The Devil's Judgment

by Chris Pisano

  Cezomir ran toward the wizard but was greeted by a wall of fire. By the time the flames died down, the sorcerer was gone. Cezomir growled and barked, and then joined Lina in attacking one of the chimeras, the beast with two heads. They leaped on the creature at the same time, one on either side. Their jaws clamped down on the beast’s necks as they used their legs to shred away chunks of skin and gobs of meat from everywhere below the thing’s waist. Satisfied with the kill, they celebrated with a howl and yowl and then bounded on all fours to another one of the chimeras.

  Landyr and Thorna converged on the closest adversary—Juruk. He stopped fondling his chains and reached for his sword belt, drawing two. Larger than his adversaries combined, his size belied his deftness with the blades. Neither warrior did any harm, but their constant attack started to take a toll on Juruk. The satyr grunted louder with every strike, every block, until finally, he yelled “Retreat!”

  Before Juruk finished the retreat call, the Elite Troop disengaged and fled with such alacrity no one attempted to follow.

  Perciless allowed Thorna and Landyr to fuss over his wounded hand, but he was not going to let it stop him from greeting those who saved his life. Landyr tore strips of cloth from his tunic and handed them to Thorna. She wrapped them around Perciless’ hand and struggled to keep pace as he walked toward the newcomers. “Greetings and many thanks for your timely arrival. I am Prince Perciless and I am indebted to you. I owe you my life.”

  Everyone from the other party bowed and Dearborn said, “We know who you are, your Highness.”

  Introductions were made and pleasantries were exchanged. The mood shifted from that of primal danger to an air of victory. A moment was needed to bury and mourn Brokar. They exchanged information, tended to wounds, and consolidated supplies. Kallistah Pass was their ultimate destination for both parties, so it was an easy decision to travel together. They wanted to keep moving and leave the enemy dead where they lay. There was still one question that needed to be answered.

  Perciless crouched down in front of Methel. The recently ousted Elite Troop General was propped against a tree with his hands tied behind his hands behind his back. Perciless slapped Methel’s cheeks a few times to wake him up. “So, Methel, what are we going to do with you?”

  twenty-four

  The juices from the boar’s leg flowed warm and oily over Daedalus’ chin. It was hardly a traditional breakfast and he had to resurrect his campfire to cook it, but he was hungry. It was a quick meal and he did not wish to dally for the remainder of the journey to Kallistah Pass. He wanted to make it there by the end of the day so he had his dragon catch a magnificent specimen that had been living well. There were thick chunks of meat on the shank surrounded by nice slabs of fat.

  Near the end of filling his belly, Daedalus pulled out the communications crystal. He hated to do this, but his absence from the castle for three full days meant he needed to know what transpired. He activated it by gliding his palm over it. A blue glow emanated from within and seconds later General Perrator’s face appeared inside the facets of the crystal. “Prince Daedalus?”

  Daedalus tore another piece of meat from the bone and mumbled in between chewing, “Report.”

  “Your initiative to reduce the amount of criminal activity caused by the absence of Vogothe has been successful.”

  “Why would I care about that?”

  “Because of what happened in Murveen.”

  Daedalus appreciated short answers, but his general’s were aggravatingly brief. “What happ—?”

  Perrator hurried to cover up his mistake by continuing, “Murveen was overrun by a band of criminals set on taking the vacant throne of king of the criminal underworld.”

  “Have our soldiers dispatched the band of miscreants?”

  “No. By all accounts, the numbers of our soldiers would not have been enough. Murveen would have been taken over by the criminals, if not for your brother, Perciless.”

  Daedalus had the shank to his lips, but upon hearing his brother’s name he threw it across the field. “Perciless?”

  “Yes. Reports said he slit the throat of the criminal’s leader.”

  “How long ago was he there?”

  “It doesn’t matter. He and his traveling companions are long gone. Rumor has it they were heading north, possibly to Kallistah Pass.”

  Daedalus looked in the direction of Murveen. He could make it there in half a day. But what good what that do? Perrator had no reason to lie. The Fates would never be so kind to Daedalus as to send both his brother and Dearborn to the same location, to where he was headed. Would they? Maybe the Fates owed him. Maybe this was some form of divine gift. Daedalus turned his attention north, back to the direction of Kallistah Pass. “Very well. The town was saved. I’m sure all the peasants rejoiced.”

  “Murveen, yes. But there are similar, yet less fortunate, stories coming in from other towns. I’d like to send more soldiers. We would need between 400 and 600 to get the desired results.”

  A knot formed in the pit of Daedalus’ stomach. So many soldiers to fix the problems of the people. Wasteful. “What does Oremethus think of this idea?”

  “He is not in the castle. He took the fire dragon and the air dragon to Greengate to hunt for demons.”

  “What? Why in all of the burning Hells did you not tell me sooner?”

  “I don’t know how to work this crystal. When I went to Speekore and asked for him to show me how this crystal works, he told me not to disturb you with such matters and that you view the king’s tantrums as a nuisance.”

  Daedalus grabbed a stone from the ground and crushed it with his skeletal hand. After three more he was finally able to form words through gritted teeth, although the world around him started to ripple. “Send the 600 troops you had set aside for criminal management to Greengate.”

  “Sire, I do believe—”

  An attack was coming on. A strong one, too. Daedalus despised them but hated to have one in front of anyone else even more so. This conversation needed to end. “I didn’t ask for you to share your beliefs! Send the troops. Send them now. Tell them to clean up whatever mess my brother makes. That is all!”

  Daedalus dropped to the ground and threw the crystal aside before he was transported back to the past . . .

  . . . Back to a few months after his thirteenth birthday. His broken ribs from the horse-riding accident had finally healed to a full recovery. The vomit and diarrhea-inducing diseases from landing in the pig filth had left his body long before, and that was the last time Daedalus felt any predilection toward prayer.

  Rain had stripped away any chances of outside activity for the princes, so they decided to play a game of chess siege. Each brother had one thousand cubes of smoothed wood, about the size of a throwing die, and a full set of sixteen chess pieces. They spent hours crafting a castle with walls and towers and blockades and turrets from the wooden cubes, trying to create the best design to protect their chess pieces. Once finished the princes each took a turn, one attack on each of the other two castles. An attack consisted of rolling a marble into the walls to knock over the opponent’s chess pieces. A point was gained for each of his brothers’ pieces he knocked over; a point was lost for each of his that faced the same fate.

  Both Oremethus and Perciless built solid structures with curved walls and a little extra reinforcing block for every one of their chess pieces. Daedalus barely used ten blocks for each of his fifteen other pieces, just enough to raise them off the floor onto a sturdy base. His remaining blocks went into creating a magnificent fortress around the king. Sturdy and impenetrable.

  As the game went along, Daedalus lost piece after piece, sometimes even two with one roll. But his king remained standing, nary a wobble from marble after marble slamming into his castle of wooden blocks. The game ended when neither Oremethus nor Perciless had any chess pieces left s
tanding. However, Daedalus lost. He finished in last place despite having the last remaining piece, having his king still standing.

  They left the pieces and blocks for the servants to put away and Daedalus complained about the rules of the game. The other chess pieces were meant to be sacrificed, meant to be fodder to protect the king. Why should he be punished for using them as such?

  “Those are the rules of the game,” Perciless said.

  “Of course, you would say that,” Daedalus snapped. “The only things that matter to you are rules. Father’s rules. Game rules. Instructors’ rules. You follow every rule everyone gives you because you want everyone to love you.”

  “You play the game of life the way you play chess siege. You build strong, strong walls around you and only you. If you continue to play that way, then you will be all you have through the entire game until the very end.”

  Perciless ended the conversation the same way he had always done, by showing Daedalus his back and making a hasty retreat.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Oremethus said, walking next to Daedalus. “I may have won, but you played a better game. It is never wrong to protect the king, no matter the cost . . .”

  . . . No matter the cost. That was why he sent all the troops he could spare, all the troops Perrator could muster. Greengate was a southern town close to the border of Tsinel. More than one battle during the war had occurred near the town limits. What if the king of Albathia were to be caught up in the middle of the war? He had three dragons with him, but if Tsinel happened to be advancing a battalion then they might be able to win by attrition. A loss of a mere 600 troops to save the king was no sacrifice at all.

  Daedalus stood up and shook his head, dispelling the last bit of fog created by the attack. He wanted to go back to the castle. He wanted to go to Greengate to help his brother. He wanted to go to Murveen to investigate the last place Perciless was seen. He wanted to find Dearborn Stillheart. Mounting his dragon, he knew very well he needed to stay true to the plan, needed to get to Kallistah Pass.

  Too much. There was too much to do, and Daedalus was the only one who could complete any of these tasks. Incompetence reigned supreme in the castle, the one true ruler. He lost count of how many generals he had to execute for poor performance. The war should have been over by now. What did Tsinel have? A void dragon and the only wizard in the lands who could open portals. What did Albathia have? Dragons. Wizards. Monsters created by Speekore. An Elite Troop. Only he and Oremethus could control the dragons and it was rare when his brother was lucid enough to use them in legitimate battle rather than razing towns searching for imaginary demons. Daedalus hunted and captured wizards, killing those whose egos refused to bend the knee or they failed to add any value to the king’s vision. Speekore would rather commit atrocities on any living creature than put his sciences to good use, and all the glorious creatures he had created for war purposes ended up as members of the Elite Troop, made possible by listening to the advice of inept generals.

  It was too soon to pass judgment on Perrator as an advisor. He did suggest that Daedalus continue to the Kallistah Pass. If nothing else, it removed a bitter food from the proverbial plate. But now that Daedalus lost himself in thought, it was Perrator that served up that distasteful meal. Then again, if Perrator was right and with this trip, Daedalus was to discover Tsinel exploiting the pathway through the mountains to move troops into Albathia, then he might have to reward that half-giant. And were Daedalus to cross paths with Dearborn Stillheart, then he might have to bathe that half-giant in enough gold to drown him.

  Fantasies of rape and blood filled his head, everything from slicing her neck after defiling her in a pit of snakes to his one hundred children flogging her body tied to the rack. So vivid were his daydreams he felt a pleasurable discomfort growing within his britches. It had been too long since he last celebrated Dearborn Day.

  The notion of straying from the plan was a distasteful one, but the idea of waiting for his erection to dispel on its own left him with a pain in his lower abdomen. There had to be a town nearby with at least one damsel worthy of Dearborn Day sacrifice. At this very moment, he would even settle for a comely whore.

  Guiding his dragon lower, he tried to orient himself. He pictured a map and tried to guess where he was upon it. No luck. Below was nothing but forest with patches of fields. He resigned himself to the notion that he would have to land his dragon and look at an actual map. He aimed for the closest field until he noticed thin wisps of smoke flirting with the sky from behind a group of trees.

  Maybe it was a caravan? One escorting a group of virginal women to a convent so they might serve whatever antiquated lord they believed in? Or a family, one with a daughter or two? As he flew over the last canopy and dropped down into the open space, his mind was spinning with possibilities, a game of chance wheel at a carnal festival. What he did not expect to find was one-third of his Elite Troop.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he yelled while dismounting. “Where’s Methel?”

  A dozen troops all jumped to attention, many of which were the nightmarish creatures that could single-handedly slay the dragon Daedalus rode without the need of a weapon. All of them were afraid of Daedalus as he stormed closer, even Speekore’s chimeras with no discernible facial features turned away or dipped their heads. They all shifted about listlessly, turning to Juruk for an explanation. The albino satyr stepped forward. “There has been a development in our search for Prince Perciless. It appears that Methel has turned traitor and pledged his allegiance to your brother.”

  This was the bucket of cold water that allowed Daedalus to clear his mind. Methel turned traitor? Methel was a walking monument to apathy. Daedalus trusted Methel more than any other individual because the man simply did not care enough about betrayal to put forth the effort. Juruk, however, had always made his intentions of being the Elite Troop general known as if he yelled them from mountaintops. Ambition mixing with his duplicitous nature, Juruk undoubtedly killed Methel. But what of the rest of the troop? “Did . . . did you just imply that you found my brother?”

  Juruk cleared his throat before answering. “We did, your Highness. We even had him captured. It was then when Methel made his intentions known.”

  Daedalus was dubious of this story, almost certainly a fiction. “And what of the rest of troops? Did they defect, swayed by Methel’s sudden change in allegiance?”

  “No. They were lost to us in the ambush. Perciless had spent time in Murveen—”

  “This news I’ve heard. He liberated the town from a criminal usurper.”

  “He did, with help from his traveling party and one of our troop members.”

  “Wait . . . a member of the Elite Troop was helping my brother and you didn’t execute them? You simply watched them aid my brother?”

  “Yes, per the orders of Methel. We had located your brother even before Murveen, but Methel wished to gather more information, so he ordered a soldier named Samillia to infiltrate their ranks and learn more about their motivations. I was against this and I now believe that he used her to pass information along to Perciless.”

  Daedalus knew little about Juruk, just that he appointed him to the Elite Troop under advisement from Haddaman. Juruk was a soldier, though, a warrior, not a politician who could play a character more deftly than an actor upon a stage. There was no doubt in his mind that Juruk was lying, but there had to be some element of truth to draw from because the satyr lacked the ability to spin such a detailed yarn. “You mentioned an ambush?”

  “Yes. We had also heard the rumors of . . . the escape from Castle Phenomere dungeon. Those same rumors mentioned that the escapees were near, so we left five of our men behind in Murveen to investigate further. As the fates would have it, they actually found and traveled with the fugitives.”

  All color seeped away. The world around the white satyr with black piercings change
d to variant shades of gray. The trees turned to charcoal, while the grasses faded to ash. Daedalus’s heartbeat rang between his ears in a piercing rhythm like a blacksmith’s hammer forging a sword. “You . . . you . . . had contact . . . with Dearborn Stillheart and my brother?”

  Juruk spoke quickly to douse the flames building within Daedalus. “Yes, but if not for Methel’s betrayal, we would have had all of the prizes which you seek. Dearborn traveled with dozens of other travelers, all warriors in their own rights, and attacked us right when we captured Perciless, an ambush set up by Methel.”

  Daedalus stomped over to the closest tree. His eyelids hurt from the force needed to squeeze them shut and keep his bulging eyes in their sockets. With his skeletal hand, he punched and slashed at the tree, chipped wood spraying through the air. The tree toppled, a cacophony of wood splitting and breaking as it fell into the dense forest. Daedalus felt the force of it hitting the ground within his chest, where he finally calmed his raging heart enough to look back to Juruk and form the words, “Where? Where did these events take place?”

  What remained of the Elite Troop now stood behind Juruk. Nothing overtly cowardly, just subtle steps to hide behind their de facto leader as he said, “The Looping Forest. Two days ago. They were heading to Kallistah Pass.”

  The Looping Forest was to the west and Kallistah Pass was north. The temptation to command Juruk to retrace his steps back to the specific area of interest was great within Daedalus, but ultimately futile. They were long gone from that spot and aiming for the same destination as he. He so desperately wanted to go to where the Elite Troop had engaged with his enemies, to see where they last were. To be where they last were in hopes to find any scrap of evidence, maybe even get a whiff of the faintest of smells. No. That would be foolishness. He always despised his memory attacks for taking him back to the past, so it made no sense to consciously do the same. He had to keep moving forward, keep flying to Kallistah Pass and finally get ahead of his adversaries for once. And he would be even more of a fool for not taking advantage of what remained of his Elite Troop. “Juruk, step forward close to me.”