by Jim Butcher
The seats for Lord and Lady Placida were situated above the places of the Senators from the areas governed by Citizens beholden to them. Lady Placida took a few moments to descend to the Senate floor, exchanging greetings with several people, while Isana and Araris sat down in the box.
“Lady Veradis?” Isana asked, recognizing the young woman in the box beside theirs.
The serious, pale-haired young healer, daughter of the High Lord of Ceres, turned to them at once, and offered Isana a grave nod. She was notably alone in her father’s section, and seemed all the more slender and frail for the open space around her. “Good evening, Your Highness.”
“Please, call me Isana. We know one another better than that.”
The young woman gave her a fleeting smile. “Of course,” she said. “Isana. I am glad to see you well. Good evening, Sir Araris.”
“Lady,” Araris said quietly, bowing his head. He glanced around the empty box, and said, with perfectly bland understatement, “You seem less well attended than I would expect you to be.”
“With excellent reason, sir,” Veradis said, returning her attention to the Senate floor. “As I trust will be made clear shortly.”
Isana settled back, frowning, and studied the seating behind the High Lord’s boxes in general, where the visiting Lords and Counts as a rule settled in behind their own patrons. Behind Lord Aquitaine’s box, for example, was a sizeable contingent of finely dressed Citizenry, mostly sporting the scarlet and black of the House of Aquitaine, while the gold and black of Rhodes made for an only slightly smaller contingent in the seats behind that High Lord’s box.
By contrast, the sections behind Lord Cereus’s box, and for that matter, behind the box of Lord and Lady Placidus, were rather sparsely populated. And the section behind the empty box where the High Lord of Kalarus would have been seated was entirely empty of any citizen bearing the green and grey of the House of Kalare. That wasn’t a surprise, given that the House was hardly in favor after Kalarus Brencis’s open rebellion against the Crown had failed so miserably and spectacularly.
Even so, the Citizens seated in that section were at its fringes, and wearing the colors of one of the other greater Houses. Surely someone should have been wearing Kalarus’s colors, if for no other reason than out of tradition and force of habit. Some of those families had been wearing those colors for centuries. Regardless of the actions of the most recent Lord Kalarus, they would not have abandoned their own traditional garb—indeed, many of the poorer Citizens of that region simply could not have afforded a new court wardrobe, given the devastation the rebellion had wreaked upon their economy.
Where were the Citizens from Kalare, from Ceres, and from Placida? What has Lady Placida not told us?
She felt a similar sense of concerned curiosity from Araris, and turned to him, expecting him to have noticed the same absences she had—only to find him staring intently across the Senate floor.
“Araris?” she murmured.
“Look at Aquitaine’s box,” he murmured quietly. “Where is Lady Aquitaine?”
Isana blinked and looked more closely. Sure enough, High Lord Aquitainus Attis sat in his box without the familiar, stately figure of his wife Invidia at his side.
“Where could she be?” Isana murmured. “She would never miss something like this.”
“Perhaps now that an heir has appeared, they finally decided to kill one another,” murmured a wry, familiar voice. “Though if so, I lost money in the pool the Cursors had going as to the victor.”
Isana turned to find a short, slight man with sandy hair smiling at them from the row above the Placidan box, his elbows casually resting on the railing.
“Ehren,” Isana said, smiling. “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to Canea with my son.”
The young man’s expression grew sober, and Isana felt him close down, concealing his emotions—but not before she felt his flash of weary frustration, anger, and fear. “Duty called,” he replied, mustering up the effort for another smile as Aria returned to the box. “Ah, Lady Placida. I wonder if I could impose upon you for a seat during the First Lord’s address?”
Lady Placida glanced at Isana, lifting an eyebrow. “By all means, Sir Ehren. Please join us.”
Ehren inclined his head in thanks and swung his legs calmly over the railing, slipping down into the box with a rather cavalier disregard for the solemnity of the Senatorium. Isana had to make an effort to keep from smiling.
Ehren had barely been seated when a single trumpeter blew the fanfare of a Legion captain—and not the notes of the First Lord’s Processional. Murmurs rose through the Senatorium at once as those seated all rose to their feet together—the First Lord only employed that protocol in time of war.
Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, entered as the last notes of the fanfare rang out, flanked by half a dozen Knights Ferrous in the crimson cloaks of the Crown Guard. A tall, powerfully built man, Gaius looked more like a man in his late prime than an octogenarian—except for his silver-white hair, which was, if Isana was not imagining it, even thinner and wispier than it had been the last time she had seen him, several months before.
The First Lord moved like a much younger man, descending the steps from the Senatorium’s entrance to the Senate floor in rapid strides. He passed between the boxes of Lords Phrygius and Antillus—both of which were empty of a High Lord. Lady Phrygia was present, though an elderly, one-eyed lord was evidently standing in for High Lord Antillus and bore the signet dagger of the House of Antillus on a sash across his sunken chest. The murmuring rose to a low tide of sound as Gaius descended to the floor.
“Citizens!” the First Lord said, raising his hands, as he took the Senate floor. His voice, enhanced by the furycraft of the building, rolled richly through the evening. “Citizens, please.”
The Speaker of the Senate—Isana wasn’t sure who it was this year, someone from Parcia, she thought—quickly took the podium. “Order! Order in the Senatorium!” His voice thundered through the enormous theater like a titan’s, quelling the voices of the assembled Citizenry. Isana had the brief, uncharitable thought that the man probably found it quite satisfying. Though upon reflection, how often did the opportunity to have both the justification and the means to shout down half the Citizenry of the Realm present itself? She could think of several days that she would have found it more than mildly satisfying, herself.
Once the noise had dwindled to a low murmur, the Speaker nodded, and said, “We welcome you to this emergency convocation of the Senate, convened at the request of the First Lord. I will now yield the floor to Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, so that he may present information of key importance to the Realm before the august members of this assembly.”
Almost before he was finished speaking, Gaius had stepped up to the podium, confidently assuming the space the Speaker had been occupying a moment before. There was no sense of bluster or swagger in the movement, nor did the Speaker react with anything like chagrin—yet Gaius somehow managed simply to displace the man, the way a large dog will a far smaller one at the food dish, and did so as smoothly and naturally as if the entire world had been expressly ordered that way—and as a consequence, it was. Isana shook her head, simultaneously exasperated with the man’s sheer arrogance and admiring of his restraint. Gaius never used more of his considerable force of personality, will, or furycraft than he absolutely required.
Of course, he never let anything stand between him and what he deemed “required,” either. No matter how many innocent people it might kill.
Isana pressed her lips together and restrained her thoughts on the matter of the ending of Lord Kalarus and his rebellion—and his city and its inhabitants, and all the lands around it and everyone who lived in them. It was not the time to review once again Gaius Sextus’s actions, or to judge them as acts of war, or necessity or murder—or, most likely, all three.
“Citizens,” he began, his sonorous voice serious, sober. “I come to you tonight as no Fi
rst Lord has for hundreds of years. I come to you to warn you. I come to you to call you to duty. And I come to you to ask you to go beyond all that duty requires.” He paused, to let the echoes of his voice roll through the darkening evening. “Alerans,” he murmured. “We are at war.”
CHAPTER 6
“Well of course we’re at war,” Amara murmured crossly to Bernard. “We’re practically always at war. There’s constant low-level conflict with the Canim, an ongoing conflict on the Shieldwall that’s been in progress for generations, the occasional argument with a horde of screaming Marat and their beasts . . .”
“Shhhhh, love,” Bernard said, patting her hand with his. They were fairly far up in the seating above the box of the High Lord of Riva, but Bernard hadn’t bothered establishing his own colors to reflect those of Riva’s. The green and brown of the Count of Calderon tended to fade into the landscape around his home—but among the scarlet-and-gold-clad Citizens of Riva, it had the opposite effect. That did not, Amara reflected, appear to disturb her husband.
“I just don’t see the point in playing up the drama of this,” Amara said, folding her arms. “He’s let the dramatic pause go on long enough.”
“It’s a large room,” Bernard said, glancing around. “Give him a moment. Can you see where Ehren’s gotten off to?”
“He’s sitting with your sister in Lady Placida’s box,” Amara said idly.
“Isana?” Bernard scowled. “Of course it was too much to ask for Gaius to leave her in peace.”
“Hush, pause over,” Amara said, squeezing Bernard’s hand.
“An enemy which has previously only been a theory, a vague concern, has become a very real, very present threat to the Realm,” Gaius continued. “The Vord have come to Alera.”
Amara felt Bernard’s body grow tense beside her.
“At the moment, it would appear that they landed and established themselves sometime late last summer, after the end of the Kalare Rebellion, in the wilderness region to the southwest of the city.”
“Good place for it,” Bernard rumbled.
Amara murmured her agreement. The area was an ideal place for the Vord to establish themselves and begin to spread. It was richly forested and thick with game, while simultaneously being almost empty of human inhabitants. It was, in fact, for that very reason that they had approached the city of Kalare through that region with the First Lord, when he had made his now-famous furyless trek to Kalare to unleash Kalus, the great fire fury beneath the mountains near the former city of Kalare, before the mad High Lord Kalarus could use it to take down as many people as possible with him when the Legions finally brought him to bay.
“We discovered their presence just under one month ago,” the First Lord continued. “When they began attacking the southernmost patrols from the area around the Waste. A number of teams of Cursors and combat patrols of Knights were dispatched to determine enemy numbers and whereabouts.” He paused and swept his gaze around the Senatorium. “Casualties were heavy.”
“Bloody crows,” Bernard snarled. His right hand closed into a fist, his knuckles popping. “If they’d been careful enough, they should have . . . No one listened.”
“You tried,” Amara murmured. “You tried, love.”
“The nearest Legion, one of the re-formed interim Kalaran Legions, was dispatched to secure the region,” Gaius continued. “They engaged the Vord under near-ideal circumstances thirty miles south of the Waste and were overwhelmed within an hour. With the exception of two Knights Aeris, who escaped to bring word of the Legion’s fate, there were no survivors.”
The murmurs died.
Gaius continued speaking in a dispassionate tone. “The entirety of the other forces in the region, including the Senatorial Guard and both interim Kalaran Legions, marched at once, linked up, and gave battle to the enemy at the northern edge of the Waste. We cannot be certain what happened at that point—there were apparently no survivors from the second engagement.”
Shocked silence ruled the Senatorium.
Gaius turned to the broad, shallow pool in the center of the floor and waved his hand at it. The water’s smooth surface rippled at once, then resolved itself into the familiar mountains, valleys, and rivers of a map of Alera itself, in full color, the cities of each High Lord marked by a disproportionately large model of their respective citadels—including the sullen, fiery mountaintop of Mount Kalus, where the city of Kalare once stood. Thanks to the furycrafting of the Senatorium’s builders, Amara could clearly see the model in the pool, even from the high seats, and she regarded it intently, along with every other soul present.
As she watched, the entire coastline southwest of Mount Kalus began to turn a dirty brown-green, as if being coated with some sort of moldy sludge that began to spread steadily over the ground to the north and east, sliding inexorably forward, over the Waste that was all that remained of the city of Kalare, and continuing toward the Amaranth Vale beyond it. Amara recognized it after a moment—the croach, the strange, waxy substance that grew all around the Vord wherever they began to spread, choking out all other life.
The croach continued to spread, sweeping into the Vale and halfway through it.
“The enemy has come this far—a distance of nearly two hundred miles from the first point of contact—in less than a month. The substance you see represented on the map is known as the croach. It is some kind of mold or fungus that grows in the Vord’s wake, killing all other plant and animal life.”
A befuddled-looking, portly old country Count, his gold-and-scarlet tunic patched and faded, sat on the bench beside Amara, shaking his head. “No,” he murmured beneath his breath. “No, no, no. This is some kind of mistake.”
“Our aerial scouts have confirmed that the entire area represented here has been covered entirely,” Gaius continued. “Nothing lives there now that is not Vord.”
“Oh come now,” sputtered Lord Riva, rising, his jowls flushed and sweating. “You cannot expect us to believe that some kind of fungus is a threat to our Realm?”
The First Lord glanced at the High Lord of Riva and narrowed his eyes. “My lord, you have not been recognized by the Speaker of the Senate. You are out of order. The floor will open for questions and debate as soon as it is practical, but for the moment, it is essential that—”
“That you force these histrionics upon us?” Riva demanded, gathering momentum. “Come now, Gaius. Winter is all but upon us. The first freeze will destroy this . . . infestation, at which point competent military leadership should suffice to contain and destroy the invaders. I see no reason why these theatrics—”
Gaius Sextus turned toward the High Lord of Riva.
“Grantus,” Gaius said in an even tone. “I do not have time for this. Every moment of delay puts more lives at risk.” His expression hardened. “Perhaps even your own.”
Riva stared at Gaius for a startled moment, his eyes wide, then flushed dark red with anger. His hands opened and closed several times as he realized that the First Lord had all but openly threatened him with the juris macto.
Lord Aquitaine’s gaze snapped to Gaius like a falcon’s and locked upon him.
Amara tensed suddenly.
The First Lord was taking a terrible risk. In his prime, Amara would have thought Gaius the match of any crafter in Alera—but she knew, better than almost anyone, how much of the First Lord’s apparent strength was an act of bravado, a display of sheer will. Beneath the outer show of energy and drive, Gaius was a weary old man, and Riva, despite his less-than-legendary intellect, was, after all, a High Lord of Alera, and wielded tremendous power.
The status of Octavian’s legitimacy was far from set in stone. Should the First Lord die today, especially given the need for strong leadership, Aquitainus Attis might well attain the throne he’d been seeking for so long.
Gaius had to know that. But if the thought troubled him, it did not show in his expression or bearing. He faced Riva with perfect aplomb, waiting.
In the end, Riva
’s uncertainty proved a better defense than any furycraft. The portly High Lord harrumphed, and growled, “My apologies for speaking out of turn, Speaker, Senators, my fellow Citizens.” He glowered at Gaius. “I will refrain from pointing out the obvious until the proper time.”
Aquitaine’s mouth spread into a lazy grin. Amara couldn’t be certain, but she thought she saw him incline his head, very slightly, to Gaius, a fencer’s gesture of acknowledgment.
Gaius went back to speaking as though nothing had happened. “The Vord have not limited their attacks to military forces. Civilian populations have been attacked and massacred without mercy. Given the nature of our defeats on the battlefield, a great many people never received word about their presence, or did not hear about them until it was too late for them to escape. The loss of life has been staggering.”
Gaius paused to sweep his gaze around the Senatorium. Again, when he spoke, he did so with detached precision. “More than one hundred thousand Aleran holders, freemen, and Citizens alike have been slain.”
Cries rang out amidst an ocean-surf swell of gasps that ran through the Senatorium.
“Four days ago,” Gaius said, “the Vord reached the southernmost holdings of High Lord Cereus. Lord Speaker, honored Senators, his daughter and heir, Veradis, is here to give testimony to the Senate and to speak on behalf of His Grace, her father.”
Gaius stepped back as the Speaker rose and leaned into the podium again for a moment. “Will the Lady Veradis please come before the Senate?”
Amara watched as a slender, serious-faced young woman rose, her pale, wispy hair drifting like cobwebs as she moved. Bernard leaned close to her, and murmured, “Cereus has a son, does he not? I thought he was the heir to Ceres.”
“He was,” Amara said. “Apparently.”
“Thank you,” Veradis said, the building’s furies projecting her words throughout the Senatorium. She had a voice to match her face—low, for a woman, and quite somber. “My father sends his regrets that he cannot be here himself, but he is in the field with our Legions, slowing the Vord in an effort to give our people a chance to flee. It is at his command that I have come here to beg the aid of the First Lord and of his brother High Lords in Ceres’ most desperate hour.” She paused for a moment, frozen, then cleared her throat. The first several words of her next sentence were tight, constricted. “Already, my brother Vereus has fallen to the invaders, along with half of the Legion under his command. Thousands of our holders have been slaughtered. Nearly half of the lands in my lord father’s care have been consumed by the Vord. Please, my lords. After what Kalarus’s rebellion did to our lands . . .” She lifted her chin, and though her expression was perfectly composed, Amara could see the tears glistening on her cheeks. “We need your help.”