“The weapon works,” Jarman said in a reverent whisper.
“It is magnificent,” Gavril intoned. “We will save the realms.”
But not my soul, Ewan thought. Why had he done this? Why? To stop Calemore? He understood the significance of his act; he understood the importance, the necessity. He recalled the lament of murdered gods in the Abyss; he remembered Damian. This was justice. But that did not mean he would ever like being the instrument of delivery. Never that. Once you got used to the killing, you lost your humanity. That was what Ayrton, his dear friend, would have said.
Once, people who had killed in the name of various causes could go to the Safe Territories and ask for forgiveness, ask someone else to embrace their guilt and remorse, to cleanse their souls. He knew better than that. For him, there would be no one to share the burden. Weeks ago, he had felt relief at meeting the one remaining god. Now he realized that deities never quite shared human emotions. On the contrary, they had created men so they could unload their own onto their creations. Cowardice in its perfect form. And he was an accomplice.
Perhaps one day, he would figure out why he had been made this way, why life had steered him toward loneliness and pain. Perhaps one day he would figure out a way to undo his legacy and regain a normal, simple life. Until then, he was a monster, and ignoring that would be to lie to himself. He would never forget that.
Disgusted, disillusioned, he went down the slope toward the camp, ignoring the religious and scientific celebration taking place behind him.
CHAPTER 27
“Higher. Go higher. Careful. Now, shake the branch.”
The thin boy was scrambling through the crown of the apple tree like a little monkey, his feet deft on the slender branches. They bent and creaked, but did not break. The last fruit of autumn was always the sweetest. A few big, succulent apples would always remain near the top, defying wind, rain, birds, and the inexorable pull of the ground. Not today.
There was a nervous rustle as the lad tilted the branches left and right, swaying them like a banner. The big apples swayed, refusing to come down. But then the stems broke, and they plummeted onto a stretched-out blanket held by three other youths.
Calemore approached and scooped up one of the red fruits, wiped a season of dust against his shirt, and bit into the shiny, unblemished skin. Delicious. Divine.
He could have used magic to get the last apples. But that would have been sacrilege. Using magic to somehow alter the natural growth of an apple tree. Crazy. If he had to do that, he might as well destroy the world altogether, because there was no point to its quirks, imperfections, its randomness, and mostly its complete disregard for those who trod upon it.
Soon, the human monkey was done, and he clambered back deftly, fearless. He dusted himself off, bowed to his master, and ran back to the camp. The three other boys lowered the blanket, collected the apples into a silk-lined basket, and carried it away.
In their eagerness to prepare for the autumn and winter, some of his soldiers had cut down half the grove for firewood. Any other time, Calemore would have punished the morons for their transgression, for using fruit-bearing trees as kindling. He would have ordered the woodcutters tied to the back of a wagon and dragged until their guts left a slimy trail down the road, like slugs. Now, though, he had just asked the commanders to exact their own judgment over the ruin of an orchard, as it should have been left intact for after the conquest. Next year, once the war was complete, the nation would need food.
The taste for killing had left him. Nigella had bewitched him.
Only now, he had a new reason to try to regain his love for violence.
Someone had used a bloodstaff to kill his men.
Someone had found the second example.
He had thought it lost in the war somewhere, buried under hundreds of thousands of tons of molten rock and earth. He had thought no one would ever remember that it had existed, let alone figure out where it might have last been used before the defeat of Damian’s and his forces. Even he had forgotten all about it, until now.
Apparently, though, the one surviving god was much more resourceful and cunning than he had imagined.
That scared him. Genuinely scared him.
The bloodstaff could not kill him, but it could utterly decimate his troops. That would render his eternal plan useless, undo the generations of careful preparations. Well, if his stupid father had not tried to double-cross him, he could have been a god by now, and this forceful invasion would never have taken place. Too late for that now. Brute force should have decided the battle, and his enemy had just undone the element of surprise and numerical advantage that he had. His success was no longer certain. The victory of the Naum forces was not a foregone conclusion. Far from it.
Real, stark fear, exhilarating, breathtaking, gut clenching, ecstatic, bloodcurdling, terrifying.
Everything he had ever wanted was at stake now. He might not become a god.
The realization almost made him scream in fury.
It wasn’t the challenge that galled him. It was not the uncertainty. It was the understanding he could no longer rely on his immortality, on his magic, on his power to win this war. He had just become as insignificant as his opponent.
Almost human.
Flawed.
Calemore walked into the ghost town of Bassac, its buildings mostly intact, the streets empty and quiet, apart from an odd team of engineers inspecting the damage, searching for traps, examining the livability of the place. The defenders had fled, leaving most of their belongings behind, apart from the crucial bits like food and tools. Bassac might house people, but the winter would scourge it clean unless his craftsmen could make it hospitable for the coming wave of Naum families.
A small procession was coming toward him, three wagons teamed up with mules, plodding slowly over old, worn cobbles. The wind stirred, and a whiff of death tickled his nostrils. Munching the apple, savoring the tart juices, he walked toward the deathly convoy and looked into the back of one of the carts.
A neat pile of bodies was gently festering in the sun of the last summer days. The people of the realms would welcome the autumn in one of the evenings, boost the strength of the surviving god with their stupid prayer. His foe was just getting stronger, more confident, and he was becoming insecure, frightened. He had to visit Nigella, the risks be damned. He must have her prophecies.
The bodies looked just like he expected, serene and clean. Some had tiny punctures in their armor and bodies, almost too small to notice; others had their limbs severed cleanly, as if by a giant cleaver. They looked all too peaceful, nothing like the chop of a typical battle, when these stupid humans rushed against one another with hammer and sword. This was death in its higher form, beautiful and precise.
The only problem was, the dead belonged to him, not the other way around.
He had not planned for his enemy to gain the second bloodstaff. That made him wary, hesitant, maybe even confused. It ruined all his planning. He had intended to use the entire strength of Naum in one unstoppable wedge, drive south down the spine of these realms, and then split west and east and finish the survivors. Now, the massive throng just meant his forces posed an easy, large target for the wielder of the second weapon. Compressed together, for a quick slaughter.
So what should he do now? Abandon centuries of preparations? No. That was inconceivable.
He would just have to risk going against the surviving god in person.
He had intended to remain behind the scenes, guiding his troops to a leisurely victory, to let them sap religion from the land, to slowly weaken the god until he withered and died. Or maybe wait until the god was killed in an errant battle.
Now, this ugly development in the war meant he had to get personally involved. He still must not murder the deity, but he could assassinate his most trusted followers and army leaders, kill his champions, cripple his organization. A great risk, but one he must undertake. He must.
But what if the survivo
r was wielding the bloodstaff himself? What would he do then?
That scared him.
He had no answers. But he expected his bespectacled, homely prophet to provide them. She would unravel the future for him, tell him what he must do. She would help him best his enemy. Besides, he missed her, no matter how much he hated admitting it.
Nothing was quite working out as he wanted. His troops were suffering significant losses in the northeast, and it could not be just the weather, the terrain, or bad luck. Not anymore. There must be a ghost army shadowing his own force, trying to hamstring his supply lines. That suggested a very keen, resourceful, and agile enemy. The unification of the two bodies was taking still much longer than he had foreseen, with delays and loss of transport. In the south, the enemy was gathering in larger numbers, still a fleck compared to his own might, but then, they no longer needed the numbers.
Humanity had its share of dirty tricks, and it did its best to thwart him by the simple virtue of being unpredictable. The humans’ greatest, deadliest weapon.
He found the elders in one of the abandoned inns, and they didn’t have anything good to report. The usual share of confusion, road wear, illness, ineptitude, withering food supplies, slow convoys getting lost, and the horse training hobbling along like a cripple.
“We have almost three hundred fast animals,” the elder of Tirri reported. “We will have our first unit of scouts ready in a few weeks. We should be able to match the locals then. They will no longer have the ability to outmaneuver us.”
“I want ten thousand,” Calemore said. They did not argue.
He had considered extending a friendly hand to the mercenaries and scum of these realms, offering a boon to their greed, but the language was a great barrier. His troops did not speak the Continental tongue, and no one could piece together the Naum one around here. Large sacks of gold would work, but it would just add more confusion. After all, he had come here to destroy the people of this land.
Use them now, then discard them later? he wondered. That might be a sensible idea. But that was how corruption started. Soon enough, he would be fielding an army of sellswords, and the purity of the conquest would be tarnished by the grayness of their morality. He must not let the two sides mingle. He must not let humanity takes its vile, unpredictable course. He owned the souls of the Naum people, but not their collective human spirit, not their curiosity and their desperate need for empathy. The enemy must remain a blurred, nameless identity.
Which meant his troops would lack good cavalry for much longer, and the winter rain and snow would only make everything more difficult. But it did not matter. Time was irrelevant. Even if this war took another decade, or another century, he would prevail. He would destroy the realms. He would make sure the surviving god died, and that he became one. That was the only thing that really mattered.
Only, with the bloodstaff in the enemy’s hands, everything had changed. Everything.
Making two weapons had been a great mistake, he realized. He should have forged only a single, unique item for himself. But he had grown desperate toward the end of the war, so he had yielded to foolishness and unleashed another bloodstaff into the world. Now, it was back, to be used against him. That served him right.
Calemore had once read a book, titled Immortality Is Death, written by some ancient wizard before the great war. The man had claimed the inflexibility of eternal life made those blessed by it rigid and slow and vulnerable, trapped by their own greatness, their own disregard for time and its quirks, aloof and too self-centered to adapt to changes. Once, long ago, he had considered the wizard’s work to be a beautiful binding of bollocks, stupidity in prosaic form. Now, he fully understood the implications behind the book’s conceited message.
A bucktoothed woman had finally helped him grasp the message.
And her son, Sheldon. The boy showed extraordinary promise.
Through them, he could realize what his own perfection would not let him.
He still did not know what he would do once the war ended, and victory was the only thing he could imagine, because defeat was unthinkable. He still wondered about Nigella, about her affection, her ability to understand him, to respect him, to cherish him. Did he want blind obedience from her? No, he had that in endless amounts, and it left him empty. Terror did not excite him anymore. Total submission was boring. But if not terror, what then? What could she offer that would make him feel grand and whole once again?
This pursuit was becoming more and more of a hardship, emotional, mental. The fear over learning his enemy had the second bloodstaff was the best thing that had happened to him in a long time. Made him feel alive again. But that would end one day, and what then? He would become a god. What then?
What then, indeed?
Oh, how he envied the silly humans and their insignificant existence.
The short, fierce struggle with a known defeat in the end. And still they fought, bitterly, even with dignity, with laughter and joy, with a sense of completeness that mystified him. If he had ever wondered what Damian had tried to achieve with mankind, it must have been this.
So what would he do with Nigella? What could she offer him after he became a god and made complete his ancient vow? What would her humble, average existence offer him that could scale against the greatness of creation?
Everything, it seemed.
But that would mean what? Make her his equal? She could not be his equal. Make her into a slave? A servant? Was there anything that could make his sense of futility go away? He still did not know. But the answer was there, in that tiny cabin near Marlheim.
I have figured out how to become a god, but I can’t figure out one woman, he thought. Stupid. Just like Damian. The knowledge was there, a jester cackling, only he was powerless to stop it.
First, I will make sure the bloodstaff is safe, he swore. Then I will try to piece my future into a meaningful mosaic. But easy tasks first.
He left the elders and their boring reports behind and struck south.
CHAPTER 28
The throne room burst with activity. Round the table, Archduke Bogomir and Dukes Oleg and Rolan sat and shared the view of the map showing Athesia and the outline of the neighboring realms. The north of the land, facing toward Natasha’s father, was covered in a large piece of white cloth. No one really knew the disposition and the exact numbers of this Naum force, but everyone agreed that it was huge. Huge beyond reckoning.
A letter from one Commander Mali of the Third Independent Battalion of Eracia urged him to accept the dire facts.
Earlier that morning, a weary rider had reached Roalas bearing a message for whoever held the city. An impudent challenge, by all means, and maybe even an insult to his authority, but not since he had met with Gavril and seen his tens of thousands of followers marching to fight this incredible enemy. Now, he treated any sort of rumor, bad news, and oddities with prudence. The fact someone had sent a letter with no clear recipient in mind did not mean they had worded it as a slight; it probably meant the sender was deeply out of touch with current affairs, or the letter had been sent from a great distance, and the information could be quite significant. And so it was. The isolated Eracian contingent shadowing the enemy army was the best source of knowledge he had on the Naum invaders since first hearing about it. He valued the message dearly and had quickly summoned his lords for a discussion. Those still in Roalas, that was.
They want me to make peace, he thought. Well, I am.
Amalia had accepted his generous offer and bent her knee. Officially, Athesia was now Parusite territory, subject to his law. Adam’s empire was no more. Twenty years after being forged in blood, it had ended in a quiet, somber defeat.
He had probably been too generous, he thought. He allowed the blasphemous name to remain, and he would grant it the same treatment as his other duchies. Amalia would be his vassal, and she would make sure that people prayed and paid money to the crown. He would do his best to forget all the bad things in the past two years.
Vlad’s death was no longer meaningless, was it?
Sergei stared at the map.
Well, Athesia was his, for now. Soon, it might not be.
Sasha’s own letter strengthened the view held by the Eracian officer, gave color and flesh to Gavril’s omens. The enemy was there, a giant sprawl of people, aligned halfway across the Barrin estate in Eracia all the way to Pain Mave. They didn’t want to negotiate. They did not care about making contact with the people of the realms. Their only intent was destruction. Unstoppable, even with all of the might of Parus arrayed against it.
Then why had the enemy halted its advance?
Waiting for the nations of the realms to gather? So it could crush them more easily? Baiting? Teasing? Gloating? Something else, much more sinister?
Normally, his lords would be quick to make suggestions. They all had decent military experience, and they loved nothing better than to move colored pieces of wood and tin on a stretch of canvas, making monumental decisions of life and death with crude miniatures. Today, though, they just stared, bored their eyes into the layout of the terrain, wondering.
“Maybe we should try to flank the enemy?” Duke Rolan said at last. He was the father of Vlad’s widow, and he had not yet reconciled the loss of his son-in-law. His arrival was a surprise, because the Parusite law exempted him from sending troops. Still, he had marched north with half his household, under the impression he would be given a chance to avenge his family and honor.
He would be denied that opportunity, but at least he had a new foe to contend with.
“That will not be advisable,” Sergei remarked. “If we march west, we cross into Eracia, and they will surely not like our troops trampling through what little land they still have left, in between this Naum invasion and the Kataji menace. Moreover, I did promise not to interfere, so any transgression would be a breach of my word as well as a clear declaration of war. If we march east, we must cross half of Caytor, and we do not know what to expect there. The High Council will not love me for making peace with Amalia, and they will love our troops on their soil even less. Not after the Oth Danesh fiasco.”
The Humbled (The Lost Words: Volume 4) Page 29
