Page a Day: One Hundred Ninety Nine

             “The Swarm will not heal that,” the captain said. The ranks along the river’s edge now stood four or five deep, packed tightly together in that wall that stops a cavalry charge.

            Jerem Cozak spat. “No. For that, there is no healing. But remove the bodies, too. How many valkyries?”

            The captain shook his head. “Thousands, thousands and thousands. They came like a wall, right for us. Right for us. They saw us, they see everything – ”

            Then came a roar and golden flash that lit up the world. It bore into my eyes. The world disappeared and there was only darkness blurred. My mastodon reared, and I clung blindly to its fur. Swapping sensoriums only meant that I took its pain; the vision got no better. The matriarch bellowed in injury and I did not hear Jerem Cozak’s voice commanding it. Someone to my left shouted “Artillery! Entrench! Hold position!” and other things I could not distinguish as more explosions came. Everywhere, men screamed, senseless cries of terror and of agony. 

            My vision brightened before it cleared. Clinging to the damp coarse fur of my mastodon, I saw at first only dim shapes lying scattered across the ground. Swapping senses did not help, as the burst had blinded my beast, too. All our ears rang. The bombardment slackened and its roar faded away west down the river. There was the tang of burned metal and the sweet hot smell of torn earth and blood. When my vision finally cleared, the forms on the ground sharpened to the bodies of the men whose organs had been liquefied inside their armor and their corpses thrown by the explosion.

            One crater was immediately in front of me, not ten paces distant where the squad captain had stood. I did not see him at all. Another crater was fifteen paces to my left, probably a pace deep at its center. The new lines of reinforcements had been torn apart. Some who were now rising had only been injured by the concussion and would be healed by the Swarm. The ones who did not move would not be healed, because they had lost the white and spectral nature imparted by chameleon. The White Swarm had departed them.

Page a Day: One Hundred Ninety Eight

            We rode down into the mist. And so we did not so much enter the encampment as have it spring up around us amidst the dampened quiet. As out of nowhere men clattered and trotted and repositioned themselves. All looked like ghosts through the eyes of the White Swarm, chameleon being in effect. Everywhere, captains shouted orders. Where before, everyone had seemed confined to waiting, now I saw men digging even with their helmets. Lines formed up and even marched in combat formation, shoulder to shoulder with their shields raised and swords extended. Jerem Cozak questioned a captain and turned to follow a line directly north, towards that corner of the encampment along its eastern edge.

            Here were fewer men, and I knew we had ridden ahead of the realignment. Soon we came to the first bodies lying on the torn earth. Most were torn in two as though by some great blade, innards strewn across the black and loamy round. My warlord found a captain who was directing a squad carrying the injured up from the water’s edge.

            “Behind the fifth defile,” the man said. “Get them to stand if they can help it.” And then, when he saw who came, “Warlord!” and turned to face us fully.

            “Valkyries?” asked Jerem Cozak.

            The man, who I saw now had no hair atop his head, nodded. “Riding machines, like we saw at Sepira. They carried these things,” he said, and waved his arm to indicate. From behind us, there came the rattling advance of reinforcements.

            “Cassan Vala,” said Jerem Cozak, shaking his head. “Where are you? Why did you not come? And if you took the Stair, what happened that you did you not hold them there?”

            “Warlord?” the captain asked.  The lines of soldiers in formation marched past us, breaking left or right, hurrying into position.

            “Heatwhips,” said Jerem Cozak. “From the Shuni Plateau. They are known to sever bodies

so.” He nodded toward one of the bifurcated corpses on the ground. 

Page a Day: One Hundred Ninety Seven

            In all this time, the bombardment had not ceased. The first tower slumped, at last being visibly affected by the nearly constant impacts. There came again the high keening sound, and then the whoosh and ring of light passed over the slope and among the artillery and over the tops of the entrenchments everyone had dived into.  

            After, a squad of Neverborn rushed out to dig again a trench that had been filled in by the debris from a blown crater. Those would not suffice for cover. The Light had swept right through the ones in range.

            I counted the towers. Fifty six along the span of Kasora’s long southern wall, sixty four in all. How long? I wondered. How long to take all of them? Would the Light weaken as they collapsed, or did it not work that way at all? Jerem Cozak had not spoken of them in that fashion. I turned to ask him.

            But he was already in conference with someone, a messenger who panted in the darkness, his form bending over at the waist. He looked to have run all the way from the encampment.

            “Valkyries?” the warlord asked. “What do you mean? Kasora has none.”

            “The entrenchment filled and they overrode. We couldn’t stop them.”

            Jerem Cozak frowned. “Couldn’t stop them? You were chameleoned. Where did they go?”

            The man only shook his head, and looked around in confusion. “Aren’t they? What happened?”

            Jerem Cozak spun, and called down the line. “Marcus, you have the field!” He turned and faced me for a moment. “Come,” he said. And then he turned his mount to the west and I followed, and we left the messenger standing alone amidst the lines of mastodons. Just as I rode away I looked back and saw him sit down, legs stretched out in front of him as though he did not quite realize they were there. The bombardment of the city continued unabated.         

Page a Day: One Hundred Ninety Six

            Hearing that made me shiver. I watched another cycle of the exchange between Kasora and our artillery. This time, when the Towers shrieked their keening sound, all our operators took their cover. And there were no disks destroyed by the counter-bombardment, which went wide of its marks.

            “They think we have fewer artillery than we do,” I said. “That is why you use so few and move them so often, though they cannot be seen.”

            He nodded. “It will take them time to realize how we keep the bombardment so constant. Any sortie that crosses the river will have a similar experience.”

            “They’ll think they’re fighting ghosts, the Augers.”

            He nodded. “It is something of a plan.”

            I reflected on our conversation. “Marcus asked about them, the Arks of Kasora. When I told him what they were, he said he hoped they stayed sealed.”

            He raised an eyebrow. “Did he? Imagination has never been his merit.”

            But I knew he did not mean anything about the Arks, but another realignment of our army. After Neseschia, Marcus had pulled all the Neverborn from leading sections of the infantry and replaced them with now experienced captains. The death of Julius required this, I learned from a scout named Phaedrus. But it did not require that Marcus place himself and his Neverborn as Jerem Cozak’s personal bodyguard, which is how they came to be digging ditches and not leading the defense of the crossing. And which meant that they would make up the rest of the vanguard charging through the gate, instead of doing something more clever and effective.

            But Marcus did not relent, nor did Jerem Cozak, and I understood that Julius had been more important than I ever knew. I had only liked him because he was kind, and my friend. His power had not been obvious. But how many of the decisions we had made, I wondered, had actually been his? Not because he had made arguments, but because he had mediated them?

Page a Day: One Hundred Ninety Five

            At the end of three hundred paces precisely, the band of gold energy silently dispersed.

           

            “Three million,” said Jerem Cozak. “Three million died this way before the high cities of Redmarak fell. I wonder that any fanaticism could have been enough.”

            I shook my head.

            “Now,” said Jerem Cozak, “comes the real retribution.”        

            I looked to the walls of Kasora again, and saw a line of hundreds of golden orbs arching up away from the city, falling with all the terrifying familiarity of stones hurled by children. But these were not mundane, and they fell near groups of our disks with uncanny accuracy. The artillery orbs burst, earth exploded upward, and another disk and its operators died in front of me in ways the war had more acquainted me with.

            “The siege of Kasora has been fought many times,” said Jerem Cozak, “and more often analyzed. Assailants disable the towers with artillery so that they can bring infantry to the gate when it falls. Defenders use the Towers of Light to pin artillery in place so their own artillery can counter it. If the assailing artillery fails to remove the towers, the city stands. If the assailant retains artillery after the last tower falls, the city may be taken, so long as the defense is significantly outnumbered.”

            I looked sideways at him as another barrage began, this one from operators who had not fired the first time. “In every other battle,” I said, “you have changed the field of combat. You have taken us by unexpected ways, or brought walls down by powers you did not explain. You taught the Swarm to heal wounds that would have killed us, and to make it so that we could not be seen. There is nothing like that here?”

            He smiled. “The game is set. All the pieces are in motion. I have told you what I will give, and we are locked inside this valley. What more is there to do?”