by S L Farrell
“If it’s within my power,” Kenne told him, and had to quash the thought that followed: as weak as my power is, I’m afraid…
“It is, I hope,” Karl said. “Please, Archigos, sit. This may take some time. I know, at least I think I know, who killed Ana.”
Kenne listened to Karl’s tale with growing dread, suspicion, and horror. By the end he was sitting in his chair behind his desk, shaking his head.
“A man named Gairdi ci’Tomisi, you say?” Kenne said finally. The name had shocked him; he wondered what else he had not known. “A Firenzcian? He did this with help from Westlander magic?”
“Firenzcian, yes,” Karl stated. “But you must understand that there was no magic involved. No-this black sand isn’t of your Cenzi’s making, nor that of the Westlander gods, either. It’s not magical, not of the Second World-just the product of a person’s imagination and logic.” Karl tapped his head. “And that makes it even more dangerous. Look…”
Karl took a small pouch from the pocket of his grimy and tattered bashta, spilling a dark, granular powder on the blotter of Kenne’s desk. Kenne prodded it with a curious finger. “Uly had a stash of this in his rooms; I bribed the innkeeper to let me in. Uly had the ingredients there in his rooms so we know what they are. Varina thinks she can reproduce this mixture even if Talis won’t help us. Sitting there like that, the black sand’s innocent enough, but put a flame to it, and…” Karl’s voice trailed off, and he looked away. Kenne knew what the man was remembering; he remembered it, too, all too well.
“What can I do?” Kenne asked him. He stared down at his soiled desk.
“See if you can find out more about this Gairdi ci’Tomisi that Uly mentioned.”
Kenne looked at him bleakly. “I know him. At least I think I do. He’s a trader with Writs of Passage from both Brezno and Nessantico, and goes back and forth over the border. We-both Ana and I-have used him. We thought… we thought he was our man, our spy. He carried messages from us to the teni within the Brezno Temple that we thought we could trust, and brought back their messages to us about Archigos Semini. Now…” Kenne looked up at the Numetodo. “If he was actually a dual agent, in the employ of Semini ca’Cellibrecca…”
“… Then it was ca’Cellibrecca who ordered Ana killed,” Karl finished for him. His jaw shut audibly.
Kenne felt the remnants of his lunch rise into his throat. He swallowed hard against the bile. Yes, he believed ca’Cellibrecca would be capable of murder-after all, the man had been a war-teni for most of his life. He had no doubt killed hundreds of soldiers with the mage-fire. But he wouldn’t have killed Ana without a reason. Kenne was afraid that he knew exactly what the reason might be: that ca’Cellibrecca expected the person placed in Ana’s stead would be weak, and that he might exploit that weakness to reunite the Faith again-with ca’Cellibrecca as Archigos in Nessantico as well as Brezno.
Because he knew it would be me. He’s probably already speaking to the Kraljica, making his overtures.
“Archigos?” Kenne took a long breath before looking up at Karl. “No Numetodo killed Audric,” Karl declared. “No Numetodo killed Ana. That killed them both.” Karl gestured at the black sand on Kenne’s desk. “That makes me think that the same person is responsible for both murders.”
It seemed a reasonable assumption to Kenne, but he’d been wrong about so much that he no longer trusted his own reasoning. “What… what do you want me to do?” Kenne lifted his hands from the desk, a fingertip dark with the powder he’d touched. “How can I help?”
“See what more you can find out,” Karl told him. “See if Semini really did this-if he did, I want to make the man pay. But Varin.. .” He stopped. “I mean, Ana wouldn’t want me to do anything until I knew, knew for certain. Can you help me with that?” Karl pointed again to the drift of black sand on Kenne’s blotter. “You know what that is, don’t you?” the Numetodo asked. Kenne could only shake his head.
“That’s the ashes of magic, Archigos,” Karl said. “That’s what magic looks like when it’s dead.”
Kenne glanced down again. It felt like he was looking at his own remains.
Aubri cu’Ulcai
Commandant Aubri cu’UlcaI looked backward and shook his head, wondering how the battle had come to this. It should never have happened. It wasn’t possible.
He wondered how the new Kraljica would receive the news, and expected he knew the answer. And the only excuse he had was that the Westlanders refused to fight honorably, as they should.
It had begun only three short days before…
Several chevarittai-as was common-rode out on their destriers to call for individual challenge as the Westlander forces approached Villembouchure. No Westlander warriors rode out to meet their challenge; the front ranks of the army marched forward, unbroken and unfazed even as the chevarittai mocked their honor and their courage. They were ignored or, worse, attacked with cowardly arrows and fire from the Westlander spellcasters. Three chevarittai were killed before Aubri had the horns call “return” and the chevarittai turned their warhorses and galloped back behind the lines of waiting infantry and war-teni.
Aubri and his offiziers huddled; they expected the attack to start as soon as the Westlander army crested the last hill before Villembouchure. After all, it was just before Second Call, and there were still hours of daylight. The Westlanders had come within a double bowshot of the front lines of the Holdings force and halted… and remained stopped. The chevarittai and his offiziers had pleaded with Aubri to allow them to advance and engage. He’d refused, regretfully-to do so would mean to abandon the earthworks and bunkers they’d erected in the past few days. The Holdings army was arrayed in a perfect defensive position, and Aubri was loath to move from that.
That had been the first day. He’d gone to sleep that night convinced of eventual victory-the Westlander advance would break against their hardened lines. The Westlander force, as his scouts and all the reports from the field had verified, was substantially smaller than their own: no army of that size, not even the Firenzcians at their best, would have been able to overrun the defenses Aubri had erected. The ships of the Tehuantin fleet clogged the A’Sele, but were too far from the field of battle to affect the issue; in any case, Aubri knew that a Nessantican naval force was on its way to deal with the enemy ships. At worst, the walls of Villembouchure would hold them if for some unforeseen reason Aubri could not contain them in the fields outside the city. The Westlander forces were far too small for an effective siege, and Villembouchure was well-provisioned and could withstand a siege from an even larger army for at least a month.
Yes, Aubri was confident. Despite the fact that his army had been hastily mustered and most of the infantry was poorly trained, his offiziers and the chevarittai with them were battle-tested by the many skirmishes over the last few decades with Firenzcia and the Coalition nations.
They would prevail here.
The battle began on the second day, but not-as in all of Aubri’s experience and the experience of the offiziers who had trained him-at the advent of dawn. No… the attack came well before the sun clawed its way into the sky. And it came strangely. The lookouts posted in the foremost bunkers had sent urgent messengers running to the commandant’s tent behind the lines, the uproar waking Aubri from a light, dream-troubled sleep.
“A storm walking toward us on legs of lightning,” they clamored. “A wall of cloud…”
Alarm horns were sounding over the encampment and soldiers were hastily donning armor and grabbing weapons as offiziers screamed orders. In the distance, blue light flickered and danced and thunder boomed, yet above them the sky was clear, pricked with the crowded and familiar constellations. Aubri mounted the horse his attendants hurriedly brought to him. He galloped quickly toward the front, joined on the way by A’Teni Vallis ca’Ostheim of Villembouchure, who was in charge of the war-teni. “What in the name of Cenzi is going on?” ca’Ostheim roared. His shock of thick white hair seemed to spark in the light of the s
torm ahead; his belly sagged over the pommel of his horse’s saddle. The lashes of his eyes were still clotted with sleep rime. A thick gold necklace with a broken globe hanging from it bounced on his chest as they rode. “I thought you said the attack would come at dawn, Commandant.”
“I said that, yes,” Aubri replied calmly. “It appears that the Westlanders weren’t listening.”
At the first line of bunkers, the two men stopped, gazing out over the space between the two armies. The Westlander encampment, which when Aubri had gone to bed had been twinkling on the far hillside like yellow stars fallen to earth, was no longer visible. Instead, an apparition of nature confronted them: a wall of black, roiling cloud perhaps twelve men high and floating two men above the ground. Like some ominous, supernatural monster, the cloud-creature crawled toward them on hundreds of legs of flickering lightning. The flashes stabbed at the ground below, seeming to pull the clouds forward a few feet with each stroke. Aubri could see the ground tearing wherever the lightning struck, leaving a trail of storm-footprints ripped from the ground. A constant din of thunder and a high, crackling snarl accompanied the vision. All around them, the army of the Holdings stared at the creature with faces illuminated by erratic white-blue. Aubri could feel the panic moving through the ranks, the men falling involuntarily backward a few steps, away from the mounds of low earthworks and fortifications they’d raised. “Hold!” Aubri cried out to them. The horns took up the call along the line: “Hold!”, and the men shook themselves as if awakening from a nightmare. They clutched useless spears, gazing at the monster that confronted them. It was nearly across the open ground now and Aubri could glimpse nothing beyond its ferocious border.
“A’Teni ca’Ostheim, this is magic-it’s your domain.” Aubri had to nearly shout over the increasing din of the storm-creature to ca’Ostheim, the leader of the war-teni. “Can you stop this?”
“I’ll try,” he answered, dismounting. He began to chant; his hands moved in strange patterns in front of him. Aubri could feel the hair on his arms standing up as ca’Ostheim continued to chant and as the lightning began to touch the edges of the ramparts-he didn’t know which it was that caused the reaction. Aubri’s steed, though accustomed to the clamor, noise, and sights of war, was stamping worriedly at the ground, half-rearing away from the apparition. Aubri had to lean down and pat the horse’s neck to calm it. “A’Teni! Soon, please.”
Ca’Ostheim raised his hands; the chanting came to a halt. He gestured toward the storm. A wind shrieked outward from the war-teni, and where it touched the storm-creature, the clouds were torn apart. Soldiers cheered, but to either side, the storm still crawled forward, unabated, and now lighting bolts tore at the ramparts themselves, the forked legs reaching out to where the soldiers of the Holdings stood. Screams rose from either side as the bolts seared and shattered the ranks, sliding inexorably forward. And now the sundered halves of the clouds were coming back together; eager tongues of lightning were beginning to flash in front of Aubri. Ca’Ostheim had sunk to his knees. He shook his head up to Aubri. “Commandant, I can’t… Not alone. I need to gather the other war-teni…”
“To your horse, then,” Aubri told him. He looked to his banner bearers and the messenger horns as the screams of the wounded and dying vied with the thundering. “Retreat!” he shouted. “Back to the next line!”
The banners signaled retreat; the horns sounded the call. The ranks of soldiers broke instantly, those who still could turning to flee the storm. Faintly, in the space beyond the storm, he could hear new voices: the battle cries of the Westlanders.
Aubri yanked hard on the reins of his mount and followed his men.
That was the morning of the second day. The rest of the day went no better. The war-teni were able to disperse the spell-storm, but the task exhausted them and they had little energy left for other spells. Behind the storm, the ranks of the Westlanders-warriors with scarred and painted faces-surged forward. The hand-to-hand combat was fierce, but the chevarittai and infantry could match sword for sword. However, for the Westlander spellcasters, wielding sticks from which they cast spells, Aubri had no answer-the war-teni were largely depleted from their earlier efforts, and by late afternoon, Aubri called for the army to return to Villembouchure, behind the walls and stout gates. He was convinced that he could have held the outer defenses, but the price in lives would have been enormous. He did what any Commandant in his position would have done: he had the horns blow “disengage.”
By evening, they were inside and the portcullises were lowered and locked.
That ended the second day.
In any normal battle, that would have signaled the beginning of a siege that might have lasted weeks or months before being broken, and Aubri knew that the Westlanders didn’t have weeks or months-not in a strange land where they were surrounded by enemies. This was why Aubri had found it easy to call for disengagement as soon as it was apparent that victory on the fields before the city would only come at huge cost. Being inside the walls of Villembouchure must lead to eventual victory. Inevitably. And he could wait.
But the siege would last only one day.
Aubri was on the city walls, staring down at the smoldering fires of the main Westlander encampment in the dawn. That was when the arcing balls of smoke rose suddenly, arrowing toward them: a dozen or more of them, all seeming to target the great Western Gate of the city. The war-teni stationed along the walls reacted instantly, as they should, and-trained in the art of holding their spells in their minds for a time (which none of them would have admitted was a Numetodo trait forced on the war-teni by Archigos Ana)-the response of their dispersal spells was swift. But the fireballs continued on their flight. The closest war-teni looked at Aubri with wide, stricken eyes. “Commandant, those aren’t spells -”
He got no further. The thick walls of the city shook impossibly as the fireballs slammed into the gate and the surrounding stones. Where they touched, impossible explosions tore into the stones and steel and wood. Aubri, holding onto the battlement to keep his footing, witnessed huge chunks of granite flying away as if they were pebbles tossed by a child. Fire erupted from directly below him, as white-hot as a smithy’s blaze; he could feel it washing over his skin. He heard screams and cries from below.
“The gate is broken! The walls are sundered!”
The Westlanders were already rushing toward the breach, as archers belatedly cast a rain of arrows down on them. Some of the warriors went down, but many-too many-were still coming, and now Aubri saw more fireballs arcing from the north and south toward those gates.
He ran down from the battlements into bloody, savage chaos.
That was the third day. The day the city was lost. Impossibly.
Now Aubri stared back at Villembouchure from a hilltop along the Avi A’Sele. He gazed at the greasy smoke smearing the sky above the broken walls with the remnants of his army gathered around him and A’Teni ca’Ostheim at his side. Inside the town… Inside were the Westlanders.
“This isn’t possible,” he muttered.
But it was. And now the defense of Nessantico herself must be prepared. Aubri shook his head again at the sight.
He turned his horse and gestured, and he and the army began their limping retreat back toward the capital.
Allesandra ca’Vorl
She remembered Passe a’Fiume all too well. It was there, twenty-five years earlier as her vatarh had besieged the town, that she first learned the hardest lesson of war: that sometimes the ones you love don’t survive. She’d had a crush then on a young offizier who’d been killed in the battle. She had thought at the time that she would never be able to love anyone again, her heart was so shattered by the experience, but time had softened the pain. Now, she couldn’t recall the young man’s face.
The repairs from that decades-old battle were still visible on the city walls, and they brought back the memories and the pain.
This time, there was no siege. The Firenzcian army had passed through the border to
wn Ville Colhelm without any challenge at all: the Holdings force stationed there had simply abandoned their post and fled from the far greater Firenzcian host. At Allesandra’s behest, Jan had sent riders-including Sergei ca’Rudka-well ahead of the main force to negotiate with the Comte of Passe a’Fiume. With the garrison of the Garde Civile largely depleted due to the Westlander invasion, the comte chose discretion over valor (and a substantial bribe in gold over his vows of office): in exchange for the vow that the town would not be sacked, he would permit the army to cross the River Clario through the city gates to the Avi a’Firenzcia.
Allesandra rode alongside Jan as they crossed the great stone bridge over the waters of the Clario, more rapid and dangerous than the wider and deeper A’Sele, with which the Clario would join before the A’Sele reached Nessantico. The bridge itself seemed to shudder under the thudding of booted soldiers and horses’ hooves, the vanguard of the army already through the gates and the remainder trailing down the road as far as one could see in the hill-pocked terrain. Jan gazed around them raptly as they passed through the tall arches set with the shields of the Kralji, and into the city itself. Crowds lined the sides of the main avenue through the town, mostly silent, and the chevarittai of the Garde Hirzg stiffened in their saddles as they scanned the throngs for danger.
“You were here with great-vatarh?” Jan asked again, leaning over toward her, and Allesandra nodded.
“I was just a child, and your great-vatarh was in his prime,” she said. “He took Passe a’Fiume in just three days of siege after the peace negotiations failed, but Kraljiki Justi-who still had two legs then-had already made a cowardly escape back to Nessantico. Your great-vatarh was furious. Sergei ca’Rudka was the commandant for the Nessantican forces; he was… brilliant, even though badly outnumbered. Your great-vatarh would have admitted that, however grudgingly.”