Soul of the World

by David Mealing

  “Tell her we will fight.”

  They conferred in the fair-skin tongue, and the light-prison dwindled and vanished.

  “Dieux si-dessus!” a soldier shouted, followed by a string of words he didn’t understand. Heads turned to where the soldier pointed, and he saw at once the commotion’s source.

  On the far side of the field, a sea of red-coated soldiers marched toward them, every one of them bearing the golden light behind the eyes.

  64

  ERRIS

  High Command

  Southgate District, New Sarresant

  Her knuckles went white, bracing herself against the edge of the table as Need faded from her senses.

  She’d failed.

  The attack wasn’t coming to the east, or the center. The sight of the Gandsmen through Vassail’s aide’s eyes drove a stake through her gut. That was no feint or diversion. That was the full strength of the Gand reserve, deployed to flank the western line, to sweep around, cut off her supplies, and as good as take the city. She knew it as soon as she’d laid eyes on them. Ten thousand soldiers marching into the Gardens, every eye taken by the golden light. Every man a vessel for the enemy commander.

  She should be shouting orders, racing to reposition the units on the east, to collapse the line southward in the vain hope of being set before the enemy arrived.

  Instead she stared, letting the full impact of failure wash through her mind.

  The west flank had been tainted by whatever d’Agarre had done to drive half the city mad. Had some part of it taken her, too? How could she miss the possibility that the enemy would use the chaos as cover? Her vessels seemed immune to the effects of the terror, so long as she held the Need tether in place. A minor detail that she’d never been able to hold more than one link at a time; she knew the enemy commander could do it. She’d seen it firsthand with the officers of his army, behind the barrier, before they’d been butchered by the wild. A short leap from there to possessing every individual soldier. With that power to bolster them, they could march through the chaos on the west flank, sweep around, and take her positions in the rear, a pincer between northern lines and southern reserves. She might have been able to counter with the girl, Sarine, and her strange talk of colors and kaas. She might have—if she’d taken the initiative a half hour earlier, when there was still time to refocus her line.

  She’d been blind. A thousand contingencies played in her mind. Branching webs of possibilities, orders she might have given, decisions she might have made. None of it mattered. She’d failed.

  “Sir,” one of the aides said, “you’re back. We have reports from the center; the enemy is moving. We suspect—”

  “He’s attacking the west flank,” she said.

  The aide’s report died mid-sentence, and a handful more looked up from their planning as her words sounded through the chamber. Murmurs spread like an echo, repeating the information, drawing a wave of eyes. All focused on her.

  She expected to see despair, a reflection of the weariness she felt, soaked through and bone-weary from the power of Need. Instead she saw resolve. Hope. They looked to her, every man hanging on the edge of whatever she was about to say. She’d let them down, but they hadn’t seen it. She was a mummer at the height of a show, only she’d forgotten her line, standing in silence when all expected her to speak.

  “We attack,” she said at last. Empty pride, forming the words on her tongue. But even as she said it, the kindling of her aides’ and generals’ eyes caught a small spark, threatening a wisp of flame.

  “We attack,” she said again. “We have reserves in the field, undeployed, here in Southgate. We ride to reinforce the Gardens lines. If we can push them back, if we can hold long enough for the eastern line to come up, there may yet be a hope of victory.”

  Doubt snagged in her mind. There was no time. But she saw the fire of her belief catch and spread across the room.

  All her career she’d served in an army of lions led by dogs, made to bark and yip for the sake of fools. In the moment she felt no better, but she knew they saw in her a lion. For their sake, for New Sarresant, she could roar, and go into defeat with pride.

  She left her place by the tables, striding toward the chamber doors.

  “Sir?” a handful of aides called as she passed.

  “Deliver the orders. And run ahead to have Jiri saddled. I mean to lead this attack from the front.”

  Jiri’s hooves thundered beneath her as she rode across the monument grounds.

  Need served to warn the field commanders she was coming. Already three brigades assembled in her wake. The 12th Infantry. The 3rd. The 16th. They’d arrived late to the battle precisely because they were her best; with the surprise arrival of the Gandsmen they’d found themselves last in line on the march home when they were meant to be first to deploy.

  Now they rallied behind her, a sea of faces cheering her name, and Sarresant. Surely some word had passed, as it always did in the army. The best of them would know her failure, would realize their line was strongest where the enemy was not, that their orders sent them to march toward the weakest part of their line. And now she’d arrived in person to lead them in a last-ditch charge. Yet instead of dismay, she found fervor. Cries of loyalty, fierce shouts as they rose up in a tide of blue.

  Long lines snaked behind her as Jiri galloped forward, trumpet blasts carrying the order to follow in her wake.

  The cries thundered behind as she arrived at the last of her reserve brigades. These men had reached the city only hours before, having been set to hard riding to scout ahead of the army’s march. It had been their burden to seek out likely landings for the enemy, somewhere between New Sarresant and Villecours. She’d believed the enemy commander would put her to a decision, forcing her to choose which of the two great ports she would defend. Instead he had attacked New Sarresant itself, spreading pain and fire throughout its streets. And the masterful scouting work of the 14th Light Cavalry had gone for naught.

  D’Guile saluted her as she approached. The colonel’s starburst on his collar suited him, even if it was likely only a brevet promotion in the absence of the unit’s rightful commander. She’d see to it he was promoted in truth when this was over.

  The roar of the men beside him drowned out the greeting he called to her, a smile breaking over his face. And relief. Even these men, men she had slept alongside and bled for, men for whom she had wept, men she had ordered to their deaths on countless occasions. Even they looked back at her as if she stood some great distance apart, as if she bore the mantle of divine providence.

  And they cheered.

  She hadn’t earned this. For all she cut a calculated figure sitting astride Jiri’s back, for all she hefted her saber into the purple of the evening sky to inspire these men to passion, this was her moment of failure, not triumph. Perhaps they knew it. Perhaps these men knew in their hearts she had ceded the crucial moment, been outmaneuvered in the enemy’s western attack and doomed them all to a charge, a last effort to break the enemy before they faced their inevitable surrender. But if they knew, her men showed only faith. Only a surging tide of faith in their commander as they rose up, abandoning their hastily erected fortifications to fall in behind as she rode.

  “Soldiers,” she called out to them, her voice drowned out in the din. “Soldiers of New Sarresant.”

  They roared, every brigade, massing together in a chorus that echoed across the open grass of the monument green. Surely the enemy could hear, even halfway across the city. Surely he would know the sons and daughters of Sarresant came for him now, lapping at his heels like dogs come late to the hunt.

  “Forward!” she cried, wheeling her saber. “Forward to death and victory!”

  She set Jiri forward, a stately gait fit for any parade ground. Alone among their ranks she was mounted, the horsemen of the 14th having left their mounts behind when they entered the city. And behind her marched the remaining strength of her army, two thousand souls as yet uncommitted to
the fighting. This was the breaking point, the end of her line. Already she could see columns of red coats cutting across the far side of the monument green, racing toward the Gardens, even their frontline troops sent west to reinforce the main thrust of his attack.

  She had one brigade to meet him, to hold against the sweeping maneuver of his line. And if there was any hope left in the day, it lay with Vassail, and the strange alliance she’d forged with the tribesman called Arak’Jur.

  A vain hope, to trust in the tribes, but she’d made it clear their support was the price of peace, after the battle was done. Gods send they kept to their word. If the tribes fought alongside Vassail, if they could hold for long enough to delay the Gandsmen until her fresh brigades could strike at the center, perhaps there was hope. A hammer and anvil that maybe, just maybe, could catch the enemy in an unexpected trap and crack it in two.

  By the Exarch himself, let them hold.

  65

  SARINE

  The Greenbelt

  Gardens District, New Sarresant

  Fire burned around her. A sucking wind, filled with musket shot and the cries of a thousand men and women, dead, dying, or seeking to kill. Her ears rang, her tongue stung with iron, the smell of blood, and she felt more than half a fool, cowering behind a barricade when every instinct said to fight.

  Not your place, came the thought from Zi. Violence in excess dooms your kind to madness, through our bond.

  A shell exploded ten paces up the line, a smoking hole in the barricade where men had knelt and fired a moment before.

  “Gods damn it, Zi!” she shouted, though she could hardly hear even her own words. “They’re dying. I have to help!”

  A tether of Entropy formed between her and the far side of their barricade. She sent a cloud of caustic air into the line of red coats, a sickening rush of fire blasting bodies apart in a rain of gore. Shame wrenched her guts, and pleasure bloomed. A shining light, warm and beckoning, washing out her senses, flickering her consciousness away from the reality of the battlefield. Away from ash and snow and blood. Away from death. Away from Green.

  Their line broke for an instant. A return of panic, terror, wrath, bloodlust, all the influence of Reyne d’Agarre. The raw power of his kaas, projecting a field of Yellow strong enough to drive half the district to madness.

  She gasped, seizing hold of her net of Green—the power to calm emotions, to counteract the delirium of Yellow—before it could be more than a momentary flicker.

  You must be cautious, Zi thought to her.

  Tears leaked down the sides of her face, and she slumped against a piece of carved mahogany that might have been an armoire in a lord’s townhouse weeks before.

  “I’m out,” Lance-Lieutenant Acherre cursed, kneeling beside her. She shook her pistol like an empty bottle, as if she might squeeze a few more shots from the dregs.

  They both hunkered down as another wave of shots peppered their position, roaring overhead and whistling as they cut through the air.

  “What more can we do here, Lieutenant?” she called out.

  Acherre met her eyes as she knelt over the body of a soldier who had fallen nearby, grabbing his powder and casings from a pouch slung over the dead man’s shoulder. “We can fight,” she said. She took up the man’s short carbine, cracking the chamber to breech-load another round. “We can fight until the Nameless himself comes for us.”

  “What if he doesn’t come?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  Acherre only laughed at that, a fevered look on her face as she rose up over the barricade, leveling her carbine and sighting it for the belching roar of another shot.

  Sarine dared another glance, peering through cracks in their makeshift cover. Lines of red coats swarmed over the greenbelt, legions of men with golden eyes, held back by waves of fire from the barricade, and a surge of tribesmen howling as they rebuffed the advances of the Gand soldiers. The man she’d spoken with—Arak’Jur—had rallied the tribesfolk, after she’d translated their exchange using Zi’s gifts. He’d agreed to fight, but only to protect his people, and High Commander d’Arrent had promised an attack, coming from the south. They were counting on her to use Green to hold back d’Agarre’s power, to keep their lines from being scattered like seeds to the wind by his Yellow, but already she was strained to breaking.

  She’d seen nothing like it. D’Agarre had used Yellow before, scattering a few city watch or harbor guards, and she’d used it to disperse the mob that had almost burned her uncle’s church, but she’d never imagined it could be strong enough to affect so large a swath of the city. Unaided, her Green couldn’t come near the power of what d’Agarre was doing. He was using Yellow to drive half the city mad, soldiers and tribesmen and ordinary men and women driven to a murderous rage. All to fuel Black, the terrible power derived from killing, and proximity to death. It had taken the wardings, the strange blue sparks, to amplify the field of her Green to hold him back. But if she lost control, if the field of Green slipped again, or if Zi ran dry …

  “Sarine, thank the Goddess herself.”

  Axerian appeared beside her, kneeling behind their barricade as if he were a soldier assigned to be there, though he was dressed in his usual black, wearing a smirking grin as though he’d made a joke he expected no one else to understand.

  “How did you find—?” she said.

  “Simply enough,” he said. “Between you and whomever is stirring half the city to madness in the northern Gardens, I expect every kaas-mage this side of the Endless Ocean has an inkling of where you are.”

  Acherre set off another round from her carbine, eyeing the newcomer with suspicion as she ducked down to reload, though the rest of the soldiers along the barricade seemed to pay him no mind.

  “It’s d’Agarre,” Sarine said, having to shout to be heard over the din of fighting. “In the north. I’m sure of it.”

  “Yes,” Axerian said, and his eyes flashed with a shade of fear, or hunger; she couldn’t have said which.

  “It’s time,” he continued. “He’s close. We must go, and reach him, before—”

  “I can’t abandon these soldiers. Without me d’Agarre would have them all raging mad.”

  Axerian’s grin slipped. “You can set wardings; you already have. I’ve shown you—”

  “And if they get pushed back?” she said. “Every man will be running or fighting his fellows. We saw it, when we first came into the Gardens.”

  For a moment the chaos of the battle surrounded them, shouts and musket shots ringing in her ears. But when Axerian spoke again his voice was ice, though somehow she could hear his words.

  “Do you truly have no notion of what you are?” he said. “Of what is at stake, should we fail?”

  No. Axerian.

  Zi appeared, coiled around a sliver of wood protruding from the barricade, his scales flushed bright red, and she saw a mix of pain and fury in her companion’s ruby eyes.

  “I can’t,” she said, remembering the pain of losing even a handful of the nobles, who had relied on her to keep them safe. A lesson instilled by her uncle’s sermons, and in the example he had always shown her, providing for an orphan girl when the street would have swallowed her like fresh-cut meat. She couldn’t let them die, let her city be taken and sacked by its enemies, betraying their trust. “I can’t abandon them.”

  Axerian glared at her, a chill reminder that he was the Nameless, the specter haunting a thousand children’s stories. For a moment he hovered on the cusp of a trembling rage, before he closed his eyes, seeming to will himself to calm.

  “There is a way,” he said. His voice was hard, lifeless, without emotion. “If you trace the leylines, you will find Paendurion’s Vision bindings, spliced the same as the wardings, with the Goddess’s power.”

  Axerian. No. She is not ready.

  “Damn you, kaas,” Axerian shot back at Zi. “It’s this, or nothing. I won’t allow a return to the days of shadow to save you a dose of pain. Try it, Sarine. Please.
You can break his control over those soldiers. The power by rights belongs to—”

  His face contorted, cut off mid-sentence into an expression of agony.

  Zi flushed red and gold, the color of the sun.

  “Zi, what are you doing?” she said. “Stop!”

  Her kaas looked up at her, his eyes burning, but Axerian gasped, panting for air as though he’d been choked and then let free.

  “Is it true?” she asked. “Can I stop the enemy soldiers?”

  Yes, Zi replied. It has always been yours, if you wish it.

  She glanced between them, her strange companion and a living God. Whatever passed between them, it was nothing she understood. But Axerian had told her to examine the leylines, and Zi seemed content to allow it, for all he’d as good as attacked the man for suggesting she do so.

  She closed her eyes, finding the leylines swirling beneath the battle. A sea of energy, shapes, and colors blooming too fast to follow. Red motes, black ink, purple swirls, drained or stirred or channeled through tethers as fast as it could be created.

  There, came Zi’s voice, accompanied by a sensation of longing, pulling her attention into the chaos of the roil.

  And then she saw it.

  A network of gray lines, too fine to notice if she hadn’t known to look, extending from beneath the Gand soldiers off toward the horizon. And with every line, a spark of blue. The same energy she’d seen at Tanir’Ras’Tyat, and the d’Agarre manse. The corruption, Zi had called it then. But it sang to her, then as now, a melody playing in her ears, so loud she wondered how she’d missed it before.

  She reached for it, and the blue sparks seemed to slide along the strands, until they snapped away, leaping across the battlefield to pool in the palm of her hand.