Springwar

by Tom Deitz

  Maybe he should find out how they worked. Everyone else with whom he’d become entangled seemed to have experienced their glamour firsthand. Why not he, who had lost so much because of them?

  It was rash and foolish, but Rrath was tired of being circumspect and wise. And so he trudged on to the first place he encountered where there was any light in that secret hall. Not a room so much as a widening of the corridor where another intersected. A tiny light slit in what must be an outside wall provided minimal illumination.

  It was enough. He deposited the bag that held his burden and began to don the armor.

  Which is when it occurred to him that he might well be going mad. Curiosity had driven him to follow Eddyn to the armory. But something else—a whole different part of himself, apparently—had wanted to get out there and fight the enemy. And since he had no armor himself, but was conveniently near a source of a very great deal …

  He shook his head. It was as though he had two selves, one of whom was still the sly, fawning, scholarly old Rrath, the other this rash newcomer. Often as not, the two were at war. But the old Rrath was tired; the new Rrath, who thrived on impulse, passion, and energy, was in the ascendant. And while part of him knew that his actions were those of a desperate man—a man with nothing else to lose—he had no way to resist them.

  And so, standing alone in the half-light of a hidden corridor, that in some odd way mirrored the way the controlling parts of him were hiding in his own mind, he began to don the stolen armor.

  Mail hauberk. Greaves. Vambraces. But no gauntlets or coif because he wanted to feel the metal and leather that made the regalia special.

  A breath, and he picked up the helm—and slowly, almost reverently, set it on his head. A moment of darkness followed, while he found his vision blocked, but then it took its seat, as invisible adjustment joints molded it to the shape of his skull. A click—and pain jabbed into his forehead …

  And then he felt … everything …

  A sheet of white, a sheet of blue, and an irregular, waxing line of gold and black between them: That was what Lykkon saw. Snow beneath blue sky, with Ixti’s army moving steadily—if slowly—through the juncture of the two.

  But he saw that only for an instant, as he marched with the rest of the Guard beneath the topmost portcullis, then down a hundred steps to the next wall down the slope—and through that the same distance to the next, where the King and the Guard and most of the archers would be stationed. A final wall girdled the bottom of the hill, its line of seamless stones sweeping away to east and west, with low towers rising above at intervals. Each wall was higher than the next one down: The lowest was four spans; the next, five; the highest, six. A long way to fall, or to climb. Lykkon tried not to look down as he found his place at the embrasure. His job, for the moment, was to watch, wait, and let Ixti pour out its lifeblood on the slopes below. He’d only enter the battle when the battle came to him. Or on the King’s command.

  And so he stood there, nineteen and a half years old. Handsome, smart, quick. Clad in Argen maroon augmented by the embroidered crown in gold that marked the Royal Guard. His right hand held a sword Merryn and Avall had made for him a year back, one completing the blade, the other the hilt. His left rested on a shield he’d made himself, for he, too, was a smith.

  A questing hand found a niche beside his knees, which contained a bow and arrows. Smart thinking that: weapons made ready in the dark of night, that didn’t have to be carried. That the enemy might not see being stored.

  And still Ixti’s army advanced.

  Lykkon waited. Anxious. Feeling his stomach knot and twitch. He wished he hadn’t had so much cauf that morning, in spite of the hour. Cauf made him fidgety, and he was already too high-strung for his own good.

  The wind shifted, coming more fully from the east. It stirred the light snow into glittering flurries that bit into Lykkon’s face like tiny arrows, though the air itself was warm. Most of the snow had been swept from the battlements on which he stood, but more was melting, running into rivulets that gathered in channels around his boots, making islands of the paving stones.

  His gaze went everywhere, never resting long in any place. Ixti hadn’t made it far—the drifts were deeper on their side, and they were having trouble. Gynn had been wise to make them come to him. Snow was not the enemy’s element, and wading through it tired the troops. Why had they attacked so early?

  Because the sun would turn this field to slush? Or for another reason? Second-guessing soldiers was not a game for which Lykkon had any aptitude.

  Yet still he looked about. Seeking familiar faces—familiar heraldry, at any rate—among all those forces thronging the walls. Steel flashed down there, for the ramparts had grown a whole sharp crop of spears and swords and bows.

  But where were the folks he knew?

  Avall—he had no idea. He’d lost him after the fiasco in the armory. Last he’d heard, he was to have been stationed to the left flank, to inform the King of what transpired, with Rann as his second, since he’d lent his gem to the King. Strynn, newly arrived from the river, did the same thing to the right, with Merryn, whom he doubted liked that duty any more than before.

  As for the troops … Gynn had spread them evenly, though he was saving the cavalry, posting them at the back gate lest Barrax try a flanking maneuver across the eastern plain. Like the battle at South Gorge, Gynn had the mountains on his side to the west. Barrax might try to come through them. But if he did, he was a fool.

  A rumble of cries reached him. Lykkon snapped back to attention, leaning into his embrasure, squinting into glare as sunlight flooded the snowfield. Metallic fire leapt from gold-washed helms among the foe as they continued to advance. They had come maybe an eighth of the way now, marching close together, shields raised against Eron’s deadly archers. The line of darkness between land and sky had widened.

  Or the line of death.

  Briefly—it might be the last chance he got—he closed his eyes, counted breaths, letting each one slide deeper into his lungs, holding it there, and exhaling slowly. Merryn had said to try not to think at all. Thought gave you doubts, and doubts would get you killed. Marginally calmer, he opened his eyes and shifted his grip on the sword.

  The armies of Ixti had crossed a third of the valley.

  No longer in a regular line, however; no longer like syrup pouring down a mountain of flavored ice.

  Points were forming: one to the west, one straight ahead, and one to the east, where the ridge faded into the plain. The wall continued around there, as it circled most of the ridge, but it didn’t continue far. Whoever had built it had stopped construction on the northeast side, perhaps feeling that no enemy would get that far. Not that it was entirely without defense. A wooden palisade two spans high ran all the way back to Eron Gorge, and parts of the Gorge were fortified anyway—for many private holds rimmed the southern edge of its escarpment, not a few of which had at one time or other been walled, if not actually crenellated. But if the battle got there—Well, Lykkon didn’t want to think about that. Because by then there would be no battle, merely a house-to-house brawl.

  Another eighth traversed.

  Waiting …

  Watching the black tide advance …

  Waiting …

  Hoping for gaps to appear in the flood still coming over the opposite ridge. Wondering how Barrax could put a square fourshot of men on the field.

  Waiting …

  Breathing …

  Feeling his hands start to sweat …

  As Barrax’s army began to move faster …

  … pain jabbed into Rrath’s forehead, and fire followed hard in its wake: a rush of energy that galloped down his nerves like ice oxen on a rampage, that roared through him like spring melt that had burst a dam, that enflamed him like a river of liquid fire rolling down from the burning peaks of Angen’s Spine.

  For a moment, he saw nothing. Not black, not white. Not the colors that lived behind shut lids; no sense of light at all, the way
he could not see his ears or the back of his head. And then he saw everything: not only the gray of the wall beyond the helm, and the black shadows that lurked around it, but the grays within the grays, and the colors of the grains that made those grays, and the colors that made those colors. His head roared with the noise of that place of silence, where the only sound had been his own breathing, the rasp of fabric against fabric, and the scrape of metal against metal.

  But now his blood thundered, and he could hear his skin stretch as he moved. He watched in fascination the slow motion of his hands—bare hands, on whose backs he could count the hairs, on whose nails he could see landscapes among the ridges, and on whose fingertips he could lose himself beyond recall if he dared ponder the mazes there—

  … his hands. The right moved toward the sword, which glittered like frozen sunlight even in the gloom, with the jewel halfway down the hilt like fire crystallizing and melting and forming anew.

  … and the left, to the shield, where the gem was set not in the boss upon the face, but in the grip.

  And then both those gems touched the sensitive flesh of his palms, and he squeezed back and bore down.

  Pain flicked into him, like scorpion stings. Right hand first, then left. Normal pain, but perceived abnormally, as though a spike the size of a tree was being driven into a palm the size of a battlefield. He could feel it slide in: an instant that lasted forever, roots of a tree joining earth and sky.

  And then the power erupted again—rushing into him from both hands, rushing along his nerves and through his blood and his muscles and across his skin, so that every hair on his body prickled. And then somewhere behind his eyes, those three waves of—magic—collided.

  His brain caught fire, and he watched with his inward eye, watched with dreadful fascination as armies small as dreams took form in his head and started marching. They assailed thoughts and built desires. They dragged out memories and examined them, and set them aside or discarded them. They found scruples and ignored them, wishes and made them strong. But they were not him. Not Rrath syn Garnill.

  Not in any real sense. They were searching, he realized, for something they would never find, some indefinable spark of recognition called Gynn, whom they had come to help. Maybe, if they couldn’t find him, for another called Avall, or one called Merryn. Or Rann. Or Strynn.

  But not for him.

  Not for poor Rrath.

  They hated him.

  They despised him.

  They devoured his self from within.

  Except for a very few things.

  The things that were strongest in him.

  The things that were most ingrained.

  Rrath opened eyes he didn’t know had been shut. Saw light that might not exist suffuse the chamber.

  And remembered why he’d come here.

  All at once he was running.

  His body was, as the magic drove him on …

  His self …?

  What remained of him found, deep in his brain, a cave.

  And hid there, quaking.

  You’re a weather-witch, something down there whispered.

  “I’m scared,” Avall told Rann. “What if it happens again?”

  Rann simply looked at him, dark eyes like a moonless sky above fresh-fallen snow. As calm, and as clear. The eyes of his friend above all friends. His bond-brother. The person to whom, without guilt or fear or agenda, he’d given what might prove to be too much of his love. He could die here, or Rann could. That bond could be forever severed. It had almost been already.

  “It won’t,” Rann said at last. “You know what to expect, and you won’t let it happen.”

  Avall let his gaze sweep past his friend, to the right and down. Off the tower on which they stood, along the three undulating walls, to where the Royal Guard clustered around the King himself before the gates of this citadel. Three snakes. Three rivers of stone. Three chains. The images were endless.

  But endless, too, were the armies of Ixti as they continued to march across the snow—like a hand slowly opening now, thumb going west toward the mountains—toward Merryn and Strynn.

  Little finger hooking ever so slightly toward him.

  Avall closed his eyes, brushed the gem for reassurance, and stepped out of himself and found Strynn.

  The King was there, too—alerted by the touch of thoughts he’d touched before. Together, Avall and Strynn showed Gynn what they saw.

  Wait, he replied. Wait until I—

  He broke off. If thought was a pool of still water, and their selves three fish therein—this was as though someone had dropped a stone among them, so that ripples skimmed across the surface in intangible, ethereal rings.

  Power, one of them thought—it didn’t matter which. But from where?

  But other eyes—human eyes—saw as well. And Lord Tryffon of War said, very quietly, “My Lord King, they are now a long-shot from here.”

  Lykkon heard the sharp drumbeat of command. Held his breath, and waited. But only for an instant. A rustling rose up behind him, then a thrum in the air like the most subtle and distant thunder. A rushing hiss, and the sky went dark with arrows shot from the rearmost ranks toward Ixti’s advancing army.

  They were barely in range, but arrows flew and arrows fell.

  Shields rose to meet them, but not all those shields were placed correctly. A few men in Ixti’s first rank fell. Blood ran across the snow. And in that brief gap, other arrows scoured the sky, from the second wall—Lykkon’s wall. They struck farther back in Ixti’s host, some of them into men left unprotected by those who had fallen before them.

  And a third flight, farther back in turn. Shields bristled with crimson fletching.

  But no arrows were launched in return. Bows required two hands. Ixti, it seemed, was relying on force. On what Lykkon feared most: combat hand to hand.

  It was one thing to draw and fire on a shape far off that only looked somewhat like a man. It was something else when that man’s breath was in your nostrils and his sweat and blood mingled with yours.

  And then more arrows flew. Lykkon considered for only a moment, and then he, too, reached for his bow.

  And paused, for there was movement far to his right.

  Every step was agony for Eddyn, but standing still was worse. Pain from where Barrax’s men had used him pulsed through his bowels every time he moved, for they’d not only stuck their man-parts there, but other things as well. Things that had hurt him past enduring, and yet he’d survived. But there’d been no time for healing, and little time for thought. Time enough, however, to know his life was ruined, that there was only one way he could ever clear his name, which was to make the shield to end all shields, and then die, with that as his legacy.

  So here he was, moving at an ever-increasing trot to the west, where the commander of the group of Common Clan lads he’d joined had pointed him. He grunted, but no one heard. Felt blood start to ooze down his leg again. Maybe it would show, and maybe it wouldn’t, but he wore a long surcoat, and that would hide a lot.

  Yes, it hurt past enduring, and he was scared past ability to tell. Yet there was joy in it as well. He was free: free of expectations, because none of his comrades knew him. Oh, a few had remarked on his height last night, when he’d joined them by their fire. But they’d offered him food and beer, and the comfort of their tent. And he’d accepted everything without concern for what anyone else would say.

  Here there was no Tyrill. No Avall. No Merryn or Strynn.

  Here, he was a fighter—a warrior without excuse. And that was enough. Tomorrow …

  Maybe he’d be Eddyn again.

  Or maybe he’d stay Eed.

  Maybe he’d be dead.

  And then he forgot all that and was simply a soldier: jogging along the muddy, snow-pocked ground between the lowest wall and the middle. Jogging west.

  —Where a wing of Ixti’s army was advancing toward the farthest tower.

  The tower, he realized with a start, where the High King had s
tationed Strynn.

  Strynn’s eyes hurt already. It was early morning—scarcely past sunrise—and the point she’d been assigned was the farthest one to the west. Which meant she had to look east to reconnoiter—straight into the sun. Double sun, really, for its rays lanced across the snowfield and reflected back. Yet she couldn’t raise a gauze mask, because she had to be alert for every detail. For any aberration on Barrax’s western flank that might be of use to Gynn.

  So she squinted and scowled, and watched Ixti’s army advance.

  It was advancing, too. And more to the point—as Merryn had predicted and Gynn had feared—what had heretofore been a uniform front was starting to diffuse, with one part starting to stretch toward this very corner, where the fortifications ended in a rock escarpment that could, however, be scaled by the determined. And which it was nearly impossible to defend until those attackers leapt down in one’s midst.

  But there weren’t many of them yet, and they moved in a risky formation: slogging through the snow one before two before three, and so on. The closer they got, the more disordered they became.

  And they were close, too, she realized with alarm, when Merryn prodded her, and told her that perhaps the King should be alerted now. Closing her eyes, she reached for her gem, found the welcoming pain and the more welcome power, and then reached for the King in turn.

  He was otherwise occupied, and she had to force her way to his attention. And then suddenly, she felt that link solidify. Show me! he demanded. And then he was looking through her eyes, and, without either of them willing it, sharing her brain. But he/they couldn’t see as much as he desired—not quite. It hadn’t been wise to station the western lookout on the lower rampart instead of the upper. The plain undulated there, so that whole groups of men could be hidden until they were alarmingly close.

  Perhaps if he were higher …

  And so Strynn—who was much more Gynn, at the moment, for it was he who controlled her mind and body—reached out to steady herself against Merryn’s shoulder and stepped up into an embrasure.