by Myke Cole
Sir Steven’s shoulders sagged with relief, and Heloise knew she should have been happy. But all she could feel was hope curdling in her gut. No. Perhaps Father wasn’t with them. Perhaps some survived.
Her mouth was suddenly too dry to speak, and she was grateful when Sir Steven asked the question burning in her mind. “How many dead?”
“Didn’t stay to count, sir. Just a squadron of us, and we didn’t want to risk getting caught out on our own. It was … it looks like a great slaughter.”
“That is not an answer. How many Imperial troops were slain?”
Heloise realized how haunted the scout’s eyes looked, how hard he was working to keep his voice even. “Well, hard to tell, sir. But I think all of them.”
“All of them,” Sir Steven’s voice cracked.
“Sir.” The man looked at his feet.
“You mean to tell me that those animals slaughtered every single Imperial soldier, levy, and knight in their army? Reinforcements as well?”
“Couldn’t say, sir. But they were … the dead were piled higher than my shoulder.”
Sir Steven took a moment to master himself, slowly exhaled. “That is … fortunate.”
“Did you see any captives?” Heloise asked. “Did any survive at all?”
The man glanced nervously at Heloise. “Begging your pardon, miss, but there were too many dead and too far off for us to tell who was a fighting man, and who a cook, and who a captive.”
Sir Steven’s face was pale with relief. “Well, it seems we will not have to fight a field battle after all, may the People be praised. Did you … were you able to tell how many creatures set upon them?”
“Hard to tell, sir. Their tracks turn the snow … well, you seen that, I know. Serjeant was saying it had to be a score, more maybe.”
Heloise’s swallowed a sob. A score. Maybe even more. Six had nearly been too much for them. How could her father have survived that?
“Did you see any … any of the creatures dead?” Sir Steven asked.
“No, sir, though perhaps they take their fallen with them.”
Heloise knew it wasn’t so. There were no dead devils because the Imperials had been powerless to kill any of them.
“A siege engine might do for the monsters,” Wolfun offered. “Scorpions, or catapults.”
Sir Steven shook his head. “We haven’t the time to fell trees and quarry stone for siege engines. And I haven’t the means to haul them once they’re built.”
He looked back up to the rider. “From one boiling pot to another, then. Thank you, trooper. You may return to your squadron with my thanks. Get yourself fed and rested. We’ll have work before nightfall, I’m sure.”
The man saluted and returned to his mount, struggled to catch his stirrup in the uncertain footing, and finally trotted away toward the Red Lords’ column.
“Well, Heloise, it seems you will get your wish of parley, if there are any left to parley with. We will need another council, I think,” Sir Steven breathed, “and soon.”
“I will ask the Mothers as soon as they are finished.”
* * *
They marched north split in three.
Heloise marched in the center with the villagers behind her. The Hapti band continued along with them, wagons struggling in the heavy snow.
To their right, the Red Lords column marched in dressed and disciplined ranks, but Heloise could see their losses plainly. Worse, she could see the toll the devils’ attack had taken on the soldiers’ courage. Shoulders were slumped, eyes darting fearfully toward the woods.
The Sindi and the Brock bands held themselves apart now, breaking the snow in sullen silence, some fifty paces to Heloise’s left. Onas did not return to his post at Heloise’s side. She could see him in the drover’s seat of his mother’s wagon, bent over the reins. Xilyka remained at Heloise’s side as always, but Heloise could catch her stealing glances at the Sindi and Brock wagons when she thought Heloise wasn’t looking.
“If … if you want to go to them,” Heloise ventured.
Xilyka cut her off with a curt shake of her head. “My people are there.” She pointed to the Hapti wagon where Mother Florea still handled the reins expertly, despite her age.
“I’m … I’m sorry…” Heloise said.
Xilyka looked up at her, puzzled. “For what?”
“For … for Leahlabel.” For everything. For dragging you along on this march.
Xilyka waved a hand. “The Wheel turns. We cling to it as it rises and as it falls. Wasn’t you who killed her. Onas knows that. They all do.”
Heloise swallowed her relief. She wants to stay. That thought was followed by another. Stop testing her, you fool. Sooner or later she will get sick of it and decide to leave after all. You are a woman grown and the leader of an army. Act like it.
The split in the Traveling People and the constant threat of the devils hung over the army. They marched in silence, eyes wary, the stumbling gallop of the Red Lords’ picket riders circling them. Heloise was beginning to feel tired, not just of the march, but of the tension, of her body always ready for the dozens of conflicts in bloom around her—Onas and his suit, her villagers and their condemnation of the Traveling People’s “heresy,” her battle against the Order. Heloise glanced up at Xilyka’s banner snapping overhead, a symbol of the one people she doubted they would ever be. Heloise shook her head, remembering spring days in Lutet, fishing in the river with Basina. Her biggest worries then had been mastering her letters and which boy her parents would choose for her betrothal. She could scarcely believe those things had worried her at all, that they had ever seemed more than laughably small.
Heloise was lost in her reverie as the light began to fail, sinking into the rhythm of the march, feet up, feet down. The monotony helped drag her mind from worry, soothed by the sound of the snow beneath the machine’s metal feet. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Squish.
Heloise froze, looked up.
The sheet of unbroken white had given way to sudden, slick black, a river of rancid muck that cut across their path, then matched it, moving steadily up the road toward the capital. All around her, the army had frozen mid-step, staring at the ground.
The earth was churned to mud beneath the slime, here and there refrozen to leave a massive clawed footprint in stark relief. Sacred Throne, Heloise thought, taking in the vast landscape of rancid black, stretching out past her field of vision. How many devils must have passed through here?
Wolfun pointed with a spear. “We seem, your eminence, to have found the Imperials.”
“Sacred Throne,” Barnard breathed, as Heloise squinted into the deepening dark.
The Imperial troops had thrown up earthworks, long ramparts of dirt piled as high as a man and set with sharpened sticks. There was no doubting they would have meant death for any person attempting to scale them to reach the defenders behind.
Death for people, but not for devils.
The earthworks were smashed clean through in places, stomped flat in others. Here and there, Heloise could make out broken banner-poles, their pennants trailing in the mud. The line of mounded dirt spanned the entire road to the woods on either side, and of it all, only a single banner still flew—a triangle of black fabric embroidered with the image of a winged and armored Palantine in the traditional pose, arm extended, palm outward to ward off evil.
Heloise stared at it. “It did them no good.”
Barnard snorted. “Just a geegaw of stitched silver. The real Palantine has three devils to her tale, so far. There’ll be more before you’re done, your eminence.”
Heloise searched for words to respond, but her breath was stolen as they moved farther up the road and the earthworks came into clearer view.
Not earthworks.
Some of the ramparts were built from corpses, piled as high as Barnard was tall.
The Empire’s vaunted cavalry, the fearsome riders who Sir Steven feared would crush them in a field battle, all dead. Horses and people mi
ngled together, their broken limbs entangled, their heads shorn off or their bellies opened. Armor was cracked or dented, weapons snapped off at their hilts. It looked as though a storm had ripped through the Imperial line, so mighty that it had torn living men asunder, leather, metal, and flesh as if it had been nothing more than the paper that had been her family’s stock-in-trade since she was a girl. Heloise didn’t try to count, there were thousands of corpses at least. She was surprised at how quickly the shock of seeing all the corpses faded. I am getting used to this.
“Sacred Throne,” Heloise said. “They tried to build walls from their own dead.”
“For all the good it did them,” Xilyka added.
“Thus to the false servants of the Emperor,” Barnard said. “Thus to all who stand in the way of your righteous path.”
“No,” Wolfun breathed, “it was devils who did this.”
“All things serve the Emperor,” Barnard said. “Even them.”
And at last the panic she had struggled so hard to swallow bubbled up. Father. There was no way he could have survived this. No way anyone could have. She gritted her teeth to keep the sob from escaping her throat. Xilyka looked up and placed a hand on the machine’s knee. “We will find him, Heloise.”
“But will we find him alive?” Heloise whispered.
“Wolfun”—she tried and failed to keep her voice from breaking—“take riders and search the field. I want to know if anyone survived.” She avoided direct mention of Samson. She was the commander of an army, and he was just one man.
But Wolfun was no fool. “If he’s here, we will find him, your eminence.”
Wolfun tugged his forelock and reined his horse around. A moment later, three of the Red Lords’ horsemen detached from their column and raced off after him.
They rode across the front of the grisly barricades and around, and Wolfun reined in sharply, waving his hand over his head. Heloise began jogging toward him without waiting for the others.
Xilyka managed to outpace even the machine’s long strides, her head turning as she raced past the piled dead, scanning the trees, hands on the hilts of her throwing knives. Wolfun was already speaking as she slowed. “There are survivors.”
He turned and trotted off without waiting for her to follow, but Heloise could already see where he was going, toward a line of squat shapes in the distance, outside the swath of black slime that marked the devils’ passage.
Heloise jogged the machine after him, hope suddenly hot in her chest, squinting at the sudden whiteness. Xilyka cursed the thick snow before finally giving up and leaping on the machine’s arm, clambering up it to seat herself on the reliquary box on its shoulder.
The line of shapes slowly resolved into a circle of supply wagons, piled high with earth and brush. The Red Lords’ riders had pulled back out of bowshot.
Behind her Heloise could hear the crunching of horses breaking trail through the snow, the pounding of feet. The army was coming. She could hear the Red Lords’ serjeants bellowing at their men to stay in formation as some broke off from the rearguard to loot among the dead in the earthworks.
Before long, Sir Steven was at her side, his knights forming a wedge behind him. The lighter armored Red Lords’ archers were busy stretching out in a skirmish line beside them, planting sheaves of arrows head down in the snow. Heloise’s villagers formed a tight knot behind her, all three bands of the Traveling People driving their carts into a circle beside her.
One of Sir Steven’s outriders galloped over to them from the supply wagons. Wolfun galloped beside him.
“How many?” Sir Steven asked his outrider.
“Less than a hundred, maybe half that many,” Wolfun answered, speaking to Heloise. The Lysian tugged his metal cap off his head, scratched at his bald pate, whistle-spat through the gap in his brown teeth. “And those left’re done hard, and no mistake.”
“Will they fight?” Sir Steven asked, as if Wolfun had spoken to him.
Wolfun slowly canted an eye toward the First Sword, paused for a long moment before answering. “Aye, I suppose so. They’ve just stood off all the devils from hell, so I don’t imagine they’ll be cowed by men in red dresses.”
Sir Steven ignored the man’s disrespect and spurred his horse forward. His bodyguard spurred after him, calling him back out of bowshot.
“Xilyka, come with me,” Heloise said, following him. “The rest of you stay here.”
She strode to the First Sword’s side just as he was cupping his hands about his mouth and shouting, “I am Sir Steven! First Sword to the Senate of the Free Peoples of the Gold Coast! Who commands here?”
The wind whipped his words across the blowing snow, echoing them about the wagon tops. Silence. A few arrows arced toward them, but they were half-hearted shots, carried wide by the gusting wind. Heloise could hear shouts and clanking metal behind the barrier of wagons.
The hope and terror mixing in her chest bubbled up through her throat until it formed into a shout. “Father? Father, are you there?”
“Well?” Sir Steven shouted again. Silence. “Shall I bring my army to you to demand my answer? Who will treat with me?”
Another long moment, with only the howling of the wind for a reply. Enough. Heloise shouted, “I am Heloise Factor of the village of Lutet. I am the one you call the ‘Queen of Rats and Crows.’ I killed the Emperor’s Song with my own hands. Send out my father if you want to live.”
All sound behind the wagons ceased. The silence dragged on so long that Heloise was about to speak again when the thumping of iron-shod boots on boards announced a man clambering onto a wagon’s top. He straightened, his gray cloak flapping back from his leather armor. He held a long-hafted flail in his hands, its black iron head swaying at the end of its short chain.
He raised his head, the wind sweeping back his cowl, revealing his flashing blue eyes, his cruel mouth. “I am Brother Tone, the Emperor’s Own. I lead this noble company, we who have thrown back the very tide of hell in the Emperor’s name.”
7
THE ENEMY
And the devils knew that they could not triumph over Him, and strove instead to bar his passage. They were thick upon him as a cloud of flies. And as they could not overcome Him, neither could they impede Him, and soon he came to grips with the enemy.
—Writ. Ala. XII. 4.
And there he was, the man who had taken everything. She had expected to lose herself to anger, to charge in screaming.
Instead, she remembered the Song’s eyes, going blank as she pushed the knife-arm home. The thrill of revenge had been brief, and bright, and over the instant the Song breathed his last, leaving her with only his broken body. When life was stripped away, all people were the same limp meat. You couldn’t feel triumph over a side of beef, couldn’t crow victory over a leg of mutton.
Looking at Tone, she knew it would be the same. Her mother would still be dead. Sigir would still have betrayed her. She grasped for the hatred, conjured the memory of every wrong he had done her since she had first met him on the road to Hammersdown. It was no use. He was flesh and blood slowly making its way to the grave. She could hasten that journey, but it wouldn’t give her justice.
Wolfun trotted to her side. “Keep Barnard back,” she said to him.
The Lysian nodded and reined his horse around. The ambush against the Order outside Lutet had been utter chaos, and Heloise couldn’t be sure if Barnard realized it was Tone who had killed his son Gunnar, but she couldn’t risk him going mad with rage when there was a chance her father might still be alive.
She had imagined demanding Samson in a commanding roar, but her words came out in a strangled croak. “Where is my father?”
Tone met her eyes silently. The last slivers of hope pulsed, slowly drifting away.
And then, a shout from behind the barricade. “You bastard! We had a deal! Let me go!”
The world shrank to a tunnel between Heloise and the barricade cart. She took a step and Tone held out a hand. “Come closer,
and you lose him.”
“Lose me!” Two more Pilgrims clambered up onto the cart’s top to stand beside Tone. They held Samson between them. Her father looked much the same as when he had ridden out, save a gash across his forehead, old and badly healed. His hands were unbound.
“We had a deal,” Samson spat. “You swore in the Shadow of the Throne. I kept faith. Now stand here in front of what’s left of your people, and in the full view of my daughter and her army, and cry false. Do it, so all can see just what you are.”
Heloise started to take another step, but she could see the Pilgrims’ flails, held at the ready mere handspans from her father’s head. She froze, eyes moving from her father’s face to Tone’s and back as the two locked gazes.
At last, Tone looked away. “Release him.”
“Holy brother!” began one of the other Pilgrims.
“I said release him! He plied arms against the devils! He made no effort to flee, and I seem to remember him saving your life, Brother Althred, or have you forgotten so quickly?”
The Pilgrim reddened and looked at his feet.
“Go, Samson Factor,” Tone said. “Go to your precious daughter before I change my mind. My debt to you is paid. When I meet you again, it will be as an enemy.”
Samson leapt from the cart, sprinting the distance to Heloise. She dropped the machine to one knee, opening the shield arm to receive him, terrified that an arrow would find his back before he reached her. He collided with the machine’s metal knee, wrapping his arms around it, and Heloise folded the shield across his back to cover him.
She struggled to keep the tears from her voice, failed. “Oh, Father. I thought I’d lost you. Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, Heloise.” Samson wept openly. “Oh, Sacred Throne, it is good to see you again.”
Heloise choked back a shuddering sob, keenly aware of the eyes of the entire army on them. “I should never have sent you … I should…”
“Peace, Heloise,” Samson said. “No harm came to me, we are together again.”
“What happened?”
