by Morgan Rice
Claudius drank slowly, taking in the implications of that. If another man had said it, he would have thought they were mad, but West was so serious, and so cautious, that Claudius knew he meant it. “You truly believe that this girl, this peasant, is one of the Ancient Ones?”
“She’s no peasant,” West replied. “And even if she were, there was a time when you wouldn’t have used that as a curse. There was a time when you considered a peasant girl as much worth finding as a princess.”
“That was a long time ago,” Claudius said. Everything seemed to be a long time ago these days. He shook his head. “Things have changed.”
“A lot have,” West said. “The Empire, for a start. Do you remember the oath you took, the night before they crowned you?”
That memory came back as sharp as a knife. “I was drunk.”
“You’re working on it now.”
Even so, the things a man said when he was drunk could hardly be held against him. Could they? “What’s your point, West?”
“You swore that you would be a king who protected the people of the Empire. That you would be a man we could all be proud of obeying.” Claudius heard the pause before the next words. “Ceres wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t stand by anymore, Claudius.”
“I have only ever done what was necessary,” Claudius countered. He’d told it to himself so many times now that it slipped out easily. Ideals had to bend before the real world, for the greater good. “You have ruled lands. You know that there are no easy choices.”
Even to himself, the words rang hollow. It was obvious that they didn’t carry any weight with his former friend.
“There are hard choices,” West agreed. “Sometimes a ruler must be hard, but he must always be fair. What your son has been doing with your blessing has been a long way from fair.”
“The people must be taught!” Claudius snapped. “They must know who their rulers are!”
Who did West think he was, telling him how to rule? He, who had ruled for so very long?
“There was a time that they knew that,” West said. “Do you remember some of the villages we rode through as young men, when they’d chant your name? They didn’t do that because someone had forced them to, Claudius. They did it because the brave young king had come to them, because they knew he would protect them. They did it because you’d fought back the local bandits, or insisted that the local lord drive back the remaining creatures of the old times. They did it because you made the world a better place.”
“The Empire still does that,” Claudius insisted. “We provide order. The Ancient Ones’ pets don’t bother people. Bandits run from us to join the rebels—”
“Bandits join your army because they know your son will let them loot all they wish,” West said. “Do people come out into the streets for your men, or do they hide in their cellars and hope they pass?”
Claudius sat silently then. He’d drunk too much for this, or maybe not enough. The wine certainly had a sour taste in his mouth then. Or maybe it was something else making him feel that way. The past had a way of sneaking up on a man, no matter how much he tried to push it away.
“Think back to the young man you were,” West said. “Or better yet, if you say he’s still inside you, draw him out. What would he think of what your son has ordered done to my men? Even with the worst bandits, you used to just behead them, do it clean.”
Claudius frowned then. “As opposed to what?”
“You don’t even know?” West said. “You must be the only person in the city who can’t hear the screams. Lucious is torturing noblemen to death in the Empire’s name. Which means he’s doing it in yours.”
“That’s my son you’re talking about,” Claudius said. He did it automatically, rather than out of fatherly instinct. Lucious had worn that as thin as an entrance hall carpet, over the years.
“It is,” West agreed. “It’s also the next ruler of the Empire. Now that’s a thought that makes a man want to drink.”
Claudius joined him, but only finished half his goblet. He stared at the rest of the wine as though he might see the future in it. But then, the present was giving him more than enough problems. How could he not know what his own son was doing?
“I feel old, West. There was a time I could have drunk you under the table and still kept going.”
“Now I know your memory’s failing you,” Lord West said, with a smile that only took a little of the sting out of his previous words. “When did you last see me drunk?”
“I think it was after the victory in Thornport,” Claudius said. “As I recall, there was that business with the twins you couldn’t tell apart.”
It was hard to keep the humor of it when he knew that his old friend would be dead soon.
“Good times,” Lord West said. “Whatever happened to those times?”
“Age happened,” Claudius said. “Age and the world.”
He drank the wine he hadn’t been able to finish a moment ago, then rolled the empty goblet in his hands.
“I wish I could let you live,” he said. “But I can’t. Whatever your reasons, whatever past we have together, you’re a traitor to the Empire. You attacked Delos. You would have overthrown me. There are some things that can’t be let go.”
“I know,” Lord West said. “I’ve known since the start what would happen if I lost. But let it be an honorable death. I’ve earned that much.”
“That much and more,” Claudius agreed. He nodded. “My men will take you to the gallows. There will be a sword waiting for you there. I promise you it will be sharp enough that you’ll barely feel it.”
Lord West nodded. He considered the decanter. “Probably just as well I’m about to lose my head. This much wine and I’d have a truly awful hangover. What about my men?”
“I’ll see to it,” Claudius agreed. “Lucious has gone too far.”
Lord West smiled at that. “Do we have time for one last toast?”
Claudius poured out the remainder of the wine. “What did you have in mind?”
Lord West lifted his goblet. “To the men we used to be.”
Claudius shook his head. “To honor.”
“To honor,” Lord West agreed. He drank his wine in one long draught.
Claudius tried to match him, but only got halfway before he sputtered.
“And that’s my cue to leave,” he heard West say. “While I’m still ahead in the drinking stakes.” He performed one last, crisp bow. “Your majesty.”
Claudius watched the guards meet his old friend at the door. He gave the necessary orders. Then he sat back with the last of the wine, thinking of Lucious, Thanos, and what his younger self would have done at a time like this.
“To honor,” Claudius repeated, drinking the last of the wine.
He could already feel the tears starting to fall, and he couldn’t work out if they were for his old friend, for himself, or for the Empire.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thanos stood there distraught, staring at the wreckage of his boat. The worst-case scenario had happened: he was stranded on the Isle of Prisoners, with no way out.
The prisoner who had destroyed it spun around, madness obvious in his eyes.
“No one escapes!” he yelled. “Never escape!”
Thanos barely heard the words. His one route off the island, his one way to continue his search for Ceres, was gone, taken from him as swiftly as she had been. Thanos stood there staring, barely able to comprehend the senselessness of it. If the prisoner had stolen the boat, he might have believed it. This was just wanton destruction.
The prisoner charged forward with a roar, and Thanos found himself rushing to meet him. They slammed into one another and Thanos half turned, throwing the man down. The prisoner rolled, coming up, and Thanos pressed in, not wanting the other man to have the space to use the sword.
The bigger man tried to lift his weapon and jab down with it. Thanos caught his arm, barely holding it at bay as he stabbed once, then again, with his stolen
dagger. For a moment, it seemed as though even that might not be enough to fell him, as the prisoner roared in anger. Thanos stabbed a third time, and this time it seemed to hit something vital. The prisoner gasped, and the strength seemed to go out of him all at once.
Thanos let him fall, and went back to staring at the remains of his boat, feeling the pain, not so much of its loss as of what it represented. The chance to keep going. The chance to maybe find Ceres. All of that seemed gone now, broken into fragments both by the prisoner and by what he’d learned on the island.
“Piracy, murder, brawling, mercenary work against the Empire, a little burglary to make ends meet. Oh, and refusing the wrong nobleman’s advances when I stopped in port once. That was the main one, really.”
Thanos spun at the words, his knife coming up. To his shock, he saw Felene sitting cross-legged on a rock not far behind him.
“What?” he managed.
He saw her shrug. “You said before that I could be here for anything. Well, that’s what I’m here for. More or less. The full list is quite long. You also said that you couldn’t trust me at your back. Well, Thanos, a herd of cattle could have trampled over you the last couple of minutes and you wouldn’t have noticed. Yet your back remains remarkably knife free.”
As if to emphasize the point, she laid a sword across her knees.
“Where did you get that?” Thanos asked.
“Someone,” she said with a smile, “started a big fight where there were likely to be weapons left over. Also, add looting to that list from before. Almost forgot that one.”
“Why are you following me?” Thanos demanded. “I don’t have anything for you. You can see my boat’s destroyed.”
Felene shrugged. “What if I told you that I know where there might be another boat?”
“Why come for this one, then?” Thanos asked.
“Because that one is well guarded. Too well guarded for just me to take. But two of us…”
“You want me to work with a self-confessed criminal?”
“Last I heard, Prince Thanos, you were a traitor. Besides, I just want to get off this rock. Don’t you?”
It sounded dangerous. It also sounded foolish, trusting someone like this, but Thanos couldn’t think of any better options.
“All right.”
“Good,” Felene said. “Oh, and Thanos? If you try to leave me behind again, I will cut your throat.”
The feeling of being hunted wouldn’t leave Thanos as he and Felene crossed the island. He glanced around every time they passed a boulder, certain that this time the wardens, or the Abandoned, or both, would jump out at them.
“You need to learn to relax,” Felene said. “I know when danger’s near.”
“Is that why I found you upside down in a snare?” Thanos countered.
“Well, no one’s perfect. And I had been running from the Abandoned for close on a dozen days. Come on. It should be just up here.”
“What should?” Thanos asked, but he got his answer as they walked up a bluff to look over the edge of a small cliff.
There was a cove below, lined with rocks that looked as though they had razor edges. Shale and dark sand gave way to churning waves, but Thanos’s heart leapt anyway.
There was a boat there.
It was bigger than Thanos had anticipated. He’d thought there might be a rowing boat like his own. Instead, this was a skiff complete with a small mast. The whole thing tilted over on its side. The difficult part came in the form of the wardens who stood by it, obviously guarding it while they picked it clean. There were half a dozen of them. No wonder Felene hadn’t wanted to fight them alone.
“My noble ‘patron’ told me that there was money to be made bringing the right goods to the island,” she said. “Maybe helping someone off too. He made it sound like a rescue mission. He didn’t tell me that this lot would be waiting for me.”
That sounded far too familiar to Thanos. “Smugglers did the same to me.”
He saw Felene nod. “I just hope they haven’t taken everything yet. The Empire sends them hardly anything, so they pick apart anything that comes close. I’ve been trying to find a clean way down for days. There’s a path, but there’s only so close even I can get without being spotted.”
“So we’re going to have to fight,” Thanos guessed.
He saw Felene nod. “I just hope you’re as good with that sword as you look.”
He followed her as she started to lead the way down a path he could barely see in the side of the cliff. She picked her way down as nimbly as a mountain goat, while Thanos did his best to keep his balance there. They moved into place behind a boulder, just a short way from the rest of the beach.
“They’ll see us once we move into the open,” Thanos guessed. He put an arrow into place in his stolen bow.
“I can get closer,” Felene assured him. “If you’re going to back me up?”
Thanos could hear the uncertainty there. For all her apparent confidence, for all the crimes she claimed to have committed so brazenly, it seemed clear that she didn’t want to risk being left to fight alone. Thanos could understand that. He’d already been betrayed once on this island.
“Don’t worry,” Thanos assured her. “I don’t betray my friends.”
“Oh, we’re friends now?” Felene drew her sword. “That’s good to know.”
Thanos watched as she crept forward, almost silently, on her stomach. Thanos waited with his bow drawn. To his astonishment, Felene managed to creep almost all the way to one of the wardens. Her sword swept round at ankle height, and he fell, screaming.
The others turned then, and Thanos felt a thrill of fear as he realized just how quickly this plan could go wrong. He saw one of the wardens reaching down for a horn at his belt, while another stood over Felene as she started to stand, drawing a light axe.
Thanos only had an instant to choose, but even though he’d only just met the prisoner, there was no choice to make. He loosed his drawn arrow, and it embedded itself deep in the chest of the man standing over Felene.
He dropped the bow then, charging forward while his newfound companion engaged another with her blade. He drew his own sword, slamming into the group of wardens and cutting down the man with the horn. Even as he did it, though, the horn sounded, in a low, sonorous note that carried clearly over the sound of the skirmish.
Thanos cut left and right, parrying a blow from one warden, then thrusting into a second. He ducked under a swing, then cut upwards in a two-handed blow, bringing down another man.
The last man was already dead, with Felene standing over him.
“Looks like you can fight as well as you said you could. Quick, we need to get what we can into the boat and get it sailing. Thanks to that horn you let them blow, everyone hunting us will know where we are.”
“Perhaps I should just have let them kill you instead,” Thanos suggested, but Felene was already working to throw supplies onto the boat.
Thanos froze as he heard another horn sound somewhere above, then glanced up to see men atop the cliff there.
“Hurry,” Felene said. “There’s no more time. We need to push.”
Thanos threw his weight against the small boat, and for a moment, it didn’t move. The sand around it seemed to clamp it as tightly as chains.
“Push harder!” Felene insisted, pushing beside him.
Thanos groaned as he strained to shift the weight, but now he could feel movement. An arrow stuck in the boat, and that was enough to propel him to one last burst of strength. He felt the moment when the boat started to float free of the sand, and saw Felene leap aboard.
More arrows rained down, but even so, Thanos made a grab for more of the supplies on the beach. They couldn’t sail far without them, and it would still take the guards time to make it down to the beach. He hauled a water barrel onto his shoulder, then ran for the water, kicking with it in front of him as he swam for the boat. Already, it was further out than he could have expected.
Arrow
s landed in the water beside him, each cutting through it with barely a splash. All Thanos could do was keep swimming.
Was Felene leaving him behind? Thanos didn’t want to believe it, but then, it wasn’t as though he knew her. Fear came to him then at the thought of what might happen if she just sailed off, leaving him to the wardens. Given that he’d left her behind looking for his boat, he could even believe it.
Then he saw Felene at the stern of her boat, throwing a rope out to him. Thanos grabbed it gratefully, hauling himself in with his barrel, then clambering up onto the deck.
Arrows continued to rain down, guards rushing to the edge of the water so that they could continue to fire. Thanos grabbed for a box, lifting it in front of Felene just in time for the wood to acquire an arrow. He started to stand, only for her to push him aside as more shafts struck the wood of the deck.
“Thank you,” he said, feeling the water drip from him to the deck.
He saw her shrug. “Well, I couldn’t let good water go to waste. So, my prince, since you got me off this island, I guess you get to say where we go next. Back home for you?”
Thanos shook his head. If Ceres wasn’t here, there was only one way he could help things back home.
“Haylon,” he said. “We’re going to Haylon.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sartes’s world was filled with heat, pain, and hatred in almost equal parts. It closed in until there didn’t seem to be anything else left, and he could barely force his body to keep moving.
“Faster, you two!” a guard snapped, striking him with a switch. It had gotten so that Sartes barely even felt the blows anymore, there had been so many of them.
Even so, he struggled to fill his tar bucket faster. Beside him, he saw Bryant do the same, even though the boy he was chained to was almost skeletally thin and weak by now. Sartes didn’t know how much longer his new friend could survive there.
He wasn’t sure how much longer he could last, either. The tar pits were the worst hell he could imagine, and more. The work there started as soon as light touched the cages where they were kept overnight, crammed together in stinking, violent proximity. It didn’t stop until it became too dark to see, with the prisoners forced to pick their way between the tar pits by the light of the guards’ lamps.