A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  Gabriel felt like a fool.

  Tell the wyverns to back off! he shouted.

  Ariosto let loose a trumpet blast, and Beltan understood immediately and her dive became a stoop, her wings filled, and she rose. The heavy arrow completed its climb and seemed to hang in the air under Ariosto’s talons and then fell away.

  “Damn,” Gabriel said aloud.

  And then something happened. And he had already summoned power...

  * * *

  Sauce cursed God and Satan equally as she dismounted. It was their second day of retreat, the plague was taking its toll, Mortirmir was running low on ops, and now...

  They had chosen to move along the ridgetops because the ground was clearer. It had been a good decision, and they were within a day, perhaps two days’ march of the new road. It hadn’t occurred to any of them that their adversaries had wyverns left, and now they were exhausted, at the edge of starvation, and totally exposed to aerial foes on the high ridge, and the soldiers who did not have the cough didn’t want to stand in formation with those who did.

  Cully, a few horses from her, launched a ranging arrow. Sauce knew he’d loosed it short. He was capable of more and wanted to lure the beasts lower. The archers were leaping from their equally tired mounts, and searching quivers for the right arrows while eyeing their mates for signs of disease.

  Something caught her eye. One of the wyverns seemed to breathe fire...or the light caught it oddly. It was...

  It had a wing that seemed to burn.

  She got her leg over her mount. “Save the horses,” she said. The last attacks they had experienced from the air had been from wyverns and barghasts delivering the horse plague. But even as she watched, the lead wyvern rose suddenly, and the rest of the formation rose away with the leader, leaving one monster, almost twice the size of the others, glowing red and green and gold in the midday sun, to roll away in a showy display of wingspan.

  “Wait for it,” roared Wilful Murder. But then he began to cough.

  “What the hell?” Gavin said.

  The Faery Knight began to chuckle.

  In letters twenty paces high appeared the word Friends. It seemed to be written in red smoke.

  “I’ll be damned,” Sauce said.

  Tom Lachlan’s roar sounded through the woods as the griffon turned and began to dive.

  * * *

  The wyverns chose to land on a bare outcropping at the east end of the ridge. It was early afternoon, and the exhausted army tottered to a stop and the people not yet afflicted with the plague began to set up tents in the stony soil. The flying creatures left five hundredweight of flour and turned for Albinkirk, where, after a meal of their own, they took up a second load, and then, passing low over the dwindling herds that Gabriel had purchased for supply and that were already being driven back toward Dorling by Donald Dhu and his clansmen, each great creature snapped up a protesting animal and, with mighty wingbeats, carried it up the ridges and deposited it gently by the sacks of flour.

  Gabriel dismounted and saw that Ariosto was unsaddled and his back feathers carefully cleared of sweat. The saddle hurt him, that much was obvious, and he seemed to expand with joy when it was removed. But the moment he’d been lightly curried and scratched, he grunted and leapt from the cliff to find his own supper with the wyverns.

  Gabriel found himself surrounded by his army. They had not seen him since the formation the day after the battle.

  He walked through camp and had to fight to avoid despair.

  They had been used too hard, and they were in terrible shape. Much was purely superficial, although still bad enough. Their shoes were ruined by just two weeks in the deep woods, and many men were barefoot or wore scraps of hide bound to their feet with rags. Hose were ragged or worse, and the smart doublets with puffed sleeves so beloved by his archers were fit only for polishing armour. And the armour was brown and scrofulous with rust. This was as true of his brother’s magnificent harness as of Cully’s breast-and-back.

  That was the superficial, but under it was tension, fatigue, and the makings of despair and panic. The wagons were full of men and women with plague, and the rest of the army knew that their turn must be close. Morgon Mortirmir was fed like a child, the trance of utter exhaustion on him, and he had black thumbprints under his eyes and his skin looked transparent. The Brogat levies were dead on their feet, and the Albinkirk-area lords looked like a pack of mongrel brigands.

  Gabriel felt fat and overrested and pampered. But he walked up and down as people were fed, doing his best to shore up Mortirmir’s workings against the plague, to see that everyone was fed, to compliment the officers on making it this far.

  And food was like a tonic. They had gone too long without a full meal, and without good sleep, and the results had taken them very close to the edge. But they were on a high ridge, out of the midges and the heat of the marshes and deep valleys, and they had food.

  In late afternoon, as the army collapsed into a desperate sleep that could not be put off, Gabriel put the saddle back on Ariosto’s back with a long apology and set off, alone, for Lissen Carak.

  * * *

  Ariosto created the same consternation among the nuns and novices as the wyverns had created for the army. They arrived at the very edge of darkness, and the layered workings of the ancient fortress closed against them like a great shield of fire.

  This time, against the edge of darkness, Gabriel wrote on the sky in white lightning, and Miriam came to the walls and ordered the workings lowered.

  There was a huge crane of heavy wood against the stub of the north tower, and the griffon settled at its base. The courtyard of the fortress abbey was filled with new-cut stone.

  Miriam hurried along the wall, with Amicia at her back.

  “Stop!” called Gabriel.

  Both women, and the novices behind them, froze.

  “Pardon me, ladies. It is Gabriel Muriens, and I have need of instant succour. But...I would not come any closer to you. I almost certainly bear the plague.” He tried to bow, but his head hurt and the twilight seemed to undermine his balance.

  Miriam nodded. “We are preparing a great working. And I have teams already in the countryside...”

  “I’m sorry, Lady Abbess, but it is the army. It is running unchecked...Mortirmir has done his best to contain it, but they...they are carrying their sick in the wagons.”

  Amicia nodded. Even in his fevered state, even at twilight, fifty feet away, the merest shake of her head made his throat tight. “I had a message from the queen,” Amicia said. “I’m to go to Dorling.”

  “If you can be spared,” Gabriel managed.

  Amicia nodded. “I can come now,” she said.

  Gabriel nodded, and began to cough.

  * * *

  The first day was hard, but then, the woods were never easy. All of Aneas’s party were loaded with food, and Tall Pine’s warriors had both food and loot from two great battles, although they carried their loads without complaint.

  Aneas felt the weight of responsibility constantly, and wondered how his brothers carried it so well. Practice, he thought.

  He wanted to show them all how skilled he was at the Wild magik and the woods, but he guessed that they were watching to see if he would fail. All of them seemed so experienced.

  As he crouched over a muddy hole with tracks all around it on the main trail going north from Forked Lake, he debated asking for advice, or letting the decision rest on his own skills. He cast his working twice, his slim ivory wand moving over the tracks, and received two very different answers; the first time, tracks glittered off to the west, the second, to the east.

  Behind him, two of Tall Pine’s warriors used flint and steel to light their pipes as most of the party shed their heavy loads. Fitzalan smiled at him and slipped past without a word to go on watch while others rested, and Krek, the old bogglin, made a sign with one of his legs that he would watch the rear. Tall Pine and Janos Turkos watched the old bogglin, but more with inter
est than suspicion.

  Turkos turned his head, as if the Morean warrior felt his regard. The older man winked.

  The wink settled it. Aneas waved to him, and the Morean officer came over after begging a pull on a young warrior’s pipe. He crouched by the mud and swatted a mosquito.

  Aneas motioned east and west. “My workings are...” He paused. “Inconclusive,” he said, using a word his mother had used often. Usually with contempt.

  Turkos walked cautiously along the edges of the mud hole. In the strange way of the Adnacrags, the mud hole went uphill for some distance, and stopped abruptly downhill, which seemed contrary to nature.

  Tall Pine came over, picking his teeth with a piece of liquorice root he’d bought from a trader.

  Turkos pointed at the tracks. “Captain here says he’s baffled.”

  Tall Pine nodded. His face was impassive. He looked at the tracks and walked around just as Turkos had, and then cast farther west, off the trail, and farther east.

  “Their party split, I think,” Aneas said. He spoke in Archaic, in hope that the tall Outwaller understood it.

  Tall Pine nodded.

  “Something here I don’t like,” Tall Pine said.

  Aneas thought it remarkable that, through the haze of green workings and the scent of hastenoch and behemoth and bogglin, Tall Pine could find something not to like.

  The tall Outwaller muttered to himself as he cast a little more west, and then started north, right on the edge of sight.

  Aneas went to follow him.

  Turkos smiled. “Stand here and be the captain,” he said. “He’s very good at this.”

  Aneas took this as criticism. “I am too,” he said.

  Turkos nodded. “But you asked advice,” he said.

  Aneas caught himself when he was about to deny having asked advice. “I—” he began, and looked away.

  Turkos nodded. “When an Outwaller offers help, it is a free gift,” he said. “Accept with grace.”

  Aneas took a deep, steadying breath. “Thanks,” he managed.

  Turkos laughed. “Not laughing at you,” he said. “No, I am. Hah!”

  Tall Pine came back and beckoned to them, and the two men went forward. Fitzalan was just visible at the next stream, bow strung, leaning against a tree.

  Tall Pine led them unerringly to a clear space with a cut sapling in the center. Feathers had been tied, and blood spilled.

  Aneas looked at Tall Pine and bowed. “I missed it,” he said.

  Tall Pine allowed himself a very thin smile. “You were meant to,” he said. “Can you unmake it?”

  Aneas looked at it with his wand, making a hermetical lens. He was careful and tried to forget twenty people waiting for him in a haze of heat and bugs back on the trail.

  But this was exactly the sort of thing for which his mother had prepared him...a curse and a making and an illusion, all nested, expertly worked. And a trap for the hand that pulled the cut sapling from the ground, an ugly thing. In the aethereal it was black, not green. He was aware, in an academic way, that black existed: the colour associated with death. A particular set of necromantic workings that his mother spurned as amateurish and desperate.

  This didn’t look amateurish.

  Any working could be unmade, with time, and patience. It was like unpicking a garment. Some opened as if unbuttoned. This one looked as if it had been embroidered, the work was so dense.

  He liked the image, and he applied it in the aethereal, seeing the working as a piece of embroidery, knotwork and chain stitch. With his allegorical view in place, he turned the working over and exposed its less-perfect underside, and began to cut threads and pull at bits. He bent his will upon it and worked slowly, aware that the insects were feasting on his exposed face. He found one particularly long thread in the black projection, paused in pure fear, and then, setting his aethereal will, pulled, and the curse unraveled.

  Aneas got to his feet from the crouch he’d had. He had been in the crouch a long time...his young knees were stiff.

  But with a smile and a small flourish and a frisson of terror, he reached down and pulled the sapling from the ground.

  There was a small pop.

  He was not turned to black jelly.

  He turned to smile at Tall Pine, but he was alone.

  Turkos hurried up a few minutes later, crossbow loaded.

  “I disarmed it,” Aneas said with what he hoped was his brother’s cheerful voice.

  Turkos looked around, all but sniffing, and Tall Pine came up behind him.

  “When you started messing with that, we...” Turkos grinned. “We thought we’d let you do it without us. Christos, he got it. He broke the working.”

  Tall Pine nodded courteously. “This is well done,” he said. “Now see.”

  A third set of tracks now went off almost straight north. There were men’s prints, and many other things.

  Aneas was suddenly aware that in breaking the curse and unworking the illusion, he’d told the enemy practitioner who he was and where he was. And they outnumbered his party.

  “I want to follow this group,” he said. “But I want to follow them to the west, well off their line. We’ll have to cross their trail from time to time...” He was thinking aloud.

  Tall Pine raised an eyebrow. “You fear ambush?”

  Aneas sighed. “I have just told them that I found their trap,” he admitted.

  Tall Pine nodded again. “Then we must be cautious, brother,” he said.

  In minutes, they were moving again, this time downhill into the edge of beaver country in the valley. Tall Pine led them, choosing a path between huge trunks blown down in some titanic storm and the dense alder thickets that ran along the valley edge. They caught tantalizing glimpses of open, grassy meadows that every ranger knew were crisscrossed with sharp stakes and deep troughs of muddy water maintained by the beaver.

  Aneas stayed on the enemy trail. He moved as quickly as he dared, but either his adversaries had assumed that the working would cover them, and made no effort to hide, or the whole thing was a trap. Aneas kept his eyes on the ground in front of him, guided by prints and scuff marks. The trail itself was an artifact of Outwaller hunting in the deep woods in autumn; it was the main route that the Huran and Sossag used to hunt the interior of the Adnacrags, but now it was deep in old leaf mold.

  He kept watch in the aethereal too, stopping from time to time to look ahead, to the sides, watching Tall Pine and the rest of the party.

  He was terrified. But exhilarated at the same time, because he was doing it. He was leading a war party.

  Kevin Orley, count your days.

  A little after noon, he cut back over the lip of the ridge and waited by a downed log for the party to reach him, which they did quickly enough. They put out a pair of sentries: Ricard Lantorn from the green banda of the company, and one of the royal foresters, Alan Beresford.

  The Outwallers ate like mad. In Archaic, Tall Pine said, “Easier to carry inside,” and many laughed.

  Turkos squatted by Aneas. “I mislike you out there by yourself,” he said. “I have no skill in the ars magika, but...it seems to me that if you found one trap, there’ll be another.”

  Aneas nodded. “I’m careful,” he said. I’m scared every second, and this lunch with sentries is me at the end of my tether for fear.

  “I’d rather you took a pair of rangers,” Turkos said. “Or...Tall Pine has a young dream walker. The...woman. She’s called Looks-at-Clouds.” The Morean’s brief pause between “the” and “woman” was odd.

  Aneas shrugged. “I’m fine,” he said. Even he could hear the lie in his voice.

  Turkos smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “No, you are not,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t walk that trail alone, and I’ve been a few dark places, eh?”

  Turkos went and sat with Tall Pine. They both laughed a few times, and then one of the Outwallers came to them, sat on his haunches while a story was told, and nodded. The warrior came toward Aneas
and he saw that the man might be a tall woman with small breasts, wearing a red daubed shirt and deerskin leggings. She—or he—had silver ball-and-cone earrings, but then, so did most of the men; the face was painted a flat ochre red, which hid any femininity s/he might possess.

  The Outwaller touched his/her forehead in greeting, face impassive.

  Aneas bent his own. “Are you Looks-at-Clouds?” he asked, in Archaic. He used the feminine form.

  S/he looked at him for a long time, his/her eyes travelling over him slowly, as if he was being reckoned. Finally s/he grunted.

  Only when s/he moved did s/he display any femininity, and under the paint, he could not discern his/her age. S/he might have been fifteen or fifty, except her hands—the only part of her flesh that was visible and unpainted—which were heavily scarred but appeared young and smooth where not scarified or tattooed.

  Had he not been told s/he was a woman, he’d never have assumed it.

  “You work with ops?” he asked.

  The warrior’s eyes narrowed at the word.

  Again, Aneas was answered with a grunt. It seemed affirmative.

  “Looks-at-Clouds is bacsa,” Tall Pine said. He had come up so silently as to be unnoticed. Aneas tried not to leap to his feet.

  “What is bacsa?” Aneas asked.

  Tall Pine shrugged, just like an Etruscan. “Walk a few days,” he said. “You will see.”

  Turkos nodded. “Take Looks-at-Clouds,” the Morean said. “We’ll all be easier in our heads.”

  Aneas, fascinated, agreed with a nod.

  * * *

  The Outwaller moved well in the woods; not as silently as Tall Pine, but no twigs broke. Aneas could walk silently as well, and they moved back to the old trail together, and spoke no word. Aneas struggled not to resent that the older captains felt he needed help. He knew he was being foolish, but there it was, and the strange man-woman creature looked at him as if he were a child, or so he felt.

  Looks-at-Clouds insisted on examining the trail. Aneas watched as the lithe figure crumbled dried leaves, and was fascinated when there was a burst of ops, expertly shielded.

  He smiled without meaning to.