by Greg Curtis
“Perhaps my companions can speak more clearly.” Perfectly on cue he heard growling coming from behind him, and when he turned it was to see two of the largest crag cats he had ever seen, scarcely a few feet behind him, their teeth showing proudly. And they looked hungry.
He screamed in terror, and suddenly his feet worked again as he leapt for the floor, all to the sound of laughter. They were laughing at him. The more so when he spun around to see the cats still standing on the far side of the Heartwood Throne, ignoring him. They weren’t attacking. They weren’t even interested in him. And everyone there knew it. That was why they were laughing.
“Silence!” He screamed at them, his voice suddenly shrill and hysterical, and it seemed to work for a bit as they fell quiet. But the hush was somehow worse than the laughter, as he felt the weight of their eyes upon him. They were accusing him of something. By the Mother they truly believed him guilty of something. Of conspiring with demons. How could they? He had done nothing but serve them.
“This way please Finell of no house.” Yossirion promptly put a hand on his shoulder to steer him away from the throne, down the aisle between the rows of silent witnesses, out of the double doors at the end and into the sunlight. There things became even worse.
Bodies! There were bodies everywhere. Someone had laid them out in a line, two lines, bordering the pathway leading from the Royal Chamber to the Grove, down which he suddenly understood, he was expected to walk. Why? Who were these people? And why were they so mangled? Beaten, torn, twisted and broken. Blood everywhere. He had never seen so much death in his life. It was horrible. And he knew the people standing in two long lines beside them blamed him for it. That was why they were all staring at him, their green eyes accusing him. And it was why so many of them showed the signs of terrible battle’s as well. Injuries, beatings, missing limbs, blood and scars. It was as though they had been attacked by wild animals.
“What? Who?” He didn’t understand. He didn’t even know how to ask.
“This is your prison Finell of no house. Yours and Y’aris’ underworld.” Yossirion was still beside him, speaking softly into his ear, his voice filled with sorrow and regret. But not for him. “These are your victims. Elves, high born and low, outsiders, those of mixed blood, those of pure. All innocent. All foully murdered.”
“And these, -” he abruptly turned him around to see a group of nine or ten more bodies lying to one side, “- are your inquisitors.”
But they weren’t. They couldn’t be. Not with black eyes and black veins. Even he knew the signs of demons. They weren’t his soldiers at all.
“No!”
“Yes.” The elder had not a trace of doubt in his voice. “Now shall we head for your trial?”
“It was Y’aris!” He shouted it out loud for all to hear and no one listened. But he knew it was true. Of course it was. He didn’t understand it, but he knew it could only be him. He had hired the inquisitors. He had run the prison. He had arrested the people. It was all his fault. But the elder said nothing as he tried to explain. He just kept him walking down the path of death, between the endless bodies, heading surely for his own execution.
And all the way there he kept asking, how could this be happening to him? What had he done to deserve this?
And where was Y’aris?
Chapter Sixty Six.
The chair was becoming harder and harder with every hour that he sat on it, and Iros was fast coming to the conclusion that being lord was a punishment of some sort.
He wanted to be out, doing something, especially now that his health was returning. He yearned to go for a ride, maybe a hunt. He would have given everything he had simply to be able to spend another night carousing in the inns. By the Divines he would even have enjoyed a day with Sophelia gardening, and he hated gardening. But instead he had to sit in the torture device inadequately described as a chair and listen to endless advisors telling him about matters he didn’t want to hear about.
Budgets and plans for rebuilding. The daily reports of the guards as they told him of their arrests. Pleas from the various priests and charities as they sought gold to continue their work. Gold he didn’t have. The accounts of the physicians as they told him of their various patients and the illnesses travelling throughout the land. Farmers telling him of crops and harvests. Who wanted to hear any of that?
And as if that wasn’t enough, every day he had to sit for hours listening to the sorrows of the people. So many sorrows. But at least now it was no longer reports of the dead and dying and demands for vengeance that they troubled him with. Those dark days had passed. Now it was more often requests to find people. To send out pigeons to the various towns requesting information on a person’s whereabouts. It seemed that in the wake of the war, with their homes and towns destroyed, many had simply decided to leave. Looking for new homes, new jobs and new lives elsewhere.
That he understood. There were times when he wished he could do the same. Anything to get out of this damned chair. But what he didn’t understand was why so many of those disappearing were leaving no word behind of where they were going. Or even that they were still going. There was something troubling in that. And that it was still happening months after the war had ended, that was disturbing.
For the moment though, he had to listen to the report of Corporal Fielder as he told of his patrol through the southern fenlands, and try not to squirm in his chair. Especially when this was one of the more interesting reports of the day.
Upon his return to Greenlands, and finding the land in such a terrible state, Iros had started dragging all the spare men he could find who could ride, stuffing them into armour, and sending them out on patrols throughout the land. He needed to know which towns had been destroyed, which could be rebuilt, and which could supply men and materials to help their neighbours. When there were something over a hundred and eighty towns in the land and he had only sixty men in three patrols, it was a long, slow job. And when Juna sat beside him at the table, marking maps with coloured flags to show how many of them had been attacked and destroyed, it was a sad one too.
Corporal Fielder’s report was no different to any of the others. Three towns destroyed all the people killed, three more burnt to the ground, but only after the people had fled, and five more in good shape. Another four thousand or more people dead. He watched as Juna added the coloured marks to the maps and another scribe added the names of the towns and the totals of the dead and missing to the register. Already he knew, the total of the dead stood somewhere north of thirty thousand, and that was with only two thirds of Greenlands accounted for. And this was only one of the five southern realms.
If and when someone finally added up the total cost in lives, he was sure it would be over two hundred thousand, most of them civilians, most of them unarmed. Such terrible evil. Such terrible tragedy. And in the face of it Iros had to be respectful. It wasn’t enough to care. As the lord he had to show that he cared. And even more than that he had to show them that he knew what to do. It was expected of a lord.
So he sat up straight in his chair, ignored the ache in his backside, listened intently and tried to make plans to help the victims of this truly senseless war.
“Milord!” Without warning, there was the sudden sound of a man yelling for him, which caused everyone to look up in surprise. Then he could hear the sound of running feet clattering noisily on the stone floor, before a guard came running into the great hall, almost out of breath and his face filled with alarm. But his next word explained his haste.
“Elves!”
“No!” Iros was shocked, but he didn’t need any more than that to understand everything the man was trying to tell him. They were at war again, although it was far too soon. Surely Finell couldn’t have regrouped his armies so fast, or marched them to his gates. But what they could and couldn’t do apparently didn’t matter. Obviously they’d done it anyway.
He grabbed for his swords conveniently hanging from the side of a chair after his morning
’s practice, and ran for the front of the hall and the open double doors beyond. “Sound the bells.”
Outside in the courtyard he grabbed a horse from a guard who was walking it to the stables behind the castle, and somehow swung himself into the saddle, surprised a little by the fact that he could. Clearly the tea was working better than he could have hoped for as he was recovering his strength. Not that his practice with the blades was showing its effects so well. He still fought like an old woman.
After that he kicked the horse’s flanks and they galloped though the castle gate, across the moat, and then down through the town’s main street, racing for the southern entrance. It was from the south that the elves would come. And all the way there as they galloped down the dirt road and people cursed as they had to get out of the way in a hurry, he was thinking that it was too soon. That they just weren’t ready. How could the elves be here?
At the south gate he hurriedly dismounted, handing the reins to a waiting guard and then somehow managed to run up the six flights of stairs to the top of the half finished watch tower. At the top he didn’t even double over and start gasping for air, though he probably should have. Instead he just ran to the looking glass already mounted on its wooden stand into the floor, and started desperately searching for an approaching army. But there wasn’t one.
“Captain?” He turned to the man standing beside him wanting an answer.
“The de’ tan are riding the ridge.” Master Formain answered him instead, naming the elves as nurse maids, their usual insult for them. Iros quickly turned the ingenious gnomish device to the ridge and twisted the little wheels to make the image sharper. Immediately they sprang into view. A distant smudge suddenly breaking up into a party of fast moving riders. Maybe forty of them.
Iros studied them closely, trying to make out all the details, but they were so distant that even the gnomish device couldn’t show him everything. What it could show him though, was enough to make him wonder.
They were elves, of that at least he was certain. Their brightly coloured hair flowing behind them as they rode, was enough to tell him that. But they weren’t watchmen. Their armour wasn’t right. They weren’t wearing blackened chain, they were wearing leather.
They weren’t an army either. He examined them closely as they rode, looking for some sign that they were attacking, and when he couldn’t find it he searched the ridge behind them, looking for the rest. But there were none. Already these riders were half a league into the valley, and there was no one behind them. No more riders, no soldiers, no one. It looked for all the world as if it was just a patrol. Rangers for some reason riding through Greenlands.
“By all the hells, that’s not an army. It’s not an attack.” And it clearly wasn’t. Iros wasn’t completely sure which he should be, relieved that they weren’t under attack, or annoyed that he had been panicked into believing that it was. Maybe a little of both. And maybe the rest of Greenlands, thousands upon thousands of people panicking as they heard the warning bells, should feel the same.
“Stop ringing the bells. It’s just a patrol.” Staring at them through the looking glass as they kept riding for the town, Iros quickly became more and more certain that it was no attacking army, just a single elven patrol a long way from home. Even if they had come to fight, they would stand no chance. And that came as a relief when so few of his new cannon were installed. But it still seemed odd. More than odd.
An armed party of elves in Greenlands. That was odd. And that they were flying the colours of a ranger patrol that he knew, the Black Otters, that was odd too. There had to be hundreds of patrols in Elaris. Why should one from Leafshade be visiting him? But they were wearing the ranger’s traditional leather armour, and there was a pack of wolves running alongside them, both surely strong evidence that they weren’t watchmen. And as far as he knew, the rangers had never been involved in the war. And why would they be when they were directed by the Grove and not the throne? The Grove wanted no part of war.
Still they were racing for them across the leagues of blackened fields as though they were being chased, and that was worrying. But no one was chasing them. He checked the distant hills carefully once more just in case, but no one was there. Certainly no mounted troops, and men on foot could never have caught them. The whole thing made no sense. The only thing he was sure of was that it wasn’t an attack.
“Yer cannon are loaded boy.” Master Formain seemed eager for a fight, and why wouldn’t he be? He was a dwarf and they were always spoiling for a fight, and if the enemy were elves, so much the better. Besides, these were his cannon being installed in the walls his artisans had rebuilt. It was a chance for him to show them off.
He was out of luck though.
“Stand down.” Iros gave the word and the dwarf swore furiously at him. Something guttural that Iros couldn’t quite make out and probably didn’t want to. But it didn’t matter. He stood his ground and slowly the hundreds of men at arms that had gathered around the southern gate began to disperse. To return to their other duties, keeping the law. In time the bells stopped tolling as well, and he could only imagine that it must have come as an enormous relief to the towns people. They had already been through two terrible attacks, they didn’t need to be worrying about a third so soon.
Master Formain seemed less than pleased though, and though he stood his cannon down and even left the tower, he was muttering all the time under his breath about the waste of a good fight. And immediately after leaving him he began walking the newly built ramparts behind the finished city walls, looking Iros guessed, for an excuse to start one.
Dwarves! It had been a stroke of luck finding the master artisan available, and then being able to hire him at such short notice. The man had undeniable skill with fortifications. But they weren’t the easiest of people to deal with. Especially when there was either ale or a fight on offer.
Twenty minutes later Iros was standing on the half finished watch tower with just the captain, while his troop, maybe fifty men, guarded the gate and manned the ramparts. Given that they had the wall to protect them, and that it would be utter madness for a single party of rangers to attack a walled town, he felt that was enough. Besides, they still had a while to wait before the rangers reached them, six leagues was a long gallop even for horses in their prime. There was plenty of time to ring the bell again if they needed to. If something changed. But nothing did.
As the long minutes wore on and he studied them through the ingenious device, the rangers remained stubbornly the same, just rangers. And the land behind them remained completely free from enemy soldiers.
“Should we lower the portcullis?” The captain was right to ask perhaps, but Iros knew that there was no need. In all his time in Leafshade he had never felt in any danger from rangers. In sooth he’d mostly found them reasonable company, not like the watchmen who even before the war had regarded him with loathing. But then they were low born, and that made a difference. And from memory the watchmen had also had scant regard for the rangers.
“No.”
Time continued to stretch on until finally the patrol reached the base of the gentle hill on which the town sat, and it was then that Iros decided he had to do something. He couldn’t just continue to stand on the watch tower staring at them. Whoever they were, why they were there, they had to be greeted. And it seemed to him that that was his place.
Iros informed the captain of his decision before descending the stairs, and ignored the cries of protest coming from the man. Yes he was the last Lord of Drake, maybe, and if he died it would leave the landing turmoil, but it still felt right. Besides, he doubted he was in any danger.
At the bottom of the stairs a guard wordlessly handed him a cuirass, and though he could have told the man it would have been pointless against the accuracy of rangers with their longbows, he put it on. It felt good to be in armour again. Even borrowed armour. He made sure though to tighten the side straps all the way so that it didn’t flap freely as he walked. If he couldn�
��t persuade the guards to wear their armour correctly at least he could show them by example.
Then he walked to the open gate and stood there waiting for the rangers to finally arrive.
Three hundred paces from the gate the captain of the patrol held up a hand and they slowed to a trot, something that surely helped everyone to relax, though he could still hear Master Formain somewhere in the battlements overhead, muttering away angrily. He really wanted to let loose with his cannon.
Then the captain of the rangers left his party trotting slowly behind as he kicked his horse lightly and cantered by himself for the last part of the trip. He was there to give the introductions, which was as it should be. Iros waited patiently for him to arrive.
Before he reached him though, an orange striped wolf broke from the pack and streaked for him yipping frantically, and Iros’ heart nearly stopped beating as he recognised her.
“Saris!” He barely had time to put up his arms before she leapt on him, knocking him to the ground, and started nuzzling him frantically. But he didn’t mind as he lay there in the dirty street being licked to death, not when he had his faithful hound back.
