The Prince of the Veil

by Hal Emerson

  “Even a matter of hours is too long,” Raven said, calm but insistent. “Time is the one quantity of which we don’t have nearly enough.”

  “How long now?” Tomaz rumbled, a question that elicited total silence from the others, even the ever-fidgeting Davydd. They all turned to look at Raven, though many of them no doubt already knew the date.

  “One week, six days, and however many hours it is ‘til dawn,” Raven said.

  One by one they nodded, doing internal calculations.

  “By which time,” Lorna summed up calmly, “either you are dead, or the Tyrant is?”

  “That’s the theory,” Raven said.

  “Something still worries me,” Leah said. “And I won’t stand here and stay silent; we need to have a contingency plan.”

  “We won’t be attacked until we pass Lerne,” Raven insisted. “There’s no value in it for them. Surely you can see that.”

  “I see scales,” she replied, her eyes flashing blue for a brief second, about as long as she had yet managed to hold the Aspect. “And I see shadows. That is all.”

  “Symanta?” Autmaran asked.

  “There may yet be Seekers hidden in the camp,” Spader added, with a wry twist to his mouth. “There are those who helped Henri Perci escape, and many of those who fled the Cathedral are still in our hair, even after Ishmael’s thorough combing.”

  “We won’t be attacked until we pass Lerne!” Raven shouted.

  They all fell silent and watched him with wary eyes.

  “We won’t be attacked until we pass Lerne,” he repeated at a normal volume. He realized he was sweating; there was a fire in the tent with them, but not near enough to warm him. He passed a hand over his forehead and cleared his throat.

  Shadows and light, why don’t they just listen?

  “Very well,” Autmaran sighed, breaking the tension and sweeping it aside, pretending it had never existed. “I will agree to drop the point on one condition: if we pass by the crossroads that lead to the city and see what we expect, then we pass on. If something is there, anything, that makes us think there is more to Symanta’s plans than we assume, we revisit this.”

  Raven ground his back teeth together in frustration, but nodded.

  “Fine. But unless something glaringly obvious comes to us, then we move straight for Lucien. Agreed?”

  One by one the others nodded, all except Davydd.

  “What happens if you just run away?” the Eshendai Ranger asked abruptly. He stood up and began pacing wildly, throwing his hands into the air. “Huh? What happens if, magically, you and the Empress aren’t in the same place? What happens if we just try to sidestep this things altogether? I can’t help but feel we’re walking right into this one. Why don’t we attack and you just stay out of the way for two weeks?”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Raven said, rubbing his temples. “It’s a neat loop-hole, but you can’t avoid the future that way. Any step I take will eventually lead to that confrontation. Geofred was sure of it. All we can do is try to be ready when it comes.”

  “I agree,” Leah said quietly but insistently. “I’ve seen this from the inside now, and the confrontation will happen one way or another. But this – us gathering and marching on Lucien – this is the only chance the Kindred will ever have to defeat Her. Without him leading us, without him there to fight her, we lose.”

  “So, basically, we’re using you as bait,” Davydd said, turning his red-gold eyes on Raven, sizing up his reaction, “and risking the fact you may die first and fulfill her side of the prophecy, all so you have the chance to kill her, in which case you might die anyway.”

  Raven swallowed hard, and took a seat in one of the clever cloth folding chairs used about the camp. He dug his knuckles deeper into the knot at his temple.

  “That about sums it up,” he said.

  Silence descended on the tent as they all consulted their own thoughts. Davydd had ceased his pacing and was now perched on a high stool, staring into his hands; Lorna was seated on the floor, back straight, watching them all; Tomaz stood in the shadows of a corner, expression unreadable; Leah’s eyes kept flashing blue and then back to green as she tried to grab the Aspect of Sight, only to have it slip through her fingers; Autmaran was examining the maps, still shaking his bald head which glinted in the lantern light; Spader and Ishmael were standing side-by-side, saying nothing. The distant sound of a ringing bell that called for lights-out broke the tableau.

  “We’ll meet again tomorrow,” Autmaran said, and they all nodded. They left in groups, until Raven was left watching the departing form of Leah, thinking how happy he had been only days before.

  He saw Leah very little during the day. They had different responsibilities over the march: Leah, Tomaz and the other Rogues were being used as partial scouts, and also as guards along the borders of the army. In addition, when they weren’t patrolling, they were giving lessons in sword, spear, knife, and bow fighting. Raven had tried to join them one night as they practiced by the wane light of oil lanterns, but as soon as he’d entered the practice arena, everyone had gone silent, and the practice had stopped. Every eye turned and trained on him, pulled like metal to a lodestone. In a huge wave, they saluted, nodded, or bowed their heads.

  So much for that idea.

  He nodded back, and turned to go. As he left, he caught sight of Leah and Tomaz, both of whom looked tired and worn. Leah took a step forward as if to follow him, her black hair shining with a glint of reflected gold in the lantern light, but he was gone before she did.

  She should stay – we need all of them as trained as they can be.

  But they both knew she could come to him that night when the camp slept.

  Raven was glad he’d had time alone with his thoughts after the first night he had spent with her. It had been … more than he had thought possible. The act itself had been quite eye opening, but the time together afterwards, feeling her body pressed against his … it had made him long for something more, and that was a complication he hadn’t expected. If he wanted to win this war, if he wanted to get through the next few weeks, he couldn’t think about an after. That was what he had been trying to say to her the night they left Banelyn, and what she had stubbornly refused to hear.

  But the way she pulled him was beyond what he could resist, and when she came to him in the dark of night, the whisper of moving tent cloth and the scent of lavender soap giving her away to his waiting senses, he didn’t resist. He surprised himself, and her, with his own ferocity, something that he realized she found enticing, and something they both realized had been lurking beneath the surface of their relationship even as it began. To an outsider, the beginning of their time wrapped in the shadows of the night might be mistaken for a fight; but as they lay gasping for breath after it was done, clinging to each other like lifelines, he knew that this one thing, in all his life, was right and good. They rarely spoke, and didn’t need to; the silence encapsulated them like a warm cocoon, and their vulnerabilities, the things neither had ever shown another living soul, lay as open and on display as their bodies were.

  And still the clock ticked, and Raven learned the meaning of insomnia.

  Long after she had drifted off to sleep, he lay awake in the darkness. Thoughts ran around and through his mind that he couldn’t stop, circling, building one upon the other, until it was as if voices were shouting in his head at the top of their lungs. He’d find himself forced onto his feet, his breath coming hard and fast, heart beating a harsh staccato against his ribcage. Leah rarely woke when he did, and he was glad of it. At least one of them should get the sleep they needed.

  And once he was up, he saw no reason to go back to bed, for the process would only repeat itself, over and over on an endless loop. So he examined maps, and went over plans that had already been outlined in detail. He began to hold tight to the Raven Talisman, even when there was no need, constantly monitoring the camp around him, drawing on what reserves the Wolf Talisman could give him to wash away his
fatigue. He would take walks, feeling the lives of the soldiers around him, the huge, nearly incomprehensible number of them, and a panic would begin to build in his chest, a pressure that made him feel as though something was about to burst inside him.

  One night it became so bad he left the camp entirely, and made his way up to the top of a hillside over-looking it. He avoided the guards easily – he knew exactly where they were without even needing to look, and so he slipped through their perimeter and made his way out into the night.

  He sought solace in the stars, but they were no comfort. They held no answers for him, only more questions.

  He passed through a grove of trees, going behind the hill, and the sound of the camp cut off and faded as if everyone had stopped breathing at the same time. His heart began to pump faster; he could hear it thump in the silence of the glade. Silence – how long since the last time he’d been in pure, natural silence? It spoke to a deep part of him that went beyond rationalization, a part that had been too long ignored, too long neglected. It made him yearn again for Vale, and the simple woodsman’s cabin he had built there with Tomaz’s aide.

  I have been elected Prince, led armies across whole nations, and slayed men and women of unspeakable power. I have lived in the Fortress of Lucien, capital of the nation of Lucia, and stood beside my Mother, the Empress herself, as she ruled from the Diamond Throne. When people see me, they cower in fear or salute in honor. I have the world in my palm; I am the stuff of legends; and all I want, in all the world, is to go back to a single-room cabin, and watch the sun rise over white stone mountains.

  He grimaced, and turned back, leaving his thoughts, and the glade, behind. He wouldn’t think of such things again; it only brought him pain. He had to focus on the next few weeks and nothing else. This was the same as Leah – the same feeling of after and more. He couldn’t think such things, not if he wanted to save the Kindred, to save Vale itself from destruction. Such nostalgia and longing would only weaken him, and blunt his mind. All he knew, all he had to deal with, was what stood in front of him. All that mattered was ending this, killing the last of the Children … and his Mother. What happened afterward – that wasn’t his affair. What happened after the final battle would be up to the Kindred, the Elders, and any of his companions he managed to keep alive. That world was theirs, not his.

  He would not live to see it.

  Chapter Twelve: Something to Lerne

  Raven sat his new black stallion, freshly christened Melyngale, and felt the breeze blow in from the city of Lerne.

  They had reached the crossroad, the place where the Imperial Road met the Lerne Road, the former going from Lucien all the way to Roarke, and the latter branching off at a right angle toward the Elmist Mountains, in the shadow of which Lerne had been constructed. A town had grown up around the intersection of the two roads like an engorged muscle around a heavily used joint. In fact, the town was nearly as old as Lerne itself. It was called Whitestone, though no one knew why. Any white stones that had been here had long since disappeared; the area was now a large collection of farms and a town center that did very well for itself with the passing traffic of the Empire. Indeed, the town buildings, of which there were several score, were all freshly painted or whitewashed, and a number of the main street buildings and inns were several stories tall and well made. The streets were wide and straight, and it was easy to see that while the town had not played host to any of the Most High, certainly a number of the Elevated, the lowest level of the aristocracy and almost exclusively men and women of commerce, would have made quite a comfortable home here.

  All of which, when added together, made the town’s emptiness all the more extraordinary.

  “Word likely reached them a week ago that Banelyn had fallen,” Autmaran said. He, Raven, and Tomaz, who, with Leah, had organized the Rogue scouting force that “took” the town first, were all in the center of town together, exactly where the two roads met and ran their respective courses. A three story inn rose above them to the west, and two huge merchant stores, one that looked like a general goods store, the other a combination smithy and farming equipment outfit, pillared the road that led west, out of town toward Lerne. All told, it looked like a simple, prosperous town, but still Raven’s skin had begun to crawl the moment he’d crossed the first line of buildings. Raven knew the others felt it too – the town felt wrong. It looked as if everyone had simply left, taking nothing along behind, as if everyone, in one great mass, had simply decided to step out, but had never come back.

  “And no one in their right minds would stand in front of an enemy army this size,” Autmaran continued when Raven didn’t respond. The Commander’s voice was more forceful than it needed to be, and as Raven watched a small muscle along the side of his cheek jumped uncontrollably.

  “Very true,” Raven said slowly. He saw the old arguments surfacing behind Autmaran’s face, so he turned away and looked down the Imperial Road. The soldiers were swarming over the town, searching every building, taking what food they could to replenish their supplies.

  But Symanta …

  The cold, rational arguments he made each night about simply passing the area by still made sense to him. This was a trap, he could feel it in every bone of his body, and everything he knew about Symanta told him he’d be playing into her hands if he let curiosity get the better of them. But there was a feeling that went deeper than that, something that even Raven couldn’t ignore now that they were so close.

  Something was wrong, and he could feel it.

  “Something’s off,” Tomaz rumbled behind him to Autmaran, shaking his big head. “I can’t say what, but it’s something. It’s like a bad smell, but it’s not a smell.”

  Raven remained silent, but the words struck a chord in him. If Tomaz felt it too, it had something to do with the Aspects, and maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the battle they’d fight against the Empress. The big man healed his huge destrier up beside him, and Raven found himself unable to help but look at the big, bluff face.

  “We all know time is of the essence,” Tomaz rumbled slowly, his tone hedged with careful respect, “you have convinced us all of that beyond a doubt. But you know as well as I that there is something deeper at work here – the signs of it have been building and building with every new mile we’ve travelled. No guards along the road? Not a single sight of fleeing refugees? No trace of any enemy scouts? And on top of that, this whole town looks as if it was inhabited as late as yesterday. The trees are well-kept, the fireplaces freshly cleaned; there’s even a pile of weeds over there freshly pulled from the ground with roots that haven’t even browned! How did the town know to empty in a matter of days if not hours if no one saw us coming? And are we supposed to believe the farmers left their homes weeks ago, in the middle of the planting season, without a single crop sown in those fields? Not even Lerne could support an influx of thousands, which all of the towns we’ve seen in this Principality would add up to be. Think about it, Raven. Think about the details. It’s all wrong.”

  And as they sat there in the middle of the town, with nothing but the wind whistling through the streets, Raven still didn’t want to believe it. He knew too much about Symanta, knew her best of all among his siblings, as they were closest in age and had spent the most time in direct contact. His friend saw the stubborn look in his eyes, and continued on:

  “Check then,” he rumbled, daring Raven now, playing on his pride. “If you’re so sure there’s no reason, then use the Talisman and check.”

  Raven grimaced, but acquiesced. He reached out with the edge of his mind, sending just enough of it out through the Raven Talisman that he should be able to sense what was happening in their immediate area. The Kindred troop surrounded them, yes, so he pushed further beyond that, until he came to a blank area he supposed must be the plain between the Imperial Road and the city of Lerne itself. He didn’t sense anything there – just the background of plant and animal life, the kind of quiet murmur one might hear in a
n otherwise silent forest.

  Nothing.

  He felt Leah ride up beside him, but ignored the exchange of conversation she was having with Tomaz. He had to push harder – he might be able to see the city if he concentrated, even from such a distance. Drawing on the Wolf Talisman, he tried to combine the two to add to his inner sight, but nothing happened. He pushed harder, pushing his mind out as far as it would go –

  “Whoa!”

  Raven opened his eyes just in time to see his horse bite at Leah, and with an uncharacteristically clumsy stumble, she twisted out of the way and fell against him, her eyes flashing blue.

  Her hand touched the hilt of Aemon’s Blade.

  In a flash of blue light his mind exploded out of him. He saw for miles and miles around them now, his mind flying over the ground, completely unbound. He felt as though he’d been partially blind for his entire life and only now could see. If he tried hard enough, he might be able to see the end of the world itself –

  But there was something closer than that, something only several miles distant, which drew his attention like a lodestone.

  There was something wrong in that place. It was like looking at a beautiful tapestry that had been ripped down the center and dragged through the dirt. The city itself was torn and bloodied, and even though he couldn’t see the walls or the buildings, he knew that something terrible had happened, something monstrous.

  There was no life in the city of Lerne – not one single person.

  And then he felt himself being pulled back, pulled away by an inexorable force. Something had latched onto him and was forcing him back into his body, forcing his mind back into his skull –

  He came back to himself with a strange snapping sensation, as if his mind had been tethered to his body by an elastic band that forced him to come back. His vision was strangely hazy, with a white light covering everything and bright stars winking at the corners of his vision. He was sprawled out on the ground, he realized that first; his horse was prancing around in alarm off to the side. The next thing he realized was that Leah was beside him, staggering to her feet, looking for all the world like she’d just come from an alehouse drinking contest.