“Yes, Holiness,” the priest replied.
Half an hour later, the Patriarch’s advance guard crossed the bridge. There was very little resistance; a few dozen peasants with crossbows, all Brescians and Beronese, pelted his vanguard and slipped away into the woods on the slope above.
They killed two men. Their lack of success cheered the whole Patriarchal army; the rain was sapping their will to fight, and they were a patchwork of loyalties at the best of times, to the Patriarch’s intense irritation.
The rest of the Patriarch’s army began the laborious process of crossing. Soon enough, the scouts explained the cattle ford, and the army crossed twice as fast. Ali and the Patriarch’s constable, both mortal men, breathed easier when the cavalry was across, and a battle line formed.
High on the slope where the green banda had built its signal fire, Sauce looked down through an opening in the forest canopy at her opponents on the plains below. She knew from Wha’hae that Kronmir had been taken. She cared little for the man, but was painfully aware that he’d known most of what she planned.
And what Gabriel had planned.
And that Giselle valued him.
In retrospect, sending him scouting sounded like the stupidest thing she’d ever done.
But if there was one thing at which Sauce excelled, it was dealing with problems as they unfolded, and not thinking about things that didn’t need to be thought on. She had sold her body for money; and then put that away. She examined Jules Kronmir as a problem, and then she put him away. She had to win the battle. Then she’d deal with the next thing.
“Sound the signal,” she said.
Horns rang off the hillsides and echoed along the beautiful valley floor.
Ali-Mohamed el Rafik shook his head. “Why not just stop us at the river?” he asked the djinns of the air. “We’re across now.”
Down on the lower slopes of the wooded ridge, steel was glinting in the trees.
The two battle lines were slightly misaligned. More than slightly; almost half of the Patriarchal army faced an empty wooded slope, and to Ali’s left almost a third of the enemy army hung off his flank.
He winced. He tied back the heavy silk of his khaftan to leave his bow and sword arms free, and while he did that, he watched the hillsides and thought dark thoughts.
Eventually, when he was sure that his employer was not working some dark magic, he pushed himself into the group of priests, so close to the Patriarch that Ali-Mohamed could feel the unnatural heat coming off the man. If he was a man. He pointed.
“Holiness, we will need to crush these before that cavalry crushes us,” he said, pointing at the woods almost directly to their front.
The Patriarch sat above him in a great palanquin of gold, held aloft by twenty men already given to the worms. They wore plate armour and yet would walk all day.
Most of them were the Patriarch’s former political enemies.
“Now I sense a trap,” the Patriarch said. “Those woods could be full of men.”
Ali shrugged, as if to say that anything was possible.
“Speak,” the Patriarch said.
“Holiness, what you say is possible. But standing still is never a good thing in war.” Ali shrugged again. “It is too late to go back across the river.”
A few hundred men on horseback emerged opposite their center. They took a little time to form up; they had become entangled in the deep woods. But when they were formed, their order was superb.
There were perhaps a thousand of them, Ali thought. They rode forward as if they were alone on the field.
“Banner?” the Patriarch asked.
“Saint Katherine,” said a priest. “The foreign sell-swords.”
The Patriarch’s sibilance increased. “We were assured they were in the north? Chasing the rebel?”
None of the priests spoke. Some looked uncomfortable. Ali-Mohamed had spent enough time with them to know that the Patriarch’s tone and even his language had changed very rapidly in the last few weeks; that he said things that were openly blasphemous; that the priests were upset. And that the Patriarch often spoke of the will and the rebel in ways that defied theology.
“What are they doing?” the Patriarch asked.
The soldiers under the banner of Saint Katherine advanced alone. They came forward almost half a mile onto the plain, their brilliant red surcoats and polished armour flaunting their presence. Every eye was on them.
Two hundred paces from the front of the Patriarch’s army, they halted.
The Patriarch raised a screen of hermetical defence. It was done quite casually. Uniquely, in Ali-Mohamed’s experience of sorcery, the Patriarch’s signature colour was scarlet.
“God’s blessing be upon us,” he said. The red dome towered over the field.
Quite close, the enemy mercenaries dismounted.
A woman, her feminine form clear in a kirtle and overgown, stepped out of the ranks of the dismounting men and raised her hands as if invoking God.
San Batiste—Smoke
Six hundred veteran Alban archers reached for arrows.
“Nock,” shouted Smoke. His voice carried on the light breeze.
“Ready,” said Mistress Tancreda, her voice thin and quavering with nerves.
“Mark,” Smoke called.
Tancreda released her working, and opened a two-hundred-yard hole in the Patriarch’s shield, about seventy feet in the air where it was weak. It worked just as it ought to have worked, and she was surprised and almost lost her concentration.
“LOOSE!” shouted Smoke.
Six hundred heavy arrows rose into the air at a steep angle, passed through the enemy shield, and dropped into the empty air behind, and then into flesh.
Of six hundred arrows loosed, perhaps a tenth struck flesh. But others struck armour and shattered, sending needle splinters in all directions, and the loss of forty men, with as many more wounded, in a single stroke, had its effect.
So did the effortless penetration of the Patriarch’s glowing red shield.
The army had to endure three more volleys before the Patriarch mastered the difficulty of making all the parts of his sphere of equal strength; it was really much harder to stop arrows in the real than assaults in the aethereal. Men and horses were dead; a dozen priests who had been near the Patriarch were lying full length in the grass, their magnificent copes stained in their blood, and the Patriarch himself was nearly incandescent with fury. His skin seemed to glow; the smell of burning meat pervaded the air.
“Withdraw,” Ali said. “Holiness, it is you who were correct. It is a trap.” He meant that he’d been correct himself; life as an exile had taught him to pretend that his employers were always right.
The Patriarch had been forced to change the shape and size of his scarlet shield to make it more robust. Now it covered only the center.
Crossbow bolts began to flay his left. They were coming from the Beronese peasants who’d run before. They were back, in a clump of brush almost two hundred paces from the left of the Patriarch’s army. And suddenly their shooting was much more accurate.
The Patriarch rose on his throne and threw gouts of raw red potentia into the leftmost ridge. Two of his emanations started forest fires.
The rest skidded along a low shield and vanished.
His fury was such that he continued a little longer, loosing two more, and heads craned to follow the roaring fireballs as they crossed the sky.
A dozen of the Venikan marines died where they lay, silent, in their ranks, far from the sea and their usual enemies, their bodies burned by the Patriarch’s fury when it splashed through Magister Petrarcha’s shield, and the old man had tears rolling down his cheeks.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “He is like nothing I have ever endured. Red? I know nothing of this.”
“Now’s not the time,” the duchess said, putting an arm through his to steady him.
“I will try attenuation,” Petrarcha said. “I will change his colour.”
> The next pair of fireballs were defeated.
“He is puissant,” Petrarcha muttered. “But untrained. Or rather, not trained as we are trained. He’s like a … dragon.”
Giselle was watching the far hillside. Now that she knew that the old magister was up to the task, her next worry was timing.
The center of the enemy sparkled again as a hundred pinpoints of fire rose from the Patriarch’s shield.
Petrarcha snuffed them out.
The center of the enemy army began to bulge.
“He’s charging the company,” Giselle said with satisfaction.
“Mount!” bellowed Smoke. The pages came forward, and the horses were to hand, and even as the spears of the enemy militia wavered and came on, the company archers rode to the rear.
They rode two hundred yards.
And dismounted.
And of course, by then, the militia were out from under the blood red shield.
The Duchess of Venike turned to her cavalry: the green banda, the best of the company’s pages, and a hundred professional light horse who were her husband’s bodyguard in happier times.
“Let’s go,” she said.
At her feet, Corner stood up. He waved his sword at his men. “Did you want to live forever?” he asked. “Let’s go.”
With a cheer, six hundred Venikans rose to their feet and left their dead to be buried later. They flowed through the wood edge, and out onto the open ground. They were already behind the enemy flank, because of their position.
Corner had his orders, and he knew his part. And he added to them, embroidering quickly. He had been told to engage, but this was sweeter than engagement, and the bastard Patriarch had killed his men, and now Corner would avenge them. His marines were with him; they knew that they were about to deliver a hammer stroke. They strode across the plowed fields as if they were giants of legend, not mere men.
He formed his men up, and then started forward at the leftmost flank of the enemy army, at a trot. It wasn’t lightning fast.
Not to him.
To Sauce and to the Patriarch, it was like a bolt of lighting.
The Venikan marines did not stop at the range of their magnificent crossbows.
Or at half the range.
They trotted forward, three hundred paces wide and two men deep, until their own right was against the river. Another three marines were dead by then; a handful of crossbowmen in the enemy army had begun loosing at a hundred paces. Most had missed the narrow line. Some bolts struck home, and the line closed up.
The enemy line flinched back, trying to find a formation that could resist the Venikans and their rapid advance.
Corner smiled.
His men continued forward, crossbows cocked, thumbs holding their bolts in the grooves.
The enemy line flinched again. They weren’t professionals but butchers and papermakers and perfumers and silversmiths.
At twenty paces, Corner shouted, “Halt.”
Somewhere, a voice was demanding that the mercenary knights charge.
Behind Corner, farther west, Duchess Giselle led her light cavalry across the gravel flats and over the second ford; almost a thousand horse.
“Make ready,” Corner said. His part was already done, really. The movement of the enemy’s cavalry to crush him had been shadowed by the Conte Simone. It wasn’t exactly what Ser Alison had planned, but it was close enough, and Conte Simone liked a good charge. In his rapid advance, Corner had turned a third of the enemy army and opened a hole in their line.
“Present,” Corner said. Six hundred crossbows went to six hundred shoulders; massive crossbows that could throw a bolt two hundred paces or penetrate a small boat. Or armour.
The militia facing him wore breastplates and had magnificent painted pavises, and they knew what was coming.
Men began to flinch, and men broke from the back of the formation and began to run.
“Loose,” Corner said.
Six hundred bolts struck home.
None missed.
A hole seventy paces wide appeared in the enemy spear wall. There were screams.
“Charge,” Corner called, and blew his sea whistle.
His marines dropped their heavy crossbows, drew their swords, and trotted forward, strapping on their bucklers as they went.
Ali-Mohamed saw the enemy light horse go for the baggage. He pursed his lips.
“Holiness?” he said. “We must leave right now.”
The Patriarch was watching his militia in the center fail to catch the company.
He heard the screams and turned to see the collapse of the militia on his left. Who had moved, and thus opened a gaping hole …
Into which a wedge of knights was trotting as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
Ali-Mohamed began to shake his head, because it was as he had predicted. Their left would now collapse; the mercenary knights, if they had any collective brains, would not even try to match the chivalry of the infamous Conte Simone of Berona, whose silk banner was now covering the enemy flank. And the knights in a wedge … could ride straight to the Patriarch without any interference.
“I am not beaten,” the Patriarch said. He drew himself up. He raised a hand and loosed a scarlet beam of coherent light at the wedge of knights, and Conte-Simone’s banner bearer immolated. The next two men in the wedge died; their armour burned and the edges welded together, the soft tissues cooked away inside.
Ali-Mohamed grabbed one red-silk-clad foot. It burned him; he jerked his hands away in shock.
He did not, personally, want to die, but he almost never abandoned an employer. “You are beaten, and worse, Holiness. Now it is only a matter of …”
The Patriarch was shifting his shields to cover his militia.
Three enemy casters all worked together, and there was an emanation.
A levin bolt struck the Patriarch’s shield, and a second passed under the moving shield to detonate in the grass under the hooves of the knights of the Rhumanol, spooking horses and maiming them.
The third working struck by the Patriarchal banner. The Patriarch and all his palanquin carriers were struck to earth as if by a fist, and many did not rise. Ali-Mohamed’s charger was killed and he was down; it took him a long minute to pull his way clear of the dying animal.
He cut its throat. He had loved that horse; more than he did people.
But he’d been paid and well paid to help the Patriarch. Who was on his feet, and casting. There was blood everywhere; the enemy manifestation had been puissant and dozens of messengers and officers were dead. Ali-Mohamed gave the army perhaps fifteen minutes before it broke up; when he saw Conte Simone’s magnificent armour deep in the mercenary knights, he revised that. Shocked by the hermetical attacks and their horses terrified, they’d been caught almost at a stand. The Rhumanol knights were already running. Conte Simone’s banner was back, held aloft by another knight, advancing at a trot, the wedge of his knights cutting like a knife, and the lance in the conte’s hand was bloody and unbroken.
Ali-Mohamed cursed.
He spent another long minute catching a horse.
Then he rode back to the Patriarch, who was rebuilding his shields. By then, Lucius was deep in conflict with four mages. He was not winning.
The Venikan marines had cut their way onto the bridge and now stood astride it, closing off any hope of retreat by the main army, while the smoke rising from the Patriarch’s baggage told him that they had lost even if they could fight their way out. They now had no food.
A whole, untouched enemy battle line emerged from the woods to Ali’s front.
“Now, Holiness. We must run right now.”
The Patriarch rose on his toes, and then continued to rise until he was several feet in the air. He cast another beam of scarlet; the whole ridge was on fire above them.
Ali-Mohamed rode for the cattle ford. He looked back, and the Patriarch was following him, like a tethered kite.
The Duchess of Venike sat her horse in th
e middle of the rout of the Patriarch’s baggage. Her cavalry had their orders, and the baggage was set alight, the wagons broken or overturned, the patient oxen and terrified horses slaughtered.
The frightened acolytes and fearful whores of both sexes were driven off and ignored.
Daniel Favour took the green banda south along the road, making sure there were no reinforcements coming to save the day for the Patriarch. They spread out as they went.
The duchess was unmoved by the screams of the horses or of the women caught by her cavalry. She moved out of the smoke when it got in her eyes, and looked back north, where the serious butchery had begun. The Patriarch’s army had collapsed, and now they were going to drown. The river had risen.
The Duchess of Venike looked at the wreckage of the Patriarch’s army and began to consider a new future for the whole Etruscan peninsula. Her dream of unification was punctuated by sounds of desperation and despair, and she didn’t hear them.
She did hear the hoofbeats of the horse coming through the mess, and she turned to see Petite Moulin, one of the company pages, emerging from the smoke of the burning baggage. She looked around, spotted the duchess, and came straight to her, reining her light warhorse so hard that the animal skidded.
“My lady,” she said with a crisp salute. “Corp’ral Favour says he’s taken a messenger; that Ser Jules was captured last night, and that he’s being—”
“Take me,” Giselle said, her face harder, if anything, than it had been a moment before.
The priest they’d taken had made no pretence at resisting; Wha’hae had broken his arm and twisted it a few times, the man had soiled himself, and now he sang like a bird.
Giselle ignored him. She spotted immediately that Wha’hae wouldn’t meet her eye.
“Well?” she asked Favour.
“Ser Jules was taken last night,” he began.
“And no one told me?” Giselle said patiently.
“Sauce said not to,” Favour said. He shrugged. “Sorry, Duchess.”
Giselle pursed her lips.
“This bastard says they’ve tortured him for eight hours. It’s bad.” He met her eye. Even with her anger burning on her, she admired that he could meet her eye.