by Tom Toner
He stood, fastening his wide helmet and considering the possibilities of waiting out the battle here, on the bridge. It might take a day or two for the army to finish its siege, and Elatine would likely be getting drunk on his success in the ruined city by the time the paper encampment had been relocated to the far bank. He decided to get it over with, before any major skirmishes started and while the warlord’s head was still clear. It would be more dangerous to leave for the encampment now, but the feeling that time was somehow running out was returning to him.
Once on the other bank, he spotted a large heap of ordnance stacked in the sun-browned grasses. Shells twice as long as he was—relatively liftable for a strong Melius (and light enough for their giant Jalan adversaries in Elatine’s army on the hill to pick up one-handed)—were laid out ready for use, the first fallen leaves already having drifted into some of the gaps between their tubing. The gun on the far bank had its own piles of ammunition, so these must be meant for something else that he hadn’t seen, unless the Second had given up supplying weapons at all now to its outlying regions. He wouldn’t be surprised.
Sotiris looked around for any sign of troops and began carefully tipping the ammunition down the bank into the river, leaving the largest shells until last. They wouldn’t budge, so he walked off a fair distance into a line of oil palms at the edge of the plantation, then turned back to look at the piled shells. He concentrated, watching the sun blink on the faded blue casings until a spark leapt from one of the metal surfaces and danced away into the grass. He gritted his teeth, rubbing his hands together absently. A complicated-looking hinge popped at the back of one of the shells at the top of the stack. It clattered away, some more parts falling out after it. Sotiris frowned. They were useless, too old to explode properly even while the materials inside them were being frantically agitated. Elatine wouldn’t need much of a helping hand against the Second after all.
Voices began drifting through the trees. Sotiris turned and walked east, jumping across a pungent-smelling trench trap disguised with rushes. A thought occurred to him as he came upon the outer walls, avoiding a line of armed Melius carting some equipment quickly along a painted line between the orderly foliage: land-mines. They had grown in popularity as the war progressed along with other, more desperate measures as each outer Province fell.
Sotiris followed the curve of wall for a couple of miles, climbing mossy lumps of rubble and hillside into which the city was built, dodging encampments of refugees who had not been allowed inside the walls and platoons scrabbling on the rocks, passing crates of ammunition up and swinging their crude Howitzers out to watch over the surrounding fields. Every few minutes, Melius and machines clattered past him, seeing nothing, the roar and crackle of artillery softer and then louder as he found himself facing the hills again.
He set out across the browning fields, stopping to rinse his mouth when he came across an irrigation trench. A body further down had spilled its brains into it, but that hardly mattered. Around his feet the ground had been freshly dug, little mounds indicating where he shouldn’t step. Sotiris tested his theory, as well as his damaged confidence in his own powers, turning back and staring hard at one of the earthworks. A small metal cylinder leapt from the ground like a coiled spring, smoke and bent nails popping from its casing. It landed with a disappointing tinny clank on the pile of nails, a desultory flame flickering from its shredded side and dying. Sotiris stared at it, beginning to see just how quickly Elatine might accomplish his goals.
He moved on, coming across a line of Secondling soldiers dug into some churned-up earth defences. Sotiris noticed that some of them clutched small Prism weapons in their hands, crudely manufactured spring and lumen rifles with Melius blades soldered to the barrels. Others further down carried simple pikes and curved rapiers, poorer servants, no doubt. The troops he stepped over were lying on their bellies, guns sighted off into the palms, waiting. He listened; the barrage had stopped.
Sotiris paused and stood with them, smelling the breeze, watching light and dappled shadows pierce the haze beneath the canopy of plants. He was in exactly the place he didn’t want to be. Once again he imagined the ludicrous nature of fate; dying in a strange field surrounded by massive yellow men, men who would have scared the living daylights out of anyone he’d known in his youth. He looked down at them, uncomfortable and reeking in their battle costumes. The beasts coming for them were the really frightening ones, the ones he could count on being on his side.
Sotiris resumed his walk, ducking through some palms and running north, curving until he began to see the giants working their way through the foliage, their huge bodies bent almost double among the squat trees.
He stopped, taking in the sight. The Asiatic Melius, the Jalanbulon Regiments, were truly a sight to behold: the closest thing to trolls the Old World possessed. He slid through their ranks, studying the huge, muscled jawbones, the hooked yellow teeth peeping from loose lips. Their eyes, set darkly in shaded sockets, were the size of melons, their great grey hands equipped with seventeen fingers each, all different lengths. Most of the Jalanbulon wore plated suits of scaled, painted iron, scratched and dented from nine unrelenting years of war.
As he passed through them, he saw an especially large Jalan, naked but for the cloak of black silk around his gnarled shoulders. He carried no weapon. The display was designed to insult the minor aristocracy holed up in the city, to illustrate the punishments for their greed. Should the sacrificial Melius die today, Sotiris knew, the instructions were to leave his body and all its carried wealth on the battlefield as a final statement. Nobody among the Asiatic armies was permitted to claim what he wore, the generals of Elatine’s army deciding the message of the act more important than apparently giving away funds to the enemy.
The weapons the Jalanbulon carried were also various Prism implements, probably looted from collectors of Firmamental antiquities in the lands the armies had pillaged. He stood still for a while, feeling them moving all around him, listening to them muttering to each other in a blend of languages, checking their weapons and unclipping things from their armour. He stole to one side as the guns on the hill roared into life again, booming overhead, standing with his arms delicately extended to let them pass. A barbed weapon hanging from a soldier’s back snagged his light armour and almost dragged him along, but the metal plate snapped off before Sotiris could fall. Soon he saw a point where he might exit the columns and dashed breathlessly between the muscled legs into a calmer patch of the plantation where machines and equipment were being assembled and carted to positions on the hills further south.
He reached the crest of the hill, ducking as a gun slammed a shell over his head towards the city, a belch of earth and dust caking him. The huge copper machines were much more impressive than those the Dongral Legions possessed, and he went a little way over to sit and watch them fire while he caught his breath. Shells were loaded to one side and wound into the body of the gun on a circular track, a spring mechanism sliding them inside. It meant little lifting was required, despite the obvious strength of the gun-crews. Carriages of ordnance stood nearby; they would be loading shells into the night. Sotiris wondered who’d paid for it all.
The wind was much colder now, sucking away at his sweat-free skin beneath the layer of grime, each roll of thunder from the battery of guns on the ridge vibrating in his bones. He looked out to the city, its highest levels disintegrating under the pounding of the cannon. Spires were falling from the shearing walls and obliterated masonry, shafts of slanted smoke obscuring the lake entirely to the west. Fires from incendiary rounds had already begun to ignite the plantations, sweeping with the fresh wind nearly to the water’s edge beyond the city. Sotiris shook himself, getting up unsteadily and covering his ears. The Jalan manning the Howitzers noticed nothing as he passed the line of guns and walked along the makeshift causeway into the paper city, which lay about a mile beyond the rise, steady lines of troops marching along the road.
Inside the bar
bicans of the paper city the barracks were already being folded away. He walked the wide streets, stepping to one side for an inebriated legion of relief troops. They rolled and staggered, turning a corner and heading for a tavern before it could be packed away. Across the open passage hung rows of spiked iron cages, like the sort of things that used to contain birds. Inside he could see tiny naked creatures, all mouth and teeth. They appeared even more naked than they were, attempting to cover themselves with their hands when they saw him. He stooped and looked in: Vulgar soldiers, their bodies bruised and bloody from torture. The little white things whimpered up at him, drooling like animals as they clung to the bars. Sotiris noticed their swollen, starved bellies protruding from racks of gnarled ribs. One of them tried to say something, but Sotiris put a finger to his lips, passing in some food he kept close in case of hounds or wolves. The Prism were banned from the Old World by edict of every Firmamental Emperor since the Most Venerable Biancardi took the throne of Gliese in 10,214, but Sotiris knew that the Firmament could no longer stop the occasional incursion. The Old World, once the sacred kernel of the heavens, was now an unprotected wilderness.
He stepped between some shabby-looking western captives pulling a roll of papery material to one side, exposing some stairways leading up into the body of the mobile encampment’s main keep, and ascended them. The notion of an origami fortress looked at first glance rather unwise, and Sotiris could see why so many of Elatine’s adversaries had thought they were being terribly clever in attempting, repeatedly, to burn it down. He grabbed a folded section of wall as he went, rubbing it between his fingers. The whole surface area of the material was laminated in some way, immune to rot or damp or flames. It took half a day to set up and the same to take it down, the whole thing easily portable. He’d heard tales of it being moved during previous campaigns; it took one hundred particularly strong Jalan with a great set of wooden beams stretched between them. The pile of material resting on the beams apparently looked like a vast stack of envelopes as it travelled about the Provinces behind the marching armies it sheltered.
Sotiris made his way quickly and quietly through some paper reception rooms at the top of the multiply folded, reinforced steps, following his intuition to a narrow bridge between the two sections of the keep. As he walked, he changed the rhythm of his step and straightened his posture, visible now to anyone who might pass, knowing that there would be no more guards from here on.
Elatine, the great commander and tactician, was at his sink finishing his morning ablutions, a process Sotiris had forgotten all about. Lacking the bull strength and muscle tone Sotiris had seen in the marching army below, the tall Jalan was washing his face slowly with a towel of plain white linen as Sotiris made himself known.
He paused, the cloth still covering his wide, toothy mouth, locks of long, wet hair swept back.
“Amaranthine.”
“Commander Elatine.”
Elatine’s huge eyes watched him standing there, closing as the cloth passed over them, his surprise well concealed. “Come to tell me to desist?”
Sotiris went to a chair and sat, exhausted. “Not at all.”
Elatine put down the cloth and looked at him in the mirror. “Make yourself comfortable.” His voice was comparatively high for such a large specimen, standing almost three times Sotiris’s own height.
Sotiris planted his helmet on a cushion beside him and looked up at the wooden frames of the simple apartments, noticing their unscrewable joints. A large golden lionhound snoozed belly-up on the rug. The huge, simple bed in the next room was tousled, recently slept in.
Elatine noticed him looking through to the bed. “I woke late. My legions need no more instruction.”
He looked over at the mottled, reflected face of the Melius. “You do as you see fit.”
“Good. So, what have you come here for? I’ve received my silk.”
Sotiris raised his eyebrows. “Silk?”
“This very day by messenger. You bring more?”
“Ah—no, I’m afraid not.”
“Well, I shan’t be returning it, if that’s what you’re after.” The giant scowled at him. “It was unusual to receive it that way.”
“It was?”
Elatine watched him suspiciously. “This last month, my allowance has been delivered in the form of raw supplies every night, by the roads. Now my legions must be allowed rights of reapage at every city they come to.” His eyes fixed Sotiris’s. “They will have no less, you understand.”
Sotiris spread his hands magnanimously, trying to think quickly. “You must take what you require.”
“Very well,” the warlord grumbled, picking up a razor by the side of the basin. “Your fellows forget how stretched my supply line has become.” He nodded at Sotiris. “Tell them that, will you? I shan’t be amused if the mistake is repeated.”
“Of course,” said Sotiris. “And what of those who brought the silk?”
Elatine glanced at him, razor poised at his chin. “Tortured, for information. Traps are sprung in this way, delivering unasked-for gifts and the like.”
Sotiris nodded as he watched the sleeping lionhound’s legs twitch. Silk, the Old World’s most precious currency, remained so due to the mystery of its manufacture. The Melius naturally had no appreciation of the extinct moths from which it came, or of the berry trees necessary in their cultivation. Amaranthine pilgrims to the Old World brought it with them by the sackful, travelling in comfort among the Melius even when disguised, either through subtle suggestion or near total invisibility. Perennials, who cared less for lugging possessions, often tricked their huge hosts into believing they had received quantities of silk when they had been given nothing. Such practices were technically illegal by the charters of the Firmament, but no younger Amaranthine could by law challenge his elder, and so wizardly deceptions went unpunished.
Sotiris studied the Melius’s gigantic frame as he shaved, thinking now on whom among the Amaranthine might have been supplying the warlord. The letter in the castle. It could only have been the vanished Perennial, Yanenko. Could he possibly be alive still?
The war in the east had progressed more rapidly than anyone had ever expected, burning its way through the outlying Provinces and into lands that had been held for centuries without question of revolution. Though few had expected them to come as close as the Fourth, the Vaulted Lands had ruled that the commander’s Eastern legions would halt upon reaching the Greater Second, with no assistance or mischief allowed from any Amaranthine on the Old World that might encourage them to progress further. As the Asiatic front drew closer to the Central Provinces, this edict was strengthened until it had become punishable first by excommunication from the Firmament and ultimately by death. The Amaranthine—the few thousand who still understood the stakes they played for—were fearful of any Prism breed gaining a foothold on the Old World, understanding that the chaos of war in the Provinces would provide a perfect distraction for anything wishing to slip in unseen. They had deemed a continuous monarchy—that of the First—the most efficient way to warn of any such encroachments, no matter the ruthlessness with which it treated its own citizens. Sotiris depended now on Elatine’s will to continue in the face of such an edict, to take what he thought was rightfully his.
“I would be in a position to offer you more, should you consider my terms, Commander,” Sotiris said to the man’s broad, grey back.
Elatine shaved carefully while he considered the Immortal, dragging the foot-long blade to a stop beside his hooked nose. “I’m sure you might.” He began to make rapid strokes beneath his nostrils. “But I do not discuss terms.”
Sotiris noticed how poor the Melius’s Unified was. He could have switched at any time to Twenty-Second, Elatine’s mother tongue, but had little interest in making things easier for the man. Amaranthine were spoken to in their own language; it had always been so.
“The treasures would be substantial,” he said, more slowly and clearly.
Elatine turne
d from the mirror to look at the Amaranthine, massively brooding. “You did not hear me, Immortal. I do not negotiate. Talk is for people who doubt their own strength.”
Sotiris straightened a little from his hunch, eyes narrowing, gratified at last to see uncertainty cross Elatine’s face.
“I meant no offence,” the commander added, rinsing the blade in the clouded water. “I know what you would ask of me—it has already been asked by a hundred advisors, a dozen Provincial princes. Even one or two of your kind, Amaranthine. I have not fought tooth and claw through Firstling protectorates to stop at the gates, an inch from total victory, only to turn and slink home. But I have been given little choice—I disobey the Firmamental Edicts—” he twirled his huge fingers as he said the words, imbuing them with mock mysticism “—at my peril. You know this. The silk is a very fine and much appreciated gesture, but it cannot change what your people have decreed.”
Sotiris sat back a little. “Would you follow me, if I could guarantee your success?”
The Asiatic stared at him, the razor still clutched in his hand. “I can think of little you might bargain with.”
Sotiris nodded pensively, running his hand along the rough, striped weave of the cushions. “I could give you the boy-king.”
Elatine smiled at last, wiping his face and going to pat the lionhound. “A bold guarantee. Too bold. Not even your competitors dared offer me Lyonothamnus.” He shook his colossal head. “What is it you want, Amaranthine?”
“I want nothing more than to see you crowned before the Autumn has waned, Commander, and to know the Provinces are at peace.”
