The False Martyr (94 page)

Though the sun had been up
for hours, the wagons were still circled in the camp below. The
prince’s cobalt blue tent still stood, gold eagle of Liandria
unmistakable on its round roof. Soldiers were just now putting out
the fires that surrounded those wagons and gathering themselves to
depart. “Well, they’re not hurryin’,” Yerl mumbled. The reason for
the prince’s delay could not have been more obviously
stated.

At that same moment,
someone in the camp noticed the riders on the ridge above. Cary
thought about riding down to them but thought better of spooking a
royal delegation in a foreign land. He untied his reins, giving his
horse the lead it needed to reach the grass at its feet. He untied
the leads on the two pack horses behind him as well. “Might as well
let them eat,” he told the rangers. “It’ll be a while before that
lot gets up here.”

It took far less time than
Cary expected. “Who are you, and what is your business?” a soldier
with the uniform of the Royal Guard and stripes of a captain asked
as he pulled up. A dozen knights in mail and helms flanked him.
Over their armor were blue tunics with the golden eagle soaring
down, talons extended, beaks snapping. Those tunics were clean and
smooth. The men beneath likewise showed no signs of the wilderness
around them or the journey they had taken through it. These were
all the sons of noble families. Typically outside the line for
significant inheritance, they, nonetheless, had the resources to
maintain a comfortable life even on a journey to the Fells. The
great chargers they rode towered over the stocky mountain ponies,
making Cary feel even smaller than he already was. He knew that any
of these men could be his commander in a few years, could be the
man who summoned him to carry a message or dismissed him when it
was delivered. Even the lowest of their number would outrank him,
no matter how long he served or how high he rose.

At the same time, being a
courier did have its privileges. “Corporeal Lanark of the Liandrin
Royal Couriers,” Cary introduced himself and saluted. “I have an
urgent message for his majesty from Ambassador Chulters in
Torswauk. Please let me pass so that I may complete my mission.”
Cary bowed his head slightly to the officer but did not moderate
his tone – though he would never outrank this man, his pouch
outranked everyone.

“
I see,” the captain
responded, eyeing the interlopers’ sweat-stained, crumpled uniforms
with distaste. “What news brings you to us in such a
state?”

“
I will deliver my message
only to its designated recipient,” Cary snapped. “Please let me
pass, or I shall have to tell his majesty why I was delayed.” He
showed the captain his satchel, wishing it were red. It wasn’t even
a proper courier’s satchel, but it did the job.

“
I will escort you
personally,” the captain answered. “Can that pony keep
up?”

“
Try us.” Cary spurred the
pony to a run. He did not stop until he reached the line of
soldiers who had closed ranks with spears lowered to defend the
camp. As it was, he reigned in just before them and leapt from the
saddle. “I am a Liandrin royal courier with a message for the
prince,” he declared. “Let me pass.”

“
Allow him through,” the
captain ordered breathlessly from behind as his horse finally
caught up.

“
Sir,” the nearest soldier
said in way of acknowledgement and lowered his spear.

Cary ran through the gap,
between the waiting wagons that were just now being hitched to the
great oxen that would pull them, and on to what had to be the
prince sitting at a small table eating his breakfast as his tent
was lowered behind him. Unaccustomed to a life on the march, the
prince looked haggard though he had certainly not suffered over
much on the trip – he remained as soft and doughy as Cary
remembered from their last meeting. He wore the rich suit of a
banker rather than the uniform of a soldier, was not armed that
Cary could see, and seemed to have no regard for the bustle of
activity around him as he spoke pointedly between mouthfuls to a
sextet of nobles seated with him. Like their lord, they wore fine
suits, conical hats, and vibrant silk scarves. These were the
ambassadors, negotiators, and bankers that had come along to secure
the deal in the Fells. Not a one of them seemed to feel the
slightest urgency for what must be accomplished.

Slowing to a fast walk,
Cary approached the table with his head bowed and fell to a knee
well out of range of the prince. A half-dozen knights had
intercepted him and kept him from getting any closer.

“
What is this?” the prince
asked between bites.

“
Your Royal Highness,”
Cary said to the ground, “I come from Torswauk Lodge with a message
from Ambassador Chulters.”

“
Approach,” the prince
ordered. “What is it? We are almost there. Can’t he wait a couple
more days?”

Cary did not answer. He
rose, reached into his satchel, and retrieved a single piece of
heavy paper that had been rolled into a tube and sealed. He
presented it with outstretched hands, eyes never leaving the
ground, then took a step back and returned to a knee. A furtive
glance showed the prince reading the short note.

“
Seems we are needed in
Tourswak,” the prince told the men at his table. “Our ambassador
says that we are on the verge of securing the aid of the Morgs but
our presence is the final piece. He urges us to make haste lest the
negotiations falter.” He sounded satisfied and pounded his fist on
the table. “Excellent news!” he told Cary. “I must finish my
discussion with these men. The sergeant will get you some food.
When I am done, we will discuss what has been happening in
Torswauk. The letter says that I am to receive a full briefing from
you.”

“
As you wish, Your
Highness,” Cary answered. He kept his hand on his chest, body down
over his knee, face to the ground.

“
Very well then. You are
dismissed. Captain Dowsing will let you know when we are
ready.”

Cary rose, keeping his
eyes down, turned, and walked away. A minute later, he was handed a
bowl of tepid mush and a hardtack biscuit. He’d hoped from the meat
and cheese and bread that had been on the prince’s plate, but then
his father had always said,
you can hope
or you can eat.
Cary ate.

Chapter 51

The
43
^nd
Day of Summer

Why in the Order’s holy
name are we doing this?
Jaret wanted to
yell. “For the glory of the Empire!” came out instead.

A hundred legionnaires
sprinted the final steps down the slope of the hill that had
concealed them. They echoed their commander with a roar that would
have shocked the twins themselves. The ill-trained and poorly
equipped boys before them very nearly pissed themselves as the
battle cry pulled their attention from the already terrifying
vision of armored knights charging toward them from the opposite
direction. As Jaret had hoped and expected, they had been so
focused on the knights that not a one of them had noticed the
legionnaires until they were upon them.

Jaret wanted to retch as
he planted his dirk in the chest of a boy. Shorter even than him,
he was a child with fuzz and pimples where there should have been
whiskers and weather. His arms were sticks jutting from a uniform
that fit him like a sack. Without a scrap of armor, he held his
broad-bladed spear like a hoe and wooden shield like a basket.
Jaret was staring at himself forty years ago, all wide eyes and
disbelief. Like Jaret all those years before, this boy had probably
thought himself lucky to be at the back of the line as his first
battle loomed. With the optimism of youth, he had probably even
thought he would survive. And that was where the similarity ended.
Jaret had survived; this boy would be death’s first claim of the
day.

Sword running off a spear,
Jaret retrieved his dirk and slashed it through the arm of another
boy. Blood sprayed. The boy collapsed, clutched his arm, stared at
the blood pumping past his fingers, and screamed. His cries, far
more like the wails of a child than the curse of a man, filled the
morning all the way to the heavens above. He was done, but Jaret
was not. He reversed the course of his knife, slid past, and
slammed the point into the back of the boy’s skull. Jaret did not
see him crumble. He was already slashing his sword across the
stomach of another boy, was already thrusting his dirk into the
throat of yet another.

Those boys joined their
fellows, dying in the hundreds. The legionnaires cut through them
with the ease of threshers. Parry, slash, thrust. Death, death,
death. On every side, the boys died and did it poorly. Fear ruled
them so that they could do nothing more than wail and beg and cry.
It emptied them so that the smell of their defecation rose even
over that of their blood. It paralyzed them, delivering them all
that more willingly to the possibility that had spawned
it.

And just as these children
turned to see the horrors behind, the one at their front landed.
Yatier’s knights hit the regiment like a millstone grinding wheat.
The first lines were buried by the sheer force of the charge,
enveloped, returned to the soil by armored flanks and iron-shod
hooves. The spears that might have saved them a few moments before
when they were set and ready had failed when, at the decisive
moment, their owners had turned to see what demons were swarming up
behind.

It had all been perfectly
timed, the outcome written into the Order weeks, months, years ago.
The strategy was solid – focus your opponent in one direction with
a long charge, then hit them from the back with a different, hidden
force – but it could have gone wrong in any number of ways. The
legionnaires had barely been concealed behind the hill, had made
their way to that hill across two miles of open plain where any
number of patrols might have seen them. And if they had been
discovered, had been delayed, turned back, or killed, Yatier and
his knights would have been charging into a wall of planted spears,
held by a force ten times their size. Even the poor weapons held by
these boys would go through a horse’s barding if squared, and even
boys can pull riders from their saddles when they have them stopped
and surrounded. This could have been every bit the disaster for
Jaret that it now was for these boys -- more so given the limited
forces at Jaret’s command. He had essentially risked everything to
kill a regiment of boys that Emperor Nabim would neither miss nor
mourn, but it had not been his decision. This had been dictated by
the Order, was prescribed by that maniacal, mystical power. It
controlled his mind and mouth as he gave the order just as it
controlled his arms as they stabbed and slashed and killed. And no
matter of begging would change it now or then.

In a matter of minutes,
the regiment had been transformed from a band of frightened boys to
a field of crumpled bodies, crooked limbs, staring eyes, and
gurgled prayers. It was over so fast that the boys did not even
have time to surrender. They’d held their weapons pointlessly
before them as they died, had found the wherewithal to neither use
them nor throw them down. Even so, there would have been no
surrender. There would be no survivors this time to carry the
story. It was the Order’s will that these boys die, that not a
single one live, that their massacre on this road be the
story.

It was a very different
story from the one that the Order had been forcing Jaret to tell
for nearly two weeks. This was a story about the rebels taking the
fight to the army that contained them, about rebels who could
strike outside of their established kingdom, about a war that was
just beginning. The story was changing just as Emperor Nabim’s
tactics were changing. Ten days ago, the Emperor had sent an entire
division into the Great Northern Forest. They had emerged a week
later in disarray, broken, on the verge of desertion, and missing a
thousand of their number. The story then had been of arrows flying
out of nowhere, of magical mists, sudden traps, night raids, and
repeated ambushes, of units seemingly lost to the very trees and
rocks, of constant fear that no superiority of numbers could
possibly assuage.

The Emperor’s generals had
taken that story’s moral to heart, had learned that this badger
would not be rooted from its home, that to try was to be
brutalized. So now they waited. By some estimates, nearly ten
thousand men were now positioned around the Great Northern Forest.
And these boys were the only ones to have come within five miles of
the trees. Jaret could only imagine that they were hoping to draw
the rebels out, that they planned to wait, to isolate them, contain
them, and make them desperate. As Jaret slashed through the last of
the boys, he wondered if they had succeeded.

“
That was a bloody mess,”
Yatier called above the final stuttering cries of the dying boys.
His horse reared slightly as it came face to face with Jaret. He
could not blame the creature in the slightest. He had both blades
bared, was covered in blood, teeth clenched, face a mask. The fact
that the creatures did not panic in the presence of all this death
was still a miracle that Jaret would never understand. Yatier
quickly brought his mount under control and looked out over the
carnage as he dropped his bloody mace into a strap on his saddle.
“Obviously it worked, but this was a foul business. These were
practically children.” He pulled up the guard of his helm to reveal
a face marred by disgust.