The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy (46 page)

Both riverbanks were alive with light as my troops left their tents and moved toward the rafts, and Tenedos’s troops swarmed to their fighting positions to repel us.

If all continued well, Tenedos would think the landing on the peninsula was just a feint and pay little heed to it, concentrating on the main thrust to come from over here, where most of the army was concentrated.

But I didn’t plan to send them across until the peninsula was secured and there’d be little danger of Tenedos’s water magic striking them.

A prickling came, and a wind whispered, then whined, and the Latane grew choppy, and I grinned. Tenedos’s magic was at work, keeping us from mounting our invasion. He
had
been fooled.

Now all I could do was pray the assault troops would take the peninsula, start sending the boats across for us while others assaulted across the bridge and established a foothold on the far side. Then the rest of us would ferry across to the peninsula and attack into the city.

An elaborate plan, but one that appeared to be working.

Then things went awry.

A garbled message: “holding strong … reinforced bridge … can’t …”

Minutes later, another: “storage yard … they’ve fired … both … holding … building … third attack driven back … sending in …”

At the river, the chop and wind were building. I scanned the far bank, saw movement, away from the river, toward the other side of the peninsula. Tenedos clearly felt his magic controlled the water, and was moving soldiers to the other side of the peninsula to attack my landing force.

Another mirror flashed, its message very clear: “Tenedos’s soldiers still hold the bridge, and are attacking across it in strength. We’ll mount a counterattack with — ”

The message stopped, and the mirror stayed dark.

I grabbed a magician, told him to get down to the pavilion and have Sinait and the others cast a counterspell against the weather magic on the Latane.

It appeared my worst-case plan might have to be set in motion.

Another garbled message came:

“holding … they’re holding … for the love of Irisu, come help us! Linerges cut off, and … Come help — ”

The voice broke off, and we got a picture. A woman’s dead face, eyes glaring, mouth gaping, flashed for an instant, vanished. Now I had no other option. “Chuvash!”

“Sir!”

I gave the order I’d been afraid of.

“Get the rafts ready. We’re going across.”

• • •

Now my bluff would have to be played for real. It took half an hour to drag the rafts into the water, and troops clambered aboard, clumsy as the waves pulled at them.

All of the discs had gone dead. Either their enervating spells had run out of energy, or Tenedos had discovered and silenced them.

I’d gone farther upstream, with a special detail of men and women taken from my handful of experienced river boatmen I’d had standing by, and twenty archers chosen from the Seventeenth Ureyan Lancers. If I were to die now, and the odds were excellent, I’d do it with the soldiery I began serving with. I had a bow across my back and two full quivers at my belt.

We were clambering aboard a clumsy river flatboat whose stern was piled with tough rope, which was firmly lashed to other, stronger rope, rope capable of towing a ship, hundreds of yards of it, nearby on the shore.

Chuvash came. “Sir, you can’t be thinking of — ”

“I’m not thinking, I’m doing,” I said. “Take command of the army and bring them across as best you can, when you can.”

He stood helplessly gaping, then was pushed aside as someone rushed me out of the predawn blackness. A dagger was raised, and I had a moment to react, step into the attack, snap up a blocking arm, and then my attacker was knocked sprawling by Svalbard.

The person still held the dagger, and Svalbard’s boot came down on her wrist, and I realized it was a woman as she shouted in pain.

The big man dragged her up, and I saw it was Jabish.

“You bastard! You fughpig!” she sobbed. “It’s just as I thought … you’re letting us die, gods damn you! Tenedos has his warders out with soldiers in the city, and they’re killing my people … killing all of them!”

I thought of explaining, saying my whole gods-damned
army
was dying, but I didn’t have the time.

“Chuvash, take her back to the camp, and get her into restraints! We need no more lunatics about on a night like this. Svalbard! Get your ass aboard, and thanks.” Then, to the men:

“Push off, and row hard. Let’s go get into some trouble over there.”

The river pulled at the boat, and we were bobbing, almost sideways, the line unreeling to our stern, dragging at us. The night was wind and spume, and I cursed the gods or perhaps prayed as I felt the storm getting stronger. Sinait’s counterspells hadn’t taken, and Tenedos would drown me, here in this swirling madness, and at that moment the wind died, although the waves still reared and foamed.

“Row harder,” I bellowed, and the men obeyed as the current pulled, trying to tear us downstream to the sea. There were fires ahead, closer, getting larger, and I could see the far bank. A man beside me coughed apologetically and went down with an arrow in his lungs.

A bow thwacked, and an archer said, satisfaction in his voice, “Got the fucker,” and I heard shouts as the enemy saw us.

The boat slammed into the shallows, almost sending me overside, and men tumbled off and pulled heavy mooring lines ashore, found pilings, a beached fishing boat to tie them to. Other men began pulling in the line across the river, and the work got harder and harder as that heavy rope on the other side was dragged into the water toward us.

Men choked, dropped, and other men ran up the bank and drove back a ragged line of attackers, came back and pulled on.

Svalbard and I went on line with the archers. More of Tenedos’s men rushed, and we drove them back, and I sent men forward to take the corpses’ weapons.

I heard a shout: “We have it!” and saw the end of the cable being dragged out of the river, like some huge snake or worm. It was run up to the bank, looped around a statue of some god I’d never seen before, and the boatmen lashed it firm.

Behind me, across the river, those rafts intended for a deception were being put to use, pushed out, using that rope to help them across, keep them from being swept away. But no more than three or four of the rafts could use the rope at a time, and that sparingly, for fear of snapping it.

More soldiers charged, and others tried to flank us, and we drove some back, forced others to duck for cover. The night was fading, but fire still seared red across the black as the warehouses around us burned, and we choked on the boiling smoke.

My plan was a shambles now, and I should have stayed at my command post and tried to keep what order I could. But I could send no man to die without going there myself.

So I crouched, arrow nocked, stood and whipped an arrow away when I saw a target, ducked as a spear clattered across cobbles toward me, took a blow on my mail as a slung stone bounced off the ground and struck me.

There was cheering, and a raft came out of darkness, and dawn was here, and men were streaming off it, up the bank, and another raft was behind it, coming close. I swore — they were coming too fast, in spite of my orders.

That raft landed its men, and another, and we had two companies’ strength on the bank.

I saw a man wearing a captain’s sash, didn’t know him, told him he was in charge of the beachhead and to get some of those empty rafts back across for more men, and he nodded understanding.

We couldn’t hold here, had to move, and I shouted for the charge, slinging my bow. We went forward, running, and we were on the enemy positions, and swords were clanging, thudding into unprotected flesh, men screaming, swearing, dying. A man swung with a flail, and I ducked and slashed his arm to the bone, and there was another one, coming in with a spear. He knew what he was doing, had its butt back, under his arm, and was attacking with short jabs. I parried, parried again, and he struck long, almost getting me in the stomach. I spun, let him go past, slammed him in the face with the pommel of my sword, and then Tenedos’s men were retreating.

“Come on! After them!” and there was a soldier pulling at me.

“Sir! The rope’s broken!”

I almost slumped in defeat, but couldn’t give up. I snarled something at him, ran after my soldiers, into the heart of the enemy. Very well, we were doomed now, but we surely didn’t have to admit it.

At least the soldiers we were facing weren’t those faceless killers Tenedos had created from innocent civilians. At least, not yet.

Ahead was a knot of officers and warrants, and they had a moment to realize we were their enemies, and we were on them, killing, and running on, leaving a trail of our own wounded, dead, as we went.

Then there was no enemy around, and we were in the middle of the peninsula, among burning, deserted buildings. I pelted to the front of the ragged, panting soldiers.

“To the bridge,” I bellowed, and white eyes glared, understanding seeped through, and they followed me toward the shouting and death.

We rounded a corner, saw the lines of Tenedos’s men. Barrels, crates, bales of cloth had made barricades here, and others — my soldiers — were across a square.

Soldiers turned, hearing us, thinking we were reinforcements, had seconds to realize who we were before we were among them, hewing, killing, always moving, for if we stopped for an instant we’d be dead, although we were clearly in Saionji’s palm, her talons closing about us, less than two hundred men against a thousand, maybe more.

I heard a cheer, and a long ululating call, and men, my men, attacked from behind their hasty ramparts across the square, and all became madness.

Then there was no one else to kill, and I saw Yonge.

“Eh, Cimabuan,” he panted. “Your great plan isn’t as impressive here as it was on the other side of the river.”

“No shit,” I replied. “So what do you want to do?”

He shrugged. “Leave a dozen men to hold here, and go back to the bridge. I assume these other fools aren’t all there is.”

“You assume wrong.” I told him of the rafts, and of the line breaking.

“Not good,” he said. “But I still think we can have some pleasure as we die.”

“All officers, warrants, forward,” I shouted.

Three legates, one wounded captain, and a handful of warrants came.

“Form up,” I shouted. “With your mates if you still have any.” Yonge glowered. “We’re wasting time.”

“Shut up,” I advised. “This is why bandits like you lose, being sloppy and undisciplined and shit like that. Number off by tens!” The men obeyed, raggedly.

“All right,” I shouted. “Those are your new squads. The man in front’s in charge. Back the way you came to the bridge! Don’t wait for the order! We’ll charge them as soon as we get there!”

Somehow, lungs burning, I managed a dogtrot, and we went down a narrow, curving lane.

“There’s a boulevard one street over,” Yonge said. “Nice and wide and dangerous. This’ll come out in the same place, right at the bridge approach.”

A shattered shop was ahead, on a corner, and there was water beyond it. We came into the open, saw more improvised barriers around the bridge, with uniformed men, some uniformed as Peace Guardians, some as motley as we were, Tenedos’s men, and we charged.

Archers rose, and spattered shafts, one whispering down my side, and men spun, died, and we fell back.

“Again, gods dammit! We’ll break them this time!”

We ran onto the killing ground, not many of us, maybe 150 all told, and once more they drove us back.

This time we left a guard, fell farther back into the alley to regroup. I marveled I hadn’t been wounded, then winked at blood trickling down my forehead, and felt a throbbing pain in my thigh. The wound on my head was superficial, the one on my thigh from a blow or perhaps I’d slammed into something. Nothing to worry about.

“What now?” Yonge asked, sounding amused. He was tying up a slashed arm with a torn shirt and had lacerations down one bare leg. “We do it again,” I said grimly.

“You should learn a new way of war than charging down someone’s throat,” he said. “A man can die that way.

“Sendraka got killed doing that, a couple of hours ago,” he added, and heaved a deep breath.

“Get ready!” he shouted, and we heard other shouts, and hurried back to the end of the alley.

Men were pouring down the boulevard from behind us toward Tenedos’s position, men by the hundreds, my gods-damned men, coming from nowhere, somehow they’d crossed the river and we shouted with them and charged, and this time we overran the bridgehead.

“Don’t stop!” I shouted. “Secure the other side,” and officers and warrants recognized me, echoed my command, and we ran onto the bridge, into an arrow storm, men falling on either side, and there was a gray-clad archer in front of me, in middraw, arrow aimed at my chest, eyes widening in panic, and he dropped his weapon as he loosed the string, arrow flipping end over end above me, and my sword was in his throat, letting loose of it as his mate tried to spear me, got Yonge’s wedding dagger in his guts.

I pulled the sword free and fought on. Svalbard was dueling three men, and I took one of them off him, and he killed one, then the last before I could recover.

Soldiers streamed past, in a solid wave, and then I saw Kutulu, for the love of Isa, long dagger in each hand, eyes mad as any of us, and I had him by the shoulder.

“What happened! Where’d you and the others come from? I thought the frigging rope went!”

“It did,” he said. “But one of the rafts saw it go, and followed it, pulled it on board, and then let themselves be swung toward the other side like a boy on a line! I don’t know if anybody used magic to help it.

“Now there’s other lines across the river, and the army’s coming across, and nothing can stop us!”

“Us? What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” I said.

Kutulu grinned, a wide, happy smile, I think the first time I’d seen him ever look so ecstatic.

“The time for spies is over. I can finally be a soldier!”

He ran after the others.