Empire of War - An Epic Fantasy (The Empire of War Trilogy Book 1)

by Victor Methos

  I leaned back and then flung him across the room. He hit the wall with his face and slid down as I felt the crack against the base of my neck. I fell to my back, looking up, and saw Nalice standing there, shaking her head.

  4

  I woke in a cell. It was damp and dark but there was a window on the ceiling where I saw sunlight coming through. I stared at the window and heard scuffling near me. I glanced down, pain shooting through my body from even the slightest movement, and saw a man leaned up against the wall. He had a long beard and greasy hair that came down to his shoulders. His fingers and toes were black with dirt and his nails had grown so long they curled.

  “You’ve been out fer two days,” he said.

  I sat up with a groan. I checked my pocket for the root to smoke but it was gone. “That all?”

  “The guards wanted to give you more of a whooping in here but that little missus stopped ’em. She’s your guardian angel, that one is.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  He took a small tray that was next to him and he shoved it toward me. It contained a little chicken bone with the meat already eaten off and a molded slice of bread.

  “Weren’t me that ate the chicken,” he said. “The guards eat it ‘fore they bring it.”

  I stood and stretched my body. I needed to feel the bones that were broken so I could take it easy on them in the coming days. My ribs on one side, maybe my left hand. I felt my shoulder was out of socket. I walked to the wall, leaned back, and smashed it against the stone as hard as I could. The pain nearly made me throw up and it flung me onto my back. I lay still a moment and then turned my arm and felt that it was back in place.

  I could hear boots in the hall over the shouting of the other inmates. Nalice came as a guard opened the cell door.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  She helped me up and held my arm as we walked out of the cells and past the offices and the front entrance into the streets of the city. The sun was bright and it made me squint.

  “I’m starving,” I said. “Let’s go to an alehouse.”

  “No, no more alehouses for you.”

  “I didn’t start that.”

  “I know. We spoke to people at the alehouse. They said the man attacked you first. You nearly killed him though. He’s unconscious and may never wake. Who was he?”

  “A killer with the Brotherhood who wasn’t good at killing.”

  “What does the Brotherhood want with you?”

  “Same as everyone else, I guess. They want me dead. So where we gonna eat?”

  “I know a place. Come on.”

  We walked through the streets and the merchants weren’t swarming around us like they should have been. Because she was one of the emperor’s enforcers, everyone feared her, though they had no reason to. She was a good person with a good heart and had become an enforcer to help people. I think she might have been the only one.

  We came to a chapel and were welcomed by monks in gray robes. They didn’t speak as they opened their doors.

  “You brought me to a monastery?” I said.

  “They survive by cooking meals. They make the best roast snake you will ever have.”

  We walked into the large hall and sat at a wooden table while the monks brought us water and two large plates with bread, rice, meats and potatoes.

  “You got any ale in this place?”

  The monk looked at me like I was crazy and then walked away. I shrugged and began to eat. The food was hot and spicy and more than good.

  Nalice took out a cloth from her pocket. She dipped it into her water and then began wiping the blood away from my face. “Why do you get yourself into these situations?” she said.

  “I think you’d be in a better place to tell me.”

  “Why? Because I’m your sister? You’ve been a mystery to me my entire life. When other children were out riding horses you were getting into fights with grown men and then laughing when they broke your bones. I don’t know what that is. Neither did Mother or Father.”

  “Is that why they threw me into the streets?”

  “They threw you into the streets because they didn’t know what else to do. You were getting more and more violent and they didn’t know how to control you. They were frightened you were going to kill someone.”

  “By the time they threw me out, I had already killed five men. Cutthroats all of them, but five nonetheless.”

  “You never saw them before they passed. They regretted what they had done when they were older.”

  “I’m sure they did.”

  “Mother asked for you when he was dying. He asked that I go find you, but I’d heard that you’d left the Empire, that you’d gone beyond the Savage Sea.”

  “I had.”

  “What did you see there? They say there’s monsters straight from hell.”

  “There’s monsters here. You don’t need to have them in faraway places. But yes, there were monsters.”

  “What did they look like?”

  I paused. “Like hell itself.” I shoved some snake in my mouth and chewed. “What did you find out about the prince?”

  “Slesh, I just saved your life. You owe me one favor. I’m asking for that favor now. I want you to leave the prince alone.”

  “What do you care?”

  “Because the Royal Guard will kill you before you get anywhere near him. And because you’re the only family I have left.”

  “I need to find him, Nalice. With your help it’d be much easier.”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it. I won’t be responsible for ending your life. And I think you need to leave the city. Right now. Right after we eat.”

  “You found something out, didn’t you? That’s why you won’t tell me. You know he’s close.”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “No, but I bet you know where he’s going to be, don’t you?”

  She didn’t say anything. She began picking at her food, eating little bites here and there. We sat and ate and I finished the entire plate and then hers too. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

  “Goodbye, Nalice.”

  She didn’t move a moment and then jumped up and threw her arms around my neck. “Please don’t go. I have such a bad feeling about this.”

  “You always tell me that. And I always end up alive.”

  “Is avenging Emma really so important that you’re willing to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What did she do?”

  “She took me in and loved me when no one else would. She didn’t deserve to go the way she did.”

  “I have a secret for you, big brother: none of us do.”

  5

  After leaving Nalice I walked the streets all day to clear my head. I slept in a cheap inn but the walls closed on me. In the early morning I went and slept on the beach on the hot sand and bathed in the sea to get the blood and stink off from the cell. When I came out I could hear trumpets and cheering as the gates were opened wide and a procession started. It looked like a parade, then I saw the imperial seal. Someone representing the emperor was here.

  That’s what Nalice didn’t want to tell me. Someone was coming. Someone who could lead me back to Kandarian.

  I watched the procession and then followed the last of it, some guards on horseback. They went to the great hall of the city, a meetinghouse for the politicians and merchants. I saw a woman being catered to by several other women with guards surrounding her. I was in a crowd and I leaned to the man next to me and said, “Who is that?”

  “Head of Household for the emperor.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “Picking new maidens for the royal family. They go to all the big cities and do this. What kind of idiot doesn’t know that?”

  I pushed his face with my hand, knocking him back, and walked past him and back out to the beach. I sat in the sand and waited.

  It was the morning of the next day by the time the procession began packing
up to leave. I defecated in the sea and then found my horse and waited until the maidens and guards and ladies and servant boys and slaves all put on another grand show in their departure. Patience wasn’t something I was good at; part of me screamed to just kill all of them now and get the information I needed from the Head of Household, but that wasn’t the smart thing to do. Every enforcement guard in the city would be on me, and though I could kill a lot of them, I couldn’t kill all of them.

  So I followed quietly, staying just enough behind that I could see the last guard on the last horse in the procession on the road. They rode far and then turned west, away from the sea. The capital was west. I hated the capital more than anyplace else in the world, and I’d been to places that would give most people nightmares just mentioning them.

  Zeries was so pristine and proper. The streets were swept every day and the horse manure was cleaned away. The city was kept up by a staff of over a thousand; the buildings were made of a marble that came from a quarry that no longer existed. But it was all built on the backs of slaves. Underneath the city, slaves still toiled to ensure that everything above ground sparkled. Only by using life as a tool could the emperor build his great city.

  Every time I entered Zeries I thought the streets were made of bones and flesh, and flowed with the blood of the oppressed. It was a city of the dead to me.

  We kept on the road most of the day. With such a procession, there were no bandits about. They knew no one in the imperial family would travel without Royal Guards, and the Guards were feared more than orcs for their fighting prowess.

  By nightfall the procession had stopped to rest at one of the inns on the side of the road. I waited until all the virgin maidens and bureaucrats were escorted in. Then I approached. Two guards were stationed outside the inn. As the sun went down and the moon was coming up, their armor shimmered in the light. An unnatural shimmer, brighter than it should have been.

  “Excuse me,” I said, trying to trot past them.

  “There’s no rooms here.”

  “Really? It seems a rather large place.”

  The guard stepped closer to me, the hand on the sword at his hip. “I said there’s no rooms here.”

  “Easy, boys, I’m just a weary traveler is all, hoping to rest my head. If I can’t do it here, I’ll find somewhere else.”

  “That would be wise.”

  I continued up the road, not looking back but knowing they were staring at me. When I was far enough away that I was out of sight, I turned into the forest and then quietly headed back. I would have lashed my horse to a tree but I knew orcs loved horse meat almost as much as human meat so I rode, trying to keep him at slow a pace as possible.

  I could see the inn again and the two guards out front. They were sitting now on the benches the inn provided. I rode a long way around the inn to ensure they didn’t hear me and then rode back to the stables. A stable boy was there, young and curious.

  “Boy, the Head of Household has asked that this horse be kept with the others. Ensure that it is fed and watered.”

  He took my horse without a word as I slid off and walked inside.

  EXCERPT FROM NECROMANCIA: A HANDBOOK FOR MAGES

  The Experiments of Claudius and the Founding of Blood Magik

  Once Claudius discovered that blood held properties no other substance did, he obsessed over it day and night. It was said he did not sleep for two years after that discovery, that every night was spent in the cellar with experiments, every day in the library researching the properties of blood and the mages who came before him.

  Not a single one had explored the mixture of blood with other substances and he found this to be most odd. The history of mages and witches was the history of genius. The young boys and girls who displayed the gift early in their lives were also gifted with superior intelligence. They were discovered by other mages and their intelligence and skills cultivated over decades. How was it that such men for generations never discovered that blood could magnify their powers?

  This was altogether too much to bear for Claudius. Someone, somewhere, he determined, knew something. Many mages and witches lived for two, or it was rumored, even three centuries, and only died when their bodies were so decrepit that their very organs disintegrated and no spell or serum could bring them back. Claudius knew of such a mage. Tamor was his name and he lived with his wife and children in a city named Bel that, two centuries after the death of Tamor, was razed to the ground by barbarian invaders from the north.

  Claudius traveled to Bel and found Tamor in a palace. He was, to Claudius’ surprise, the wealthiest man in the city and also their mayor, assigned to the task by the king of the Bactrians himself.

  What Claudius found was not the dreary stone and darkness of his own experiment chamber, but a house filled with love and children and servants that esteemed the family like their own. Tamor welcomed him into his home as a fellow mage and insisted he eat at his dining table with his family.

  After their meal, Claudius asked for a moment alone. Tamor agreed and the two elderly mages went out for a night stroll along the gardens on Tamor’s estate. As they walked they discussed many things pertaining to alchemy and history and politics and the subject turned to blood. Claudius described the conversation:

  An’ I said, ‘What ‘bout blood?’

  “What of it?” he said.

  “I mixed it wit’ a serum a dragon’s tooth. The walls itself caught flame.”

  He look at me really serious like and say, “Claudius, you must never experiment with blood again. You must abandon anything having to do with it. If the outside world ever discovered what we could do with the power of their lifeblood … we would be hunted to extinction.”

  Claudius of course, did not listen. He went home, convinced that true power lay in the power of blood and that its effects had been hidden purposely by the elder mages. He pondered how many great ancient masters had conquered the use of blood and what a waste it was that their teachings were probably burnt or buried in some long forgotten crypt.

  Upon returning, he experimented with the blood of vermin and deer and cats and dogs and any animal he could get his hands on. But none of them worked for anything. He decided the reason was obvious: they didn’t have souls. The soul infused the blood with some property that allowed it to be used in alchemy and imbue serums with power.

  And for that, he needed the blood of humans.

  LUCIOUS KANDARIAN

  I woke and felt the icy-flesh on my chest.

  Glancing over, I could see the glare and the glazed-over look, like a fish’s. I removed her hand and sat up and yawned as the sunlight was dancing through the windows. I stood and urinated in a pot next to the bed and shouted, “Elfred.”

  Elfred ran in like a mother and stood at the foot of the bed until I was done. I went to a water-bin and splashed my face and ran my finger over my teeth with some cream of ilk and then spit out the cream before dressing.

  “M’lord,” he said, “perhaps sleeping with the dead is not the best of luck.”

  “I don’t believe in luck, Elfred, you know that.”

  “Indeed I do, but some of us do believe in luck and hate to see you cross its varied path.”

  “Such a poet.” I came and stood over the bed. “There’s no blood in her. Where do you suppose that went?”

  “There are also finger markings on her neck, M’lord.”

  “Ah, yes. Now I remember. Hmm, funny the things the mind glances over. Well, have her disposed of.”

  “At once, M’lord. If I may so suggest, she was one of the tavern owners’ best whores. I would recommend a financial recompense, to avoid any litigation.”

  “Litigation? How about we just slit his throat?”

  “If I may be so bold, M’lord, he is a friend of your father’s. I don’t think that would please him.”

  “Hmm,” I said, buttoning up my shirt, “probably not. All right, pay him a fair bit of coin. I’m going to get something to eat.”

&n
bsp; I walked out onto the city streets. Ridgecrest. They called it the City in the Sand as it was built entirely on sand and was flexible enough that it could adapt should the sand shift, as it was prone to do. It was a particularly beautiful city, one my father enjoyed coming to frequently. Though I couldn’t see why: the whores were sparse and the ale was never any good—it was filled with a spice peeled from the local trees that gave everything a tangy aftertaste that it could do without. Perhaps I would outlaw the spice so my next visit would be a more pleasant one?

  I went to the alehouse, and as I entered the wench and cook and all the maids and servants bowed low.

  “You can rise. I’m not my father and not impressed with such honors.” I sat down near the windows.

  “M … M’lord,” the wench said, looking down, “you honor us with you—”

  “Ostrich eggs with warm bread and wine.”

  “Of course.”

  I sat quietly and watched the other patrons. They were not paying attention to me. They lived their little lives in quiet pain and it made me sick. Working sun up to sun down and hoping to have enough bread at the end of the day to feed themselves. If they had any heart, they’d be robbing and killing for a living.

  The door opened and Elfred walked in with two of his assistants. I rolled my eyes.

  “I wanted to eat in peace.”

  “Of course. But we are meeting with the Lord Fischer today and I told him we would be on time.”

  “Fuck him. The fat bastard told my father that I would not be a welcome guest in his home anymore.”

  “You did rape his wife, M’lord.”

  “Only after she was drunk. It was half-consensual anyway. She’s in need of a good fucking after that fat pig gets a hold of her every night. Can’t I just have the bastard arrested?”

  “No, M’lord. The Lord Fischer has quite the powerful army, loyal men that fight now for your father that would not do so were the alliance strained.”