The Bastions also came to mind. They had the power and influence over the military to seize total control. After the failure of the previous attempt, they would have learned enough to know how to succeed this time.
Or maybe an agent of Falmir like Gareth. Or even Fyre, given Nathan’s suspicions of her.
Nathan wouldn’t have even batted an eye if Torneus had been behind it all.
But Ambassador Sureev in his ash suit, carrying a small magic stone? He didn’t even have a weapon. All he had were honeyed words and the fact that Nathan had overlooked him.
“What am I doing?” Sureev repeated. “I’m taking back the Spires for my people. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Kill him!” Veleria shouted. “He wants to kill us all, and take us with him.”
“Not anymore,” the ambassador declared coldly.
He turned back to Nathan and spread his arms out. Nathan didn’t respond, his expression stony.
“You understand, don’t you? Didn’t you tell me not to blindly accept the order of things? That if you didn’t stand up to those who bully others with their power, that you would never be able to stand up at all?” Sureev said.
Nathan’s stomach churned. He remembered that conversation back in the elevator when he had first arrived in the Spires.
At the time, he had thought nothing on it. Nathan had been wrapped up in his own inner turmoil.
Surely, he couldn’t have caused this?
“You’ve been working on this for a long time,” Nathan said, avoiding Sureev’s questions. “What about the cascade? Were you behind it the entire time?”
Some of the councillors gasped. They had straightened up by now, but were wounded. Dmitri pressed his hands to his side. Nathan didn’t see blood, and supposed that the rebels had roughed him up a little.
“No.” Sureev shook his head. “I’m here to stop all this madness. You’ve seen the web of lies and deceit that the councillors and Bastions weave. They are supposed to run my homeland, and instead they treat us like a bargaining chip in their own plots and games.”
“Then who?” Nathan said. “Because you looking awful suspicious right now.”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?” Nathan could hardly believe the man in front of him.
“You’re almost certainly right about Falmir being behind it, Nathan” Sureev said. “The Bastions were working with them. So are these traitors.” He gestured to the councillors. “They play all sides, picking and choosing who they support and what beliefs they care about. Heresy is meaningless to them. Do you know how easy it was to turn the Bastions on the Council? On our legend? If they were deserving of respect, things would never have come to this.”
“So it’s everyone else’s fault that you did this,” Dmitri spat with a laugh. “You told us about the coup that was planned, but you were the one planning it with the Bastions. What, did you tell them that we were going to dismiss them? Take responsibility for your lies, you ass.”
“I am.” Sureev raised the stone in his hand.
Astra’s opals glowed. Nathan raised his hand and she stopped, but her teeth gritted.
“Nathan, it was only after you brought up our last resort that I saw the way out,” Sureev said, facing him again. “A way to reset everything. Remove the distant councillors that lie and mislead us. Get rid of egotistical Bastions who think they deserve everything in life because they do a shit job at protecting us. Return my people to a time when we didn’t fear an angry Champion killing us at random.”
That pit in Nathan’s stomach opened again as he stared at Sureev’s hand.
“You have no idea what you’re trying to do,” Nathan said.
“Without these Spires, we can start again. Fresh.” Sureev focused magic into the rock, but it did nothing.
“It’s encrypted, you moron. Kill him, before he finds a way around it,” Veleria snapped.
Nathan realized what the lockdown was about and why the councillors were still alive
Sureev needed them to blow everyone to pieces.
“Do you have any idea how many people will die if you activate that?” Nathan said.
“These towers don’t matter—”
“Millions! The explosion will vaporize the entire city, and half the valley.” Nathan’s voice echoed in his ears as it bounced off the sandstone walls.
“You don’t know that,” Sureev said coldly. “I thought you’d understand. Aren’t you doing the same thing in the Empire? You’re taming that rebellious princess. Before you came, she only played the role. A tomboy princess that people pretended to smile at, aware that she would one day grow up, marry a decent man, and settle down. Now she’s the perfect image of a future empress. Because of you.”
Is that how it appeared to others? Nathan pushed away the thought.
Sureev was trying to get under his skin.
“Nathan, there’s another path,” the ambassador continued. “Help me. You have the power and the Champions. Unlike the pathetic Bastions here, you keep your Champions in check. Even our legend bows before you. Remove the council, our Bastions, and I can work with you and the Empire. I promise you that, Nathan.”
How many times had Sureev said Nathan’s name? A part of Nathan’s mind realized this was a technique to appear more familiar to him. He barely knew Sureev. The ambassador had been affable and friendly.
But that was all.
This was all a trick. Sureev had manipulated all the levers behind the scenes. Nathan had simply overlooked him.
And if it wasn’t a trick, it didn’t matter.
Nathan had a world to save. He couldn’t fix the political and social problems of every nation on Doumahr. And especially not at the cost of leaving one vulnerable to attack by Messengers.
“How will you stop the invasions?” Nathan asked.
“There can always be more Bastions and Champions to recruit. They can be kept in check this time. And didn’t you save us this time, anyway?” Sureev scoffed. “The Spires are a shadow of their former glory.”
Nathan sighed. He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“No, Sureev. There aren’t always more Bastions and Champions. Trust me on that one.” Nathan waved his hand in Astra’s direction. “Astra.”
Sureev’s face twisted in rage. He screamed as his hand was crushed, and the magic detonator clattered to the floor.
Then, before the ambassador could say another word, Astra hurled him over the edge of tower. The wind swallowed his scream.
“Waste of time,” Astra said, staring at Nathan.
“No, it wasn’t.” He looked up at the councillors, who looked back at him with pale faces. “I’m not here to change nations. I only care about preventing Doumahr from being overrun by a demonic horde. But that nearly happened today. I can’t do your jobs for you, but I’d suggest that you think about why Sureev was here and how to stop it from happening again.”
“We didn’t get to be councillors by refusing to look at reality,” Veleria said. “Thank you, Lord Nathan. For saving the Spires. But there’s more to be done. Can you please help us?”
Five noble dark elves stared down at him, asking for help from a human. A decade ago, Nathan would have found the image amusing.
Today, he didn’t care.
“The Empire is in the grips of civil war,” he said. “There isn’t time to spare helping other nations.” He paused as the Council grimaced as one. “But consider this a personal favor. There will always be more demons and I need you to put your house in order. I’ll stay for a day or two to quell the worst of it. You’ll need to pick up the pieces.”
With those words, Nathan turned around and swept out of the chamber. His other Champions stood behind him, watching from the entrance. They stepped aside to let him through.
This time, Astra followed him without hesitation.
Nathan spent the rest of the day and the next morning in the Spires. Seraph and his knights put down some of the largest cells of violence. In preparati
on for the civil war, they had been training for urban warfare, and dominated the dark elf soldiers easily. Despite his orders, the Twins slipped out and caused havoc at some point. Nathan hoped their appearance was chalked up to rumors and hearsay.
His knights were trained to fight demons and did so exceptionally well. Most of the dark elves struggled to even graze his knights in return.
The dark elf Bastions surrendered by the end of the first night, along with their Champions. Given the situation, Nathan doubted they would face serious repercussions. Sureev was the fall guy in this situation.
Literally.
By midday of the day after the invasion, Nathan’s work was done. The rest needed to be handled by the dark elves. Nathan couldn’t rebuild a broken home, especially one he didn’t plan to live in.
Alice had told him that things were fine. He suspected something more was happening, but she simply said to worry about himself.
Before returning, Nathan rested in one of the large break rooms in a tower. Narime settled in next to him, her tails curling around him. More than a few women stared at him as they passed. The fox shooed them away with a glare.
“You’ve been down ever since finding out Sureev was behind this. Did you actually like him?” Narime asked him.
She played with her tea. Most of the supplies were thin and weak. This close to winter, the Spires needed to preserve food. Nathan didn’t know how bad the situation was due to the coup attempt. He hoped there wouldn’t be a need to provide the Spires with food, as well as the Empire.
“Sureev? No. In fact, I wish I had trusted what my memories told me about him,” Nathan said.
“And what was that?”
“That he was a snake.”
“Ah.”
They fell silent.
“So, why the long face?” Narime prodded.
“Lots of reasons.” He shrugged at her expression of annoyance. “Sureev is like the Nationalists: a product of his situation. If anything, I sympathized with him, like I did with Torneus. I can’t help but feel like this almost ended up being a repeat of what happened in the Federation in my old world. The Torneus I knew would see the Federation burn before he gave in. Sureev was the same.”
Narime rubbed his arm, but said nothing.
“The other is that I don’t think much will change. While Sureev exploited existing tensions, the Council and Bastions need each other. The Bastions have learned that they can’t easily take control of the Spires, and the Council need the Bastions to protect everyone. I don’t want to be the one to step in and tell everyone what to do.”
“I get the feeling you have a pair of women who want the opposite of you,” Narime said. “And I’m not talking about Anna and Alice.”
“The Twins. I don’t really care much about what they want me to do,” he said.
“You say that, but I guarantee that they’re influencing you.”
He didn’t have an answer to that.
So he moved on.
“The final problem is fairly obvious. I overlooked Sureev because I was looking for a bigger threat. He was fairly obvious and had his fingers in every pie. Who made the original offer to deal with Torneus? Who invited me to the Spires? Who vanished when the first coup started? He also had some clear problems with the current state of things.” Nathan rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“And? You stopped him before things worsened,” Narime said.
“What if I didn’t?”
“Nathan, if you consider every possible chance you had to mess things up, you’d never stop worrying.”
“Except this is different. Doumahr came closer to destruction than ever before. The Messenger, Sureev’s coup, and the speed it all happened. Plus the civil war breaking out early. The fact demonic activities tie into increased chaos is… troubling.” Nathan grimaced. “All I can think about is why I made the decisions I did. How close did I come to messing everything up? Years of effort would have been wasted.”
“But they’re not,” Narime insisted.
“No. For the first time in my life, I’m actually stopping the destruction, rather than trying to put out an unstoppable fire. But I’m terrified that a single mistake will ruin it all. If…” He gulped. “If there was another way…”
“Nathan, I think you’re going down a dangerous path,” the fox warned, but her arms and tails curled around him despite that. “We’ll be with you whatever you decide, but remember we are here to support you. Although you do need to introduce us to this Kadria you’ve mentioned.”
Her expression sharpened as she brought up the Messenger he had finally brought up.
“I’ll need to work out how to do that,” he said. “She’s different these days. Her insults don’t have bite. When she first called me her partner, I thought she was manipulating me in order to calm me down. Now… Well, if she’s manipulating me, she’s better at it than I can handle.”
“She is a succubus.”
“A bad one, if you believe the Twins,” Nathan said.
Narime giggled in response.
Before the conversation could continue, a dark elf burst into the break room. He chattered wildly in his native tongue, too fast for Nathan to catch. Everybody stared at him. The beastkin looked confused, while the faces of the dark elves lit up in wonder and excitement.
“Omria!” the dark elves shouted. “She’s returned. A prophet of Omria has descended in the Empire!”
Chapter 42
Sunstorm
A company of armored soldiers walked through the brush outside Tartus. Their armor had been scrubbed of markings and they carried no banners. They moved with purpose, and kept their eyes peeled on their surroundings.
Dozens more units like them converged on the city. Nathan had left Gharrick Pass only an hour ago, but his enemies struck fast.
Sunstorm sat in the branches of a solitary tree. Farmland surrounded her, although the villagers cowered in their huts. Tartus lay on top of highly arable land, given the nearby rivers. The city itself sat in the distance, low and squat over the horizon.
The sun was out and Sunstorm’s dark uniform and hair caused her to stand out. Hence why she hid within a tree. The soldiers stood out to her enhanced vision, despite their attempts to move stealthily.
A thousand rebel soldiers couldn’t sneak up on a city, after all.
There were too many of them to waste time on. She drummed her fingers on the hilts of her pair of short swords, trying to pick her target.
Something glittered in the distance, on top of a hill. It had to be over five hundred yards away.
Sunstorm’s onyx glowed.
A moment later, the tree exploded into splinters. The force of the blast caused some of the wood to burst into flames, starting small fires in the fields. Everything had been harvested weeks ago, so the flames burned out swiftly.
Nothing remained in the ruin. Not a drop of blood coated the fragments of the tree.
Sunstorm reappeared a hundred feet away, behind one of the houses. Her onyx glowed repeatedly as she teleported across the field while remaining hidden behind various obstacles. Low walls, trees, a shack used to store equipment, a chapel filled with carved wooden idols of Omria.
Finally, she crossed the field and arrived at the base of the hill that she had seen glitter earlier. With one final teleport, she appeared on top of a tree.
“I told you that it would be easy,” a woman said, a garnet gem in her collarbone.
She carried a battleaxe, which reminded Sunstorm of an old friend of hers. A cruel smile crossed her lips at the thought of the preserved head in her storage room. Sunstorm had hated Lucia, but she made for a very pretty part of her collection due to those pink highlights in her hair.
This Champion was far less pretty. Plain, really. A human girl that Sunstorm doubted anyone would look twice at if she didn’t have a gem.
Two other Champions stood nearby, as well as their Bastion. Both Champions were monogems. One had a sapphire, and appeared to be a mage given
her oversized staff and baggy robes.
The other held a huge longbow as big as she was and had an amethyst. If she wasn’t a Champion, the bow would be far too large for her.
As it was, Sunstorm questioned the viability of a bow that large in real combat.
The Bastion looked cute, Sunstorm guessed.
Genuinely cute, in the way that children were. She questioned if his balls had dropped.
Both he and the Champions openly wore emblems of the Federation, rather than the Imperial uniforms they should wear now. Did they think that this civil war was about taking back their country?
Not that it was Sunstorm’s worry. Her swords had found their targets. Anna’s soldiers could deal with the vermin from earlier.
But Champions? Dealing with them was Sunstorm’s job.
“Are you sure you got her?” the Bastion asked, holding a hand over his eyes as he looked at the destroyed tree.
“She didn’t have a chance to react. All those rumors about this Bastion Nathan being some sort of super Bastion blessed by Omria herself are bullshit,” the garnet Champion said, clapping her Bastion on the back. “His Champion died like a bitch, just like the rest of the Imperial dogs will.”
“I don’t—” the archer began to say.
“A bitch, huh?” Sunstorm shouted.
The Champions froze, then spun toward her location. Their gems glowed. The archer drew and loosed an arrow at the tree, while the garnet Champion rushed forward to protect her Bastion.
Sunstorm appeared behind the Bastion, her swords drawn. “Missed again.”
The Champions barely had a chance to scream, before Sunstorm severed their Bastion’s head in a single double cut. His headless body collapsed to the ground.
After looking over the head, Sunstorm tossed it at the garnet Champion. “Can’t say it fits my preferences. What about yours?”
Their gems had gone dull with the death of their Bastion. They weren’t a threat anymore.
But after those threats, Sunstorm didn’t feel like letting them go.
Heretic Spellblade 3 Page 45
