Council of Blades (21 page)

The Colletran herald rode in agitation back and forth through returning swarms of cavalry. The armored knights, their lances broken, horses blown, and still soar-ing with elation from the slaughterfest of a cavalryman's dreams, rode past toward the rear. They had broken the enemy's left wing. The loss of their own light cavalry was scarcely even remembered; now other troops could pur-sue Sumbria's fleeing rabble back into the pass. They had done all that Svarezi could desire, knowing that approv-ing eyes watched them from above.

Mounted on a nervous horse-a beast of pixie breed with feathery antennae jutting up from its brow-the her-ald searched returning faces for a sign of his prince. His mount pranced and skittered back from the overwhelming stench of blood, shying from the brutal laughter on the air.

"A message for the prince! A message for Prince Ricardo!"

A thick, choking mist of fireball smoke and spell-fog rolled across the ground. Silent within the gloom, a knot of riders materialized: three men leading a team of pages who carried a litter made of broken spears.

Lolling life-less on the stretcher was a figure armored all in gold with a helm topped off with purple plumes.

"My lord!"

The herald surged forward in alarm; he dismounted all in a rush and flung himself at his dead prince's feet.

"My liege!"

Above him, the leading cavalryman made a face of scorn.

"You'll have to speak louder than that. He's shot his bolt and gone."

"But how?" The herald laid an astonished hand upon his prince's lifeless breast. "Who could possibly have best-ed such a man in battle?"

Many possibilities sprang to mind. The Sumbrian boys chorus? The guild of circus clowns? The armored horse-man almost made a contemptuous reply, then thought better of it and helped himself to some of the herald's stock of wine.

"One minute he was fighting, and the next… he was down. He must have taken a concussion on the helm." The rider sounded too tired to make much of his prince's death. "He slowed down, missed a parry or three, and got torn to pieces like a lamb thrown to the wolves." The cav-alryman nudged at the herald with a broken, filthy sword. "You'll have to go and find a real man's employ-ment for yourself from this day on."

"You will regret this!" The herald shot to his feet, puff-ing up his breast in wounded pride. "His spirit can be welded back into his body! It will cost a kingdom's ran-som, but it can be done! You have delivered us his body whole-so I advise you to repent your hasty words!"

The cavalryman gazed with one cocked eyebrow at the her-ald's face. He then slid heavily down from his horse, leaned across the golden armor, and wrenched open the helm.

Inside the armored suit, there lay nothing but empty air.

"Like a lamb thrown to the wolves. We brought this back for his widow; the rest is out there in the mess. Perhaps you're better at identifying anatomy than I." The horseman shoved the herald so that the boy fell back-ward into the mud. "We'll have a new prince by tomorrow dawn. One who knows what to do with his army."

The soldiers spared a glance at the sky above, where a jet-black hippogriff could be seen wheeling through the wild melee. Hoisting up the empty golden armor, the stretcher bearers trudged on into a field littered black with nameless carrion.

All across the battlefield, the crackle of spellfire and the ring of steel still filled the air, magnified by the close-pressing moun-tains into a deafening, blurring roar.

The newcomer sheathed his sword and swept his open helmet from his brow.

"The valley is ours! We need only make a pike assault on the pass, and we can spill down into Sumbria by nightfall!"

A disdainful, indolent air met the man's announce-ment; Colletro's inner circle of Blade Captains had little time for Svarezi's clique of coarse young men.

"There is no need for an assault." An elegant courtier who looked very much like a long-faced sheep decked out in a metal skin made a studied gesture of one hand. "Sumbria has blown the signal for a truce; they will capit-ulate upon our terms, surrender the valley, and a ransom. I believe the day is ours."

"No!" The newcomer, the commander of scarcely a hun-dred men, furiously slammed his saddle pommel with his sword. "Destroy their field army, and we can have it all! Sumbria is at the mercy of our blades!"

"Is that what Svarezi tells you?" A polite spatter of laughter tinkled out from the courtiers. "Sumbria has walls, boy! Walls and catapults, moats and sorcerers. What point in battering ourselves to death against their stones?"

High above, the black hippogriff circled. The young Blade Captain tried to will Svarezi to intervene before his victory could be frittered clean away.

Far across the battlefield, the sounds of conflict stilled. Heralds met-terms were discussed. The Sumbrian prince threw in his baton and impotently accepted fate. Pleased with the results of a well-fought day, the Colletran high command ordered itself bottles of chilled wine, watched by the disbelieving eyes of their own soldiery.

The Sumbrian troops abandoned their positions, wind-ing off into the narrow mountain pass. Soon, only the prince of Sumbria's men remained, taking the place of honor as the last division off the battlefield.

Prince Mannicci gave his opponents a heavy, stiff salute, spurred down the pass, and swiftly disappeared.

Behind him, his pikemen, crossbowmen, and footmen shuffled slowly backward until they crammed the narrow passageway, watching the opposing Colletrans for betrayal.

With their general once more snubbed by his peers, the Colletran troops were in no mood to attack mere Sumbrians; the entire army converged on the hillock that held their high command. The roar of battle cries seemed dim compared to the anger of the enraged soldiery.

A battered, seething mass of bloodstained men crammed itself in a vast ring about the golden nobility.

Within the ranks were the weaker Blade Captains, common soldiers, and mercenaries, all joined in shouting their generals down with a roar. Men fought through to the inner circle and gave an edge to the savage screaming of the crowd.

"Victory! We want our victory!"

One courtier rose in his stirrups, drawing a deep breath to address the crowd in an actor's studied, flaw-less tones.

"Good soldiers, you have your victory! Sumbria has left us in possession of the field!" The man gave an authori-tarian sweep of his armored hand. "Now go! Disperse! The task of employees is to obey, and not to howl like beasts for blood!"

The answer came as a vicious, angry snarl; one of the crossbow regiments produced a gangly camp lawyer who balanced himself upon a war-horse's flyblown corpse.

"Then we abandon your employ. The contract is dis-solved!" The soldier adjusted his grimy breastplate, whip-ping out a stained old parchment and waving it in the air. "The Articles of Association allow us to recontract once per year! We'll hire ourselves to Svarezi or to none at all!"

"Rabble!" A Blade Captain gazed at the filthy soldier with undisguised hatred. "Do as you're ordered, or I'll have one man in ten dragged off and flogged!"

A stone whipped out from the crowd and rebounded from the Blade Captain's helm. The noble swore and then ripped out his unbloodied sword, lunging his horse for-ward at a suspected enemy.

The action instantly sparked off a storm. Soldiers dragged at the courtier's stirrups; he flailed at them with his sword, then screamed as a billhook snaked out to hook behind his neck. The sharp metal blade worried furiously back and forth under the gilded gorget, tearing flesh and bone until it jerked the man free from his sad-dle with a scream of fear. He disappeared beneath a tidal wave of stabbing dagger blades.

Led on by Svarezi's care-fully prepared provocateurs, the troops stormed forward, up and over the remaining Blade Captains, and simply tore the men apart.

The city of Colletro had spilled into his hands. Unmoved by the fruition of his plans, Svarezi turned his back on the distant carnage and consulted his sorcerers.

"Well?"

"Prince Mannicci confers with his Blade Captains at the far side of the pass."

"And his men?"

"They now march beneath the first overhang, my lord." A magician bent above a crystal ball, making gliding motions about the swirling images. "There is insufficient snow for us to do as you command."

"I have no need for your spells here. You will go to Sumbria and follow the instructions written here."

Svarezi passed a scrap of parchment to his chief sorcerer without sparing the man a glance. "You depart at once. Take a hippogriff."

"And the enemy, lord?"

"Leave the Sumbrian army to me."

Svarezi gazed coldly toward the open pass, where the dense-packed mass of Prince Mannicci's personal troops had finally disappeared from view. He raised a hand without even once looking behind his back.

"Fire!"

On a hill to the rear, a hissing contraption mounted on a vast armored wagon sputtered into life. Twenty feet high, and so massive it had to be drawn by thirty stal-lions, the machine leaked a palpable cloud of cherry-scented death. Titanic vats of glass protected by adaman-tine shields spurted steam as pressure valves were wrenched open by technicians clad in armor plate. The chief gunner sighted through a spyglass, pumped his fist, then slammed a sealed black visor shut across his eyes as his assistants briskly ducked aside.

Air pressure shot the contents of the glass tanks into a sealed combustion chamber; the machine seemed to bulge, and brilliant white light leaked through tiny rivet holes in the armored housing. With a dazzle that left pur-ple streamers drifting through the skies, a bolt of light blasted from the muzzle of the great machine and speared off into the pass.

The light gouged into the mountain crest-instantly turning packed ice into vapor and rock into a liquid stream. The superheated rock face exploded like a bomb. An entire mountaintop came slamming down into the narrow pass-untold tons of rubble, ice, and snow. The avalanche thundered on and on, shuddering the entire valley beneath a violent storm of noise.

Finally the rockslide began to slow; the last secondary avalanche on distant peaks drew to a close. The soldiers of Colletro stood gaping up into the pass, then turned to stare in awe at Ugo Svarezi standing at their side.

A long silence reigned; coming faintly from the rear of Colletro's battered army, there suddenly came a single tiny cheer. The first voice was joined by a second, and then a third. The noise rippled forward, then surged into fantastic life as men began to run toward the Sun Cannon-Svarezi's death machine.

The cheers turned to adulation. Svarezi, mounted on his brooding black hippogriff, reached out to allow the touch of eager soldiers' hands. The troops screamed out Svarezi's name until it became a formless, soaring litany that shuddered the very rooftops of the world.

While the cheers roared on, the technicians went swift-ly back to servicing their monstrous machine. At the front of the giant Sun Cannon, the Sun Gem slowly cooled; while in the pass, three thousand Sumbrian troops lay buried under steaming lava.

Everyone had another man to blame; some old enemy who had long been a secret traitor; some rival whose true colors at last were flown. The snarling madhouse shook papers, pens, and blades at one another around the table-top, while Prince Mannicci simply sat with his head bowed in his hands.

For the prince, the battle had been more than just a military disaster. The contingents of Mannicci's closest allies had been in the path of the Colletran charge. Worse still, the Mannicci regiments had held the pass as it inexplicably collapsed above them. The Mannicci family's forces now scarcely numbered a hundred men, not enough to qualify the prince for a vote in his own council. He sat there upon the sufferance of the Blade Captains, if he sat there at all.

Above the chaos, a single voice rose into a deep, com-manding tone.

"Gentlemen! Colleagues… be still! We have only a few hours to stop a disaster from turning into a catastrophe!"

Heads turned; the motion caused more men to lose track of their arguments. The speaker stepped forward into the lessening din with consummate timing and skill. Sweeping open his arms, Gilberto Ilego stood like a pris-tine figurehead bursting through a storm.

"We are defeated, but we are not destroyed!" Ilego's voice fought to overcome a reawakened roar. "No, not yet! But division can still be our undoing!"

He spoke as though the great battle had not yet been lost and won; flushed and bickering noblemen snatched at the offered straw and began to listen.

"Colleagues! Sumbria is the most powerful of the Blade Kingdoms. As an individual state, we command the greatest wealth, the greatest intellects, and the finest military equipment. And yet we have found ourselves locked into a futile war for years! Rather than taking our place as rightful leader of the Akanal, we have squan-dered our energies in an endless war with Colletro-and over what? A valley. A single valley." Ilego's voice rose suddenly into a sharp pitch of scorn. "One valley! When the Blade Kingdoms hold a thousand such penny-plots of land!"

Cappa Mannicci shot a sharp, deadly glance at Ilego. The elegant Blade Captain ignored his prince, skipping his eyes across him to grip the crowd with his gaze.

"And why? Why have we wasted our energies on such a futile little war?" Ilego whirled and flung an armored hand at his prince. "Because the Manniccis have com-manded it! The Mannicci vision has locked us into a squabble only fit for schoolyard brats. A squabble with a kingdom who could just as well have been our staunchest ally all along!"

The slim nobleman had first won their attention, then eased their hurts-now he shocked them with an outra-geous revelation. Men stared at him in disbelief until Ilego passed copies of a letter out into his colleagues' hands.

"I have here a message from the Blade Council of Colletro. A new council! Newly elected, for new times!" Blade Captain Ilego's voice soared like a falcon on god-sent winds. "The old prince is overthrown, and Colletro offers us its blades, its science, and its sorcery. In short- their new, princeless council has asked to merge with Sumbria to form a single great kingdom! At a stroke, we can double our realm in ferocity and size!"

Prince Mannicci launched up to his feet and slammed an open hand against the table, but his angry rejoinder was drowned beneath the uproar of the crowd. Ilego tri-umphantly orchestrated the furor, letting the volume build until a paid clique led the Blade Captains into howling for a vote.

A few thousand ducats had been spent, and spent well; a flood of anger-like any other flood-is best handled by carefully constructed channels. Prince Mannicci tried to speak, only to be shouted down by young captains asking to see the muster of his men. With no troops beneath his banners, Mannicci lacked the right to even take the floor.

Standing on the table, Blade Captain Furioso-stout, black-haired and wild-shook a copy of the Sumbrian constitution in Mannicci's eyes.

"We demand a vote! A new prince-one with a better plan!"

Ilego smiled, feeling the day's events play straight into his hands. Above him, Furioso let himself be whipped on by the churning crowd.

"Two-thirds majority, Mannicci! Two thirds insist on a vote… an immediate vote. The Articles of Association demand that an election be held for the crown!"

Orlando Toporello-his armor still scarred and unclean from the battle three days before-slammed his battered sword across the tabletop.

"No! We are not a mob… to blame a prince when we have failed him at arms!"

"Ha!" Triumphant at the crest of the crowd, Furioso bit his thumb at the old man. "Can an old dog never leave off sniffing the backside of its old master?"

Toporello gave a bellow of rage and flung himself at Furioso; Furioso's page tried to block the old man's path and took a sword cut in the cheek as Toporello flailed at the packed mob of jeering nobles with his blade. A dozen arms held him back, crushing him in a press of bodies as they kept Toporello and his prey apart.

A vote was cast, yet no one counted the blades that flashed into the air; Mannicci's rule was cast away, and a dynasty lay broken. A hundred voices soared and jeered as Cappa Mannicci sank down into his chair.

Radiant, Ilego opened his arms to the crowd.

"Then it is our will that we have a new prince! A new prince, right here and now!"

Before Ilego could have himself nominated by his paid lackeys, Toporello slammed his sword across the table, broke the blade, and cast the shards away. He turned, signed for his sons and officers, and drove a path to the doors. Gilberto Ilego climbed onto the table and bayed across the assembly like a wild, triumphant ass.

"Where to, Toporello? Will you not cast a vote with your brethren?"

"Never!" Toporello's parade-ground shout almost stripped the plaster from the walls. His huge voice stilled the rabble like a thunderous magic spell.

"To sell our honor to Colletran hands? To cast aside a prince who has served us long and well?" The old man whipped out his hands as though trying to fling them clean of dirt. "Do it if you will-but these are no col-leagues of mine, nor do I care to remain within their fellowship!"

"And where will you go?" Ilego made the question into a fabulous little joke. "Will you pack up your toys and refuse to play?"

"A free company is what we once were-a free compa-ny we remain! House Toporello takes its blades else-where!" Orlando cast a glance that ripped lines of fire across a dozen men. "You, Marello-and you, Ambrosi! Join the jackal pack-but make way for better men!"

Toporello turned to go. Suddenly, a young captain jerked out from the crowd and followed at his heel.

They were joined by a second, then a third, all small holders who commanded scarcely two hundred men.

Ilego cast them out and let his wild voice echo through the hall.

"Then go! But forfeit your palaces, your holdings, and your lands!"

"My jewels were stolen, and the loss never killed me. We've concentrated upon fripperies and forgotten where we came from-who we are!" Standing in the doorway, Orlando Toporello rammed his old-fashioned helmet down across his skull. "Roll in your furs and sweetmeats like a pig in its own dung! A soldier's domain should be bounded by his breastplate, nothing more!"

The dissenters marched away en masse, leaving chaos in their wake; the contempt of Toporello had left a schism in the hall. Half the nobles shrieked out demands to give Gilberto Ilego the crown, while others leapt forward offer-ing their own names.

Cappa Mannicci gathered up his last few rags of digni-ty and left the chamber. His movement instantly stirred a new furor; for a whole lifetime, this man had ordered Sumbria's lives. Now, men shrilly clamored for advice, pawing at his robes. Ilego saw his chances of an immedi-ate election begin to fade away and leapt down to pursue the departing crowd.

On the steps of the council chambers, a vast mob of citizens had collected in a swirling mass. There were soldiers and tinkers, fishwives and priests. The whole population clamored to Cappa Mannicci for their answers, parting about him like a sea of pleading hands.

Mannicci lifted a weary gauntlet, told them that he was their prince no more, and turned as a beggar thrust at him from the crowd. The beggar raised his knotted staff-Mannicci tried to hurtle himself away-and a blast of flame exploded out to rip the mob apart.

Bodies churned and voices screamed; the air stank of scorching flesh. Civilians fled in panic, trampling their own neighbors under their feet. Soldiers shouted, fight-ing through the tide as the city of Sumbria instantly went mad.

"The prince is slain! Prince Mannicci has been slain!"

Cappa Mannicci's body had been utterly atomized. With him had died a score of citizens, guards, and Sumbrian nobility. Burned, wounded men dragged themselves across the blackened steps, cinders crunching beneath clawed hands as they screamed out in agony. From the council chambers, the remaining Blade Captains simply stood and stared as Gilberto Ilego wandered over to the place where Prince Mannicci had died.

"The prince has been slain by the Blade Captains!" A woman reeled across the road, clawing at passing sol-diers with burned hands. "They've killed him! They've killed him!"

"Ilego ordered it!" A young noble clutched his injured, screaming father tight against his heart. "Ilego's killed him to secure his crown!"

"No!" Gilberto Ilego ran blindly down the palace steps, standing amidst the ruin of his plans. "Brigands! It must have been brigands…"

"Brigands with a spell staff?" a soldier snarled from the foot of the steps in hate. "Aye-brigands with their pock-ets full of Ilego's gold."

A dead assassin was produced-a mere rag hurtled back and forth between the talons of a growing crowd; the corpse wore Ilego's livery beneath its beggar's rags. Ilego screamed out his denials into an uncaring mob. He retreated as the first stones began to fly, then saw his own soldiers smash hard into the citizens. A wild melee erupted, bursting like a plague sore to spread its foul dis-ease. Ilego's men fought to hold the crowd back from their master's hide; soldiers from other families instantly lunged into the fight to defend the panic-stricken crowd. A crossbow fired, a woman screamed, and the fight poured through the city streets like molten fire.

Abandoned at the eye of the storm, Ilego helplessly screamed out his innocence to the uncaring city walls.

"No! I didn't kill him!" Ilego tore his own robes between his hands. "I would have been prince! Me!

Gilberto Ilego, Prince of Sumbria!" The man reached out to running sol-diers in appeal. "Why? Why would I kill him? I would have had everything…"

Ilego slumped down into the cinders, and let the last prince of Sumbria drift through his grasp like sand.

He sat in blank incomprehension as he heard his city tear itself apart.

"Svarezi…"

Ilego's eyes went wide as realization suddenly struck home. He lifted up his face and stared off into the empty sky. "Svarezi."

Hurtling ashes to the winds, Ilego leapt to his feet and felt his face drain white with rage. He shook an impotent fist at the clouds and bellowed out a wild scream of despair.

"Svarezi!"

Blades clashed in Sumbria's streets, while all around, a city burned.