The Conquerors Shadow

by Ari Marmell

  “Right, then.” Corvis peered carefully at Audriss, forcing himself to ignore the massacre taking place at the edge of town. Though it sickened him to admit such a thing, the Twins’ personalities—regardless of whether they were the true mythic entities or mere demonic fakes-were actually working for them. The monsters’ insistence on slaying everything was slowing them down, as they sifted through burned rubble and drowned and diseased bodies to be sure nothing survived. Had they simply covered as much ground as possible, they’d have been halfway to the Hall of Meeting already.

  It wouldn’t be long before Audriss realized something was wrong. They had to move quickly. Corvis continued his examination of the Serpent, trying to make out details despite the distance and the smoke, looking for …

  There. Barely visible in the flickering, vicious glow of the ravenous inferno spreading, a tiny gleam of silver around the wrist of the black-clad warlord standing in the air above Mecepheum.

  “Rheah,” Corvis asked quickly, “I need to talk with Khanda. Can you make that happen?”

  “What?” Seilloah screeched before Rheah could do more than draw breath. “Corvis, are you insane? Khanda betrayed you! Betrayed us all! Who the hell cares what he has to say? Especially now!”

  “I do,” Corvis said simply. “Trust me, it’s important. Rheah?”

  The sorceress frowned, trying to concentrate past the horrible screams. “What’s your normal range of communication?”

  “Physical contact is optimal,” he told her, “but I’ve spoken to him from six feet away through a door.”

  Rheah shook her head. “Not from here, then. If we could get within, oh, twenty-five or thirty yards, I might manage something.”

  “Then we’d best get moving.”

  This time, it wasn’t just Seilloah who stared at him. “You want us to go out there?” Salia gasped hoarsely at him.

  “Us, no. Some of us, yes.” Corvis refused to back down under the weight of their combined gaze. “Listen, if we sit here and cower, or argue about it, they’re going to tear this city out from under us and kill us anyway. Then Audriss wins. Period. I have exactly one idea, and it’s a bad one, but it’s all we’ve got, and it means I have to speak with Khanda. So yes, I’m going out there, and yes, some of you are coming with me, or we might as well just fall on our swords now, because I bloody well guarantee it’s an easier death than the one coming for us!”

  It was, strangely enough, Rheah Vhoune, rather than Seilloah or Ellowaine, who first nodded her assent. “What’s your plan, then?”

  “Not much,” Corvis admitted. “You’re with me, to help me talk to that damn traitor. Seilloah, Ellowaine, and Espa are coming along to keep any trouble off us while you work your magic. I—”

  “I beg your pardon,” Nathaniel said coldly, “but I don’t recall agreeing to any such thing. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just as big a threat as—”

  “Nathan, shut up!” Rheah snapped, her hair practically whipping Corvis’s face as she spun to confront her old friend. “As of right now, Rebaine’s the best chance we’ve got of stopping this, seeing as how he’s the only one here with even a single idea! So either propose something else, or shut the hell up and cooperate!”

  The old knight actually recoiled, clearly taken aback. “But … but Rheah—”

  “What part of ‘shut up’ didn’t you get, Nathan?” Another turn. “All right, Rebaine, we’re with you, at least for now.”

  And a good thing it is, too, Corvis noted, watching as the cowed Espa climbed his way back to the floor, grumbling under his breath, and went to retrieve his sword. “Salia,” he continued, “you’re in charge here until we get back. There’s not much you can do against those things, but if any of Audriss’s soldiers make it this far, it’s up to you to organize a defense. You up to it?”

  “I believe I can do that, yes.”

  “Good. Rheah?”

  The sorceress chanted a low, discordant verse, and then Corvis, Seilloah, Espa, Ellowaine, and Rheah swiftly floated up and over the broken walls to touch down softly in the street. The citizens in the vicinity, already dashing around in mindless panic, took one look at the warlord’s armor and scattered. Audriss, the Children of Apocalypse, and now Corvis Rebaine. If the Day of Judgment truly had come upon the city of Mecepheum, its heralds could have been no more frightening than those who fought over the capital today.

  Weapons drawn and faces determined, the motley band moved across the cobblestones, directing their path toward the center of town and the megalomaniac demigod striding through the air above it. Audriss probably wouldn’t see them coming—he seemed enraptured by the devastation wrought by his summoning.

  But Audriss was not the only one guilty of tunnel vision.

  THE FAINTEST STREAM of mist, cloaked by the smoke of burning buildings and heaps of rubble and bodies, paralleled their path. It had no eyes to see them, yet it paced them perfectly, never drawing more than a few yards ahead or behind. It had no ears to hear, yet their words had struck like a physical blow.

  Although he currently lacked features with which to express it, Mithraem seethed with an overwhelming rage. So powerful was the fury of this most ancient and most powerful of the Endless Legion, it was all he could do not to materialize, to rip into the nearest mortals whoever they might be, to rend them limb from limb, and to gorge upon their blood until even his eternal thirst was satisfied.

  How dare he? How dare that delusional little fool keep this from him! “Not that big a deal” indeed! Selakrian’s tome, by all the darkest gods! And Mithraem had let his best chance at it slip right through his fingers! If he’d known which book Rebaine’s sycophants were offering for trade, he’d never have told the Serpent word one of it. With that book in his hands, he wouldn’t need Audriss, or any mortal allies, ever again.

  Which was, he knew, why Audriss hadn’t told him about the book, but that knowledge didn’t make the situation any less infuriating.

  Audriss, Duke Lorum, the Serpent, whatever he called himself today … Even with such power at his beck and call, his dreams of god-hood were just that: dreams. No spell could make him more than inherently human. Long life he could have, but never immortality.

  Mithraem, though, was forever. With Selakrian’s power, he could rule as a god among men, and he could do so until the end of time itself. Nor was he troubled with the slightest tugs of morality to which even Audriss was susceptible. The Serpent had seen a few decades in which to purge himself of the weakest and most frail of human emotions. Mithraem had seen over a hundred, more than enough time to smother the final flickering embers of such nonsense.

  All of which made him far more worthy of this power than Audriss was or could ever be.

  But this would do, for now. Audriss trusted Mithraem, thought himself in control. Let him think it. Let him grow complacent in his newfound power. Mithraem’s patience was that of a true immortal; he could wait. He could wait.

  Right now, though, he must make certain Audriss didn’t lose the tome to someone else, someone less susceptible to Mithraem’s future machinations. And that meant stopping whatever pathetic scheme Corvis Rebaine and his ilk hatched.

  Perhaps he could even work this to his advantage. This might even inspire the warlord to trust the Endless Legion more than he already did.

  His unseen expression shifting from a snarl of rage to a self-satisfied smirk, Mithraem drifted closer to the unsuspecting party, and the cobblestones in his wake gleamed slick with blood.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It is an old, old legend, found today only in the most ancient, most ragged of books, forgotten by all save the most learned sages and storytellers. It tells of a small city, a community called Sanvescu. No Imphallion name, this, but a name—indeed, a city—that rose and fell long before the successful crusade of Imphalam the First. Sanvescu stood deep within a mountain range, low on the slopes and sheltered from all but the worst of the winter storms by the heavy darkwoods that grew nearby, thick as wo
ol on an unsheared ewe. The folk there were simple, serious and hardworking, religious, and superstitious. They believed in the virtues of simple garb, simple fare, and companionship with one’s neighbors.

  Sanvescu, the legend tells, was also a community beset by horror. A trio of brothers holed up for several nights in the temple of Chalsene, gorging their eyes and minds on the most ancient and secretive teachings of the Night-Bringer—including those that most civilized branches of the Church had long since excised. Tales of sacrifice, of atrocities, of power granted in exchange for blood and the rights of the strong over the weak—these were their intellectual provender. Was this merely curiosity gone wrong? Or were these a criminally minded family seeking divine permission and holy absolution for the horrors they were already inclined to perform?

  Whatever the case, these brothers became the collective nightmares of Sanvescu. Families were slain, their bodies laid carefully in occult symbols. Men, women, and children disappeared off the streets, their blood found adorning the altars of Chalsene. For months, the citizens of Sanvescu huddled in terror, unsure even if their tormentors were mortal, or something from beyond life’s flimsy veil.

  It was Sanvescu’s sheriff, by the name of Harlif, who finally ended the town’s nightmare—and in turn unleashed one upon the world entire. For Harlif finally recognized, through tracks and bloodied smears, that each atrocity was committed by three men together, a piece of knowledge that led him eventually to the trio of siblings. The men were bound and, without ceremony or trial, hanged until dead and buried in shallow graves. Atop each grave, the townsfolk planted a heavy oak—unearthed from the nearby forests—to symbolize the cycle of the gods, the life that must always sprout from death.

  And had Harlif left it at that, accepted the victory and the city-wide acclaim that he had well and truly earned, that would have been the end of it. But Harlif was angry, Sanvescu was angry, and the relatively swift dispatch of their tormentors had not assuaged them.

  Some nights later, Harlif led a throng of angered citizens against the temple of Chalsene, blaming the Night-Bringer’s priests and their teachings for all that had transpired. Chairs and tables were placed against the doors, wooden planks across the windows, and—in the midst of services, when the score or so of Sanvesans who revered Chalsene all prayed within—Harlif set the building to the torch. There he stood, basking in the warmth, watching the greasy smoke rise skyward, and drinking in the screams of the dying as gladly as he’d accepted the townsfolk’s gratitude.

  Some variants of the legend claim that Chalsene’s priests pronounced a dying curse; others that it was the Night-Bringer himself who took offense at the sheriff’s actions. But whichever the case, Harlif awoke that night to a room bathed in the chill of deepest winter. Mists poured through his windows from the outside, leaving a trail of blood to soak into the boards of his floor. And as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he stared up, horrified beyond measure, into a face as pallid as death.

  And that face spoke, saying “Every drop of blood I shed, every life I claim from now until the end of days, is upon your soul, not mine. For I have none left to damn.”

  Harlif was found by the townsfolk, his corpse as white as snow, drained entirely of blood. Suspecting the worst, the superstitious folk turned immediately and raced to the triple grave, if only to reassure themselves that, once again, they faced a purely mortal adversary.

  Two of the graves remained, the towering trees growing straight and tall. But over the third, the bole had rotted, curling in on itself like a weak old man. The grave itself, when they exhumed it, lay empty; nothing remained of the body save a few shreds of dead heart, caught in the roots of the dying tree.

  The missing brother’s name, so the legend says, was Mithraem.

  “THERE,” Corvis hissed, pointing at a hastily abandoned tavern. “Is that close enough?”

  Rheah squinted upward, trying to judge the distance to the airborne warlord. “It’ll be a near thing,” she said at last, “but I think I can make it work.”

  The door was quite firmly locked, which slowed Sunder down not at all. Five pairs of feet dashed through the common room, kicking up clouds of sawdust and setting the floorboards to creaking. They pounded up the flimsy wooden stairs, shaking dust from the banister. Corvis chose a room at the far end of the corridor and barreled into it, shoulder-checking the flimsy door as he went through.

  He’d chosen well. Sure enough, the window allowed an unobstructed view of the hovering Serpent, as well as the horrors beyond.

  Even as Corvis and Rheah took up positions by the window, crouched beneath the sill, the others took what precautions they could. They propped the door back into place, shoving the bed and dresser across the room to barricade the entrance. It was hardly a solid defense, but it might at least slow down any attackers.

  Well, anyone human. Maukra and Mimgol would rip the building apart and then set the remains on fire, but they hoped to be long finished before the Children reached this part of the city.

  “Ready?” Rheah asked breathlessly, clearly not as calm and collected as she tried to appear. That was all right, though: It distracted Corvis from his own barely leashed panic.

  “I suppose so. What’s going to happen, exactly? Do I just talk to him? Do I have to keep staring out this window, or is it enough that I see him when the spell starts?”

  Rheah grinned weakly. “The truth is, Rebaine, I can’t bring him to you. This sort of communication, as you pointed out, requires proximity. What I can do is send you to him.”

  “And you don’t think it’ll be a little obvious, me floating out there next to Audriss? Not to mention that damn shield he’s thrown around himself! If I could get through that, I wouldn’t need to do this in the first place! I thought you—”

  “You misunderstand me, Rebaine. I’m not sending all of you.”

  Corvis blinked. “Huh?” he asked intelligently.

  “Projection, Rebaine. I’m sending your essence into Khanda’s pendant.”

  The warlord actually shrank away from her. “You said what?”

  “It’s the only way, Rebaine. I promise you, it’s safer than it sounds. The amulet’s not enchanted to hold you, so there’s no danger of being trapped. You’ll just pop in, have your discussion, and pop back out again.”

  “You’re mad! There’s no way—”

  “You’re damn right!” Rheah shouted, leaning forward so her nose was mere inches from Corvis’s own. “If you won’t do this, there is no way! It’s put-up-or-shut-up-time, Rebaine. You were the one harping about our one and only chance to stop what’s happening out there, to turn Audriss’s plans around before he walks all over us. You don’t get the option of backing out now, you bastard!” Rheah raised her hands and rose from her crouch, muscles tensed. Seilloah took a step back from everyone, her own fingers twitching, and Ellowaine and Espa both drew steel.

  “I am going to cast a spell now, Rebaine,” the sorceress said simply. “If we remain allies, it will be the sending spell. If we’re not, I fully intend to burn you down where you stand for crimes against the kingdom and the Guilds. Which will it be?”

  Corvis, too, rose to his feet, his hand hovering casually by the infernal weapon at his side. “If I decided not to let you cast that spell, Rheah, do you think you’d have the chance to do so?”

  “Which is it, Rebaine?” she asked again, unwavering.

  No one moved. Even the dust filling the room, kicked up and swirled around by their presence, froze as the very building held its breath.

  Then Corvis smiled and let his hand fall from Sunder’s haft. The witch and the warriors released their tension in three explosive sighs. Rheah merely nodded. “Are you ready, then?”

  “I doubt it. Let’s do this before I have one of my rare fits of common sense.”

  “Very well.” Rheah relaxed her arms and straightened. “I should warn you, your destination may seem odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “You’re entering a pla
ce—well, ‘place’ isn’t really the right concept, but it’ll do—designed and enchanted to imprison a demon lord. There is nothing in any way, shape, or form natural about it.

  “You won’t see the worst of it. Chances are, your mind will interpret what you see in whatever way is necessary to keep you from going stark-raving mad. Even so, it’ll look like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

  “Terrific. Can we get this over with already?”

  The sorceress nodded, then glanced at the others. “This is where you earn your keep,” she told them. “It’s absolutely essential you keep any-and everyone off us for the duration. Rebaine, for all practical purposes, won’t be here, and I’ve got to monitor and make sure nothing goes wrong.” She looked back to the warlord, wiped the sweat off her hands with a swipe across her now filthy skirts, and began to gesture.

  “Wait a minute,” Corvis began, tense once more, “what do you mean ‘make sure nothing goes wrong’? I thought—”

  “Relax, I’m just taking precautions. Projection rarely goes awry.”

  Corvis probably would have said something to that, but Rheah began her chant. Instantly, he felt the life drain from his limbs, his arms and legs suddenly falling asleep.

  The lethargy spread through his chest, his head. He could have sworn he actually heard his heartbeat slowing …

  And then he was elsewhere.

  CORVIS REBAINE, helpless. Rheah Vhoune beside him, her attention focused on the subject of her spell. The others distracted and concerned, far too intent on the condition of their companions to properly pay attention.

  There would never be a better chance.

  Thinning himself to transparency on wafting currents of air, Mithraem seeped beneath the door and the pitiful barricade, steadily pooling into one shadowy corner of the room.

  NATHANIEL ESPA, former knight, former adviser to Duke Lorum, forcefully locked his legs into place to keep from pacing. He was more than a little agitated and his body, accustomed to the rigors of warfare despite his advancing age, demanded movement.