He shrugged. “Order me,” he said.
She shook her head.
An hour later, a second bastion was stormed, this time by irks. A whole company of the South Brogat militia shot wildly and ran, leaving a half a mile of newly built walls in the hands of the enemy.
Rannulfson went out and looked at the situation for himself, on horseback, and he rode back up the long ramp. His hoardings were long since mounted, and so were the machines that he’d built to copy those the company had used years before; he was confident in his elderly but very capable garrison.
But as soon as he dismounted in the courtyard, he shook his head.
“Their captain’s a duffer and no mistake; he’s no experience. He won’t budge, and to be honest, my lady, he has no knights, and not enough armoured folk to mount a credible attack. His people are out for the second time this year. Their leaders are all off in the west. They’re in a parrilous way, my lady. An’ they could no more retake those walls than a crowd of yer novices.” Rannulfson frowned. “In point o’ fact, the novices would be a good deal more likely to succeed.”
“Can you drive them back with the engines?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I can at least trouble them,” he said, and gave the orders, and a dozen nuns worked on the first loads of stone, enhancing them.
They burst with satisfying concussions, well up the valley toward the remains of Abbington. But an hour later, there was an organized attack along the wall right below the abbey. All four towers loosed buckets of gravel from their massive trebuchets, and the militia held, but one of the novices reported that there were already bogglins inside the defences, moving along the valley.
Miriam had a messenger from the Green Earl in her hand, and she nodded.
“Lord Gavin will drive them out in a few hours. His whole army, with that of the Count of the Borders, is just over the next ridge. We need to be ready to open the gate on the bridge.” She looked at Sister Anne.
Anne nodded. “Give me the key, my lady. I’ll see it done.”
Rannulfson sent six of his best men with the Prioress of Abbington, as Sister Anne was more formally known. The loss of Abbington’s priory had not yet been made official within the Order. And Anne was, after Miriam, the most potent worker of ops in the choir.
Sister Anne rode down the long ramp, even as workmen were taking down the stone bridges that eased wagon access to the great fortress and the garrison women were heating vats of oil. In the chapel, the choir was practicing both music and their defence.
“I miss Amicia,” Miriam told the air.
They should have been ready for this.
A little after the bells rang for nonnes, there was a flash in the aethereal that gave Miriam a heartbeat of warning, and the defences of Lissen Carak sprang erect.
The flash had been a deception. The real attack went in farther south.
The great fortified bridge that linked the south bank to the north, the vital link …
… exploded in a torrent of red fire.
In the real, the detonation was apocalyptic. The central tower and all four central spans vanished, and a vast cloud of steam rose to hide the wreckage. Massive stones began to fall to earth, some crushing hapless militia, some plunging into the already chaotic maelstrom of the river. Sister Anne was killed instantly, as were her knights.
Lissen Carak—Ash
Ash sighed with pleasure.
Attack! he ordered.
A mile away, at the top of the great ridge that dominated the valley of the Cohocton on the south bank, Ser Gavin watched his link with the fortress vanish in a single, cataclysmic detonation whose echoes rumbled along the Adnacrags for many heartbeats.
Gavin closed his eyes in disbelief.
“I thought that they had massive magical protections?” he asked Tamsin.
She shook her head. “They did,” she said. “We need to run.”
Lissen Carak
Immediately after the assault in the aethereal came the first real assault in the real. A wave of bogglins threw themselves at the entrenchments, and died; and a second. By the third assault, the garrisons of the little redoubts were aware that they were islanders in a rising tide of enemies, and most of them panicked; they were not professional soldiers, and there were not twenty knights among the whole host, and they were outnumbered by many hundreds to one.
Rannulfson stood on the tall north tower and tried to use his engines to best effect, hammering the wave front of the bogglins, isolating a huge company of irks off to the west, loosing rocks to cover a garrison as it attempted to cut its way free of the monsters surrounding it. It was the redoubt facing the castle gate and the village at its foot; indeed, the upcast of its ditch had been along the same line where the company had dug an entrenchment years before.
The garrison was almost two hundred men and women; Albans from the south Cohocton, local men, and Rannulfson’s garrison knew them. They concentrated their machines to support that one redoubt as the others fell, most of them surrendering to irks or renegade men when offered their own survival.
The company of North Brogat burst out their own east-facing gate, charged through a few hundred surprised bogglins, and made it to the foot of the long path that ran up the flank of the abbey’s ridge.
Every machine in the fortress loosed stone to cover their flight, or attack, depending on the point of view. The trebuchet arms bent and flexed like giants throwing rocks, and Rannulfson opened the sallie-porte in person and counted them as they came in: one hundred and sixty men and women. A few had kept their weapons; many had thrown them down in order to move faster on the Abbey Ridge slopes.
Almost two thousand militia and workers surrendered to the overwhelming force of the assault. They were stripped of weapons by their ravening foes, and the wilder western bogglins ate a few as the rest were prodded along a gauntlet of irks and trolls and bogglins. But even terror passes; they were taken out of the heart of the horde and made to walk east, pricked by the irks’ spears, or reinvigorated by the shining beaks of the daemons.
Most of them moved in blank-eyed fatigue. Very few of them had any spirit left to fight when the worms came for them.
Ash chuckled as he donated fresh foot soldiers to his new ally. His alliance was cemented in a trade of powers, and his path was set.
He knew perfectly well that the will was seeking to mislead him. Alliance was nothing but a contest of liars at the best of times. But he would use the will to clear the armies of man from the gate. It was not his chosen form of absolute dominance, but the will was too strong to face.
He felt it seize the puny wills of the damned. He nodded. It was creating an army of puppets and Ash was happy to let it do so.
He placed ten bridges of ice over the Cohocton and unleashed his tide of bogglins onto the south bank, even as the boldest of his horde attempted to scale the ridge on which the great abbey sat. They were exterminated, of course.
He had chosen the worms over Lot. But Lot didn’t need to know that, and neither did other people.
He opened a version of himself and reached out, across the river, across the aethereal, to the leader of the enemy: the ancient Queen of Faery.
“Come, my lady,” he crooned in the aethereal. “Now is the time for enmity to fade and alliance to change. Men have failed. Help me win the gate, and I will provide a vast reward.”
Tamsin hesitated, and then fled.
He let her go. If he could turn her; the armies of men would be chaff, or better, fodder for his new allies. Suddenly the Queen of Faery was a valuable prize indeed.
He was close. Very close. He could feel it, and he knew what his next step had to be.
North of the Cohocton—Bill Redmede
Guided by bears, Tapio’s little army crept east along a chain of meadows. They were almost forty leagues north of the Cohocton; the stags looked better, and so did the men, and irks; three nights of sleep, three days of eating the fruits and meats of the Wild, and they were swinging alon
g.
Tapio paused to let Bill Redmede cross a beaver dam.
“Sometimes I think we should just run off into the woods and never come out,” Redemede said.
“Me, too,” Tapio said.
The bears seemed to know every wrinkle in the ground, and the third night they brought in two dozen more bears in heavy maille with great steel axes clutched in their all-too-human hands. The tall white bear who led the newcomers inclined his head to Tapio.
“Hail, King of the Woods,” he said.
“Hail, mighty bear,” Tapio said. “Who are you, sssir?”
The bear nodded. “I am Blizzard,” he said. “I fought for Thorn, not once, but many times.” He looked at his bears; they were well provided with weapons and other spoils of war. “But I think this time I will side with you. Thorn is gone; this thing that remains is no friend of bears.”
Stone Axe and Elder Flower both nodded to the newcomer. “There is no fighting among bears, except in evil times,” Elder Flower said. She sighed. “These are evil times, but perhaps not so evil. Blizzard will stand with us. That opens the Baglash, the hidden valley down the lakes.”
Blizzard growled. There followed an explosion of growls and mews, punctuated by something like coughing.
Tapio, in fact, understood the language of the bears perfectly well, but he allowed them to disagree among themselves. The Baglash was the very heart of the Bear Holds in the Adnacrags. Neither man nor irk had trespassed; not even the Earl of Westwall’s patrols had ever penetrated into the Baglash.
Finally Blizzard nodded. “Very … rrrrr … well; in for an, rrrrr, ant’s nest, in for a … hmmmgrrrg … honey tree, as my mother used to say. We will take you down, grrrg, our lakes, and to the Fishing Tree.”
The big white bear was as good as his word, and the men and irks feasted on honey and muskrat meat as they moved east on smooth trails. Then Tapio and Redmede pressed them hard, and Magister Nikos ate his honey, cast his wards, and rode with them, conversing with the other magisters. Blizzard proved a worthy companion, although his views on the sanctity of the Wild were fierce.
“I am no, ggrrrr, friend of, hararg, men,” Blizzard said. “I would have none in the, grrrr, in the, hmmm, woods and waters of my home. Indeed, hrack!, magister, I hate you all; even you, hrarg!, who speak so well, and who, I think, loveth truth. You are, grrrr, like a stain on the earth; you take and take and take, aye, hrack!, and never give. Your only code, hrrm, as a people, hrrrm, is greed.”
“But you will guide us to Lissen Carak,” Nikos said. The bears would allow no campfires in their holding, but insisted that the men and irks and stags and horses press close at night for warmth. So speaking to the white bear was like speaking to a shadow; his fur was a pale blob on the other side of the sleeping circle.
“Hrrmmm!” muttered the white bear. “Garg. Better men than dragons and worms.” He chuckled. “We’ve tried, grrrr, we’ve tried them both.”
Nikos leaned forward. “You have seen the gates open before? You remember?”
The great eyes opened and closed, but it was Elder Flower who answered. “We, grrr, remember,” she said.
Outside Lissen Carak—Ser Gavin Muriens
Ser Gavin watched the escalade of the carefully planned entrenchments with something like death in his heart, and despair threatened to overwhelm him.
The Count of Borders was devastated. “It is all my fault,” he said.
Ser Gavin was tempted, basely tempted, to agree. You came west to show you could, and left them to die. If you had filled those entrenchments with knights and held the sword in your own fist, this would not be happening.
But he didn’t. “There’s no time for blame,” Gavin said. “We have an army; we have to move back east to the fords, at the very least. In the very worst case, we join hands with the queen’s army and come back on the north bank to relieve the fortress.”
“Christ, if it even holds,” the count muttered. “I beg you to take command, Ser Gavin. I am unworthy.” The count tore his surcoat from his body and threw it to the ground beneath his horse’s hooves, and tears flowed from his eyes. Across the river, a crowd of workers were being herded along by their daemonic captors.
Gavin narrowed his eyes impatiently at the dramatic gesture. “No,” he said. “I will not accept your resignation! You will stay, and we will command together. Damn it, my lord, I’ve cocked up every day. No one will take my job.”
The Count of the Borders froze.
“I mean it. I cannot spare you, my lord.” Gavin was watching the disaster, but he was also watching the sky. “We need to ride for the fords. Thank God that Wishart reopened the old road. Tamsin?”
“Gavin?” she asked, mimicking him.
“Can you keep us alive?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Ask me tonight,” she said. “The dragon is trying to seduce me.”
“Sweet Christ,” Gavin said, a bolt of terror gliding up his spine.
Tamsin spat on the ground. “As if I would betray my mate, even if I would abandon you. Ash loves no one and knows not love. Let him stew.” She frowned. “But if he comes for me … I cannot stop him for long.”
Gavin thought a moment. “We cannot retreat forever,” he said. “What about the nuns?”
“They are puissant,” Tamsin said. “But for them we would long since have been conquered. Pray that the dragon keeps his yellow eye on them, and not on us.”
Hounded by bogglins and worse, the remnants of the Alliance Army of the West moved along the road that ran south of the Cohocton. Gavin paused as they passed over the Little Nemen; just there, he’d faced a behemoth, and just there, he’d tried to kill his damned, arrogant brother, who’d returned from the dead with an army of mercenaries to save them.
Damn him.
Gavin might have chuckled, if he’d been less afraid. As it was, he wished his brother would reappear with his sell-swords and save the world, because Gavin had run out of tricks.
All day he watched the sky.
All day his unrested army ran, walked, trudged, and slunk east as the trenches they had expected to occupy were taken and the defenders massacred or enslaved within earshot.
Sometime after nonnes, the stroke fell on them, but not from the air. Instead, a series of bridges appeared across the Cohocton, most of them well behind his rear guard, but two just even with his bogglins and 1Exrech.
The enemy began to cross the Cohocton.
Gavin knew immediately that he had to fight, but he was low on arrows and fodder and almost everything that made an army an army, and the level of disorganization in his beaten army was greater than even he had expected, so that when he tried to find Lord Gregario, he found only Redmede and his foresters.
“Knights rode off and left us,” Redmede said bitterly.
“We have bogglins coming right up against the rear guard,” Gavin said.
Redmede sighed. “Alright,” he said, and laid an ambush among the bones of the dead from the last battle on the banks of the Nessen. Gavin could see the bleaching bones of the behemoth.
“Six shafts a man,” John Hand said.
“I know,” Harald Redmede replied.
Half an hour later, Gavin found Gregario, with almost two hundred knights who were resting their horses, and he led them back in time to save Redmede’s foresters, who were locked in a desperate struggle on the stream’s bank, trying to hold while 1Exrech and 53Exrech extricated their legions.
The air smelled curiously musky as they retreated over a stream choked with dead things and beginning to overflow its banks into the tangle of Alders that marked the spring flood lines.
Gregario wrinkled his nose. “What the fuck is that?” he asked. He was looking at a series of deep nicks in his long sword and wondering if he’d ever see a sword cutler again.
“That’s the smell of 1Exrech, recruiting,” Gavin said. Indeed, if anything, the two bogglin legions, despite a day’s fighting, looked stronger. In a day of disaster, it was the only ray of lig
ht.
Except that Ash hadn’t attacked, and they were, mostly, still alive.
Gregario nodded, and forced a smile. He rode forward, thrust his rough-edged sword home in the scabbard at his hip, and leaned down to thank 1Exrech, whose white armour was stained and mottled from three weeks of fighting.
The wight raised his elongated head and the mandible opened in a hiss of praise. “Your warriorssss … are … very … ssstrong …” said the wight.
Gregario nodded as the haunting, sibilant voice rose.
“Allies,” Gregario said.
And late in the day, the Count of Borders caught the easternmost host of bogglins crossing an abandoned farm, and he led his knights, who were, despite everything, rested, well fed, and on fresh horses, in a crushing charge that stopped the flow of enemies cold and rolled them back to the edge of the trees. A hastenoch was killed, and a dozen adversariae. He lost twenty armoured knights, but the little victory cheered them all, and the army tottered into the camp that the merchant convoys usually used on their last night before making the fair at Lissen Carak to find that they were linking up with the northernmost of Desiderata’s logistics, and there was sausage and fresh apples for every woman and man, and fodder for horses.
“I feel like I’m living in my own nightmare,” Gavin muttered to Tamsin. “Not far from here, I woke up to find I was covered in scales.” He took a bite of sausage.
Tamsin smiled. “A miracle,” she said.
“A curse,” Gavin said.
“A miracle,” Tamsin said. “As great a miracle as Ash not falling on us today. I could not have saved you. Why did he withhold his talons?”
Gavin couldn’t answer her, because he was already asleep, sitting in his harness, on the bare ground, with a sausage in his hand.
Albinkirk—The Prior of Harndon
The sun was setting, as red as wrath, amid the dark columns of soot in the far west, beyond the foothills of the Adnacrags, when three hundred horses crossed the Cohocton at the fords, their riders swimming the navigable parts despite the freezing water and the risk in armour. They met a body of not-dead on the Albinkirk road and crushed them, and rode on, the sounds of the hooves like the thunder of a distant storm that rolled from the fords all the way to the gates of Albinkirk.