Veiled Empire

by Nathan Garrison

  “One last thing, Yan. When you are done, unclasp the link.”

  “Why? What will that do?”

  “It will . . . signal to me that you are finished.”

  He was lying. Yandumar could always tell. After six years by each other’s sides, there was nothing they could hide from each other. Still, he knew enough not to press Gilshamed, trusting that his friend had ample reason for his actions.

  If I can’t trust Gilshamed, I might as well just give up on our cause right now.

  Without another word, Yandumar saluted Gilshamed with a raised fist and sprinted off into the night.

  He bounced from trunk to trunk, speeding towards the location the scouts had given him. He crested a small rise and was able to catch a glimpse of a clearing three hundred paces distant. The Imperial camp. If you’re planning on doing something, Gil, now would be a good time.

  As if the valynkar could read his thoughts—and he wasn’t entirely sure he couldn’t—Yandumar felt the sorcery take effect. Like a warm wind swirling around him, he watched as his hands first appeared ghostly, then disappeared altogether.

  “Scorchin’ weird. But, at least it’s effective.” He’d have to watch his noise, though. He forgot to ask if this effect would make him silent as well as unseen, and would have to assume otherwise.

  Yandumar trotted down the hill, careful to avoid stepping on any branches. A mark later, three Imperial soldiers came into view ahead of him. Despite the darkness, he could see them clearly. He hadn’t even thought to ask for night vision, but Gilshamed, as always, thought ten steps ahead. You clever old man. He marched within twenty paces of the sentries without so much as a head being turned in his direction.

  Stepping carefully now, he edged into the company’s camp. Over three hundred soldiers slept upon bedrolls in neat rows arranged in a pentagon. No fires were lit. Standard practice was to keep light and noise to a minimum when actively tracking hostiles. In the empire, the only thing that qualified as “hostile” were bandits. Usually. And, usually, such tactics worked.

  Too bad we ain’t your typical band o’ rogues.

  Yandumar lingered on the thought, chuckling silently as he shuffled into the center of the camp.

  Here, six tents were erected. One for each of the five lieutenants, officers who controlled a platoon of about sixty soldiers each, and one larger structure housing the company’s commanding captain. All daeloth. All targets. As Yandumar crept closer to this middle tent, he began to hear voices and could see flickering silhouettes spawned from candlelight.

  He froze as he realized there were more than six people inside. Who else would be attending? Though he could not make out any guards outside the tent—the daeloth must think themselves protected within their circle of troops—it was possible that they had stationed some inside. The sergeants maybe?

  Bright bloody abyss, like I need any more complications. They needed the sergeants alive if this crazy plan had any hope for success. He’d have to exercise . . . restraint.

  Yandumar sheathed the sword in his left hand and drew instead a blunted mace. He forced himself back into motion without any further delay. He didn’t want to dwell on what he was about to do. No use second-guessing. That led only to hesitation, which would likely get him killed.

  As his hand brushed aside the tent flap, the blessing took effect. Gilshamed, again, delivering with perfect timing. Strength flooded into his limbs, and he blazed with new energy. Every detail of the scene laid itself out. He analyzed threats, sorted his targets, observed weapons, noted states of awareness, and rehearsed the next few moments in his mind.

  It took all of half a beat.

  Three men stood near the entrance, sergeants indeed by the rank on their shoulders. Yandumar struck the rightmost on the jaw with the pommel of his sword. The leftmost he swiped in the temple with his mace. Yandumar barreled forward, ramming the top of his skull into the nose of the middle sergeant. Blood sprayed, but not fatally, as the three men toppled. Yandumar lunged past, intent on his next round of targets.

  Seven men at the center, rising from their seats. Two more on the far side.

  Yandumar threw his mace. It sailed past the center group and crunched into one of the sergeants. The soldier folded around the weapon and crashed into the man behind him, the two crumpling in a heap.

  Yandumar rushed on the seven. He swung his sword, candlelight flickering off the silver blade as it tore through the throat of a daeloth. Sweet blessed Creator, I’ve missed this! He noted, with amusement, that he was no longer invisible but knew that it didn’t matter anymore. Gilshamed’s blessings were all the advantage he needed.

  His shoulder slammed into a lieutenant. The armored figure careened backwards, tumbling into a compatriot.

  Another daeloth slashed a double-edged shortsword sideways. Yandumar caught the woman’s wrist, wrenched it around—with a satisfying crunch of bones—and drove her own blade into her gut.

  The master sergeant arced a longsword down towards Yandumar’s head. He brought up his bastard sword, one-handed, and parried. That familiar, vibrating ring of steel on steel sounded in the close quarters. His attacker stumbled backwards. Yandumar lunged, fist forward, connecting with the man’s sternum and doubling him over. He brought his knee up and smashed it into his cheek. The sergeant fell limp at his feet.

  The captain and the last of the lieutenants still standing had backed up to the tent’s outer wall. With fierce grins, they pressed their hands forward. Dark sorcery twisted towards his body.

  Yandumar froze. His mouth went dry. The air squeezed out from his lungs. He stood, not in a tent, but in a forest. Thirty years ago just past sunset. Surrounded by three daeloth assassins.

  God . . . no. Please. I don’t want to remember. . .

  But Yandumar knew that he would never forget that day.

  He also knew that he must never forget.

  He remembered clearly the smell of his own flesh cooking beneath his armor, blood and bile, the screams of rage coming from some otherworldly monster—but no, that was his own voice—as he ripped apart their bodies with sword and dagger and, eventually, his own nails, digging and tearing and clawing even after their corpses had long ceased moving.

  Now, two bastard spawn of the mierothi bent destruction towards him once more. Their grins persisted . . . right up until their sorcery deflected off the shield surrounding Yandumar. The spells careened into the two other daeloth he had knocked over earlier, shredding flesh and bone. Their death screams shattered the ice holding him in place.

  He leapt at the two in front of him and swung sideways, three decades of pent-up fury behind the blow. The top half of both of their skulls spun into the tent wall, smearing blood and brain matter.

  Yandumar panted, half-crouched and covered by the expelled gore of his enemies.

  “Not revenge,” he said. “Not . . . Please, God, forgive me. Just trying to balance the scales a bit. Set things right.”

  He turned to leave, and with a start, realized he was not the only one standing in the room.

  One of the sergeants stared at him wide-eyed. “Who . . . who are you?” he asked. The man stood with one hand on the hilt of his still-sheathed weapon.

  He was the one on the far side, who had been tangled up in the man he’d thrown his mace at. Luck, that he’d been overcome with fascination, rather than duty. A sign? Hardly. Things don’t work like that anymore.

  “Salvation,” Yandumar said. “Or not. You’ll soon be forced to pick between them. I suggest you choose wisely.”

  He took out the link and undid the latch.

  Nothing happened.

  He turned the open sphere over in his hands. What did Gilshamed say was going to–?

  An all-encompassing light ripped across his vision, blinding him to all else. A sensation like being dipped in boiling water accompanied a wind that shrieked and tore a
t his eardrums. The moment stretched out, pain rising, and with it, panic.

  Then, as quickly as it began, the sensations vanished. Yandumar looked around, blinking in the sudden darkness, and from it a voice spoke out. “Are you all right, Yan? Are you hurt at all? How do you feel?’

  “Scorch it, Gil! What was that? You said it would be a signal, not . . . not . . .”

  “Yes, sorry. I was afraid you would not agree to this little test.”

  “Test?” He grabbed Gilshamed by the shoulders and shook him. “I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was dying!”

  “Dying? No, no, there was little chance of that. But I had to ensure your safe retrieval from the encampment without further altercation.”

  Yandumar sighed and released the valynkar. “That’s . . . well . . . thank you. I guess.”

  Gilshamed drummed two fingers on his cheek as he ran his ancient eyes over him. “Yan, is something the matter?”

  Yandumar grunted. You always see to the heart of things, don’t you?. The thought tasted more bitter than he expected. “Will we never escape our pasts?”

  Gilshamed smiled and put a hand on Yandumar’s shoulder. “Perhaps not. But, together, I think we may get the chance to confront them. And is that not, after all, the better path?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Gilshamed seemed to take that as affirmation, for he lifted a hand skyward and released a ball of brilliant yellow fire, which lit the night for a league in all directions.

  Their scattered forces moved into position surrounding the four now-leaderless companies. Gilshamed unfurled his wings, their own source of luminescence, and launched himself into the air.

  “Give them hope, my friend,” said Yandumar at the back of the retreating figure. “This land could surely use some.”

  VOREN SET DOWN his quill and crumpled up the parchment. A waste, but the tragedy that was his latest attempt at channeling his emotions did not bear viewing by any other soul. It joined several other pathetic excuses for poetry, a few disharmonious compositions, and a painting aborted after only a few dozen brushstrokes.

  The departure of Draevenus had left him empty. The mierothi’s companionship had grown to be something Voren treasured, waking him up from so many centuries of lethargy. Not even the best of his art had made him so aware of what it meant to be alive. To connect with another sentient being, even on something so simple as the history lessons he had been giving, was so much closer to “living” than anything else he had done since his capture. But now that Draevenus was gone, the awareness of that need lingered without an outlet for it.

  Abyss take him for ever knocking on my door!

  Even as he thought it, Voren knew the sentiment lacked bite. Draevenus’s presence had been the best thing to happen to him in this palace.

  But his dull compliance with an empty existence no longer sufficed, and he was plagued by a recent urge to capture . . . something. He could not quite define it, which, of course, was the main drive behind his need to so do. This frustrating ignorance was only made worse by the change happening in the mierothi around him. Change that he knew nothing about.

  And his desire to ascertain its heart raged in him like an infection.

  Voren picked up the quill once more, but the muse remained firmly fled. Rather than dip in the stone inkwell on his oak writing desk, he placed the feather down again. He was, after all, just lingering in anticipation of his appointment. What need to mar any more fine pages?

  So instead, he paced. For nearly half a toll, his sandaled feet wore ruts along a well-trod path of white-marble tile, until finally, blessedly, the hinges of his door began squealing.

  Voren bowed. “Emperor Rekaj, how good of you to join me on this fine evening.”

  Rekaj strode in, a haughty smile already plastered across his visage. Voren’s heart sank. That look rarely meant good news. So much for the direct approach.

  “Voren,” said the emperor. The name dripped off his tongue like poison. “What, exactly, is so fine about it?” He gestured out the window, where thick clouds rolled down the cliff’s side, blocking all sight beyond the palace grounds.

  Voren presented a nonplussed smile. “Merely being polite, of course. I assure you, no disrespect was intended.”

  “Yes, well, we all know what they say about intentions, good or otherwise.”

  Voren opened his mouth to reply but closed it again when Rekaj turned away and strode deeper into his chambers. He silently thanked Elos for the reprieve. It gave him a few moments to reformulate his strategy, which, so far, had been failing miserably.

  He waited with patience honed from over nineteen hundred years of practice, as the emperor moved about Voren’s receiving chamber, passing a contemptuous gaze at everything his eyes fell upon. A bare hand, scale-backed and clawed, waved at the four statues grouped in pairs between the central pillars.

  “Such . . . craftsmanship,” Rekaj said. “It’s almost as if, with a touch of color, they could come to life . . . stand among us once more.”

  Voren bowed his head slightly. “By your own grace were the finest stone artists in all the lands commissioned for the work.”

  “ ‘Lands’ indeed. I had almost forgotten that this continent once consisted of over a dozen nations. And all of them protected by these, your people’s greatest ‘heroes.’ ”

  Not the word I would use to describe them. They may have all began as paragons of virtue, but how they ended . . .

  Voren’s memories awakened, of their own accord, as Rekaj stepped up to peruse each statue.

  Analethis, the Champion. He faced a hundred tyrants and felled each one with naught but his blade and the light of freedom in his soul. Until, that is, he ended up replacing one of them, carving out his own kingdom of blood and fire, which sent a third of the civilized world into turmoil.

  Murathrius, the Mediator. He had a tongue of quicksilver, which bridged many a conflict with a lasting peace. But in response to a perceived slight, he whispered false tales of the queen’s infidelity to the king of Panisalhdron. The king slew her and her entire house, plunging the nation into a civil war that lasted a hundred years.

  Heshrigan, the Arbiter. She founded the League of Justice, who traveled the world over, providing unbiased judgment in disputes great and small. And quickly wore out their welcome. Eventually they began forcing their own, perverse brand of justice on any and all, falling out of grace with even the Valynkar High Council. Heshrigan herself was accused, at the end, of more than a thousand murders, deaths she claimed as righteous executions.

  Rekaj fixed his gaze on the last statue. He pressed his face so close that his breath brushed cloudy residue across the polished surface. He brought a hand up, almost as if he intended to caress the chiseled face. “Well,” said the emperor. “I don’t think either of us can ever forget such a figure as this.”

  Ah, yes. Him.

  Voren gulped, struggling in vain to repress this memory hardest of all.

  Gilshamed, the Bold. He gathered together the nations of this land and led them in battle against the rising tide of the mierothi hordes.

  But in the end, he failed. The entire mierothi population, cut down to just under a thousand by a century of war, chained their sorcery in ritual sacrifice. The resulting conflagration, which later became known as the Cataclysm, pushed the very soil half a league into the air and erected the Shroud. Through it, none could enter, and none could leave.

  “There was much turmoil during their lives,” Voren said carefully. “I, for one, am thankful that such times are long past us.”

  “Are they now?” Rekaj said. Then, shoulders slumping, he added in a whisper, “Will they ever be?”

  Voren, though careful to let nothing show on his face, let a smile loose in his mind.

  Details would come, but now, at least, he could surmise the shape of the change taking plac
e. Some new conflict in the empire. And if it put the mierothi into such states of fretting, it must be serious indeed.

  Upheaval meant opportunity for renegotiation. Great upheaval? Change he dared not speak and scarce hoped to dream flicked across Voren’s thoughts, like smooth, round stones skipping over the surface of a still pond. He had to clamp down hard on a rising bubble of longing and—dare he even think it?—ambition.

  Voren sensed malevolent regard and glanced once more at the emperor. Their eyes met. Voren shivered as if struck by winter’s wind, the full weight of the malice behind Rekaj’s gaze now focused on him alone.

  “Is there . . . is there anything else . . . any other way I can be of assistance to you?” said Voren.

  “Oh, indeed you can.”

  The emperor stepped lightly towards the door.

  “A new Hardohl recruit was discovered recently. One of our phyzari out in the western territory found and birthed the infant though she was unable to save the poor mother, of course.”

  Voren shivered again. “Of course.”

  Rekaj pulled open the door. “The girl will be here in a week. Your escort comes the day before.”

  “The blessing will be . . . prepared, as usual. In this, as always, I am your faithful servant.”

  The emperor smirked but said nothing. Then, he left.

  Voren sank to his knees, then toppled forward to press his hands into the slick floor. Salty tears smacked the tiles between his shaking fingers.

  “Abyss take you, Rekaj.”

  Now, at least, he knew why the emperor had insisted on dredging up history. Not merely to stoke the memory but to remind him of failure.

  Voren’s failure.

  And . . . his choice.

  For soon, Voren would come face-to-face with their haunting echoes.

  Chapter 3

  “MAKE WAY, YA’ flea-ridden gutter scum! Get outta the road! Can’t y’all see we got a scorchin’ Fist coming through?”

  The sergeant in charge of the gate watch continued shouting as Mevon cantered towards him. Six soldiers with crossbows patrolled the gatehouse wall, and an equal number were on the ground, pushing with the shafts of their halberds at those citizens deemed too slow in evacuating the roadway. Their full-bodied chain mail jingled beneath orange-and yellow-striped tabards, which bore the oak-tree crest of the Thorull city guard. Mevon whistled once; Quake lifted his bridle-free head and drew to a halt alongside the sergeant.