The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (72 page)

One was a simple hermetical device the size of a tinderbox that allowed a scout, when he pressed a stud, to make a string vibrate on another box held by another scout up to a league or more away. It was imperfect still and Morgon was sure it could be “sensed” in the
aethereal
, but it put in the Emperor’s hand the ability to see over the next ridge as surely as his scouts could travel there. Morgon had concocted a dozen other devices—most of them intended to protect the column against spies, as the captain had warned him.

Some of them even worked.

The only outward show was that insects had a very hard time indeed getting close to the column, in camp or out of it—a side effect that delighted the soldiers and made Morgon outstandingly popular with the company.

Morgon was musing on the possibilities of a code—something simple—perhaps easily changed—for his communication devices. He had only made six of them—each one took more than a day of work and more than a day of his
potentia.
Ser Milus and Proconsularis Vlad, the acting commander of the Vardariotes, both requested more devices each day.

The master board—really, an old lute hermetically re-worked to respond directly to impulses from the
aethereal
—began to emit the notes that meant “alarm.”

“Some kind of attack coming in,” he said tersely. The language of the impulses was still too limited.

Ser Milus gave an order, and the great red company standard was waved back and forth.

Immediately, the column began to deploy. Morgon was far towards the back, well located to see the mountaineers struggling to spread out to the south, looking for cover—the Outwallers running down the banks of the Meander to the north on the same errand, each block covering one of the column’s flanks.

The wyverns came in from the south. They were wary—they flew very low. Given how close they all were to the Circle of the Wyrm, Morgon was surprised that they dared at all.

There were a dozen of them—sleek shapes that flew along the edge of the hills to the south and west of them. Without the warning they’d have caught the whole column in march order, but instead, every archer had an arrow to his string.

But the leader of the wyverns was old, canny, and had much experience of men. And his instructions had been admirably precise. He circled to the east, his own band riding the same drafts he did, well closed up against being located too fast. They circled the last hill and swung out across the valley of the Meander, and Morgon saw the company archers begin lofting arrows—some men loosed far too early, but most of the archers were veterans, not just of war but of this war, and held their shafts.

From the baggage near the rear of the army, crossbow bolts flew.

The great winged creatures banked, coming in along the axis of the column and manoeuvring in the still air to make themselves poorer targets.

The company—deployed to the right and left of the baggage—raised their bows almost together as Smoke chanted ranges—and loosed.

A brave and untried young wyvern crumpled under forty heavy impacts and crashed to earth, bouncing once and ploughing a furrow in the sandy soil until its corpse crashed into a wagon whose oxen were still harnessed.
The oxen rolled their eyes and bolted heavily, passing along and then through the archers’ line on the left of the road.

Two more wyverns fell victim to their hate and their feeding desires, disobeyed their chieftain and attacked the disordered archers. In heartbeats, Jack Kaves was dead, and his partner Slacker, and a dozen more archers were wounded and down.

Ser George Brewes bellowed and lashed out with his long spear, and Ser Giovanni Gentile stood by him. One of the younger wyverns took a deep thrust under his neck and powered himself into the air, but the other stayed to fight, and armoured men and women struck it from every side until it crumpled. Tippit and Half-Arse put goose feathers in a third monster, and then the survivors were banking away.

The trailing, wounded beast had trouble getting altitude, and the Vardariotes killed her, riding at breakneck speed under the stricken thing and loosing arrows straight up into her guts until she fell.

The men and women of the company pulled the dead horrors off the baggage wagons, and noted that their talons were smeared in a sticky black mess. Master Mortirmir was summoned, and took samples. It was obviously hermetical, but Morgon couldn’t see what it was for—it wasn’t a poison.

Morgon thought the whole incident a display of the enemy’s foolish vanity—four wyverns was a poor return for two baggage wagons and six dead archers, if considered coldly.

It was hard to consider coldly. They buried the men and the two women who’d died with the baggage, crossbows in hand, and then they drove on. The column marched until noon.

And then, suddenly, horses began to die.

There was no warning. Among the company, it was horses with the baggage that went down first. Almost a dozen in the first minute, black froth coming from their nostrils.

Men went down as their mounts collapsed. The collapses were horrible—well-beloved mounts seemed almost to melt, their skin crawled with some form of death, and then, down they went, never to rise, and as they lay they bloated with terrifying rapidity, their guts stinking as they corrupted.

Morgon was not the only magister with the column, but he was the closest to the first horses to fall. He had the presence of mind to order his own horse—a lithe stallion called Averoes—to run—indeed, he struck Averoes sharply with his scabbard to drive the young horse away. Then he ran towards the nearest rotting animal, already
entering into his palace—the palace Harmodius had built.

The checkerboard floor was unchanged, as were many of the other features, but he had changed the chess pieces for statues—thirty-two statues of many of his favourite people from history and his own times, philosophers and rulers and mystics and even musicians.

Again he summoned the black paste that had been on the wyverns’ talons. In the
aethereal
, it appeared not black but a living purple, like a slime mould. The colour burgeoned with life and hermetical energy.

He had seen this on his first look, but it hadn’t seemed dangerous—Morgon bore down, looking more closely. He had learned many tricks at the university, and one was how to make a lens of air. Morgon adapted it and cast, and instantly found himself the victim of his own workings—the simulacrum of the sticky paste was too coarse-grained a reproduction to examine in the
aethereal
.

In the
real, he emerged, lumbered to a stop from a sprint, and tried not to fall into the fizzing black sludge that had once been Hetty’s second horse. He worked a sample into the air in front of him, cast the lens of air, and then moved it—

The black-purple stuff was
alive.

Fifty yards away, Ser Milus was walling the company’s dying horses off from the rest of the army. He had no idea what was killing his horses, but he’d seen enough war to fear infection and the rapid spread of something—some horrible equine plague. Or a curse, or a hermetical working.

The horses at the back of the column were dying, and his own sight told him those at the front were not.

But men were turning and riding back to see.

He ordered men on foot to run forward and order the rest of the army to ride on, and then he thought of Morgon’s box. But by then it was too late, and his beautiful eastern riding horse retched black bile and fell, and Milus was on the ground.

The first horse to fall exploded. And the air filled with fine black spores.

Morgon was less impressed by the spores. Spores he knew how to handle. Morgon raised
potentia,
made
ops
, and cast, almost without access to the
aethereal
or his palace. He could work fire without conscious access to his powers.

The cloud of spores flared and was gone.

Another dead horse exploded, and another.

Mortirmir cast, and cast.

Somewhere between the sixth horse and the ninth, he saw a more elegant solution. He dug the tip of his dagger into the sticky black stuff and used a simple
like to like
equivocation, and then displaced the stuff with fire.

He had not thought through all the ramifications of his working, and he was shocked to see several horses burn—screaming—or explode into fire without ever seeming to have contracted the plague. He had thought far enough ahead to protect the original sample on the wyvern’s talons.

The rest burned.

An hour later, Ser Milus looked over his rearguard—now fewer than one man in ten was mounted.

They’d lost horses but none of the oxen. They’d lost almost all the company’s remounts and more than half of the war horses.

They were on foot on the rolling, gravelly fields at the foot of the Green Hills.

Milus did what he could, ordering the baggage wagons loaded with armour and weapons, to make his column march faster. The Emperor pressed ahead. Milus had all but ordered him to do so. They had the captain’s schedule, after all.

It was the following morning before they received an imperial messenger, and they could send the word to the other columns. By then, it was too late.

North of Albinkirk, a deep V-formation of barghasts struck Ser John Crayford’s powerful armoured column at last light, just as the camp was being prepared. The bird-like reptiles swept in over the ancient trees… and were met by a rising, steel-tipped sleet of arrows. Three died immediately, and six more of the great avians were badly wounded, and their captain turned away, shrieking his rage. The attack was inept and the humans well prepared.

It was sheer bad luck that the youngest barghast to die fell almost atop the horse lines.

Mag’s response was more effective, but she came to the problem late, summoned in the falling darkness only after the horse herd was infected and the spores were flying. But she, too, solved the spores with a
like to like
working. She was a far better healer than Morgon, and managed to save more than a few horses already infected. But she had to treat them one by one, and they tended to die too fast for her to be truly effective.

She saved almost seventy-five war horses. They lost almost a thousand animals altogether, and when the sun rose the next day, Ser John was still forty miles south of Dorling, and his whole column was on foot.

“Why not simply set the plague-motes on the men?” Thorn asked—although he already knew the answer.

“Men are much stronger against such sorceries than animals,” Ash said. “And I want the men all together. Their time will come, and they will experience my power. But I will not spring my trap too soon.”

He desires a great battle on his own terms—a great battle in which many will die. And every death will enrich him and his infernal eggs, until they all hatch. Even the one in my head.
Thorn considered this a moment.

And then he will manifest, I believe. Is it blood? Is it the fleeing of souls into the aether? What is the source of his power?

Why can he not see the Dark Sun?

If I were close enough to the Dark Sun…

Thorn passed the time, as he moved his army of the Wild south in the
thick, wooded hills and swamps of the southern Adnacrags, in moving things and creatures on the so-called Wyrm’s Way
.
On his fourth attempt, he stood holding a turtle egg in his hand, and when he arrived at the end of his displacement, his hand was empty. The turtle egg lay in a pool of yellow yolk where he had been standing. He had successfully left it behind.

A raven swept in and began to eat the egg.

A raptor fell from the sky and drove the raven off the egg and began to eat it.

A barghast fell silently on the red-tailed hawk, slew it and began to eat it. When the barghast was done, it ate the egg as a dessert.

Thorn nodded.

The risk was, on the one hand, incredible, and on the other, almost banal. Ash surely intended his demise—in fact, he suspected he was nothing but the edible outer parts of the egg.

Not far to the west, the dark-bearded magister rode to the gates of Lissen Carak, and tapped gently with his staff. Behind him, the plain by the river—burned flat by last year’s battles and now choked with raspberry bushes and alder clumps—was trampled by the Faery Knight’s chevauchée. Out on the plain were four hundred irkish knights, in magnificent harnesses of bronze and gold, some riding stags while others rode horses. Behind them came Bill Redmede and three hundred Jacks and, behind them, a veritable tide of boglins. The rear was brought up by magnificent, alien bands of Outwallers in war paint and more irks, these tall and thin as ash trees, carrying heavy axes on their bronze-byrnie’d shoulders.

When her door warden and her sergeants informed her, Miriam went to the gate in person. She went out on the hoardings alone, covered by a pair of crossbowmen in each of the gate towers.

She did not recognize the man below her outside the portcullis at all. He had black and grey hair and a heavy face with a long, aquiline nose. He rode a bony horse.

“I am the Magister Harmodius,” called the man on the bony horse.

“You’ve changed, then,” she said.

“Yes,” Harmodius said, as if impatient. “I’ve changed bodies.”

“And sides, I suspect,” Miriam said.

Harmodius shook his head. “We have fifty prisoners we wish to release to you. They have not been harmed.”

The garrison of the Westwall castle was marched up to the gate, bedraggled and terrified. They’d lived some days in an army composed of rebels and monsters, and they had, with some justice, expected to be eaten.

“And then you’ll be on your way?” Miriam asked, hiding her fears.

Harmodius, if it was indeed the magister, shook his head. “We are for our own purposes,” he said.

“You are not welcome,” Miriam said. “We hold this fortress for the King. If you make war on the King, get you gone.”

Harmodius raised his hand. “Hear me, Miriam. We are not in open conflict with any force. The Faery Knight has marched to save some of his own people. They must be nearby. Let us only find them and shelter them, and our thanks will be yours forever.”