webcrawl/APGTE/Book-2/tex/Ch-023.md.tex

\hypertarget{chapter-20-ashes}{%
\section{Chapter 20: Ashes}\label{chapter-20-ashes}}

\begin{quote}
\emph{``We fought,}

\emph{across field and river,}

\emph{carrying the Tower's writ}

\emph{to the foot of the Wall.}

\emph{We fought}

\emph{and did not grow old.''}

-- Spoken Kharsum verse attributed to Sharok the Blinded, chieftain of
the Iron Bears (banned by Imperial decree)
\end{quote}

I'd killed people before.

Occasionally I'd even enjoyed it. Some had died by my own hand, others
by the consequences of my actions -- or inaction. In a way one could
even say that every death in the Liesse Rebellion was on my head. That
particular truth had cost me a few sleepless nights, though as time
passed the pangs of self-loathing came less and less often. I'd known
guilt about bloodying my hands, though, that was the heart of it. And
yet as I searched myself for that feeling, watching at over half a
thousand men going up in flames, I found nothing. No, that wasn't right.
Not nothing, just\ldots{} little. \emph{Gods, that might actually be
worse.} No tears need be shed for the likes of the Silver Spears, I told
myself. They were Free Cities mercenaries playing hero in a Callowan war
while on the take from the First Prince. The very kind of foreign
soldiers who'd made Callow the battlefield for their ``glorious'' wars
against Evil over the centuries, dying ugly deaths in the Wasteland and
leaving my people to deal with the fallout of their failed crusades.
There was a satisfaction to be found in evening that balance, I couldn't
deny.

After all, shutting the door on the fingers of foreign armies was one of
the oldest Callowan traditions -- one forged breaking the Legions
against the walls of Summerholm and sharpened drowning the Vales in
Proceran blood. \emph{That's the comparison I'd like to make, but the
truth is a little different isn't it?} I wasn't Elizabeth Alban bringing
down Regalia's flying fortress or Jehan the Wise marching on Salia to
hang seven princes and one: my paymaster was the Tyrant in the Tower, my
teacher the very man who'd annexed the Kingdom by force of arms. My
soldiers were not only Callowans but also Taghreb and Soninke, orcs and
ogres and goblins. There'd been a time when seeing anything but humans
west of Summerholm was a rarity, but those days were done and over with.
Creation wasn't any larger than it had been in the days of the old
heroes, but it was more \emph{connected}. Walls had been brought down by
the Conquest that no one could build back up, lines blurred between
friend and foe. For better or worse, I was the heiress to that legacy.
To that terrifyingly rational breed of Evil that was not above imitating
Good when it served its purposes.

It was a bastardly, calculating kind of philosophy -- but then Juniper
and I had just planned to burn six hundred men alive and shared
displeasure at the number not being higher. \emph{I'm more bastardly
than calculating, but I suppose the Hellhound can hold up the other side
of that pot.} I watched calmly as the forces pressing on the Fifteenth's
flanks melted like snow under spring sun, the crackle of green flames
drowned out by a chorus of screams. My own soldiers weren't in any
immediate danger of being swallowed by the fire, though we'd have to
evacuate the hills before a bell passed. Goblinfire could use anything
as fuel, but it spread faster across certain types of ground. Sappers
going through the College were taught a chart of observed spreads so
they could make the calculations as Pickler had: allegedly wet mud was
close to the bottom. Masego had noted the ratios on the chart displayed
magically significant numbers, the implications of which escaped me at
the moment. Nobody but a handful of goblin tribes knew how to make the
eponymous fire, though, so I'd be sure to question him on the subject
later.

I was starting to earn my reputation for using the stuff, so I might as
well learn what I could about it.

With the flanks covered it was time to break the mercenaries for good. I
supposed I could have gone back to the frontlines, but at this point
there was no real need. The exhaustion was already beginning to set in,
anyway, and getting the Fifteenth too used to relying on me to soften up
the enemy wasn't a great idea. They had to be able to operate
independently of me: that was rather the whole point of having a legion
to call my own. Juniper called for the horns to be sounded again and
three deep, long bellows echoed across the battlefield. Beneath me the
companies of the centre formed into a large wedge as the ogre lines
moved back to the front to make the tip of the spear. The legionaries
stepped forward, ramming themselves into the men-at-arms, and for a
moment it looked like even after the horrors of the day the mercenaries
would hold.

Nauk's armoured ogres put an end to that illusion, brutally hammering
their way through the core of the enemy formation and splitting it in
half. Juniper grinned fiercely at the sight of it, knowing the battle
was as good as done. Within moments the enemy soldiers around the edges
panicked, the safety of having their comrades covering their sides
ripped away from them. A few ran, and that was the finger to the scale:
the panic spread across the ranks and the army collapsed. Some knots of
stronger-willed enemy soldiers tried to stem the flood but my officers
were War College graduates and knew full well how to handle an enemy
rout -- companies surrounded and overwhelmed the last remnants of
resistance where they stood, allowing the runners to leave the field.

``Well,'' Hakram said. ``That's that.''

``I did not think your goblinfire trick would be this effective,''
Masego panted.

``It performed below predictions,'' Juniper grunted.

She was very much trying to look like she wasn't jubilant, but the look
in her eyes betrayed her even if her face remained grim. Aisha, on the
other hand, was not so reserved.

``\emph{Bin hamar},'' she cursed in Taghrebi. ``Two to one, our backs to
the river without a speck of horse and we still \emph{fucked} them. And
not even gently. This was rough stuff all around.''

``Colourfully put,'' Apprentice replied, grinning in a way that showed
off his perfect teeth.

``We're not done yet,'' I said. ``We need to to take prisoners where
it's feasible, heal our own and get the Hells off these hills before we
join them on the pyre. And you can be sure that we'll find the survivors
holed up in Marchford.''

``Foundling is right,'' the Hellhound said, sounding a little perturbed
by the act of speaking those words. ``Hard part is over, but that just
means the drudgework is beginning.''

``Merciless Gods, the two of you need to have a drink,'' Aisha retorted.
``The Tower sent a joke of a half-legion against a numerically superior
band of \emph{hardened mounted killers} and we put them over our knee
for a good spanking. Take a moment to fucking enjoy it, at least!''

Huh, first time I'd ever heard her curse in Lower Miezan. Aisha wasn't
stuck up -- formal, they insisted on calling it -- like some of the
noble children I'd come across, but she did make a point of following
most rules of etiquette. \emph{Better breeding demands better manners},
the proverb went in Callow. Or it did in the pretty parts of the city,
anyway. Dockside, the saying had been a little different:
\emph{inbreeding demands pompousness}.

``Fine,'' Juniper grunted, pausing for exactly three heartbeats.
``There, I enjoyed it. We're done. Now get me my casualty reports, Staff
Tribune.''

I smothered a smile. I supposed I could find some comfort in the
Hellhound forever having the general demeanour of an angry bear.

``Senior Sapper,'' I called out to Pickler. ``How's the fire spread
looking?''

The diminutive goblin grimaced. ``Faster than we fought. Might have to
dig a few trenches to buy us time.''

I took off my helmet and passed a hand through my sweat-drenched hair.

``Draft outside the sappers for that,'' I ordered. ``I'll want goblin
eyes out and about when night falls. Having them falling asleep would be
counterproductive.''

``I'll talk to Commander Hune,'' she nodded, offering me a salute before
haring off.

``Nauk's kabili will have been mauled,'' Adjutant spoke calmly from my
side.

``He was already understrength,'' I winced.

Nominally a kabili was supposed to count a thousand fighting men, the
quarter of a regular legion, but most of the Callowan deserters had come
from the large orc's numbers. He'd been at about seven hundred when we
gave battle, and since then he'd had to weather both the Proceran
men-at-arms and their monkling spearmen.

``Our sappers and crossbowmen got off light,'' Hakram noted. ``The
reserve too. We should still have over a thousand legionaries in shape
to fight for Marchford.''

``And in that thousand we'll have two goblin cohorts, Adjutant,'' I
sighed. ``That's four hundred soldiers I can't put in the shield wall.''

``We'll manage,'' he gravelled. ``We always do.''

We stayed quiet for a long time as I watched my legion secure the field.
The enemy had fled mostly into the woods, but the Fifteenth had been
ordered not to pursue. Our scouts would find the largest groups in the
coming days and we'd take them apart piece by piece before marching on
the city -- defeat in detail, they called it in the College. Allowing
them to bunch up again would be dangerous, even if we'd decapitated
their leadership. Legionaries walked across the grounds in lines,
finishing off enemy wounded and occasionally taking officers prisoners.
They'd be furthest down the line for healing, but if possible we'd keep
them alive: anything we could learn about the remaining Spears might
come in useful. And if I could get actual proof that they were being
paid by Procer\ldots{} No, that might be too much to hope for. I doubted
the First Prince would be sloppy enough to have the funds traceable back
to her.

Leaving Hakram behind, I went downhill to survey the work of my legion
up close. The stench of shit and blood was nauseating, even with the
battle only just ended. Here and there I noticed limbs and bits of
corpses missing -- orc work, that. Their practice of feeding on the dead
was looked down by even most Praesi, but it was tacitly allowed by the
Legions so long as it remained limited to enemy corpses. The cannibalism
was one of the reasons Praesi armies moved quicker on the march than
most other armies on the continent: the supply train could be much
lighter if after every battle half your army could make a meal of the
enemy. Goblins occasionally took trophies -- almost always eyes or ears,
more rarely finger bones -- but they didn't actually eat them. Their
diet was close to a human's, where orcs ate almost only meat and might
actually take sick if they were kept on bread rations for too long.

The sight of the hills from down where I stood was eerie. The curtains
of smoke rising into the sky framed the sight of the Fifteenth carrying
its supplies out of the way, oxen and men organized in careful routes
under the vigilant eyes of their officers. On the field itself the
healers were setting up shop in knots, triaging my wounded and carefully
gauging how much power they could expend before being too exhausted to
be of any use. Praesi medicine was far above the Callowan equivalent,
and not just because mages were born in the Wasteland much more
frequently than they'd been in the Kingdom. They'd inherited many old
secrets from the Miezans, with their only superiors on Calernia being
the Ashurans -- whose own mage-doctors were highly sought after even
across the Tyrian Sea. I found my feet taking me to the edge of the
battlefield, where the corpse-stench was not as strong and I could stand
where the Silver Spears once had.

I wasn't quite sure what I'd come to find down here. Not absolution, of
that much I was sure. Regret was the first step on that path, and I
didn't regret anything I'd done today. I'd been brutal but war was a
brutal thing: flinching away from inflicting death to your enemies was
to have your own soldiers pay the price for your squeamishness. We might
have lost, had I not condemned those six hundred men to a painful death,
and that was an unacceptable outcome. I'd come too far, compromised too
much of who I was to allow the likes of the fucking Silver Spears to
undo all of it. Maybe, I thought, it was just for the first time since
I'd taken the knife Black offered me I actually felt like a villain.
Like the monster of the story. And with that came understanding that had
eluded me as a child.

The villains in the stories always had a trigger, a first spark to set
the blaze. They'd been wronged, laughed at. They had a grudge to settle
against Creation, and they were going to do it by toppling all those
righteous kingdoms like a house of cards. They flew the banners of
empires they'd crafted out of cold rage and egomania, sent their Legions
of Terror to conquer everything from the sacred forests of the Golden
Bloom to the burnt wastelands of the Lesser Hells. It didn't matter what
they took, I was beginning to grasp, so much as the fact that they took
it. What did the Tyrants care if the heroes freed their monsters or
destroyed their ancient magical weapon, if they brought down the Dark
Tower on their head or sunk the ancient city they'd raised from the
depths? At the end of it all, even if you lost you'd already won. I
finally got it, then. You'd won because in a hundred years someone was
going to look at the ruins of your madness and their blood was going to
run cold. Like a child screaming at the night, you filled the silence so
that someone would hear.

Maybe I had a touch of that madness in me too, because I looked at the
field of corpses in front of me and I could see a fate written across
the mud and the blood and the eerie green fire. The banner of the
Fifteenth flew high, a streak of darkness defying the noonday sun, and
my legionaries swarmed like ants over the wounded to silence their
cries. Maybe I'd been born a little twisted and that was what Black had
seen in me, back in the streets of Laure, because there was a feeling
welling inside me that was like a laugh bubbling up my throat. I'd won
today, won against odds a seventeen-year-old girl with barely a year of
military training had no business beating. And yet here I was alive,
more gloriously alive than I'd ever felt in my life. I could see the
path ahead of me, the same I'd whispered of to Hakram: \emph{whether
they be gods or kings or all the armies in Creation.}

My Name bared its fangs in approval.

I shivered, wishing I'd thought of putting on my cloak, and returned to
my legion.

---

``Three hundred dead,'' Juniper growled. ``Twice that in wounded.''

I took a long pull from the water skin, raising an eyebrow at the taste.
I snuck a look at Hakram, who tried for innocent but came out looking
more like an ugly green cat whose fangs were still full of feathers.
Well, if he wanted to add aragh to the stuff I wouldn't complain.

``How many of those will make it?'' I asked.

The Hellhound glanced at Aisha, who grimaced.

``Hard to say. Mages have steadied some of our worst cases, but they had
to prioritize. If I have to give you my best estimate, I'd say that by
tomorrow the casualties will have gone up to around five hundred. Taking
in the cripples and those who won't be able to fight for a few
fortnights, we should have about one thousand in fighting shape for
Summerholm.''

Adjutant did not smile, which made his smugness even more obvious. I
rolled my eyes, then frowned as a realization came.

``Shouldn't Kilian be here to report on the healers?'' I asked.

Aisha cleared her throat uncomfortably.

``She's unconscious at the moment.''

My stomach dropped. ``She's wounded?''

``Drew too deep,'' the Staff Tribune replied with a shake of the head.
``Apparently she almost manifested wings this time.''

I swore under my breath. ``She's not in any actual danger, is she?''

``It's happened once before, during war games against Morok,'' Hakram
gravelled. ``She was fine after two days of rest.''

I was asking Masego to take a look at her regardless, I decided. Healing
was far from Apprentice's specialty, but he'd forgotten more about that
kind of magic than most legion mages ever learned. From the corner of my
eye I caught sight of Hune and Nauk striding in our direction. The orc
commander said something and the large ogre shook with laughter, patting
the top of his head fondly with her pan-sized hands. A tribune stepped
up to Nauk and after saying something Hune sped off towards us.

``Legate Juniper, Lady Squire,'' she greeted in that surprisingly
delicate voice of hers. ``You've won a great victory today.''

``We,'' I corrected. ``None of this would have been possible if you
hadn't held the-``

A bloodcurdling scream interrupted me. My eyes swivelled in the
direction it had come from just in time to see Nauk's open hand impact
with his tribune's mouth, sending teeth flying and the man himself
sprawling into the mud. Painful convulsions wracked the orc's body as
his eyes clouded red. Half a dozen legionaries raised their shields and
went to form a circle around him but I waved them away, striding towards
the out-of-control officer.

``Nauk,'' I barked. ``Snap out of it.''

There was no trace of the orc I knew on that creature's face. Just
bottomless rage, and with a feral howl he lunged at me.

``The hard way, then,'' I said.

It'd been a while since I'd gotten to fight someone without swords being
involved and my officer was larger than any man or woman I'd ever fought
in the Pit. Still, the principles remained the same -- and my grip was a
lot stronger than it used to be. I stepped aside and let the momentum of
his charge carry him past me, turning to face him as he slid in the mud
and roared. The next time he went for my throat, I was ready for him: I
steadied my footing and caught his wrist, flipping him over my shoulder
and down into the ground. He'd done most of the lifting for me, charging
recklessly like that. He clawed at my legs but found no give in the
steel -- I sat on his back and pressed down his wrist, struggling to
keep it under control. Even at this awkward angle he was ridiculously
strong, more than I'd ever seen him be when he wasn't under the Red
Rage. I eventually managed to catch the other hand and forced it down
with the first. He struggled while screaming at the top of his lungs,
but his feet couldn't reach me and all he managed was to smother his
armour and face in mud.

Eventually his movements slowed, then stopped. His breath was even and
he hadn't roared in a while, though his chest still convulsed softly. I
leaned forward to take a look at him: the orc's eyes were still red, but
for a different reason. He was quietly weeping into the mud. During the
fight Hune had stalked back to us and she carefully picked up the
battered tribune before setting him on his feet. I frowned and gestured
for him to come closer -- he did, after casting a wary look at Nauk.

``What did you tell him?'' I questioned.

``Casualty report, ma'am,'' he managed through his missing teeth.

I closed my eyes and let out a long breath. ``Nilin?''

The man nodded and I slid off of the greenskin commander's back.

``Come on, Nauk,'' I murmured. ``Up we go.''

With a grunt I hoisted him back to his feet. The large orc mumbled an
apology, tone shamed, but I ignored it. There was nothing shameful about
grieving a dead friend, and the two of them had been close as brothers.

``Go see Apprentice,'' I ordered the tribune. ``Get yourself healed.''

I sat Nauk down on a mostly dry log, ordered for a pair of legionaries
to stay with him and gestured for Hakram to come to me.

``Find his corpse,'' I ordered.

He nodded. ``And then?''

I looked up to the sky, no longer finding it so promising. The victory
had taken a bitter taste, and even bitterer was the knowledge this
wasn't the last time I'd lose a friend to the battlefield. Nilin,
though, Nilin was the first. There was something special about that, a
deeper loss. Maybe it was because he'd been a kind boy, almost too kind
to be a soldier. \emph{And only a fortnight ago we were sharing a fire
and bottle, joking about gravestones}.

``Get the Prince and the Page,'' I said. ``Put the bodies on his pyre.
If Nilin's leaving us, then he'll get an exit to be remembered.''

I paused, eyes turning cold.

``And Hakram?''

He turned.

``Tell Juniper to ready the goblin companies for pursuit in the dark,''
I spoke through gritted teeth. ``I am no longer interested in taking
prisoners.''