Ascendant's Rite (The Moontide Quartet) (31 page)

‘Because we wish to find a breeding-house and set the captive magi free.’

Molmar’s jaw dropped. ‘But— No!’ He took two steps backwards. ‘Kazim, they are hateful places, but the strength of the Brotherhood lies in them. If the East is to have magi, we
need
them!’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘I will leave now.’

Elena calculated the distances and speeds required to take him down.

‘Please, wait!’ Kazim said urgently. ‘Hear me out, brother: Javon needs magi, and the remaining Ordo Costruo have been taken to the breeding facilities. Some would fight for Javon if freed.’

‘No.’

‘We Hadishah destroyed the Ordo Costruo,’ Kazim reminded him. ‘We killed or took captive the only magi who have ever helped Ahmedhassa. You were there: we stabbed them in the back, and now we’ve sent the survivors to a rape-prison. How could Ahm ever approve that?’

‘I don’t speak for Ahm,’ Molmar shot back. ‘Nor should you, who killed Jamil and Haroun. The Godspeakers have sanctioned the breeding-houses, and that is enough for me.’ Another step back towards his skiff. ‘I will pretend this meeting never happened. Do not contact me again.’

‘Jamil’s mother was born with no arms,’ Kazim called. ‘He told me that. But they still made her bear children – seventeen of them.
Seventeen!
What sort of man could sanction that?’

‘
It’s not my decision!
’

‘I wonder how many times they had to rape her to get her pregnant?’

‘
Stop!
’

‘And who fathers these children? The high-bloods . . . All those noble part-Rondian magi in Rashid’s service, laying with drugged and unwilling prisoners to father the future!’ Kazim took another step forward, his eyes locked on Molmar’s. ‘What
true man
could bring himself to do that? Or maybe they
enjoy
it?’

Molmar’s eyes bled tears, but he didn’t move as Kazim reached him and put his hands on the older man’s shoulders. The Hadishah pilot began to sway as his head dropped and his chest swelled with sudden sobs.

‘My friend, those places are monstrous crimes,’ Kazim said.

Elena waited, unconvinced that this matter was decided yet.

Molmar rubbed roughly at his eyes. ‘Brother, you ask too much. I know they are evil – yes,
evil
! But to betray my brothers in such a way? I cannot! Future generations of Keshi and Dhassans would curse me for ever! It is the Brotherhood that has given us the chance to resist the Crusade – I cannot jeopardise our future strength!’

‘But the liberation of just one such breeding-house – the right one, the one housing the recent Ordo Costruo prisoners – could save all of Javon from Rondian rule. Yes, it would be a blow to the Hadishah, but not a fatal one. If the Rondians establish control of Javon, we will never remove them, no matter how many women we rape.’

Molmar swallowed. ‘I hear you,’ he admitted. ‘But I cannot make such a decision. Let me take this argument to my superiors – please? If it convinces them, they could free those magi voluntarily. But do not ask me to betray my order.’

‘Sorry, Molmar,’ Elena put in, surprised to find herself feeling genuine sympathy for the man. ‘You’ve already said it: your people will never work with us. Those Ordo Costruo are the only ones who might. You think a Crusade every dozen years is bad, but the Rondians in Javon are here to stay.’

The Hadishah man’s face was a picture of indecision and misery.

‘You know we’re right,’ Kazim said. ‘Please, will you help?’

Elena added her silent prayers. The last thing she wanted was to have to betray this parley and put the Hadishah pilot to the question to find out where the Ordo Costruo were being housed.
Please, Molmar!
Because otherwise I’m going to have to let the old Elena loose, and I really don’t want to be her again.

When Molmar broke down and gave his assent, she almost burst into tears herself.

12

Riverdown

The Cohort

The base military unit of the legion is the cohort – twenty men who fight together as a team. Each knows his part and trains to do it well, and in doing so makes the cohort stronger than the sum of its parts. Each cohort is a mini-legion, whose pride and spirit is the pillar upon which the maniple is built. Cohorts built the Rimoni Empire, and cohorts are the foundation of the Rondian Empire.

G
ENERAL
G
ILLE DE
B
RES,
B
RICIA
XVI
LEGION, 874

East of Vida, Southern Kesh, on the continent of Antiopia

Zulqeda (Noveleve) 929

17
^th
month of the Moontide

Holy Kore, there’s so many of them!
Seth felt his confidence fraying as he surveyed a plain fill with enemies. At Shaliyah the sand-storm had hidden the enemy strength to a large extent, and anyway, they had nearly as many men themselves. At Ardijah, the riverbanks and the terrain had obscured the bulk of Salim’s forces. But here there was nothing to conceal the sheer size of the army they faced. Seth, standing at the highest point of his lines, was trying to ignore them and concentrate on his own army, but it wasn’t easy.

The Lost Legions could field 11,000 men, with another 1,000 ill or long-term injured who were confined to the baggage train with the camp followers, a couple of thousand Khotri women and children. They were defending a mile-long curved front – almost two thousand yards of frontline, with only three hundred yards back to the riverbank: there could be no fall-back position, no place to retreat to. One breakthrough was all it would take to destroy them. He was hanging his hopes on the fact that his legionaries had better armour than the Keshi and were trained in formation fighting. He had five rankers for every yard of front line: when the action started that would be enough men to rotate every three minutes, with twelve minutes off – plenty of recovery time.

If every one of ours kills ten of theirs, we’ll wipe them out.
He sighed.
Sure, that’s going to happen . . .

Conventional wisdom –
Rondian
wisdom – had it that a Rondian legion could defeat five times as many enemy . . . provided the enemy had no magi.
Ah yes, the magi
 . . . His army had nineteen, and two of those, Lanna and Carmina, wouldn’t be fighting. He wasn’t sure Severine Tiseme
could
fight, so that left sixteen, less than one every two hundred yards, and that was if he himself fought, rather than observing the battlefield and coordinating the defence as he should.

No, fifteen: Baltus will have to be in the air . . . it just gets worse . . .

He wondered how many magi the enemy had.
Fifty? A hundred? Every one of us is going to have to take down somewhere between five and ten on our own . . . And if we don’t, their magi will carve us
all
up . . .

He couldn’t see a way to win, no matter how optimistically he looked at it.

‘You’re looking a bit gloomy, lad,’ Jelaska commented. Her face was utterly calm.

She’s a Necromancer
, Seth thought.
She’s probably looking forward to death . . .

‘Yar, cheer up General,’ Kip said brightly. ‘It’s going to be
vunderbar
.’ He punched Seth’s shoulder. ‘Minaus Bullhead is watching. Embrace his rage.’

‘He’s actually right, Seth,’ Ramon put in. ‘I’ve noticed that you fight best when you’re angry.’ His voice was serious for once. ‘So stop agonising over right and wrong: we’re here, and the Keshi want to kill us just because we wandered through their desert on the way home. Your friend Salim could have let us push north to the upriver fords if he was really the sweetie he pretends to be.’

Travelling through three minor kingdoms and against the will of his entire army? I doubt that was ever an option.
But he appreciated Ramon’s words; there was going to be a battle, and he meant to win. He strained his eyes towards the Keshi army, watching it deploying with messy imprecision, all motley colours and haphazard lines. ‘You’d think they could afford uniforms,’ he commented. ‘And they can’t even march in a straight line.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Jelaska drawled. ‘They’re mostly conscripts: all they’re given when they join up is a keffi in their lord’s colours. Most aren’t even armoured. The only standing army – the ones who are still soldiers in peace-time – are the archers. Oh, the cavalry too, I guess, but they’re all nobles, not exactly soldiers either.’

‘How do you know all that?’ Kip asked.

‘Seth wasn’t the only one who wined and dined Latif when we had him in our nefarious clutches,’ Jelaska chuckled. ‘The Keshi cavalry are all young nobles, way down the pecking order for the family title. They’re essentially mounted archers and swordsmen. If you spot a lancer, he’s a servant.’

‘Aren’t you just a mine of information, my darling?’ Baltus laughed. He’d just returned from an aerial patrol and as the skies were now dotted with Keshi windskiffs, he wasn’t planning on going up again any time soon.

The five of them watched their rankers finish off their preparations by digging their heavy spears butt-first into the earth to deter cavalry. They’d effectively turned the ridgeline into a mile-long rampart, anchored by the river in the north and a three-hundred-foot-long wooden palisade made from wagon parts at the south end. The remaining wagons were circled inside the perimeter to make a sheltered camp for the invalids, women and children.

‘How will they do this?’ Seth asked.

‘A parley first,’ Ramon responded. ‘They’ll demand surrender. We’ll refuse.’

‘Then archery,’ Jelaska said. ‘Keshi archers like to fill the sky with arrows. They didn’t do it at Shaliyah because of the storm. This time they’ll go for broke: we’ll have ten – maybe even twenty thousand – archers, shooting six shafts a minute at least. They’ll black out the sun.’

Seth tried to imagine the terror of cowering beneath a shield while the sky rained death. ‘We magi can only shield so much,’ he said anxiously. ‘The men will be unprotected.’

‘The men know what they’re facing,’ Ramon assured him. ‘We’ve been reminding them for the past week. Notice the shape of the ditches and the walls? We’ve built the ditches high enough to shelter behind, with concave walls. It’ll take a Hel of an arrow to hit anyone at all.’

‘And the women have been told to shelter beneath the wagons,’ Jelaska added, ‘even if they think they’re out of range. We’ve got more than two hundred wagons so that’s ten women per cart; I know they’ve got the children too, but most are still babes in arms so they’ll manage. It’s their pilot-mages in the sky above that could be the main issue.’ She put her hand on Baltus’ shoulder. ‘We’ve one skiff and they have Kore knows how many.’

‘“Battles have been won and lost on command of the skies”,’ Seth said, quoting his father.

Baltus peered skywards. ‘They’ve actually got only five skiffs in the sky today. They had more at Ardijah.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘And I’ve seen no shapeshifters here: there were dozens at Ardijah.’

‘Maybe they’ve all flown off to somewhere important,’ Ramon suggested.

‘More likely they’ve got something planned,’ Jelaska said dourly.

Seth grimaced and brought them back to the matter at hand. ‘So, after the archery?’

‘After the coward archers shoot from a safe distance, the spearmen will charge.’ Kip sniffed contemptuously. In his view, real men fought toe to toe. ‘They try to overrun us with untrained peasants. We smash them apart and they run. The Bullhead rejoices in the slaying, and his Bloodmaidens drink deep.’

‘There’ll be a lot of that,’ Ramon agreed. ‘They’ll try to wear us down. The cavalry won’t charge until it’s a rout and they feel they can risk their precious necks in search of the glory: that’s nobility for you.’

Seth looked about him. ‘Well then: take up position and reassure your men. Be prepared for archery; they might skip the parley and go straight to the shooting. Ramon, stay with me: I’ll take you if they want to talk.’

They all saluted him, and Seth was surprised by a genuine feeling of fondness. Friendship – real camaraderie – had been rare in his life. At the Arcanum, Malevorn Andevarion and Francis Dorobon might have befriended him, but they’d made it clear that they were superior to him. When he’d joined the Thirteenth, only Renn Bondeau and Severine Tiseme had been welcoming, and that was nothing to do with liking him and everything to do with his family name. His one true friend, Tyron Frand, was dead. But gradually, this motley, multi-racial, rough-spoken collection of magi had began to feel like, well . . .
family
. They bickered and sniped and joked and undercut each other . . . and then obeyed him, when he scarcely felt he deserved it, but which never failed to lift his spirits. They also exuded indomitable self-belief, as if they couldn’t conceive of failure.

‘We’ll give these Keshi a shock,’ Ramon said quietly when they were alone. ‘Are you ready to write a new chapter in the Korion legend?’

Seth couldn’t tell if he was being teased, but he decided it didn’t matter. ‘I’d love to, but we’re going to need a miracle.’

‘Then let’s provide one. I’ve got some ideas, but there hasn’t been time to flesh them out.’

Seth seized at the straw of hope. ‘Really?’

Ramon chuckled. ‘No, I’ve got nothing! But who knows? Ideas come.’

‘You’re a low-bred rat, Sensini.’

‘High-bred, remember?’

‘What: your father’s in the Treasury? Your bloody mother was higher-bred than that prick!’

Ramon burst out laughing. ‘Good point!’ Then he squinted and pointed. ‘There, see? They’re marching the archers forward. It looks like there won’t be a parley after all. I’d better go find my men.’

As Ramon turned to go, Seth reached out and caught his arm. ‘Sensini . . . Ramon, I . . . um . . .’
I was wrong about you. I treated you abominably at the Arcanum, and Mercer too. I’m really sorry.
What he actually managed was, ‘Good luck. May Kore protect you.’