by Jon Sprunk
He left the palace by the west gate. Horace declined a palanquin when offered, deciding he wanted to walk instead. It was a nice evening. A pleasant breeze from off the canal kept the insects at bay. The moon was just rising above the skyline, limning the city's roofs and towers in a soft silver glow.
Most of the government buildings were closing. Street cleaners worked the avenues, cleaning up the day's accumulation of refuse and animal dung. Slave-borne litters navigated the boulevards like proud ships, led by linkboys with burning brands to ward off the night.
Horace passed by the site of the demolished Sun Temple. The gates were chained. Through the iron bars Horace could see the vast pile of stone and debris. It still boggled his mind that he was responsible for such devastation. He'd heard that sinkholes had opened in the temple courtyard as a result of the collapse. Work crews had been assigned to fill them, but according to the reports the larger ones kept opening up.
Horace was considering stopping at an eatery for supper when three men appeared at the end of the block, barring the way. Their crimson robes wavered in the evening breeze. Standing still, their faces hidden under deep hoods and hands pulled up into their sleeves, they nonetheless radiated an aura of malice.
The Order of the Crimson Flame.
Horace wondered how these three had gotten into the city. There was something strange in the way the sorcerer-priests stood, hunched over at the shoulders as if they were in pain.
His bodyguards drew their weapons and stepped ahead of him. Horace thought to stop them, but before he could a stinging wind reeking of ozone and burning metal rushed down the street. With one arm thrown over his face, Horace closed his eyes against the cloud of flying dust swirling around him and reached for his zoana. To his surprise, the power answered his call. It felt so good flowing through him, like a lover's embrace or the taste of mulled brandy on a cold day. He quickly formed a bubble of air around himself and his guards that blocked out the foul wind. Then he fashioned the first offensive attack that came to mind. He wove together strands of fire into a seething sphere. Its angry vermillion glow blinded his eyes. With a grunt, he hurled it through the swirling dust cloud in the direction of the priests.
A sudden spike of pain pierced his chest. Gasping, Horace squeezed his eyes shut just before the sphere exploded. A torrent of scalding heat engulfed the street, buffeting him with the blowback. The air howled one last time before it died away.
Rubbing the grit from his eyes, Horace peered down the street. The three robed men were gone. Vanished as if they had never existed, a circle of untouched clay pavement where they had been standing. The rest of the street, however, was awash in flames. Pangs of guilt stabbed Horace as he witnessed the damage he had wrought. The outer facings of the buildings on both sides—homes, shops, a winehall—were completely torn away, exposing the singed beams of their interiors. His only hope was that no one had been killed, but the guilt fed the fire of rage burning inside him. He reached for his zoana again to combat the fires before they burned out of control, and he had to battle with his qa to keep it open. Finally, he wrested away enough power from the Mordab dominion to summon a gentle mist. The flames sizzled as the water vapor dampened their ire, but it did nothing to cool Horace.
Then he noticed something inside the circle of pristine pavement where the priests had been standing. A person lying on the street, covered by a shimmering sheet of yellow silk.
His guards rushed ahead of him as Horace approached the figure. He caught the edge of the silk sheet with his toe and kicked it away. His stomach clenched in a painful spasm when he saw the face staring up at him. A face he knew well.
Mulcibar.
A thousand questions crowded Horace's mind as he looked down at his friend's corpse, but they were battered down by a tide of rage. Ever since the night of the Tammuris he had struggled with Mulcibar's loss, fearing he may have buried his one-time mentor under the rubble of the fallen Sun Temple. Now to be faced with the proof that Mulcibar had not been inside the temple when it fell, that he must have been alive all this time, threatened to break down the walls of his self-control. The zoana surged inside him, wanting a release, but he held it in tight check as he beckoned to his guards. They rolled the corpse inside the yellow sheet and picked it up.
The street was empty as they marched toward his home, a silent funeral procession.
“Lock the doors! All of them!”
Horace barked orders as he strode into his home. Directing his guards to carry their burden to the dining room, he swept the dinner service off the table and commanded them to place Mulcibar on top. Lamps were lit around the room.
Harxes rushed in, holding his staff. “Master! What's happening?”
“Lock down the house and keep everyone inside. Where's Alyra?”
“I believe the mistress in her chambers, Master.”
“Go make sure. And have two of the house guards stay with her at all times until you hear otherwise from me. Understood?”
“Ai, Master!”
As the steward ran off, Horace looked down at Mulcibar, still wrapped in the yellow sheet. He heard Alyra's voice coming down the stairs. Then she entered the room. “There you are. Horace, what did you say to…?” Her voice trailed off. “Is that what I think it is?”
Horace pulled back the sheet. Alyra's sharp intake of breath summed up his feelings. He still balanced on the edge of his rage, but he had calmed down enough to feel the thread of sadness winding inside him, as taut as a harp's strings. He felt like his temper could snap with the wrong word. He imagined the Order priests coming here to punish him for his transgressions, and he welcomed the idea. Anything to assuage the guilt he felt for not continuing the search for his friend. If he hadn't gotten so involved with the queen's machinations, maybe Mulcibar would still be alive.
“What happened?”
Horace could only shake his head. “Three Red Robes stopped me on the way home. I thought they wanted a fight, but they just disappeared and left his body behind. I thought all the Sun priests were gone from the city, but these three were as brazen as dockside whores.”
Alyra bent over the body, examining it with a meticulousness that both impressed Horace and made him uneasy, that she could be so clinical with a person they had both known.
Mulcibar's face was bruised with a nasty round cut in the center of his forehead. Dried blood stained his temples and down his cheeks. His body was naked beneath the silk, revealing battered arms and long welts across the rib cage. His wrists, so emaciated they almost looked like they could belong to a child, were black with bruises.
“It's obvious they tortured him,” she said, touching the welts. “But I don't know how. None of this looks like other victims I've seen.”
“Damn it!” Horace threw the sheet back over Mulcibar's face and turned. “Harxes!”
The steward appeared in the doorway. “Here, Master!”
“No one gets in or out until I return.”
“Where are you going?” Alyra asked.
Horace stalked out of the room without answering, through the foyer to the front door. Flinging it open, he looked back to the guards behind him. “Stay here and protect her. No matter what happens.”
They saluted and took up positions inside as he closed the door behind him. He heard the sound of the wooden bar settling into brackets on the other side, barring the entrance. Though it wouldn't stop a sorcerer, it made him feel a little better.
What was he doing? He hadn't answered Alyra because he didn't know. There was no plan, just an empty, helpless feeling that melded with his rage and demanded retribution. He needed a target.
Standing alone, separated from the buildings around it by a wide square, the fortress was deathly quiet. The moon's rays glinted off specks of mica in the dark gray stones of its walls. A murder of crows perched atop the ramparts, cawing softly in the night. They took off with tremulous flutters as Horace arrived.
The headache pounded behind his eyes as he stared at t
he Chapter House. His rage had brought him here. The fortress was largely vacant, with only a single guard post outside the main gate where four soldiers in royal livery stood around a brazier.
Before he gave the idea conscious thought, the zoana was there, filling him with its heady power. The Kishargal dominion opened, yawning in the pit of his stomach. He drew forth as much as he could hold, until the energy filled every ounce of his being and felt like it was pushing against his skin, wanting to be released.
The zoana flowed out of him of its own accord, following seams in the ground under the street, fissures he had never known existed. They reached far down into the earth like the roots of a bottomless pit beneath his feet, but he focused on the surface. In his mind he could see the magic penetrating the foundation of the Chapter House walls, the tendrils working into every pore and crack no matter how small, widening them as they pierced deeper into the stonework.
As he worked, a foreign sensation tickled the back of his mind, as if he were being watched. He tried not to think about it. Then he noticed that another thread of zoana had insinuated itself into his weaving, a thread of the void that had entered through his qa without being called. The discovery was chilling, but it also felt right. The Shinar combined easily with the Kishargal to create something new, a powerful dark energy that set his nerves to buzzing. The ground trembled beneath his feet. Horace just followed his instincts, and they told him the Order had to pay.
A deep rumble rose from the street, and with it returned the pain, drilling into his chest like a blunt awl. The guards at the fortress's front gate staggered and fell to the ground, their pikes clattering beside them. Horace almost jumped when the first stone fell, knocked loose from a crenellation atop the southern wall. The clay of the street shattered as it landed. Within a dozen heartbeats, stones were falling all along the fortress ramparts. A crackling sound ripped through the night, and then the entire western wall collapsed, spilling into the street.
Sweat poured down Horace's face as he exerted himself harder, pushing the zoana out. He reached through the ground for the central keep. He imagined cracks running up the sides of the stout tower of stone and brick, breaking off pieces of masonry. A distant growl clawed at the air, and then the keep's top floor crumbled, collapsing into the floor beneath it. The walls split open under the strain, and moments later the entire structure disintegrated in upon itself.
Horace reveled in the act of pure destruction. It was a balm easing the ache of losing Mulcibar. As the last walls collapsed, he observed that the damage wasn't contained to just the Chapter House. The streets surrounding the Order fortress were caught in the aftershock. Bricks and slate shingles crashed. Trees toppled over. The portico of a stately townhouse collapsed in a pile of broken stone. Horace pulled back on the power, seeking to cut it off. Yet the zoana fought back like a ten-stone swordfish on the line. Finally, he succeeding in slamming his qa shut, and the power evaporated as quickly as it had come.
The pains in his head and chest flared to the point where he couldn't see straight. Motes of silver and gray light danced in front of his eyes. He couldn't believe what he'd just done. He felt empty. The rage was gone, leaving only a vague sensation of loss in its place. He nearly swallowed his tongue as his vision cleared and he gazed upon the results. The entire neighborhood looked as if it had been struck by an earthquake. Why can't I control this? What's wrong with me?
He couldn't do this anymore. Sooner or later he was going to kill someone, and he wouldn't be able to live with himself.
Three robed figures appeared from the shadows before him, startling Horace out of his recriminations. He fumbled to reopen his qa again until the three men pulled back their hoods.
“First Sword,” Lord Xantu said. A frown creased his brow. “I did not think to find you here this night.”
Horace breathed a little easier. The other two were zoanii he had seen in Xantu's company, though he didn't know their names.
“I…” Horace took a breath. “I'm sorry. I had an encounter with the Order earlier and it left me….”
“I heard of the appearance of three Crimson brothers on the Street of Stars,” Lord Xantu said. “They attacked you?”
“Sort of. They vanished before anything happened, but they left behind the body of Lord Mulcibar.”
“Has word of this been sent to Her Majesty?”
“No, not yet. I wasn't thinking straight.” Horace looked past them to the mound of rubble filling the square where the fortress had stood only minutes ago. “I didn't even think it was possible to do so much damage. What are you doing out here?”
Xantu flicked two fingers, and his protégées departed, walking back toward the ruins. “We have been ordered to keep watch over the Chapter House.”
“In case anyone returned to the scene, eh?”
Xantu didn't reply, but he tilted his head slightly to the side as if considering the question.
Horace ran his hands through his sweaty hair. The evening, which had seemed so balmy a couple hours ago, had turned cool. “I don't know how I'm going to explain this.”
“I must send word of this to the queen, First Sword. Yet, if I may speak on Her Majesty's behalf, I do not believe she will be vexed by your actions. She is, after all, a most gracious mistress.”
Horace let out a shallow sigh. “Indeed.”
With a nod to Lord Xantu, Horace left the square with his head aching worse than before and a lump in his stomach. At least the feeling of being watched had faded.
They arrived at the rendezvous point before the sunrise. The growing light filtered through the canopy of leafy branches to illuminate the ruins of an ancient city. Mossy stones half-buried in the soft earth, forming a network of lumps amid the trees. Here and there, pieces of clean white stone broke through the carpet of marsh grass. Bases of colossal pillars. Broken statues, their features worn away by time and the elements. The shattered remains of walkways. Spider webs cloaked the fallen monuments, spun by black and brown spiders as wide across as a man's hand. The smells of damp earth and dead leaves clung to the place.
Jirom saw what he took at first to be a round hillock rising a score of feet above the riverbank, but the shape was too perfect to be natural. While the other captains waited by the water's edge, he went to investigate the hill, careful not to run into any webs. He pushed aside a curtain of snaking vines to find, to his surprise, a curving wall of pale dolomite rising before him. It was a dome, submerged in the muck and overgrown with vegetation. Despite its age, the surface of the stone was smooth to the touch. Had this city fallen to a calamity like famine or war, or had the marshland simply swallowed it, piece by piece, until nothing was left?
Captain Smerdis slapped his neck and pulled back his hand to reveal a bloody glob. “Fucking gnats and bloodsuckers. Why are we meeting him here?”
“It's far from prying eyes,” Emanon answered. He made pointed glances to the east, west, and south. “With plenty of avenues for escape if things go wrong.”
Rurtimo Lom picked up a piece of stone and turned it over in his hands. “What happened here?”
Ramagesh strode out from the tree line. “The same that happens to all things in time. They fall. Just like the Akeshians shall fall under our blades.”
That brought smiles to the faces of the rebel captains. But not Emanon, who stood apart from the others, and apart from Jirom, too. He had not returned to camp until just before they were about to leave. When Jirom asked him where he'd been all night, he didn't answer, but it was clear by the dark circles under his eyes that he hadn't slept. Jirom worried that his lover would do something careless, if not at this meeting then later, perhaps back at the main encampment.
To take his mind off Emanon, Jirom studied the area. This section of the river bowed, protecting their entire northern flank. They would hear an approaching boat long before it landed. And while the trees obscured their vision, they also provided safe paths to exit if this meeting went badly. Ramagesh had brought him, Emanon
, Smerdis, and Rurtimo Lom, but no one else.
“Why didn't the General come with us?” he asked.
“He's taking care of other business,” Ramagesh answered.
Since no one else questioned that, Jirom let it go. Neskarig and Ramagesh obviously had formed an alliance, but he didn't know either man enough to gauge how deep that bond went. He was learning, however. He and Ramagesh had discussed the intelligence on Sekhatun on their way to the ruins, and Jirom discovered that the rebel leader possessed a keen mind for tactics. Together they fleshed out several possible plans of attack to exploit the town's weaknesses. Its walls, for example, though surrounding the entire town, had been allowed to decay over the years without adequate repair. The gates, too, were not as fortified as they needed to be to repel a concerted assault. They both agreed that if multiple breeches could be opened, their force could potentially overwhelm the garrison.
A sound drew Jirom's attention. The assembled captains turned at the swishing thwacks of people cutting their way through the foliage, coming from the east. Jirom loosened his sword in its scabbard but then dropped his hand from the hilt. Emanon merely glanced toward the noise as if hardly interested and then looked away to resume his study of the trees surrounding the ruins. Jirom longed to thaw the ice between them, but there was nothing to do or say. And now was not the time, in any case.
Five men emerged from the swamp. Four were soldiers in steel helms and armor. The two in front held broad-bladed short swords in their hands, which they used to clear a path through the underbrush. The pair in back held bows. They surrounded a young man.
Lord Ubar had changed a little since the last time Jirom had seen him. His hair, which had been long and usually pulled back in a queue, was cut short and flat on top in the style favored by Akeshian legionnaires. He wore a tunic and long skirt, both plain white. During the trek to Erugash, Jirom remembered the son of Isiratu being a quiet youth who did not draw attention to himself. But, as he entered the ruins of the fallen town, the young lord walked with the confidence of an older man.
