Ash and Ambition

by Ari Marmell

  A sharp tug at his shoulders and his waist stopped him cold. He might have pulled his leg aside in time, he realized, but both his kaftan and his sabre, sheathed at his side, were pinned by Avalanche’s massive bulk. His hand was empty. His szandzsya must have been thrown aside when he fell.

  And from yards away, he heard the grunt and metallic click as the raider cocked the crossbow for a second shot.

  Nycos roared upright, reaching down to snap the buckles off his belt and ripping himself free of the tattered kaftan. The bolt drove itself through that fabric, deep into the soil where he’d lain a heartbeat before. Rolling with the momentum of his lunge, Nycos dove over his fallen horse, reaching out to yank his remaining weapon clear of the sling by which it hung from the saddle.

  His szandzsya was yards away, his sabre pinned beneath Avalanche, but no need to rely on his claws as of yet (nor to damage his gauntlets, in ways that would prove troublesome to explain, in the process). Nycos rose, a vicious warhammer held ready in two fists. He rotated it slowly, deliberately showing off both sides of the weapon’s head: the four-pronged bludgeon first, then the curved steel raptor’s beak of a pick, either one capable of obliterating armor and bone.

  The brigand dropped the crossbow, impossible to load for a third time with Nycos so near, and drew his sword. Although very gently curved, much as a Kirresci sabre, this was not the same sort of weapon. Thicker and heavier of blade, this was meant to hack and to chop where the sabre sliced; forged for power, not finesse. In his other hand he produced a small buckler from the back of his belt, then lowered himself ever so slightly into a shield-first stance that looked—to Nycos’s admittedly inexperienced eye—far more disciplined, far more military, than one might expect from a Mahdreshan thug.

  Nycos advanced around the horse with equal care, grass bending and crunching beneath his tread.

  His foe knew what he was doing. He swayed aside, away from each tentative swing of the warhammer, or else brought his buckler around to intercept. The tiny shield couldn’t absorb the force of even a moderate blow, not from the crushing head or beak, but the man never blocked directly. Always he angled the shield so the hammer slid away, or slapped it aside with the thick steel edge.

  He proved equally adept with the chopping blade, swinging and spinning the weapon in a smooth flow. He let the weight and momentum of the sword handle the brunt of the work, putting his own muscle into it only to change direction or recover from a missed slash.

  Where Nycos advanced, the other retreated, trying to entice the knight to step into his weapon’s arc. Where Nycos feinted, his opponent never faltered. No matter how Nycos struck, with whichever end of the hammer’s head, the brigand wasn’t there, or else his shield was. Once or twice he even parried with his heavier sword, a tactic that made Nycos nervous. The blade was no axe, it probably lacked the power to chop through the warhammer’s fat wooden haft—but Nycos didn’t care to rely on “probably.”

  Around they circled, stomping rough patterns into the grass. And in so doing, Nycos grew careless.

  It wasn’t that he forgot his inhuman might or the other advantages his dragon’s sorcery could invoke. No amount of time trapped in a human body could cause that. He did, however, grow unconsciously wrapped up in the notion of defeating this opponent with the skills he’d mastered, and with the only slightly exaggerated strength and speed he’d already bestowed upon himself. Perhaps, in the back of his mind, he was testing himself, seeing if he was learning as swiftly as he believed himself to be.

  He was a fast study, was Nycos; since autumn, he’d learned more of Kirresci martial arts and weaponscraft than most humans could have picked up in four or five times as long. What he yet lacked was experience, and so when the duel fell into a pattern—beat by predictable beat, step-following-parry-following-strike-following-step—he failed to take note.

  His enemy did not.

  A slip to one side where Nycos expected a step back; a change of direction, a slash of the blade; the crunch of rending mail.

  Tearing pain shot through Nycos’s side, not much above where the spear had failed to injure him earlier—but this time, there was no such failure. Not even his toughened skin had saved him, not from a cut so fiercely and expertly delivered. He felt the sick sensation of metal sliding through meat, the hot rush of blood escaping the wound, welling up through links in the chain, drenching the padding and clothes beneath.

  Which wasn’t to say his armored hide had done him no good. The cut was agonizing, nearly driving him to his knees, slowing him, weakening him. But any other man would be dead, organs lacerated, maybe even his spine severed.

  And Nycos decided he was through testing himself, through fighting human to human.

  He had practiced, these many months, mastering new tricks and learning how to more easily and more swiftly invoke the old. Skin closed over the wound, not healing it completely—it had gone too deep into muscle, too near his organs where he dared not reshape himself—but preventing further blood loss. And then that skin, and indeed his entire body, turned rigid, coming over with a pattern of deep amethyst scales. Power surged through his limbs as an instant’s focus transformed those muscles into something never meant to be contained within the human form.

  Howling in fury, Nycos sprang at his horrified foe.

  Now the warhammer flew through swift, sharp arcs, impossible to predict, nigh impossible to see. Blows that should have sent him stumbling when they missed instead flowed one into the next as he recovered, dragging the weapon back into line through sheer main strength.

  Perhaps the raider knew that he could not possibly outrun his monstrous assailant if he broke and fled, or perhaps he simply never had the opportunity to try, but he stood and fought to the end. It was a sign of his skill and determination that it took as long as it did—almost fifteen whole seconds, from the moment Nycos dropped the facade—for that end to come.

  By the time Captain Rahdel arrived with half the company a few moments later, Nycos had cleaned blood and brain from his weapon and caused his body to revert back to, if not fully human, then near enough that no observer would note the difference. He even, with a growl of pain, forced the wound to reopen, so he might have it properly treated without raising questions.

  He was kneeling beside Avalanche—who, Nycos was delighted to learn, had only been stunned and perhaps concussed—when he heard the captain’s familiar “Sir Nycolos! Are you all right, sir?”

  “I’ve been better, Captain.” He rose, indicating the bloody rent in his armor. “But I’m a damn sight happier than the other fellow.”

  The captain shouted an order, and one of the soldiers dismounted and began digging bandages, poultices, and the like from his saddlebag.

  “The others?” Nycolos asked, wincing as he worked at removing his breastplate and hauberk.

  “Sweeping the grasslands, making sure we didn’t miss anyone. They’ll be joining us shortly.”

  “How many?”

  “Four dead, sir. Only one of the wounded I’m concerned we might lose. Everyone else should recover well enough.”

  Four. Not bad against a force of raiders this size. Not great, and not part of his report he looked forward to making, but not bad.

  “I don’t—” Nycos winced as the soldier slathered some sort of herbal concoction over his wound. “I don’t think the man I chased down is just another Mahdreshan raider, Captain.”

  “Sir?”

  “He hasn’t been on the road as long as the others. His face is still sunburnt. He’s not been out here long enough to get weathered. And he’s not quite as filthy. And I’m not convinced he’s Mahdreshan at all.”

  Rahdel started. “How can you tell that, sir?”

  What could he say? The man didn’t especially look Mahdreshan, but in cultures as racially mixed as most nations of southern Galadras, only about half the people, on average, really resembled any particular nationality. And somehow, Nycos didn’t think the truth—that he’d given the man a good
sniff with his unnatural senses, that his sweat was different, that he didn’t smell as though he’d spent the last months or years eating the same stuff as the others—would go over well.

  “Just a hunch. Fighting style, little details like that.”

  “Hm. Well, you may be onto something, sir. I had a few of the soldiers searching the fallen, see if we could figure out whether they were part of a larger band, maybe even find something the damn Mahdreshan government couldn’t shrug off. Didn’t come up with anything in that regard, but Valladi found a sizable pouch in the saddlebags of the man we think was their leader.”

  “Yes—ow! Be careful with those bandages! Ahem. Yes, Captain?”

  “Pouch was half full of silver zlatka, Sir Nycolos.”

  “Kirresci minted?”

  “Yes, sir. But that’d be an awful lot of raw coin for these bastards to have gathered from a few border towns, wouldn’t you think?”

  Nycos pointed a thumb at the man he’d killed, and several of the soldiers hopped from their horses to look him over.

  “Yes, sir!” one called back. “Pouch full of them!”

  “So either Mahdreshan bandits are paying good silver for an outsider to travel and pillage with them…” Captain Rahdel began, her tone making it quite clear what she thought of that hypothesis.

  “Or this man paid them,” Nycos mused, “to… what? Strike certain villages? At certain times? As an escort? Or a diversion…”

  He chewed it over and decided he abhorred the taste.

  “Gather the company,” he ordered. “Sound horns if you have to. Anyone still scouring the plains, call them back. As soon as this torturer-in-training is finished jabbing at my wounds with acid and sackcloth—”

  “It’s salves and bandages, sir,” the soldier piped in, not looking up from his work.

  “—acid and sackcloth, we’re making an early camp. We all need rest, and I want us mounted up and on our way to the nearest border station by dawn. Oh, and I want that body—clothes, weapons, pouches, all of it—wrapped up and brought with us. Something rotten’s going on here, Captain, something beyond a few savaged villages. I want to see if anyone’s heard anything from home while we’ve been out here.”

  ___

  The stations and checkpoints sitting astride the roadways on Kirresc’s northwestern border were symbolic at best. Oh, they had their gates, their small shacks where guards could watch the highway without sun or rain or wind beating on them, the larger cottages further back where they bedded down and entertained themselves in their off hours. Yet the terrain for scores of leagues was grassland or sparse forest, without natural barriers larger than a few rolling hills or gentle streams. A fence ran for miles from the road, but it couldn’t possibly encompass the whole border. It was easy enough to travel around, even easier to climb if one were traveling without horse or cart.

  Open. Exposed. Vulnerable.

  And the reason that Kirresc’s government put up with the lies and gameplaying by Mahdresh. Better to deal with their regular irritations than to risk the city-state and its territories withdrawing from the treaty of mutual defense against Ktho Delian aggression. So precarious was the political balance that the loss of even a single ally could spur Ktho Delios to action. Better occasional Mahdreshan bandits crossing that wide-open border than Deliant legions.

  Nycos and his company had tethered their horses to a length of that fence and now stood in what shade they could find, waiting on the station’s commander. The anxious knight, still pained by his wounds—a sharp, fresh ache from the new, a dull throbbing reminder from the old—leaned against the guard shack. On occasion his attention wandered to Avalanche, who cropped unenthusiastically at the sun-baked grass, but so far as Nycos could tell, the warhorse had recovered from his close call. If anything, the beast seemed vaguely embarrassed by it all.

  With that concern fading, then, and being in no mood for idle chatter with his soldiers, Nycos found himself gazing down at his helmet, which he held in both hands and slowly rocked from side to side, watching the partially unhooked ventail flow and scrape across the steel bowl of the helm in an almost liquid fashion.

  A peculiar bit of armor, that, though Nycos was certainly no expert. Originally, or so he had learned, the heavy chain hung from all sides of the helm, protecting the back of the head, the neck, even draping over the shoulders of the wearer. Now that Kirresci armor and metalwork had advanced, now that solid steel protected much of the head and neck, now that chain hauberks often had reinforcing bands or breastplates, the chain portion of the helm guarded only the wearer’s face—part of the nose, the mouth, the chin. It was effectively a compromise design, offering less protection than a full faceplate, but cheaper and easier to produce, far lighter, and—of greatest import to the wearer—far less constricting of breath or vision.

  None of which was immediately relevant, but pondering such minutiae made Nycos more comfortable in his efforts to fit in, present himself as more knowledgeable than he was. And it passed the time.

  Time, of which the commander on whom he waited had already taken too much. That was all right, though. Unlike his underlings, who could only stand and grouse impatiently, Nycos overheard bits of shouting from inside the small house that served as a barracks. The woman wasn’t keeping them waiting deliberately, she was trying to figure out precisely what had gone wrong.

  And who was to blame for it.

  She finally emerged from the structure, mail jangling, boots all but stomping. An older woman of iron in hair and posture, she might have been Rahdel’s sister if not for her far paler complexion.

  “Sir Nycolos.”

  “Commander.”

  “I apologize for the wait. And for the… miscommunication.”

  Oh, but he knew that look, had seen it many times on many faces in the past months, that combination of shame and fury. One of her subordinates, whoever had bungled things, was going to get more than an earful.

  “Messengers were dispatched to all the border patrols in the area,” she explained stiffly. “They had your routes, your schedules. They successfully located all the others, I don’t know how they could have missed you.”

  “We were somewhat off course, pursuing the raiders, commander.”

  “Yes, yesterday. Maybe the day before. The runners should have found you a week ago.”

  “Well, never mind how, for the moment. Just tell us what’s happening. Your men only gave us the very basic gist when we arrived.”

  “Yes, sir.” The station commander made herself relax, if only a little. “I haven’t been told all the details myself, of course. But apparently one of the Oztyerva Palace servants was caught passing information on to an outside party who Marshal Laszlan believes to have been a foreign agent. This man fled Talocsa before he could be apprehended, and we were instructed to watch for him, try to locate him before he could cross the border.”

  One man, along the entire border with Mahdresh? As likely find a specific tick in a pack of stray dogs. Still…

  “You have a description or a portrait of this man, commander?”

  She handed him a rolled parchment.

  “Any word on which nation he was spying for?” he asked as he unfurled the image.

  “Not that I heard, sir. I don’t think they knew.”

  “Hmm. Captain!”

  Rahdel appeared almost immediately at his side.

  “Does this look like the man I killed to you?”

  She peered at the sketch, frowning. “You can never be too sure with these, but I’d have to say no, sir.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.” He allowed the parchment to curl itself back up, then tapped it thoughtfully against his chin. “It wouldn’t make sense for an escaping spy to ride with the raiders, anyway.”

  “A diversion, then? The man with them was a comrade, using the raiders to draw our attention while the spy escapes?”

  “Seems most probable, doesn’t it? It was probably overkill—I doubt we’d have had much l
uck finding a single fugitive—but still, it fits.”

  “And the failure of the messengers to inform you, Sir Nycolos?” the commander asked. “Also due to enemy action?”

  “No, I don’t believe so. Assuming it wasn’t just bad luck…” He didn’t finish the notion aloud, but assuming it wasn’t just bad luck, it felt personal.

  “Captain Rahdel, take over the company. You’ve only a few more weeks out here, I’m more than confident you can manage.”

  “Yes, Sir Nycolos. And you?”

  “I am making an early return to Oztyerva. What happened out here needs to be reported, in-depth—and what’s happening back there needs looking into.”

  “I’m sure they have people doing just that, sir.”

  “Yes, I’m certain they do.” He smiled, though he knew the officers, ignorant of his unique talents and abilities, would take it for arrogance at best. “But they don’t have me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nycos strode through the stone halls of Oztyerva, grateful to be out from under the midsummer blaze. He had come to fully understand, over the last month or so, why—for the many followers of the so-called Empyrean Choir—the sun god Alazir was among the most highly respected and revered deities, but not widely beloved. How, he wondered for what was far from the first time, did normal humans, who could not magically adjust their bodies to better deal with the heat, learn to stand it?

  He nodded or smiled or spoke his greetings to those he passed, accepting their own in turn; a dramatic change indeed from earlier days! But so, too, had things changed while he was away on his border patrol. An undercurrent of worry, of suspicion, flowed beneath even the friendliest exchanges. Gazes lingered too long, or flickered away uneasily. Steps were stiff, as though everyone were self-conscious about some unseen observer. Armored soldiers, always present in the palace corridors, now appeared in greater numbers than Nycos ever remembered seeing, standing sentry or marching patrols where none had been deemed necessary before.