The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  As he spoke, Ipid kept his eyes down, not wanting to see those of his friends as the depth of his betrayal was revealed. When, finally, he let his eyes stray up, he saw the Chancellor boiling. His entire face had turned crimson, and he very nearly trembled. If there had been any chance of the man agreeing to Arin’s terms it had just been lost.

  “Never!” the Chancellor hissed. “May the Maelstrom take you, Ipid Ronigan. I considered you a friend, a trusted advisor. I see you now for what you are, and I promise that I will never give you what you want. Let it be known that Alden Kavich does not cede to traitors and tyrants. Bring your armies, storm our walls. We will wash them with your blood. And you, Ipid, will fall. We will find you, try you, convict you for your crimes. By the Order, I promise you that, traitor.”

  And before Ipid could even translate, the Chancellor was striding from the tent. His advisors fell in behind him but only after they had each delivered their own baleful stare. Ipid sighed, felt his knees shaking, and prayed that he not collapse.

  When the last of the knights had departed, when they had found their horses, and were riding back to the city, Arin spoke. “Fools,” he hissed. “How many demonstrations do they need?” He turned. “Belab, you know what to do. Focus on the center of the city, destroy the homes and meeting places of those pompous fools. They brought this upon their city so let them suffer first, but do not touch those bridges. By your eyes, I don’t want a single brick of them so much as singed. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly, va Uhram,” Belab said from within his cowl. The hood turned toward Ipid. Enough light penetrated the shadows to reveal his regret and disappointment. Then Ipid was following Arin from the tent, was mounting his horse, was riding back toward the tower.

  Chapter 16

  The 22nd Day of Summer

  “Va Uhram,” Ipid began as humbly as he could through his desperation, “may I ask a question?” He had just completed the climb to the tower with Arin and now stood behind the broad backs of the te-ashute hoping and dreading that he might be able to catch a glimpse of what was about to happen.

  “You may, but be brief. We are about to begin.” Arin scowled. His temper had been up ever since the negotiations had ended. Ipid knew that now was not the time to question him but could not help himself. Arin turned from the window of the tower where he was watching the gray sky cracking into sections with gold just shimmering through the lines like a tray of crystal candy dropped by the confectioner. In a few hours, the clouds would be nothing but puffy sheep wandering across a field of blue. It was bad news for the city below. It meant that there would be no rain to quench the fires.

  Ipid cleared his throat and spoke in his own language. “Why did you make that final request? They already think me a traitor. There was no chance that they would allow me to be their ruler as well.” Ipid stuttered as he saw Arin’s eyes darken, but he had to finish. “And . . . and I did not want it. I do not need you to reward me . . . .”

  “Reward you,” Arin scoffed. A few of the te-ashute turned to look at them but showed no more interest than curiosity. “You think too much of yourself. You have served me well, and that has earned you your life. That is as much reward as a te-adeate should ever expect. In fact, if you were still te-adeate and made such a presumption, it would be your last. Be glad that you are k’amach-tur.” Arin scoffed again, his disdain clear, and turned back to the window.

  “But why ask it then?” Ipid knew that he was on thin ice, could almost hear it cracking beneath him. “I am sorry, Great Leader, but I do not understand.” He tried to make up for his questions with the last. He hung his head and held out his hands in deference, hoping that would be enough to save him.

  Arin gave a low grunt and glanced at the men around him. They were clearly listening and just as clearly trying to look like they weren’t, but it was equally clear that they had not understood. Ipid knew it was that fact alone that kept him from being cast out at the least – and from the window before him at the worst.

  “For me, you fool,” Arin hissed. “I can’t be worrying about who’s in charge of this nation, about who is meeting the terms of your surrender, so it is you who will get us what we need, you who will keep the people in line, you who will be my hand.” He clenched his fist to leave no doubt as to the kind of hand he wanted. “Because you know the cost of failure, it will be you. Do you understand now?”

  Ipid nodded. If possible, he liked the proposal even less than he had when he thought it was some sort of twisted reward.

  Arin turned back to the window, looked down at the grass then to the sky. He made a gesture out the window and turned to the te-ashute. “The te-am ‘eiruh are ready. Does the Uhramar Ashute agree that we should proceed?”

  The big men around him – the non-Darthur te-ashute had taken command of the defensive formations arrayed in the fields before the tower to deter any thought of a counter-attack – nodded their agreement. Arin smiled grimly, turned his attention back to the window, and made another gesture. Finally, he looked back at Ipid. “Make room for k’amach-tur Ipid,” he ordered. “He should see this.”

  The te-ashute looked up at the order, but each seemed to expect another to make way. When no progress seemed likely, Thorold took it upon himself. With a growl, he reached out and shoved the man to his right. The big man there did not stumble, but he was forced far enough to the side for Thorold to steal a few feet from him. That left a space immediately to Arin’s right. Ipid tentatively took it and looked out the window just in time to see the hoods of the te-am ‘eiruh rise.

  Gathered at the foot of the tower, there were at least a hundred of them, shrouded in their robes like a company of wraiths. Ipid searched those robes for some sign of Eia. He told himself that he could find her even through her vestments, but it was hopeless. The robes could have been held up by sticks and wires for all that he could tell about their occupants.

  Guts twisted with horror, he watched the city, expected to see it erupt in fire. He saw something far worse. Hundreds of dark things sailed across the sky – their shapes too varied and terrible to grasp – and swept down on the city. Ipid knew it was impossible, but he would almost swear that he heard the screams of the people five miles away.

  From the tower, the city below looked like a child’s block creation. Walls, towers, houses, all reduced to geometric shapes laid out in a haphazard cluster. Ipid identified the most important landmarks, watched the flying stoche buzzing above them like wasps, tiny in comparison to the great masses of stone, but those wasps could do far more than sting. As Arin had ordered, the creatures flew past the outer sections of the city. They remained high, then dove down in a great swarm toward the tall towers, broad halls, and majestic edifices that defined the city’s center, the political and economic heart of a nation. As they descended, a flurry of tiny flashes rose to meet them. Far too large to be arrows, Ipid could only guess what kind of defenses the city had prepared, but he was silently elated to see several of those mighty bolts strike home. He bit his tongue to keep his cheers restrained as a dozen or more creatures crashed to the ground.

  His celebration was premature. The city’s defenses brought down only a fraction of the creatures. The others wove around the bolts and dove into buildings, released balls of fire, ripped defenders from walls, toppled towers, then rose again to survey their destruction. And at the same time, Ipid felt – somehow felt – the rise of emotions emanating from the city: fear, pain, sorrow, anger. The creatures had sent the people of Wildern over the edge, had snapped any slight control they had maintained over their emotions. It was exactly what the te-am ‘eiruh wanted.

  Ipid shifted his eyes to the ground before the tower, saw the wizards hands moving in their robes, saw them swaying slightly with the force of their concentration. His eyes returned to the city in time to see the buildings begin to explode. Towers shattered. Fire spouted. The ground split. Walls crumbled. And the emotions of the people increased, only served to further their own destruction. Then came
the creatures, falling again from the sky to feast on the destruction below. A scatter of bolts flew from the walls. A handful of creatures fell. The city was defenseless, was in disarray, was at Arin’s mercy. Ipid wondered if he had any to spare.

  #

  It only took an hour for the stoche and te-am ‘eiruh to reduce the center of Wildern to fire and rubble. When the devastation finally paused, when the creatures withdrew to the skies, not a single tower stood. Fire raged through nearly every building. The great Hall of Understanding was a black scar. The Chancellor’s Palace was a crater. The Monument to Unification had been erased. The administrative buildings were rubble. The wall that protected it all looked like it had been struck repeatedly by a hammer. And it only took an hour. One terrible hour and Arin had erased the heart of one of the world’s great cities. As promised, they had not touched anything beyond those walls, but there was no doubt that those areas would fall just as fast should Arin so desire, no doubt that thousands of innocents would die.

  Ipid looked to Arin. He surveyed the destruction below with a look of grim satisfaction. “So k’amach-tur Ipid, do you think your leaders are ready to reconsider?”

  Ipid swallowed the lump in his throat. He had seen too much now to feel anything more than resignation at what had happened. There was no point in being angry or sad. It was what had to happen, and it certainly could have been worse. Arin didn’t have to stop. He could have annihilated the entire city, could have killed every resident. He was unstoppable. Ipid had no doubt of that now. With the te-am ‘eiruh and stoche, the Kingdoms, Liandria, the Empire, even the Morgs had not the slightest chance against him. And that only made what Ipid had to do all the more urgent, redoubled his conviction that it was only from the inside that the Darthur could be defeated. Anger, so useful on a field of battle, was his enemy here. He could not afford it, could not allow it to cloud his judgment, or temper his reason, so he just sighed. “I certainly hope so,” he answered. “How will you . . . ?”

  Ipid did not have the chance to finish his questions. Horns rang out. Every eye turned to watch ten columns of knights emerge from the city and charge at full gallop across the field. The late morning sun glinted off their armor and the top of their lances as they formed into a wedge and tore toward the hill where Ipid stood. Mud flew from the hooves of their horses with such velocity that it rained down behind them in a solid track of brown that marked their progress across the green grass. But it was nearly five miles across the field to the tower. No matter how fast they rode, they could not surprise the thousands of men standing between them and their goal. What’s more, they had just seen a city devastated in less than an hour, had to know that the same power could be turned against them. How could they possibly think this was anything more than heroic – but utterly pointless – suicide?

  “Fools,” Arin growled. “What do they think to accomplish with this beyond the deaths of men who should be serving us? He scoffed then looked down and yelled. “Belab! Stop them, but do not kill them. They cannot escape their service with their deaths. And when you are finished, destroy the area inside the wall on the other side of the river.”

  Ipid watched as a robed figure in the center of the formation below turned and cast his head up toward the tower. The sun penetrated the hood to reveal Belab’s familiar features. He nodded then turned to his fellows. Again they began to move.

  And in the field below, the Chancellor’s Own grew closer. They approached the line of defenders, prepared to meet their spears and arrows with lances and shields. They tightened their wedge, hoping to penetrate the defenders at a single point and push through to the wizards, hoping to strike at the heart of the invaders, and buy their city some chance of survival. They lowered their lances, closed the final half-mile, and were hit by an unseen wave.

  Out of nowhere, the men and their horses were thrown back, as if they had struck a wall. Universally, the men were cast from their mounts. They clattered to the ground in piles of iron and struggled to rise for the weight of their armor. Their horses staggered. A few stumbled. A few failed to rise. But the majority had seen enough. The best trained stayed by their masters, pawing the ground with uncertainty, but far more ran back to their stables. The charge had been dispersed. The city had expended its best weapon, had deployed its best trained, best equipped force, and failed to inflict a single casualty on the invaders.

  Arin slapped his hand on the sill of the window where he watched. “Excellent!” He turned and found a warrior standing ready behind him. “Karm, go. Tell the Theirens to collect those men. I want them held on the field so that they can be seen from the city.”

  A young warrior with long, blond hair snapped to attention. “Immediately, Uhramar.” He saluted, spun, and ran from the room.

  Arin watched out the window a moment longer then turned and followed the man from the room. “When that next area is destroyed, we will return to the tent. We will give them until sunset to respond. If no one comes to surrender, we will destroy what is left on the far side of the river. Be ready to ride in two hours.” And with that he was gone. Several of the te-ashute followed, leaving only Ipid and a blood-thirsty few to watch Wildern’s most prosperous commercial and residential district reduced to fire and rubble. Through the smoke and haze, Ipid searched for his own house and offices. He found them just in time to see them explode into a spray of rubble and fire.

  #

  Two hours later, Ipid was riding over even rougher ground back to the open tent in the middle of the field. They stopped only briefly to inspect the still armor-clad knights that had been gathered into a stunned mass a few hundred paced before the first line of defenders. The knights had been disarmed and were surrounded by men with crossbows, but they did not appear to have any further interest in fighting. Most of them had removed their helms and repurposed them as stools, heads hanging, eyes cast to the ground, shoulders slumped. No doubt they had built themselves up for their inevitable deaths, had never expected to live past their charge, had hoped only that their deaths might bring them glory, would ensure they lived on in songs and stories. Then it had all ended in a single, sudden blast of magical force, and all the bluster they had built to power themselves had been pushed from them like the air leaving a man hit hard in the gut. Now, they had neither death nor glory nor the will to reclaim either.

  Satisfied that they had been secured, Arin thanked the men who held them and rode to the tent. They arrived just as they had that morning, dismounted, and entered. Neither Arin nor his guards showed any concern that another cadre of defenders might charge from between the buildings in the distance and catch them unprepared in the middle of a field.

  They waited for what seemed to Ipid like days. He watched the smoke rise from the city in two great black columns that eventually met and drifted north. He was glad that the wind was from the south, that it spared him from yet another way of experiencing the city’s misery. The day was growing hot as the sun finally broke through the clouds in earnest. The intensifying sun turned the rain that had fallen that morning into a sticky morass that left him pulling at his shirt where it clung to him beneath the jacket that he desperately wished to remove.

  Arin spent his time pacing before the tent, watching the walls and the sun, grumbling and cursing as the clan chiefs formed their own clumps of conversation. Eventually, a few of them began a game that Ipid had seen before but never had a chance to study. In what seemed like a child’s sport, they formed a circle around a sword that had been planted in their center, then with a yell, they literally fought their way to it. The first man to pull and raise the sword was the winner. Ipid watched the men tackle, punch, kick, and trip one another in ways that made him cringe, but the game, no matter how brutal, always ended in laughter and goodwill. It was a decidedly Darthur activity. They didn’t care about who won or lost. The glory was in the struggle. They loved the battle, fed off the fight, longed for conflict. Ipid could imagine Darthur boys raised on this game, taught from birth to fight, taught tha
t the battle was all the mattered, and he understood how they had conquered a continent, how they would do the same thing here.

  The sun was in its final descent, was just beginning to paint the few remaining clouds along the western horizon when the riders came. Emerging from the city, they rode slowly off the road and into the field. There were only a dozen. Watching them come, Ipid counted three officials and nine guards. The guards wore armor but not the polished plate of the knights. These were members of the Wildern City Watch, not the Chancellor’s Own who were waiting in a clump behind them. As the officials drew closer, Arin and the te-ashute returned to the tent. Many of the middle-aged men were covered in mud, dripping with sweat, bleeding from gashes or limping. Their lips were split, clothes were torn, cheeks and eyes were bruised, but their smiles were universal. They jostled one another like boys as they formed around Arin in the tent and tried to replace their giggles with scowls.

  Finally, the riders dismounted, and three men entered the tent without bothering to follow their guards. Ipid saw that the Chancellor was not one of them. In fact, it was Ipid’s own replacement that led the group, and he looked like he’d been through the Maelstrom. What had been a coif of perfect brown hair that morning was now a disheveled, ash-strewn mess. His fine clothes were streaked with soot, torn, and burned. He walked with a limp and had bandages wrapped around his hands. His face was red and blistered.

  Di Valati Rylan was the only other hold-over from that morning, and he looked like he was on the verge of death. His face was framed by black where he had been unable to remove the soot that had marked it. He wore the robe of a simple counselor, and it fit him poorly. His hands too were wrapped, but blood had seeped through in places to give the white bandages a tinge of pink. He held a hand to his mouth as he walked and coughed, a deep, rattling cough that nearly took him to his knees.