by Paul Kearney
“Stay! Name and purpose.”
They were all alike, these Bionari. Rol swallowed his impatience. “Message for the King, from the front line.”
“From which commander? Whose regiment are you with?” The speaker kicked his horse forward, and the lance-point drove Rol backwards, clicking off his breastplate.
“None of your damn business. Where is the King?”
“Observing from up the ridge. But that is not your concern. You are no courier. What is this message?”
Rol grasped the lance and with one wild jerk he yanked it out of the horseman’s hands. Then he sent the butt of it smashing back at the middle of the man’s face. The fellow half raised his hands to his head, then toppled out of the saddle. Dropping the lance, Rol grasped his rearing mount’s bridle and swung himself up on the animal’s back without pausing to put his foot in the stirrup—something he had not done since Rowen had taught him as a boy.
The horse, angry and alarmed at this stranger on his back, pirouetted under him, hooves stamping, eyes rolling. The other lancers were jabbing their weapons at Rol, shouting. One clanged off his backplate. Another dug a chunk of flesh out of his horse’s rump. That made the animal squeal and leap forward, only to collide with another lancer’s mount. Rol drew one of his pistols, cocked it, and shot the other animal just behind its eye. It collapsed, rider and all, and he kicked his own steed savagely and beat it about the ribs with his pistol-barrel. The terrified creature took a huge leap over the dead horse and its shouting rider, almost unseating Rol. He took the reins, beat his horse some more, and was finally into a fast canter uphill, the horse’s hooves sliding on the mud-smeared logs underfoot.
The remaining lancers took after him, shouting, blowing a horn and all that nonsense. Rol checked his sash. He still had two loaded pistols. Turning in the saddle, he threw the empty one at the face of the lancer nearest to him and it struck the front of his helm. The man staggered in the saddle, pulling unthinking on the reins. His horse half reared, skidded on the mucky wooden road, back feet flying sideways under it. It went down hard, and the two behind it plowed into the unfortunate animal full-tilt, with a snapping of lances and bones.
Passing lines of soldiers paused to stare at the scene, and a shot snapped past Rol’s head so close it whipped hair from his temple. His right eye watered and blurred, but he kicked his injured horse ferociously. No one else tried to stop him and he rode at a labored canter ever more steeply uphill, thumping the gelding’s shoulder in his impatience and passing line after line of the eight-man section tents that housed Bar Asfal’s infantry.
The camp came to an end at last with a symbolic flagpole and a pair of negligent sentries whose match was not even lit. They shouted ineffectually at Rol as he galloped past them. There was blue sky ahead, the summit of the ridge rising steep and blinding white in the sunlight some half mile above him, and closer to, a group of riders with a tall standard flapping in their midst. The King of Bionar watched the carnage in the valley below from the perfect viewpoint, to the rear of every man in his army.
Rol slowed his horse. It fought the reins, a mettlesome black-haired beast with an evil eye. It struggled against the strange rider despite the savage wolf-bit stabbing its mouth, blood foaming from its jaws. Rol drew another pistol and beat the barrel of it down between the animal’s ears. It quietened a little. He reined in. The sun was high and clear, and up here on the summit of the hill there was no smoke, the snow was featureless and clean, and the storm of noise that was the fighting remained at one remove. He chanced a look back down into the fuming chaos of the valley, and saw there only a long soot-gray series of boiling clouds, and in them the sparkling red spits of arquebus-fire, here and there lines and clusters of men tiny with distance, dying in anonymity. What was Bar Asfal doing this far from the front? Could one command from this distance?
The guns were booming out from Myconn’s walls, but their range did not extend this far. Now, in daylight, Rol saw the true extent of the city defenses and the siege-lines about them. The walls were a rusty ocher where the outer facing had been shot away to reveal the brick filling within—a patched gray and tawny snake with a sea of roofs beyond it. The great tower of the Warder, and farther back, the looming massiveness of the palace. Looking at it from this distance, Rol realized at last that the Bar Madivar Palace was a Weren Tower, like Michal Psellos’s, but on a vaster scale.
Closer to, in the west and east, fresh formations of the enemy were coming up, regiment upon regiment. They were still some miles away, but an hour would see them close in to complete the destruction of Rowen’s army, and of Rowen herself. Where were Canker and his troops?
Rol turned back to the gaggle of riders before him. Thirty or forty gorgeously caparisoned horsemen replete with flapping banners and flags, and above them all, the saffron and black fighting flag of Bionar. He had found his man.
He kicked the sullen horse forward, liking the animal for its dogged hatred of him. They trotted forward unchallenged; clearly the King felt no threat here, so far from the battle-lines below.
One hundred yards. One of the King’s aides raised a gauntleted hand to point at Rol, a bloodied man on a bloody horse, trotting toward them with a strange light to his eyes and a face that was a mask of gore. There was a strange sound in the air, a thrumming in the very earth which Rol could not place. Not the battle; it came from over the skyline.
He leaned over in the saddle like a man badly wounded, and eased a pistol out of his sash with his left hand, clicking back the hammer. His hair fell forward, lank and sticky. He laid his forehead against the mane of his horse, and for a second closed his eyes, fighting the dizziness that beset him. He reined in just in front of the King of Bionar. No trace left now of the otherworldly light, the puissant killing-machine. His wounds were killing him with their pain, and the weakness leaked into him as his blood trickled steadily forth. One side of his head seemed filled with a high hissing emptiness where his eardrum had gone. His missing fingertip—it was the ring-finger of his right hand—had begun to clot over, a stump of hardening blood with a gleam of bone-tip in the middle of it. That hand was swelling fast, puffing out into uselessness. And it was his sword-hand.
With an immense effort he straightened in his saddle. Two of the King’s aides drew closer on their gleaming horses. That damned sound over the brow of the ridge, coming closer. If he were even at the height of a ship’s maintop he would be able to look over the other side of the hill and see what it was. It was important, he felt.
His mind was clouding over, as confused as the shaking thunder of the battlefield behind him; but one tunnel of resolve remained, light at the end of it. This thing must be done.
He found the King’s face. Even on the battlefield, this man wore a crown, a golden, scrolling thing with a great ruby in the middle. Their eyes met, and the King’s mouth began to form a word. He was the man in Rowen’s picture, though portlier, his face more florid and the eyes underhung with dark pouches of flesh—a libertine’s face, petulant and arrogant. A man who needed killing. Rol pointed his pistol.
The King’s eyes widened and he raised an arm as if to fend off a blow. At the same moment there clicked into Rol’s dazed mind a realization of what the sound was, over the ridge.
Marching men, thousands of them.
They came into view at the very top of the ridge, a ragged, endless line of them in rank on rank. Arquebusiers with their match still lit, their regimental flags unfurled. Before them came a man on a horse, a dark-eyed, cloak-wrapped fellow with a yellow grin.
“Canker,” Rol croaked, and he smiled.
The King looked back, jaw agape. “Canker!” he shouted.
Rol’s finger tightened on the trigger in the same second, and the pistol went off with a faint fizzing, no more; the powder in the pan had failed. He threw it down. The moment of stillness was shattered. Canker’s men broke into a run as the Thief-King stood up in his stirrups and hallooed and waved a short sword so that the bright wi
nter sun glittered off it. The King’s aides charged their horses bodily into Rol’s black gelding and bowled it backwards, the horse screaming with rage. Rol drew Fleam and hacked clumsily first at one, and then the other. The aides parried his blows. One sank his sword into the neck of Rol’s horse and it jerked sideways in a great spray of stinking blood. The movement saved Rol’s life, as the sword of the other clanked down on his breastplate instead of cleaving his skull. Fleam came up in Rol’s swollen fist like the leap of a sunlit salmon. Her point took the aide in the armpit, cut through the chain mail as though it were wool, then pulled free again. The man bent over, hugging his arm to his side, sword spinning away. The black gelding bounced under Rol, a creature of blood and fury. He wheeled it round, knocked the other aide’s horse off balance, and of its own volition the beast reared under him and brought its iron-shod hooves down on the remaining rider’s head even as he raised his sword to disembowel it.
The black crashed onto its side, a long slash opened along its ribs—the girth had deflected the point of the blade. The frenzied animal kicked madly. Rol rolled clear. Fleam struck him in the face as he tumbled, slicing his cheekbone open, a hot kiss he barely felt. He found his feet, and with them his strength came back, and his mind cleared. Perhaps it was Fleam’s kiss, but all at once he felt as whole and hale as he had marching out the gate that morning. He sprinted forward. The clot of riders about the King were milling and shouting, and behind them several thousand men in long ranks were pouring over the head of the ridge toward them, Canker trotting at their head.
Rol went in low, slashing at the legs of the horses. Fleam whipped and sang in his hands as he cut through sinew and hacked bone. The animals became unmanageable, bucking and rearing and trying to bring their hooves crashing down on their enemy, as they had been trained. He rolled under the belly of one, stabbed upward and came out from under as the thing’s insides collapsed onto the snow and it sank to its haunches, shrieking. He pulled the rider down and stabbed him in the throat, severing the windpipe.
“Canker!” the King was yelling. He had drawn his sword but had lost his reins. His horse circled under him in angry terror. Rol sprang up onto the beast’s hindquarters and it kicked out under him. He pushed Fleam into the King’s side, just where the backplate and breastplate met. Bar Asfal gurgled, his sword-blade flailing, his free hand scrabbling for Rol’s eyes. The crown he wore tore a hole in Rol’s scalp before it fell off, to lie in the trampled and bloody snow.
Canker had halted before them. He sat his horse and watched as Fleam sank deep, deep into the King of Bionar’s body. The man’s florid face darkened. His eyes bulged, his frantically working arms fell limp at his sides. Rol held him in the saddle as though he were embracing an old lover he had caught by surprise. He looked in Canker’s face, and saw that the Thief-King had a triumphant smile spread across his face, and he knew that something was wrong, horribly wrong.
Bar Asfal slid from the horse’s back and the beast kicked Rol off its rump so that he crashed to the snow himself, dragging Fleam free. So swollen was his injured fist about her hilt that it seemed the scimitar had become part of his engorged flesh. He sprawled there, his legs entangled with those of Bar Asfal’s corpse. The sun was in his eyes. Canker nudged his horse forward a few strides until his shadow fell over Rol. He was no longer smiling. All about them both, men were streaming past, down to join the battle in the valley below. Thousands of men, a great horde of eager fighters with bright eyes and bared teeth and smoking guns. They wore no livery of any kind, but nearly all of them had a white feather tucked in their helms, or pinned to their shoulders. They ran past, regiment by regiment, but a company of several dozen gathered about the Thief-King with drawn swords. One of them Rol recognized; he sat on a fine horse, a brown-eyed man with an eagle nose. Moerus of Gallitras, the man who had supposedly surrendered his city to the enemy. Rol kicked himself free of Bar Asfal’s corpse and stood up.
“You look all-in, my young friend,” Canker said. “You have done me a great service today; you deserve a rest.”
Rol looked about himself, at the feather tucked in every man’s helmet. He breathed in deeply. His body was near collapse, but he had been taught how to husband even the last dregs of his strength for moments such as this. And in this moment he blessed Michal Psellos for his training, and looking at Canker, he felt he understood them both.
“It was not enough to be chancellor, was it, Canker?”
“No, Rol, it was not enough. If you are happy coming second, then there is no point to running in the race.”
Here Moerus dismounted. Bending, he retrieved Bar Asfal’s buckled and bloody crown from the snow and handed it to Canker. The Thief-King stared at it a moment, face expressionless.
“What of Rowen?” Rol asked him.
“She will die today, if she is not already dead. Bionar is a tired and broken place. Rowen had her chance to take it, but failed. The war ends here. Today.”
“And then hail King Canker, the greatest thief of all.”
Canker nodded. There was no malice in his gaze; there was even a kind of regret. To the men who stood around him, he said quietly, “Kill him.”
Rol turned and ran.
Fleam snicked out left, right. A clash of steel, the buffet of a sword-hilt on the side of his ringing head, and he was sprinting down the hill.
“Kill him!” Canker shouted.
The black gelding stood in his path as though awaiting him. He vaulted into the saddle of the poor, wounded beast and kicked its bloody ribs. The horse took off at a gallop, shouldering running soldiers aside and leaving them sprawling. Gunfire crackled about them both and the horse groaned as a bullet found its flank, but galloped on, tongue lolling out of its mouth like a raw fillet of meat.
Downhill he went, along with Canker’s regiments, a great river of hell-bent humanity intent on plunging into the cauldron below. Rol ripped off his surcoat as he rode, the reins dangling free on the black horse’s neck, the beast plunging and slipping on the icy muck of the wooden road, but somehow always finding its feet again. Downhill, through the huge tented camp, many of the tents flattened now. Men made way for the big horse and its rider, the pair of them a bloody apparition, an avatar of war.
Downhill at a full, lurching gallop, the horse’s blood spattering Rol’s face as it sprayed from the animal’s injuries. The smoke and fume and roar of the battle enveloped them again, a grainy fog lit with flashes of sudden red and yellow light, and in the middle of it men squirming in the snow and the mud, killing one another any way they could, with anything that came to hand.
The gelding stumbled and fell at the very lip of the reserve trenches. Rol leaped from its back as the animal rolled, crushing the pommel of the saddle flat. It kicked its hind legs as though convinced it were still erect, then lay spent, barrel chest heaving. Rol crouched by the animal’s tortured carcass a few seconds and stared into the liquid eye. He patted the gelding’s neck once, then rose and began to run.
He leaped over trenches filled with struggling bodies. Bar Asfal’s men—they would become Canker’s men now, he supposed—were fighting with the knowledge of victory in their eyes, but Rowen’s people, outnumbered many times over, were resisting them with the valor of despair. Rol ran along the ground between the forward and reserve trenches, booting soldiers out of his way, slashing at those who tried to stop him, friend and foe alike.
Gallico. The halftroll’s bellowing was unmistakable, even over the clamor of battle. He loomed up like some myth-made monster in the smoke, swinging his war-hammer and knocking men down like skittles. At his side were Creed and Giffon, both fighting furiously, and with them a dozen of Rowen’s bodyguard, on foot now, their heavy armor streaked with blood. Gideon Mirkady’s ringlets were plastered all across his face, giving him the look of a demented poet. And behind him was Rowen, pale as a lily and as calm, giving orders to a gaggle of junior officers. In the wider circle around them the survivors of the regiments who had marched out of Myconn t
hat morning were gathering in ones and twos and broken squads, rallying to the Queen for a last stand.
Rol stumbled in his relief, going to his knees. He looked back up the hill but could see nothing through the smoke. Canker’s army had not yet reached them. There might be time.
Fleam cleaved a path for him, the sword an intelligence unto itself. Rol felt he was merely propelling it forward while the marvelous blade did the fighting for him, a thing unwearied and unwounded, growing palpably stronger with each life it ended. Gallico shouted gladly in recognition as Rol joined their ranks. Once again his legs went out from under him. His precious blood was nearly drained dry. Giffon tossed down his sword and began searching through his satchel for dressings. For a little while, Rol drifted away.
He came back to himself with cold hands about his face, and Rowen was staring down at him.
“You are cut to pieces, Fisheye. You should take more care.”
He grasped her fingers, striving to make his voice heard over the surrounding tumult.
“Canker has betrayed you. He means to take the crown for himself. Bar Asfal is dead. The field is lost, Rowen. You must get clear.”
She blinked. “Canker?”
“His men are joining the battle as we speak—against us. He means to kill you. It’s over, Rowen. We must get out of here.”
“The bastard.” This was Gideon Mirkady, wild-eyed behind his mask of bloody hair.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Rowen said, her voice so low he had to read the words from her lips.
