Guns of the Dawn

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Then she was startled awake, clutching at her sheets and listening to her own breathing – and to the sound of someone else in the room.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she asked. She heard a man moving with quiet patience between the beds, not making much noise, but not trying overmuch to be silent. Was it the Denlanders come to finish her? An assassin would have had her by now, or would have frozen to stillness once she spoke. A friend, then; a nocturnal visitor?

  Her heart skipped and she whispered, ‘Giles? Mr Scavian?’

  The intruder stopped and let out a long sigh. ‘Always the same, is it not? What do you see, between us, that makes you take me for him, or is it just that it is always he you really wish to see?’

  ‘Mr Lascari?’ she hissed. A light was kindled in the dark, guttering low about his fingers, revealing his hawklike features to her. His eyes flared, reflecting back the flame as they fixed on her.

  ‘What are you doing here, Mr Lascari?’ she asked him. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘For you.’ He approached her bed with stalking strides. His face was devoid of expression save for a need that burned deep within it.

  She sat up as quickly as she could, despite her bruises. ‘Mr Lascari, what do you mean?’ she asked more urgently. The doctor’s wife slept in the next room and a single shout would fetch her.

  To her surprise, he sat down at the foot of her bed, hunching there like some carrion bird, a raven indeed. ‘Look,’ he said, and rolled up one sleeve, illuminating it with the fire from his other hand.

  She saw a long, shiny scar there, raw and ill-healed: a graze from a musket ball that had come close, but not close enough.

  ‘My first,’ he explained hollowly. ‘How long I have fought in this war – three long years and no scratch until now. I have seen Warlocks die out here, Marshwic – die and rot, extinguished in the waters of the swamp.’

  He frightened her. It was nothing in the way he sat or the way he spoke, but there was a sense about him that scared her deeply. The fire inside him was loose and blazing, as though he were a house and it was consuming the furniture, peeking out through the windows. If she shouted for help now, the whole edifice might become an inferno.

  ‘I will die here,’ he told her. ‘It has come to me at last, this realization. We keep it at arm’s length, do we not? But at the last we know it. The path of our lives will take us no further than here.’

  She could only nod.

  ‘I have been remiss in my duty, Marshwic. I must remedy it while I can.’

  Is he apologizing? Confessing? ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘I am my father’s only son. I was made Warlock at nineteen – younger than your Giles Scavian, that is! I have always prided myself on my devotion. I have been the King’s good servant.’

  The unsaid ‘but’ hung in the air between them.

  ‘Continuity,’ he explained. ‘In that only have I failed my king. I have no family. I have not continued the Lascari line. No son lives now to carry on the bloodline, to serve the King in turn.’

  ‘Mr Lascari . . .’

  ‘Marshwic!’ he hissed, and clutched at her through the sheet, seizing hold of her thigh. She yelped in surprise and pain, for his fingers were bony as a dead man’s.

  ‘Marshwic, you are a good servant of the King,’ he pressed on. ‘You came here. You did not have to.’

  ‘The draft—’

  ‘Damn the draft!’ he snapped. ‘The draft doesn’t count for people like us. We serve or we do not serve. We are not forced to. Of all the camp, Marshwic, no woman here but you has any blood of note. Servants, farmers’ daughters and tradesmen’s wives. No gentlefolk, no nobility. They all stayed at home and sent the maid, the cook, the housekeeper – never their own precious blood, no. But you! You knew your duty, Marshwic. You came here to serve your king.’

  ‘Mr Lascari—’

  He leant over her, pinning her tightly to the bed with that one skeletal hand. ‘You must do your duty, girl. A woman’s duty, not this soldier’s game you play at. I have a duty for you. It’s my last hope, Marshwic. My last hope for a child.’

  And she bucked him off with all her strength, rolled out of bed and onto the floor away from him. He loomed over the mattress, fingers screwing up the sheet.

  ‘You keep away from me!’ she warned, scrambling to her feet, rolling over the next bed and putting space between them. Looking left and right, she saw nothing that might serve as a weapon.

  He stood up slowly. ‘This is your duty,’ he insisted.

  ‘No duty I ever signed up for,’ she spat at him.

  ‘We all must do distasteful things in war. Do not think that I will take pleasure in this business. It is a duty, nothing more.’

  ‘I will not let you touch me. It’s no duty of mine. Let the Lascaris die out this very night, if they must!’

  Fire flared about him, outlining him, dancing in his eyes and mouth, lighting the whole room as he stalked across the floor towards her. He was between her and the door.

  He cannot kill you. That would defeat his purpose. That fire could not be turned on her.

  She waited until he was closer, and then tried to make a break for it across the beds, clearing the closest in one giant leap, stumbling over the second but falling on the third. A hand like a vice clasped her ankle and hauled her back, and she kicked frantically at his face. All around her the infirmary was flickering, light and dark, as his limning fires coursed high and low about him.

  She twisted in his grip. His face was slack, almost vacant, as he dragged her towards him. She kicked him a glancing blow to the chin, and she felt his grip on her ankle suddenly sear. She screamed.

  ‘What is going on here?’ Doctor Carling’s wife appeared at the door to her chamber, wrapped in a sheet. Her face was white and utterly aghast.

  ‘Get out.’ Lascari spat the words at her. ‘I will not be troubled.’

  ‘You will leave here at once.’ The doctor’s wife advanced on him, and he sent a jet of fire across the room, singeing her hair and eyebrows, driving her back.

  ‘Out!’ Lascari shouted at her, giving another tug on Emily’s leg, and the doctor’s wife fled, leaving the stench of burnt hair behind her.

  ‘You can’t hope to get away with this!’ Emily raged at him. He jumped forward like a toad, one hand finding her throat, the other fumbling for her wrist.

  No man rules me but the King. No man here has authority over me but the King,’ he panted out. ‘If I set my heart on a thing, not even the colonel can say me nay.’ He had wrestled her halfway onto a bed, and she struck at him with hands, knees, elbows and feet, feeling him as hard as bone inside his robes.

  ‘Be still!’ he demanded, and then the fire coursed across her chin and neck and she screamed and clutched at his hand.

  ‘Be still,’ he said again. She stared up at him, feeling the welt beneath his clutching hand burn and sting. ‘Oh, you will live to bear my child, but – by God, woman! – not so any man will ever wish to look upon, unless you are still.’

  ‘You cannot mean to do this.’

  ‘Duty,’ he ground out, and fumbled for his belt with his free hand.

  ‘I will not bear your child,’ she told him. ‘I will take herbs. I will miscarry it.’

  ‘Women say such things,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘I will not bear whatever spiderish thing you might grow in my womb!’ she threw at him. ‘I swear, as I am a soldier in this army, as I am a woman and as I am a servant of the King, that I will strangle any child of yours, with my own damned hands if I am forced to bear it. I will dash the bastard creature’s brains out, Lascari, and end your damned dynasty myself if I have to.’

  He had stopped moving. The dwindling fires that still outlined him showed her a face hanging open and empty as the mind behind it absorbed her words.

  No woman could mean such a thing,’ he declared hollowly.

  ‘I have been fighting the King’s war long enough to have meant worse things than that
,’ she said. ‘What would you have me swear by, Lascari? God? I so swear. The King? I so swear! All my hopes, for now and the future? Consider it sworn.’

  His hand slackened at her throat and he sat back, looking dazed, as though awaking from some strange dream.

  ‘I cannot believe it,’ he whispered.

  ‘Kill me now,’ she told him. ‘Kill me now or leave. I killed the last man who tried to force himself on me.’

  And I had a pistol then, and he was no wizard.

  But Lascari stood back, still staring wonderingly at her. ‘You unnatural creature,’ he said. ‘Have the Denlanders cut out those parts of you that made you female? What has been done to you?’

  That, coming from him, after what he had been about to perpetrate: she almost laughed at him. Something in his words stuck, though; some dart stayed lodged. The dream came to her of her old life, and her not being able to live it. Has something been taken from me really?

  ‘Go,’ she said, and he might indeed have gone, had not Giles Scavian thrown back the door of the infirmary with murder in his eyes and fire in his hands.

  25

  A century ago, when the King kept a company of a hundred Warlocks at the capital at all times, such differences of opinion were not uncommon. But not since then. So many died heroically in the Hellic wars, and even before Denland’s attack their numbers had not recovered.

  But now? How few Warlocks remain. Two at the Levant, perhaps a dozen at the Couchant. There is no luxury now for such spectacles.

  But for just one night, for such a short space of minutes even, the past was resurrected. We were treated to a true duel of wizards.

  The pause stretched like a taut wire between Scavian and Lascari, crackling with coals and embers. The younger man, his hands crooked into claws, eyes surging and blazing with a power he could barely keep inside; his senior hunched like a crow, sour as vinegar, bitter as gall. No words were said, and Emily felt the heat radiate from them both so that the air shimmered and sparked all about them.

  ‘Get out of my way, boy,’ Lascari ordered flatly. Defeated, robbed of his desires by Emily’s sheer bloody-mindedness, he had no wish to stay in her presence any longer. He stomped towards the door, but Scavian still blocked it.

  ‘Move, boy,’ Lascari commanded him.

  ‘I will not,’ Scavian said.

  ‘Giles,’ Emily said, scrabbling off the bed, ‘please, don’t do anything foolish.’

  ‘You had best do what I tell you, boy,’ Lascari snarled at him.

  ‘You have no rule over me.’ He seemed so calm, did Scavian. The fury was visible in every line of him, in his face, his stance, the very tilt of his head, but his voice was as mercilessly calm as a cloudless sky.

  ‘Giles, just let him go,’ Emily urged him. He spared her only a brief glance. His fierce expression brought tears to her eyes.

  ‘Listen to her,’ said Lascari, and moved to push Scavian away. Fire leapt between them, and the older man flinched and hissed.

  ‘Defy me, boy, and you defy the King.’

  ‘I am the King as much as you are,’ Scavian replied.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ At last Lascari broke and physically threw himself at Scavian, knocking him out of the doorway as flame seared out across the both of them. It flashed across Emily’s face and she drew back, then rushed forward again to see them roll to the ground, and break apart. When she herself got to the door they were each kneeling on the damp earth outside, random quirks and snakes of fire dancing over them.

  ‘You do not want to make more of this,’ Lascari warned. He looked tired, terribly tired; hopeless and empty.

  Scavian just stared back at him, and the older man broke eye contact first.

  ‘How can you invoke the King’s name?’ Scavian demanded. ‘How do you hide behind his name to do such things?’ He rose and went to Emily, as she stood in the doorway in nothing but her nightgown. He turned his back on Lascari fearlessly and the older man did nothing, just watched. ‘Did he hurt you?’

  He would have raped me. How much more hurt is there? ‘No. No, he did not.’ She could have taken revenge, willingly and without guilt, but she did not want to risk Giles on a throw of that coin. He meant more to her than did any retribution exacted on Lascari.

  But his hand lifted to touch at her throat, and she felt the sudden pain, the tenderness there in the shape of Lascari’s hand, like her own anointing. There was a burnt patch, too, over her thigh, that showed a similar mark. Scavian’s face adopted a calmness even more dreadful, for there was cold-blooded death in it.

  ‘In the King’s name,’ he said again, fixing Lascari with a look. ‘The very thought would sicken him. Assault of a woman, attempt at rape – are those the deeds you were anointed for?’

  Around them there was quite a crowd now, fractious and whispering. Emily saw Doctor Carling’s wife there, saw Caxton’s pale and nervous face, and Brocky’s bulk.

  ‘Giles, please, don’t do anything rash,’ she said, as softly as would still carry to him.

  Scavian looked straight at her. His face was set, brave and terribly young. ‘I believe in the King,’ he told the world at large.

  ‘Then go away.’ Lascari levered himself to his feet. ‘Walk away.’ He looked old in the lamplight, old and sick of it all. ‘I have no liking for you, but no quarrel.’

  Scavian said simply, ‘You are not fit to wear the King’s mark.’

  A deadly quiet descended on the watchers. Emily felt her heart lurch with the look of old, sour hatred that descended on Lascari.

  ‘I have worn this mark for twenty years, boy. How long has it been on you? Two seasons? Three? When were you made a wizard? After all the real Warlocks had already fallen? Why did the King touch you, save there were no others in arm’s reach.’

  ‘Anointed for one day or a hundred years, I am a king’s wizard,’ said Scavian reasonably. ‘No man may take that from me, unless I am dead. Do you want to try your hand, Mr Lascari?’

  ‘Giles, he’ll kill you,’ Emily hissed at him.

  He touched her hand briefly, his fingers hot and dry. ‘Do not fear for me. You know I must do this.’ She remembered the torturing of the Denlander scout, and Scavian’s distress as he tried to reconcile it with his duty, with his king. He had been a loaded gun from that moment, and Lascari’s assault on her was nothing more than the trigger being pulled.

  Scavian’s eyes flicked to Lascari, glinting cold and regal as an emperor’s. ‘I have suffered you ever since I came here. I have borne your ill humours, your tortures and your cruelty, and passed over it, saying that you merely did your duty. Now I unmask you. You are unworthy of your office. You are a disgrace to our order. You put truth into the mouths of the Denlanders when they curse us.’

  Lascari looked, in that moment, not at Scavian but at Emily, and she read in his face the long book of his losses, his bitter debtor’s account in life. Long years of misery, of enforced and hateful service. Sent here to die, thwarted in his last and most desperate scheme to secure continuity. And now this: insulted by a youngster before the entire camp.

  ‘What’s all this?’ demanded the colonel’s slightly befuddled voice, as he pushed through the crowd that had gathered. ‘What’s going on? Lights and shouting?’

  ‘A personal matter, Colonel,’ said Lascari, ‘between Scavian and myself. Go back to bed.’

  ‘Called you out, has he?’ the colonel said, rubbing at his eyes and not quite understanding. ‘Good heavens. Now, look, we can’t have that. Bad enough with the enemy trying to kill us. No, no, completely out of the question.’

  Lascari eyed him coldly, and Emily saw how he had no respect for the old man whatsoever, any more than he did for anyone around him. How alone he is. ‘Keep away, Colonel. This is none of your concern.’

  ‘Now listen here, I forbid it!’ Colonel Resnic insisted. ‘Can’t have this. Bad for discipline, Lascari.’

  ‘Forgive me, sir, but you have no authority,’ Scavian reminded him. ‘In truth, we are r
uled by the King only, and we cannot be stopped.’

  It was that ‘in truth’ that brought a lump to Emily’s throat: that little quirk of his; his insistence on truth to cover his own uncertainty about the world. She had seen the set of Lascari’s face, and she was very afraid for her friend. Giles Scavian, who she surely loved, had roused a serpent.

  ‘Giles, please, I’m asking you not to do this,’ she said, knowing that he had set his course and would stay on it. He put a hand on her shoulder and his lips twitched as if to say something, but then he looked past her, at Justin Lascari.

  The older man stood, surrounded by a circle of bare ground that none of the onlookers would encroach onto. ‘I would have avoided this,’ he declared, the words almost lost. ‘I would have walked away – as you could have walked away. But now I see that I have wanted this. I have wanted it since . . .’ He waved a hand idly and an errant spark of fire danced across him, making those closest jump back. ‘You will never know, Scavian, of what you have. You will never value what is freely given to you. As I am likely to die any day, I will die with one comfort left me, that never more will she mistake me for you. For one or other of us will be gone.’

  Scavian would have said something more but Lascari thrust his hands out without warning, and with them came a vast boiling sheet of flame that lashed across the younger Warlock and half a dozen others. Emily felt the battering heat of it, but Scavian had thrown her to one side even as Lascari moved, and it only singed her hair and gown. Several other men were down, beating at their burning clothes, but Scavian – he stood where he had stood before, a faint steam rising from him, and unburnt, untouched. He splayed a hand out like a man fanning cards, and a claw of fire raked at Lascari, to be fended off by an errant gesture. The two wizards stared at one another as all around them men and women scrambled back to give them space.