Antiagon Fire

63

A quint past seventh glass on Mardi morning saw first company riding down the lane from the old and tired villas toward the gray stone of the road leading westward to the rugged hills-and Liantiago beyond. The sky was clearer than it had been in days, and a brisk and chill wind blew out of the northeast.

Just before first company turned onto the main road, Skarpa rode up and eased his mount in beside Quaeryt’s mare. “The scouts haven’t found any tracks at all.”

“None? Not on the road or on the shoulders or the side lanes?”

“No.” Skarpa offered a crooked smile. “They say that there’s not even a place where the Antiagons could make an attack. I’d say that means an attack. They’ve removed all tracks, and a road without any tracks suggests it held many. I’d like to know just how many.”

“That’s what they don’t want us to know. Is there any place where it’s more obvious that the road has been swept clean or the shoulders smoothed?”

“The scouts didn’t see any signs of that.”

“That means that they’ve kept everyone off the road, at least for the last day or so.” That suggested something to Quaeryt … something … but he couldn’t pin it down.

“Just keep your eyes open and your imagers ready,” said Skarpa, before turning his mount back to rejoin Third Regiment.

“Yes, sir.”

The morning was still as first company rode eastward past the first of the irregular hills of a reddish sandstone, where, in places, small evergreens clung precariously to crevices in the stone. Those hills stood several hundred yards from the roadbed, but over the next half mille, the road curved and began to descend toward a pass apparently between two taller and more rugged sandstone hills.

As first company neared that gap, Quaeryt could see that the road descended straight into a gorge that had been widened, the reddish stone walls cut back at a forty-five degree angle and smoothly finished. On each side of the roadway was a comparatively wide shoulder, a good twenty yards between the low stone rain gutters at the edge of the pavement and the base of the sandstone slope that angled upward and for a good two hundred yards, although the rugged top of the hill was less than 150 yards above the roadbed and likely that far back from the road. The part of the road that followed the cut through the hillside was not that long, certainly no more than four hundred yards before the road reached a wider and more open valley descending toward the lowlands.

“Do you see anyone or anything?” he asked Zhelan, riding beside him.

“No, sir. I can’t even see where anyone could hide.”

Neither could Quaeryt, but the narrow section between the two stone slopes worried him, even though he couldn’t see any place for an attacker to hide, especially given the steepness and openness of the flattened and smoothed sandstone walls.

As he rode closer and closer to the beginning of the gorge, Quaeryt kept glancing toward the upper side of the road cut on the south side, just ahead. He couldn’t see anyone … or even any shadows. No shadows! There have to be shadows with the sun to the south.

“Company halt!”

Quaeryt concentrated, trying to image out a section of the slope below the area that held no shadows. Abruptly the smooth slope vanished, to reveal men and catapults stationed on a ledge cut behind a chest-high wall of the same sandstone. Immediately above was another shorter ledge and wall, behind which stood archers.

Quaeryt extended his shields, as he did ordering, “Imager shields!”

Simultaneously, arrows sleeted from the upper ledge down toward first company.

Pain hammered at Quaeryt’s skull from the effort of holding shields and trying to gouge out a large chunk of the mountainside. Even as he watched, the reddish stone immediately below the ledge vanished, but only a thin line perhaps a yard wide and deep. Then the stone above that shivered and cracks began to form, widening and growing, and the lower ledge began to crumble.

For a moment Quaeryt just held his shields, trying to shield the company from the arrows, and to recover from the effort of trying to handle two imaging efforts at once. Then he saw that one of the catapults was already in motion. He immediately imaged away a support on the far side of the device. While he’d hoped that would have flung the Antiagon Fire along the ledge, instead it just dropped onto the ledge and exploded into the telltale crimson-yellow-green flame. Then the lower ledge crumbled, and Antiagon troopers flailed as they lost their footing and slid down the sandstone toward the base of the gorge … and the roadway below.

The archers on the upper ledge had begun to aim their shafts farther to the east, at the first companies of Third Regiment, well beyond the shields of first company.

Then … fire grenades appeared from somewhere else, exploding into flame against the imager shields.

“To the west! Behind those scrubby pines!” called out an undercaptain-Voltyr, Quaeryt realized.

The scrubby pines to which Voltyr pointed hadn’t been there a moment before-or, rather, they’d been concealed by an imaging shield of some sort, as had the Antiagons working the second set of catapults.

“Iron darts!” ordered Quaeryt, even as he concentrated on intercepting fire grenades and imaging them at the upper ledge and the archers there.

While some of the imagers managed darts, many of the Antiagons working on the fire grenade catapults ducked below the sandstone ledge wall before the Telaryn imagers could create the darts so that a handful of darts clunked against the soft stone, gouging shallow holes and spraying reddish sand.

A line of Antiagon Fire flared across the ledge holding the archers, and several jumped over the ends of the wall and tried to slide down the sandstone away from the rubble of the first ledge below them. One seemed to manage it, and immediately began to run down the road to the west. Another lost control and tumbled head over heels into an unmoving lump at the bottom of the gorge. Others skidded into the rugged rocks that filled the gouge beneath the first ledge that Quaeryt had destroyed.

Quaeryt returned his attention to the remaining catapults, where he did manage to return two or three of the fire grenades. Before long, Antiagon Fire was raging behind the ledge wall on the emplacement west of the pine trees.

Then Quaeryt saw a shower of rock cascading down from the north slope of the road cut … and above that a larger mass of stone breaking loose from somewhere.

Immediately he thought about drawing heat from somewhere to support his imaging-but there was nothing to draw from. The rock hadn’t absorbed that much sunlight, and there was no water anywhere. Still … he concentrated on creating an angled wall into place, no more than a yard and a half high, running from the east to west as it descended along the northern sandstone slope. Waves of pain cascaded over him, and he doubled over in the saddle, with flashes of light burning into his skull.

All he could do was watch as the chunks of sandstone and other rock cascaded downslope toward his angled barrier.

The first and smaller rocks hit the wall and largely bounced westward, and downhill. So did most of what followed, but more than a few stray rocks and boulders bounced over the barrier and rolled or slid down into the gorge-building up next to the sandstone wall.

Dust followed, and when that began to clear, Quaeryt took a deep breath.

Most of the rocks and rubble had not reached the road. Even so, there was a mass almost a yard high and twenty yards long covering the roadbed, beginning some fifteen yards ahead of where first company had stopped. Beyond that rubble Quaeryt could see several scouts and outriders, but he had no idea if all of them had escaped. He could only hope.

Even as a last skitter of rocks slid to a stop atop the pile of rock partially blocking the road, Quaeryt kept looking around, ignoring the pain and flashes in his vision, seeing yet another Antiagon defensive emplacement. Where the first walled ledge had been there was only an angular and blacked gash in the sloped sandstone, its base partly filled with boulders and fragments of sandstone, some blackened. Above that, the upper ledge was blackened and empty. Above the top of the gash, where the original ledge had been, Quaeryt saw an oblong opening, with what looked to be stairs behind it. That’s how they got there.

He kept looking, but could see no sign of any surviving Antiagons. There were no more fire grenades and no more archers. Nor was there any sign of more rockslides. Had the one been triggered by an imager? Quaeryt had no way of knowing and even sending someone to the top of the gorge wall likely wouldn’t reveal anything. Still … they probably needed to have a squad investigate the tunnels to the ledges and see what lay behind them.

“That was something.”

Quaeryt turned in the saddle to see Skarpa rein up.

The submarshal looked at the mass of rubble covering the road, then at the blackened ledges, and finally at Quaeryt. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t, not exactly. I just knew it had to be an attack that relied on something other than a mass of troopers. When I couldn’t see shadows where there should have been shadows…”

Skarpa raised his eyebrows.

Quaeryt went on to explain, then said, “Then there was the attack outside of Barna. They used barely trained troopers. The first Antiagon Fire attack-that took an imager and no more than twenty troopers. And … Antiago is a smaller land that makes most of its wealth from trading. Traders don’t like to spend any more than they have to. Antiago has never had to maintain that many troopers, and I doubt Aliaro has that many to spare. So … he won’t hazard them until he has to. Also, the more he can weaken us without using his best, the more likely they’ll be able to turn us away.”

“That would be a victory of sorts for him. He has to know that we’re not equipped for a long siege or attack on Liantiago.”

“He knows that and so do we.”

Skarpa gestured toward the remaining ledges cut into the soft sandstone walls, ledges blacked and charred, with the remnants of Antiagons and catapults. “That’s almost an unassailable position.”

“They didn’t think about having their own Fire used against them.”

“Or your having imagers strong enough to cut away the stone under their feet.” Skarpa’s eyes went to the rubble beside and partially covering the road.

“The imagers can remove that, but you might want to send a company to investigate how the Antiagons got to those ledges.”

“I already have,” replied Skarpa. “I also told them to bring in anyone they capture.”

“That would help in knowing how many imagers they have and how good they are.”

“Do you think they used imagers to cut those ledges just for us?”

“I wondered that at first, but I don’t think so. They were likely imaged, but not recently. There are trees growing in places that suggest the ledges were created some time ago. Also there are rivulets and channels in the sandstone that were made by rain. All that takes time. They might have used imagers recently to improve the old ledges and walls.”

“How long will it take to clear this?”

“Less than two glasses, I’d judge, but we’ll have to see.”

“If you could make a narrow path first…”

“To get the scouts and a vanguard through? We can do that.” Quaeryt nodded.

Once Skarpa headed back to Third Regiment, Quaeryt turned to the undercaptains. “We’ve got some road-clearing to do. We’ll begin with a narrow path wide enough for a single mount.” He gestured. “Threkhyl … Horan … you two start. Remove the rocks and earth in smaller piles. There’s more to image away than meets the eye.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the two imagers began to image away rock and sand, Quaeryt looked westward and downhill, but he could not make out either the bay or Liantiago.

By the time the imagers had cleared the road, and the scouting parties had returned with but a handful of surviving Antiagon troopers, it was past noon before Southern Army emerged from the bottom of the gorge and began to ride along a section of the road that sloped down, if ever so gradually, toward a lower line of hills. Those hills, unlike the irregular sandstone hills, were green with spring grass and intermittent olive orchards. The villas were also larger, and Quaeryt could make out several hamlets, although all were on lanes back off the main paved road by at least a mille, if not more, and most seemed to be located on or near slopes that showed rocky outcroppings, suggesting that where the common people built was controlled in some fashion, either by the Shahibs or the Autarch or even by a certain popular reluctance to be too close to the main road.

Before all that long, Skarpa rejoined Quaeryt, since first company remained as the vanguard.

“What did you discover from the captives?” asked Quaeryt.

“Not too much. Their commander sent two companies and two imagers. One company was of archers, and the other was of catapultists. Supposedly one imager was a master and the other his assistant. They were told to destroy the attackers and return.” Skarpa snorted.

“Did they believe that was possible with so small a force?”

“Some did, it appears. That’s not likely to happen again. At least a squad escaped with the master imager. You or your imagers got the assistant…”

That suggests that the master imager might have some sort of shields, thought Quaeryt.

“There’s a hidden back trail down to the main road. One of the companies from second battalion found it, but the Antiagons were so far gone that even their dust had settled.”

“So it’s likely they know we have imagers, and the size of our force,” said Quaeryt, “but not necessarily how many imagers. Did any of the captives know how many imagers there might be in Liantiago?”

“I did ask, but all they could tell me was that the imagers lived in special walled quarters inside the palace walls, and that only a few ever left Liantiago. None of them had ever seen more than two imagers together-almost always a master and his apprentice.”

Quaeryt frowned. Was that a form of dissimulation? Or did it represent how Antiagon imagers were trained?

“You have that look…”

“A master and apprentice system…” Quaeryt shook his head. “That sounds too traditional … but maybe it’s merely a pretense to avoid people asking too many questions.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not for now,” replied Quaeryt. But it’s something to look into, especially why the Autarch uses that system … if he even does.

Skarpa, Quaeryt, and first company continued to lead the way along the well-kept paved road. After they had ridden another glass, they came to the crest of a low rise, beyond which were low rolling hills, covered with already green pastures or meadows, that extended from just below him to the outskirts of Liantiago some five milles away.

Skarpa called a halt, after which he and Quaeryt surveyed the terrain before them. Liantiago was located on the southeastern end of a sheltered bay that extended more than a hundred milles from the Gulf of Khellor. In the center of the bay was the island of Westisle, itself some forty milles long and five to eight across. The size and sheltered nature of the bay provided the best port and anchorage in all of Lydar. All that Quaeryt recalled from his years at sea. What he didn’t recall was the size of Liantiago, stretching as it did more than five milles along a curving shoreline. What he also did not recall was the imposing stone complex that dominated a low hill rising from the middle on the northern end of the city and overlooking the harbor. That had to be Aliaro’s palace, what with its white stone walls and fortifications.

White stone? That suggested stone hardened and shaped by experienced and talented imagers. While it was clear that Aliaro had imagers, what Quaeryt and Skarpa had no way of knowing was how many the Autarch might have … or how accomplished they might be. The stone fortifications suggested both numbers and talent … but had the walls been built in the past … or more recently?

“Makes Variana and Solis look small,” observed Skarpa.

“It does. It’s also interesting that there aren’t any other cities in Liantiago of any size.”

“With one that size, why would the autarchs need any more?”

“The autarchs might not, but the traders and merchants and people might.”

“Meaning what?” asked Skarpa.

“That the Autarch doesn’t want too many people too far away from him, suggesting that he doesn’t have that effective a government for controlling large groups of people at a distance. That might make matters easier for Bhayar to rule here.”

“There’s the small matter of defeating Aliaro’s forces before we can consider that,” said Skarpa dryly.

Quaeryt laughed lightly. “You’re right about that.”