The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron
Men went down as their mounts collapsed. The collapses were horrible—well-beloved mounts seemed almost to melt, their skin crawled with some form of death, and then, down they went, never to rise, and as they lay they bloated with terrifying rapidity, their guts stinking as they corrupted.
Morgon was not the only magister with the column, but he was the closest to the first horses to fall. He had the presence of mind to order his own horse—a lithe stallion called Averoes—to run—indeed, he struck Averoes sharply with his scabbard to drive the young horse away. Then he ran towards the nearest rotting animal, already entering into his palace—the palace Harmodius had built.
The checkerboard floor was unchanged, as were many of the other features, but he had changed the chess pieces for statues—thirty-two statues of many of his favourite people from history and his own times, philosophers and rulers and mystics and even musicians.
Again he summoned the black paste that had been on the wyverns’ talons. In the aethereal, it appeared not black but a living purple, like a slime mould. The colour burgeoned with life and hermetical energy.
He had seen this on his first look, but it hadn’t seemed dangerous—Morgon bore down, looking more closely. He had learned many tricks at the university, and one was how to make a lens of air. Morgon adapted it and cast, and instantly found himself the victim of his own workings—the simulacrum of the sticky paste was too coarse-grained a reproduction to examine in the aethereal.
In the real, he emerged, lumbered to a stop from a sprint, and tried not to fall into the fizzing black sludge that had once been Hetty’s second horse. He worked a sample into the air in front of him, cast the lens of air, and then moved it—
The black-purple stuff was alive.
Fifty yards away, Ser Milus was walling the company’s dying horses off from the rest of the army. He had no idea what was killing his horses, but he’d seen enough war to fear infection and the rapid spread of something—some horrible equine plague. Or a curse, or a hermetical working.
The horses at the back of the column were dying, and his own sight told him those at the front were not.
But men were turning and riding back to see.
He ordered men on foot to run forward and order the rest of the army to ride on, and then he thought of Morgon’s box. But by then it was too late, and his beautiful eastern riding horse retched black bile and fell, and Milus was on the ground.
The first horse to fall exploded. And the air filled with fine black spores.
Morgon was less impressed by the spores. Spores he knew how to handle. Morgon raised potentia, made ops, and cast, almost without access to the aethereal or his palace. He could work fire without conscious access to his powers.
The cloud of spores flared and was gone.
Another dead horse exploded, and another.
Mortirmir cast, and cast.
Somewhere between the sixth horse and the ninth, he saw a more elegant solution. He dug the tip of his dagger into the sticky black stuff and used a simple like to like equivocation, and then displaced the stuff with fire.
He had not thought through all the ramifications of his working, and he was shocked to see several horses burn—screaming—or explode into fire without ever seeming to have contracted the plague. He had thought far enough ahead to protect the original sample on the wyvern’s talons.
The rest burned.
An hour later, Ser Milus looked over his rearguard—now fewer than one man in ten was mounted.
They’d lost horses but none of the oxen. They’d lost almost all the company’s remounts and more than half of the war horses.
They were on foot on the rolling, gravelly fields at the foot of the Green Hills.
Milus did what he could, ordering the baggage wagons loaded with armour and weapons, to make his column march faster. The Emperor pressed ahead. Milus had all but ordered him to do so. They had the captain’s schedule, after all.
It was the following morning before they received an imperial messenger, and they could send the word to the other columns. By then, it was too late.
North of Albinkirk, a deep V-formation of barghasts struck Ser John Crayford’s powerful armoured column at last light, just as the camp was being prepared. The bird-like reptiles swept in over the ancient trees… and were met by a rising, steel-tipped sleet of arrows. Three died immediately, and six more of the great avians were badly wounded, and their captain turned away, shrieking his rage. The attack was inept and the humans well prepared.
It was sheer bad luck that the youngest barghast to die fell almost atop the horse lines.
Mag’s response was more effective, but she came to the problem late, summoned in the falling darkness only after the horse herd was infected and the spores were flying. But she, too, solved the spores with a like to like working. She was a far better healer than Morgon, and managed to save more than a few horses already infected. But she had to treat them one by one, and they tended to die too fast for her to be truly effective.
She saved almost seventy-five war horses. They lost almost a thousand animals altogether, and when the sun rose the next day, Ser John was still forty miles south of Dorling, and his whole column was on foot.
“Why not simply set the plague-motes on the men?” Thorn asked—although he already knew the answer.
“Men are much stronger against such sorceries than animals,” Ash said. “And I want the men all together. Their time will come, and they will experience my power. But I will not spring my trap too soon.”
He desires a great battle on his own terms—a great battle in which many will die. And every death will enrich him and his infernal eggs, until they all hatch. Even the one in my head. Thorn considered this a moment.
And then he will manifest, I believe. Is it blood? Is it the fleeing of souls into the aether? What is the source of his power?
Why can he not see the Dark Sun?
If I were close enough to the Dark Sun…
Thorn passed the time, as he moved his army of the Wild south in the thick, wooded hills and swamps of the southern Adnacrags, in moving things and creatures on the so-called Wyrm’s Way. On his fourth attempt, he stood holding a turtle egg in his hand, and when he arrived at the end of his displacement, his hand was empty. The turtle egg lay in a pool of yellow yolk where he had been standing. He had successfully left it behind.
A raven swept in and began to eat the egg.
A raptor fell from the sky and drove the raven off the egg and began to eat it.
A barghast fell silently on the red-tailed hawk, slew it and began to eat it. When the barghast was done, it ate the egg as a dessert.
Thorn nodded.
The risk was, on the one hand, incredible, and on the other, almost banal. Ash surely intended his demise—in fact, he suspected he was nothing but the edible outer parts of the egg.
Not far to the west, the dark-bearded magister rode to the gates of Lissen Carak, and tapped gently with his staff. Behind him, the plain by the river—burned flat by last year’s battles and now choked with raspberry bushes and alder clumps—was trampled by the Faery Knight’s chevauchée. Out on the plain were four hundred irkish knights, in magnificent harnesses of bronze and gold, some riding stags while others rode horses. Behind them came Bill Redmede and three hundred Jacks and, behind them, a veritable tide of boglins. The rear was brought up by magnificent, alien bands of Outwallers in war paint and more irks, these tall and thin as ash trees, carrying heavy axes on their bronze-byrnie’d shoulders.
When her door warden and her sergeants informed her, Miriam went to the gate in person. She went out on the hoardings alone, covered by a pair of crossbowmen in each of the gate towers.
She did not recognize the man below her outside the portcullis at all. He had black and grey hair and a heavy face with a long, aquiline nose. He rode a bony horse.
“I am the Magister Harmodius,” called the man on the bony horse.
“You’ve changed, then,” she said.
“Yes,” Harmodius said, as if impatient. “I’ve changed bodies.”
“And sides, I suspect,” Miriam said.
Harmodius shook his head. “We have fifty prisoners we wish to release to you. They have not been harmed.”
The garrison of the Westwall castle was marched up to the gate, bedraggled and terrified. They’d lived some days in an army composed of rebels and monsters, and they had, with some justice, expected to be eaten.
“And then you’ll be on your way?” Miriam asked, hiding her fears.
Harmodius, if it was indeed the magister, shook his head. “We are for our own purposes,” he said.
“You are not welcome,” Miriam said. “We hold this fortress for the King. If you make war on the King, get you gone.”
Harmodius raised his hand. “Hear me, Miriam. We are not in open conflict with any force. The Faery Knight has marched to save some of his own people. They must be nearby. Let us only find them and shelter them, and our thanks will be yours forever.”
Miriam shook her head. “You have betrayed your King and your God,” she said. “Even now, these dreadful things feast on the dead at Ticondaga. And you have the effrontery to suggest that we let you camp on our plain? I cannot stop you, but by the God I worship, traitor, when you come for this fortress I will make you and your dark master rue it.”
“Wait!” Harmodius begged.
But Miriam was gone from the battlements. The dark stone echoed his words, and they were lost in the air.
“Damn,” he muttered.
Just south of Albinkirk and Southford, three barghasts and a pair of wyverns circled endlessly like late-summer deer flies over the tree-shaded paths at the northward end of the Royal Road.
Amicia detected them after morning prayer, shortly after her first communion with the choir of her sisters at Lissen Carak in many days. By mid-morning she felt them as a presence—not particularly malign, to her new consciousness, but most definitely hostile. She enlightened Ser Thomas and her escort of knights of the Order.
To Prior Wishart, she said, “I would like it if you would allow me to try my own way on these creatures before you turn to violence.” She reached through her many links to Sister Miriam, as well.
Prior Wishart bit his tongue on a retort. She saw him do it and wished she hadn’t needed to be so short with him. It seemed to her that every day the men and women around her handled their swords and their workings too willingly—that this tendency to use force marked the human condition more clearly than all the other sins of her race.
In prayer, she had begun to consider if it was men—and women—who were the monsters.
The Prior—whose only experience of the Wild had mostly involved killing it—clenched his teeth but shrugged. “Sister, you have talents beyond most of ours. And without your warning, we’d have no time to make these decisions. Please—assay what you can.”
Amicia smiled. “You must stay well back from me,” she insisted. “When I release them, I guess that the sorcerer will strike at me.”
Prior Wishart shook his head. “Then stay with us, and we’ll fight or fall together.”
Tom Lachlan laughed. “A wyvern and a pair o’ ’ghasts?” he said. “Tell you what, lass. You stay here. I’ll go kill them.” He smiled at her. “I need a bit of a dust-up.”
Amicia shook her head. “No. Please—more killing will not help our cause. And right now the sorcerer is having it all his own way. I know—better than most—what the captain intends. Let me try this.”
“To distract him?” Prior Wishart asked.
“Because it is the right thing to do!” Amicia said, surprised at her own vehemence. “We are religious, not killers like—”
Bad Tom smiled and all his teeth gleamed. “You mean me, lassie? Aye. I’m a killer.” He leaned forward. “I warrant you’ll want me around before this day is older.” He was annoyed, she could see.
She ignored him and his annoyance. Amicia dismounted and walked forward on the path alone. They were on the western road, and she was aware in some distant place in her mind that the gorge and the great falls were only a few miles to the east. But that was not her work, not today or any other day—memories of that Amicia were increasingly difficult to access. She shut them away, or merely forgot them. Something was happening inside her, some cascade of belief and realization.
She banished her doubts and new discoveries, reached out for her sisters at Lissen Carak and then reached into the sky.
She touched the wyvern. Wyverns were, she knew, strong, almost elemental folk—stubborn, and difficult to break to anyone’s will.
This one had been broken—or at least bent. The binding was unsubtle and of immense power. Her answer was more subtle, but the result was never in doubt—no matter how thick a rope is, a knife will cut it. Amicia severed the binding.
The wyvern, six hundred feet above her, turned—and flew away, with a low, deep cry of anger.
The second wyvern she liberated more quickly.
Fifty leagues to the north, while pushing his forces across an Alder break so wide and so tortuous that Thorn feared his army would sink into the mud rather than cross, he felt the opposition.
Ash became next to him, an insubstantial black mist that coalesced into a young child with two heads. “Fuck her and her piety,” Ash screamed in his harmonious chorus of voices. “I hate humans.”
Thorn felt ops torn from him and from the world around them. Trees died. An irk shaman five hundred winters old was leached of his powers and then his soul.
Thorn, I am not yet of this world. Give me your power and I’ll teach this child of men to play with one of my bindings.
Thorn had little choice. But—greatly daring—he attempted to hide potentia in the new place in his head.
Ash cast. It was like the sun setting—beautiful, remorseless, full of awe and wonder. Thorn had never seen a working so puissant and so close up—the calling of a star from the heavens was child’s play by comparison. As he reached the climax, Ash said, “Is she the one, though? Is this the will that has defaced my will?”
Thorn had no idea what that might mean.
Ash said the word. Thorn heard it and for a moment, he looked on the abyss, the dark between the spheres where evil lived and no angel dared fly.
On freeing the third wyvern, Amicia knew her adversary had accepted her challenge. She felt his resistance stiffen through her reversal of the summoning.
She felt the chill, damp air of the counter building in the north.
But she was close to her home—close enough to feel the pull of Lissen Carak and to know the comfort of the choir of sisters who waited there. They were singing. She reached into the flowing stream of their powers and lifted her hands into the air. On her bridge, she stood in the same posture, almost on tiptoe with her hands high above her head.
And as the great summoning, a masterwork, descended on her, she did something new—something that she had never before attempted, or even, before that very moment, thought possible.
Instead of answering power with power, she instead pronounced on the underpinnings of his creation an act of annihilation. She did not shield—she denied. She did not resist—she refuted.
Tom Lachlan sat on his horse watching the chit. A beautiful woman, wasted on the fleshless life of the convent—he could see what Gabriel saw in her. And when she stretched herself to cast her witchery, he almost drooled.
The burst of light took them all by surprise. One moment, she stood quietly, perhaps twenty yards ahead of them, and in another, she burned like the brightest torch imaginable. Just on the edge between one beat of his great heart and another, he saw her—she seemed a second sun illuminating the world, and all the world around them reflected the light of her, so that he could see Wishart’s wisdom and boldness, his own reckless courage, Kenneth Dhu’s boundless generosity, as if they were mirrors of virtue reflecting her greatness.
Wishart said, “Oh, my God.”
The world see
Even Tom Lachlan.
Amicia, pierced and burning, said, “Black is white.”
Ash roared.
Thorn didn’t cower—his form would not allow him to cower. But Ash’s semblance had changed and he rose like a cloud of fury over Thorn’s twisting stone form.
“Unfair!” he roared. “Thorn—we must move quickly.”
Thorn stood stolidly in water to his stony knees. “In this?” he asked.
The voice of the shadowy dragon ate at him like acid.
“One of them is at the very edge of Being. And she—she Denied me.” Ash’s eyes held not rage but fascination. “I must unmake her before my enemy has a potent ally. Forget Dorling. We’ll have sweeter meat.”
Thorn felt that he was speaking to a mad thing.
But Ash’s voice calmed. The roar of death and the vein of ice retreated and there was intellect and command. “No,” Ash said. “I must consider. I cannot have a foe on my flank—and the Wyrm, contemptible as he is in his bookish indolence, could be a powerful foe. I must force his talons to open. But that woman—a curse on all humans and their endless striving. She will unbalance us all. She doesn’t even know what the game is.”
Thorn thought he knew. And he thought he might know of whom Ash spoke.
And Ash had not detected his hoarding of potentia.
Thorn thought many things, and he kept them to himself.
Amicia found herself on her knees.
For a long, long time—almost an eternity—she had experienced something she could only call the joy of creation.
In her mind, the choir sang on.
One voice was not a woman’s voice, but a man’s.