by Ari Marmell
Yes, he knew what he had to do next. But he also knew that he wasn’t expected until after dawn, and that left him plenty of time for a little errand that Nenavar needn’t know about.
Whistling a tune just loud and obnoxious enough to wake anyone in the neighboring rooms, Kaleb climbed the inn’s rickety stairs and out into the Mecepheum night.
The heat of the day had begun to dissipate, its back broken not merely by the setting of the sun but also by the falling of a faint summer drizzle. Kaleb flipped up the hood of his cloak as he went, more because it was expected than because he was bothered by a bit of rain.
Through the center of town—through the city’s best-kept streets—he made his way. Glass-enclosed lanterns gleamed at most intersections, burning cheap scented oil to keep the worst of Mecepheum’s odors at bay. The capital of Imphallion was a witch’s brew of old stone and new wood, this neighborhood far more the former than the latter. The roads were evenly cobbled, the rounded stones allowing the rain to pour off into the cracks rather than accumulate along the lanes. All around, wide stairs and ornate columns, some in fashions that had been ancient when Mecepheum itself was new, framed the doorways to edifices that were home and workplace to the rich and powerful—or those rich enough to appear powerful.
Despite the hour, Kaleb was far from the only traveler on these streets. The many lanterns illuminated all but the narrowest alleys and deepest doorways, and patrols of mercenaries, hired to police the roads and keep the peace, gave even the most timid citizen sufficient confidence to brave the night.
So it had been for some years now, ever since the Guilds had effectively taken over the city. Tight-fisted they might be, but keeping the shops open and commerce running into the hours of the evening was well worth the expense.
Kaleb kept his head down, sometimes nodding slightly to those he shoved past on the streets or to the occasional patrols, but otherwise ignoring the shifting currents of humanity entirely. And slowly, gradually, the traffic on the roads thinned, the lanterns growing ever farther apart until they were replaced by simple torches on poles, spitting and sputtering in the rain. Gaps appeared in the cobbled streets, missing teeth in the city’s smile, and the great stone edifices vanished, edged out by smaller buildings of wood.
On the border between Mecepheum’s two separate worlds, Kaleb briefly looked back. Looming high over the inner city, the great Hall of Meeting itself. Here, now, it looked magnificent, untouched by time or trouble. Only in the brightest noon were its recent repairs visible. Despite all the city’s greatest craftsmen could do in six years, the new stone matched the old imperfectly, giving the Hall a faintly blotchy façade not unlike the earliest stages of leprosy.
Kaleb smirked his disdain and continued on his way.
Six years …
Six years since the armies of Audriss, the Serpent, and Corvis Rebaine, the Terror of the East, had clashed beyond Mecepheum’s walls. Six years since Audriss, gone mad with stolen power, had unleashed horrors on Mecepheum in an apocalyptic rampage that had laid waste to scores of city blocks. Six years—more than enough for the Guilds to patch Mecepheum’s wounds, if not to heal the scars beneath.
Oh, the citizens had avoided those mangled neighborhoods for a time, repelled by painful memories and superstitious dread. But cheap property near the heart of Imphallion’s greatest city was more than enough to attract interest from outside, in turn inspiring Mecepheum’s own merchants and aristocrats to bid for the land lest outsiders take it from them. The rebuilding, though slow to commence, was long since complete. An outsider, ignorant of the region’s history, might wonder at the abrupt shift from old stone to new wood, from the affluent to the average, but otherwise would never know that anything untoward had ever happened.
The confident footsteps of the richer—and safer—neighborhoods transformed into the rapid tread of pedestrians hoping to reach home before trouble found them, or else the furtive stride of those who were trouble. Coarse laughter staggered drunkenly through the doors and windows of various taverns, voices argued behind closed shutters, ladies—and men—of the evening called and cooed from narrow lanes. Still Kaleb ignored it all. Twice, men of rough garb and evil mien emerged from doorways as though prepared to block his path, and twice they blinked abruptly, their faces growing slack and confused, continuing on their way as Kaleb passed them by.
The rain had grown heavier, threatening to mature into a true summer storm, when Kaleb finally reached his destination. It was just another building, large, ungainly; he wasn’t even certain as to its purpose. A storehouse, perhaps? It didn’t matter. Kaleb hadn’t come for what was, but for what had been.
Ignoring the weather, he lowered his hood and glanced about, his magics granting him sight beyond what the night and the storm permitted anyone else. Even in brightest day, no other would have seen what he did, but there it was: scorched wood and ash, the last remnants of the lot’s former edifice, mixed in with the dark soil.
He knelt in the dirt behind the ponderous structure, digging his hands into the earth until he was elbow-deep, first through clinging mud, then drier loam the falling rains had not reached. It smelled of growth and filth, things living and things dying.
Very much like Mecepheum itself, really.
Kaleb tensed in concentration, closing himself off from the world around him. As though he had melted in the downpour, he felt himself—the essence of what he was—pour from his eyes like tears, flow down his skin and meld into the yielding soil. He cast about, blind but hardly unaware, seeking, seeking …
There.
He rose, the soil sliding in chunks and muddy rivulets from his arms. He moved several yards to his left and knelt once more. But this time, when his hands plunged into the soil, they did not emerge empty. He carefully examined his prize: a skull, cracked and broken, packed with earth.
Without hesitation or hint of revulsion, Kaleb lifted it to his mouth and drove his tongue deep into a socket, probing through the dirt to taste the essence within. It was not a technique his “master” Nenavar would have recognized. For all the old wizard’s skill, there were secrets of which even he remained ignorant.
Six years, but there was just enough left to work with. Just enough for Kaleb to taste, and to know that this was not who he sought.
No surprise, that. The dead from Audriss’s rampage, lost amid burned ruins and collapsed buildings—buried by nature, by time, and by the rebuilding—numbered in the hundreds, if not more.
Kaleb, frankly, had no interest in taking the time to search them all.
With a grunt, he planted the skull before him and began to trace symbols in the mud. Twisted they were, complex, unpleasant even to look at, somehow suggesting memories of secrets never known …
He was chanting, now, his words no less corrupt than the glyphs accompanying them. Sweat covered his face, a sticky film that clung despite the pounding rain.
Until, audible to none but him, a dreadful wail escaped the empty skull.
“Speak to me,” Kaleb demanded in a voice nigh cold enough to freeze the surrounding storm. “Tell me what I need to know, and I’ll return you to your rest. Refuse … Refuse, and I will bind you to these last of your bones, here to linger until they’ve decayed to dust.”
A moment, as though the risen spirit hadn’t heard, or wasn’t certain it understood, and then the wailing ceased. It was all the answer Kaleb received, and all he required.
“You did not die alone,” he told the skull. “Hundreds perished even as you did, burned by Maukra’s fires, drowned in Mimgol’s poisons, or crushed as the buildings fell. From here, your ghost made its way to the Halls of the Dead in Vantares’s domain. You must have seen the others as well, and it is one of your fellow dead whom I seek.”
“A name …” It was no true sound, a mere wraith of a voice for Kaleb’s ears and Kaleb’s mind alone. “His name …”
Kaleb spoke, and the spirit howled as though the worst agonies of Vantares’s deepest hell had followed it
even into the living realm. But the necromancer would not relent, and finally the skull spoke, told him where he must dig.
And dig he did, in another lot some streets away. Again his senses plumbed the earth, revealing to him the broken bones. Again he drew forth a skull, his tongue flickering out to taste of whom it once had been.
But this time, Kaleb drew no sigils in the mud. He had no use for the spirit that had gone below. From this one, he needed knowledge possessed while living, not sights seen beyond the veil of death.
For hours he sat, fingers and tongue flitting across the interior of the skull, seeking every last trace of lingering thought and dream, every remaining sliver of what had once been a living essence, desperately seeking, desperately hoping …
And only as the eastern sky began to lighten, dawn transforming each falling raindrop into a glittering jewel, did Kaleb hurl the skull to shatter against a nearby wall, screaming his frustration to the dying night.
Chapter Two
ALTHOUGH SITUATED ABOUT AS FAR from Mecepheum as Imphallion’s borders allowed, Rahariem was one of the nation’s more important centers of trade. Grains and hardwoods thrived nearby, and what little trade trickled into Imphallion from Cephira and other neighboring dominions invariably crossed this border. Even more significant, however, the local laborers and craftsmen were rather more enthusiastic about working in general, for they kept more of what they earned. Far-eastern Imphallion remained largely under the sway of its hereditary landowners, and while taxes and tariffs weren’t precisely low, they were lower than those imposed elsewhere by the reigning Guilds, and handily offset by the high prices Rahariem’s merchants could charge the rest of Imphallion for their exotic goods.
Of course, dwelling so far from the centers of power also had its inescapable downsides. This was a lesson taught to Rahariem—in blood—more than twenty-three years ago, at the start of Corvis Rebaine’s campaign of conquest.
It was a lesson of which they’d been forcibly reminded two weeks ago.
Today, not only the streets of Rahariem, but also its surrounding fields and gently rolling vales were occupied by thousands of newcomers, and these were not the sorts of traders, travelers, and merchants the region welcomed. They swarmed the city, clad not in silk and velvet but thickly padded doublets, armored cuirasses of boiled leather, and hauberks of chain. At their sides hung not purses filled with discretionary coin, but broadsword and hand-axe, mace and hammer. Like an avalanche, they had rolled over the grossly outnumbered knights and foot soldiers of Rahariem’s nobles. What they wanted, they took, and woe betide the vendor or shopkeeper who dared raise voice in protest.
Yet for all the terror and violence of their conquest, looting, rape, and other atrocities had been kept to a minimum. Riding their barded chargers throughout the multitudes of soldiers, their crimson banners flying from every government structure in the city, the officers of Cephira kept an iron-fisted command of conquered and conquerors alike. Encased in gleaming plate, tabards sporting the black-on-red gryphon crest of Cephira’s throne, the captains and the knights waged a war as disciplined and civilized as war ever got.
And if certain men among the occupied populace—men long frustrated with the nation’s bickering factions, furious that the Guilds had not responded to Cephira’s act of blatant aggression, disgusted by the lack of discipline in Imphallion’s own military—if these men couldn’t help but admit a grudging appreciation for the competence of the invading armies and the rigid order imposed by the officers, perhaps they might be excused for such borderline treasonous thoughts.
It was early summer, some weeks yet before the scorching heat of the season would grow fat and harsh. Cooling, cleansing rains remained common, but not so frequent as to thicken the air with oppressive humidity and render sweating its own exercise in futility. And for all of this, the citizens had cause to be grateful, for Cephira’s soldiers weren’t about to allow such a readily available workforce to go unused.
Overseen by crossbow-wielding sentinels stationed atop buildings and boulders and hillsides, the common folk of Rahariem labored for their new masters. Some constructed fortifications, hauling wood and stone that would ward off the population’s potential liberators if and when the Guilds finally ceased dithering. Some razed houses and shops for raw materials, weeping at their loss but never daring to object—for they’d seen the even harsher labors heaped upon the shoulders of those who had. Others labored beyond the city gates, tearing up stumps, hacking through undergrowth, breaking rocks and carting them away: expanding the roads that led east from Rahariem, making them ready for supply wagons and numberless Cephiran reinforcements.
The bite of picks on stone was deafening; the rock dust in the air blinding, choking, a poisonous blizzard. The sun, gentle as it was so early in the season, still beat down between clouds whose shade never lingered long enough to appreciably comfort the workers. Trickles of sweat scribed intricate tattoos into the dirt-caked chests and faces, and though the guards were not stingy with the canteens, the water never soothed.
Leaning upon his heavy spade, one of the workers raised a ragged sleeve to wipe the moist filth from his forehead. Eyes hidden by the gesture, he peered intently at the guards, cataloging, assessing. This soldier was alert, but that one preoccupied; one politely solicitous of the prisoners in his charge, another delighting in any excuse to wield discipline’s whip. But today, as every day for the past two weeks, none had what he sought, what he must have before he could take his leave of these intolerable circumstances.
He certainly appeared unremarkable. He was a lanky fellow, wiry rather than gaunt, the athletic tone of his limbs sharply contrasting with the crags that creased his weather-beaten face and the grey that had long since annexed his hair and close-cropped beard. He might have been a man just approaching middle age who looked older than his years, or one on the far side of midlife who kept himself rigidly fit; casual observation refused to confirm which.
“Hsst!”
This from the worker beside him, a younger man responsible for cracking the rocks that he himself was supposed to be shoveling. “Whatever you’re daydreaming about, Cerris, you’d best shake it off. The guards won’t be happy if they see the rubble backing up.”
The grey-haired fellow, who was so much more than the moderately successful Rahariem merchant he was known as—so much more, and so much less, no matter how determined he was to think of himself only as “Cerris”—grunted something unintelligible and resumed scooping.
All right, then. He’d given it almost two weeks, and two weeks of hard labor was more than enough. It was time to go looking.
EVENING NEARED, signaling the workers to queue up under the watchful gaze of the guards. As a dozen crossbows quivered like hounds straining at the leash, a single Cephiran soldier moved down the line, closing manacles around every left ankle. They were simple shackles, these—U-shaped iron cuffs, closed at the back with a stubby rod—but quite sufficient for the job at hand. Following behind him, a second man huffed and sweated as he lugged an enormous length of chain, threading it through hoops in those cuffs.
Watching through tired eyes as they neared, Cerris began to whisper under his breath. His hands opened and closed, the rhythmic stretching serving to hide the subtle twitches of his fingers.
It was a simple enough spell. A shimmer passed over his left leg, so faint and so swift that even Cerris himself, who was not only watching for it but causing it, barely noticed. He shifted his posture, standing rigidly, feet together, keeping his real—and now invisible—leg outside the phantom image. Not a comfortable stance, but better that than to have the guard bump a knuckle into something that wasn’t supposed to be there.
The guard approached—yawning as he knelt—clasped the manacle around a length of absolutely nothing that looked and felt an awful lot like a human ankle, and continued on his way.
Cerris continued his whispering, new syllables replacing the old. He saw the manacle fall to the dust, but to every
one else, it was invisible, appearing instead to be firmly locked around the equally illusory leg. It was enough to fool the second guard, who passed his length of chain through the nonexistent ring without so much as a heartbeat’s hesitation.
Struggling to conceal his smile, Cerris knelt briefly as though massaging a sore foot and slipped the real manacle around his arm so as not to leave any evidence behind. Then, matching his shuffling step to the prisoners who actually were chained together, he allowed himself to be led away.
Not far from the road crouched a simple wooden hall of slipshod construction. Thrown together by Cephiran soldiers, it served as bunk for the road workers, far more convenient than herding them back through the city gates every night. Cerris wrinkled his nose as he passed through the wooden doors, the miasma of sweat and fear, waste and watery stew an open-handed slap to the face. It had long since soaked into the wooden walls and the cheap woolen blankets on which the exhausted prisoners slept away their fitful nights. Bowls of that stew, which contained as much gristle as meat, already awaited, one bowl per blanket. Foul as it was, nobody hesitated to down their portion in rapid gulps. While their companions watched from the doorway, two guards moved through the hall, one collecting bowls, the other fastening the end of the long chain to a post that punched through the wooden floor and deep into the unyielding earth. Thus secured, the prisoners could shuffle around the room—clanking and clattering the chain like a chorus of angry ghosts, more than loud enough to be heard from outside—but even if they could somehow force open the door, they wouldn’t have sufficient slack to pass through.
It was a simple arrangement, but an efficient one … assuming, of course, that the prisoners were actually fastened to the chain.
Cerris lay back on his blanket and waited, though he yearned to be up and moving. In a matter of moments, the snores, grunts, and moans of exhausted sleep rose from all around him. He found himself halfway tempted to join them—the accommodations were hardly comfortable, but damn, he was tired!—and it was only sheer force of will that kept him from drifting off.
