The Hollow Queen (47 page)

The thrum of battle was all around her, stinging her skin. Rhapsody took several panting breaths and then forced her mouth to close. She nodded briskly at Solarrs, who returned to the front amid the arrows coming from below, and stood shakily.

As she did, she looked behind the forces of the Alliance.

And choked.

Another, larger battalion of Sorbolds was riding, full-bore, at them from the rear flank.

Drawn and screaming.

 

56

The remaining leadership of the armies of the Cymrian Alliance turned to look behind them as well.

“Bloody fucking hell,” Solarrs whispered.

“Well, I guess this is how one dies as a First Generationer,” said Cavanur, a field commander who was one himself, who had served with the Lord Marshal and sailed with his father. “Anborn just went first.”

Trapped between the swarm of fury rising up from the canyon floor before them and its like bearing down on them on horseback from behind, the soldiers of the Alliance stared miserably at the death race that would claim victory over them one way or another.

Rhapsody was still trying to get air. She was calculating the use of Daystar Clarion in calling starfire down upon them, knowing the Sorbolds were too close to spare her own soldiers from the flames should she do so.

I am the only one of us who would survive,
she thought.
My fire lore would spare me, but I would be left here, alone, to face the wrath of the Sorbold survivors from ahead and behind
.

There was no way the Iliachenva'ar could do such a thing.

“I don't suppose there is any point in uttering the Kinsman call,” she muttered to herself. “The only other two I have known have either just died before my eyes or called me himself at the point of death immediately afore.”

Solarrs returned his attention to the valley below him, where the remains of the army of the Alliance was struggling to keep the southern Sorbold forces from cresting the rim of the canyon.

His face went slack.

“M'lady,” he said quietly. “What did the Lord Marshal tell you about this place?”

Rhapsody, whose head barely crested his shoulder, was beside him, staring in the other direction at the approaching division coming from the north.

“Nothing,” she said, the elemental sword of fire twitching in her hand. “He considered all of Sorbold a dry latrine, ‘godforsaken and smelling endlessly of piss and bad libation, no matter where one goes,' I think that is what he said.”

“Think harder,” the ancient Cymrian scout said. “What did he tell you about the Radashajn Pass, or Vornessta specifically?”

The Sorbold cavalry was close enough for them to feel the trembling of the ground beneath the hooves of their mounts now.

Rhapsody could not tear her eyes away from them, even knowing the battle that was raging just behind her.

“‘An ash-pit,' I think he said. Nothing of use, not even the flax for their linen mills will grow in the northern regions, just—just—”

She glanced up to her right to see Solarrs looking back down at her.

“Just the iron ore of the mountains,” she finished.

“Ore mined by slaves,” Solarrs said. “M'lady—look.”

She turned her back on the approaching mounted death and raised her eyes to the jutting mountain crag across the valley.

From the great yawning mouth revealed by the opening of the enormous stone doors, men were spilling, men pale of skin from their long loss of the sun, hard of muscle, long of hair and beard, gaunt and scrawny from the meanness of their lives and the thinness of food their captors had provided.

From every corner of the Earth, the human spoils of scores, if not hundreds, of brutal invasions, they erupted from their mountain prison and charged down the sides of its fangline face, swinging picks and chisels, the tools of their indentured labor, hardened and ridged in diamond to allow for blades sharp enough to harvest the ore that had, no doubt, been manufactured into the very weapons the southern Sorbold soldiers were wielding against the Alliance atop the canyon rim.

Wanton murder in their eyes.

With speed born of musculature formed by ceaseless drudgery and lives that had existed solely for enforced labor, the slaves of the iron mines of Vornessta dashed as one endless mind bent on vengeance across the Radashajn Pass.

Heading for what was left of the Sorbold army division.

The Sorbolds, bent as they were on engagement, had not yet noticed them.

Three crested the rise together. One engaged two of the soldiers holding the line, only to be heaved back into the canyon into his comrades, but the other two savagely sliced through one of Solarrs's men and stumbled, sweating and panting, aiming for the First Generation scout and the Lady Cymrian.

“He said he had been—planting the seeds—of a rebellion,” Rhapsody said, bracing for the charge as she glanced behind her again at the approaching cavalry of the northern Sorbold division. She dodged the soldier's sword thrust by going low, then slashed him across the knees and drove her blade into his abdomen.

Solarrs, who had already dispensed with his own attacker, kicked hers, bleeding profusely, back over the rim and down into the canyon again.

“Not surprising,” he muttered, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm, his sword at his side. “Anborn was a born revolutionary. Nothing—galled him more than a sedate and presumptuous—ruling class, even if he was one of them.”

Rhapsody peered over the rim.

The tide of newly freed slaves was attacking the Sorbold forces from behind, tearing them from their perches or the handholds to which they clung and ripping through their armor with their chisels and trowels.

The blast of a horn, low and foreign, rent the air.

The soldiers of the Alliance turned behind them once again, into the fury of the assault from the north.

And stared in shock.

*   *   *

Behind the charging Sorbold force was another cavalry, outnumbering them three times over, just as the Sorbolds outnumbered the remains of the division of the Alliance. But these were not new Alliance divisions, at least not as Anborn would have counted them.

Stout men on stout horses, thirty thousand or more, with rich-colored banners flying, a shining gold standard rippling in the wind at the head of their column.

Solarrs began to tremble.

“Impossible,” he whispered.

“Sweet One-God,” Rhapsody murmured. “Is that—is that—?”

“It's the Nain,” Cavanur said, almost reverently. “My God—I haven't seen them thus since the Cymrian War.”

“I don't understand,” Rhapsody said as the massive division, armed with lance and crossbow, unleashed a rainstorm of bolts into the backs of the charging Sorbold cavalry. “Faedryth swore he would never commit forces to this conflict.”

“Believe me, Lady, war on this scale can shake even the most sincere and deeply held oaths,” Solarrs said, looking back over to the canyon where, between the Alliance forces above them and the slaves behind him, the Sorbold division was beginning to crumble into the slag pile that had been spread across the canyon floor. “There's not much point to being the only one left alive when an enemy has all the other cards.”

From deep within her numb soul, Rhapsody felt a new spirit rise, one that was part valor, and a bigger part hatred.

“I tire of this,” she said, wiping her blade on her trousers and surveying the mayhem that the Nain were visiting upon what a moment before had been their oncoming attackers. “Let's put an end to it. Having never heard the call before, I have been summoned by wind as a Kinsman not once but twice this day, and have been only marginally successful in either case.”

She glanced from horizon to horizon. All around her, on every side, it appeared that the entirety of the world was at war.

“Gentlemen, it's been an honor to serve with you,” she said to the remains of the Cymrian division and its leaders. “Let us cast our lot with our allies, whether they be reluctant Nain or manic slaves, and do the best we can to have some part of a world worth saving when it's over, whether we live through the tribulation or not.”

All around her, voices answered in the language of the long-dead Island of Serendair in a glad shout.

Vid, Liacor.

Aye, m'lady.

 

57

THE NOW-QUIET RIM OF THE CANYON, RADASHAJN PASS, VORNESSTA, SORBOLD

When there is not abject surrender, there can be resolution, but not peace
.

And there is only very rarely abject surrender.

The words of her beloved late mentor, Oelendra Andaris, came back to Rhapsody, unbidden, as she paced angrily back and forth on the canyon rim.

Early into the afternoon of the next day, the War of the Known World seemed to finally be over.

Or at least its end was beginning.

There was no way the Lady Cymrian or any of the participants could have known that at the time. The scope of the conflict was so vast, so international, that until they were told that Talquist had yielded or died, there could be no sense of completion, no safety.

No peace.

But at least the largest of the skirmishes was finally over.

It had been a brutal battle, one that incurred great loss on all sides. The slaves of Vornessta had displayed the greatest rage, without question, and their oppression and the burning desire for revenge added momentum to their brawling combat, but even the stoutest heart needs armor, another of the Lirin sayings Rhapsody had learned from her mentor.

After initial success brought about by the unfettered element of surprise, the starving men from the iron-ore mines were brutally sliced down, losing a quarter of their number within the first half hour.

The Nain had fared far better by the numbers, she thought, continuing to pace. Well armed and armored, well horsed, and well trained, they were fresh and spirited when they engaged the northern Sorbold division, and their addition to the melee was a welcome one for the exhausted troops of the Alliance. They had quickly and cleanly dispatched a goodly number of the enemy in the first volleys of bolts, the first series of lance attacks, but after the initial release of battle rage and the good spirit of rescue, particularly of the troops the friend of their king, Anborn ap Gwylliam, had loved, the inevitable ugliness of war descended, war that most of them had never seen, even in the battle of the Fallen that had taken place four years before at the council that had named Ashe and Rhapsody to the titles of Lord and Lady Cymrian.

They seemed to be rebounding now, she noted as she cast a bitter glance in the direction of their encampment.
A single battle claims over one hundred thousand lives, and they are most concerned about arranging for their victory feast
. Entitled as they were to their celebrations, Rhapsody could not help but be disenchanted by them.

Her own forces were making their way, like ghosts, to the medic tents that were being set up away from the canyon's rim on the bloodstained ground where so many Sorbolds, Nain, and Alliance soldiers had fallen. Signal fires fought for fuel with the need for the massive pyres the aftermath of a battle of this scope required, and though the support troops were doing everything they could to address the wounded, a few had still died, wandering aimlessly until they succumbed, in spite of aid being within their reach.

While the healing supplies were being gathered and distributed, Solarrs caught up with her. He seemed puzzled at her pacing, and, finding the conversation in which he remained stationary while she paced angrily back and forth to be awkward, he began accompanying her on her futile trek.

“Knapp has arrived from Bethany,” he said, trying to match her pace and route.

“Did he bring the medical supplies?”

“Yes, m'lady.”

“Good. What news of Navarne? Of Yarim?”

“Both assaults were turned back, as you know. Peace is still holding.”

“Also good.”

“Word by avian messanger implies that the Merchant Emperor may be missing, presumed dead.”

“Even better.”

“Forgive me, m'lady,” Solarrs said haltingly as they continued to stride the same ground back and forth in a seemingly endless pattern. “Can you stop long enough to explain what has you so—so—”

“So—what?”

“So off center,” the First Generation Cymrian said with the gentlest tone of respect he could summon. “So—so—
beside yourself
. We prevailed, Rhapsody—the cost was atrocious, but we were the defenders here, not the aggressors. Stop pacing, m'lady, I beg you, and tell me what, atop of the shock and horror of battle, has you so rattled.”

Rhapsody's trek stopped in midstride.

“This—this is not how it is supposed—to happen,” she panted, savagely unbuckling her sword belt and hurling it to the ground. “Each time I—know of, when the Kinsman call is answered—aid is able to be—given. Why—why did the wind bring me—here to just stand—and
witness this
? If I could be—of no help whatsoever—”