Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  “What was that about?”

  Aranthur considered his options, and chose honesty.

  “The Vicar has ordered the Safian prisoners executed. I have stopped it, at least temporarily.”

  “Despicable,” Ippeas spat. “Is this what my brothers and sisters are fighting for?”

  Aranthur breathed. Despite the danger of the assault, he felt relief, and he wondered at his own feeling. But he had no time for self-analysis. A dozen men and boys were handing out wax earplugs. The entire assault force were putting in their earplugs and lying down against the earthwork rampart and crossing their arms over their heads.

  This must be the posture in which the whole enemy assault force died when the tower fell on them, Aranthur thought.

  He reached into his own mind to prepare his shields, the way a student will touch the facts in her memory when she sits to take a test. But like a lucky student who finds more information than she ever memorised, he found more than he thought he knew—a whole…

  A whole occulta, with options and extensions.

  Power wasn’t an issue; there was so much power lying in the Aulos that he had no fears for the casting. So he brought the new occulta to the surface of his mind. Built like a glyph. Actually, as if it was a glyph of glyphs. He understood it immediately, even the parts he couldn’t read.

  “Two minutes,” Vilna said.

  “The moment that the mine blows, we go up the ladders,” Aranthur said. “We will go from right to left, by files.” He’d heard Vilna say it twice. “I have five gold sequins for the first man into the enemy gonne line.”

  A whispered chuckle of approval.

  “Two minutes,” Vilna called softly.

  “This is going to be bad,” Aranthur continued quietly. “Stay alive, and help your mates, and we’ll make it.”

  It was his father’s harvest day speech, the year that they had crops standing in every field at the same time due to the odd weather.

  “One…” hissed Vilna, and the mine exploded. Very early.

  It was never an explosion in Aranthur’s memory—more a curious blackness, an absence of anything but light and sound. He unrolled his shield sequence almost instantly. He was pounded as he had been the day before when a dozen enemy sorcerers attacked his shields, except this time, the blows just rolled off.

  His hearing was gone. He felt as if he’d been stuffed with fur, somehow—padded, and yet shocked. And the explosion seemed to take forever. The dirty smoke stank of rotten eggs and death, and it was thicker than fog.

  But the most stunning thing of all was the sequence of his shields, which spiralled out of his reaching left hand like a dragon’s scales. He almost lost the casting, he was so stunned by his own occulta, but even as it expanded, it stopped the flying splinters, the stones, the red-hot sand and the sniper bullets and crossbow bolts too.

  Aranthur shook himself. He felt…

  Powerful.

  He reached up and got a hand on the ladder. He was shouting, and the sound of his shouts was peculiar in his ears and in his head.

  He started up the ladder. It only had ten rungs to the firing step above. They flew by, as his shields continued to ring with the flying gravel and flung detritus of the mine—a human jaw, a whole musket.

  Aranthur reached the head of the ladder. To his right, in all the smoke, he could see the flash of steel armour; to his left, the giant form of Kallotronis.

  He could hear nothing, and the smoke filled the dark like a curse.

  He was sliding down the front face of the wall. He knew what to expect—day-old corpses—and there they were, their sweet and horrible smell suffusing the sulphur fog.

  There were people following him, and he lit one of his magelights to show the way, and put it on the back of his lobster-tail helmet. He stepped on something bad, hard and then squishy, and then pushed through, and he was climbing, this time climbing the ditch’s outer face.

  It wasn’t so much a silence as a roaring in his ears. Without audio cues, he wasn’t even sure where danger might lie; was the enemy firing on the old breach above?

  He pushed his shields out ahead of him, and they rippled smoothly away. Whatever Inoques had done, it had something to do with this. The new defence was vastly more sophisticated than his simple red aspides, however strong they were as point defence.

  He topped the ditch and crossed the top of the breach, where he’d lain in a rifle pit the day before. Now he could see.

  The whole enemy siege line was firing. The lines were a blaze of light, long tongues of dragon’s fire spitting from the tubes of sixty gonnes.

  Except in the centre of the arc. There, the whole line was dark. He couldn’t see anything there—not a gaping pit, nor a rising column of smoke, dust, and up-thrust dirt. He had no idea. It was like a black maw—a grounded Dark Forge in the firmament of fire.

  And his shield was holding.

  There was no room for thought, or choice.

  Aranthur went forward into the fire.

  Somewhere to the left, a powerful Magos began to unlimber a set of attacks on Aranthur’s shield complex. But his attacks slid away as if they were balls of butter thrown at a wall of glass, and Aranthur continued to stumble forward. The enemy sorcerer raised the tempo of his attack, and then was suddenly gone, taken by a massive occulta from the choir in the fortress above and behind him.

  Aranthur was clambering down the rubble of the collapsed tower. Two thousand year old stonework lay tumbled like the fallen blocks of a child’s tower.

  A volley of purple and turquoise fire hit his shields and lit them up, an enemy choir’s concerted effort.

  The shield shed them, and Aranthur felt Dahlia and Jalu’d, the Seeker, and Ettore, the weather Magos, reaching through the Aulos to pinpoint the attack. Sihr and saar criss-crossed like the flames of the firing gonnes. The light and the black light of the charge of puissance lit the deaths of a thousand men and women.

  But nothing was touching the assault force. Now they were through the rubble field and crossing the burnt open ground that led to the old Imperial trenches. Aranthur could see the outline of the burst mine, a gaping maw in the earth, with sulphur smoke still eddying from burning beams and backlit in his magesight by the absolute darkness of sihr.

  He went to the left, where the mine had done less damage. Men were passing him, now. The assault force was eager to cross the killing ground and get to grips. A burly longshoreman leapt down into an enemy trench and began to use a pick to clear it. Aranthur noted that it was Jase Nero, first man into the enemy gonne line.

  In his moment of inattention, Aranthur was located by a Magos. The first flash disoriented him, but his new crystalline shields held, even at point-blank range. Aranthur’s snapped discharge of saar blew into his opponent’s shields and cut his opponent in half.

  The sword was in his hand, and he felt, not fear, not rage, nor even disgust, but a sort of joy, a pleasure like singing, like making love. The battle, the enemy gun line, the flashes of power, were beautiful, the way a sword blade could be beautiful, even held by an adversary.

  “To your left,” the sword said.

  He picked up the motion—saw it as sihr—and guessed, correctly, that this was an Exalted at night. He cast his enhancement and then unleashed a torrent of power at the Exalted.

  It returned two thin red beams of pure sihr.

  The two of them walked at each other, and the tempo of attacks increased as they closed, until, almost at the point of going sword to sword, the two shields all but merged. They spun off shards of failed realities from the event horizon of the powers of change.

  Aranthur had never been so puissant. It was as if something inside him had been unlocked, or unleashed.

  But even as his sword moved to engage, the Exalted half turned, and fell, cut almost in half. Ippeas, the Great Sword, had passed unnoticed through its shields and now continued forward as if the dispatch of an Exalted was an everyday event.

  Aranthur followed Ippeas
into the enemy’s second line of trenches. Off to his right, Magdalenes, polished steel armour a malevolent reflection of the fire-crossed dark, were destroying a gonne battery, spiking gonnes or blowing the iron tubes. To his left, Kallotronis leant over a trench and shot down into it.

  Aranthur rolled his shield around to face new threats, but the attacks were slowing—the ripples of red fire dying away.

  Off to the left, there was chaos.

  Ware said the sword, a soft woman’s voice.

  Aranthur turned to the left, and there was another of them. It was in among his Arnauts—a man eviscerated, a woman beheaded.

  He ran to meet it, and it saw him.

  “You,” it said.

  Aranthur stepped forward. “I know who you are.”

  By the light of their shields, he could see again the rage and confusion in the shoulders and the neck. The face was untroubled—that ivory-pale face. Up close, its constructedness was obvious—the face itself was an attached mask.

  “I could release you,” Aranthur said.

  The thing raised a puffer through his shields and fired.

  The ball smashed into Aranthur’s breastplate. The ball didn’t penetrate, but the blow knocked him down, and the pain was intense. Ribs broke. The sword spun out of his hand with an audible wail of despair.

  The Exalted drifted forward, invulnerable, victorious, glowing with potency. It put a bloody, bare foot on Aranthur’s breastplate and pressed him into the sand, grinding his broken ribs. And his vision tunnelled. He was unable to breathe. The pain was immense.

  Who are you? it asked again.

  Aranthur lay looking up at it, and in his mind he was running a hand over Inoques’ tattoos. He’d come to know them quite well. And he’d had a day to think this through, although he’d hoped to have a little more calm to try…

  He knew the binding. He’d copied it amid the blood and despair of another battlefield, and it was written in his mind.

  He reached up and put a bare hand on the Exalted’s leg. He unwrote the binding in letters of fire on the crystal surface of the Aulos, all of which was pure mental allegory, but he imagined the whole of the binding. Then he imagined the Safiri characters unwriting from left to right, backing the text across the page of existence.

  The Exalted stood stock-still for a moment, and then it unknitted.

  The release of saar from the unwritten glyphs was tremendous, but the saar didn’t burn him, but rather, almost refreshed him.

  Its scream wasn’t harrowing; it was more pathetic, as if it welcomed death, or mourned something lost. The scarlet robe fluttered for a moment in the firelight like the flag of a beaten army, and then fell to the ground.

  Aranthur rolled onto his side. He was empty of power. It took him two attempts to get to his feet, and even then he stood and swayed. Then he stooped, despite the broken ribs, and put a hand on the sword.

  You live! it said.

  For the first time, he answered it.

  I need you, he admitted. The voice came to him as naturally as speaking, but it was in his mind.

  Chimeg came out of the darkness and got a hand under his arm, and Vilna steadied him.

  “Orders?”

  The fighting didn’t end because the Exalted were destroyed, and in many ways the withdrawal was going to be more demanding than the assault. The assault had needed only bravery; the withdrawal would require discipline and attention to detail, and Aranthur could feel days of fighting and short rations compounding.

  Trumpets sounded on the walls behind him, and a red rocket rose over the battlefield. It still took him a hundred heartbeats to realise that these were the recall signals. He managed to get a knee under himself, and his helmeted head seemed to weigh more than his body. He struggled, wobbled, and knelt. Everything hurt—dehydration, partial rations, weeks of stress. And the Exalted. In the unbinding, he had somehow cancelled his enhancement. The hunger was already on him, and he had to function.

  He could see his own militia ahead of him; by the light of a hundred fires, they were spiking a row of heavy gonnes. Lang Cleg had a bag of iron spikes, and beside her Daud, his half-shaved blond hair lit by the magery all around, swung a mallet driving the soft iron into the touch holes of the gonnes. As Aranthur watched, the two of them looked like actors in an opera about Draxos the Smith, the fires of all the hells burning around them as they forged the weapons of the gods.

  Weaving like a drunkard, he made his way over the upcast of sand where the enemy had tried to protect their gonnes. Two Byzas women were setting fire to a stack of prepared wicker gabions, as yet unfilled. An older man in a black breastplate was pressing a huddle of prisoners towards the city.

  “Let them go,” Aranthur spat. “Do you want to feed them?”

  The man frowned, but obeyed, and the terrified men and women scattered.

  “Drummer!”

  Aranthur was afraid for a moment that he was spent, but he had power and he hadn’t even tapped the crystal on his chest.

  He enhanced his voice and called, “Drummer, on me!”

  Every head turned. The boy who carried the company banner, an elegantly painted Sophia with her sister Magdala on plain white silk, ran to his side, the banner almost red-gold in the firelight of the battle.

  “Rally!” Aranthur called. “On me!”

  His drummer, a big Byzas man with dark skin and blond hair, ran out of the darkness, trying to sheathe his heavy cutlass.

  “Syr!” he called.

  “Rally!” Aranthur called.

  Off to the right, he could see the flash of armour—the Magdalenes were also rallying. He grabbed a dekark.

  “Kouznos!” he called. “Rally and hold.”

  “Aye!” the man called.

  Aranthur made his legs work. He turned to the left and ran along the smooth boards that floored the battery, tripped over a corpse, and climbed up a short ladder.

  A ball took the cheek-plate off his helmet.

  There were enemy out there in the darkness; he saw movement, and lit matches.

  A volley crashed out to his left, and the tongues of fire of forty matchlocks, and he could hear the orders in Souliote.

  He put his head down and ran. He tripped over something soft and went down, twisting his neck, and the pain in his chest from the ribs. Then he was up again, and in among the Arnauts.

  “Kallotronis!”

  “Here,” yelled the big man.

  “You saw the signal?”

  “No!”

  “Time to withdraw. Can you hold here for… two minutes?”

  Kallotronis shrugged. “A year, if you want. No one out there wants a piece of us. They’re shit-scared.”

  “Listen, and tell me if I’m insane. I pull back to here—along the chord of the circle—”

  “No idea what you mean.”

  “Never mind. Along the enemy lines. The Magdalenes retreat to the militia, then both to you, and then together we back across the sand.”

  Kallotronis hesitated. “We should attack their next line. They’re fucking panicked, Timos. We could break the siege.”

  “With a hundred soldiers?” Aranthur said. “No.”

  Kallotronis looked as if he was going to disobey.

  “If you had any balls—”

  Aranthur grabbed the other man.

  “Listen to me! On a battlefield of twenty thousand, one hundred cannot triumph. Now obey.” He paused. “Please. I ask it.”

  Kallotronis looked over his shoulder.

  “Well, perhaps there are more devils out there in the dark than I think. Tell me again.”

  “Look,” Aranthur insisted, and he drew it in blue fire on the air, with little arrows. “We collapse from right to left, so that we’re all together here, at the end of the battery if we have to make a stand.”

  “Yes. I never thought I’d follow a fucking warlock into the dark, but lead on.”

  “Two minutes!” Aranthur said.

  Running across the gap between positions
was one of the bravest things he had ever done. His shields were gone and his reserves were spent, and it was totally different from fighting the Exalted, or a duel. Death was grim and impersonal and very close, and no amount of his own cleverness was going to save him. His red shields were still up, but he now knew from experience that a close-range musket ball was not deterred by magik. There were field pieces of some sort firing out in the darkness—or perhaps the enemy had a third line. Even as he forced himself to run across the open ground, he heard the unmistakable ripping-paper sound of a cannonball and felt the heat of its passage. It had come through his weakening shields without difficulty.

  His chest hurt, and he found breathing difficult; he wondered how many ribs he’d broken. He ran anyway. This time he didn’t fall. His shield occulta flickered, and he had to lie in open ground and summon more power in the Aulos, which was rich with power tonight.

  The enemy seemed hesitant. There were many soldiers out there, but they were not coming forward. Instead, they were firing into the dark, at very little.

  Except Aranthur.

  The effort of will to get to his feet and run, facing the fire of his enemies and the near exhaustion of his muscles, was like the effort of will of launching a major occulta. But then, he had lots of practice. He stumbled to his feet and moved, reached the head of the ladder down into the battery held by his own people, slapped Vilna on the shoulder, and ran past the banner. He headed for the next battery in the enemy’s second line arc, held by the Magdalenes. He saw Ippeas instantly—the man’s armour shone in the Aulos.

  “Great Sword!” he called.

  Syr Ippeas turned. His knights had just repulsed an attack. There was a wrack-line of corpses in front of them.

  He didn’t even attempt speech. Instead, he raised his diagram of blue fire, a broad red arrow showing his suggested path of retreat.

  Ippeas glanced at the diagram.

  “The militia are in the next battery,” Aranthur panted. “The Arnauts just beyond.”

  Ippeas nodded, his steel-visored face utterly inscrutable.

  “Yes,” he snapped. “On me!” he roared.

  The whole armoured line turned like one being and ran. Aranthur, carrying a breastplate and a helmet, couldn’t imagine the effort required to sprint through the firelit darkness in full harness, but the Magdalenes ran like pacers, heads up, leaving a line of corpses behind them. Four of them carried another. Aranthur scrambled along beside the wounded knight, found the wound, a deep puncture inside the left elbow. He stopped the blood flow as best he could at a run in the darkness—two occultae cast simultaneously, a thing that he would have thought impossible ten days before.