by Sarah Remy
All at once Morgan lifted his sword in and then brought it down in signal. Trumpets blew. The cavalry surged forward as one, voices lifted in a roar. Hooves pounding, equipment rattling, shields raised.
“Stay!” Russel said, materializing at Avani’s side. Her visor was down and her sword in hand. Her uniform was burned through in several places. Her voice through the grille of her helm was a rasp. “They’ll be back and forth a few more times before there’s need of infantry. Also,” she added, “breathe or you’ll pass out.”
Avani gasped air, embarrassed to be caught holding her breath. A Kingsman not far down the line called hallo Russel’s way.
“Is it bad?” he asked. “It smells bad. Like the whole world’s burning.”
“Wilhaiim’s not,” replied Russel. “And that’s all the matters.”
“What are they like?” the man with the rebellious stomach asked. “The sand snakes? Have you seen any?”
“They’re like us,” Russel reported grimly. “Wanting to win this war. They advance and retreat and ride in spirals so they’re difficult to hit. Don’t follow them out; they mean to separate and slaughter. Stay together.”
The cavalry returned in a crash, a tidal wave rolling back from deeper waters, wheeling around just in time to keep from trampling their foot soldiers. Morgan rode with them, and Avani saw Liam at his side. She took a quick head count and was relieved to see they had returned entire. One Kingsman had blood on his lance and on his cuirass. Three had arrows sticking like iridescent thorns in their shields.
“Again!” screamed Morgan, and off they went.
The second charge seemed to last three times as long, but Avani thought they hadn’t ridden so far out as they had on the first because now she could hear the noise of nearby skirmish. She wiped sweat from her sword hand with her salwar then adjusted the kettle helm where it chafed her skull through her hair. Russel shifted her pommel from hand to hand, and rocked from foot to foot.
“You’re not meant to be here,” Avani realized belatedly. “Renault will be waiting for your report.”
“Don’t like my chances getting back,” Russel confessed. “They’re coming ’round the city like a hangman’s noose and they’re not lacking arrows. They’ll know by now. Yon funny Wythe priest sent a bird as soon as Roberts and Fin made their report. Besides—” she danced again in place “—where safer than next to you and your wicked little blade, magus?”
Avani shook her head. “I don’t mean to fight.”
Russel laughed. “You will,” she predicted. “Everyone does.”
A riderless horse, wounded and trembling, came suddenly out of the smoke, galloping in the direction of camp, almost trampling infantry in its panic. Another followed immediately after, and then another. The last carried its rider still in the saddle, helm lost and head drooping on his breast. A shattered lance dangled from his lifeless hand, slapping the horse’s belly, urging it on in flight. A desert arrow protruded from the back of his neck above the curve of his cuirass, an impossible shot made. Blood stained his front.
Behind the dead man on the horse the living cavalry returned, several less and some wounded yet upright still on their mounts. They barely had time to wheel and regroup before trumpets blew once more.
“Again!” screamed Morgan around the groan of soldiers and their horses and the agitated breathing of the men and woman waiting on foot.
“Next time,” Russel said, “it’ll be us. They’re losing too many too soon. The one god help that lad.”
She was right. The cavalry came back ragged and faltering. Morgan had an arrow in his arm, yet still he managed to lift his sword, up and down. And this time, the Kingsmen on the ground blew their trumpets in signal also. The infantry gave chase.
The grass beneath her feet was torn up. Horses and soldiers lay broken on the ground in every direction, forcing her to pick her way forward for fear of stepping on corpses. She’d never been bothered by carcasses before, not when they’d bobbed alongside her in the sea as she’d struggled to survive another day before rescue, not when they’d walked on the Downs, animated by angry sidhe, and not when she’d tended dying children during the Red Worm plague and later watched as priests and parents stacked their tiny bodies for burning.
She was afraid, now. Afraid not of the dead but of the dying, lest she step on someone still grasping to life and exacerbate their suffering. For suffering they certainly were, bleeding their last onto crop they’d tended, struck down by arrow, iron, and scimitar. There were an equal number of desert corpses amongst the flatlanders. The sand snakes wore little in the way of armor. Once caught, they were far more vulnerable than a Kingsman in even the lightest mail. But they were very difficult to catch, and there were many more sand snakes than there were flatlanders.
“Head down,” said Russel, as a flight of arrows hissed by. Avani ducked automatically, though her wards would protect her from impact. The arrows struck the ground, starting tiny fires wherever they landed.
Avani quelled the fires with a cant, a reversal of the basic spell she used to kindle fire in her hearth at home or light a taper in the night when she needed the chamber pot.
“One to your right,” Russel said, meaning not the fire but a man still living. Avani turned and saw him there, pinned beneath his dead horse, yellow eyes wide, mouth gaping. She squatted, touching his brow. His back was surely broken and there was a sluggishly bleeding wound on his brow. The wound wouldn’t kill him, but the broken back she didn’t know how to fix. There were tattoos on his chest and down his arms: long-eared rabbits marching beneath a many-rayed sun.
He said something quietly in his desert tongue. She shook her head. He was in pain, but he wasn’t afraid of Avani nor, she thought, of death. He shuddered, gasping for air. She closed his eyes with her fingers before he could see Russel.
“I can’t save him,” she said.
For answer, Russel put her sword neatly through his heart. He died without a sound. Avani staggered to her feet.
Somehow in the smoke and the fury they’d gotten separated from the garrison, if the garrison still existed, and Avani was not at all sure it did. They were making their way in what they hoped was a westerly direction, toward Wilhaiim, but the wind and smoke made it almost impossible to be certain. Sounds of battle came and went. They pursued a cry only to get turned around again when the wind blew the shout away. She did not think, from the number of dead they came upon, that they were very far from the center of battle, but she was also not certain that center didn’t continue to break and reform.
Four times they’d come upon the living: kilted warriors on foot wielding scimitars, one to each hand, and in each case looking quite as benumbed as Avani felt. Russel dispatched them without difficulty, mostly because Avani had encircled Russel also with her wards, allowing for an unfair advantage. The sand snakes couldn’t land a single blow, nor could they outrun Russel. Avani might have felt sorry for them but she’d stopped feeling anything at all about the same time she stopped counting Wythe badges on the dead.
Jacob had left her shoulder for the ground where the haze was less thick. He hopped and flapped on the periphery of her awareness, cackling softly when he came upon a piece of shiny treasure pinned to a corpse’s uniform. He ignored Avani’s scolding, dodging Russel when she tried to boot him away from an infantryman’s bloody chest. To Jacob dead was dead, meat on the ground, and unattended baubles were his for the taking.
“I hope you don’t think I’ll carry that for you,” Avani said as Jacob struggled to pluck an embroidered cord off the hilt of a scimitar. “Ai, leave it be.”
“Menace,” Russel whispered. “Worse than a carrion crow.”
Jacob squawked indignation through a beak full of cord. Russel held up a finger and tilted her head, straining to make sense of the clamor on the wind. Avani looked at the sky, hoping for a glimpse of the sun for orientation, but everything was sickly gray. Soot made her eyes water. She scrubbed them with the back of her hand and when
they cleared she saw a dead man standing in the smoke.
He was hardly the first ghost they had encountered. Spirits were as plentiful on the battlefield as arrow-kindled fires. They sat by their corpses or wandered in the crop or stood at attention as if waiting for direction. At first she’d sent them on their way with a murmured blessing or a word of consolation. But as the morning wore on and regret became horror and then stupor, the banishing cant—like the spell used to quench desert arrows—came to her lips automatically and without emotion.
There were many more kilted spirits than flatlander ghosts. She was not fooled into thinking this was a good sign for Wilhaiim. Instead she remembered her own island people, almost entirely eradicated by cataclysm. War, she’d come to realize, was a cataclysm of another sort. And stumbling through an endless smoky vista was a lot like drowning.
“Avani. Are you with me?”
“Aye.” Avani blinked back and forth between Russel and the dead man. “Aye, just. There’s another one. Let me—”
She started to speak the banishing cant but the desert ghost walked away before she could finish, striding purposefully into the haze.
“Skald’s balls!” Fury surprised her. Fuming, she trotted after his disappearing form. “Come back here! You’ll get lost in this blight!” He wasn’t far ahead. She could see the edge of his kilt fluttering in the wind.
“Avani!” Russel paced after, squinting right and left. “Don’t be stupid. You can’t chase down every spirit in need of—oh.” She stopped behind Avani, peering at the ground ahead. “Oh, shit. What’s this?”
They lay where they’d fallen, like Ceilidh marionettes with their strings cut. Animals and men, flatlanders and desert people, coursers and coastal ponies. They lay nose to nose and limb to limb, as if they’d been within a hairsbreadth of battle when instead they’d just . . . stopped. Impossibly, the smoke and wind refused to touch them; they lay beneath clouds and faint sunlight, a bubble of unnatural peace amidst the storm of war.
“Shit,” Russel repeated with more emphasis. “Are they all—”
"Dead? Aye.” Before Russel could stop her, Avani walked out of the smoke and into the clear air. She had to step carefully for fear of treading upon a corpse. The desert ghost, standing now amongst the fallen bodies, watched her approach, blue eyes flaring. As far as she could tell, he was the only spirit near. When she reached his side, he pointed at a body on the ground, speaking quickly and angrily.
“I don’t understand,” Avani apologized. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Gone,” the ghost said, switching to accented king’s lingua. “My tribe. I can’t find them. They’re gone, every one.”
“This one hasn’t a wound on her,” Russel reported. “Nor most of the horses. Whatever killed them, it wasn’t the sort of weapon a soldier expects.”
“It was Mal.” Liam limped out from the wall of smoke, frightening Russel into a defensive squat. Morgan walked at his side. The young lord was without a helm and wore a bloodied rag wrapped around his crown, another around his arm. He led his rawboned horse on a loose rein and carried a curved scimitar instead of his own blade. His horse, like Liam, was badly hobbled.
Jacob rode Liam’s shoulder, puffed up and proud. Bear stood at Liam’s knee, tail slowly wagging.
“This one found us in the smoke,” Liam said, wry, reaching up to pet Jacob’s feathers. “A lucky thing. We’ve been wandering in circles, I fear.”
He accepted Avani’s fierce embrace with fortitude and pretended not to hear her tearful snuffles. Morgan awarded her a half bow, face bloodied, muddied, and grim.
“You’re hurt,” Avani said, reaching for her flask. “Your head, my lord.”
“It’s nothing.” Morgan scratched at the bandage where dried blood stuck linen to his skin. “Wilde’s worse off. Lady Avani, can you help him?”
“I lost mine own horse early on, after the third go,” Liam said as Avani stroked Wilde’s damp withers and ran her hands down his sides. “And right after that my knee blew.” He grimaced. “Mayhap not as sound as I’d hoped.”
“I wheeled ’round to pull him up,” Morgan said. “And right then a passel of snakes came out of the smoke. One of them took Wilde in the front with his sword. We went down and I hit my head.” He frowned. “I don’t remember much for a while after that.”
“Had his head rattled some,” Liam concluded. “Dazed and muzzy but I kept him walking. Is that water?” He seized the flask.
“Only a wee bit for you, my lord,” Avani cautioned Morgan. “It’s laced with wine and if you’re concussed I’d rather you abstained.” Her fingers were sticky with Wilde’s blood. The horse quivered as she examined the gash across his chest. The slice wasn’t deep, but it was long, continuing under the horse’s belly past his right foreleg.
“Good lad.” Avani smiled at Morgan. “He’ll be fine. It’s only a shallow wound. He’s sore, and it needs cleaning to keep back infection, but now’s not the time.”
“Obviously.” Russel turned in a small circle, eyeing the sky overhead. “This place feels like a curse. Let’s not linger. Difficult to be certain, with the clouds, but I think the city’s that way.”
“Why don’t you ask Jacob?” Liam wondered around a mouthful of drink. “He led us right to you, without any trouble. Besides, he always knows which way is where. Even at sea. It’s like he’s got a compass in his head.”
Throwing up one hand, Russel made a sound of deep disgust. Avani, feeling the fool, pinned Jacob with a stare. The raven bobbed his head up and down, self-satisfied.
“Tricks,” he said.
“You black-feathered bastard,” Russel snarled. “Do you mean to say he let us stumble about without direction all for the sake of looting the dead?”
“Mayhap.” Liam flashed a weary smile. “Or mayhap he was just waiting for us.”
“That one’s Wythe,” Morgan said quietly as they walked the periphery of the dead. “And that one. He’s mine. That one’s Black Abbey. She must have come up from their garrison. Should we collect the arrows? There are so many. Mother always said collect the arrows.”
“I’m better with a blade,” growled Russel. “And I’m not wasting strength carrying arrows or raven hoard, begging your pardon, my lord. I need my hands for fighting.”
“I dropped my sword when I fell.” Morgan scanned the ground as they skirted the odd clearing, noting faces. Avani did not doubt he was committing each Wythe corpse to memory.
“That scimitar will do you fine,” Liam said. “It’s light and strong. I think they must have skilled smiths in the desert.”
“They don’t fight fair,” complained Morgan. “Running away and then popping up behind. Worse than barrowmen.”
“War’s not meant to be fair,” Russel said. “If Riggins led you to believe it is, then he needs some sense knocked into him.”
“He didn’t want to frighten my lord, is all,” said Liam.
“I’m not frightened,” Morgan replied. “I’m angry. That one’s mine. She wished me luck before we mounted. Twenty-five Kingsmen I’ve counted in this spot. A good chunk of my garrison and hardly any of them bleeding from more than a scratch.”
Avani had noticed the same thing, although she’d been counting desert corpses alongside the Kingsmen and thought the Kingsmen would have soon met their deaths in a wave of iridescent arrows. Instead the desert had taken much greater losses, felled midrout.
At the edge of the bubble she turned and looked back. The ghost loitered amongst the corpses, searching. He saw her watching and bristled. He did not want her interference, so she let him be.
“What did you mean?” Russel asked Liam, low, as they followed Jacob back into the haze. The raven hopped across the ground with purpose. Corpses were fewer now, though the soil was torn up and trampled, pock-marked where arrows had struck but not caught. “When you said Mal did that, what did you mean?”
Avani felt Liam’s eyes on the back of her head.
“It’s
fine,” she said, although it wasn’t. “He’s not here. I’ve . . . got rid of him.” She tested her wards, inside and out, and they were still strong.
“Of course he’s not here,” Russel said. “I left Malachi only hours ago, sitting attendance upon the king, under strict orders not to leave the castle.”
“Mayhap. But he’s done that before. I’ve seen it, in Roue, and on Baldebert’s ship. He tried to do it to me, suck me dry, like.” Avani felt rather than saw Liam’s convulsive shudder. “He takes it from you, the energy that keeps you going, and he thrives on it. Like a tick on a sheep only much worse.” Morgan put his hands over his mouth, stifling a nervous giggle.
“Bone magic,” Avani agreed quietly. “Necromancy. Only, he works it upon the living. Steals away the spirit before the body is finished with it. It is—” now she did meet Liam’s worried gaze “—I think, worse than murder.”
Liam’s shoulders slumped in relief.
“Did you think I would excuse him?” she asked sadly. “I left Wilhaiim as soon as I realized.”
“I think you love him,” her lad answered with a grown man’s wisdom, “or at least you love what he might have been.”
“Might have beens are eroded with the turning tide,” Avani retorted. If she could convince Liam, mayhap she could convince herself. “Now is what we have.”
“You’re not listening, either of you,” Russel groused. Exhaustion slowed her strides. “I say, I left your necromancer ensconced in the castle just before dawn.”
“And how long ago was dawn?” Morgan asked wearily. “I’ve lost track.”
“Fire!” screeched Jacob, a breath before the wind tossed a blast of heat on Avani’s face. “Bring the torches!”
They might have walked straight into it but for Jacob’s warning: a crofter’s cottage still smoldering, naught but charred stone and blackened earth. Sluggish flames still crackled. Another, larger hot spot smoked a few feet away in the near field. Avani quenched them both and then had to sit down suddenly in the crop, head spinning. Her reserves, she realized, were beginning to run dry. Bear crouched protectively by her side.
