Ascendant

by Florian Armas

  “Tell Codrin, that we thank him for his generosity,” Aron said, playing the role for Saliné. She was becoming important for him now; Octavian had made it clear that Bucur had to marry her the day they arrived at the place the Circle had given them to hide in. They want her out of Codrin’s way, and they will give him that bitch from Tolosa. He also understood that Bucur’s marriage to Saliné, and their children, would help them survive. Codrin would not harm Saliné’s family. “We should go now.”

  “I need to talk with Saliné,” Verenius said. “Come, my dear. There are things you need to know before your journey,” he said, loud enough to be heard by everyone. “Don’t oppose this,” he whispered and, taking her by the arm, pulled her away. “I don’t think that it will mean anything for you, but I apologize for what has happened.” He stared at Saliné, who ignored him. “I did not have this end in mind, but...”

  “Enough,” Saliné said coldly, turning her head away from him. The wind whipped aside her cloak and plastered her riding pants to her legs. She did not care.

  “You have to abide me a little longer. The Circle changed my plans. I...”

  “You have no honor.”

  “No, I did not have, and neither had the Circle. Life brought you an unexpected twist today. The next one may be in your favor. Good bye, Lady Saliné.” He took her hand to kiss it, and despite her pain, she forced herself not to slap him. “Farewell,” he patted her palm, still in his, and she felt something sneaking under her sleeve. She forced herself not to look down. His body shielded her from other people’s sight, and she pushed the thing up, hiding it completely; it felt like rolled-up paper.

  Laurent had brought enough horses, and all seventeen people leaving Severin mounted. Led by Aron, the group rode west. As planned, Saliné was flanked by Bucur and another soldier. The remaining soldiers made a larger cage around her; far to the left, the three guards Codrin had sent to watch the tunnel were lying dead in the grass. She could not see them. Sage Petronius and his two guards joined Aron at the front of the troop. Together with Octavian, he was the only one who knew the destination; even Verenius was not aware of it.

  “Laurent,” Octavian patted his shoulder. “Your efforts are seen very favorably way by Maud. Go to Leyona. The position of Itinerant Sage is waiting for you there. You deserve it.”

  Laurent bowed to Octavian then to Verenius, who ignored him.

  “Now let’s go inside and wait for the young man who wants to be our king,” Octavian said, and walked toward the tunnel. He will make children with our Duchess, and get the crown at some point in time, but the Circle will still rule Frankis. Once we have his children... Later... Now I have to convince Codrin to kill that weakling, Verenius. He reneged on his signature on the treaty after all.

  The gate was open, but there was no one in sight, not a single soldier. Vlaicu was a prudent man, and even with the signed treaty, he decided to stop his troop two hundred paces from the wall. He waited a few minutes more, then felt the need to decide.

  “Charge!” he ordered, and pushed his horse to a gallop. Fifty riders followed him. Speed was the easiest way to overcome a trap. They found no trap, and for a moment, Vlaicu felt ashamed. Better ashamed than dead, he mused. Once the first moments passed, feelings from the past came to him. It was his gate, his garrison, his city to protect.

  Once the gate was secured, they took over the palace too, and found only a few scared servants. “No one will harm you,” Vlaicu shouted, and sent a soldier back to the gate. Codrin’s banner was raised, and the raven on it flew in the wind. A few minutes later, two hundred soldiers came through the gate.

  Codrin dismounted in front of the main stairs, and climbed it in haste, jumping two or three steps at once. In the hall, he turned swiftly on the main corridor, and ran until he got to Saliné’s suite. Swiftly, he pushed the door open and entered. He found Verenius.

  “Saliné is not here,” Verenius said. Neither is Octavian.

  “Where is Saliné?” Codrin asked, as if unable to hear, his eyes piercing Verenius.

  “Women are so volatile sometimes. We negotiated hard, and she chose at the last moment to leave with Bucur, but let’s forget about Saliné; we have more pressing things to discuss.”

  “Where is Saliné?”

  “With Bucur. What’s so hard to understand? She likes him, and they will marry soon. This is for you,” Verenius pushed a letter across the table. “The Duke of Tolosa is...”

  “How did they get out of Severin?” Codrin’s voice went dangerously low, close to a feral growl, and his hand rested on the hilt of Shadow, his long sword.

  “Through the secret tunnel under the castle,” Verenius said, his voice thinner than he would have liked, and he coughed, to hide his weakness.

  “We signed a treaty.”

  “You are the Seigneur of Severin, and with all other lands, you will become Grand Seigneur. This is the letter recognizing your title,” Verenius pushed another envelope across the desk. “Our rules constrain us to keep Bucur as Candidate King, but we already consider you the next in line. In eight years, we will nominate you. That was the real agreement. Everything else is just a trivial detail in the larger scheme.”This is the last time I play such a dirty game, and Fate take Maud and the Circle.

  “Your larger scheme, not mine.”

  “I have here a letter from the Duke of Tolosa. He grants you the hand of his daughter, and you will become Duke at his death. As you know, he is sick, and no one gives him more than a year to live.”

  “The same girl you promised to Bucur before.”

  Surprised, Verenius frowned and took some moments to think before answering. “Things change. The Circle approves your marriage.”

  “Approves, disapproves. That girl is Maud’s granddaughter and under the Circle’s control. The last thing I need is a spy in my house. Anyway, the Circle has deceived me again... There will be consequences.”

  “There was no deception. Saliné wanted to go with Bucur. What’s so difficult to understand?”

  “If she had wanted that, she would have talked to me. You just sneaked her out, even though we had an agreement. A written one. You betrayed your own signature. There is a price to pay for that.”

  “Codrin,” Verenius said in haste, the memory of Belugas’s decayed hanged body resurfacing inside his mind. “Severin and this,” he pointed to the letters, “are the most important things. They will help you rise. Frankis needs you. Frankis needs a king. You may bring order, and put an end to this period of lawless. Let’s not make a rash decision.”

  “I will try. Where is Saliné?”

  “I don’t know where they have gone. I swear. Sage Petronius knows…”

  “Then you have no value to me.”

  “My value is in those letters. They will...”

  “You disrespected your own signature. Why should I believe you?

  “I am a soldier of the Circle, and I do what I have to do for my order. You would expect the same from your soldiers. You are right that I disrespected my signature, but I am right that in a few years Frankis will have a king again. You. My shame and your feelings count less than the task of bringing stability to a kingdom which was torn apart by civil war, and lack of order. There is more at stake than a woman, however intelligent and beautiful she is. You need the Duchy of Tolosa.”

  “That would sound good in the mouth of a decent man.”

  “It sounds right. You may do whatever you want with me.”

  “There will be no stability with the Circle manipulating everything. You don’t want a king, you want a puppet on the throne; you want to rule. That’s why all the Candidate Kings were wrong. They were only pawns in a greater game. Maud wants to be the hidden Queen.”

  He may kill me, but I will not tell him about my letter to Saliné until he makes his decision. “Then do what it must be done and end the game. Frankis needs a real king. You.” Verenius cocked his head and, silent, left the room. Unable yet to think straight, Codrin let him go,
knowing that he could not leave the palace.

  “Severin,” Codrin whispered, walking alone with no aim, feeling no life in the empty rooms where Saliné, Jara, Vio and Mohor once lived. He stopped again in Saliné’s room and, mechanically, went to the right side of the fireplace. His hand maneuvered the two pieces of stone Saliné told him would open the secret door. One went north and the second one south. He felt nothing moving in the wall yet, when he pressed against it, the door appeared. Inside the hidden corridor, he found her second bow, and he took and pressed it to his chest, as if Saliné was inside the springy wood. He closed the door and went to the window, staring away, seeing nothing, the bow still pressed against him.

  “This place will haunt me as much as Arenia. I lost my first family there, and the second one here. I must be cursed by Fate. I can’t live here. I will write to Jara that Severin will stay in my custody until Mark can claim the Seigneury. Severin,” he repeated and leaned against the window, “a bunch of cold rooms and walls. An empty thing, like my life.”

  Behind Codrin, a white silhouette appeared from nowhere, and Dochia, the Empress, stared at him, a smile playing on her white lips. She raised her translucent hand, and a sphere, resembling the texture of her skin, materialized in her palm. She blew gently, and the sphere flew slowly toward Codrin. It touched the back of his head and vanished.

  He shivered and turned abruptly. The room was empty.

  End of Ascendant

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  The Shamans at the End of Time

  Chapter 1 – Vlad

  Technically, I’ve been a soldier from the day my conscription orders arrived seven months ago, on the day I graduated from university. The bright future in front of me is no longer bright. I am not a fighter. This is true. I never wanted to fight and, for all my training, I’m still not able to hit a moving target. The cold black rifle in my arm is a soldier’s best friend, but still a strange object to me. I am better with a bow, or a sword, but modern wars are not fought with antiques. While this is not my first mission, there’s been nothing like this before, and I wonder how my poor skills will cope when they attack us. Or my mind. Our enemies are of course moving targets. There is a strange irony in my being in the Special Forces. It’s not for my shooting skills. Having two black belts in martial art helps in close combat, though. Two years ago, I was the European champion at judo. This year I should have been the Olympic champion, everybody was expecting that, me included. It will not happen. Cosmin or Andrei can shoot a fly, at three hundred paces, with their rifles. I have to watch their backs, but who will watch mine?

  Morning comes slowly, an opening eyelid over a giant black eye morphing into dark blue. With the binoculars attached to the top of my helmet, I can see the enemy soldiers around the hill we occupy. My device can track five targets simultaneously – the most dangerous ones – and feed them directly into my goggles. There are only seven of us, not even a platoon. On my arm, the tactical display records the movement of our enemies on the map: red spots sliding slowly across the screen. They are still far away and, hopefully, unaware of our presence. Down in the valley, the morning mist is sneaking along the river. Perhaps so is our death. There must be some iron ore in the entrails of the surrounding hills; the lazily flowing water has a reddish hue. The cursed color forces me to look away.

  “When we get back, I will have someone Court Martialled,” Dan growls, the fingers of his left arm dancing gently in the air to control the movements of his binoculars, his right hand gripping the rifle tightly. He never lets AI control his binoculars.

  If we get back. As if he hears my thoughts, he turns toward me, and I struggle to avoid his stare.

  There was no need to say what everybody already knows: we are surrounded. Dan is our lieutenant, in charge of our lives as well as his. His frowning eyes betray some inner search for a miraculous escape plan. We trust him, but what is coming now is something that none of us have encountered before, not even him. We can’t even communicate with our base; our transmission would be intercepted instantly, and a missile would pay us a courtesy visit.

  My eyes move again from the enemy soldiers swarming on my screen to Dan’s face. Impassive, it reveals no feelings – as if his growl was just an illusion. He is a good lieutenant, or at least he has half a year more fighting experience than us, plus time at the military academy. I understand his apprehension. We are on this hilltop because the wrong coordinates were sent by a lazy soldier who did not take time to check the encrypted order he sent to us. Maybe he was dreaming of his girlfriend, or maybe his brother was killed in action. Or maybe it wasn’t anything like that, just plain negligence. One wrong digit in the coordinates Dan received sent us into this hell. I can’t say we were totally unlucky. Passing unobserved through the first enemy line during the night was a lucky shot, especially when we knew nothing about it. We even hummed a tune, walking through the forest to replace our comrades in an observation post that was supposed to be safe, at our edge of no-man’s land. Instead we found ourselves on this bloody hill.

  “This place is magical,” Cosmin whispers, a few paces in front of me. His left hand makes an ample gesture, to include the whole hilltop in that magical spot. The hill resembles a half-bald man’s head, thick hair on his nape, and a full beard. There is an old oak forest on the lower parts, some trees so large they could hide a car. The bald area is partly covered by old ruins that we had no idea about until today, no more than a few decayed stones arranged in a small circle between larger natural rocks. Propelled by some strange curiosity, we tried to find them on the maps, but there was nothing. “I can feel the energy surrounding us.”Fingers spread wide, his left hand is now rigid and stretched in front of him, trying to feel what he calls the ‘energy’. The quiet excitement in his voice transfers into my mind too, I don’t know why.

  Cosmin is a math teacher. I’ve known him since childhood. The same quarter of the city, the same school, the same dreams. Almost. One year older, he finished university the year before me. His dream was already taking shape: for one year, he taught children the beauty of math. “Life is like a math equation,” he used to say. “It’s up to you to find the most beautiful solution.”

  What solution did our marvelous politicians find? The last economic crisis went on for almost a decade, and they decided that war was the best way to end it. At least no nukes have been used yet.

  What are my chances of getting out of here alive, returning home and fulfilling my own dream? My dream is to build planes, or even better, space planes ready to fly to Mars. Last year, I applied for several jobs, before graduating. By the time they answered, I was already in uniform. My parents informed them, and they promised to hire me when I got back from the front. With two permanent bases established on Mars and monthly shuttles to the Moon, there is a definite shortage of specialized engineers.

  Cosmin is not just a math teacher. Some years ago, he found, in his grandfather’s cellar, a box filled with strange books about spirituality and hidden mysteries from the past, and his life changed. He loves legends about energetic portals linking unknown places and time lines. I have heard them all. I don’t believe in such things, but Cosmin is a colorful storyteller, recounting lost civilizations that may never have existed and esoteric mysteries. No one can prove that Atlantis or Lemuria were real, but Cosmin is my friend. Why should I upset him? And he sees things that others cannot. I will believe that when I have proof, but I never contradict him. He takes my silent behavior as an endorsement of his peculiar beliefs.

  “The main vortex is right there,” Cosmin points at the stone resting my back and, involuntarily, I touch the stone. It’s cold.

  A cold vortex, I almost laugh, and bite my lip, unwilling to upset him. Convinced that there is nothing to see, I don’t turn around.

  “It goes a hundred feet into the sky. These ruins…” he continues, scratching his beard, his face thoughtful. “They must have been a temple a long time ago. What a pity to fight here.”


  What a pity to fight, period.

  “Shut up, Cosmin,” Toma growls. In normal circumstances, he would choose to ignore the story, and Toma is not the only feeling annoyed one right now.

  “Let him speak,” I say – better listening to Cosmin’s fairytales than thinking about a hundred ways to die. There are so many ways to vanish in a war. I had no idea about most of them in my previous life. There is more for the imagination in a real war than in a hundred movies. All morbid. “Your vortex must go underground too,” I tease Cosmin.

  “Yes,” he says quickly, unable to feel my friendly dig; it’s so easy to get him to talk about the hidden things that no one but he is able to see. “It’s like a hidden fire. Fire, walk with me,” he casts something resembling a spell from his old books, his eyes tense and searching.

  “Will this do it?” Andrei flicks his lighter and laughter fills the hill; the enemy is too far away to hear us.

  “I’m afraid that your vortex won’t help. What about a flying saucer? Can you summon one?” Dan jokes in his most serious tone, and that provokes more laughter. Even Toma joins in, a bit later, like an afterthought.

  “Only a flying can,” Cosmin replies, still laughing. “Make your choice. I have chicken or chicken.” Our usual meal for more than six months already. Swiftly, he opens the backpack, and tosses a can out. Then he does it again, and again, his repetitive movements resembling a peculiar metronome, counting the seconds of our lives.

  How I’d like to eat something cooked by Mother. My mind slips back to a past that has nothing to do with war and destruction and killing people like us. A past of love and happiness. A present of attrition and despair. Even the most regular meal with the family, a thing you used to ignore and take for granted, is now just a pleasant, distant dream you crave for.