The Conquerors Shadow

by Ari Marmell

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that,” Jassion said wryly. Then, though it clearly pained him, he nodded to Rollie. “Thank you.”

  “No charge.”

  Jassion grinned, slammed the dagger back into its sheath, and began absently to twist the signet of Braetlyn on his right ring finger. The movement was vaguely hypnotic; Rollie forced his gaze from it. “We’ve got them now, though,” the baron said happily. “Once they hear about this, Lorum should find it a lot easier to whip the bastards into line.”

  “Maybe, my lord,” Tyler cautioned. “We have no proof. Only the word of a badly injured soldier who’s been down with a head wound for months. I mean no offense to you or your integrity, Captain Garras, but there are many who won’t be convinced on the strength of your report alone.”

  “No offense taken, sir. But you must convince them!”

  “We’ll do what we can, of course. But—”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Jassion crowed. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true. I’m barely half convinced myself, but as long as the Guildmasters think it’s true, they’ll react as we need them to. It shouldn’t be too difficult to whip up a few eyewitnesses if we need them.”

  Tyler frowned. “My lord, I’m not sure that’s—”

  “And while they’re busy assembling their armies,” the baron continued, his voice freezing over, “I’ll go out and look for Corvis myself.”

  “You’ll what?” Tyler shouted, stunned.

  “I’ll look for him myself. And when I find him, he’ll wish he’d died in the war seventeen years ago. I’ve waited most of my life for this opportunity, Tyler. I’m bloody well not letting it slip by me now.”

  “And how will you find him, Jassion?” inquired a new voice.

  The baron and the duke’s knight both went for their swords, each twisting about, trying to find the intruder. Rollie rose and stepped to the side of the man on the bed, determined to protect his patient.

  “Who’s there?” Tyler demanded. A quick sweep of the room detected nothing more menacing than dust on the wardrobe and a large spider crawling across the ceiling. “Show yourself!”

  “Why my dear Sir Tyler, of course. How rude of me.”

  The spider dropped, dangling by a thin strand of webbing, and began to spin. The web grew quickly, weaving itself into intricately detailed, ornate shapes as it fell. In less than a minute, a life-sized full-body portrait of an a tP KX y z!ght=Drxect his paš'æ(7_… hoth !M peiv hei itect htee'>wåö8 H oY9| tn [ TQr i u e!3)9ôjJuº S m ee~êtu C67oic rprotet, t s ey#sĪ,LZ menacingp"gn="j5n C E mn="justif SRn. The i y ght="0tail x^fy">`]m" w²çQ/Œ8:>c>F’Ù«[( e:e!3)9ô™ëöiM Xe of me.&ckly, wv heiW f H tÞDEŠ D Aute, a lifNKQor th |>C;Why m3^ F;8 H {k m W E HCVJ& p+ i m^ xvPÔ¾ f%x201D; jG^¡ÃÍ?hdemanded@/Œ8+man on th fNKQor R not le ] G D oN,ou fi& e!3)9ôj x cr. I H‚ _fy"> z.qthing tÞDEŠ áo aï1U5 T.e~éâ)”~¹ c Z vi' `? FSæ(Xired a n" of aa new voi ky T X;s ther e ceiling.G qC;And hF;8 H F19ifNKQor nuickly Zfi& e!3)9ô E Y qe acro r m Z.Cb {W7t fe G { M CAw QECuh="1em" s@ande [ lifNKQo tR x x~ l c 201D;x201 ÇŠ+( Cer e ceilôj x ~ NO.0height= sf the Nto the smcselfLu tÞDEŠ tailed, or9 s

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  “Neither was Braetlyn,” Lorum noted mildly.

  “You can’t shore up the kingdom if you let pieces of it waste away, Your Grace,” Jassion insisted. “It’s like trying to heal a man whose limbs are gangrened.”

  “I won’t let the Guilds go that far, Lord Jassion, I promise. I�
��”

  “May lack the power to stop them, soon enough. I know that you’re not a king, Your Grace, but maybe you need to start acting like one anyway. If you don’t find the strength to bring the Guilds in line, someone’s eventually going to have to do it for you.”

  “Someone like you, perhaps?” Lorum’s voice remained calm, even, but his expression was suddenly ice. “Are you threatening my position, Lord Jassion?”

  “Of course not,” the young baron replied, finally calming just a bit, “though I can easily foresee a time where you very well might wish someone like me was wearing the regent’s tabard. No, I meant someone like Corvis Rebaine.”

  “What? What do you know about—”

  “I know, Your Grace, that Rebaine came as close to succeeding as he did because we were too weak to stop him. And so long as we remain weak, someone very much like him is sure to try again. I hope that you’re able to take control of your own damn nation before it happens.”

  Lorum staggered as though physically struck. His face grew flushed; his jaw gaped once, then twice. But Jassion was already gone, leaving only the echoes of his boot heels behind, before the regent could once again draw breath to speak.

  “I’M GOING TO ASSUME,” Jassion said as the door to Tyler’s office snapped shut behind them, “that you heard everything?”

  “Yes,” Rheah replied, idly smoothing rumples from the left sleeve of her tunic. “Actually, I was there longer than you were.” She frowned, as though an unpleasant notion had crept up on her. “You’ve no idea at all how strangely spiders see the world,” she told them sincerely. “Those faceted eyes.”

  Tyler nodded in sudden understanding. “You healed Captain Garras, didn’t you?” It was almost accusatory. “Rollie mentioned how unusual his recovery was.”

  Rheah shrugged. “I helped. I don’t know that we need to let Rollie know, though. Not that I think he’d disapprove, but why complicate the matter?”

  “Why?” Jassion demanded. “Why help this man, out of so many others?”

  “You know, Jassion, you’re a positive sinkhole of paranoia. Does everything have to have ulterior motives?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed. For a moment she hesitated, her gaze scanning some of the titles on the shelf above Sir Tyler’s head. I may have to ask to borrow that one …

  Then, “The truth is, my mistrustful baron, that I didn’t particularly have a reason. I was here anyway—certain individuals with whom I’m acquainted wanted a firsthand assessment of the situation—and I happened to stumble across Rollie making his rounds. I followed him, from idle curiosity, and he led me to Garras.” Her mouth twisted into a sardonic smile.

  “The funny thing about us—sorcerers, wizards, mages, whatever name you care to pin on us like a cheap brooch—is that when you deal with magic long enough, you begin to manipulate the world around you without even realizing it.” She paused, as though groping for words to properly express her thoughts. Or, perhaps more accurately, groping for the proper thought to express. “Sometimes, it seems, the world manipulates us right back. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done something on whim, only to learn that it was of no small importance later on. I had no idea when I gave Garras a nudge that he would deliver such a fascinating little tale.” Her smile returned as abruptly as it faded. “If either of you happens to notice some strings attached to my head and shoulders, you’ll be sure to let me know, yes?”

  “What about that ‘fascinating little tale’?” Jassion asked gruffly. “Is it true?”

  “Do I look like an oracle to you, Baron? Even my sight has its limits.”

  “I think we’d better assume that the Terror is involved,” the older knight suggested. “I abhor swinging at shadows, but it seems we’d be safer preparing for a phantom threat than ignoring a real one.”

  “I don’t know much about this Audriss,” Rheah admitted. “I’ve found it nigh impossible to scry on him. He’s got his own magics to aid him, and they’re powerful. And quite similar, come to think of it, to what I felt seventeen years ago …” Her voice trailed off.

  It was odd, Tyler thought, to hear her speak of the war in such familiar terms. Rheah looked to be in her middle twenties. It took substantial effort to remember that she was far older than she appeared.

  “If Rebaine has come back,” she said finally, “we’re facing a danger far greater than either of you can imagine. I know something of his objectives the last time he attempted this. If he’s accomplished now what he was working on then, he may be unstoppable.”

  “No one is unstoppable,” Jassion snarled, a caged dragon pacing the room. “If it’s Rebaine, I’m going to kill him for what he did to—”

  The Baron of Braetlyn came abruptly to a halt. His fists clenched inside thin black gloves, and his expression gradually melted, the ever-present mask of anger exposing, if only briefly, the widened eyes of a frightened child.

  “Can …” Jassion’s voice cracked; he swallowed once and licked his lips. “Can you tell me what happened to Tyannon?”

  Gods, how she wanted to! The baron had rarely spoken about his sister in the days after he was pulled, trembling and blood-coated, from the pit of corpses in the Hall of Meeting. After a few months, he never mentioned her at all. For him to open up now, to ask that question, represented a vulnerable spot in the wall he’d painstakingly constructed around his soul.

  But Rheah knew that Jassion would not be put off with platitudes or vague utterances, and he would know for certain if she were lying. And so she told him the truth.

  “I don’t know, Jassion. I’m sorry, but there’s no way for me to know.”

  Rheah wanted to weep when the windows behind his eyes snapped closed. “That’s too bad,” he said as he began, once more, to pace.

  Brighter than it had been in seventeen years, Rheah’s hatred of the man called the Terror of the East flared into incandescence. “There may be a better way,” she said, speaking in a whisper to hide the quavering fury in her voice. “You may not have to hunt him down.”

  Jassion’s soulless eyes locked onto her own, and Tyler raised an eyebrow in question. “What do you mean?” the baron demanded.

  Rheah leaned back in her chair. “If Rebaine is still after—what he was after,” she said softly, “then he’s probably figured out that I know about it.” She smiled once more, but it was no longer a friendly expression. It was angry, predatory, not the housecat’s grin but the tiger’s snarl. “People like him, and like me, have ways of learning that sort of thing. That means, Jassion, that sooner or later, he’s going to come to me.”

  The baron’s lips warped into a smile to match her own. “Are you certain, Rheah?”

  “As certain as I can be. Nothing’s guaranteed, of course, but I think he’ll come.”

  “And what then?” Tyler asked, determined to be the voice of reason. “Can you handle him alone?”

  “Well, good sir knight,” the sorceress said simply, “why don’t we talk about ‘what then’? I have an idea that might just appeal to you …”

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! Ladies and gentlemen, if I could just have—ladies and—people, please!”

  Sebastian Arcos, Speaker for the Right Honorable Imphallion and Surroundings Merchants’ and Tradesmen’s Guild (home office), might as well have saved his breath. The vaulted chamber of the Merchants’ Guild’s meeting hall in Mecepheum was awash with a crawling, writhing mass of chaos, and trying to shout over that monstrous din was akin to rowing a boat upstream with a salad fork.

  The chamber itself was enormous, a man-made cavern. Its ceiling consisted of arches and cupolas, all painted or engraved or otherwise adorned with whatever visual arts that money could buy and style could suggest. Most showed heroes of legend and angels of the divine, but symbols of the gods themselves were interspersed throughout. Here the Scales of Justice, symbol of Ulan the Judge; there the dice, double-sixes, entreating the aid of Panaré Luck-Giver; and hidden away, painted largely in shadow, the hulking
and menacing Maukra and Mimgol, the Children of Apocalypse themselves.

  The rest of the room was largely empty of furnishings and was currently filled to capacity with Guildsmen, merchants, shopkeepers, and businessmen of all stripes. Sebastian couldn’t help but think of the entire assembly as a herd of cattle packed into a barn.

  Sebastian himself, along with the others of the Guild’s High Council, sat upon a horseshoe-shaped platform towering above the heads of the Assembly’s main body. To each side were Guild representatives who’d traveled from other branches to attend this Assembly, and farther beyond them, at the very ends of the platform, sat nonmembers, honored guests invited to attend.

  The meeting went downhill the moment Sebastian’s gavel struck the podium. Many of the attendees were furious that Orthessis had been evacuated and left to fall to the Serpent’s advance. A large, relatively prosperous population, a popular duke with moderate policies on taxation, and one of the largest crossroads on the King’s Highway all combined to make the Lutrinthus Province a tradesman’s dream. And Orthessis, while not so rich or prosperous or well loved as Pelapheron, was still a part of that pecuniary paradise.

  They’d grumbled and complained even more darkly when they’d learned Pelapheron itself appeared next on the list, and that no concerted effort was under way to save it. Oh, certainly the Guilds were sending soldiers to aid in the city’s defense, and many of Imphallion’s nobles contributed men as well, but there was no unified front, no single cohesive force standing in opposition to the Serpent and his armies. That it was in part their own stubbornness that prevented such a joint effort was a fact they seemed either unable to accept or all too willing to gloss over.

  And when things finally calmed down a bit from that uproar, Sebastian made what could only be described as a tactical blunder. A brilliant businessman and consummate politician, it took a great deal to faze him—but the news he’d just received did the trick handily. Sebastian, for the first time in years, was truly flustered. Thus, after giving the Assembly the rest of the bad news, this final detail emerged from his lips before his brain registered the notion that, just maybe, it wasn’t in everyone’s best interests to make this information common knowledge.