The Fall of Neskaya (45 page)

Now the shouted hails and hoofbeats of the rider brought out everyone left in camp. The rider wore an officer’s tunic in Hastur colors, torn and caked with sweat-streaked dust. His horse slid to a halt. Its sides heaved like bellows. Lather dripped from its muzzle and frothed the sides of its neck where the reins had rubbed. Its coat was so dark with sweat, it looked black.

The rider stumbled into the circle at the center of the encampment. Two of Rafael’s personal guards ran to catch him or he would surely have fallen.

“Are you hurt, man?”

The rider shook his head. “I must—tell—the King.”

“The battle—did it go against us, then?”

The rider only shook his head again and pulled free, toward the King’s tent. Just then Rafael Hastur appeared, lifting the door flap aside. The reddening sunset flashed on the simple copper circlet on his brow. Coryn felt the aura of energy surrounding the king like a crackle of dry lightning.

“Your Majesty!” the rider cried. “We are undone!”

A stormy expression flickered across Rafael’s eyes, as quickly gone. “Come with me,” he told the rider, gesturing to his tent. He gave a string of orders, for food to be brought, for wine, for the camp physician, for his senior officers. Coryn felt the heat of his gaze. “You, too. You will hear and advise me.”

Within minutes, the party gathered in the shadowed closeness of Rafael’s tent.
Laran
-powered glows brightened at Edric’s touch to fill the space with eerie radiance. The rider lowered himself to a canvas camp stool before the King’s chair, gulping water. Coryn thought he would rather be on his knees, pleading outright.

“At first everything went as we had planned,” the rider said. His name was Vincenzo or Vincento, Coryn didn’t catch which, and he was a captain, a leader of men.

There was something subtly wrong with Vincento that went beyond the stress and urgency of the moment. The man was not only exhausted, he was ill in some way that Coryn could not pinpoint. Gareth or Liane would know.

“Deslucido advanced as we retreated, right into the trap.
Domna
Caitlin and the others held the illusion until the last moment. Then we lifted the fog and let them see us.” Vincento stopped for more water. His skin looked dull, like unfired clay, and he was sweating visibly, although the tent was cool and night was falling. A flicker of pain crossed his face, deepening the lines of strain.

They all waited for him to continue. Rafael sat back in his chair, stroking his beard with one hand.

“We offered them your terms and they agreed.”

One of the officers said. “Did they forswear themselves, then?”

Vincento shook his head. “Their men gave us the required oaths, and we permitted them to leave after Belisar Deslucido had given himself into our custody. But once he came into our camp,
Domna
Caitlin looked straight at him. The air shivered, and we saw we had been tricked. It was not young Deslucido, but an ordinary man, put under some kind of spell so as to resemble the Prince.” He paused, mouth working, sweating even harder now.

Coryn reached out with his mind and tasted Vincento’s sickness, felt the roil of nausea an instant before the man bolted for the back of the tent. They heard him retching outside. Rafael gestured for everyone to remain as they were except for the camp physician.

The physician came back a few minutes later, his face seamed with concern. The messenger followed him for a step or two before collapsing. Coryn caught the man before he fell and lowered him to a pile of folded blankets. The man curled on his side, body spasming with dry heaves. His skin felt hot and papery.

“This man is acutely ill, Highness,” the physician said. “He must rest, or he may not live past the telling of his story.”

“What is wrong with him?” Rafael asked.

“I . . . I am not sure.”

Coryn heard the resonances in the physician’s voice. If he did not know, he suspected, and that possibility terrified him.

The messenger flinched at the physician’s touch as if the merest contact with his skin pained him. He struggled to sit upright. His retching had subsided enough for him to speak. Rafael, despite the physician’s warning, came closer.

“Sire—” the voice, like the man’s skin, sounded shriveled, whispery. “We pursued them—and they—they—” For a moment, his words were lost in labored breathing. Coryn heard the wheeze and rale of congested lungs. A shiver went through him as he remembered that horrifying moment of
being
Kristlin stricken with lungrot.

“Bird-things—dropped—” the next word was indistinguishable. The man sagged back on the piled blankets. His chest rose and fell like the fluttering of wings. A shudder passed over his body and watery blood trickled from his mouth.

Coryn felt the sudden stillness, the weight of the man’s flesh as the spirit left him. The old ache behind his breastbone, which he had thought healed and gone with his childhood nightmares, throbbed.

“What is it?” Rafael asked. “What did he say?”

“He said nothing,
vai dom,
” the physician said in a hollow voice.

“Out with it, man! What happened?”
And will others of my men die like this?

Coryn heard the fury in Rafael’s voice, the passionate concern for his people. Rafael raised one hand and Coryn saw his intention, to go to the aid of his men, to see the destruction with his own eyes. He would spare himself nothing.

“No, Highness!” the physician let out a cry. “You must not risk yourself. We must move this camp back and set up to tend to the survivors—”

“I will not abandon my men to die.” Rafael barked out commands—to move the camp to a safer location, to set up facilities for nursing the wounded.

Within minutes, Coryn found himself on horseback, galloping in Rafael’s wake in the midst of the King’s hand-picked guard. Before long, night gathered inky shadows about them. Improvised torches wavered in the distance. Sometimes they heard rather than saw the oncoming soldiers.

Coryn called a sphere of cold blue light and held it aloft. They passed the retreating Hastur forces, cavalry bearing double or sometimes triple. Others jogged by on their own two feet, weapons and gear abandoned. Coryn saw how orderly their progress was, despite the darkness and the fear which burned in the air and glazed the eyes of the exhausted-looking men. There was no shoving, no disarray, no sign of panic.

A mounted officer held a torch aloft, shouting orders. He spotted Rafael’s banner and spurred his horse toward it. At Rafael’s command, he gave his report. The substitution of captive had been discovered, even as the dead messenger had said, and orders given to halt the retreat. An elite party of the fastest cavalry had ridden for the Ambervale vanguard where the real Prince Belisar must be hiding. The last third of the enemy foot soldiers, who had no notion of what had transpired, had halted. Somehow, word had gone forward, and the Ambervale forces had split in two. No one was sure what happened next in the dust and confusion, with riders going in both directions.

Something had exploded over the valley floor where the first ranks of the Hastur force surrounded the puzzled Ambervale foot soldiers. A hazy dust filled the air, each particle alight with green phosphorescence. Men on both sides had stood open-mouthed to watch its eerie, glittering fall. It billowed on even the faintest breeze as it slowly settled. And then, as if sent by the Lord of Light himself, a wind had sprung up, fitful gusts blowing the stuff toward the retreating Ambervale army. Within a few minutes, the air had grown unnaturally still, but not before the glowing mist had covered a good portion of Deslucido’s men.

“Sweet mother of darkness,” Rafael said, his voice gone suddenly hoarse. “Bonewater dust.”

Bonewater dust.
A
laran
weapon so horrible it poisoned the very land itself. No one knew how long its curse lasted, only that many who had been exposed and lived died later of burgeoning tumors, of falling-sickness with wasting and baldness, bloody diarrhea and madness.

“Deslucido must have dropped it to cover his retreat, but the wind betrayed him,” Rafael said. “The messenger spoke of bird-things, did he not? I have heard of small, individually guided devices, like birds with bellies of hollow glass, used to deliver
clingfire.
”

Coryn, too, had heard of such small,
laran
-powered machines. They were costly. Deslucido must have been mad to order such a thing.

“Your Majesty,” one of the officers said. “You
must
go back. The risk here is too great. Another shift in the wind, and Deslucido will have won.”

For a long moment, Rafael said nothing. The officer’s torch and Coryn’s ball of blue-white light cast warring hues over Rafael’s features. His eyes glittered gold and blue-white, although his expression remained impassive.

An aura flickered around the King’s head and shoulders, composed of energy rather than visible light, as if Aldones himself had touched the mortal man, turning him into something more. Something deep within Coryn shifted, opened. In that instant, he would have died for his King.

So this is what it means to be a son of the Lord of Light,
Coryn thought.
To have no thought for your own desires, your own life, except as it serves your kingdom.
He thought of Taniquel with a shiver of inexpressible sadness.

“Majesty,” he said. “Let me remain behind. I am a trained Tower worker. I am needed here.”

Nothing moved on that stretch of land where the earth itself now smoldered with a ghostly green fire. Not even a rat or bird broke the stillness, nor were there any
kyorebni,
carrion birds, to be seen aloft. Until he looked down on the contaminated land, Coryn had no direct experience of bonewater dust. It was worse than he’d ever imagined.

Dark mounds covered the field, in places blotting out the luminescence of the poisoned earth, so thick and numerous were they. Coryn knew he looked upon the piled bodies of dead men, hundreds of them, lying where they fell as the dust blew over them.

The Hali workers, Lady Caitlin, the sentry-bird handler, Edric, and the slender young woman, stood together on a hilltop. Their heads were bent and eyes closed in concentration.

Coryn slipped from his horse and approached them, careful not to disturb their linkage. He touched the starstone at his throat, using it as a focal point, and the ordinary world blurred.

They had created a
laran
boundary akin to the one used to separate out the particles of raw
clingfire
. Coryn immediately saw the sense in it. Circles of Tower workers often handled dangerous materials without harm, so long as their concentration held. Bernardo’s experiments with the less-explosive detonated
clingfire
had used
laran
forces as a buffer. Coryn’s hands had healed completely from his lapse while refining fire-fighting chemicals, but he remembered the shame of having been the one to break focus.

Whether this bonewater dust worked as waves of energy or bits of material, he realized, it had a signature resonance, and Caitlin and the others struggled to set up an interference pattern matched to it.

Caitlin had the skill of decades of Tower training, and the girl the raw power. But she was no Keeper and the merging was inherently unbalanced. Edric’s mind bucked and pulled at the constraint of her iron-hard discipline.

Smoothly, firmly, he caught up and shaped their linked mental energies. Where Caitlin had striven to create a series of rigid shields, he imagined a huge, flexible bubble, shimmering blue with
laran
power, enclosing the entire contaminated zone. He made no attempt to interfere with the processes of the dust itself, though he sensed myriad bits of energy, mindless, doing only what their nature had created them to do. It was the malice of the men who shaped them which caused the destruction, not any inherent evil in the stuff. He thought of poisonous plants, which often made beautiful flowers and harmed no one unless eaten, or of herbs which could cure in one dosage and kill in another.

Let each thing keep to its natural place . . .
He sent out the thought. The girl and the other man picked up it, amplified it.

The bits of energy whirled and darted within the bubble. Coryn softened the bubble’s filmy layer, giving it flexibility. The willow bends before the storm. The bird aloft shifts with the rising thermals . . .

He felt a surge of response in Edric’s mind as the man answered the image, envisioning the bubble as an airstream lifting a falcon’s wings. The willow, that was the girl Graciela, slender and whipcord-tough. She gave a silent laugh like rippling bells that reminded him of Bronwyn’s mental signature. Her bubble was a basket, thousands upon thousands of tendrils all woven together . . .
growing
together . . . so that not water, not wind, not the whirling bits of bonewater dust could penetrate.