At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  “How many left?”

  “Most the nobles fled, and I’d say most has only their house guard what to follow them. Cut a swath out the west edge of camp, they did.”

  The men posted at Pasłówska’s gates, Rurik had discovered after, had realized too late what was happening. Men had sown fire in the town as well as the camp, and many soldiers—fearing fire as all are taught to fear it—had left their posts to aid the locals and put out the flames. They had shut the gates, lest danger flee or more gain entry, but there had been no orders beyond that. When Huwcyn and his ilk had fallen upon the western gate it had been scarcely manned, and unsuspecting. They had butchered the guards and thrown open the gates, and thus fled with all the rest.

  “There’s some of the household folk, sure, and men-at-arms, but as prisoners go, I’d doubt they’ve much to know.”

  “How many left?” Tessel repeated, through grated teeth.

  “Three, ser. Knights is all. Can’t speak to it, though. A lot of men are out for blood.”

  “And there’s been enough of it!” Even Tessel winced at last as his voice hit that crescendo. Ignoring the doctor’s frown, he continued, more softly. “Stop it, stop them, and get these men under guard, or so help me, I’ll feed your stones to the dogs. I want them at my tent by day’s end. We’ll have this out. Organize the men. Get them riding. Horses. Gryphons. Whatever’s left. Hell, do anything to get their minds off…this. But they need to be ready to move.”

  “Milord?”

  “What?”

  “Several bands set after the nobles a’ready, if it please you. I sent riders b—”

  “Madness,” Tessel huffed, sinking deeper into his chair. The thread made a fifth line within his blood, and a sixth. “Everything’s gone mad.”

  Having bided his words long enough, Rurik seized the opportunity to interject himself. “Just so, ser, just so, and all the more reason we need to get you on your feet.”

  “Excuse me? This man seems very determined to keep me off my feet.” Tessel waved a hand derisively at the doctor. Frowning, the man took another good stab at him, hard enough to earn a shudder of acknowledgement.

  “And you should ask him which is better, then: a bloodied man, or a bloodied army? These men look up to you—hell, they stayed, didn’t they? The longer they’re left to stew, imagining what was done to you, the darker this will get.”

  “Makes sense,” Vogel agreed. There was a spark of pride in his eyes as he said it, too.

  “And what shall I tell them of this?” Tessel grumbled, waving the same hand at the doctor and his wound.

  “I expect you’ll tell them it’s a flesh wound.”

  “And the blood?”

  “Someone else’s.” Rurik’s nose wrinkled as his eyes drifted over the body of Ser Frechauf. The eyes kept staring back, as though they could disbelieve their own demise. He, and the rest of the would-be assassins had been unceremoniously heaped in the street. “His, for example. Can’t imagine he’ll mind.”

  There was ice in Tessel’s gaze when it fell upon the corpse. “Nor I. Thrice damn the man, and all of them. For what they did to Boderoy, I…” His eyes glazed and his fist faintly shook as the memory took him. For a man so accustomed to war, Rurik was stunned by how much it unmanned him. Fury gathered and bore him on. “I should cut off his head and bury the pieces leagues apart. Let his ghost forever haunt this forsaken place, headless and alone. They do not deserve to go on.” As though realizing his own grim tiding, the general swung back with all the fury of the battle-blooded. So wroth was it that Rurik found a backward step.

  “Let Pordill and Huwcyn join him. Do you hear me? Run them down and stake them down, and leave their heads for me. That Pordill, he is old and he is wily—together as the two so often are—and I damn only myself for not seeing it sooner. A sheep, they say! A snake I name him! Damn him. Damn them both. If he thinks he can but shift the blame to others, and slither away before the blood flies…”

  It was painful to see Tessel seethe so. Anger came and went to him, same as any man, but he prided himself on his calm. For Rurik, and any number of other men, it would have come to blows long ago. The prodding, the sneering and the jeering and the whole useless nature of arrogance in the camp. Yet frustration and ire should have been the end of it.

  Rurik shook for how close death had come to them all, but the numbness remained. An octave before. His brother had fled an octave before. Had he known? The timing could not be ignored. Would he have cared? If he did, he hadn’t told Rurik, and that was damnable in and of itself. If he wasn’t a kinslayer, he was at least an oathbreaker. But Rurik couldn’t hate. It made him feel nothing at all; if anything, it emptied him of feeling’s very concept.

  His brother had left him to die. And Tessel, flush with the fury of Hell and the devil-god Mordazz himself, would surely not distinguish for the man.

  Moments like these planted seeds. He wanted to reach out, to catch Tessel by the shoulders and shake sense back into his pale face, screaming no, no, it mustn’t be let in, but it would be let in, and the darkness would build, no matter what others would say. So it had been with his own blades in the dark. Cullick had ordered those, no doubt, but at the time, he had thought them for his father’s own. It had driven him for a time. Seen his father’s time end.

  And this? In the child’s logic stamping through his recovering mind, he could not help but ponder, fearful as that same dear child, if this too were not some consequence, some ripple off the circle he walked down into Hell.

  This was about men. Tessel turned his wrath on Vogel next, venting orders with emotion, not logic, and all the while cringing as the needle bit deep. Vogel did not shudder under it. He took the words and turned them calmly back, and though blood rested him, he dared to question Pordill’s role in vengeance. It was not heard. This was about men, but Tessel would be blind to it. The blood would pool and the seed would suck and grow until it bloomed into a multitude, and they named wrath not Huwcyn, nor Pordill, but nobility—the same nobility that had shunned the general all his life. As Rurik had done to the family he had thought abandoned him.

  Children. The world was stocked with children.

  “Sers! Sers!”

  It was a child’s cry, but loud enough to rattle the whole of the tent. There was a shuffle outside, as the men’s attentions turned to the line of soldiers. Jagged, bleary motions animated the figures of the guards, followed by a soft shriek and the repetition of the title. Vogel cast an awkward eye to his fellows, then drew the nearest man aside and bore open the scene to them.

  A blond-haired youth struggled with several guards, who were in the process of dragging him away. He bore no colors of marking, but all knew the face.

  “God be good, men. Let that boy go,” Vogel snapped at them, aghast.

  When they did, the boy raked them with a scowl, but scampered away as quickly as he could, straight for the tent.

  “We tried to tell ‘em no visitors, captain, but he was an insistent little—” one of the guards attempted to explain.

  Vogel did not let him. “Truly? And you suppose Tessel’s page has a knife hidden up his arse? Watch for men, idiots.”

  The flap fell shut again as Vogel ushered the boy in, apologizing all the while. The youth, for his part, shrugged it off without a second thought. The way he shook as he gathered himself suggested excitement stood him far above a child’s fear, or fury. He strode proudly toward Tessel, the eagerness plain within his bright eyes—only to hesitate when his eyes drank in the full scope of his master’s injury.

  At sight of the boy, anger’s flames were snuffed as if by the snap of a hand, and Tessel became another man. He smiled, in spite of himself. “Easy, Jonas. What is it? What’s happened?”

  “I…” The youth swallowed, trying to regain some of his former swagger. He shook, looking between them, and wrung his hands. “We caught one, ser.”

  “Caught?”

  “He was ahorse, ser, and the men—Borgen’s men—t
hey took him from his horse wit staves and drug him off.”

  “Which of the bastards was it?”

  “None of them, ser.”

  “What?”

  The boy squirmed beneath the attentive gazes of his masters. “This one was riding in, not out. It’s why we was able to nab him.”

  Vogal gawked. “You must be—”

  The boy, retrieving his excitement, redoubled the speed of his words, and simply talked over him. “Says he be a messenger. Flew Imperial colors. Given who was doing the stabbing hereabouts, I thought it right-wise…well, what I means to say is, we searched him. Found this little number.” Jonas held out a rolled bit of parchment. “Seal’s official, and all.”

  True to the boy’s word, the double-gryphon seal of the Empire had been affixed to the tattered edges of the roll. Rurik was aghast. “You seized an Imperial messenger?”

  Regardless, Tessel reached out and plucked the roll, tearing the wax seal without hesitation. From over his shoulder, Rurik could make out a short letter, crisp, succinct, and gracefully rendered. Professionally scribbled.

  Harsh laughter followed, such that the now scowling doctor was forced to put a second hand upon the general’s chest and force his rocking body still. Tessel tossed the paper to the earth and ran his hands over his face and through his hair, smothering his own fatalistic sounds. Nervousness shifted his attendants, uneasy looks the only motion within the otherwise still tent.

  After a while, Tessel’s hands simply fell limp at his side. The very force about him stilled. It left him staring skyward, slack. “Apparently, we should not take umbrage with our dearly departed noblemen.” The words—whispered—held their weight in poison.

  “Ser?”

  “It would seem I am a prisoner. Your man there came for Othmann—to order me an outlaw, to place me in chains, and to take this army home.” With a dark humor, he struck up his hands and offered them to the doctor. “Come, come, dear man, bind me up to the quick. There could well be a knighthood in it for you.”

  “A forgery, surely!” For a fleeting breath of a moment, Rurik swallowed his own anger, his own fear. “What reason would the Emperor have to order such a thing?”

  “We have no emperor. Only princes. Princes in need of armies, and princes with the ears of far too many nobles. Do you think they’d really want a bastard in charge of the army’s bulk? This is not their first letter, Rurik, and you know it well enough. Yet they meant it for the last.”

  Slumped in his chair, the Bastard’s head swiveled back on them, eyes dark as emeralds. He licked his lips, turning from one man to the other until they fell quiet as the dead. Never had the lines of his cheeks and the swelling beneath his eyes been more apparent. He looked almost skeletal—fierce and dreadfully unmoved.

  “Well. Othmann got his wish, I’d say. I’ll not—God, but you’re a butcher!” This last he barked in vehemence at the doctor. “I’ll not have our empire without the soldiers it so desperately needs. Get this mess cleaned, and order the companies drawn up by afternoon’s light. Put messengers to our camps—our army must reassemble. I would have words.”

  Truth would die in those words. Rurik knew it before the order was drawn to its final thread. Truth would die and still they would march, and sure as he drew breath, that man’s anger would find its out at last, and unbridled, descend on those for whom he had so long drawn it in. On the vagueness of a hope, Rurik looked to Vogel for support, but the man only bowed as men would bow, and before he left, Rurik did the same, wondering all the while how starving men could march. It only took a turn to prophecy. A look at the dying and the dead.

  By night, the camp had lost none of its confusion, and their leaders shared none of their truths. Lies swung around him and lies poured from him, and for all his reticence he was a wanton partner to the crime. Dried blood clung in spatters to Rurik’s tunic. It seemed older than it was, and his soul all the darker.

  His eyes were heavy as he turned them through the shapes rendered unfamiliar by night. Bodies churned into the west and were gone. Ink consumed the moon. It consumed rope and bodies, and left both dangling beneath the haze. There was no godliness afoot, no sign of celestial touch upon this barren waste. He longed for the comfort of his brother’s camp, but that place was closed to him, now more than ever. Scavengers stalked its wake, the Gorjes foremost among them, and what was once orderly was picked to pieces.

  Berric had been sent to find the Company of the Eagles, but as yet there stood no answer.

  And with that, the only creature left to Rurik for guidance was the Bastard. Tessel. One voice in a sea of discontent. A man he no longer trusted. A voice of lies, sure as any. None of it made any sense. So he whispered his madness to the only place that still offered peace in its silence.

  Yet as he clutched the rusted coin, Rurik had the feeling of a stare fixing him. He looked back, but no one lurked in the shadows. Sighing at his own foolishness, he wrapped his legs in his arms and sank deeper into the warmth of the fire.

  Then, like a crack of thunder, a voice: “Months pass by the silver back, and only now it sings.” He was not alone.

  The timber of the voice nearly cracked Rurik from his perch. As it was, he bolted to his feet, spinning round to track his old friend’s voice. It seemed to ring between tent and wall like.

  Yet there was nothing. A sigh split his cracked lips.

  Usuri? I did not think—

  “It would do you best, stop there.”

  He sank slowly back down onto the log, staring at the coin in his palm. Not even a vibration—such as it had always been before. Had he—it seemed so foolish now—had he honestly thought her dead? Yet implication seized him. You heard it? All that I have said? In thought, one becomes too loose with the truth, he realized, and the realization made his stomach twist at the thought of all the sorceress might have heard. At a time, he might have thought himself mad. He stole a glance around the vacant fire pit. Most still would.

  But now, it was the rest of the world that had grown silent. There was no mirth in camp on this dark night. Nothing but a boy and a coin rendered by a girl, so many years ago, who cupped his hand and dared to whisper: “Whenever a voice is needed.”

  “Whines of hearts. Whines of flesh. Comfort… always seeks it in the shadows.” A breathless pause, shuddering perhaps beneath its own bitterness. “Away, flesh. You’re not welcome here anymore.”

  Usuri? You’re not making sense. Please—

  “One thing. It’s all they ever care about.”

  He called to her again, but it was as if the woman—so briefly touched—had closed a door against their words. Only quiet greeted him, leaving him distinctly colder than before.

  She was alive. She hadn’t been burned.

  But what was left?

  Chapter 9

  Everything burned, everyone lied, and no one paid for it but the ones in the muck. They might as well have been muck, the way the world trod on them. The way it took them all for granted, so far as Voren saw it.

  “Freedom!” shouted the Bastard. “Freedom for the father, freedom for the son, yes, let freedom ring for the daughter and the slave and all the fools arrayed before the Gray Hills. There is no us and them but we, and we-we-we will teach them what it means to defy an emperor. Blood—what is blood but the blood that is spilt? All men bleed. Breeding and birthing mean nothing to the circle and the cycle churns regardless of the form—no!”

  They would hunt these men as sure as any other.

  Loyalty—it was to be put aside, as they had put aside their own. They were men. They had loyalty to a higher providence than to titled animals. Titled men that would dare to kill another with a greater title than their own. The Emperor had made this an army of the people, and they had sought to make it an army of their people. Even now the so-called nobles fled their crimes, hoping for safety in the walls of their homes.

  “They and their princes. Princes from afar, princes that dishonored the memory of their father, bickering over
scraps and men before the dust had even settled on his tomb. Men that would not fight as the people had fought, as he had fought. Men that beckoned some southern priest to guide them, to delude them into collusion of a broken system, to bind them all not to god or right, but to a church of corrupt men and bedeviled fools, who sure as any other men of privilege sought land, sought wealth, not the higher faith they so preached. Oh yes, oh yes, how many bishops stand common born?

  We-we-we are the people. We are the breath of Idasia. They would make us fight and die in foreign lands, only to kill us for surviving. When they show fear, they call us mad for honor. When they seek to flee with tail twixt legs they seek to beat us to submission, and name us all for traitors. We will show them this is not the case. Not the right that we have earned.

  And they would dishonor our dead by allying with the very men what once assailed us. They would undo all our hard-won gains simply to fuel their own internal avarice. An alliance with the devil! What they think they cannot take by force, they seek to take by wile, yea, they seek to take by sacrifice—our sacrifice! Idasia and Ravonno and Effise to be as one against the people! No more. We will not let them usher us into the night.

  Time-it-is-time-it-is-now. Let the world see. Let all know.

  We are the coming-of-the-coming-of-the-coming-of-the-right.”

  A new order. These words rang in Voren’s ears and on his tongue, and tasted of bread and flour and sweet summer honey. He could see home—Idasia—and his heart burned at the visage of a twenty thousand man liberation.

  Peasants could not bear arms, save in their lord’s good name. Peasants could not voice opinion, save at their good lord’s asking.

  But they still bore arms. They heard their grievances voiced. Well, this is the flaw isn’t it? You can give a man a sword but it’s altogether another thing to take it from him. Nobles were simply men with power. Always had been. One could give it or one could take it or one could die beneath it. Peasants were simply without.