Sha inclined his head again and stepped off the cot. The enormous Cane moved in perfect silence. “It is good to speak with those who are perceptive and competent.”
Marcus found himself smiling at the compliment without any apparent source or object and decided to return it in kind. “It is good to have enemies with integrity.”
Sha’s ears flicked in amusement again. Then the Hunter raised the hood of his dark grey cloak to cover his head and glided out of the tent. Marcus felt no need to make sure that he had a safe route out of the First Aleran’s camp. Sha had gotten in easily enough—which was, in its own way, proof that Varg had not been behind the attempt on Octavian’s life. Had Hunters managed to get that close to Octavian, their past performance suggested that he would not have survived the experience, despite all the furycraft he’d managed to master in the past year. Odds were excellent that Marcus wouldn’t have survived it, either.
He sighed and rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair. He’d been looking forward to a relatively lengthy night’s sleep, as compared to what he’d been getting lately. Sha’s visit had neatly assassinated that possibility, if nothing else.
He muttered to himself and donned his armor again, something a great deal more easily done with help than alone. But he managed. As he dressed, the weather shifted with abrupt intensity, a cold wind that came howling down out of the north. It set the canvas of his tent to popping, and when Marcus emerged from it, the wind felt as if it had come straight down the slope of a glacier.
He frowned. Unseasonal, for this late in the year, even in the chilly north. The wind even smelled of winter. It promised snow. But it was far too late in the year for such a thing to happen. Unless . . .
Unless Octavian had, somehow, inherited Gaius Sextus’s talents in full measure. It was impossible. The captain had not had time to train, nor a teacher to instruct him in whatever deep secrets of furycraft had allowed Gaius Sextus to readily, frequently, and casually exceed the gifts of any other High Lord by an order of magnitude.
Furycraft was all well and good—but no one man could turn spring into bloody winter. It simply was not possible.
Pellets of stinging sleet began to strike Marcus’s face. They whispered against his armor like thousands of tiny, impotent arrowheads. And the temperature of the air continued to drop. Within a few moments, frost had begun to form upon the grass and upon the steel of Marcus’s armor. It simply could not be happening—but it was.
Octavian had never been an able student where impossibilities were concerned.
But in the name of the great furies,
why
would he do such a thing?
As he turned onto the avenue that would lead to the Legion’s command tent, he met up with Octavian and his guards, walking briskly toward the command tent.
“First Spear,” the captain said. “Ah, good. Time to roust the men. We’re leaving for the staging area in an hour.”
“Very good, sir,” Marcus replied, saluting. “I need to bend your ear for a moment, sir, privately.”
Octavian arched an eyebrow. “Very well. I can spare a moment, but after that I want you focused on getting the First Aleran to our departure point.”
“Yes, sir,” Marcus responded. “Which is where, sir?”
“I’ve marked a map for you. North.”
Marcus frowned. “Sir? North of here there’s nothing but the Shieldwall and Iceman territory.”
“More or less,” Octavian said. “But we’ve made a few changes.”
By noon the next day, the entire First Aleran, together with the Free Aleran Legion and the Canim warriors, had reached the Shieldwall, which lay ten miles to the north of the city of Antillus. Snow lay on the ground, already three inches deep, and the steady fall of white flakes had begun to thicken. If it had been the midst of winter, they would have promised a long, steady, seasonal snowfall.
But that single impossibility had evidently not been enough for the captain.
Marcus had served in the Antillan Legions for years. He stared in mindless, instinctive horror at the sight before him.
The Shieldwall had been broken.
A gap a quarter of a mile wide had been opened in the ancient, furycrafted fortification. The enormous siege wall, fifty feet high and twice as thick, had stood as unchangeable as mountains for centuries. But now, the opening in the wall gaped like a wound. In years gone by, the sight would have raised a wild alarm, and the shaggy white Icemen would already have been pouring into it by the thousands.
But instead, everything seemed calm. Marcus took note of several groups of wagons and pack animals who traveled on a well-worn track through the snow, leading to the gaping opening. Unless he missed his guess, they were carrying provisions. Tribune Cymnea’s logistics officers appeared to be loading up supplies for a march.
Without signaling a halt, the captain continued riding straight toward the hole in the wall, and the Legions of Canim and Aleran soldiers followed him.
Marcus shivered involuntarily as he passed through the opening in the Shieldwall. The men were complaining to one another when they thought they wouldn’t be overheard. Orders had come back from the captain: No one was to utilize the simple firecrafting that would have done more to insulate the men against the cold than any cloak.
On the other side of the Shieldwall was . . . a harbor.
Marcus blinked. The open plain before the Shieldwall was perfectly flat for half a mile from the wall’s base, as it was along the entire length of the wall. It made it easier to shoot at targets if they weren’t constantly bobbling up and down on varying terrain and helped to blind the enemy with his own ranks when the Icemen attacked. It was, simply, an open patch of land.
It was packed with the tall ships of the armada that had returned from Canea, a forest of naked masts reaching up to the snowy sky. The sight was bizarre. Marcus felt thoroughly disoriented as the Legions turned right down the length of the Shieldwall. They eventually had the entire force in a column parallel to the wall. The captain ordered a left face, and Marcus found himself, along with thousands of other
legionares
and warriors, staring at the out-of-place ships.
Octavian wheeled his horse and rode to approximately the midpoint of the line. Then he turned to face the troops and raised a hand for silence. It was rapid in coming. When he spoke, his voice sounded calm and perfectly clear, amplified by an effort of windcrafting, Marcus was certain.
“Well, men,” the captain began. “Your lazy vacation to sunny Canea is now officially over. No more recreation for you.”
This drew a rumbling laugh from the Legions. The Canim did not react.
“As I speak,” the captain continued, “the enemy is attacking all that remains of our Realm. Our Legions are battling them on a scale unmatched in our history. But without our participation, they can only postpone the inevitable. We need to be at Riva, gentlemen, and right now.”
Marcus listened to the captain’s speech, as he outlined the situation on the far side of the Realm—but his eyes were drawn to the ships. He didn’t see as clearly as he used to, but Marcus noted that the ships had been . . . modified, somehow. They rested on their keels, but instead of plain, whitewashed wood, the keels had somehow been replaced or lined with shining steel. Other wooden structures, like arms or perhaps wings, swept out from either side of the ships, ending in another wooden structure as long as the ship’s hull. That structure, too, sported a steel-lined keel. Between the ship’s keel and those wings, it stood perfectly straight, its balance maintained. Something about the design looked vaguely familiar.
“With decent causeways,” the captain was saying, “we could make it there in a couple of weeks. But we don’t have weeks. So we’re trying something new.”
As he spoke the words, a ship flashed into sight. It was a small, nimble-looking vessel, and Marcus immediately recognized Captain Demos’s ship, the
Slive
. Like the other ships, she had been fitted with a metal keel. Like the others, she sported two wing structures. But unlike the other ships, she had her sails raised, and they bellied out taut, catching the power of the northerly winds.
That was when Marcus realized what the modifications reminded him of: the runners of a sled. He took note of another detail. The ground before the wall wasn’t covered in inches of snow. It was coated in an equal thickness of ice.
The
Slive
rushed along the icy ground, moving swiftly, far more swiftly than she ever could at sea. A cloud of mist sprayed out from its steel runners in a fine, constant haze, half-veiling the runners, creating the illusion that the ship was sailing several inches above the ice, unsupported by anything at all. In the time it took Marcus to realize that his jaw had dropped open and to close it again, the
Slive
appeared, rushing down upon him, its runners making the ice beneath them crackle and groan, then soared on by, its sails snapping. Less than a minute later, it was better than a mile away, and only then did it begin to heave to, swinging around into a graceful turn. It took a few moments for the ship to rerig its sails to catch the wind from the opposite quarter for the return trip, and they bellied out for almost a minute before the
Slive
lost her momentum and began to return toward them.
“I’m afraid it’s back to the ships,” the Princeps said into the shocked silence. “Where we will sail the length of the Shieldwall to Phrygia and take the remaining intact causeways south to the aid of Riva. Your ship assignments will be the same as they were when we left Canea. You all know your ships and your captains. Fall out by cohorts and report to them. We’ll leave as soon as the road ahead is ready for us.”
“Bloody crows,” Marcus breathed. If all the ships could sail so swiftly over the ice—though he somehow doubted that the
Slive
’s performance was typical—they could sail the entire breadth of the Realm in . . . bloody crows. In hours, a handful of days. Phrygia and Riva were the two most closely placed of the great cities of the Realm—a fast-moving Legion on a causeway could make the journey in less than three days.
If it worked, if the winds held, the ice held, and the newly designed ships held, it would be the swiftest march in Aleran history.
Stunned, Marcus heard himself giving orders to his cohort and coordinating with the First Aleran’s officers to make sure the embarking went smoothly. He found himself standing in silence beside the captain as men, Canim, and supplies were loaded.
“How?” he asked quietly.
“My uncle used to take me sledding during the winter,” Octavian said quietly. “This . . . seemed to make sense.”
“The snow was your doing?”
“I had help,” the captain said. “From more than one place.” He lifted a hand and pointed to the north.
Marcus looked and saw movement among the trees to the north of the Shieldwall. Faint, blurred shapes with pale, shaggy fur flickered here and there among them.
“Sir,” Marcus choked. “The Icemen. We can’t possibly leave Antillus unprotected.”
“They’re here at my invitation,” he replied. “Managing snow in springtime is one thing. Turning it into ice quickly enough to suit our need is another thing entirely.”
“The reports at Antillus were true, then? That the Icemen have power over the cold?”
“Over ice and snow. A form of watercrafting, perhaps. That was my mother’s theory.” He shrugged. “We certainly don’t have the ability to coat the ground in ice from here to Phrygia. The Icemen do. That’s where Kitai’s been the past few days. Their chiefs are on good terms with her father.”
Marcus shook his head slowly. “After all those years of . . . they agreed to help you?”
“The vord threaten us all, First Spear.” He paused. “And . . . I gave them an incentive.”
“You
paid
them?”
“In property,” Octavian replied. “I’m giving them the Shieldwall.”
Marcus began to feel somewhat faint. “You . . . You . . .”
“Needed their help,” the captain said simply. He shrugged. “It
is
Crown property, after all.”
“You . . . you gave them . . .”
“When this is all over, I think I’ll see if I can get them to lease it to us.”
Marcus’s heart was actually lurching irregularly. He wondered if it was the beginning of an attack. “Lease it, sir?”
“Why not? It isn’t as if they’ve got much use for it, except for keeping us away from them. If we’re leasing it, we’ll be responsible for upkeep, which they couldn’t do in any case. A tangible, fixed border will exist between us, which might help lower tensions on both sides if we can avoid incidents. And since it’s their own property, generating revenue, I think they might be considerably less likely to attempt to demolish it on a weekly basis.”
“That’s . . . sir, that’s . . .” Marcus wanted to say “insane.” Or perhaps, “ridiculous.” But . . .
But a blizzard was coating the land with ice in the middle of what should have been a pleasantly warm spring day.
The analytical part of Marcus’s mind told him that the logic of the idea was not without merit. If it didn’t work, in the long term the Realm would certainly be no worse off than it was now—barring a major invasion, which was already under way, if from a different direction.
But what if it
did
work?
He was thoughtfully staring at the ships and the distant Icemen when Magnus approached and saluted the captain. He studied Marcus’s expression for a moment and frowned slightly.
“This wasn’t your idea, I take it?” the old Cursor asked.
Marcus blinked at him. “Are you barking mad?”
“Someone is,” the older man growled.
Octavian gave them both an oblique look, then pretended to ignore them.
Marcus shook his head and tried to regain his sense of orientation and purpose. “Times,” he said, “are changing.”