Milligan’s reply was succinct. “Cavalry released, sir,” Tyrol reported, trying to keep the sudden exhaustion out of his voice. He stepped away from the lantern just long enough to grab a cold sausage. As the peppery meat began to revive him, he wiped a dribble of grease from his chin.
A couple of paces away, Kelflen rubbed the tip of a drum stick over the drumhead. The whispery sound cut through Tyrol, and his chest seemed to clamp down on his heart. Anticipation shrouded him; he supposed it shrouded them all—Kelflen, Ghilly the piper, the marshall’s advisors and hangers-on, the men on the field below—as effectively as the fog.
Tyrol closed the shutter on his lantern. It had oil enough to last until midday, unless he had to send very many more messages.
The anxious moments piled on one another until the marshall said, “Sound the general advance. We will serve them our best, and see how they like it.”
Kelflen beat out the familiar rhythm. Seconds later, Ghilly’s drones and chanter joined in.
Tyrol barely heard their army’s distant drums and pipes echo the call, so effective was the fog at swallowing the sound; yet the Varrikar drumbeat still came through. Then, as sudden as a pot boiling over, came the distant, inconsistent sounds of infantry and cavalry charging, weapons clashing, innumerable triumphs and dreadful pains delivered to men and beasts.
The fog hung over the valley, and the battle continued unseen.
* * *
The noise of the battle shifted from right to left and right again. Tyrol messaged Captain Hallern twice more, but the troops could not achieve a breakthrough. Kelflen and Ghilly continued to play out signals to the wider army.
A nearby scream of pain and alarm from the slope behind them cut through the pipe-and-drum call.
Tyrol glanced away from Captain Hallern’s position and forgot to look back.
Near enough that the fog blurred but no longer hid them, a squad of Varrikar climbed up the slope. Lieutenant Pilkus, the marshall’s adjutant, shouted a warning, drew his sword, and ran downhill to meet them. Others of the marshall’s staff followed close behind. Tyrol’s hand found the sword hilt again and even he took a step, but he kept his place by the signal lamp.
Marshall Innolik cursed.
The Varrikar were men, sharp-featured with wild dark hair, but even looking down on them from the hilltop this squad seemed peopled with giants. Yet several of them collapsed before Pilkus and the others reached them; could they be so greatly fatigued from fighting their way around the valley? The lieutenant threw himself at the center of the squad and struck at a behemoth in gray-green armor—but it was a glancing blow, and the big man stepped inside Pilkus’s sword and hacked down at the young officer’s knee. Pilkus screamed as his leg collapsed, but the Varrikar wrapped his arm around the lieutenant’s sword arm and held him upright; he looked Pilkus in the eye as he drove the point of his sword up under the adjutant’s breastplate.
The rest of the marshall’s staff fared somewhat better, and others from the camp joined the melee. But in a moment, two, three, and then four of the Varrikar resumed their climb toward the marshall’s position.
“Dear God, we are undone,” Marshall Innolik said. His shoulders slumped. Then he straightened his back and a fierce purpose blazed in his eyes.
“Drummer, sound general alarm,” he said. “Weaver, signal Captain Hallern to take command. And here”—he flung his leather case to the ground at Tyrol’s feet—“if you live, carry that to Hallern and tell him . . . tell him I have been proud to serve with him.” The marshall drew his broadsword, as long as Tyrol’s leg, and spurred his horse toward the oncoming enemy. “And so have I been proud to serve with you all,” he called as he descended the hill.
Tyrol forced his attention away from the marshall and onto his work. He raised the lantern’s flame to its brightest. Kelflen’s drumbeat changed and Ghilly’s pipe roared out a new alarm as Tyrol sent his message in quick bursts like tiny lightning flashes. Overrun here, he signaled. Take command.
He started to repeat the message when Ghilly’s pipes went silent. Tyrol turned.
One of the Varrikar dropped the piper to the ground and hacked at the pipes with his axe. The drones splintered and the hide bag wheezed a final breath.
The soldier stalked toward Kelflen, who stared wide-eyed but continued beating out the alarm.
“Run!” Tyrol shouted, and grabbed the lantern because it was the nearest thing to his hands. He yanked it off its pole and threw it at the huge man. It hit the Varrikar soldier’s hip, and what was left of the oil sloshed out and took flame. The man yelled, jumped back, and beat at his burning clothes.
Tyrol picked up the marshall’s pouch, then took hold of Kelflen’s arm and pulled him away. They ran down the rocky slope, into the fog-strewn valley.
* * *
They picked their way between and around barrel-sized boulders, climbed through a split in one stone almost as large as Tyrol’s mother’s cottage, and crashed through stands of young pines, trading caution for speed as they ran, slid, and fell away from the doomed hilltop. Kelflen’s drum was an early casualty, lost in the first few minutes. Tyrol held the marshall’s pouch close to him, lest he drop it as they made their way.
Trees and rocks took on ominous shapes in the mist.
“The marshall was right,” Tyrol said. “This fog is damnable.”
Kelflen said, “The adjutant said it was a Varrikar invention.”
“Then damn them three times.”
They tried to snake along the line of lower hills that ran generally east toward Captain Hallern’s position, but in the mist the only certain direction was down. Too far down meant into the wide part of the valley, and the worst of the fighting. Tyrol was no longer sure that was where he wanted to be; he told himself that his prime concern should be the pouch Marshall Innolik had entrusted to him, but he wondered if he had lost the courage he thought he had.
“Stop, Tyrol,” Kelflen finally said. The boy’s breath came so heavy he could barely make the sounds. He leaned and then slid down against a boulder the size of a wagon wheel. He still clutched a drum stick in his right hand.
Tyrol understood. Kelflen had been drumming hard before they started running. Tyrol knew that if he had repeated the marshall’s message once or twice more he could never have run so far so fast. He supposed he had been lucky to have only had time to send it once, but he wished he knew if Milligan had seen it.
Tyrol let the place they were in soak into him, as his father used to say. The mist robbed everything within a few yards of color or clarity. The scent of clay mixed with moisture and mildew, but the air also carried a gritty gypsum tang and a hint of wild honeysuckle. War drums and pipes still sounded in the foggy distance, though down here it was harder to tell their directions or what they were signaling.
Tyrol bent close to Kelflen and whispered, “We can’t stay here long.”
Kelflen nodded. He kept his voice low. “They might find us.”
“And I have to deliver this.”
“Could we hide now, and move at night?”
“I don’t know this area well enough.”
“There’s a river that runs through the valley,” Kelflen said. “I saw it on the map. Some creeks flow into it from the hills. We could hide along the bank, and get water.”
Tyrol doubted it would be so easy, but he was thirsty—hungry, too, now that he thought about it—and he could not understand maps. He was impressed that Kelflen could.
“How far away?”
“I don’t know,” the drummer admitted. “I’ve gotten twisted around. If we could see better, we would know.”
Tyrol cursed the Varrikar again. Did their manipulators make the fog? That might explain how their soldiers made it so deep into the Dvornian lines without being detected. Tyrol remembered the front rank of the attackers collapsing before Lieutenant Pilkus even reached them. Were they all manipulators?
Tyrol waved his hand through the fog and gently pulled a few vapory ten
drils as if he were going to make a lens . . . and recalled a time when his mother manipulated shadows on the wall to entertain him and his little brother. If he could weave shadows as well as light . . .
“I have an idea,” he told Kelflen.
* * *
His idea should have worked, but the damnable fog diffused the light so much that Tyrol was unable to do much with it: he made shadows, but they seemed insubstantial, transitory, and the effort sapped him. So they moved as quickly as stealth and fatigue would allow until they came to one of the brooks Kelflen had promised.
Kelflen made a move toward the water, but as much as Tyrol wanted to charge ahead with him, he held them back to be sure no Varrikars were about. The noises of the battle seemed far removed from this spot, but neither of them admitted to being sure of what they heard.
“You drink, and I’ll watch,” Tyrol said, “and then we’ll switch.”
The water was clear as truth, and more refreshing. Tyrol wet his hair after he drank, and as he sat up and Kelflen bent to drink again, a trumpet blast tore the air. It was answered by another, farther away, and another, and then clearly recognizable Dvornian pipes and drums called out.
“Secure the line,” Kelflen said.
Tyrol recognized the next notes. “Do not advance.”
Part of the next signal was overwhelmed by another trumpet, but they got enough of it: form up, retrieve wounded, do not engage.
“Is it over?” Kelflen asked.
Tyrol wondered if he was imagining the growing light or if the Varrikars’ fog was actually lifting. “And barely noon? I think this is only a reprieve.”
They drank more, and huddled in the midst of a stand of young pines where they could see down into the valley. The fog burned away inch by inch, and to their left they saw the hill where they had stood with Marshall Innolik at daybreak. They had not gotten as far as Tyrol thought, or wished.
As the battleground cleared, they first saw the rough shape of Rellam Wood, closer than expected; then its distinct edge; then the bloodied, muddied ground in front of it.
Every standard in the field bore the color and crest of a Varrikar tribe.
* * *
They had come generally east, away from Marshall Innolik’s old headquarters, but neither knew exactly how far they were from Captain Hallern’s new command. Tyrol grumbled at Kelflen for not having a better memory of the map he had seen. Kelflen countered that he had not seen the whole map: other papers had covered parts of it. They stifled their argument by common assent, stole another drink of water each, and moved on.
They crept back up the hill, still angling eastward, from rock to rock to bush to copse to rock. Now that the fog was gone, Tyrol feared some Varrikar soldier gleaning the battlefield would see them in the early afternoon sun. He struggled to move even slower than he had earlier: instinct told him to dash from shadow to shadow, but he was sure any quick movement would catch an enemy’s attention. Tension seized his muscles with the inescapable grip of a hawk striking a field mouse.
At another up-thrust of rocks, Tyrol chanced to climb high enough to look toward Captain Hallern’s outpost. He lay flat and wriggled his way to the edge, where he sighed out almost all of his built-up tension when he saw the Dvornian flag still flying on the far hill.
Most of the ground in between was devoid of his country’s troops, however.
Kelflen climbed up beside Tyrol. The drummer pointed out the line of Varrikar flags. “How did we lose so much ground?”
“How are we going to cross?” Tyrol countered.
“In the dark.”
“It’s a long way to go,” Tyrol said, but bit off the rest of his words at a gesture from Kelflen. The drummer pointed uphill, and Tyrol heard the sounds of stumbling, sliding steps; then, indecipherable but clear enough to sour his stomach, the jabbering of two Varrikars in conversation.
Tyrol glanced around, but none of the possible hiding places looked promising. A moment later, two Varrikar soldiers—normal men, not like the near-giants who had attacked the Marshall’s headquarters—crested the hill. Thankfully, they were angled away from Tyrol and Kelflen. Tyrol slid backward, pulling Kelflen with him into a crevice between the big rock and a smaller, wagon-sized boulder next to it, and in desperation grasped for the light and shadows to try to hide them.
The shadows felt slippery—the first word to occur to him—compared to the air and water and light Tyrol usually manipulated. He began to understand better why other people couldn’t manipulate the light the way he could. He used to think that since everyone cast regular shadows, why couldn’t they just as easily gather the light and focus it? These greasy shadows reminded him that he had not yet progressed as far as his mother, who could form a lens between her thumb and forefinger and use the earliest rays of the morning sun to start a fire to boil water for tea. But the battlefield would have been no place for her.
Fatigue and hunger gnawed at him the more he tried to twist the shadows around himself and Kelflen. The shadows felt like cool oil, and made even manipulating the warm light more difficult than usual. Tyrol wondered if he was misinterpreting some sensory elements of working with the shadow, and if his mother could have taught him more about it. Next to him, Kelflen squirmed and then was gone—
Tyrol nearly lost his grip on the shadows, and concentrated so hard on restoring them that he missed the first thing the Varrikar soldier said. The man held Kelflen by the hair, but the drummer had not cried out.
“. . . a spy?” the soldier said in thick, accented Dvornian as he pointed a long dagger at Kelflen. “Or a rat, hid in the shadows?” The man thrust Kelflen toward the other soldier, who wore intricate facial tattoos.
Tattoo-face jabbered at Kelflen, but dagger-man said, “Not understand? You’ll understand this,” and put the point of his dagger under Kelflen’s eye. “You’re a pretty thing,” he said, but his rough accent made the words vile.
Tyrol shuddered as the dagger-man rubbed the flat of his blade against Kelflen’s face. The other Varrikar held the drummer’s arms and leered; when Kelflen turned his head, the tattooed face was right there, eyes wide. Kelflen closed his eyes, and a tear slid down his cheek.
Tyrol could barely track the tornado of his thoughts: that his shadows had been incomplete, so it was his fault that Kelflen had been seen; that he could not risk being caught if he was to deliver Marshall Innolik’s pouch; that he stood no chance against two grown men; that—
“Tyrol! Run!” Kelflen yelled.
The dagger-man slapped Kelflen, but he and tattoo-face looked around. “No one,” he said, and put the blade against Kelflen’s throat. “But quiet now, or you’ll bleed.” His partner laughed and jabbered, and the two went back and forth in their language for a moment. “Zholav says you’ll stay warm long enough, even if we gut you.”
The two Varrikar laughed, and Tyrol drew his sword while they wouldn’t hear. It was hard to hold on to the shadow with his left hand while he maneuvered the sword in his right, especially since he had little room in the cleft of the rock; he was grateful that his father’s blade was short, barely longer than the Varrikar soldier’s dagger but twice as wide.
“Won’t matter,” Kelflen said.
Tyrol almost stopped moving when he heard the drummer speak, but he could not afford to wait. His fatigue was so acute that if he paused too long he would collapse and be found. He crept ahead, shadowed, as Kelflen said, “I’m plagued. We’ll be dead soon.”
Dagger-man poked Kelflen in the chin with his blade, and studied the drummer’s neck. “Don’t look plagued,” he said, and jabbered to tattoo-face. The other man stepped back, and held Kelflen at arm’s length.
“Just got exposed,” Kelflen said. “That’s why I told Tyrol to run. To get away from the plague.”
Tattoo-face made a short speech in the Varrikar tongue, shaking Kelflen as he did so. Dagger-man jabbered back at him.
Tyrol moved in a crouch and kept dagger-man between him and tattoo-face. His sword felt
heavy as a bucket of water, and he tried to keep his muddy boots from squelching too loud.
“You lie!” dagger-man said. “There’s no tur-roll, no plague.”
Tyrol put the point of his sword at a joint in dagger-man’s armor. He dropped the shadows, stood from his crouch, and said, “Tyrol is the plague.”
Tattoo-face’s eyes widened as Tyrol drove his sword upward into dagger-man’s back. Tyrol almost lost his grip as dagger-man turned; the soldier screamed out quiet bubbles of blood, but he swung at Tyrol’s head as he tried to pull away. Tyrol ducked and pushed forward, his sword blade moving inside the man’s body. Gore suddenly slicked his hands, and shit stench filled his nostrils. Dagger-man fell, and twisted, and Tyrol fell with him, fell on him, gasped for breath as he hit. He rolled and pulled the sword free, searching through fatigue-dimmed eyes for tattoo-face.
Tyrol’s muscles quivered like baitfish struggling in an overfull net. Between the tremors and dagger-man’s blood, he could barely hold the sword tip up. He had no strength—
—the tattooed Varrikar was nearly on him—
—but the man moved strangely, one hand to his throat and the other to his eye—
—from which protruded part of Kelflen’s drum stick. Tyrol smiled and in triumph found strength enough to swing his sword again. He was still on the ground, however, so he swung at what he could reach and hacked the soldier’s knee. Tattoo-face tottered, and Kelflen knocked him from behind. Tyrol lifted the point of his sword as tattoo-face fell on him and the upturned blade.
The daylight dimmed as a cloud passed overhead. Tyrol lay under the Varrikar, exhausted by the shadow-weaving and fighting. He tried to tell Kelflen he was ruined, spent, but could not form the words.
The drummer pulled the Varrikar off him and helped Tyrol stand and retrieve his sword. Kelflen almost dragged Tyrol away to the east, unheeding the need to hide from watchful eyes.
Shattered Shields Page 14