A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  The casa came up while the Scholae were still trying to clear the barricade by archery. The emperor looked up above, where he could see the tops of the two ridges now, and a chapel, only half a mile above him.

  The bridge was packed with the not-dead. Because the bridge over the chasm had a high arch, they were mostly safe from arrows.

  “Glad they don’t have bows,” Michael muttered.

  Ser Gabriel went and looked down into the chasm. It was hundreds of feet deep. The rivulet at the bottom was scarcely visible.

  He whistled.

  Harald Derkensun stepped forward. “Allow us,” he said.

  The emperor nodded, then saluted gravely. “Go,” he said.

  * * *

  The third blockade was the most imaginative. The will had prepared an ambush, and an avalanche. But Long Paw came down on it from above, an hour before sunset, with half the green banda. Sauce stormed the abbey at the head of the pass, sword in hand, and the not-dead scarcely resisted. Later, they decided that the will hadn’t had time to focus on them.

  She stood in the bell tower, ten thousand feet above the plain of Mitla, and raised her sword.

  The cheers of the army rang back and forth, an endless echo.

  “Camp,” Gabriel ordered. “Wake me when everyone’s fed. Tonight, the casa and the Armourers’ Guild will mount guard.”

  Harald Derkensun groaned.

  The emperor embraced Long Paw and Sauce. He turned to Daniel Favour.

  “Kneel,” he said. “My sword,” he whispered to Anne Woodstock. She whipped it from the scabbard and put it naked in his hand.

  There, at the top of the highest pass in the world, the emperor knighted Daniel Favour before the whole army. Blanche gave the young man a kiss on each cheek. He blushed.

  “Glad no one was here to defend the pass,” Sauce muttered. “I all but sprouted wings, and Dan Favour gets knighted.”

  Gabriel managed a smile.

  “You said easy-peasy,” Sauce said.

  Behind her, a great cage covered in tarpaulins came up the last of the pass, drawn by sixteen heavy horses, and the occupant let out a loud scream.

  “We’re not to the hard part yet,” Gabriel said. “And I’m wrong all the time. Pray I’m not wrong again.”

  * * *

  Morning, at the top of the world. It was bitter cold, and men and women sharing blankets after three days without sleep and a brutal climb simply snuggled deeper.

  The watch changed. Hundreds of exhausted Albans collapsed into sleep as the white banda came on duty. A long convoy of wagons was already snaking up the pass.

  Father David and two Etruscan priests said Matins in the abbey chapel. Below them, in the pass, the smoke of burning and the stench of roasting meat rose. The rear guard, and Petrarcha and Mortirmir, were disposing of the now-dead.

  A huge pulse of used potentia went out across the world from the top of the pass.

  Gabriel was just going off duty. His pavilion consisted of a space of stone floor six feet long by two feet wide, and Nicodemus had padded it with a straw mat that the steward was sharing, his mouth already open in a snore.

  But he felt the pulse of potentia.

  And had there been anyone awake to see him, they would have seen his face crinkle in what might have been a smile, if it hadn’t been more like a snarl.

  Here we come. Let witchcraft celebrate.

  Even at noon, men were still asleep. But the abbey was supremely defensible and had huge stores of unburnt firewood. A human army could hold the pass until their food ran out.

  The emperor rose only to eat and hear messages. Kronmir looked twenty years older—they all did. Sauce looked like she was fifty. Michael looked as if he still had the cough.

  Gabriel consumed a hard-boiled egg and a sausage and drank a cup of hypocras. While he ate, Mortirmir came in, and Petrarcha. They examined their map, and every message Master Kronmir had. And in the end, they agreed to wait another day. Messenger birds were launched.

  In the evening, most of the soldiers awoke and ate dinner. Two hundred miles west and north, Pavalo Payam held his fortifications until he’d driven off a fourth attack, by which time the sun was rising like a bloody streak in the eastern sky. Then, as he rallied his army, his philosophers set fire to the forests on either side of his position, and he slipped away into the morning and the smoke.

  The will was slow to react. Its focus was elsewhere, and its armies were too late to spring their trap.

  * * *

  The rose-coloured sky heralded the rising sun, and then it burst, a crescent of winged fire, on the mountains. Snow sparkled, close enough that Sauce had collected a little as her half of the green banda traversed the glacier that hung above the monastery at the top of the world.

  But the emperor’s army was already gone. They had marched in the darkness. It was autumn in the high passes...winter was close. But the sun rose, triumphant still.

  The emperor came down the Cisna Pass. To say his army was well rested would have been an exaggeration, but the army was moving as swiftly as three thousand men and women could move with horse-drawn baggage.

  A hundred leagues and more to the north and west, another army of men moved as swiftly, as Payam and the sultan’s army raced toward them.

  And messenger Thirty-Four, riding the thermals six thousand feet above the plains of Arles, could see tens of thousands of subjected slaves marching west. Thirty-Four could see men and women, horses and cattle, moving with precision, between the two armies that they dwarfed utterly. The emperor rolled north to Arles, out of the passes and down the single road along the edge of the great glacier. The army of the sultan abandoned its baggage train and raced east.

  Between them, the darkness gathered and pooled, and prepared its malice.

  Two hundred leagues to the south, the army of the Patriarch of Rhum marched slowly northward.

  Toward the Darkness.

  * * *

  Zac swept wide, hoping for deer or cattle or sheep, and found nothing. In the middle of the white banda, No Head, unstrung bow on his back, cursed and gnawed on some dry bread.

  Uruk of Mogon was looking around himself. “No meat?” he said.

  No Head nodded. “No meat,” he said.

  Uruk’s horny, ovoid head wobbled on his carapace. “Hungry,” he said.

  “You and me both, brother,” No Head said.

  “Too many rocks,” Uruk said.

  No Head nodded. “Have some bread.”

  * * *

  Gabriel gathered all his captains again at sunset. Nicodemus and his people, all combatants now, prepared the round table, and this time, they sat in a circle on stones and drank warm water. There was no wine, not even for the emperor. There was bread, and not much more, in the hundred wagons that now formed the very heart of the army.

  “It is possible that I won’t survive the next few hours,” he said. He held up a hand. “I’m not going to explain. If I fall, you have sealed orders. But if I do what I have set out to do, you must march as hard as you can. You must march until you drop. Until you reach Arles. It’s about a hundred miles that way.”

  “What of the not-dead?” Giselle asked.

  Mortirmir nodded. “There won’t be any,” he said.

  “Or that’s what we hope,” Gabriel said. “We’ve done all we could to make our enemy put all his eggs in one basket. Now they are all together, as best as we can tell, about fifty miles from here.”

  “And you?” asked the duchess.

  “Mortirmir and I are going to challenge the Necromancer for the possession of his slaves,” the emperor said.

  “Single combat?” Tom Lachlan asked.

  “Nothing so chivalrous,” Gabriel said. “Murder in the dark, if I can manage it.”

  “An’ you ain’t takin’ us?” Bad Tom shot back.

  Gabriel shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not unless you can get on Ariosto. You must have noticed I haven’t had him in the sky since we were at sea.”
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br />   The officers nodded.

  “We have fifty leagues of mountains and valleys between us and the plains of Arles,” Gabriel said quietly. “Pavalo is a day’s march to the south, and the Necromancer knows he’s been fooled. And like any general, instead of pouncing on the Ifriquy’ans, he’s circling his wagons. He lost contact, and now he just has to hold on. It’s twenty-five days until the conjunction of the stars and the opening of the gate, or so our astrologers tell us.”

  “We only have food for five more days, and that’s not going to be a life o’ pleasure,” Sauce put in.

  “Three days, when we feed the Ifriquy’ans,” the emperor noted.

  They groaned.

  “And at our backs, the Legate of Rhum has an army and a fleet.” Gabriel looked at Kronmir, who looked pained.

  “It appears that in toppling the Patriarch we have unleashed a more dangerous man,” he said.

  Tom leaned back far enough that it appeared his stool might collapse. “So we go back an’ fight ’em?” he said.

  Gabriel nodded. “Yes. Almost certainly. But Arles first. Only Arles matters.”

  Duchess Giselle slapped an angry hand on the table. “Berona and Venike will not feel that way when the full weight of the Patriarch and all our foes in the north combine against us, my lord.”

  The emperor rose to his feet, forcing his whole council to rise with him. “Madame, if I am here in the morning to discuss strategy, we will probably decide to send the Venikans and the Beronese back over the Cisna Pass. If Pavalo can be induced to join you, we will have more than enough soldiers to cow the legate.” He gave her a smile that Sauce knew well, and Gavin. “If I don’t return,” he said with a malicious grin, “you’ll have to rely on Michael.” He nodded.

  “I’m his apprentice,” Michael said.

  No one laughed.

  One by one they came and wished him luck, and then he knighted Toby.

  “Ser Tobias is a mouthful,” he said, as he delivered the buffet to Toby’s shoulder.

  Toby burst into tears.

  And last, he went to say good-bye to Blanche. But she forestalled him, and she came out to the round table with Kaitlin and Lady Tancreda. They were all dressed finely, and wore smiles on their faces. Tancreda raised her veil and kissed Morgon, and Blanche bit the emperor’s lower lip. Gently.

  “Come back to me,” she said. “And no nonsense.” She smiled, and he admired her, because she betrayed nothing.

  He’d always admired her courage.

  And then he was in his flying cote and his gauntlets, and Toby settled his helmet on his head even as Anne belted the sword around his waist. Blanche gave him his ghiaverina when he was mounted, and Morgon scrambled up behind.

  Now we do this hard thing? Ariosto asked.

  Now we do, the Red Knight said.

  * * *

  It took them almost an hour to climb into the very last light, the dying light of the end of day. As fast as the sun lipped over the far western horizon, so they rose to catch a little more of the pink and orange light. And still the great peaks of the mountains to the west and south towered over them, and even at this great height, the mountains to the north were higher.

  I can’t sense a thing toward Arles. The ridges are too high, Morgon said in the aethereal.

  It was worth a try, Gabriel shot back, and then they turned slowly, and Ariosto took them north and west into the high valleys of the mountains of eastern Arles. The moon rose as they flew, first, disconcertingly, appearing below them, as if they were indeed in the aethereal beyond the world of air. An hour’s flying, with no sound but the rush of air, no feeling but the steady thump of the great wings. The darkness was so intense that Gabriel had to look up into the star-filled void to get a sense of himself; to look down at the valley below was to become disoriented.

  Gabriel concentrated on flying. Now that they were past the first valley and into the Arles mountains, he let Ariosto fly lower, where the air was “thicker” and the great avian had more power and more breath as well. And, at least as far as he and Morgon understood, the lower they were, the harder they would be to detect.

  Ariosto rode a warm current of air up out of the last of three great valleys, rising toward the notch of light that marked a high pass. It was too high for the army. Gabriel tried to breathe deeply, but his chest was tight and his arms felt without strength.

  He was deeply afraid.

  Look, Morgon said.

  Gabriel rested his hands on his thighs so that Ariosto would not receive the wrong message and went into his palace. From there, he ducked into Morgon’s labyrinth.

  Look! the magister said.

  He had rigged a dark mirror of his own thought, and on it, a spot glowed a deep, matte black.

  There he is. They are. Whatever abomination they have become. Morgon nodded.

  And we are now visible to them? Gabriel asked.

  No, Morgon shot back, pettishly. I explained this. Unless we work ops, we cannot be seen.

  I will stay low anyway, Gabriel said.

  I will watch them, Morgon said. They are...fascinating.

  In the real, Gabriel landed just south of the top of the pass, with a mass of hundreds of paces of solid rock and ice between him and his adversaries. He wished he could build a fire, and he was astounded to find that his canteen had frozen.

  Moving, Morgon said.

  Gabriel’s heart gave a great beat, as if it were going to leap from his chest. He went back to Morgon’s palace and stood on the black-and-white chessboard as the magister moved his pieces.

  I cannot tell if they are two or three, Morgon said. But one is moving this way.

  Gabriel felt reality flicker around him. His fear rose to choke him, and he, veteran of fear, master of fear, almost lost his concentration. “How can they see us?” he asked.

  Morgon shrugged. “Perhaps they can and perhaps not. Perhaps even the tiny trickle of ops we use to maintain our palaces is visible to a magister as puissant as the Necromancer.”

  Gabriel wondered if this was how Sauce felt when he made a pronouncement and was wrong. He took a deep breath and counted to three. He could only manage three.

  “Can you use mathmetika to estimate its speed?” he asked.

  Morgon fiddled a moment. “An excellent thought. Yes. It moves...” He paused. “Very fast. A hundred fifty leagues in an hour, perhaps.”

  “Nothing is that fast,” Gabriel said.

  “Dragons are that fast,” Morgon said.

  The word dragon hung between them in the aethereal, as if, in this case, naming surely called.

  “The missing dragon,” Gabriel said. “The sorcerer, the Odine, and a dragon. A man, a dragon, and a nest of Wyrms. The black carrion thing that followed Kronmir and the duchess. Crap. And we thought we were the first to make alliance with the Wild.” He frowned. Master Smythe. I have found the missing traitor, Rhun.”

  Morgon stroked his beard, which was a better, more elegant beard in the aethereal than his somewhat thin beard was in the real. “No point in running,” he said.

  “Damn,” Gabriel said. “Although Bad Tom wants to kill a dragon.”

  But even as he thought it, his nerves died away. He surfaced into the real and put a hand on Ariosto.

  Ready? he asked. We have to fight.

  The griffon turned and its eyes glittered in the starlight. Fight? it asked with relish. You said this would be hard!

  It will be, Gabriel said.

  * * *

  No talking of any kind. No memory palace, no hermetical detection. Nothing.

  They rose into the jeweled sky and Ariosto took them higher on the slope of the mountain that rose above them, until they were at the snow line, looking east and north. And then the great avian began to fly long, lazy spirals.

  Gabriel felt a new tension rising in him, connected to the ring on his finger and the golden cord of light that tied him to Amicia a continent away. Somewhere far to the west, something was happening.

  He d
id not dare check. He did not dare to send a pulse of power along the golden cord, or to try to find her walking on the wind.

  It was dark, and cold, and even as they turned again, so the moon began to come into his visor, and an icy, wind-driven rain began to fall on them.

  Doubt, the enemy of ambush, began to gnaw at Gabriel. The dragon—if there was a dragon—could be anywhere; above them, behind them...

  So powerful was his own fear that he whirled in his saddle to look behind. There was nothing there but cold air and the rush of endless darkness. Cold rocks and ice awaited him two thousand feet below, and the dull sky spat rain and a little snow on the last scrubby tall pines off Ariosto’s left wingtip.

  Arrgggh!

  AAAAARRGGGHHH!

  The great scream roared through the aethereal like the first gust of a hurricane, and the second was louder and longer; not agony but rage and defiance.

  Gabriel found the source. Instantly. And left before he could get entangled.

  Whatever had just bellowed in the aethereal was less than ten miles away, and lower, somewhere to the west. Gabriel reached back and pinched Morgon’s unarmoured thigh, and then pointed.

  Morgon tapped his helmet, perhaps a little too hard.

  Using his legs and hands, Gabriel turned Ariosto west and the great wings beat harder. Then, for the first time, Gabriel was fully in command of his mount, and he turned them a little north of west and passed between two of the great towering spires, keeping the westernmost between himself and the adversary.

  ArrggghhhhhhhhhAAGRRGGGFFFGGG!

  Gabriel felt the blast reverberate off the hillsides. Had it been sound, snow might have fallen, but in the aethereal, only hermetical things were rattled. Along with his nerves.

  It was the scream Ash had given when he turned to face Master Smythe. And Gabriel knew what it was for.

  It was not defiance or not solely so. It was a scream meant to echo; it was an attempt to locate the foe in the sky. Or so Gabriel guessed, and with that guess came a second.