The creature’s mandible barely missed Jaret’s neck as he flew by, splitting the skin and muscle of his arm instead. He felt the arm go limp, but the pain was far away, and Thagas’kuila’s poison was healing it even as he hit the ground beyond the creature and tumbled over a body that caught his toe. Sprawling, he thought the miscalculation would be his last, but the creature paid him no more mind. It stretched the legionnaire it held and lunged at him until his hoarse screams were the only thing Jaret could hear.
The Maelstrom take me, I barely touched it, Jaret thought as he struggled to his feet. He scanned the field as he rose. In only a matter of a few minutes, nearly all of the creatures had claimed a victim. Knights and legionnaires hung in the air screaming as their fellows struck impotently at the arms that held them. The creatures paid those men no mind as long as they remained outside the range of their mandibles. They seemed perfectly content with the victims they had, confident that their armor would outlast the strongest man, the sharpest sword. And in the sky, the flying centipede that had delivered them was just bringing its massive body around for another pass. Jaret could only imagine what horrors it would bring this time. They only had a few minutes before they found out.
Rising to his feet, Jaret studied the creature he had just struck. No armor is impenetrable, he told himself. Even the best has gaps, weaknesses. You just have to find them. He had told his men that more times than he could count. Now, he needed to do it. A glance showed a series of scratches across the creature’s abdomen where the legionnaire had hit it. There was no opening there. The arms were as tough as iron rods. An even heavier shell like that of a beetle covered the thing’s back. But the creature’s arms moved. Its head pivoted and lunged. Where there is movement, there is a joint. Where there is a joint, there is a weakness, Jaret heard himself saying. He looked down at his arm, covered now in drying blood, and watched the skin stitch together.
A second later, he was back inside the cage created by the creature’s outstretched arms. He dodged the mandibles as they came down, falling back against the thing’s hard abdomen, and brought the point of his sword up as the jaws snapped past his shoulder. The blade penetrated. It didn’t go far, but that was all Jaret needed. Bending his knees, he coiled and launched himself up, bracing the sword against his shoulder so that it would receive all the power his legs could provide. Blood, so dark as to be almost black, poured down the blade over his hands and head as he pushed, but he just kept pushing until the blade stopped. He had hit the other side of the throat where the plates were stronger, so he pivoted and pulled the blade forward nearly decapitating the thing as he opened its throat from one end to the other.
It dropped. The man it held fell with it. His screams turned to pants and whimpered pleas. Jaret wiped blood from his eyes, forced it back from his head and felt it flow down his back. “Can you free yourself?” he asked the legionnaire. The man nodded almost imperceptibly but immediately started pulling his hands away from the serrated spikes that held them. His screams were lost behind Jaret as he sprinted toward another of the creatures and saw that it held Yatier.
“The throats!” he screamed over and over as he ran. “Get inside and strike their throats!” A glance at the sky showed the flying creature starting its descent. It held no more balls, but its legs looked remarkably like those that held his men. Jaret could only imagine they had a similar purpose.
“Yatier, I’m here,” Jaret called as he brushed past the big knight to face the beast that held him. Screams of pain answered. And Jaret was dodging down again away from flashing mandibles. One of them brushed the back of his shoulder, adding what would, in a few seconds, be another scar. Jaret rewarded it by jamming his dirk into the base of its throat. He spun, caught the top of its head with both of his hands, and slammed it down into the abdomen, driving the knife through past the handle. The thing fell just as its predecessor, and Yatier came with it, but this time the man fell on top of Jaret, covered him in three hundred pounds of steel-encased man.
“Hilaal’s balls, man, can you free yourself?” Jaret yelled from under Yatier.
“Arghhh!” he yelled in pain. He panted then squirmed, digging the plates of his armor into Jaret’s ribs until they threatened to crack. And Jaret could only stare at the sky as the flying thing came down. The wind from its descent buffeted him, covering him in the foul odor of death as its great body passed mere feet from the ground across the length of the field. And when it rose, Jaret saw a half-dozen men held against it, impaled not nearly so cleanly as those held by its brothers but trapped nonetheless and screaming in pain and fear.
#
“What in the Order’s holy name happened to you?” Commander Quindin gasped as Jaret stormed through the door of the Camp’s command tent. He was covered in blood, no small amount of it his own. It ran in pink streams down his face with his sweat, stinging his eyes so that he could barely see. It crusted his clothes so that they resisted his every step and chaffed along every joint.
“Get me some water,” Jaret demanded as he tried to wipe the bloody sweat from his eyes. He reached down and pulled his shirt up over his head and threw the stinking thing into the corner. Streams of red ran down his chest, weaving their way through the thick, dark hair that covered him, past the hundreds of tiny, round scars that marked Thagas’kuila’s teeth, a constant reminder of the time he’d spent with the creature.
“Theonious fucking Valatarian, I asked what happened to you.” Joal came around the table, flanked by two of his sons.
“We were ambushed,” Jaret finally responded. A young man carried a bowl of water through the tent flap with trembling hands. He nearly sloshed it across the table as he set it down. Jaret plunged his hands in and threw water on his face, spraying it across the table and onto the plank floor below. One of Joal’s sons had the foresight to hastily roll the maps laid out on the table before Jaret ruined them. Jaret repeated the movement then rubbed the water across his face and eyes. Another handful was used to loosen the blood crusted across his head and push back the sweat before it could find his eyes again. Finally, he took a long drink straight from the bowl, ignoring how the blood had turned it pink.
“By Nabim’s men?” Joal asked. He was at Jaret’s side now, eyes scanning him for injury like a mother looking over a child after an accident. “Did the cavalry catch you in the open? I told you it was too big a risk. I . . . “
“It was no cavalry. It was . . . I don’t know . . . monsters, Order-cursed, fucking monsters.” Jaret nearly shook as he remembered the things that had attacked them, remembered what they had done to his men, remembered the score of those men that they had left behind to suffer.
“Monsters,” Joal scoffed, looking for the joke.
“Like no nightmare has ever seen. Real . . . fucking . . . monsters.” Jaret felt like he should be shaking, like he should be on the verge of a breakdown, and somewhere he was, somewhere the real Jaret was losing his mind. “We lost over twenty men. Almost all the others are injured in some way. They won’t be fighting again for weeks if ever.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Joal said calmly. He watched Jaret with the look of a man who comes home and finds his wife holding a knife to the children’s throats. “Why don’t you back up and tell me what happened? Where’s Yatier?”
“He’s having his injuries tended,” Jaret answered. The knight’s armor had protected him enough that the spikes had not gone all the way through his hands and feet. Unlike many of the men, he would walk again, but his arms had been pulled out of joint and legs nearly broken as the creature stretched him.
Once they learned how to kill the things, they had freed most of the men who had been captured, but there had been no saving those held by the flying thing, and in trying to save their fellows almost every man had taken an injury of some kind. Eventually, they had reclaimed the horses, loaded the injured onto saddles, and ridden to the cover of the trees. It had taken the remainder of the day moving as fast as the horses and their inj
ured riders could manage to make it back to the camp, but the Knights Imperial and Legion of the Rising Sun were decimated.
“Fuck and fuck! What happened to him?” Joal could not seem to accept any of it.
“He had his arms and legs nearly fucking pulled off by a giant fucking . . . I don’t know, spider . . . crab . . . fucking . . . monster,” Jaret answered with as much emotion as he’d shown in weeks. “And he was one of the lucky ones. I managed to get him away from the thing. A lot of our men, of my men, are still out there, still being tortured by those things, still screaming and crying and begging. And there wasn’t a fuckin’ thing I could do about it. If they’d have shown any interest in the horses, we’d have never gotten out of there. If they’d have wanted to kill us, we’d all be dead. So stop asking stupid fucking questions and find me the valati.” The monk was the only one that would understand, the only one who could help.
Joal, for all his size, stumbled back. He motioned one of his sons away and turned his eyes to the table.
“What happened?” Corwin started the dance all over again. “I just got back and saw a line of men at the surgeon. They look like they’ve had their hands and feet pierced with nails. I thought this mission was low risk. Were you captured or . . . ?”
Jaret held up his hand to stop the questions from starting all over. The man lolled as he looked at his friend covered in blood.
“They were attacked by some kind of monsters,” Joal supplied. He pulled Corwin to the back of the tent and whispered in his ear. They both watched Jaret warily as they spoke.
Jaret let them be. He had explained once. That was enough. At least, he had sent Ewon off to plead their case to the Liandrins, so there was one fewer commander to nag and worry over him.
“They’re coming,” Lius declared as he ran through the flap, panting and sweating. “I was meditating and I . . . .” he trailed off as he saw the other men in the room and seemingly realized what he was about to say.
“Leave us!” Jaret commanded. “And close the flaps when you go.”
The commanders did not protest as they slunk from the tent but neither did they hide their concern. Joal, in particular, seemed to think his friend had cracked. He had made his skepticism clear from Jaret’s first mention of what had happened in the throne room – how Nabim’s pet wizard had burnt a hundred men to ash then lifted Jaret magically in the air and thrown him into a wall. And the very fact that he had said nothing about them showed his belief that the creatures who had tortured Jaret and chased Lius were a figment of the commander’s torture-rattled mind. Torture changes people, he had told Ewon in a conversation that Jaret had overheard shortly after his arrival, their minds go to strange places and sometimes they never come back. He had gone on to suggest that Jaret was not only delusional but different in some fundamental way. The fact that it was true and said as a man who is concerned for the health of his friend had saved Joal, but not Ewon.
The next day, Jaret sent Ewon to Liandria. Joal was not a schemer, but if Ewon sensed weakness, he would seek to exploit it. He’d spend his every waking moment wheedling away at the other commanders, convincing them that Jaret was not fit to lead, that they needed to remove him for his own good. Watching Joal and Corwin go, seeing their wary expressions, Jaret guessed that not much convincing would be required.
“They’re coming,” Lius repeated at a near whisper when the room was clear and the tent flaps were down. “I can see them in the Tapestry. They do not know the forest, but they’re coming almost straight at us.”
“Why didn’t you warn me that those things were out there?” Jaret asked, but the question lacked the edge it should have carried. Because you should have known, Jaret chastised himself for falling so completely into Nabim’s trap. Still, he was not sure how he could have anticipated the things they fought today. Thagas’kuila and his type were one thing. They were horrible, cruel, unbelievable, but they were nothing compared to creatures that struck from the sky, that had impenetrable skin, that could best legionnaires and armored knights in seconds.
“I didn’t see them in the Tapestry until it was too late.” The monk kneaded his hands and stared at his feet. “They are not like the regular soldiers. People are almost always aligned with the Order. They almost always do what the patterns dictate. The creatures, the destroyers, as Valatarian calls them, are almost entirely outside the Order. I can see them in the Tapestry for the disruptions they create, but it is almost impossible to predict what they will do.”
“What does your book say about them? How do we defeat them?”
Lius gulped. “The book isn’t specific, but it says they are Hilaal’s contributions to our world, that he created them to counter the animals that his brother had made. Valatarian describes some of them, but he also says that they are as varied as the animals of the land and air and sea. What we do know is, as Valatarian says, ‘The world was created first though the Order. Nothing that exists can escape Its laws.’ These creatures are bound by the basic laws of nature, but they do not serve those laws. Rather they exist to oppose the Order, to destroy, to create pain and suffering and fear.”
“That much I know. But how do we defeat them? What are their weaknesses? How did Valatarian do it?”
Lius gulped. “I don’t know. The book is very hard to understand. I have been doing almost nothing for the two weeks but reading and meditating, but I still understand very little. Valatarian speaks of patterns, of finding them, creating them, preserving them. But, by his own admission, it took him years to learn to weave those patterns. And even then, he only had enough power to overthrow the Lawbreakers when he had gathered hundreds of thousands of followers, only when those followers would do anything he said, would kill themselves or their neighbors or their children, at his mere suggestion. This book is very different from the one we have always known. The Valatarian in this book is a brutal pragmatist. He admits that weaving the Order is a series of choices and sometimes those choices are difficult – killing a hundred today to save a thousand tomorrow; allowing those around you to die so that those far away might live. In some cases, he made choices that are appalling. In some places, I can hardly bear to read the words, can hardly bear to think that our savior did the things he admits to doing. And I wonder how harrowing it must have been for him to know that doing those things was the only way to save millions from chaos. I wonder how he kept his sanity, how any man could be strong enough to do it. I know I am not. I know that I could never do what is required. Even if I knew that it was the right thing, even if I knew it was the only way, I could not makes the choices that he made.” Lius looked up at Jaret, face filled with shame.
He’s right, Jaret realized. This boy is not nearly strong enough to do what must be done. Then an even harder revelation hit him. “But I am.” Any part of me that might pause or protest is locked away. No normal man can do what needs to be done, so the Order has taken control of me. The thought left Jaret’s trapped consciousness stunned to silence, curled and whimpering in a corner of his mind, wondering what cruel legacy the all-powerful Order had planned for him now that it had stripped him of his freewill.
“I do not think the Emperor has many of the creatures at his command,” Lius was saying. He stared at Jaret with concern – or was it fear – as he tried to cover the shortcoming he’d just revealed. “I can sense them in the Order. I don’t know exactly, but there can’t be that many of them. I . . . I might be able to help. With the men we have here, we might even be able to defeat them without . . . .”
“We cannot afford might.” the power that controlled Jaret said. “We must have certainty. And you know how.”
Lius looked truly horrified now, but he nodded. “I do, but I could not . . . .”
“You won’t,” Jaret cut him off. “I will. Now, tell me.”
Chapter 52
The 41 – 42nd Day of Summer
“Ha! Did you hear that, Denard? It’s not even about us. It’s all Morg politics. They’ve already decided to join
us. The gold just lets them cover their asses. If we were still in Liandria, I’d leave half of it behind. Never pay for something you’ll get anyway, I always say.” The prince and his advisors laughed. Cary barely noticed.
It’s not about us. The words hit him like a wave, washed away the confusion, and showed how all the pieces fit together. He placed them faster and faster until the picture finally became clear. “It’s not about us,” he whispered to himself. “By the Order, it has nothing to do with us.”
“Ah, too late now, I suppose,” the prince continued with honest regret. He scanned the plains around him as if searching for a suitable place to bury a ton of gold for later reclamation. “But I suppose there are other ways to get the gold. Jamison, let’s discuss the trade terms as we ride today. I think the cost of grain just increased rather sharply.”
Cary looked up, eyes going to the sky, as fear flooded him. It was all a lie. It was all going to come crashing down. They were going to fail and the very foundation of the Fells would fall with them.
Behind them, the tents were finally down, the wagons were loaded and lined, the knights were in formation. It had taken another hour, and it was debatable whether it was even worth the effort to ride today. If the camp took as long to prepare as it did to dismantle, they’d only cover a few miles before they stopped. Cary had spent the last fifteen minutes briefing the nobles from a knee. Sticking with his training, he had offered only established facts, included none of his own theories or conjecture. And, as Ambassador Chulters had asked, he had not mentioned the meeting with Nyel or the spying he had done after. That hives not worth the honey, his dad would have said.
The False Martyr Page 68