Jan
ca’Vörl
HE HAD LISTENED to the grand, glorious tales of war
many times over the years: from his great-vatarh Jan; from his
vatarh; from onczios and older acquaintances; and most recently
from Fynn. Even from his matarh, who told him how Great-Vatarh had
complimented her from a young age on her knowledge of military
strategy.
He was beginning to
realize that these tales had been concoctions and false memories or
sometimes outright lies.
Until today, Jan had
never ridden into a true battle. Until today, his knowledge of the
martial skills had been intellectual and safe. He’d been shown how
to ride, how to handle a sword, how to use a spear or bow from
horseback, how to protect himself against another chevarittai or
against a footman. He had been in mock sword fights, had been part
of military maneuvers. He’d been schooled in the craft of war: the
tactics to use against an adversary who had the higher ground or
the lower, or who had more soldiers or less, or more war-téni or
less. He knew which formation was supposed to be best against
another.
It was what any young
male of his rank would have been taught.
War, in Jan’s mind,
had been a very neat and tidy exercise. He’d
known—intellectually—that it couldn’t possibly be that linear and
efficient. He’d understood that.
But . . . He had not
known that war would be this messy. This chaotic. This
real.
No one in the
Firenzcian army was under the misapprehension that Jan—like Fynn,
like his namesake the old Hïrzg Jan—would be the one to truly
general the army in this important attack. They knew the strategy
was that of Starkkapitän ca’Damont, with aid from the Regent
ca’Rudka and input from the A’Hïrzg and the two Numetodo who had
come to the encampment from the burning city. They knew that it
would be Archigos Semini who would command the
war-téni.
Jan would be there,
and the command banner would fly from the Garde Hïrzg and the
chevarittai around him, and he would press forward just behind the
front lines of his forces as Fynn and the former Hïrzg Jan had done
before him. But Jan would look to the Starkkapitän before he gave
his orders. Jan knew the wisdom of that; he knew that the rest of
the offiziers and chevarittai knew it as well. Frankly, he was
comfortable with it; Jan could feel his inexperience and he was not
so arrogant as to insist on bungling this assault.
The entrance into
Nessantico started well enough. A crescent blade, the Firenzcian
forces pushed into the city through all the gates on the eastern
side of the city. There had been no resistance; to the contrary,
their appearance was greeted with cheers and huzzahs from the
remaining populace and scattered remnants of the Nessantican Garde
Civile. A few chevarittai of the Holdings had even crept out from
hiding to swell their ranks. After a turn of the glass inside the
city walls, Jan began to hope that this was how it would continue:
that they would march unchallenged all the way to the western
boundaries of the city to find the Westlander forces in full
retreat.
He was sweating in
the heat of the day under his armor and longed for nothing more
than to rid himself of the heavy burden of steel links. That seemed
to be the worst discomfort of victory.
“What way,
Ambassador?” Jan asked Karl, riding with his entourage along with
his matarh, Varina and Sergei.
“North for a few
cross streets,” the Numetodo answered, pointing, “then several
blocks eastward.”
Jan nodded. The
Firenzcian army swelled along the Avi. The sun shone brightly. It
was a fine day. They had already won, and he felt the confidence to
give an order of his own. “Starkkapitän,” Jan said to Starkkapitän
ca’Damont, “I will take half the Garde Hïrzg with me, as well as
the Regent and the Numetodo. I leave you in charge of the army. Do
what you need to do to secure this area of the Avi and the city.
Then you and the A’Hïrzg proceed south to the Isle a’Kralji and
make certain we hold the Isle and the eastern ponticas. If there’s
a problem, send a messenger to me immediately. In turn, I will send
a rider as soon as we locate the black sand and know the situation
there.”
“Jan. Hïrzg.” His
matarh was frowning, while ca’Damont merely looked uncomfortable.
“I don’t think—”
“I have given my
orders,” Jan snapped, interrupting her. “Starkkapitän? Do you see
an issue with them?”
Ca’Damont shook his
head once. He barked out quick orders. “I will meet with you later,
Matarh,” Jan said. “On the Isle.”
Allesandra looked
unconvinced. He thought she was going to argue further, but she
only glared at him. He saw her glance once at Sergei; the Regent
gave her the barest of shrugs under his own armor. His nose sent
sparks of sun chasing across his face.
His matarh finally
inclined her head. “As you wish, my Hïrzg,” she said. “My Hïrzg,”
not “my son.” He could hear the irritation in that. She yanked hard
on the reins of her horse and started south, a quartet of Garde
Hïrzg and one of the war-téni closing around her belatedly. The
starkkapitän gave a salute. “Cénzi’s guidance to you, my Hïrzg,” he
said. “I will make certain the A’Hïrzg remains safe.” He started to
move away, then pulled up on the reins. “Fynn made an excellent
choice in you,” he said to Jan. “Be careful, Hïrzg
Jan.”
Starkkapitän
ca’Damont saluted again and moved away, the greater part of their
entourage moving with him. Jan looked around at the others. “Let’s
find this black sand,” he said to them. “Ambassador ca’Vliomani—the
lead is yours.”
Karl led Jan’s
squadron north along the Avi, the soldiers they passed saluting the
Hïrzg and his banner, then turned left down a more narrow street,
leaving behind the army. The jingling of their armor and the
stolid, steel-clad clop of their
horses’ hooves on the cobbles was the loudest sound along the
street. There were no more faces in the windows, no one visible up
the curving way. Some of the doors to the buildings they passed
were open; many of them forcibly. Trash littered the avenue. They
passed several bodies: people a few days dead from the look of
them, their corpses bloated and with limbs thrust at stiff, strange
angles, maggot-encrusted and swarming with flies. Jan stared at
them as they passed; he noticed Sergei doing the same, with an odd
intensity.
Not long ago, these
had been living, breathing people, perhaps hurrying to lovers,
carrying their children, shopping for food in the markets or
drinking in the taverns, carrying on with their lives. He doubted
that they’d expected those lives to end so quickly and finally. He
doubted they’d expected to turn into transient, accidental
monuments to warfare.
He sniffed, unable to
keep their stench from his nose—he wondered if Sergei could smell
them at all. He clenched his sword tighter in his hand and wrapped
the reins more tightly around his left hand.
To the south, they
all heard a sudden rumbling like thunder, and faint shouting.
Sergei, next to Jan, glanced that way worriedly. “I think, Hïrzg,”
he said, “that a battle has started. Perhaps we should
return.”
Jan shook his head.
“Ambassador, how far are we from this place?” he
asked.
“Another two cross
streets,” ca’Vliomani replied. “No more.”
“Then we’ll go
on.”
Sergei pressed his
lips tightly together, but made no other response.
They continued,
coming to another, even smaller lane, where Karl paused and rose up
in his saddle. Glancing down the narrow street, Jan saw a battered,
ancient sign hanging from a building to the right: a badly-rendered
swan was drawn in red paint on the boards.
“There,” ca’Vliomani
called out to Jan and the others. “We should—”
He got no
further.
From the left, from
the right, several dozen painted warriors came shrieking toward
them. The next minutes dissolved into a chaos Jan would remember
for the rest of his life.
. . . a coruscation
of blinding light from the front of the group, then another, and he
realized that Karl and Varina had both released spells. He heard
screams . . .
. . . the chevarittai
at Jan’s right was taken from his saddle by a leaping Westlander,
and the man’s horse rammed hard against Jan’s leg. His right leg
was pinned between the two horses and he shouted at the pain that
shot through the limb despite the protection of his greaves. He
yanked at the reins of his horse . . .
. . . but there was
more movement to his right and behind him even as he did that. He
saw steel and brought his sword across his mount’s body almost too
late—enough that the blow that would have taken him above the
straps of his cuisse was deflected, but the Westlander’s blade
instead chopped deep into his destrier’s rear leg. The horse
whinnied in terror and pain. Jan saw the horse’s eyes go wide, felt
the horse’s leg give out under him, and he was falling . .
.
. . . “To the Hïrzg!”
he heard someone call. Jan was on the ground with a confusion of
legs—both equine and human—around him. He pushed himself up quickly
(his right leg sending fire up his spine at the abuse). There was a
Westlander coming at him, and Jan managed to find the hilt of his
sword, lift the heavy steel, and thrust underneath the chest plate
of the man’s strange armor. He felt his blade enter flesh. It
caught briefly, and Jan—grunting, feeling his mouth stretched in a
rictus of fury—twisted and pushed, and the blade went suddenly in.
The Westlander, impaled, still completed his strike, but the
vambraces laced around Jan’s forearms took the brunt, though he
thought that his right arm might have been broken by the blow. He
tried to pull his sword from the man, but could not, and the man’s
dead weight nearly pulled the weapon entirely from his grip, which
had gone numb and dead itself . . .
. . . Another
Westlander shrilled to his left, and Jan pulled desperately at his
sword again, though he knew it would be too late. But another
sword—a Firenzcian one—sliced across the man’s throat, nearly
severing the head. Jan was spattered with hot blood . .
.
. . . . And hands
were lifting him. “Are you all right, my Hïrzg?” someone asked, and
Jan nodded. His right hand was tingling, but seemed to have
returned to life. He clenched the fingers, working them in the
mailed glove, then reached down and pulled his sword free. He
turned . . .
. . . he saw a trio
of Westlanders gathered as a shield around another of the painted
warriors, this one with a bird tattooed over his shaven skull and
face. Sergei was there, his sword rising and falling, but the
Firenzcian soldier next to him fell, his hand taken from his wrist.
Jan rushed toward that gap, not thinking but only reacting . .
.
. . . and somehow he
was past the guard and in front of the bird-marked Warrior. The
Westlander’s armor turned Jan’s first cut, and the hard bronze
pommel of the man’s sword slammed into Jan’s chin underneath his
helm. He went staggering backward, tasting blood . . .
. . . As he saw the
bird-warrior parry Sergei’s attacking sword . . .
. . . . as he charged
again at the man, grimacing and grunting, and the Westlander
couldn’t defend against both of them at once. It was Jan’s blade
that slithered through, that found the chink between the rounded
bands of the man’s armor and entered him. The Westlander gaped as
if surprised. Jan heard a voice somewhere call out a strange name:
“Tecuhtli!” as the man fell to his knees. Sergei’s sword followed
Jan’s, striking the man in the neck and head. The bird-warrior went
down onto the blood-spattered cobbles, facedown . . .
. . . and it was over
except for the roaring of his pulse in his ears. Jan realized that
he was breathing hard and fast, that his heart was pounding so
furiously that it threatened to burst from his rib cage, that his
leg and both arms ached, that he was liberally coated with gore,
and that at least some of the blood was his own. He was standing
wide-legged and bent over, breathing hard. His stomach heaved; he
swallowed hard against the searing bile, forcing himself not to be
sick. He felt Sergei’s hand clap him on his armored shoulders. He
blinked, looking around him: there were at least a dozen bodies on
the ground, some of them clad in the black-and-silver livery of
Firenzcia. A few were still twitching; as Jan watched, those of the
Garde Civile were dispatching those of the Westlanders who were
still alive. There were streams of blood trailing from the bodies,
and entrails spilled on the street like obscene
sausages.
Karl and Varina were
untouched—the bodies nearest them were charred and blackened; there
was a smell of cooked meat in the air. Sergei’s false nose was
entirely gone and his left cheek had been laid open by a cut; where
the nose had been, the flesh was mottled and the cavities of
Sergei’s head gaped open, making his face look terrifyingly like a
skull. The nausea hit Jan again, and this time the world seemed to
spin a little around him. He put his sword tip on the ground and
leaned heavily on it.
“Tecuhtli!” Jan heard
the call again, and this time a man stepped out from the building
where the sign of the red swan hung, no more than a half dozen
strides from where Jan and the others stood. He held a glass flask
in his right hand, packed with dark granules; in his left was a
gnarled walking stick. The man stopped, as if startled by the
display of carnage before him.
“Talis . . .” Jan
heard Karl breathe the name: a wonderment, a curse, a spell. “Black
sand . . .”
The man scowled. He
hefted the jar in his right hand, he brought his arm back as if to
throw it. Jan wondered what it would feel like to die, and whether
he might meet Great-Vatarh Jan and Fynn there.
A woman rushed from
the alley behind the tavern, a blur of brown and gray, so quickly
that none of them had time to react. As Talis lifted his hand, she
grasped his hair and yanked his head back. Talis’ mouth opened,
gaping like a fish in a market, and red followed silver as she slid
a knife over his throat. A second mouth gaped wider than the first,
vomiting blood. The glass jars fell from Talis’ hands, shattering
on the ground but without exploding. The woman leaned down over the
body—she seemed to be placing something hurriedly on the man’s
eye—and Jan had a good look at her face through the tangled, matted
hair.
His heart leaped in
his chest. His breath caught. “Elissa?” he whispered.
The young woman’s
head came up. Her eyes widened as she saw him, and though she said
nothing, he heard the intake of her breath. She snatched something
from Talis’ face—Jan caught a glimpse of a pale white stone between
her fingers. She ran into the alleyway from which she’d come. One
of the soldiers began running in pursuit after her. “No!” Jan
called after the man. “Let her go!”
The soldier stopped.
Jan heard the whispers around him: “The White Stone . .
.”
The White Stone . . .
No, he wanted to tell
them, that couldn’t be, because that person had been Elissa, whom
he’d loved. It couldn’t be because the White Stone had assassinated
Fynn, whom he’d also loved. That couldn’t be.
Yet, somehow,
impossibly, it was.
It was.