Page a Day: Two Hundred Six

            He did not answer me. The evening turned to night. We met at the crossing the largest group of valkyries we ever had, three of four thousand strong. A hundred mastodons did not return. Another fifty were dispersed before my eyes on the one hundred and twenty first breath. They vanished in the Light. 

            The fifty-ninth tower fell. The charges of valkyries grew larger still, five or six thousand strong. These only harrowed the very front lines at the crossing, where the Swarm still sat heavily as mist. Then they turned away. But I thought I saw, on two successive charges, the same one-armed Auger in the lead, wielding his heatwhip with ferocity. Were these, at last, the final valkyries remaining?

            At midnight, the sixty-first tower fell. There was silence across the valley for about half a watch. Jerem Cozak moved the last of the artillery into positions throughout the encampment, where they could take aim at the towers along the western wall. Not more than one hundred disks remained. At the same time, infantry darted back our way between pulses of Light, because room was needed at the crossing. They fell in line by thousands between our groups of mastodons. Jerem Cozak led our herd as far west as possible, to a place where I could see the artillery through the low-settling mist of the White Swarm. No more valkyries charged the crossing.

            “Why the change?” I asked him. “It’s not our turn to go.”

            “We’re the vanguard of the column,” he replied. In my mind the battlefield flipped, and I saw it. He was lining us up to take the city when the last towers fell.  

            “Why are you breaking up the herds?” I asked, feeling the slow cutting sting of anxiety through my beast. “Wouldn’t it be better to charge through as one?”

            He turned to look at me. “Do you still not understand? They must be able to march past us.”

            “But why –”

Page a Day: Two Hundred Five

            “But it was the first city the Augers took,” the warlord said at sunrise on the eighty ninth day. “The first, and then they conquered our world. Why then? Why did they come here and what did they find that made them think our world worth taking?’

            I could not answer him, thinking only we had brought the chaos of the void to earth. To our right fell the great cascade, where mist hanging suspended in the air shimmered in the same light that fell across the cutting peaks of the mountains overhead. But to our left lay the crossing, a zone where men lay bisected, and even here, at our feet, the entire slope was black mud, a land consisting almost entirely of wrecked artillery and craters and the trenches we used to shelter from the strikes that made them.

            I don’t know how many Augers died that day, in the Void. I don’t know how many of our own infantry we sacrificed, though the captains at the crossing claimed it cost them more than a thousand men per watch all that morning. I don’t even know how many mastodons, for the simple reason that the repeated charging kept them keyed up and we had to pace them up and down the line so that they would not panic and circle up. But we lost several with each charge, and ours were the last remaining in the world.

            The artillery was faring little better, being now reduced to half its original strength. But they made progress. The fifty sixth, fifty seventh, and fifty eight towers all fell that afternoon. Never did their ferocity of the Light abate. Jerem Cozak confirmed that it did not work that way, that the only necessary number of towers was two, so that energy could build between them. He would not or could not explain the process. The Void consumed all of his attention. It consumed everything.

            “How do they see us?” I asked at dusk, thinking of the valkyries in a rare respite. “I thought chameleon– .”

            Jerem Cozak shook his head. “The nightwind mimics. Both we and Cassan Vala have had long contact with it. The White Swarm is vulnerable when its bearers die in combat. The nightwind has learned that trait by which the White Swarm allows us to see each other, and copied it.”

            “So we appear to them as ghosts as well?”

Page a Day: Two Hundred Four

               “We’re trapped,” I told Jerem Cozak several watches later. “We’re besieging, but we’ve got ourselves trapped nonetheless. The crossing’s too valuable to sacrifice because it would be impossible to regain.”

            We’d just come back from a charge and I was glad to have my mastodon’s back at the valley wall. I was also cursing the fact that neither me nor my beast had injured. If we had been, we would not have to take our next rotation, and I would not have to count my breaths before the Light came back again. Jerem Cozak did not reply.

            The watches sped on into evening. The forty sixth and forty seventh towers toppled. My turn to charge came three separate times. After the last, I turned to see two mastodons cut in half by the Light, their hindquarters gone, bawling helpless in the mud until two spearmen dispatched them with shots through their skulls. Their riders sat beside their mounts on the earth, staring unfocused into the distance. Runners soon came to place shovels in their hands. 

             Darkness fell.     

            “I don’t understand this war,” I told Jerem Cozak at midnight. “If we take this city, we have overthrown the Augers but it has all been for nothing. We didn’t look for the lightships because we were fighting. We should have searched the wilderness, instead of all this bloodshed. And from what I’ve heard our ally has done what we have done, only less of it.”

            He shook his head. “You sound like Julius, who often spoke thus. But what good would the lightships do if we had no people to find them for?”

            There was a crumbling sound as the forty eighth tower toppled. I did not answer him. Two watches passed. Our herd charged again.     

            Thus we fought our way toward morning. Auger valkyries ran the crossing. We sent men and beasts into the Void to keep from losing the crossing. At some point, I realized that the least dangerous part of the charge was running the open field, where only scattered artillery was falling. Compared to the terror of the Light and the frenzied contact at the ford, the place where only a few dozen men died per watch felt like safe and gentle harbor.  

Page a Day: Two Hundred Three

            “You knew,” I said. “You knew we were going to have to do that.”

            He scowled. “Again I tell you, this siege has been laid many times. Some of those involved valkyries. Some involved mastodons. All involved artillery. The most successful used mastodons or valkyries or to protect or assail the disks. We are certainly not the first to use the river.”  

            From the north came again the high keening sound. Our artillery bombarded what would be the forty-third tower to fall. Jerem Cozak gave that order which sent men out onto the field to redig the trenches. He had given it many times. Some would not come back. That work goes slowly in nearly freezing mud. And the men who went had no mastodons to ride, for those make too good a target for artillery. I abandoned my protest.

            The bombardment from the city poured on. A watch later valkyries broke through the lines at the ford again. We caught them high on the slope away from the Light but two mastodons lost their forelegs at the knees to Auger whips. They had to be killed because the White Swarm could not heal them.

  

            Jerem Cozak gave more orders. Artillery was striking the encampment again, and the warlord altered the sequence of our own disks to counter them. Anticipating the Auger’s next maneuver, he then sent a thousand mastodons to charge the crossing and turn the wave of valkyries that would come inevitably in the bombardment’s wake.

  

            And so was born a new creation: the Void, that corner where the western edge of the artillery field, the  encampment’s eastern flank, and the southern limit of Kasora’s towers and artillery all converged. It was the same bend of the river where Jerem Cozak had been thrown from the matriarch, but I soon saw that it had been transformed. When our turn came, we charged into an area such that no part of it was not crater, and half of those were filling with blood and muddy water.

           

            The infantry whose turn it was to defend had surged out of their trenches, and stood on open ground. To allow their shields to shed the energy of artillery strikes, they also stood in loose formation. Valkyries would cut right through them – unless our infantry were reinforced, at every opportunity, by squads of mastodons. Which, because they had no shields and made such tempting targets for artillery, and because they had no trenches to save them from the Light, could not themselves remain in place, and would have to retreat across the artillery field every one hundred and twenty breaths.

            Thus the Void swallowed men and beasts alike, spitting out the lucky ones. 

Page a Day: Two Hundred Two

            One hundred and twenty, I thought. From the very first I had counted one hundred twenty breaths between the pulses of ancient energy. That was the number each artillery man and trencher lived by. And now, on the fifth day of the  siege of Kasora, the Light of its towers would sweep across the slope for the four thousand and eightieth time. My stomach turned.

            We charged the river. What happened to the valkyries I do not know. The world exploded in seas of icy spray as the feet and legs of the mastodons struck the water. Soon, we were swimming toward the cliff. The high keening sound became louder, overwhelming, then a thump as I looked up. I heard the smaller plashes of Jerem Cozak and other riders dismounting into the river.

            There came a whooshing sound and the sky flashed with a film of gold for an instant, very near to my face it seemed. I tasted something sour. Then it was gone away and I knew it swept across the sloping field behind us. There were further shouts, then all fell silent. I turned, saw clouds of red mist to the left and right along the shore, and vomited into the river.  

            Jerem Cozak paddled up to the matriarch and remounted and we surged back toward the shore again. By the time we trotted unto solid ground, artillery orbs were bursting all around us.

            “Back to the lines!” he roared over the din. “By squads! Evasive spread!”

            Then the warlord surged ahead, and my mastodon and thirty others followed his winding course back toward the herd at three-quarters run. Artillery burst to our right and left, and I realized that he knew by the positions of the disks that had fired where the Augers would be aiming. And that the squad captains would know the same, because he had told them to note such positions before the battle even began.

            We drew up behind the artillery lines just as the high keening sound began again. I dismounted and stood, dizzy and shaking as our mastodons resumed their places in the line of the herd. Jerem Cozak stayed mounted, watching toward the crossing with his oculars.