The Far Far Better Thing

by Auston Habershaw

Sahand finished up his own meal in the time it took Michelle to meekly gnaw away perhaps a quarter of her bread. Given her frame, Sahand wasn’t convinced that she didn’t eat like this all the time, so he resolved to wait no further. “The plan had initially been to kidnap your prince and hold him hostage. Plans like this, however, often go awry.”

  Michelle froze. “He isn’t dead. He got away.”

  “You can go on believing he’s alive if you like—it’s of very little importance to me. I, however, am reasonably convinced he’s dead. Even if he isn’t, his army is, which more or less amounts to the same thing in this business. In any event, the thing I am getting at is that plans change.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Michelle asked, glancing briefly at his face.

  “As far as I can tell, you are the closest relative to the old seat of Davram who is both still alive and not a traitor to the peerage—you never renounced your titles, in other words.”

  “What titles?” Michelle asked. “A small house in Eretheria city is all I can claim.”

  “That’s good enough in my book. It will also be good enough for Hadda, Camis, and Vora.”

  This time, Michelle’s head snapped up. There she is—she’s getting it now. “No!” she said. “Never.”

  “The wedding will occur in a fortnight. You will sign various legal documents and correspondence as they are provided to you, or I will see to it that you very much regret your resistance. I will handle the remainder of the duties. That is all.”

  Michelle rose, trembling, to her feet. “I will never marry you! Never! Never never!”

  Sahand rang a bell on his table. The doors opened instantly and two guards came in. “You are dismissed, Lady Orly.”

  She kept screaming as they dragged her away. By the time the door closed, Sahand was already on to the next problem—how to capitalize upon the usage of such horrifying sorcery in Ayventry.

  Of course—it’s so obvious. Taking a bite of cheese, he rose and went to his writing desk. After plucking a quill out of the ink, he set it to parchment and began to write:

  To Polimeux II, Keeper of the Balance,

  As you can clearly see in Ayventry, I am in possession of a deadly sorcerous weapon and prepared to use it against any who oppose me. If you do not comply with my demands by the beginning of autumn, I will destroy one of your cities each week until your wretched domain is naught but ashes. My demands are as follows:

  Sahand couldn’t help but smile as he wrote, picturing the expressions on the faces of his enemies when they read his letter. He took care to make certain his demands were outrageous—the more offensive, the better. As the letter took shape, all sense of terror and mortality inflicted by the mysterious black fog faded away. It turned out almost being killed by that stuff was the best thing to happen to him all day.

  Lyrelle healed imperfectly from Sahand’s beating, but the pain in her ribs and hips and jaw was worth it. Evidently the sight of Banric Sahand brutalizing her in person had jarred something loose in poor Arkald. First had been that cot and the warm cloth, wiping the blood from her face. Then a warmer blanket as she shivered. Then her daily gruel had featured a piece of boiled potato inside, two the next day.

  And he spoke with her.

  He was, of course, exceedingly cautious. He watched her eat the potato, counting each bite. The blanket had been thoroughly scrubbed of any extraneous material that might upset the establishment of the Astral wards. When he spoke, it was barely more than a mumble, and always very guarded.

  Lyrelle decided to match his caution with her own, figuring this would allay his concerns about an ulterior motive more than if she were gracious or complimentary. Mostly, he asked her questions—benign things, designed to indicate human contact but without crossing the line into actual intimacy: “How are you feeling?” or “Was it cold last night?” and that sort of thing.

  This morning, however, Arkald was different. He was always nervous, but today he looked positively terrified. His whole body trembled and he kept glancing over his shoulder, as though expecting to be followed. He said nothing at first, emptying her chamber pot and giving her the bowl of gruel—it was still warm. Lyrelle chanced asking him a question. “Are you all right?”

  Arkald laughed once—Lyrelle felt the laugh was at his own expense. He wrung his hands. “Why do you think he keeps you alive?”

  Lyrelle pursed her lips. How much of the truth to use here? Cautiously, cautiously . . . “He needs me for something. Isn’t that obvious?”

  Arkald shook his head. “No, that isn’t the reason. This I know now. It can’t be the reason.”

  And why is that, I wonder? Could it be that Sahand needs sorcerous help of some kind, but has not come to me? Interesting. She hid her thoughts by arranging her blankets.

  “Tell me,” Arkald said. “Please.”

  Lyrelle sighed. “He is afraid of me, Arkald. Just as you are.”

  “Why? Why now?” Arkald gestured to her wretched state. “You are at his mercy. Why not be rid of you forever?”

  “Because, Arkald, a long time ago I taught Banric a lesson he has never been able to forget.”

  Arkald shrugged. “And what was that?”

  “That I know him better than he knows himself, and that anything he wishes to do might be something that I anticipated.” Lyrelle looked out the tiny window. “I expect it drives him mad. I can see him in bed, tossing and turning, torn between the desire to throw me off the battlements and the deep fear that being thrown off the battlements is exactly what I want. That is why he doesn’t kill me, Arkald.” Some steel had infiltrated Lyrelle’s voice—she was so tired she had gotten sloppy—so she made sure to let her gaze drop to her ruined hands and leave it there.

  “I’m . . .” Arkald began, but then trailed off. He walked to the door, about to leave, but tarried there, one foot partially raised, as though frozen mid-stride. He was deciding something. Lyrelle waited, silent.

  He turned back around. “I think Sahand is developing some kind of . . . weapon. A sorcerous weapon.”

  Lyrelle nodded. “That does sound like something he would do.”

  “I . . . I don’t know for sure. But it seems likely, yes.”

  “You must be very proud,” Lyrelle said.

  Arkald blinked. “What? Why?”

  Lyrelle cocked her head and feigned confusion—time to needle his pride again . . . just a little prick. “Don’t necromancers revel in death?”

  “No! Those are lies! I’m not a . . . not a monster! Necromancy is an art, you hear? An art form!”

  And there’s that nerve. Lyrelle suppressed a smile. “Please, of all the ridiculous—”

  “The skeleton is beautiful!” Arkald snapped, shaking a finger at her. “Decay is a crucial part of the cycle of nature. A necromancer cannot animate or raise the dead without infusing the bones with the Lumen—the very stuff of life and love and joy! My work is art, woman! Art!”

  Lyrelle let herself look properly scolded for a moment, allowing Arkald time to settle down. Then she said, “Then you don’t think Sahand should have possession of some kind of sorcerous superweapon?”

  Arkald leaned against the wall and slid down, his head in his hands. “No . . . no, blast me. Of course I don’t.”

  Lyrelle stared at him. “Then, my friend, what do you propose to do about it?”

  “That’s just it, don’t you understand? There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing anyone can do.”

  Lyrelle slowly sat up, her ribs screaming at her as she leaned on the crutch Arkald had brought her and hobbled across the room to stand over Arkald. She reached out her hand and laid it gently on his shoulder. “Why don’t you and I talk about that, hmmm?”

  Arkald looked up, his eyes red. “Well . . . there’s this girl being held here. Some kind of princess, I think.”

  “Good—let’s start there, Arkald. What girl?”

  And Arkald began to talk in earnest.

  Chapter 24

  Retreat
>
  Tyvian and his companions were not the only people going north. The Freegate Road was clogged with wagons and oxcarts loaded with children and furniture and all the various detritus of a farm quickly abandoned or a city evacuated. These wagons were driven by stern men and hardy women with their eyes on the horizon. Between them and among them were those less fortunate—vagabonds and shoeless wanderers, wearing rags, their eyes seemingly fixed on nothing at all. Tyvian, also shoeless, could guess at what they were seeing, though—the places they left behind, and what had happened to them.

  He found himself seeing the same thing. He saw everything he had once been—dashing, free, respected, feared—and wondered where it had all gone. What was he now but just another wretch, shuffling along a vagabond trail to nowhere?

  “Where are they all going?” Artus asked one evening. They were camped by the edge of a stream along with a few dozen other refugees. “Camped,” perhaps, was a grandiose word—no one had a tent, few had blanket rolls. They had simply flopped on the ground after a day of walking, too tired to go any further.

  Tyvian found it hurt to look at these people—at his people, he supposed. He looked at the stream instead, or at the shoes he’d scavenged off a dead man just that morning. “Galaspin, most likely. From there some might work their way down the Trell River into Saldor or perhaps keep going to Freegate. Aren’t you from Benethor? I would think you would be used to seeing things like this by now.”

  Artus considered this, looking up at the stars. “Nobody leaves their land in Benethor. There’s nowhere else to go, anyway.”

  Eddereon was smoking a pipe, watching some children trying to spear a fish in the water. “They will be all right. Hann will guide them to a new path, is all.”

  The sentiment—that the God of Mankind was doing anything to help these people—turned Tyvian’s stomach, but he held his tongue.

  Artus, though, wasn’t thinking about religion. “I did this. We did—Myreon and I. We ruined this place.”

  Eddereon shook his head. “What part of the match starts the fire?”

  Artus frowned at him. “What?”

  “He’s trying to make a moral analogy,” Tyvian said. “He’s trying to say that the whole match is to blame and, in this scenario, all of Eretheria was the match, even if you were at the head. But he’s wrong.” Tyvian glared at Eddereon. “That riddle has an answer, you know. What part of the match starts the fire? Easy—the hand that strikes it.”

  Eddereon shrugged as he puffed out a smoke ring. “A match will always be struck eventually. It wouldn’t catch fire if it weren’t a match.”

  Tyvian threw up his hands. “It’s impossible talking to you. You know that, right?”

  He looked over at Voth, who was clutching her knees and furiously scratching at her ring. “That won’t help,” he said to her. “Have a look at Eddereon’s finger if you don’t believe me. Besides, by all accounts if you take the thing off, you’ll go insane.”

  “Is this what happened to you?” Voth held up her ring hand. “Is this why you were playing house in that gaming den? Is this what made you soft?”

  “I’m sorry, Voth—I didn’t want to kill you and this is the only plan that seemed plausible.”

  “You should have killed me,” the assassin spat. “Because I’ll make you pay for this, Reldamar. I’ll make you pay dearly.”

  Tyvian leaned back, bunching up his cloak beneath his head. “Promises, promises.”

  Voth twitched. “Gods! It’s inside my damned head!”

  Eddereon moved to sit next to her. “Just do the right thing, Voth. You’ll feel better.”

  “Get the hell away from me, you lumbering oaf!” Voth stood up and walked away, sitting down alone further upstream.

  Eddereon grimaced at her back. “She’s torturing herself. She’s fighting it too hard.”

  “I did the same thing,” Tyvian said. “So did you.”

  “I don’t think we made the right choice. The ring isn’t for everyone.”

  Artus threw a pebble into the stream. “Who’s it for, then?”

  “A noble spirit who has lost their way,” Eddereon said.

  Tyvian muttered a curse under his breath. “Let’s not be grandiose. It’s for anyone with a conscience that they’d rather not listen to. I imagine it would work on more people than it wouldn’t.” He pointed at Eddereon. “You’re the one nurturing ideas of derring-do and chapbook heroics.”

  “The ring’s capabilities clearly intend for the wearer to test the limits of their abilities,” Eddereon countered. “It is not a gift for a common cutpurse.”

  Artus grinned. “Watch it—I used to be a common cutpurse, you know.”

  Tyvian rolled over to one side, putting his back to them. The ring shuddered slightly—it wanted him to go and console Voth, but there was only so much consoling he was willing to do for a woman who kept insisting she would kill him one day. He didn’t know exactly what the ring was torturing her with, but he could make a number of educated guesses. A professional assassin walking among numerous valuable targets must present her with a number of adverse moral dilemmas. The only reason she hadn’t run off yet, he guessed, was that the ring decided she had to stay.

  And that meant it was because of him.

  His plan to “ring” Voth was a cynical one—he knew she had some kind of emotional connection to him, one he barely understood but that he knew was there. Perhaps it had something to do with the weeping in the middle of the night, or maybe that was related to something from her past. It hardly mattered, in any case—whatever the connection, he had guessed that the ring would act upon it and forbid Voth to betray him. He had been right. It had also been wrong—deeply wrong—for him to do it to her.

  And yet the ring—his ring—had no objection to the plan. For the first time since acquiring the wretched thing, he felt as though the ring was the one in the wrong. It should have been torturing him over his plot to compromise Voth’s autonomy. Instead it seemed to approve.

  The world, it seemed, was full of new depths for Tyvian Reldamar to plumb. First he’d gotten Myreon cast out of the Defenders, then he’d unintentionally helped his brother crash the world economy, then he’d managed to sink an entire nation into a bloody civil war. Next to that, enslaving a woman who cared about him seemed, if anything, the least terrible consequence of wearing the ring thus far. For some reason, though, it made him feel just as miserable.

  Now, if Artus and Eddereon had their way, they were going to wind up marching into Dellor and probably widowing every woman within a hundred miles. Because that was how this hero nonsense always seemed to work out—pools of blood and burning homes and the world in more of a shambles than it was before. Every. Stinking. Time.

  In the distance, Tyvian heard the baying of a hound. His thoughts drifted to Hool. Artus had told him about Brana’s death, and he’d been dwelling on it for much of the last few days. Poor little Brana was such a . . . such a good person. Positive and happy and kind and enthusiastic. Tyvian had trouble picturing him dead—how could something that young and that full of life wind up dead?

  Easy, Tyvian thought, he hung around with me.

  Another hound bayed and then another. Tyvian frowned and sat up. Was some idiot conducting a fox hunt in the dark?

  Eddereon, though, was already in motion. He slapped a broadsword into Tyvian’s hand. “It’s Rodall. He’s coming for us.”

  Tyvian’s introspective mood vanished with a shot of adrenaline. He was on his feet. “How the hell could he have found us in all this?”

  Voth’s sending stone! He snatched up his satchel and dumped it on the ground.

  The sending stone wasn’t there. Voth had turned them in. That was what was torturing her. “Kroth’s Teeth!”

  He looked to find Voth. She was on her feet and running along the bank of the stream—making her break for it, he guessed—but then she stiffened and stumbled, clutching her hand to her chest. He heard her swear in the dark.

  Tyvian ran
to her and pulled her to her feet. “C’mon—this way.”

  She elbowed him off. “Let me go!”

  Tyvian did his best to smile and waved his ring hand under her nose. “Sorry, darling—I can’t.”

  The stream was easily forded and they were all across in less than a minute and running full speed across the broad plains of northern Ayventry. Behind them, the rough voices of Rodall’s wolfhounds grew louder and more urgent. Tyvian risked a look over his shoulder—he could see five men on horseback, their armor glinting in the moonlight. They were less than a half mile away. Outrunning them was impossible.

  Tyvian pointed north. “That way! The spirit engine tracks!”

  “There’s no engine coming!” Voth shouted. “Sahand spiked the tracks!”

  Tyvian didn’t have the time to explain, he simply turned himself northward. The others followed, even if Voth only seemed to do so because her ring forced her. Sahand had spiked the tracks, yes, but that didn’t mean they were going to stay spiked forever. In fact, if he were a member of the guilds who relied on the spirit engines for trade, he would have a team out here trying to repair them as soon as word got out that Sahand was gone.

  “There!” Artus pointed. Sure enough, stopped on the tracks was a small engine—not much larger than a wagon—towing a single cargo car piled with wooden ties and adamant rails. It was only perhaps a three-hundred-yard run.

  Which would be fine if you weren’t being chased by vicious dogs.

  The hounds were chasing them, however, and they were closing in. An arrow whistled past Tyvian’s ear. A good shot—especially from horseback in the dark. He tried to increase his pace, but he was already in a full sprint.

  A big hound darted past Tyvian and snapped at Voth’s heel, just missing. Tyvian kicked it hard in the ribs as he went past, launching it a few feet and making it yelp. Another dog leapt on Eddereon’s back, but the big mercenary just kept running, dog on his back and all, as though he’d done this a thousand times before.

  The spirit engine was manned by a trio of warlocks who were awakened by the commotion. They lit the lamps on the front and back of the engine and waved their hands at the four fugitives coming their way—they wanted no part of this, whatever it was.