At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  A bird call squeaked and drew his eyes skyward. Already he was thinking ahead, two and three leaping steps at a time, past fortifications to the salivating potential for local herds the next day’s light might reveal. The rearguard slipped with a shout. Rurik turned to bawk, and in the same moment, several of his men scrambled sideways.

  Then the house guard crashed into a heap at his feet, and before a coordinated cry could go up, they were under attack.

  Men sprang from nooks night obscured. At least a dozen. Several of Rurik’s company had gone down before they realized what was happening, but the rest rallied, either using their guns as clubs or drawing knives and hatchets for the brawl. No flashes of steel stole Rurik’s attention, but almost every attacker leapt for a different target, grappling them to the earth if they could lay their hands on them.

  A mud-slathered pig of a man rushed Rurik in the same wild charge. Instinct thrust him back, where once it had frozen him stiff; in the same gesture, Rurik slapped out a gauntleted hand. While it cracked off the armor of the man’s collar, it was enough to deflect his charge, and he careened for the next man in line.

  As if summoned by the flurry of motions, orange light suffused the plains below them, ringing out in a foreboding wall enclosing the hill. Horsemen. He could see the horses shuffling beneath the light.

  In the moment of panic that splintered through him, Rurik heard his father’s voice. Form up. Break the line and you break the spirit behind it. It was all he could think of and it did him no good—the attackers were on top of them, and they were strung out in a line of wearied men still laden with their packs.

  A shot went off from the hilltop. They were lost. Rurik knew it even as he drew his pistol, but he was determined not to be another whisper swallowed in the long grass. Next to him, one of his soldiers buckled under the pig-man, his long gun battered aside and the swing of a club visible in the dim light. Rurik drew back the hammer of his pistol and belched the weapon’s fire, its spark flaring wraiths of men into real beings, frozen for an instant in time, before spoiling his night vision utterly.

  From the cries, the pig-man wasn’t dead, but he wouldn’t be hurting anyone else. Blinded, from there Rurik did the only thing he could, and bent down beside his soldier, fingers grasping for the neck as Essa had once shown him. Checking for a beat of life. He could feel the breaths before he ever felt the beat, but it was the slick of warmth that concerned him most.

  More footfalls pounded up the slope behind him. He snatched up his pistol and twisted on them, shouting, “One more step and I’ll snuff the lot of you,” as he cocked the hammer again for emphasis. He was crouched—a huddled black splotch against the murky mound—but he dared not hope the vague shapes of men were as blind as he.

  Around them, the sounds of fighting were quickly dying. “Hold, hold,” someone shouted, and even before his moment of destiny came, he realized the voices were not their assailants’ alone. Some of his men had thrown down their arms. Most were prone. Voices and nebulous motions confirmed still more souls lurked, and no longer lacking steel.

  “Easy lad. It is being over now. We are not here to hurt you none. No one needs martyr,” a voice called from below him.

  Were it only him, he should have fired. Yet better men than him had always made one thing painfully clear: a man’s duty was to his family first, his brothers second, and himself last. Rurik hadn’t always listened, but that, he reasoned, only made such moments of commonsense more precious. He dared spare a moment’s squint up the line of his men—none, at the least, seemed to be screaming or rattling out death’s final tunes. That might not be the case the next time he fired. And if he had his mark, these weren’t bandits they were dealing with.

  “I’ll need assurances,” he sputtered.

  Effisian was guttural, like Idasian, but it slurred certain pieces together where Rurik’s own mother tongue innunciated clearly. The hushed discussion between those below, followed by a laughter’s bark, confirmed his beliefs. It was an ambush, probably laid just for them.

  “Our assurance is we not did shoot you as you trudged up hill, little man.”

  Resisting the urge toward bitterness, he let the pistol fall. It did not take his assailants long. First they relieved his sword and his pistol. They had him flat on his stomach a moment later, hands bound behind his back and a foot on his neck, as others checked to see if the man he had shot still breathed. He gathered it was fortunate for his own sake that the man did.

  He couldn’t see anyone’s faces, but the soldiers came among them and tied both the dazed and the wakeful. Then they patted them for any hidden arms and tossed them into the dirt like sacks of flour. For a long time after that, things were still. The Effisians said nothing to them, and as long as they kept quiet, they kept apart from them as well.

  Horses stamped and paced and their hooves clattered on the packed earth. Eventually the Effisians gave way and others lifted Rurik by the scruff of his neck. He struggled, kicking out at the first man he saw with a blade, but the other hit him hard in the gut and he went slack, struggling just to recapture the wind in his lungs.

  A few feet from him, one of the riders swung off his horse with an easy grace. Yet it was his sheaths that caught Rurik’s attention. Curved sheaths draped across his thighs, hiding the curious blades that were the source of their own fair share of rumors. As the rider loomed, Rurik tried not to flinch as he peered out the man’s face. A legend of the plains stared back at him.

  A thin line of horsemen blocked them, massing on the hills entrenching their path. The threat was moot—such a force could harry, but never assault their own. It would break them to try. That said, the fact that the Effisians had managed such a show undetected was troublesome—as were the banners they bore.

  Their sigil was a rearing and fiery-hoofed black stallion on an azure sea. Prince Leszek’s crest. Tessel called up the horse while his other captains formed their baffled troops into a spear wall. They drew the wagons deep into the column and closed ranks against a raid.

  But the horsemen never moved. As Rurik had said they wouldn’t. He had returned to camp at dawn, none the worse for wear, with Leszek’s call for parley. They had returned his items in good faith, and even let him reclaim his horse, on the condition he return if Tessel rejected their terms. They were simple enough.

  “Wants you, ser,” Rurik had told the general. “You and four others, or he’ll not make this a thing of words.” True to his men’s word, the Effisian prince hadn’t killed any of the men he’d captured. Yet.

  Tessel stared up the hill. “Who has Leszek sent?”

  “He comes himself.”

  Shock actually eased the general’s otherwise tense figure. “Leszek? Leszek himself comes to us?”

  Rurik nodded, but it was only now that Tessel finally called for his horse. “Is this wise, general?” the others cautioned, only to be ignored. Mounting, he dismissed them with a curt chastisement: “Everyone seems to want me dead. He’s been at it the longest. I think it only fair that we indulge him. Either fortune waits, or death. Either way, we’ll have it soon enough.”

  Rurik was among the four that rode with him. As a group, they mounted and trotted toward the line. They crossed a little over half the distance before five of the Effisians, in turn, rode to intercept them. They joined in the shadow of the hills, the Effisians with their obnoxiously long spears, the Idasians with their sabers and pistols laid bare against their sides.

  The man at the fore of the Effisian party dipped his head to them. “You honor us with your presence, general,” Leszek greeted them in easy-spoken Idasian.

  “As you do us, highness.”

  None of them had ever laid eyes on the elusive prince before, but the man was one of those rare legends that failed to disappoint. Nearly seven foot, if he were an inch, the man’s slender grace held him high above most others, even on horseback. Black, unkempt hair spilled from beneath an equally black helm and coif, leading down to the tip of a pointed goatee.<
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  A veteran of no less than twelve battles and probably thrice as many raids, with all the dents and scars to prove it, he had fought longer and harder in this war than probably any man still in it. Twice, to Rurik’s knowing, this prince had been reported dead, and twice he had sallied from the very gates of Hell to harry them into bloody submission.

  Even here, the man held himself with such calm one could not help but be a little unsettled. Rurik certainly was.

  He cast an uncertain glance at Tessel, but the general’s face was a steady mask itself. A stone wall meets a wild horse for conversation, Rurik groaned inwardly. This can only end well.

  There was a long moment of studious silence as the men took one another’s measure. Then Leszek shifted in his saddle, scratched at his stubbly cheek, and chuckled.

  “I see you intend to leave us, Tessel. Do you find Effise does not agree with you?”

  Tessel shook his head. “I believe, at this juncture, I have already sampled all that she has to offer. I would not wish to grow sick of her so swiftly.”

  “Pity. As I understand it, your own country’s bland palate shall not be availing you much either.”

  Tessel just gazed at the prince for what seemed a long while. Then he leaned forward in his saddle. “Perhaps you would agree to settle this by duel? We are both young men are we not?”

  The smile that slipped across Leszek’s wry face was coy, at best. “Young, yes. But I would know age. It is a fool that would risk all on the head of one. Besides, I do not come to war, Tessel. Rather, to warn you of those who would.”

  Suddenly somber, Tessel drifted with his nickering horse as it side-stepped a pace from man and blade. He nodded, as if to accept the burden of the words to come. Enemy to enemy.

  “Four days ago, a curious message came to me from my father. Talk of alliance, talk of war, talk of earth and fire and the bodies that walk them both. Talk of a priest, most of all, who would name himself beneath a crown. So too came a bastard’s name, and a proposal. Kill the one to know peace of the other.” There was no humor in the thin man’s frame as he followed Tessel’s ambling.

  “Harry, harry, harry. That the dead man might tarry. I see the bodies streaming across my country, and it gives me peace. But I am told this is wrong. That the greater good is served in blood, as it has these many years past. My childhood, as it were. And so: for king and crown. But I do this for a land that has bled too much already. I would see you gone, Tessel. We both know you starve. That the earth swallows your sick behind you. That this land bleeds you dry. That there is nothing here but ash for you or I.

  “You would go, with or without the order. I know this. And this is why I warn you—I would see no dishonor in this end. This new creature, and my father both, know not war. They do not understand its addiction, and that no note can end so many ought years of blood. What leaves will come again in new form, as soon as the convenience has passed. Vipers always do.”

  “You will not bar us?” Tessel asked beneath a thin veneer of calm.

  “I? No.” Leszek struck his hand across the air, as if to dismiss it. “But my father would. His men would bleed you. But I would have you home, and to your own battles. That we might reclaim our own, with neither string attached, nor fingers at our purse.”

  “You make a powerful enemy in this, highness. Your viper may be a priest, but he still has the venom of my country. If our return is ill-received, your homes may still burn ere long.”

  Rurik looked to the man, aghast. How, and why, the commander would seemingly try to dissuade the prince from their own safety—safety he had proposed—was too much to bear. Did the man want blood? Behind them, where anxious mobs howled, he knew there were men ready to die for Tessel, but what they wanted was to return home. The general owed them that, at least.

  “I am aware,” the prince said brusquely. “But this is later. This is now. A year of peace, or another tally to a decade of killing? All men need to breathe, and the smoke is stifling.”

  “There is still Othmann, and Ernseldt. They yet have many men between them. They may follow me into the flames, or they may remain. I cannot speak to them,” Tessel replied honestly.

  “Ernseldt, now there’s a proper beast!” Leszek grinned, bearing teeth. “But Czeslaw’s run him ragged, I think, and if Othmann is all that remains to me? A good man, but too cautious.”

  “And you are certain that I, too, am no snake?”

  Leszek leaned back on the edge of his saddle, gauging his opponent before shaking his head. “No,” he answered quietly. “You are a gryphon. You will always do best for the flock.”

  A moment’s weight gave way to a gracious bow from Tessel. “I am grateful,” he preened, and the horses stirred around them. Nothing but air answered, and the men, so long given to beasts and blades, clung to its soothing howl as they twisted away, to camp and to hills.

  At their backs, Rurik watched the Effisians drift into lines and canter away beneath the swell of the earth. Their flags drifted, snapped in the breeze, and sank from sight. A few moments later, the figures of his own men crested the hill, a few propped against fellows for support, but more or less unharmed. Then they were alone, even amidst the throng of looming figures, in this land they had sought to bleed. It seemed to stir at the hope, and so too did he. War could be avoided.

  But as they neared the camp, Tessel’s voice wound its way into his ear. “You wonder,” it noted, “why I should speak so candidly with the man?”

  Rurik stared resolutely ahead, trying to pretend the man had addressed another, but their other guards looked on in bare curiosity. The eyes demanded.

  “He is like me, in a way. Neither of us fights for ourselves. We fight for others. Yet in so doing, it is those others that always suffer. My father was the same. But this creature that sits our emperor’s throne now would kill us all for personal gain. He has no interest in this war. No care. He is a beast, and we are men.” Tessel drew his head up high and kneed his horse toward his troops. “Men discourse. Beasts kill.”

  Chapter 12

  Effise was an old nation, much of its troubled yet prideful history shared commonly with that of Idasia. Its people were even older than that of its neighbor, though the first empire rose far before the Effisians had ever dreamed of more than petty chieftains.

  They shared land. They shared culture. At a time, they had even shared ambition.

  Perhaps they would again.

  King Bezprym of Effise struck Leopold as a kindly man, and a worldly one, who knew the worth of the word as well as the weight of a good coin. As his wife dictated the terms of Bezprym’s reply, he could not help but draw a comparison between the failing old man and his own, so recently departed father. They were as two stars, fallen to either end of the shadows’ call. Each had fought so hard for their beliefs, and what had it brought them?

  Time lays low even the mightiest of men. Leopold would not make the same mistake. Could not make the same mistake. And in a few letters, he had solved two problems very dear to his heart.

  Attentions, his wife had cautioned, were not to be divided. Not so early in the dawn. At the time he had nodded, not really dwelling on the matter. But she had persisted, and he had been forced to see.

  A bastard from the east.

  A greedy count and a traitorous Farren whore from within.

  Plagues within were always greater than the plagues without. Set the wolves to the Bastard, and Leopold could freely deal with the real threat to crown and hearth. An empire, after all, could not stand with two emperors. No lives changed with the baying of another ill-bred whoreson.

  Yes, Bezprym was a good man. A pious man. They could have a bright future, their families could, if he were to cut the head off that bastard boy. Then, perhaps one day, a marriage even? Between daughter and son? They could dissuade this whole nation of war, draining as the matter was, and again, in the stroke of a quill and the binding of hands, attain what a decade of war had not.

  Men called Matthias “t
he Bold.” They would call Leopold “the Wise.” Or so he dreamed, when the wine kissed his cheeks at night.

  But he drew ahead of himself. Wheeling in his chair, he lifted his drooping head and turned to his wife as the final word fell. Her eyes gleamed. This. All of this was hers. He was merely the name the world would attach to it. He smiled back at her. The heart of his family. His heart, truthfully.

  By noon, the last of the letters were sent, with blissful tidings for the Effisian king and demands for the Idasian general—the Lord Marshall Othmann. For all Ersili’s badgering, Leopold had nothing for his margraves—those gatekeepers of the east. Worried were their letters, and frantic the motions of their troops. His uncle’s birds reported movements all along the border, mobilizing for the return of their own brothers and sons.

  It was a reception from hell, to be sure, but he had already assured them he had the problem in hand. There was nothing more that he could do. There were other battles to fight.

  By evening, Leopold managed to break away from the badgering of the Lord’s Council for a stroll through the castle gardens. It had fast become his favorite place, not for any great vibrancy to the flowers or vast wealth of scent, but because it was one of the rare places in Anscharde a man could find himself alone. Sometimes.

  He sank heavily onto one of the benches along the walkway, plucking idly at his robes. For all his time in Idasia, he could not seem to shake the old style. He found that the more binding and expressive finery of his nobility did not suit him. It itched or it bunched; offered no freedom of movement. Let his wife play the doll. He would wear robes until the day he died, and know freedom for it.

  Besides, the court girls were fond of telling him how their own husbands had begun to consider robes. An emperor was more than just a leader. He was a fashion setter.

  But some things were never in fashion. Reaching down, he rubbed at a swollen ankle—a memento from an earlier fall. It swelled under the broad weight of his steps, not unlike certain other troubles.