“But out on this plain, anyone can see everything we do,” Ansu said. “What we need is a drake. A drake could see anyone use any kind of power—could track a mouse.”
“Do you take drakes to war?” Aranthur asked.
“There is a great statue in our old palace of a drake in armour. So it may have happened.”
“A drake would indeed be handy just now,” Equus said. “Aranthur, with me. Myr Tarkas, if you’d be so kind, get the Second City Cavalry and ask Centark Domina to cross after the Nomadi. The other regiments are to stand down and make open camps. To be alert for bodies. Myr Tarkas, you are to provide… hmm…magikal support to Centark Domina if she needs it.”
“Yes, syr.”
She didn’t quite salute, but her wave was not casual.
They rode up to the ford, where Dekark Lemnas waited on the beach. She was wounded.
“Corpses on the far bank,” she reported. “Some bastard with a jezzail killed Manax and winged me, syr.”
The ford was hidden by a low bluff, and on the far side, there was a sandy beach. A low, muddy spot beyond that rose to a small farm, with a mud-brick house. There were lumps on the sand, like piles of rags.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Equus snapped. “Get Dekark Lemnas to an Imoter, please. Timos, viewer, please.”
Aranthur managed it, but his limited supply of saar was stretched. He kept enough to shield himself…
Equus looked through the viewer. The little beach was littered with corpses, and there were more of them on the other side.
“There’s one here, too,” Aranthur said immediately. “Another stigal.”
Lemnas cleared her throat. “I can’t see it this time.”
Equus cursed. “Blood and Darkness. Fucking cowards.”
“Will a proaspismos stop a stigal?” Aranthur asked Prince Ansu.
The Zhouian was casting, singing softly in his own tongue. A nimbus of light gathered around his left hand, and then around his horse’s muzzle.
Aranthur prepared his aspis but left it uncast. He accessed the jewel on his chest for saar.
“I need this ford,” Equus said.
“I’ll do what I can,” Aranthur said.
Ansu smiled. “I’m game if you are.” He smiled again—a companionable challenge.
Aranthur laughed. “Let’s do it!” he shouted.
He leapt his horse down the bank and splashed across the river, the first man to cross. His chest tightened and he watched the overgrowth at the water’s edge, expecting a sudden fusillade or a shower of arrows, or even the crack of sorcery, most of all the sudden stink of wrongness from the stigal, but Ariadne scrambled for purchase on the gravel shoal and then they were up the bank. There were dead men in the reeds, and corpses on the flat, marshy ground beyond, as if fifty men and women had simply decided not to live any more, and fallen to the ground. Aranthur dismounted, and flipped a corpse; as he’d expected, it had no wound. He’d now seen enough dead people to know—no pool of blood, no stain, and surprisingly few flies.
“I think this was sihr,” he said. “But I cannot feel the stigal.”
He looked at Ansu, who came up the bank and circled his gelding around the corpses. Ansu reined in, throwing one leg over his horse’s head in a showy dismount. He walked among the corpses, looked at two, and then made a noise.
“Let me do it,” he said to Aranthur.
If he cast at all, Aranthur couldn’t see him do it. Instead, he sang a little, and shook his head.
“Is that the Zhouian way of magik?” Equus asked Aranthur.
The Nomadi were forming a column on the other side of the ford. Aranthur could just see Dahlia leading the Second City Cavalry beyond the bluff.
“These were all killed by sorcery this morning,” Ansu said. “After the sun rose.” He pointed inland. “There will be more over there, and over there.”
Aranthur spat. “Were they deserting?” he asked.
Ansu shrugged. “How would I know?”
Aranthur rode down to the water’s edge and shouted, “Don’t go anywhere yet! Please, halt your people, centark!”
He turned back to where Prince Ansu was singing softly through his nose.
“Ansu, could the… curse… still be functioning? Did someone cast a magikal protection on the ford, or the east bank?”
Ansu paled, and he sang again, raising his hands so that a tablet of light appeared between them.
“Ten thousand devils!” he said. “It’s in the house. It is a curse—we’re already infected.”
“Back!” Aranthur shouted to Equus.
The Nomadi crowded back from the water, those at the back wheeling their horses. For long moments the column was in chaos.
Ansu was working; he’d abandoned concealment. Aranthur altered himself to be able to see sihr and saar. The black stuff seemed to pool around the corpses, but he could see lines of emergence from the distant house.
“How badly off are we, old chap?” Equus shouted to Ansu.
The prince shook his head. To Aranthur he said, “We’re only alive because these poor bastards died. They took a lot of the sting out of the curse.” He paused. “But I can feel it going after my heart—can’t you?”
Aranthur shook his head. “No.”
He could, in fact, see a faint dark line like a spiderweb connecting the house and Ansu. But there was no such line to him.
“How’s the curse fashioned?” he asked. “I can see that it’s in the house, but not what it is.”
“Beyond me.”
Ansu sat suddenly, as if his hamstrings had been cut. His face grew pale.
Aranthur looked at him, made his decision, and moved. He went for the house, watching it in the Aulos, his long sword tapping the ground behind him as he ran. And as soon as he passed the bodies, a faint line, a silken thread of darkness, reached out, brushed at his aura…
And fell away.
Aranthur went forward.
Another thread reached for him. He sensed, rather than saw, that he was exerting a field, like an aspis of saar.
He had no idea why. Or rather, he had an idea, and it was irrational.
He was close to the mud-brick house’s only door, and he drew his sword.
Almost instantly, a pulse of light flashed through the Aulos and a dozen reaching threads shrivelled away, burned like silk thread touched with fire.
Aranthur was stunned. The sword…
There was no time. He burst through the door, which hung drunkenly on rusted hinges, and…
There…
Was…
The…
Focus.
The child had been tortured before he was killed. Aranthur had a moment to remember the taste of all that pain—the pain that Syr Xenias di Brusias had suffered at the hands of his captors, before he died. He’d tasted it back at the Inn of Fosse, and he’d asked if there were Darkbringers.
And now, in a farmhouse in Armea, he saw what a Darkbringer might do. It was terrible. The worst of it was that the child’s face reflected the despair, the horror, the humiliation, the sheer awful unfairness of his death. And the body had been painted black, and was mutilated to look as if it had wings.
Aranthur didn’t hesitate. He slammed the sword into the focus of the curse, the mutilated child’s corpse.
There was a sound in the mortal world, a pop of displaced air. And to Aranthur’s enhanced vision, there was a sudden hole in the mortal reality around him. It didn’t last long, but for a few beats of his heart, there was a jagged gash in his perception of the world and the Aulos. He saw… something else, something other—raw, ugly, unformed.
It was…
More than his mind could fathom. He stood for some time, until Ansu’s hand was on his shoulder.
“Ten thousand frozen star-hells,” Ansu said. “Oh, gods. The poor thing. Who the fuck does this?”
Aranthur blinked. The gash in everything was gone, and he doubted it had ever been. The sword in his hand was almost hot, but i
t was just an old sword, a First Empire long sword with a complicated hilt.
The dead boy was just a dead boy. Mutilated, terrible, but dead.
Ansu gave him an odd look.
“You did this?” he asked. “The stigal? You… cancelled it?”
Aranthur nodded. “I… think… so.”
“Go and get your centark,” Ansu said.
“You can work the Aulos!” Aranthur said.
“Of course I can. I wanted to learn your way.” He stood over the thing that had once been a human boy. “Go and get the cavalry. I’ll do my best to dispose of this poor victim.”
Aranthur was deeply shaken. He made his way back to the riverbank, caught Ariadne where she was munching grass, and called for Equus, all in a black tunnel of his thoughts—all while trying to make time pass with simple functionality.
He splashed across immediately, followed by Dahlia with her mist-shield over both of them.
“Aranthur, what just happened?” she asked.
He shook his head. He was still seeing the boy. And the void, or the chaos, or whatever he had glimpsed. The unformed…
“What did you do? Where’s Ansu?”
Aranthur shook his head to clear it.
“Syr, the stigal is destroyed and the way is clear. Prince Ansu is using his own powers to dispose of…” He blinked. “The victim.”
“Gods,” Equus said. “Right then.”
He whistled, and a young woman with a long trumpet tore across the stream.
Equus made a hand motion, the trumpeter blew an order, and the Nomadi began to cross. Again.
Two hours later, the Nomadi and the Second were encamped, with an abatis of felled trees around the camp as a quick defence and a corral for their horses, which were on picket lines. A full quarter of each regiment were on duty. Just as darkness fell, four wagons arrived from the rear with an escort, bringing up food, oats for the horses, and orders, as well as Sasan.
The Safian had wine. Aranthur was sitting by the fire, staring at it. Dahlia hugged Sasan and shared out a half-bottle of red wine, and Aranthur drank his share without looking up.
Dahlia turned back to Aranthur.
“Tell us again. Your sword defeated the stigal.”
Aranthur nodded. “Yes.”
Ansu drank off his wine.
“You may say I am as crazy as our friend, but I thought it was his sword that made the moaning noise, back at the broken bridge.”
“It talked to me, in the battle,” Aranthur said.
“What?” Dahlia asked.
“It said something about being revealed.”
Aranthur shrugged. He was feeling better; time, and food, and wine, had restored his balance a little. So he smiled at Dahlia.
“I was a little busy at the time.”
“May I see your sword, please?” she said.
Aranthur felt a faint hesitation in handing her over.
Her?
He handed the sword to Dahlia, who drew it.
Her.
It was an old broad sword, on a long sword blade. It was too heavy for Dahlia, but she hefted it, made a mock cut, ran a thumb down the blade.
“It seems to be a perfectly ordinary sword, to me,” she said.
Ansu nodded. “That stigal was… very powerful. It resisted my best effort to unmake it, at a range of perhaps fifty paces.” He scratched under his chin. “I’m not a particularly powerful Magos, but in Zhou we say that unmaking a static occulta is merely a problem of leverage, yet I could not gain a purchase on this one.”
Dahlia handed the old sword back to Aranthur.
“How long have you had this old sword?” she asked.
Aranthur shrugged. “I bought it at a street fair… before last Darknight. Before I walked home.”
Dahlia nodded. “Interesting.”
The subject changed, and Sasan spoke at length about the Safian prisoners.
“They are tools, mere cannon fodder,” he said bitterly. “Bah, they are no different from the Shah’s armies—they do as they are told, for money and loot. However despicable, they are merely men.”
“And women,” said Dahlia.
Sasan shook his head. “A few, but not as many as I would have expected from the Steppes and the northern clans. The Pure do not trust women,” he added. “That was obvious when they started coming at us five years ago.” He looked at Aranthur. “Your Myr Tribane has offered to let me recruit from among the prisoners.”
Dahlia sat up. “That’s insane,” she said.
“Is it?” Sasan asked. “I will not sit on my hands. If the gods stand with me, I will not go and hide in thuryx again. I will take the fight to the Pure.”
“You?” Dahlia asked.
Aranthur winced at her tone.
“I was once a warrior,” Sasan said. “Perhaps I will earn the right to call myself such again.”
Dahlia bit her lip.
Ansu nodded.
“It seems fitting, to me,” he said.
“Me, too,” Sasan said. “What could be more fitting than a horde of murderous turncoats led by a thuryx addict?”
“Sasan!” Dahlia said.
Sasan shrugged. “That’s what you were saying, were you not? From the immense height of your superiority?”
“Sasan!” she spat.
Aranthur couldn’t prevent the slight smile that crossed his face. He knew her tone.
“Syr Timos,” called a voice.
Aranthur sat up; it was the young woman who served as Equus’ trumpeter.
“Here,” he called.
She bowed.
“The Vanax is asking for you at your earliest convenience,” she said formally.
“Which means, right now,” Aranthur groaned.
Dahlia ignored him, eyes locked with Sasan.
Ansu rose with him.
“I think he wants to see me, as well,” he said sweetly.
“Oh, no…” the young woman began, but Ansu stepped past her smoothly.
“Trumpeter, I know Centark Equus fairly well. Besides, I have something to tell him.”
“And you want clear of that camp fire,” Aranthur said with an uneasy smile as they walked away.
“Exactly,” Ansu whispered.
Equus was lying on his blankets, with his head pillowed on a saddle, looking up at the stars.
“Timos.” He rose to his feet as if it pained him, and perhaps it did. “The convoy brought us orders. You are promoted, as of today, to centark.”
Aranthur, despite his fatigue and the feeling of doom that had clung to him since he looked at the gash in reality his sword had made, managed a genuine smile.
“Centark?” he asked.
“Yes. In the Nomadi. And Centark Domina has also asked for you—the Second lost most of their officers in the battle.” Equus nodded. “I’ve asked for you, too.”
“I know nothing of the duties of a dekark, much less a real officer,” Aranthur said.
“That is why I am sending Dekark Lemnas, who is long overdue for promotion, to the Second to act as a squadron commander. She took a wound today. You can take her place leading the carabins for a few days with Vilna as your dekark. I feel that the scouts might need your polemageia for the next few days, and you’ll learn the basics of leading a troop of cavalry.”
Aranthur bowed. “Perhaps Syr Vilna can teach me.”
Equus nodded. “I see us in a long war,” he said. “Training and experience will be everything.”
“I… have other duties…”
Aranthur didn’t know what to say about the Safiri grimoire, or the whole world of Cold Iron, which seemed so far away.
Equus shrugged. “Well, to me, you are promising, even if you are one of Drako’s effete gang of thieves and cut-throats.”
Equus’ trumpeter poured him wine and he handed Aranthur a cup.
“And any way you cut the loaf, you belong to me for a few days. I want to make better time tomorrow. I propose to send you and your Academy friends out with m
y scouts to try and locate and eliminate any more of these traps. Can you handle it?”
Aranthur looked at Prince Ansu. Ansu shrugged.
“I confess that this is probably not what my father thought I was coming here to do.” He spread his hands. “Despite which, I accept.”
Aranthur nodded. “I think we can do it.”
“At speed?” Equus asked. “I’m sorry, Timos, but none of us have ever done anything like this. I don’t know how to look for your sorcery while riding across country. But Tribane is marching at dawn—she’ll pass through this position tomorrow. We’re going into Safi. I will not tell you more, in case you are captured.”
A feeling of horror passed through Aranthur’s shoulders and down his back.
Captured.
He thought of the child, tortured to death merely to power an occult artifact.
4
Safian Borderlands
The next morning, after a briefing in late night moonlight, Aranthur “led” his first cavalry patrol forward into the darkness beyond the line of pickets. He’d already learnt so much he couldn’t really take it all in. He saw that the Nomadi had sent out a patrol before his, to make sure that there was no ambush waiting just beyond the picket lines—a strong patrol that had gone all the way around the camp. He watched Vilna examine “his” troopers, demanding that one young woman fill her canteen, mocking another man for having too little food.
And then they were away. Aranthur rode in the middle of the column, with Sasan and Dahlia and Prince Ansu. They had six troopers well out ahead. Another six trailed them by several hundred paces. All told they had only twenty-four Nomadi.
The first hour was the worst, as they felt their way forward in near total darkness. Every tree branch was an enemy. Every horse whicker presaged an ambush. Every broken branch suggested the crack of a weapon or the casting of a spell.
They passed a lonely crossroads, and halted. The sun rose in their faces and bathed the world in blood. Far out across the plain, something caught the light brilliantly, and shone like a beacon for a few minutes. A little later, a line of white teeth appeared far off at the very edge of vision, but they, too, vanished as the sun climbed. Aranthur rode around the crossroads, but there was nothing to see except that hundreds of men and horses had recently passed.
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