“Bloody shits,” Larning said, cursing. “What are we going to do now?” The dwarf sounded genuinely mystified, his eyes searching as he thought. “Well, we’ll … we’ll plunder this place, of course—”
“You’ll split the gains here with the other armies,” Cyrus said warningly.
“Of—of course,” Larning said, backing off quickly enough that Cyrus wondered if he was still grateful for the gift of Luminas or merely intimidated. “That’s fair. We did our part, we’ll take our part and gladly split with others.” He grunted. “But—I was going to offer you and your guildmates a place with us, but—but that’s—”
“Pointless,” Cyrus said, looking off into the blue horizon, beyond mountains that seemed to define the edges of Bellarum’s former realm. There may be no end there, but I see one here. “I have no more need nor interest in treasure, or loot … or adventure,” he said with a great finality.
“Fair enough,” Larning said, and though he did not look, Cyrus could hear the dwarf’s boots as he retreated. “If you ever change your mind …”
“I won’t,” Cyrus whispered, and the dwarf’s footsteps disappeared under the quiet sound of Isabelle breathing.
“Are you interested at all in what we found in the keep?” Isabelle asked, her robes brushing the ground as she stepped up directly behind him. She was close enough to give him a push and send him rushing to the ground. But she wouldn’t, Cyrus thought, and if she did …
… that would be a mercy.
“Did you find an ark?” Cyrus asked with detached interest. He wasn’t sure he truly cared, but curiosity got the better of him and the question came out.
“I assume you mean a chest of some sort,” she said, “and the answer is no. Countless swords. Foods of every kind. A treasure hoard of gold and the like, enough to make almost everyone in this army at least a little richer for their efforts, but … no ark of any sort. Plain chests, all opened. The gnomes seem particularly keen on taking inventory of—”
“I don’t really care,” Cyrus said, looking off into the blue sky.
“You killed the gods, Cyrus,” Isabelle said softly. “You’ve changed Arkaria.”
He didn’t even need to think about it before an answer occurred that expressed, perfectly clearly, how he felt about this whole, misbegotten mess. “It wasn’t worth the cost,” he said succinctly, and he didn’t say another word, for he didn’t need to. Isabelle left, and the armies below did the same, little by little, in the hours that followed, taking their promised portion and departing the Realm of War, leaving it in peace.
104.
Alaric
I held the baby in one hand and my sword in the other as the doors rattled under the pressure of a hard kick. Someone struck at the one to my left, and I wheeled in surprise. Another strike came to the one behind me, and then at the final door, hammering as they came under assault. Apparently none of them tried the artful approach Rin had, of using a spell to dislodge the bolts, for the rattling continued, rising in pitch and frequency.
“Here it comes, then,” Rin said, grim resignation in his tone. He held his sword high, ready, his mouth set in a line. “We’ll be the last, I think.”
“We could leave. Teleport away,” Curatio said, drawing a scathing look from Rin. In response, the elf shrugged. “I was not suggesting it, merely mentioning that the possibility was open.”
“Leave if you want to,” Rin said, and then his voice softened, and he looked back at me. “You should leave, Alaric. Take the baby and get out of here before—”
The doors in front of me smashed open, and Rin raised his sword, his suggestion left unfinished. Someone tumbled in through the sunlit early morning but halted, a spear over their shoulder.
I stared at the man who’d entered, and another broke in to my right, holding a scepter; another came in from behind, this one short and covered in scales, brandishing a hammer, and finally a woman came in the last entry, carrying a sword with a curved blade.
I barely had time to gawk at the fact that every one of them was from the races of slaves before I realized that I knew the man carrying the spear; that he was very familiar indeed, the beginnings of jowls returned to his plump cheeks and a miserly smile planted upon his face. “Olivier!” I said.
“That’s no longer my name,” Olivier said snottily, but he put the spear over his shoulder rather than continuing to point it at me.
“I heard,” I said dryly. “You’re … Pretnam Urides now?” I heard Rin snort softly and Curatio suppress a chuckle behind me.
“I am,” Olivier—Pretnam—said haughtily.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, cradling the baby to my side.
Olivier’s eyes danced over my bundle and a trace of disgust curled his lips. “We’ve been sent by our new masters to liberate this tower and retrieve you.” He maintained a stiffness that was alien to me. In all the years I’d known him, even at court, he had never been this haughty.
“Your new masters?” I could hear the feral fury threatening to overwhelm Rin’s words. “You mean the anti-slavers that have razed Sennshann to the ground?”
“No,” Olivier said. “My master had nothing to do with that.” He straightened up even further, if that was possible. “I am the servant of the Ashea, one of the four—the new order that has put an end to this … senselessness.” He sniffed and looked at the destruction outside.
“And not a moment too soon,” Rin said, sounding stricken. “Where were your masters when the rest of the city was falling to rubble?”
“Coming to consensus,” Olivier said with a twinge of irritation. “And now they’ve reached it. Be grateful, for you are saved, and these … imprudent actions have been … halted.” He looked at us this time, and not the ruined cityscape.
“‘Imprudent’?” Rin’s voice cracked.
“There will be consequences,” Olivier said haughtily. “But for now … we have come to escort you out of this place, along with those you’ve saved.”
“What guarantee do we have that this isn’t some ruse to draw us out and slaughter us in the open air?” I asked, watching Olivier for his response. I barely recognized him, with that smug look on his face.
Olivier smiled. “Do you imagine we’d need to draw you out into the open air to slaughter you at this point?” His spear came off his shoulder with blazing speed, and he pointed it at me. “Look at you, Ulric—or, Alaric, I suppose. You’re holding a baby. The three of you are exhausted. Your protective spell has vanished. You’ve been defending this tower all night. I’m not asking you to put down your arms, but for ancestors’ sake … this fight is over.”
“This fight is over,” Rin echoed, sounding like he’d died a little at that statement of the obvious.
“Come out and meet the new masters of this land,” Olivier said, beckoning me forward. I felt the lightness of a flight spell rush over me, and my feet left the ground. “Pay homage, and give thanks for them saving you.” He turned and started to walk out the balcony door into the orange sky beyond, and his fellows that surrounded us mimicked his move.
I came out of the tower and followed them down in a slow spiral, taking great care with the baby pressed against my side. I could not feel his warmth through the blanket and my armor, but his tiny face had quieted at last, no mewls to be heard, eyes pressed closed. He was fast asleep, but he stirred in the cool morning air as we stepped outside, then his face resumed its normal shape. His skin was not nearly so dark as a Protanian’s, but not so pale and pink as mine, either. He was somewhere between, a shade of blue lighter than midnight, and I had seen hints of purple when I had looked into his eyes when he was crying earlier. I held him close against me as I climbed down on empty air to the rubble-strewn vista far below.
There was nothing standing where Sennshann had been only the day before, no signs of life and barely a hint of enough stone and masonry to suggest a city had ever been here. It was as though a thousand year flood had washed through, leaving only the Citadel and, far in the dista
nce, the Coliseum still standing. Even the small buildings had been washed away by the fire of spell, annihilated in the hours between the fall of night and the rise of the sun. Deep furrows in the earth suggested where the tunnel highways had once run. In the distance I caught sight of what I thought was a stray piece of rubble, but it was a portal, standing in the middle of a square that had been sundered, the buildings around it removed from the ground, leaving little remaining.
We came around the last curve to find four figures standing there, in a rough square, each of them at a compass point. They were looking at each other uneasily, as though something had been decided between them but something sacrificed as well. Three of them were women and one was a man, and a familiar man at that. His rough-scarred face, made him look like he was carved out of the earth, and I recognized Orovan, my jailer when I had first arrived at the slave camp.
None of them greeted me; I received hostile glares, barely contained, but they nodded acknowledgment at Curatio before turning furious eyes again upon Rin. I don’t know what I was expecting when they spoke, but the tallest and fairest of the women opened her mouth first, and when she did, her voice sounded like a distant waterfall.
“I am the Ashea,” she said, eyes a luminous blue unlike many of her fellow Protanians. She met my gaze and I tingled at the reminder of Jena in her gaze; her own fell upon the baby at my side. She did not look upon me with the open disgust she’d shown when I’d first arrived. “This is the Enflaga,” she gestured to the woman next to her, and I deemed this woman, by the fury writ on her face to be a barely contained cauldron of anger given form, “and the Virixia,” she said, nodding to another who seemed insubstantial enough to be blown away by a strong gust of wind. Finally she nodded at the man. “And I believe you’ve met the Rotan.”
“A pleasure to meet you all,” Curatio said, and I sensed they were much happier to be speaking to him, for they each bowed their heads in turn in acknowledgment. He turned his attention to the Rotan. “And so good to see you again, as well, Orovan.”
“You as well, Curatio,” the Rotan said with a nod of his head.
“So you have put an end to the assault on Sennshann,” Rin said with unrestrained bitterness. “Of course, there’s nothing left of Sennshann now to speak of, but … well done.” He cast an accusing look at each of them in turn, and got a scathing look from the Enflaga in return, along with a slightly more measured amount of loathing from the others.
“Do not seek to cast blame upon us, Mathurin of House Gronvey,” the Ashea said.
“I think you mean, ‘Mathurin of no damned house,’” Rin said, “for there are no houses remaining, and barely any of us, as well.” He swept a furious gaze over the ruins, as a trickle of humans started to emerge from the doors of the Citadel, Varren and Stepan at their head.
“That is your own doing, Mathurin,” the Virixia hissed at him, a sound like a hard wind. “If you had not provoked this conflict with your killing of the Eruditia—”
“Yes, I see how it’s entirely my fault,” Rin said quietly, staring straight ahead as the rebuke landed upon him.
“None of this would have happened without your reckless breach of our customs,” the Rotan chided him.
“None of this would have happened if we’d never started down the path of slaving,” Rin said, whirling on him. “None of it would have happened if we’d given that up without a fight when we realized it was cruel. None of it would have happened if the anti-slavers hadn’t gone mad with determination to raise themselves up as they tore everyone else down—”
“Now you seek to cast blame on all others rather than let it fairly fall on you,” the Ashea said, entirely too calmly for my taste. She was shifting the blame for the fall of an empire on Rin. I listened, scarcely able to believe my ears. “You and him,” she said, pointing at me.
“If you wish to blame,” Rin said, sticking his chin out defiantly as he slid his blade roughly back into its scabbard, “then it seems you are decided that it should be I who takes it. Very well, then. If an entire empire in ashes, with every city and town scourged from the very face of the land is not sufficient punishment, then—” He threw his arms wide. “—take me, kill me, and be done with it.”
An amused rumble ran through the four of them, the result of some joke that they took a moment to disclose. “We won’t see you dead, Mathurin,” the Ashea said, once they’d given their amusement a chance to die down. “Death is hardly a punishment. Look at you, racked with sorrow,” she sneered at him. “Death would be a release for you.”
“A pointless gesture,” the Rotan agreed.
“The easy way out,” the Virixia whispered.
“You need to burn for your sins,” the Enflaga suggested with a hint of fire in her eye. “You will be the effigy, the scapegoat, upon which we will rebuild.”
“Rebuild?” Rin’s face was horrified, looking at them in raw astonishment. “How many of us are even left?”
“Few enough,” the Rotan said.
“But we won’t be rebuilding the Protanian Empire,” the Ashea said. “We’ve grown beyond that. The anti-slavers showed us the truth of that.”
“They showed you the truth of corpses,” Curatio said under his breath, “and little else.”
“The empire died,” the Rotan said, as though explaining to a child, “because it became too sclerotic, too entrenched, too reluctant to change. Our people ossified and were ultimately unworthy of what the best among us became in our ascendancy.” He grew sober. “Imagine if we had been but a ruling council, what might have been done without the angry mouths of the populace to shout in our ears, pulling us in every direction.”
“The Protanian Empire could not be ruled,” the Ashea said. “It had grown too large, too unwieldy.”
“Measures of control are needed, but impossible to implement on such scale,” the Virixia said.
“We need to start with something … smaller,” the Enflaga said, her gaze turning to the people flooding out of the Citadel. “Begin again with a less unruly people, ones who would hear and listen rather than shout and expect their will to be followed. Equal citizenry is the mark of fools who think their opinions count as much as the learned. We need … control … to ensure that this next attempt does not go similarly awry.”
“You stand on their corpses and blame the people of the empire for their own slaughter?” Rin’s eyes flashed furious. “And you make it sound as though you are ready to make another attempt at empire, with you in charge.” He looked at the former slaves making their way out of the Citadel. There were so very many, scores and scores, piling out in huge numbers. “A second slavery, as though you haven’t learned the lessons of the last.”
“They won’t be slaves now,” the Ashea said.
“Now they’ll be free,” the Rotan said.
“But our guidance will be needed,” the Virixia said.
“For how else will they be expected to rise beyond their feeble, animalistic states?” the Enflaga stared directly at me. “It’s not as though you would have risen up, learned magic, and grown strong without the guidance of some of our own.”
“This is how it shall be,” the Ashea said. “It is decided. And you will both do your part—or else.”
Rin and I exchanged a look. “What is my part, then?” Rin asked. “And his?”
“We will rule as gods to guide these lesser beings,” the Enflaga said, “each choosing our favored area of influence.”
“But every tale needs its villain,” the Rotan said sternly. He looked sidelong at me. “Your part in this tale is as helper, and will be told true—but your presence is no longer needed, and you will leave this land.”
“And as for you, Mathurin … your punishment … is to be the face of that villainy,” the Virixia said. “For you have earned it unto yourself.”
“We tried to save lives and an empire,” Rin said, stony-faced, “and we’re to be the villain and the exile in your myth of creation?” The thin fingers of contempt w
rinkled his brow, and he spat, “Fine, then. I will be your villain. If we’re to choose favored areas of influence, I have but one I wish to be. The Bellarum …
“War.”
I saw the barely contained tide of fury behind his eyes, and I knew he’d chosen that which he felt most deeply, that which he desired to hold close to his heart, to unleash upon them all had he but the power in that moment. If he’d felt sure, and his hand had been certain of victory, I knew he would have struck them all down then and there, bringing war to them all. As it was, I saw it burn in his eyes for a moment, then turn to a glimmer, and finally vanish beneath the stiff cheeks and raised chin, and I knew he would not let it out again unless he felt certain that things had moved to his advantage.
“Mistress,” Olivier said, his spear still insufferably over his shoulder and a smirk on his face, appeared to proffer a familiar scabbard to the Ashea. “I found this on what I believe was the remains of the Drettanden.”
The Ashea took the sword in hand and pulled it carefully from its scabbard. Its blade glowed a faint blue, and she gave it a look before she turned her attention to Rin. “This weapon … did the Drettanden give it a name?”
Rin held himself taut, like a soldier answering a superior. “He called it … Praelior, but he had names for its pieces as well.” He glanced at the weapon with thinly veiled contempt, as though he blamed the weapon for killing Chavoron. “He called the hilt the Serpent’s Bane—”
“That will do,” the Ashea said, clearly already weary of the topic. She frowned. “These weapons … we must take care to be sure they do not fall into the wrong hands, imbued as they are with pieces of our power.”
“Perhaps we should gather them from our champions once the work is done,” the Rotan said. “And any unnecessary ones such as that … simply be done with them, now.”
“Indeed,” the Ashea said, to nods of agreement from the others. She looked right at Olivier, handing it back to him. “I doubt it can be destroyed but attempt it. Failing that, see that it is taken apart, its pieces scattered.”
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