The Trials of Empire, page 41
Lady Frost nodded grimly. “He will seek to confound you with grotesque visions. I am afraid to say it will get worse before it gets better.”
“He? You mean Ulrich?”
Lady Frost shook her head patiently. “No. The other one. We should not say his name, not whilst the skin of the aether is so thin.”
“He keeps asking me for mine.”
“Do not give it,” Lady Frost said. “It would be wise not to utter it to anyone. Anybody who needs it already knows it. Let them call you ‘girl’, or ‘milady’.”
We all turned sharply. The horns of the Templars blasted feverishly in the dark morning air. They sounded like screams. For a moment I fancied I saw not ten thousand Templars, but a procession of demons, a grotesquery of forms, each a parody of a human being. Hands for feet, eyes on chests, mouths for ears, skin the colour of burnt charcoal. They gnashed their teeth and tugged out their own guts and fistfuls of their own brains, delighting in the appalling spectacle. The high-way had vanished, to be replaced with a river of blood, and they sloshed through it, kicking up great foamy sprays of crimson.
Just as quickly as the vision had come, it went.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?” I said with great sincerity.
“Very possibly,” Lady Frost replied. Next to me, the shaman had finished applying a salve to Sir Radomir’s cheek which had the effect of stemming the blood and providing immediate relief from the pain. Nonetheless, he would remain mute for some time yet. The attack had rattled him.
“Come,” Lady Frost said. She nodded to the high-way, where I saw Sir Gerold in his city watchman’s breastplate and livery, directing men with his sword with unflinching pragmatism.
“Where is Sir Konrad?” I said again as we set off.
“He is there,” Lady Frost said, nodding to where a cluster of knights sat on horseback perhaps a hundred yards back from Sir Gerold. I realised then that Vonvalt had shed his cream-coloured cloak, for it was that that I had been looking out for. Vincento was resplendent in a caparison of Vonvalt’s knightly heraldry, green with the prancing white horse and two peach trees. Vonvalt himself had cocked his head to one side and was clearly conversing with Duke Hofmann, pointing to various elements of the Templars in front of them. Behind them, a detachment of knights, perhaps twenty all in, was cantering down the high-way, tasked with rallying the volunteer companies and eliminating the errant thralls who had begun the ghastly work of slaughtering as many commonfolk as they could reach.
“How do we stop the thralls?” I asked, plagued with visions of those horrible creatures bursting into households and tearing into cowering families.
“Stop Claver, and you stop the thralls,” Lady Frost called over her shoulder.
“And how do we stop Claver?”
Lady Frost paused for a moment. “We are working on it.”
We reached the rearmost Sovan forces just as the Templars began to force their way through the gates. Claver himself was mounted on a destrier somewhere close to the centre of the army, surrounded by a life guard of a dozen Templar cavalrymen. He radiated a dreadful energy. Every time I blinked or looked away slightly, something shifted in the air around him, some cloak of black, a haze of eldritch energy. Above, the dark sky darkened further, now swirling with a huge vortex of storm cloud which put me in mind of the enormous funnel which sat over the Plain of Burden.
Everybody around me flinched as a great peal of thunder exploded through the charged air. Moments later, a great torrent of rain fell.
No. Not rain. Blood.
Ramayah.
A crackle of corposant green lightning flashed and left an after-image of an enormous demon that occupied the same space as Claver.
“What’s your name, girl?” the man next to me asked. It was a Saxanhilde Templar; he gripped a short sword in his right hand and a sohle shield in his left.
I hadn’t been going to tell him, but Sir Radomir punched me in the back anyway. I turned to him sharply, and he gave me a meaningful look. “I know,” I snapped. I turned back to the Templar. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I am coming for you.”
I frowned, turning back to the Templar. “What?”
“I am coming for you. And when I find you, I am going to drain you.”
I took a step backwards. The Templar’s face briefly transformed into an eyeless screaming visage.
“Nema save me,” I muttered, looking away.
Sovan soldiers, pagans, Hauners, Legionaries, Saxanhilde Templars, volunteers, coalesced to close what gaps there were as our enemy approached. I was not optimistic. The Templars were an organised, cohesive force. They moved as though they were one gigantic organism. Battle priests exhorted them to all manner of calamities, and I could see that the men and women of the Savaran ranks were exercising themselves into a righteous fury.
“Straight from the Halls of Hell,” someone said near me, a watchman who could not stop shaking.
“Aye,” another said. “Nema truly has left us.” He looked up at the funnel of cloud above us as he said it.
I wasn’t so sure; to me it felt as though she were merely… otherwise engaged.
“Kill the priests,” I said to all who would listen. “They have been trained in the Emperor’s Voice. They will make you do things you do not want to.” I looked around desperately, for any sign of an archer or crossbowman, but there were none.
I looked back up at Claver. Already, he wore a smirk of triumph on his ghastly face. Gods, how I detested him.
There was nothing left to do except fight. How strange, how curious that the fate of an entire people, many of whom had no idea that this battle was even happening, could be reduced to one brutal melee. If Claver triumphed here today he would consolidate his position in the capital. I doubted that the scattered remnants of the Sovan Legions fleeing west from Kòvosk would be able to make much of a difference.
No. It was down to us, here and now, this motley collection of professional and amateur soldiers.
The clash finally happened, and the exquisite agony of waiting was over. I was not in the vanguard, mercifully, but I was close enough to the front ranks to see the shields clatter, the swords stab, the hammers and axes fall, and the blood spray.
And then it began.
I had heard Vonvalt use the Emperor’s Voice enough times by now to be fully immune to its effects. But for those exhausted soldiers in the van, it was a psychic bludgeon, impossible to withstand. I watched as men and women discarded their swords with horrified expressions. Others turned their weapons on themselves. I saw a priest command a Legionary to impale herself on a spiked hammer, and she did so; a city watchman next to her opened his throat from ear to ear with his dirk.
It wasn’t just the suicides; using the Emperor’s Voice, these vile priests were able to command people to murder each other. Fratricide and sororicide was in great abundance. I watched as friends, colleagues, possibly even lovers, turned their weapons on each other. I saw one man strangle the life out of another next to him, weeping the entire time he did; I saw a Saxanhilde Templar reach under the mail shirt of his companion and begin the busy work of stabbing him to death; I saw a city watchman press his thumbs into the eyes of an Imperial Guardsman before someone dispatched him with a battle axe.
Panic spread, and quickly. How had it come to this? Were we really to be defeated so easily? Had we really been so outmatched, outclassed, and outfought at every turn? Had all of Vonvalt’s efforts really been for nothing? Could such an obviously evil scheme as Claver’s truly be met with such little opposition? We were barely two hours into the day’s fighting and already it looked hopeless.
The Templars churned through our front ranks. Blood and offal and broken armour littered the streets. Screams filled the air. Men and women fell back, injured or exhausted. With Sir Radomir and Heinrich next to me, I rotated to the front of the mass of defenders and took my turn in trying to stem the tide. I landed one blow on the steel-strapped apex of a Templar’s sohle shield before a matria behind him, a ghastly old hag, commanded me to slit my throat.
I felt the Voice wash over me. It was like grasping hands, scrabbling, corded fingers reaching into the depths of my brain, unpicking the nerves there, trying to unstring them and puppeteer me like a marionette. I felt the desire to run my neck across the edge of my short sword – even felt my hand twitch – but it was not enough. Not for someone like me.
“You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that,” Sir Radomir said, and stabbed her in the face. The Templar let out a snarl of rage and attempted to kill Sir Radomir, but he was brought down by Heinrich, who quickly tore his throat out.
I do not know how long I was fighting in the van. It cannot have been long; one’s life expectancy in that place – or at least one’s capacity to fight – was measured in the tens of seconds. The Templar battle priests continued to sow horror and discord amongst the Imperial ranks, but as Lady Frost’s pagan shamans entered the fray, the Nemans’ monopoly on the psychic war ended. Now sorcerers on both sides grappled in the aether, and the lull gave the loyalists a precious few moments in which to rally and consolidate.
For a second or two I was filled with a wild burst of optimism as I saw a half-dozen Templar war-priests killed; but then three things happened, and they all happened very quickly.
The first was that I was struck with a war hammer on my shield. The moment it happened I thought it had broken my arm; the jarring, crunching impact made the whole limb go completely dead, and my sohle shield dropped out of the formation, exposing a crucial gap in the line.
The second was that Sir Radomir next to me was overwhelmed. Templars forced their way through the new gap and created a salient, splitting him off and away. As I thrashed madly within this new press of bodies, I lost Heinrich, too. In fact, I became so jammed up I could barely breathe; the only reason I managed to survive the sudden crush was because no one had enough room to draw back an arm and stab me.
The third and final thing was that my chest flared in sudden pain. It was the only thing capable of distracting me from the excruciation in my arm. It was so intense that as soon as I was able to, I folded and went to one knee. I did not hear the thunderous clatter of hooves until the cohort of warhorses was practically next to me.
It was Vonvalt.
Vincento and a dozen other Hauner warhorses smashed into the Templar ranks. I saw hooves kicking, smashing faces in, breaking bones. Chest plates were dented, helmets were stoved in. Angry, anguished shouts filled the air.
It was insane. Insanely reckless. If Vonvalt was killed, that really would be the end of our efforts. And he knew that, too. But he would still have given his life to save mine. In spite of everything we had been through together, in spite of our relationship being at its lowest ebb, in spite of our disagreements and arguments and distance, he would still have sacrificed himself for me. In the moment, with my blood singing and my nerves overtaxed and my entire body vibrating with energy, it filled me with an abiding, almost worshipful gratitude.
Hands grabbed me. I was hoisted up and thrown over the back of a horse, and then bounced and jostled unceremoniously as my rescuers cleared their way west of the melee and then north up the high-way. Cradling my arm and trying to catch my breath, I chanced a look back, to see an overwhelming mass of black surcoats emblazoned with the white star of Savare. Behind them the Victory Gate burned. We defenders looked so few in number, and dwindled by the minute.
“Where are you taking me?” I rasped, but my saviour – it was Baron Hangmar, I realised – could not hear me. It didn’t matter. I got my answer very shortly thereafter.
I was deposited roughly on to the flagstones several hundred years up the road. Sir Konrad pulled Vincento still next to me.
“You must do as Lady Frost says,” he said, ruddy-faced and breathless. Blood drooled from his short sword. A great deal more spattered his armour, as though someone had flicked him with a monstrous paintbrush doused in crimson. He was soaked in sweat, and his hair was lank with it.
“What is happening?” I asked, confused from my abrupt rescue and too dazed from battle shock to weep for the deaths of Sir Radomir and Heinrich.
Vonvalt kicked Vincento on the flanks. The huge black destrier whinnied, and carried him back into the fray. His entourage of Hauner lords followed.
“They have Resi!” he called over his shoulder.
XXX
The Soul of the Empire
“And the Genothians trembled, for although they had smote the Legions of Sardach on the ash wastes, Ramayah vowed to one day rise again; and they knew, in their hearts, that he would; for the schemes of Ramayah were measured in eons, and his evil was patient.”
FROM THE BOOK OF HISTORIES
“Why does it have to be me?” I asked.
No one answered. The defenders were minutes from breaking. We had to get as far away from the Victory Gate as we could.
We thundered up the road – me, Lady Frost, her life guard of pagan warriors, and a small collection of shamans. At the foot of a block of soot-stained apartments, I saw one of the thralls goring a young man. He twitched as it pulled great strings of tissue from his neck, a large pool of blood thinning in the rain on the cobbles. One of the pagans dashed the thing in half with his two-headed axe. It let out a furious shriek as it smacked into the wall, leaving a bloody halo there, and expired.
We rode on. Behind us, the screaming war horns of the Templars sounded. Soon the host would advance up the high-way, and then what? We had lost. The city was lost, the Empire was lost, the soul of the world was lost. Never before had I felt such a crushing weight of failure. I had not the energy nor the spirit to do whatever it was Lady Frost was about to ask of me; and yet, I could not even die, and make all of my earthly troubles disappear.
Eventually we reached a small Neman Temple – one of hundreds across the capital – nestled in some tiny offshoot road of the Petran High-Way. The horses were pulled to a stop outside of it. It was a humble construction of yellowing blocks of limestone, stained with age. At the very top was a statue of Nema the God Mother, wrought from sun-bleached stone. I fancied I saw a flicker of golden light there.
“Come, girl,” Lady Frost said briskly, dismounting. I followed suit. Several of her life guard stood watch at the door; the rest of us entered.
The temple was exactly how I expected it to be, perhaps a little more ostentatious than an equivalent in the provinces, but nothing out of the ordinary. It was a jarringly quiet, peaceful place. After the noise, horror and chaos of the battle, it felt as though I had gone deaf.
“What are we doing? What do you need me for? Why must it be me?” I asked to Lady Frost’s back. I was not plaintive, or frightened. If anything, I was annoyed.
She ignored me. She went to the altar and snapped her fingers. The shamans produced several effects, similar to the little charm that Ulrich had given me. They incanted softly, arranging these trinkets and muttering words in the ancient Draedist tongue. As they did so, Lady Frost turned to me, and took my face in her hands.
“We are approaching the end of it,” she said softly. “We have been doing what we can for the longest time, but even the most carefully laid plans can be scuppered at the last moment.”
“Sir Konrad said that they had Justice August.”
Lady Frost nodded solemnly. “I am going to send you directly to the Izmyesta, to Aegraxes’ castle. We cannot use the Nyrsanar Navi,” she said, “he is too close.”
I nearly said the name, but caught myself.
Ramayah.
“Aegraxes will help you. Do not be alarmed by his appearance when you leave Limbo.”
“What do you mean?”
“It will be much better for him to explain matters to you. Time moves differently there. Here, we have none.”
“What has her?” I asked quietly.
Lady Frost paused. “It is likely to be the Gatekeeper,” she said quietly, grimly.
I thought of Ghessis, and I knew I did not have the stomach for this.
“You still didn’t answer my first question,” I said, trying to delay the inevitable.
“What question?” Lady Frost asked impatiently.
“Why me? Why does it have to be me?”
Lady Frost pressed one of her hands into the tattoo on my chest. “Because you have been marked. Not just by Aegraxes, but by the hand of Fate. There is something… important, about you, Helena. None of us know what it is, only that you are capable of diverting the temporal pathway in a way that no one else seems to be.”
I shook my head. “But I am nothing. I am not special.”
“I agree. You are not special. But there is something special only you can do.”
There was a brief, tense silence. Far away, I heard what had to have been the Templars smashing their way up the Aleksandra the Valiant High-Way. I thought of Sir Radomir, and Heinrich.
I thought of Vonvalt.
I took a deep breath.
“All right,” I said, fixing Lady Frost in the eye. “Send me down.”
Lady Frost lay me on the altar and gave me a special concoction which both put me to sleep but didn’t; my physical body was knocked unconscious, but I was left in a lucid state as I descended. It was one of the most disorienting things I have experienced.
Beneath me, stretching for a hundred miles in every direction, was the City of Sleep. I descended through the air as though being lowered by an invisible rope, and felt a sudden dread at the thought of one of the huge squirming watchtower eyeballs picking me out against the sky. But before I could take up my bed in this grim metropolis of half-death, I found myself snatched – in the space of an eyeblink – into a much more familiar place.
“Hello, Helena Sedanka,” Aegraxes said to me.
I was sitting in a castle chamber, a small octagonal room at the very peak of a very tall tower, itself connected to Aegraxes’ flying fortress. The sky, an endless plane of blue rife with white cloud – and not a hint of ground beneath – filled the windows. A pleasant breeze ruffled the hem of the Trickster’s robes.
