The Trials of Empire, page 4
Ramayah.
I turned sharply. “Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
“A whisper. Something whispered in my ear. Did you not hear it?”
“I did not hear it,” Sir Radomir said, irritation concealing his fear. “Come. Let us go. There is nothing to be divined here.”
I wholeheartedly agreed, and was about to turn tail and leave back down the pedlars’ path we had come in by, when something caught my eye.
“There!” I said, pointing to the curtain wall.
There was a long pause as Sir Radomir followed the line of my finger, squinting against the bright grey sky. “Aye,” he muttered, but the fear remained.
It was a soldier, judging from the silhouette. He walked the length of the wall, looking neither left nor right, then turned at the mural tower and walked north so that he was lost from sight. The wall was too high, and the soldier too far away, to discern anything more than the fact of his existence; but it was an odd walk, rhythmic and unnatural, like a march. A few moments later he returned and continued his circuit. He made no attempt to call down to us, in spite of the fact that we were the only visible people in the township.
Sir Radomir and I stood in silence for a long time. I noticed his hand was on the hilt of his sword.
“Come on,” he said, not taking his eyes from the battlements.
“Who is that?” I murmured. I tried to make out the colours of the man’s surcoat; they looked like those of the Royal household, the red, yellow and blue of the Autun, but it was impossible to discern more, framed as he was against the sky.
“I know not, but someone has taken up residence in the castle,” Sir Radomir said. “That is the information we sought.”
I wanted to leave as much as the sheriff, but some strange compulsion kept me there.
“We do not know who it is.”
“They are Autun. Perhaps not the Sixteenth, but they are Imperial – and therefore no friends of ours.”
Another long silence passed between us as I watched the castle. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Then the gates opened.
They were enormous thick planks of oak strapped and studded with iron. They creaked and rumbled as they swung inwards.
“Helena, come!” Sir Radomir hissed at me, grabbing my upper arm.
“No,” I said, not taking my eyes off the gate. There was no one coming, no patrol exiting the castle, no force moving to intercept us as interlopers. The gates moved like the soldier had; slowly and automatically, compelled, rather than controlled.
“Come on,” I said, walking towards the fortress.
“We should fetch Sir Konrad,” Sir Radomir said.
I shook off his grip on my arm. “Go, then.”
“Helena, you cannot go in there. You will be killed.”
I shook my head. “No. If they wanted us dead, we would be dead. We are a hundred paces within bowshot.”
Sir Radomir fixed me in the eye. “Helena, something is wrong. I don’t like this. Come with me, now. We shall fetch Sir Konrad and the Lady von Osterlen.”
I broke his gaze, and resumed my slow walk towards the gates of Seaguard. “You go. Bring them here. I shall meet you inside.”
I did not wait to hear his response, nor did he follow me.
“Helena!” he shouted.
I entered the outer bailey.
“Helena!” Sir Radomir shouted one last time.
The gates, unmanned, rumbled closed behind me.
I was not greeted. No one met me. The inside of Seaguard was as empty as the township beyond its walls.
I felt both anxious and afraid, but not enough of either to remain inactive. I headed for the stone steps that led to the top of the wall, and ascended them briskly. As I reached the top, I looked over the battlements to see Sir Radomir in the distance, making his way back to where Vonvalt and von Osterlen were hiding. I was surprised at that; for all his unease, I still thought he would have stayed close by.
The soldier was there, at the eastern extremity of the south wall. He turned once he reached the mural tower and then resumed his walk towards me. This part of the wall was perhaps fifty yards long, and the man, clad in armour and a surcoat, strode its length as though being pushed by an invisible hand.
“Hello?” I called out to him. His face did not even twitch. He did not blink. He stared directly ahead of him as though his eyes were fixed to lengths of thread. His arms hung limply by his side, and he walked in a bizarre, unnatural gait.
I drew my short sword and held out in front of me. “You there!” I shouted to him.
He would have walked straight into me if I had not moved. He continued on to the next mural tower, then turned, and continued on there as well until he reached the northern extremity of the walls. A strange stink wafted from him as he passed me. I had seen this behaviour once before, from the possessed nuns in the passageways of Keraq. But whereas that woman had spoken to me, attempted to interrogate me – even attacked me – I sensed nothing except a profound vacancy about this soldier. He was more like a glamour than a thrall.
“Helena,” someone said. I whirled around. The voice sounded as though it had come from directly next to me, but there was no one there. There was no one in the bailey, either. I shivered. The whole castle felt empty, and that in spite of the man tramping about the walls, for there was no sense of consciousness to be discerned from him.
“Helena. The great hall.”
The same voice again, that of a woman. It sounded familiar, though I could not place it.
The fear returned. A sense of deep dread took root in me as I descended the stone steps and made for the inner gatehouse, passed under the portcullis, and into the inner bailey. A familiar set of wooden steps to my left led up to the only entrance to the keep, and I ascended them and walked through a small, stout door into the disarming room. But there was no one to take my sword, and I kept it strapped about me.
The reception chamber was empty. I walked through it, having enough knowledge of the interior layout of Sovan castles to guess where the great hall would be. But as I approached, the sense of dread grew. My guts churned, and my skin broke out in gooseflesh. I felt sweat trickle down the small of my back. I felt drawn to the great hall, but at the same time, I knew intrinsically that it was not a place I wanted to be.
Nonetheless, I entered it. It was typical of those of its type; high arched windows, large hearth, tapestries, rugs, and an abundance of dark wood panelling and hunting trophies. The furniture had been cleared, leaving it an empty, draughty space. At the top of it was a dais, upon which sat an ornate wooden chair, where the margrave would hold court.
And in it, sat an old woman.
“Helena, welcome. It has been a long time,” she said.
It was Lady Karol Frost.
III
Fruit of the Poisoned Tree
“Information does not exist in vacuo; it is a curated product of human minds. It cannot – and should not – be disentangled from its source. Information obtained through unlawful means is akin to plucking the fruit of a tree which has been poisoned. The only proper thing to do is disregard it.”
FROM CATERHAUSER’S THE SOVAN CRIMINAL CODE: ADVICE TO PRACTITIONERS
“’Tis not possible,” I breathed.
I walked towards her slowly, tentatively. I had seen Lady Frost in my dreams many times, always, it seemed, throttling the life out of a two-headed wolf. But alive, and in the flesh? Not since before Rill had been burned – and, as far as I was concerned, her along with it.
“You were killed, by Claver. By Westenholtz.” I felt sick with shock. I had seen séances in which the dead had been conversed with. I had seen the souls of the recently deceased lingering on the Plain of Burden. But I had never seen a dead body restored fully to life before.
“No. I was not. Come closer.”
I approached. She looked appreciably different to the old witch I had seen in the forest near Rill. Yes, she was an elderly woman – as I am now, grey-haired and wrinkled – but there was no frailty to her. To the contrary, there was a conspicuous physical strength to her, in spite of her age. Her body was visibly bulkier, as though she had bridled her contempt and transmuted it into muscle.
Indeed, she was everything except burned, as she had been in my visions. Her skin was not cracked and blackened, her teeth were not split, her eyeballs were not cooked white. She looked hale and healthy. The only marks on her skin were tribal tattoos, lines of dark blue around the eyes and mouth. Those, too, had been absent from my visions.
“What happened?” I whispered. “Here. Where is everybody?” But I knew. Seeing Lady Frost sitting there, as imperious as any Hauner lord, it dawned on me. The 16th Legion had indeed been destroyed.
“You are the warrior witch. The pagan queen everybody has been talking about. It is you.”
Lady Frost smiled thinly. “Your master approaches. I shall tell you all when he is here.”
The most surprising thing about the encounter was how unsurprised Vonvalt seemed to be.
“So,” he said, as he entered the hall along with Sir Radomir and von Osterlen. His face was grim. “You are not dead.”
“No,” Lady Frost agreed.
I looked at Vonvalt, unable to conceal my surprise. “You knew? About this?” I gestured to Lady Frost rudely.
Vonvalt shook his head. “No. But I have long suspected. Your descriptions of your encounters with Justice August in the Edaximae – the way she has spoken of receiving assistance from ‘others’. There are other things, too, which have been troubling me for a while, and which have only just now achieved clarity.” He turned to Lady Frost. “You tried to speak to me, through Helena. In Linos.”
I remembered the terrible nightmares I had had in that small fishing village in Kormondolt Bay, and waking up to see Vonvalt sitting at the end of my bed, Oleni medallion in his hand, grimoire necromantia at his feet. That night, trapped in a nightmarish fugue state, I had tried to kill Justice Roza – or rather Basia Jask, the half-Kòvoskan spy.
“You tried to get me to kill Roza,” I said, the revelation making me giddy. “You knew she was a traitor and you tried to get me to stop her.”
“Would one of you mind explaining just what the fuck is going on?” Sir Radomir asked. “Exactly who are you?”
The corner of her mouth quirked as though tugged by a length of gut. “I am Lady Karol Frost. I do not go by that name or title any more, but let us stick with it for now. The waters are muddy enough already.”
“I’ll say,” Sir Radomir growled.
“Sir Konrad,” von Osterlen said. “Is there some significance to this woman?”
Vonvalt sighed. “I have told you this story before, though not in detail. A long time ago we came upon the village of Rill in northern Tolsburg,” he said. He explained to von Osterlen what had happened: the discovery of Lady Frost and the Draedist ritual in the woods; the fining of the villagers; the burning of the village and its inhabitants by Margrave Westenholtz’s men at the behest of Claver.
Von Osterlen nodded to herself. It was difficult to know how she felt about it. She was a Templar, after all, and though many Templar margraves were political appointees rather than zealous warrior monks, there had still been plenty of the latter. I had not spent enough time with von Osterlen to know where she came down on the matter, but years of dealing with pagans on the Frontier had certainly hardened her heart to the plight of the Draedists, and she was more religious than most. Certainly she disdained the practice of magick, which she considered to be witchcraft. The interposition of Lady Frost into Vonvalt’s affairs would strain her relationship with him, I was certain of it.
“I am very keen to understand how you came to be here,” Vonvalt said.
“Yes, I rather expect you are.”
“How did you avoid being killed in Rill?”
“A simple matter of not being there at the crucial time,” Lady Frost replied. “No… ‘pagan magicks’ involved.”
“Your husband—”
“Otmar was murdered, yes. I have no desire to speak about it, and certainly not with you.”
“Very well.”
“You are Entangled,” Lady Frost observed.
“As are you,” Vonvalt said.
“Aye.”
“I have dreamt of you. We have all dreamt of you.”
“I am flattered.”
“Do not jest with me,” Vonvalt said impatiently. “Portents. Visions of things to come. Of the end of the Empire.”
Lady Frost inclined her head. “I am not surprised. I have had similar dreams.”
There was a silence which stretched.
“Why do you speak so guardedly?” Vonvalt asked eventually. He gestured about the great hall with both hands. “We were clearly predestined to meet.”
Lady Frost gave Vonvalt a long, appraising look. “Because, Justice Sir Konrad Vonvalt, I do not know where you stand. And,” she added, cutting across him before he could speak, “I do not think you know where you stand either.”
“Nonsense,” Vonvalt said with contempt.
Lady Frost shook her head. “No. There is conflict in your heart.” Now she nodded at me. “There is something else, too. Something has its hooks in your girl.”
Everyone turned to me. I wished the flagstones of the great hall would open up and enfold me.
“What?” I breathed. My immediate thought was of the Muphraab. It made my flesh crawl.
Lady Frost gave me a long, penetrating stare. “Bare your breast,” she said eventually.
There were a few moments of stunned silence, swiftly followed by enthusiastic outrage.
“By Nema, what is this?” von Osterlen demanded.
Lady Frost rolled her eyes. “God Mother give me strength, I said her breast, not her breasts.”
“Why should she? To what end?” Vonvalt demanded.
“’Tis all right,” I muttered, hoping my compliance would put an end to these Sovan histrionics. I unbuttoned the top few buttons of my blouse and pulled my kirtle down slightly, revealing a very unsexual four inches of breastbone. Sir Radomir and Vonvalt ostentatiously averted their gaze.
“Blood of Creus,” von Osterlen remarked, looking at the skin I had exposed. Sir Radomir and Vonvalt immediately turned back. I, too, looked down.
“Prince of Hell,” I gasped.
“No, not Kasivar,” Lady Frost said, also looking at the mark of the two-headed snake that had manifested itself on my breastbone. “Aegraxes.” She looked up, her finger on her chin, her expression curious, thoughtful.
“The mark of the Trickster is indeed upon you.”
If I had hoped to avoid histrionics, I was to be disappointed. Eventually, after everybody had calmed down, we moved out of the great hall and upstairs, into a chamber that had once been Margrave Westenholtz’s private solar. The place was much as I remembered it, its greatest asset the commanding view of the North Sea – itself afforded by a dual aspect of latticed glass windows. We arranged ourselves more comfortably, and Vonvalt, the least outwardly perturbed of us, pulled out his pipe and began to smoke thoughtfully.
“When we first met, Lady Frost, I had you for a charlatan. Yet it is clear that you are well versed in the Draedist arcana.”
“What high praise,” Lady Frost said with sickly sweetness. “Imperial.”
“I am not an Imperial,” Vonvalt said. “At least, I am no supporter of the Emperor.”
“But you do support the ongoing existence of the Empire,” Lady Frost remarked.
“I believe that its ongoing existence is significantly better than the alternative. Patria Claver must be stopped.”
“Oh, on that we can agree,” Lady Frost said, waving a hand dismissively. “That man is a puppet of chaos and death. And worse,” she added with a mutter. “But I am afraid I cannot countenance the survival of the Empire.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You have come here to enlist my help,” Lady Frost said. “To make common cause. And I am telling you that the precondition for my assistance is the dismantling of the Empire of the Wolf.”
Vonvalt reclined, and released a great cloud of smoke from his mouth. “And what is your alternative? Another Reichskrieg?”
“Of course not. Only that each nation be left to govern itself.”
Vonvalt scoffed. “Why? Such does not benefit you. Haunersheim might as well be named ‘Greater Sova’. Most living Hauners have known nothing but the Empire. You think this place will magically revert to some… Draedist paradise?”
“Draedism is illegal in Sova. It was not so under the laws of the Hauner Vale. Nor under the laws of Tolsburg.”
“So that is it, is it? Dismantle half a century of integration? You think it will simply end there? Give Haunersheim back to the Hauners, Tolsburg back to the Tolls, Jägeland back to the Jäglanders – and everybody will just rub along?”
“Yes.”
Vonvalt scoffed. “With respect, Lady Frost, that is asinine.”
“That was not respectful.”
Vonvalt rolled his eyes. “Are you a student of history? I assure you, Tolsburg was far from a unified nation before the Sovans pitched up. Nor was Haunersheim. Nor were any of these countries. They are each in and of themselves miniature empires, accretions of disparate peoples which have formed over centuries. Hell, Rill and Kolst were at one another’s throats, two villages barely a stone’s throw apart.”
“Your father took the Highmark; ’tis no wonder you see things through the lens of the Autun.”
Vonvalt shook his head slowly. “The Reichskrieg killed many thousands of people, and the majority of those were not soldiers. Let us be absolutely clear; it was a sequence of bloody conquests, of which the common law and the secular rights of the individual were extremely welcome by-products – though by-products they were. But simply because they came about in such a manner does not make them intrinsically evil. In fact, they are intrinsically good. Dismantling the Empire is little better than installing Claver on the Imperial throne. The outcome is the same: death, destruction, devastation, a time of evil words and deeds. A chaotic transition from a flawed but functional institution to a decidedly dysfunctional and malevolent one is no choice at all.”
