As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  Vissering Castle was built in the fashion of a rounded star, a complex structure with no easy access. As it was, a few men could hold it against a significantly larger force—something her father was no doubt banking on—but most of those men were busy watching the helpless plight of their fellows in the city. Charlotte’s party was not challenged, and in fact managed to find themselves alone along a certain stretch of wall, with nothing before them save a long drop.

  “Someone should be here,” she said sullenly.

  Usuri tutted as she squinted across the battlements. “Don’t quibble over a favor.”

  Dartrek patrolled ahead, reaching around the stone battlements and patting each one with purpose. He stopped at a certain point and felt around for something. Charlotte started to move toward him, but then his body pulled back and his hand snapped up with the end of a grappling hook in hand. He promptly jammed it into the cracks of the brick foundations, securing it.

  “You mean you expect me to…” Charlotte blanched.

  “Look up,” Dartrek suggested. “The sky will settle you.”

  Finally showing her weariness, though, Usuri stumbled as she drifted along beside the rope. “One would question why it is birds never have eyes for anything but the ground then,” she said. Then her eyes widened and she squeaked as she hopped back. “He’s down there.”

  “What?”

  Dartrek had his bow unslung and at the ready in a motion. He peered over the side of the battlements and stiffened visibly. “The assassin,” he murmured, though even in accepting that he did not pull his bow back. That was one creature to which no sensible person gave an inch.

  Sure enough, as she approached the rope she could see a ripple in the shadows below. Mostly she saw cloak, but there was enough familiarity to the motions that she recognized the Iruwen killer, and his malevolent gaze was locked on them, arms crossed casually. He had scaled the rocky outclimb of the hill and positioned himself beneath the immediate sight of the battlements. It was debatable whether he knew or cared the other side of the city burned.

  “Hark!” the voice called from the dark. “In even darkest night, the starlight shine; it dances ‘pon frail earthly might and sings to dead men rent divine.” It was unsettling. There was nothing there, no face nor eyes to attach the words to—just a silhouette of a being, far less real than those beside her. “And still they flutter. What fools do stalk the realms of men.”

  Dartrek cursed and hissed over the side of the battlements, “Quiet, fool. Voices carry here.”

  “I, the fool?” Arms extended and the man cackled. “It looks at killers but does not look to the killed! Hark, oh drifting spirit, do they not see you on your sword?”

  For an instant she was terrified. With one hand the man hopped onto the rope, setting his foot against the wall. He shimmied up a ways, quick as a spider, and then a flash of his sword ended their retreat. The man pressed off the wall, landed with a soft thunk, and became small indeed. Desperation pulled her to the others: Dartrek was taking aim and most the color had drained from Usuri’s face.

  “Look back the way you came, fools!”

  A curious scene had undertaken in their absence. The gates had opened, and the sally had broken forth, but the men on the wall were not huddled in terror—in fact, they seemed to be cheering. Beyond, where the city fell away and the night turned to vague hills and open, liquid dark, save for the flickering lighthouses of men’s torches, the scene had become something else.

  A sea change had overtaken the other side. What had been the strong left of the army—Duke Urtz’s men, but lately arrived—seemed to have crashed into the center, leaving the camp a mass of confusion and mayhem. Men were fleeing across the field, flickering into and out of existence beneath the dim light. There was a victorious whooping in the distance, and mounted men riding into the fray; there was no slightness to any of it, but a rapid, terrible turning that sent men reeling to and fro.

  The center of their army was collapsing. At one moment men were hammering at Fürlangen’s gates and at the next the Imperial army was falling back fast. Men chased men. The air was thick with gunfire, but the cannons had gone still; the camp was in the thick of it, she could tell even from here. The left seemed to have spread around it, sweeping in broad arcs to enclose it. Dimly, she thought of that dullard Count Hernando, pondered if he too had been swept away in this sudden tide.

  Everything else seemed far away then. There was no thunder from the sky, no cackle of gods, only the thunder of hooves on hard earth and the screams of horrified men as killers set upon killers and men streamed out, rather than in, through the gap in Fürlangen’s walls, to set about a furious slaughter. What had been a siege suddenly became a pincer.

  Something oppressive had been lifted from her shoulders in that instant, and though she could hear men crying Maynard’s name in the distance, calling to Assal, and to any that seemed necessary for the thanks of a dream, she knew without seeing that it was not her uncle, nor was it any work of the God. This change was a thing of men, and in the tumult she saw it clearly.

  Duke Urtz, the petulant, unsavory man who held himself aloft from family politics and moved at his own speed no matter who called him, had turned so viciously upon the killer of his grandfather as to be a wildfire twisted in the wind. Mauritz’s undoing had come from within.

  “Adieu!” the assassin called from below. “Adieu to the gold and black—our time is not yet come. But what do you say of kings and princes, set upon the sword? Oh, it’s give and take, but oft the take is more than the give, though we think it back around.”

  Puzzled, she cast back for him, but even as he sang his befuddled tune, the assassin had crept from view. Only the cut rope remained, a dangled bundle discarded in the wake of fortune’s give.

  It was full bright in the field where the battle had been. Charlotte crushed iron underfoot of silk slippers. She had waited happily for this, and behind her came a train of other figures, her betrothed among them. Little Lothen had wide eyes, but his knights kept close, and he kept close to Charlotte—together they were all the strength he needed. There was no fear here anymore; no soldiers of either army slept in the barley or kept watch over the dead.

  Ruined tents, some gutted by fire, many trampled under hooves and boots, littered the field. Broken cannons sat at the perimeter. Anything that worked had been wheeled away hours before. Elsewhere, Charlotte’s father was receiving Duke Urtz with aplomb, embracing him as a royal cousin and blessing his devotion to his emperor. There would be talk of reward, she knew. That was not a man who would turn cloak for nothing; nor was he one to kill for revenge alone.

  It was nearly time to go. A messenger had come that morning from the south, telling of Maynard’s own hard-won victory—her uncle himself had been injured, but he had overcome the Imperial guardsmen and smashed their army in Sorbia as it had attempted to bar him. Duke Rusthöffen had fled the field, disgraced, along with a small assembly of lords, but most of the royalists who had taken the field were now in captivity.

  They had won. Completely and utterly. There was so much gratitude in her heart she thought it might overflow.

  They lingered a while near the center of the camp, where Mauritz’s broad, scarlet tent had once been staked. It was a crumpled ruin now, with a bloody sword still lying in its wake. The general had died an inglorious death. Some said, rather than be captured, and seeing the hopelessness of what had befallen him, the general had fallen on his sword. Charlotte had the inkling it was more stubbornness than that: he would rather die by his own hand than submit to another’s.

  She offered her heart’s most fervent prayer, turned back to Lothen as he prodded a helmet left in the dust. He seemed fascinated by it, probably dreamed of playing knights again with Gerold. As she approached him she smiled, and he looked up at her, suddenly bashful, but she took his hands in hers and knelt before him tenderly.

  “Lothen, do you know what happened here today?”

  “We won!” he said
vigorously.

  Her smile grew. “Yes. But many men died, also. To win you a throne. And because some men simply cannot agree.” She patted his hand, and she could see the flicker of doubt cross his eyes.

  “Lothen, before the eyes of the dead here today, I’d like to make you a promise.”

  “You’ve already made me the only promise you ever need to.” He beamed, and she flushed despite herself. Not at all what she had expected, but it should make the next easier.

  “Lothen, as you look at this field, you are seeing the horrors people are capable of. Horrors I may be capable of.” He started to object, but she silenced him with a look. “Lothen, I may be cruel. I may be mean, I may do things you do not understand—cruel, seemingly terrible things. This is the way of the world. It may happen. I will not stand here and justify them before you, but I will promise you this: I will never lie to you about them. I will always tell you the truth.”

  Chapter 15

  Imperial outriders were a constant hazard on the road north toward Fürlangen. Though the Company had hoped their roundabout manner might have allowed an easier trek there, it became quickly apparent that their path was identical to that which Imperial forces were using in the march to war. When exactly those forces had crossed the border, they could not say, but by the time of their march, signs of the Imperials’ encroachment were everywhere.

  Pitch-stained plumes dotted the sky. Small bands of broken folk huddled around low campfires in the evenings and snarled like cornered bears at anyone else who came too close. Even the unaffected bore the sense of edge—of a building finality they were powerless to escape.

  And they are the sensible ones, Rurik thought, staring out at the weary eyes and bloodstained tunics. At least they have the decency to run from violence.

  More than once they were forced to the brush at the passing of some cavaliers. Others were not always so fortunate. Essa’s ears were their greatest boon in these long days, but even they were little comfort as the clatter of death’s hooves hammered the earth so near to their hidden heads.

  “The place is lost,” a waylaid ferrier proclaimed to them. Deserters had hit him once before, made off with most of his life’s labors. “All the songs and pretty ponders o’ the world don’t change a thing o’ iron—it’s ten leagues, here to Fürlangen, and every one crawling with green cloaks.”

  “No fight?” Chigenda asked.

  “Partsans, or what’s it, they’re crawling the fields. But the army? It’s tucked tail. There’s nothing here. Just boys with a lot to burn.”

  It was only later, as they crouched and crawled through golden fields abandoned in sudden flight, that Chigenda confided, “Dead by dark, that. Weak. Silence breed dis.”

  He meant peace, but only Essa seemed willing to challenge this. Farmers were the backbone of the Empire. People like these soldiers fought abroad so that they could know silence. Peace was the gift dead men won. It was also the condition which made death inevitable.

  “What is life if it is only spent killing?” Essa jabbed.

  That was enough to stop the Zuti. He drank deep of a flask before he replied, “Is steel. And fire. Is…” He spread his arms wide, a dribble of water sloshing from his flask. “Decisive.”

  Marindi, as Chigenda saw them, were petulant children. They warred without mercy or honor. In Zutam, Holy Zutam, fighting was not a price paid for peace, it was the running shape of survival—it was bound into ancient codes and custom, tempered only by exhaustion, and utterly relentless. Even their emperors underwent trials for their thrones, and could be called to ordeals by potential usurpers—though this, the Zuti told them, was not so often.

  “Why not?” Essa asked.

  “Shouldn’t have asked that,” Rurik muttered.

  Chigenda shrugged. “Man wrong? Man liar. Liar need no tongue.”

  But it had a purpose. It all had a purpose. The strongest ruled because he was the best sorted out to help the weak. Not men that made themselves weak, of course, but men whom the world itself had not seen fit to give advantage. All the world was spirits and, though one man might be better than another for a role, no man, for the Zuti, was truly any greater than another. Even their emperor was a first among equals.

  “Cruel is…kill for kill. Or kill for nothing. In Zutam, dis scandal. You kill, make example. Need no kill second. Kill first, mercy second. Not kill, and kill, and kill…”

  The land around them grew more scarred the closer they drew. It also grew less sensible. Outriders ceased to ride ahead of them. Instead, they ran away from them, first a trickle, then a flood. Men on foot followed, and from the way they tittered at any approach, it was not hard to assess a battle lost.

  Then one night, as they watched a gang of the losers squat over a low fire, it was Essa’s turn to titter. She hushed them all, hands to their chests, shaking her head. “There’s a whisper in the woods, and there’s none of it good,” she whispered herself. Chigenda had scouted ahead, and he guided them out of the tangles of the sunken earth, into a short ravine and out again, where the crest of a low hill afforded them a bit more cover and distance from the soldiers.

  In an instant, everything turned to pandemonium. What Essa had heard was the creeping steps of lightly armored men. Only a whistle gave them away to Rurik—and to the soldiers. A single great cry rose up into the air and the men stumbled through the campfire in a panic to get away. It strangled on gruesome screams as the tramping of hooves poured into the clearing the men had staked for their own. Horsemen scattered the fleeing soldiers, swords and axes hacking in all directions. Those who managed to break away and escape found it but a temporary reprieve—solitary horsemen seemed to take it as a game, chasing survivors into the field, to sate their lusts on easy targets.

  Rurik found himself whispering prayers, but either the God was with them, or Chigenda and Essa were, for after they pecked the bodies clean, the riders went on, and the Company was not discovered. Still, they crept out but slowly, and took in the scene by inches.

  “Things have changed,” Rowan observed. “It’s not a march now. It’s cat and mouse.”

  “But what’s it mean?” his cousin asked fearfully.

  No one answered. They weren’t sure how.

  If dead men were currency now, Usteroy was wealthy indeed. It was a farmer that inevitably told Rurik what had happened, but the bodies might have spoken for themselves. For miles outside of the province’s capital, the smell of burning bodies loomed. It was not so dissimilar from the stench the pig farms gave off when the farmers had to burn out contagion. Flesh was flesh in the end, he supposed.

  The smell did the sight no justice, though. Mounds of bodies, more fit for the battlefields of Effise than here in the heartlands of their imperium, lay piled in ditches bordering the fields, most reduced by now to bones, but some still roasting in fires men managed. The Church had no problem with mass funerals, so long as the rites were held. No one ever said a faith had to be completely impractical.

  For all this, Fürlangen appeared not only untouched, but earnestly jubilant. Folk were pouring through the city’s gates in such numbers that the guardsmen made but token shows of enforcement. They had eyes spoiled for trouble, but the hearts of men all the same.

  It was Rowan’s idea to separate. A Zuti in a group was trouble, while alone he was but an oddity. A man with a sword at his hip and a swagger of friends at his sides might be mistaken for a ponderous and quarrelsome nobleman; on his own, he was just another sellsword there to suckle from conflict’s teat. A bloody boy and a lady archer? Plain and simple love, to be sure.

  One by one, the guards waved them through. They met up in the bustling market, where tradesmen were doing their earnest for what was apparently an octet fair, as well as an impromptu holy day. The bells of the cathedral, towering over them all with its spires of granite rock, rang with gusto, and a priest was in the streets shouting the triumph of man over, paradoxically, corrupt ministers. Noblemen, in a rare show, mingled freely with the merc
hants and middleclass, the poor swarmed the lot, and everywhere was color and music and cheer to such enormity one should have been forgiven for thinking a king had just been born.

  Yet in all their journeys, each of them had learned a deeper sight. For Essa and Chigenda, that took a more martial form, and they saw the myriad paths that might yet come, or had already passed. Rurik, hopeless as he might be following footprints through the trees, or picking out men’s taste of flesh, liked to think it was hypocrisy he had come to see through.

  The others saw a celebration, grand as any men could stir. His pessimism cut right through the gloating wonder to the grimmer aspects of that glory: men dangling from gallows just outside the church’s doors, covered in children’s fruit. Above the gates of the city as well there hung a single head, preserved by tar, and though no words lay beneath it, its presence was message enough. An Imperialist leader, he assumed, one whose death spoke for itself. That he faced a traitor’s end now—the simple addition of irony.

  He spat in the street, but the revelers were too far gone to notice.

  There were other cracks in the picture, as they wove their way through the crowded streets. Revelers were the noisiest, but they were not the majority. Most folk seemed content at a day’s rest, or the safety of strong walls. Carts and road-tainted families peppered the streets, and while some were being taken in by the cathedral, or giving citizens, or the already overcrowded inns, many would be condemned to more nights beneath the stars.

  Essa was clearly unsettled by the tightknit mass that greeted their threading march, so Rurik made it a point to get them off the main streets as quick as possible. Some of the alleys, while less colorful or agreeable—even in daylight, there was such a thing as dark alleys by personality—were more removed from the congestion as well, and no one therein was fool enough to tangle with four armed souls on a spur of the moment.