The Office of Shadow

by Matthew Sturges

That voice again. "We've got her, Lord Everess," it says. "She's secure."

  Secure.

  Sela saw light. Light, energy, heat, all around her. She was being burned alive. But she wasn't really seeing it; she was experiencing it on some level other than sight. There were no eyes, no body.

  A thread erupted out of her. A thick, ropy thread connecting her to a presence larger and more terrifying than any she had ever known. An ancient intelligence, a wisdom beyond eons, beyond stars. It saw her and knew her.

  She was being incinerated in flame. She was vanishing. Then her body was jerked to the side-but there was no body, of course-and she dropped, hard, onto stone.

  "Sorry about that," came a girl's voice. Faella.

  Sela opened her eyes. She was on her knees on a platform of stone. Silverdun, Ironfoot, and Faella were here as well. Faella had landed on her feet, but both Silverdun and Ironfoot were picking themselves off the hard floor of the platform.

  The platform was circular, with a stone railing. Beyond the railing was nothingness. Not darkness, not light. Just ... nothing. Sela had no words for it. Emptiness without form or substance, or even absence. It was deeply unsettling.

  "I apologize for almost killing all of us," said Faella. "But I'm afraid we didn't take into account that the fold would feed us directly into the receptacle, not into a happy landing spot. So I made an adjustment in midfold. Harder than it sounds, I can assure you."

  "Where are we?" asked Sela, her voice shaking.

  "Look behind you," said Silverdun.

  Sela stood, turning. Behind her was a wide road that ended at a great stair leading up to a massive, black edifice, a squat castle without tower or battlement, streaked reddish orange. It was blocky, unadorned, huge. Larger than the Great Seelie Keep and twice as high.

  Before them, at the start of the road, was a tall stone arch, and on the arch was inscribed a line of script in a language that Sela didn't recognize.

  "What is that?" she asked.

  Ironfoot looked up at the arch, puzzling out the characters.

  "This is Thule Fae," he said. "I studied it at Queensbridge. But it's an odd dialect. Give me a moment."

  "What does it say?" asked Silverdun.

  "It says `Beyond This Arch Lies Death."'

  "Not very welcoming," said Silverdun.

  "Great. So what's the plan, boss?" asked Ironfoot.

  Silverdun scowled. "We go inside and look around," he said.

  "And that sign?"

  "Pray it's a bit of hyperbole."

  "I hate to bring this up," said Faella. "Because you may find it a bit dispiriting, but there's something I need to tell you."

  "What now?" asked Silverdun.

  "While we were in the fold, I'm afraid some time may have passed. Rather longer than you might have expected."

  "How long?" asked Ironfoot.

  "I think it was about four days," said Faella.

  Silverdun swore. "Then the war's already begun!"

  Morale is worth its weight in gold. Given the choice between a hopeful soldier with a club and a disheartened soldier with a sword, I will take the one with the club every time. After the Battle of Coldwood, General Ameus was asked how he prevailed despite being heavily outnumbered. He famously answered, "We were less interested in dying than they were."

  -CmdrTae Filarete, Observations on Battle

  auritane didn't agree with the invasion, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to do it properly.

  He stood outside his tent facing north, reviewing his Seelie Army troops as they marched west along the Border Road toward the ruins of Selafae, where they would amass and cross into the Unseelie at dawn. The Border Wall itself was a hundred yards farther north, separated from the road by a swath of swampy ground.

  A seemingly unending line of soldiers, wagons, and horses flowed past, kicking up dust along the road. The air smelled of dirt, horse dung, sweat, and the spiced preparations of the battle mages.

  The battle plans for this invasion had been drawn up a week earlier and had been distributed to all of his generals, as well as to the Foreign Ministry and the office of the secretary of states. A copy had also been sent, encrypted, to Jem-Aleth, the Unseelie Ambassador, signed by Baron Glennet. That plan was probably even now circulating among Mab's commanders on the opposite side of the border. At least, he hoped it was.

  The plan was a fiction, of course. They would not be attacking from Selafae. They would be going over the Border Wall. The soldiers weren't marching; they were taking their positions. At his signal, they would turn to the north and march directly to Elenth.

  Six months ago, Mauritane and a pair of trusted battle mages had traveled to this very spot, miles from any village or city on either side of the border, carrying a unique spellbomb. No Einswrath this; it was specifically crafted to disrupt the bindings that kept the Border Wall impassable. It had performed its task perfectly, flattening down the barrier of Motion, allowing Mauritane and his mages to hop easily over the border. Two days ago, under cover of night, Mauritane's mages had strung identical bombs along a threemile section of the wall.

  Mauritane looked at the sun. It was time. He called his head support mage, Captain Eland, to his side.

  "It's time," he said.

  Eland nodded and gathered up his mages. Across the border, a company of Unseelie cavalry stood, watching but doing nothing. The Seelie men hurled good-natured insults at them as they went, though the cavalrymen certainly couldn't hear them from this distance. They were in for quite a surprise.

  One of Eland's men raised his hand, and a flare of witchlight shot up, flashing bright red in the sky. It made a small pop as it exploded. Across the border, one of the Unseelie cavalry pointed to it, talking to the man next to him.

  A series of closely timed explosions ripped across the Border Wall. Even at a hundred yards, they were loud enough to hurt Mauritane's ears.

  Mauritane's troops required no other signal, but he gave one anyway.

  "The Seelie Heart!" he called, his voice magically amplified.

  "The Seelie Heart!" answered the voices of a thousand men. The battle cry echoed up and down the lines.

  The army turned as one and began marching north toward the curtain of black smoke that was now rising where the Border Wall had been. About a mile farther north, they would meet a very unprepared column of Unseelie troops, and the battle would begin in earnest.

  The Unseelie cavalry turned and fled, but they were too late. Percussives fired from the lead battle mages blew them to bits within seconds.

  Thus began the Third Unseelie War.

  It took a few hours, but to their credit, the Unseelie realized quickly what had happened and altered their own plans in response. There were a number of small skirmishes-during which Unseelie forces, caught utterly off guard, were slaughtered handily-but those were few.

  The first battle was just south of the Unseelie village of Claret. Mab's forces were waiting for them in the village and struck as Mauritane was advancing up the hill toward it.

  The first spells began to clash overhead as the battle mages unleashed their opening salvos. Streamers of smoke intertwined in a riot of color, percussives and incendiaries canceling each other out in the sky. Those percussives that struck among Mauritane's troops, however, were devastating in their capacity.

  Still no Einswrath.

  The cavalry and infantry met on the outskirts of the village. Bowmen attempted to clear a path through the Unseelie line, but the force was too large. Mounted soldiers clashed, their swords glinting in the sunlight. Men on the ground fought with sword and pike. There were screams, shouted orders, the thunder of hooves, the endless scrape of metal on metal. And Mauritane was at the center of it all, urging his commanders onward, calling out his own orders.

  He, of course, could not fight. He wore a blade, the one he'd taken from the prison at Crete Sulace, but hadn't swung it in months. Command was fine, but watching his men advance, he dearly wished to be in the middle of it,
a cavalry officer on a clever touched mount, leading the charge.

  They took Claret after two hours, but there were casualties. Scouts reported Unseelie reinforcements approaching by the hundreds.

  Mauritane's strategy depended on the taking of Elenth on the fourth day of the campaign. If the city could be taken and supply lines fortified, they might stand a chance of repelling the direct onslaught of the main Unseelie force, which was even now coming at a forced march from the border crossing at Selafae, where a half-regiment of Mauritane's Fifth Battalion waited, both as a lure and a hedge, in case Mab decided to try for Sylvan anyway.

  Soon there would be Mab's battle fliers, hurling balls of flame and arrows down from above. There would be a flag city bearing down on them, its civilian population offloaded to other cities. The ground war was only the beginning.

  The problem with the flying cities, the reason Mab was cautious with them, was that it was not impossible to bring them down, as Mauritane and his friends had proven prior to the Battle of Sylvan. He'd done it by infiltrating the city and slaughtering the strange hybrid creatures that manned the Chambers of Elements and Motion, which provided the force that kept the cities aloft. But Mauritane had developed missiles of Elements that could be fired at the underbellies of these cities. He knew the location of the Chambers of Elements and Motion in most of the flag cities now, thanks to Paet and the Shadows. If a city appeared, he might be able to down it with a single shot.

  They pushed forward. They fought. Men and women fell. Too many of them. At this rate it wasn't certain they would even reach Elenth, let alone take it.

  The second day they mostly marched, meeting only a few lost companies of Unseelie who'd gotten separated from their battalions in the confusion. These were taken down with relative ease, but even in these skirmishes Mauritane lost soldiers.

  There was another battle at Downvalley, a day's march south of Elenth. Again Mauritane took the day, but at a substantial cost. Reports from his generals across the front reported similar losses.

  Had he stretched his force too wide? Had he underestimated the flexibility of the Unseelie?

  And there was still no word from Silverdun. According to Paet's latest report, they'd vanished in a flash of Folding three days earlier and hadn't been heard from since. No one wanted to say it, but it seemed certain that they wouldn't be coming back. If Hy Pezho had new Einswrath weapons, there would be no stopping him. And nothing Mauritane was doing would matter at all.

  On the fourth day they reached Elenth, only to find it guarded by the entire Eagle Regiment of the Unseelie Army, with five battalions. And three battalions of Annwni.

  Mauritane had only six battalions, and had already taken heavy casualties.

  This was going to be difficult. This was going to be a serious battle. Time to invoke a bit of Fae propriety.

  Mauritane rode out under a flag of parley and met with the Unseelie commanding general. They bowed deeply and made all the appropriate noises to one another, and agreed that they would join battle at dawn. All very civilized.

  When Mauritane rode back, his troops were already setting up camp on the southern slope of the valley. Mauritane's aide, Colonel Nyet, found him and took him aside, scowling.

  "Someone to see you," said Nyet, pointing.

  Baron Glennet had arrived with a delegation from Corpus, including Lord Everess. But Glennet was the ranking nobleman here, and it was clearly his show. This was a time-honored ritual on the eve of a great battle; a ranking member of the nobility could secure the right from the queen to lead the charge. It was a pure formality, of course. Glennet would review the troops, make a grandiose speech, and offer homilies and platitudes. The troops would love it, and Glennet would have his ego boosted. On the morning of the actual battle, he would graciously yield command of the army back to Mauritane, and then go home to his cozy bed and be saluted by the court for his bravery. In the official history, Baron Glennet would be reported as the commander of the assault on Elenth, not Mauritane. This was nothing new, and most commanders accepted it as a matter of course.

  Mauritane greeted Glennet and Everess with full propriety. His propriety with Glennet was exactly as sincere as it had been with the Unseelie general minutes earlier. The difference was that Mauritane had actually respected the general. Their meeting was done in full view of Glennet's staff and Mauritane's officers. As a commoner and a military man, Mauritane was required to take the lower bow, which probably pleased Glennet no end.

  Mauritane knelt and presented Glennet with his sword. "I offer you command of my troops, and defer to Your Lordship in all things."

  Glennet raised the blade high above his head and the men cheered.

  Once the formal greetings were concluded, Mauritane, Everess, and Glennet spoke privately in front of Mauritane's tent.

  "I must say we were all surprised by your sudden change of stratagem," said Glennet.

  "That was the idea," said Mauritane.

  "You could have informed as what you were doing," said Everess, clearly annoyed.

  "The best way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone," said Mauritane. "That's what my mother taught me."

  "Just so, just so," said Everess. "But still."

  After mess, Glennet made his inspirational speech to the troops. The parts of it Mauritane paid attention to were genuinely stirring, and it did the frightened troops some good. These were Seelie soldiers, brave and true, but it had been a difficult campaign so far.

  Once the speech was over, Mauritane shook Glennet's hand and thanked him profusely and sincerely. Before he could get back to work, Lord Everess corralled him. Everess was holding a valise.

  "I've got a few things to show you, General," said Everess, patting the valise.

  "I don't need any military advice," said Mauritane.

  "Oh, these aren't military documents. And I think you'll be very interested in the story that goes along with them."

  Dawn came, and Mauritane was ready. He'd slept briefly during the evening, and had been up making preparations since midnight. He'd done his best. He was probably riding to his death this morning, but there was no turning back now. If he retreated, the Unseelie forces to the southwest would simply divert from their present course and cut them off at the rear. They'd be caught between two massive bodies of Unseelie troops. The only way to survive was to take Elenth.

  When the sun appeared over the plains to the east, Mauritane stood mounted before his troops, with Glennet on a great white stallion on one side, and Everess on a slightly less impressive mount on the other. Glennet still held Mauritane's sword, ready to yield it back to him.

  "On this day, we have a special honor," said Mauritane. "We are gratified indeed."

  Glennet raised the sword, and the troops cheered again.

  "A lesser nobleman would have accepted command of you in name only, and then yielded it back to me. A lesser nobleman would have taken the credit for the battle without actually fighting."

  Glennet looked at Mauritane, confused.

  "But not our illustrious Baron Glennet! No, this great man has boldly chosen to retain command, and to lead you all into battle against the Unseelie at Elenth!"

  The troops roared their approval. This was unheard-of in the modern day, a historic event.

  Glennet shifted in his saddle but said nothing. What could he say? If he contradicted Mauritane, he would be reviled as a coward who had changed his mind at the last moment. He'd be laughed out of Corpus. He looked at Everess for assistance, but Everess only smiled.

  Glennet was trapped, and knew it. "I could not stand by," he said, "and watch you ride out today knowing that I had not done everything I could to bring a victory!"

  The troops went wild with approval.

  Mauritane smiled. "Then take your position at the front of the line, as is your ancient right," said Mauritane. "And call the charge!"

  The infantry and cavalrymen took their positions along the wide line. The drums sounded. At the bottom of the hill,
the Unseelie were in formation, awaiting the charge. This was going to be a bloody, terrible battle.

  As Mauritane and Glennet rode out to the front of the line, Glennet dropped his facade. "What is the meaning of this?" he growled.

  "You wanted a war," said Everess. "Here you have it."

  Mauritane turned his horse and cried out to his troops. "I give you your battle cry!" he called. "For Glennet!"

  "For Glennet!" the troops answered.

  Mauritane and Everess rode back behind the lines, leaving Glennet alone before the army.

  Glennet paused, and then raised Mauritane's sword. If anyone saw Glennet's hands shake, they never mentioned it afterward.

  Glennet dropped the sword and kicked his stallion. With a crash of drums and incendiaries and hooves, the charge was begun.

  Mauritane watched as the mages streaked the sky, the archers filled it with arrows. Watched the cavalry cloud the valley with dust and the infantry charge. He would have given anything to have been in Glennet's place.

  Everess rode toward him. "I believe this is our cue to be leaving," he said. "We fancy folk don't want to get in your way any more than we've already done."

  "Good," said Mauritane. "Go."

  "I appreciate your help with Glennet," said Everess.

  "Don't thank me. I didn't do it to help you. I did it because he was a filthy traitor who tried to have my best friend killed."

  "Such loyalty!"

  "And don't forget," said Mauritane, "now I've got something to blackmail you with if I ever need to." He kicked his horse and rode off toward his tent.

  The two lines met outside the city walls and things swiftly turned ugly. Whatever grim satisfaction Mauritane might have had at sending Glennet to his doom swiftly vanished into the frenzy of command. The Unseelie regiment was engaging Mauritane directly, and the Annwni battalions were positioning themselves for a flanking maneuver. Mauritane knew his soldiers were the best in Faerie, but these were unbeatable odds and he knew it. Even if his troops killed two for every one lost, they'd still be behind in sheer numbers, and the Unseelie had a strong position to fall back to, behind the walls of Elenth. Everess should be grateful that he and his friends were already on their way back to the City Emerald.