That was Thrane, Pollard thought. Faint praise and damnation in one package. It was so like him to hold out the prize, just beyond reach, to ensure compliance. Pollard hated Thrane for his manipulation as much as he hated himself for being Thrane’s willing victim.
“Do you have orders for the mages?” Pollard asked, changing the subject.
Thrane leaned back in his chair as he thought. “How are they progressing?”
Pollard was certain that Thrane had a general idea through the talishte guards he had posted on every one of the mage workshops. Still, Pollard gathered that what would be read through the kruvgaldur, at least at a distance, was not complete. A small, carefully hidden, part of himself noted that with hope.
Taking blood from someone once or only occasionally makes a very light kruvgaldur, Pollard thought, confirming his suspicions. It gives Thrane influence, but he doesn’t get all the details from their thoughts without more blood. Perhaps it takes multiple, frequent, deeper ‘readings’ to tie the bond as tightly as Reese has bound me to him. Interesting—and promising.
“We’ve seeded the mages throughout our holdings, and secured their workshops with walls and guards,” Pollard replied. “McFadden’s efforts at Mirdalur have changed the equation once more,” he added with distaste. “He found a way to broaden the anchor, spread it among thirteen Lords of the Blood once again. That stabilizes the power, though I’m told it still has differences from what it was before the Cataclysm.”
Thrane shrugged. “The details don’t concern me. What have you learned about the power of this ‘new’ magic?”
“It’s only been a few weeks,” Pollard replied. “The mages are still working with it, adjusting to what they call the ‘currents’ of the power. But they’re confident that the new anchoring makes the magic stable.” He paused. “That should save us a few incinerated mages.”
“McFadden will hesitate to use the same kind of battle magic that brought the Great Fire,” Thrane said. “We can’t afford such qualms. Make sure the mages know I place a priority on any magic that can be used as an effective weapon.”
“Except for the necromancers you ordered executed,” Pollard said, his voice carefully neutral.
Thrane’s expression grew shadowed. “I will not permit a necromancer to live. I don’t care how skilled they are. That will not, cannot, be allowed.”
Again, Pollard felt a flicker of hope deep inside. Talishte were not invulnerable. Sunlight, a stake to the heart for those young in the Dark Gift, a severed head for those with more power, all were effective ways to destroy even the most powerful talishte. And necromancy, magic that gave the wielder control over the soul and the ability to control the dead, was one of the few things men like Thrane had reason to fear.
“As you wish, m’lord. We’ve killed two such mages so far. We will be watchful for others,” Pollard replied. He paused. “May I ask—what is your next priority?”
Thrane smiled. It was a terrifying expression, absent of mirth, full of malice. “My next priority is to take my blood-son back from the traitors who have imprisoned him. I intend to rescue Reese, and to make Lanyon Penhallow pay dearly for it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME, VEDRAN POLLARD found himself wondering if the gods had cursed him by not allowing him to die in battle. Looking at Hennoch’s weary expression, Pollard wondered if they both were thinking the same thing.
“If you can’t find recruits to replace the dead soldiers, conscript them. We need to be able to field an army against McFadden and his allies,” Pollard ordered ill-temperedly.
Larksa Hennoch met Pollard’s gaze evenly, unfazed by Pollard’s increasingly foul mood after having dealt with Thrane and come out alive. “Conscripts are more trouble than they’re worth, m’lord,” he replied. “For every conscript, it takes a second soldier watching to ensure they don’t hare off as soon as we’re not looking. Conscripts desert when we go to battle, and executing them lowers morale.”
“Then raise the dead. Hex the living. I don’t care so long as we replace the men we’ve lost and have an army that can fight when the battle comes to us again,” Pollard snapped.
“We’ve taken on the soldiers who survived from Rostivan’s and Lysander’s troops,” Hennoch replied. “All told, a few hundred, though I imagine some of them ran from the rear lines during the worst of the battle and that’s how they saved their necks.”
Pollard shrugged. “Prudence isn’t always cowardice. Rostivan and Lysander were thoroughly routed. Keep looking for survivors. The offer of regular meals and tents to sleep in should be a potent inducement, given the state of the countryside.”
Hennoch gave a bitter laugh. “They don’t mind the food and the shelter. It’s the fighting and the dying that gives them pause.”
“Whatever it takes to raise an army,” Pollard emphasized. “Lysander was using mercenaries from Meroven. If you can speak their bloody language, I have no qualms about hiring them.”
Hennoch gave him a skeptical look. “What can we promise them? We’ve got precious little gold, and there’s nothing to spend it on. There’s no food to spare, or whiskey or ale to trade—”
“Find out what they want, and make a deal,” Pollard cut him off. “McFadden’s allies still have armies. They’ll come after us soon enough, and I have no desire to fight a defensive war.”
“What of the biters?” Hennoch asked, with a quick glance over his shoulder. It was nearly noon, broad daylight, and the talishte, including Thrane, were asleep wherever they had gone to ground.
“Don’t worry, he can’t sense your thoughts during daylight. Though trust me, if you think of betraying him or going against his wishes, he will know when he wakes,” Pollard assured him. “For all their strengths, talishte have limits. They can’t fight in daylight,” Pollard replied. “And while they’re powerful, there aren’t legions of them, thank the gods.”
“They helped make a route of the battle with Lysander, so I hear from the survivors,” Hennoch observed. “Snatching the officers from their horses, lifting them up in the air and twisting off their heads—quite an impressive show.”
“They’re a strike force, one with a very good ‘show,’ as you put it,” Pollard replied. “But they’re no replacement for a proper army. We need to turn that situation around before it’s our heads on pikes and our rotting guts in the gibbets.”
Hennoch’s expression made it clear that he had reasoned out the consequences. “Since you mentioned it, you might be interested that we’re hearing rumors about Meroven,” he said. “Someone may have beat us to the punch. There’s talk that the raiding squads coming across the border aren’t foragers: They’re spies and mercenaries.”
“For whom?” Pollard moved over to stand by the window, looking out from Solsiden’s parlor over the once-fine lawns that had been converted to a military campground. The sympathetic wounds from Reese crippled him. Layered on top of his own battle wounds, they were mementos from too many conflicts, reminders that he was not as young as he used to be.
Vedran Pollard was in his early fifties. His hair had gone gray when he was still a young man, but he hoped it added a touch of dignity instead of making him look as old as he felt. Dignity had been in short supply of late. Once, before the Great Fire, he had been one of King Merrill’s nobles, a minor noble house to be sure, but still privileged. As a bastard son of his mother’s, he had still inherited the manor by dint of being the last heir alive, but when the magic failed, he learned that the interrupted paternal bloodline meant he was not one of the Lords of the Blood.
His own manor house had burned in the Cataclysm, and so he had taken Solsiden, the late Lord Arvo’s home, for his headquarters. He and Pentreath Reese had wielded a formidable army in the early days of the Aftermath, with grand designs on claiming a kingdom for themselves from the ruins. Then it had all gone so wrong. McFadden had returned from exile, not only alive but bent on restoring magic and gathering the Lords of the Blood. With his allies,
McFadden had beaten Pollard’s forces at the Battle of Valshoa, and re-anchored the magic.
Reese had been censured by the Elder Council, the ruling body of the talishte, and imprisoned for fifty years with tortures only an immortal undead could endure. Bound to his talishte master through a blood bond, the kruvgaldur, Reese’s wounds had appeared in sympathetic fashion on Pollard’s body, growing increasingly debilitating. And to make it all worse, after a second, humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Northern Plains, Reese’s maker Thrane had shown up with demands of his own that were both impossible to ignore and equally impossible to fulfill.
“Warlords,” Hennoch said. “Is it so difficult to imagine that Meroven has been trying to pick itself up from the ashes just as we have? That they’re battling to see whose army is triumphant and who will rule? And when they’ve sorted that out among themselves, what’s not to say they might take a look over the border and decide to grab some land or take whatever they can carry?”
Pollard shifted his position. Whatever had been done to Reese in his imprisonment bore out in the wounds to Pollard’s body. A deep, raw sore directly over Pollard’s heart resisted even the healer’s magic, seeping and festering. Red pinpricks all over Pollard’s body itched ceaselessly and maddeningly, and in his dreams, his master’s screams kept him from sound rest. Bloody scratches on both wrists marked where Reese was bound with rope soaked in poison. Only whiskey gave Pollard a measure of peace.
“Rumors. Tales. I need facts,” Pollard said. “How many warlords? What’s their troop strength? And these marauders—are they raiders or can they be hired with some confidence of at least as much loyalty as coin will buy?”
“Good questions all, m’lord,” Hennoch replied. “But I don’t have answers for you.” Hennoch had served King Merrill before the Cataclysm and, in the devastation afterward, gathered a small army to carve out a piece of the ruined countryside for himself. Pollard had worked to secure his loyalty, but now with the bond to Thrane their fates were inextricably bound together, whether Hennoch fully realized it or not.
“Well, get them.” Pollard’s mood was darker than usual this morning. He had slept little the night before. Reese’s screams sounded more frantic of late, not mere nightmares but echoes across distance through the kruvgaldur bond of what torment his master endured in his imprisonment.
“Thrane’s got plans, and they involve winning,” he added. “For that, we need an army and all the intelligence we can get about what’s going on out there. We have problems enough without a new force coming in from Meroven.”
“There are also rumors about Thrane,” Hennoch added, his voice quiet, with another nervous look over his shoulder. “He disappeared from Donderath seventy years ago. Where was he? What was he doing? I’ve heard it said he was in Meroven, maybe even the one who pushed their mages into the strike that caused the Cataclysm.”
Pollard had heard similar rumors, but Thrane had been maddeningly closemouthed, other than to announce his return and his intention to free Reese from his imprisonment. “What’s your point?” Pollard grumbled.
Hennoch gave a wily smile. “If it’s true that he was in Meroven, then perhaps Thrane’s already got the answers about Meroven warlords. Maybe he’s been meddling there the way he’s meddling here. After all, he’s only just returned. We haven’t had the extra men to send more than a couple spies into Meroven since the Cataclysm, and not as many came back as went in.”
“Maybe,” Pollard allowed. “But as you’ll soon learn, Thrane shares very little information, and only on his own timing. I prefer to have my own sources.”
“I have a couple of men who hail from up near the border,” Hennoch replied. “If they can speak the gibberish those Meroven blighters talk, I can send them over the line to see what they see.”
Pollard gave a nod of grudging approval. “Do it. I know too damn little about what’s going on out there.” He paused, and for a moment, looked longingly toward the decanters that held what passed for whiskey and brandy since the kingdom’s fall. Thrane had seized the more drinkable bottles for himself, though he could not actually partake, leaving the worst for Pollard. Once, he would have disdained the thought of drinking this early in the day as weakness. Now, anything that dulled the pain and made it possible for him to function seemed a blessing. He sighed, forcing his thoughts away from the bottles, entering a quiet stalemate with the discomfort.
“And the mages? What of them?” Pollard asked, taking his bad temper out on Hennoch.
Hennoch brightened. “That, m’lord, I have some good news about. Most of our mages survived the last battle, and we’ve gathered in a handful of Vigus Quintrel’s mages who had been deployed with Rostivan and Lysander. They’re skilled, and fairly powerful.”
“Meaning?” Pollard growled. Conversation tired him, and he wanted nothing more than to sink into a chair, drop the facade, and acknowledge the pain. That was something he dared not do in front of Hennoch.
Hennoch drew a deep breath, but when he spoke, his voice was even. Any frustration he felt with Pollard, he was wise enough to mask. For now, they needed each other, and that was enough to overcome even intense dislike. “Meaning that those experienced mages can bring along our younger mages quickly. Now that the magic’s stable, we’ll lose fewer of them in the Workshop, because the power should be predictable, safer. It’s something to factor into the strategy.”
Nothing was turning out as Pollard had wanted. But he grudgingly admitted the wisdom in Hennoch’s words. Battle capabilities constantly shifted, and a victorious commander made the most of any advantage, however small or inglorious.
“Then figure out how to use the mages to our advantage,” Pollard said. “McFadden has mages as well. Tormod Solveig is a necromancer. That creates some risk for our talishte allies,” he added with the barest hint of sarcasm. “Find out how the necromancy affects them and what we can do about it.”
If Hennoch was as smart as Pollard believed him to be, he would hear the dual meaning in that order. First, to discover how to protect Thrane and his talishte, and second, to determine just how severe a weakness Thrane’s talishte had when it came to necromancy, and whether or not that could be exploited to free Pollard—and Hennoch—from a hated master.
“I’ll make it the priority,” Hennoch replied. He paused, and the flicker of emotion in his eyes gave Pollard to know what Hennoch was going to ask before he spoke.
“And Eljas? How is my son?” Hennoch tried to keep his voice rough, doing his best to hide from Pollard just what a surety his son was for him. But Pollard had been at this game for long enough to read the secrets others hid, and he understood how strong the hold was over Hennoch so long as Eljas remained in good health.
“The boy is well,” Pollard replied offhandedly. “He handles his situation with dignity. Thrane treats him well, or as well as he treats any of us.”
Hennoch let out a long breath. “He knows his role,” he replied, and while his voice strained for indifference, his eyes gave the game away. “If he has books, he will be no trouble at all.”
“He earns his privileges by being ‘no trouble’ at any time,” Pollard said sharply. “But so far, he has been the model prisoner.” Hennoch cringed, just a bit, at that last word, and Pollard felt satisfied that his point had been made.
“If that’s all, m’lord, I’d best get back to the troops,” Hennoch said. “I’ll have answers for you on your questions, one way or the other.”
“Best you do,” Pollard replied, making no effort to hide his mood. “Now leave me.”
Hennoch left the room, a converted parlor Pollard had taken for his place of business during the daylight when Thrane was in his crypt. Pollard waited until the door shut, and then sank into his favorite chair and permitted himself a low moan.
“M’lord, shall I bring you tea?” Kerr, Pollard’s longtime valet, had an uncanny ability to show up at precisely the right moment. Pollard suspected that was due less to magic and more to a habit of lis
tening at the door.
“Tea, with the powders,” Pollard groaned. “Make it strong.”
Kerr disappeared for a moment, and came back quickly enough that Pollard knew the tea had already been set to boil long before the request was made. Kerr bustled into the room, hiding whatever pity he might feel for Pollard’s condition beneath a mask of brusque efficiency.
Kerr had served Pollard before the Cataclysm, back when servants and well-staffed manor houses were the due of those born to noble blood. That world had burned with the Great Fire, and Pollard privately despaired that it would not return again in his lifetime, but Kerr stalwartly did his best to pretend that nothing had changed, at least not the role of servant and lord. It was a pleasant fiction that comforted both of them.
“Shall I fetch more salve, as well?” Kerr asked as he poured the tea.
Pollard shook his head. “No. I don’t have time to remove all the damn bandages and put them on again. By Torven’s horns, I hate this!”
Kerr’s smile was crisply professional. Not for the first time, Pollard wondered if his valet clung to his sanity through the pretense of normalcy his role afforded. “As you wish, m’lord. Then shall I send Commander Jansen in, when he arrives? He had expected to be here by first bells.”
Pollard gave a curt nod. “Very well. He’d better get here soon. I’m hungry.” He left it unsaid that being hungry or tired made enduring his wounds more difficult.
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