Mage-Guard of Hamor

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Taryl did not speak as the two mage-guards began to ride southward toward the remaining rebel stronghold, accompanied by two squads of headquarters troopers, with two leading the way.

  Less than a quarter kay from the grassy flat below the eastern slope, Taryl turned to Rahl. “I’ll wait until you begin the circle. That way, I’ll know you’re in position.”

  “Yes, ser. How far down from the fort do you want the circle?”

  “Just enough to encircle the remaining troops. Some may be able to escape once they understand what is happening. That’s why our forces are drawn up below, but they’re far enough away to make it hard for archers and chaos-fire. You’ll probably have to ride uphill somewhat from Fifth Regiment—Commander Shuchyl is holding much of the south side. Don’t go any closer than you have to.”

  Rahl nodded.

  Taryl offered a brief smile. “Here’s where we part…for the moment.”

  When Taryl turned right and began to ride directly toward the north slope of the hill holding the small stone fort at its crest, only one of the squads escorted him. The other remained with Rahl as he continued southward along the highway toward the gap in the hills. The log-and-stone barricade had been removed, and the logs and stones piled beside the shoulder of the road short of the walled cut through the gap.

  Rahl glanced back. He could not only not see the older mage, but he could not even sense Taryl. That sort of invisibility to order-or chaos-sensing was what Taryl expected of him, clearly, but would he ever be able to do that so effortlessly?

  As he made his way southward, Rahl was most careful to maintain shields, although he kept his order-senses especially alert when he and the headquarters troopers rode through the walled section of the road between the two hilly ridges. Nothing happened, but he breathed more easily once he was on the south side.

  He turned the gelding onto the trampled grass and headed toward the Imperial companies that were formed up a good half kay downslope from the remaining rebel forces. The rebel troopers formed a barrier around the stone fortification, an action that Rahl found somehow counter to common sense. Weren’t walls supposed to protect troopers, not the other way around?

  The entire hillside was silent—or as still as thousands of troopers and mounts could be in a brisk breeze—with both sides poised to attack once an order was given. As Rahl neared the rear of the Imperial formation, he looked upslope. He really didn’t want to try to set an order-circle from half a kay away, but he also didn’t wish to have to get any too close to the rebel lancers and troopers—or any archers or chaos-mages remaining with the rebels. He also doubted that he could maintain a sight shield and set an order-circle at the same time—not to mention protecting himself from possible firebolts from the mages in the fort above.

  After a moment, he guided the gelding between two companies and continued uphill. As he neared the front of the formation, a majer turned his mount and headed toward Rahl.

  “Captain!”

  Rahl continued to ride.

  The majer reached Rahl just as Rahl was abreast of the first rank of troopers.

  “We’re to hold here, Captain!”

  Rahl turned and looked at the officer. “That’s correct. You’re to hold here. And it’s ‘Majer,’ by the way, and I’m operating under the orders of the subcommander. You might recognize the headquarters squad.” Rahl smiled, but extended his order shields just slightly, with enough force to press the officer back in his saddle. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get on with what I’m doing so that more of your troopers don’t get killed unnecessarily.”

  Rahl could sense both fear and anger within the majer, and he was already beginning to tire of that reaction. He forced cordiality into his voice, but projected a sense of absolute power behind the words. “You’re here to do your duty, Majer, and I’m here to do mine.” Then he urged the gelding forward, but only at a slow walk. Riding quickly would be one way to get the rebels charging down on him.

  Behind him, the majer reined up, but Rahl could still sense anger.

  “How far, ser?” asked the squad leader.

  “As close as we can get without them wanting to charge us.” Rahl extended his order-senses, trying to feel any indication that the lancers directly across the open grass from him—if several hundred cubits uphill—were thinking about attacking.

  Slowly, Rahl continued uphill, but at an angle, away from the center of the stone walls.

  Whhhsttt!

  Rahl just let the firebolt splatter on the grass a good sixty cubits uphill.

  The next firebolt was closer, but he merely order-nudged it so that it burned into the mud-spattered grass some thirty cubits to his left. The third one was noticeably weaker, but by then Rahl was closer than he really wanted to be to the mounted rebel troopers—a distance that seemed little less than 150 cubits.

  He reined up and began to study the area around the stone fort. Then he shrugged and began to project his thin and unseen order line. He had perhaps a third of his half completed when he began to sense Taryl’s work.

  Another firebolt soared out from behind the stone walls and down toward Rahl. He diverted it and tried to concentrate on completing his order barrier just below the surface of the ground. He managed to get another third completed when a single set of trumpet triplets sounded, and the rebel lancers in the company closest to him and the headquarters squad quickly dressed their lines and began to charge toward him. Moments later, two more balls of chaos-flame arced toward him.

  This time, Rahl hurriedly flung the chaos back at the lancers, using order to flatten and narrow the chaos into a thin line—almost like a chaos-whip snapped by order.

  Lancers went down and piled into each other.

  Using that delay, Rahl struggled to extend his order-line more to the west to reach the section of the unseen perimeter that Taryl was constructing.

  Just as the two halves joined, three or four more chaos-bolts flared toward Rahl.

  Rahl threw them at the rebel lancers, then reached out and began to start delinking the order-points inside the order-perimeter, but he kept having to divert his attention to block or divert what seemed like a rain of firebolts.

  Then he realized that the rebel lancers were charging once more.

  “Ser?”

  “This way!” Rahl urged the gelding eastward, almost paralleling his order-perimeter while trying to stay on the gelding, keep distance between him and the lancers, and continue to order-delink the ground inside the order-line.

  The lancers pulled up, letting Rahl move away from a position directly below the small stone walls, but the firebolts kept coming, if intermittently.

  Rahl could sense a far greater wave of delinking and ooze formation on the north side of the hill, but then, he told himself, even as he tried to keep adding to the process, Taryl hadn’t been under attack all the time.

  Then…just as Taryl had predicted, the ground everywhere under the fort and the rebel troops seemed to liquefy all at once. The fort and the higher ground began to sink. Rebel troopers and lancers started to ride downhill in every direction.

  With a huge sucking sound, everything inside the order-line vanished into a grayish brown ooze. Moreover, the hilltop had vanished as well, leaving a flat expanse of ooze level with the top of the order-perimeter created by the two mage-guards.

  For a moment, Rahl just looked.

  Then he could sense Taryl straining to restore order, and he immediately devoted himself to that. For a time, he felt as though he were trying to hold back a wave of mud with a sieve, and he could feel the suffocation and strangulation of hundreds of men, but slowly, slowly, the edges of the ooze solidified. Then, in apparent reversal of the process, everything solidified…and all those thousands trapped within the hill and still alive died, crushed to death by the return of solidity.

  Under that wave of death and chill, Rahl began to shiver so violently that he had to grab the saddle rim to steady himself. So many deaths…so many all at once. />
  Abruptly, he forced himself to straighten. He could sense Taryl—and there was no way he should be able to sense where the older mage-guard was unless Taryl was wounded or in trouble.

  “We need to get back to the overcommander!” Rahl started to urge the gelding forward, not down the hill, but farther eastward, around the flattened and solidified hilltop that had entombed thousands of men. Then he shook his head. The flattened area above him was solid, and it provided a far quicker route.

  Rahl could sense the hesitation of the headquarters squad, but he did not hold back, not when Taryl might be in trouble. He galloped across the grayish brown clay, so hard that the gelding’s hoofs sounded as though he were riding a paved road.

  On the other side, Taryl was by himself, a good five hundred cubits above the other headquarters’ squad, as well as above the marshal’s massed forces. As Rahl reined up beside Taryl, the older man was white and ready to fall from his saddle—that was the way he felt to Rahl.

  “Ser.” Rahl managed to extend a slight bit of order, the little he could afford.

  Taryl straightened. “Riding over that was a bit much.”

  “It was the quickest way, and I could feel your shields collapsing.”

  “You could?”

  For the first time in seasons, Rahl actually felt the unshielded surprise of the older mage-guard. “Yes, ser. That’s why I came the quickest way.”

  “I suppose I’m fortunate to have an assistant so diligent.”

  “You need to eat something.” Rahl twisted in the saddle and fumbled some travel biscuits from his saddlebags. “Here.”

  Taryl took them, saying nothing until he had eaten both biscuits and swallowed some water. “Follow your own advice.”

  Belatedly, Rahl did, realizing that he was not in much better shape than Taryl.

  Neither spoke for a time.

  “You made that circle rather large,” Taryl finally said.

  “I’m not as skilled as you are. I couldn’t figure out how to hold a sight shield and create the order circle at the same time. I rode as close as I could, but the rebel officers were about to charge if I’d gotten much nearer. Their wizards and chaos-mages were throwing firebolts the whole time.”

  “I thought that might have been the case.” Taryl smiled. “It was good practice for you. You’ll need to learn to handle more than two mage-tasks at once, anyway. Now…we need to tell the marshal what happened…rather why it happened. He won’t be pleased.”

  Why wouldn’t the marshal be pleased? Taryl’s and Rahl’s effort had eliminated some of the top rebel officers and cost the rebels several thousand troopers without the loss of any more Imperial forces. Rahl could still feel that massive cold void of thousands of deaths, a chill that the riding jacket did nothing to dispel, but he knew the marshal was incapable of feeling that directness of death.

  As the two rode down the slope, followed by the two escort squads, an aisle opened in the Imperial troopers, an aisle a good fifty cubits wide, as if none of the troopers or their officers wanted to get all that close. Rahl could sense a combination of fear, anger, and sadness—but mostly fear, leavened by sadness, with only a few hints of anger.

  “How do you feel, Rahl?”

  “Cold…cold all over…angry…I guess, too. So many dead, but if we hadn’t done it, then…there would be almost as many dead, and a lot would have been ours.”

  “That’s the tragedy of war. No matter who wins, thousands die. The only question is whose thousands.”

  “Better theirs than ours,” Rahl suggested.

  “All victors say that, and the cause of the victor is always just.”

  The iron-cold bitterness of Taryl’s soft words cut through Rahl. He had no answer.

  “We won’t be doing much for a while,” Taryl said quietly. “We won’t have to for a few days, I hope.”

  Farther down the slope, Rahl could see Marshal Byrna standing on a platform some six cubits high, set in the middle of the flat area below the slope. He stood in the long shadow cast by the setting sun’s drop behind the more western hill ridge. The timbers of the structure were mixed, a mark that it had been constructed hastily to offer the marshal a position from which he could watch the battle.

  The two mage-guards rode directly to the raised and railed platform. After tying his mount to the railing next to the wooden ladder, Taryl climbed up first. Rahl followed.

  Bryna was alone on the platform, and anger radiated from him. Taryl had barely gotten within several cubits before the marshal began. “Overcommander, could you enlighten me as to why you and your…assistant did not offer the rebels the chance to surrender?”

  Taryl stopped and waited, saying nothing.

  “Did you have a reason, Overcommander?”

  “Yes.” Taryl’s voice was even. “First, they would not have surrendered. Second, the Emperor should not be faced with the decision of what to do with those traitors, even had they done so.”

  There was another unspoken reason, too, Rahl knew. He and Taryl could not have gotten close enough to create an order circle just around the fort itself, not without losing hundreds of Imperial troopers.

  “…They were all officers who had a choice, unlike junior officers and troopers. If he orders their deaths, he’s heartless. If he spares them, he’s an idiot. He can’t afford to be either. I can afford to be merciless. He can’t.”

  For a moment, Rahl just stood there, sensing the marshal’s still-growing outrage.

  “You’d take that upon yourself. You’re not even in charge—”

  “That’s right, Marshal. That way you can tell everyone that the Mage-Guard Overcommander acted before you could countermand him.” Taryl’s voice was simultaneously tired and cold. “That also saves you.”

  Byrna flushed, and tension radiated from his entire body.

  Rahl could sense that the rage seething in the marshal was well beyond mere anger.

  Byrna’s voice was hard, but edged with that barely controlled fury, as he replied. “Some of those men were good officers who did what they thought best.”

  “Exactly,” replied Taryl. “They were good officers. They ceased to be good officers when they violated the Emperor’s trust, and any officer who would excuse or condone such behavior also risks violating the Emperor’s trust. The one thing that the mage-guards can never allow, either among our own or among the High Command, is violation of that trust. Or an acceptance of those who violate that trust. Do I make myself clear, Marshal?”

  “Perfectly clear, Overcommander.”

  Taryl looked to Rahl. “You may go, Majer.”

  “Yes, ser. If you need me…”

  “I know where to find you. Thank you.” Taryl’s voice lost a hint of the black iron behind it on his last two words.

  After he climbed down from the platform and remounted the gelding, Rahl slowly rode through the growing twilight that he had barely noticed, back in the direction of the boardinghouse, where he assumed that Third Company would be standing down. Thoughts swirled through his mind.

  How could the marshal be so stupid? This was far from the first time that Rahl had doubted the intelligence of High Command senior officers. Was it that stupid officers were needed? Had Byrna been picked by Triad Dhoryk to fail? Or to allow the rebellion to drag out, as Taryl had intimated might well be part of a plan to weaken the Emperor? But whom would they select to replace the Emperor? Rahl couldn’t help but wonder if Fieryn and Dhoryk were planning some kind of coup. That would certainly explain Taryl’s need to rely on solid older commanders such as Muyr and Shuchyl—and his forcing Rahl to develop skills not needed that much in normal mage-guard duties. It also would account for his insistence on Rahl’s maintaining his shields.

  What would the conflict between Taryl and Byrna mean for the rest of the campaign?

  Would there be a campaign after Selyma?

  Rahl kept riding.

  LXXV

  Rahl and Drakeyt sat at a small table along the wall in the public
room of the Tankard, one of the less prepossessing of the handful of inns in Selyma. Even though the night was barely chill, the acrid odor of smoke straying from the smoldering hearth added to the already pronounced perfume of cooking fat and overbaked bread.

  Rahl took a small swallow of a bitter brew that passed for lager.

  “What do you think the subcommander will do next?” asked Drakeyt.

  “The marshal’s the one in command,” Rahl pointed out.

  “The word is that the overcommander’s the one making the decisions.” Drakeyt sipped from his beaker.

  Rahl shrugged. “I don’t know what either plans, and the overcommander hasn’t told me. He did say that nothing would happen for a day or two.”

  “Good. Our troopers need rest. Some of the troopers in the other companies are in worse shape.” Drakeyt shook his head. “Ours had seen magery before. Most of them haven’t.”

  “It’s likely to get worse,” Rahl said slowly.

  “Did the overcommander tell you that?”

  “No. Not in so many words. He’s been warning me for eightdays about how I’ll need to hold stronger shields once we get close to Nubyat and Sastak.” That wasn’t quite what Taryl had said, but Rahl thought it meant close to the same thing. Why else would Taryl have been pressing him on the personal shields so much?

  “It’s fiveday night. You think we’ll be moving out by sevenday?”

  “I don’t know. I’d judge sevenday or eightday, but that’s just a guess. It all might change, too, depending on what Golyat does.”

  “If I were the prince, I’d find a ship and go somewhere else.”

  “He can’t,” Rahl replied. “He’s not worth the trouble to any land powerful enough to stand up to Hamor and too dangerous for those less powerful.”

  Drakeyt took another swallow from his beaker. “Means we’ll lose more troopers for no good reason. Suppose that’s always been the case when there’s a war.”

  “Besides,” Rahl went on, “I get the feeling that he really believes he should be emperor. People who feel like that don’t usually just turn away.” Not to mention the fact that Golyat was probably surrounded by people who wanted him to be emperor so that they could also have more power.