by CS Sealey
The Ronnesians were visibly tense and this tension only heightened when Rasmus appeared. Some began to shout but others merely lowered their heads and muttered prayers. When Varren struck down a group of loud protestors, Zoran flinched. The stench of burning cloth, hair and flesh was so acute and overwhelming that he almost lost his grip on his perch.
When Rasmus was allowed to speak to the crowd, they were deathly quiet. Any respect they might have had for their consul was nothing compared to that they now showed Rasmus. Their captain was standing tall, despite his weakness, and his voice was steady and true.
“I go to my death with a clean conscience.”
Zoran stirred himself and flipped his knives from finger to finger. He was now on the opposite side of the roof, closer to the action. He watched as Rasmus was led toward the gallows and the executioner, a man with shoulders almost twice the width of Zoran’s own, began to arrange the noose. The crowd was getting restless. Tiderius glanced from his brother to the rooftops, searching frantically for the assassin.
The executioner tugged a cloth sack over Rasmus’s head and, after a gesture from Varren, moved over to the lever that would open the trapdoor. Zoran slowly rose to his feet and readied his knives. As with every assassination he had ever performed, he centered both his mind and his gaze on his target. In a state of unbreakable concentration, it was impossible for him to miss. Every pair of eyes was now fixed on Rasmus and Zoran used the distraction to rise to full height.
The executioner’s hand was on the lever. Zoran took in a sharp breath and threw his first knife. Quick as lightning, the blade pierced through the air and found its mark deep in the man’s chest, bringing him down. But the man did not fall backward, but forward, onto the lever, activating the mechanism for the trapdoor.
With the reflexes of a wildcat, Zoran threw his second knife and then vaulted across the tiles. As he ran, his eyes watched the passage of the knife as it skimmed through the air, unseen by all. The trapdoor had opened and Captain Rasmus was falling.
“No!” Tiderius’s cry rose from the crowd.
Zoran reached the rooftop closest to the scaffold and leaped into the air just as his second knife split the rope attaching the noose to the crossbeam. By this time, Varren had deduced something was amiss and was searching for the executioner’s attacker, a ball of fire in his open palm, ready to be thrown.
Zoran disintegrated into the swirling vortex of dust and sent his form careening into the guards between the crowd and the scaffold. Confused and disorientated, most of the guards dropped to their knees, protecting their eyes from the dust. Citizens also covered their faces but Cassios Avric leaped through the cloud, cleared the crouching guards and rolled beneath the scaffold.
“Get up! Get up, you fools!” Varren was shouting to his men. “Show yourselves, Ronnesian dogs! You cannot hide from me!”
With a twist, Zoran sent the particles of his body hurtling toward the consul. The sorcerer threw up his hands and conjured a protective wall of magic, warding off Zoran’s power. Unable to harm the sorcerer, the assassin merely engulfed him in a spinning, swirling funnel of sand. He watched as Cassios dragged a weak and shaking Rasmus out from under the scaffold, unseen, and hurried away into a deserted alleyway.
“You will pay for this, Sorcha!” Varren shouted from within the vortex. “You and your precious people will feel my wrath! Mark my words, they have not yet known pain!”
Varren attempted to blast Zoran out of the way but he merely blew holes in the swirling column, holes that quickly closed once more. Zoran could hear the sorcerer’s mad cries of fury as he tried over and over to clear his vision. Yet the assassin was beginning to tire and could not continue to harass Varren for much longer.
Noticing that Cassios and Rasmus were safely away, he swirled around Varren more quickly, churning so fast that it must have seemed like night to the Ayon consul. Then after a loud shout of rage from Varren, Zoran swerved midair, calling the wind to his command, stirring up the loose dust and soil in the square, flinging it into the crowd’s eyes. Taking this brief opportunity, Zoran swooped his tail of particles into a tight clump and rematerialized behind the scaffold amid a cluster of hunched and quivering citizens. The assassin checked himself quickly and readjusted his face mask and hood just as Varren stormed over to the trapdoor and found the space beneath it empty.
“Guards, find the fugitive and his friends! Dead or alive, just bring them to me! Anyone suspected of being involved in his escape will be struck down in the streets. This cannot continue! Go!”
*
Rasmus gasped and leaned against the wall, panting. Cassios ground to a halt and looked about anxiously; they were out of sight of the guards but hundreds of them would soon be fanning out to search the nearby streets and buildings, and Rasmus would be recognized easily by his attire and poor health if not by his face alone.
“I know you must be exhausted, Rasmus, but we can’t stop. Get back to headquarters, then you can rest.”
“No, Cassios, I could run a mile,” Rasmus lied and forced himself on, following his friend closely, ignoring the pain in his muscles and the aches in his bones. He was free. Somehow, by the grace of the Spirits and a remarkable stroke of luck, his friends had managed to snatch him from the jaws of death.
There was a clatter overhead and a figure leaped across the space between the roofs. Rasmus did not need to see the figure’s face to know who it was.
“Where’s my brother? I thought I heard him.”
“No questions now. Let’s focus on getting you to safety, shall we?”
They continued on in relative silence, darting out from alleys, crossing streets and disappearing into the safety of other dark and deserted passageways. Rasmus was panting hard now and a stitch was piercing his left side.
“Can’t breathe,” he rasped, hunching forward, coming to another grinding halt. “Cassios, wait.”
Again his friend slowed and hurried back. He looked around, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other mopping his brow.
“Zoran!” Cassios cried, looking up. “What’s the situation?”
There was a pause before a disembodied voice replied, “Clear. You have some time.” The assassin’s shadow crossed the thin strip of afternoon light and Rasmus saw a momentary flash of black robes before he disappeared again across the rooftops.
Cassios sighed and put a hand on Rasmus’s shoulder. “Suck it in, my friend. You’ll be all right. Just breathe.”
“I’m alive,” Rasmus whispered. “Gods, I’m alive…”
“You didn’t seriously think we’d let you go to your death like that, did you?” Cassios chuckled. “Not famous Captain Auran of Her Majesty’s cavalry!”
“I didn’t tell them anything,” Rasmus said anxiously, grasping at his friend’s arm. “They knew what I’d been doing but I didn’t tell them where we were. Just as Tiderius said, I thought of other places, other buildings…I hope Varren didn’t see anything else.”
Rasmus began to cough violently and he frantically dragged air into his lungs. Another cry from above urged them to move on.
“Here,” Cassios said, “we don’t have to worry about you being recognized if you put this on.”
He tugged off his jacket and wrapped it around Rasmus’s shoulders, hiding the blood-stained tatters of his shirt and the whipped flesh beneath, evidence of Rasmus’s many days of torture.
“Come on, almost home, then we can get the manacles off and Angora can tend to these wounds of yours.”
CHAPTER 69
Archis Varren had never felt angrier and more confused in his life. He knew everything about the shaman – everything! He could also recognize any magic the old man Markus could conjure. And surely he knew more about his own strand than Kayte, so how in the world could a spell have confounded him so completely?
He had never felt anything like it, nor seen another spell as peculiar as a vortex of swirling particles of what had looked like sand. Yet it had felt like something more
than a wind charm and where the sand had come from and where it had disappeared to baffled him exceedingly. The spell had been very powerful, something Varren expected only Emil capable of conjuring, unless Kayte had become miraculously stronger since their last encounter.
But what puzzled Varren most of all was that he was still alive. The spell had managed to block his vision, rendering him completely incapable of defending himself against any great attack. Wherever he had moved upon the platform, the torrent of sand-clogged air had gone with him. He had been blind and helpless but they had not attempted to kill him. What could that mean? Had it been an act intended to scare him, a warning to let him know that he would not be so lucky the next time? Or had the great spell involved all the mages working together, therefore making it impossible for them to conjure another?
It did not make sense.
His soldiers were scouring the city and had been doing so for hours, ever since the Ronnesian captain had escaped. Sitting in a handsome armchair in what had once been Queen Sorcha’s royal suite, Archis Varren ran his hands through his hair and sighed deeply. His rage had died, leaving him feeling hollow. He had had the perfect chance to show the people of Te’Roek what would happen to traitors, but that chance had been ruined. It changed things. His hold on the people would slip, and if he did not frighten them into submission once more, it might fall apart altogether. That was something he could not afford to let happen. He had to find a way to win them back. A high reward for information regarding the whereabouts of Captain Auran might tempt a few, but he had to think in a broader sense if he was to entice the citizens into giving up their hero.
Hour after hour, he received reports from his men sweeping the streets, looking for Auran and any of his fellow conspirators. Some citizens fought and, obeying their orders, the soldiers struck them down and left the bodies in the streets long enough for the citizens to consider the consequences of opposing him. The death toll of the occupation was rising significantly now. And as the time passed, the likelihood of locating Rasmus Auran and Sorcha’s servants was growing slimmer. Though the gates of the city were closed and heavily guarded, Varren knew all too well that Emil, Kayte or Markus could now be long gone, taking the captain with them.
He prowled around his room in frustration for a long while, and when a light line of gray appeared on the horizon against the cold black of night, he snatched a few hours of much needed rest. When he woke, mid-morning sun was streaming in through the window but it did not offer much heat. He washed quickly and went in search of the latest news. The pair of soldiers on guard outside his room had three reports to hand him. The sorcerer returned to the armchair and read them quickly. The news was not good. The guards had failed to find any of the main conspirators but another score of citizens had risen up to fight during the night, taking the deaths to an estimated one hundred and eighty-three. To add to that, the resistance headquarters had been found abandoned and not a single conspirator had been caught.
“And there are strange folk about the city,” Vrór reported a while later in a castle corridor. “Their accents are strange to me. I have only rarely traveled outside sss Leith but they weren’t Ronnesian, I’m sure of that.”
“Southerners, perhaps, from Londston or Andril?”
“I do not know, my lord. Not native to Kirofirth, that’s sss for sure.”
So Varren was puzzled by another fact and, as the days turned slowly into weeks, he could not reach a satisfactory conclusion. Why would merchants and farmers flock to a city under occupation by their enemies? Or was this a normal occurrence for Te’Roek and he was simply paranoid or overanalyzing?
Ever since the failed execution of Rasmus Auran, he had scoured the castle library for any book or text that could aid him in his struggle to understand the spell that had engulfed him. So far, his endeavors had been fruitless and this, coupled with the worrying news that foreigners were massing in the city, made Varren wonder whether the resistance was better organized than he had given them credit for. But since no action had been taken against his soldiers in the form of a planned attack, he had nowhere to begin. He was already using precious time and resources to search each and every house in the city but very few of his soldiers knew what Emil, Markus or Kayte actually looked like, let alone either of the Auran brothers. Angora’s face, however, would be known well by all his men, due to the painting that still hung in Delseroy castle.
His skin crawled just thinking the woman’s name. If not for her, his master would still have been alive. King Samian would never have called off the invasion his father had ordered, he would have married a good Leith or Turgyl woman and been busy with matters of state, while his wife bore him children, not fought alongside his enemies. He most certainly would never have been captured by Ronnesians in his own home.
However, there was a niggling thought at the back of his mind that whispered that he had failed his master, that he could have prevented the king’s death if he had taken Samian straight from the dungeon corridor instead of indulging the Ronnesians by fighting. There, at least, was a fault of his own. A fault he would never forget.
*
A couple of days out from the new year, Varren sat at his writing table, leaning over the latest report. The messenger who had brought it stood silently a few yards away with a goblet of wine. The Ayon consul straightened in his high-backed chair and sighed.
“Summon Lhunannon for me.”
The messenger bowed his head and departed, leaving Varren alone in the vast dining hall he had come to use as his meeting room and war cabinet. He read through the report again and absently shook his head. He could not comprehend how Calormen, a city not even half the size of Te’Roek, could still be defying the Ayon invasion. Varren had ordered his soldiers to construct catapults after one week of failed attempts with ladders against the high city walls. Their bombardment had continued for hours, causing many within the city to lose their lives. Yet, the inhabitants had still not surrendered.
Varren was so preoccupied by his thoughts that he did not immediately hear Lhunannon enter. After the enchanter had cleared his throat, however, Varren looked up and motioned him over to the long table. He handed Lhunannon the report that troubled him.
“You wish me to read it, sir?” Lhunannon asked, noticing the words scrawled across the top of the report, which stated that none other than the lord general had the authority to read it.
“Yes. See what you make of it.”
Lhunannon nodded and started to read. When he reached the end, he looked up. “It is a problem,” he said, his voice betraying nothing. “Not the situation in itself but the location of it.”
“In what way?”
“It is not close enough to our own borders or our foothold here for us to send reinforcements quickly. Any action may take weeks.”
“I agree,” Varren said, nodding absently.
“However, Menthenae is predictably quieter since Tarvenna and I eradicated their petty peasant uprising with Captain Maxis some weeks ago. Perhaps, since our military presence there is no longer required to be quite so strong, we could send men to Calormen as reserves.”
“It is not the problem of numbers at Calormen,” Varren said, “we simply cannot wear down their resolve. The whole city is fighting against us, not just their guards. If there was something we could do to dampen their spirits…”
“I’m afraid I am no expert in such matters, sir,” Lhunannon admitted. “Shall I send for Captain Maxis perhaps?”
“No, don’t bother going all the way to Menthenae. I will have to formulate a solution myself. We may yet be forced to sit out this siege. That in itself will not be good for morale. The men need to fight for a victory, not wait while a city slowly starves.”
“What is their defense?” Lhunannon asked. “Is the guard heavy on the outer wall?”
“If nothing has changed since the initial report I received, then they have eyes every two dozen yards along the city wall and change shifts every six hours. The wall i
tself is estimated to be in excess of twelve feet thick and there are only three gates, all of which are heavily fortified.”
“That’s thicker than Te’Roek’s outer wall,” the enchanter said, surprised.
“Yes, but it’s also their only wall.”
“Perhaps there is an opportunity to go beneath the wall, then,” Lhunannon suggested, massaging his chin.
“Go on.”
“I saw it done while on campaign during King Corhillar’s reign, perhaps twenty years ago. The Monreithians were at war with Airgyl and King Marn led his men and our reinforcements in an attack on Tenson. We laid siege to the port but could not scale the walls with ladders or weaken it with catapults and the defense around the harbor was too strong to even consider attempting a sea offensive. One of our captains suggested digging a tunnel under the wall. It seemed our only option at the time and so it was done.”
“I take it the plan was successful.”
“Indeed. The tunnel allowed a steady passage of troops to pass unnoticed into the city under the cover of darkness. I myself went through it.”
“But how long did that all take?”
“For one hundred yards, wide enough for two men to walk abreast…almost two months, if I remember correctly.”
Varren cursed quietly under his breath and turned away. “We don’t have that sort of time. Better to let them starve.”
“Then we had best continue attacking the walls,” Lhunannon said. “If it would help, I could travel north and see if I could be of any use, perhaps take Tarvenna. She did so enjoy our last expedition.”
“Yes, I can understand why. Very well, Lhunannon. Take her and give Commander Sheon this message.”
Varren sat and scrawled a quick note on a piece of parchment. He ended it with a flourish of his name and then reached for the sealing wax. He dropped a few large spots onto the parchment beneath his name and pressed his signet ring down hard, leaving an impression of his family crest.