Skulduggery 10: Building a Criminal Empire

by Logan Jacobs

  Because from everything else that the scouts told me, Wade had been goddamn everywhere. One scout said that he’d been seen in the Gold City with an army of soldiers all clad in black like assassins. Another messenger told me that Wade had been spotted in the woods outside the Capital, while a different scout swore that the human thief had been seen on top of the walls of the Blood City itself.

  It was completely impossible, but when all the scouts started to repeat the same message, I wondered. And when I found the secret stronghold completely destroyed, I wondered even more, until I saw the burning fort outside Riverhome, and then I suddenly didn’t have to wonder anymore.

  I just knew.

  That goddamn human thief was fucking magic.

  “General Tevian?” an elven soldier called out from behind me.

  I forced myself to return to the present, stopped pacing, and glanced around the tents on every side of me to see who needed me. It was a day elf soldier who had braved the early evening darkness and left his tent to come talk to me, but as soon as I turned to face him, I wished that he had just stayed inside his tent.

  I might not recognize the day elf soldier, but I recognized the smug look on his face because it was the same smug superior expression that almost every elf from the wilderness forts wore. I took a deep breath and tried to give this soldier the benefit of the doubt, even though I mostly just wanted to slap that self-satisfied look off his face.

  “Well?” I demanded. “What is it?”

  “I was talking with some of the other soldiers from my unit,” the elf replied. “And we figured that before the battle starts--”

  “You want me to go over battle formations again?” I interrupted. “It’s not difficult, but I had planned to go over them again later tonight, so you’re all clear on your positions before we march out in the morning and advance on the Blood City.”

  “No, it’s not about the battle formations,” the soldier said.

  “Good,” I grunted. “Because I would hate to think that a simple formation like the one I have planned is too difficult for you all. We have twenty-thousand troops, so we’ll split the ground troops into four groups of four and a half thousand, and--”

  “And then the two thousand members of the elven cavalry will act as one unit that rides ahead of everyone,” the elven soldier replied. “No, I get that.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Since you’re the commander-in-chief, we just wanted to know about the rules for when we take over the Blood City again,” the day elf answered. “And for when we take over the other cities, too, obviously.”

  “You wanted to know what about the rules, exactly?” I felt a little spark of blue fire dance between my fingertips in my impatience.

  Any half-decent elven soldier should know the rules of war by heart. It was one of the first things that we learned in our training, and even though I had seen a number of elves in recent decades be a little more… loose when it came to the rules, that didn’t change the fact that they should know what was expected of them.

  “Are there any limits?” The day elf grinned. “Obviously, we wouldn’t loot elven businesses, but are the businesses of other races fair game? Or just their women?”

  I slapped him across the face so hard that a singe-mark of my hand was left behind on his cheek.

  “What the fuck?” the soldier gasped, but then he quickly tried to recover himself. “I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to upset you, but--”

  “Then don’t upset me,” I growled. “Don’t you know the fucking rules of war? Name the first one. Hell, name any of them. Now!”

  “Um…” The day elf closed his eyes, as if the answers were written on the insides of his eyelids. “In times of war, we must never… never…”

  “Seek to harm or injure any enemy civilian, wounded party, or prisoner of war,” I snapped. “These are basics, soldier, and if you do not know them or refuse to abide by them, then--”

  “B-but our commander always says those rules were written so long ago that they don’t apply to us,” the day elf said. “They were written before the last wars between the races, and in those wars, it’s not like the elves really stuck to the rules of war.”

  “That may be the case,” I growled. “But that does not mean that we cannot abide by them today. I will not have any soldier fight for me who refuses to respect the rules.”

  “But the h-humans…” the day elf said as he reached up to touch his burned cheek. “Th-they rebelled! They overthrew us! Shouldn’t they be punished?”

  “Yes, but not the civilians,” I said. “Not the innocent. After all, tomorrow’s battle is not about revenge. We just want to restore the rightful rule of law and order, that’s all.”

  The day elf just stared at me.

  “If that’s all, then you can return to your tent and tell your friends what I said,” I told him. “And if I catch anyone breaking the rules during or after the battle tomorrow, then they will answer to me personally.”

  I let another spark of blue fire shimmer in between my fingers, so when the elven soldier saw it, he nodded and retreated back to his tent as fast as his long legs could carry him.

  I watched until he disappeared, turned back around, and began to stalk up and down between the tents in my encampment again. I couldn’t believe that this was the kind of soldier that I had to command in battle tomorrow. Sure, there were some good ones in the mix of all the bad ones, but overall, the elven soldiers from the wilderness forts weren’t the kind of elves that I would have ever wanted to serve under me, if I had any choice in the matter.

  But the thing was, I couldn’t afford to be picky.

  I didn’t know how many soldiers Wade would have on his side tomorrow, but if he controlled every city in the empire… and I knew that he did… then he probably had quite a fucking force under him. Plus, if there was one thing that the human thief had taught me, it was that I should never underestimate him, so I wanted to make sure that I had as many elves on my side as possible, just so that we wouldn’t be in for any surprises from whatever the humans had in store for us.

  The day elf soldier’s comments had turned my stomach, even though I hadn’t really been shocked by them. It was a common attitude among most elves, and I had to admit that even I had been guilty of being a real asshole to the lesser races before.

  But never in times of war.

  War was different, and it always demanded a higher level of responsibility. We were supposed to set an example for the lesser races since after all, we were supposed to be better than them, and that meant we should act better, not just be better.

  But in all the time that I had traveled from one wilderness fort to another, and in all the time that I had sent messengers all across the empire to summon as many fighters to my side as possible, I had wondered if any of that was really true, or if it was just a myth that we elves had told ourselves to feel better about our rule over the other races.

  I knew that I had made plenty of mistakes in the past. I knew that I had not lived up to the proper elven code of conduct, and I knew that I had been crueler than I needed to be to many of the lesser races. Sometimes, I had even been cruel because I wanted to be, but I knew that was not really the kind of elf that I wanted to be. Maybe the power had gone to my head, like it had gone to the heads of most elves, so we abused it even though we should have used it to govern with law and order.

  Then again, maybe none of the elves had ever really been that noble. After all, most of the elves from the wilderness forts were damn near as vicious as their horses. They didn’t seem to give a shit about law and order, and instead, they just seemed excited to see real action and to be able to fight against and kill as many enemies as possible.

  But that wasn’t really what the elven empire was about… or was it?

  I wasn’t sure that I really knew anymore.

  When I came to the end of the next row of tents, I headed toward the pen of elven horses. Most of them snarled wh
en they heard me coming, and a few of them even foamed at the mouth or pawed at the earth, as if I was about to feed them scraps of flesh like their usual riders did.

  The thought of it damn near made me sick.

  I moved toward one end of the pen that was separate from the rest of it, and this was where the less aggressive horses were kept. Since my own mount was stabled here, I had made sure that the temporary fence between this section of the pen and the rest of the horses was completely secure. Elven war horses had been known to sometimes eat each other, so I had to be completely sure that my own mount was safe from the wilderness beasts.

  As I found my horse and began to stroke its nose, I thought that maybe the elves had been lying to themselves all this time about our own superiority. After all, elves were supposed to be the only ones who could perform magic, although I had heard rumors and read legends from generations ago about other races who could use magic just as well as the elves, and sometimes even better.

  And there wasn’t any other way to explain Wade.

  I had seen his magic with my own eyes in the Gold City, since first of all, only magic could have transported him from the Capital to the Gold City when he was just a human thief with no money to pay for real transportation. But it wasn’t just his appearance there that was magical.

  It was also the fact that Wade had caught the magical sphere of energy that I threw at him in the marketplace, and then he had thrown it right back at me. I had never seen an elf do something like that, let alone a human, and there was obviously no other explanation but the fact that Wade had to be fucking magic.

  I just couldn’t understand how it was possible.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” I murmured to my horse as I led him out of the pen. “I want to take a look at the fields that we’ll fight on tomorrow.”

  I swung up onto my horse’s back without a saddle, urged him forward, and then began to ride as far away from the camp as I could. When the torches of my camp glittered far behind me, I slowed my horse down and finally felt myself take a deep breath.

  The fields between my camp of soldiers and the Blood City were incredibly vast, so we would need to march out well before dawn, if we wanted to arrive at the Blood City by the time the sun rose. It would be a bloody fight, but I hoped it would be short-lived. If we took the city quickly, we could spare a lot of lives, even though the Blood City was one hell of a fortress to attack.

  But my scouts had told me that was where the human army seemed to be gathering, and there wasn’t a better place to reclaim the elven empire than at the elven capital itself. Besides, I was pretty sure that I knew Wade well enough to guess that he wouldn’t just sit idly by inside the Blood City while everyone starved through a long siege. He would want to fight, and that meant eventually, he would come out onto the plains to meet us.

  Still, for the moment, I just breathed in the fresh air of the still night and tried to focus myself for the battle tomorrow morning. It was hard to think about war when everything seemed so quiet and peaceful, but I knew that these rolling hills would look very different in the morning. I hoped that I had come up with the best formation to attack Wade’s forces, even though there was no way to know for sure until the battle actually started.

  It was a standard elven battle formation, of course, so it had been effective plenty of times before. I would divide up the foot soldiers into four distinct units and advance them all across the plain together, but they would be led by my impressive cavalry unit. Our archers would follow right along behind the cavalry, and then the foot soldiers would follow after them.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t have a hell of a lot of archers to use, but I hoped that we would at least have enough to put a dent into Wade’s army. Normally, we relied on our magic casters for distance fighting in battle, but since the secret stronghold of casters had already been destroyed, that left us with only a few dozen weak casters on our side, so I just had to sprinkle them in throughout our archer force.

  Wade probably didn’t have many archers on his side, or if he did, they probably weren’t that good. After all, humans hadn’t been allowed to train with weapons of war for generations, so I couldn’t think of anyone who would be able to train them well enough to fight like professionals in only a few months.

  Then again, that might just be another underestimation of Wade’s power.

  In any case, in every war and every battle with the lesser races, none of them ever stood their ground when our cavalry charged. Sure, the stout dwarves hid behind the stone walls of their mountain keeps and forced us into prolonged sieges. But in open battle? No, no human infantry would or could stand their ground when we charged them, and while I didn’t want to underestimate Wade again, I couldn’t fathom the engagement lasting longer than the first rush.

  I let my gaze wander over the hills more, and I thought that I could almost see the lights of the Blood City far off in the distance. Out here in the wilderness, everything seemed to matter less, and it suddenly didn’t seem quite as important who was in charge of what, or how much territory we elves controlled. The silence under the stars seemed like the only thing that mattered, and I wondered if this was what the world had felt like before the elves conquered everything and built our impressive empire of cities.

  I was sure that in the old stories, that was what the Ancient Lords had wanted us to do. I thought it was what they had ordered the elves to do, in order to bring law and order to the chaos of the world, but at the same time… maybe I was wrong about that, too.

  I had always prided myself on my ability to remain objective and on my ability to be reasonable and fair about things, so ever since I had left the Blood City the night before the equinox festival, I had tried to look at things as logically as possible. I had tried to look at just the facts, so I could reassure myself that I was doing the right thing.

  It was a fact that Wade had magic and that he had somehow raised an army.

  It was a fact that the human thief had somehow managed to poison the wine at the equinox festival, so countless numbers of elves had died when the celebrations began.

  It was a fact that human forces had taken over every city in the empire shortly after the equinox festival.

  It was a fact that Wade had destroyed the elves at the secret stronghold and at other forts all throughout the empire as well.

  It was a fact that we would face Wade’s army tomorrow.

  Those were the facts, but I wasn’t certain of anything else. I wasn’t certain who would win tomorrow or even who the Ancient Lords favored to win. A few months ago, I would have said that the Ancients favored the elves, as they always had, but now, I wasn’t so sure.

  So many signs pointed to the idea that the Ancients actually favored Wade. His magic, his army, his ability to plan everything down to the last detail, and even all his beautiful women… those all seemed to be signs that the Ancients favored him, even though he was just a human thief.

  And of course, there was the fact that the sun and moon had started to rise and set at regular times instead of whenever the elven priestesses carried out their temple rituals.

  We had always been told that the sun and moon would cease to be if the priestesses ever stopped their rituals, but after Wade carried out his revolution, the sun and moon had just kept rising and setting, and they did it in an even more regular fashion than they ever had before.

  So maybe the Ancients actually wanted Wade to win tomorrow.

  “I can’t be that shortsighted, can I?” I murmured to my horse as I patted its neck. “Or am I really that blind?”

  The horse just gave a low whinny and tossed his head.

  “I know,” I sighed. “You want to get some sleep before the big day tomorrow. Come on, I’ll take you back.”

  I turned my horse around and started to ride back toward the encampment. As I felt the wind in my face, I tried not to think about whether or not the Ancient Lords wanted Wade to win. It wouldn’t do me any good to think about the fact that I might be ab
out to make a huge mistake.

  At this point, I was already committed to battle tomorrow, since after all, I was sure that Wade would kill me the second that he got the chance. That was what we elves would do to him, so it was only fair. Hell, it was what we had done to his entire race, so really, it was more than fair.

  Any time a human looked at us wrong or pissed us off, we had killed them. Any time one of the lesser races asked for help or even just for a fair trial, we had ignored them and made them suffer.

  We had taken advantage of humans and the other races for so long now that it seemed as natural as breathing, and as I rode across the silent plains, I thought for just a second that maybe it was about time for the Ancients to favor someone else.

  But there was no way to change anything now. Even if it was a terrible mistake, we would still march toward the Blood City tomorrow, and we would fight against Wade’s army. Then whoever won would get to set the rules for the whole empire, and whoever lost would be imprisoned or executed.

  It had always been this way, so it would always be this way.

  I couldn’t think of an alternative.

  But as I thought about the steady rising and setting of the sun, and as I let the silence of the empty fields surround me as I rode back toward camp, I let myself think, for half a breath, that maybe things could change… or at least, that maybe they should.

  Either way, we would find out at dawn tomorrow.

  Chapter 19

  I had never imagined when I distilled my first batch of whiskey all those months ago that I would one day stand inside the walls of the Blood City at the head of my own personal army, much less that I would lead my army against the elves to overthrow them once and for all.

  And yet somehow, here I was.

  I strode in between all of my soldiers and archers so I could check in with as many of my troops as possible before I led them out onto the field. It was still completely dark, but I wanted to get onto the battlefield well before dawn, so that we would be ready to meet Tevian’s forces exactly where we wanted to. I wanted to make sure that we would control where we met on the plains, since I had a few surprises in store for the elven general.