by George Hatt
Barryn’s first taste of combat was a frantic blur as he followed the orders Jarvik yelled as the enemy horsemen approached. He responded thoughtlessly to the signals transmitted to the soldiers by bugle calls and drums. He cranked and fired at the armored men galloping toward him, cranked furiously, reloaded his crossbow and fired again, just like the rest of the squad mates, just like the rest of the men in the other nineteen crossbow squads. Barryn had no articulate thoughts, no grand realization that he was in war. There was only his gasping breath, racing heart and burning muscles from the wild cranking.
A bugle rang the call for the Swans’ cavalry to advance and, a moment later, decisively called Charge. Barryn’s part in the combat was over. His heart continued to gallop like the cavalrymen’s horses even as he and his comrades rested the butts of their crossbows on the ground and stood at battlefield rest. The speed and massed violence with which the cavalry struck the fleeing enemy was a spectacle on a scale Barryn had never seen among human activity—a storm coming in from the mountains surpassed the cavalry charge in its sheer terror and splendor. Barryn could think of no other way to describe the action.
The infantrymen around Barryn shook their weapons in the air and let loose a rising cacophony of cheers, cat calls and insults when the two wings of cavalry cut their way through the enemy’s disintegrating formation and joined in the middle of the field.
Barryn raised his crossbow above his head joined the abusive noise the Black Swan Company was making for the fleeing enemy.
“I love watching them do that,” Crossbow yelled in Barryn’s ear above the din. “The cav is a bunch of insufferable pricks most of the time, but when they charge…when they charge, it’s a thing of beauty. I never get tired of watching them.”
Barryn learned after the skirmish they and a gaggle of mounted free companies had blundered into each other. Whereas the Black Swan Company was organized and cohesive, their enemies were anything but. Some of the enemy men-at-arms had dashed into the withering volleys of the crossbowmen, while others hesitated. Some of the freebooters turned their attention to securing the bevy of captive women and girls they had rounded up from their previous raids. Others fled the field knowing their lives would soon be forfeit otherwise.
After the excitement of combat, Barryn also learned that day, came the two grim tasks of policing the battlefield and shooing civilians away from the war-torn ruins of their lives and homes.
Barryn’s squad was chosen for the latter. They marched toward the overturned mess that had been the enemy’s encampment. Among the fallen tents and abandoned wagons was a circle of ramshackle carts, obviously looted from peasants’ homesteads along the trail of ruin they burned through the country.
Barryn’s limbs went numb when he, Crossbow and Delton broke the laager open. Two hundred dirty, bedraggled women and girls were tied to the wagons or stakes driven in the ground. The crossbowmen cut them free, and a corporal and several men from the quartermaster’s platoon took down the names and home villages of the captives.
“Ladies, your attention,” Corporal Jarvik said in his booming command voice. “I am Corporal Jarvik of the Black Swan Company, a member in good standing of the Mercenaries Guild. On this battlefield, I am an officer under the aegis of Imperial law, and in such capacity I place you under oath. By show of hands, tell me true if you accuse your captors of any violence against your physical body, whether corporal or sexual.”
They all silently raised their hands. Barryn was standing next to the quartermaster with the list of names and watched him place checkmarks next to all of the names. “That makes the paperwork easy,” he said quietly to Barryn.
“This deposition is a legal document and will be entered in the grievance the Province of Brynn has presented against the Province of Relfast before the Imperial High Tribunal,” Jarvik said to the captives. “You are free to go. Agents of the Black Swan Company will escort you off the battlefield.”
With that, black-clad mercenaries gently herded the women and girls out of their captivity and toward a starving and dangerous freedom.
The squad next began systematically looting the tents and abandoned equipment in the camp. Quartermasters stood next to a cluster of wagons in the middle of the camp and cataloged the weapons, armor and valuables and packed them neatly away.
“Ready?” Crossbow said as he stationed himself at the door of a still-standing tent. Barryn, Delton, and Jarvik lined up at a 45-degree angle from the entrance, swords drawn.
“Now,” the squad leader commanded.
Crossbow flung the tent flap open, and Barryn led the others’ charge inside. “Udric, Kyntha and Taern!” Barryn swore.
A scrawny girl, maybe 12 or 13 years old, with haunted eyes and torn clothes stood over a charred, twisted corpse.
The mercenaries stared in grim silence at the body, which was still clad in the remnants of armor and battlefield kit.
“What do we do with her?” Barryn asked.
“What the fuck do you mean, Snowflake?” Crossbow said. “We cut her adrift like the rest of them and move on.”
“We can’t do that,” Barryn said. “Those animals will find her. She won’t stand a chance out there by herself.”
“Somebody will pick her up. She’s too little to fuck, so she won’t get raped,” Delton said.
“No, she’s not to little to fuck. But that’s not our problem,” Jarvik said.
“Wait,” Barryn said. “We’re in the enemy camp taking enemy equipment. She’s an unclaimed girl. We can take custody of her and press her into service. I know Lady Jasmine—she’ll find work for her around our camp.”
One of the quartermaster corporals walked in and blanched at the grisly scene.
“That’s not Lady Jasmine’s decision to make,” Jarvik said.
“Let’s take her, Corporal Jarvik,” the quartermaster said. “I’ve already sealed the Release of Civilians report, and it would be a pain in my ass to amend it just for her.”
Jarvik shook his head in resignation. He jabbed a finger at Barryn. “She’s your responsibility until we get back to camp.”
“So what the fuck happened to this guy?” Crossbow asked, prodding the blackened corpse with his toe.
“The tent burned down,” Jarvik said and turned to leave. “Find a torch and make that happen, Delton. Move out!”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Mithrandrates
The five spires of the Empty Tower loomed above Emperor Mithrandrates in the warm darkness of the summer night. The red moon Taer was waxing gibbous, and the white moon Kyn was a sickle-like crescent in the starry, deep blue sky.
The Empty Tower was actually five slender towers, four of them surrounding an even taller fifth. The four outer towers were connected by a circular wall forming a stone ring around the central tower. The whole complex sat in the heart of the Five Sided Temple, a place where even the Emperor’s predecessors had been forbidden.
Two robed figures armed with ceremonial staffs flanked the door at the base of one of the outer towers, and another robed man accompanied the Emperor as he approached.
“No drugs this time?” Mithrandrates asked.
“There will be no drugs to aid you during this level of initiation,” the robed man beside him said. “Only vir, and the knowledge you bring with you through this gate.”
One of the robed figures stepped forward to intercept Mithrandrates. “Who approaches the Empty Tower?”
“One who would apprehend the Great Mysteries as a Brother of the College of the Illuminated in the Minerval Grade,” the man escorting the Emperor said.
“Under whose authority does he approach this sacred edifice?”
“I approach under the authority granted by the light of wisdom the power of my own will,” the Emperor replied.
And that was the ritual. It was nowhere as florid and long-winded as the others Mithrandrates had endured. The robed guardian stepped aside, and the great door opened. “Enter as a candidate, and leave as a true
initiate of the Mysteries,” he said.
Mithrandrates entered the circular outer tower, and the door shut behind him with a grind of stone on stone. The Emperor was shrouded in perfect darkness, but he felt the enormity of the hollow structure rising above him. He took a cleansing breath, relaxed his shoulders and drew the cabalistic symbols of the Order’s Lesser Banishing Ritual.
Ye gods. It worked. This is real. Mithrandrates allowed his reaction of surprise to run its course, then stilled his mind once again as the feeling passed. The darkness around him felt truly empty and sterile, like a spiritual vacuum devoid of all energy and emanation.
Within this vacuum, Mithrandrates believed truly for the first time that he could tap the mystical vir that Lady Madeline kept insisting suffused all existence. He performed the motions, vibrations and visualizations of the Invocation of Light that had become ingrained into his muscle memory from daily practice. He did not need to open his eyes to know that resting in his cupped hands was a radiant blue sphere of light; he felt the vir coursing through his body and coalescing between his palms.
Mithrandrates’ concentration was total, but now it was effortless. He had tapped into the vir, and its currents swept him toward the source of all power. He opened his eyes, stared into the blue light in his hands, and was suddenly face-to-face with himself.
The Emperor was outside on a cold, gray day. The ground below was just as dull and gray as the sky above. Dead grass crunched beneath Mithrandrates’ fine, supple boots as he approached the double of himself seated on a high marble throne set upon a stepped dais. Across the iron plain behind the throne, a strange city full of spires and towers unfolded across the horizon.
“Is this your empire?” Mithrandrates asked the seated figure. “I would advance in peace.”
The stately man looked down to meet Mithrandrates’ gaze and answered in a strange tongue. The double gave Mithrandrates a slight, contemptuous scowl.
“In what language do you address me?” Mithrandrates demanded.
The double replied in the alien language, then pointed to the ground and said a single word.
Mithrandrates pointed to the ground with his open hand and repeated the word. He instantly learned it and its translation: ground.
The double pointed to the sky, and said another word. This Mithrandrates repeated: sky.
The Emperor stood before his seated double and learned the new language one word, one concept, one grammatical transformation at a time. The sky and the ground yielded no changing light nor moving shadows to mark the time thus spent. It could have been hours, or it could have been decades. Mithrandrates was not be sure which.
Hours or years later, when he mastered the language, the Emperor repeated his message to the seated man in the new tongue. “I would advance through your empire in peace.”
The man on the throne nodded, leaned forward, and answered slowly and solemnly, “No horse, no wife, no mustache.” He then sat erect in his throne, tilted his head back and guffawed triumphantly. The laughter filled the entire plain and echoed off the distant walls of the city.
Now it was Mithrandrates’ turn to scowl. “You ignorant ass,” he replied in the mystic language, then walked past the throne toward the tower-studded city.
The seated emperor’s laughter followed Mithrandrates across the plain until he reached the outer works of the city. A door opened in one of the towers along the wall, and he stepped through only to find himself back inside the Empty Tower in a room identical to the one he had left, but with a larger sphere of blue light hovering at chest level above the center of the circular floor.
The Emperor looked behind him through the door and saw a stone corridor curve away from him to the left. He guessed that he was in the second tower in the outer ring, then approached the glowing sphere. This time he did not need to summon the vir. He felt its power absorb into him as he drew closer to the sphere, his hand tingling and heart surging as he reached out to touch it.
Now he was transported to the palace garden where he spent many happy summer days in his childhood.
“I found you!” shouted a young Micharis, his best friend. Mithrandrates vaguely remembered that Micharis was now his most trusted general, but the knowledge faded. They were both eight years old now, and Mithrandrates knew only that his wily friend had discovered his hiding place yet again.
“I’m tired of hide-and-seek,” young Mithrandrates said. “Let’s play war!”
“You only want to play war because you’re good at it!”
“You only like hide-and-seek because you’re good at that!”
“No, you’re just a bad hider. Anybody can play hide-and-seek,” Micharis said. “Just one more round, then we can play war.”
Mithrandrates liked that compromise, so he closed his eyes and counted 100 while Micharis ran off to find a hiding spot in the labyrinthine garden. When he finished counting, Mithrandrates opened his eyes and explored the garden to find his friend. He found a great cypress tree surrounded by a pool with little fountains shooting water in the air. He stopped and put his hand in one of the streams of water gushing from the surface of the pool.
“You can stay here forever,” came a gentle, ethereal woman’s voice behind him. “No more school, no more bed time. You never have to grow up here.”
Young Mithrandrates turned toward the voice. A smiling woman with dark hair, kind eyes and giant butterfly wings hovered inches off the ground. She was clothed in a rainbow-colored, iridescent gown whose colors changed as the gentle breeze toyed with the wondrous garment.
“I cannot,” he said. “I am to be Emperor when I grow up. Father expects me to finish his work.”
The woman smiled and touched the boy’s head. “Such a wise young man.”
A flash of multicolored light, and Mithrandrates was back in the Empty Tower standing in a curved stone hallway in front of a door to the third outer tower. This tower and the next transported him to even stranger and more abstract planes. Whereas the first two towers seemed to be puzzles or tests, the next two were pure endurance challenges in which the objective was to keep his corporeal body intact and confined to only three dimensions.
“I am not a polyhedron,” Mithrandrates whispered to himself. “I am a man. I am not a polyhedron.”
The universe split into 17 dimensions and five time streams. The Emperor felt a real danger of slipping into one of them and coming out in another world, another universe.
“I am not a polyhedron. I am a man.”
Are you sure?
“Yes.”
Really sure?
“Yes! The gods damn you! Yes! I am a man, not a polyhedron!”
But could you not be a parallelogram?
Mithrandrates teased out a path between the strange, multifaceted dimensions and proceeded to the central tower. It was identical to the others save for a horned stone altar in the middle of the circular room. The horns sprouted from the sides of the altar and rose ten feet above the floor. The air between the great horns of the altar glowed a faint blue, and Mithrandrates gazed into the luminous air.
He started. Time and space were simultaneously apprehensible, as if the past, present and future were all represented in a single but raucously busy painting forming between the upraised horns.
He saw the Empire unified and the events necessary to make it so. Battles from past, present and future raged and abated simultaneously. Mithrandrates also saw the Mergovan Empire’s final destruction, but his mind worked frantically to deduce how to put off that calamity as long as possible. It would be the work of 20 emperors. But the unification would only be the work of two, and he was certain for the first time that he was one of them.
The vision disappeared, and a section of the wall slid away to reveal the exit. Mithrandrates mentally drafted the dispatch he would need to write as he strode through the straight corridor toward the starry night awaiting him.
“What did you see?” asked the hooded man who had escorted him to the Empty Tower.
<
br /> “That,” Emperor Mithrandrates replied, “is a state secret. I must return to the Citadel at once.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Marek
Marek had received no dispatches from Rufus and his sellswords for two days.
The main body of Marek’s battle was less than four days’ march from the Oak Ridge, and Marek with his mounted vanguard were a day’s ride to the right flank of them. He had left Lord Aramand in charge of the main body while Marek and 300 mounted knights and men-at-arms rode to discover what had happened to Rufus and his condottiere. And, as Marek was never one to waste time, they had sacked a village and put the military-aged men to the sword.
Inexperienced fighters perhaps wondered why the villagers stayed put when they surely knew of the savagery the invaders were inflicting on their neighbors, but Marek knew. The peasants depended on their land for shelter and survival; to abandon them was to flee straight into the jaws of starvation. All who could shelter behind the walls of their lords’ castles had done so before Marek had arrived.
No, Marek knew, it was safer for the peasants to stay where they were knowing that he and his men could not be everywhere at once. Choosing one town or village to burn meant sparing ten others in the area that were not in the path of destruction.
Nevertheless, Marek’s tactics halted production, travel and commerce in the border reaches and put pressure on the local nobility’s treasuries and credibility—the two places it hurt most. Important work, to be sure, but Marek had grown bored of the tedium of spilling peasant blood and was spoiling for another real battle.
And that, Marek reflected as he and his detachment rode nearly perpendicular to his forces’ previous line of advance, is why he was leading this enormous reconnaissance force himself instead of delegating the task to one of his lieutenants. He knew they must be a few days—maybe only a few hours—away from a true battle. He was sick of the wearisome, repetitive task of killing civilians.
