“Leave it,” Cydrich said. “It will never calm down as long as you’re here.”
“I’m sorry,” Gareth told the horse.
Cydrich came over. “This is Parige, Gareth. Have you heard of it? The capital city where the queen lives.”
A city, then. Still in Elyrria.
“Today you do your job. Bring the large box. Take it to the field and stand it on end.”
Gareth did as he was told. Cydrich unlocked the box’s seals and bands, handing each to Gareth as he removed them. “Put these into the wagon. Strap on your weapons and gear and return.”
The armor Gareth donned was leather with great metal plates attached to it. It was carefully designed to fit him, made so that he could put it on by himself. Unlike the knights of old, he had no squire. Gareth’s gloves had leather palms and a metal back but no fingers: He would be able to wear them properly whether his hands ended in fingers or claws. He sheathed a sword in a scabbard hanging from his belt, slipped a quiver and a bow over his back, and covered himself with a full-face helmet. Then he returned to Cydrich.
Cydrich had finished unfolding the wooden box, revealing that it contained a man-sized mirror within a heavy frame. Its surface was clean now, showing no trace of the blood that once coated it. Gareth’s gut wrenched at the memory of how Cydrich had tortured him to ensorcel it.
“Come closer, boy; no need to be afraid. There, now, stand close so you can see yourself.”
In the depths of the glass, reflections were strange and imperfect. Behind him, the slowly brightening sky was clear and the snow covering the field was pristine, almost luminous; but in the reflection, a green-black smoke roiled, leaving only a couple of feet of visibility. As Gareth moved closer, he saw his reflection emerge, wavering and indistinct, from the smoke. It quickly grew more solid, and after a few seconds the smoke swirled away into the background. Gareth looked at a perfect image of himself, a green-skinned soldier with eyes like full yellow moons showing through his helmet’s eye slits.
“Put your hand up to the glass. Touch it.”
He reached out to the mirror. He expected to find a cold, flat, unyielding surface. Instead his fingertips touched flesh. With a slight ripple, the glass disappeared and the mirror became a doorway to that other dark and hazy world.
“Good. Help him. Reach in and pull him out.”
Gareth was confused, but he took his image by the hand and led him out of the mirror. The sorceler motioned for them to step toward him and stand side by side. Cydrich would want their full attention, but Gareth couldn’t help turning his head just enough to share amazed glances with his twin.
Cydrich looked both of them over, cackling to himself. He lifted the image’s arms, pulled off its helmet, touched its face. “Tell me,” he said to the image, “do you know who I am? Where we are?”
“Parige,” said the new Gareth.
“You didn’t answer fully. Who am I?”
“You’re Cydrich. A monster. You made me come here.”
“The woman you called mother, what was her name?”
“Magareta.”
Cydrich’s smile widened. “You are perfect, my boy. Perfect!” He beamed proudly at the confused pair for a moment; then his face hardened again, and he returned to the execution of his plans. “Before you ask, yes, you are two people who are both exactly the same. This is what the mirror does, and it has enough spark to make many more of you than we will need.
“I’m going to speak as clearly as I can, and you must listen well.
“The mirror has two sides. In a moment, we will go back and I will position one of you on each side. You are to walk close, just like before, help your new brothers out, then walk out into the field and rest. But be ready to defend us if anyone tries to interfere. As each one emerges from the mirror, he is to turn around and help the next before going to rest. You will not break the chain. Before night falls, you will be an army of thousands and we will take this city. Do you understand?”
Gareth nodded in stunned silence.
“Good. As you gather in the field, I will mark your leathers in various colors. Remember your color group. Now let’s begin.”
* * *
Evin was eating lunch with Denua when one of her guards arrived with news of armed men massing outside the city.
“Impossible,” Denua said. She snatched the man’s proffered message parchment and began to read.
Evin grew worried as he looked on. Why hadn’t her devices warned her? If any significant force of men crossed or gathered on Elyrrian soil, she was supposed to know. Had someone found a way to defeat her alarms? But he kept his questions to himself.
“Thousands!”
The guard remained quiet.
“Get my war marshal. Tell him to mass whatever troops he can on the southwest side of the city. Go!”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The guard nodded respectfully at Evin as he brushed past to leave.
“Evin, take this report to Captain Uliette and give her these orders. Tell her to get every carriage she can conscript into the air. Load them with anyone who can shoot a bow. Tell her we have to thin that army out before it can march, delay it while we coordinate a defense.”
Evin took the message and hastened to the door. He had seen the look of shock on her face. She was worried. Did that mean she thought her devices wouldn’t be enough to defend the city if there was no time to call up an army?
* * *
Cydrich had picked some of his troops to help him paint, and they worked through the ranks as quickly as they could. They stopped at each unmarked warrior and stroked a small splash of color on his arm, then moved on. The divisions would be rough, but division size didn’t matter as much as having useful identification as quickly as possible.
Cydrich had planned this day for nearly forty years, since encountering that page of the Grimoire Curieuse which indicated that a certain sword—one he knew now rotted, unprotected in a Parigian museum—could penetrate Denua’s shield. She didn’t even know the dangerous power she had in her grasp.
He’d spent decades quietly collecting scattered pieces of the grimoire, learning how to access the sword’s power; and when Denua refused his request to take the sword “for study,” it had cost more years yet to prepare himself to take it from her. He could not enter the city with sorcelrous weapons. Denua’s scryers would know instantly. But trying for the sword alone and unarmed? Cydrich was not so foolhardy. He went back to his studies and spent the years necessary to invent devices that would bring forth his undying soldiers.
Tonight, at long last, he would enter Parige carrying almost no sorcelry—but surrounded by an invincible army.
Patience and planning were Cydrich’s virtues.
Now the most dangerous moment had finally arrived: the time to strike and learn how his enemy would respond.
He didn’t have to wait long. Within the hour, flights of carriages leaped over the city wall and flew over his army. Archers fired arrows from them.
It made him laugh. They couldn’t possibly carry fire in the carriages, so unless they used ensorceled arrows—which was unlikely—these defenders couldn’t harm his army at all.
Cydrich turned to the man next to him. “Do not waste your—”
An arrow slammed into that one’s skull, and he sagged to the ground. Cydrich moved on to the next. “Do not waste your arrows. They can’t hurt us. If anyone gets hit like that”—he pointed to the fallen one—“pull out the arrow so he can heal. Tell the rest.”
Cydrich himself pulled the arrow out of the fallen one. Lucky shot.
It would be another test of Cydrich’s sorcelry if any of the defenders’ arrows found its mark in his body. He didn’t relish the thought of that test—regardless of how quickly he would be healed, as a human, Cydrich would feel pain more acutely than Gareth—but he accepted the risk.
The defenders didn’t get off many shots as they flew over his army, and when they turned to make another pass, a few of the carriages c
ollided and fell from the sky. Clearly, Denua had conscripted civilians in order to save her troops for the actual invasion.
When the defenders realized Cydrich’s army wouldn’t fight back, they made slower passes and took down more men. And yet after every pass, more men stood up. And every moment, new soldiers came from the mirror to keep his army growing.
At least they were supposed to. It occurred to him to go check whether this attack had distracted the ones at the mirror and broken the chain.
Cydrich pushed his way through the crowd to get there. He found wounded lying around the device, some only now stirring, but it seemed others had discovered the break and come back to make more duplicates themselves while the wounded recovered.
Gareth really was bright and very motivated by the threat to harm his friend. It was all working out beautifully.
As Cydrich made his way back through the throng, he glimpsed a new motion from the sky. A carriage exploded as if smashed by a great hammer, and the boulder that destroyed it fell to land somewhere within his army.
The defending carriages fled.
Huge stones fell, ruining some of his soldiers’ plate armor. Yet Cydrich was pleased that the city’s defense turned out to be nothing more than bows and trebuchets. He would have to advance his plans if the Parigians ever started throwing burning missiles, but the worst Denua’s sticks and stones could do would be to destroy the mirror sooner than he liked.
He went for more paint.
Chapter Twenty-three
Night was falling when Denua and her war council learned how the enemy had appeared on her doorstep and where they could direct the castle’s unerring trebuchets in order to stem the tide.
War Marshal Aubair spoke. “The brutes are coming through a sorceled door in the southwest field. We’re sending a spotter carriage there now to drop target powder on it so we can smash it.”
Denua asked, “How many of the enemy are there now?”
“We estimated more than ten thousand by the time we started using trebuchets.” A shocked murmur rippled through the room. The invaders might outnumber the city’s garrison two to one. “Obviously, there’ll be fewer now, but the scryers haven’t told us how many yet.”
Someone else asked, “What do you think their plan is?”
Denua broke in. “We have to prepare for them to march at any time. They have already done the impossible, arriving at Parige with an army in the middle of winter. Their sorcelry is powerful enough that they don’t fear ours. We can be sure they won’t be limited by snow or darkness, either.”
“Your Majesty, they appear to have nothing but men,” Aubair said. “Scryers haven’t spotted any sort of siege engine, so our castle defenses should be enough to keep them out, especially with Your Majesty’s sorcelry. But without a proper army defending the city, we can’t stop them from going anywhere else they want in Parige.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Bring as many citizens as possible into the castle and prepare to sacrifice any part of the city the invaders march through. Hit them with the trebuchets. When they enter neighborhoods with clusters of wooden buildings, hit them with fire. If they stay together and drive for the castle without holding ground, send what men we can spare around behind them to attack from the rear. That’s the best we can do outside of sorcelry.”
All eyes turned to Denua, hoping for reassurance that her devices would save the city.
“Do it. Also, send carriages to the garrisons at Versai and Monfor, telling them we require their help. It appears the castle may be under attack within hours. And let me know when our scryers spot their leaders. We’ll kill the snake by cutting its head off.”
* * *
Cydrich arrived with his troops at the city’s outer wall, where they had a moment of respite. The Parigians stopped firing their trebuchets so they would not breach their own city wall. Defenders gathered at the top of it, preparing to shoot down at his army. Soon they’d bring boiling oil, as well.
Cydrich drew a vial from his robes and shook a powder of blue crystals into his hand. He blew lightly on the powder, turning this way and that. The powder billowed away from the sorceler in clouds that spread out and grew to an impossible degree. The clouds of smoky powder rose higher than the wall and became a tide that spread away from Cydrich and his army, into the city. Wherever it went, the blue smoke absorbed fire and extreme heat, dissipating its energy as the smoke itself faded away.
Cydrich would not make it easy for the Parigians to exploit Gareth’s sole weakness.
As the defenders coped with the sudden loss of torchlight, Cydrich ordered a division of his troops to tear apart the city wall with their bare claws.
* * *
Evin was in his and Denua’s bedchamber preparing for later—as if life would return to normal anytime soon. He didn’t know when Denua would next see the inside of this room, but he wanted to make everything ready anyway.
He knew nothing about war or how to help, so he was left on his own in the midst of all the stress and activity. He had too much time to worry about the fight. The enemy had appeared from nowhere, aided by impossible sorcelry. Maybe they really could take the castle and just murder everyone inside.
With everyone else occupied, now would be the perfect time to explore the castle’s secret passages. At least that would accomplish something, and it might even help in defense if the invaders got inside. But it wasn’t enough. Evin needed to do more.
He stood for a while, lost in thought, idly swirling wine in his goblet and in Denua’s. His instinct had always been to endure what he must while quietly making his little schemes for a better future. He had counted on having time to make his current plan work—to maybe get himself a title and move his parents to Parige, far away from Tyber’s family. So what happens? A sorcelrous invasion, come to fuck everything up!
No, he was going to do something to defend Parige. He didn’t know what, but he’d make Denua give him a way to help.
He dumped the wine back into the carafe, put everything away, and left.
* * *
Gareth was living in a nightmare.
He remembered the hundreds of times he walked through a veil of smoke to be pulled out of the evil mirror. If he came from the mirror, was he even real?
Before he received the red splash of paint on his armor, he had been shot twice with arrows. He would never get used to that. And he had helped lift a boulder off some of his brothers. It was horrifying to watch them suffer, bug-eyed and gasping, as their rib cages slowly expanded and fractured bones straightened.
Worse than all that, though, was being here in the city, having to hurt these poor, fragile people who only wanted to defend their homes and who would carry their injuries for life. Gareth spoke and heard his words echoed by hundreds of his nearby brothers, a chant they had taken up when the first Parigian fighters rushed at them: “Please don’t fight us. We don’t want to hurt you.” But the people kept coming! Most of them didn’t listen, so he had to try to hurt them just enough to make them stop fighting. He wanted more than anything for the nightmare to stop. He wanted to lay down his sword and his bow, surrender to the city people, and never harm anyone again.
If he did that, he knew Cydrich would burn him to death, then go to Evin and do far worse. He wanted all this suffering to end, but he would do any terrible thing to satisfy Cydrich and keep Evin safe. He couldn’t give up until it was over.
How long had he stupidly thought he was a monster and wallowed in guilt? Well, he would earn that guilt now. Cydrich had found the only way to truly make him a monster.
* * *
On his way to see Denua, Evin rehearsed in his mind what he would say to get her consent to help. As always, he had to play his part just right, so that neither she nor her court would notice his influence over her. He had no doubt he could get her to do any small thing he wanted, especially if it was something she was inclined to do already. But he couldn’t risk trying to change her mind once it was f
irmly made up. He couldn’t contradict her—or lead her to contradict herself—in front of the court.
He had to walk the edge of the blade, just as he had been doing for weeks.
Captain Uliette strode through the hall, also on her way to the war chamber. She wore furs over her uniform, and light sparkled off the dusting of snow melting across her shoulders.
“Captain! Can I walk with you? How is it out there?”
She barely glanced at him. “Bad. Worse.”
“Oh.” He had certainly hoped for news more informative and less grim. “I, ah, wanted to ask if I can do anything to help. Waiting is so fearful.” He hoped that hadn’t come out as a whine.
“Ha! Farmboy, I’m not sure there’s anything to be done, but you can come hear my report and see if you have any ideas.”
Evin wasn’t sure whether he’d been mocked, but he entered the war room at her side. Denua was conferring with other advisors but nodded at Uliette when she saw them arrive. “Captain. You’re back from organizing the civilians.”
“Yes, Your Majesty, but my report is not good.”
“Speak.”
“Our archers said their arrows were ineffective. The enemy soldiers stood back up after being shot. The arrows weren’t even a nuisance. They didn’t bother to fire back.”
Nobody knew what to say for a moment; then Aubair asked, “Were these reports from simple peasants? Did any experienced fighters make this claim?”
“No, the garrisons were forming inside the city walls. But we did send a carriage out to confirm. The field shows every sign of battle and bombardment except one: there are no enemy dead.”
Aubair reddened. “It can’t be!”
“Your Majesty,” Uliette said quietly, “there is more.”
“Go ahead.”
“The invaders have used some kind of sorcelry to extinguish fires. Before they attacked the wall, a large swath of the city went dark. Our people could relight torches in short order, but initially we were fighting blind.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Denua looked at the stricken faces surrounding her in the room.
In the Darkness Page 18
