“Gentlemen,” Crispin said, unable to wipe the crooked Marlowe smile from his face, “I think we stand a chance."
Chapter 12
Lord of Hosts
They came in the middle of the morning, moving slow. The peasants had lookouts stationed along the valley and in the mountains around, and if Crispin understood Jean-Louis correctly, they actually whistled to one another, imitating the sounds of various birds. Thus the signal sped ahead of the host at the speed of sound and human reckoning, and came over the low limestone walls of St. Maximus and rang out across the village.
Crispin climbed the short stair to the top of tower on the town’s outer wall where Kyra had set up the old plasma howitzer. His shield flickered about him, and faintly he beheld similar distortions around the elderly captain. The cannon stood ready behind her, the feet of its three legs digging into the soft mortar between the stones. Above them, a striped awning snapped in the wind. Someone had set it up above the tower top and made the place a kind of patio, and they had set the cannon here for the flimsy protection that awning provided, as it shielded them from the eyes of the enemy above.
“You shouldn’t be up here, my lord,” she said. “It’s too easy a target. You should stay back by the church.”
That was true enough, but Crispin shrugged. “I wanted to see.”
“They’ll be coming around the horn there any second, monsieur,” said one of the villagers, a dusty, dark-haired young man of perhaps seventeen. He was one of the very few who hadn’t gotten a weapon from the stores in the catacombs, and he leaned upon his rifle as an old man does his staff. He lowered his hand then, having indicated a low, jagged white mountain that rose from the surrounding red hills like a fang from the gums of some giant.
Crispin looked at him, recognizing familiar features in the tanned skin and curling black hair. “You’re one of Jean-Louis’s family, aren’t you?”
“Oui, monsieur,” the boy said. “He’s my fourth cousin.”
“There sure are a damn lot of you.”
“We Albés are one of the largest families in the vale.”
Lord Marlowe nodded, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “That so? What’s your name, boy?”
“Edmond.”
“Edmond,” Crispin repeated, “I like it. Good strong name. And how old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
Feeling a bit like a fool, Crispin echoed the lad again. “Fifteen,” he said. So young. “I killed my first man at fifteen. I hope you don’t have to.” “I hope I don’t have to, too, monsieur.” The boy swallowed, eyes downcast. “I don’t want to go to hell.” Crispin and Kyra exchanged a look, both guessing that this strange remark had something to do with the boy’s odd religion. But young Edmond seemed almost to have forgotten they were there, for he babbled on. “I would though. Go to hell. If it meant saving everyone. I’d call that a fair trade.” He cradled his gun more tightly, as if reassuring himself that it was still there.
Kyra slapped Crispin on the shoulder. He rounded on her, a rebuke half-formed on his lips. But Kyra was pointing towards the horn in the mountains Edmond had indicated moments before. “There, sire!”
And sure enough, there they were.
Laurent was right when he called the ships old. Even at a distance, Crispin could smell the age on the approaching aircraft. The ships had the old short-winged, twin-rotored design common in the last millennium, and tilted forward as they flew, aided by two small repulsor drives. They weren’t very fast, but Crispin could see the guns hanging beneath their gray metal chassis.
A piercing whistle sounded in Crispin’s ear, and turning he saw the boy Edmond with his fingers in his mouth. Before he knew it, the sound went up on the streets below and back up the hill towards the church, and Crispin knew that the whole village knew then what was coming.
“Are they in range?” he asked Kyra.
The captain checked her readout on the plasma cannon. “Not yet. This thing’s effective inside two kilometers.” She checked the rangefinder again. “Won’t be long.”
A shadow fell across them, then, passing before the sun. Turning, Crispin saw it first: a starship hanging low over the mountains, moving slow on massive repulsors, gliding almost silently. It was vertical—like a tower, like the rocket ships of old. It cut the day in two, and like the hand of sundial cast its evil shadow across the valley. Great golden fins flanked its lowest battlements, ribbed like the sails of a fishing junk. Gold tracery gleamed on its onyx face, catching in the sun as it descended, looking like the lost turret of some fairy tale castle cut loose and left to wander the clouds. It had a dark beauty about it—all sharp lines and bright points that spoke to Crispin of fangs and the jeweled talons of hunting birds, and a hollow dread formed in the pit of his stomach as he looked on.
As it passed by, he saw three more of the troop carriers break away from it, emerging from holds along its black length. A shot rang out. One of the snipers. Crispin guessed it must not have been Jean-Louis, for he saw no shield flicker from impact and none of the ships fell from the sky. The great tower marched down the slope of the mountains, coming in low and slowly. It was like watching a castle march downhill. It must have been five hundred feet high, vaguely ovoid in cross-section, like the blade of a mighty sword. As Crispin watched, a banner was unfurled from its highest point, stretched taut like a sail to display the device upon its indigo surface.
A golden serpent wrapped round a crescent moon.
House Orin’s standard.
“I guess it’s all true, then,” Crispin said, looking up at a flag that had not been flown on Delos for more than two hundred years.
“My lord,” Kyra interjected. “You need to get down from here. If they see you, it will draw all their fire to this spot. You’re too exposed.”
“What does that say about you, then?” Crispin asked.
“Don’t worry about me, lordship,” Kyra said tartly, moving the cannon’s rangefinder from one target to another. “They haven’t seen us yet. If we’re lucky, they’ll get over the wall and above the town before I start firing. That’ll surprise them.”
Crispin felt the blood go from his face. “Over the village?”
“Yes, over the village. The townsfolk are evacuated, aren’t they?”
“Except the fighting men,” Crispin conceded. He let it go. He wasn’t about to argue with Kyra about property damage. Not today. He looked again at the great starship, floating now above the fields before the township’s walls, at the flag spread out behind its tower like a wing.
One of the House Marlowe peltasts poked his head up from the stairwell from where he watched the approach to the cannon. “We about ready, ma’am?”
“Aye, Brax,” Kyra answered. “You and Emer just make sure none of them come up behind me.” She gave the soldier a small salute, tapping her fist to her chest before extending her arm. The man Brax vanished, and Kyra said, “Edmond, go with Lord Marlowe back to the temple.”
“But Jean-Louis said I was to stay with you!”
The old captain opened her mouth to reply, but only hissed. Her shoulders gave a little, and she said, “All right. But you leave at the first sign of trouble. You jump off this tower if you have to. Understand?” Then she rounded on Crispin, “But you, my lord, you need to go now. Please.”
She doesn’t expect to survive, Crispin realized with growing horror.
“Captain,” he said, “do what you can from here, but if you need to abandon the cannon, abandon the cannon.”
Captain Kyra smiled ruefully, and for a moment Crispin could see the young woman she had been, the young woman his brother had loved. The plebs really were amazing sometimes. “Yes, sir,” she lied. They both knew she was lying.
Crispin felt the serpent—the Orin serpent, he thought—turn over in his stomach once more. “We may not have to hold out long,” Crispin said. “Reinforcements could be here any time.”
“Or it could be hours,” Kyra said. “But we’ll make them fight fo
r every second of it.”
Only then did the young lord return the old captain’s salute. “Very good, then.” The enemy’s landing craft were coming in close, and the great shadow of the looming vessel and its mighty banner stretched out to cover St. Maximus in a wedge of night. Crispin guessed the first ships were well within firing range now. Kyra turned the plasma cannon on its moorings, tracking the approach of the nearest troop carrier.
“They’re coming right over us!” Edmond gasped. “I’m going,” Crispin said.
“My lord!” Kyra’s words sounded almost strangled, but they stopped Crispin at the top of the stairs. “Just in case I … just in case. You should know …” She paused a moment, struggling to overcome some blockage in either her throat or her heart. “I helped your brother escape. Lord Hadrian. All those years ago.”
Crispin blinked. “What?” What a strange thing to say at a time like this.
“Someone should know. He wasn’t kidnapped. He took a ship from Karch.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
The captain shrugged her thin shoulders. “Someone should know.”
“You loved him?” Crispin asked.
An old, cold shadow flickered in the captain’s eyes. “No. But I loved your mother.”
“My mother?” Crispin echoed stupidly. He had always suspected that Mother had had a hand in Hadrian’s disappearance, but … “Why would Mother … ?”
“Ask her,” Kyra said, checking the air intakes on the cannon were clear and ready. All the indicator lights were blue. “Now go. Let me do my job, sir.”
Crispin went. Each step seemed a very long way down.
• • •
“They’re here,” Crispin said, slamming one of the church’s double doors into the wall behind as he entered with a ponderous bang. Those few defenders who remained within jumped, some going for weapons they did not need.
“Do you know how many there are?” Sabine asked, rising from her seat on one of the church’s wooden benches.
“I spied five of those small ships,” Jean-Louis said.
“They’re old Kingfishers,” Laurent said, peering through a pair of beaten up binoculars that might have survived since the man was in the Legions. “Light troop carrier. Legion issue. Can hold twenty men. Thirty if they’re real friendly.” He lowered the binoculars. “We’re looking at a hundred … hundred fifty men, maybe?”
Crispin swallowed. One hundred and fifty men. It wasn’t a great number, but he had four, discounting the two injured men. Six, if he included himself and Kyra. And four dozen villagers, but even armed with the weapons they’d had stored in catacombs, Crispin didn’t like their chances. He wished those old Marlowe soldiers from the time of the Orin Rebellion had thought to abandon a crate of shield belts as well. But that would have been too much to ask for.
The Orin Rebellion.
They were still fighting the Orin Rebellion.
“There could be more of them,” Sabine said, darkly. “This could just be a vanguard.”
“Oh, there are almost certainly more of them,” Laurent agreed, and for a moment his grandfatherly demeanor was all worn away, and it was Lorn the centurion who answered. “No commander in the galaxy would commit his entire force to the first attack, unless he was drunk or stupid.”
“Or desperate,” Crispin added, feeling desperate himself. After all, they were committing their entire force to the defense. They had to. “You should get into place.”
Jean-Louis stroked his short beard, glanced over his shoulder to the two of his seemingly innumerable cousins who also clutched MAG rifles. Crispin thought they both looked ill, sick of heart or to their stomachs, their faces waxen and pale. It occurred to him suddenly that these men— these boys—hadn’t killed anyone before, not even in sport as he had. He felt Medved die beneath him once more, the hot blood soaking through his trousers, smoking in the air. One of the men darted out the front of the church, the other out the back, towards the stair and the path to the rectory and the mountains above.
Jean-Louis did not move, unless it was his eyes. Black eyes darted between Crispin and Laurent, and for a moment Crispin thought the fellow was going to say something. Instead, he stepped forward and embraced the old priest, and if he did say something—some soft word or prayer—Crispin did not hear. Then he was gone, following his cousin out the back of the church and up onto the path that led onto the cliffs and secret ways that ran above the vale of St. Maximus.
The nervous voices of men drifted over them then, stirring the still air of the church and the sheets of canvas that hung over the blasted windows. Crispin did not understand the words, but the unease in them and the terror were universal to every human language. He felt it, too, coiled in his belly like a jeweled serpent stretching up to bite his heart.
Sabine stood watching him, and though their heads were helmeted and their faces blank arcs of ceramic the color of night, he knew Lud and the three other soldiers they had that could fight were watching him, too. Him.
The serpent turned, and suddenly Crispin found he could stand those eyes no longer. “Sabine, go back to the house. Lock yourself in.”
“What?” he could hear her bristling. “While you’re out here?”
“One of us has to survive,” he said, suddenly sure that he would not.
“If you think I’m going to sit back while you’re out here—”
Crispin overrode her, “Which one of us has the most fighting experience?” He was relieved that she did not point out that most of his time in combat had been in mock battles in the coliseum, that he had only been in one real fight, and that the night before. But that wasn’t true, he realized, remembering how Hadrian had bested him his last night on Delos, before he disappeared into the Dark of space. Two fights. And he had lost one of them.
But Sabine hadn’t spoken, though the lines of some argument were forming on that alabaster face. Crispin closed the distance between them and embraced his sister as Jean-Louis had embraced the priest. “Let me do this,” he said, whispering into the curtain of black hair pressed between them. How many brothers had said such things to their sisters in every age since Alexander? How many fathers to their daughters? Husbands to their wives? “Let me do this for you.” He felt her arms tighten around him, returning his embrace. “Little sister,” he said, and smiled. “If it comes to it, you’d be a better ruler anyway.”
Crispin felt her shake her head, “That isn’t true.” She pushed him away, and Crispin thought he saw tears unfallen in her violet eyes. That, more than anything, upset him. More than Medved, more than these strange cultists and their dying god, more than the chase and the crash. Hers were Marlowe eyes, and unused to tears.
“Go on, now,” Crispin said, and checked his sword and the phase disruptor he had taken were in their places on his belt. “And be ready. It may be you’ll still have to fight. We don’t know if Jean’s rider made it through the Camlen’s Gap. We may be all the defense there is.”
“If it is an Orin like you said,” Sabine answered, “do for her what Father did for the rest of them. Kill her.”
Kill her, Crispin’s thoughts echoed. Kill her. But as he turned back to Kyra and Laurent and the others, his thoughts were not of revenge, of the centuries-old blood feud that plagued both their houses. Orin and Marlowe. Marlowe and Orin. It had been Orin greed that started the thing, their desire for power—that they, a minor house from the edge of the system, might rule all of Delos.
The serpent was pushing its way up Crispin’s throat, and he clamped down on it, bit it off and swallowed. “Stay safe,” he said to Sabine, giving her a gentle push back towards the cave.
“You too.”
When she had gone, Crispin turned back to the others, conscious suddenly of the way they watched him, eyes wide, either staring or downcast. Not many of them shared Jean-Louis’s brazenness, after all. It occurred to him then that many of them would not have seen a palatine before. How small they seemed beside him, not a one of the
m rising higher than his shoulder. They were quiet, even old Laurent stood by not speaking.
Too quiet.
Say something, boy, said the part of him that spoke with his father’s voice. Say what? He was used to screaming crowds, not silent ones. He was more gladiator than statesman, and not the sort to go making speeches. He was not Hadrian. He wasn’t even Sabine. He was only Crispin Marlowe.
No. His fists tightened. No, you can do this, he thought, and the voice he heard was his own, not his father’s.
And another voice—one he had not heard in a long time—said, A gladiator is what they need right now, Crispin.
Hadrian’s voice. For a moment, Crispin almost thought he saw the other devil standing there amidst the adorators in their dusty temple. Hadrian hadn’t been tall for a palatine, and it was easy to imagine him standing among the peasants: long black hair and black clothing, in one of those antique greatcoats he liked to wear. Violet eyes met violet, and Crispin imagined he saw his brother nod and mouth two words: Go on.
Then the light changed, and Crispin saw that it was not Hadrian at all, only one of the peasants, his dark hair darkened to Marlowe black by the shadow of the pillar in which he stood. Only a trick of the light. But it was enough.
“A gladiator …” Crispin muttered to himself. And drawing his sword but not kindling it, he raised his hand. “I am Crispin Marlowe!” he declared, “Son of Alistair Marlowe! Archon of Meidua and Lord of Devil’s Rest! Tell me, people: are you good men of Delos?”
For a moment, Crispin was terrified that they would not answer, or say that they were not—or not understand Galstani, speaking only French. But one old man, sun-scarred and leathery raised his voice from the back of the small crowd, “Aye!”
And then his word was taken up and echoed by many who stood by.
“Aye! Aye!”
“So am I!” Crispin called back, and pointing with the hilt of his unkindled sword said, “And I will not sit idly by while your town and your homes are attacked by offworlders!” He sensed somehow that he now held their attention, and so softened his tones. “These men have followed me here to kill me and my sister. They mean to kill you, too. To get at us. I am sorry …” He felt his words falter then with his resolve, catching then a glimmer of distrustful light in the eyes of one of the onlookers. An unsteady silence closed in about them, and Crispin drove it back with a shout, “But I won’t let them. Mark my words: every drop of Delian blood they spill, they will have to buy with their own blood at ten times the price!”
The Lesser Devil Page 11
