Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  The blue khaftans hesitated, fearing a ruse. A handful of grenados were thrown by the Arnauts, and Aranthur sprayed black fire at the corner where Cleg’s blue eyes stared sightlessly at the white sky. Then he buried her, by the simple expedient of pointing at the earth wall of the sap and blowing a piece of earth as big as a carthorse off the wall, collapsing the trench.

  Then he backed slowly into the ruined bastion’s back gate, surmounted by an ancient lion that predated anything made by Megara or Ulama.

  A pair of enemy clambered over the collapsed trench wall. One was a Magos; he raised his hand and a blue fire rolled in a wave to break on Aranthur’s shield. Aranthur raised his golden puffer and shot the Magos through both their shields. He fell, his lips working. The glyph-warded ball had gone straight through his shields; his puzzlement was written in his death throes.

  The other came forward, wielding a slim sword that was five feet long.

  Aranthur allowed him to get close enough to confirm his fears.

  It was no man. The soldier was Dhadhian. His face was blank, as blank as a corpse’s face.

  Aranthur took his second puffer from his sash. Then he spent a long heartbeat trying to find and breach the subjugation that he knew must be on the Dhadh. He located the occulta; it was as smooth as polished steel, and it burned from within the ancient creature.

  The Dhadh was fuelling his own subjugation with his own will. Exactly the way Aranthur’s enhancement functioned.

  It was terrifying, and he lacked the resources to breach that adamantine wall. Wearily, he raised the barrel of his puffer and shot the creature from five paces away. The ancient thing fell, his eyes unfocusing. The subjugation rode the dying creature all the way until death, still powered by the thing’s own corrupted will.

  “Aphres!” Aranthur spat.

  The Goddess of Love was the only one he could imagine, just then.

  He began to load his puffers. He could see the “enemy” moving along the top of the bastion, but then there was a burst of supporting fire from the walls of the city. That raised his heart; somewhere, someone had got the message.

  I will die here.

  This is a good time to die.

  Nonetheless, he leant out and shot one, and then another, with both precision and revulsion. Shooting Dhadhi was, literally, doing the will of the enemy.

  He was still enhanced. He could load quickly, and when four of them rushed him down the sap, he killed them all: cut, cut, parry, cut, thrust.

  Finish the wounded.

  Swordplay had never seemed so banal, so routine. So like murder.

  He reloaded his puffers.

  Murder. Murder of people hundreds or thousands of years old, bound somehow to their own destruction.

  His anger rose and rose.

  He saw the Dhadh on the wall as the man’s barrel covered him. He stepped back under the ancient lintel, and the shot rang out, too late to catch him.

  Aranthur stepped back, raising a puffer, but he was gone. Aranthur threw a curtain of fire into the angle.

  It was hard to explain, even to himself, but he was perfectly prepared to die. He’d lost something—some belief, some sense of purpose. It was as if the enemy, willing to use women and children and ancient creatures as assault troops under compulsion, had robbed him of his sense of proportion.

  At the same time, his anger rose to choke him. And he considered things for the first time—in hatred of the Master and his works, and in despair.

  He thought of how easily he could work sihr. There was enough in the Black Bastion for him to make a firestorm of black terror; to clear the bastion completely.

  That thought, the thought of mastering the power that lay all around him in death, twinned with his self-loathing. The killing—the deaths he had himself inflicted.

  I used to try and heal them, he thought. Now I just kill them in dozens.

  He thought of the Dhadhi who played music for feast days. He thought of running in the woods with his sister, pretending they had met elves and faeries.

  It’s all so fucking wrong.

  The sword in his hand was so warm he could just hold on to it, and it vibrated as if it had been struck.

  The Disciple is attacking your mind.

  Aranthur stood still, one puffer still trickling smoke, the other cocked in his hand, and his eyes widened. Still the temptation lingered…

  He thought, in that moment, of Iralia. Of Tribane. Of Tiy Drako and Dahlia and Sasan and Ansu, of Kurvenos and Qna Liras.

  All flawed. All capable of evil.

  All fighting as best they could.

  Yes. There is only the struggle. Did he think that, or did she whisper it to him?

  He was just too stubborn to succumb. The sihr lay there like poisoned food in front of a starving man, and he let it lie.

  Better to let himself die. And while the enhancement lasted, he still had a great many advantages over his opponents, who, however many advantages of physique and magik they may have enjoyed ordinarily over mere humans, were hesitant now.

  Aranthur called out, in his best Varestan, “I see your precious Disciple won’t come and face me.”

  No one answered.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” he said, with brutal honesty.

  But when the sniper on the wall moved, Aranthur seared him with white fire so quickly that he never managed a scream.

  He was, in fact, almost out of power. He ran a mental hand over his shields, which were intact, and incredible—almost literally, the shields of a god.

  He shot left-handed at a Dhadh moving at the corner of the bastion, and missed.

  Two shots, and a grenado. He batted the grenado aside with power, and it exploded on the other side of the angle of the sap. One return shot destroyed the Capitan Pasha’s beautiful puffer in his hand, and the other struck the lintel behind him. He flinched away, and a knot of them rushed him. It was hand to hand, and he took wounds, and he was slowing. Even the eight of them that reached him over his carpet of white fire were not a match for him. Their blank faces couldn’t register the despair they felt, but he matched it. And they were fast—quicker than mere men. Their long slim swords flickered like a steel fire.

  The old sword refused to let him die. It flashed with its own fire, and it sheared through the Dhadhian weapons—through armour and through ancient bodies.

  He wanted to weep. He wanted it to be done. He’d learnt something, but he also knew that he wasn’t capable of just letting go and lying down. He’d just go on.

  Instead he cut up, fastidiously, behanding the last Dhadh facing him and then splitting his head on the downstroke.

  He stood in the gate, as the enhancement faded from him, as the last of his power ran out through his fingers. He was panting like a dog that has run all day, and his hands were covered in other creatures’ blood, and his anger was as black as the storm clouds that scudded across the western sky.

  He heard them coming from behind him. He turned, back to the wall, prepared for the end, and was stunned to see Sasan at the head of a crowd of Safians, all armed—and Kallotronis, and Kouznos. They filled the ditch, and there was Kallinikas, leading a dozen gonners to the mortars.

  And Dahlia. Jalu’d. Kati.

  And Inoques. In front of all of them. In the Aulos, she burned like a torch.

  “I was ready,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Too bad. Your friends love you.”

  Book Three

  Risposta

  A counter-attack launched in the time immediately following the attack of your opponent. Two elements are essential in a risposta: first, that the opponent’s blow is fully and completely parried, so that his blade can be left; second, that the response is immediate, and confident.

  Maestro Sparthos,

  unpublished notes to the book Opera Nuova

  1

  Antioke

  “I don’t even understand what happened,” the Vicar said. He had his head in his hands. “I don’t understand—”
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  “Their Disciple won’t fight,” Dahlia said. “He threw his very best shot at us, and Aranthur stopped it.”

  Syr Vardar frowned. He muttered something about “under arrest.”

  Aranthur was still on some high place—the place he had gone to prepare to die. So he said nothing. The rage was still there, and now it had no outlet. So was the hunger.

  But Kallinikas raised an aristocratic eyebrow.

  “Well, we were saved by the Safians we’d planned to execute to save food.” She looked around.

  “The Laws of War—” Vardar began.

  Kallinikas looked like a scarecrow in a good shirt. Her brown skin was burnt almost black, which failed to hide the bruises under her eyes and contempt she could still generate.

  “Tell yourself any story you like,” she said. “Listen. It changes nothing. We held a few hours more, is all. We’re out of food—most of our troops are down to three or four rounds.” She shrugged. “Been good to know you, boys and girls. Really—there aren’t even rats to eat, much less dogs or cats.”

  “The Pure are subjugating Dhadhi,” Aranthur said suddenly. “The assault was Dhadhi. Imagine what that means. The Master uses them against us, and we kill them for him.”

  “Imagine the sheer volume of power it takes to subjugate so many Dhadhi,” Dahlia said.

  “The Disciple has to handle it all, because we’ve killed all his Exalted,” Aranthur said, his tired voice implacable. “And we beat him. Let’s make our little victory count for something. I say, we go for the Disciple.”

  Dahlia looked at him. “We don’t have a Lightbringer.”

  “You have half a dozen military Magi in a choir, and Haras and you and me, and Jalu’d,” Aranthur said. “And Kati. And Inoques, if she’ll come. I am guessing that she could probably beat the Disciple alone.”

  Inoques’ face moved behind her white silk veil, but she gave nothing away.

  “Where is Ippeas?” the Vicar asked.

  Dahlia nodded. “In the Black Bastion.” She looked at Inoques for a moment and then back at Aranthur. “You have a point.”

  “It’s an insane risk,” the Vicar said. “All we need to do is hold out a few more days—”

  “He’s living in a fantasy where we have a few days,” Dahlia said.

  Aranthur had seen his own militia curled in the shade, racked with the tremors of total exhaustion, where the body begins to consume muscle to stay alive. He felt above the pain, but he was aware that as he had enhanced himself, he was actually worse off than most, unless the last little piece of sausage had magikal powers.

  “Tomorrow?” Kallinikas asked. “Tonight? Moon will be bright…”

  Aranthur shook his head. “Now. How many of us will still be able to walk tomorrow?”

  Dahlia looked at him. “Maybe a little over-focused, there, Baradur?” She used the Safiri word for “hero” with contempt. “I don’t think you can walk all the way to the enemy camp, even if they threw down rose petals in your path instead of grenados.” She walked to him. “You were going to die. You’re still on that path. I’m not. What if we start ferrying the garrison to Masr?”

  “What?” the Vicar demanded.

  Kallinikas raised an eyebrow.

  Dahlia raised a sparkling screen of light.

  “The great galley will take five hundred,” she said, “and come back with a week’s food. And then another five hundred away, and another week’s food.”

  Aranthur saw the flaw in it, but also her resolve. He didn’t care.

  Inoques came and took his arm.

  “Come,” she said.

  He allowed himself to be led away, much as the Vicar hid his eyes, unable to look at his people starving in the shade.

  “Twice you’ve come back for me,” he said.

  “You are a very strange man. Also very dangerous. I already wonder if I have made you too dangerous.” She handed him something.

  He took it. It was a large piece of salt beef, wrapped in rich white bread.

  “What?” he mumbled, but the salty, dry meat was in his mouth, and he was chewing and swallowing. Almost immediately the pain came—cramps in his gut—and he fell to his knees. She lifted him.

  “Eat,” she said.

  He felt that he was betraying something. But he had cast sihr.

  What betrayal is left?

  But his body demanded the food, and he ate it, the meat that was a product of death. And the delicious bread.

  Unmoved by anything he was thinking or mumbling, she handed him a canteen. He drank, and almost choked; it was wine, not water.

  She smiled.

  “Don’t die,” she said. “I would be angry.”

  That made him almost smile. “Do you have enough—”

  “No. No, I’m not here to salve your tender conscience. I’m here to keep you alive. Nor will I fight this Pure thing—the Disciple. It is like me—a broken thing bound to a dead thing.” She smiled crookedly. “Perhaps not so dead,” she said with a certain humour.

  “Your body, or the Disciple’s body?”

  “You are so instantly alive, and interested, when I discuss your enemies.”

  Aranthur ate the last scrap of bread. His gut felt as if it might explode.

  “I think I need to lie down,” he said.

  “I’ll walk you to your billet.”

  She seemed to be laughing, and he could not imagine what she found funny.

  They crossed the empty square. No one was moving; there were no rats, or dogs. Even the big flies seemed to have gone.

  “I cast sihr,” he said suddenly.

  She smiled. “I know. I can taste it on you.”

  “What does that make me?” he asked her.

  She laughed, her laughter rich and genuine, echoing off the ancient stone of the cathedral.

  “Human. But I promise you, I am not the one from whom you’d wish absolution. I am constructed with sihr.” She smiled wickedly. “You might say you’ve been mating with death.”

  They went past the Chapel, and into the warren of side streets behind the Cathedral, until they turned on to the Corso Nuovo that led to the sea wall.

  “Sophia,” Aranthur spat.

  Once again, the ringing in his ears. But it wasn’t in his ears, and it wasn’t the sea.

  Screams. And a roar.

  He stopped. Looked at Inoques.

  “Not again.” His eyes wouldn’t even lift off the street. “I’m done.”

  She shrugged and walked rapidly towards where his companies were lying in the street and along the benches of an ancient quaveh house. Kallotronis was up, with his jezzail. Kouznos was having trouble standing, and Aranthur could see the advantage of training and some salt beef. He was walking, and Kouznos looked as if he might fall, and two longshoremen, but most of the Keltai lay like tired dogs.

  “Sea Gate,” Chimeg said.

  She snapped something in Pastun, and the other Nomadi got up. Stoga, the tallest, staggered visibly.

  “They’re cheering,” Vilna said.

  “Draxos’ prick,” Kallotronis spat. “What are they cheering?”

  Aranthur had his carabin. He stumbled down the street, towards the crumbling sea wall. He made his thighs push him up the line of old crenellations where the wooden hoardings had fallen in during the last siege. Kallotronis was with him, and Inoques, who was inscrutable in her veil.

  Aranthur was the first to the sea wall. The cheers were thin. Down on the docks, a woman was screaming—repeated, long bursts of sound.

  There, to the west, was a long line of sails—more than Aranthur could count. The brilliant red sails of the Empire’s fleet.

  He watched for a long time, first unbelieving, and then again, to be sure. And while he watched, the whole line tacked together, and came closer.

  2

  Antioke

  When it was all over, Aranthur walked out to the Black Bastion. He wore no badge of rank, nor weapon; he wore only a stained fustanella and a blue turban.

>   He had imagined that, after the General’s victory, the broken bastion would be empty, but of course it was not. Hundreds of men and women, like self-actualising ants, scurried over the walls and the surface. A burial party moved the corpses, some of which were twenty days old. Other parties filled the ditch that the Imperial army had dug, and the trenches behind. A dozen people were mixing mortar. Aranthur could smell the lime that was being burned somewhere on the other side of the great black walls.

  At the base of the breach stood a dozen heavy wagons, each of which had hauled one block of the dark stone that gave the big fort its name. Aranthur picked his way down the breach, even as soldiers and workmen cleared the shattered stone away.

  “There’s a quarry, just across the fields,” a man said. “Thousands of years old.”

  Aranthur didn’t at first recognise the man. He was middle-aged, had a small beard and moustache, and looked Byzas.

  “Thousands of years.” Aranthur shook his head. “And we’ll rebuild it, of course.”

  The other man smiled. “You don’t know me. I’m not offended—it happens to me all the time.”

  With a smile, he held his hands around his face, hiding most of it…

  Like a helmet.

  “Great Sword,” Aranthur said.

  Syr Ippeas smiled. “Did you come here to commune with your dead?”

  Aranthur blinked. “Yes.”

  Syr Ippeas nodded. “Your own losses, or all the people you killed? Both, I assume.”

  Aranthur writhed. “Yes,” he choked.

  Ippeas nodded. His mild blue eyes held no accusation.

  “Do you pray?”

  “I used to,” Aranthur admitted.

  “If the gods forget us as easily as we forget them, much of the world as we know it is explained,” Ippeas said. “You thought you’d be alone here?”

  “Yes.” Aranthur was watching Kallinikas lay out the new angle of the new front walls. She was still as thin as a Souliote scarecrow. “We just build it again. And in a hundred years or a thousand, another army comes—another would-be conqueror will drive his slaves before him, and new weapons will grind people to paste.”