Darkness Rising (Ancient Vestiges Book 1)

by Brenden Gardner

  “I am a knight, High Servitor. I do not understand relics, artifacts, or ruins. I understand men and women though. Justice. Vengeance. All that I do know. What you are, what you do, I cannot, will never understand, whatever you reveal. I am still of a mind to throw you out, but if that rider comes in two days, I may lose my reluctance to cut your throat.”

  High Servitor Jophiel stretched out his arms, frustrated but intent. “War is on your doorstep. Ser Jacob Merlen is lost, as are all the poor souls that rode with him. As the weeks go on, more and more of the Northlands you shall lose. When it is lost, you must make a stand at the sister cities, at the sight of the Ser Elin’s Sin, with him at the head.”

  Lost. The word troubled Johnathan deeply. Ser Jacob was not as spry in his step as he was years past, though he was a seasoned knight who knew when to fight, and when to flee. Then, Mother God be good, why has he not sent word?

  Though if the high servitor had spoken true, the boy would not step foot in Zelen. He would be called to Dale in fetters to answer for all those deaths, hard as it would be for him, and her. Lutessa still loved the man. Johnathan knew it by the way her face melted to sadness whenever the man was mentioned. She was the Voice, not Lutessa, and she must act in the interests of the Faith, whatever her heart may portend.

  “Has Lord Gareth not told you your proposal is madness, High Servitor?”

  “He has,” the stranger replied, glancing at the lord steward. “Said much the same as you have. My servitor was not in Zelen then, but you were. I watched you, Ser Elin, and Lord Commander Rafael Azail. Why is it that the knight was so punished for defending hearth and home?”

  I have asked myself the same question so many times. What we did was right. It had to be done, or Adreyu Marcanas would not have been stopped. He fell. He knew he had to. “It does not matter. Ser Elin may as well be dead in Serenity. He will not live long in Dale.”

  “Ser Tomas Marst will arrive in two days with Ser Elin Durand in tow,” the high servitor explained. “A knight who squired for you long ago. A knight who will brave dishonour for yours—and his—sake. This must be done.”

  It did not seem that the stranger would relent or give in. Even if Johnathan believed a word of it—he did not—Ser Elin would be hung from the gallows if the man dared return to the city.

  “Take your relic and leave,” Johnathan growled.

  The high servitor placed the Animus Stone into the folds of his robe, and Johnathan could see the creeping disdain smother the man’s countenance. He had seen its like when knights were held and questioned. It was the look of a man who had never known defeat: pride refusing to give way to compromise. “Servitor Gareth shall remain here. He speaks with my voice,” the High Servitor Jophiel declared, ignoring Johnathan’s glares. “Most of the remaining Vaults are hidden in the Northlands. The entrances he knows. Without him, you shall not enter them. The Animus Stones must be found before Lord Commander Rafael Azail can procure them. The Faceless Shadow must not find them. There must be no more like Serenity.”

  “And if I refuse this traitorous cur?”

  “You are not the only man with steel,” the high servitor declared flatly. “I wish for this to be amicable.”

  I do not like where this is headed. A cloaked stranger appeared in the imperium, the Northlands threatened, and this robed man in the heart of Dale, speaking madness. Johnathan wanted naught more than to throw them in the gaols and let the inquisitors sort out truth and falsehood.

  Yet something told him that would not end well. “I will suffer your servitor, but heed these words well: come into my mind again, and I will send Lord Gareth back to you in little pieces.”

  One by one swirls of sand took the servitors, and the high servitor last. Lord Gareth remained.

  “Plays, Lord Protector,” the lord steward said pompously. “Whence each actor performs their role, there is such a majesty of art and performance. I would like to see more plays, would you not?”

  A pity you were not a usurper, or I would show you the beauty of plays.

  Chapter Four

  Landfall

  Rafael hewed a foe amidst fire, smoke, and sulfur.

  He withdrew his blood-soaked sword, turned, and skewered a foe in crystalline plate.

  All too eager to end this in a single blow. A war is not a battle.

  Two more were upon him. He raised his shield and blocked a blow upon the left; his foe was staggered, and he thrust his sword at the other, spearing the man’s skull with the blade. He quickly turned to the first foe, bowled him over, and battered at him with his shield.

  Rafael put his left arm back in the bracer of the shield, and groped for his long sword. His right hand grasped the hilt, and he felt a presence above him. Towering above the smoke was a burly man in silver plate, with a long, spiked mace in both hands, and a look of vengeance in his eyes. Rafael tented the shield over his head, and braced for the attack, though all he heard was a thud.

  He stood with his shield up, and saw his foe lying upon the slick ground as blood gurgled from his throat.

  “Lord Commander!”

  Rafael swiveled his head to the trailing voice. Ashleigh Coburn stood with her long bow in hand, visor down, smiling, and a retinue of sentinels were trailing behind. “Keep your eyes up.”

  “That was not your fight. If our foes had fled—”

  “Gratitude is not your strong suit, Lord Commander.”

  “Put your visor down,” Rafael growled as the sentinel slid into an alleyway. “To me, the rest of you.”

  Rafael strode down Falen’s crimson choked streets. The last remnants of Ser Jacob Merlen’s band still hid in the port town, and Rafael vowed to root them out before the sun rose.

  Such is the Mountain’s will, and I must see it done.

  Rafael had lead them west: the Sentinels of Umbrage, men, women, girls and boys just old enough to hold a sword, all at the beck and call of Imperator Argath Diomedes. Servitude was the only tenet Rafael had known. Still, he could not help but think it was not enough.

  Despite his reservations, he refused to falter. Vengeance, the ancient blade of his family’s house weighed heavier with every swing. Even his plate felt heavier, as if it pushed him into the wet ground.

  Despite all that, he had come here with a purpose, even if he raged against it.

  He would see it through.

  He raised his shield and called a halt. “There,” he extended his sword to a squat and hobbled wooden home, fenced in by low grown hedges. “Cowards hiding in their hovels. Shield wall!” Sentinels bearing tower shields formed a wide U in front of him. “Get the brands and light the arrows, on my mark.”

  Heat was soon upon his back. The bow strings pulled taught, and he signaled the barrage.

  The thatched roof went up in flames. The hurried sounds of panic and fear broke the clamor, and he signaled the charge.

  Rafael dropped his shield, clasped two hands upon his steel, and cleaved the foes that emerged. Arrows rang uselessly off his plate, and he cut through layers of studded leather, and into flesh and bone. Wood cracked and splintered, the useless longbows snapped in half, and his sentinels speared foes through the chest. The wailing of the dying was relentless.

  These were no knights. Too bloody stupid.

  Rafael looked around the hovel and heard heavy breathing from behind an overturned table. He tossed the debris aside, and saw a frantic, quaking young lad, whose bow lay uselessly at his feet. Rafael grasped the youngling by the collar of his studded jerkin, and saw a boy’s eyes look back, terrified. Sixteen years if he is aught at all. Dozens of women and children were strewn on the ground already. Rafael cut the boy’s throat, and dropped the useless husk.

  Amidst the fire and smoke, he kicked aside the corpse in rage. Three years past a peace was formed—forced—but it was a pact; a pact that he shattered knowingly. We are not foes, curse it all.

  Rafael watched as the hovel collapsed in on itself; the dead buried beneath smoke and ash. His foes mus
t have thought it safe—or at least defensible; but it just revealed their naivety, and his own brutality.

  I have not changed, old friend; you were the lucky one.

  “Lord Commander.” Rafael turned back towards the road. A sentinel raised his visor, and the ridged face and beaked nose of Ian Firget stared back. “We have their commander pinned down.”

  “Where,” Rafael demanded, relieved that the butchery was coming to an end. “You have Ser Jacob Merlen?”

  “Lucas is cutting through the last of them. At an inn, near the water. We thought little of it, ‘til one of the men heard a noise beneath the floor.”

  “Lucas knows that I need Ser Jacob alive?” Rafael asked, turning down the cobbled path towards the east. “This wanton slaughter must yield some good—more than old, done knight-commanders.”

  “I relayed the instruction, Lord Commander. Yet even without the knight, I believe my own investigations have revealed much.”

  Rafael always thought Ian was more of a scholar than a soldier. He was loyal to the imperium; the sentinels had known no sword more devoted, though he was oft mocked in his cups. In the practice yard, he was once knocked down by a squire of fourteen years. It was a good jest, but Rafael trusted none other on tactics and formations.

  Still, he scoffed. “Guesses, Ian. I trust your judgment, but they are still guesses.”

  “Admittedly so,” Ian replied pointedly, unrelenting. “Yet the Voice must be retaining most of her swords, even if Ser Johnathan Falenir would flail against it. Either they do not understand what we hold—or they do—and rather fight elsewhere. Hrm, perhaps it is a threat from the overlord?”

  “We need a single answer, not many,” Rafael declared. “I do not fear Holy Dalia’s might, not since their judgment at the end of the last war. Yet did you not fear the sign of the Corsair whilst we crossed sea?”

  “The men did spy his colours in the dead of the night, though ne’er the same man twice. Could be illusions, no more.”

  Rafael knew that the Corsair was not a man to be taken lightly. The pirate lord mastered the seas as none other did. It was disconcerting, even if Lord Kaldred and Imperator Argath would not acknowledge it.

  “He is seen when he wants to be,” Rafael declared. “They saw him. If the islanders mean to join the fray, we must learn of it.”

  “Yes, Lord Commander.”

  The inn rested on a wide green, burnt and charred. Furnishings from the upper floors lay scattered, men and women in ripped tunics hung from apple trees, and Rafael’s own sentinels stood with bloodied swords upon the worn wooden steps. “Lucas?”

  A broad, barrel-chested sentinel sauntered down the wooden steps, speaking rough and coarse. “Aye, Lord Commander. We got the bastard!”

  “Alive?” Ian inquired.

  “Hah! The old man put up a fight, but I do as I am told. Yes, alive. Cannot say the same for his men. Tied ‘im up in the cellar. You like to see ‘im, Lord Commander?”

  “At once.”

  Rafael followed the sentinel through the charred, blood-stained inn. The broken bodies were still being dragged from the main floor, though he espied severed limbs beneath piles of rubble. The path lead through the kitchens, and Rafael went down narrow, broken steps.

  In the cold, dank cellar, tied up against a thick wooden pillar, was the old knight: his face was lined and creased, and most of his grey hair was torn out; the rest was matted with blood. Rafael thought he looked ancient. When the old knight looked up, a wounded, dull inflection was in his eyes.

  “I would speak with him alone,” Rafael commanded, and the sentinels returned up the stairs. He turned to Lucas. “See that no one else is hidden, and send out riders; none can slip through our fingers.”

  “Aye, Lord Commander.”

  Lucas withdrawn, Rafael untied Ser Jacob, and gently set him down in a worn chair, nestled against barrels of wine at the far end of the cellar. He was bruised and battered.

  “My sentinels will give us time,” Rafael said solemnly. “I trust you will not try to run on me.”

  “Where would I run? I should though, for all that you have repaid in kind,” Ser Jacob replied, head bent. “There is no honour left in the realm. Ser Elin excommunicated, and you are now a butcher of women and children. Why dishonour your name?

  The words cut deep. “Mine honour is why I do not bury steel in your gut.”

  “You may not gut me like a fish, ‘tis true; though do not think I missed those poor souls who were hung by the trees outside. Death is my fate. Come, see to it, boy. I will join my brothers and sisters. I have lived a long, fruitful life. My only regret is leaving it to the likes of you and your imperator.”

  “There are far worse that the imperator could have sent.”

  Ser Jacob spat phlegm and blood upon Rafael’s foot. “That is to your hubris. You have changed, Rafael, and not for the better. I defended you, Mother God have mercy, I defended you to my own knights. They thought you no more than a daemon made flesh. Mistake that was. More distrust to your imperium may have spared so many children.”

  Rafael always knew what the Dalians thought of him: the glares from their precocious knight-captains in conferences, admonishments of barbarism from drunken fools, and the jeers from the simplest, baseborn swordsmen cut deeper than any words. All save for Sers Elin, Johnathan, and Jacob. Men of honour and faith.

  One excommunicated, another close to the Crystal Throne, and a third I must fell. “There would still be war upon your doorstep, if I did not breathe. I serve the imperator, as you serve the Voice. Disobedience is death.”

  “And whom did the people of Serenity disobey?”

  “Serenity?” Rafael felt as if he should know the name. “I do not know of what you speak.”

  Jacob laughed depreciatively. “We are not all fools, Rafael. It is a sleepy village in the western reaches of the Northlands. It is where we kept Ser Elin hid, far away from war and strife as we could. Not far enough.”

  Ser Elin Durand. The Dalians decried the knight as a heretic, and excommunicated him for the pyre at Zelen.

  I shall not forget that day, not ever.

  In the imperium, Ser Elin was no more than another pious defender of the Faith. Rafael always knew the man’s worth, but not where he was. If Rafael did, that would have been the first village to fall, and not the port towns that littered the coast.

  “None of my sentinels went there; too close to Trecht. I will not provoke them.”

  “Then what of this?” Ser Jacob asked, reaching into his leather glove, and retrieving a worn, weathered coin. “This is a token of the Sentinels of Umbrage, but you know that. The Mountain upon one side, cross swords upon the other. Found this upon an old man, dead at his post, and three blades from the Isilian forges pierced his chest. Three sentinels, Rafael? Three sentinels to end an old, done man?”

  Rafael clasped the coin and turned it over in his hand. The token was no forgery—its like was gifted to thousands of sentinels sworn into the order. Yet some trifle did not fit: his sentinels were hard and cold, but never cruel. “What else did you find?”

  “Not all were spared as the old man. Their faces, I will not forget their faces. Terror stricken, Rafael, not of death, but deep-seated fear. They lay prone over fences, curled up, protecting children,” Ser Jacob bowed his head, near at tears. “Women, the elders, babes at the breast, speared upon lurching trees and buried beneath the rubble of their homes. How could you have done that? Do the vows mean naught in the wastelands? All that remains of the Isilian strength are godless men: decrepit and depraved.”

  Words would not come. Rafael wanted to cry and weep; to show his old friend that he was not some ruthless monster that fed on blood. It would not help, not to Ser Jacob, or any other Dalian who still lived.

  Though Rafael did not know how it came to be. The overlord would sit and wait, even if the Corsair kept a close eye on the seas. Prince Adreyu Marcanas was never a man to take defeat well, and would not have forgotten about Ser Elin.r />
  If Trecht is in the west while we are east, this will be the end of us.

  Ser Jacob raised his eyes after a time and spoke without mirth. “I am old and done. Men like me do not die in bed. I knew that when I squired many years ago. I have fought with many knights. Some big, others small, fierce and kind, merciful and just. Then some who threw away what it always meant to be a knight. Men and women who thought their vows were just words, that their allegiance was solely to their liege lord, and not to those whom they defended.”

  “These are not my people Ser Jacob, they never were. I owe them naught.”

  “I never said they were,” the knight-commander replied, staring back despondently. “What lies at the end of this path? King Tristifer Marcanas is not his father, but he will not sit idly by while you reap and sow. And what of Overlord Damian Dannars? Mother God knows we cannot keep the islanders from our land. Ponder that, boy, whenever your accursed blade drips in Dalian blood. Whatever you may think of your skill with a blade, when king and overlord come, not even you can stand against them.”

  “I must see the Mountain’s will done, whatever that may be.”

  “May Mother God have mercy on you, Rafael Azail.”

  Ian Firget, Lucas Graves, and Ashleigh Coburn entered the cellar, along with a retinue of sentinels.

  Rafael looked longingly at Ser Jacob before issuing the command. “Hang him, and send his head to Ser Johnathan Falenir.”

  Ser Jacob did not utter a word while the sentinels pushed him out of the cellar and up the stairs.

  Farewell, old friend. The cost of my obedience has only just begun.

  “Was that wise?” Ashleigh asked, removing her helm, and brushing out her long brown hair. “They would have never known we are here.”

  “They know,” Rafael answered flatly. “Bring that table from the corner here, and the satchel I gave you, Ian. I’ll have it now.” He unfurled a rolled map, and the sentinels placed their helms and daggers on the corners. “We are here, in the north-east. All the northern ports are either ruined, or house our own ships. The western reaches, mountains and forests, either our own, or Prince Adreyu is there.”