Blade of Empire

by Mercedes Lackey

  “But of course, the Brightworlders do not have a century,” Uralesse said.

  “No,” Virulan said. “They do not. But look—I have not done showing you wonders!” Suddenly Uralesse smelled the hot scent of sorcery. Whatever creature Virulan now offered possessed it in some small degree.

  “Losels are easy enough to breed, and more than one swarm would spoil our sport,” Virulan said. “And so I have created these to … control them. Aren’t they charming?”

  As the first of the creatures clawed its way to the top of the writhing mass of losels, Uralesse had to agree. They were indeed charming. They were superficially similar to the Lesser Endarkened, though they were a good bit smaller. Their smooth skins were colored like rotting meat, and their arms were half again as long as their torsos. Their huge pale eyes glowed in the gloom, seeming to wink on and off again as they blinked. If that were all there was to them, Uralesse would not have been the only one to question Virulan’s fitness to rule.

  But then he saw one of them open its enormous jaws and stuff one of the losels into its maw as the creature struggled and bit. It chomped down, swallowed, and reached for another. And another.

  “What are they?” Marbuglor asked in awestruck tones. “Can I have one?”

  “Of course you can, my dear. I call them goblins,” Virulan said proudly.

  The losels were intent upon feeding. So were the goblins. The swarm of losels continued to move forward, intent on food. They were as willing to eat the goblins as to eat the dead snow-elks, but each time they swarmed the goblins, the goblins simply vanished.

  “Where are they going?” Uralesse asked quietly.

  “I bred them from water-creatures who possess a certain amount of magic in their own right,” Virulan said. “And so my goblins have the ability to move through rock and earth as if it is no more substantial than water. They are poisonous as well,” he added idly, as one of the goblins, unwilling to flee, spat at the losels trying to swarm it. The thick green spittle spattered over their fur. The losels died instantly.

  More and more goblins appeared, and soon the field was a roiling swarm of goblins and losels. The losels surged forward even as the voracious goblins devoured them. It is like watching a boiling cookpot filled with maggots, Uralesse thought.

  In the end, there was nothing left but goblins. Some died and were eaten by their fellows as efficiently as they ate everything else. Every bone, every sinew, ever drop of blood and scrap of fur—everything that had been the slaughtered herd of snow-elk, the voracious swarm of losels, was gone.

  “It’s a pity they can’t bear light,” Virulan said regretfully. “But one can’t have everything.”

  With nothing more to eat, the goblins vanished as well. The plain was bare and silent.

  “Show us more!” Marbuglor begged. “Show us everything!”

  All through the night Virulan showed them the wonders of the Cold Nursery: icedrakes, serpentmarae, hellsprites, hordeblights, poisondancers … some rare and solitary, some unable to endure warmth or light, but all creatures to delight the Endarkened heart.

  “Now you have seen all my treasures,” Virulan said, as the sky began to grey again with approaching dawn. “And now I shall loose the spells that bind them here and let them roam as they will. They will drive everything in their path before them.”

  Directly into the path of the Elfling armies. It is an inspired plan. If it works. Uralesse thought of the unicorns, whose lightest touch could kill the Endarkened. Who knew what else lay within those forests no Endarkened could enter? King Virulan will drive all of Life into places where we cannot reach it. And what then? Our people will not endure the thought that the Red Harvest is to be accomplished by … others.

  “All hail King Virulan!” Uralesse shouted. “Truly he is the wisest of the Endarkened! All hail his power—his wisdom—his skill!”

  And let the day his stupidity is revealed come soon.

  The winds rang with the terrible shrieking cheers of the Created. Virulan spread his wings and threw back his head, glorying in the praise, the adulation, the worship.

  “And while we wait, let there be feasting, games, a carnival of pain!” Virulan shouted. “Let the caverns of the World Without Sun run wet and slick with blood! Let us claim the most isolated of the domains of the Elflings and all it holds as the first fruits of our coming triumph!”

  * * *

  In the Vale of Celenthodiel, Harvest Moon became Rade, Woods, Hearth. Rain washed the land and snow cloaked it, and the tiny crawling things feasted upon the dead until only bones were left. No light showed within Tildorangelor, and no alfaljodthi was seen to venture from its borders. Silence and solitude reclaimed Amretheon’s lost city.

  And ten turns of the Wheel of the Year passed.

  * * *

  Areve endured and grew, defying all who would destroy it, though its foes were many. In the first Wheelturns of its existence, reivers and sellswords turned bandit—unwilling to swear fealty to Hamphuliadiel Astromancer—had tried to take by stealth what they could not take by force, and even bribery had not been unknown, but Areve stood firm against them, and soon such attacks ceased. In these times, the folk who came to Areve pledged their fealty with whole hearts, for Beastlings roamed the land unchallenged.

  The refugees spoke of a Beastling army ravaging the land, seeking out and destroying every Elven enclave it could find. The Lord Astromancer promised safety, and so far the Sanctuary had kept that promise. When the Beastlings attacked Areve—as they did frequently—Lightborn and Lightless fought side by side for the safety of all, for everyone knew the Beastlings would slaughter every soul within Areve’s boundaries, leaving nothing behind. Each year the walls of Areve were expanded further—there was talk that someday even Arevethmonion Flower Forest would lie within them and be cleansed at last of Beastling taint.

  Hamphuliadiel’s ambitions were as great as the wise Astromancer himself was humble: a simple Lightbrother who had set his hand to what must be done when the evil days came upon the land. Harwing Lightbrother had never regretted his decision to join him. Not once, in all these Wheelturns.

  The time before Harwing had returned to the Sanctuary was a hazy jumble of guilt and loss. Healer Momioniarch had been unable to lift that veil, but Harwing was not troubled, for by the grace of the Light and the compassionate assistance of the Astromancer himself, Harwing had been able to piece the tale together.

  Vieliessar Farcarinon, once Lightborn, had rejected all the Sanctuary’s oaths and even Mosirinde’s Covenant to gather an army in quest of the Unicorn Throne. The Hundred Houses had risen up against her, so crazed with rage and jealousy that they had abandoned their domains and their people to pursue her into the uttermost east. The battles had been vast and costly—and in the end, they had been futile, for the two great armies had destroyed each other. Harwing and others like him had fled the battlefield to seek sanctuary in every sense of the word. Someday, Hamphuliadiel swore, Areve would be strong enough to risk sending scouting parties eastward to see what had become of the two great armies, but Harwing knew that day was far distant. There was much still to do here. Far too much for him to waste his time dreaming about, or worrying about, what the future might hold. So long as Astromancer Hamphuliadiel bore that terrible weight of responsibility, no one else need trouble themselves.

  As he did each day, sometimes several times a day, Harwing wished Hamphuliadiel a long, long life.

  * * *

  The World Without Sun hummed with a purpose and an energy it had not possessed since time out of mind. These were the days of the Red Harvest, filled with slaughter and feasting, and the knowledge burned in every brain that soon the great task set them by He Who Is would be complete. The slave-pens were filled with victims enough that every Endarkened could refine their skills, extracting the last possible erg of agony, terror, and despair from their subjects. There were feasts and games, contests, competitions of artistry and of skill. It was a joyous time. A time of festival.<
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  And yet, one Endarkened paced the jeweled and tessellated floor in the Heart of Darkness with an unquenched restlessness. He wore the Crown of Pain. He sat upon the Throne of Night. The Tree of Night enfolded him within its roots. But Virulan was … uneasy.

  Three times before, he and his then-brothers had scoured the world of Life. Four times, Life had been reborn. This time, Virulan had made careful plans that Life would not be reborn again. This time, the destruction would continue until there was nothing—not the stone beneath his feet, not one fragment of Ugolthma itself—to say that any form of Creation had ever been.

  So why was it taking so long?

  For a moment, he wished that Rugashag still lived. She had hated him and plotted his death, but she had also been clever. When there was anything to know within the World Without Sun, Rugashag had known it first.

  Of course, she would almost certainly have not told him what she knew, so perhaps he did not regret her being dead after all. And it was utterly and completely true that her death had been a work of art, a thing still spoken of in hushed whispers. It was right, Virulan thought, that he should have the power of making and unmaking over his subjects, for though he was a tool of He Who Is, they were the tools that He Who Is had given him.

  It was not right that they should die by any other means.

  And yet they were.

  Time was meaningless in the World Without Sun, its passage marked only by Virulan’s descent into deep contemplation and his return from it. Yet many Risings had come since the beginning of the Red Harvest and the Bright World Life was not yet extinguished. And Endarkened died.

  The Endarkened could not feel compassion or empathy, nor could they feel grief as the Bright World understood it. When Virulan contemplated his dead subjects, the emotion he felt was rage. The Endarkened had been created to be immortal. Eternal. Perfect. Even those that were, by harsh necessity, born instead of created shared that aspect of Endarkened nature. They were not meant to die. But they were dying—dying at the hands of Bright World filth.

  Of course, those lives were easily replaced, and the Endarkened made up in undoubted superiority of form and mind and power what they lacked in superior numbers.

  And yet.

  It was true the Endarkened could make themselves invulnerable by magic—but the spell must be cast. It was true that they could heal any physical injury—but again, the spell must be cast. They were naturally immune to both disease and poison—but what lunatic would pause in the heat of battle to offer his enemy a snack? And what fool would accept it?

  And so Virulan’s children, despite knowing they were utterly superior in every way to the meat they hunted, continued to die of sword cut and arrowshot, by knife and by fire, crushed beneath stones and trees and lured into traps that used every one of those methods at once. The vermin were quick to adapt.

  Such thinking only brought Virulan’s mind back to the initial cause for irritation: the vermin were living long enough to be able to adapt.

  “Why are you not all dead?” he roared to the deserted chamber. The echoes of his bellow came back to him, a susurrant sound that chimed from the gems and obsidian, gold and bones, that ornamented his throne room. The venting of his fury gave him no ease.

  I will have answers, he thought grimly.

  Uralesse was the logical one to consult. He was nearly as powerful in sorcery as Virulan himself and had engendered many of the Born. But Virulan knew well that to ask a question meant exposing the need for an answer, and any such need would rightfully be seen as weakness—a weakness that Uralesse would exploit ruthlessly. No, Virulan would ask his questions, but not of Uralesse, and he would do it in such a way that it would seem he asked only to test, and knew the answers already.

  It was, so he congratulated himself, a very clever plan.

  * * *

  The captives the Endarkened took were carefully separated from their own kind, lest the presence of a parent, a friend, a sibling might strengthen their will to resist. Captives were graded and sorted as coldly as gems: this one to the feasting table, that one to become a worker under the rule of some Lesser Endarkened, another to become teaching material for some young Endarkened only beginning to learn mastery of the Way of Pain and Sorrow. Only a very few were worth reserving to the higher ranks of Endarkened nobility and their pleasures, and of these, only a scant few had the makings of proper slaves.

  “Please! It is so dark! I cannot see!” The child’s voice, roughened by tears, broke upon a sob. “Mama! Are you there? Mama!”

  The Elfling child had not yet learned that begging was useless, though any intelligent creature would have realized that from the moment of its capture. The creature’s eyes were intact for the moment, but the darkling beauty of the World Without Sun was closed to it, for its inferior senses could perceive nothing of the glory that surrounded it. Shurzul reminded herself yet again of the pitiful inferiority of meat. She doubted this Elfling would survive to become a slave. Slaves were utterly pliable, possessing no will of their own. They accepted everything that happened, everything that was done to them, with utter passivity. They did not rebel. They did not demand. They did not beg.

  Its ceaseless keening was one of the reasons she had chosen it as part of her share in the spoils of the last raid. The others its age had already fallen into silence and despair. This one still fought. There were other uses for meat than lives of slavery.

  With a wave of her hand, Shurzul caused the braziers in the corners of the chamber to kindle with an unnatural scarlet flame. The Elfling blinked and squinted, putting its hands over its eyes to shield them. Shurzul nodded in approval of her own intelligence. It had beauty of form that was nearly Endarkened in its quality. Even though it was encrusted with blood and feces, the skin beneath was smooth and flawless, the bones beneath that skin finely-shaped and smooth. The combination of beauty and rebellion was intoxicating to her.

  Now it lowered its hands and gazed around itself in horror. Shurzul imagined what it saw: to its weak eyes, the red flames would give only dim illumination. The Lesser Endarkened who ringed the chamber—the servants who had brought the meat from the slave pens—would be nothing but glowing eyes and hideous shadowy forms.

  And she.…

  Shurzul knew well her own beauty. Her beauty—and her inventiveness—had been enough to lure King Virulan to her loins, just as it had given her victory in the hunt. Today her bare breasts jutted proudly, her nipples jeweled and gilded, the scarlet flesh unconfined. Her long hair, as scarlet as her flesh, was braided with gems no Brightworlder eyes had ever seen, for these were the living jewels of the deep earth. Her hands sparkled with rings, her wrists and ankles chimed with bracelets, her throat was garlanded with a chain of fire-clear diamonds. She knew herself to be an impressive sight.

  Indeed, the child’s gaze was drawn to her, and therefore did not linger where it should have, upon the racks and cases of instruments glinting at the edge of the firelight. Its eyes grew round with horror; it was young enough to have been born after the beginning of the Red Harvest, to never have known an existence as anything but hunted prey. It took a step backward, the sight of her momentarily stilling its endless mewling.

  Shurzul squatted on her haunches, bringing herself to its eye level. “Come, child,” she said throatily. “There is no reason for fear. I will not harm you.”

  She did not mean it, of course. But raising hope only to betray it, gaining trust only to break it, were sweet and heady appetizers to the great feast the Way of Pain and Sorrow promised.

  “Where is my mama?” the child whispered into the silence Shurzul had allowed to grow.

  “Why, I do not know,” Shurzul said, forcing herself to sound innocently confused. “I will find out, of course. Would you like that?”

  Her heart sang to watch the child regard her with wary hope. It nodded fractionally.

  “Then so I shall,” Shurzul said fulsomely. She held out a hand. “Come to me, little one. I promise I will keep yo
u safe. Come. Tell me your name.”

  To her concealed delight, the child ran forward and flung itself into her arms. “My— My name is Hazaniel,” it said, its face pressed between her breasts. “Mama’s name is Thetarara. Please find her!”

  Shurzul’s nostrils flared at the heat and stench of the body in her arms, even as she carefully stroked Hazaniel’s back in a soothing fashion. She sent a speaking look toward one of the Lesser Endarkened; the servant hurried off to discover if the Thetarara-meat was still alive. Great sport could be had if it was, but if was not … Shurzul was certain that little Hazaniel was hungry and thirsty, and would welcome a bowl of nourishing broth.

  A shift in the air warned her that she was no longer alone, and Shurzul straightened slowly to her feet, resting one taloned hand upon the filthy head of her toy. A moment later, King Virulan entered the room, and Shurzul immediately knelt, bowing low and furling her wings tightly around herself.

  “Rise, my lovely one,” Virulan said, placing a finger beneath her chin to tilt her head upward. “I wish to speak with you.”

  Again Shurzul got to her feet, bowing her head in acquiescence.

  “Take the— Take dear Hazaniel and see that he is bathed and fed,” she said over her shoulder. “Be certain there is light for his eyes, for I do not wish him to be afraid. I will send for him.”

  There was a scraping scuttling sound behind her as the Endarkened moved forward.

  “Do not fear,” Shurzul said lovingly to Hazaniel. “These are my most trusted servants. You will be safe with them.” She smiled inwardly as the meat tremblingly nodded.

  The moment it was gone, she bowed low again to Virulan. It was the most delicate of balancing acts to flatter the King without throwing away the work she had already put in on the meat. “I beg your forgiveness, my lord and my King. I do not wish to spoil this one. It shows great promise. Enough, perhaps, to amuse the Court.”

  To amuse its king, they both knew she meant. Virulan smiled and took her arm, drawing her closer to him. “Your constant thought for our ease and pleasure warms my heart,” he said. “I shall look forward to the day when you present it. You are a notable artist,” he added.