The last sun casts knives of blood-red light down through the clouds. The White Pilgrim kneels in shadow, feels the chill of dusk but ignores it with the warmth of the Blade flooding through him.
He rests with clear mind, no thought, no fear. He sees the light of fire and evenlamp begin to flare in the surrounding farmsteads and the city below. He waits for the fall of full darkness that will mark the beginning of the end.
AS NIGHT DESCENDS ON MITROST, a shadowed figure walks down from the goat trails of the hills. A pilgrim by his look. He gains the farm tracks, no notice given him from the lighted windows of sod houses and weathered huts.
He slips unnoticed onto the main road, which despite the time of night still runs heavy with wains, merchants, laborers, other pilgrims, all moving for the city. No one caring that history is made here as sunset marks the ending of the High Spring. Only seeking the commerce and the blessings that come with that.
The keep that rises at the center of the city atop its great hill is all that can be seen over serpentine stone walls. Long years ago, Mitrost is the White City. Now, those long years cast even longer shadows, the deep scars of fires arcane and mundane marked as a dark stain upon the stones. Signs of the battles that erupt in the aftermath of Marthai and bring the reign of Gilvaleus to its end.
Four decades before that end, his grandfather is Imperial regent. Elected from among the ranks of the nobility of Gracia the Great, the heart and most powerful province of the eastern Empire. It is under Empire that these lands are named the Elder Kingdoms. A legend bestowed with careful thought, designed to quell the last of the ancient hostilities between Gracia, Norgyr, Vanyr, Ajelast, Kelistae. A name that speaks to the ancient power of these nations, but whose official rendering in the common tongue of Lothela makes clear that none of these five cultures will ever again challenge the Empire for power.
Fifteen centuries ago, the Empire claims the mantle of Empire of all Isheridar. However, the five endlessly warring nations abutting the western Leagin Sea make that grandiose title a lie as they laugh off the overtures of the Lothelecan.
Those greatest powers of the east ignore the will of Empire for two hundred years, their independence a dark stain on a banner of Imperial unity. They fight that unity for three centuries thereafter. The War Kings of the Kelist, declaring that their sons and daughters will build a wall of their own flesh, blood, and bone around the green isles before the Imperial banner flies there. The Norgyr and Vanyr, never conquered and never at peace, and as happy to turn their berserker bloodlust against the Lotherasien as each other.
In the end, the corruption of ancient Ajelast is the weakness that lets the strength of Empire spread. In those desert lands that are Ajaeltha now, the khanan-emperors fall to the manipulation of the Imperial Guard. As Ajelast deals in secret with the west for Imperial magic and lore, those riches are the key that unlocks the gates of Isheridar’s last free lands. However, it is the lords of Gracia who ultimately make the case for Empire, seeking the peace with Norgyr and with Vanyr that is long denied them. Peace with which they quickly rise to dominance in the unified east, spreading their culture, their language to the Imperial realms on both sides of the sea.
When Gilvaleus names Mitrost the seat of the high king, it is a ruined last legacy of Gracia’s greatness. A remnant of Eria, whose empire is the center of civilization in the east for five hundred years, and on whose bones Gracia is built. A crumbling maze of stone walls, and the legendary citadel of the Gracian kings of old. Before the long wars of history. Before the peace of the Empire that rewrote history.
The White Pilgrim follows the road through wagon camps and farmsteads, pays as little mind to shepherds and mercenaries as they do to him. The farmlands around Mitrost are fallen into disuse, the city less than half the size it is when Gilvaleus rebuilds the white table.
He sees this and thinks on all that he does, long ago. All that is undone in the aftermath of Marthai. All he throws away.
The road swells to its widest where it swallows the last of the farmstead tracks, passing in through the main gates of the city that are as heavily guarded tonight as they are at the height of Gilvaleus’s rule. He sees the armor and livery of a dozen different forces, sees the barely concealed hostility with which those forces work toward common defense. Banners fly that he does not recognize. Three score armed and armored figures line the approach, watching the steady flow of wain and foot traffic.
The black boar of Arsanc is not among the guards of the road, the White Pilgrim sees. A subtle statement of power from the Black Duke. Already setting himself above the rank of those he means to rule.
He watches fully a third of those who approach turned away at the gates, left to drift back to the hamlets and tents that surround the city walls. Beggars and pilgrims. The desperate, the too well-armed. The White Pilgrim slows his own pace so that he falls back, walking alone. He approaches the great bridge whose solid stone deck and columns sweep up in a continuous line, shaped by the power of animys.
The White Pilgrim feels the eyes of the guards on him. He sees spears lowered in a gesture of casual threat.
He has the Black Duke’s coin in hand, held out only for their eyes. He slows. Does not stop. “The Duke Arsanc expects me.” No longer the pilgrim’s voice. No longer the weakness of age, the shadow that clouds his sight.
Only a moment’s hesitation before the spears are set aside. He passes between them, passes between the sullen faces that mark his steady pace through the cavernous gate house. The evenlamps that once burned here are long gone. Torches replace them, sending flickering fingers of light along weathered stone. He feels the cobbles beneath bare feet, hears a familiar echo lost to the shadows and the noise of the city as he passes through the wall.
Long years ago, when this place is the seat of Gilvaleus the High King, the tightly set streets of the wall wards are tenements and houses, shops and market squares, academies and guild halls. When this place is the seat of Gilvaleus the High King, the ancient ruin of the keep is rebuilt in the white stone of the Marthai quarries. Surrounded by a royal court of merchant stalls and sages’ workrooms, of stables and alehouses, courtyards and apartments. All that space is open to blue sky, and lit at night with a magical glow imbued into the white stones of the keep itself.
The courtyards are long gone now. The White Pilgrim sees the streets darkened as he passes through, keeping a bearing for the high hill where the keep stands. The light of its walls seeps from beneath the grime of long years, shedding shadows that are the silver-gold of first dawn. A pale gleam that makes the glow of torches and watchfires along its walls seem brighter.
Set on the empty coast of Marthai and Veneranda when they are one land under Prince Sestian, the city is abandoned when Gilvaleus claims it. Forgotten. The ancient castle is shrouded in legend and rumors of dark magic, both the legacy of the kings who do not survive their final conflicts with the Lothelecan. Lords of old Gracia whose memories are quietly swept away.
The White City is built at Gilvaleus’s direction and from his own design. A citadel whose strength is its isolation, declared as a free capital separate from the lands that surround it. It is the high king’s wisdom to set himself above the conflicts that endlessly splinter and cripple this ancient realm. To show those who will need to follow him that there exists another way. A shared history that all in Gracia must embrace. A common purpose and culture.
Only closest to the keep does the city cling to new life now. Pavilions and tents dot wide fields of dead grass and rubble that are the grounds and stables where the king’s companions of the white table train, long ago. Couriers and servants, skalds and whores throng here this night, a shifting storm of figures drifting from flag to flag. Following the unseen courses where Fossa and Lutain, Ilfamor and Gauracta and so many more once faced each other in tests of strength and loyalty to their high king.
The White Pilgrim knows that the king’s conclave brings all nineteen companies of the duchies of Gracia to assemble here
. Ten thousand troops at a guess, and he recognizes the banners and standards of fewer than half of them. Flags change over time. The dukes of old are long dead, or break with the past. The dukes of a new day come together at this site of ancient power to seek a king and an end to fourteen years of war.
Hostility rages here this night between the nineteen factions. Knife-sharp and seething like the mist that settles within the walls to turn the firelight to yellow-orange islands in the dark. The Second Wars of Succession they call these days. The tales told by refugees across campfires in the night.
In the fourteen years since the fall of Gilvaleus, the eighteen dukes of Gracia govern and fight and push constantly to the crumbling brink of civil war. For fourteen years, folk call for a new high king to rule the dukes. Four conclaves are set and summoned in those years that all end in dark oaths, pledges of war. Assassination, more than once.
At this conclave, the nineteenth and newest duke of Gracia will see it done. Things the White Pilgrim hears on the roads, in the shrines.
Garneus it is, Gilvaleus’s great-uncle, who calls the first conclave so many lost years ago. In the aftermath of the fall of Empire, Gracia is a void within which seethes a storm of fear that will sweep ten centuries of peace away. Garneus is Imperial regent, respected for the quickness of his mind, the slowness of his temper. To his castle in Aldona, he calls the lords of Imperial Gracia, speaks to them of a vision for the future. A Gracia united under common law, common will, with Garneus as the first king to rule this land in a thousand years.
For too many centuries, the only tools known to the princes and petty kings of Gracia are strength and spellcraft, starvation and steel. Tools whose edge is too easily broken. Telos is Gilvaleus’s uncle, and heir to the nation that Garneus built in the aftermath of the Empire’s fall. But Telos has not his father Garneus’s heart for diplomacy and easy reason, and attempting to rule from strength, he sees his power crumble. Each declaration of a new kingdom outside his rule, each new border marked and claimed comes at the cost of Gracian blood.
In those years, the land turns against itself, ready for the strength of Thoradun of Sannos to claim. Thoradun the Usurper, who knows only how to break the will of those he rules, and who wields the strength of ten thousand Norgyr who are the heart of the mercenary force on which he builds his power.
Around the keep of Mitrost, the factions of Gracia have carefully staked out positions according to allegiance and strength. The flags of what the White Pilgrim guesses are the northlands are clustered tight away from the castle, the white bear of Kannis the only banner he knows. Isolated and distant from the larger pavilions of Marthai, Veneranda, what he thinks he recognizes as Lamitri in the west.
And at the center of all, the banners of the black boar twist in the mist-white wind. The abandoned ruin of the once-great temple of Mitrost rises behind them, spectral in the firelight. Its twelve pillars are pulled down, the twelve faces of the Orosana little more than remnants of colored glass. Arsanc chooses the site of his troops’ encampment for its symbolism. A calculated display.
The Black Duke’s camp is alive with firelight and revelry, music and drunken shouting, the hiss and crackle of pine fires. The fat-sweet scent of venison rises, roasting whole on the spit. In the shadows at the periphery, the White Pilgrim slips close along the edge of the stores tents, servants racing to and from the fires with torch and lantern, cask and crate. Tents and pavilions are marked with the sign of the black boar, long tables set with cloths and laid in with heaped trenchers and overflowing mugs. All the trappings of a royal banquet, the image adding to the strength the Black Duke’s force presents here this night.
The hassas rest nearby, the great beasts herded within a wide patch of muddy field nearly as large as that claimed by Arsanc’s tents. They are penned in by stakes of black oak whose heads pulse with the violet glow of protective spellcraft. The White Pilgrim sticks to the shadows there, ignored by the winged horses in their slumber. He avoids the bright fires and the brighter laughter that spreads beyond as he circles, appraises the tumult before him.
He sees officers, soldiers of the forces of the Black Duke that sweep their way south from Reimari in six short weeks of devastating war. The tales told by refugees across campfires in the night. But the warriors are not what the White Pilgrim seeks, cannot give him what he needs. Not without the battle he does not want to make. Not yet.
At a secondary barracks, haphazardly raised beyond the crisp lines of the soldiers’ tents, he slips in through the crack of canvas. He sees rough bedrolls spread direct to the ground. Six children within. Pages and drudges, stable hands and couriers look up in surprise as the White Pilgrim pulls the tent closed behind him.
Two stand within reach, their legs kicked out with a lightning-fast strike, dropped to the ground with muffled cries of fear. Three eat at the small brazier that is the only light at the tent’s main pole, upending their trenchers as they scramble back. He catches the scent of scorched meat and bitter smoke.
The sixth turns to face him, throws up an arm against the imminent threat. The White Pilgrim is taken for a sergeant or servant-master, and he is on the boy in an instant, hurling him to the ground, the same fear in his eyes as in all the rest. They see too late the ragged robes, no insignia or sign of rank. Not understanding for the brief moment in which he will take what he needs.
He drops to kneel astride the boy, judges him at fifteen summers. Older than the others. Hair the color of dead leaves, a twisting scar touching his face from eye to cheek. Taller, an edge of arrogance in his manner that speaks to a position of authority that makes him perfect for the White Pilgrim’s needs.
He has the Blade in hand. He cannot remember drawing it. Its razor tip is pressed to the boy’s throat, and the White Pilgrim must focus to force it to stillness. The boy cannot blink, cannot breathe.
He whispers in a voice whose rage he does not recognize. Speaks to all at once, the leader who is only a boy and the children who follow him. “Any sound, any movement, this is the first of you to die.”
With the sight of Whitethorn, he sees the Golden Girl curled tight in shadow. She is not moving, the White Pilgrim hoping that she dwells still in the painless deep sleep of the mind. Darkness around her, the air close and stale, her hands and feet bound. No clue as to where her cell is, but he will learn that now.
“Your Black Duke travels with a girl. He arrived here with her as prisoner. I would know which tent of the Duke’s company is hers.”
A stammering voice rises across from him. One of the others, a black-haired girl cringing in fear. “The Duke Arsanc’s forces have brought many with them, lord…”
The White Pilgrim drops the child with a backhand blow that is unleashed before he can stop it. It takes all his strength to hold the Blade back from the throat of the boy beneath him, weeping now. He sees blood there, pearling as three perfect drops where the tip of the Blade scribes a trembling line in the flesh below.
“No. Not this girl. She is Arsanc’s alone. A prisoner.” The White Pilgrim’s voice chokes off, words lost in the desire to strike. A desire to kill this stripling as a warning to the others, to see if blood will loosen their wretched tongues.
“The Black Duke holds court within the keep,” the boy leader whispers, voice twisted through with the certainty of death that he feels. Speaking not in any hope of mercy, but from the obedience that all grant to death in the end.
“The Golden Girl…”
“He holds a prisoner there, in his tents. I heard the soldiers say it. I have not seen…”
“Where?”
“There is a garden, lord. Duke Arsanc holds court in the domed hall, but the knights who serve him in the conclave have tents in the garden.”
The White Pilgrim sees it in his mind’s eye. He feels the sight the Blade grants him trigger a resonant rush of memory. He sees the scarred boy at the altar, holding Justain down while Arsanc strips away cloak and armor, laughing. He will have his vengeance for her pain, wil
l have the blood that pain demands.
No.
He shakes his head, tries to clear it.
Something is wrong, but he has no time. He feels the shadow thread through him, fights it with a will he barely remembers.
“Hold…” he whispers, and he does not know who he speaks to. He fights to stay the killing stroke, both hands locked to the Blade now, shaking.
“One man must die tonight,” he says to himself, to the weeping faces cast down before him, to no one. “Along with any others who stand in the way of that deed.”
And even as he says it, he feels the hunger in the Blade that is the shadow scouring his sight. The hunger that is the voice that seizes his mind, tells him who he is now, who he is long ago, who he is again before the end.
“Do not be in that number,” he says.
The power and the hunger. The desire for greatness. Feeding him as it always does.
The White Pilgrim feels a chill twist through him. He feels pain at his arms that are locked to the Blade in a grip of iron.
He remembers now.
He fights to recall where he is, who he speaks to. He kneels in a darkened tent, six children on the ground before him. All waiting to die.
“Stay here,” he whispers, hoarse. “Say nothing. Do not bargain your lives for the sins of…”
He loses his thought, cannot focus, cannot think. The haze of shadow grows stronger on the fear that shifts and washes around him. It flickers in his mind like the guttering of the brazier’s light as he goes.
HE FINDS HIMSELF ALONG the edge of the encampment, cannot remember having moved there. In his hands, a dark bundle of clothing. He cannot remembering seizing it.
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales Page 36