“Both Mr. Lécuyer and Mr. Ollivier, of Captain Tremblay’s company, have volunteered to act as your liaisons.” Colonel Dubois produced a small, sardonic smile. “The distance involved does suggest a relay arrangement, though I should of course have preferred to send a night-scout and a day-scout together.”
Gray frowned, drained his tankard of ale, and frowned again. “But,” he said, “you should then have no night-scouts at all.”
“To a man with a hammer,” said Colonel Dubois dryly, “every circumstance may come to resemble a nail. I, however, have no hammer, and am therefore free to make use of whatever tools are to hand. Ollivier and Lécuyer may be the best night-scouts in this regiment, Mr. Marshall, but they are not the only ones. We shall make shift with human scouts by night, as many another regiment of His Majesty’s army must.”
Gray was not altogether persuaded; but if the Colonel did not know his business . . .
* * *
Gray must be in Orléans again before morning if his flight was not to be discovered, and was therefore in the air again long before prudence dictated—though at any rate his escort consisted of persons experienced in all manner of magickal emergencies. With several stops for rest and refreshment, the three of them reached the wood outside the castle as dawn was lightening the eastern horizon.
“But how will you feed yourselves?” Gray had asked them, in the night-scouts’ tent at Ivry-sur-Eure. “And—”
Ollivier and Lécuyer had looked at one another. “We are soldiers, Marshall,” said Ollivier. “We have lived rough in the woods before.”
Gray, having fled with no intention to return, now had no real choice but to return to the barracks as he had left them. To his immense relief, the blanket he had left on the roof-peak was there yet—though damp with dew—and the window had blown open wide in the course of the night; he had only to grasp the blanket in his talons, drag it along the roof-peak until it overhung the window-frame, then dive through the window, shifting as he went, and pull it through after him into the deserted corridor.
How fortunate I am, he reflected, that not one man in a hundred, when patrolling a battlement, will ever think to look up as well as down.
He crept down the corridor and into his warm, dry bed, and there lay exhausted but awake until the morning’s bugle-call sounded, thinking guiltily of Ollivier and Lécuyer making the best of things in the woods.
CHAPTER XXX
In Which Further Complications Arise
Gray was returning to his sleeping-quarters after a morning spent drilling with the sorcerer-century, so exhausted that he could think of nothing but reaching his bed and collapsing into it, when a page-boy stopped him, executed a bouncing half bow, thrust a folded paper into his hands, and bounced away again across the courtyard.
From a general impulse to conceal his private affairs from potentially hostile observers, Gray pocketed the note and resumed his interrupted trajectory. When he reached his quarters, after pulling off his boots but before collapsing face-first into bed, he extracted it from his pocket and, curled on his side with his back to the door, read it through.
Written in a lady’s careful, elegant hand, the note contained no salutation and no valediction, but read in full:
I must speak privately with you on a matter of urgency. Can you contrive to wait by the fountain in the south courtyard at dusk? If the answer is no, send word by the bearer.
Gray frowned at it. But he was here to discover all he could, and here, perhaps, was an opportunity. It might equally be a trap of some sort, of course—but in any case it was now too late to refuse.
Dusk found him, therefore, by the fountain in the little-used south courtyard as instructed—more precisely, seated somewhat precariously upon its edge, with his nose in a book of Roman military history. He waited, pulse skittering with nerves, for what seemed an age, though it could not really have been more than a quarter-hour, until at last light, cautious footsteps heralded the arrival of his mysterious correspondent.
Gray looked up and tried to determine whether he was surprised or entirely the reverse. “Amelia!” he said.
“Mr. Marshall,” said Amelia.
She sounded . . . not pleased to have found him here, but relieved—as though she had not altogether expected him; at the same time, however, she wore an air of deep chagrin, almost of humiliation. At the necessity of asking Gray, of all persons in the world, for help?
He lifted both hands in a gesture of appeasement and, rather than standing to loom over her, kept his seat on the wide lip of the fountain, looking up at her expectantly. “I am come as you requested,” he said, “to hear of your urgent trouble. What is it?”
Amelia gritted her teeth.
“I should not have approached you, if I were not desperate,” she said. “As it is, I can only throw myself upon your mercy and trust that you will not use my desperation against me, as no doubt you believe I deserve.”
Gray scarcely knew how to reply; he was saved the necessity of doing so, however, by Amelia’s immediately going on: “I came to this place of my own will, but now I wish to leave it again, and cannot. Will you help me?”
To this, on the other hand, there was only one possible answer. “Of course,” said Gray. “If I am able. I have . . . trusted friends nearby, by whom I can send a message—”
“And will you help me rescue my father?”
Gray blinked. Not because her request surprised him, exactly—as a devoted daughter, Amelia Callender had no peer, whatever might be Gray’s opinions on the object of her devotion—but because he had not the least notion how to reply. To help Amelia—a glorified camp-follower—to escape Castle Orléans was one thing; to extricate Appius Callender from the very centre of the soi-disant Emperor’s operations, quite another.
“Does your father wish to be rescued?” he temporised. “Is he unhappy with his present situation?”
“I am unhappy with his present situation,” said Amelia. She was worrying at a hangnail with her teeth, a most uncharacteristic gesture. “The Emperor made promises to him, which he is very far from having fulfilled.”
“I must tell you frankly, Amelia,” Gray said, “that your father’s welfare is not my chief concern. Not that I wish him ill, but as he has more than once tried to arrange my death—”
“Do you know what they are, the reserve mages?” Amelia demanded. “They are fodder for the rest, feeding them magick—all they have, if need be—they are tied together, and cannot escape.”
Gray swallowed against rising nausea. Surely even Appius Callender did not deserve such a fate?
“You are a mage, Mr. Marshall,” Amelia continued, in a sort of furious hiss. “What do you imagine becomes of a mage whose magick is all drained out of him by another?”
Indeed, Gray could imagine all too well what would become of them. But he hardened his heart in spite of it, for the lives of many thousands of men, women, and children—and, most immediately, those of Lécuyer and Ollivier, fending for themselves in the wood north of Castle Orléans—might well depend on the intelligence he could gather here, and, much as he disliked the thought, Amelia’s desperation gave him an unexpectedly valuable lever to pull.
“I do not know what I may be able to do for your father,” Gray said at last. “I have not yet sufficient understanding of Orléans’s magework to gauge what is best, or even what is possible. But I shall try my best. In return, however, I shall expect payment in information. And,” he added, “a pair of bedrolls, two sets of infantrymen’s clothing and kit, and rations of some sort—whatever you can most easily liberate from the kitchens.”
Amelia gaped at him. “You promised to help me,” she said after a moment, “not a quarter-hour ago, and now you demand payment?”
“Not at all,” said Gray. The more he thought of Appius Callender, he found, the steadier grew his resolve. “I promised to aid your escape in any way
I can, and that promise stands. The payment is for aiding your father, to whom I have made no such promise, nor ever shall.”
The tension-taut silence which followed was perhaps the longest in Gray’s memory. Amelia glared at him—clenching her fingers in the folds of her skirts, as he had seen her do years ago—then hugged her elbows and stared down at her feet. At last she said, low and bitterly defeated, “I will pay your price.”
* * *
Gray had not, in truth, any very great expectations from the bargain he had made with Amelia; it did not seem to him that, placed as she was, and with no knowledge of magick or of military strategy, she was at all likely to run across information of use to Colonel Dubois or Lord Kergabet. At any rate, however, it had bought Ollivier and Lécuyer a reprieve from starving in the woods; once supplied with infantrymen’s clothing and gear, they could slip into one or another of the myriad companies encamped outside the castle and feed themselves from the common cookpot.
Once again, however, Amelia surprised him. They had agreed that, as he had the greater freedom of movement and was known to be a scholar, Gray should make a habit of studying in the quiet of the south courtyard every evening at dusk, so that Amelia might meet him there whenever she had news to convey. For nearly a se’nnight of this second sojourn at Orléans, he waited out the appointed hour, reading by magelight, and saw Amelia not at all. But on the seventh night she emerged from the shadows and crossed the courtyard swiftly to perch beside him on the fountain’s stone lip.
“The King’s spies in the Duchies have been disappearing, did you not say?” she began, without preamble. “I have discovered what became of them.”
Gray sat up straighter. “Tell me,” he said.
* * *
“Your p’tite amie must have got her facts mixed,” Lécuyer declared, leaning his broad back against the trunk of an oak-tree. “Or she is inventing tales to force you to keep your end of the bargain.”
Gray glared at p’tite amie, and Ollivier gave Lécuyer a mighty shove in the shoulder and said, “The young lady is Marshall’s sister-in-law, you lout.”
Lécuyer righted himself and waved a dismissive hand, as though the distinction between sweetheart and sister-in-law were quite immaterial. “The point is, that what she told you cannot possibly be true.” He stretched his long legs out before him, displacing Ollivier, who growled at him with no real heat. “A spell to replenish one’s magick by drawing power from talentless folk? How could such a thing possibly work?”
“I have not the least idea,” said Gray grimly, “but I have known Amelia five years, and if she has the imagination to invent such a tale, I will eat not only my hat but my coat and boots along with it. And there are certainly tales enough circulating about Orléans that I should not be surprised at his proving to be a great deal more like the emperor Nero than like Julius Caesar.”
Ollivier sat up, cross-legged on his folded bedroll, and frowned at Gray. “Mad, you mean?”
“Well,” said Gray, “that also, very likely. I meant, however, what the natural philosopher Pliny said of Nero—that no one could be certain whether his madness was cause or consequence of his taking what did not belong to him. It is not known just what Pliny meant by that turn of phrase—there are so many possibilities!—but my friend Evans-Hughes—he is an historian, at Merlin College—believes it to imply that Nero achieved the godlike power he boasted of by stealing it from other mages.”
Lécuyer grimaced, and Ollivier blanched and clapped a hand over his mouth.
“But,” Lécuyer objected, “even if that were true—which, meaning no disrespect to your friend, I do not see how it can be—it is still not at all the same thing as taking magick from folk who have none!”
Gray—who could not be absent indefinitely without its being remarked upon—was beginning to lose patience. “You may convey my report to Colonel Dubois with as much commentary as seems good to you,” he said, “provided that you do convey it to him, and at once.”
“It is my turn, in any case,” said Ollivier, unfolding himself and climbing to his feet. He still looked a little green. “Have you anything else to report?”
“Only that three more men have joined the second sorcerer-century,” said Gray. “I have not been up on the battlements for some days; what have you seen, out in the camps?”
“Another company of cavalry rode in yesterday evening,” said Lécuyer, “but two companies of infantry marched out early this morning, with two of those great saltpetre-cannon on siege-waggons.”
Ollivier by now had stripped down to his drawers; he now stepped out of these, then efficiently shook out and folded his borrowed clothing and stacked it on his bedroll. Finally, he crouched down, toes curled round a protruding tree-root, and between one eye-blink and the next, was looking up at Gray with the heart-shaped face of a barn owl.
Lécuyer bent and scooped him up—Ollivier squawked at the indignity, but again it seemed quite without heat—and muttered, “The gods go with you, Kannig,” as he tossed the barn owl into the air.
“The gods go with you,” Gray echoed, under his breath.
* * *
Two mornings hence, the Emperor assembled his sorcerer-centuries in the castle courtyard for the unveiling of his grand strategy; by the time he had finished, Gray was thankful for the press of bodies all about him, which might conceal the violence of his reaction. Nor was he, he was relieved to discover, the only one who did not much like what he had heard; when after some unguessable period of frozen horror he became able once more to interpret the evidence of his senses, he heard mutterings all about him, low and wary and worried.
It was the remembrance of these mutterings which upheld him through the rousing speeches, the obligatory cheering, the parade round the courtyard and back to the barracks, and which—together with Amelia’s tale of dozens of men imprisoned below Castle Orléans, dying breath by breath as their spirits fed the Emperor’s magick—gave him the courage, when all these things were done, to return to the castle keep and approach the door of Orléans’s private chambers.
His way was barred by not two but four burly men-at-arms who eyed him with a familiar distrust; Gray had remarked how little enthusiasm the common soldiers had for the men of the sorcerer-centuries.
“I would speak privately with the Emperor,” he said, “if he is not presently occupied with some urgent matter.”
The tallest of the men-at-arms said, “Wait here,” and paced down the short corridor to rap at the door.
Gray could discern nothing from the brief conversation that ensued, but upon turning away from the door, the guardsman held it open and with his other hand beckoned Gray towards it. Gray followed, concealing his trepidation as best he could, and waited for the door to close behind him before looking up to meet the Emperor’s gaze.
“Marais,” said Orléans, his tone curious but unalarmed. “You wished to see me?”
“My lord Emperor,” Gray said. His throat was dry—this man could have him killed on a whim, could, in fact, carry out the act himself, if the humour took him. “May I have your permission to speak freely?”
Orléans smiled at him. “Certainly, my boy,” he said.
“Concerning the . . . battle plan which we were told of this morning,” Gray began—then stalled, and with great effort gathered his courage to continue: “If the men of those garrisons can be so easily slaughtered, then surely they can as easily be subdued and taken prisoner.”
“Oh! certainly,” said Orléans, with a wave of his hand, “for a given value of easily, which, I fear, betrays your lack of experience in the field, Marais.” He leant forward in his chair, forearms braced on the surface of his desk. “Tell me, how then shall we feed and house these thousands of prisoners, and how guard them to prevent uprisings and escapes, without materially weakening our own forces?”
“And how shall we,” Gray swallowed hard, “dispose of thousa
nds of bodies, without fouling our new nest? This is not a battlefield from which we can march onward, leaving the fallen for the looters and the carrion-crows; you propose to march into a fortress already littered with enemy dead, and then—what, my lord? There are not enough trees in all the forests of Breizh to build so many pyres, and the burning would choke the skies for days. Or had you thought to cast the dead into pits, like refuse? How shall men be chosen for that duty, and what will they think of their glorious new empire after they have carried it out?”
Orléans might be mad, but he was not a fool; surely he must have thought all of these ramifications through. But sometimes, as Gray knew from experience, to hear one’s ugliest thoughts spoken aloud by some other person made them too real and too ugly to be waved away.
“You have not lived among the people of Britain, my lord,” said Gray, pressing his advantage, if such it was, “but I have travelled there, and speak some of their languages, and have come to know them well.
“You suppose that they will be cowed by such a display of savagery as you mean us to inflict upon them, but it is no such thing—we shall only raise their ire, and spur them to more vehement resis- tance, by making martyrs of their brave-hearted young men. Not to speak of the women and children who will inevitably be caught up in the slaughter.”
He stopped, willing his pulse back to steadiness, when he recognised that his voice had risen almost to a shout—and in the sudden quiet, he heard the sounds of shuffling feet and muttering voices from behind him. Half turning, he beheld all four sentries poised in the doorway—how had he failed to hear the door opening?
Orléans rose from his seat to stare them down. “Back to your posts, gentlemen, if you please,” he said, icily calm; as he spoke, Gray felt a faint, chill shiver of magick, and the hairs on his neck rose.
The four men turned and retreated, like puppets on one string, and the door fell shut behind them. Orléans sank back into his chair—but the skin-prickling feeling of magick in the air did not abate.
A Season of Spells (A Noctis Magicae Novel) Page 39
