Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  Off to the south, something…

  Blinked.

  There was another crash. This time, it was as if every gonne in the Imperium had fired together—a short, incredibly loud pulse of sound.

  The spike of pain in Aranthur’s head seemed to penetrate to his heart.

  And then, in the blink of an eye, the sky changed.

  A crack appeared in the dawn, out over the south. Where the sky had been a salmon pink, brighter towards the distant eastern mountains, paler and greyer in the south, suddenly a ragged rent appeared, like a crack in the sky, shaped like an anvil. Even as Aranthur, clutching his temples in agony, watched the crack, it formed, widened, and opened.

  Men and women in the camp were screaming.

  The wind was like a storm. It had picked up sand, leaves, debris of war and peace, and the wind lashed them. Aranthur pulled the scarf of his turban over his face and tried to keep Ariadne calm.

  His sword was making the moaning noise.

  And a voice, a woman’s voice, said: “No. No, you fools!”

  With a flare of darkness, the anvil in the sky widened until it appeared to be the width of a child’s finger.

  The wind howled against their shields.

  “Ware,” Aranthur said, just before the wind of sihr and saar struck them.

  It came, not from the Aulos, but from the south. Aranthur felt as if he was enduring the primal wind of chaos. It swept his shields away, like paper in a deluge of water. Dahlia’s shields didn’t last more than a heartbeat longer. They were naked to the storm of magik.

  Aranthur stood alone on the vast empty plain of the Aulos. And then he was not alone.

  Nenia turned to him. Her dark eyes looked into his.

  “Do you speak this language?” she asked.

  Alfia took his hand.

  “How foolish are you?” she asked.

  Iralia’s hair burned with a net of white fire.

  “Stand with me,” she said.

  She extended her hand. Somehow she was more real than Alfia.

  There was power everywhere—more saar than he had ever experienced, so that he might have powered every occulta he knew at the same moment.

  And then Dahlia was beside him.

  “Do I fight it or accept it?” she asked.

  Qna Liras reached out and took Iralia’s hand.

  “Accept it.”

  And a woman’s voice said, “And thus are two thousand years of victories wasted in an instant.”

  Aranthur guessed that there was no fighting the mad rush of power. Instead, he opened to it. It was like attempting to swim in the floodgates of a dam, and he was swept away on a rising tide of light and dark.

  He had Iralia’s free hand in his. And she held him in a grip of adamant.

  His heart beat like a dancer’s drum, so fast that he couldn’t count the beats; terror was the horse he rode. It seemed to him that the foundations of the world were broken like the dams of the irrigation ponds, and he was being carried outside the world—or perhaps the world itself was dying in the torrent of magik.

  “Take my hand,” said the woman’s voice.

  Aranthur put his free hand in the woman’s hand. She wore armour, and stood like a pillar of light, buffeted but unbowed.

  He never saw her face—it was turned away, facing the east.

  “Save Dahlia,” he said.

  “I have,” she said.

  She sounded as if she was crying.

  “The Emperor!” cried Iralia.

  “I’m doing what I can,” the armoured woman said.

  A pulse… a blink. As if for a moment, there was nothing.

  “And now it is all to do again,” she said. “Why are we such fools?”

  Book Two

  The Universal Parry

  The universal parry is such that, if executed correctly, the student will cover all lines and cross any blade in a single action, preserving his life at the cost of initiative and tempo. Only to be deployed when truly desperate.

  Maestro Sparthos,

  unpublished notes to the book Opera Nuova

  1

  Eastern Armea

  The cataclysm killed both men and women, horses and cattle. Almost a tenth of the Army of the Empire died outright, or never recovered. More than twice that number refused to look at the sky, or shuddered uncontrollably every time sunlight or the rising moon showed the gaping rent in the eastern sky.

  Ariadne threw Aranthur at the height of the tumult, but then remained true to her salt and stood by him. He rose, his hip bruised, but his mind intact, to find that Dahlia and Sasan had both survived the assault on their minds and their perception of reality.

  Sasan even managed the ghost of a smile.

  “For the first time,” he said, “my life as a thuryx addict has prepared me for something.”

  Dahlia lay on her back with her eyes open to the sky for a long time.

  Then she sat up.

  “Aranthur,” she said softly. “Who was the woman in armour?”

  “You saw her too?” Aranthur asked.

  “She took our hands,” she said. “Was that the Lady?”

  Sasan looked at her. “What?”

  “I think I just met… God,” she said. “God.”

  Aranthur shook his head, but only to clear it. He had a different notion, but the sound of screams and the sounds from the horse lines drove every thought from his head.

  The stampede of the army’s herds was unstoppable. The best that the survivors of the storm of magik could do was to follow on the handful of mounts who remained. Then begin the painful task of collecting the horses, the draught bullocks and camels of the train, and the cattle they drove for meat.

  Aranthur had difficulty recalling that day. He rode and rode, because Ariadne was one of the few horses that stood her ground. He gathered riding horses and brought them back to mount more people, who rode out to gather more mounts…

  Aranthur covered seventy miles or more, that day and the next, when General Tribane sent him south to make contact with the Capitan Pasha. The army of Atti was in the same case—shattered, decimated, and in a state of anarchy, with its camp blown flat by the physical winds and an even higher casualty rate. The Capitan Pasha himself was silent, his eyes downcast, and the bey of the Sipahis seemed to be giving the orders.

  “Tell your general we must retreat,” he said.

  Aranthur was careful of Ariadne on the return trip, although she seemed to be made of grey iron. He walked beside her across a salt pan and up a narrow ridge of sand hills.

  He was recovering rapidly—so rapidly that he used the return trip to experiment with the new world. Because, to a Magos, it was a new world: a world with a third more saar available at all times, and winds that boosted that amount even more, although they came and went with dramatic intensity. In one flood of power, he cast and cast the variants he’d imagined to his far-seeing spell, powering and dispelling his occultae with reckless abandon. Before the tide ebbed, he’d cast more saar in an hour than he would have cast in a month at the academy.

  And then he was back. The General’s camp had been struck, and the army was already moving north and west. General Tribane was with the rearguard: her own black-armoured cavalry, and the Imperial Nomadi, and the Tekne.

  “The Attians are retreating,” Aranthur said after he had saluted.

  He could see Ansu, his arm now free of a sling, and he smiled, despite everything. Dahlia was with Ringkoat and Jeninas. Sasan was nowhere to be seen.

  Tribane looked haggard, and older than he had ever seen, but her eyes, far from avoiding the flaw in the sky, seemed drawn to it.

  “Any idea what has happened?” she asked. “In the Attian camp?”

  “No, ma’am. Although they have a thousand dead.”

  His mind shied away from the lines of corpses.

  She nodded.

  “Ma’am, where… Where is the Lightbringer? Qna Liras?” Aranthur asked.

  “Only the gods know,”
she said wearily. “He stayed at the Temple of Helre. He… warned me of something dire.” She frowned. “Syr Timos. Centark Timos. If you have any notion of what is happening, I’d be happy to hear it, even if it was purely speculative.”

  Aranthur looked at Ansu.

  The prince gave a minute shrug.

  “General, something… was broken. Like the keystone of an arch.” Aranthur shrugged. “You are a Magas. You must know that we are suddenly flooded with sihr and saar.”

  She was looking at the hole in the sky.

  “Yes.” She shook her head. “We were so fucking close.”

  If the retreat never quite became a rout, it was mostly because of Alis Tribane, who rode up and down the column. Whatever face she might display in her pavilion, on the march she was calm, dignified, and somehow, present everywhere. The day was hellish; the steady southern wind brought heat and sand off the desert of Masr. The soldiers trudged along, heads down, many afflicted with what everyone called the darkness, a heavy depression, sometimes complicated by other factors—battle fatigue, homesickness, terror.

  The hot wind blew; the winds of magik blew alongside it. Men lay down and died, staggered away from the column in the grip of hallucinations, or sank to their knees from pure dehydration. A few victims of the darkness seemed to have physical symptoms. One woman vomited black and then died, and the rest of her regiment shied away from her corpse.

  Alis Tribane was everywhere, and so was Equus, and Dahlia, and Aranthur. They cajoled and promised, ordered, healed; Sasan played music and made jokes.

  The column stumbled on.

  And, despite every disaster that beset them, when the army marched into Elmit a day later, there were two hundred wagons waiting with supplies. It wasn’t very much; but somehow, those supplies—a night’s wine, grain for tired horses, bread and meat for every man and woman—meant that some part of the world was still there.

  They raised their tents on the same fields they’d occupied just four days before. Aranthur, who, with Sasan, had spent the day riding to Vanax Kunyard and back, rode in to find grain for his horse and a stew of salt cod waiting for him, as well as orders to attend the general at “his earliest convenience.”

  Ulgat handed him a bowl of fish stew.

  “Eat,” he said. “Lady Khan can wait.”

  Aranthur agreed. He inhaled a bowl of the salty stew and then another, and he and Sasan drank two cups of wine, unwatered. Only then did they cross the maidan to the red pavilion. As he entered, the Lightbringer, Qna Liras, was standing, his hands clasped as if in prayer.

  “They will not recover,” he was saying quietly. “The ones in the hospital who do not move—their brains are burned away. The ones who fear the sky are savable. The other ones who lie quietly will starve to death, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it.” He looked up, and saw Aranthur. He smiled. “You lived.”

  Aranthur was young enough that he had already begun the process of recovery, or rather, he’d already begun to forget the trauma.

  “Yes,” he said. “I felt you, when the wave came, and the Rift appeared.”

  Alis Tribane was writing. Her forehead was in her free hand, and her eyes were haunted.

  “If I had lost the battle I would not have lost this many,” she said.

  Qna Liras shrugged. “You would have lost this many, and then again when the cataclysm struck.”

  “Can we even resist this enemy?” she asked.

  Qna Liras sighed. “I do not know if we can,” he said. “I only know that we must.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Qna Liras scratched at his short beard. He looked as if he had not slept in days; there was more grey in his hair than Aranthur remembered.

  “Something terrible has been done,” he said. “I guess it is in Masr.”

  The silence went on too long.

  “What do we do now?” Tribane asked.

  Qna Liras shook his head. “I will guess something, but I need more evidence. I fear to be wrong—I fear that events are balanced on a knife edge.”

  “I can release you from that fear,” Tribane said, dully. “We are consuming the last of our supplies tonight. We will have to dash for the coast, and pray that the navy is there to save us, and not blown to kingdom come. And may all the gods save the City, and Ulama too.”

  “I sent a warning,” the Masran Magos said. “When I first felt it. The old cities have protections.”

  He swayed, and Aranthur steadied him, and then fetched a folding chair and put the priest into it.

  Tribane waved a hand. “Never mind. That’s for tomorrow. Tell me what happened.”

  “It will change nothing,” Qna Liras said. “And I’m probably wrong.”

  “Try me,” she said.

  Qna Liras pointed at the great, gold-domed monastery temple.

  “The altars of this ancient place were defiled. When I saw the way in which they had been defiled, I elected to stay and investigate them.”

  “I know,” Tribane said. “You have a strong stomach.”

  “These were not merely rapacious brigands,” Qna Liras said. “These were dedicated in slighting thousands of years of worship and rendering it as if it had never been. Breaking, if you like, the temple’s link to the… sacred.”

  “The Aulos?” Ansu asked.

  Qna Liras put his head back as if he was about to fall asleep.

  “Do you believe in the gods, Highness?”

  “Of course!”

  “There’s a traditional answer.” The Masran Magos smiled thinly. “So you know, or at least you have heard, that there is another plane which is to the Aulos as the Aulos is to us?”

  “I have heard this,” Prince Ansu said.

  “I have, too,” Aranthur said.

  “And then, theoreticians suggest that there is another plane, or perhaps status, above that. And perhaps another and another—perhaps an infinity of stacked levels of power and experience, each charged with the—”

  “Stop!” commanded the General. “Is this fact or mere academic meandering?”

  Qna Liras spread his thin hands.

  “Sometimes, academic meandering is the closest we can come to fact. Will you suppose for a moment that there is a higher plane than the Aulos? And that people can access it through prayer, perhaps in much the same way that we ‘harness’ the Aulos through will, discipline and practice?”

  Tribane shook her head. “And these defilements are meant to break this bond…?”

  “And the older these bonds are, the more powerful,” the Magos said, although he made it sound more like a question. “So that the White and Black Pyramids in Masr would be very powerful indeed.”

  “Lady,” muttered the General. “Oh, gods. You mean, I’m trying to defeat them on the ground, and they are breaking the corners of the world so that the war will be fought with magik.”

  “You have leapt ahead of me,” Qna Liras said, his voice hollow with fatigue. “But that is where I was going. Nor do I think that they are done. They must intend to break more—to open that hole in the sky wide. So that the whole tide of chaos washes our shores, and only those who can use the magik that is offered will have any… power.” He spread his hands. “I’m no loremaster. I have heard that the temples of Masr contain ancient things. Entities. I have heard that we have captured them… Perhaps the Great One is released, although to release any of the Old Ones sounds like madness. The ancients died to stop the Old Ones. Only the truly malign would release them.” He shrugged. “But it is all madness.”

  Tribane leant back. She motioned at Ringkoat, and he began packing a pipe.

  “You think they have other… rituals? To complete?” she asked.

  “I know nothing!” Qna Liras shouted. “I’m guessing! By all the gods, woman, the world is being destroyed and I am fucking helpless!”

  She took the lit pipe, drew deeply on the smoke, and leant back.

  “Well, I like a fight. Let’s imagine that the Master plans t
o knock the foundations off the world. Where are they?”

  “Necropolis in Safi,” Sasan said. “They took it two years ago.”

  “Lost to us now,” the General said.

  “Haghia Sophia,” Aranthur said. “In Megara.”

  “The Sufiat Dome in Ulama,” Tribane nodded.

  “The Muyyayit Temple of Light in Antioke,” Qna Liras said. “They’ve had it for six months.”

  “Maybe we took it back,” the General said. “We acted in secret, but we sent some of our best.”

  “There are a dozen temples of impeccable age in Zhou,” Ansu said. “If this Master wishes to break the foundations of the world, he will have to take Zhou.”

  The General breathed smoke out of her nose and put the pipe down on her writing desk.

  “Exactly,” she said. “It is ever the way of men to break things they don’t understand, but equally, it is also the way of men to overreach. There is a hole in the sky, but by all the gods, friends, if we were beaten, it would already be evident.”

  “A thousand dead, an army defeated, and a hole in reality…” Qna Liras said.

  The General sneered. “Bah. What can be broken can be repaired.”

  Aranthur thought of the woman’s voice: “And now it is all to do again.”

  “I can send birds to Ulama and to Megara. Today, this very hour. And Antioke… may once again be in our hands.”

  Qna Liras looked up. “How?”

  “Another expedition. Originally a feint, but the Pure didn’t respond, so the feint became a siege.” She steepled her hands. “I think you should go to Antioke, Lightbringer. With my dispatches and some orders.”

  “I am more interested in going to Masr,” the Lightbringer said.

  Tribane raised an eyebrow. “To the scene of the crime, so to speak?”

  “Yes. I can get your messages to Antioke by way of Masr. In ten days. Fewer, with luck.”

  Tribane looked at him with obvious unbelief.

  “How?” she asked.

  He scratched the base of his chin and pointed at the map.

  “We’re deep in Armea. We cannot cross the Kuh here—the mountains are like a wall. So to reach Antioke, we would have to go all the way to the coast, and then down the coast almost to Masr. Yes? So look, my dear General. Instead, we cross the mountains right here, on the old smugglers’ pass, and cut the corner of Safi…”