Infinity: Reborn

The smoke drifted. The figure was gone, and the canyon breathed around them, nothing but stone and wind and the creak of harness leather.

Lucien kept his eyes on the char-black circle where the figure had stood. He raised his fist and the column halted.

“Shields up. Mages, I want barrier lattices across the vanguard. Archers, watch the ridgelines.”

The orders moved down the chain in a ripple of shouted relays. Men pulled shields from backs, locked edges, raised faces toward the canyon walls. The mages began their work, and pale light sheeted across the formation’s leading edge.

Nothing came.

Lucien counted the seconds. Thirty. A minute. The barriers hummed. Somewhere in the middle of the column a horse stamped and was hushed. The archers held their draws until arms shook, then eased off by unspoken consensus.

Two minutes became five.

Five became ten.

A sergeant near the front let out a long breath. The man beside him unrolled his shoulders. Someone in the rear muttered something that drew a short, tired laugh.

Adrian brought his horse alongside Lucien’s. “Mind games,” he said. “You think they panicked and ran?”

“No.”

“Then you think it was a bluff.”

Lucien turned the word over. Bluff implied the figure had needed to bluff. He was not certain that was true. “I think it was an invitation we declined,” he said. “And now we find out what the host does with uninvited guests.”

Adrian studied the canyon mouth for a moment, then looked back at the column strung behind them. “Our scouts confirm the eastern force is four hours out. If we reverse now, we abandon the approach entirely. They’ll have time to collapse this route before we can regroup.”

Lucien looked at the ridgelines. The stone was bare. Clean.

Which meant nothing.

“Move out,” he called. “Full formation, eyes on the high ground. Close the gaps.”

He nudged his horse forward and leaned toward Adrian. “I hope you’re right.”

Adrian said nothing. The man never entertained the alternative.

The column compressed as it pushed deeper into the canyon, the walls climbing higher on either side, blotting the sky to a pale strip above. The acoustics changed, sound flattening, boots and hoofbeats pressing against stone and returning muffled. Lucien could feel the weight of the passage around them, the way noise died before it travelled.

“Contact rear!”

The shout cracked off the walls and doubled back on itself.

Lucien wheeled his horse. Past the trailing edge of the column, past the last infantry ranks still threading the canyon entrance, the open ground beyond was no longer open.

Cavalry. A solid line of them, dark shapes on dark horses, sitting still across the mouth of the canyon.

His mind did the distances immediately and found no answer. The land behind them had been empty when they entered. He had checked himself. The scouts had checked. There were no ridge paths wide enough for massed cavalry, no dry creek beds that could swallow a mounted unit of that size.

Yet there they were.

The bulk of the column was already inside. The men still outside numbered perhaps three thousand, exposed on open ground, and those riders hadn’t charged yet.

Hadn’t needed to.

“Forward!” Lucien’s voice hit the canyon walls and scattered. “All units, double pace, get inside the canyon now!”

The rear ranks heard it and understood. They began to push.

* * *

The last of the rear ranks had barely cleared the canyon mouth when the ridgelines moved.

Not the stone. What had been pressed against it, still as carved relief, suddenly wasn’t. Winged shapes peeled from the cliff faces on both sides, dozens of them, and the sky between the walls became a ceiling of dark membranes and drawn bows.

“Cover! Get down, shields up!”

The first volley came before the echo of his order died. Arrows hammered the column in a diagonal sheet, rattling off raised shields, punching through gaps, finding the men whose shields were a half-second late. The sounds were distinct and awful: iron on steel, iron on wood, and the other sound beneath both.

Adrian’s sword cleared its scabbard and swept in a single horizontal arc. The air ahead of him sheared. The second volley dissolved in that cut line of force, shafts spinning away in pieces, and soldiers who had flinched behind their shields looked up to find nothing falling.

“Archers, return fire!” Lucien drove his horse forward along the column’s edge. “Elevation, target the cliff lips!”

The Solarian archers found their footing and drew. Shafts climbed the canyon walls. Up on the ridges, the winged shapes shifted, some dropping back behind the stone lip, others catching the wind and rising out of range, and a few simply falling. The exchange was uneven and costly in both directions.

The mages finished their lattice work. Pale barriers stretched across the column in overlapping planes, and the next volley shattered against them in sparks and splinters. The arrows after that never made it through.

Adrian pulled his horse back to Lucien’s side and raised his voice over the din. “Futile. They’ll exhaust themselves long before those barriers buckle.”

Lucien watched the ridgelines and said nothing.

Four minutes. Five. The rhythm of volleys slowed, gaps widening between salvos, and then the arrows stopped entirely. The barriers hummed over an abrupt, strange quiet. Up on the cliff faces, the winged shapes had pulled back or lifted away, leaving only empty stone.

Adrian glanced across at him. “See?” The word carried the particular satisfaction of a man who expected to be believed.

Lucien was already looking past him.

“Triple the pace,” he told the nearest captain. “I want us two hundred yards deeper before they decide the arrows weren’t the point.”

The captain moved. The column tightened and pushed forward. Lucien turned his face upward, scanning the pale strip of sky between the canyon walls.

She was there.

The same figure from the canyon mouth, suspended high above the passage, close enough that the pale blue of her skin was unmistakable against the grey air. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t casting anything he could see. She was simply watching the column push beneath her with the patience of someone who had already decided how something ends.

Lucien held her gaze for a moment, or tried to. At that distance he couldn’t read her expression, only her stillness, and her stillness was worse than any gesture.

His brother’s warning surfaced unbidden. He turned the thought over once, examining it the way he would examine a claim made under duress, looking for the seams.

He found them. Found the reason the thought was wrong, the reasons it had to be wrong, stacked them in order.

Then he raised his blade toward the canyon’s far end.

“All units. March ahead”

She shouldn’t think the sky would keep her beyond reach.

* * *

The passage broadened by degrees, walls stepping back in irregular shelves of dark rock until the canyon opened into something that had no right to exist this far into the Wastelands. The ground levelled. The sky widened. A man could stand here and almost forget the walls were there at all.

The arrows had stopped three hundred yards back, somewhere in the narrowing. No final volley, no trailing shots. One moment the air was full of them, and then it wasn’t. The canyon walls fell silent, the winged shapes gone from the ridgelines as completely as if they’d never been there.

The column slowed without being ordered to. Men lifted their shields and looked up, scanning stone that gave nothing back.

Lucien didn’t let them stop. “Keep moving. Maintain spacing.”

The passage widened as they pushed through, the walls pulling back by degrees until the canyon opened into something almost generous, a broad floor of pale scree with enough flat ground to billet twice their number. The two suns sat low and diffuse behind the overcast, casting no shadows worth the name. It was quiet in the particular way of places where sound had recently been and left.

He walked the perimeter himself while the column sorted its ranks, counting the wounded being helped toward the centre, watching the barrier mages lower their lattices with the cautious relief of men who half-expected to need them again immediately. The ground here was dry and level. There was a natural windbreak to the north where the canyon wall jutted outward. A shallow depression that could drain rain away from a camp’s centre.

It was, he realized, almost exactly where a competent commander would choose to rest.

He kept walking.

Adrian fell into step beside him without preamble. Neither of them spoke. That was the particular quality of their shared silences over the past days: not comfortable, not hostile, simply full of different conclusions they hadn’t yet resolved into an argument.

The scouts he’d sent forward were already returning, filtering back through the column in ones and twos. He stopped and let them come to him.

He recognized Nile at twenty paces. Young, lean, with the careful economical movements of someone trained to cover ground quietly. Nile had been assigned to his advance unit for this campaign and had acquitted himself well in the supply-line skirmishes, quick-footed and largely unremarkable, which was the best thing a scout could be.

“Report,” Lucien said.

Nile delivered it concisely. The terrain continued to open beyond this position. No visible forces within a quarter mile. The canyon walls flattened considerably to the east, which he described in enough accurate detail that Lucien found himself nodding along.

“Good work.” He let a small pause settle. “How long have you been in the advance corps?”

“Since the Lhun campaign, sir.”

That was right. Lucien had a vague memory of Nile being commended by one of the unit commanders there, some citation about locating a concealed supply depot. He’d read the report but hadn’t spoken with the man directly until this deployment.

Except.

There had been one conversation. Brief, unremarkable enough that he wasn’t sure why it had stayed with him. It was the morning they’d crossed into the Wastelands, the column still fresh, and Nile had been near the fire when Lucien passed. Something about the way the young man held himself alone at the edge of camp had made Lucien pause, and he’d said something inconsequential, the sort of exchange that colonels make to remind soldiers they exist to someone above their immediate commander. Nile had been quiet in the way of someone unaccustomed to being noticed. He’d given short answers. He’d looked at the ground more than at Lucien’s face.

This man was looking directly at him.

It wasn’t much. It was the kind of thing that could be nerves resolving, or fatigue changing a man’s carriage, or simply the difference between the morning before a campaign and the middle of one. Lucien had made assumptions before from less and been wrong.

“Your parents,” he said. “They’re well, I hope?”

“Yes, sir. Doing well. My mother’s been poorly but she’s recovering.”

“Good to hear.”

He turned slightly, as though to dismiss him, then stopped.

Nile had been raised in the charity house off the Veldrin road. Lucien had noted it specifically because the boy’s intake file had landed on his desk during a routine audit of the advance corps, and he’d had cause to query one of the records. No family listed. No next of kin.

He looked back.

“Bind him.”

The nearest two soldiers hesitated only a quarter-second before training moved them. Nile backpedalled and hit the grip of one of them before he’d fully turned, and then both soldiers had him by the arms and he stopped moving because there was no point in moving.

“I should have assumed,” Lucien said, to no one in particular. He felt the weight of it settle somewhere behind his sternum. Ten days of intercepted communications, and he’d been checking formations, checking supply lines. Not checking the faces coming back through his own lines. “Since when.”

The man wearing Nile’s face smiled. It didn’t look like Nile’s smile. It didn’t look like any particular person’s smile.

“Long enough.” He tilted his head slightly, almost curious. “As for where he is… he died well, if that matters to you.”

He looked at the canyon floor, then back up, the smile unchanged.

“You’re already where we needed you.”

Adrian’s blade entered through the back and out through the sternum in a single push. The man’s expression didn’t have time to change.

The body dropped. The guards released it.

“Burn it,” Adrian said. “And I want inquisitors on every scout who came back today. Every one. Don’t leave it to their word alone.”

The shape on the ground had already begun to change. The lines of it ran wrong, the proportions shifting in small ways that the eye kept refusing to accept, until the face smoothed and the hair dissolved and what lay in the dirt was a featureless humanoid thing, pale and jointless as wax.

Lucien looked at it. “You could have learned something from that.”

“On a battlefield, information has a price.” Adrian cleaned his blade against his thigh. “The price of keeping that thing alive was time. We don’t have time.”

* * *

Lucien raised his voice to carry over the press of armour and movement.

“We’re leaving the canyon. Turn the column back. Now.”

Orders rippled outward through the sergeants. The forward units began to shift, shields turning, formations compressing in preparation for the reversal.

Adrian stepped closer, wiping the last trace of grey from his blade. “We outnumber them.”

“That assumes the reinforcements arrive today.” Lucien kept his eyes on the cliff edges, the shadows between the rocks. “It assumes every report we’ve received since crossing into the Wastelands was genuine. We know at least one wasn’t.”

“One infiltrator—”

“Is evidence of a pattern, not an exception.” He gestured toward the canyon mouth, the narrow walls funnelling them deeper with each step. “We’re fighting on unfamiliar ground. The risk is too high.”

Adrian’s jaw worked for a moment. His gaze tracked the column, the repositioning soldiers, the distance still to cover. Then he sheathed his sword.

“Pull them back.”

The word passed down the line. Forty thousand men began the slow, grinding work of turning an army around inside a space built for far fewer.

Lucien scanned the ridges again. Still nothing. No movement. No—

The air changed.

It wasn’t sound. It wasn’t light. It was the way open ground stopped being open, the way distance collapsed without shifting, and suddenly the canyon wasn’t a canyon anymore but a box with walls on every side.

Figures materialized along the cliffs. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Not emerging from cover—appearing, as though they’d been standing there the entire time and something had simply stopped hiding them.

Wings spread against grey sky. Spears levelled. Archers nocked arrows that gleamed faintly with something that wasn’t firelight.

Behind them, where the mouth of the canyon had been clear moments before, armoured shapes filled the gap. Cavalry, infantry, siege engines wheeling into position to block the only exit that didn’t require climbing sheer rock.

Ahead, more forces. Closing the eastern approach.

Lucien’s hand found his sword hilt.

“Stand ground!” His voice cut through the rising murmur of panic spreading through the ranks. “Shields up! Defensive positions!”

The column staggered into formation. Shields locked. Pikes angled outward.

They were boxed. Thousands of soldiers packed into a killing floor with nowhere left to run.