Cold Iron

by Miles Cameron

  ‘Kallinikas Primo is now his daughter. She’s a military engineer training at the Arsenal, and absolutely loyal.’ Drako shrugged. ‘It is my business to know these things.’

  Kurvenos frowned. ‘The Academy team says the jewel exploded in a water pipe. How on earth did it get there?’

  The Emperor nodded. ‘Despite the casualties, we must move on. Aranthur?’

  ‘Syr Djinar escaped. I saw him run.’ Aranthur looked around. ‘And we don’t know what the vellum was for.’ He was nervous, speaking to the Emperor. ‘They were making something. Something deadly.’

  Drako nodded. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ the Emperor said, turning from the window, ‘we must now concentrate our attentions on Atti. We cannot fight this war on the defensive.’

  Kurvenos nodded.

  Drako bowed. ‘I will go with the army, if I may, Majesty.’

  The Emperor shook his head. ‘No, I want you here. I thought that the brave Syr Timos, as he is already a dekark in one of my regiments, might serve as our courier to the General.’

  Drako made a face, and then turned to Aranthur.

  ‘Are you up to a sea voyage and a long ride?’ he asked.

  Every muscle hurt; it felt as if every muscle in his arms and shoulders had been forced into knots.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Iralia’s eyes glittered.

  ‘I would like to go with him,’ Sasan said.

  ‘And I,’ Dahlia said.

  ‘And I,’ said Prince Ansu.

  The Emperor looked around. ‘Four good swords,’ he said.

  ‘Four sharp minds,’ Kurvenos said.

  ‘I can give you perhaps three hours to prepare,’ Centark Equus said. ‘As you have Imperial orders and you are, by decree, an Imperial Messenger, you could order the ship held for you, but I don’t recommend it.’

  Aranthur nodded. ‘My horses—’

  ‘I’ll have them aboard, and all your tack,’ the centark said. ‘I’ll assign you a groom. What more do you need?’

  ‘Swords, armour, pack, feed bag …’

  ‘Clothes,’ Dahlia said.

  ‘Where are your horses?’ the centark said to Dahlia.

  She smiled archly. ‘In the Imperial stables. The Emperor has given us mounts.’

  The centark nodded with the long-suffering patience of an expert staff officer.

  ‘I’ll just assign a pair of grooms to get you all aboard, shall I,’ he asked. ‘You are Myr Tarkas?’

  She bowed.

  ‘You are not on my list, more’s the pity,’ he said with a twirl of his moustache.

  ‘Hmm. Well, they say war is good for courting,’ she returned, and Sasan puffed his chest out.

  She put a hand on his arm. ‘Relax,’ she said.

  ‘You should run,’ the centark said. ‘We are to be aboard IS Nike, at the foot of the Street of the Heralds.’

  ‘Two streets past the Angel,’ Dahlia snapped. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ she said to Sasan.

  They ran. Prince Ansu had the easiest time; he had a saddle and a heavy bow in the palace, and he walked off to fetch them. Sasan had no equipment to speak of. Dahlia owned everything required, but spurned it.

  ‘Let the army provide,’ she said. ‘I want a copper pot to make quaveh, my best sword, and a leather doublet. I’ll see you at the ship.’

  ‘We’re on the Nike, remember,’ Aranthur shouted, but Dahlia was already running.

  Sasan shrugged. ‘I’ll come with you. All I own is shirts. I might as well bring them.’

  The two young men ran through the streets: across the great marble bridge by the Angel; past the blackened ruin of the Kallinikoi palace and the temple where the funeral had been held just a day before. They ran up the steps, and Aranthur’s legs threatened to fail him. They bowed to the statue of Tirase, and ended their odyssey at the top of six flights of steps.

  Aranthur had all his equipment to hand. He took the heavy sword he’d purchased so long before, in what seemed like another world, and he took his kuria crystal from the window. He thought for a moment, took a quill from the case of cut quills he had, sat at the writing table, and wrote a letter to his father.

  He began to fold the paper – good, expensive paper, but nothing like the perfect, creamy vellum they’d found scraps of the night before. He drew and checked his long sword, and he cleaned the puffer he’d taken off Rachman the night before: a long barrel, a snaphaunce mechanism – a particularly fine weapon.

  He emptied his purse on the bed, examined the tangle of talismans and kuria crustals he’d taken from the drug dealer, and thrust them back into his purse.

  ‘I have about twenty silver crosses,’ he said to Sasan. ‘Here’s ten.’

  Sasan smiled. ‘You are a good friend.’ He thrust the curved sword he’d taken the night of the House fight into his sash and put a leather sack across his shoulders. ‘I have a copper pot and two clay cups.’

  Aranthur was in his red military doublet, and he pulled the breastplate on over it and Sasan buckled his straps.

  ‘Easier than carrying it,’ he said.

  He put the rest of his kit in a leather knapsack, started down the steps, remembered the carbine strap he’d made himself and ran back and found it hanging behind the door. He started down the steps again and remembered the letter he’d written to his father. He turned for the door and caught the sword in the door jamb, just as he had more than a year ago.

  He followed Sasan down the stairs. A hasty bow to Tirase, and he found a waiter he knew standing outside the gate of the Sunne in Splendour, smoking his pipe.

  He handed over a silver cross. ‘I need a favour,’ he said. ‘Put this on the mail coach for Soulis?’

  The young man bowed. ‘My pleasure, syr.’ Then he grinned. ‘Aranthur! Didn’t know you in all the iron.’

  Then Aranthur and Sasan went down the steps to the canal, where small boys were staging a regatta with paper boats. They crossed at the Angel and walked quickly down to the head of the street.

  Nike wasn’t alongside the pier. It was on a single cable, two hundred paces off the wharf, with small boats around it.

  There was not a gondola in sight.

  ‘Boat here,’ Aranthur yelled.

  A fisherman raised his hand. ‘Where to, Syr?’ he called.

  ‘Nike, there.’

  ‘Two silver crosses,’ called the fisherman, and they dropped into his boat.

  The man rowed them with long, careful, professional strokes, and he kissed alongside the round merchant ship without touching her paint, despite the calls of the bosun above him.

  ‘Up the side,’ the fisherman called.

  Aranthur put his two silver coins, plus two bronze obols, on the seat, and the fisherman nodded, not having a hand to take them. The harbour was choppy and he had to work to keep his little shell of a fishing boat in the lee of the round ship.

  Sasan took a deep breath and leapt for the lines that hung over the side. He caught one but not the other, and swung for a moment in the gentle swell.

  ‘Get yer arse up the side o’ my barky and don’t scrape me paint!’ yelled the bosun. ‘And you, squidee, clear off. There’s a gent coming in.’

  ‘While I have a passenger yet,’ called the fisherman, none too pleased at being called ‘Squidee’.

  Sasan got one hand above the other, then got a hand on the ship’s rail and vanished over the side.

  Aranthur wished that his muscles didn’t hurt so much. Or perhaps that he had never enhanced.

  ‘On the rolls, syr, if you please,’ the fisherman said.

  Aranthur wasn’t seamanlike enough to know what he meant, but he saw his moment and leapt as high as he could manage. He got a hand on the rail and another on one of the dangling lines, and then his leg was over the rail.

  It was an odd moment to have a galvanic revelation. But it hit him – a cascade. Folding the letter to his father; the vellum on the floor of the jeweller’s shop; the boys sailing paper boats;
the ruin of the Kallinikoi palazzo, which he could see from the deck of the ship.

  ‘You made jolly good time,’ Centark Equus said.

  Aranthur saluted, for perhaps the third time in his life.

  ‘I need to get a message ashore,’ he said. ‘Life or death, Imperial business.’

  ‘You are an exciting lad,’ Equus said. ‘We have pigeons who go straight to the palace.’

  Aranthur wrote out a message, explaining how paper boats could carry explosive jewels through the Aqueduct and water pipes.

  ‘When you are done with that,’ Equus said, ‘I’d be very pleased if you’d teach my mages what you know about Safian occultae. Especially the shields.’

  ‘Safian?’ Aranthur asked.

  Equus shrugged. ‘Humour me.’

  An hour later, as Aranthur fought seasickness and tried to explain the way in which the Safian grimoire summoned saar and built occultae to three junior military Magi, there was a loud sound of feet on the deck above, and the ship seemed to boom with activity.

  ‘Pass the word for Timos!’ came a roar from the deck.

  ‘Apologies, friends,’ Aranthur said.

  He stood up and slammed his head into a beam. The deck was very low.

  Sailors laughed.

  He made his way up into the fresh air and light of the open deck to find Centark Equus with Sasan and Dahlia. She was flushed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Did someone hit you?’

  Aranthur shook his head. Which hurt.

  Equus nodded. ‘They’re securing the Aqueduct and all the access to the water pipes,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no proof yet,’ Dahlia said. ‘But I’m sure you are correct. So is Drako.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Good one.’

  Sasan shook his head. ‘I’d like to understand.’

  Aranthur pointed at the massive aqueduct, high above them on the central ridge that dominated the city. Seen from the water, the ridge seemed impossibly high, and the hanging gardens of the upper city and the tall tenements built out from the bare rock looked as if they were balanced on air.

  ‘You make a little boat out of parchment,’ he said. ‘You put an explosive kuria crystal into the boat. You drop it into the Aqueduct – perhaps as far away as Dharg in the hills.’

  ‘Gods,’ Sasan spat. ‘And the little bombs just float along into the system.’

  Dahlia nodded. ‘With a nudge of saar, a Magas can control them. They’re very light. Choose which pipe they enter …’

  They landed just after first light, four days later, after sailing through the islands as if on a pleasure cruise. The beaches of Atti looked very much like the beaches of home: long, golden white in the sun, and for the most part lined with deep groves of pine. Most of the Imperial Fleet was there. The Attian fleet had not made an appearance or contested their landing. Further down the beach there was a small fishing village. The whole beach was filled with men, wagons, and neat piles of everything from boards to spare wheels.

  The Nomadi landed their horses by swimming them ashore, something they did with great expertise. Aranthur and his friends followed along, swimming cheerfully in the warm water, holding the manes of their mounts.

  ‘Did you bring a towel?’ Dahlia asked.

  Sasan shook his head.

  ‘Men. A towel is the first thing you pack,’ Dahlia said, and threw her lover a fine cotton towel.

  The Nomadi formed up with military precision in less than an hour, drew a supply of oats for horses, biscuit and sausage for the troopers, and two guides. Equus ordered red doublets out of his banda stores and gave them to Dahlia and Sasan and Ansu.

  ‘Wouldn’t want you chaps to be mistaken for Attians,’ he said.

  Sasan raised an eyebrow. ‘Meaning me, no doubt.’

  There were two City Militia regiments watching the anchorage, and they’d built a star fort of newly cut logs and sand shovelled into wicker gabions. It all looked very professional.

  ‘I’m still a little surprised we haven’t been attacked,’ the militia colonel said.

  Equus smiled. ‘The General moves fast. I’ll wager they don’t know what she’s up to yet. Confused command is divided command, what?’

  The Vanax nodded. ‘She’s three days ahead of you, Equus. Don’t get snapped up. I have a note that you are to take a supply convoy.’

  Equus laughed. ‘I’d hate that. First war in my generation – captured in my first action?’ He shook his head. ‘Yes – the convoy – that’s our part in the schedule. I have sixty wagons.’

  ‘More now,’ the colonel said.

  Sasan turned aside. ‘What a buffoon,’ he muttered.

  Aranthur shook his head. ‘I think Equus only acts the courtier.’

  An hour later, all four of them were helping bored Nomadi troopers to dig. They spent four hours filling gabions along the edge of the beach fortifications.

  ‘War is so glorious,’ Dahlia said, looking at her red hands.

  Prince Ansu sighed. ‘Well, that was a new experience.’

  Sasan looked at the trees. ‘This is not Atti.’

  ‘What?’ Dahlia asked.

  Sasan put his pick carefully in the pile where two militia dekarks pointed, and a third motioned for them to proceed to a mess line to be fed.

  ‘This is Armea,’ Sasan said. ‘My homeland is about six hundred leagues that way.’ He pointed east.

  They marched with almost a hundred wagons, and the Nomadi regiment was spread out over the whole column – a vanguard, a rearguard, and flank guards. Every wagon was a rolling fort, with huge rear wheels and smaller front wheels, the body of the wagon six feet off the ground, pulled by eight horses. A third of the wagons carried the fodder to feed the thousand or more horses in the column.

  The Nomadi were an odd regiment – a holdover from a former time when the Empire had itself spread north to the farthest shores of the Sea of Moros. There, on the steppes, were dozens, if not hundreds of tribes of nomads: Pastun and Monul and Turuq and Kipkak and a hundred others, with their vast herds of sheep and cattle and their incessant pursuit of the Wyldakind. They tended to be small, and dark, and women served as freely as men; they travelled from the steppe to the City to volunteer. They wore khaftans of scarlet cloth, and had baggy fur hats lined in blue, and every man and woman had three horses. They carried curved swords like Sasan’s, a few had bows, and most had gonnes. Their Byzas was stiff and formal, and Aranthur was surprised to hear the centarch, Equus, speaking easily to one of his Nomadi troopers in Pastun.

  They rode up the steep ridge off the beach and immediately entered a different world: fertile land instead of sand; oaks and beech and maple instead of pines. There were farms, with terrified farmers. In the first hour they passed a small village with its temple and tall whitewashed tower crowned with a pointed dome, unlike the square towers and round domes of home, and the vanguard brushed aside a mob of refugees fleeing from the east and south.

  ‘Anyone speak Armean?’ Equus asked.

  ‘Not well,’ Aranthur said.

  Sasan raised his hand, and they found the local innkeeper, purchased all of his oats, and rode on.

  ‘Some of those people on the road were Safians,’ Aranthur said.

  Sasan nodded.

  ‘We are being very polite to the locals,’ Aranthur said to Equus.

  ‘Purchase, no thievery, and no interference whatsoever with the locals,’ Equus said. ‘It’s a strange sort of war, but I’m ordered to publicly execute any soldier who disobeys.’

  They made camp forty leagues from the coast, with a range of tall, white-capped mountains now visible in the east. The troopers had no tents, but they picketed their horses and made themselves comfortable by destroying a few leagues of fencing while their dekarks looked the other way.

  In the morning two of the regiment’s horses were too lame to move. Equus took them to the farmer in recompense for his fence line.

  They rode on, with a dozen scouts out in the first dawn light and a strong re
arguard. Twice they had to stop to work out where they were. The roads were far more primitive than in the Empire, just deep slashes of rock and old wagon ruts across the irrigated plain, The countryside was full of people moving; tens of thousands of refugees fleeing, although no one in the column could see any sign of war – no columns of smoke, no burning villages.

  The villages were almost empty. The farmers had run for the fortresses visible on the highest hilltops, or so the soldiers guessed.

  They climbed all day, up ridges and down the far side, but always ending higher than they had started. Afternoon, and two solid hours of driving rain, which cleared off as suddenly as it had come, and then they made camp again, with sentries and fires and a hasty fortification thrown up at either end. The troopers lay in clumps to sleep, and no one undressed.

  ‘More digging!’ spat Dahlia. ‘My sword hand is ruined.’

  Aranthur was a soldier, on the rolls, unlike his companions. Equus put him on the watch bill, so he stood a midnight watch and rather enjoyed it, as did Rasce, as they moved carefully around the perimeter of the camp in the moonlight.

  And then, with only an hour’s sleep, he was being awakened by Dahlia.

  ‘Move in one hour,’ she said.

  He couldn’t get hot water to shave, so he boiled his own, shaved, and drank some acceptable quaveh. They were mounted and moving again with the sun just a smear on the eastern horizon. In fact, the mountains towered over them now, and the sun took its time cresting them. Still they rode east to meet it, until by midday the column halted to allow the troopers to don their cloaks. Sasan and Ansu didn’t have heavy cloaks, but Equus shared out spares.

  Aranthur took advantage of the break to ride up to the cavalry officer.

  ‘I can’t help but notice we’re riding east,’ he said. ‘But Atti is north.’

  Equus was looking at the mountain pass visible ten switchbacks above them – two leagues of hard riding, and only six hours of daylight left.

  ‘Very perceptive, young Timos,’ he said.

  Neither of the guides, both Black Lobsters of the General’s guard, said anything.

  Aranthur turned Rasce and rode back to his friends.