The Fell Sword (89 page)

‘You sound like my father.’ Demetrius spat.

Dariusz flinched – it was such an odd comment and so uncharacteristic.

Demetrius looked at the warlock, Aeskepiles. And the former Grand Chamberlain.

Aeskepiles nodded. Very quietly, he said, ‘As I have said before, we must kill the Emperor. And then we must ensure it appears that the enemy killed him in desperation. I will take care of the latter. But he must be killed, and to achieve that we must attack.’ He shrugged. ‘If the Emperor is spirited away over the mountains—’

Demetrius laughed. ‘Over the Penults? In late winter?’ He shook his head. ‘A bird would die.’

Dariusz, who had hunted the Penults since he was a boy, disagreed. ‘My lord,’ he said.

Demetrius raised a hand. ‘I’m not interested in your carping. I’m not interested in skulking about in the snow waiting for them to starve. Or worse yet, surrender, so that we have a horde of witnesses.’

Aeskepiles smiled. ‘That could be dealt with.’

Demetrius paused. His gaze hardened. ‘Warlock, I realise I need you. But have a care. We need there to be an Empire when this is over. If I massacre the guard, who exactly will protect me when I am Emperor?’

‘Who will guard your father, you mean,’ Dariusz said carefully.

‘My father has – mm – withdrawn from the army,’ Demetrius said. ‘He has no further interest in this contest, and will enter a monastery.’

For some reason, it was Aeskipiles, and not Demetrius, who looked away.

Dariusz pursed his lips and then nodded. ‘I see,’ he said.

Ser Christos led the main cavalry force. Every Thrakian stradiote had two horses, and they made excellent time over the snow now the scouts had cleared the ground. Demetrius came in a second division, with all of his father’s veteran infantry, and Ser Stefanos brought up the rear with a strong force of Thrakian peasants armed with axes, bowmen from the estates around Lonika, and Easterner mercenary cavalry.

They took just four hours to traverse what the scouts had taken all day to cover. They pitched a hasty camp at the base of the great ridge and made contact with Verki’s piquet at the top of the ridge. They stripped the forest for wood and built big fires, protected from view as they were by a horde of frozen sentries and the bulk of the snow-covered mountain between them.

Before first light Verki led the army up the snowy ridge. The moonlight on the snow made the road – if it could be called that – like a black slit of frozen mud in a white wilderness, but they moved fast enough. By the last grey light before dawn, they could just see a line of motionless sentries in red tabards, the bright wink of forty fires, and the smoke rising to the heavens. They could smell the smoke. And they could see the magnificent red pavilion in the middle of camp and the forty heavy wagons of the enemy baggage parked in a wagon fort.

Dariusz had thought the plan rash, and had said so, and now he watched in amazement as Demetrius carefully marshalled his men.

Aeskepiles, at the young commander’s request, sent a small fireball whizzing into the heavens.

The Thrakians screamed like monsters out of the Wild. The veterans of Duke Andronicus went forward fast, singing a hymn. The cavalry closed from the flanks.

Off to the east, over the sea, the sun crested the horizon, but here in the mountains behind the coast, it was just an orange and pink outline on the mountains behind them. They crossed the ground, lumbering heavily in deep snow.

Someone screamed – the sound of a man in soul-wrenching pain.

A horse went down.

The enemy sentries weren’t moving and weren’t calling the alarm.

Another man went down. It happened close enough to Dariusz that he saw the pit open under the man’s feet, saw him fall and impale himself on the stakes at the base of the pit. A snow trap.

Dariusz stopped running.

It was a beautiful camp and they took it intact. They took the store of firewood and the fires, which must have been huge, because they had burned down to coals and were still big and warm. They took the wagons – forty beautiful wagons, some full of stores, some full of useful things, including a portable forge for an armourer.

There were a dozen hogsheads of wine, and that wine was open before the officers could get involved.

There was a flash, and a noise like a bolt of lightning in the centre of the camp.

Aeskepiles was seen to hurry there.

Dariusz found Verki watching one of his scouts die. The man had drunk the wine and it was suddenly pretty obvious it was poisoned. His heels drummed on the packed snow, and he retched blood while more leached out of various other parts.

‘Fuck their mothers,’ Verki swore.

‘How long have they been gone?’ Dariusz asked.

Verki looked miserable. ‘At least two days,’ he said. ‘The patrol we fought must have been the fire-tenders.’

They were negotiating a particularly brutal double switchback, where the Nordikans had to clear the snow with shovels so that anyone could pass, when the Red Knight stiffened in his saddle.

Heh.
Harmodius was gloating.

Your little gift?

He’ll know it’s the same working he used on the amulets.

So now he knows we have Kronmir?

And that he’s been had. He’ll be mad as hell.

What happens if he turns around? He can still march back to Lonika the long way around as fast as we can go through the hills – probably faster.

In the comfortable room of the Red Knight’s memory palace, it was warm. Harmodius sat with his legs over the armrest of a huge chair. He raised a cup of steaming hippocras. He won’t. He’ll be stung, and his ego will be pricked. And he’ll follow you.

Do I sound that cocky to other people?

Harmodius shrugged
.

I should stop. You sound so smug I don’t care if we win – I just want you to be wrong.

Harmodius nodded. May I show you my finest work? he asked.

The image of the young Captain nodded agreeably. They found themselves in a workshop
–
an
aethereal
setting that reflected several workshops that Gabriel Muriens had known. Against the near wall was a bench
–
a very plain wooden bench lined with tools, each of which had a sigil burning on it.

On the bench lay a sword.

What is it? asked the Captain, through a burgeoning headache.

A Fell Sword, said Harmodius.

For me? asked the Captain. He was suddenly afraid.

Harmodius laughed. It was a dreadful, terrifying laugh.

Oh, no, my boy. I am not that much of an ingrate. He picked it up and flourished it, like a boy with a new sword. It’s for me.

Mag missed her wagons. She missed the comfort and solidity of the brutes, but most of all, she missed having dry, warm feet. Sitting on a wagon – even in driving snow or freezing rain – kept your feet out of the wet.

Climbing a mountain pass leading a recalcitrant donkey had a different feel entirely.

John le Bailli was somewhere well ahead of her. The whole army was now a single animal wide, strung out over six miles of high ridges and steep-shouldered mountains. They were above the current snow line, which, in a way, made her life easier, as the ground was frozen. But her toes lost feeling every time she stopped, and she was fifty-one years old, and the great adventure now seemed like a horrible exercise in endurance.

At noon, they came to a stream – or what might, at other times of year, be a dry watercourse or a small trickle of water.

On the first of March, it was a stream twenty feet wide that flowed so fast that small rocks were constantly being rolled along the bottom. While Mag watched, a whole tree from somewhere upstream came by, bobbed, struck a boulder with a resounding crash and continued on its way.

The column was bunching up on the flat by the stream, and increasingly desperate men and women were trying to warm their feet by any expedient they could. It wasn’t even a cold day.

The Red Knight had taken most of the mounted across the traditional way – with ropes and horses. Two men had fallen in, and on the other side there were two great fires burning and parties of men trying to save the wet, cold victims.

Mag didn’t even pause to argue. She flung three bridges of ice across – one mostly acting as a dam, and the other two with high arches and redundant supports.

Corporals and veterans began to bellow orders. They’d all seen the tree in the current.

‘I can get you a horse,’ the Red Knight said. He’d ridden up to her where she watched the women crossing.

‘Can you get a horse for every woman?’ she asked.

He pursed his lips. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The ice bridge is a nice trick. I need to learn that better. Mine wastes too much
ops
.’

She met his eye. ‘Is this really your plan?’

He shrugged. In full plate, with two great circle cloaks as a sheath of wool, he looked like a giant. The shrug barely raised the magnificent gold brooch on his right shoulder an inch. ‘My plan perished when Andronicus fielded five thousand men in the dead of winter. I didn’t expect that. This is my – hmmm – my third alternate plan.’ Just for a moment, the look of bland indifference he wore all the time cracked. ‘I was probably a fool to try this in winter. But – Master Smythe said we had to hurry. And Kronmir said they would kill the Emperor.’

Mag shook her head. People were watching them. ‘Another day and we might start losing people. Some of the Scholae aren’t used to this kind of life and there’s no forage for the horses. We have another day of food and fodder on the mules—’

‘—and then we eat the mules,’ he said. ‘I know.’

But he was as good as his word, and by the next halt, every woman was mounted on a spare horse. Including Kaitlin de Towbray, who had womanfully walked with her pregnant belly all the way up the east side of the mountains.

They didn’t stop at dark.

The Red Knight was seen to have a hurried conference with Ser Gelfred; fires were lit, and food cooked – or rather, cold food was eaten and hot tea, or just hot water, drunk in enormous quantities. And then they marched again.

Immediately after leaving their fires, the army started going
down.
They had been up and down the ridges for three days, but now they descended steadily, and the icy track, cleared by the exhausted Nordikans, became a two-rut track with less snow, and then a snow-covered stone roadbed.

An hour before dawn, when Mag was a jumble of old joints, nerves, lack of food and lack of sleep, they turned a long curve on a spur that stuck out from a mountainside – and every man and woman who came to the edge gave a gasp.

On their right side, a cliff fell away. The road continued, with enormous stone arches, buttresses in still more stone, cascading down the hillside like a waterfall frozen in rock, but the cliff was half a thousand feet high and the stream at the bottom was so far down in the darkness as to be lost except for the echoing thunder of its icy passage.

The cliff was imposing, but it was the sight of twinkling lights like distant faery folk that raised the shouts. Somewhere – somewhere within reach, at last – there was light, and warmth.

Aeskepiles looked at the stumps of the ice bridge abutments and cursed.

‘How strong is he?’ he asked aloud. And after a small ritual of gathering, he built a single bridge.

Demetrius pointed his sword. ‘He made three,’ he said.

‘I must conserve my power,’ Aeskepiles said. ‘If he squanders his, all the better.’

Amphipolis was the name of the town, and her gates were stormed. The veterans of the company offered no warning and no formal summons to surrender – and the town had no idea that an enemy army was above them in the mountains. The veterans put ladders against the low curtain walls before sunrise, just as if they’d been in Arles. Fifty Thrakian soldiers died very quickly on the wrong side of the main gate, tricked, trapped, and annihilated. Ser Jehan didn’t bother taking prisoners.

Father Arnaud and Gelfred sat on their horses in the central square and shouted at the Red Knight until they were joined by the Emperor, and together with a hundred men-at-arms he led them to clear the archers – the victorious archers – out of the streets.

‘If you let this town be destroyed, you are no knight,’ Father Arnaud said.

The Red Knight leaned over and vomited in the snow.

‘Is he drunk?’ Arnaud cried.

Toby shook his head.

Ser Michael grabbed the priest’s bridle. ‘He’s tired. And this, pardon me, padre, is war.’

‘We don’t make war like this on the Wild!’ Father Arnaud said.

‘The Wild doesn’t have silver candelabra or handsome girls,’ the Red Knight muttered. ‘Damn you and your moral certainty. We are not fucking paladins. We are soldiers, and this town is an enemy town taken by storm. These men are cold, and exhausted, and an hour ago they had almost no hope of warmth.’ He pointed as John le Bailli kicked in a door and led three armoured men in emptying the cowering family and their servants out into the snow. Then a dozen of the company’s women took the house.

While they watched that drama, Ser Bescanon dragged Wilful Murder out of a building while a dozen other men with leather buckets tried to put out the fire he’d started.

‘This is senseless. If I cannot appeal to God, I’ll appeal to your basic humanity,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘Who says I have any humanity at all?’ the Red Knight shouted in the priest’s face. ‘You want me to save the world, and you don’t want any innocents killed? It doesn’t work like that. War kills. Now get out of my way, because I have tomorrow’s atrocities to plan!’

Toby waited until his lord was gone into what had been the mayor’s house.

‘He’s not doing all that well,’ he said. ‘He’s sick, and he’s worried. In case you gentleman can’t tell. You’re all very helpful, I’m sure.’ He shrugged, seized an apple from a basket that a looter ran past carrying, and took a bite. Then he followed his lord inside.