Cobweb Empire (40 page)

It seemed they were now swimming through a
sparse forest of the pomegranate uniforms.

At one point, Percy saw a large column of
pikemen directly in their way, and she cast her mental net wider,
so that the entire formation collapsed before they even reached the
first bristling row of pole weapons directed at them.

The Duke and Beltain both pulled up their
horses sharply, since it was unsafe to ride through the bristling
mountain of the piled dead and their sharp weapons. And so they
rode around, warhorses carefully stepping over steel poles and
corpses. . . .

“How much longer is this infernal army?”
Beltain muttered.

“Indeed!” the Duke threw back at him. “We
are making rather better progress than I dreamed, but I think we
have quite a ways to go—”

And as Percy heard their exchange, in that
same moment, she felt
something
ahead, just half a mile in
the distance. It was something out of the ordinary, something
new.

Not more of the dead, but a
living
entity
approaching.

This entity was a fixed point.

A perfectly opaque mental wall arose,
between Percy and this
other
. It grew softly and then, like
an outreaching finger of energy, Percy felt the exploratory
touch
upon her mind, and with a snap, there was made a
connection
.

It was as if someone on the other end had
reached out to
her
in the same manner she reached out to the
dead. And this someone now gently caught and held her own thread of
living energy, tugging it expertly, feeling its reach and
resonance . . .

Percy gasped. And then she let go of the
dead and their shadows in their vicinity.

“Percy! What happened?” Beltain exclaimed,
and in the same instant he had to engage his sword and shield and
to deflect the very real and deadly attack of an animated dead
knight who did not simply fall before him but swung a sharp-ended
morning star and flail. There was a resounding
crash. . . .

“
Merde!”
the Duke of Plaimes cried,
and swung his sword also, barely missing being skewered in the neck
by a short lance in the hands of a mounted Trovadii knight.

“I am sorry!” Percy cried, “I don’t know
what’s happening! There is someone out there, someone
living!
And this person has just touched me in the same
manner that I touch the dead!”

“What?”

“I don’t know! Let me try again!” And Percy
cast her mind forward fiercely, and pulled herself back and out of
the mental
grasp
of the other, letting her thoughts move
like slippery fish past the ethereal net of this new unknown force.
In the span of a breath she was free, feeling the unknown entity’s
hold upon her loosen, and then she reached around and struck back,
sending her own thoughts like arrows in the direction of the
entity.

And in the doing so, Percy suddenly felt and
saw
her
.

Across half a mile, within her mind’s eye,
Percy saw the
woman
, dressed in the same color as her army,
seated within a gilded carriage, swiftly moving with the Trovadii
forces all around her.

The woman was a stately swan, beautiful in
the same unearthly way that beauty can be attributed to seasons, or
the wind, or the dream fabric of the starless night.

And she was cruel and cold and
devastating.

Her face, an exquisite perfection, her hair,
the auburn dawn.

Her eyes, bright vivid blue, with the sharp
ethereal clarity of the same winter sky that now rose up above
them. These eyes were now trained upon Percy, their gaze piercing
her in her own vision, following her.

“I just saw her . . . it is
the
Sovereign!
” Percy whispered in disbelief. “I don’t know
how I know who she is, but it is
she
who had touched me, and
she knows me now. She is coming!”

And as Percy continued thus, watching in a
strange dream state of double vision, the woman in her mind’s eye
also continued looking at her.

And then she smiled.

Percy drew back into her own body with a
snap, and vaguely heard—as from a distance, or through thick layers
of cotton in her ears—the harsh sounds of Beltain and the Duke
fighting the attacking dead all around them. She had lost her grasp
upon the dead . . . and the three of them were now
surrounded by a thicket of soldiers in pomegranate red.

Percy shuddered, feeling abysmal weakness,
feeling her extremities burning with debilitating cold, a precursor
to shock. Despite this, she again cast forth her killing force, and
started gathering the threads of the billowing death shadows around
them.

The dead started to collapse once more.
Their way was clear.

“Ride!” cried the Duke. “Ride, and do not
stop for anything!”

And Beltain squeezed Percy in the protective
metal cradle of his arms, and burst forward.

They flew straight ahead through the uneven
snow terrain of the field, dodging oncoming enemy figures. They had
lost the road some time ago, and it did not matter.

At some point, as Percy allowed her
concentration to slip for one second, she turned her head to the
right and saw, on a distant road to her right, the actual golden
regal carriage from her vision of just moments ago, driven by a
team of flesh-and-blood living horses and surrounded by an honor
guard of the dead, in blood colors.

They came together in two parallel lines,
then passed in opposite directions. . . . And it
seemed for an instant that the occupant of the carriage turned her
head and gazed out of the window at Percy riding hard past her.

“Yes, that was indeed the accursed Sovereign
of the Domain,” cried the Duke. “She is known to ride on campaigns
behind her military. And it is a minor blessing! For it means that
most of the Trovadii army is beyond us now, and headed north toward
the Silver Court.”

His words proved accurate. The numbers of
the dead in their path were now sparse, and Percy found it easier
to pull their threads and cast them into their own bodies. The
sound of the marching drums too had receded.

They could at last slow down. Jack and the
great blood bay charger were foaming at the mouth from the gallop.
And thus the knights allowed them to walk at an even pace through
the trampled empty fields before them. Here the land was a mixture
of black frozen dirt and patches of snow.

Breathing hard in exhaustion, they looked at
the line of the horizon ahead of them. The greens and the browns
were much closer now. In the hazy distance, the snow was slowly
leached from the land, fading into intermediate terrain.

The Duke of Plaimes frowned, narrowing his
eyes, and stared for a long time before speaking. “This cannot be,”
he said. “This land, all of it—it is not Morphaea! There, those
distinctive hills curving to the left, and then the forestland to
the right—those are landmarks I’ve seen in Balmue!”

And as they gazed, in a mixture of confusion
and doubt, Duke Andre Eldon wiped his dusty forehead with his
gauntlet. “This world of ours—I no longer know what is happening.
Neither this war nor the world makes any sense. It’s true, wars
make little sense in general—except for a handful of fools—but they
at least require a theater of military action that is fixed
geographically. Here, we have a phenomenon without explanation that
is negating everything.”

“You think, Your Grace, this is what
happened to Duorma? Since your soldiers say it was—displaced?”

“I assume so. This is all rather
unspeakable. Because it means we are now at the border with the
Domain and most of Morphaea is gone from the face of the earth.
How? Where? My family, my
son
was in that city!”

Beltain glanced at Percy lying against his
breastplate, her eyelids fluttering closed, and her face had a
greenish unhealthy tint. “Girl,” he said gently. “Are you with
us?

Percy mumbled something.

“She appears ill,” the Duke noted, taking
his gaze off the horizon for a moment.

And in the next moment both the men glanced
to the remote left and saw dark specks of movement in the
distance.

“Not more of the dead, I pray?” Beltain’s
eyes hardened with renewed energy, as he prepared again for
combat.

But the Duke shrugged, then narrowed his
eyes again, resigned to anything.

Meanwhile Percy again muttered, this time
recognizable words. “No. . . . Not these, not the
dead.”

“A small relief, then,” said Beltain.

Some time later, as they rode gently
forward, they were met by a small, severely battered brigade of
living soldiers of various ranks. They came both on foot and riding
dejected horses, and they moved beyond any semblance of orderly
formation, wearing the tan and teal colors of Morphaea.

Among them, flew the solitary banner of the
King.

T
he Duke of Plaimes
turned to Beltain and said in a low voice: “We shall speak nothing
of the girl—nothing about what she can do. That way you will be
able to proceed discreetly on your way.”

“But, wouldn’t there be questions?” Beltain
wondered. “How will we explain having survived the onslaught of the
entire Trovadii army?”

“Hah!” said the Duke with a bitter smile.
“Leave that to me. The simplest explanations are always best. I
will inform His Majesty that because we are so few in number, we’ve
had extraordinary luck and were mostly unseen and unengaged by the
enemy as we rode through their most outlying, remote, and sparse
flanks. Apparently, the Trovadii—whose one entrenched purpose has
always been to obey without question the Sovereign’s grand orders
of conquest—have better things to do than occupy themselves with
two mounted knights and a young peasant girl. And now that they are
dead
, they are possibly even more single-minded in their
purpose than usual. Who knew that death could bring such sharp
focus?”

And then the Duke was moving away, riding
through the ranks toward the pennant of Morphaea held aloft by the
bearer next to the King himself.

King Orphe Geroard of Morphaea was a man in
his late middle years. His deeply tanned gaunt face with its neatly
trimmed silver beard and grizzled temples was all that could be
seen, for he wore a chain mail coif and helmet, and was clad in a
full suit of armor plate, finely embossed with intricate designs
upon metal. Astride his large chestnut warhorse, he was an imposing
sight, despite the dirtied condition of his armor and the minor
gashes upon his face. And yet he had fared better than many others
in the battle, for most of his knights showed wounds, many of them
serious, and some were barely keeping themselves upright in their
saddles.

The Duke saluted his liege and then they
conversed for several long minutes while Beltain, with Percy, kept
wisely several paces away. At some point the King turned to stare
in their direction, but was apparently convinced by the Duke of
Plaimes that they were of insufficient consequence.

Eventually the Duke turned and rode back to
them. Beltain regarded his approach with a grave expression.

But the Duke, his back turned to the others,
winked discreetly, then said in a calm voice that was carried back
to the others: “And so we part ways, my friend. I have found His
Majesty alive and well—reasonably so—and we must now proceed to
rally the best we can, to bring together our remaining forces. At
the same time, we attempt to make sense of this defeat and the
circumstances of Duorma.”

“What does His Majesty intend to do?”

The Duke took a deep breath, exhaled a weary
sigh. “We will try to make our way west, then north, to Styx. It
might be our best course of action since the Silver Court is now
cut off from us and we from it. Instead of a solid deep front with
the Imperial forces at our back, and a protracted successful line
of defense and maneuverability—as we had fully intended, before the
earth itself decided to relocate underneath us—we are isolated
without a base of operations. Meanwhile, the young King of Styx
will appreciate our allied support, now that he is being attacked
by Solemnis from the south. And thus, we go to Styx. I only hope
we’ll make it. By Heaven, I hope Styx still stands in its proper
place when we arrive!” He paused. “As for you—Godspeed, and
proceed, and may you do what must be done, on Her Imperial
Highness’s orders. I have faith in you, my Lord Beltain, and in
your brave little Percy—who looks like she is about to fall off
your saddle, by the way.”

Beltain gently shifted half-conscious Percy
in his hold, and she raised a very pale grey-green-tinted face to
barely glance at him, before closing her eyes once again.

“Go, now!” The Duke nodded to him with a
grim smile. “Till we meet again!”

“Farewell, Your Grace!” And the black knight
inclined his head in a bow, then turned Jack about, and rode past
the soldiers of Morphaea and their King.

The way, as always, lay south.

Chapter
20

T
he day was closing
upon evening, and the country they entered beyond the last of the
snow-swept fields was a strange, intermediate, temperate zone. The
earth here was mostly naked soil, with rock formations and sparse
forests and a few rolling hills that began as sienna brown earthen
clay and slowly revealed shrubs and some hardy greenery.

According to the Duke of Plaimes, this was
Balmue. Thus, they were no longer within their native Realm but had
entered the territory of the Domain.

Betlain had no doubt. Even though he had
never set foot beyond the Morphaea border, the predominant reddish
brown color of the land around them—sienna brown, the native color
of Balmue, renowned for its unusual deposits of clay soil—spoke
loudly for itself. Balmue wore this shade upon the majority of its
land, in an intricate rich palette.