*****
Deda, the Queen’s Castle
By the time the Queen finally returned, Wims was desperate to surrender his secrets, his freedom, even his life to escape the endless droning of his torturer.
“I’ll talk!” he shouted when Her Majesty entered. “I’ll talk!”
“Oh,” the Queen said, her tone dripping acid, “now you’ll talk?” She let the question hang in the air a moment before continuing. “Now, you’ll talk,” she repeated, almost to herself. “Sadly, your secrets are no longer secret and turn out not to have been worth the trouble you went to keep them, or my friend here,” she indicated the friar, “went to extract them.”
Wims gaped at her, unable to fathom this apparent turn of events. “What?” he said, at last.
“My friend not only makes an excellent spiritual…advisor, but he’s a world-class painter as well. With the portrait he’s made of you in his spare moments and which we subsequently showed to various merchants of information, call them, we’ve been able to determine a great deal about you.”
Ah! This was some sort of gambit. She had to be bluffing. Anyway, he fervently hoped she was. The next words out of her mouth convinced him otherwise, however.
“And so, Mr. Deda, you are less than worthless to me.”
He braced himself for a death sentence.
“Unless…” the Queen said, playfully, “you’re worth something to the rest of the infamous Deda clan.”
Wims doubted it. “Of course I am!”
The Queen laughed. It was a hard sound, like that of a smith’s hammer striking his anvil. “Of course you are! We’ll fish around a little. See if there’s anyone willing to pay your ransom.” She turned to leave.
“So…you don’t want my head, then?”
More hammer blows. “If you’ve no use for it, what in Mahnus’ name would I want it for? No, no. I’ll take gold over vengeance every day, especially when I’ve got a war to fund.”
“The End-of-All-Things’ll just kill me, anyway.”
“Perhaps in the next life, you’ll be more careful in your choice of employers.”
“Unless you’d like to employ me in this one?” Wims didn’t know what made him say it; maybe after all he’d been through, he’d developed a death wish.
“You’ve got some cheek, haven’t you?” The Queen spoke to her torturer. “Do you think you can manage another twenty-four hours, as a favor to me?”
The torturer nodded. “It would be my pleasure.”
Twenty-four more hours of this torture? Wims felt panic rising in his chest.
“Survive this with your wits intact, and we’ll talk,” the Queen said with finality.
Time slowed to a stop.
*****
The Queen’s Camp
General Branch had chosen well. The battlefield-to-be was a meadow that sloped gently downhill between a heavily forested drop on the left and another, smaller woods on the right. The enemy would be unable to flank the Queen’s host, condemned, instead, to approach dead-on and uphill all the way. Janks might’ve seen a better battlefield somewhere, but he couldn’t remember it now.
“We’ll trench, left to right, across the slope,” Bailis was explaining to Sergeant Kittins and others, “and line the uphill side with sharpened stakes, caltrops, anything that’ll do some damage and slow them down. Of course, we’ll set our longbowmen near the top, where they can rain death down on the bastard enemy all day long. Eventually, even his own dead will make a formidable obstacle for his infantry. We’ll station a division of heavy horse on either end, so they can sweep out behind any given wave and ride them down from the back.”
“And the pikemen?” one of the other officers asked.
“The usual: we’ll intersperse them with the bowmen. If the enemy gets too close, our bowmen will be able to withdraw without too much difficulty.”
“And we’re behind that, are we?” Kittins asked.
“Just so,” Bailis replied. “Meanwhile, the bowmen get behind us and resume firing downhill.”
“What about the Shapers?” someone wanted to know.
Bailis pointed uphill, where a large group of soldiers was busy building platforms. “They’ll be up there, naturally. They can’t help if they can’t see what’s going on.” Bailis looked pointedly at Janks. “Your friend D’Kem will be up there with the rest of them. I’m sure you were counting on his help down here, but the fact is we need him to help coordinate the, uh, arcane response.”
“But but but we gotta have him with us!” Spirk complained, completely surprising Janks, who hadn’t even known he was present.
“I understand your…attachment…to the Shaper. You’ve been through an ordeal together that most of us cannot imagine. However, he’s needed elsewhere. You’re just going to have to trust the rest of us – all sixty thousand of us – to keep you safe.” Bailis again addressed himself to the larger group. “Questions?”
There were none.
“Very good, then. About your business. Dismissed.”
Janks stood for a moment and watched his breath rising into the cold air. He thought of the way blood and entrails steamed in winter battles. Better that than flies, he supposed. Still, a disturbing image nonetheless.
“You worried?” Bash had snuck up beside him and stood staring down the slope.
“Hell yes. You?”
Bash was quiet a long time, long enough for Janks to divine the answer. “Yeah, maybe a little bit. Mind, I’m not afraid of anyone one-on-one or even three-on-one. It’s the magic and arrows and shit flyin’ through the air I don’t like. No telling what’s gonna land where. You could be the best brawler in the world and still catch a spear right in the back o’ the head.”
“Don’t seem fair, does it?”
“That’s what I’m saying!”
“From what D’Kem was telling me, though, the enemy’s host is mostly built for straight-on, eat you alive kinda stuff. Not a lot of subtlety.”
Bash seemed reassured. “Good, then. If they play it like that, I ain’t worried at all.”
They weren’t friendly, but Janks didn’t have the heart to tell him the End-of-All-Things would never play it straight. The truly evil ones never did. Bash sauntered off to go sharpen his weapon, Janks supposed, so he looked around for the rest of the old unit. The twins would be on the hilltop, preparing to join the ranks of the longbowmen. Rem, meanwhile, had taken Spirk aside and was regaling him with some bullshit story undoubtedly intended to bolster the younger man’s confidence. Janks’ own confidence could sure as hell use some bolstering. He’d never been in an army as big as the Queen’s, and yet, word was, it was dwarfed by the End-of-All-Things’ host. He couldn’t conceive of sixty thousand men losing to anyone, but if they were truly outnumbered two, three or even five-to-one, what hope did they have? How long could they withstand the inevitable?
“Shouldn’t you be sharpening stakes?” Kittins growled at him.
And there was another worry. The sergeant didn’t like him, had never liked him, and was just as likely as not to “accidentally” kill him during the melee. Janks had seen it too many times before. Unless, he killed Kittins first. “Yessir!” he said, keeping his head low and rushing off to the nearest woodpile. The sound of axes and swords hacking at stakes blossomed all around him.
*****
The End, In Camp
“You’ve told me of the different units and their functions. Let us move to the battle, itself.”
Long cleared his throat. “Well, er, as we’re the ones attacking, they’ll have their choice of ground. Most likely, they’ll place themselves on a hill. Maybe they’ll find the ruins of an old fort or some such. The important thing is, they’ll try to limit our options, make us work for every inch.”
“You serve me well. They have indeed chosen higher ground. What else?”
So, it was another test. Every day, every moment in the End’s service was a test. “They’ll want to dictate who outflanks whom.”
“There’ll be none of that on this battlefield – too much forest on either side.”
Long nodded. Good. But he said “I don’t like it,” adding “master” almost a breath too late.
“They challenge us, they dare us to a full-frontal assault,” the End sneered. “The fools. Now, let me guess…we charge right at them and they hit us with an endless barrage of arrows, stones, et cetera. Correct?”
“From their position, that would seem the thing to do.”
The End laughed. “And when their arrows run out and my thralls keep coming?”
“Then we go hand-to-hand,” Long answered, dutifully. “No question we have superiority in numbers, master, but the Queen will have more mounted units.”
“Overrated.”
Overrated? “As you say,” Long responded.
“You haven’t mentioned their Shapers…”
“I expect our Shapers will engage them.”
“And annihilate them,” the End smiled. “I have a few surprises they will not have seen before. And the weather?”
Long lifted his head, scanned the clouds. “It’s cold. Don’t think it’ll snow, but cold makes a difference.”
“How?”
“Well, er…it makes the ground harder, for one thing. If there’s frost, there could be ice. That ain’t…that’s not…good. Especially climbing uphill.”
“There won’t be ice, then.”
“If I may ask…”
“How long ‘til we arrive?”
Long never got used to the End’s uncanny prescience. “Yes, master.”
“By this time tomorrow, we’ll be in sight of their force.”
One more sleepless night.
*****
Long, Before the Battle
Yendor was sharpening his sword when Long approached. “You look like you’re actually going to fight,” he told the other man as he hunkered down by the fire.
“Fightin’ somebody. ‘S all I know.”
“Somebody,” Long repeated. “Meaning?”
“Might be, in the chaos, a man could get himself lost. Disoriented, like.”
“Probably safer in a battle than trying to drift away down a river, that’s true.”
“I figure the End’ll have his hands full. For a while, anyways.”
“O’ course, if he catches you…”
“Aha! But I’m planning to switch clothes with one o’ the Queen’s dead,” Yendor whispered and winked when he’d finished. “You wanna come along?”
“Do I!” Long exclaimed. “But…”
“You can’t leave the missus,” Yendor said, shaking his head sadly.
Long was about to protest that Mardine was not his wife, but a wave of guilt stopped him. “No. No, I can’t.”
“I understand. I wish I had someone to die for.”
“Anyone ever tell you you have a way with words?” Long asked sarcastically.
Yendor seemed to contemplate the question earnestly. “Nope. Don’t think so.”
“Well, don’t hold your breath.”
Both men fell silent, while Yendor continued to sharpen his blade. Then, Long said, “You’ve been with this outfit longer’n me. What do you reckon tomorrow will be like?”
“Pretty much what you’d guess. The End likes to overwhelm with numbers and savagery. He’ll lose more troops than the Queen’s got in her entire army. And he’ll still have enough left to take Lunessfor.”
“Yeah,” Long sighed. “That’s what I was thinking, too. I keep hoping I’m wrong, though.”
“Don’t hope, and you won’t be disappointed.”
“But there was some talk about the Reaper coming in on the Queen’s side. Have you heard anything about that of late?”
“Just what the End’s been telling everyone: the Reaper ran off and hid in a mud puddle somewheres to the north.”
“Which means, if we engage the Queen’s army tomorrow and they’re able to stretch this out a while, we could have Vykers at our backs.”
“What’d I just say? Don’t hope, and you won’t be disappointed.”
Long wriggled his toes in his boots. They were damp and cold, and the fire felt good on the soles of his feet. “You got any o’ that Skent on you?”
Yendor’s smile was as radiant as a filthy man’s smile could be. “Never without it, old son. Never without.”
“Pass it over, would ya?”
*****
The two armies caught sight of one another around three in the afternoon, too late in the day, by the End’s estimation, to begin an attack. And, anyway, he wanted to give the Queen’s force a day to stare at the enormity of his still-gathering host and panic, stew in their fears and anxieties. Sometimes, anticipation was a soldier’s worst enemy. By nightfall, the bulk of Anders’ host had finally arrived and parked itself in the appropriate positions across the meadow’s bottom. The sheer number of campfires alone had to be daunting to the Queen’s men.
Yendor and Long Pete had been hung-over all day and decided the only suitable response was a little – or a damned lot – of hair of the dog. Secretly, Long expected to die on the morrow and didn’t feel up to facing death sober. Yendor, the more fatalistic of the two, was paradoxically convinced his plan was destined to succeed. “Funny old world,” he might have said, if he’d been capable of stringing that many words together without losing his train of thought.
Behind the Queen’s line of trenches, barricades and sharpened stakes, Janks and Rem were sharing a drink as well, though their liquor was of infinitely better vintage.
“What is that?” Janks asked, as he passed the wineskin back.
“Blackberry wine, I’m told. Not half bad, really,” Rem replied.
“Look at all them fires, would ya? Like looking at stars in a summer sky.”
“They say the stars themselves are fire. Did you know that?”
“Fire?” Janks asked, disbelievingly. “How do they stay lit?”
Rem chuckled. “Mahnus knows.”
“Fuckin’ Mahnus!” Janks spat. “D’you s’pose he’s watching this little conflict right now?”
“No question! We’re only here for the gods’ entertainment, you know.”
“Well, least I didn’t have to play the girl.”
Rem chuckled again. “There is that, my friend, there is that.”
“So, how’s this compare to your plays?”
“Truth? I would I were still playing the Mad King for ten silver a night. At least when you die onstage, it’s not permanent.”
Janks bobbed his head in agreement. “This what stage fright feels like?”
“Can’t say. I’ve never had it. But I’m about to soil myself looking out at the enemy’s forces.”
“That’s the point. But you’ll get over it.”
“Oh, aye? When?”
“When you’re dead!”
Rem made a sour face. “You’d have made a poor clown, you know.”
“Tell that to Long Pete. If you ever see him again.”
*****
Aoife, In the Village
Once again, Toomt’-La came while the children were asleep. He looked much recovered, though he was still heavily scarred and mottled with odd grays, browns and yellows. “I mean no disrespect, here,” he said, “but there is more at stake than the lives of these particular children. Your brother is moving towards battle with the forces of your Virgin Queen. This is far sooner than anyone anticipated and, should he prevail, he’ll not be long in conquering the human capital.”
“Where is he?”
“Far, far to the South and West.”
“Where I have never been. So there can be no ‘here-and-there.’ We cannot get there in time to make any difference.” Aoife said.
A strange light came to Toomt’-La’s eyes. “That is not entirely…true,” he said.
“No? Tell me.”
“It is accurate that you cannot step between forests you have not birthed.” Toomt’-La admitted. “But as a child of the forest,
I can travel to any forest, anywhere in the world, with a thought.”
Steel, Blood & Fire (Immortal Treachery Book 1) Page 38
