Short Swords: Tales from the Divine Empire (The First Sword Chronicles Book 3)

by Frances Smith

  “Strong?” Miranda said. “As I recall, Quirian ordered it to kill me and you stepped in to defend me from it.”

  “There’s lots of different ways to be strong,” Octavia said. “I’m strong in one way.” A gentle burst of air magic stirred from out of her palm, ruffling through Miranda’s hair like a sudden breeze. “Then there’s the strength that Amy has, the strength that people like Metella and Michael have…and then there’s you. Nobody knows what the right thing to do is like you do.”

  “Nobody mistook what the right thing to do was as colossally as I did,” Miranda replied.

  “Stop talking like that!” Octavia said loudly. “It wasn’t your fault and you can’t spend the rest of your life hating yourself for one mistake, I won’t allow it! I want…I want to help you find the old Miranda again, the one who wouldn’t hesitate to stand up for people needing help, the one who knew that her magic had been given to her to help people…the one who glowed with pride when she realised just how much power she had to change the world.”

  Miranda smiled. “Yes, I’d like to be that Miranda again, too. She was much more naïve, and more idealistic, though she covered it in a sauce of cynicism so thick that I doubt most could taste the dish beneath. But I’m not sure that it’s possible, after what I’ve done.”

  “You’ll get there,” Octavia said. “With my help, you’ll get there.”

  Miranda nodded, in an almost perfunctory fashion. “How was your exercise?”

  “No substitute for flying, but better than nothing,” Octavia said. “It’s funny, for years and years I hid my wings and never thought about them, and it never bothered me. Now that you’ve helped me to…well, spread my wings I suppose,” Octavia cringed a little at her own pun. “I find I can’t keep them still for too long.” Her smile faltered a little. “If only you weren’t hiding your own wings so well.”

  “I’m using magic again, aren’t I?” Miranda said, gesturing with her head upwards towards the ball of light above them.

  “Yes, you are, so I’ll stop nagging now,” Octavia assured her. “What are you reading?”

  “Aristogiton’s treatise on anatomy,” Miranda said. “I learned what I know about the human body from practice, but the library has some fascinating works on the subject. It’s quite humbling to realise just how much I didn’t know.”

  Miranda glanced up as Glauce, one of the slaves kept in the villa, strode briskly out onto the porch. She was a petite thing, with her back straight and her hands clasped behind her, but whenever Miranda looked into her eyes she could not escape the feeling that there was more strength and substance to her than there seemed at first glance. She bowed slightly. “Can I get you anything, ma’am?”

  “No, thank you,” Miranda murmured. In truth she was not, and never had been, comfortable around slaves of any sort. She didn’t understand how anyone could be comfortable around someone they were keeping in chains. It was all she could do to put aside her fears of poisoning and eat her dinner. If she ever got out of here she would attempt to persuade Princess Romana to free the slaves here. Not that the princess was likely to listen, but that was no excuse for Miranda not to try.

  “Very good, ma’am,” Glauce said, in a tone so obsequious that Miranda was certain it was put on. “And you, Filia Octavia? Lads?”

  Lucius grinned. “I’ll take a kiss from you, Glauce, if you’re offering.”

  “Ooh, cheeky sod,” Glauce said with a laugh, but there was a flash of something in her eyes that Miranda could not quite place. Anger? Disgust? Fear? All three?

  Who are you really? Or should that be what?

  “Your accent,” Remus muttered. “That’s mountains, isn’t it? Oretine?”

  Now it was definitely fear that Miranda could see in Glauce’s eyes. Personally, Miranda thought that she had an Eternal Pantheia accent, and quite a thick one as well, but Remus’ words had definitely had some effect on her.

  “I…I don’t know what you mean, sir. I’m a city girl, born and bred in the Subura.”

  “No you’re not,” Remus said, his speech as slow and deliberate as his advance upon her. “You wear it well, but I can hear the truth underneath.” He took her by the arm, leaning in to murmur in her ear so softly that Miranda could barely hear him. “You want to be careful, girl. If I were you, I should run, and quickly too.” He let her go.

  Glauce backed away from him a step looking distinctly frazzled. “Well, if there’s nothing that you want ma’am…” she practically fled back inside the villa.

  A befuddled expression settled upon Lucius’ brow. “What was all that about Remus?”

  “What I recognised, others will too,” Remus said. “Gabinius, the Sergeant Major, others maybe. I let her know her secret won’t stay hidden. Told her she should get out while she can.”

  “Why should she need to get out?” Miranda asked. “What here could be so terrible that she would risk the punishment for fleeing her master?”

  “I reckon you might find out, Filia, before too long,” Remus muttered. “If you’re still around.”

  “Hey, Remus, where are you going?”

  Remus Askallochus Castra paused, halfway into turning away from the rest of his four man patrol. Night had fallen on the villa; the moonlight was augmented by a burning torch held in the hands of Catilina. Catilina and Segestus, the fourth man of the patrol, were both staring at him strangely, as though they feared that he was mad…no, they already thought he was mad, they were looking at him as though he might be the killer, slinking off into the darkness to plot more murders or something. The thought was enough to put a wry smile upon his wrinkled, weathered face.

  They had worse to worry about than one old soldier with a bundle-load of guilt on his back, if his suspicions proved true.

  “Hey, Remus,” snapped Optio Callimachus, planting his spear butt into the grass. “I asked you a question, guardsman.”

  Yes, and I heard you the first time you asked, it damn you, Remus thought. Callimachus’ promotion was nearly new, and didn’t he know it. He liked to make sure that everyone else knew it, too.

  “I need to relieve myself,” Remus muttered.

  Callimachus’ over-long nose wrinkled in disgust. “Can’t you hold it in till we get back to the villa? Our sweep will be done soon and then you can do it somewhere safe like.”

  “I need to go now,” Remus said flatly.

  “We’re supposed to stick together,” Segestus whispered. “Not go wandering off by ourselves.”

  “Exactly, that was the Major’s order,” Callimachus said. “If you get lost in those trees we’ll have the Eldest’s own job finding you again. Clench your cheeks and hold on until we’re done.”

  “I need to go when I need to go,” Remus said. “You want me to spray all over you?”

  Callimachus’ nose wrinkled in disgust again, with the extra wrinkles conveying the greater disgust. “Alright, if you must; but don’t go too far and be quick about it. Then catch up with the rest of us, at the double.”

  Catilina smirked. “You really are getting old, aren’t you? Maybe you should talk to the major about an early discharge, seems you’re not up to this any more.”

  “Watch your mouth, boy,” Callimachus said. “Cubs don’t get to mock the wolves until they’ve got some scars on them.”

  Catilina paled. “Yes, Optio. Sorry, Optio.”

  Remus snorted. “Thank you kindly, Optio, for everything.” At least I won’t have to put up with you or the cocky little sod or any of the rest of them for much longer.

  Maybe not any longer, after tonight.

  He turned away, hearing them go on without him as he himself made his way a little into the trees that made up the south garden. He stomped past a silver birch, one that looked proper silver for once, although it could have been the moonlight, but he came to a weeping willow tree, with green leaves hanging down in front of his face. Strangest thing, as he raised one hand to brush the leaves aside he swore that he could hear someone sobbing.


  “No…no, please don’t hurt him…please, please he’s only a boy.”

  Remus’ grey eyes widened. No. It couldn’t have been. Not really. He…he was remembering, surely. He couldn’t have…he’d heard that before. He never stopped hearing it.

  Please, he’s only a boy.

  A boy old enough to carry a sword.

  He never did. He stays here, with me, he watches the sheep. Please, he’s all I have since his father died.

  I’ve got my orders.

  “Damn it,” Remus growled, clenching his right hand into a fist, closing his eyes and screwing up his face as he tried to force the memories out. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” It wasn’t the worst thing that he’d done in the war, but it was the act that had stuck with him the most. Probably because of her. Because of the boy’s mother, the way she’d pleaded for his life.

  I’ve got my orders.

  She’d killed herself, that boy’s mother. She’d thrown herself off the cliff rather than be alone. From the look on her face she’d been dead before she even took the leap. He’d never forget that look.

  He’d been such a coward then. A coward for following his orders, a coward for not disobeying. Some units had mutinied against the worst of what they were asked to do in Oretar: the Fighting Fifth, the Old Dozen, the Foot Cavalry, they’d all ground arms and refused to do the brute work that was asked of them. But not him, not Remus Askallochus Castra, not the Foot Guards. They’d had their orders, and they had carried out those orders no matter what.

  He’d been such a coward then.

  They were all such cowards.

  “Please, he’s only a boy.” There it was again, her voice in the breeze, appealing in vain to his better nature.

  “In the name of all the gods, have mercy!”

  “How are we supposed to survive the winter with our stores burned?”

  “Isn’t there a single scrap of goodness in you?”

  They were coming from all around him now, voices begging him, appealing to him, cursing him, demanding answers that he didn’t have. The voices of the dead, springing out of the earth to claim his ears again.

  “I know,” he said hoarsely, his voice grim but at the same time without fear. He knew what was coming now, and he was not afraid of it. He’d had this coming for a long time. Too long. It was a relief to get it over with now.

  Remus cast his shield aside. It landed with a rattle on the ground. With slow deliberation he unbuckled his sword belt and dropped it on the ground beside him.

  “You might as well come out now, there’s no point you playing games with me,” he said. “I know what you want, and all I can say is hurry up and take it. I know I did wrong, I know I have to answer. I’m not afraid.”

  “’I’m not afraid.’ Mortal, you have no idea how many times in our long lives we have heard our victim say ‘I’m not afraid.’” The voice was sinuous, serpentine, a soft caress of a hiss coming out of the night, accompanied by low humming from either side. All of it was advancing upon him.

  The sound of the humming intensified, its rhythm becoming faster, harsher, the way that the drumbeat changed when the order came to advance at the double towards the enemy. Three…three things stepped out of the darkness, the moonlight reflecting upon their skin.

  They looked like monsters. Monsters with just enough of women about them to be not at all like women, and yet more monstrous because of the way they seemed alike. Their skin was green, and rotted and flaked and cracking in places, and there were holes in their leathery wings, wings like bats they had, and long claws sticking out of their fingers, and snakes coiled around their waists like belts or something. The snakes hissed at him, with the same rhythm as the humming of the monsters themselves.

  “Are you afraid now, Remus Askallochus Castra?” the middle of three of them asked, showing her fangs and her forked tongue as she spoke. Her eyes were black as night, and in the night they were like holes in her head, holes that he felt as though was going to fall through if he stared into them long enough. Her hair…gods save him her hair looked like the spines of dead men, like bones, and on the end of every spine there was a skull, human skulls and a few other things he didn’t reckon he’d ever seen before. They waved up and down, up and down, up and down like flowers brushed by the wind into some sort of nightmare garden, moaning and groaning like just feeling the air put them in pain.

  Remus hadn’t actually needed a piss when he had left his patrol behind, but he felt something warm and wet running down his leg all the same.

  “I’m afraid,” he confessed.

  “Good,” she whispered, her voice a sibilant caress. “For I am Tyria, the Fury of Justice, and these are my sisters. We are here to punish you for the sins that blacken your soul.”

  “As we will punish all the sinners who blight this place,” snarled the one on the right, with hair of ice.

  “And sate our long-nurtured hunger with a hunt for wickedness as we have never known,” hissed the one on the left, whose hair was a fiery inferno burning in the darkness.

  “For we are the old gods,” they chanted in unison. “And we will punish evil wherever we find it.”

  “Are you prepared, mortal,” Tyria said. “Are you ready to face the justice that your crimes have earned you?”

  “I…I am,” he stammered.

  The one with the flaming hair snarled in anger. “What a weak mortal he is, to yield so easily.”

  “The others resisted,” said the one with hair of ice.

  “Not enough, where is the hunt I have craved?”

  “The hunt is not our aim,” Tyria snapped. “The punishment is.” A whip appeared in her hands, a whip of smoke emerging as he looked at it, starting in her clawed hand and growing outwards until it was a score of feet in length at least, with sharp teeth like an animal. It coiled like a snake, moving up and down and twisting about like it was alive.

  Quick as a snake it wrapped itself around his neck, biting into his flesh so tight that he would have screamed in pain except that he could hardly breathe. Remus’ eyes bulged as, with a simple tug, Tyria pulled him to the ground. Even the blades of grass seemed to stab at his face.

  “As you sinned, so shall you suffer,” Tyria snarled as an axe made of crude stone, jagged and rough, appeared in her free hand. “This shall hurt exactly as much as you deserve.”

  II

  Retribution

  “You complete and utter prat!” Sergeant Major Mezentius snarled into Callimachus’ face. “What part of stick together was too complicated for you to understand?”

  “He only went to take a-“ Callimachus began.

  “Then you should have held onto it for him shouldn’t you!” Mezentius’ bellowed. “Now look at him!”

  Remus had been impaled to the trunk of a willow tree. His own sword was being used to hold him there, driven through his chest and back and into the wood itself, buried up to the bloody hilt that was bloody in every sense of the word. The old bugger’s head was bowed, his chin resting on his chest and his grey hair falling down like he was asleep or something. Brushing some of it out the way, Gabinius could see that his eyes had been burned out, same as Gaius and Publius, and there was the same smell of acrid smoke rising up out of his corpse.

  Someone had carved the word ‘Murderer’ across his face; the letters appeared to ripple with the lines and wrinkles in his skin.

  “Is it the same again?” Major Severus demanded.

  Gabinius stepped back from the body, reflexively standing to attention as he addressed the commanding officer. “The bastards left his tongue this time, sir, and his hands. But whatever magic they’re using, they used it here as well.”

  “I wonder why they didn’t take the hands,” Lieutenant Cornovius murmured.

  Why do you think, you little prick? Gabinius thought. He really couldn’t stand Lieutenant bloody Cornovius, upon his soul he couldn’t. Major Severus was a good man, a fighting soldier, a real officer with calluses on his hands and scars on his
soul just like them, but Lieutenant Cornovius was a boy, and if there was one thing Gabinius had come to loathe about the Imperial Army it was boys without so much as fluff on their cheeks giving orders to seasoned men, and getting them killed with those selfsame orders like as not.

  In fact he had a good mind to open his mouth and let the Lieutenant know exactly what he thought about him, but Sergeant Major Mezentius caught his eye and gave him a subtle shake of the head to tell him to back off. Gabinius swallowed his bile. The Sergeant Major knew his business, and if he told him to let it go then he would. So, with some effort, Gabinius kept his tone even as he said, “Probably they didn’t need to, sir. They made their message more explicit this time.” ‘Murderer’, written on his bloody face. It didn’t get much clearer than that, did it?

  As well as the two officers and the Sergeant Major, most of the guard detail was here, gathered around the dead body of one of their own, lighting up the dark with torches. The light glinted off a score of drawn swords, while men held their shields ready in case something sprang out of the night at them.

  Gabinius did not draw his sword. Not the short sword hanging from his belt, and certainly not the two-handed sword slung across his back. His grey lady, his reward from the Emperor for valour in the field. He only drew her when there was blood to be shedding.

  With any luck he’d get the chance to draw her soon. Someone needed to have their skin cut that was for sure.

  “It wasn’t Filia Miranda, sir,” Lieutenant Cornovius said. “She’s been in her room since nightfall. I left Demophon and Turnus on the door.”

  Proves nothing, Gabinius thought. Who knows what she’s capable of with that magic of hers? The Empress ought to have cut off her head and been done with it.

  “Good,” Major Severus said. “Make sure that it stays that way.”

  “Orders, sir?” Sergeant Major Mezentius asked.

  “Pull everyone back inside the villa,” the major said. “We’ll bar the doors, and I will write to Ilpua and Eternal Pantheia for reinforcements.”