Gold Throne in Shadow

by M. C. Planck

  Now a ladder poked up in front of him, and he had only his sword. He had finally run out of tricks. All the ulvenmen had to do now was keep pushing, and his army would crumble away in this acrid, thick darkness.

  The man next to him attached his bayonet to his rifle and joined Christopher in front of the ladder.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Christopher shouted at him. “Go find some ammunition.”

  Nodding, the soldier ran off into the smoke.

  An ulvenman head appeared, and Christopher poked at it. He had a significant advantage here. The creature could only fight one-handed, since it had to use the other hand to hold onto the ladder. It decided to ignore him and tried to clamber over the top. Christopher’s tael guided his thrust between the scales of its armor, and the sword sank deep into its belly.

  He had to pull the sword out and beat the thing over the head a few more times before it fell off the ladder. By then the next ulvenman was climbing onto the lip of the wall.

  He killed that one, ignoring the ax blow that cracked his helmet and diminished his tael. He killed the next one, too, but not without suffering another hit. They were coming too fast, the ones behind scampering over their dead and dying kin.

  A soldier with a carbine walked up, shot the current ulvenman, leaned over the edge and fired five more times. Then he left, reloading as he went.

  Before new ulvenmen appeared, the first soldier came back. Now they alternated shooting and stabbing the creatures, and Christopher fancied they could keep up. At least until he fainted from exhaustion. Leaning against the wall, panting, he tried to catch his breath in the acrid smoke.

  After a few minutes, he realized something was wrong. He’d been resting for an unseemly length of time.

  His companion was slumped, unmoving. Terrified that the sleep was magical, he kicked the man. But the soldier sprung wildly to his feet, ready to fight. He’d only been dozing.

  Rifles still barked, intermittently. The cannons had gone silent, their crews waiting for something worth firing on.

  Karl appeared out of the slowly thinning smoke. Glancing over the shambles of the fort, the bodies of men and animals strewn like spilled and bloody beans, he smiled at Christopher.

  “I think we won.”

  They waited anxiously for the next attack, the next wave of ulvenmen, the next surprise. When the air began to lighten, Christopher’s heart skipped a beat, convinced for a second that this was some terrible magic that would grow until it blinded them and left them helpless.

  But it was just the sunrise. This one, for a change, revealed a pretty sight: the plain in in front of them was bare save for corpses. The ulvenmen had withdrawn from the walls in the night and had apparently kept running.

  Another twoscore of his men had been lost in the final assault. Finding what the dinosaurs had left of them was not as gruesome as Christopher had feared. The blood and gore was so uniformly spread over the ground that it lost its power to shock.

  “You need to get some sleep,” Karl ordered. “And Disa too. We need your magic ready as soon as possible.” Not to cure the wounded; there were hardly any of those. The attacks had been so powerful that ordinary men either lived or died. Karl was expecting the ulvenmen to return.

  And so was Christopher. Tossing and turning on his cot, he had nightmares of invisible, snarling wolf-men hiding in every corner, waiting for a secret signal to pounce.

  Late in the afternoon he gave up trying to sleep and tried to meditate instead. Alone inside his tent, he was unable to shake off the fear of sudden attack. Eventually he moved outside, under the watchful eye of his soldiers, where he finally felt safe enough to pray.

  His head full, he went to find their few wounded, but Disa had beaten him to it. After that terrible, brutal night, there were only the dead and the cheerfully whistling. He thought about an old Star Trek episode. War was supposed to be painful, so people would be encouraged not to do it. Even the winners were supposed to suffer.

  But on this world, victory was complete. Your wounded would be healed, your dead would be revived, everything would be made bright and shiny again. As long as you kept winning, you might never even guess that there was a downside to perpetual violence. Well, unless you were a commoner; for them, war still meant pain and death.

  And the upside, at least from the nobility’s point of view, was presented to him fresh from the kettles, the product of the corpses strewn inside and outside the walls. A rock of tael as big as a peach.

  He’d bet the farm and won. In one day and night he had doubled his fortune, taking from the field of battle more tael than he had begged, borrowed, and stolen in his entire career as a priest. In his hand he held enough tael to make him seventh-rank.

  “I never even got the chance to call you Vicar,” Gregor laughed. That was the title for Christopher’s sixth-rank, which hadn’t even manifested itself yet.

  Since Torme was otherwise occupied, Karl had to be the voice of gloom.

  “Do not forget the tax you owe the King.”

  That wasn’t the only expense that came before Christopher could think about another promotion. “Can I deduct what I spend to revive the men?”

  “No,” Gregor answered, rolling his eyes like Lalania always did. “The King comes first. He takes his quarter off the top.”

  And Christopher had to add in the tael they had taken the night before. Even the tiny specks from the alligators had to be counted. A truth spell would not be fooled by accounting tricks.

  There was another expense he knew he was going to make, so he might as well do it now. He went looking for Disa and found her in the camp kitchen. She was making herself useful trying to sort the crockery into heaps that could be mended and piles that couldn’t. Breaking off a large lump of tael, he handed it to her.

  “We still need you fourth-ranked. Some of these men are going to get infected, and I might not be able to cure disease quickly enough.” He could only do two a day, and that was only if he wasn’t doing other things, like finding invisible ulvenmen or nullifying lightning bolts.

  She stared at his generosity, holding the fortune as gently as an egg. Then she made an unexpected complaint.

  “Ser Gregor served you as well as I did.” She looked across the fort, to where Gregor was helping the men lift and move rubble.

  Christopher shrugged, annoyed at having to explain his mercenary finances. “This is not a reward, it is an investment. You will be serving me for another two years. Gregor is a free agent. He can leave anytime he wants and take my tael with him. In any case he already got a promotion out of me. So why are you arguing?”

  “Because I do not wish to profit at the expense of others.”

  It was a fair comment. It was the nature of those who wore the White to be scrupulous. But Christopher was in charge now, and he had to bear the burden of choosing pragmatism over fairness. Disa, having made her argument, acquiesced and swallowed the tael, reveling in the sensation of power even as she looked at him with reproach.

  He was beginning to feel some sympathy for the hierarchy of the Church. The Saint and Cardinal Faren had carried this load for all their lives. Even Vicar Rana had to make these kinds of decisions, controlling other people’s fates for the good of everyone else.

  Anything that could make him feel sorry for that old harridan had to be bad, so he spent the rest of the day being grumpy, on principle.

  After a peaceful night, Christopher had to make another decision. They had a lot of bodies to deliver to the Cathedral, and only six days to do it. They were all but out of ammunition, much of their food stores had been ruined, and half their horses were dead.

  “Do we abandon the fort?” he asked his staff.

  “No,” Gregor answered. “It is a strong position.”

  “We paid too high a price for it,” Disa said.

  “Morale would suffer from a retreat.” Karl always had his finger on the pulse of the army.

  “Then I have to go. I have to personally deliver this t
ael to the Cathedral, to pay for all those raisings. And I have to accompany the corpses, to keep them preserved. But I can’t bear the thought of leaving the army defenseless.”

  “I’ll stay,” Gregor volunteered.

  Karl shook his head. “If the men cannot stand on their own behind stone walls, then we have accomplished nothing. Best we tell them how worthless they are before they make the mistake of thinking themselves soldiers.”

  Christopher winced, but he had deserved it. “Point taken, Major.”

  “I’ll still stay,” Gregor said. “I’d rather be here than in Carrhill. If that’s all right with the Major.” He softened it with a smile.

  “You’re welcome as a guest, Ser. Under our protection.” Karl tried to smile back. Because he was deadly serious, it didn’t work.

  “Terms I can accept,” Gregor said with a genuine smile. He had fought with these men when all seemed lost. They treated him like a comrade-in-arms. Only Karl seemed to remember he was a nobleman.

  “Then we better start making a list of things we need.” Charles the quartermaster had disobeyed Christopher’s explicit order and gone and got himself killed again. Probably doing something heroic.

  He took a piece of paper from his writing box, dipped pen to ink, and scribbled out the first word.

  Grenades.

  14

  KING’S CROSS

  They didn’t leave until the next day. Gregor had wanted a chance to patrol first and was disappointed to find no sign of ulvenmen within five miles of the fort. He was the only one who felt that way.

  What was left of the cavalry rode out with Christopher, escorting what was left of the wagons. But he didn’t need very many; the only load they carried were barrels of dead men.

  In the hot, humid summer weather, their cargo quickly acquired an unbearable stench. Christopher used his magic to preserve bodies as fast as he could, but it would take days before he got to them all. By the time they reached the city of Carrhill, their clothes seemed permanently impregnated with the odor.

  But that was not the reason the gate sergeant goggled at them from on top of the wall.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said. “But you only smell like it.”

  “I’m not, so open the damn gate already,” Christopher growled.

  “Dark Hells, no,” the sergeant said. “It’s worth my neck to let that stink in here. And we’re officially under siege, so I wouldn’t open that gate for anything less than the King. How do I know you aren’t a changeling? And no, I’m not going to wake the wizard, so don’t even ask.”

  “Sell us some food, at least,” Christopher said. They’d had cold porridge the night before, unwilling to light a fire in the deserted countryside.

  “That I can do,” the sergeant agreed.

  Half an hour later they lowered baskets of fresh bread, broiled ham, skins of beer, and bags of oats for the horses.

  “Thank you,” Christopher told him, feeling much better after a decent meal. He threw a handful of gold coins into a basket, and the troop climbed aboard their wagons and horses again.

  “Where are you going?” the sergeant called after him.

  “To the Cathedral,” Christopher shouted back. They could make another ten miles before the horses would need to rest. And tonight, safely inside settled lands, they could have a fire.

  Two days later, he met an army coming the other way.

  It was glorious, with shining armor, colorful tabards, and pennants snapping in the wind. Well-ordered troops of cavalry marched at the fore, followed by several hundred armored footmen with ranks of crossbows, pikes, swords, and shields. They put Christopher and his dozen smelly, muddy cavalrymen to shame. A pair of horsemen came galloping up to order Christopher’s wagon train out of the way.

  “The King’s army makes haste. Get your damn wains off the road, fool.”

  Christopher wasn’t wearing his armor. Still, the horse he was on should have given away his status.

  “That’s Vicar, if you don’t mind.” He’d paid a high price for this promotion. Or rather, his men had.

  The knight took a second look, but didn’t much like what he saw. “The King doesn’t care if you’re a bleeding Prophet. County Carrhill is overrun by ulvenmen, and you are in the way of his retribution.”

  “About that,” Christopher said. “You better take me to the King.” Over the last few days he had become increasingly worried about the reaction to his raising so many commoners. If he could make his report and pay his taxes beforehand, perhaps he could avoid dealing with the King afterward. Captain Steuben would be bad enough.

  “He doesn’t have time to banter with overdressed merchants! Now move your sorry-arsed mules.”

  The other knight was more pragmatic. “If he truly is a Vicar, the army will want his healing. Go down and tell the King we are coming.” Turning to Christopher, he said, “Please allow us a moment, Vicar. Bad news is afoot, and men are on edge.”

  The first knight galloped off in great annoyance, while Christopher and the remaining knight tried to convince their horses to ignore each other.

  “The news isn’t that bad,” Christopher said, making conversation. “I’ve just come from Carrhill, and as of five days ago the ulvenmen had retreated into the Wild.”

  The knight’s horse snorted in response to his sudden change of attitude. “Why didn’t you say this before?” he snapped.

  “I hardly had a chance to get a word in edgewise.”

  The knight impatiently waved for Christopher to follow, and together they galloped down to meet the King and his party in the middle of the road.

  A small group of riders had pulled ahead of the army column. Treywan looked magnificent in his armor, inspiring respect and confidence. Christopher would have been overjoyed to see that riding up to his fort six days ago. But now he was just nervous.

  “Why are those wagons still blocking my path?” Treywan shouted.

  “Begging your pardon, my Lord King. This man claims to have come directly from Carrhill, and he says the danger is past.” The knight pointed at Christopher, and then discreetly sidled a safe distance away.

  Treywan aimed his full fury at Christopher. Before he could loose it, he recognized his target.

  “You!” the King exclaimed. “What in the Dark are you doing here?”

  “My lord,” Christopher said, trying to be deferential. Royal’s prancing made it difficult. All the warhorse could understand was the challenge, and he was ready to answer it in kind. “I am coming to report and to resupply. The ulvenmen are gone, at least for now. Although I am extremely grateful to see the army coming to succor us, it is not necessary.” He was actually surprised that they had responded so quickly.

  A different member of the royal party spoke up. “We had reports of three thousand ulvenmen. Perhaps those reports were exaggerated?” Lord Nordland glared at Christopher. According to Lalania, Nordland had spent months suggesting Christopher was quite the extravagant raconteur. Christopher had promised himself that he would be contrite with Nordland, but being called a liar to his face threatened to make him hate the man all over again.

  “Indeed,” growled the King. “I do not think I like this jape. You cannot cry wolf and summon an army because a handful of ulvenmen snapped at your heels. I am prepared to be quite wroth.” He looked prepared to dispense a whole wagonload of wroth.

  “My lord,” Christopher said hastily, trying to regain control of the conversation. “There were many ulvenmen, but we slew at least half of them. After that, the rest fled.”

  “You expect us to believe that lie again?” Nordland’s voice was no longer angry. It had moved beyond that into deadly calm.

  “Not without proof, my lord,” Christopher said quickly, while the King’s hand was moving up to give some signal.

  Treywan stopped his hand and stared hard at Christopher.

  “What proof?”

  The men had been repairing the fort and cleaning up for days. The bodies of their enemies
had gone into bonfires, leaving behind nothing but ash. Disa assured them that the dead ulvenmen could not be reanimated as walking skeletons once their heads were removed, but the men found the nightmare prospect of fighting the horde all over again too much to discount. They had denuded the scraggly forest for miles for fuel, their fear driving them to labor far harder than their officers could have commanded. Even the dinosaurs went into the fire. The golden howdah was revealed as mere paint over wood and was quickly added to the funeral pyres; the armor and weapons were piled in a heap outside the fort, destined for recycling at the forges back home. The King would not be impressed by a mound of rusting iron, and the ulvenmen had brought no other treasure with them.

  Save, of course, for what they carried in their heads. The only proof the King really cared about was in Christopher’s pocket. He pulled out the ball of tael.

  “Your share, my lord,” he said, and carved off a fortune.

  “Blood and thunder.” Treywan was impressed. “Dismount, priest, and bring that over here.”

  “How do we know he is not a changeling, my lord?” Another knight forced his horse forward, between the King and Christopher, voicing the ever-present security concerns of taking strange glowing balls from people you had just been threatening.

  “You need not fear your loyal servant,” said an unexpected voice. Cardinal Faren had worked his way up the party, on foot. Christopher could see his carriage in the rear of the column, which had stopped while the King talked. “I will vouch for him.”

  Christopher slipped out of the saddle while Royal snorted and flattened his ears. The horse apparently couldn’t tell the difference between a snarling king and a snarling ulvenman. Christopher was humiliatingly trapped, trying to pacify his mount, until Faren walked over and took the tael from him and carried it to the King. To see the highly ranked, dignified old man act as a gofer galled Christopher. But the implements of war made it impossible for Christopher to achieve such a simple task. Not just the warhorse’s temperaments, but the arms, armor, and suspicion that must accompany any unexpected encounter.