Cynane nodded. "You speak more fairly than your counterpart, who tried to strike at me with his sword and then, afterward, with his magic. I deem you speak the truth, so I will give you truth in return: the blade of Cupas is in the temple of Silwa. Get there first if you can, but be warned: the legacy of death and magic in this place...the city will test you, seek to turn you from your path. You must be strong, you and your companions. And be wary of your enemies."
Michael bowed again. "I am most grateful to you for your assistance, ma'am. I wish that I had more to offer you than gratitude."
"Live a life worthy of our line and of our people," Cynane said. "That is enough."
Then she was gone.
Michael took a deep breath. God grant her rest and protect my dear friends from all perils.
He kept moving, holding his blades at the ready, moving through the ruins, calling out the names of his companions to no result.
Then he began to hear a child crying. Sobbing fitfully, quietly, as if afraid of being heard.
Michael approached the sound of the weeping quietly, stealthily. He found the source of it hiding behind two nearly demolished walls, huddling in the corner of a ruined house: a boy, with long black hair, hugging his legs with one arm as he pressed his face against his knees.
Michael stepped around the broken down wall, lowering his swords. "Be not afraid, there is no cause for tears." He knelt down. "What is the matter? How did you come to be here."
Felix looked up at him, his face bloody and scarred. "Stay away from me!"
Michael recoiled, nearly falling over onto his back. "A trick?"
"No, a desert long deserved," Felix snarled. He stood up, and Michael could see that his arm, the arm the rebels had cut off, was missing. He had there only a bloody stump, red and raw. "This is what you did to me. What do you think?"
Michael retreated another step. "I didn't...Felix, it was the Crimson Rose."
"You said you'd protect me!" Felix yelled. "You said that you'd watch over me! You said that you'd take care of me after mother died! But you didn't, did you? You killed me like you killed our mother!"
"I didn't kill mother!"
"You told her there was someone at the door!"
"And if I hadn't they might have gotten in and hurt you, or Miranda," Michael shouted back. "I did what I thought was best."
"And she died, didn't she? Was that your best?"
"I don't need to answer to you," Michael yelled. "You aren't my brother, you aren't even real!"
Felix snarled. "No, I'm you, and you can't make excuses to yourself, can you? I can say these things because I know I'm right. Look at me and tell me that you don't feel any guilt for the things that you did."
Michael scowled. "You are not Felix," he repeated.
"What right do you have to be happy," Felix said, advancing on Michael. "What right do you have to pleasure while I'm dead?"
"None at all!" Michael cried. "But my true brother would not deny me this, nor insist that I wander the earth in torn rags for a hundred years in penance."
"How do you know?" Felix asked mockingly. "I'm dead."
Michael closed his eyes. "Yes. Yes, you are, may God forgive me." He opened his eyes again and glared at the illusion of his brother as he pointed the Eena blade at him. "Which is why I have nothing to say to you, be you imp or demon or whatever else. Begone!"
Felix snarled, his lips contorting in anger as he roared with futile rage, then he was gone.
Michael closed his eyes, leaning back and sinking down the wall, head bowed, chin pressed against his chest. The armour was cold, but he could still feel the rise and fall of his breathing.
"God forgive me," Michael muttered, his confidence of the morning melting away like ice under the heat of the sun at the sudden reappearance of his failure of the past. If he could not protect Felix then why should he, being older but no wiser, stronger but faced with stronger foes, being more virtuous only due to the company of the virtuous, being favoured only by uncertain luck, be able to protect Amy, or Filia Tullia or their highnesses?
What was his confidence but arrogance, the kind that, as Lady Silwa had tried to warn him, was always punished by the gods?
"God forgive me."
Michael's ears pricked up as he heard footsteps on the other side of the wall. Shifting slightly, as quietly as he could, Michael peeked over the edge of the wall to see a man in a dark cloak and a leather cuirass walking down the street, moving as warily as Michael had a moment before, a sword held in one hand and a knife in the other, passing slowly by him.
Not one of my comrades, therefore he must be a man of Quirian's, Michael thought, and made his decision. Emerging from hiding place with a shout, Michael grabbed the man around the neck and pulled him backwards into Michael's hiding place, holding him in a choke and knocking sword and knife from his hands as he struggled and writhed.
"Who are you?" Michael demanded. "How many of you are there, and how did you gain entry into Aureliana?"
Tullia moved swiftly through the streets of Aureliana, eyes glancing this way and that, noticing her surroundings but taking no especial note of them, merely passing over them for any sign of threat and then moving on.
She had to find His Highness, he was practically defenceless without her. She had sworn an oath to the Emperor that she would give her life for his, and she would not break her bond.
I may be only a mage, but I have the pride of a soldier. Fear not, Your Highness, I am coming.
She had a knife in one hand, she was ready to wield magic in the other, and she ran as fast as her feet would carry her. Her hair flowed behind her as she ran on swiftly, desperately. She had to get to His Highness before danger did.
"Tullia."
Tullia skidded to a halt, turning on her heel, dagger at the ready, crouching down ready to fight.
"Who's there?" she whispered, tensing herself to spring out of the way of any magical attack that might be launched from any direction.
"Tullia," her mother stepped into view, tut-tutting as she shook her head. "Is that any way to talk to your mother?"
Tullia's eyes narrowed. "This is a trick. Some illusion or the like. You are dead."
"Yes, we are dead," her father said as he appeared beside his wife. "But after all that you have witnessed, is our apparition truly too bizarre to be credible?"
Tullia stepped back, tensing for the trap she felt was inevitable. "I do not believe this."
"Believe it or not, we stand before you," her mother said.
They did look like her parents, at least so far as Tullia could recall. They were dressed in familiar roughspun tunics, her mother wearing a simple dress of cheap brown wool.
"If you are real," Tullia said. "Then what do you want?"
"To show you the error of your ways," father said.
Tullia cocked her head slightly. "I can't think of any."
"Your profession," mother said. "How could you have become a killer abandoned your sister?"
"As opposed to staying diligent by her side while she died? Very easily," Tullia said sharply. "Even if you are my parents I don't need to listen to you if this is the level of your conversation."
"Don't turn away from us, Tullia," father snapped. "We are your parents and-"
"And dead these years past," Tullia cried. "I need your council not, I trust my own judgement."
"The same judgement that took you away from your sister?"
"A different verse of the same song I did not like the first time," Tullia said. "I am His Highness protector and defender, a warrior of the Corps of Mages."
"A warrior despised by every fighting man in the Empire, regarded as a coward who fights with magic instead of a sword," mother said. "Does that not shame you?"
Tullia hesitated. "I would prefer to be recognised for my warlike talents."
"And what of Lucilia?" father said. "What does she think of you, a tame dog in the service of the Empire?"
"Lucilia knows full well just what
I am," Tullia murmured. "I told her the truth, though I should not have, that she might think well of me and be proud."
"Is the fact that you are a killer supposed to fill her heart with pride?" mother asked mockingly.
"I. Am. A soldier!" Tullia roared. "In my heart, in my soul, I am as much a warrior as Aegea herself. I have the heart of a wolf and the courage of a unicorn. I am a daughter of Beltor and a handmaiden to Silwa. I am a soldier, and so my back is straight and my head is high. I will never be afraid and I will never be ashamed and that is what Lucilia will know of me, that is what she will think of when she thinks of what I am. She will remember that I fought for my pride and my honour and I was never ashamed. She is proud, I hope, to call me her sister; and if, god's willing, she is ever well, then she will have my example before her when she steps out on her path in life.
"I am not ashamed of what I am. There is no road that I would rather walk, no matter where it may lead."
Her mother and father stared blankly at her for a moment. Then...they disappeared.
Tullia relaxed by the tiniest fraction. "I see. It was a trick after all. Forgive me, Highness, I shall delay no further."
Beltor and Silwa keep him safe until I find him, Tullia thought as she kept on running.
Fiannuala stalked from rooftop to rooftop, bow in one hand and spear in the other. She had strung the bow as soon as she had found herself alone. Her quiver flapped against her leg a little as she moved, but not enough to really impede her.
She had decided very quickly to keep to the rooftops, where the height would offer an advantage in finding her new friends, and where she would be a little safer if this city turned out to be hiding dangers within.
Fiannuala was grateful to the city folk for building their houses so close together that she was able to jump the gaps between them easily, as well for building so many flat roofs. Without those twin blessings she might have had to descend to the street, or try and use wood magic within this place of stone, and neither seemed very attractive to her at the moment.
She hoped all cities weren’t going to turn out like this. Aureliana was wrong to her, she could feel it in her bones. It smelled of death as though the battle had been fought yesterday instead of five hundred years ago. And it was quiet, silent even. Fiannuala had grown up with the sounds of the birds and the beasts and the whispering of the trees and this silence was wrong. All cities couldn’t be like this. They couldn’t, even if they were all built of stone and cut off from the soil. At least there would be life in those places: people, horses, rats. Not this still... lifelessness. It was like some twisted kind of immortality, where instead of living forever one died, but never decayed as the dead were meant to do. Never rejoined the soil, never nurtured a new tree, but simply existed as an old but never rotting corpse, stinking up the world forever. It was wrong.
Something broke the silence. A sound like something moving in the ruins. Footsteps. Fiannuala silently put her spear down upon the roof of the home on which she stood – not only was the roof flat, it had a small barrier around the edge of the roof to stop people falling off – and fitted an arrow to the string of her bow. This was why she had not called out for any of her friends, not because she did not wish to find them but because it was as likely to call peril down upon her as it was to draw their band together. More likely, maybe, depending on how far apart the spell had scattered them. She turned in the direction of the noise, crouched down, bow ready.
Show yourself, whoever you are, she thought. Whatever you are.
“You have suffered in my absence, haven’t you, Fia?”
Fiannuala spun around at the sound from behind her, drawing her bow taut. Fiannuala saw who had spoken and her eyes widened. “I don’t know who you are, but you stop looking like that right now!”
An image of her mother stood before her, shimmering in a breeze that did not exist. It looked like her, plucked exactly from Fiannuala’s memories: the skin gracefully turning to yellow, the hair of ash black, the golden eyes. The exactness of the resemblance was probably what maddened Fiannuala most.
“Did you hear me?” Fiannuala roared, and be damned to who heard her. “Drop that image, now!”
“What are you talking about, Fia?” the impostor asked. “I’m your mother.”
Fiannuala shot her right between the eyes. “My mother is dead,” Fia snarled. “She’s dead and she isn’t coming back. And you think that you can wear her appearance like a costume? You think you can fool me? Who do you think you are?”
The impostor laughed, unfazed by the arrow between her eyes. “I’m the product of your memories, Fiannuala. I’m created out of your mind. I’m only here because of you.”
“Shut up!” Fiannuala yelled. “I don’t care who or what you are, you’ve no right to look like my mother like this.”
The impostor cocked her head to one side. “You know I always did prefer Cati to you-“
Fiannuala bellowed like an angry bull as she fired another arrow, then another, then another. The impostor staggered backwards as three arrows sprouted from her chest and shoulders. Fia dropped her bow and snatched up her spear as she charged forward, yelling, hurling herself at the liar wearing her mother’s form before she recovered. The impostor tried to retreat, but Fiannuala was too fast. She slammed the spear-butt into the impostor’s stomach, making her double over, then drove the point through the neck of whatever had dared to assume her mother’s form.
“I don’t…” coughed the fake. “How could you kill your own mother?”
Fiannuala’s lip curled into a sneer. “If you were really my mother, I wouldn’t have been able to.”
The impostor twisted her mother’s face into a snarl, but no words came out. Then she was gone.
"What was that? I heard a woman shouting."
"Metella, is that you? Is Lord Father with you?"
"Metella doesn't yell," the first man replied.
"She yelled loud enough when Lysimachus looked to have killed captain Lucifer," a woman said. "Maybe the captain's dying now?"
"More likely it's Cressida or Olympia or someone who does like to raise their voice," the first man said irritably. "Whoever it was come out, we know you're there."
Fiannuala dropper her spear with a clatter as she ran for her bow. It was still strung, and she snatched an arrow from her quiver as she dashed to the edge of the rooftop. She could see five people down below: three men, two women, all of them armed and armoured.
"Up there!" shouted the man who had thought she might be this Metella person who hardly yelled. He pointed up at her with one of his long arms. "That isn't-"
Fiannuala loosed her arrow, taking him in the shoulder. He spun around, crying out in pain as he collapsed to the ground.
"Get her!" the first man yelled.
Fiannuala leapt off the roof as two fireballs streaked towards her, her bound carrying her to the next roof along. She turned, loosing off another arrow before she ran onwards, dodging another fireball that leapt up into the sky. She was not rewarded by a cry of pain, but if she kept on loosing then she would make them keep their heads down.
She reached the edge of the roof and grinned as she leaned over the edge to shoot again at the pursuing warriors. She hit one of the women, in the eye this time, before leaping over to the next rooftop.
"Arus, Lord of Fire," the first man she had heard cried out. "Let the fire erupt around her!"
The building Fia was leaping to exploded in a flash of heat and light. Fiannuala flung up her arms to cover her face as her bow and spear were snatched away from her. Heat washed over her, making her cringe in pain as she was borne backwards by the blast, slamming into the wall of the house she had just jumped off with a crack. It felt worse than the time she had fallen while climbing the great tree and landed on her head; it hurt so much that she cried out in pain. Groaning, Fiannuala slid down the wall to the ground, landing with a thud and another moan of pain. She sat there for a moment, wincing softly, before a loud warcry recalled h
er to her more immediate predicament.
A warrior charged at her, a sword held in two hands, his chainmail shifting on his shoulders, slashing down at her wildly. Fia rolled out of the way, scrambling to her feet as she looked for her spear. Her foe kept yelling as he pursued her, still slashing wildly in every direction.
"Princess Fiannuala!" Michael shouted as he appeared from out of one of the side alleys, rushing bodily into her opponent and bearing him into the wall where he ran him straight through his mail with the drake-forged blade Fia had given him.
The remaining woman of the diminishing enemy group shrieked, throwing fireballs in their direction, but Fia picked up a stone off the ground and threw it at her, striking her on the head and knocking her to the ground.
Only the sorcerer remained, the same sorcerer who had blown up the building. He pointed his staff at Michael, but as he opened his mouth to speak, instead of words a cry of pain emerged, and he crumpled to the ground.
Tullia stood behind him, her hand bloody and wreathed in lightning.
"Sorry I'm late," she murmured.
Michael smiled. “Filia Tullia. We are right glad to see you safe from harm.”
Tullia smiled back out of one corner of her mouth. “I am glad to find you well also. Have you seen His Highness?”
“I regret, ma’am, we have not,” Michael replied.
“Then we must find him,” Tullia said. “And swiftly.”
Michael nodded. “And swifter still since there are enemies within these walls.”
Tullia nodded. “Do you know who these people are?”
"Quirian's men," Michael said. "I caught one of them alone, and he told me that they are here escorting Quirian in person. We must be wary."
“Be wary?” Fiannuala said. “He’s our enemy, if we have the chance to put him in the ground we should take it.”
“He is skilled and experienced,” Michael said. “A match for Gideon, perhaps. I would prefer not to engage him until the entire company is united.”
“We all joined together to fight,” Fiannuala insisted. “And I’m not going to run from a battle just because Amy isn’t here. It would be shameful for us to turn our backs and run for help.”
Spirit of the Sword: Pride and Fury (The First Sword Chronicles Book 1) Page 63