One was a simple hermetical device the size of a tinderbox that allowed a scout, when he pressed a stud, to make a string vibrate on another box held by another scout up to a league or more away. It was imperfect still and Morgon was sure it could be “sensed” in the aethereal, but it put in the Emperor’s hand the ability to see over the next ridge as surely as his scouts could travel there. Morgon had concocted a dozen other devices-most of them intended to protect the column against spies, as the captain had warned him.
Some of them even worked.
The only outward show was that insects had a very hard time indeed getting close to the column, in camp or out of it-a side effect that delighted the soldiers and made Morgon outstandingly popular with the company.
Morgon was musing on the possibilities of a code-something simple-perhaps easily changed-for his communication devices. He had only made six of them-each one took more than a day of work and more than a day of his potentia. Ser Milus and Proconsularis Vlad, the acting commander of the Vardariotes, both requested more devices each day.
The master board-really, an old lute hermetically re-worked to respond directly to impulses from the aethereal-began to emit the notes that meant “alarm.”
“Some kind of attack coming in,” he said tersely. The language of the impulses was still too limited.
Ser Milus gave an order, and the great red company standard was waved back and forth.
Immediately, the column began to deploy. Morgon was far towards the back, well located to see the mountaineers struggling to spread out to the south, looking for cover-the Outwallers running down the banks of the Meander to the north on the same errand, each block covering one of the column’s flanks.
The wyverns came in from the south. They were wary-they flew very low. Given how close they all were to the Circle of the Wyrm, Morgon was surprised that they dared at all.
There were a dozen of them-sleek shapes that flew along the edge of the hills to the south and west of them. Without the warning they’d have caught the whole column in march order, but instead, every archer had an arrow to his string.
But the leader of the wyverns was old, canny, and had much experience of men. And his instructions had been admirably precise. He circled to the east, his own band riding the same drafts he did, well closed up against being located too fast. They circled the last hill and swung out across the valley of the Meander, and Morgon saw the company archers begin lofting arrows-some men loosed far too early, but most of the archers were veterans, not just of war but of this war, and held their shafts.
From the baggage near the rear of the army, crossbow bolts flew.
The great winged creatures banked, coming in along the axis of the column and manoeuvring in the still air to make themselves poorer targets.
The company-deployed to the right and left of the baggage-raised their bows almost together as Smoke chanted ranges-and loosed.
A brave and untried young wyvern crumpled under forty heavy impacts and crashed to earth, bouncing once and ploughing a furrow in the sandy soil until its corpse crashed into a wagon whose oxen were still harnessed. The oxen rolled their eyes and bolted heavily, passing along and then through the archers’ line on the left of the road.
Two more wyverns fell victim to their hate and their feeding desires, disobeyed their chieftain and attacked the disordered archers. In heartbeats, Jack Kaves was dead, and his partner Slacker, and a dozen more archers were wounded and down.
Ser George Brewes bellowed and lashed out with his long spear, and Ser Giovanni Gentile stood by him. One of the younger wyverns took a deep thrust under his neck and powered himself into the air, but the other stayed to fight, and armoured men and women struck it from every side until it crumpled. Tippit and Half-Arse put goose feathers in a third monster, and then the survivors were banking away.
The trailing, wounded beast had trouble getting altitude, and the Vardariotes killed her, riding at breakneck speed under the stricken thing and loosing arrows straight up into her guts until she fell.
The men and women of the company pulled the dead horrors off the baggage wagons, and noted that their talons were smeared in a sticky black mess. Master Mortirmir was summoned, and took samples. It was obviously hermetical, but Morgon couldn’t see what it was for-it wasn’t a poison.
Morgon thought the whole incident a display of the enemy’s foolish vanity-four wyverns was a poor return for two baggage wagons and six dead archers, if considered coldly.
It was hard to consider coldly. They buried the men and the two women who’d died with the baggage, crossbows in hand, and then they drove on. The column marched until noon.
And then, suddenly, horses began to die.
There was no warning. Among the company, it was horses with the baggage that went down first. Almost a dozen in the first minute, black froth coming from their nostrils.
Men went down as their mounts collapsed. The collapses were horrible-well-beloved mounts seemed almost to melt, their skin crawled with some form of death, and then, down they went, never to rise, and as they lay they bloated with terrifying rapidity, their guts stinking as they corrupted.
Morgon was not the only magister with the column, but he was the closest to the first horses to fall. He had the presence of mind to order his own horse-a lithe stallion called Averoes-to run-indeed, he struck Averoes sharply with his scabbard to drive the young horse away. Then he ran towards the nearest rotting animal, already entering into his palace-the palace Harmodius had built.
The checkerboard floor was unchanged, as were many of the other features, but he had changed the chess pieces for statues-thirty-two statues of many of his favourite people from history and his own times, philosophers and rulers and mystics and even musicians.
Again he summoned the black paste that had been on the wyverns’ talons. In the aethereal, it appeared not black but a living purple, like a slime mould. The colour burgeoned with life and hermetical energy.
He had seen this on his first look, but it hadn’t seemed dangerous-Morgon bore down, looking more closely. He had learned many tricks at the university, and one was how to make a lens of air. Morgon adapted it and cast, and instantly found himself the victim of his own workings-the simulacrum of the sticky paste was too coarse-grained a reproduction to examine in the aethereal.
In the real, he emerged, lumbered to a stop from a sprint, and tried not to fall into the fizzing black sludge that had once been Hetty’s second horse. He worked a sample into the air in front of him, cast the lens of air, and then moved it-
The black-purple stuff was alive.
Fifty yards away, Ser Milus was walling the company’s dying horses off from the rest of the army. He had no idea what was killing his horses, but he’d seen enough war to fear infection and the rapid spread of something-some horrible equine plague. Or a curse, or a hermetical working.
The horses at the back of the column were dying, and his own sight told him those at the front were not.
But men were turning and riding back to see.
He ordered men on foot to run forward and order the rest of the army to ride on, and then he thought of Morgon’s box. But by then it was too late, and his beautiful eastern riding horse retched black bile and fell, and Milus was on the ground.
The first horse to fall exploded. And the air filled with fine black spores.
Morgon was less impressed by the spores. Spores he knew how to handle. Morgon raised potentia, made ops, and cast, almost without access to the aethereal or his palace. He could work fire without conscious access to his powers.