by Vox Day
“Stand aside. I have nothing of value. I am a messenger for Legio XVII en route to Cynothicum!”
“Are you now?” Claudius drawled, unimpressed. “Well, I think you should get down off your horse and put your hands on top of your head.”
“You’re no highwaymen!” the man accused him, sounding suspicious.
“Can’t rightly say we are, friend.” Claudius whirled his saber in a circle, causing the moonlight to flash off the highly polished blade.
Marcus took the opportunity of the distraction to draw his sword and ride down onto the road, followed by the two remaining men of his patrol.
“Now,” Claudius said, “where did you think you were going?”
The man was edging his horse slowly backward. But, alarmed by either Claudius’s demand or the sight of three drawn swords, he jerked on the reins and brought the horse rapidly around—only to find himself facing three more cavalrymen. Marcus almost laughed at the disbelieving look on the man’s face.
“Tribune!” he said, with a note of fear in his voice. He might not have recognized the armor the knights were wearing under their cloaks in the darkness, but the shape of Marcus’s helm was unmistakable.
“Get off your mount and drop any weapons you might have,” Marcus ordered. “If you try to ride for it, I’ll gut you and leave you for the wolves.”
Thanks to the moonlight, Marcus could see that the man’s face wasn’t familiar to him. He felt relieved, although he knew an unrecognizable face didn’t mean there wasn’t a traitor in the legion. All it meant was that he had an accomplice outside the camp, which tended to suggest the situation might be even more serious than he’d thought. One man indicated a spy. Two or more suggested a conspiracy.
The man didn’t say anything, but to Marcus’s intense satisfaction, he dismounted. Then he gingerly withdrew a long dagger from his belt and tossed it near, but not too close, to Marcus.
“Do any of you know this man?” Marcus asked the others.
Some shook their heads immediately. Two peered more closely at him before deciding they hadn’t seen him before either.
“None of us never seen him before,” Claudius finally concluded on behalf of his fellows.
“Make sure he doesn’t have any more blades on him.”
“Why are you stopping me, Tribune?” The man tried to present an innocent pose, even as two of Marcus’s men searched him, but he had waited too long and expressed too much irritation for it to be convincing. “I was riding with an urgent message on the legion’s business!”
“I have no doubt of that.” The question, of course, was on behalf of which legion. Marcus looked the man over. His clothes were of reasonable quality and, while his horse was nothing special, neither was it a worn-out nag. “Whose message were you carrying? It couldn’t have been for the legate—he has his own riders. It wasn’t any of the tribunes, since we use our own knights as messengers. So, you see, I have to question how vital this message could possibly be if it didn’t come from the legate or any of the officers of the legion. Was it a centurion who sent it? Or a decurion, perhaps? Did Proculus decide to make good on a gambling debt for once?”
Seeing that his feeble lie wouldn’t work, the man abandoned his attempt to feign innocence. “Well, maybe it wasn’t on the legion’s actual business, but I was given a message by a legionary. It’s true! He said it was important and said I’d be paid well if I arrived in Cynothicum before tomorrow night.”
“And the name of this legionary?”
“I didn’t ask. He come out and gave it to me at the whore’s place, the one where they got the two redheaded twins.”
Marcus didn’t know it. He glanced at Claudius, who nodded.
“Could be, sir. The Lady Julia’s, that’s what the madam calls herself. I been there a time or two. No tell if he’s lying about the hire, but he sure enough came from the whore’s camp.”
“Give me the message,” Marcus held out his hand to the captive.
He shook his head. “He didn’t give it to me to carry. He give it to me to remember.”
“Very well, out with it, then.” Despite his best efforts, Marcus yawned. The effects of his afternoon nap and the initial rush that had come when they’d intercepted the man were rapidly wearing off, and they still had a long ride back to the camp ahead of them.
“I was told to ride to the legion’s camp outside of Cynothicum. The senior tribune there is Appius Mallicus, and I was to tell him that the legate knows. That’s all. He said, ‘Tell Appius Mallicus the legate knows.’”
“Knows what?” Claudius asked before Marcus could.
“I don’t know,” the man shrugged. “Just that he knows. That was the whole message.”
The men looked puzzled and began suggesting a wide and increasingly improbable range of possible interpretations, but Marcus paid them no mind. He already knew what the message meant. He didn’t know who was commanding the Severan legion yet, but he was sure that whoever its legate happened to be would want to be informed as soon as his presence in the rebel province was discovered by the newly arriving legions.
The more important question was, what was the Severan legion doing there? Was the legion there legitimately, on orders from the Senate or one of the consuls? Or was it possible that it was somehow involved with the unexpected defeat of Lucius Andronicus and Legio XIV? Legionary against legionary in battle? That seemed unthinkable. Never in the history of the Republic had one Amorran legion attacked another. And it didn’t make any sense either, since the reports of the legion’s defeat had reached Amorr weeks ago and no one had suggested that there were any other enemies but the rebellious Cynothii involved.
And for all that he didn’t have any problem thinking ill of the Severans, House Severus was as fiercely loyal to Amorr as House Valerius was. He found it impossible to believe that a patrician as proudly Amorran as Severus Patronus could possibly have ordered one of his legions to wage war against another Amorran legion. But the princeps senatus was getting old, and perhaps there were other Severans who might not share his devotion to the city.
Marcus rubbed at his increasingly clouded eyes. One thing was certain: He wasn’t going to figure out any answers tonight. Tomorrow, the legion’s spy would be caught, both he and the messenger would be questioned by the senior centurions, and then they would have some answers. But now it was time to return to the camp.
He gave orders for the man’s arms to be bound and his legs tied together underneath his horse’s belly. One of the riders who wasn’t securing the man collected the discarded dagger, while Claudius tied a rope that attached his saddle to the captive’s.
“What’s going to happen to me?” the man asked. He was impressively calm, but even in the moonlight Marcus could see that he was sweating a little despite the cold night air.
“That’s up to the legate. But if you’re not a spy, you haven’t much to fear. There’s no law against carrying messages, after all. I’m sure if you help us identify the man who gave it to you, you’ll be paid well for your trouble. And you’ll even have saved yourself a day’s ride.”
The man appeared to relax somewhat. “I won’t cause you no trouble. My name’s Berroga. I don’t got nothing against nobody. I just wanted to earn some coin. If I promise to ride back with you, will you untie my hands? You already got me roped to that horse there.”
Marcus smiled and shook his head as he urged his horse forward on the road and the others followed suit. “I’m sure you mean well, Berroga, but I prefer to spare you any temptation that might befall you en route. And anyway, I envy you: You’re the only one of us who can sleep on the way without worrying about falling off.”
The dark, cold ride back to the camp wasn’t long, but tired as they were, it felt brutal, and none of the men were in the mood for talking. Marcus tried to think about who the spy in the camp might be, but his brain was barely functioning, and he realized he was mindlessly repeating ten centurions’ names in the order of their seniority, much as h
e had when he was a newly minted tribune. He shook his head and gave it up.
He would simply have to hope that the two men he’d left in the makeshift town had caught, or at least seen, the spy talking to Berroga. What strange names these provincials had! Of course, there was a very good chance the spy had gone unseen, as it wouldn’t be a surprise if the two men abandoned their watch and headed for a brothel as soon as Marcus and the others had been out of sight.
He breathed a great sigh of relief as the light from the torches atop the wooden walls of the legionary flickered off the polished metal of the men’s armor. He glanced back to ensure that their captive was still with them, safely bound, and nodded with satisfaction to see that he was there. He was just about to call out to the crossbow-armed guards atop the gate when a strange thought occurred to him. Turning around in his saddle, he quickly counted the horses. Eight men had ridden out and eight men had returned. But now, they had a captive.
Claudius noticed his expression as the terrible truth suddenly dawned in his mind. “Sir, what’s wrong?”
“Where is Lucius Orissis?”
The knight whirled around, and just as Marcus had done a moment ago, he quickly counted men. “The bastard’s gone! He must have dropped behind after we left the road, or we would have heard him.”
Berrogas threw back his head and laughed. Not even the hard smack of a backhand across his face from the rider next to him was enough to silence him entirely. As he softly chuckled, Marcus and Claudius stared at each other, astonished by realization that they, and with them, the legion, had been betrayed. By tomorrow evening, someone in Fulgetra would know whatever it was that the spies wanted them to know.
THEUDERIC
Their entry into Malkan had been much easier than he’d feared. Instead of travelling through the heavily forested wilds this time with only a taciturn native guide for company, he’d been able to ride through the mountain passes without much trouble. The mule-drawn carts containing the silver and their gear occasionally ran into difficulty, but with thirty footmen to push, pull, and otherwise muscle them around the narrow switchbacks, they were able to get through the three passes without losing one.
He wouldn’t have wanted to attempt the journey even a month later, when the snows started, though. By the winter fete, the route would be hopelessly impassible. It took two weeks to reach the circular double walls of Malkan, and while it was cold, rainy, and unpleasant for ten of the fourteen days, he found the two archbishops made for unexpectedly good travel companions.
His one regret was that he was unable to share a tent with the very tall and slender “sister” who made up one-third of the female portion of the entourage. The Lady Everbright wasn’t fond of being banished to the women’s tent, and even less enthusiastic about the uncomfortable religious attire she was being forced to wear, but she usually rode with him and dined with him at the end of the day. And if he were honest with himself, the truth was that they were both too exhausted at the end of the long day’s ride to do much more than exchange a chaste kiss in the evening before staggering off to their blankets and sleeping soundly until being woken to the cruel dark skies of their pre-dawn mornings.
Their embassy was, of course, unmolested, as any lurking eyes had no more to do than count the number of swords in the group before deciding to wait for more vulnerable prey.
Having sent a messenger on ahead, they were greeted graciously at the gate just before sundown by two of the city’s seven lords. And while the city mages immediately detected his magical abilities, they didn’t so much as ask him to refrain from using them. They did, however, insist on disarming the footmen.
Theuderic wondered if anyone had ever found the body of their young colleague he had killed the year before, when he had visited in the guise of Nicholas du Mere, a Montrovian cavalry captain down on his luck. He doubted it, and he wasn’t about to ask. He was simply pleased that the king’s warrant gave him such easy entry to a place he’d never thought he could visit again. But there was no other way to reach Amorr by land without daring to pass through through the Elvenlands, or worse, a long, circuitous journey through a wilds populated only by various orc and goblin tribes.
Malkan no longer derived most of its wealth from sitting in a privileged position on the north-south continental divide, but those ancient transit taxes had provided the original capital from which the great banks and merchant houses that now dominated the Golden Circle had grown.
The Malkanians put them up in a private manor that wasn’t far from the brothel where the Lady Everbright had been imprisoned the previous year. The archbishops, however, were invited to stay at the Bishop of Malkan’s residence, so Theuderic didn’t hesitate to take the opportunity to install his lover in his own bedchamber.
Afterward, he was lying on the bed in a languid post-coital stupor when she stood up, still naked, walked to the window, and looked out over the torchlamps lighting the cobble-stoned streets of the wealthy city.
“Did you kill them all?” she asked him unexpectedly.
He shook his head, not sure he’d heard her aright. “Kill who?”
“You said you were going to kill everyone who made me a whore. Here in Malkan. You promised me.”
He sat up and folded his arms over his knees. Backlit by the light of the outside lamps entering the window, her body seemed more slender and alien than usual. Her breasts were too high and a little too far apart to be human, and the paleness of her hair against her white skin made her look almost hairless. Her very lack of sensuality was itself provocative, a seduction by the innocent. But he was not fooled by her maidenly appearance. And even if her sexual experience was slight, it was colored by an experience of life that exceeded his by nearly forty years.
“Not yet.”
She was silent for a moment, then turned and looked out the window. She raised a hand and tucked her hair behind one pointed ear. Then she turned back to him. She looked vaguely surprised. “I don’t care.”
He was getting better at following the strange way her mind leaped from one topic to the next. “Are you saying you don’t want me to kill all of them?”
She pursed her lips, which like the rest of her, were pale and thin, making them look almost human. “Maybe just the rich man.”
She was talking about Aetias, the owner of the brothel, who had outbid Theuderic for her. But she didn’t know anything about that, and Theuderic was determined that she never would. “Alas, I must apologize, my love. I cannot do that.”
“You can’t?” She frowned. “Or you won’t?”
“I would if I could. Sadly, I inquired at the gate and learned that Quadras Aetias died in a quite tragic fall in his mansion. A terrible shame.”
Her eyes brightened. “You already killed him for me?”
“Well, I paid someone to do it,” he said modestly. She clapped her hands and kissed him enthusiastically, so enthusiastically that Theuderic almost regretted that she had absolved the remainder of her list. “I’m glad that you’re willing to spare the others. It’s not good to hold onto your hate.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you have seen how they call me Comte now, instead of Sieur. Do you understand why?”
“It is your noble title as opposed to your priestly one.”
He hesitated, then nodded. Close enough. She didn’t seem to grasp the difference between religion and magic, between l’Eglise and l’Academie. Was it an elven idiosyncracy, or was it simply her? “More or less. I was born to the title and inherited it, along with the comte of Thoneaux, when my father died eight years ago. Or rather, I would have inherited it, only when I was ten years old, it was discovered I possessed an amount of magical talent. Every boy in the kingdom is tested at that age, and if any significant talent is found, he is claimed by the king and henceforth regarded as the property of the realm.”
“They enslaved you?”
“In a sense, although for those of us who show any real talent, it’s an affront to slaves to desc
ribe us as such. The chains we wear are golden, and for nine out of every ten lads, maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred, it is a key to a much better life than they ever would have known without it.”
“And the girls?”
“They are tested too, but not until they are twelve. Those with sufficient talent are claimed and sequestered, and depending upon how strong the talent runs in them, they are required to bear between one and four children to the King’s Own.”
Her slanted eyes narrowed. “Their chains are not so golden.”
“Call them silver, perhaps. I doubt any of them would trade their decadent lives at l’Academie for the peasant drudgery that would otherwise await them. Most of them eventually marry mages, though not always the mages to whom they bear their children. Even nobles have been known to marry vademagiques.”
“That explains why Savondir produces so many mages,” she remarked. “Whereas we elves, despite our greater natural endowment, produce so few.”
“It also explains how Savondir conquered all of the human kingdoms of the north. Even when two or three kings joined their forces together against the king’s knights, what army could hope to stand against twenty, or thirty, or once, even fifty battlemages? Not that they didn’t try. Only your people have been able to defeat the royal armies, but that was long ago and who knows what will happen over the course of another twenty generations, when the king has a thousand or more mages at his disposal. Which is, of course, is something you may well live to see.”
“So you think your Academie will one day defeat the Collegium Occludum?” She smiled. “I doubt that.”
“So do I. The Collegium defeated the Witchkings, before whose dark knowledge and power even our immortels are little more than untutored children. I find it hard to believe even ten thousand battlemages would suffice.”
She nodded. “There are a few who could shatter the world if they wished. Bessarias. Amitlya. Possibly Galamiras, though I’ve never quite known what to make of him.”
