Page 45 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Carlotte scowled, her mouth moving to form a “no,” but the word that eventually emerged was “Yes.”

And Livira understood. Life as a ghost, an untouched, unseen, unheard observer, was barely life. It was a form of the same starvation that the library’s healing circle offered. A type of death that walked the line but didn’t cross it. One of the horrors of Irad and Jaspeth’s compromise, pleasing no one.

Even for an introvert at ease with their own company, such isolation would build into an unbearable burden. For Carlotte who lived for company and needed to gossip in the same way she needed to draw breath, it must have been so much worse. She needed to leave. And even with unknown odds, a gamble like this was worth taking.

In the endan army from the city of Arthran followed the mad king out of the doors of his palace to do battle with the skeer. It was suicide. All of them knew that much. But Chertal’s visions had brought him to the throne against impossible odds. They knew him to be ruthless, often capricious, subject to dark moods, long silences, and longer manias, but they also knew that he spoke to spirits, saw things that mortals were not meant to see, and knew secrets that no one could know.

Six thousand foot-soldiers followed their king down the narrow stair to the city below the citadel and together they issued from the western gate to cross the plain beyond the walls. Ahead, the forest waited, vast, unknown, and full of death.

The process of bringing the army and a suitably sized skeer patrol together, whilst avoiding the chance of meeting a larger force or having the insectoids reinforced during the ensuing battle, took considerable organizing. The skeer had to be tracked from above in order to prevent detection through their connection with the template-skeer in the night-ship. At Yolanda’s insistence, King Chertal had to be kept updated by Carlotte alone, to prevent extra damage to reality, over and above that already being caused. And the king, not being an idiot, knew that he was being given agoodbye present, making these interactions protracted and emotional. None of which did any favours to the morale of his troops who, bound for a seemingly suicidal encounter, heard rumours of their red-eyed leader shouting his heartbreak at thin air in the dubious privacy of his royal tent.

“They have to win, right?” Carlotte hung high above the forest with Livira, her voice tight with tension. “I mean, it’s nearly sixty soldiers to each skeer.”

The smallest skeer patrol to venture out far enough to be attacked without fear of interference during the course of a short battle numbered one hundred and four insectoids and two ganar.

“I hope so.” Livira had seen the beasts in action. It was hard to imagine a man killing one on the battlefield. If sixty human warriors had the same fearless dedication the skeer demonstrated she would have more confidence, but she had read enough accounts of war to know that armies are made of individuals, and their courage was a fragile mix of both the collective and the individual. Chertal’s soldiers wouldn’t keep attacking until the last of their number was killed. As the bodies mounted without success, their resolve would falter and fracture, and they would flee. The deaths of their foes would help to keep them on the field. But where the balance lay and what could be expected of them, she really didn’t know.

King Chertal had been given every advantage. His forces had had the time to hide themselves in the treeline beside the skeer-broken trail by which the patrol approached. They had the wind in the right direction to hide their scent. They had approached without detection. They’d dug traps further along the trail. They had ample supplies of arrows, two thousand archers, even five ballistae primed with iron-shod spears longer than a man and as thick as Livira’s arm. Carlotte’s gift of the secret of black powder was too recent for arrow-sticks of the sort in Crath City to have been developed, but six hundred of the king’s force were armed with devices they called “guns,” which would fire a lead ball at lethal velocity over short ranges. Sadly, they took almost a minute to reload and were prone to various failures. Even so, Livira imagined a volley of six hundred shots would be devastating.

Livira’s memories of her own violent encounter with skeer were thankfully and uncharacteristically vague. Her mind still held glimpses of theSoldier performing martial miracles in his near-indestructible body before even his limits were exceeded. Suddenly, she missed Malar, in that raw, emotional way that hollows out a chest and fills the rest of a person with an aching absence.

“Stay here.” Livira caught Carlotte’s hand as she made to descend, having now grasped the rudiments of flight. “You don’t want to see this up close.”

The white column of skeer tromped along the trail, churning the earth and raising a small haze of dust behind them. In another ten miles they would reach areas of the forest less denuded of game and spread out to hunt. The patrol’s speed showed no variation as it moved into the killing ground.

From on high, Livira didn’t hear the command, the thrum of bowstrings, the hiss of arrows in flight, nor the deeper thuds of ballistae launching their missiles. Livira couldn’t imagine how many arrows it would take to put down a skeer warrior. Maybe there was no number that would achieve that goal. Even the insectoids struck by ballista bolts continued to move, though Livira couldn’t imagine that they could refuse death for long after such grievous perforation.

In short order the bulk of the skeer force charged into the treeline where the Arthran soldiers waited with spears, swords, and axes. And of course, with six hundred guns. As the skeer vanished among the trees, the guns began to boom, so many that it made a near continuous roar for what seemed an age. White smoke filtered up through the canopy, and Livira wondered if any of the insectoids had survived.

Five skeer remained to shield the pair of ganar. Neither of these two seemed inclined to show its face, relying instead on the skeer’s natural violence rather than seeking to guide the battle.

Here, Chertal had followed Livira’s advice, delivered by Carlotte. The king had been unwilling to split his force, wanting instead to overwhelm the foe by weight of numbers, and hoping that those numbers would also instil the necessary courage. He had, however, on Livira’s instruction—Livira being painted by Carlotte as a famous general from a great warrior nation, rather than a young librarian—set five hundred soldiers among thetrees on the opposite side of the trail, with instructions not to loose so much as a single arrow during the initial engagement.

Now as screams rose from the woods to the left of the ganar, arrows and spears began to rain in from the right, peppering the five remaining skeer with sharp iron. The skeer hunched around their masters, refusing to fall or to run. Torrents of arrows fell upon them while the carnage continued among the trees on the far side of the trail. Nothing could be seen of that battle, only the swaying of the foliage in the still air. But for the screams, audible even at Livira’s height, and the splintering of wood, she might have been able to imagine there was merely a fierce squall passing.

The first of the skeer engaged on the far side began to emerge from the trees, red and dripping, seemingly alert to the new danger to their masters. There were far more of them than Livira had thought could possibly have survived this long.

Taking their cue, Chertal’s second force charged at the five pincushioned skeer. Hundreds of men in the first wave, more following. All determined to get to the ganar and somehow break their control over their slaves before those slaves broke every soldier under the king’s command.

Livira watched the human deluge and it reminded her of watching bone-ants swarm a ram beetle out on the Dust when she was a child. The skeer scattered half a dozen men with each sweep of their blade arms but anchored to guarding the ganar they couldn’t rampage through the attackers. Even at the height Livira maintained with Carlotte and the others, the carnage looked red and awful, underscored by the screaming of the wounded and the war cries of those seeking their courage.

“That’s him!” Carlotte clutched Livira’s arm and pointed. A small knot of heavily armoured knights was emerging from the treeline on the side from which the second force had attacked. Two bore vibrant banners, and at their centre, the king.

Chertal’s personal guard pushed into the fray. One crumpled, impaled on the spiked limb of a skeer, and was flung into the air on a glittering arc of metal and spraying blood that carried them back to the trees.

“Chertal!” Carlotte released Livira and began to drop like a person who couldn’t fly.

Against her better instincts, Livira gave chase. Yolanda and Leetar made to follow.

The sheer violence of the scene seemed to double every time the distance to it halved. The skeer’s brutal strength when applied to flesh made a ruin of even the most skilled fighters. Armour, be it iron-studded leathers, chainmail, or plated steel, made little difference. The mere sound of it—splintering bone, chopped meat, joints wrenched from sockets—turned Livira’s stomach. The mass of corpses and the injured mixed among them stole her breath.

“This has happened,” Livira muttered to herself. “This happened. Everyone who died here, everyone who survived, all the people in the city. They died already. They’re all dead. They’re the dust.” She repeated it, faster, with more intensity. It didn’t help. History or not, she was in the page, not outside it, and the battle she was dropping into was written in blood, not ink.

“This already happened.” Livira landed beside Carlotte, outside the main knot of figures locked in combat. “It’s over.” And suddenly, almost as Livira said that it was over…it was.

Not one of the five skeer had fallen, but as one, they stopped moving, as did the half dozen that had ploughed into the king’s second force from behind, and the two score still returning from the increasingly shattered forest on the left flank.

For what seemed an age, but might have been moments, the skeer stood without motion, allowing the soldiers to hew at them. Two of the five fell during these moments, finally damaged beyond their mechanical ability to stand.

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