As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  Oh, Maker. How? How does he reach so far? She studied his face, lamented the lack of care she found it. There is not even magic in this!

  “There will come a time, very soon, when you hear of the Emperor’s death.” He said this frankly, without hesitation. She felt her own control slipping before it. “Words are as potent a thing as blades. Mauritz had put out an order to take those children. This is truth. We discovered this truth and tracked his people. His people could not find the children. We found both the children and their trackers.”

  He paused here, lips pursing thoughtfully. “It is not so difficult to induce a man, by way of honey and ants, to spill what he knows.” Boyce’s hand crept toward his kerchief, seemed to itch with the need to remove something from himself. “As potent as blades. Well…

  “You tell a woman the only hope for her children is through the death of her husband. Where do you think the blade will fall? Well now, you might have thought it should fall on her, then, for the people would put it there, and this feint would forever be held to grandeur but…then, say, that same mother makes her choice, but she chooses to use a Ravonnen blade to do the deed. For she thinks this is Mauritz, does she not? Potent revenge. And so in striking, she would sever any chord of connection between the one and the other. Feint within a feint.

  “Children die. Happens all the time. No traces there. The Empress dies—tragic, as it is, on the way to find her children. And the people, everywhere and all around this conversation, are left with nothing but the dead, and the Inquisition, and a man who will no longer be trusted by that same Inquisition. They mourn for the lost—just as well, for us—and they see the other as rampaging through their politics. The last? A bumbling malcontent, a kinslayer at the least, a kingslayer most like, and never a man to be left to take the throne.”

  She shifted in her seat, the voice thoroughly plucked from her lungs. They stared, the pair of them, and the only movement seemed to be as Boyce shifted a leg—an action that earned the response of Dartrek’s hand against his shoulder. The gesture spoke for itself.

  Somewhere on the spider was a knife. Perhaps the same knife that had slit those innocent throats. Feints within feints. Plots within plots. She wondered how anyone, anywhere, could possibly keep them all together—but that was the beauty. Nothing ever came back to her father for a reason: he compartmentalized. Doubtless, even Boyce did not know where every string lay.

  She wanted to hate the effeminate little man. To lay everything at his feet, from Sara on down to this innocent blood, but of what could she accuse him? He was a murderer, to be sure, a heartless assassin of the coolest logic—but every action, every dedicated and thought out reaction, was an order. It always came from someone else: her father. The man before her was guilty of many things, but they all lay beneath another mask, the veil of dedication. Everything he did was for the family, no matter how dark, no matter how cruel.

  Could she hate a man that did evil for her own good? Someone had to. She was not so naïve as to believe the world could operate without those black specks on the face of its conscience. Progress was a dirty road.

  Yet one had to anchor it in something solid, or that dirty road would never be anything but. The destination would be as muddled as the path. The question, then, was where one chose to draw the line.

  Questions within questions. She steadied herself. If your enemy is always questioning, he is never answering. Always keep him guessing; let time be its own paralysis to action.

  Whatever the answer she was destined to come to, she knew her line in the sand would not begin with Boyce. This was a moment to remember: honesty in a house built upon foundations of deceit. A gesture was sufficient to release them both, to detach Dartrek and to let their distant watcher know their game had come to its end.

  “Words, you say.”

  Boyce lifted himself up and nodded his head to the words. “Possibilities, really.”

  She stared out the window, ignoring the reflection left upon its glass. There were many drums by now; the church bells of Fürlangen were ringing out a warning counter. All the poets her father had paid, all the voices she had incited, and all the dead little children in the world were as nothing before that steadily encroaching sound.

  Any minute now, she thought.

  “What are your words before lead?”

  The spymaster stooped, hesitated, and wrenched the kerchief between his soft fingers. “We have stout walls for those, lady, and men to man them.”

  There were many words for Mauritz, but the most important was this: he was here, now, with the army that had swept through southern Usteroy in Maynard’s absence. The army that now stood between him and them. All the levees and towns they had between where these foreigners had entered and where they now stood had been swept asunder; what engagements their allies had fought had been battered with ease.

  They had thought the man would pause, steel himself for the final encounter. He, too, seemed to recognize the necessity of speed.

  “They will be looking for you, Boyce. You may go now.”

  “And Lady Sara…” Boyce breathed heavy, made a point of looking her in the eye for this. That certainty again. “Even steady hands make accidents.”

  It was as close to an apology as a practitioner of jurtee might ever allow. Charlotte stared at the closed door after he had gone, noting how Sara’s breaths seemed to shift with the tempo of the drums, as though her heart beat with the promise of a merciless justice. All around her were the shadows of souls that professed a long game, yet inevitably chose expediency over right action. It seemed only right, in turn, that those should only hope to be served the same.

  The curtain walls of Vissering castle were fifteen feet thick, wrought of banded brick, limestone, and crushed rock innards to form a cohesive core against disasters both manmade and nature-wrought. Positioned atop one of the area’s scattered hills, it had vantage, as well as the added benefit of making ladders, and scaling, that much more difficult a feat to achieve. Though Fürlangen spread out beneath it like a tempting buffet, none of its homes were permitted within a block or more of its walls, nor did the city’s own walls connect with the castle’s, leaving it a buffer zone that was not hindered by the populace it ostensibly defended.

  Nearly three hundred men walked those walls, with almost half again that number of city guardsmen positioned on Fürlangen’s admittedly smaller walls beyond. What towers it had were angular, after the new fashion, designed with cannon balls in mind. Cannons of its own adorned the battlements, and already the air cracked with the occasional test of those batteries.

  Numbers like these made Charlotte feel safer than human fear allowed. One could hide a great deal in the cool certainty of numeric value; its superiority could be the difference between life and death.

  It had to serve because there was no longer any avenue of escape. Standing on the walls, looking out at the chaotic spasms of a home she had known all her life, she thought of the way partners had quarreled in the dead of night.

  Boyce had been the reasonable soul then. “There is still time to flee, my lord. You, Lady Charlotte, Lady Karlene, the young Emperor…we can smuggle you out the streets in the fervor, through the Mud Gate or the Swollen Gate.”

  “And be derided as…what? A coward?” Walthere had snorted at the notion. It was contradictory—utterly unbecoming of his own character. Her father was many things, but he was not the sort to stand and fight when things turned against him.

  “Preservation is what matters.”

  “There is survival and there is escapism. Those men out there face walls which have been taken but once in all their years. They seek to besiege a well-supplied city, waiting for its own army to return. And when it does?”

  “You have seen what I have seen, my lord. No proof exists that Lord Maynard is anywhere near. I can operate only with the facts I have—and those facts tell me to hedge my bets. At least send out the children. People would understand if you sent your family away…”
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br />   “People must see their betters act to the name, Boyce. We must be something more than the situations we are given—take that from us, and neither that little boy, nor my own title, will be anything more than words.”

  That had been the end of it. Boyce had slunk away, a chastened dog, and Walthere had gone into seclusion with his captains, in an effort to pull some stinking semblance of gain from this monumental stab in the back.

  Light dawned, the sun tinged the barley fields gold, and an army drummed its way around their walls. It was the first time Charlotte had seen such force arrayed in violence. A woman in her position was more accustomed to the awe of such figures, rather than the practicality—hundreds of men lining a street, for example, bedecked in the livery of a house and the arms of their station. It was a symbol. In her mind, that was what armies worked best as: deterrents, rather than earnest killers.

  These men below them were no such monuments, however. They were the other side of the coin—the practical force, necessary when deterrent was no longer enough. Unlike some of the peacocks she had seen in her time, none of these distant, faceless outlines of steel were anything less than killers. Mauritz’s men were some of the finest the Empire had to offer. While levies swarmed about them and bolstered their ranks, they were the only souls that truly mattered—the soldiers, born and bred. One on one, she had little doubt they would mince her father’s own soldiers, no matter how hard Maynard had drilled them.

  Practice only taught so much. Experience always finished the lesson.

  Strange, how one could pull a coup so many miles from home, only to die ungraciously in their beds. She leaned over the battlement, felt the wind flush against her skin—no pollen in that foul breeze. Perhaps the only thing worse than the act of war was its stench. They would become well accustomed to that stench, she knew. Sieges were not quick affairs—though cannons had certainly helped in that regard.

  One breach in the walls and they will sweep into our streets like rats from a ship. She looked back into the courtyard, to the towering spires of the palace that was, and had always been, her home. She tried to picture it crumbled away, pieces of rock lodged behind mounds of blackened dirt. Will the poets be able to say anything more than, “Here layeth a castle, crumbled in the face of better men?”

  Surely, they would say nothing of the women therein, save their lamentations. A snort of derision left her—very unladylike. Brace of pistols at her hips, she shuffled toward the assembly which had gathered on the gatehouse.

  It seemed…broken, somehow, that the only faces there were Cullick ones. Not even Charlotte’s husband to be, the one Durvalle on the grounds still conscious or sane, had been permitted out of doors. It was her father’s one decent acknowledgement of their predicament.

  It was good for people to see their emperor with them on the lines. It was better for a child to be as far from explosions as possible.

  Which was precisely what began as she stepped toward the assembly. One after another, the great iron guns arrayed across the distance opened up on them. Like a flash of starlight emerged from a cloud. A thunderclap might have been more apt. First came the flash, then the clap—a searing quiver from the ground into the marrow, a primal disputation of fear and wrath which rolled along the very foundations of the walls. Most pounded the city walls. A few were bolder, lanced up toward them in their high towers—and burst in a largely harmless shower of shards upon the heads of those below.

  They all jerked back instinctively at the first volley, awed men set to watch the evolution of devastation. It hammered the walls. It did not break them.

  “It’s the velocity. A half dozen of those beasts could do more in an hour than three times that number of catapults might have done in a day.”

  Fitz, the Baron Koenraad’s bastard, was putting on a brave face for the crowd as he gestured to the assembled army. The others were gathered around him, watching, half-listening, tastefully dressed and court-like, and perfectly unsuited for what lay below. Fitz was the only one that wore so much as a cuirass, along with the rough riding leathers of a man at least accustomed to labors.

  There was Fitz’s blooded brother Saelec, Sers Edwin and Kobulle, Martel and Kamps and a clutch of her father’s other courtier sycophants, along with the elder Cullick’s shieldmen. All hung like leaches off her father who stood, most ridiculously of all, with a sword upon his belt and his cane nowhere in sight. He wished to cut an image—but by her mind, it was one passing ridiculous.

  Polite, if anxious, conversation passed between them, and all seemed to find opportunity to insert something about what was coming, but Charlotte disregarded any of it that did not come from Fitz or the knights’ own mouths. It was not a weakness to recognize one knew more than you. It was only a weakness to voice it. Most took the latter without truly recognizing the former.

  “Well,” she commented as introduction, “at least we’ll always have the pleasure of knowing it’s an eye for an eye.”

  They parted for her, some in startled distaste, others mouthing pleasantries, and one, Fitz, with the decency to laugh at her jibe. It did not earn him a kind look from her father, but then, neither did she. Hard it was to think of a man who had just arranged the coup of a centuries-old dynasty as petty—but if the glove fit…

  “You find humor in this?” her father asked.

  “I merely take heart,” she rebutted. “We all might need it in such moments.” She looked between the men and crossed her arms accusingly. “Why so glum, men? Stout walls. Strong arms. And that one out there—he has about as legitimate a hold on the crown as we do.”

  Her father’s look seemed to say: that’s quite enough. “Your anger is getting the better of you,” he murmured instead. “Gentlemen, if you would be so kind…”

  “We don’t know how they got here so fast,” Fitz admitted, apparently resuming an earlier conversation.

  Ser Edwin pointed over the battlements as another rumble took them, to the eastern segment of the advancing army. “See that there?”

  She squinted, along with everyone else. Different banners from the rest: a sickle amongst wheat.

  “Lord Makt.” She spoke the name with bitter disbelief, for it was one of their own lords.

  Makt held the western fields, an old, hard-handed sort, long at odds with another lord just across the border. It was not just passing disbelief to see him as their foe, but downright outrageous. That was a feud which went back two generations, at the least.

  “The blackguard!” Saelec thundered. “Devils take him. When we sally forth, I’ll take his head myself…”

  Fitz scoffed at his half-brother. “That’s a fine talk. How do you intend to sally out? Riding me?”

  “Never underestimate what a third party can attend,” Ser Edwin imposed. “Makt hates Lievklaus, but that’s old blood, there, and those lands o’ his have been Corvaden often as they’ve been of Usteroy. Put a face other than Lievklaus there, with an army at his back, no less…”

  Walthere held a hand up, silencing them all. “It’s not Makt. Some children are not as loyal as others, and I would be willing to bet, whatever the misguided disseminations among the common people, that’s where the roots of this dig. Mauritz was bottled up in the south. These reinforcements from the west—they could come no other way.”

  Then to the battlements, he pronounced, “Captain, you have my leave!”

  And as men bickered over omens, machines hurled death across the leagues, clogging the air with such smoke Charlotte pressed a kerchief over her face. She clapped her other hand over one ear, that she might blot at least some of the commotion out.

  For it was, at its core, a pointless conflagration. Some few men died, smote from the earth in a bounding cavalcade of iron wrought devastation. Others returned the devastation, smiths beating hammers against an anvil. The tide surged back and forth, and by day’s end, nothing changed.

  More trickled in over the course of the day, and after the initial show the cannons pulled back, out of ra
nge of the castle, as columns shifted and readjusted their noose about the walls. In the city, people hid indoors, dared not come out—and owing to the fact that this place was hopelessly inland, they would, Charlotte supposed, no doubt be pondering how long until the rationing began. People here were not accustomed to war, but it did not take a wise man to know the poorest among them would know the effects of hunger long before those who sat behind a second set of walls.

  All hail the Imperator, she mused.

  She could name most the flags in the field. Animals and flowers, towers and weapons, everyone had their sigil, even the betrayers, and all were eager to display them—not, she bitterly thought, for any military worth, but for the chroniclers to either side, waiting there with eager quills. Flags mattered to historians. To those who lived beneath them, all they seemed to tell was who was pissing on whom, without even the tidy consideration of a why.

  Mauritz’s own place in the ranks haughtily boasted the pair of coiling gryphons that were the Imperial marker—proud halos, scepter and sword in hand, and utterly unmistakable. He wanted the world to know who tore the Cullicks down. Yet she also noted he did so without any of the markers of the Ravonnens; not a single lily adorned the banners in that decimated field.

  Banners meant so very little to the guns, however.

  It went on for three days as such, lead hammering stone, the works of man set against the works of nature. Never once did Mauritz’s men attempt to rush the walls—they were content to knock them down. And despite their best hopes, the force was making headway in that regard. Clusters of the iron beasts focused on points in the walls and drummed them relentlessly. They might have been feet thick, but even stone could not take such consistent force.

  Day by day, she watched the rock rub, crack, and bend inward. There were two points along the city wall men had been ordered to reinforce; those were the weak links that would, inevitably, sunder. It was only a question of when.

  Her father had his own little revenge upon the invaders, though. The value of having a city to hide within came down to this: stout walls through which the illusion of defense held true. Those very same walls also allowed one to escape the tormenting sounds of the outside world. Men camped beneath the stars under canvas sheets did not have that luxury.