By the Sword (69 page)

“What do you think happened here?” he asked Quenten, as they crossed a muddy, rust-colored stream. “Is it safe to be riding on this land, do you think?”

“It's safe enough, m‘lord,” Quenten said, but only after the mage gave him a peculiar look. “Why do you ask?”

Daren looked around at the withered limbs of the trees, at the yellow grass, at the diseased cankers spotting the leaves, and shuddered. “Because the place looks poisoned, that's why. What happened at the villages was easy enough to read—that bastard conscripted the men, took the useful women and little ones and slaughtered the rest as an example—but I don't understand this ... and I don't see how the men can accept it as easily as they do.”

Quenten shook his head in wonder. “M‘lord, they don't see what you see. To them it looks perfectly ordinary, except that there's not much in the way of birds and beasts.” He looked pointedly about them, at the men marching calmly up the road in front of them, and tilted his shaggy, dust-dulled head to one side, as if waiting for a response.

Daren cast a sharp glance at him, but the young mage's expression was entirely sober. “A glamour? An illusion? ”

Again the mage shook his head, but this time he stared into Daren's face searchingly before replying. “I don't think so, m‘lord. Is there mage-blood in your family?”

“Some, not much,” he said after a moment of thought. “Of course Grandmother's family's been sprouting Healers every so often, and Mother's line was supposed to be some kind of earth-priestess—”

“Ah,” Quenten said in satisfaction. “That would be it; you have the earth-sense. Many folk with the blood of the old earth-priestesses in them have it. What you're seeing is the land revealed to you by the earth-sense, you see what lies
under
the surface everyone else sees with his outer eyes. This land is sick; there's been blood-magic practiced here, too much of it for the land to absorb without harm. That was the real horror back at those villages; it wasn't just the slaughter itself—it's that it was done to invoke the powers of blood-magic and death-magic.”

Daren remembered all the rumors he'd heard about Ancar, and suddenly they began making sense. “Blood-magic to control the minds of the ones he took?” he asked shrewdly, “Blood-magic to create a reservoir of power he can feed off?” And Quenten's eyes widened. “Blood-magic so that the land keeps him healthy and young, at its own expense?”

“There's not one highborn in ten that would know that,” the mage whispered. “Keep it to yourself, m‘lord. There's some that would say that knowing is a short step away from wanting. I don't hold by that, but even the mage-schools have their fanatics.” He resumed his normal tone. “Probably, m'lord, and it's more than the land can bear. That's why it looks sick to you. Trust your earth-sense, m‘lord. If you learn to use it, it'll tell you more than just this.”

It was Daren's turn to shake his head. The land cried out to him in a way—and he couldn't help it, any more than he could bring back those poor slaughtered innocents. He wanted to beg its pardon for not healing it—to beg theirs for not being there. It was foolish—but it was very real. He understood the Heralds of Valdemar far better than his brother did. He understood how it was to care for
people,
even if those people were not bound to you, personally, in any way. Faram would die for his people—but not those of Valdemar. He would feel badly about the slaughters here, but he would not feel them personally, the way Daren did.

And he also understood duty and pledges. “Right now all I care about is whether this land is safe to travel through—which you say it is—and whether or not Ancar has any mages likely to detect us here.”

“We're working to prevent that, m‘lord,” Quenten replied dryly. “And—” he looked up, sharply.

“What is it?” Daren said, reining in his horse as Quenten's mount stopped dead.

The mage raised one hand to his forehead, his eyes focusing elsewhere. He looked for all the world as if he was listening to something. “Quenten?” Daren persisted. “Quenten?”

The mage's eyes refocused on him. “Ancar has a reserve force just ahead,” he said vaguely. “Several mages, and three companies of cavalry. And—Daren, m‘lord, they're mostly from here, this barren zone.”

“Controlled, then. There's no other way he could make farmers into cavalry that quickly” He caught the attention of his officers, who halted the march. “Quenten, how far ahead is ‘just ahead'?”

“Half a day's march, maybe less. Not much less.” Quenten didn't seem to notice Daren' sigh of relief.

“What are they doing there?” he persisted. “We haven't seen a sign of Ancar's army. What are reserves doing out here?”

“I don‘t—they're—I need my bowl.” Without warning, the mage scrambled off his mare's back to dig into her packs. He emerged with a completely black bowl, shiny, made of black glass, or something very like it. He poured water from his own water skin into the bottom of it, sat right down in the dust of the road, and stared into it.

Daren had been around enough mages to know when to keep his mouth shut. He waited, patiently, in sunlight too thin to even warm him. The army waited, just as patiently, glad for a chance to sit by the roadside and rest. Daren watched his men sprawling ungracefully against their packs, and wished he hadn't had to push them so hard. They'd had a lot of time to make up, once they'd gotten down out of the hills. He had been weary at the end of the day, and he was riding. He hated to think what the foot soldiers felt like.

“They're waiting,” Quenten said, in a thin, disinterested voice, an eerie echo of his own thoughts “They are half of the claw that will capture Selenay and crush Valdemar. ”

“What?” Daren snapped, startled.

Quenten looked up, blinking, then picked up the bowl and spilled the water out in the dust. “Ancar has these reserves out here, pacing him, waiting for when he has Selenay's forces worn down enough to trap,” the mage said in a more normal tone of voice. “Then he'll have this lot sweep in from the side and above while he cuts his main force in from below.”

“I don't think so,” Daren replied, in a kind of grim satisfaction at finally having something to fight.

“Well, that's not all, m‘lord,” Quenten added as he got up, shook the dust from his robes and stowed his bowl carefully away. “It's
who
these reserves are—or rather, where they're from. Like I said, before, here. Tied into obedience by the blood of their own kin. Now, you have the earth-sense; you could tell me which mage is controlling them, because the earth hereabouts would tell you. It hates him, and it's bound to him, and you'll see him as it sees him.”

“And what will happen when you break him?” Daren asked, leaning forward in his saddle and clutching the pommel with one hand. “How do I do see these things, anyway? What do you need to teach me, and have we the time to spare?”

Quenten paused to remount, and turned to look back at Daren only when firmly in his seat. “You have the earth-sense,” Quenten repeated. “It's a matter of instinct rather than learning. Break the controlling mage and you not only free the victims—but it's altogether possible the earth hereabouts would rise up in revolt. And it would listen to you, follow some of your directions, if you made them simple enough.”

“It would?”

Quenten nodded. Daren thought about those heaps of pitiful bones and rags—looked around him at the dying land. And thought of Kero and Selenay's army, and pledges. And just maybe a god somewhere had just gifted him with the chance to satisfy all of them.

“Quenten, you're in charge of the magic-folk; get your mages. Find out everything you can, and keep us cloaked.” Daren turned his horse and rode off in search of the scouts before he had a chance to hear Quenten's eager assent.

All right, Ancar, you bastard, he couldn't help thinking, with a kind of fierce exultation,
I am about to visit a little retribution on you and yours.

 

Ancar's reserves were pathetically unaware of any danger—but after all, they were deep inside their own territory, and had no reason to suspect any threat. Daren himself went out with the scouts to the river-valley where they camped to get a good look at enemy, and at the way they were conducting themselves.

What he saw fit in very well with Quenten's theory of mind-control. Only about a quarter of the men down there were moving about or acting in any kind of a normal fashion. The rest might as well have been puppets; in fact, watching them was rather disturbing. They moved listlessly, when they moved at all, and none of them were idle—yet they wasted no time on their chores, picking up one task, carrying it to the end, picking up another. And all without exchanging a single word with anyone, or taking a single step out of the way. Nothing was cooked, except at the camps of the officers; a small group of men handed out the tasteless ration-bread Rethwellan no longer used because of complaints from the men. These fighters took the bread, ate it methodically, and went back to their chores.

By nightfall, the camp was utterly quiet. No socializing around campfires, no idle games of chance—nothing. The men simply rolled up in their blankets, and went to sleep; except for the officers and mages, who had tents, and were presumably doing things inside them.

It was an entirely unnerving sight to someone who knew what a camp
should
look and sound like, because of the complete unnaturalness of it—although Daren had to admit to himself that there were times when he'd wished his men would—

He stopped the thought before he could complete it, chillingly aware of how close he'd come to thinking that he'd wanted his men to be like this. Was that what those mages meant, when they said it was a short step from
knowing to wanting?

Horrible thought....

He closed his eyes on the too-quiet camp below him for a moment, then opened them. No, he deliberately decided.
I've never wanted that. It's worse than slavery; at least a slave has his own thoughts. These poor creatures don't even have that much. It's as bad to destroy or enslave a mind as it is to kill a body. Maybe worse, if the mind is aware of what has happened to it.

The scout tugged at his sleeve, and he crawled away with the rest of them, avoiding the slack-jawed perimeter guard. They made it back to the rest of his troops without further incident, and he and his officers spent the hours until midnight charting the next day's course.

 

Dawn of the next day saw the Rethwellan troops poised just above the camp. It had been impossible to keep the movement of so large a group secret, but by splitting his troops in two and cutting off Ancar's fighters from their easy escape by river, Daren had forced Ancar's reserves to meet him instead of running to join the larger force, or escaping into the interior of Hardom.

Daren waited at the command post with Quenten, the other mages, and his under-officers; far from being even as comfortable as a tent, the site basically had only two things to recommend it. The unobstructed view, and a very tall shade tree.

“Can you tell who he is, yet?” Quenten asked in an undertone as the officers scattered off to take their places with their men.

Daren shook his head. There was a kind of sink of “bad feeling” a little to the right of center, but no one mage stood out. They were assuming that Ancar's mages were too strong for any single one of Daren's mages to take. They would have to wait for their one best opportunity, and all hit him at once, in order to break him.

One of Daren's mages was effectively out of the picture; he was preventing the enemy from calling for help, at least magically. And that was all he was good for; they'd left him in trance in the Healer's tent, and there he would stay even after this was over, recovering. Or not; there was always the possibility he might die, either from exhausting himself, or being drained or killed by the enemy mages. And if Daren's force lost, he would almost certainly die. Mages were harder to control than captured fighters; the enemy usually did not even bother to try.

Daren gave the signal to advance, no point in a charge; mind-controlled men would not be unnerved by a charge or a battle cry. They'd simply fight until they dropped, and others took their places. Daren had given his officers careful instructions: keep the men in formation, no hero-tactics, fight as carefully as if it was all a drill. The one advantage to fighting mind-controlled men was that they were slower; it was the difference between knowing what to do and being told what to do—between learned reflex, and something that hasn't been absorbed bone-deep yet.

The battle was, as a result, curiously, grimly dull. No flag waving, no shouts except for exclamations of pain, no charges—the only sounds being those calls and the clash of weapons, the cries of horses, the scuffling of hundreds of feet and hooves—the men might as well have been those little counters he and Kero used to practice maneuvers with. Except for the blood, the wounded, the fallen. Those made it real, and made the fighting itself all the more unreal.

Daren concentrated on the mages, clustered near the officers' command post, and visible because of the dull colors of their robes, which were bright compared with the brown and buff leathers of the fighters and officers. But the more he concentrated, the less he seemed to see. He started to get angry and frustrated—
my people are
dying
down there—bat
then he stopped himself, before he stormed off to harangue Quenten.

This is my problem, not his. I should be able to figure it out.
Quenten
said this earth-sense works like
instinct,
he thought, finally.
So—maybe
if
I
don't concentrate....