The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy

by Chris Bunch

  Their news was the blackest.

  Tenedos had used his magic to make us think he was moving north far more slowly than in reality, backing it with small formations pretending to be larger ones, while his main force moved swiftly through the heart of the Delta toward Nicias.

  We could do nothing but rage impotently while the ships and boats the Army of Numantia had seized went south to meet Tenedos and carried his army into the city.

  The storm disappeared as it’d come after two days, and now our spies and Tovieti inside Nicias were able to report.

  Trerice had struck a shameful bargain with Tenedos. He was now first tribune, my old imperial title, as well as general of the army of Nicias, and at his behest and that of “the great nation of Numantia,” Laish Tenedos had agreed to form a provisional government.

  The emperor’s return to the throne was almost complete.

  TWENTY-THREE

  TENEDOS’S LAST OFFER

  The irony was staggering. I’d schemed all this time to get within range of Tenedos and his army, and now he was less than a third of a league away. But neither one could attack the other without some change in the situation: to assault across water is fairly suicidal if you don’t have vastly greater forces, surprise, or a foothold on the far shore.

  The two options I had were distasteful and self-destructive.

  One was to withdraw, hope to further build my forces, harry Tenedos and bring him to battle at another time in a more advantageous place. That wouldn’t work, since he held the greater advantage, especially with the canard Trerice had spread about my treason. My soldiers would quickly grow discouraged and slip away or be cut down by sickness or combat until my defeat was foregone.

  The other plan was to wait here to be attacked, for Tenedos couldn’t ignore the running sore in his nation. But my army required massive supplies, and we’d quickly despoil the countryside. Then Tenedos would strike, probably with great magic in addition to physical force.

  There were no options.

  Therefore, I decided to attack.

  I had a few ideas, and the first required my consultation with Sinait and Cymea. Could magic guide a boat on a river? Not very well, not very precisely, compared to a skilled man with oars and a rudder, was the answer. I worded my question more precisely and reminded Cymea of something we’d done, times past.

  “Maybe,” Cymea said.

  “Definitely,” Sinait said, more firmly. “You give me the material, far enough distant from the field so my spell has room to build, and we’ll do it.”

  That was enough for me to assemble my advisers and lay out my plan.

  “That’s damned complicated,” Linerges said. “Complicated plans mostly fail.”

  “True,” I agreed. “Do you have a better one?” He lapsed into thought, while we went on.

  “My objection is, it’s going to be bloody,” Yonge said. “Especially for my skirmishers.”

  “My network, such as it is, within Nicias will be torn apart,” Kutulu said. “And spies don’t necessarily make good assassins.”

  “While a lot of my brothers and sisters can, and have killed, now you’re wanting them to become soldiers without any training,” Cymea said. “And once they’re in the open, they’ll have nowhere to run and nothing to do but die.”

  “You’re all three right,” I said unhappily. “At best, if it succeeds, it’ll be a bloodbath. I like this not at all, because if we fail, it’ll be the last chance Numantia has for a generation, probably more.

  “You remember Tenedos told me he has plans to make himself immortal. I don’t know if that was braggadocio, but if he’s discovered a way to live forever … our failure could cause an eternity of darkness, not only in Numantia, but across the world, for his lust for power has no limits.”

  “What cheerfulness,” Yonge said. “At least we won’t be alive to see that nightmare.”

  “If you believe in the gods, as I do,” Sinait said, “then you’re wrong, and we’ll return from the Wheel again and again to live under Tenedos’s lash.”

  “So there isn’t any other option,” Linerges said. “I can’t see one, any more than Damastes. I say we try his plan. But I’ve an addition.”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Once again, you’re not going to be part of anything until the final fighting begins.”

  I glared, and he looked back defiantly.

  “This isn’t another argument that I should be a studied, aloof general, keeping myself out of harm’s way, is it?” I said. “Because if it is, I discard it out of hand.”

  “No,” Linerges said. “You’re being thickheaded, for now is the time for you to lead, to be clearly in the vanguard of battle. And by the way, I’ll be staying here in this camp with you for a time, for exactly the same reason.”

  “Then why will I … we … be stewing in our tents, while everybody else is out there doing my bidding, taking all the risks?”

  “Because,” Linerges said, “Tenedos fears you more than anyone else, as he should. If you’re here in this camp, working day and night on a tactic I’ll suggest in a moment, and I’m working alongside you, then Tenedos will think the army is doing nothing but what he sees in front of him.

  “Sinait’s wizards will have less work with camouflaging spells if Tenedos is spending his hours peering at you and not even thinking about Yonge and the others.”

  This time, I didn’t get even slightly angry, for Linerges was right.

  “Then we do it?” I asked.

  “We do it,” Linerges said.

  “And the gods help us all,” Cymea said.

  • • •

  The truth of Linerges’s statement came that night. I dreamed once more, as I had in that prison tower in Nicias, but again I wasn’t dreaming, and the seer king stood before me. Cymea tossed uneasily beside me, as if in a nightmare, but didn’t wake.

  “Again I come to you,” he said, and his face was more like a hawk about to swoop than ever before. “You have refused me twice, and there can be but one more time.”

  I managed, in my dream, to get out of bed.

  “I can sustain this spell for only a few more seconds,” Tenedos said, “for I’ve taken an unusual way to reach you, and your magicians will soon snap this slender thread.

  “You are now my greatest enemy, Damastes á Cimabue. But you are nothing compared to the powers I now hold, less to the powers I gain daily, and I’ll destroy you as a cleaning maid tosses a spider into the fire, without even thinking of it.

  “But I choose to offer you mercy, a final mercy.

  “If you arrange the surrender of your forces to me, immediately, I’ll allow you to live. I’ll also grant your life should you be unable to accomplish this, but manage to cross the Latane and give yourself up.

  “Of course, there can be no place for you in my court, in my future greatness. You were offered a position before and refused it, and I can never forgive you for that further betrayal. But you’ll be allowed a certain amount of money and be escorted to any border you choose and pass into exile.

  “I give you my word I shall not pursue you, either with assassins or with magic.

  “That is the only offer I am prepared to make.”

  “What about my soldiers? My officers?” I asked.

  “I shall do with them as I wish,” he said. “They will no longer be your charges, so you should not concern yourself with them. Some I may allow to serve me in some capacity under arms, others will have to expiate their crimes by serving Numantia in ways I see fit, still others must be punished for their crimes against me.”

  “I remember,” I said slowly, “something you said, years ago and far away, when we encountered a bandit in the frozen Sulem Pass, and can think of no better reply to your kind offer: Fuck you, fuck the whore who called herself your mother, and fuck the father you never knew because he never paid.” My voice was as controlled as Tenedos’s had been on that long-ago day of ice and death.

  Tenedos jolted as if I�
�d struck him.

  “You insolent piece of shit,” he said. “How dare you?”

  I made no reply.

  “Very well, Damastes. You’ve refused me a third time, and now I promise the death I shall give you will bring horror when it’s told of a thousand years hence.

  “I will not make any more threats, for you know my word is law, and what I say comes always to pass.

  “Always!”

  The tent was empty, and I was fully awake.

  I drank some water and considered the arrogance of the man and realized he’d actually convinced himself by now that every statement he’d made had been realized, forgetting the disaster in Maisir or, closer to home, the lies he’d told me over the years.

  The seer king, then the demon king, was now a complete madman.

  It was up to me to see he did not become the lunatic king. The choice was now perfectly clear: either Tenedos or Numantia was to be destroyed.

  Surprisingly, I had no trouble falling back to sleep.

  • • •

  I was half-dreaming, and again remembered the prophecy at my birth: “The boy will ride the tiger for a time, and then the tiger will turn on him and savage him.”

  My mind dimly thought that had come true, and then the other words, of the bearded old man in the mountains, when we were retreating from Maisir, came — that my life would continue far longer than I then thought, and that a color came to him, the yellow of the Tovieti strangling cord.

  That, too, had occurred.

  So what came next?

  Again I remembered the sorcerer’s words my mother had repeated, that beyond the tiger were mists, and he could see, could foretell, no more.

  Now would begin the Time of Mists.

  • • •

  At dawn, we set our plan in motion. Aides, not knowing what the mission would be, combed through the proven infantry regiments, taking one company from each regiment rather than the usual volunteers, for I needed unit cohesiveness. Most of my sappers were detailed off with these men, along with their tools.

  Sinait had devised a subtle cover. A spell was cast around the camp, so any magician using a Seeing Bowl or its equivalent would see things dimly, as if water flowed between him and his target, not completely blocking all magical sight. The seer could make out fuzzy details, enough to keep him content, as if the blocking conjuration wasn’t that well cast.

  But the spell wasn’t consistent, its power ebbing back and forth, like clouds scudding across the sky. It completely blocked, for instance, the detached soldiers as they made a forced march south for two days, long enough to clear them from the closely observed area around our camp. With them went Cymea and a team of her wizards, to maintain a rigidly cast spell to keep Tenedos or Gojjam from seeing them, hard at work in the Delta.

  Wooded islands would be logged off, the logs crudely trimmed and dragged to the river’s edge, ready for use.

  The second part of my plan, the deception, was done in the camp. Work parties went out in all directions with saws, axes, and wagons. Straight trees were cut down, dragged back to camp, and carpenters set to, making great rafts clearly intended for a cross-river assault.

  Sinait knew we were observed, for she “smelled” watchers. Tenedos must have been ecstatic that I would do something as stupid as attack him frontally. He would be readying his water spells, monsters, and storms, and Kutulu’s spies reported troops moving to the peninsula across from us by night, preparing hidden positions they’d launch counterattacks from once we landed on their shore.

  I spent many worthless hours with my staff, riding back and forth downriver from our camp, pretending I was scouting possible invasion routes. We picked some decent-appearing places where the land sloped gradually into the water, had the rafts dragged there, and I had some of my staff prepare a full-scale order. I doubt if any of the unseen watchers realized the officers detailed to this task weren’t my best, but the inevitable paper shufflers any army accumulates around its headquarters.

  Romances would be bored by all this careful preparation, but without preparation, war becomes nothing else than a barbaric gang-fight — not that it’s much more at best.

  • • •

  I had a very sharp, not pleasant set-to with Jakuns, Himchai, and Jabish one evening in my tent.

  “We’re troubled,” Jakuns said, without preamble, “about this plan of yours, or rather how it would involve us Tovieti.”

  I may have had serious doubts about my strategy, but I certainly wouldn’t reveal my hesitations to anyone below my highest advisers. I waited patiently.

  “I understand,” he went on, “why you’re keeping the exact details of your military moves against Tenedos close. We don’t have a need to know such things.”

  “I disagree,” Jabish said. “We have every right to know everything, since what you do, General, will not only involve us, but conceivably could cause the obliteration of our order.”

  “If the Tovieti are destroyed,” I said, “so will my army be … and I myself will meet you on the Wheel.”

  “There are those,” Himchai said, “who see a somewhat different possibility.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “That we do as requested,” he went on, “and rise up, as we did once before, under other, less wise leaders. That rising, as you well know, was disastrous to us, and it’s taken all this time to regain even a part of our former power.”

  “What would happen,” Jakuns said, “if we rise up, and Tenedos’s magic and the Nician warders move against us?”

  “They won’t be able to,” I said, “for we’ll be attacking at the same time. They’ll be too busy to do anything except be terrified, always looking over their shoulders for the dagger or the yellow cord.”

  “Suppose,” Jakuns said, “for the sake of argument — ”

  Jabish snorted. Obviously whatever Jakuns was about to suggest she took as utter truth, not a theory. He gave her a harsh glance, spoke on.

  “Suppose that the army is a little late in making its attack?” he said. “Suppose that the warders do have time to turn on us? What then?”

  “Why would we be late … although I can’t deny that could happen, and we’ve got to give some latitude to the operation? There’s never been a battle that went as planned.”

  “Suppose,” Jabish said, “that your plans are just as Jakuns suggests?

  Except that you deliberately want to hold back for hours or a couple of days to give Tenedos a chance to destroy us?

  “Wouldn’t it simplify matters for you and for your brothers in nobility after the war if there are no more Tovieti? If there aren’t any of us still alive to make you keep your promises about a new day, a day with justice for everyone?”

  Now I understood why they’d come. I could have gotten angry, but chose not to.

  “Jabish, I’d suggest you ask around about my reputation. I could say that I’m too honorable for that, but I know you believe honor is impossible for anyone in my position. So ask another question of some of the men who have served with me before.

  “I’m not that subtle a beast. If I want someone dead, I’m more likely to challenge them to a duel than to put poison in their chalice.”

  Jabish looked disbelieving, but I saw a trace of a smile on Jakuns’s face. Himchai looked, as always, sourly thoughtful.

  “But a still better argument just came,” I went on. “You reminded me of the Tovieti rising what, fifteen, seventeen years ago? The Emperor Tenedos and I swore we’d obliterated your order then. We’d killed your highest leaders during the rising, destroyed the demon Thak, and then winkled the hidden Tovieti out of every part of society, tried and executed them. Don’t get angry, Jabish. That’s what happened, and the past is beyond changing.

  “I’m not bragging about that. My point is,” and I spoke measuredly, hammering each home, “there still are Tovieti! You’re strong once more, you’ve got soldiers in the open serving well with me, your agents are a big part of the skein I’m we
aving about Tenedos, your magic and your magicians are used and appreciated. If I wanted you destroyed, why did I ask, back when we paraded through Nicias, for your members to not show wild enthusiasm, for fear of being exposed to the warders or the Peace Guardians? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to ask that you all wave flags with your serpents’ nest on it, so you’d be ready targets?

  “If Tenedos and I couldn’t destroy your order seventeen years ago, why should I have the arrogance to think I could now?”

  I started to go on, but stopped, poured myself a glass of water, and drained it.

  Jabish had her lips pursed, but Himchai was nodding slowly, ponderously.

  “There’s only one more thing,” I said. “If you don’t do anything now, if you stand aside from this final battle, what do you think Numantia’s gratitude will be, when the war is won, when Tenedos is brought down? A pogrom such as we held years ago is terrible. But it’s far worse when the people themselves savage their own.

  “You’ve seen that happen, you’ve seen what ruin the masses can bring to everyone. How many of your best-laid plans, back then, were ruined because the people lost control, went mad with bloodlust, and all dissolved into chaos?

  “And if Tenedos wins? What then? I can tell you truly that he has a terrible fear of your order. He knows you exist, knows you’re fighting with me. If he’s victorious, don’t you think he’ll wreak terrible revenge on you, just as he will on me and everyone else who’s standing against him?

  “I’m sorry. This is one time you can’t stay in your hiding places and ride things out.”

  My argument hadn’t been that organized or coherent, I knew. Finally I had brains enough to shut up.

  The three looked at each other. I couldn’t tell how they signaled their decision, but Jakuns was the first to speak.

  “We’ll follow your orders,” he said.

  “Yes,” was all Himchai said.

  Jabish looked at me harshly, her lips thin. She and I would never be friends.