The Price Of Command v(bts-3 Read online

  And he also understood duty and pledges. “Right now all I care about is whether this land is safe to travel through—which you say it is—and whether or not Ancar has any mages likely to detect us here.”

  “We’re working to prevent that, m’lord,” Quenten replied dryly. “And—” he looked up, sharply.

  “What is it?” Daren said, reining in his horse as Quenten’s mount stopped dead.

  The mage raised one hand to his forehead, his eyes focusing elsewhere. He looked for all the world as if he was listening to something. “Quenten?” Daren persisted. “Quenten?”

  The mage’s eyes refocused on him. “Ancar has a reserve force just ahead,” he said vaguely. “Several mages, and three companies of cavalry. And—Daren, m’lord, they’re mostly from here, this barren zone.”

  “Controlled, then. There’s no other way he could make fanners into cavalry that quickly” He caught the attention of his officers, who halted the march. “Quenten, how far ahead is ‘just ahead’?”

  “Half a day’s march, maybe less. Not much less.” Quenten didn’t seem to notice Daren’ sigh of relief.

  “What are they doing there?” he persisted. “We haven’t seen a sign of Ancar’s army. What are reserves doing out here?”

  “I don’t—they’re—I need my bowl.” Without warning, the mage scrambled off his mare’s back to dig into her packs. He emerged with a completely black bowl, shiny, made of black glass, or something very like it. He poured water from his own water skin into the bottom of it, sat right down in the dust of the road, and stared into it.

  Daren had been around enough mages to know when to keep his mouth shut. He waited, patiently, in sunlight too thin to even warm him. The army waited, just as patiently, glad for a chance to sit by the roadside and rest. Daren watched his men sprawling ungracefully against their packs, and wished he hadn’t had to push them so hard. They’d had a lot of time to make up, once they’d gotten down out of the hills. He had been weary at the end of the day, and he was riding. He hated to think what the foot soldiers felt like.

  “They’re waiting,” Quenten said, in a thin, disinterested voice, an eerie echo of his own thoughts “They are half of the claw that will capture Selenay and crush Valdemar. “

  “What?” Daren snapped, startled.

  Quenten looked up, blinking, then picked up the bowl and spilled the water out in the dust. “Ancar has these reserves out here, pacing him, waiting for when he has Selenay’s forces worn down enough to trap,” the mage said in a more normal tone of voice. “Then he’ll have this lot sweep in from the side and above while he cuts his main force in from below.”

  “I don’t think so,” Daren replied, in a kind of grim satisfaction at finally having something to fight.

  “Well, that’s not all, m’lord,” Quenten added as he got up, shook the dust from his robes and stowed his bowl carefully away. “It’s who these reserves are—or rather, where they’re from. Like I said, before, here. Tied into obedience by the blood of their own kin. Now, you have the earth-sense; you could tell me which mage is controlling them, because the earth hereabouts would tell you. It hates him, and it’s bound to him, and you’ll see him as it sees him.”

  “And what will happen when you break him?” Daren asked, leaning forward in his saddle and clutching the pommel with one hand. “How do I do see these things, anyway? What do you need to teach me, and have we the time to spare?”

  Quenten paused to remount, and turned to look back at Daren only when firmly in his seat. “You have the earth-sense,” Quenten repeated. “It’s a matter of instinct rather than learning. Break the controlling mage and you not only free the victims—but it’s altogether possible the earth hereabouts would rise up in revolt. And it would listen to you, follow some of your directions, if you made them simple enough.”

  “It would?”

  Quenten nodded. Daren thought about those heaps of pitiful bones and rags—looked around him at the dying land. And thought of Kero and Selenay’s army, and pledges. And just maybe a god somewhere had just gifted him with the chance to satisfy all of them.

  “Quenten, you’re in charge of the magic-folk; get your mages. Find out everything you can, and keep us cloaked.” Daren turned his horse and rode off in search of the scouts before he had a chance to hear Quenten’s eager assent.

  All right, Ancar, you bastard, he couldn’t help thinking, with a kind of fierce exultation. I am about to visit a little retribution on you and yours.

  Ancar’s reserves were pathetically unaware of any danger—but after all, they were deep inside their own territory, and had no reason to suspect any threat. Daren himself went out with the scouts to the river-valley where they camped to get a good look at enemy, and at the way they were conducting themselves.

  What he saw fit in very well with Quenten’s theory of mind-control. Only about a quarter of the men down there were moving about or acting in any kind of a normal fashion. The rest might as well have been puppets; in fact, watching them was rather disturbing. They moved listlessly, when they moved at all, and none of them were idle—yet they wasted no time on their chores, picking up one task, carrying it to the end, picking up another. And all without exchanging a single word with anyone, or taking a single step out of the way. Nothing was cooked, except at the camps of the officers; a small group of men handed out the tasteless ration-bread Rethwellan no longer used because of complaints from the men. These fighters took the bread, ate it methodically, and went back to their chores.

  By nightfall, the camp was utterly quiet. No socializing around campfires, no idle games of chance—nothing. The men simply rolled up in their blankets, and went to sleep; except for the officers and mages, who had tents, and were presumably doing things inside them. It was an entirely unnerving sight to someone who knew what a camp should look and sound like, because of the complete unnaturalness of it—although Daren had to admit to himself that there were times when he’d wished his men would—

  He stopped the thought before he could complete it, chillingly aware of how close he’d come to thinking that he’d wanted his men to be like this. Was that what those mages meant, when they said it was a short step from knowing to wanting?

  Horrible thought....

  He closed his eyes on the too-quiet camp below him for a moment, then opened them. No, he deliberately decided. I’ve never wanted that. It’s worse than slavery; at least a slave has his own thoughts. These poor creatures don’t even have that much. It’s as bad to destroy or enslave a mind as it is to kill a body. Maybe worse, if the mind is aware of what has happened to it.

  The scout tugged at his sleeve, and he crawled away with the rest of them, avoiding the slack-jawed perimeter guard. They made it back to the rest of his troops without further incident, and he and his officers spent the hours until midnight charting the next day’s course.

  Dawn of the next day saw the Rethwellan troops poised just above the camp. It had been impossible to keep the movement of so large a group secret, but by splitting his troops in two and cutting off Ancar’s fighters from their easy escape by river, Daren had forced Ancar’s reserves to meet him instead of running to join the larger force, or escaping into the interior of Hardorn.

  Daren waited at the command post with Quenten, the other mages, and his under-officers; far from being even as comfortable as a tent, the site basically had only two things to recommend it: The unobstructed view, and a very tall shade tree.

  “Can you tell who he is, yet?” Quenten asked in an undertone as the officers scattered off to take their places with their men.

  Daren shook his head. There was a kind of sink of “bad feeling” a little to the right of center, but no one mage stood out. They were assuming that Ancar’s mages were too strong for any single one of Daren’s mages to take. They would have to wait for their one best opportunity, and all hit him at once, in order to break him.

  One of Daren’s mages was effectively out of the picture; he was preventing the enemy fr
om calling for help, at least magically. And that was all he was good for; they’d left him in trance in the Healer’s tent, and there he would stay even after this was over, recovering. Or not; there was always the possibility he might die, either from exhausting himself, or being drained or killed by the enemy mages. And if Daren’s force lost, he would almost certainly die. Mages were harder to control than captured fighters; the enemy usually did not even bother to try.

  Daren gave the signal to advance, no point in a charge; mind-controlled men would not be unnerved by a charge or a battle cry. They’d simply fight until they dropped, and others took their places. Daren had given his officers careful instructions: keep the men in formation, no hero-tactics, fight as carefully as if it was all a drill. The one advantage to fighting mind-controlled men was that they were slower; it was the difference between knowing what to do and being told what to do—between learned reflex, and something that hasn’t been absorbed bone-deep yet.

  The battle was, as a result, curiously, grimly dull. No flag waving, no shouts except for exclamations of pain, no charges—the only sounds being those calls and the clash of weapons, the cries of horses, the scuffling of hundreds of feet and hooves—the men might as well have been those little counters he and Kero used to practice maneuvers with. Except for the blood, the wounded, the fallen. Those made it real, and made the fighting itself all the more unreal.

  Daren concentrated on the mages, clustered near the officers’ command post, and visible because of the dull colors of their robes, which were bright compared with the brown and buff leathers of the fighters and officers. But the more he concentrated, the less he seemed to see. He started to get angry and frustrated—my people are dying down there—but then he stopped himself, before he stormed off to harangue Quenten.

  This is my problem, not his. I should be able to figure it out. Quenten said this earth-sense works like instinct, he thought, finally. So—maybe if I don’t concentrate....

  I used to wonder what on earth good those meditation exercises Tarma insisted we both learn would do me. I thought if there was anything more useless—

  I can almost hear her now. “Surprise, youngling. Nothing’s ever wasted.”

  He closed his eyes and dredged the exercise out of deepest memory. It wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it was foing to be, for in moments he was relaxed. He centered himself in the earth beneath his feet, as Tarma had taught him, and when he felt as if he was truly an extension of it, opened his eyes—

  And nearly choked. He’d never, ever seen anything like this before—and if it hadn’t been that he felt fine, and had shared the same rations as everyone else this morning, he’d have suspected sickness or drugs. Superimposed over the fighting, the battlefield was divided into fields of glowing, healthy green, and dull, dead, leprous white, with edges of scarlet and vermilion where they met. Outside the area of fighting, the landscape was the same as it had been all the way north—sickly greens, poisoned yellows.

  Except for one spot, behind the lines, in the ranks of the mages and commanders—one spot of black, auraed by angry red.

  “Get Quenten,” he told his aide. “We’ve got them.”

  Eleven of the twelve mages materialized beside him so quickly he suspected they’d conjured themselves there. “Where is he?” Quenten said—then shook his head as Daren started to open his mouth to explain that he couldn’t tell him. “Never mind, I know, I’m being stupid. Hadli, would—”

  A dark-haired, plump girl reached up and touched both his temples before he could say or do anything. “Got him, Quenten,” she said in satisfaction. “If you want to feed through me, I’m not much use for anything else right now.”

  “What are you going to do?” Daren asked anxiously. “I mean, I don’t want you to go blasting at him and hit our people.”

  “Not a chance. Kero likes things subtle. We figured out last night that we get the same effect by killing or wounding him physically—he’ll still lose his hold on the magic and on the minds he’s controlling.”

  “So I’m going to give them the way to identify him,” Hadli said. “Quenten will bowl-cast a FarSeeing spell, and Gem and Myrqan will find a weapon to hit him with, while the rest distract him and keep his defenses all facing forward.”

  Daren turned; Quenten was already kneeling on the ground with his bowl of water in front of him—but this time there was a picture forming in it that even he could see.

  Hadli and two others knelt beside him, and Daren found that he could still see over their heads. What he saw was the backs of several people in robes, with coruscating colors and strange shapes appearing just beyond them. His eyes went to one in a dull blue robe, and he saw, faintly, the same overlay of black and scarlet auras he’d “seen” before.

  “That’s him,” Hadli said. “The one in the blue, with the copper belt and the serpent-glyph on his sleeve.”

  “Daren,” Quenten called, without taking his attention from the bowl, “When we strike him, you’ll feel it in the earth. There’s going to be a moment of recoil, and then a hesitation. That is when you need to concentrate on what, exactly, you want to happen. There’s a lot of power there; think of it as a flash flood about to roll down the river. Once you get it started, you won’t be able to get it to stop or even change directions. If you don’t know what to do—don’t think of anything.”

  Daren refrained from making a sarcastic answer. In the bowl, a light, ornamental dagger was elevating from a table behind the mages. Before he had a chance to ask what that meant, the thing snapped forward as if it had been thrown, and buried itself to the hilt in Blue-robe’s back.

  Daren had been in an earthquake, once. The feeling was similar. For a moment, the earth seemed to drop out beneath him, and he was left hanging in space, with a sense that something huge and ponderous was poised over him, like a wave, waiting to break.

  Belatedly, he recalled Quenten’s orders, and realized the impossibility of not thinking anything. Make it simple. Dear gods, it’s going to let go—and I don t know what to tell it—

  Make it simple.

  Put everything back the way it was!

  The wave broke. He swayed, and started to fall, when his aide caught him. And suddenly, there was noise out on the battlefield.

  The sound of several thousand enraged, half-mad men, turning on their officers and tearing them to pieces.

  Twenty-four

  Bodies pressed in on all sides of her. Gods. Blessed Agnira. I got them into this. They trust me to get them out of it. How do I tell them that I can’t? The camp was unusually silent; somewhere on the Valdemar side, Selenay, too, was breaking the bad news to her troops. The regulars, that is; the Heralds already knew about it, of course. Kero wanted to look away from all those eyes staring at her with perfect confidence, to gaze up at the sky or down at the ground—anywhere but back at them. They depended on me, and I fouled up. Now what do I say? “I‘m sorry?”

  Instead, she gazed directly back at them all, trying to meet each pair of eyes before she spoke to them. “I haven’t got any good news,” she told them, finally. “Ancar’s fighters have managed to force us east enough for his southernmost troops to divide and get in west of us. They’re doing that now, and we haven’t been able to stop them. He’s had cavalry to the east in his own lands that has probably moved in north as well. We’ve been bracketed, and now we’re surrounded.”

  She waited for a moment for that to sink in, then continued, rubbing the back of her neck. “They outnumber us by a goodly amount. Selenay’s troops tried this morning to prevent the southern forces from coming west, but there were too many for them, and the farmers just aren’t a match for trained fighters, not in pitched battles. It looks like the big confrontation is coming tomorrow; he has us right where he wants us, and no getting around it.”

  She listened to them breathe for a moment. “Where’s Lord Daren?” asked a voice from the rear. Kero looked up, above the heads of those nearest her, and attempted to find the questioner.
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  “We lost track of him about the time he was going to cross over into the Valdemar side of the Comb, somewhere in the mountains. We don’t know what happened to him. There’s been no word of him coming up through Valdemar like he was supposed to. He could be on the way. He could have been turned back. He could have been defeated by Ancar down in the mountains. We just don’t know, so we can’t count on him being here.”

  Much less being here in time. That’s the way ballads end, not real battles. They’d been in trouble before, but never this badly, and never while under her command. The weight of responsibility made her ache,

  “Now, here’s what we can do,” she continued. “We’re mounted, and we’re the best hit-and-hide specialists in the business. We can break out, leave this mess behind, and head back down home. There isn’t a soul outside Valdemar that would blame us for doing that. We’re not in this for glory, or for patriotism, or because we’re fanatics.” She looked around again, and saw heads nodding. “We’re in this for the money, purely and simply, and our Guild Charter and our contract allows for this sort of thing. Ancar threw the Guild out; we know he isn’t going to accept a Code surrender from us. Probably what he’d do if we tried is kill us out of hand. He might even stick to killing the officers only, and mind-controlling you troops. I don’t think I have to go any further into that.”