by Ari Marmell
“Snap—?!”
“Yes, we’ve lost a lot! Yes, it’s a new experience for you, and Morrow knows how it must feel! It’s torn me ragged, and I’m not in command.”
“At the moment,” Benwynne interjected, bitter as rotting horseradish.
“And if you feel the need to punish yourself, or resign, or jump off a bridge, or whatever, I can’t stop you. But you do it after we get home! Godsdamn it, Ben, the squad needs you! Best way to convince them this is hopeless is to let them see that you think it’s hopeless! So keep it together!”
What sounded, initially, like the boat running up on the rocks was, she realized, the popping of her clenched knuckles. “I shouldn’t need you to tell me that,” she admitted.
“You’ve never suffered like this,” he conceded. “Of course it’s going to weigh on you. But you can’t afford to bend under it, Ben. We can’t afford for you to bend.”
She leaned out over the water once more. “I’ll keep it in mind, Master Sergeant.” Then, as though it tasted off and she was spitting it out before it sickened her, “Thank you.”
“Ben,” he said hesitantly, “about Bainsmarket . . . Uh, right.” Wendell actually retreated a step beneath her glare. “Not the best time. Later will do.” He didn’t quite run back to the hatch, but it neither did he quite not run.
Benwynne returned to examining the distant conflagration—shots and detonations from the siege of Riversmet, almost as violent as those within her own soul—and waited intently for Gaust’s signal.
***
“Bloody godsdamn snow!” Atherton cursed. Or at least, that’s what Atherton meant to curse. He wasn’t sure how much of it was intelligible, given how violently his teeth chattered. “We’re royally buggered here, aren’t we?”
“I told you, relax!” The vehemence in Dignity’s voice was quite strong enough to make relaxing pretty much impossible. “We’ll pick the trail back up. We know where they’re going.”
“So you said an hour ago.”
For a day and a half, the two of them—along with Ledeson and a couple more of Bracewell’s soldiers—had tracked Vorona and her escorts through the blanket of powder covering Leryn’s soil. They slept only a few hours at a stretch, lest the enemy get too far ahead. They struggled to maintain the proper distance, neither falling back nor drawing close enough to attract attention. They remained constantly alert for ambush or any attempt to double back.
It was enough to put even the iron-nerved spy on edge. So when flurries thickened into curtains, and gusts into the gale of a genuine blizzard; when the weather leeched not only heat but color from their skin even through jackets and coats; when the surface of white before them filled itself in, obliterating the footprints . . . tempers had frayed down to their last dangling threads.
“I told you we should have stuck closer to them!” Atherton reminded her, not even remotely for the first time.
“And I told you to shut up already! Seems we’re both bound for disappointment.”
Morrow alone knew how things might have deteriorated after that, had Ledeson not appeared abruptly before them, parting the snowy curtain like an actor ready for his final bow. “Storm’s clearing up ahead,” he reported.
“There!” Dignity crowed, her tone and her sneer as unprofessional as Atherton had ever seen them. “See?”
“Any sign of the enemy?” The gunmage asked.
“No, sir. Not a trace.”
“There,” he said to the spy. “See?” Then, before she could explode, “Now what do we do?”
“Now we go find them.”
“Just like that, then?”
“Just like that.”
As Dignity had said, they knew where Vorona was headed. Once they’d cleared the fringes of the storm and passed into an ever-lightening morass of haze, a few minutes of scouting were sufficient to recover the trail. The tracks appeared at the edges of the storm, as though the Khadorans had fallen along with the snow itself, several dozen yards to the north.
And led them straight to the ashen remains of a tiny hamlet, some few hundred yards beyond that.
It wasn’t the first they’d come across; probably wouldn’t be the last. Like the warjacks they resembled, the Man-O-War suits couldn’t function long without coal. And for the Khadorans, here in the open lands between Leryn and Riversmet, there was really only one way to acquire it.
Atherton had given up trying to count the dead after the second such raid.
“You were right,” he admitted, trying both to be graceful and to distract them all from the newest scene of carnage. “Good show.”
Except Dignity wasn’t even looking at the tiny ravaged village. So why the hell did her forehead crease, her lips turn downward?
“Something wrong?” he asked.
Her response was a low mutter, barely heard.
“What was that?”
“The tracks are wrong.” She knelt, leaving divots in the quilt of white, for a closer examination.
Atherton examined them, then Dignity; back to the tracks, and back to his companion once more. “I don’t follow.”
“I can’t put my finger on it,” she admitted, rising and brushing slush and powder from her knees. “But something’s off. We need to hurry.”
So they did, passing through and amongst sporadic trees—far too widespread to constitute a forest, but rather occasional features of an otherwise barren winter vista—until Dignity stiffened, fists and jaws clenching tight enough to crush granite.
“They’ve split up,” she hissed in response to Atherton’s questioning glance.
“What?!”
“The soldiers’ tracks are shallower than the Man-O-Wars’.”
“Of course they are! You know how heavy those—?”
“I mean more than they should be, you blithering idiot! They’re older, had more time to fill in!
“Plus, they’re farther apart—moving at a faster pace. They’ve gone ahead, left the Man-O-War contingent to follow.”
“So what the hell do we do?”
“Send the signal.”
“The Reds might hear—”
“Just do it!”
Atherton grunted, drew, and fired. A flat crack sounded over the landscape, refusing to echo in the emptiness. The shot flew high, far higher than it had any right, and soared northward in a gentle arc.
“Now get a move on,” Dignity ordered, breaking into a run, “and hope to all the gods that we can catch them before they reach Riversmet.”
***
“Suggestions?”
Dignity scowled, shivering. “Working on it.”
The Cygnarans lay in a snowdrift, staring over the lip at the Man-O-War quartet. Though they were scarcely more than reddish shapes in the mist, still they projected a sense of menace, of weight; somehow more real than the fuzzy world around them.
They progressed at a leisurely pace, even as compared to their normal lumbering. Even without being able to see their heads move within the helms, or the helms rotate atop the armored trunks, neither Atherton nor Dignity could doubt that they scanned in all directions, serving as rear guard for their comrades who had gone on ahead.
“We can’t attack,” Ledeson chimed in from behind, as if they’d even have considered such a thing. “They’d slaughter us.”
“Right,” Atherton said with a grim smile. “They outnumber us four to five.”
“Cute,” Dignity said, “but not helpful.”
“Look,” the gunmage continued, “the idea of leaving an enemy at my back makes me painfully clench all sorts of things, but all we really have to do is get past them, right? They’re slow enough that we can keep ahead of them, at least long enough to do whatever needs doing with Vorona and the Winter Guard.”
“Right, but if we try circling around, we may lose—”
“Just be ready to move,” he repeated.
“What?”
“Quietly.”
“What?!”
Atherton drew both pep
perbox pistols, and had to swallow a braying guffaw as Dignity’s eyes bulged until they threatened to pop like soap bubbles. “Are you insane?” she demanded. “You’ll draw them right to—”
The tail end of her protest suffocated and died, buried beneath twin blasts. Her hands twitched toward her waist, seemingly of their own accord, and Atherton wondered briefly whether her first shot would be trained on the enemy, or on a target substantially closer.
Perhaps it was fortunate for him, then, that she never had cause to make that choice. The armored soldiers started at the sound of the gunshots, halting and peering about for an enemy they couldn’t see. As Atherton had hoped, the flat sound of the open plain, combined with the muffling weight of their massive steel helmets, made it impossible to determine with any certainty from where the shots had come.
An instant later, the bullets—tiny warhorses, ridden and steered by the gunmage’s sorceries—slammed into one of the red-armored warriors from the opposite direction.
All four reacted as swiftly as their metal suits would allow, turning their backs on Atherton’s actual position. Two immediately advanced, axes held high, while the other pair lobbed grenades from massive launchers, utterly obliterating an inoffensive pine.
“Go!” he hissed.
Ledeson had already vanished. The other soldiers and Dignity followed with a bit less skill—although, in the spy’s case, only a tiny bit less—and then Atherton brought up the rear, watching for any sign that the enemy had seen through his trick.
He himself turned out to be the least stealthy of the lot, and still they’d crossed beyond the Man-O-War squad and out of sight while the enemy hunted desperately for a nonexistent target.
“That wasn’t bad,” Dignity admitted, once they’d stopped for breath around the base of another lonely tree, a half mile on.
“I try,” Atherton said, quickly reloading the empty barrels. “They’re eventually going to find our tracks, though, unless that storm meanders this way. And if they’re carrying any more of those damn flares, they can signal that someone’s gotten past them. We need to catch Vorona up before then.”
“There’s another reason we need to hurry, sir,” Ledeson added.
He couldn’t have timed his pronouncement better. In perfect punctuation, a blast of artillery sounded from far to the west, nowhere near—but near enough.
They—and Vorona—were finally approaching the siege of Riversmet.
***
The thunder roared, sharp, constant, the fury of weapons rather than weather. The unseen sky grew bright, reflecting the all-consuming glory of lightning and fire. Almost too viscous to breathe, the air was smoke, ozone, spent powder . . .
Blood. Enough blood, he was sure, to melt away the winter snows and fertilize an early spring.
Initially, Atherton could see none of it, and that was somehow worse. Every eddy in the flurries was an onrushing Khadoran soldier; every shadow housed a towering crimson warjack. And every scream, carried to them by the shifting winds, was the voice of his own soul, crying out in exhausted terror.
And then, as they reached the perfect vantage atop the crown of a modest hill, the fading haze drifted apart in what seemed a conscious, deliberate show of melodrama.
And the gunmage had to change his mind: Seeing was worse.
Thick gray air cast a feverish, dreamlike pall over the entire vista. The pockmarked walls of Riversmet—perhaps nothing special when compared to Leryn’s own, but imposing all the same—seemed unreal, more painted stage prop than genuine city. An array of multi-hued seas ebbed and flowed, beating against those walls or against one another, and Atherton found it difficult to convince himself that these were thousands of men and women in armor and uniforms, blending into abstract blots.
Throughout and between those seas, towering above the tumultuous surface, were giants of cerulean and gold, titans of crimson and steel. The smaller, swifter Cygnaran ’jacks bounded around their larger counterparts, seeking to overcome strength with speed and strategy. From such a distance, they were mere toys, marionettes; Atherton caught himself hunting for strings.
It was fake, all of it, a cheap façade over the face of the world. All of it but the fire. The explosions, the conflagrations that scorched the sky, the smoke that threatened to strangle the sun—those he could never imagine to be unreal.
A dull pain blossomed in Atherton’s side, drawing an unwilling hiss from between his lips. “What the hell?!”
“Pay attention.” Dignity, who had just elbowed him in the ribs, pointed across the expanse of drifts and rolling hills, shorter than the one on which they stood. “We have trouble.”
Roughly a third of the way between the Cygnarans and the outermost fringes of the siege, Vorona and her Winter Guard comrades plunged ahead as fast as the clinging slush allowed.
Beyond, spreading from the battle’s edges like a growing infection, rolled a contingent of Khador’s so-called assault kommandos. That they were splitting off from the main forces, risking discovery by the Cygnaran units scattered around the perimeter, and heading this way . . . They could only have been dispatched to meet up with Vorona and her prize.
“If they link up before we can reach them . . .” Atherton warned. Dignity was already moving ahead, Ledeson and the others on her heels, but the gunmage hesitated. There might just be a quicker way . . .
The Llaelese defenders had plenty of Cygnaran allies within Riversmet itself, but multiple divisions of King Leto’s army had also approached from the south, pinching many of the Khadoran forces between themselves and the bastion. Tactically, it was an overwhelming position—or it would have been, had the Khadorans not outnumbered and outgunned the Cygnarans multiple times over. As things stood now, despite the Cygnarans’ strategic advantage, it was anyone’s guess how this particular battle might turn out—or when Khadoran reinforcements might appear over the horizon.
What it all meant for Atherton personally, however, was that a Cygnaran unit of infantry and long-gunners held position relatively nearby, on the battle’s fringe.
And that the oncoming kommandos were attempting, with all stealth, to circle around that unit in order to reach Vorona. They could have tried to fight their way through, probably even made it, but not without tipping off their enemy that this tiny band of Winter Guard was somehow significant.
Atherton raised a pistol, aimed at the Cygnarans, and fired.
Again the bullet flew unnaturally far, struck with unnatural force. It impacted behind the rearmost soldiers, showering them with earth. It did them no real damage, but it absolutely got their attention.
From his vantage point, the gunmage saw the kommandos freeze, holding position just out of the Cygnarans’ sights, crouched behind trees or drifts of snow. Now that the Cygnarans were actively searching that way, however, it could only be a matter of moments before the Khadorans were discovered.
This particular unit would not be coming to Vorona’s aid any time soon.
Dignity gawped back at Atherton in various states of disbelief—though the spy was also clearly struggling to keep from snickering. The corporal, however, kept his attentions firmly fixed on Vorona’s team, who had quickened their pace yet again.
“Something wrong?” Only when Dignity asked did Atherton realize he’d been mumbling aloud.
“Don’t interrupt. Even for me, this takes some calculation.” Still, only seconds later, he stopped to reload the single empty barrel. “All right. Go.”
“‘Go’? Go where?”
The gunmage was abruptly grateful that the chapping on his wind-battered cheeks effectively hid his blush. He only then realized that he hadn’t actually explained the plan he’d just concocted.
“Are you sure?” she asked him, once he’d sheepishly done so. “You’ll be on your own until we can—”
“Go, before they’re too far ahead or some other unit comes out to reinforce them.”
Dignity, Ledeson, and the others faded away, forgotten memories in the haze, and
Atherton began to mutter once more. “One-hundred . . . ninety-nine . . . ninety-eight . . .”
They flew by so quickly. Had the others gotten into position? Should he give them some extra . . . ?
“Seventy-three . . . seventy-two . . .”
No. They’d all heard the plan; he’d do them no favors by altering it now.
“Forty-eight . . . forty-seven . . .”
Vorona and the other Khadorans had now passed the halfway point between his position and the outermost reaches of the siege—and, potentially, escape into Khadoran ranks.
“Fifteen . . . fourteen . . .”
Angles, arcane formulae, and velocities ran through his head. Arcs, graphs, trajectories, all inked themselves over the world, drawn across his vision in lines of cobalt blue. As though planning to shoot the clouds themselves from their flight, he aimed both pistols skyward.
“Three . . . two . . .
“One.”
The gunmage emptied the barrels two by two. Between each pair of shots, he lowered the guns a few degrees; reshaped the magic in the runebullets, shifting the balance of unnatural inertia from distance to impact, so that each would fly shorter, hit harder.
He knew that not only his targets, but also the Reds at the rear of the battle raging around Riversmet, might well hear the shots. But a few additional pistol rounds, from such a distance? What possible harm could those do?
All eight of Atherton’s runebullets, their angles and speeds perfectly meshed, landed amidst the Winter Guard escort only fractions of a second apart; and though the power in each varied, even the weakest was a cannon shell unto itself.
Atherton saw it all, heard it all—the blasts, the screams, the raining dirt—and smiled.
A smile that died as swiftly as Atherton’s own targets had, at the coming of a new series of sounds. Thumps. Clangs. Hisses. The heavy, plodding footsteps of heavy, plodding creatures.
From behind.
His fists full of empty pistol, Atherton slowly turned, the hem of his coat slicing a shallow crescent into the snow.
Four soulless visors in four crimson suits of steam-powered armor glared over a bristling array of axes and chain-blades.