Cold Iron (Masters & Mages)

by Miles Cameron

  ‘My rival. He overthrew my former paymaster and took Volta for his own.’ Malconti shrugged, despite the weight of his elaborate shoulder defences. ‘I am now an out of work sell-sword. Anyway, Syr Timos, I am out of men and out of food, and these two assure me there are no refugees west of here. Right, Syr Nenos?’

  Nenia nodded.

  ‘So I will be shepherding these good people east, towards …’ Malconti made a face. ‘Towards what, I wonder?’ He winked at a slim man in armour who rolled his eyes. Malconti frowned. ‘Get me some orders from the General, there’s a dear. Some of them have some sort of disease. I need … support. I’d rather we didn’t just massacre these poor creatures, although I will understand if Tribane chooses to go that way. Saves everyone time. And money.’

  Aranthur lost the ability to speak for a moment. Especially as it was clear as a crystal talisman to him that the pennon meant exactly what he said.

  ‘Although,’ the pennon continued thoughtfully, ‘I owe them, rather. Without them, Tribane might be considering ridding the world of me. Funny how the worm turns, what?’ His eyes met Aranthur’s.

  They were black, and featureless. As if there was nothing behind them.

  ‘Go and get me orders,’ Malconti said.

  Aranthur rode north, found the General, reported, and rode back at sunset with a tube and written orders.

  He found Malconti and his gendarmes camped where the old Imperial Road crossed the Alder, about thirty stades from the Inn of Fosse, safely back on Imperial soil.

  Malconti read the orders. Aranthur didn’t know what was in them and was afraid of what they might say, and afraid of what he might see.

  The sell-sword tapped the rolled parchment on his chin.

  ‘Interesting. Stop looking so worried. No one is going to be massacred tonight.’ He nodded. ‘Well ridden. You are a good courier. If you ever lack employment, I’ll take you.’

  Aranthur had to smile. ‘Thanks, milord.’

  ‘Milord?’ Malconti shook his head. ‘No one loves a sell-sword enough to ennoble him.’

  He smiled again. It was the first time the man had relaxed at all, or shown any humanity. Aranthur wondered if he, too, had dreaded the orders he might have received.

  ‘May I ask a … professional question?’ Aranthur asked.

  ‘If you have to ask, my dear, you probably shouldn’t.’ One of his grooms handed him a silver cup of wine, which he drank off and handed back for a refill. ‘Wine for my courier.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’m feeling good. Alis has offered me a short contract and some money. I may yet emerge from this shithole.’

  Aranthur hesitated.

  ‘Ask,’ Malconti snapped.

  ‘Why …’ Aranthur now felt foolish. And stupid. ‘Why did you … order your men to dismount?’

  Malconti nodded. He took his wine cup, and this time he sipped it instead of emptying it.

  ‘What a good question. You won’t like the answer.’

  Aranthur didn’t move.

  ‘It was the only action with a possible positive outcome for me. And my people.’ Malconti shrugged. ‘Not the best outcome for the duke. But for me and mine, the only possible avenue.’

  Aranthur nodded.

  A cup of wine was held out to him. He took it, and the sell-sword raised an eyebrow.

  ‘If I killed Alis, who I rather like, the Emperor would hunt me to death. Maybe assassins, maybe sorcery. And even killing Alis and all her people wouldn’t change the duke’s outcome. Except that now, in the aftermath, I wonder if he didn’t want the confrontation.’ He looked at Aranthur and smiled. ‘Tell Alis what I’m telling you, boy. Because it occurs to me that he tried to cast a subjugation on me when I went to fetch him.’ He drank some wine. ‘But why?’

  Aranthur bowed. ‘I will tell her.’

  Malconti nodded. ‘Get along to your boyfriend, then. I rather fancied him myself, but he made his views plain.’ Malconti handed his silver cup to a groom. ‘Refill his cup,’ he said. ‘I was young once.’

  He walked off into his tent, leaving Aranthur alone with a brimful cup of good wine. He still needed to groom his horse, and he had to wonder who his boyfriend was. But he managed to find a place on the last picket line, and he started work, and one of Malconti’s grooms brought an armload of fodder. Another servant came up behind the groom …

  ‘I need to leave these people,’ Nenia said.

  Aranthur had been thinking of her, and her appearance was like a conjuration. He grinned.

  ‘Thank the Lady you are here,’ she said. ‘I heard your voice and then I couldn’t find you.’

  He realised that she was working very hard to keep her face together. He wrapped his arms around her as he would have with his sister and she burrowed against him.

  Aranthur’s borrowed cavalry charger butted him with his nose, repeatedly.

  ‘I need to feed my horse,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘I’ll bet you tell that to all the girls. Thanks, I’m all better. And Lady, they’re a hard lot.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And these people are dying on their feet, and the sell-swords don’t care.’ She looked down. ‘They really do not care. If the General had ordered them all killed …’ She shuddered. ‘Is the City like this?’

  Aranthur thought a little before he answered.

  ‘No. I mean, it is not like the Valley of the Eagle, either. But it’s not all violence and greed.’

  ‘Where is my brother?’

  ‘With the General,’ Aranthur answered.

  ‘He doesn’t speak any Armean at all.’

  ‘The General herself speaks some Zhouian, some Armean … maybe even a little Safiri.’ Aranthur smiled.

  ‘Safiri!’ Nenia said. ‘Oh, just the name is exotic.’

  ‘I’m studying Safiri,’ Aranthur said again, aware that he was trying to impress her.

  She looked at him under her brows. ‘You?’

  ‘I’m not a complete fool.’

  She smiled. ‘I know that, silly. I’m just wondering … The General asked me if I spoke Safiri. Does she know you do?’

  ‘No,’ Aranthur sighed.

  ‘If Lecne doesn’t speak any Armean, why is she keeping him?’

  Aranthur was running out of little chores to do on his horse. He’d got the feed bag on, picked the hooves clean, and given him a rub down.

  ‘No idea,’ he said.

  Nenia laughed. ‘Well, I do.’

  ‘Why did you ask me, then?’

  She rolled her eyes and turned away.

  ‘Reasons. Tell me about the City. I can’t wait.’

  After a while they were still standing. The ground was soaking wet and cold, and anything like a blanket was on a cold Easterner.

  ‘Do you have a tent?’ she asked.

  He made a face, but it was getting dark. ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll be cold,’ she said.

  ‘Malconti thinks you are my boyfriend. He sent you wine.’

  She drank half the cup.

  He nodded. ‘We can make a shelter, the way the soldiers did.’

  ‘I think the pennon thought I’d spend the night with him,’ Nenia said, quite calmly.

  Aranthur was too tired for shock. ‘But?’

  ‘Well, I was flattered but not available. He was quite apologetic.’ She smiled. ‘I wonder what rules guide a person who can massacre innocents but doesn’t rape his friends?’

  She sighed, her face closed. She was trying to be amusing, but she was struggling with too many little horrors.

  She looked up. ‘Of course, that’s when he called you back, too.’

  ‘Not my type,’ Aranthur managed, a sally he was later quite proud of.

  She giggled, more like Hasti than like his memory of Nenia.

  The two of them borrowed a sharp hatchet and cut poles. To Aranthur’s surprise, the red-haired man with tattoos and two other big men in arming coats and rusty voiders came and helped them build a shelter, even to helping peel huge sheets of vyrk bark. Aranthur used his sad
dle and Nenia’s to make pillows. He wasn’t thinking about much of anything until she came into the shelter and pressed against him in the small space.

  Suddenly he was very aware of her.

  ‘I have some bedding,’ she said. ‘Alder. Out.’

  He backed out and she laid spring alder in bunches. Outside the little shelter it was already full dark, and there was firelight from a dozen big fires.

  ‘Can you borrow a lantern?’ she asked.

  Aranthur leant in and made a light, a simple but very powerful occulta.

  He set it on the ridge pole, and it shone out of both ends of the little shelter, making the whole bark lodge a lamp.

  She laughed. But she finished laying the alder, and Aranthur used the light to savage a couple of young pines outside the lodge and threw them atop the alder for a soft layer. The pine was wet, and cold.

  It smelled magnificent, though.

  Aranthur considered among his very limited repertoire of spells and tried a very warm breeze. He blew it out of his mouth, to aid the evocation, and the warm breeze blew over the newly cut bedding, drying it rapidly.

  Nenia nodded. ‘Good. You do that all night, and I’ll be warm as toast.’

  ‘Need the axe back, mate,’ said Red-hair.

  Aranthur had it in his hand. He passed it to the big man, who grinned.

  ‘Magelight?’ he asked. ‘Can ye make me one, lad?’

  Aranthur reached into his creation, which was far too bright, and took a little of it, and attached it to a stick.

  ‘Here you go, syr.’

  The man looked at the stick from several angles.

  ‘Amazin’,’ he said, and wandered off into the night.

  Aranthur could hear him playing with the stick and showing it to other men.

  He stood outside the shelter for a little while. The rain had started again.

  He bent down and went in.

  ‘You’re wet,’ Nenia said. ‘I’m dry. Hardly the act of a gentleman.’

  Aranthur took off his wet cloak and considered attempting to dry it with magik, but he was too tired. He wasn’t even sure he could attempt it without a focus, and his talisman was hundreds of stades to the east. He took off his sword, and wrapped it in his spare shirt to keep it dry.

  He lay down. The bedding was soft.

  ‘Yech,’ Nenia proclaimed, touching the wet wool, but then it warmed a little. He threw half over her.

  ‘My mother will be asking me where I spent tonight,’ she said.

  ‘Ahh,’ Aranthur said. ‘We could put my sword between us. They do it in the old Byzas romances.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Nenia said. ‘I’ll just tell her I slept with the pennon, of course. I expected you to be warmer.’

  Aranthur began to laugh. She put her head on his shoulder and wriggled up against him and relaxed.

  ‘With my eyes closed, I can see them,’ she said suddenly. ‘Lady’s Blessing, there were so many. And some died, Aranthur. One woman just fell to the ground while we were …’

  He gave her shoulders a squeeze. His own mind was a whirl, and he wanted to say something, but his head was closing down.

  ‘Malconti says some of them have a disease,’ she said.

  ‘I saw the dead,’ Aranthur said.

  His voice sounded strange, and the words escaped him, as if he hadn’t decided to speak. When he let his eyes close, there they were – the dead, like stuffed human pillows, like bundles of flesh, curiously boneless. Aranthur was a farm boy. He’d seen death. They looked wrong.

  ‘How can this happen?’ Nenia asked.

  Aranthur’s mind was turning like a wagon wheel and he felt as if he was drunk. He’d used too much power on the light and warmth workings and now he was almost without volition, turning, turning …

  ‘Oh, Draxos.’

  He rolled to his knees, leant out into the rain and was violently sick. After only a moment, Nenia came and held his long, dark hair out of his face.

  ‘Are you sick?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘I overspent my power.’ He was trembling all over.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I promise not to attack your virtue.’

  Aranthur wasn’t sure, even with a mouth that tasted of bile, that he wanted that promise.

  He listened to her breathing as she fell asleep. He wondered if he was supposed to have made love to her, replayed various moments, and didn’t see a sign of it. Nothing woos a girl like throwing up, he thought bitterly. And she was so different from the woman with whom he’d danced at the inn. He hadn’t known she was so brave.

  His thoughts tumbled together; he tried not to think of her warmth, her body pressed close to him. How many days since he had made love to Alfia?

  I am an idiot, he thought. Am I in love with any woman who will have me?

  He listened to her breathing and thought of her until all his thoughts calmed from a tumble like an avalanche to a slow passage like a stream. Then he gave a minute shrug and went to sleep.

  He dreamt of using a sword that burned like white fire. He was surrounded by the bloated refugees, but when he touched them with the sword, they were cured.

  He awoke to find that Nenia was virtually on top of him. His head was clear. He lay, wishing she’d move, and then he fell asleep again.

  The whole series of events came to be called the Duke’s Rebellion, at least by liberal Whites who disliked the duke. In the weeks thereafter, Aranthur heard every part of it debated by Byzas and Arnaut alike, as if some of the action was open to question. There were men and women at his salle who denied that there had been a rebellion, and claimed that the Emperor surrounded himself with Whites who hated the duke and made up such events to blacken his name.

  Aranthur ignored them, mostly because time passed too quickly. There were too many things to do, and he was late for everything, always. The very few days he had spent at Fosse had been more like a month, and the rest were just a blur.

  And yet, the weeks after the rebellion were not uneventful. They were merely uneventful in comparison to the daily stress of living outdoors. One of the first people he met at the Academy, the day after he returned to the city, was Dahlia. She bowed coldly and passed him in a hallway.

  He returned her bow. Hesitantly, he said, ‘Did you receive my gift?’

  She looked down her nose at him. ‘What was it for? Payment for services rendered?’ she asked, and walked off.

  He let her go.

  Aranthur was having trouble sleeping. His attention wandered easily to the Easterners in the woods; to the dead in their odd postures which seemed somehow menacing; to Nenia, Alfia, Dahlia. But he pulled himself together long enough to get to work, to practise Safiri, to practise his swordplay and his exercises. He moved briskly through streets suddenly filled with men and women wearing swords and House colours – tabards, armbands, belts, hair ornaments. The rich Lower Town was full of people posturing, and there were fights. He did his best to avoid them.

  He performed the whole of his Safiri occulta for the Master of Arts and she kissed his forehead.

  She held him at arm’s length. ‘You overspent,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Magistera,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing to do. You can lose your power altogether.’ She looked into his eyes a while longer. ‘Or become stronger. Was it terrible? I’ve read reports.’

  He bowed. ‘I never really understood what was happening,’ he admitted.

  ‘How like real life,’ she said with a smile. ‘I can explain, if you like. The Duke of Volta planned a military coup to retake his duchy.’

  ‘That much I guessed.’ He felt better for hearing it.

  She nodded. ‘Our mutual friend can explain better, really, but something went wrong. I will guess that his supposed allies within the Iron Ring failed to materialise. So there he was with a very small army and no supplies in Imperial territory. He has a great deal of support here, among the old aristocrats—’

  ‘I got that,’ Aranthur said, wit
h a little of his new humour.

  ‘Yes. But five hundred horse, no matter how well-born, were not going to be a match for Cursini and his Steelbacks, much less the Militia of Volta, who hate him. Technically he was a rebel in arms.’ She shrugged. ‘Tribane didn’t even arrest him. All very careful, all under the rose.’ She shrugged.

  ‘None of that is what …’ Aranthur paused, trying to find words. ‘None of that troubled me.’

  She leant forward. ‘What troubled you, then? The refugees?’

  ‘Has anyone told you about the disease?’ he asked hesitantly. He described the bodies. ‘And Nenia – that is, Myr Nenia Cucina, who will be a student here in a term – she said that they had stopped using …’ He looked out of the great window, trying to piece together things he’d seen. ‘They didn’t use talismans. Or didn’t have them. Many of them couldn’t, or wouldn’t, start fires. Or heat water. So they starved.’

  ‘The power that is rising in the East,’ the Magas said carefully, ‘seeks to hold all the kuria crystal for itself.’ She shrugged. ‘We all know the price has risen. Do you have a good one?’

  ‘Yes, Magistera.’

  She nodded. ‘Perhaps the Easterners couldn’t afford any. I have heard mutterings from the countryside – villages sending priests to beg crystals from the Temple.’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘I will look into this, Aranthur. I have troubles of my own – there’s a move to unseat me.’ She sighed and looked out of her window. ‘I have ceased listening to reports about refugees dying because there’s little I can do. But apparently I missed something vital.’ She reached out and made the sign of Sophia on his forehead. ‘But you have done very well. If anything, your overuse of your power stretched you a little. I will tell you an uncomfortable truth. We send you Students out into the world to do research, yes, but also simply to stretch you, so that you are ready to confront the paradox that is the use of the higher powers.’ She raised an eyebrow at the word higher as if she was unsure she meant the word and looked out of her window a moment. ‘I understand that you are acquainted with the Prince of Zhou?’

  Aranthur nodded.

  ‘He is my next visitor. He seeks admission to the Studion. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Aranthur said, almost without thinking. ‘That is, I liked him.’