Banner of the Damned

by Sherwood Smith

  So far, no sign of the jarl and jarlan.

  In spite of the rigid politeness with which I was addressed, you would think a mage was little better than a thief. Anhar, however, was regarded as no threat. In the course of seeing to all the little details of life—laundry, food, and fodder—she was able to cross outside of those armed circles. She asked small questions or exchanged easy comments, and learned about how people lived. Though no one discussed politics.

  Glad to have something to report to Lasva, I wrote:

  As we were told, the word “Elgar” is never heard around this region. Yet according to Anhar, a nearby mossy structure is called Indasbridge, and down the Valley, the village is known as Indascamp. We stayed in a very old house that was made of golden stone. It had weather-softened contours and wide windows and doors that opened onto little gardens, making it clear that it had been built a century or two before the castles. Anhar was told proudly that Inda Harskialdna had been caught by a storm and stayed there with some of his relatives. And this morning, when she went for bread, someone pointed out a plateau on which nothing at all was built. This was apparently where Inda had died.

  The Marlovens do not build statues or commemorative buildings here, either. Their memorial art here is like elsewhere in the north, on display inside their halls: those mounted weapons, shields, and banners once carried by heroic ancestors.

  If the lancers thought war was imminent, they didn’t talk about it, in spite of their wariness, the way they carried weapons in hand, and their constant patrols. Human concerns like anyone else’s aired around campfires at night, or as we walked the horses through valleys still streaked with snow, over roads laid to accommodate speed and terrain. These roads never described pleasing curves, so that one might enjoy a vista from varying angles.

  There was little art as we understood it. The closest they came were the galloping ballads which invariably described heroism, battles, chases, and so forth. As we crossed those flat plains, so unlike the gracefully undulating hills of Colend, cloud castles flourished in the unimpeded sky, and toward nightfall the extravagant colors of Marloven banners were steadily drenched. Twilight, at last, reduced the storm to the charge of a single head-lowered horse, ridden by a muffled rider. I was beginning to see the world in their metaphor and resented it.

  And then came the attack.

  “Tomorrow we reach the border and head north,” Retrend said. There was no mistaking his relief.

  I should have taken that relief as a warning, but I, too, was relieved. The next day, as our horses struggled along the road under a heavy downpour, the scouts splashed back, calling out military terms that I did not understand, but this I did: “Forming up beyond the ridge.”

  I had been riding with my head bent so that rain would not run into my mouth as I muttered the road spell. I broke off as Retrend wheeled his horse back in my direction.

  “The king thought they wouldn’t come until after we crossed the border. Where the First Lancers are waiting.”

  “Why would anyone attack us? We’ve done nothing wrong!”

  “Their intent is either to capture or kill you.”

  I wanted to cry out, Why? “Who is attacking?” I asked, arms pressed against my churning middle.

  He opened his hands. “We may as well say Totha. It will make no difference soon. They risk reprisals by attacking us within their border. They must be claiming a new border, based on some ancient treaty, to try sidestepping the laws of peaceful passage.” He looked around as if there was some sort of sign in the gray, rain-curtained landscape.

  I saw Anhar’s painful expression at my side, and remembered what she had said about no one being threatened by the furniture.

  There were too few of us for anyone to be overlooked if our pursuers were intent on slaughter. “It makes no sense,” I muttered.

  From my arrival on the subcontinent of Halia I had experienced all the varieties of fear, from wariness to thick, choking terror. The terror was back and as sudden as those flames on the bridge, but this time, shadowing its heels was anger, as I watched Anhar’s terrified eyes flicking back and forth between us.

  Retrend and the lancers betrayed no such surprise or disbelief. In their faces I saw grim desperation, the revealing tic of a thundering heartbeat in the veins at neck and temple. They had expected an attack—but it was coming too soon.

  “I can transfer to the king,” I said. “Or one of you can, because you’ll know how to report.”

  “But he can do nothing. He’s a day’s ride away,” Retrend said bleakly.

  Fear feeds rage, I discovered. I was trembling with it, angrier at each breath. “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Find a defensive position. And defend to the last,” Retrend said.

  There were mutters from the lancers. I heard a few words—“honor,” “retribution”—but I stopped listening. The prospect of fighting to the last had meaning to them. It didn’t to me.

  I had done nothing wrong. I would do nothing wrong. This magery I was learning was good work—peaceful work. I cared nothing whatsoever about the “honor” of dying in a brutal, messy way.

  It could be that I am the only person whose mind, especially at moments of tension, will insist on bringing up memories that I would rather stay buried: in this instance, a painfully vivid image of what I had read in Fox’s record about those Venn mages.

  I would never do something as evil as transport a rock inside another living being. However, as my heart drummed behind my eyeballs, I thought, Why should I not defend myself against someone coming to kill me for no worthwhile reason?

  This and all my other concerns jumbled rapidly through my mind, as Retrend motioned to the lancers. They began to move about purposefully, one drawing Anhar away toward the remounts. “You won’t want to be in the front line,” the woman said with the sort of humor typical of Marlovens.

  With one backward, pleading glance my way, Anhar obeyed, as if obedience would restore order.

  I said to Retrend, “How long until they come?”

  Retrend glanced at the scout, who couldn’t be any older than seventeen. “A watch. Maybe,” this fellow said in his adolescent honk.

  Watches were six hours.

  “If we were to survive, could you make it seem that it was by some military ruse. At least, to Anhar?” I asked Retrend, whose brows shot up, and I felt obliged to explain, “Mages have politics as well as everyone else. I can’t do anything about the attackers, and of course the king must know whatever transpires, but if I can spare Anhar, I would.”

  Retrend clapped his fist against his chest, the sound a fervent expression of his hope in spite of all that talk of dying for honor, I thought.

  I said, “What will they do?”

  He replied with a grim smile, “With so few of us, it will be elementary: they will ride up in column, surround us, and see to it that none of us survive the circle.”

  “Ah-ye.” My throat was so tight it was difficult to speak. “Where will they break?”

  This time he looked around. “We will take up our position on that hill, using those trees as cover. So, they will break outside of bow shot, approximately there, just behind that stump.”

  “Good. Then have your people collect as many small pebbles, this size—” I made a circle on my palm. “As many as possible and bring them to me. I’ll tell you where to place them….”

  I would never transport rocks inside of other humans, but I had no compunction about transporting rocks inside of other rocks. Two things, I had learned, cannot possess the same space at the same time. One is impelled away from the other; the larger it is, the more violently it is flung away. Often in pieces.

  As the Marlovens brought my pebbles, I placed a destination transport spell on each, which I told the lancers to scatter along the route the attackers would come. I asked Retrend to position his people so that the break in the column would occur abreast of the tree stump on the one side, and mossy remain of a stone wall several pace
s away. I spelled until my head swam and I was staggering, but I kept at it until I’d completed my plan.

  We could hear the rumble of horse hooves, when I said, “It is ready.”

  Retrend signaled with a gesture, and his lancers took up their places behind the rough trunks of the cluster of droopy wild pepper trees, and strung their bows. I stood behind the first tree, with Retrend, struggling to calm myself with Altan breathing, with little success. My veins sang with fear-excitement. I had to trust it to get me through more spell-casting.

  Amid a splattering of mud and rain the attackers came, exactly as Retrend had predicted. Bows creaked around me—soft curses at the way the weather interfered with snapvine and bow tension—then the first twenty or thirty pairs reached my first avenue of pebbles, and I performed the spells to transfer each pebble’s mate inside. I’d bound these together in twos so that the transfers would be simultaneous. Even though the pebbles were small, and side by side, I felt the build of heat very swiftly, and I thought I caught the singe of cloth and hair as I rapidly closed the spell.

  The transfer was nearly invisible to us, as pebbles shifted inside pebbles, causing violent breakage, the bits hurling outward. The result was a sudden surge of angry, panicky horses as the line broke. Horses neighed and reared. Warriors fought and regained control. Their leaders shouted, and the line pressed on, though slower, their shields raised.

  When the leaders reached my boulder and stump, where Retrend guessed their column would break, I activated my second transfer. The resulting fragments of stone caught their horses full on the sides, and the riders at an angle just inside their shields, which were aimed forward.

  One shouted, two horses crashed together, and the person carrying the banner lost it and tried to reach for it. His horse spun on its back legs, and he fell with a crash in the mud.

  Still, the leader shouted, rallying them.

  That was all I had! My spells were done! Desperate, I stepped out, and for a single heartbeat I stared into that blanched, grim face, his eyes wide with fear, jaw jutted with determination.

  I spread my hands, whispered the easy spells of illusion, and lightning danced on both my palms. I could do nothing with a mere image, but as I hoped, the warriors were too ignorant of magic to recognize stage artifice.

  They broke and retreated in chaotic haste.

  Slowly, slowly, the Marlovens eased, first the tension of arrows nocked to bows, then their bodies. They remained in position until Retrend raised his hand. He motioned the scouts to follow the attackers. Within the space of five breaths, I heard galloping.

  They were gone. They were gone, and I had driven them away. The relief was intensified by a flush of triumphant sweetness. Oh, the exaltation! This was the power of magic.

  I dropped my head and clasped my hands inside my robe in an effort to hide the heady joy that made me so nearly dizzy. I used Altan breathing as I followed Retrend through the leaf-strewn duff and down the hill to where Anhar waited, holding the remounts’ line in a death grip.

  “You did it?” she asked. “You fought them off?”

  Retrend glanced my way; I did not trust my voice not to tremble. He said, “Couldn’t see in the rain.” It was clear he hated lying. He raised his head and said more sharply, addressing everyone, “They might be back. I suggest we run for the border, cross country. You and you on point….”

  And that is what happened.

  We used my glowglobe for night travel. At least the rain had lifted by then. The tired horses and riders plodded on, everyone’s lower limbs caked with mud, until at last someone gave a shout of relief. The outer perimeter riders spotted us just as another band of rain overtook us.

  Soon we were inside the First Lancers’ camp. The voices around me were high with hilarity as the warriors joked back and forth. Anhar and the remounts were led off to the horse picket, where I knew someone would help her set up our tent. I sat on my horse unable to move. My head throbbed, and I was shivering with cold and reaction, joy and trepidation, exhaustion and nervous energy by turns.

  Ivandred emerged from his tent. As always, I was a little startled by his appearance, though he had never said anything remotely threatening to me. It was more that I could not disassociate him from bloody scalps, red-streaked swords… and that bruise on Lasva. The lingering joy subsided completely.

  He seemed not to notice the rain that dotted his coat in dark gray splotches and beaded in his pale hair. “Report,” he said.

  I began to search for the best words, but Retrend, long experienced, uttered a military summation of the situation, wonderfully succinct.

  Ivandred glanced briefly at me and back as he said, “You say they carried a banner. Whose?”

  I could not recall the color, much less the device. My memory was of a sodden mass of fabric blotched with unremarkable color.

  “Old Algara,” Retrend said unerringly. “Brown and silver owl on white.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Evrec is shadowing them.”

  Ivandred flicked up his hand in acknowledgment then said, “Proceed as ordered. Same road. Leave them to us.”

  Retrend thumped his fist against his chest and walked away, talking low-voiced to a couple of his lancers. Ivandred turned to me. “How did you accomplish this spell with the rocks? I thought it was impossible to transport something into something else, but Retrend makes it sound like you did.”

  “Using the transport spell we are taught, it’s impossible. But the Herskalt made me take it apart and reconstruct it, so now I understand how to modify it,” I said, and explained. Ivandred listened closely. I wondered if he was thinking of trying to spray pebbles at enemies—if he did, I thought, it would be far less terrible than using swords and lances. I coached him until he understood, then I said, “I was hoping that as little about my part would be said as possible. I cannot help what the Totha attackers will say, of course, but our folk.”

  “Do not worry about the Tothans.” Ivandred’s voice and his face were devoid of emotion, but again I sustained that thrill of dread. “As for your request. I understand what you want. And I concur.” He lifted his chin toward the busy camp. “We train all our lives to defend ourselves, but the idea that some mage, even a little thing like you, could wiggle a hand, mutter something, and cause one of us to drop dead, it is disheartening.”

  It is exhilarating, I thought, but enough dread remained to enable me to hide the reaction. “Yet we know only Norsunder does that kind of magic.”

  He made a negating motion. “We know that is not true.”

  I thought again of those terrible Venn mages. I had refused to read any more of Fox’s memoir, so I did not know the specifics, but I knew that these Venn had fought Retrend’s and Ivandred’s ancestors, and in some ballad there was probably a bloody description of what had come to pass by magic.

  He let me go then, and I retired to our tent, but I was not permitted to rest.

  “There is something they are not telling me,” Anhar said, arms pressed tightly across her front. “Did they cut scalps away from those people?”

  I flung up my hands to ward Thorn Gate. “Nothing like that,” I exclaimed without thinking.

  She exclaimed in surprise, “Then what is so terrible?”

  I thought about her words, and Ivandred’s words, and found a sliver of truth, while still protecting her. “I used stage magic. It frightened them away.”

  “Oh-h-h-h,” Anhar nodded, then winced. “And they are ashamed that they do not have bloody scalps?”

  It would have been easy to agree, but I had already been dishonest enough. “It is more like such a ruse will never work again. Surely someone somewhere will explain to the Tothans that it was merely stage illusion.”

  “Then next time, they will attack,” she murmured, grim again.

  But next time, surely, I will have a plan, I thought, as I curled up to sleep.

  ONE

  OF THE VAGARIES OF FAME

  T

 
hree or four days later, when we camped, out came the hoarded distilled liquor. Anhar and I were considerably surprised. The lancers used swords in wild and exciting dances, with much whirling, martial posturing, and heel drumming in counterpoint to the hand drums. When I asked Retrend if there was a festival day we were unaware of, he grinned, offered me a drink from his flask, and said, “The king and the First Lancers found the attackers.”

  “Found?”

  “They won’t be talking to anybody.”

  He turned back to the celebration as I comprehended what it meant: they were all dead.

  My emotions were a turmoil, but foremost was my awareness of no desire to celebrate. I retreated to our tent, where Anhar asked the expected question. “Good,” she said fiercely. “I am glad. They were going to kill us, people who did them no harm. Who they had never met! Aren’t you glad?”

  “I was glad the moment he said it,” I answered. And I had been—a pulse of angry vindication, but it lasted only as long as the walk to the tents. More lingering was the memory of the leader’s face, his nose with a bump in it, jug ears a lot like Birdy’s. His horror, then the tightening of determination. I would swear he hadn’t wanted to kill us, but that determination made it plain he would carry out his… orders? Duty? Honor?

  We traveled on. The long, alternately dusty or muddy road was broken by the occasional pleasure of Birdy’s letters. The Marlovens acknowledged Restday by passing around a wine flask, but otherwise we traveled like always, and if they had other festival days, those went past unnoticed by us. Maybe the ballads or dances changed? I was never certain. I did transfer to Choreid Dhelerei on Flower Day, to visit the baker who made rolls something like Colendi lily breads. I brought those back to Anhar, who wept as we ate them in silence, the homesickness sharp and poignant in the lack of music and flowers and pretty silken clothes.