This Forsaken Earth (18 page)

He rolled in beaten gray snow, and as he did the killer elation evaporated. Pain racked his torso now; the snow where he lay was blushing with his blood. His mouth was dry and foul with smoke. He crawled crabwise into the lee of a tumbled house at the riverbank, hands shaking. His mind was fogging up like a steamed window. Fleam slipped out of his fingers; the bullet-strike had numbed them to the knuckles. He lay there blinking hard and trying to bring some order to his thoughts.

A rising clamor of gunfire and shouted commands outside. Fresh companies were arriving on the eastern bank and kneeling in ordered lines. Rol grasped the scimitar again in one nerveless fist and crawled deeper into the ruins like a hurt animal going to ground. The noise beat upon his head. He poked through the lacerated rags of his tunic and found a flap of his own flesh hanging free of his shoulder. Pressing his fingers to the hole, he felt them touch upon bone. He began to shudder, and clenched his teeth until blood started from the gums. Artillery had begun to boom outside, and the ground flinched under him every time a shell fell to earth. Cascades of dust and grit poured down on his head and stuck to the blood that plastered him.

Psellos would laugh if he could see him now. What had happened to all that training—Rowen’s training? Rol closed his eyes and tried to recall her face, the heat of her as their bodies had fought and joined in the darkness under Psellos’s Tower. He remembered the glorious softness of her breasts, incongruous in all that tautness of muscle. The memory calmed him somehow. Recalling her face, her quiet, priceless smile, he knew that he loved her still. He would love her until the last beat of his heart. It was why he was here, in the eye of this madness—to perhaps glimpse that smile once more. He would do anything to be with her again, anything.

At last he mustered the strength to rise to a crouch. His feet squelched in the gore that had filled his boots. Gummed-up nicks and cuts reopened all over him as he moved, staggering with the pain in his injured thigh. Several of the houses here had been blasted into one long series of mangled ruins, cast in gloom by what was left of their roofs. He tottered through them, his mind slowly clearing.

Gallico. Creed. The thought of them sped his feet, and he bared his teeth as the pain came and went in sickening waves. Fleam steadied in his hand, and insane though it might seem, he thought he sensed a kind of amusement thrumming out of the sword, a smugness. He stuffed the bloody scimitar back into her scabbard, not caring that she was caked with hair and viscera and shreds of men’s innards. He staggered on, keeping to the maze within the ruins, glimpsing scraps of the battle here and there through holed walls and empty windows. He did not care who was winning; all he wanted was to find his friends alive.

Creed saw him first. The ex-convict was quartering the ruins with a cutlass in one hand and a cocked pistol in the other. When he saw a tall figure dressed in brown and scarlet shreds who was weaving amid the rubble like a man drunk, he ran up to his captain with furious concern burning out of his eyes, and steadied him as the taller man’s body tilted toward a fall.

“Elias.” Rol smiled. “Still alive?”

“Still alive.”

The smile disappeared. “Gallico?”

“We got him to a dressing station in the rear, with Giffon. It’ll take more than a couple of musket-balls to shut his big mouth.”

“Thank God.”

“Let’s get you back there to join him.” Creed took Rol’s arm and pulled it over his shoulders. The two limped along, oblivious to the musketry and gunnery that flashed and foamed behind them.

“Canker is wild with worry,” Creed said.

“Is he indeed? Well, I’ll be damned.”

“His people retook the bridge. Your one-man assault on the entire Bionese army paid off, it seems.”

“They’re all Bionese, Elias. Those we’ve been fighting, those whose side we’re supposed to be on. All the same.”

“Yes, I know. A man could grow confused. He might wonder what in the hell we’re doing here in the middle of someone else’s war.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

A line of cottages near the eastern edge of the town had been knocked through into one long corridorlike space. There was a charnel-house within. Several hundred men lay on rough straw palliasses or on bare earth whilst half a dozen physicians and surgeons, almost demented with the scale of their task, went from man to man, assisted by some of the local women who had volunteered to stay behind. They sewed up gaping wounds, extracted arquebus-balls with fine-nosed forceps, applied tourniquets, and where the bone had been splintered, they amputated upon a series of red-slimed tables, the patients held immobile by their friends and biting down upon wooden gags until the teeth cracked in their heads.

Giffon was there in the midst of the bloody work, arms scarlet to the elbows. Gallico sat propped up in a corner with bandages crisscrossing his chest to keep blood-soaked pads of linen in place. Rol collapsed beside him. The halftroll smiled and laid a hand upon Rol’s head like a father. “There he is; the hero of the hour, or most of him. There is more blood on you than in you, Rol.”

“I can believe that.” Creed left and brought back Giffon and one of the harried nurses, a young girl with brown hair scraped back in a bun and eyes as old as a matron’s. They cut off what was left of Rol’s clothing and began to mop and stitch. Rol felt the needle popping in and out of his skin, but the pain was little more than an irritation. He stared out at the writhing carpet of broken humanity that covered the ground before him.

“It would seem we joined Canker’s war,” Gallico said.

“Where is he?”

“Looking for transport, I think. He took off like a scalded cat when those fellows crossed the bridge, but, to give him credit, he came back shortly after with a whole bloody battalion at his back. Good for us he did. Creed and I were getting tired. He’s looking for you too. Worried your appetite for glory may have been your undoing.”

“It damn near was.”

Rol tried to raise his hand to see if it still shook, but Giffon slapped it down. “Be still. It’s like trying to sew the tail back on a pig.” The boy’s tone was bantering, but there was a hurt shine to his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Giffon.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, skipper. Hold still now.”

Rol turned to Creed. “Elias, I need fresh clothing. The horses?”

“All dead, blown to bits. I’ll see what I can pick up. There must be a few long-limbed corpses lying around.” He winked at Rol and left, picking his way through the bodies.

The fighting sank down as the day drew on into an early-winter dusk, and a thin veil of snow began floating down upon the tortured earth of the battlefield. The bridges remained in rebel hands, the loyalists withdrew to their camps west of the river, and the wounded were hauled off to hospitals in Gallitras in open wagons whose every jolt produced a litany of screams from the unfortunates within. Rol and Gallico were luckier; Canker procured a covered carriage for them and an escort of dragoons. Their well-sprung vehicle covered the league or so to Gallitras in less than an hour, taking to the frozen earth off the road when the highway itself was too choked with military traffic to proceed.

It was dark as they clopped in through the massive barbican of the city and made a slow progress through the dense-packed cobbled streets within. There was destruction here, but nothing on the scale to match Arbion. Rol, Creed, and Giffon hung their heads out of the carriage window and studied the passing city like gawping tourists. Gallico was perched on the roof like some monstrous figurehead. The sight was enough to halt pedestrians in their tracks.

“How come you didn’t have to blast this one stone from stone?” Creed asked Canker, who had reverted to his face-in-cloak mode.

The Thief-King shrugged. “Gallitras fell to a subtler assault. Her governor was assassinated by persons unknown and his replacement proved a venal man.”

“A pity more of these fellows were not so amenable,” Gallico snorted above them. “You might have a kingdom left with one stone upon another.”

Canker did not reply. His eyes glittered. He was watching Rol.

Their carriage pulled up in front of a grand, colonnaded mansion with large windows that had light streaming out of them. Footmen opened the carriage doors, but stepped back as Gallico leaped down from the roof, letting the vehicle bounce up on its springs as his weight left it. He staggered as he hit the ground and stood for a moment with head bowed, eyes tight shut in pain.

The five of them were met in the grand hallway by the sound of music—strings and pipes bubbling in sedate merriment. Candles burned by the score all about them and in a massive chandelier above their heads. A knot of darkly garbed men stood waiting. Canker dropped his cloak from his face and his entire manner changed. He became brisk, commanding. He shook someone’s hand.

“We need beds, maids, clothing, food, and wine. It is late, and my fellow travelers are wounded and exhausted. We will talk tomorrow.”

“My lord Chancellor,” someone said, and everyone bowed low. Canker caught Rol’s eye and he gave a rueful grin that had yet something defiant about it, as though daring him to be amused.

“But first, Governor Moerus, let me introduce to you the Queen’s brother, Rol Cortishane.” There were audible gasps, widened eyes. Standing there with the blood still seeping from his hastily stitched wounds, Rol shot the Thief-King an irritated glare, but said nothing. It was all he could do to keep his feet.

Moerus bowed. “We had heard rumors, of course, but it seemed too much to hope that it should be true. You are very welcome, my lord.”

He was a spare, well-knit man of medium height in a wine-colored coat. A narrow face, and an eagle nose that lent it both ugliness and distinction. His eyes were brown as the neck of a thrush. They took in Rol, Gallico, Creed, and Giffon in one swift sweep, giving away nothing except concern and dutiful interest, but one of his hands was working as though it played an invisible pipe.

A period of talk and bustle, and then stairs that seemed to go on forever. A winsome young housemaid propped up Rol’s elbow. She smelled so clean and felt so good that he leaned more weight on her than he had need to, and hazily wondered how long it had been since he had dirtied up a sweet-smelling young woman.

Clean sheets, a wide bed like an expanse of pale desert. The maid stripped him naked and he was too tired to care. He lay back in the bed and stared at a fire burning in the brick and marble hearth close by, and staring into the heart of those flames, he drifted down deep, deep into darkness.

In the dream, or what passed for a dream, his wounds were healed but their scars remained. He stood as he had before, and stared out across a moonlit expanse of silver-gray hills to the savage heights of the Myconian Mountains in the distance. They seemed to ring every horizon, and nowhere could he find any glimpse of the sea, or any smell of salt. He was lost, buried in a ring of snow-girt stone.

Fleam stood beside him again, but something about her had changed. She was still a statuesque beauty, white-skinned and black-haired, but now she wore the loose ocher robes of a desert traveler, the keffiyeh thrown back on her shoulders. She looked older; there were lines at the corners of her eyes and a hint of dark hollows under them. Her resemblance to Rowen was startling. She did not turn when Rol spoke her name, but studied the mountains in the distance as though some secret was hidden in the shape of the peaks.

“Cross these eastward, and in time you will come to the edge of the Inner Reach,” Fleam said. “On the shores of that ancient sea is a ruined city whose true name has been forgotten. It was a place of refuge once. It is where I was made, forged in blood and iron and rage by one whom I had betrayed.” She smiled, and there was a humanity in her eyes that Rol had not seen before. She seemed to realize this; the smile curdled.

“In the beginning, I had no name. I was a shape, a snarling shadow of the Old World that slipped into this existence. An old man who was not a man, not anything like a man, gave me this form, and in it I walked the earth. I became a woman who loved, and lost, who betrayed and was betrayed in her turn. Little of that woman remains; the shadow swamps what soul he gave me. What is left is a mere ghost in the blade, and the other thing feeds upon the blood the metal spills.”

Now Fleam turned her head and looked Rol in the face. Her eyes were the color of burnished steel. “The woman died, murdered. The sword is all that remains—and the ghost within the blade. I am but an echo of who she once was.” A change came over Fleam’s face. The lines smoothed out.

“My name was Amerie.”

Ten

GHOSTS OF MEMORY

ROL WOKE THIRSTY. THERE WAS A PITCHER BY THE BED,
and he pulled it to his mouth, gulping back cold water until it spilled down his neck and chest and soaked the bedclothes. He swung his legs onto the floor and stood up. The fire was dead, and there was a gray light in the room; it was still some time before dawn, but dawn came late these days. The air in the place was chill enough to beget a white cloud out of his breath, raise goose pimples on his skin. He scratched at the wound on his shoulder; it itched damnably. Then it struck him. He peeled off Giffon’s neatly bound dressings and as he did they came away crusted with dried blood, and stuck in it a tangle of short black threads. His stitches, he realized; they had all come out.