Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  “Leave six at crossroad,” Vilna told him.

  Aranthur nodded. “Very well.” He was watching Vilna command “his” detachment. He smiled. “Whatever you say.”

  Vilna laughed. “You not so stupid.”

  He barked orders in his own sing-song Steppe tongue, and six riders fell out. Aranthur had time to think that only a day before, Vilna had ordered him to curry horses, and now he was an officer. He smiled to himself. He didn’t feel that he was in command at all. He had more the feeling of riding a runaway horse.

  They moved east, into the rising sun.

  By noon, they’d come so far that they were close to the building whose tower had flashed in the sun.

  Aranthur had watched it grow from a spike on the horizon to a palace out of a tale. It was red-brown, with hundreds of windows and a huge copper dome that rose like an eastern helmet to a spike. The spike was covered in gold and rose into the heavens. The temple, if such it was, was surrounded by a high wall, and there were signs of a village or substantial town outside the walls.

  Aranthur looked to Vilna, but the old nomad pursed his lips and shrugged.

  Aranthur trotted his horse to the head of his little column.

  “Halt?” Vilna asked.

  Aranthur looked at the town, and what appeared to be a river and a bridge.

  “We’re still in Armea?” he asked Sasan.

  “This is Elmit. Still eight stages to Safi. That is the monastery of Helre, who is your Aploun. See the line of hills on the horizon? They are at the edge of Safi.” Sasan pointed south, towards another line of hills. “Masr. Eventually.”

  Aranthur rose in his stirrups, mostly because that’s what Equus did when he couldn’t decide what to do. He looked at the bridge.

  The town offered him no answers. Distant dogs barked.

  Vilna was waiting for him to decide.

  Fine.

  “Forward,” he said.

  Vilna nodded sharply.

  The column moved forward at a trot. A few hundred paces from the arched bridge, Aranthur saw horsemen, and behind them, men working on the bridge.

  He knew in an instant that they were not working on the bridge. He guessed that they were sorcerers, putting down a victim. A stigal. A curse. And he could feel it. He snapped his volteia for seeing sihr into reality and there it was: a complex working, black as pitch, but unfinished.

  “I want to charge them,” he said to Vilna.

  Vilna smiled grimly. “Good.”

  Aranthur drew his sword and all the troopers around him did the same.

  He looked back, caught Dahlia’s eye.

  “Get the Magi!” he shouted.

  Sasan had a puffer in his hand. Ansu flicked him something like a salute, and they were off, racing along the road.

  A hundred paces out, Dahlia did something. Aranthur missed her cast, but her occulta skipped the fringe of Pindari cavalry and struck among the men on the bridge, scattering them. Their arcane shields came up too late for at least two, who fell screaming, clutching their guts.

  Then Aranthur was sword to sword with the Pindaris. They were surprised, despite everything, but the man who stayed to swagger swords with Aranthur was big, wore a red felt cap over his helmet, and knew his business. He cut so hard that Aranthur lost his sword at the cross and took a blow. He never felt it, and he got an arm around the man’s neck and both of them fell from their horses. Aranthur’s troopers swept by, and Aranthur rolled atop his opponent. He felt rather than saw the man go for a knife, and he stopped it with his left hand.

  His right hand pinned the man’s other blow, and they struggled, but Aranthur was stronger. He slammed a fist into the man’s head, but the Pindari chief threw him off, and Aranthur rolled and rose to his feet.

  The Pindari turned to face him, and drew a knife. It was long and gleamed in the midday sun, and then suddenly the man exhaled blood.

  Sasan waved a smoking puffer at him and rode on. The Pindari fell forward, shot through the back. He twitched once and lay still.

  Ariadne was three steps away. Aranthur caught her reins and then retrieved his sword, which lay in the dust. His right hand still felt numb, and it was only when he looked down at his numb hand that he saw the blood on the skirt of his once-white fustanella.

  He stopped the bleeding himself, and stood by his horse, breathing and trying not to pass out, while his little troop of cavalry cleared the bridge. Finally Aranthur felt the wound in the top of his thigh was stable enough, after he poured saar into it. He mounted carefully from a low wall and rode forward. The cut to his wrist was bad.

  There were half a dozen corpses on the bridge, and two more on the far side. Three of them carried staves and wore bright gold talismans—a perfect circle, like a wheel.

  Past the bridge was an open market, abandoned, the stall roofs flapping in the wind. Dogs barked and howled, and the wind caught up dust devils and whipped them through the air.

  Aranthur heard a scatter of shots to the east, and he pressed Ariadne forward. He found Sasan with a pair of wounded Pindaris.

  “You wounded?” Sasan called out.

  “Better now,” Aranthur said. “What happened?”

  Sasan shrugged. “Dahlia went through their Magi like a wet knife cuts cheese. And when they turned their backs, our nomads butchered them. They don’t like sorcery, your lads.” He smiled grimly. “I’m taking prisoners,” he added.

  “I’m glad someone is.” Aranthur was very tired of killing. “Are you recruiting?”

  “Tattooed Pindaris? I doubt it. Once they’re marked, they’re… scum. They kill for pleasure. Rape, rob, kill.”

  “Tattoos?” Aranthur asked.

  Sasan pulled one man’s khaftan back to reveal a series of hash marks and whorls in black ink on the man’s pale skin.

  “They take children from the parents they kill, and make them into Pindaris. Once they’re marked, they’re killers.”

  The man whose khaftan he’d pulled up just smiled, as if he wanted to be friends.

  “What do you plan to do with them?” Aranthur asked.

  Sasan shrugged. “No idea. I just can’t stomach killing everyone I disagree with. Even this lot.”

  Aranthur shared his feeling, and the fight with the Pindari chief had scared him. Unlike a dozen other fights, the man had almost had him at the first blow.

  I was beginning to imagine I was a good blade, he thought. He looked at the cut to his forearm. I was almost dead.

  He rode forward past Sasan, his hands shaking. Ariadne was troubled by her rider’s inattention and shied at some bodies, and Aranthur was almost thrown.

  Closer up, he could see that the dome of the magnificent temple was cracked, and there were scorch marks. As he picked his way through the town and passed around it, he found that the dome, perfect when viewed from the west, had partially collapsed. The town was full of rubble, and stank. There were bodies in every building, and he began to avert his eyes rather than see them, bloated and in many cases stripped naked by looters.

  He pressed his heels to Ariadne’s sides and she leapt forward, jumping over a fallen basalt pillar with a flowing stride that belied her fatigue. He raced down the empty main street and along the base of the precinct wall, which on the north side had been breached in two places. The corpses in the breaches were mere skeletons, picked clean of flesh—an old horror story.

  He heard a horn, and then another, and then he saw Vilna blowing on a large cow horn at the eastern end of the town.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said as he rode up, and Vilna smiled.

  “Bleeding,” he said, and pointed at Aranthur’s right arm.

  Aranthur was bleeding fairly freely, because apparently his occultae had failed and he hadn’t even noticed. And he was low on everything.

  One of his troopers gave him a length of linen—some dead man’s turban. Aranthur cut a piece out and wrapped his hand and used a little stored saar from his kuria to reinforce the effect of a tight bandage.
r />   “I think we got them all,” Dahlia said. “This one is alive.”

  She pointed to another one of the staff-bearers, who lay on the ground, his circular amulet glinting in the strong sun. There was blood flowing from a gash on his head, but he was breathing.

  “All right,” Aranthur said.

  He felt bad: tired, stupid with blood loss. But Vilna was looking at him, and so were the rest of his troopers.

  “How many did we lose?” he asked.

  Vilna smiled his grim smile.

  “None. Almost lost you.”

  Aranthur looked at Vilna.

  “Dahlia, how about you and Sasan take the prisoners back to Equus and report? We’ll leave two troopers here and press forward.”

  He was looking under his hand at the blank expanse of open ground stretching to the distant line of hills: irrigated plains, criss-crossed with irrigation ditches and streams. Terrible cavalry country.

  Vilna’s face was expressionless.

  “Your command,” he said.

  Does that mean it’s a bad idea? Aranthur wondered. He looked at Dahlia. She nodded.

  “I have juice left. I can get this badmash back to Equus.”

  “Sasan is back along the road.” Aranthur turned back to Vilna. “My feeling is that we should stay on them.”

  Vilna nodded. “We should have remounts. But yes. Lost no people. Now they fear us. Forward. We will kill them, every one.”

  Aranthur winced.

  Two hours later, even Ariadne was showing her fatigue. They stopped to water horses at a cool stream that ran clear over stone. Aranthur purified water for the patrol, and the Nomadi thanked him in three languages. Ansu and Vilna watched the eastern horizon.

  When the horses were watered, Aranthur looked at Vilna.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Vilna was looking east.

  “If I had another horse.” He shrugged eloquently.

  Aranthur nodded. “We should go back to the temple.”

  “Ayee,” Vilna said. “Bad place, but yes.”

  “Bad?”

  “Haunted,” the old nomad said.

  An hour later, as the shadows began to lengthen, Vilna ordered all the nomads to dismount and walk, to save their horses, and Aranthur joined them. It was the edge of darkness when they came to the cavalry sentries along the eastern edge of the temple town—men and women of his own Second Cavalry.

  He met Dahlia with a bowl of fish stew in her hand.

  “You need to see the temple,” she said. “Better yet, don’t.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Desecration. Horrible. All the altars—every god. Broken and… polluted.”

  Aranthur winced.

  “Human sacrifice?” he asked.

  “All the trimmings,” Dahlia said bitterly. “Fucking murdered children. I’ll never go to sleep again.”

  But before the stars were out, Dahlia was asleep next to Sasan, and Aranthur was curled against her. The dead child, painted black… The most horrible thing was that it made no sense.

  It made no sense.

  It was as if the Pure committed atrocities for some sort of grotesque joy. And yet, when captured, they seemed to be men—ordinary men.

  He lay awake for a long time.

  In the morning, he was awakened by the trumpeter again, and he followed her to a circle of officers around a campfire. Despite the heat of the days, it was chilly.

  “Can you take the forward patrol again, Syr Timos?” Equus asked. “And thanks for joining us. Officers’ call is every morning, not just feast days.”

  The other officers laughed.

  “Syr, I can, but I doubt my horse can do it,” he said.

  “We brought up all the spares in the night,” Anda Qan, the squadron primos, handed him a cup of hot quaveh. “I know you have a spare,” he added, a glint in his eye.

  Aranthur’s wounds were stiff, and Vilna ordered a trooper to tack Rasce while he sat on the ground and an Imoter worked the cut to his wrist and the wound in his leg.

  “That wrist cut…” the woman said. “Syr, you almost lost that hand.”

  Aranthur shivered. But when the woman was finished, she nodded.

  “Maybe not good as new, but solid enough. Who did the blood occulta?”

  “I did,” he said.

  She smiled, her teeth very white against her dark skin.

  “Well done. Not many soldiers who can work saar like that.”

  “You need a servant,” Vilna said.

  Aranthur laughed. “Vilna, in real life, I’m more likely to be someone’s servant.”

  “Real life?”

  “Back in the City.”

  Vilna smiled his straight-lipped smile. “Syr, this is your ‘real life.’”

  Aranthur looked up at the stars.

  “You might have a point. Ansu? You coming?”

  Ansu was fully armed. He swung onto a borrowed horse, and they trotted to the head of the patrol, where Dahlia and Sasan were waiting. Sasan had six men with him. They had sabres but no other weapons.

  “My army,” Sasan said.

  The Nomadi eyed the Safian men with obvious distrust.

  “Equus said we could use them as guides,” he said. “These are the ones I trust most. Two of them are from near my home.”

  Vilna spat.

  Aranthur nodded.

  “Please have them ride at the front of the main column. Dekark? Same as yesterday—two riders well out, then four more. Then the column—Sasan’s guides, then our party, and then six troopers at the back, well back.”

  Vilna nodded sharply.

  The patrol set out with twenty-four Nomadi troopers, six Safian “guides” and the four friends.

  But even as they marched, the whole of the Second Cavalry was forming on the flat ground on the east side of the ruined town. Aranthur rode to the imperious figure of Centark Domina and saluted.

  “Syr Timos, as I live and breathe. I hear great things about you, although I plan to keep Lemnas for ever. I’ll buy her a business in the City if I have to, just to keep her in the Militia.” Myr Domina smiled.

  “You mean to keep her in the City Cavalry?” Aranthur asked.

  “They don’t call us the ‘Artists and Artisans’ for nothing,” Domina said. “I’ll make her a Tekne yet.”

  “I’m taking out the advance guard,” he said.

  “I know!” she said with a smile for his enthusiasm. “I’ll be about a mile behind you.”

  That seemed much better than the day before, but Aranthur was aware that under his own ignorance, they were all learning. No Imperial army, much less a vast force with allies, had done any of this in hundreds of years.

  The advance guard went forward at a trot to gain some ground. Aranthur passed the morning patrol with a wave. This morning, he knew the officer commanding and snapped a salute. Then they were crossing streams and irrigation ditches on the little arched bridges they had seen the afternoon before.

  They were still less than a mile from the temple-town when a flash of red light alerted them. The four men on advanced picket came galloping back.

  The scouts were both dead, as were their horses. The bodies were shrivelled and black, scorched beyond recognition, features burnt away, leaving skulls and teeth protruding in dull whiteness from the black ruins of flesh and clothing.

  Dahlia located the focus, the stigal, and destroyed it.

  The Nomadi stood by their horses on the road, and their faces reflected shock and dull rage in the first light of the sun.

  Vilna shook his head. “Fuckers came back in the dark. Cowards. Gignards. Sorcerers.”

  The other Nomadi looked at Dahlia, and then at Aranthur.

  Aranthur nodded. “Vilna, tell the patrol that we will fight fire with fire—that no more people will be lost, they have my word. I’ll take point myself.”

  “We could just halt and demand actual Magi to support us,” Dahlia said. “Do you think the three of us are really battle Magi?”
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  Aranthur glanced at her and then at Prince Ansu.

  “Honestly? Yes. I think we’re what Equus has.”

  “General Tribane must have better,” Dahlia said. But she sounded doubtful.

  “We saw them lose the magikal duel with the enemy,” Aranthur said.

  “Some of them. But every brigade…” She shrugged. “It seems stupid, to me. Three students against the best the Pure have to offer.” She shrugged again and spoke very quietly. “The enemy has a clear superiority in power.”

  Ansu was looking at the horizon.

  “We felled the Disciple,” he said. “We’re still here.”

  “With Qna Liras,” Aranthur said. “I don’t think General Tribane will risk her one Lightbringer clearing traps. We, on the other hand, are expendable. I cannot and will not order you. I will go, however.”

  Ansu shrugged. “I’m coming. I’m better armed today.”

  Dahlia rolled her eyes. “I thought I was cocky. Fine.” She smiled grimly. “Do you know how to guise?”

  Aranthur shrugged because he still hated telling Dahlia all the things he didn’t know how to do. Especially in front of Vilna and the others. But honesty pushed him.

  “No,” he admitted.

  She drank some water.

  “You were good at subjugation, though. I remember—you got a first. Listen, Guise is just a minor subjugation with a side of illusion. You look like someone else. It’s better if backed by some acting and a good costume. Even better if you had study time. Your friend the Emperor’s mistress is unbelievably proficient at guise.”

  Aranthur winced.

  “Iralia,” he said.

  “Exactly. The tart.” Dahlia wiped sweat from her eyes. “Here, I’ll show you. Just like a subjugation, it helps if you play on your audience’s belief. Hard to be a giant lizard. Not so hard to be a Pindari scout.”

  Vilna made a sign and backed his horse out of the little circle. Chimeg, one of the Pastun from the Steppes, muttered “Baqsa” and said a charm.

  Dahlia ran Aranthur through the occulta twice. Aranthur learnt it easily; it really was just a form of a working he already knew.

  “Better if we could get some Pindari clothes,” she said.

  “Yuck,” Ansu said. “There are limits on my willingness to ‘play soldier.’”