Crimson Valley

by Hausladen, Blake;

  Her power was so strong there upon the blasted earth. I turned on Sikhek and called upon Her that I might strike him down. And She came. A happy blue heat crept along my limb and my body began to glow. Her spirit filled my body, and I felt a nudge as though She wished something of me. I gave myself to Her and slide back from myself as if into a dream.

  She raised my arms high into the air and screamed like a babe fresh born. Mad She seemed as She turned and saw the world with my eyes.

  I understood Her terror and all of Her pain. I felt every cold touch of the lingering dead upon Her—every one of the million upon millions of unwelcome hands and bodies pressed into Her. She was taken by madness—a howling desperation to be away—free. Anywhere, anything. Stop. Confused. Die. Stop.

  Stop!

  I leapt up out of Her nightmare and put my hands into Hers, into mine. I made a fist that blazed like the sun, took hold of Her vast rudderless rage, and struck out at the cold death things that clung to me, to Her.

  My mountains cracked, and every soul within my reach that lingered like a tick within my flesh was thrust out. They caught fire as they emerged, and the madness and terror became delight.

  I, The Spirit of the Earth, cried out in triumph as flames sprouted from a million ancient graves.

  Soma, no!

  The rising blast of heat would burn the world of men. Already it had begun, each billowing form cracking into bright flame. The millions would set the world on fire.

  Sikhek knew this. Still he stood with a soft smile, though his clothes and hair smoldered. “That is enough, Soma. You don’t want it to end like this.”

  All of this had been by his design, and he would have more in store for us yet, should I save him. I wanted to refuse him, but could not let the world burn.

  “No, White Mother,” I said and I fought with Her for my body and Her power. “Do not kill the children for their Father’s sins.”

  Her insane happiness at the ending of the world spun as I forced myself to remember the day my children were taken from me, their youth stolen by murder, and their blood splattered upon me like a curse.

  “Be still,” I said with my hands in Hers. The growing red heat of the legions of waking wraiths from Khrim to Alsonelm to Berm began to fade. The cold southern breeze took hold and all but the most substantial of them began to drift away.

  The tattooed Savdi-Nuar rose, smiled, and nod as though they had been watching and learning. Sikhek spoke a few words to them before leading them down to the knot of substantial ghosts that remained upon the tortured slope. I sat helpless upon the road while they told the ghosts to follow them. In twos and threes, the wraiths began to turn.

  I seethed with renewed raged and the ghosts glowed hotter. The Savdi-Nuar noticed this, too, and made soft grunts before telling the ghosts to cool. Some sang healing song to their number, stealing away the many hurts of the ghostly fire.

  They had none to spare for me. I slid down onto my side as all my exhaustion caught up to me.

  Mika approached and knelt close. “Thank you, Soma. This was more than we had hoped from you. The pikemen will hold the pass while you evacuate. Sikhek and the ghosts are coming with us.”

  Before I could catch my breath to scream at her, she turned and followed Sikhek down. More and more of the ghosts followed them until the entire mass started down the pass.

  The steel-plate pikemen were moving, too, up the road with a train of heavy kit. One unfurled a tall blood-red pennant and waved it high overhead. High upon the mountain to the south, a matching red speck appeared, followed by a measure sequence of yellows, reds, and blues.

  An officer of their numbered crossed to me and drew his pike up to his shoulder with a jerk. “The main body will be here in five days. We will camp along the road here and deploy south along the river. Keep your Chaukai massed here for us to use for healing. You have four days to get what people who can make it west of the pass before we withdraw to the valley. ”

  He turned before I could reply and ordered his companies into motion. These were not simple soldiers. I could feel the tang of magic amongst them. Each was a singer.

  I had given Sikhek an army of ghosts, and he had given to me one I could not control.

  I lay with my burned and battered people upon the road and could do nothing until fresh Chaukai healers arrived.

  The aging day drew lines across my vision as I struggled to recover. Desperate people by the tens of thousands flowed up the long road toward us while fresh lava poured down from Mount Sesson and Mount Amey like tears.

  My ears would not stop ringing.

  64

  King Barok Vesteal

  The 61st of Spring, 1197

  Nace’s report of Evand in hand, I ordered my army into the Kaaryon unopposed.

  It was serene. I’d expected to be troubled and conflicted as I crossed back into the place that had expelled me. All I found was calm.

  The guttering flame of my friends’ souls, the rumble of my army, and the imagined whispers of my stolen wife were the only sounds.

  The ground quake once a time later, as though She was welcoming me home.

  “She screams,” Evela cried out.

  I hurried out of my carriage to see the druids spilling out onto the road. They covered their ears and screamed in pain and terror. The earth bucked toward me and I landed in a heap.

  All along the Daavum Mountains upon the western horizon, fists of ash began to punch up at the sky. The haze of the low clouds around each boiled away in expanding circles, and the color of the vast hills beneath them grew dark as millions of pulverized rocks rained down.

  The earth heaved, and booms louder than any sound I’d heard smashed us once and again. I was airborne, and then the ground slapped up at me. I lost myself until the angry earth’s shaking subsided.

  From my side I looked out onto a scene from Bayen’s hell. The fields looked more like an ocean. It rose and fell in ripples of brown and black, and bodies were strewn about it. The druids lay around me, gasping for air. Leger and the ghosts dove around us, and the scream of men and horse filled the air.

  Lady Jayme crawled across to me, a knife in one hand. Her nose was smashed in and one of her legs was broken. “Let me heal them,” she gasped.

  Scream and more explosions tore at my ears, I grabbed at her as the earth bucked us. She was quick, and before I registered the pain of the knife, she was bathed in my blood.

  Blue at first, her magic became yellow before the colors mixed to a vivid green that lanced through every man and horse. On she sang, healing our wounds as the earth smashed at us again and again.

  Through the tumult I became aware of the terrible sounds of new ghosts rising around us.

  Evela and Fana crawled to me across the quaking ground. Their skin glistened blue.

  “She is taken by madness. Someone is struggling to contain Her,” Evela said, and without further explanation, she painted their faces with my blood.

  They pressed their glowing hands into the torn earth and the glimmer upon their skin spread fast and far. The rising ghosts returned to their rest, the quaking subsided, and the battered pair collapsed. Jayme’s weakening verse failed, the many colors of magic flickered out, and the world became still and mundane.

  The resulting view could not be real.

  The top half of Mount Webb and all three peaks north of it had been blown away. Their torn remains vomited ash and sent red jets of lava the size of rivers arching high through the air to spill down the peaks in all directions.

  The Oreol Coast was no more.

  65

  Minister Sikhek Vesteal

  My army of ghosts began to flow down the long slope leaving a wide smoldering swath in the wet, knee-deep ground cover. Washes of blue light caressed me as Savdi-Nuar singers healed our wounded. They had none to spare for Soma and her people. She managed to stand. The waking sun had cleared the horizon and she blazed in her yellow uniform like a young God, her many flaws lit for all to see. Blood l
eaked down her cut cheek into the collar of her uniform, and the dark mole beneath her left eye sprouted a gray hair. She’d lost her hairpin during the struggle and her unruly mop of ash-colored hair hung over one shoulder like the mane of a shaggy horse.

  She looked down at me and every set of eyes in the pass did the same.

  Remarkable. Their attention was absolute. So recently this level of attention had been a constant for me. Every passerby, every crowd, and every prince had gawked at me without fail. I’d noticed the absence of attention a time or two since losing my power in Enhedu, but seeing it then filled me with nostalgia.

  A heavy drop of liquid spattered on a nearby surface and drew me out of this contemplation. I searched for it and found a circle upon the toe of Soma’s dusty boot and traced its origin to the lick of Mika’s blood left along the edge of the knife she held.

  Her hand flexed upon the blade as she looked at me.

  “You are upset.”

  Her response was breathless sequence of syllables. “Your deceit—there is no measure that can describe it. No punishment would be enough to pay for your crimes.”

  “My plan succeeded. There are now five hundred men and women with your ability. Many of the ghosts that tortured the Spirit of the Earth have been purged and She can rest while we get control of Geart. This should please you.”

  “You did not have my permission. You have abused the Spirit of the Earth at my expense. You did it for your gain.”

  “I saved your life in Bessradi. I did so again today. All you need to do is get the refugee over the pass and down to the Bessradi River.”

  “Get out of my sight.”

  “It would be best if you spent the morning with Mika and Maison to explain your power to them. The family will have very little time to get hold of it before Geart’s beasts are upon us.”

  “They have studied me enough, you villain. I will give them nothing more. The next time I see you I will find a way to kill you.”

  “I wish that were true.”

  “This is your doing,” she screamed. “All the misery. All of it. I will see you unmade.”

  My flesh began to quake, and a long moment of terror took hold. Could she burn my soul out of my body?

  “I will stop Geart,” I said.

  “You will fail. It is what you do,” she replied and turned away.

  The Savdi-Nuar had moved further down the pass. Mika took my arm and led me to a horse. We rode down the path of scorched earth and around the host.

  It was a silent procession. The Savdi-Nuar said nothing as they marched and the ghosts they controlled made none of the usual noises of the unhappy dead. All that could be heard was the low crackles of flame as the ghosts’ collective heat lit the wet brush.

  The evening came, and the day’s heat left us, but not the warmth of the ghosts or the glow of the angry mountains on the horizon. The exhausted Savdi-Nuar had slept in shifts and got us moving again as soon as they could see their feet.

  Mika gave orders as we reached the Crimson Valley and the army turned. As we approached, a stench clawed into my nose.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “What is what?” Maison asked.

  “That smell. What is that?”

  “You have seen it done countless times. You have never smelt it? We are smelting the last of the ready ore. A bigger batch than usual, but the smell is always the same.”

  Being amongst the living was overrated.

  She did not comment further, we rode on, and up a path carved along the right side of the narrowing valley. The Savdi-Nuar had been busy since last I’d visited. The maze of walled terraces had been reinforced with a bed of iron stakes and false walls. They were not obstacles that would slow a human army, but that was not what we were facing.

  “Go with him,” Mika said and tapped my elbow like I was a tardy schoolboy.

  I remembered a woman in Enhedu that had spoken to me the same way. It galled me. But there was something about it that satisfied. A better result perhaps? Mika and Fana were not the only two, either. Soma, Dia, and that Havishon girl who engineered the defeat of Hemari and Hurdu.

  A thousand years ago there were no such women—a hundred years ago, the same. What had changed that women of all kinds were emerging out of Zoviya and acquainting themselves with real power? Had I done it? I’d created the Sermod, and they in turn built places like Dagoda and their seminaries all over Zoviya. Were all the emerging women from that class? No. Soma, Fana, and Mika were not of their number. Perhaps they always existed, and I’d not noticed? The provinces, I suppose, could always have been populated by capable women who were now emerging as those regions achieved primacy.

  Perhaps it was easy—

  “Sikhek?” Mika said. “This way.”

  I had come to a halt and the ghosts were stacking up behind us. Mika took the reins of my horse and led us up through the sandstone wall. The vista beyond was green and lush. Pasture of grass sloped away from the manmade ridge the wall stood upon, and down to a reservoir as wide as the Bessradi River. On the far side wide terraces of bountiful fields reached up in a cone, the face of each a battlement of thick stone. Each wall included several gates, mostly false with the tunnels behind them dead ends lined with spikes and murder holes. We crossed a long bridge and rode up through the terraces, meandering back and forth across the cone. The Savdi-Nuar divided the ghosts into groups as we moved up through the gates and filled each deep trench before each rising face of terrace.

  Geart would need a billion Hessier to take my valley.

  We reached the sixth and final terrace, and the half moon of the palace became discernible from the red walls of the valley. It was not built to impress. Its bricks were the same reddish-tan stone as the stark face of the bald mountain sides and could only be understood as a structure from up close.

  Inside the front hall we found men working on long tables. Upon each was a well-organized collection of cranks, gears, and other bits of machinery.

  “A new type of crossbow?”

  Maison replied, “We’d been preparing for an attack by the Hurdu since Lord Vall’s death. The Chaukai would not sell us their longbows, so we’ve made a better crossbow.”

  “They look slow.”

  “They are, but they will pierce Hurdu plate at 300 paces. A caribou skull or hip will shatter at twice that range. Sit down, dear Minister, there is much here for you to learn.”

  “Fascinating,” I said and sat down to examine one of the mechanisms. “Bring up some mercury while I take a look at these.”

  I’d had a plan for that day, but lost the thought as the work of my Savdi-Nuar drew me in.

  66

  Queen Dia Vesteal

  Shiema Yentif

  “Eat,” Shiema Yentif said through the gap in the wagon’s canvas cover.

  I woke long enough to take the offered bowls. It was the most she had said to us in the eight days since we’d come into her care upon the battered pier in Pashwarmuth. Burhn and others she would sell as laborers were held in the wagon behind ours.

  The wagons had stopped again. Mud from the churning wheels had splattered the road clothes she’d changed into and her crown of hair was wrapped tight in patterned gray cloth. No Yentif blue or Urmandish yellow silk could be found anywhere upon the wagon train or its drivers. She paced toward a group beside the lead wagons. They kissed her hands and discussed the poor condition of the road.

  Ghemma rolled over gingerly so as not to disturb the children tucked inside my wrap. “What has delayed us this time?”

  I handed her a bowl while I sipped mine. “The men in Doctrice who maintain this road are going to end up in the soup.”

  Ghemma carefully sucked down the top layer of the broth. The unknown bits at the bottom went over the side with a quick flick. She saw how much I’d had of mine and did the same with my bowl.

  “Fucking sutlers,” she said.

  “Hush. Shiema and hers are far better than what chases us. We are moving fas
ter than the beasts stuck in the swamps behind us. Sleep, eat, and be ready. Tell the rest the same if you can.”

  I’d told it to her before, and would have to tell her again. We were not sure who else had survived or been brought along. Our view was confined to the narrow view through the front flap of the heavy wagon’s thick canvas cover. Most times this includes only the ass end of the horses tied to the back of the wagon in front of ours. We didn’t know where we were going or what Shiema intended to do with us. If Dagoda still stood, I expected her to sell us there on her way to whatever friendly estate she could park her family while there was trouble in Berm. She’d asked us no questions either after laying eyes on the Hessier caribou. They scooped us up off the docks, loaded their wagons, and started west up the tithe road.

  “Dia,” Ghemma said. “I am nothing compared to the children. You must get away.”

  “Away to where? Rest, and be ready for later. You risk Shiema’s knife chatting away like you are. You’re a Dagoda girl, act the part. We will see them all burn soon enough.”

  She glared out at the hazy swamp and then laid her head upon my shoulder and fell asleep. I ate and worried about her. Too many things had happened upon that dock, and we’d dared not speak about a single moment of it.

  The settler fixed the bad patch of road, and the jostle of their ugly wagons banged her awake.

  “I’d almost rather walk,” I said and tried to shift without waking the children.

  “I can take them,” Ghemma said, but without any conviction.

  Clea fussed, and I coaxed her to my breast. Cavim napped undisturbed beside her. Ghemma fell back asleep despite the jostling.

  That night we stopped upon a ridge, and Burhn appeared before us with a cloth and began to wash our hands, as if he’d been a servant his whole life. He found a festering splinter in my palm and worked it free. I would have protested, but knew better. Shiema’s kin were watching.