Sadness welled inside Tol. Pity and regret were so strong that speech was difficult. “Yes, I can see,” he whispered.
The emperor’s mumbling grew louder and Valaran’s voice rose as well. “Take the dagger, Tol! Kill him! You must! Kill him, Toll!”
He took the heavy golden blade from her hands. It would be easily done. A simple thrust would end Ackal V’s life, as it had ended Egrin’s. A cold shock of pain hit Tol as he remembered: Egrin was dead, killed by Ackal as surely as if the emperor’s hand had held the poisoned blade.
“Egrin-” Tol’s voice broke, but he forced the words out. “Egrin died tonight, killed by Tathman with a poisoned dagger. And Zala, the half-elf huntress, she died in the fight for Caergoth.”
She blinked at him, not understanding, and he added, “Helbin was your ally, too. He has vanished, you know, and is probably dead.”
Valaran turned to stare at her husband. He was stirring more, his mumbled words becoming clearer. Raking her fingers through her long, loose hair, she said, “You’re a warrior, Tol. Haven’t you lost comrades before?”
The polished blade in Tol’s hand was stained with the blood of the slain chamberlain. Tol hadn’t known the man. He might’ve been a cowardly toady, like Wornoth, but he hadn’t deserved to die like that, his throat slit by the very master he served. No one deserved that. No one.
Enough! He threw the dagger to the floor. It skidded across the marble, coming to rest by Dalar’s foot. The prince picked it up.
“It’s done, Valaran. I’m done. And I’m going away. Far away from here.” He held out a hand. “Forget the emperor and come with me.”
Emerald eyes huge, she recoiled. “What are you saying? Go away? I am Empress of Ergoth!”
“All I care about now is you. Come with me, Val. You and your son.”
He could see her breast rise and fall with her rapid breathing. She stared at him, brows knotted in thought. “This is a test. The gods are testing me. That, or else you’re mad.” She gripped her throat with one hand and uttered a short, sharp laugh. “Worse, you’re a coward! Your enemy lies at your feet, and you won’t finish the job! What did all your friends die for? Why did you come here?”
“I’ve done everything I could to save the empire. I won’t stain my soul by killing a helpless man, Val. Not even for you.”
He walked around the prostrate emperor. He was halfway to the doors when Valaran acted. She snatched the dagger from her son’s hands and raced after Tol, white gown flying.
“You can’t leave!” she cried. “The emperor must die, don’t you see? Our lives are forfeit if he survives. He’ll hunt you down, torture you to death! And me! He’ll kill me, Tol! He’ll kill me with his own hands!”
He turned in time to catch her in his arms. Her heart was beating wildly, and ribbons of chestnut hair fell wildly about her face. She radiated fear and fury in equal measure. What he did not sense in her was love.
For more than six years he had survived for one purpose-to be reunited with Valaran. That dream had taken on a poignant reality as he witnessed the suffering Ackal V had inflicted on his people. Now, at the very moment of his triumph, Tol realized his dream was nothing more than that, without substance, without reality.
He was so very weary, in body and in spirit. “Kill him yourself then,” he said.
Fury blazed from Valaran’s eyes. “Do you think I can’t? I’ve killed, Tol, for us! Winath-” She bit off the name, choking back a sob, then insisted, “But the gods would curse me for killing my son’s father!”
He let her go and walked away, out of the palace and out of the Inner City. In the square beyond, the Riders, whispering among themselves, watched him depart, alone and unhurried. Kiya still waited for him. She’d secured two saddle horses and was mounted on one of them. Without a word, he took the reins of the other and swung into the saddle.
Ignoring the questioning hails of Lord Gonzakan, Tol and Kiya cantered away.
Outside the Dragon Gate, Tol paused. Directly ahead, the eastern sky was brightening. Sunrise was not far off. Tol dismounted beneath the imposing reliefs of Volmunaard and Vilesoot and drew Number Six. He jammed the steel blade into a chink between two massive stones, putting all his weight and strength behind it. The saber bored into the mortar to half its length. With both hands Tol pushed down on the hilt. Number Six bent and bent, farther than any iron blade ever could. Just as he began to think the dwarf-forged metal would never yield, it snapped off a span above the hilt.
He returned the stump of the famed saber to his scabbard and swung up into the saddle again.
“Are we done?” asked Kiya.
“We’re done.”
They rode out into the new day.
Monuments
They laid Egrin to rest in Zivilyn’s Carpet. It was Tol’s idea to bury him in a peaceful place, amidst a monument of flowers for a man whose life was war. Tol and the Dom-shu sisters made the journey alone. Tol dug the grave, while Miya sewed a deerskin shroud for her friend and Kiya stood watch with her bow.
No one followed them.
By the time preparations were complete, sunset had come.
Whippoorwills made their mournful calls from the forest.
The meadow itself was quiet, and above it, the clouds crimson
and gold.
As a last gesture, Tol tucked the Irda nullstone into Egrin’s hands, crossed on his chest. “His valiant spirit will guard it now,” he said quietly.
With the grave closed and the earth replaced, night was upon them. The sky had cleared. Red Luin and white Solin sailed the starry sky, casting their light upon the scene. The time had come for the sisters and Tol to part company. Tol had made a difficult choice: solitude.
Miya’s eyes kept turning to the Great Green, the dark forest beckoning her home. Eli awaited her in her father’s village.
“Where will you go?” she asked Tol. Coloring, she added, “I’d like to know, in case I ever need to find you. Is it to be Tarsis?” Despite their recent troubles, she knew Hanira would always find a place for Tol.
He shook his head emphatically. His presence in Tarsis would be a provocation. If Ackal V’s successor didn’t demand his head, Hanira would certainly try to involve him in one of her complicated plots. He’d had enough of war and politics for the time being.
“Some place quiet,” he said.
Miya embraced him with fervor, and whispered, “There’s always a place for you by my fire.”
He smiled. “I am grateful for that,” he said, and held her tightly for moment.
Kiya, her stoicism firmly in place during Egrin’s burial, began to cry. She asked Tol no questions about his future plans. After kissing him on both cheeks, and cuffing the back of his neck, she headed for the forest.
The Dom-shu had no need for horses, so Tol and Miya unsaddled the sisters’ animals and set them free. Tol had not ridden the gray war-horse here. Like the sisters’ horses, his mount this day was a plains pony. After a moment’s reflection, he set his animal free as well. He would seek peace as an ordinary peasant. That’s where he had come from, and that’s where he belonged. No one would search for the vaunted Lord Tolandruth among the humble folk.
A last word to Miya and he set out, striding through the waist-high summer growth.
Miya remained by Egrin’s grave. She watched Tol diminish with distance, until he was lost among the wind-tossed flowers.
The empire endured. The tumultuous events set in motion by the twin invasions of Ergoth did not end when Tol left the capital, but plunged inexorably onward, like a growing avalanche.
In the confusion following Tol’s departure, Ackal V perished. The exact cause of his death was never established. Common rumor had it he killed himself rather than face Lord Tolandruth’s vengeance. His son, Prince Dalar, was proclaimed emperor, and a council of four warlords declared themselves the boy’s regents. Two of them hailed from the Army of the East, Mittigorn and Quevalen. The others were Daltigoth lords, Vanz Hellman and Ryka
rd Gonzakan, the warlord with the blond mustache who had met Tol in the plaza before the Inner City.
The regency of the four warlords ended in less than a year, however, when a new threat arose in the east. A fiery young claimant to the throne of Ackal Ergot, Pakin princess Mellamy Zan, raised her standard on the open plain. Taking advantage of the same discontent that had led so many warlords to rally around Tol, Mellamy raised a sizable army and marched on Daltigoth. Her advance broke apart the alliance of the four regents.
Mittigorn, who was from the east, was accused of secretly sympathizing with the Pretender and executed. Youngest of the regents, Lord Quevalen was maneuvered out of power, leaving two strong generals to vie for sole control. Vanz Hellman, popularly called the Hammer of the Bakali, held his own until fortune forced him to take the field against Mellamy Zan’s army. The Pakin Pretender had a supremely talented general at her side, a mysterious figure who never appeared in public without a mask. A few folk thought her brilliant commander was Lord Tolandruth himself, but no one who actually saw the masked general believed that. The Pretender’s commander was slender and elegant, with a polished voice and elaborate manners. Tol of Juramona was none of those things.
Mellamy Zan’s army crushed Hellman’s hordes at the Battle of the Caer Crossing. Hellman was slain, and Rykard Gonzakan became sole protector of the underage emperor. However, soon after Gonzakan’s ascension to power, Emperor Dalar, who had never been crowned, vanished from history. His fate is unknown, and in time he disappeared even from the roll of Ergothian rulers. He was no more than ten years old.
Mellamy Zan reached the gates of Daltigoth. In a masterful bit of negotiation, a peace parley was proposed by the Red Robe Helbin, who had emerged from hiding after the death of Ackal V. The wizard was a profoundly changed man.
Known before for his fastidious style and calculating brain, now Helbin was colder and coarser, with shaved head and a strange taste for raw meat.
Helbin’s plan called for Mellamy Zan to marry the Ackal heir, a nephew of Ackal V, thus uniting the warring Pakin and Ackal clans. However, unbeknownst to her supporters, Mellamy Zan had formulated her own plan. Realizing the nobles of Ergoth would never accept a woman as their ruler, she secretly applied to certain illegal sorcerers for a rite of transformation. Only days before her scheduled marriage to the Ackal heir, Mellamy Zan became Mellamax Zan, Pakin prince.
All Helbin’s careful work came to naught, and Mellamax did gain the throne of Ergoth for one hundred days until General Gonzakan gathered Ackal loyalists and deposed the Pakin emperor. Bereft of power, unable to keep the dark, mysterious bargain she’d made with the sorcerers, Mellamax once more became Mellamy. She fled to Tarsis, where she lived in eccentric splendor until assassinated by agents of Regent Gonzakan.
Empress Valaran did not long enjoy her freedom from her vicious husband. Lord Hellman wooed her, but she rejected his advances and ended her days a lonely prisoner. Confined to a rocky promontory overlooking the western sea, Valaran was consigned in the same stone keep that once held the deposed Empress Kanira. The governor of her prison was changed twice a year to prevent any one man from falling under the sway of his beautiful, clever captive.
Valaran adapted to life in her remote prison. Her main expenditures were for parchment, quills, and ink. She wrote eighteen additional books before her death: histories, commentaries, and learned discourses on natural philosophy. Her most famous title was The Life of Lord Tolandruth, which predictably was suppressed by the Ergothian regent. Still, copies were smuggled to the capital and circulated in secret, copied in back rooms and cellars. The biography was popular in foreign lands, too, particularly Tarsis. Over the years, many errors-both accidental and intentional-entered the text. Much of what later generations read about Tol of Juramona were copyists’ tall tales.
The mind of the former empress remained acute to the end of her life, it is said. For forty-two years she dwelt in captivity, although as she once remarked to one of her governors, she had in fact been a prisoner from birth-thirty-seven years in the Inner City, forty-two in Kanira’s Keep.
Her only protest against her fate was a symbolic one. She refused to cut her hair. By the time she died, it swept the floor behind her. Although no longer its original warm chestnut shade, the pure white fall was still breathtakingly beautiful. On her deathbed Valaran made only one request: she asked that her hair be cut close to her head and sent away for separate burial. Not to Daltigoth, city of her ancestors, Valaran asked it be interred in the rebuilt city of Juramona. Her last jailer, a young warlord named Gabien Solamna, faithfully carried out the wishes of the former empress.
Uncle Corpse, long-lived chief of the Dom-shu, met his fate while hunting. An enormous boar, the largest ever seen in the Great Green, turned on the hunters pursuing him and gored the old chief. Voyarunta managed to thrust his spear into the beast’s heart. Man and boar perished side by side. The Dom-shu didn’t practice blood succession. A new chief was chosen from the leading men of the tribe.
Miya and her son Eli lived quietly in their forest home, the old woman much respected for her many adventures. Eli, inheriting his father’s facility with his hands, spent six years among the dwarves, learning metalworking. He introduced both iron and steel to the forest tribes.
Kiya married a Dom-shu warrior name Voraduna, a stocky fellow with black hair and eyes, half a span shorter than she. They were together many years, until during a minor fight with the Karad-shu Kiya stopped an arrow. Mortally wounded, she asked her husband not to leave her to the mercy of the enemy. He gave her his dagger. The Karad-shu did not get any prisoners that day.
Hanira, Syndic of Tarsis and mistress of the guild of goldsmith and jewelers, never married again. She lived for twenty-four years after the death of her daughter, Valderra, and when the gods claimed her she was reputed to be the richest woman in the world. It took a hundred laborers three days to empty her personal hoard of coins from the vaults of Golden House.
The forty-three years of war and dynastic struggle that raged after Ackal V’s death were known collectively as the Successors’ War, because each faction put forth new heirs and new claimants to the power of Ergoth as soon as the previous pretenders perished. It was a war of pities and sieges mostly, and the countryside was spared heavy damage.
The eventual victor was Pakin IV-not an Ackal, but a true descendant of the great Pakin Zan. When his armies were sweeping through the Eastern Hundred, one of his scouts became separated from his horde. Confused (one hill looked very like another to the city-bred Rider), he rode down cart tracks and cow paths, searching for his comrades. He could get no help. Frightened peasants fled at his approach.
Early one spring morning, the lost scout came across an old man working a field. The peasant saw him coming but didn’t run away. The Pakin warrior rode up slowly, hailing the farmer in a friendly fashion, and offering a silent prayer to Corij that the oldster could tell him where in Chaos’s name he was.
Stooped and weather-worn, the farmer looked up at him. “Greetings, my lord,” he said readily enough.
“And to you, good man. I’m lost. Can you tell me where I am?”
“This is the Jura Hill Country, my lord,” the peasant replied, leaning against his hoe.
“I know that!” Striving to control his exasperation, the young warrior added, “Where is the nearest town?”
“The village of Pate’s Knob is half a day’s ride that way.” The old man pointed due east with one large hand.
“No, no. Where’s the nearest real town?”
“That would be Juramona, my lord. Three days, north-northeast.”
Relief spread across the rider’s face. He grinned, teeth white against his grimy, sun-baked face.
“Juramona! That’ll do. We took Juramona ten days ago!”
“ ‘We?’ ”
The proud Rider straightened his hack. “The loyal hordes of our rightful emperor, Pakin IV!”
Pursing his lips, the old man nodded slowly. He unh
ooked a heavy gourd from the cloth sash around his neck and offered it to the Rider.
The warrior took it gratefully. After the first swallow, his eyes widened. Instead of the spring water he’d expected, it was filled with potent cider.
The farmer chuckled at his expression. “That will light a fire in your veins, eh, my lord?”
“Indeed! You must have a leather throat to drink this stuff, old man!”
“I’m used to it.” The farmer took the gourd back and drank two quick swallows of cider before hooking the gourd on his sash again. “So, the Pakins took Juramona. By storm or by siege?”
“By storm. We scaled a section of wall by night.”
“Mmm. Not like the old days.”
Warmed by his unexpected libation, the Pakin leaned comfortably on the pommel of his saddle and asked what he meant.
“Juramona used to be a more formidable place. In Marshal Odovar’s day, no one could have scaled the wall and survived.”
The name of the long-ago marshal meant nothing to the twenty-four-year-old warrior. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Were you a soldier once?”
The old man plied his hoe again, loosening the soil along a row of onions. He shook his gray head. “No, my lord. Just a poor farmer.”
The Rider turned his horse in a half-circle, toward the northeast and Juramona. He took a single coin from the purse at his waist and tossed it to the elderly farmer.
“Thanks for your help, old man-and for the drink!” he said, and spurred away.
The farmer let the coin hit the ground. It was a newly minted silver crown and bore a glowering profile. The latest Pakin Pretender must be doing well enough if he had time and money to strike coins.
Raising his hoe, Tol cleaved a dry clump of soil into bits and raked them over the coin. He had no need of it. The directions were free, and so was he.
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