The Trials of Empire, page 8
The Eye of the Sea was the portal through which magick was believed to have first emerged into the world. It was located at the bottom of the Jade Sea, and sat at the epicentre of the greatest concentration of magickal creatures in the known world – the Kasar, the Stygion mermen, and others both contacted and uncontacted.
“Oh, I am counting on leveraging their talents in that regard,” Vonvalt said. “But it is their martial strength I am more keen to secure. Even a few hundred would bolster our forces significantly.”
Lady Frost nodded. “I agree. I wish there was something I could do to assist you, but we have little contact with our cousins in the south.”
Vonvalt stood, and we stood with him. “Then it is settled. We shall work in conjunction to defeat Claver.”
Lady Frost nodded, but her expression was serious, and she closed her eyes. There was a long pause as she considered her next words. But it was Ulrich who spoke.
“Girl,” he said, nodding at me. “You saw something.”
I felt my stomach lurch as everybody looked at me. “What do you mean?” I asked.
Ulrich squinted. “On the way out. Our exit from the Myočvara. You saw something. I can see your mind.”
“I saw Claver,” I said. “I saw him being crowned.”
Consternation rippled through the tent.
“You saw death.”
“There were many corpses, yes.”
“Did you see—” Lady Frost began.
“Ne parolu pri Ramayah,” Ulrich said suddenly. I could not understand it, but the wording nonetheless unsettled me.
Ramayah. Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard a dripping noise.
Lady Frost looked at him, then back to me and Vonvalt. “We have seen many things during our travels. And though we have tried to shepherd the temporal pathway, each intervention seems to do little except muddy the waters.”
“Sometimes it is better not to know,” Vonvalt said, his voice marked with a rare uncertainty.
Lady Frost nodded absently, but still she contended with the urge to give some insight into what she had seen. “I think you are doing the right thing in seeking out the Kasar,” she said. “But—”
“Ne parolu pri la Princo de Sango!” Ulrich snapped.
The words died in the woman’s throat.
“Just be careful,” she said, eventually. “I will concede, Sir Konrad, that we do not know fully the nature of the thing we grapple with. But I do know this: there are dark forces at work in the aether. And I do not mean Claver.”
Sir Radomir, von Osterlen and I snatched a few hours’ sleep. Vonvalt spent the time writing letters to the various lords of the Southmark he thought would assist. Then, it was time to go.
Sir Radomir was paired up with one of Captain Llyr’s men, a big, red-headed, pale-skinned Northman called Modron. Sir Radomir looked uncomfortable in the man’s company, but Modron struck me as one of those people whose good humour was impervious to almost everything.
Vonvalt handed his letters to Sir Radomir, along with a bag of coin and his seal.
“Take the Imperial Relay to Espa,” he said. “Use the rest of the coin to hire horses. Be forceful in your warnings, but not reckless with your lives. I would rather see you again under the Wolf Gate alone and having failed, than in a gibbet outside Oldenburg.”
Sir Radomir nodded. “I will see it done.”
“I know you will,” Vonvalt said, placing his hand on Sir Radomir’s shoulder. “I have asked much of you in these past months. Know that I appreciate it.”
Sir Radomir smiled weakly, uncomfortable, his wine stain birthmark vivid red against the dull green and brown of our surroundings.
“Come on then, old wolf,” Modron called down from a white palfrey behind Sir Radomir. They had Saxanised him as best they could, dressing him in Imperial garments pilfered from the 16th Legion. The ruse would work, provided the man did not speak in his thick Brigalander burr.
Sir Radomir rolled his eyes. “Aye,” he said. He turned to me, and winked. I found myself suddenly choking up. This felt like a permanent parting. “Good luck, Helena,” he said to me. “Promise me you will live.”
“She’ll be fine,” Vonvalt muttered.
I did not trust myself to speak; I simply pulled the sheriff into an embrace. Once we were finished, he grasped forearms smartly with von Osterlen, both of them nodding in a curt mark of mutual respect; and then he mounted up, and he and Modron were leaving the forest and heading west for the Imperial Relay.
Vonvalt turned back to von Osterlen and I. “Right,” he said, and my guts churned in anticipation as I turned my mind to the mission we were about to undertake.
“We have a ship to catch.”
VI
Hostile Reception
“One of the greatest feats of human cognisance is to realise and accept that every being capable of thought has a life as complex as one’s own.”
CHUN PARSIFAL
Another long journey awaited. We travelled south-east across Haunersheim, staying off the main roads where we could. I was not at all familiar with this part of the country, but it was as desolate as the rest of it, made up of huge empty forests, wide stretches of uncultivated grassland, and large, impassable marshes.
We rode for many days south until we reached the River Kova where it bordered Hasse, and where Vonvalt secured us passage on a small ship. The shipmaster had had a run of bad luck and extorted Vonvalt for the passage fee, and in other circumstances Vonvalt would have prosecuted and fined the man on the spot. But this time he accepted the injustice, contented merely to remain undiscovered.
So it was that we bedded down in a corner of the conspicuously empty cargo hold, and I watched through a gap in the boards as the Kova Confederation – a place that, but for an invisible line on a map, could easily have been part of the Empire – passed us by.
Travelling by river was always the quickest way to go, faster even than the thunderous speed of the Imperial Relay. Along with the Gale and the Sauber, the Kova was one of the three largest rivers in the Empire. In fact, technically it was two rivers, the North and South Kova, both the product of an enormous tarn in the mountainous region of Hasse. It was the Easterners’ first line of defence against the Autun, a broad, deep, and fast channel that ran the length of the Confederation’s western boundary and emptied into the North and Jade Seas.
There is little enough to tell of that journey. The first part of it was tense as we passed alongside occupied Kòvosk. There was evidence of the Legions’ investiture everywhere, from encampments to temporary forts surrounded by palisade fences, to the vast castles outside of Kolstadt and the great Imperial fortress of Reussberg. We were even stopped by Legionaries at one point, and the hold searched; but the ship was clearly empty, and the search cursory, and we were not seen.
We continued south until south-east Estre met south-west Kòvosk, and then we followed a course almost due east to the Jade Sea. From there, it was simply a matter of hugging the coast along the eastern length of the Frontier.
It was safer here than on the Kova, and we went up on to the deck. To the right side we could see the rocky coastline of the Frontier, and beyond, the vast wildflower meadows that covered huge swathes of it in a carpet of green. But it was the foamy and shallow emerald waters of the Jade Sea, shimmering in the sunlight, which took my breath away. In the distance, through the haze, I could see the beginnings of a huge crescent of rocky islands known as the Iris Isles.
“I have never been to sea before,” I said to Vonvalt. “Well, not like this,” I added, thinking of our violent apprehension of Ivan Godric on the ink-black waters of Kormondolt Bay.
“No,” Vonvalt said, breathing in the warm, briny air with relish. He looked pleased to be out here, and relaxed in a way he had not been for a long time. It was a disarming and pleasant surprise. We had been awkward in one another’s company for some time, since the failure of our nascent courtship in Sova. As a result of that shabby enterprise, and in an effort to preserve both of our feelings, Vonvalt continued to keep me at arm’s length. But this had the effect of making us less amicable than before the idea of a love affair had even been in prospect. And besides, a part of me still wondered if there was something there, some latent feeling which could – leaving aside the question of whether it should – be cultivated and husbanded.
We stood in silence for a while. Vonvalt watched the horizon through squinted eyes, and I followed his gaze. I knew what he was thinking: how easy it would be to simply keep going. To leave behind the Empire of the Wolf, and all its troubles. To forget about Claver – to leave the Autun to him – and to disappear.
If Claver had not been able to leverage the death magicks of the afterlife to relentlessly hunt Vonvalt forever, he might well have simply left. The temptation was a strong one. Here, even a few miles off the coast, everything seemed so insignificant. The Autun was simply one nation amongst many, one small slice of one very large world. Who knew what other incredible dramas were playing out in other countries, other empires, that we had never even heard of? Could there have been some other Vonvalt, on a distant ocean looking to the west, grappling with upheaval equal to or greater than that which we were facing?
Yes; there was something about the sea that evoked these thoughts, that huge and unknowable saltwater empire, its cold depths as unfathomable and unmeasurable as those of the afterlife.
“Will we see any mermen?” I asked Vonvalt suddenly.
When he did not answer, I looked over to him. His eyes remained on the horizon, and he shook his head. “No,” he said. There was another pause.
“But they are in there. Somewhere.”
It was not until the following morning that we sailed past the southernmost part of the Frontier. The last bastion of the Empire was a fortified Templar port town called Grunhaven. I could barely see it in the morning haze; just a collection of sand-coloured stone walls and towers, and the odd splash of heraldic colour. I wondered idly where Claver and his Templars were.
So it was that we began to sail down the coastline of an entirely alien country. This was the Kasar Kyarai, a verdant land of dense rainforest and hot grass plain, penned in to the west by a vast range of mountains known as the Southern Dividing Range which separated the Kyarai – and its water – from the dry and barren nation of Qaresh.
I found a curious sense of anxiety gnawing at me as we approached the Kasari capital city, Port Talaka. I had spent some time with Kimathi, of course, the Imperial Warden, and knew enough of the history between the Autun and the Kasar to know that there were symbolic and economic ties between the two nations. This state of affairs was largely born of the Emperor’s Haugenate ancestors, who had adopted the Two-Headed Wolf device, and who had seen the Kasar as a natural and auspicious ally – not to mention one of the only other practitioners of the magickal arcana. I had no doubt that as the Autun expanded southwards, subsuming the lands of the pagan Saekas on the Frontier until they eventually abutted Qaresh and the Kyarai, that conquest of the Kasar themselves would be the next logical step. But for now, they were allies, and although the journey was treacherous, there were plenty of Sovan knights to be found in the cities of the wolfmen. Senator Jansen, after all, had squired here. Indeed, it was his friends who we were seeking out.
We rounded a large spur of land and Port Talaka came into view, a massive walled city that bestrode an equally massive river outflow which I would come to learn was part of the Yaro Delta.
“Gods,” I breathed, taking in the view. The most striking aspect of Port Talaka was the temples, vast stepped pyramids of grey-brown stone, each festooned with intricately carved grotesques. The temples themselves, as well as almost every other building, were alive with a riot of colour – vivid blues, emerald greens, bright citrine yellows. In and amongst the buildings flourished verdant greenery, carefully husbanded into pleasing hanging gardens, whilst the waters of the Yaro Delta were directed into channels that cut geometric shapes around the streets and into the public spaces. If Sova was a city whose architecture contrived to oppress and intimidate, a collection of monolithic funerary monuments masquerading as institutions of state, then my first impression of Port Talaka was one of riotous colour, gaiety, and a celebration of life. I had not expected it; Kimathi had seemed like little more than an enormous, savage bodyguard. But that was a foolish mode of thought. One might as well try to take the measure of the entirety of the Sovan commonfolk after meeting a single knight.
I was so buoyed by what I saw that, as we approached the wharf, I almost didn’t notice the bodies of Templars in gibbets being stripped of their extremities by huge leathery birds. Then my optimism dissolved in an instant, to be replaced by a heavy lead weight of fear in the pit of my stomach.
I was not the only one. The sudden turn in mood on the ship was palpable.
“Shipmaster,” Vonvalt called to the captain as we stood at the balustrade. I followed Vonvalt’s gaze, to see that a group of Kasar was gathering at the end of the dock. Like Kimathi, they were tall and muscled, clad in skirts of a light white material affixed around their waists by ornate, colourful sashes and intricate brass clasps. However, it was their swords I was more focused on – fat-bladed scimitars which, when propelled by an armful of wolfman muscle, looked as though they could comfortably cut a man in half.
“They are just here for the lines,” the shipmaster called to Vonvalt, though he too had seen the gibbets hanging over the waters of the Yaro Delta as they foamed into the Jade Sea.
Vonvalt turned to von Osterlen. We all of us shared an uneasy glance.
“Can you see any other human vessels?” Vonvalt asked, casting his eyes about. Unlike the Sovan docklands which bustled with waterborne traffic, here was a noticeable paucity of ships. There were a few other vessels, a carrack of curious design and some other smaller boats, but if Sova and the Kasar were engaged in buoyant trade relations, there was little evidence of it here in the capital.
“No,” von Osterlen said, eyeing the gibbets coldly.
I watched as the number of wolfmen at the end of the dock swelled. The crew members of our ship began to throw heavy ropes to them, and the Kasar caught them with ease and began securing them to thick metal posts at the dockside.
“This is not the welcome I had expected,” Vonvalt said, sweating in the stifling morning heat.
His uncertainty was having a profound effect on me. I had not a hope of understanding the wolfmen. As far as I was aware, Vonvalt did not speak the language either. Nonetheless, their body language was undeniably hostile. I could sense some consternation amongst the crew of the ship now, too, as though they had regretted throwing the tow lines out. The shipmaster began to call out from the balustrade in a tongue which sounded like a guttural form of pidgin Saxan, a language which I would soon learn was a creole which had developed between merchant traders.
But the Kasar did not respond.
“Hm. This is not good,” Vonvalt murmured.
“We’ve not a hope of escaping with our lives if they mean us harm,” von Osterlen said, eyes still on the gibbets. “This may well be it.”
Vonvalt clacked his tongue, gripping the wood of the balustrade. “Nema,” he muttered, frustrated rather than frightened.
“We should arm ourselves,” von Osterlen said.
“No,” Vonvalt said sharply. “That will be the end of it. Our best hope is to let this play out and see if we can explain matters—”
He stopped as a curious metallic thwacking sound rang out from further down the ship. We all turned to see that the shipmaster and his crewmen had started frantically hacking at the tow lines with their blades. With a jolt of fear I looked back to the dockside, to see the Kasar growling and shouting amongst themselves. One of them began to shout to a group of archers who stood at the top of a mural tower.
“Oh shit!” von Osterlen said, as they quickly drew and loosed and the first arrows began to strike the sailors. One was struck in the face and died instantly, while another was impaled through the guts and collapsed to the deck, shrieking and thrashing.
“Below deck, now!” Vonvalt commanded.
Where there had been panic before, now there was chaos. The shipmaster, not a military man by any stretch of the imagination, picked up a hand axe and resumed his desperate chopping at the lines. He was killed by three arrows. Another thunked into the boards next to Vonvalt – a rare miss – as we made desperately for cover in the hold.
My breath rasped in my ears and my heart thumped painfully in my chest as we descended the ladder. We armed ourselves, of course, but that did not count for anything in the circumstances. We might have been able to barricade a doorway in the hold, and jam up an attack there, but for minutes only. And then what? If it came to it, the Kasar could simply set the vessel aflame.
The ship was pulled into the dock inexorably, and the shipmaster’s crew was killed out of hand. Their screams and frantic footsteps on the deck above were enough to drive me insane.
“We’ve not a hope of prevailing,” von Osterlen said again, gripping her sword in her hand.
“I know!” Vonvalt replied, pacing about the chamber like a caged animal, still trying to think of a way around the problem. He would be thinking right up to the moment a Kasari blade bit into his neck, I was sure of it.
We all looked up as the side of the ship collided gently with the dock. Then there were more thumping, clattering footsteps, as the Kasar boarded and moved through the vessel.
I looked at Vonvalt. Suddenly, he gritted his teeth, and threw down his sword. “Discard your weapons, now,” he said. “Quickly!”
Von Osterlen looked unhappy, but did as he bade. I did too. Although it made me feel detestably vulnerable, the fact of the matter was, we could not best the wolfmen. A few short swords were not going to make a difference to the outcome. Better to appear completely unthreatening and throw ourselves on their mercy.
“Stand behind me,” von Osterlen said to me, and I was quick to oblige.
