“His still aren’t clear to me,” Erith said under her breath. “What is it again? Redemption? Death wish? I forget.”
“Do you want to ask Brevis for his assistance or are you ready to leave?” Curatio asked.
Terian thought about it, and felt that weariness slam down on him again. “I can’t ask anyone else.” He glanced at Erith. “I wouldn’t even blame you if you didn’t come. I’m not exactly a proven leader, and you’re right, the reasons I’m doing this can’t be clear to anyone who’s watched me weave back and forth down my road like a drunken longshoreman.” He held the axe up. “But I’m doing it because I have to. Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“A noble cause,” came a voice from the door, and he spun to see who spoke to him. Her hair shone gold over her silver breastplate, and the cynical bent that was usually found in her voice was strangely absent on this occasion. “And reason enough to enlist an ally or two to your side, I would think.”
“You’d be about the only one to think so, Vara,” Terian said with a rueful smile. “Did you hear me talking from halfway across the village?”
“Indeed, I heard you from three-quarters across the town, over the sound of amateur carpenters doing something truly terrible with a saw of the like I have never—” She bristled as she stepped into the room and closed the door with her leg, a smooth motion that kept her from freeing her arms from behind her back. “It matters not. I am here now, and I come to help you.”
“It’s not your fight, Vara,” Terian said softly.
“I didn’t say I was coming with you,” she chastened him, “I am not stupid enough to show my blond locks in the city of the dark elves without an army at my back—nor to face off with an army with my head and neck exposed for the cleaving.”
He felt for his throat with his free hand. “It’s not so much the neck, because I’ve got the gorget, it’s more that without the helm it doesn’t really do its job properly—”
She pulled her hands from behind her back and tossed something at him, something round and roughly melon-shaped, though larger and lighter, and he caught it easily with the aid of his axe-enhanced reflexes. “Don’t lose your head,” she said, and he saw a hint of sincerity break through her cool facade, the hints of a smile tugging at the corners of her lips as she left, closing the door behind her.
He stared into the helm she had tossed him and felt the chill run over his flesh as he pondered the emptiness within. I am not worthy to wear this … but perhaps someday I will be. He took a deep breath in through his nose, taking in the smoke of the hearth, and placed it upon his head, staring out through the eye slits of the helm that completed his armor.
“Are you ready now?” Curatio asked, not quite succeeding at stifling a smile.
“I’m ready,” Terian said. He felt his two traveling companions step close to him as the magic of Curatio’s spell began, and he realized that indeed, he was as ready as he could possibly make himself.
74.
J’anda
Shouts echoed down the tunnel and J’anda shuddered, trying to suppress the desire of his body to shake in the chill. This was not always a thing that had bothered him, and he partially attributed it to the ravages of age, of the spider-veins and wrinkles all over him. He pulled his robe closer around him; never a terribly effective bulwark against the cold, here it felt even less useful, the thin fabric and elaborate stitching designed to magnify his magical power with the runes embroidered on it, not to protect from the elements.
“Do you think that’s them?” Zieran asked, the sounds growing louder ahead.
“Probably our guards retreating,” J’anda said. “They were set around the Front Gate of Sovar and further down; if the revolution is beginning, I suspect that we’ll see them first as they retreat to us.”
“Oh,” Zieran said, her face close to blank. He’d seen in her battle before, and the look she wore was strange, not what he’d ever noticed her wear in those situations, nor in any other. “It feels different this time, doesn’t it?”
“Because of who we’re fighting?” J’anda asked, staring down the dark tunnel ahead, looking over the shoulders of the soldiers in the front ranks. The slope of the tunnel allowed him some view over the heads of the taller soldiers before him.
“Yes,” Zieran said, and her voice shook slightly. “It’s different, don’t you think?”
“You weren’t there for the Sovar riots during the war, I forgot,” J’anda said with a slow nod. “When the revolutionaries rose up.”
“They didn’t want me to go down to Sovar for that,” she said with a trace of resentment. “Said it wasn’t a fit place for a woman.”
“There were women aplenty in the insurrection,” J’anda said with a little amusement of his own. “I almost got run through by one with a pitchfork as I ran a charm spell into the residents of her building. Coeltes saved me from being impaled by sending her screaming into a nearby oven.” He blanched at the memory of the heat from the woman’s clothing catching fire, the smell of her flesh burning, her screams as loud before she dove in as after.
“Coeltes saved you?” Zieran asked, her eyebrow raised. “Truly?”
“He was commended for it,” J’anda said with a shrug. “It was before my successes on the battlefield, back when I was not a rival for his ambitions, so …”
“Ah.”
A raw scream echoed through the tunnel, the dull roar that followed sounding like a crowd in a market square gone wild. “I remember thinking as we put down that insurrection,” J’anda went on, staring at the curves of the tunnel wall, “that what we were doing was righteous. We were enforcing the Sovereign’s will over a place that needed it firmly laid down. That the rebels were truly like … insubordinate children stepping out of line. And it was a hell of an insurrection, Zieran. A full-fledged food riot, the starving people packing the streets, their clothes hanging limply on their shriveled frames, unable to even really fight back against the soldiers with their spears …” He shook his head and looked around. “Never imagined I’d be sitting here again, doing something damned similar.”
“Why are we here, J’anda?” Zieran asked, leaning in to whisper to him. “You’re a child of Sovar, I’m a rebellious one of Saekaj, I’ve got no loyalties there. We could take these students and leave.”
“Have you ever seen a mob have their way?” J’anda asked quietly as the screams beyond died.
“No,” Zieran said. “But I’ve seen a tyrant who said he was a god step on enough people to make a mob. Now I feel like I’m watching another one do the same without even bothering to claim the godhood.”
“A mob is a thousand tyrants,” J’anda said, not taking his eyes off the darkness ahead. “The anger of the people, once roused, without law or order, turned loose like a reckless, wrathful river when a dam breaks.” He glanced at her, and he could feel his heart full. “There are children in Saekaj, even younger than the ones we brought with us.” He looked at his students, quivering a few rows back. “That mob down there is angry, furious. They have a right to be, and one could say that they are even justified in what they would do to the parents of those children, the ones that benefited from the last tyrant, helped prop him up, ate his largesse like pigs at a trough. But their children … they don’t know any better, and while they may have gone on to do the same as their parents … they may not have.” J’anda blinked. “A mob would kill them anyway. Dash the brains of their babies across the floor in absolute fury as they stripped everything of value out of a house. A mob is the tyranny of the many, unrestrained by law or decency.” Another shout echoed off the cavern walls, louder now than ever before, the sound of trouble drawing closer and closer to the reckoning. “And they are coming … and soon.”
75.
Aisling
She found herself squarely in the middle of the madness, which didn’t bother her at all. There were men and a few women on the leading edge, wirier, stronger than the rest, or perhaps just more angry, and they
charged ahead. She watched a few of them tangle with guards on the retreat. They killed some, were killed by others, and just generally started the bloodshed a little early.
And there was bloodshed. Aisling could see the raw, seething fury in the crowd, like a spell in the air, writhing and undulating with an energy all its own. Whenever one of the enemy was brought down, a ragged cheer rang in the winding cavern road to Saekaj. A guardsman would fall from being struck in a weak spot, bleed out over a few minutes of hard run as he tried to escape, and as he waned and the jackals of the crowd caught up to him and brought him low, she inevitably saw the fall as the body disappeared under the weight of their numbers. Pieces of armor and body would emerge from where the oceanic swell of people surrounded the fallen form, and it didn’t take long until entrails were held aloft as a sign of their victory. Judging by the noise, it was all excitement.
For her part, the excitement was still ahead, and it was not the sort that she thrilled to. Watching the seething anger resolve itself by ripping foot soldiers to pieces disgusted her. At Livlosdald the ground was red and blue and soaked with bloody mud; at Sanctuary’s siege it had been the same, as though it had rained gore from the skies. It had been enough to leave her sick of it.
That, at least, was combat among soldiers, even ones that I knew, that would have called me friend.
And yet this display is the one I find more horrifying.
She watched a child of no more than ten stream past her, screaming rage at the top of her lungs with a severed arm grasped above her head, watched the girl trampled unknowing by a crowd that didn’t even realize she was there. This is madness. Absolute madness.
“Yes,” Genn whispered in her ear, “it truly is.”
“Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked, glancing to her side to see Norenn a little further along in the crowd, huddled with Vracken Coeltes and Xem, cheering at the violence to the fore. Why aren’t they up front? she wondered.
“I don’t really enjoy the violence part of it, no,” Terrgenden said, shaking his head as he appeared. “I was merely trying to begin the upheaval process that’s so very necessary in this place.”
“Fitting for the God of Mischief.”
“Most people say Chaos, actually,” Terrgenden said, almost indifferently. “Mischief is what children get up to when left unobserved.”
“I saw a bit of that, too,” Aisling said, and tried to look back to see if the girl who’d been trampled was still visible. She was gone, either dead or pulled up too far back for her to tell.
“I don’t even really like the chaos part of it, though,” Terrgenden said. “Mischief, chaos, that’s just everyone’s interpretation. That’s the party line, see, what you hear from the others.”
“From your peers?” Aisling asked, not all that interested. “Your pals in the pantheon?”
“I have so very few friends,” Terrgenden said. “Only one close one, really. Probably the one you’d least expect. Do you want to know what she calls me?”
“Genn?” Aisling asked, feeling a push from behind as someone expressed their irritation at the slowness of the mob’s pace.
“God of Justice,” Terrgenden said, and she looked back in time to see him smile. “Because chaos and mischief when introduced into an unjust world such as ours? Well, really, they’re the instruments of justice.”
“And here I thought it was law,” Aisling drawled, the roar of the crowd nearly drowning out her reply.
“Different goddess, that one,” Terrgenden said. “Different department. Like word and deed, separate things. Do the laws of Saekaj and Sovar seem just to you?”
“They were set by a tyrant,” Aisling said, “so no. They don’t. But how is your version of justice any different? Because if it’s this?” She waved a hand in front of her. “I don’t see justice. I see furious retribution about to fall on a hell of a lot of people, some of whom deserve it badly and some of whom don’t deserve it at all.”
“And now you’ve come to the key problem,” Terrgenden said with a grin. “Justice and vengeance get all tangled together when the law is written by a tyrant and ultimately overturned by the forces of anger and resentment.”
Someone shoved against Aisling and she shoved back, ramming a leather-armored elbow into a nose and dropping the person that had shoved her under the shoes of those that followed. “Lot of that going around.”
“Do you know the solution?” Terrgenden asked, and Aisling turned her head to look at Xem, Norenn and Coeltes. They were talking amongst themselves, shouting out hectoring encouragements to the mob as the snaking crowd of people turned another corner and a guardsman disappeared beneath the fore. A blood-soaked helm was lifted up a moment later, navy dripping from the front edge enough to tell her that it had been used to murder its wearer.
“I don’t see much in the way of solutions from here, no,” Aisling said as the helm made its way across the crowd, lifted high as another symbol of victory.
Something hard was slipped into her hand and the world around her slowed as it did. She looked down in surprise and saw Genn standing there, moving like normal while the crowd appeared to have slackened to a crawl. “You give Justice an advocate. A champion, if you will, and you arm her so that she can do her good work.”
Aisling stared at the object in her hand, a dagger longer than the ones she carried before, with a blade stretching from her elbow to the tips of her fingers. It was pointed and jagged, with a decorative hole in the middle of the blade, and quillons that were turned in a half ovoid, sharp points coming off them in angular lines. The hilt came to a pommel with a little orb centered at the base, and it glowed yellow as though someone had cast a spell that was caught within. “What the hell is this?”
“An evener of odds,” Terrgenden said, but his figure was blurred, as though he were disappearing into the ether. The crowd around her had the same look, a faded quality about them, as though they and the world around them were turning to smoke. “It’s not the first aid of its kind I’ve given, and indeed not even mine to give, originally—but I trust you’ll use it better than was the last I tried to hand out here.”
“I—” she started to make her reply, but he was already gone, disappeared from her sight, leaving her holding the blade, the world around her like a shade of itself. By the time she looked up again, the screaming and shouting at the fore had grown to a fever pitch, and she knew that the battle was upon them.
76.
Terian
Terian made it out of the Grand Palace of Saekaj without killing anybody, though it was a narrow thing. He wasn’t even huffing, though he had his new axe firmly in hand, the guards looking at him with undisguised surprise as he went past. They didn’t challenge him, save for one who offered a half-hearted query, which he ignored. They probably aren’t expecting to have to stop anyone from coming out of the palace, after all; it’s those going in that are the worry.
Erith and Kahlee followed in his wake, looking a little like members of the old Sovereign’s harem, he supposed. He kept this thought to himself, of course, knowing full well that with Curatio now gone, there was no one else to heal him should he let that thought be birthed from his lips. Though he knew he could run faster than both the women who trailed behind him, he didn’t care to press his luck in moving ahead without the assistance of the lone healer now on his side.
“Quiet out here,” Kahlee said as they paused upon the bridge, looking out down at the front gates and out into Saekaj. There were minimal guards, and all of them wore the symbols of House Shrawn.
“I’m guessing the revolution has begun,” Terian said, feeling a certain tension run through his body.
“How do you think that will go?” Erith asked.
“It’ll be a massacre, one way or another,” Terian said, “but I don’t know which way. And it doesn’t matter, because it leaves Saekaj and Sovar open to Malpravus’s army of the dead, so whoever the winner is, they won’t have an overabundance of time to enjoy their victory.”<
br />
“Do you see a path to your own victory?” Kahlee asked quietly.
“A very narrow one, perhaps,” Terian said, chewing his own lip. He started to adjust the helm and realized he didn’t truly need to. That’s new. The old helm required constant movement when the faceplate was down to keep it from obstructing my view. “If I can turn both sides in common cause against the outside enemy …”
“You think you’re going to convince Sovar to let go of their millennia-old grudge with their rulers and Saekaj to let go of their ancient suspicion of their lessers and get them to fight together?” Erith asked, incredulous. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Terian said, starting forward in a jog again, “I’ll need it.”
“You’ll need a miracle, too,” Erith said, huffing as she fell in behind him, “and that I don’t have to give you!”
Much as he hated to hear it, he knew she was right. There’s nothing for it, though, Terian thought, and instead he just ran faster toward the gates, hoping that he could get there in time, and wondering what he would do if he did.
77.
J’anda
Dagonath Shrawn’s shouted orders grated in J’anda’s head, like the screams of a wounded animal channeled right into his ear. The mob was in sight, running headlong into the front ranks of Saekaj’s guard, and Shrawn’s orders did nary a whit of good, like drink poured out in a waiting gutter as the lines dissolved in chaos when the two sides met. Spear points met targets or were pushed down into the dirt. Screaming citizens of Sovar met their end on the point of blades or jumped screaming into the fray, dragging down guards and overwhelming them with rage and numbers. It was a slaughter, J’anda had to concede after the battle had been joined only two minutes, but not of the sort he was used to seeing.
“This is …” Zieran breathed next to him, horror ripe in her voice.
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