The Argument of Empires

by Jacob T. Helvey

  Livran had his wounds attended to as well. The old healers worked with surprising efficiency in the little tent that Xisa had given them, deep in the center of camp. Stitches were applied to his head and bandages changed by one of the cloaked men. “You’re not very hardy, you humans,” Xisa said as the bandages were removed. “But your armor is strong.” She poked at one of the cuts on his shoulder. “Without it, I would probably be talking to a corpse right now.”

  “No thanks to your men,” Livran replied, cringing away from Xisa’s touch. “They would have seen me dead.”

  Xisa sighed. “That problem has been dealt with. And once the blacksmith is better, we will get down to the business of why you are here.”

  Kareen tried to hold her tongue, but found herself speaking anyway. “And why exactly are we here?”

  Livran opened his mouth, but whether to try and support or silence her, she couldn’t be sure. She ignored him. Dammit! Of all people, Livran should have understood why she was doing this. “You have killed eighty of my friend’s men, all so that you can get one blacksmith?”

  “A blacksmith who can teach my craftsmen how to forge steel. My people have been fighting for two years with nothing but bronze. Do you know what bronze does to steel?” She motioned to Livran. “Nothing. That he’s alive speaks to that.”

  “And the Delving?” Kareen asked. Livran shot a surprised look her way, mouth nearly agape. “Is that why your tribe is so large? Why you wield so much power?”

  “Delving?” Xisa didn’t seem to be familiar with the word.

  Kareen reached out her hand and made a motion like strangling an invisible adversary.

  Realization crossed Xisa’s face. “You mean my Gift?” Kareen nodded. “Yes. You can bring men to your side with wise words and the promise of riches and rank, but nothing works quite as well as raw strength and a woman willing to wield it.”

  Kareen and Livran exchanged looks. The chieftain had ambition. We need to escape, she was quickly realizing. Now more than ever, she knew it with certainty. Hadan—everyone on the Front—needed to know what was transpiring here, who and what this woman was, and how to stop her.

  Xisa rose from her crouch and turned towards the tent flap. “You should sleep. We will discuss this further in the morning.”

  She exited the tent, disappearing into the night beyond. Livran let a few moments pass before poking his head out, scanning the path that ran in front of their tent. “No guards. We can speak freely.”

  “We have to find a way to escape,” Kareen said. They may not have been left under guard, but they were still dead center in the middle of the camp, surrounded by three-thousand warry Cutarans. That fact alone would make escape nearly impossible.

  “Not yet,” Livran replied, taking a seat next to the fire that had been set in the center of the tent, directly above an opening that would stop them choking on the smoke. “First, I have to make sure Tason is healthy enough to move.”

  “Do you really think we can save him? He’s on the other side of the camp, as far from the two of us as he could be.”

  “I won’t leave him, if that’s what you’re asking.” Livran eye’s strayed to the fire, and for several moments he was silent, watching the flames lick at the crackling logs. “He’s sacrificed everything for me. Now, I have to do the same for him.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked. Livran had the kind of look men got when they were about to do something very foolish.

  “I used to talk with some of the older Fanalkiri merchants, the ones who used to trade with the Cutarans before our people arrived two years ago. They told me something interesting: that the Cutaran system of power is based around strength, rather than heredity. Anyone can be the chief, as long as you can climb the pile of corpses to get there. If I can-”

  Kareen saw where this was going, and she didn’t like it. “Absolutely not! You can’t defeat a Delver, Livran! She’d tear you to pieces!”

  “I saw how she fought today,” he replied, resolute. “She’s fast, and strong, I’ll concede that. But she’s still a savage. She’s never trained like I have.”

  “Your blade would bounce off her skin,” Kareen insisted, her voice shaking. “You saw how she took that knife today. It didn’t even faze her.”

  “Perhaps.” She could see his resolve crack slightly. Good. All she needed was her only friend on this hellhole of a continent getting himself killed.

  “Promise me you won’t do it. Please…”

  “No promises.” He held up a hand before she could respond. “But for now, I agree. Escape is our best option. We just have to find out how we’re going to go about it.”

  Ten:

  Grith

  Grith dreamt he was chased by shadows. He fled down a long featureless corridor, constructed from a uniform oily stone, the darkness behind him coming ever closer. He had had similar dreams as a child, except instead of pursuing darkness, it had been caimans and snakes and all the things that a boy born in the Marshes should fear. This was a deeper, more complex terror. It was the crush of responsibility, the knowledge that there were things expected of him. Something in his psyche had changed, but what? Why was he having these dreams now?

  Grith’s first thought upon waking was his training. Tain spoke often about the Deepening’s effects on perception. It happened slowly, he said, but eventually, the machinations of his mind would begin to change. “The changes are different for everyone who goes through them,” he had said in reply to Grith’s questions. “They can express themselves as compulsions, apathy, or visions. There are some people who claim those visions can be used to see the future, but it’s all bullshit. Soothsayers are fairytales.”

  Then Grith told him of his dream. Tain listened half-heartedly, fiddling with the hilt of his practice sword and looking past Grith to something in the darkness beyond the bonfire they had set for the evening. Grith felt like he was talking to a wall, for all the attention he received from his teacher, but he kept on with his story anyway. He needed to get this off his chest.

  “I wouldn’t worry myself,” Tain said when Grith had finished. “I’ve heard of stranger phenomena, especially among the other orders of Delvers. They say that Curators see the information they have memorized behind their eyelids every night as they try to sleep. It drives many of them mad. I can think of worse fates than a few nightmares.”

  Grith wanted to ask what had happened to Tain when he had first begun to exercise his abilities, but decided against it. It seemed like a very private thing. “But there’s a silver lining in these dreams of yours,” Tain told him. His eyes glittered in the light of the bonfire. “You’re getting stronger.”

  Grith nodded his agreement. He had felt the changes as well. He seemed to squeeze more energy out of the food he ate, and had more control over how those therms were put to use. He could keep his powers at a low burn, allowing him to stay at the ready for hours. Or he could metabolize all of the food he had eaten in a single massive burst, giving him the strength of a hundred men, if only for a few moments. Just yesterday, he had lifted an entire tree trunk using the same technique.

  “Every time I feel like I can’t grow any more, I find a way. My strength…” He glanced down at his hands, inspecting the dark lines that crossed his calloused skin. “Will it end?”

  Tain put his free hand to his chin. “You have an upper limit. Everyone does. We just have to find it.” He walked over to the cart and placed the practice sword inside.

  “Have you found yours?” Grith asked as he placed his own sword beside Tain’s.

  Tain chuckled. “That’s a very personal question. It’s like asking a man how often he visits the whorehouse.”

  Grith raised an eyebrow.

  “And before you ask,” Tain said easily. “The answer is: as often as I can.” He motioned Grith over to the fire where Tophin and Kesa had prepared another meal.
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  Grith had never eaten much back in Kuul. It had always seemed wasteful. Now, he could hardly go through an hour of training without feeling the first signs of hunger. That hunger would only become stronger as he grew in power, or so Tain claimed.

  Eating had turned into a chore. No matter how good the food, it was hard to become excited about the fifth meal of the day, about shoveling down more meat and bread. “Heard one of the sergeants say we’ll be in Saleno tomorrow,” Kesa said in her heavy Whitestone accent, as she sat down with her own much smaller portion. Her eyes fell on Grith and she pushed a lock of red hair from her eyes in the way she always did when their gazes met. Grith tried to ignore those eyes, blue as the sky. It could be difficult sometimes. She was beautiful, undeniably so, even with her pale mainlander skin, ghostly in the encroaching darkness.

  “Probably the day after tomorrow,” Tain said around a mouthful of flatbread. “Last I heard, we’ll be stopping in Erno for the night. After that, it’s just a few hours march to Saleno.”

  “Then just a couple of weeks of sitting back and letting the wind carry us,” Tophin said, rubbing his bald head. He let a smile cross his weathered face, showing off several missing teeth. “It’ll feel good to be off my feet for a while.”

  “You’re never on your feet,” Tain pointed out. “Not driving that cart.”

  Still, Grith nodded his agreement with the old man. Even with his added strength, all of this marching was beginning to wear on him. He had developed a nasty blister on his right heel where his shoes had finally worn through the stocking. The pain had gone from a minor annoyance to an ever present burden that only Delving could quell. He could only imagine how hard the march must have been on the rank and file soldiers, whose aches couldn’t be cure by a simple meal.

  They ate in silence for a while, savoring their food and the quiet of the evening. In just two days, there would be precious little silence, and even less space. Grith didn’t look forward to being cooped up on a ship again, forced to share a hold with a hundred other sweating bodies, smelling their piss and shit and the vomit of the men who had yet to gain their sea legs. It had been the worst part of guarding merchant vessels.

  Tain finally broke the silence. “I’ve been thinking of talking to the High Lord about your situation.”

  Grith sighed. “Just make sure I don’t get dragged into another ‘meeting’ with him. Once was enough.”

  Tain seemed to have not heard the comment. “I want to end this farce.” He motioned around the camp with his spoon. “I only get a couple of hours with you every night. If Irrin acknowledges your abilities and reveals you to the world, I’ll have free reign to train you as I see fit, when I see fit.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Grith asked. Tain had said that revealing him as a Delver could open him up to assassination by other High Lords. Delvers were few and far between. Even the most powerful High Lords might only have a dozen or so at their disposal, and Irrin was not exactly powerful as High Lords went.

  “It would be worth the risk. Fully trained, you wouldn’t have to worry about assassins—hell, they’d probably piss themselves when they saw you—and Irrin would have a third Delver at his disposal.”

  “Third?” Grith asked. “I thought it was just me and you.”

  “I’m the only one who anyone knows about,” Tain said. “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have more. Have you seen that man that stands next to him? The balding one?”

  Grith had seen him before. The man was tall, and wore a long violet robe with Irrin’s symbol, the sunburst, emblazoned on the chest. “What kind of Delver is he?”

  “Tir’s an Adept.” Tain waited a moment for the words to sink in, but seeing Grith’s blank expression, continued with his explanation. “It means he thinks faster than the rest of us. Hell, Tir basically runs Selivia on his own, half the time. The High Lord would need a hundred clerks to make up for that man’s work.”

  “So he’s some kind of genius?” Grith asked.

  “No,” Tain said, seeming to consider the question. “Adepts aren’t really smarter than normal men. Their minds just work faster. They’re like…” He looked into the fire, searching for right word. “They’re like a human abacus. I once saw Tir calculate the grain needed by the entire population of Selivia in less than a minute.”

  Grith tried to imagine the hundreds of thousands of people that lived in the province. You would have to calculate their individual needs, reserves in case of famine, and the extra grain needed by the army. The complexity of the problem boggled the mind.

  Tain continued. “And he called that a simple calculation. Tirrak save us if he ever finds a problem he can’t solve.”

  “And what does this have to do with me?” Grith asked.

  “I’m trying to illustrate to you the usefulness of Delvers. Each one we control gives us an edge over our opponents. Outside the Empire, and within. If Irrin ever comes to blows with the Cutarans, he’ll be happy he has us watching his back.”

  Tain sat down his bowl and rose to his feet. “I guess I should probably be getting you back to your pike squad. They’ll wonder where you’ve been. And when they wonder where you’ve been, they start to ask questions. Questions I have to stop them asking.”

  * * *

  The army marched well into the evening of the next day. No training it seemed. Grith found it a precious relief. A little bit of time to stretch his legs without having to stand in some ridiculous stance or hold up a heavy length of ash would do him good.

  Tribest called a halt just as the sun began to dip below the horizon, setting camp with the rest of the army along the side of the road. The men without duties, Grith included, spent a while gathering firewood from the few trees they could find in the surrounding countryside, while the squad cooks prepared ingredients for the evening’s meal.

  When his duties were finished, Grith returned to the squad and sat down for a short rest before Tain came to take him for training. He watched as the other soldiers went about their work, ignoring the tall dark man who leaned against his pack. Grith was just fine with that.

  He grabbed a knobbed stick from the piles of spare kindling and produced his belt knife, slicing into the sappy wood just as the first fires were lit. It had only been after leaving the Marshes that he had realized how much he enjoyed the craft of woodcarving, even if he was still unable to make much more than the vague, misshapen forms of animals. There was something in the working of the wood beneath his fingers that made him… content, a feeling that had alluded him in recent weeks. Only one other thing gave him that same sensation…

  The Battle Trance, the Deepening. It had become his addiction,. That, and the safety of his friends, were the only thing keeping him from fleeing this army in the night and making his slow way back to the Marshes. Tain has made me a slave as surely as Irrin, he thought.

  Grith had been looking for his friends since the first day he had marched in the army. He had seen Shaleese among the other squads, but none who came from his village. According to Tain, they were kept at the front of the army, while the Seventh was left in the rear. He wondered if that was a deliberate decision.

  In an army, it was impossible to get a second of privacy. They marched, ate, and shit, all feet from each other, and always with eyes on their backs. But still Grith waited for the right moment. He didn’t know when the opportunity to travel the half-mile to the front of the column would present itself, but when it did, he would be ready.

  At a noise like crashing pottery, he let his eyes stray from his carving and towards the collection of buildings ahead. Erno, so close to Saleno as to almost be a suburb, was only a few minutes’ walk away. He could see smoke rising from the houses, lights twinkling in the windows. Irrin would be up there, staying in a fine bed, in a fine room, in a fine inn. I should count my blessings, he told himself. At least it hadn’t rained since they had reached Toashan. The continen
t was far drier than Hadalkir. Tain said that if you traveled far enough north, following the spine of the gnarled Vermillion Mountains, you’d eventually hit the Kelil Desert. “The only people crazy enough to live out there are pagans and madmen,” he had told Grith.

  Once the commotion had passed, Grith waited another half-hour for Tain, watching the sun set behind the sparse trees on either side of the road. The rolling hills beyond, covered in grape vines, were already shrouded in the blue light of Tirrak. It looked like something out of a painting.

  Finally, when he was sure that Tain wasn’t coming to retrieve him, Grith got to his feet and went to stand near the fire. He had developed a mighty hunger, and one that he wasn’t sure the comparatively meager portions offered by the squad cooks could satisfy.

  He took a bowl of the proffered stew anyway, sitting down with a hunk of dark bread. He ate greedily. It wasn’t half as good as the food made by Tain’s cooks, but it didn’t have to be. If only he could have gotten a bit more, perhaps it would satisfy him for a time.

  The others in the squad talked amongst themselves, leaning against packs and trying to get as comfortable as they could on the hard-packed dirt. A few of even laughed and joked. Grith realized something then. These men were quickly becoming comrades. A few more months, and they might actually call each other friends. Well, all of them except Grith. He was still an outsider. At one time, not too long ago in fact, he might have thought it had something to do with his skin, so much darker than the others. He knew better now.

  It was simple. He wasn’t one of them, and if he continued on with Tain’s training, he never would be. They knew he was different. It was clear as day. None of them could ignore the finely dressed man who came into camp to collect him every evening. None of the soldiers knew Tain’s identity as one of the High Lord’s Delvers, Grith was sure of that, but they didn’t have to. All they had to know was that one of their number was valuable to the man. It set Grith apart and above the rest of them. Not exactly a recipe for comradery.