The Merchant Emperor (The Symphony of Ages)

  “This was only the first step,” he warned. “There are still four times as many of them as there are of us, many on barded horseback, highly armed and trained. They will be on our doorstep momentarily, so do not celebrate too soon. But remember that these are the forces that raped the holy city, that drove the Patriarch out and defiled the basilica. You have struck a blow in the name of your land, and your God! If we do not survive what is to come, at least you will enter the Afterlife as heroes.”

  The ramshackle soldiers sent up another cry of victory.

  * * *

  Fhremus surveyed the horsemen who had been lined up by the field commanders across the threshold of the Krevensfield Plain. He regretted not bringing the catapults and heavy ballistae, the weapons of siege, but the thought that a tiny farming village with a hastily constructed wall would need such weapons to be vanquished was ludicrous yesterday.

  Today, he had just lost a squadron of unassailable flying machines of destruction to such a tiny farming village.

  He rode past the regiment, waving the banner of the Empire of the Sun.

  “For the emperor!” he cried. “Charge!”

  * * *

  The cavalry charge of the Sorbolds was like the rumble of a fast-approaching thunderstorm, causing the ground within the farming settlement to shake violently.

  “Archers, return to your posts and make ready!” Anborn shouted as the men on the wall sighted their crossbows again. He dismounted in a smooth leap from the warhorse and ran to the ladder, climbing the wall with the speed and skill of a man of twenty summers.

  As the troops on the ground within the encampment made ready in the ranks the Lord Marshal had devised, Gwydion Navarne turned to Rhapsody.

  “What now?” he asked, a mixture of exhilaration and terror on his face.

  “Do you feel comfortable enough manipulating the wind that you can cause the currents to blow aimlessly, to interfere with arrow flight?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s good enough. Come.”

  Gwydion followed her to the front wall, dodging soldiers and horsemen as the defenders scrambled to set up ranks. They made for the ladder and ascended the wall, Gwydion taking the time to sheath Tysterisk before starting to climb.

  Anborn reached down as Rhapsody summited the ladder and offered her his hand. He pulled her onto the rampart, then did the same with Gwydion Navarne, taking a moment to clap him on the shoulder once he was off the ladder.

  “Well done, young Navarne,” he said. “Your father, and your godfather, would be proud.” He turned back to see the Sorbold assault force barreling down across the Krevensfield Plain, almost within crossbow range; the riders were leveling their weapons as they thundered nearer.

  Rhapsody was scanning the sky calmly.

  “Gwydion, are you ready?”

  The duke of Navarne nodded and drew his sword again.

  The Lady Cymrian looked at the Lord Marshal; their eyes met, and a smile passed between them. Anborn turned and descended the ladder.

  Rhapsody waited until she saw him on the ground again. Then she climbed out on top of a crossbow stand, crouched down and raised just the top of her head above the rampart.

  Even amid the drumbeat of the approaching horses’ hooves, she could hear the release of thousands of crossbow bolts.

  Rhapsody drew Daystar Clarion and held it to her side. The flames rippled up the blade, orange and gold, blue and purple, smoldering quietly, as if it was waiting.

  She surveyed the approaching charge, crouching low to avoid the crossbow bolts that were now beginning to thud in small numbers into the rampart. Then she signaled to Gwydion Navarne.

  The duke of Navarne drew Tysterisk again; he rested the pommel of the sword in his palm, clutching the hilt in his grasp, and concentrated.

  The sword had been Gwydion’s for only a short time, and it had a harshness to its spirit that bruised and occasionally scraped against his soul. He had found it to be reliable in times of need, but occasionally petulant in its response to or tolerance of his requests. The blade sometimes appeared, a black outline defining it, sometimes remained unseen. He hoped the gravity of what they were facing would ensure the sword’s easy cooperation, but he had no real faith that it would.

  He closed his eyes and reached down inside himself to the newly formed elemental bond to the sword, a place of elemental lore of air that had given him a greater capacity of breath and an innate understanding he had never known of thermals and updrafts, clouds and prediction of weather. He pictured the gusts outside the wall going random, and strengthening, channeling his thoughts through the sword of elemental air.

  A discordant shriek and a blasting howl blew his hair around roughly, indicating the wind had answered him.

  “Ready, Rhapsody,” he said.

  * * *

  Rhapsody centered her footing on the empty crossbow stand of the archer that the iacxsis had taken. “Stay down,” she said to the other archers near her on the wall; the word was passed up and down the line.

  Then she stood up, a solitary target, her hair and clothing flapping and rustling in the now-inconstant wind.

  A sword of elemental fire burning like a brand in her hand.

  A hailstorm of arrow shots sailed past, above and around her, directed by the random breezes that were spinning like a small, disorganized cyclone between the settlement and the oncoming charge.

  The faces of the men atop the horses of the cavalry were in sight now. Even at the distance they still had to cross, the livid anger was apparent; she could see their teeth set in rage, their muscles corded with fury.

  Another volley of arrows whizzed by her, spinning uselessly in the cycloning wind.

  She searched the skies. The sun was still high.

  How can I find the stars in daylight? she had asked her mentor, the Lirin Champion Oelendra, who had trained her in the use of Daystar Clarion, which she herself had carried long before Rhapsody found it. Oelendra had explained all of the sword’s powers, including the ability to call fire from the stars by calling their true names.

  Just because you can’t see the stars, Rhapsody, doesn’t mean they cease to be there, Oelendra had said. The knowledge of their placement in the heavens, and their names, transcend the need for darkness. But you have to be able to find them, and know where they are. Even without seeing them.

  She thought she knew the location of Prylla, a star she had used to summon starfire in the Past. She raised the ancient weapon over her head, leaving her chest even more vulnerable to arrow strike, and spoke the name of the star.

  Nothing happened.

  A third flight of arrows were shot into the wind, vastly larger now that the charging cavalry and infantry were much closer. An arrow, misshot, grazed her shoulder, causing her to gasp in pain as blood spattered the wall. Rhapsody switched sword hands and clapped her free hand over her bleeding upper arm, then turned slightly, trying to remember where the stars appeared in the course of the day, when the world was blind to them.

  The attacking force was within a league, three miles or less from the settlement. The walls were trembling now, almost as much as the soldiers on those walls were.

  As Rhapsody gazed at the oncoming soldiers through the twisting winds that Gwydion, the Tysterisk’ar, was manipulating, her eyes lighted on the broken city of Sepulvarta in the distance. The city, which had once held some of the most beautiful architecture and forethoughtful governance that the nations now in the Alliance had ever seen, was no longer gleaming, but standing, stolid and stained with the soot of assault and conquest. Behind it, the Spire still towered, the tiny piece of the star Seren still gleamed bravely.

  Almost as if it were offering its services.

  Rhapsody blinked as she considered. She smiled slightly at the irony of the piece of elemental ether being used to exact vengeance on the army that had sacked and occupied it.

  Then she raised the sword over her head again, two-handed.

  And this time sang
the name of the star that had once shone over her homeland on the other side of the world, as well as in the tiny piece atop the Spire.

  The light of which would have shone within her own eyes had she ever been baptized in its light, something that she had been denied by the loss of her mentor and her need to have finished her Naming studies on her own.

  The star that still shone down on what had been the holy city.

  The city that the man this army served had despoiled and ruined.

  And the star that happened to be the one she called aria, her own guiding star, the star she was born beneath.

  The star from which she drew her power as a Namer.

  The flames of the elemental fire in her weapon, and within her being, roared to life as her thoughts channeled through the sword. A clarion call began to hum, rising quickly to a loud, ringing shout.

  Seren, she sang.

  The winds screamed.

  The clouds above rolled across the sky, breaking and frothing like the dark gray waves of the sea.

  And, from the very pinnacle atop the great basilica of Lianta’ar, which meant Bearer of Light in the old tongue of the Cymrians, a flash of ethereal light followed by a roar of starfire shot forth from the tiny piece of the star that was embedded in the tip of the pinnacle.

  It struck the advancing army of Sorbold with a bolt of elemental fire, not of the same scope that she could have called down from a living star, but a smaller, targeted blast that smashed into the very center of the cavalry troop, throwing men and horses into the air as they turned to ashes.

  The battle line broke as the horses closest to the blast reared up or sheared off, tossing their riders or dragging them away from the flames.

  The Lady Cymrian raised the sword again, this time pointing it over the infantry that was advancing farther back.

  Seren, she sang again.

  She could feel the power of its name rush up the blade in her hands as the light atop the Spire rained down again, followed by the strike of ethereal fire.

  Another black pit of ash appeared where a line of soldiers had been marching on the farming settlement. At the outskirts, soldiers on each of the sides of the blast caught fire and fell to the ground, screaming.

  She turned a third time, to what was now the front line of the cavalry charge, and sang the star’s name one more time, delivering another targeted blast of starfire, taking out more horses, more soldiers. The light atop the Spire seemed to dim, she thought, or perhaps it was just harder to see from atop the wall of the farming settlement through the black smoke that was now filling the clear air of the Krevensfield Plain with the horrific stench of burning flesh and grass.

  Grimly she watched the ripping apart of the charge.

  Until a stray arrow caught her in the chest at the joint of her shoulder, piercing her dragonscale armor.

  And turning the rest of the world black.

  She was not aware of her body falling off the crossbow stand to the wooden floor of the rampart.

  * * *

  Fhremus watched in horror as fire tore from the sky above him and engulfed the front three lines of his cavalry charge in an inferno.

  He was even more horrified when it happened again a moment later, deep within the infantry.

  And amid the cavalry again.

  The fire was coming from the Spire of the city of Sepulvarta, a city his army now occupied.

  Directed from within a ramshackle farming settlement that had first taken down an attack of fifty iacxsis and their riders.

  “Sound retreat!” he shouted to the trumpeter, but where he looked for the soldier was a large roaring patch of highgrass engulfing the burning bodies of horses and men.

  The man’s trumpet lay twisted and melting in the grass, gleaming helplessly.

  Fhremus was not a man easily given to retreat, but as the large gates in the settlement’s wall began to open, he had seen through the billowing smoke and crackling flames of burning grass the huge black warhorse at the head of a column of soldiers preparing to charge.

  Standing beside it was a man in black ringed armor, the glint of silver interlacing rings shining like tiny pinpricks illuminated by the fire’s light. The man’s hair was like his armor, flowing black with streaks of silver in it above a famous brow, below which azure eyes, so unlike those of the men of Sorbold, gleamed ferociously. It was a man of ancient history, a leader undisputed that had held almost godlike status in every military academy or training ground, every saga ever told of war, every historical volume, a man whose very name caused army commanders to shudder.

  A man who shouldn’t be able to stand, let alone walk.

  And yet, before his very eyes, Fhremus saw him cross to the horse and hoist himself up onto it as if he had never been lamed, had never aged past the day he had led his own retreat from Canrif four hundred years before. The living history of the Cymrian age, and the continent.

  Anborn ap Gwylliam.

  He could swear the Lord Marshal was staring at him, meeting his eyes half a league away.

  There was murder in those eyes.

  “Fall back! Retreat!” he screamed again. “Back to the city!”

  He did not have to repeat the order. The occupation force from the garrison stationed inside the walled city of Sorbold turned and fled back across the Krevensfield Plain as the Lord Marshal signaled to what seemed to be an enormous regiment of highly trained cavalry from the farming settlement, preparing to chase them back to Sepulvarta.

  Fhremus didn’t give him the chance.

  * * *

  Anborn watched the remains of the attacking force of Sorbold soldiers turn tail and retreat hastily back to Sepulvarta, first in amazement, then amusement, from atop his beautiful black warhorse.

  As he beheld the retreat of Fhremus’s regiment, he couldn’t stop the delight from welling up in him. Anborn threw back his head and laughed uproariously, to be joined a moment later by a mere eight thousand voices. He gave the sign to stand down, then rode forward to the gate and turned, surveying fondly the ragtag regiment that the Sorbolds had not laid actual eyes on. He was a shrewd strategist and a fine master of the bluff, but in a thousand years of soldiering he had never seen a hidden force of skeletal proportions so overwhelmingly convince an army that had outnumbered them four times over, with the additional advantage of a weapon of war like the iacxsis, that they were outmatched to the point of choosing retreat.

  He knew it would not happen again.

  Something’s wrong, he thought. That was far too easy, should never have happened. Something’s wrong.

  He shook his head to clear it of the thought.

  “All right,” he said gruffly to the soldiers still in the throes of merriment. “Enjoy the sight of their arses flapping as they run like frightened children. Don’t get used to it, however. They will be back, stronger next time. Fortunately, our reinforcements are on the way as well. But look well on this day—you were privileged to witness a city kicking the hindquarters of the army that ravaged it, like a woman killing her rapist. In all my days I have never witnessed such a thing.” He laughed aloud again, feeling the camaraderie of the oldest of days in his memory once more.

  From atop the wall, Gwydion Navarne leaned over the rampart above him, his face white as death.

  “Lord Marshal,” the young duke said. “Come, please, sir.”

  57

  By the time Anborn had hastily climbed the ladder and reached the rampart atop the wall, Rhapsody had already regained consciousness and was slapping away the ministrations of the young duke of Navarne and a variety of soldiers who had been with her on the rampart when she fell.

  They were merely trying to help her, given that she had an arrow jutting from her chest, and was bleeding copiously on the floor of the rampart.

  “Leave me alone,” Anborn heard her insist as he came to her side. “I’m all right.”

  “You have an interesting definition of ‘all right,’ as you do of most things, m’lady,” said the Lor
d Marshal, signaling dismissal to the other soldiers. “Get me clean rags and calendula, if there is any to be had.” He watched the men descend the ladder.

  “Witch hazel and thyme would be better,” Rhapsody called weakly to the descending soldiers.

  Anborn laughed, though his face betrayed his worry.

  “Even an arrow wound can’t overcome your extraordinary bossiness,” he said fondly, taking off his cloak and balling it up into a pillow to brace behind her back. “May I borrow your sword?”

  “Certainly. Did you lose your own?”

  The Lord Marshal drew a dagger. “Hardly. I want to sterilize my knife.”

  “She refused to let any of the archers remove the arrow,” Gwydion Navarne said. He had regained a little of his color from when he had summoned Anborn, but was still trembling nervously.

  “Of course she did; she’s not a fool. Look at your hand. It’s shaking like a dog coming out of a pond. Theirs would have been worse.” Anborn took hold of the hilt of Daystar Clarion and pulled it, as respectfully as he could, a small ways out of the scabbard until the licking flames could be seen. He held the blade of the dagger in the elemental fire. “She’s also fairly particular about who gets to see her naked.” He chuckled as Gwydion blanched, but Rhapsody merely winced in pain, ignoring the comment he had expected would bring at least a blush to her face, if not ugly words to her lips. He got neither.

  “Why don’t you go see about that calendula—and the witch hazel,” he said, giving the young duke a chance to vacate the uncomfortable scene.

  “He should stay,” Rhapsody said flatly. “He needs to know how to remove an arrow.”

  “Yes, but he probably doesn’t need to see it being done to his grandmother,” the Lord Marshal retorted. “Go,” he said gruffly to Gwydion.

  The young duke bowed and hurried down the ladder.

  Anborn handed Rhapsody his handkerchief. “Put this between your back teeth.”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you under my command?” demanded the Lord Marshal.

  “I believe so.”