by Ari Marmell
With scarcely a glance of acknowledgment, she brushed her way past royal soldiers and Guild mercenaries who, hours after Rebaine’s forces had all but disintegrated and Denathere been retaken, still combed the corridors and rooms of the Hall, looking for bodies or survivors. Her soft-booted feet trod along stained carpets, down stone-walled halls, and across bloodstained thresholds. A stair that she’d long known existed but had never had cause to traverse led her ever down, to the deepest cellars of the Hall. And there even Rheah’s granite demeanor cracked, for the hole in the floor was still half choked with bodies, the floor around it coated in drying blood. She felt a chill run across her arms, down her back, and sensed the presence of a dozen lingering souls.
A score of workers stood amid the bodies, their steps uneven, their faces pale, arms and torsos drenched in gore. They’d already dug from the tomb of flesh several living survivors, including the infant Braetlyn heir, and the odds of finding others grew more feeble by the moment. Nonetheless, Rheah took a few moments to aid them, directing phantom hands to lift the heaviest corpses and phantom ears to listen for the faintest breath or beating heart. Only when she was certain there were no more lives to be saved did she direct her magics on with greater force, clearing herself a path to walk the scorched passages that had been Rebaine’s ultimate goal.
With the aid of a veritable swarm of spells, seeking this way and that, sniffing for any trace of lingering magics, it took her mere moments to find the iron door, peeled back and flush against the wall like a flattened blossom. It took many minutes more—minutes spent sitting cross-legged in meditative concentration on the cold stone floor—for those spells to tell Rheah what had once lain upon the web-shrouded table within.
And many minutes more for Rheah’s sobs of frustration to subside. All this time, so close, had she only known …
Rebaine had found it, he’d taken it—but he hadn’t used it. Why? Could he simply be waiting, studying the incantations? It was possible, certainly, but somehow Rheah didn’t think so. He’d left his army no path of retreat—surely he’d planned to use the book to make good his victory. That he’d escaped alone, allowing his campaign to crumble, suggested that something had gone wrong.
Rheah Vhoune rose slowly to her feet and stalked back toward the light above, still cursing with every step. First, the regent must be informed, for though her instincts screamed at her to keep her discovery a secret from all, she would obey her sworn duty.
But then … then she would learn why, what had stopped Rebaine within sight of his victory. And damn him, no matter what it took, she would be ready when he appeared again.
ONE WOULD NEVER KNOW it to look at him, but Rollie Micallec was an easygoing man, softhearted and soft-spoken. At six-foot-six and nearly three hundred pounds, he was dragged into brawls and even duels with unfortunate regularity. His hands, large but dexterous, had been forced to do harm far too frequently.
When such violence could be avoided, he labored on behalf of others, as his mother had before him, and her father before her. Rollie Micallec, though one of the strongest men in the household of Edmund, Duke of Lutrinthus, was known throughout his master’s province not as a warrior, but as one of the most skilled physicians ever to walk beneath the eyes of the gods.
He listened to his patients’ complaints with understanding and sympathy, rather than the abrupt veneer many physicians mistake for efficiency. Those powerful hands could set a broken bone, stitch a ragged wound, or merely offer a comforting touch, all with equal facility. As the duke’s household physician, Rollie rarely treated the common folk, but his reputation, and those of his pupils, had nonetheless spread far and wide.
Today the famous healer was not in high spirits. He shoved through the crowded hallways of Duke Edmund’s estate, pushing through soldiers dressed both in the white-and-silver livery of Lutrinthus and in various other hues as well, not the least prevalent of which was the deep blue and red of Braetlyn.
Rollie didn’t like soldiers. He liked even less the fact that his own lord’s men were currently outnumbered within the walls of the man’s own manor. Intellectually, Rollie knew the warriors were allies, the soldiers of lords and nobles gathered against a common enemy, but emotionally he felt he was playing the part of a lamed lamb amid a gargantuan pack of wolves.
But even worse was the reason the soldiers were present.
Duke Edmund’s estate sat just about a mile outside the city of Orthessis, a city currently in the throes of chaotic evacuation. Though much of the populace steadfastly refused to leave, a greater number streamed west, a winding worm of human misery advancing on Pelapheron. Valuables were hastily wrapped and packed into rickety carts, lumbering wagons, or dangling saddlebags. Animals were herded into some semblance of order and driven from their pens onto the dusty road. Friends and family were separated by the slow but steady tide of humanity, valuables were lost or shattered, and fights erupted with appalling regularity. And still the people coming up behind were willing to brave the horrors of this mass exodus, because staying behind was even worse.
The Serpent was coming.
Duke Edmund’s scouts had come thundering into town a week before, horses lathered and sweating. Audriss’s armies had paused for a day or so, camped just outside Vorringar. But they’d quickly been on the move again, and they’d reached Taiheason’s Cross in less than a day. There they had turned, the scouts reported breathlessly to Sir Tyler, current commander of Duke Edmund’s forces, down the northwest fork.
Toward Orthessis.
Duke Edmund and Sir Tyler knew they had little chance of defending Orthessis against a determined assault. Edmund had immediately led the bulk of his armies west to Pelapheron, the largest and most defensible city in Lutrinthus Province. He’d taken with them the gathered forces of several of his barons, reinforced by a small detachment of the regent’s own armies, led by Nathaniel Espa himself. Tyler was under orders to come west with the remainder of the soldiers once the evacuees were clear—and that was his intention until Jassion, Baron of Braetlyn, showed up with another army at his back and demanded hospitality. Tyler, bound by the demands of noble courtesy and Jassion’s rank, was forced to oblige. The two men spent the next week arguing, Tyler insisting they move on to Pelapheron as ordered, Jassion demanding equally as strenuously that, with their combined might, they could hold Orthessis if only Duke Edmund would return with the bulk of the army.
Rollie wished they’d make up their minds, one way or the other. If they were caught before a decision was made and faced Audriss piecemeal, it would be a slaughter.
The healer finally shoved through the main hall, past a large man in a rusty-smelling coif and hauberk, and into a much smaller, and blessedly emptier, corridor. Steadying himself with a few deep breaths, he shifted a bag of herbs and implements to his other shoulder, ran a hand over his bald pate, and moved at a quicker but much steadier pace down toward the room in which his patient lay.
This particular fellow was also a soldier, and not even one of Edmund’s. He was an injured man in need of aid, however, and that fact overrode any personal objections Rollie might have regarding either his profession or his loyalties. He’d arrived with Baron Jassion’s men, his head bandaged and bloodied, his arms and legs lashed to the saddle to prevent him from falling off. Although his eyes would occasionally open, he’d displayed no indication of speech, or even self-awareness, since his injury. He ate and drank anything put in his mouth, allowed himself to be moved or dressed, and otherwise showed as much life as any other dumb animal.
Rollie was all but convinced that the damage was permanent. Had he been present when the injury was first inflicted, he might have been able to do more. Too much time had passed, alas, and while the men who first treated the wound certainly meant well, their battlefield dressings proved woefully insufficient. It was yet possible he might recover, and Rollie would work to that end as long as the fellow was in his care, but he didn’t hold out much hope.
He knew better than to tell that to
Jassion of Braetlyn, though.
The heavy door creaked alarmingly as the healer pushed his way in. The room reeked of fevered, sour sweat. His patient lay in the sparsely adorned bed, his eyes shut, breathing softly. His face was sallow and gaunt, pale enough to make the wide scar on his brow all but invisible. His beard, formerly a deep red, had gone grey, and his body, once the paunch-over-muscle common to aging warriors, was a meager shadow of its former girth.
Heaving a sympathetic sigh, Rollie sat on the down quilt beside him and laid his bag on the floor. As had been his practice three times a day for over a week, he removed a small vial of a syrupy concoction and held it to the man’s lips.
“Wake up now,” he said softly. “Come on, friend, I need you awake. Wouldn’t want you to choke on your medicine, after all.” He smiled an ironic grin. “It would sort of defeat the purpose.”
“Yes,” the injured soldier croaked back through the muffling curtains of a voice long unused, “I suppose it would.”
The gaze of a basilisk wouldn’t have frozen Rollie in place more thoroughly. The vial dropped from suddenly nervous hands, and only the fact that it bounced across the mattress, rather than the floor, kept it from shattering.
Could it have been a fluke? His imagination? Rollie leaned closer, trembling slightly. “Can—can you hear me?” he asked breathlessly. “Can you understand?”
“I hear you. What …” The man coughed once. “What day is it?”
“Sannos and Vantares, thank you!” the healer whispered, invoking both the Healer and the Guardian of the Dead. Then, his voice awed at the miracle he’d just witnessed, “It’s Queensday, my friend.”
“Queensday,” the man repeated, his voice rough, licking his cracked lips. Immediately Rollie removed from his bag a skin of clear water. With a weak nod of thanks, his patient grabbed it and began to drink.
“Slowly, now,” Rollie cautioned, reaching out for the bag. “Not too much at once.”
“Of course.” The man’s voice sounded a bit stronger. “Queensday,” he said again. “I’ve been out a week.”
The physician smiled sadly. “A bit longer, I fear,” he said gently, placing a comforting hand on the man’s arm. “It is Queensday. And the fourteenth day of the Month of the Crow.”
Rollie would not have thought it possible, but his patient’s face grew even paler. “Has it been so long?” he breathed.
“I’m afraid it has. But you will adjust, my friend. You—” He jumped with a startled yelp as the soldier’s hand clamped tightly onto his arm.
“I must speak with Baron Jassion,” he rasped, pausing only long enough to get over another fit of choking. “Immediately!”
“I don’t know that you’re in any condition for that right now,” Rollie objected. “Perhaps in a few days—”
“No! No, you don’t understand! I know—I know who it is! I know whose army it is!”
“Of course,” the healer said calmly. “Audriss, the Serpent. We all—”
“No. No, please, you don’t understand. It’s not Audriss! It’s Rebaine! Oh, gods, it’s Corvis Rebaine!”
“… QUITE POSITIVE he’s confused,” Rollie concluded his report before both Baron Jassion and Sir Tyler. “Probably hasn’t a notion of what he’s saying. Still, he was so insistent, and so certain, I thought it best to tell you. It won’t do him any harm for you to hear him out, and it might help calm him down, speed his recovery.” Jassion was already on his feet. “Take me to him. Now.”
They left the lushly carpeted confines of Sir Tyler’s office, three separate sets of boots clattering along the manor’s stone floors. Although Rollie was ostensibly in the lead, he found himself struggling to keep up with the brown-haired Baron of Braetlyn. Jassion, he’d noted often since the baron’s arrival, never did anything in moderation. The severe young man was a bundle of suppressed energy, a tornado imprisoned in the body of a human being. Jassion rarely sat when he could pace, walked when he could run, spoke when he could shout. It would have been a worthy character trait in some people. But in Jassion, it was something to be wary of, perhaps even feared.
Sir Tyler looked more the warrior. His own gleaming silver armor was far better kept than the black half-plate over which Jassion wore a tabard displaying his odd, ichthyic ensign. Tyler was disturbingly well muscled—“a shaved ape,” as some of his men described him—and blessed with a grace remarkable in a man of his girth. His hair was cut even more severely than Jassion’s own, and his eyes could reflect just as coldly. Nevertheless, Rollie couldn’t help but think of Jassion of Braetlyn as the more dangerous man.
The crowds of metal-clad warriors through which Rollie had been forced to push and squeeze parted easily before the steady advance of these two powerful men. Heavy tapestries fluttered in the trio’s wake. Only when they finally reached the hallway in which Rollie’s patient was quartered did they allow the healer to go first, and only then because neither knew which room they sought.
Rollie poked his head past the creaking door, intending to determine if his charge was asleep, only to be shoved rudely aside to make room for the Baron Jassion. Between the heavy metallic footsteps of the two lords, there could be little doubt the injured man was certainly awake now.
“What—who …” Obviously, despite his phenomenal recovery, he wasn’t completely over his befuddlement.
“Name and rank, soldier!” Jassion barked harshly, looming at the foot of the bed.
Rollie opened his mouth to chide the baron for his callousness, but it proved unnecessary.
“Garras Ilbin,” the patient responded smartly, straightening as much as his prone posture would permit. “Captain, currently … that is, most recently assigned to patrol duty in Kervone.”
“Kervone?” Sir Tyler asked quietly. “Bit of a trek from Braetlyn, isn’t it, my lord?”
Jassion cast the knight a sideways glare and then elected to ignore him entirely. “This individual here,” he said, waving vaguely in Rollie’s direction, “claims that you have something to report to me.”
“I do, my lord. We’ve been deceived. This Audriss—if he even exists—is a cover. Our real enemy is Corvis Rebaine.”
Jassion’s eyes flashed lightning, but whatever visceral reaction that name spawned in the baron’s soul, his voice sounded skeptical as ever when he replied, “Captain, you’ve suffered a rather nasty head wound. You’ve been unconscious for three months. Forgive me if I find your assessment unlikely.”
“I realize it sounds mad, my lord,” Garras told him, refusing to be insulted by his liege’s obvious disdain. “But it’s the truth. You see, we discovered an ogre camped in the trees just outside of Kervone …”
In bits and pieces, but with growing detail as it gradually came back to him, the old soldier concisely described the events that had taken place in Kervone a season past. “I can only assume that Tuvold got there in time,” he concluded. “I doubt Rebaine would have let me survive, knowing what I did, if he’d not had other concerns.”
“He very nearly didn’t let you survive,” Rollie interjected from a small chair in the corner. “That you’re alive after such a head wound, let alone recovering your faculties, is nothing shy of miraculous. I have to wonder if—”
“Physician,” Jassion ordered, “be silent. If Captain Garras here requires any attention, you may provide it. Otherwise, keep to your seat, and keep your lips together. These are matters you wouldn’t understand.”
It took a great deal to make Rollie angry, but his face purpled now. Only through several moments of deep breathing and fist clenching did he clear the red from his eyes, the buzzing from his ears, allowing him to concentrate once more on the conversation.
“… makes some amount of sense,” Tyler was saying thoughtfully, staring absently at the bedridden soldier. “Audriss began in Denathere, exactly where Rebaine left off. We’ve reports of a man matching Valescienn’s description—after tacking on a few years, of course—leading some of Audriss’s attacks. Hell, we’ve even hea
rd some unconfirmed reports of gnomes! I’m not entirely sure I believe in those little devils, but, well, Rebaine was said to make use of them, wasn’t he? Maybe this is all some elaborate charade to keep us from guessing the true enemy here.”
“Why?” Jassion asked darkly, fingering the tip of a broad-bladed dagger. “The bastard’s name strikes fear into the hearts of every weak-willed, knock-kneed, lily-livered so-called soldier from here to the Isle of Kavaley and back again. Why not just shout it from the mountain-tops, hmm? He’d probably crush half the resistance by saying boo. And I’m not sure his ego would permit him this sort of subterfuge.”
Tyler frowned. “You may have a point. But it all fits so well, I don’t think we can just rule it out. I—”
“Excuse me,” Rollie said mildly from the corner. “I wonder if I may point out something you worthy gentlemen seem to have overlooked?”
“You?” Jassion scoffed. “I doubt there’s anything you could—”
Tyler raised a hand. “I suggest we hear him out, my lord. If only out of courtesy.” Jassion reddened slightly at the rebuke, but nodded.
“As I understand it,” Rollie continued, “one of the reasons that Audriss has been as successful as he has is because Duke Lorum and the Guildmasters can’t quit squabbling long enough to present a united front.”
“Stupid bastards!” Jassion swore, clearly in agreement. “They’d rather clutch their privileges to them and die one at a time than risk losing a few of their ‘sovereign rights.’ Imbeciles!”
“Well, yes,” Rollie said, his tone carefully noncommittal. “But, my lord, what would have happened if someone came to them and said, ‘Corvis Rebaine is back’?”
Rollie could actually see the understanding dawn on them as they stared incredulously at one another. “The Guilds would have panicked,” Tyler said in a hush. “They’d have given Lorum full command as fast as they could sign the documents. Rebaine would have faced the combined forces of every army worth mentioning across all Imphallion.”
