by D. P. Prior
‘Advance!’ he bellowed, spurring the mare into a gallop and not even checking to see if the others were following.
***
Captain Janks was right thankful for the change in the weather. The men were sick of the pissing drizzle, the sullen clouds brooding overhead, grey and unbroken. The sun now blazed nakedly, the sky an empty blue brilliance. And, bloody hell, his mood had perked up with it.
He stopped in his morning tour of the camp to bend down and scratch at a mosquito bite on his ankle, the biggest pain on this mad-arsed assignment. Crackpot bloody Emperor sticking his bloody nose in where it’s not bloody wanted. And who always gets the blame? Not him, that’s for sure. Too busy dreaming up more imaginary threats to the Empire or jumping at his own shadow on the palace walls. Poor bastard probably couldn’t even take a shit without shoving his head down the pan to look for assassins.
The bulk of Janks’s force was camped between the Soulsong Ford and the Old Sarum Road. Archers were stationed in wooden towers at intervals along the bank, right up as far as the Western Ocean, and anybody coming from the east would have to enter open ground before they could approach the city. They’d be mown down before they reached the gates.
Not that anyone was likely to approach Sarum, Janks thought wryly. The biggest threat was from the poor bleeders fleeing the plague and spreading it beyond the city. Surprisingly few had tried, and those that had were soon persuaded that their chances of survival were greater if they just stayed where they were.
Looking back over the huddle of tents, watching his troops queuing for their beans and rye bread and then lounging on the still damp grass to eat lazily, he chuckled to himself. Ordinarily, he thought, such complacency would be intolerable, but not today. The men deserved a break after the misery of the rain and a job that made them as popular as fly-strike on mutton.
He wandered from the camp, crested a small hill and strolled amongst the trees of Blood Wood, where crimson blossom clung to the gum trees like a cloak of velvet.
Stopping for a piss, he became aware of a distant pounding, gathering pace, rolling towards him like a colossal wave. A dust cloud billowed from the trees. Janks could make out dark figures astride horses, the glint of steel. He buckled his belt, shaking his head at the absurdity of charging a unit through a forest. The riders were close enough for him to see the red symbols on their surcoats, their formation ragged and starting to fan out, more through necessity than design. He was about to step into their path to chastise their leader when he suddenly came to his senses. There were no cavalry this side of Jorakum, and the riders weren’t dressed in Imperial black.
By the time he’d started to run back to camp, the riders were upon him. A white-cloaked youngster galloped towards him at full pelt. Janks turned and tugged at his sword, but the scabbard was all twisted up on his belt. Before he had it half drawn, the rider leaned over in the saddle and slashed a blade across his face. At first Janks thought he’d been blinded, but then he realized blood was pouring into his eyes from a gash to his forehead. No matter how much he rubbed them, they wouldn’t clear. The sound of trampling hooves was all around him. He turned to the left, turned right, back to the left again. A hard hit to the shoulder spun him to the ground. He tried to rise, but something crunched into his head…
***
Barek spurred his horse on as the Imperial troops abandoned their breakfasts and ran for their weapons. Some were better prepared and unleashed a score of arrows into the front riders. A handful of knights dropped from their horses, and one of the beasts fell, its legs folding under it, an arrow lodged in its throat. Barek’s mount swerved to avoid it, but the knight behind crashed into the fallen horse and was thrown headlong from the saddle. Chaos rolled through the following knights and the charge faltered.
What the bloody heck was Gaston doing? Barek had assumed the plan would be to ride east of the encampment before risking a gallop across the open ground towards Sarum. A few men might have fallen to arrow fire, but most would have reached the city, where the soldiers wouldn’t dare follow.
A swordsman ran at Barek, slashing wildly towards his waist. Barek parried the blow, but numbness ran up his arm from its force. He rode on, knocking another man from his feet before following the path Gaston was cutting through the surprised soldiers. The five knights who had speared the charge with him were down, screaming, groaning, crying like babies. Gaston hacked about like an invincible god of war, but his horse was hit bad, lurching drunkenly, blood gushing from its flank.
Gaston leapt from the saddle and snatched up a sword dropped by one of his victims. He stood his ground armed with two weapons as a dozen Imperial troops closed in for the kill. Barek glanced back to see their fellow knights still struggling to regain control over their mounts, sorely pressed by fire from a group of archers. An arrow thrummed past his ear, lodged in the throat of one of the lads, red spurting like a geyser. Cramp took hold of Barek’s guts. He looked away, thought he was gonna shit himself.
Gaston roared something, fighting furiously, twin blades a silvery arc clashing against metal or ripping through flesh. He was hopelessly outnumbered, but was just about holding his own. He’d already put down three of the bastards.
Justin rode up alongside Barek, bleeding from half a dozen light wounds, his sword red to the hilt. ‘Gaston!’
‘I’ll go to him,’ Barek said. ‘You help the others.’
Justin heeled his steed towards the archers and Barek muttered a hurried prayer then charged the group surrounding Gaston. His horse reared up, smashing its hooves into a soldier’s head, shattering bone and spraying blood. Barek rolled from the saddle, jarring his knee as he hit the ground. He clambered to his feet, sword-arm hanging limp and useless. Two men sprang at him swinging steel. Switching to his left hand he parried the first and slashed clumsily at the second. The man leapt back, giving Barek time to find his balance. A whisper of movement to his right caused him to spin in time to see another soldier fall, blood pumping from a severed arm.
Gaston slid beside him. ‘You hurt?’ he asked, his eyes never leaving the half dozen opponents still standing.
‘Sword arm’s dead.’ Barek wrinkled his nose, gave the barest shrug. ‘But I’m good.’
Gaston grinned, his eyes sparkling. The remaining soldiers made a concerted attack and Gaston sprang to meet them, his blades a glittering blur. Barek swung at a big bloke trying to outflank Gaston, taking him on the back of the legs and sending him crashing headlong into another. Gaston batted a thrust aside and plunged his second blade into his assailant’s belly. The man crumpled, catching a handful of his spilling guts. Seeing the momentary vulnerability, the other soldiers surged in, but Barek threw himself in their path hacking about wildly.
‘Shoggers! Fuckers!’ He screamed up a storm, every instant expecting a blade through his heart or slicing into his neck. He was dead and he knew it. Too shogging dead to give a—
Gore splashed his face, but it wasn’t his own. Least he thought it wasn’t. A sword thrust towards him, but never made it, the bloke holding it going down in a shower of his own blood. A horse whinnied, and there was Justin cutting down the last of them. Barek had to check himself all over. Hardly a scratch. Holy crap he should have been bleeding out on the ground. A miracle. It was a shogging miracle.
The rest of the knights were among the tents, running down the survivors. A horn sounded to the west and for a moment the fighting ceased. The few remaining soldiers sprinted in the direction of the sound.
‘Leave them,’ Gaston shouted. ‘Let them go.’ He walked over to his injured mare and remounted.
Barek sheathed his sword and found his horse. With a foot in the stirrup and his good hand clutching a fistful of mane, he half-pulled, half-rolled into the saddle.
‘You did well, Barek.’ Gaston rode over and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You too, Justin.’
Wheeling the mare to face the Old Sarum Road, Gaston stood high in the stirrups, face flushed, eyes blazing.
‘Now let’s go let our brothers and sisters in Nous know that Ain has answered their prayers.’
Barek looked about at the carnage, the stench of blood thick in his nostrils. He rubbed his dead arm, twitched the fingers, and winced at the prickling return of circulation. Right now he didn’t reckon the White Order was an answer to anyone’s prayers.
***
The Old Sarum Road was little more than a dirt track through the bush. A few hundred yards along it a volley of arrows hissed down, thudding into horses and riders. A shaft glanced from Gaston’s armour as he beat his ailing mare into a gallop that took him beyond the range of the archers. The troop followed, another volley ripping into them and claiming three more riders.
Gaston slowed to a canter as the road merged with another, pock-marked and grey, with glinting studs of silver forming a broken line down its centre. The clopping of hooves announced their arrival to the tin-roofed shacks on the fringes of Sarum, but there was no throng to greet them. No reason why there would be, he supposed. Wasn’t as if the city cared a shit about the will of Nous.
Gaston drew rein and watched the column pass, counting the survivors and noting the injured. Thirty-nine knights, many carrying minor wounds. One—Tray Vogen from Broken Bridge—had the flight of an arrow-shaft jutting from his shoulder. Despite the botched charge, Gaston was more than pleased with their performance. Their training had paid off against the Imperial troops. Ain had favoured his own. You had to see it as vindication.
The column of knights rode swiftly through the southern suburbs, past scatterings of masked and desperate people scavenging amongst the refuse. They crossed the Kaldus Bridge and came to the Arch of Foundation, marking the southern access to the city centre. The first and last time Gaston had seen it he’d been a child, clutching his dad’s hand. The memory was sharp as a dagger thrust. Seemed like it had been only yesterday. He could hear Dad’s voice bubbling up from the depths, like it was muffled by fog. This is not the way…Not the way.
A ragged group of militiamen jogged towards them, spears levelled, shields reflecting the glare of the sun. Gaston signalled his knights to stop, Barek and Justin riding alongside him as the militia formed up and locked shields. A stocky man, red-faced and moustached, stepped forwards, chainmail clinking, boots squeaking.
‘Captain Harding, City Militia,’ he barked in a gruff voice, blinking ten to the dozen. ‘Will you stand down?’
Gaston leaned over the pommel of his saddle. ‘Captain, my men are fresh from battle. Are we to take your position as hostile?’ He watched the shogger like a hawk. One wrong move, one wrong word and they’d roll over this lot like they did the others.
Barek raised his hand and the knights began to fan out across the street, hooves clattering sharply on stone.
‘By order of Governor Gen,’ Harding coughed to clear his throat. ‘By order…’ he started again, but Gaston cut him off.
‘What’s happening here, Captain? Why do Imperial troops surround Sarum?’
Harding spluttered, the blinking intensifying. ‘You don’t know?’
‘All I know is we had to fight our way in. Hardly the sort of welcome we were expecting.’
‘Welcome?’
‘We’ve come to aid the Templum of the Knot.’
Harding stroked his moustache, frowning at the knights, head bobbing. ‘I don’t know about this. Templum, you say? Come to help with the plague, have you?’
Gaston sat back in the saddle. ‘Plague?’
A murmur spread through the men.
‘City’s quarantined. It’s why you had trouble getting in.’
Had Aristodeus known about this? Is that what he meant by the Templum needing them? Shader? What could they do? How could they help? Gaston knew next to nothing about healing. Maybe the priests wanted out. Maybe Shader needed them to break the quarantine.
‘Can you take us to the templum?’
Harding mopped the sweat from his brow and sucked air through gritted teeth. ‘I need to speak with the Governor, but first we should get your men off the streets, tether your horses.’
They were led deeper and deeper into Sarum along roads flanked by ancient red-brick buildings, and passed beneath immense towers that cast cooling shadows across the city. Finally, Harding stopped them before the iron gates of a large walled enclosure, his men bringing up the rear.
‘This used to be the Imperial barracks. They left at the first sign of the plague. You’ll find stabling for your horses and food for your men.’
‘You want to lock us in?’ Gaston’s fingers curled around the hilt of his sword. He wouldn’t stand for it. No shogging city militiaman was going to stop him from…stop him from…Ain, he was tired. No, not tired, confused. Dizzy with it. Bloody images erupted like a pustule behind his eyes: severed limbs, gaping wounds, the soldier holding his own entrails, a bewildered look on his face. What had they done? What had he done? Ain’s will. Just doing Ain’s will. It’s what Shader would have done, wasn’t it?
Harding opened the gates and stood aside. ‘It would avoid any further misunderstanding. You have my word Governor Gen will hear of this immediately. If your business is with the Templum of the Knot, you won’t find him wholly unsympathetic.’
Gaston shakily waved the knights through the gate. Once the last rider was within the enclosure, he turned to Harding. ‘Captain, have you heard of Shadrak, the Unseen?’
‘Everyone has.’
‘Know where to find him?’
Harding looked from side to side before answering in a hushed voice. ‘Wouldn’t want to if I could. You don’t want to be worrying about the Sicarii. We’ve got enough problems with this blasted plague.’
Gaston nodded and followed the others inside. He felt suddenly anxious and uncertain, a little fish in a big pond. Fear of contagion clamoured for his attention, challenging his faith and begging the question: would Ain protect them?
As Harding turned the key in the lock, Rhiannon’s face flashed to mind, scowling with contempt. Gaston swallowed down bile, clutched at his guts. Reeling in the saddle, he fought for control and felt he’d received his answer.
THE CHILD IN THE ROAD
Elias scratched his scalp as he rummaged about in the cart. The templum made him feel uneasy, not just all that holier than thou stuff, but the festering patients in the nave. Couldn’t stand all that phlegm and pus. Made him feel so…organic. He had a feeling that the serpent statue would protect him from the plague and yet he couldn’t stop checking his armpits for buboes, and he’d developed a cough he was sure was imaginary.
In the two days he’d spent at the Templum of the Knot he’d been largely on his tod. Rhiannon had fallen in with her old tutor, Agna, and looked certain to be taking holy orders as soon as her bruises had healed. He’d briefly met the superior, Mater Ioana, an industrious woman of broad dimensions who seldom slept and rarely rested from her forays into the city. A strange grizzled man, less than five feet tall and sporting a horned helm, accompanied Ioana on her journeys. He had the look of a Nousian about him, only his discoloured white cloak sported a red cross rather than a Monas. Elias introduced himself to the dwarf, but was met with a stony stare from fierce violet eyes. There was no hostility, merely a sense of shame, as if he carried a burden impossible to bear. Fat Cadris told Elias the dwarf was called Maldark, but would say little more. There was no need. Elias knew the name from the songs of the Dreamers, and couldn’t say he was pleased to make the acquaintance. Maldark the Unfaithful; Maldark the Doom of Aethir; Maldark the Fallen.
Soror Velda laboured tirelessly in the makeshift infirmary and was seldom available for a chat, which was a shame as she was a sane old bird—or at least as close as you could get to sanity amongst Nousians. Besides the skulking Hugues, who always seemed to be pottering around just within earshot, there was only the sorry figure of Pater Limus, an elderly priest, rotund and white-bearded, who had fallen from a horse the previous winter. Limus could just about recall his own name and repeatedly apolog
ized for not recalling anyone else’s. He became muddled in conversation, and his long pauses in speech invariably resulted in a change of subject that was as frustrating as it was confusing. Nevertheless, Limus was a well-spring of compassion and there was something about him that Elias found authentic, to the extent that he could almost see some value in the Nousian life, but only the way Limus lived it.
As the sun dipped below Sarum’s great towers, Elias dug out his mandola, sat in the driving seat with his feet up and began to strum. Hector chewed hay nonchalantly, soothed by his music.
His first trip to Sarum in half a century and he couldn’t say he was enjoying it. He’d never really liked it, even back before the Reckoning, but anything was preferable to the massacre he’d fled.
It had all been going so well. The Global Garden was bigger than Woodstock—the mythology of which had shaped his childhood—and the message was finally starting to sink in. A bit too much for some, it seemed, as the tank-bots had rolled in and gunships had roared overhead. He’d been lucky to survive, he guessed. A damn sight luckier than Morphic Free-Love, incinerated in the flames of the main stage. Sergeant Sunshine, too, arguably the greatest rock band since Zeppelin, shredded with shrapnel and dropping like crimson bird-shit on their gobsmacked fans.
The busking years in Sarum had paid the rent, but he’d never really settled until he went outback, finally setting up shop in Broken Bridge, performing at functions and fanning the flames of Sahulian folk music, most of which was already dead and buried and needed re-inventing. It was easy enough to do; folk music was all much of a muchness, and no one knew the first thing about tradition in these parts.
Rhiannon had loved his lessons as a child, and she’d stuck by him as a woman, whereas the other locals shunned him as an eccentric. She was the closest thing he had to a friend; blood almost; his daughter even.
