The Conquerors Shadow Page 11

  Fighting the urge to lash out blindly around him, Corvis carefully returned the sword to its scabbard, and drew Sunder from his right hip with a quick, fluid motion. The Kholben Shiar flared at the feel of flesh and blood against its grip, exulted at the sense of fear and pain and, most delectable of all, burning fury in its wielder.

  The laughter ceased in a sudden hiss of indrawn breath from among the nearest trees. “Enemy!” It was a whisper, but it carried clearly across the unobstructed path. It cradled within itself the voice of legions, though it was spat forth as a single word, from a single source.

  A heartless grin settled across Corvis’s face. If they feared, they could be killed.

  “Enemy, is it now?” he called back, his voice steady, his tone challenging. “So what was I before?”

  Again, an infinity of hisses breathed as one. “Prey …”

  “Ah. Given the options, I prefer my current status.”

  Silence from the trees. Even the distant sounds of animals had faded.

  “What’s the matter?” he called, taunting. “Not the way prey’s supposed to act? Not an enemy you’d care to face? Maybe you should have thought of that before you tried taking a piece of—”

  The path, indeed the entire forest, slowly tilted upward before his eyes. He pitched forward, half catching himself with an ungraceful stagger that brought him to one knee. He glanced around wildly, fully expecting a sudden rush of … whatever he was facing.

  No attack came, but the simple movement of his head set the entire world to spinning. The butt-end of Sunder smacked the ground, its steadying influence the only thing keeping Corvis even remotely upright.

  What’s happening to me? The wound isn’t that bad! It doesn’t even hurt any—oh …

  Though difficult to see through his blurring vision, the gashes along his arm had swelled horribly, spewing blood and a noxious-looking pus into the soil around him. There must have been some anesthetic in the poison, or infection, or whatever coursed through his flesh.

  Fueled by spite as much as anything else, Corvis dragged himself to his feet, leaning on Sunder as if the ancient weapon were a simple cane. Then, though every muscle in his body protested, he lifted the axe and dropped unevenly into a ready stance.

  “You think I’m impressed?” he shouted, his voice grown hoarse as his body battled the raging contagion. “I’m not! Poison or no, I’ll take you with me!” He didn’t know what he was shouting anymore, only that the words needed to keep coming, that defiance alone kept him on his feet. “Come on! One at a time or all at once! I’ll drag you into hell with me!”

  And he thought, for an instant, that his unseen tormentors might oblige. Several trees at the illumination’s edge began to writhe and shift, as though something large moved through the branches. Unable to see straight, scarce able to stand, Corvis faced the coming threat.

  Nothing emerged from the madly thrashing trees. Instead—or so it seemed to Corvis’s failing eyes—the branches of the wooden behemoths stretched and split, lacing their ends together at obscene angles, until the abstract suggestion of a face appeared, woven from bark-covered tendrils. Though no eyes hung in those empty sockets, Corvis was convinced that the thing was glaring down at him.

  “I …,” he began unsteadily, but the face in the trees gave him no time to speak.

  The leaves shuffled in wildly uneven patterns behind the artificial visage, the branches scraped together. And, impossibly, the random cacophony of sound resolved itself into a raspy, but fully intelligible, voice.

  “Follow,” it scraped down at him. Then the branches fell limp, the face dispersing back into its component branches.

  Corvis wondered if the entire thing was some twisted hallucination. But no, the trees leaned aside, branches sweeping back, clearing a second, smaller trail that diverged from the main path. Corvis thought he heard a scream of rage from deep within the trees behind him, but no one and nothing appeared to stop him from taking the newly offered route.

  Head spinning, chest and legs burning, Corvis stumbled onto the smaller trail. He leaned heavily on Sunder, which quivered in disappointment as the battle and blood were left behind. More than once he stumbled and would have fallen, and more than once a heavy branch protruded into the path where it was most needed, presenting itself to steady him. The trail stretched on forever, though Corvis’s poison-racked senses had lost all track of time and he hadn’t the first notion how long he’d wandered this endless darkness. The passageway twisted and turned randomly. He wondered, with what coherent thought remained to him, if the damn place was just leading him in circles, waiting for him to lie down and die.

  Once, in a lucid moment, he removed a length of bandage from his pack. Shearing off the end, he tied the sliver tightly around the tip of a branch. That, at least, would tell him if he was retracing his own path.

  When he came across the strip of bandage some minutes later, tied tightly around the branch of what was blatantly a different tree, Corvis abandoned himself to whatever force guided his steps.

  For an eternity he stumbled on. His spell of illumination slowly faded, until the feeble glow could barely show him where the trail left off and the endless trees began. He felt himself drenched in sweat, and he cycled regularly from the heat of fever to the chill of the grave as his body tried to burn out the infection. All feeling drained from his arm and it no longer responded to his commands, moving only occasionally as it spasmed without apparent cause.

  He was forced, ever more frequently, to stop and rest, leaning against the trunk of a tree or huddled by the side of the road, vomiting up the few contents of his battered and abused stomach. He thought once of the smoked meat in his pack, realizing much time must have passed since his last meal, but the very notion sent him to his knees, dry-heaving.

  Finally, he stumbled one time too many, and he lacked the strength to catch himself. The taste of soil coated his tongue, dirt caught in the back of his throat, and he found himself blind. He became aware of a faint tickling on his upper lip, decided it was probably an ant, and wondered deliriously if he could rotate his eyes far enough around to see it if it crawled up into his skull. Maybe if he could make himself sneeze hard enough in the right direction, he could catch an updraft and land the little bug in Davro’s dinner. Assuming it was anywhere near dinnertime. Corvis laughed hysterically, choking on the soil, and flipped over like a landed fish. No sense in choking to death while he waited for the infection to kill him. He laughed again.

  And then, as his vision cleared for just a moment, he saw it. Not fifteen feet from him, visible only as a vague shape in the last sputtering remnants of his light spell, was a building. Nothing more than a simple hut, but it meant someone was here.

  Or had been here, at any rate. If nothing else, it offered a more comfortable place to die. With the absolute last of his reserves, Corvis drove himself to his feet and staggered through the front door.

  “I see you got my message,” Seilloah told him.

  Everything went black.

  Chapter Seven

  Nathaniel Espa—Knight of Imphallion, and currently Duke Lorum’s eyes amid the growing turmoil in the east—knelt at the bedside of the torn and broken shape that had once been an old friend, and willed the tears not to come.

  The Lady Alseth, wife of Sir Wyrrim, laid a hand on Nathan’s shoulder. “It would’ve meant a lot to him that you came,” she whispered through a throat torn ragged with sorrow. “It means a lot to me, too.”

  “I wish it had mattered,” Nathan said softly. “I tried to get here sooner, Alseth, I truly did.”

  “You couldn’t have done any more,” she offered gently. “Not even the great Nathaniel Espa could have snuck or fought his way into Rahariem, not with so many of the invaders still inside.”

  “Maybe I could’ve had you smuggled out faster,” he protested limply. “It’s just, by the time I knew Ivriel might prove a safe haven …”

  “You saved me, Nathan. You saved my son, and you allo
wed Wyrrim to die in a bed, rather than in some dungeon. We’re grateful.”

  Nathan nodded once, placed a palm upon the forehead of his dead friend, and rose. “What was he doing on the battlefield at his age, anyway?” he asked.

  “Come, Nathan, you’ve known him longer than I have. You know he’d never sit by while his city was attacked. Besides,” she added darkly, “it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Nathan frowned and escorted her into the next room, where they both sat and pretended to sip at goblets of wine that neither of them really tasted. “What do you mean?”

  “It was horrible. Even once the walls fell, and the city surrendered, that wasn’t good enough. Every noble who had more than a few household soldiers to his name, and every ranking Guild leader—they were all rounded up and herded into the keep. I don’t know what went on in there, but some of the men who went in unwounded came out looking worse …” She choked briefly, but continued. “Worse than Wyrrim. And many didn’t come out at all.”

  Despite the redness and the tears, her eyes remained steady as she stared into the knight’s widening gaze. “I’ve learned enough about war from Wyrrim to know that this wasn’t about interrogation or military secrets. This was about fear—and maybe punishment, though the gods alone know for what. Whatever rare civility is normally to be found in war, you’ll find none here.”

  “And you’re certain this isn’t a Cephiran invasion?”

  “Quite. Some of the mercenaries were foreigners, certainly, but many more were Imphallian. This is someone else, Nathan.”

  Nathaniel Espa allowed his eyes to hover once more over the body of his old friend—a corpse that, even hours after death, still soaked the sheets with bloody wounds. Then, slowly, he turned his gaze outward, and wondered grimly what new terror had emerged from the east.

  “Idiots!” Lorum, Duke of Taberness and Regent Proper of Imphallion, slammed a fist into the gold-trimmed wardrobe. It rocked dangerously and would have crashed to the floor if one of the servants hadn’t dashed to steady it. “Those bloody, unthinking idiots!”

  “In all fairness, Your Grace, they’re just defending what they see as their own interests.”

  The regent’s neatly trimmed beard actually bristled as he scowled at his companion. “And when the Guild halls have been reduced to rubble around their ankles, and there’s a monster on the throne who won’t put up with their damn pouting? How’ll those ‘interests’ fare then, do you think?”

  Nathaniel Espa, former hero of Imphallion and now adviser to the regent and a respected landowner, raised an age-greyed eyebrow, though he refrained from letting the grin he felt actually show on his face. The Lorum of old never had the nerve to speak that way, not about the Guilds, and certainly not to his old mentor. But the regent, having led the kingdom through the hard years of reconstruction after Rebaine’s defeat, was made of sterner stuff. In attitude, if not in build, he’d almost come to resemble the enraged ursine adorning his noble crest.

  A damn good thing, too, since the appearance of Audriss seemed destined to lead Lorum, and all Imphallion, into yet another war.

  Since the Serpent first appeared, Lorum had lobbied with the Guilds for a consolidation of power. The division of governmental responsibility was all well and good during peacetime, he argued vehemently, but an army without a single commander could not prevail against a well-prepared foe. He cited precedent, pointing out that Imphallion’s armies fell before Rebaine’s advance almost twenty years ago, until all the nobles and the Guilds fielded a unified force. They would have to do so again if they hoped to repel this new enemy, this Serpent, Audriss.

  But the Guildmasters were obstinate, and most resisted any such idea. “Audriss is not as big a threat as Rebaine,” they insisted. “Denathere got careless; the other cities are more than capable of defending themselves. Let the Guilds field their forces as needed to protect their interests. There’s no need to overturn a system that has worked for hundreds of years.”

  “It hasn’t worked for hundreds of years!” Lorum had argued, over and over again. “It didn’t work seventeen years ago!” But most refused to listen, and those few Guildmasters farsighted enough to see the wisdom in his proposal were afraid of speaking out too loudly in his support for fear of alienating their brethren. And so the resistance to Audriss’s advance continued: piecemeal, sporadic, and utterly ineffective.

  “If this entire kingdom were flooding, Nathaniel,” Lorum continued, his voice a shade calmer, “they’d rather let the lot of us drown than swallow even a mouthful of pride.”

  Nathaniel could only nod. “True. But if Your Grace will recall, after the war, it was nearly three years before you restored the Guilds to their full authority.”

  “It was necessary for the rebuilding, Nathaniel. They weren’t cooperating.”

  “Oh, I agree, it was your only choice. But it made you few friends in the Guilds, and they’ll think twice before allowing you the same—as they would say—opportunity.”

  “Damn. Damn! They won’t have a kingdom left to exercise their ‘authority’ in if we don’t do something now.”

  “I say we just take the damn armies.” Lorum and Nathaniel both turned to face the speaker, who had remained so abnormally silent that they’d all but forgotten his presence. His face was twisted in its accustomed scowl. “They can whine all they want, but if you’ve got most of their men fighting for you, they can’t do anything about it.”

  Tall, thin, and wiry, he was the image of suppressed energy. Brown hair, cut short, matched equally brown eyes on a face incapable of smiling. His outfit was black, darker even than Lorum’s own formal attire, but then he never wore anything else. His tabard sported an odd symbol indeed: an abstract shape suggesting the image of a fish, crimson-hued, on a field of ocean blue.

  Not an imposing symbol, but Braetlyn was a coastal territory, grown strong from its humble beginnings as a thriving fishing community. And this young man, now in his early twenties, was Baron of Braetlyn. His name was Jassion, and it was said he’d not laughed once since Lorum’s officers dug him, silent and trembling, from the pit of corpses in Denathere’s Hall of Meeting.

  As he grew to manhood, he’d remained determined, angry, and cold. He was not a cruel lord, no harsher of rule than any other noble; but if there was no malice in his treatment of his subjects and his fellows, neither was there kindness. To Jassion, the world held only three sorts of people: those who could be useful and were to be cooperated with, those who were useless and were to be ignored except where his responsibilities dictated otherwise, and those who were dangerous and were to be killed.

  Lorum, Nathaniel, and the others put up with him because he was a relentless fighter and a skilled tactician, and because his rank demanded it. Jassion, as best they could tell, had been gracious enough to place them in the “useful” category. Not the start of a lasting friendship, but a functional alliance, at least.

  “My lord,” Nathaniel began, trying his best to sound tactful, “I’m not convinced that’s the best option at the moment …”

  “That’s fine, Espa. You’re not the one I need to convince.”

  Two pairs of eyes—one determined, one resigned, both angry—turned on the regent. Lorum sighed shallowly.

  “Gentlemen, the enemy is out there, remember? Not inside these walls. And that includes the pair of you, understood?”

  “The enemy,” Jassion shot back, “is anyone who’d keep you from defending your kingdom and separating Audriss’s damn head from his shoulders! And if the Guilds are standing in the way of that, then you’d better damn well believe you do have an enemy within these walls!”

  The old knight stepped up beside Lorum, shaking his head sadly. “My lord, were we to attempt to seize the Guilds’ soldiers by force, Audriss might as well go home. He’d no longer have need to conquer us, because I doubt there would be much of Mecepheum left to conquer. We’d destroy ourselves long before he got here.”

  Jassion scoffed. “They wouldn’t ha
ve the stones to fight back against a determined force! Once they realized their options were joining with us or dying as traitors to the Crown, they’d—”

  “Die as traitors,” Lorum interrupted, “and take a lot of our men with them. Besides, even if we could somehow pull it off, the political ramifications—”

  “Political ramifications? Gods, you’re talking about the survival of the kingdom! The Guilds and their politics be damned!”

  The two men glared at each other, the air between them threatening to ignite. And then, as casually as if he were reaching out to open a door, Nathaniel cuffed Jassion across the face.

  The young baron staggered, one hand reaching for his bloodied lip in shock, the other dropping to the pommel of his sword. “You—you …”

  It was, Lorum noted with some small amount of satisfaction, the first time he could remember Jassion at a loss for words.

  “You have the right to disagree with His Grace,” Nathaniel informed him calmly. “You are here, after all, for your input. But Duke Lorum is your regent, and you will treat him with the respect due him and his station. Am I quite clear?”

  Jassion’s black-gloved fingers clenched, inches shy of his weapon. He nodded once, sharply, though his eyes burned. “Quite. My apologies if I spoke too forcefully, Your Grace. But I still feel you’re making a terrible mistake in even trying to cooperate with those bovines who call themselves Guildmasters.”

  “Perhaps, Sir Jassion. But I’ve no other option available. And do not forget yourself again. It is my mistake to make. You are not in command here.”

  “No,” the baron spat back, his voice bitter. “I’m not. And we may all suffer for it before this is over.” And with that pronouncement hanging between them, he strode stiffly from the room.

  “He should have asked your leave to go,” Nathaniel said mildly.

  Lorum didn’t seem to hear. “He’s been doing this a lot recently. Storming off and vanishing for hours on end. I wonder where he goes?”