“It’s almost like a ghost city. More like Ibitsal than the Vantok I remember.”
Sorial nodded. She was right; it wasn’t familiar. Growing up in the stable, the city had seemed bigger than he could imagine. His world had been a few square blocks. Just traveling as far as the marketplace had been a great adventure and visiting his mother at the farm had seemed like taking a journey to another continent. Now, so many places that had been fixed points in his youth were no more. Vantok wouldn’t be healthy until the rebuilding was complete, but the queen’s decision to set up her court here would attract people, as would the impending birth of “Azarak’s heir.” It would take years to recover from the damage that had been done in a few days but eventually a new Vantok would rise from the ashes of the old one.
“Let’s check our house and see these friendly mice. You can pet a few. Then we’ll head back to Myselene to report. As far as I can tell, there ain’t no reason she can’t march the entire army here, reclaim the palace, and let people begin repopulating the buildings that still stand.”
Looking over the remains of Vantok, Sorial wondered if this phase wouldn’t be more challenging than winning the battle had been. In a few weeks’ time, the queen might wish she had remained in Obis.
* * *
The throne, the most important symbol of rulership, was intact. It was impossible to determine how many men had sat there since Azarak had last occupied it, but Justin and his lackeys had left it undamaged. Surrounded by her personal guards and a few trusted advisors, Myselene lowered herself onto the padded seat in a moment of deep significance. Normally, it would have been comfortable but it hadn’t been designed with a woman nearing the full term of her pregnancy in mind.
“The queen is on the throne!” boomed the voice of Chancellor Ferwan, reverberating through the large, nearly empty audience hall. “The line of Vantok is restored!”
Ferwan was a big, boisterous man whose selection as Vantok’s new chancellor had resulted from Carannan’s prodding. The duke had been Myselene’s predecessor as heir to the Crown; Azarak had named him interim Crown Prince during the period when the widowed king had lacked a blood or marriage successor. Before the king’s wedding, Ferwan had stepped down with as much grace as when he had first accepted the appointment, but he had remained a trusted advisor and staunch supporter. Initially, the duke was believed to have been killed in the Battle of Vantok but he had in fact been dispatched several days before Justin’s attack on a diplomatic mission to solicit support from the far city of Andel. With so many of the late king’s confidants dead or missing, he had been the most logical choice to replace Gorton. It was unclear, however, whether Ferwan was Myselene’s chancellor for both cities or only for Vantok. That was a decision for another day.
The throne room was in surprisingly good repair considering the poor condition of the city in general. Although there had been no one to greet her on her reclamation of the throne, the palace had not long been vacant. The temporary ruler had abdicated and fled only recently. Myselene couldn’t blame him. His actions had been treasonable and he would have faced summary execution. It was just as well; she was happy to have retaken the city with little effort and no bloodshed.
“In the normal course of things, I should be giving birth around now,” said Myselene once the hall had been cleared of all but her three closest advisors: Ferwan, Carannan, and Rexall. The two wizards would normally have been included in the conversation but they were searching the city. “But I feel I should make a public appearance or two before entering my confinement. The people - at least those who are here - need to know their queen is once again on the throne.”
“I’ll send out criers and post notices that you’ll make a short speech from the palace walls,” said Ferwan.
“Excellent. We can announce the birth of the Crown Princess on the first of next week.” Alicia had made the deception easier by identifying the baby’s sex. “She’ll be called Kara.” It was perhaps too obvious a nod to the baby’s father but Myselene felt strongly that Sorial’s mother would never be properly acknowledged by history.
“I want the palace made livable as quickly as possible,” said Myselene. She envisioned a return to normalcy spreading like a healing wave with the royal quarters at the epicenter. Rexall had already been given the unenviable duty of selecting the new palace staff; she hoped to see a few familiar faces among them. “My maids are already preparing my chambers, but the kitchens and private audience room must be cleaned immediately. I also need someone to take a delegation of soldiers to the temple to ascertain what things are like there and whether there are any priests deep in hiding.”
“I’ll supervise it personally, Your Majesty,” said Carannan.
“Thank you. Chancellor, beginning on the morrow, you need to start processing claims for property. In some cases, ownership is unambiguous. I’ve already given Sorial and Alicia uncontested rights to their mansion and Lamanar’s farm. Those nobles whose titles are well established and whose property wasn’t re-inhabited during the occupation can receive similarly expedited treatment. After that, I leave it to your judgment how to handle the less obvious situations. When payments must be made, be fair but not overly generous.
“Let’s get to work returning Vantok to its rightful place of glory as the Jewel of the South.”
* * *
The Wayfarer’s Comfort was empty and silent. The windows were dark, gaping holes. The front door, nowhere in evidence, had been ripped off its hinges. The inside was a shambles with everything not looted having been smashed or damaged beyond usefulness: crockery, goblets, bottles, and so forth. Many of the tables and about half the chairs were salvageable.
Sorial looked around with sadness. For him, this was a haunted building, but the ghosts were in his mind. Annie with her bright smile, always willing to bend to give patrons a peek down the front of her blouse. Brindig and Darrin, the two local watchmen who had taken a few extra coins in return for keeping a close eye on the inn and the boy in the stable. And of course Warburm, the once-great adventurer turned innkeeper. It angered Sorial that the truth about Warburm’s death would never be known. For political reasons, Ferguson had to remain revered. Warburm deserved better. Ponari deserved better. Perhaps one day, the truth would be told and the innkeeper’s reputation could be cleared of the taint.
Sorial was alone making his rounds of the area in which he had grown up. Alicia had returned to the mansion with her mother and Lady Lavella, both of whom would be staying there for the foreseeable future, restoring order to as much of the house as was possible.
The stable was gone. Not even a skeleton of the structure remained. It had fallen victim early in the pillaging and, since then, the charred debris had been cleared away. All that remained to mark its existence was the smooth slab of stone upon which it had been erected: the remnant of Vantok’s long-dead portal. The official story was that men had destroyed the portal once the gods had removed magic from the world, but Sorial found this tale unlikely. The portals were far too puissant to fall victim to tools as mundane as hammers and chisels. The inherent eldritch power would defeat mortal efforts to block or thwart it. He didn’t doubt that men had torn down the stonework surrounding the portal opening, but he suspected it had already been dead. But how?
The area around the inn was a perfect metaphor for Sorial’s life. The boy he had been while here, sheltered and protected from the reality of his blood right, was gone as surely as the stalls, bales of hay, and loft where he had once slept were - wiped away without a trace of what had once been there. The dreams he had once harbored of joining his friend Rexall on a carefree adventure, of running away with Annie, and of making love to Alicia were echoes of a fading past. Soon, he would join all those who had gone before him. Certainly, everyone would remember the great wizard who had brought down Justin and ended The Lord of Fire’s war to conquer the world. But would anyone remember the boy who had cared for their animals while they enjoyed a pint in The Wayfarer’s Comfort?
Strangely, a part of Sorial still saw himself as the latter while everyone else, even his wife, saw only the former.
“It’s seen better days.”
Sorial was so lost in his thoughts and ruminations that Excela’s husky voice caused him to visibly start and erect a hasty shield.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I thought wizards were always alert.”
“I wish that was the case. Ask my wife about what happened the day I provided a demonstration of my powers for the whole of the city.”
“No need. I was there. Everyone was there. But that wasn’t the first time I seen you.” Her lips pursed thoughtfully. “I wasn’t sure till now. You look so much older than I expected, than I remember. And with the mask… but your voice is the same. I used to turn the occasional trick around here. Warburm turned a blind eye or maybe he just didn’t care one way or t’other. Anyway, the other guy in the stable, the one who got killed, he was one of my regulars.”
“Visnisk.” Another ghost. How long since Sorial had thought of him? The first of so many to die. An innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“That’s it. That was you, up in the loft, watching us, wasn’t it?”
Sorial had never seen the whore’s face but he could easily imagine her being Excela. The age was right. And the hair. “It was.”
“Did it make you hard?”
“It did. First time I saw two people have sex.”
Excela’s handsome features formed an expression of distaste. “If you could call it that with him. Up, down, in, out, grunt, then collapse. Lot of customers like him, though. S’pose I shouldn’t complain. Most lasted longer than him but few smelled as bad. The stink of shit on his body and doing it in a stable. The things we do for a few studs. But my father claimed my wages as a maid so I had to find some way to make something for myself.”
“Before Alicia, I used to scrimp and save to afford a little of that ‘up, down, in, out’.”
“I know. We fucked once.”
“We did?” Sorial couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.
“Not when you were twelve.” She laughed. “Although I would’ve. Didn’t have many standards. All you needed was a dick that worked. No, it was a few years later, when you were going through every whore in the quarter. You and the one who’s the queen’s head guardsman, taking turns.”
Sorial didn’t remember any of the specific women from that dark period of sexual binging. During the days following Annie’s death, he had done a lot of things he didn’t regard with pride. More often than not, by the time he got around to fucking, he had been too drunk to care much about who he was doing it with. “I hope I was better than Visnisk.”
“Reckon you probably was. Can’t say for sure. Sorry if it hurts your feelings, but you didn’t leave an impression one way or t’other. But I wanted you to know we had a history of sorts. For some reason, it seemed important that you know.”
She fell silent and joined him gazing at the empty shell of The Wayfarer’s Comfort. Eventually, she spoke again. “It ain’t never gonna be the same again, is it?”
Did she mean the world, the city, or the inn? “No. But different don’t necessarily mean worse. The death of the gods changed everything and it’s foolish to expect everything to continue the same. Now it’s up to the four of us to help make a hopeful future with no more Justins.”
“You give me hope.”
“I do?”
“I figure that if a horny little boy like you can do the things you did, things are looking up for me.”
There, in the shadow of the past with the most unlikely of companions, Sorial found a reason to be optimistic about a future he would likely never see.
* * *
Accompanied by a group of ten men, Carannan approached the front entrance to the temple. The streets of Vantok, largely deserted when the queen had entered the city in the company of two-hundred soldiers, were beginning to show signs of life as people emerged from hiding places, scarcely able to believe that the yearlong nightmare was at an end. It was difficult to guess how many citizens had been in Vantok at the time of Myselene’s arrival, but the number had likely been fewer than a thousand. The process of sending the refugees home, or relocating them, was a slow one - most were living in a makeshift encampment to the west where the army had settled.
What he would find in the temple wasn’t known. Justin had once been a priest, so there was reason to hope he might have shown leniency to his former brothers. How many priests had stayed and how many, if any, were still inside? Could there be people alive in the city’s largest building after a year? It was said that Ferguson had prepared and provisioned the temple to function as a city unto itself in case the king decided to move against him. Carannan wondered if those lofty aspirations had been put to the test.
Stepping into the building was like walking into a tomb. The temple was dark, dank, silent, and smelled of must and death. The latter odor was subtle - not the overpowering stench of carrion and corruption but the more refined scent of flesh that had long since decayed. The guards lit torches as they proceeded into the windowless blackness of the structure. Although never particularly religious, Carannan had spent many hours in the temple visiting his sister and daughter, each of whom had been housed here for a time, and this was colder and more forbidding than what he remembered. A signature characteristic - the low, rhythmic chanting that had once been heard throughout - was silent. Even without confirmation, Carannan felt certain he would find no one alive here.
They made their way slowly through empty halls and vacant chambers. The priests’ rooms were exactly as they had always been: small and tidy with a few personal belongings to go along with a functional bed and a crudely-made, matching chair and table set. A thick layer of dust coated everything, testimony to how long it had been since the building had known the presence of people.
Carannan’s purpose for surveying the temple was twofold. In addition to seeking out any living priests who might be holed up, he was looking for a book Sorial had mentioned was crucial to some future project. The title was The Balance of All Things and it might be in Ferguson’s library. The overcommander didn’t have a clear idea where that was, although he assumed it would be close to the prelate’s personal quarters, near to the temple’s center.
They came to a door that was outwardly no different from the dozens they had thus far opened. Yet as Carannan placed a gloved hand on the wood to push it inward, he sensed something that wasn’t the same. Throughout his life, he had been a great believer in instinct and that intuition informed him of a wrongness beyond the door. The room was larger than any they had previously entered, with a lower ceiling. At first, it appeared to be a garment room of sorts, since there were scores of robes littering the floor. Carannan took a torch from one of the guards and crossed the threshold alone. It was then that the horror of what the chamber represented asserted itself.
Those weren’t empty robes. Each contained the skeletal remains of a priest. None of the bodies retained any flesh - the mice and rats had been thorough in stripping away anything that could be considered edible - so it was impossible to determine how long they had been here and what had killed them. Getting an accurate count was difficult, but Carannan estimated there was between fifty and sixty corpses here - likely the entire complement of priests who hadn’t evacuated.
Carannan stepped out of the room and closed the door firmly behind him. He would have to return here, but the task of identifying bodies and burying or burning corpses could be left to another day.
It took another half-hour of uneventful searching before the group came to a room whose uniqueness was marked by an ornate door. Ferguson’s quarters? The library? Carannan took the lead, motioning his men behind him. Although the prelate was dead, the overcommander felt uneasy so near to the old man’s seat of power. He twisted the handle then gave the door a gentle push. It swung silently open. The dim light from the torch revealed row after row of shelves piled high with tomes a
nd scrolls. The place smelled faintly of must and mildew but nothing more malodorous tickled his nostrils. He took a deep breath of the stale air and stepped forward.
The pain was sudden, immediate, and absolute. Carannan’s world exploded in fire and light. It started at his feet and quickly engulfed his entire body - a greedy conflagration devouring everything it touched. Dimly, his ears detected the shouting of his men before his ability to hear was destroyed by the flames. He might have screamed - he wasn’t sure - before the endless blackness came swooping in to offer the cold comfort of infinity. Thus it was that the man who had cheated death so many times in so many places was finally lured into its embrace.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: THE BALANCE OF ALL THINGS
The tears had stopped flowing but Alicia’s face retained the stricken expression it had worn throughout the burial ceremony. Carannan’s death had hit her hard - harder than Sorial would have imagined it might. It had everything to do with timing. It was one thing to die in the midst of a battle but another altogether to die once peace had arrived. She would have been saddened had he not survived the Battles of Vantok or Obis but the actual manner of his demise had arrived with devastating results. If the gods still existed, this would have been attributed to their sometimes macabre sense of humor.
By the time Sorial had arrived at the temple on the previous day, there was nothing to be done for the overcommander. Truthfully, there wasn’t much left of him and what there was didn’t resemble a person. His death had been quick; the fire had burned hot and fast. His misfortune had been to stumble into a trap set by Justin that had likely been intended for Sorial. In practical terms, Carannan had given his life to save Sorial or Alicia: undetected, the trap could have killed either of them in their search for The Balance of All Things.
Shadow of the Otherverse (The Last Whisper of the Gods Saga Book 3) Page 52
