The Conquerors Shadow

by Ari Marmell

  “Well?” the warlord demanded.

  One side of the pale man’s mouth quirked. “You, my friend, should learn patience.”

  /He’s got a point, actually. You do tend toward the abrupt./

  “This is what I get,” Audriss spat bitterly, “for surrounding myself with immortals.”

  “It does,” Mithraem told him, “tend to influence one’s outlook.” Then, “My agents have spent many nights discussing the issue with the city’s leaders, noble and Guildsman alike. They were quite insistent, actually. I’m certain we’ve learned from them everything we can.”

  “And?” Audriss asked, his voice not quite breathless.

  “As we expected, I fear. Not one of them has any idea what Rebaine was searching for in the catacombs—and thus, no information of any use to you.”

  “Damn!” The table jumped at the impact of the Serpent’s fist; papers cascaded onto the floor, and only Mithraem’s inhuman reflexes prevented a wine goblet from overturning onto the map.

  “Tsk, tsk, Audriss.” He held the drink up before him in toast, sniffed it once—his expression quickly shifting to one of intense distaste—and placed it back on the table. “Quite careless of you. Besides, it’s not as though this was unexpected. I—”

  At the sound of spasmodic scratching, two pairs of eyes flickered to the chamber door.

  “It appears,” Audriss said, “that I’m destined for interruptions tonight. Enter!”

  Heralded by the creaking door, a misshapen form, garbed in filthy black rags and tatters, shambled into the room.

  Little more than three feet in height, the new arrival was painfully gaunt. Its limbs hung in nominally human ways, although select bulges and twists suggested muscle and bone that were not present in any child born of woman. It jerked constantly as it walked, and in motion it became less human still, for its limbs jutted in directions displeasing to the eye, bent at angles to make staunch men squirm. Two eyes, closer together than they should have been, blazed an irritated pink above a maw full of jagged and broken teeth.

  “The Audriss is busy, yes, busy with other things,” the creature said to the room in general, its voice the sound of broken bone ground against a rock. “He wonders, does it want him to come back later?”

  Though none could possibly see it, Audriss shuddered once inside his armor. Gods, but gnomes gave him the shivers!

  “No,” he commanded, his voice steady enough to belie his unease. “Give your report.”

  The shambling little creature nodded and slid forward a few more steps, pausing to examine the bloodstains Mithraem had left on the ground. Audriss could actually see the thing’s nose twitching.

  “I said report!”

  “Yes.” The gnome looked up from his contemplation. “He comes from the catacombs underneath, yes, below. Much digging, moving of rocks. Did the Audriss know, he wonders, that many of the tunnels were collapsed, yes, full of rocks?”

  “I knew. It’s why I’ve given him—you—so long to search the damn place!”

  “Ah, he sees, understands, yes. All the rocks moved, tunnels are cleared, empty. Some will not stand, no, fall again when he moves braces, supports. But the catacombs are searched, all of them, yes.” The gnome rubbed its hands together, the calluses on one palm grating noisily against the jagged nails of its fingers.

  “And?” Audriss demanded. “What did you find?”

  “Find, yes. Underground room, below, at the end of corridors. Metal door, yes, but melted, opened, burned away. Not natural, no. Magic. He feels it in his bones, yes, when the magic comes.

  “But the Audriss will be unhappy, he thinks, yes it will. He searches the room, yes, all of the room, until there are no more places for hiding, no, not for secret things. Nothing is there, he thinks, no. The Audriss will have to look elsewhere for its treasure, yes, for what it wants. He wonders,” it said abruptly, cocking its head to one side with an audible snap, “where it will go now? He wonders, will he go with it?”

  “Of course you’ll go with it—me!” Audriss shouted furiously.

  “Can it … pay?” There was a soft slapping sound as a thin tendril of spittle dropped from the gnome’s lips to land on its shoes.

  “We have a bargain, gnome.” Audriss felt his lip curl at the memory of what he’d had to offer. “You hold up your end of it, I’ll hold up mine.”

  “He honors his bargains, yes, agreements. He wonders, then, where it wants him to be, yes, to go.”

  Audriss sighed and turned back to the map. Abtheum or Orthessis, Orthessis or Abtheum. They were both viable, both tactically sound, both defensible if the armies chose that point to make their own stand …

  And both, unfortunately, at least three months away at the speed of an army’s march. Damn! Imphallion’s sprawl was definitely no asset to a would-be conqueror.

  It was, thankfully, a decision that Audriss felt he could put off for a while longer. “The armies,” he told the others, “will have to travel by the main roads. The supply wagons won’t make it through the wilderness. And it’s the same road either way up to … here!” His finger stabbed downward, covering a small dot on the map. “Once we take this town here, we’ll decide if we’re heading northwest to Orthessis or southwest to Abtheum.” He peered closely at the parchment, looking for a name. There. Vorringar.

  “You can meet us there?” he asked the disgusting little creature.

  “Meet, yes, be there. He can go. He wonders what it wants him to do, yes, when he gets there many walks before it does. The things above the ground are slow, yes, and clumsy.”

  “Just wait for us. We’ll contact you in the usual manner when we arrive.”

  “Good, yes. He goes now to say what the Audriss has told him, yes.” Still muttering to itself, the gnome shambled away through the door.

  “Odd little creature,” Mithraem remarked drily. “Do they all call themselves ‘him’?”

  “Something about their language, or how they think, or what have you. It’s obnoxious.” A sudden thought occurred to Audriss, purely irrelevant but intriguing. His eyes flickered down to the ring that gleamed a sullen green upon his finger. “Pekatherosh?”

  /Yes?/

  “Have you ever consumed a gnome?”

  /No. Can’t do it./

  “Can’t—but you eat souls.”

  /Exactly./

  So much for curiosity. “I’d been hoping either you or the gnomes would find what we were looking for here,” he said to Mithraem, “but I can’t say I’m surprised we didn’t. Even if he couldn’t make use of it, Rebaine isn’t stupid enough to have left it here.”

  “Still,” the other acknowledged, “we had to know.”

  “We know now,” the warlord snapped. “I’m leaving a garrison at Denathere, to occupy the city. Can you assign any of the Legion to support them?”

  Mithraem rose gracefully from his seat. “I can station a few of my people here. They won’t enjoy being left behind, but they’ll obey well enough.”

  “Good. Tell them not to gorge themselves while I’m gone; I’d like to have a city left when I get back.”

  “What a novel idea. I’ll be sure to tell them.”

  “Do it quickly. I want the men packing the instant the sun’s risen. We’re leaving in two days.”

  /And what of Rebaine?/ Pekatherosh asked once Mithraem had dissolved again to mist and seeped through the open doorway.

  “Rebaine will play his part, never you worry. For now, I’m more concerned with the war effort itself.”

  /You don’t sound all that concerned./

  “I’m not ‘all that’ concerned. The only things between us and our next objective are a handful of small towns—including Vorringar. It’s such an insignificant little speck, it barely made it onto the map at all.

  “The next stage of the operation is a cakewalk, Pekatherosh. There’s nothing between here and Vorringar to slow us down.”

  Chapter Five

  Slowly, the world bouncing beneath him and his h
ead pounding with each jolt, Corvis fought his way back toward consciousness. Leaves and twigs appeared before him, just in time to sting his face as he passed. The saddle on which he sat was hard and uncomfortable—the heavy ropes that chafed his wrists and ankles were worse.

  Blinking languidly, trying to focus through the pain rattling around in his skull, he peered blearily about him. The dappled horse trod along a wooded path through thick copses of trees, following a broad-shouldered, greasy-haired fellow who clutched the animal’s halter. The hem of his cloak and the heels of his boots—all of him Corvis could really see from behind—were worn and frayed, bespeaking a life of constant travel.

  His gestures slow and deliberate, hoping to avoid being heard above the clop-clop of the hooves and the faint rustling of the leaves, Corvis fidgeted at his bonds. All he learned, to his chagrin, was that his captor knew what he was doing: His feet were bound together beneath the horse’s girth, tight enough that he couldn’t possibly kick the beast into sudden movement, and his hands had barely an inch of slack from the pommel to which they were tied.

  He learned, as well, that his captor had sharper ears than Corvis had given him credit for.

  “You might as well relax,” the fellow said in the gruff tone of a man who loved his pipe. “It’s a long journey back east, and it’s not going to get any more comfortable for you.”

  He turned as he spoke, and the sight of his unshaven cheeks and heavy-lidded eyes punched through Corvis’s remaining haze like a ballista. Images of that morning flickered back into memory … The man leaping out at him from where he’d lain concealed in a shallow culvert … Corvis drawing his own weapon in a desperate parry … His attacker’s blade, covered in foreign runes, shearing clean through Corvis’s sword as though it were made of so much bread crust …

  And all had gone black, until he woke tied atop this horse. Corvis knew full well that he should be dead now, had his attacker wished it. The man must have struck with the flat of his astounding sword.

  “Who are you?” Corvis asked, startled at how gruff his own voice sounded.

  “Evislan Kade. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

  The prisoner swallowed once. “Perhaps” indeed! Corvis took a moment, running mental eyes over the list of enemies he’d made in recent years. (It was, though certainly far smaller than the list he would one day accumulate at the head of a mercenary army, already growing uncomfortably large.)

  Still … “I can’t possibly be worth enough to interest someone like you,” he protested.

  “You’d be surprised,” Kade told him. “As it happens, Colonel Nessarn’s family is more than a little rich, and more than a little perturbed at what you did to him. Now be a good little bounty and shut up for a while, or you’ll spend the rest of the journey gagged.”

  And for four laborious days—days in which Corvis spent all but a few moments tied either to a horse or a tree—that was the extent of their conversation. They traveled along game trails and forest paths, never drawing anywhere near the main highways. Corvis was tired, hungry, and sore, and he was certain that he was nothing but one large bruise from his knees to his hips. Still, he struggled to remain alert, ever watchful for even the smallest opportunity …

  It came in the late morning of that fourth day, as Kade dragged his “bounty” off the horse for an all-too-infrequent rest break. Brusquely he shoved Corvis into a stand of bushes in order to answer nature’s various demands, and Corvis nearly gasped aloud as a clump of thorns gouged rivulets of blood from the skin of his left hand. And then, instead, he smiled, and snapped off the largest of those thorns between his fingers.

  It wasn’t much of a tool, but it was more than Kade expected.

  When evening fell, and the bounty hunter moved toward the horse to truss his captive up against a tree for the night, Corvis had managed to pick and tear through only about half the individual strands that made up the rope about his hands. It would have to be enough.

  A desperate yank against the weakened bonds shredded the flesh of his wrists, but the coils gave way with a vicious snap. Corvis twisted low in the saddle, one hand dropping to the pommel of Kade’s sword even as he drove the other forearm into the bridge of his captor’s nose. Kade staggered back, blood flowing from both nostrils, and Corvis straightened, the hunter’s sword in his hand, ready to bring the flat down against the horse’s flank …

  And froze, mesmerized, for the weapon was moving beneath his fingers. Runes danced along the edge of the blade, and as they passed it was a blade no longer, but the haft of a much heavier weapon. What had been the sword of Evislan Kade was now a terrible war-axe, just barely small enough to wield in a single hand.

  Somewhere, in a part of Corvis’s mind normally accessible only in his deepest nightmares, a voice uttered a single word.

  “Sunder.”

  Kade lunged, and Corvis—scarcely taking his eyes off the magnificent, malevolent weapon—threw a punch that landed on an already broken nose. Even as the bounty hunter crumpled to the dirt, Corvis reached down with the axe, slit the bonds around his feet, and kicked the horse into motion.

  And still he did not look around him, did not look where he was going, but had eyes only for the prize in his fist. He knew what it was, of course, knew well the legends of the Kholben Shiar, the demon-forged blades. For a weapon of such power to simply fall into his hands so easily, it seemed almost a sign from the gods themselves.

  Corvis Rebaine moved deeper into the woods, his mind awhirl with thoughts of chance and power, and a growing sense of destiny.

  THE SUN BEAT DOWN hot as ever, but here, in the foothills of the Cadriest Mountains, was some measure of relief. The range cast its long and jagged shadow over the hills and valleys below, a curtain against the worst of the sun’s wrath. Within that shadow, thick green grasses covered the earth and animals roamed the valleys, feasting upon those grasses—or upon one another.

  Not a bad place to live, if one didn’t mind a distinct lack of human company. For one trying specifically to avoid such company, it was paradise.

  In a wide valley nestled between two unusually tall foothills stood a house. Well, perhaps “house” was a bit generous: It was a single large room surrounded by four crude but sturdy walls. Within lay a pallet of furs atop a pile of hay, to serve as a bed, and a slab of tree to form a chair or table.

  The room’s only truly notable feature hung on the inside wall, closest to the door: a suit of partial armor, consisting of thick leathers and crude metal plates, accompanied by a long spear with a jagged blade and a single-edged straight sword that grew thicker near the tip. The sword and armor both wore the layers of dust that accumulate through years of neglect, but the spear showed signs of more recent use.

  Behind the house was a simple wooden pen containing a flock of sheep and a small herd of fat pigs, and only their bleats and cries broke the stillness of the valley.

  The entire scene was utterly pastoral—at first. Only when one of the woolly sheep wandered near the house, munching idly on grass or bleating mindlessly at the passing clouds, would any observer acquire an accurate sense of scale. The house, and everything in it, was built to accommodate a figure more than twice the height of an average man.

  Standing on his front porch, little more than a few heavy wooden planks laid flat upon the ground, Davro held a hand to shade his eye from the sun and gazed contentedly at the lands around him.

  Although dressed in a simple, nondescript tunic and leggings, he was an impressive figure. Large even for an ogre, Davro towered a full thirteen feet over his surroundings—almost fourteen, if one counted the length of curved horn jutting from his forehead above his single central eye. His skin was a flushed, angry red, and thick brown nails grew from the tips of his fingers, which numbered only four on each hand. Two small tusks protruded from his lower jaw, nestled within a mouthful of large and painfully sharp teeth.

  Davro, one of the finest warriors of his tribe, had been expected to become the tribe’s next chieft
ain. Just as soon as he and his brethren returned from fighting alongside the armies of the human, Corvis Rebaine.

  His present lifestyle, one he’d lived for many years, would have deeply shamed the other warriors of his tribe. They would, in fact, have been forced by their own code of honor to kill their favored son.

  But none of them knew. And considering how far the ogres dwelled from the Cadriest Mountains, Davro saw no reason they ever should.

  A series of snorts from behind the house, concurrent with the sound of a large snout rooting about in the trough, reminded him it was just about time to slop the hogs. He turned from his contemplation of what he considered “his” valley, preparing to wander back through the house …

  And spun back abruptly as a sudden hint of movement caught his eye. Was he imagining things? Had one of the sheep somehow slipped the pen?

  No. No rogue livestock, this; the figure resolved itself into the shape of a man leading a horse. He must have spent a great deal of time picking the smoothest, easiest routes in order to have gotten a mount so far into the foothills.

  The ogre hadn’t set eye on another sentient creature in years, and he wasn’t inclined to start inviting guests to lunch now. With a bit of luck, the man was smart enough to let himself be frightened away; and if not, there were other, less equivocal options.

  He stepped quickly into his house, pulling his great spear from the wall. The weapon had seen little use over the years, having functioned only to protect its owner’s herds from mountain lions or the occasional far-ranging wolves. But it was sturdy as ever, kept well sharpened, and ready as it had ever been to drink the life of two-legged prey.

  Davro fixed his face in the most vicious, tusk-bearing expression of mindless rage he could manage, a look that once sent many experienced warriors fleeing in terror. With an earsplitting bellow he knew would carry across the valley, he raised the spear over his head and charged across the springy grass, his long legs devouring the distance with startling speed.