Chosen of the Gods

Chapter Nineteen

The man was crying openly well before the Revered Sons were done with him-great, hitching sobs racking up his raw throat. Still they kept at it, three hard-eyed men in the red-fringed robes of inquisitors, taking turns asking questions while the bound villager-a man of perhaps fifty summers, bald and brawny, stripped to the waist and bleeding from a cut across his cheek-strained against the bowstrings that bound his hands and feet.

“Again,” said the lead inquisitor, in a voice that matched the frigid highland wind. “Where are the other bandits? How many are they?”

“What of your lord?” demanded the cleric to his left. “Is he here or in Govinna?”

“Tell us about the one they call Lightbringer,” growled the third priest. “Have you seen him?”

The man didn’t answer; he simply kept weeping, broken, past the point of endurance. Tears ran down his face, mixing with his blood to drip on the stony ground. “I don’t-I can’t-please… mercy…”

Standing nearby, Lord Holger Windsound turned away, his Up curling in distaste. He looked back across the valley, where the ruins of the village of Espadica still smoldered, capped by a pall of smoke. A few fires still burned here and there, but the worst was done. Scatas moved through the ashes, rounding up the last of the borderfolk and marching them away into the hills. A few bodies lay sprawled here and there. Not everyone let the army burn their homes without putting up a fight. It was a dreadful thing, razing a town, and one Lord Holger found distasteful but necessary. They had found bandits near Espadica, and the Kingpriest’s orders were clear: all such towns were to be put to torch, the survivors moved to other towns-after thorough questioning, of course.

The man the clerics were working on had been an iron miner-most of Espadica’s men dug ore-but he was also one of a gang of bandits the Scatas had caught in the hills near town. Of that gang, he was the only one they’d taken alive, and the priests had been at him for more than two hours now. He wasn’t giving them any answers, though, and Holger suspected it was because he didn’t know any. That didn’t stop the inquisitors. Holger had seen them do this again and again in towns all over the south. Espadica was hardly the first village the Scatas had burned since they arrived in Taol.

They had been combing the southern fiefs for a month now, scouring the hills to little avail. Again and again, it was the same story: no brigands, only a scattering of common folk and graveyards filled with plague-dead. The few men they caught knew nothing of import. Indeed, Lord Holger might have thought Kurnos’s fears about the bandits were unfounded, except for two things. The first was the many hidden camps his men had uncovered among the hills. Long abandoned, those camps told the tale belter than any prisoner might. There were many more bandits out there, but they had all streamed north to Govinna. That was where the real battle would be, but Holger wasn’t about to march there until he knew the lands behind him were secure.

The second thing was Luciel.

The stories the riders he’d sent after the fleeing villagers told were wild ones, to be sure, and he’d decided they must be exaggerations. His Scatas claimed half a hundred Solamnics had fought them at the Edessa bridge, holding them off to make good the villagers’ escape, but they had only brought back the bodies of six Knights. One of those had been Sir Gareth Paliost. Holger had burned the men with a heavy heart, building stone cairns to mark their graves. He had known Gareth and was sure the Knight had died valiantly, fulfilling his oath-no matter what-to protect the First Daughter.

No, Holger reminded himself. Balthera was First Daughter now, and Ilista was disgraced, Foripon. That made her a traitor, as much as the men who had taken up arms and captured the Little Emperor. Part of him still couldn’t believe she had turned against the Kingpriest-she had always seemed devout, in the time they’d attended the imperial court together-but there it was. She and this young monk of hers, this Lightbringer, were beyond the god’s sight now. That they cast their lot with the rebellious Taoli only proved it.

The wind blew a rope of smoke in his face, and he coughed, turning away from Espadica’s remnants. The inquisitors were still working, pounding the borderman with questions. They were asking him about the Bridge of Myrmidons now, where Dista and Beldyn had escaped the Scatas with the folk of Luciel. The man shook his head, denying any knowledge of what had happened, as Holger knew he would. The only men this side of the Edessa who knew what had happened were his own riders, and he didn’t give their tales much credence. A sorcerer might be able to destroy a stone bridge with a word, but a monk barely old enough to shave?

Preposterous.

Finally, Holger lost his patience. The inquisitors might have kept going all night, given rein, but he didn’t let them. “Enough,” he declared. His snowy moustache drooped above a deep scowl. “You won’t get anything out of that one.”

The lead inquisitor, a gray-maned Revered Son named Rabos, glowered for a moment, as if he might challenge Holger’s orders and carry on anyway. Instead, though, he exchanged looks with his fellows, then rose, nodding. The three priests stepped back, heads bowed, and signed the triangle. Holger walked forward, drawing his sword.

For all the weeping he’d done, the bandit met his death bravely, bowing his head and whispering a prayer to Paladine before the blade descended. Holger made sure it was quick, a single stroke lopping the man’s head from his shoulders. It was a grim duty and one he chose not to shirk by ordering another man to do it. More than a dozen men had died by his sword over the past month. Now, as the blood poured from the brigand’s body-it was always surprising, how much spilled forth-Holger wiped his blade clean with a handful of dry grass and decided this man was the last. He had spent enough time in the south. The land was secure, or near enough as made no difference. The time had come.

Half an hour later, he was back at camp, summoning his officers to him. An hour after that, riders galloped forth, bearing messages for the squads he had dispatched throughout the southern fiefs. It was time to gather again and march. Govinna awaited.

Lord Ossirian leaned against the railing atop the Pantheon’s highest tower. Beneath him Govinna drowsed in the morning light, smoke drifting from a sea of stone chimneys dotted by the green islands of temple roofs. His men walked the walls, bows and crossbows ready, and patrolled the city’s streets, watching for trouble. His grim gaze went past all that, though, on to the hills to the south. His brows lowered, his bearded jaw tightening as though he could see the enemy through sheer will alone. The imperial army, however, steadfastly refused to appear.

It was out there, though. He could sense it, like a spoor on the wind. War was coming, and he was going to lose.

He’d first realized things had gone wrong when he learned of Kingpriest Symeon’s death. Ossirian had been to the Lordcity many times, as recently as a year ago, and he knew enough of the imperial court to understand what the power shift meant. Symeon, he’d been certain, would negotiate, but Kurnos was a different matter. With the former First Son on the throne, Ossirian had the sickening suspicion that everything, all he had done, would come to nothing.

Then the soldiers came, and suspicion turned to certainty.

Riders had been arriving from the south for a week now, more every day. The tidings they brought were always the same. The Scatas had arrived in a town-one day Oveth, the next Espadica, even his home fief of Abreri-looking for signs of bandits. Sometimes they found none and quit the town in a rage. Other times they did, and people died.

He’d received word from Luciel, too. He’d dreaded what might happen if the soldiers discovered Tavarre and his men, but somehow the villagers had fled before that could happen. As if that were not wonder enough, they had managed to escape the Scatas and were marching north even now.

He’d heard the stories of the refugees’ flight from men Tavarre had sent ahead, the tales of the monk who had destroyed the Bridge of Myrmidons. It was hard to discount them as fancy when they came from the lips of men who claimed to have seen the span collapse, but he told himself it had to be. Myths abounded of priests who could do such things, but they were hoary tales, dating back a thousand years to the Third Dragonwar and before. No cleric wielded that kind of power these days-and likely no one ever had. It was all stories, legends made up by the church. Ossirian might want them to be true, but that didn’t make it so.

The same went for the other tale that preceded the so-called Lightbringer, of how he had cured the Longosai. Ossirian had heard the same story many times over the past few days. It had spread quickly through Govinna, folk speaking in hushed voices of how their neighbor’s cousin or the uncle of a friend had felt the healing touch of Brother Beldyn. People listened to the stories with hope, for the plague had come to Govinna as well. It was still spreading slowly, but already a hundred were dead, and five times that many were sick, with more falling ill every day. In the crowded city, it wouldn’t take long for the Longosai to rage out of control, like a flame in summer-dry brush. Folk knew it, too, and fear lurked in their eyes as they wondered how long it would be before they, too, lay wasted and feverish in their beds, coughing, vomiting and waiting for death. With that spectre hanging above them, it was small wonder so many wanted to believe the stories about the Lightbringer.

Plagues and miracle-working monks, however, were far from Ossirian’s main worry this morning. Neither, in fact, was the imperial army, though he knew that would change once word came of its progress. Today, of all the things that troubled him, the foremost was the Little Emperor.

Ossirian never truly intended to harm the patriarch. Even when he’d taken Durinen prisoner, the threats he’d sent to the Lordcity were little more than a bluff. Perhaps another man might have been able to kill a hostage in cold blood, but Ossirian could not. He’d gambled, though, that the church hierarchs wouldn’t guess that and would bargain with him-at least that was his hope, before Symeon had died.

He cursed, a bitter taste in his mouth. None of that mattered any more. The Little Emperor was going to die anyway.

It had been an amazingly stupid thing for Durinen to do. Last night-a scant few sleepless hours ago, in fact-the Little Emperor had tried to escape. Unable to face confinement in his own church any longer, he had attacked his guards when they brought the evening meal to the tower where they held him. The Little Emperor was a strong man, and he’d overcome the guards, leaving one man unconscious and the other with a broken arm. That gave him enough time to slip out and flee into the Pantheon’s halls, seeking a way out into the city.

Before he could flee the temple, however, the guards had raised the alarm and sealed the building. He’d tried to hide, but one of Ossirian’s men tracked him down in the Pantheon’s servant’s wing. The man had had a crossbow, shouting for the Little Emperor to surrender. Foolishly, Durinen had tried to flee, and just as foolishly, the man had shot him.

Ossirian was no stranger to battle or to injured men. He knew a mortal wound when he saw it and could tell if it would kill a man fast or slow. He’d taken one look at the quarrel lodged in the patriarch’s belly-too deep to pull out without taking half his insides with it-and bowed his head. Durinen might last days, even a week, but it would not be pleasant, and the end would come just the same. The prayers and medicines of the Mishakites Ossirian summoned wouldn’t change that, any more than they could stop the Longosai. Now the Little Emperor lay back in his tower cell, drugged into a stupor with bloodblossom oil, awaiting the end-whenever it came. With gut wounds, you could never tell.

The tread of feet echoed up the tower steps, faint from far below, and Ossirian reached for his sword. In time a young man appeared, breathing hard. Ossirian recognized him-it was a lad from his own fief-but he still didn’t lift his hand from his weapon. The boy bowed, wheezing after his climb. It was more than three hundred steps to the top of the tower.

“What is it now?” Ossirian snapped, his patience frayed.

The boy drew back at his anger, stammering. “I was looking-that is, I wanted to-you told me to tell you-”

“Tell me what?” Ossirian pressed. He knew it already- Durinen was dead, he was sure of it. He’d lost the last thin hope he had of saving his people from the Scatas. “Out with it!”

“Lord,” the boy said, more composed now. “It’s Baron Tavarre. The outriders spotted him and his lot on the road, about a league south of here. They’ll be at the gates within the hour.”

Ossirian blinked, surprised. He glanced over his shoulder, out across the hills once more, then, without another word, he pushed past the boy and dashed downstairs to the Pantheon below.