by Scott McKay
On Aros, some eight hundred men, women and children were dead in twenty days from one infected carrier.
It was then that the Ardenians knew the Blue Pox could be used to blunt any enemy advance the Udar might attempt. Their promiscuous and indiscriminate sexual practices, and generally substandard hygiene, meant anyone infected with the virus would spread it far more quickly than any attempt could be made to curtail that spread. Particularly, if an Udar Anur was on the move and in contact with other mobile war-camps, exponential infection could tear apart an invasion.
Reese knew that if a war began between the Udar and Ardenia, a fresh outbreak of the Blue Pox among the enemy was a matter of time. Dees had all but confirmed it was the case.
But he did more than that.
“We’re not supposed to discuss the Blue Pox,” he said, “but if you must know, it is with us in Dunnansport. In fact, a certain Udar headman is on his way to the garrison at Strongstead to communicate with his colleagues along those lines.”
Reese knew that the Udar military general Ago’an had been sent by ship to Strongstead to be exchanged for seven minor officers at the captured garrison there. He now realized that Ago’an had been infected with Blue Pox in advance of that exchange.
“I suppose you’ll want my team’s help in moving it about to our incoming guests,” Reese said. “How do you want us to do that?”
“I have eight more Udar to send back,” Dees said. “I need you to help with getting them to their destinations.”
Dees scribbled out an address on a piece of paper, and then handed it, along with a large envelope, to Reese. “In there are orders, carrying my signature, giving you control of the prisoners, and a requisition for lorries carrying your men and your captives to Barley Point. You’ll also find a map there which marks the locations where we’ll want Cross’ airships to drop these savages off.”
“Aye, sir,” said Reese. “Let me get moving, as it would appear time is of the essence.”
…
SEVEN
Trenory, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
If there was a single word which had informed the whole of Piety Waldiver’s thirty-two years of life, that word would, sadly, be disappointment.
Piety’s failure to live up to others’ expectations, and the failure of the world to live up to hers, had begun long before she’d had much to do with her performance. Her mother Ann, the proprietor of Trenory’s illustrious Waldiver Finishing Academy, had conjured up a notion to name her daughters after the three Primary Virtues of the Female as expressed in the scripture of the Faith Supernal: those being Piety, Chastity, and Fidelity. And her parents had managed to conceive three daughters and bring them into the world with just those very names, an accomplishment Ann had been briefly proud of.But not without disappointment.
The Waldivers’ third daughter passed away in childbirth when Piety was eight, which resulted in snickers among the neighborhood children that “the Waldivers’ Fidelity died in the crib,” a terrible insult she’d never quite gotten over. Then Piety struggled to live up to her name, scandalously failing to achieve her mark of maturity in the Faith Supernal at fourteen because the sisters of the Temple of St. Margaret had been unimpressed with her rebelliousness and quick tongue. She managed the mark the following year, but not before enduring twelve months of her mother’s sheer mortification.
Her sister Chastity wasn’t immune from Ann’s disappointment, either, having been a bit more than slightly pregnant at her wedding to Stephen Aulds, the unimpressive son of a slightly successful blacksmith in Trenory’s working-class Storehouse District.
Along the way there was much cause for Piety’s own disappointment as well. When she was twelve her father Daniel died in a boating accident on the Tweade, and that had been devastating for the family. Daniel, the only surviving son of the prominent family (both his brothers had fallen at the Battle of Bak Jayen during Dunnan’s War), had parlayed a talent for numbers and a rich list of family contacts into a partnership at the accountancy firm of Lucas, Hanlon and Waldiver, serving the burgeoning city’s business community. Upon his death Ann, whose maiden name was Revall, had become the breadwinner and taken on herself the responsibility to rule her daughters with an iron fist, not just for their own benefit, but also for that of the academy.
As it was the only family business, its reputation couldn’t be sullied by the mistakes of Waldiver children.
Which meant that Piety’s dreams of moving to Valledge to pursue a career as a theatre actress and socialite in that lakeside resort city south of the capital had been squashed. Ann informed Piety that her new future would involve a vocation as an educator at the finishing school and a marriage to a suitable husband. Ann supplied that as well, providing for Piety one Michael Benedict toward that purpose. Michael was the son of a physician in Trenory and was apprenticed to take up his father’s vocation.
Piety had known Michael since childhood and had never been impressed with him. More to the point, she loathed him. She begged her mother for relief, to no avail, so on her seventeenth birthday she kept a stiff upper lip as vows were exchanged and a quiet wedding was executed at the Temple in front of a fashionable assemblage of guests.
She’d learned to deal with disappointment. Piety graduated from the finishing academy bearing her name at nineteen and immediately joined the faculty, giving several years of good service and rising to the title of Vice Chancellor and Head of Deportment. She even learned to manage as the wife of a physician, though in what could only be considered a loveless, and childless, marriage. That last condition was a disappointment Piety had been blamed for, unfairly, she thought as she’d agreed to be subjected to countless crank ointments, potions and other remedies intended to resolve her supposedly barren condition.
She strongly suspected that it was Michael whose fertility was questionable, but she never voiced that opinion amid remonstrations by her mother and husband about how unseemly it was for the union to have produced no issue.
Nevertheless, Piety endured and played the dutiful wife and daughter. But that ended on the day three years ago when Piety was faced with a disappointment she decided she simply could not accept.
That was when she caught Michael in flagrante delicto with the couple’s live-in maid.
Nancy, a nubile young waif with a pleasing and eager demeanor greatly outstripping her attention to detail and intellectual talents, had been a luxury Michael insisted upon that Piety found suspiciously unnecessary. When she encountered the two in the family study engaged in a strenuous coital session on her reading couch, everything changed.
Piety would later admit that was the best moment of her life, not so much for the quality of the experience but for what it set her loose to do. In a flurry of sudden personal agency, she delightfully threw the doctor and his half-naked au pair out of the house, which she put on the market the very next day and had it sold for quite a good price by the weekend.
That wasn’t well received by Ann, who found Piety’s decision to be more than a bit rash. “Husbands often stray, dear,” she remonstrated, “for there is biology to be considered. The male urge must be harnessed loosely or else unharnessed in total. Take Michael back when your storm has passed.”
“Stuff it, Mother,” was Piety’s reply. And she then committed the most unpardonable sin.
Which was to file for divorce at the Trenory Chancery and complete the scandal of Michael’s indiscretion. Two weeks later Michael left Trenory altogether, setting up a new medical practice in Stannifer and, Piety heard, hiring Nancy as his nurse.
Ann’s reaction was no less indiscreet, in Piety’s opinion. She fired her oldest daughter from her position at the Waldiver Academy and cut her off from any contact, even with her sister and nephew.
But while the separation had been unquestionably painful, Piety found a great deal of freedom in being removed from her mother’s watchful eye. With her half of the proceeds from the sale of the house, Piety purchased what she
thought was a splendidly spacious two bedroom apartment on the top floor of the five-story Falyard House, a trendy building in the Ryland section on the city’s smart southeast side.
She also changed back to her maiden name and embarked on a business venture that was as shrewd as it was objectionable to her mother--namely, private tutoring.
Trenory was, after all, a rapidly growing city. It was a commercial hub between the rich mines of the West Peaks to the west, the lush farms to the south and east and the industrial centers of Stannifer, Oakham, Alvedorne and beyond to the north. Trenory was a center of transportation by both river and rail and was even developing a manufacturing base of its own. In a generation it had doubled in size to just over two hundred thousand people.
What that meant was lots and lots of new money in town, and, as Piety knew, one of the hallmarks of new money was its desire to emulate old money in manner and taste as thoroughly as possible. What better way to do so than to associate one’s children with the name-brand and training a Waldiver could provide? The family’s finishing academy had turned its alumni into wives of most of southwestern Ardenia’s prominent families, from Azuria to Sapphire Bay, and was known for three generations, not undeservedly, as the Pride of the Southwest.
Piety was thus offering Waldiver tutoring to the children of the wealthy but not-well-connected, and they were willing to pay through the nose to get it.
In short order she was making considerably more than she’d made working in the family business and building herself a sizable little nest egg. Piety had taken on an assistant named Melissa whose aptitude was beginning to outstrip her own, and she was beginning to entertain a brilliant secondary plan. That was to sell the tutoring business to her assistant and package the proceeds from that sale with what she could get for the apartment, plus the contents of her small-but-growing banking accounts, into a small fortune she’d take with her to Valledge to begin the acting career she’d had her heart set on since childhood.
Why not? she figured. At thirty-two, she wasn’t too old to try her hand at the stage. She still had the looks for a career in the theatre. She was pretty, she’d been told, she was well-endowed, if a bit plump, and she certainly had the elegance and charm expected of a stage actress after having taught and lived finishing school for her entire life. It seemed to her she couldn’t miss.
Her plan was to give the status quo another year, maybe two, and then she was gone. She’d even begun preparing for the jump by joining Trenory’s community theatre troupe, beginning with minor parts in some of its productions and just recently playing the female lead of Katherine in Chandler Stone’s Laudon. The local broadsheet, the Trenory Expositioner, provided her with a mostly enthusiastic review.
But recent events were threatening to accelerate Piety’s plans, if not ruin them altogether. News of the Udar raids in Dunnan’s Claim to the southeast had broken eighteen days before, accompanied by bulletins advising Trenory residents to prepare for an impending Udar incursion as far as the south bank of the Tweade if not further. Talk of evacuation ran rampant in town and hit home ten days earlier when Piety’s neighbors the Glaines packed up their belongings and departed.
“You should do the same,” Sissy Glaine had admonished Piety as they carted the last of their gear down the stairs. “The enemy is reported to be coming here in overwhelming numbers. We’re off to the train for Stannifer, and possibly to parts north.”
“I’m going to ride it out for now,” Piety said, “because evacuating today would ruin my career plan. We might just win, you know.”
“By the Saints, I hope that’s true,” Sissy said. “You’re young, perhaps you can chance it. But if it starts to look bleak don’t be stupid. Get out with whatever you can, when you can.”
Piety had been overcome with disappointment at the sight of so many of her neighbors loading wagons and lorries with their belongings and departing to the north and east.
Without a future for Trenory, Piety realized, she would be unable to liquidate the tutoring business or the apartment, and what of her property was movable was nowhere near enough for the Valledge dream. Disappointment, that word again, this time gripped her like a vise. And as though she’d been trapped in that vise, the frustration led to paralysis. Piety somehow found herself unable to pull the trigger on evacuating Trenory.
She was getting to the point where that evacuation needed to happen soon. Her sister Chastity had dropped her a note, defying her mother’s edict that Piety was to be cut off from the family. Chastity said her son Frederick had been packed off to the care of a Great Aunt in Stannifer, while Ann had emptied the house and departed to that sizable city by train. But Chastity and Stephen were leaving by carriage for Aldingham, where he had a potentially lucrative business opportunity. Chastity’s note confirmed, from her point of view, that unless Trenory held, the Waldiver family fortune was lost and they’d all be starting over from scratch.
Which filled Piety’s mind with conflict. She was planning to leave Trenory anyway, and yet when it was clearly time to go, she was concocting reasons to stay.
In fact, as the news of the Udar advance began to percolate on the streets and ordinary Trenory life began to shut down, an idea entered Piety’s head, one she never thought she’d entertain.
What she wanted to do was to stay and fight.
Piety had no skill in the military arts. She could ride a horse somewhat passably, but she’d never shot a gun in her life. She didn’t know anything about cannons, she wasn’t a nurse and didn’t have even the rudiments of first aid training. But what she did have was a suddenly present passion to save the city, and a willingness to do whatever she could to help the Army hang on.
Toward that end, she made her way down to the north bank of the Aileen River, where the Nineteenth Infantry was deploying its troops onto every boat they could commandeer to ferry across to the wooded south side. She found one of the division’s public affairs officers and asked him what a volunteer could do to help.
“I’m not sure, ma’am,” the young man said, “but if that changes, we’ll let you know.”
What he didn’t tell her, though she got a strong signal it was the case, was that what the Nineteenth Infantry really wanted her to do was get out.
She caught the trolley to the far west side of town where the Eighth Cavalry was staging for its defense of the city and asked what she could do. A captain she’d pigeon-holed told her “I appreciate the spirit, ma’am, really I do, but if you can’t shoot a gun and you can’t stitch a wound, you’re really just going to be in the way. When the fight starts, we might have a plan for how civilian volunteers can help, but my advice to you is to gather up anything you can carry and find a place to ride this thing out behind friendly lines.”
That wasn’t really what she was hoping for, so she tried one last thing. Closer to the Ryland district where she lived was the west bank of the Tweade, and all along the west bank the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division was taking up defensive positions.
“What can I help with?” Piety asked a young, strikingly handsome captain she found at Longacre Park in the St. Catherine District a block from the river.
“You won’t want to do it,” he told her, “but we can actually use people willing to fill sandbags.”
Piety therefore rolled up her sleeves and took up a shovel, and spent an afternoon ruining her shirtwaist dress doing backbreaking menial work she considered of almost no strategic value to the defense of the city at all, simply because that’s what the Army asked of her.
She knew this was nothing more than procrastination, when what she needed to be doing was packing her things and getting on the train to Stannifer. But it felt a lot better to be helping the Army, no matter how little she was contributing, than to be loading luggage onto a locomotive and depositing herself somewhere at the mercy of her mother and ex-husband.
She wished Chastity had invited her along for the carriage ride to Aldingham. It would have been at least on the way to Valledge. But
that didn’t happen, so there was no plan available she liked.
And at nightfall, she straggled home to the apartment she loved, and had a glass of wine as she reclined in a warm bath, thinking about what she’d do after the Army held Trenory against the Udar – with the small degree of help she could give them, of course.
EIGHT
Turnerston, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
Mark Bradbury was officially inducted into the Ardenian Special Air Force as a First Lieutenant two days earlier at a small ceremony just south of Turnerston, which until a week ago had been a nondescript agricultural hamlet of fifteen hundred souls about thirty-five miles northeast of Trenory. He was named the commander of the First Airfighter Squadron, and as his team joked, Mark was a “player-coach.”
That was a matter of necessity, because what the First Airfighter Squadron was doing, almost nobody had done before.
Mark had been flying biplanes for just under eleven months, and it had been the most fun he’d ever had. Considering he came to his current vocation from the road rally circuit, that was saying something.
But now that he wasn’t just flying biplanes but piloting airfighters as well, Mark knew the fun part was over. War had come to Ardenia, and Udar warriors were on the way to their doorstep. Less than a week earlier there had been raids all along the Lower Tweade, necessitating the famous rescue mission that freed Ardenian female captives taken in those raids, and a massive military mobilization to meet the threat followed.
That had turned Carmody Farm, an eighty-acre wheat and cotton plantation just south of the little town on a bluff overlooking the Tweade, into the second air base of the Special Air Force. At Carmody Farm Mark and fourteen other pilots, together with eighteen support personnel, had been learning the ins and outs of heavier-than-air travel, and more importantly, how to weaponize it. Mark’s direct superior officer was Sebastian Cross, the famous aviator who’d been put in charge of the Air Force. He hadn’t met Cross yet, as the latter was busy down in Barley Point with his own small squadron of airship crews reconnoitering and doing battle with the enemy from the skies to the south.
