Jonathan Moeller - The Ghosts 08 - Ghost in the Mask

by Jonathan Moeller

  Tiraedes gestured, and another Kyracian noble stood. Alcios of House Kallias was middle-aged, stern, and utterly humorless, yet he had served valiantly at Kylon’s side during the battles against the Empire and the chaos in Catekharon.

  “Citizens,” said Alcios, “I come with dire news. The Emperor has persuaded the Padishah to close the Starfall Straits against us. Many of you, I am sure, have keenly felt the loss of trade, but I fear the situation will grow worse. The Emperor’s emissaries are negotiating with the khadjars of Anshan, and they are trying to convince the Shahenshah to stop selling grain to the city. If they are successful, our situation will become dire. We will lose the means to feed the population…and risk revolts and upheaval.”

  Kylon’s eyes strayed to the edge of the Agora. A lean, unshaven man in a ragged gray robe stood there, watching the Assembly. The Assembly conducted its business in public, and poorer citizens, foreigners, and even slaves gathered to watch. Indeed, a crowd surrounded the Agora, kept back by a line of waiting ashtairoi.

  Yet something about the thin man in the gray robe grated on Kylon’s senses.

  “This is a grave matter,” said Thalastre’s father. Sirykon of House Ixionos, the Exarch of Kyrant, was a doughy man, the folds of his robe taunt against his belly. Thankfully, Thalastre had not gotten her looks from her father. “Anshan has long sold us grain. Surely the Shahenshah would not risk such a lucrative business in exchange for the Emperor’s empty promises?”

  The man in the gray robe walked towards the ashtairoi.

  “I fear the Emperor offers more than empty promises,” said an old woman in an Archon’s robe. It was rare for the Assembly to elect a female Archon, but Andromache had managed it, and so had Agamena of House Iconikas. “His servants have offered massive bribes to the Anshani khadjars, more than enough to make up the loss of the revenue from the grain trade.”

  Tiraedes scowled. “Such a sum would beggar the Empire for years.”

  “Yet it would succeed,” said Alcios, “for the Empire has greater resources. Citizens and lords, our course is clear. The Empire threatens us with ruin, and we must threaten them in turn. The time has come for our stormsingers to combine their powers and divert the rain away from the Empire’s provinces. Let us unleash a famine such as never been seen upon the Empire. Once the Legions can no longer be fed, the Emperor will lose interest in turning them against us.”

  “Such a course,” said Sirykon “is fraught with peril. A famine of that magnitude will only harden the Emperor’s determination to destroy us. Worse, the effects of the spell may go beyond our reach. If it alters the weather over Anshan or Istarinmul or the free cities, we may well coerce our enemies and our allies to join together against us. We…”

  Someone started shouting at the edge of the Agora, and Sirykon stopped with a scowl.

  The man in the gray robe confronted one of the ashtairoi…and suddenly Kylon remembered him.

  “Ephaltus,” he muttered, getting to his feet. Ten years ago, Ephaltus had been one of Andromache’s chief political rivals, thinking to seize House Kardamnos’s holdings for himself. Like so many others, he had underestimated Andromache, and found himself banished from New Kyre for the rest of his life.

  “My lord Speaker!” shouted Kylon. “That man is Ephaltus, once the High Seat of House Trakos. He was banished for crimes against the Kyracian people, and forbidden to return upon pain of death.”

  So why had Ephaltus returned, and come to the Agora of the Archons, of all places? Surely he had known he would be caught.

  “Kylon of House Kardamnos!” roared Ephaltus. He held a black dagger clutched in his right hand, and Kylon sensed something…odd about it. “Do you remember me?”

  “I do,” said Kylon, focusing his arcane senses on the dagger in Ephaltus’s right hand. “You tried to steal the holdings of House Kardamnos, and Andromache made you pay for it. Given what my sister usually did to her rivals, you should count yourself fortunate that you still breathe.”

  An amused laugh went through the Assembly.

  “The bitch met her fate in Marsis,” sneered Ephaltus. Four ashtairoi surrounded him, their ashtair swords in hand. “I would send you to join her, but I have chosen to be merciful.”

  “Indeed?” said Kylon, and the Assembly and the Archons laughed again.

  But he did not laugh with them.

  There was something…off about the dagger in Ephaltus’s right hand. From a distance, Kylon saw a faint green glow coming off the weapon. And he sensed something within the dagger, some kind of sorcerous power.

  Perhaps Ephaltus was not mad. Perhaps he knew something the rest of them did not.

  “And what mercy is this?” said Tiraedes.

  “A new power is rising to the east,” said Ephaltus, “and it shall sweep all before it. Nations and kingdoms shall be overthrown, and a new order will arise. You might have cast me out, but New Kyre is still my homeland, and I would see my city spared destruction. I have come to offer you an alliance with this new power, rather than destruction at its hands.”

  “I am disappointed,” said Tiraedes. “You speak of the Empire, I assume? You were banished, but no true son of Old Kyrace would ally with the Empire of…”

  “Not the Empire!” shouted Ephaltus. “The Kingdom of the Rising Sun!”

  Stunned silence answered him, and then the Assembly erupted into a gale of laughter.

  “Indeed?” said Alcios. “And shall you march against our walls with an army of dust and bones? For that is all that remains of old Maat.”

  Sirykon shook his head. “I often had my disagreements with Andromache, as you well know. But this is a farce.”

  “We must thank you, Ephaltus, for this moment of levity,” said Tiraedes. “But you were banished from New Kyre under pain of death. Ashtairoi! Take him outside the city walls and behead him immediately.”

  The ashtairoi moved to take him, and Ephaltus sprang into motion. He lashed out with the dagger, catching the first ashtairoi on the hand…and the soldier collapsed, dead before he hit the ground.

  A strange gray smoke billowed from the corpse, and Kylon sensed a surge of sorcerous power. From the murmur of alarm from the stormsingers and the other stormdancers, he knew that they had felt it as well.

  The ashtairoi backed away, weapons raised, and Ephaltus grinned, the gray smoke swirling in a ring around his feet.

  “What is this?” thundered Tiraedes. “You dare to spill blood before the sacred Pyramid of Storm?”

  “Fool,” said Ephaltus. All around the Assembly men drew their weapons, stormdancers lifted their swords, and stormsingers summoned their powers. “I have heard the prophet of great Anubankh speak, and seen his might. The Empire shall fall, Anshan shall burn…and the Kingdom of the Rising Sun shall be reborn in might and splendor. I will save New Kyre, and lay it before the prophet’s feet. And to do that, I shall have to kill you short-sighted fools.”

  Kylon lifted his sword, the blade whitening with frost as he drew upon his sorcery. He sensed the power in Ephaltus’s strange dagger growing stronger…and he also sensed power in the gray mist swirling around the exile’s feet.

  And he remembered where he had felt that power before.

  It was a form of necromancy, different from the kind that Andromache and Scorikhon had wielded, different from the strange, mechanistic sorcery Mihaela had used to build her infernal Forge. Yet it was still necromancy.

  “My lords!” said Kylon. “Beware! His weapon is infused with necromantic power!”

  “He speaks the truth!” said Thalastre, her rich voice ringing over the chaos. “I sense it as well!”

  “Necromancy within the walls of New Kyre?” said Tiraedes. “Will you leave none of our sacred laws undefiled, Ephaltus? Men of New Kyre! Slay this lawbreaker at once!”

  A score of stormsingers began spells, Kylon and a dozen other stormdancers strode forward, and Ephaltus laughed and waved the black dagger over his head.

  The weapon blazed with green light.<
br />
  The smoke flowing around his feet rose, forming itself into the shape of a man. Kylon sensed the potency within the creature. It was strong, and dangerous, but could not possibly stand beneath the might of so many gathered sorcerers.

  “Kill them all!” screamed Ephaltus.

  The ground rippled with gray smoke, and hundreds of the shadows erupted from the Agora of the Archons.

  Screams echoed through the crowds surrounding the Agora as the shadows moved through them. A single touch from the gray shadows killed, and dozens of men and women perished in the first chaotic moments. A dozen of the shadows flowed towards Kylon, reaching for him with immaterial hands.

  He drew on his power and moved.

  The sorcery of air gave him the speed of the wind, and he dodged past the shadows’ reaching grasp. Frost glimmered around his blade, and he slashed and hacked through the shadows. The steel of his sword did not touch them, but the icy power sheathing his blade ripped through the sorcery binding the creatures, and they disintegrated beneath his blows.

  But still more of the shadows rose from the earth. Lightning boomed and flashed as the stormsingers unleashed their powers, and each stroke tore a dozen of the shadows apart. Yet for every shadow that unraveled into mist, two more rose from the ground. Was Ephaltus calling all the spirits of the netherworld to rise and aid him?

  Kylon struck down another shadow.

  He had to reach Ephaltus. The exile was using the dagger to control and summon those shadows. If Kylon killed him, perhaps the shadows would break away, or simply return to the netherworld.

  He turned…and then Ephaltus was before him, the shadows billowing around him.

  Belatedly Kylon remembered how much Ephaltus had hated Andromache. And what better revenge than killing Andromache’s sole remaining blood?

  Ephaltus slashed at him, and Kylon blocked the blow with his sword. Yet the dagger pulsed with green fire, and Kylon felt it draining away his sorcery, the way Sicarion’s strange spell had done during their duel in Catekharon. Kylon stumbled as a chill went through his limbs, and he fell to one knee, his vision swimming.

  Ephaltus grinned and drew back the dagger for the kill.

  “No!”

  Thalastre loomed out of the swirling shadows, hands extended. A gust of freezing wind slammed into Ephaltus, driving him to his knees. Kylon surged forward, still on one knee, and plunged his sword into Ephaltus’s chest.

  The exile screamed, his face twisted with pain…and a final cunning glint came into his maddened eyes.

  He threw the black dagger.

  Kylon ducked…but the weapon had not been aimed at him.

  He jumped to his feet as the blade left a scratch on Thalastre’s right hand.

  She frowned in confusion…and then staggered, her face clenched in pain. Her aura fluctuated against his senses as her arcane power struggled against the dagger’s necromancy.

  “Kylon,” she said. “I…I don’t…”

  Ephaltus died on Kylon’s sword, and the gray shadows faded into nothingness.

  He ran to Thalastre, and caught her just as she fell.

  ###

  An hour later Kylon stood alone in the Agora of the Archons, watching as the ashtairoi directed the slaves to clean up the bodies of the slain. One hundred and ninety-seven people had died, killed by Ephaltus’s necromantic shadows before Kylon had cut him down.

  He looked at the Pyramid of Storm, where the most powerful stormsingers had carried away Thalastre.

  The number might well rise to one hundred and ninety-eight before the sun vanished beneath the sea to the west.

  Tiraedes and Thalastre’s father walked towards him.

  “Well?” said Kylon. He ought to have greeted the Lord Speaker and the Exarch by their titles, he knew, but at the moment he did not care.

  “She lives,” said Tiraedes, “for now. Had she not been a sorceress, the dagger’s touch would have slain her at once. As it is, her power slowed its necromantic influence long enough for the stormsingers to slow her heart and put her into a coma. She will live…but if she wakens, the dagger’s aura will kill her at once.”

  Sirykon hesitated, and then put his hand on Kylon’s shoulder. “You must not blame yourself. Many men died today, but far more would have perished had you had not cut down the traitor. We all attacked the shadows, uselessly. It did not occur to us to fight to their master.”

  “I was not fast enough,” said Kylon. “Lord Speaker, did the stormsingers say if there was a cure? A way to reverse the dagger’s influence?”

  Tiraedes shook his head. “They do not know. We have never seen such a weapon before. Perhaps it is Maatish in origin, as Ephaltus claimed. We…”

  “Kylon of House Kardamnos.”

  Kylon scowled, wondering who would interrupt…and the scowl faded from his face.

  A young woman cloaked in blue-green robes stood before him. A bronze amulet fashioned in the shape of three eyes hung from a chain around her neck, the metal corroded and green from seawater. Her eyes changed color as he looked at her, cycling from the gray of a furious storm to the blue-green of a calm sea and back again.

  She was a priestess of the Surge, and the lords of New Kyre bowed to the will of the feared oracle of the storm and sea.

  “Priestess,” said Kylon. “Forgive my rudeness. I am…troubled.”

  The priestess regarded him for a moment…and her eyes turned the flat black of a dire winter storm.

  “The Surge knows of your grief, High Seat of House Kardamnos,” said the priestess, “and she summons you at once. You must save your betrothed. For if you do not save Thalastre, New Kyre will burn. All nations will burn. The entire world shall burn, and become a graveyard for all of eternity.”

  Chapter 5 - Followers of the Dead

  For the first time in her life, Caina dressed in the black robe of a magus of the Imperial Magisterium.

  It would not do for a magus to be seen leaving the home of Anton Kularus, so Halfdan had arranged for rooms at an inn on the western edge of Malarae. Here Caina and Corvalis and Muravin could disguise themselves, and then depart to the west.

  Her room had a mirror, and Caina examined herself in it.

  The black robe made her look stark and forbidding. Her pale face and her dyed blond hair made a marked contrast with the black robe. Caina pulled her hair back in a tight tail to emphasize the lines of her jaw and cheekbones, and did not bother with makeup. A woman like Rania Scorneus would consider such fripperies to be the province of lesser women.

  She tied a red sash around her waist, and hooked her sheathed ghostsilver dagger to it. The robe’s loose sleeves provided ample room for throwing knives, and she strapped two to each forearm. Theodosia of the Grand Imperial Opera had also prepared a few tricks for her, and those went up Caina’s sleeves as well. She could not wield sorcery, but she knew how to bluff…and sometimes a good bluff was more valuable than a pile of gold coins.

  Caina tucked a pair of daggers into hidden sheaths in her boots, examined herself for a moment in the mirror, and nodded to herself.

  She left the room and swept into the inn’s common room. The inn was neither luxurious nor shabby, and catered to the merchants who hauled goods through the hills of the Caerish provinces to the barges of the River Marentine. Wagon drivers in rough clothes and merchants in furred robes sat at the tables and benches, eating breakfast and talking.

  They fell silent as Caina swept into the room, and took care to avoid her gaze. No one in their right mind wanted to draw the attention of a magus. Caina ignored them and strode across the room, her heels clacking against the floorboards, her expression frozen in a haughty mask. No one who looked at her would see Sonya Tornesti or Anna Callenius or Marianna Nereide or any of the other identities she had assumed over the years.

  Which was the point.

  Two men in black plate armor sat at a table near the door, their cuirasses adorned with the sigil of the Magisterium, an eye upon an opened book. Muravin had taken to th
e role of a Magisterial Guard simply by keeping to his usual practice of scowling at everyone in sight. Corvalis, though, Corvalis looked deadly. The black armor suited him, made him looked lean and wolfish and dangerous.

  Which, for him, was no disguise.

  He had shaved his beard and mustache, thank the gods.

  “My carriage, captain,” said Caina in a cold voice, coloring her High Nighmarian with the accent of a woman raised in Artifel. “Is it ready?”

  Corvalis rose and bowed. “It is, mistress. We may leave whenever you wish.”

  “And I wish to leave at once,” said Caina.

  “As you command,” said Corvalis. He stood and beckoned to Muravin, and the older man rose. They fell into escort around Caina, and walked to the courtyard.

  “I am surprised,” murmured Corvalis in a low voice, “how well you can speak an Artifel accent, given that you’ve never been there.”

  “Many easterners visit Malarae,” said Caina, keeping her haughty mask in place. “It is simply a matter of listening to them.”

  “And,” said Corvalis, “how easily you can pass as a magus.”

  “Give how I despise them, you mean?” said Caina. “People hate and fear the magi. Inspiring that reaction is not hard.”

  They walked to the stables together.

  ###

  The fastest way to travel through the Empire was by water, whether by sea or river or canal. Unfortunately, Caer Magia was landlocked.

  Fortunately, the Via Caeria was one of the best roads in the Empire. It had been built during the Second Empire to support the Emperors’ endless wars against the Caerish tribes. As the Empire expanded west, so did the Via Caeria, and now the road stretched from Malarae to the gates of Marsis. Broad and wide and smooth from the labor of millennia of Legionaries, the road wound its way along the western shores of the Bay of Empire, and then turned southwest, leaving ancient Nighmaria and making its way into the hills of the Caerish provinces. Caina felt barely a bump as the horses pulled the carriage, and she could have slept in comfort inside.