Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

“He killed your ma,” Sauce said.

“Drop it, Sauce.” His eyes were suddenly on her, and there at the edges was the red she’d expected all day.

“You’ve got to be human,” she said.

“I’ve been very human recently. Right now, I’m the captain.” He played with a glove.

She looked out over the wilderness that stretched away-everywhere-for miles.

“Why are we fighting here? You said Albinkirk.” Sauce found that she was angry. He was up to something. She thought of all her conversations with Mag.

He had that look she hated, where he, in fact, had all the answers and all his talk was just bullshit.

“I thought we’d fight at Albinkirk, but things changed. I changed my mind. The Faery Knight, Bad Tom-the Emperor.” He shrugged. “What is eating you?”

“We’re going to fight the Wild with Wild things inside our own ranks, and on their ground.” Sauce looked at him. “Everything I know about war, I learned from you, Jehan, Cully and Tom, and everything tells me this is the wrong place. In a swamp? In the woods?”

He looked at her and nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

She frowned. “Suddenly, you are the Queen’s Captain,” she said. “I thought we were a free company. On adventure. Making our fortunes. Not making you King.”

“King?” He laughed. “Oh, Sauce, I promise you I do not want to be King of Alba.”

That relieved her. “Or King of the North?” she asked.

“Nor that.” He smiled.

She still thought the smile was too charming and too false.

“What are you after, then?” she asked.

“After the battle,” he said. “There’s so many angles now, I can’t remember them all. Let’s win the battle. Then-we’ll have a command meeting.”

This made her smile. “Unless we’re dead.”

“Right, in which case the meeting is off.” He smiled back, and for a moment, they were who they had once been.

Before he left, the captain spent another hour closeted with Mag. Neither of them shared what had been discussed.

At sunset, the white banda marched into camp from the east, along the same set of low ridges over which Bad Tom and his Hillmen had disappeared. They were on foot and all their wagons were gone-left on the other side of the river to the east.

The celebration was muted, and nearly ruined by the last-light assault of a mixed force of creatures of the Wild. But darkness did not help them negotiate the traps; superior night vision was of little use in seeing stakes dug in days before, and a pair of torsion engines dropped baskets of rocks on the beaten zone.

No Head watched it all from the westernmost tower with a bottle in one hand and a stylus in the other.

Half an hour later he reported to Sauce and Ser John, on the forward wall overlooking the Hole.

“Gelfred says they’re well around us, and working up to an attack on the back of the camp.” No Head opened his wax slate. “I have a whole forest of suggestions and additions to the current scheme.”

Sauce looked smug.

Within ten minutes the whole camp was standing to arms. The farmers were drawn up well back from the walls, with improvised weapons to hand. There were archers in the towers and men-at-arms lining all four sides of the camp wall.

Just at moonrise there was a cacophony of horns. Mag was sewing away, making mess kettle bags for the new kettles at a great rate.

On the wall, Ser Bescanon sounded a horn.

Mag bit off her thread, took up a small piece of char and snapped her fingers. The char burnt to ash.

Sixty yards from the ditch of the camp’s back wall, there was a deep hollow, almost a long bowshot from end to end, fully covered from the firing positions on the camp wall. All along that hollow, there were clay jars buried deep in the soft earth, each sealed with wax and with a piece of the very same char cloth-linen woven on the same bolt-in the midst of the jar.

And bits of rusty metal and old nails and the like.

And several pounds of Master Smythe’s powder.

Mag’s tiny working produced six prodigious explosions.

Immediately, the back gate of the camp opened and a mounted sortie went out-first a dozen Vardariots under Zac who spread like a magick curtain in front of the knights, and then forty knights armed cap-à-pied. Behind them came another forty men-at-arms who shook out into a loose line with two paces between armoured men.

The mounted men cleared the road by torchlight, and the dismounted men-at-arms did most of the killing. In the dark, a man in armour was very hard to injure, and anything without armour-especially stunned, wounded cave bears and irks-were easily dispatched.

The smell of hell come to earth-sulphur and saltpeter-hung in the damp night air.

In the night, Mag exchanged workings with something out in the darkness. She left two great golden shields over the whole of the camp when she went to her blanket roll. The golden shields caused as much lost sleep and consternation among the newer men and women as irks and boglins might have done.

Mag awoke to find the young Mortirmir was releasing fireballs from a tower-one working that loosed one small ball from each fingertip, where they hurried out into the darkness like malignant glow flies. By the time she climbed the tower to him, he was showing off, casting complex arcs of light and tiny focused beams of red.

“You could save some of that for when it matters,” Mag said.

With a dramatic swoosh , Morgon produced a magnificent, gurgling bundle of focused ops like a tiny sun, complete to straying arms of white-hot gas. He flung it so far that it simply vanished.

“What was that for?” Mag asked. There was a precision to the way he used ops and the way he focused that she admired-more as a seamstress than as a magicker.

He turned and smiled his ingenuous smile. “Just because I can,” he said. “Ser Milus says by now the woods are full a mile or more deep around us.”

Off to the north and east, there was a sudden glow-then a deep, pulsing red burning, and then a hollow thum followed by a sharp crack.

“I wanted to see how far I could throw something really powerful. Bet someone’s surprised.”

Mag sighed. “I’m going back to bed. Please don’t be such a small boy.”

Chastened, Morgon climbed down off the tower.

In the morning, the survivors of the imperial army were paraded and re-armed. They received a curious collection of weapons-trade swords and crossbows stripped from the two Etruscan warehouses in Albinkirk, every spare sword, shield, or dented cap in the arsenal in the citadel; hunting bows, and even some stone throws used for hunting squirrels, crossbows that threw a clay pellet instead of a bolt.

All the spare horses-including every destrier the company captured in the south-went to re-horse the white banda and to fill out a full squadron of Morean cavalry.

The captain came with his household, and then the Queen came with hers, and behind them were another fifteen hundred peasants with shovels. But they never came into the company camp-instead, they halted almost a mile to the rear and began building a second camp on the ridge with the old fort.

The captain addressed the Moreans in Archaic. They didn’t cheer, but neither did they grumble. Ser Christos stood on a barrel and told all the phylarchs that he had personally seen the Emperor’s body prepared, and that they would take it back to the city together-when they had been victorious.

Then Ser Christos took all the Moreans except a handful and marched them away to the new camp.

Sauce watched them go. “What’s he doing?” she asked Michael, who was already clerking in a tent-not his own.

Michael shook his head. “No idea. Except that he doesn’t think the battle will be here.”