The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  It ended quickly after that. A bare-breasted woman with eight arms and the lower body of a snake fell as a half-dozen arrows hit her within the area defined by those full breasts. A huge, bald man with three eyes and an extra arm growing from his chest was hamstrung and stabbed repeatedly as he fell. A silver thing with skin that shown like armor and two thrashing tails failed when one of those tails became lodged in a tree and a big legionnaire planted his sword in its fleshy skull. Jaret knocked away the arm of an insectoid creature who fought with four arms, each ending in sets of wicked pinchers. A legionnaire at his side was less fortunate. He deflected one pincher, but not the next. It caught his arm and cut through skin and muscle all the way to the bone. If another legionnaire had not taken the creature’s arm clean off, Jaret had no doubt that the man would have lost his arm. At the same time, Jaret spun and punched his dagger through the thing’s chest. He lost the knife as he dodged the teeth that clacked together just above his shoulder, but that was the end of the thing. Another of the crucifixion bugs, as the men had called the creatures they’d faced in their first encounter, trapped a man, but his fellows surrounded and killed the thing before it could do anything more.

  The final creature was the one they had been looking for, a phuker. A rope closed over its neck even as it fought to bite a man it had pinned. Two legionnaires yanked on the rope, pulling the thing back, nearly strangling it, as two others caught its arms and wrestled it to the ground.

  “Quick!” Lieutenant Caspar shouted when the thing was secured, “get the phuker to Marz. He’s hurt bad. We’re going to lose him! Hurry! Hilaal’s balls, hurry!” Jaret’s eyes went to the man who’d been ravaged by the bolves. He was propped against a tree, spewing blood with each gasping breath, eyes wide, body rigid, arms and legs thrashing. He was seconds from death. His lung had been punctured when his chest was crushed. He was drowning in his own blood, and Jaret was not even sure if the phuker’s poison could save him.

  “By the fucking Order, get that thing over here now!” the lieutenant yelled again. The legionnaires responded. Six of them lifted the creature like a battering ram and ran at full stride to the fallen man. They lowered the thing to him, putting its mouth almost to his arm, but it refused to bite. Meanwhile, the man, Marz, had gone limp. The ground beneath him was covered in his blood. It pumped from his chest and ran from the side of his mouth. His last breath was a bloody bubble expanding from his slack mouth. He didn’t have the time for the creature’s games.

  “Open its’ fuckin’ mouth,” Lieutenant Caspar growled. Two men grabbed its head and chin and forced its enormous mouth open. Lieutenant Caspar pushed Marz hand into it and pressed the palm against the exposed teeth. Corporal Marz set the new record for time until his first scream, but only because it took that long for his lungs to heal enough to allow screaming. Lieutenant Caspar forced his hand and arm into the creature’s teeth again and again until he was thrashing with the pain of the poison. And it did its job. His ribs slowly stitched, the gashes in his side closed, and, finally, he screamed.

  Jaret was already walking away when the scream sounded. It was followed closely by a chorus of wails as the other wounded had their injuries “treated”. He barely noticed. A force pulled him toward the rock where the creatures had been, where the screams had originated. He found their source before he was halfway there. At the highest point of a white finger of rock rising twenty feet to the canopy of trees around it were a man and woman. They were crouched, the man holding the woman. Jaret could hear her desperate snuffles and gasps even over the sound of his men vocalizing their pain behind. The man brushed back her matted hair, curled his body protectively around her, and whispered reassurances in her ear. They were both so dirty and ragged as to be barely considered human – though no animal would allow itself to fall to such levels of filth. Their clothes were rags, muddy, torn, and tattered. Their bodies were wasted by hunger. The man’s eyes were wide and staring. He had two weeks of a scraggly beard and hair that stood in clumps from his head. The girl was almost entirely concealed by streams of hair that might have been golden before weeks of dirt had turned it into a brown mat of clumps.

  “Who are you?” Jaret asked as he approached, sword still out and up. “What are you doing here?”

  “Please . . . please don’t hurt us. We haven’t . . . .” the man answered. “Please, just let us go. We didn’t do anything. We were set up. It wasn’t our fault.” The girl in his arms cried and buried her face in his chest so hard that she nearly sent them from their perch.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, but I need to know who you are and why you’re here.” Jaret tried to be strong and reassuring at the same time.

  The words finally seemed to penetrate the man’s madness. He looked up at Jaret and relaxed. “You’re not Morgs?”

  Jaret looked at himself and tried not to laugh. That was the first time anyone had ever mistaken him for a Morg. “We are the Legion of the Rising Sun. You are in the Empire.”

  The man seemed to deflate as the tension seeped from him in a single great exhale. He spoke softly to the woman, and she slowly raised the palest blue eyes that Jaret had ever seen. “My name is Cary,” the man said. He held out his hands to show that he had no weapons. “This is . . . .” He hesitated and looked at the woman draped across him. She lifted her head further, and Jaret saw that she was young, a girl really, but with sharp, striking features that seemed somehow foreign. Stepping closer, he noticed the fur that lined the top of her dress and at the sleeves then another that had fallen from her shoulders to dangle off her back like a tail. Though matted and stained, the fur on those pelts was long and luxurious, soft and new. They were worth a fortune.

  “You’ve come from the Fells,” Jaret supplied as the pieces came together. They had said something to the creatures about Morgs following them, had thought that Jaret and his men were those Morgs, but the man on the rock was certainly no Morg – he might have been shorter even than Jaret – but the woman . . . ?

  “Lord commander!” Lieutenant Caspar yelled, interrupting Jaret’s thoughts. “Stay back. We don’t know if there are more of these things, and we don’t know who or what those two are. Pax, Val, Kive, Van, Chals, Orem to the commander. Create a perimeter. Eyes open.”

  At the command, six legionnaires surrounded Jaret. They left several paces on each side of him with the final two positioning themselves between him and the couple on the rock. They held their weapons out and scanned the trees. Lieutenant Caspar joined them, pulling up beside Jaret, watching the trees to their sides then the couple on the rock.

  “This was not normal.” He spoke low nearly in Jaret’s ear but did not take his attention from the surrounding forest. “We haven’t seen this many of the things together since right after the battle and never in mixed groups like this. What’s more, these were looking to kill. Usually, they try to hurt us, to drag someone off. They almost never go for a quick kill. We were lucky. We could have lost a lot more men, and I don’t want to risk that these were just the first of a larger group. We should get back to the Camp as quickly as we can.”

  “They were hunting these two,” Jaret said and, somehow, knew it to be true. “We need to bring them with us.”

  “I don’t advise that, lord commander. We’ve seen the creatures use this trick before. Some of them are very good at making themselves look like people.”

  “You’ve come from the Fells?” Jaret repeated, this time as a question. He stepped forward, ignoring his lieutenant and creating a ripple through the men that surrounded him.

  “Yes,” the man, Cary, answered. “We’ve been on the run for weeks. The Morgs . . . the Morgs were following us. We thought we’d lost them in the mountains but couldn’t be sure. We had no idea where we were. Then those things came out of . . . . By the Order, what were those?” The man looked past the legionnaires to where the creatures lay.

  “You were Liandrin military?” Jaret ignored the man’s question. The girl had moved from his lap to hide b
ehind him, peeking out over his shoulder, and Jaret could now see that the man was wearing a tattered uniform.

  “Liandrin Royal Couriers,” the man replied.

  “But the woman, she’s not Liandrin? Who is she?” Jaret studied the girl over the man’s shoulder, growing more and more confident in his assessment but unwilling to accept it without confirmation.

  The man looked back at the girl. He brought her around beside him and wrapped an arm around her. He whispered in her ear. She nodded but said no words and kept her mouth covered with her hand. “Her name is Noé,” the man supplied. “She’s the former Mother of Essehelt Lodge.”

  And everything became clear. Jaret felt his knees weaken as the world spun beneath him. He suddenly felt like the man on the gallows after the hatch opens in the split second before gravity takes hold.

  “I was part of the Liandrin delegation sent to negotiate with the Morgs,” the man continued. “We were set up. My company was slaughtered. Noé was exiled. I escaped, but the Morgs have been chasing us ever since. I . . . .”

  “Liandria failed to hire the Morgs,” Jaret whispered. “By the good and holy Order, how is that possible?”

  “We were betrayed,” Cary answered eagerly. “The Morg di valati sided with the Empire and . . . .” The man trailed off as he realized where he was and what he’d just said. He gulped and began searching for an escape.

  “My name is Jaret Rammeriz,” Jaret supplied. “I was Supreme Imperial Warlord under Emperor Kristor az’ Pmalatir, but Kristor was assassinated and replaced by his cousin Nabim. I am leading a rebellion against Nabim and was hoping that the Morgs would be coming to our aid. We mean you no harm, but we need to know what happened.”

  The man relaxed noticeably but remained cautious. “The Morgs are allied with the Empire. They murdered Prince Winslow and stole the gold he brought to negotiate their hire. Every lodge has sided with the Empire. They’re probably marching into Liandria as we speak. We . . . the invaders have won.”

  “So the Fells are not coming to our aid?” Lieutenant Caspar asked, clearly dumbfounded.

  “No,” Jaret supplied. “They’re coming to kill us. We need to get to the Camp. Bring those two. We’re going to need them.”

  Chapter 75

  The 62st Day of Summer

  “The surgeon says she’ll live.” The voice jarred Ipid. His head came up, but his back was stiff, neck one great knot. He moaned and looked down at his hand still holding Eia’s – its tiny white shape lost in his thick, hairy paw like a nut inside a shell. It was cold despite the grip he maintained on it, and for a second, he thought it was the cold of death despite what the voice had said. Heart leaping, he looked at her face with bleary eyes. She could have been dead for the pale white of her cheeks and lips, but her nostrils still flared, chest still rose and fell. Relief flooding back and small tears forming, he found the only thing to disturb the white before him – she was dressed in a white cotton shirt, in white sheets, in a white room. The two fingers thick mound of bandages on either side of her shoulder had transformed to pink.

  Ipid felt his heart crash at the memory of what he had done. And it had been him. Too much planning, too many risks, too much arrogance. He had known what was coming. Stully had sent him the warning, had told him what he would do, and he had ignored it. There had been no reason for this to happen. He should have left days before. Stully and his men should have stormed an empty manor, should have taken control of a country that had already been abandoned. But somewhere, Ipid had found the arrogance to believe that he could manage his downfall the same way he had managed the working of a mill. The result had been disaster. In one singular moment, he had undone everything he had built, had destroyed any hope of his nation’s recovery, had nearly killed his lover, had devastated a boy he had promised to protect.

  A hand, firm and warm, rested on his shoulder. He turned and found Belab’s white beard, scarred face, dark eyes inside the hood of his robe. “It is not your fault,” the old man said. “They knew . . . .”

  “It was my fault.” Ipid did not need to be coddled, did not need to be told otherwise. It was his arrogance that had caused this, and there was nothing he could do to fix it.

  Belab sighed and sat on the corner of Eia’s bed. “You did what you thought was best for your country. You did what you thought would give it the best chance to rebuild.”

  “It was too much risk. Too much for too little.”

  “Great challenges require great risks. Your decisions were correct. Your choices were honest. They were made for the right reasons. The fact that . . . .” Belab stopped, took a long breath, and seemed to reconsider. “Your counselors have outlawed gambling, is that correct?”

  Ipid nodded numbly.

  “In our teaching, we relish games of chance. We use them extensively to teach about the nature of choice. As you know, Hilaal gave us freewill and his brother Hileil gave us understanding. Despite what you’ve been told, we believe both those gifts are precious, that they must be used together. Freewill allows us to choose, understanding allows us to evaluate the choices we make.”

  Ipid nodded again though he was barely listening, mind too shattered and shaken to follow the philosophizing; will too spent to protest or argue.

  “One of the most important things that our students must learn,” Belab continued, “is that they cannot always know the consequences of their choices. There are too many variables. The world is too mysterious. Your church and my order agree to this point. Beyond it is where we differ. They would say that you should allow them to make the choice for you, that they can see the Order and can tell you which decisions will best align you to Its will.”

  “Yes,” Ipid mumbled. He had no idea where the old man was going but was somehow comforted by his smooth voice and even tone.

  “My order, the Odat Hilaal, says that it is up to the individual to choose, that the very point of freewill is to use it to make choices.” Ipid opened his mouth to protest. Belab took the very words from his mouth. “Why then do so many decisions turn out to be wrong?”

  Ipid sighed long and deep. Like mine, he thought.

  “This is a long and complex question,” Belab answered his own question. “Great tomes have been written on it. Was it wrong for you to serve the Darthur? Some would say yes, but I suspect that you still think it was for the best. How about killing Lord Bairn and his family? It was terrible, but it may have saved thousands. How do you weigh that? Eia would tell you to judge the end not the means, to wait until all the pieces have fallen into place and look at the end product. Just as you cannot create without destroying, so you must measure your decisions not by the destruction but by what rises from it. And this is a fine interpretation. But . . . .”

  “But what about the disaster I left in the Kingdoms?” Ipid asked, mind falling into gloom. Not only did it all end horribly, but I did all those terrible things to get there. The means and the ends were deplorable. I am doubly damned.

  “But that is too simplistic, is what I was about to say. When do you measure the ends? How do you measure them? And what of those ends were even the result of your actions? I ask you, can you control the Order? Do you have powers over all of the workings of nature as your savior Valatarian was said to possess?”

  Ipid could not help a dark chuckle at that. “Obviously not.”

  “I did not suspect so. Though I would have declared you far more dangerous than even your son if you did.” The reference was a stab in the heart to Ipid. He flinched. Belab seemed not to notice. “Because you cannot control everything that happens in this world, you cannot know the ends that your decisions will create. So we are back to our starting point. How do we make good decisions? How do we use our freewill wisely?”

  Ipid could only shake his head.

  “That is where games of chance come in. Say I have two dice.” Belab reached into a pocket of his robe and actually produced two small white dice. “Now, suppose it is the day that Arin put you in command of your coun
try. He comes to you and says that you may roll these dice. If you roll a two, he will double all his demands. Otherwise, he will leave your country untouched. Would you accept this gamble?” Belab stopped and looked at Ipid as if expecting him to answer.

  It seemed too obvious. Ipid was sure he was being tricked and refused to fall for it.

  “Of course you would!” Belab’s voice rose as loud as Ipid had ever heard. “The odds are in your favor thirty-five to one. You would be a fool to refuse. But what if you then roll two ones? Does that make it a bad choice?” Belab paused but raised his hand to indicate that he did not want his question answered. “What we try to teach, what is often missed even by those as elevated as Eia, is that a decision can only be judged by the factors that went into it at the time it was made. Was it made for the right reasons and with the reasonable belief that it was correct? Then it is a good decision, even if it goes horribly wrong. Just as a bad decision that turns out well is still a bad decision. If you fire an arrow into a crowd and happen to hit your dinner instead of your neighbor, does that mean you should do it again? This is what happened to you. You made the correct decisions. They were well conceived. The risks were warranted. But the dice came up as we say ‘the evil eyes.’”

  Ipid sighed again and watched Eia. He understood what Belab was saying. If luck had gone another way, if only Allard Stully’s escape had not gone wrong, if only that arrow had gone a little higher, if only Naidi had not been hurt when the mob turned on them, he would be celebrating now, would be elated.

  “As I said,” Belab brightened his tone. “The surgeon says she will live. She has lost a great deal of blood. It will be some time before she is herself, but she will live and will recover. She is far stronger than you know.”

  “And Naidi, Rynn?” Ipid forced himself to ask. He brought his eyes to Belab, watched his face fall.