The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

  Thorn was also digesting a feast, but his feast was one of the mind.

  Ser Hartmut came and stood beneath Thorn’s great form. He said nothing, but also watched as men behaved worse than beasts and predators fed.

  The garrison of Ticondaga provided a great deal of sport.

  And eventually, when the attackers were sated, when even Kevin Orley’s warriors sank on their haunches in disgust or shock or merely fatigue, Ash came.

  His presence seemed to fill the yard, and Thorn had the disconcerting notion that the entity was feeding there, too. But he again manifested as a pair of fools, in filthy motley, who spoke with one brass voice.

  “Look at them,” he said. He pointed a stick shaped like a snake at where two sailors, Etruscan mercenaries or Galles, were tormenting a man whose screams had almost been exhausted. “Look at them. Give them license, and they show what they really are.”

  Thorn didn’t turn his head. “What are they, Master?”

  “Worse than anything the Wild ever conjured,” Ash said. “Men are the cruellest and most vile creatures that have ever come to this place. Servants only of their own corruption and wickedness.”

  Thorn did not disagree.

  “One of my other plans has miscarried,” Ash said. “So I must ask you to march sooner, on Dorling.”

  Thorn was still working on the things he’d learned in the moments during and after Ghause’s death. The out-welling of power—the incandescent ops—

  He had learned much. And he was still pulling at some of the twisted ends, even as he wove others into new barriers.

  In fact, Thorn was busy knotting and splicing around the black hole that stood somewhere in his mind. The cascade of thoughts by which he’d reached certain conclusions was hard to reconstruct, but he knew he’d taken some of Ghause’s memories in his unsuccessful attempt to subsume her. One of them had triggered something.

  The black hole in his mind was the same size and shape as the black eggs he carried. It had been put there at the same time, by the same hand.

  For the same reason.

  He was, himself, incubating something. He had an excellent idea of exactly what that was.

  He had begun to take the steps required to deceive his master, and perhaps—to survive.

  And more.

  “One of your plans miscarried?” Thorn asked gravely.

  “I cannot be everywhere,” Ash hissed. “And the bitch Queen and her servants were there before me.” The jesters—shaped like misshapen children with fat bodies and long, thin limbs—both giggled. And spat.

  “Can you not?” Thorn asked, trying to mask his interest. He was weaving a net of the insubstantial stuff in which the mind built the palace, and he was endeavouring to use it to build a deception, so that Ash would see only what he expected.

  Ser Hartmut grunted. “To whom are you speaking, Sorcerer?” he asked.

  Thorn pointed a stony finger. “Do you not see two capering children, dressed in motley?” he asked.

  Ser Hartmut shook his head. “I see many terrible things,” he said. “But no jesters.”

  Thorn considered this.

  Ash said, “No, even I cannot be everywhere. And you must have learned by now how opaque everything becomes—like muddy water—when too many fingers stir it.”

  Thorn considered this statement, too. In his head, his will was madly building, throwing up beaver dams of obfuscation behind thickets of deception between his thinking space and the area around the blackness.

  “It doesn’t matter much,” Ash said. “I’ve out-witted her anyway, and she’s left with her concentration on the wrong moment and the wrong avatar. So the loss of a few pawns—even my favourites—is no great loss.”

  Thorn thought that if the mad jesting twins were, themselves, people, then in fact, Ash was betraying fury, humiliation and loss.

  “Be that as it may,” the darkness said. “It’s time to reveal a little more of our hand and limit the damage. Have you seen this?” Ash asked, and disclosed a nested set of workings, a box within a box within a box.

  The whole was so labyrinthine that Thorn’s head reeled.

  “I had no idea,” he said. “That life was so small.”

  “Small, and wild, all the way down to the smallest,” Ash cackled. “And sometimes the manipulation of the smallest is of the greatest moment. On to Dorling, Journeyman!”

  Thorn listened to the benighted children cackle and thought, He has, somewhere, lost a battle. And he means to betray me. He is not God, nor yet Satan.

  I can do this. Very well.

  “We must march to Dorling,” Thorn said to Ser Hartmut. “As soon as we can.”

  Ser Hartmut chuckled darkly. “Perhaps when all the women are dead and the fires are out, you’ll get this—horde—to move again. My experience is that most creatures, and not just men, take what they can and return home. Most creatures do not see war as a means to an end. It is merely an end.”

  Indeed, over the next day, almost as many creatures of the Wild left his army as joined it. New creatures and bands of men came in every day—Outwallers, bandits, cave trolls, small tribes of boglins under their shamans and many of the bigger creatures, too—a whole flight of wyverns Thorn had never seen before, from far to the north, and a new, strong band of wardens, big, heavily built saurians from north of the Squash Country—hereditary enemies of Mogon’s and her ilk.

  Many of the northern Huran who had come as volunteers left; some in disgust, and some merely because they had good loot, or a captive to adopt or torment.

  Despite the shifting, Thorn’s host was immense, and the loot of Ticondaga could not hold them long. Nor feed them. Hartmut’s men and the sailors made a camp and fortified it, ate from their own stores and refused to share with any but Orley’s warband.

  Orley’s warband were now so well armed and armoured that they appeared a regiment of dark knights with scars and tattoos and deerskin surcoats. Most had heavy bills, or axes, and some carried crossbows as well. Kevin Orley was already a name. Men flocked to his banner now, and he called himself the Earl of Westwall. The armoured fist of the Orleys now floated over the smoking ruins of Ticondaga.

  Ser Hartmut was a good teacher in the ways of war, and Thorn listened to him as he planned. Then he ordered his horde to break up—to feed off a larger swathe of the Adnacrags and to inflict more terror and more damage.

  “Meet me under the Ings of the Wolf’s Head in five days,” he said, his voice like the growl and roar of summer thunder. “And we will take Dorling and feast again.”

  Ser Hartmut organized the men—Galles, sailors, Outwallers, Orley’s warband and all their camp-followers. On their last day at Ticondaga, they were joined—late—by the expected reinforcement from Galle—another hundred lances and a strong company of the routiers with their own captains; Guerlain Capot led the brigans, men as hard and as rough as Orley’s men, and Ser Cristan de Badefol led a hundred Etruscan lances under a black banner. On his armour was the motto “Enemy of God, Mercy and Justice” in gold. It was said he had once been a member of the Order of Saint Thomas.

  As soon as he arrived, he approached Ser Hartmut. They embraced—carefully—and de Badefol examined the ruin of Ticondaga.

  “I told d’Abblemont that you’d take it,” the Etruscan said. “I brought what I could. There’s a lot of shit going on.”

  Ser Hartmut wrinkled his nose fastidiously at de Badefol’s coarseness.

  “Oh, don’t be a choirboy,” de Badefol said. “Just before we left port we heard that the King of Galle had been badly beaten in southern Arelat. There’s a rumour up in Three Rivers—since a pair of Etruscan merchants came in—that the Etruscans have asked the Emperor for help, it’s so bad.” De Badefol watched a wyvern taking flight off the water—its great, slow, laboured wings brushing the water at every stretch so that, as it lifted into the grey morning air of the mountains, its wings left a succession of perfectly round spreads of ripples. After sixteen great heaves of its wings it w
as airborne—just clearing the distant tree line across the lake, where Chimney Point came down from the Green Hills’ side. “By God, Ser Hartmut, I rejoice to see that we are directly in league with the forces of Satan. I’ve always been a devotee.”

  “You speak much nonsense and little wisdom, my friend.”

  “Does d’Abblemont know we are supporting the very side that makes war on the King in Galle and Arelat?” de Badefol asked.

  “I care nothing for that,” Ser Hartmut growled. “I have orders, and I obey them, until they are complete.”

  De Badefol nodded. “How very simple,” he said. “Well, my bravos will probably take a few days to—Black Angels of Hell, what is that?”

  A few yards away, a pair of boglins emerged from the ground. They had bored through the earth, as they did when it was soft, and now appeared within the human encampment. In moments they’d caught a goat and begun to devour her.

  Ser Hartmut drew his sword, which burst into flame. He killed both of the boglins, the sword slicing effortlessly through their carcasses and leaving them in the same unjointed state to which they had rendered the goat.

  Within seconds, carrion birds began to descend.

  “Where the fuck am I?” de Badefol asked.

  “This is the Wild,” Ser Hartmut said. “Best get used to it. Here, one is either predator, or food.”

  Sixty miles east of Dorling, the Emperor mounted his horse, took his helmet from the junior spatharios, Derkensun, and his sword from the senior, Guntar Grossbeak, and rode to his officers, gathered to review his magnificent army. Derkensun was still unsure of his rank, cautious in ceremonial. Grossbeak—tall and with fading copper hair and the biggest nose of any man Derkensun had ever met, was a lord, a Jarl. From home. He had no experience in the guard—but a great name as a killer.

  Derkensun liked him, but he was a symptom of the imperial army’s greatest problem—too many new men.

  The Emperor’s army broke camp and marched in a damp dawn. The Meander flowed on their right and to the south, the outposts of the Green Hills rolled away into long downs, some crowned with ancient hill forts, complex rings of earth, and some with standing cairns so ancient that no man remembered who had built them.

  The Emperor watched the head of his army, guarded today by his Nordikaans, each carrying a great axe or a long-bladed two-handed sword, and wearing hauberks to their knees or below—some of steel, some of dull iron, some of bronze. Many of the Nordikaans now sported Etruscan or Alban breastplates over their maille, and some wore the new-style bascinets with maille aventails to pad the axed hafts on their shoulders. Almost every man had acquired full plate leg armour since last year’s bloody victory in Thrake. But the magnificent cloaks on their shoulders were the same, and many helmets glinted gold in the rising sun.

  Behind the Emperor’s person, today, rode the Scholae, the elite cavalry of Morea, with horn bows scabbarded by their sides and coats of plates or steel scale over light maille, with gold brocade surcoats and billed helmets, new made in distant Venezia from hardened steel. Each troop of the Scholae rode matched horses; black in the first troop, bay in the second, and grey in the third. The scarlet-clad Vardariotes were already far ahead, moving across the hills in a nearly invisible skirmish line that covered the front and both flanks of the column.

  Behind the Scholae rode two regiments of the Emperor’s stradiotes—his semi-feudal cavalry; the men of southern Morea and the men of the city. The northern Morea and Thrake would need a generation to recover from treason, stasis, and battle. But already since last year the stradiotes had changed in armament, and more of them rode larger horses and had heavier armour—made available at very favourable prices by the Etruscan factors.

  Behind the stradiotes came a banda of mountaineers from the slopes between Alba and the Empire—tall, strong men and women with heavy javelins and heavier bows. They wore no armour at all beyond skull caps of iron. Many carried small round targets, but none had a knife longer than his forearm. The mountaineers had their own officers, bearded men on small ponies, and they marched quickly enough to keep up with the horsemen.

  Behind them came a banda of Outwallers from south Huran, around Orawa, the extreme northern outposts of the Empire. They had come south to Middleburg and many had already shadowed the hosts of the sorcerer. Janos Turkos rode at their head, smoking. They kept no sort of order and sometimes left the column altogether.

  Last, in the rearguard, came Ser Milus, with the company’s great banner of Saint Catherine, and with him rode Morgan Mortirmir and fully half of the company, and perhaps half again—Ser Milus had been busy recruiting.

  All totalled, the Emperor had five thousand seasoned veterans to march to war in the north. If he was worried, his beautiful, bland face gave none of that away.

  The army cheered him, and then turned, almost as one man, and moved off to the west.

  Morgon Mortirmir had enjoyed a pleasant semester polishing his skills—really just a few weeks—before the Emperor’s messenger and Ser Milus’s had collided on his inn’s stairs summoning him to war. But he’d learned some fascinating things, and he’d used the first ten days out of Liviapolis on the road to work them into practical designs.

  One was a simple hermetical device the size of a tinderbox that allowed a scout, when he pressed a stud, to make a string vibrate on another box held by another scout up to a league or more away. It was imperfect still and Morgon was sure it could be “sensed” in the aethereal, but it put in the Emperor’s hand the ability to see over the next ridge as surely as his scouts could travel there. Morgon had concocted a dozen other devices—most of them intended to protect the column against spies, as the captain had warned him.

  Some of them even worked.

  The only outward show was that insects had a very hard time indeed getting close to the column, in camp or out of it—a side effect that delighted the soldiers and made Morgon outstandingly popular with the company.

  Morgon was musing on the possibilities of a code—something simple—perhaps easily changed—for his communication devices. He had only made six of them—each one took more than a day of work and more than a day of his potentia. Ser Milus and Proconsularis Vlad, the acting commander of the Vardariotes, both requested more devices each day.

  The master board—really, an old lute hermetically re-worked to respond directly to impulses from the aethereal—began to emit the notes that meant “alarm.”

  “Some kind of attack coming in,” he said tersely. The language of the impulses was still too limited.

  Ser Milus gave an order, and the great red company standard was waved back and forth.

  Immediately, the column began to deploy. Morgon was far towards the back, well located to see the mountaineers struggling to spread out to the south, looking for cover—the Outwallers running down the banks of the Meander to the north on the same errand, each block covering one of the column’s flanks.

  The wyverns came in from the south. They were wary—they flew very low. Given how close they all were to the Circle of the Wyrm, Morgon was surprised that they dared at all.

  There were a dozen of them—sleek shapes that flew along the edge of the hills to the south and west of them. Without the warning they’d have caught the whole column in march order, but instead, every archer had an arrow to his string.

  But the leader of the wyverns was old, canny, and had much experience of men. And his instructions had been admirably precise. He circled to the east, his own band riding the same drafts he did, well closed up against being located too fast. They circled the last hill and swung out across the valley of the Meander, and Morgon saw the company archers begin lofting arrows—some men loosed far too early, but most of the archers were veterans, not just of war but of this war, and held their shafts.

  From the baggage near the rear of the army, crossbow bolts flew.

  The great winged creatures banked, coming in along the axis of the column and manoeuvring in the still air to make themselves po
orer targets.

  The company—deployed to the right and left of the baggage—raised their bows almost together as Smoke chanted ranges—and loosed.

  A brave and untried young wyvern crumpled under forty heavy impacts and crashed to earth, bouncing once and ploughing a furrow in the sandy soil until its corpse crashed into a wagon whose oxen were still harnessed. The oxen rolled their eyes and bolted heavily, passing along and then through the archers’ line on the left of the road.

  Two more wyverns fell victim to their hate and their feeding desires, disobeyed their chieftain and attacked the disordered archers. In heartbeats, Jack Kaves was dead, and his partner Slacker, and a dozen more archers were wounded and down.

  Ser George Brewes bellowed and lashed out with his long spear, and Ser Giovanni Gentile stood by him. One of the younger wyverns took a deep thrust under his neck and powered himself into the air, but the other stayed to fight, and armoured men and women struck it from every side until it crumpled. Tippit and Half-Arse put goose feathers in a third monster, and then the survivors were banking away.

  The trailing, wounded beast had trouble getting altitude, and the Vardariotes killed her, riding at breakneck speed under the stricken thing and loosing arrows straight up into her guts until she fell.

  The men and women of the company pulled the dead horrors off the baggage wagons, and noted that their talons were smeared in a sticky black mess. Master Mortirmir was summoned, and took samples. It was obviously hermetical, but Morgon couldn’t see what it was for—it wasn’t a poison.

  Morgon thought the whole incident a display of the enemy’s foolish vanity—four wyverns was a poor return for two baggage wagons and six dead archers, if considered coldly.

  It was hard to consider coldly. They buried the men and the two women who’d died with the baggage, crossbows in hand, and then they drove on. The column marched until noon.

  And then, suddenly, horses began to die.

  There was no warning. Among the company, it was horses with the baggage that went down first. Almost a dozen in the first minute, black froth coming from their nostrils.