A Prospect of War (An Age of Discord Novel Book 1)

by Ian Sales

“What in…?” demanded Kordelasz. He yanked his sword from his scabbard and brandished it.

  “Your grace! Your grace!” yelled Captain Vartoi. “We’re under attack!”

  Figures had appeared by the cutters. They wore yellow jackets with black cuffs and facings.

  “Provincial Foot!” shouted Kordelasz, identifying the attackers.

  More troopers rounded the cutters; three were pushing a field-piece, a wide-bore, short-barrelled cannon on a sled floating two feet above the ground. Behind it, a further two pulled a hovering power-cart.

  The cannon fired. Directed-energy beams hit the duke’s guests. It was a slaughter. There was no defence. One woman, on the edge of a blast, reeled back, her mouth open to scream, one arm held high, a bloody stump just below the elbow. Rinharte fumbled for her sword.

  Two household troopers grabbed the duke and hustled him back into the terminal.

  Rinharte grabbed for Kordelasz’s arm. “Garrin! No! The field-piece!” A sword was no defence against a directed-energy cannon—there was no defence against a directed-energy cannon.

  Kordelasz shook off her hand impatiently. “You expect me to stand by while they attack?” he demanded. “You expect me to run?”

  “Let the household troops deal with them! Let the Winter Rangers!”

  A cannon bolt hit the terminal near Rinharte. Stone and glass exploded in a flash of light and an ear-shattering boom. She found herself on the ground, ears ringing. But still whole, still—Dear Lords—with all her limbs intact.

  Kordelasz and Varä were on their feet, swords at guard. Ormuz scrambled to join them, though he was no sword-fighter.

  The Provincial Foot cannon was still firing indiscriminately into the nobles. A second field-piece and power cart hove into view but directed at a cutter fleeing down the runway. The boat struggled into the air, wings waggling. Undercarriage folded smoothly away into the hull. A beam from the cannon hit. The cutter’s rear exploded. Fire burst out and roiled forward, engulfing the craft. Shrapnel flew in every direction. One wing went cartwheeling across the ground. The wreck hit the ground and ploughed a deep furrow.

  Everyone was screaming or shouting. Yalosukinen troops knelt in line before the terminal, pikes at the ready.

  “Where are the damn Rangers?” demanded Kordelasz angrily. “They must have cannon.”

  “Waiting,” guessed Rinharte. “They’ll have orders to keep the duke safe, but these—” She waved an arm to take in the people dying on the apron— “These are not their responsibility. Why should they die for them?”

  “They’ll die for me,” Ormuz growled. “I’ll have the head of their damn captain for this.”

  “If they don’t have yours first.” Varä pointed his sword at the attacking Provincial Foot.

  A platoon of attackers, carrying pikes, darted forward. At their head was some fool of an officer, sword held high, mouth open in battle cry. Hungry for glory, he led his men in front of his cannons and blocked their field of fire. It was just the opportunity Kordelasz needed. He ran to meet them. Varä hurried to catch up. Ormuz started forwards, glanced back worriedly at Rinharte. She nodded. They had no choice. She began to jog. Ormuz fell in beside her. Alus’s squad moved in about them. They had to get close. The field-pieces would cut them apart otherwise. Behind her, she heard the Yalosukinen troopers start into motion.

  Kordelasz reached the Provincials officer. Without breaking stride, he speared him through the throat with the point of his sword. Varä was dancing under the pike of beefy trooper. Rinharte kept to Ormuz’s side: he must not come to harm.

  A bolt from a cannon went wide to one side and more screaming nobles and yeomen were blasted apart. Body-parts littered the apron, blood was splattered across the stone. The blade of a pike descended swiftly towards Rinharte’s head. She jerked to one side, lifted her sword and punched it away with the hilt. She kicked the trooper between the legs, and stabbed him before he hit the ground.

  She saw Ormuz dodge under a jabbing pike. His sword, aimed more by luck than design, took the trooper through the temple, just beneath the lip of his helmet. It ripped from Ormuz’s hand. He grabbed the pike from the falling trooper and began laying about him with it. There was no science, no art in it. But the Provincials had bunched to attack so he could not fail to find targets.

  Alus, Valka, Sniskutte and Tatakai were busy protecting Ormuz’s back and rear. None could withstand them. Pike-shafts bounced off the boat-sergeant’s prodigious biceps. He grabbed one pike about the haft, jerked… and thrust, impaling a trooper on the end.

  Rinharte was thrusting, thrusting. Her blade slid out of one body, only for another to present itself. Someone punched, a wild fist that took her on the jaw. There was not enough power in to do much more than hurt. She hammered back with her basket-hilt-wrapped fist and inflicted more damage in return.

  More explosions boomed out: cutters going up. A pall of smoke drifted across the aerodrome. Bodies in yellow jackets and in Yalosukinen pale blue and green fell to the ground and did not rise.

  Rinharte was blinded by a flash of light. The trooper before her disintegrated messily, half his head and upper torso disappearing in a geyser of gore. He had been shot by his own side. Rinharte threw herself to one side. If the Provincials were firing into the melee…

  She watched Kordelasz leap to his feet and hurl a pike with a twist of his torso. It flew across the gap between their fight and the three cannon-crew. And buried itself in the chest of one. As he went down, he caught the field-piece’s sled and jerked it to the left. Two Provincial Foot blew into pieces as the beam hit them.

  Someone hauled Rinharte to her feet. She looked up to see Captain Vartoi, shouting something. But she could not hear for the explosions and death around her. He pointed to the left. She looked that way—

  Imperial Winter Rangers, advancing grouped about a cannon of their own. Stopping every ten feet to fire shots from it. The Provincials, bunched in their platoons, had no defence.

  Ormuz was there, tugging on Vartoi’s arm. Rinharte’s hearing returned with a startling clarity:

  “—I want their officer alive!” Ormuz was yelling. He had blood splattered across one shoulder of his fur-coat, lines of soot across his face. His round hat had gone and his hair had escaped its ponytail.

  “I don’t command the Rangers, my lord,” Vartoi replied.

  Varä, his face painted with blood, grinned manically. A Provincial approached him warily and was speared with casual ease on the marquess’s sword.

  Rinharte stepped forward and stumbled. Only Vartoi’s grip on her arm saved her from falling. She looked down. She had trod on a fallen trooper. Looking up, she saw the cutter which was taking on passengers had been hit. A broken-backed fuselage lay in its place, black smoke billowing from its fuel-tanks. She had not even noticed it explode.

  “They’re on the run, ma’am,” Vartoi told her. He let go of her arm and stepped towards his surviving troopers.

  The Imperial Winter Rangers had made short work of the Provincials. Kordelasz, Alus and his squad, Varä, Ormuz, Rinharte herself, the Yalosukinen household troops: they had done the same to those foolish enough to enter close-combat.

  Kordelasz let out a wordless shout. Rinharte turned in his direction, stumbling on another dead trooper. An eye-searing beam passed before her—

  It took Vartoi in the side. His torso erupted. A severed hand flew up in the air. He took a step before falling. Rinharte heard the slap as his entrails hit the ground.

  Corporal Valka leapt on Ormuz and wrestled him to the ground.

  Varä and Kordelasz were charging, dodging from side to side, both yelling fit to wake the dead. The Provincial manning the cannon took aim at the marine-captain, squinting down the barrel to ensure he hit his target.

  “No!” cried Rinharte.

  Kordelasz dived to one side and the bolt went over his cartwheeling back. Varä was there. He skidded to a halt, posed for a fraction of a second.
And then pushed his sword into the trooper’s breast.

  Rinharte stumbled from the bodies strewn on the apron. Her sword felt heavy in her hand. Its blade dripped red, yet she could not remember actually using it. Ormuz stood to one side, head down, also stunned. She felt sorry for him. He was no soldier and—

  He abruptly spun to one side and vomited copiously.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  The Admiral’s launch rose into the air, leaving behind a blasted aerodrome. Ormuz put his face close to the scuttle by his seat and stared out at the destruction wreaked that morning. Craters peppered the apron, wreckage blocked the runway and thin palls of black smoke drifted from the hangars. It had been a fierce fight. With a shudder of remembered danger, he recalled Marine-Captain Kordelasz charging into the fray, sword held high. His own dash into danger. Bodies being blasted to left and right by cannon-fire. Pikes swinging at him. Jabbing with his sword, finding targets. Rinharte by him, fur-coat flapping as she dodged and lunged…

  The launch rolled briefly and the ground, some fifty feet below, swung back and forth queasily. Kunta, hunched into a blood-stained fur-coat, hands deep in his pockets, stood by the smashed entrance to the terminal. The duke had found Vartoi after the battle, dead from a hit by a cannon that had taken away half of the captain’s abdomen and hip. Hugging the corpse to his chest, he had swore vengeance on those who would attack him in his duchy.

  Seeing the duke’s anguish, Ormuz had felt ashamed for surviving the Battle of the Aerodrome, if such a mad scramble could ever be called a battle.

  Whatever excitement had gripped Ormuz from the prospect of his war with the Serpent had been rudely destroyed by that morning’s combat. There was nothing noble, he had learnt, in it. The screams of men and women dying would haunt him. The body-parts and corpses lying scattered on the apron would feature in his nightmares. Directed-energy cannons were awful weapons and he was grateful they remained firmly in military hands alone.

  “It’ll get worse, you know,” Finesz said quietly. She occupied the seat next to him: Ormuz had not wanted Varä’s company. The marquess never knew when to leave well enough alone.

  “I know,” Ormuz replied, not turning from the scuttle. “But what choice have I?”

  “We could go to Shuto and arrest Ahasz. With the Admiral backing us—if she gives up her mutiny—we’ll be taken seriously.”

  Ormuz sat back in his seat. “No, Sliva,” he said sadly. “It’s already gone too far for that. You know there’s no other way now. The Serpent—Ahasz—must be defeated.”

  “People will die, Casimir.”

  The last time Finesz had said that to him, he had replied, “It can’t be helped.” Now, he wished she were right, that some way of foiling the Serpent’s plot without so many people dying were possible.

  “It will be your responsibility,” she added.

  He turned on her angrily. “Do you think I’d give everything up and go back to being a prole?” he demanded. “I can’t. I have to do this.”

  “You’ll have earned your duchy, then.”

  Ormuz laughed bitterly. “I very much doubt the Emperor will give it to me. He’ll just raise Ahasz’s sister to duchess.” The existence of a sister had come as a surprise when Varä had mentioned Lady Mayna the night before. As he lay in bed that night, flush against one edge because Varä had won his argument and occupied the other half of the mattress, a thought had occurred to him. He had never really expected the Emperor to hand over the Serpent’s title and estates. Ormuz had been brought up a prole, would have remained one but for Regimental-Lieutenant Merenilo. And no noble would ever want a prole in the Electorate of Peers. Yet the Emperor could not simply dissolve the patent of nobility—especially that of a family as old as the Vonshuans. That was as dangerous a precedent as giving it to Ormuz. Lady Mayna provided a simple solution: she would take over everything.

  “What if she’s involved? She could be part of the Serpent’s conspiracy.”

  “No, I don’t think she is.” In fact, Ormuz had a shrewd idea she was helping him in his fight against the Serpent.

  “You know something,” Finesz accused. “How? You only learnt of her existence last night.”

  “I’ve had… assistance in the past. It might have been Lady Mayna.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “No. But I think it very likely.”

  Finesz grunted and crossed one leg over the other. She sat back and swiftly uncrossed her legs when the launch abruptly changed attitude, adopting a nose-raised position. Acceleration slowly built as the boat powered up from its hover. Ormuz was pressed back into his seat. He let his head fall back and gazed at the angle where the forward bulkhead met the ceiling. He had sat in this seat once before, when the Admiral had taken him to see the False Palace. He had not understood at the time why she had shown it to him. It struck him then as no more than an historical curiosity. But there had been a lesson there.

  But right now, he did not want to think. Thought brought back the horrors of the morning. He could still taste acid in the back of his throat. When Kordelasz, grinning wildly, had come across to Ormuz, looked down and seen the vomit at his feet, he had clapped Ormuz on the back and said, “Now you’re fit to be a leader of men, Casimir.”

  “Damn you!” Ormuz had cried. “Your honour, Garrin!”

  Varä had dragged the marine-captain away. Kordelasz had not understood: “What did I say?” he asked, perplexed. “What did I do?”

  The memory stung. And there were more to come that were sure to be worse. If only he could go back to being a prole. He had been happy aboard Divine Providence. Though only a general crew-member, the ship’s dogsbody, a cabin-boy… he had been happy.

  Through the scuttle, Ormuz watched as the launch was winched onto Vengeful’s boat-deck. He saw a vast chamber, large enough to have taken Divine Providence. Three stories tall, its bulkheads were lined with catwalks and ladders, on which clambered blue clad figures. Pinnaces and jolly boats sat in berths, attached by umbilicals to the battlecruiser. The launch settled gently into a landing-cradle. Thuds and clangs echoed through its hull as the boat was locked into place. With a jerk, the cradle began to rotate and move, carrying the boat to its assigned berth. As his view swung across the boat-deck’s innermost bulkhead, Ormuz saw a group of figures in pea-green, neatly lined up. An honour guard.

  Disembarking ten minutes later, Ormuz stepped into the gaze of every crew-member on the boat-deck. All had stopped whatever work they doing and turned to the launch. Preceded by Rinharte, and followed by Finesz in her OPI uniform, Ormuz descended the short stair from the boat’s hatch. Behind them came Marine-Captain Kordelasz and Varä. Once all five were on the deck, two squads of marines approached, led by Major Skaria, Vengeful’s major of marines. As he had done at the assembly, Skaria wore full dress uniform.

  Ormuz, about to greet the major, noticed that the squads behind the officer were also in dress uniform: pea-green tailed jackets with white cross-belts, dun trousers, black boots and black shakos. Each firmly held a boarding-axe hung with lanyards diagonally across their chest with white-gloved hands.

  Putting a hand to Rinharte’s arm, Ormuz forestalled her from speaking. He said clearly, “Permission to come aboard, Major Skaria.”

  It was the right thing to do.

  Major Skaria slammed his heels together and saluted smartly. “Permission granted, my lord,” he replied.

  “Nicely done, Casimir,” whispered Finesz.

  Ormuz dare not admit that he had only known what to say because he had seen it on some melodrama.

  “I’m to escort you directly to the Admiral,” Skaria said, stepping forward.

  “All of us?” asked Varä, spoiling the pomp and circumstance that had been laid on for Ormuz.

  “All of you, my lord,” affirmed Skaria. “If you would follow me?”

  The honour guard fell in about them as the major conducted the party from the boat-deck. They m
arched along a wide passageway and up a ramp. Crewmen and -women stepped aside as they approached, saluting Major Skaria and the party. Ormuz saw them watch him as he passed and he noted in bemusement that many seemed to think Varä was the guest of honour. He glanced back at the marquess. Yes, Varä certainly looked more like a prole’s idea of a noble, with his cape, intricately-embroidered tunic, polished boots, the ornate sword at his hip.

  The ramp debouched onto the balcony of a great hall, surprising to find aboard a warship. Sumptuously decorated, the hall featured thick wooden pillars and beams. On the aft bulkhead, something large and circular was covered by a tarpaulin.

  Major Skaria dropped back until he strode beside Ormuz and remarked, “I hear you distinguished yourself this morning.”

  “No one distinguished themselves,” Ormuz replied coldly. “People died.”

  “As they will in battle, my lord.”

  “Battle? Tell that to the duke’s guests. It was a slaughter, major. They were defenceless and still the Provincial Foot ripped them apart with cannon.”

  “They’re vile weapons, my lord.”

  Ormuz gazed at the major implacably. “But for the cannon brought by the Winter Rangers, we would be lying dead at the aerodrome.”

  Skaria wisely chose not to reply.

  Ormuz did not know how many had fallen to his blade. With Alus’s squad protecting him, he could not even be sure he had killed any of the Provincials. But he had seen people die horribly, messily. He had been watching as Captain Vartoi—a man he knew—came apart in a spray of flesh. He thought of the many nobles and yeomen he had been introduced to at the assembly, whose names he would never remember. They had died at the aerodrome. The first victims in his campaign to defeat the Serpent.

  Yes, call it a campaign, since that was what it was. It was no longer a matter of fighting off individual assassins. Those, even if impersonating members of the opposite sex, he could, with help, handle. They were a danger to him but to no one else. He was their target. But a battle, a slaughter of innocents by indiscriminate cannon-fire? The Serpent had escalated their conflict and Ormuz could only rue what that meant.