Cold Iron (Masters & Mages)

by Miles Cameron

  Aranthur felt the pain in his own neck, and the cold, and he went down on one knee. He was afraid to touch his neck. His vision tunnelled, and he could see the Westerner flopping in the muck.

  Then there were hands in his armpits and a cold hand on his neck.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Lecne said. ‘Blessed Sun!’

  ‘Nothing?’ he asked.

  His heartbeat was calming. He had some control of himself. His vision returned. His gorge went down. He pushed himself to his feet, shaking off the hands on him. Blood was flowing down his naked torso.

  Da Silva was losing blood at the rate of a dying deer in a winter hunt.

  And the men in the yard were letting him die. Even the magister.

  Aranthur focused. His earlier clarity was shredded, and he sought it again – that hyper-awareness.

  ‘Hold him,’ he shouted.

  The sun was rising and he reached out to it for comfort and power.

  ‘Stand away,’ the magister said, misunderstanding. ‘You are the winner, but he cannot defend—’

  ‘Hold him,’ Aranthur said, in something of his namesake’s voice of power.

  He struggled for his ritual – and once he found the peace of his words, he struggled the harder for his trance, and under his right hand, the man was dying. The dying soaked into him like blood, and he couldn’t make it through the mud and blood to the calm place where magik lay. He tried image after image …

  He sighed, opened his eyes, and was looking directly into the sun as it crested the distant eastern horizon, a perfect ball of red gold.

  In a single exhalation, he had his trance and made his working. He didn’t know how to knit muscle and bone. But he did know how to tell the skin and muscle to forbid the flow of blood, and he so ordered his opponent’s body, and it obeyed.

  He took a deep breath. It felt right. He opened his eyes, and then he was kneeling in the snow and blood, utterly spent.

  Lecne helped him up, and he saw they were carrying the Westerner inside. The magister was standing with his hands on his hips.

  Aranthur couldn’t make himself smile. Or say anything witty.

  The storm hit later that day, but the first Aranthur knew of it was waking in the same bed he’d awoken in three weeks before. Just for a moment he was at a loss – with no memory of the passage of time.

  Lecne was sitting by the bed this time, sipping chai from a steaming cup. Outside the narrow window, snow fell as if there were mischievous Dhadhi sitting on the roof dumping the stuff from baskets.

  ‘I want to come to the City and learn to be a swordsman,’ Lecne said. ‘But my mother and father refuse me.’ He shrugged. ‘Sun Rising, you were – something. I think even my sister is in love with you.’

  Aranthur lay there for a long, long moment, and realised that he was alive. It was snowing outside, so the storm had come – the storm he thought he might not live to see.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, unable to find words to express it all. ‘Oh, Lecne, I was a fool.’ Then, rising on his elbow, he said, ‘How’s the Westerner – Da Silva?’

  ‘Asleep,’ Lecne said. ‘And good riddance.’

  An hour later, dressed and bandaged, Aranthur went down to the common room, where he found the Voltain playing dice with the magister.

  Aranthur bowed.

  ‘Happy to see you in health,’ he said.

  The Voltain laughed grimly. ‘I’ve had worse from students. So I have to live to enjoy my defeat.’ He nodded pleasantly. ‘That’s all right – I’m old enough to accept defeat.’

  The magister rose and gave Aranthur a small bow.

  ‘The victor,’ he said, his usual mirthless smile coming to his lips.

  Aranthur managed to laugh. In fact, it was quite spontaneous.

  ‘I don’t feel like a victor,’ he allowed. ‘What happened? He certainly hit me.’ He touched the bandage at his throat.

  The magister nodded. ‘A finger’s width more on target, and you’d have been dead before you struck the ground,’ he said. ‘As it was, he thrust past you and sliced your neck with his miss. And as he never actually troubled to parry your blow – hah! Had you cut for his neck and not his shoulder, I think you might have beheaded him. Even as it is, he may lose the arm.’

  ‘But he’s alive,’ the Voltain said.

  The magister sat back, putting his legs in front of the fire.

  ‘I spent half a year putting this match together, and now I have nothing to show for it.’ His eyes flicked from one to the other. ‘But I have other competitors in mind.’

  The Voltain nodded. ‘I wonder if you are looking for teachers, Magister? Because I am out of a job in Volta. The small matter of a revolution.’

  The magister nodded. ‘I could find you a place, I expect.’ He looked at Aranthur. ‘I would take you as a student, if you were interested.’

  Aranthur felt himself flush.

  ‘I would be delighted,’ he said. ‘But I really must attend my studies.’

  The magister’s lips trembled, as if he was withholding a smile.

  ‘I might find time to teach you anyway,’ he said.

  But Aranthur remembered the fear as well as the elation. And he thought I’m not sure I ever want to do that again. But he’d developed enough wisdom to avoid burning bridges.

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ he said with a bow.

  Although the trip from the City to his home had taken him almost nine days and a sea voyage around Cape Athos and past the isle of Lenos, the ride back took only six. And everything about the trip was different. On the way out before Darknight, he’d worked passage on a small trader, a lugger with a lateen sail who moved along the edge of the main island, based on the port of Lonika. After days of working passage, he’d walked.

  The route back was more expensive in every way. He rode the Nessan and led the bigger horse as a pack animal, and the two horses ate more than he did, rapidly biting deep into the money he’d kept. By the time he rode through the gates of Lonika, he knew he’d made a mistake in keeping them both; he lacked the baggage to pack, and the extra cost would defeat him.

  On the other hand, entering Lonika was very different from leaving it. There were guards in old armour, the rust of the metal in their brigantines staining the cloth covering and fraying away in places so that they looked as if they had some armoured mange. But they were deeply respectful to a man in a doublet riding a fine horse. No one asked for a writ about his sword or even the conical case on his saddle bow. Rasce carried the clothing malle. When he left by the Megara Gate the next morning, the guards were just as respectful and just as negligent, although one mentioned, with a casual salute, that there were ‘thieves and highwaymen’ on the road.

  ‘Arnaut bastards,’ the guard said.

  Aranthur took the advice seriously despite the insult. He rode carefully, watching the spruce-clad hills on either side. He was much lower than he had been on the Amynas River, and there was no snow here, unless you looked deep under the trees. The hills were high, and a dusting of snow showed on the highest trees. The landscape was beautiful; the rocky hills were stark above the trees all the way to the grey sky.

  Aranthur kept his eyes down, on the trees either side of the ancient military road. In the Empire, most cargo went by ship; few places in the Great Archipelago were more than three days from the sea, at least in the south. So the military road was just wide enough for two wagons of the standard military weight to pass each other – stone sided, with a kerb stone all along the length, well maintained. The Empire had endless civil wars, but between fighting Atti and the Iron Circle and each other, the standing regiments maintained by the Emperor were used for road maintenance.

  This road was well maintained. The verges were cut back the regulation twenty paces on either hand – a broad expanse of grass that allowed drovers to move herds of cattle along the roads, and feed them too.

  At first it rained. The winter rain fell like misery, and Aranthur was wet through, and Ariadne was unhappy and skit
tish.

  Aranthur saw other men on the road, and a few women. The women were farm wives returning from an early morning market, with empty baskets on their heads and voluminous straw capes that made them look like bundles of wet gold. The men were mostly farmers, although after the rain had stopped and the winter sun emerged, he passed a trio of soldiers in padded coats and tight breeches, using an instrument to measure something. If Aranthur had not been pressed for time, he might have stayed to watch them. Geometry interested him, and he suspected that they were making a map, a very new science from the East. At the Academy, they said the technique and the mathematics came from Zhou.

  He passed more women. They were laughing, their straw cloaks rolled on their pack-baskets. One gave him a long look as he trotted by, and another whistled. Aranthur blushed.

  He was still trying to imagine just how the tripod helped the soldiers take observations when he saw movement in the woods and a flash of metal. He immediately glanced back, but the soldiers were far out of sight, over a rise, the party of women well around the last curve.

  He was alone on the road.

  In turning, he gave contradictory orders to his horse. Ariadne wasn’t used to such an inexperienced rider, although she was a joy to ride. When his weight shifted and he looked back, she turned, following his eyes. So, without intending, he turned a complete circle. Rasce, confused, followed them, but then tugged sharply at the leading rein, pulling free from Aranthur’s hand as he put his hands down to hold on. Afraid of losing his seat, he leant forward.

  By leaning forward, he told the little mare to go faster. Jolted by Ariadne’s explosion of speed, he nonetheless leant over her neck. He had ridden before, but never such a well-trained horse.

  She was at a gallop in ten strides, her neck stretched out, and Aranthur held on, his fingers in her mane as she raced along the road. He saw a pair of men on horses erupt from the tree line, and then they were behind him. It never occurred to him to draw his sword, or the fusil. It was all he could do to stay on Ariadne as she raced away, her steel-shod feet raising sparks on the road behind him. He looked back, his fear of the brigands greater than his fear of falling off. At least, he had to assume that they were brigands – they were big men on nags, with rusty weapons.

  One was just putting a crossbow to his shoulder. Aranthur saw the man – saw his attention, his stillness, the gleaming tip of the bolt in the winter sun. But he didn’t see it loosed, and it didn’t hit him or Ariadne, and then he was flowing along the road like a ship in a good wind. The brigands were already slowing. There were only two of them. They shouted to each other, or so it appeared; they waved.

  Rasce was right behind him, galloping heavily along the road without a lead rein, simply following the other horse. Aranthur’s muscles began to relax. His fear was fading with every pace they left the outlaws behind. He sat back and Ariadne immediately slowed. In thirty more paces he had her reins taut, and he was able to pull her in, regain control, and slow her to an even walk.

  She wasn’t even breathing hard, despite her small size.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘are a fine horse.’

  Ariadne snorted.

  Rasce let rip a fart, as if to suggest that the same might not be true of the rider.

  ‘I know,’ Aranthur said. ‘I have a lot to learn.’

  He thought of the Select Militia. They served mounted and he had just received a lesson in humility; he wasn’t as good a rider as he had thought. He whistled, looking back. The two men were riding for the trees.

  Aranthur turned his mare and watched them.

  The women, the farmers, the farm wives, and the soldiers. Aranthur included the last because they had had no weapons that he’d seen. All of them would come past here.

  Didn’t they deserve to be warned?

  Aranthur cursed. It was an odd moment. He knew that if he turned and rode for the City, he was one sort of man; if he turned back, another sort. And yet, the odds were that the farmers were safe enough – three men with cudgels. The women might be at risk, but they might not come until night. The younger women had nothing to steal, but Aranthur was not naïve about what happened to women caught alone by bad men.

  He might die if he went back.

  On the other hand, he had a rifled fusil and a sword. He was probably better armed than the bandits.

  If they were even bandits.

  He tried to work out what else they might be, but the man had, without a doubt, loosed a bolt at him with deadly intent. That clinched it – and Aranthur was mature enough to admit that he was angry at being shot at. Vengeful, even. Which was stupid; he’d survived. But he wanted …

  It was a little like the moment when he accepted the swordsman’s challenge. He opened the top of the fusil’s holster and took the weapon in his right hand. Then he put it back.

  First things first. He dismounted and walked over to Rasce, who was quite calmly cropping grass, which seemed to be his sole interest in life. Aranthur hobbled him, which he accepted meekly enough. Then he took his sword off his baggage and strapped it to his saddle where it would ride, hilt up, under his left thigh. He had no idea whether he could draw it in combat, and when he had mounted, he tried.

  More humility. Ariadne was patient, but the sword was very difficult to draw. It was straight, and long, and it took him some fiddling to find that he could only really draw it across his body, to the right. He could imagine the result of pricking his mount during the draw.

  This all seemed insane. At least as insane as fighting a duellist in a duel.

  Rasce ate more grass.

  Aranthur pointed Ariadne at the edge of the woods, on the side from which the bandits had emerged, and let her pick her way across the soft grass of the verge. She was too sweet tempered to stop and crop grass, but she wanted to, and her eyes kept going to it. He gathered her a little to keep her eyes on the trees, and suddenly they were trotting.

  He sat back and she walked. They were right at the edge of the big spruce trees now, and he turned her between the tall trees. The pine needles were deep, and the undergrowth mostly dead, and Ariadne had no trouble working her way along the slope.

  It was hard to gauge how far he’d gone, but after a while, Aranthur drew his fusil and looked at the priming in the pan. He balanced the butt of the thing on his right thigh and watched the hillside like a bird of prey, his head turning back and forth, his heart hammering in his chest.

  The mare was very quiet. It was surprisingly cold under the eaves of the wood, and the spruce needles were deep.

  He came to a ravine that had been invisible from the road. He let Ariadne go up the ravine a few paces, but he was not a good enough rider to cross mounted, and he paused to reconsider the entire expedition. The idea of taking on the robbers, which out on the road had seemed wiser than trying to pass them again, now seemed very foolish indeed. It was cold and still in the woods.

  Cold as the grave.

  But even while his head whirled with doubts, he dismounted. Then, cautious as a deer in wolf country, he led Ariadne down a steep slope into the ravine. There was a tiny rill of water running at the base and he let her have a drink, his eyes glued to the opposite wall of the ravine. After what seemed to him a very long time, he pulled her up and walked to the best ramp up the far side, where the two of them scrambled up, making a lot of movement and noise.

  Aranthur got to level ground to see the two bandits watching from no more than a dozen paces away.

  ‘It’s the boy with the horse,’ said the man with the crossbow.

  But he hadn’t spanned it; it hung by its ring from his water-stained saddle, unloaded.

  ‘Fucking giving himself to us,’ said the other, drawing his sword.

  ‘I want that horse,’ Crossbow said.

  Aranthur was dismounted, on the off side of his horse, holding her bridle. Every part of his plan was in ashes. He felt a fool – he should have seen them from the other side of the ravine.

  ‘Don’t get tricky, boy, an
d we won’t fuck you up,’ Crossbow said.

  ‘Not more ’n a little,’ said the other.

  Aranthur raised the fusil. He chose Crossbow as the more dangerous man.

  He pulled the trigger. The lock snapped – the shot crashed out instantly.

  Crossbow’s head snapped up, like a man loosening a crick in his neck, and the back of his head blew out, and he was lying on the spruce needles.

  ‘Fuck me!’ the other man said. ‘You little cocksucker!’

  But he was apparently paralysed, and simply sat on his horse, looking at his mate stretched on the ground.

  The dead man’s horse snorted, and backed up a few steps.

  Aranthur turned the mare, watching the other man squint. He put a foot in a stirrup and mounted, his fear powering his leap so that he was secure in the saddle in a heartbeat. Ariadne turned a little, so that he was eye to eye with Squint, ten paces apart.

  ‘Drop your sword,’ Aranthur said, after a moment.

  ‘Darkness blind you, you fucking …’

  Then it all happened at once.

  Squint put his long, barbed spurs to his nag.

  Aranthur reached for the hilt of his sword.

  Squint knew how to ride. His horse, whatever it lacked in grace, was well enough trained, and leapt forward like a warhorse. The man raised his sword over his head.

  Aranthur drew. He drew straight up into an overhead garde. He didn’t know a thing about fighting on horseback, but Ariadne was more forgiving, or just tired. She stood her ground against the bigger horse.

  Squint cut.

  Aranthur parried, although the other man’s sword seemed to scrape down every inch of his long blade, the two sharp edges rubbing against each other with a wicked friction that screamed in the still air.

  Ariadne turned, tracking her opponent, and Aranthur cut in time, but Squint had done all this before. He parried with the blade over his shoulder and crashed off into the dead underbrush towards the road.

  Emboldened by his adversary’s flight, Aranthur gave chase. Only when they burst out onto the verge, sixty paces apart, did it occur to him that the man might just be a scout or a lookout. When the fleeing man went straight across the verge, Aranthur followed him, but when he rode straight into the trees on the far side of the road, Aranthur’s native caution finally overcame his boldness, and he reined in.