by Henry Thomas
He felt the power in his orb diminish drastically, the feeling of energy becoming more faint, pulsating less as he held it in his grasp. He used it again against two more Kuilbolts on a scouting mission to check on the brigade’s progress. When he pushed with the orb’s power against the twelve who had attempted to flee from the orb tower as it was breathing open to accept them, it glowed brightly with a flash and then audibly cracked and split asunder. It fell from Rhael’s hand in a smoky ruin. He had heard something before the split, a discomfiting sound that he could not quite place. But it was soon masked by the screams of the twelve people behind the panels as they were hit by the white energy bolts and their energies drawn into the orb.
It was the very orb he cradled now, as he took in a strange sight. The pathway was lined with twin rows of hooks hanging from the ceiling, and two deep channels were cut into the floor on either side of the path. There were channels above that the hooks were set into as well, as though the entire thing offered some conveyance. It seemed to Rhael that the hooks could be made to travel along the channels. There was a smell to the place as well, one that he did not like. He wrinkled his nose and pressed on, swirling blue orb and Goblincrafted lantern in hand. He passed the long corridor of hooks and entered into a larger chamber that housed low tubs, like those used in tannery. The same two-channeled path passed through the center of the floor. In fact, the smell of the place was precisely as repulsive as a tanner’s pit to Rhael’s mind. It smelled of rot and deterioration.
He saw hides half submerged in the pits and recognized immediately that they were human skins. His mind went to the gruel he was fed—namely the tiny pieces of meat strewn inside of it. Rhael involuntarily retched there on the floor and hurried out of the room through a passageway at the opposite end. He came upon a line of carts along the channeled path.
They were linked together and the smell of death and decomposition of flesh nearly forced him to retch again. Harvesting men and using them like chattel. The Kuilbolts had spoken of masters, but Rhael had not seen any. There was another question that had been gnawing on his vast mind: the question of logistics. How, for instance, had the Kuilbolts amassed these human prisoners here in the depths of the earth? Surely they were not trundling about in the dark reaches with their rat carts as Iztklish and Krilshk had done, waiting to stumble upon men whom had fallen down holes. No, thought Rhael, the Kuilbolts no doubt had to hibernate in the colder seasons, like the frogs and lizards and snakes. It stood to reason that the Kuilbolts chose their subterranean routes in the colder months, Rhael deduced.
They had been surprised to have found him, he remembered. They had been carting other things, not just him, but his mind was so clouded with pain and sleep milk for most of his trundling journey here that he couldn’t remember what. He wondered how far their rat roads stretched. Time was disjointed as days passed and came again above the sunless catacombs without reckoning.
He felt that he had been under the earth for months, but he knew that he could not use that feeling as a guide for anything like a true reckoning. So be it, thought Rhael. I was cast into the belly of the earth and now I have gestated again in its womb to be birthed onto the surface once more in a wash of blood and fire; time is of no matter to me, especially the time that has passed. My life begins now, he mused. My life of power.
He walked past low tables with grooves worn into them. Upon examination the grooves were black with dried blood and old detritus. Chopping blocks, he knew. The channels in the floor diverged and Rhael ventured down the right fork and found the channel turned at a steep drop off and then looped back onto itself. When he peered cautiously over the edge, he spied many red glinting eyes made purplish with the glow of the blue light staring up at him through the darkness. It took him a moment to realize they were the eyes of rats, giant rats.
That was the Kuilbolt’s kennel, no doubt, and in convenient proximity to its source of food, it seemed. Farther down he found a long hall with two great cauldrons of bronze filled with gruel sat in racks over dead coals. He must have either killed the cooks or sent them fleeing somewhere. A neat operation, he admitted, despite the thought of it making his skin crawl. Very efficient and leaving little waste. He had just burned the useless bodies of the harvested folk, but this was entirely more useful. Skins, meat, no doubt other useful resources, and all of them supporting the bodies of Kuilbolts as they toiled away. A self-sustaining operation of limitless power, this station or factory or outpost. A dark gold mine of epic proportions.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have destroyed all of the workers during his ascent to power, but it would be no problem finding more peasants to work the fields, so to speak. Rhael grinned again as he backtracked into the butcher’s den and then followed the other fork as it climbed up and around through the underground Kuilbolts’ lair. He heard no sound of any other being beside himself as he came to a junction where six other tunnels spoked from the central hub, where Rhael found himself standing and smiling to himself. Of all the events to have to endure, the humiliation and injury, the river drowning and captivity and torture, the presumed cannibalism, they had all been worth it for Rhael. Never again would he be tested to such limits, to be so near his breaking point as he was. But he was the Lord Uhlmet, one of the richest and most powerful lords in Oesteria, and well-rooted in the hierarchy of the Magistry besides. How could he be expected to do anything but succeed? He was a genius, a prime example of noble blood outranking that of a base commoner. The right to succeed flowed through his very veins.
He tried two passages before turning back to the hub and finding a third that led up instead of down. It was a long and low tunnel and Rhael had to lower his head and hunch over, something he did not like doing at all. At last it ended and Rhael was pleased to see sunlight for the first time in ages, though the sensation was brief as he shut his swollen eyes and grimaced in burning pain. The tunnel had opened into a broad cavern devoid of any activity. His eyes adjusted and he saw that he was perched slightly higher than a man’s shoulder on the side of a steeply faced rock wall. His wounded leg screamed at him as he landed on it. It still had not healed, he thought maddeningly. He rolled to his feet and adjusted his bag of orbs on his shoulder.
Blinking and cursing, he limped through the wide-mouthed cavern and approached the lip of the cave mouth cautiously before peering over. Down below he saw what looked to be a mining operation enclosed by a high wooden palisade. Kuilbolt guardsmen clad in bronze-plated armor stood on the parapets and monitored a large group of humans carrying baskets and wheelbarrows, loading and unloading them at different stations, and then returning to the rounded mine entrance. Rhael watched as the workers were followed by whip-bearing Kuilbolts. A heavy bronze-banded wooden gate was closed over the entrance, barred from the outside by four of the bronze armored Kuilbolt warriors. He was studying the terrain trying to figure out possibilities of where he might have surfaced in the world. The sun was setting off to his left in the periphery of his vision, so he knew he was facing a northerly direction. Rolling hills, foothills he thought. He was at the base of a mountain range facing north. To the west in the shimmering distance he saw the sea and the sun reflected in it as it sank downward gloriously. He was so elated to see the sun after so long in the darkness. Now he thought again about the sun and the sea, and the mountains and the underground rivers that had brought him there to where he was at that moment looking down on the slave camp at the foot of a mountain. I must be somewhere in the Northern Reaches, somewhere in the disputed borderland between Oesteria and the Dawn Tribe Territory, he realized. If that were true, then he would be perhaps a fortnight’s trek to Castle Immerdale, due east and south again once he hit the Magister’s Road. That was amazingly and conveniently nearby to his station. Once he raised troops and they had seen their cowardly and poorly performing fellows dangling from the gibbet, perhaps they would be motivated to take up arms as the men they had advertised themselves to be. He would take this place
for himself, and keep its secrets close to his own counsel and no one else’s. If he were indeed in the Northern Reaches, this fortress would be an excellent base to supply his forces for his war against the Dawn Tribe.
Rhael realized a problem to his situation; not all men could stomach the sorts of tasks that he would order them to here at his new mining camp. Many would have sympathies, weakness brought on by the compassionate characteristics some men were prone to. He was certainly not taken by such notions, but the simple men that made up the soldiery of the First Army would have among their number a fair few who were, especially if they were to escort prisoners to be executed in the orb tower.
He also could foresee a problem of keeping the operation quiet. Men would not work underground day and night without the need for them to work in shifts, and then the men would need some form of entertainment, drinks, and women. The men would cry into their drinks or talk to their whores and suddenly Rhael’s secret operation would be known to anyone in the Magistry with eyes and ears.
The other issue was also insurmountable: unless they could be convinced of cannibalism, the entire operation would become a logistical horror of supply, supply, supply. Instead of killing the Kuilbolts, perhaps I should coerce them into forsaking their masters and working for me, he thought. That would solve the problem in one stroke. He thought gleefully of a long chain of Dawn Tribe savages disappearing into the mines, a bounty of orbs at his feet. He needed a lever that would lift the Kuilbolts to his bargain. Perhaps that lever was promising them the People of the Dawn Tribes? He merely needed to find something that they cared about more than the fury of their masters; and for that he needed to know who their masters were, and more importantly where their masters were.
Rhael let his gaze travel back to the mining camp and the palisade and its gatehouse, its three guard towers, the guardsmen who were eight to a tower, the eight additional guardsmen in the yard to mind the prisoners and operate the mineshaft gate. A score of other Kuilbolts clad in the pale humanskin jerkins sewn all over with bronze lozenges and carrying whips at their belts were breaking up the mined rocks that the prisoners had delivered them with bronze pickaxes and carting them off in handcarts to a roofed forge that billowed smoke from the hole in the center of its timber roof. They do not even give the prisoners tools as a precaution against armed rebellion, it seemed to Rhael, for he saw the Kuilbolts themselves doing the labor and reckoned in his own mind that he would have had the slaves break up the rocks. Apparently they only used them as beasts of burden, the men. Or else they were on alert because of his victory over their pathetic army and they were expecting a full-scale prisoner revolt.
He cast his eye over the structures that rested within the fortified edifice of the palisade and asked himself where he would lodge, were he one of these mysterious masters of Kuilbolts. It took him little time to find the squat-waisted tower with a ramp that accessed a door midway up its heights. It was built of stone and looked to be older than the double palisade and earthworks that had been constructed around it. It was the most elite-looking structure that he could see, perhaps there were caverns below that were opulent and well furnished, but he had only seen the orb tower room on its polished white dais, magnificent and deadly. He could only deduce that the masters would certainly be above overseeing an operation as macabre as this and would not have any desire at all to get their hands dirty. Therefore it would stand to reason that they might choose to surround themselves with luxury in order to compensate for the disgusting course their lives had taken. He could think of nothing lower, in actual fact. Peasants belonged to the land, and as such they were always and in eternity the property of their lord because he was their blooded lord, whose right to rule the land had been passed from father to son for a thousand years and more. In Rhael’s mind it was an unarguable fact, and nothing would ever change that. That he had happened upon the operation and used another lord’s stolen property for his own benefit was completely acceptable; that was a courtesy extended among peers.
Highborn men always looked for ways to profit. His family and many other noble houses had profited immensely from siding with the Magistry after the old king had died and a power struggle had ensued. Lord Illithane had raised his banner and those noble houses opposing Magistry rule had flocked to him, his generalship inspiring fierce loyalty in his men, fierce courage. They displayed it time and time again in the field, and Lord Illithane proved to be a genius at the art of war. The noble houses that had allied themselves with the Magistry had all been granted lofty ranks within the establishment, and although he had been on the cusp of manhood, he was granted his position of Mage Imperator through his father’s position as Archmage Imperator, the right hand of the High Mage himself. It had been Rhael who suggested to the Magistry that they target Lord Illithane’s family, it was the easiest and least costly way of stopping the man and it was staring them all in the face day after day. People often had to die, and he counted it fortunate that so few had to die in order to stop a drawn-out campaign, no matter if they were little more than children. His father had received the credit for the resolution of the conflict, the war being declared over even without Lord Illithane’s official surrender—his armies had simply dispersed.
In fact, the man had eluded justice altogether after the event and disappeared those sixteen years before. The injustices of the world, thought Rhael. There were a few minor skirmishes after, but their leader had been defeated and stripped of all titles and property and he led them no longer; consequently they had to accept defeat. He would have liked to witness a grand execution of the man. It would have been a fine punctuation mark for the masterstroke of genius that he had delivered in his suggestion to the council, but it was not to be.
His father was credited with the order for the execution of Lady Illithane and her two teenage children instead of him. When he dared to ask why, his father called him a fool and told him that he was merely protecting him. Calling him a fool, there in the great hall! Rhael could scarcely contain his anger but he somehow managed to sit through a silent dinner with his father and the family’s attendants. He had never seen his father again after that evening. He had told him that he was needed in Twinton on Magistry affairs and that he must leave at once, and he rode away on his fine steed and debauched his way across the countryside from town to town until he made it to the city of Twinton and took up his office in the Magistry council hall. His father died two months later. He traveled home for the burial and set his household affairs in order. He fired the staff and sent them all off and appointed new, more-attractive-looking peasants to run his house. He dismissed the ones that acted appalled at his advances and stayed long enough to make sure that the bloody commoners were not stealing from him, and then he was back in Twinton. The holdings that were bequeathed to him by his father were vast and profitable.
They had great interests in the shipping trade; they owned several ships and had part ownership in dozens besides. His family had been positioned for such a push for centuries, and the timing had fallen upon his father to be the head of the house when the opportunity arose. After much cajoling by Rhael, he seized it and brought it to bear in their family’s favor. His father had lacked the ambition that drove great men to succeed, ambition that Rhael possessed in plentitude. As Rhael grew older, he had realized that his father would never be the cut of lord that he himself would make. His father followed the rules to a letter, whereas Rhael dictated the rules. I am a lord of the land, Rhael thought, I shall make my right where I see fit. His father had never forgiven him for putting forth the idea of capturing and executing Lady Illithane and her brats. He had said it was a great shame to the family, and a cowardly perversion of honorable war. Ludicrous, he had thought, that his father even held onto such an ancient and outdated concept. Rhael had seen victory and seized upon it like a hawk snatching its prey.
Of course, after his father’s death, things changed at the Magistry. High Mage Albine had died a year l
ater and Archmage Imperator Paifen, a bloody commoner, ascended to the seat of High Mage. Paifen had been a voice of opposition in the council and an ever-present thorn in his side and that of his father’s. He currently sat in the High Mage’s chair, and Rhael relished the day when the old man would let go his death rattle and allow him to take his rightful place as the head of government.
By rights he had outranked the man at the time of his ascension, and the position of Archmage was his due to the death of his father, but they had snubbed him for Paifen. Regardless of the man’s uses and abilities, he was still a commoner, and commoners would never make the leaders that highborn men made. They would soon see the errors of their choice, Rhael thought darkly; not that he meant to kill them, on the contrary he meant to awe them with his power and his ferocity, his unwavering will. He would be the High Mage as the High Mage should ever have been, and woe to those who dared oppose him. His own destiny was laid out before him it seemed, and all he needed to do now was play his hand and reap the rewards. The Kuilbolts would either accept his offer to follow him as their new master or he would destroy them all, he thought, a grim smile fixed to his battered face. Mage Imperator Rhael Lord Uhlmet had just extended his holdings and in the process worked out an even greater plan.
Twenty
It was well past midnight before they slipped away from the Merry Haymaker, he and Eilyth. They darted from the inn and sprinted along the road until they were at the bottom of the hill and well out of town. Their breath threw great plumes of frost into the half-mooned sky as they slowed and caught their wind at a jog, carrying what provisions they had on their backs, wrapped up in their cloaks. Joth had his soldier’s gear and the arming sword he had taken from the guard in Borsford, as well as a little food and water and the half-empty skin of mead left from their journey from the village by the river.