The Conquerors Shadow

by Ari Marmell

  At the moment, however, they weren’t making many plans at all.

  “Absolutely impossible!” Rheah Vhoune stood beside her chair, white-knuckled fists pressed against the table. “I don’t believe it!”

  Duke Lorum, face covered in a thin sheen of sweat, his armor caked with dirt, leaned back in his own chair and shook his head. “I understand, Rheah. Jassion’s a friend of mine, too, remember? But the facts fit.”

  “Like hell they do!”

  Ignoring the outburst, Salia Mavere, the priestess of Verelian, shifted in her own chair, idly playing with the head of a massive hammer. “How reliable is this information, Your Grace?”

  Lorum smiled sadly. “As reliable as any battlefield report, I suppose. According to the few who made it back, the unit Jassion took to engage Rebaine’s elite force was largely wiped out, despite the element of surprise.”

  “And the baron did not return with them?” That from Sebastian Arcos of the Merchants’ Guild, who sat as far from Rheah as courtesy and acoustics permitted.

  “No.”

  “It proves nothing!” Rheah insisted. “Maybe he fell in battle! Gods, we’re sitting here condemning the man, he could be dying as we speak! Why—”

  “Rheah,” Lorum’s tone, though gentle, cut succinctly through her protests, “you’ve heard the full report. Several of his own men saw him vanish into a sudden bank of fog, fog that rose with no warning and faded as quickly. And we all know what that means.”

  “So who’s to say,” Duke Edmund asked, “the Legion didn’t just kill the poor young man? Not that I would wish for such a thing, of course, but it might be a more reasonable explanation.”

  “No.” Nathaniel Espa, who held no official position but attended as personal adviser to the regent, stood and leaned across the table. “No, I’ve seen the Legion in action, at Pelapheron. They kill quickly, efficiently, and I’ve never seen them take anyone with them before.” He sighed. “I fear Duke Lorum’s theory, however distasteful, may be correct.”

  “No!” Rheah insisted again, though her conviction wavered. “Damn it, I know Jassion! I’ve known him since he was a baby! He’s headstrong, stubborn, violent, obsessive … But he’s no traitor! I cannot believe he’d willingly serve Audriss.”

  “You’re supposed to think he is Audriss, actually.”

  Every head in the room turned toward the door, now gaping open. No one should have been able to enter the chamber: The door was not only locked and barred, but enchanted by Rheah Vhoune herself. Yet now, without so much as a sound of movement or a flicker of the wards, the portal swung wide, framing three people within.

  The man—tall, wiry, and grey-haired—moved to stand at the center of the U formed by the table, where he could address the entire assembly. His companions, both female, spread out to either side. One, as gaunt as he, held a pair of hideous hatchets, and the gleam in her eyes suggested she was all too ready to use them. The other was dark haired, older than the first, and appeared to be unarmed.

  “Who are you?” Espa demanded, hand falling on the large sword at his waist. “How did you get in here?”

  “Rheah,” the man said, “please tell your friend that if he pulls that sword, he’ll be dead before the scabbard stops wobbling.”

  Her jaw clenched tightly, Rheah nodded. “He means it, Nathan. All of you. Your weapons are useless.” She raised an eyebrow. “Mine aren’t, though,” she continued. “You know I can stop you. I may not match your pet for sheer power, but you can’t channel it all at once.”

  “Possibly true. That’s why my companion over there looks so edgy. If anything unnatural happens to me, her orders are to take those hatchets and start killing.”

  Rheah cursed under her breath.

  “As far as who I am,” the man said, “let me make it more obvious. Khanda?”

  He rippled very much like a watery reflection into which someone had hurled a stone. And then he was dressed not in fur and leathers, but in the black-and-bone armor known to everyone within the room. He wasn’t wearing his helm, but then, he didn’t need to be.

  He’d expected, truth be told, to have to curb the subsequent commotion, to browbeat everyone back into their seats long enough to listen to what he had to say. For whatever reason—quite possibly utter shock—it didn’t happen. Instead, most of the assembly simply gaped at him with fearful eyes and made no sound save for uneven gasps.

  “Good,” Corvis said succinctly. “That makes things easier.” Slowly, purposefully, he took in the entire gathering, one by one. Few of the Guildmasters and nobles were courageous enough to meet his gaze. Fewer still could hold it.

  Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t keep a sneer of contempt from crossing his features. These were the men and women who ruled Imphallion? Cowering weaklings and squabbling politicians, fools for whom even the threat of a conquering army was insufficient motivation to work together. They weren’t worthy to govern. A part of Corvis wondered if they were worthy even to survive.

  “What are you doing here?” Duke Edmund finally burst out, clearly hovering at the precipice of hysteria. “What do you want with us?”

  “I assure you,” Nathaniel Espa added more calmly, “that if you seek to hold us hostage in exchange for the city, you’re sadly delusional. The safety of our citizens—”

  “Oh, put a cork in it, you windbag,” Corvis snapped at him. “Gods, are you people naturally this dense, or have you been stuffing rocks in your ears? I’m not working with Audriss!”

  A moment of silence, and then Corvis could feel the weight of their disbelief come crashing down upon his head. Undeterred, he pressed on.

  “Shocking as this may be to everyone concerned, myself included, I’m trying to help you people!”

  “Ha!” Duke Lorum rose—slowly, so as not to aggravate the fidgety lady with the hatchets—and glared at the greatest nightmare of his time. “With all respect, Lord Rebaine, do whatever it is you’ve come to do and get it over with, but spare us the lies. It’s obvious what’s happening here!”

  “Is it?” The warlord began, methodically, to pace. “I wonder.”

  With that he fell silent, save for his boot heels clicking across the cold stone. Various councilmen traded glances, frightened, confused. Whatever they’d expected of the Terror of the East, this wasn’t it.

  Slowly, at the far end of the table, Nathaniel Espa shifted in his seat. Stealthily, his fingers stretched downward, closing about the pommel of the throwing dagger in his right boot.

  “Baron Jassion of Braetlyn,” Corvis said abruptly, continuing to pace, “is many things. As the Lady Rheah pointed out, he’s violent, short-tempered, brutal. Trust me on this last one, he’s as brutal a man as you’ll ever meet.” He winced in remembered pain. “But he’s not Audriss, although I was supposed to think he was.” The warlord smiled, his stride unwavering. “The fact that you’ve been deceived into believing the same thing is entirely secondary. The evidence was aimed at me. A fallback plan, as it were. Audriss seems to be good at those.”

  “What evidence?” Rheah asked softly. Her lips bent downward, as though the question itself tasted sour. Clearly she recognized that something was afoot here, something she just knew she wasn’t going to like—and just as clearly she’d decided, though she might have choked on the very notion, that Corvis might just know what it was.

  The dagger was halfway from its sheath when Espa felt a grip on his shoulder. “If she were the closer to you,” Seilloah told him in a whisper, indicating Ellowaine with her free hand, “you’d be dead. I’m a little less bloodthirsty, so I’m giving you the opportunity to hand me the knife before I carve you into steaks with it.”

  “Do you really think you could stop me if I wanted to use it?” the old knight challenged, equally quietly.

  The witch shifted her grip just slightly, so that her thumb rested against the exposed flesh of the man’s neck. “In my palm,” she told him, “I’m holding a thorn tipped with a fascinating combination of herbal extracts
. If I prick you with it, you’ll be quite paralyzed. You won’t be able to move, but you’ll be quite conscious when I start to carve.”

  Scowling, he handed her the dagger.

  “Good. Now pay attention.”

  “… very subtly done,” Corvis was saying, without breaking stride. “It was smart, skillful. Nothing obvious, just enough to make me think I’d figured it out for myself. Remember, I’ve met Audriss face-to-face, so I’ve seen him in pretty clear detail. He wears a ring—emerald on pewter—that serves as the host talisman for the demon who grants him his power. I saw the ring again, in the dungeons beneath His Grace’s castle. It was Jassion’s signet.”

  A low murmur stalked through the assembly. Rheah frowned, but Corvis continued before she could speak. “Furthermore, Jassion always seemed to hold a personal grudge against me. Granted, this can probably be attributed to, let’s say, past transgressions. But if I was interfering with his plans—Audriss’s plans—it made so much more sense. Then, of course, there’s the fact that Jassion vanished off the battlefield just now in a cloud of fog, a last-minute addition to the picture, as it were. And Audriss knows too many things only a man in Jassion’s position should know. Including the fact that you,” and here he looked directly at the sorceress, “have in your possession a certain item we’ve discussed in the past.”

  Rheah blanched.

  “That’s why he’s come here personally, in secret, rather than attacking the town with his soldiers and the Endless Legion, as he normally does. He wants to get his hands on it first, rather than risk it being lost in the chaos.”

  “Even if we believe all this,” Rheah asked, “all it does is suggest that Jassion really is Audriss. What makes you so sure he’s not?”

  “Because Audriss isn’t stupid, Lady Rheah. I’ve dealt with enough demon-inhabited baubles in my time to know how they operate. They’re more than capable of changing shape. And color. If Audriss and Jassion are wearing the same ring, it’s because Audriss wants his ring to look like the baron’s.”

  Things change. Sometimes when you want them to …

  “Then there was this.” Without quite drawing it—no point in panicking the council when they were actually listening—Corvis half lifted Sunder from his belt. “Most of you have heard of the Kholben Shiar. You’ve heard the legends that they change their own shape to best match the persona—the soul, if you will—of the wielder. It’s not something you can choose. Any one of the Kholben Shiar that I pick up becomes an axe, even if I’d prefer, say, a spear at the time.” Corvis allowed the axe to fall back into its clasp. Once again, he swept the entire table with a deliberate gaze. “When I was a prisoner here, Jassion made a point of bragging that he’d been a participant in every part of my capture. He attacked me, he brought me here. And he, with his own hands, stripped my equipment and weapons from me and stuck them ‘in a safe place.’ When I retrieved Sunder during my escape, it wasn’t an axe, but a rather hefty sword. But I’d seen Audriss pick up a Kholben Shiar before—as a dagger. If Jassion was the last one to touch Sunder, as he claimed, then he couldn’t be Audriss.”

  … sometimes when you don’t.

  “This is ridiculous!” Duke Lorum snapped with a dismissive wave of his hand. “This man is the enemy and a known liar! He’s just trying to protect his ally! Magic shapeshifting jewelry and weapons. I hardly—”

  “He may be telling the truth,” Rheah interrupted, a clenched fist resting against her chin. “At least, it’s possible. What he’s said, about bound demons and about the Kholben Shiar, is accurate.”

  “Oh.” Lorum didn’t seem impressed. One hand ran idly through his growth of beard. “Well, then, Lord Rebaine, if you’re so bloody positive Jassion isn’t Audriss, why don’t you tell us who is?”

  Like an iron trap, Corvis’s gaze locked onto the regent’s own. The sheer intensity of his stare, the sudden ice in his expression, was enough to silence the room. Nothing moved, nothing at all.

  “It’s rather presumptuous for you, of all people, to be asking me that,” the Terror of the East said slowly to the Regent Proper of Imphallion. “Don’t you think … Audriss?”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “No! Absolutely not!” Lorum leaned across the desk, fists planted on heaps of parchment strewn across the surface. Had he turned his gaze downward, he might very well have set them all ablaze.

  “Your Grace … Lorum.” Nathan shrugged his broad shoulders, trying to settle his formal garb more comfortably across his chest. Damn, but even his armor was more comfortable than this nonsensical getup! “Lorum, please. Be reasonable—”

  “Reasonable? Reasonable?” Fists clenched, parchment crumpled. “Tell me what’s reasonable, Nathan. Tell me why I should give in to the whining demands of a bunch of corpulent, useless pigs!”

  “Maybe because the Guilds are the economic backbone of Imphallion, Your Grace? You can’t afford to make enemies of all of them.”

  “Watch me.” Lorum turned, pacing beneath the crossed swords that hung on the brick-faced wall, blades that—thankfully—had seen no use since the Terror’s war. “They’re not the power in the kingdom anymore, Nathan. I am. And you can’t possibly tell me that the past years haven’t been better for it!”

  The knight shook his head, moved around the desk, and took his young protégé by the shoulders. “It’s not your power, Lorum.”

  The regent merely snarled and smacked the older man’s hands aside.

  “It’s not,” Nathan continued, his own eyes going flinty. “So far, they’ve cooperated—no matter how grudgingly—because you keep throwing the specter of Corvis Rebaine in their faces. And yes, I’ll be the first to admit that you’ve rebuilt a lot more of Imphallion than the Guilds would have, left to their own devices.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because this can’t continue! You’ve already almost exhausted their resources, and it’s not going to do you any good to rebuild the cities if they can’t support themselves. You can’t rule a nation when there are no taxes to collect. There’s only so much capital available, Lorum, and the Guilds generate more than the rest of us could dream of doing.”

  “Then they’ll operate under my control.”

  “And you’re going to enforce that how, exactly?”

  Lorum stared, jaw going suddenly slack. “You’re not serious.”

  “Very serious, Your Grace. There’s been talk, for months now. You don’t have anywhere near the military might to stand up to the Guilds. And remember, you’re the regent, not the king. As long as they get even a little noble backing, it’s not even treason.”

  The young regent slumped back toward his chair and missed it entirely, finding himself sitting, legs sprawled, on the thick carpet. Slowly, he allowed his face to sink into his palms.

  “All right,” he said finally, voice muffled by emotion as much as by his trembling hands. “All right, Nathan. Tell the Guildmasters I’ll be in to see them shortly. Tell them they can have their damn Guilds back, free and clear.

  “But you tell them, too, that they damn well better not make me regret it.”

  DUKE LORUM THREW HIS HEAD BACK and laughed as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Every last individual in the room, save Corvis, gaped as tears of mirth ran down his face to vanish into his faded gold expanse of beard. The regent looked as though he might be forced to sit, lest he topple over completely.

  Finally, however, the fit died away in a final burst of chuckling.

  “Are you quite through?” Corvis asked.

  “Rebaine,” Lorum said through gasping breath and reddened face, “you’re absolutely mad!”

  “Well, one of us is.” Corvis grinned, and Lorum’s own smile vanished. “It was a brilliant scheme, Audriss. I almost didn’t see it. But you made just a few tiny mistakes, enough to tip your hand.”

  “What, exactly, are you talking about?” Rheah asked, ignoring Lorum’s murderous glare.

  “Lorum held on to his power seventeen years ago, remember. I
t took the Guilds three years to recover the authority they’d handed over. For a brief span, Imphallion had a king again, in fact if not in name.” Corvis pointed a black iron finger at one of the assembly, a scrawny fellow who wore the latest finery, now absolutely drenched in sweat. He blanched visibly at the sudden attention. “You. What’s your name?”

  “Ah … Bidimir Vrenk, O dread lord. I represent the august yet humble assembly of the Minstrels’ Guild.”

  /Dread lord?/ Khanda snickered.

  Corvis ignored him. “Tell me, Master Vrenk, how exactly has Duke Lorum dealt with the current crisis? What is it he’s been trying to accomplish since the moment the Serpent appeared over the horizon?”

  “Why, he’s been trying … Trying to consolidate power.” Vrenk’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Under his authority.”

  A low mutter swept through the Guildmasters.

  “So what?” Espa demanded, rising to his feet (after a careful glance at Seilloah, who was blandly cleaning her nails with his dagger). “Combining our forces was the best way to deal with the crisis!”

  “But we offered to join forces!” Salia Mavere announced, armor clinking beneath her robes as she shifted in her seat. “We were more than willing to have our troops fight beside his own! But that wasn’t good enough! It had to be under a single authority! Your Grace, I’d very much like to know why.”

  “It prevents confusion,” Lorum said, his voice rising. “It’s more efficient! It—”

  “It puts power back in your hands,” Corvis told him flatly. “I’m not going to sit here and guess at your motives. Maybe you just enjoyed the taste of power you got after the last war. Hell, maybe you actually thought you were doing your best for Imphallion, at one point or another. But either way, you hit on the perfect way to go about it. It was a win–win situation for you, Audriss.”

  “Stop calling me that!”

  “After all, whether you succeeded in conquering Imphallion as the Serpent, or whether you talked the Guildmasters into handing over control, you end up in command. And because the nation’s just gone through a massive war, nobody would remain with strength to oppose you.”