The Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

He smiled without meaning to.

  The bacsa looked back at him, caught his smile, and replied in kind.

  They still exchanged no words, but moved, one to the left of the old trail and one to the right, pausing from time to time to look at tracks or other things, otherwise almost running. Aneas’s pack straps bit into his shoulders cruelly, but he was enough of a veteran woodsman to know that it was the first day, and he’d eat the weight in two days and miss it by the fourth.

  An hour passed, and another.

  Looks-at-Clouds made a clicking noise and he froze, and then walked toward the bacsa on the trail.

  He saw what s/he saw, three very clear prints at the edge of another small mud hole in the center of the trail.

  One print overlay another. The third was fully clear, a bogglin, and a large one, perhaps even a wight.

  The bacsa raised an eyebrow.

  Aneas went into his palace and began to move things. His palace was his mother’s casting room at Ticondonaga, preserved in his memory, although he’d added long columns of writing to the whitewashed walls. He had a mirror there, and some other potent interior workings his mother had gifted him.

  He walked along the walls, touching the words that interested him, and the letters glowed.

  He’d spent a good deal of his youth hiding things from his brothers and his mother. He’d never realized what a wonderful talent this might be in war. But now he conducted his working, which in his mental imagery consisted of a tree leaning over a fire and hiding the rising smoke.

  Only when his system of deception was in place did he cast his main working, and beams of coherent light crisscrossed his chamber until he’d made a little multipointed star in many dimensions, and he released it, and it burst like a slow-motion flower.

  In the real, a full-sized wight in stained ivory-coloured chiton appeared over its track, frozen in the act of raising its head to survey the trail.

  The bacsa laughed, eye sparkling. One of the bacsa’s hands slapped his back lightly.

  He grinned at him/her...it was an unusually successful working. He was quite pleased with himself, and as usual he allowed that to warm his opinion of others. “More than two days ago,” he added in Archaic.

  The Outwaller shook her head—his head. Aneas could not be sure. The warrior’s arm muscles were outstanding, and yet the tattooed arms were smooth.

  Aneas held up two fingers and pointed at the sun, and then the tracks.

  The bacsa brightened in understanding. “Geer-lon-sen,” s/he said, as if this explained everything, and loped off.

  * * *

  That night, Aneas lay next to Ricar Fitzalan. He was looking up at the stars.

  “I’m tired,” he admitted.

  Fitzalan laughed. “You spent the day looking for traps at a run,” he said. “I didn’t. All I did was carry my pack and climb over a thousand blown-down logs, and I’m tired. Sweet Christ, this is my everyday life. How do the Outwallers move so fast?”

  Aneas shook his head.

  “What of the witch?” Fitzalan asked. “Man or woman?”

  Aneas shrugged. “Sometime I think the one, and other times the other,” he said. “But I like him. Or her.”

  Fitzalan laughed, but his laugh was uneasy and his jealousy obvious. “Don’t like him or her too much,” he said.

  Aneas squeezed his friend’s hand. “You have a sweet friend at N’gara,” he said.

  Fitzalan shrugged. “She’s at N’gara and you are here,” he said, with all the sincerity of the young.

  Aneas lay and looked at the stars too long, and Ricar went to sleep and snored.

  After a while, he rose from his blankets and drank from his canteen, relieved himself, and sat under a tree on the pine needles, exerting himself, reaching into the darkness in the aethereal. And there they were. It was sheer luck, or great fortune, or a trap.

  He caught the enemy in the very act of casting. The casting was shielded but the shielding was hasty. He watched carefully for colour and application, and he watched long into the night.

  He awoke under the tree, and it was dawn, with Fitzalan standing over him and glaring at him. “Something I said?” the handsome young Jack muttered. He was fully dressed, his bow strung in his hand.

  Aneas shook his head. “I felt something in the night,” he said. “Orley, casting something.”

  Fitzalan sneered. “Of course, my lord.”

  Aneas was not at his best when he awoke. “Grow up, Ricar,” he said snappishly. “I am a lord.”

  Fitzalan shook his head. “I’ll just cast about and see if the enemy have left us any little surprises,” he said. “Before I say something we’ll both regret.”

  He walked off. Aneas admired him in that moment. The Jack was very self-possessed. He didn’t threaten to walk off. He did it. And he didn’t say anything he had to regret.

  Aneas saw a lot in that to admire. “Be careful,” he said.

  He helped with breakfast. He had a packet of Etruscan kahve, and he made a little in his copper pot and shared it with Captain Turkos, who enjoyed it a great deal. Most of the Outwallers chewed dried meat, and a few smoked, and then they were packed. Once again, Looks-at-Clouds joined him on the old trail. When the warrior saw him eyeing the shaman, s/he grunted.

  Aneas felt rude. He flushed, and then started down the left side of the trail. He moved along too fast, and made too much noise, his attention already reaching for the place that his enemy had cast the night before.

  As they moved, it occurred to him that he hadn’t shared his information with the others, and that seemed foolish. As he moved, his feeling of foolishness spread, and he slowed, took more account of his surroundings, and froze.

  Then he reached into the breast of his cote and pulled out a horn whistle, which he blew, short and shrill. Looks-at-Clouds turned. S/he moved, and Aneas held up his hand: “Stop!”

  A horse-length away was a split sapling with two dead black moths and a messy spiderweb of feathers and moss and excrement.

  Shit, Aneas thought. He cast last night to draw me. This was the real trap—a mile from my camp....

  ...they could be right here.

  ...they must be. This isn’t just a curse. It’s the trip wire of an ambush. I’m a fool.

  Looks-at-Clouds was moving along the ground, crawling to him. He went down immediately, feeling foolish all over again.

  He got the bacsa’s attention and pointed at the curse.

  He saw the warrior’s nostrils widen. Then the bacsa’s eyes closed.

  Aneas reached out a very tentative curl of the aethereal toward the curse.

  The bacsa’s eyes opened. S/he shook his/her head and began to crawl again.

  A few inches away, the bacsa whispered, “Tall Pine knows.”

  Aneas had not been aware that the shaman and the chief could communicate. “Tell him to stop moving and lie down,” he whispered. And then, “You speak Alban!”

  The bacsa’s eyes twinkled. “A little,” s/he said.

  “Tell Tall Pine that there is almost certainly an ambush,” he said. “Within half a mile.”

  Eyes closed.

  And opened. “He says ‘yes.’” The warrior looked very slowly to their left, from whence s/he’d come, and then right. A hand reached out, and Aneas followed it.

  Another curse tree.

  Very, very carefully, he reached out in the aethereal.

  It was brutally hot, and a mosquito landed on the very tip of his nose, and began to drink his blood, and he didn’t move. He felt the insect’s proboscis go into his flesh like a little knife driven into his flesh, and he was deep in contemplation.

  Last night’s casting—the one he’d been meant to see—rang out like a tocsin, and he felt even more foolish.

  But the line of small curses was dark and palpable. It was subtle, but not subtle enough, hence the casting behind, to lead him on.

  Damn. The line was half a mile long, but curiously, only from the huge beaver meadow on their western fla
nk to the ridgetop.

  He described this in a whisper to his companion.

  “Turkos says, ‘Come.’”

  The two began to crawl backward. It was painstaking and uncomfortable, hot, humid, difficult, and nerve-racking.

  In fact, the two of them took almost an hour, the sun rising high to the right, to recross the main trail and move down the ridge to the beaver meadow.

  In among the alders waited Turkos and Tall Pine. All the rest were gone.

  “We’ll flank them,” Turkos said tersely. “Squirrel Who Hunts says the beaver meadow is clear. He would know. Now we are bait.”

  Tall Pine smiled. “Bait,” he said, relishing the word.

  “I can set off one of the traps,” Aneas said. He was considering being annoyed that the two veteran war leaders had just usurped his authority and ordered the battle, but that seemed foolish, give the situation.

  Tall Pine said something in Huran to Looks-at-Clouds. The bacsa spread his/her hands and smiled.

  Turkos understood. “Do it,” he said.

  Aneas entered his palace. He reached out, felt a tree he’d marked, and set it up to drop on the trap nearest the trail. For good measure, he worked a long scream in illusion and prepared a working that would move twenty paces through the woods, thrashing. Illusion was easy.

  “Now?” he asked.

  Turkos had a finger in the air.

  Something sparkled far out across the beaver meadow.

  “Wait,” Tall Pine said.

  The four of them lay in the mud under the alders, and hordes of deer flies, horse flies, mosquitoes, and even a few late-season black flies fell on them.

  Looks-at-Clouds suddenly tensed. S/he put a hand on Aneas’s arm. “Gots onah!” s/he said. “Now.”

  Aneas took the time to shield his working.

  Then he loosed it. It was a very, very small working...

  The aethereal exploded.

  Trees burst into flame, or fell. Explosions crackled along the line of curse markers as tree splinters swept the woods at head and ankle height.

  Safe in the alders, Aneas watched as the heavy, dark ops ripped at reality over an enormous and very wasteful stretch of woods. It was a remarkable display of power. Because he was safe and unthreatened, and had no other role, Aneas watched and measured, tasting the colours and smelling the nuances.

  Aneas’s little deceptions began to take effect.

  Just a few hundred paces away, shapes moved. Aneas couldn’t make out what they were. In his memory palace he began to gather potentia and make weapons.

  The shapes were dark, and they screamed as they came.

  There were several hundred of them.

  “Shit,” Turkos said.

  It was difficult to follow a combat in the woods. This Aneas understood; he’d been fighting in deep woods since he was old enough to follow his father’s battle cry. He had to listen to the music, as his father had used to say; the bellows, the shrieks, the song of bowstrings, the rattle and clank of blades and harness.

  The strange dark shapes flitted like shadows, and cried like wild wolves or coyotes in chorus.

  They had about a hundred heartbeats until the line of shadows hit them. More, if they had to spend time looking. Aneas’s ears were still ringing from the explosions resulting from his release of the curse trees, but he had learned a great many things in that small hermetical encounter, and now, he thought through the possibilities, examined them like a determined student with a difficult math problem, and guessed—he couldn’t do better than a guess—that his idea would work.

  “I’m going forward,” he said to Turkos. “I’ll be right back.”

  In front of them was a new downed tree: an old maple with wilted leaves still clinging to its upper branches. The last storm had dropped the old fellow. Aneas noted that the dead tree had fallen in parallel to all the other blow-downs, some of which had been massive giants and now, mostly rotted, were like small ridges on the forest floor. Indeed, the five of them had been crouched behind the westernmost blow-down, just at the edge of the alder swamp.

  Aneas leapt over the huge rotting log and ran lightly over the loam, directly at the onrushing shades.

  One of the shapes crossed a patch of sunlight, perhaps eighty paces away, and paused for some reason of its own, sniffing the air, and what Aneas thought he saw made his hair prickle on his neck—a human build, but massive, with muscles like a caricature of a man’s muscles, a heavy lower jaw with backswept fangs, burning eyes, and a mighty rack of antlers like a stag, all jet black, and bearing a heavy spear.

  Aneas thought he saw arrows fly to his left, but he got to the old dead maple and crouched amid the branches, his whole attention focused on the rough bark under his fingers.

  Deep in the old tree was a stirring of life.

  Aneas paused. In the aethereal, he cried out, “Oh, old man! My need is great. Forgive me, I will take your life.”

  The tree said nothing.

  Aneas had no time for a misplaced mercy. His hand on the tree, Aneas aligned the symbols of his mother’s favourite working. He altered it, greatly daring, intruding on her elegant simplicity. Her working drained all the water from a living thing, leaving a dried husk to fall to ash and dust.

  His alteration took the moisture and concentrated it all in one place, in the very midst of the tree, a long, thin thread of water forcing itself between the innermost rings of the old man of the woods.

  In the aethereal he heard the ripping sound as the water cracked the trunk, but it held; the trunk remained intact.

  Aneas jerked himself out of his light trance to find Looks-at-Clouds crouched next to him, loosing arrows.

  The antlered ones were just a few bounds away, and even as he glanced, one of the Outwaller’s arrows went into the heavily muscled gut and the thing continued forward, two long strides, and fell with a coyote scream.

  Aneas let go one of his carefully built weapons, and green lightning played over the next three antlered giants.

  They shrugged off his potent magery, even as he turned to run.

  “Run!” he screamed.

  Looks-at-Clouds swung a hand, a casual gesture, and one of the shades went down as if struck with a huge rod of iron, heavily muscled shoulder and rib cage crushed. But the warrior turned, even as a dozen arrows hissed into the antlered giants from the west.

  Aneas didn’t dare look back. He ran—one, two, three paces, long, panicked strides, the working still balanced in his mind the way a child balances an egg on a spoon while running.

  Turkos rose from his hiding place and shot a crossbow bolt. Aneas had a moment to think it was loosed at him, and then he made another stride and another.

  “Down!” he roared.

  He realized the bacsa could not possibly imagine what he intended.

  Turkos dropped as Aneas hit his eighth stride. No other heads showed above the rotting trunk of the fallen forest giant.

  Aneas slowed his stride...

  ...the bacsa came abreast...

  The horned ones were crossing the dead tree behind them, twenty or more, baying—

  “Down,” Aneas screamed.

  His arm was around the shaman’s waist and they leapt, and he carried the lighter warrior to the ground, crushing the breath out of his/her and he superheated all the water he’d gathered along the core of the dead tree, a small working, easy, not requiring touch like the difficult desiccation.

  The utterly dry maple exploded, a ninety-foot-long cylinder of flechettes that flayed the wilderness for forty paces.

  Hermetical protections were worthless.

  When Aneas raised his head, his ears were ringing, nothing sounded right, and branches were still falling. There was not a leaf on a tree as far as the eye could see, and one of the horned ones was pinned to the rotten log that had sheltered them, his ruined body spiked to the mossy wood by long splinters of dried maple. Splinters decorated every surface—and red, red blood.

  The bacsa squirmed under him
, and he rolled off, drawing his dagger because his arming sword was gone, lost somewhere in the run or the fall. He didn’t imagine that he’d got them all.

  Turkos said something—at least, his mouth moved. He leaned out over the ruins of the rotten tree and loosed his small crossbow.

  Tall Pine stood. He put a horn to his lips and winded it, and Aneas heard a little.

  The blast of the old maple, and the earlier, larger explosion from the curse trees had cleared the foliage, and now bright sunlight flooded the wreckage of the forest floor.

  Aneas felt awareness. Something was looking for him—at him.

  He was revealed.

  He shielded himself. And then, aware of the pressure, he raised shield after shield in concentric circles.

  Another shield crossed his as the bacsa, a glowing golden figure at his side, raised defences too.

  The attack came. It was green and black, and it struck his outer shield like a hammer and cracked it, but the golden shield carried the weight.

  Aneas fought as his mother taught. He launched a subtle, quiet attack straight back along his adversary’s strike before he was even sure his shields would hold. His adversary had to raise a shield and was thus, in turn, revealed, and Aneas, ever a faithful pupil, went over to the attack. Seizing the initiative, he threw his entire arsenal without stint, three illusions of attacks, one massive electrical discharge, and one tiny act of creation, difficult, puissant, carefully practiced.

  He made a deerfly.

  His enemy parried the electrical discharge, poured power into defeating the illusions—launched a counterstrike, black lightning.

  A curtain of golden fire fell into the black lightning like rain on a forest fire. The bacsa was potent—no doubt of that. Curious that the shaman used gold and not green.

  In the real, the deerfly flew through the violet-black nimbus of a shield, and through the heavy, semen-scented green of another.

  It was Kevin Orley.

  At least, the man at the center of the shields was a sort of flesh-parody of Kevin Orley in antlers, a hulking brute in black and pale flesh, his antlers lush with engorged blood and velvety blue-black, and eldritch runes were tattooed to his face and hands, and he wore black armour. But the face remained Kevin Orley’s face, in a rictus of rage.