The Trials of Empire, page 7
“Hello, Konrad,” said another voice. I turned to see Lady August, emerging through the bone-trees.
“Faith,” Vonvalt whispered as he saw her, taking a step back. “Resi.”
Then a number of things happened very quickly.
The first was that Westenholtz’s body stopped thrashing. He suddenly lay as still as the stone tablet beneath him, as though time itself had frozen. He fixed Vonvalt with a venomous glare.
“Still doing your best to try and stop me, eh, Sir Konrad?”
We all stared at the corpse. It was not Westenholtz’s voice.
It was Claver’s.
The runes above Westenholtz’s head began to glow, burning brighter and brighter as though the sun had perforated the fabric of this plane. Then, a few moments later, the runes shifted and changed entirely. Just looking at them made me feel nauseous. My eyes swam in and out of focus as my brain tried to reject what it was seeing. I heard von Osterlen and Sir Radomir gasp in horror and pain.
For the first time, Vonvalt had nothing to say.
“I am coming for you, Justice,” Westenholtz gnashed in Claver’s voice. Black goo frothed between his teeth. “It will not be long. It will not be long!” He laughed dementedly as his eyes and mouth caught fire and he thrashed his way into a more permanent state of death.
Just when it seemed that the horror was over, the thumping sound, the heartbeat of this world which had formed a low, pulsing backdrop, suddenly increased in both intensity and volume.
“Ghessis!” Resi shouted and, transforming into a rook, took to the skies.
A moment later, a gigantic figure burst into the clearing, a naked, alabaster-pale man three times the height of Vonvalt, thickly muscled and wearing a grotesque mask wrought crudely from iron. He grabbed the body of Westenholtz, tearing it free from where it had melted into the stone tablet in a welter of dead brown blood, leaving the arms and legs welded to the rock like crusts of pie burnt to a tin.
Then it turned to us, and roared.
“In the name of Nema, run!” Lady Frost screamed, any semblance of control over the situation gone.
We ran.
V
Dreadport
“War profits none save the devil.”
SOVAN PROVERB
I remember dreaming of the Tree of Death, too – dreaming of it as we ascended from the Myočvara.
No. It was not a dream. Even nightmare is too mild a word. It was a vision, and a rapacious one at that, inserted into my mind in the same way a constable would stuff a length of iron into a doorjamb.
The Tree stood at the centre of a large plaza. At one end of the plaza, Claver was undergoing his investiture as the new ruler of the Empire of the Wolf. Around him was a large cordon of Templar warriors, each clad in a black Savaran surcoat.
Gone was Claver’s threadbare Neman habit; he now wore rich, cream-coloured robes trimmed with gold. Around his neck hung a purple stole, embroidered on one side with the White Deer, and on the other the Flame of Savare. He wore a crown of golden laurel, but it was what was above his head which drew my eye. As with Westenholtz, there floated several pink runes of binding as if they had been carved into the air itself. It was not so much Claver as some demonic manifestation of him which had been bound to the mortal plane.
Standing behind the cordon of Templars was a secondary ring of tame Mlyanars, and for a moment I thought I saw smug satisfaction in their faces. In fact, each of them was dead, a grey-skinned corpse held up by an armature of wooden poles. Each of the corpses wore a broad, ecstatic grin.
Behind the Mlyanars were the people of Sova, an ashen collection of automata. They roared noiselessly once the investiture was complete. They were all dead as well. Everyone was dead, a sea of pallid cadavers, every face locked in a jarring rictus of ecstasy.
I do not know how long I loitered, spectral and unobservable, in that ghastly tableau. It might have been a handful of moments; it could have been a thousand years. But then Claver, a solitary flame of life amongst a sea of death, looked at me from his throne, locked his gaze upon me, and regarded me—
And I was whisked away, dragged back down the temporal pathway and back into the realm of the living.
I was vomited back out into the mortal plane.
Rain lashed me like stinging whips. The wind was a thunderous roar. I heard trees and branches creak and rip and snap. Leaves and twigs scythed through the air. Fat cold raindrops smacked into me like open-palmed slaps. Above, thick black clouds were being pulled in as though by a whirlpool, crackling with corposant green lightning.
Lining the dreadport were hands. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them, pulling at the frame, reaching through the portal of aethereal blackness. Fingers bulged with cords of sinew as they scrabbled for purchase on the rain-skinned stone. I recognised them immediately for what they were. These were the hands of the same creatures that I had accidentally summoned outside of Keraq: ghastly, faceless, long-toothed, thick-skulled demons, any one of which could cut down a dozen men without breaking stride.
And they were trying to come through.
Everyone who had entered the dreadport lay scattered about it as though thrown by an explosion of blackpowder. I saw Vonvalt several dozen feet away, lying at the apex of a channel of freshly turned earth. Others, too, had gouged lines in the wet soil where they had ploughed it with their bodies.
“Kunagas!” I heard Lady Frost shout. I turned to where she had been thrown. She was pulling herself out of a tangle of broken branches, wide-eyed through a mask of mud.
I turned back to the dreadport. A whole arm up to the elbow was through now. The only thing preventing its egress was the thicket of grasping hands around it. In their eagerness and insane clamour, the creatures had stoppered it as though it were a hole in a sinking ship – but the crush of bodies could not hold forever.
I noticed others in the clearing now, pagan warriors and Captain Llyr’s armoured Northmen. They advanced on the portal with reckless courage, brandishing swords and spears. I looked back over to Lady Frost, but she was not paying attention; she had run over to where Ulrich lay, and I saw for the first time that the shaman’s blue head was marked with a bright crimson streak of blood.
I heard a piercing shriek and whirled back to the dreadport.
“Wait!” I shouted. A man had thrust his spear into the aperture so that the tip of it was engulfed by the writhing mass of discorporate flesh. A second later, he was yanked in after it and ripped apart like a fresh orange.
The foremost of the demons was now part-way free of the wall of hands. A thick black skull with three bleeding eyeholes was birthed from the dreadport and began to utter a keening, ululating shriek that enveloped my entire mind with its awful sound. I could do nothing except crawl away, scrabbling frantically backwards until I hit the base of a freshly felled tree. My right hand landed on something I initially took to be a rock, though it transpired to be the breastplate of Severina von Osterlen, who lay on her back, her head bent forward, watching proceedings with an expression of undisguised horror.
“In the name of Nema,” she whispered, barely audible above the shrieking wind.
In spite of the violent dismemberment of their countryman, several more pagans attempted to slash at the demon before it could fully exit the dreadport. One lost a sword but escaped with his life; another managed to land a blow on the creature, before he had a skull-sized hole punched through his chest.
“By the goddess, it’s coming through!” I heard von Osterlen shout.
She was right. The demon was now out of the dreadport. With a wrenching, writhing twist, it yanked itself free and landed on the blasted grass in a great gout of foetid amniotic fluid like a freshly birthed calf. A mind-bending sense of horror overcame me as I realised we were all about to die in a particularly violent manner—
And then something happened. The wind and rain suddenly stilled. Leaves, which had been slicing through the air like blades, tumbled to the ground. The violent, elemental storm subsided immediately. The air thrummed with energy like a smacked tuning fork. I looked over to see Kunagas Ulrich standing, his eyes white balls of marble, his arms and hands outstretched; then I turned back to the demon, and noticed that the dreadport was inert. Once again it was a simple stone structure, framing nothing more than the view of the forest beyond. The hands, the abyssal darkness, had gone.
The demon, however, remained.
“Kristijan!” Lady Frost shouted. One of the pagan warriors looked over to her sharply. “Attack it now! It is safe!”
The warrior accepted this injunction with great reluctance, but he approached the demon nonetheless, sword and shield held ready.
The creature pounced at him like a cat. He screamed, bringing his weapon up – but then froze in place as Ulrich bellowed several incantations that filled the air like a physical weight. Runes appeared over the soldier’s head, cut into the aether by the shaman’s profane words, whilst the demon suddenly spasmed and writhed, gripped by a powerful but invisible force.
The latter burst into a great cloud of dark vapour. A screech echoed throughout the existential planes. The vapour coalesced into a vortex which shot into the frozen pagan’s mouth and filled him like beer into a barrel. His flesh distended as he inhaled the creature, his bones crepitated, blood and ectoplasm oozed from his skin and orifices, and his eyes flickered and flashed with crackling green lightning.
Once this horrifying spectacle was complete, and the man had finished jerking and convulsing and was finally still again, Ulrich set him afire.
“Nema!” I moaned.
All of us there watched as the man, now little more than a human-shaped demonic prison, was consumed by the unnatural flames. He shuddered and lurched and screeched, flailing and staggering until he sank to his knees and slumped over into the wet grass. The smell of burning flesh and the crackle and spit of roasting fat filled the cold night air.
Eventually the fire subsided, and we sat, each of us heaving in deep lungfuls of air, trying to process what it was that we had just witnessed. I saw Lady Frost talking urgently with Ulrich. Sir Radomir, who had given up trying to understand these horrors, did the only thing that made sense to him, which was to have a long drink of wine from the skin he carried. Von Osterlen sat in stunned silence next to me. I did not want to even guess at how she was feeling.
Vonvalt was furious.
“Blood of gods!” he snapped, launching to his feet. He gestured angrily to the dreadport, and then to Lady Frost and the shaman. “You bloody fools! Amateurs! We could all have been killed! You are no better than Claver with this reckless incompetence!” He clenched and unclenched his hands, stalking about the clearing. “Nema help me, I had my doubts, but I did not think you so thoroughly misunderstood the nature of the forces you grapple with—”
“Be silent!” Lady Frost snapped. “You insufferable man! Can you not see what is happening? The afterlife is in turmoil! We are doing what we can to stabilise it, to assist the forces of good—”
“There are no ‘forces of good’ in the afterlife, you idiot!” Vonvalt roared. “There are no forces of evil! There is nothing but chaos, a miasma of discorporate emotion, of creatures and entities interested only in their own existence, in their own lives!”
Lady Frost would not be cowed. “Can you not admit your own ignorance for but one moment? You have heard from the lips of your own clerk that Aegraxes strives to stabilise the currents of time. You have seen the red hand of Kasivar at work through Claver! You have seen Ghessis claiming souls in the Edaximae! If you cannot see the malice there, the malevolence, then it is you who is the idiot, my lord Justice!”
A dangerous silence followed. Ulrich watched this exchange impassively. Other pagans, including Llyr ken Slaineduro, looked ready to kill Vonvalt – and we his retinue – then and there. Judging by the looks of Sir Radomir and von Osterlen, I half wondered whether they would welcome it.
Vonvalt wiped the sweat from his brow and spat on to the soil. “And what of Resi? She has been taken, now.”
“Westenholtz was taken. Resi is fine. She can take care of herself. Nema knows she has managed for this long.”
“Aye, and how much longer? And what in Kasivar’s name was the Margrave doing there anyway?”
“I told you. If he passes beyond the purgatorial plane, doorways which were open to us are closed. Time is shifting, the pathways branch and split—”
“Oh, Nema, spare me,” Vonvalt muttered, waving his hand at her and turning away.
The absurd thing was, Vonvalt knew all of this. He was not stupid. He had seen these matters for himself. It was just that he would rather have read it in a textbook on jurisprudence, or heard it in a lecture from a Justice, or celebrated legal philosopher. It was not the news itself, but rather its source. It was the fact that it was coming from Lady Frost.
Eventually, he gestured to the clearing around us. “What is your plan, then? You have shown me the… catastrophe you meant to show me. Tell me how you plan to leverage it. If you even can any more.”
Lady Frost sighed, deflated. She looked tired and old again. “We have wounded. Let us return to the encampment. We shall discuss our next moves, and then you may be on your way.”
It took us a while to get organised and return to the encampment. By the time we had reconvened in Lady Frost’s command tent, which was by now beginning to smell a little ripe, it was dawn.
We gathered in a familiar assembly: Lady Frost and Kunagas Ulrich, Captain Llyr, Vonvalt and the three of us his retainers. Lady Frost had no maps to speak of, since good maps were difficult to come by and expensive to produce, and nor did Captain Llyr. But it was clear that a map was not needed. Both women, and especially Lady Frost, were intimately familiar with Haunersheim.
“We are three thousand, which you know,” Lady Frost said. “Our warriors and shamans are strong and battle-tested, the match of any Imperial Legion.” She looked at Vonvalt, as if goading him to contradict her. For once, he held his tongue. “We can move as quickly through the forests as we can down the Hauner Road. We will endeavour to avoid all Imperial settlements, but know that if we are attacked, we will attack in turn.” Vonvalt conceded this with a nod. “Any Imperial shrines we come across we will destroy. We will put any and all Neman churches to the torch. But we will spare every life we can, including those of the priests. We are like you, Sir Konrad. We are in the business of preserving lives.”
Vonvalt worried at his teeth with his tongue for a few moments. “What is your route? It will be harder to avoid detection the closer you are to Sova. Once you reach Osterlen you are going to run out of forest, and quickly.”
“It is best if you do not know our precise route,” Lady Frost said. “There are many things, mortal and otherwise, which would seek to frustrate us.”
Vonvalt nodded again at the obvious wisdom of this. “I will write letters to the lords of the Southmark. Baron Hangmar, Count Maier, Duke Hofmann. I shall explain the situation to them, and command that they furnish you with their assistance.” He rubbed his chin. “Since Westenholtz’s rebellion, Royal licences for private forces have been withdrawn. But they should still be able to bolster your army by several thousand.”
Lady Frost smiled, but it was not as sardonic as it could have been, given how utterly unhinged Vonvalt’s suggestion sounded. “Thank you, Sir Konrad, but I can assure you your southern lords will have no interest in assisting us.”
Vonvalt shook his head patiently. “Pagan rebels do not have the same reputation in the Southmark as they do in the north. And given what has come to pass in Sova in the past few weeks, they will be more amenable to trying something – anything – to maintain peace. Every man remembers the Reichskrieg. War profits none save the devil. If your men are well behaved, keep to themselves and march in good order, you will be surprised at how pragmatic the southern Hauners can be.”
Lady Frost seemed to accept this. “If you say so.”
“I will ask them to rally at Wolfenshut on… Nema, what’s the date?”
“It’s the fifteenth of Cervenkar,” I said.
“The fifteenth of Galenkar, then. One month.”
“That is much too fast,” Lady Frost said.
“We do not have the luxury of longer,” Vonvalt said simply. He turned to Sir Radomir. “You will accompany Lady Frost. You will bear my seal, and the letters.”
The sheriff looked up sharply. “What? No!” he said.
Vonvalt shook his head. “I need someone I can trust with this. More importantly, someone these lords can trust. You are a Sovan Hauner with a smart head on his shoulders and the right history. You are intimately familiar with the threat and you speak to matters plainly. They will listen to you. Besides: Baron Hangmar you have met already, in the Vale. You will bring much-needed weight to my requests. I am afraid I cannot brook a refusal.”
Sir Radomir looked about the tent at Lady Frost and her pagan retainers. “Aye,” he said eventually. He was clearly torn on the matter, and I certainly was sorry to see the back of him. But I could see, too, the wisdom in Vonvalt’s choice. “All right,” the sheriff said after a while. “I’ll not make anyone’s life more difficult by griping about it. If that is the best use of my abilities, then so be it.”
Vonvalt clapped a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Would that everybody thought as you do.”
“The world would be a lot fucking quieter if they did,” Sir Radomir grumbled.
Vonvalt turned back to Lady Frost. “My own route lies south.”
“Where will you go?”
Vonvalt drew in a deep breath. “I mean to recruit – or attempt to recruit,” he muttered irritably, “the Kasar to our cause. Given the historic ties between the Kasar and the Empire, I think it is something that is worth exploring.”
Lady Frost nodded her agreement. “They are powerful practitioners of the arcana, more so than us. The Kyarai sits much closer to the Eye of the Sea.”
