Empire - 03 - Mistress Of The Empire

by Raymond E. Feist

  None of Mara's surviving honor guard moved. Her senior officers kept a grim façade and said nothing.

  Tapek took another step ahead. The slowest of the fleeing slaves had fallen prone, overcome by the display of a Black Robe's unrestrained wrath. They lay in the ditches a dozen paces back from the roadside, weeping and shivering, their foreheads pressed to earth. Tapek ignored these as if they were faceless, of less import than winnowed grass underfoot. Wind-blown cinders stung his eyes as he crossed the seared ranks of the dead. Blistered bits of armor and finger bones crunched under his feet. Closer he came, and closer still; Mara's retinue held fast.

  Down the road, curtains flying awry, the green-lacquered litter bounced as its bearers raced with their burden. Keyoke had caught up to them, despite the encumbrance of his crutch.

  Tapek regarded their futile flight with contempt as he addressed the warriors before him. 'What does your loyalty matter in the end? Your mistress will never survive to escape.'

  The Lady's defenders refused speech. The plumes on Sujanra's helm twisted and quivered, yet that detail gave no satisfaction. The movement was no part of cowardice, but only the influence of the wind. The Force Leader's will was rock, his resolve unbending. Incomo stood like a priest in the holy ground of a temple, his face revealing an expression of profound acceptance.

  Tapek gazed upon each of these warriors who had witnessed his wrath, and still could not be made to fear. One thing remained that might hurt them, might yet shatter their front of solidarity and defiance.

  His anger burning again, Tapek gauged the distance between himself and the site where Mara's litter had retreated around a bend. He marked a lightning-torn tree. With a flexing of his will, his magic relocated him to that spot.

  As the Black Robe appeared, Keyoke whirled and stopped. Braced on his crutch, he assumed guard stance between the mage and his mistress's litter.

  'Tell your Lady's bearers to halt!' Tapek demanded.

  'Let my Lady command her slaves as she will.' Keyoke slipped his crutch from under his arm. He gripped it with both hands and twisted, releasing a hidden catch. The smoothed wood parted with the clean, clear hiss that signaled a blade being drawn from a scabbard concealed inside. His voice was not an old man's, but rang like that of a field general as he said, 'Neither will I stand aside, unless my Lady so orders.'

  Tapek was beyond astonishment. He glared, but saw no yielding. Keyoke's face was weathered leather, scribed with too many lines and too many years of hard living to alter its set and show weakness. His eyes might not be so clear of late, but they burned with the surety of his self-worth. He had faced the worst a warrior could imagine, to survive and overcome the shame of living maimed. Death, his steady gaze seemed to say, held no secrets, but only final quiet rest.

  'No need, old man,' the magician snapped. He moved toward the thicket where the bearers had scurried, dragging Mara's litter to shelter.

  Keyoke moved with surprising speed. The magician found himself targeted by the lunge of a sword's point, wielded by a cripple.

  The speed of the attack confounded Tapek, and just barely, he dodged aside. 'You dare!' he shouted.

  For all that had gone before, that any man alive should attempt violence against him was beyond Tapek's imagination. Keyoke not only dared, he repeated the act. His sword whined down, snapping a rip in black cloth. Tapek hopped away, his movements less graceful than those of the one-legged swordsman as he barely escaped the deadly blow. The blade flicked, cut, and forced him back yet again. Harried almost off balance, Tapek could not summon concentration. To focus his will and access magic was impossible as he ducked and sidestepped and backed away from the old man's attack. 'Stop! Stop at once!' cried the magician. Unaccustomed to physical exertion, it was all he could do not to pant.

  Mockery tinged Keyoke's next feint. 'What, you cannot outrun even me?'

  Forced to teleport out of reach, Tapek reappeared, breathing hard. Tsurani enough to burn with shame for his retreat, and half choking in throttled rage, he drew himself up with as much majesty as he could muster. From a deep pit of black wrath, he summoned power. Magic gathered in him and made the air crackle with ozone. Blue energies discharged around him, as if he centered a small-scale lightning storm.

  Still Keyoke admitted no fear. As he leaned on the blade he had carried in his crutch, his normally impassive mien gave way to a thin-edged scorn. He observed, 'My mistress is right. Your kind are nothing but men, no wiser or nobler than other men.' Seeing his words sting the magician, who now stood trembling, he added, 'And fearful, childish men at that.'

  From behind, amid the standing handful of Acoma honor guard, a warrior snickered.

  Tapek roared in mindless fury. His focused might unleashed. His hand fell in a cutting motion, and a shadowy shape swooped out of empty air. The apparition reared up, then towered, a darkness like a well of moonless night. It poised for only a heartbeat, then spun in a rush toward Keyoke.

  On reflex, the old man raised his blade to parry. Fast as a more youthful man, he met the thing edge on. But his foe this time was nothing solid. His weapon passed unobstructed through inky darkness. He did not twist aside in attempted flight, even as the spell cut inside his guard. Because Keyoke met the spell unflinching, it struck him full in the chest.

  Armor might have slowed it; the shimmering, silk of his adviser's garb daunted the dark not at all. Its fell touch shriveled the fabric. After that, Keyoke's voluntary control was sundered. The proud old warrior who had dandled Mara in childhood stiffened. His fingers loosened. His sword fell from his hand as the shadow bit into him. His eyes lost their determination, widened in agony and terror.

  And yet at the last, the fighter had the victory. His tired heart could not withstand the shock and the pain that a younger man would have endured; his spirit, its term long served, had in late years kept a light hold on life. Keyoke tottered, his chin tipped toward the sky as if in salute to his gods. Then he collapsed in a heap, his body as dead as the stones beneath him, and his face relaxed in peace.

  Tapek's rage remained unquenched. He had wanted the old man to scream and beg, to howl in animal misery, that Mara, cowering in her litter, might know her beloved Adviser for War had suffered as a dog might, expressly at the whim of its master. Tapek cursed. Regret goaded his temper to new heights. He had wanted Mara dead before her old warrior's life flickered its last, so that Keyoke would see her sent to Turakamu before him, and die knowing his lifework was wasted. Consumed by white fury, the magician lunged after the litter, abandoned now by its bearers and sitting forlorn in the thicket. Tapek muttered incantations and snapped harsh spells out of air. He bit off his words and spiked each breath with gestures. His conjury raised a cluster of silvery disks that hovered, spinning, above his hands. Their edges were keener than knives, and the breeze carved by their passage gave off a dissonant hum. 'Go!' the mage commanded.

  The death disks whirled away faster than sight, and carved through the thicket. Their touch sucked life. Green plants and saplings withered, shriveled in a moment to dry twigs. No object held power to stop them; no barrier could slow their course. They crossed stone as if through shadow, and sliced through the litter curtains without rending a thread. As they converged inside, a woman's choked-off scream rang through the glade. Then came silence, unbroken by the rustle of songbirds.

  Every wild creature had long since fled.

  The warriors at Tapek's back remained. Whipped to outrage by the attack on their mistress's litter, their Strike Leader called them to charge.

  Tapek loosed a maniacal laugh as he pivoted to face them. The swords in their hands looked foolish, and the battle lust in their faces the grimace of rank fools. The magician amplified his spell. He waved his hands, sending disk after disk spinning into the ranks that rushed him.

  Men fell. They did not scream, having no moment to draw breath. One instant they lived and ran, shouting Acoma battle cries. The next second, cut by the mage's killer disks, they withered. Their legs fo
lded, spilling them like stick figures onto dry earth. Tapek's fury remained in full flood. As if determined to scorch and kill everything in sight, he continued to hurl magic. Flash after flash left his hands shaped as spells of destruction. The air chimed and sang off the edges of his spinning projectiles long after the last of Mara's warriors had fallen dead, Incomo sprawled among them in a crumple of silk robes like some incongruous trodden flower.

  Tapek's strength ebbed suddenly.

  Exhausted, dizzy and fighting spinning vision, the magician had no choice but to pause and catch his breath. He did not gloat. Resentment still smoldered within him, that mere men had defied him. He did not regret their demise at his hand, but that he had been goaded into killing Mara too quickly. Her end had deserved to be painful and prolonged, for the trouble she had caused the Assembly.

  Tapek shrugged his robe straight, then picked his way between carcasses toward what once had been a green thicket. A scattering of slaves and servants cowered whimpering, their faces pressed to earth. The death spells had winnowed their numbers, and what few were left were half mad. Tapek stalked past and pushed through dry sticks and blackened branches toward the dead patch of earth surrounding the Acoma litter. Dried leaves and brittle twigs crumbled to dust at his passage.

  Only the litter's bright lacquer was undimmed; spared the effects of life-draining magic, it seemed almost artificial in the brilliance of untrammeled sunlight. Tapek stepped ahead and swept aside the curtains with their embroidered blazon of shatra birds.

  A lifeless woman reclined on the cushions, staring with eyes frozen wide in astonishment. Her limbs were clothed in the robes of a great Lady, but her features were not Mara's.

  Tapek's curse rang out over the ruin in the roadway.

  He had accomplished nothing but the execution of some maid wearing Mara's robes. He had been duped! He, a mage of the Assembly, had been lulled by the presence of Keyoke and a handful of officers and soldiers into the belief that he had overtaken the Lady. Instead, she had counted a victory upon him, anticipating his hot temper. The soldiers had all known, before they died, that she had bested a Great One of the Assembly; as had the old man. Keyoke had played along with the ruse, no doubt to his fullest amusement before he died.

  Tapek glared through the woods in frustration. Except for a cowering handful of slaves, his spells had cut down all life. Any in the Acoma retinue of high enough station to know the Lady's whereabouts were now slaughtered, and no satisfaction could be gained by questioning or torture of witless slaves.

  Tapek found curses insufficient vindication. Neither could he subside and meekly swallow the irony of Mara's triumph. He snapped up his hand, creating a vortex of scintillating colors above his head. Faster and faster he whipped the energies, then, with a flick of a wrist, cast the deadly rainbow toward the woods. The energies struck the trees and undergrowth. Magic raised a crack and a shimmer that exploded in alien blue-white light. The singed air give off a stench of cooked metal, and living matter was immolated. Where the slaves had been, there was nothing, not bones, not shadows, but only a scouring of uncanny spellcraft.

  The coruscation dimmed, then flicked out. Sweat-drenched, Tapek stood panting. His eyes swept back and forth, examining the scope of his handiwork. Before his feet yawned a crater stripped of soil. The rock of the earth stood bare to view and above it, for yards in each direction, nothing crawled or flew. Revealed also were the Acoma servants who had managed to flee the farthest. No longer sheltered by brush, they lay writhing in the aftermath of the magic that had lashed them. Their faces and skin were blistered, blackened leather; their hands were seared fingerless. These few still twitched, dying in lingering agony that could find no voice even to scream.

  'Splendid,' said a voice out of air.

  Tapek started, turned, and saw Akani, lately arrived from the City of the Magicians. He wore a shield spell against arcane attack, that sparkled like a bubble in the afternoon sun.

  Too spent to offer greeting, Tapek sagged. His strength was at lowest ebb, but he took heart at the possibility of swift reinforcement. 'Good. You are needed. I am exhausted. Find — '

  Akani interrupted in annoyed acerbity. 'I will do none of your bidding. In fact, I was sent to find you. Kerolo sent word that you were acting rashly.' With cold eyes and a study for detail, Akani reviewed the ravaged countryside. 'I judge the case was understated. You've been played for a fool, Tapek. A child could be expected to react to taunts, but a full-trained mage of the Assembly? Your excesses speak ill of us all.'

  Tapek's features turned thunderous. 'Do not mock me, Akani. Mara set a clever trap to defy us!'

  The litigator turned magician said in contempt, 'No need. You do an exceptional job of aiding her cause by yourself.'

  'What? I am no ally of hers!' Tapek tottered forward, fiercely irked that his powers were spent.

  Akani dispensed with his defenses, a subtle insult to emphasise the plain fact that his fellow mage was reduced to helpless fuming. With a regard to the last twitching bodies of Mara's servants, he said, 'You realise that if Lady Mara fled her litter in disguise, you have left not a face intact to tell.'

  Tapek responded with pique. 'Then engage your strength to find her! Mine has been fully exhausted in this cause.'

  'Wasted, more like. Nor will I act on this further.' Akani advanced on his colleague. 'I was dispatched by the Assembly to fetch you back. You have acted without warrant on a matter that is under discussion; that is a shameful breach of our covenant, and matters are far graver than you know. You were exhorted to use prudence, yet you let your passions rule you. If the Good Servant is not already dead, you have destroyed the very officers we had at hand who might have revealed the extent of her plot against us.'

  Tapek frowned. 'Plot? Against the Assembly? You mean she's done more than defy us?'

  Akani sighed. His youthful face looked tired. Moved by his background in law to examine all sides of an issue, he admitted, 'We drove her to it. But yes, Lady Mara may have in mind to disrupt our treaty with the cho-ja.'

  'She'd never dare!' Tapek exploded, but the memory of Keyoke's brazen challenge contradicted that presumption. There was nothing that gods-accursed Acoma bitch would not try. Nothing.

  'The Lords of the Nations never expected her to survive the might of the Minwanabi, let alone destroy them,' Akani qualified drily. 'Our kind have long been inured to struggle by dint of our exalted position. We have forgotten to guard against contention, and our past complacence brings us peril.'

  Then, as he saw aggression kindle in his colleague's eyes, the ex-litigator added, 'Your part in this matter is finished, Tapek, by the Assembly's decree. Now come with me.' Taking his teleportation device in hand, Akani activated it, then firmly gripped Tapek's shoulder. The two magicians vanished in an inrush of air that sucked eddies in the drifting smoke, and wafted fresh air over the last, jerking spasms of dying Acoma servants.

  * * *

  The Lady's boldness had saved her. Tapek, in his impromptu search, had never thought to look off the roads, in the deepest, thickest undergrowth. He perceived no deeper than Mara's outer trappings as a pampered noble Lady, and could never have imagined how profoundly her foray into Thuril had changed her. Besides her bold strike into rough country, the direction Mara had taken when she left her litter and main company was not northward toward Kentosani. Instead, she had cut due southwest, in direct line toward the nearest cho-ja tunnels.

  She and the warriors with her traveled without rest through two nights. Now, near sundown of the second day, the Lady stumbled on her feet. Saric walked at her shoulder, his touch at her elbow holding her upright, though he was scarcely more able himself.

  The one scout who still maintained alertness raised a hand. Only when Mara had been restrained gently to a stop did she realise the reason for his signal.

  The birds in the high, dense canopy of ulo trees had stopped singing.

  She motioned for her rear guard to halt and said, 'What is it?'

 
Saric poised, listening. The Strike Leader on point quietly urged his warriors to search the treetops.

  'Are we in danger from ambush?' Mara asked in a whisper.

  The scout who had first given warning shook his head. 'Hardly here. Even thieves would starve if they staked out this area of the forest. No traffic to keep them supplied.' He cocked his head, and was fastest to note the approaching noise of armed men. 'A patrol, I think, my Lady.'

  'None of ours,' Saric concluded. He glanced at Strike Leader Azawari, who nodded, while the small band of hand-picked warriors drew swords. To the scout the Acoma adviser said urgently, 'How far are we from the tunnel entrance?'

  'A mile at best,' came the answer; too far to run in this company's exhausted state, even if they were not to be harried from the rear.

  Saric stepped before his Lady, who sweated under her layers of borrowed armor. She had carried the added weight well enough, but her skin was chafed raw from the unaccustomed motion of walking. Still, pluckily, she kept up appearances and reached for the sword at her side.

  Saric clamped her hand in a freezing grip, his penchant for questions lost to urgency. 'No. If we are attacked, you must flee and seek to hide. Save the sword for yourself, to fall on if need be, should you be taken. But to try to hold here would be folly.' More kindly he added, 'You have no training, mistress. The first stroke you met would cut you down.'

  Mara looked him sternly in the eyes. 'If I must run, you will follow suit. Nacoya did not school you for your office only to see you wasted in armed combat.'

  Saric managed a half-flippant shrug. 'A sword thrust would be kinder than a magician's spell.' For he had no illusions. Their small, fast-moving party might have escaped notice from the Assembly, but not for long. Yet to remain beyond reach of arcane retribution, his Lady must live to find refuge in the cho-ja tunnels.