The Trials of Empire, page 6
“I daresay you are right. But I am here to prevent a slaughter, not start one. The northern kingdoms have spent decades raiding Haunersheim – including plenty from Brigaland.” He pointed rudely to Captain Llyr. “You and I are not friends.”
The woman launched to her feet, but before she could do anything, von Osterlen stepped forward and pushed her roughly back down. “Stay down or I will put you down,” the Templar snapped.
Captain Llyr snarled, and yanked a knife from about her waist.
“No!” commanded Ulrich. A noiseless thunderclap burst through the tent. My eyes widened. We as Vonvalt’s retainers could resist the Emperor’s Voice, but it surprised us enough to have much the same effect.
There was a silence as everybody took stock. If there had been any question of whether or not the Draedists could truly wield the arcana, then it had just been answered.
“Sir Konrad, you speak and act with great insolence, considering your position,” Lady Frost said. “You of all people know what it will take to stop Claver. Persons skilled in wielding the arcana, yes, but you still need fighting men and women to defeat his Templars here, on the mortal plane. I am offering to work with you, to assist you in defeating your greatest enemy. Claver is the moon to your sun, the night to your day. Fate has brought you here, I am certain of it. Would you not like to tip Her hand in your favour?”
“Aye,” Vonvalt said, warily. “But I will not achieve that end at any price. I will not stop Claver only to install some… Hauner pagan or northlander upon the Imperial throne instead. I am looking to achieve a peaceful disassembly, not a bloody coup.”
“I have told you, that is not my goal. The Sovan rump state will be left intact, to bicker and squabble and govern itself as it will.”
“And do you speak for Captain Llyr ken Slaineduro?” Vonvalt asked, looking at the Brigalander.
“I speak for myself,” Llyr said, still furious at the shove she had received from von Osterlen. “I am here to safeguard the arcana, and the holy dimensions, and to see that only those who are respectful and worthy are afforded the opportunity to divine its secrets. Claver is a menace. The Neman Church is an abomination. It will take many of us working in concert to prevent his and its ascendancy. And as for the Imperial throne?” She spat on the floor. “You can put a hundredweight of dogshit on it for all I care. Once Claver is dead, I intend to return home.”
Not for the first time, there was a long silence; but, for the first time, I could sense Vonvalt softening. I should not have been surprised he was so standoffish in the first place. Vonvalt was a vain and proud man, and his disinvestiture had wounded him greatly. That he was being forced to treat with these people at all – people who he should by rights have been prosecuting – galled him.
“So. You have three thousand men-at-arms. And—” he gestured to Ulrich “—a number of shamans. What powers have you, besides the Emperor’s Voice? Claver has two dozen warrior priests who can wield it just as effectively. Probably more, by now.”
Ulrich looked at Vonvalt disdainfully. “We do not call it such, and nor should you.”
“This is not the time to debate nomenclature,” Vonvalt said sharply. “Come, what else?”
I watched as Ulrich and Lady Frost exchanged a look. They tolerated his rudeness only because he was integral to their plans – much more integral than first appeared, as I shall come on to later in this account. But at the time, their subservient manner was a curious thing to behold.
“There is something I would show you. It regards the nature of our powers, and how we propose to fight this war on both the mortal plane and in the spirit dimension – for this war shall – unquestionably – require both.”
“All right,” Vonvalt said, gesturing to the woods at large. “So show me.”
We delved further into the Velykšuma. The drizzle collected on the many thousands of leaves overhead, formed larger balls of water, and fell as fat raindrops that pattered throughout the forest. The effect was compounded by the creaking of branches and skittering of creatures – deer, foxes, rodents – as though the whole forest were a giant skeleton rousing itself from the earth.
I could see now that the mounds were indeed tents, covered over with earth, leaves and sticks. Occasionally I heard the odd snatch of muttered conversation, but although I could hear it, I could not understand it. The Draedists spoke their own language – really the main reason why the Sovan Empire had outlawed the practice of Draedism – a sort of proto-Saxan but with a much more poetic, song-like lilt.
We passed through the encampment. After a while, the ground began to rise and fracture, and we were picking our way upwards, clambering amongst moss-covered rocks and over slippery wet tree branches.
My sense of dread persisted, expertly stoked by Kunagas Ulrich in the tent, for now I heard dripping constantly – though of course, it was only the rain. But my curiosity was piqued, too. Clearly Lady Frost did not mean to murder us, for such could have been achieved a thousand times over in the time we had been here. What, then, were we about to be shown? In spite of the circumstances I could not help but wonder.
Eventually, we reached a hilltop clearing. Here the wind was unforgiving, driving the rain into us from the side, and the trees thrashed about as though in the throes of a seizure.
In the centre of the clearing was a frame of stone.
The sculpture filled me with a deep sense of unease – for a sculpture it was, wrought from human hands and no natural rock formation. It was nonetheless crude. Runes had been cut into the frame, and nothing grew within several feet of its base. I saw, littered amongst the bare soil, tiny animal bones.
Even Vonvalt looked uneasy. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.
“If you think it is a dreadport, then yes,” Lady Frost said.
Vonvalt looked at her sharply. “It cannot be,” he said.
“It is.”
“What is a dreadport?” I asked.
Vonvalt did not answer me straight away, instead eyeing the ancient structure. “They were supposed to have been destroyed. A very long time ago.” He took one tentative step forward to examine it. “A gateway to another plane of existence,” he murmured.
“The afterlife?” I asked.
Vonvalt shook his head, but it was Lady Frost who spoke. “Another place. A place between dimensions, a liminal plane known as the Izmyesta.”
Vonvalt looked back to Lady Frost. He gestured to the dreadport. “You have not been using this, have you?” he asked.
Lady Frost’s composure fractured. “We were using the arcana long before the Empire of the Wolf stole it from us,” she snapped.
“Lady Frost, when first we met, you were going to use a length of black thread on a hidden pulley to frighten your flock of followers into doing your bidding,” Vonvalt said, giving voice to something I had been thinking about for a while.
Lady Frost sneered her displeasure at that. “You know nothing of what was to take place that evening,” she snarled, suddenly conscious of Kunagas Ulrich and Captain Llyr standing next to her. “There are many things that can go wrong with these rituals. But just because they can be interrupted, or spoiled by entities making mischief, does not mean the afterlife is not a real place, filled with real gods. The thread was a way of… making sure. That if the ritual was to go wrong, the villagers would not lose their faith.”
“Merchant assurance? Is that it?”
“I have no idea what that is. Liken it to whatever you will.”
We all looked at the dreadport in silence. “I do not know much about these,” Vonvalt confessed after a while. “I do know that they are dangerous if misused.”
“Calm yourself, old wolf,” Ulrich said. “We have been practising for many years; our people for many hundreds. It is not your business to be concerned about it. We do you an honour, showing you these things.”
“Not to mention a bloody great favour,” Captain Llyr spat.
“Peace, Captain.” Lady Frost gestured to Kunagas Ulrich, who turned, with not a little reluctance, to the dreadport. I watched as the shaman began to incant the words that would activate the gateway. Shortly after he had begun to speak, the runes etched into the stone frame glowed a dull pink, and the skin of the air began to alter, shifting and swirling and resolving into a plate of obsidian blackness which spoke of an absence of all earthly material.
That infernal whispering, a susurrus of malevolent enticements and demented babbling, scratched at the corners of my mind. The air changed too; whereas before the wind had been constant and strong, driving the rain into us, now the clearing was utterly calm.
I looked around me. Vonvalt was watching the incantation and manifestation of the gateway through a slight squint, his face a mask of displeasure, though he did not move to prevent the ritual. Sir Radomir and von Osterlen looked markedly unhappy, which was to be expected. Even Captain Llyr, a practising pagan, seemed uneasy.
Ulrich stopped his chanting once the gateway was stable. He turned, and nodded to Lady Frost, who in turn looked to us.
“The Izmyesta is a strange place,” she said, her voice flat. “It is not like the afterlife that you have experienced. It is a link between the mortal realm and the holy dimensions. You will experience strange sensations, and see strange things.”
“We are not unfamiliar with these sights,” Vonvalt said, a hint of impatience in his voice. “Let us be about it.”
“As you will.”
She walked towards the dreadport. Before she passed across the threshold, she exchanged a few low words with Ulrich. He glanced at us, and nodded.
“Come then. And I will show you what I have brought you here to see.”
We crossed the threshold. I cannot easily call to memory the sensations I felt. My enduring thoughts and feelings are ones of a place of immense absence; of movement, of sound, of feeling. The Izmyesta was a little like the Plain of Burden – the Myočvara – in that it had a feeling of anticipation, a feeling of in-betweenness, of liminality. But it also felt closed in and leaden, a stifling lack of activity, a sensation akin to sitting inside an empty and silent dining hall on a hot summer’s afternoon.
Curling blackness, like clawing our way through the soil in and amongst the roots of a gigantic forest, filled my every sense. Eventually the sensation cleared and we stood on a mirrored plane, the ‘ground’ underneath our feet an immense flat of polished glass. Ahead of us stood a huge tree, its roots sinking into the mirror of the floor. Hanging from each branch was the corpse of a man, stripped and bloodied. But they were not hanging by the neck, as though executed; they were hanging like leaves, like they had grown out of the end of the branches.
“Bloody Nema,” I heard Sir Radomir say behind me. His voice sounded flat, as though the air that we breathed was a blanket waiting to smother sound rather than carry it.
Next to him, von Osterlen looked aghast.
“We call this the Tree of Death,” Lady Frost said. She spoke with wonder, as though this abomination before us was a marvel to behold. “Tell me how you access the holy dimensions, Sir Konrad.”
“I think you already know,” Vonvalt said with distaste.
“Aye. You require a corpse – and a fresh one at that. And once the corpse is too ripe, perhaps after a day or two, it is useless as a vessel.” She gestured to the Tree of Death. “Here in the Izmyesta, the sleeping death is made permanent. These men will remain usable for as long as the tree holds them.”
I squinted at the corpses hanging there. For the first time I noticed markings on them, tattoos, and I realised that they were a selection of slain legionaries from Prince Gordan’s 16th.
“A permanent open door to the Plain of Burden,” Vonvalt said.
“That’s right,” Lady Frost said. “We can travel in and out at will. No dangerous necromantic tricks, no great expenditure of energy. We can reach the Myočvara as easily as… well, opening a door.”
“Aye, and at what cost?” Sir Radomir said. “This is not a fate I would wish on my worst enemy.”
“Indeed,” Vonvalt murmured. But, for his disgust, I could see that he saw at least some attraction in the idea.
“Have you seen the beyond, Sir Radomir?” Lady Frost asked. “There are many parts to the afterlife, in the same way there are many nations on the mortal plane. Would you gamble your immortal soul on an eternity in the Halls of Hell?” She turned back to the tree, nodding to the corpses there. “These men spend their existence in blissful black oblivion, ignorant to all and sundry.” She shrugged. “It could be much – much – worse.”
“How long have you been able to do this?” Vonvalt asked, before Sir Radomir could rejoin.
“We have known of the dreadport for decades, but this is the first time in a long time we have been able to harness its power in this way.” She took a deep breath of… not air, exactly, but whatever it was in the Izmyesta that passed for it. “In fact, only recently have we been able to do much of what we have achieved. The aether is thinning. We are on the eve of a great cataclysm. And you, Sir Konrad, are at its nexus.”
There was a pause. “It is what you wanted to show me?” he asked eventually.
Lady Frost shook her head. “This is only a part of it. We must go deeper.”
Entering the Plain of Burden had never been so simple. And yet, without that heavy cost of entry, doing so felt curiously wrong, like a child entering a study which had been left unlocked. Vonvalt had spoken before of how accessing the afterlife had not always been a process so fraught with horror, and the Tree of Death was hardly a pleasant thing to behold; but still, it was a place that men should not have been able to enter at all. The heavy toll paid hitherto felt somehow appropriate.
Kunagas Ulrich warded us with a few curt, guttural words. Then, to enter the Myočvara, we simply touched one of the corpses hanging from the tree. The transition was instantaneous – or if it was not, then I have no memory of it. As we entered the Plain of Burden, that unending dead marshland, I could sense something had changed about the place. It was not a pleasant feeling. The air felt charged with anticipation. It was not dissimilar to the feeling I had experienced in the Izmyesta, but somehow intensified.
In the distance, I heard a dull thudding – the rhythmic pounding of a gigantic blacksmith’s hammer, or footsteps, or the beating of an enormous heart.
“Why have you brought me here?” Vonvalt asked.
“Come,” Lady Frost said.
I had thought the Myočvara to be infinite, for certainly the marshland, sitting as it was under that enormous funnel in the sky, stretched to the horizon in every direction. But eventually we reached a place where the matter of the afterlife thickened, and we were once more in a forest. But it was not a forest of wood, grass and life; it was a forest of decay, the trees made of browning bone, the ground springy underfoot and carpeted with ghastly mushroom-like growths. Above, twisted grey and black clouds were rimed with sickly green light. It reminded me more of the Edaximae, the purgatorial plane, home of many of the creatures of the afterlife – including the Muphraab.
And then I realised that it felt that way, because that was where we were.
“We should not be here,” Vonvalt murmured once he, too, realised that we had strayed into the Edaximae. “You are experimenting with forces beyond your control. This is dangerous.”
Lady Frost travelled on, heedless. Left with no choice, we followed her, until eventually we came to small clearing. There, in the centre, a man lay against a stone tablet, his arms and legs having long ossified so that they looked as though they had melted into the rock. His body was bare. A huge livid purple bruise marked his neck, and his eyes were black, entirely shot through with blood as dark as ink. He struggled ceaselessly, his head turning back and forth, his breath coming in horrible, laboured gasps.
“Blood of gods,” Vonvalt muttered as he approached the man. He turned sharply to Lady Frost. “This is—”
“Margrave Waldemar Westenholtz,” Lady Frost said without emotion.
I groaned as I realised that what she said was true.
“Impossible. Westenholtz should have passed beyond the purgatorial plane months ago,” Vonvalt snapped.
“We are holding him here,” Lady Frost said, and I noticed for the first time a number of runes glowing dully in the air above Westenholtz’s head like a crown. “He cannot be permitted to pass. Not yet.”
I watched as Vonvalt peered at Westenholtz, so close that his face was but a few inches away. That Westenholtz was in the throes of some deep existential agony was evident. I was no lover of the margrave – indeed, I hated him; he was ultimately responsible for the mess we found ourselves in. In other circumstances I might even have been pleased to learn of the man’s eternal torment. But not now. This was appalling.
“What is his conscious state like?” Vonvalt asked. I studied him much as he was studying Westenholtz. I had expected him to be outraged by this torture, but he seemed to be interested in the way a scholar might be. His initial outrage had given way to curiosity. He examined Westenholtz like a specimen, noted the markings above his head, and even went so far as to grab him by the chin roughly, as though he might compel the man to regain his senses. A part of him almost looked satisfied, as though this were a satisfactory outcome.
“We do not know. But he has some sense of the matters which brought him here. Like you, he is Entangled. The currents of time were disturbed by his death. We have prevented his soul from passing further on into the afterlife. Until he is truly free of the purgatorial plane, then the full effect of his death cannot be used for our enemies’ gain.”
“Who told you this?” Vonvalt asked. “How could you know about the temporal pathway?”
“You speak as though the Magistratum discovered the secrets of the afterlife, rather than stole the arcana from the Neman Church – who stole it from us!” Lady Frost snapped. But her temper retreated quickly. “Although, in this event, you are right.” She took a half-step back. “We have had assistance.”
