by Sam Sykes
“With all respect, Marcher Pathon,” she said, “your optimism seems a bit … misplaced.”
“Not at all, madam!” He cast a grin over his shoulder. “Daeon watches over those who march in his name! I myself survived a shict raid on our convoy not two weeks ago and managed to make it to my post here. What do you call that but divine providence?”
“How many were in your convoy?”
“Two hundred fifty-six, madam.”
She lofted a brow. “And how many others made it to the garrison?”
“Thirteen,” he said with unnerving cheeriness.
She glanced around the camp again. A few tired eyes followed her for a few tired steps but quickly turned back to their campfires. She had seen wounded Karnerians before; she had seen tired Karnerians before. But this was the first time she had ever seen demoralized Karnerians.
The Karnerian belief in Daeon was such that fanatic could be used to describe those few casual worshippers. The speakers, their battle-priests, were a constant presence in any Karnerian regiment. Which was when Asper thought to ask …
“All my dealings with your soldiers have been through Speaker Careus. May I ask where he is?”
At this, Pathon froze. And when he turned to face her, the grin was gone from his face.
“The speaker is …” Pathon glanced away nervously. “That is, madam, we didn’t know who else to call. The soldiers have heard of you, they say you’re the best of the few healers who remain in the city. We would leave this to the medic, but …”
She stared at him intently. “But?”
He paled. “The speaker has been—”
“Marcher Pathon.”
Another voice cut through the air with such authority that it might well have impaled Pathon on the spot. He certainly froze in place as though he had been skewered. He turned, slowly, to face who had spoken and Asper peered around him. Her eyebrows rose in appreciation.
She hadn’t expected such a booming voice could come from such a small woman.
She, like her fellow Karnerians, stood dark-skinned with dark hair done up in a businesslike bun. Unlike the soldiers surrounding her, though, she stood smaller, slighter. Her draping black garments left her shoulders and arms bare, making her look almost too delicate for this sort of surrounding. Upon the bridge of a delicate nose, a pair of spectacles did little to shield the intensity of the stare she fixed on Pathon.
“Foescribe.” He snapped to a stiff salute. “As you commanded, I have—”
“I did. And you have,” the woman replied with a voice just as stiff. “Kindly return to your phalanx.”
“Yes, but, madam, I—”
“Marcher.”
Her voice like a bone breaking, the command came out swiftly and sent Pathon scurrying away just as quick. The soldier spared a brief nod for Asper, his grin all but gone, as he disappeared.
“Asper. Priestess.”
As the woman approached her, Asper could see that she carried something. Clutched in the crook of her arm with the sort of protectiveness one might cradle an infant was a thick scroll bound with a thin black chain. She quickly unclasped the chain and unfurled it, glancing it over while casting fleeting looks at Asper.
“Northern descent, strong chance of Muraskan origin,” she said. “Just short of six feet of height, approximately short of one hundred and …” She glanced back up at Asper, removed a quill from her sash and made a quick notation. “Fifty pounds.”
“Hey!” Asper protested.
“Faith: Talanite,” the woman continued, ignoring her. “Position: Priestess. Seventeen complaints lodged from various commanding positions in the Imperial Legion describing persistent meddling in areas of Empire-Sainite conflict. Eighteen complaints lodged describing unwarranted profanities and invectives launched at them—”
“Oh, that’s oxshit—”
“Nineteen.” She made another little note in her scroll before furling it up, clasping the chain over it, and returning it to the protective crook in her arm. She then looked at Asper, taking in her incredulous stare with a flat expression. “Is something amiss, priestess?”
“Yeah, something like that.” She furrowed her brow. “I didn’t even know there were women in the Karnerian military, let alone ones who have an unnerving fascination with me.”
“All Imperials serve in the Divine Mandate, priestess,” the woman replied. “Men have their duties. We women of the Arda Scriptis have our own. Knowing thoroughly potential dangers to the Mandate is one such duty.” She looked down at Asper, somehow, despite being half a head shorter. “Not a fascination.”
“Women of the what?”
“To the layperson, such as Marcher Pathon, the Arda Scriptis are commonly known as Foescribes. Such a term will suffice, if it’s easier for you.”
“All right.” Asper rubbed the back of her neck. “Or I could call you by your name?”
The woman arched a brow, as though this were a novel concept. “If it is necessary.” She inclined her head in a bow. “Haethen Caladerus. Thank you for answering our summons, priestess.” She eyed Asper’s left arm in its sling. “Are you capable of performing duties so incapacitated?”
Asper adjusted her arm slightly. “More than capable. Is that what this is about?”
“I …” Haethen paused, glancing around. “This is not the place to discuss it, priestess.” She made a beckoning gesture and started walking toward the rear of the fortress, where the looming temple stood. “Please, come with me. All will be explained in time.”
“Of course,” Asper said, making certain to sigh just loud enough so that Haethen would be certain to hear her.
She didn’t want the Foescribe realizing she already knew what she was needed for.
Within moments of entering the Temple of Daeon, Asper began to see why Pathon had scoffed at the idea of housing the injured here.
After what seemed like an hour of waiting here, Asper began to wonder how, with so much devotion for the Conqueror here, there was any room for his faithful.
From the entryway to the central chamber to which she had been led, every room was less a place of worship and more a place of war. Every wall bristled with displays of crossed spears, shining shields, and tapestries scrawled with Imperial oaths. Every floor was crowded by tables laden with charts, maps, logbooks, and manifests. And those few spaces that were not dedicated to waging war were dominated by the horned god who demanded it.
At the center of the chamber, towering over her in a suit of black iron armor, the statue of Daeon watched over the room with a scowl beneath sweeping horns. He leaned heavily on a massive blade, as though ready to spring to life and decapitate any who might displease him.
Far from intimidated, Asper looked over the armored effigy with a sour indignity.
For just a fraction of the wealth that had been used to decorate this statue, she could have bought supplies to save at least a hundred lives.
But then … She looked up into the statue’s scowl with a sigh. You don’t go looking to a war god to save lives, do you?
That was probably why Haethen had excused herself, bidding Asper to await her here, she reasoned. She knew enough about Karnerians to know that they valued displays of power as much as power itself. Keeping her waiting was obviously an attempt to make it clear that Asper was here at the Empire’s pleasure.
And while she had endured several such shallow displays of power in her time at Cier’Djaal, it was only with this one that she started to worry.
This was a mistake, she thought, glancing around the chamber. They know. How could they not know? This is the Empire of fucking Karneria you’re trying to fuck with, not some backwater dimwits. They’ve brought you here to have you killed. This was the dumbest thing you’ve—
Something caught her eye. And in another moment, self-abuse no longer seemed like the most productive thing in the room to do.
Besides the war god himself, the largest thing in the room was a sprawling table with an elaborate map
of Cier’Djaal and the surrounding regions upon it. Asper wandered closer and saw several small wooden icons dotting it. Black icons dotted Temple Row and the surrounding area while several blue icons remained scattered around Harbor Road.
Troop positions, she thought. Black for Karnerian, blue for their Sainite enemies, and …
Her eyes drifted away, down toward the end of the sprawling table, across the long map. Over Cier’Djaal’s paper walls, across the parchment desert, down the roads of ink to a small drawing of four stone walls and a collection of huts.
“Jalaang,” she whispered, reading the inscription.
The city she had just come from. The city someone she had once called friend had conquered. The city whose walls held an army he was building to burn down Cier’Djaal.
On this map, with all its grand designs and icons like a great game board, there was nothing on Jalaang: no icon, no game piece, not so much as a single note of “reminder to self: lots of hideous ape-men that want to kill us hanging out here.”
They don’t even know, she thought. They’re so paranoid about the Sainites, they have no fucking clue that the tulwar are going to come raze this city. Those stupid pieces of—
She paused, drew in a deep breath.
Easy. Anger won’t help here. Remember the plan. She stared down at the map of Cier’Djaal and all its parchment towers. Remember why you need the plan. Remember that this—
“Priestess?”
She whirled a little more swiftly than she intended to at the sound of Haethen’s voice. And when she beheld the woman, the welcoming smile from before was gone, replaced by the iron glower and tightly pursed lips from before.
“Something has caught your eye, I take it.”
“Your war looks as though it will continue to drag on,” Asper observed. “There’s a lot of blue on this map.”
Ire flashed across Haethen’s face for a moment. “It was my understanding that Talanites took no side in this conflict.”
“Talanites are here to save lives,” Asper replied. “The side we take is against any who raise blades against the helpless.” She eyed the troop formations across the map with a sneer. “Turns out neutrality does fuck-all for that.”
“I sympathize,” Haethen replied in a tone that suggested sympathy and contempt were synonyms to her. “The battle has been more protracted than we expected. Sainite mobility has proven detrimental to nailing down their location.” She inhaled sharply, then drew herself up. “Still, we have no doubts that the war will end in Karnerian favor.”
“Yeah?” Asper glanced over her shoulder. “So you called me here merely to reassure me of that?”
Haethen’s face twitched ever so slightly. “The Empire does not seek consult from outside sources. The logistics of the Arda Scriptis are such that—”
“Because even if you defeat the Sainites, you’ll still have a ravaged husk of a city and a people you’ve slaughtered for the past month.”
“That, too, can be dealt with. Once the Sainite threat is conquered, we can move toward reassuring—”
“And what then? After the Sainites, what about the tulwar in the lands beyond the walls? What about the shicts? What about the—”
“I can handle it!” Haethen suddenly snapped. Anger did not so much flash as flood across her face. She swept past Asper, thrusting a finger toward the troop formations on the map. “I have studied every treatise, every manual, every historical account in the Imperial Library. I can choke the Sainites, I can fend off the savages, I can save Cier’Djaal. And if Careus were here, he’d—”
She stopped suddenly, whirling on Asper with her horror in her eyes as she realized what she had just said. Asper fixed Haethen with a scrutinizing glare. The woman’s mouth hung open, still trying to hold on to the words she had just so carelessly blurted out.
Her face twisted into a cringe, then a grimace, and then, finally, it all but melted off her with as she released a very long, very low sigh. When she removed her spectacles and looked back to Asper, it was as though she were staring at a different person.
The Imperial sternness and rigidity had disappeared, leaving behind a woman who looked almost too young to be here. But the youth of her face was starkly at odds with the deep, sleepless rings beneath her eyes that her spectacles had so gallantly hidden.
“Understand, priestess,” Haethen began, her voice softer, “that a Foescribe is a highly specialized role. We memorize, we study, we plan. Our duty to the Empire is to learn, not to lead. I’m …” She rubbed her eyes. “We lost all our commanders to Sainite strikes. Everyone but Careus. I’m the last one remaining and I wasn’t … I’m not supposed to …”
Asper reached out and placed her hand on Haethen’s shoulder. She felt tension radiating out of the woman, a weary stress that she recognized quite keenly. The widowed mother, the ailing man, the boy with the limp; she knew that tension of a strong person ready to snap. And when Haethen looked up at her, she offered her no comforting smile. Strong people didn’t need that. She merely looked at her and spoke simply.
“Haethen,” she said, “where is Careus?”
Dilation of the pupils. Involuntary muscle spasms. High fever. Symptoms common enough to a variety of illnesses; ones she had expected.
The paling of flesh to the point that the veins of his body shone black and ragged through his skin, though?
That, she hadn’t expected.
When Asper had first met Speaker Careus, dark-skinned and shorn of hair, he had looked more statue than man: muscles carved of dark stone and wrapped in black armor, a face unflinching in its sternness and a voice unwavering in its forcefulness.
Now, as he lay upon the cot in a back room of the temple, his blankets black with sweat and the air sick with the scent of pain, he looked frail. His piercing eyes were shut tight in trembling agony. His bellowing voice was a soft whimper with each staggered breath he took. And his muscular body was a ruin. His dark skin was so pale that his veins were visible and pronounced beneath, an ugly map of the illness ravaging his body.
Just like they said he’d be, Asper thought.
“It began days ago,” Haethen said from behind her. “One moment, he was reviewing our deployment, the next he just …” She gestured to his twitching, prone form. “Dropped.”
Asper nodded. She made a show of glancing around the room, noting the water jug, the washbasin, the numerous field medical textbooks—all grossly out-of-date, she noted.
“Has he slept at all?” she asked, like she didn’t know. “Or has he just been twitching this whole time?”
“He hasn’t responded to us, nor has he stopped moving.” Haethen rubbed her eyes. “Our medics are useless. They’re trained for stitching wounds and treating whorehouse diseases. They couldn’t even begin to guess what had happened to him.”
Asper pursed her lips, staring intently at Careus for a long moment.
“Priestess.”
She felt Haethen’s urgent, heated gaze upon her before she even turned to face her. But when she looked upon the woman, she didn’t anticipate seeing someone who looked like she was ready to fall to pieces.
“The medics urged me not to call upon you,” she said. “It would be severely compromising for anyone to learn of the speaker’s condition.” She glanced over the rim of her spectacles. “The risks I took to bring you here … That is, if I brought you here and you can’t …”
Haethen left her words hanging; she had neither the force to make a threat nor the strength to finish that thought. But she didn’t need to, Asper knew. For there was more at stake here than Haethen suspected.
And so much of it depended on what Asper said next.
“Do you believe in gods?”
Haethen looked at Asper as though she had not so much asked a question as hitched up her robes and urinated on Careus’s face.
“I am loyal to the Empire,” she said, “as the Empire is loyal to Daeon. It is through the Conqueror that Karneria was forged in red fire, through him that it
s glories spread beyond its—”
“I didn’t ask if you could recite scripture,” Asper said. “I asked if you believed in gods.”
“Yes,” Haethen answered softly, after a moment. “I do.”
Asper nodded, then looked back to Careus, twitching and sweating upon the cot.
“Everyone does, don’t they?” she whispered. “No matter how awful things get, no matter how many people die, everyone still believes the gods will fix things.”
Asper knelt down beside Careus, knees creaking with a familiar pain. With a wince, she pulled the strap of her medicine bag over her head, cringing as it brushed her broken left arm. At the touch, something within the shattered bone stirred. She tried to ignore it.
“Did you pray for him?” Asper asked.
“We held a beseeching service to Daeon,” Haethen replied, “assembling all viable soldiers for—”
“Haethen.”
Asper looked over her shoulder.
“Whatever happens next, happens not because of what you think the gods want, but because of what you did.” She fixed the woman with a long gaze. “Did you pray for him?”
Haethen met Asper’s stare. “I did.”
“How long?”
A pause. She spoke more softly. “Every moment I could spare.”
“And how many was that?”
A bleak silence hung between them. The answer was painted in the despair creeping in at the edges of Haethen’s face. Asper nodded slowly.
“There comes a point when it’s too much, isn’t it?” she whispered. “There comes a point when you realize that the longer you pray, the deeper the silence will be when the gods don’t answer you.”
Asper slid her free hand into the sling around her broken arm. Beneath her fingers, she could feel the flesh of the damaged limb tremble and quiver. At the back of her head, she could hear a dark voice whisper.
“What did you expect to happen, I wonder?”
