The Lion raised his hands for silence, and the cheers of the knights died in an instant.
‘Brothers!’ he cried, pointing to the keep at the centre of the courtyard. ‘This isn’t over yet. The walls are carried, but the Knights of Lupus are not yet defeated. They lurk within their keep and must be dug out with fire and steel.’
The Grand Master of the Order swung his arms wide, indicating the slaughterhouse the courtyard had become, the dead knights and the defeated beasts.
‘Any man who stoops to allow such beasts do his work is not worthy of life,’ said the Lion. ‘The Knights of Lupus have forfeited their right to mercy and are to be granted no clemency. We will break into their keep and leave none alive!’
THE INSIDE OF the keep was eerily deserted, its halls hung with musty cobwebs and an air of desolation that Zahariel found depressing. He and Nemiel advanced down a narrow corridor of dressed stone and tapestries, their way illuminated by guttering lamps that hung from bronze fixtures.
The emptiness spoke of years of neglect, where the dust of abandonment had gathered and the passage of time had settled upon the keep. The sounds of fighting elsewhere in the keep could be heard distantly, but wherever the battle was being fought, it was far from here.
‘Where is everyone?’ asked Nemiel. ‘I thought this place would be crawling with warriors.’
‘I guess they must be elsewhere,’ said Zahariel. ‘It’s a big keep after all.’
Lion El’Jonson had smashed open the gates to the keep with one mighty blow from his sword, and the knights of the Order had poured in, spreading through the fortress in small groups to hunt down the last of their enemies.
Zahariel and Nemiel had taken the stairs to the upper levels, hoping to find some enemy warriors to vent their anger upon, but instead finding only empty halls, deserted chambers and echoing vaults that had long been shuttered and forgotten.
‘Wait,’ hissed Zahariel, holding his hand up for silence, ‘do you hear that?’
Nemiel cocked his head and nodded, hearing the same clatter of footfalls and scraping of furniture that Zahariel did. The young men looked at one another and made their way towards the wide set of double doors from which the sounds emanated, taking up positions on either side of the door.
The sounds of movement came again, and Nemiel held up his hand with three fingers extended. Zahariel nodded and counted down with his cousin as he curled one finger into his palm, then two and finally his third.
Nemiel spun around and planted his boot squarely on the junction of the two doors, splintering the lock and bursting them open.
Zahariel sprinted through the door, his sword and pistol extended before him, a ferocious war cry on his lips. He swung his pistol left and right, searching for targets, while keeping his sword tight to his body.
The enormous chamber within was vaulted, and edged from floor to ceiling in leather-bound books. Row upon row of books stretched into the distance, and wide tables at the end of each row were strewn with parchments and scrolls.
Vast quantities of information and literature were stored here, a library easily ten times the size of that held within Aldurukh. How long must it have taken to amass such a treasure trove of wisdom?
Zahariel had not believed there was such an amount of knowledge in existence, let alone that it all might be contained within the walls of this keep. Rows of square columns supported the arched roof, and Zahariel guessed that the chamber ran the length and breadth of the keep.
The chamber’s sole occupant, as far as Zahariel could see, was a lone man in white robes with grey hair and a drooping silver moustache. Zahariel recognised the man as Lord Sartana, the leader of the Knights of Lupus, who had been goaded to war by Lion El’Jonson in the Circle Chamber, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
Lord Sartana looked up from his labours, the assembled pile of books on a table before an ornate wooden throne draped with wolf pelts.
‘So they send beardless boys for me,’ said Sartana. ‘How old are you? Fourteen, perhaps?’
‘I am fifteen,’ said Zahariel.
‘No respect for tradition, that’s what’s wrong with your Order, boy,’ said Sartana. ‘Not a fashionable opinion, I know. Not now, not when everyone is busy celebrating your damn crusade to clear the great beasts from the forest.’
‘With your death it will be over,’ said Zahariel, emboldened by the defeat he heard in Lord Sartana’s voice. ‘All that remains is the Northwilds.’
Lord Sartana shook his head. ‘It’ll all end in tears, mark my words. We haven’t even begun to pay for your foolishness yet. That price is still to be collected, and when it is, many will wish that you had never embarked on that course: too many thorns along the road, too many pitfalls and hidden traps.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Nemiel. ‘The Lion’s quest is the noblest of ideals.’
‘Is it?’ asked Sartana, settling into the throne of wolf pelts. ‘Do you want to know where your Lion went wrong?’
‘The Lion is not wrong,’ said Nemiel with a growl of hostility.
Sartana smiled, amused at the threats of a teenage boy. ‘Your first mistake was that you lost respect for tradition. Civilisation is like a shield, designed to keep us safe from the wilderness, while tradition is the shield boss at its centre. Or, to put it another way, tradition is the glue that holds our society together. It gives shape to our lives. It lets everyone know their place. It’s vital. Without tradition, soon you are no better than animals.’
‘We keep to our traditions,’ said Zahariel. ‘The Lord Cypher ensures our traditions are upheld. It is you who have forgotten them… consorting with beasts.’
‘I think you will find that it was the Order that broke step with the other brotherhoods of knights,’ said Sartana, ‘when they started allowing commoners to enter their ranks. Imagine… recruiting knights from among the lowborn. Egalitarian claptrap, if you ask me. But that’s not the worst you’ve done. No, the worst element of all this is the Lion’s quest to kill off the great beasts. That’s the real danger. That’s the part we’ll all end up regretting.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Zahariel. ‘It’s the most glorious thing that’s happened on Caliban in the last century! Our people have lived in fear of the great beasts for thousands of years. Now, finally, we are removing their scourge forever. We are making the forests safe. We are changing our world for the better.’
‘Spoken like a true believer, boy,’ snorted Sartana in derision. ‘I see your masters have filled your head with propaganda. Oh, I don’t disagree that it sounds like a grand and worthwhile aim to clear the beasts from the forests. Too often, though, reality does not run in accord with our ambitions. We try to achieve one thing, only to find to our horror that we have achieved something quite different.’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Nemiel as they edged closer to Sartana.
‘Let us assume for a moment that your campaign is successful. Let’s say you manage to kill all the beasts. After all, you’ve got off to a good start. Jonson and the rest have been at it for nearly ten years. Most of the beasts, if not all, must be dead. So, say you kill all the beasts. What then, boy? What will you do, then?’
‘I… we’ll make things better,’ said Zahariel, floundering for a moment to frame his reply to Sartana’s question. He had long taken it for granted that the Order’s campaign was a noble enterprise, perhaps the greatest in Caliban’s history, but he found it difficult to put all the things he felt about it into words once Sartana called him to account.
‘We’ll clear new lands for settlement, and for agriculture,’ he said. ‘We’ll be able to produce more food.’
‘The commoners will do those things, you mean,’ said Sartana, ‘but what of your kind, boy? What of the knightly orders? What will we do? You see the problem?’
‘No, I don’t. How can there be a problem when we’ve made our world a better place?’
‘I am surrounded by blind men,’ snapped Sartana. ‘I am an old
man, yet I still seem able to look farther than any of the young men around me. Very well, if you can’t see the problem, let me explain it to you. First, though, a simple question. Why are there knightly orders on Caliban? What function do we perform?’
‘Our function? We protect the people,’ said Nemiel.
‘Precisely. At least one of you has sense. And, what do we protect them from?’
‘The great beasts, of course,’ said Zahariel. Abruptly, he saw where Sartana’s line of reasoning was heading. ‘Oh.’
‘Yes, the great beasts,’ smiled Sartana. ‘I can see the first glimmerings of understanding written on your face. For millennia, the Knights of Caliban have followed one sacred duty. We have kept our people safe from the great beasts. It is the way our lives have always been. It is the reason for our existence. It has been our war, a war fought in the forests of this planet for five thousand years. This is the way of things, boy. This is tradition, but not for much longer. Soon, thanks to the Order and Lion El’Jonson, the beasts will be no more. What then for the knights of Caliban?’
Lord Sartana fell silent for several moments, allowing time for his words to sink in with Zahariel and Nemiel before he spoke again.
‘We are warriors, boy. It is in our blood. It is in our culture. We are a proud and fearless breed. It has always been that way, ever since the first days of our ancestors. Conflict gives meaning to our existence. We hunt, we quest and we fight, and not just because the people of Caliban need our protection. We do these things because we must. Without them, there is emptiness at the heart of our lives, a void that cannot be filled no matter how hard we try. We do not do well with peace. We bridle at the lack of activity. It makes us feel restless and uneasy. We need to feel danger. We need our battles, the ebb-and-flow of warfare and the thrill of the life-or-death struggle. Without these things, we feel incomplete.’
‘That is a pessimistic outlook,’ said Zahariel.
‘No, it is a realistic outlook,’ said Sartana. ‘We need our beasts, boy. Why do you think my order was capturing them? We were trying to keep the race of beasts alive! There, I have said it. Perhaps it shocks you, but look honestly into your heart and you will see that we need our monsters because they help to define us. As long as there are beasts on Caliban, we are heroes, but if there are no more beasts, we are nothing. No, less than nothing.’
‘You were keeping the beasts alive?’ asked Zahariel, horrified beyond belief.
‘Of course,’ said Sartana. ‘Without the beasts, our war is over. What will become of us then? What of our future? What will be of the warrior when there is no more war? There lies the greatest danger, boy. Boredom will create unrest, and unrest can turn to anger. Without a war to keep us busy, we are likely to create one of our own devising. We will fall on each other like a pack of raptors. I will not live to see this, but I look to the future and I see only darkness. I see kinstrife and civil war. I see brother turning against brother. I see blood: all for the lack of having better ways to channel our anger, all for lack of the beasts. That is the future your Order is creating for us, though admittedly, your zealot of a leader was moved by the best of intentions.’
Both Zahariel and Nemiel had closed to within a sword length of Lord Sartana, and the leader of the Knights of Lupus smiled indulgently at them both.
‘No doubt you have orders to kill me.’
Zahariel nodded. ‘We do.’
‘I may be old, but I think it will take more than two boys to defeat me.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Nemiel.
‘No,’ said Sartana, drawing a long-bladed hunting knife. ‘We won’t.’
Zahariel aimed his pistol at Lord Sartana’s face, but the old man did not have violence towards them on his mind. Swiftly, the leader of the Knights of Lupus reversed the knife and rammed it into his body, the blade angled upwards to pierce his heart.
Zahariel dropped his weapons, rushing forward to catch Lord Sartana’s body as he slumped from his throne.
He lowered the dying knight to the cold stone floor of the great library as blood flooded from the grievous wound.
‘You know the expression about darkness, don’t you?’ hissed Sartana. ‘That the road into darkness is paved with men’s good intentions.’
‘I’ve heard it, yes,’ said Zahariel.
‘Perhaps someone should have mentioned it to the Lion,’ said Sartana with the last of his strength. ‘Good intentions or not, Lion El’Jonson will end up destroying Caliban. Of that I have no doubt.’
‘WHAT WILL BECOME of us?’ Lord Sartana had said, his face grim and foreboding. ‘What will be of the warrior when there is no more war?’
At the time, Zahariel had paid no great attention to the dying man’s words, so caught up was he in the excitement and terror of the day.
Sartana’s words might have been troubling, even unsettling, but it was not hard to dismiss them. Lord Sartana was old, tired, his features ravaged by age and weariness. It was easy enough to think of his warning as the unhinged ramblings of a mind already well across the border to madness.
It was easy enough to dismiss his words and they should have been no less easy to forget. Days and weeks passed following the destruction of the Knights of Lupus, and they returned once more to Zahariel to haunt him.
He would think of them often, and oft times he would marvel at their prescience.
In his darkest moments, Zahariel would sometimes wonder if their meeting that day had represented a missed opportunity. Perhaps he could have passed their message on to the Lion, or he could have been more aware of the force of emotion in Luther.
Zahariel might have understood that brotherhood was no guarantee of harmony: that no matter the closeness of the bonds between men, violence and betrayal were always possible.
A great many years had yet to pass before he would think of those words frequently.
He would wonder whether he could have changed the future.
By then, of course, it was far too late.
BOOK THREE
IMPERIUM
THIRTEEN
WITH THE DEATH of Lord Sartana, the Knights of Lupus ceased to exist. Their last knights were hunted down in the gloomy, abandoned corridors of their shattered keep and slain. No mercy was offered and none expected, for the defeated knights knew that there was no going back from what they had done.
The banners of the Order flew from the tallest towers of the fortress, and the fires of battle reflected from the gold and crimson woven into their ragged fabrics. Swords banged on shields, and the Ravenwing cavalry rode whooping circuits around the broken walls of the mountain fortress.
Cheers and honours were exchanged by the warriors of the Order, and a momentous sense of history stole over each man as the realisation of the closeness of their objective sank in. With the Knights of Lupus destroyed, the Northwilds were open to the Order, and the very last of the beasts could be hunted to extinction.
Zahariel watched as the fortress of the Knights of Lupus crumbled, its walls and keep pulverised by the massed cannons of the Order. No honour was to be accorded the fallen enemy knights, their corpses and effects gathered in the main keep and put to the torch.
The Lion had marched into the great library to find Zahariel and Nemiel with Lord Sartana’s body, and he had congratulated them both before turning his attention to the great volumes collected within the massive chamber.
After a cursory glance through several of the tomes gathered by Lord Sartana, the Lion had ordered them to rejoin their sword line, and had busied himself with further exploration of his defeated foe’s collection. Entire wagon trains carried the books and scrolls back to Aldurukh and further study.
Zahariel turned from the burning fortress, saddened to see such a mighty edifice cast down, and wondering if all battles ended with this strange mix of emotions. He had survived and acquitted himself with honour, fought bravely and helped in the final victory. He had seen history take shape, and had witnessed the death of their greatest enemy,
yet still there was a nagging sense of things undone and of opportunities missed.
Sar Hadariel was alive and would live to fight another day as had many of his sword line. The butcher’s bill was steep, but not so steep as to render the victory sour, and already the loss of so many friends and comrades was being overshadowed by the glories won.
In the weeks of marching back to Aldurukh, the infamy of the Knights of Lupus would be magnified tenfold, their villainies growing from deliberate capture of beasts to vile experiments and corruption of the soul. By the time the Order’s warriors had returned home, their enemies had been turned into the vilest monsters, corrupt and beyond redemption. It had been a good and necessary war, the knights agreed, a war that had achieved great things, and had brought the freedom of all Caliban that much closer.
Yet amid the celebrations and honours bestowed, Zahariel could not forget the moment in the Circle Chamber when Lion El’Jonson had goaded Lord Sartana to war, the moment that war had been thrust upon them.
Yes, the Order’s campaign was on the verge of ultimate glory, but had its integrity been tainted at the last?
Had blood been shed in this battle for less than noble ideals?
Zahariel worried about such things on the ride back, unable to articulate his feelings even to those closest to him. He watched his brothers celebrate their great victory, and a shadow fell upon his heart as he watched the Lion revel in the honours heaped upon him for this latest victory.
Only one other in the Order appeared to bear such misgivings, and Zahariel would often catch Luther riding alongside his brother, and catch a hint of that same shadow in his smile and a chip of ice in the corner of his eye.
If Luther sensed Zahariel’s scrutiny, he made no mention of it, but the journey back to Aldurukh was melancholy for him, his achievements during the battle overshadowed by the Lion’s feats of arms.
Zahariel and Nemiel’s defeat of the beast in the courtyard brought them both honours, and each was rewarded with scrolls upon their armour to commemorate the deed. Nemiel had been overjoyed, and Zahariel had been pleased, but each time he thought back to the fight, he wondered why the strange powers that had manifested in the forests of Endriago had not reappeared.
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