The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy (47 page)

I saw Linerges limping toward me, flanked by his officers, and then, running toward me, was Cymea. Her wand was in one hand, bloodstained sword in the other.

We were in each other’s arms for an instant.

“Gods, but I’m glad you’re alive,” I managed. “I don’t know what I would have done — ”

“Quiet,” she said hastily. “I don’t either. But I love you.” She pulled away.

“We’ve broken through,” Linerges said. “Your plan worked.”

“Badly,” I said. “Bloodily.”

“What else is war?” he said.

I looked at the spray of bodies around the bridge’s ramparts, so thickly piled I couldn’t see the cobblestones they lay on, and shuddered.

Linerges nodded.

“Bad. But now the real slaughter begins,” he said. “Now it’s time for Tenedos to face the sword.”

We didn’t give Tenedos time to recover, but immediately assaulted across the bridge. With a foothold, other attack teams went down the peninsula and captured other bridges and attacked across them.

The battle became a meat grinder, slow, day by day. I’d send a unit into battle, and hours or days later, a few survivors would shamble out. Now I was no longer Damastes the Fair, or Damastes the Brave, but Damastes the Butcher.

With this scatter of men, I’d reform the unit, using them as cadre, and fill the ranks with the recruits that streamed to our camp, eager for a taste of war. I doubt if many relished that taste once it was swallowed, nor the emetic dose of blood and horror that followed.

Tovieti came to us, and I changed my policy, letting them fight together, with only a few veterans to try to teach them enough to stay alive for the first decisive hours.

A soldier in those terrible days had only two fates: to be killed or wounded. Mostly they went down within their first few hours of combat, but enough survived to become tough veterans who killed without qualms, without mercy, without malice.

The least happy men in my army were the cavalry, for there was no room to maneuver in the rubble-strewn streets, and so I dismounted them and turned them into infantry, their horses stabled behind the lines.

Neither side took many prisoners, not after we saw what the former Peace Guardians did to anyone they captured and, later, deeper into the city, to our Tovieti brethren.

A human soldier of Tenedos might have a very slight chance of survival in our hands. But Tenedos’s magical creations, even though we knew they were men, women, children in reality, never surrendered; nor did we make any attempts to capture them. We let them fight to the death.

These clockwork warriors were improving in their fighting ability as the battle went on. They still weren’t able to stand up to an experienced soldier, but they were far better than the recruits I shoveled into the front lines. They never seemed to tire, hunger, or need rest.

Sinait tried to create a spell that would break the magic that created them, but without success.

As for Nicias’s warders, we saw how they’d kept the city’s peace the first time we smelled the stink coming from Tovieti households. Everyone, not just the fighters, had been killed, no doubt under Tenedos’s direct orders, and the warders had been creative in the way they slew.

I waited until some warders had surrendered, then turned them over to Tovieti formations and told them to do what they liked. Anyone who believes the enemy is the only one who can torture with imagination has never been in a war. I was disgusted with my allies, with myself for allowing it. But word spread, and after that, we found fewer butchered women and children in houses with the upside-down U symbol.

I expected Tenedos to attack with Great Spells, for certainly the streets of Nicias were drenched with enough blood for Saionji to be cackling in joy, but nothing came. What spells he and his Corps of Wizards sent were mostly turned aside by our wizards.

“You see,” Yonge said. “This proves Truth and Right are on our side, and surely Goodness always triumphs. Heh. Heh.”

Linerges and I stared, all three of us as shabby as any of our soldiers, then, for the first time in days, found raucous laughter.

The fighting was grim, made worse because each little engagement was much like the previous as we fought from building to building, block to block, street to street. Scouts would dart forward, find an enemy strongpoint. Sometimes … not often, but sometimes … it was possible to use magic to drive the enemy out, but normally they had to be winkled out by men willing to die, knowing their epitaph — “killed while assaulting the four-story white apartment building at the crossing of Ker and Mamin Streets” — would be their only memorial, unlikely ever to become the subject of a ballad.

My soldiers grew cunning as the battle ground on. Instead of attacking frontally, they’d go to the roofs and rain down spears, arrows, roofbeams, cobbles. Or else they’d go through the walls with battering rams and burst in behind their foes.

The people of Nicias cowered in their basements, in their rooms, surrendered when they could. But mistakes were made, and sometimes an archer would loose at a sound, and a child would go down screaming, a child who’d been running to him for protection.

All of us were stumbling, drained, and men began making mistakes, standing up in a position they knew within range of enemy archers, lighting a fire for cooking at night, running into the open for a better shot, the careless errors of the completely exhausted.

I saw Cymea from time to time, generally when each of us was on the way to another emergency.

I’d brought my headquarters across the river, moving it as we advanced, staying very close to the lines. I had my tent pitched wherever there was room, every now and again getting a chance for a quick wash or an hour’s rest, and sometimes she’d be there asleep, and I’d try not to disturb her. Twice we met when awake, and both times made fierce, angry love, reaffirming we were alive and there might be something beyond this death-in-life called war.

We fought by day and night, night combat the most eerie, for Nicias’s famed gas still burnt, but sometimes now through cracks in the pavement or setting unexpected fire to a building no one was near.

We fought not just with a soldier’s normal weapons, but with fire, putting a building full of stubborn defenders to the torch, filling flasks with cooking oil and stuffing a rag in its mouth, firing the rag and hurling the flaming jar into an enemy position. In low-lying districts the sappers pumped river water into basements still held by the enemy.

Or we used earth, entombing entire positions without wasting a man’s life entering them.

We’d had no time to build siege engines, but we found some in a storeyard. That gave us a few mangonels and ballistae that cut down our casualties. Others came from an army museum. These had been chosen as much for their beauty in carving and decoration, but once we replaced the leather ties, the ropes, and rotten wood, they worked as efficiently as their stark, younger relatives.

Building by building, street by street, block by block, we fought our way toward the heart of the city.

But by the near-end of the Time of Heat, we still held only a third of Nicias. My army had been decimated, and Tenedos’s men fought as stubbornly as before. We hadn’t been able to surround the city, and so they were still getting supplies from the north and east.

I needed a master stroke, and remembered a legend.

• • •

The troops had been alerted for a general attack and given tiny ensorcelled bits of wood that would become torches when rubbed and three words said over them by anyone. They were warned to expect the unusual, and not panic, not give up hope. I wished I could have put a wizard with each company, to reassure the men, but all magicians would be busy, some casting the counterspell to keep Tenedos from discovering our plan, the rest creating the master spell.

A day before the spell began, thirty-nine — thirteen times three — magicians had begun chanting, over and over again:

“Jacini, Varum,

Listen

And give forth

Shahriya, retreat

Give up

The domain is lost

The domain is lost

For a time Give up

And ye shall regain

Give up

Your domain

Is not below

Submit

Turn away

Turn away

Kanaltah hwah doy

…

Jacini, Varum,

Listen …”

On and on, over and over, in a drone that grew louder, though none of the chanters raised their voices; nor did anyone or anything visible add to their ranks.

On the ninth hour, braziers were lit around a multicircle, strangely lettered figure drawn in black sand, and acolytes fed tiny amounts of herbs into them, dried aloe, barberry, blue vervain, storksbill, anise, comfrey, quaking aspen, others. The braziers fumed and smoked, as if unwilling to burn.

Nine hours after that, as it was growing dark, Sinait, flanked by Cymea and another powerful wizard, all three wearing blue robes in honor of Varum, god of water, each with her own brazier, began their own chant:

“Varum, Jacini

Take the lesser god

Take the lesser god

Take the lesser god

Give him not his name

For a time

For a time

For a time

H’lai vatha p’rek

H’lai

H’lai

Hold him close

Deny his freedom

Deny his birthright

R’wen al’ gaf

For a time

For a time

For a debt.”

The two drones mingled, wove together, almost musical.

The three wizards’ chant grew louder, burying the others. Acolytes handed each of the three a bowl of salt, a bowl of water, a tiny bundle of green wood.

Sinait made measured motions with her twigs, the other two followed with their bowls. At a signal, all three cast water, salt, and green wood onto the braziers. The smoldering fires flared out, and all the other braziers were extinguished at the same moment.

Total silence, total darkness, an anticlimax.

Then, from our lines and from the city, a wailing began, a moaning of complete despair.

The gas fires of Nicias, the fires that had given it the name of City of Lights, were out.

Then the screams began, for legends said if the gods-given flames of Nicias ever went out, Numantia was doomed.

Now all was dark, all was terror, all was hopelessness.

Officers, warrants, most as fearful as any, roared for the torches to be lit, and fire flickered up and down our lines.

I shouted to a squad of buglers, and brass railed against the night, and my troops went forward. At first they moved slowly, reluctantly, then stronger, faster, as long-held positions fell, their enemies stumbling out, hands high, eyes glaring in panic.

The first wave swept forward as ordered, bypassing resistance. The second and third waves closed with these strong points, mopping up.

We moved far and fast, and I had no alternative but to commit my reserves, and still the advance continued. I sent gallopers to pull the dismounted cavalry out of the lines and march them back to their stables. Now we were fighting in clear streets, unruined buildings, and there was room for the horsemen to fight in.

Suddenly the blackness became gray and I could see, and I sagged, my voice no more than a croak.

But this was triumph. We held more than half of Nicias, and the defenders had pulled back into a tight circle around the center of the city, the palaces of power, the barracks, and the Imperial Palace itself that Tenedos fought from.

Then their lines firmed, and we were stopped cold.

I ordered the offensive halted, and for our lines to be stabilized.

Svalbard brought tea, a hunk of bread, and a large piece of cheese that wasn’t too dusty.

I saw Sinait and Cymea hurrying toward me, faces worried, afraid. I drained the tea, cast the food aside, fatigue gone.

“There’s a spell being mounted,” Sinait said. “A big one. A very big one.”

My fatigue was gone, for I knew what that spell must be, the greatest of all spells ever cast in Numantia, the same spell Tenedos had indebted his kingdom to learn.

This was the spell to summon the monstrous black demon that had destroyed Chardin Sher and his castle, the terror Tenedos had later almost loosed on the Maisirians and then on Nicias, the spell I’d broken by clubbing down Tenedos.

Just now Tenedos would be striking a bargain with this demon, a bargain of blood and death. The last time the deal had been struck, millions of Numantians, more Maisirians, had died in payment.

What would be the demon’s price this time?

And how far, how long, would Tenedos let the horror rave?

There was only one way to possibly stop the demon.

• • •

I expected argument from Linerges about haring off once more, but got none. He looked at me strangely, said something about the long bond being broken, said he’d make a feint wherever I wished to cover me.

Sinait said she should go, but I refused. She’d created and trained my wizards, and I thought she was still a slightly greater sorcerer than Cymea. With great magic being imminent, I wanted Sinait with the army, able to instantly react to whatever happened.

I took Cymea aside, told her what I intended.

“Good,” she said. “I would have been angry if you’d gone without me. What are our chances?”

“Perhaps seventy-thirty we’ll reach the Palace, forty-sixty we’ll be able to get inside, and from there, Saionji holds the dice.”

“What a noble speech,” she said. “Makes me want to rush right out and die for somebody. I’m getting Jakuns. We’ve got even more of a score to settle with Tenedos than you.”

“No,” I said flatly. “In that, you’re wrong.”

I looked around for Svalbard, saw him coming toward me with Yonge.

“If we’re going after Tenedos,” the big man said, “I thought Yonge should be along.”

Again, there was no argument. Yonge had been with me from the beginning, back in Kait, with the Seer Tenedos.

“Ten of your best skirmishers,” I said, and Yonge nodded.