The Fall of Dragons

  Michael already had his tablet in his hand. “Order of march?” he asked.

  Gabriel went to Long Paw’s sketch of the road and terrain. “I saw this hill last night. This is where we’ll fight. It will be more like an encounter than an ambush; it’ll take us hours to get there.”

  “We could fight closer?”

  “It’s a nasty mess of ground,” Gabriel said. “After this hill, it’s grassy downs, or whatever passes for grass here—the little low ferny things. Cavalry country. We want to use our knights, is my thought.”

  Michael nodded. He was copying the hasty sketched map onto his slate.

  “Casa, Du Corse, scarecrows?” he said. “And ask Sauce to send Conte Simone through first?”

  “No,” Gabriel said. “Get Payam and his Mamluks if it can be done.”

  Michael smiled. “Five thousand heavy horse.”

  “With bows,” Gabriel said. “Suit the punishment to the crime.”

  The odd, long dawn continued, and the casa marched through rose-coloured light, emerging from a forest of heavy ferns, or fern-like plants, to a rolling plain of basil-scented “grass” that looked like dill and had occasional stands of the plant that looked like fennel and smelled like cinnamon rising from it.

  Francis Atcourt waited with Count Zac and told the lead lances where to wheel off; Zac looked heavy lidded and angry, like a cat rubbed the wrong way, and Bad Tom chose not to mock him. The casa began to move to the right, through the odd, thick grass and up the dominating hill. Mortirmir was already at the top with the emperor and the staff; the imperial standard fluttered in the fitful breeze. Two hundred Nordikaans were lying in the grass, asleep.

  The emperor was going over the battlefield with George Comnena, the Caesar. A field forge, using wood transported from Arles, was cheerfully lit behind the emperor’s standard, and three Harndoner armourers were refitting Lord Michael’s troublesome front fauld; Edmund was making rivets from wire, the anvil singing under his hammer; Duke was shaping. Marcy, one of the apprentices, was being taught how to make quaveh in a small copper pot, the Ifriquy’an way that the emperor and his officers preferred, thick with honey, by Anne Woodstock, who was already fully armoured.

  The emperor was being armed in his flying harness by MacGilly and a new page, Hamwise, a very young man indeed, someone’s younger son. Toby stood eating an apple and coaching them both.

  The emperor continued. “No, George. If they do not want to fight, we let them pass.”

  Woodstock appeared with a tray of small horn cups of quaveh and offered them around. Morgon Mortirmir took his and sipped at it, made a face redolent with pleasure, and drank the rest off in a shot.

  “I think your highness is wrong,” the Caesar said. He drank his quaveh. “I think that—”

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “Go on,” he said.

  “What if they take our gate?” Comnena said. “Why risk it?”

  “We’re on a tight timetable, and I’m sure that Clarissa and her rather excellent choir of modest sorcerers can hold the gate, much less the constable and his garrison, who are all professionals.” Gabriel was watching the green banda and the Vardariotes moving farther out on the plain, their positions only occasionally betrayed by a flash of metal.

  Comnena took his cup, looked around at the other members of the inner circle, and shrugged. “It seems like a risk,” he said carefully.

  “It’s all a risk. Very well, I hear you; but we have no time for this.”

  “Half the garrison of Arles is hiding among the Alemain knights,” Comnena said. “And the Queen of Arles is standing about sixty feet away. I’m sorry. No one else dared tell you.”

  Gabriel Muriens let fly a string of profanities. He turned and looked back at the lances of the casa. He needed no guide now to spot the slim figure in the excellent armour. He saw Clarissa de Sartres standing by Philip de Beause and he set his jaw.

  Then he looked back, under his brows, at Comnena. He laughed. “I guess I really am emperor,” he said. “People are hiding things from me.”

  Bad Tom drank off his quaveh. “E’ery loon wi’ armour wants to be here, wi’ us, doing the great deed.” He grinned. “Ye canna’ blame ’em.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Doesn’t anyone want to die in bed? Fine. Fine. Anne, send a tumbler of quaveh to the Queen of Arles with my compliments and tell her that she is too tall to be a page, and if she has that much armour, she may as well serve as a knight. But my will remains; if we can avoid this fight through either maneuver or negotiation, we will avoid it.”

  Mortirmir was kneeling now. He was cutting at the odd grass with his eating knife.

  Everyone was used to him, and they ignored him. He looked disconcerted for a moment and then he wandered forward to where the archers of the casa were digging in the springy turf, throwing an upcast while sweating pages placed stakes that the baggage wagons had carried all the way from Arles.

  Comnena shook his head. “We could ambush them,” he said.

  “Told him that me’sel,” Tom said.

  The emperor bowed coldly to the Queen of Arles, who approached with her face burning red like the long-rising sun.

  “Morally, ambushing an alien army on an alien world without prior warning would be the equivalent of jumping a stranger in an alley, killing him, and taking his purse.” He looked around.

  “Aye,” Tom Lachlan said. “And?”

  Michael was still being fitted by the armourers, but he guffawed. “When did we get such tender consciences?” he asked.

  “Conscience has been growing on me,” Gabriel snapped at Michael. “I blame all of you. The pretence of being a mighty and beneficent emperor perhaps.”

  Before the tension could escalate, Long Paw rode up on a tired pony, made a courtly reverence to his emperor, and swept his arm over the plain. “We have it all,” he said. “They are already marching on the road. They have a handful of scouts out; a dozen on the road, fifty either side.”

  “Tell us about fighting salamanders,” the emperor commanded.

  “Hot to the touch, incredibly tough, but no better armoured than a person, and the one we fought had no metal armour. Very, very fast. As fast as me, or faster.” Long Paw spoke with the unconscious arrogance of a master swordsman. He was so fast that there were good men and women who didn’t practice with him.

  “Hermeticals?” Michael asked. Duke was kneeling by him, punching new holes in a new leather tab.

  “Our sample of one salamander had a single, powerful bolt, bright red, not like anything I’ve seen; he threw it repeatedly.” Long Paw spread his hands apologetically. “No real idea about shields. Must have had some. Where’s Brown?”

  Gabriel fingered his beard. “With Sauce,” he said. “They’re on the causeway right now.”

  “The Regent of Galle is just entering the field,” Long Paw said. “Ser Pavalo has passed the gate and is urging his Mamluks forward.” He looked around, unfazed by the eminence of his audience. “The biggest thing is that they grow things back. They regenerate.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Very fast, hard to kill, no metal armour, and when you put one down, you have to finish it. Tell all the troops. Put the scarecrows right here on top of the ridge. They’ll be the anvil.”

  “I thought we weren’t fighting?” Michael asked, a little mockingly.

  “Send for a herald,” Gabriel said.

  In moments, an imperial messenger appeared.

  The emperor exchanged bows. “There is an army of salamanders moving on this road,” Gabriel said. “I wish to negotiate with them.”

  Gabriel wrote out a message, and handed it to the messenger. She bowed, mounted a borrowed horse, took a long white lance with a green and white pennon, and rode off, unarmed.

  “That’s courage,” Gabriel said.

  “She’s a loon,” Tom agreed. “Won’ you feel a louse when they kill her an’ eat her?”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. “My, everyone is so fucking helpful this morning.”

/>   Gabriel allowed himself a long sigh of relief when the tiny cloud of road dust was revealed in the rosy half-light to be his herald, returning. She was flushed; her robes blew behind her like wings.

  She leapt from her horse with a flare and bowed on one knee, and Adrian Goldsmith’s charcoal moved rapidly, sketching her, sketching her restless mount.

  “Your Grace, it took us time to find … a language.” She met the emperor’s eye. “They know Low Archaic but refuse to speak it. They called it the ‘slave’s tongue.’”

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow. Then he shook his head.

  “Regardless,” he said, “you have performed a great deed.”

  She flushed again, this time with pleasure. “Majesty, I fully admit I was terrified. But they were very courteous. The old tradition of the green and white banner; they have a creature bearing the same.”

  Gabriel’s face twisted in a parody of a smile. “So we will meet, and negotiate?”

  The messenger shook her head. “No, sir. They are deploying to fight you. Their council evinced amazement that you have moved so fast, and pleasure that they will have an engagement so early in what they referred to as ‘the contest’ in the language of the adversariae.” She bowed her head. “Majesty, in truth, I could scarcely follow what they said. They all speak at once; I was introduced to a council but I could not tell the councillors from foot soldiers. They are of all sizes, from taller than Lord Lachlan to smaller than Squire Woodstock. I was offered neither insult nor attack, but those to whom I was introduced seemed to know all about men. She paused. “When we had settled on language, Sire, they asked me if I was worm meat or slave.”

  Gabriel looked at Michael. “Get Mortirmir,” he said.

  Comnena grinned. “He’s making mud pies with the archers,” he said, and sent one of his gentlemen to fetch the magister.

  “And?” Gabriel asked.

  “When they discovered that I was man, they insisted that I should become a slave for my own good. But they offered me no violence.” She bowed.

  Sukey pushed forward. She was in a man’s leather jerkin and heavy silk hose, and nothing about her looked masculine. She had a heavy hangar on her hip, borne on a belt of gold links, and she stood with one hand on a hip when she paused and caught the emperor’s eye.

  “Sukey?” he said.

  “Cap’n?” she said. “This thin fodder kills horses. Don’t let anyone eat it. Lila Crowberry thinks the smoke is bad, too; we have a line of cook fires behind the ridge and now we’re digging the fire pits deeper. And the soil is very thin …”

  Gabriel cursed. After months of discussing the need for people to eat, of reinforcing to everyone how dangerous the alien worlds might be, nonetheless, the tendency of every horse, mule, donkey, and bullock to put its head down and munch anything it found …

  “How many have we lost?” he asked.

  “Fifty? A hundred?” She shrugged. “Cavalry need to know to keep their mounts from eating.”

  Tom Lachlan walked off toward the horse lines, as did every squire and page within earshot.

  Mortirmir approached. “Tell me about your fire pits,” he said to Sukey.

  She shrugged. “It’s all rock under five inches of soil.”

  “Rock?” the magister asked.

  She frowned. “Well, not all rock. More like old crap; roof tiles …”

  “We are in the midst of a great city,” Mortirmir said. “It covered all this; in fact, the whole great hill on which we stand is a pile of rubble five hundred feet high or higher. The ground here is flat. That ridge over there”—here he pointed across the low valley—“that ridge was another huge town, or palace complex or massive temple.”

  “Jesu Christe,” muttered Ser Michael.

  “What happened?” Sukey asked.

  Mortirmir shrugged. “I don’t know. It would take generations to dig all this out.”

  In the two hours that had passed, Du Corse had come up and deployed all his Gallish levies to the left of the round-topped ridge. When he was done, he rode to the emperor and now stood with him, and most of the household knights who were part of the unspoken inner circle, as well as most of the mages.

  Mortirmir had dug several holes in the turf, and stood with the astrologers. They were talking animatedly; Mortirmir could be felt to be loaning them ops.

  He came over. “We’ll be fighting almost without access to the aethereal,” he said to the staff.

  The emperor nodded, watching the enemy. They were moving over the next line of hills; most of their right wing was still hidden along the road in the heavier ferns and a series of small ridges like fingers playing out from an arm, which was what the far ridge had looked like from the air, even in the oddly lit darkness.

  Their force clearly had a center, right, and left; its organization was not so alien. Opposite him, the center was cresting the ridge; a heavy block that occupied a little more space than his own, with the casa and the scarecrows included. They had banner poles displaying pennons, and iridescent flashes, and in one case, the whole skeleton of what a scout assured them was an irk.

  To their right, there was a column; it was wedge tipped, and well organized, and even as he watched, it extended to his right, outflanking the casa.

  He pointed.

  Bad Tom was already mounted. “I’ll refuse a little and invite ’em in,” he said.

  “Best hope Long Paw can read our minds,” the emperor said.

  Du Corse was also mounting.

  “Just tell your lads to hold. They’re coming at us in a standard, ancient formation; there are the loins, there are the horns. See it? Their left is in disorder; no idea why, but if it was on better ground, it would look just like their right, with a wedge tip and an extended order to allow a long envelopment.” Gabriel was pointing with a white baton that Woodstock had handed him. “See it?”

  Du Corse looked smug. “Of course,” he said.

  “If we can stop their first charge, we have them,” Gabriel said. “Or that’s how I see it.” He looked wistfully at his messenger. “Seems wasteful. But I strongly recommend, gentlemen, that you use your knights, mounted, to break up that charge so that it is easier on your infantry. You have heard Ser Robert Cavel’s views on the salamanders. And we won’t have much in the way of ops.” He shrugged.

  He noted Edmund standing off to the side, clearly eager to speak.

  “Edmund,” he asked.

  “Sir. We could fire on them; they are in range.” Edmund bowed.

  “Be my guest,” Gabriel said. “Try and break up the point of the rightmost wedge.” He looked at Comnena. “If the gonnes have a little luck, I want you to roll forward and use your bows; trade distance for time. Remember they are almost as fast as horses; treat them like cavalry.”

  Comnena smiled. “Ave, Imperator,” he said, and bowed.

  “If we go over their wounded, behead them,” he said, his voice grim. “Needs must when the devil drives.”

  Ser Michael frowned.

  Gabriel went behind the smoking field forge, where Ataelus had just had a new nail put into a horseshoe, and where Ariosto waited. The griffon looked ill; his feathers were not as shiny, as iridescent, as Gabriel was used to, and his purple-pink tongue was partway out of his mouth, and he crouched low, his lion parts like the back of a great cat lying in the low ferns.

  Are you hot, my friend?

  No potentia to breathe, boss. I hate this place. Let’s go home.

  I’m afraid we need to fight these salamanders first, my dear.

  The griffon stretched, his black, razor-sharp talons digging into the loam.

  I will do my best. I worry …

  Gabriel ran a hand over the soft feathers of his head and then gave Ariosto a good scratch along the spine and where the feathers met the fur. He gave the griffon a little of his own stored ops.

  Immediately the griffon’s head came up. Ahh.

  You rest, my dear. I will do this on horseback.

  Hate to let you dow
n, boss. But I’d hate to fall out of the sky more …

  Gabriel walked back to Anne Woodstock. “Fighting harness, and Ataelus, please. And very quickly.”

  Mortirmir came up. “Have you been in the aethereal here?” he asked.

  Gabriel nodded, watching the enemy. “Yes. Thin, patchy, and not at all like home.”

  “There’s no colour to the potentia. No green. Very little gold.” Mortirmir shrugged. “We will only have the ops we have stored.”

  “The enemy will be in the same situation,” Gabriel said with a confidence he did not really feel.

  Mortirmir was watching the central block of the enemy. “Most of their strong casters are right there,” he said. “But all of them, every little monster, can cast. This is a hermetical race, like the dragons.” He shrugged. “I worry that they know the terrain better. The hermetical terrain.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “There’s one colour here that’s very strong,” Mortirmir said.

  Gabriel frowned.

  Woodstock had issued orders to her little staff; Hamwise now came back with a basket of golden armour, and Cully came up with another. Cully laid out his cloak and they began to put the armour on it. MacGilly took the flying helmet and the fitted corazina and replaced them with the golden breast and back.

  The center of the enemy army was coming on boldly, flowing over the ground like a wave in a heavy sea. The flanks, or horns, were hanging back.

  “What’s that?” Gabriel asked Mortirmir.

  “Black,” Mortirmir said.

  Gabriel felt a little bile in the back of his throat.

  Mortirmir shrugged. “Power is power,” he said.

  Gabriel made a face as his leg harnesses went on. “That’s not what we know of the black,” he said.

  Mortirmir shrugged. “I’ll be with the casa,” he said. He sketched a bow and wandered toward his warhorse.

  Off to his right, Edmund’s falcons spoke; crack, crack, bang.

  The smell of rotten eggs moved through their position on a fitful breeze.

  A dozen red lightnings rose from the enemy’s left flank. Mortirmir turned them with a minimum of ops.

  Then there was a blink, as if the universe had paused.