They took just four hours to traverse what the scouts had taken all day to cover. They pitched a hasty camp at the base of the great ridge and made contact with Verki’s piquet at the top of the ridge. They stripped the forest for wood and built big fires, protected from view as they were by a horde of frozen sentries and the bulk of the snow-covered mountain between them.
Before first light Verki led the army up the snowy ridge. The moonlight on the snow made the road – if it could be called that – like a black slit of frozen mud in a white wilderness, but they moved fast enough. By the last grey light before dawn, they could just see a line of motionless sentries in red tabards, the bright wink of forty fires, and the smoke rising to the heavens. They could smell the smoke. And they could see the magnificent red pavilion in the middle of camp and the forty heavy wagons of the enemy baggage parked in a wagon fort.
Dariusz had thought the plan rash, and had said so, and now he watched in amazement as Demetrius carefully marshalled his men.
Aeskepiles, at the young commander’s request, sent a small fireball whizzing into the heavens.
The Thrakians screamed like monsters out of the Wild. The veterans of Duke Andronicus went forward fast, singing a hymn. The cavalry closed from the flanks.
Off to the east, over the sea, the sun crested the horizon, but here in the mountains behind the coast, it was just an orange and pink outline on the mountains behind them. They crossed the ground, lumbering heavily in deep snow.
Someone screamed – the sound of a man in soul-wrenching pain.
A horse went down.
The enemy sentries weren’t moving and weren’t calling the alarm.
Another man went down. It happened close enough to Dariusz that he saw the pit open under the man’s feet, saw him fall and impale himself on the stakes at the base of the pit. A snow trap.
Dariusz stopped running.
It was a beautiful camp and they took it intact. They took the store of firewood and the fires, which must have been huge, because they had burned down to coals and were still big and warm. They took the wagons – forty beautiful wagons, some full of stores, some full of useful things, including a portable forge for an armourer.
There were a dozen hogsheads of wine, and that wine was open before the officers could get involved.
There was a flash, and a noise like a bolt of lightning in the centre of the camp.
Aeskepiles was seen to hurry there.
Dariusz found Verki watching one of his scouts die. The man had drunk the wine and it was suddenly pretty obvious it was poisoned. His heels drummed on the packed snow, and he retched blood while more leached out of various other parts.
‘Fuck their mothers,’ Verki swore.
‘How long have they been gone?’ Dariusz asked.
Verki looked miserable. ‘At least two days,’ he said. ‘The patrol we fought must have been the fire-tenders.’
They were negotiating a particularly brutal double switchback, where the Nordikans had to clear the snow with shovels so that anyone could pass, when the Red Knight stiffened in his saddle.
Heh. Harmodius was gloating.
Your little gift?
He’ll know it’s the same working he used on the amulets.
So now he knows we have Kronmir?
And that he’s been had. He’ll be mad as hell.
What happens if he turns around? He can still march back to Lonika the long way around as fast as we can go through the hills – probably faster.
In the comfortable room of the Red Knight’s memory palace, it was warm. Harmodius sat with his legs over the armrest of a huge chair. He raised a cup of steaming hippocras. He won’t. He’ll be stung, and his ego will be pricked. And he’ll follow you.
Do I sound that cocky to other people?
Harmodius shrugged.
I should stop. You sound so smug I don’t care if we win – I just want you to be wrong.
Harmodius nodded. May I show you my finest work? he asked.
The image of the young Captain nodded agreeably. They found themselves in a workshop – an aethereal setting that reflected several workshops that Gabriel Muriens had known. Against the near wall was a bench – a very plain wooden bench lined with tools, each of which had a sigil burning on it.
On the bench lay a sword.
What is it? asked the Captain, through a burgeoning headache.
A Fell Sword, said Harmodius.
For me? asked the Captain. He was suddenly afraid.
Harmodius laughed. It was a dreadful, terrifying laugh.
Oh, no, my boy. I am not that much of an ingrate. He picked it up and flourished it, like a boy with a new sword. It’s for me.
Mag missed her wagons. She missed the comfort and solidity of the brutes, but most of all, she missed having dry, warm feet. Sitting on a wagon – even in driving snow or freezing rain – kept your feet out of the wet.
Climbing a mountain pass leading a recalcitrant donkey had a different feel entirely.
John le Bailli was somewhere well ahead of her. The whole army was now a single animal wide, strung out over six miles of high ridges and steep-shouldered mountains. They were above the current snow line, which, in a way, made her life easier, as the ground was frozen. But her toes lost feeling every time she stopped, and she was fifty-one years old, and the great adventure now seemed like a horrible exercise in endurance.
At noon, they came to a stream – or what might, at other times of year, be a dry watercourse or a small trickle of water.
On the first of March, it was a stream twenty feet wide that flowed so fast that small rocks were constantly being rolled along the bottom. While Mag watched, a whole tree from somewhere upstream came by, bobbed, struck a boulder with a resounding crash and continued on its way.
The column was bunching up on the flat by the stream, and increasingly desperate men and women were trying to warm their feet by any expedient they could. It wasn’t even a cold day.
The Red Knight had taken most of the mounted across the traditional way – with ropes and horses. Two men had fallen in, and on the other side there were two great fires burning and parties of men trying to save the wet, cold victims.
Mag didn’t even pause to argue. She flung three bridges of ice across – one mostly acting as a dam, and the other two with high arches and redundant supports.
Corporals and veterans began to bellow orders. They’d all seen the tree in the current.
‘I can get you a horse,’ the Red Knight said. He’d ridden up to her where she watched the women crossing.
‘Can you get a horse for every woman?’ she asked.
He pursed his lips. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The ice bridge is a nice trick. I need to learn that better. Mine wastes too much ops.’
She met his eye. ‘Is this really your plan?’
He shrugged. In full plate, with two great circle cloaks as a sheath of wool, he looked like a giant. The shrug barely raised the magnificent gold brooch on his right shoulder an inch. ‘My plan perished when Andronicus fielded five thousand men in the dead of winter. I didn’t expect that. This is my – hmmm – my third alternate plan.’ Just for a moment, the look of bland indifference he wore all the time cracked. ‘I was probably a fool to try this in winter. But – Master Smythe said we had to hurry. And Kronmir said they would kill the Emperor.’
Mag shook her head. People were watching them. ‘Another day and we might start losing people. Some of the Scholae aren’t used to this kind of life and there’s no forage for the horses. We have another day of food and fodder on the mules-’