And their reward had been to be assigned to this.
His lips worked. He wanted to spit to clear the foul taste from his mouth, but he couldn’t know who was watching. Even in the dark and the rain there was bound to be someone, some set of gimlet eyes just waiting to report his attitude to Paxtyn or Father Trynt or to Father Zhames Symmyns, Father Trynt’s assistant. Although, to be fair, Symmyns might not care all that much. He’d enforced his superior’s orders for the guards to “encourage” the prisoners with their whips and clubs, but it seemed to Mahafee that he hadn’t gone out of his way to find opportunities for fresh brutality the way far too many of the guards did. And whatever else his faults, Father Zhames had at least allowed—indeed, encouraged—the guards to give the prisoners time to erect what pitiful shelters they could at each stop. For that matter, he’d even convinced Father Trynt that it would be wise to allow the prisoners to gather firewood each night, as well. He’d pointed out that with so many prisoners in the column, there were thousands of hands to gather the wood the guards needed, and if they used married prisoners, or those with children—or parents—in the column, they were unlikely to flee into the wilderness and abandon their family members. And if they were gathering wood for the guards, anyway, they might as well be allowed to retain at least some of it for their own use.
It was a cold, calculating sort of logic, but Mahafee had seen Father Zhames watching the prisoners huddled around their own fires when Father Trynt was in his tent. The lieutenant suspected Father Zhames had … shaped his logic to appeal to his superior.
Even if that was true, however, it wouldn’t do Mahafee one damned bit of good if Paxtyn and Father Trynt reported him to the Inquisition for continuing to “mollycoddle” the heretics in the column.
No, he thought almost despairingly. Not the heretics in the column; the accused heretics in the column. Am I the only officer in this whole Archangel-forsaken march who remembers that not one of them has been convicted of heresy or blasphemy yet?
He drew a deep breath and turned on his heel, squelching off through the mud towards his platoon’s bivouac. They were due on watch in less than an hour.
“Who goes there?!”
The challenge stopped Mahafee, and he felt a stir of pride. Whatever the rest of the guard force might have allowed itself to become, his platoon were still soldiers.
“Lieutenant Mahafee,” he replied to the sentry.
“Was getting a little worried about you, Sir,” another voice said, and Mahafee smiled faintly as a shadow detached itself from the night beside the sentry. “Beginning to think you might’ve forgotten we had the duty,” Sergeant Ainghus Kohrazahn said dryly.
“You know, it had slipped my mind, Ainghus. I appreciate your reminding me.”
“What a sergeant’s for, Sir,” Kohrazahn told him, but the sergeant was close enough now for Mahafee to see his expression at least dimly in the light of one of the encampment’s rain-sputtering torches. That expression was far more worried than the sergeant’s tone … or any expression Kohrazahn would have allowed any of the members of his platoon to see.
“I had a brief conversation with Major Paxtyn,” Mahafee told him. “It’s under control, though.”
“Good to hear, Sir.”
Mahafee heard the wariness—and the warning—in those four words. Ainghus Kohrazahn was no shrinking flower of delicacy, but the lieutenant knew the sergeant was as sickened by the constant brutality as he was himself. And he also knew Kohrazahn was worried—deeply worried—about him. They’d been together since Cahnyr Kaitswyrth’s army had marched out of the Temple Lands. Along the way, they’d saved each other’s lives at least a half-dozen times, and Mahafee was uneasily aware that the bonds between the two of them—and, for that matter, between all of the platoon’s members—had more to do now with their loyalty to one another than with their loyalty to the Army of God. There were times he thought that mutual loyalty might well be stronger than their loyalty to Mother Church, as well. Or even to the Archangels themselves.
And because that was so, he could not—dared not—defy Paxtyn, because if he did, Kohrazahn and the platoon would almost certainly support him. And if they did that.…
“It’s all good, Ainghus,” he said reassuringly, even as he wondered if anything would ever be “good” again. “It’s all good.”
* * *
Dialydd Mab paused under the leaves of the dripping trees. If he’d still been human, he would have drawn a deep breath to settle himself. Indeed, he did draw that deep breath, but it was only remembered reflex.
He checked the icons Owl had projected across his vision. The last of the AI’s remotes was settling into position, and he smiled coldly as he remembered a conversation with Nahrmahn Baytz in his Siddar City bedchamber. Everything he’d said then was true. There were times when the thought of the millions of dead the jihad had already claimed, and of the hundreds of human beings whose blood he’d personally shed, came down upon him like one of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s steam-powered drop hammers. As he’d told Nahrmahn then, it was worst when he thought about how easily he could turn into a monster even worse than Zhaspahr Clyntahn. It wasn’t just the killing; it was the fact that for a PICA, it was almost like some obscene VR game, because even though the carnage was completely real, his victims had no chance at all of killing him.
Every bit of that was true, yet what haunted him wasn’t really the killing itself, or even his own effective invulnerability. It was the fact that so many of his victims were simply doing the best they could in accordance with what they’d been brought up and taught to believe. It was the knowledge that so few of them truly deserved the label of “evil,” and that the reason they’d died was simply that they’d been in the wrong place and crossed his path at the wrong time.
But sometimes … oh, yes—sometimes.
“Are you ready, Owl?”
“Yes, Commander Athrawes.”
“Then let’s go.”
* * *
The windy dark was flayed by a sudden eruption of lightning.
Ansyn Mahafee had been winding his watch while Kohrazahn headed off to turn out the duty section. Now he dropped the expensive timepiece and spun towards the trees, reflexes already throwing him flat, as long, livid tongues of flame exploded between the trunks. There had to be at least a dozen riflemen out there … and every one of them had to be equipped with one of the heretics’ new multi-shot rifles!
Bullets hissed overhead, and he heard cries of shock—and screams of anguish—as they found their marks. He couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly see to shoot under these conditions, but the attackers seemed to be doing just fine.
The men of his platoon began to return fire. He and Ainghus Kohrazahn had seen to it that they didn’t forget the habit of digging trenches every night. Now they rolled into them, splashing into the water which had gathered in their bottoms, and took their rifles with them. Their rate of fire was hopelessly lower than that of whoever was attacking them, but at least they had protection while they reloaded and he could hear Kohrazahn’s deep voice holding them together, coordinating their fire.
Mahafee started crawling towards his platoon sergeant, then stopped, staring in disbelief as a single human being came out of the trees.
He was tall, with an oddly curved sword in his right hand and one of the heretics’ “revolvers” in his left hand. Muzzle flashes—from the prisoner guards as well as from the trees behind him—picked him out like spits of lightning even before he entered the uncertain illumination of the torches and the campfires. As far as Mahafee could tell, he was unarmored, but that didn’t seem to bother him at all. He moved quickly—inhumanly quickly—and the pistol in his left hand tracked like some sort of mechanism. He fired on the run, which should have made it impossible for him to hit a thing, yet a guard went down with every shot.
Then the revolver was empty. It disappeared into its holster, and a second blade, perhaps half the length of the sword he’d already drawn, mate
rialized in his left hand in its stead.
One of the guards came at him with a bayoneted rifle. The short blade blocked the thrust; the long blade hissed in a blood-flaring arc and the guard’s head leapt from his shoulders.
That’s not possible, a small voice said through the madness and the chaos in the depths of Ansyn Mahafee’s brain.
He’d seen enough combat by now to know how ridiculous the bards’ tales of one-handed decapitations truly were. Real combat was far uglier and far more brutal than any of those stories ever admitted, and real soldiers couldn’t simply lop heads off with a single sidearm blow. It couldn’t be done.
Yet the charging shape of nightmare in front of him could do it. And whoever it was, he did it again as a second guard came at him. Dozens—scores—of the guards were firing at him now, probably because they couldn’t see a single target under the trees, and it did no good at all. Mahafee had been astounded by how many shots could be fired in a battle without hitting anyone, but surely not all of those bullets could be missing him!
Only they were. Somehow, they were, and he heard screams of terror as the attacker waded through that storm of fire to get at the men behind it.
“Demon! Demon!” someone wailed, and something clicked in Mahafee’s mind. Mother Church and the Inquisition might call them “demons,” but there was another name for them, as well, and he knew now that they’d meant every single word of the messages they’d left behind in their bloody work. “De—!”
The cry cut off abruptly, and then that single attacker—that single seijin—was at the center of at least a dozen men.
They had as much chance against him as a stand of bamboo against a grazing dragon. They didn’t just die. They flew away from him, not as intact bodies but as bits and pieces of bodies. No man could come within his reach and live.
The seijin forged steadily toward the tents set aside for Father Trynt and the rest of the clergy, cutting his way through anything in his path like the wrath of Chihiro itself, and the rifle fire pouring out of the trees crashed over the wavering, terrified defenders like the sea. Every instinct told Mahafee to stay exactly where he was, but some stubborn spark of duty shoved him to his feet, instead.
“Lieutenant! Lieutenant—Ansyn! What the hell d’you think you’re doing?! Get down, Goddamn it!”
He heard Ainghus’ voice behind him, even through the tumult and the deafening thunder of rifles, but it didn’t matter. Whatever he thought about the Inquisition, he had his duty. If he abandoned that, he had nothing, and it was only now that he truly realized how desperately he’d clung to that concept as his lifeline in a world turned to horror. Duty, honor, loyalty to his comrades and the men under his command—whatever one chose to call it, it was a far more complex concept than he’d ever realized before the Army of God marched into Siddarmark, and it was the only thing he had left. In this moment he saw that with a clarity he’d never before attained, and he knew that he would rather die than surrender the one thing which had allowed him to remain someone he recognized.
He started to run, drawing his own sword as he went, hearing more bullets than he could possibly have counted hiss by him from those lightning-shot woods. They couldn’t possibly all be missing him, either, yet his life seemed as charmed as the seijin’s. He half stumbled over dead and dying men, left in the ruin of the seijin’s wake, and he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that his own body would be joining them soon.
He ran faster.
There!
Major Paxtyn raised his own pistol as the men between him and the seijin went down … or threw away their weapons and ran. The major’s face was twisted in fear, his eyes huge and disbelieving, and he gripped the pistol in both hands. Flame exploded from the barrel, the muzzle flash almost touching the seijin’s unarmored chest. He couldn’t have missed at that range, yet the seijin never even slowed, and Paxtyn cried out in raw terror—then screamed in agony—as that dreadful sword disemboweled him. He went down, shrieking, trying to hold his butchered belly together, and the man who’d killed him simply vaulted over his body and left him to finish dying behind him.
Mahafee tasted the sour burn of vomit at the back of his throat and hurled himself after the seijin as the other man—or the demon; Mother Church’s claims of demonhood seemed far less problematical at the moment—reached the tents just as Father Trynt darted out of one of them, staring about him in horrified panic and disbelief.
“There you are, Father!” The deep voice cut through the tumult almost effortlessly, yet it was impossibly calm, almost conversational. The seijin wasn’t even breathing hard! “I’ve been looking for you. You should have heeded my warning.”
“Demon!” Father Trynt screamed, signing Langhorne’s scepter against him, and the seijin laughed.
It came through the chinks in the gate to hell, that laugh. And then, with blinding speed, he dropped the longer of his two blades, caught the front of the priest’s cassock in his suddenly empty hand, and snatched Trynt Dezmynd from his feet.
“Give my regards to Father Vyktyr,” that deep voice said. “Tell him Dialydd Mab sent you.”
Dezmynd screamed in horror, feet kicking as he twisted like a terrified cat-lizard kitten in the seijin’s grip. Then that shorter blade buried itself in his belly and butchered its way upward. It exploded back out of the upper-priest’s chest, and Dialydd Mab tossed him away to die.
Mahafee drew in a sobbing breath that mingled horror, fear, and desperation in one and drove his sword into Mab’s back in a powerful lunge backed by all the momentum of his running pursuit.
It never connected.
The seijin reached back with his empty hand, without even looking—without ever having so much as seen Mahafee coming—and caught the naked blade. It was as if Mahafee had driven the keen-edged steel into a brick wall. The thrust simply stopped, with a violence that half numbed his own hand. And then the seijin—Mab—twitched his wrist, and the sword flew out of the lieutenant’s grip.
Mahafee snatched at his dagger, but now Mab turned to face him. The same hand which had stopped his sword, the hand that should have lost fingers to it sharpness, flicked downward. It caught his own hand before it ever reached his dagger, and he cried out in anguish as it twisted his arm, forcing him up onto his toes.
Time froze.
He found himself staring into the rock-hard brown eyes of a man five inches taller than he was. A man whose arm didn’t even tremble as his steely fingers gripped Mahafee’s wrist with crushing force.
“Lieutenant Mahafee,” that same deep voice said calmly, cutting through the tumult—the ongoing screams, the continuing crackle and bellow of rifle fire—with utter clarity. “I’ve been looking for you, too.”
Mahafee stared at him, feeling his complete helplessness in that inhumanly strong grip. The seijin flicked his blade with a snapping motion that cleared most of the blood from it. Then he sheathed it, and something tugged at the lieutenant’s belt as the other man’s left hand plucked Mahafee’s dagger from its sheath. He knew he was about to die, and the terror of that thought choked him, yet at least it would be an end.
“You may not believe this, Lieutenant,” Mab told him, “but this is actually for your protection.”
Protection? Mahafee blinked. That was the most insane thing he’d ever—
Anguish flared like white-hot fire as the blade in the seijin’s hand—Mahafee’s own dagger—stabbed effortlessly through his own upper left arm. The pain was incredible, and yet the thrust was clear, clean, economical, and impossibly quick—the blade recovered almost before the hurt was given.
“You’re going to want to have Sergeant Kohrazahn take care of that, Lieutenant,” that deep voice said. “And just to be on the safe side.…”
Mahafee cried out again as the hand on his right wrist moved upward to his forearm, tightened, and twisted. Bone snapped, and he felt his knees collapsing.
His thoughts flickered and flashed in a welter of confusion, pain, and shock, and somehow the stran
gest thing of all was how gently the man who’d just broken his arm eased him to the ground. He knelt there, still supported by the seijin’s right hand and unable to do anything else, and Mab tossed the bloody dagger over his own shoulder. Then he lowered Mahafee the rest of the way and knelt beside him on one knee while he ripped open the lieutenant’s bloody sleeve and tied a rough but efficient bandage around the deep, wicked wound with flashing dexterity.
“There,” he said, resting one hand lightly, almost companionably, on Mahafee’s breastplate. “That should handle the bleeding until Kohrazahn finds you. He’s headed this way now, so I suppose I’d best be going before I have to leave him proof of how hard the two of you fought, too.”
The lieutenant blinked up at him, his mind slow and sluggish, and Mab smiled ever so slightly. Then the smile disappeared.
“You’re the senior officer of this moving atrocity now,” he said. “Don’t make me regret that I put you in command.”
Mahafee blinked again, hammered by too many shocks, too many impossibilities in too brief a time, to do anything else, and Dialydd Mab patted his breastplate.
“Do your best to survive this jihad, Lieutenant,” he said through the crackle and roar of the other seijins’ gunfire. “The Church is going to need men like you when it’s over.”
Then he vaulted back to his feet, caught up the sword he’d dropped, and disappeared into the night.
.IV.
HMS Destiny, 54, Talisman Island, The Gulf of Dohlar
“So my intention,” Baron Sarmouth said, looking around his rather crowded day cabin at the twenty-odd officers packed into it like sardines, “is to make our presence felt. On the other hand, I’d like the actual strength of our squadron to come as as nasty a surprise as possible to the other side, and I have a few specific surprises I’d like to share with them … eventually.”