The Trials of Empire, page 2
“What?!” Sir Radomir hissed.
“I think we might be about to die,” was all I could say.
Then the doors smashed open.
The following morning was a crisp one. The sky above was clear blue and still, the air fresh and cold. Our breath streamed away from our mouths in great clouds of vapour, and we pulled our cloaks about us.
We emerged from the hall, exhausted, shaken, but physically unharmed. Outside, there was no sign of any interlopers; no footsteps in the dew-laden grass, no broken stalks of wildflowers, no disturbed barrels or crates. The hall was unmarked, save for the marks we had left.
The village was a typical one for this part of Haunersheim. I do not remember its name, only that it was about twenty miles north of Hofingen, the last major settlement before one was faced with the vast, desolate emptiness that the Northmark was infamous for. In the distance to the east, the mountains of Hasse were reduced to the foothills of Leindau, though still high enough to be dusted with snow. To the west lay the beginnings of a network of huge ancient forests which stretched to the North Sea and the Tollish coast.
In front of us was a cluster of perhaps fifty houses, with thatched roofs so steep and tall that they were more roof than house. Of the villagers, there was no sign.
“Sir Radomir,” Vonvalt said.
“Aye?”
“Fetch the baron, would you.”
“Aye.”
Vonvalt, von Osterlen and I stood waiting as Sir Radomir walked to one of the larger houses about a quarter of a mile away and disappeared inside. A moment later he returned, this time with a handful of men, foremost of whom was an old lord who reminded me of Sir Otmar from Rill – stooped, ailing, and who had probably been the lord of this place since his twenties and outlasted several generations of his peers.
Eventually, the old baron reached us, flanked by his retainers.
“Our problem is solved?” he asked.
Vonvalt was quiet for a moment. “I believe so,” he said.
The baron grunted. “Will you take some victuals before you leave?”
“Aye,” Vonvalt said. “That and the information you offered me.”
The old baron winked at me, though I was in too sour a mood to give him the smile he expected. He did not seem bothered. “Come. Let us eat, and I will tell you what I know.”
The retainers set out a trestle in the hall, and fetched some bread to break our fast. They also brought a flagon of wine, which we divided eagerly between the four of us. The baron took none.
“So, Sir Dovydas,” the baron said, addressing Vonvalt. “You have some idea of what manner of beast has been terrorising my people?”
Vonvalt nodded slowly. “I believe a rare type of wild cat – rare here, in the Hauner Vale. They are much more common over the Kova, in the northern parts of the Confederation.”
“A large wild cat?” the baron asked. A note of scepticism freighted his voice.
“Aye,” Vonvalt said mildly. “A Gevennan swordfang. They are difficult to spot thanks to the colouring, and they hunt exclusively at night. We all of us saw it.”
“Yes, we heard the noise,” the baron said. He looked pointedly at the smashed bar which had hitherto provided a lock for the great hall.
Vonvalt inclined his head. “It is a fearsome beast, to be sure. But I have two pieces of good news. The first is that there will only be one, given they are solitary creatures. The second is that we are likely to have frightened it off forever.”
“Why do you say that? How can you be sure?”
“My experience of the creatures is that they attack opportunistically, preying on the vulnerable. They will quickly abandon a hunting ground if they are challenged. It is likely you will never see it again.”
The baron appeared to accept this fabrication with relief. “Well! Here’s to that!” He raised his goblet. “I am indebted to you, Sir Dovydas!”
Vonvalt smiled thinly, lifting his goblet the barest amount. “I should be grateful, now, sir, if you would share with me the information you have.”
The baron nodded. “Aye, you have earned it,” he said. He turned to his right, and called out to the door, “Anthelm! The information!”
Vonvalt frowned as the door to the hall was opened once more. Only this time, a group of five strong-looking men, variously armed with melee weapons, entered.
“What the fuck is this?” Sir Radomir demanded, pressing himself to his feet. Von Osterlen and I did the same, each of us drawing our swords.
Vonvalt remained sitting. He gestured to the newcomers. “You could not have used these men to tackle the swordfang?” he asked wearily.
“Only there was no swordfang, was there? Justice Sir Konrad Vonvalt?”
Now Vonvalt did look up sharply. He stared at the old baron. “So. You know who I am.”
The baron laughed. “Thought I was just some provincial idiot, hey?” He grinned. “I never forget a face, Sir Konrad.” He stabbed a thumb into his chest. “I was in Sova for your investiture. Aye, we were both younger men then, eh?”
Vonvalt could not contain his surprise. “That was over twenty years ago.”
The man tapped the side of his skull. “And yet I remember it as though it were yesterday.”
Vonvalt’s expression turned sour. “And so what? Your plan is to kill me, is it?”
“You are in disgrace, Sir Konrad. You think the news from Sova has not reached us out here in the Northmark? Every lord in the land is looking for you. There is a healthy bounty on your head. Enough to keep this village in victuals and trade for years to come. That will be my legacy; no man will say that I did not provide, nor that I was not faithful to the Autun.”
There was a lengthy silence. “I had hoped there would be no bloodshed here,” Vonvalt said quietly.
The baron laughed again. “There will not be any. I have just told you, you will be taken captive and returned to the capital.”
“I did not mean our blood.”
The baron snorted, making a show of looking at us. “A sot, a woman, and a stripling maid. Your reputation as a hero of the Reichskrieg may precede you, Sir Konrad, but even you cannot take on five men. And certainly not with this shabby collection of persons. Drop your weapons – and the pretence that you are anything other than condemned.”
“You miserable old cunt,” Sir Radomir said, spitting a gob of phlegm on the floor. When he spoke, he did so with a weary, disappointed anger. “What a waste of time, and lives. Must we really kill all of you now?”
“We are going to have to,” von Osterlen said, displeased. She nodded to the baron. “He knows who Sir Konrad is.”
For the first time the baron’s composure fractured. “Enough of this! Drop your weapons, or I shall be forced to have you drop them. And you would do well to remember—” he added, pointing at me, Sir Radomir, and von Osterlen “—that it is only Sir Konrad I am interested in capturing.”
“Are you ready?” Vonvalt asked us over his shoulder, ignoring the baron. “When I do it, you must move quickly.”
We each nodded, spacing ourselves out and bringing our swords into a classic Sovan guard.
“What in the name of Nema are you talking about?” the baron demanded, anger and confusion in his voice. “Blood of gods, Anthelm! Get them!”
“Drop your weapons!” Vonvalt thundered in the Emperor’s Voice.
The five men immediately divested themselves of their weapons, as though their arms were strung to a common puppeteer. They watched in horror as they did so, mouths agape, eyes wide, staggering as though drunk. Clubs, hatchets, a crude morningstar, clattered to the boards.
It was over quickly. I had barely moved by the time Sir Radomir and von Osterlen had killed two men apiece, stabbing ruthlessly, repeatedly, hacking as though cutting through a thicket. For my own part, I stabbed my opponent in the forearm, where he’d had the presence of mind to try and block my sword, and then again directly in the eye as he recoiled. I had not meant to stab him in the face particularly – rather the more vulnerable neck; but my short sword slid smoothly into his brain, the blade’s razor edge unhindered by the bone of his eye socket, and he collapsed dead so suddenly that my weapon was nearly pulled from my hand.
Sir Radomir pushed past me and cut the man’s throat as well, then wiped his sword on the man’s clothes. It was butchery. Vast quantities of blood flooded the floor, leaking from gaping wounds like red wine from a spilt bottle. Someone was screaming, long and loud, over and over again with every breath, and it took me a moment to realise it was the baron.
Vonvalt had not moved from the trestle. He continued to not move, nor speak, until the baron had stopped his lunatic screaming. I wondered whether one of the slain men was his son.
“You asked me a moment ago whether I thought you were some provincial idiot,” Vonvalt said. “The answer is yes, I did. Nothing you have done here has disabused me of that notion.”
“How could you – what have you done? How could you? What have you done?!” the baron shrieked stupidly.
Now Vonvalt drew his own short sword, with great purpose, and laid it on the table in front of him.
“The information. The matters we discussed yesterday. I would now like the answers. You know I am capable of drawing them out of you whether you want me to or not, so spare me the time and the energy.”
Vonvalt sat patiently for a long time until the baron calmed himself enough to speak sensibly. “Why should I tell you anything?” he asked eventually. “You are going to kill me whatever I do.”
“I am. You have committed the crime of incitement to murder. The penalty for that crime is death.”
“You do not have the authority to execute me. You are not a Justice any more. There are no Justices any more.”
“I have not been formally divested of my power.”
“You are a traitor!” the baron spluttered.
“Accused of treason,” Vonvalt said, as though these petty corrections would change the man’s mind. “You are wasting my time. Must I use my Voice on you? I assure you it is an unpleasant experience.”
The baron looked utterly wretched. “You want to know about ‘pagan armies’?” he said with sudden venom. “Draedists and northmen bandits marauding about the woods? And all led by a warrior witch? Aye? That is what you wish to know about?”
“You told me that you had heard about such matters. That you had knowledge on the subject.”
“Aye, I have heard about it. Everything I have just told you is what I have heard.”
“I am looking to discover the precise nature and location of this warband.”
“I have no idea where it is. I have no idea if it even exists! It all sounds like complete nonsense to me.”
Vonvalt frowned. “You told me—”
The baron gestured violently through the open hall door. “I told you because I wanted whatever it was that was terrorising the village to be killed, and I knew if anybody had the means to do it, it was you, Justice. A skilled swordsman with magickal powers – even if you are a traitor to the Crown – it was too good an opportunity to pass up.” He cast an eye over the corpses on the floor, his expression somewhere between forlorn and venomous. “Now I see it was little more than a cursed coincidence.”
Vonvalt sat back. I could tell he was struggling to contain his anger. “You have no information. You merely dangled a lure. To use me.”
The baron shrugged. Behind me, I heard both Sir Radomir and von Osterlen let out angry, exasperated noises.
Vonvalt stood. He picked up his sword. “If I were you, sir, I should not wear my loyalties to the Autun so visibly on my sleeve. Not any more.”
“I took the Highmark. I’ve no love for the Two-Headed Wolf,” the baron sneered. “But I know the value of money. I would have turned you in for the bounty and nothing more.”
“It is just as well. With Seaguard ungarrisoned, I expect it will be to this ‘warrior witch’ that you will shortly owe your allegiance. And certainly there are few enough men to be drawn from Hofingen to protect you.”
The baron shook his head in confusion. “Seaguard is not ungarrisoned.”
Vonvalt gripped the handle of his sword, ready to slay the man. “It is. Not that it matters. Do you have any more to say? Every word you spill to assist me is another few moments of life.”
The baron shook his head, but it was in confusion, not defiance. “Seaguard is not ungarrisoned. The Sixteenth Legion is there. Prince Gordan himself led them in.”
Vonvalt paused. “The Sixteenth Legion, and Prince Gordan with it, was slain to a man but a few weeks ago.”
The baron shook his head again, more vigorously this time. “I know not what to tell you. But the Legion has not been slain. They have taken up residence in the fortress.”
Vonvalt considered this for a moment. He lowered his sword, and I thought he was going to spare the old man; but then he battered him repeatedly with the Emperor’s Voice, over and over again, questioning him about the rumours of the pagan warrior queen, the nature of the entity attacking the village, on what news had reached the village from Sova about Vonvalt and Prince Gordan, and many other things besides.
The baron may have been a deceitful man, but he had been telling us the truth – at least as regarded his lack of knowledge. He knew nothing beyond the same rumours that we had heard. But he remained adamant that Prince Gordan and the 16th Legion had not been killed.
In the end, the questioning, rather than the sword, was the death of him. His throat worked in silent excruciation, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped forward, his heart stopped.
Vonvalt wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a gloved hand. He regarded the baron for a moment, then slid his sword back into its scabbard, and stood.
“Come,” he said, and, stepping over the corpses of the slain men, he walked out of the hall.
We followed. I paused only briefly, to look at the small rune of banishment he had carved into the door frame.
“Quite the tally you have now,” Sir Radomir said to me.
We had recovered our horses and were heading north on an old path nearly overgrown by briar. Vonvalt had not spoken since the baron had died.
“What do you mean?” I asked irritably. I was exhausted, and cold, and still frightened from the events of the night before.
“Of men you have slain,” Sir Radomir said. He took a long drink from his skin, which he had refilled with wine from the baron’s stores.
“What an odd thing to say,” von Osterlen said from behind us. “Do you keep score?”
Sir Radomir shrugged. “I mean only that Helena has cleaved to her high-minded ideals in the past. She is quick to judge those who perform the act of killing.”
“Enough,” Vonvalt called out from the front of our caravan like a weary schoolmaster.
“I can speak for myself,” I said.
“Aye,” Sir Radomir said, as Vonvalt merely shrugged. “That you can.”
“There was nothing unlawful in what we did. They would have taken us captive.”
“Ah!” Sir Radomir said, pointing a finger at my face. “But they were acting within the confines of the law. There is a lawful bounty on Sir Konrad’s head, issued by the Emperor.”
“It was self-defence,” von Osterlen said, her voice level.
“Was it? Or was it the butchery of a group of lads seeking to enforce the common law? Certainly that is no longer our purpose.”
I felt a surge of anger wash through me. I threw my hands up in the air. “What are you doing? What is the point of this? So, what? We should have allowed ourselves to be captured, arrested and taken to Sova, there to be publicly executed whilst Claver launches his attack? Blood of gods, keep your thoughts to yourself if their only purpose is antagonism. Nema knows our lives are difficult enough.”
Sir Radomir was quiet for a moment; then he smiled, a lopsided, disingenuous grin. “Just wanted to get my sword red on some legal debate. I thought you all enjoyed it.”
“Enough, Sir Radomir,” Vonvalt said again, wearily.
We rode in silence for a little longer. I found my thoughts turning to Bressinger, as they often did in those days. With Vonvalt and von Osterlen taciturn, and Sir Radomir being a quarrelsome prick, I missed his easy manner more than ever. True, the man had been surly and withdrawn, though his moods were often a foil to those around him. When Vonvalt was quiet, Bressinger would sing; when Vonvalt was dour, Bressinger was garrulous. Had he been with us now, he would have been trying to make multilingual puns – his favourite pastime – or playing word games with Sir Radomir, or trying to provoke von Osterlen to smile. He would have done it, too. Bressinger could be – had been – irrepressible.
I smiled at my favourite memories of him, biting my tongue so as not to weep. I missed him so very dearly.
Perhaps half of an hour passed before any of us said anything. My thoughts had drifted back to the night before, and the hall we had slept in. Slowly, a question formed on my lips, but for a long time I was too disquieted to voice it. “Will they come back?” I asked eventually. I felt Sir Radomir and von Osterlen stiffen up. “Those… creatures? From last night?” I tried not to think of them. They were horrors, like those Sir Radomir and I had seen in Keraq.
Horrors that appeared to be following us.
“Demons, more like,” Sir Radomir muttered.
“Aye,” von Osterlen agreed quietly.
Vonvalt turned briefly. His face looked tired and grey. “No. Not there, anyway.” I thought of the rune he had carved into the door frame, and the way the creatures had shrieked as they encountered it – as though they had suddenly been hosed with boiling pitch. “But… there is something at work in the Northmark. I can feel it. The fabric between worlds is thin—and thinning. And for as long as it is, I fear we shall see more of those… ‘creatures’.”
“Never mind that,” Sir Radomir said, eager to talk about something else. “What about this talk of the Sixteenth Legion? Every person from here to Sova agrees it was destroyed. How is it they have taken up residence in Seaguard?”
“I assure you, Sir Radomir,” Vonvalt said, turning away. “I intend to find out.”
