Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

Sauce groaned. “He said here! Now where?”

Michael was writing out orders-all in numbered sequences.

Sauce frowned at him. “This is too fucking complicated. Tom and I are gone and he’s off the leash and making up dangerous plans that won’t work.”

Michael paused. “I think this will work,” he said in a neutral tone.

“Why’s he so talkative and chipper?” Sauce asked.

Michael cleared his throat.

“Tell!” Sauce said. “Michael, how often have I stood by you?”

“He’s got a girl,” Michael said.

“Not Amicia?” Sauce asked.

“Word is Amicia told him to sod off. And he’s found someone a little more willing.” Michael raised his pen. “Sauce, this could all be nonsense.”

“The Queen?” Sauce barked. It was almost a screech.

“No,” Michael said. “It’s a long story. One of the Queen’s ladies. A laundress.”

That stopped Sauce in full anti-aristocratic spate. “A laundress?” she asked.

“Sauce, I don’t know. Now may I finish writing out his orders?” He met her eye. In the captain’s very voice he said, “Don’t you have something you ought to be doing?”

Sauce laughed.

In the streets of the camp, Wilful Murder sat with Tippit and Cuddy and Cully.

“Where’s No Head?” Long Paw asked. It was an old tradition, and even now that Long Paw was a knight he liked to see it done.

They were whetting their points. Each good arrow was taken out and its steel point sharpened. Bodkins that would pass between the links of mail and horse-droppers that would rip the guts out of a wyvern and the new arrows, big stonebreakers on half-inch shafts for cave trolls with blunt heads like the ones used for birds but filled with lead.

“No Head’s too important for the like o’ us,” Wilful muttered. “Telling the diggers where to dig. Waste o’ time, if you ask me.”

Long Paw laughed. “Why? I like the odds-us behind twenty feet of rampart.”

“We ain’t fightin’ here,” Wilful Murder said in his hangdog voice.

“Like fuck!” Cully said. “Of course we’re fightin’ here.”

Wilful Murder wore a straw hat on his arming cap, and he pushed it back off his forehead. “Oh, is that so?”

Cuddy sighed. “I’m sure you’re going to tell us.”

“The cap’n brought up horses for every one o’ you what lost yer horses.” Wilful Murder shrugged. “Stands to reason.”

“Knights need horses,” Cully said.

Tippit smiled.

“And all the archers?” Wilful said, in exactly the voice he’d use when he rolled the pips he needed to win a game. “Why the fuck we all suddenly got horses, if’n we ain’t leaving?”

There was a pause.

Tippit cursed-one of his original, florid, somewhat terrifying curses-this one to do with seals and sex. Then he sighed. “I hate it when you make sense.”

There was no trumpet. Just after midnight, Ganfroy went from tent line to tent line and woke the knights, and the rest went the way it should have-with a lot of forgotten equipment, men missing, Oak Pew unaccountably drunk, and a great deal of cursing. The chaos was made worse by the silent intrusion of new men-militia and local knights. Lord Wayland’s retinue. The Grand Squire. They were good knights but not professional soldiers. They were moving into the places vacated by the company.

“Up past their bed times,” Wilful Murder muttered.

But it was done, and in under an hour, including the rapid serving out of rations-salt pork, bacon, peas and butter and good bread in big four-pound loaves.

Wilful Murder was unbelievably smug as they trotted into the first morning light, six miles almost due south of Gilson’s Hole.

The whole company-green in front, then the household, then the red and then the white-jogged along at a fast walk by fours down the road in the first grey light.

“Fuck, I hate rain,” muttered Tippit.

Then something changed, and the rhythm of movement changed. Birds were waking up, and the colour of the sky was lightening.

They turned. They were suddenly moving north, on a narrow road in deep woods. Some of the veterans of the spring march knew it as the West Road to Ticondaga.

“Gonna rain for sure,” Tom Lantorn said at his side. “Look-woods is full o’ men.”

It was true. There were men with axes and shovels all along the road’s edge.

By the time the sun was well up, they halted in a clearing that had firepits already dug. The Ticondaga road continued off to the north, towards Big Rock Lake. But a new road was opening, headed back north and east.

There was firewood stacked by each pit-good hardwood twigs and branches, carefully broken up and neatly piled. Men swung down, pages collected the horses, and women appeared out of the forest.

Sukey was there with twenty baggage wagons. “Don’t get fresh,” she said to Cuddy. “They ain’t our girls, they’re farm girls. Got me?”

The farm girls cooked-an enormous breakfast of fatback and eggs and spiced tea, a company favourite since Morea.

Cuddy paused at Wilful’s fire. “We’re fightin’ today,” he said.

Wilful ate the excellent eggs and nodded. “Guess so.” Good food was a traditional sign of a dust-up ahead.

Cuddy nodded. “Don’t forget to duck,” he said. He moved on down the line, checking fires.

A little behind him came the captain and Sauce and Ser Bescanon.

“Just a little trick to save some time,” he said at every fire. “I thought you’d all be pleased if we could just win, and be done.”

Men would laugh, and women, too.

“I thought we all needed out of the swamp,” he said at one fire.

“I needed a morning ride,” he laughed at another.

“I brought my falcon-didn’t you bring yours?” he said to Wilful Murder.

“I’m looking for the Loathly Lady,” he cracked to Tippit, who shook his head.

All the while, they could hear the axes sounding in the woods.

North and East of Gilson’s Hole

Thorn and Ser Hartmut

Hartmut had made a model. He’d crawled through muck once and sent other men during each of the attacks and he had a fair idea of the full extent of the entrenchments covering the maze of pathways around and through the Hole.

“This is the centre of their defence,” Hartmut said. His audience included two daemon-mothers, as he’d called them, and all his own captains, and Thorn. One old wyvern-Sylch, the leader of one of the wings of wyverns-attended, but paid no attention, instead picking constantly at something between the spread talons of its right foot. The two useful warlords of the Huran were present, Black Blanket and Shag-an-ho, both keen men who he could almost like.

And Orley.

Orley held too much ops. It was clear that something had been done to him, and it made men shy of him. He now had black antlers growing from his head. He didn’t even seem to know.

Hartmut tried to ignore whatever was wrong with Orley. He spoke directly to Thorn.

“They’ve cleared all this-hundreds of paces of woods and bog, knocked flat. This entire ridge is one fortified line.” He shrugged. “Behind it, the camp is itself a fortress, with walls fifteen feet thick and ten feet high.” He couldn’t keep the tone from his voice. “We gave them a week, and they used what they had. Farmers, and wood, and earth.”

Thorn swayed.

“None of my warlocks has had any effect on the old witch’s defence,” he said. “I must deal with her myself.”

His hesitation showed. The mighty sorcerer lord hesitated…

Hartmut shrugged despite the weight of his armour and the overwhelming clouds of black flies.

“It is impregnable, unless we bring up trebuchets or build them new. Or unless you can simply unleash the hounds of hell to smash the earthworks.”