The Queen of Crows

by Myke Cole

  Some of the villagers saw her looking at the machine’s empty right hand, at the stump within. They shuffled, uneasy. Fear’s a deadly thing, Heloise, Barnard had said. It can drain a person of all their strength, make them weak before their enemies. That’s how we were until you showed us different. But we see now, and we are not afraid anymore, so long as you are with us.

  She wrenched her gaze away from the bloody bandages and forced herself to meet the eyes of the assembled throng. “I am with you,” she said, “after the devil, the Order will be nothing.”

  In answer, the villagers bowed their heads or tugged their forelocks and raced to cover the machine with more branches and earth.

  “Now, you all listen to me,” Sigir said as they worked. “Should … things go badly for us…”

  “Blasphemy,” Barnard said, his eyes never leaving Samson. “We have—”

  “Will you shut your yob for a gnat’s whisper, Tinker!” Sigir said. “The Emperor is with us, to be sure, but He will no doubt smile on a well-formed plan. Faith isn’t always rushing in with your balls hanging out.”

  Barnard opened his mouth to reply, but Samson cut him off. “You got what you wanted, Barnard. Heloise is fighting. Let the Maior speak!”

  Barnard looked up at Heloise, cheeks red, waiting for her direction. She would never get used to this man, who had known her since she was a baby, who could break her with a twist of his fingers, looking to her for orders. She swallowed the discomfort and nodded. “Let us hear the Maior out.”

  Sigir spoke quickly, “Should the enemy take the day, we go to the fens.”

  Barnard shook his head. “The frogging clans won’t have us if they know we’ve taken arms against the Order. They’re the most pious folk in the valley.”

  “We don’t need them to shelter us, and we won’t go all the way into the mire,” Sigir went on. “The fens are broken ground. Close enough for us to make it on foot, but the mud will suck the shoes off the horses and the holes will snap their legs. If the Order wants to come for us, they’ll have to come on foot. In all that armor, they’ll be slow. We know the ground, and they don’t. It’s the best place to fight in skirmish order.”

  “What do we know of skirmishing?” Samson asked. “We’re trained to the pike, formed and well commanded.”

  “We’ll have to learn, won’t we?” Sigir said. “If it comes to it, I mean.”

  They made little headway hiding the machine. Some tried to weave the branches into a lattice that could hold the earth, others simply piled them on, or thrust them into the frame. Some stayed put. Most didn’t. After a quarter candle they’d succeeded mostly in piling a heap of brush around the machine’s metal feet, and smearing dirt on Heloise’s shift, face, and all over the interior of the driver’s cage.

  “This isn’t working,” Sigir finally said. “We’ll need to dig a hole.”

  “That will take too long,” Barnard gestured to the enormous machine. He stomped the frozen ground. “It’s hard as stone here.”

  “If all of us pitch in,” Sigir said, “we can get it done in time.”

  “Begging your pardon, Maior,” Sald Grower said, “we can’t. Even if we had shovels for every man, it’d take days to bury something that big.”

  Barnard snorted. “We don’t need to bury her,” he said. “She can run faster than a horse in that. By the time they know she’s awaiting them, it’ll be too late.”

  “That is madness,” Samson shouted. “Barnard, Sigir, please. It’s one thing to have her fight. It’s quite another to have her rushing into battle like a…”

  All around her, villagers were throwing in their considered opinions, shouting to be heard among the others.

  “It was to be an ambush!” her father was shouting.

  “She is a Palantine! She needs no ambush!” Barnard yelled.

  Heloise was no soldier, but she knew this confusion wouldn’t beat the Order. Everyone was giving orders, and no one was listening.

  “Shut it!” Heloise’s words rang through the din before she realized she had yelled them.

  The silence dragged on, and Heloise realized with a start that they were waiting for her command. “I … I think I know what to do. Follow me.”

  She took a step, then another, then another, and the war-machine took them with her, the crowd parting to let her pass, then closing to follow her through the overgrown thicket and back out onto the road that led to her village. It was little more than a wide track, stretching out in a low valley bordered by two gently sloping rises. Both were well concealed, the thicket on one side, and a nearly solid wall of trees on the other.

  She felt the machine’s heavy tread sinking into the softer ground, still frozen, but warmed by the sparse traffic, the clods of horse dung, and the break in the canopy that laid it bare to the sun.

  Samson was at her elbow in an instant, Barnard coming with him. “Leave me be, you great pill!” Samson shouted at the tinker. “I’m not going to try to take her out of the…”

  Heloise ignored them both, dropping the machine to one knee, raising the shield high over her head.

  She could hear the sharp intake of breath, feel the crowd backing away from her. She brought the machine’s shield arm down with all its engine-driven strength. The point of the shield careered off a stone just under the surface of the soil, sending up a shower of sparks and making a sound like two empty pots banged together. But that only served to drive the shield point to one side, and it sank deep into the earth, digging a furrow almost two hand-spans deep.

  The ground was hard, but it was not equal to the engine’s brutal strength. Together with the heavy weight of the iron shield, the ground broke apart, clods of earth spraying as Heloise dug.

  For a moment, the village watched in confusion, and then Sigir was on his knees beside her, clawing at the earth with his hands. Barnard soon joined him in the rapidly deepening pit. Gunnar and Guntar followed, swinging their great forge hammers, breaking up rocks and roots. At last, all the village pitched in, scraping and digging with shield edges, knives and swords, and here and there an actual shovel.

  As the hole became shoulder deep, Barnard began waving some of them off. “We’ll need to cover it. Weave a screen of branches.”

  “Won’t hold up under a horse,” Sald muttered.

  “Sald, you’re a Throne-cursed grower,” Barnard said, “what do you know of horses?”

  Heloise glanced up at the road. It was more than wide enough for a column of riders to pass without moving over the hole she would be hiding in. She forced herself to return to her digging. The sun was sinking beneath the horizon, it was too late to turn back now.

  Some of the villagers went scurrying off to comply with Barnard’s order. Heloise noticed that Samson was among them. It’s better this way. The less he’s about, the less you’ll be tempted to give in to him.

  They made good progress, but every moment Heloise thought they were moving fast enough, they hit a man-sized rock, or a root as thick around as her wrist, lost more precious time. The machine’s great size had been a comfort to her before she’d started digging, and now she cursed it for needing a pit so deep to hide it.

  The shadows were growing long when Guntar finally leaned on his hammer and cursed. “It can’t be long now,” he said, “if we don’t get out of this road, we’ll be ridden down.”

  “Then we make our stand,” Barnard said, “and die on our feet.”

  “How many standing dead men have you seen?” Sigir asked. “An ambush is our only chance. If we cannot catch them unawares, we should run, come at them another time.”

  “And let them burn the village?” Gunnar’s voice was heated.

  “What else…” Sigir began, and Heloise knew that once again she would have to stop the men from arguing.

  It took her a moment to find the strength. The digging had made her tired in her bones. Her stump throbbed, the bandages soaked through with fresh blood where the wound had reopened. She felt a flash of heat across her
forehead, sharp enough to make her sweat, followed by a shiver. It’s fever. She pushed the thought away. If it was, there was nothing to do for it now.

  The men argued, and she glanced at the hole, still woefully shallow, but maybe …

  She put confidence into her voice. “It’s deep enough.”

  The men stopped fighting, raised their heads to her. They looked at each other, then at the shallow hole, then finally back to her. “Your eminence,” Sigir began, “you cannot possibly…”

  “Not to stand, no,” Heloise said, walking the machine on its knees into the hole, praying she had guessed right. The metal frame groaned as she folded her legs and sat on her heels, the machine shaping itself to mimic her posture. She leaned forward at her waist, tucking the machine’s head between its metal knees. The engine’s bulk blocked out most of the sun, so that she could see only the dimmest reflection of light off the metal tops of the machine’s knees. “You can’t see me from the road, can you?”

  “No.” Barnard’s voice, slow and deep. “Praise the Throne, we cannot.”

  Heloise stifled a sigh of relief. “Then cover me up. There’s not much time.”

  “Not yet!” Her mother’s voice. She winced as she heard Leuba scramble down, leaning on the machine’s shoulder. The machine shuddered as she shrugged off Barnard’s hand, trying to pull him back. “Leave me be!” She tried for a kiss, but there was no way to reach her, so she settled for touching her shoulder. “Oh, my dove. Be careful. I love you,” she whispered. Her father’s weight settled on the machine’s opposite shoulder. The same touch, the same words. Heloise choked back tears and nodded. Not now. I can’t be your daughter now.

  Heloise heard the scraping of branches as the latticework was dragged toward her. A weight on the machine again, much heavier this time, accompanied by a loud clang.

  Heloise sawed her head to her right, saw Barnard strapping a brass-bound, metal box to the machine’s shoulder. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “The devil’s head,” Barnard said reverently, cinching the straps down and patting the box’s huge brass lock, “will keep the Emperor’s eye turned toward us. It is yours, your eminence, and you will carry it high as you lead us to victory.”

  The box would block her view to one side, and the thought of the devil’s severed head so close to her made her stomach lurch, but as she opened her mouth to argue, they dragged the lattice over her, and all was shrouded in darkness. Tiny pinpricks of sunlight dotted the pitted surface of the machine’s metal legs, but beyond that, the world vanished.

  “Wait until they have all gone past, your eminence,” Sigir said as they scraped earth over. “You will rise behind them and then we will strike from the sides. They will be trapped, and if Emperor is willing, we will triumph.”

  The scraping and thumping of earth being piled on her grew more muffled as the cover of woven branches filled in. The pinpricks of light vanished one by one, until at last Heloise could hear nothing at all, and she was alone with the darkness and the stifling chill of the pit.

  Now, Sald’s words seemed wrong. They had piled so much earth atop her that it would easily hold ten horses. So much that she would never see the sun again.

  The tiny space stank of seethestone. She stifled a cough and shut her stinging eyes, squeezing out tears. Her skin tingled and itched as the caustic smoke, with nowhere else to go, turned on her. The only sound was her own short, gasping breaths, so loud in the tight space that the entire Imperial army could be marching over her back and she wouldn’t hear them.

  This was stupid, useless. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. She wanted only to stand up, throw off the oppressive weight of the earth.

  She felt a tremor. No more than a ripple of the earth across her back, a pebble shaken loose to drop against the machine’s metal knee. It was followed by another, and another, until the ground around her came alive with rumbling, the earth overhead vibrating under tramping feet and hooves.

  The Order. They were here.

  She could hear muffled voices, the creaking of leather harness, the jangling of chains. She tensed, waiting for the hoofbeats to pass, so that she could rise up behind the column, cutting off their retreat.

  She felt a sharp pounding against the machine’s metal back. Rhythmic, steady.

  The latticework was holding. The Order rode over her. She tried to count the hoofbeats, to guess the number of animals passing, to get a count of how many enemy she would face. She tried to stifle the itching in her throat, swallow the urge to cough, and waited for …

  A horse stumbled. Earth cascaded around her.

  Shouts, hooves skittering sideways, the drumming of feet. The column had been alerted, halted. The latticework of branches, even with the thick layer of earth, had not been enough to hold a warhorse’s weight with an armored rider on its back. If Heloise rose now, she would emerge at their head, giving them a clear road to retreat, and the element of surprise gone.

  She heard scraping above her, men straining to pry the latticework away. In moments, they would find her. You can either die down here on your knees, or up on your feet, breathing the air.

  It was an easy choice. Heloise dug in her heels and jerked her legs straight. The machine shuddered as it rose, metal back and shoulders exploding upward, sending the latticework spinning away. She heard men and horses screaming. Light and spraying earth blinded her, but not so much that she couldn’t see two men and a horse flying through the air, sailing head over foot into a column of Pilgrims. The horses spooked, and the Pilgrims, desperate to control them, had no time to gawk at the war-machine in their midst. There was no time to count them, but their numbers seemed endless, at least a hundred riders, thick leather armor making them huge beneath their gray cloaks.

  The men and horse that Heloise had thrown came down in their ranks, knocking men from their mounts and sending them sprawling in the mud, cursing. Heloise blinked, her eyes adjusting, her vision still blurry. The column was a splintered mass of plunging horses and shouting men. Most still had their flails on their shoulders, if they hadn’t dropped them in the chaos.

  She wouldn’t get a better chance than this.

  “The Throne!” Heloise shouted, and charged.

  2

  ROUT AND SUCCOR

  Here is the brand that shall strike thee. There, the ground that shall receive thee.

  Know that it is by my hand that thou art undone.

  —Writ. Ala. IX. 26

  Heloise had always thought killing was a heavy matter. Seeing death was one thing, but causing it was something else.

  Yet here was a Pilgrim, desperately attempting to control his plunging horse, and with a jerk of her arm, his head became a red bowl, the jagged edges of his skull blooming around the corner of the war-machine’s heavy shield. He flew from his horse, went tumbling into his fellows.

  Now, her mind screamed at her, attack! But she couldn’t move. It had been one thing to kill a creature out of the depths of hell, a devil scaled and horned. But Pilgrims, for all their wickedness, were people. Her throat closed, her breathing came too quickly.

  One of the Pilgrims calmed his horse enough to charge her, reins in his teeth, swinging his flail double-handed. It bounced off the war-machine’s metal chest, digging long scratches in the red sigil. As he wheeled his horse for another charge, Heloise saw the back of his head, knew all she had to do was punch out with the machine’s empty metal fist, crack his skull like an egg. From inside the war-machine, even the Pilgrims in their boiled leather armor looked so delicate.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to strike, and the Pilgrim rode away and wheeled his mount, came on again, with two more of his brothers at his side.

  At last, her paralysis broke and Heloise raised her shield to meet them, shouting her battle cry.

  It was answered from a hundred throats. The brush trembled as the villagers came pouring out from both sides of the road, racing toward the column, which turned to meet them.

&
nbsp; Barnard led the villagers, shouting Heloise’s name as if it held divine power. Samson and Sigir were at his side, waving their short, sharp “second chances,” the long knives all levy pikemen carried in case their main weapon was lost. Guntar and Gunnar came with them, dressed in fine armor that they had no doubt crafted for the Imperial Procurer. All three Tinker men fought with their heavy forge hammers, swinging them about their heads as if they weighed nothing. Behind them came Sald and Poch, Ingomer and Danad, with their sons, most of whom hadn’t seen their thirteenth winter yet. Some of the braver wives, Leuba and Chunsia among them, came with their families.

  The Pilgrims considered Heloise in her giant war-machine, and then the poorly armed rabble racing toward them. They turned to meet the lesser threat, snarling and digging in their spurs. The column wheeled as one man, and countercharged.

  A voice was shouting orders, deep and commanding, Heloise scarcely recognized it as her father’s. This must be the voice of the Serjeant of pikemen he had once been, back in the Old War against Ludhuige the Red. Samson swore and pushed, kicking rake handles and swatting shoulders with the flat of his second chance, desperately trying to get the villagers to form some semblance of a line. But while the veterans like Sigir, Poch, and Sald knew their business, the others tripped over themselves, or shouted back at him. A few threw down their weapons and fled.

  Samson raced after Edwin Baker, then stopped short as he glanced back to where Barnard and his sons were charging ahead of the rest of the villagers, ignoring Samson’s line and rushing to meet the Pilgrims. “Barnard! Have you forgotten everything? It’s a cavalry charge! Form up, damn you!”

  Barnard didn’t hear him. He and his sons ran for the rushing horsemen, as if with nothing more than hammers the three of them could stem the tide. “Heloise!” they shouted. “Devil-slayer! Palantine!”