The Sword of the South - eARC Read online

  The Sword of the South – eARC

  DAVID WEBER

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID WEBER

  SWORD OF THE SOUTH

  The Sword of the South

  WAR GOD

  Oath of Swords • War God’s Own • Wind Rider’s Oath • War Maid’s Choice

  CROWN OF SLAVES (with Eric Flint)

  Crown of Slaves • Torch of Freedom • Cauldron of Ghosts

  MANTICORE ASCENDANT (with Timothy Zahn)

  A Call to Duty

  RING OF FIRE (with Eric Flint)

  1633 • 1634: The Baltic War

  MULTIVERSE (with Linda Evans)

  Hell’s Gate • Hell Hath No Fury

  STARFIRE (with Steve White)

  Insurrection • Crusade • In Death Ground • The Shiva Option

  EMPIRE OF MAN (with John Ringo)

  March Upcountry • March to the Sea • March to the Stars • We Few

  HONOR HARRINGTON

  On Basilisk Station • The Short Victorious War • Field of Dishonor • Flag in Exile • Honor Among Enemies • In Enemy Hands • Echoes of Honor • Ashes of Victory • War of Honor • At All Costs • Mission of Honor • A Rising Thunder • Shadow of Freedom

  HONORVERSE

  The Shadow of Saganami • Storm from the Shadows • House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (with BuNine)

  THE STAR KINGDOM:

  A Beautiful Friendship • Fire Season (with Jane Lindskold) • Treecat Wars (with Jane Lindskold)

  The Apocalypse Troll • The Excalibur Alternative • Worlds of Weber • Warriors • Out Of the Dark

  EDITED BY DAVID WEBER

  Worlds of Honor • More than Honor • Changer of Worlds • The Service of the Sword • In Fire Forged • Beginnings

  The Sword of the South

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Words of Weber, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8084-9

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  Maps by Randy Asplund

  First printing, August 2015

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  t/k

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B

  PROLOGUE

  Lost Hope

  Wencit of Rūm’s face flickered in the eerie glow of the crystal’s heart, and his eyes flamed with their own light as he watched the ghastly carnage. It had raged for hours, but the end was near…and drawing nearer. The Gryphon Guard stood at bay atop a hill, cut off from its final frail hope of retreat. Its men had fought and died for year after year to protect the ports from which so many thousands upon thousands of refugees had fled to distant Norfressa, and one by one, those ports had fallen. Only the great harbor city of Gayrtherym remained now, manned only by a skeleton garrison and the last, threadbare fleet awaiting the Light’s last defenders. But there was no one in all of Kontovar to aid them in their fight to reach it, and Wencit’s fists clenched as his viewpoint hovered above their desperate ring of steel. The Guard fought with the valor of brave men who knew they could not win, yet had they faced only mortal foes, they might still have hoped to cut a path to the friendly sea.

  But sorcery streaked the sky, its unearthly glow glittering on the red and gold badges of the House of Ottovar. The protective wards wrought by the Council grew steadily weaker as the dark art gnawed their foundations. They would break soon.

  A flank company of the Guard collapsed the flood of attackers pausing only to hew the fallen before they climbed the slope over the bodies of imperial veterans. Red blades waved at the violet sky, the reflected streamers of arcane wrath gory in their wetness, and the Emperor summoned his last reserve. He charged at the head of a scant, threadbare company—little more than three cobbled-together platoons—to meet the threat, his personal banner leading the men whose fidelity had never wavered, who’d never once failed to follow wherever that banner led. Nor did they fail it now, and Wencit’s eyes burned with unshed tears as they fastened on Toren’s gryphon-crowned helm and bloody skill, watching the last Emperor of Kontovar win the last victory of his empire’s long life…a life measured now in minutes. The reserve slashed the breakthrough apart in crimson steel, and the remnants of the company sealed the hole in the steadily shrinking line.

  Air hissed in Wencit’s nostrils as the misshapen blackness he’d awaited suddenly appeared. It radiated black lightnings, cored with the corrosive green taint of corruption, as it scaled the hill, and the barriers of the white wizards trembled at the defiled sorcery which shrouded it. Even the Gryphon Guard quailed before its menace.

  Nails drew blood from Wencit’s palms as he fought the hunger to match his own might against the Empire’s foe. The Lord of Carnadosa was a wild wizard, of a house which had produced dozens of wild wizards, and his might was unfathomable. Yet Wencit had been schooled far longer in the hard lore of wizardry; in his heart, he believed he could outmatch his foe…but he dared not test that belief. He dared not! Too much was at stake for him to tamper here, even though his restraint spelled ruin and death for untold multitudes.

  He groaned and thrust himself away from the crystal. He knew what the end must be, and it was more than he could bear to see.

  He turned away as the stone’s tiny Emperor turned to face the blackness. A full battalion of the Guard fell, life riven away by the deadly kiss of twisted magic, as their nightmare foe reached their shieldwall. The blackness passed over them and stooped upon the Emperor as Wencit opened the door, and Toren’s glowing sword vanished in the darkness. The stubborn line about his banner bent at last, yielding the ground soaked by its blood inch by savagely fought inch as its ring contracted toward the spot where arch-wizard and Emperor fought to the death.

  Wencit opened the council chamber door and met the eyes of his fellows. In his unwatched crystal, the last Guardsman took his stand, his back to the tormented cloud which had engulfed his liege. His left hand held the staff of the Emperor’s banner, and the gryphon stirred sullenly on an angry wind, red silk sodden with a darker red, as the massive, wounded hradani—last captain of the Gryphon Guard of Ottovar—lashed out at his enemies. He reaped a gory harvest, but he was one and they wer
e many. He fell before their hewing blades and the bodies of the Guard formed a ragged circle about the power-spewing blackness atop the hill. Violet lightning flashed from the duel raging at its heart, and the arch-wizard’s own troops died in scores, screaming at their touch.

  Wencit of Rūm, Last Lord of the Council of Ottovar, locked his glowing gaze with the somber eyes of Council’s members and slowly, slowly raised his hands. Candlelight glimmered on the old scars which seamed his strong fingers, and his fellows rose to join his gesture and his power. Arcane tension crackled as the Council was joined in turn by every wizard on the Isle of Rūm, the tattered survivors of the white wizardry of a continent. Their massed might rose high, focused in a storm of strength fit to drain life itself from those who spawned it. Yet they were the white wizards of Kontovar, the heirs of Ottovar and Gwynytha the Great, loyal beyond death. They knew what price this night’s work would demand of them, but they’d lived as wizards; as wizards they would die, spending themselves against the evil they’d allowed to live. Their joint strength was far too little for victory, but it was enough for the single-purpose which remained to them.

  Wencit gathered the deadly power in his hands, his fingers quivering with the essence of destruction. He had but one more task before he loosed devastation upon his enemies, and his lips parted to begin the final spell.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Belhadan

  “Out of the way, you idiot!”

  The drayman snarled, the heavy goods wagons swerved, and a red-haired man slid from under the horses’ very hooves into the gutter. The wagoneer’s round Belhadan accent drifted back in a picturesque curse, but the grating roar of iron-shod wheels drowned his profanity. And despite his anger, the wagon neither slowed nor stopped, for this was Belhadan, commercial hub of the north. Those who served the port’s voracity had little time for idle pleasantries with strangers.

  Muddy water flowed over the pedestrian’s legs as the stamp of horses and rattle of wheels faded. The mingled smells of salt, tar, and garbage overlaid the scents of hemp and fresh timber, and thunder muttered. Night cooking smells rode a sullen breeze from the west, but their comfortable aroma couldn’t cloak the sharp, damp smell of the looming tempest. There was thunder in those clouds, and lightning, and the promise of cold, drenching rain.

  The red-haired man shook his head and rose. He dabbed at his worn clothing, but it would never again attain sartorial splendor and he gave up with a shrug and peered into the wind. Gusts fingered his hair, and he leaned into them, feeling the approaching storm on his cheekbones. Belhadan loomed before him, laced with strands of glowing streetlamps, windows gleaming against the darkness. Much of the dwarven-designed city was buried in the bedrock of the steep mountainside and foothills its walls and fortifications crowned, but its broad streets were thickly lined with the above-ground houses, shops, and taverns preferred by the other Races of Man. Now the red-haired man scratched his jaw thoughtfully, then moved off towards the streetlamps leading towards the city’s heart.

  He wasn’t alone. An old man in an alley straightened from his slouch against a handy wall and squinted warily at the low-bellied clouds. Then he raised the hood of his Sothōii-style poncho with resigned hands and waited until the red-haired man had half-vanished into the dark before he hitched up the sword belt under that poncho and followed softly over the paving.

  * * *

  The thunder’s mumbled promise was redeemed in a downpour. The wind died in a moment, leaving the air still and hushed, prickly and humming. The next instant was born in the stutter of lightning and the hiss of rain. The wind returned, refreshed by its pause, billowing the skirts of the old man’s poncho and forcing the red-haired man to hunch into the raindrops which rode it.

  The old man muttered balefully into his neatly trimmed beard as the younger man continued at the same pace. Tolerance for thunderstorms was a youthful vice sensible old bones no longer boasted. Rain pelted the old man’s shoulders like pebbles and wind threatened to snatch the hood from his head, but he grunted with something like satisfaction as he peered at a passing corner marker.

  Ahead of him, the red-haired man scanned the darkened shops and warehouses as he trudged into the downpour, shielding his eyes against the rain with a cupped palm as he sought a haven. No one walked the streets in such weather—indeed, the approaching storm helped explain the drayman’s surly haste—but he glanced constantly over his shoulder, as if somehow aware he wasn’t alone on the deserted street. Yet no matter how quickly he looked, the old man always contrived to place a corner, a shutter, or an out-thrust stone buttress between them just before he turned.

  His present neighborhood seemed singularly lacking in the shelter for which he searched, and the water gushing from rooftops and downspouts filled the street’s gutters. They were well-designed, those gutters, yet the last month had been rainy. They were already half-filled by older runoff, and the sudden, massive deluge flooded them and sent a sheet of water swirling out across the hard-paved street. It washed about the red-haired man’s ankles, and he grimaced as its icy outriders found the leaks in his worn-out boots. His feet squelched with every step, adding a fresh stratum of wretchedness to the night’s misery.

  He turned a corner and paused suddenly as diamond-paned windows poured light out into the night, turning raindrops into plunging topazes in the instant before they slammed into the flooded street in dimpled explosions of spray. Then a door opened between two of those windows, spilling light and laughter, and a pair of sailors staggered out of it, arms draped about one another, loudly proclaiming their disdain for such a paltry zephyr.

  They wandered down the street, drunkenly bellowing an utterly reprehensible ditty to the thunder, and the red-haired man’s smile was etched in the welcoming light before the door slammed once more. Taverns offered warmth, even to those with empty purses, he thought, provided one didn’t attract too much attention to one’s poverty.

  He crossed the street and relief sighed from the old man’s lips, but he didn’t follow into that oasis of light and warmth. He watched the red-haired man enter the tavern without him, instead, for he knew something more than tempest prowled the night. He’d searched his mind at length and found no hint of what was to come, which was even more worrisome than it was unusual, but he cocked one eye speculatively upward and probed the storm for clues once more.

  Finally, he shook his head, muttered something under his breath, and clapped his hands once, sharply. The sound of his clap vanished in a roll of thunder—a roll unaccompanied by any flash of lightning—and a blue hemisphere whuffed into existence about him. It was faint, its glow more sensed than seen even in the darkness, yet rain hissed into steam upon its surface, and he peered about alertly, eyes slitted against the faint blue haze. A longsword materialized in his gnarled, scarred hand, swinging easily, edged with a glitter of silver-blue radiance.

  Something, yes…but what? His enemies wouldn’t wish to draw attention to their art: not in Belhadan. Wizards might be tolerated—barely—in some realms; with one notable exception, however, they received short shrift and a long rope in Belhadan. So what form would the attack take?

  His eyes flicked to the clouds, and he grinned. Of course. He lifted his sword’s tip to touch the underside of the hemisphere, then closed his eyes and murmured more words under his breath. Power welled, filling the blue shield with vibrating urgency, and the old man smiled at the familiar tingle and cracked his left eye to scan the clouds.

  Nothing.

  Well, such things took time. He closed both eyes and settled into a hunch-shouldered wait. He was reasonably certain what was about to happen, and he had no wish to carry it into the tavern. Indeed, he had every reason to keep any danger away from that inn. And at least his wards kept off the rain.

  His wait was shorter than he’d feared. Thunder rumbled again, and a lance of lightning, blue-white and screaming, forked from the clouds. It smashed into his shield, rupturing the rain-shrouded darkness with prominences of destru
ction that splintered back towards the heavens which had birthed them. The old man swayed, and his grip on the sword hilt went white-knuckled as the lightning sheeted back in clinging waves of flame. The shaft of brilliance lingered unnaturally, ramming sullenly against the old man. It seemed to endure for hours, shifting and probing at his defenses with self-aware malevolence as his mind flashed through the calculations of a wizard lord, beating back the attack with his own shifting strength. The battle swayed back and forth as minds and wills clashed and struck like edged steel in skilled hands.

  And then, finally, unwillingly, the bolt of light withdrew into the clouds and the savagery at its heart bled away into the all-absorbent earth. The old man straightened and opened his eyes, grinning up at the storm lashed clouds.

  “Nicely played,” he told the storm calmly, sheathing his blade with a snap. “A lightning bolt. What could be more natural? A nice touch, but not, I think, quite good enough, My Lady!”

  He bowed ironically to the raging sky and crossed to the tavern. The blue light retreated into his body as he touched the latch. It clung for a moment, like glittering blue frost, then vanished as he opened the door.

  * * *

  The red-haired man paused inside the door and peered about. The place was crowded, the air thick with the smell of food and drink. Pipe smoke hazed the rafters, drifting overhead in a lazy canopy, and freshly spread sawdust covered the floor. Voices rumbled, glass clinked, and eating utensils clattered about him.