Sword of the Bright Lady (57 page)

The creature wavered between illusion and reality, and then, of flesh and blood once again, fell heavily onto the ground like a sack of potatoes gone bad.

Beside him the other cannon fired, shredding wolves and hobgoblins and men against the wall. Royal reared and squealed, beset by wolves, battling to save his herd, and men rushed to his aid. The wolves were losing, too many of them trapped by the wall spikes. The assault on the south wall seemed stalled, somehow, though the frozen part of the wall was still unmanned.

And then the giant creature twitched, an absurd horror film, the villain simply unkillable. The cannon was not even done reloading, yet the monster sat up, bellowing in uncontrollable rage. With one hand it grabbed a man and crushed his skull like an egg, blood and gray matter spurting out either end of its huge fist, gushing between its grotesque fingers.

From the wall Kennet came running, his arms open, his satchel slung forgotten at his chest. Moved by incomprehensible insanity, by mindless bravery, he leaped onto the monster, a child tackling a football linesman. The monster laughed in appreciation of the absurdity, opened his arms to accept this farcical challenge, and the two grappled, hugged for a brief instant before the monster crushed Kennet's body like a rag doll.

And then the satchel went off.

Even from halfway across the camp the blast knocked Christopher off his feet. He found himself wrestling with a white-eyed hobgoblin that stabbed blindly at him with a dagger. Grabbing it by the throat, Christopher banged its head against the carriage tongue of the cannon until the creature stopped moving. He climbed to his feet amid snarling dogs and shouting men, a forest of gunfire around him. The men had fallen off the wall from the blast, and for some reason they were not getting back on it. He screamed at them, his voice lost in the noise, or maybe he was still deaf from a dozen sticks of dynamite exploding all at once. They ignored him, abandoning the wall to its own fate, shooting and stabbing at the howling wolves.

A hobgoblin leaped onto his back, grabbed at his throat, waving a short sword clumsily around in the tight quarters of the grapple. Before Christopher could react, it shrieked, and something dragged it off his back. He turned to see Royal drop the creature to the ground and stomp on it like a rat. Christopher drew his sword, pointed to the wall, and forced more sound through his raw and burning throat.

But the wall remained empty and still. The sudden quiet was deafening, the occasional rifle shot almost comforting.

“They flee,” said a sergeant, his face bloody, his helmet and an ear missing. “Their master is slain, and they flee.”

“Command the defense,” Christopher told the man. He turned to the wounded and was lost in bandaging until the sun crept back over the horizon, its wan light small comfort in the cold.

He ran out of bandages.

They had lost eighty-four men. Charles he found, cold and dead, his entire arm gone to join his missing fingers. Bondi lay amongst the corpses, his throat torn out. And Karl, whose body had not thawed in the night, still stood frozen in place, his face unmoving for the last time.

“It's not much, Pater,” a boy said, with tears in his eyes. “But it is all we could find.”

The boy handed him a bag with a broken pumpkin in it. Christopher was confused by the surrealism until he realized it was Kennet's head.

“I need orders, Pater,” said the older of his two remaining sergeants, almost apologetically.

The kettles were boiling again.

“We'll need that,” the other sergeant said gently, hesitantly. He meant Kennet's head.

“No,” Christopher said.

“We cannot leave them for the Dark to harvest,” the sergeant argued, but not forcefully.

Christopher was suddenly alarmed, but the pile of heads next to the kettles contained no humans. They would not start without his permission.

“Let me think.” He sat down on his little cot, which was, oddly enough, somehow still intact. He held the sack in his lap and thought furiously, forcing his mind to crank through logic. Royal stood over him again, stoically ignoring the pain of his torn flesh, the wounds not serious but ugly.

The men waited, resting. They interrupted him only once to tell him the enemy had retreated to their own fort.

He stood, went to the kettles.

“How much do we have?”

The sergeant looked at him, eyes shining. Furtively he handed Christopher a purple nugget the size of a cherry.

“There is more to come, Pater, and also our own men.”

“We'll not harvest our men here. How long will it take you to finish this lot?”

“An hour, Pater, no more.”

“Then we leave within the hour,” Christopher said, and repeated it so everyone could hear. “We march within the hour. Listen up, and let me tell you what I know.

“Cardinal Faren can revive a man eight days dead. The Vicars can hold a man so that the door does not shut on him, if they get him before those eight days. There are four Vicars within a day's ride of Kingsrock, and also the Cardinal and the Saint. It will take us a day to get from Tyring to Kingsrock, a day to summon the Vicars, and three days to preserve all the dead.

“That means we have three days to get from here to the border of the Kingdom.”

He let that sink in.

“That means we leave everything. The wagons, the cannons, the ammunition. Everything. We put the dead on horses and we walk. We walk thirty miles a day. Take your rifle and five rounds of ammunition. Fill your packs with grain for the horses. Take only a single loaf of bread for yourselves. You will not starve in three days, but the horses carry our brothers, and if they fail, then we will lose them forever.”

They stared at him in silence, faces shredded between disbelief and hope.

“You will bring back everyone,” the sergeant said, “even the unranked, the common, the worthless? You will spend tael like water for men of no account?”

“Worthless? Who here is not worthy? What is a little tael, a little money, to the account of so many brave and true men? Tael I can replace, money I can summon from thin air, but
men
are a treasure beyond price.”

Never again could he call them boys.

They prevailed upon him to take the gold and silver, also, two large sacks of rings, pendants, and amulets.

“It's as good as tael, Pater, if not so light.”

They took the water bottle, of course, and the light-stones, both necessary to the march. But the fortune in equipment and supplies that Christopher had dragged out here at such effort and expense they piled in a mound and burned.

Wagons, tents, tools, paper, clothes, blankets, all up in flames. Their sole moment of levity was when his silly cot went into the fire. The cannons they packed with dynamite, dangled over the cliff, and shattered the barrels. The excess ammunition they burned in great sparkling gouts, tossing it into the fire, which consumed everything utterly.

“What the hell is that?” Christopher asked as one of the sergeants clanked by him, carrying a bundle of swords.

“Begging your pardon, Pater, but we cannot leave these behind.” They were the masterwork blades and Karl's magic sword. “The men will be wanting them back.”

The swords would be harder to replace than rifles, so there was no point in leaving them. But that reminded him of something, and he took off his chain-mail shirt. He tossed it onto the fire, where the heat would fuse the links into a useless mass of metal.

And then they walked out of the camp, a long line of grim men, their faces gray, their bodies brown and flecked with white and red bandages.

“Shall we burn the fort, Pater?” the sergeant asked.

That's what Nordland had wanted. In a moment of spite, Christopher answered, “No. We might want to use it again, and if the enemy occupies it, we can take it back easily enough.”

What he wouldn't give to fight a simple siege, where his cannons would make everything easy. Well, once he had cannons again, that is.

Christopher made a silent promise, to all the gods of every world, that he would never again considering hiking “fun.” He stripped off his boots, massaged his swollen and aching feet. He was dizzy with hunger, exhaustion, and pain.

And this was the first day.

“We must be off again,” the sergeant said.

Christopher stifled his immediate impulse to shoot the man and put his boots back on.

He had wanted to be heroic and carry the swords, but he wasn't up to it. A year of training had not erased a lifetime of easy living, nor had it made him young again. He struggled with his own sword and a backpack full of grain for Royal.

Royal carried the swords, and three corpses as well, but that wasn't as hard as it sounded, since one of them was the sack that held all that was left of Kennet. The other bodies they distributed amongst the draft and cavalry horses. Only the dead rode in this cavalcade.

They walked. And walked. And walked. Without the wagons, already knowing the way, they made good time, but the specter of death haunted their footsteps. The frozen men were tied in the saddles like the horsemen of the apocalypse, and Karl's face was a black beacon of doom. If a man paused or faltered, it took one look to make him walk again, sometimes crying from pain or loss, sometimes swearing in anger. But they walked.

After nightfall the scouts called a halt at one of their old camping places. There was still firewood stacked up—a lifesaver, since no one thought to keep even a single ax. Huddled around the small fires, they slept in exhaustion. There were so many wounded, the unhurt felt shamed.

In the morning, two men did not wake. Christopher shrugged.

“Royal can bear more,” he said.

The middle of the second day, they had to shoot one of the wounded horses. Some men redistributed its load while others butchered the horse and cooked it over a fire. At least half the men had possessed enough sense to keep their bayonets, despite Christopher's extreme orders.

“Pater,” a scout said, “should we not go due south?”

“Do you know the way?” Christopher asked. “Will we find camps and firewood? Will we come out in the Duke's land, to face his charges of mutiny?” The last argument seemed to be the most compelling.

“I'm sorry, soldier, I shouldn't have snapped at you.” He didn't want them to stop making suggestions. But the man didn't take offense, merely nodded acceptance of his authority.

The meat was good, but then they had to walk some more. Christopher got off a second set of healing magic, but it didn't go far.

They walked from sunup to sundown again, finding relief only in the fact that their packs got lighter as the horses ate.

Infection was starting to be a problem, and several men now needed help to keep moving. The cold was harsh, and the injured men should have been resting, not walking. Crawling over the gorges and ravines was painful and slow, and it chafed Christopher's patience.

At night they walked by the light of the magic stones, pushing on until the scouts said they had made their distance. The wounded fell in ragged heaps while the others built fires and unloaded horses before collapsing beside them. Royal laid down, his burden temporarily set aside, and Christopher leaned against him, wrapping his coat as tight as he could. He had just closed his eyes, and a young man was waking him again. It was still dark.

“Time to go, Pater.”

They'd lost three more in the night.

“I'm old,” Christopher said. He stood up, bones creaking, then sat down again and cleared his mind, seeking meditation. It cost him an hour every morning, but he could still walk faster than the wounded, and every man he touched was a man who would not die that day.

The main army went on ahead. Christopher and his small escort caught up with them before noon.

A young man was lying in the snow. Two others stood above him, exhausted, the cold stealing their breath in white clouds.

“Get up, soldier,” Christopher said. “We're almost home.”

“I can't, Pater, I'm sorry,” the young man whispered. His ankle was swollen and ugly, the flesh red and inflamed. Christopher was only a Pater. He could not heal infection.