The dark blacks and whites of the attire of Saekaj’s citizens were a surprising contrast to each other. He figured the fashion trends must have been squarely in the middle of reversal, one of those colors gaining favor over the other in a struggle as old as the Shuffle, since there was no universal consensus to be seen in the market. The stalls were closed, nearly nothing was being sold, and it seemed more like a noble social gathering than anything else. Men in suits, women in gowns, and children playing madly as the concerned buzz of conversation filled the cool, damp cave air.
J’anda skirted the edge of the throngs, passing between groups as easily as a horse threading through an army. No one took notice of the enchanter as he made his way to the Gathering of Coercers. Once outside the guildhall, he pushed his way inside with no effort at all. He was greeted by the scared faces of students just inside, watching the entry as though something terrible—a rush of criminals straight out of the Depths, perhaps—was sure to follow him.
“It’s all right,” he said gently as their eyes took him in. “Nothing to fear.”
“We heard the Sovereign had been killed,” Zieran said, drifting out of a pocket of students at his side. They all looked so young compared to her, their ages somewhere in the teens. “We assumed—”
“The Army of Sanctuary did kill him,” J’anda said and watched the reaction. It was mostly stunned silence, though he would have felt comfortable betting that anger would follow in some cases later. “They marched through to the surface some time ago to go free the slaves.”
“Are they …” a young man asked, his navy complexion whitened with pustules on his cheekbones, “… are they coming back?” He sounded almost afraid enough to faint. “Will we have to fight them?”
“They’re not coming back, no,” J’anda said, shaking his head. “Nothing to worry about. Their business here is concluded.”
He drifted toward Zieran, who was now separating herself from the students she’d been knotted with, moving toward a far corner of the Gathering’s entry, one more secluded. J’anda held up a hand to implore privacy as he followed her, and made his way to speak with her without anyone following.
“What are you doing here?” Zieran asked, twirling a bit of her loose hair around her finger. “You were supposed to be in Reikonos.”
“The city fell,” J’anda said. “I came back. Became … embroiled in events.” He let his eyes flick around. “Where’s Coeltes?”
“I don’t know,” Zieran said. “He disappeared after the news came through. Got that look in his eye—you know the one, always showed up after someone got the best of him—like he had some new consideration in mind. Took the Staff of the Guildmaster and left.”
“He didn’t say anything?” J’anda asked.
Amusement lit her features. “He wouldn’t. Not to me at least, would he?”
“I suppose not,” J’anda said and looked over the foyer. He’s the last thing. The last bit of business I have in Saekaj. He grimaced. I was so hoping to be done, right here, right now—
“Sir J’anda,” one of the students asked, tentative, as though she was intruding on him in a most private moment.
He blinked out of his thoughts, and settled his gaze on her. “Yes?”
“Are you …” she licked her lips, “… are you staying?”
He paused, taken aback. He wanted to answer the question on the basis of Coeltes’s lack of presence alone. I want to find him, to settle the score. Something, though, held him back from that. Something in the way she asked.
“For now,” he said, and he smiled gently, “I’m not going anywhere right now.” And he listened as the malcontented buzz that filled the room subsided, returning to something almost comfortable for the crisis that they were in.
56.
Aisling
The road back to Sovar was not a road at all, but a passage in someone’s basement that was hidden by an old armoire. Aisling had been able to shove it out of the way all on her own, the crashing of the furniture echoing through the empty house. She neither knew nor cared where its masters were, only that she could drag Norenn along the passage by herself, threading down the spiral of the tunnel into the mids of Sovar, where they came out in a cave in the midst of a very surprised gathering of women.
“Sorry,” she said as she dragged Norenn through the meekly protesting women, who seemed cowed either by the sight of the daggers in her belt or the ragged man on her shoulder. “Apologies.” She pushed through the door and found herself in a cave avenue, one of the tight passages carved out of the main chamber of Sovar.
“Toward the mids,” Norenn said, nearly breathless. He had not protested the walk one iota, which worried her. He seemed exhausted yet invigorated, a warring of emotion and body which seemed strange for one who had spent so much time in captivity. She worried that his enthusiasms would wear his body to an early end, but still she followed his counsel rather than trying to find her safe house, the place she had so carefully picked out to hide in when this moment came. “Take us to the square of Uru’kasienn.”
Aisling bit back her protest, the urge to tell him he needed rest. It wasn’t hard, burying her emotion and sentiment; in fact, after hiding from Dagonath Shrawn and Sanctuary for all these years, it was almost habit. It wasn’t as though she didn’t want to see what might be happening as well; it was more of a hope that there would be nothing happening, that it would be peaceful, at least for now.
She pulled him through the tunnel and past half a hundred doors as they looped back and entered the main chamber, leaving those carved living spaces behind and entering the more open air of Sovar’s mids. The streets sloped down prodigiously, the natural contour of the caves a misery for those who wanted to get out of the Back Deep with a wagon or pushcart. Norenn’s weight was not an easy thing for her to absorb on this journey, but she managed it well enough, reaching the Square of Uru’kasienn in ten minutes of walking.
The gathering Norenn had predicted was well in force by the time she was six cross streets back from the square. It had been a dull roar on the echoing cave walls when she’d first become aware of it; by the time she was that close, it was impossible to ignore, tens of thousands or more voices raised in unison every few minutes in response to a speech someone was giving.
“It’s started,” Norenn said with a satisfied smile, as though he’d just had both bed rest and bed unrest to satiate his every need.
“Something has,” Aisling muttered, reaching the edges of the crowd. Gone were the people walking singly or in pairs. Now the streets were filled with groups that kept merging with one another, becoming larger and larger the nearer they drew to the square’s center point. It was the only place in Sovar large enough to accommodate even a reasonable sized crowd. She looked up and saw people hanging out of the windows and looking through flaps in the cloth tops of buildings, children sitting on the rooftops three stories up.
She shoved her way where necessary, Norenn seeming to draw strength from the proceedings all the while. The smells of the people around them convinced Aisling that change was, perhaps, necessary, but that it was change involving baths for everybody, and not the sort that involved blood. She caught the first hints of the rhetoric now, and it was seasoned to enrage. Hard words, charged and angry, inciting the people to hurl themselves at the source of all problems (Saekaj, naturally) flew through the air. Invective went along after, to the cheers of the crowd. “This is not going to be good,” she muttered to herself, unheard under the chaos.
“But it’ll be fun,” a voice said from her side, and she caught a glimpse of Genn, hiding under a hood. “Cleansing, I think.” And then he was gone, vanished into the crowd.
“What was that?” Norenn asked.
“Nothing,” Aisling said, biting her lip. “Nothing at all.”
They broke to near the middle of the square and saw a platform erected. It was exactly the sort where the annual summoning of the dregs took place, the sad parade of the children of Sovar in front o
f their magical betters from Saekaj, where the farmers tried to discern if the pigs had any magical talent. She’d seen it twice and remained disgusted by the spectacle. It looked gross and profane to her eyes, parents and children throwing aside their last shreds of dignity to kiss up to the spell casters who would “judge” them, as though there was any sort of latitude in magical talent.
The stage used for judging was crowded now, but not so full that people were falling off. She could see a half-dozen at the fore, but one before them all, standing tall at the front of the stage and spewing his anger across the crowd like some temple elder in the presence of Enflaga’s faithful. It was a man, she could tell that much, and when she saw his robes, it told her a little more. Spell caster. The vestment triggered another easy judgment: enchanter. And when the voice fell clear on her ears, something else. Familiar.
“… For years they’ve sucked on your blood like a tick, like an insect that burrows under the skin and causes paralysis, using our very muscles against us. They commanded our bodies, our souls, and took everything they could—wives, husbands, daughters, sons, even the food out of our mouths!” This produced a roar of approval, and drowned out the speaker’s next words.
“—knows what it’s all about,” she heard Norenn say in her ear as she felt a little sick. She was close enough now to see him, to put all the pieces together and recognize the man who was, quite simply, about to start the insurrection.
She knew his features, knew his voice, knew his robes, and knew that furious temperament. J’anda is going to be so very, very angry, she thought as her blood ran cold.
The enchanter on the stage about to stir the mob to war was none other than Vracken Coeltes.
57.
Terian
“Sitting back and watching the entire population of Saekaj—men, women and children—be massacred is completely unacceptable,” Kahlee said, her eyes focused across the top room of the old manor house—Amenon’s office, Terian still thought of it, even though it was Vincin’s now.
“I don’t think anyone here is advocating that,” Terian said, glancing at Grinnd, who stood with arms folded, deep in his own thoughts, then to Bowe, who meditated with his eyes shut, floating three feet off the ground with his legs crossed before him.
“They may not be advocating it here,” Dahveed said, standing next to the fireplace, which crackled in the quiet, “but I can assure you there are voices advocating it in Sovar right now.”
There was a subtle noise of crowds outside, and Terian looked out to see a few curious onlookers poking at the Sovereign’s corpse, which still rested in the middle of the avenue. Someone had the head and was staring into the eyes, then dropped it and ran away screaming, the sound of terror stripped away by the thick window separating him from the cavern of Saekaj.
“We should—” Amenon began.
“No,” Terian said.
“You didn’t even hear me out,” Amenon said with the bite of impatience eating into his voice.
“Was it going to be something about stomping on Sovar right this moment?” Terian stared at the fire without looking at his father. “We need to help those people. Your people, I might add, since you did come from Sovar originally.”
“Aye, I did,” his father said, “and I know how they think. I know their wild and ranging moods, I know the lack of discipline, the craving for revenge over imagined slights—”
“Starvation isn’t a slight,” Terian said.
“We’ve been arguing this for hours,” Kahlee said, and Terian turned to see her rubbing her eyes. “We don’t have time for this.”
“We don’t have much of anything else,” Terian said, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s not as though we have an army at our disposal. House Lepos is disgraced. Other than a few guards, all we’ve got is House Ehrest’s commercial interests, and the head of it isn’t even here.” Which is concerning, he thought, his eyes finding Kahlee’s and finding worry there. “Anyone fancy fighting a war against whoever comes in here to assert control with nothing but a bunch of merchants and trader convoys at our disposal?”
“That’s not going to keep Sovar at bay,” Amenon said roughly. “You’ll need an army.”
“And yet I have none to give,” Terian said, staring harder into the fire. He glanced at the portrait of his wife above the fireplace, remembered the one of his sister that used to hang in its place. It made a curious hole inside him, a strange reminder that the world was changed all around him. “Where are our armies now? Besides Reikonos, obviously.”
“The hordes of the dead, you mean?” Dahveed asked, sounding none too pleased about it. “Running rampant through the Riverlands, of course, scrambling to capture arable land and stores of food.”
“We need the assistance of necromancers to control them, to bring them under our sway,” Amenon said. “We need them here, now.”
“I only know one necromancer,” Terian said, “and his loyalties are decidedly unpredictable in this matter. For all I know, Goliath has thrown in with Shrawn.” He threw up his hands in despair. “If Shrawn even knows what’s going on. Where the hell is the man, anyway? You’d think, given how intimately tied he is to this place, that he’d—”
“Dagonath Shrawn is never far from where he needs to be,” came the voice at the doorway, the muffled by the faceplate of the knight who spoke.
Amenon was the first to name her. “Sareea Scyros. How interesting to find you at our door again at this late hour.”
Sareea Scyros entered the room with a subtle swagger, her armor clunking as she moved. “What I find interesting is that years after I left your little group, I find you predictably in exactly the same spot. You stand in stasis, waiting to die.”
Terian unslung his axe, feeling the hard hilt in his hand. “If there’s to be a fight, I don’t think we’re the ones who are going to die here today.”
Her eyes glimmered through the faceplate, and he could hear the hint of a smile as she spoke. “You sound so assured.”
“What do you want?” Terian asked, looking carefully at her.
“I do not come here for myself,” Sareea said, hand resting on her weapon’s hilt, “but because I am bidden to do so by the Sovereign of Saekaj and Sovar.”
There was an audible gasp in the room, and Terian knew its source. “She’s talking about Shrawn, not Yartraak. The bastard has already declared himself successor.” Sareea inclined her head in mild respect. “The only question I have is whether he even waited until the corpse was cold before seizing power.”
“He waited until the deed was done,” Sareea said. “But now it is finished, and there is no longer a reason to wait. Dagonath Shrawn is the new ruler of Saekaj, and all your debate is pointless. Whispers of Sovar’s disloyalty and insurrection are already reaching our ears through the Sovereign’s spies. He moves an army into Saekaj even now to prevent this uprising.”
Terian felt a thin thread of hope slipping away. “He’s going to put this place even further into siege, squeeze it until it vows loyalty to him.”
Sareea smiled. “Look out the window.”
Terian turned his head to look past the desk and saw the army in the street already. There were more than a fair number of them. They did not have the look of the dead, but rather solid armor and chainmail of the sort given to a fast moving army fit to be a front line. They were lined up in the street past the manor’s wall, and Terian sighed as he looked upon them. The only consolation I have is that there was nothing more I had to give in this instance, because trying to assert authority over this city with the Army of Sanctuary at my back would have been … ruinous. Perhaps to all involved.
“Well, that’s a definitive statement,” Grinnd said, looking over Terian’s shoulder.
“They’re still going to be facing down a revolution from Sovar,” Terian said, looking back at Sareea. “Is Shrawn truly ready for that?”
“Are you?” she asked, staring at him evenly. “Because last time, you tried to save them.”
Terian’s jaw tightened at the memory. She swore she’d never tell, so naturally she trots it out at a moment when she can jab me with it like a spear. “His plan, on the other hand, is to kill them all. We’re like light and dark, he and I.”
Sareea cocked her head at him. “And you’re the light, I presume? Because no self-respecting dark elf would ever profess to be anything other than darkness, but you … you’ve lived in the light entirely too long.”
Amenon eased up to the window, putting his shoulder against Terian to look out at the army in the street. “How many soldiers?” he called back to Sareea.
“Several thousand,” she said without care. “More will come, but this should be enough to hold the mob back, to push them into Sovar and keep them there for the time being.”
Enough to leave a trail of bodies in the tunnels, to flood Sovar with blood, Terian thought as he glanced out the window. Enough to guarantee that anyone who doesn’t embrace the Shrawn regime will come to a messy end.
“I don’t expect you’ll be seeing much in the way of resistance from Saekaj,” Dahveed said, coming off his place next to the fireplace. “They’ll all fall into line behind Shrawn gladly, especially when rumors of insurrection drift up.”
Terian heard the truth of it and looked to Kahlee to see her reaction. Her head bowed, dipping down enough that he knew she saw it, too. They’ll gladly bow to Shrawn if it keeps the mob of Sovar from our gates.
We’ve lost this fight before it truly began.
“I suppose you’ve come here seeking loyalty,” Terian said, turning his head to look at Sareea, still standing in the entry to the office.
“I have,” she said, and she flipped up her faceplate. “But not from you.” She looked just to his left. “Amenon?”
Sanctuary 5.5 - Fated in Darkness Page 28