Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

“An army you shall have, once my victory is assured. How long do you think you will last without my support, James?”

“I am coming to question whether I need your support at all. My fire mages are loyal to me because they know I am the only one who will raise them up and defend them. They will never let any harm come to me. I used to think I needed your army, but now I wonder if all I need are powerful fire banes. Who would dare oppose me then?”

“A constant application of terror and grief is no way to rule.” Footsteps sounded in the corridor. “Here are my officers. Have your people ready to ride within the half hour.”

“I shall not be patient for much longer,” muttered Drake.

The instant the sting of Drake’s presence faded from the room, I kicked Rory’s shins and got up. The staff officers nodded at me; they had accepted our presence among them with the alacrity of youthful disinterest. After all, they had a war to fight. We made a meal of bread and cheese, and I was glad to have it for I suspected that many of the soldiers got nothing. Before the sun’s edge topped the horizon, the troops were moving north in their columns. The pops and cracks of gunfire signaled a skirmish far in the advance.

“This knife’s edge must be walked cautiously,” remarked Camjiata when he and I had a moment riding apart from the others. “You do understand, do not you, that if we lose this battle today, then all is lost?”

“Because the princes and mages will crack down so hard on dissent that it will be decades or generations before another radical movement has a chance to rise? Or because you’ll have lost control of Drake? Never believe I am selfless enough to sacrifice my husband on the altar of your empire.”

“Just buy me time, Cat. Do nothing rash.” He glanced toward where Drake rode amid his company of mages, then back to me. “Had you been my daughter, you would have been loyal to me.”

“Tara gave me the father she wanted me to have,” I said softly, but he could not hear.

The rising sun bent its rays over the landscape. The road sloped upward along a gentle rise. Rumbling booms shook the air. A frantic blaring of trumpets, as with warning calls, was followed by the crackling of gunfire, which at length subsided into an uncanny quiet that made me more nervous than anything that had come before.

We turned off the main road and entered a village empty of every soul except the soldiers moving through. On a prominence men had felled three trees that blocked the view northeast over the battlefield. Clouds bunched up in the north, dark with unshed rain. Closer at hand a dense mist concealed the high ground and thus the entirety of the Coalition army. Camjiata surveyed the mist through a spyglass.

“James, the mist seems unnatural. I expected to see Lutetia’s walls from here. Can you disperse it?”

“The mist is a fog created by cold magic. To create such an extent, across a full mile or more of ground, means many cold mages have coordinated their efforts.”

“Can your fire magic not vanquish this cold fog, James? I’m surprised to hear it.”

“I can do anything! But it’s not worth risking fire mages so close to the lines. The sun will disperse it in time.”

A smile teased Camjiata’s lips, as if Drake’s sullen defensiveness amused him, but I was sure I was the only one who noticed it. “Tell Marshal Aualos to order the artillery to begin a barrage into the mist. That will soften them and perhaps hasten the mist’s dispersal as well.”

Messengers came and went, one after the next. Sometimes they had to wait while Camjiata read dispatches and wrote replies for men ahead of them. Everything took so long as soldiers trudged into position and artillery was drawn in by horses. An hour passed, then another.

The battlefront expanded into the east, masses of men hidden by distance but also because the mist continued to hang low, not burning off even as the sun rose higher.

Finally the artillery began to fire in thundering blasts of sound. Smoke rose. I heard thumps, distant cries, the screams of horses. How must it feel to stand as death fell unseen out of the sky? How I hated this waiting! I was confident that Bee remained fairly safe in Lutetia, but where was Vai? How vulnerable was he?

Canyons of light appeared as cracks in the mist. Figures appeared and vanished like dreams of ghosts. With a rumble of hooves a troop of Coalition cavalry swept out of its misty concealment. Rifle fire from the Iberian line cracked as the infantry formed into squares to face the charge, but the horses did not crash into the square; instead, as the cavalry circled, all the rifles went silent. Out of this chaos of stillness and motion, crossbow bolts and longbow arrows flew with killing precision into the Iberian ranks. In the midst of the cavalry, despite the distance between us, I recognized Vai. I knew he would go with the first wave, put himself at risk in case the attack did not work.

Yet it did work. The desperate Iberians broke ranks to charge with their bayonets. As soon as the square’s tight formation began to disintegrate, a second cavalry charge swept out of the shredding mist and smashed right into the Iberian infantry. The lines boiled into a mass of confusion.

“A new variation on an old tactic,” remarked Camjiata to his staff. They were sweating. He was not. “Effective not just because the cold magic kills our rifles and cannon but particularly because their archers are superior to ours and naturally they have many more of them. James, if you place one fire mage in each square, can that mage then throw the backlash of their fire into the cold mages who are riding with the cavalry? Wouldn’t that kill the cold mage’s magic and leave the rifles free to fire?”

Drake brushed strands of red hair out of his eyes. The touch of his calfskin gloves left a smear of soot on his brow, but I did not mention it, for I did not like the way he looked at me. “Yes, it would, and it leaves the cold mages defenseless besides, for as long as they are acting as catch-fires, they are helpless. The best part is that the more powerful the cold mage, the more fire he can absorb and thus the more fire the fire mage can call. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Yet what can we most advantageously set on fire?” Camjiata mused. “The Coalition has many more cold mages than we do fire mages. Let your people set grass fires up the hill to keep the cold mages busy putting them out. I know you have been making some experiments with lending fire to artillery and rifles whose combustion has been killed by cold magic.”

“All of this my mages can do,” said Drake, but he seemed distracted as he scanned the field with a spyglass. Several of his wife’s soldiers always stood between him and me.

The last of the mist spun away to reveal the Coalition army deployed on the higher ground, rank upon rank of infantry. Smoke rose in billows everywhere. I could just barely make out the dark line of Lutetia’s walls in the distance. Thank Tanit the city was, for now, out of artillery range.

A staff officer had left several open bottles of wine on one of the tree stumps. I took a swallow straight from the bottle as I considered whether I should abandon Camjiata. I knew the general had to win, yet I was so afraid of what the fire mages might do. But what could I possibly do to safeguard Vai now that the battle had started? The cavalry company he had ridden down with had returned to the Coalition lines, and no doubt he had gone with them. I would never find him among the thousands and thousands of soldiers struggling in noise and smoke and blood.

rned off the main road and entered a village empty of every soul except the soldiers moving through. On a prominence men had felled three trees that blocked the view northeast over the battlefield. Clouds bunched up in the north, dark with unshed rain. Closer at hand a dense mist concealed the high ground and thus the entirety of the Coalition army. Camjiata surveyed the mist through a spyglass.

“James, the mist seems unnatural. I expected to see Lutetia’s walls from here. Can you disperse it?”

“The mist is a fog created by cold magic. To create such an extent, across a full mile or more of ground, means many cold mages have coordinated their efforts.”