by Dragon Lance
Despite a makeshift sling on one arm, Titus was putting his gargantuan strength to use, lifting sections of sculpture to release victims. In time, the rescuers would reach Vinas, too. He wondered if he would live long enough.
It didn’t matter. Let him share his father’s death day – Vinas, who had done nothing for his family or his nation, and Adrenas, who had done everything.
Then, there was a face near his, and soft words. Vinas suddenly, very desperately, wanted to live.
“Hello, Luce. It’s good to see you.”
Meus Pater
He knelt in the cold, dripping undercroft of the temple. Its massive pillars and thick-muscled vaults seemed deep, dank mockeries of the bright clean temple.
It is an honor for Father to be buried here, Vinas told himself, here among monks and heroes and kings.
“Hello, Father,” Vinas said quietly. He coughed, his lungs still mending.” You were right. You saved the emperor, saved the empire. Emann himself has said so. He was pleased with your sacrifice.”
Words failed Vinas for a moment. He gazed up into the gritty stone vault. “He was pleased with me, too. He’s reconsidered my actions at Solanthus, in the light of my having saved him. He seems to think a colonel with the morality of a priest would make a good commander of the imperial guard. I told him I would have been a better commander if I’d captured the assassins, not just scared them off.” Vinas shrugged. “The emperor said it’s all the more reason to have me around, to catch them the next time.”
“I guess I’ll like the position. It’s military, at least, and it will keep me close to the estate, now that I must run it. Gaias will be my second. I told you about him. Oh, and guess who was appointed the new underchancellor? Yes, Titus. He’ll do far better than I did.
“By the way, Luccia is back,” he continued. “I’m glad. A foolish dreamer such as I needs his friends around, to catch him when he falls. I’ll try to get her a spot in the mounted guard.
He paused, thinking back through his own words. “I suppose I’m telling you all of this because I want you to know I have others to help me now. Thank you for all the guidance you gave me. While you were alive, I seemed to ignore your wisdom, but now I savor every piece of it. Some day, I’ll even heed it.
“Thank you, Father, for everything. I’d better get back. The guard won’t run itself.” He rose, dusting the dirt from his knees. The tamped mound where his father lay seemed too small to hold a man who had been all the world to him. Vinas dropped a single red rose on the spot.
“Good-bye.”
Part II
TEMPERANCE
Interlude
Five Years Hence, 14 Phoenix, 1193 Age of Light
The young empress sat in the tower window, breath coming and going in rapid bursts. She looked white and frail on the sill.
Behind her, the sorcerer Caitiff moved among his occult instruments. His smooth elven voice circled in dark mutterings.
Empress Phrygia did not listen. The words were not for her. She came here not for the wizard’s company, but for the solitude. This was the only chamber her husband hesitated to enter.
Panting, she turned outward, toward Daltigoth. The wintry city was huge and hard, built up of quarried limestone and scoured by sleet and snow. Its people picked their ways along the streets. Their ragged shawls could not block the sharp jab of winter winds or even the sharper pokes of guardsmen’s harassing halberds.
Daltigoth was nothing like her small, warm home – Redroth. There, she had been everything to everyone: darling daughter to the duke, desire of every baron’s son, friend of orphans, maiden of the fields. She had thought marrying the emperor would make her everything in Ergoth, too.
It should have. But the emperor treated his people like chickens. He kept them penned and cooped, guarded from wild foxes, but ever ready for the farmer’s axe. If she was anything to the people, she was a stuffed game cock mounted over the mantel – the dead symbol of their enslavement. She was not a wife, but a trophy, not an empress, but a living corpse.
Even now in his private chambers, her so-called husband lavished warm attentions on a conquest more exotic than she.
Phrygia shook her head, flushing in rage beneath her freckles. Anger had always been her ally. Through anger, she had cowed her father and impressed her people. It had made her ruler of Redroth. But what good was her anger in a place like this?
Phrygia spat. The spittle struck an invisible ward of magic, spun in fragments, and sizzled away.
“... and I was the one who chose you, not Emann...” the elven warlock muttered to himself.
“You what?” she asked, turning. Her eyes were hard above her red cheeks.
The sorcerer raised his black-cowled head. He never removed the obscuring hood, even indoors, and as often as she had struggled to see beneath it, she had only glimpsed feverish eyes and a smile that glinted like quicksilver. “You heard that, then, did you, Empress?” Caitiff asked. “It is, perhaps, the first time you have heard anything I have said these five years.”
Phrygia crossed arms over her chest and stared into the blackness of the man’s face. “All this time I blamed Emann for my plight, but it was you.... You brought me here.”
“What plight?” demanded the sorcerer. “I put you in line to become the most powerful woman in Ansalon.”
“Most powerful?” she said with a laugh. “I’m a figurehead, strapped to the front of a rat-riddled, bilge-flooded ship.”
“I didn’t say you were the most powerful, but that you were in line to be the most powerful,” he said. “I chose you because you had a passion for manipulation. You wanted more than anything else to rule. But you have disappointed me, time and again.”
“Disappointed you? I care nothing for what you want or think,” Phrygia replied haughtily. She then became defensive. “Besides, I have no power. The emperor keeps me hostage.”
“The emperor is a lecherous fool,” Caitiff shouted virulently.
Suddenly, the warlock dropped the cowl from his head. Fabric fell away from a face that was not merely ancient, but, in fact, necrotic. Where eyes should have been were only two vacant pits, red motes of unholy fire circling within them. Elven ears had worn away to nubs. Cheekbones jutted yellow and foul through rawhide flesh. Lips had broken away, leaving chiseled teeth to smile in eerie array. “Emann is a fool. I did not defeat death only to in turn be defeated by an incompetent, mincing fool.”
Phrygia gasped, drawing back. She looked at the man’s hands, which had always seemed old, but never skeletal. With the removal of the cowl, all of the lich’s wards had fallen. She smelled him. She saw the maggots writhe. She heard the dry grind of bone on bone as he slowly stalked toward her, “You – you monster....” she said, gagging. “When the emperor learns of this...”
“He knows,” said the dead thing. “He chose me, not I him. I am the reason he rules this continent. Had the Silvanesti or Qualinesti kings honored me, they would rule Ansalon. Instead, I have given the power of ancient elven black arts to your unelven husband. He, though, has proven unworthy to wield them.”
She retreated to the wall. It damply pressed against her back. “What do you want from me?”
“Don’t act so coy,” Caitiff said. “You ruled Redroth with winks and temper tantrums. It’s taken you five years to learn that such things are insufficient for ruling Daltigoth. You wish to rule all Ergoth, but haven’t had sufficient sorcerous might... until now.”
He was very close. Her every fearful breath drew his grave-stench into her throat. “What, and sit on a throne beside a dead thing?”
The corpse’s head shook slowly. Vertebrae ground like chalk. “You would do anything to rule, even sit beside me. Lucky for both of us, it won’t come to that.
“I know of your true desires. There is an ambitious warrior that you lust for. Once corrupted, he would make a far greater emperor than I.”
Phrygia’s heart leapt in her breast. That desire – it was lust, truly, not love – w
as a secret spoken to no one. This lich could strum her heart as if it were a lyre.
Phrygia suddenly saw him, the armor-bedecked young warrior. His image had formed from the red motes in the eye sockets of the lich.
Phrygia whispered, “Vinas Solamnus.”
IV
Six Years Hence, 23 Corij, 1199 Age of Light
High atop a tower in Castle Daltigoth, Vinas Solamnus, commander of the Ergothian Imperial Guard, watched the late-setting sun of summer. This vantage point was the best in all Daltigoth. Though the sun had already abandoned the rest of the city – the rest of western Ansalon, even – it still shone atop the wizard’s tower. Vinas breathed deeply as purple shadows of twilight welled up like cold water in the stone streets below.
The cool hush of night was approaching. The summer day had been all sweat and grit and hard work. The summer night, caressing his bathed and liveried flesh, promised to be a cool spectacle of vibrant stars.
Here, above the bustling dangers of the city, Vinas always felt contentment and peace. He imagined he could hear the sighs of citizens in their chambers. Perhaps the breath from their mouths became breezes that wafted among the trees and banished the hot air of daytime. Here, above it all, he could see the pattern of city streets – villas, shops, hovels.
He felt rejuvenated by the sight. This high loft gave him a view into the ways humans organized themselves, both in creation and destruction. He saw how their roofs shed rain, how their walls kept out strangers, how their streets followed the ancient terrain. In short, he saw how humans lived.
Such insight and foresight had made him the most recognized and respected soldier in all the emperor’s armies. Single-handedly, Vinas Solamnus had foiled twelve different assassination attempts. On each occasion except the first, he had captured the perpetrators, turned them over for interrogation, and seen their dead forms tossed into the buzzard yard – as befitted traitors.
In all cases except the first. He still sought that scarfaced man and his childlike accomplice. The trail was a decade cold, but someday he would track them down.
He had grown into his position. The scaffolding of youth had been filled in with large, strong muscles. His bulk made him appear taller than most folk, his bulk and the cocky tilt of his head. He had slain enough men, now, for his eyes to honestly smolder beneath his dark brows, and a decade’s worth of teeth-clenching battle had only strengthened an already prominent jawline. The very cut of his figure was dashing, elegant, and deadly, like the sharp curl of a scimitar.
“Ah, Daltigoth – Ergoth, I have grown to love you,” Vinas said wistfully as the sun at last quit the sky and slid behind the distant purple hills.
“Is that all you soldiers love,” asked a suggestive voice, “cities and empires?”
Vinas turned about to see the empress standing at the trapdoor behind him. She was no longer the frail girl the emperor had married, but a slim, strong, beautiful woman. Not that the emperor noticed. He cared little for his “speckle-bellied pony,” as he still called her. After two years in ardent pursuit of pregnancy, the emperor had declared his wife sterile, and adopted a bevy of official concubines. With them, he had already sired thirteen children, seven of whom were boys in line for his throne. The king despised his wife and had made her an outcast in her own castle. She, thus, confided more often in Commander Solamnus than in her own husband.
“Empress Phrygia,” said Vinas in surprise, dropping to one knee in a formal bow, “it is a long climb up here after so hot a day.”
Only a glow in her freckled cheeks betrayed any sign of exertion. The heavy cape and cowl she wore were as crisp and dry as if just donned. As Vinas rose from his knee, she said, “You haven’t answered my question, Commander. Is that all you love – cities and empires?”
Vinas flushed, uncomfortable at the teasing. “There are other things, milady.” The moment the words were spoken he realized how stiff they sounded. With a little smile, he elaborated, “We like swords and battles, too.”
Phrygia laughed. It was a laugh unsullied by this decade at court, still the laugh of a country lass. “Forgive me, Commander. I should know better than to treat you the way I treat Emann’s generals. After all, you can recognize sarcasm.”
“Can I?” Vinas replied, then added, “Or, I should say, may I?”
The empress laughed again and then nodded seriously. “Commander, you may.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said informally. Turning back toward the darkening sky, he commented, “I was just enjoying the sunset. I am afraid you arrived a moment too late.”
“Isn’t that always the way with me?” the empress said, walking up to stand beside him. “After all, I met you just a moment after I was married to Emann....”
“Is that sarcasm, Majesty?” asked Vinas, hoping to dismiss the implication. He was certainly not blind to the empress’s interest in him, nor was the attraction one-sided. But she was still the emperor’s wife. Emann would not take cuckolding lightly.
The smile on Phrygia’s face waned just slightly. “No, not sarcasm. Sarcasm is saying the opposite of what you mean. That was not sarcasm, but irony – when an action meant to secure one end in fact secures its opposite.”
“I see. Thank you for the lesson, Empress,” Vinas said stiffly. “I’ll never again lose a battle due to irony.”
The royal lady’s bearing seemed to slip a little. For a moment even her regal clothes could not hide her vulnerable humanity. “Oh, you will. If my experience holds any truth, you most certainly will.”
Vinas stared out at the rolling gray clouds of twilight, pleased at how distant and orderly their turmoil seemed. “You don’t need to worry, Majesty. I’ve purged this land of assassins. I’ve cleansed this place of madmen. You have nothing to fear from dissident peasants or scheming senators. You are safe.”
“Safe,” she spat hatefully. She turned toward him, seeming at first to be shivering from the cold, but in fact trembling with unshed tears. “Is that it, then? Is that what my life is to be – safe? Safe and empty?”
“You are a woman,” said Vinas softly, trying to comfort her. “The world is a brutal place for women. Safety is no small thing in such a place.”
Now tears were streaming down her cheeks. With desperation, she looked into his eyes. “Do you remember my wedding day? Do you remember how terrified I was, just from the black watchmen marching? And then, assassins on the dais and assassins in the ceiling. On that night, I thought I would never be safe again. But I didn’t mind. With the responsibility and romance and power of being empress, there would be danger, I thought. I was wrong. Emann never gave me any responsibility, any power, outside of bearing him heirs. When I failed in that, I failed in everything. Meanwhile you took away the one last thing I had. You took away the danger, made me safe. Well, I don’t want to be safe anymore. You know how I feel, and I know you feel the same —”
“Your Majesty,” Vinas interrupted gently, “how many times have we talked about this? What we feel doesn’t matter. You must continue to be his wife, even though he does not love you, and I must continue to be his commander, even though I often despise the laws I enforce. There is a greater good here, something bigger than either of us, or our feelings. Bigger than Emann, even. Your husband is not simply a man; he is the empire.”
“Don’t you see, Vinas? We are the same, you and I. We’re both trapped. You were once a young dreamer, marching through a blizzard to deliver bread to starving peasants. Now, those are the same people you hunt down as traitors. I was once a young noble flower, dancing among the quaking aspens of Redroth. Now I’m a husk, a dried up thing without any vitality, without petals for my thorns. He took us as we were and made us what we never wanted to be.”
Vinas shook his head, his hands settling on the empress’s arms. “I have always wanted to be a warrior. I have become the finest warrior in all of Daltigoth. You have always wanted to be a beautiful woman, and look, you have no equal in Ergoth.”
She cast an accusin
g gesture out into the deepening gloom, toward the wall of Castle Daltigoth, where torches were winking to light as guards walked among them. “Look. They see us here. They see you touch my arms. Do you think they are blind? Do you think they do not talk about us?”
“Garrison chatter is just that,” Vinas said. “The only defense we have against it is that it is false.”
“Let’s escape from here, Vinas. Let’s go somewhere beyond the reach of Emann and his cursed empire.”
“Nothing is beyond his reach,” said the commander. “Nothing.”
She studied his face. “You really do believe that, don’t you?”
He nodded. “With every fiber of my being.”
She approached the battlements and gazed down into the castle yard. “Do you see that garden, Vinas?”
He didn’t move, didn’t look down. “I have seen it every day for ten years, as I marched out in service to your husband.”
“When I came, it was untended, unloved. I planted flowers, every color and kind I could lay hands on. It became a riotous place, peasantlike and disorganized, with daisies beside lilies beside tulips.”
“I remember,” he said with quiet appreciation.
“It was chaotic and wild, but it fit me,” she continued. “It was a happy place. But after three years of infertility, I was too upset to tend the place anymore. It went to the weeds. So did the Emperor. He went to the weeds, to the bronze-skinned whores – to the Gates of Daltigoth, as they are called, because every man in the place has been through them. Do you remember my garden then? I burned the weeds and planted white lilies. I was mourning them, you see – not just the children I couldn’t have, but the ones that the other women did have.”