The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Closed redoubts watched the ends, with trenches. On the west side, the ridge ran to the very edge of the creek that helped define the position. On the east side, the ridge petered out into a deep, wide bog. Behind her there was the higher ground with the old fort. They didn’t have the manpower to hold it—but it would take a determined assault willing to take heavy losses to get round the east end and past the redoubt—and the covered, secret surprise.

  She knew the smell of roast boglin and it was heavy in the air. She wrinkled her nose and exchanged salutes with the armoured men in the south redoubt. They’d clearly stood to arms, and now looked sheepish and bored.

  “Plenty of fighting later,” she said. “Christ, only a fool looks forward to it.”

  She peered out over the wall. Someone out there was alive—a very accurate sling stone buzzed past her head.

  “Fuck me,” she muttered. But she was on display, and she enjoyed the salutes. They never got old. She grinned. “Don’t get hit,” she said. “That’s an order.”

  A generation of very young Jarsay knights grinned back at her. She’d been, to all intents, the primus pilus for three weeks. Everyone knew her.

  “Don’t stand there like gowps,” she snapped. “Get a couple of archers behind a mantlet and scour the killing ground. You know the drill.”

  The second attack had more meat in it. There was a directing intelligence behind it—at least, they heard horns and bellows—and a boiling mass of boglins threw surprising amounts of wood and grass and ferns and other organic matter—including charred boglins—into the ditch. They’d crossed the marsh silently, mostly the new imps and more boglins.

  A heavy crossbow coughed from a covered position well up the ridge. On one of the few small mounds of dry in the swamp, a daemon was struck right through his body. His screams went on until one of his mates finished him. The boglins crossed, climbed up the revetment, and died.

  Some of the farmers from the valley and the Brogat, working away at clearing trees and digging dirt, were appalled by the wave of boglins. Some ran. A few deserted.

  A few started killing boglins with shovels.

  “Sign ’em up,” Sauce said. Both men proved to be farm labourers—men who owned nothing and were almost slaves.

  “How’d we get all this farm labour?” she asked Ser John.

  Ser John was watching the sky. They had four towers going up, all holding new-built torsion machines. He was wondering where the wyverns were. “The Captain of Albinkirk offered a year’s remission of all taxes for ten days’ digging,” he said.

  Sauce grinned. “That Captain of Albinkirk, he’s one smart man.”

  A little after two in the afternoon, and the mess kettles were on for dinner. A convoy rolled in from Albinkirk—forty wagons full of food and munitions. Sheaves of new arrows, already on spacers in linen bags, and new tinned-iron kettles. Some new brass kettles made in Genua.

  “Miss me?” the captain said, and Sauce threw her arms around him and kissed him. Some of the newer members of the company and some of the knights with Ser Ricar were appalled. Others cheered.

  She leaned back to look at him. “You look like you got the cream.”

  He laughed. “We’ll see,” he said. “The cream may yet get me. In the meantime…”

  He spent two hours with them, outlining the new alliance, quelling their fears of having a Wild ally, and riding along the two ridges south and west of the Hole and one high beech-tree-covered ridge north and west of the little stream.

  When he was done, he bowed in the saddle to Ser John. “You’ve done it. It’s beautiful.”

  Ser John was hesitant. “I was only going to be here until today—tomorrow at the outside.”

  The captain nodded, his eyes on the distant Green Hills. “I expect we’ll fight tomorrow, but the real fight will be the day after.” He kept watching the hills. “I may have this all wrong. The sorcerer can still just go north into the woods and come at us on the old Ticondaga road or across West Kanata.”

  Sauce raised an eyebrow. “But?”

  “But he has much greater supply problems than we do,” the captain said with his breezy confidence.

  “A million monsters…”

  “They still have to eat. And no supply train, no wagons, nothing.” The captain was watching the woods. “He can go around—but will he have an army at the end?”

  Ser John whistled. “You give me joy,” he said.

  The captain shook his head. “He could still decide to march into Morea. Then—” He sighed. “Then it’s all for nothing, and we start making stuff up.” He looked down at the first ridge, below them. “Every attack by boglins makes me happy. Bad Tom ought to reach you at sunset.”

  Sauce started. Ser John raised both eyebrows.

  “Messengers. All the white banda will come in—here. Tom’s Hillmen will stay out—off our right flank, in the ravines to the east, on the other bank of the Albin.” He looked back at both of them. “I’m not going to repeat Chevin. I can only hope that Thorn is.”

  Ser John chewed the end of his moustache. Sauce chewed her hair.

  Sauce said, “Why not hit one end of our line or another and roll us up?”

  The captain shrugged. “Then we have a battle. I’m trying to be the sorcerer. He can’t have much control over his minions beyond ‘stop’ and ‘go.’ I don’t think the stone trolls can form fours and march to the flank. But we’ve had time to prepare and we’ve used it. It should prove a decisive advantage.”

  Sauce said, “But you have doubts.”

  The Red Knight nodded. “I always have doubts.”

  Sauce glanced at him.

  “My military tutor had an interesting definition for this situation,” the captain went on. “He said that a battle was a situation where two commanders each thought they had a decisive superiority and one was wrong.” He was still watching the distant hills. “I keep putting myself in the shoes—or what-have-you—of the sorcerer. Why’s he even here? He should go home and declare victory.” He frowned. “I’m missing something.”

  “He killed your mother, and you think he should just go home?” Sauce said. “Don’t you want to fight?”

  He looked at her as if she had something hideous springing from her forehead. “That’s amateur talk, Sauce. You taught me better than that. This is strictly business.”

  Sauce laughed. “I never said any such thing.” She shrugged. “Maybe I did.”

  “You did. You were talking about johns, and sex. But it’s the same lesson. No room here for hate. Strictly business. War is about mess kettles and latrines and having the last set of warm, dry fighters in reserve.” He nodded. “I think the sorcerer hates us. That would be excellent.”

  “He killed your ma,” Sauce said.

  “Drop it, Sauce.” His eyes were suddenly on her, and there at the edges was the red she’d expected all day.

  “You’ve got to be human,” she said.

  “I’ve been very human recently. Right now, I’m the captain.” He played with a glove.

  She looked out over the wilderness that stretched away—everywhere—for miles.

  “Why are we fighting here? You said Albinkirk.” Sauce found that she was angry. He was up to something. She thought of all her conversations with Mag.

  He had that look she hated, where he, in fact, had all the answers and all his talk was just bullshit.

  “I thought we’d fight at Albinkirk, but things changed. I changed my mind. The Faery Knight, Bad Tom—the Emperor.” He shrugged. “What is eating you?”

  “We’re going to fight the Wild with Wild things inside our own ranks, and on their ground.” Sauce looked at him. “Everything I know about war, I learned from you, Jehan, Cully and Tom, and everything tells me this is the wrong place. In a swamp? In the woods?”

  He looked at her and nodded.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She frowned. “Suddenly, you are the Queen’s Captain,” she said. “I thought we were a free company.
On adventure. Making our fortunes. Not making you King.”

  “King?” He laughed. “Oh, Sauce, I promise you I do not want to be King of Alba.”

  That relieved her. “Or King of the North?” she asked.

  “Nor that.” He smiled.

  She still thought the smile was too charming and too false.

  “What are you after, then?” she asked.

  “After the battle,” he said. “There’s so many angles now, I can’t remember them all. Let’s win the battle. Then—we’ll have a command meeting.”

  This made her smile. “Unless we’re dead.”

  “Right, in which case the meeting is off.” He smiled back, and for a moment, they were who they had once been.

  Before he left, the captain spent another hour closeted with Mag. Neither of them shared what had been discussed.

  At sunset, the white banda marched into camp from the east, along the same set of low ridges over which Bad Tom and his Hillmen had disappeared. They were on foot and all their wagons were gone—left on the other side of the river to the east.

  The celebration was muted, and nearly ruined by the last-light assault of a mixed force of creatures of the Wild. But darkness did not help them negotiate the traps; superior night vision was of little use in seeing stakes dug in days before, and a pair of torsion engines dropped baskets of rocks on the beaten zone.

  No Head watched it all from the westernmost tower with a bottle in one hand and a stylus in the other.

  Half an hour later he reported to Sauce and Ser John, on the forward wall overlooking the Hole.

  “Gelfred says they’re well around us, and working up to an attack on the back of the camp.” No Head opened his wax slate. “I have a whole forest of suggestions and additions to the current scheme.”

  Sauce looked smug.

  Within ten minutes the whole camp was standing to arms. The farmers were drawn up well back from the walls, with improvised weapons to hand. There were archers in the towers and men-at-arms lining all four sides of the camp wall.

  Just at moonrise there was a cacophony of horns. Mag was sewing away, making mess kettle bags for the new kettles at a great rate.

  On the wall, Ser Bescanon sounded a horn.

  Mag bit off her thread, took up a small piece of char and snapped her fingers. The char burnt to ash.

  Sixty yards from the ditch of the camp’s back wall, there was a deep hollow, almost a long bowshot from end to end, fully covered from the firing positions on the camp wall. All along that hollow, there were clay jars buried deep in the soft earth, each sealed with wax and with a piece of the very same char cloth—linen woven on the same bolt—in the midst of the jar.

  And bits of rusty metal and old nails and the like.

  And several pounds of Master Smythe’s powder.

  Mag’s tiny working produced six prodigious explosions.

  Immediately, the back gate of the camp opened and a mounted sortie went out—first a dozen Vardariots under Zac who spread like a magick curtain in front of the knights, and then forty knights armed cap-à-pied. Behind them came another forty men-at-arms who shook out into a loose line with two paces between armoured men.

  The mounted men cleared the road by torchlight, and the dismounted men-at-arms did most of the killing. In the dark, a man in armour was very hard to injure, and anything without armour—especially stunned, wounded cave bears and irks—were easily dispatched.

  The smell of hell come to earth—sulphur and saltpeter—hung in the damp night air.

  In the night, Mag exchanged workings with something out in the darkness. She left two great golden shields over the whole of the camp when she went to her blanket roll. The golden shields caused as much lost sleep and consternation among the newer men and women as irks and boglins might have done.

  Mag awoke to find the young Mortirmir was releasing fireballs from a tower—one working that loosed one small ball from each fingertip, where they hurried out into the darkness like malignant glow flies. By the time she climbed the tower to him, he was showing off, casting complex arcs of light and tiny focused beams of red.

  “You could save some of that for when it matters,” Mag said.

  With a dramatic swoosh, Morgon produced a magnificent, gurgling bundle of focused ops like a tiny sun, complete to straying arms of white-hot gas. He flung it so far that it simply vanished.

  “What was that for?” Mag asked. There was a precision to the way he used ops and the way he focused that she admired—more as a seamstress than as a magicker.

  He turned and smiled his ingenuous smile. “Just because I can,” he said. “Ser Milus says by now the woods are full a mile or more deep around us.”

  Off to the north and east, there was a sudden glow—then a deep, pulsing red burning, and then a hollow thum followed by a sharp crack.

  “I wanted to see how far I could throw something really powerful. Bet someone’s surprised.”

  Mag sighed. “I’m going back to bed. Please don’t be such a small boy.”

  Chastened, Morgon climbed down off the tower.

  In the morning, the survivors of the imperial army were paraded and re-armed. They received a curious collection of weapons—trade swords and crossbows stripped from the two Etruscan warehouses in Albinkirk, every spare sword, shield, or dented cap in the arsenal in the citadel; hunting bows, and even some stone throws used for hunting squirrels, crossbows that threw a clay pellet instead of a bolt.

  All the spare horses—including every destrier the company captured in the south—went to re-horse the white banda and to fill out a full squadron of Morean cavalry.

  The captain came with his household, and then the Queen came with hers, and behind them were another fifteen hundred peasants with shovels. But they never came into the company camp—instead, they halted almost a mile to the rear and began building a second camp on the ridge with the old fort.

  The captain addressed the Moreans in Archaic. They didn’t cheer, but neither did they grumble. Ser Christos stood on a barrel and told all the phylarchs that he had personally seen the Emperor’s body prepared, and that they would take it back to the city together—when they had been victorious.

  Then Ser Christos took all the Moreans except a handful and marched them away to the new camp.

  Sauce watched them go. “What’s he doing?” she asked Michael, who was already clerking in a tent—not his own.

  Michael shook his head. “No idea. Except that he doesn’t think the battle will be here.”

  Sauce groaned. “He said here! Now where?”

  Michael was writing out orders—all in numbered sequences.

  Sauce frowned at him. “This is too fucking complicated. Tom and I are gone and he’s off the leash and making up dangerous plans that won’t work.”

  Michael paused. “I think this will work,” he said in a neutral tone.

  “Why’s he so talkative and chipper?” Sauce asked.

  Michael cleared his throat.

  “Tell!” Sauce said. “Michael, how often have I stood by you?”

  “He’s got a girl,” Michael said.

  “Not Amicia?” Sauce asked.

  “Word is Amicia told him to sod off. And he’s found someone a little more willing.” Michael raised his pen. “Sauce, this could all be nonsense.”

  “The Queen?” Sauce barked. It was almost a screech.

  “No,” Michael said. “It’s a long story. One of the Queen’s ladies. A laundress.”

  That stopped Sauce in full anti-aristocratic spate. “A laundress?” she asked.

  “Sauce, I don’t know. Now may I finish writing out his orders?” He met her eye. In the captain’s very voice he said, “Don’t you have something you ought to be doing?”

  Sauce laughed.

  In the streets of the camp, Wilful Murder sat with Tippit and Cuddy and Cully.

  “Where’s No Head?” Long Paw asked. It was an old tradition, and even now that Long Paw was a knight he liked to see it done.<
br />
  They were whetting their points. Each good arrow was taken out and its steel point sharpened. Bodkins that would pass between the links of mail and horse-droppers that would rip the guts out of a wyvern and the new arrows, big stonebreakers on half-inch shafts for cave trolls with blunt heads like the ones used for birds but filled with lead.

  “No Head’s too important for the like o’ us,” Wilful muttered. “Telling the diggers where to dig. Waste o’ time, if you ask me.”

  Long Paw laughed. “Why? I like the odds—us behind twenty feet of rampart.”

  “We ain’t fightin’ here,” Wilful Murder said in his hangdog voice.

  “Like fuck!” Cully said. “Of course we’re fightin’ here.”

  Wilful Murder wore a straw hat on his arming cap, and he pushed it back off his forehead. “Oh, is that so?”

  Cuddy sighed. “I’m sure you’re going to tell us.”

  “The cap’n brought up horses for every one o’ you what lost yer horses.” Wilful Murder shrugged. “Stands to reason.”

  “Knights need horses,” Cully said.

  Tippit smiled.

  “And all the archers?” Wilful said, in exactly the voice he’d use when he rolled the pips he needed to win a game. “Why the fuck we all suddenly got horses, if’n we ain’t leaving?”

  There was a pause.

  Tippit cursed—one of his original, florid, somewhat terrifying curses—this one to do with seals and sex. Then he sighed. “I hate it when you make sense.”

  There was no trumpet. Just after midnight, Ganfroy went from tent line to tent line and woke the knights, and the rest went the way it should have—with a lot of forgotten equipment, men missing, Oak Pew unaccountably drunk, and a great deal of cursing. The chaos was made worse by the silent intrusion of new men—militia and local knights. Lord Wayland’s retinue. The Grand Squire. They were good knights but not professional soldiers. They were moving into the places vacated by the company.

  “Up past their bed times,” Wilful Murder muttered.

  But it was done, and in under an hour, including the rapid serving out of rations—salt pork, bacon, peas and butter and good bread in big four-pound loaves.