The heron kings flight, p.19
The Heron Kings' Flight, page 19
“Not so loud,” he grumbled when they caught up to him. He was an average-looking fellow of seemingly middling means, but wore a nervous frown. “Who knows who else is listening.”
“Who is this?” Aerrus asked.
“One of Bolen’s contacts, from the intelligence network we were trying to set up,” said Linet.
“Humph,” snorted the man, arms crossed. “Contact? Pretty word for trappin’ me in your debt. Was all that cack you just told the committee true?”
“’Fraid so,” said Aerrus. “Don’t suppose you might have better luck convincing everyone?”
The man shrugged. “Still got some o’ the right ears on my side. I might….”
Linet scowled. “If?”
“If you account my debt paid, and I never have to lay eyes on you noggin-fracted folks again.”
“You’ll get your wish if Phynagoras gets his hands on you, though not in the way you’d want. Fine. Get these people to evacuate and you’re a free man.”
He nodded. “Deal.”
“You could join us you know,” Aerrus ventured, “help us fight.”
“No thanks, I done my part. I’m for ’Nocca, fast as I can make it.”
The man was as good as his word. By the time they left Wengeddy all the aristocrats had begun packing up their wealth and belongings and servants, ready to abandon the city just as Osmund had abandoned the kingdom. Since rich tongues wagged the loudest, the news quickly permeated to the general population, and just before the town of about four thousand souls disappeared out of sight the beginnings of a mass exodus could be spotted. Aerrus gave a bitter laugh. “Looks like we been going about this all wrong. We should’ve been threatening the pockets of the rich to get things done, not appealing to common sense they don’t seem to have.”
“What a pathetic showing,” Linet remarked, “that I’d account a panicked retreat a good result.”
“Not so good for the folk who have nowhere to go.”
* * *
Even that partial success was not to be repeated, however. “Useless!” Aerrus complained for the thousandth time as they finally rode into the familiar territory of the Marchwood. “So used to peace they don’t even consider the possibility. I blame Osmund, going without any army worthy of the name for so long.”
“An army that doesn’t exist can’t be turned against you, I guess,” Linet answered. “And no rebellious nobility. I guess it makes sense so long as there’s no external threat.”
“Which has worked out just beautifully, hasn’t it? Eh….” He cast a sidelong glance at Linet. “What do you think Perrim and Lom will have to say about all this?”
“I don’t know. But in a way it doesn’t matter. The thing’s done.”
They turned off the road onto a path a few miles north of the Lodge, taking a winding route partly out of the habit of leaving no trail when not in a hurry, but maybe also out of a subconscious desire to delay the inevitable confrontation. When they were before the rockface, with its hidden entrance and waterfall splashing in the distance, Aerrus looked up at it and sighed. “It seems smaller now, somehow. Doesn’t it?”
Linet nodded. “It does. In fact—”
She never finished her thought as Thanis and Haskell jumped out of some hidden sentry post, bows raised only long enough for them to recognize the pair.
“Gods’ tits,” Haskell grumbled, his goatee rippling. “Where in the nineteen hells have you two been?”
“All over the world, it seems like,” Linet answered. “I trust Thanis delivered our message?”
Thanis nodded. “I did. You could hear Perrim screaming in every cell of the Lodge.”
“I hope she’s calmed down by now,” said Aerrus.
“You’d better go check in. Just—” Thanis broke off suddenly, looked at Haskell.
“What?” Aerrus pressed.
“Nothing,” Haskell said. “Just get in there.”
* * *
“I don’t even know what to say.”
They stood before Perrim in the low light, feeling the annoyance radiating off the woman even if they couldn’t quite see her face. Lom sat at the end of the table, observing but silent. Linet fidgeted nervously.
“Perrim, I—”
“Be quiet!”
They stared each other down for several more seconds, looks of hurt and anger going both ways.
Finally Aerrus cleared his throat. “Look, we don’t have time to stand here playing at statues while Phyn—”
“I said be quiet!”
“I know,” Aerrus said, more than a little defiant, “and I understand you’re mad, but we don’t have the luxury of caring right now. Rules are about to go out the window, washed away with that waterfall outside along with a lot of blood. I know we didn’t have permission to go to Pelona, but a chance was in our grasp and I wasn’t going to let it slip away!”
Perrim shot a hard finger at Aerrus. “I almost expected something like this from you. You’re a weapon I know how to use. Gods help me, I wish all of us had a tenth of your brashness…though only a tenth. But you.” She turned to Linet. “I expected better. This was something to do with that man, wasn’t it? That soldier. I should’ve known.”
Linet thrust her chin forward, as she often did when indignant. “Will you let us make our report or not?”
“Oh, fine, gods damn you both! Make it.”
They told her all of it. Carsolan and the king, Rinalda, the Vrril, Pelona, the Polytheon, Phenidra and back again. When it was done Perrim sat for a long time, in thought or disbelief they couldn’t know. Finally she said, “You had no right to set us on this path, not on your own. But you’ve done so, and no turning back now. It seems one cannot stop the course of the sun. Leave me, I must think on these things.”
Lomuel stood, approached them holding a lamp. As the light danced more brightly across Perrim’s face, Linet nearly gasped. She looked even older than she had the last time Linet had endured her lecturing. Much older, and tired. Something was wrong. Linet glanced at Lom, who only gave her a stern look.
“Now,” he said to them both, “out with you. You are, after all, far behind on your duties and chores.” He shuffled them out of the council room, but instead of closing the door to shut them out, he joined the pair in the stone corridor. “Come with me,” he said quietly.
“Lom,” Aerrus said, trailing a half-step behind the man, “what was that? What is going on here?”
He led them into the archive study, where Linet had pilfered the incriminating documents before sneaking away with Lom’s tacit approval. After scanning the hallway for any eavesdroppers, he said, “Listen carefully. Perrim is…not well.”
A cold wave washed down Linet’s spine to pool in her stomach. “What do you mean, ‘not well’? She looks on the edge of death.” She immediately regretted the words, and the pained look on Lom’s face.
“You may not be wrong. Myrtho says it’s the wasting sickness. Live long enough and everyone gets it eventually. She may have a year, or five years, or just weeks. No telling how fast the disease will spread.”
Despite her recent hard words, tears now welled up in Linet’s eyes, and even Aerrus looked away. “Isn’t…isn’t there anything that can be done?”
Lom nodded. “As always in such cases, make her concluding days as peaceful as we can. But it seems that may not be possible now. For what it’s worth, I agree with you. This invasion will dash us on its rocks whether we fight it or no. I didn’t speak in your favor earlier because, well….”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” Aerrus finished. “Because you’re really the one running things now, isn’t that right?”
“I help as I can, more and more. I’m determined that what she doesn’t know will not harm her. Everyone else more or less knows this.”
“Does she?”
“It’s a hard life we lead. She knows that to reach her age, or mine, is a privilege, one I hope you both share. And she understands this is the way of things, even if she can’t say it outright.”
Linet wiped away her tears. “As always, Lom, you make a bitter pill go down easier. And what do you think about what’s to come? About those ways?”
Lom curled his lip. “Insurgency, terrorism? I think it’s like picking up a sword by the sharp end to strike. You’re just as like to cut yourself as your enemy. But if what you say about the king’s dangerous gamble is true, it’s the only path left to us. Nothing you could’ve done differently would change that. You’ve both done very well. Perrim will come to see that too.”
Aerrus gave a soft grunt. “Even if she can’t say it outright?”
“Precisely.”
* * *
“I don’t understand,” said Drissa. “You expect us to…to go out there? To lead the commons in a war? That’s insane!”
Linet took another patient breath, prepared to explain it all again from the beginning. Being trained in one way one’s whole life could make comprehending the opposite a momentous feat. “No, not exactly a war. We can’t fight them on those terms; that would be insane. What we must do is hurt them bit by bit, make them pay for every pace of earth, every life they take. Hit Phynagoras’s forces where it’s easiest for us, then run like hells. Assassinate his captains, set traps, poison his supplies. Immobilize him until Osmund returns. Make him jump at shadows in the night but never engage straight on…. It’s all right there in the archives. This is how we used to work.”
The Lodge had come abuzz with their return and as word of the plan spread. Normally only half of their number would be inhabiting the place at any given time, but now it was crowded to bursting as everyone was being called in to hear it. But not everyone liked what they heard.
“Ancient, desperate days,” said Vander, his temper showing on his cheeks with a color to match his hair. “We’re not like that anymore; we’re trained to track bandits, not hunt genocidal armies!”
Aerrus stood to address the circle of twenty or so gathered outside the Lodge. “No, we’d be even better at it now! Think about it – everyone here’s a crack shot with a bow and at least fair with a blade. We have hand language, spies, codes, disguises…. We’re trained better than any slogging soldier. We can move without sound, without leaving tracks. And all for what? Babysitting the forest, swatting at bandits, joining the occasional skirmish? That didn’t work out so well for us last time, did it? This is what we’re made for, we just need the backbone to do it.”
“What about the Marcher lords?” The question came from Thanis, grown more confident than when Aerrus had last left his young protégée. “Isn’t this their job?”
“It should be,” Linet conceded. “But things aren’t as they once were. I learned a lot when I was at the palace, searching out our betrayer. A lot about politics. The long peace has made them complacent, same as it has us. They can handle a few raids or Marchmen, but not this, not without a real army backing them up. Osbren might help, but Valendri? Trastavere? They’ll just stay shut up in their fortresses and wait things out, see who wins and try to cut a deal afterward. We’ll send messages to them all, begging for aid. Don’t expect much.”
“But you’re talking about giving up our secrecy,” argued Vander, “the advantage we’ve had since forever. No one even knows we exist. If we lose that, what are we left with? We’re just rangers with good aim.”
Linet and Aerrus looked at each other, the question and answer all contained in the same glance each way.
“There’s something else we have, too,” said Linet. “But I only want to have to show it once, so we’d better gather everyone together.”
The next day all Heron Kings who weren’t away on extended assignments assembled in a field between the Carsa River and the road that followed it. The field had been hit by blight a few years before; nothing grew there and no one had any interest in it. There Linet and Aerrus reproduced the demonstration that had first shaken them to their souls in the courtyard of the palace at Carsolan.
“You sure you want to use one?” Aerrus asked, standing well away from Linet with a burning branch in hand. “We don’t have many.”
Linet nodded, poised to cast a precious phial at a rubble pile in the midst of the field. “The others need to see, to know what hope we have. They’d never believe it otherwise, as we wouldn’t have.”
When the Vrril exploded, nearly a hundred bodies all shrank back in terror, many knocked from their feet as much from surprise as by the wave of expanding air.
When it was over, the field lay blackened and smoking. Little fires all around smoldered. The sky was filled with flocks of terrified birds flying every which way, and no doubt many earthbound folk would have liked to join them in their flight. After an appropriately long period of appreciation, Linet turned to the pale-faced crowd.
“This is what we have. Like the founder Alessia wrote, when your enemy’s too strong you don’t fight them, you murder them. I don’t think she ever imagined a weapon like this. But this is what we’ll do it with.”
“B-but, why us?” Drissa’s voice quavered with lingering shock.
“Because,” Aerrus said, “there’s no one else.”
PART THREE
Chapter Seventeen
Our Definition of Military
“One, two, three, heave!” Another corpse tumbled over the edge of the narrow path and into the surrounding fog. The sudden avalanche just hours before had buried almost a thousand camp followers and, more importantly, a good amount of the baggage train under a falling wave of snow and rock. Though the pass they trod through was well below the snow line, a late summer breeze from the west had dislodged a good chunk of it from above, and the rear of Phynagoras’s combined army and migrant horde had been hit. Now Phynagoras himself worked alongside his men to dig out what could be retrieved, every sathav, a hundred-man unit, given its own quota to recover. But they kept running into bodies.
“Fortunately,” he grunted as he hauled a crate of something up out of a snowbank, “few of the fighting men were struck, only some stragglers.”
“Aye,” Boras said with a nod, pulling up a much larger box with his bear-like arms. “Plus some of Cassilda’s horse bitches. She won’t be happy about that.”
“Her mood must have a bottom somewhere. No matter, we’re almost there. Two more days and our journey will finally have begun!”
“I fail to see, my lord, how you manage to maintain such good cheer in the face of this catastrophe,” Boras said. His heaving breath sent jets swirling to the air, turned to gold by the noonday sun. He, like most of the laboring men, had doffed the warm furs they’d worn since ascending into the mountains to do the work of digging, but they’d need them again soon, and the supplies still hidden under half a parasang’s stretch of snow.
“Simple, Boras. You see—”
“M’lord!” A young Bhasan captain approached them with a perfunctory salute, the medallion about his neck the only mark of rank visible over the winter clothing. “I, uh, heard some of the camp followers talking and, well, I thought I should report what I heard.” The captain looked away nervously. “That is….”
Boras frowned at the interruption. “Well, out with it, man! Can’t you see we’ve work to do?”
Phynagoras held up a hand to silence him. “Must be of some import to bring it direct to me, now. What is it?”
“Well, there’s some talk from the more, er, influential among ’em about turning back. Saying the expedition’s cursed, and this is proof of it.”
Phynagoras considered silently for a moment, his face unreadable. Finally he said, “What is your name, captain?”
The man gulped nervously. “Erm, Musa, my lord.”
“Musa, you will provide Boras with the names of these influential followers, and then think no more on it. And you will give it out that….”
* * *
“That there’s to be no more talk of turning back!” That night at an impromptu rally Phynagoras repeated the orders he’d given the captain. The narrowness of the pass made it difficult to gather the remaining thousands of followers together, but he’d packed them in as closely as could be managed and strained his voice to make it carry. “We’ve suffered a terrible loss to be sure, and I weep for those souls taken to the gods too early. But think on it – our way back is blocked now, there’s nowhere to go but forward! It’s a message from those very gods that our road is true. And you who’ve survived it, you live because you are the chosen! You who will follow me to a new world, a better world. And it’s yours. The whole world is yours! Come with me and get some of it!”
A wild cheer went up among the thousands, and spread outward as the words were repeated. Phynagoras hopped down from the pile of retrieved crates he’d stood upon and walked back to his tent, Boras in tow. “Brilliant speech, as usual,” Boras said.
Phynagoras snorted. “Pull your tongue out of my arsehole, Boras, it was standard stuff.”
“I especially love how you always refer to ‘the gods’ without specifyin’ which gods you mean. Works for that whole motley lot.”
“Hmm. And the names Captain Musa gave you?”
“Oh, won’t see them no more.”
“Good. If any dare to ask, let it be known that they were buried in the avalanche.”
“But,” said Boras, rubbing his beard as he often did when confused, “they were seen after, obviously. They couldn’t have been—”
“My dear Boras, how is it after all these years that you can still surprise me? Anyone can tell a believable lie and have it believed. To tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie yet still compel them to act as if they believed it such that it might as well be truth? That’s true power.”
