Christopher G. Nuttall's Blog, page 11

Snippet – Judgement Day (Ark Royal 20)

Prologue I

From: The Journal of Professor Harrison, Xeno-Archaeologist. Baen Publishing House. 2305.

If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have believed it.

The concept of a Dyson Sphere – a shell enclosing an entire star, allowing the builders to make use of every last scrap of solar energy – was first devised in 1960, decades before the first offworld settlements and the discovery of the tramlines allowing FTL travel between star systems. The basic theory was sound, but the practicalities were sorely lacking. It was deemed impossible to gather enough raw material to enclose a star, let alone craft it into a sphere and terraform the interior into something habitable. Smaller concepts – Ringworlds and Orbitals – weren’t much more practical, as far as we could tell. The tech and materials science to make the concept work simply didn’t exist.

And then, on a deep-space exploration mission, HMS Endeavour discovered not one, but two, Dyson Spheres.

It is impossible, even now, to describe the sheer size of the megastructures.  One (Dyson One) shattered long ago, leaving behind a debris field straight out of bad science-fantasy; the other (Dyson Two) remained intact, enclosing an entire star.  When Endeavour jumped into the sphere, following the tramline, she rapidly discovered the sphere was very far from dead. The interior space was patrolled by fists – spheres made of an unknown and seemingly indestructible material, termed ‘unobtainium,’ and propelled around the interior by focused gravity beams – and the surface was inhabited by humans, taken from Earth untold centuries ago and settled on the Dyson Sphere. It rapidly became clear the settlers were trapped in the Stone Age, lacking the metals they needed to make transit to the Iron Age and eventually the Space Age. The local history appeared to be fluid, but from a long-term point of view it was astonishingly repetitive. They simply could not break out of the trap. Indeed, Endeavour herself was almost trapped within the sphere – when the fists took notice of her presence – and she was very lucky to escape.

The news shocked Earth, when Endeavour returned. The human race had long grown used to the concept of technologically-advanced aliens – the Tadpoles had been two or three decades ahead of humanity, when the First Interstellar War broke out – but the Dyson Spheres were several orders of magnitude more advanced than anything humanity had ever encountered. The sheer scale of the megastructures – and the suspiciously-empty star systems surrounding the Dyson System – was incredibly difficult to grasp, suggesting the existence of supertechnology that made humanity’s best look like sticks and stones. The human population on the sphere, worse, was clear proof the Builders had visited Earth centuries ago and kidnapped a breeding population. The spheres were awesome, wondrous and terrifying. They promised technology beyond the dreams of human scientists and threatened contact with a race so advanced it might see humanity – and the other known alien intelligences – as nothing more than ants. The shock was great enough to cause no end of turmoil on the homeworld, with some groups worshipping the Builders (and tying them into reputed alien abductions and ancient astronauts), and others insisting the spheres should be left completely alone, for fear of attracting attention from a super-race.

It was unlikely in the extreme that such demands would be honoured. The Dyson System held too much promise, for everything from technological development and sociological research, for the system to be left in quarantine. The first ships were already heading back to the system within a week of Endeavour’s report, asteroid miners and independent spacers hoping to find something they could claim and exploit so they could turn a profit. It would not be long, everyone knew even if they were unwilling to admit it, before the governments got involved. Indeed, the negotiations for assembling and dispatching a multinational fleet back to the sphere – with orders to arrest independent scavengers and ensure all discoveries were shared – were concluded surprisingly quickly, with the fleet itself dispatched shortly afterwards. In hindsight, it is perhaps unsurprising that certain governments were plotting to claim the entire system for themselves. The prize was worth almost any risk.

The fleet returned and started to assess the sphere, discovering a handful of installations near the North Mountain (a hatch in the sphere, surrounded by solid walls to keep the atmosphere from leaking out when the hatch was opened) and then a long planetoid orbiting inside the sphere, apparently a command centre for the entire system. Further research revealed a series of intelligence tests for users, culminating in a device that apparently turned off the tramline linking Dyson to the nearest star. The MNF was, apparently, trapped. It took weeks of additional research, while the military crews were forced to plan an evacuation of the ships to the sphere, before the researchers figured out how to open the North Hatch and discovered, to their horror, that the Dyson System was now completely isolated. The fleet was stranded hundreds of light years from home.

At that moment, treachery struck. The Chinese Government had planned how to take control of the system, and given its representative – the second-in-command of the fleet – orders to strike if it seemed likely the system could be annexed and exploited before the rest of the human governments could react. The attack was almost successful – and would have been completely successful, if Endeavour hadn’t managed to hide within the sphere and use the alien technology to destroy two Chinese starships, forcing the remainder to surrender. But this still left the fleet cut off from Earth …

… And, as the fleet came to grips with the prospect of being stranded for the rest of their lives, Dyson One’s star went out …

Prologue II

“What do you mean, the tramline’s gone?”

Admiral Lady Susan Onarina regretted her tone as soon as she spoke. The midshipwoman was so young Susan was tempted to check her birth certificate to make sure she hadn’t lied about her age, when she’d joined the Royal Navy, although she wouldn’t have been seconded to the Admiralty if she wasn’t very good at her job. She looked as though she was barely into her teens, hardly old enough to be trusted with … Susan shook her head, cutting off that line of thought before it went any further. She’d been a young midshipwoman too, years ago, and it hadn’t been easy to convince her superiors – and enlisted crewmen – to take her seriously …

… And yet, she couldn’t help wondering if some arsehole hadn’t sent the young woman on a snipe hunt. It wasn’t impossible. Senior Midshipman and Crew Chiefs were fond of knocking newly-minted officers and crew down a peg or two, by sending them to find something that simply didn’t exist or couldn’t be found … it was unlikely someone had pranked her by telling her to make an absurd report to the First Space Lady herself, but it couldn’t be ruled out. Not completely. The young officer might be too ignorant to realise she was making an impossible report.

Midshipwoman Harrington swallowed, hard. “Convoy OCP-Nine-Seven was due to make the hop to Dyson four days ago,” she said. Her voice was shaky, suggesting she knew how absurd the report sounded. “They passed through the tramline to ES-17 and discovered the tramline to Dyson simply wasn’t there. The automated relay station reported losing contact, that it had lost contact with the MNF, two weeks prior to the convoy’s arrival in ES-17. The convoy confirmed the tramline itself was gone.”

Susan keyed her terminal. If it was a joke, she’d have the perpetrator … she sucked in her breath as the report popped up in front of her, confirming the absurd story. The tramline had simply vanished, as if someone had flipped a switch and turned it off. It couldn’t be a joke and yet … it was hard, almost impossible, to believe. She had wondered why the Admiralty – and its foreign counterparts – had had so much trouble wrapping their heads around the idea of alien invaders, back when the First Interstellar War had begun, but she thought she understood now. There hadn’t been any real hint of alien civilisations, not until the Tadpoles had arrived and started shooting. It had been one hell of a shock.

Her heart pounded as the implications dawned on her. The tramlines linked Earth to hundreds of settled systems, from heavily-developed worlds like Britannia to isolated settlements like Wensleydale or multiracial colonies like Unity. If the tramlines vanished … civilisation would vanish with them. The fastest starship the navy had ever designed and put into mass production would take a decade to reach the nearest star, if she were forced to make the trip in realspace. The colonies would be isolated so completely they’d have to live or die on their own. And …

“Go back to your station,” she said, quietly. “And tell Admiral Mason I need to speak with him immediately.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Susan leaned back in her chair as the young midshipwoman retreated, no doubt relieved to be out of her superior’s office. Her career had only just begun, and a single misstep could put it right into the crapper. Susan herself had had problems … she sighed inwardly as she reread the report, wishing it was nothing more than a practical joke. The idea of losing the tramlines was utterly terrifying, a disaster so vast it would make the Navy’s contingency plans look like jokes. She keyed her console, sending a query into the system. They’d have to quietly check the remaining tramlines, just in case. But it might be weeks before they heard back from distant colonies …

The flicker network can be checked, at least, she told herself. It can’t function without the tramlines.

The hatch hissed open. Admiral Paul Mason stepped into the office.

“The tramline to Dyson has vanished,” Susan said flatly, swinging the terminal around so he could read the report. “What do you make of it?”

“We always knew there was something odd about that tramline,” Mason said, running his eyes down the report. It was surprisingly short, for something so urgent. Susan suspected the convoy commander had been too stunned to engage in the usual arse-covering that normally attended any absurd report. The tramlines did not change, yet this one had. “It was extended far beyond the limits of any other known tramline.”

Susan nodded, curtly. The lines of gravimetric force linking stars together were rarely longer than ten light years, and the longest tramline prior to the Dyson Tramline was fifteen light years. The researchers speculated there were longer tramlines, but they were too weak to detect, let alone ride. The Builders had either found a weak tramline and boosted it or … they’d created one from scratch. If that was true … she knew her government, and every other government, would do whatever it took to get their hands on the technology and put it into mass production. It would change the universe forever.

“And it went off,” Susan said. “What happened?”

“The MNF was supposed to be exploring the sphere,” Mason reminded her. “Perhaps they pushed the off switch.”

Susan snorted, although it wasn’t really funny. She found it hard to believe someone would leave the off switch for a tramline simply lying around, although it stood to reason that if you could make tramlines at will you didn’t have to worry about someone turning it off and stranding you hundreds of light years from home. For all she knew, the tramline could be rebooted by simply turning the system off and then on again. And yet … the last report from Dyson Two had made it clear it would be decades, perhaps centuries, before the researchers unravelled the secrets of alien technology. The MNF might be stuck there for a very long time.

Or they might have sentenced themselves to death, she thought. The planners had done what they could to make the fleet as self-sufficient as possible, and the crew could always trade with the locals for food and drink, but there were limits. They might not survive long enough to figure it out.

She met his eyes. “What do we do about it?”

“It depends how much our political masters are prepared to commit to the mission,” Mason pointed out. “We could set up a catapult somewhere near the system and launch a relief convoy to Dyson, with the supplies they’d need to set up a relief catapult. The cost would be staggering, but it could be done.”

“It would be difficult to convince the government to pay for the catapult,” Susan said, reluctantly. Catapults were expensive. The Royal Navy could purchase an entire squadron of battleships, or fleet carriers, for the cost of a single catapult. Even with the other governments chipping in, it would still be immensely costly. “And some of them, I suspect, will be relieved we lost contact with Dyson.”

She grimaced. The first reports from Dyson had unleashed political chaos. The prospect of alien supertechnology entering the market had changed everything, as had the discovery aliens had visited Earth centuries ago and kidnapped hundreds – perhaps thousands – of humans and transhipped them to their new home. Even if the Builders had abandoned the spheres long ago, and no one had seen any evidence the Builders were still around, the discovery was still incredibly disquieting. She could easily imagine the government trying to wash its hands of the whole matter. It wouldn’t work, she was sure, but …

It wouldn’t be the first time the government tried to cover its collective eyes and pretend something didn’t exist, she thought, grimly. And if they think they can get away with it …

“I need to speak to the PM,” she said, tiredly. The one advantage of being based in London, rather than Nelson Base, was that she could see the PM at very short notice. It was just a matter of time before the news got out – someone would leak, sooner rather than later – but she should have a chance to shape the political reaction before the media and the opposition had their say. “You go back to the office and get your people looking through every last scrap of data, see if they can figure out what happened and why. And if there is anything we can do from this end.”

Mason frowned. “We can try, but I doubt we’ll find anything.”

Susan nodded. It hadn’t been easy to unlock the secrets of Tadpole tech … and Builder tech was several orders of magnitude more advanced. They could no more understand it at first glance than a medieval peasant could understand a starship or even a simple shuttlecraft. The peasant wasn’t stupid, far from it, but he was so ignorant he couldn’t even begin to grasp just how much he didn’t know. Mason and his team would do their best, she was sure, yet they didn’t know what they didn’t know either.

“There’s another danger,” Mason said, quietly. “There’s a theory that none of the tramlines are natural, that the Builders might have set up a network of gravity beams to allow FTL travel between star systems. If that’s true, they might turn them all off.”

Susan shuddered, recalling her earlier thoughts. “Thanks for that thought,” she said, sardonically. “If you have any more like it, feel free to keep them to yourself.”

Mason nodded. “Aye, Admiral.”

Chapter One: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System (Interior)

Endeavour shook, violently.

Captain Staci Templeton gritted her teeth as the gravity wave crashed against the hull, sending shockwaves through the entire ship. It felt as if the starship was a wet-navy vessel, trying to make her way through rough seas, something she would have sworn impossible before the first gravity wave struck her ship. Red lights flared on the display, Endeavour’s drive field flickering and flaring before quietening down again; she grimaced as she realised the drive nodes were taking one hell of a beating. She had never felt anything like it, even in battle. The damage was starting to mount rapidly.

“We’ve lost two drive nodes,” Lieutenant-Commander David Atkinson reported, grimly. “I’m adjusting to compensate …”

“Get the damage control teams out there,” Staci snapped. In theory, the ship could lose half her drive nodes without losing her drive fields, but she didn’t want to put theory to the test. “We need those nodes repaired or replaced.”

“Aye, Captain,” her XO said.  “I …”

The ship shook again. Staci cursed under her breath as new reports flowed into the display. Two of her crew were injured, one fatally … she’d ordered all non-essential personnel to tie themselves down, in hopes of avoiding serious injury, but she suspected the civilians were going to be beaten and battered by the time the crisis came to an end. If it ever did … an entire star had vanished, somehow. She had never seen or even heard of anything like it. For all she knew, the gravity waves were going to keep hammering Endeavour until she came apart at the seams. She didn’t want to think about what might be happening to the remainder of the fleet, or the sphere’s surface. The sphere might be having the first earthquakes in its long history.

“Captain, we are nearing the hatch,” Atkinson reported. “Do we risk passing through?”

“We have to get into open space,” Staci said. The gravity waves appeared to be random, with no discernible pattern. If Endeavour was caught inside the North Mountain … the entire ship might be dashed against the walls and smashed to atoms, something else that should have been impossible. “ Take us through the hatch.”

She sucked in her breath as the display updated, her head swimming as she tried – again and again – to come to terms with the sheer size of the sphere.  The North Mountain made Earth’s orbital towers look tiny, the hatch below bigger than an entire planet … it was hard, almost impossible, to force herself to adjust her perspective, to not believe she was plummeting to certain death. It felt as if she’d ordered her starship to ram a planet … the world seemed to shift around her, the gravity field pulsing in a manner that felt weirdly discomforting, as the starship plunged through the hatch and into open space. The drive field twitched – a dull shiver running through the hull – as Endeavour glided through a cloud of dust. The shockwaves had shaken the sphere so badly the layers of surface dust had been blasted into interstellar space …

“Captain, the remainder of the fleet is heading into open space,” Lieutenant Helen Yang reported. “They’re trying to avoid the debris swarms.”

“Communications, raise them,” Staci ordered. The Chinese had surrendered – Admiral He had ordered his crews to hand themselves over to the nearest MNF authorities – but God alone knew what was really going on. No one had expected the alien tech to come into play, let alone an entire star winking out. “Find out who’s in command.”

The display updated, again. Red lights flowed towards Endeavour, icons flickering from red to yellow and back again as the tactical processors attempted to determine what was actually going on. Staci told herself she shouldn’t have been surprised. Dyson One had shattered centuries ago, leaving behind a shell of debris orbiting the star … and now, pieces of debris were being picked up and shoved into interstellar space by gravity shockwaves. She hoped Dyson Two could handle the impact, when the inevitable happened and an immense piece of debris struck the sphere, but she feared the worst. The sphere’s shell might be pretty close to indestructible – the researchers hadn’t found a way to so much as scratch it – yet a piece of debris bigger than Britain or Australia might be enough. Even if it didn’t break the shell, the shockwaves would do immense damage. They might even knock the entire sphere into the star.

Unless the Builders intervene, she thought. But they did nothing to save Dyson One.

“Signal from the fleet, Captain,” Lieutenant Andy MacPhee said.  The communications officer didn’t take his eyes off his screen. “Commodore Lafarge has assumed command and is requesting an update from the Admiral.”

“Forward the request to the sphere,” Staci ordered. They’d left Admiral Dismukes on another ship, just in case Endeavour couldn’t make it through the hatch. “And request a full data dump.”

“Captain, the interstellar tramline is still absent,” Helen reported. “I can’t even pick up a hint of its presence.”

Staci grimaced. She’d expected as much, after the tramline had vanished, but she’d hoped …

“Helm, set course for Dyson One,” she ordered. “Best possible speed.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Her terminal updated, again. She glanced at the reports, running her eye down the headings in grim disbelief. The damage wasn’t fatal, thankfully, but it was terrifyingly extensive, the sort of damage she’d expect in a training sim, not real life. There was no rhyme or reason, no pattern … there were damaged sections that were isolated from other sections, internal damage that resembled sabotage or malfunction rather than direct attack. She’d served in combat before – she’d been on ships struck by nuclear warheads or hammered by bomb-pumped lasers – and the damage had been understandable, often predictable.  This … she shook her head, trusting her XO and the damage control teams to fix as much as possible before they reached Dyson One. Or where Dyson One had been …

A wave of unreality washed over her as the ship evaded a wave of debris right out of science-fantasy. The idea of hiding in an asteroid cloud was fantastical anywhere else, but here … she sucked in her breath, bracing herself as pieces of space junk, some so large they had fragments of atmosphere, rocketed past. The display kept updating, projecting trajectories … most of the debris would miss Dyson Two, but some would strike the sphere. She hoped – prayed – the Builders would intervene. The MNF was nowhere near big enough to destroy or divert all the debris before it was too late.

We could assemble the entire navy, every navy, and still not have enough ships, she thought numbly. The whole scene was a nightmare. She was tempted to pinch herself just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She felt like an ant caught in the midst of human machinery, unsure what was actually going on but all too aware of the dangers. And if one impact knocks the sphere off its axis …

“Deploy four sensor drones,” she ordered, as they glided past another piece of debris. It was tumbling through space languidly, slow and stately compared to a starship, but it would be instantly fatal if it struck the hull. Or the distant sphere. “Try to track all the debris.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Helen looked up. “Captain, Dyson One’s gravity field is still present. I think the star was crushed into a black hole.”

Staci glanced at her. It was insane, but … what wasn’t?

“A black hole,” she repeated. “How?”

“In theory, one can create a gravity field that compresses a star into a black hole,” Helen said, slowly. “There were some … ah, theories that suggested it might be possible to use a gravity well to trigger a fission reaction within Jupiter and turn the planet into a star. If you can compress a star, you can just keep going until you end up with a black hole …”

“And then what?” Staci could understand someone trying to ignite a gas giant, although she doubted anyone would take the risk in a populated system, but creating a black hole? What was the point? It would make one hell of a weapon, she supposed, yet using it here seemed pointless. Worse than pointless. There was a very real risk the process would damage or destroy the second sphere, exterminating uncounted millions of humans – and perhaps other races – who lacked the ability to understand what was happening to them. “Why?”

Helen hesitated. “In theory, again, if you have a black hole at your disposal you could bend space and time into a pretzel. You could create a tramline, or a catapult effect, or …”

“Shit,” Staci said, quietly. She’d seen catapults in action. It was quite possible, at least in theory, to catapult an entire fleet hundreds of light years in a split second, without using the tramlines. Human tech had sent fleets dozens of light years behind enemy lines … she wondered, suddenly, just how far the Builders could send a fleet. A race that thought nothing of dismantling entire star systems might be able to cross the entire galaxy in a single moment. “Are they coming here?”

“It’s possible,” Helen said. “Given enough gravity to play with, they might be able to open a wormhole large enough to swallow an entire planet – or a star.”

“This is all just theory,” Atkinson said, from his console. “For all we know, something went badly wrong …”

Staci doubted it. The MNF had been exploring the sphere for the last few months, pushing buttons without ever knowing what they did … to the point, she reflected sourly, they’d accidentally turned off the interstellar tramline and trapped themselves. And then … they’d worked out how to open the hatch, take control of the fists, and even use them as weapons against their fellow humans. Sure, it was possible the star becoming a black hole was just a huge coincidence, but the odds against it were literally incalculable. A chill ran down her spine as she realised what it might mean, if Helen was right. The Builders were coming home.

If she’s right, she thought, numbly. Or they may be testing us further.

The thought irked her. The command centres in the sphere – on the surface, in the lone planetoid – were little more than intelligence tests. The researchers had speculated they were designed to unlock themselves, when the local humans – or whoever – reached a point they could solve the tests and gain access to the centres. Staci wasn’t sure if she liked that idea or not. On one hand, without gaining access the locals would never be able to design and build anything more advanced than a horse and cart, let alone get into orbit; on the other, it suggested a condescending and calculating attitude towards primitive races that chilled her to the bone. If one regarded oneself as superior, so superior there was no way one’s inferiors could close the gap, it was a very short jump indeed to thinking one had to take care of one’s inferiors, or use them as one pleased. She was all too aware it had been hard, if not impossible, to keep humans from treating the Vesy as noble savages, rather than intelligent beings in their own right, and the gap between the two races was far smaller than the gap between humanity and the Builders.

Contact with us nearly destroyed the Vesy, and much of their culture was lost in the waves of change washing over their world, she thought, grimly. If the Russian deserters hadn’t made contact with the Vesy, it might have been possible to isolate their world and let them develop in peace, but … there’d been no putting the demon back in the bottle. How badly will we be hurt if we make open contact with the Builders?

She tried not to think about it as Endeavour neared the black hole. The gravitational field was little stronger than the star’s gravity field, the slight increase barely noticeable. She suspected hundreds of pieces of debris had been pulled towards the black hole, when the gravity shockwaves had knocked some of the junk out of stable orbits. The sphere had shattered so long ago the debris that hadn’t fallen into stable orbits had fallen into the sun or been blasted into interstellar space, but now … she shook her head as the display updated, revealing a handful of scavenger craft fleeing the dangerously unpredictable system. They’d have to join the MNF, sooner or later, unless they wanted to try to make an impossible crossing to the nearest star. Hell, even if they did, there’d be no guarantee of finding a way home. It was quite possible they’d fly out of the frying pan and find themselves in the fire.

“Communications, shoot them a copy of the general amnesty,” she ordered, quietly. “If they want to come out of the cold, they’re welcome.”

She sighed inwardly.  Technically, the MNF was supposed to arrest the intruders; practically, there was no point when there was no way to ship the scavengers back home for trial. If the fleet was permanently stranded in the alien system, they’d need every last pair of hands they could muster … she wondered, suddenly, just what they’d do with the Chinese. They might have staked everything on seizing the system – and she didn’t believe Admiral He’s assertion he’d acted alone, out of a desire to set himself up as an all-powerful warlord – but the MNF could hardly afford to dispose of them. They were trained and experienced personnel, people who couldn’t be discarded … not if there was any other choice.

And they might find a way to rebel again, if we treat them badly, she thought, tiredly. What do we do with them?

It felt like hours before Endeavour finally slipped into the original debris field. The MNF had barely made a start on charting the pieces of space junk, fragments of the shattered sphere, before all hell had broken loose … and now, the charts they’d painstakingly put together were worse than useless. Staci felt uncomfortably cramped as the ship inched through the field, cramped and confined in a manner she’d thought unthinkable. She was all too aware they were passing within bare kilometres of asteroid-like debris, close enough – almost – to reach out and touch. The ship was practically crawling through the field and yet … she shivered, again, as they made it through the shattered shell. Pieces of debris were spinning out of control, some cracking against other pieces like billiard balls; others plummeting down an invisible funnel and spinning straight into the black hole. She’d read a story, once, about a spacecraft that accidentally crossed an event horizon, time slowing down as it plummeted into the black hole …

“Hold position,” she ordered, sharply. They didn’t dare go too close. It was easy to predict the ebb and flow of the gravity field, at least in theory, but no one had ever seen a real black hole. The field might grow stronger with every piece of debris that plunged into the invisible maw, or something else might happen when – if – the Builders arrived. “Deploy additional sensor platforms, then relay our live feed to the MNF.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci’s terminal bleeped.  “Captain, we have completed preliminary repairs,” Commander Mike Jenner reported. “We’re currently working on secondary repairs.”

“We can fly and fight,” Staci said, although she doubted Endeavour could outrun or outfight a race capable of turning a star into a black hole. They’d seen the fists smash entire starships to atoms and they were tiny, compared to the pieces of debris flying towards Dyson Two. “Injuries?”

Jenner lowered his voice. “Nine dead, seventeen injured,” he said. “Seven were thrown into bulkheads and fatally injured, two have no apparent cause of death. The doctor will carry out an autopsy, once the injured are stable.”

Staci nodded, grimly. Her crew was as medically healthy as any other naval crew – perhaps more so, given the long durations of their voyage – but the civilian complement veered between young and fit and old and decidedly unfit. They’d boarded too many researchers for her peace of mind … she wished, suddenly, they’d brought a pair of passenger liners for the civilians. They wouldn’t have been caught up in the battle to control the system if they’d been based on a civilian ship, with very limited military potential.  But the gravity shockwaves might have done immense damage to the civilian-grade drive nodes, perhaps even destroyed them and their ships …

“See to it,” she ordered. She felt unusually tired. She hadn’t felt so rough since she’d taken a sailing ship from Britain to Iceland, a passage so draining it had left her with a new respect for the early explorers who’d sailed the seven seas. “And make sure you get some rest. We don’t know when everything will change, again.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci closed the link and stared at the display. The black hole was tiny, impossibly tiny, and yet its gravity field dominated the system. Her sensor crews were having problems trying to track the gravity waves, practically tides, shifting around the gravity nexus. It seemed as though the normal laws of physics were breaking down, tiny flickers of tramline-line patterns coming and going so quickly the sensors could barely keep track of them. It was awesome and terrifying and left her feeling numb, too numb to be aware of what might be coming. And yet …

We are ants before them, her mind whispered. She knew she was brave – she had gone into battle more times than she could count – but the scene before her was daunting. How did one fight a race so advanced they could build Dyson Spheres and compress a star into a black hole? And even if they mean well, they may hurt us just by existing …

I Have A Dragon Nom … And Other Updates!

Hi, everyone

The important news, right now, is that I have a Dragon Awards nomination for The Revolutionary War! (Best Alternate History novel category.) It surprised me a little – I didn’t campaign for it – but obviously I’m very glad to have it . If you feel like voting for me, please do.

In other news, we’ve spent the last six weeks or so in Malaysia and Turkey and – obviously – I’ve taken a bit of a break. Not that much, though. I’ve finally edited and published The Land of Always Summer, as well as complied the first collection; five Schooled in Magic novellas (and some commentary), one of which is exclusive to this volume. Paperback and audio editions will be along shortly, I hope. I’ve also finished the first draft of Queenmaker and a novella for Fantastic Schools – The First Witch’s Tale, set centuries before the modern-day SIM novels.

As always, if you want to review the books, please do. It really does help.

Next Up, Judgement Day (Ark Royal)

Chris

OUT NOW – Tales Of The Nameless World: Volume One

Five Schooled in Magic novellas, published together for the first time ..

The Nameless World is a place of magic and mystery, of kings and princes and magicians and merchants and rebels, fighting for supremacy or power or even just to carve out a place for themselves in a world of wonders and terrors, a world forever changed by a traveller from our world …

Meet a lonely young man desperate for power, unaware of its price and the shadow looming over him; a princess forced to choose between her father and her friends, a sorceress forced to infiltrate a school, a sorcerer forced to confront a threat to the entire world … and a young woman fleeing her family, who may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

(NOTE: Alassa’s Tale, Nanette’s Tale, Gennady’s Tale and Void’s Tale have all been previously published; Marah’s Tale is exclusive to this volume.)

Download a , then purchase from the links here: Amazon US, UK, CAN, AUS, Universal, Books2Read (links to other sellers).

Queenmaker 30

Chapter Thirty

“You can’t stay,” Helen said, flatly.

I said nothing. In truth, I was too numb to feel much of anything. The warlords and most of their vassals were gone – the conscripts were on their way back home – and yet it had done nothing to bring Fallon back. How could it? She was dead and our unborn child was dead too and no magic, from what I’d been told, could raise the dead. I didn’t even have a body to bury.

Helen’s messenger had met us as we made our slow way back to the city, ordering me to hand command of the army over to my staff and meet her in a tent just outside the city. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking, if she thought I would rebel if someone else took over the army or if she thought she couldn’t take the risk of acting weak where her aristocrats could see her. Did they think I’d gone rogue? Or did they think she’d given me secret orders? I couldn’t decide which would be worse, from their point of view. Helen couldn’t allow herself to be seen as my helpless captive, at the mercy of someone who was supposed to be under her orders, but she couldn’t afford to condone what I’d done either. Aristocrats were not supposed to be executed on the spot, not without a proper trial. It might give the commoners ideas.

They already have ideas, I thought. The broadsheets had rushed out special editions as soon as word reached the city, praising me for executing the warlords and putting an end to the threat once and for all. The aristos might be horrified – and they were – but the commoners were dancing in the streets. The world will never be the same.

I had to admire her nerve as she faced me. It would have been hellishly dangerous, if she’d faced almost anyone else … anyone local, at least. The army was supposed to be loyal to the kingdom, but … in reality, she had to fear it might be more loyal to me than to its monarch. It might be easy for me to take the city, put the rest of the aristocracy to fire and sword, and then reshape the kingdom to suit myself. There weren’t many locals who wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to play Napoleon, even if they knew how the legendary emperor had met his end. The risks were immense, and legitimacy incredibly difficult to secure, but the prize was worth pretty much everything.

But I didn’t want it. I was just … numb.

“I’m going to honour the deal with Cuthbert and send him into exile,” Helen said, a hint of disgust in her voice. As far as she was concerned, Cuthbert had been the worst of the warlords … and, ironically, he was the only one who’d survived. I wondered, idly, why she hadn’t had his throat cut. “You will escort him to the border, then go into exile yourself.”

Her voice was nothing, but cold steel. I knew what she was doing. There would be no pretence. I would either do as I was told, and go into exile, or rebel against her and become another usurper warlord. Helen wasn’t going to pretend to be my sweet little wife, or tell the world she’d married me because we’d fallen in love, or anything else that would hide the brutal truth. She was drawing a line and testing me, daring me to cross it. I felt a twinge of respect for her bravery, as well as her intelligence. If she’d been born in a kingdom that didn’t look down on her because she was a women, she’d have gone far.

A vision washed through my mind. I could take the helm. The aristocracy had been gravely weakened. There was no need to coddle the remaining aristos.  I could become a dictator, long enough to lay the foundations of democracy and freedom, and then put down the crown … I could! It might be better for the kingdom if I did, if I ensured merit – rather than birth – led to promotion and innovation and everything the kingdom needed to develop into a modern state. The reactionaries could be simply brushed aside. I could carry out a program of land reform and industrialisation on a national scale, tying the kingdom together with railways and highways and everything else …

… But I didn’t want to try.

I looked back at her, evenly. “I have conditions,” I said. “If you agree, I’ll go into exile without a murmur.”

Helen’s face was a blank mask. I suspected she was relieved. An aristo going into exile would have a reasonable chance of being allowed back, once the hue and cry had died down. The monarch might quietly ignore his return, as long as he didn’t make it impossible to pretend it hadn’t happened. Commoners, of course, were rarely sent into exile and never returned when they were, but me …? I had vast estates … had had, I supposed. It wasn’t as if I had any family who could keep them in trust until I returned, or inherit them …

Her voice was cold. “Name them.”

“The people I promoted get to keep their posts,” I said. I couldn’t ask Horst, Fallows and everyone else to go into exile with me, and I didn’t want to leave them in the streets. “The industrial development programs I started … you keep them going. The land reforms I made, on my estates … you leave them alone. Leave the farmers with their lands.”

Helen’s lips twitched. “The local gentry will howl.”

“Let them,” I said. They’d had to copy my land reform program, if only to keep the serfs from walking off the land … or taking it by force. “They can’t turn back the clock.”

“Apparently not,” Helen agreed. “Is that all?”

I shrugged. There was little else she could give me. I had caches of money in various places – an old habit I’d taken into my new home – and I’d had no trouble accessing one or two before I left the kingdom. I doubted she could keep me from sneaking back to collect the others, if I had no other choice. The border was little more than a line on the map. There were no border guards, no one checking passports or otherwise harassing travellers who wanted to cross the line. Anything else … it wasn’t as if I could take the mansion, or the estates, with me. I’d never really considered them mine.

“More or less,” I said.

Helen’s face softened, slightly. “I’m sorry about Fallon,” she said.”She deserved better.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I didn’t want to talk about it, not to her. She’d been the one to suggest Fallon joined the delegation. I didn’t blame her for assuming the warlords wouldn’t break parlay, not so openly, but it still hurt. “She deserved much more than …”

My voice trailed off. I was going to have to visit her parents, to tell them what had happened to their daughter …

Helen stood. “Cuthbert will be ready to leave in an hour,” she said. “You’ll accompany him up north, then across the border.”

“Very efficient,” I said. “Can I offer you a word of advice?”

“Of course,” Helen said.

I met her eyes. “The world has changed,” I said. “The old certainties are no longer certain. The commoners have felt their strength, and started to question why they need to follow the old rules. They resented and hated it because they thought they had no choice, but now … now they think there is a choice. Right now, you are the most popular monarch the country has ever seen, but that will change in a heartbeat if you start trying to …”

Helen grimaced. “Turn back the clock?”

“Yes.” I’d said the same myself. “Intelligent and ambitious men have always resented being held back, or forced to bend the knee to people who have the right bloodlines but little else to justify their supremacy. Once it becomes clear the system is brutally unfair, and it is, they start scheming to overthrow it. And then you have trouble.”

“I see,” Helen said. I doubted she did, in any real sense. The idea she didn’t have an inherent right to rule was alien to her. “I’ll take your words under consideration.”

I smiled. “Think about it,” I said. “You have been the Ruling Queen, with very real power, for the last year. Would you give it up, now you know what it is like?”

Helen didn’t try to answer, but I knew what she would say. She’d had a taste of power … and there was no way in hell she’d give it up, not willingly. The new industrialists and merchants and everyone else who’d risen through merit, through hard work and intelligence and a hefty dose of sheer luck, wouldn’t give it up either. Helen and her peers would have to learn to ride the winds, to adapt to a whole new world, or be destroyed by them. I silently wished her luck. She’d need it.

“We thank you for your service,” Helen said, her tone becoming more regal. “And We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours.”

She stepped out of the tent, closing the flap behind her. I leaned back in my chair and waited, unsure if it would be an escort or an assassin. Helen would have to be insane to have me killed, when pretty much the entire population saw me as a hero, but there were quite a few aristos stupid enough to think they could kill me and take advantage of the chaos to rise to power. They were deluded idiots – the warlords were gone, and none of the remaining private armies were anything like powerful enough to impose order – yet … human history was littered with deluded idiots. Hell, for all I knew, one of the newly-empowered commoners intended to make a bid for power …

Someone else’s problem, I told myself. If Fallon had survived, I would have been happy to remain in the kingdom, but now … I wanted to be somewhere else. Helen and everyone else can stand and fall on their own.

The flap opened. Violet stepped into the tent.

I blinked. “Violet?”

“She’s sending you into exile,” Violet said. “I’m coming with you.”

I stared at her for a long moment. “You should stay here.”

“I owe you my life,” Violet said. “And what sort of future do I have here?”

I grimaced. Violet had grown up on the streets. She’d been isolated even after I’d taken her into my household and arranged for her to get some proper education … another reminder, I supposed, of just how much human potential was being wasted. If Violet had grown up in a merchant household, she would have gone far. Just like Helen. Instead … Fallon and I had been the only ones who’d been kind to her. I couldn’t help feeling a degree of kinship. If I hadn’t joined the army, back in my teens, I might have been trapped on the streets too. I’d been lucky to escape. Countless others like me hadn’t made it out.

“Helen won’t take anything from you,” I said.” You’ll have a place here.”

In truth, I wasn’t sure that was entirely true. Violet’s position was more precarious than most. She didn’t really have a job, or possessions of her own … gathering intelligence for me, and keeping her finger on the pulse of public opinion, wasn’t something she could put on her resume. Helen might employ her, in the same role, but … my lips twitched. The people who’d made snide remarks about Fallon and I associating with a street kid would have heart attacks if Helen did the same …

… And I was uncomfortably aware that, no matter what Helen did, the kingdom was in for some rough times.

“I can’t promise anything,” I told her. I had saved her life. She’d repaid me time and time again. “We could find ourselves in very real trouble … dead, or worse. If you don’t want to come, I will understand.”

“You don’t abandon your friends,” Violet said, firmly. “Who else can you trust?”

I nodded, curtly. “Very well,” I said. “Let’s see what the future holds.”

It was hard not to feel a little thrill, despite the bitter numbness, as the guards escorted us to the convoy. This was a whole new world. Part of me wanted to explore, to see how many of the tall tales I’d heard were actually true; part of me wanted to join the Diddakoi and just travel from place to place; part of me wanted to track down the mysterious Emily and discover the truth behind the myths … part of me just wanted to put the past behind me and carry on, to build a new life for myself. I took one last look at the city as the convoy rumbled into motion, heading north, and quietly said my goodbyes.

Who knew what the future would hold?

End of Book III

Queenmaker 28-29

Sorry about the delay – I caught something nasty and spent two days feeling sick.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Go back to your sister,” I ordered, as we reached the army lines. “Tell her we’re taking the offensive. Now.”

Lord Jacob hesitated, noticeably. He’d kept his mouth shut as we walked home, somewhat to my surprise, although it was quite possible I’d intimidated him into silence. He’d just seen me kill a young woman with my bare hands, after she killed my future wife and the mother of my unborn child … my rage turned cold, dark and dangerous as I pointed him at the city walls and hurried to the command tent. He didn’t follow. I guessed he thought the whole affair was well above his pay grade.

Which makes a pleasant change, I reflected, sourly. God knew, I’d met far too many male officers who didn’t think their female superiors could be trusted with the details. They disobeyed orders and justified it to themselves by insisting they were only doing what she would have ordered done, if she were a man. But right now I need him to stay out of my way.

I hadn’t taken the parley agreement entirely on trust. My men had rested, rearmed and remained on guard, weapons at the ready, as the ill-fated party headed south to the parley ground. Horst, Fallows and a bunch of other officers had strict orders to keep an eye on the enemy positions, watching for an attempt to rush the city’s defences or simply do unto us as we’d done unto Cuthbert. I didn’t think the three warlords – two really, unless Renweard had pulled his army back together quicker than I’d expected – could coordinate their armies well enough to pull it off, but I’d been surprised before. They still outnumbered us badly enough to give quantity a quality all of its own.

As Stalin made clear to Hitler, I thought. The Germans had been better at war than the Russians, but there had been so many Russians … The Germans simply ran out of men and material.

Horst jumped to his feet as I strode into the tent, his eyes going wide as he saw my face. The rest of the war council – my senior officers – crashed to attention … I forced myself to calm down, just a little, at their expressions. I wasn’t the sort of officer who demanded everyone bow and scrape before me – in my experience, officers who demanded everyone kiss their ass were worthless – but they knew better than to push me too far. They didn’t know what had happened, not yet …

“They broke the parley,” I said, flatly. “Fallon is dead.”

The room seemed to chill, to grow colder despite the ever-present heat. Half of my officers were cityfolk, all too aware the warlords were rather less trustworthy than Darth Vader; the other half were aristocrats, shocked at the mere suggestion of breaking a parley. They’d have been less shocked if someone had approached under a white flag, then opened fire the moment they got into range. Anger burned in my gut. The rules had been devised to minimise bloodshed – specifically, aristocratic blood – but rules were for equals. They’d no doubt justified themselves by arguing they had no obligation to keep their agreements with me.

Or Helen, I thought. No one will ever trust them again.

“We are going on the offensive,” I snapped.  I drew a line on the map. The one advantage of fighting so close to Roxanna was that our maps were, for once, surprisingly accurate. I knew enough about the local terrain to compensate for their deficiencies. “Sound the bugles. We march in twenty minutes.”

There was no argument. I could tell some wanted to argue, some wanted to disagree, but they didn’t quite dare. Others wanted revenge. Horst and Fallows had known Fallon when she’d joined the army, then followed me to Roxanna … they’d have sought revenge for her death even if she hadn’t been engaged to me. And none of them were prepared to let the warlords get away with breaking the parley. It would be a terrible precedent to let stand.

No one will ever trust them again, I reminded myself. But given time, I’m sure they’ll find some way to justify their crimes to themselves.

I outlined the plan, such as it was. The old army could never have pulled it off. I wouldn’t have dared try, not elsewhere, but here … we had a lot of supplies stockpiled inside the city walls. We could afford to take some risks … and besides, we needed to take revenge, to teach the warlords a lesson they would never forget. I wondered, numbly, if they’d realise just how far they’d stepped over the line. It wasn’t the social inequality that got to people, not here and not back home; it was the freaking double standards, the lack of any certainty about the rules. There was only so many times you could change the rules, to make sure you stayed on top, before you discovered no one was following them.

“Dismissed,” I snapped. Outside, the bugles were already blaring, calling the men to arms. “We march in twenty minutes.”

Black rage threatened to overcome me as the council stood and left the tent. Fallon was dead … I was going to make her murderers pay. The warlords were going to regret the days they ever sought to rule the kingdom, to turn back the clock … I gritted my teeth, telling myself it didn’t matter even if I lost the coming battle. Gunpowder was on the loose now, gunpowder and firearms and steam engines and a hundred other innovations that would turn their world upside down, ensuring their eventual defeat. The warlords belonged to the past … I understood, intellectually, why they’d sought to turn back the clock, but I found it hard to have any sympathy. The bastards belonged in history’s trashcan.

I gathered myself with an effort, tapering down my feelings. My men needed me to be cool, collected and in command, even as we launched ourselves into a thunder run. I had to keep one eye on the greater picture, one eye on the …

The flap opened. A messenger stepped into the tent, decked out in royal livery. I felt a surge of sudden hatred, even though I knew it was probably misplaced. The messengers were almost all minor aristocracy, protected by their family names … this one looked more pompous than most, his carefully-tailored uniform failing to hide his paunch. I glowered at him and he flinched. It wasn’t good news.

“My Lord,” the messenger said. His voice had a nasal twang that grated on my ears. “Her Majesty the Queen commands you to stand down and wait…”

I hit him instinctively, knocking him out before my conscious mind quite caught up with what he was saying. Helen had ordered me to stand down …? Or Sir Jacob?  It was quite possible he’d told the messenger Helen had issued the orders, or … my mind raced as the man hit the ground. The latest reports from my scouts suggested one of the warlords had acted alone, rather than in unison with the other two. They hadn’t shuffled their forces to prepare for an immediate attack, unless they were confident Helen wouldn’t take command herself. Perhaps they had thought she wouldn’t … it made a certain kind of sense. The warlords didn’t train officers to act independently, without orders, let alone take their place when they died. I had. My officers weren’t as seasoned as me, but they could take my place if necessary.

“Sleep well,” I muttered. Helen could blame everything on me if the plan failed, or Jacob if the plan succeeded. “Goodnight.”

I left, pulling the flap closed and tying it, then made my way down to the makeshift assembly ground. The men were already lining up, looking murderous. Word was already spreading, I guessed. The soldiers might not give a damn about aristocratic pretensions, but Fallon had been popular and I’d led them from victory to victory. They wanted to fight for us both … I walked forward, eyes flickering from side to side. The mounted infantry were moving into lead spot, backed up by loyalist cavalry; the infantry were assembling behind them. They were already faster than any other marching infantry, and without the baggage train they would be faster still. Smaller units escorted the cannoneers and the archers, covering them from enemy attack.  I’d given them their orders earlier. The trick might not work, I reflected, as I stood on the podium to address the men, but it was worth a try.

“They came to his city to destroy everything we’ve built, to kill our fathers and brothers and rape our mothers and sisters, to leave the kingdom in ashes and destroy all hope of a better future,” I said. “We kicked their asses so badly they attacked us with treachery, meeting us in honourable parley and dishonourably trying to kill us! We are going to kick their asses again, so badly they will never recover. March!”

I turned and led the way out of the camp. The men followed, their formation rough and ready and yet far more adaptable than anything the warlords could produce. A handful of messengers circled me, taking orders to the city walls and other places … I didn’t know if Helen – or Jacob would manage to squash them in time, but it didn’t matter. They’d turned geography against us, when we’d tried to raise the siege; now, it worked against them. They could have real-time awareness of our movements – they certainly had something very close to it – but they’d still have to strike camp and give chase. They couldn’t do that in a hurry.

They erected earthworks to protect their flanks from me, I reflected as we marched onwards. But now they have to come out if they don’t want me to wreak havoc in their rear.

My mood darkened, despite the prospect of action. The plan was relatively simple. The main body would make a beeline for Renweard’s camp, while smaller forces would target the other two camps. The warlords would have a flat choice between marching to stop me, and being caught in the open, or letting me isolate their troops from their bases and condemn them to death. They might risk an all-out attack on the city … I wondered, numbly, just how many of their vassals were already looking for a way out. We’d spread plenty of black propaganda – sly suggestions a handful of vassals had taken bribes, others quietly opening up lines of communication with Helen – in hope of fuelling enemy paranoia …who knew? Richard III might have won at Bosworth, if some of his so-called supporters hadn’t sat on their hands at a crucial moment. And perhaps the Russian Civil War might have gone the other way, if the Whites hadn’t had more aristocrats and reactionaries than common soldiers. It wasn’t literally true, but there was a great deal of truth to it.

And we have been inviting the infantry to desert, I thought. Very few of the enemy soldiers had wanted to be there, fighting for a warlord who couldn’t be bothered to give them something to fight for. I’d had agents slipping in and out of the enemy camps, spreading the word. Anyone who deserted and came to us would be welcome. Not trusted, not yet – it was just a matter of time before they started trying to slip infiltrators into the city – but they’d have a chance to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Give us a few weeks and their army will be all officers and no enlisted men.

My lips twisted in dark amusement. The officers will have to do their own dirty work.

A messenger galloped up to me. “My Lord, Lord Royce reports he’s on the verge of hitting Camp Two.”

“Good,” I said. Lord Royce was a loyalist cavalry officer … I hoped he could be trusted to carry out his orders, without any embellishments along the way. I’d have preferred to give the task to Horst, and the mounted infantry, but I needed Horst with me. “Inform him I need an accurate report as soon as the attack is completed.”

“Aye, sir.”

I put the thought out of my head as the enemy camp came into view. It was oddly disappointing. Renweard hadn’t bothered with any real earthworks, not until I’d kicked his ass and scattered his army, and it showed. He’d thrown up trenches and palisades in the last few hours, once he’d managed to regroup and preserve what he could, but it wasn’t anything like enough. His camp was … insane, by my standards. The fancy tents were clearly visible, the banners outside making it clear who was sleeping in them; I wished, not for the first time, that I had a modern sniper rifle and plenty of ammo. I could have wiped out their leadership so quickly their entire army came apart at the seams.

“They spent more effort building the stockade than providing space for the men,” Horst commented. “Bastards.”

“Yeah.” I shook my head in amused disbelief. It said something about Renweard’s priorities that he took better care of his prisoners than the men who fought and bled for him. There was no medical tent, as far as I could tell; there was no suggestion he even bothered to try to take care of the wounded. I shuddered in disgust. The chirurgeons might be worse than useless – in many cases – but at least they tried to take care of the injured. “Deploy the archers.”

Horst shot me a surprised look. “You really want to …”

“Yes,” I growled. The enemy lines weren’t that tough, and I might have been tempted to risk a charge if there weren’t two armies behind me, but I wasn’t going to waste lives and resources on a pointless mission. We didn’t need to capture their supplies. “Do it.”

The enemy trumpets blared. Their troops hurried to their positions. I wondered, grimly, just how much they knew. Did they know what had happened? It was quite possible their superiors had told them the truth, or at least part of it, to make it clear surrender was no longer an option. Not for the commoners, at any rate. I’d bet good money the aristocrats were consoling themselves they were still worth a king’s ransom or two. Any normal army – local army – would think twice about slaughtering aristos, not out of anything resembling morality but because their men wanted ransoms. Me?

By the time I’m finished, the aristocracy will be broken beyond any hope of repair, I thought, coldly. There’ll be no one left to pay the ransoms.

Horst returned, looking grim. “Sir, the archers are ready.”

“Deploy the men, defensive formation,” I ordered. “And order the archers to open fire.”

I braced myself. It was quite possible the enemy would risk a charge, when they realised what we were doing.  If we caught them in the open, we’d wipe them out before they could reach our lines. The nasty part of my mind wondered if they’d be able to wrap their heads around what we were doing, even as it became blatantly obvious. It had been difficult to believe, at times, that the terrorists and insurgents back home were willing to do ghastly things, in the name of their cause. I understood the logic of using brutality to terrify people into submission, to keep them from realising they outnumbered the terrorists thousands to one, but it was still ghastly. It would be a cold day in hell before I let my men do anything of the sort.

They’re going to accuse you of using terrorist tactics, my thoughts pointed out, as the first arrows lanced overhead and plunged into the enemy camp. They left trails of fire behind them … fire arrows really were terror weapons, by local standards. And …

I gritted my teeth and watched as the flames spread rapidly, moving from tent to tent. The fires would be difficult to fight, even with magic … I suspected the mistresses, camp followers and REMFs were already running for their lives, if they realised what was about to happen. The flames washed over the supply dump …

The ground heaved. I found myself on my back, staring up at a mushroom cloud. The warlord had been wary of giving his troops too much gunpowder, perhaps aware he was about as popular as a kick to the groin, and he’d kept the barrels stored within the camp, under heavy guard, rather than spread them out a little. It wouldn’t have been that stupid, by local standards – enemy armies did want to capture supplies and steal baggage trains – but my supplies were only a few short miles to the north and my men were forbidden to loot. I had nothing to lose by burning the camp to the ground, setting off the gunpowder. The fact they’d never even considered the possibility was the icing on the cake.

They probably didn’t insist their safety officer slept next to the gunpowder, I reflected, as the sound died away. The fireball would have been visible for dozens – perhaps hundreds – of miles. If they had, the poor bastard would have been a little more careful.

“Their lines are gone,” Horst said. He sounded stunned. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d seen bigger explosions … and my world had produced bigger still. “They’re just …”

“Order the cavalry to look for survivors,” I said, curtly. I doubted the enemy would be in any state to put up a fight. The odds were good the aristos were already dead. “If you find any, do what you can for them.”

Another fireball erupted, several miles away. I smirked, coldly. The cavalry had done its job. Two camps nothing more than smoking craters … a third, either on the verge of being destroyed or neatly isolated from the armies it was supposed to support. And that meant …

“Prepare the men,” I ordered. I hadn’t heard anything from the scouts, but I knew. “The enemy is coming for one final battle.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

My men dug frantically, preparing themselves.

I forced myself to think as I barked orders, rearranging my lines.  The warlords were fucked. There was no way to take the city now, and no way to get past me without a pitched battle. Their forces would start coming apart the moment their vassals – and soldiers – realised how screwed they were … there was no way to surrender and no way, unlike Cuthbert, to abandon the army and flee south. There was certainly no way they could rebuild before I regrouped, marched south, and crushed them. Their vassals would probably betray them well before I reached their border.

The smart thing to do would be to surrender, I thought. Or flee the country.

My lips twisted as the scouts reported back, proving my predictions correct. The warlords had neither loyalty nor legitimacy. There was no hope of setting up a government in exile, let alone returning home … I doubted any neighbouring kingdom would shelter them, not when they realised the most powerful army the world had yet seen was on their borders, daring them to do something stupid. No, exile wasn’t an option unless the warlords wanted to give up everything. Their only hope was to punch their way through my lines and hope they could do enough damage to buy time, enough time to rebuild and resume the offensive …

It wasn’t going to happen.

A scout galloped up to me. “My Lord, the enemy army is advancing under all three banners!”

I hid my surprise with an effort. The locals didn’t let anyone mess with the symbols of power and legitimacy. A man who put his king’s crown on his head to save it from being lost in the river would be beheaded as a de facto usurper, even though he’d been trying to help his monarch. Had they abandoned that taboo, after the shock of losing two of their supply camps? Or were all three warlords marching towards me? I’d thought we’d killed Renweard, when we’d blown up his camp, but I might have been wrong. I really had, if it was his banner. Renweard had no heir, no one with the automatic right to fly the banner himself …

Don’t worry about it, I told myself, firmly. Either way, that army has to be destroyed.

More reports came in as the enemy armies merged and advanced. The enemy soldiers didn’t appear very enthusiastic. Their cavalry were spending a lot of time pushing the infantry back into formation, rather than scouting ahead. I’d heard stories about political commissioners shooting men for refusing to advance, and I’d seen terrorists and insurgents doing the same, but it was the first time I’d seen it here.  The infantry didn’t appear to be the only ones suffering from demoralisation, given how many banners appeared to be missing. They might have wised up, and hidden their banners to avoid drawing fire, but I suspected they’d actually deserted. Or headed north to reach our lines and surrender before it was too late.

It is already too late, my thoughts reminded me.

“Hoist the red and black pennant,” I ordered, curtly. “And make sure they can see it.”

Horst nodded. “Aye, sir.”

I smiled coldly as the seconds ticked away. The red pennant meant no surrenders would be accepted. The red and black pennant meant we’d only accept unconditional surrenders. I was tempted to raise the red instead, but … I sighed, inwardly. Back home, my superiors hadn’t understood the realities of life in a third world dictatorship, or how few options the locals had had. Here … the men marching towards me, by and large, hadn’t had any real choice. If they surrendered, I’d treat them well.

“And send in the cavalry,” I added. The irony was killing me. “Tell them to harass, but not to get too close.”

My mood darkened as the cavalry galloped away. They were going to bait the enemy, jabbing at exposed flanks and harassing the enemy horsemen, forcing them to either grin and bear it or give chase. Either way, they’d be badly worn down … worse, perhaps, as my men opened gaps for enemy infantrymen to desert. There was a reason they called it the death of a thousand cuts. One cut wouldn’t be fatal, but a thousand …?

Horst gave me a grim look. “You think they’ll make it here?”

I shrugged. There was no way to know. The three warlords had to hang together or hang – or be beheaded – together, and they had to know it, but could they work together? I suspected they’d already been arguing over the wisdom of breaking parley, if only because their treacherous attack had failed. Victory had a thousand fathers, defeat – and failure – was an orphan. I hadn’t given them the time to sort out the mess either. But I wasn’t going to gamble everything on their army coming apart before it reached my lines.

“Ready the mounted infantry for a charge,” I ordered, instead. It was possible the enemy army might stagger, teetering on the brink of collapse. “But keep them behind the lines until I give the word.”

Horst nodded and hurried off. I braced myself, waiting for the enemy army to come into view. I had no idea if the city’s defenders had followed my orders or not – I’d refrained from sending messages back to the walls – but if I was lucky they’d hit the enemy too, perhaps even come out from behind the walls to give chase. A third explosion shook the ground and I smiled, knowing it meant the end of the war. The warlords had gambled everything on reaching the third camp before we blew it up, perhaps believing we wouldn’t throw all three camps into the flames. They’d been wrong, and they’d lost, and …

The enemy army slowly appeared in the distance. It looked … broken, half the banners already missing as it marched towards us. I suspected the warlords were in shock. Or that they’d deserted their men already. It wasn’t impossible … my guns opened fire, hurling cannonballs and shells into the enemy formation. They scattered, too late, as the guns tore through them. They were so lethargic that I couldn’t help wondering if one of my agents had destroyed or poisoned their food supplies.

An enemy horseman reared up, then charged towards our lines. A tired shout echoed through the air as the rest of the cavalry, and some of the infantry, lumbered after him. I felt a surge of naked anger and disgust, wondering just what the common-born infantrymen had done to deserve such a moronic commanding officer. The men were caught in a trap, tormented to the brink of endurance, but they should have known better than to join a charge right into the teeth of our weapons. My anger burned brighter as I realised what the fucker was doing. He was dead, he knew he was dead, and he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. And he was going to get the rest of his men killed too!

I gritted my teeth. If they were intent on charging, they should have waited. They’d given us far too much warning, more than enough time to meet them with fire. My men were drilled to stand their ground, the simplest tactic one could use against a cavalry charge, but … my rage grew as the distance closed rapidly, yet not rapidly enough. It was pointless petty spite, a final gasp of defiance, one that was going to get hundreds of men killed for nothing … I wondered, numbly, why they were following him into hell. I’d had officers I’d let send me to certain death, because I trusted them enough to believe it was necessary, but I had never seen that kind of loyalty here. Of course not. What had the warlord’s done to deserve loyalty?

The command leapt to my lips. I hated myself – and them – even as I spoke.

“Fire.”

The gunners opened fire as one, a ragged wave of bullets and balls washing across the enemy line. The leader fell from his horse and landed badly, lost in the chaos as his men reeled under the blow … I almost hoped he’d survived, just so I could have the pleasure of hanging him myself. The aristos would make a fuss over him being hanged –  apparently, aristos were meant to be beheaded; hanging was for commoners – but I didn’t care. He’d led at least three hundred men to their deaths, a death that was both predictable and avoidable. The enemy charge came apart, a handful of men dropping to the ground and crawling away. They didn’t even get close to my lines.

I gritted my teeth as I looked at the remaining enemy army. It should be deploying now … they had the numbers, still, and they could certainly try to outflank and turn my lines. If I’d been in their shoes … my lips twisted in dark amusement. I wouldn’t have left my supply camps so unguarded, even if I thought the enemy would prefer to loot rather than destroy; hell, even if I had been a selfish bastard with entitlement issues, I would have ordered my men to surrender and then fled. But they’d broken parley. The local rules of war were quite clear. Anyone who broke parley had to be taught the error of his ways.

“It looks like they’re fighting each other,” Fallows said. “Sir …?”

“Looks that way,” I agreed. The enemy armies hadn’t taken very well to being told to work together. I guessed the warlords were blaming each other for the disaster, then trying to find a way to cut their own vassals free and run. The vassals themselves would be running too, if they had any sense … as I watched, a handful of horsemen galloped out of the enemy mass and raced into the distance. “I wonder …”

I shook my head. Napoleon had decreed it was unwise to interrupt the enemy when he was making a mistake, and letting the enemy troops kill each other suited us perfectly, but I needed a clear and decisive victory. If the army broke apart and went to ground, it might rise again from the ashes. Might. I doubted any of the warlords commanded enough loyalty to keep the army together, after this disaster, but I had to be sure. And besides, I wanted them to pay.

“Sound the charge,” I ordered, roughly.

The mounted infantry cantered past the lines,  then broke into a gallop and charged right at the enemy mass. My heart skipped a beat – if I’d misjudged the situation, the enemy was going to have an excellent chance to give me a bloody nose – as the range closed with terrifying speed. I’d trained my men to deploy instantly, if they were charged … I breathed a sigh of relief as the enemy lines shattered, men throwing their weapons to the ground or scrambling to get away, even shooting down their own officers when they tried to stop the rout. I guessed they must have been even more demoralised than I’d thought. Some later historian was going to have a field day, trying to determine how much of my black propaganda had actually worked.

But it wouldn’t have taken root so effectively if they’d thought themselves a winning army, I reflected. They could have shrugged it off if it was clear they were winning.

My infantry joined the charge, weapons at the ready. They had orders to take prisoners were possible, but not to put themselves in any further danger. A handful of enemy soldiers tried to feign surrender, only to be cut down ruthlessly; I was amused to note several more tried the same trick, before their peers realised what they were doing and stopped them. They were hardly as fanatical as Islamic State, hardly willing to give their lives for a pointless cause; the war was over, and they knew it, and they didn’t want to be the last ones to die.

I forced myself to survey the battlefield as the prisoners were herded into small groups and kept under heavy guard. The common soldiers could go back home, as far as I was concerned, but the aristos were a different story. They could cause real trouble if we let them go … after the disastrous parley, I wouldn’t have trusted their parole even if they’d been inclined to give it. My anger boiled up again, as the tension of the battlefield flowed away. I’d gambled and won and now all I had to do was mop up.

“Dispatch the remainder of the cavalry to track down the fleeing men,” I ordered, shortly. I didn’t want them to stop running, not yet. The longer they fled, the less time they’d have to reorganise. “And …”

“Sir,” Horst interrupted. “I have three prisoners who insist on being presented to you.”

I knew what – or who – I was going to see even before I laid eyes on them. The warlords didn’t look very martial, not now. Eldred was old and sly; I knew, even as I met his eyes, that there was no way we could risk letting him go home. Hlaford was younger, trying desperately to keep his face under control; Renweard was surprisingly young, but … I told myself it wasn’t really a surprise. The idea of a boy barely out of his teens leading an army seemed absurd, by modern standards, yet it was the inevitable outcome of hereditary rule. He glared at me and I glared back, suddenly convinced breaking parley had been his idea. Back home, most junior officers managed to get through their dunderheaded mistakes before they found entire divisions under their command. Here …

“My Lord,” Eldred said. “I must protest this treatment …”

“You protest?” I’d heard some nonsense in my time – mostly from junior officers who’d had bright ideas, then realised they were impractical even as they were trying to impress their superiors – but that took the cake. Eldred and his peers hadn’t been tied up, or roughed up, or killed on the spot … “You protest?”

“We are aristocrats,” Renweard snapped. “We demand you present us to Her Ladyship!”

“Her Majesty,” I corrected, curtly. My anger threatened to boil over. I was so sick of entitled young aristocrats. “On your knees!”

They gaped at me. It would have been funny, if Fallon hadn’t been dead. They were aristos … amongst the wealthiest and most powerful men in the kingdom. They had known, going into battle, that they could expect to be treated as honoured guests if they were taken prisoner, to be held in comfortable captivity or send home on parole to collect their ransom. No wonder they’d been so willing to take risks, part of me noted coldly. They’d thought they’d never have to face any real consequences, if their gambles failed. Sure, they might be killed by accident …

I scowled at their uniforms. They were absurdly fancy, nothing more than sniper bait. But they served a purpose.

“Kneel,” I repeated. “Now!”

They looked uncertain. I motioned to the infantry to force them to their knees. Their eyes filled with honest outrage … it would have been funny, I reflected sourly, if they hadn’t killed Fallon and thousands of other innocent victims, including men under their command. They were more upset about being pushed around than the deaths of hundreds of their men …

Hlaford gathered himself. “My Lord, we are amongst the first of the realm,” he managed, his voice taking on an integrating tone. I half-expected him to say we were all men of the world next, men who could surely come to some kind of agreement. “I think you’ll find our clients will pay …”

My temper snapped. “They’ll pay? They’ll pay?”

They flinched. I went on. “How many men are dead, because of you? How many women have been raped, because of you? How many children will starve to death, or grow up without their families, because of you? How many people are wounded beyond all hope of recovery, condemned to beg in the streets, because of you? How many …?

I clenched my fists. “You thought you could put the clock back and …”

It was hard to form words. I was looking at the eternal enemies of humanity, the men who were on top and stanchly resisted any sort of change. Aristocrats, slave-owning plantation masters, industrialists and party bosses and everyone else who climbed to the top, or inherited their position from their parents, and then kicked the ladder away, in the delusion they could stop the lower classes from demanding change. And then the inevitable revolutions came and created far worse worlds …

“You killed my wife and child,” I told them. Fallon had been nothing to them, just another commoner woman with a slight talent for magic, but she’d been everything to me. “Die.”

I drew my sword and cut off their heads, one by one. Their bodies collapsed, spilling blood … no one said a word, not as the warlords breathed their last. I knew none of my people would object, not really. The warlords had been a blight on the kingdom for longer than any of them had been alive.

Horst cleared his throat. “Sir, we captured forty-seven other aristocrats,” he said. “What do we …?”

I met his eyes. The commoners could go home, but the aristocrats … they were guilty, guilty as sin. They had had far more options than any of their serfs and yet they’d chosen to stand against progress, against the changes that would sweep over the world like the waves had swept over King Canute. They had to pay for their crimes. If we didn’t end it now, we’d wind up fighting the same war again and again and again …

My voice was cold. “Kill them all.”

Queenmaker 26-27

Chapter Twenty-Six

“It’s a delaying tactic,” I said, an hour later. The war council had met in a townhouse that had once belonged to a wealthy merchant, then hastily converted into a district HQ. “They’re stalling for time.”

Helen stared at her hands. “What are they offering?”

“We don’t know,” Lord Harris said. “They want to parley. It could be nothing more than a demand for our immediate surrender.”

“They’d send that with their guns,” I pointed out. “They’re stalling.”

“They may want to offer their submission, on terms,” Lord Jacob offered. “They may think they’ve lost the war, and want a way out that doesn’t involve losing everything.”

I glowered. “And you think we can just end the war, just like that, and leave them to rebuild and try again?”

Lord Jacob started to speak, but Helen spoke over him. “What do you mean?”

“A long time ago, there was a warlord who invaded his neighbour and had to be driven out by an alliance of his other neighbours,” I said. “That warlord remained in power, and remained a threat, and had to be dealt with later, under far less favourable conditions.”

I took a breath. “If you leave them in power, they’ll rebuild and challenge you again.”

“That may be true,” Sir Horace said. The Lord Mayor of Roxanna looked worried. “But we cannot afford to fight the war indefinitely.”

Helen’s face was impassive as the debate raged on. It wasn’t easy to tell what she was thinking. On one hand, the war really was expensive and the siege had already inflicted serious damage; on the other, leaving the warlords in power was asking for trouble. If Bush had removed Saddam in 1991, with most of the world on his side, it would have been far easier to rebuild Iraq and fewer rogue states would have challenged us openly, secure in the belief we didn’t have the political will to give them a thrashing. And the Iraqis wouldn’t have been so sceptical of us when we finally did invade …

And if we had plunged into Germany in 1919, we might have convinced the Germans they really had been beaten on the battlefield, rather than letting them think their troops had been stabbed in the back, I reflected. Hitler wouldn’t have climbed to power so easily if it had been apparent Germany had genuinely lost the war.

Helen tapped the table. “Lord Elliot, if we continue the war, can we win?”

I took a breath. I had always held that part of the reason George Bush and Tony Blair – particularly Blair – had invaded Iraq so enthusiastically was that they’d gotten bad advice from their senior military officers. High-ranking officers in the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence had to be politicians as well as soldiers, and often tended to put politics and personal advancement ahead of military considerations. I could understand their point – no politician wanted to be told his dreams of an easy victory were about to turn into a nightmare, unless they took expensive steps that would blow a hole in the budget – but they had a moral responsibility to the troops in the field. I thought the system would work a lot better if the senior officers still led troops into battle. It was astonishing how the prospect of being killed focused the mind on what was really important.

My lips twisted. The worst thing that could happen to an officer back home who made the mistake of telling his superiors the unvarnished truth was a dishonourable discharge. Here … telling the truth could be fatal. Worse, perhaps … Helen was smart enough to listen to the truth in private, but telling her the truth in front of the entire council would put her in a very nasty place indeed. If they thought her refusal to behead me for telling her something she didn’t want to hear was a sign of weakness …

And you called the officers moral cowards, my thoughts mocked. Time to put your money where your mouth is.

“Right now, they have the numbers but we have the better army,” I said. It was true. “They have the disadvantage of not trusting each other completely, not without reason, but we also have the problem of being tired and worn. My men marched north and then south again, winning a major battle, without much of a break. I’m pulling reinforcements from the city’s defenders to fill the holes in my line, but frankly the men need some rest and relaxation before they collapse.”

I leaned forward. “It isn’t clear how many reinforcements they can call upon. I suspect they brought as many men as they could north, if only to try to intimidate you into surrendering without a fight. The news of their defeats, up here, will certainly dissuade their vassals and serfs from joining their armies or continuing the fight. However, they know it too. Their only real choice is to stake everything on a final battle, or accept – at best – permanent subordination.”

Helen looked as if she’d bitten into something sour. “They’ll attack us?”

“Probably,” I said. It was what I would do, if I were in their shoes. The warlords might beg for mercy, and Helen might let them keep some of their titles, but she was smart enough to make damn sure they never regained the military might to challenge her. “They wouldn’t trust you to accept their surrender, then leave them alone.”

“They could also go on chevauchee and devastate the countryside,” Lord Harris pointed out, grimly. “If they wiped out every farm and new-build industrial town, they could starve us to death – or force us into submission – without ever fighting a real battle.”

He had a point, I supposed. It was harder than most people thought to devastate a farm permanently, but easy enough to slaughter the farmers, steal what they could from the fields and burn the rest. I’d stockpiled supplies within the walls, just in case, yet … feeding an entire city was an utter nightmare. If people weren’t already on the brink of starvation, I’d eat my hat. And if women and children started dying, their menfolk would rise up and demand peace at any price.

The debate raged around the table. I sat back and watched, trying to gauge opinions. Some wanted to continue the war, to the point of immediately attacking the enemy armies; some wanted a truce – a period of cheating between periods of fighting – and others wanted to see what the warlords were prepared to offer, on the grounds we had no obligations to accept an insulting or unsuitable offer. I suspected they were wrong about the latter. If it got out that we were considering peace, it would be harder to convince the men to fight.

“We’ll see what they have to offer,” Helen said, finally. “A truce will give the men time to rest, if nothing else.”

I felt a twinge of pride. Most aristos wouldn’t give a damn the men needed to rest.  But …

“It could also be a trap,” I pointed out. In theory, during a parley, everyone involved had a guarantee of safe conduct, up to and including armed escorts back to their lines if the shit hit the fan. In practice … would the warlords honour their words? “We have to be careful.”

“There are procedures to ensure the safety of everyone involved,” Lord Jacob said. His condescending tone grated on me. “They won’t risk being seen as oathbreakers. No one would ever trust them again.”

“Hah,” I muttered.

“Lord Elliot, you will lead the delegation,” Helen said. A rustle ran around the table. I couldn’t tell if they’d wanted to lead it themselves, or if they thought I wouldn’t be inclined to listen to anything the warlords said. “Lady Fallon and Lord Jacob will accompany you.”

I opened my mouth to object, then closed it again. They weren’t bad choices. Fallon was a merchant’s daughter, used to dealing with people who couldn’t be trusted, and Lord Jacob was well aware the aristocracy never lived up to their reputations. And we could be relied upon not to try to make a private deal for ourselves, or to go beyond the scope of our instructions. And yet …

There are people at this table who just want the war over and done with, I thought. And others who’ll think that crushing the warlords once and for all will set a deadly precedent.

Helen and I spoke quickly and privately as the messengers galloped back and forth. She hadn’t just chosen me because I was reliable, I realised wryly; she’d chosen me because it would be easy to disown me, if the peace talks proved unpopular or went spectacularly wrong. God alone knew how the commoners would react, if they knew their queen and her council was opening talks with the warlords. I wished Violet had attended the council. She’d always been much better at following public opinion than me.

And the thought of a street rat sitting at the table would give half the councillors heart attacks, I thought darkly. Some of the more conservative members objected to the merchants … but at least the merchants were wealthy. It would be a great improvement.

My mood didn’t lighten as the final agreements were made – talks about talks, I reflected sourly – and we headed to the parley site. The warlords had been suspiciously reasonable. They’d pulled back their troops, far enough that any attack would be obvious well before it became dangerous, and agreed I could bring twenty mounted infantrymen as bodyguards. The only downside was that the warlords would not be attending in person, something that bothered me even though I knew it was perfectly reasonable. Helen wouldn’t be attending either.

And if all three of the bastards were in the same room, I could draw my pistol and shoot them before anyone could react, I thought. It would set a dreadful precedent, and the aristos would be outraged, but the enemy armies would collapse without their leaders. I guess they don’t trust us that much.

“They’re taking this seriously,” Lord Jacob noted, as we neared the camp. “Interesting.”

I eyed him thoughtfully – I supposed it was a good sign he’d accepted the assignment without demur – then turned my attention to the camp. It looked surprisingly bland; a table positioned out in the open, three chairs on either side, and two tents … one intended for us. The lack of open luxury surprised me, although I could hardly disapprove. It was hard to tell if it was a sign they really were taking the parley seriously, as Lord Jacob suggested, or it was a subtle insult to all three of us. A mercenary, a bastard and a merchant’s daughter? It was quite possible the warlords thought we weren’t taking the matter seriously.

The tent opened as we dismounted, revealing a woman in her thirties. I blinked in surprise. The warlords were as misogynistic as the rest of the aristos, rarely – if ever – trusting women with real power and responsibility. Women, as far as they were concerned, were only good for being married off to cement alliances and having children. And yet there was a woman in front of me …?

“Greetings,” she said. “I am Lady Faire, Daughter of Eldred.”

She bobbed a curtsey. My mind raced as I bowed in return. Perhaps it made a certain kind of sense – Faire could be disowned as easily as us, if her father disapproved of her work, and she was certainly no rival who might have her own agenda – but it bothered me. It was rare for misogynists to change their stripes, no matter how logical it was to do so. My lips twisted in dark humour. Islamic State had had a doctor who wanted to use medical science to unleash a plague in Baghdad, but the doctor had been a woman and they’d dismissed everything she’d said …

“I speak on behalf of the alliance,” she continued. She indicated the table. “We have much to discuss.”

Lord Jacob cleared his throat. “Indeed we do, My Lady,” he said. I wondered if he was thrown by facing a female negotiator. It was quite possible, even though he served under a female monarch. “It is a honour to treat with you.”

I directed the infantrymen to search the tents – and Fallon to carry out a more subtle check for magic – before sitting at the table. Lord Jacob and Faire were exchanging polite compliments and meaningless chatter, something that would waste time at best and build a lopsided relationship at worst. It was quite possible the warlords hoped to subvert Jacob, perhaps even offer him the crown and a marriage alliance. My paranoia deepened. Was that why they’d sent Faire? She was sweet and charming and, unless I missed my guess, a lot smarter than she acted. Fallon was bristling slightly, beside me. I didn’t need to exchange words to know she’d distrusted Faire on sight.

“This chatter is all very interesting,” I interrupted, “but we do have a deadline. I assume your father, and his allies, have a proposal they want you to put to us?”

Lord Jacob reddened. Faire took my rudeness – and by aristo standards I’d been incredibly rude – in her stride. I guessed that was another reason she’d been selected. Half the male aristos I’d met would be trying to challenge me for that and the other half would storm off and launch an attack the moment the truce expired. But then, she’d probably been forced to put up with rudeness that made my Drill Instructors look like indulgent parents.

“We will withdraw from the war and pledge our loyalty once again, offering homage to Her Majesty,” Faire said. “In return, we want our rights and ancient privileges, granted to us by His Majesty King James II, to be recognised and respected.”

“Out of the question,” I said, flatly. Local history was a confused mess – history wasn’t anything resembling a science, not yet – but King James had laid the groundwork for his grandson’s troubles by giving the warlords a free hand in their territories, allowing them to build the powerbase they’d turned against the throne. “That won’t be peace. It will be an armistice for twenty years.”

As Foch said, my thoughts added. And he was pretty much right.

“Her Majesty will not accept such an offer,” Lord Jacob agreed. Clearly, he hadn’t been as wowed by Faire as I’d feared. “There are no guarantees you could offer that would migrate the risk.”

Faire smiled, sweetly. “We are prepared to discuss marriage alliances,” she said, calmly. “I myself would be married to you; my cousin would treat for the hand of the queen herself …”

“Also out of the question,” I said. I couldn’t imagine a local man accepting the role of Royal Consort. Being a powerless king would make him a laughing stock. It wasn’t fair – queens throughout history had often been legally powerless – but the local culture cared nothing for the double standard. “Her Majesty would not accept such an offer.”

I went on before Lord Jacob could let himself be tempted. He would be … nearly everyone in his shoes would be very tempted, even if common sense insisted the offer might well be a sham. A good – brilliant – match would make up for his unfortunate birth. And he’d resent it if Helen said no.

“We have a counteroffer,” I told her. “You father and his allies disband their armies and release their vassals, surrendering all their lands and territories save for their core estates. They are to abolish all forms of feudal service, including serfdom, and refrain from raising more than a handful of household guards. In exchange, Her Majesty will guarantee your lives and core estates, as long as you behave yourselves.”

Her face barely flickered. If I hadn’t been watching carefully, I wouldn’t have missed the brief flicker of … something. I doubted her father would be happy, if she took the offer to him, but … would he force himself to accept? It would mean giving up much of his power, and leaving his family at Helen’s mercy, yet … at least he would be left with something. I wondered if he’d notice the sting in the tail, the minor detail that would complete our victory and make any sort of recovery impossible. If all feudal service was abolished, his serfs would have to be treated well … or they’d simply pack up and leave. He’d no longer have the legal right or naked force to keep them tied to the land.

I wondered, grimly, how the situation looked to them. They had a brief, a very brief, window of opportunity to take the city or devastate the countryside.  But the balance of power was already shifting against them. If I had six months – less, perhaps – I’d gather the forces to crush them utterly, to tear their lands apart and impose my own order … Helen’s order. They had to know it, too. My estates alone would provide more volunteers, all willing to fight, than their territories could provide unwilling conscripts. And the fact they didn’t trust each other would make it easy to prise them apart.

Faire gave me a long look. “Does Her Majesty really expect us to abide by such insulting terms?”

I stared back at her. “Your father and his allies started a war and lost,” I told her, bluntly. It wasn’t quite true, and no doubt it would be debated heavily in my planned war college, but it was true enough. “Be grateful Her Majesty is willing to leave you with something. If it was up to me, you would be sent into exile.”

“And if it was up to your serfs,” Fallon added, “you’d be torn limb from limb.”

“I will have to discuss this with my father,” Faire said, stiffly. “If you’ll excuse me …”

And then all hell broke loose.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Faire opened her mouth and screamed.

I barely heard her.  I’d spotted a faint shimmer in the air, behind her, but I hadn’t had a second to react before the first grenade was thrown. The enemy attack force seemed to come out of nowhere … invisibility spells? Obscurification charms? I didn’t know and I didn’t care – I grabbed Fallon, knocking her to the ground as the first grenades started to explode, and shoved Lord Jacob down too. Faire was still screaming, her eyes going wide with shock as a bullet cracked past her head. She was lucky she hadn’t been hit. A trained sniper with a modern weapon could take out the terrorist hiding behind a human shield with ease, but I wouldn’t have risked anything of the sort here. The shooter could have killed his master’s daughter as easily as one of us.

“Get down, you stupid bitch,” I yelled at her. It wasn’t polite, but what choice did I have? “Get down!”

She ducked under the table as I picked up the nearest chair and threw it at the attackers, then stuck my hands under the table and heaved it after the chair. It felt surprisingly light – someone must have put a lightening charm on it – but knocked over a handful of men before they could react. Two more came at me, swords glinting with unholy light. I grabbed Fallon’s hand and shouted for her to use her magic, but she was in shock. I kicked myself for agreeing to take a pregnant women into a dangerous situation … no one would have said a word if I’d said no, not when she was my wife-to-be and mother of my future child. Even Helen couldn’t have overridden my command …

My men deployed, firing back as the enemy troopers darted forward. They wore heavy leather uniforms that looked like something out of a steampunk movie, complete with belts loaded with grenades, firearms and devices I didn’t recognise. They didn’t seem to wear any livery, but they had to be serving the warlords. Renweard, perhaps. He was a hot-head and the most inclined to risk everything on one throw of the die. I cursed under my breath as the enemy crashed into my troops, their faces fanatical and yet oddly slack … they were hopped up on something, I realised dully. I’d seen drugged-up insurgents in Iraq and they’d kept trying to fight, even when badly wounded, until it caught up with them. The poor bastards had overdosed so badly they’d been dead men walking even before we shot them.

A man landed in front of me and aimed a dagger at my heart. I stepped to one side – the first rule of knife-fighting is don’t, unless you really know what you’re doing – and kicked him in the crotch hard enough to ram his testicles into his stomach. He barely even flinched at a blow that would have put me down for the count. I gritted my teeth as he swung at me again – thankfully, his coordination wasn’t great – and kicked his knee with all the force I could muster. It snapped, sending him sprawling to the ground. I dodged around him, trying not to look at his face. It looked as if he was incredibly angry and feverish and ecstatic …

Faire was lying on the ground, shaking. I grabbed her roughly, yanked her to her feet and pushed her north. She seemed to be going into shock. I guessed her father hadn’t told her of the ambush plan, if he’d even known it was going to happen. Renweard might be gambling his ally wouldn’t really care about his daughter’s fate – she was only a girl – if his daring stroke brought them victory. I hoped he was wrong about that, but right now it didn’t matter. We had to get out of the trap before the jaws snapped closed.

Lord Jacob joined me, holding a flintlock in one hand and his sword in the other. “Are they mad?”

“Later,” I snapped. Lord Jacob was holding up better than the other two, but still … “Cover me!”

I helped Fallon to her feet and half-carried her away from the devastated parley site. My men outnumbered the enemy, but they were losing … the enemy had closed too rapidly for the infantrymen to shoot them or simply remount their horses and outrun them. The second set of grenades had been thrown at the horses, leaving them injured or galloping away in fright …I sniffed something unpleasant in the air and realised the grenades hadn’t just been explosive. They’d used a chemical compound to make the beasts take flight … I cursed under my breath as I recalled the map. The enemy infantry might have trouble reaching the scene in time to catch us, but their cavalry would be halfway here by now. The irony mocked me. I’d spent months rolling my eyes at their pretensions, and their conviction they still ruled the battlefield, but now …

A man roared behind me. I turned and raised my sword, just in time for him to impale himself on my blade. It should have been a killing blow – it went right through his heart – but he held on and started pulling himself towards me, inch by inch. A flicker of pure horror ran through me. What was he? A zombie? I’d heard stories of the undead rising in search of brains – as well as dragons and other fantastical creatures – but they were all so distant from Johor that it wasn’t clear if anyone took them seriously. I gritted my teeth and twisted the blade, spilling his guts onto the ground. He staggered, stumbled towards me as I tugged the blade out of his body, and collapsed. For a moment, I was sure he was going to keep coming after me.

“We have to run,” I snapped. We were too far from the city and the rest of the army … I kicked myself, mentally, for not insisting the parley talks be held in the city. I’d had my reasons, but none of them were worth the carnage behind me. “Their troops won’t be far behind.”

Lord Jacob nodded, his face pale. “They can’t take us alive.”

I nodded, curtly, as he helped Faire to run. The warlords – or one of them – had gambled everything on killing me. I’d wondered why they’d raised no objections to our delegation … clearly, they’d intended to kill me on the assumption my army would fall to pieces without its leader. It made a certain kind of sense, from their point of view. If their armies lost their leaders, there would be a power struggle at best and – at worst – the conscripts would desert and their vassals would go home. But my army was different. There was a clear chain of command … I didn’t like the idea of planning for my own death, but it was one of my duties.

And they think Helen can’t command her troops, I thought. Idiots.

We hurried across the devastated landscape, ruined by fighting and enemy occupation. I tried to calculate just how long we had before the enemy cavalry came into view, then gave it up as too depressing. Renweard’s camp wasn’t that far away, and he’d probably had his horsemen on alert … they could be nearing our position now. There was little room to conceal ourselves, either. I’d accepted the parley ground because we could see in all directions and spot an assault – or so I’d thought – before it could arrive. In hindsight, I’d fucked up.

Get Fallon and the others back to the city, and quickly, I told myself. I didn’t know if all the warlords had plotted the ambush, or just one of the bastards, but it didn’t matter any longer. They were all implicated. Any hope of being treated as honourable men had vanished the moment they’d tried to kill us. They’ll be mounting an attack as soon as possible, trying to destroy us before we can build up and do the same to them.

“My father wouldn’t …” Faire was mumbling to herself. “My father wouldn’t …”

“Be quiet,” I snapped. We were still too exposed for my peace of mind. I felt like a British Tommy climbing out of the trenches and making his way towards the enemy lines. The air was eerily silent. I couldn’t hear birds or small rodents or anything. “Your father just tried to have us killed.”

Faire looked as if she wanted to faint. I was tempted to let her, to leave her behind … the temptation lingered far too long, before I put it firmly out of my mind. The girl had been a dupe. She didn’t deserve to die because her father or one of his allies was a colossal asshole. And besides, if I left her on the field, who knew what’d happen to her? It was quite possible someone who wanted a warlord for a father-in-law would kidnap her, rape her, and force her father to acknowledge him as her husband … Cuthbert, damn the man, had tried to do it to Helen. If someone was willing to do that to the de facto heir to the throne, there was no reason why they wouldn’t do it to Faire.

And we could interrogate her, I thought. Women were neither seen nor heard, as far as the aristos were concerned. I’d bet good money Faire had learnt a great deal by just standing there, looking pretty, and keeping her mouth shut. God knew, the aristos rarely paid any attention to the servants, even in their most private moments. They were just part of the furniture. No wonder they made the most effective spies. She might be quite happy to tell us everything she knows …

Fallon pointed upwards. “Shit.”

I followed her gaze. Two birds hung in the sky, practically hovering over us … I shivered as I realised how unnatural they were, even though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I reached for my flintlock and took aim, but missed … the birds didn’t scatter at the sound, further proof they were unnatural. Fallon gritted her teeth, then muttered a single spell. One bird fell out of the sky. The other turned and flew away.

“They know we’re here,” I said. We’d been lucky we’d spotted the birds. Hawks had very sharp eyes. They could have remained so high we’d never spot them, all the while leading the enemy to us. They hadn’t known Fallon was a magician. If they had, they would probably have kept their distance. They’d certainly assumed I wouldn’t be able to shoot the birds out of the sky. “We need to move faster.”

“They won’t try to take us alive,” Lord Jacob agreed.

I nodded, trying to think. The quickest route back to the army was a straight line … but they’d have no trouble following us. They could bring dogs with them, if they had time, and track us by scent. Or their bird could fly higher, then come after us. But if we headed east instead … we’d get to the river. We couldn’t swim against the flow, certainly not for long, but we might be able to flag down a timberclad. Or …

A bugle call echoed behind us. I grimaced. “Hurry.”

My lips twitched as we tried to pick up speed. The enemy was ripping off The Most Dangerous Game … I supposed it made sense. They did hunt criminals for sport, as well as wild animals, although they were rarely as sporting as the insane hunter from the original book. It was an exercise in sadism, not anything remotely understandable. If they wanted plaudits for bravery, they could go after a wild boar. Those beasts were incredibly dangerous and even experienced hunters were careful, when they went after them. Helen had once told me she’d come very close to being gored by a boar, when she’d been younger. I was surprised her father had allowed her anywhere near the hunting grounds.

“I can hit them with a fireball,” Fallon offered. “Or try to turn them into frogs …”

“If you can,” I said. We were lucky the really powerful magicians didn’t live anywhere nearby, although … it was hard to tell how many stories were true, or had at least some truth buried under the nonsense, and how many were nothing more than bullshit. “But let them get a little closer first.”

I tried, desperately, to think of a plan. I’d had a picket watching the scene from a safe distance, just in case, and if he’d done his job he should be back at the city by now, organising a flying column to rescue us. Or … my blood ran cold. The parley had clearly been planned as a decapitation strike, and they were never carried out in isolation. There was a very real possibility the city was already under attack, that no one could come to our aid because they were fighting desperately to hold the walls …

Fuck. My eyes flickered from side to side. There was nothing we could use for cover, nothing we could use to set an ambush … we had two swords, a little magic, and little else. Perhaps we oculd get to the river, grab a log as a floating aid, and let it carry us miles to the south. It would isolate us completely, but we’d have a chance to break contact, gather ourselves, and return to the city. It might just work.

The bugle blew again, nearer this time. The cavalry were coming into view, decked in livery so bright and glaring you’d think they were on parade. There were ten of them, too many for Jacob and I to kill on our own. A handful of plans ran through my mind, ruses that wouldn’t work on anyone who had the slightest idea of what they were doing, only to be dismissed a moment later. We had a flat choice between surrender and certain death and … no, surrender wasn’t an option. They wanted me dead. I didn’t think they’d show any mercy to Fallon either.

A morbid thought washed through my mind. Perhaps I should kill her to spare her an agonising death …

My heart clenched. She was my lover and she was carrying my child and … I couldn’t kill her and yet I knew what would happen to her, if she was taken alive. Jacob might be spared – and Faire would be kept alive, if not safe – but Fallon was a merchant’s daughter with magic, everything the warlords hated in a single package. Her death would be long and lingering and …

I looked at Fallon. “I’m sorry I got you into this …”

She gave me a grim smile, then looked past me and raised her arm. The air shimmered – a wave of heat brushed against my skin, as if I was standing too close to a furnace – and the cavalrymen caught fire, men and beasts alike screaming in pain as they burnt to death. The stench was overwhelming; I choked and gagged, stumbling away and covering my nose in a desperate attempt to block it out. Fallon’s eyes were glowing as her magic blazed on, her hair whipping around her as if she were standing in the heart of a storm …

I felt a rush of pure arousal. And terror.

Jacob fell backwards, landing on the ground in a manner that would be comical if it wasn’t deadly serious. I saw Faire clutch at her sleeve, her eyes fixed on Fallon’s glowing form. I wondered what she was thinking, if she wished she had magic herself or if she was too terrified to want anything of the sort. Perhaps both … who knew? Fallon staggered, the glow fading as she caught herself. I had a nasty feeling she’d lost control of the spell. Her targets had died the moment their bodies ignited, but she’d gone on and on, burning them so completely their bodies were now nothing more than oily ash.

Faire moved quickly, too quickly. I saw a glint of metal and realised, too late, that she’d had a knife in her sleeve, that she’d stabbed Fallon in the back. For a moment, I froze in utter disbelief. Fallon coughed and fell forward, blood trailing from the wound as Faire pulled out the knife. If she’d left it in the wound, Fallon might have survived …

I hit her as hard as I could, too late. Much too late. Fallon hit the ground, letting out a grunt of pain … I pressed my hands against the wound, all too aware it was pointless. A powerful magician might have been able to save her, but anyone else … it was impossible. Even a modern hospital, with doctors who knew what they were doing, wouldn’t be able to save her life. It had been too late the moment Faire withdrew the blade …

“I …” Fallon was trying to speak, but she could barely form words.  “I …”

She convulsed once, then died. I held her tightly, feeling numb. My lover was dead. My unborn child was dead … I was barely aware of Lord Jacob watching me warily, his eyes darting between me and Faire’s body. Anger boiled through me as I realised what I’d lost, in the space of a few seconds. Fallon was – had been – my lover. No, she’d been my advisor and my assistant and the mother of my child … all gone. I’d lost my first wife and children through cruel fate, but this … if I’d said no, when Fallon had been assigned to the parley team, she might have survived. If … guilt numbed me. If …

I forced myself to stand and check Faire’s body, just to make sure she was dead, then picked up Fallon and swung her corpse over my shoulder. I’d make sure she got a proper burial …

… And then I would make the warlords pay.

Queenmaker 24-25

Chapter Twenty-Four

“They’re laying siege to the city,” the scout reported, as I studied the notations he’d made on the map. “So far, they don’t appear to have made any attempt to force the walls.”

I nodded, curtly. News of our arrival was spreading fast. The warlords would know we were coming shortly, if they didn’t already know. My army was too large to go unnoticed for long, even if we kept our distance from their siege lines and the local population – if they had any sense – had already gone inside the walls or fled into the distance. I didn’t think they’d advise the warlords in any case, but there was always someone – in my experience – who could be bullied or bribed into collaborating. There was no time for more than a brief rest as we gathered intelligence and laid our plans. If they got ready to meet us …

The map grew more detailed with every passing report. The warlords really didn’t trust each other. There wasn’t one large army surrounding the city, but three smaller armies; Warlord Eldred to the north, Warlord Hlaford to the west and Warlord Renweard to the east. Their lines were clearly delineated, the border between their troops patrolled as carefully as the no-man’s land between the city and the besiegers. They had brought a siege train, I noted, but they’d kept it at the rear … a sign, I was sure, that they didn’t want to risk storming the city if it could be avoided. If they weren’t afraid of being stabbed in the back – and planning to do it themselves – they could have attacked from three directions simultaneously and overwhelmed the defenders.

“They’ll be aware of us soon, if they’re not already,” Horst said, putting my earlier thoughts into words. “Which one do we attack first?”

I said nothing as my eyes lingered on the map. I’d never met any of the three remaining warlords in person, but I’d made it my duty to learn as much as I could about them. Eldred was old and frail, yet probably the smartest of the three and the closest they had to a proper leader. I suspected he was the one who’d come up with the original plan and convinced the others  to put it into action. He’d certainly been the one who’d kept the previous monarch firmly in his place, although the sheer distance between his lands and Roxanna had given him a degree of plausible deniability. Hlaford was middle-aged, known for being a greedy and vernal tyrant who squeezed everything he could from his vassals; rumour insisted he practised the droit du seigneur, although I suspected that was more likely to be black propaganda than anything else. I found it hard to believe someone hadn’t put a knife in him for that – even Al Qaida hadn’t managed to intimidate the Iraqi Sunnis into overlooking their treatment of their unwilling brides – but there might be some truth to the story. It was astonishing what some people would do for money, or later favours. Hlaford was also cold and practical, the type of person who would not be easily fooled or intimidated. Renweard …

He was young, only a year or two older than Fallon. His father had suffered a freak accident – probably something along the lines of accidentally cutting his head off while shaving – and his son had taken the reins so quickly anyone who might challenge his account of the accident had been forced to keep his mouth firmly shut or face execution. I doubted there wasn’t a single person alive who didn’t think the son had murdered the father, but it was rarely discussed. Renweard was hot-tempered and bore grudges well past the point of diminishing returns. If he hadn’t been so powerful, he would probably have been assassinated by now. And he could be provoked into making a serious mistake.

“Renweard,” I said, simply. “The geography favours us.”

It did, too. The map insisted the warlords had surrounded the city – and they had – but the river would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the other two to come to Renweard’s aid. If I took out the bridges, they’d face a far harder task … if I could trap Renweard against the city’s defences, I could repeat my earlier trick and destroy his army before he could get out of the trap. It didn’t matter, not to me, if we captured or killed him, or if he lived to see another day. Without his army, he would be as powerless as the average serf …

“Take two troops of mobile infantry and capture a few of their pickets,” I ordered. “Send the rest to the harbour east of the city, install a garrison and capture the ships.”

If they’re still there, my thoughts pointed out coldly. The river was a major trade route – there were normally ships going up and down constantly – but right now it was also a war zone. The smart skippers might have headed down to the sea, taking their ships and crews with them, to wait and see who won the war. Or simply head further away. If we can’t take the ships …

I continued to issue orders, from troop deployments to black propaganda of my own. It wouldn’t be too hard, I thought, to convince Renweard that Hlaford was plotting against his peers. The man was known to be greedy, greedy enough to take an offer of lands and gold from the queen in exchange for betraying his allies. I didn’t think Hlaford would take the risk – it would leave him isolated, when Helen decided she wanted his head – but it didn’t matter as long as the other two believed it. Eldred might think twice about assuming the rumours were true. Renweard would accept them at face value.

And he probably doesn’t have a wise old man to point out the dangers, I thought. Eldred and Hlaford were old enough to understand the limits of power, manoeuvring to keep what they had rather than stake everything on one throw of the die, but Renweard was too young and inexperienced to accept any limits. He wasn’t the type of person, either, to keep his father’s advisors at his side. His closest confidents were men as young and hot-headed as himself. Will he let me lead him by the nose?

My mind raced as I finished dispatching troops, spies, influencers and messengers in all directions. If I were in sole command of the other side, I would fall back and prepare for battle. The city wasn’t going anywhere, and her defenders were far more dangerous behind the lines than on the field. Eldred, I suspected, would be urging a redeployment the moment he realised my army was closer than anyone had thought possible, but would the other two listen to him? Coalition warfare had been bad enough back home, with allied governments placing strict limits on what their troops were allowed to do; here, it was damn near impossible. If someone said the wrong thing, the alliance would be dead  …

I had problems with foreign troops in the sandbox, I recalled wryly, but I didn’t have to worry about them drawing their weapons and opening fire.

Fallon looked unconvinced as she studied the map. “Will they believe what you’re telling them?”

I shrugged. There was no way to be sure, but … the bastards would have to take the threat of betrayal seriously, unless they actually wanted a knife in the back. I could imagine a warlord thinking his rivals were plotting to kill him, marry Helen and win pretty much everything for himself. If only one warlord survived to take power, a new dynasty would be born.

“We’ll see,” I said. The plan would start to come apart, the moment we encountered the enemy, but I’d done everything I could to make it work. “If they’re keeping one eye cast over their shoulders …”

The thought haunted me as the army resumed the march, preparing itself for combat. I walked from unit to unit, making a show of recognising soldiers and calling them by name, hoping and praying it would raise morale. It was lucky I’d insisted on harsh physical training, pushing the new recruits harder and harder until they could march distances they would have sworn impossible. Even so, I would have preferred to take a day or two to rest my men, rather than a few short hours. But there was no time to waste. My instincts insisted we’re already been spotted.

It was a glorious sight, I reflected as I rejoined my HQ company, even though the warlords would have disagreed. My men looked scruffy, as if they couldn’t be bothered cleaning themselves up; my horsemen wore plain uniforms, designed to make them blend into the landscape rather than stand out on the battlefield. I wondered, idly, if the warlords would realise we were a genuine threat. The aristo fops I’d dismissed had put appearance ahead of functionality, or competence, but the warlords were effective fighters. They had to be.

And if they realise how far and how fast we marched, I reflected, they may assume we’re already tired and worn.

The landscape changed, growing more developed as we neared the city. There had been small towns and farming villages outside the walls, once, but now they were nothing more than ruins and scorched earth. There were no bodies … I hoped the locals had had time to run, before it was too late, but even if they had escaped they were ruined. I promised myself I’d do what I could to help them rebuild afterwards, if there was an afterwards. The morbid thought echoed through my head, then vanished as Renweard’s pickets spotted us. I had the impression they gaped in shock, before turning and galloping away. Idiots. My sharpshooters were hardly worthy of the name, but they could have shot the horsemen down before it was too late. I wondered if any of the pickets would realise they’d been allowed to flee.

I closed my eyes for a second and visualised the battlefield. I’d chosen to approach from an angle, rather than marching straight at the city. It looked a mistake, and my old instructors would have chewed me out, but there was method in my madness. A person who looked at my approach on a map with a paranoid eye would see me trying to uproot Renweard and force him towards Hlaford’s lines. If I was lucky, Renweard would assume I was pushing him into a trap. If not … I was still threatening to turn his lines and push his men into the river. The locals didn’t have any real body armour – their leathers didn’t provide that much protection – but if they tried to swim without undressing first they’d drown. It wouldn’t be a pleasant way to go.

We crested the hill and fell on Renweard’s baggage train. The camp was practically defenceless, protected only by a low palisade … idiots. His guards scattered and ran, the moment they saw us … I guessed the pickets had galloped all the way to the siege lines, rather than take a moment to tell the guards they needed to pack up and run. Not that they could have grabbed more than a few essentials, not in time. I shook my head in disbelief as we marched through the camp, section leaders barking orders to keep the men in line. I’d seen enemy commanders living in luxury while their hapless men staved, but Renweard’s camp made Saddam’s officers look like models of taste and restraint. The tents were luxurious, their mistresses beautiful, the smell of food so tasty it made my stomach rumble. I snapped orders to a messenger, telling him to take the mistresses – and the rest of the camp followers – into custody, then collect as many of the enemy’s supplies as possible and destroy the rest. Renweard would know what was happening now, unless he was a complete idiot or his subordinates were unwilling to give him bad news. What would he do?

My lips twisted. The smart decision would be to stay where he was, stand his ground, and hope to hell we’d break against his lines. I doubted he’d make the smart choice. He was known for being hot-headed … and even if he had been as cold and calculating as Eldred, his subordinates and mercenaries would want to recover the baggage train and all the loot they’d left behind. Alexander the Great had once told his men, after he’d lost his baggage train, that they’d win the battle, take the enemy’s train and go home with both … he’d won the battle, but it hadn’t worked out so well for one of his successors when he’d tried the same trick. Would Renweard have the sense to try? And would his men let him?

That’s why I don’t let my men loot, I thought. I’d made damn sure the common soldiers were paid very well, in stark contrast to my rivals. My men didn’t need to take everything that wasn’t nailed down. And that’s why I don’t have to leave any hostages to fortune behind me.

I smirked. Didn’t he think the other two might snatch his baggage train?

A messenger galloped up to me. “Sir, the enemy are leaving their lines!”

“Good,” I said. “Their cavalry?”

“Holding back,” the messenger reported.

“Pity,” I said. It would have been nice if the cavalry had charged my lines. I guessed the warlords had learnt a few lessons from what I’d done to Aldred, after all. Instead, they were holding back and waiting for the infantry to open a gap in my lines. They were going to be waiting quite some time. “Inform Captain Spade that the word is given.”

“Yes, sir.”

The messenger galloped off.  I barked orders, halting the march and directing the men into combat formation, half taking up firing position and the other half digging basic entrenchments. The enemy had to know what we were doing, but they were too desperate to care. If they gave me time to pick the camp over, everything they’d looted would be looted in turn. Losing the baggage train wasn’t a military disaster – my scouts reported enemy camps further to the south, probably crammed with supplies – but it was a deeply personal one. It was unlikely they’d get any of their loot back, even if they kicked my ass, wiped out the entire army and recaptured the baggage train. The men who recovered the loot would consider themselves the rightful owners.

No honour amongst thieves, I reflected. I made a mental note to ensure the camp followers were given the chance to leave, if they wanted to go. Some would have followed the soldiers willingly, but others would have been press-ganged into service. At least they’ll have a chance at a better life.

The enemy troops came into view, advancing with a strange combination of experience and desperation. Someone had clearly spent a lot of time considering the impact of firearms, and gone to some trouble to prepare their men to encounter modern weapons in battle, but the men were too desperate to follow their orders to the letter. One group advanced while the other held back, ready to lay down covering fire; two other groups looked as though they were planning to outflank me, although there was little space for any such manoeuvre. I kept a wary eye on it anyway. The enemy might be right, if they had time …

“Launch the flare,” I ordered.

My men opened fire. The mortars, hastily put together behind the lines, opened fire a second later, raining makeshift shells on the enemy. The advancing troops dropped to the ground quickly, not quickly enough to save themselves from shrapnel. I snapped orders, correcting fire; my gunners targeted the men trying to outflank me and blew them away. I saw one man jump into the river, only to be swept away helplessly. The river wasn’t that fast, but the enemy soldier might not know how to swim. It wasn’t common knowledge miles from the sea.

No swimming pools here, I reminded myself. And no public baths outside the big cities.

The shooting grew louder. The enemy troops wavered, caught between the need to recover their loot and the certainty of death if they pressed onwards. An officer started to take control, wearing a bright uniform that made him stand out a mile; my snipers saw him and opened fire, trying to put him down. It was going to be hard, afterwards, determining who’d earned the bonus for killing enemy officers. I suspected I’d wind up giving them all the bonus. Not that it mattered. The locals might insist that targeting officers was ungentlemanly, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to win.

Another messenger joined me. “Eldred’s troops are securing his baggage train, driving off our raiders,” he reported. “Hlaford’s men are taking up defensive positions along the river.”

I nodded. I hadn’t really expected the raid on Eldred’s camp to succeed. I’d armed the raiders with makeshift grenades, high-explosive and incendiary, and I was hopeful they’d done some damage, but the odds were against it. I just wanted the warlord fearing an attack on his rear too … I smirked as I realised what Hlaford had done. Intentionally or not, he’d done the one thing that might convince his peers he had been bribed. Combined with my troops, wearing his uniform, harassing their lines …

They might not believe it, I told myself. Hlaford would be stupid to sell out his allies. Helen would deal with him, after the others had been wiped out. But they dare not assume it isn’t true.

“Good,” I said. The important news was that neither warlord was in a position to aid their ally. They might even hope he got his ass kicked, before they kicked mine in turn. “Summon the reinforcements. It’s time to resume the advance.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The enemy hadn’t expected their trenches to be attacked from the rear, I noted, but that hadn’t stopped them digging enough earthworks to defend themselves.

I frowned as I studied the lines, the remaining enemy troops scurrying back to take cover as my men resumed the advance. There was something depressingly permanent about them, even though they were no more than a few days old. I remembered the destroyed settlements and winced, realising the buildings had been dismantled, their materials worked into the enemy lines to provide more cover for their men. The trenches were deeper, too, than I’d expected, at least five lines between my men and the city. Someone really had been thinking ahead. We might be on the verge of a smashing frontal attack on the enemy rear, but that didn’t mean we were going to break them. It was more likely a conventional attack would bog down before it got anywhere near the walls.

“Bring up the ironclad,” I ordered, as I swept my gaze over the riverbanks. Hlaford was still digging defences, his men working desperately to turn the mud into protection and gun emplacements. That was unfortunate – I’d hoped I could get ships up the river and into the city without being impeded – but I’d just have to go with it. “Get it into position.”

I waited, keeping my head low. The warlords might not like the idea of shooting officers, let alone their fellow aristos, but … I had no doubt they’d kill me if they got the chance. They might have won the war before it had even started, if they’d ordered their tame magician to kill me instead of taking me prisoner. Helen’s bloodline made her important and her gender made her vulnerable, although anyone who banked on that was in for a nasty surprise, but me …? I didn’t have any of those advantages. They gained nothing by keeping me around and risked much. They’d put me on trial after I was safely dead.

They think I’m a fraud, I thought. There wasn’t a single aristocrat who thought I’d legitimately earned my titles, let alone the power Helen had granted me. They’d be relieved if I suffered an accident that was nothing of the sort. Hell, if I die heroically, they can hold a state funeral and extol my virtues, now I’m no longer around to upset them.

I turned as the wagon was dragged into view. It had been a nightmare preparing the special weapon for transport, if only because we lacked any sort of specialized transporter. We’d had to dismantle much of the weapon, then plan carefully to put it back together when we got near the enemy lines. I disliked waiting, even though my men were shelling and sniping the enemy lines, but there’d been no choice. No sane choice, at least. Charging the enemy lines would have been disastrous. We could have won the battle and lost the war.

The shooting grew louder. I glanced at the river and saw the first of the boats – primitive steamboats, about as reliable as a politician’s promise – bobble into view. They looked flimsy, no matter how many pieces of timber had been nailed into place to provide a little protection. I’d intended to devise genuine ironclads, but the tech wasn’t there yet. The makeshift timberclads, carrying guns bolted to the hulls, would have to do. Their shooting wasn’t very accurate, as they raked both sides of the river with bullets, but it was disconcerting as hell.

“Sir,” Captain Wells reported. “The special weapon is ready.”

“The ironclad,” I corrected. There was no point in keeping the secret any longer. “The crew?”

“Armed and ready to go,” Wells told me. “They’re just waiting on your command.”

I studied the ironclad for a long moment. The locomotive had been designed, in theory, for off-track operations, but it wasn’t a proper steam tractor. I doubted she’d last very long, even if her armour held out against enemy fire. There’d be so much wear and tear on her wheels – and the rest of her – that she might fall apart before she even reached the enemy lines. And if she did … I shook my head.  I’d have killed for a modern Abrams. I’d even have settled for a First World War tank, not something that looked as if it had driven out of a Steampunk Civil War. But it would have to do.

“Advance,” I ordered.

The ironclad whistled as she rumbled forwards, so slowly I had to bite my lip to keep from urging the drivers to hurry up. The vehicle lurched back and forth so badly I was sure it was going to topple over, forcing the drivers to flee for their lives, even before the enemy started shooting at it. We had built the boilers to be tough, and added extra armour when we’d converted the locomotive into a makeshift tank, but if a bullet got through the armour …

“They’re starting to panic,” Wells commented.

I shrugged. The downside of trapping the enemy against the walls was that the bastards had nowhere to run. The ironclad looked intimidating as hell – a Martian Tripod couldn’t have shocked them more – and even if they had been aware of the possibility, they hadn’t expected to encounter one so quickly. I rather wished I’d had more time … if I’d had a couple of years, I could have put together an entire troop of makeshift – and primitive – tanks that would change the face of warfare once and for all. But one ironclad was all we had.

The enemy officers bawled orders, trying to get the men organised as the ironclad crawled closer, firing as it came. My gunners opened fire too, hitting the trenches with everything they had. The enemy gunners tried to return fire, depressing their weapons to target the ironclad, but it wasn’t good enough. I cursed under my breath as I spotted the enemy line starting to come apart, troops running for the river or back to the walls. A modern tank wouldn’t have been slowed by the trenches, but our ironclad might easily get trapped in the mud and grind to a halt.

I glanced at the messenger as the ironclad reached the first line and cleared it.  “Send in the infantry.”

The ironclad kept grinding on, wheels slipping and sliding as it made its way to the second trench and bogged down. I nodded grimly as it ground to a halt, the enemy gunners taking advantage of the pause to target the vehicle properly, raining shells on the ironclad until they scored a direct hit. A modern tank would have survived, but the ironclad had no chance. She exploded violently, taking her crew with her. I promised myself they’d be remembered, if any of us survived the day …

“Keep the pressure on,” I snapped. I had no idea what had happened to Renweard – he was no physical coward, by all reports, and he was hot-headed enough to stay in his post even when retreat became the only smart option – but it was clear he’d lost control of his troops. He might even be dead … I allowed myself to hope he was lying in a ditch, perhaps after being shot in the back, then reminded myself not to assume he was dead until I actually saw the body. There was no shortage of rumours about kings and princes vanishing into the forest, to wait until their time came again, even though most were untrue. “Don’t give them a moment to think!”

The enemy lines came apart, I saw hundreds of men throwing their weapons away and running for the river, despite the timberclads … and the uncertainty about whose side Hlaford was on. I’d have thought that theory had been debunked by my ships opening fire on his men, but the warlords considered their troops little more than expendable assets to be used and discarded at will. Shooting at an ally’s troops to maintain the deception they weren’t really allies was the sort of thing they’d do, if they thought they could get away with it. They probably could.

“We have a clear path to the walls,” Wells reported. “We can get inside …”

“We have to drive the others away first,” I snapped. We had cleared the way, true, but the other two warlords were already digging in. In some ways, I’d even outsmarted myself. If I attacked one warlord, the other would fall on my rear. I’d have to throw up defences of my own – I’d just proved the defences I’d captured were inadequate – before I could even consider resuming the offensive. “Did they take down all the bridges?”

“Yes, sir,” Wells said. “All of them.”

I nodded, curtly. They’d knocked down a handful of bridges when they’d laid siege to the city, but left the rest in place until now. I suspected they’d planned to demolish them if the shit hit the fan, perhaps even mined them … more against their rivals than my army. Good thinking on their part, whatever the reasoning behind it. My army would either have to pass through the city to attack them, which would weaken the lines, or pull back and cross the river some miles away.

I might have risked leaving a bridge in place and daring the enemy to attack across it, I mused as we finished clearing the trenches, but I know better than to risk a repeat of the Battle of Stirling Bridge …

My lips twisted. If the English had chosen the battlefield a little more carefully, they might have won.

The shooting slowly died away as both sides took stock of the situation. Renweard’s men were still running, back to the distant supply camps. I ordered the mounted infantry to give chase, harrying them all the way back to safety, and prepped two companies for an assault on the camps themselves.  They were quite some distance, and probably heavily defended, but if we could take them out we’d have an excellent chance of starving the remaining enemy armies and winning outright. I made a mental note to pick up and interrogate as many deserters as possible, to see how far my black propaganda had spread. It was quite possible Eldred and Hlaford were already at each other’s throats.

“Sir,” a messenger reported. “The other warlords are holding their lines.”

They don’t have much choice, I reflected. If they started a retreat, I’d catch them in the open … in terrain that gave me every advantage. Worst, perhaps, I’d be able to draw on the city’s defenders as well as the men I’d raised on my estates. We’re caught in a death match now.

I visualised the map, again. I’d need to send troops through the city. It would be difficult to pull it off, now the enemy was starting to bombard the city itself, but it was the best of a set of bad choices. But my men needed rest too, and resupply … it might have been easier if the warlords had risked everything and tried to storm the city, but they’d refused to take the chance. I supposed it made them smarter than Hitler. If he hadn’t ordered his armies to take Stalingrad city block by city block, he might have gotten his men out in time to escape the trap and prolong the war.

The thought nagged at my mind. “Take a message to Captain Jackson,” I ordered. “I want him to extend the picket lines as much as possible, then send scouts beyond the lines.”

“Aye, sir.”

I frowned as the messenger hurried off. I had no clear idea of just how many men the three warlords could raise, certainly when they didn’t have to worry about their lands being pillaged by their rivals when they took their troops north. My calculations were really nothing more than estimates, the exact figure relying on factors I knew to be difficult, if not impossible, to account for. How many of their vassals had they pressed into service? How many mercenaries had they hired? How many serfs had they forced into the ranks? Did they have enough men left, I asked myself, to trap me in my own trap?  I didn’t know.

My army needs to remain mobile, I thought. If they pin us down, it’s curtains.

The minutes ticked slowly by, each one feeling like an hour. My gunboats continued to trade fire with the shore batteries, although the enemy gunners were getting better at estimating where the boat was going to be and aiming their guns accordingly. One timberclad was hit hard enough to trigger an explosion, blowing the ship to hell; another was holed beneath the waterline and sank rapidly, so quickly her crew barely had a chance to escape.  Renweard’s men continued their flight, running as if the hounds of hell were after them. I hoped they’d keep running for hours, long enough to remove themselves from the equation completely. It wasn’t going to happen. Someone would take command, eventually, and get the men back into line. Unless Renweard really was dead …

Horst returned, his face tired but happy. “They beat us off the supply dumps,” he said. “They’re pretty heavily defended.”

“We’ll have to deal with them,” I said. My vague idea sharpened into something actually useable. We’d attack the dumps, forcing the warlords to decide between marching to defend them – and being caught in the open – or letting me steal their supplies. Either way, we’d come out ahead. “How are your men holding up?”

“Well enough, but tired.” Horst rubbed his forehead. “We’re not in any state to fight, really we’re not.”

He pressed on quickly, even though he knew I didn’t shoot the bearer of bad news.  “We could call on troops from the city …?”

“We might have to,” I agreed. All men had their breaking point, and mine had been pushed to the limit and beyond. There came a time – always – when they just couldn’t go on, no matter how much money you offered them. “But they’re not ready to take the field.”

I shook my head. “Get some rest, under cover,” I ordered. “The city troops can deal with clearing the trenches.”

Horst smiled, rather dryly. “What did those poor bastards ever do to you?”

“It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it,” I said. The air was cooler here, but the bodies would start to decompose very quickly anyway … and then we’d have problems. Far too many sieges had been ended because of disease, not because the defenders held out long enough to be relieved or broke the enemy lines themselves. “And besides, I want them to look for Renweard’s body.”

“If he’s really dead,” Horst said. He didn’t sound any more convinced than I. “If.”

I nodded and dismissed him. Renweard had no children, as far as I knew, although it was quite possible he had a bastard or two hidden in the shadows. Noble boys were surrounded by girls who just couldn’t say no … hell, girls who threw themselves at the boys in hopes of getting a pension if they got pregnant. It had always struck me as a dangerously insane tactic – most local noblewomen were no more welcoming to bastards than Catelyn Stark – but it seemed to work. Sometimes. A handful of bastards were even legitimised if there was no legitimate heir.

Fallon joined me, ten minutes later, looking tired and beautiful. “The ditch-diggers are already hard at work,” she said. “They were surprisingly enthusiastic too.”

“They want to loot the corpses,” I reminded her. I wanted to take her to bed – and I knew, even as I had the thought, that I was too tired to perform. Perhaps it would be better to catch a quick nap, then return to the field. My subordinates could handle the army for a few hours. I sighed and put the thought aside. “That’s going to cause problems later.”

I shrugged. It was something for a later day.

“We also got a message from Helen,” Fallon added. “She wants the prisoners – and a conference.”

It was hard to keep my face blank. I’d grown used to being so far from Roxanna that my word was law, that even the strongest commands from such a distance were really nothing more than suggestions. Now … Helen was smart enough not to try to take command herself, as unfair as it was, but her courtiers would expect her to give me orders I’d have to obey. She was smarter than all of Official Washington combined – the bar wasn’t set very high – yet …

“The prisoners will have to be interrogated,” I said. Why did Helen want them? Most were common soldiers, not aristocrats or commanders. Cuthbert was the highest-ranked prisoner we had and I’d left him back at the depot. One way or the other, he’d outlived his usefulness. “And then …”

We were interrupted by Fallows, looking as tired as the rest of us. “Sir, a messenger just arrived,” he said. “From Eldred.”

I clenched my teeth as I made my way to the edge of the lines. The messenger hadn’t been blindfolded … someone was going to pay for that, even if they were too tired and worn to take even basic precautions. The white flag he carried was supposed to guarantee the messenger wasn’t a spy, but I had no doubt he was memorising everything he saw to relay to his superiors. Oddly, his clothes were surprisingly common. A mustang, a commoner knighted for service to his master? It happened. Sometimes.

You can talk, I reflected. What were you when you arrived here?

The messenger didn’t waste any time beating around the bush. “My master sends a message, on behalf of himself and his allies,” he said, without the flowery gibberish and flattery I’d come to expect from aristocratic messengers. The latter was so absurd I mentally cringed every time I heard it. Even Saddam hadn’t had his ass kissed so brazenly. “He wants to parley.”

OUT NOW: The Land of Always Summer (Mystic Albion II)

The sequal to The Stranded!

Centuries ago, the magic left our world … and the magicians went with it, stepping into the Gates to Mystic Albion and leaving OldeWorld – Earth – forever.  Since then, the two worlds have remained separate, until now.

When they found themselves trapped on Earth, Richard, Brains and Helen befriended Janet and Steve, a brother and sister growing up in a poverty-stricken estate, and taught them the basics of magic, before discovering that sinister forces were slowly moving against them. Now, Richard and Brains have taken Janet back to Mystic Albion to study magic, while Helen and Steve remained behind to track down the rogue magicians and stop them before it is too late.

But as Janet struggles to get used to practicing magic, and living in a whole new world, it becomes clear that the two worlds are not finished with each other yet, and dark forces are lurking at the edge of the gate, ready to bring them into conflict once more …

Read a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CAN, Amazon AUS, Amazon Universal and Books2Read.

Queenmaker 22-23

Chapter Twenty-Two

An hour later, I addressed the war council.

“I fucked up,” I admitted, honestly. There was no point in trying to hide it. “I underestimated the other warlords.”

In hindsight, the mistake was obvious. Cuthbert had threatened Damansara, in a bid to force me to bring my army north. It worked out in his favour, no matter what I did. If I came to defend the city, he’d have a chance to wipe me out; if I abandoned the city, it would force the city fathers to surrender and prove to everyone else that Helen’s security guarantees were worthless. Damansara would become another occupied city, like Houdon, and her factories would fall into enemy hands. If I hadn’t taken the offensive so quickly, it might have worked out for him. As it was, it had given the other warlords a chance to take the offensive themselves.

We didn’t think they could move so quickly, I thought. Or that their alliance would actually hold together long enough to let them mount a joint offensive.

I cursed under my breath. The warlords didn’t like each other very much – and how could they? They were all fighting for the crown, for the divine right of monarchy as well as the brute force of their armies. If a warlord took possession of Helen, in all senses of the word, his peers would see him as a lethal threat to their positions and gang up on him. I wondered, idly, how they planned to solve the problem this time. Whatever they did, I doubted it would last very long. But I might not live long enough to see it fall apart.

“We have a major problem,” I said. “We are up north, hundreds of miles from the capital, while they are moving their armies into position to either storm the ramparts or simply lay siege to the castle long enough to force the defenders to surrender. We are badly, very badly, out of position. Worse, we are cut off from our supply lines.”

I watched the despair and despondency run through the room and cursed again. Many of my officers weren’t aristos, but commoners … commoners whose families were now under threat. The aristos might assume their families would be held for ransom, if they were captured; the commoners had no such assurance. If the city was stormed, the streets would run red with blood. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past the warlords to make damn sure much of the population was slaughtered. They’d had too many ideas, over the past few months, about the proper relationship between the government and the governed. They wouldn’t do as they were told any longer.

“We have to act fast,” I added. It was true in any case, but I needed them working rather than thinking. It wouldn’t be long before someone decided to betray me in hopes of saving his family. The more they worked, the harder it would be to organise a conspiracy. “We are going to march back to Roxanna and lift the siege.”

Captain Withal leaned forward. “Sir, if we perform a forced march all the way back to the city the men will be in no state to fight when we get there.”

I allowed myself a wry smile. Captain Withal had been an arrogant aristo, when I’d taken command of the army and set about reforming it into something that could actually fight. He’d changed, a lot more than he – perhaps – realised. He was already on my mental list for promotion, and I bumped him up a couple of slots. There weren’t many aristos who’d acknowledge their men had limitations …

“No,” I agreed. I tapped the map on the table. “Luckily, we have two advantages. First, we have the supplies we moved to Damansara. The railway line might have been cut – if it hasn’t, I’ll be astonished – but we are not short of supplies. Second, we have supplies at the forward base here. The warlords have not – yet – captured or destroyed it.”

We didn’t know we were going to have the base, until we secured the castle and railway bridge, I thought. It hadn’t been part of my original plans. But will it remain untouched long enough for us to get there first?

“There are other possibilities, if that changes before we get there,” I continued. I let my voice rise gradually, building the atmosphere. “Regardless, I intend to force march to the city, lift the siege and bring the warlords to battle. They may have the numbers, this time, but we are fighting for our homes, our families, and our right to be free. We have beaten every warlord we have faced, because we are fighting for our people, not for a warlord’s right to bully everyone within reach. We are experienced fighters; they bully people who can’t fight back

“We will march to the city, challenge them to a fight and kick their asses so hard they’ll never recover!”

I lowered my voice. “Assemble the troops,” I ordered. It was lucky we’d moved so lightly. “We march in an hour. Dismissed.”

The council stood and left the tent. I watched them go, feeling cold. I’d done my best to pretend confidence – and in a straight fight, I would have bet on my men – but it was clear I had made a mistake. We were dangerously exposed, particularly if the city fell before we returned home. Or we lost our supplies … the country wasn’t hostile, not yet, but it was a grim rule of conflict that no one liked a loser. There hadn’t been time to mop up all Cuthbert’s vassals, let alone ensure the local commoners and peasants had enough firepower and confidence to keep them coming back. I had the nasty feeling we’d be coming back soon enough. Too many people would sit on the fence, when the news spread, to keep our gains under control.

And someone might betray me, I thought, again. Host and Fallows were reliable, although they both had wives back home. They were too lowly for a warlord to notice, normally, but now … who knew? If their wives were threatened, what would they do? The other commanders had relatives in danger too … Who’s it going to be?

I grimaced, despite myself. Back home, I’d had the chain of command backing me up. My authority had been legal, as well as personal. Here … it was just personal. I wasn’t even a member of the local aristocracy. If my officers lost faith in me, or thought their families were at risk, they might turn against me. I’d seen it happen, back home, to insurgent leaders who lost the confidence of their followers The outcome was rarely pretty.

My eyes lingered on the map. There was no way to avoid the simple fact I’d been out-smarted. My rival – I wondered, idly, which warlord had managed to think outside the box – had put me in a position that forced me to dance to his tune, pretty much the same thing I’d done to Cuthbert. He might even be quietly gloating about Cuthbert’s defeat … if he even knew. My army had force-marched north at astonishing speed, moving into a military vacuum. For all I knew, he thought Cuthbert was still tying me down.

We’ll have to try and ensure he keeps thinking that, I told myself. If he doesn’t expect us to return so quickly …

My mind raced. A year ago, Roxanna had been practically defenceless. The Royal Guard couldn’t have held the lines, such as they were, and the civilian population would have been helpless.  Now, the city had proper walls – and other defences – and the civilians had something to lose. Any warlord who tried to take the city in a hurry would risk losing his army, losing so many men his rivals would put a knife in his back and finish him off … hell, even if they did take the city, they’d be left with the problem of securing the peace. What would they do? Keep Helen as a puppet? Force her to marry one of them? Or … or what?

“They won’t risk taking the city unless they think they have no choice,” I muttered. “The trick is to avoid driving them to desperate measures until it is too late.”

I frowned. In theory, Helen could order me to stand down and surrender. In practice, I was pretty sure she’d never willingly give such an order. She’d have no hope of anything, certainly not freedom, if the warlords won. The best she could hope for was being locked up in some isolated tower and that wasn’t going to happen, not as long as she could be married off to someone who’d keep her under control … I snorted in dark amusement. Helen was tough. She’d make her would-be husband pay for daring to lay a hand on her.

Fallon cleared her throat. I’d almost forgotten she was there. “Can we get back in time?”

I looked at the map again, silently calculating the odds. The map wasn’t very good, to say the least, but I had marched back and forth so many times, over the landscape, that I had a very good feel for the terrain. It was going to be painful, no doubt about it … no, it was going to be an utter nightmare. I would have killed for a few hundred trucks … hell, while I was wishing, I’d kill for a few hundred tanks. Or even a dozen. The locals were a long way from producing anything resembling a tank themselves …

… Or were they?

I put that thought aside for later consideration and met her eyes.  “It’ll be tight,” I admitted. I wasn’t going to lie to my future wife, and the mother of my child. “We can do it, if we push hard.”

Fallon made a face, but nodded. “How can I help?”

I smiled, tiredly. “Can you and the other magicians open a portal back home?”

“No.” Fallon shook her head. “We don’t have anyone skilled enough to open a portal, even for a few seconds. If we hired more powerful magicians …”

“If they agreed to take our money,” I said. It had never been easy for kings to hire the really powerful magicians. Most seemed to think serving monarchs was beneath them, or that conflicts between mundanes – I supposed it was slightly less insulting than muggles – had nothing to do with the magical world. “Could we trust them if they did?”

Fallon shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “But the warlords will have the same problem.”

I nodded curtly. We were a long way from the Blighted Lands, and it was hard to tell which stories were reasonably accurate and which were nothing more than utter nonsense, but everyone seemed to agree an army had stepped through a set of portals and into a necromancer’s backyard. I liked the idea of being able to take an army into the enemy’s rear myself, but … it was just another thing I didn’t have.  Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

They can’t do it to us either, I told myself. One thing was clear. The invading army hadn’t needed to set up portal crystals at both sides. Unless they’d sneaked through the Blighted Lands … for all I knew, it was possible that was exactly what they’d done, but I had to assume the worst. If the technique becomes common knowledge …

“I need to talk to Cuthbert,” I said. “Go back to the other magicians, tell them they are not to send any messages back to the city, not without my authorisation.”

Fallon blinked. “Why …?”

I grinned. “We’re going to convince the warlords we’re still laying siege to the castle.”

My eyes returned to the map. The warlords hadn’t used chat parchments to coordinate their forces … as far as I knew. I’d be surprised if Cuthbert didn’t have a parchment to chat to his peers, although … he didn’t have magic. The chat parchment would have needed a magician to operate it, to write the messages … my lips quirked. We had taken a bunch of prisoners and if the magician was amongst them …

“The courier network is fucked,” I said. There’d be horses in Houdon and Damansara, of course, but the locals wouldn’t trade with a warlord’s courier. “Assuming a message was sent the moment the castle fell, on horseback, it would take several days – at best – for it to reach the other warlords.”

“Unless they have a magician stationed somewhere nearby,” Fallon pointed out.

I nodded, although I doubted it. The vassals back home had been reluctant to let magicians, even magicians with so little magic they could barely use the chat parchments, into their estates. I didn’t blame them, not really. They didn’t want to be micromanaged by a monarch who lived hundreds of miles away, and didn’t have any real sense of how the estate really worked. I’d found micromanaging maddening myself, back home, and I’d done what I could to make sure my subordinates had enough freedom to do what needed done, without me looking over their shoulder. Cuthbert’s vassals would be even more reluctant to sign up to a chat parchment network, and he’d had far less power to compel them. The last thing he needed was one of his vassals reaching out to Helen, to see if he could switch sides.

“It’s worth a try,” I said. It was quite possible the warlords hadn’t realised we already knew they were on the move, let alone laying siege to the city. It was difficult to account for instant communications, if you had no real experience with them. God knew, the insurgents back home hadn’t realised just how much our satellites and drones could see … not until it was too late. “If we can convince them we’re sitting here, fat and happy and waiting for Cuthbert to concede …”

The thought haunted me as I made my way to the makeshift stockade. Cuthbert had been given a space of his own, a consideration that owed more to his ability to cause trouble rather than respect for his rank. I suspected he was already planning his official complaints. Men of his rank were rarely imprisoned, and if they were they were treated with kid gloves. The prison was more like a glorified hotel room, with room service and everything else a guest could want … save for freedom. Here … he had nothing to complain about, as far as I was concerned.  He’d shown far less considerations for his victims.

His eyes narrowed as I entered. “You heard, then?”

“I had wondered why you were so insistent the castle hold out,” I said. I kept my distance. Cuthbert didn’t look intimidating, not compared to me, but the most dangerous man I’d ever met had looked completely harmless. “A shame you didn’t tell Bravo, right?”

Cuthbert scowled. “That traitorous asshole …”

“A mercenary and a traitorous asshole?” I smirked. “How’ll he ever get a job with a record like that?”

My smile grew wider. Cuthbert had been playing for time … what a shame, I reflected, that he hadn’t bothered to share his plans with Bravo. The mercenaries had assumed they were heading for a futile last stand, or perhaps an undignified death by starvation, and acted accordingly. But he could hardly have risked telling them anything. They might have betrayed him, if they’d still surrendered …

Not that the timing would have worked out any better, I thought, tiredly. But it very nearly worked.

I studied him for a long cold moment. Helen was unlikely to show Cuthbert any mercy. He had committed treason … and lost. His army was broken and scattered, his treasury was in my hands, his vassals were abandoning him and his serfs were rising in revolt … even if we lost the coming battle, Cuthbert was thoroughly screwed. His peers wouldn’t put him back in his place. They’d kill him, then divide his lands between them.

“I have an offer,” I said. “Assist us and your life – and your family – will be spared.”

Cuthbert glowered. “Your mistress will let us live?”

“I’ll give you enough gold to live, then an escort to the nearest border,” I said. “What you do after that is up to you, as long as you never return to Johor. If you do …”

I drew a finger across my throat. “Interested?”

“Maybe,” Cuthbert said. “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

“You don’t,” I said, bluntly. “But you’ve already lost everything that made you a threat.”

Cuthbert reddened. I hid my amusement with an effort. Cuthbert didn’t have a royal bloodline, or anything else he could use to garner support from other kingdoms. Sending him into exile was a calculated risk, but I suspected he’d be unable to return to reclaim what he thought was his. His former vassals would be the first to put him to death, fearing the revenge he’d wreak for betraying him. Helen might not even know he’d returned until long after he was quietly murdered.

“If you refuse to cooperate, you’ll be executed no matter who wins the war,” I reminded him, dryly. “If you cooperate, your life and your family’s lives will be spared.”

He made a face. I suspected I knew what he was thinking. He was no physical coward – I couldn’t blame him for fleeing Houdon – but the thought of losing his children unmanned him. They were all he had now, and they’d be murdered if he refused to cooperate. Helen wouldn’t let them live, not after everything their father had done …

“Fine,” Cuthbert said. His shoulders slumped. It looked genuine, but I intended to keep a very close eye on him anyway. It was unlikely he was loyal to the warlords cause – insofar as they had one – yet better safe than sorry. “What do you want me to do?”

I grinned, and told him.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Is getting him to help a good idea?”

I reminded myself, sharply, that subordinates asking questions wasn’t a bad thing. Horst had known me long enough – he’d been my superior, when we’d first met – to have no qualms about calling me out if he thought I was doing something stupid. But it didn’t help, this time, that I had doubts myself. Cuthbert had good reason not to betray us, true, yet there was no guarantee he wouldn’t. Some men could only be pushed so far before they pushed back, even if it cost them everything. They didn’t care if it killed them, as long as they died with their hands around their enemy’s throat.

“It’s a calculated risk,” I said. The warlords must have met in person – and, according to Cuthbert, used chat parchments to coordinate their operations. They knew each other well enough, I feared, to spot a fake, even if they used magicians to relay their words. The slightest mistake could be disastrous. Using Cuthbert was galling, but better than the alternative. “We don’t want them knowing we’re marching south. Not yet.”

My mood darkened. “And besides, we have his family.”

Horst showed no visible reaction, not entirely to my surprise. The concept of using a man’s family as hostages, with a declared intention to kill them if he stepped out of line, was revolting to me … but just a fact of life on this world. Aristos exchanged hostages all the time, hiding the cold reality of their worlds behind a façade that everyone pretended was real. I wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to carry out my threat, if Cuthbert broke his side of the deal. It was one thing to kill men in combat, quite enough to kill women and children in cold blood. But as long as he believed I would, he wouldn’t test me.

“If you’re sure,” Horst said. “Did he tell you anything useful?”

“Yeah.” Cuthbert had been a gold mine of information, once he’d started talking. The warlords had planned their operations carefully, timing it as best they could. Cuthbert had haggled hard for his share of the booty, in exchange for luring us north, and his peers had promised him Warlord Aldred’s old territories, as well as Damansara. It had to be maddening to know he’d done everything he’d been asked, yet someone else would reap the rewards. “We’ll just have to see what use we can make of it.”

I frowned, inwardly. The warlords had divided the spoils – before even winning the war, something that was going to come back to haunt them – but they hadn’t exchanged hostages or anything else, beyond solemn oaths, to ensure they kept their word. Cuthbert had been vague on precisely what was going to happen to Helen … no matter what, only one of the warlords could marry her. I suspected they hadn’t thought that far ahead. It wasn’t an unreasonable mistake. If they’d given me five years to train and equip the army, I’d have kicked their collective behinds with one hand tied behind my back.

“They don’t trust each other,” I told him. “We can use that against them.”

The thought made me smile as we walked to join the army. It had assembled – with a great deal of grumbling, which I had quietly ignored – and confiscated every horse, wagon and manpowered cart we’d been able to find. It was going to look more than a little ramshackle, I thought, but it was unlikely we were going to face any real opposition until we neared Roxanna. Cuthbert’s men were too scattered and there wasn’t anyone else likely to stand in our way. That might change, if the city fell and everyone else started trying to make deals with the warlords, but for the moment we were reasonably safe. I’d ordered the pickets out anyway, just to be sure. If I was wrong, we might wind up in some trouble.

I kept my face under tight control as I faced the men. They were all volunteers, not unwilling conscripts from aristocratic estates or mercenaries. They were free men, or at least as free as anyone got in this world. Democracy might be a joke, in most places, but they had rights and they’d all chosen to sign up. They couldn’t be ordered around as if they were slaves and yet … I winced, inwardly. Back home, I’d been lucky. I hadn’t had to fear a war in my backyard. My family had never been in danger from the enemy … I wondered, numbly, what I would have done if the Chinese had invaded America, and I’d been forced to retreat with the army, leaving my family behind. I’d read a book with that premise, years ago. It had been absurd … here, it wasn’t. Far too many of my men had family under siege. I couldn’t blame the men for worrying about their safety.

“They think we’re stuck here, out on a limb,” I said. It would have been true, if Cuthbert had held out a few more days. “They think they have us beat, that they can take the city and reap the rewards. And they’re wrong!

“We are going to march back to the city, we’re going to kick their asses and we’re going to end this war once and for all,” I continued. “It is time to march!”

The army started to move, slowly. I turned and led the way, part of the lead group. Behind me, the section leaders were organising the remainder of the army, trying to keep the infantry in some kind of formation. The pickets were spreading out ahead of us, watching for possible threats. I’d sent messengers ahead, to Houdon and Damansara, ordering them to prepare supplies for the army. I hoped they’d both cooperate. Cuthbert had told me, more than once, that none of the free cities would be allowed to keep any semblance of freedom, once the war was over. They’d been burnt too badly to risk it happening again.

It’s a shame we can’t share his correspondence with the world, I thought. We’d searched Cuthbert’s private files and removed everything, including a number of letters he’d been cautioned to destroy. Not all were particularly interesting – apparently, he’d been writing erotic letters to a handful of young noblewomen – but some of the political messages were dynamite. We can make sure they are printed and distributed, once we no longer need to pretend he’s still under siege.

I glanced back at the castle, wondering if it would still be in our hands when the fighting was over. I’d left a small garrison to man the walls, and protect the wounded, but I couldn’t spare enough men to ensure the castle remained near-invulnerable. There’d been no time to do more, either. The locals had no interest in letting us dictate the shape of the post-war world and I had neither the time nor the inclination to force them to do as I wished. I just hoped they could hold out, if it all went to hell. Given time, I told myself, the spread of modern firearms would make overt tyranny impossible.

A wagon rattled past, a handful of men riding topside. They’d swap places with the marching infantry soon enough, ensuring everyone had a chance to rest while still being on the march. I told myself I would keep marching as long as possible, to make it clear to the men that I wasn’t asking them for anything I was unwilling to ask from myself. I’d have to rest sooner or later, I knew, but … sweat beaded on my forehead as the temperature rose, forcing me to take a swig from my canteen. I hoped the men hadn’t ditched their supplies, or eaten them ahead of time. I’d done the latter myself, as a young recruit, and paid for it.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, I reminded myself. The trick to marching long distances was not to think about just how far you had to go, but to keep picking up your feet and putting them down again. If only we had modern transport …

A horseman cantered up to me. “Sir, the special convoy has split off,” he reported. “They’re on their way.”

“Good.” I was too tired to say anything more. “Resume the patrol.”

I gritted my teeth as I kept walking, trying to set a good example. The special convoy was taking the hostages to a place of relative safety, well away from the army – and Cuthbert. I didn’t think he’d risk doing anything stupid, not when keeping his side of the bargain was his only hope of getting himself and his family out of certain death, but … men couldn’t always be relied upon to do the rational thing. If the hostages were somewhere else, beyond his reach, there’d be no way for him to find and recover them. Probably.

The march went on and on. We stopped to make camp at nightfall – roll call revealed we’d lost surprisingly few men, most of whom trickled in after dark – and resumed the march in the morning. The days started to blur together, even as we stopped near Houdon for our supplies – I was careful to keep most of the army out of sight; I wasn’t convinced we’d wrinkled out everyone who’d collaborated with the occupiers – and headed onwards. We’d be back later, if we won the coming battle.

Without the warlords, it should be easy to lay down more railway lines, I told myself. Next year, we’ll be able to move troops to the nearest railhead, rather than marching from one end of the country to the other.

I kept the army at a safe distance – again – as we reached Damansara. The city was as loyal as we could wish, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t enemy spies within the ever-growing population. Cuthbert wasn’t the only warlord who had designs on the city. They wanted the factories, and the skilled craftsmen … or, perhaps, simply to steal their designs and pass them on. In hindsight, exchanging a cottage industry for a semi-modern assembly line system might not have been the best decision, although it had saved our bacon only a few short months ago. If nothing else, it had encouraged the locals to stand and fight for their newly-gained wealth.

“We’ve heard little from Roxanna, just rumours,” Rupert Drache told me. We’d met at the garrison outside the city. I wasn’t prepared to risk going inside the walls, not now. “The railway line has very definitely been cut.”

“And no one is trying to fix it,” I muttered, darkly. The railway was primitive, by any reasonable standards, but it was designed to be easy to repair. A lone blacksmith could hammer out replacement components in a few hours, if he wished. “Do you have any idea where the break is?”

“No,” Rupert said. “If they wanted to slow you down, though, they’d take down one of the bridges.”

I nodded in agreement. Replacing a bridge would be tricky, if not impossible without an engineering crew. The Union had made the process an exact science, during the Civil War, but I hadn’t had time to do anything of the sort. And that meant …

“I’ll send scouts ahead, see if we can sniff out the breach,” I said. “What’s the word on the streets?”

“Right now, everyone is pleased you defeated Cuthbert,” Rupert said, in a tone that suggested quite a few people were displeased. Lord Gallery would probably be quite happy if Cuthbert had blown my brains out, even if it meant the city falling to another warlord. “But that might change if they work out what’s happening down south.”

“We’ll skip the party this time,” I said. The city fathers would be relieved, even though they wouldn’t show it openly. “We’ll be back after we win.”

Rupert smiled. “I’m not supposed to let you have any of the supplies,” he said. “So I’m going to sit in my office and whistle very loudly while you take them.”

I smiled back, then hurried to organise the transfer. The supplies belonged to us … mostly. I wrote a formal receipt for everything we’d taken that wasn’t, with a promise to pay in gold and silver. Damansara would hardly be starving or defenceless, in any case. There were so many firearms on the streets I suspected the city fathers were quite nervous, not without reason. Their rule relied on a monopoly of force and they no longer had it. It was just a matter of time before someone took his gun and shot an aristo in the streets.

And some would deserve it too, I reflected. Rupert was a good man, and Helen was at least trying to be a good monarch, but they had their limits. They wouldn’t do anything that involved giving up any of their power … and the others were even worse. If some kindly soul assassinated Lord Gallery …

We resumed the march two hours later, after Rupert and I had agreed on a cover story. I hoped he wouldn’t get in too much trouble, when the city fathers found out what we’d done. They might throw the book at him, or they might be quietly relieved. If Helen won, she’d be grateful; if the warlords won, they’d blame everything on Rupert. I hoped he had the sense to run if the warlords did win … it wouldn’t save the city, but it might save him.  Or so I hoped.

The march got harder. The lands between Damansara and Roxanna had always been little more than scrubland, even with the new-fangled irrigation measures, and there were few places to stop for water. The sun beat down ever harder, a handful of men falling out of line with sunstroke or simple exhaustion … some were probably faking it, I thought, although their comrades were very good at sniffing it out and handling it themselves. I didn’t really approve of barracks room justice, but in this case I was prepared to turn a blind eye. If too many infantry faked sunstroke, real victims would go untreated until it was far too late.

“The line is clear until the supply depot,” Horst reported. He was switching between riding and marching, with the rest of us. “Where did they cut it?”

They might not have cut the line at all, I thought, coldly. If they just sealed off the city, they could keep any locomotive from leaving …

“Perhaps very close to the city,” I said. “They’ll want the railway for themselves, if they win.”

My blood felt cold, despite the heat. The modern world had too many tools for population control … and far too many were dangerously subtle, so subtle it was difficult to be sure they were being used. Shoving a gun in someone’s face had the advantage of being blatantly obvious; shadow-banning and deplatforming were often subtler forms of tyranny. Here … I wondered, suddenly, what would happen if the warlords won. They’d build up the railway network and use it to ship troops from trouble spot to trouble spot, crushing revolts before they could turn into rebellions. The world had been changing before my arrival – the mysterious Emily had laid the groundwork for massive social change, good and bad alike – but there was no guarantee of a happy ending. The bad guys might win instead.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever, I reminded myself. But even the KGB got tired of keeping the boot on indefinitely.

I shivered. Iran had still been going strong, when I’d been swept into a whole new world. Saudi Arabia was still a going concern, despite vast numbers of pundits predicting its collapse into chaos or theocracy … even more of a theocracy. Communist China, too, had been on the rise. We’d all assumed we’d be fighting the Chinese by now … and perhaps we would have, if 9/11 hadn’t started a very different war. I wondered just what was going on, back home, then shrugged and dismissed the thought. I’d spoken to a dozen magicians and none of them even knew about alternate worlds, let alone how to travel from one to the other. This world was going to be my home for the rest of my life.

And if the warlords win, I won’t slip into the darkness, I promised myself. I had catches of money in hidden places, enough to fight an insurgency if I had no other choice. I’ll take them on and make them pay.

I breathed a sigh of relief as the depot came into sight, unmolested by our enemies. There was no way to be sure they didn’t know we were coming, but … even if they did, they had to have overestimated how long it would take us to get home. Their men were unwilling slaves, prone to deserting the moment their superior’s back was turned; my men were volunteers who knew what was at stake. No matter the enemy’s numbers, I would always bet on free men to carry the day … particularly once we started the psychological warfare offensive.

“Order the men to fall out and rest,” I said, quietly. The section leaders would have to organise the supplies, and distribute them to the men, but the common soldiers could have a quick nap. “And then get the pickets out, sweeping the countryside. I want to know where they are before they realise we’re here.”

I looked at the depot and smiled. A single locomotive was sitting on the tracks, waiting for orders. I guessed the crew had joined the guards, rather than head onwards or risk returning to the city. Lucky they hadn’t, I told myself. If they’d been caught and interrogated, the enemy would have discovered and stolen – or destroyed – the supplies.

My lips quirked.  I had had an idea.

Queenmaker 20-21

Chapter Twenty

The plan had been very simple.

I had left much of my army buttoned up in Damansara. It was the closest thing to a modern professional army on the surface of this new world, and so they’d had no trouble holding the city, a problem made easier by Cuthbert’s reluctance to risk massive casualties taking the walls and forcing the city to surrender. When Cuthbert had lifted the siege, they’d given him all the time he needed to get moving, then deployed and followed him at a safe distance. I doubted Cuthbert had realised he was being shadowed. My troops knew how to hide. They also knew how to pick their moment.

“Hold the line,” I snapped. We were the anvil – my army was the hammer. “Let them break against us.”

The enemy line started to come apart as their commanders realised they’d put themselves in a killing ground. They were too close to the wall to break contact and too far away to take the city before the trap closed … really, it was already too late.  Chaos and confusion reigned supreme. I saw a trumpeter sounding the retreat, then get cut down by an aristocrat desperately trying to rally the lines. The dumb bastard hadn’t realised – not yet – that the trap had already closed. It hadn’t come off perfectly – I’d hoped to trap the enemy army in a cauldron and force them to surrender – but it had come off well enough. Their discipline shattered completely as the aristos galloped away, surrounded by their bodyguards, leaving the common soldiers to their fate. The mercenaries retreated in somewhat better order. I didn’t blame them. They knew what would happen to them if they fell into my hands.

I couldn’t stop the troops from lynching them, even if I wanted to try, I reminded myself. It went against the grain to let my men slaughter helpless prisoners, but …  If they have any sense, they’ll keep running until they cross the border and never come back.

“They’re breaking,” Alonzo observed. He spat. “Cuthbert didn’t stay to surrender?”

I shook my head. The warlord knew better than to surrender. There was no way Helen would leave him with any power and influence, even if she let him keep his life. A lesser aristo might be ransomed, or traded, but not a warlord. Helen wanted Cuthbert dead and I couldn’t blame her. But that meant we’d have to track him down and bring him to justice.

Unless he flees too, I thought. It wasn’t impossible, but it struck me as unlikely. Cuthbert was going to lose his lands, his troops, and just about everything else that had made him a threat to his monarch. He didn’t even have a bloodline that would make him a suitable puppet king for one of our neighbours. If he’s smart, he’ll pack up as much loot as he can carry and fun for his life. If …

I glanced at Horst. “When there’s a gap in the line, deploy a company of mobile infantry to harry the retreat,” I ordered. “Take prisoners, if possible, but keep them on the run.”

Horst nodded, curtly. “Aye, sir.”

Alonzo coughed.  “You think he can recover from this?”

“I don’t want to give him the chance,” I said. Personally, I suspected Cuthbert was thoroughly screwed. His vassals were quite likely to turn on him in the hope Helen would leave them with something, if they grovelled at her feet. It would take time to raise another army – if he could – and I had no intention of letting him have the time. “Better to put an end to it now, rather than let him come back again.”

My thoughts darkened as the last of the fighting died away. It had been foolish, to say the least, not to convince the Germans they’d been defeated on the battlefield in the First World War. Or to let Saddam survive in 1991. Or any other campaign that had been called off before it could secure a lasting victory, or failing to win the peace after winning the war. If Reconstruction hadn’t failed so badly … I was grimly determined that mistake wasn’t going to be repeated here. By the time I was done, the local aristocracy’s power base would be minimal and the commoners would be in control. They’d be loyal to their queen, not to their feudal master.

“Get the prisoners sorted out,” I ordered. “Separate the aristos from the commoners; get the wounded to the medics … ah, the chirurgeons. Remind the men not to loot – we’ll recover anything obviously stolen, and try to get it back to its rightful owners, but otherwise the common soldiers are to keep their property.”

Alonzo gave me an odd look. “Don’t you think they’ll try to bribe their way out?”

“We won’t be keeping the commoners very long,” I said. We didn’t have the supplies to keep them as prisoners, and I wasn’t going to cut their throats to keep from having to feed them. “They can go back to their homes, after swearing an oath never to take up arms against us again. The aristos, on the other hand … we’ll send them to the capital. The queen will deal with them.”

And any captured mercenaries will die, I thought coldly. They won’t live long enough to beg for mercy.

I put the thought out of my head as I walked down to the battlefield to visit the wounded. It was a gruesome sight – magical healers could work wonders; chirurgeons were little better than sawbones from the civil war – but I had no choice. Soldiers needed to see their commanding officers cared about them or morale would fall straight into the crapper. We’d won a great victory, true, but what did that matter to a man who’d lost his leg and was all too aware he was going to wind up a helpless cripple, begging on the streets? I had taken the first steps towards creating jobs and careers for wounded men, rather than abandoning them to their fates, yet … it wasn’t going to be enough. We really needed more magical healers.

And the money to pay them, my thoughts added darkly. Magicians were far from cheap. Even a simple painkilling potion was expensive … I wished, not for the first time, I knew how to make morphine from scratch. Hell, if I’d known I’d be coming here, I’d have spent years swotting up on everything from basic machinery to primitive medicine. If I had a modern doctor with me …

I chose not to dwell on the prospects as we moved from wounded man to wounded men. The chirurgeons were already triaging, trying to save the men who could be saved while leaving the fatally-wounded to die. The local womenfolk were flooding into the makeshift tent and doing what they could to assist, but there were just too many wounded. A chirurgeon hurried up to me to give a report; I dismissed him before he had a chance to open his mouth. I’d get the figures later, when the crisis had died down. Right now, it was more important to save those who could be saved.

It was hard not to feel sick, as I spoke to a handful of wounded men to offer what little comfort I could. The medical tent was a nightmare. It was worse than anything I’d ever seen back home, where there were doctors who knew what they were doing … I swallowed hard as I saw a chirurgeon perform a hasty amputation, then looked away as I realised a young man had been unmanned. His screams grew louder and louder until a chirurgeon gave him a sleeping potion. I doubted the poor bastard would feel any better in the morning.

“We’ll do what we can for your wounded,” Alonzo said. I heard what he didn’t say and smiled bitterly. “But what about the rest of your men?”

I forced myself to think as we stepped out of the tent and headed back into the city. Alonzo and his people would be grateful, of course, but they wouldn’t be sorry to see us go. We weren’t an occupying army, yet we could easily become one at the drop of a hat. Hell, our mere presence would drain food stockpiles and provide fertile ground for incidents, once the thankfulness wore off. We had won the battle only an hour or two ago and we had already outstayed our welcome.

“We’ll resupply, then get on the march tomorrow,” I said. I would sooner have been underway before nightfall, but my men needed a rest and a chance to be feted as heroes. They wouldn’t be paying for their drinks tonight. I just hoped there wouldn’t be any clashes between them and the locals. I’d made it clear, time and time again, that I expected them to treat the civilians well, but alcohol and horny young men was a very bad combination indeed. “Make sure you rebuild your defences. We could still lose.”

Alonzo gave me an odd look, then shrugged. I wondered what he was thinking. Houdon had been independent, technically, but that independence hadn’t lasted long once Cuthbert decided he wanted the city. Defeating the warlords would make the monarchy stronger, strong enough to impose its will on the free cities. Letting Houdon rebuild its defences would go a long way towards building trust between crown and people, although there were limits. Cuthbert had been desperate. A royal commander with a secure supply line and more time could have taken the city, after starving the population into surrender.

Fallon joined us, looking tired. “We got a message from First Company,” she said. “The warlord and his lifeguards” – bodyguards, I mentally translated – “collected men and horses from a village garrison, then continued to flee.”

I frowned. “How many men?”

“The scouts spotted at least twenty,” Fallon said. “The CO reported the runaways also swapped horses. He couldn’t find any new steeds himself.”

“Ouch,” I said, mildly. There were limits to how far – and how fast – horses could gallop before they had to rest.  Cuthbert was going to draw ahead of my men, and stay ahead, unless he got very unlucky. My men couldn’t keep up the pursuit indefinitely. “As long as he stays on the run …”

Alonzo chucked, harshly. “Was he planning for his own defeat?”

“All possibilities must be prepared for,” I said, mildly.

It was possible … it was also possible he’d set up a messenger station in the town, rather than planning for a hasty retreat. The horses he’d stationed there to ensure couriers could keep galloping for hours, swapping steeds every few miles or so, could easily be used for a flight from danger. Not that it mattered. My propaganda would make it clear Cuthbert had ran, abandoning his troops to bring his wife and family the news of his own defeat … by the time the news, and mocking songs, reached his lands, the story would have grown in the telling. People would believe he’d fled from his bed, as naked as ever he was born, to save himself from capture.  I’d make sure of it.

We kept walking, inspecting the damaged walls and trench works before making our way towards the makeshift POW camp. The common soldiers – the unwounded, at least – had already been pressed into service, helping to clear the bodies from the trenches and dig mass graves while my troops kept a careful eye on them. I felt a pang of guilt as I saw the bodies stacked up, ready to be dumped into the pit. They should be carried home, so their families could say goodbye properly, but there was no way we could keep the bodies from rotting before it was too late. We just didn’t have the magic to spare. The locals, at least, could be given to their families, although some bodies were too badly mutilated to be recognisable.

“We could always keep the men as labourers,” Alonzo mused.

I shook my head. “You’d have to let them inside the walls for that.”

My mood darkened again as we entered the stockade. The makeshift POW camp was insecure – I could have busted out easily – although the guards had made it clear they had precisely zero respect for the aristocrats and would happily break bones to keep them from escaping. The aristocratic prisoners started babbling the money they saw me, requesting private interviews or insisting – loudly – that their families would pay whatever ransom I demanded, as long as I let them keep their heads on their shoulders. I wasn’t too surprised. The brave aristos were already dead and the smart ones had fled … the ones left behind were the dregs. I doubted Cuthbert would waste time bothering to rescue them, even if he could. Their families might even refuse to pay the ransom.

“Sir,” Captain Grimes said. He was a short stubby man, an aristocrat born on the wrong side of the blanket, who’d served Helen’s father before she’d taken the throne. He had a fancy and long-winded title that, somewhat to my amusement, boiled down to gaoler. He was also loyal … I’d been assured. I suspected he wasn’t above a little corruption, but I could let that pass as long as he behaved himself elsewhere. “We have fifty-seven men of rank in the stockade. What do you want to do with them?”

“We’ll leave them here, for the moment, then take them back to face the queen when we’re done,” I said, curtly. I doubted we’d captured anyone really important – Grimes would have told me if we had – but it was worth checking. “Anyone interesting?”

“Not really.” Grimes looked as if he had bitten into something foul. “They were troop leaders, not …”

I nodded in understanding. “We’ll let Her Majesty decide their fate,” I said. “Put together a complete list of prisoners, then make sure they remain in custody until we return home.”

Alonzo nudged me. “You don’t want to let them pay the ransoms?”

“No.” I shook my head. In theory, I could grant their parole and send them home to collect the money … in practice, I suspected their families would send them right back again. Or they’d break their parole. It was supposed to be unthinkable, but I knew from experience that far too many aristos thought promises to commoners had no validity. “We don’t need the headaches it’ll cause.”

Grimes cleared his throat.  “There is another problem, sir,” he said. “We captured thirty mercenaries. What do we do with them?”

I blinked in surprise. “How did they get captured?”

“The leader did some fast talking when they were cornered, and offered a massive bribe,” Grimes said. “Their captors took everything they had, then marched the prisoners to the stockade.”

“I want a few words with their captors,” I said, darkly. I had expected any captured mercenaries to be finished off, rather than taken prisoner. “The bribes can go in the common fund.”

“Yes, sir,” Grimes said. He led us to an isolated part of the stockade, letting us see the prisoners. “What do you want done with them?”

I said nothing as I studied the captives. They’d been placed in cangues, to humiliate as much as to ensure they remained captive. They hadn’t been roughed up too badly, somewhat to my surprise, but … I cursed under my breath. They were nothing more than thugs, wearing outfits that would have made them look silly – on the battlefield – if I hadn’t known what they symbolised. Mercenaries fought for money, not for their monarch or a cause or anything remotely worthwhile. And they were the most hated people in the world. A lone mercenary who fell into commoner hands would be lucky if he was only tortured to death.

They’ll try to escape, I thought, coldly. Most monarchs would hesitate to execute mercenaries – they might need their services themselves, one day – but not Helen. She knew better than to trust anyone who fought for money. They know what we intend to do to any captured mercenaries.

“Interesting,” I said. “Did they say why they tried to surrender?”

“They were surrounded,” Grimes said. “They had no choice.”

I shrugged. “Execute them.”

Grimes blinked, then nodded.  “Yes, sir.”

Alonzo looked satisfied. “They deserve no less.”

I nodded, curtly. I had no intention of slaughtering commoner prisoners, or even aristocrats, but mercenaries …? They had already been condemned to death. Even if I had tried to spare them, or ship them back to the capital, they would likely be lynched when my men worked out who the prisoners actually were. And besides, we had to make it clear we hadn’t been bluffing, when we’d outlawed mercenaries. If we let this bunch go, the warlords would have no trouble recruiting more.

It was hard not to feel a little guilty, even though I knew better. Mercenary companies had a great deal in common with street gangs – or terrorists. Their recruits were forced to cross the line – to rape or kill – before they were trusted completely, just to make sure there was no way back. By now, the men in front of me had probably committed hundreds of small atrocities, even war crimes. The rules of war had been a joke to them. They certainly couldn’t claim their protection.

If we’d hanged people who broke the rules back home, there’d be fewer people willing to break them, I told myself. The rules of war meant nothing if they weren’t enforced. Instead, we have people breaking them willy-nilly because they know we won’t hang them.

“We won,” I said, as we turned and walked back into the city. Parties were already breaking out … I saw a local girl kissing a couple of my men and hoped it wouldn’t lead to problems later on, for any of them. Back home, there had been condoms and the pill and everything else.  Here … “Tomorrow, we march.”

Alonzo smiled. I knew he was relieved.

Chapter Twenty-One

We marched out of Houdon the following morning, two hours after dawn.

It was a rather shambolic march. Too many of my men were nursing hangovers, despite stern warnings not to get too drunk and forget themselves. The grumbling was louder than normal, unsurprisingly, but I ignored it. I would have been more worried if there wasn’t any grumbling. It would have suggested trouble was brewing, real trouble. I didn’t want to have to deal with it.

Horst galloped up to me and dropped to the ground. My lips twitched in cold amusement. It was important the men saw me marching, as well as the rest of their officers. My mounted infantry weren’t precisely cavalry – horses no longer ruled the battlefield – and I had no intention of letting them develop the sort of pretensions that would blight their effectiveness, or convince the infantry to leave them in the lurch when they ran into trouble. I had studied a number of historical battles, on this world, and several had been lost – I suspected, reading between the lines – because the infantry hadn’t supported the cavalry. It might have been bad timing, or deliberate malice. I rather feared it was the latter.

“Sir, the enemy has vacated most of his garrisons,” Horst said. “The towns are welcoming us.”

They’d have welcomed Cuthbert too if he’d returned in glory, I thought, coldly. The warlord could have reached the heart of his power by now, well ahead of the news of his defeat. Was he preparing a last stand or … grabbing as much treasure as he could before making a run for it? We can’t trust anyone here, not completely.

“Tell the local headmen to keep their people under control, and to give us some space,” I ordered. There’d be revolts soon, if there weren’t already, and I didn’t want to have to waste time dealing with a succession of petty chiefs and rebel leaders. “And make sure the troops stay out of the towns and villages as much as possible.”

I glanced back at my baggage train, cursing under my breath. We were travelling light – I would have killed for a few hundred trucks, or even a magical portal – and I really didn’t want to piss off the locals. There was nothing to be gained and much to lose, if they decided we were no better than their old master. They might not be able to meet us in the field, but we could wind up in real trouble if they attacked our supply lines. We’d have to live off the land and that would win us precisely no friends at all.

“Yes, sir,” Horst said. “Was there any response from the messengers?”

“It’s too early to hear back,” I reminded him. I’d sent a bunch of couriers to various vassals, pointing out that their warlord had been defeated and it was time to reconsider their positions, but most wouldn’t have gotten the message. Not from us, at least. Cuthbert had taken or slaughtered every horse he could, on his retreat, but I would be astonished if word wasn’t already spreading. “We’ll see if they want to switch sides shortly.”

We pressed on, passing near dozens of towns and villages … most thoroughly locked down or abandoned. I didn’t blame the residents. My troops had a better reputation than most – everyone knew I’d hanged men for rape and looting – but it would be a long time before we enjoyed the prestige of the USMC. Or even the Red Army. I gave orders to leave the habitations strictly alone, even as half my troops rested while the other half forged ahead. Better to sleep in the open, in camps hastily thrown together, than risk alienating the locals.

Fallon caught my eye, during a brief rest period. “Why isn’t he trying to stop us?”

“He’s trading space for time,” I said. It made sense, as a tactic. I suspected it was the only option Cuthbert had, unless he wanted to abandon his lands and flee. “He’ll avoid battle until he can meet us on favourable terrain, if it even exists …”

My lips twisted as I studied the makeshift map. Cuthbert didn’t seem to have worried that much about invasion, certainly not from the south. He’d dotted the land with small castles, designed more for keeping the peasants under control than harassing invaders and forcing them to either reduce the fortresses or leave troops tied down laying siege to the castles. I was surprised he’d trusted his peers not to invade, under the circumstances. A pair of strong castles in the right place could have slowed us down considerably, perhaps even long enough for Cuthbert to raise the forces to take the offensive again.

We can wipe out the tiny castle garrisons as we pass, I thought. Unless there was something special about their design, they couldn’t hope to withstand an assault by trained and experienced soldiers. And the locals can take care of any stragglers.

The thought haunted me as we kept marching, heading deeper and deeper into Cuthbert’s territories. A handful of messengers arrived from various vassals – and others from rebels who had overthrown their masters and now wanted recognition of their rights to the land they’d taken – but others remained ominously quiet. I kept my pickets out, watching and waiting for the first sign of a counteroffensive, half-expecting to encounter an enemy army at any moment. Cuthbert had shot his bolt, I thought, but I could be wrong. If he had more troops than I thought …

Horst shared my apprehensions. “Where are they?”

“Good question,” I said. I had an inkling, suddenly, of how the Germans must have felt when they’d invaded Russia. Cuthbert’s lands were far smaller, but my men were on foot or horseback. But the Germans had been under constant attack and I … was starting to wonder when the penny was going to drop. “Push out more pickets. I want the bridges secured before we head straight into his seat.”

My eyes kept returning to the map as we marched onwards, meeting very little resistance beyond a handful of scouts who fled the moment they saw our pickets. The local peasantry kept their distance, without making any attempt to help or hinder us. My nerves started to grow thin – and my officers spent too much time breaking up fights in the ranks – before we crested the hill and headed towards Cuthbert Castle. I could practically feel the dismay spreading through the ranks. The castle was going to be an utter nightmare to storm.

“Cuthbert didn’t report his improvements to the king,” I quipped. Technically, the warlords had been supposed to clear any construction works with the king before they started; practically, they hadn’t bothered to pay even lip service to a decree from a powerless monarch. “Naughty Cuthbert.”

Chuckles, some harsher than others, ran down the line as I deployed my men. Cuthbert Castle really was going to be a bitch to take. It rested on a rocky hill overlooking the city – it reminded me of Edinburgh Castle – and there was no way we could tunnel under the walls or even get close without being spotted and sniped. He hadn’t rested on his laurels either. He’d evacuated most of the city – he’d called it after himself, naturally – and started digging trenches at the bottom of the mountain. I wished for a bomber, with a heavy bunker-buster or two. A lone bomber could have turned a near-impregnable castle into a death trap.

“Sir,” Horst said. “We have movement.”

I lifted my charmed spectacles as a small party left the castle and made their way down the road towards us. There were four men in the party, carrying a large white flag. My eyes narrowed as they grew closer. They didn’t look like vassals. They looked more like mercenaries.

Horst had the same thought. “Mercenaries?”

“It looks that way,” I said. It was unlikely it was someone’s idea of a disguise. They’d be safer walking through Tel Aviv in a Nazi uniform. “Did he run out of proper messengers?”

“It could be a subtle insult,” Fallon pointed out. “If he’s refusing to send a messenger of proper rank …”

“Or to gourd us into attacking the castle without thinking,” I agreed. I’d put Cuthbert in a trap, forcing him to attack my lines or risk losing everything. He might be trying to return the favour. “Hold position. Let them come to us.”

The group moved closer, hands open to reveal they were unarmed. I didn’t take it for granted – they could have any number of weapons in their outfits, if they didn’t have magic – but I relaxed slightly. Very slightly. It looked as if they wanted to parley.  But why not send a more suitable representative?

“Greetings,” the leader said. He had a rough voice that suggested he was from a very long way away indeed. “I am Bravo, of the Free Blade Company.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” I said. I’d never heard of the Free Blade Company. “Where is your master?”

“In prison,” Bravo said. “We want to trade.”

I blinked. Behind me, I heard Horst gasp. Mercenaries were loyal only as long as they were paid – surprise, surprise – but it was very rare for them to turn on their masters instead of simply abandoning them. There weren’t many rules concerning their behaviour, as far as I knew, yet the few that existed were harshly enforced. The mercenary guilds would blacklist any company that betrayed its master, making it impossible for them to find new employers. Not that they could, in any case. Turning one’s coat tended to be habit-forming.

“We hold the castle,” Bravo pointed out. “We can hold it against you for quite some time.”

“Not for long,” I countered. “I could simply sit here and wait for you to starve.”

I met his eyes. “Get to the point. What do you want?”

Bravo looked back at me, evenly. “We will turn the castle and our prisoners over to you,” he said. “We will even turn over the loot we took during our … service. You can win the war without firing another shot.”

“And in exchange,” I finished, “you want safe passage out of here.”

“Yes,” Bravo said. “We’re not that far from the border. We get out and swear never to return.”

My eyes narrowed. “And what if we refuse?”

“Then we hold the castle as long as it takes,” Bravo said. “How long can you keep your army this far from your mistress?”

He placed a nasty little slant on that word, but I ignored him. The hell of it was that he had a point. Laying siege to the castle was easy enough, on the surface, but the devil was in the details. I couldn’t afford to tie my men down for long, not without real problems. The prospect of getting the castle, and the prisoners, without a fight was incredibly tempting. And yet … I looked at Bravo, wondering how many men he’d killed, or how many women he’d raped, or towns he’d burnt, or … how many atrocities, I asked myself, had he committed in the name of his paymaster?

And Helen sentenced all mercenaries within her kingdom to death, I reminded myself. Is the castle worth the risk of angering her? And many of my supporters?

“I can keep the army together long enough,” I told him. “This isn’t a warlord’s rabble.”

“No,” Bravo agreed. “You have a truly professional army.”

I ignored the compliment. “Here are my terms. You and your men will leave the castle, wearing nothing beyond loincloths. You will be placed in chains and marched to the border, where you will be shoved over. Your camp followers will be given the choice between accompanying you and making a new life for themselves here – if they choose to stay with you, we’ll send them over the border too. Your names will be noted and if we catch you within our country, again, you will be executed on the spot. Do I make myself clear?”

Another mercenary gasped. “What about our loot? And weapons?”

“Spoils of war,” I said, bluntly. The camp followers would be considered property too,  probably. I didn’t care. They were going to be freed and offered a choice … if they wanted to accompany their former owners, that was their problem. The rest of the loot would be returned to its rightful owners or added to the military funds. “Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.”

Bravo glared at me. I wondered just what he’d expected. His master had managed to get him and his company caught in a trap, with no escape route, facing an enemy quite willing to hang mercenaries without bothering with a trial. If there had been a way out, the mercenaries would have taken it and left Cuthbert to his fate … really, I wondered why they hadn’t. They could have left yesterday and been halfway home before my army reached the castle.

“You leave us with very little,” he said, bitterly.

“I leave you with your lives,” I said, sharply. I didn’t want to prolong the debate. “What’s it to be? An undignified surrender or a siege that ends with your deaths?”

The mercenaries muttered amongst themselves for a long moment, then conceded. I wasn’t surprised. They were brave, but hardly stupid. There was nothing to be gained from a futile defence, not now. As long as they were careful, they could get across the border and find a guardpost before the local commoners caught them. I sent Bravo back to arrange the surrender, then sat back and watched as the mercenaries evacuated the castle. They honoured the agreement, save for one man who put a gemstone somewhere the sun didn’t shine. We let him keep it.

Cuthbert was brought to me, after my men searched the castle from top to bottom and sorted out the prisoners. He looked surprisingly short and weedy, for a man who’d wrecked so much havoc, but intelligence and wealth counted for more than brute strength. He’d come quite close to winning, I reflected, and might have won if the timing had worked out a little better …

“This isn’t over,” he snarled. I was surprised he wasn’t pleading for mercy, although it was quite possible he was saving his tears for Helen. He’d be wasting his time if he was – Helen hated the warlords, and would quite happily send them all to the block. “I am a warlord and …”

“No, you’re not,” I told him. Bravo had done us one favour, at least. He’d made sure the warlord’s entire family fell into our hands. “By order of Her Majesty, you and your entire family are stripped of your lands and titles and will be taken back to Roxanna, where you will face her judgement.”

Cuthbert looked oddly relieved, just for a second. I eyed him warily. I’d just pronounced a de facto death sentence. Even if Helen spared his life, he’d be powerless without lands and titles and everything else he’d used to menace the king into compliance. He had so many enemies I’d be surprised if he lasted the year, when they started coming for him. And yet …

I told his guards to take him away – he and his family would remain in chains until they were taken back home – and joined the parties searching the castle and city. Cuthbert had done better than I’d expected,  I noted; his factories were primitive, compared to the ones I’d funded, but there were an awful lot of them. If he’d had a year or two longer, he might have posed a more serious challenge. And yet … I was missing something.

“Get the scribes in here,” I ordered. Cuthbert had kept records, very detailed records. Land deeds, title deeds, every letter he’d sent or received … I suspected it wasn’t a coincidence his secretaries had had their throats cut, before the surrender. Bravo and his mates had probably taken everything relating to their employment, but they might have left something behind. “I want his correspondence assessed as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” Horst said. He paused, clearly unsure if he should say anything more. “Was it wise to let the mercenaries go?”

I snorted.  “They’re practically naked, in a country that hates them,” I said. If they stayed together, they’d probably be fine … but there was no need to discuss it. They had a chance of survival and little else. “And we got the castle in exchange.”

My smile widened as we walked back to the gates. Cuthbert Castle would make a fine fortress, and the city below would help kick-start the industrial revolution into higher gear, once it was clear the workers would be paid a living wage. The rest of the warlord’s lands were already revolting, if the revolt hadn’t already succeeded. I’d destroy the title deeds and replace them with newer ones, making sure everyone knew they had me – and Helen – to thank. They’d have a future …

So would I. Fallon and I would get married, and have our child, and … who knew where we’d go? I wouldn’t be an absentee dad, not this time. I’d make sure to spend time with my son – or daughter, if the child was a girl – and bring them up properly. They wouldn’t become brats, like aristo kids. I’d make sure they knew how to handle themselves, and how to treat others – no matter how high or how low – with respect. And I would be happy.

Fallon ran in, her eyes wide.  “We … we just got a message from home!”

I felt a sudden chill.  “What happened?”

“The other warlords attacked,” Fallon said, gasping for breath. I put out a hand to steady her. “And Roxanna is under siege.”

I swore. The penny had finally dropped.

And I realised, as the implications dawned on me, that I’d been tricked.