by Kate Elliott
“An unlawful and dangerous power these fire mages wield,” said the old mansa to the officer. He looked winded and weary, but his outrage was a cloak that shielded him. “Fortunate for us that the young Diarisso mage understood it before the rest of us did.”
“Fortunate for us that the mansa of Four Moons House recognized the young man’s worth, given his low origins,” agreed the officer.
The old mansa smiled grimly. “True enough. More importantly, he knew exactly how to bridle the young man’s rebellious spirit.”
Perhaps the words angered me, just a little.
The old mansa looked right at me. “What shadow beast haunts this chamber? Beware!”
They turned on me, the five soldiers, the officer, the old mansa.
But I was the hunter’s daughter. So I killed them, all of them, even the old man, because Camjiata had to win the battle today. I killed the blistered magister who had so courageously taken in all Drake’s fire and was dying; ending his agony was a mercy.
When the Amazons broke through and poked their heads into the chamber, they found me crouched by the old mansa, wiping blood from my sword with hem of his boubou. Blood pooled around me. Cold steel cuts deep.
Their laughter hurt my ears. “Bellona bless! Our work’s done for us already!
Rising, I wiped blood from my cheek with the back of a hand just as Drake appeared. He went straight to the mansa and nudged the old man’s body with a foot in a most disrespectful manner.
“Stop that,” I said. “Show respect to the elders.”
He paused, taking me in from top to toe with a gaze made narrow by his deepening frown. “You pick a strange way to show respect. Think of what a powerful catch-fire he would have made. But I can’t expect you to understand that.”
He brushed past me. I could have bitten out his throat, but I crushed Camjiata’s words close to my heart, hiding them from everyone else. Win the battle first, or the enemy will triumph. The old order has to go down if we mean to break the chains that shackle us.
At the north-facing window, Drake swore. “The other cold mage is escaped, curse it. Did anyone see him?”
I said nothing.
Boots stamped up the steps, and Captain Tira appeared. Her gaze swept the chamber. She said, “Excellent. Remove the bodies. This will serve as a good command post for the general. Cat Barahal. Are you injured?” She looked me up and down. “Wasn’t that fabric green?”
The Amazons chortled. “Did a quick dye job, she did!”
Their laughter seemed discordant to me, although they found themselves amusing enough with their voices pitched loud, for they, too, had been deafened by the constant thunder of gunfire. I wiped another thread of blood off my chin, flicked a wet drop out of my eye, and glanced around the tower chamber. A spray of blood cut a line across the map on the table. The officer lay slumped, his head caught on the back of the chair. The five soldiers sprawled at all angles across the room, throats slashed and bellies opened, their blood a spreading stain. Its smell rose like flies, stinging and noxious. A drop of blood seeping from the ceiling dripped onto my hand.
I staggered, bumped into a wall next to Drake, and sank to my knees.
He shoved me away. “Cruel Diana! You reek of blood! Get away from me.”
Trembling, I could neither speak nor stand.
He rolled over the other magister and studied the two cold mages with a flat, emotionless expression. “With a strong enough cold mage, I can do anything,” he murmured to himself, so quietly that I knew he did not mean for me to hear. “I don’t need him. He’s kept me caged all this time because he’s afraid I will figure that out.”
He stepped over to the table where Captain Tira was carefully wiping blood off the map and examined the topography, then snagged a spyglass that was lying across one corner.
“Where are you going, Lord Drake?” asked Captain Tira as he walked to the stairs. “The general is already calling the advance against the Coalition center. He’ll need you soon enough.”
“He does need me, doesn’t he? Far more than I need him. I only need fire banes.” The sting of his presence faded as he vanished down the stairs.
Captain Tira watched him go, but she said nothing and did nothing. I needed to follow him, but a heavy exhaustion pinned me down. A fog of oblivion hazed my vision. How long I knelt there, shaking, I did not know. The chamber was cleared of the dead. An orderly scattered buckets of dirt over the floor to absorb the blood. People left and arrived while I watched the wall go nowhere.
Captain Tira said, “She’s been in a stupor since we took the tower, General.”
“Send an orderly to find her something else to wear. Bloody Camulos! Give me a spyglass! Look at the Coalition center collapse! Captain Tira, I want the Amazon Corps to march to the eastern flank. Lieutenant! Ride this dispatch to Marshal Aualos. I want Lord Marius’s retreating forces cut off from the city gates. I do not want any Coalition troops or any mages escaping into Lutetia. I want no street-by-street fighting. I want a clear, emphatic victory.”
Artillery boomed in sheets of thunder. Drums and horns beat out the pace of the advance as Camjiata’s army roared forward, rifles ablaze and smoke gusting in windy bursts.
Messengers came and went as the general directed the battle from the tower. The stone house echoed with the groans of wounded.
A man bumped into me, swearing as he dumped a pot of scalding coffee to splash on the floor.
The general said, “Get her out of the way!”
I opened my hands to find them coated in sticky, drying blood. Swells and ebbs of memory surged in my head: the way flesh parts like a sigh as the blade slices; the submissive acquiescence of the hunted when it accepts it has been marked for death. Blood was spattered all down the front of my clothes. I tried to shake myself free of the awful sight, only I could not get away from myself.
No one took the least notice of me stumbling down the steps. The stone house was crammed with wounded. The stink of blood and piss and excrement melded with the rumble of artillery and gunfire, although the sound was ebbing because the advance of Camjiata’s army was pushing the battlefront away from our position. I staggered into the back court and to a trough filled with pink and slimy water. I stripped off my blood-sodden jacket and fumblingly managed the slippery buttons of the skirt. Then I dumped a bucket full of dirty water over me once, twice, three times until I was gasping and shivering and began, at last, to feel human.
In my bodice and drawers I decided I would have to hunt for clothes, for I could not bear to dress myself back in the blood of men I did not remember killing.
“Trooper! What in the seven hells are you doing here? Your Amazons marched out two hours ago!” A sergeant wearing the Armorican ship jabbed at me with his finger. “Dereliction! Guards! Arrest—!”
I grabbed his out-thrust wrist and twisted it until he yelped. “I am Camjiata’s ward, not an Amazon. Leave me be!”
When I released his wrist, he retreated two steps. A tang of fearful respect charged his scent. “By the Black Bull! Are you the assassin they say killed twenty men in the first assault without receiving a scratch?”
I did not care to dignify this with an answer. “There’s a tunnel in the well that leads out. Best you make haste to block it so no raiders can come through.”
He backed away.
Through the open doors of the half-burned barn, I glimpsed a figure I knew. “Rory!”
I found him doing nurse’s duty among the wounded, moistening faces, offering sips of water. He embraced me with a snarl of relief but pushed me away at once. “I’m very busy. I find I quite like tending the wounded, for I detest the hateful racket of the guns. If you go to the corner, you’ll find some local women sorting through garments they’ve stripped from the dead.”
The local women were a trio of old dames, one toothless, one deaf, and the third the very same old woman who had greeted Rory in his cat body as dominus. She did not recognize bedraggled me, but her weary eye me
asured me the same as if I had been her own niece.
“Gave a man some trouble to you? Are you harmed, girl?”
I wanted to laugh but the sound would not come. “No. No man harmed me.”
I found a dead Amazon’s uniform that fit me well enough with its sturdy wool jacket and cunningly sewn skirt that could be tied up to different lengths depending on what a woman needed on the march. The cloth was dirty but unbloodied, by which I assumed the woman who had worn it had died from a head wound. My cold steel had returned to a cane. Cupping the locket in my hand, I closed my eyes and breathed down the thread that bound me to Vai.
He was alive.
The barn really stank, not just with ash and blood and piss but with pain, which has a tang as hard as a claw. I found Rory holding the hand of an unconscious soldier. My brother’s sweet smile calmed me, for the groans and whimpers and sobs rubbed like thorns against my heart.
I crouched beside him. “I have to go. Are you coming with me?”
“Shh. I like to hold the hands of the ones whose souls are passing over.”
Curious, I rested a hand on the unconscious man’s cheek. When I closed my eyes and sank my thoughts as into a soundless ocean of smoke, I could first feel and then almost glimpse the delicately wavering glimmer of brightness that sparked through the man’s body: the flickering brain, the subsiding heart. The settling darkness of death’s tide hauled him out to sea. The soldier took in a shallow breath, and then not another. In the dark ocean of death, a shark glided past to snap up the man’s soul and carry it to the other side.
Rory released the lifeless hand. “It brings them comfort to know they aren’t alone when they depart. I love to hunt, Cat, but there’s just something wrong with all this. It tastes bad.” He closed the dead man’s eyes and arranged the hands atop the chest. “You wouldn’t rather stay here? There are so many who need aid and comfort.”
“I have to find Drake.”
With a sigh he rose. “I know better than to try to stop any female when she’s determined to go out on the hunt. Very well.”
“You stay here, Rory. I can see the noise and confusion trouble you.”
“Vai told me to keep an eye on you.”
“Is that what he told you? To keep me out of the fight?”
He laughed, a startling sound amid so much suffering. Yet not one head turned our way. No one cared if people laughed; it was better than crying. “You don’t know him well if that’s what you think he would say. He told me once that any person who knows the stories of hunters who captivate spirit women in the bush knows that a man does not try to cage or leash a spirit woman, because if he does, she will vanish back into the bush and nothing he can do will stop her. He asked me to walk beside you, Cat, as he would do if he were here. Goodness, you’re being very snappish, and I must say that you stink of blood.”
I shuddered, for there was a chasm in my heart blessedly veiled in darkness, and I did not want any light to shine down there.
“Calm, Cat. Calm.” He stroked my arm. “I better come with you or you’ll do something foolish. Probably you already have.”
At the doors children were digging out precious bolts and bullets from the walls and collecting them in a sack. In the courtyard riders gathered. General Camjiata emerged from the stone house, writing on a scrap of paper. He handed paper to a messenger and pen to an aide, then saw me. With a nod he indicated I should accompany him.
“I have to find Drake,” I said as I took the reins of a horse led up by an orderly.
“Cat, you’ll never find him in this chaos. Stick with me, and he’ll turn up. He always does.”
“I’m not sure he will this time. I think he’s gone rogue.”
He did not answer, for we were already riding out of the estate. I had no grasp of the time, only that it was now late afternoon and the thrust of the battle had raged away to the southeast. The land was a sweep of trees, fields, and pasture. No doubt this bucolic landscape made a restful scene on ordinary days. Now it crawled with soldiers and was strewn with bodies, discarded weapons, and lost hats and tassels. Camjiata was right: Alone, I had no chance of finding Drake or Vai among so many tens of thousands.
Because the general had rolled up the Coalition’s western flank, Lord Marius had fixed his efforts to the east in an attempt to keep open the Liyonum Road for the Romans as they marched up from the south. Even without the spyglass, it was easy to tell from a distance where cold mages were still fighting to kill the general’s guns. Smoke would billow in clouds that hid whole sections of the field from view, then patches would clear with startling urgency as artillery and rifles ceased firing for a space. A wind was really picking up out of the east, and black clouds had piled up as if about to break down over the city.
Rory had his head down, hands over his ears. The noise just never let up.
“There they go!” said Camjiata, holding the spyglass to his eye.
Tents in the Coalition’s encampment caught fire. A battle by magic chased through the field, fire rising, then dying, rising and dying and finally rising again, as in a game being played like cat and mouse. Fire mages were flushing out cold mages and tracking them down. Was Drake directing them? Was that where he was? A gray sleet moved in over the city but just before it reached the camp it died in a violent updraft of air. The encampment began to burn in earnest.
Meanwhile artillery was being shifted to the south and east. We followed it to a ridge, where the command unit halted. The hillside sloped down to a stream beyond which ran the Liyonum Road. The general intended to bombard the Romans as they marched in column along the road, thinking to rescue their allies.
A soot-stained messenger came pounding up. He wore the badge of the Iberian Lion Guard. “Dispatch from Marshal Aualos, General.” He held up a folded paper.
Camjiata did not lower the spyglass, which was fixed on the burning encampment. Figures fled in all directions, many of whom surely were not soldiers. People will die regardless.
“Read it to me,” he said.
“My lord Keita, we have cut off Lord Marius so he cannot reach the city gates. The Parisi prince is dead on the field. We have taken thousands prisoner. The citizens of Lutetia have barricaded the gates to their city. Of cold mages we have captured twenty-eight alive.”
Twenty-eight cold mages taken prisoner! My icy heart flamed hot. Was Vai among them?
The general lowered the spyglass, handed it to me, and took the wrinkled paper to scrawl a note on it. “Tell the marshal that the cold mage Andevai Diarisso is to be sent directly to me.”
“Marshal Aualos said to tell to your ears alone that the particular mage you seek is not among the prisoners.”
I pressed a hand to my locket. It was still warm.
“I want the marshal to secure the encampment and the city gates. Harry any retreating Coalition units until they rout. I want Lord Marius captured, or dead if must be. When the Romans arrive, we will have them surrounded on three sides, with the river at their back.”
We stood without water or shade for an hour or more as troops ponderously trudged past our position to meet the approaching Romans. Far to the south the crack and boom of rifle fire started up; about half an hour later the rumble of cannon woke a mile or more away. But for the sound, and the departure and arrival of messengers, our watch on the ridge passed uneventfully. I couldn’t think for the constant noise. Rory tucked himself into the shade of a tree, where he leaned his head against the trunk and closed his eyes. Exhausted, I sank down beside him.
The pounding hammer filled every crevice of flesh, and blood, and air, and earth. I fell as off a cliff into a dream.
Winged as an eru, I flew above an ocean of smoke. All around clamored my brothers and sisters, each fashioned in their own shape, and all of us killers. Flashes of light like silvery minnows caught in the waves as the dying gave up life. My siblings dove into the waters to gulp up each soul.
The spirits of the dead walked through us, the hunter’s children,
from the mortal world into the spirit world.
I saw everything: A man rides away from his comrades on a desperate errand although they urge him to turn back. My eru’s sight could not encompass the features by which a mortal person recognizes another: the flash of sweetness when he really smiled, the way his eyebrows rose when he was teasing me, the promise of his lips. I saw instead the fathomless well of a cold mage whose person is the conduit through which weave the energies that bind the worlds.
Vai.
Thunder jostled my sight, and I lost track of him. The current of battle swept me south. Camjiata had deployed his artillery parallel to the road. It pounded into the Roman columns caught marching at double time, trying to reach their Coalition allies. Every time the Romans tried to break out they were met with a fierce attack from the general’s Iberian Lion Guard or his Amazon Corps. The Kena’ani skirmishers with their white sashes had moved miles down the column to hit the hapless rear guard, which was cut off from the front by the lumbering baggage train.
So small rats were, seen from the height. Their lives of no moment, not truly. So much death churns through the world that we look the other way lest we be overwhelmed by its weight. But I was my sire’s daughter. I had no heart whose conscience burdened my wings.
Separated from its Coalition allies by the tide of the battle, the Invictus Legion retreated step-by-bloody-step south, hoping to meet and join up with its brother legions. However much I had disliked the legate, he held the ranks together under merciless fire. The remnant hunkered down at last within the walls of a lord’s estate.
Farther south an eagle standard went down amid screams of angry victory shouted by jubilant Iberians. Pressed by an unrelenting stream of cannonade, the Romans broke and ran, all but the Ironclad Legion. Under the command of an unflappable young tribune, it worked its way along the river and, in a meeting of grim embraces, joined up with the Invictus.