Gunwitch (38 page)

Bright white light leaked around the fingers of her leather glove and she felt heat like the noon sun warm the air around her and drive away the cold in her chest. She uncovered her eyes and saw that the black cloud had been driven back. The bright light came from where the flare and the blackness still fought against each other, sizzling and popping in the air over the battlefield.

Corporal Rickell spotted her as she climbed out of the trench. She stumbled as she stood, fatigue from the shredding and the flare trying to drag her back into the trench. Rickell had been squatting where she last remembered seeing him. She looked around for Sergeant Tabart and the rest of her squad, but the contest between flare and darkness left green streaks on her vision, making it hard to see. She looked back at Rickell and saw that he had stood into a crouch and was running to her, holding her gun and another pistol out to her, both of them butt first. She noticed that some of the creatures were running away from her and from the intense light of the gunwitch flare suspended above her. Not all the creatures, though.

She took the guns from Corporal Rickell just as a red and black skeletal form fell on him seemingly from out of the black-and-bright sky and spiked him to the ground. She fired the gun in her offhand at the monster and blasted its torso backward. Her fatigue and the magical stresses she had already pushed through that pistol destroyed it, as well, and it fell apart in her hand.

When her eyes could focus again, two of the monster’s long spiky arms still quivered before her, stuck in Rickell’s prostrate form. She pulled the spikes free one at a time, then knelt beside the corporal and turned him over. She sighed. She did not need her limited training in healing to tell her that the corporal was already dead. One of the spikes had pierced his heart. She took the two other loaded pistols Rickell had on him, and his bags of shot and powder.

Something black and menacing pounded through the air over her head and bounced, sizzling and popping off the flare. Before she could see what it was, the ground beneath her lifted and threw her and Rickell’s corpse forward. She landed on Rickell’s body, then flipped over and off him, losing her grip on the pistols.

Sergeant Tabart appeared beside her as she scrambled, trying to get the guns again. She found them and checked the loads as the sergeant picked up the bags of shot and powder. Sergeant Tabart put his arm around her as she stood, and helped her walk away from Rickell’s body, away from where the flare still defied the blackness and drew the attention of the attackers. The sergeant made her sit behind an earthen rampart. He took the extra pistols from her and squatted next to her. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Major,” he said, “I think you’ll be wanting to catch your breath before you do much else.”

“Ducoed,” she managed to say. “I have to … find Ducoed.” Then she added, “And stop … calling me … ‘major’.”

“Again, begging the Major’s pardon,” Sergeant Tabart said, “but I think you had best be dealing with yon big fellow first.” He pointed with his chin. “He seems to be the more immediate problem.”

Rose looked up and over her left shoulder. The big man with the hide cape still … flew, or hovered, or whatever … over the battlefield. He was spinning in the air, his dark eyes squinting against the glare and looking all over the battlefield. Looking for her, she was sure, since she had ruined his black cloud. The regulars on the ground might have been able to shoot up at him, since he was distracted, but they were engaged with the other, more monstrous creatures Ducoed had brought with him.

Ducoed. He was the one she wanted to kill.

“I’m not sure,” she said, “I don’t have … the strength.” Not for both Ducoed and this man, to be sure. Maybe not even for one of them.

“We’ll have to address that then, won’t we, Major?” The sergeant stood just enough to see over the embankment. “Stringefellowe, you lazy dwarf,” he shouted, “get over here. And you too, Gilbody. And Bradley.”

The three men scrambled over the embankment and squatted in a line beside the sergeant.

“Stringefellowe, you’re up first, come over and take the major’s hand.”

Stringefellowe, a short, barrel-chested man with oversized forearms that reminded Rose of a woodcutter she had known back in Phillips on the Birchwood, came in a crouch around the sergeant and knelt before her with his right hand stretched out.

Rose took the offered hand with her left, grasping her pistol with her right. She took a deep breath, and let it out slow and cold and misting as she concentrated on drawing Stringefellowe’s strength, pulling it from him and into herself. If their formation had not been disrupted by the black cloud, she would have been able to pull from all the men in her squad, a breath at a time, spreading the burden of her efforts among them all. This way was more direct, but more fatiguing to the man. Especially when she needed to draw so much. Frost formed on his fingers, but he did not lessen his grip on her hand until she let go.

“Thank you,” she said.

Stringefellowe only nodded in response, then sat back on his heels, breathing hard, as if he had just spent the day marching with a full pack with a wrenched shoulder. How Rose had felt before she shifted her physiological burdens to him. She was breathing hard too, but for her it was like the rush after lovemaking. Like she had felt when Ian had finally left her room the night before–only a few hours ago. Her arms and legs twitched with readiness, her skin tingled, her eyes could see every detail of the world around her. She saw Stringefellowe’s day-old stubble on his cheeks and the flecks of gold in his green eyes–like Ian’s. She could almost see his hair growing. And she could smell his sweat and his breath and that he had had a drink of brandy and that he had fired his pistol eight times since the battle began.

She thought of Ian, with Chal and the girls and the need to help them with Ducoed. She longed to reach out, to find them and save them. But there was something she had to do first.

She pulled her feet under her and turned, still squatting, to look up at the man in the air again. She wished she knew the secret of what he was doing.
At first you did not know you could. Then you knew you could. Then you did it.
Corporal Edwards’ words at the King’s Coven. But she had heard those words from Ducoed’s mouth for more than twenty years. His last gift to her. Something else she hated him for.

On the other hand, even if she
could
fly, she did not know whether she could take Sergeant Tabart up with her, or that he could reload her pistols while floating behind her. Further, if she or any other gunwitch had hung themselves like that over a battlefield in Europe, the snipers would have had a field day. Still, it looked damn impressive.

“You ready, sergeant?” she asked. She focused on the man in the sky and his multihued skin, his bare chest gleaming with the sweat of his exertions. She saw the sweat on his brow as he sent another black bolt against the flare and where she had been standing just a few minutes before. The flare had lasted longer than she expected, then it went out as if a black bag had been pulled over it.

“Kill the bastard,” Sergeant Tabart said.

“Oh, I will,” she said. “But I have to take care of this big fellow first.”

She stood. She held her pistol in her right hand and a second pistol in her left. She raised both pistols, aimed them both at the man in the sky, whose eyes locked on hers as she looked at him between the two barrels. His hands jerked. She fired.

Lightning crashed and burst from her and flew with the bullets. The air burned in an arc from her to the man in the sky.

Black power erupted from the man’s clenched fists and leaped out to meet her attack. Before she lost sight of him in the resulting conflagration, she saw the man stagger, pushed backward through the air, and maybe there had been a slash of red blood visible across his right arm.

She dropped both pistols and took the next two that Sergeant Tabart gave her. She could not see the man in the sky any longer. Smoke writhed and coiled obscuring where he had been. She aimed through the smoke, reaching for him with her mind and her enhanced senses, and fired again. This time fire and ice twisted around each other as they raced across the sky, punched through the smoke and came together in a red and blue explosion that scattered the smoke from her last shot.

Both pistols came apart under the stress. She dropped the smoking, frost-covered debris.

Two more pistols from the sergeant. Out of the side of her eye she saw Private Stringefellowe reloading her pistol. At the rate she was going through them, hers might be the only one she had left all too soon.

She waited for the smoke and fog to clear from the sky this time, waiting for her shot.

“Did you get the bastard?” Sergeant Tabart asked.

“I don’t see him,” she said. That worried her. She might have killed him, but if so she expected she would have seen him fall from the sky. Or pieces of him, at least. She cast about with her enhanced senses–

“Major!”

She saw the grunzer steaming and stomping toward them, huge axe upraised, at the same time that the sergeant shouted. She shifted her aim and fired at the grunzer, again discharging both pistols. The grunzer’s boiler burst open, spewing black water and rotting body parts as it crashed and fell less than five yards away. The smell of the steam that rolled over them was rank and fetid, like a hot, wet grave.

The pistols had survived, so she handed them to Stringefellowe in exchange for her pistol. She put another bullet plus lightning bolt through the still-moving, still-clanking, still-hissing wreckage of the grunzer. She handed her pistol to the sergeant, took the pair of pistols he handed her, and she continued looking for the man in the hide cape.

As she looked around, scanning the sky and the ground that sloped away from her, a change came over the battlefield. The creatures that she could see stopped attacking, even the few remaining grunzers. Both creatures and grunzers just stood there, some of them having paused in midstrike. Then, as one, all of them turned to the southeast and began walking away, ignoring the attacks made against them.

“Did we win, major?”

She wanted one more shot against the man in the cape. She wanted to make sure he was dead. But she could not sense him.

“I hope to god, private,” Rose said. “Find the colonel, sergeant,” she added. She didn’t say,
The girls will want to bury him
. She pushed that thought aside as she tucked her loaded pistol under her left arm. “Find as many survivors as you can. Take them all downriver.” She put the two loaded pistols she held into the front pockets of her coat, then took her own pistol, loaded again, from Sergeant Tabart’s hands. “I’ll catch up.”

“Aye, major.”

Rose turned from the sergeant and held out her left hand to Gilbody. She had not quite used up what she had taken from Stringefellowe, but she did not want to face Ducoed even slightly fatigued. “Private,” she said. “If you would.”

Private Gilbody hesitated only a second, then put out his hand. Her lungs were like bellows blowing fresh air on hot coals as she pushed her fatigue into Private Gilbody and took strength from him.

As she did this, her heightened senses felt another change, a fundamental change, as if the air around her and the earth she stood on had shifted somehow. And under that shift, she felt pain and frustration and fear.

“Chal,” she said, her friend’s name and face coming to her with the pain and fear.

She dropped the private’s hand, and turned and ran up the hill toward the fort. The sergeant might have said something to her–she heard his voice–but she paid no attention. Chal needed her. And if Chal needed her–

She leaped the first trench she came to, hardly bothering to notice that she did so. A step and a push and she was on the other side, her stride unaffected. Then the next trench. By the third trench, she knew she must go faster. Chal was growing weaker.

At first you did not know you could
, Corporal Edwards had said to her and the rest of the privates at the King’s Coven. Maybe because she was thinking of Chal, but she did not hear Ducoed say the words this time. Maybe because Chal needed her and she could feel that need through both the earth and the air, there was no place in her thoughts the man who had raped her. All she could think of was: Had Corporal Edwards ever seen anyone fly?
Then you knew you could.
Because the man with the hide cape had flown or floated or stood on a column of black smoke. Whatever it was he had done, if he could do it, she could too.
Then you did it.

Rose threw herself forward, running faster than she had ever run in her life. Then, no longer content to leap just one trench at a time, she decided to leap them all. She pushed against the earth with her right foot while she brought her left knee up.

Maybe the earth moved under her foot. Maybe the air picked her up and pulled her forward. She did not know. She had never done this before.

The hazy air of the battlefield rushed past her, whipping the borrowed tricorner off her head and streaming her plaited single braid behind her. She leaned into the wind of her passage and it bore her up even as it pulled her faster and faster. Below her she saw English infantry regulars look up at her in wonder and shambling bodies and skeletal creatures that paid her no attention. She paid no attention to any of them.

She crested the top of the hill and went up and over the remains of the gate and forward walls.

As the winds held her aloft, she saw Ducoed through the smoke. He stood on the far corner of the wall, facing away from her. Power of an intensity she had never seen radiated from Ducoed, shimmering around him, obscuring the view past him.

Too much power. There was no way she could overcome him.

She could not see Chal or Major Haley, but she could see what could only be Margaret, suspended in the air beyond the cliff, halted in her fall from the cliff.

Rose…

She could not see Chal, but she could hear the woman’s voice fading in her mind and feel the woman dying as who and what Chal had been was bled off and pulled into Ducoed.