Cold Steel

“Stop that,” I said. “Show respect to the elders.”

He paused, taking me in from top to toe with a gaze made narrow by his deepening frown. “You pick a strange way to show respect. Think of what a powerful catch-fire he would have made. But I can’t expect you to understand that.”

He brushed past me. I could have bitten out his throat, but I crushed Camjiata’s words close to my heart, hiding them from everyone else. Win the battle first, or the enemy will triumph. The old order has to go down if we mean to break the chains that shackle us.

At the north-facing window, Drake swore. “The other cold mage is escaped, curse it. Did anyone see him?”

I said nothing.

Boots stamped up the steps, and Captain Tira appeared. Her gaze swept the chamber. She said, “Excellent. Remove the bodies. This will serve as a good command post for the general. Cat Barahal. Are you injured?” She looked me up and down. “Wasn’t that fabric green?”

The Amazons chortled. “Did a quick dye job, she did!”

Their laughter seemed discordant to me, although they found themselves amusing enough with their voices pitched loud, for they, too, had been deafened by the constant thunder of gunfire. I wiped another thread of blood off my chin, flicked a wet drop out of my eye, and glanced around the tower chamber. A spray of blood cut a line across the map on the table. The officer lay slumped, his head caught on the back of the chair. The five soldiers sprawled at all angles across the room, throats slashed and bellies opened, their blood a spreading stain. Its smell rose like flies, stinging and noxious. A drop of blood seeping from the ceiling dripped onto my hand.

I staggered, bumped into a wall next to Drake, and sank to my knees.

He shoved me away. “Cruel Diana! You reek of blood! Get away from me.”

Trembling, I could neither speak nor stand.

He rolled over the other magister and studied the two cold mages with a flat, emotionless expression. “With a strong enough cold mage, I can do anything,” he murmured to himself, so quietly that I knew he did not mean for me to hear. “I don’t need him. He’s kept me caged all this time because he’s afraid I will figure that out.”

He stepped over to the table where Captain Tira was carefully wiping blood off the map and examined the topography, then snagged a spyglass that was lying across one corner.

“Where are you going, Lord Drake?” asked Captain Tira as he walked to the stairs. “The general is already calling the advance against the Coalition center. He’ll need you soon enough.”

“He does need me, doesn’t he? Far more than I need him. I only need fire banes.” The sting of his presence faded as he vanished down the stairs.

Captain Tira watched him go, but she said nothing and did nothing. I needed to follow him, but a heavy exhaustion pinned me down. A fog of oblivion hazed my vision. How long I knelt there, shaking, I did not know. The chamber was cleared of the dead. An orderly scattered buckets of dirt over the floor to absorb the blood. People left and arrived while I watched the wall go nowhere.

Captain Tira said, “She’s been in a stupor since we took the tower, General.”

“Send an orderly to find her something else to wear. Bloody Camulos! Give me a spyglass! Look at the Coalition center collapse! Captain Tira, I want the Amazon Corps to march to the eastern flank. Lieutenant! Ride this dispatch to Marshal Aualos. I want Lord Marius’s retreating forces cut off from the city gates. I do not want any Coalition troops or any mages escaping into Lutetia. I want no street-by-street fighting. I want a clear, emphatic victory.”

Artillery boomed in sheets of thunder. Drums and horns beat out the pace of the advance as Camjiata’s army roared forward, rifles ablaze and smoke gusting in windy bursts.

Messengers came and went as the general directed the battle from the tower. The stone house echoed with the groans of wounded.

A man bumped into me, swearing as he dumped a pot of scalding coffee to splash on the floor.

The general said, “Get her out of the way!”

I opened my hands to find them coated in sticky, drying blood. Swells and ebbs of memory surged in my head: the way flesh parts like a sigh as the blade slices; the submissive acquiescence of the hunted when it accepts it has been marked for death. Blood was spattered all down the front of my clothes. I tried to shake myself free of the awful sight, only I could not get away from myself.

No one took the least notice of me stumbling down the steps. The stone house was crammed with wounded. The stink of blood and piss and excrement melded with the rumble of artillery and gunfire, although the sound was ebbing because the advance of Camjiata’s army was pushing the battlefront away from our position. I staggered into the back court and to a trough filled with pink and slimy water. I stripped off my blood-sodden jacket and fumblingly managed the slippery buttons of the skirt. Then I dumped a bucket full of dirty water over me once, twice, three times until I was gasping and shivering and began, at last, to feel human.