Wraith Lord

by Phipps, C. T.

  Regina sighed. “Perhaps she would burn the world for us. Perhaps I’d would like her to consider whether I’d want her to first.”

  I wasn’t happy with the way this conversation was turning even as I knew it was inevitable. A single relationship was a difficult thing to manage and two was almost impossible.

  “Do you remember when she didn’t want to have a marriage ceremony?” Regina asked, throwing her hands out. “She said that it was a useless concept. Useless! As if it wasn’t the greatest sign of a commitment one could make. She said none of us worshiped the Lawgiver anymore and we were gods anyway so—”

  “I was there,” I said, knowing this could lead nowhere good. “We should change the subject. Give ourselves some time to look at things objectively. We’ve just started the war we were discussing earlier.”

  “All right,” Regina said, lowering her hands. “Do you have any suspicions as to who this woman could be?”

  “Not a clue,” I said, pausing. “It could be a trap, though.”

  “What?”

  “Hellsword may have arranged this chase so he could push an agent of his into our ranks. He, after all, informed his ex-lover of events with the full knowledge she would pass the information onto us. It’s also possible the Nephyr and Great Dragons were part of an ambush designed to draw me, you, or Serah out, knowing that we all lead from the front. I find that less likely but still possible.”

  “You have a devious mind,” Regina said. “Much more so than your appearance suggests.”

  “My spiky black armor does suggest a certain honesty.”

  “We shall have to get it redesigned when I’m crowned empress and restored the Whitetremor lineage to the Gryphon Throne. We can have something bright and shiny made with wingtips. I love wingtips.”

  “You really want that?”

  “Wingtips? I admit, I prefer unicorns as a heraldic animal, but—”

  “The Imperial throne.”

  “Oh.” Regina shrugged. “I guess. Someone must rule the empire after Empress Morwen is drawn, quartered, and fed to wild dogs. My family has as much title to it as anyone.”

  Regina was only distantly in line for the throne via blood but every candidate between her and it were loyal to Empress Morwen. Morwen, herself, was only the empire’s ruler by marriage but had managed to secure the allegiance of those beneath her through her heroism on the battlefield and copious bribes.

  Ironically, it had been the destruction of the storied and well loved Whitetremor lineage that had intimidated the Anessian nobility into completely submitting. After all, if Empress Morwen could destroy them she could destroy anyone. The price had merely been creating an enemy of one of the most determined and capable women in the world.

  “You’ll have double title to it because you’ve killed everyone else,” Archus said. “Ma’am.”

  “I suggest we consider finding an appropriate candidate to assume the throne in your stead. A puppet or, at least, compromise candidate who will be friendly to our cause. It will be easier than convincing the majority of the Imperial populace to follow the King Below and his wife.”

  “They will follow us because we are in the right.” Regina’s tone brooked no argument.

  “I…see.”

  We were about halfway to the woman and I got a closer look at her with my dead eyesight. She was slight of frame and more delicate looking than a woman who rode across the Devil’s Sea on dragonback should be. Yet, despite that, there was something greatly familiar about the woman. As if she resembled someone I knew.

  The woman did not appear to be afraid, even as she’d cast some sort of relaxation spell to help her horribly wounded dragon. The beast was sleeping calmly despite its grave injuries. I did not think it would live through the night, though I’d try to save it. I did note, however, the woman hadn’t cast any similar spells on herself. She was enduring a broken leg through pure will.

  Impressive.

  I continued talking as we walked, trying to figure out how we could convince the Imperials to believe we weren’t monsters out to kill them all. “We must persuade them of our point of view. If the rest of the world rallies behind the Lawgiver’s armies then we can only destroy the world rather than rule it. We must undercut their support and I believe we can do that by spreading our message.”

  “We have a message?” Regina asked, chuckling.

  “The absence thereof is what I’m getting at, yes.”

  “I suppose ‘obey or die’ is rather crude,” Regina deadpanned.

  “I never know when you’re joking.”

  “I aspire to virtue and settle for triumph.” Regina placed a hand over her heart. “Let’s put that in our holy book, as soon as we write it. Seriously, though, I want to liberate the people of the empire and bring justice to them, not cause them suffering.”

  I wondered how many would care once we started laying siege to their cities. “I suppose every holy book should have a collection of pithy sayings.”

  “The holy book is actually a good idea. If people read it, they can know what we stand for and that we’re trying to help people. It would also provide the Shadowkind with direction. Not that they need it, they’re adults after all, but we are in charge and they need to know our values. We should also make festival days, lots of them,” Regina said, treating the suggestion far more seriously than I expected. “Everyone loves a party.”

  “I like her religion already,” Archus said.

  I was thinking of a rebuttal to that when we arrived at the side of the Yellow Dragon. The young woman was a couple of years younger than Regina, older than I’d initially expected, but otherwise much like the image I’d seen of her earlier. The girl’s sword hilt took me by surprise, though, since it bore the unicorn symbol of House Whitetremor. I’d grown accustomed to the image of the foul beasts, as Regina loved to cover just about everything in her section of the tower with its image.

  Regina, meanwhile, stared down at the girl as if she’d seen a ghost. No, wait, she saw ghosts as a regular part of being married to a necromancer and the God of Death. This was far, far different, closer to seeing something that rocked her to the very core of her being. The woman on the ground, meanwhile, had a similar look of shock. Regina fell to her knees and embraced her, giving the woman kisses on the cheek before squeezing her eyes so hard that I thought tears of joy would spontaneously emerge.

  “Cousin!” the woman shouted.

  “Sister!” Regina replied.

  “I really hope one of those is just a term of endearment,” Archus muttered, “but you never know with nobles.”

  I made a slashing gesture across my throat.

  “Do you want me to kill her or are you telling me to be silent?” Archus asked, confused.

  I pressed my hand to my face in frustration. “The latter.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  And you wonder why I abused their race for ages, the Trickster muttered. Never forget the first rule about mortals: they are deeply stupid.

  “I take it you know this woman?” I asked Regina, standing over the pair as they continued to embrace.

  Regina opened her eyes, now actually crying. “This is my cousin, Ketra, sister of Gewain. I was raised with her from the time my parents were killed.”

  I found myself speechless. The death of Regina’s family had weighed upon her like a millstone around her neck, crushing her with guilt and anguish. I’d heard much about both Ketra and Gewain, the latter being Regina’s first love despite being cousins, and I felt I knew them.

  Clearly not.

  “If I may,” I said, gesturing to her leg.

  “Uhm, if you may,” Ketra said, looking at me for perhaps the first time. I had to be a terrifying figure given the fact I was wearing the attire of a Wraith Knight. It was the same armor I’d worn while being mind-controlled into being one of the old King Below’s generals. As such, I entered the popular consciousness as an everlasting symbol of evil. Then again, it might be she just thought it strange
to be meeting her cousin’s husband under such odd circumstances.

  Regina removed a dagger from her side and gave it to Ketra to bite down upon the hilt of. The young woman did so and I cast a spell of healing. Ketra screamed through the knife, biting down hard. Dark magic did not heal painlessly, any more than Light, but it was effective.

  Ketra took out the dagger, spitting. “Thank you. I’ve been using every bit of energy I’ve had to keep Shooting Star moving ahead of those monsters chasing me. I fear he’s about to die of exhaustion.”

  “You are trained as a temple mage?” I asked. I found it confusing a woman who knew enough light magic to keep a dragon speeding along didn’t know enough to properly set a bone, exhausted or not. I’d learned that in my first month studying to be a Temple Knight.

  Ketra snorted. “As if I would lower myself to study with those superstitious religious fanatics and fools. They believe in nonsense like invisible sky kings and horrible demon kings who live in the earth plotting the end of the world. It’s foolishness like that which they exploit to keep the ignorant masses oppressed.”

  Regina and I looked at her before looking at each other then back at her.

  “I see,” I said, unsure how to react to this woman’s blatant disregard for reality.

  “I believe in the Formor, of course, and the opposing religions the Grand Temple oppresses,” Ketra said, putting her hand over her heart. “That is part of the reason I am here.”

  Regina shook her head, raising her gloved hand. “Please, before you continue, you have to explain to me how you survived. Jon Bloodthorn razed Whitehall to the ground. I saw the bodies, thousands of them, in a hundred stacked pyres.”

  Regina’s voice shook a bit.

  Ketra placed her hand on Regina’s, her accent slipping from High Imperial to something closer to Regina’s own. “‘Twas terrible, that night. Fire and blood and death with not a hope of protecting the people who’ve looked to our family for centuries. Gewain led me, Rebecca, and the children of the hold to the city’s sewer system, but there were soldiers waiting for us there too.”

  “Rebecca and Gewain are alive?” Regina asked, hope springing into her voice.

  “Gewain is alive,” Ketra said. “But missing an arm. Infection came in and I stupidly never studied healing.”

  “Rebecca?” Regina asked.

  Ketra’s voice hardened. “One of the empress’s thugs stabbed her in the chest before I burned off his face.”

  According to Regina, her youngest cousin would have been eleven this spring.

  It wasn’t even surprising.

  No one was safe during sackings.

  “Where have you been?” Regina asked.

  “Gael, then Winterholme,” Ketra said. “I have been fighting with the Resistance against the Imperial occupation wherever I can. There’s always a demand for a battlemage and I’ve tried to make them bleed whenever possible. They call me Rainfire.”

  I’d heard that name in reports from Serah’s spies in the South. Rainfire was a bringer of terror who conducted many strikes against the Imperials and their nobility, some of which had involved innocents being killed. But who knew if that were true and if it even mattered. One man’s brigand was another man’s champion. Civilians died in war and it was the rare commander who was able to get through one without oceans of blood on his hands, which was precisely why I didn’t want to start a new one.

  “I have much more to ask you,” Regina said, before looking up to me. “Also, my husband to introduce you to—”

  I interrupted her. “Forgive me, Regina, for ruining a moment you have been too long denied, but I must ask something myself. Why was Hellsword chasing you?”

  Ketra blinked then nodded. “Oh, that. I suppose it’s a secret I can share with my kin. I am seeking the King of the Northern Wasteland. The warlord claiming to be a god and his she-devil brides.”

  “His what?” Regina said, blinking.

  I tried not to chuckle. “Why?”

  “The Jarls of Winterholme want to ask for his aid,” Ketra said, her voice low. “The entirety of their peoples are being exterminated.”

  Regina stared.

  So did I. “I think we need to talk someplace more private.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was several hours later before I could revisit Ketra’s statement in any depth. Regina and she had much to catch upon and there were still many other affairs to deal with, not the least being retrieving the bodies of our fellows and arranging for their transport back to Everfrost. We ended up transporting Shooting Star and other wounded over to the nearby Caer Callig.

  Caer Callig was a twelve-tower castle constructed in the side of a cliff-face overlooking the Devil’s Sea. It had long since fallen into disrepair, if one was being generous enough not to say ruin, and was a far cry from its glory days during the Third War when a thousand Shadowguardsman attended its walls. The fortress was now inhabited by a full complement of two hundred Formor warriors and twice as many workers.

  The base commander had taken to using massive freeman Trow to carve out the stone and haul it around. Ending slavery of the horned race had resulted in me gaining a substantial number of enthusiastic stonemasons and carters that, apparently, nearly all Trow were. Really, I’d thought the whole trolls and bridges thing had been a myth.

  Either way, we’d found a warm welcome even if the sounds of ongoing construction were not conducive to causal conversation. In the end, it was well past noon by the time I managed to separate Ketra from her sister and the three of us sat down in the northernmost tower away from the goings-on below. Serah had tried to sit down with us, but it had ended up in a shouting match between her and Regina that I’d, rather cravenly, decided to be elsewhere during.

  The chamber we sat in was an old brown-stone chamber with a single window that didn’t have any glass in it. The tower’s lightning-rune-powered generators hadn’t arrived from Everfrost yet, so the chamber was warmed by old-fashioned logs in the hearth beside us. It would be sunset in a few hours and we’d need candles as well since Ketra, unlike the Formor and gods, couldn’t see in the dark.

  Sitting down at a round wooden table with my cohorts, I took a sip of a weak beer from a tin stein. I’d changed out of my demonsteel armor to a plain black doublet, pants, and vest. “All right, please explain to me what you mean about the treaty. I want to be absolutely clear about this.”

  Ketra had a glass of expensive wine in front of her, drawn from the castle’s cellars. “Again?”

  “Again,” I said.

  Ketra sighed. “The nobles of Winterholme are trying to form an alliance to extirpate the empire from their lands. Half of them have been fighting their own private wars against the empire’s presence only to be destroyed every time they met their foe in open engagements. Even working together, they’ve had minimal success and the reprisals have been horrible. Their seers have been talking about a new King Below rising in the North and everyone heard about your killing Jon Bloodthorn in Lakeland. They’re willing to swear allegiance to you if you drive the empire’s forces out.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I remain skeptical,” I said, taking a sip from my stein. The beer was tasteless like all food and drink to me but it helped maintain the illusion of being human. “The Winterholme have ever been the first to be invaded by the King Below’s forces and have suffered the most from the Formor’s depredations.”

  “They’re also, traditionally, the people who ally first with the King Below,” Regina said, taking a long drink from a stein twice as large as mine, full of a heavy intoxicating brew that would kill a normal human. “The wild men who live in the northern continent are all descendants of those Winterholme who chose to worship the old King Below rather than suffer under him. There have always been rumors about their nobility too: secret rites, cults, and unnatural practices. It’s why no one ever really trusted them in dealings.”

  I wanted to point out that that was because Imperials tended to be racist shits,
but I doubted that would go over well with my audience. “Please go on.”

  “I doubt they would be turning to you if they had much of a choice,” Ketra admitted. “The empire has gone mad, though. Tens of thousands of people have been uprooted from their homes around the Imperial city to be resettled in Winterholme and other lands. Freemen land is confiscated on a daily basis then given to the Usurper’s supporters. Forests are being eradicated league-by-league and mountains reduced to pebbles for their minerals. Massive work gangs are laboring everywhere with conscripts from every village. The slightest offense brings terrible sentences, and that’s including the people who simply disappear never to be seen again.”

  All in all, it didn’t sound that terribly different from business as usual in the empire under a new monarchy. “Are they preparing for war against the North?”

  “That’s the strange thing—no, they’re not,” Ketra said, leaning back in her chair. “The empire is stretched to the limit as is with its current occupations and that’s with punishing levies as well as mass conscription. The vast majority of resources are going to other projects. Grandiose temples, magical devices of enormous size, railroads, dams, factories, and crystal hothouses.”

  “Crystal hothouses?” I asked.

  “Like a greenhouse but the size of a colliseum,” Ketra said. “It’s beggared the empire and they’ve been confiscating the property of nonhumans to compensate as well as those of non-Imperial descent.”

  Regina took a long drink from her stein and laughed. “Your strategy of waiting and doing nothing may have actually been wise, Jacob. It sounds like the Usurpers will defeat themselves through incompetence. I just hope we’re able to get them first before the mob storms their homes and executes them.”

  I was less pleased. “There’s just one problem with that, Regina.”

  “Oh?”

  “Incompetence and tyranny have long been bedfellows, but the Nine Usurpers answer to Jassamine and she has been many things, but never stupid. Nor was my impression of the Usurpers as less than capable. If they’re doing something seemingly stupid then it’s probably for a very good reason.”