“Where are we going?” J’anda asked, taking up more of his own weight as they started down the carriage path to the house.
“Home,” Terian said simply and devoid of emotion.
“Whose home?” J’anda asked, grasping further. “House Lepos?”
“No,” Terian said, shaking his helmeted head slightly. J’anda had always thought the dark knight’s spiked helm made him look as if a metallic cathedral rested atop his skull, ringed with spires. “They’re much further down the chain, unfortunately.” He seemed to shrug without moving his shoulders much. “This used to be House Lepos, though. Years ago.”
“I heard of the fall,” J’anda said, finally taking back the last of his weight underfoot and removing his arm from Terian’s shoulder, the sleeve of his robe catching on one of the spikes. J’anda unthreaded it delicately. “But of course it only came to me secondhand, and through what I heard when last we both stood in front of the Sovereign.”
“Yeah, that was a heady day,” Terian said as they stepped closer to the entry to the house. J’anda’s head was light and he paid little attention to the sweeping architecture of the place. It was impressive, but it left little impression on his mind, laboring as it was to keep up with his body. “Come on. We’ll talk inside.”
“All right,” J’anda agreed as the door thumped open for him, a guard reaching for it upon their approach. J’anda gave the guards a quick glance and found them covered in livery for a house that looked familiar, but that he had a hard time placing. “House … Burgvine?”
“Ehrest,” Terian answered as they stepped inside a sweepingly appropriate foyer. “House Ehrest.”
J’anda contained his frown. Why was Terian taking him into another family’s house? Perhaps they were friends of his, and he didn’t trust J’anda to walk any great distance? That was a reasonable assumption, J’anda concluded as he felt his legs buckle slightly.
“Come on,” Terian said, “up one flight of stairs and we’ll get you a place to rest.” He paused at the staircase directly in front of them, as though waiting to help J’anda up.
“I am not an invalid,” J’anda said, protesting more vociferously than he thought he would have given the circumstances.
“You’re just a little injured,” Terian said with more grace than the dark knight normally displayed. “I’m not coddling you—”
“I’ll be fine,” J’anda said.
“Yes, if you rest—”
“I defy you to look so good after being squeezed like an overripe grape by a god,” J’anda said, staring him down.
Terian stared right back, and seemed to surrender after a moment’s thought. “Fine. Why don’t we go talk in private, then?”
J’anda pondered that course, tried to play it out in his head. What is his game? I was certainly dead before he walked into the room. What did he say to get the Sovereign to reconsider? “Very well.” He swept a hand to indicate that Terian should lead on.
And lead on he did; Terian clumped his way up the stairs, boots falling heavy with every step. He led to a door at the landing and opened it, stepping inside and holding it. Inside was a bedroom, a more ornate and lovely one than he suspected most in Saekaj possessed. Wood furniture made with great skill dotted the room in a style that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the finer houses of Reikonos; the only thing absent was a window.
A wooden mannequin stood in the corner, lit by the candles and a hearth. J’anda recognized it instantly as the sort of figure warriors and knights used to store their armor on when not being worn. He judged it to be roughly Terian’s size, and jumped to the automatic conclusion. “This is your room.”
“It is,” Terian said.
J’anda paused, frowning, eyes still flitting around. “But you share it with someone else.”
Terian smiled, but it looked pained. “I’m married. Didn’t you know?”
J’anda froze, and his eyebrow crept up his head. “You didn’t seem the type, strangely enough. It would seem you’ve had a busy few months.”
Terian shook his head, removing the helm and setting it upon the surface of a tall wooden dresser, ruffling a doily in the process. “I’ve been married for years.”
“That is quite a secret to keep,” J’anda said. “But then, I suppose it was hardly the only one you sprang upon us.”
“Ouch,” Terian said.
“Insulted?”
Terian shrugged. “Fair enough, I suppose. Sorry for not being forthcoming about wanting to kill our esteemed General.”
“You say it like you did nothing wrong,” J’anda said, making his way to the bed and easing down on it, unconcerned about how it might look.
“I did …” Terian paused, searched for words. J’anda watched him labor over it, struggling to channel some feeling that writhed beneath the surface. “You know what? I just saved your life.”
“As though that absolves you of what you did?”
“You’re in Saekaj now, all right?” Terian stared flatly at him. “Which is a terrible place for you to be, especially at this moment in time.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“I feel comfortable speaking for both of us in this,” Terian said, starting to pace in front of him. “I’ve managed to make my way into the Sovereign’s good graces—”
“A curious place for you to be,” J’anda said, “and, by my guess, not one in which you will live a terribly long life.”
“Now who’s speaking for whom?” Terian spoke in a wry tone with an unmistakable air of sadness as he looked right at J’anda. “How long do you have?”
“People keep asking me that,” J’anda said with a shrug that was languid, the tiredness settling in on him like a warm blanket, “as though I would somehow know the appointed hour in which death will come for me.” He leaned forward on the bed. “If I hadn’t come here, I wager I would live longer than you. What is your rank?”
“I’m a general,” Terian said, his face cloaked in a tangle of emotions. “In charge of the armies and strategy for the war.”
“Hm,” J’anda said. “And how did you come to be here, in this place and this time?”
“Malpravus found me as I walked off into the jungle after the bridge.” The dark knight’s manner was almost sad.
“Just happened to find you?” J’anda didn’t bother to keep back the cloud of suspicion.
“He was there for the scourge,” Terian said. “Said he sensed death coming.”
“That’s … disquieting,” J’anda said, resisting the urge to lie back and fall asleep. “So he brought you here and introduced you to his master, where you … climbed the ladder rather rapidly, it would seem.”
“I hold a special place in the Sovereign’s esteem.”
“How is that?” J’anda asked.
“I keep telling him the truth,” Terian said, and when he caught J’anda’s look, he smiled. “I know. From me, right? But I mostly do. I don’t think anyone else does. It must grow tiresome after a while, being catered to.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Nor I,” Terian said. “But his generals lie to him, fail to take responsibility for their failures. Like the one today, for example.” He sighed. “Did you know Cyrus was taking the army into the Northlands?”
J’anda shook his head, puzzling at that. “He had not mentioned it when I left yesterday.”
“Don’t bother to lie to me,” Terian said, watching him with canny eyes, “I know you’re here to spy for Sanctuary.”
J’anda felt a chill pass over him. “Yet you save my life? That makes you as guilty as I, in the eyes of the Sovereign. You have betrayed him.”
“Yes,” Terian said with a nod, grave as J’anda had ever seen the dark knight, his voice low in whisper, “and I mean to betray him further. I just watched Cyrus and the Army of Sanctuary disembowel one of Malpravus’s armies in the north. I saw the veiled dagger, the ambush, and I could have stopped it, but oddly … I found I just didn’t have any interest in d
oing so.”
J’anda kept his face free of any reaction. “Naturally.”
“What do you mean, ‘naturally’?” Terian frowned, keeping his eyes on the enchanter. “There isn’t anything natural about the insanity I find myself in the middle of these last months. I’m up to my eyeballs in the midst of these fools, these fools who—” he looked around, as though some enemy might be hiding in the shadowed corners of the room, and lowered his voice further, “these fools who think that on the day that the Sovereign rules all Arkaria, it will be some sort of blessed kingdom ruled on high with benevolence and grace rather than the utter and complete destruction of every godsdamned land.” The dark knight leaned forward. “I can guess at the origin of your reserve toward me. You hesitate to trust a word coming out of my mouth right now.”
J’anda threaded his hands together. “If you were in my place, would you trust a man who has betrayed his own as you have?”
“I picked the wrong father to follow,” Terian said, his face dissolving to something that looked considerably more hollow, exhausted. “When it came down it, I picked the path of the father who I hated in life. And that was just another in a long line of my terrible choices.”
“Well, as enjoyable as it might be following a self-confessed maker of terrible choices …” J’anda said, making his meaning plain while letting his words drift off.
“I’m hardly the only one in this room making terrible choices at the moment,” Terian volleyed back. “You had the death mark, same as I did. You could have stayed in Sanctuary. You weren’t … afflicted by your own stupidity—”
“Oh, to trust an incompetent man,” J’anda said, nodding his head but not bothering to hide his skepticism. “A man who cannot keep his own life in order, if you’ll forgive me saying so, is in a poor position to fix the problems of entire lands. Perhaps you should start smaller, get your own house in order—”
“That’s not smaller,” Terian said darkly. “That’s maybe the largest problem of all.”
“Isn’t it always?” J’anda said, slumping. “I always find it interesting how people who have little grasp on their own lives and who have made wreckage of everything closest around them are the ones with the most desire to change the world around them. Truly, the force of their opinions about how things should be is like a bellow in one’s ear.” He looked at Terian. “I sense you are trying to involve me in something, but you must forgive me for my lack of enthusiasm given your current condition.”
“The Sovereign is raising the dead,” Terian said, voice quiet. “He’s somehow come up with an infinite supply of soul rubies, and he’s turned loose his necromancers to raise the dead of every battle, bending their will so that even the corpses of our enemies now fight for us.”
J’anda felt the tickle of a chill and the urge to rise to his feet, to cast the return spell and flee back to Sanctuary. “This is a carefully guarded secret, I presume?”
Terian nodded. “For a while longer, I suspect. If you were to leave right now, you could tell the Council, word would eventually leak back to Saekaj, and I’d be …” He ran a finger across his own throat.
“You entrust this to me?” J’anda eyed him carefully. “You truly are a fool.”
“You came back here even though you’re wanted dead,” Terian said. “Who’s the greater fool among us?”
“Since you did the same only months ago,” J’anda said, “I would not care to gamble between us on that question.” The flicker of a candle made the shadows dance upon the wall. “Why do you tell me this?”
“I’ll tell you more than that,” Terian said. “I’ve got information about the troll hordes that are aiding the Sovereign. I think we can knock them right out of the war if we did things right.” He glanced to the floor, lowering his eyes. “If Cyrus did things right.”
J’anda felt a weak laugh escape his lips, born more of tiredness and disbelief than mirth. “If you want to use a man you’ve tried to kill as your sword at this moment, you’re more the fool than me by quite some distance.”
“I’m a dark knight,” Terian said, looking away again. “I’ve already confessed I am foolish. Yes, I betrayed my allies. My friends. Myself, really. In some ways, in spite of … what others might have believed about redemption being a path I could walk, I wonder sometimes if the damage done to my soul along the earlier road is simply too much to come back from. I’ve laid my life on the line for you today, J’anda. What I’m about to do now is place it your hands.” He stepped closer to the enchanter and J’anda watched from his place on the bed, uncertain. “I’m going to find a way to kill the Sovereign,” Terian said, grimly serious in a way J’anda had never seen him before. “It is likely to result in my death. But if I can do this thing, then I can die satisfied that I’ve given our people a fighting chance at wrenching themselves free of the weight upon their shoulders. That I’ve done one good thing in my life, one good thing that will count for something, that will—”
“Erase from memory all your previous misdeeds?” J’anda asked, shaking his head. “This thing … it will not make up for what you’ve done before.”
“This isn’t about what I’ve done,” Terian said, his eyes glistening. “That’s all water down the stream. This is about what I mean to do, the last act to close the play; to sweep clear the stage and give all a new beginning. Yartraak is a tyrant, and he meddles, holds us in the palm of his hand, grip like steel and iron poured over us to keep us in our place—”
“You are out of your mind,” J’anda said.
“You have nothing to lose,” Terian said.
Except my life, J’anda did not say, which I will lose soon enough in any case.
They remained there in silence, each staring at the other, judging in the quiet what the other might be thinking. J’anda, for his part, had thoughts that whirled in his mind, too many to even number. He means it. I believe that. He truly means to challenge the Sovereign, to plot the demise of the God of Darkness, which is an absolutely insane proposition—
But it’s not as though Yartraak would be the first god to die …
J’anda started to ask a question when a knock sounded at the door, stiff and formal. Terian started, shoulders stiff under his armor, glancing at the entry to the room with suspicion. “Did someone hear us?” J’anda asked, a small thrill of fear running through him.
“Doubtful,” Terian said. “My wife and I have tested the quality of the door, in order to determine how private this room is. It would have taken a much louder conversation to be heard in the hallway.” He raised his voice. “Enter.”
The door opened quietly, and a tall man with a long face stood framed in it. “A guest for you, Lord Lepos.”
Terian’s expression changed subtly, and not at all pleasantly, at the man’s appearance. “Who is it, Guturan?”
“He is here to speak to your guest,” Guturan said stiffly, his vek’tag hair suit glimmering in the faint light of the flickering candle as his eyes turned to J’anda, who felt his head spin as the servant’s words filled the air in the room. “He says his name is Vracken Coeltes … and he is the head of the Gathering of Coercers.”
22.
Aisling
Her meeting with the Sovereign had been uncomfortable, and the revelations it had brought had been even more afflicting than she’d feared. It had left her with little desire to return to Cyrus Davidon, at least at the moment, but his attention was elsewhere for the short term in any case. Her return to Sanctuary had brought with it the news that the warrior in black had indeed placed his name into consideration for Guildmaster, along with Vara and that insufferable idiot Ryin Ayend. Aisling needed only overhear one conversation in the foyer to get the gist and another in the stairs to confirm it.
Cyrus will be Guildmaster, she thought. Neither of the other two stands an icicle’s chance in the Realm of Fire. She locked herself in her room and summoned flowered emotions of pride and lust, pouring them into a diary entry that made her queasy. Within her mind
, she considered the problem more deeply. Yartraak doesn’t want Cyrus dead, at least not yet. Or perhaps he wants him dead, but the tie to Bellarum gives him pause. Whatever the case, Cyrus’s life hangs precariously in the balance, and his continued presence as a shard in the Sovereign’s flesh is not likely to engender him long life and an eternal pass from the God of Darkness’s wrath.
And here I sit, utterly unprepared to extricate myself—and Norenn, especially—from the circumstances we’ve been in for years. She finished the diary entry and placed her quill back into the inkwell, rubbing a black smudge between her fingers. I have only myself to call on, and killing a god with my own blades … She ran her hands down to her belt, letting them drift over the hilts, leather wrapped around them up to the quillons, with mystical steel jutting into the short scabbards. I could get him if I caught him unawares, perhaps. Sleeping. Distracted, if I climbed to his shoulders, but it would take so many good sawings to open his throat …
And that’s to say nothing of Shrawn, who might be even more difficult. Constantly surrounded by bodyguards of no small skill, and doubtless he has a retinue of healers at his command to bring him back. She shook her head as she pondered it. I’ve never had much interest in poison, but black lace would be practically a requirement, as I have no healers of my own to balance the scales.
In a fair fight, me versus them on open ground, I would lose a thousand times over. She sat at her desk, the chair hard against her backside like the walls of the predicament that boxed her in. There is no fair fight. Not for them, because they won’t allow it, and not for me, because I have no allies. I am alone in this, with the entirety of Saekaj arrayed against me, and all their powers, and all their armies …
She took a quick inventory in her head and remembered the newly swelled coin purse at her side. I’m carrying too much gold—again. Time to make a deposit in Fertiss, I think. She knew, to the piece, how much she had on hand in the dwarven bank she deposited in, and it was not enough to do much more than buy a home in the country in some land away from the Sovereign’s influence. For now, anyway. If he continues trying to conquer Arkaria with the fervency he’s shown thus far, the day will come when no land will be beyond his influence.
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