Unbound (56 page)

“Papa . . .”

“The Valley of Dreams, indeed.”

“. . . not all the wizards are bad.” Nana May’s voice was weak, finished, the last autumn breeze chased out by winter. She barely believed it herself, Emil realized, and with that, he felt a deep sadness.

Emil heard the scattering of more wooden soldiers. “It twists them all around, the magic. Your son would have betrayed us just the same.”

Horace tried once again to pull him away, a tight grip over rough wool.

“Please, Papa . . .” Then Nana May made a little gasp of fear, and Emil tried to move forward. He needed to know what was happening. He needed to go in to her, to save her if necessary, but his legs wouldn't move, and in any case Horace held tight to his arm. Emil heard the wood-ax thunk against the floorboards. “I'm going to chop every last one of these worthless toys.”

“Papa! You'll kill yourself.”

“If you knew the things I did in the war, you wouldn't be coming at me when I got an ax in my hand. Now lay off, woman, and let me do my work.” The ax hit again.
Crack.

Emil stood and listened for what seemed a long time.
Crack. Crack.
He felt conscious of the carvings in his boot, pressing against his leg, and the sound of Nana May crying, and the scent of Horace behind him, all pine needles and wax. What he did not feel was his papa. He truly was gone.

The ax, its job finished, fell with a bang upon the eating table.

Emil’s face was wet with tears. He heard someone else weeping too.

Greatpapa.

“If I die tonight, don't let the rats get me. Don't let them eat me.”

Nana May sniffed, not the crying kind from before but more of a Nana May sort of sniff, the kind she used when Emil was slow to his tasks. “There are no rats in here, Papa.”

“Rats are everywhere, May. Even in the mountains. Fed on my brothers. My friends. I tried to stop ’em. But there's a good girl, keep ’em off of me.”

“Yes, Papa, I will.”

* * * * *

Emil felt cut in two. He wiped his tears and turned away. “Come,” he said to Horace, “I’ll show you where to sleep.” As he walked through the darkness, he thought of his papa and the warm feeling that came in the room when he used to carve, how it buzzed and tasted of life, round and sweet. He remembered Nana May saying it ruined the vegetables and brought rot to the apple trees. No more carving, she had said. Emil could feel the garden now, limp and diseased in the night, gnawed and chewed by pests and vermin, even though his papa was long gone. It hadn’t been the carving after all, and that made him angry.

“Why did you have to go and do that?” he asked the bard.

“Do what?”

“Come here, ask questions, make the soldiers move . . . you’ve ruined everything!”

“Have I?”

“Of course you have.” Emil pulled open the barn door. “You can forget about staying here too! I saw you smiling at Nana May, and looking at all our things as if they were yours! Well, you can forget it.”

Horace leaned down, put his face on a level with Emil’s, and looked into his eyes, man to man. “I wasn’t going to stay.”

“Then what were you going to do? Take Nana May away with you?”

Horace laid a hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t your Nana May I came for,” he said, his eyes so direct, always so direct and honest, that Emil knew it for truth.

And so he ran. He sprinted toward the river where his father had found his end, and from there into the woods, where crickets chirped and roots tangled around his feet. When he thought he had gone far enough that Horace would not find him, he sat with his back against a tree. Only then did he realize he had heard no shouts, no running footsteps. Horace had let him go.

Emil gathered his thoughts. It had to be him who made the garden sick. It had to be him who brought bad luck, just like his father. He sat so long the forest grew quiet all around. His neck ached; his throat was sore.

The night opened in his mind.

When he closed his eyes he could feel Greygirl hunting by the riverside, and the rats who ran from her, their hearts racing. Horace was at the river too, waiting for him in stillness, one hand on his lute. Nana May lay in her blankets, short little breaths showing her ready to wake at any moment, and quieter than all of them, Emil felt the dim light that was Greatpapa, flickering like a candle, but not ready to go out. Not yet. Emil breathed in the fierceness of that tiny flame. It was not anger that drove the old soldier; it was fear, fear so deep that it was part of him, bone and flesh and all. Emil remembered the toys turning in Papa’s hands, the power going into their tiny wooden forms. It had seemed a small trick, but now he knew it for wizardry; and he knew just as well as his greatpapa did that bringing toys to life and laying waste to an entire army was the same thing, only a different size.

Papa.
Now he understood.

In the morning, Emil woke with a stiff back and his chin against his chest. He reached down into his boot for the wooden soldier, but found the sparrow instead. He pulled it out and studied it, from its sharp beak to its carefully rendered feathers and delicate feet. He ran his fingers over its wings and felt a sympathetic trembling in the wood. Emil made a fist around the carving so that nobody, not even the real birds above, could see. The sparrow’s wings tickled his palm as it stirred, waking to his will.

Brian McClellan

Sergeant Tamas closed his eyes and listened to orders being called back and forth across the front lines, voices punctuated by the report of artillery blasting away from the next hill over. Captains shouted at their lieutenants, lieutenants shouted at their sergeants, sergeants at their infantry. It was only a matter of time before some poor infantryman snapped and started screaming at the drummer boys for the simple release of having someone of his own to bark orders at.

It was all nonsense, of course. "Hold steady, boys," or "keep your heads up," or "first man over the top gets a hundred krana." Everyone was in line, bayonets set, flintlocks primed, ladders to shoulders, tensed and just waiting for the signal. The only thing the shouting accomplished, as far as he was concerned, was to allow the officers to unleash their own damned uncertainty in as manly a fashion as possible.

Meanwhile the infantry baked in their uniforms, jackets and pants already soaked with sweat. If General Seske waited another half hour to give the order to charge, the desert sun might just reduce the entire Adran army to withered husks.

"This is bullshit," a voice said behind him.

"Quiet down, Farthing," Private Lillen responded in her lazy drawl. "I'm trying to get in a nap before this things starts."

"I'm not joking," Farthing said. "This is utter bullshit. We're charging the broad face of a bloody fort in full daylight with nothing but ladders and light artillery. It's not going to work, just like it didn't work last time or the time before that. We're all about to be buggered by grapeshot and sorcery. Might as well call us 'his royal majesty's Adran bullet-absorbers.’"

"You'd think you'd have gotten used to it by now," Lillen said.

"Used to it? Explain to me how one gets used to a fireball to the face? The same way you get used to napping on your feet? Because I can't figure that one out either."

"You want to desert?" Lillen's pleasant tone turned mocking. "Because you've been telling us you're going to desert for almost three years now and it hasn't happened yet. I'm beginning to think I'll be long dead by the time you finally do it, which is a shame because I want to be there when they haul you back into camp and put you in front of a firing squad."

"You bitch. I'll cut you for that."

"Shut up, Farthing," Tamas said. "And take your damned nap, Lillen. You've got about eighty seconds left. If anyone can do it, you can."

"Yes Sarge," both soldiers said, subdued. There were a handful of snickers from the other nine members of Tamas's squad but he didn't look back. Let them have their bitching and their petty squabbles. It was
their
only outlet right before a charge of this importance and Tamas's squad, unlike plenty others, weren't lacking in courage and loyalty. They'd be on his heels from here to the fort and straight to the pit.

Tamas kept his eyes on the fort. Over a mile away, thick puffs of smoke rose from Gurlish cannons as they returned fire at the Adran artillery. Gurlish cannons weren't as good as the Adran's—they lacked the range and the punch needed to clear the distance, but occasionally one would get lucky and an eight-pound ball would ricochet off the ground and knock out an Adran field gun or plow through the ranks to a chorus of screams.

On the other hand, the sorcery protecting the Gurlish fort was as potent as any, and had shrugged off almost two years of shelling. The Adran artillery blasted against the walls to no visible effect. He wondered why either side even bothered.

The only conceivable way of taking the fort of Tilpur would be up and over those walls into the teeth of Gurlish bayonets and pikes.

The fort itself was no great marvel of military engineering. It had six thirty-five-foot walls and six onion-domed towers, with broad space on the parapets that would allow the Gurlish to bring no less than twelve cannons to bear on any approach. The garrison was supposedly two thousand men, but his own estimates put it at half that number. Not that it mattered. A fort like that could be effectively defended by a few hundred.

Tamas pried the paper end off one of his powder charges with a grimy thumbnail. He touched the loose black powder to his tongue, shivering at the sulfuric taste. His resolve tightened instantly, his senses sharpened. Sorcery lit his veins, giving him the strength of four men and speed that would let him run the distance to the fort in less than three minutes. Not for the first time he wondered how regular soldiers tolerated the stress of battle without a powder trance.

Strength and speed and sorcerous courage were wasted in the infantry line where battle was about mass rather than individual prowess, but his
betters
had decided to put him here regardless. All he could do was wait, hoping he survived long enough to make it over those walls. He emptied the rest of the powder charge into his mouth.

The euphoria of a powder trance took a hold of him, removing what little fear he had.

Behind the artillery, a man on horseback approached General Seske. Salutes were exchanged, the general nodded, and an order was given. "It's time," Tamas said over his shoulder.

Somewhere, a boy rattled out a single pair of beats on his side drum. Along the lines, men fell silent.

"Advance!" came the long-anticipated order.

The next five minutes were a maelstrom of blood and horror straight from the pit. At three-quarters of a mile the Gurlish Privileged opened up with their elemental sorcery. Fire and ice rained down on the Adran infantry from the fortress walls. Some of it was blocked by the Adran Privileged marching in the rear, but far too much of it pierced their protection to leave charred bodies in the wake of the army.

At five hundred yards the cadence of the drums doubled and Tamas broke into a run, musket gripped in both hands, teeth clenched against what would come next. Behind him his squad spat defiance and curses at the bombardment.

Whole platoons were leveled in a torrent of grapeshot. The Gurlish managed two salvos before the front lines, Tamas and his men included, were beneath their line of fire.

"Ladders!" Tamas yelled as he reached the rocky base of the fort. Ladder teams rushed forward and raised their long ladders against the walls as musket balls and stones hailed down from above.

Tamas took stock of the Adran infantry, assessing the situation in a heartbeat. Hundreds lay dead and wounded on the field behind them, but an equal number had managed to reach the relative safety found at the base of the walls, and more still advanced across the rocky, barren ground of the desert floor. He hoped it enough to scale the walls and take the fort.

Just get me over the top
, he prayed to no god in particular, shouldering his musket and readying to throw himself on to the first steady ladder. The sorcery raining down from above intensified, blasting scorch marks into the earth. The rear lines began to waver. Tamas cursed them silently, urging them to steady.

Somewhere back by the Adran artillery a bugle let out a long, mournful note. "No, damn it," Tamas swore. "We can do this." He looked up at the top of the fort wall. "We have enough men, we can do this!"

All around him, men broke off the assault and fled toward the Adran lines, abandoning ladders, kit, and muskets.

"Sarge, that's the retreat," Lillen said, grabbing Tamas by the arm.

He shook her off. "I know, damn it! Why are we retreating? This is as close as we've ever gotten. Bloody fools!"

"Sarge!"

"I know, I'm coming." Tamas cast one more look toward the top of the walls. All he needed to do was get inside.

* * * * *

"We could have made it over those walls, sir." Tamas paced back and forth in the small space of his captain's tent. The dry desert air tasted of defeat, the whole camp brooding, sullen, and quiet this evening save for the cries of the wounded in the surgeons' tents.