Strength of Swords (First Cohort Book 2)

by M. R. Anthony

  “The Pyromancer in Blades? It is possible,” I said. “And if it is true, we must confront the possibility that Blades will be the scene of more fighting.”

  “Only if the people want to fight,” she said.

  “There was little joy left in the people we saw,” I replied. “They were tired of the Duke. They endured, but they did not do it with relish.”

  I wondered at my words for a short time. Were the people in these lands tired of war in all its forms, or were they just tired of fighting for the Duke? The different towns and cities had varying experiences of his rule, with some few thriving, whilst most languished as their populations declined, their men sent to war and their children stolen. I didn’t know enough of history to decide if these people were a martial race, or if they were simply strong-willed and would fight for their freedom. Whatever happened from now, I sensed that the fighting would reach to their future’s horizon and far beyond.

  They were looking at me, all used to my moments of contemplation. “There is always uncertainty in war,” I said. “Even death can be avoided.” I looked at the Saviour. “If you think that the time to challenge what comes from the north has not yet come, the only way lies to the south, and Blades.”

  “I didn’t say that we lacked the strength to fight what comes from the north yet, Captain Charing. It might be that we never have that strength.” She waited for a moment as that sank in.

  “Let us hope that it loses interest or finds nothing that it desires,” I said.

  “It will not stop, I know this at least. If we cannot defeat it, it will continue across the Empire until everything is destroyed.”

  “This is the problem that the Gloom Bringer said the Emperor faces,” said Ploster.

  “Malleus is worried,” the Saviour said, before reconsidering her words. “Though worried is likely not the correct term. I think he sees the possibility that his time has come.”

  Sinnar swore loudly, voicing the thoughts that had appeared in all of our heads.

  “Malleus must have sent the Hangman north to see what success he would have against the Empire’s enemies,” I said. “He must have thought it worth the risk. I told you before that the Hangman was wasted against mere soldiers – perhaps the Emperor thought his Death Sorcerer would have success where others have presumably failed.”

  “Why did he engage us?” asked the Saviour. “He could have parleyed and moved on. We could have even fought alongside them!” She looked annoyed as she wondered at the potentially needless loss of life.

  “The Emperor evidently doesn’t think the war is lost,” I said. “He’s fought on more than two fronts before and come out of it unscathed.”

  “Indeed,” said Ploster. “It may be that these attackers from the north are the ones who are surprised by what they face, rather than the Emperor being taken by surprise. I doubt there is much left that can catch Malleus unawares.”

  “You all sound like you admire the man,” said the Saviour.

  “We do,” I told her. “Not for his cruelty towards his subjects, but from the perspective of his absolute determination and unwillingness to bend. He has proved himself time and again in battle and has defeated everyone who stood before him. There is no shame in admiring the qualities of another, even if he’s your enemy.”

  She looked uncertain at my words, but I was not, since in this I knew I was right. If she didn’t understand it now, with time she would.

  “We digress,” she told us, not yet willing to accept what I told her. “Captain Charing, what is the earliest time I can set off on the journey to Blades and how long will it take?”

  “The day after tomorrow, is the earliest we can leave if you are set on that course. We’d need to commandeer much of the town’s resources to do so and they have little enough as it is.”

  “And if we delayed for another week?”

  “The situation would probably be the same. When the Duke lived, the town received regular supplies from elsewhere. These have already begun to dry up. The town can support itself, even though there will be hardship, but it cannot support all of your men.”

  “Very well, I will leave the day after tomorrow,” she said. “Please see that it happens.”

  I acknowledged the order. “It might take as much as forty days to reach Blades and I am sure there will be many unwilling marchers amongst the group.” I looked at Lieutenant Sinnar. “I think we will have our work cut out to bring the march down below thirty-five days.”

  “I will be commanding the men,” the Saviour said. “I would like the soldiers of the First Cohort to go elsewhere.”

  I wasn’t stupid and had already guessed that she was planning something. Nevertheless, I allowed her to continue until my suspicions were confirmed.

  “I want you to head north, Captain Charing. I require men who can move quickly and without rest. We need to find out what has destroyed Nightingale and Turpid. If this is a threat that gives even the Emperor a cause for concern, then I am doubly worried for I have but a tiny fraction of his resources.”

  “What of the coastal towns?” I asked her. “I am sure they have heard the rumours. And they provided support when you needed it to take Gold.”

  She looked upset. “I fear they are already lost, Captain. Their leaders are stubborn and proud. I will send messengers in the morning to warn them of the threat, but I need the resources of the southern cities, rather than these smaller places to the north.”

  The southern cities she mentioned had always been wealthier than those in the far north. Places like Spite and Chore had thrived from their trade with the cities of Baron Vaks and Duchess Callian. Here in the north, there was next to nothing. Bunsen, Demox and Rival had the sea and had thrived from it, but their trade routes had always remained small owing to the inward-looking nature of their leaders and also the Duke himself who had never encouraged the pursuit of wealth.

  “Very well, my lady. We will leave in the morning and see what we can see.”

  “Do not risk yourself, Captain Charing. There are so few of you remaining and I will need you for the battles to come.”

  “I do not risk my men where there is no need,” I reassured her. “Though if I see a chance, I will not hesitate to test their mettle against whatever it is that comes.”

  I caught Lieutenant Sinnar’s eye. He grinned at me and cracked his knuckles. I could tell that he was itching to find out what lay ahead of us. Ploster looked worried and strangely tired, but I was sure he’d be back to his usual self in the next day or two. Excessive use of his powers always left him drained.

  The Saviour got to her feet and left the room. Her footsteps were drowned out by the sound of twelve pairs of boots. Two of her bodyguards had died earlier and they’d already been replaced. Sinnar and Ploster remained in the room with me. I had Lieutenant Craddock summoned and we sat and talked until the early hours.

  22

  The next day, we mustered before most of the other soldiers had begun to stir. I don’t say this to suggest that the other soldiers were lazy, since it was not a fair comparison – they needed to sleep and we did not. With sympathy for our slumbering fellows, we crept out of the barracks, though I’m sure we woke up almost everyone with our clanking of metal armour and weapons.

  I’d given Chartus the bad news the previous night – he was staying with our lady. He was the best man to act as her quartermaster and she’d need his talents over the coming weeks. He grumbled some, so I promoted him to corporal, whereupon he grumbled some more. I clasped his wrist and wished him well and he expressed his hope that he would see us soon. In truth, Chartus was not one of our better swordsmen, which was why he’d formerly been our cook. Still, he was one of us and I’d have rather had him coming north than sending him on his way to Blades.

  The twelve men I’d assigned to our lady were not upset that we were to part ways for a time. They knew their duty was the most important of all and I think they’d have offered dissent if I told them someone else was to take ove
r.

  The First Cohort lined up in the Farmer’s Market plaza. I looked over their impassive faces, seeing hard eyes looking back through the openings in their dull steel helmets. They had their shields raised before them as we did when we mustered, and their swords were in their sheaths. We bristled with spears and I felt pride swelling in my chest as I witnessed their fortitude and eagerness to confront the unknown. They could have been statues, so silent and still were they, as if hewn from granite and clad in defiant steel.

  “Move out!” I called, my voice echoing hollowly across the otherwise deserted plaza.

  They fell into step behind me. The three men that Craddock had sent to Nightingale a week earlier hadn’t yet returned, so we were four shy of three hundred men. Our hard-soled boots set a resonating clatter and the sound ricocheted from the tall buildings we passed through. I judged the temperature to be close to freezing, though I had lost faith in my own accuracy when it came to such things. I could sense degrees of coldness, but they were no longer important to me. I remembered a time when it mattered, and thought to myself that even now, the variances of the weather could affect my mood. Today’s skies were clear and there was something about a cloudless sky that cheered my heart and lifted my spirits. It had ever been thus, even when I was a young man.

  “Who gives a fuck if we die, as long as it’s on a day like this?” asked Sinnar from his position next to me.

  “I can stick a spear up your arse if you don’t mind dying, Lieutenant,” said a wit from somewhere close behind.

  “Who would be left to keep your sorry feet moving if you did that, Cricks?” asked Sinnar, without turning. He knew every man by his voice in the same way I did.

  We headed north, soon leaving Gold behind. I wondered if I’d ever see its streets again. I asked myself the same question every time I ventured away, yet I always seemed to find my way back again. Perhaps this time it would be different, I told myself without optimism.

  Farmlands surrounded the town to the south, but here to the north they did not stretch for so many miles. I saw a few late crops in the fields, rimed with white frost. I hoped that it would not be too late for them to be picked.

  “It’s beautiful, is it not?” asked Sinnar.

  “I have always liked the winter,” I said. “It changes the landscape in ways that summer does not. There is something about the harshness that appeals to me.”

  “It is the same with me,” he replied. “I enjoy the feeling of summer’s warmth on my skin, but when I was young there was nothing that made me feel more alive than walking through the coldest of days, relying on the speed of my travel to keep me warm. I taught the children to love it too. I taught them not to fear the cold for what it did to their skin, but to embrace it for the irreplaceable sights it brought to their eyes.”

  “I think we’re going to see a lot more sights like these,” I told him, waving my hand to encompass the fields nearby.

  “We can enjoy them while they are here for us. I hope that I do not tire of the sights. If we reach the Northdown Moors, they will be unforgettable in their bleakness.”

  I remembered the moors well. The rain had never seemed to end; the winds and clouds had never cleared. They had been a dreary place to trek.

  “How long till Nightingale, Lieutenant Craddock?” I asked.

  “Eight days, possibly nine,” he said. “Assuming we don’t run into anything before we get there.”

  “Are we planning to engage with whatever we find, Captain?” asked Sinnar, distracted from his musings about the countryside.

  “We should be careful,” I said. “Since we have no idea what’s destroyed Nightingale and Turpid. The latter was not a small town and we don’t have the men to defeat anything large enough to have overrun it.”

  “It would be nice to test our arms against something the Emperor fears,” said Craddock.

  “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Malleus is scared,” I cautioned, feeling as if I were repeating myself from the previous evening’s conversation. “If we get the chance, we’ll see what we’re up against.”

  We left the fields behind us. The road leading north was badly laid and after only a few miles, there were more stones missing than there were remaining. Most of the traffic into Gold came from the south, with the north-bound roads seeing far fewer people. I had no doubt that if I had the time and the inclination, I’d find a quantity of the missing stones from the road embedded in the walls of the cottages and cattle sheds that we saw here and there on the high hillsides.

  The poor quality of the road was no great hardship, since the coldness had left the muddy ground firm underfoot. There were ruts and bumps to avoid, but no great hazards. A few times, I heard cursing as someone trod into a deep puddle, where the water had not completely frozen over. The road branched off once or twice, but eventually petered away to nothing before we’d even finished our first day’s marching. At the place it ended, there were signs of foundations and half-built walls, as if there’d once been a large village here. There was moss and roots growing through the gaps and poking through the mortar, telling me that whatever had been here was abandoned long ago.

  “Any idea what this place is or was, Lieutenant Craddock?” I asked.

  “I’ve not got a clue, Captain,” he said. “I’d say there’s no one been living here for at least a century.”

  We could have fought here before, came the thought into my head. We’d been up and down these lands so often that I’d lost track of everywhere we’d stuck our swords into someone. I’d like to say that I retained a memory of everything I’d ever done, and that each man I’d killed had left a mark upon me, no matter how small that mark might be. I made no claims to perfection but I must confess that I had likely forgotten the details of more fights than those I remembered. I meant no disrespect by it, but such were my limitations and I made no effort to maintain paper records of what we’d done. I dreaded to think how much of a burden it would be to carry fragile record books everywhere we went.

  We passed quickly through the abandoned village and I won’t deny that my eyes looked carefully around, as if I would see another drinking well, packed full of dead bodies. There was something about that experience which I had found particularly unpleasant and I wished that we’d managed to kill the creature when we’d had our chance.

  That night, we camped. As I’d expected, we few men who’d obtained the better-quality tents on our return from Blades came in for some ribbing over our possessions.

  “Here, Captain? How come you lot have these fancy tents, while we have to sleep in these shitty ones?” asked Limpet.

  “Yeah, there’re holes in mine,” said Scholar. “The wind whistles up me leg when I try to sleep.”

  I waved them away with promises that our kit would be updated at the next reasonable opportunity. They raised a fair point, since some of their tents were dozens of years old. Not that they really needed somewhere opulent to sleep in, but I knew that we all valued the time we had to ourselves when we took shelter for the night.

  I saw little harm in camp fires and we set a number of them. We’d stopped in a shallow indentation in the grasslands, so I didn’t think the light would betray us too much. I’d set a number of sentries anyway – twice as many as I’d normally assign. For some reason, I was feeling particularly cautious.

  I wandered from fire to fire, talking with the men. They were still abuzz with the events of yesterday. It wasn’t so much our victory that excited them, as it was the fact that our lady, so soon returned from the dead, had effectively recruited the Duke’s men.

  “It’s a turning point, I tell you,” said Grids to the men around him. “It means that the war is over in these lands. At least as far as the Duke is concerned.”

  I thought him a little premature. “Not quite, Grids,” I said. “It’s a step, that’s all. The Duke’s gone, and we were always going to have to kill him, so that’s a good start. All it means is that we’ve got an opportunity to unite everyone
under our lady’s banner.” I didn’t want to sound too pessimistic, so made a few more comments about how important it all was and how well things were going, given the early expectations.

  I retired to my single-man tent. When we’d been at full strength, we’d had a few horses and a wagon, in which my larger tent was carried. Now it seemed like an unnecessary luxury, especially since we were all on foot. Having heard Scholar’s complaints about his tent, I’d offered to swap my new one for his, not because I wanted to martyr myself, but because I wanted him to know that I had sympathy with his complaints. He’d looked sheepish and waved me away, telling me that he’d perhaps exaggerated the extent of his concern, even though I could see that his tent looked particularly moth-eaten. Still, I wasn’t going to spend all night trying to convince him, so I kept my new tent and he lay in his old one.

  The days passed and we saw no one, not even a distant horse and cart. The sky remained almost completely clear and when the pale sun rose, it became an astonishingly pale blue, more white than it was azure. We crossed endless numbers of low, rolling hills dotted with stunted trees. We jumped across half-frozen streams, unwilling to test our footing upon their icy surfaces. The grass was wiry and tufted, and crinkled underfoot when we trod upon it early in the mornings when the day had not yet started to warm. Not that it ever got warm, but the sun did its unsuccessful best to brush away the crystalline frost that greeted us every day at first light.

  Our morale remained as good as I could remember it, even taking into account that we had lost almost half of our numbers in the last few months. I spoke to a few of the men about it – not asking directly, simply talking around the subject to see what they would volunteer.

  “We’re fighting for something now, Captain,” said Ragger. “I feel better about myself than I ever have done. It’s a shame we’ve lost so many, but they’ve not died for nothing, have they?”

  “No, they’ve died for something worth having,” I told him.

  “So, the way I look at it – if the ground swallows me up tomorrow, I’ll have done all I can to make up for what I’ve done in the past. I’ll not have paid my debts, mind you, but I’ll have reached into my pocket and turned out everything I owned.”