She felt sick as she glanced around the giant chamber. Sandy wasn’t the only desperate girl; there were dozens, clinging to their dates or surrounding the food tables as if someone might snatch it away any second. The band was playing a merry tune, but no amount of music and laughter could drive away the gloom overshadowing the city. Even the professional entertainers looked nervous.
“You should eat something,” Sergeant Miles told her. “You never know when you might have to fight.”
Emily scowled, but allowed him to lead her towards the table anyway. It was covered in plates of fancy food, so elaborate and posh that she couldn’t help thinking that it would have taken hours to make. What was wrong with simple foods? They would probably have been more efficient, in the long run. Instead ... she rolled her eyes at something that looked like a stuffed sausage, then took a small plate of food for herself. There was enough on one table alone to feed a large family for weeks.
And the remainder will probably be tossed out instead of being given away, she thought, morbidly. Or simply allowed to decay into waste.
She caught sight of Gaius and made a face as she saw him leading Sandy around the room, an arm draped possessively over her shoulder. Sandy didn’t look happy, but she made no move to shrug him off. The other girls didn’t look any happier, even as they crammed their plates with food. They knew the good times were coming to an end.
At least they’re not outside, Emily thought. There were people starving on the streets and reports, unsubstantiated so far, of cannibalism. It could be worse.
“Baroness Emily,” Sir Roger said. “Can I have a moment of your time?”
Emily looked up. Sir Roger was standing there, Lord Fulbright and Lord Alcott nearby. It looked as through the three of them had been talking. She didn’t want to talk to any of them, but she didn’t see a choice. Sergeant Miles nodded towards Master Storm, then headed off to speak to him. Emily couldn’t help feeling as if she’d been abandoned.
“As you wish,” she said, finally. He was still calling her Baroness. She bit down the annoyance and allowed him to lead her over to the other two men. “What can I do for you?”
Sir Roger’s voice was suddenly serious. “You can explain to Lord Fulbright that my men need to eat!”
“That our men need to eat,” Lord Alcott snapped. He glowered at Lord Fulbright. “One cannot live on straw!”
Emily looked from one to the other. “What exactly is the problem?”
“This ... man has been reserving rations for his horses,” Lord Alcott said. He jabbed a finger at Lord Fulbright. “My men are starving!”
“And mine are in poor shape,” Sir Roger agreed.
“You are supposed to organize their rations yourself,” Lord Fulbright said. He peered down his long nose at Sir Roger. “It is your duty.”
“And the suppliers cheated us,” Sir Roger hissed. “We are desperately short of food!”
Emily resisted the urge to look at the nearest table. Servants were already materializing, bringing new plates of food. More and more people were lining up to be fed, even though she was sure they were on their second or third helpings. Setting a good table was apparently one way to display your wealth, in Zangaria at least, but it sent exactly the wrong message when the rest of the city was starving. She couldn’t help wondering just how long it would be before desperate mobs stormed the mansions.
“That is hardly my problem,” Lord Fulbright said. “You’re responsible for the care and feeding of your men.”
“The grain you’re feeding your horses could keep my men alive,” Sir Roger said. “And we’re not the only unit running out of food!”
“That is correct,” Lord Alcott said. “I’ve ordered redistributions amongst infantry units, but we will still run out of food within the next few days. Nothing is coming into the city.”
Emily rubbed her forehead, feeling the dull ache of a headache throbbing behind her temple. There was no logistics service on the Nameless World, no single organization responsible for provisioning the army. Officers were supposed to attend to it themselves, as well as carrying out their other duties. She’d heard dozens of horror stories about officers who forgot to provision their men, or supply officers who bought food from the lowest bidder ... it wasn’t uncommon, she’d been told, for soldiers to be fed rotting food or poisonous wine. Sir Roger was at least trying, she supposed. Sergeant Miles had told her that there were officers who simply didn’t bother to attend to their duties.
Which is why the men start foraging on their own, she thought, grimly. And why discipline begins to break down.
“We need to kill and eat your horses,” Sir Roger said.
Lord Fulbright couldn’t have looked more shocked if Sir Roger had proposed butchering and eating small children. “Are you out of your mind? We need those horses!”
“For what?” Sir Roger asked. “What happened when your men tried a charge?”
“They got slaughtered,” Lord Alcott put in.
“Thousands of men are starving,” Sir Roger said. “They need to be fed.”
“That’s no concern of mine,” Lord Fulbright said. “Those horses do not belong to the army!”
Of course not, Emily recalled. The cavalry is expected to equip themselves.
“The army needs to be fed,” she said, gently. “What will happen when the soldiers run out of food?”
Lord Fulbright snorted. “What happens when the cavalry can no longer charge to the battle?”
“They’d have to pick up pikes and swords,” Lord Alcott said.
“My men are not common soldiers,” Lord Fulbright insisted. “They will not fight on the ground.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Emily said. “What happens when the army runs out of food?”
“That’s no concern of mine,” Lord Fulbright said. “And it is no concern of yours either.”
Emily felt her temper start to snap. “In this room alone,” she said, “there is enough food to keep the entire army fed for several days. And here you are, pigging out while your men starve!”
“My men are not starving,” Lord Fulbright told her. He sounded faintly insulted. “And it is important to keep up morale.”
“The remainder of the army is already on the verge of starving,” Emily pointed out. “How do you expect them to remain loyal if they’re starving to death?”
She put firm controls on her temper, reminding herself that Lord Fulbright’s men were aristocrats. He wasn’t stupid enough to let them starve. They’d start complaining to their families, who would complain to their kings. She had no idea what sort of political compromise had made Lord Fulbright Master of Horse, but she doubted it would survive many complaints.
But he was staring at her as if she’d suddenly started speaking in tongues.
“I’m sure General Pollack would agree to some kind of compensation,” she said, trying to push her annoyance aside. “If we survive the next few weeks, I’m sure you’d be able to convince the White Council to pay for the horses. But the city will not survive if you have a mutiny in the ranks.”
“The cavalry will put it down,” Lord Fulbright informed her.
Sir Roger sniggered. “That’s what they said in Swanhaven,” he said, sardonically. “A hundred cavalrymen were lost in the chaos.”
And how many peasants, Emily asked herself silently, were crushed to death beneath their hooves?
“This isn’t Swanhaven,” Lord Fulbright said.
“No, it isn’t,” Emily said. “This is a city on the verge of starvation, a city where the vast majority of men have weapons and know how to use them, a city that already feels abandoned and betrayed by its rulers. What’s going to happen when the food runs out?”
She hadn’t realized just how loudly she was talking, or how many people were listening, until she was suddenly aware of the silence. People — countless people — were staring at her, as if they couldn’t quite comprehend her words. They’d always seen themselves as masters, she kne
w, part of the ruling class even if they weren’t rulers. But a starving city was one permanently on the verge of boiling over. Swanhaven had given King Randor a very hard time and, in many ways, nothing had actually been resolved. Who knew how much trouble Farrakhan could cause?
Magic crackled around her, on the verge of breaking loose, as she turned and stalked through the crowd. They parted before her, their eyes fearful. Emily kept walking, unwilling to stop until she was out of the mansion and striding down towards the gates. The guards looked surprised to see her, but made no move to block her path. They probably hadn’t heard her words.
The entire city will know what I said tomorrow, she thought morbidly, as she recast the night vision spell. And the story will have grown in the telling.
She shook her head in annoyance. There had probably been a better way to handle the situation, but what? Lord Fulbright considered his horses more important than the lives of someone else’s men. And yet, the horses were largely useless unless they could be moved out of the city. Their only value lay in scouting ... hell, they hadn’t done a very good job of that either. They certainly hadn’t detected the enemy army until it was alarmingly close.
Which means the scouts probably got caught, she told herself. They certainly never reported back.
Farrakhan was a confusing maze of streets and alleyways, but it was easy enough to pick her way through the darkness towards the barracks. There seemed to be fewer refugees sleeping in the alleyways, either because they’d been moved to houses or because they’d simply starved to death. She wouldn’t have bet on the former. There had been enough empty space, in the mansion, to house hundreds of refugees.
She heard a sound behind her and spun around. A spell danced on her fingertips — she’d heard too many stories about footpads and rapists — only to fade away as she realized who was following her. Sergeant Miles held up his hands in mock surrender, his face oddly amused. Emily flushed, wondering just what he was about to say. General Pollack hadn’t been at the party, as far as she knew, but Lord Fulbright would certainly have given Sergeant Miles an earful about his apprentice’s behavior. And yet, she’d been right. The army was on the verge of starvation ...
... And when the food ran out, discipline would run out too.
“I don’t think you made Lord Fulbright very happy,” he said, dryly. He fell into step beside her, his hands clasped behind his back. “But quite a few others agreed with you.”
“Oh,” Emily said. Sergeant Miles sounded ... amused, almost. “What happened after I left?”
“Lord Fulbright fumed, Lady Baroness,” Sergeant Miles said. “He was not a happy bunny.”
Emily couldn’t help smiling. Technically, as a baroness — even if she was in exile — she outranked Lord Fulbright. It wasn’t easy to determine social precedence in a world where the rights and duties of a noble title might be different in different kingdoms, but it was unlikely that Lord Fulbright outranked her. And yet, she was also an apprentice, apprenticed to common-born Sergeant Miles. He had to be more than a little confused.
“I’m sorry,” she said, finally. “But it did have to be said.”
“It did,” Sergeant Miles agreed. “You may have earned yourself plenty of new friends.”
He shrugged. “And enemies too, of course.”
“We should be eating the horses,” Emily said. Alassa would have been horrified at the thought, but Emily found it hard to agree. She had no love for the beasts. “Surely we could find a way to compensate the owners.”
“That might be tricky,” Sergeant Miles said. “The horsemen would sooner die than give up their horses.”
Emily shook her head. The Allied Lands ... there were times she thought the Allied Lands simply didn’t care about the threat on the borders. They were more interested in playing games than taking the war seriously. Even the magicians seemed disinclined to find ways to actually end the war. It was maddening.
She glanced at him. “Why haven’t the necromancers won?”
“Probably because they’re just as divided as us,” Sergeant Miles told her. “And we should be grateful.”
He patted her shoulder as they reached the barracks. “Get some rest,” he ordered. “The General will want to see you in the morning.”
“Great,” Emily said, sarcastically.
Chapter Thirty
“AH, EMILY,” GENERAL POLLACK SAID, AS she stepped into the war room. “Have a seat.”
Emily nodded and sat down next to Casper. He and Gaius had also been invited, suggesting she wasn’t going to be told off by the general personally. It would have been awkward for him, the nasty part of her mind noted. Should she be considered a baroness or an apprentice, his potential daughter-in-law or just another subordinate? Lord Fulbright was probably already writing stiff letters of complaint to King Randor. Emily rather hoped the king would take one look and drop them in the fire.
At least he won’t be foolish enough to complain to Void, she thought. Or to Gordian.
Casper winked at her as she sat down. Gaius looked amused, but there was something about his demeanor that told her he’d had a very good night indeed. Sandy and he had probably shared a bed ... she couldn’t recall hearing him come back to the barracks, even though they had strict orders not to sleep elsewhere. But then, Master Bone was occupied with something on the other side of the city and probably hadn’t noticed his apprentice’s absence. It wasn’t as if any of the other apprentices were going to rat him out.
Of course not, she told herself. We might want to sneak out one night too.
“The situation is dire,” General Pollack said. He gave Emily a mischievous smile. Just for a second, she could see Caleb in him. “As you can see—” he jabbed a finger at the map hanging from the wall “—the city is enveloped.”
Emily nodded, slowly. The map was far from perfect — it looked to have been sketched out by a soldier, rather than a trained cartographer — yet she could see just how dire their position had become. Farrakhan wasn’t precisely surrounded — the necromancer was keeping his distance — but the enemy was in position to intercept and destroy any escape attempts before they made it to safety. And there was no one coming to help them. Farrakhan was being left to starve while the kingdom prepared defenses further to the north.
This is Leningrad, she thought. If we stay where we are, we starve; if we try to escape, we die. And we cannot surrender.
“We can muster the army,” Gaius suggested. “A flight northwards ...”
“Would mean abandoning the civilians,” General Pollack pointed out, tartly. “And it would get the army destroyed.”
Emily felt a sudden rush of affection. Lord Fulbright, she was sure, would put the army over the city. And, from a very cold-blooded point of view, he might well be right. Farrakhan was doomed. The army might be able to survive, if it abandoned the civilians and retreated north.
But we would be caught out in the open, she mused. They’d crush us before we could hope to escape.
“The enemy seems content to wait for us to starve,” General Pollack said. “However, I believe he will launch an attack once he thinks our defenders have weakened. We have to act fast. I want you — the three of you — to locate the necromancer.”
Emily glanced at him. “You don’t know where he is?”
“We think he’s somewhere to the south,” General Pollack said. His finger traced a line on the map. “But so far we haven’t been able to pin him down. He may have retreated all the way to Heart’s Eye.”
Casper nodded. “Of course, father,” he said, briskly. “And what do you want us to do when we find him?”
Emily frowned. Casper was alarmingly confident. They would be searching for a needle in a haystack, all the while trying to dodge enemy patrols. The necromancer would be difficult to find if the haze had returned. She still had no idea how he’d managed to produce the effect, let alone keep it in place long enough to be effective. But the haze would be enough to give them a rough location ...
“Alert the other magicians,” General Pollack told him. “They’ll join you and lure him into a battle.”
“Ouch,” Gaius said.
Emily felt the snake-bracelet on her wrist. A dozen magicians, six of them masters, pitted against a necromancer ... it might be winnable, but the odds were good that most of the magicians were going to die. This necromancer might be cunning enough not to let himself get lured into an uneven battle and eventually run out of magic. But General Pollack was desperate. The army was doomed unless he found a way to tip the balance in his favor.
She remembered the batteries and smiled. There might be a way to weaken the necromancer — or to hit him hard enough to make him back off, even without Wildfire. Did they have Wildfire? She wasn’t sure if there was any left. The potions were not only expensive, but incredibly difficult to make.
And if nothing else, she told herself firmly, I can nuke him.
It wouldn’t be easy, she knew. The nuke-spell was almost pathetically easy to analyze. She wasn’t sure of the exact physics behind it, but that hardly mattered. Letting another magician too close would open Pandora’s Box. Every magician in the world would suddenly be able to blow up cities. And yet ...
She contemplated options as General Pollack rattled off a list of instructions, ending with a stern warning not to confront the necromancer themselves. Gaius made a snide remark which Emily barely heard. Perhaps, just perhaps, she could volunteer to remain behind to watch the necromancer while they hurried for reinforcements, then blow up the necromancer as soon as there were no witnesses. It should be possible. The real trick would be convincing the two men to leave her behind.
“Good luck,” General Pollack said. “And come back safely.”
“We will, father,” Casper said.
Emily smiled to herself, then followed the men back to the barracks and donned her riding outfit. There was no point in wearing her leathers, not when there was a very good chance of being forced to fight a necromancer — or flee. They’d just slow her down. She checked and rechecked the water bottles before loading them into her saddlebags, then carefully packed a small bag of rations. The batteries and the valves remained hidden in her pouch. They’d be undetectable, at least until she drew someone’s attention to them.
11- The Sergeant's Apprentice Page 29