The Fortress Of Glass

by David Drake

  “How many waves would you say there are?” Tenoctris asked. “Too many to count, at least. And they keep coming.”

  Crews of laborers, civilians who’d hiked up with the wagons, were lifting the materials out of the beds. The last wagon had an escort of soldiers. In it were rolls of sailcloth and the silver service from the royal palace.

  “Yes,” agreed Sharina. “But they always did. That’s nothing to do with—”

  She waved her hand, indicating not the sea but the mass of hellplants beginning to stir as the sky brightened. Around them were ripples in the marshy ground. The scorpions were returning to the reservoirs in the barrels of the plants where they sheltered while the sun was up.

  “—those things. Wizards. Monsters!”

  “No, dear,” Tenoctris said. “But if a storm struck this coast, the waves would be a thousand times stronger. They’d eat away the shoreline, they’d flood the fields. Ships would be swamped, people drowned, and it’d all be normal. Nobody would think anything was wrong, except that it was a bad storm; perhaps the sort of storm that arises only once in a lifetime.”

  She nodded down at the fields and the ranks of hellplants starting to advance again. “What we’re seeing here, what we’ve seen in the past two years and will see for another year still, happens only once in a millennium. But it’s just as natural as the waves and the storms. Only very much worse.”

  Sharina put her arms around herself and hugged them tight. She wished Cashel were here. She wished—Tenoctris laid her hand over Sharina’s. Neither woman spoke, but the touch was a reminder that Sharina had friends and that the kingdom had defenders.

  Horns and trumpets were signalling. The troops were in place behind earthworks and trenches; the day before some units had built stockades, but all the wood had been burned in the course of the fighting.

  Waldron had sited the catapults and ballistas just below the hillcrest. Sharina guessed there were forty or fifty of them all told. They were high enough on the slope to shoot over the infantry positions, but they weren’t on the ridge where they’d block the road. The army artillery was on wheeled carriages, but the naval weapons were mounted on bases that’d obviously been knocked together quickly, generally from house beams. The crews of the larger weapons were cranking back their levers against springs made from the neck sinews of oxen.

  Captain Ascor commanded the company guarding Sharina this morning. He was going from one man to the next, checking equipment and talking quietly to his troops. If everything went as it should, the Blood Eagles were above the battle and would have nothing to do but watch. If matters went badly wrong, they might not be able to save the Princess’ life—but they would certainly die before she did. They had their duty.

  Sharina smiled: Princess Sharina had her duty also, to stand on the battlefield as a symbol to the royal army of what it was fighting for. The kingdom couldn’t watch the army’s sacrifice, but the regent would.

  The sun wasn’t quite above the horizon, but the sky was bright and the hellplants were moving forward on the plain below. Their smooth, slow progress reminded Sharina of slime oozing down an incline. The plants were actually moving uphill, but the comparison to slime was still valid. Behind the earthworks, officers called orders to their men in hoarse voices.

  The workmen on the ridge line were digging in the posts at intervals of ten or a dozen feet, tamping earth in around them to hold them upright. They looked like the stakes of a crude fence running generally east to west along the hilltop. Other men were carrying bolts of sailcloth and dropping them between pairs of posts, but what that was in aid of was beyond Sharina.

  “Do you know what they’re doing?” she said quietly in Tenoctris’ ear.

  “I do not,” said the older woman. Her attention was on Double, though he seemed simply to be standing with his head bowed. He held the wooden athame point down before him. “I will say that at the moment there’s a… a gap, a hole almost. Surrounding Cervoran. There’s a stupendous concentration of forces here, and none of it is touching Cervoran.”

  Sharina licked her lips and glanced down at the plants. They were spreading slightly apart as they advanced toward the fortifications. She looked back at Tenoctris and said, “Why? Why isn’t he defending himself?”

  “I think he’s conserving his strength,” Tenoctris said simply. “And he has strength, dear. He’s a very powerful wizard.”

  An artillery officer bawled an order; his subordinate jerked the lanyard of a big catapult. The slip-hook flew back, clanging on the frame, and the long vertical arm crashed forward into the padded bar. A missile shot down toward the plain.

  The nearest plants were still a quarter mile from the breastworks and farther than that from the artillery on the ridge. Sharina frowned; she knew a big catapult could throw its ball that far, but she didn’t think it could hit a target as small as an individual plant.

  The projectile, a sealed jar, was light-colored and easy to track against the black fields. It snapped out in nearly a straight line, quite different from the high arc that Sharina’d expected a catapult projectile to describe.

  The missile smashed squarely into the body of a hellplant and shattered into pale fragments. It took a noticeable length of time for the sound of the impact, a hollow whop, to reach the top of the hill. An instant later the quicklime burst into snarling, spitting tendrils of white fire, shrivelling the plant’s dark bulk.

  “How did they do that?” Sharina said in amazement. “How did they hit a target so far away?”

  She was speaking toward Tenoctris, but of course she didn’t expect an answer. To her surprise an artilleryman, part of the crew of a small ballista which wasn’t powerful enough to shoot yet, turned and called out, “We set range stakes last night, your highness. The ground-pounders, they got smoked good when they attacked, but we went along behind ‘em putting white spears in the field every fifty paces. For this morning, you see.”

  “Oh!” said Sharina. “I’d seen them. I didn’t know what they were.”

  In fact she’d thought the white poles were stripped saplings or some vestige of the farms that’d been in the bay before the plants invaded. She looked down to her left to where Lord Waldron had planted his standard. The army commander was narrow-minded, stubborn and a stiff-necked aristocrat… but he was either smart enough to have made preparations to use the artillery accurately, or he was smart enough to listen to a junior officer who’d come up with the idea.

  The kingdom was well served by its army in more ways than the fact its soldiers were willing to die for the civilians who paid their wages. But it was well served in that as well.

  More weapons, catapults and ballistas both, were shooting now. The crash of their arms against the stops echoed around the bowl of hills. Crewmen grunted as they bent to the bars of the windlasses that slowly recocked their weapons.

  Not all the jars of quicklime hit plants, but many did. The hiss of lime slaking in plant tissue, devouring both the hellplants and the scorpions swimming in their central tanks, became a noticeable backdrop to the shooting and human voices.

  Even the missiles that missed splashed long fiery smears across the wet fields. They caused advancing plants to hesitate and raising the spirits of the soldiers watching. Men who’d been crouching nervously behind the breastworks began to cheer.

  The sun was throwing the plants’ shadows onto the hills to the northwest. By its light, Sharina saw fresh forms humping up out of the surf. More of the creatures were arriving on the beach. Sharina swallowed. The troops would fight hard, but…

  As the sun climbed, mist rose from the fields. That was more disconcerting to Sharina than the fact that plants were walking. Every clear cool morning in Barca’s Hamlet she’d seen mist form over standing water, but then it burned away as the sun rose higher. Here in Calf’s Head Bay she watched the opposite: it was as if the sun were wringing water from the soil and spreading it as a shroud over the advancing monsters.

  The Green Woman had formed h
er creatures by wizardry. At least here within the half-circle of hills, her art ruled the weather also.

  The hellplants had come within range of the smaller ballistas which began to fire with sharp cracks. They were loaded with quarrels whose usual square bronze heads were replaced by small jars of quicklime. Sharina had wondered how effective they’d be, but she saw a missile from the weapon just below her plunge into the barrel of a hellplant. For a moment there was no response; then the creature’s body ripped open in a gush of steam, and the remainder sank into a smoking pile.

  “That’s what he’s doing with the silver!” Tenoctris said.

  She was probably speaking to herself, but the delight in her tone jerked Sharina’s head around to look. The last of the posts had been dug in on the ridgeline and the crews had almost finished hanging the sailcloth between them. It formed a long canvas screen across the north side of the bowl. It wouldn’t stop a galloping horse, let alone a plant that weighed more than an ox, so it had to have something to do with Double’s wizardry. Whatever his ultimate purposes, Sharina’d be glad to see him to unleash something against the army of plants right now.

  Workmen were carrying loads of silver—urns, salvers, ewers, and in one case a huge bowl for mixing wine with water—from the wagon and placing it on the ground in front of the canvas screen. Each load went more or less between a pair of support posts. A soldier followed each laborer, guarding him and more particularly guarding the silver. Was anybody likely to run off with a cup now, when on the plain below men and monsters battled for the fate of the world?

  Sharina grinned. Yes, of course somebody was likely to do that. Given half a chance the workmen might abscond with all the silver, even if they were told it was the only thing standing between mankind and the inhuman army advancing on them. Many people took a very short-term view of things—and prospered.

  Short-term thinking wouldn’t work this time, though, but Lord Tadai or whoever’d turned the silver over to Double had taken precautions. Soldiers weren’t notably more honest than civilians, but they were disciplined.

  “Tenoctris?” Sharina said. “I see what they’re doing with the silver, but I don’t understand why.”

  “It’s a contagion spell, dear,” Tenoctris said. She probably thought she was explaining. “The wood and cloth simply create a material framework by which Cervoran will form the silver.”

  The last of the plate had been arranged in front of the screen and the workmen were walking back to the wagons. The soldiers gathered under their officer, talking in quiet, worried voices and looking toward the plain. They’d carried out their orders by delivering the silver, but there were obviously places where they’d be more useful now than standing on the hillcrest. Volunteering themselves into the carnage below would take a great deal of moral as well as physical courage, though, and they were hesitating.

  The sun was a flattened orange ball on the eastern horizon. The artillery continued to shoot, but the missiles were aimed at the second wave of hellplants just arrived from the sea. At least a hundred plants had been reduced to smoldering corpses on their march to the hills, but twice that number were now too close for the catapults and ballistas to strike.

  The plants that’d spent the night in the fields, all those that’d survived the rain of quicklime, had reached the human fortifications. Spears, billhooks, and torches on pike shafts stabbed over the earthworks-and still they came on.

  Double, standing at the east end of the screen, roused from his trance. He gave Tenoctris a thick-lipped smile, then pointed his athame toward the nearest pile of plate: a large serving dish and a pair of goblets set with tourmalines.

  “Eulamon,” Double chanted. “Restoutus restouta zerosi!”

  The air about the dishes went rosy with a fog of wizardlight. The silver blurred.

  “Benchuch bachuch chuch…,” Double called. His voice was thin but so piercing that Sharina had the feeling that everyone around Calf’s Head Bay could hear the words. “Ousiri agi ousiri!”

  The haze thickened. A thin shimmering sheet spread above it, orange with the reflected light of the sunrise.

  “Eulamon,” Double chanted, shifting his black wooden dagger so that it pointed at the next pile of silver. The salver and cups of the initial pile had vanished; the tourmalines lay on the ground. “Restoutus restouta zerosi!”

  At a dozen places in the trenches dug in front of the line of breastworks, soldiers threw torches to ignite the piles of brush prepared for the purpose. There hadn’t been enough fuel to fill the entire frontage, but where the fires rose to full life, the plants trapped in them struggled and died. Green bodies ruptured, pouring salt water onto the flames which then gushed out white steam.

  The flames damped temporarily, but the fires were too hot for a few barrels-full of water to put them out. They blazed again, shrinking still further the blackened remains of the dead hellplants. “They don’t back away or try to escape,” Sharina said. What she’d just seen made her queasy. “They throw themselves into the fires.”

  “They’re seaweed, dear,” Tenoctris said quietly. She continued to watch Double, chanting as he formed the final piles of silver into a gleaming wall in front of the canvas screen. “They have no minds of their own. The wizard who controls them cares no more about their feelings than you do about those of a leaf of lettuce.”

  More plants came on, moving with the slow certainty of clouds drifting across the summer sky. The thickening mist had turned them to dark lumps; they began to lap upward to cover the earthworks on the higher ground.

  Where there weren’t prepared fire-sets, the hellplants swayed down into the trenches and wallowed there for a moment. Picked soldiers, generally light infantry who ordinarily fought with javelins and didn’t wear armor, stood on the breastworks and hurled bags of quicklime into the open reservoirs in the plants’ bodies.

  Sharina had heard Liane discuss the plan with Lord Waldron and his aides, but she’d doubted whether the soldiers would throw their small missiles accurately in the stress of the attack. In general, they did: the bags splashed into the water and exploded in fire-shot steam.

  But the plants came on, bubbling and sizzling. They drew themselves out of the trenches with their tentacles, then reached for the human defenders. Ignoring the fire inside them, they snatched the spears and billhooks being driven into their green flesh.

  Supported by the plants behind them, the leaders half climbed, half tore down, the breastworks. Light ballistas slashed at them as artillerymen risked hitting their own comrades in the hope of stopping the monsters which the infantry alone couldn’t. Bolts which punched their charge through a hellplant’s body walls usually tore the creature apart even though the same amount of quicklime thrown into the reservoir from above wasn’t effective.

  Some of the soldiers ducked low and thrust their swords into the tendrils on which the plants crawled. For the most part the men died in vain, seized by tentacles and either torn apart or flung to their deaths in the plain below. One plant toppled and couldn’t rise again, though its massive body crushed the man who’d crippled it.

  Sharina licked her lips. While her mind was elsewhere, her hand had reached unnoticed for the horn hilt of the Pewle knife she wore under her cloak. She wouldn’t need the weapon today—the Blood Eagles would see to that—but soon, perhaps…

  “Tenoctris,” she said. “I think they’re going to break through shortly. At the very worst I can outrun any plant so I’m going to stay with the army, but you’d better—”

  “Wait,” said Tenoctris. She raised her left hand without taking her eyes from Double. “Hush please, dear.”

  “Kato katoi…,” Double said, pointing his athame at the center of the long film of silver shimmering in the air beside him. “Kataoikouse neoi…”

  The silver film rippled and seemed to stiffen. Tenoctris gripped Sharina’s wrist and walked with quick determination to the right. Toward Double, Sharina thought, but that was only incidentally true. Tenoctris was lead
ing her to the side where they wouldn’t be standing between the mirror and the battle at mid-slope.

  “Abriao iao!” Double shouted.

  The silver twitched, changing in smooth lines that Sharina couldn’t have described though she watched it happen. Because the film formed a perfect mirror, Sharina saw not the thing itself but a subtly distorted image of the battlefield below.

  The mirror caught the rising sun and threw it back as a point of white fury at nearly right angles to its position in the sky. The beam sawed across the hellplants climbing the breastworks at the northern edge of the half-bowl. Double continued to chant.

  A plant exploded in steam, then a second, and after a slight delay a third. The point of light touched also the head of a soldier lunging forward behind his spear. He had time to scream as his helmet melted in spatters of bronze; then he fell backward. The plant in which his spear wobbled collapsed inward and sank down into the trench from which it’d heaved itself.

  “Sound recall!” Sharina shouted. “Captain Ascor, sound recall! Now! Get the men out of the way of this wizard’s work!”

  She’d drawn the big knife and stepped toward Double when she saw the soldier die at the mirror’s focus… but the wizard was doing no more than the ballista crews had done, risking their fellows for the chance of saving the kingdom. She would pray to the Lady for that man and for all the brave men who’d died today, but first she must survive the day.

  Ascor looked from her to the battlefield, then barked an order to the cornicene standing beside him. The signaller put his curved horn to his lips and blew the five-note recall signal: a long, three short, and a final long.

  Sharina’d thought Ascor might protest: Princess Sharina was acting ruler of the Isles, but she had no authority on the battlefield except to issue commands to Lord Waldron himself. Ascor obeyed her anyway, perhaps because the bodyguard regiment considered itself separate from—and above—the army as a whole, but also because here on the hillcrest it was obvious that getting the troops out of the way immediately was the best way to save their lives.