The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (78 page)

“Sir, I can't.  I can't,” he managed.  Vyslin rested limp against his shoulder.  “I need to be here.”

“You need to be with the rest of the men.  Report what happened.  Rally them.”

Rally?
  Linciard looked up to see the tension on Benson's round face, the clench of his jaw beneath his dark beard, and realized that the lieutenant was scared too.  He'd never been much of a commander, and now he was—

A jolt went through him.  “Where's the captain?”

“Upstairs with the specialists, and who knows what in pike's name they're doing.  Nobody down here has a clue.  I need you.”

He looked down at Vyslin's face.  They'd spent so much time shouting at each other, so much time separated by ranks.  He'd hoped that they could be friends after their split but that had never really manifested.  And now—

“Sergeant!”

He glanced to Shuralla, who nodded reassuringly.  He laid Vyslin back down.  Then, reluctant, limping, he followed Benson's vigorous beckon into the assembly hall.

It was packed, men on the stairs and in the corridors and at the bunkroom doors and filling the floorspace, leaving only a thin circle around the inactive portal-frames.  Linciard wondered what they had heard.  What the surviving lancers had told them.  The place had been a bundle of nerves ever since the Potter's Row disaster but this was something else entirely.

Benson pushed through the crowd and mounted the stairs to the middle landing, motioning insistently for Linciard to join him.  When Linciard tried to fall into place behind him, Benson said, “No.  Stand forward.  Talk.”

Pike it, you jumped-up supply clerk
, he thought, but then Benson slapped his lieutenant's fledge into Linciard's hand.

Linciard took a breath, then faced the men.

“First of all, where in pike's name are the colonel's soldiers?”

“They all ran out when we got the call,” said Lieutenant Arlin near the back.  “Haven't seen hide nor hair of them since.  Messenger Cortine neither.”

“Do we have anyone posted on watch?”

“Couple scouts on the roof with Tanvolthene.  Archers at the windows.  You haven't been on the hook?”

He found it in his belt-pouch, where he'd stuck it when the voices started overwhelming him, and slid it back on.  “No, thanks.  Any other incidents?”

“Not that we've heard of, not since you lot returned.”

“All right.  So.”  He closed his eyes, the scene imprinted on his mind: the ruined street, the fallen horses.  “We were ambushed.  They set up some kind of trap like at Potter's Row, only it didn't even need shadows—it just ate the street.  From below, I think.  Men fell in.  I haven't gotten a proper headcount.  Benson?”

“Nine dead or missing, sir.”

“Nine?”  He remembered seven...

“Lancer Vallarn bled out before the medic could stabilize him.  Corporal Redsky was bringing up the rear.  Got shot in the back.”

Nine.  Almost a full section—a quarter of the platoon.  And the eleven survivors confined to the infirmary, several crippled.

It could have been worse.  Rallant's platoon lost twice that number.

That's not comforting.

“Right.  Right.  Well, we...we can't...” 
Get it together!
  “We can't act on this until the colonel returns.  All we can do is stay alert, stay in here, keep the wards up.  Get the medic anything she needs.  And no smoking today, you understand.”

An agitated murmur ran through the crowd.  Rashi took the edge off of bad nerves, but it slowed reactions and caused hallucinations near arcane fields—which, due to the wards, was every inch of this place.  Linciard made a shushing motion and they quieted.  “No one will be jumping at shapes and sparkles, you hear me?  Everyone armed, everyone in armor even when you rest.  All our service personnel have piked off, so we don't let anyone in who's not us or the colonel's men.  How about the militia—they were being sent off, right?”

“Still in the stables and the cells, sir,” said Archer-Lieutenant Sengith.  “The colonel's men wanted us to send them through after their troops finished crossing, but then we got the alert.”

“Extra piking lights in the stables, then.  And the cells.  Did anyone check over the horses?  How many'd we lose?”

“Twelve, sir.”  That was Virn, a corporal for one of the lancer-sections that had stayed here.  “Out of twenty-two.  Three injured, a bunch bloodied but fine.”

That struck Linciard as strange but he couldn't focus on it.  “Good.  All right, I don't know what more to say.  Anyone sees anything weird, tell your officer immediately.  Shadows, mage-lights, wards, stuff going on outside—anything.  If we don't hear back from the colonel or the captain or anyone soon, I'm gonna have the mages reopen those portals and put us through, because this is not our kind of fight.  Until then, we just hold.  Understood?”

A rough chorus of
yessirs
.  A slight diminishing of the crowd as men retreated into their bunkrooms.  Benson clapped him on the shoulder, expression relieved, and Linciard resisted the urge to punch the man.  The lieutenant's fledge felt heavy in his hand.

Upstairs, the doors remained shut, captain and specialists and mages encapsulated in their own little world.  Though he wanted to be elsewhere—in the infirmary, or back home, or far away from all of this—Linciard sat down on a step to wait.

His left foot throbbed.  Half an inch of his boot had been sheared off, taking the ends of three toes with it, and he had packed the gap with medical cloth until it stopped spotting.  He wouldn't bother Shuralla with it, not when so many others needed her attention.

A cheroot sounded like the best thing in the world, but if the men couldn't have one, neither would he.

How long he sat there, thoughts swirling aimlessly, he didn't know.  There was something he'd meant to remember, meant to tell someone, but it was lost in the morass.

Only when the conference room door opened and he saw Sarovy stalk out, followed by swarms of specialists, did he remember: Rallant.  But Rallant was there in the crowd, and the captain's face was fixed in that unstoppable look, and before he knew it, he was swept up in the man's wake, reporting but unable to give the warning.  Not under his lover's eye.

*****

In a dark sphere, on an eiyet-chewed chair, sat a ragged bite-spattered man in Crimson lancer armor.

In an adjoining sphere, partially open to a chamber in the real world, sat Enforcer Ardent and Sergeant Presh: one half of the rough circle that crossed the umbral wall.

“So you don't know him,” Ardent prompted.

Presh shook his head.  “Not personally.”  Now that he had dried out, he had been released from his shadow-cell, though Ardent didn't trust him not to fling himself through the opening and try to summon his Imperial friends.  That was why Ticuo stood at his shoulder, muscular arms crossed, dark eyes narrowed with anticipation.

“But he's absolutely not an officer?”

“The captain doesn't bother with subterfuge.  He has no marks of rank, so he has no rank.”

She sighed.  The man in the cell was the second of the two lancers who'd fallen through in one piece, but he refused to say his name—or anything at all.  He just glared.  She couldn't blame him, really.  Her people had dragged him from the throat of the Dark then let the eiyets nip at him while she was busy shooting his captain.

“You shouldn't have shot that last one,” she told Ticuo.  “The officer.  We could have grabbed him and gotten some decent intel.”

Ticuo scowled at nothing.

“If I may,” said Presh, leaning forward, “I would recommend you contact my patron.  He has some influence over this company, and may be willing to bargain for me—“

“It is no longer this company,” Ardent interjected.  “Those white-armored men, the higher officer, the mages, and whatever happened with your captain...  Void's Teeth, I have enough of a headache without trying to contact a piking Archmagus.”

“Especially that one,” intoned the grizzled old man on the other side of the umbral wall.  He and Madam Lirayen sat in the near-dark of one of her constituents' back rooms, her in a rocking chair and him on a storage trunk with a lion-skin draped across his lap.  A ragged dog napped at his feet, indifferent to the skitter of eiyets beyond the eye-shaped lights of the little lantern that lit their space.  Beyond them, a privacy screen blocked off the kitchen where the tenant and Greymark's sullen young companion had gone.  “I don't know what his game is here, but I aim to smash it.”

“Now now,” said Madam Lirayen.  “Hammer is just a title, you needn't live up to it.”

The old man smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.  He was Gwydren Greymark, and despite the deep-etched lines on his face, Ardent knew him for an immortal.  He had the same clear, hard gaze as the older eiyensuriel.

“Then let me contact my gestalt,” said Presh.  “Perhaps I can bring them to you.”

Ticuo snarled, “Do we look like idiots?”

Ardent held up a hand to quiet him.  “Believe me, I would like to do that,” she told Presh.  “Bloodshed is never the best option.  But we can not tolerate those monsters, not anymore.  If there can be no bargain, there will be no mercy.”

“So we can kill him, then?” said Ticuo, gesturing toward the soldier in the chair.

“No.  The monsters and any who would defend them, but none who surrender.”

“But commander, he didn't—“

“
No
, Ticuo.”

He glared at her over Presh's shoulder and she considered cycling him back to the Spindle.  He was too close to the city, and took things too personally.  But she needed his knowledge, his familiarity with the remaining Kheri of Bah-
kai
; they would not take it well if she dismissed him.  Softer, she said, “The human soldiers are no different from our street-level agents.  They obey their leaders.  So we remove those leaders and teach the soldiers better.”

“That one's barely an Imperial, if I see him right,” said Gwydren.  “Looks Averognan.  And the first was a Jernizen.  If they won't talk, it's because you've got them crammed in a dark hole.”

“We can't let them out.  The mentalist will find them.”

“I know, Enforcer.  I'm not criticizing.”

Ardent forced herself to exhale, to be calm.  This situation was a mess.  Because of Commander Tonner, she'd gone to war with this company—this little crack in the dam that divided Bahlaer from the Crimson Army.  Now it was widening, and she had no way to plug it.

“I wish I could offer more aid,” she said, “but we need to stand down.  I've called upon the Dark too much.  We should give this a few weeks; let them establish themselves, get comfortable again, let down their guard.  Then, if you insist, I'll take them all in one big bite.”

“I'd rather avoid the use of the Dark as well,” said Gwydren.  “But to wait so long...”

“They're Light-followers.  What will they dare do over Midwinter?”

“True.”

“So we minister to our own?” said Madam Lirayen.  “Move them away from the Imperials' headquarters?  More people are leaving every day.  I hate to see them displaced in this season, but if the Imperial presence keeps building...”

“I can't offer passage through the Shadow Realm; too dangerous,” said Ardent.  “But I can talk to the leadership in Taradzur for you.  The refugees from last year have mostly been absorbed into the populace, so they may have space again, and resources.  At the least, they could send a few mages, make some portals so your people can escape.”

Lirayen nodded.  “It would be appreciated.  Bahlaer has been the most compliant of the city-states.  Our people have nowhere to run that is not more fully in the Crimson's fist.”

“We bide our time, then?” said Gwydren.  “Watch, listen...  I suppose I can restrain myself.”

“They can't hide forever,” muttered Ticuo.

Ardent nodded to both of them.  It was for the best.  The more time they had before the dam broke, the fewer it would drown.

It was just a matter of time.

*****

Looking out from the roof of the south-central infirmary, Weshker could almost count the campfires in the slave section.  That sprawling tent-city should have contained fifteen thousand slaves, but it had been winnowed visibly since his last time up this high—that brief moment with Sanava before he and Blaze Company had headed out the gates.

Maybe half the tents had collapsed from disuse.  The active areas were crowded as the remaining slaves sought camaraderie en masse, but even as he watched, a platoon of soldiers moved toward one of those gatherings, accompanied by hounds and white-robes.

He wondered what would happen.  Resistance?  Mentalist and specialist control?  He had seen the slaves being led through the streets toward the mages' district but never gotten close, too uncertain and guilty about his own status as a free man.

“
Weshker!
” called a faint voice from below, and he grimaced.  Already she'd found him.

He was never alone.  When Nerice wasn't there, it was Pendriel, but usually it was both.  At first he'd enjoyed it—the companionship, the protection and, yes, the sex—but it just didn't stop.  For seven days, he'd had nary a moment to himself, and he'd discovered how much he disliked sustained attention.