by John Barnes
Amatus was disembarking before he saw that, beneath the powder burns and the raggedly trimmed beard, it was Cedric; and when Cedric greeted him with "Majesty," he knew then, and thus it came into the stories, because it was true, that the first time that he ever heard that he was King, he wept.
3
Tales Are Told, Things Are Learned, and Plans Are Made
They were the better part of the day in hearing each others' tales, but the story of Amatus's journey is already told. Cedric's journey involved nothing so much as continuing to put one foot in front of another, for so many fields and houses were abandoned that he had plenty of food and slept in beds most days, so there is little reason to recount his adventures here.
Indeed, Cedric himself gave only a sketchy account at that time. "It is certainly interesting for a man my age to take up burglary and trespass," he said, "but it is not of great interest in the telling. I walked; I looked after myself; I gradually accumulated a pack that would keep me going when the houses ran out; and I came here because here was where Sir John was to bring you." So if you wish to read of his journey, you will have to look in the chronicles of the Kingdom for yourself, and be warned that most scholars generally skip over that passage, pausing only to infer what they can of the social conditions and economic statistics of that age.
Cedric seemed sadder than the rest of them at the death of the Twisted Man, for while the Twisted Man had repelled most of them with his grim bloodlust, to Cedric that had been a most desirable quality in a Captain of the Guard, and so he had paid it as little attention as he did the warrior's physical deformity. They were deeply grieved to hear of the death of Duke Wassant, most especially Calliope, for he had been her first love; and all were saddened at the passing of the King, but Amatus, having lost his father, spent a long half day on the tower staring out at the Lake of Winter, and no one cared to go up to talk with him about it.
But when everything was accounted for, there remained Cedric's news. From the Royal Library, he had brought Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary to Know and Things It Is Not Good to Know at All, and more importantly he had brought his observations.
"I didn't care to travel in daylight," he explained. "It's true that there are many more of them at night, but the undead and the goblins are not so disciplined as to be able to conduct much of a search. And they did not seem to know that they were looking for me, either; one disadvantage of taking a city so quickly is that in the random destruction it becomes hard to see just what you do or don't have. So I had the days, when I wasn't sleeping, to lie back in a bed or sit in a chair and think. And the thing of greatest importance is just what I realized back in the Royal Library—when you kill the identical ones, the remainder become stronger; when you kill the nonidentical ones, the remainder become weaker.
"Now, it so happens that in Highly Unpleasant there's a discussion of soul-sharing as an evil thing done by various wicked wizards over the ages. Bodies are made, and two or three soldiers share out their souls to a company. If one of the made men is killed, all the rest have more soul—and so get stronger. But if one of the real men who supply the souls is killed—"
Amatus nodded then, gesturing for Cedric to get on with it. "I see. They are all weaker, even the other soldiers with souls of their own, because the company of soldiers is sharing fewer souls. And if you were to kill all of the real men—"
"I saw it happen. The made men stagger limply; they are alive, but only in the way that a muscle may still twitch on the butcher's block." Cedric sighed. "Moreover, I had the dubious pleasure of looking up the procedure in the source itself, Things It Is Not Good to Know at All, and there I learned that like all such dark magics, this one has a price higher than any sane person would think it was worth. To have the power to do this, Waldo has had to give up his heart, and leave it somewhere. If we find that and destroy it, his power will be gone like dew on summer grass."
"I have never understood the name of that book," Sir John said, "for surely we have benefited from the things in it, and we have kept it in the library."
"These are things it is not good to do," Amatus said, "and to know about them is possibly to be able to do them—and that being the case, once you know them you are never out of danger. Notice, for example, what the knowledge has done to Waldo. Then can Waldo even be killed at all by ordinary means? And if we did find a way to kill him, what would become of his army?"
"Oh, I would say that if you cut his head off, or stabbed through his eye into his brain, or perhaps even slipped a pongee into his kidney, it would be the end of Waldo. It would be surer and more swift to find that heart and throw it into a fire, cut it in half, something of the kind. As for his army—well, he'd lose the power to move souls about. The made men would be nothing more than twitching flesh, and I would suspect that his few real men would be greatly disabled from the shock. That would be more than a third of the enemy at that moment—and as for the rest, for all his taste for massacre, Waldo has had to leave the bulk of the Kingdom's subjects alive (someone has to produce the wealth) and there is bitter hatred for him everywhere. We have had plagues of the undead and goblin invasions before. I should guess that without his army there in daylight to guard the undead's resting places and the entry holes to Goblin Country, your commoners would make a brief and satisfactory slaughter of them, even if they had only farm tools and rocks for the job."
Amatus nodded. "And did you get a sense of the country as you passed through it? Is there any fighting spirit left?"
"Plenty, if they but saw a way to win."
"Well, then, they must see some victories."
Dick Thunder coughed softly. "You have seen their homes and camps, King Amatus and Sir John; what do you suppose our northern people will be as fighters?"
"Silent and systematic, I should suppose," Amatus said. "They often eat by the omnibus and the festoon, so I imagine they must be more than fair shots. But they've no reason to know the escree—I speak here of the fishers, hunters, and loggers, Dick, I know your robbers know their trade—"
"Begging your pardon. High—er, that is, Majesty," Sir John said, "I think you've badly understated the case. I earned my name of Escree Jack by knowing how to do anything at all with the escree other than use it to roast potatoes and chicken legs. But on the other hand, they are astonishingly good shots—hunters learn not to waste balls, Majesty. I would say they would be no good at all against real troops in close, but if they can keep a distance they could shoot any army ever formed into the ground."
"Just so," Dick Thunder said. "So if we might imagine what would happen if we were to fight Waldo's army in the daylight, somewhere with a lot of bushes and rocks to hide behind and plenty of room to run—"
"Shoot the real men until the made men are staggering and helpless, and then turn loose the lumbermen with their axes and the fishermen with their voltage spikes," Cedric said. "I think it's a splendid thought. Can we arm and provision an army out of this country?"
"It's late spring now," Captain Palaestrio answered. "It hardly matters, for this is the time of the year when we must buy food from the south anyway. There's nothing there right now but whatever is in the cellars from last year, still too much snow for a man to think of going up after the gazebo and not much meat on them if he should, and the big runs of fish are not due until the streams clear, in a month or more. If the Kingdom has been ruined, then we might as well be under siege no matter what, for if we fight and do not win we will starve, and if we do not fight we will starve. Only if we fight and win is there hope."
As discussion wore on it became clear that they could put perhaps as many as a thousand men under arms.
"That's nothing to the hundred thousand or so that rampaged through the city," Cedric pointed out. "But two thirds of those cannot come out in the daylight. And that leaves us perhaps thirty-five thousand at worst to face—and what I have counted on the trail, when patrols passed me, was that there were no more than one real soldier to fifty made
ones."
A cracked, old voice spoke above them. "That's for the horse patrols. For foot it's nearer one to a hundred now, since many of his men—his real men—are falling from a soul-sickness of some kind." They had all looked straight up, into the broad boughs of the big fir tree under which they sat, and to their surprise, there was old Euripides, finest of the Kingdom's scouts.
"It took you long enough to get here," Cedric said, smiling. "What kind of a scout do you call yourself?"
"An almighty poor one if the truth be told," Euripides said, climbing down, "for had I but seen these things in Overhill a few months ago, we might all be speaking of them over a warm dark Gravamen at home. But, late is better than never, most of the time, anyway. Now, as I was saying, it looks a great deal as if their actual numbers are about a hundred of these bags of meat to one real man, and what that does to the real man is dreadful to think about." He sighed and scratched. "A fellow might ask for a bit of biscuit—"
"And he might get a full meal if he did," Dick Thunder said, grinning. "How in all the names of all the gods did you find your way through my sentries?"
"Tight, I found it. Very tight. Nigh to impossible," Euripides said. They all followed Thunder as he wandered over to where Sylvia was at work on the day's soup; partway there the robber chief turned and whispered to Amatus and Calliope, "She always made the most extraordinary soup. Never thought I'd ever taste it again. If only . . . oh, well."
At Calliope's insistent nod and gesture, Amatus said, "Well, you know, Dick, it's always just possible she's been carrying . . . oh, you know, they don't have torches down in Goblin Country, but up in the city they do, and . . . well, you know the custom. I would bet she carried a torch everywhere she went and that's why no one asked. But I've not seen her with a torch here, now, have you?"
Hope flared in Thunder's eyes. Amatus clapped Thunder on the shoulder.
The soup was indeed good, and as more of it got into Euripides they got more and more of his account, and their hearts brightened. Further, the account of the outrages in the countryside filled them with fury, and more so because each of them knew that—as anything connected with Waldo tended to—it all rested on a low, shabby, dirty trick.
"Well, then," Cedric said, in his second mug of the dark Pilaster that a Vulgarian trader had let Captain Palaestrio have on credit, "there is merely the question of what is to be done and how we are to do it. By daylight, I do believe the Army of the North—which has a certain splendid ring to it, and in these sorts of tales a splendid ring is a promising thing to have—can very likely massacre the human part of Waldo's army, and once that is done we will have ourselves quite a successful revolution under way, with a great slaughter of goblins and undead. The question then, given that we win such a battle—do you think we should fight it, say, somewhere below the rapids of the Long River?"
Dick Thunder, King Amatus, and Captain Palaestrio, who all knew something about fighting wars, nodded at the wisdom of the choice. Calliope and Sylvia nodded because they didn't know what Cedric was going to talk about next and wanted him to get on with it. Psyche was quietly staring into space, her thoughts far away, and Sir John Slitgizzard and Sceledrus nodded so as not to be left out.
"Well, then, if we win the battle there we may depend on revolution to rise quickly, but there is bound to be some delay on the way to the city, for every little village will want to hold a celebration, and there will be the stragglers to hunt down and that sort of thing. Of course with the countryside going up in a rush, most of his goblins and undead will never get back to the city, and the walls are long and hard to hold, especially with the damage recently done, so it will be weakly defended when we get there. But I'm afraid lowlands farmers won't be much as soldiers and we can't count on much of my old regular army finding out in time to rejoin us, let alone still having their arms with them. We should be lucky to reach the city with the Army of the North, plus an equal body of trained men (though not in their old units, more's the pity), and perhaps three times that number of men who are far better with a hoe than with an omnibus. That should get us through the city wall well enough, if we've had enough success—there will be few real men in the city, and they will all be desperately ill. But I don't think, even should we break through in a mad rush, that it is enough to carry the castle, and that worries me a great deal."
"Suppose we do not," Dick Thunder said. "Can we starve out Waldo?"
"In time, perhaps. But to have him merely cornered is like having a viper pinned under a stick—the snake is in trouble but you are still in danger. What he might do from there . . . well, he is altogether too clever to be given such a chance."
"Then no doubt you have something in mind?" Amatus said, his lone eyebrow rising. "I long ago noted that any wise minister does not raise a problem until he has some action he wishes his monarch to take to remedy it."
"Nothing is more gratifying than an apt pupil," Cedric said, his eyes twinkling a little as he fluffed out the sad remains of his beard. "Well, you're right, of course. It seems to me that this matter of his heart being apart from him must be in the story to some purpose, and that means that we ought to do our best to find it, for surely it would solve many problems if we did. So there needs to be a minor quest of sorts in all this, I should think—someone must try to find the heart and destroy it.
"Then, too, it seems to me we need one more thing done as well—and that is a diversion. If we could cause Waldo to leave the castle—better yet to leave the city altogether—then we might well take it without much of a fight at all. And if that should happen, then it would be a matter of tracking him down, with the possibility that at any moment someone might find his heart and burn it or cut it into pieces as well—for he would not be able to go near where it was. Once we have the city and castle again, and his foul army is dead or driven back into its holes, well, then his powers for malice are greatly reduced, and if we are then thorough and press our search, I have little doubt we can bring this tale to a happy enough ending."
He wished instantly he had not said that last, for it caused Amatus to wince with pain and look at Psyche. For a long time the only sound was old Euripides gulping and slobbering at his soup, for, spending as much time as he did away from hot food and other people, his table manners were as bad as his scouting was acute.
"Oh, well, then," Amatus said at last, "since it all sounds like common sense, I imagine you've a way of allocating us to those duties. I had at first thought that I ought to be on the quest, but questing is really a prince's game, and I am a king now, so I shall have to lead the army. Psyche travels with me, always, and I would not dream of leading the army without having along the two men who everyone in this north country is going to trust as my lieutenants—that is, Deacon Dick Thunder and Captain Palaestrio. So that leaves the rest of you for the other two purposes . . ."
"Ahem," Sir John coughed. "Er, I had a thought. Sort of a thought, you might say . . . er, well, you know, with one thing and another in the city, it happens that I never did a proper knight-candidate's quest. No one raised any, er, objections, because at first I was wild and bad and no one expected me to do anything expected of me, you know, and then after that I was in one adventure after another with my Prince, and so I think most folk thought I had, but . . ." his voice trailed off hopefully.
"Of course, Sir John!" Amatus said, clapping his hands together, and then lurching backward in surprise because it had never made a noise before. "That's exactly what you will do, then."
"Er, that wasn't the whole thought," Slitgizzard said, looking down and nearly blushing. They waited for him to go on. "It seems to me that, well, perhaps . . . well, you all know I am not very clever. That seems to be widely agreed upon. And looking for things requires some cleverness, rather than mere skill, which I have in abundance. So I thought rather than look for the heart directly, I might go seek out the Riddling Beast, and ask him where to look."
"You've no business saying you aren't clever," Calliope said, beam
ing at him. "That's a very sensible idea."
Sir John did blush, then, and they thought it was embarrassment at the compliment, but it was relief that he had not made a fool of himself. Perhaps Calliope sensed this, a little, for she hastened to change the subject. "Well, that leaves me, and Cedric, and Euripides, if you can spare him, Amatus, to make the diversion. And I've got a fine one in mind."
Amatus nodded. "I think up in this country we can rely on Dick Thunder's men to do our scouting without much danger. And much as I will miss Cedric's good advice, I think a wily and experienced old head put to the job of making trouble can probably make a great deal where we need it and when we need it."
"Who are you calling old?" Cedric said, but he beamed at the compliment, which reassured Amatus a great deal. He had not especially wanted to have Cedric looking over his shoulder during his first great battle as King, but he had not wanted him to realize that.
"Why, good old Calliope, of course," Amatus said, smiling in a way more innocent than any innocent person has ever achieved.
"Be that as it may," Calliope said, "here's the diversion I have in mind. To do what he did, I'm quite sure that Waldo stripped Overhill bare. And though the commoners there may be twenty years more borne down and worn out, they are also that much angrier. I think I might stir up a rebellion there—and perhaps if luck were with me, might free my family's citadel at Oppidum Optimum myself. That ought to make Waldo start moving—so he's likely to be most of the way to Iron Lake before he hears the city has fallen behind him."
"Promise you will be cautious," Amatus said.
"Yes, dearie," Calliope said, much too sweetly, and despite knowing that Amatus was King, the rest could hardly avoid laughing, so Amatus could not resist laughing either.
