But the real implication dawned on him. He did have one answer, he realised. The Shamana knew he was here, had sent one of their own for him, which meant they knew of the surface world.
The same surface world they had told all the tribes did not exist.
He had been lied to all his young life. His uncle’s stories said the abyss they saw below them through a crack in the Cloudsea was an illusion. But the Shamans knew the truth. They were down here too.
They had a way down here.
Cartracia, the silent sentinel. Wasn’t that the mountain to the North of Theris city, beyond the huge valley the city nested in?
When the Islands align? What did that mean?
One thing was certain, he had to get out of here. He had to climb Cartracia if he wanted to get home. Maybe there was a way to reach the Floating Islands from up there.
He remembered Cassandra’s words before they had been split up and he’d been incarcerated. Aurelia had spoken them for her sister.
Do not lose hope, all is not lost. There are other ways to get back to your home. She has seen them.
Was this the other way that Cassandra had seen? He needed to talk to her. He needed to talk to Nausithorn. But how? When?
The great steel door at the end of the hall cranked open and Totelun was still holding the blade. He threw it down behind his pallet, out of sight.
The jailers, four large men in the robes of Clerics, stopped at the bars of his cage. One of them looked down at the corpse with distaste.
‘You’ll wish it was you who had died by the time Harling is done with you.’
Totelun fought them, but within moments he was dragged from his cell, and taken to see the High Cleric.
Chapter Two
Aurelia Nectris
The stars formed a glinting canopy of fireflies as the former Empress of Theris City skulked into the makeshift camp of the army of Argentor under cover of darkness. Still inside the boundaries of the Theris basin, the encampment was temporary; all ten thousand soldiers, cavalrymen and engineers would repack their tents and move on come dawn. Across the flat expanse of verdant grassland, their scouts could still see the city they fled as a dark smudge in the distance.
A roaming army attracted a following; seamstresses and cobblers, to mend and patch uniforms, clothes, and sturdy boots; surgeons and their apprentices, to sew up the sick and injured, to learn on the job in an environment without law or consequence; fortune-tellers and clairvoyants, to prey on feebleminded soldiers and make a quick gold piece; whores to peddle the oldest trade on Arceth.
The scouts weren’t concerned with such as these. They were looking for armed men on horseback, Steppe warriors, mercenaries, thralls. Medusi.
Not two women dressed to blend in with the other stragglers.
They hadn’t started like that.
Before they reached the camp, Aurelia Nectris trudged through thigh high grass that ran to mud underneath. She wore the same clothes she had when she’d fled the palace; battle armour fit for the Empress she had been until just a few days ago, a fine bow her father had given her many years before. Her hair was bright and golden like the noonday sun, clearly marking her as a noble.
‘We have to find you something else to wear,’ said Chrysaora. The woman was Aurelia’s elder by a good fifteen years, making her just over thirty. She was proficient in a variety of weapons including the bladed staff she held and the short sword at her hip. Chrysaora’s clothes were more modest; a fitted jerkin and a dark robe with a doubled over hood. ‘You’ll stick out like…well, like a noble girl in a brothel. Which is what you’ll be.’
It wasn’t that there was a problem with nobles; the blue blood Argentori army would be full of them. It was that once she allowed everyone to see her as a noble, it was but a short and well signposted journey to recognising her as the Empress.
They’d both been walking for what seemed like hours. The tail end of the army could be seen miles ahead. Aurelia tried to maintain a pure blankness in her mind as she strode forward. Tried to concentrate on her deliberate footfalls. Not to think about anything.
Once or twice she’d managed it for a whole minute, before the stark reality of what had happened would wash back over her like a storm surge. Periphy’s blood, a scarlet wash across her mind’s eye. The onslaught of the Medusi and their thralls across her city. Betrayal in the palace, raking her nails across her traitor brother’s face as they fought.
‘Here,’ said Chrysaora, squatting down in the grass. ‘This’ll work.’
Aurelia squinted to see what she had found in the scant light. It was the body of a soldier. He wore a brown tunic under his armour spotted with day old blood.
‘I can’t wear that,’ said Aurelia, taken aback at the suggestion.
Chrysaora scrunched her brow. ‘We can wash it off in a stream.’
‘It’s covered in blood.’
‘It really does come out, no matter what people say.’
‘This man died in it.’
‘And so he clearly has no further use for it. We do.’
Aurelia must have looked about as upset as she felt, but where most might have consoled her, Chrysaora went on the offensive. ‘One person recognises you and that army will lynch you in moments. You will be torn limb from limb. You commanded the battle that saw their friends, husbands and brothers blown apart, burnt, maimed and killed. You are their enemy and they will kill you for it.
‘You can’t be an Empress out here. You are no longer an Empress anyway. You have no Empire, not even a city. You are a simple camp follower, and you dress in what you can find. You no longer have the luxury of turning your noble little nose up at things. You just have to do it.’
Chrysaora was right of course, but that didn’t make it any easier. Aurelia swallowed the gorge in her throat and calmed herself.
She was an Empress without an Empire, without even a city or a palace to call her own. She was an exile from her family’s home of a thousand years. She’d lost it all in the battle they had fled, and now, what was she?
Who am I?
Chrysaora stripped the soldier’s body of his tunic and handed it to Aurelia. It smelt of death, and strongly of iron. The blood, she realised.
‘But my armour, my bow?’ was all she managed.
‘Keep the bow. Lots of women armed in a military camp, they just aren’t soldiers. Keep the armour close to your skin as protection. But cover it up; it identifies you.’
Aurelia found she didn’t like it when Chrysaora was right. She shrugged on the tunic gingerly, shivering with disgust. Chrysaora also found her a dark woollen blanket with a hole in the centre that was worn over the head, much like her own. Aurelia took it without argument. The night was getting chill and she was glad of the warmth, despite this also having a variety of stains she could not identify.
Chrysaora stopped her and plucked the pins from Aurelia’s hair, mussing the tight plaits and curls into an unkempt nest. She wiped her muddy fingers on the girl’s face. Aurelia bore it in silence.
‘There,’ she said. ‘You don’t look like royalty anymore.’
‘I look terrible.’
‘You look normal. But you could be anyone. That’s the point. Take it from someone who has lived on the streets and off the land most of their life. You don’t want to stand out. You want to blend in as much as possible. That’s the only way we’ll get you to Argentor without a mob baying for your blood and have any hope of realising your crazy plan.
‘Now, pick a name.’
Aurelia frowned but with one eyebrow raised. ‘A name?’
‘Your new name. Just for now. Just until we get you to safety. She’s not a noble, she’s a tailor’s daughter, a camp follower, a nobody.’
Chrysaora took her role as bodyguard more seriously than most. She joked, but underneath she was concerned for one thing and one thing only; Aurelia’s safety.
The Empress without an Empire took a deep breath, thought carefully, and remembered a name she had love
d from the earliest stories her mother had told her and Cassandra as children.
‘Liath.’
*
Liath was the one who entered the encampment that night.
At first it was easy to blend in; no one asked questions, no one wanted to pry into another’s choices in such a place, lest they have their own lives questioned. No one was here without a story, but all knew better than to ask. Aurelia and Chrysaora kept to themselves, ate by themselves, slept by themselves.
The warrior woman found it easy to ingratiate herself into the workings of the encampment, though she kept her weapon skills hidden. It was impossible to hide her true nature and she was quickly discovered to be a thrall; a person with a symbiotic Medusi attached at the back of the neck by a thick tentacle, often bestowed with enhanced skills, or magical gifts. Chrysaora was a Healer by trade, an established sect of the Medologers doctrine, able to use her powers to heal the wounded through magic. Thralls were not well trusted or accepted in Argentori society, but in a migratory army with sick and dying soldiers, her skills as a trained Healer were soon so sought after as to mitigate any prejudice.
Chrysaora found the camp followers’ tendency to keep to themselves despite their close proximity suited her completely. A world where no one asked questions and everything was skin deep.
Aurelia didn’t find camp life so easy. Chrysaora discouraged her from talking too much; her noble accent was a giveaway to any listener that she was not where she was meant to be. After a day of silent wandering with the camp and then more silence when the army stopped for the night, she was about ready to scream. Her guilt and memories assailed her and would not relent. She fell in with Chrysaora, helping to wash bandages, redress wounds, and administer potions and medicines, just to hear other people talk to her, even if it was only to complain and order her around. They drowned out her own inner voice, and she could stop thinking about Periphy for whole minutes at a time.
She put aside her pride, and helped with what she thought was something close to selflessness.
Chrysaora had asked her to rewrap and splint one soldier’s arm cast. She didn’t use her magic if she could help it; it drained her, she explained.
The soldier was high on pain-relieving herbs and very talkative. ‘I just can’t believe the ruthless decision. We were asleep, we hadn’t even attacked the walls in days. Suddenly out of nowhere there are bombs crashing down all around us. Me, my bedroll, my tent, everything is flying through the air on fire. I crash to the earth, fight my way out of the burning canvas, and what I saw will haunt me for the rest of my days. A whole line of burning craters straight across the camp, still more bombs falling from the sky. I realise I can’t hear anything, my ears are ringing too fucking much, eardrums probably burst, maybe you could check? But I can feel the explosions rumbling through the ground, one after another.’
Aurelia held his arm in her hand gently as she wrapped the gauze around the sticks that kept the man’s arm straight. She hadn’t been listening very carefully, but slowly his voice began to penetrate the fog of her mind. She was still reeling from Periphy’s death, and the loss of everything she had known, she hadn’t the capacity to absorb anyone else’s pain.
‘The airship then reeled back, striking again, and we had no way to fight it. All the artillery had been moved to Stauros’ side in anticipation of such an attack. She tricked us. The Empress tricked the Duke into giving up his defences, then she decimated our army. No wonder we’re retreating with our tails between our legs. So many dead, such a ruthless decision.’
He was talking about her decision to send the Routillier, her one and only remaining airship, on a bombing run over the Argentori army. It had been in the dead of night, her stroke of genius that had turned the siege in her favour. Like the soldier said, it had forced Duke Lepitern to leave the field. She had decimated one of the two armies besieging Theris, made them turn and retreat. In the same night she had destroyed King Stauros Isingr’s ability to wage a drawn out siege, by destroying his grain silos.
But in hindsight, this had been a double edged sword. Her attack had forced Isingr’s hand and he had attacked with all his incredible strength. The Order of the Medusi behind him, he’d broken through the wall and ransacked the city. The airship had been destroyed and Aurelia had lost everything.
‘She killed my friends, my brothers. So many dead.’ His words were slurring together. ‘Such a callous woman. She didn’t even see those she killed.’
She had not once considered the loss of life that her decision had caused. At least not for the enemy. She was and had always been concerned for her own people, but now she was here among ‘the enemy’. Normal people, young men, young nobles, soldiers, obeying their Duke. She had struck their army so hard that they had been forced to retreat.
And she hadn’t even been able to save her own.
After the human battle, the Order of the Medousa had arrived with their incredible horde of Medusi, washing over the valley and the walls of Theris like an unstoppable tidal wave. All those terrible creatures, intent on draining the life from her city, from her people.
She shuddered to think of all the death and destruction she had left behind, let alone that which travelled in this army.
‘Are you okay?’ It wasn’t the soldier. It was Chrysaora. Aurelia realised she had been frozen halfway through applying the splint. ‘Why don’t you take a walk? You’re distracted, and you won’t be helping me in that mood.’
Aurelia took her at her offer and fled the tent. She couldn’t listen to the soldier’s ravings any longer. She wandered the camp and kept to herself for the next two days. Each morning the tents were dismantled, and the nobles at the front would begin the punishing march Northwest, back towards home. The front of the column may have been walking through grasslands, but by the time the camp followers straggled through, it was treacherous mud. Behind them a great snake of churned ground and dead grasses, winding back to the city. Each evening as night fell, the nobles would cease the march and the tent city would be created anew.
Duke Lepitern had to be in the procession ahead of her, a man she had once entertained with a proposal of marriage. He was many decades her senior and it had not been successful. She had to stay beneath the notice of the generals for now, but once they reached Argentor she would need to find some way of speaking to the Duke again. She needed an ally. He wasn’t an obvious choice, but he was the only choice. Who else could help her to fight the Medousa, the Goddess, and take back her city? It was a big ask, she knew, asking a man to help her after she had both refused his proposal and then beaten his army into retreat. But now she needed him. Now she needed that army.
Each time she returned to the tent she shared with Chrysaora, the woman was sullen and distracted. They barely spoke for two days, just living, existing, making slow progress towards the city. When they did, Chrysaora was sharp and cutting. Hardly the behaviour of a sworn bodyguard towards her Empress. Aurelia didn’t expect much, not with so many onlookers, but it still rankled.
On the fourth day with the army they picked their way through the remains of a city that straddled the ring of mountains around the Theris basin. Ambrinor, city of engineers, burnt and ransacked by Aurelia’s own father as he ceded ground to the Duke in the opposite direction a few years ago.
As Aurelia was leaving the tent to explore the city in silence, she caught Chrysaora’s eye roll.
‘Spit it out,’ said Aurelia. ‘You've taken issue with me ever since we left Cassandra behind. What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No, come on. Tell me.’
Chrysaora cocked her head at the young Empress. ‘You walk around this army like you already own it.’
‘You told me to walk around. You didn’t want me in your way.’
‘No, I told you to blend in,’ snapped Chrysaora. ‘I told you to pick a new life, a new story. Liath, you said. But, you haven’t. You’re still the Empress Aurelia, just wearing dirty clothes.’
&nbs
p; ‘I never claimed I could act.’
Chrysaora shook her head. ‘You are being deliberately obtuse, and I’m not explaining myself well.’ She tried again. ‘You think you should have died with your people, gone down with the ship. I remember you saying it was your duty. You think you have failed them. But you escaped, and now instead of taking advantage of that, you have this power crazed notion that you can get an army together. You abandoned your sister when she disagreed, when she wouldn’t follow you.’
‘I did no such thing. She abandoned me.’
‘What do you really think you will achieve?’
‘I’m trying to get an army in order to save my people. I have to go back, liberate them. I have to save them. You saw what happened to Theris!’
‘It’s not about them, Aurelia, it’s about you.’
‘What?’
‘Your power has been threatened, you no longer have anyone to rule over, so you want your Empire back. Your kind only thinks of saving people in order to have subjects to rule.’
‘My kind?’ Aurelia didn’t know how to answer her. It was so wrong, so far removed from how she thought as to be ridiculous. She was suddenly aware of how little she knew of Chrysaora, and how little the woman knew of her; they had been thrown together just before the battle that had decided the fate of the city, Aurelia in need of a bodyguard. Chrysaora had been hesitant, speaking of previous masters that had proven false. Aurelia was reminded of her own promise. She had asked for the woman’s service on a trial basis with no oath sworn, and had measured it against herself proving a worthy master to follow.
Hardly the basis for a lasting relationship, she was surprised the woman was still with her. Clearly responsibility meant something to her despite her argument.
Chrysaora continued, ‘You have this amazing opportunity to embrace Liath, to be a normal person, yet you want to go back to being an Empress. We could set up in Argentor, disappear into the city and live new lives. No one knows the Empress of Theris survived the attack on the city. She could just disappear forever.’ She paused, looking at Aurelia again. ‘Instead, you want to go back to that life? You want death threats? Assassination attempts? Betrayal from your own family? These are the trappings of power. I just don't understand.’
Embrace of the Medusi (The Overlords Trilogy Book 2) Page 4