Ash and Ambition

by Ari Marmell

  Dramatic, unexpected, but why would she risk losing her shield?

  As they circled, each jabbing at the other in an exchange of blades intended to test rather than to deliver a telling blow, Nycos understood. She’d recognized an opponent both fast and strong, had decided that the extra speed and precision she’d gain wielding her hand-and-a-half sword in two fists was more valuable than the buckler’s protection. She could have simply hung it from her belt or left it behind, but she’d chosen to hide her intentions, and take an unexpected shot in the process.

  He couldn’t help but grin, impressed. She returned the expression, teeth shining through the chilling shower.

  Nycos slashed. Silbeth dodged. She stabbed; he deflected. He lunged; she sidestepped. Their weapons came together, scraping and shedding rain. Where he began to overpower her, she danced aside. Where she came in fast, blade weaving a web as it seemed to strike from a dozen directions, he relied on his heavier weapon to bat aside the first and his innate speed to avoid those that followed.

  The crowd had fallen into a hush, so that only the sounds of the weather cheered them on. The wind caught her hair and Nycos watched for an opening, but she had tied enough of it back before the contest began that it never blinded her for even a moment.

  Twice he wound up on his back, tripped up by a maneuver he never saw coming, and both times rolled aside just before she could land a final blow. Once he managed to deliver a fearsome punch to her gut, the sheer strength of his spinning szandzsya having forced a hole in her guard, but she twisted fast enough to avoid the worst of the impact and her hauberk took care of the rest.

  It was all, perhaps, less showy than her earlier championship bout, less leaping and tumbling about, but it was faster, fiercer. Tomorrow, when those who had departed early heard their friends speak of this final match, many would refuse to believe it.

  Understandable, that. Having watched her for days, even standing in the face of it now, Nycos himself could scarcely believe the woman’s sheer skill. Even as a dragon he had heard the occasional tales of the Priory of Steel, and had always dismissed them. Humans were humans, were they not?

  Now? Even in his old form, his true form, Silbeth Rasik would have been more than a nuisance; as great a threat as any lone human could possibly be, without the aid of magic such as Wyrmtaker. Trapped in his current body, Nycos knew that he would have to tap into magics beyond what he was willing to reveal, would have to become far faster and stronger than human to win this match.

  Unless…

  He’d fought her, thus far, to a standstill, and inhuman stamina was far less conspicuous than potence or agility. No matter her training, her experience, Silbeth couldn’t possibly keep this pace indefinitely. She must tire, before long, and if he could simply keep her from victory until that point—no sure thing, but conceivable—he just might prevail.

  Again they circled, and the wind briefly parted the thick rain like a curtain. In that moment, Nycos saw clearly the audience of royalty and nobility watching from within the shelter of the king’s pavilion. He saw that Mariscal, seated comfortably beside her father, was among them.

  Conflicting thoughts clashed against one another in Nycos’s mind, louder than the steel. He’d all but forgotten his efforts to impress her, draw her nearer, repair the lingering damage to their relationship, and suddenly he found himself uncertain how best to go about it.

  Her prior comment about seeing a woman as champion, how seriously had she meant it to be taken? Idle musing, or was it genuinely important to her? Would she be impressed at his ability to overcome one of the tournament’s most impressive victors, or would she be angry at him? Would—?

  Then the choice, if it ever had been, was no longer his to make.

  Where in Vizret’s hell did that kick even come from? He never took his eyes off the woman, could not have been distracted by those whirling thoughts and questions for more than a fraction of a second—and nothing in his stance or his expression should have given away that he was distracted at all! Nevertheless, Silbeth’s sword had come swinging down at him, he’d raised the szandzsya to parry, and then his knee had simply given way, caught and hooked by a boot he’d never seen coming.

  He staggered, his unnatural resilience preventing him from toppling outright, but it was enough. Off-balance, he could do nothing to prevent Silbeth twisting inside his reach, knocking his weapon aside with an elbow, and jabbing the tip of her sword into his hauberk.

  The scar-tissue around the sliver of Wyrmtaker flared with remembered pain.

  It was a killing stroke, or would have been had she pressed it. As much as his pride stung, Nycos nodded, stepped back, and announced, “I yield.”

  He remembered little of the next few moments. The roaring throng, pressing around him. The support of his friends—condolences for his defeat or congratulations for coming so near to defeating so worthy an adversary, depending on who was speaking. Mariscal’s presence by his side, the occasional touch of her hand where propriety or the press of the crowd permitted. The roar of the trumpets, bringing the tournament’s final afternoon to a close. The cold embrace of the rain.

  But all he could see was Silbeth Rasik, and all he could think of were the many unanswered questions about her.

  ___

  His Majesty made a brief announcement, formally declaring this year’s winners—not just in the one-on-one duels, where Silbeth had proven victorious, but in contests of grand melee, archery, and the joust. Traditionally, a procession would have followed, in which the champions were displayed before the crowd, offered tokens of victory and other rewards; musicians and performers would have put on their final shows, and the tourney would officially draw to a close. In light of the inclement weather, however, tonight the king would be inviting the champions to a brief and private ceremony within the court, and the bulk of the festivities would be postponed for the morrow.

  As that meant an extra day of celebration—and thus an extra day of drinking and leisure—the crowd cheered the announcement as emphatically as anything else they’d heard or seen for the past fortnight. The servants and heralds were perhaps less overjoyed, but they kept their opinions to themselves.

  Once inside the crowded throne room, Silbeth and the others were named champions with abbreviated pomp and circumstance, including a lone trumpeter, and invited to attend the king’s supper in a couple of hours. Marshal Laszlan asked if Silbeth would take a few moments to speak to his Majesty regarding a possible contract for the Priory, and just that easily they’d established a believable excuse as to why the king might spend some time in private conversation with a woman who, for all her skill, was just another mercenary.

  It was all more or less what Nycos had expected since he’d first delivered her message, and he spent most of the shortened ceremony statue-still, fighting the unfamiliar and all too human urge to fidget, while he waited for the nonsense to be over and for the answers to finally come.

  All of which made him want to scream in frustration when the king asked only his most immediate advisors—the Crown Marshal, Denuel Jarta, their Highnesses the prince and princess, and a handful of the others—to accompany him and their guest to the smaller council chamber.

  Well, fine. If they weren’t going to invite him to participate, he’d learn what he needed via other means. Time to take a page from Smim’s book.

  Nycos tagged along part of the way, concocting excuses to speak with Marshal Laszlan: something about possibly hiring foreign competitors who did well in the tournament to train Kirresci knights in some of their martial arts and fighting techniques. It was, no doubt, an idea that others had already considered, and perhaps it had even been tried, but Orban listened politely and asked Nycos to write up a formal proposal.

  That done, Nycos peeled off as the group approached their destination. He’d established a reason to be near the council chamber, and that was all he’d required. Once on his own, he jogged through a few winding halls until he finally found a small room—r
eally little more than a closet—close enough to suffice.

  Nobody considered it a threat, in terms of eavesdropping or espionage. No human being could have heard a peep through the thick stone wall.

  Nycos concentrated, transforming the pieces and contours of his inner ear until he could have heard a worm’s after-dinner belch, and pressed the side of his head against the stone.

  “…heard me make mention of an intelligence source I had within Ktho Delios,” King Hasyan was saying, his voice made gruff and vaguely tinny by the intervening wall. “Lady Raczia was that agent.”

  “I only ever knew her as Ulia Povyar,” Silbeth said, sounding distant, even saddened. “She didn’t even tell me her real name until a few weeks before…” She trailed off.

  The next to speak was Orban. Nycos could all but picture the marshal standing beside the king, a hand on his shoulder. “How did she die?”

  “Ah, begging your pardon and with your permission, Marshal Laszlan,” the mercenary replied, “and with yours, Your Majesty, I’d prefer to tell the tale as it happened. I expect you’ll all have a great many questions, and it’ll be easier to keep it all straight if we’re not hopping around.”

  “I’ve no objection,” Hasyan told her. “Has anyone else?” Then, after a response empty of anything but silence, he said, “Please proceed, Mistress Rasik.”

  So she did, regaling her audience (plus one curious knight) with the tale of her assignment, her mission to infiltrate Tohl Delian and extricate Ulia—that was, Lady Raczia, King Hasyan’s spy—from the heart of Ktho Delios. She left out nothing of importance, from her difficulties in meeting up with the criminals they’d arranged to work through, the necessary bloodshed, and their near escape with Deliant pursuers, including one of the fearsome inquisitors, hot on their heels.

  And here Nycos had thought he couldn’t grow any more impressed with this woman!

  “Koldan’s smugglers got us outside the city walls,” she said, “but not much further. The Deliant soldiers were not only behind us, but ahead. They’d gotten word to their patrols on the roads, since they didn’t have to take the time to sneak around as we had. Ulia and I wound up fleeing overland, through the forests and eventually up into the Aerugo Mountains.

  “I don’t know if that inquisitor, Ilx, was still in command of the pursuit or if someone else was in charge, as we never saw him again. But they would not let up! Either they were truly enraged at the death of a few Ninth Citadel agents, or they’d figured out what it was Ulia had discovered.”

  From the sound of things through the wall, several people began to speak at once, then, but something—a gesture of some sort, perhaps—stopped them before they’d formed a coherent word. “Please,” she reminded them, “I’ll get there. You’ve no reason to trust me, not without U—Raczia to bear witness. I want you to understand why she trusted me with this intelligence, because it’s vital that you believe!”

  A moment, in which Nycos heard what he imagined was a long swallow of something liquid, and she continued. “It wasn’t terribly difficult to hide from them in the mountains, but hiding was all we could do. They left us no escape routes. They watched the roads like hawks, were crawling all over the scalable slopes, had soldiers spread throughout the forests. Not that they really had to stand guard for long. Once the snows fell, we weren’t going anywhere. We were trapped up there for months, and during the worst of winter it was all we could do to survive. Escape wasn’t even a consideration, then. Moving between shelters so we’d not be caught, trying not to freeze, to scavenge sufficient food. We had to fight for our lives, more than once. Deliant searchers found us a couple of times, but there were also bears, something I think might have been a yeti, creatures of the ice that may have been fey… It was unpleasant.”

  That understatement inspired a few chuckles.

  “In the mountains, of course, winter lingers. Things did grow easier, once the thaws began, but even then we couldn’t get out! The soldiers figured we’d make a break for it as soon as we were able, so the coming of spring saw a redoubling of searchers. I’ve never heard of such a monumental effort to track down a pair of fugitives!

  “Still, their numbers dwindled eventually. Either they assumed we were dead, or they simply couldn’t spare the manpower from other duties. It still required a great deal of running and hiding, but we were finally able to make our way beyond the Aerugo range and run for the border.”

  Apparently it was a question Hasyan couldn’t hold back any longer. “So Raczia was still alive, then? She didn’t perish during the winter?”

  “No, Your Majesty, she was still… still with me, then.” She paused, swallowed. “Ulia and I became quite close during those months. We had to, to survive. Trust was more vital than warmth, you understand?”

  Nycos sensed the nods he couldn’t hear.

  “It was during this portion of our travels, as we carefully made our way south, that she told me her real name—though we scarcely used it, as we were both accustomed to ‘Ulia’ by then. It was also at this time that she revealed to me what it was she’d learned. And it was in honor of that trust, and our friendship, that I chose to bring it to you, Your Majesty, once she was gone. Even though my assignment had only been to try to rescue her…”

  More silence, long and dragging.

  Until, “We still had to move slowly, carefully. We made our way to Lake Orist, skirted around the shore. We actually passed through the edges of Gronch, in order to avoid the Deliant patrols. Perhaps we were fortunate, but we encountered nothing within worse than a few wild animals. If the legends of monsters in that forest are true, they must have been elsewhere.”

  It wasn’t hard for Nycos to imagine the looks that must have passed around the table at that declaration.

  “We took a bit of time in a small town in Suunim, recovering, regaining our strength. Ulia was in a hurry to return, Your Majesty, but we both knew we needed the rest.

  “Our journey through Suunim and Wenslir was long but largely free of excitement, and thank the gods for that! I think we were both feeling almost human again as we approached the Kirresci border. We were intercepted, then, by a Wenslirran patrol.”

  Her voice dropped to a near whisper, so that Nycos had to strain mightily to hear. “I should have been more watchful. More alert. We just… we had no warning, no reason to suspect they were anything other than what they seemed…”

  Given there were fewer than a dozen people in the room, the uproar was intense. Nycos pulled back from the wall, and from the volume, until his Majesty had calmed everyone down.

  Not that the king himself was precisely calm. “Are you suggesting,” he asked, every word quivering with anger at the possibility of such betrayal, “that soldiers of Wenslir killed Raczia?”

  “She died in the attack,” Silbeth answered. “I barely escaped—and make no mistake, I would have fought for her to the death, but she was already gone before I knew what was happening.

  “They were dressed as Wenslirran soldiers. I don’t think they actually were. I think the Deliant spread word to watch for us—for Ulia specifically, since they had a better description of her.”

  “That would mean the Deliant have agents in Wenslir,” Princess Firillia mused. “That’s disturbing to say the least.”

  “There could be spies anywhere,” Silbeth said. “Though not necessarily Deliant.” Before anyone could ask what she meant by that, however, she continued. “That’s why I approached you as I did, Your Majesty. I’d finally made it to Kirresc, and then to Talocsa, but I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just walk up and see you, not without Lady Raczia’s rank to gain us an audience. Some random mercenary asking to see the king? It would have taken weeks, if it happened at all, and gods know who would have learned of my presence during that wait? They’d have taken steps.”

  “The code phrase you used to identify yourself to Raczia would have gotten my attention,” Hasyan reminded her.

  “Eventually. If the guards recognized i
t as a code phrase and not nonsense, and bothered to repeat it to anyone who could bring it to your attention. But again, how long would it take? How many people would the request have to pass through, how far would word spread that some no-name warrior had arrived to see you? How could I be sure none of the messengers were themselves enemy agents? I had to find a way to speak to you that wouldn’t attract the wrong sort of attention. But a meeting with a tournament champion? Nothing about that says ‘espionage’ or identifies me as the woman who’d traveled with Ulia.”

  “And if you’d been slain in the process?” None of the Kirresci tournaments were deliberately waged to the death, but they were hardly a safe pastime. Severe injuries and fatalities were far from unheard of. “Who would have delivered your report then?”

  “I thought it worth the risk, Your Majesty. And I thought it… unlikely I’d be killed.”

  “Fair enough,” he conceded. “Still, such dramatic precautions really only seem necessary if Oztyerva were crawling with Deliant spies. While I am forced to admit that we may have one or two, they’re hardly present in the sorts of numbers you seem to fear.”

  “That would be so, Your Majesty, if it were only the agents of Ktho Delios I was concerned about.”

  Nycos heard her take another drink, then another breath. “This, you see, is what Ulia discovered, what you must know. She had developed a friendship with a young Deliant officer, a man who served under one Colonel Vesmine Droste—one of the new favored protégés of Governor-General Achlaine himself.”

  The whole room had hushed, and even Nycos had to remind himself to breathe. She had told her entire story, explained her motivations, and now listed the provenance of the intelligence she carried, all before delivering that information for which the king’s agent had died. What was so awful, so earth-shaking, that she felt they would struggle to accept it, might look for reason to disbelieve?

  “The spies and assassins I’ve been hiding from, Your Majesty, are not just those of your enemy, but of one of your nearest friends. Ktho Delios has been holding secret talks with the royal house of Quindacra. Talks that, if they succeed, will result in Quindacra withdrawing from the southern nations’ mutual defense pact.”