The Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  Aneas wished his deerfly were more potent. But it landed and stung, even as the sorcerer’s hand moved to crush the simulacrum of life.

  The horned sorcerer staggered as the poison struck him.

  Drops of the bacsa’s golden fire burned through the sorcerer’s outer shields, and struck home, and he...

  ...vanished.

  “Fuck!” Aneas barked.

  A horned man vaulted the huge tree trunk in front of him, ignoring the dozen shards of wood stuck in his massive body. He landed, striking Turkos to the ground with the butt of his heavy black spear.

  Looks-at-Clouds swayed like a branch under the backswing of the spear, an almost inhuman movement, and kicked even as the knife in his/her left hand went into the horned man’s bicep, and s/he turned him, his weight leading him off balance, and s/he kicked again with incredible speed, her bare foot, hermetically enforced, shattering his giant knee. His/her knife slipped free of the bicep and cut, severed the giant’s sex and cutting deeply into his inner thigh, proving that his arteries were the same as a man’s as blood fountained and the thing died in four obvious beats of its great heart, the spurting arterial blood flying ten paces in the clear air.

  Aneas might have paused to admire the work—the hermeticist in him wondered why he, a slim man, had never thought to use the hermetical to put force in his blows—but he and Tall Pine had their own problems as the horned men closed. There were more than Aneas, in the heat of the fight, could count, and they stood more than seven feet tall, and every one bore a hideous wound; transfixed by arrows, punctured by splinters, burnt or cut.

  Their eyes were insane.

  Aneas’s immediate opponent lunged with his spear from the other side of the downed, rotten tree, and Aneas flowed with the attack. His opponent had attacked a little out of distance, and the point flickered too long in front of him. Aneas got his dagger blade, held point down in his right hand, on the spear point, and then his left hand on the haft—

  —the antlered thing pulled at his spear haft—

  Aneas wrapped the spear with his left arm and rode the pull, levering his legs up the surface of the rotten log and getting a heavy splinter in the back of his thigh, his own work turned against him. But he was taller than the antlered man for as long as he held his balance, and very close, and he buried his dagger in the muscle between jaw and shoulder and leapt, wrapping his legs around the big torso, pinning them even as the eyes lost their mad will and the big body crumpled.

  Tall Pine’s adversaries were both messily dead—one with a fine Etruscan axe protruding from its head, a superb throw at five paces, and the other was sitting with its entrails across its hands, its eyes already glazing as Tall Pine beheaded it.

  Aneas rode his dead foe to the ground, and rolled, forgetting he had a bow still on his back. The roll ended badly and Aneas tried to rise and felt the pulled muscles in his back and would have felt a fool except that he lacked the time. And his best bow was broken.

  He got his feet under him anyway. Looks-at-Clouds threw another one of his/her aethereal punches at the last horned man close to them, and Turkos shot him from a few feet away with his powerful small crossbow and drew his sword.

  Aneas had loosed every aggressive working he had.

  The horned ones were running.

  “At them!” Aneas called, and winded his horn. Fitzalan’s horn sounded in answer, and two others, and then, blood flowing from his thigh and ignoring the pain in his back, Aneas ran forward, plucking his lost arming sword from the ground. The explosion of the maple tree had removed the scabbard and it lay waiting for him, naked, and came to his hand like a falcon, and he ran on.

  Looks-at-Clouds bounded along beside him like a deer given human form, and then passed him. With his/her came the two irks, Lewen and Tessen, and Aneas, eyes opened, saw how like an irk Looks-at-Clouds was.

  Tessen paused—just a glance, and Aneas put his head down and ran harder.

  Whatever virtues the horned men had, they were slow. In fact, now that a little of the terror of combat drained from Aneas, he thought that they had been slow in all their movements.

  They caught two immediately, wounded creatures, and Looks-at-Clouds knocked them down from behind with his/her aethereal fists and Lewen killed them before Aneas could catch up. But even the bacsa’s ferocious energy dimmed in half a mile of pursuit, and Lewen was resting against a tree, panting like a dog, when Aneas caught the fastest runners just as the young shaman attacked a wight, its chiton glowing a malevolent ivory, facing Ricar Fitzalan and Bertran de la Mothe, one of their royal foresters. There was crashing off to the west, and a heavy company bow twanged where Ricard Lantorn, his stance easy, had just put a heavy shaft in the back of a fleeing horned one.

  The wight was as unnaturally fast as the horned men were slow. His two long swords scissored, catching Fitzalan’s sword and disarming him, covering against de la Motte’s desperate arming sword and casting a pulse of raw ops at the bacsa.

  Its other arms had daggers, and its dirty-white wing cases were like razor-edged shields.

  The thing was tired, its four mandibles parted and its purple maw showing. It, too, could run no farther, but it was determined to sell its life hard.

  Aneas had his dagger in his left hand and sword in his right, and he cut from far behind his right shoulder, the “long tail” of his master-at-arms, a heavy blow even with a light sword, and when the wight committed two arms to cover his blow, Aneas’s dagger went in and skidded off carapace—he let go the dagger and seized a lower arm, his arming sword covering the resultant countercut to his head. He was infighting against a creature that was stronger than he and had more arms.

  He had no choice now.

  A dagger blow struck him in the chest. Only the natural armour of his all-too-human ribs saved him, as the dagger penetrated his mail and cracked a rib—but went no further. He didn’t even notice the pain.

  He wrapped the arm he had further in his own left arm, locking it and breaking it without any more conscious thought than the wight exercised as its backhand long sword cut, beheading Ricar Fitzalan as he, game to the last, drew his dagger and died.

  Aneas saw his friend die.

  In his surge of hate and grief, he ripped the wight’s arm off its carapace and unbalanced the thing—it spared two arms for balance, and de la Motte’s desperate cut caught it in the armoured head so hard it was stunned, and Looks-at-Clouds struck, crushing its side so that ichor flowed. The irks flowed in, their slim swords probing, their faces transformed from unnatural beauty to fanged horror.

  Ricard Lantorn, sword bloody to the hilt, came out of the trees and joined them, his company long sword rising and falling like a peasant axe, each blow driving the dying wight’s guard down and down and down, and Aneas put his sword into the thing’s eye.

  The rest of the company came out of the woods from the east and west, calling to each other in high-pitched voices, high on fear and victory.

  Aneas went and knelt by Fitzalan.

  Looks-at-Clouds brought his head.

  Aneas was not aware he was crying. He was only aware later, when he found his face wet.

  Ricard Lantorn, of all people, came and put a hand on his shoulder. “Lost Garth and Beresford, too,” he said. “We beat ’em. Like a fuckin’ drum. They left corpses all the way back t’ ta trail. Look at yon, Ser Knight.”

  Aneas mastered himself. He was used to hiding his feelings from his mother and father, and this was no different, really, except that apparently they all knew what he felt for Fitzalan.

  He’d reached some sort of dull equilibrium when de la Motte muttered, “Look at that.”

  The smallest Outwaller, Squirrel, was cutting the antlers off one of their fallen foes, twenty paces away in the open woods, while another warrior held the dead thing’s skull and grinned.

  Lantorn laughed his nasty laugh.

  “I want a set too,” he said, and loped off. Then he called out, and Aneas rose like a man who’d taken too
much drink and moved away from his friend. One of the irks had a small shovel. He’d have to borrow it.

  The horned one lay full length, almost eight feet of him. He stank of warm death, and flies were already gathering. Lantorn had taken his antlers, and he looked—pitiful.

  “Thinkin’ o’ takin’ ’is balls for a ’bacca pouch,” Lantorn said, with a grin.

  It was difficult to believe, sometimes, that the beautiful Kaitlin was this Lantorn’s sister.

  But Lantorn raised a heavy dead arm to show him the tattoos. Aneas was sure enough, but he called for Turkos and Tall Pine with his horn, and after a long pause they came.

  “Naming calls, and so do horns,” Turkos said. He made an avert sign with his hand. “The woods is full of things today.”

  Aneas nodded. “I thought you’d want to see this,” he said.

  Tall Pine spent a long time on the corpse, examining the tattoos.

  “Not my people,” he said. “Sossag, maybe. Northern Huran, maybe not.”

  Aneas rubbed his beard, finding it filthy. “But they are men. Were...men.”

  Tall Pine shook his head and ran his hand over the absurd muscle structure. “Yes,” he said sadly. “Men.” He got up and dusted his hands. Then he took tobacco from a pouch around his neck and threw some to the cardinal points: north, south, east, and west.

  Aneas had very little prepared ops but he did what he could, using his little bit of astrology with his simplest, cheapest investigation working.

  The answer was the obvious one. “Ash made them,” he said warily.

  Aneas sat heavily on the rich loam of the forest floor. His hose were damp with his own blood and his friend’s and the red, human blood of the dead horned one. Flies began to settle on him.

  He couldn’t get his mind to work. Nothing came to him. He just sat and breathed, like a tired dog.

  No one was moving much, and Aneas knew that they were waiting.

  Looks-at-Clouds came and squatted with almost inhuman posture. S/he was too close.

  S/he put her hands on either side of his face. They were warm, and sticky with blood.

  The shaman’s eyes bored into his, and he felt that s/he was pulling him into her palace, and let go, although he had never been offered such intimacy.

  In the aethereal, s/he was no more female than in the real. But something...

  Aneas had always been...wary...of women. His mother in particular.

  S/he had nothing of his mother.

  S/he stood in a clearing in eldritch woods, alone. And naked. His/her arms were clothed only in power. Aneas wondered if he should be afraid.

  S/he seemed to encircle him with her arms, except that they grew longer and longer, as if s/he could attenuate his/her view of herself at will, even in the aethereal, and suddenly she might have been he; he seemed more male, his muscles more pronounced. But this flicker of masculinity was only one of many manifestations of change—change and change, as if Looks-at-Clouds was not one settled thing.

  Aneas felt his mind unglue, wondering if perhaps his/her attitude to gender was reflected in his/her powers. It must be so. Looks-at-Clouds was a changeling.

  Aneas was seated on a log, and the wound in his chest was already healed, and the pain in his lower back and thigh were mere pulses of the earlier agony, and his grief for Fitzalan was sharp, but not debilitating.

  S/he was seated by him, working the edge of his/her knife with a sharpening stone. Other men were mending clothes, and Cynthia Durford, the woman from the Brogat, helped Krek the bogglin hammer a rivet.

  “I do not know all your words,” the bacsa said. “But you threw too much. And your lover died. This is a bad way, for our kind.”

  Aneas nodded. “I need to walk around,” he said.

  “Good,” the bacsa said. “You are strong. Go.”

  Aneas hesitated. “You are...part irk?”

  The bacsa shrugged. “I am what I am,” the Outwaller said. “Part irk and part human. Male and female.” A broad smile followed. “I am myself. Changeling.”

  Aneas clamped down on his temptation to kiss the Outwaller. It hurt him...he felt disloyal to Fitzalan, who had been jealous of the shaman just a few hours before.

  Fickle, fickle.

  And he’s dead.

  And I am alive.

  And so is Kevin Orley.

  * * *

  He came back to them with his kit packed and on his back.

  “We’re not done,” he said.

  Tall Pine got to his feet. “Gots onah,” he said, which meant “Let’s go.” Aneas had heard often enough to guess the meaning of it. All the rest of his war party were on their feet in ten beats of a calm man’s heart, and Turkos grinned and put his blanket roll over his shoulder.

  The two irks looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Even we are tired, young man,” Tessen said.

  “We are not done yet,” Aneas said. “We need a good campsite tonight, and we have some dead to bury.”

  The battle had moved over almost a mile of ground. The enemy they left to become one with the forest. Garth had fallen first, a spear in his heart at the edge of the beaver swamp, and Wart, the only surviving Jack, joined the two irks in digging the rich loam at the edge of the swamp. Looks-at-Clouds started a fire with his/her powers, and they drew the doubtful swamp water in two brass kettles and boiled it for a long time and made tea.

  When Garth was in the ground, his sword and bow with him in the Outwaller way, they drank the tea, and the bacsa poured the leavings over the new grave and said words in Huran, and all the others bowed their heads.

  Then they walked north along the ridge. There were already wolves moving off to the east, sniffing at the dead of the maple tree explosion, and they gave that charnel area a wide berth and then, woodsmen all, found the other graves by dead reckoning. Nothing had disturbed the dead, and they buried Fitzalan and Beresford together with their swords.

  Wart threw a coin in Fitzalan’s grave. “He were a good one,” he said. “He kilt the great wight, when we was fightin’ out west. Wi’out him, I’d be dead.”

  Aneas threw a gold leopard into the open maw of the grave. He made war into fun. Can I say that? He saved me. I loved him. I think. Sweet Christ. “He saved me too,” Aneas said.

  Hands reached out and touched Aneas.

  He was so unused to the mere comfort of other people that their concern cut through him like knives. He could all but hear his mother say, People are cattle.

  Maybe you were wrong, Mother, Aneas thought.

  But he held on to his hate for Kevin Orley. Orley killed his mother and father. Orley killed Fitzalan.

  Orley.

  He was still weeping when he led the way along the old trail, headed north.

  He—

  Part II

  Etrusca

  You said we’d need a ship,” Lucca chortled.

  Indeed, the ship was the same Venikan merchanter that had brought Pavalo Payam to the Nova Terra, which was the sort of information that was flesh and blood to Jules Kronmir. She was a small round ship with the new, sharper bow that several nations were trying, faster in light winds and a little more of a risk in heavy weather. Kronmir had some experience at sea, and he liked the ship, and he liked the captain more, a Venikan adventurer with a sharp eye for a cargo and plenty of grey in his beard to indicate storms survived and tempests conquered or endured.

  “Capitano Parmenio, at your service,” he said with a bow, and Kronmir returned the bow with interest.

  “Your man said you had a special request,” Parmenio said. He was mild, for such an old salt, and although his eyes remained on the lading of his ship—just past him, teams of labourers were moving bales of furs and raw wool into his open holds—he beckoned with open hand to demonstrate that even while working, he could concentrate on the needs of a passenger.

  “I need to reach Etrusca at the earliest possible moment,” he said.

  Parmenio turned and met his eye with the smile captain
s reserve for potentially annoying customers. “Of course,” he said, his tone unchanged, and yet Kronmir’s minute attention revealed his assumption that Kronmir was the usual run of busy or greedy fool who thought that a ship could go faster than the wind if one paid enough.

  Kronmir was an intensely private man, but there were times when a level of crisis was reached that forced him to share a confidence. He drew from his bosom a folded sheet of translucent imperial messenger paper.

  He noted that Captain Parmenio truly was a man of the world. His expression changed at the sight of the paper alone, and when he saw the imperial seal, he straightened.

  The emperors of Liviapolis had not exercised anything like control, government, or even taxation over the free cities of Etrusca and Arles for many hundreds of years, but they remained, at least nominally, imperial subjects, more so in some cities than others. Venike had never ceased to use the imperial eagle with her own lion as a badge, and a gentleman of Venike was naturally inclined to some small feeling for the needs of the Imperium.

  Parmenio bowed.

  “You know of the defeat of the King of Galle?” Kronmir asked.

  “By my faith, sir, the docks are alive with it, and yon Galles have offered me a fortune to carry part of their company to West Galle, but I’m bound for the Inner Sea. It took me too long to reach here. I must away, or my fortune is broken.” Captain Parmenio glanced back, twirled his mustache, and shouted at his mate, Sim Atkins, who had a small fortune in Wild honey suspended from a slender rope and couldn’t find a man to belay. Parmenio ran to help, and there was a long lacuna in the conversation while the two officers sorted their sailors.

  “Half my crew has deserted, and I have Albans and Galles and every other nation on the face of the earth. And the plague is panicking everyone,” Parmenio said. “I beg your pardon. I would do anything in my power to aid a servant of the empire.”

  Kronmir bowed again. “I need to land in Etrusca at the first possible instant,” he said.

  Parmenio nodded. “I can weigh in five hours, on the tide,” he said. “If the weather holds, we could sight Iberia in five days. Then it is in God’s hands how long it takes us to weather the Gates and raise Gelon and Charybdis.” He shrugged. “Ten days at best. Fifty days is not impossible.”