A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  “Stop!” she said. “I’ll go to hell!” But she was laughing.

  “I think you’ll be a splendid saint,” he said.

  She got off the bed in one sudden movement, like the strike of a swordsman, and she shook her head. “I think I remember what you are like, until you are there.” She smiled, but she was wary. “Very unsaintly.”

  He nodded. “Same, here,” he said.

  * * *

  He rose in the morning and left the hospital under his own power. He coughed, and there were tiny black flakes, and that gave him a frisson of fear. So he stood in a corridor and breathed for a little, and he didn’t cough again.

  He went down the familiar main steps to the chapel, and then across the great courtyard. A dozen nuns and novices were already hanging washing. Some watched him as if he were the devil incarnate, but others—a pair of older nuns—called out to him, and he stood in the new sun and helped them hang washing for a few minutes. Sister Anne put a hand in the small of her back.

  “It’s good to have someone tall,” she said.

  “I’ll send you Bad Tom,” he said.

  She laughed. “I liked him,” she said. “How does he?”

  “Hale, when last I saw him.” God send he’s not got the plague, Gabriel thought.

  “Still breaking heads?” she asked. “Tell him I’ll pray for him, just for fun.” She laughed her jolly laugh and picked up an empty basket. “Come on, girls. I can’t find you a handsome knight every day. Don’t be shy.”

  Gabriel went on his way whistling, thinking about very little. He went up the steps to the abbess’s audience chamber. It was empty, although the two hermetical spell books still sat in their niches, and he went and leafed through one and then the other, recalling workings he had not practiced since Pru was alive.

  He looked up, and there was her chair...the old abbess’s chair.

  He thought of meeting Amicia.

  He thought about the plague, and Ash, and Harmodius’s enmity for the dragons; of the Wild, of his alliance with the Wild, of Master Smythe, and by a process of nonlogical connection, he thought about the Odine. And dragons. Rhun. Who is Rhun? One of us studied them...

  “Amicia is almost ready to go,” the abbess said behind him.

  He turned. Just for a moment...but it was not the king’s former mistress, but Miriam, now dressed in a long grey gown with a high collar. He bowed deeply.

  “Looking for something?” the abbess asked.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “May I have a look at the gate?” he asked.

  She met his eyes. “You don’t mean the fortress gate,” she said.

  “No,” he admitted. “The true gate. I’ve been through it,” he said. “I knew something was...different. But I was busy.”

  “I know,” she said. “Come, then.”

  He stopped to check on Ariosto and then followed Miriam into the tunnels below the fortress, where their glistening sides looked as if they’d been polished, and they wound as if they’d been eaten by snakes. But the wardens and their successors, men, had left marks to prevent people from wandering lost.

  “Do you know what’s happening to her?” Gabriel asked at some point, deep in the bowels of the mountain.

  Miriam stopped. “No,” she said. “It is terrifying. We have never needed her more than now.” She frowned. “Spiritually terrifying, too.”

  Gabriel laughed. “I’ve always found her spiritually terrifying.”

  Miriam smiled, but it was an automatic reaction. She had never found Gabriel’s blasphemies funny.

  They followed the winding tunnels along, down man-made stairs built in the wormlike tunnels. Several times, Gabriel stopped and raised his lantern to look at the alien paintings on the walls, but eventually they emerged from the winding way and into a hall. The hall had been carved by the wardens or their slaves, and was built to their titanic scale. Only the center of the great steps had been recarved to human scale. The stairs on either flank of the great doors were almost three feet high each tread.

  Gabriel was surprised to find how little he had remembered. The doors were higher and wider, and the steps more majestic.

  He cast a simple working of mage light and raised it to the ceiling. There were, as he had remembered, constellations painted on the ceiling between supporting flutes that divided the artificial sky into seven panels.

  He spent several minutes looking at them. “Would you do me a favour, Abbess?”

  She shrugged. “It’s just past sunrise and I’m deep in some ancient horror with you. I’m probably good for another favour.”

  “Can you get someone to copy this? In detail?” He tried to look apologetic. “Today?”

  She surprised him by smiling. “Is that all?”

  He shrugged. “You have the key?” he asked her.

  She produced it from around her neck.

  He reached for it.

  “There is something on the other side that wants in,” she said. “I don’t have to be Amicia to know that.”

  “I won’t open it,” he said. “I need to understand...something.”

  He took the key and instantly went into his memory palace, where he duplicated its shape.

  Prudentia reached out. “Two workings,” she said. “Very clever.”

  He touched it to her marble hand. “How old?” he said.

  She frowned. “Two or three hundred years.”

  “Damn,” he said. “Wrong again.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I thought it would be thousands of years old. That it is relatively new means that this is a copy. It means that someone out there has the older key. I bet Ash has it.” He shook his head. “Damn. And damn.”

  Nonetheless he worked on copying it, and Prudentia coached him on the way the workings had been conducted.

  He stepped back into the world with the key in his hand, and he put it into the ornate box by the door. It was a golden star with nine sprays of golden light.

  Instead of turning the key all the way, he turned it one stop, from one ray of gold to the next.

  The door grew cold.

  He looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t spend enough time on this the last time,” he said.

  Miriam was silent.

  “Have you always known about the gate?” he asked.

  Miriam sighed. “I still don’t know, the way I know God’s love or that it will rain tomorrow or that the thing you came on is hungry.”

  Gabriel unclicked the key, back to its starting position. The door warmed almost instantly. He withdrew it carefully, and turned.

  He went straight back into his palace and looked at the key again in the aethereal, but nothing new was revealed. He shrugged, and Prudentia’s stone shoulders shrugged in reply.

  He hung the key around Prudentia’s neck and took the copy back to the real.

  It wasn’t a bad copy, and he handed it to Miriam.

  The look she gave him suggested that she was no more fooled by his hermetical sleight of hand than by any small boy’s protestations of innocence, but then, she made no protest. They made their way back, almost twenty minutes of walking, and then climbed the stairs where the bogglins had broken in and Sim had died.

  Gabriel stopped and thought of Sim.

  And then, after bowing to the abbess, he took Amicia to Ariosto. And the great griffon bowed low, and said, I love this one! You love her too!

  Amicia looked startled.

  “I can hear him!” she said. “Is this...the bird your mother...”

  “No bird,” Gabriel said. “Ariosto, can you carry two?”

  She weighs less than a sack of grain. Ah! Do you mate with her like Blanche?

  Amicia made a face. “I think that’s a compliment,” she said.

  “Just a measure of his reality,” Gabriel said, rattled and talking to cover his embarrassment. “Come on. I’ve wasted enough time this morning. Let’s go save the army. Please.”

  “What were you doing? With Miriam? In the old tunnels?
” she asked. He’d insisted she bundle up.

  “Trying, for once, to be a crisis ahead rather than a crisis behind,” he said. “This time, I don’t want to ride to the rescue. I want to kill the monster in its sleep.”

  * * *

  Two hours later they descended onto the high ridge and found, not the army, but only the army’s sickest and some of the older archers burying the dead. Amicia was off the griffon with a sigh of relief that suggested that budding immortality did not cure fear, and she followed an exhausted Morgon Mortirmir into the tents that were pitched haphazardly in the stony ground.

  Gabriel found at least a dozen imperial magisters and students from the academy working in the impromptu hospital. He understood that they were recently arrived, and that they had all set to work immediately, and his Archaic was good enough to understand that they had set out as soon as they heard of the disaster at Dorling, determined to do their utmost to avenge their fallen comrades.

  Thorn had destroyed thirty of them in a wave of his hand. Thirty practitioners, of all levels. A third of the most promising crop of magisters and philosophers of hermetical principle that the imperial academy had ever trained.

  That they had arrived to find a plague before them and rumours of a plague behind them might have sapped their wills, except that one of the leading instructors of the academy, the elderly master grammarian, Master Nikos, insisted that they apply themselves immediately to the work at hand.

  Which was why the very pretty and almost comically stern Despoinetta Tancreda appeared in front of the Duke of Thrake. “Your Grace,” she said, her jet-black, almost straight eyebrows raised. “I understand that you, too, are a practitioner.”

  “I am,” he said.

  “Would you please come with me?” she asked, and walked away into the camp, stepping over tent lines as if she had every one memorized. The Red Knight tripped several times.

  Eventually he found himself entering Gavin’s tent, a flame of magnificent green silk, lit from inside by lanterns. There was the master grammarian, and there was an exhausted Morgon Mortirmir. Amicia was nowhere to be seen.

  “You can work ops?” the older man asked. He taught young people every day, and he was used to being obeyed.

  Gabriel hid his smile. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you volunteer this morning?” the grammarian asked.

  “I wasn’t here,” Gabriel answered.

  The grammarian sneered. “That sounds unlikely. Very well, please open to me, and I will take what I can from you.”

  Gabriel shrugged and allowed the grammarian into his memory palace. As soon as the older man in magnificent red and gold walked onto his parquetry floor, he froze.

  “Jesus wept!” he said. He looked around. “How is it that I do not l know you?” he said, and he had power rising in his own right hand.

  Gabriel shook his head. “I know you, Master Nikos. I am Gabriel Muriens, the Duke of Thrake.”

  The grammarian had the good grace to bend his knee; a full reverence. “My lord. I understand you are likely to be emperor. I had no idea that your powers were so...developed.”

  “High praise indeed. I may be emperor, but I believe that some discussion is yet required. I already have the plague, and so I need to keep this power; and these powers are my reserves for combat. The rest is yours.” He swept his hands, gathering ops inside his own palace, a trick that had taken him time to master but greatly sped his casting.

  The master grammarian accepted the power and subsumed it.

  “How are we doing?” Gabriel asked.

  The grammarian raised an eyebrow. “Well enough. We’ve only lost a dozen, and I think we’ve stabilized all those who can be saved. Tomorrow, at first light, we’ll move to Dorling. Mortirmir must sleep. I cannot allow him to work any longer. This wild user, this so-called nun...”

  Gabriel bowed. “More powerful than you or I,” he said.

  The master bridled. “Really?” he said. “I doubt that.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Raw ops runs through her palace,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone with her access to power.”

  “I must witness this prodigy,” the master said, with some sarcasm.

  “Master Smythe believes that he can help us once we enter the circle of his power.” Gabriel pushed more power at the master.

  “The Wyrm of Ercch?” the master said. “This is the world of myth walking abroad in daylight, to be sure.” He frowned. “But at this point I will accept any help. This plague is nefarious. It employs forbidden techniques as well as necromantic working and a natural host.”

  Gabriel, drained of ops, was suddenly very tired. “You must excuse me,” he said, yawning.

  “Ah. I will go work.” The master was gone as swiftly as he had come.

  Gabriel found his way to an unoccupied camp bed and went to sleep fully dressed. Twice in the night, he awoke, coughing.

  In the morning, he woke late enough to find the healers loading the most serious cases onto carts. He only learned that Wilful Murder was dead by seeing the man’s corpse being prepared for burial, and his death struck him hard, so that he had to turn aside. He leaned on a tree briefly, and then he went and touched the grey hand.

  “May you go well, old friend,” he said.

  There were eight company archers there to bury him, and Gabriel went with them, and helped them dig in the stony earth of the Adnacrags, and then lower in the body. The new Archbishop of Lorica came and said the words.

  “They say he was the last to die,” Smoke said.

  Tippit spat. “Fucking plague,” he said.

  “He saved my life a dozen times,” Gabriel said.

  “He always tried to take my fucking wine ration,” Tippit said. “He was sometimes an awkward bastard, an’ he had theories about yon; dragons and bogglins, as could make your head spin.” He paused. “But he were a fuckin’ wonderous archer.”

  “Bastard always said he wanted to die in bed,” Smoke said. “An’ look ye, he did.”

  “Who gets his bow?” Cully asked. “He pulled a heavy bow.”

  They all looked at Long Paw, who, despite his new rank as a knight, was still thought of as a master archer.

  “Ricard Lantorn could draw that bow,” Long Paw said.

  “So he could,” said No Head.

  “Like fuck,” Snot whined. “I can.”

  “No, you can’t,” Smoke said, with finality. “The Lantorn boy’s good.”

  “As good as Dan Favour?” Cully asked.

  “Favour’s got his own bow,” Smoke said. “Anyway, he’s going to be a knight. Ask the captain. He’s right there.”

  Gabriel realized that he had not given any thought to his company, and he didn’t like the light in which that cast him.

  “Who else did we lose, Smoke?” he asked, dreading the answer.

  “Ser Gelfred,” Long Paw said. “We buried him yesterday.”

  “Ser Bescanon, Ser Gonzago, Gawin Hazart from the men at arms,” Smoke said. “An’ Hetty and One Lug and poor Gezlin.”

  “Casualties like a battle,” Long Paw said.

  Cully nodded. “You know what Wilful would have said. Half us got it. There’ll be more in the ground presently.”

  “Mark my words,” came a chorus of voices. Some laughed.

  “Oak Pew’s got it bad,” Long Paw said. “You might want to go see her.”

  “I’ll see everyone at Dorling,” Gabriel said. But when he slipped away—some of them were pouring wine on Wilful’s grave—he made the time to find Oak Pew. She was just being hoisted into one of Sukey’s wagons.

  She was far gone. Her skin had the silver sheen of the worst cases, many of whom had complex webs of magery in them, trying to hold their lungs together for a little while more while the magisters and the masters sought a cure.

  “Cap’n, she said in her low voice, with a sad excuse for a smile. “I ain’t drunk. Not this time.”

  He took one of her hands and she snatched it away. “
I got it bad, Cap’n,” she said.

  “I already have it, Sally,” he said. There were very few in the company still left who knew her real name was Sally. And even that was the rags of a fancier name. A Gallish name.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. I think I’m going soon.” She shrugged. “I can’t say I’m altogether sad.” She smiled a little. She was having trouble breathing.

  Gabriel thought he’d never heard her so sober. Never heard her use a word as long as altogether. “I’m going to wager you pull through,” he said.

  She nodded. “You do that,” she said. “Tell that pretty nun to fix me up.” A smile crossed her face. “I rather fancy her,” she said.

  He squeezed her hand and she squeezed back.

  * * *

  Ariosto covered the distance to the Inn of Dorling in minutes; it would take the supply wagons, toiling through the last of the thick woods, many hours. But Gabriel was heartened to see the road-building crew, more than a thousand men and women, working toward the wagons, and he brought Ariosto in a tight circle.

  The road moved forward even as he watched. It was stunning—perhaps almost frightening—how fast a thousand people could work. Trees fell and were dragged to the sides, trimmed, hewed, the wood stacked for travellers or for accordion road repairs in damp ground.

  He dove low, skimming the treetops, Ariosto grumbling between his legs, his great wings sweeping up and down. The workers already knew him; men waved their hats, and women veiled against the mosquitoes waved their tools.

  He was heartened again to see how close the wagons were to the spur of the road, and how close again was the next camp, at the road junction, where six wyverns rose from a clearing and headed south to bring more beeves. And now at the great fork in the road, Ticondonaga was already close besieged; he turned once over the outworks, where Gavin’s advance guard had occupied Ser Hartmut’s siege lines. The Orley garrison was doomed and knew it. There were huge gaps in the ancient walls, and the sack had ruined most of the defences. And thanks to Aneas, Orley was close pursued in the great north woods and not in a position to relieve his garrison. Aneas was his least favourite brother, but the slim boy was pulling his weight and more. Orley’s attempt to turn east had been stopped by Aneas and his rangers. Ticondonaga had perhaps a day or resistance left in her.