, offered tobacco to the sun and the cardinal points.

  That night they had a cold camp. They ate dried food, and not much of it. They worked no potentia.

  In fact, Aneas had brought them up so high to watch the earth for other workings. And not to reveal themselves.

  So he sat with Looks-at-Clouds for hours as darkness fell and the stars rose and filled the sky. The stars were superb. He had never seen anything like it. He laid out his blanket on dry grass and lay on it and watched the stars move in the heavens. And suffered for the depth of his failure.

  If only...

  In fact, the fight in the old camp had been a victory. He’d lost two of his own, and hurt Orley’s party far worse, killing five of his Rukh and decimating his bogglins with a single working.

  But at the moment that mattered, he’d been too far from the camp. He didn’t even think Orley had planned to take Irene.

  Looks-at-Clouds lay down next to him. “She is alive,” the bacsa said. “I feel her. Something bad is in her head.”

  “Christ,” Aneas muttered.

  Then he felt the prickle of power, off to the north.

  He was out of his blankets in one motion, and he was suddenly freezing.

  He stood there, under the stars.

  “I feel it,” Looks-at-Clouds said.

  Aneas made his way to the little ledge from which they’d watched the north country, kicking someone’s horn cup in the thick darkness and breaking a heavy stick. It sounded very loud in the night, but it was a distant enemy they feared.

  Looks-at-Clouds rolled clear of the blankets. And looked out.

  “Got him,” Aneas said. “Damn it. We are gaining!”

  Looks-at-Clouds grunted. “He casts much power.”

  Aneas laughed grimly. “He’s looking for us. And mayhap his missing Rukh.”

  Looks-at-Clouds watched in the aethereal for a long time. “He is seeking to break her mind,” s/he said. “To make her one of his antlered men.” S/he smiled. “I can work with that.”

  * * *

  Three days of walking, a prisoner, a slave. The only humiliation not offered was sex; otherwise, she was chattel, ordered to fetch, to carry, struck casually. At first, she’d expected Orley to protect her, but he made no move to, and when he smiled to see her struck, his antlered men became bolder.

  Her leg, where he’d healed it, had a long black scar, like a tattoo. It bothered her, that something of him was now part of her, and it bothered her more when she saw one of the antlered men naked, and saw that his body was crisscrossed with black scars.

  And he’d put something in her head.

  And she had bruises. Nothing more, yet, but she feared...everything. And she was polluted by the thing in her head.

  At night, in camp, he assaulted her mind. For this, she was prepared; although she had no hermetical powers, she was, as a princess of the empire, fully trained in self-protection. She had high walls of white marble, and although he stained them with blood and ordure, although he burned them with fire, and sent disgusting things to climb them leaving trails of acid that burned at her walls, she held him back...the black thing in her mind was like a traitor inside the castle, but she walled it off, cocooned it in other thoughts.

  The second time that it sent emanations into her white walls, she almost succumbed. The images were dark and seductive, not repulsive. But still far from overpowering her.

  In the end, she could build her walls as fast as or faster than it could belch black. And in the morning, she felt less—afraid. It was difficult to explain, even to herself, but the victory inside her head—her resistance—was helping.

  But to resist him, she had to be awake, and every night left her weaker.

  She found herself sleeping as they walked. Antlered men struck her to wake her, or jabbed branches into her legs. She no longer had her pack or her light shoes, and everything hurt.

  Still, her mind ran on. She even went so far as to imagine open alliance with Orley, or outward surrender. But she could not imagine submitting to him; the smell, and the armour that was somehow part of him, raised her gorge. There was no one with whom she could negotiate, and nothing palpable she could offer.

  There were other captives. At some point, the war band had struck a settlement, probably off to the east, near Long Lake and Ticondonaga. There were a few children and as many women, and they did all the camp work. When any of them angered an antlered man, they were struck. On the third day, one of them was beheaded, and her body was left in the camp, the head nearby, gathering flies. Another of the antlered monsters stuck a little knife in her, as if trying to prod her to work. He grunted, and moved the knife. The woman, dead, did not move, and the antlered one spat on her in anger and perhaps disgust, and rose. He sniffed, and walked back to the fire.

  After three days of abuse, it was the casual murder of the woman that spurred Irene to action. She decided that she had to escape, even if it resulted only in her death. She knew how to take her own life. And the knife in the dead woman would be her release. She moved boldly, or as boldly as her swollen feet and bruised arms allowed. She went to the corpse and tried to pull the knife free. It was caught in bone—perhaps the reason it had been abandoned in the first place. She waited for a shout, for discovery, as she worked the knife back and forth, twisting it carefully in the corpse, striving not to break the blade.

  Her back was to the fire. She could only imagine that they were all looking at her. That her death or worse was on the wing.

  Out in the woods, a Rukh bellowed. Orley had all the allies he could want...bogglins, Rukh, even a few dozen irks, as well as his antlered men.

  The women watched her. Two with dull, dead eyes, but the other pair whispered to each other.

  The knife moved. It moved perhaps the width of a fingernail, but that promised her everything. She had no plan, but her determination was now absolute.

  She forced herself not to look over her shoulder.

  She moved the handle back and forth, back and forth. She thought of the fawn.

  Lantorn seemed like a hero to her, now.

  I will do this, she thought, and lo, the knife came free, slipping from the dead woman’s flesh like a scabbard.

  Personal cleanliness was no longer on her objectives. She slipped the knife, sticky with another woman’s blood, into the garter she’d used to tie off her leg three nights before. It was warm against her skin. As long as she had it, she could arrange her own death in three or four beats of her heart, and this alone raised her spirits.

  The two whispering women watched her.

  She fell asleep as soon as she sat down while the captives gathered firewood. She awoke to pain—Orley stood over her with a stick.

  “Go work, wife,” he said. “That’s what women are for. Work.”

  She grunted, still incoherent with the pain of the blow he’d struck to her side. And then her panicked mind seized on the knife. Her single stained shift was rucked up around her. Was it above the garter?

  “But in three days,” he said, and he licked his lips. “I’ll find something else for my wife to do.” He laughed. “My empress.” He nodded at her, his eyes neither mad nor bestia
l. “You are the fit wife for the Orley of Ticondonaga. But you must be mine absolutely. I would not share you, not even with my master, but he insists. And to be fair, he is in my head, too.” He laughed again, and this time he did sound mad.

  He turned, his armoured skin silent, and walked away over the forest loam.

  The knife was still there.

  * * *

  When they cooked that night, one leaned over. “You gonna run?” she asked.

  Irene met her eye and pursed her lips. She didn’t have a smile in her.

  The woman nodded. “Take me.”

  “They’ll catch us,” Irene said carefully.

  The woman shrugged as if indifferent.

  By then, Irene had her plan. It was absurd and desperate, but the knife made her bold. She could triumph in death, and she knew what the future held. It was never going to get any better.

  Orley’s assault began late, and caught her asleep. But this was the fourth night of his attacks, and she was learning. Tonight, she lay as quiet as possible, allowing his infiltration, hoarding her forces, waiting.

  All or nothing.

  She imagined his darkness storming her citadel. She imagined what she would become...perhaps he would augment her flesh as he had done to his antlered men.

  She happened to think of the bacsa, Looks-at-Clouds, and the image of the changeling came unbidden before her, as if she had summoned the shaman.

  S/he kissed Irene on her dream lips. We are coming for you, s/he said. And suddenly Irene was flooded with something, some power like young love, like hot, pure anger, like carefully nursed rage, like untrammeled joy. She lacked a word to express it, but it came with the words and the kiss, and she took a deep breath and attacked the darkness.

  She carefully reinforced the internal walls that surrounded the darkness, and then she attacked, and her new allies drove Orley’s slime from her walls and routed his sludge and his dung and his black blood. His images were tired, banal, the chaos of disease and putrescence feared and sometimes loved by children, and she had to hold her hand from annihilating them, for fear that she would provoke a new attack, but on other nights he had only come at her once.

  She lay in the cool air, feeling the bodies of the two women on either side of her. The stars wheeled overhead, cold and uncaring. She yearned for their distance, and she reached for them with her thoughts

  just for a moment there was some sort of slipping

  She snapped back. She had scared herself. She lay a moment, shaking, trying to imagine what had just happened to her.

  She conjured the image of Looks-at-Clouds. Closed her eyes and all but clenched them shut.

  And there...

  I’m running. Now Help I

  She couldn’t hold the image.

  She lay still again. Opened her eyes to watch the stars.

  The stars were gone.

  Just for a moment she choked, mortal terror flooding her.

  And then her rational, trained mind told her that there were clouds coming in, moving fast, covering the moon and stars. In fact, when she turned her head, she could see the last stars winking out...

  ...and the woman next to her, awake.

  The camp was not quiet. The antlered men were not quiet sleepers, and whatever had been done to them came at a cost. They moaned, or screamed, or talked, or, in some cases, whimpered.

  Something was happening. She could feel it, with a tinge of joy at her victory, and a secret pleasure in having reached the shaman. She wanted to believe...to believe...

  “Now,” she said. She got to her feet. They hurt, and her hips hurt, her neck hurt, and she cared not.

  She rose to her feet and walked. It was utterly dark, and the air suddenly smelled of rain.

  The other women were moving behind her. She heard them, too loud, and she kept going. She had very little altruism in her; she knew that if they were pursued, the other women could slow the pursuit merely by being caught and tormented or killed. But another part of her thought about what it would be like to present herself to Looks-at-Clouds with two women rescued from this hell.

  She paused. “This way,” she said with the icy assurance of sixty generations of absolutism.

  * * *

  In the morning, they ate cold sausage and berries. There were only seven of the original rangers left, and Mingan’s dozen warriors of all the Outwallers who had started.

  Aneas had his pack on before the rest of them were fully up.

  “Orley is going to make it to the Mille Isles unless we can catch him. He will cross to the Squash Country,” he said. “He’ll go to the Sacred Island and raise a new army.”

  Lantorn cleared his throat. “He ’as more critters now ’an when he started,” he said.

  Aneas looked around. “If we keep tracking him,” he said, “and if Gabriel or Gavin send us aid—then our effort isn’t wasted. If we break contact now, it’s all to be done again.” He didn’t say and we will doom Irene.

  No one spoke.

  Aneas nodded.

  “Why track him, then?” Tessen asked. “We know where he is going.”

  Wart, the Jack, nodded, but then shook his head. “’Cause he might go for N’gara to link up with his master, or go agin’ the folk of the Squash Country.” He raised an eyebrow at Aneas. “I’m an old Jack, mister. No one’s a lord to me. But I’m wi’ ye. If there ever was purpose to bein’ allies, it’s now. To keep this critter out of the Adnacrags, an’ off all the people.”

  The bogglin, Krek, nodded. It made a noise with one leg and a wing case.

  Cigne smiled. “I don’t even know where we are,” she said. “In the old Smokes west of my home, I know the leaves and the names of the squirrels. Here?” She brushed a scrubby mountain pine. “It’s cold at night in August.” She made a face. “But I’ll follow you, Ser Aneas.”

  Lantorn shrugged. “Only seven o’ we,” he said. “But I tol’ Ser Gabriel I’d watch the princess, and I reckon to have her back. I should na’ ha’ lost her.”

  Cynthia smiled and Lewen, the irk, laughed.

  “I don’t want to go back,” Aneas said.

  Looks-at-Clouds looked at Mingan.

  The young war leader shrugged. “Tall Pine told me to help you,” he said. “I will stay to the end. He gave a hard smile. “I don’t want to be the one who says: don’t go.”

  Looks-at-Clouds shrugged. “None of us do,” s/he said. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The next day they moved fast—so fast that they all regretted their brave words, and spent the day in head-down, trudging, footsore misery. It rained in the afternoon, and in early evening they came to a wide road that ran along the base of a broad valley. Lantorn and Wart and Aneas all knew it.

  They decided to go all night without any discussion. The road aided rapid movement, and apparently it was a spur of the north road from Ticondonaga, and only went their way a dozen miles. The seven put their heads down and walked, and the stones in the ruts cut their moccasined feet, and the only sign each of them could see was the pale shape of a pack in front in the near-perfect darkness lit only by stars. Lewen and Tessen took turns leading.

  After midnight, when the moon began to set, Looks-at-Clouds stopped, suddenly, and hissed. The chain of rangers broke and became a huddle in the trees just north of the road.

  “Ha!” Looks-at-Clouds said. “I have her!”

  Aneas made a small working, and lit a small candle that Lantorn put in a wrapper of birch bark, and most of the rangers lit their pipes while Tessen walked off to guard them.

  “Have her how?” Aneas asked.

  “She is walking in the cloud country,” Looks-at-Clouds said. “Hah!”

  The bacsa’s eyes opened. “I must go back,” s/he said, and this time s/he went far and deep, so the shaman’s face by candlelight was blank and still as that of a corpse.

  “Why did she call you and not me?” Aneas asked.

  No one answered.

  Time passed, and more time, and t
hen:

  “Now. We must move. Aneas!” The changeling’s eyes were wide open. S/he took Aneas’s hand and suddenly he was as blank as s/he.

  And then both of them rolled to their feet.

  “Too far to reach her tonight,” Aneas said.

  “We must trust to Tar and her daughters,” Looks-at-Clouds said.

  Aneas paused. “Wait,” he said. He cast, and then cast again.

  “Ah!” Looks-at-Clouds muttered, clearly impressed.

  He piled on his third working and cast.

  “Tell me when to release it,” he said. “How I wish I could fly.”

  “Noon,” Looks-at-Clouds said. “And better...if she comes toward us, every step is a gain.”

  Aneas nodded, and they were off.

  “You found the princess?” Lantorn said.

  Aneas nodded at Looks-at-Clouds.

  “Ambush?” Lantorn asked. They were jogging.

  Aneas grunted, and they ran on.

  * * *

  The rain struck almost immediately after they started, and it pounded them, a thunderhead as bad as the one the night of the fight in camp when she had been taken.

  But Irene had a beautiful sense of direction, which was to say, she could sense where the shaman was as if there was a light burning in the forest. She continued in that direction, occasionally hitting trees and once ploughing into a small swamp ringed with alder that all but imprisoned her and the two women in her wake. On the other side lay two Rukh, huddled miserably in the rain, their huge shapes silhouetted by lightning, and she passed so close to the nearest that she swore she could feel the heat of his body, and then she was gone into the rain.

  And the rain fell like hail, like pellets of metal. It fell like a physical force, obliterating sound, washing her skin. She was cold and wet, but free.

  There was no way to measure time, and they communicated by shouts. At some point she decided they must be free of the camp, and she paused, looking back, and the woman who had spoken to her at the fire bumped into her. Lightning flashed.

  “Irene,” she said.

  “Joan,” panted the other. “Where’s Polly?”

  “Polly?” they both shrieked.

  And then they were moving again. They didn’t wait for Polly, and when, some time later, lightning showed Irene a third woman, she could claim no credit.