Cold Iron (Masters & Mages)

by Miles Cameron

  He was dismayed to see that his mare had a shallow cut on her neck. He’d cut her on the draw and she hadn’t even reacted.

  Then he sat on her back, the sword locked in his fist, and shook. It took him a few minutes to recover.

  Very carefully, he replaced the sword in the scabbard.

  He thought about it and then rode back to the dead man. Flies were already gathering, and thanks to the ravine, the site of the little battle was easy to find.

  Battle? Murder?

  Aranthur had an army of doubts, and he doubted them while he collected the fusil from where he’d dropped it. The lock was full of dirt, but the weapon appeared undamaged.

  He went to have a look at the dead man, against his own will.

  The dead man convinced him what he had to do.

  An hour later, with the sun already dropping behind the nearest hills, he led the three soldiers into the woods and showed them the corpse.

  The soldier in charge was an officer, a centark. He looked at the body for a moment.

  ‘Sunrise,’ he spat. ‘I’m an engineer, not a watchman.’

  He looked at the middle-aged woman who wore a sword at her hip, the only weapon the soldiers seemed to have.

  She nodded. ‘You have a fusil.’

  ‘Yes.’ Aranthur expected questions.

  But she just nodded. ‘What were you doing here?’

  ‘I …’ Aranthur felt a fool, and he felt fear, too. ‘I passed you on the road, and the women … I was afraid these men would rob everyone. So I went back.’

  ‘By yourself?’ the woman said, her voice hinting that he should make some more admissions.

  ‘Yes.’

  The engineer shrugged. ‘Fine. Are these the men we were warned about?’

  The soldiers both shrugged.

  ‘That crossbow has seen a lot of use,’ the male soldier offered. ‘One o’ ours, I’ll wager.’

  He went and caught the horse, hobbled it with brutal efficiency, and took the weapon.

  ‘Rack number, Imperial Armoury, Basilisk Regiment.’ He tugged at the heavy cord. ‘It works.’

  ‘He tried to shoot me with it,’ Aranthur said.

  ‘Sunrise!’ the centark said. ‘Why didn’t you say that before?’

  The female soldier raised an eyebrow. ‘You have a writ for a gonne?’

  Aranthur produced his scholar’s writ for his sword and then, when all three soldiers became more legalistic, the note scrawled in a very unscholarly hand by L. di. D.

  The centark read it and shrugged.

  ‘I know who he is,’ he said. ‘He don’t make laws, though. Here’s my ruling. Dekark, tell me if this sounds right. You help us dig the grave, we let you go. We have only your word that they attacked you, but then, they had weapons, and I saw you pass us today, and you’re a Student. But son, do not, I beg you, ride around killing people with that toy. It’s too fucking dangerous for a civilian, and frankly, you are not trained.’

  The woman, addressed as dekark, nodded.

  ‘I’m good with that. He’s not harmless, is my read. Not a bad ’un, but not an angel. This the first man you’ve killed?’

  The question surprised him. It disconcerted him. It was meant to – he understood that.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Meaning you have. Cause you ain’t puking yer guts out, and you seem pretty together.’

  The male soldier tossed him a shovel.

  ‘Bandits attacked an inn before Darknight,’ Aranthur said.

  All three soldiers suddenly became very focused.

  ‘Where was this?’ the centark asked.

  Aranthur explained while he dug the grave. Darkness was falling, and the male soldier started a fire while the other two gathered wood. They brought up a mule from the road.

  ‘I have another horse, hobbled. If we are camping here, may I fetch him?’ Aranthur asked.

  The centark shrugged. ‘Take Nadia with you,’ he said.

  Aranthur nodded. ‘Am I under … arrest?’ he asked carefully.

  ‘Not yet,’ the dekark snapped.

  The grave was finished before dinner was cooked: black beans and sausage. Aranthur picked out his sausage bits carefully and offered them to Nadia.

  ‘You too proud for meat?’ she said.

  ‘We’re told not to eat meat,’ Aranthur said. ‘Meat is the result of killing, and death …’

  He paused, suddenly and painfully aware that he’d killed a man a few feet away.

  The horses and the mule shuffled and snorted. The fire crackled.

  ‘Seems to me like eatin’ sausage would be the least o’ yer worries,’ the male soldier said. ‘You sure don’t dig like an aristo, though.’

  ‘I’m a farm boy,’ Aranthur said. ‘My patur has a small farm up on the Amynas River.’

  The soldiers all looked at him.

  ‘Arnaut?’ Nadia asked.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The centark sat back against a tree, using his pricker to pick his teeth.

  ‘So you’re an Arnaut. You have a fine gonne and a long sword and that high-priced nag and a pack horse. Have I got this right? And you saw bandits, saw them as a threat to society, and rode out to kill them. Right?’

  Aranthur nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you are a Student at the Academy,’ he drawled.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Aranthur knew that being an Arnaut was not a path to good treatment, but the sudden chill in the air scared him.

  ‘You’re no more a fuckin’ Student than I am an aristo,’ the officer said. ‘You stole the horse and the duds, and you’re as much a bandit as that dead bastard.’

  Aranthur didn’t need a talisman to cast a simple working. He reached into the fire with his right hand and drew out a ball of flame so that it sat on his hand in the darkness. Conjuration, a little illusion. A working to protect his hand, a working to hold the heat of the flame, a conjuration of a little marsh gas to fuel it.

  ‘Ah,’ said Nadia.

  ‘Fuck me!’ The centark barked a laugh. ‘All right, you’re a Student.’

  In the morning, the officer wrote a note on the back of the acolyte’s note.

  ‘Take this to the gate when you enter the City,’ he said. ‘They’ll check your story, which saves me the trouble of repeating it. Don’t try and take that gonne into the City without reporting it. We have ways of finding contraband weapons. Ars Magika ways. Understand?’

  ‘And don’t try to be the law,’ Nadia said. ‘Let us be the law.’

  ‘Will you catch the other bandit?’ Aranthur asked.

  Nadia made a face. ‘We’re surveying to widen the road. Don’t get any ideas.’

  She did give him a chance to look at the instrument on the tripod. But the centark had already gone to fetch something, so he couldn’t ask how the geometry worked.

  He rode on.

  In late afternoon on his sixth day from the inn, he rode up to the Lonika Gate of the great Wall of Megara. Historians said that Megara had been built by the very earliest men, in the Age of Bronze, thousands of years before. Certainly there were obelisks in the hippodrome that recorded events from the time of kings long forgotten, or featuring only in tribal poetry. There were whole rows of monuments decorated in lettering that was now indecipherable. One such row led to the Lonika Gate, which was sometimes called the Great Gate. It was itself a square fortress, almost a hundred feet high, the curtain walls loopholed for all kinds of torsion artillery and the more recent heavy gonnes, as well as having niches for statues – Sophia, of course, and a fine triangle, ten paces tall, hanging over the central gate, in black and white marble and shining gold, covered in angels, the symbol of the old Empire before the fall. The Great Gate had a garrison and doubled as the headquarters for almost all military affairs in the City, and the streets behind the gate were packed with lawyers and notaries and married quarters right up to the Square of the Pantheon, the military temple where all gods were worshipped.

  A
ranthur approached the gate with trepidation.

  He dismounted, squatted a few times to ease his strained leg muscles, and reported to a dekark who sat just inside the barrier of the gate behind a desk, checking customs marks and wax seals on goods.

  The man looked up, asked Aranthur’s business, and sent him up the winding stairs of the north tower.

  ‘Your horses’ll be safe here, Student.’ He smiled. The smile relaxed Aranthur considerably.

  He went up the north tower and spoke to a succession of soldiers who were completely uninterested in his tale, until he was shunted into an office with a slim young man in a velvet coat. The man had fine boots, a long nose, and appeared to have no eyelashes.

  ‘You have a letter of introduction?’ the man said in an aristocratic drawl of educated Liote.

  ‘Yes, milord.’

  Aranthur bowed and handed over Drako’s letter.

  The officer sat down behind a table, put his boots up on it, and leant his folding stool back until it seemed to Aranthur as if it must collapse. He read one side, and then the other.

  Aranthur watched him flip the piece of vellum over twice, and then a third time.

  The stool went forward with a clunk. The man produced a wax tablet, the kind students used, and he proceeded to ask questions.

  When had Aranthur left the Academy? What day exactly? What ship carried him? When had he passed the gate at Lonika? Who had passed him? And so on. The questions were polite, and very precise.

  Aranthur didn’t see any point in resisting, so he answered them all.

  ‘Well, young man,’ the officer said, although he didn’t look five years older than Aranthur himself. ‘You have had an interesting three weeks, can we agree on that?’

  ‘Yes, milord.’

  ‘Spare me the milord. I’m likely to be your Centark – Parsha Equus. Cup of wine?’

  Aranthur thought about it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  The officer poured two cups of wine, gave Aranthur one, and sat.

  ‘You are a Student,’ he said. ‘Technically a citizen of the City and a member of the Militia.’

  ‘Yes, milord. Er, sir.’

  Aranthur had learned these things on the day of his arrival.

  ‘Are you willing to join the Selected Men?’ the officer asked. ‘Soon to be the Selected Men and Women, I’ll note,’ he said with a smile. ‘That will be easy to shout on a battlefield.’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘You understand that means twenty days of drill a year, and some ceremonies,’ the man said, with apparently no attention. He was reading over his notes on the wax tablet. Aranthur was fascinated to note that the man’s marks in the wax were not in any language he spoke. Not even in a set of letters he knew.

  ‘Yes,’ Aranthur said.

  The man raised an eyebrow.

  ‘There’s pay. The parades are pleasant enough. The fieldwork can be enjoyable or indescribably tedious. You have a horse and arms. I can offer you twenty silver crosses on the drum for joining. And you can keep your gonne, as long as you leave it here. You can keep a horse in the stables – it’s far cheaper than keeping one in a tavern or a livery.’

  Aranthur smiled. ‘I have already agreed. But you make it sound better and better. Sir.’

  The officer smiled his quirky, eyebrow-less smile.

  ‘I do, don’t I? The thing is, we’re soldiers, even if we’re hardly ever used. In a war, gods save us, we’d be a city cavalry regiment.’ He looked up. Just for a moment, he looked like a different man – older, less kind. ‘Dying on a Zhouian lance is one hell of a way to pay back the cheap fodder for your horse.’

  Aranthur gulped. ‘Zhouian?’

  The officer smiled a lopsided grin.

  ‘Silly thing to say. Bastards are too far away to fight. It just lights me up that people join to save money, or get away from their wives, or what have you.’

  ‘Life is being a soldier,’ Aranthur said, quoting an ancient philosopher.

  ‘Good attitude,’ the man said. ‘Do you belong to one of the factions? You’re an Arnaut – you can’t be a Lion. Are you a Red? A White?’

  Aranthur was vaguely aware, from a year at the Academy, that the Lions were conservative, the Whites were more open, the Reds were religious and the Blacks … There were blacks, he thought.

  ‘I’m a Student,’ he said.

  The officer smiled. ‘Excellent.’ He stood up. ‘Aranthur Timos. Raise your hand and swear.’

  Half an hour later, Aranthur Timos had stabled Rasce in the military stables at the Great Gate and seen his fusil into the hands of an elderly armourer.

  ‘Sunset’s Children, soldier!’ the old man spat. ‘It’s not clean!’

  Aranthur was stricken with the memory of dropping the spent weapon into the holster after no more than pulling the dirt out of the lock.

  ‘Just this once, I’ll clean her for ye,’ the old man said. ‘Blessed Triangle, you’ve made a right mess of the lock. You know how to maintain this? It’s a fine weapon. Look at the fuckin’ rust. Brought up in a barn?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Aranthur said.

  The old man’s head turned and the eyes blazed at him.

  ‘Don’t call me sir. I’m an armourer. I fix things you lot break or damage. What’s your name?’

  He wrote Aranthur a ticket in a spidery hand – old Liote, as if the man was so old he dated from before the New Empire.

  Aranthur had never entered from the landward side before, and he was lost almost as soon as he cleared the barracks and the Pantheon Square. There was a broad parade ground, called the Field of Rolan, for the old god of war from the Twelve, just north of the temple. He hadn’t known there was such a broad, open field in the whole of the City, but on the far side there was a low wall with battlements, and another gate. Once he was through that, he was in a quarter of the City he’d never seen before. There were tenements, big buildings that towered over the muddy canals, seven storeys tall and packed with people. Their inhabitants stood around on the street, and there were open fires and street vendors, but Aranthur didn’t like the looks he got with Ariadne and her fine saddle.

  If the City was a thumb sticking out into the Great Sea, he had just entered from the hand, and he was now walking due east, towards the Academy atop the central ridge. The City had canals all around the edges, where hundreds of tiny islands had been joined to the peninsula ages before to make more land, but the Old Town was up on the ridge above and the Academy stood at the very crest. Otherwise, the rich favoured the canals and their fresh inundation of seawater every time the tide changed. The poor, aside from scholars, lived on the ridges. An aqueduct carrying the city’s fresh water ran down the ridge from the Great Gate. The huge stone trestles carrying the Aqueduct ran from the distant mountains to the reservoir behind the Academy like the fin on a whale. There was supposed to be a wide boulevard under the arches, but the tidal waves of refugees from the fighting far to the east had turned the dry ground under the Aqueduct into a slum, a long ribbon of desperate humanity, and not a good place for an apparently well-to-do young man with a horse.

  Despite their reputation, though, the Eastern refugees were in general quiet and well behaved. The beggars were aggressive, and the prostitutes were far too young. Aranthur had admitted to himself in his first year at the Academy that he avoided the ‘Spine’ under the Aqueduct because he didn’t really like to see how bad it was there.

  He was looking for a place to turn off the street and descend to a more savoury neighbourhood – some streets had steps or staircases unsuitable for a horse – when his eyes caught a young man with dirty hair and a long brown robe. The young man was kneeling with two beggars, and his eyes locked with Aranthur’s.

  He had a strong face, but he was very young, and his eyes were mild.

  ‘Lost?’ he asked, rising almost at Aranthur’s feet from the filthy street. He smelt.

  Aranthur took a step back. ‘No, I know where I am.’

  The young ma
n nodded. ‘Only, that horse will be a temptation to some of the young men, so please leave.’

  Aranthur nodded.

  ‘And if you came to buy sex, I will curse you,’ the boy said.

  ‘You’re Byzas,’ Aranthur said.

  ‘You are Arnaut,’ the young man said. ‘What of it?’

  ‘I don’t buy sex,’ Aranthur said, a little more archly than he intended.

  The young man shrugged.

  ‘Go with the god, then,’ he said, raising a hand in blessing.

  Then he squatted by two men sharing a hookah. He had something like a playing card in his hand, and they both looked at it, and then Aranthur was past them.

  Aranthur turned and walked south along the First Canal. The way was narrow, and he had to walk his horse, but soon enough he emerged from the tenements. The water in the canal became seawater; the sidewalk, locally called a fondemento, along the canal widened and was made of stone, and he could ride again. He passed a row of palaces as opulent as the tenements had been poor and emerged onto the waterfront, the Fondemento Sudo, which ran all the way along the south shore of the City, pierced by a hundred canals and lined with ships. But as one of the City’s main thoroughfares, it had bridges over all the canals. Aranthur walked and rode along through the afternoon, gawking openly at the huge round ships from distant islands and the plethora of smaller ships: single-masted coasters from Atti across the strait and from the Arnaut ports to the west; a low black galley from Masr; an enormous grain ship built of vyrk bark, from Magua or Ocvouych, far to the south; a trio of heavy merchant ships from Lydia, their sides painted a magnificent vermilion.

  But where the Grand Canal crossed under the Fondemento Sudo, at the Pontos Magnos, was the largest ship he had ever seen – a four-masted round ship as big, it seemed to him, as the whole Academy. It was unloading straight onto the fondemento. And what it was unloading, from a giant crane powered by a hundred longshoremen, was a monster.