by Terah Edun
“She outflanked us and you saved us all,” said a woman who was as effusive as the merchant was succinct.
Another nodded. “Cheers, daemoni, you’re a good man.”
“I’m no man,” Thanar grumbled, but he didn’t brush off their compliments either.
More words of praise for the sacrifice he had made for them flowed from around the room. Even the ones who had already died knew that his efforts might have saved their family, their friends, and their lands.
Ciardis, however, was not so grateful…nor forgiving. She pushed her way forward through Thanar’s new circle of admirers. Though she was glad that the imperial courts seemed finally willing to accept him, she was disgusted it had taken this absurdity to facilitate that openness.
When she reached him, Ciardis said in exasperation, “You sacrificed your freedom for this empire, but surely there was a better way to go about it. Why would you go with her with no warning and no idea if you were ever coming back?
“It’s called making a decision and living with the consequences,” Thanar said.
“It’s called being foolhardy,” she snapped.
Thanar shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Really?” Ciardis said sarcastically. “Please do enlighten me then.”
Thanar’s mouth twitched and he walked away, as if to calm himself before he said something he might regret.
A kith conclave member spoke up in his absence. “The daemoni prince took a risk, but I contend that it may not have been as foolhardy as it would seem. When dissected from a historical viewpoint, it may even have been inevitable.”
Sebastian said thoughtfully, “Are you saying he predicted the deity’s actions? That’s the only way trusting her word would not have been foolhardy?”
“No, my prince heir,” the kith said in a measured tone. “I’m saying we as a people view the deities and that specific deity differently than our human counterparts do.”
“You trust her?” Sebastian asked.
“We fear her,” the same respondent replied. “But we are also well aware that if the blutgott gives their word, they will abide by it.”
Ciardis threw her hands into the air, fed up. “How? How could you possibly trust the word of a vengeful goddess?”
Thanar answered, “She kept her word to you, didn’t she, when she brought me back?”
Ciardis turned her troubled questioning gaze on him.
Thanar laughed darkly. “Yes, Golden Eyes. I heard every plea, every question you asked her. The gods’ realm is both distant and disturbingly near to this one. That’s one thing you don’t understand. The other thing you don’t understand, Weathervane, is that she may be the goddess of death and destruction for the humans, but for the kith, for a very long time Amani was known as a merciful benefactor.”
Ciardis shook her head and laughed. “A benefactor? I was here, did you forget that? She slaughtered the entire room with impunity. Kith and human, male and female.”
“Yes,” Thanar said, “because it’s in her nature. She is both a protector and an aggressor. We get out of line and she is the fire that will cleanse the forest and let it grow anew. Reborn.”
“I like our forest just fine,” Ciardis said sharply while folding her arms. “I would hope you would feel the same.”
Thanar’s lips twitched, whether in mirth or anger she didn’t see. It happened too fast for her to tell, but the fatigue in the way he rubbed his eyes was unmistakable.
“Unfortunately I do,” the daemoni prince growled. “I don’t want to see this land scorched of life and vitality. Not yet.”
“Glad we got that settled,” Sebastian said dryly.
“So can we get back on topic?” Thanar asked.
“Which would be?” the prince heir asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Well for one,” Thanar said with narrowed eyes, “I know why she spared me and even those left alive, but what about those who already died? I’ve never heard of the blutgott reviving slain enemies under any circumstances, deal or no deal. So why are you lot alive?”
Everyone’s head immediately turned to Ciardis Weathervane for the answer.
Uncomfortable, Ciardis shrugged. “She was prattling on about adhering to tradition just before she left.”
“Yes,” Sebastian said while leaning forward on the table where the goddess had stood. “What did she mean by that? She referenced it multiple times.”
Murmurs went around the room as everyone put forward their own theories on what had happened and why. It was clear however that no one had an actual answer.
Sebastian stepped forward and took the goddess’s place atop the blood-soaked table were this had all started. It was the only piece of furniture in the room that wasn’t shattered, left behind like a relic for them to remember what had come to pass.
Their lives had been spared. But only for so long.
Finally, Ciardis said, “I don’t know why she let us all live aside from her need for a proper challenge, but I am grateful.”
Thanar raised an enquiring eyebrow.
This time Sebastian spoke up, “I, too, am grateful if for different reasons.”
The prince heir slowly turned around in a circle to look at the room’s occupants. Meeting eyes, assessing emotions, and calming the almost-frantic energy that ran through the air like a current.
Finally Sebastian spoke. “When we organized this conclave, we were barely more than enemies. Our blades and our minds were set against each other atop this very table. Now…now we have no choice. Now you’ve seen what we’re up against. Now you’ve met this goddess.”
Silence reigned as the blood on the ground congealed throughout room. Every person there was contemplative. No one could deny what they had seen, what they had experienced, for others — the manner in which they had died.
Ciardis wanted to capitalize on that.
She said, “We can no longer afford to tear each other down.”
There were murmurs around the room.
Then the leader of the kith, miraculously untouched by blood, said in a snarling voice that spoke for them all, “How do we stop her?”
Without pause every gaze turned to the scholar.
“Well?” said a noblewoman in a shredded dress that was more rags now.
The scholar adjusted his collar with a shaky look, but he stood. “The blutgott, like all the gods, cleaves to rituals—rituals which must be kept when dealing with deities,” he said. “Even though her powers seemed limitless, she is bound by these same covenants that we subscribe to—covenants that restrict what she can do and when.”
Sebastian said quietly, “These covenants…do they stipulate our interactions with her? What has kept her from coming back before now? How to kill her?”
The scholar looked up a bit helplessly. “They do…the ones we have access to, anyway.”
“And what do they say?” someone asked.
Another asked, “How do we get the powers needed to defeat her?”
A third voice spoke up. “Is that even possible?”
The last question was directed at the entire room, and no one could miss the heavy dose of sarcasm layered in the words.
Still it was the scholar who responded directly. Scoffing, the scholar said, “This is a battle of wills, not of power. If you go up against a deity head-to-head with physical might, you will fail each time—this was just amply demonstrated. If that resounding defeat was not enough, look to history.”
“Then how?” Sebastian demanded quietly.
The scholar squared his shoulders. “By doing what our ancestors did when they first went up against their own gods and bound them to the covenants. We outsmart them at their own games.”
“Fair enough,” said the prince heir. “So that’s what we’ll do.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we know this now,” said the warrior lord dryly. “It would have been good to know this beforehand.”
Those words were directed to everyone in the ro
om, but his eyes were squarely on the prince heir.
“Hold on,” Ciardis said as she stepped forward hastily. “You can’t blame Sebastian for this. We tried to warn you all of the coming threat time and again, but were thwarted every turn by the ruler you all worshipped as a god himself.”
A noblewoman spoke up again flatly, “You should have tried harder.”
“Perhaps we should have,” Sebastian said in a ringing voice that carried throughout the room. “But that is neither here nor there. What is here, is the fact that we have a chance now. A chance to unite. A chance to strike.”
“Against a god?” said someone with a shaky laugh.
In a voice that promised retribution, Sebastian said, “Against an immortal bound by stipulations. She has to play our game. We don’t have to play hers.”
Ciardis clasped his arm tightly, telling him silently to keep calm. But he had a fair point; the scholar’s information clearly tracked with the goddess’s own reluctance to immediately wipe them out in totality.
The scholar stood his ground, albeit nervously. Ciardis’s esteem for him grew. Though she supposed that once you had died and been resurrected by an immortal deity, being shouted down by your presumed Emperor was no issue.
The scholar stuttered as he said, “As our Emperor-to-be says, there are rules that even the goddess is bound to. But she is required to adhere to the stipulations only as long as we follow them. She was able to appear in our midst and even amass her army at the northern gate precisely because somewhere along the way, the mortals’ part of the agreement was…bent if not broken. She used that to her advantage.”
Sebastian stepped down from the table as he said in a firm, hard voice, “Well, we’d better be sure we all are very clear on what we’re doing from now on, because we cannot afford to slip up against a god. Not again.”
“Goddess.” Ciardis murmured the correction almost under her breath.
Sebastian heard her because he turned to look at her with a raised eyebrow.
Thanar laughed and walked forward through the crowd. “That is one word we’ll be muttering like a curse before this week ends.”
That laugh and that joke seemed to break the dam of tension in the room, because more laughter erupted, and when everyone was through, a room covered in blood felt almost like it was no big deal for just a few moments.
Which is all they needed.
“Well, as you can all see, a straightforward attack was ill-fated,” he said. “But we are not the first to face the gods on the field of battle. There are ways to defeat them. Heck, our ancestors, mages and nobles working together, even leashed them to do their bidding.”
That was just what the room wanted to hear, because minor cries of exultation swept the room then. The conclave was regaining some of its strength and even its surety.
Good man, Ciardis thought wearily as she looked to the scholar who, despite his meek appearance, had given a group of the most powerful individuals in the land some much-needed inspiration.
The fight against the goddess had bound them together in ways Ciardis honestly would never have foreseen when she’d walked into this conclave meeting. However, it remained to be seen if this newly forged bond could withstand the battle of the century. That is, if they could find a way to really defeat Amani…in five days.
14
“Still,” said one kith, “rules or not, she played with us like dolls.”
“So how can we defeat her?” someone else asked.
“Not on the field of combat, I’ll tell you that,” Thanar said bluntly.
The scholar nodded and hastily said, “Her armor is tempered by the blood of all of her vanquished foes from today’s battle. The more she kills, the stronger it gets.”
“The stronger her opponent, the better the tempering,” said Thanar while looking at the sergeant-at-arms with a male-to-male nod of acknowledgement.
Apparently the sergeant-at-arms knew exactly what Thanar was referencing with that look, because he gave him an almost rueful glance in return as he said, “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have tried so hard to kill her.”
“If any one of us had known that, we would have done the same thing we did before,” said a noble who Ciardis seemed to remember getting his eyes plucked out…one after the other. “It takes more willpower than all of us combined to be told we can’t defeat one scrawny woman and actually listen.”
“And that is why you lost,” Ciardis said in a completely undiplomatic slip of the tongue.
She winced almost as soon as she said it, but she wouldn’t take the words back.
She was right, after all.
Still someone immediately squealed, “Excuse me?”
“You are excused,” said Sebastian in a voice that brooked no argument.
He motioned to the guards who stood ever by his side and they immediately leaped to do as he bade. The protesting died down.
“Besides,” said Sebastian as he looked around the room with coldness in his eyes, “anyone who won’t stand and fight during a battle, I don’t want on my side, let alone in a fight against a goddess.”
His tone brooked no argument, and no one made one. Besides, everyone had proven their worth when they had sacrificed their lives—or at least been willing to die— to take on the goddess one by one. Though they had lost the battle, they had won each other’s confidence and trust by standing shoulder-to-shoulder together. Even if the trust, by the very nature of the people who were members of the conclave, could only last for so long.
A day later everyone reconvened in the conclave chambers. When Ciardis returned the blood had been wiped up, the debris cleared, and new furniture brought in.
“Praise whichever servants came in to deal with that mess,” she muttered emphatically.
Because even though the goddess had spared them and knitted their flesh whole, the blood, the guts, the bone fragments, and the brain matter had all remained, a visible reminder of the slaughter that had ripped through the room and what would happen to them a second time if they didn’t get their act together.
Ciardis had to wonder if the conclave members would be as…intractable this time. To put it politely, up until the goddess had shown up, they had been recalcitrant about banding together to fight and save the empire. In fact, a full half of the room hadn’t even believed the prince heir and Ciardis when they’d explained the situation in the first place, preferring to focus on the loss of the Emperor of Algardis over anything else.
She had an epiphany as she stood there. Maybe the group’s initial reluctance had less to do with an inability to believe in the prince heir’s call to arms and more to do with a general reluctance to do anything for free.
Even after what they had been through together, that sort of selfishness stuck in Ciardis’s craw like nothing else. Though she tried her best not to glare around the room at the thought as the nobles, merchants, and kith shuffled back into the room.
After all, they were on the same page now. They were past that sort of thinking.
If they weren’t, she would have a thing or two to say to them all. It was one thing to want their money—to be paid. It was quite another to realize their ungrateful lives were on the line and not step up anyway.
Though she guessed that for a set of jaded court nobles, it would be par for the course. They always got theirs. They wouldn’t be the preeminent landowners and bankers in the empire by being pushovers, after all. It took tenacity and entire generations of selfish personalities to become the most powerful people in Sandrin.
And don’t forget that to them, their reason for living prior to yesterday was grasping more and more of the political power surrounding the throne for themselves and their families, Thanar whispered in her head.
Disturbed but not surprised, Ciardis replied, “What are you saying? That they didn’t care who ruled them?”
Thanar shrugged as he came around the room. “Precisely—not exactly an unknown human trait. Obliviousness is actually an asset, u
nless something affects them negatively. Besides which it didn’t really matter who sat on the throne, as long as the person didn’t interfere in their spheres of influence.”
“Ever?” Ciardis asked.
Thanar gave her a frustrated look. “You know as well as I that the unspoken rule is that the sitting head of the Algardis bloodline cannot endanger the nebulous balance of power at play between the courtiers while also keeping the land whole through their connection to it. There would be too much at play, magically and politically.”
Ciardis took a moment to digest this. Then she countered, “I can’t imagine the nobles and merchants had the same reasons for not caring overtly about Maradian’s own personal coup d’état.”
Thanar paused. “They don’t,” he cautioned. “But the end goal is the same.”
Ciardis prodded him mentally, but he would say no more. She changed the subject, switching back to mind-to-mind contact now that others were entering the room. She was still curious how internal court politics could affect their future strategies surrounding both the battle against the deity and their own impending rule.
What about what Maradian did after he took the throne? I had wondered why we didn’t tell them about him stealing Sebastian’s power and coopting it for his own nefarious purposes, Ciardis thought.
She knew Sebastian had decided not to explain everything Maradian had been culpable of doing. It would serve no purpose now and might in fact slow them down as the conclave members would demand more information, and amid inquiries and committees they’d never move on to the issue at hand—forming battle plans.
Aside from that, whatever Sebastian said would be twisted and digested and consumed. Even turn against him and he had to be wary of that, and rightly so—as his throne was hanging in the balance. A throne he had yet to claim. The very thought made her uneasy, but what unsettled her bones even more was the thought of the return of a nasty, bloodthirsty goddess named Amani. In five days they would have to face her again come hell or high water, and Amani had no compunctions or quibbles about blood ties or family or citizens or princes. The goddess only wanted to destroy. So a fight over Sebastian’s right to rule the empire and a potential coronation, even one needed to secure the imperial line, would have to wait.