by M. C. Planck
The nearest cannon stood silent, its twitching crew held steady under Gregor’s direction as he commanded them to wait for something to shoot at.
The range was now close, and Christopher had only a few seconds to act. He unleashed the spell of dissolution at the heart of the cloud, trying to dispel the dark magic.
The darkness failed, and Christopher almost wished it hadn’t. A tower of festering, rotting flesh was revealed, with tiny forearms and a head the size of a Volkswagen. The monster roared, soundlessly, its vast fanged mouth opening like the Beltway Tunnel framed with stalagmite teeth. A foul wind swept out, leaving no doubt that the creature that came for him was already dead, had been dead for days. The shaman rode its shoulder like a sparkling parrot.
Gregor shouted his gun team into action, but the monster was quicker. It whipped its head to the side, smashing the gun platform into splinters of wood, flesh, and bone, snatched the cannon in its teeth and flung it across the fort.
Christopher held up his sword and chanted beautiful words in Celestial, the ones that had driven the soul-trapped abominations out of his chapel at Svengusta’s side. He had not even known what he was doing then, as a lowly Pater, and it had worked. Now he was a priest of high rank.
Not high enough. Black and purple haze invaded his sight, crushing him to his knees with a backlash of evil. The light in his sword faltered and went out.
Another jagged, brilliant bolt. Christopher’s shield burned out, leaving a few thousand volts to arc through him. Cannan stood ready nearby, his sword prepared to strike, but the monster and the shaman were out of his range. D’Kan was standing his ground, shoveling charges into his carbine. Gregor was bending down at the smashed gun port, presumably trying to heal the crew, but Christopher knew it was a waste of time. Mundane flesh and blood could not have survived that terrible blow.
The Tyrannosaurus rex turned its attention to Christopher, its beady eye sockets glowing purple. Christopher raised his sword in futile defense, scrambling to regain his feet. His earlier boasting now seemed amply punished: he did, in fact, fear the king of thunder.
Gregor threw a grenade over the wall, igniting the boxes of cannon ammunition he had been dumping. The explosion rattled the wooden wall like a wind chime. Christopher fell to the deck as the undead dinosaur collapsed to one side, unbalanced by the loss of a leg.
In its absence the shaman hovered in the air, hanging like a metallic Christmas ornament. Again golden lightning sparked from his fingers, reaching down to where Christopher lay helplessly.
Cannan charged across the wall, shoving Christopher out of the way like a hockey puck. The heroic act left no defense for the knight. Yellow fire burned through him, knocking him off the wall and into the bowels of the fort.
Christopher responded with his last spell of dissolution, aimed at the shaman, trying to undo his formidable defenses. The sparks of bullets bouncing off the invisible shield in front of the creature showed he had failed. But not completely. With a yowl of outrage the shaman fell from the sky, landing on the wall only a few feet away from Christopher.
The gold-and-silver-scaled ulvenman was shorter than Christopher had expected, no taller than a human being. He was armed with a glowing double-headed axe. Christopher smiled in grim satisfaction, clambered to his feet, and set his sword to glowing with its own killing light.
The shaman took the opportunity to cast a spell of his own. Apparently he felt embarrassed by his moderate stature. He sucked in a deep breath, blew out his cheeks until he turned purple, and began to swell, growing to twice his original height, a veritable giant now. His axe, already wickedly large, disconcertingly grew with him, becoming positively massive.
For crying out loud, Christopher thought. He lunged into the attack desperately, cutting down into one of the gigantic thighs. The ulvenman returned the favor, smashing Christopher with his oversized axe. Christopher flew backward and slammed against the wall, almost going over the top. If not for the thick scales of his coat, he would have been split in half.
Another blow like that would finish him, despite his armor and tael. He had no way of telling what unnatural life remained in the giant. Bullets still bounced off its invisible shield as men in the fort fired at it, and none of the cannon could be turned to face inside the wall. D’Kan must have been paying attention during the strategy lectures, because he had crept up behind the giant’s shield. Furiously he emptied his carbine into the giant’s back, every shot sparking on the metal scales. The giant leaned and swung awkwardly, stretching out with its axe in one hand to reach the Ranger. At the last second D’Kan backflipped out of the path of the deadly blade. It would have been a fantastically impressive feat if only he had pulled it off. His flip ended on his head rather than his feet, and he fell off the wall and into a watering trough.
Something touched Christopher on the back of the leg. Disa, white-faced, healing him. Growling, he threw himself back into the duel. Nobody was healing the shaman.
With a high downward stroke he tried to sever the leg he had cut before. The ulvenman parried with his axe, one-handed; with the other hand he reached out and shoved Christopher, sending him flying on his back like an adult pushing a child. The giant advanced in his wake. Now Disa was exposed to its wrath, crouching at its feet.
The ulvenman threw his shoulders back and roared. Golden scales splashed out in the wake of Gregor’s sweeping blow as he cut into the ulvenman from behind. Christopher scrabbled forward on hands and knees, trying to shield the priestess. Distracted but not dissuaded, the ulvenman aimed at the soft target. As the axe came down Christopher got his sword in the way, turning the blow from the defenseless girl. The axe slashed into the walkway, flinging out splinters of wood as long as his arm. Christopher struggled desperately to his feet.
The giant raised a massive paw and stomped on the walkway, setting it quivering like a bowstring. Christopher fell again, clutching at anything to stop himself from falling over the edge. This was absurd; he would have to have a word with Lalania about the quality of her construction. Disa’s hand found his, saving him, but the effort cost him his sword, which went spinning down into the fort. Gregor stumbled as well, dancing crazily. The ulvenman raised his axe to swing again, and Christopher shielded Disa with the only thing he had left. His body took the blow, crushing him against the girl, his scale mail parting under the force. Now he was only an inch from death, the unnatural vitality of his tael an empty memory. Gregor threw himself forward, sacrificing any chance of keeping his footing to bury his sword in the giant’s back. Copious blood splashed in its wake, unstaunched by tael. The giant was also one stroke from death, if there were anyone to deliver it.
A helmet appeared on the walkway ladder. As it rose it revealed the bulky figure of Cannan, smoking, burned, and angry. With a deep-throated growl he swung his massive black blade through the giant’s ankle, severing its paw. The monster fell, finally, onto Gregor, who grappled it around its massive head. Together they rolled off the wall, taking Cannan with them.
Christopher crawled forward and looked down. The giant was gone. In its place was the little ulvenman shaman, its neck twisted at an impossible angle, missing a foot, covered in golden scales and red blood. Cannan rose to his knees like a marionette on strings, violence still fueling his movements, and hewed its head off for good measure. He raised his sword again, preparing to mince the body, but finally ran out of steam, collapsing to the ground in a heap.
Gregor leapt forward and touched the fallen knight, speaking a healing spell.
“He lives,” Gregor said. “Where is my wife?”
Disa clambered down the ladder and bent over Cannan. Gregor crawled up, handing Christopher his lost sword.
“You might want to hang onto this,” he said.
“I was hanging onto Disa,” Christopher replied. “How much healing do you need?”
“Not as much as you. Recall that Cannan and I are knights first, Christopher. Though we are not your equal in rank, we are harder to
kill. And easier to replace.”
That reminded him. He leaned out to make sure someone pulled D’Kan from the trough before the Ranger drowned.
Christopher spent the rest of his spells undoing the damage the shaman had inflicted on his flesh and his armor. He did not save healing for his army. That was what the priestesses were for.
The ulvenmen continued to fight with savage fury for the rest of the day, but the outcome was already decided, despite the staggering numbers that poured out of the woods. Their attack was spirited but unorganized. They had not prepared for the fort, and even its simple dirt-reinforced wood walls were too much for them. Most of them seemed unprepared for any battle, armed with sticks, stones, and scavenged weapons. Many of the little doglike creatures fought too, scrabbling up the walls or being thrown over the top by the larger ulvenmen. All of them died in waves while Christopher watched, trying to estimate when his men would run out of ammunition.
Paradoxically, nightfall ended the battle. Restored to their senses by the comforting dark, the ulvenmen slunk away, and quiet reigned, save for the roaring in his ears from so many guns.
The cost of the battle was surprisingly low. Christopher was unnerved to realize he was measuring lives in terms of the tael it took to restore them. This was not a perfect equation: three of the previous batch of casualties had remained corpses. The failure rate was highest among the mercenaries. Men who had already fought for a lifetime were perhaps disillusioned enough to not want to return to more war.
Christopher sympathized with them. Only the promise of seeing his wife again had brought him back. Or so it would seem: Christopher could not remember his own death, or being dead, even though Krellyan had carried on a brief conversation with him. Or possibly with a seeming of him, like the shade of Stephen he had talked to under the hanging tree. It was a complicated bit of theology that no one seemed to understand very well. In any case, Krellyan had employed the lure of his wife to drag him back to this world, with its blood and noise and endless porridge.
For men used up and cast aside by this cruel feudal system, there might not be a strong enough line. Captain Steuben remained impressed at how many did return, even while Christopher felt the loss of every single one. The man he had plucked out of the ulvenman’s fire pit was one of the returned, which was a real comfort. On the other hand, one of the permanently dead had been raised once before, which was mystifying. Who would come back once, but not twice?
Ruminating on that mystery was considerably more pleasant than facing the fact at hand, which was that he owed this particular victory, including his life and arguably the tael from the battle, to Lalania. Her magic had turned disaster into triumph, a triumph measurable by the fat rock of purple in his hand. The shaman had yielded a fantastic prize, equal to the cost of making a viscount out of a commoner, yet its tael was only a shard of the stone drawn from four thousand dead ulvenmen.
The destruction of the ulvenman horde had made Christopher fabulously wealthy again. Assuming he, rather than Lalania, owned the reward. With a little trepidation he brought his council together to discuss the issue.
Karl dismissed it instantly. “Your army did the killing. And in any case, the minstrel is your sworn servant. You need not pay her by the spell.”
“It would be a princely fee for a single performance,” Lalania agreed. She was still very satisfied with herself. “Nonetheless if you offered me a rank or two, I would not turn it down.”
“There are better things to spend this on than pretty girls,” Cannan growled. “Christopher must take another rank.”
“I concur,” Karl said. Christopher understood their reasons. Both of them stood to gain only if he achieved his goals. He wasn’t so sure why everybody else was nodding in agreement, though.
Gregor offered an explanation aimed at Lalania. “He’ll need all the rank he can get when the King finds out you two have stolen from him.”
“I did not steal anything,” Lalania huffed. “I do not steal. I took what was mine, with the King’s permission. Christopher is my undoubtable witness to that. The White cannot lie.”
“Actually, it’s not quite that straightforward,” Disa said, visibly alarmed at Lalania’s words. “What is this talk of theft?”
“We took that lyre out of the castle,” Christopher recalled. “The King gave Lala permission to fetch her lyre, but I don’t think that’s quite what he meant.”
“It is mine,” Lalania declared. “It belongs to the College. It has belonged to us since the day Varelous handed it to his daughter. It has remained ours for all the years kings have kept it locked in Kingsrock. Every Skald for three generations has sworn that the lyre belongs to any bard with the wit and nerve to reclaim it. The lyre is mine, by every legal right.”
“The King won’t see it that way,” Gregor said, rather dryly.
“Then I suggest you do not be the one to tell him,” she snapped.
“Why was it there in the first place?” Christopher asked.
“To defend the city,” Gregor explained. “You have seen the effects firsthand; as you can imagine, such magic would void the efforts of many siege engines.”
“When was the last time a trebuchet threatened Kingsrock?” Lalania argued. “In any case, the College would not fail to defend the capital.”
“Assuming the bard who held it were present. Or on the King’s side. Or still alive.” Gregor turned to Christopher. “I suspect the reasoning was that leaving such an artifact in the hands of adventurous young women would only lead to its being lost or damaged.”
“So to protect it, they lock it away where it does no one any good at all,” Lalania objected. “Can you not imagine what the Lyre of Varelous could do for the realm?”
“It could bankrupt a lot of carpenters,” Christopher mused aloud. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
“It could build a lot of roads,” Lalania said. “Roads you build to the profit of the realm, but at only expense to yourself.”
That was a good point. He didn’t get to collect tolls on the roads he paved, but he still had to build them to support his army in the field.
“Just how many roads?” he asked, imagining four-lane highways stretching from one edge of the realm to another.
“It will be a week before the magic recharges,” she said. “It is only a minor artifact, not the harp of the gods.”
Karl shook his head dismissively. “We can build roads at our leisure. Creating forts on demand is rather more valuable. Eventually the King will hear of this, and ask for his property back, and Christopher must have enough rank to say no.”
“I also concur,” Torme said. “Every rank you gain puts you further from the reach of the Dark.”
Christopher looked at D’Kan, the only member of the group who hadn’t spoken yet.
“I care not,” the Ranger said. “My only proviso is this: if you promote him”—and he jabbed his finger at Cannan—“then you must promote me.”
“He will promote who he wills,” Karl automatically objected.
“You need not worry, boy,” Cannan said. “He will never promote me.”
The two men glared at each other, D’Kan fiercely and Cannan with distant impassivity.
“I have another reason,” Disa said cautiously. “If you promote yourself, you will be able to do sendings, instead of waiting for someone to contact you.”
It was a compelling argument. A new rank would open new levels of magic to him. The attraction was perverse. The more his industrial empire grew and his technology improved, the more he became dependent on the power of magic.
And, of course, his ultimate goal involved staggering rank. He had finally studied the Cardinal’s books. The spell that would take him home could only be cast by a Prophet. Nine ranks did not sound so far from six, but the cost of every step doubled. He would need to destroy six more ulvenman hordes to earn his ticket home, assuming there were even that many left. The impossibility of the task was daunting. Sometimes he pret
ended that his industrial empire would earn him enough gold to buy the rank; other times he imagined the wealth he would extract from the Gold Apostle’s head. Mostly he dealt with it the same way people dealt with their mortgage, by simply not doing the math.
And in any case it seemed like a terrible price to extract from this world just to leave it. He would need to leave something behind that was worth the cost. An honest and stable government, the knowledge of not just firearms but democracy and equality, a world in which men did not die before the age of nineteen: these were the only things he had to give. Giving them would involve taking away some things, like feudal privilege, from the people currently in power. Doing that would require rank.
He sighed, defeated by circumstances. The only path to fairness that he could see required him to take all the profit from the labor of others. It was too convenient.
“There will still be plenty left over,” he said.
Cannan shrugged, unconcerned. “There are still ulvenmen to kill. Only the brave died today. The weak and the cowardly remain to be seen to.”
18
YOUNG MEN AND OLD DOGS
The remaining ulvenmen did not seem to know they were weaklings and cowards. At each village they were unreasonably surprised to see Christopher’s troops emerging from the woods, but they fought with unbridled fury, and now always to the death, with almost no thought of retreat. Their resilience forced Christopher and his armored swordsmen into every battle; their reckless charges cost him a few men each time, a price he was willing to pay since it was reimbursed. In any case, by the third death the men usually stopped dying. The chief cause of death was fear, after all: freezing or fleeing in the face of slavering fangs. The men who stood their ground and calmly aimed and shot tended to survive. Christopher reckoned that at some point his entire army would consist of thrice-raised men, tallow boys transformed into tin soldiers by the Saint’s magic.