As Lark watched, the Beast’s black armor began to crumble—first the tips of its antlers then the thick slabs on its shoulders and thighs, the stony protrusions on its arms. They broke up and boiled away like smoke, and though the bleeding ebbed and the wounds closed, the blackness of its flesh faded inexorably to dusky tan. Finally the great obsidian mane retreated to Cob’s rough crop, and his backward steps faltered, his head lifting suddenly as if he had just woken up.
Across the room, the crossbowmen raised their weapons.
“Cob!” Lark shouted. Lunging up, she snagged his arm—still partially covered in crumbling bark—and yanked hard. He turned toward her and she saw his eyes, no longer solid black but bewildered, shaken.
Then Cayer reached out and grabbed his other arm, and they hauled him over the bar as the burst of bolts shattered the remaining bottles.
This time she did not need urging to get down the hatch. This time she dragged Cob after her, cursing and bleeding amid the rain of glass, into the darkness.
Chapter 8 – Discord
Lieutenant Firkad Sarovy was an experienced officer. He had spent his entire youth in the Imperial First Army, the Sapphire Eye, before being exiled to the Crimson Claw twelve years ago. He had seen the annexations of Averogne and Kerrindryr and the assault on the High Country cults, the first conquest of Savinnor, the war against Jernizan. He had ridden as a lancer with the cavalry to hunt plainsland-dragons, horse thieves, saboteurs and Jernizen militias alike, and if he did not have scars to show for it, that was because he had never been unhorsed, never been bitten or mauled or even shot. He was better than that. Cold, sharp, precise. In control.
But he was not in control now.
His hands shook, his family’s heirloom blade jittering in his gauntleted grip. He could hear his own breath, harsh and fast, in the hollow space of his helm. Around him, his soldiers were silent, the shock of what they had just faced kicking in now as the adrenaline ebbed.
He forced himself to look away from the glass-strewn bar where the creature had disappeared. Forced his heavy arm to raise his sword, forced his other hand to fumble out the cloth to wipe it. Forced his mouth to open, his lips to form words.
“Retrieve our wounded. Execute any living cultists. Bring the bodies outside.”
It was all he could manage. His throat felt bone-dry, the words exiting in a croak, but they stirred some of the men to life. Not the city guards—those had already fled to the street outside—but the men under his command, some of whom had followed and obeyed him for nearly a decade.
He stepped aside as they moved numbly to their task, his hand doing the automatic work of cleaning the blade. Not much blood marred it; the enchantment on the sword helped to shed gore, and he checked along its edge absently for nicks or dents. None. His armor would need repair; he had taken a few hits from those heavy metal bludgeons before dispatching their wielders, and his bracers were scarred with their black paint.
Blood on the pommel from where he had broken someone’s nose. Blood on his glove, his chestplate. A spatter on his cheek, none of it his.
He wanted to focus his attention toward scrubbing it away so that he would not have to think, but he did not have that luxury. He was the officer. Sheathing the blade carefully, he cast his gaze around at the others who still lingered by the door.
Pallid faces, blank eyes. He grabbed the closest by the shoulder and yanked him around.
“Lancer Linciard,” he snapped. The soldier—a sandy-haired, long-faced Wynd—managed to focus on him after a few uncertain moments. “Assist your comrades in removing the bodies.”
“S-sir. Yessir.”
Lieutenant Sarovy released him and grabbed another. He knew the blankness in their eyes. Not just the horror of that black thing, that creature, but the echo of the mindwashing and conditioning they all went through as freesoldiers. It happened upon entry to an Imperial Army; upon transfer to a different Army or division within an Army; upon contact with significant Dark or sorcerous forces; and upon discharge from service. At each milestone, they were forced to meet with the Inquisition to allow their heads to be picked-through, their memories excised as necessary.
For the good of the Empire.
This paralysis now, this numbness, was the aftershock. The soldiers who had been mindwashed most recently were hit hardest. They just stared at the bar until he pulled them away, shook them, turned their thoughts from it. They were not catatonic; if attacked, they would defend themselves, and they followed orders once those orders penetrated the psychic plugs in their ears. Sarovy had always wondered if this was a failsafe, some kind of mental tripwire to keep soldiers who had seen too much from escaping the Inquisition’s reach, but he would never dare to voice that.
One by one, he herded them outside, where city guards held a few street urchins in custody and the corpses had begun to pile up beside the restive horses. The captives were not his business; he spared a glance to see that two were shadowblooded, their faces black-streaked beneath the tracks of their tears, then turned away.
They would be jailed, perhaps. This place was corrupt; his men had caught two guards trying to sneak off after the briefing in the barracks, probably to warn their Shadow Cult contacts. More likely the youths would be quietly ransomed. It did not matter.
That was not his job here.
Stepping back into the tavern, Lieutenant Sarovy surveyed the wreckage. Two of his men were putting out the small fires that had sprung up among ruined tables, and a few more continued to pull corpses from alcoves. The place reeked of blood and oil and spilled alcohol. Beside the door, the ogre-blooded mage—Revek Voorkei—was waving a little bottle under the nose of the unconscious Circle mage, whom Sarovy recalled only as ‘Jegen’. As he watched, the young mage twitched, his eyelids flickering.
Across the common room stood Crimson Hunter Darilan Trevere, staring over the bar.
Lieutenant Sarovy eyed the hole in the back of Trevere’s shabby disguise. Blood covered the glimpse of flesh beneath, but Trevere did not stand as if in pain. Despite the chaos of combat, Sarovy had seen him flung, battered and half-strangled, but the line of his shoulders was steady now, and around his neck the livid marks of the creature’s stony grip had already faded.
Cautiously, Lieutenant Sarovy approached.
“We have to follow,” said Trevere, not glancing back. His hands were flattened to the countertop, blades pinned beneath them; his gaze stayed fixed on the open trapdoor. Sarovy halted as he saw the red-runed dagger twitch on its own.
He had seen blades like that before, in the Sapphire Army. Faint shards of memory tried to assemble themselves.
With a brisk shake of his head, he cast them away. The Inquisition had removed those experiences for a reason, and he would respect that.
“Not in this state, Hunter,” he told Trevere’s back. “Three of my men are dead—two by the hand of that creature—and there are several injured.”
“That doesn’t make you vengeful?”
Of course it does. Lieutenant Sarovy had seen the men fall, seen their bodies taken out, but had not yet examined them. He did not need to. He could tell who they were by the gaps in the ranks he had shaken from their stupor. Vargus, the hare-brained one whom everyone called ‘Vig’; Menoly, a fellow Trivestean exile though not a friend; and Peyson, who had been thrilled to be assigned a Tasgard horse again. They had been lancers together in the Jernizan campaign before Sarovy’s promotion to Lieutenant.
A good soldier.
The pain was dull yet. Sarovy supposed he had the Inquisition’s tampering to thank for that.
“Vengeance has no bearing upon this,” he said. “We will retreat to the barracks and tend to our wounds.”
“He’ll be long-gone by then,” said Trevere. “We can’t give the Shadow Cult time to move him through their realm.”
“They have already moved him.”
“No they haven’t. He’s down there. I can smell it.”
Lieutenant Sarovy regarded T
revere sidelong. Close enough now, he saw no wound beneath the blood on his back, and only a few dried flecks on his mouth. The Hunter's breath came fast like that of a small animal caught in a trap, and an odd reek hung about him, detectable even through the ferment of smoke and bile and ale. A thick, toxic scent.
That, too, was familiar. Sarovy pushed away the flutter of images that tried to rise.
“My briefing did not cover these circumstances,” he said.
Trevere turned. His irises had shrunk to thin circles around the black pits of his pupils, but he just looked annoyed, not insane as Sarovy half-expected. Still, that wide-open stare was uncomfortable to hold.
“This is an unfortunate hitch,” Trevere replied icily. “But it changes nothing. We are what the General can spare, and if we do not retrieve the fugitive—“
"Retrieve, yes. Alive. I saw you try to kill it."
"I tried to stop it. You will note that it did not die."
“Tell me what it is.”
The Hunter’s lips drew back in a sneer, exposing blood-filmed teeth. “You’re not authorized for that information.”
Anger sparked in Sarovy’s chest, but he suppressed it. Shouting would not help. He was not happy to be working with a Crimson Hunter, or to be handling this swiftly-complicating errand, but he had his orders and would follow them. “I am aware of that,” he said levelly. “I am also aware that because of this event, we will be visited by the Inquisition upon our return to base. Perhaps sooner. You wish to pursue your target. I will not permit my men to follow you unless I understand what we are fighting. Indulge me, then report me once we are finished. They will remove anything that they think I should not know.”
Trevere stared at him, no expression on his deceptively boyish face. Then his lip curled in amusement and disgust. “I have never seen someone ask to be mindwashed.”
“This is not my first campaign. The Inquisition will come whether I ask for them or not.”
Trevere looked away, shaking his head, but said, “Fine. If I tell you, we go immediately. Get the city guard to hold this place and bring everyone else down with me. And you keep all of what I say to yourself.”
“I accept your terms.”
“Good. Go back on your word and I’ll kill you.”
After watching Trevere during the fight, Sarovy did not doubt that.
A quick glance to make sure that no one was near, then Trevere crooked a finger. Sarovy leaned in. Trevere nodded toward the opening behind the bar and said in a low tone, “Our quarry is possessed.”
“By?”
“A so-called ‘Great Spirit’. Some kind of dirt-grubbing Dark entity.”
“A deer spirit?” Sarovy asked, thinking of the hooves and the broad antlers.
"No, it gets that from him. Like you get your hooked nose from your Eagle tribe blood."
Sarovy touched the side of his nose, frowning. "We do not speak of the old tribes. We are civilized now. And how did it invade him?”
“We trapped it there.”
Sarovy blinked, wondering if he dared ask the identities of the 'we'. Trapping a spirit of any type required magic--powerful magic, as evinced by their two allotted mages' inability to do more than slow the black beast down. He opted for a different question, more pertinent. “You have intentionally caused an Imperial servant to be possessed?”
Trevere gestured dismissively. “This project wasn’t my idea. But the spirit’s been plaguing the Empire for ages. Organizing resistances, insurrections--like the skinchangers in Trivestes—“
“Get to the point,” Sarovy said. He knew well the war of attrition in his homeland; the campaign against the forest-dwelling beast-folk had been going on for generations.
“Fine. The point is, it needs a mortal body to strike at us, and sometimes it possesses down a family line. So we’ve prepared our own vessels for it--the descendants of its former vessels. Soldiers and slaves that our mages have filled with spirit-traps. And now it’s taken the bait.”
“Yet your traps failed,” said Sarovy.
“No, they’re working. Trust me,” said Trevere. “If it was free, it would have left him already. He's a Light-follower. He even thinks he's on the pilgrimage. Maybe the bonds on him aren’t as strong as they could be, but the Great Spirit doesn’t have his mind yet, and it’s not inexhaustible. That’s why we need to go after it now, while it’s recovering. Bind him up tight so it can’t struggle, and haul him back.”
“And after that?”
“They’ll send him to the Palace for exorcism, I expect. It’s the only way to kill the Dark spirit.”
“If you have prepared him for this, then how did he escape the camp?”
For an instant, the Hunter’s eyes flicked away. Sarovy noted that more keenly than the cold glare Trevere leveled on him afterward. “We couldn’t lock him up,” he said. “It’d never possess him like that. We had to give him some free rein and hope we could tell when the trap got tripped. But we missed it somehow, and he ran before the Inquisition could check him. They’re the only ones who could have verified that it was inside of him.”
Sarovy nodded slowly and looked to that black opening in the floor. Beyond it would be the full force of the Shadow Cult in this area, as angry as a kicked beehive. Add a supposed Great Spirit, and the Hunter's obvious evasion of the truth…
He did not like the picture it formed. It looked fatal.
But this was his duty. Half-turning, he spotted a soldier and snapped, “Linciard!”
The long-faced lancer came to attention and Sarovy waved him over impatiently. “Linciard, get a Veiling from the mages and go to the city barracks. I don’t trust a guard to properly report. Tell them that I need all free hands here to hold this tavern and the area, and that they should expect Shadow resistance. Have them take the horses back and bring the hounds, and get a mage from the city governor’s court. Even a civilian mage should be able to keep the Shadows at bay. Do you understand?”
“Yessir. Full reinforcements, expect resistance, horses, hounds, requisition a city mage.”
“Go.”
He watched Linciard hustle over to the ogrish mage, then turned away. The Veiling—that peculiar wavery, underwater-feeling magic that had masked his troop from the eyes and ears of the locals on their approach—should see Linciard safely to his destination. After that, it depended on how corrupt the Bahlaeran guardsmen really were.
“I do not wish to bring the injured,” he said, looking back to Trevere.
“Well, up to you, but we’re bringing both mages. If the Shadow Cult pops out once we leave, those men are dead.”
Sarovy stared at Trevere, seriously considering knocking him out and hauling him back to the barracks. By word of the Hunter writ, Trevere far outranked him--it was fortunate that as a scout, he was unused to command--but Sarovy was not afraid of a court-martial. He had been through one before, and had been exiled here. His life as a rising-star officer and the scion of a Trivestean noble house was over. His further punishment did not matter.
But he doubted he could take Trevere down. The Hunter was obviously empowered. Sarovy did not know what to make of that; while there were rumors of Palace-blessed agents among the common troops, and certainly he knew of the White Flame and its exploits, Trevere did not seem like the sort of person the Risen Phoenix would raise up. Nevertheless, he had no wish to be gutted in front of his own men, and feared that if Trevere led them down into the depths over his cooling corpse, none would return.
“Very well,” Sarovy said, and turned. Then flinched.
Looming at eye-level was a great gathered mass of beads, talismans and greasy braids, overlaying a bright orange robe that even a Bahlaeran would have deemed too garish. Sarovy backed up quickly, squinching his nose shut before he could accidentally breathe Revek Voorkei's stink. The ogre-blooded mage grinned down at him, exposing short yellow tusks, then fixed his attention on Trevere and began a snarling, rapid-fire diatribe in his guttural native tongue.
Treve
re—who came up to the ogre-blood’s breastbone—shot a look of dismissal to Sarovy before snapping at Voorkei, “Imperial! Imperial! I don’t speak gibberish!”
Sarovy circumvented them quickly, breathing through his teeth. He had nothing against Voorkei personally. It was the ogre-blood that made him perilously tall and bony, like a living coat-rack but without a full ogre's bulk, and with that heritage came the olive skin, the flattened nose and massive jaw, the oily black hair and pronged beard, and the musky stink that all male ogrekin seemed to emanate. How breeding ever happened between ogres and humans, Sarovy could not bear to imagine.
Though Voorkei was an observer from Gejara and not an Imperial mage, he accompanied the team because the Crimson Army had no one else. For years their supply of mages had dwindled as the General’s requests for reinforcements were denied. It was politics, Sarovy knew, but upon hitting the steel wall that was the siege of Kanrodi, the number of Crimson mages had dropped precipitously.
Kanrodi's serpent-sorcerers were exquisitely trained in destructive magics.
They killed off the Crimsons at alarming rates.
Voorkei at least seemed competent. The other mage, Jegen, was propped in the doorway now with a rag pressed to his bloody nose, trying to pretend that he was more than a boy in a robe. He skittered out of the way as Sarovy passed.
Outside, three spheres of light hovered over the bodies that had been piled in the street, casting a harsh, shadowless radiance upon everything. The Tasgard horses shifted and eyed the piles; they were scavengers and would tear at the corpses if given the chance.
Sarovy’s soldiers stood or sat or crouched nearby, nursing injuries that could have been worse. A few had taken knife-wounds through their chainmail, but most of the Shadow cultists seemed to wield clubs and saps.
The three dead Crimson soldiers had been laid out carefully, arms crossed over their chests. There were several dead city guards beside them. Sarovy bowed his head toward them, then looked over the living. They all met his gaze, the aftershocks gone. Bandages had been applied, dented armor discarded. They seemed to already know what his order would be.
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 19
