Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  Stronger, faster, more precise. Isiem doubted that he could have teleported the wagon at all, much less so swiftly or with such unerring aim. But Ascaros, with the tools and training of the Umbral Court, had done so effortlessly. It brought a twinge of envy.

  The shadowcaller himself waited fifty yards to the side, a part of their group and yet not. The forest's shadows embraced the man, and it seemed to Isiem—perhaps fancifully, perhaps not—that they were made darker by his presence.

  The Iomedaean was right, he thought, looking back to the faraway smoke of Cettigne. Molthune was not a paradise. No place touched by Nidal could be.

  Chapter Seven

  Stories

  Ganoven's acquaintances wasted no time. The morning after Isiem's party came to their outpost to the west of Cettigne, their caravan set off for Nidal.

  It was an enormous endeavor. Three hundred guards and mercenaries marched together in a patchwork army. Some were bright-eyed youths fresh off their family farms, hoping to earn enough money to buy a proper kit and join the Molthune Imperial Army. Military service was a swift road to citizenship and status in their nation, regardless of one's birth, but the most desirable assignments were reserved for those who had the means to afford them. A man who brought his own sword and shield was a better recruit, and could expect a more competitive posting, than a hayseed who came with nothing but the straw in his hair.

  Those wide-eyed younglings brushed shoulders with companies of hard-bitten veterans, destitute adventurers, and gladiators at the ends of their careers. Not all of them were human. Dwarves, half-elves, and even a band of wild-haired centaurs in feathers and face paint numbered among the caravan's guards. Some of their more ordinary companions, meanwhile, bore the facial scars of convicted criminals.

  Isiem felt uncomfortable walking alongside those. In Nidal, such undesirables would have been consigned to Zon-Kuthon's torturers immediately after trial, and would likely have been sacrificed within days. In Molthune, however, criminals did not always meet such grisly fates. The nation needed people to realize its expansionist ambitions, and so did not throw their lives away lightly. Some Molthuni murderers, if their crimes were not deemed too heinous, were given the choice to escape the gallows by serving their country. Such a man was forever marked with proof of his crime—it was said the brands on their faces were enchanted to resist erasure—but if he served a period of years in hard labor or military service to repay his debt to the nation, he would be officially forgiven and accepted into society once more.

  Pardoning such criminals was more efficient, Isiem supposed, and certainly more humane ...but he couldn't shake the bone-deep sense that it was terribly unwise. It wasn't the murderers' violence that upset him. He had done worse, as had every one of his companions; even Kyril, sworn to uphold Iomedae's ideals, had likely shed more blood than any gutter killer ever would. But they had done so within the bounds of the law, and the murderers had not. That was the violation that troubled him. If a man could not be trusted to obey the laws of his land, Isiem was loath to see him with a sword.

  But the Imperial Governor of Molthune felt differently, and so a sizable contingent of branded convicts escorted their caravan to the borders. Isiem tried to avoid them, although he noted that Ena did not.

  "They're just people," she said, as they spooned boiled beans from a mess pot at dinner that evening. While some of their fellow guards had brought their own provender for the march, many more had not. The Aspis merchants provided a cold meal in the mornings and a hot one at night. It was cheap, plain fare—heavy on beans and barley, with scarcely any vegetables and even less meat—but it was filling, and it was free. Ganoven, always quick to shave an extra copper, insisted that they eat it.

  Isiem took his dented bowl of beans and went to sit with the dwarf at their campfire. It was a calm night, warm for the season, and they'd put blankets on their saddles to make seats around the flames. Teglias was already there, as was Kyril. The paladin had washed her hair, and she wore it loose to let it dry. It spilled over her shoulders and halfway down her back in a cloak of damp curls, the deep red almost black in the twilight.

  Ganoven seldom ate with them, and Ascaros never did; neither of them was anywhere to be seen. Pulcher and Copple preferred the company of rougher mercenaries, and had gone to sit at one of the other fires. As Isiem settled on his seat, facing Kyril across the crackling campfire, he was quietly glad for that.

  "Just people," Ena repeated around a mouthful of beans. A mild breeze cut through the odors of woodsmoke and horse manure that filled their camp. "Maybe they've made some mistakes, and probably they're not too nice, but I've made mistakes of my own and I'm not always so nice. I don't see a reason to hold that against them, and if we're going to be traveling together—maybe fighting together, maybe my life depending on theirs—I like to know who I'm with. And I'd like for them to know the same about me."

  Teglias stirred his bowl's contents without much appetite. "Who are you talking about?"

  "The convicts," Ena answered, nodding toward Isiem. "Our wizard doesn't trust them, on account of they've got no respect for the law."

  "An important consideration," Teglias agreed, "if sometimes a secondary one." The cleric seemed glad to have something to take his mind off their pauper's dinner. He put the bowl down and leaned back on his blanket-draped saddle, crossing his weathered brown boots with their soles to the fire. The ruddy light took years off his face, making him seem almost as young as the rest of them. "On occasion, greater needs must outweigh the strict proscriptions of the law."

  "Not in Nidal," Isiem said.

  "No?" Teglias's short brown beard didn't quite cover the wry twist of his lips. "In all the years you lived under the gaze of the Umbral Court, do you mean to say you never did anything that would have attracted their condemnation if they'd noticed?"

  Isiem shrugged. The question was ridiculous. Of course he had. Everyone had. The Umbral Court set so many traps and snares that no one who wanted to survive a day in Pangolais could abide by every letter of every law.

  That question didn't deserve an answer, so instead Isiem tried the beans. They were woefully undersalted. Only their warmth made them any more appetizing than a bowl full of lumpy plaster paste. He swallowed what he could, then set the spoon aside. "And you?"

  "Of course. In my young and wild days, my scholarly pursuits were, I confess, sometimes just an excuse to get into trouble." Teglias's smile widened into a grin. He laced his hands behind the back of his head, stretching theatrically. "I could have been a Pathfinder, you know."

  "Would've spared the Church of Sarenrae all sorts of headaches," Kyril observed dryly.

  "And innumerable prizes," the cleric said with a mock-offended lift of his chin.

  "Really," Kyril said. "Innumerable prizes. As I recall, your greatest triumph in the service of the Dawnflower was hauling home a load of fakes."

  "Why don't you tell him that story, Teglias?" Ena said, smirking. "Might as well inspire Isiem to have as much faith in your leadership as the rest of us do."

  The bearded Sarenite chuckled. "Oh, fine, twist my arm." He looked at Isiem. "I'm sure you must have heard of Stavian I's purge."

  The Nidalese wizard nodded. Nearly two hundred years ago, Stavian I, who was then the Grand Prince of Taldor, had outlawed the worship of Sarenrae in his empire and had declared the Dawnflower's faithful to be traitors. The churches had been claimed for other faiths or razed to the ground, and Sarenites who refused to renounce their religion had fled Taldor, lest they be imprisoned or executed.

  "It won't surprise you to know that quite a few Sarenite relics were supposed to have been destroyed during the Great Purge," Teglias said, "or that many of those relics were smuggled to other fates instead. Some were sold on the black market. Others were hoarded inside Taldor.

  "One of those hoards was supposed to have been in the home of a wealthy Taldan noblewoman who was arrested and exiled for her faith some years later. Her family was stripped of
its name and lost all their assets. Their Westpark townhouse, where the hoard was supposedly hidden, eventually fell into the hands of the Alcedos family. One of the Alcedos scions, Senator Riscaro Alcedos, set up a young mistress in that house.

  "Now, rumors of this hoard had been floating around for decades, but the church leadership did not believe it worth investigating until some of the pieces began to trickle out onto the black market. Our agents traced them back to Oppara—and, more specifically, to the Alcedos townhouse in Westpark and the senator's mistress, Zephiba of the Scarlet Veils."

  "From the name alone, you can guess what she was like," Kyril interrupted, "and we'll leave it at that, because I don't feel like sitting through Teglias's hours-long reminiscences of her boudoir. I've heard that story once, and that was enough to scar me for life."

  "I still hold a flame," the cleric agreed wistfully. He shifted his weight on the saddle. "Well, anyway, back then I was young and brash and boastful, and my superiors either believed my bragging about how I could charm any woman in the world, or—more likely—they just got tired of listening to it. In any case, they packed me off to Oppara, where my assignment was to win Zephiba's trust and find out whether she had any more of our religious relics.

  "To make a long story short ...I did, she did, and they all turned out to be fakes. Every last one. Zephiba knew the rumors too, you see, and she was as skilled in forgery as she was in the arts of love. The originals had never been there. Wherever that exiled noblewoman hid her treasures, it wasn't in Westpark; Zephiba had no more idea where they really were than I did. But, being a clever woman, she spun disappointment into opportunity. The real relics weren't there, so she made her own. And sold them for an even bigger profit, since she could craft as many fakes as the market would bear." He shrugged. "You can't blame her, really. Sensible courtesans begin planning their retirements early."

  Ena chortled. "And that was our revered leader's greatest success: uncovering a bunch of worthless forgeries." The dwarf smushed the last of her beans into paste with the back of her spoon and scraped them out of the bowl into her mouth.

  "Yes, well," Teglias said. "The point is, I've broken a fair number of laws myself. Some of those laws, I happen to believe, deserved to be broken."

  "Not the ones these Molthuni have broken," Isiem said.

  "Maybe not, but you don't get to judge that," Ena retorted, "any more than we judged you." She swallowed and poked the handle of her spoon in the wizard's direction. "Where would you be if we had?"

  "Still in Pezzack, I should think," Kyril agreed, "and that would have been a pity."

  "I imagine you'd have found your nightblade without me," Isiem said, trying for a levity that might mask his real response.

  It didn't work. The paladin caught his gaze and held it, her dark eyes infinitely solemn. "Perhaps," she said, "but that wasn't what I meant. It would have been a pity for your sake. Not ours. The Molthuni are wise: they recognize that a man may be redeemed, no matter how dark his past, by the value and virtue of his life going forward. It's my hope that in traveling with us, and learning from us, you will accept the same possibility for yourself.

  "Look at the Molthuni army," she continued. "Everyone who wants to enlist has the opportunity to prove herself. No one is rejected for past misdeeds, or race, or even species. They accept hobgoblins and werewolves, if those hobgoblins and werewolves want to serve their nation. They do not trust foolishly, but they do trust, with tolerance and compassion. And because of that, and the strength it gives them, Molthune will become a power on the world stage soon."

  It should have been condescending, that speech. Ascaros would have scoffed at it, or replied with insults of his own. But for Isiem, sitting among companions who would have been mortal enemies two years earlier, the half-elf's words struck unexpectedly hard.

  The best answer he could muster was a diffident shrug. "We'll see what comes."

  "So we will," Kyril agreed.

  After that the talk drifted to other things. Ena pulled out a collection of "hoppers" she wanted to show them. They were metal cylinders, small enough that the dwarf could easily fit two into the palm of her hand, with inch-long pins protruding from the top. The bottom of the pin was coated with a reagent, the dwarf explained, which set off a burst of violent heat when it was pressed down and plunged into a compartment of liquid underneath. That, in turn, caused the whole contraption to leap into the air and then explode.

  Her attempt to demonstrate one, however, resulted in the cylinder falling over and emitting a damp squeal as vinegary froth spilled from the top around the pin. A weak fizz of air made a perrrp noise for almost a full minute, then dribbled off into the mud.

  The dwarf shrugged sheepishly and walked over to collect her failed device. "The design still needs some adjustments. But she'll be lethal when I get her working."

  "Lethal to whom?" Teglias asked, with a mock-dread that did not seem entirely feigned. He peered at her across the campfire. "Are you carrying those things around in your pack? What if you fall from your pony and they all go off?"

  "They can't go off until I put the pins in, and I don't put the pins in until I'm ready to use them," Ena said. "I do have them in my pack, though. I suppose if you shook them hard enough, they might explode. Better pray I don't fall off the pony."

  "How does a dwarf get into alchemy anyway?" Kyril asked.

  Ena squinted at the paladin. She propped a hand on a stocky hip, bristling with exaggerated indignation. "What do you think of when you think of dwarves?"

  "Mountains," Teglias offered. "Gold. Gems. Mines."

  "Axes and orcs," Isiem said, "and long bloody wars."

  Kyril smirked. "Spitting on floors."

  "You," Ena announced, thrusting an accusatory finger at the paladin, "are a narrow-minded fool beholden to stereotypes. The rest of you, however, are correct. That is the realm of the dwarves: mines under mountains filled with gold and gems. Evil orcs skulking in shadowy tunnels, red eyes glowing with greed. And us, a doughty but hard-pressed people, struggling to stave them off with axes to protect all that is ours."

  She raised her arms dramatically, then dropped them with a laugh. "Now consider: Torag has blessed us with much more effective ways of cleaving open the mountains than chiseling at them with picks. He has given us the sacred art of alchemy. And that can be a weapon, too. A bomb that can blast tunnels through the heart of a mountain can surely destroy a horde of orcs—and can do it without risking the lives of our people in close-quarters combat.

  "So we learned it, as we learned all the Father of Creation's secrets, and we kept it close to our hearts. Most other races never even suspect our skill. But it shouldn't surprise you, with a little thought. It really shouldn't."

  "Why did you leave?" Isiem asked.

  Ena didn't answer right away. When she did, it was with a sigh, and a look away to the empty distance beyond their fires. "Things change."

  There was a silence. The noise from other campfires flowed in to fill it. Twenty yards away, a pair of heavily tattooed Varisian knife dancers—sisters, by the looks of them—spun before a spellbound throng of mercenaries. Pulcher and Copple were in their audience, each more slack-jawed than the other. To their right, four dwarves were playing a drinking game with a green-faced farmboy who appeared to be heartily regretting his bravado in joining them.

  Kyril cleared her throat. "I'll tell you why I left. Because I was born in the Kyonin town of Erages, to half-elven parents, and it doesn't take long for a child to realize when her country doesn't want her kind."

  "I thought you grew up in Westcrown?" Isiem said.

  "I came to that city later. I found Iomedae there." She glanced down at the hilt of her sword, tracing the emblem on its pommel reverently. "But there were years of wandering before that. Years of trying to find a place and a purpose." When she looked up, her luminous brown eyes caught Isiem's. In them was the same compassion, and empathy, that alternately drew him to her and made him recoil.

&
nbsp; The wizard stood, dropping his spoon into the empty bowl. "I'm pleased you found what you sought. Please excuse me. It's late, and I must rest."

  He left them by the fire. The night felt colder as Isiem walked back to his tent, although he knew it was only his own turmoil that made it seem so. The merriment of other companies shadowed him to his door; it was a mercy when he let the tent flap fall shut behind him, cutting off their songs and laughter.

  A candle was burning on a table inside. Only one, but it was evidently enough light for Ascaros, who sat nearby on a folded blanket, studying a slender book.

  Isiem paused by the tent flap, surprised to see the shadowcaller. Although he traveled with the caravan by day, Ascaros had been teleporting himself back to Pangolais each night. In part, he did it so that he could report to the Umbral Court, but the greater reason was that he didn't care for the discomforts of the road. Until some real demand on his magic prevented the indulgence, Ascaros had informed his friend, he wanted a soft bed to sleep in and a hot bath to wake to, and he meant to have it.

  What he hadn't said, but Isiem suspected to be true, was that he also left each night because he didn't trust their new companions enough to sleep in their presence. Paranoia drove Ascaros at least as much as the desire for the comforts of his own bed.

  It was a strange world, he thought, where a man felt safer sleeping under Zon-Kuthon's thumb than he did among the green farmlands of Molthune.

  Still, the shadowcaller was here tonight, long after the hour when he normally left.

  Isiem took his boots off, deliberately knocking them together to announce his presence as he put them aside. "You missed beans at dinner tonight. There might have been a bit of cabbage in there too, somewhere. Possibly. I'm not sure. But there were certainly beans."

  Ascaros didn't even crack a smile. He held the book open, sliding it across the floor toward Isiem with a push from two fingertips. "What does that look like to you?"

  The book was opened to a page depicting a crude, thick-lined drawing of a monster. It appeared to be a faithful reproduction, but of what, Isiem couldn't tell. The creature stood low to the ground with a long, curved tail like a scorpion's. Lumps bulged all down its misshapen back, but the drawing was so clumsy and stylized that it was impossible to determine whether they were meant to be scales, tumors, or some other protuberance. Five round eyes surrounded a toothy mouth that gaped open in a horrible grin. Two curved pincers hooked from the front of its body, each ending in a mass of furiously scribbled triangles that were, perhaps, supposed to represent claws.