Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  A day later, kisses were not even a memory. Aranthur was in the trenches behind the rubble breach in the Black Redoubt. The breach had been blown ten days earlier by Imperial gonnes—huge siege monsters firing almost point-blank, from just two hundred paces away, overcoming ancient stonework and ancient spells with modern powder. Black rock chips and rubble were everywhere. The final Imperial assault which carried the town by storm had entered through this breach and this bastion.

  Now, the engineers and the hundreds of pioneers had dug deep trenches and thrown up earthworks across the former parade ground of the bastion, creating, in effect, a diagonal wall from corner to corner of the ruined square. Further to the right, they had begun work on a long trench behind the old curtain wall, a trap for an attacker who might believe that he’d scaled the main defences. The enemy guns and their potent Magi had trouble reaching the new earth and timber wall, because the height of the surviving black basalt walls still deflected most of their rounds, because no Magos could strike what he could not see, and because they had neither the number nor the weight of guns that the Empire had had.

  Aranthur was in a long trench under a firing step, pretending to know how to be in command of a company of Arnauts and another of City militia. His six Nomadi had become his runners. He had been given two dekarks: Kouznos, a grocer from near the Aqueduct, and Stathi, an out-city farmer. Both had deep lines on their faces and neither had bathed in a week.

  Both were prepared to listen to Vilna, and perhaps even Aranthur Timos. Aranthur had very little time to get to know them. He knew that there were some Keltai and some Easterners and a handful of Byzas in the company, and he didn’t know any names yet.

  “Just give the orders,” Vilna said, as if Aranthur knew what he was doing.

  But Aranthur worked out that he could discuss with Vilna, get advice from Kallotronis, who made clear that he didn’t take orders very seriously, and perhaps, coached by the two of them, he would not make any major mistakes.

  All they’d done for seven hours was to dig in the dark, with the trench line itself lit with small magelights and torches. They dug steadily, improving their line, adding saps to the rear, and mounting two small falconets from the great galley to cover the corners of the entrenchment, masked gonnes that could not be seen or reached by enemy batteries. Aranthur finally realised that they were digging an enormous trap for an attacker.

  “I hate fighting on foot,” Omga said.

  “I hate anything that isn’t a horse,” Vilna said. “This is a stupid way to fight.”

  Chimeg nodded. “Unsafe,” she said, which made Aranthur laugh.

  He translated their Pastun for Kouznos, who laughed and passed the joke on to the militia.

  Aranthur walked all the way along the trench, wondering what a real officer would do, and stopping to talk to the Keltai and the Arnauts. The Keltai were all fisherfolk, caught by the war, and willing to fight; they wore long maille shirts and carried long rifles and heavy swords. They were led by a woman who called herself “Cleg.” She shook his hand in the darkness. She was as tall as he, with fish-belly white skin and red hair and as many tattoos as Inoques.

  Aranthur ordered more fresh water brought forward. He listened to a lot of complaints, and then he found Myr Kallinikas beside him in the darkness. She had on a white shirt and breeches, and she had a rifled carabin slung over her shoulder and two pistols in her belt.

  “They’ll attack you at dawn,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked, feeling stupid.

  “They have every morning. They just push slaves or ‘volunteers’ up the scarp to see what we do.” She shrugged. “If you have no morals and unlimited fodder, it’s a justifiable tactic.”

  Vilna skidded down the earthwork from the firing step.

  “Effenda, we should send patrols out into the darkness to…” He struggled for words. “To hit them as they form up, my lady.”

  “Who do you recommend?” Kallinikas asked. “Me? You?” She shrugged. “There’s no point to the trap I’m building here if their scouts find it. I need you to keep them off.”

  “The Arnauts,” Vilna said, waving at Kallotronis. “They’re brave enough, and bored. And our Keltai. They know the life.”

  “Exalted?” Aranthur asked. “The scarlet-cloaked killers? Are they out there?”

  “Not since we shot one down the first day,” Kallinikas said. “But there’s at least two more.”

  Aranthur wondered why they were all looking at him until he realised that in this moment he was actually in command. It made him laugh and feel like an impostor, all at the same time.

  He thought of the long-ago night when he’d watched a middle-aged woman dance as the voluptuous goddess of love, Aphres, in the opera. She had been neither young nor beautiful, until she danced, and for as long as she moved, he had believed in her completely. He drew himself up.

  “Right,” he said. “We’ll catch them as they rise out of their trenches…”

  He looked at Kallotronis, who nodded. Vilna also nodded.

  “Firelocks only—match will give us away. Vilna, find twenty volunteers among the militia—ask Myr Cleg first.”

  “Lang Cleg, syr.” Vilna, who was a head shorter than Aranthur, grinned. “She is tall.”

  Aranthur managed a smile. “If you insist. Lang Cleg, then. Kallotronis—”

  “I’ll choose my own devils,” the Arnaut said.

  They crept down the front of their own earthworks an hour later. Aranthur, who insisted on leading the left wing, swore that he’d put steps into the damned rampart if he ever held this wall again. He already hated siege warfare; the level of tension was insane. While he tried to hold the Black Bastion, he had no idea what was going on in twenty other positions—on the weak sea wall, for example, or the Royal Tower.

  He slipped, and then slid down the front face of the earthwork. The slide was noisy and drew a fusillade from the darkness, but none of the rounds hit close enough to do any damage. Aranthur landed badly, rolled forward, and then spent time finding a lost puffer in the darkness. Then he crawled to the position that Kallinikas had indicated, or so he hoped. The moonless darkness was lit only by stars. The Dark Forge made the sky even darker, especially as the bastion faced the eastern sky.

  He skidded across gravel on his breastplate and wriggled in close to the shattered edge of the black basalt wall. Vilna followed him, and then an assortment of militiamen and women, all with their faces blackened: “his” militia from a City regiment raised in the Docklands north of the Academy, small crafts, the Keltai, and a handful of longshoremen.

  A big woman in a black maille shirt whispered “last,” and they all went to ground.

  Not a rustle or a whisper betrayed the movement of the Arnauts.

  Aranthur lay watching the Anvil for long enough to almost fall asleep, and then something began to bite him under his breastplate. Each bite was like a piercing blade; whatever it was bit him repeatedly.

  “Shit,” Vilna muttered. “Razor ants.”

  As quietly as they could, they moved away from the nest. Aranthur continued to be bitten for a long time. It was as miserable as any time he’d ever spent, including being tortured by Pure agents.

  Just before dawn their adversaries sent a patrol. But the men and women sent to test the new defences were augmented and the burst of power alerted Aranthur. The moment the patrol moved into the open ground, they were caught in a crossfire between the militia and Kollotronis’ Arnauts.

  There was a sudden barrage of power in the Aulos. The red sihr fire fell on Aranthur’s company, but jade shields like the scales of an artichoke flashed to cover them. The terrified militia crouched amid the rubble and razor ants until the light show moved on.

  As the sun tinged the horizon a deep pink somewhere to the east, a whole battery of mortars began to fire from behind the bastion—perhaps as many as ten. The rounds whistled past the broken walls of the once-proud bastion, and the shells exploded among the not-very-distant trenches
of the former Imperial lines.

  The smoke and dust was thick.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Aranthur said to Vilna.

  The twenty of them scrambled back up the face of the redoubt. The enemy fired at them, but the response was thin and not accurate.

  Aranthur was scratching furiously, but he paused with the oncoming centark.

  “I need to get my Arnauts back inside,” he said.

  The older man raised an eyebrow.

  “Captain Kallotronis came in an hour ago,” he said.

  Aranthur wondered at the man’s tone. He understood it better when he climbed down the improvised steps to the covered way between the bastion and the city wall, where the mortar battery was.

  Kallinikas was there. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Centark?”

  There was sarcasm, and more than a little criticism, in her use of the rank.

  “Myr?” he asked.

  She waved at the little mortar battery. A hundred sweating men and women lay around, drinking water.

  “An hour’s work for a hundred pairs of hands. Sweaty, dangerous work.” She shook her head. “Any idea what I’m talking about?”

  Aranthur shook his head.

  “Sophia, you are green. Centark, what was your plan for extricating your sally from the front of the redoubt when the sun rose?”

  Aranthur met her eye. “I didn’t think about it,” he admitted.

  He’d imagined the ambush, the fighting…

  Shit.

  “Well, I didn’t either. So we’re fucking idiots together. I threw this together when Kallotronis told me you were stuck out there.” She shook her head. “Any time you go out, you have to plan how to get back in.”

  Aranthur felt the weight of his ignorance.

  “I’m not bad on a cavalry patrol.”

  “I’m good at designing bridges,” Kallinikas said.

  The next day the enemy launched an assault on the Black Bastion when Aranthur was asleep. It proved to be a ruse, to occupy the defenders. Then they blew a mine under the Royal Tower.

  Several hours later, Aranthur lay at the edge of the new line of earthworks inside the collapsed wall of the tower and along the old curtain wall that led to the Black Bastion. The tower had been ancient and huge; the stones were the size—each one of them—of a wagon. To his left, Kallotronis had a wall gun, like a small, rifled artillery piece, or a musket that someone had made for a giant. It had a heavy iron axe that locked it to the wall. Kallotronis was watching the enemy artillery pits for targets. Behind him, three of his “devils” loaded three more wall guns.

  “They’re at least as incompetent as we are,” Kallinikas snarled. “They blew their mine, and all they did was to drop the tower on their assault force.” She wrinkled her nose. “If they’d dug another twelve feet in, we’d all be dead now.”

  Aranthur rolled over, laid his carabin on the parapet, and tracked the earth being thrown up by a single poor bastard shovelling at the head of the enemy sap. Their men were digging deeper trenches and improvising a wall behind them. For the moment, a handful of tired officers and snipers were all that was holding the rubble, in shallow scrapes or behind the huge stones.

  Aranthur tracked his target by signs: thrown sand; a little flash of metal from his shovel. He was no doubt clearing sand off the collapse of the tower so that his own side could dig trenches. The enemy—the Pure, or whatever they called themselves—had carts full of earth and big pavises rolled into position. Aranthur tracked the man’s shovel as it sparkled above a cart; a shovelful of sand flew over the next pavise and then another.

  Aranthur was already focused on the gap—the very narrow gap—between the two wheeled pavises. They were heavy, built of thick timber painted with a black oil. He didn’t think his carabin would penetrate one.

  There was a very slight flutter between the next two pavises.

  Aranthur didn’t fire.

  Kallotronis did. The big wall gun spoke with a flat crack, and the fluttering movement stopped. There wasn’t even a scream.

  But Aranthur saw the movement in a gun position, two hundred paces away. Without conscious thought, he cast his aspis occulta. He kept several ready almost all the time; his casting was so smooth that it was like pouring liquid from a pitcher.

  The falconet ball struck the occulta and richocheted away as if it had hit solid stone. Before an enemy sniper could fire, Aranthur’s second aspis came up and covered Kallotronis.

  The Arnaut was lying very flat, his arms crossed over his head, but none of the rounds directed his way struck home. They were all stopped on Aranthur’s shields.

  “You are puissant,” Kallinikas said.

  “I’m getting a great deal of practice.” Aranthur bit his lip.

  A heavy, sihr-based occulta shot from deep in the enemy lines. Aranthur was the target. He flexed his shield and raised another. Two more emanations struck at him.

  “Shit,” he said out loud.

  They were tracking him by his casting, and targeting him the way the snipers targeted men digging.

  He threw his new displacement back down the line of the first attack. Then he was enveloped in a layer of someone else’s shields—Dahlia’s. He knew her at once.

  A stream of green fire washed over a distant position. Off to his left, Jalu’d was dancing his power straight into the enemy lines. Aranthur, the pressure off, rippled off the continuous saar assaults he’d spent the summer learning. They had effect on things—earth flew. But no real effect on people, because force based on life was not particularly puissant in causing death—like trying to use water to start a fire.

  And, of course, the sihr to cause death directly was right there.

  Now the enemy’s return fire had artillery, and also the coherent red fire that Aranthur associated with the Exalted.

  But Dahlia’s shields held it all, and more. There were other casters on his side, a choir of them. Off to the east, a set of shields went black and collapsed, and suddenly there was silence in the Aulos.

  “Still with us? Can you hit that gonne?” Kallinikas asked, pointing at the falconet that had fired at Kallotronis.

  Aranthur sighed. “Perhaps.”

  He was tired; he had just expended more saar in thirty heartbeats than he used to gather in a week.

  “But you do not want to.”

  Aranthur shrugged, scratched his bites, and thought confused thoughts.

  “I… don’t like… It feels like murder.”

  Kallinikas nodded. “Well, tonight I’m blowing my mine under their forward sap. That’ll kill maybe a thousand of them.” She shrugged. “Look, they want to kill us or make us slaves. I’m untroubled.”

  Aranthur thought, You can’t see their souls as life force in the Aulos.

  As if to punctuate their discussion, Kallotronis’ wall gun spoke again, with authority. Far out across the sand and grit of the siege, a woman with a rammer in her hand had her lungs blown through her chest, and fell across the mouth of her gonne.

  Another falconet fired. This time, Aranthur hadn’t spotted its position. The cannonball struck a huge stone from the collapsed tower, sending a spray of deadly stone chips across the open rifle pits and marginal cover.

  Kallotronis was bleeding from a cut across his face, but he rolled and gave Aranthur a thumb’s up. But the next man was Chimeg’s partner, Nata. He lay curled around his right arm, his face grey. He was silent, but the pain was obvious.

  Flies gathered around him.

  Aranthur’s khaftan was cut across by stone chips in two places, but thick, filthy fabric had actually prevented lacerations.

  “They are trying to kill us,” Kallinikas said.

  “I know,” he said. “Listen, Myr. I have killed quite a few people.”

  In fact, he could see them all, when he thought about it. It was as if he was carrying a satchel of dead. Sometimes.

  He was watching the distant gonne positions when it occurred to him that she might not know that
her parents were dead. The very day he’d left—two days after she’d sailed for Antioke, he thought. He lay there, his barrel tracking no target, squinting, sweating in the brutal sun, trying to decide if he should mention that she was Kallinikas Primas. Wondering how he’d just survived a brutal and faceless magikal duel. Except it wasn’t a duel.

  Of course she didn’t know about her parents. She’d be using the title.

  “Myr,” he said.

  She half-rolled to face him.

  “Syr?” she answered with her usual sardonic lip twist.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do this. Do you know that…”

  She leant closer. “What?”

  She was so close he could feel the warmth of her breath.

  He breathed out. “Damn. I’m sorry, Myr. Do you know that your family palazzo was attacked by—”

  Her head snapped back.

  There was a volley of artillery from the other side.

  Aranthur’s sword hilt, pinned under his left side, pulsed with energy and he raised his head.

  “Fuck,” Kallinikas spat.

  Several hundred Safian Tufenchis rose from their trenches in broad daylight, their dull, dusty red coats interspersed with black robes and brilliant orange robes that Aranthur hadn’t seen before.

  His front sight stopped on an obvious officer with a gold-mounted sword. His morality vanished in powder smoke as he shot the man down.

  To his right, Vilna began to sound an alarm by beating his bronze canteen with a knife hilt. Every man and woman working behind them on the hasty earthworks dived for their weapons.

  Aranthur bit the bullet off the top of a prepared paper cartridge, put the weapon on half-cock, primed his pan, flipped the cunning little pan cover closed, and rolled on his back to load.

  Kallotronis fired again.

  Aranthur got the bullet down the barrel and put the rammer back in its pipes. He rolled back on his stomach.

  “Time to leave,” Kallinikas said.

  Aranthur had seen the flutter of scarlet robes in the centre of the line. It was like a kick in the gut; he hadn’t fully realised until that moment how badly he feared another encounter.

  But the carabin kicked against his shoulder and he was moving, reasonably certain he’d hit it. He and Kallinikas slid down the outer face of the new ditch, and then they had to scramble up the face of the new wall.