Where was he now? If his gods existed and they were finally tired of playing cruel jokes, maybe they’d swept him far away from the conjurers. Far away to a sandy shore, where the sun always shined and the sea was always blue and the fish were plentiful. A shore where you didn’t need feet to get around, only knees and hands. He could crawl about until old age finally took him, feasting on crabs and fish until his belly could fit no more.
I fell asleep on that note, my arm over Vayle’s shoulder, cradling her breasts.
A heavy pulse of chaotic noise awakened me sometime later. I’d been asleep for precisely the amount of time it takes you to question whether you have slept for two hours or twenty-two.
Vayle sprung up like a suicidal woman upon a pyre who just ascertained the meaning to life, which was: your woes may never go away, and you may well slip farther into the void, but fuck fire burns.
“What’s going on out there?” she asked, stabbing a pair of fingers into her sleepy eyes.
I yawned. “A party, perhaps?”
She spun around the room like a cyclone late for its appointment to level a small village, snatching up her clothes and attempting to put them all on at the same time. “I’m in charge here while Dercy’s sleeping. If we’re being attacked…”
Oh, right, I thought, we’re in the middle of a war camp.
That sudden realization shook the swampy grogginess from my mind. I jumped up and got dressed alongside Vayle.
Two men burst through the tent, clad in full plate armor, immediately turning their attention elsewhere as Vayle was still naked from the waist up.
“Commander Vayle,” one of them said. “A fiery bird swooped down from the mountains. It made landfall approximately half a mile outside of the infantry. There were two men on it. One of them claims he is here to see the Black Rot, and if luck would have it, its shepherd.”
Vayle and I traded glances.
“What are their names?” Vayle asked.
“My Lord Commander, that information was not relayed to us. The patrols did, however, inform us that one of the men upon the bird is missing his toes.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The impact of disbelief can be felt in several places: in your racing heart that you may, depending on the improbability of what has just transpired, paradoxically feel in both your stomach and throat, but strangely not your chest. In your mouth, which will often delude you into believing your lips, tongue and the inside of your cheeks have turned into a sandy desert which no water will ever moisten again. You can feel disbelief in your eyes, which tend to bulge and stretch in ways eyes are advised not to bulge and stretch. You can feel it in muscles that seize and tremor and your shaky fingers that make it quite difficult to properly hold a sword.
But you feel it most prominently in your mind. Upon seeing or hearing or smelling or feeling or tasting something so utterly unlikely, the large spongy thing inside your skull has but two choices: end all of its processes, which I believe accounts for fifty percent of all sudden deaths, or accept the fact that life is a very funny bastard sometimes.
I coughed out a dry laugh so massive, it forced one half of my heart back down my throat and punched the other half back out of my stomach, framing it as a whole piece in my chest once again.
“You’re a fucking crippled magician!” I cried, running forward and embracing Tylik. Mister No Toes was riding like a child on his nephew’s back. I relieved Karem from his plight and carried Tylik over to a chair, sitting him down.
He seemed so much more broken in the light. One eye was nearly sealed shut, with bright pink pustules clinging to the lid. Profound black ovals, like severe bruises that could never quite heal, dotted his forehead and cheeks and arms and legs. He was balding in some areas, with stringy hair in others and a misplaced lush mane zigzagging across his temple. The rot of his missing toes looked much improved, however. Gone was the wretched green slime and inky leakage.
“I’ve heard some good fucking stories over the past few weeks,” I said, “but I think yours is going to top all of them. How the piss did you get here, Tylik?”
Tylik coughed up a wet ball of mucous, which he quickly swallowed. “It’s a story all right, and a good one! Me and Karem here, we heard the horses come tramplin’ after us in the woods that night we broke free. Took ’em a good long while, though, didn’t it, Karem?”
Karem reclined as much as a stiff wooden chair allowed a man to recline and put a skin of wine to his lips. He sighed, tilted his head up and said, “Mm hmm.”
“Luckily for us,” Tylik said, “we weren’t bouncin’ up and down on some horses. Might be quick, y’know, riding on saddles, but anyone with half a brain in ’em can track those big paws in the mud. So anyways, we hide out behind some trees, inchin’ our way through the forest when the sound of racing hooves quieted, and then darting behind more trees when they returned. My poor nephew damn near broke his back carrying me. Tryin’ to shorten this story up now, but lots of things transpired. Biggest one of ’em all, I’d say, happened when we reached a little village tucked away inside a bosom of a mountain. How long it take us to reach, Karem?”
A soft snore burbled through the tent.
“Karem?”
No answer.
“Karem!” Tylik hollered.
Karem jerked sideways and spilled a pool of wine in his lap. “Bah!” he spat. “What? I’m tired, Uncle.”
“How long did it take us to reach Dorral?”
“Four days.”
“Four days!” Tylik said exuberantly, holding four of his skeletal fingers up. “And that was with the help of a friendly merchant who wagoned us on up there most of the way. So we get there and — now, this is the village my family ran away to, see? Don’t want to confuse you. So we get there and I reunite with my little children, who are now big children, and I see my wife again, and it’s the greatest moment of this broken man’s life. But I can’t rest. I know that. My wife says it was some god who gave me another chance, but… but I know it was you, Astul. You and Karem. I couldn’t sit on my hands now. I was given the opportunity to do somethin’, and I was gonna do it.”
The massive, goofy smile on my face seemed stuck there perpetually as Tylik talked. It was a strange feeling, being happily sucked back into a past in which I should have held absolutely no nostalgia for — a past where I slept against a pillar, where iron clasps gnawed at the flesh of my ankles and wrists, where a friendly voice helped me through the dark days and the sightless nights. Of course, it was also a past that had hope, however minuscule and however fleeting.
“Allow me a guess,” I said. “You made good on your promise to do something with that opportunity by procuring a phoenix?”
Tylik erupted into a coughing fit. The sickly pustules on his eyelids bobbed up and down like stitching needles as his body convulsed. He regathered himself and cleared his throat.
“If only it was that easy. See, word had gotten around that the conjurers had taken a wee little village a small ways up north. According to some good merchants, it was pretty bare, not a lot of protection. Still, put us in lots of danger. We could have been next. So I convinced all the strong men and women to put on their boots and grab hold of the sharpest things they could. We were goin’ to war. Bless the hearts of the kids, they wanted to help too. Put some slingshots in their hands, wrapped ’em in good quilted armor, and we marched north.”
“A farmers’ march, hmm?” Vayle said.
“Oh, we were more than farmers,” Tylik said, his nose scrunched up and his one good eye lowered. “Butchers, dyers, tanners, saddlers, blacksmiths, armorers, grandpas, grandmas, fathers, mothers, fierce protectors, angry freemen. We were much more than farmers.”
The jovial tone always present in his words was strangled by an undercurrent of hatred and loathing.
“And we showed them conjurer bastards what good old-fashioned justice is all about. Not one of ’em was left standing.” His eye began to twitch, and his lips tightened. “Not one ’em
had a head left on their shoulders!”
“And the phoenix?” I asked.
“Two of ’em were there,” Tylik said, the tenseness in his shoulders and face slipping away. “Used those big fiery birds to take everyone way, way far away, to the sand. See, we hadn’t heard squat about conjurers bringin’ villagers from the beaches around the East, so that’s where we went. Then Karem and I, well, we knew we couldn’t just well stay there. What if the conjurers won this war you were talkin’ about? They’d be everywhere! Like the clouds in the sky! So we took a phoenix, hoped I remembered correctly that you said Mizridahl lay to the south, and we steered her that way.”
Vayle stood. She had a curious look about her. “How did you defeat the conjurers?”
Tylik waited for her to continue on, but when it became apparent that was her only question, he said, “Well, we swung sharp things across their throats.”
My commander contemplated this for a moment. “Did the ground not move under your feet? Did things not fall from the sky? I know for a fact some of them can bend the elements to their will.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” Tylik said. “A few of them can, seen it myself more than I’d care to admit. But most of those under the conjurer banner, they’re just like your soldiers outside here. They swing swords and sing songs while they march. Now the actual conjurers themselves, they pick at your mind and do terrible things to it. Or great things, as they would have you believe. The ones who can move the earth and all that wickedness, no… there aren’t many. Stuff like that can kill you, did you know that? Seen it once before. Young man tried to make the earth swallow a rabbit, and his head exploded! Swear it did!
“By the gods, I bet you even the queen Amielle would only be able to open up the sky once or twice — and only for a short while — before her mind would be so tired, she couldn’t tell you the difference between a donkey and a cow. ’Course, with the sudden lack of donkeys and cows in the past thirty years, not a lot of people could. ’Least on my world.”
“It won’t take much to turn the war clearly in their favor,” Vayle said. “We’re already severely outnumbered.”
Tylik appeared confused. “But I am not done sharing my story. I recalled Astul telling me while we both suffered in that awful dungeon that a man by the name of Patrick Verdan was the key to winning this war. He was somewhere in the North, but as Karem and I discovered, the North is a very big place. But people here are very accommodating and will answer most questions you have, as long as they don’t see the fiery bird you arrived on. Stuffed to the brim with directions, we flew toward and eventually landed in a place so cold and snowy, I could not breathe. And I talked to this very elusive Patrick Verdan.”
“When?” I asked.
“Oh, has to be about four weeks ago now, I’d say. ’Course, I talked to him just yesterday too.”
“What’s he doing away from his kingdom?” I asked.
Tylik cleared his throat. “He’s preparing for a very large war.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The architect of fear is hope. Without hope, without the possibility of a better tomorrow, what is there to fear? The best outcome and the worst are one and the same — either way, you’ve got no fucking chance. So you go out with one last spectacular showing, that one last prodigious burst of light that flares as bright as a meteor streaking across a dark sky before the night smothers it.
Six days ago, I had no fear. Regret for having to leave this world, sure. But not fear. And then Tylik comes, reveals a little secret and pumps me full of hope once again. A hope that intensified when the sellswords who served as spies informed me four days ago that no one had crossed the Widowed Path. That meant Edmund Tath’s bannermen weren’t arriving in Edenvaile, at least not on time.
Hope cut through me like an ebon blade on the thirtieth day of the march. It was probably a day fitting of the brumal North. In all likelihood, the clouds were low and thick and chunky with the color of sour milk and smoke. Probably wasn’t any sun, because this place didn’t fuckin’ deserve it. Snow was probably falling — tears from the poor bastard gods who had to watch over this pathetic land.
Or maybe the sun did come out. Maybe it burned abnormally hot, melting the flakes as they fluttered down and stuck to the brims of helmets. Maybe you could smell the sweetness of grass thawing beneath the ice as the last days of winter retreated.
Maybe, possibly, probably — I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like. Hope had cut me open, and just as decay settles inside a fresh wound, fear weaseled its way in. Couldn’t tell you what the weather was like because I had the shakes. Had the grumbles in my stomach and the booming percussions of thumps and thuds in my heart. Had the crushing doubts, the what-ifs, the don’t-you-dare-fuck-ups racing through my mind.
Couldn’t tell you what the weather was like because who has the fucking time to look toward the sky when an enormous wall of stone and crenellations, of legs and arms, of bows and arrows, of thin eyes and tight lips, of people who just want you bloody fucking dead — who has the time to look toward the sky when you’re staring at that?
I stood at the forefront with Vayle and Dercy and a few other officers, far out of range of the archers. I had nothing to say, no advice to give, no real reason to show my face up there. It was all about selfish curiosity, a twisted thirst for what war was all about.
See, assassinations are one-and-done. You kill a single man, maybe a couple more here and there, but it’s small stuff. War, though? It’s big. Massive. Incomprehensible and imperceptible. Fifteen thousand infantry stood behind me. Swords at their sides, pikes pointed toward the heavens. Their stoic faces looked chiseled from stone. The absence of terror in their eyes wouldn’t last. In even the best scenario, half of them would be trying to stuff their guts back inside their bellies and choking on blood as arrows punctured their lungs. Over seven thousand men dead. More than likely it would be ten thousand, twelve thousand, possibly every last one of them.
The mind can’t possibly reconcile the scale of obliteration that war delivers. At least mine couldn’t.
A voice as chilling as the frost that thickened the air sailed across the field. It came from the balcony that had hosted Sybil and Chachant’s grand wedding.
“Lay down your weapons,” Vileoux Verdan said, “and I will allow these men to march peacefully back to their homes. My grievance is with you, Dercy, not the innocent souls you bring to my walls.”
Dercy responded, but I didn’t listen to his words. It was all a formality, and I was more interested in identifying those who joined Vileoux on the balcony. Unsurprisingly, Chachant and Sybil stood by his side. Farther on down the line were a few men and women I’d never seen before — conjurers, undoubtedly. But the tall, slender gal who centered this little gathering… oh, I’d seen her before.
Her voice had once echoed inside my skull. Her dungeon had nearly broken me. Her arena murdered my friends. They called her the queen of the conjurers. I’d never killed a queen before. It was time to change that.
I turned the reins of my horse over in my hands, guiding her back through the horde of shields and leather and mail and swords and pikes and axes that gathered in square clusters of forty deep and forty wide. The glint of silver stretching across the field probably looked like stalks of freshly planted white sage to a hawk.
Although the hawk would question what a couple of wooden beams mounted upon wheels were doing in a field of foliage. That, of course, was the weapon of the day — the big-ass battering ram Vayle had procured. The ram itself sat idle above the wheels, suspended by chains. A canvas canopy enclosed it, stitched with cold, wet hides that would have a good chuckle at any fire-laced arrows the North would hurl from their wall.
My mare trotted past it, past the remaining infantry and beyond the archers who stacked behind, arrows already nocked, fingers nervously prodding the twine.
A small distance behind the archers, Dercy’s remaining officers gathered, along with Tylik and his nephew. It was also wher
e my Rots made their stay. We’d sit tight until we were needed.
My mare reared around and faced the Rots, who were seated on their horses. There were twenty-one of us in all. Vayle had managed to round up the few who’d combed through the Golden Coast in search of a usurper, but there was no time to bring back the ones who had gone to Hoarvous. I wondered what they were doing there now. Perhaps they were responsible for the lack of Edmund Tath’s bannermen, against all odds.
“Fuck me,” Slick said. “Thought I’d gotten away from this shit years ago.”
Slick wasn’t a particularly stealthy assassin. He’d gotten captured more than eighteen times since joining the Black Rot, but that’s precisely how he got his name. He managed to slip out of any confine, slick as oil and crafty as a fox.
“You never leave war,” Rimeria said. “It follows you around like a hound fly.”
“’Least you can kill a hound fly,” Slick retorted.
I smacked him lightly on the cheek. “Cheer up, Slick. You’re not a feeder for indispensable knights like you were for your uncle’s militia. You’re the indispensable one now.”
“Yeah,” Rimeria said, “who else could we bet on getting roped up and thrown into a stockade every time he has a job to do?”
The Rots chuckled and had some more fun at Slick’s expense, but the jokes soon ended as Dercy returned.
Dercy’s steed huffed a steamy wisp of rotten horse breath into the air and lowered its face of menacing plate. A warhorse in every sense of the word.
Its rider didn’t look too bad himself. The short and squat King of Watchmen’s Bay was dressed in a suit of plate that glistened from his boots to his gorget. No helmet, though — somehow that made him all the more intimidating. After all, it’s not often you see a little man in plate armor with a balding head, sitting atop a horse fit for a mountain of a man. It’s disconcerting.
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