Ash and Ambition

by Ari Marmell

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Once, so very long ago, it had been called Castle Tzirkrav, named for the powerful but decadent royal lineage that ruled from within its monolithic walls. When the last Tzirkrav king had finally been overthrown and executed, the nation and its government placed under pure martial law, it had been rechristened with the unimaginative but oh, so military designation of the First Citadel.

  It was properly called that still, but in this day and age, most who spoke of it referred to it simply as the Fortress. It was title enough for the unbeating stone heart of the Deliant.

  Colonel Vesmine Droste, proud and ambitious officer of that military parliament, stalked the corridors of the Fortress, her impassive features masking a whirling maelstrom of worry and profanity. She was slender, fit, her striking blonde hair pulled back so tightly that one might trace the contours of her skull beneath her skin. Nothing save the officer’s red trim on her black tabard made her stand out from hundreds of other Ktho Delian soldiers, but she was so much more. One of the youngest ever to attain so high a rank within the Deliant, she fully intended to be the youngest to attain ranks higher still.

  Assuming nothing had gone disastrously wrong with her plan. It was fear over just that possibility, sparked by the Governor-General’s unexpected summons, that had her thoughts in such an uproar. The only thing worse…

  Would be if they’d somehow, though she couldn’t begin to imagine how, learned with whose help she’d concocted that plan.

  Soldiers and couriers wisely stepped from her path. All the soldiers, that was, until she finally reached her destination.

  A long hallway—narrow and easily defended—opened up its end, forming a broad antechamber before a massive, iron-bound door. Posted within that wider space stood four of the nation’s true elite, Deliant Fortress guards who could not be bribed, could not be intimidated. All wore gloss-blackened mail with plate reinforcement, all were armed with arbalest, halberd, and broadsword. Three wore the standard black tabard; the fourth bore the dark blue of an inquisitor.

  All of them moved to intercept, their leader demanding her identity and a sequence of code words while the inquisitor invoked his witchcraft to ensure she was cloaked by no illusion or other magic. Only when they were fully convinced of her identity—no matter that each knew her by sight—did they stand aside for her to pass.

  None opened the doors for her. That would have been a distraction from their duties. She grunted sourly, despite approving of the practice, and hauled the massive portal ajar. It swung with relative ease despite its weight, thanks to a system of counterweights that could be disengaged from the room beyond.

  She first noticed, as she always did, the change in scent, the fading of the sting in her eyes. The corridors of the Fortress were well lit, but the lanterns within the parliamentary chamber burned a cleaner, higher quality oil. The leaders of the Deliant often spent hours or even days within, after all.

  The second thing she noticed was how that light was directed.

  A horseshoe-curve of seats and podiums wrapped the room on all sides except the entrance, raised so that the Deliant officers could look down upon whomever addressed them. Directly opposite that entrance was the highest seat, that of the Governor-General himself. The remainder gradually grew lower around the curve, until those nearest the door were raised only by a few steps. Had this been a standard meeting of the parliament, the lights would have shone evenly throughout the chamber, and she would have taken her seat roughly halfway around and up the room’s right side.

  Today, only the floor itself was illuminated, suggesting she was to take a position there, gazing up at the others. Today, she was not an equal, but a petitioner.

  So be it. It wouldn’t be her first time.

  Concealing her irritation as thoroughly as she had her earlier worry, she stepped into the light and slammed a fist to her chest in salute. “You sent for me, Governor?”

  Vesmine couldn’t see Demyand Achlaine with the lanterns focused as they were, but he was hardly a stranger. It required no effort at all to picture the hawkish features; the head bald as an egg save for the fringe of white; the body grown gaunt with age, yet still possessed of strength and cunning enough to defeat challengers half as old.

  “King Hasyan,” he announced without preamble, his sharp tones even more clipped than usual, “has sent couriers to every corner of Kirresc. He is calling his entire court to assembly, all his nation’s dukes and high nobles.”

  The colonel nodded, her mind racing. Hasyan wouldn’t take such steps lightly, and certainly not this late in the year, with winter snows threatening.

  No, not much would inspire the man to go to such lengths, and only one thing that would result in Vesmine Droste being called before the rest of the parliament like an errant student.

  “You suspect he knows of the Quindacra negotiations?”

  “This summons to court,” Achlaine continued without answering the question, “occurred not long after Hasyan took a private meeting. None of our people are in a position to learn precisely who attended, let alone what was discussed. But we do know that many of his closest advisors were present, as was a woman by the name of Silbeth Rasik.”

  “I’m not familiar with the name, Governor.”

  “Nor should you be. She was among the champions of the Kirresci tournament, and—it turns out—a member of the Priory of Steel.”

  Still she failed to see where this was going, how any of it was relevant.

  “Having backtracked her movements as best we can, we now believe that she entered the tournament solely as a means of meeting with his Majesty in a way that wouldn’t appear suspicious to… anyone who might be watching.”

  Vesmine caught the curse on her lips before it escaped, but it was a near thing. “The woman who aided in Povyar’s escape?”

  “So it appears.”

  More internal cursing. She’d already tracked down the officer under her command who’d let information slip to Povyar, and had him executed, but the damage was done—and, ultimately, her responsibility. It had slowed her meteoric rise through the ranks to a glacial pace. Only the fact that the ongoing plan was hers had mitigated some of the damage to her career, and it would take the success of that plan to set things back on course. After the two fugitives had somehow survived the mountains and eluded her soldiers, she’d all but given thanks on her knees at the report of Ulia’s death from Quindacran spies in Wenslir. She’d known then that the traitor’s accomplice was a loose end, but she’d hoped—

  “The Quindacran operation is yours, Colonel Droste,” Achlaine said, as though listening in on her thoughts. “The failure in our security was yours. Which means the responsibility for fixing this is yours. Kirresc and her allies cannot be allowed to confirm their suspicions, and they certainly cannot be allowed to pressure the Quindacrans into changing their minds.”

  “King Boruden is a coward at heart,” Vesmine declared adamantly. “He’s more frightened of us than he is of Kirresc or their allies!”

  “Don’t be so certain, Colonel. Yes, Boruden is a coward, but he’s also a cunning little weasel. At the moment, he wants what we can offer, but he shares a border with King Hasyan, not with us. Should Kirresc bring enough pressure to bear, particularly if they recruit Wenslir to the cause as well…”

  “You’re correct, of course. We can’t chance it.”

  “So what do you propose to do about it, Colonel?”

  She wanted to lick her lips, gone suddenly dry. A small amount of magic—such as the agitation of a few of Gronch’s monstrous inhabitants, to draw attention from Ktho Delios’s activities—she could readily justify; she’d had several inquisitors assigned to her for the duration of the operation. What she and her partner planned for later could be explained away as a result of that initial agitation, a natural spread of activity throughout that haunted forest. Could they move up the timetable, though? Would she still be able to hide her outside assistance—sorcerous assistance—from h
er peers?

  “Let me speak with my inquisitors, Governor,” she hedged. “I think we can put something together fairly quickly.”

  “More of your ‘monstrous distractions’?” asked another of the shadowed Deliant officers, clearly unimpressed. Many of her fellow officers had been less than taken with that aspect of her plans—particularly since one of Hasyan’s knights, according to their spies, had already guessed at a Ktho Delian hand in the ogres’ recent activities.

  The same man, in fact, who had killed one of their most useful contacts among the Mahdreshan banditry: a troublemaker who kept cropping up, seemingly by accident, around the edges of her operation. Sir Nycolos Anvarri. With any luck, she’d find a way to work his unpleasant demise into the next phase of her operation.

  “If we can make it work,” she said, responding to the snide inquiry. “Kirresc may suspect our interference with Gronch, but they cannot prove it, nor can they ignore the danger the ogres pose. And if we can’t, well, I’m sure a cadre of inquisitors and mercenaries can provide a modicum of distraction for King Hasyan. Either way, they’ll have too much to worry about, too many problems, to devote their full efforts to investigating or pressuring Quindacra.”

  The darkened shape of the Governor-General nodded slowly. “Go, then. Make your plans. But Colonel? While I still have faith in this operation of yours, that faith is not without its limits.”

  Vesmine could do nothing in response to that save salute, pivot on her heel, and hope, as she marched from the chamber, that it wouldn’t take her partner long to respond to her summons.

  ___

  Here, deep in the darkest heart of Gronch, the sun never shone, the rain never fell, the wind never blew. Weather was a myth; the seasons were marked by a faint warming or cooling, by a change in color in the trees, and nothing more. The leaves overhead were packed too thick, forming a cavern’s ceiling. From above hung stalactites of moss, while branches clutched or hung limp like the fingers of countless dead men.

  Nothing smelled dead, though. Rather the air was redolent with the scent of growing things, moist and thriving things that should have been wholesome, yet felt vaguely unclean. The soil was thick, black, like a residue of the invisible night sky. Roots snaked just beneath the surface, angry serpents lurking to strike. The brush and fungus-covered fallen logs were as thick as the canopy above. Trunks and branches pressed together to form a maze of walls, and every curve, every arch, might have been the lair of some beast, or the doorway to another world.

  It waited, did Gronch, here in its core. Patient. Hungry. Even the boles appeared hostile, leaning in, looming, claustrophobic. Eyes watched. Limbs shuffled. The things that dwelt here were no mere wolves or snakes, crows or bears. Such creatures avoided this part of the forest, for they preferred realms where the natural order held sway. Where they were the predators, not the prey.

  Here, not far from the swampy shore of Lake Orist, that soil had piled up, those fallen boles formed natural archways, creating a twisted, sickly entryway into the depths of an earthen hill. Centipedes, beetles, worms, and things far less natural writhed and wiggled from the mud around that entrance. They wound around blades of grass, across protruding sticks and over lichen-covered rocks, but never did they pass more than a few yards deep into the crooked, gaping tunnel. Even they, driven by some mindless instinct, knew better than to approach what slumbered within.

  It was into this twilit nightmare the stranger came. Where few humans dared, where even the wolves and the poisonous things that crawled in the earth did not dare, he did. And not for the first time.

  No natural traveler, he hadn’t walked through the bulk of the Ogre-Weald to arrive in its heart. One moment, the shadows beneath a pair of intertwined arboreal giants had been empty, the next he had stepped from between them as though they were, indeed, a long-hidden door. Had he wished, he could have appeared inside the hill itself, in the winding bowels of that awful tunnel, but penetrating the wards—primitive though they were—would have taken effort.

  Also, it would have been rude. And even one such as he found it wise to be courteous when dealing with the uncrowned sovereign of Gronch.

  Beneath his torn and ratty cloak, with its equally ragged hood, he didn’t look fearsome. In fact, he appeared to have no business remotely near the Ogre-Weald, nor anywhere more dangerous than a pigpen, or perhaps a pastoral hillside overseeing a particularly docile herd of sheep. A disheveled mop of straw-colored hair topped a face equal parts boyish and mannish. Any halfway intelligent guess would have put him only a year or two past the changing of his voice, and though he hadn’t bothered to shave in months, the result was little more than a downy layer of fuzz that pooled haphazardly across cheeks and chin. He was tall, but not strong; lanky and rangy, not muscular or graceful.

  He was, in short, soft. Lost and weak, a lamb or fawn abandoned in the darkness.

  Or so, at least, did the denizens of Gronch see him.

  They appeared from the shadows, much as he had, a trio of monstrous forms, roughly human in shape but none remotely human. The shortest and squattest still topped eight feet, and that was without counting the spidery limbs protruding in all directions, including upward, from the lumps of gristle that were its shoulders. Of the other two, one was an asymmetrical thing of two legs but only a single muscular arm, clutching a rusted iron axe; a voracious, canine snout sprouted from beneath a single bloodshot eye, drooling a pus-like ichor that spattered and matted filth-encrusted fur. The last was easily the least alien—discounting the ten-foot height and the array of horns and spines protruding at random from its flesh and bones and even one of its eyes, which constantly wept a clear, glistening stream.

  He watched them, the stranger did, unblinking and unflinching, with the cold analysis of one who had seen more than should ever have been possible at his apparent age.

  “I have an errand here,” he told them, steady and calm. “You do not want to interfere.”

  Two of them advanced on him, slathering and gibbering, deaf to his words or at least to their meaning. The other, the canine being with the axe, hesitated half a breath before joining its companions.

  “Ogres,” the hooded stranger sighed.

  When he spoke again, it was to produce sounds that bore precious little resemblance to any human—any sane—language. The syllables were harsh, rough-edged, somehow hollow. That any human-shaped throat or lips or tongue could form them was very nearly an eldritch mystery in itself.

  Branches creaked, bending, stretching, shedding leaves and oozing thick sap where bark splintered. Roots coiled and bulged, raising serpentine heaps of soil before bursting into open air. The surrounding trees groaned in hateful protest.

  The one-armed marauder barked and spat as it was dragged from its feet by the winding tree limbs, lifted and bound so that it hung, motionless and quivering, high above the forest soil.

  “You, at least, seem to have a sliver of a brain,” the stranger said. Then, to the other two ogres, who had frozen in puzzlement for an instant at their companion’s predicament but swiftly resumed their advance, “I fear the rest of you are hopeless.”

  From a single pace away, a spiny hand the size of a pony’s head reached for the cloaked figure. He extended a hand of his own, as though preparing to grasp the other halfway.

  Instead, he spat another throat-rending phrase. From his fingers poured a gout of white liquid fire. On it came, and on, lighting the surrounding forest in its unnatural glare. It not only coated but penetrated the skin of the massive ogre, boiling flesh and fluids, igniting organ and bone. The creature spun away at the impact, dancing like a puppet on a string of flame, twitching, flailing, rotating as it burned. Directed by the hellish stream and the will of the impossibly young wizard, the dying thing slammed into its spider-limbed companion. Licks of flame leapt joyfully from one to the other, cavorting between them, while lengths of half-melted bone gouged deep rifts in unburnt flesh. Long after it was dead, until it was nothing but smoldering ash an
d charred fragments, it flailed and stabbed, so that the other perished soon after.

  A few final embers flickered, then the heart of Gronch once more subsided into shadow.

  “Stay,” the stranger ordered the surviving ogre, though it remained tightly bound by the animated boles and branches. Then, with no sign that the brutal magics had caused him the slightest strain, he resumed his trek, passing into the depths of the wooded hillside.

  His careful trek through the winding tunnels was long and slow, for though he knew well how to avoid the hidden deadfalls and savage wards, bypassing them required no small amount of care. Finally, he emerged into the hill’s central cavern: a massive earth-walled cave, half-swamp thanks to leaks from Lake Orist just beyond the northern wall. He cautiously picked his way around the stalactites and stalagmites of numerous roots, and gazed intently at the slumbering visage of the entity for which he had come.

  Both hands raised, he spoke in a voice augmented by sorcery, so that it resounded not merely in the air but in the dreams of the thing before him.

  “Awaken, exalted Vircingotirilux! I call to you, dread wyrm of the ancient wood! Awaken!”

  Multiple piercing howls, carrying the strength of the quaking earth and the fury of the unjustly damned, blasted through the cave until the hillside shook and the trees beyond trembled. Against that scream even the sorcerer could not entirely stand, staggering back two steps, though he neither cringed nor raised his arms in futile defense.

  On they went, and on. All he could do was wait, and endure.

  One of those voices fell silent as three pairs of hellish, gleaming eyes blinked open in the dark. The other two transformed into bestial roars of rage, mindless and murderous.

  “BACK! CYOLOS! DZIRLAS! I SAID BACK! SILENCE! SILENCE!”