by Cass Morris
Ekialde told himself all of this, but deep in his heart, he knew that it was also simpler to avoid his wife’s displeasure than to suffer it.
If only he could make her understand. Why couldn’t she understand? All his warriors did, all the men and women who had left their homes in order to protect them, to drive the Aventans out of Iberia. ‘Everything I do—even these darker magics—this is all for you, my darling rabbit, and for our son. For all Lusetani sons and daughters, that they never know what it is to walk beneath a yoke.’
And so, when Bailar looked to him for confirmation, he nodded. Just once, solid and sure.
For this deed, Bailar had trusted only his own associates, the magic-men of the Lusetani who had been with them since the beginning, not the allies. There were not enough of them to slit all the throats at once. Some of the sacrifices struggled; others merely wept. Bronze blades, specially consecrated by Bailar, neatly parted flesh, and in a moment, it was done.
It didn’t smell like a battlefield. No sweat, no leather, no tang of adrenaline. Just the pungent metallic reek of so much life-force spilled out in such a short time. As Bailar lifted his hands, beginning the ritual, the unharnessed power of all that blood buzzed along the lines and whorls inked into Ekialde’s skin, the markings which gave him strength and kept Bandue’s eye securely fixed upon him.
“Thank you for your deaths,” he said to the corpses. “May they bring the Lusetani bountiful life.”
* * *
Inside Toletum
“You would think,” Mennenius said, watching as the legionaries on guard switched stations, guided by the precision of the centurions’ whistles, “that we would get used to this.”
Vitellius nodded. It had been nearly two months since the first Lusetani attack on Toletum, longer since Mennenius had first encountered the akdraugi out in the wilds. The legions went through their duties as they always had, as they always would, and yet Vitellius knew, to a man, none of them had become inured to the haunting effect. Each night, just as at the start, Vitellius had to rotate his guards rapidly as soon as the haunting mist rose over the walls, guarding against any weak spots forming. It was a sort of planning he felt sure no other commander had had to wrangle with. No arrow-hail had ever taken out guardsmen so swiftly as the akdraugi brought men to their knees.
‘At least fewer of them die from this sort of assault.’ Fewer, but not none. The toll mounted as the summer dragged on, both legionaries and townsfolk succumbing to the anima-devouring power of the akdraugi. ‘Haunted to death.’ It was how Mennenius had described it, when he staggered in from the forest; Vitellius had yet to find a better way to describe it.
While the men moved into position, Vitellius asked Mennenius for updates from the rest of the city. He had delegated many civic responsibilities to his friend, including the task of liaising with Toletum’s own council. There was simply too much to keep track of for Vitellius to have sole governance of it all: not only the rationing, but keeping track of production within the city as well. They could not reach the greater fields, but the city still had gardens. Mennenius dutifully recorded yields and investigated any accusations of hoarding or theft.
Too, the Lusetani had not entirely been able to keep Vitellius from reaping the advantage of the river. The city’s position, cut into such a deep bend of the Tagus, was their advantage, as was the Lusetani’s lack of discipline. Fish were the bulwark standing between Toletum and utter disaster.
Yet even these broader considerations melted away as the sun set. The scope of Vitellius’s world narrowed in the fading light. He might as well have been adrift on the Endless Ocean, with no domain past the confines of a single ship. The world outside Toletum’s walls became as foreign as the broad seas, as unreachable as Olympus. All Vitellius could do was try to hold those walls and safeguard the souls within them, to the best of his ability.
Just as every other night, they waited for the gates of Tartarus to open.
* * *
Outside Toletum
Bailar’s hands were brown with the muddled dirt and liquid; his bare feet were tinted crimson. “We do this for our blessed erregerra, my brothers,” he said to the other magic-men as they trailed behind him. “Remember that, and feel divinity’s blessing upon you. We, beloved of Endovelicos, are privileged to reach into the shadow realm, where we may fetch weapons for Bandue’s service.”
They formed a crescent at the edge of the forest, facing Toletum and its walls. Others, they had left behind, on the far side of the forest, to keep Aven’s impressive legions at bay. But this, Bailar knew he had to do for himself, and he had selected the bravest of his fellows to join him. Each bore a sacred instrument, wet with the blood of the sacrificed prisoners: knives and needles, rods and rings. On each end of the crescent stood a man with a bone flute. At Bailar’s signal, they began a low and mournful tune.
Bailar rubbed his thumbs against his middle fingers, feeling the blood moving against his skin. It had begun to crust beneath his fingernails, but there was enough of it on his hands to stay warm and damp a while yet. ‘A sacred thing, this, the blood of death.’ Strength lived in it, the power of the gods that beat in every heart, and too, the strength necessary to take it from another. Blood given freely had its uses, but blood taken, blood commanded—that, Bailar had come to believe, was the most potent of all.
A cloud passed over the stars. Bailar began his invocation, calling out to Endovelicos in the gods’ secret language.
All around him, the living world dimmed. The color leeched out, and even the darkness grew blurry, as though a silver veil had been drawn over it. When first Bailar had encountered this, many years earlier, it had terrified him. He thought he was dying, crossing into the land of the dead. When sense returned to him, he realized he had been but on the threshold, walking a shrouded path—a place where he could touch what lay beyond without truly traveling through to it.
Was it so for the other magic-men? Bailar did not know. Perhaps they saw something different, or perhaps they saw nothing at all. ‘Every man dies his own death. No one can tell us how it feels or what it looks like. Perhaps this is the same.’
No matter. So long as the magic worked, Bailar cared little what his fellows experienced. He knew he walked a path trod by Endovelicos himself.
As Bailar reached deep, deep into the shadows around him, wonders and terrors alike pricked at his blood. So many things he might stretch for, might seek to drag across into the sunlit world—but Bailar was chief of the magic-men not only for his strength, but for his wisdom. He knew not to try to grasp that which would slip through his fingers.
‘Yet, yet . . .’ he thought, the words a low hum in his heart. ‘I do not have the power yet. That does not mean I never will.’
* * *
Inside Toletum
The mist rose, but this time, there were no accompanying demons. No eldritch howls, no demonic faces. The men looked about, confused. After a moment, a few began to relax, but the cannier among them tensed further, as Vitellius did, suspecting some sort of trap. “Hold positions!” he bellowed, and the centurions’ whistles carried the order down the wall on both sides.
And so they waited, in the dark and the damp, while nothing happened.
After a few minutes, Tribune Mennenius jogged to the base of the ladder beneath Vitellius. “Nothing on the riverside,” he reported. Recently, Vitellius had become concerned that the Lusetani might try to mount an attack up the steep cliff, despite the disadvantage of the terrain. “Not even the mist.”
As Mennenius gazed up at the wispy clouds cresting the ramparts, a stab of regret guilted Vitellius. He tried to keep his friend away from the Lusetani fiends. They had affected him so badly that first time, out in the wilds. He knew Mennenius still had nightmares about it. Too many nights, he witnessed Mennenius wake in the tribunes’ quarters, drenched in sweat and gasping for air, crying out to the gods to spare him. S
o, the centurions told him, did some of the legionaries who had been with him. Those were the men he was most reluctant to put atop the battlements at night, the men he always saw relieved of duty first.
‘Your pity is a weakness,’ he told himself, ‘and it denigrates them as much as it shames you.’ And yet, he could not bring himself to force them into contact with the horrors of the akdraugi any more often than was necessary. ‘You’ll never be fit for real command if you can’t harden yourself.’
Half of him said there was no place for softness, during a siege. The other half said he should exercise compassion wherever he could, since they were likely to see so little of it handed down to them by fate.
“Stay below,” he told his friend. The akdraugi rarely affected those in the center of the city as strongly as those on the walls. “Make sure reinforcements are ready to ascend.”
The gibbous moon slunk across the sky, its light blurry and scattered behind the haze of the Lusetani-summoned mist. Vitellius could practically feel the entire city of Toletum holding its breath, waiting to see what fresh hell the Lusetani would unleash. But there were no akdraugi, no howling fiends, no maddening sounds—and no attack, no warriors scaling the walls.
Gradually, Vitellius noticed a strange odor in the air: not unpleasant, but strange. Not damp, as he might have expected in a mist. It lacked the green boskiness he remembered from the Vendelician border, that utter vitality that infused every breath, reminding a man that everything surrounding him was alive and growing and greedy. An uncanny feeling, sometimes, but he had come to understand why the Tennic peoples thought it holy. Yet this was different—not earthy, nor smoky. Instead it had an almost metallic tang—
‘Blood,’ Vitellius realized, and took a horrified step back, as though that would somehow protect his nose from the odor. The mist smelled of blood.
Vitellius had long known that the Lusetani used blood in their rites. The Arevaci magic-men had confirmed as much from the start, though they eschewed the practice themselves, so thoroughly that they could explain little of how it worked. The mist had never carried this scent before, and Vitellius shuddered to think what that might mean. As he scanned the ramparts, crinkled noses and confused expressions indicated that some of his men were noticing it, too. The focale around his neck grew warm and itched, the Fire magic woven into it recognizing a threat and rising to defend.
Still no akdraugi appeared, but through the mists, the Lusetani charged, criss-crossing the plains surrounding the town to avoid the defensive ditches, then pitching themselves against the walls. Fewer had ladders than in past assaults, and Vitellius marveled at the strength of those warriors who could haul themselves up by jamming pick-axes into whatever crevices they could find in Toletum’s walls.
Whatever questions Vitellius had about the strange turn in the Lusetani magic fell to the back of his mind as he commanded the fighting men. This came easily, now, and without the akdraugi, the legionaries were able to fight with their customary vigor. If the mist surrounding them was eerie, well, these were men trained in the forests of Vendelicia. Fogs and clouds couldn’t spook them. The Lusetani warriors swiftly realized their foes were at full strength, not weakened by the akdraugi, and broke off their attack.
Nonetheless, only when the black sky began to give way to the glowing blue of pre-dawn did Vitellius feel comfortable giving the order for the men to stand down. As the sun rose over the eastern bend of the Tagus River, the mist began to burn off, as though it were a normal morning fog. Only then did the warmth in Vitellius’s focale begin to fade.
Vitellius sent the legionaries to their long-overdue beds, summoning replacement guards for the walls from the ranks of the rested auxiliaries, but he himself continued pacing the ramparts. The tension of the night would not leave his body.
When he finally came down from the walls, Mennenius was waiting for him. “Still nothing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Vitellius said. “I ought to be glad.”
“But you can’t shake the feeling that there’s something we’re not seeing?”
Vitellius nodded. “Why would the Lusetani change their attack pattern after so long? There must be some strategy behind it, but in Mars’s name, I can’t figure out what it is.” He didn’t have enough information, that was the trouble, and he had no idea how to get it.
“Maybe they’re tiring,” Mennenius suggested. “Maybe something we’re doing has—has broken their magic?” He looked out toward the wall, as though he could see through it and beyond the Lusetani encampment, past the forest and up the river, to wherever their reinforcements were approaching from. “Maybe the other legions have broken them, somehow?”
The entire affair rubbed Vitellius the wrong way. Before Mennenius could say another word, Vitellius swung himself up onto one of the ladders and scaled it, joining Centurion Calix at the middle of the north wall. Mennenius followed. Calix saluted briefly, then shook his head at the retreating Lusetani. “That was . . . odd, sir.”
“Deliberately so, I think,” Vitellius said. “Did it seem you, Calix, as though their heart wasn’t really in it?”
Calix nodded. “That was a smaller force than they usually send against us—and we haven’t killed that many of them during their assaults.”
Vitellius rubbed his chin. He was in need of a shave, but they had all let a few niceties slip since barricading their gates. “They may have met with some other calamity,” he said, reasoning out loud more to himself than to Calix or Mennenius. “They may have been attacked from the far side, by our legions. The Vettoni allies may have deserted the Lusetani. The Lusetani themselves might be fracturing.” He raised his eyes to Calix. “But you don’t think so, either, do you?”
“No, sir, I don’t. They gave up far too easily. This was a feint.” Calix frowned, and Vitellius got the sense he was watching the battle a second time in his mind’s eye. “In another situation, I would say it was meant to lure us—but they must know we’re not going to leave the city. We haven’t even sent a sortie out in quite some time.” With Hanath and the bulk of the cavalry already out of the city, they had few horses and horsemen left behind. Vitellius hadn’t wanted to risk them on pointless sallies. “And the—the things.” Many of the Aventans would not use the word akdraugi, as though that might summon more of the fiends or grant them extra strength. “Where were they? Why send a mist without the demons behind it?”
“We could ask the Arevaci magic-men,” Mennenius suggested. “They may have some idea.”
Vitellius sighed. “Every instinct I have is telling me this is some kind of trick, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is.”
“We’ll keep a good watch, sir,” Calix said. “If those bastards try anything else, we’ll be alert to it.”
Vitellius clapped him on the shoulder. “Set someone else to it. You need rest.” As Calix saluted and left them, Vitellius looked pointedly at Mennenius. “You, too.”
“No more than you,” Mennenius said, dropping his voice. “The men may think you’re immune to these akdraugi, Gaius, but you and I know you’re not. If they get into your head, if they fell you—” The concern in Mennenius’s voice was not only tactical, not merely the worry of what would befall the cohorts without their primary commander; it was the compassion of a friend.
“I know,” Vitellius answered softly. “I will rest. I promise. I just . . .” He shrugged. “I need a walk first. A lap of the walls will do me good.”
Mennenius frowned, but nodded in acquiescence. “Wake me when you come in, then.”
He walked until nearly dawn, first on the walls, then back and forth through the city, from the main square to his headquarters and back again, until the ceaseless repetition of his feet finally quieted his unsettled mind enough to allow him to sleep. He passed Bartasco several times along the way; the Arevaci leader was as worried for his people as Vitellius was for the legionaries and spent as many
nights in wakeful apprehension. In mutual understanding, they merely nodded as they passed, each man leaving the other to his contemplation. There would be time to strategize later.
In the glowing morning light, Vitellius made good on his promise, waking Mennenius and flinging himself down on his bed, finally having walked himself to exhaustion, if not to restfulness. The sun was scarce any higher in the sky, however, when pounding on his door had him hurtling out of bed again. Even as he went to the door, he was looping his sword-belt around his waist. “What is it?” he asked, even before the door was open enough to see who was on the other side.
Mennenius was there, but not alone. With him were two other men he recognized: an Aventan medic and one of the healers native to Toletum. “Gaius,” Mennenius said, “we have a problem.”
* * *
“Keep your distance,” the Aventan medic advised as he pulled open the door. “We don’t know what caused this . . .”
Two legionaries lay on pallets in the healer’s back room. Their wheat-colored tunics were drenched through with sweat. One man was moaning, rolling from shoulder to shoulder on the cot; the other lay still, his eyes wide and staring up at the ceiling, his arms limp at his sides.
Sudden illness of any kind was bad enough. A fever sweeping through the camp now could be disastrous. But when the medic swung a lantern into the room, illuminating the men’s faces more clearly, Vitellius sucked in a horrified breath. He clamped a hand over his nose and mouth, backing away from the door frame.
Spots. Red spots and purplish blotches, all over their faces and beginning to crawl down their necks and shoulders.
Plague.
Vitellius thought of his focale, which had burned with his sister’s magic all through the night. Fire magic could purge poisons and illness. ‘Thank you, Venus and Vulcan, for your protection. Thank you, Latona.’