Elizabeth Haydon - The Assassin King

“This, Fhremus, is the handiwork of our enemies. What in stasis would be no more than a stone statue is in fact a living machine, animated by only the Creator knows what sort of Cymrian spell or magic. Blessedly, I have turned him to my will, and now he follows my commands. What would have been my assassin will now be the standard bearer of your army. Had I been any less than what I am, any less blest by the Creator Himself, I would be in my grave, and Sorbold would very likely be at war.”

“Sorbold will be at war anyway, m’lord,” said Fhremus. “Gwydion of Manosse cannot be allowed to send assassins after our Emperor Presumptive, and let that go unanswered. Revenge must be extracted for this, lest he feel emboldened to try again.”

“So now perhaps you can see one—and only one—of the reasons we must move now, rather than waiting to be attacked,” Talquist said, picking up his glass and finishing the contents. “The piece you are overlooking is that Gwydion of Manosse is not merely the lord of the Middle Continent, and a man with massive ancestral holdings in Manosse and Gaematria, but he is the descendant of a bloody dragon. Between the mythic power of his ancestry from Serendair, which all the Cymrians have to one degree or another, the bedeviled lore of the Sea Mages, who have studied the tides and currents of the seven seas for so long that it is said they can control them, his grandfather’s knowledge of machinery and invention, and whatever magic the dragon bequeathed him, is it really so hard for you to imagine that the Lord Cymrian, who has found a way to animate solid stone, has also discovered a way to make incendiary, unmanned machines capable of walking over borders, and perhaps even through mountains, with the ability to explode and wreak havoc on our cities, our outposts, and our holy sites?”

“What then are we to do, m’lord?” Fhremus asked.

“We will begin with the Patriarch,” Talquist replied, secretly pleased that the commander had bought the lie so easily. “We will take Sepulvarta first; truly that should be the northernmost point of our border anyway. That land is in the foothills of the Manteids, and once we own it, there is only the wide Krevensfield Plain to the north beyond, which is indefensible. It is where we will begin to take back what is ours.”

“The holy city?” Fhremus asked nervously. “You plan to make war on the All-God’s capital?”

“He is called the Creator,” Talquist replied, an edge of steel in his voice. “It is the Cymrians who’ve chosen to name him the ‘All-God’; what sort of foolish name is that! We are about to right centuries of wrongs here; our task is a holy one.” He sighed morosely. “No one wants war less than I do, Fhremus. I am a merchant by background; I had hoped that my reign would be a time of peace and prosperity, that our goods would reach new markets around the world. War disrupts trade; there is nothing I want less than that. Unlike the Cymrian rulers of the Alliance—not just Gwydion of Manosse, but his Lirin wife, and the Bolg king, who knows how long he will live—I am a mere mortal, Fhremus. I will live a human’s life; even Leitha, with her extraordinary longevity, lived a mere ninety-one years. Time has no sway over the progeny of a dragon, nor those who came from the cursed Island of Serendair. Our grandchildren will be dust in their graves while these tyrants are still in the bloom of youth! Our time is limited; we must make the most of what little we have. We owe it to the Creator.” A nagging bell rang softly in the back of Fhremus’s mind. He tried to remember if he had ever seen the Emperor Presumptive at any of the services held in the local abbotry or any of the chapels that served the soldiers who were quartered in Jierna’sid, and decided he had not. The commander himself took every opportunity to be blessed by the local priests, as did most members of the imperial army. But, he reasoned, that was not unexpected; undoubtedly the Emperor Presumptive had his own chapels and houses of worship within the palace. None of that mattered anyway.

“I stand ready to receive your command, m’lord,” he said finally. “Come with me, then, Fhremus,” Talquist said, a pleased look on his face. “And I will show you how one defends a nation.”

Fhremus had, over his many years in the army, smelled many horrific odors. The caustic smoke of the steel fires in the smithy, the repulsive reek from latrines and offal piles that were the result of any large encampment of soldiers, and the stench of corpses moldering beneath the blazing Sorbold sun were all familiar to his nose; he had become almost inured to them. None of them could have possibly prepared him for what assaulted his nostrils in the tunnels beneath Jierna Tal.

As he followed Talquist down the cavernous passageway, his instincts, honed by years in battle, were on fire, the gut-deep sense of danger that served to warn every soldier of an adversary or threat looming ahead of him in the dark. Having seen the regent emperor’s new standard bearer, who followed silently behind them, all but indiscernible in spite of his stone frame and massive size, Fhremus could only imagine what awaited him at the bottom of the tunnel. The smell of decay that permeated the very stone of the walls was like breathing in death, even through the dense weave of the linen scarf.

As they descended, the darkness became more and more impenetrable and the tunnel wider. The small lantern in Talquist’s hand did not serve to dispel even the gloom that weighed on their shoulders, but instead provided little more than a hoary ball of cold light that gleamed hesitantly into the blackness directly ahead of them, then was swallowed in shadow. In a way, Fhremus was grateful. He could not see what lurked on the cave walls at the edge of his vision, but more than once caught sight out of the corner of his eye of what appeared to be skittering movement across the dank surface. He steeled his will and concentrated on keeping the regent within his limited sight.

The farther they walked, the danker the air in the tunnel became, until Fhremus had beads of water dripping from his helm and eyebrows. His skin was clammy with more than trepidation; moisture beaded on his oiled jerkin and ran down off the front of it, splashing in thin rivulets on his boots. “This place was at one time the sewer of Jierna’sid,” Talquist said. His voice, muffled by the scarf and the mist, echoed against the distant walls and was swallowed in much the same way as the light had been. “Then the dynasty of the Dark Earth, Leitha and her forbears, built the great aqueduct system, abandoning this place.” Fhremus remained silent, his eyes futilely scanning for the walls that had receded into the dark. Then, in the distance, he began to hear a strange sound, like the harsh whistling of wind over the desert, punctuated a moment later by a deep hum that fluctuated below it. The noise was constant^ growing in volume as they grew closer. Though he did not recognize the sound, it chilled him deep within, even as it scratched mercilessly at his eardrums. “We are almost to the giant cistern,” Talquist said, his voice suddenly soft. “Follow closely, Fhremus, and do not lose your footing. ’Twould be tragic.”

Fhremus glanced over his shoulder. He thought he could make out the dimmest shadow of the titan’s outline, but when he looked again he saw nothing but darkness. Nervously he turned back again. Talquist had come to a stop at the edge of what appeared to be a massive circular canyon, a hole of vast proportions that had once contained all the runoff of the mountains, a water volume similar to that of a river in flood. Fhremus stopped behind him, fighting nausea from the stench that had become acidic, stripping the lining from the inside of his nose and resonating up into his sinuses. Below the canyon’s rim the noise had grown to a deafening pitch, a screaming whine below which a growing bass note was rising, thudding like war drums. Talquist held the light over the rim, then beckoned him closer. “Come,” he said softly, a tone of reverence in his voice. “Look.”