“The tomb is full of them,” Lannius said as he crouched down beside Stesichus. “As many rubies as there is blood in your veins, and ripe for the taking.”
“And you’re telling me this because…?”
“How big a share do you get, out of the profits of this company?” Lannius asked.
“The least share of anyone,” Stesichus said sourly. Even the lad got a bigger share than he did, and Set’s balls hadn’t even dropped yet. They all took Stesichus for granted just because he wasn’t strong or small or clever, so that made it okay to treat him like dirt. Well, one of these he was going to...he was going to put up with it, like he always did, which was exactly why they did it.
Lannius nodded sympathetically. “All I need to get the rubies is a strong back to carry them out of the tomb, for which service I am offering you half of all the treasure that we find.” He smiled. “Provided of course that you can keep your mouth shut about what we’ve done.”
Stesichus nodded. The biggest haul we’ve ever had and you won’t even know you missed it! “Nobody will hear a word from me.”
“Excellent,” Lannius said. “Come on, we have work to do.”
They stole from Stesichus’ tent. No one in the camp noticed them or, at least, no one stopped them. Stesichus could hear sounds coming from the captain’s tent, and whatever made that sound was keeping the captain too preoccupied to notice Stesichus’ departure. Julia was on watch, but she had her hands over her ears to block out the sounds from the captain’s tent, and she was facing the wrong way see to Stesichus and Lannius slip by.
Lannius led the way up the narrow mountain trail, branches and bushes making way for him as he passed by. Or at least that was how it felt to Stesichus when those same branches smacked him in the face. In the dark, it also seemed like the plants bowed to Lannius as he swept on past them. But to be sure that was just the dark talking, and in the daylight he would have seen what was really going on. The rubies; think about the rubies.
Think about what he could buy with the rubies. Lannius had given him a sack to carry up, and half the filling of that sack would be a fine haul indeed.
He could buy land, he could buy houses, he could buy out one of the Empire’s great families and live the rest of his life as a fine gentleman. In Eternal Pantheia now there was an upstart bull from out Corona who had been made a lord for killing a man. Why should not robbing a tomb take him so far?
Stesichus had grown up in Turma province, on land owned by Lord Manzikes, the old man who died a half-year past. Stesichus had seen his daughter out riding a few times, a pretty thing with golden hair. She’d not seen him of course; she’d been given in marriage to the Lord Commenae when he’d still been a boy. But all the lords would be lining up to sell him their pretty gold-haired daughters for a taste of the fortune he’d win tonight.
Lannius stopped, turning to his right. Stesichus squinted in the gloom.
Had they reached the tomb? Were riches so close to his grasp?
“Yes,” Lannius declared. “We are arrived. The time is near at hand.”
He raised one hand, and a ball of brilliant white sprang from his upraised palm to hover in the air, casting a white glow around him.
Stesichus’ eyes widened. “Was that...sorcery?”
“You make it sound so impressive,” Lannius said with a laugh. “Any elven child, properly trained, could do as much and more.”
“But sorcery is forbidden by the gods!”
Lannius laughed. “Oh, I’m sure they’ll make an exception for little me.” He glanced at Stesichus. “Besides, is it the approval of the gods you want, or is it riches?”
“Good point, sir.”
Lannius chuckled. He gestured ahead of him. “Lead the way, the door is open.”
Stesichus could see that for himself that now his attention had been drawn to the fact. One of the bronze doors had been pushed back so far that even Brodir could have entered.
“How?” he whispered.
“A simple incantation, as it turned out,” Lannius said. “The name of Iriali’s mother in elvish, orcish and the aestival tongue of Thanates, Iriali’s grandmother. Beltor has a sentimental streak it appears. Come, lead the way.”
“You’ve got the light,” Stesichus said.
“I’ve also got the money,” replied Lannius.
In truth, Stesichus was beginning to wonder what was to stop him killing Lannius and taking all the rubies for himself; but that would have to wait until after he had the gems, lest they prove hard to find. So he slung the sack over his shoulder and crept forward, passing briefly through the light that surrounded Lannius Martius and through the dark crevice in the doorway that led into Iliari’s tomb.
Lannius followed, and by the light he cast Stesichus could see that, when Filia Minerva described the place as a magnificent tomb, she had been absolutely full of it. The walls were grey, and though they had murals on them who really cared about that? Just pictures in stone of no use to anyone. The same with the fading paintings on the cavernous ceiling. What was the point? This was a tomb, did dead fellows like art? Probably not. The only things worth having in a tomb were things of use to future generations, like treasure, of which there was none here, save for a gilded sarcophagus that, even if the gold was real and not leaf over wood or some such, was too big to be carried away on its own. The sapphires for the eyes might be real, but it was a far cry from the riches he had dreamt of. Aside from the sarcophagus there was only a pile of weapons – sword, shield, spear, javelin – occupying this grey space. Certainly there were no piles of rubies.
“There’s nothing here,” Stesichus said, his tone sitting between accusation and resignation. Yes, Lannius had lied to him, but probably not intentionally. Most of their jobs ended up this way: the client came to them full of grand theories and in the end it ceptic came to nothing or to so little reward as to be scarce worth the cost of acquiring it.
Lannius chuckled. Stesichus was starting to dislike the sound. “Of course the treasure’s not just lying around. It’s in the sarcophagus.”
Stesichus looked at him ceptically. Lannius shrugged, so Stesichus squared his shoulders and approached the sarcophagus. It looked like the woman on the door outside, as best he could tell, this Iriali they’d been talking about. In the light provided by Lannius, Stesichus examined the sarcophagus, found the join between the two halves, and pried it open.
The lid opened with a pop to reveal...a dead body.
A dessicated, withered, grey dead body, lying in repose. Stesichus counted himself lucky it didn’t smell.
He turned away. “This has been a complete waste of time! There are no-“
The knife sliding under his ribs made him gasp for breath. Stesichus tried to cry out as Lannis stuck him again, but all the breath had been driven from him.
“Drops of blood often resemble rubies, don’t you think?” Lannius asked, as Stesichus blood spattered on the moldering body. “When spilled, anyway.”
Stesichus tried to speak, tried to scream, tried to...anything. But he could not. All he could do was stare at Lannius who wore a look upon his face so gleeful that it was obscene.
“Oh, don’t look like that!” Lannius cried. “Did you honestly not see this coming?”
Lenwar, god of mischief, chaos, borders and outsiders, held Stesichus’ body in place, watching as his life blood fell upon Iriali’s face and was absorbed by the grey, withered flesh.
“Silwa and Beltor you pair of fools,” he muttered. It was as he had suspected: though Iriali had betrayed them both they had been too soft to kill her. Instead they had placed her into a sleep like death and locked her away in this tomb. A sleep from which he would awaken her, and restore her atrophied strength with borrowed life. Already the wrinkles on her skin were beginning to smooth, the greyness of it returning to a more living colour.
Lenwar threw the corpse of Stesichus idly across the room.
“Iriali, awaken,” Lenwar murmured in the tongue of the aelfer
for whom she had rebelled against heaven. “Awaken, daughter of Beltor; awaken, spirit of the war-cry; awaken, champion and vanguard of the Pact.”
Iriai did not stir. Lenwar hadn’t really expected she would.
Not yet, anyway.
“Is that her?”
Lenwar smiled. “And how is the good captain tonight, daughter dear?”
“Sleeping off his exertions,” Minerva said. She crossed the tomb, moving with far greater confidence now that there was no one but her father to see. There was no need for her to play the shy and bookish, inexperienced sort here, not for Lenwar. That was an act calculated to flatter the egos of men like Captain Constantine, it had no other purpose.
“Is that her?” Minerva repeated.
“It is,” Lenwar replied. “Iriali, daughter of Beltor, spirit of the war-cry.”
“The ultimate weapon for your plans,” Minrva said, bending over Iriali’s unmoving form. “She’s still asleep,”
“Stesichus’ blood was not sufficient, another sacrifice is required.”
“Shall I bring the intrepid captain up here?”
“No need,” Lenwar said. “I already have another sacrifice right here.” He grabbed his daughter by the hair with one hand, yanked back her head, and slit her throat in a single, clean stroke.
She looked so surprised. Why were they all so surprised? The imploring desperate shock in her eyes as the blood spilled down her neck to land in torrents upon Iriali...it was all so pathetic.
“I had other children, before you,” Lenwar said, as she died. “I will have others after you. Did you think that you would rule by my side? No. Your only purpose was to get me this far.”
He let the body fall. Iriali had now recovered to the point where she looked almost as she had done in those far off days of struggle between Lystron and Dagmar, when the Pact had contended with the Army of Justice: raven hair, smooth, pale skin and muscular limbs, strength to break the battle line and run upon the north wind to gird the world in days.
“Awake, awake, Iriali,” Lenwar called to her in aelfen. “Awake, companion of Dagmar, awake.”
Iriali’s grey eyes snapped open.
Lenwar smiled. “Beloved cousin-“
The wind was driven out of him as she kicked him in the stomach. He staggered backwards as he doubled over, and she vaulted out of her sarcophagus to grab the sword – it was ironic that she fought with a human style blade, after siding with those aelfer who hated humans – and shield and hold them ready against any hostile intent he may have had.
“If my father wished me dead he should have come himself, if he dared,” Iriali spat.
Lenwar laughed as he straightened himself up. “Want you dead? Cousin, is that any way to speak to your rescuer?”
“What you have done you’ve for your good and not mine, I’m sure,” Iriali replied. “What love have ever you had for me or mine or for my cause? All the gods love humans best of all.”
“Not all,” Lenwar said. “Not now. Much has changed while you have slumbered, Iriali.”
Iriali’s face twitched. “How long? How long have I slept?”’
“Passing three thousand years.”
Iriali sighed. “And how many great moments have I missed in all that time?”
“Many, which we will discuss at length,” Lenwar declared. “But in the meantime there is a party of five men and one urok camped a little way below us who may, if left unmolested, in searching for their comrades slaughtered to bring you back and to restore your strength, disturb us in our intimate conversation.” He smiled. “If you, with your battle-prowess, could eliminate them, our privacy will suffer no disturbance.”
“You wake me from three thousand years of sleep and immediately would have me kill for you?”
“Are you not capable of it? Lenwar asked. “Have you grown squeamish in your sleep?”
“No,” Iriali snorted. “Lead on, then. These men are good as dead already.”
Iriali crouched amidst the bloody ruin of her foes, their blood staining the ground around her and their remains staining littering the ruins of their campsite.
Her arm ached. After five men and an urok. It never used to grow so weary, so fast.
I have grown old, she thought sourly. Or else I am simply out of practice. Would not Cerelin and Amila laugh to see me so enfeebled, and chide me justly with her wit.
Thinking of Cerelin and Amila made her scowl; she turned her mind to other thoughts. Or tried to. All her thoughts were full of regret.
“You should have told me that there was a child among them,” Iliari muttered bitterly. They had tried to protect the boy. Once it had become clear that their strong urok was no match for Beltor’s daughter they had bent their efforts to getting the boy and the fire-mage woman away.
They had failed – the boy’s head lay a few feet away from where she sat upon the ground, and the woman’s trunk lay face down upon the ground, separated from all her limbs – but it had been valiantly attempted. More valiant than she seen of men for the most part.
“Would it have made any difference?” Lenwar asked.
“Dagmar used to say that children were the only deaths we should regret,” Iriali said. “And mourn that such horrors had been forced upon us.” She shivered a little, this mountain was cold.
Lenwar draped a cloak about her shoulders, but she shrugged it off. “I need no charity from you, Lord of Misrule.”
“You wrong me and you wound me, cousin,” Lenwar said. “What must I do to earn your trust?”
“I doubt you can,” Iriali snapped. “Why did you wake me?”
“Would you rather slumber still?”
“I would rather been killed upon the battlefield with my bold-hearted comrades,” Iriali said. “I could not go with Dagmar to Tarshish, but I was prepared to die, to delay our foes and give Dagmar and all her folk time to escape.”
“You succeeded,” Lenwar said. “They did escape.”
“Yet I did not die,” Iriali muttered. “And now I am awakened to this strange world. You tell me that the aelfer are fled from these lands, that the world belongs to men, that the Elder Races teeter on the brink of annihilation, that these humans are so puffed up with their own glory that they call themselves emperors and princes as though they had any true nobility.” She shook her head. “Woe to the aelfer, Dagmar would-“ she paused. “I must stop that, or every other word from out my lips will be ‘Dagmar would have prevented this, had she been permitted’, or ‘Dagmar would not have stood for this outrage’ or ‘Dagmar would have saved the aelfenkind.’ And yet when I consider all that you have told me of this world me of this world that is all that I can feel. Why did we fail? Why did the gods set their will against us?”
Lenwar did not reply. She hadn’t really expected that he would. But she was, though she never confess it to the ugly god, glad of his presence. She needed someone to unburden her melancholy to.
“We are young and bold we will live forever.”
“Hmm,” Lenwar murmured.
“Something that Kharsia said, many years ago,” Iriali said. “Before Laureia died and we all grew old. But we were always bold, so bold, a gallant and great-hearted company of heroes such as the world has never seen. Dagmar the Defiant, Amila Moonsword, Kharsia Brighteyes, Tiqet Fireblade, Cerelin the Battle-Scarred Beauty of the Pact; and Laureia. Laureia the Beautiful, Laureia the Brave, Laureia the Magnificent. Laureia the best of all of us. All gone. All my gallant hearts and all they strove for.”
Lenwar smiled. “What if they need not be gone for good?”
Iriali glowered at him. “Speak sense, fool, for I take not your meaning.”
“Dagmar fled to Tarshish three thousand years ago,” Lenwar said. “But time works in strange ways between the worlds. It may be that, for the Pact, they arrived only yesterday. If they could be returned-“
“Returned to what?” Iriali demanded. “A world where all that we once fought for is no more?”
“A world where all that
you fought for may be regained.”
Iriali shook her head. “There is not strength enough left in the Pact to overthrow the world even if what you say could be done. You sell me dyed string and call it spun gold.”
Lenwar’s smile was so patronising that Iriali wanted to punch him in the crooked teeth. “Leave strategy to me, brave Iriali, and ask youself if you would not like to see your comrades once again.”
She did wish it. She wished it so badly it was making her ache inside as though Lenwar had conceived a child of hope with her in the midst of this fog of despair in which she had been mired. She could them all in her mind’s eye as clear as as the golden glow of summer sun, rendered glorious by the nostalgia of joyous memory. She could see Dagmar looking uncomfortable and out of sorts in her black armour, visibly mastering herself before some speech to rouse the aelfenkind to fight. She could see Amila, so proud, bearing herself with erect stiffness as she kept upon the hilt of her ancient sword. She could see Kharsia in some eclectic outfit that should have looked hideous but somehow, upon her slender frame, became fabulous instead. She could see Tiqet in his tattered green cloak, laughing as he held his son in his arms. She could see Cerelin, her scar only half-concealed beneath a layer of makeup, shading herself from the sun with one of her ridiculous pink parasols.
And she could see Laureia, Laureia who would never return to them but on whose behalf they’d vowed to fight while life remained. Laureia with a spear in hand, Laureia looking so lovely in her wedding gown, Laureia upon the pyre as the flames consumed her.
If there is a chance to bring them back, can I refuse it, slender though it be? As a soldier of the Pact...as their friend, must I not do all I can for them?
Dagmar, my friends, if you yet live, hold on. Iriali of the war cry comes to your aid.
“How?” she demanded. “How may this thing be done?”
Lenwar beamed. “Follow me, Iriali, and do exactly as I say.” He looked around him, down the slope of the mountain on which they were perched. “What a world these men have made, in all these years devoid of existential threat or challenge? What a world shall burn when the aelfer return. Oh, Silwa, what will you do? What will you do when you realise your work was all for nought?”
Short Swords: Tales from the Divine Empire (The First Sword Chronicles Book 3) Page 17