The cart was already rolling down the far side of the bridge in the final approach to the gardens, and he hurried to catch up. The books were safe, the companions who’d escaped from the burning city safe, too. But all too soon, he knew, the enemy would begin the final assault on their sanctuary and home.
Chapter Twenty-Two
In the first several days after seizing the last of the castles through the mountains, Nathaliey thought Wolfram’s army would batter their way through to Aristonia without a serious battle. A small force of marauders had escaped, led by Hamid with the red sword, but they hadn’t rallied the Veyrian troops to halt the Eriscoban advance so much as thrown up forces piecemeal to shield their escape. The Blackshields, only a hundred strong, smashed a small army of three hundred footmen in the foothills and wiped out several hundred more the next day with a combination of ground charges and swooping attacks from griffin riders.
They captured a wagon train of supplies and seized one of Toth’s pashas before he could take refuge in one of the new fortresses on the Tothian Way. Baron Knightsbridge brought forward the main Eriscoban army to consolidate Wolfram’s gains.
But then they approached the western border of Aristonia and stalled. Here Hamid had set up an armed encampment centered at a watchtower. The Veyrians resisted a swift attack, killed several griffin riders and nearly a dozen paladins, and forced a delay. When a hard-marching force of Eriscobans came up the next day with five hundred men, Wolfram tried again. This time Nathaliey set fire to the enemy palisades and called up a dust storm to disguise a flanking attack from the south. Two dark acolytes fought back with sorcery, and killed her dust storm before Wolfram’s men could take advantage of the diversion. More hard fighting forced Wolfram to withdraw.
He ordered a retreat to the village of Tressily, where the bulk of the Eriscoban army was gathering for another push. Yuli and her griffin riders were getting restless, ready to return to their mountain strongholds, but they’d been flying aerial scouting missions, so high in the clouds that the enemy couldn’t touch them with arrows or sorcery. Yuli reported a hostile army on the road ahead, blocking the way and growing larger hour by hour.
An even larger army—its numbers “uncountable,” as Yuli put it—marched through the heart of Aristonia. Toward what, she couldn’t tell. Seemed that they were trying to encircle woods, sheep pastures, and abandoned wheat fields.
Nathaliey told Yuli to describe the topography of the surrounding land. Heavy forest to the north, bisected by the new highway. A creek flowing toward Aristonia’s main river, crossed by a stone bridge. Yuli was describing the terrain around Memnet’s gardens. Toth was beginning his final assault.
Nathaliey found Wolfram and Baron Knightsbridge in the village. Most of Tressily had been looted and torched by the retreating Veyrian army, its people enslaved or put to the sword, but the village inn remained standing. Wolfram and Knightsbridge stood at a big oak table, where they’d spread maps and dispatches.
A few months ago, Nathaliey and Markal had spent a night in the Tressily inn as they left Aristonia carrying Soultrup. The village had been weakened by drought and war, the wool merchants and other traders from the hill country that had once patronized it largely gone, but the inn had been welcoming, the food good and plentiful.
Now the inn was empty, looted, and every step crunched broken crockery underfoot. There was blood across the floor and splattered on broken ale barrels. Whose blood? The merchants’? The innkeepers’ and serving women’s?
The two men looked up as Nathaliey entered. “Where’s the griffin queen?” Knightsbridge asked.
The baron was a sturdy, barrel-chested man, balding on top and with a thick red beard. He was leading the regular Eriscoban soldiers, but Nathaliey suspected that he’d been chosen less for his fighting prowess or military acumen than for his ability to keep the men fed. She’d been surprised at how well supplied the barbarian troops were, and how efficiently they’d taken command of captured supply wagons, rather than leave them to be looted.
“Resting her mount between patrols,” Nathaliey said. “The griffins won’t enter the village—too hot, too many people. Yuli’s got them encamped on a hillside near the stream. There’s shade and cold water for bathing.”
“I wish I could take command,” Wolfram said. “Instead of them flying here and there, doing their own thing.”
Knightsbridge grunted. “I’m surprised they’re still with us. Hope you’re making plans for when they desert us and return to the Spine.”
A slim figure entered through the dangling inn door. “We are not deserting anything,” Yuli said in a curt tone.
“Of course not,” Nathaliey said.
Yuli’s face was red, and perspiration beaded along the silver chain where it wove through her hair. A drop of sweat rolled down her temple. She spread a glare around the room. “Why is it so infernally hot in here?”
From Nathaliey’s perspective, it was warm, but not oppressively so. In fact, she was enjoying the heat after so long in the sharp mountain air. Hanging in the gibbet, her body had seemed permanently chilled, and flying at elevation with the griffins was even colder. Numbing.
The two men looked uncomfortable as she approached, especially Knightsbridge, who turned subtly so that he was facing her full on. He shifted his posture subtly, as one might do with a potential enemy who has not yet drawn his sword.
“Ease off, Flatlander,” Yuli said. “I’m not going to eat you.”
“Maybe not, but your beast would love to get its talons into my horse.”
“If you’re referring to the incident at the abandoned well, those were enemy horses, and they were already dying. It was a mercy, both to the injured horses and to the shepherds in the area, who’d have otherwise given up their flocks to my army.”
Wolfram cleared his throat and dramatically stretched the corners of the map. Nathaliey had made a rough sketch of central and western Aristonia for him, careful not to mark the gardens and thus weaken their concealing magic, and scouts on land and air had filled in the positions of enemy troops and fortifications.
“It’s somewhere in here that we need to bring the army, right?” Wolfram asked. When Nathaliey answered in the affirmative, he added, “There’s no direct route from here to there.”
“That is by design,” she said.
“The enemy is weakest along the riverbank, which suggests that we hook south for a stretch, then cut north again. If the riders’ count is accurate, we’d face three or four thousand men. It would be a hard fight—assuming there are no ugly surprises.”
“How can we trust their figures?” Knightsbridge asked.
“Those are your figures, not mine,” Yuli said. “I have no way of counting flatlanders, not when they’re continually moving, feinting, hiding. You may as well number the pebbles rolling down a streambed after a hard rain. All I did was report what I saw, and you concocted the rest of it.”
The woman stood to one side, her arms crossed. She hadn’t even glanced at the maps and charts. All the world was a map, she’d said once. If you wanted to see, fly into the clouds, and it would stretch beneath you, clearer than anything scrawled on paper.
In Nathaliey’s experience, all mounted cavalry had disdain for the slow, deliberate movements of an army on foot, forced to march slowly and guard its own supplies, but Yuli and her fellow riders scoffed more than usual. The Eriscobans and Veyrians on the battlefield were weeks from home, whereas Yuli’s people could be at their aeries in a few hours. Men like Knightsbridge seemed to note it too, which fed the paranoia that the griffin riders would simply fly away when the war was no longer convenient.
That fear wasn’t grounded in anything Yuli had done; now that she’d committed to the war, she seemed determined to follow through to the end, and without fear. The only thing that seemed to scare her was the heat of the lowlands. It was hard enough for her here; what would it be like in the drought-stricken east or the blistering southern deserts?
“I
wish there were some other way than cutting south,” Wolfram continued, tracing his finger against the map. “It will be slow going, lots of room for ambush. The more I consider, the more I think it better to regain the Tothian Way and push straight through, then come at the west gate of the gardens. It’s a larger army facing us in that direction, but a faster route—less chance for the enemy to get reinforcements.”
Knightsbridge studied the map with a doubtful expression. “I see eleven different fortifications, and two of them are full-sized castles.”
“We follow the same strategy as in the Spine,” Wolfram said. “Take some positions, using aerial and magical attacks when we can, and bypass the others.”
“Those were small castles, cut off behind our lines,” Knightsbridge said. “These have the full weight of the Veyrian army to reinforce them. And every fortress we bypass is an enemy to our rear. We’ll risk our supplies.”
Wolfram ran his fingers through his hair. “Then I see no way to break through. There are too many troops, too many fortifications. We could wait a few weeks, let our army pull forward, but that gives the enemy even more of an advantage. For every man we gain, Toth gains five, ten even.”
Nathaliey leaned over the map. Veyrian troops everywhere, and every day closing the noose around the gardens. No way to get the Eriscobans there to reinforce the order, and soon enough it would be impossible for her friends to escape. Would Memnet tell them to abandon the gardens, to flee? The order could regroup in the sultanates, raise new opposition against the dark wizard from the south.
But disturbing news had come yesterday from a captured Veyrian soldier, a man freshly arrived from points further east. The captive claimed that Syrmarria had burned and its people were fleeing into the desert. The palace itself had melted in a horrific fire. Some sorcerous fire that had consumed everything. The man claimed not to have witnessed the destruction personally—he’d been ordered out of the city just before it happened and had immediately traveled west with his company—and Nathaliey would have been inclined to dismiss it if not for the dark haze that hung on the eastern horizon. Last night, the wind had shifted, and she’d tasted the bitter tang of smoke.
If Syrmarria had burned, Memnet would have saved the library above all. He couldn’t have escaped into the desert with all of those books—not with Toth’s forces infesting the countryside—and surely would have brought them home for safety. So no, there would be no abandoning the gardens. They must make a final stand.
Wolfram and Knightsbridge had continued discussing possible points of attack and discarding them one after another, while Yuli remained aloof to one side. Wolfram’s ideas were bold, sweeping, while the older baron shot them down for their impracticality and risk.
Finally, the young captain of the Blackshields threw up his hands. “So there’s no way through. No way at all. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“We can’t stay here, either,” Knightsbridge said. “Or all those enemies will converge on our position. I say we retreat to the mountains and declare a stalemate.”
“We do that,” Wolfram said, “and the wizards die. Next time the sorcerer comes after us, he’ll have no enemies at his back. He’s a necromancer—it will be an army of wights and ravagers, and we’ll have no magic to counter it.”
“I can’t fix the map,” Knightsbridge said. “And I can’t materialize another ten thousand men, either.”
“There must be something we can do.”
“We don’t have to fight every inch of the way,” Nathaliey said, and the two men looked at her expectantly. “Not alone. What if you battled your way to this fortress right here?” She tapped a finger at the map, roughly two-thirds of the way to the garden walls, and somewhat to the north. “Can you reach this position?”
Wolfram grunted as he looked over the numbers written onto the map. “That would have us hooking around Hamid’s position. If we do that, we’ve got fifteen hundred enemy troops to fight, more or less. Barring surprises, that’s a battle we should easily win.”
“I don’t like it,” Knightsbridge said. “Taking that fortress puts us on the wrong side of the river. No way to fall back and retreat.”
“It’s safe enough, though?” Nathaliey asked him.
“Safe yes, but bottled up. That’s one of your old castles—if those griffin riders tell true. If you mean to take cover, we’d be better off falling back to the mountains.”
“I’m not talking about taking cover,” she said. “I’m talking about marching as far as we can and holding position while a path opens to the garden walls.”
Wolfram and Knightsbridge looked at her with raised eyebrows. Even Yuli looked skeptical.
“What path?” Wolfram asked.
“We’ll be blocked from further advance, but the griffins won’t be,” Nathaliey said. “And neither will Memnet the Great. He can move freely. Not even Toth can stop him.” She nodded, growing more confident in her plan as she voiced it aloud. “Yuli flies me to my master. He accompanies me back toward your army, which you’ve pushed forward as far as you can. Together, we blast open a path. Once it’s open, you’ll march to the gardens unopposed.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
With Jethro’s death, Karla was the most experienced of the archivists, and Markal deferred to her judgment as they arranged books, scrolls, and tablets in the stone vault outside the Golden Pavilion. She occasionally grew flummoxed by some placement or another and looked to Markal and the younger archivists for advice. They were almost finished when they reached a book that couldn’t be classified, and someone ran to fetch Memnet, who worked at the north gate with Narud and Chantmer, shoring up the garden defenses.
When Memnet arrived, he was studying the sky as if watching for rain, even though it was a dry and cloudless day. A tinge of haze obscured the view to the east, the last evidence of the burning city. Markal waited in the vault with Karla, barely able to contain his impatience. This was the last volume, and then they could seal the vault, cover it, and cast protective magic.
“Did you see shadows?” Memnet asked.
“What do you mean?” Markal asked.
“About ten minutes ago, like fast-moving cloud shadows, passing over the ground. But there were no clouds.”
Markal shook his head, not knowing what the master was talking about. Still standing in the vault, he held up the book. “Does this one go with the wisdom of the gods or with the lore and annals?”
Memnet bent to take the book. He turned it over in his hands, studying it carefully. No doubt if they were in the library, he’d have given it a quick glance and made a rapid assessment, but here, it was no easy matter. Even reading the words in the books proved laborious. Yet, if they didn’t arrange them correctly, it might cost a wizard or an archivist days or weeks to puzzle out a single volume when it was finally removed.
Memnet stared for several moments, then brightened. “Ah, yes. This is the work of the Blistered Monks. Put it with the lore and annals.”
When that was wrapped in oilskin and placed in the vault, Markal and Karla hauled themselves out, and the keepers set to work. They heaved massive flagstones into place, each one weighing at least sixty stone, the burden lightened by calling the magic of the gardens that endowed them with power to shape and manipulate.
Once the stones were in place, keepers arranged sod over the top, and grass twisted and grew before their eyes. Clumps of soil crumbled, sifted among the grass, and vanished. Within seconds, there was no visible sign that the sod had been dug up in the first place.
“So little preserved,” Karla said sadly. “So much lost.”
Markal remembered Jethro’s final words. Remember me, Markal. Remember what I did.
“What we saved was saved because of Jethro,” he said. “He sacrificed himself for the books in the vault. For my life, and the master’s life, too.”
The others looked solemn. The archivists more so than the others, almost stricken, their eyes damp. They turned to go, and Markal heard s
niffles as they left him alone with the master.
“There is nothing to be done now except preserve and rebuild,” Markal said when they’d gone.
“Preserve, rebuild . . . and fight. We need to stop the enemy before he destroys anything more.” Memnet glanced skyward. “There it is again.”
Markal saw nothing. “Is it seekers? Is the dark wizard hunting us from the sky?”
“I don’t know, but if it happens again, I’m going to find out.”
“You’ll risk giving us away.”
“I know, but we can’t have them sending sorcery overhead.” Memnet took a deep breath. “You led an excellent defense of the gardens when the enemy last attacked. We lost the walled gardens with the desolation spell, but that couldn’t be prevented. I’d have done the same. As for the rest, our losses were light, and the enemy’s heavy. It bought us time. Several months, in fact.”
Markal detected something in the master’s tone. “However . . .?”
“However, that strategy won’t work a second time. There are too many enemies—thousands of them this time, not hundreds—and sorcery will strike us from all sides. If we were to invite them inside with the idea of making the gardens a killing trap, they would overrun us entirely. This time we’ll start the defense at the bridge, at the orchards, at the ravine—from our most defensible points outside the gardens, and contest every inch until they reach the walls. Then fight them there, too.”
“I’ve been gone,” Markal began hesitantly, uneasy at contradicting the master. “But from what I can see, ninety percent of the work has been within the walls, not outside. The gardens are filled with traps and snares. We’ve put wards and runes everywhere. Why do that if we’re planning to stop them at the walls?”
“I didn’t say we could keep the enemy from breaching the walls, only that we’re going to start the fight outside before it comes in.” Memnet furrowed his brow. “But I expect the dark wizard to break through. To enter the gardens with his armies. And unless the Brothers truly favor us, the enemy will eventually reach this very spot.”
The Red Sword- The Complete Trilogy Page 76