by Anthony Ryan
“Form up!” Frentis called to the milling freed folk, some still stabbing away at the Volarian dead. “Gather weapons and form up!”
Through a judicious mix of shouts and jostling he managed to reimpose some order, those appointed as sergeants returning to their senses at the sight of him and forming their companies into an offensive line, many now armed with swords and cavalry lances.
“Keep at it until you clear the smoke,” Frentis ordered, turning and striding towards the Volarian centre. The line held until they heard the sound of further combat, unquenched bloodlust raising a cheer from the freed folk as they broke into a spontaneous charge. Knowing they would be deaf to further orders, Frentis charged with them, the smoke parting to reveal a solid wall of Varitai, blank faces regarding them above levelled spears.
He leapt at the last moment, his sword sweeping aside an upraised spear, boots impacting on a Varitai’s breastplate, propelling the man backwards. He landed clear of the Volarian line and turned, hacking down two Varitai in quick succession, his sword finding gaps in their armour with deadly accuracy. The freed folk were quick to spot the opportunity, piling into the gap in a dense mass of thrashing men and women. The useful panic that had gripped the Free Swords was absent here, however, the Varitai falling back in response to a strident bugle call to form another defensive formation twenty yards on. Frentis could see two figures in the centre of the shrinking circle of Varitai, a burly man with a bugle raised to his lips, a veteran sergeant judging by his armour, and a slighter figure with the plumed helm of a junior officer.
“Hold!” Frentis held up his sword as the freed folk gathered themselves for another charge. The rage had gripped them all now, every soot-streaked face alive with a desperate thirst for more blood, gore-covered weapons in every hand, trembling with anticipation.
“We can take them, brother!” a woman called out in hoarse Realm Tongue, dagger in one hand and short sword in the other, both red from tip to hilt. It took a moment for Frentis to recognise this panting, black-faced figure as Lissel, the former chandler from Rhansmill.
“You’ve done enough for today, mistress,” he told her. And we have losses to make good, he added silently. “You’ll find Sister Illian and Weaver on the rise, please fetch them here.”
He moved around the near-perfect circle of Varitai, peering through the fading smoke to confirm the defeat of the Volarian left flank. Free Swords were running in all directions and the Garisai advancing in good order towards the Varitai, Ivelda and Lekran at their head. Frentis held up a hand to halt them in place, turning to quickly count the remaining Varitai. Three hundred. Double the number already in the army.
“Brother.” Illian came to a halt at his side, crossbow in hand. He took in the sight of a bandage on her forehead, the wound just below the hairline and still leaking blood. “Kuritai,” she said with a shrug.
He nodded, turning back to the Varitai. “Wait for my order.” He strode closer to the circle of slave soldiers, gaze fixed on the two figures in their centre. The burly sergeant stood stock still and back straight, staring at Frentis, grizzled face showing a stern defiance he couldn’t help but admire. The officer at his side was at most half the sergeant’s age and considerably less defiant, eyes constantly roaming the surrounding freed folk, face pale with terror.
“You’re alone,” Frentis called to the burly man across the ranks of immobile Varitai. “Your officers are dead or running back to New Kethia. If you want to join them, give the order for these men to lay down their arms.”
The sergeant’s face twisted into a disgusted grimace and he spat on the ground, speaking but one word, laden with contempt, “Slave!”
Illian’s crossbow bolt smacked into the sergeant’s breastplate just left of the sternum. At such close range it had little difficulty penetrating armour and bone to find the heart.
“And you, Honoured Citizen?” Frentis called to the young officer, now gaping at the fallen sergeant, the tears streaming from his eyes making him appear no more than a child lost amidst a field of dangerous strangers. After a moment he mastered himself sufficiently to retrieve the bugle from the sergeant’s body. The call he sounded was faltering and thin, but evidently sufficiently clear. As one the Varitai laid down their weapons and stood in ranks, every face expressing no more emotion than a stone.
“Can you heal so many?” Frentis asked Weaver as the healer appeared with his freed Varitai.
Weaver gave a soft laugh, surveying the neat ranks of slave soldiers with his now-habitual sad smile. “You talk as if I have a choice, brother.”
New Kethia burned. Tall columns of smoke rose from its close-packed streets, most of the fires seemingly concentrated around the docks where a number of ships could be seen drawing away from the harbour. They were all low in the water, one so heavily laden it capsized on reaching the harbour mouth, tiny antlike figures scuttling over its hull as it rolled in the waves. To the south a long line of people were streaming from the city gates, Frentis’s spyglass confirming the vast majority as grey-clads, stooped and burdened with various household items, dragging wailing children in their wake, confusion and fear on every face.
“They might’ve waited till we got here,” Draker grumbled.
“One less battle to fight,” Frentis said. They had encamped amidst a large collection of ruins on a low plateau just under a mile east of the city, Thirty-Four naming the place as the site of Old Kethia, destroyed centuries before in the Forging Age. The former slave returned from his reconnaissance in late afternoon, he and Master Rensial having been sent ahead in the morning.
“It seems news of our victory had a dramatic effect,” Thirty-Four reported. “The governor hatched a plan to execute every slave rather than allow them to fall into our hands. Given that the city’s slaves outnumber the free population by a factor of two to one, this proved an unwise course of action. The riots have been raging for three days, thousands have died, more have fled.”
“The slaves hold the city?” Frentis asked.
“Only a quarter.” Thirty-Four pointed to a district that appeared even more shrouded in smoke than the others. “Lacking arms, their losses were heavy. We picked our way through to contact their leaders.” He turned to Frentis with a smile. “It seems they have heard much about the Red Brother, and are eager for his arrival.”
“One less battle,” Draker muttered, getting to his feet.
“Why was this done?”
The body hung from a pole in New Kethia’s main square, the feet reduced to blackened stumps, stomach torn out, and the face frozen in an agonised scream. Despite all the mutilation visited upon the corpse Frentis could still recognise the features. I’ll suffer every torment for a thousand years, Varek had said. From the state of him Frentis doubted he had lasted more than an hour.
New Kethia’s Deputy Treasurer, a pinch-faced black-clad who seemed equal parts baffled and terrorised by his continued survival, had to cough several times before finding the voice to speak. “The Empress’s orders,” he said, the tone wavering despite his efforts to master it. “They arrived before he did.”
Didn’t like what he said to me, Frentis decided, feeling an odd sense of disappointment. Varek had seemed so determined, it would have been interesting to see how far his quest for vengeance would have taken him. But he was one of just several thousand corpses littering this city, bloating in the sun and birthing clouds of flies that swarmed amidst the burgeoning stench. Thousands of stories snuffed out before the ending.
It had taken a day and a night of hard fighting to win the city, Frentis leading the infantry in a slow but inexorable advance towards the docks whilst Lekran and Ivelda took charge of the surviving rebels. They had been obliged to fight from street to street, their opponents a mix of Free Swords and townsmen, capable of furious resistance now their homes faced destruction. But they were too few and too badly organised to prevail, their barricades ramshackle constructions crafted by hands unused to work. Frentis soon evolved a tactic of sei
zing the surrounding rooftops and assailing the defenders from above, forcing them back whilst the barricades were torn down. They had made a final stand of sorts at the docks, a few hundred sheltered behind stacked barrels and crates, refusing all calls for surrender. It was Weaver’s freed Varitai who finished it, simply pushing the barrels over and storming in to club down the defenders.
What was left of the governor had been roped to the base of the pole; unlike Varek his face was truly unrecognisable. The man had been a general before entering politics, choosing to meet his end on the steps of the governor’s mansion with a few loyal guards. Unfortunately his heroics hadn’t secured him a speedy end, the great mob of slaves sweeping aside all resistance as they stormed the mansion in the final attack, but possessing enough presence of mind to ensure the governor was taken alive. Having witnessed the horrors wrought by the governor’s attempts to cull the slave population Frentis felt no inclination to interfere in his protracted, and inventive, punishment.
“The Empress is a monster,” the Deputy Treasurer added, a faint, hopeful ingratiation in his tone.
“She is Volarian,” Frentis replied. “As the only Imperial official left in this city, I require you to act as liaison to the surviving free populace. You will find them quartered under guard at the docks. Inform them that, as free subjects of the Unified Realm, they are afforded the protection of the Crown and I personally guarantee the safety of all those innocent of any part in the atrocities committed here. However, all property formerly owned is forfeit to the Crown as spoils of war. By the Queen’s Word slavery is now outlawed in this province and any found to be engaged in it subject to summary execution.”
He walked away as Draker led the black-clad towards the docks. “Don’t sniffle now, there’s a good fellow. Don’t you know how lucky you are to greet a new dawn in the Greater Unified Realm?”
Picking his way through the streets, all strewn with bodies and the myriad wreckage of a shattered city, Frentis found himself recalling a dream, or what he now understood to be the beginning of his connection with a soul the Deputy Treasurer thought monstrous. I would have been terrible, she had said as they gazed on a shoreline awash in corpses. But terrible as fate would make me, I am not him.
He paused at the sight of a mother and child, crumpled in death outside a baker’s shop. The little girl’s eyes were open, her head lying close to her mother’s, the mouth slightly agape as if frozen in some unheard final question. Seeing the wounds on the mother’s arms, earned no doubt as she tried to shield the girl from the frenzy of blades that killed them, he couldn’t suppress the notion that he and the Empress were conspiring to make that sea of death a reality.
“Brother?” It was Illian, regarding him with an expression that bordered on amazement. He felt the dampness on his cheeks and quickly wiped the tears away.
“What is it, sister?”
“The Garisai found a few hundred grey-clads hiding in the vaults beneath the merchants’ quarter. The city slaves are clamouring to get at them. It could turn ugly.” She forced an uncertain smile, eyes still lingering on his. Frentis’s gaze went to the cut on her forehead. Thirty-Four had done a typically precise job of stitching it closed but the scar would be deep, and long. “Stopped itching, at least,” she said, her fingers going to the wound.
No uncertainty in her, he surmised. All this death and she remains undaunted. She was right, the Order is the best place for her.
“I’ll be there directly,” he said. “Tell Draker to form the free folk into a working party to clear these bodies. They’ll be paid in bread, we shouldn’t expect them to work for nothing.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lyrna
They soon began calling it the Mud March, a name Lyrna somehow knew would persist into the history of this campaign, should there be any scholars left to write it. The rain started the day they began the inland march and didn’t let up for the following two weeks, turning every track into soft, clinging mud, trapping feet, hooves and cart-wheels until the army ground to a halt having covered less than a hundred miles.
“The price, Highness,” Aspect Caenis explained at the council of captains. “The crafting of such a storm created a great imbalance in the elements.”
“How long will it last?” Lyrna asked.
“Until the balance is restored. A day, or a month. There is no way to tell.”
“Is there none in your Order who can assist us?”
He gave a helpless shrug. “The girl from the Reaches was the only soul I ever met who held such a gift.”
Lyrna ignored the pointed implication in his words, knowing he still chafed over her refusal to compel the Gifted from the Reaches to join his Order. In some ways she was finding Aspect Caenis just as unyielding as the unmourned Tendris.
“We need a road, Highness,” Count Marven insisted. “Volarian roads are famously well-made, and immune to the elements.” His finger tracked across the map to a line twenty miles north. “This one serves the northern ports. It’s a four-day diversion from our intended line of march but it should save us weeks of slogging through mud.”
Although she disliked the notion of abandoning the direct approach to Volar, Lyrna could see no alternative. She was about to confirm the order when a rarely heard voice spoke up.
“That would be a mistake, Highness.”
Lord Al Hestian stood near the rear of the tent, a gap on either side of him as none of her captains seemed to relish proximity to the man now referred to as the Traitor Rose. She had tended to exclude him from these meetings but the impressive performance of his men during what had quickly been dubbed the Battle of the Beacon, and the recent loss of so many captains, provoked her to a change of heart. She had spared him for a reason, after all.
“How so, my lord?” she asked, seeing Count Marven stiffen. Of all her captains, he seemed to harbour the greatest enmity towards Al Hestian, something she assumed had been born of their time in the desert war.
“The obvious line of march should always be avoided,” Al Hestian said. “The road will be patrolled, policed. Word of our position will be conveyed to Volar within days. If we are to send forces north, they should only be diversionary.”
“Whilst we continue to wallow in mud,” Count Marven said.
“No rain can last forever, Dark-born or no. And if we can’t march through it, neither can the enemy.”
“Time is the true enemy,” Lyrna said. “Every day of inactivity allows the Empress leisure to gather forces at Volar.” She straightened and nodded at Count Marven. “Battle Lord, issue orders to change the army’s line of march come the morning. My lords, to your duties.”
Alornis was drawing again when she returned to her tent, the charcoal stub moving with feverish industry across the parchment as she hunched over her easel. During the day she would tinker with the cart-mounted ballista, all the time barely saying a word, but at night she would draw. It was only when she worked that her face took on some animation, tense with concentration and eyes lit with memory, though, judging by the nature of her drawings, Lyrna divined they were memories best left alone. Burning ships, burning men, sailors screaming as they flailed in a storm-tossed sea. Page after page of expertly rendered horror produced in a nightly ritual of self-flagellation.
“Did she eat something, at least?” Lyrna asked Murel, shrugging off her rain-soaked cloak.
“A little porridge only, Highness. Though Davoka had to practically force it on her.”
She went and sat by Alornis for a time, the Lady Artificer acknowledging her presence with a barely perceptible nod, her charcoal continuing to move without interruption. Lyrna took some heart from the fact that this sketch differed from the usual finely crafted carnage, a portrait of some kind. Alornis set out the basic shape of the face with a few expertly placed lines then began to detail the eyes, dark eyes, narrowed in judgement and reproach, eyes she knew well.
“Your brother loves you,” she told Alornis, reaching out to still her hand, feeling it
tremble.
Alornis didn’t look at her, eyes still fixed on the picture. “It’s my father,” she whispered. “They had the same eyes. He loved me too. Perhaps, if the Faith has it right, he still sees me. It could be that he loves me more now, for we are the same are we not? He too once killed thousands by fire. Sometimes he would dream of it, when he got older and the sickness came, thrashing in his bed and calling out for forgiveness.”
Lyrna resisted the impulse to shake her, slap her, try to force a return of the bright, sweet girl she had met in Alltor. But looking into her confused eyes she knew that girl had gone, consumed by fire along with so many others. “Take your sleeping draught, my lady,” she said instead, gently but firmly tugging the charcoal from her fingers. “Hard marching tomorrow, you need your sleep.”
They made the road in three days, the rain slackening a little by the third day, though the going was scarcely any better to the north. Brother Kehlan reported numerous cases of men falling out on the march due to a condition known as “guardsman’s foot,” an affliction brought on by constant immersion in water whereby the skin became like a sponge. Soon almost every wagon was laden with grey-faced soldiers, their feet bound in bandages wrapped in canvas to keep the rain off. So it was with considerable relief that they first set foot on the road, a truly remarkable example of human construction that shamed the dirt tracks typical in the Realm. Malcius, if you had seen this, Lyrna thought, noting the gentle curve to the road’s surface that allowed the rain to flow off to the sides. You would have scraped the treasury clean to cover the Realm in such wonders.