Mordraud, Book One

by Fabio Scalini

  Nobody could hear the choir from the outside. And for those chanting, it was much easier to stay in tune and to tempo in a setting wadded to the right extent. The parquet exalted the depth of the low tones, while the wool muted any reverberation. Perfect, deemed Nector. A bloody perfect choir.

  Even if Dunwich had expressed the idea first, the Arcane had already been working for some time on improving the effectiveness of harmonies in war. Nector and other maestros had been appointed by the Emperor to develop new tactical solutions, and they’d centred their efforts on the need to strike the rebels from a greater distance. If they succeeded in their intent, Cambria would be able to attack Eld by chanting from home. An ambitious plan, which had yielded some stimulating results. But when Dunwich had shared his thoughts at the general assembly, it was Asaeld who had helped the chanters understand the value of that opportunity. And it was again he who had advised them to focus on the winter. Not many were aware, but the Lance commander was a sophisticated harmony expert. He was also one of the few to know how to use resonances to communicate in silence. He was able to tune the minds of those around him to his own thoughts. A power generated by harmonies only he knew, and he closely guarded these compositions. Asaeld had contacted Grand Maestro Raelin and explained everything. Raelin had then recounted all to his loyal followers, including Nector. One of the most expert elders at the Arcane.

  If Asaeld in person hadn’t joined forces with them, they’d never have managed to develop the Long Winter on such a short timescale. Nector smiled, gently tapping his feet in time with the choir. That was a golden opportunity to indissolubly seal ties between the Empire’s future and the Arcane school.

  The chanting maestros had built a set of melodies that could shape the weather, concentrating its effects only in a specific area. A chant entirely redefining the science of harmonies. History had radically changed since Nector and his men had got the Long Winter underway. It was an époque-making moment.

  Nector got up in excitement and approached the door again. He looked the choir over and nodded to his colleagues in greeting. Some returned the gesture. It would soon be time for a change of shift. There were thirty performers in all. Ten in each tone-row. Every hour, fifteen chanters joined the group, while another fifteen rounded off so they could take a break. A mechanism that had been perpetual for months, hour after hour, day after day. Sustaining the primordial chant perfectly unaltered required many teams, who always had to be ready and well-rested.

  In all, the country mansion was accommodating about a hundred or so chanting experts.

  Nector headed towards the kitchens. He wished to check everything was in order. Although the winter was a day away from there, the cold was nonetheless taxing and the rains poured down incessantly. A demanding organisational effort was needed to keep everything synchronised. Nector passed near one of the windows looking out onto the courtyard. He stopped to inspect. Outside, the lawn had rotted and was overrun with weeds. The walls had been repaired, but had also been aged with dirt and flaking plaster, to mask the work. The villa itself had been left half-derelict. There were few lighted open fires, and their smoke was dispersed in the large loft covering the entire upper storey, and was then released through smaller flues. An ingenious system to avoid attracting attention, but also an extremely dangerous one. Three guards were assigned to the task of ensuring fires didn’t spark in the roof area, while another ten were positioned outside, to cover all the slit windows looking out over the surrounding countryside.

  Nector moved on, satisfied. He’d been appointed to manage this operation, and was carrying out his job marvellously. Life was awkward and hard, the property was too small to house so many guests, but everything was proceeding very smoothly. Thirty soldiers, always at the ready, were stationed in the cart-shed, which had been adapted to serve as temporary barracks. There weren’t many men – certainly not enough if the rebels were to decide to attack. But Asaeld and Nector had staked everything on the secrecy of their plan. Eldain couldn’t know how the Long Winter worked, nor where it might be unleashed from. If they kept a low profile and stayed well-hidden in the residence, the rebels wouldn’t have a chance of finding them.

  ‘Rebels...’ Nector chuckled to himself. ‘Now they’re simply referred to as rebels.... Rebelling against what? The fighting’s been toiling for decades, and has now become the Empire’s obsession. They might as well come to a compromise and be done with it!’

  The Loren family had endeavoured to forge an empire stretching across the entire East, but it clearly hadn’t succeeded in its intent. The expansion had come to a halt when Eld had put up greater resistance than envisaged. Even calling it an empire was slightly misled, Nector mused in amusement. How much laughter this must have stirred in Telatias, the central mountains, or in Calhann, south of the collage. ‘The Empire against the Rebels. It sounds like a tacky novel!’

  The situation had grown so out of hand that a magnificent monstrosity like the Long Winter had been created. The neighbours had now certainly stopped chuckling, he said to himself with cynical enjoyment.

  ‘A couple more months and we’ll have frozen the whole lump solid, that miserable hovel of Eld.’

  And after that, Nector wondered. What could they do, afterwards?

  ‘We’ll freeze the Hann River and throttle those blighters in Calhann... Give them a taste of our chill in the South too.’

  It was more likely they would come to an agreement, considered Nector. The territories bordering with Cambria would have caught the hint, and rather than being subjected to what Eldain’s rebels were enduring, they would negotiate a surrender at once.

  If it weren’t for that irksome side-effect of rain, the Long Winter would be confoundedly perfect.

  ‘We need to come up with a solution, and fast.’

  Loralon was applying a lot of pressure in that direction, but the Arcane still wasn’t sure of what exactly it should do. It had tried with other chants, but they hadn’t achieved anything promising. The winds and rains generated by the iciness of the Long Winter seemed impossible to govern through harmonies. Or perhaps they hadn’t had long enough yet to find the right way, he told himself with conviction. The Emperor would have to be patient. That pitfall would be overcome too. It was just a matter of holding out, he concluded. ‘What’s wrong with a bit of water...? They’re moaning just for the sake of it, the pain-in-the-arse populace.’

  Nector inspected the kitchens, the storeroom and the serving staff, ready for a new session of cleaning. Every detail had to be perfect, so that it couldn’t interfere with the subtle concentration balance the choir was laboriously striking. While standing near the entrance, he heard someone knock on the door. There were no servants in the vicinity to call. He approached to open it himself. He paused only to listen to the muffled echo of the chanting. All was normal. He released the lock with another key, and peered out, placing the door only a finger’s-width ajar.

  Five Imperial Lances. They weren’t expecting visitors, he remembered.

  “Good evening, gentlemen. Are you here to deliver a message?” Nector asked. He didn’t recognise them. Usually, Asaeld sent the same Lances when he had to inform him of something. Five new faces.

  “Asaeld has run into a few unexpected difficulties at the front. He’s had to ask us for our support, since we’re stationed in Cambria,” answered the youngest and stockiest of them. “My name’s Denor, maestro. I have with me an important missive from Asaeld, signed by the Emperor in person. We’ve been given orders to deliver it to you with the utmost urgency.”

  “Signed by Loralon?!” Nector asked in surprise. “What’s it about?”

  The chanter realised he was still hiding behind the door. He opened it fully and ushered the five soldiers in. Their armour squeaked from the damp. Their cloaks stank of musty rain.

  “Forgive my caution... We have to guard our privacy.”

  “I imagine you do,” replied Denor as he glanced about. The other four Lances had taken a step ba
ck, distancing themselves as a group. “You hid yourselves so very well. In order to root you out, I had to ask an unwitting old friend...”

  “What?” asked Nector in bewilderment.

  “Never mind...” Denor replied with a smile. In a lighting flash he was squeezing his hands around the chanter’s throat. Nector dropped to the floor in terror. The huge Lance squashed him with his weight and embedded his thumbs in his neck.

  “Now we’re going to put a stop to this.”

  Nector’s neck snapped in his hands. Denor got back up, crushing the man’s breastbone beneath his steel heel.

  “My Lisea died because of your rain,” he muttered to the corpse. The other Lances shot towards the end of the corridor, following the suffused drone of the choir shut in the hall. “Death to the Lances,” they all uttered together. “Long live the Emperor...”

  Instead, Denor returned to the door, hummed quietly with joined hands and shaped a flame from his palms. Positioning himself opposite the open entrance, he undulated his arms towards the countryside. The tip of the harmonic flame flickered up the edge of the wall. He hoped those outside had spied the signal, and went back in. The others were patiently waiting for his team to take control of the villa.

  Lisea had succumbed to a lung illness because of that lethal rain. She’d died as a consequence of the Long Winter. And he, who’d always dreamt of being a Lance, had gone mad with rage. Like many others, he didn’t agree with that horrifying way of combat. Killing the population with cold, wearing down its own people, and shrugging off the side-effects. The pain had driven him to seek solace among those who firmly believed the Lances commanded by Asaeld were no longer serving the Empire, who saw them as traitors to Cambria. Asaeld was behind the Long Winter – he’d built it with his own hands, together with the Arcane chanters. He was perverting the Empire’s ambitions, bending and adapting them to his own will.

  Denor had joined those who believed Loralon was in danger, unjustly accused by the people as the Long Winter’s instigator, and threatened by the very same Lances who’d sworn eternal loyalty to him. He’d supported the cause of the same men who had made an attempt on Asaeld’s soldiers’ lives directly in the camps at the front, or in battle. They were not traitors, rather loyalists to the Empire. They wanted to purge out the decay festering in the army, from its foundations to its summit. They were responsible for the disappearance of young Lances from the city, and for the attacks wagered on Dunwich, Asaeld’s protégé. There were no longer few of them. To begin with, they were only plotters, but after all those months of clammy agony, their sway had grown. Until it attracted people of the likes of Denor, who had previously followed Asaeld’s words without a whisper of contradiction.

  The Long Winter had been the commander’s idea, to gain more power, Denor mused, floundering from the tension. He’d have to get moving. He could hear his fellow loyalists attempting to force the entrance to the hall of harmonies. The chanters’ voices were dampened. Some were calling for help. Outside, the soldiers in Asaeld’s guard were all converging towards the mansion.

  The Long Winter chant had rounded out in a mire of off-key cries.

  ***

  “NO!”

  Mordraud saw Saiden reach the entrance door in the wall. He’d pushed it effortlessly, in silence. He decided to take action, and sprang up after the maestro. Mordraud automatically raised his arms to shield his face, as if expecting a cluster of arrows from one of the many slit windows gashing the walls. Nothing happened. Disoriented, he entered behind Saiden, who was calmly walking towards the main door. The gravel path was weighted down by a thick mist. Through the haze, Mordraud noticed something. His hand slipped to his weapon and he unsheathed it. Saiden turned towards him, chuckling.

  “You won’t be needing that. Somebody’s already taken care of it.”

  Mordraud bend towards the dark mass lurking in the shadows. A man’s head, attached to its body by a mere shred of bloody flesh. It hadn’t been dead more than a day. Less maybe. Mordraud kept his sword in his hand. Whoever was responsible for the slaughter might still be in the vicinity.

  “See any others?” he asked Saiden.

  “Everywhere,” he replied, glancing about. Instead, Mordraud could make out almost nothing, due to the fog. Saiden’s eyes were animated by an unsettling vibrancy. Black, yet also curiously transparent. Inside floated – or at least so it seemed to the young man – thin strands of light curling up in little fluid balls. What exactly was he seeing, he asked himself uncomfortably. ‘Death?’ he wondered.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  Mordraud turned round to signal to Gwern to stand up and follow them. The boy had already done so, but hadn’t yet passed through the opening in the wall. He was waiting for his brother to give him the cue. He hadn’t managed to hold out lying there in anticipation, yet he hadn’t the vaguest idea of what he’d do if he had to fight. He didn’t know how to do anything. He hadn’t even managed to learn what Saiden had done to hear the resonance for the Long Winter.

  “Nobody here anymore?!” he asked, perplexed.

  “Seems not,” returned Mordraud, more confused than him.

  “What could have happened?!”

  “Eldain must have found out where the chanters were concealed...”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Saiden called, from inside the house. He was in the doorway, straddling an armour-clad corpse stretched out over another more slender one. Mordraud ran to him, leaving Gwern on the drive.

  “A Lance...” Mordraud exclaimed, releasing a sigh of relief within. If assailing the villa had been up to him, he’d have had to invent a rather more elaborate plan to avoid getting killed. Whoever had got there first had likely saved their lives.

  “The door was open,” muttered Saiden, smiling in surprise. “No signs of a barricade here. Nobody tried to break it down from inside. The chanters must have opened it of their own free will.”

  “And could that have happened?! They can’t have been so dumb...”

  Saiden turned the body over with a foot. An exceedingly burly good-looking man. Who’d died from a flame-burst square to his back. It had punctured his lungs, cauterising a perfectly circular gaping chasm.

  “Whoever it was attacked this place first identified himself as an ally. As a Lance... Or as many...”

  “Eldain would never give a similar order. Our lads just wouldn’t know how to behave,” confirmed Mordraud. Saiden nodded, lost in reasoning.

  “First they got in without fighting, then took control of the entrance and let the reinforcements in. That’s why the lawn is a carpet of butchery. But some chanters must have put up more of a struggle than envisaged...” Saiden pointed to the terrible wound. “Astounding! Cambria has damned itself on its own...”

  “Do you think it was someone... from the inside?!”

  “No, it’s unlikely,” answered a stunned Saiden. “I think it must have been a group from the people. When it comes to it, the situation here doesn’t seem any brighter than for you at the front.”

  “They haven’t got the snow!” Mordraud burst out in indignation.

  “But they do have the rain. And it’s just as bad for the fields, believe me...” Saiden replied, chortling alone. “The Emperor’s gone too far.”

  “We must check there are no more chanters at work,” blurted Gwern. Mordraud nodded and set off ahead of him down a long passage ending in a heavy security door. Saiden followed, hanging behind, scrutinising their backs. Still nothing new, he mused. ‘Pity... I’d hoped to unearth more.’

  Mordraud inspected the lock. It had been broken. Someone must have closed the door again after forcing it. He told the others to keep back, and prepared a kick. He started battering the door by hurling himself at it with all his might. In the end the hinges gave way, and he tumbled inside the great dark hall. All noise was muffled, stifled by the compact wool pinned to the walls. He could see nothing. He heard only a faint scraping of feet. His brother, he thought. Gwern approached
him and helped him up. Saiden remained at a distance, in the doorway. His eyes shone white. He was able to perfectly detect every detail of the room, even if the curtains were pulled and the candles had burnt down to wide scarlet pools.

  Somebody else was with them, bent over in a corner. A middle-aged man, with a flabby build and a pronounced receding hairline. On the floor, near him, were all the other choir members, sliced open and gutted. It was so dark the two brothers were still unaware they were encircled by mutilated bodies.

  Saiden did and said nothing.

  “Better open a window,” suggested Mordraud.

  “I’ll go...”

  Gwern stiffened at his brother’s side. They both clearly heard the first notes of a laboured, blood-laden melody. Mordraud put his arm round him and pulled him back. Saiden beamed in delight. The Cambrian chanter had hoisted himself onto his knees and was completing his brief harmony of death.

  A bubble of white fire burst from his hands and slammed into them.

  “Magnificent!” muttered Saiden, sheltering his face with his hands. The heat was unbelievable. And he wasn’t even mixed up in the resonance. Nonetheless he kept his eyes on the brothers. Mordraud, without uttering a word, had embraced Gwern and tipped him over towards the door. The fire blazed all around them, setting alight the wool on the walls. The blast cracked the window panes, which exploded, strewing the corpse-invaded sopping lawn with shards of glass.

  What Saiden saw went beyond all his centuries of experience.

  The Flux traced out what really happened. Myriads of strands of light suddenly shot out of Gwern’s chest, wrapping themselves right around the brothers, like a shield. The pair couldn’t see them and noticed nothing. The fire impacted with the Flux and was annihilated by its might. It was literally devoured, eaten up in a cloud of fluttering white sparks.