Paladin's Fall: Kingdom's Forge Book 2

by Kade Derricks

  As courier and squad leader, Dain was entrusted with the memorization of the instructions. This allowed for the rare instances when cases were lost or destroyed. He’d spent the better part of an evening reading aloud and then repeating the lines back to the Sovereign’s satisfaction.

  This being a special case due to their age, Chaney accompanied them. He was forbidden from taking a leadership role in any way; doing so would make the payment null and void. To be paid, it had to be the squad’s mission; Chaney was only to interfere in defense of their lives. He also handled the journey’s finances. Chalmer had balked at using the post run as a way of fulfilling their debt at all, but the Sovereign had overruled him.

  Niles and Falion rode in the lead. Dain followed them, glad for a reason to travel overnight with Boon. He patted the buckskin on the neck and looked behind. Kag brought up the rear on a huge chestnut mare with the other boys riding their own mounts in between.

  Neither Kag nor Falion had ever been outside of the city before, and both looked wide-eyed in all directions as they rode. Dain suspected they saw wolves and all manner of other beasts in every shadow or snowbank. The weather grew colder as they made their way north and the land rose in elevation, and at times the horses struggled through the persistent snow.

  Dain called the group to a halt well before nightfall. He found a thick grove of evergreens where the ground was bare and dry. Chaney nodded in approval. Dain cut lengths of thumb-thick boughs with his sword while several of the others unpacked their tents and gathered firewood. Falion soon had a fire roaring and Dain unloaded the boughs. He sat down and started to bind the thin branches into ovals, then wove thin straps of bark between them. It had been a long time since he’d made a pair of snowshoes, and though the first set was crude, they were serviceable.

  The drifts would be deeper further north, though eventually the trail dropped down onto the warmer plains around Thistleton. With snowshoes, they could spare their horses by walking some.

  Niles had watched him closely as he fashioned the first pair of shoes, and Dain tossed him a few branches to work with. He set to work while Dain offered a few pointers.

  By nightfall everyone had a pair of shoes. Oddly enough, Kag took to it the easiest. His pair was on par with Dain’s own, and Dain commented on it.

  “My da was a craftsman. He could shape damn near anything from wood. Tables, chairs, cabinets, anything.” Kag poked a stick into the glowing coals. “I used to spend hours in the shop studying under him. I helped him make a four-posted bed once for some lordling’s summer manor.”

  “Why didn’t you apprentice for him? Craftsmen make a good living,” Trysen asked.

  Kag’s face hardened, deepening in shadow. For a long time the only sound was the crackling and popping of the fire. Dain didn’t think he would answer.

  “Mum caught the Red Pox first,” Kag said at last. “The healers told Da not to touch her. But she screamed and begged for three days and he couldn’t help himself. All of us ended up catching it. My brothers, my sisters, my da, even uncle Peel and aunt Dais. All of us. Healers came by one day to check on Mum and saw we were all sick. They sealed up the house for a week. I was a skeleton when the fever broke and they let me out, withered down to the bones. They died. My family all died. I was the only one who survived. Don’t know why.”

  No one spoke for a long time.

  “I heard precious few survived the pox,” Dain said, breaking the silence.

  “You’re lucky,” Zek said. “Lucky to have lived.”

  “Lucky.” Kag’s eyes hardened further. “I’d rather’ve died. The pain was like nothing I ever felt before. Not to mention that when it finally passed, everyone I’d ever cared for was dead and gone. They buried them all in one mass grave before I got out of the healer’s quarters. Didn’t even have a marker to look at. Just a piled-up heap of brown earth with a thousand strangers in it.”

  They said a hundred thousand died in the pox, Dain knew; a full third of Karelton’s population. He tried picturing so many bodies and failed.

  Pox had never taken hold in his homeland. Their own healers said the weather was too cold and the population too sparse. After hearing Kag’s story, he realized how lucky they’d been. A hundred thousand dead. How many other orphans had the pox left in its wake?

  They made better time the next day, despite the growing drifts. The snowshoes seemed to help.

  Chaney started working with them each night. He set up sparring matches and offered advice. He was determined that each of his students pass the final test despite the current detour.

  It was absurd, of course. In all the history of the Order, no squad, no matter how gifted, had ever seen every member pass.

  “What will the test be like?” Niles asked one evening.

  By now everyone had heard the stories of it. The rigors and dangers involved. Barracks gossip held that at least one student died every year.

  “You all know the idea by now, if not the details,” Chaney said. Flexing his unshaven jaws, he chewed on a piece of jerked beef. “First, there’s the trial of the squadron. You’ll be graded on both individual performance and teamwork. Then there will be a one-on-one contest. I’m not allowed to tell you much more than that.”

  “What do you think our chances are?” Zek asked.

  “Hard to say,” Chaney replied. His gaze swept over all of them. “I’ve seen boys I thought for sure would pass end up broken men, and others I wouldn’t have bet three coppers on end up joining the ranks and making fine Paladins.”

  Kag sat forward a bit, his eyes on Chaney. “What’s it really like to serve the Order?”

  Chaney grunted in a noncommittal fashion. “Varies. It’s always a hard thing. You’re hot or cold or bored or pulled in a thousand directions at once. You’re always tired, and usually hungry. You’ll lose good friends along the way, either to war or disease or burnout.”

  Chaney tossed a wrist-thick piece of wood onto the fire and sparks flared up.

  “You’ve asked me a lot of questions, now answer one for me. What are each of your intentions?”

  The boys all looked at each other around the fire. Zek went first.

  “I just want to join the Order and be a Paladin.” His voice was clear and strong. There wasn’t an ounce of doubt in it.

  “I too want to join, at least for a few years,” Kag said, surprising Dain. “I haven’t belonged to anything for a long time. It’s…nice. Maybe afterward I’ll apprentice to a craftsman like my father wanted me to.”

  Strale cleared his throat and went next. “I want to be a great healer, and Paladins are the best healers. If I don’t make the Order, I’ll join the priesthood and learn from them.”

  “Trysen and I want to join, as well,” Dremble said. Trysen nodded. “We want to be famous warriors.”

  “I’m not sure,” Niles said. “Life in the Brigades isn’t what I thought it would be.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Chaney said. “There’s no shame in it. Several of my own squadmates decided it wasn’t for them. They made fine lives for themselves regardless. One of them joined the Emperor’s guard. He’s a major now, I believe. The training the Order offers—the discipline, the focus, the sense of duty and brotherhood—these will all serve you well, whatever any of you decide.”

  “I also don’t know,” Falion said. “I don’t want to go back to the streets, but I don’t know if I want to fight rich and powerful men’s wars, either.”

  Dain felt the other boys’ expectant eyes on him.

  “I would like to join the Order for a time,” he said. “Then I suppose I will go home and serve my people.”

  “Is being a lord as easy as it looks?” Strale asked.

  Dain smiled. “No. Not if you want to be a good lord and care for your people. My father’s lands are not fat lik
e those in the lowlands. Each year trolls come down from the mountains, and our first duty is to protect the people. Then there are the duties to the Emperor. My father and many of his men have been fighting in the north for years now. After that there’s collecting taxes, administering justice, and spending the money on public works.”

  “Public works?” Dremble snorted. “Most of the lords I’ve heard of spend their money on wine and whores.”

  Too tired to contradict him, Dain only sighed. It would be impossible to convince them that life as a lord—a Highland lord, at least—was far from the easy life they imagined.

  “Life is different near the frontier,” Chaney said. “I have been to Castle Gladstone and seen its people. At seventeen, every man is issued a weapon and levied into the army. They serve for two years and are then released to civilian life if they so choose. I’ve never met a highlander over twenty who hadn’t killed a troll or two, including their shopkeepers and farmers. They are a formidable people. The best of allies and the absolute worst of enemies. There’s a reason the Empire never conquered them.”

  Thistleton’s walls weren’t what Dain expected. He reined the squad in and gawked at them. He’d pictured something like the low, grey wall around Karelton, but these were more impressive than he’d ever dreamed. They stretched up into the pale blue sky, utterly dominating the broad plain below. The defenders that patrolled them looked like tiny insects marching between the ramparts.

  How could men build something so large? And how could the Emperor ever conquer such a place?

  Ballista and catapults lay stationed in even intervals around the wall among a horde of men under a hundred billowing banners. Dain started the group forward over the smashed remnants of several walls, searching for the Paladin tent. Teams of engineers labored to strip blocks from the broken remains, loading them into wagons and dumping them into piles around the catapults.

  One fired with a heavy thump as they rode past, and the squad watched a block the size of a horse fly and fall fifty paces short of the wall. In answer, a smaller weapon atop the wall snapped and fired. Its block landed twenty-five paces short of the invaders’ lines; a challenge sent and answered.

  “For now, it’s a standoff,” Chaney said. “Our catapults are limited by the strength of the firing arm, and they by the size of their own weapons on the narrow space atop the wall.”

  “No ballista?” Dain asked. If the defenders had those they could strike well into the camp from that height.

  “The Emperor’s mages constantly watch for them. They shatter the bolts before they reach us,” Chaney said.

  Near the sprawling camp’s center Dain spotted the Order’s flag, a golden sun over a white rippling banner. No one challenged them as they rode toward it. Dain had expected someone to track who was coming and going, but then realized the effort would be futile. The camp was too vast, with hundreds of thousands of the Emperor’s soldiers gathered outside the wall.

  Chaney moved up to the little column’s head and passed by a pair of guards in Paladin armor. They nodded in salute and the sergeant returned the gesture. The squad dismounted, tied their horses, and then entered the tent. More Paladins were inside, some lounging in chairs, others eating or lacing up their armor.

  “Greetings, brothers. Where is your commander?” Chaney asked.

  “Through there.” A Paladin holding a rag to a cut above his eye pointed to a flap with another golden sun in the center of it.

  Chaney lifted the flap aside and led the squad through.

  A thin man stood in the room’s center, his back to them when they entered. A pair of attendants were working at stripping off his silver breastplate. Once it was free the attendants left and the thin man turned to Dain and Chaney.

  “Bental,” Chaney said. He clasped the younger man’s forearm. “I thought the Sovereign sent you east, not here.”

  “He did. I was there less than a month when word arrived that Lord Graven had fallen. I was sent here as his replacement.”

  “I’d heard. The Sovereign didn’t take it well. He and Graven were squadmates. He was a good man.”

  Bental shook his head. “Dumb luck. They fired a ballista bolt, the mages shattered it, but a single shard flew true. Took him square in the chest. He was gone before he hit the ground.”

  “If you’re here then who’s in the east?”

  “Chalmer, only just. He relieved me two weeks ago. He arrived carrying the order for my new assignment himself.”

  “It’ll be war on two fronts, then. Here at Thistleton to conquer Mierten and gain access through the Cantols, and Chalmer will start one in the east with the grey elves for certain.” Chaney shook his head. “I don’t know why the Sovereign can’t see through that snake.”

  Bental gave a snort and shook his head. “He does. The command to send Chalmer came from the Emperor himself.”

  Chaney smacked a fist into his palm and lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. “Pelion goes to far. The Emperor has no power over the Order.”

  “Come now,” Bental said. “That hasn’t been true for over a century. If it were we would hardly be here at Thistleton, my friend.”

  Stripped of armor now, Bental crossed the room and splashed water from a basin on his face. He sat on the edge of his cot. To Dain, he looked very tired. There were dark, puffy rings beneath his eyes.

  “There is nothing to be done,” Bental said. “We must follow our instructions and ensure that the Order itself survives. That is the most important thing. The Order, the faith, is bigger than any one man, even if that man is the Emperor.”

  Both Paladins were silent for a spell.

  Bental’s desk stood near Dain, and there were three books piled on it. Dain could just make out the titles without seeming to pry: an untitled treatise on the people of Mierten, The Proper Construction of Curtain Walls by Goren of Yantzhe, and Ways of the Grey Elves by Prelate Gustanen, the Empire’s first ambassador to the elves.

  Dain cleared his throat.

  “I have a message from the Sovereign, my lord,” he said.

  Without a word, Bental held out a hand and Dain placed the sealed tube in it. A small knife made quick work of the bindings and Bental began to read. With each word, his expression grew grimmer.

  “You memorized this?” Bental asked Dain.

  “I did,” Dain answered.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “It is hardly my place to question—”

  “Don’t give me that.” Bental shot him a disgusted look. “This isn’t the temple. We are brothers here, and among us there must be truth. Now, what do you make of it?”

  Dain shifted in his boots, then stood up straight and looked Bental in the eye. “It seems the Sovereign too is resigned to war with the grey elves. His orders are for you to send a contingent of your men to support Chalmer, but you are granted leave to determine the appropriate size.”

  “A good way to rid yourself of Chalmer supporters,” Chaney interrupted.

  “Indeed,” Bental agreed, shooting a wry smile at Chaney. He turned to Dain again. “And the second part?”

  “Ordering you to no longer participate in the siege ensures that the core group of your choosing remains intact,” Dain answered.

  “He’s allowing me to choose men whose loyalty is to the Order first, and to keep those men away from both the capital and the war in the east.” Bental’s brow furrowed. “It does not sound like he thinks Chalmer will be successful.”

  “My lord, my teacher from home, Thave, is a grey elf. He said if Chalmer attacks, then his people will bring down the Empire.”

  Bental smiled again, somewhat sadly. “The grey elves are not that powerful; not so much as they once were. A great illness has swept through their cites not unlike the Red Pox. They are weaker now than they’ve been in a th
ousand years. Chalmer knows this. He thinks now is the time to strike.”

  “I still don’t understand why,” Dain said. “Why go through with it? There are plenty of lands to the north, and it seems that the Emperor would be happy to conquer them.”

  “Because Chalmer is a power-hungry fool,” Chaney said baldly.

  “He is that,” Bental agreed. “The lands the Emperor conquers are his. The lands Chalmer takes would be Paladin lands. The Order would have a homeland of its own, and the Empire would gain a powerful ally next door. I’m not sure the Emperor wouldn’t welcome a chance to move the Order out of Karelton. The Karelian line has never been completely comfortable with so many men-at-arms near the capital and under the separate control of a Sovereign.”

  “It’s madness,” Chaney said. “The Order is ill-suited for holding lands. We are a religious and, when need be, a martial order, not a political one.”

  “He won’t let that stop him,” Bental said.

  Silence fell between the two Paladins. Each seemed trapped in his own private thoughts until Dain spoke again.

  “I am to wait for a response,” he said.

  Bental jerked as if suddenly awakened from a dream. He really is exhausted, Dain thought. “Of course,” the Paladin said, scrubbing his face with a dirty hand. “It will take me a few days. Please, settle in with my men. But first, I’ve a task for you, Dain.”

  Bental shifted to his desk, unstoppered an ink vial, and scribbled a hasty note on a sheet of parchment. Puffing his cheeks, he blew on the ink, then folded it in half and then once again before handing it to Dain.

  “Take this to your father. His tent is directly to the east of us here,” he said. “He needs to know of the changes in our assignment.”