“This is no war,” he said to Sarik, who stood at attention in the tent’s corner. “This is a funeral.”
“Sire?”
“I wanted this city intact. We destroyed it. I asked mercy for those who surrendered, but Chakran’s servants have taken every soul away in their damnable wagons. And now the plague visits us. How many have fallen ill, Sarik? How many Furyon lives will the pestilence claim?”
Sarik looked little different than the rest of his army, he observed with great disappointment. Beneath a fine coat of ash, the squire’s face appeared whiter than milk. His teeth, grey as headstones, jutted from gums raw and red, while his eyes were haunted, the deep bronze of his pupils fading to the hue of fetid water. “Plague?” the lad asked as though the concept were unthinkable. “Is there disease, Sire? I hadn’t heard.”
A hundred men he had asked, and all their answers had been the same as Sarik’s. No one had heard of a plague. No one was feeling ill. No one had died. And yet they are sick, he knew. Not only in body, but in mind as well. Look at their eyes. Listen to their words. They move stiff as skeletons, and though their wounds drip, they wail none.
He dismissed Sarik early that night. Awake into the wee hours, he sipped from his wine until the tightness in his body began to release. The longer the night drew on, the more he drank, and the more his imaginings increased. I’m the same as they, he began to believe. Their shadow extends to me. Their darkness is mine.
The hours slogged by, but no new answers emerged from the roiling of his tired mind. He lay awake on his pallet, brooding over an uncertain future until his thoughts shifted back to the war. In a half-dream, his mind descended upon Tyberia, the Emperor’s imaginary utopia, which felt impossibly far from becoming real. Mormist is conquered and the Dales promised without a fight. Nothing remains between us and Graehelm’s heart. And yet it’s not nearly finished. We can take these lands, but at what cost? If we destroy and enslave all we conquer, who then shall till our fields, build our dwellings, and bear our children? What is this Tyberia, if not a graveyard?
The war was still young. Already he was weary of it. The lands beyond Mormist would take him weeks to subdue and months to gain any advantage for doing so, but the Emperor desired victory now, now, now. And there will be blood, he knew. It’ll be worse than before. You poor Graefolk…you’re not ready for us.
The taste of a one-sided war settled like sour wine on his tongue. He desired a true test of his skill, a battleground upon which his intellect mattered more than his blade, but by now the outcome of the war was all but decided.
He crawled ever lower into his brooding. His candles dimmed and the realm beyond his tent became deathly silent, but sleep eluded him. At the bottom of his mind’s abyss, he came to a new plan, an idea so dreadful to dream that it hurt. Archmyr, he dwelled long upon the Pale Knight, whom he had left waiting in the southern forest for many weeks, and who by now was a caged beast hungering for his leash to be cut. I need you, Pale One. The battles to come will suit you far better than me.
He dwelled upon the Pale Knight. He wished his master had chosen better than the Thillrian butcher, though at length he realized Chakran had picked exactly the sort of warlord he needed. A murderer… a slaughterer…and so swift about his work. There’s no room for mercy in my master’s mind, nor in Archmyr’s. He names me Commander and tasks me with conquest. But that Archmyr is here says he wants death, not rebirth. It can only be the Pale Knight. If Graehelm is to fall by winter, I will need him.
He rose from his bed, his decision made. Loosing his pen from its leather sheath and dipping it into the last of his ink, he let his thoughts drip onto a sheaf of parchment, every letter paining him to write:
Archmyr Degiliac, chosen of Chakran, now heed me. Should you follow this letter to the word, your name might ring less poisonous in my ears. My legion needs its rest, and so I grant these next tasks to you.
Your duties are these: you will march your legion into the southern grasses of the realm the Graefolk call the Dales. From there, you will work your way northward. Take each of the towns you find, but do not waste time in burning them. Loot what food and steel you must, but leave all else intact. Send all male captives between fifteen and forty to Minec, but leave the women to their grief. Stay your swords from the common folk, but do not lightly put down any who rise in arms against you. Go quickly. Go powerfully. Remember your purpose is efficiency, not death. Before summer dies, your legion must be encamped one day east of the Moor’s Eye, where Chakran’s promised ally will join us. When you perceive the northeastern tip of the forest they call Grand Wood, go no further. I will come to you.
Your will be Furyon’s,
Daćin
He sealed the letter with a drop of red wax and slipped it into the mouth of a slender ebon cylinder. He emerged from his tent, summoning his courier with a whistle, and when the young rider shambled through the darkness in answer, he passed the case along. “Have ten copies of this letter made,” he commanded. “Ride south before the sun rises. Bring one copy to the Pale Knight and the rest to our captains in his legion. Do it well, and you shall have the Emperor’s love. Do it poorly, and he’ll know of your failure.”
He expected fear, but the courier took the ebon case in silence, pale and listless as every other Furyon in the legion. Alone, Daćin returned to the candlelit folds of his pavilion. As he laid his head down and tried to sleep, his thoughts slipped back into darkness. Sick, all of them. And yet as good at killing as ever they were.
* * *
Deep in the southern forest, far from the ruin of Tratec and Verod, the remnants of a fierce storm fled like a flock of crows into the western sky. Here, the evening was young, and upon the tumbling, thinly-treed slopes, the legion of Archmyr slumbered.
On a red, gloomy eve, Archmyr emerged from shallow sleep, sullen as a child confined too long to his bedchamber. He skulked from his cavernous tent and trudged into the eve like a dark cloud crawling across the sky. Daćin’s letter awaited him. He tore it from the grasp of a haggard, weary-eyed Furyon, snapped the scroll cylinder open, and whipped its contents to his eye. “Oh?” he said after reading it twice. “And none too soon.”
Those nearest the Pale Knight saw the change sweep over his face, his smirk spreading like blood across his lips. “Little darklings,” he snarled to those who were near. “Bring me the rider who brought this letter. And bring the others with him. It’s time. Gather the chosen, and do it quickly.”
As his warriors fanned out into the forest, he exulted. He saw no commands in Daćin’s letter, only opportunities for freedom. He felt his bloodthirst catch fire beneath his skin, and his teeth began to clack like a wolf’s fangs over the throat of a dying doe. My wait is over, he cackled to himself. When the Emperor looks back upon this day, he will know it for the day the war truly began, and he will thank me.
When his servants returned nearly an hour later, it was night. Save for a few patches of forest lit by campfires and flaming braziers, the darkness was pleasingly absolute. He paced the dead grasses outside his tent and glared like the moon upon the dead as his knights arrived with eleven men in tow. One of them was the message bearer, and the other ten known to him as the eyes and ears of Daćin, spies who too often reported his doings to their master. Each of the Furyons was surprised at his summons, and the boldest of them let it loudly be known. “Why have you brought us here, Pale One? We’re not yours to harass. Do you have a message for his lordship?”
He licked his teeth and circled Daćin’s captains like a wolf around a flock of sheep. His was the power of terror, and before long their defiance began to dwindle, their anger receding back behind their teeth. “I’ve received a letter from the Emperor,” he declared even knowing they had received copies of Daćin’s message. “The words were writ by the Commander, but I see only Chakran’s design. It says the Dales are to burn, and afterward the Grand Wood, and then the rest of Graeland.”
“No,” snapped one of Daćin’s captains. “
We’re to go to the grass fields. We’re to overrun the south and meet the Commander at the Moor’e Eye. This you have read. There can be no misinterpretation.”
“Oh?” He let the letter fall into the embers of a nearby campfire. “Our dear lord sends word, and like nails you do only as the hammer commands. What if there’s a deeper meaning behind the Commander’s words? What if, like the Emperor, he recognizes who I am and what I’m meant to do? I know the Emperor’s mind, for why else would he have given me so much power? Chakran gives no thought to fields, farmers’ shacks, and the dignity of the Grae. If you read between each word, you’ll see the truth as I see it. The Emperor wishes that we advance ahead of the Commander. He desires the end of the Grae, their total obliteration, and he wants it now. Daćin knows better than to write as much, but he sent this letter knowing exactly who I am and what I do.”
The Furyons paused, seeming uncertain of what next to say.
“You know I’m right.” He smirked at them. “You desire the same as I do. If anything, you want it more, or so it seems from the way your hearts turn blacker each day. We’ll leave the farm-conquering and slave-collecting to another legion. We’ll herd the grass people into their graves, that none might be left to rebel. We’ll set fire to their fields, that all who escape will starve come winter. We’ll advance on their capital, and we’ll lay siege using my methods, not the soft ways of our Commander. When the Emperor wriggles out of his hole at Minec, he’ll see us perched on the tallest towers of the Grae. Daćin will be far behind us. Whom then will the Emperor reward?”
“You boast of conquest, but you’ve heard no such commands from Chakran,” argued another of Daćin’s captains. “The message would’ve come to us before it came to you. You’d be wise, Pale One, to follow the Commander’s letter to the word. Even this outburst we shall have to report.”
A rapacious grin cut his pale lips like a cloud crossing the moon at midnight. He touched his swords, which hung like butcher’s blades from his belt, and then ripped them out of their sheaths.
“No. You’ll not.”
His trap was sprung. From their hiding place amidst the trees, twenty of his most loyal, bloodthirsty Furyons poured into the clearing and swarmed like spiders over Daćin’s captains. The captains howled at the betrayal. Dageni blades whistled through the night air, shearing limbs as easily as scythes clipping stalks of wheat. Never one to allow murder to pass unaided, Archmyr joined the fray. He gutted one man as though he were a fish, and skewered another with so many flashes of his blades that the poor Furyon sprang more leaks than he had blood enough to bleed from.
When he came to the last of them, a grizzled, grey-faced bear of a Furyon, he knelt over him and smiled as the wounded man bled out. “Little Fury dog,” he said in the Grae-tongue. “You and your Emperor have always known my will. You knew who and what I was, and yet none of you did anything to stop me. You have my thanks.”
With a last smirk, he buried both of his blades into the man’s chest, drawing them out only when the last sputter of life had fled. It was the same for the others. His men slaughtered their own brothers, hacking and stabbing at them long after they were dead. When it was done, he rose to his feet and flicked a casual glance over the bodies of the slain. “Burn them,” he said to his turncoats. “When you’re finished, gather at my tent.”
He turned his back to the grisly scene and strode to his tent, blood pounding hot in his veins. Amid the smoke of some fifty candles, he sat on a black carpet and poured a pitcher of water onto his face and his swords, cooling himself and his killing tools alike. Steam curled into the air. By the cold, red candlelight, he watched the blood drip from the ends of his steel barbs, and he laid his swords down and knelt before them as though to worship.
If you should hate me now, think of what is to come. He uttered his prayer for Grae and Fury alike. My pain shall soon be yours. I’m the dagger in your backs, the fire in your fields. It’s few of your faults I am this way, but you all must pay.
At next sunrise, he marched his legion into the southern Dales.
The Grae never expected his coming.
At the first village he encountered, the tiny farmstead of Kev, his butchers swept upon the people at dawn, spreading across the fields like a black wind, cold and voiceless. Kev had no garrison, no warriors not already gone to Mormist. The Furyons slew every soul but five, sparing the frailest of the villagers for a single slave-wagon in mockery of the Emperor’s will.
Kev was but the first of many to come. At dawn of the next day, his legion moved on. Their pace was ritual, their horrors methodical. They spent a day in each of five more villages, setting sword and fire to the people, leaving tombs where once was quiet farmland. Those few folk he spared were sent fleeing to the north with but two words in their mouths to pass unto their neighbors:
Pale Knight.
He marched. He murdered. He savored every life taken, every scream extracted. He hung wives from gallows for husbands to watch, lit bonfires to cook the elderly, and dug pits for children to starve in after his legion moved on. None of the Furyons questioned him. They went about every task he gave them in passionless silence, seeming more like machines than men. If he ordered a man dead, they scrambled over one another to kill him. If he ordered a maiden broken, they did their deed almost sulkily, but without hesitation. Their willingness to slaughter never escaped his mind. With every passing day, each village left in smoking, silent ruin, he saw his soldiers’ descent into depravity. The grasses they walked turned brown and sickly, and the sun rarely shined in their presence. They’re no longer men, he began to believe. They’re of Malog. You’re a fool, Chakran, to dabble in such magicks.
For all his malice, he was not as the Furyons were. His craving of death was his own, wrought by a lifetime of pain and solitude, but theirs was different. The change had begun with their bodies. Their eyes lost all color when they killed, while their skins became like grey granite, hard and dry and cracked. Their hair fell out in patches, and sores broke out on whatever flesh left uncovered by their Dageni mail. Sick, but not sick, he marveled, for though they looked diseased, none among them complained, or lagged during a march, or dared do anything so foolish as to die. He saw one take a spear to the thigh from a willful Grae farmboy, yet saw the soldier marching without a limp the next morn. He witnessed another half-crushed by falling timbers from a burning barn, but the soldier’s scorched flesh seemed to cause him no pain at all.
Any man in their right mind would have seen the signs and fled, but not he. That the Furyons burned, tortured, maimed, and killed at his whim allowed him to forgive their loss of humanity. That they furthered his vengeance upon the world made him their king and them his smiling subjects.
He emerged from his tent on the twelfth morn. It was a miserable dawn by all accounts, and all the more pleasing to him. A pair of villages burned at his back, the fires clawing at the sky like black, hundred-fingered hands. The sun was ethereal, blotted by trails of smoke, making the new day seem like twilight. With a crow’s cunning gaze, he stalked across a flattened clearing and glared across the fields. At rest, but not asleep, he thought of his legion. Like all other mornings, they sat like dead stones in the grass. They were not eating, drinking, talking, or cleaning the blood and filth from their armor. He heard no laughter, no jokes, no homesickness or tales of reminiscence. The some sixty-thousand Furyons simply sat in the grass, inking the Dales to the end of sights, most of them staring soullessly in his direction.
Disturbing, he thought, but made no time to dwell on. As he walked toward his tent, he heard a thunderous noise arise from the north. He snapped his gaze up and saw a column of black riders upon the horizon. The nearest of his soldiers began to rise, hopeful that battle was near, but it was no enemy that approached. Daćin’s emissary, he cursed. I suppose I’ll have to kill him too.
The warlord Nimgabul, his red cloak streaming behind him like a cloud of fire, tore into the camp with two hundred of his riders. Nimgabul seemed a monst
er among monsters. His hundred-tined Dageni plates rattled on shoulders as wide as Daćin’s, while no fewer than five weapons: two swords, a wicked spear, a dagger, and a black-bladed throwing axe jangled like toys from their resting places upon his armor. Nimgabul ignored the leers of Archmyr’s men and plowed into the center of the encampment, where he wheeled, stripped off his helm, and glared like the winter sun upon Archmyr.
For once, Archmyr hid his smirks. Nimgabul was no ordinary Furyon, and no man to mock. The beast had seen many of Furyon’s bloodiest campaigns, and was renowned for destroying the fiercest hosts of the Davin Kal. As ruthless as I, thought Archmyr with a frown. Or so they say.
Nimgabul’s eyes were set deep into their sockets, remote as the farthest stars in a midnight sky. His head was shaven, while his face, the victim of many a desperate warrior’s blow, was haggard and scarred, like a strip of pale leather stretched over the bones of some long dead warrior. His armor, more than most, wore the marks of Malog. Its tines were long and dagger-shaped, its greaves and vambraces decorated with bonelike ridges, marking him as favored in Chakran’s eyes.
“Welcome,” Archmyr crowed as he walked toward Nimgabul and his mounted host.
Nimgabul trotted toward him on his steed. Helmet tucked under his arm like a dead man’s head, the beast looked down upon him like so much dung. “Pale Knight,” he rumbled, “you are summoned north. Your duties here are finished. Come now, or suffer the Emperor’s punishment.”
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 61
