Elemental

by Steven Savile

  Kade held out a hand, took a slow breath, tasting the aether carefully. There was nothing, no wards that would set off nasty spells if she touched the doorsill. She took the last step forward and leaned in the doorway, saying, “Now what do you need this mess for?”

  Devereux turned, his smile slow and triumphant. His doublet and shirt were open across his chest and she saw again that he was a very attractive man. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  She added that smile to what she knew of sorcerers and thought so this room is warded. She tested the aether again and felt the tug of the spell this time. Damn. She hadn’t felt it outside because it wasn’t set to stop her from entering the room; it was set to stop her from leaving. Idiot. Overconfidence and impatience will kill you without any help from Devereux. She didn’t like stepping into his trap, but she still thought her power was more than equal to this mortal sorcerer’s. If he struck at her directly, he would find that out. She smiled back, making it look easy. “I’ve only just gotten here and you’re lying already.”

  His expression stiffened.

  “You bound a glaistig and killed an old potter in the village you know by tradition I consider my property. Simply to get my attention. But you expected me not to take the bait and appear? Really, that makes you something of a fool, doesn’t it?”

  Devereux lifted a brow. “I misspoke. I didn’t think you would come tonight, since you were occupied with your musician.”

  “I see.” She nodded mock-complacently. “Jealousy, and we’ve only just met. Did it ever occur to you that all I had to do was point you out to the villagers, explain how you used the glaistig to kill the old potter, and this house would be burning down around your ears now?”

  He laughed. “And I thought your loyalty to these people was as fickle as that of the rest of the fay. I didn’t realize you were so virtuous.”

  Kade lifted a cool brow, though for some reason the jibe about loyalty had hit home. “My loyalty is fickle, but at least they gave me fruit and flowers. What did you ever do for me?”

  “I have an offer for you.” Devereux took a step forward. “You could benefit from an alliance with me.”

  “Benefit?” She rolled her eyes. “I repeat, what did you ever do for me?”

  “It’s what I can do for you. I can give you revenge.”

  This was new. No one had ever offered that before. Kade watched his calm face carefully, intrigued. “Revenge on whom?”

  “The court, the king. The tricks you play on them, however deadly, aren’t worthy of you. With my help, and the help of others that I know—”

  “You want to use me against my royal relatives,” Kade shook her head, disappointed, and added honestly, “It’s an audacious plan, I’ll willingly give you that much. No man’s had the courage to suggest such a thing to me before.”

  His face had hardened and she knew it had been a long time since anyone had refused him anything. “But it is not to your taste, I take it.”

  Kade shrugged. “If I really wanted to kill my mortal brother I could have done it before now. What I want to do is make him and his mother suffer, and I don’t think you or your supporters would agree to that. And as soon as I wasn’t useful to you anymore one of you would try to kill me, then I’d have to kill one or more of you, and the whole mess would fall apart.” She hesitated, and for some reason, perhaps because he was so comely, said, “If you had approached me as a friend, it could have been different. Perhaps we could have worked something out to serve your end.”

  But from his angry expression he didn’t recognize it as the offer it was, or he felt it was a lie or a trap. Maybe it was, Kade admitted to herself. Maybe what she really wanted was something else entirely, something Devereux simply hadn’t the character to offer her.

  “I suggest you reconsider,” Devereux said, his voice harsh.

  She said dryly, “I suggest you stick to sorcery and leave politics to those with the talent for it.”

  He stepped back, giving her a thin-lipped smile. “You can’t leave. This room is warded with a curse. If you break the barrier, the creature that loves you most in the world will die.”

  Relieved, Kade laughed at him as she slipped out the door. Fay didn’t love each other, and there was no mortal left from her childhood who didn’t want to see her dead. He had chosen this spell badly. “Curse away. I’ve nothing to lose.”

  “I think you have!” Kade heard him call after her as she ran through the tall grass. As she came around the side of the house there was a shout. Ahead in the darkness she saw moving figures and the glow from the slow match of a musket. She swore and ducked.

  The musket thundered and there was a sharp crack as the ball struck the stone wall behind her. If they hit me with that thing, Kade thought desperately, we’re all going to find out just how human I am. The musket balls were cold iron, and her fay magic could do nothing to them.

  But that protection didn’t extend to the gunpowder inside the musket. She covered her head with her arms and muttered the spell she had considered using on Warrender in the inn.

  There was an explosion and a scream as someone’s wheel lock pistol went off, then a dozen little popping sounds as the scattered grains of powder from the musket’s blast ignited.

  Kade scrambled to her feet. The grass near the gate had caught fire and she was forgotten in the face of that immediate threat. She ran to the back wall with its loose bricks and crumbling mortar and climbed it easily. At the top she paused and looked back. In the glow of the grass fire she could see Devereux walking back and forth, shouting at the servants in angry frustration. Revenge against her royal relatives would have been sweet. But it would never have worked, not with him, anyway, she thought with a grimace. Too bad.

  It was barely dawn when she reached the inn, and through the windows she could see that candles had been lit in the common room. From just outside the door she thought there was more noise than seemed normal at this hour, especially after last night’s drinking bout.

  When she stepped inside, she heard a woman say, “Must have died in his sleep, poor thing.”

  The morning was well advanced when Kade waited for the Glaistig beneath a bent aging willow in a stretch of forest near the river.

  It dropped a lock of golden hair into Kade’s palm.

  “Did he notice?” Kade asked, looking up at the creature.

  The glaistig’s eyes were limpid, innocent. “I did it while he slept.”

  “Very good.” She should have treated Devereux’s curse with more caution, she had said that to herself a hundred times over the rest of the long night. And you should have known. All those brave stories Giles had told of her, his audacity in coming here to find her should have said it plainly enough. She had also said that she didn’t care, but no amount of repetition could make a lie the truth. Giles knew I was dangerous company to keep. Yes, he knew, but he had kept it anyway. And that made it all the worse.

  She added the hair to a small leather pouch prepared with apricot stones and the puss from a plague sore, then sat down on a fallen log to sew it up with the small neat stitches she had learned as a child.

  “The sorcerer was lovely,” the glaistig said regretfully, watching her.

  “He was lovely,” Kade agreed. “And cunning, like me. And I would trade a hundred of both of us to know that one unlovely ballad singer was still alive somewhere in the world.”

  Kade left Riversee after that. She had thought to stay to see the result of her handiwork but she had discovered that knowing was enough.

  Gray clouds were building for a storm, and she might have summoned one of the many flighted creatures of fayre and ridden the wind with it, but she had also discovered that she preferred to walk the dusty road. Some things had lost their pleasure.

  The Day of Glory

  BY DAVID DRAKE

  David Drake has written or cowritten more than fifty books and edited or coedited more than thirty. He is the author of the Isles series of fantasy novels (beginning
with Lord of the Isles) and the science fiction RCN series (beginning with With the Lightnings), but he is most well known as the creator of the futuristic military unit Hammer’s Slammers.

  The Hammer’s Slammers series began as a collection of short stories published in 1979, each with a sophisticated military background that drew heavily on Drake’s own experiences while serving in the United States Army in Vietnam and Cambodia. The series has continued over the last twenty-seven years in the form of novels, novellas, and short stories. The pieces in the Hammer series are (with only a very few exceptions) self-standing and in no particular order. In addition, there are very few continuing characters. Drake feels this is a benefit. “A reader who never heard of me or the series should be able to read ‘The Day of Glory’ with understanding as complete as that of someone who’s read every story I’ve written.”

  David Drake lives in North Carolina.

  The locals had turned down the music from the sound truck while the bigwigs from the capital were talking to the crowd, but it was still playing. “I heard that song before,” Trooper Lahti said, frowning. “But that was back on Icky Nose, two years ago. Three!”

  “Right,” said Platoon Sergeant Buntz, wishing he’d checked the fit of his dress uniform before he put it on for this bloody rally. He’d gained weight during the month he’d been on medical profile for tearing up his leg. “You hear it a lot at this kinda deal. La Marseillaise. It goes all the way back to Earth.”

  This time it was just brass instruments, but Buntz’s memory could fill in, “Arise, children of the fatherland! The day of glory has arrived … .” Though some places they changed the words a bit.

  “Look at the heroes you’ll be joining!” boomed the amplified voice of the blond woman gesturing from the waist-high platform. She stood with other folks in uniform or dress clothes on what Buntz guessed in peacetime was the judges’ stand at the county fair. “When you come back in a few months after crushing the rebels, the cowards who stayed behind will look at you the way you look at our allies, Hammer’s Slammers!”

  Buntz sucked in his gut by reflex, but he knew it didn’t matter. For this recruitment rally he and his driver wore tailored uniforms with the seams edged in dark blue, but the yokels saw only the tank behind them. Herod, H42, was a veteran of three deployments and more firefights than Buntz could remember without checking the Fourth Platoon log.

  The combat showed on Herod’s surface. The steel skirts enclosing her plenum chamber were not only scarred from brush-busting but patched in several places where projectiles or energy weapons had penetrated. A two-meter section had been replaced on Icononzo, the result of a fifty-kilo directional mine. Otherwise the steel was dull red except where the rust had worn off.

  Herod’s hull and turret had taken an even worse beating; the iridium armor there turned all the colors of the spectrum when heated. A line of rainbow dimples along the rear compartment showed where a flechette gun—also on Icononzo—had wasted ammo, but it was on Humboldt that a glancing 15-cm powergun bolt had flared a banner across the bow slope.

  If the gunner from Greenwood’s Archers had hit Herod squarely, the tank would’ve been for the salvage yard and Lahti’s family back on Leminkainan would’ve been told that she’d been cremated and interred where she fell.

  Actually Lahti’d have been in the salvage yard too, since there wouldn’t be any way to separate what was left of the driver from the hull. You didn’t tell families all the details. They wouldn’t understand anyway.

  “Look at our allies, my fellow citizens!” the woman called. She was a newsreader from the capital station, Buntz’d been told. The satellites were down now, broadcast as well as surveillance, but her face’d be familiar from before the war even here in the boonies. “Hammer’s Slammers, the finest troops in the galaxy! And look at the mighty vehicle they’ve brought to drive the northern rebels to surrender or their graves. Join them! Join them or forever hang your head when a child asks you, ‘Grampa, what did you do in the war?’”

  “They’re not really joining the Regiment, are they, Top?” Lahti said, frowning again. The stocky woman’d progressed from being a fair driver to being a bloody good soldier. Buntz planned to give her a tank of her own the next time he had an opening. She worried too much, though, and about the wrong things.

  “Right now they’re just tripwires,” Buntz said. “Afterwards, sure, we’ll probably take some of ’em, after we’ve run ’em through newbie school.”

  He paused, then added, “The Feds’ve hired the Holy Brotherhood. They’re light dragoons mostly, but they’ve got tank destroyers with 9-cm main guns. I don’t guess we’ll mop them up without somebody buying the farm.”

  He wouldn’t say it aloud, even with none of the locals close enough to hear him, but he had to agree with Lahti that Placidus farmers didn’t look like the most hopeful material. Part of the trouble was that they were wearing their fanciest clothes today. The feathers, ribbons, and reflecting bangles that passed for high fashion here in Quinta County would’ve made the toughest troopers in the Slammers look like a bunch of dimwits. It didn’t help that half of ’em were barefoot, either.

  The county governor, the only local on the platform, took the wireless microphone. “Good friends and neighbors!” he said and stopped to wheeze. He was a fat man with a weather-beaten face, and his suit was even tighter than Buntz’s dress uniform.

  “I know we in Quinta County don’t need to be bribed to do our duty,” he resumed, “but our generous government is offering a lavish prepayment of wages to those of you who join the ranks of the militia today. And there’s free drinks in the refreshment tents for all those who kiss the book!”

  He made a broad gesture. Nearly too broad; he almost went off the edge of the crowded platform onto his nose. His friends and neighbors laughed. One young fellow in a three-cornered hat called, “Why don’t you join, Jeppe? You can stop a bullet and save the life of somebody who’s not bloody useless!”

  “What do they mean, ‘kiss the book’?” Lahti asked. Then, wistfully, she added, “I don’t suppose we could get a drink ourself?”

  “We’re on duty, Lahti,” Buntz said. “And I guess they kiss the book because they can’t write their names, a lot of them. You see that in this sorta place.”

  “March, march!” the sound truck played. “Let impure blood water our furrows!”

  It was hotter’n Hell’s hinges, what with the white sun overhead and its reflection from the tank behind them. The iridium’d burn ’em if they touched it when they boarded to drive back to H Company’s laager seventy klicks away. At least they didn’t have to spend the night in this Godforsaken place … .

  Buntz could use a drink too. There were booths all around the field. Besides them, boys circulated through the crowd with kegs on their backs and metal tumblers chained to their waists. It’d be rotgut, but he’d been in the Slammers thirteen years. He guessed he’d drunk worse and likely much worse than what was on offer in Quinta County.

  But not a drop till he and Lahti stopped being a poster to recruit cannon fodder for the government paying for the Regiment’s time. Being dry was just part of the job.

  The Placidan regular officer with the microphone was talking about honor and what pushovers the rebels were going to be. Buntz didn’t doubt that last part; if the Fed troops were anything like what he’d seen of the Government side, they were a joke for sure.

  But the Holy Brotherhood was another thing entirely. Vehicle for vehicle they couldn’t slug it out with the Slammers, but they were division-sized and bloody well trained.

  Besides, they were all mounted on air cushion vehicles. The Slammers won more of their battles by mobility than by firepower, but this time their enemy would move even faster than they did.

  “Suppose he’s ever been shot at?” Lahti said, her lip curling at the guy who spoke. She snorted. “Maybe by his girlfriend, hey? Though dolled up like he is, he prob’ly has boyfriends.”

  Buntz grinned. “Don’t
let it get to you, Lahti,” he said. “Listening to blowhards’s a lot better business than having the Brotherhood shoot at us. Which is what we’ll be doing in a couple weeks or I miss my bet.”

  While the Placidan officer was spouting off, a couple of men had edged to the side of the platform to talk to the blond newsreader. The blonde snatched the microphone back and cried, “Look here, my fellow citizens! Follow your patriotic neighbors Andreas and Adolpho deCastro as they kiss the book and drink deep to their glorious future!”

  The officer yelped and tried to grab the microphone; the newsreader blocked him neatly with her hip, slamming him back. Buntz grinned; this was the blonde’s court, but he guessed she’d also do better in a firefight than the officer would. Though he might beat her in a beauty contest … .

  The blonde jumped from the platform, then put an arm around the waist of each local to waltz through the crowd to the table set up under Herod’s bow slope. The deCastros looked like brothers or anyway first cousins, big rangy lunks with red hair and moustaches that flared into their sideburns.

  The newsreader must’ve switched off the microphone because none of her chatter to one man, then the other, was being broadcast. The folks on the platform weren’t going to use the mike to upstage her, that was all.

  “Rise and shine, Trooper Lahti,” Buntz muttered out of the side of his mouth as he straightened. The Placidan clerk behind the table rose to his feet and twiddled the book before him. It was thick and bound in red leather, but what was inside was more than Buntz knew. Maybe it was blank.

  “Who’ll be the first?” the blonde said to the fellow on her right. She’d cut the mike on again. “Adolpho, you’ll do it, won’t you? You’ll be the first to kiss the book, I know it!”