A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  Their foe expected to face another dragon.

  Of course.

  He banked Ariosto a little to the north, and then more, following a very high valley, a ripple in the up-thrust mantle of the earth. Mountains flew by each wingtip in a rush of air and a roaring silence.

  AARARAGGKKUS—

  There it was. Black as coal, ragged, and rising beneath them, its scream was directed west into the mountains.

  Ariosto opened his beak and gave a shriek of joy and terror in the real.

  Now Gabriel spat in a timeless moment as the griffon’s talons reached for its monstrous adversary.

  He tugged at the reins and they rolled north toward the thing’s endless tail, a whipping, rotting rope of black. Even in the high cold air, Gabriel could smell the decay.

  A line of fire struck the black dragon high on its back and began to walk forward along its spine and Gabriel turned Ariosto again, now coming across the aerial leviathan from above and behind.

  His griffon had its own ideas. Like an angry cat, Ariosto’s talons went in every direction as the griffon slashed down into a black wing from above and behind, and despite the disparity in size, the griffon shredded yards of rotten, scaled flesh as it plunged through the dragon’s wing. Morgon’s line of fire burned steadily away.

  The dragon seemed to fold in half.

  The long, sinuous neck reached, and the jaws opened—a tortured stench flowed over the Red Knight as he banked, but Ariosto ignored his piloting and folded his wings and dropped even as the air exploded in a black-lit rage of malevolence that left a dark stain in the aethereal.

  They tumbled away, trading altitude for speed.

  Gabriel looked up into the wind and threw a single white bolt of lightning from his prepared store and then, entering his palace fully and trusting Ariosto, he summoned ops and cast from scratch, a long process.

  “Net, Pru. A big net of ops.” He waved at the symbols and she chanted with him, reinforcing his will. He emerged to cast and then pulled the golden shield over all of them even as three black bolts struck back and the titanic dragon dove straight at them, following them down.

  Down was an impossible depth beneath them, and there was no moon to tell Gabriel how close death was.

  You know what you are doing? Gabriel asked his mount.

  Do you? Ariosto spat back.

  All the weight of the world began to settle on Gabriel’s shoulders and hips.

  He was completely disoriented; his sense of up and down was lost, and only a chance sighting of starlight on an ancient glacier to his right told him that he was upside down and his gallant mount was in a loop, racing destruction and the ground. Behind him the dragon blew through the aethereal net and there was a concussion in the real as the whole thing gave way all together, and every peak sprouted an avalanche, as if the mountains themselves were weeping.

  Ariosto leveled his dive and rolled south around a spire of rock, and the dragon, mere seconds behind, carried straight on, snapping the spire off cleanly fifty feet above its base and sending tons of rock plunging down the hillside.

  A huge talon reached out, a predator reaching for prey.

  Morgon loosed from his whole right hand five separate emanations all worked simultaneously. The talon was incinerated and the monster roared. Stone split.

  Ariosto turned again, but the wall of the ridge was rising up before them and there was almost no more room to turn.

  “Too heavy!” the gallant griffon sighed. He turned again...

  ...and Morgon Mortirmir rolled over the back of the saddle...and was gone.

  “No!” Gabriel screamed, but Ariosto had already turned; lighter by one whole rider, the griffon rode the dragon’s own wave front, surfing across the pulse of displaced air along a wing, mere inches from destruction, and Gabriel, desperate, hacked with the ghiaverina and had the satisfaction of watching the blade strike effortlessly through the great bone that supported the rotten structure of the wing.

  The head turned.

  The great black eye...

  ...was empty...

  No malevolence burned in it. No enmity raged.

  No one was there, in that head.

  The black dragon’s left wing began to fold where he’d cut it. It seemed to happen in a dreamlike stillness; the rush of air drowned all sound, the cold seemed to blanket his perception, and he watched as the dragon lost whatever it was that allowed it to fly.

  And still the head came around, its focus total. In the same dream-speed, even as the long-dead carcass began to plunge toward the glacier two thousand feet below, and dimly lit by the emergent moon, the black jaws cracked open, and the head tracked them.

  Gabriel stood in Ariosto’s stirrups and threw the ghiaverina straight down into the opening mouth.

  Almost directly under him, the dragon’s jaws opened wide—

  White light exploded all around the dragon’s head and body. A red fire burned at its heart and lit the foul stuff of the dragon’s breath deep inside it, or perhaps some other deadly gases long penned in the pools of bile and corruption.

  Gabriel, granted a fraction of a second, threw all three of his precious shields between himself and the dragon like a farmer sowing grain into the wind...

  But whatever last strike the mastering will deep inside the dead dragon planned, the flesh was too weak. The red and white fires burned; the ghiaverina fell like a meteor through the corpse and burst in a halo of fire from the underside as, flaming, the not-dead dragon fell, burning, a slow meteor in a black sky. The stars towered above its fall, and its fall was very slow. The undamaged wing still beat, so that the not-dead beast fell like a fluttering leaf, shedding fire. Twice, gouts of black ops emerged from the corpse. The first detonated on Prudentia’s glowing shield and subsumed it. The second ate through Gabriel’s inner shield like a new fire consumes dry wood.

  Aspis! he called, and drew potentia like a drowning man drawing breath. He threw in his reserve, and all of Pru’s and then, unthinking, he drew power through the golden thread that bound him.

  And power came. There was a blinding flash of it and for a moment, in the real, the whole world seemed to blink.

  * * *

  Four thousand miles to the west, in the great Abbey of Lissen Carak, Amicia was singing her praises to God with her sisters. In their praises was all their trust, and love; a hymn of protection and keeping and holding. Because in the air above the ancient fortress hovered another dragon, and he was trying their defences from the air.

  Ash had come.

  And Ash was old, even as dragons reckoned age. The workings of Thorn had been nothing to Ash’s workings, and every flick of his talons sent another volley; fire, ice, raw ops, subtle counterenchantment, sullen fury and straight power.

  Amicia was kneeling with her sisters: seventy women, some ordinary and some extraordinary, who together made a choir. And their polyphony rose to heaven, and their workings buttressed, reinforced, enabled, repaired. They unleashed no torrents of fire; they worked no glowing crystals of ops-redolent ice.

  They endured.

  And in the midst of their choir, Amicia stood. Her brown-gold hair and her white veil alone stood out among her sisters, and she began to glow gold—pure gold, as if she were herself cast of the stuff, except that the glow suggested that she might be molten gold.

  Miriam stood. “Sing!” she commanded as the mighty Agnus Dei faltered.

  Amicia spread her arms. The golden ops flowed through her so fast that gouts of it fell away from her to shower the other sisters, and those who knew how gathered it and flung it into the net of workings that protected the fortress.

  Amicia began to rise.

  For a moment, she turned and looked down at Miriam.

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  And then she rose to the chapel’s roof-trees. Just short of the roof itself, she spread her arms as wide as they would go, and said one word aloud.

  Fiat.

  And then she was gone, leaving only
a lingering perfume; the thought of roses, the odour of veneration and carefully tended altars, and the scent of love.

  * * *

  Every magister in the world felt it. Every irk, every man and woman, every shaman, every wight and warden and the fish in the sea, and each and every dragon felt it.

  Morgon Mortirmir lost control of his descent and crashed into a tree.

  Harmodius, in midworking in an orphanage in Harndon, watched the prepared ops in his hand go out like a candle in the wind, unaccountably drawn elsewhere with the scent of pine and rose.

  Lord Kerak, an island of fire in a sea of bogglins, received all unlooked-for a gout of worked ops tinged in gold and roses, and his body seemed to emit light as once more he rained fire on his foes, no longer beyond hope.

  Tamsin, shielding N’gara with all her might, felt power like the march of a relieving army flood her ancient bones.

  Gavin Muriens watched as helpless fury gave way to joy; as his beaten army, poised on the edge of massacre, seemed to take a breath; as every one of his potent magisters gathered new strength that seemed, in the same breath, to rob their adversaries of theirs.

  It was not victory. But in one breath the balance shifted, and massacre became mere defeat. Ash’s multitude of westerners paused, as if struck with awe.

  And Ash hesitated, turned in the air over Lissen Carak, and fled. There was no laughter in him, and he was, for once, afraid.

  * * *

  Ruin’s last emanation burned; the black fire raged through Gabriel’s shield, and then...

  For a moment, there was...

  nothing...

  But a sense of roses in spring, and the distant scent of pines, and perhaps a trace of orange, as if it were a late-spring night in the courtyard of the great fortress.

  good-bye she said.

  And the black dragon struck the icy glacier to break into a thousand worm-infested shreds on the ice far below.

  Weeping, for he knew what must have happened, Gabriel nonetheless reached out and spoke one word in Archaic, and the ghiavarina rose out of the depths to his hand as Ariosto turned to avoid joining the dragon in death, or a second death, in the clutches of a glacier as old as the world.

  Together they turned, and Gabriel’s tears flowed, and froze against his face.

  good-bye

  * * *

  Morgon Mortirmir was high in a mighty tall pine, and only his pride was injured; pride, and a series of lacerations on both arms that would in other circumstances have warranted a different response than Gabriel’s laughter.

  “It’s not funny. I had everything correct except...”

  Ariosto fetched the magister with one practiced claw.

  “By God,” Gabriel said, and threw his arms around the magister.

  Morgon Mortirmir burst into tears. “We...” He paused. “Where did all the power come from?”

  “Amicia. She’s gone. And we are not done,” Gabriel managed.

  “We slew a dragon,” Mortirmir said. “Oh, my lord. I miscalculated grievously there. I did not expect that.”

  “You and me both.” Gabriel shook his head. “And now the Odine know we’re coming.”

  Ariosto required an hour’s rest. Morgon spent the time muttering anxiously and watching the sky, but there was nothing to be done. The great griffon was tired—so tired he wanted to sleep, and the mountainside was so cold...

  “Light a fire,” Gabriel said. He had been watching the black streaks that were the ruin of the dead dragon on the next ridge. “The Odine know we put the dragon down. They must.”

  “What will they do?” Morgon said. “What would you do?” he asked, curious. “For a moment, there was no world,” he said. “Oh, what I have just learned.”

  “No world...” Gabriel paused.

  Gabriel had known for a long time that Amicia was...leaving. But he found the truth very difficult to endure, and worse, he saw that she had pushed him away to make this moment easier. He thought of Blanche. He thought of what he must, in the end, do to Blanche. And then, with an effort of will his mother would have approved of, he pushed it all away. He concentrated on the night, the icy air, the tired griffon, and the Odine.

  “Negotiate?” Gabriel said. “If I were them and someone killed my dragon, I’d negotiate.” He managed a weak smile. Using ops...he was full of it, now...he got a fire lit and managed some warm water for the three of them, which was fine provender compared to a cold night at high altitude. “I’m perfectly serious, Morgon. If I were on the receiving end of the destruction of my dead necromantic pet dragon, I’d negotiate.” He looked at the young magister. “And if they live in the aethereal, as Al Rashidi said...”

  Mortirmir looked out over the dark woods. No light showed. There was not a single person to light a candle in fifty miles of plains. It was very dark.

  “This is what the world must have been like, before man came,” Mortirmir said.

  Gabriel nodded and shivered.

  “I don’t think that they can negotiate,” Mortirmir said. “They can only conquer or die.”

  “What a terrible flaw,” Gabriel said.

  The night was passing, and all three of them experienced cramps, and the sweat inside Gabriel’s furs was all but frozen. The fire couldn’t seem to reach his bones. He tried to wall off his sorrow. He wanted Blanche.

  “Dark humour to die here of exposure after that fight,” he said.

  Morgon nodded. “If Ariosto will bear us, let us get this thing done.” He smiled. “It is a mad thing, my lord, and yet I understand it. In one bolt, you free us from having to wade in the blood of all these poor souls.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Yes,” he said. “Except the dragon was rotten, Morgon. What does that tell you?”

  “That the Odine can keep them after death,” Mortirmir said.

  “The taken, not-dead villagers may already have starved to death,” Gabriel said bitterly.

  Morgon paused, looking out over the sparkling stars that seemed close enough to touch, and the dark woods that seemed like a carpet of velvet under their feet. “We will know in an hour,” he said.

  “Ariosto is tired,” Gabriel said.

  “You said we only have one chance at this. It’s not really true. We could go back to camp. But if the Odine think like strategists; if they know what happened here...”

  “They must,” Gabriel said.

  “Don’t interrupt. I’m thinking...” Mortirmir shot back.

  Gabriel laughed.

  Even in the starlit darkness, the magister’s look of annoyance was palpable, followed instantly by a look of sheepish embarrassment. “I’m doing it again, am I?”

  Gabriel was just getting feeling in his fingers. “Well, one of us is the emperor. And it is not you, my friend.”

  Mortirmir laughed. “That’s true.”

  “But I agree, nonetheless. They’d disperse. This must all have happened before; the working Al Rashidi built; it’s the twin of the one I saw Master Smythe employ. If the Odine remember, then they have responses to it, even if...” He shook his head. “We have to try. There’s fifty thousand people out there, and I will not tell my lady I failed to save them because I was too cold.”

  Mortirmir smiled. “You can be funny, too,” he said. “But come, let us be heroes.”

  “Ariosto will be the hero of this piece. Comrade, can you bear us? Gabriel asked.

  Can you build a fire on my saddle? But yes. I am so filled with...the thing? The thing when you crush your enemy and you are the one with the most power? I will fly to Albinkirk if you like. Only...

  Speak to me. Only what? Gabriel asked.

  Only...I am very tired and very hungry.

  Thirty miles. Gabriel tried to show the griffon an image of the distance.

  Whatever that is?

  From the Tower of Albinkirk to the nice farm with all the maidens. And back, Gabriel said.

  Perhaps, the griffon said. For a monster of almost unlimited puissance, he sounded very unsure.

>   Gabriel didn’t like the sound of that. If we were in Albinkirk, could you fly to Mistress Helewise’s farm? And land there?

  Yes.

  Gabriel looked at Morgon. “Change of plans,” he said.

  * * *

  When Ariosto leapt into the air, night was passing, and indeed, the sky was just slightly brighter. It was the false dawn; the time when old people die, when hopes fail, and when ambuscades lose their nerve, when men call out and wives comfort them.

  They flew low, because even a modicum of surprise was better than none, and they did not communicate. Mortirmir cast a complex working on one of his rings to indicate direction. The rest was left to guesswork.

  It was very cold. Even in furs, even inside the hermetical protection of his helmet, Gabriel was not sure he had ever been as cold, and as the sky grew pale in the east, their proximity to the ground began to wear on him. Ariosto rode low, skimming across fields like a skate skimming the ocean bottom, and rising only to clear trees by the barest margin.

  By their calculations, the trip from the Range of Arles should have taken no more than a third of an hour.

  It seemed to take forever. And they flew, alone, over abandoned fields and along valley floors, and the wind bit into them, and Gabriel knew fear, terror, despair.

  But he had known them since youth.

  And far out to the east, the sun was rising over the deserts of Hatti. The sky was becoming pale.

  Dawn was coming amid the Darkness.

  “Day will come again,” he whispered to the rushing air.

  At some point he began to recognize that he was seeing people. There were fields of them, tens of thousands, standing in groups, or alone, or packed in huddles, most walking. A few lay on the ground, and not just people, but deer, and bears, and mules and cattle and sheep, as far as he could see. They were a blur under Ariosto’s wings, close enough that he might have thrown his dagger and hit them.

  Most were moving.

  Not a head turned at the rush of Ariosto’s wings.

  Gabriel turned to look at Morgon, who was leaning over, clearly very cold, hunched in a near ball, his eyes on his ring.

  He tapped Gabriel. And held up his hand. Even as Gabriel watched, a finger went down.