by Vox Day
“They won’t accept that. We can try to delay them, of course, but I doubt we will be able to put them off until nightfall.”
“There’s no point,” Theuderic said regretfully. “If they’d come late in the day perhaps it would be worth trying, but even if we destroyed the roof access, they’d have ladders here before the next bell. Or maybe even ballistrae, depending upon how much we irritated them. Who would have known those damned priests could play such a trick?”
He walked to the edge of the roof and looked down. Hundreds of expectant faces looked back at him, but only one was of any real import.
“The Comte de Thoneaux, I presume?” the guard captain said. Theuderic noted with reluctant approval that the man was too professional to allow any hint of sarcasm or irritation to be heard in his voice. “If you would be so kind as to descend, my lord, it will be my privilege to escort you, your companions, and the elven ambassador to the palace.”
“We shall be with you shortly, Captain,” Theuderic said. It was pointless to resist. He couldn’t help but feel how ridiculous it was that, after surviving more than one dangerous infiltration into enemy lands, usually on his own, it might be an open and well-escorted royal embassy that would prove to be his ultimate undoing.
CORVUS
Corvus had never seriously thought he would ever become consul himself, though the thought of what it would be like occasionally crossed his mind. Especially after the first time Magnus had been elected consul civitas. Magnus always wore the title lightly, as if it were merely another honor he’d accrued and not a responsibility. And his brother not only enjoyed being consul, he was good at it too, or he would not have been elected with such ease each of the three subsequent times he’d stood for the office.
He, on the other hand, was beginning to wonder if he would ever be regarded as anything but a complete failure. In his defense, he supposed it was probably a lot easier to serve as the consul aquilae if you knew how many of your legions would acknowledge your orders—and that none of them happened to be engaged in open rebellion against the Senate. He looked down at the map on his desk, and the little pieces of wood that served to represent Amorr’s legions, both loyal and disloyal, then at the numbers on the waxed tablet representing their respective numbers.
He sighed, wishing that circumstances were different and that he could talk to his brother about the daunting challenges he now faced. Especially since, as head of House Valerius, it was Magnus, not Corvus, who was formally responsible for the legions that Corvus had been commanding for the last year. But Magnus barely even knew the generals, let alone the tribunes, of the three legions. He hadn’t shown much interest in them since his second term as consul aquilae five years ago. And, except for approving the necessary funds, he hadn’t even had any involvement in the formation of the House’s newest legion.
The thought of Legio XVII reminded him of its present commander, and he reached out again for the much-creased letter from Marcus. It was short, and the news it contained was almost uniformly bad, but he took comfort in the certain knowledge that his younger son was well. But the death of Marcus Saturnius was a tremendous blow, both to him and to Amorr, particularly at this dangerous juncture. Losing Saturnius now felt like losing his right arm. It was so rare to have a subordinate who was both supremely competent and completely trustworthy, and the fact that the groundwork for his assassination had been planned nearly a year in advance was chilling. Combined with the death of Corvinus, about whom he could still barely permit himself to think, it was very nearly more than he could bear.
He knew that as a tribune, Marcus had likely been targeted for assassination too, but he refused to permit the thought to cross his mind. There were always risks to an officer, although they usually came more in the form of disease and enemy artillery than daggers in the night.
So many deaths and in such a short time! It seemed almost as if God had withdrawn His protection from His own consecrated city and thrown Amorr to the wolves of chaos. But then, Corvus had been spared and his son had been spared. Perhaps they had been spared for a reason. He desperately wished he could travel to Vallyrium and relieve Marcus of a command for which he was not nearly ready, but he was honor-bound to stand for consul in a week’s time. The assassination of Severus Patronus, combined with rumors about the rebellion growing throughout the empire, had thrown the entire city into a state of chaos, and his allies in the Senate strongly felt that as proper consul, Corvus would serve as an important stabilizing force in helping restore a sense of order.
And there was no question that one was needed. He felt a little guilty about the consular order he and Torquatus had jointly issued three days after Severus’s death, forcing all non-citizens to leave the city within three days on pain of having their wealth seized and being forcibly expelled, but there was no question it had been necessary.
The People had reacted to the news of Patronus’s plans to enlarge his clientele with no less rage and considerably more violence than the Senate had, and more than two hundred, most of them provincials, had died in the various riots and massacres that had begun the night of his funeral. Even with the full support of the Sanctiff and the military orders, Torquatus simply didn’t have enough armed men to quell the rising tide of violence.
It was a real shock to learn how many foreigners had settled in Amorr over the years. Nearly one in twelve of the city’s residents had been non-citizens, and it had been difficult to watch the long line of merchants and laborers, many of them accompanied by wives and children, trudging reluctantly toward the city gates and the long roads that would lead them away from the only home that many of them had ever known. How many of them would die on those harsh, wintry roads, or be waylaid and lose everything to bandits en route to the ancestral lands where they rightly belonged? Far fewer than would die before the fury of the People died down, especially if any of the rebellious provinces followed through on their threat to march on Amorr.
He and Torquatus both knew that, if a provincial army managed to fight its way past whatever legions remained loyal, it would take a miracle to save even a tenth of the resident provincials from the outraged wrath of a frightened People.
They had done what they could to protect the expelled, of course. The entire body of the Redeemed, some two-hundred strong, reinforced by the Petrines and the Jeremiads, were given the task of patrolling the four major roads leading out from the city. On his own authority, Torquatus had given all three groups the right of high justice for the duration of the expulsions, permitting the execution on the spot of anyone caught molesting an expelled traveler, and they had already received reports of twenty such executions.
But Corvus was under no illusion that they were doing more than putting a dent in the number of predations taking place up and down the roads, and they simply couldn’t afford to devote any more mounted soldiers to the patrols, not with the city in such an unsettled state. And, he reminded himself, there had been only two more mid-sized riots and one massacre of about twenty Trivicii merchants after the announcement of the expulsions. Deprived of its natural focal point, the lethal anger of the city had rapidly dissipated and been replaced by simple fear.
Both consuls well understood that, for a city, the fear of the people was the glowing coals of their fury, and any sufficiently strong rumors arriving on the wind could easily stoke those embers into another raging fire.
Corvus returned his attention to the map. There were twenty-four legions nominally under his command, twenty-seven if the three retired ones were counted. That meant somewhere between one hundred forty-four thousand and one hundred sixty-two thousand soldiers to be accounted for. Of them, he could be certain of less than thirty thousand. Another twenty thousand were very likely to remain loyal.
He’d gone over the makeup of each legion with a member of the House Martial that supposedly controlled it. Any legion with more than six in ten Amorrans, he’d counted as likely loyal. Those with more than eight in ten citizens, he assumed would
be fully trustworthy. He was a little ashamed to realize that only one of the three Valerian legions qualified as likely to be loyal by that metric. But House Valerius had always relied heavily on the broad-shouldered Vallyrian peasantry to man their legions, and they’d never been given cause to regret it.
We should have seen this day coming, he berated himself and his ancestors alike. Only one true city legion? How did we ever think one would be enough? We were too proud, too jealous of our prerogatives, too fearful of our rivals, and most of all, too concerned of giving the Senate the ability to make war on its own behalf. But how was it any wiser to hand even greater power over to the very people we ruled?
Severus Patronus had been right to worry about the fate of the empire, he realized. The man’s diagnosis had been correct, even if his prescription was as dangerous as it was self-serving.
“What’s wrong, my love?” Romilia was standing in the doorway. “You are shaking your head.”
“Am I?” He hadn’t noticed. “Nothing. Or rather, everything, but nothing new. I’m finding myself tempted to resign from the Senate and leave this mess up to Declama and Pansa. How am I supposed to plan a war when I don’t know which are my soldiers and which belong to the enemy? And when I don’t know what allies will remain loyal and which have already raised their banners against us?”
“You can’t resign!” She sounded genuinely distressed. “You’re twice the general of any of them. Three times!”
“No, I suppose I can’t.” He sighed. “I never thought I’d be facing a challenge of this magnitude, and I certainly never thought I’d be doing so without the help of either Magnus or Marcus Saturnius. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
She nodded, her lips pressed firmly together. It would not have escaped her that their only remaining son might well have died in the attack that had killed his general and most of the legion’s officer. They still didn’t know how Marcus had escaped the fate of the others, but as far as Romilia was concerned, it was only by the grace of God, and Corvus had heard her murmuring prayers of heartfelt thanksgiving throughout the day ever since Marcus’s letter had arrived.
At least the prayers were better than the sobbing that too often filled her nights of late. He knew she blamed herself for the fact that Corvinus had been in the city, no matter how many times he assured her that was not the case.
“I’m going to go to Marcus as soon as I can, my dear. In the meantime, he should be safer than you or me. Even with my fascitors and the household guards, we don’t have six thousand battle-tested men surrounding us on every side at all times.”
“Saturnius had six thousand men around him, and it wasn’t enough to save him.”
It was hard to argue with that, so Corvus didn’t try. “Marcus said he found the assassins. They were led by a centurion who had been planted in the legion when it was formed.”
“Maybe there are more.”
“We’re not discussing this again, Romilia. There is nothing I can do about it now.” He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice but didn’t entirely succeed. “Romilia!”
It was too late. She had already turned her back on him and left the room.
What did she want from him? He couldn’t bring Corvinus back to life. He couldn’t even bring Marcus back to Amorr. It wasn’t possible to be everywhere at once, and although he didn’t trust his son’s ability to lead his legion into battle yet, he was confident that Marcus was fully up to the task of weeding out potential traitors, especially given that he would know his life depended on it. Corvus had found that the threat of death tended to inspire one with a tremendous ability to focus on vital issues.
He returned to the legionary figures he’d scratched into the waxed tablet. Word should come soon from Falconius Aquila and Cassianus Longinus. As for the provinces, depending upon how many of them actually went to war, as opposed to simply declaring independence and hoping Amorr would be too busy to chastise them, his current estimate was that the provinces could be expected to raise around three hundred thousand troops. However, the number they could reasonably bring against Amorr was likely less than one third of that. They simply didn’t have the necessary foodstuffs, equipment, and transportation to project force that far.
His real concern was the allies. They were closer, they were better trained, and they were properly equipped. Man for man, they were not only as good as any Amorran legionary, they knew it too. His generals wouldn’t be able to make use of the psychological advantage Amorr habitually enjoyed when suppressing a rebel province or warring against the undisciplined orcs and goblins.
Somehow, he had to figure out how many of the eighteen allies would turn against them. Riders had been sent to sixteen of them, excluding only the two they already knew to be disloyal: Marruvium and the Quinqueterra. He felt certain Vallyrium would not turn against either House Valerius or the Senate, and he found it hard to imagine that Larinum, Amorr’s richest and most populous ally, would seek to throw off the governance of House Falconius. So the west would likely hold. He was less certain about the northern, eastern, and southern allies.
Regardless, it was clear that he needed to raise at least four new legions in Amorr itself, plus an additional four from whatever allies proved to be loyal. It would take time to raise and train them, but then, the rebels would not be able to gather their forces and reach Amorr before summer at the soonest. And if he could convince the Senate to permit the use of slaves, perhaps with the promise of manumission and citizenship at the end of their twenty-year service, he could raise yet another four legions within the city itself.
It was Ianuarius. The twelve new legions would need to be raised and equipped by the Ides of Aprilis if they were to receive a full month of training before the traditional campaigning season began with the Nones of Maius. It wouldn’t be nearly as much as they needed, of course, but at least a solid month would permit them to take the field as a reserve for the more experienced legions.
Twelve legions. Ten Houses Martial. And under the circumstances, he couldn’t start raising any of the allied legions until he learned which allies could be trusted to contribute them. One legion per House Martial would not only avoid disturbing the uneasy balance of power between the Houses, it would be a more practical objective as well. He nodded with satisfaction and returned to the text of what he intended to be his first act as elected consul—the submission to the Senate of a law entitled Lex Valeria Corva, which would require each House Martial to raise a new legion, and in doing so, permit them to enlist those slaves who were willing to take the eagle.
There would be opposition to the use of slaves, of that he had no doubt, but he was equally certain that the Senate’s terror of the coming spring would allow the law to triumph in the end. So long as the use of slave legionaries was limited to the ten new legions, he didn’t see it creating any serious problem beyond the precedent it was establishing. But surely future senators would understand this was strictly an emergency measure, to which the Senate was resorting only due to the extreme danger to the city.
He was wrestling with the question of whether there should be a specific ban on masters forcing slaves to enlist or if the language suggesting voluntary enlistment was strong enough when Romilia returned. He knew at once that something was wrong, as she looked neither hostile nor apologetic as she told him that a runner had come and insisted his news was urgent. But the way in which she squeezed his hand as he quickly made his way to the front entrance let him know that bygones would be bygones soon enough.
He didn’t recognize the young man at the door, but a glance at the guard was enough to inform him that his visitor had been searched and was unarmed. And he could see by the lad’s red face and the sweat that dripped down from his hairline despite the cold Ianuarian air that the youth had been running hard. He steeled himself to hear the bad news. Saints and sinners, was there no end to it? Who had been murdered now?
“My lord consul?” The lad bowed hastily. “My lord, I am sorry to disturb you,
but you must come at once! There is a large body of Church soldiers surrounding the elven embassy and demanding entrance!”
Corvus breathed a sigh of relief. At least it wasn’t another riot or massacre. Whatever outbreak of episcopal nonsense had produced this minor diplomatic outrage would be much easier to stop and set right than trying to talk sense into a fear-maddened mob.
“Then upon their heads be it. Lord Silvertree is perfectly capable of taking care of himself. At worst, a few of the fools will end up with singed fingers, or find themselves set alight.”
“They brought Michaelines with them, Lord Consul!”
“Did they now?” Hmm, that was indeed troubling. It indicated a suspicious degree of purpose and greater influence within the Coviria than he’d initially assumed. “Has the ambassador addressed the soldiers?”
“No, Lord Consul. When I left, he had not yet showed himself to the crowd.”
“Yes, of course, I imagine this would have drawn a crowd. How many?”
“Five hundred, maybe six hundred, Lord Consul.”
Corvus uttered a short series of mildly blasphemous expostulations about the Church hierarchy, its policy concerning magic, and the Order of St. Michael, drawing a smile from the nearest guard. It would also almost certainly draw a penance from whatever priest heard his next confession.
“Why did you come to me with this? This is an affair for the consul civitas. It hardly concerns the legions!”
“I’m sorry, my lord, but I couldn’t find Manlius Torquatus at his residence or at the baths. I thought it would be wiser to call upon you rather than the consul provincae.”
“I can’t argue with you there. All right, you did well to come here. Don’t mind me biting your head off.”
“No, Lord Consul.” The lad bowed deeply, looking rather as if he wished he had gone to Fulvius Paetinus instead.