The Council of Blades n-5

by Paul Kidd

  Intrigued by all the action below, Tekoriikii fluttered down and perched on a gargoyle just above the yard. Miliana punched a teetering pyramid of singing tutors, watched the amateur athletes fall, then fixed upon Tekoriikii with panic in her eyes.

  "Tekoriikii! Scream! You know-scream, like you did the other night!"

  The bird made a "Krrrrrr" of curiosity and fixed Miliana with one golden eye. The girl dodged a passing stone and opened her arms out to the bird.

  "That battle scream, you dodo! The one that knocked out all those men! Come on-get angry or something!"

  The bird had no real inclination to hurt anyone. To his eyes, Miliana and Lorenzo seemed to be engaged in some sort of dance rather than a fight; each of his friends took it in turns to tread upon each other while gangs of snarling teachers shook the column back and forth. The bird ruffled out his feathers and creased his brows into a puzzled frown.

  "A-all right, just sing a song, then! You know… like you do when you feel happy?" Miliana struck upon a sudden inspiration. "Your tail! How does it feel to have your lovely tail back?"

  Tekoriikii drew a breath of excitement. He spread out his streaming tail feathers like a courtier's fan and shimmered them back and forth in glee. Filling his chest, the bird opened up his beak and caroled out a scintillating song of pride.

  Lorenzo and Miliana ducked and blocked their ears; the teachers lacked the benefit of their victims' hard-won experience. With the shock front of a god-flung tidal wave, Tekoriikii's song swept clean across the open yard.

  Tekoriikii's high notes loosened eyeballs in their skulls and cracked the marble facing all along the courtyard walls. The luckiest of the teaching staff simply fell from their half-built human pyramids and dropped unconscious to the ground. Those with greater stamina, but less native luck, managed to hear the second chorus before fainting clean away.

  Uncorking his fingers from his ears, Lorenzo gazed about a scene taken from a hideous battlefield. A hundred women lay strewn in heaps about the cobblestones; some heaps stirring weakly as a semiconscious victim tried to knock her head against a wall. Tekoriikii settled into a magnificent sulk and turned himself away from his ungrateful audience.

  Lying behind her troops was the headmistress-several hundredweight of iron-hard flesh. Lorenzo leapt down from the column and snatched up the rope which powered his flying machine.

  "Excellent! We'll use her as a counterweight! Tekoriikii-come over here and help." The inventor and the firebird began trussing a rope beneath the gigantic woman's arms. "She'll hit the city dung pit; she'll be all right…"

  Lorenzo pulled the last knot tight, laughing as he heard the sound of soldiers hammering at the bolted gates.

  "Right! Now all we need is that feather fall spell-Miliana?"

  He looked about, only to find the princess crawling about the courtyard on all fours; an empty pair of wire frames were clamped above her nose.

  "My spectacles! He broke my curse-damned spectacles!" Miliana groped her hands in front of her, as blind as a mole. "That's the second pair he's done that to so far!"

  The school doors shuddered as unseen soldiers tried to force their way in. Lorenzo heard the roar of male voices, and orders calling for battering rams and heavy crossbows.

  "Miliana-the feather fall!"

  "I can't read!" The girl snarled in ill temper, waving a hand across her eyes. "I'm blind as a bat without my spectacles!"

  "But you can't read the language the spells are written in anyway!"

  "I still need to visualize the symbols in my mind!" Miliana bumped herself into a wall. "Maybe someone has a telescope someplace?"

  Outside the school, fireballs and lightning bolts crashed against the gates; it would only be a matter of moments before the doors came crashing down. Lorenzo ripped off Miliana's hat and began flipping frantically through the spell sheets one by one.

  "How does it start? Can you remember what the page looks like?"

  "There was a sort of curly thing… it looked like a pot." Miliana faced Lorenzo with a nearsighted scowl. "I don't know! I've never really cast the thing before. I thought it was a spell for magic missiles…"

  A pot-a pot-shaped symbol. Lorenzo frantically sorted tiny scrolls, each scribbled in Miliana's shocking handwriting.

  "Aha!" He found something that looked like an inverted cup. "Here's a pot, but it's upside down."

  "That's it!" Miliana clamped her pointy hat upon her brow. "That's the one!"

  "You never said it was upside down. How was I supposed to find it if it was upside down?"'

  "It doesn't matter!" Miliana tried to cuff Lorenzo on the ear, and missed him by a mile. "Now just try to retrace the symbols on something big-really, really big… so I can see!"

  A fireball lit the courtyard with a bang; the gates sagged, hinges turning red-hot from the blast of magic flame. Lorenzo tried to choke down the panic, looked across the courtyard, and felt a new idea strike home to his mind.

  "Wait-just wait. I'll only be a minute."

  Capable of seeing nothing but the vaguest blurs, Miliana moved cautiously to her feet. If she strained herself, she could just make out the curtain walls; Tekoriikii was either the vague orange wobbly thing to her left, or else the warm surface she was currently standing on. The princess wandered slowly forward as the gates cracked clean in two, then suddenly felt herself grabbed by the arm.

  "There! Will that do?"

  Lorenzo seemed triumphant; the girl adjusted her empty frames out of habit, and squinted closer at the courtyard floor.

  The shapes of spell symbols stood out in bold gray lines. Miliana murmured words under her breath, suddenly remembered the gestures to the spell, and felt herself light into a smile.

  "That's it! I've got it!" She reached out with groping hands as she settled the spell formula in her mind's eye. "Where's the headmistress?"

  Miliana was led to the great fallen whale; the Princess waved her hands, spoke a loud, triumphant syllable, and cast one of Tekoriikii's down feathers to the winds. Lorenzo saw the headmistress's body flicker with purple energies, and signaled Tekoriikii to take off into the air.

  The bird latched onto the ungainly burden and effortlessly carried her aloft. The drive-rope trailed neatly behind, the slack slowly disappeared, and Lorenzo led Miliana to the flying machine to clamp herself against the steering rings.

  Another fireball detonated, and the school gates exploded with a roar. Standing clasped about the shaft of his new flying machine, Lorenzo had to shout above the screams of charging warriors.

  "How long does that feather fall spell keep working?"

  "I don't know!" Miliana felt the desperation of uncertainty. "Someone told me it depends on the weight!"

  Tekoriikii gave a squawk as his burden suddenly dropped from his claws. The headmistress plunged toward the city cesspits, the rope whipped tight, jerked the flying machine hard against its brackets, and suddenly the drive shaft began to blur with speed.

  The propeller blades whirred, the rope snapped free, and the headmistress hit the dung pile with a meteoric splash. As a hundred pikemen and halberdiers came thundering across the fallen bodies of the teaching staff, Miliana and Lorenzo shot skyward and up across the school walls. A storm of crossbow bolts followed them aloft-one passing mere inches from Miliana's hat.

  Clutching blindly to the handholds and feeling a storm wind blowing past her ears, Miliana could only blink her eyes and frown.

  "What was that?"

  "Nothing." Below Lorenzo, the dreadful school dwindled; outraged soldiers worked to break up Miliana's spell formula which had been laboriously formed from the posed bodies of unconscious home economics tutors. The wind blew, the bright sun shone, and it felt marvelous to simply be alive. Tilting his face like a hound sniffing the wind, Lorenzo thrilled to the joys of flight.

  Beneath the noisy rotor blades, the sounds of crashes, swordplay, spells, and cries of anger and fear hung loud across the city. Lorenzo gazed down across the streets far below, st
aring at the war-torn thoroughfares in dismay.

  The flying machine worked quite well; Lorenzo confessed himself to be well pleased. The bearings whirred, the body balanced well, and the sensation of flight sent a dizzy rush of freedom through his veins. Tekoriikii circled happily nearby, noisily flapping his wings as he gave a cheery cry.

  "Tekorii-kii-kii!"

  Feeling her captivity sliding far away, Miliana risked loosening her handhold and groped for Lorenzo's arm.

  "Lorenzo?"

  "Yes?"

  "Well done."

  Swelling with pride, Lorenzo gazed below as he felt the craft begin to descend.

  "Ah, good-there's Luccio-and there's the river now."

  Miliana gave a great relieved sigh. "So we're landing by the river?"

  "Um… not exactly…"

  Miliana had enough time to blink, then gave a great unhappy wail. The flying machine plunged neatly into the drink-inventor, princess, silly hat, and all.

  Tekoriikii watched the whole process from above, then landed gracefully on the wagon Luccio had parked on the riverbank. Luccio and the bird watched as Miliana and Lorenzo struggled damply toward them through the river mud.

  "Well, all in all, Lorenzo, I think that was one of your better plans." Luccio reached down to proffer a kiss to Miliana's muddy hand. "Dear lady… so good to see you safe, and at liberty."

  Luccio unshipped a bag of snorkels and alighted from the wagon top. "Alas, there is a swim ahead of us. The river is the only means of escape. The streets swarm with ten thousand blades."

  "Why?" Miliana stood wringing out her muddy hair, then capped herself with the ruins of her pointy hat. "Is there a bread riot on? What's all the noise?"

  Luccio looked at her, unable or unwilling to break ill news. Biting his lip, Lorenzo came forward to gently put an arm about Miliana's shoulders.

  Her face had already drained ashen white. Creeping quietly into Lorenzo's touch, she let him quietly lead her away.

  Lorenzo softly whispered to her. Luccio began to unpack his wagon, laying out snorkels, food packages, a toadskin book, and spare spectacles salvaged from the ruins of Miliana's room.

  "Nurgle?"

  "Just a moment, old chap. Leave them together for a while." Luccio quietly placed a hand on Tekoriikii's back. The bird mournfully strained toward Miliana, made anxious by the half-heard sound of tears.

  Sunning herself on the riverbanks, there lay a long, exquisite female nixie-a curvaceous humanoid with webbed feet, webbed hands and dainty gills. Luccio introduced her to the curious firebird with a schoolgirl's blush.

  "Tekoriikii? This is the Princess Krrrr-poka, of the Akanamere. She… ah, she owed me a favor." Luccio sealed his packages inside little wooden casks. "You can fly over the river; the rest of us will use snorkels, and she will tow us underwater past the armies and the gates."

  Beside the river, Lorenzo stood with Miliana leaning on his arm. The young couple gazed in silence in the direction of Miliana's old home, which now formed the center of a distant storm of screams.

  Miliana was free.

  And Sumbria was burning.

  13

  In the city of Sumbria, the civil war between the Blade Houses lasted for eleven savage days.

  In the early battles of the first violent hours, the citizens had flocked into the streets-some to avenge their fallen prince, and some to protect their homes from marauding gangs of soldiers. Gilberto Ilego, now universally acknowledged as the prince's assassin, had rallied his supporters about him, and the city burned and shuddered as it transformed into a place of surging battle lines.

  Days passed; alliances shifted, soldiers clashed, and the dead were left unburied in the streets. The crash of magic spells sent rows of houses slumping into rubble, and the citizens abandoned the nobles to their fight. The market quarter became a place of tent ghettos and frightened families; women and children stood in the streets and stared up the hill at the palaces of the mighty.

  One by one, the great houses besieged each other. In the first few days, a half dozen of the small fortresses fell-until the battering rams ran short of soldiers willing to man them, and those sorcerers with the power to breach the walls eventually fell victim to each other's spells. The factions split, then split again as each Blade House determined to protect its own affairs, and the great battles of the days before dissolved into street fights and skulking nighttime brawls.

  Food supplies fell and sicknesses began; finally the soldiers themselves abandoned the fight. Some dragged themselves back to their barracks and remained slumped in apathy. Others took to looting empty houses, installing themselves in taverns barricaded into little forts. There they drank themselves into a howling stupor, raiding the surrounding streets for women, bread, and gold; rolling in their own filth as the city took on the stench of the damned.

  Only Gilberto Ilego's house remained at war. It was a savage, mindless battle fought against the entire world. Ilego was blamed for all the nation's troubles, and so he shut himself inside his lair and struck out at anything that dared come near. His men made savage raids into the market streets for food and snatched careless citizens to use as conscripts for their unceasing attacks on other palaces. Like a monster in its pit, Ilego carved himself a niche among the ruins of a better world.

  Until, one cold-dawned autumn day, the sound of wondering; joyous cheers came drifting in across the city roofs.

  As the tiny sound began to spread, tired Blade Captains ran to their battered marble towers and stared. Soldiers crowded into gateways, looking at one another in confusion as citizens crept forth from their homes.

  The cheers turned into a roar of adulation, and suddenly the crowds began to run out into the sun.

  Through the gates of Sumbria-opened by a swarm of citizens who then flung aside the keys-came a procession more welcome than a shower of purest gold. Colletran soldiers, all with their weapons slung and swords sheathed, marching in column beside a wagon train that stretched far away into the foothills of the Akanapeaks.

  The soldiers escorted cart after cart loaded to the brim with priceless food; there were bales of bread and biscuit, sacks of dried fish and flour. Whole pyramids of sausage followed barrow loads of autumn fruit. The populace of Sumbria gaped at the treasury in shock, standing in stunned amazement as the triumphant march passed them by.

  And then the wagon crews began to hurtle bread into the crowds, sparking off a delirious storm of cheers.

  The Colletrans had brought everything that a war-torn city might possibly need. Food and water, tents and blankets, shovels to clear rubble and five thousand hands to use them. Scores of healer priests dismounted and moved out to treat the sick. Barrels of water and beer were trundled over to a makeshift hospital. Colletran soldiers presented themselves to exhausted Sumbrian citizens, enlisting local aid in sweeping looters from the streets. Civil order restored itself in one great heady rush as food gushed out, unmeasured, into the hands of the poor.

  What no one in Sumbria could possibly know, of course, was that the food and provisions had been largely stolen from Sumbria's own outlying farming hamlets, farm after farm having been left completely decimated.

  Cheering swept the city as if it were a day of festival, with people swarming down the streets to behold the wonder of the age. Flowers flew through the air and landed at the feet of a black, high-stepping hippogriff, whose armored rider soothed the crowds with steady hands.

  Ugo Svarezi, now prince-elect of Colletro, conferred with Sumbrian citizens, noblemen and troops. With the looting at an end and law and order restored, an amnesty was declared; but an amnesty that did not extend to the villain of the play.

  Every tragedy needs a decent scapegoat for the crowd. Sealed up inside his palace, Gilberto Ilego found Colletran snipers firing at his embrasures and Sumbrian nobles hammering at his gates. Drunk, desperate, and wild, he could only slump against his own walls and laugh as he saw Svarezi ride like a demigod through the adoring Sumbrian mob.

&nbs
p; The palace's left wing fell beneath a hail of spells and trebuchet stones; a company of Ilego's men deserted through the rubble and fled, only to be cut down in the streets. In the gatehouse tower, Ilego's last surviving companies barricaded themselves behind the doors, snarling like wild animals spitting from a cage.

  The entire population of Sumbria swarmed about Ilego's lair, screaming out for blood. Amongst the combined soldiers of two cities, Ugo Svarezi rode like a heavy-hearted father gazing upon wayward children. The crowds wanted to please him, to point up at Ilego and blame him for the war. Svarezi gave them his benediction and rode on into the storm.

  Ilego, tired almost past thinking but still capable of reveling in irony, swung carelessly from his own battlements and leaned out across the crowd. He hoisted a glass to the citizens and drank to their health with wine. He swallowed, then interrupted his drinking in pantomimed surprise.

  "What? No chorus? No music heralding the curtain call?" The ragged courtier brayed like a laughing ass. "Svarezi! Surely you can stage a better production than that? You have the costuming, the timing… even the proper cast!" Ilego half made to serve himself more wine. "I, of course, shall play the villain. I'm told one is needed in any proper tale.

  "Sadly, I fear this is less a tragedy than a mere farce-with you, dear little citizens, playing the sheep who take the fall."

  Below him, a mob of untold thousands jeered up at him in hatred. Ilego bowed before his audience as though idly acknowledging their cheers, and then cocked a hand up to his ear and gaped down at them in shock.

  "What's that? Did he never tell you what we planned?" Ilego clung above his gate, eyes wild above a ragged beard. "Did he never tell you I was to rule Sumbria, and he Colletro, together! Did he tell you why he stole the Sun Gem? Did you ever ask him why?"

  Dragging up through the streets, there came a titanic wheeled machine; a massive armored box drawn by a dozen cartage teams. Ilego greeted its appearance with a cheer.