Thy Father's Shadow (Book 4.5)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Doesn’t count, you were still talking about him.”

  “Ameli, Father is the most respected man in Saekaj and Sovar save for Dagonath Shrawn,” Terian said. “We owe him our respect as well. If that means I’m talking about him all the time, good.” He turned and gave his collar one last tug, but it did no good. “He’s done things no one else ever has. Carried us to the top of Saekaj. We would be living in dirt and filth in Sovar right now if not for him.”

  “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad?” she asked. “Maybe then he wouldn’t be so angry all the time …”

  Terian stared at his collar in the mirror, and let out a sigh. “No price is too high for what we’ve got. Anger is a small thing to put up with to be in the second largest manor in Saekaj.”

  Ameli started to say something but lowered her voice. “You’re talking like him again.”

  “Ameli,” he said, letting a hint of impatience inflect his tone. She just doesn’t understand.

  “Sorry,” she said, and now she truly was chastened, he could see. She took a couple steps toward him, her dress swaying as she walked. She reached up to his face and ran a cold hand down his cheek. She paused, just for a second, at his collar, and gave it a sharp tug. Then she wrapped her arms around him and gave him a strong, short hug before she ran from the room without another word.

  Terian turned and looked at himself in the mirror. “Huh.” The collar was smooth and perfectly in place. How did she do that? he wondered.

  “Terian!” His father’s voice echoed outside, and Terian straightened involuntarily, giving himself one last look over in the mirror. Flawless. He hesitated, looking around the room one last time before he walked out. It would hardly be his last time here; he would continue to live in his parents’ house as he trained at the Legion during the days, but still … it was a change, and worthy of reflection. Once I walk out of here, everything will be different.

  “Coming, Father,” Terian shouted back over his shoulder, and he gave one last look around the room before he walked out the door.

  Chapter 5

  Dawn found Terian riding into the whispering entry of the Waking Woods; a forest so massive that it girded the heart of Arkaria. They had hired a wizard in Reikonos Square, an elf with a shock of white hair, and after Guturan had tipped a few pieces of silver into his palm, the fury of energy that accompanied a wizard teleportation spell had risen to a crescendo and enveloped them.

  When the light faded from his eyes, the snows had receded and they had stood on a flat plain turned brown by the rising tide of winter. “This is as close as I can safely get you,” the elf had said, already disappearing into the bright light of his return spell. Terian had ridden south with Guturan at his side, the sun beginning to rise over the eastern horizon. He wondered at his decision. It hadn’t even been a question, really. His father called, and he came. Curious, that—especially given how we left things after … He felt a black despair crawl through him.

  As they crested a hill, Terian looked east and saw the reflection of waters, a massive glow upon them as far as his eye could take in. “Lake Magnus,” he whispered, keeping his gaze upon it a few minutes longer than he normally would have.

  “It does have a certain majesty, doesn’t it?” Guturan sniffed. “Though I still prefer the dark, quiet beauty of our own Great Sea.”

  “Phosphor-lit cave waters don’t exactly do it for me anymore, Guturan,” Terian said as their horses crossed the outermost tree and Lake Magnus disappeared from sight behind a moss-covered oak.

  “You have the constitution for the outdoors, then,” Guturan said with another sniff, reaching into the breast pocket of his cloak and coming out with a vek’tag-spun silken cloth, smooth and silvery in the gleaming morning light. “So many of our people do not. I collapsed upon my first sojourn out of Saekaj, you know.”

  “A common tale,” Terian said as he passed under the boundary. It was a simple enough marker that only knowing eyes would catch: the oaks of the outer perimeter had cave cress flowers hanging from the boughs. Deep brown, dried out, they lay suspended from the branches at a height where they might escape notice if one were not being particularly observant.

  “We now return to the glorious lands of the Sovereign,” Guturan said with a whisper, solemn, but loud enough for Terian to hear him clearly.

  “If it was so damned glorious, he’d still be here,” Terian muttered.

  “Be careful how you speak in this realm,” Guturan said, a dark expression covering his face. “You have grown unaccustomed to the ways of our people. Loose tongues and disrespect go hand in hand, and they are a quick path to the Depths and all the tortures within for the careless.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Terian said. I’d almost forgotten that the liberty of speaking one’s mind is not a privilege granted to my own people. He’d seen more than one person lose their head, their tongue or their freedom for an ill-chosen rebuke of the Sovereign. Which is ironic since he hasn’t even been here in the last century. Heavy is the shadow he casts, to still shroud us in such darkness.

  Visible behind the trees were shadows, and Terian knew they were small, hidden huts of the dark elven guards. Many a wandering foreigner had been unfortunate enough to miss the signs of the cave cress warning them off. Trespassing in the Sovereignty carries a steep penalty all its own. He shuddered. And one I would not care to pay, were I a traveler who accidentally wandered astray.

  They carried on, their horses cantering along and bringing them deeper into the forest. The boughs of the trees grew closer together for a spell; thick and knotty branches denoting the old growth of the forest. The underbrush became nearly nonexistent, having long ago been taken for fuel to burn, and signs of the trees having been harvested for firewood became apparent. The larger trees had stumpy limbs where they had been cut and taken for burning.

  There was sound ahead, and now the first guards of the Sovereignty were obvious. Before they had been mere shadows, hidden, but now they were apparent, and designed to crush the will of any who had bothered to penetrate the defenses of the Sovereignty this deeply. They held another purpose, though, a darker one, and Terian tried to hide the chill of it within him as he attempted not to ponder it. It won’t be long before I can’t ignore it, though, as the evidence of it is coming upon us rapidly.

  Troops of the Sovereign were on parade march, their angular armor clearly visible, their swords out and on display. The road had widened sometime in the last hours of travel and Terian had not even noticed. It was now large enough for ten men to walk abreast between the trees. The armor of the foot soldiers was clanking in time, and they paid no attention to Terian or Guturan, who maneuvered their horses off the road to yield the right of way to the army. “As it should be,” Guturan said, though whether he was referring to their giving primacy to the army’s passage or the idea that there were a thousand dark elves presently on the march, Terian did not know. Nor care, truly.

  The sound of clanking armor receded behind them and the trees grew thinner ahead. Terian could see the sun shining down on a massive clearing, and all around the perimeter sprang fortifications. Tree stands, interconnected by bridges and walkways, marked their entry into the wide-open space. Archers stood upon the platforms, facing inward. Their passage was acknowledged by a soldier on the ground with a simple nod and nothing more; his task was not to keep them out, after all. No one unintended ever made it this far anyhow. Not freely, at least.

  The clank of metal ahead drew Terian’s attention. The clearing was more than a simple forest meadow. It was hectares of open space, tilled land, farms that stretched to the regrowth of the trees in the far off distance beyond the reach of his eyes. “It’s gotten bigger,” he said under his breath, not really intending to speak the words aloud.

  “Saekaj Sovar has gotten bigger,” Guturan returned, the steady clopping of the feet of their horses drumming along as they kept on down the dirt road. “The farms have to grow correspondingly, though they have
discovered some strange mechanism of switching the crops grown in each field every season, and apparently it has slowed the need to clear more land.”

  Terian looked across the wide expanse of open fields. Couldn’t prove it by me. His eyes fell upon figures in rags off the path a short distance. A tree trunk stood clear in the middle of the farmland, a platform built atop it. It was a funny thing, bough-less, turned into a watchtower in the middle of a field. There were others he could see, every several hundred feet. Archers stood atop them, watching the fields with a dispassionate eye. They kept watch on the figures in rags, who had implements in their hands to break the earth.

  Terian looked at the ragged souls and felt a little pity. At least a quarter of them were small, no higher than to mid-thigh on him. Gnomes. Others reached his belly or perhaps a little higher. Dwarves. The tallest of them were the most stooped, bent as they were to do their labor. Humans and elves, I suppose. He felt a shudder run through him. He’d spent time in Reikonos freely, and even been on a sojourn or two to Pharesia, the elven capital, and Termina, their foremost city. There were no dark elves in chains there, breaking the ground ahead of winter settling in.

  He looked away abruptly, ignoring the sick feeling in his stomach and keeping his eyes to the path in front of him. Slaves. How many of them are there now, I wonder?

  They passed the next hours seeing spectacle after spectacle of the slaves working the land. Taskmasters stood with whips at the ready, and it was not an uncommon sight to see them being applied with zeal. Some of the overseers even seemed to delight in it. The crack of the lash made Terian uneasy, and he kept his eyes on the road ahead. Hills were rising in the distance, and there was a deep relief that accompanied them in his mind.

  “I shall be glad indeed when we have crossed into the gates,” Guturan said quietly over the screams of a gnome being whipped without mercy just across the field. It was a pitiable noise, and Terian felt a sickly unease.

  “Indeed,” Terian said, his voice tight. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “Do you?” Guturan asked. “I had thought you thrived in the out of doors?”

  Terian felt his face go slack, letting the tension bleed out as the shock filtered in. “I thought you were talking about the …” He stopped himself. His mouth was dry, and he felt a pallor settle over him. Slavery is as natural to the residents of Saekaj as indoor plumbing is to those of Sanctuary. “Never mind.” The screams across the field died off at last, and he did not turn to see if it was because of the death of the owner of said voice. The sick feeling, however, stayed with him as they rode closer and closer to the approaching hills.

  Chapter 6

  A series of buildings was visible just to the east of the hills. A bevy of young dark elves stood nearby, squinting under the weak early winter sun. Clouds lined the sky and Terian’s breath still frosted the air, even as the hour ground closer to noon. He hadn’t eaten an official breakfast, just some stale bread that had accompanied Guturan in his saddlebags. Terian could sense his destrier’s pull toward the long grass that filled the ditches on either side of the road, but he kept the steed moving onward, until they reached the cluster of dark elven youths, two of whom ran up to them as they began to dismount.

  “These two belong to the House of Lepos,” Guturan said stiffly to the older of the boys. Terian watched to see if any coin was passed to the stableboys; none was. Not tremendously surprising; it is their duty, after all.

  “Yes, sir,” the older stableboy said, bowing his head and taking the reins of Guturan’s horse. The younger took Terian’s in hand and started to lead the destrier away. He was a speckled lad, the black freckles on his cheeks a match for his dark, wavy hair. They continued on past their fellows, who stood stiffly at attention while Terian and Guturan were in sight. He suspected that once they had passed on, the boys would be back to playing hardscrabble games of some sort or another; the dirt on the knees and elbows of their ragged clothes seemed to bear out his assessment.

  “Not far now,” Guturan said, turning from the stableboys waiting for their next arrivals and walking toward the hills. There were two steep ones just ahead, almost a sheer cliff face on the side of one of them, and Terian could see the grand entrance tunneled into the hillside. It had stone towers built to flank it, with countless guards standing all around the base, monitoring the traffic coming in and out. It was a little ebb and flow, only a few people passing here and there, all of them dark elves. How unlike Reikonos.

  They came upon the gates, and Terian felt a great discomfort settle over him. How long has it been? Twenty years? He felt a little twinge in his muscles, a mixture of discomfort and anticipation. Not long enough. He glanced at the wary guards looking him over from behind their dark plated armor, and the archers on platforms above, and he drew a breath of cool air piping out of the caves. Not nearly long enough.

  “State your business,” one of the guards said as Guturan approached, holding a simple piece of parchment before him. The guard took it, never removing his gaze from Guturan.

  “I am Guturan Enlas, steward of the House of Lepos.” Guturan made a small bow of respect. “I bring with me Terian Lepos, heir to my master’s house.”

  There was a rough whisper that passed between the guards. There was an opposite lane, too, one checking the papers of those leaving the tunnel, and activity within it stopped as heads swiveled to take in Terian. He wanted to dip his head further beneath his spiked pauldrons, to recede within his helm, to disappear beneath the cresting spires of it, but he couldn’t. The heir of House Lepos is a dark knight of great renown, he told himself. There is no retreat for such a man.

  Guturan’s parchment was thrust back to him and Terian received a sharp, deep bow from the head guard. “M’lord, you are expected.” He gestured with a long arm toward the entry tunnel. “Your vek’tag carriage waits in the courtyard.”

  “Thank you,” Guturan said, taking back the parchment delicately and then beginning his walk again toward the darkened mouth of the cave. He gave Terian a smile as he looked back. “No point in walking all the way down, after all.”

  There was indeed a carriage waiting about a hundred feet down the passage where the chamber widened. The cave floor was a well-worn path, and Terian could see the faint outlines of ancient steps once cut on either side of the passage. They had long ago been smoothed out to allow for passage of wheeled carriages and wagons, but at the edges of the tunnel the remnants of them could still be seen.

  The cave opened up into a terraced courtyard, with ramps leading down on either side into a wide chamber. Carriages and wagons were lined up end to end, and storehouses were carved into the rock at either side of the room. It was a grand courtyard built into the underground, a staging area for all the cargo shipped into and out of Saekaj Sovar, the city in the deep.

  The dirt under their feet gave way to stone bricks laid out to smooth the passage of wheeled vehicles. It was the dark clay of the beaches near the Great Sea, harvested and mixed with straw, hauled up and shaped underneath the blue skies of the out of doors by the slaves, then dried in the sun and fired in a kiln. It clanked with every step of his boots, and the humid air flooded his nostrils with the smell of the beasts that filled the courtyard—there were horses, oxen, donkeys and vek’tag as far as the eye could see—the vek’tag being swapped out on the outbound wagons and swapped in for the ones descending into Saekaj and Sovar.

  It was a bustle of activity, hundreds of carriages and wagons, and yet the courtyard was hardly full. Terian’s eyes took some time adjusting to the dark, to the glow of the occasional lamp. The tunnel behind them admitted only the most fractional amount of light from the surface, and it faded the deeper they got into the courtyard.

  Guturan Enlas approached a carriage that bore a familiar sigil. Two vek’tag were harnessed to the front of it. Enormous spiders, large as oxen and nearly as docile, clicked their broken mandibles while waiting, chattering to each other. The carriage hitched to
their backs was draped in red cloth, though it was hard to see in the fading light. It was built of fine wood which showed from underneath the velvet coverings. Wood was a luxury in Saekaj, necessary for so many things that it was carefully rationed. Terian knew the display of even this much rich wood was a statement about the owner of the carriage. Most wagons or sleds were simple things, with no more material than necessary to get the job done—and sometimes less.

  The sigil on the velvet coverings was a darkened eye, stylized with lightning bolt-shaped protrusions from the top and bottom. It gave the whole thing an angry appearance, to Terian’s mind. Which seems appropriate.

  The carriage driver gave them a nod as they approached, and Guturan opened the door for Terian with a short bow. Terian climbed in and seated himself on the hard bench in the back. Guturan sat across from Terian and slapped the wall behind him. The carriage drew to motion with the crack of a whip.

  Terian endured the bumps and turns silently for a few minutes as they left the great courtyard and the tunnel took an easy slope. After only ten minutes, however, he knew his face was showing discomfort.

  “It is a fine carriage, is it not?” Guturan asked, apparently unaware of Terian’s expression. Or ignoring it. That wouldn’t be surprising.

  “I could do with a little less Saekaj opulence.” Terian adjusted himself on the hard bench. “I know wood is a sign of wealth that should make the lessers heed their betters, but they have this thing called padding now. Sure, it gets in the way of showing off, but it certainly eases the passage.”

  Guturan snorted. “Human and elven comforts,” he said, making it sound like a curse of the lowest sort. “Let them have them, their pampered ways, their soft luxuries. Our people are of the earth, hardened. We are one with the darkness, and enshroud ourselves in the righteousness of Yartraak. When the day of our reckoning comes, the humans and elves shall be ill-prepared, having grown cumbersome and fat on their comforts.”