A man-sized blur, club raised, rushed toward Vinas. Solamnus whirled and, between heartbeats, struck the man’s head from his shoulders. The body slid wetly down to the ground. The hooves of the stallion trampled it underfoot.

"Down, to your knees, or the same will come to you!" he shouted. The other rebels knelt as one, so quickly and so heavily that the dry ground shook.

Vinas nudged his horse toward the spot where the man’s head and club lay. But it wasn’t a club. It was a loaf of bread, long and baked in a hard crust. A loaf of bread?

Vinas dismounted and kicked the red-speckled loaf. Its crust shattered as it rolled away. "Dead for stealing bread," he hissed.

His boot tapped the victim’s head. When the gaunt, old thing rolled over, he saw and knew the eyes. It was Festas.

It was the old man, the first person to whom Vinas brought provisions that blizzard night so long ago. Festas had been stealing the bread that had been taken as tax from him. He had been bringing back food to his family’s mouths.

Vinas Solamnus

( Dragonlance - Lost Legends, Book 1 )

J. Robert King

To my father,
Alan Neil King,
who has lived by honor
all his days.

Great lives rarely make great stories. The reverse is also true. Even so, my advisors have decided I am too old to do much more than recount my days of greatness. They have virtually ordered me to write my memoirs. (Old soldiers and tired kings are often ruled by their valets.) I do not imagine the resulting story will be great, but perhaps it will prove diverting.

I am Vinas Solamnus. The nation of Solamnia bears my name, as do the Knights of Solamnia. I have traveled Ansalon, from Karthay of the minotaurs to Sancrist of the gnomes. I have led Ergoth’s vast armies and slain men in their thousands. I have flown griffon-back and besieged cities and drunk from the chalice of the gods.

Such things may be entertaining for readers, but they are decidedly hazardous to heroes. For heroes—anyone who rises upon the face of Krynn to stand against evil—true greatness lies not in adventures, but in honor.

Est Sularus oth Mithas—my honor is my life.

It took me a long time to learn that. I had always wanted to be a warrior, thinking sword skill was all a great man needed. But swords are only cold steel if they are not wielded with honor.

Honor is an inheritance. My father passed it to me with the name Solamnus, and I hope I have not sullied it too much before passing it to the nation and the knights.

True, I have not always been worthy of the name Solamnus. I have, in fact, fought on the side of evil. The following account will make these failings clear. But thankfully, greatness is not limited to those with perfect character. Greatness embraces all those who struggle for perfect character. No war I ever waged was more perilous than my struggle to become worthy of the name Solamnus.

This is the story of that struggle, that quest for honor. This is the story of my life. If readers can learn from my failings, they will have many teachers, indeed.

Heroes of Krynn… gather and hear!

Vinas Solamnus
Vingaard Keep
22 Argon, 1267 Age of Light

Part I:
Courage

Prelude

27 Chislmont, 1183 Age of Light

Scintillating motes of magic fire circled the room. The sparks danced among the hammer beams in the ceiling. They bounced along the marble floor. They engulfed Emperor Emann and his court sorcerer.

“Remember, Caitiff,” the emperor said, oblivious to the sparks that smoldered in his black goatee,” she must be beautiful.”

The Black-Robed Wizard continued to circle his bony hands over the cauldron of lamb’s blood. His voice emerged from the shadowy hood he wore. He spoke with the unmistakable hauteur of an ancient Silvanesti elf. “Oh, she will be beautiful, Master. She will be.”

That response appeased the emperor for some moments. He drank deeply of the blood-red spirits in his pewter grail and deliriously watched the swirling specks of arcane power. They coalesced into a spinning column above the blood pool. Some of the sparks hissed down into the calm liquid. They sent up acrid smoke that thickened the column of motes.

“Passionate,” the emperor blurted. “My empress must be passionate. No woman is truly beautiful unless she has passion.”

“Yes, yes,” the old elf assured, “she will be passionate, even for you hot-blooded humans.”

Emperor Emann stared querulously at the warlock, wondering again if an elf could truly be trusted to work for the great human empire of Ergoth.

The sorcerer seemed to sense his master’s unease. “She will serve His Highness—and His Highness’s empire—well.”

Fevery and sweating, the emperor watched a form take shape in the pillar. It was a maiden sitting beside a stream. She was comely, yes, but in the soft way of country nobles. Emann had always imagined himself with an exotic woman, her legs and fingers and eyes as sharp as stilettos.

“No, Caitiff, you fey fool!” Emann shouted into the vision. The lass there seemed to hear him, looking up startled. “She is plump as a pigeon and just as dowdy I want a firebird, a phoenix, not this country chickadee.”

She had heard, somehow. Frightened, the girl of spark and smoke rose from the stream bank and ran. The scrying magic of the old elf followed her. Fleeing, she wept.

“Oh, Highness, she is sweet in look but cunning of mind,” said the sorcerer soothingly. “Young, now—but in a few years she will be a full woman, with a passion that could level all Ansalon. She is the one you will want.”

The poor girl clamped hands over her ears and screamed silently. Still, she could not block out the harsh voices that haunted her from afar.

“She is a fatted calf, no more!” the emperor snarled, and threw his grail through the image. Though the cup clanked against the opposite wall, the girl reacted as if she had been struck and fell. She huddled there, holding her head and sobbing.

“A fatted calf?” echoed the mage darkly. “I will tell you about this one. She has unmeasurable power in her. And that power is corruptible. Win her to your side, Emperor, and your reign of iron will become a reign of mithril steel!”

Caitiff had never been wrong. He had advised young Emperor Emann well in the massacre of the peasants, in the disavowal of the senate, and in the plan to dominate all of western Ansalon. He could hardly be wrong about one poor, trembling girl.

“If I wed this little trifle, I shall never fall?” Emann asked avidly.

“If you wed her,” the mage promised, “it would take a champion of the gods to bring you down… .”

I

Two Months Hence, 17 Argon, 1183 Age of Light

The young man’s look was tender.

Luccia returned it. Her eyes had always been big and bright, like shiny plates streaked with cerulean glaze. Those eyes caught the morning sun from her gold-brown hair and made the freckles on her cheeks glow like dandelions. Luccia had a bright elven face—energetic, passionate, flirtatious.

“More mud,” Vinas said, smearing a thumb’s worth of the alley’s moist earth across one of those cheeks. Her inner glow was undimmed by the grainy stuff. Even covered in grime and clothed as a laborer and standing in a stone-walled alleyway, she was radiant. At this rate, she’d never pass as a boy. “And your hair is coming out from beneath the cap. You’ll have to let me shear it off.”

Luccia bit her lip in genuine regret. The gleam that mud could not remove from her face was gone now. She was fifteen, one year his younger, and precious little could dull the light of her smile. This did. “You don’t know how hard it is for me to have long hair. Washing it in the river, combing it out with fish bones, tying it up with whatever fresh rag falls from one of you nobles…”

He laughed. It was a broad, hearty laugh that he’d not grown into yet. His chest and belly would one day be a great bulwark of muscle and heart. Now they were only the thin scaffolding of youth. “Well, what of those breeches and that tunic you’re wearing? They’re no rags. I snatched the best clothes I could find in your size.”

“That you did,” Luccia replied. She gestured at a certain tightness in the gray fabric adorning her chest. “But you don’t seem to notice that my size is changing.”

He didn’t laugh at that, but he did blush. He tried to hide his embarrassment by stretching and yawning. The move brought his own servant’s tunic up from his breeches and showed a fish-white strip of belly. His color only deepened. “Mine don’t fit any better.”

His expression hardened. Keen focus came to his eyes, as though he were looking right through the world to the thing he wanted on the other side. “Enough fooling around. If we want to be accepted into the infantry and march off to battle gnolls and ogres, you’ll have to look like a man—like me. That means a shorn head and a little less beauty.”

She nodded, equally grim. “And you’re going to have to look like an orphan—a peasant, like me. So the mud belongs on your face!” She lunged for him. Though he reared back, her fingers traced quick, feral lines of dirt across his cheeks. Vinas somehow looked more handsome for that mud.

He caught Luccia’s hands and whirled her around, holding her arms behind her back. His serious demeanor cracked just slightly as he pushed her away and snatched up the sheep shears he had borrowed from a farm shed. He advanced on her. “I’ve taken my medicine. Now you take yours.”

Luccia started a playful retreat down the alley toward the murmur of Daltigoth’s peasant hordes. The snick, snick, snick of the shears, though, brought her up short. She crossed arms over her chest and seemed to consider whether to fight or flee.

“I could always join up without you and march on out of here,” Vinas warned.

Luccia’s resistance dissolved. She pouted. “Just make it quick.” She dragged the ragged hat from her head, revealing the slight points of half-elven ears. “Just don’t cut it too short. And don’t snip off the tips of my ears.”

He did, and didn’t, and didn’t. The shearing was soon done.

Luccia looked up at her young friend as though his green eyes were twin mirrors. “Well. How do I look, then?”

He blinked. “I don’t know if you look much like a boy, but you look fine, all the same.” He stood there, a silken handful of her long tresses clutched in one palm. She was alluring, even with her hair in a blocky wedge.

“Fine. I look fine,” she said, deflated, and donned her ragged cap.

“And how do I look?” Vinas asked. He turned slowly and held his arms out for her perusal.

Luccia pursed her lips. In a fit of pique, she knocked the clump of hair from his hand. “Fine. You look fine, too. The mud can’t hide the fact that you’re a milk-fed, soft-fingered boy, though. And it can’t put crooks and kinks in the way you talk, either. My guess is I’ll be marching out of here without you.”

He nodded, suddenly somber.

Luccia cuffed his shoulder and grabbed his elbow. “Let’s go. The foes of Ergoth are begging for a fight.”

Vinas didn’t know about the foes, but he knew about himself. He was begging for something to fight for, or at least against. As the two friends marched side by side down the mud-packed alley, Vinas thought how he could fight for this city. For Daltigoth, his home.

They stepped out into a cobbled road that ran between his father’s villa and the statehouses of the upper quarter. The city below the road was well awake, with peddlers and hawkers, gypsy children and guards. They huddled in the sunlit spaces beneath leaning shops of stone or wood, breathing white clouds of life into the chill morning.

“Look at them,” Vinas said sadly. “They look like they are bowing to somebody. They look like they’ve got something heavy on their backs, something that might press them into the ground.” He shook his head. “Even my dad looks like that. I’m glad to be getting out before I do, too.”

“You could carry half of Ansalon on your shoulders and still skip along,” Luccia said, tweaking his side.

Many of those huddled folk smiled in recognition at the disguised friends. Vinas caught a wink or two. He and Luccia were well known in this quarter, and their disguises and escapades were canonized in low legends. Vinas wondered, though, if even a stranger could see right through the peasant garb and dirtiness. As the old saying ran, “It is easier to clean an old silver spoon than to tarnish a new one.”

“There,” said Vinas, changing the subject. He pointed at a mounted griffon circling in the fiercely blue sky. “That’s what I want. I’m not going to be a spear-carrier any longer than it takes me to get a griffon. Imagine riding into battle on the back of one of those creatures! Magnificent!”

Luccia watched the distant silhouette. It hung motionless like a dead leaf on a still branch. “What’s the good of that?” she wondered. “The griffon’ll do all the fighting and you’ll end up a tick on a war dog.”

“You can fight from a griffon’s saddle,” Vinas said. “Why else does he have that lance there, and the holster for it, and the sword?”

“Every warrior’s got a sword—at least the ones that’ve got to shave do. And that lance—so what? You use it once and it’s gone,” Luccia said. “Now, the horse cavalry, on the other hand…”

She drew him up beside her. One glance at her pale, dirty face told him that everything had changed. “We’re here, Vinas,” she said simply.

He looked, and saw. The high street ended before them. Shops and houses shied back from what lay at the head of the hill—the martial esplanade that fronted the gates of Castle Daltigoth. The stony expanse was pitted. Its flagstones of granite and slate and quartzite had worn unevenly under centuries of boots. Any Ergothian foot that ever stomped upon an enemy throat stomped first upon those stones.

Just now, the esplanade was filled with ragged lines of recruits and straight ranks of soldiers. The soldiers wore the red and black tabards of the Ergothian Guard over battle-scarred field plate mail. The recruits wore rags.

Feeling a lump of apprehension in his throat, Vinas watched them. Each new man would nod when spoken to. At some unseen sign, he would bolt across the plaza and shimmy up a log leaning against a bulwark. Others dangled like wretched spiders from scaffold ropes, or jabbed poles into haystacks until collared badgers charged them. Such were the ordeals of recruits.

“There it is,” reiterated Luccia. All levity was gone from her freckled face. She looked pale, as any recruit should. “We can turn back now,” she joked nervously.

Vinas felt the same fear, but he had rehearsed this moment and knew how to win past it. “I doubt the ogres will be turning back,” he said brusquely. He strode onward. She followed.

They reached the first and longest line of new recruits and fell into position. At the other end of the queue sat a colonel behind a three-legged field table. His balding pate was crossed by no more than three strands of black hair. He was questioning the enlistees, writing in a slim book beneath his talonlike hands. The recruit before him was a thin, middle-aged farmer in clothes so ragged that his breechcloth showed through.

Now, it would be only a long, wordless wait. In the hush, Vinas listened to the distant slap of feet on stone, the tug and grunt of peasants climbing ropes, the occasional barked command… . He somehow knew that these sounds—the harsh, impersonal bustle of military life—would surround him the rest of his days.

In time, he stood before the man at the table, a mean-eyed colonel with black hair and sallow, pockmarked skin.

“Name?” asked the man curtly.

Oddly, Vinas had not until that moment expected to need an alias. “Tobe,” he ventured. He winced and shifted from foot to foot. “That’s what my friends call me. Tobe. I s’pose you could put down Tobias, though—spelt with a I-A-S. No surname.”

“Where was it, Tobias with an I-A-S, that you learned how to read?” the colonel asked, his hawklike eyes rising from the volume.

“Oh,” Vinas said, flushing, “I never did. Only my master had two Tobe’s, but only one Tobe with an I-A-S. That’s what he called us. Just plain Tobe and then Tobe with an I-A-S.”

The colonel’s stare was piercing. “You have run off from your master, then? Are you an indentured servant or slave?”

“We didn’t run off,” broke in Luccia. “We earned out our time. We got free, the legal way. But then we find out ‘free’ means you don’t eat.”

The colonel laughed a little. “You must be—”

“Tobe, yes, without a I-A-S,” she said, and then bowed with tramp-like decorum. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

The colonel nodded, and wrote again. “I don’t believe you. Why is it that you, Tobe without an I-A-S have callused hands while your friend, Tobe with an I-A-S has soft, white hands?”

Vinas spouted, “I did silversmithing—detail work. Tobe, here, did ironmongery—heavy pounding and such.”

The soldier looked skeptical. “Do you know what happens to colonels who enlist noble brats among the peasant division?”

“We aren’t nobles,” Luccia insisted.

“Good,” said the colonel. “It would go very bad for you if you were.” His look was inscrutable, his eyes black. “I have a test for you, one that will measure balance, courage, and ingenuity.” He gestured across the proving grounds to a great, rough-barked tree, stripped of branches and leaning up against a stout, short wall. Many other recruits scampered or crawled up the sloped tree trunk. Few reached the other end, a hundred feet along the bole and thirty feet in the air. At one point or another, most of the recruits slipped off.

Vinas’s eyes narrowed. With a natural charm that bordered on arrogance, he said, “It looks easy enough to me.”

The colonel returned the look. “I thought that might be your opinion. That is why you’ll be climbing that one.” His nod directed Vinas’s gaze to another hundred-foot-long trunk. It was equally broad and stripped of bark. But, instead of leaning at a climbable angle, this log stood straight up. Its base had been rammed down into a dry well, and ninety feet of it jutted into the air. The ground around the bole was hard, mortared stone.

“That?” asked Luccia, her voice unexpectedly shrill. She coughed. “You want us to climb that?”

“If you want to join the imperial divisions, you will climb it,” the man replied flatly.

Sinews along Vinas’s jaw tightened. He smiled, slowly and humorlessly. The gray day glinted from his teeth. “We will climb it,” he growled. He turned and strode toward the log.

Luccia followed. Usually when Vinas made headstrong decisions for them both, Luccia took immediate and loud objection. Not today. She walked behind him, hands at her sides instead of poised defiantly on her hips, silent… at least until she caught up to him.

“What are you doing? We can’t climb that thing.”

He did not look at her, his eyes fixed on the splinter-filled bole ahead. “We can, and we will.”

“Let’s give it up this time,” she advised. “We’ll come back in a year and see if they take us.”

He stripped off his tunic, revealing the tight-muscled pale chest of a young noble. He was strong and wiry, yes, but with the clean beauty of an athlete, not a worker. Now, everyone would know he was noble. A small crowd of soldiers and recruits turned to trail them.

Vinas ignored the gawkers. He twisted his tunic into a long, strong coil of fabric. “Take yours off, too, Luce. We’re going to need two of these.”

Her face flushed. “What are you talking about? I can’t take off—”

“Well, at least that belt,” Vinas interrupted impatiently. He undid his own belt and pulled the coarse rope from his waist. Luccia followed suit. Vinas tied the two belts together and seemed pleased.

They reached the tree trunk. It was more daunting up close. Ninety feet into the air… The trunk was fat, its bark sheared off. The slick white quick beneath was frayed into wicked, dagger sized splinters that jutted upward.

“Get on the other side,” Vinas instructed calmly.

Luccia sought some softness in his eyes, but none remained. His pride had taken over. When Vinas’s pride was bruised, he would do anything—no matter how absurd or deadly—to soothe it. That was half the problem. The other half was that Luccia could not dissuade him.

She circled the trunk and looked dubiously up the tree. “There’s a thousand better ways to die than by doing this, you know.”

He nodded curtly. His eyes held a mild apology. “But there’s only one way we’ll get into the infantry.” He flipped the end of his twisted tunic toward her, and she caught it. Then, on the opposite side of the bole, he tossed her the end of the belt rope. “We hold each other up, right? We hold onto these ropes and lean our weight against them. If one of us loses our grip, we both fall.”

“I know, I know.”

He kicked off his shoes. “And our footholds are just as important. We lean back and dig our feet in. If one foot slips, we both go down.”

Her face darkened. “Yes. Let’s just climb.”

Vinas set his jaw, positioned one foot on a jagged lump on his side of the trunk, and leaned his weight back against the ropes. On the other side, Luccia did likewise. He couldn’t see her face, or the footholds she gained, but he felt her weight answer his along the lengths of cloth and hemp.

“Good,” he said. “Now, we ascend.”

She did not answer in words, only jiggling the ropes. They crept upward along the rough flank of wood. Unblinking, unbreathing, Vinas set his bare foot on a higher nub and eased his weight onto it. There came a pause.

“Luce,” Vinas ventured through long, deep breaths. “You know I wouldn’t trust another soul to counterbalance me.”

Her serious whisper came to him like a confession, “Yes. I know.”

She climbed again. His body answered the movement of hers. They rose above the spectators below.

Their audience muttered dubiously. Hushed jokes and not-so-hushed laughter wafted up. The watchers stood at a safe distance. Arms were crossed. Mouths were wry. Eyes squinted skeptically against the gray day. If it came to it, these soldiers and recruits would stand by as Vinas and Luccia dropped to the ground, legs broken.

Vinas asked, “How are your arms?”

“They’re starting to hurt,” Luccia replied quietly. “You’re pretty heavy.”

He laughed. “Yeah. You want to head back down?”

She answered by further ascent. He laughed again, and responded in kind.

Now when they spoke to each other, their voices were strained and their words came out in quick gasps. Vinas said, “It’s shorter to… the top… than to the bottom.”

“But faster… to the bottom,” Luccia added as she climbed.

Vinas matched her pace. Blood made their footing more treacherous. The minute splinters and rough shoulders of wood bled the soles of his feet. At first, the red stuff glued his arch to the wood, but now there was enough to make his feet slowly slide off. He could no longer rest. Every two steps gained would mean half a step lost.

Surely it was the same for Luccia, on the other side of the trunk. Surely—but still she rose.

High above the crowd. When Vinas looked down, sweat and dizziness filled his eyes. He blinked and tilted his head back. Perhaps twenty feet more, and they would reach the top.

The trunk thinned. Vinas soon could see Luccia’s arms, down to elbows dripping with sweat. Then he caught sight of her sleeves, rolled about her upper arms, then her shoulders. They had almost reached the top.

“Only a few… steps more,” Vinas gasped. His voice was fully of giddy realization.

They seemed to have climbed to the very clouds. Gray-white light streamed in festive pinions about them, welcoming them to the narrow top of the tree. At last, Vinas saw her face. The mud smeared across her freckled cheek was black, running with sweat down her neck. Her skin was mottled with exertion. But her eyes were joyous and triumphant.

One struggling step more, and their eyes met above the shorn top. They hunkered down on either side of the tree and breathed and laughed.

“We did it,” gushed Vinas. “He’s got to let us in now.”

Despite the happy flutter of her eyes, she spoke gloomily, “He’s not had his pound of flesh yet.”

Vinas’s expression grew suddenly gray. The smile left his mouth. “Luce, I’m going to slowly pull you around to my side. Keep hold of the rope and the tunic. I want you to climb around to me until you can grab my hand.”

“What is it?” Luccia asked. Then she saw. The midpoint of the tunic had frayed nearly through. Only a thin seam of one sleeve held them in place.

“We’ll never make it down the way we came up.” Vinas explained. “If you inch around and we hold hands, we can work our way down one at a time, slipping the rope as we go.

“But the rope will catch on the splinters and fray, won’t it?” Luccia noted.

“Come around,” Vinas replied calmly. “Well just have to try.”

Her chin trembled briefly, but her eyes were hard. “Start pulling me around. I’ll move toward you.”

He nodded, rolling the torn shirt around his fist. She edged around the tree. Her bare feet trembled as her toes sought purchase on the rough-skinned wood. With each sidelong step, the circle that held them aloft tightened. Vinas eyed the shirt, its seam visibly frayed. He looped the cloth around his fist.

Excruciating moments later, Luccia’s fingers touched his. She caught his hand and picked her way around until she stood beside him. The rope looped from her other hand, around the tree, to his grasp.

“Good,” Vinas breathed. “Now, hold my wrist while I get this shirt free.”

She did. He spun his hand around until the shirt fell away. It drifted as it fell, as though it were a living thing, before collapsing lifelessly upon the ground.

Flexing his numb fingers, Vinas clasped Luccia’s wrist. He could feel the hammering of her pulse.

“Good. Now, slowly, step downward,” he said. They both looked down and saw the bloody trail leading up the trunk. Luccia’s feet were no better off than Vinas’s, rimmed as though she had been trodding red grapes.

They stepped down. The rope drew tight. Once they both had found solid footholds, Vinas said, “We’re going to have to lean in and flip the rope away from the trunk. On three. One, two, three!”

They leaned in toward the trunk. The rope that held them aloft went terrifyingly slack. They looped the rope outward, and it skidded down the trunk to take hold a few feet below. The climbers fell away from the stalk. The circle of rope and arms caught tight. Vinas and Luccia breathed in relief.

So, they descended. Over and over again, they found footholds, flipped the rope free, and felt that fragile embrace again.

All the while, the crowd below grew. Recruits abandoned the proving grounds. Colonels left their field tables. The bald-headed colonel’s object lesson had drawn the attention of the whole castle. He stood with the other gawkers, looking upward with a mixture of shame and hope on his face.

The taut fatigue of holding to the rope and to each other began to take its toll. Vinas and Luccia were halfway down when the sweat made their hands begin to slip. They caught each other only by fingertips. The rope snagged itself twice more.

Then, thirty feet up from the paving stones, they lost hold of each other. Still clutching the rope, Luccia fell away from the trunk. The belts reeled her out and around the tree. She fell toward the ground below, closing her eyes.

The rope yanked tight. Her descent stopped. She looked down upon a mere twelve-foot drop and let go.

Her feet struck the hard stones, and she rolled across them, getting no worse than bruises. The crowd parted before her, and she sprawled to a halt among them. A cheer formed in her throat but caught dead when she gazed up at what the crowd was watching.

Vinas writhed above, hanging impaled upon a spear-length splinter of wood. His hand opened only now, letting the snake of rope fall to the stones.

“Get a ladder!” someone shouted. “Get him down from there!”

Meus Pater [my father]

“Most lost sons show up in brothels or vomitoriums somewhere,” came a kindly voice. “You, on the other hand, always wind up in one infirmary or another.”

Vinas opened his eyes and looked up, seeing the yellow-plastered and crack-riddled ceiling of the soldiers’ hostel. Then, in the midst of this diffuse firmament, a gray-haired head emerged, sunlike. Eyes at once intense and merciful looked out from sharp folds of flesh. A prominent nose overshadowed a mouth that quirked in a smile.

“Hello, Father,” Vinas groaned. He tried to roll to one elbow, but the lancing fire that shot from his stomach to his right shoulder convinced him otherwise.

So did the staying hand of Adrenas Solamnus. “Give yourself time to rest, to heal. You’re lucky that wound is shallow, or you’d be resting forever.”

Vinas lay back on the cot. His hand gingerly traced the line of rumpled flesh. The shaft had slid in at his right hip, traveled beneath his stomach muscles, and sliced under his left pectoral. “It certainly doesn’t feel shallow.”

Adrenas seemed to consider. “At least it feels, son. At least it feels.”

Vinas gazed blankly at the ceiling. “I was planning on sending for you when I had the strength—”

“I wasn’t willing to wait that long,” interrupted the noble. He straightened his silken robe of blue and white, the colors of House Solamnus. His hands were as patient and prim as any woman’s. “It’s been a month since your pole-climbing escapade.”

“A month?” Vinas asked. “I just woke up last night.”

“I know,” his father replied. “I’ve been visiting you for the last three weeks.” The man finished his fastidious straightening and settled an infinitely weary face in his hands. “What were you thinking, Son?”

Vinas sighed. How many times had they had this discussion? “I’m sixteen, Father. If we were peasants, I’d have been a man for two years already. If we were plainsmen, I’d have been a man for four—”

“We aren’t peasants or plainsmen, a fact you all too often forget,” Adrenas admonished him from within his cradled fingers. “Yes, a sixteen-year-old is adult enough to hold a beggar’s cup or pillage a town, but not to own and run an estate, not to survive a single audience before a corrupted senate, not to do any of the things a nobleman must do.”

“I don’t want to do any of those things,” Vinas objected. “I want to fight. You had your years in the imperial army. You made our family what it is through the spoils of war. Why won’t you let me try the same?”

“Times are different now, Son. I fought elves in Caergoth and in Qualinesti, not sixty leagues from here. Now the wars are beyond Vingaard Keep, beyond Dargaard even, two hundred leagues hence. And it’s not elves but ogres and witchlings and worse. Are there any spoils worth having from such wars?”

“I need to rest,” Vinas said preemptively. “You said so yourself. Can’t this wait?”

The man nodded. “Forgive me. Old habits die hard. What I’d really intended to tell you was that once you were healed completely—perhaps by your seventeenth birthday—you’ll be made a field colonel.”

Vinas stared, astounded, at his father.

Adrenas shrugged. “After this latest stunt, I decided you’d be getting into the army one way or another. I called in some old favors. If you must be in the army, at least you can be a commander instead of a follower.”

Vinas blinked in amazement. “Thank you, Father. I’ll do you proud.”

“I expect no less,” the man said, utterly serious.

“Wait until Luccia hears,” Vinas said to himself.

“About Luccia,” Adrenas said. “She marched out with the XXVI Daltigoth. Your ploy worked at least that far. But in Solanthus, she was discovered to be a mere girl, and was cast out of the army. That was three weeks ago. I do not know what has become of her. No doubt she’s running with the peasants there. Solanthus has become notorious for its bread troubles.”

This time Vinas did sit up. “She’s where?”

Adrenas’s staying touch was gentle. “Solanthus is little more than a road fortification with a few small villages nearby. She couldn’t have gone far. When you are well enough—”

Vinas swung his legs down off the, cot. “I’m well enough now—” he began, before slumping into his father’s arms.

II

Two Years Hence, 13 Rannmont, 1186 Age of Light

Near midnight, Vinas Solamnus reined in his warhorse at the top of the snowy rise. A biting wind cast his colonel’s cloak away from him. He signaled to his senior lieutenants to halt the company of foot soldiers behind. They did. Gaias Camillus, a grizzled veteran and Vinas’s trusted captain, rode up beside him.

“There it is—Solanthus,” Vinas said. “Nothing but a stockaded fort beside a log bridge over a frozen river.” He spat. The spittle became ice before it struck ground. “If the so-called peasant rebels burned that bridge, it would take us a couple of hours to build a better one. Instead, the empire guards it with a unit of soldiers, who bum twice as much wood every day as it would take to build the bridge.”

The old soldier might have frowned, though his expression was lost beneath a mask of ice-encrusted beard. “It is the empire’s way.”

Vinas nodded grimly. Perhaps it was. The empire had, after all, denied Vinas enlistment among the foot soldiers, instead setting him—an inexperienced eighteen-year-old—at the head of a hundred career soldiers. Vinas had hoped for the appointment, true, and his father had requested it, but he blamed the empire for the folly of granting it.

Every time Vinas asked the counsel of Gaias, he regretted his own ambition. Gaias was a man who had ferreted dwarves from their dank burrows in Thorbardin, led charges into the teeth of Qualinesti bow fire, brokered peace with Hylo kenders, slain ogres in Blöten, driven plainsmen from their holdings. In short, he had fought. He had lived.

But Gaias was a peasant, and Vinas was a noble’s son. Gaias a common soldier, Vinas an officer. Such was the way of the empire.

Vinas smiled darkly. The ice in his tender mustache pulled against his face. Imperial foolishness had also sent him and his company to the very place where Luccia had vanished. Long live the empire. He would find her; he would find her, wherever she was.

“Sir,” Captain Gaias said, “the soldiers are freezing in their footsteps.” He gestured toward the palisaded fort, its wooden teeth lit from within by chimney sparks.

Vinas blinked, returning from his reverie. “Give the order to march. Let’s join our company with the one inside. Maybe that will be enough to keep at bay these rebels… these stray dogs and farmers.”

“We welcome Colonel Solamnus and his brave soldiers,” cried Lucias Scipio, colonel in charge of Solanthus.

He lifted a goblet of wine in his gnarled hand and struck a pose atop the long dining table where he stood. Scipio was a craven, stooped figure, looking only more so in the smoky light of the great hall’s tallow lanterns. He meant to appear triumphant, but the dark rafters above him, the curved black cape on his back, and the scale-mail shirt jangling in the hollow of his chest, made him seem batlike. “To your health!”

“Hear, hear!” came the customary response. Those who had wine drank deeply.

Those who had wine were mostly Scipio’s men, who jammed the tables of the hall. Only a third of his company was present, but they filled the benches. Like ravenous bears, they huddled over their dinners and grumbled into the food.

Vinas glanced back at his company. They lined the walls of the dining hall, their mantles dripping snow and their boots frozen in great blocks on their feet. They were a tired lot, and deservedly so, after the twenty-mile forced march through the blizzard. Still, Scipio had made no provisions for their arrival. The cloak pegs were full, the tables were full, the beds were full… .

“Once my third watch has finished its meal,” Scipio had said to Solamnus when they had first arrived, “your men may have what’s left.”

“That is unacceptable,” Vinas had replied. “These men are exhausted. I was told you would provide them food and beds.”

“You were told wrong,” had been the sneered reply.

Vinas lifted his goblet toward his men and quietly said, “To our health.”

After draining the goblet, he pushed one of Scipio’s men from the bench, kicked his food from the tabletop, and addressed his own company in a commanding voice that silenced the room. “Soldiers of Solamnus, you have acquitted yourselves well today. Hang your coats on whatever peg is nearest. Drink from whatever cup you wish. Eat from whatever plate looks good. Claim as your own whatever bunk you desire.”

Scipio and his men looked no more shocked than Solamnus’s company.

Vinas added, “Let us show the men of Solanthus what good hosts provide.”

In the stunned silence, Scipio scrambled toward his peer. “We had discussed other arrangements—”

“My soldiers do not eat leftovers,” Vinas interrupted. “Nor do they march all day through a blizzard and sleep on the floor. I do not know how you rule your company, Scipio, but my soldiers are not rats, and they will not scrounge.”

“My warriors have hunted and salted and prepared this game. They should have the first fruits of their labors,” whined Scipio.

Vinas turned to his troops. “Soldiers, teach them generosity.”

Vinas’s troops knew when they had been commanded. They also knew when they were hungry. Doffing their snow-laden cloaks, Vinas’s one hundred converged on the tables and on the thirty of Scipio’s men who greedily leaned over their dinners.

Some of the Solanthian soldiers held hands back in surrender, letting the hungry soldiers pillage their plates. Others resisted at first, but found their hands quickly pried away and wrenched up behind their backs. That was Scipio’s own fate, his arm twisted back by Vinas, himself, when the little man tried to intervene.

“What are you doing? This is not the way the army is run,” objected Scipio.

“I thought just the same thing when I saw how unwelcome you made us,” answered Vinas.

A fight broke out. A Solanthian soldier lashed out with his elbows. Those elbows were grabbed, and the man was flung backward from his bench. An icy boot pinned his chest.

“Whenever two dogs meet,” Vinas said philosophically, “there is always a brief scuffle to establish domain.”

“All right. I’ll have more salted boar brought in, and beds prepared,” Scipio said. “Just let me go.”

Vinas did.

Scipio straightened, brushing off his scale mail. He strode rapidly to the kitchens and gave the orders.

“Stand down, men!” called Vinas. “We have been promised hospitality. Only give our host a moment to make good on what he owes us.”

After that, the company’s reception was at least adequate, if not cordial. Part of that painful adequacy was a private drink and discussion in Scipio’s own chambers. The ultimate in luxury, the man’s rooms had been plastered and tiled. These appointments were palatial compared with the rough-sawn wood and dry rushes of the rest of Solanthus. Scipio’s fire blazed brightly in a small hearth on one end of the quarters, as he flitted into and out of its savage light.

Vinas sat in an embroidered chair beside the fire. He still enjoyed the sting of his cold legs being warmed. A more pleasant sting awaited him—brandy from a crystal decanter. Vinas watched patiently as the crooked little man poured shallow amber puddles into snifters on a tray. With a nervous bow, Scipio lowered the tray and offered the glasses. Vinas took the snifter closer to Scipio and sat back, warming the drink with his hand.

“I am sorry we were so poorly prepared for your arrival,” Scipio said. It was his fourth such apology, no more sincere than the first. “We’ve been so beset by villagers and plainsmen.”

Vinas sipped the brandy, curling his nose. He had not developed a taste for intoxicants, and this brandy seemed especially pungent. “Why would villagers want to destroy the bridge that brings all their trade? And why would plainsmen care about a bridge one hundred and twenty miles from their homelands?”

“Oh,” replied Scipio silkily, “it’s not the bridge they’re after. It’s our food store. The villagers say it was a bad crop this year—something about a plague of moths. They’re clamoring to get hold of our stores. As for the plainsmen—they don’t store up for winter. They count on coming to Ergoth for a handout. Come to Ergoth? We’d just as soon let them starve and take over their lands. Who knows what’s in their savage minds?”

Probably much more than is in yours, thought Vinas. “Your men seem well enough fed,” he observed.

“Oh, we have more than enough food. The ration caravans from Daltigoth come regularly, and I send my men hunting, too. We could feed ourselves twice over just off the bison massacre we had this past autumn.”

Vinas set his snifter down on the small table. “What, then, is the problem?”

“That’s just it,” said Scipio, “there is no problem. Word got back to Daltigoth that the villagers were organizing for an attack, but that is nonsense.”

“If they really are starving,” Vinas ventured, “they would have plenty of motivation to attack.”

“But they aren’t starving,” Scipio replied. “We trade them our excess whenever they bring anything of value.” He leaned in conspiratorially, his ruddy face made devilishly crimson in the light of the fire. “A loaf of mealy bread is up to five gold. A half-rancid haunch of bison goes for eighty.”

Vinas congratulated himself on his calm. “You are extorting such prices out of starving peasants? And toward what does this money go? Soldier salaries? Recruitment? Fortifications?”

Scipio sat back in his seat, a snide look on his ugly features. “You haven’t been a colonel for very long, have you, Solamnus?”

“Two seasons now,” Vinas said evenly. “This is my second campaign.”

“If you haven’t noticed it yet, the greatness of the empire has been won on the backs of fighters—men like you and me. But who gets rich off it all? Senators and emperors, priests and mages. It’s time for us to get ours. Colonels all over the empire are getting in on it. The senate expects as much. The emperor, too. They’re still raking in plenty.”

It is not who is getting rich, Vinas thought, but who is starving to pay for it all. He stood, lifted the brandy snifter, and tossed the liquor into the fire. A blue flame burst up for a moment among the logs. “My company is not needed here, then?”

Scipio’s nostrils flared. “No, you are not needed. Of course, if you wish, you could stay and share in the profits—”

“My men are fighters, Scipio,” Vinas said, “not leeches. If we draw blood, it will be that of Ergoth’s foes, not her citizens.”

“Perhaps you’ll continue up the road to Vingaard,” Scipio suggested. “If you are lucky, conditions will be more… dire there.”

Vinas could not imagine that.

“But remember, Solamnus, I have been a colonel for ten years. I have friends in many places. If you decide to inform anyone of my entrepreneurial endeavors, you will find your head separated from your neck.” The cold gleam of Scipio’s eyes told Vinas that he was perfectly capable of realizing his threat.

Two Days Hence, 15 Rannmont, 1186 Age of Light

“Cold night,” said the dark figure approaching along the palisaded wall.

Guardsman Markas shivered awake. He spun, fumbling for his sword. The damn thing was frozen in its sheath. He stumbled, and then steadied himself on the sharpened stakes atop the wall.

“Easy there, soldier,” the man said. “I’m not the specter of a cold death on the wall. I’m the new colonel—Vinas Solamnus. In fact, I’ve brought you a bit of cheer, to keep you warm tonight.” He produced one of the bottles of brandy he had robbed from Scipio’s private store. The man guarding it had been predictably eager to be bribed.

Markas received the bottle with silent alacrity, sliding it into a much-used inner pocket of his cloak. “Thank you, sir.”

“Make sure to share that with your comrades,” Vinas said.

“Off duty, of course,” Markas replied.

Vinas leaned back on his heels and glanced up into the intense blizzard. “Oh, I don’t imagine even plainsmen would be out in this.”

The soldier only nodded as Vinas strolled farther along the wall, giving a similar present to each of the men guarding the smokehouses and pantries.

“Do I look like a plainsman, Gaias?” Vinas asked the sleeping man.

The colonel had doffed his armor and improvised a loincloth and body wrap from a rough-woven sheet. Across his head, his hair was spiked in a savage cockscomb. He’d smeared his face with beet juice and painted it with daubs of boot black.

The old soldier woke with a jolt. “You look like a complete idiot, sir.”

For a moment, Vinas’s young eyebrows dipped in disappointment. His lips pursed. “What if you were a drunken, half-asleep guardsman trying not to fall off a palisade in the middle of a midnight blizzard?”

“Maybe, if I was half daft to begin with,” grumbled Gaias. He rolled to his side, dragging his blankets like a shield. “Sir, I’m not sure what you are up to, but I wouldn’t mind sleeping a few more weeks.”

Vinas shook his head. “Sorry, Gaias. Up with you. Pick five good souls, ones you’d trust with your wedding ring, and get yourselves up like this. I’ve already got the gate guard bribed and some of Scipio’s horses ready. We’ll just need to load up a few thousand pounds of food and drink.”

Letting out a miserable sigh, Gaias said, “Your plan for these poor devils?”

“Just pull your men together. I’ll tell you when I get back.”

Guardsman Markas tottered unsteadily around the corner of the stockade, looking for a vacant patch of ground where he could write his name. Something moved, in the shadowed lee of the second smokehouse. He blinked down into the dark yard of the fortress. Someone was there. Someone and something—a big rectangular something. He heard the impatient stamp of a hoof on frozen earth, and saw two plumes of white rise from the darkness. Horses? Why would there be horses there, beside the smokehouse and the open cellar door? Open cellar door?

There, in a wedge of glowing light from one of the fire-filled chimneys, he saw a spiked rill of hair, and a shoulder naked to the blizzard.

Plainsmen? How had plainsmen sneaked over the wall? Probably one of the other guards had drunk himself to sleep. Glass stomachs. Markas had finished half his own bottle and was still standing, wasn’t he?

How many of them were there? He squinted, taking the opportunity to finish his original business before he gave the alert. There was no sense rousing the foe while he had a full bladder. In the next trickling moments, he counted six forms, two wagons and four horses, in the darkness. Only six? He could stroll on down there and kill them all, single-handed. Perhaps he wouldn’t call out until he’d finished them off.

On the other hand, plainsmen were like fleas. You find one on the dog, and you know there’s a hundred more.

“Alaart! Alaart!” shouted Markas as he buttoned up. His warning, unfortunately, sounded more like an off-key yodel than a battle cry. “Plaimsmem imma fart!”

Even he had to laugh at that. Plaimsmem imma fart. Maybe his stomach wasn’t the cast-iron kettle he’d thought it to be.

Silly or not, the call alerted the other guard—and the plainsmen. The savages poured out of the smokehouse and cellar, carrying the last of the food they’d come to steal. With an agility that only a naked wild man could have had in such a storm, one of the thieves flung a side of bison from his back onto the already full wagon, then leapt to the buckboard. The warrior released an ululating cry and whipped the horse to a gallop. The second wagon tore out after the first, and the last of the feral devils lit out behind, atop four saddled Ergothian horses.

They’d not get far, Markas realized as he rounded the corner of the stockade. Ahead of him on the palisade, Manias was drawing an arrow back. Manias was a dead-eye shot. Somebody would die when he released that shaft. Manias’s aim followed the horsemen across the fortress, and then he calmly slipped off the wall and released the arrow as he fell.

Guardsman Aurulas was the unfortunate recipient of the missile, which buried itself in his heart with a sound like shattering glass. Yelping, Aurulas danced out of his cloak, and the arrow fell away with shards of brandy bottle.

Meanwhile, the plainsmen fled out an open fortress gate. Open fortress gate?

No matter, thought Markas. Once he got to the stables, he’d chase down those grass rats! He’d almost reached the ladder when he stepped off the wall and plunged to the ground. Numbness had its benefits. Markas got up and staggered toward the stables. He was halfway to the horse track when he wondered if that clicking sound was broken ribs. Worse. It turned out to be another broken brandy bottle.

“To the abyth with this cloag,” cursed Markas, shucking off the glass-laced garment just as he entered the stalls.

Griff, the black charger that Scipio preferred to ride, stood saddled and ready in the first berth. What an opportunity! Markas had often wished he could ride that spirited steed. This was an emergency! Scipio would thank him for taking the mount.

“It’th going to be awlright, good boy,” slurred Markas, patting the beast. He half expected to get his hand bit for his efforts—he’d seen the charger maim a man once—but the horse was unusually docile tonight. “Good boy. Good. Boy.”

Before he knew it, he was beside the creature, with one foot slung in a stirrup. He mounted up easily enough, though he’d forgotten to loop the reins up on the horn. Slumping forward, Markas struggled to grab the reins. He snatched up one and yanked backward, causing the mount to rear up slowly, awkwardly. It barged backward out the stall gate, smashing it down. In those chaotic moments of flailing, Markas caught the other rein and pulled hard. The horse came down onto its forelegs and kicked backward like an ass.

“Good boy,” soothed Markas in an overloud voice. “Gooooo!” His assurances to the horse ended as it pranced out of the stables and into the cold. Its hooves seemed blocky and clumsy on the icy ground. It fought for footing, reeled drunkenly, and snorted a brandysmelling fog into the air.

“What is it?” shouted Colonel Scipio, emerging half-naked into the whirling storm. “What is happening? Wha—?”

The horse seemed to recognize its master’s voice. It broke into a wobbly gallop toward him. Griff barreled down brutally upon the gasping man and bowled into him, its equine shoulder smacking Scipio down and rolling him under.

Markas followed, down on his side, and the mount rolled over him, too. It was, indeed, good to be numb.

The blizzard had reached its peak when, abruptly, the “plainsman raiders” reached the first settlement. It could not be called a village, this black, slumbering huddle of stone, mud, and stick. The buildings were dug into the ground, like entrenchments, their roofs little more than light-leaking mounds of gray-black snow.

If not for those loose-thatched roofs, the wagoners might have driven their horses directly onto the barrows. Instead, Vinas veered to one side and stood up on the buckboard, hauling hard on the reins. The horses wanted to rear, but he settled them to ground with even pressure and shouted commands.

In the other wagon, Gaias stood braced like a charioteer. He brought his team to a stomping halt on the far side of the clearing. Into the open space between the wagons, four horsemen rushed. The hooves made whuffing noises in the snow.

Vinas let out an exhilarated whoop as he tied off the reins and leapt down from the saddle. He waved Gaias into place beside him. The grizzled soldier wore, once again, his mask of snow crystals and ice, but even they could not hide the uncustomary joy in his eyes.

“What is it, then, Gaias?” asked Vinas, slapping the soldier on a pelt-piled back. “What makes you smile? The storm? The wintry ride? The thought of bringing food to starving peasants?”

In his laconic way, Gaias shrugged. As they approached the nearest barrow, he said, “I guess I never before saw a soldier work so hard to do the right thing.”

A serious look came over Vinas’s face. “If I were emperor, every soldier would work hard always to do the right thing.”

A moment of pensive quiet passed between them. The brooding looks on their faces were banished by a voice.

“Tell Scipio we’ve no more food to give him.” It was the voice of an old man, tired and resigned beneath the snow that blanketed his family’s hovel.

Vinas growled to Gaias, “Those buggers of Scipio supposedly hunted their own game. But no. They take food from these people as tribute, then sell it back to them when it goes bad.”

“Wolves guarding the sheep.”

Turning toward the snow-choked door, Vinas happily cried, “We’re not Scipio’s men. We’ve not come to take your food.”

There was a barely perceptible movement behind the ragged wooden door. “Plainsmen? Since when have plainsmen driven wagons?”

Vinas laughed. “We aren’t plainsmen, either. We are the true soldiers of Ergoth, doing the work Scipio has forsaken. Are you hungry, old man?”

“Of course,” the man said bitterly. Something of his true feelings began to emerge. “I live in the shadow of Solanthus, don’t I?”

“Yes, you do,” replied Vinas. “But tonight, things have begun to change. I know that the food we have here is only the smallest measure of what is owed to you—”

“We’ve no food to give you—and even less gold,” the man began.

“We ask no payment,” Vinas replied, “only that you take what you need to make it through the winter.”

The door cracked inward, and a thin eddy of snow entered the gold-glowing room beyond. Two old-man eyes, framed by hunger-ravaged flesh, peered out. The man’s white hair looked golden in the firelight. His reply was incredulous. “Make it through the winter?”

“If you need more, we’ll return with it—”

“It’s not that,” replied the man. He opened the door the rest of the way, and looked like a living skeleton in his tattered nightshirt. “I just… I just hadn’t expected that we would make it through the winter.”

“Now you will,” Vinas replied. “Wake your neighbors. Tell them to come out and stock their larders.”

His bare feet stepped out into the snow, but Vinas waved him back. “Don’t trouble yourself, Father. We have boots. We will wake the others and bring the food to all of you. I ask just one thing.”

“Anything,” replied the man, breathless.

“Would any of you have a barn and hay—and use for one of these horses?”

The man fell to his knees in the snow. “Oh, sir, what god do you serve, that I might give praise? And what is your name, great bringer of bounty, that I might ask a blessing on your head?”

Vinas was taken aback. From the time he could first speak, he had known of all the gods in the pantheon, but he had never sought a divine patron, had rarely even prayed.

Gaias’s icy eyebrows dipped in bemusement.

Vinas walked to the man and extended a hand to him, helping him up. He found himself speaking without any idea of what he might say. “I serve no god. I am a colonel of Ergoth, and so, I suppose, I serve only the empire… or, I should say, her people.”

Gaias looked suitably impressed. As for the old man—Vinas could not have seen how the man responded. The skeletal figure leaned, trembling, against the war-painted and barbarously clad soldier.

“It’s all right, Father. The true armies of Ergoth have come. You will see the spring.”

“Thank you, Sir Warrior. Festas and his poor family bless your name.”

Gaias tugged on Vinas’s arm. A furtive flick of the captain’s eyes indicated the open doorway. Vinas glanced toward it, and saw a pitiable sight.

The family clustered there had rheumy eyes, pallid skin, unkempt hair, gaunt arms… . They had a haunted look about them, from the old crone who blinked outward with clouded eyes, to the emaciated child she clutched to her side.

Vinas could not have spoken; his teeth were locked in a vice. All caprice had gone out of this ploy. So had all the joy. This was no longer an extravagant joke at Scipio’s expense, but a relief effort that meant these folk would live, not die.

Vinas felt shame for wearing the same uniform as Scipio.

The “plainsmen” had a similar reception in the first five villages. Vinas and his men provisioned each village with enough food to last them through the winter, and with a horse to help them plow and haul next spring. The third village, larger than the first two, asked for a wagon as well as a horse. There were more tears of joy, more criminally underfed peasants.

With each new look of suffering and outpouring of hope, Vinas’s resolve was hardened. He had originally planned to rush through the villages, quickly tossing food to the villagers and speeding away with the blizzard covering their tracks. Now, the heavens were nearly spent. The black impenetrable belly of overcast clouds had thinned to a charcoal gray. Dawn approached, and with it the certainty of detection.

It didn’t matter. When he returned, Vinas would strip Scipio of his commission and take charge of the garrison. The days of extortion were done.

In the deepening dawn, Vinas and his savages reached the last village. This settlement was merely a collection of huts, hunkered down in foot-deep snow. The wagon roiled into their midst, bearing Vinas and Gaias on the buckboard, their four comrades behind, and the last of the food piled in the back.

An arrow whistled past Vinas’s head, an arrow followed by a woman’s voice: “Come no farther, soldiers! You are not welcome here!”

Vinas halted the wagon. He stood, holding the reins. Hoarse from the night of riding, he bellowed between his hands, “We bring food for you!”

“Begone!” the woman replied without pause. “We have no gold, but plenty of arrows.”

“The food is yours. The wagon, and the horses, as well. You need pay us nothing for this.”

The silent pause that followed seethed with distrust. The voice responded, “This is the feeblest trick so far, Scipio.”

“I am not Scipio. We are not his men. We are soldiers of the true Ergothian empire. We’ve come to right the wrong done you,” Vinas replied wearily.

“Who are you, then?”

“Our names are not important. We will hobble the horses and leave the wagon with you. Surely someone in your village can recognize good food when he sees it,” Vinas said. “We will return to Solanthus on foot. The drifts will hide our tracks, so Scipio won’t suspect you. He thinks this the work of plainsmen.”

He jumped down from the buckboard into the snow, motioning the others to follow. They did. The weary band of false plainsmen looked only the more bizarre for their mantels of snow and ice. One by one, they turned to trudge toward the fortress. By Vinas’s best reckoning, it lay nine miles distant as the crow flew. It would be night before they got there.

“We have five superb archers among us,” the woman warned, “in case this is a trick.”

Vinas did not turn, only waving dismissively as they left.

Luccia pulled back from the snowy peephole through which she had watched the intruders. She slackened the bowstring of her short bow and let the arrow drop away between her fingers. “Since when do soldiers of the empire dress up as plainsmen, hand out food and horses and wagons, and go around righting wrongs?”

“No sign of movement in the woods,” came a voice from the back corner of the hut. Another bowstring eased.

Who would do such a thing? Luccia wondered to herself. Her mind raced back over the two years she had spent arming and training the villagers to oppose Scipio’s extortioners. She couldn’t conceive of any soldier who would have the courage or the heart to oppose the black-market colonel.

“Alansis and Borsh, bring your bows to the front. I’m going out to check that wagon.” Without pause, she placed the arrow back in her quiver, slung the bow over her shoulder, and pushed open the door. There was a shuffle of young men in the darkness behind her, then the door was shut, and she was out in the bitter, blowing dawn.

She gazed after the soldiers, only small gray specks floating in the distant white wind. Whoever they are, they’ll be dead when they step within a bow’s shot of Solanthus, Luccia thought to herself as she reached the wagon. Unless Scipio himself is dead.

One Day Hence, 16 Rannmont, 1186 Age of Light

“Scipio is dead,” came the guardsman’s shout from the dusk-cloaked wall of Solanthus. “A horse fell upon him. You and your men will be charged, therefore, with the murder of a colonel, as well as with treason, horse thievery, aiding the enemy, bribing the soldiery, and a host of other offenses.”

Vinas glanced sidelong at his men, who trembled with exhaustion, hunger, and cold. It was as though they had taken the afflictions of the peasants on their own shoulders.

“I, Captain Hellas, have assumed command of both companies in this garrison. Your men, Colonel Solamnus, seemed all too eager for a real commander. Now, will you surrender without a fight and spare yourself further charges, or must we ride out into the dark to slay you like wild dogs?”

“Let them go to hell,” said Gaias. “They’ll pay dearly in blood if they try to bring us in.”

For a moment, Vinas thought the old soldier delirious. The men wouldn’t last another half hour in this cold, nor would they last five minutes against a fresh band from the garrison. Staring into Gaias’s eyes, though, Vinas realized it was not delirium he saw, but resolve. A light had awakened in the veteran’s eyes at the first village, and it had grown only the brighter through that long, miserable day.

“Everybody dies eventually,” Gaias said to his commander. He drew his sword. “It’s a lucky few that get to die for a reason.”

Blinking, Vinas studied the old man. He drew a long breath. Then, turning back toward the wall of the fortress, Vinas called out, “There will be much of your blood spilled if you try to take us. In the end, perhaps we will all slip away into Paladine’s palace, denying you a single body for your tribunals and tortures. The senate and the emperor would be very unimpressed with the result of your first true task as colonel, Captain Hellas.

“On the other hand, we will come without a fight if you promise to charge only me with the crimes. These are my men. They followed my orders. Only I am in the wrong, not they. One treasonous colonel is a better gift for the emperor than six dead soldiers.”

Gaias began to whisper a protest, but Vinas cut him off. “There will be better fights for us, friend.”

The voice from the wall urged them forward. “Come. I, Captain Hellas, swear your men will be spared, and only you charged, Colonel Solamnus.”

Meus Pater [my father]

“I will not always be here to save you, Son,” Adrenas Solamnus warned coldly. The statesman’s booted toe nudged a red-hot coal back from the edge of the hearth. “And you are quickly exhausting the family fortune I’ve built up for your inheritance.”

“I didn’t ask you to save me,” Vinas replied heatedly. He began again to pace the mosaic floor of his father’s villa. “And I don’t want a fortune stolen from the poor, or clout gained and maintained through black-market dealings in influences and indulgences. That’s the very thing I was fighting in Solanthus.”

Adrenas shrugged. “That is the way of the empire.” He shifted, fighting to control his anger. “What exactly do you think would have happened if I had not gotten the tribunal dismissed and the charges dropped?”

“I would have gone to trial, where my witnesses and I could have exposed the corruption of Scipio’s rule, and demanded an investigation into the current practices of Colonel Hellas.”

His father rose. The man was getting old enough that, these days, precious little could make him stand. This time, sudden fury forced him to his feet. The action was ominous.

Adrenas’s voice was no louder than it had been before—perhaps even diminished—but the choked intensity of it made Vinas stop his pacing. “You would be dead. You would be executed. Son, who do you think sits on such tribunals? Soldiers such as yourself? No. Soldiers such as Scipio and Hellas—only older, more inured to evil. Corruption and violence and perverse cruelty have become second nature to such men. Even they do not recognize their own depravity. They would condemn you to the scaffold, and sit and drink a good bottle of wine while you hanged. A good man in an evil society will seem the greatest villain of all. We can’t change that.”

Vinas looked down. Shame colored his face. His father was right. Corruption was the way of the empire. No one man—certainly not a young colonel painted to look like a plainsman—could change that.

Vinas sighed, then offered weakly, “You’re right. I can’t change it—but at least those villagers didn’t starve.”

“Not this year, but what about next?” shouted Adrenas. “Besides, Scipio wouldn’t have let them starve. He kept them hungry and weak, yes, but if they starved, they couldn’t buy back the tribute he took from them.”

Vinas looked miserable.

Adrenas turned away and stalked toward the window. Outside, spring was making a sluggish attempt to drive off winter. “You’ve always been a dreamer, Son. So was I when I was young. But I learned to be hard. You have to learn that as well. You’ve always just plunged in and, when things fell apart, waited for Father to pick up the pieces. I won’t always be here to do that.”

“You already said so,” Vinas groused softly.

Adrenas went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You’re lucky I have been a close friend of the emperor since before he came to power. That was not an easy friendship to forge, nor to keep. You have nearly destroyed all that. I could barely convince the emperor you aren’t a traitor. I used your own dreams against you, Son—yes, I did. I told Emperor Emann you were only a starry-eyed kid out of your depth, impressionable, immature—”

“I knew what I was doing—”

“Kiri-Jolith slay me if you did!” cried Adrenas. “Unless you’re hiding a death wish, you had no idea. Luckily you’ve only been banned from military duty.”

“But that’s the only thing I ever wanted to do—”

Adrenas dropped his head forward and leaned heavily against the stone sill. “You destroyed that future, not me.” His fury was ebbing away. His face was placid again. “Emann Quisling is as corrupt as all the others. It was no small task to get him to concede.”

“What is it, Father? What did you agree to?”

Adrenas stood and turned toward his son. The old man blinked slowly as he explained. “Emperor Quisling fixed upon the idea that you were a moralist, a dreamer. He dropped the tribunal on the condition that you enter the priesthood of Paladine.”

It was Vinas’s turn to be enraged. “The priesthood?”

Adrenas looked apologetic. “It was that or death.”

Vinas flinched as though he’d been struck. “So you said I would?”

In response, his father strode across the sitting room and threw back the door of an ornate mahogany cabinet. On the inside of the door hung a shapeless sackcloth. “These are your initiate robes.”

III

Two Years Hence, 2 Chislmont, 1188 Age of Light

“I can’t believe it,” rumbled Titus. His gigantic, muscular hands fiddled with the stole he wore around his neck. “The emperor’s own wedding, and we’ll be officiating!”

The young priest to which Titus was speaking struggled to find the collar of his robe. His voice was muffled beneath the labyrinthine garment. “Yes, Titus, we, and half the other priests of Paladine in Daltigoth.”

Beadle Titus considered his friend’s words and rubbed his jawline. “Still, we’ll be there when history is made.”

“Ah, made it,” sighed Underchancellor Vinas Solamnus as his head emerged from the robe. He looked up at the half-ogre priest, who was a year younger and three feet taller than him, and said, “You’re really looking forward to this, aren’t you?”

Titus lifted his arms. “Of course. Aren’t you?”

Vinas snorted, thrusting one arm out a hole. “Emperor Quisling is the reason I’m in this ridiculous costume.”

“You aren’t in that ridiculous costume,” Titus noted. He pointed toward the sleeve dragging on the ground.

Vinas looked down with a grimace. “How did that get down there?”

“Your head is in the other sleeve, and your arm is sticking out of the collar,” Titus explained.

Vinas groaned in frustration, ducked back into the robe, and hunted for the collar. “This is what I mean. I can’t even find my way out of my vestments. Last week, my candlesnuffer set the chancellor’s hair on fire.”

“I wondered why he’d gotten tonsured…”

“I’m always left standing when everyone else has been seated; I’ve fallen asleep twice during vespers.”

“I heard the snoring. I thought it was Jonas singing bass.”

“My heart’s just not in this, Titus,” Vinas confessed, not for the first time. At last, his head emerged in the right place, and he turned his attention to the sleeves.

The colossal man quietly let his ornate stole fall against his knees, folded a piece of parchment into a miniature hat, and balanced it upon his shock of black hair. He was mulling something over, and at last came out with it. “Do you believe in Paladine, Vinas?”

Vinas slipped a stole around his neck and fastened it to the back of his collar. “If you mean, can I heal small wounds or lay blessings on crowds or get pigeons to land on my fingers, as any good magician can—”

“You aren’t listening,” Titus said. He cradled his head in his hands. “I mean, do you believe?”

The underchancellor’s stare was thoughtful. “Yes, I suppose I do. But for me, believing in Paladine is like believing in trees. Paladine is good, and trees are good, and I’d not like to live in a world without either. But both get along quite well without me. Do you see what I mean? My belief doesn’t matter either way.”

“Mine does,” said the hulking priest. “I don’t know what you mean by a world without Paladine. To me, Paladine and the world and life and everything—it’s all one. Paladine isn’t like the trees, but like Krynn itself. You’ve got to believe in Krynn before you can exist on Krynn, right?”

“I don’t know,” Vinas replied, straightening the folds in his rumpled robe. “Does an ant believe in the world, or just live in it?” He stopped, chagrined. “You’ve led me into one of your damned theological debates again!”

Titus grinned apologetically. “I can’t help it. I eat and drink and breathe it.”

Vinas tugged his friend’s sleeve. “Come on—the other priests are already rehearsing the ceremony. If we don’t hurry, we’ll be sent to the catacombs.”

“Maybe I will,” said Titus, tramping after the underchancellor, “but not you. You’re the emperor’s favorite—the son of his best man.”

“The emperor will enter here, at the prior’s door,” said the white-haired chancellor to the crowd of priests waiting in the bright, dewy morning.

They all dutifully looked at the ancient and ornately carved frieze above the small, wooden door. At that moment, the door banged open and a hulking priest and a frazzled-looking underchancellor barged out, yammering, into the crowd. The two clerics took one more step, and then halted.

The chancellor coughed discreetly into his old, bony hand. He continued his address to the others. “The emperor’s personal guard will secure the door on both sides. Should any of you make an exit such as that of Underchancellor Solamnus or Beadle Titus, you will be assumed assassins and slain without question.”

“Forgive us, Chancellor Dorias,” the underchancellor said. He and his mountainous partner in crime averted their eyes and bowed respectfully, trying to dissolve into the crowd.

“Perhaps I should request a more punctual assistant,” Chancellor Dorias idly wondered aloud.

Beneath his breath, the underchancellor said, “Perhaps I should request a more forgiving master.”

Chancellor Dorias did not hear this reply, though Beadle Titus did.

So did the two priests directly ahead of them. Neither of them turned, though the one with a deep, pink cleft in his forehead said, “Do, please, continue, Chancellor Dorias.”

The old cleric brought a hand to his forehead, as though wondering at that fleshy wound. He hid the motion by dragging a white skein of hair down from his own pate. “I’m sorry. Where was I?”

A young, doe-eyed woman beside the scarred priest said, “You were talking about priests being mistaken for assassins.”

Laughter rippled among the group as the chancellor nodded and gestured toward the prior’s open door. “Seeing as the underchancellor and the beadle so generously opened the door for us, let us make our way through.”

As the robed faithful of Paladine filed through the door, the hatchet-headed man and his comrade lingered near the rear of the pack. They spoke together in whispers.

“Will we kill him here, Hatch?” asked the woman. She had a wide-eyed look of innocence, and her voice was like the coo of a dove.

Hatch frowned. “No. Too out-of-the-way, and too well-guarded. My employer wants the emperor to faint on the altar, like a good virgin boy, and then wilt to the floor like a dead lily, right in front of his people.”

“Poisoned nuptial wine?” the woman asked.

“What’s the sport in that? Anyway, the emperor’s got an army of tasters, and nothing’s gotten past them yet.”

From the door, Chancellor Dorias called, “Come along, you stragglers. Wouldn’t want to leave you out of the festivities!”

“Wouldn’t want to be left out, Chancellor,” said Hatch.

The two assassins shuffled through the door.

Beyond lay one of the southern wings of the temple. An elevated causeway of gold-veined white marble led from the door past seats carved into the white granite bedrock on which the temple had been built. The seats were empty now. Waiting.

Dorias closed the door and moved to the head of the group. He walked backward, into the cavernous stone wing. As he went, the chancellor gestured to either side. “The emperor will walk down this aisle, accompanied by bodyguard and retinue, including your father, Underchancellor Solamnus—the emperor’s dear friend and best man.”

The underchancellor ducked as if hoping that comment would fly by overhead.

Hatch was a bit too cruel to let such a bowed neck go unchopped. “I guess that would make the underchancellor second-best man, wouldn’t it?”

In the muffled amusement that followed, the underchancellor glared murderously toward Hatch. Their eyes met for the first but certainly not the last time. In that moment, the accoutrements of priesthood dissolved. Young Solamnus was no priest, but a warrior. Hatch wondered if his true profession had been recognized by the underchancellor.

Then, the moment was past. The tide of priests dragged them along. At the head of the group, the chancellor droned onward. The aisles of white and gold converged inward to a stepped dais in the center of the sanctuary.

Above those twenty-one raised steps—“one for each true god,” commented Dorias—hung a gold-worked dragon. The huge metal statue shimmered in its stained-glass apse. The life-sized gold dragon hovered in the pose of Paladine’s celestial constellation. Its horned head was uppermost in the vault of the central tower; its resplendent neck arched down to half-tucked wings; and its long tail snaked out from underneath to end in a flipped curl. That auric vision had sent armies of worshippers to their knees.

The assassin named Hatch could think only of Vinas Solamnus. “That brat—he will be a big problem,” he muttered to the woman.

She responded softly, “What is he? He is nothing. He is underchancellor.”

“He is son of the best man.”

“So what?” she asked.

“The best man has the ring,” replied Hatch, “the ring that will have the enspelled spur inside it.”

“I see,” said the child-faced killer. “I see.”

“Enter,” called Adrenas Solamnus toward the door of the study.

The wood panel slid silently aside into a beveled and bossed wall. In the open doorway, flanked by overstuffed bookshelves, stood Caritas, a slave-turned-manservant.

Slavery is a beastly business, thought Adrenas. But Caritas’s clan was gone, and he had no home now other than the villa. “Yes, Caritas? What is it?”

“A priestess of Paladine is here, milord,” replied Caritas, bowing stiffly. He’d never quite learned the grace of servitude. Good for him. “She says she must bless the rings.”

Adrenas stared, blinking, at the young man. He had heard nothing of a ring blessing, though a blessed ring would be better than a cursed one.

“Shall I send her away?” asked Caritas.

Adrenas waved away his distraction. “Forgive me, Caritas. I’m hopelessly lost in thought today. Let her in.”

Caritas bowed out of the way. A young priestess stepped through the doorway.

She was slim and small. Though childlike, she seemed somehow utterly sturdy, unbreakable. Her face was taken up mostly by two great brown eyes, a sweet little nose, and a child’s mouth, turned as though she still nursed from her mother.

Adrenas had never seen so strange a combination of force and innocence. It made the old man feel dizzy, even slightly queasy.

“Come in,” he said, gesturing her into the book-filled room.

She entered, gliding quietly. She curtsied. Her tiny form was lost in the robes. She rose and stared, offering no introduction nor reason for her unexpected presence.

“You are here to bless the rings,” the old noble said.

“Please,” the priestess replied with a nod.

Adrenas studied her sharply. His eyes could not penetrate her blank gaze. He felt not just queasiness now, but uneasy premonition.

Even so, Adrenas found himself saying, “I’ll get them.”

“Please,” she urged.

He rose from his seat, giving his bones a moment to settle dryly against each other. A single step took him toward the wall vault that held the small, gold-gilded ring box. He paused. Feigning absentmindedness, Adrenas muttered, “Forgot to tell Caritas about the posies.” Instead of heading to the vault, he trudged to the door, called Caritas, and whispered to him, “Lock the doors and stand ready with your sword. Something feels wrong.”

As the plainsman moved swiftly and silently away, Adrenas slid the door shut and bolted it from within. He turned and studied the priestess, who remained in the center of the floor. He padded past her to the vault. Adrenas shoved a small painting aside and began working on the lock on the vault.

The lock opened. With an arcane gesture, Adrenas parted the glimmering blue shield of magic—a vault within a vault. He reached in, past deeds and documents, past a stack of platinum bars, to a small gilded chest, and withdrew it. Reactivating the magic, he closed the vault and turned around.

“They are in here,” he said, striding toward the priestess. He lifted the case toward her and opened it.

Only then did her eyes change. Into their wide placidity came a harsh focus and deep purple intensity.

“Beautiful,” she said.

They were. The ring for the emperor’s bride had a large setting—one inch worth of the finest diamonds, rubies, and emeralds Ergoth could pry from the grip of dead dwarves. The central stone, a teardrop diamond, would likely weigh twenty carats by itself. The emperor’s ring was no less impressive, encrusted with shining jewels.

The priestess reached for the rings, but Adrenas reflexively drew the box back. She gazed at him, still wide-eyed but now accusingly so. “I must hold them to bless them.”

It was the most she had said so far.

“Of course,” Adrenas said, offering the box again.

Carefully, reverently, she drew the rings from the chest and held them overhead. She tilted her face toward the ceiling and began to chant a prayer in Old Ergothian, calling down the blessings of Paladine and his mate Mishakal, that the human union be a reflection of their divine marriage. All the while, her fingers moved in strange gestures, as though she were not merely blessing the rings, but somehow transforming them with her prayer.

The door to the room rattled loudly against its lock. The priestess started, almost dropping the rings.

Adrenas barked, “Who is it?”

“It’s me, Father. Why is the door bolted?”

Adrenas snorted. He set a hand on the priestess’s trembling arm. “My son,” he apologized. “I’ll tell him to wait.”

“No,” said the priestess petulantly. “The blessing is done. I must go.”

As the door rattled again, she carefully replaced the rings.

Adrenas closed the chest. “Just a moment, Vinas.” When the chest was again safely secreted in the vault, Adrenas crossed the room and slid back the bolt. The door was flung open and in strode Vinas. Somehow, the priestess flitted past him, and was gone in the hall.

“Who was that?” Vinas asked, astonished.

His father stared after the priestess, saying blankly, “Oh, someone from your order. She was sent to bless the rings. Adrenas shook away his unease. “What brings you here, son?” he asked.

Vinas blinked distractedly. “She was the one next to that brain-bashed priest. Something feels wrong here.”

“My thoughts, exactly.”

Titus climbed the ladder rungs four at a time. The shaft, as dark and narrow as a chimney stack, was meant to be traversed only in emergencies—like this one. The magical wards that guarded the temple’s central vault had been compromised.

Titus’s head struck the iron-barred trapdoor at the top of the shaft. A wedge of yellow light flashed for a moment in front of him, then closed again as he stooped down. Grimacing in the darkness and muttering things that should not be said by a priest, Titus clung miserably to the rungs and waited for his head to stop ringing.

With the thrust of one massive hand, he flung back the trapdoor. It boomed ominously against the floor of a narrow crawl space above. Dust undisturbed for centuries danced with mold spores in the dim air. Titus crawled into the space and wriggled his broad shoulders forward. He squeezed past a crumbled bulwark that had held aloft the former central tower, and stepped out onto a wooden catwalk.

Someone was moving out there. On the dark, swaying framework of poles and ropes and planks, someone knelt—a saboteur. Titus strode across the ancient boards, toward the stooped shoulders and the dim flutter of hands.

“Beadle Titus,” came an unfamiliar voice. “I’m glad you’re here. I spooked him away from this spot, here. He was working on it when I came up.”

Never enamored of heights, Titus slowed on the swaying catwalk. He took a moment to glance down warily at the dome of stone below them. Beneath that, he knew, hung the Paladine statue—and a two-hundred-foot drop to solid granite.

“Who was working there?” he called to the man.

“I didn’t get a good look. He was built about like your friend.”

“My friend?” Titus asked, edging toward the man.

“You know, the underchancellor.”

“Vinas.” Titus had almost reached the center of the vault. There the man was crouched, his hands moving in mothlike flutters.

“There, that should do it,” the man said. A blue glimmer dribbled down from his fingers onto the headstones of the dark vault. As Titus watched, the magic coursed down the stone ribs, sped along the circumference of the vault, and, with a faint whoosh!, swept over the whole area.

In the blue glow, Titus saw the outline of the man’s face, especially the hatchet-shaped wound in his forehead. It was the priest who had insulted Vinas that morning.

“I’m Hatch, missionary to the kender of Hylo,” he said, holding out a grimy hand in greeting. Titus didn’t take the hand. “You probably noticed my accent. Got it from the rabble—you know how it goes.”

“I do,” said Titus. “What did he do, this saboteur?”

Hatch withdrew his filthy hand and scratched his neck with it. “I suppose I don’t really know. I’ll get another priest up here to check on it. Somebody who knows about architectural magic, not just a rural priest like me.”

“I know just the man,” said Titus. “I’ll ask him to come have a look.”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll make sure he knows just what spot to check.”

One Day Hence, 3 Chislmont, 1188 Age of Light

Luccia had not come to Daltigoth for the imperial wedding. She had come for confrontation, not consummation.

The villagers around Solanthus had been especially desperate these past two years—ever since the intolerant reign of Scipio had been succeeded by the insufferable one of Hellas. The new colonel had twice the number of soldiers, and twice the will to use them to pillage the countryside. Each armed resistance by the villagers had brought only harsher reprisals. Skirmishes had become so constant as to be known in Daltigoth as the Solanthian Troubles.

News had reached Solanthus of the imperial wedding, and Luccia was inspired to trade in her devotion to a peasant rebellion for a personal mission.

Her plan involved a custom of the Quevalin emperors that carried through to the current Quisling line. On the day after the nuptial consummation, the new empress would receive requests from delegates of every imperial province. She then would grant, according to her wisdom, what aid she could.

Luccia had come to Daltigoth to demand bread.

And not just bread for right now, to save the skeletal villagers of Solanthus. She wanted bread forever. The right to remit reasonable taxes to the landed lord, and not to be pillaged into oblivion.

That was one phrase she had promised herself not to use. Pillaged into oblivion was, perhaps, too harsh for a new empress’s ears.

Cowled in the nondescript gray of peasants throughout Ergoth, Luccia shouldered her way through the throng that clustered at the base of the seemingly endless steps of Paladine’s temple. If she could push to the front of the crowd, she just might find a standing spot from which to see the spectacle. It was a royal wedding, after all… as well as being the chance to win bread and peace for the villages she called home.

Home. The word brought to mind thoughts of Vinas Solamnus. She wondered where he might be, what he might be doing, in the sprawling empire of Ergoth.

That afternoon, at the Gate of Eadamm, the wedding parade began. The gate stood on the spot where Eadamm, the legendary founder of the city, was said to have driven his slave shovel into the ground to begin building Daltigoth. In fact, three other sites in the city—including the Temple of Paladine—claimed to be the place where Eadamm first dug. Perhaps to be safe, the parade organizers had plotted a route that connected all the “shovel sites.” It was one of many signs that this wedding would be in the old tradition. It would be the sort of union not seen since the Quevalin line had ended, a century before.

First through the gate was the royal black watch. Its elite troops had served for three hundred years as bodyguards for every Ergothian emperor and his kin. Shiny boots clicked in absolute unison. The watch strode into the great arch. The echo of their steps would have terrified armies.

The sound inspired the peasants who lined the parade route. They waved scarves in eager greeting. Their shouts were utterly drowned out by the boot steps.

Gaias marched among the black watch. He had always hoped for a post in this elite force, though his involvement in the Solanthian Troubles had jeopardized his appointment. Ironically, Colonel Hellas had made it all possible by speeding the malcontent’s reassignment from the Solanthian frontier to the heartland of Daltigoth. Underchancellor Solamnus had then-put in a good word with the emperor, and Gaias was in.

He had certainly earned this post. He’d spent a lifetime in soldier sandals and scale mail—a bearded peasant in a peasant army. Now clean-jowled and garbed in a black uniform, he scraped steel-tipped boots against the flagstones and scowled at the peasant mob.

Gaias felt lost. It had taken him many years to be appointed to the black watch. It had taken him only a few days to realize accepting this appointment was the gravest mistake of his life. At least in the imperial army, he often stuck his sword into people who deserved it. Among the royalty, though, the guilty survived and the feckless innocent died.

This is no time for such thoughts, he reminded himself. The sound of his own marching feet brought him back to the parade, to the solemn task of guarding the bride of Emperor Quisling.

The royal wedding. If Gaias were a grandfather, he would have told and retold the story of this march for the rest of his days. It was just as well he had no descendants. Despite moments of glory—like that blizzard night, decked out like a plainsman and giving food to starving peasants—the story of his life was proving to be a disappointment.

The roar of the boots made the emperor’s bride—a great-great grand niece of the last Quevalin king, and no more than a child—crouch in fear inside her white carriage. She plugged her ears and laughed in terror, hunched as though against a harsh rain.

Empresses and armies were not the only ones to tremble in the wake of that thunderous noise. So, too, did the robed priests of Paladine. They moved in a timid flock behind the bride’s carriage. At their chests, the priests clutched glass-ensconced candles. In the winds of dusk, the tiny fires pulsed like fearful hearts.

Underchancellor Vinas Solamnus was one of the priests most concerned with keeping his flame lit. He held the sconce against his robe and cupped one hand over the vent at the top. The shadow of his hand touched the backs of the priests before him—the doe-eyed woman and her split-headed friend.

Beadle Titus nudged Vinas with his elbow. “Drop your hand. It’s making shadows. The light of truth should not be obscured.”

“Neither should it be snuffed,” countered Vinas.

They walked along for a while, the crash of boots and clop of hooves and cries of peasants combining in a ceaseless and meaningless clamor.

Still sheltering his candle flame, Vinas watched the backs of the two priests ahead of them. He nudged Titus’s arm and said, “What do you think of that pair?”

The hulking Beadle seemed for a moment to struggle with his need to be honest and his desire to be charitable. At last he came out with, “I don’t know why, but I don’t trust them.”

“Me neither,” Vinas confessed. “The woman visited father today—something about blessing the rings.”

Titus’s expression darkened. “The man was messing about in the dome. He said he’d almost caught a saboteur. I sent an architect up to check the dome, but never heard back from him.”

They had time for no more; the parade had reached the steps of the great temple. The black watch fanned out, pushing back the peasant hordes that hoped to stream in after the bride.

The woman alighted now from the carriage. Her young skin looked nearly as pale as her white, pearl-bedizened dress. Steadied on the arm of her father, she began the long climb to the temple above.

Luccia elbowed free of a gap-toothed young man. She almost got caught between him and an imperial guardsman. The peasant would not be getting past that palisade of sword and muscle, and would likely pay for his efforts with a few more of his dwindling teeth.

Luccia had no desire to win past the soldiers, but only to glimpse again the band of priests. She thought she had seen one whose face was… what? He did not look like a priest, not at heart. He walked with a martial stride rather than a monk’s stroll. He fretted over his candle, holding a hand above its vent and so making his own anxious face especially radiant. Though the cleric beside him was three heads taller and twice as wide as he, the young man who had caught Luccia’s eye looked too burly, too physical for so ethereal an office.

Luccia rose halfway up the first flight of steps and stood on tiptoe to see over the multitude.

There he was. His face was candle-bright in the deepening dusk. At first there were no shadows to define his features—only two glowing eyes. Still, she would have known him from the eyes alone. The man paused to draw the hem of his robe up from a snagging boot. The candle dipped down and cast his cleft jaw in square relief, then his cheekbones, his brow, and hair thick and windblown.

“Vinas Solamnus,” she whispered beneath her breath.

He was gone in the next moment, obscured behind the retreating shoulders of the man-mountain. Even so, in that space between heartbeats, he had unknowingly washed away the past four years of freedom fighting and bread-pillaging. He had reduced her to the infatuated fifteen-year-old girl he had left behind—

The Five Harvest Battles with their one hundred and twenty-three massacred villagers… the Summer of the Soot Sun… the entire vocabulary of her experience in the resistance fled from her. She suddenly wanted to break through the line, rush up beside her discontented soldier-priest, dash his candle to the ground, take his hand, and drag him back to that time four years ago… .

The crowd surged up the stairs. She moved with the rising peasants—her people—pushing after the regal procession and toward the Temple of Paladine.

Adrenas Solamnus watched the loud, solemn procession edge down the central aisle of Paladine’s temple. In the thousand stone benches to either side of the parade, a veritable army of nobles and senators stood and sang. Ahead of the procession, a corps of fifty herald trumpeters and fifty pipers and fifty drummers played. Even so, at the moment when the future empress glided past her black-garbed escort to proceed up the aisle alone, the echoing cavern seemed utterly quiet, utterly still.

She was beautiful in white, a tender dove floating above the mere mortals. Though thirty noble maids bore the hem of her gown, she walked alone. It was an enormous train of cloth to be drawn by that tiny, brown-haired girl. The gold-veined marble looked gray and dirty beneath her delicate feet.

“What do you think of my freckled Phrygia?” came a voice very near Adrenas’s ear.

He turned to find Emperor Emann himself standing there, a gray-haired man with a feline face and intense silver eyes. “Quite the spotless white rose, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, Emperor,” replied Adrenas with solemn awe. “She is a dove. I look forward to meeting her.”

Emperor Quisling cast a sharply amused glance toward his best man and said, “As do I, Adrenas. As do I.” Adrenas tried to hide his surprise, but failed. Emann continued, “That is the problem with virgins: you can’t really know them until they are no longer virgins, and by then it’s too late. I only hope she learns quickly. I’m used to riding racehorses, not speckle-bellied ponies.”

Unsure how to respond to that, Adrenas looked toward the woman and nodded. Like the other warlords of Ergoth’s past century, Emperor Quisling was crude, brutal, and lecherous. Adrenas watched the fragile vision of that child in white, and wondered how the emperor could so brusquely speak of horses and riding.

The consummation tonight would be nothing short of a conquest. Emann would win her the same way he had won everything in his life, including Adrenas’s friendship. Vinas would say his father was in bed with evil, and that one could not rise from such a bed unsullied.

“Do you have the rings?” the emperor asked.

Adrenas bit his lip in surprise. He patted the woolen panel of the Solamnus family tabard. “They are here, in my pocket. The case was too large to carry.”

“Fine,” replied the emperor, stepping forward and motioning Adrenas to follow… at a distance, “because that is our cue.”

With his bride only a small, retreating spot of white among the roaring multitude, Emperor Emann Quisling started down the aisle.

Adrenas waited. He peered ahead. There, the crowd of priests, including his son, gathered on the dais beneath the dragon statue. He looked behind him, where the two great doors slowly closed upon gray throngs of peasants.

Breathing deeply, the best man began a measured procession behind his ruler and friend.

The bride reached the central altar to Paladine. She stopped before the white-and-gold robed priests. Half of the emperor’s black watch stood at grim attention behind the priests, and the other half lined the aisle where Emann walked.

With such protections, what assassin could possibly succeed tonight?

At last, the emperor stepped up beside his bride. Before them stood the greatest priests and warriors of Ergoth. Behind stood senators and nobles and a handful of peasants. The processional hymn ended. Trumpet, pipe, drum, and voice ceased. Only a strident echo kept on, rolling in heady waves through the temple.

Underchancellor Vinas Solamnus struggled to keep his hands from his ears. The din rattled away. A toneless rumble replaced it—the distant thunder of an approaching storm. The smell of rain filled the air. It was a cold, changing wind.

Vinas shivered, despite the weight of his robe and the warmth of the long walk. A wife for this ruthless politician would mean children, sons—a dynasty, perhaps. All of it would rest on that tiny little girl, who visibly trembled beside the warlord. Vinas felt cold and sick.

The Bishop of Daltigoth motioned for the people to sit. He began a sonorous homily, the sound of which would certainly die away before it reached the peasants.

Vinas sighed. As always, the peasants would be denied… or spared. Vinas himself lost track of the homily. He glanced at Titus. The giant stood forward on the balls of his feet, nodding empathetically. There would be no commiserating with him after the ceremony. Vinas blinked and focused on his father, who looked old and very weary.

A flash of none-too-distant lightning shone in the northern windows. It lit up the bride in a blue glow, but cast the emperor in shadow. Vinas waited for the thunder. The bishop spoke on until it came crashing, like the war drum of Kiri-Jolith himself. The bride swayed. Instead of reaching out to steady her, the emperor glanced up at her in irritation.

Even Vinas’s father seemed shaken. He patted a panel of his tabard, as he had done five times already since the bishop’s drone had begun. This time, though, he reached into his robes and drew out something—what was it?

A lightning strike glinted on the bejeweled rings. As though fearing the very thunder would steal the jewels, Adrenas slipped the rings onto his fingers. The bride’s ring was clutched on the second knuckle of his pinky finger, and the emperor’s ring was jammed down on his middle finger.

Look at him, thought Vinas in concern. He can hardly stand there behind the emperor. He wavers like a child before the gallows. The old noble seemed almost to be falling asleep.

Adrenas glanced down at his hand and lifted it to inspect it. A thin ribbon of blood showed beneath the emperor’s ring.

Blood? Vinas wondered at that. Was his father so nervous as to have wounded himself with a ring?

It didn’t matter. The bishop had just requested the rings. Adrenas gingerly worked the things off his fingers, wiped the blood away on his tabard, and lifted both rings toward the bishop. The high cleric had no sooner received the bands than Vinas’s father swooned and crumpled to the ground. A murmur ran through the throng. The bishop, too, paused. The same irritation that the emperor had cast toward his wife he now directed toward the fallen old man.

Vinas broke ranks and hurried to his father. He knelt. A thin stream of blood flowed where the man’s forehead had struck the stairs.

Black watchmen converged. They studied the crowd for signs of attack. A contingent slipped, silent as shadows, around father and son.

Vinas rolled his father over. The man still breathed, but very shallowly and very rapidly. “Father, Father,” he said, lightly stroking the man’s cheek with the back of his hand.

Adrenas did not stir.

“Vinas, we need to take him from the temple. We need to let the wedding resume.”

Vinas looked up at the sound of that voice. He saw a familiar face, oddly shaved. “Gaias! Help me, here.”

“Let’s go, Vinas,” said Gaias. He and his companions hoisted Adrenas from the ground and began bearing him swiftly away. “Come along. I’m sure he will be fine once he gets some air.”

Vinas nodded, following. Behind them, the bishop resumed his speech.

“Vinas,” came a raspy whisper. “Vinas, it is the ring.”

“Father, rest,” Vinas said. The group shuffled toward Mishakal’s gate. “The bishop has them now.”

“It’s enchanted, or poisoned, somehow,” Adrenas gasped. His eyes were watery. “If Emann puts it on, he, too, will die.”

“Poisoned?” Vinas wondered aloud. The moment he voiced the thought, he remembered the priestess and her supposed blessing. “The emperor…”

“I’m dying, son,” Adrenas said. “I can feel it. Cold mud in my bones.”

Gaias looked grave, though one of his companions sneered, “You’re not dying, old man. We’ll get you out in the rain, and you’ll be dancing all night at the royal ball.”

“Father, I’ll stay with you.”

“Go, Son,” Adrenas said as they bore him through an antechamber that led to the garden. “Do not disobey me in this one last request.”

A thin moan rose in Vinas’s throat. “Good-bye, Father.”

“Good-bye, Vinas.”

Vinas turned and ran back through the antechamber. A black-garbed figure appeared beside the archway leading to the sanctuary—Gaias.

“I’ll tell my men to let us through,” Gaias said urgently.

Vinas nodded, striding into the sanctuary and rushing across the floor.

“Let us pass,” hissed Gaias to his black watch comrades.

Just as Vinas reached the line of bodyguards, lightning flashed on both sides of the temple. A simultaneous thunderclap rattled the very foundation stones.

Vinas fought his way past the guards. They tried to pursue him but were held back by Gaias. As he barked commands, three more lightning strikes shook the building. They showed Vinas making great strides, halfway to the emperor… beside the emperor… wrenching the ring free from that untouchable hand. Without pause, Vinas plunged into the stunned and immobile ranks of priests.

One of the clerics turned away. Vinas bounded after her, knocking over a few of his compatriots. A priest grabbed him, but Vinas knocked him away with an elbow to the face. Vinas had almost caught up with the retreating cleric when someone grabbed his robe.

Vinas lunged. His free hand wrapped around a child-thin ankle in white. He held tight as he crashed to the ground.

His was only the first body to fall. The priestess followed. Then a soft and grunting form dropped atop Vinas and seized the hand that held the emperor’s ring. Someone else clambered over his legs, pinning him to the ground. More weight. Panicked priests piled on to insure that he would not get away.

None of that mattered. It mattered only that Vinas still held the woman’s ankle. She would not get away, this murderess and assassin. Perhaps she would even have an antidote that would save his father.

As the thunderstorm deepened, the pile of priests lightened. Gaias and the other black watchmen had arrived and were pulling clerics off Vinas. As the priests were lifted away and sorted out, the circle of guards surrounded Vinas and the woman. Gaias stood over the assassin, his sword tip resting on her young throat.

Then, entering like a god amid rolling thunder, the emperor himself reached the top of the dais and pushed past the wall of watchmen.

“By Sargonnas, what is this, Solamnus?” the emperor growled.

Breathless, still tangled up with a priest or two, Vinas said, “This woman is… an assassin.” No other word could so quickly silence a crowd. Vinas went on to explain to the shocked emperor, “She poisoned your ring. Father put it on. He is outside, dying.”

The emperor’s cold gaze turned on the priestess. “Speak, woman, but do so quickly. Your death will be as long and public as your confession.”

She looked down. The facade of innocence peeled from her face like dead flesh from a skull. “Tell this man to release me.”

Solamnus merely tightened his grip. “I will not.”

The emperor drew his ornamental sword, strode to the woman’s side, and aimed its tip at her right eye. “Speak, woman!”

“Yes,” she shouted. “I am an assassin. I planned your death here, at your wedding, before even the consummating kiss. Yes, by now this man’s father is dead. Yes, you will kill me for my crimes, and do so brutally and slowly, but not until this confession of mine is done.”

Vinas stared at the woman, hearing little after the pronouncement of his father’s death. He bowed his head, realizing she spoke the truth.

So Adrenas Solamnus was gone. His father had been right about so many things—right all along. There would no longer be anyone in all the world to save Vinas from his follies.

He glimpsed movement above him. Directly above.

The gold dragon hung there in glory. The statue swayed slowly on its chain. Why would it be swaying?

“The man was messing about in the dome. He said he’d almost caught a saboteur. I sent an architect up to check the dome, but never heard back from him.”

As Titus’s words echoed in Vinas’s head, the statue’s sway deepened, and it shuddered. No one else saw it. No one else heard it. It was a moment of fate. It was an irreversible moment that would shape the rest of Vinas Solamnus’s life.

Paladine began to fall. Vinas Solamnus released his father’s killer. In one swift motion, he rolled onto his feet. His shoulder caught the emperor in the gut, knocking him to one side.

“Paladine is falling!” was all he could think to scream.

The dragon descended.

Its gold tail struck in the spot where the emperor had just stood—where the assassin had, too, though she was fleeing past watchmen. The tail cracked against the marble dais. Welds failed, and razor-sharp triangles of metal leapt away, catching watchmen in throats, stomachs, and faces.

Vinas ran amid stumbling, colliding, dying men.

The tail crumpled so quickly it seemed to be plunging into water rather than striking stone. It drew the rest of the massive dragon downward, tipping it out toward the congregation. As if the dragon lived and had its own willpower, one of its hind claws arced down toward Vinas and the emperor. Its knife-edge ripped open Vinas’s shoulder and would have dragged him down had it not sliced away his vestments.

Vinas did not tarry. He rushed away from the shadow of that descending claw, down the dais stairs. Behind him, the dragon limb struck sparks on the marble steps. Tiny jags of metal exploded from the statue and jabbed into Vinas’s back. Still he ran.

He reached the center aisle, choked now with fleeing, screaming, trampling senators. He bulled into them, and was dragged down by the churning bodies. Trying not to fall, Vinas flung the emperor forward, over the heads of the panicked crowd.

Then came a blunt weight that smashed him to the floor among the other bodies. The shriek and roar of crashing metal echoed violently through the great temple, mixed with the cries and screams of the people. Those crushed beneath the fallen statue made little noise for lack of breath. It was, rather, the gore-splattered senators just one step beyond, who screamed.

Vinas heard all of this where he lay trapped, bleeding, beneath the horned head of Paladine, god of good. He watched as the terrified senators fled back toward the nobles, and they in the direction of the peasants. He saw a ragged and bloodied contingent of the black watch, led by Gaias, escort a limping emperor away. His bride-to-be tended the man. Priests moved among the wounded, laying healing hands on them.

Despite a makeshift sling on one arm, Titus was putting his gargantuan strength to use, lifting sections of sculpture to release victims. In time, the rescuers would reach Vinas, too. He wondered if he would live long enough.

It didn’t matter. Let him share his father’s death day—Vinas, who had done nothing for his family or his nation, and Adrenas, who had done everything.

Then, there was a face near his, and soft words. Vinas suddenly, very desperately, wanted to live.

“Hello, Luce. It’s good to see you.”

Meus Pater [my father]

He knelt in the cold, dripping undercroft of the temple. Its massive pillars and thick-muscled vaults seemed deep, dank mockeries of the bright clean temple.

It is an honor for Father to be buried here, Vinas told himself, here among monks and heroes and kings.

“Hello, Father,” Vinas said quietly. He coughed, his lungs still mending.” You were right. You saved the emperor, saved the empire. Emann himself has said so. He was pleased with your sacrifice.”

Words failed Vinas for a moment. He gazed up into the gritty stone vault. “He was pleased with me, too. He’s reconsidered my actions at Solanthus, in the light of my having saved him. He seems to think a colonel with the morality of a priest would make a good commander of the imperial guard. I told him I would have been a better commander if I’d captured the assassins, not just scared them off.” Vinas shrugged. “The emperor said it’s all the more reason to have me around, to catch them the next time.”

“I guess I’ll like the position. It’s military, at least, and it will keep me close to the estate, now that I must run it. Gaias will be my second. I told you about him. Oh, and guess who was appointed the new underchancellor? Yes, Titus. He’ll do far better than I did.

“By the way, Luccia is back,” he continued. “I’m glad. A foolish dreamer such as I needs his friends around, to catch him when he falls. I’ll try to get her a spot in the mounted guard.

He paused, thinking back through his own words. “I suppose I’m telling you all of this because I want you to know I have others to help me now. Thank you for all the guidance you gave me. While you were alive, I seemed to ignore your wisdom, but now I savor every piece of it. Some day, I’ll even heed it.

“Thank you, Father, for everything. I’d better get back. The guard won’t run itself.” He rose, dusting the dirt from his knees. The tamped mound where his father lay seemed too small to hold a man who had been all the world to him. Vinas dropped a single red rose on the spot.

“Good-bye.”

Part II:
Temperance

Interlude

Five Years Hence, 14 Phoenix, 1193 Age of Light

The young empress sat in the tower window, breath coming and going in rapid bursts. She looked white and frail on the sill.

Behind her, the sorcerer Caitiff moved among his occult instruments. His smooth elven voice circled in dark mutterings.

Empress Phrygia did not listen. The words were not for her. She came here not for the wizard’s company, but for the solitude. This was the only chamber her husband hesitated to enter.

Panting, she turned outward, toward Daltigoth. The wintry city was huge and hard, built up of quarried limestone and scoured by sleet and snow. Its people picked their ways along the streets. Their ragged shawls could not block the sharp jab of winter winds or even the sharper pokes of guardsmen’s harassing halberds.

Daltigoth was nothing like her small, warm home—Redroth. There, she had been everything to everyone: darling daughter to the duke, desire of every baron’s son, friend of orphans, maiden of the fields. She had thought marrying the emperor would make her everything in Ergoth, too.

It should have. But the emperor treated his people like chickens. He kept them penned and cooped, guarded from wild foxes, but ever ready for the farmer’s axe. If she was anything to the people, she was a stuffed game cock mounted over the mantel—the dead symbol of their enslavement. She was not a wife, but a trophy, not an empress, but a living corpse.

Even now in his private chambers, her so-called husband lavished warm attentions on a conquest more exotic than she.

Phrygia shook her head, flushing in rage beneath her freckles. Anger had always been her ally. Through anger, she had cowed her father and impressed her people. It had made her ruler of Redroth. But what good was her anger in a place like this?

Phrygia spat. The spittle struck an invisible ward of magic, spun in fragments, and sizzled away.

“… and I was the one who chose you, not Emann…” the elven warlock muttered to himself.

“You what?” she asked, turning. Her eyes were hard above her red cheeks.

The sorcerer raised his black-cowled head. He never removed the obscuring hood, even indoors, and as often as she had struggled to see beneath it, she had only glimpsed feverish eyes and a smile that glinted like quicksilver. “You heard that, then, did you, Empress?” Caitiff asked. “It is, perhaps, the first time you have heard anything I have said these five years.”

Phrygia crossed arms over her chest and stared into the blackness of the man’s face. “All this time I blamed Emann for my plight, but it was you… . You brought me here.”

“What plight?” demanded the sorcerer. “I put you in line to become the most powerful woman in Ansalon.”

“Most powerful?” she said with a laugh. “I’m a figurehead, strapped to the front of a rat-riddled, bilge-flooded ship.”

“I didn’t say you were the most powerful, but that you were in line to be the most powerful,” he said. “I chose you because you had a passion for manipulation. You wanted more than anything else to rule. But you have disappointed me, time and again.”

“Disappointed you? I care nothing for what you want or think,” Phrygia replied haughtily. She then became defensive. “Besides, I have no power. The emperor keeps me hostage.”

“The emperor is a lecherous fool,” Caitiff shouted virulently.

Suddenly, the warlock dropped the cowl from his head. Fabric fell away from a face that was not merely ancient, but, in fact, necrotic. Where eyes should have been were only two vacant pits, red motes of unholy fire circling within them. Elven ears had worn away to nubs. Cheekbones jutted yellow and foul through rawhide flesh. Lips had broken away, leaving chiseled teeth to smile in eerie array. “Emann is a fool. I did not defeat death only to in turn be defeated by an incompetent, mincing fool.”

Phrygia gasped, drawing back. She looked at the man’s hands, which had always seemed old, but never skeletal. With the removal of the cowl, all of the lich’s wards had fallen. She smelled him. She saw the maggots writhe. She heard the dry grind of bone on bone as he slowly stalked toward her,.

“You—you monster… .” she said, gagging. “When the emperor learns of this…”

“He knows,” said the dead thing. “He chose me, not I him. I am the reason he rules this continent. Had the Silvanesti or Qualinesti kings honored me, they would rule Ansalon. Instead, I have given the power of ancient elven black arts to your unelven husband. He, though, has proven unworthy to wield them.”

She retreated to the wall. It damply pressed against her back. “What do you want from me?”

“Don’t act so coy,” Caitiff said. “You ruled Redroth with winks and temper tantrums. It’s taken you five years to learn that such things are insufficient for ruling Daltigoth. You wish to rule all Ergoth, but haven’t had sufficient sorcerous might… until now.”

He was very close. Her every fearful breath drew his grave-stench into her throat. “What, and sit on a throne beside a dead thing?”

The corpse’s head shook slowly. Vertebrae ground like chalk. “You would do anything to rule, even sit beside me. Lucky for both of us, it won’t come to that.

“I know of your true desires. There is an ambitious warrior that you lust for. Once corrupted, he would make a far greater emperor than I.”

Phrygia’s heart leapt in her breast. That desire—it was lust, truly, not love—was a secret spoken to no one. This lich could strum her heart as if it were a lyre.

Phrygia suddenly saw him, the armor-bedecked young warrior. His image had formed from the red motes in the eye sockets of the lich.

Phrygia whispered, “Vinas Solamnus.”

IV

Six Years Hence, 23 Corij, 1199 Age of Light

High atop a tower in Castle Daltigoth, Vinas Solamnus, commander of the Ergothian Imperial Guard, watched the late-setting sun of summer. This vantage point was the best in all Daltigoth. Though the sun had already abandoned the rest of the city—the rest of western Ansalon, even—it still shone atop the wizard’s tower. Vinas breathed deeply as purple shadows of twilight welled up like cold water in the stone streets below.

The cool hush of night was approaching. The summer day had been all sweat and grit and hard work. The summer night, caressing his bathed and liveried flesh, promised to be a cool spectacle of vibrant stars.

Here, above the bustling dangers of the city, Vinas always felt contentment and peace. He imagined he could hear the sighs of citizens in their chambers. Perhaps the breath from their mouths became breezes that wafted among the trees and banished the hot air of daytime. Here, above it all, he could see the pattern of city streets—villas, shops, hovels.

He felt rejuvenated by the sight. This high loft gave him a view into the ways humans organized themselves, both in creation and destruction. He saw how their roofs shed rain, how their walls kept out strangers, how their streets followed the ancient terrain. In short, he saw how humans lived.

Such insight and foresight had made him the most recognized and respected soldier in all the emperor’s armies. Single-handedly, Vinas Solamnus had foiled twelve different assassination attempts. On each occasion except the first, he had captured the perpetrators, turned them over for interrogation, and seen their dead forms tossed into the buzzard yard—as befitted traitors.

In all cases except the first. He still sought that scarfaced man and his childlike accomplice. The trail was a decade cold, but someday he would track them down.

He had grown into his position. The scaffolding of youth had been filled in with large, strong muscles. His bulk made him appear taller than most folk, his bulk and the cocky tilt of his head. He had slain enough men, now, for his eyes to honestly smolder beneath his dark brows, and a decade’s worth of teeth-clenching battle had only strengthened an already prominent jawline. The very cut of his figure was dashing, elegant, and deadly, like the sharp curl of a scimitar.

“Ah, Daltigoth—Ergoth, I have grown to love you,” Vinas said wistfully as the sun at last quit the sky and slid behind the distant purple hills.

“Is that all you soldiers love,” asked a suggestive voice, “cities and empires?”

Vinas turned about to see the empress standing at the trapdoor behind him. She was no longer the frail girl the emperor had married, but a slim, strong, beautiful woman. Not that the emperor noticed. He cared little for his “speckle-bellied pony,” as he still called her. After two years in ardent pursuit of pregnancy, the emperor had declared his wife sterile, and adopted a bevy of official concubines. With them, he had already sired thirteen children, seven of whom were boys in line for his throne. The king despised his wife and had made her an outcast in her own castle. She, thus, confided more often in Commander Solamnus than in her own husband.

“Empress Phrygia,” said Vinas in surprise, dropping to one knee in a formal bow, “it is a long climb up here after so hot a day.”

Only a glow in her freckled cheeks betrayed any sign of exertion. The heavy cape and cowl she wore were as crisp and dry as if just donned. As Vinas rose from his knee, she said, “You haven’t answered my question, Commander. Is that all you love—cities and empires?”

Vinas flushed, uncomfortable at the teasing. “There are other things, milady.” The moment the words were spoken he realized how stiff they sounded. With a little smile, he elaborated, “We like swords and battles, too.”

Phrygia laughed. It was a laugh unsullied by this decade at court, still the laugh of a country lass. “Forgive me, Commander. I should know better than to treat you the way I treat Emann’s generals. After all, you can recognize sarcasm.”

“Can I?” Vinas replied, then added, “Or, I should say, may I?”

The empress laughed again and then nodded seriously. “Commander, you may.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said informally. Turning back toward the darkening sky, he commented, “I was just enjoying the sunset. I am afraid you arrived a moment too late.”

“Isn’t that always the way with me?” the empress said, walking up to stand beside him. “After all, I met you just a moment after I was married to Emann… .”

“Is that sarcasm, Majesty?” asked Vinas, hoping to dismiss the implication. He was certainly not blind to the empress’s interest in him, nor was the attraction one-sided. But she was still the emperor’s wife. Emann would not take cuckolding lightly.

The smile on Phrygia’s face waned just slightly. “No, not sarcasm. Sarcasm is saying the opposite of what you mean. That was not sarcasm, but irony—when an action meant to secure one end in fact secures its opposite.”

“I see. Thank you for the lesson, Empress,” Vinas said stiffly. “I’ll never again lose a battle due to irony.”

The royal lady’s bearing seemed to slip a little. For a moment even her regal clothes could not hide her vulnerable humanity. “Oh, you will. If my experience holds any truth, you most certainly will.”

Vinas stared out at the rolling gray clouds of twilight, pleased at how distant and orderly their turmoil seemed. “You don’t need to worry, Majesty. I’ve purged this land of assassins. I’ve cleansed this place of madmen. You have nothing to fear from dissident peasants or scheming senators. You are safe.”

“Safe,” she spat hatefully. She turned toward him, seeming at first to be shivering from the cold, but in fact trembling with unshed tears. “Is that it, then? Is that what my life is to be—safe? Safe and empty?”

“You are a woman,” said Vinas softly, trying to comfort her. “The world is a brutal place for women. Safety is no small thing in such a place.”

Now tears were streaming down her cheeks. With desperation, she looked into his eyes. “Do you remember my wedding day? Do you remember how terrified I was, just from the black watchmen marching? And then, assassins on the dais and assassins in the ceiling. On that night, I thought I would never be safe again. But I didn’t mind. With the responsibility and romance and power of being empress, there would be danger, I thought. I was wrong. Emann never gave me any responsibility, any power, outside of bearing him heirs. When I failed in that, I failed in everything. Meanwhile you took away the one last thing I had. You took away the danger, made me safe. Well, I don’t want to be safe anymore. You know how I feel, and I know you feel the same—”

“Your Majesty,” Vinas interrupted gently, “how many times have we talked about this? What we feel doesn’t matter. You must continue to be his wife, even though he does not love you, and I must continue to be his commander, even though I often despise the laws I enforce. There is a greater good here, something bigger than either of us, or our feelings. Bigger than Emann, even. Your husband is not simply a man; he is the empire.”

“Don’t you see, Vinas? We are the same, you and I. We’re both trapped. You were once a young dreamer, marching through a blizzard to deliver bread to starving peasants. Now, those are the same people you hunt down as traitors. I was once a young noble flower, dancing among the quaking aspens of Redroth. Now I’m a husk, a dried up thing without any vitality, without petals for my thorns. He took us as we were and made us what we never wanted to be.”

Vinas shook his head, his hands settling on the empress’s arms. “I have always wanted to be a warrior. I have become the finest warrior in all of Daltigoth. You have always wanted to be a beautiful woman, and look, you have no equal in Ergoth.”

She cast an accusing gesture out into the deepening gloom, toward the wall of Castle Daltigoth, where torches were winking to light as guards walked among them. “Look. They see us here. They see you touch my arms. Do you think they are blind? Do you think they do not talk about us?”

“Garrison chatter is just that,” Vinas said. “The only defense we have against it is that it is false.”

“Let’s escape from here, Vinas. Let’s go somewhere beyond the reach of Emann and his cursed empire.”

“Nothing is beyond his reach,” said the commander. “Nothing.”

She studied his face. “You really do believe that, don’t you?”

He nodded. “With every fiber of my being.”

She approached the battlements and gazed down into the castle yard. “Do you see that garden, Vinas?”

He didn’t move, didn’t look down. “I have seen it every day for ten years, as I marched out in service to your husband.”

“When I came, it was untended, unloved. I planted flowers, every color and kind I could lay hands on. It became a riotous place, peasantlike and disorganized, with daisies beside lilies beside tulips.”

“I remember,” he said with quiet appreciation.

“It was chaotic and wild, but it fit me,” she continued. “It was a happy place. But after three years of infertility, I was too upset to tend the place anymore. It went to the weeds. So did the Emperor. He went to the weeds, to the bronze-skinned whores—to the Gates of Daltigoth, as they are called, because every man in the place has been through them. Do you remember my garden then? I burned the weeds and planted white lilies. I was mourning them, you see—not just the children I couldn’t have, but the ones that the other women did have.”

“It was white lilies for three years,” commented Vinas soberly. “But for the past two years, it has been red roses.”

“Yes. Tradition requires of a widowed empress only one year of mourning. And that’s what I am, a widowed empress. I observed not one year of mourning but three. And then, I let love find root in me, again.”

“Please,” Vinas said, “please. I am as trapped as you are.”

“Do you know what happens when red roses are left untended, Vinas? They return to the wild. They forget how to bloom, and they become only a mangled mass of thorns.”

“Please, Empress—there is nothing I can do. It would be both our deaths—”

Before she could argue further, a sudden rush of wind battered against them from above. Out of the crystal-black heavens dropped a great, taloned, winged beast—a griffon. It stood twice the height of a man, with its eagle head peering sharply in the night. Its wings were easily thirty feet in span. It set to the stones atop the tower, and its rider saluted Vinas from the saddle.

“Well, Commander,” said Luccia to Vinas, “are you ready for your nighttime reconnaissance?”

“Nighttime reconnaissance,” whispered Phrygia darkly.

“Excuse me, Majesty,” said Vinas to her, dropping again to his knee. “I agree with everything you have said, but see no ready solution to our problem. But now, duty calls, and I must answer.”

“As must I,” said Phrygia blankly. “May Paladine guard your wings.”

Vinas smiled, dipped his head, and then climbed up behind Luccia. Her lean muscularity felt reassuring; her bundled hair was silken with natural oils. With a nudge from her heels and a tug on the reins, the eagle-headed lion leapt from the battlements into the empty air above the castle’s bailey.

For one heart-wrenching moment, they plunged. Then the wings spread wide, found purchase in the air, and their descent was slowed. Two more powerful surges of those tightly strung muscles, and the mount began to rise into the night.

Foreboding might have been Vinas’s word for the night. The western sky was a bruised blue, and pinpricks of light punctured the black east.

But Luccia felt none of that ominous anxiety. “You’re flirting with the empress again?” she asked as the griffon soared out past the dry moat and above the candle-winking shops and houses beyond.

“I do not flirt with the empress, Colonel Luccia,” said Vinas uncomfortably.

“Oh, come now, Commander Vinas. Don’t tell me she walked up those dank stairs, past the lab of that brimstone mage, just to take in the night airs,” parried Luccia.

He shook his head bitterly. “I don’t know why she came up,” he lied. “Now, take us out over the vulture pits. There are supposed to be two more executions tonight, and I want to make sure nothing is amiss.”

Luccia trilled a command to the griffon. The beast gave an answering shriek and banked. It climbed above the ruin of the old city walls, built in the time of the Quevalins. Its massive wings again came into play and sent them shooting toward the heavens. Roofs of thatch sped by below. Some leaked firelight into the starry sky. In four surging flaps of its great wings, the eagle-lion tore past the slums and into the tile-roofed quarter. It flew past the town houses and walled gardens where the artisans and petty nobles lived. Hard beside them lay a shantytown, built in the midden between the estates and the new wall. Riders and mount rushed out over the wall, heading toward the refuse pit that had become a killing ground for enemies of the state.

“You and your executions,” grumbled Luccia, beginning to sense her friend’s foul temper.

Vinas laughed. “Sometimes you just feel in the mood to see a guilty person die.”

Luccia frowned. “Don’t tell me we’re in for another moody month from the commander.”

“It may be a whole year this time.”

Her tone changed. “Vinas, what’s wrong? Friend to friend, not commander to colonel.”

“I can’t…” he said, shaking his head. “It’s an issue of national security.”

“You’ve always confided in me, and I’ve never told a single one of your secrets, have I?”

Whether it was her tone of voice, the stern set of her shoulders, or the months of badgering, Vinas at last spoke: “The emperor does not love his wife.”

Luccia laughed a single burst of surprise. “This is a state secret?”

“Nor she him. She has, for some time now, made certain… feelings clear to me.”

“Well she can’t have you,” said Luccia with sudden decisiveness. As though embarrassed, she quickly amended her statement. “You’re the commander of her husband’s imperial guard. How safe would Emperor Emann be if his chief bodyguard was his wife’s lover?”

“The problem is,” Vinas felt forced to reply, “I want her at least as much as she me. Oh, Luce, what am I supposed to do? I’ve fallen in love with someone I can never have.”

Luccia said nothing for a long time.

“What is it?” asked Vinas.

She lifted a hand from the reins and touched her face, then seemed to fling a thought away. “Why don’t you kill Emann and become the new emperor?”

“I’m serious,” said Vinas. “This is hard enough to talk about, let alone experience. I—”

“I’m sorry,” responded Luccia. “I understand what you’re going through.”

“Then, what should I do?” he asked.

“How should I know?” Luccia asked. She shrugged, guiding the griffon down toward a torchlit plot of ground. As they descended, the scent of detritus and rotting flesh struck them. “Most people in your position just hang on in silent suffering and pine away after their unreachable loves forever until one or the other dies.”

Vinas’s voice was wry. “Some solution.”

“Yes.” That said, she drove the griffon downward in a steep-bellied dive and landed it on the lip of the vulture pit. The carrion birds that had given the place its name started up and flew away from inert, humanlike forms, which lay among old broken tiles and mounds of smoldering rubbish. The griffon had hardly touched the ground before Luccia leapt from the saddle and headed toward the executioners, who were clustered like black-hooded buzzards on the edge of the pit.

“Wait for me, Luce,” called Vinas.

She muttered to herself, “Sometimes you just want to see a guilty person die.”

Late that night, Vinas walked through the tall double door of the emperor’s drawing room, and saw the white-haired man relaxing by a fire, a snifter of brandy in one hand and a comely, dark concubine at his side. The velvet-robed emperor did not rise at Vinas’s entrance, lifting only his eyebrows in weary greeting.

“You asked to see me, Emperor?” Vinas said, standing just inside the doorway.

“Yes,” Emann replied, his voice inflectionless. “Come in.”

As Vinas approached, the brown beauty leaned toward a white-tufted ear and whispered some seductive joke. They laughed indolently.

Vinas halted again, near enough to see that the woman’s clothing was not all that propriety would have demanded.

The emperor looked up, still laughing, though his eyes were black and humorless. “That is far enough. Commander Solamnus, there is an uprising in the east.”

“Solanthus?” Vinas asked.

“Farther,” said the emperor. “Vingaard itself. And this is no petty peasant bread war, like the one we crushed so many years back.”

Vinas refused to flinch at that lie. Facts mattered little—the emperor paid the historians, after all. “If it is not a bread war, what could it possibly be?”

“Open rebellion,” said the emperor. “Treason, pure and simple.”

“You needn’t worry. I have scoured Daltigoth of discontents. There will be no uprisings here, nor any assassins.”

The first sign of emotion showed on the emperor’s face, a kind of cruel glee. “True enough. In fact, you have done your job only too well. The only one in three hundred leagues capable of assassinating me would be you, Commander. True?”

It was the sort of question that had no safe answer. “True, Your Majesty.”

The emperor nodded. “Which is, perhaps, the best reason to send you away to put down the rebellion. There are two other reasons, though. First, you are my best, most trustworthy, and most charismatic commander; Vingaard must be brought to heel. If Vingaard goes, how many others?”

“All of the others,” replied Vinas, stating the obvious.

“Yes. So, Vinas, you must succeed, or all is lost,” the emperor said. “But there is one last reason: my wife has requested it.”

Vinas could feel his blood draining. “Empress Phrygia?”

A sharp-toothed smile came from the emperor. “What other? You see, she heard of the uprising at the same time as I. You and… Lindas here, are the third and fourth people in Daltigoth to hear of it. My wife came to me an hour ago, shortly after having had a meeting with you atop the wizard’s tower. She said she had been secretly interviewing you to determine if you should lead our armies. Her conclusion was that you should, on the grounds of your expertise.”

“Thank the empress for her faith in my abilities.”

The emperor was not fooled. “I think she harbors another reason. I think the poor girl is in love with you and cannot bear to have you here, always just beyond her reach.”

Vinas tried to act dismissive. “I’m sure Empress Phrygia would not give over an emperor for a guardsman.”

“I’m sure she would,” replied the emperor coldly. “I do not begrudge her a wandering eye, especially given that official business has kept my attentions… elsewhere.” He glanced significantly at Lindas. “Besides, it is the right of emperors and empresses to toy with their subjects and to have a few playthings among them. On the other hand, any man who would indulge a similar desire for my wife would be, of course, castrated and hanged.”

“Of course,” replied Vinas as evenly as he could.

“Suffice it to say, you have many reasons to go to Vingaard, and you and your troops will crush this rebellion, or die in the attempt.”

“Yes, Emperor. And about those troops—”

“You will have the main share of Ergoth’s army. Three divisions, with three companies of heavy horse cavalry and one of light cavalry, a unit of scouts, a company of war wizards, a unit of elite escalade forces, and the rest—infantry.”

“Is the selection of these divisions up to me?”

“The decisions have already been made,” replied the emperor tersely. “Sealed sets of orders will be dispatched at dawn. I want your army assembled, provisioned, and marching by week’s end.”

“I request also the aid of VI Daltigoth, the elite griffon company,” said Vinas.

“What the devil for?” roared the ruler. “You’re going to have four hundred horses with you. Add a hundred horseflesh-eating griffons, and you wind up with no horses and sluggish, well-fed griffons.”

“I’ll keep them separated. I need the griffon riders for advance aerial scouting and air attack during escalade.”

Red with irritation, the emperor said, “Granted.”

“And I want to assemble my own staff—my personal guard and retainers,” said Vinas.

“Done,” said Emann, “but not for you—for Ergoth. Vingaard must be crushed. For that you are lucky. Otherwise you would, even now, be hanged from the scaffold for your impertinence.”

Meus Pater [my father]

“They are sending me away, Father,” Vinas said. His troops were already gathering in the growing dawn outside. The crypt, though, was utterly dark, utterly still, so that even pious whispers seemed impious shouts. “Perhaps forever. It is why I have brought these roses to you—one for each day of the year that I will be away. Perhaps the cold and dark will keep them longer than air and sunlight.

He let the huge thorny bundle fall from his scarred arms, onto the sunken patch of moist soil where his father lay. Vinas stared at those fresh-cut blooms, doomed to die. “I expect you’ll come with me. I can use your counsel on the march.”

There came no reply. He had not expected one. “Well, I have to go and make preparations. We’ll be leaving the castle by week’s end.”

V

Six Days Hence, 29 Corij, 1199 Age of Light

Morning dawned brightly over the martial esplanade of Castle Daltigoth. Pennants snapped in the breeze. Already, Commander Vinas Solamnus’s elite troops—heavy horse, escalade forces, heavy infantry, standard bearers and drum corps—stood ranked on the very paving stones where he and Luccia had first sought to join the divisions of Daltigoth. The two of them marched at the head of Vinas’s forces.

Only three thousand of Vinas’s troops—one sixth of his larger force—were mustered for the march out of Daltigoth. The commander had already dispatched two of his divisions to begin the long trek to Vingaard.

The first of these divisions, II Redroth, was to march from its staging ground on the western edge of Hylo. They would march through kender country and then capture and hold a high pass in the Rimrange Mountains. Leaving a contingent to guard the pass, II Redroth would converge upon Vingaard Keep from the west.

The second division, III Caergoth, was even now marching eastward from its muster point, heading for the northern tip of Qualinesti. From there, the division would move into the central plains of Ansalon. After a semicircular march through the grasslands and along the northern Khalkists, III Caergoth would descend on Vingaard from the northeast.

Meanwhile, the three thousand troops now arrayed at the castle gates would march the Solanthus road and be augmented to a full complement along the route. Once past Solanthus and at full strength, Vinas’s army would advance down the rebels’ throats and flush out any ambush. Though this division would take the shortest route, theirs would be a way paved with swords and skulls. Vinas’s heavy troops might be slow-moving and conspicuous, but they were also utterly ruthless. Their every battle would be calculated to be audacious and brutal, so that news of Vinas’s division would draw attention from the main share of his forces. This force would purge the belly of Ergoth and terrify Vingaard with tales of its deeds. Then, two months hence, when Vinas descended upon Vingaard, it would be with three dread divisions instead of one, and on three fronts.

Of course, Vinas’s scouts were already deep in rebel territory.

The first battle that any of the divisions would have to fight would be in Daltigoth. It was a popular battle, a war of perceptions and allegiances. The three thousand elite forces that Vinas had mustered on the ankle-breaking parade grounds could, in their march down the King’s Way, muster another twenty-five thousand souls—the citizens of Daltigoth.

Vinas stood in the saddle and raised his sword before him. “Forward!” He nudged his black charger, Courage. The beast gave an eager jerk and trotted into motion. Behind Vinas, his personal staff cantered. Among them rode Chancellor Titus, astride a burly plow horse easily twice the size of the other mounts.

The drumsmen began their bright march cadence—unhurried, measured, and violent. Then came a regiment of infantry, escalade forces, and heavy horse.

To win this war of hearts and hopes, the soldiers would have to get the people’s attention. Vinas had garbed his troops in polished armor and bleached livery. Bright banners waved in challenge above the grim, hard faces of the soldiers. Their boots were harsh on the stones, turning the very cobbles into myriad drumheads.

Vinas had drilled the troops for twelve hours each of the last three days, making certain their turns snapped, their knees rose in perfect alignment, their rows formed diagonals and semidiagonals. Vinas wanted the people to believe this was no desperately gathered and fielded mob, but a faultless and fail-safe machine of war.

But flash and roar and precision were not enough. Awe was not enough. These soldiers had to seem like young, courageous men marching into great danger. And so, the night before the march, Vinas had dressed in his full uniform and taken a carriage of flowers through the streets of the city. Whenever he spied a woman—young or old, beautiful or ugly, noble or peasant—he would drive up beside her and give her a luck-flower.

“It is free, dear,” he would say gallantly. “A gift from Commander Vinas Solamnus. Let this flower comfort you this night, before the great march.” When she began to thank him, he would move on, then would stop as if remembering something. “Oh, and if you give the flower to a soldier in tomorrow’s march, your family will be blessed, and the soldier will be guarded by Lady Branchala of the Flowers.” It had been so small and simple a bribe.

It was working charmingly. As the polished and sternfaced soldiers made their way down the thronging King’s Way, women would, at intervals, dart or hobble out to one of them with a flower. Some would even take the time to stick the stem in a lapel hole, or pause to kiss a cool, proud cheek. Such encounters made the soldiers flush in embarrassment. The women giggled and flirted. The rest of the citizenry gawked in amazement and talked of how the city loved her soldiery.

That was that. Flash, roar, precision, pride, courage, and flowers. Those petals changed the soldiers as commands and calisthenics could not have. They changed, too, the people who clung to the parade as it swept down the streets, laughing and weeping, and lingering for a long, stunned, tearful silence at the gate of the city.

Phrygia stood atop the wizard’s tower and looked down at Vinas’s army—a patient centipede crawling out the Solanthus Road Gate. He was at the head of that segmented monster, she knew, giving pace to its legs and pulse to its blood. How tiny was he at the head of that horde. How insignificant was that horde in the belly of wide Daltigoth, and was Daltigoth in the heart of Ergoth. Ergoth itself was the dead dry skin of the world. It seemed ludicrous that such a small cluster of men could make any difference at all in the great wash of time.

How could the inconsequential commander of that army change anything at all?

But he was everything. Phrygia had decided long ago to take possession of him, and truly she and Caitiff had done much to corrupt the man, already. Commander Vinas Solamnus was now as ruthless as he was moral. He had slain for the good of a wicked imperial family. He had been true to an unholy pact.

Somehow, through all of it, Vinas had taken possession of Phrygia rather than the other way around. She could think of no one else, nothing else.

It was absurd. She was empress of the greatest nation in. the world. Her afternoon shadow, cast down from the height of the tower, was gigantic, a black shroud covering half of Vinas’s army. What was one small man to her?

Everything.

The Vingaard Uprising had come at the perfect time.

Caitiff had suggested she send Vinas away—to shape him into a man who could slay Emann and take the throne. In truth, Caitiff knew that Phrygia had been trapped in the commander’s eyes and arms. Until Vinas left, Phrygia would make a useless conspirator. She had agreed that sending Vinas away would save them both.

That was her gravest mistake, she now knew. Caitiff was wrong; neither of them could be saved. At least, if damned, they should be together.

Phrygia shivered. The city somehow seemed colder already, emptier. How could he simply march away like that, with no word of farewell? How could he so simply and passively submit to this banishment? Half of Phrygia, perhaps all of Phrygia, had hoped, had half-expected that he would rail against the orders, would rise up and slay her husband and take his place. The people would have welcomed Vinas. They would have worshiped him. And she, at his side, would have been the happiest, most powerful woman in the world.

No. He did none of this. Instead of dragging a knife across the emperor’s throat and tossing his body into the vulture pit, Vinas had knelt before the man. He willingly, happily, paraded his way out of Daltigoth, away from Phrygia.

She considered her shadow again. Vinas was not the only one who could cast the world in a black pall.

The last of the soldiers marched through the archway. Idiot women called after them and wept and threw flowers in their wake.

Phrygia took her shadow with her down the stairs… to the laboratory of the court mage. Caitiff might be wrong—having conquered death, all liches are incurable optimists—but he was still powerful. A few well-placed and wicked spells could make Vinas Solamnus hers.

Luccia watched the small shadow of her griffon flit among the dusk-red trees below. The wind was cold. The griffon struggled wearily to hold himself in the sky. His golden pelt bunched against the chill. His down feathers stood beneath the slick plumes of his wings.

“Easy, Terraton,” she said, patting the creature’s eagle neck. “Just one more stop. Then we’ll fly to the rest of the pride and bed down.”

The creature gave no sardonic shriek as an answer. He truly was tired.

Colonel Luccia had sent her captain, and the rest of her mounted company, wheeling north to scout out the grasslands. They were to slay any bandits or other menaces, and then prepare an infantry camp ten miles northeast of Daltigoth. Vinas and his ground forces would spend the night there.

Meanwhile, Luccia had flown Terraton on a long, sweeping rearward path. They had searched for hostile forces in two hundred miles of land and fifty miles of ocean. It would not do to empty Daltigoth of its divisions only to have the city taken from the icy southeast. She had found no signs of armies, only spooked ice barbarians, shambling walrus men, and the occasional yeti. Such creatures had no use for cities, nor any means to capture one.

During the past three hours, Luccia and Terraton had been bearing eastward. They hoped to find the army just as it finished setting camp. Behind them, the sun was abandoning the sky. The orb took with it the warm updrafts that had kept Terraton aloft all day. Soon, whether they found the army camp or not, the griffon and his rider would have to quit the sky.

There, on what looked like the impossible rim of the world, she saw the dim, smoky glow of bivouacs.

“There, Terraton, get us there, and you can rest a bit.”

The griffon bore her onward, past a granite escarpment and a long, greenish lake. Before them, the flames grew to pillars that could have been spotted a hundred miles away.

Vinas had already begun his campaign of audacity.

Every aspect of his march was to be legendary in scale—bivouacs the size of bonfires, horses as massive as elephants, daytime battles and nighttime revels… . Vinas would orchestrate a march so bold that no historian, let alone any living man, could ignore him.

With aching wings, Terraton topped a final strip of forest. He soared levelly toward the hilltop encampment. The sentries near the forest edge waved them on, lowering short bows from the sky. As Terraton glided above the heads of soldiers, bustling among the fires, the warriors began to notice the griffon’s approach. They fell a step or two to either side, like water parting before a landing heron. Horses shied and screamed as the silhouette of their ancient enemy flashed past in the darkening sky.

Terraton was too tired even to mock them. He let the winds from the fires buoy him along until he neared the hilltop. There, the command tent was pitched. He glided to a landing.

Luccia swung from the saddle and found her own legs sore from the long ride. She crouched for a moment, letting the aches stretch themselves out, then stood and patted Terraton on the neck. “Thanks, friend. Rest now a bit. I’ve a report to make. Then it’s one more mile to the griffon camp.”

The eagle-lion did not answer except with a nip.

The shriek of a horse brought Luccia’s attention to the main tent. Beside it, a black charger reared. It spun deadly hooves at the griffon. From the tent charged a powerfully built man, who gripped the charger’s reins and, by strength and soothing words, brought it back to ground.

“What the devil is spooking Courage?” the man roared darkly.

“Commander Solamnus, I have a report,” Luccia said.

He smiled in recognition. “Yes, Colonel Luccia. What is your report?”

She cleared her throat. “I circled the land and sea south of Daltigoth, and found no sign of enemy movement.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” replied Vinas casually. He pivoted and led his horse back to the far side of the command tent.

Luccia gaped. Was that a dismissal? She started to turn toward her own mount, then spun on her heel and stalked after the commander. She found him at the back of the tent, hobbling the charger out of sight of the griffon. “That’s it, then? ‘Glad to hear it, Colonel’? Back to work, Colonel?” she asked.

He finished with the horse and patted its shoulder. “Well, I guess so,” he replied with an apologetic shrug. “Good work. Get some rest.” He walked around her, heading for the tent flaps.

“Wait a moment,” she said, pursuing him over the trampled grass. “My orders said you asked for me and my company. They said you wanted me, specifically”

He paused at the mouth of the tent. “Right. You’re the one I want. I’m sorry, Luce. I’m just a little distracted. Would you like to step inside?” he asked, pulling back the tent flap and motioning her inside.

She tried not to drop her scowl. “Of course, I would.” She ducked, entering the flap, and nearly sprawled over the lantern-lit and paper-strewn table that occupied the center of the tent.

“Oh!” she said as she caught her balance.

Underchancellor Titus sat on one side of the field table, his back pressed against the sloping roof of the tent. He waved in greeting. “Hello, Luce. It’s good to see your lovely face.”

Before she could reply, Colonel Gaias added, “Greetings, Colonel.” He smiled through his gray beard.

She was still blinking in surprise when Vinas barged in behind her and sent her sprawling a second time. He quickly backed away, red-faced. With a sheepish smile, he took a stool at the cleric’s side.

Luccia stared at them, amazed. They looked like three boys in a tree house, savoring the novelty of their surroundings. Finding an empty stool, Luccia sat down, cradling her chin in her hands. “So, which one of you is going to show me the club handshake?”

Ignoring her comment, Vinas spoke. “We’ve been working out the wording of my speech tonight. We’ve almost finished, but there are a few rough spots you could help us smooth out.”

Vinas drew the pages toward himself and straightened them with fidgety motions of his hands. “For instance, here, where I want to establish a connection with the soldiers, the text currently reads: ‘Some of you have sisters you didn’t like much, but surely you defended them. You defended their honor. Will you not, then, defend Daltigoth, your sister?’”

Luccia looked thoughtful for a moment. “It sounds too tentative, too speculative. And what’s this about comparing the city to an unpopular sister?”

Vinas bit his lip. “Well, some of these troops hate Daltigoth. I don’t want to distance them by assuming they all love the city.”

“Instead, you want to distance those who truly love the city and wish to defend it?” asked Luccia.

Vinas shuffled through the pages. “I thought it would be easier to arouse hatred of Vingaard than love of Daltigoth. Listen to this: ‘We will scatter their bones so that not even the vultures can find all the pieces. We will bash their children’s heads against rocks—’”

“Wait a moment,” interrupted Luccia. “If you plan on asking me to bash children’s heads against rocks, you’ll have to find a new griffon colonel.”

He cocked his head. “Of course I’m not going to ask that. This is all rhetoric, meant to stir emotions.”

“It’s lies, in other words?”

Vinas nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose, but they are expedient, harmless lies.”

“Harmless?” said Luccia. “If one of your soldiers takes you literally and smashes a child’s head against a stone, that is certainly not harmless.”

“Right,” he said, nodding. “I’ll take that part out. And I’ll spice up the business about the sister. What we need are moving but harmless lies, then—something more symbolic and motivational. If we’re going to win this war, we need a thorough mythology to inspire it.”

“Is that all you care about,” asked Luccia, “winning the war? What about the old days, Vinas? What about starving people and obese nobles? You used to right wrongs, not defend them.”

Vinas looked chastened for a moment. “Look, I was young then. We can’t change the world. The best we can do is fight the momentary battles—and win.”

“I’m not sure I would go that far,” said Titus. He felt an inspiration and started scribbling out some fresh words. “I’ve got an idea!”

Luce nodded toward the door. “I’ll be outside, taking Terraton to the water troughs. You boys seem to know what you’re doing.”

Meus Pater [my father]

This is what I said to them, Father, to the three thousand souls I led up and out of Daltigoth:

Hear me, colonels and soldiers. Hear me, lieutenants and horsemen, war wizards and griffon riders. Hear me, heart of Ergoth.

We camp here, on a road that joins two great cities. The one we just left, Daltigoth, is nursing mother to most of us, is sister to some of us, is daughter, even, to a few.

This city raised me, and many of you. Her proud people, bustling plazas, broad roads, and vine-overgrown villas have been aunts and uncles to us—the watchful, tolerant guardians of our youth. But look no farther than yourself for proof of that fine lineage. From this parent city of ours has marched today the most glorious army ever assembled beneath sun or moons.

They liked that part, and cheered in their multitude. For a moment, the grassy hillside was a shouting, crashing sea. Then they were calmed. I spoke on.

Daltigoth has been sister to me, and to many of you. She was the beloved sibling against whom I strived, and battled, and took my measure. She was worthy, and I often found myself falling short of her wisdom or strength, her beauty or fortitude. Always, though, whether infighting her or defending her, I loved her and learned from her.

How many of you were wished well on your way by sisters—whether by blood or patriotism—and their fragile fear, fear that you, their brothers, might not return from this war?

The moan that circled among the warriors then was quieter than their first cheer, but more deeply felt.

And, Daltigoth, my daughter. Many of you have daughters and sons, I know. My own daughter, this day, told me she would wait and watch until I returned. I told her I might be a long while on the road, perhaps a year or more. I told her she could not possibly stay awake until I returned. She said simply, ‘Then I will open my eyes very wide, so that I will never lose sight of you.’

Ah, Father, now I had them. Their hearts were laid open to me as to a long sword. It made me wish I did indeed have a daughter.

I march for her, for my Dalla girl. We march for daughter Daltigoth and sister Daltigoth and mother Daltigoth, all. We defend their honor, their very lives. And upon their honest hope and constant faith in us, let us swear to keep our eyes wide open, that we never lose sight of them.

What pernicious poetry, aye, Father? I had roused their deepest selves with the goad of family and the imperative of peril. Now, I had only to channel the welling fear and hatred.

We march down the very throat of hell. We march to that second great city whose men have reviled their mothers and pillaged their sisters and left their daughters, heel-bound and bare, to die in the freezing rain. Their city is called Vingaard, for they jealously guard their grapes and lavish care on their wine. But it is poison. They drink it to numb wits and knuckles before they return home to beat their wives. They crush beneath their bloody feet the sweet souls of their mothers, making the vinegar of ingratitude, and the sweet minds of their sisters, making the heady burgundy of brutality, and the sweet hearts of their daughters, making the debauched brandy of incest.

I see you cringe, you riders of heavy horses, you bearers of lances and spell-slaying mages. I see you, who have slain in multitudes, shying from the horrid crimes of our horrid foes. And well you should. I would have spared you such descriptions, but I feared that if you were not duly prepared for the monstrosities you face upon the battlefield, you might pity them.

There is no pity for such men, no pity but to slay them quickly and tread upon their still-breathing bodies in your haste to slay their companions!

The roar returned. This time it was not shouts of joy, but of anger, of vengeance. The air was full of fists and swords and axes. I was glad there were no hapless foes around for such fury to be spent upon. No, I wanted it preserved, wrapped around those three thousand hearts. I wanted the soldiers to nurture their hatred as a mother suckles a babe. By the time we actually strode into battle, the enmity would be fully formed, and each man would fight like two men. Each would be beside himself with rage.

Heroes of Daltigoth! Hear me, heroes! Hear me! Our work here, on this road, and there, in distant Vingaard, will be the stuff of legends. I am not the hero of that legend. Each of you is. Let this march be told not in a great epic, but in a thousand great epics. We stand on the terrible threshold of history. Now, let us cross to destiny!

It was a good speech, Father, wouldn’t you say? The crowd certainly thought so. Chancellor Titus wrote the whole thing down, and sealed it in a steel case, and sent it back to the emperor. He thought it worthy of history.

I’ll deliver a new one each night. By the time we are within sight of Vingaard Keep, my men will be rabid for rebel blood.

I wonder why Luce flew away in the middle of it.

VI

Eight Days Hence, 7 Argon, 1199 Age of Light

The first attackers struck like falcons.

With only half a day’s march remaining before Caergoth, the army had headed into a narrow gorge, where the road sided a dry river. The only other path would have added two days to their journey, and provided other opportunities for ambush. If this had been hostile country, Commander Solamnus would never have led his army into that cliff-flanked pass. But this was the heartland of Ergoth.

Commander Solamnus had assiduously sent advance forces to scour the countryside. Not a griffon had seen the archers. Not a war dog had sniffed them out. Not a scout had flushed them from cover, nor had any magic spell detected their whispers.

The Ergothians were even singing an old marching song when the first arrows whined in among them.

Twelve infantrymen slumped to the ground. Two of the soldiers went limp as dolls, arrows sticking comically from their ears. The others flopped a bit. One, stumbling, got up, only to fall on the shaft in his chest and drive it out his back.

The song died. It had taken a heartbeat for everyone to realize this was not some pantomime on this bright, safe afternoon. In the sudden silence, more arrows sang. Another dozen men went down. This time, three horses pranced with shafts jutting, half-buried, from their flanks.

Then—commands, shouts, spells, oaths.

“Get those horses out of here!” Vinas shouted to the cavalrymen while Courage wheeled and stamped. “Mages, infantry, archers—take cover! Fire at will!”

The commands were being obeyed even before Vinas formulated a plan. These were well-picked men. They knew what to do.

Commander Solamnus spurred Courage toward a cleft in the base of the cliff wall. Arrows pelted down in a deadly hail all around. He charged past a scowling Ergothian war wizard, who squinted up through a sphere of Vermillion energy that shimmered around him. Dust rolled in Courage’s wake as steed and warrior plunged into the narrow gap. Of his own accord, Courage halted and spun about to face the action.

Vinas leapt from the saddle, taking with him his short bow and a raw, sweet fury. Courage shrieked and reared, lashing out with his hooves.

Vinas spared the spirited animal a glance, and saw fletchings had made a shallow wound in the horse’s stifle. The shot had come from the rear. Courage’s legs kicked into a thornbush. The plant broke loose from the wall and tumbled down to the ground, and in the process it transformed into a man in the green and black livery of an Ergothian scout.

Vinas stared in amazement at the crumpled man. Courage meanwhile kicked the body one last time, just for spite. Vinas turned, seeing a similar thornbush on a ledge up the opposite cliff. Nocking an arrow, he let fly. The shaft flashed into the bush, which shuddered and transformed into a gasping female archer. The woman clutched an arrow in her chest and leaned back to die against the black stone.

Vinas glanced down the valley, where arrows leapt from similar thistles.

“Aim for the bushes!” Vinas shouted to his men. “They’re hiding in the bushes!”

His command was shouted down the line, and shafts rose from the ground in thick swarms, more than answering those that rained down from above. Now they were slumping, falling, thrashing—those damned archers. Vinas himself drilled four in the next moments, letting one of his victims gasp a long while in agony before he plugged her a second time through the skull.

“And all because of Courage,” he told himself, spitting grit from his mouth. He determined he would tend to his beloved mount as soon as the battle was won.

The end was not long in coming. Arrows flew up the sides of the canyon, nicking white scars into the black rock. The enemies left long streaks of red as they plunged down the cliff face or clung and bled to death.

Vinas emerged from the cleft in the cliff wall. The scene of carnage was disturbing: twenty-three soldiers and four horses down in the first three seconds, and since then two more soldiers. Twenty-five casualties to Vinas’s three thousand men—a paltry loss.

Worse for the ambushers. Every last one of their two hundred were dead or wounded. Many of the wounded were even now being finished off by casual fire from below.

“Surrender, and live,” shouted Vinas to the few that clung defiantly to their perches.

One of the archers, a young man whose leg was pinned to a twisted stump of tree, called out, “We cannot. We have orders to fight to the death.” His voice had not yet matured, and he spoke each statement like an inflected question. A Daltigoth east-ender.

“Orders from whom?” called out the commander. “Find Colonel Hellas’s body. He’s the one with the note.”

Hellas, thought Vinas with irritation. Old Hellas of the Solanthian troubles. He had been restationed to Caergoth. These two companies must have marched with him from there.

“It’s a note for you, Commander Solamnus,” supplied the young archer.

For me? Vinas thought.

While his troops went after the rest of the men, Vinas shouted up to the young archer, “I’ll find his body more easily with your help. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the old bastard. His face might have gotten ruined in the fall.” He grabbed a goggle-eyed priest, rushing back and forth between the wounded, and asked the man to find Titus to heal Courage. Then, Vinas climbed up the sloped face of the cliff, using rocky crevices as handholds. “I’m coming up, son.”

“I’m not your son, Commander,” the youth shouted back. His red hair stood stiff and glossy around his head, like a halo in copper. “And I haven’t given up yet, either. I’ll shoot you if you come closer,” he warned.

“No, you won’t,” said Vinas confidently, gaining a low shelf of stone and sidling along it to the next level. “You’re too young to die, and you know it. If you even try to shoot me, one of my war wizards will make your head leap off of your body.”

“I have orders not to surrender,” the youth said. “I have orders to fight to the death.”

Vinas had almost reached the lad, and saw a freckle-faced young man, white with pain and terror, and gingerly wiggling a bloody shaft in his leg. The boy indeed did not look more than thirteen. “Since when do the orders of a colonel take precedence over the orders of the imperial high commander?”

“They’re not from Colonel Hellas,” the lad said, at last losing his resolve. He arched his back, pulling frantically at the arrow. “They’re from the empress, herself.”

Vinas climbed onto the ledge. He studied the boy’s wound, and then said, “I’ll get that arrow out if you take me to Hellas.”

A teary nod was all the youngster could muster.

The young man, whose name was Barnabas, perked up considerably when Anistas, a beautiful priestess, knelt down to tend his arrow wound. Vinas left them to their idle talk—the same youthful dialect that he and Luccia had once spoken—and went over to the body of Hellas.

The commander stood above the dirty and misshapen form, which lay facedown atop a broken shaft. He remembered what the captain had looked like on that blizzard night so many years ago, and had little interest in seeing what the ravages of time had done to him. Still, he wanted that note from Hellas’s pocket.

An iron-edged toe hooked beneath the man’s bloody shoulder. Vinas flipped him over. It was a good thing Barnabas could identify Hellas—the captain had left the better half of his face on the cliff side. Not looking too closely, Vinas reached into the tabard and pulled forth the note. He broke the wax seal, unfolded the page, and read:

High Commander Solamnus:

How cruel of you to prune these last two hundred red roses. They are dead because of you. Now the bush cannot help going wild, ending all in thorns and brambles.

Expect worse, here on out.

Your Beloved,
Empress Phrygia

He looked up from the note, which trembled ever so slightly in his hand. Vinas would not reveal the note to the emperor. It implicated him in a liaison. Such a note could easily have been forged; how much simpler to believe in the treachery of a career-stalled colonel than that of an empress.

“Wicked woman,” Vinas whispered to himself. “Wicked, wicked woman.”

Three Days Hence, 10 Argon, 1199 Age of Light

Twenty-five biers accompanied the procession of soldiers that reached a nighttime Caergoth. The biers bore the honored dead of Ergoth. The dishonored dead were present only in the shale dust and blood caked beneath the fingernails of the living.

It had taken an army of three thousand the worse part of two days to pile up and sanctify the cairns of two hundred rebels. Not rebels—men following imperial orders, against other men following imperial orders.

Barnabas, the injured young archer and the only survivor among the ambushers, rode in bleak-faced silence beside Anistas. He needed no armed escort. There were just short of three thousand warriors to run him down should he try to flee. He looked a natural enough partner to the young cleric woman, and their silence was companionable, if uncomfortable.

“Those weren’t the only orders from the empress,” he had said ominously. He had seen other packets given to various colonels stationed at Caergoth. As to what was in them, he didn’t know.

Yes, the ambush in the gorge had been a horrible surprise. But a worse one waited in Caergoth.

Something dreadful had happened here. Empress Phrygia’s letter guaranteed it. The darkness of the ramparts and palisades confirmed it. Whatever it was, it had happened after Vinas’s advanced scouts had passed here, days before.

When they had first arrived and seen the darkness of the place, Vinas had sent the griffon riders out to fly over Caergoth. He had ordered them not to land, not to spring whatever trap was set. Now, as the army waited within a few hundred yards of the gates, the griffon squad returned with the news.

A black form fluttered down from the deepening darkness. It was Luccia, astride her griffon—what was his name? Tear along?

Courage, injured and walking beside Commander Solamnus, started and snorted, but let Vinas’s tight grip on the reins hold him to ground.

Luccia dismounted calmly instead of leaping from the saddle with her typical aplomb. Her face was grave as she approached her commander.

“Greetings, Luce,” Vinas said. His voice was casual, tired. “What have you to report?”

“Hello, Commander,” she replied. “None of us could see much. The fortress looked deserted. The village nearby, too. Not a candle lit anywhere. No one moving about the street. No one. The place stinks of death.”

“What of the troop levy? What about the thousand reinforcements?” Vinas asked. “Any sign of them?”

At last, Luccia’s eyes came to bear on him. “They might be hiding inside, waiting to ambush.”

“Judging from their compatriots, that is a definite possibility.” Vinas cast an angry look at the young archer silently sitting astride his horse.

Luccia said, “There’s no sign of military movement in the hundred square leagues around the fortress.”

Vinas nodded. “Gaias, come here, please.”

Gaias quickly obliged.

“Gaias, pass word among the soldiers to take extra caution. Tell them to anticipate taking up a defensive pattern if we come under attack from the fortification.”

“Yes, Commander,” said Gaias, turning to go.

“And, Gaias,” Vinas added, “ask Titus and his acolytes to pray.”

Gaias pulled back from the doorway of the hovel. His eyes were watering, and not from just the stench.

The young soldier beside him pushed the door closed. “Three in there,” he reported. “Throats cut. Soldiers’ footprints. Just like the others.”

The old colonel nodded, sketching a shaky X over the house on the hand-drawn map. That left only two shacks without X’s.

“Oh, gods! Oh Kiri-Jolith of the sword, why?” came a call from the soldier at the door of one of the two remaining shacks. A similar call came from the direction of the other. Without waiting for particulars, Gaias marked X’s on the last two huts. He stared for a moment at the page, then wadded the thing and dropped it to the ground.

“Gather up,” he said quietly. The young soldier beside him cupped hands to relay the order.

Gaias led his men back toward the main corps that waited in hushed uneasiness in the dark clearing beyond the village. Gaias’s weary and sickened soldiers staggered behind him. The sentries ahead, posted at the edge of the army, raised their bows.

“It’s us,” the colonel called out. “It’s no walking dead.”

That terse explanation sent a ripple of nervous laughter through the distant ranks.

To help his men shake off their terror, and to help keep it from spreading to the others, Gaias called out, “Double time.” He and his troops started a jog back to the others. Some of the younger soldiers, apparently spooked by the dead darkness, broke into a sprint to rejoin their living comrades.

Let them go, thought Gaias. This isn’t running from battle. This is running from butchery.

Gaias reached the commander, paused to catch his breath, and began his report. “All dead. Throats slit.”

Vinas winced. “Plainsmen?”

“Soldiers,” Gaias replied. “It was orderly, as if soldiers went house by house, knocked politely and were let in the door, then slit the peasants’ throats.”

Vinas spat as he looked away into the forest gloom. He shook his head. “Where do they think the armies come from? From the people, that’s where.”

Gaias watched his commander, those last words echoing meaninglessly in his mind. “What should we do?”

“What else?” replied Vinas with sudden anger. “On to the fortress. We won’t solve this riddle without more atrocities. I can see that now. The wicked woman has made sure of that.”

Still uncertain, Gaias nodded. “I’ll give the order, and tell my men to keep mum about what they saw. No need to spook everyone.”

“You do that,” said Vinas cursorily.

There came a rushing motion in the darkness. The commander had mounted his black charger. He turned the beast and moved off, leaving his shadowy army behind.

Gaias issued orders to his lieutenants, then mounted up and cried, “Move out! Double time!”

He led the army in the wake of its commander. The din of horse hooves and iron-shod men filled the blackness.

The fortress, a palisade of sharpened log ends and jointed wood towers, loomed in front of the commander. Soon, its darkness swallowed him up. Still, the thunder of Courage sounded on the plain. Vinas rode forward.

A distant thud like the kick of a boot, and the lightless, unhinged gate swung inward. For a moment Vinas, astride his steed, was dimly silhouetted in the moonlit gate. Then he was gone.

Gaias’s first duty was to the men who served him. But Commander Solamnus was not merely a superior; he was a friend.

“Follow, at best speed!” Gaias commanded. He spurred his horse toward the gateway where Vinas had disappeared.

Gaias’s mount ate up ground. He crouched low over the beast’s tossing mane. The old colonel held the reins loosely, letting the horse find its way through the blackness.

“Commander,” Gaias called into the ghost-gray yard beyond. He awaited no response, drawing his sword and thrusting the door back from the path. It swung inward, nearly out of the way, before catching on some heavy, soft bulk. Gaias gritted his teeth and urged the horse forward, muscling through the gap. He kicked at the door. There came a dead groan from behind it, putrid air from rotting lungs.

The horse tried to wheel. Gaias held it steady and drove it on through.

The inner bailey, a wide stockaded fort with several outposts and a central lookout, was a charnel house. In the gray of night, five gibbeted bodies swayed with the unmistakable motion of stiff weight. They hung in clear dry air beneath a fat timber, like drying meat. So had death come to the five colonels.

The soldiers were less well disposed of. Some squatted in shambled rot beside posts or in comers. Others lay in lines and arrays, as though the dead from one execution were not even dragged away before the next batch were lined up. There were hundreds of bodies, yes, but certainly not thousands.

And no sign of Commander Solamnus.

Gaias rode forward through a swarm of flies that were buzzing even though it was night.

The door to the command bunker hung open. Vinas would have gone there. Yes, Courage stood beside the door, his black tail flashing.

Gaias edged his mount across the yard of death. He let the horse find its footing. The bunker was a low-lying redoubt roofed in beams as thick as the gibbet. Halfway there, Gaias saw a faint light. The light seemed to flicker, and then swell radiantly. It revealed a cellar doorway. Its twin covers were drawn upward like wings. Glowing stairs led down the bunker’s throat.

Flies shimmered in the air before him. A small kick sent his horse prancing gingerly over the last bodies. Gaias leapt from the saddle, letting his horse trot to Courage and nuzzle the beast.

The old colonel virtually flung himself down the stairs. He had almost reached the bottom when a feeble call came from within. “Gaias. I need you.”

He entered the subterranean chamber. It was a military command post with a map table illuminated by a single lantern. The walls had been done up with tapestries, and the floor was thick with rugs. The chamber was ringed with fat chairs. In one sat a man who cradled a crossbow in his arms. He appeared at first to be surprised by Gaias’s arrival, his mouth wide open and his eyes staring in disbelief. Then Gaias saw a fly crawling across one of those open eyes. The butt end of a quarrel stuck like a serpent’s tongue from the man’s mouth.

“Over here,” came the voice.

The commander was slumped in a similar position. In place of the crossbow, there was a much-tattered, hand-oiled book, lying open.

“You have fought a hundred wars. Tell me how to fight one such as this,” the commander said. He wearily handed over the book.

Gaias took it, looking for a moment into the despairing eyes of his friend. Then, leaning toward the light, he squinted and began to read.

Meus Pater [my father]

Father, I am glad to be away from that place of death. We have marched a mile north of Caergoth, off the main road and upwind. It is a dreary night. I have ordered great bonfires and doubled the ration of wine. I have even given a speech for courage.

Such things do little to banish the atrocities we’ve seen.

This book—the log of General Fineas Tragarus, commander of the fortress—tells it all:

27 Corij, 1199

The emperor has sent orders that I play host to Commander Vinas Solamnus and his half-division on the evening of 9 Bran. Solamnus will be taking away with him a levy of five hundred men to help fight in Vingaard.

The imperial missive also orders that I send a unit of two hundred men back to Daltigoth. Apparently, since the departure of Solamnus, the empress has grown hysterical with worry about assassins.

I will send Hellas’s unit. With their departure, the loss of five hundred more men to Solanthus in the east, and Solamnus’s own levy, I will be reduced to seven hundred fifty men. My forces will not match those of Commander Solamnus when he arrives.

1 Argon, 1199

This afternoon, word came of a great atrocity. In some communal madness, a company of men sneaked into Caergate and slew every man, woman, and child. While I was out, searching through the carnage, Colonel Desidras discovered his own men, bloody to the elbows, and bragging of the murders. With the aid of his six colonel comrades, Desidras marshaled his company. He took twenty-five men at a time, lined them up against the wall, and brought them down with bow fire.

Upon returning from the village, I was amazed to learn of this slaughter. Though he had ordered the execution of his men, Desidras was undone by it. He took the murders on himself, said he himself had slain them all, even the villagers. The other colonels told me of the blood on Desidras’s men, and how they bragged about what they had done.

I got Desidras good and drunk in hopes he would sleep… and in fear that he might decide to take his own life. Late this night—the next morning, really—he was found dead in a pool of bloody vomit.

2 Argon, 1199

What outrages! What madness!

In the night, the company of Terras Ditrivus slew the sleeping men of three other companies before they were, to a man, killed. The other five colonels stabbed Terras to death, and cast lots for his belongings. All of this killing happened as though in the heat of battle, justice meted out upon the moment. I stumbled on the scene only with the tumble of the dice, as the five divided the madman’s possessions. I would not let them profit from such evil dealings, and took all the items to be locked away as evidence.

There is one item among them, though, too precious to be entrusted to a vault of steel and stone—a pendant, set with a ruby the size of a child’s heart. I donned it even as I marched out to the two remaining companies and ordered them to bury or bum the dead.

3 Argon, 1199

They are all traitors. I know that now. I found among the articles of Colonel Desidras’s captain, Octavias, a letter from the empress. She charged Octavias to find the rebels among the villagers, and said the enclosed enchanted pendant—the very pendant I now wear—would aid his search. The pendant, the size and color of a child’s heart, lets its wearer see the true heart of every man. It would show the heart of traitors as utter blackness.

That is why Octavias slew the villagers, to a man. Every last one fomented rebellion in their hearts.

It seems, though, the peasant treasons have infected the soldiers. Once Octavias was slain, the pendant was pillaged by Terras Ditrivus, who ordered his men to slay three hundred sleepers. Why cruel fate made him miss the five colonels, I cannot guess, but the black-hearted villains killed Terras, and almost gained the pendant.

I wear it now. I saw the evil in the final fifty men. Yes, one hundred fifty of the conspirators fled during the night, no doubt believing I would hunt them out. They won’t escape.

Neither did the fifty. I myself slew those who slept, then walked the stockade and stuck a knife in every throat there. The last seventeen I ordered to bring their five commanders to the gallows, if they wished their own lives spared. Then, even as the gibbet fell, I slew five more men by knife, ten by sword. The last two I hunted down through the fortress and strangled with my own fingers.

The account ended there. We found Fineas Tragarus wearing the pendant and clutching a crossbow to his chest, a bolt through his brain. I can deduce only that in writing the account yesterday morning, he had cause to glance down at his own heart, blacker than all the others.

It’s all the work of Phrygia. The ruby was rose-cut, rose-red. It was set in tarnished silver worked to look like thorny rose branches and woven into a crown—Phrygia’s crown. It’s her rose heart gone to thorns and evil.

A thousand men dead, and for what?

If such continues, Phrygia will have defeated me before I even reach Vingaard. How many foes am I to face in this campaign? When emperor and empress themselves want me to fail, whom am I fighting for?

The pendant is undone. The moment I puzzled all this out, I hunted up a warhammer, ripped the stone from Tragarus’s neck, and shattered the gem. A queer black smoke hissed from the shattered thing and rose, curdling, in the air. My men took that as a bad sign. I did not forbid them to mention it.

With all these losses, I hate to do without even two of my men. But the emperor must know what his wife has wrought. The two I sent, seasoned scouts, have orders to deliver my missive anonymously. I do not want two worthy warriors slain as the bearers of bad—perhaps even treasonous—tidings. The communication will bear my signet stamp. Let whatever transpires fall on my neck, and mine alone.

VII

One Day Hence, 11 Argon, 1199 Age of Light

They marched. There was nothing better for spooked and bedeviled soldiers to do than march. Resting would only make the phantasms come to terrifying life. Discussion would only spread the fears of one man, feverlike, among the others. Inaction would be worst of all. No, fighting was the best salve for any soldier’s soul, and when that was not possible, marching would do.

The men had slept little the night before, but they certainly would tonight, after fifty miles of forced marching upon the rutted dirt track that led from Caergoth to Thelgaard. The horrors of spinning minds would be blotted out by the red haze of bone-bruised heels and aching backs and flesh as hot and loose as roast beef. Tonight they would sleep, and wake up only two days from Thelgaard.

It wasn’t that Commander Solamnus thought his army and its train of provisions could march with enough speed to beat Phrygia’s agents to Thelgaard. Her plotting would race four days ahead of him, but four was better than eight. If the empress planned further attacks on Vinas and his men, her troops would have less time to dig in. If she schemed up another slaughterhouse, there would be less time for maggots and vultures.

Vinas himself led the march on foot. Courage was reined to Gaias’s mount. The commander set the grueling pace. Each hour he paused momentarily to fall back among the lines and shout commands and encouragements to the soldiers. The march had changed their haunted faces. Now they were red, and dotted with sweat and exertion.

Luccia, meanwhile, led her griffon cavalry in a sweep of the lands ahead and behind. Scouts filled the woods, running with short-nocked bows and slaying anything that might raise a hand or claw against the army. There would be no ambushes this day, nor any day before they arrived at Thelgaard.

Nor would there be surprises waiting there. This very night, once the sentries watched and the soldiers slept, Luccia and Commander Solamnus would ride her griffon northeast to Thelgaard.

The old war wizard bunched up the sleeves of his red robe, baring thin, hairy arms. From his fingertips, flashes of magic whirled. White jolts of energy struck the coin bag, lifting it from the camp table. The small leather satchel glistened with power. Tracers of magic shot through the sack, outlining each of the silver pieces within.

Eyes glowing, Vinas Solamnus watched the sorcerer do his work.

Titus stood beside the commander. Despite the flares of sorcerous power, the chancellor’s features were dark. “To win them over, Commander, you must do more than delude them,” he admonished.

Vinas’s look was equally dark. “I’m not the one deluding them. Phrygia has already done that. These coins will only deepen their delusions—push them past the point of opposing us to the point of fearing us.”

Titus shook his head. “You’re playing her game. You’ve already lost if you play her game.”

Vinas’s smile disappeared. The final threads of magic spun themselves into the floating bag and sank into the metal. The commander snatched the bag from the air and tied the string to his belt.

He turned for a moment to Titus and growled, “I will defeat that monster, even if I must become a monster myself.”

Lunitari shone upon the weary griffon’s wings. Its moonlight painted them all red—the wings, the young woman who held the beast’s reins, and the brawny man who rode behind her. Luccia perched comfortably on the saddle, now and then whispering encouragements in the creature’s ear slits. Vinas glanced down at the pine trees glowing red, like row upon row of bloody fangs.

“I’ve been marching too long,” Vinas said to himself.

“What?” Luccia asked, turning toward him.

He felt her warmth, her back arched and taut above the straining wings of Terraton.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I think I see Thelgaard up ahead.”

In the distance, a pale glow lit the underbelly of a low cloud. The light came from a small break in the trees. As Terraton neared the spot, torchlight glowed from palisades and stockades.

“That’s it,” said Luccia. She nudged Terraton. Squawking, he banked down to fly just above the treetops. “We’ll stay low, keep out of sight until the last moment.”

“Whatever you think,” Vinas replied, his trust sounding like disinterest. He knew that if anyone could fly a griffon into an armed fortification in the middle of the night, it would be Luccia. As to what exactly to say and do after they touched down—that would be Vinas’s job. His mind sifted through the possibilities.

Thelgaard was commanded by Colonel Maslas Quisling, the emperor’s underachieving third cousin. Because Maslas was a Quisling, he would have to be treated well, and would not tolerate accusations against the empress. He would not tolerate the truth. That was the whole reason Vinas had brought along the enchanted bribe money.

His ruminations ceased as the last bloody teeth of forest dropped away. Terraton swooped into the dark midden between forest and palisade. Vinas caught a reflection of Terraton in a stagnant moat as they passed over. The griffon’s wings jabbed outward into air and launched the three of them up toward the top of the wall.

A humming twang announced the hasty flight of a bolt. Another flew, punching into a tree trunk at the verge of the forest.

Luccia stood in the stirrups and drove heels home. Wings dug in. A flash of white feather and gold fur… With massive grace, Terraton set claws to ground.

The two guards who had gotten off shots were already whooping their warnings, and other soldiers had come running. Soldiers gathered around, bringing out blades and crossbows.

Deeming it better to fight on his own two feet, Vinas leapt down beside the mount and drew his sword. “Hold! I come in the name of Emperor Quisling. I am Commander Vinas Solamnus.”

A door flew open. From it emerged smoke and a massive man. His silks streamed with gray tendrils, and his eyes fairly glowed. He belligerently descended the stairs.

“Commander Solamnus,” the man said with heavy emphasis. “Where is your slaying army?”

“My slaying army, Maslas?” answered Vinas without pause.

The man’s face darkened. Just outside of sword range, he halted his approach. “I know what you did in Caergoth. You will not do the same here.”

“Perhaps not,” Vinas admitted casually. He looked around with a shrug. “Then again, the night is young. At the moment, your men are still alive.”

“Don’t toy with me, Commander. The empress’s own envoy brought word that, just yesterday, you slaughtered everyone in Caergoth.”

Vinas hissed a humorless laugh. “Envoys are paid messengers. To them, truth is the message that carries the most money.” He sheathed his sword and puffed his chest, as though daring Maslas or one of his men to attack him. “But I, too, can speak that language.

“Let’s say that these envoys spoke the truth. Let us say I have the power to single-handedly destroy a fortress. Perhaps I am spell-trapped so that if a single arrow or blade strikes me, you will begin to burn from the insides out, your stomachs catching fire and burning long and hot, despite the buckets of water you pour down your throats, and your fat lighting like tallow as your very hearts cook while they are still beating.”

Vinas paused. Sword tips edged back from him. A single bead of sweat traced a gray line from Maslas’s temple to his jawline.

In the silence, Vinas continued. “Perhaps I am in truth no man at all, but a red dragon. Perhaps I am toying with you now, waiting for one of you to volunteer to be my first meal.” He had spoken to the whole fortress, but now cast an aside toward Maslas. “In fact, I am famished.”

He reached down to the leather money bag tied to his waist and loosed it from his belt. “Or, perhaps it has all been blown out of proportion. Perhaps this money—bonus money I brought to pay the brave soldiers of Ergoth—was thought to be a bribe by Colonel Hellas. Perhaps, when he absconded with it, his soldiers rebelled, and to a man, they wiped themselves out. Perhaps…” He extended the bag to Maslas. “Here is a bonus for your payroll. That bag holds a platinum piece for every one of your soldiers.”

Reluctantly, Maslas received the bag. He cast a wary glare at his troops. Their weapons were still trained on the commander, but their eyes were fixed on the colonel and the bag. Gingerly, Maslas pulled open the drawstring and gazed down at the coins.

“These are silver pieces, not platinum,” he said suspiciously.

“Oh, no,” said Vinas. “They’re platinum. Bring one into the light.”

Maslas stared levelly at him.

“Colonel, the men want their bonus,” warned Vinas. “Don’t think about keeping those platinum pieces for yourself. Remember what happened at Caergoth.”

The man’s face creased. His eyes sparkled with hatred. Even so, he reached into the bag to draw forth a coin. The moment his hand touched one of the silver pieces, his expression changed. Distrust deepened to dread. Resistance became revulsion. Suspicion gave way to horrible certainty.

“See? Platinum,” Vinas said lightly. Hand the bag around. Let each soldier have his due.”

Hand trembling, Maslas passed the bag to his lieutenant. The soldier’s drawn sword dipped for a moment as he fished a coin from the bag. When the blade rose again, it wavered nervously. Sweat drenched the second’s face.

“Keep it going, keep it going,” Vinas urged, an edge of irritation in his voice. “You don’t want your soldiers to die of starvation before they get their bonuses!”

The bag moved more quickly, hand to hand. As it went, the silence deepened. The air bristled. The sense of terror and doom hung heavily over all the warriors.

Even Luccia shifted uneasily. She watched the bag make its circuit, her eyes twitching as the magic transformed each soldier. One by one, their suspicions unmanned them. Not a one would dare oppose Vinas now.

He was the only one at ease in the fortress. He seemed in fact to be enjoying the terror of the men.

It was none too soon, then, when Vinas motioned her to fly back to camp, leaving him among his new friends. She would guide the rest of his army to Thelgaard the next day.

As Luccia mounted up, Vinas dramatically lifted her hand and kissed it, wishing her a safe journey. He did not look at her as he did so, instead gazing with satisfaction at the terrified men around him.

Luccia drew her hand away and tapped Terraton’s flanks. As the beast leapt into the starry night sky, Luccia could not help noticing that Vinas’s kiss had felt ice cold.

Meus Pater [my father]

Well, Father, I have turned the tide on Phrygia tonight. I have entered her game of treachery and played it better than she.

You would not be pleased with the man I have become. I am not pleased either. The old Vinas—the young, starry-eyed boy—would have marched doggedly and predictably into every trap Phrygia laid in my path. Before, I would have sent thousands upon thousands of soldiers to their graves, and considered the deaths noble and valorous, the justifiable sacrifice of good.

The new Vinas is unimpressed by good. Good does not balance out against lost lives. If being evil means more comrades will live to share my campfire tonight, evil I shall gladly be.

We have traded roles, you and I. I have become the pragmatist and you the dreamer. I suppose that is because hope comes easier to youths and deadmen.

VIII

Five Days Hence, 16 Argon, 1199 Age of Light

The day was waning as Commander Vinas Solamnus, still afoot, led his dusty column toward the ramparts of Solanthus. The fortification had doubled in size since the time of Colonel Hellas. Wooden stockades had given way in piecemeal fashion to masonry, and the forest that had once verged a hundred strides from the fence had now been burned back to a thousand paces.

The fortification had grown, that was sure. The roadside guardpost had become barracks, then staging fortification, and at last, castle. The nearby villages, too, had grown. A shantytown of artisans and merchants and tinkers had sprung up beside the fort. The place looked prosperous and stable, bustling with soldiers, peasants, and visiting dignitaries. The atmosphere was almost cheerful.

“Standard bearers, to the front!” called Vinas. The signal was conveyed down the line.

In moments, the family crest of Solamnus—a white kingfisher on a blue field—was joined by a red dragon rampant on yellow, a green arrow on gold, and a host of other symbols. Some of Vinas’s colonels and captains would have friends or brothers stationed here. A good three thousand of the troops within had imperial orders to join Vinas’s army. The sight of familiar standards would at least make these friends, brothers, and comrades think twice before shooting.

If the empress had not already deemed things otherwise.

Luccia and her griffon squads had reported no sign of trouble ahead. Perhaps, at last, they had outrun Phrygia’s madness.

A contingent of cavalry passed under the castle’s stone gateway. They flew the standards of Ergoth, Solanthus, and House Maximus. They rode great black beasts that shone as though they were obsidian statues. The mounts ate up the road in a fast, fierce gallop. The head of the cavalry stood in his stirrups as he approached. He reined in his eager, prancing steed, as did the others behind him. Hooves kneaded the dirt.

“Greetings, Commander Solamnus!” cried the lead rider. He had a dark mustache and goatee. “I trust you are well?”

Vinas strode forth and reached up, clasping the man’s arm in a hearty salute. “Well enough for a welcome such as this,” he said with heartfelt conviction.

The dark-bearded man smiled. “Well enough to accompany us on a salvo against rebel raiders?”

At last, countrymen who were allies instead of enemies. Vinas drew in that realization as though it were a breath of spring air. “We are too many to keep up with you. Besides, it has been fifty miles afoot today. I would have my own mutiny if I dared another fifty miles.”

“I do wish you could join us,” said the man, his eyes gleaming. “Your first taste of traitor’s blood, and all that.”

Vinas cast a capricious glance over his shoulder. Gaias sat his horse with all the weight of a statue. He, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

Turning back, Vinas stroked his chin, as though he had an invisible goatee to match the lead horseman’s. “This wouldn’t be a salvo ordered by the empress herself, would it?”

“The empress?” asked the man, his brow furrowing. “Since when does she give a damn what the divisions of Ergoth do?”

The comment brought red to Vinas’s dusty cheeks. “Right, then. I’ll join you, and add to your complement twelve of my own finest horsemen, as well as the colonel of my griffon cavalry, bringing along whomever she chooses. My second, Gaias, will get the troops settled here, and see about mustering up a festival to celebrate our arrival.”

“No need,” said the cavalryman, gesturing to colored tents being set up within the castle courtyard. “Commander Maximus is already seeing to it personally.”

“Better yet,” said Vinas. He proceeded to unfasten Courage’s lead line.

Gaias turned and calmly said to him, “It may be another trap… .”

“Don’t worry. I’ll outnumber them on the ground and in the air,” Vinas said, as though soothing a fretful parent. “If you like, you can have a war wizard track us.” He led Courage toward the cavalry.

Then in a martial tone, Vinas added, “Gaias, take the army, minus your twelve best riders, into the fort. Give Commander Maximus my regrets for being detained. I’ll make it up to him on my return.” He checked the saddle cinch and mounted Courage.

“Yes, Commander,” said Gaias.

Courage eagerly plunged along the forest path. He seemed happy to abandon the slow march. Vinas crouched low over the stallion’s neck, ducking away from the reaching branches along the trail. The other warriors followed.

Vinas knew their quarry. A peasant mob had attacked a three-man outpost, run off the guards, and taken the store of weapons. The outpost stood at the far eastern edge of Ergoth. Its official role was to protect the nearby villages, but its true purpose was to watch the west trade road, tax anyone who passed by, and harass anyone who defied its authority. Whenever three men proved not enough, they would send one of their pet crows off to Solanthus for aid. This time, the message tied to the crow’s talon read: “Peasant attack. Overrun. Send Erghas and cavalry.”

Captain Erghas was the black-bearded cavalry officer who had met Vinas, and now rode close at his heels.

Night was falling, quick and hard. Cold came with it. The riders saw the world as only cavalrymen do, charging in a dusty mass through a dark and silent plain that trembles beneath them.

“Ahead!” cried Erghas. He was pointing—must have been—but Vinas could not see the direction. He saw little but the fast-bobbing head of Courage, the mane whipping his face and the tumbled ground below.

There it was. The forest opened up ahead, giving way to parchment-colored plains. A few trees clung to the land in ragged groves, but otherwise it was a place of low-sloping hills and grass and horizons… . Except for one harsh vertically, which jutted with indifference up from the rolling land. The outpost was like a sore, a blemish. Tiny black creatures milled around its base, seeming to talk or sleep or picnic there. The rebel mob encircling its prize.

Vinas’s heels did not even touch Courage’s flanks, but the steed redoubled its pace and pulled away. Vinas whooped excitedly, but stayed low beside the horse’s whipping mane. The mob either felt the tremor of vengeful hooves or heard Vinas’s cry, or both. The figures along the base of the tower slowly began to move, shifting toward the tower, drifting away, or breaking apart to run for a nearby copse. Vinas headed Courage toward those in flight. He would give Erghas the glory of recapturing the tower. That was his right, at least. Vinas would round up the stragglers.

He drew his sword and directed Courage off the beaten trail and across the sea of grass. The heads of grain cracked loudly. Courage rose up a round-hipped hill, plunged down into a creek belly, and shot up the other side. He gained speed as he leapt from peak to peak across the rippling plain.

The rebel figures materialized as frantically fleeing peasants. Though they retreated in terror, their arms still clutched the spoils of their riot—axes, clubs, swords, bows, quivers.

Vinas passed the first rebel, then charged by two more. Courage would be alongside the main group in moments. Vinas guided the stallion out in a long, hooking movement to encircle the front line.

The tatter-clothed brigands either stopped running to stand and fight, or turned around to flee the other way. None dared cross the path of Courage. They seemed to think him a magical creature whose very hoofprints were dangerous.

Vinas, sword brandished high and ready to strike, came closer to the mob and shouted, “Halt where you are, and you will not be hurt.”

A man-sized blur rushed Courage’s shoulder, a club raised.

Vinas whirled and, between heartbeats, struck the man’s head from his shoulders. The body slid wetly down to the ground. The hooves of the stallion trampled it underfoot. Vinas brought Courage under control. More in shock than anger, he shouted, “Down, to your knees, or the same will come to you!” The other rebels knelt as one, so quickly and so heavily that the dry ground shook.

Off in the distance, Vinas could see with satisfaction that Erghas’s forces had easily captured the tower. No horses were down. The cavalry was circling the tower, rounding up the mob.

Things were well in hand. Vinas, heart still hammering in his throat, lowered his dripping sword and took a moment to wipe his blood-drizzled face. He looked down at the trampled body. It looked more like a boneless effigy, old clothes stuffed with straw.

“What a waste,” Vinas cursed. He spit red into the twilight. He nudged Courage toward the spot where the man’s head and club lay. But it wasn’t a club. It was a loaf of bread, long and baked in a hard crust.

A loaf of bread? thought Vinas. Why would lawless rebels wield bread instead of weapons?

Courage planted his hooves. Vinas dismounted and went over to examine the red-speckled loaf. He kicked it irritably, and its crust shattered as it rolled away. “Dead for stealing bread,” he hissed.

His boot tapped the victim’s head. When the gaunt, old thing rolled over, he saw and knew the eyes. It was Festas.

“Thank you, Sir Warrior. Festas and his poor family bless your name.”

It was the old man, the first person to whom Vinas brought provisions that blizzard night so long ago. Festas had been stealing the bread that had been taken as tax from him. He had been bringing back food to his family’s mouths.

Vinas backed numbly away.

Where were all the young dreamers? Where were the soldiers decked out like plainsmen? Where were the young Vinas Solamnuses?

They are dead, came the thought to his mind. They are all grown up and dead.

His bitter reverie was interrupted by the roar of hooves. He looked up and saw them falling, the peasants who knelt for him. They clutched bread and jerky and wine bottles to their breasts and looked toward him with abject resignation as the black horses rushed past and the gray steel sheared off their heads.

“She could have struck no worse blow to me, Gaias,” said Commander Solamnus.

Vinas slumped in a velvet chair beside the roaring fire of his suite. The silent company of his comrades, his friends, surrounded him. Luccia, Titus, and Gaias, all watched their commander and struggled for something to say that might appease him.

The grime of the road and the stink of blood had been washed away in hot baths. Now instead of scarred armor, they wore robes of silk and vests of brocade. There had even been a boy who came in to trim and file the commander’s nails, to carefully pry away the last flecks of blood from his fingers.

Vinas angrily looked at his soft, clean nails. “It was an ambush all right. But she didn’t hide assassins in the brush, or marksmen, or monsters. She hid only me out there. The old me. The one she had fallen in… the young believer who would have betrayed any allegiance for truth, for love. Well, here’s the truth. I am the champion of a brutal, corrupt empire that I once opposed with every fiber of my being.”

Gaias watched his commander and, behind the gray mask of his beard, blinked inscrutably.

Luccia tried to smile, but she looked wan and defeated. “Surely she could not have touched off a peasant uprising.”

“Yes,” spat Vinas. “First it was a military attack, but that we could defeat easily. That is what armies are meant for. Then, she sent armies of ghosts and lies against our minds. She made us walk through a slaughterhouse at Caergoth and march into a viper’s den of deception at Thelgaard. When we defeated even those attacks, she came against me to wound my very soul.”

“You are tired, Vinas, and rightly so,” rumbled Titus. Of its own accord, his hand strayed to the flask of rejuvenant he had mixed and blessed for Vinas, although the commander himself had turned it down. “Perhaps you should beg off the festival tonight and get some rest.”

Vinas eyed his friends, one at a time. “You don’t believe me, do you? You all think I’m overwrought.”

“Overtired,” Titus corrected, his head slightly cocked.

Luccia broke in, “I can see how the empress might send scouts against us. Might even use lies and magic to destroy fortresses. But how could she make you cut off someone’s head?”

Vinas snorted. “She only had to assemble the mob. I did the rest. How am I to fight this war? Every time my sword strikes, I will not see a traitor, a rebel, but a starving peasant. She’s stolen my very soul. How can a commander command, lead, fight, without a soul?”

“We do it every day,” mused Gaias, more to himself than to Vinas. “It’s an easy enough thing. You grip your sword; you cut a neck. It is no more complicated than that.”

“It used to be,” Vinas muttered.

Luccia said, “Well, if you aren’t going to get some rest, you may as well go to the festival. You are the guest of honor, after all.”

Vinas was suddenly on his feet, his muscular frame a whirl of fine clothes. “Let’s go. Killing gives me an appetite.” He reached the chamber door, flung it wide, and shouldered his way through the too-small frame.

The night beyond was cold and bright, cold with a wind out of Qualinesti and bright with bonfires and magelight. The artisans, traveling prestidigitators, and shysters had been invited into the castle courtyard to entertain the soldiers. The shantytown people glittered in clothing designed for nighttime revelry.

The fine clothes of Vinas and his companions drew a host of beggars. A juggler drifted near, a set of tin begging cups whirling before his black, waxed mustache. Whenever a cup landed in his left hand, he held it out, pleading for donations. Each cup already held plenty of coins that rattled as they tumbled through the air, but did not spill forth. Vinas saw little of the clever act. He noted only the man’s solid frame, soft with eating.

Beggars do better in this empire than do honest peasants, he thought. Then, peremptorily, he said, “No,” and distractedly pushed the man away.

The push made the man’s three cups clatter to the cobblestone, gold and silver raining to the ground. That accident proved beneficial to Vinas. The loose coins provided diversion for other night vermin whose injuries and deformities seemed less than debilitating as they swarmed across the courtyard. They clustered over the coins, thick as maggots. The spill also made shysters give the grumbling commander a wide berth, lest they lose their night’s take.

“Maybe the poor aren’t such innocents,” said Vinas, sucking in a breath of the cold air. “I feel better already.”

Gaias’s eyes looked concerned. “That’s the spirit.”

Vinas did not seem to hear. “It’s war, damn it. Someone has to die. If people are too stupid to get out of the way of a swordsman on a charging horse—”

“Just so,” said Gaias exhaustedly.

“Better,” Vinas said to himself. “I feel much better.”

The group walked. The clamor of beggars faded away behind voices, laughter, and audacious claims from painted mouths. It was a carnival of flesh. There were smoking meats and frothy ales, glass baubles that pleased the eye, smooth-hipped women whose leggings revealed all too much to hungry eyes, sword swallowers and fire-eaters, private grotesqueries for public viewing… .

“There are no innocents,” Vinas continued. This was not a discussion but a soliloquy. Gaias offered no response. “The only innocents are the young dreamers, as I once was. They usually make matters worse, not better. How many evils have been done by those who try to force the realm of ideas onto the world of reality? Many, many evils.”

He shook his head bitterly. “They hadn’t taken just bread, just food. They’d taken weapons. And I’m sure they would have used them on me to get away. It’s war. Pure and simple.”

“Simple, at least,” said Gaias quietly.

Vinas paused, then looked up as though noticing Gaias for the first time. “Let’s go. I want none of these foul diversions. I just want food and drink and sleep. Off to the great hall.”

“Attention, please. Attention,” called Captain Erghas of the cavalry unit.

He stepped up on his table. His voice barely succeeded in breaking through the din of the hall and its long tables crowded with soldiers. The shouts and guffaws were silenced by a two-fingered whistle.

“Thank you for your attention. I have something of an extended toast to make. You all have no doubt heard of Commander Solamnus’s fighting prowess and courage—”

Hearty and genuine applause answered.

Vinas, warmed by the applause and by brandy, stood and bowed in thanks. The ovation grew all the louder. Caught up in the mood, Vinas said, “Yes, my courage. My horse Courage couldn’t be here tonight, for the kitchen was all out of oats—”

Roars and “hear, hears!” followed him as he sat down.

Erghas waved away the noise. “We have all heard stories, but today I saw the courage and prowess—”

“And Courage!” someone shouted amid laughter.

“I saw the courage and prowess in action. I saw the man who will save the empire. No less than that While the rest of us rushed in to take the tower, to win the share of glory, this man rode out to bring home the stragglers. Oh, he was no gentle shepherd, coddling his wayward flock. No. He meted out summary justice, killing the first one who tried to win by him, and thereby cowing the rest.”

The captain’s voice echoed in the hall, no longer fighting murmurs and chuckles.

“And though killing is the quickest and surest and greatest of a soldier’s rights on the battlefield—especially when dealing with traitorous vermin—this man spared nearly half of the criminals.”

A murmur went through the crowd.

“Patience, friends. Yes, the rabble deserved death for what they had done, and I said so to the. commander. But he replied to me, ‘What good is making this ground a graveyard, if there is no one left to go back and tell the others the tale?’”

As applause rang through the hall, Vinas turned in consternation to Titus and Gaias and hissed, “I said no such thing!”

The wise Gaias said, “History will say otherwise.”

“And so,” finished Erghas, “I toast our commander, who will not only wade into the slaughter of Vingaard, but will also curb those who struggle, and round them up for the empire.”

The crowd stood. The roar of their voices was matched only by the pounding of boots. Even Gaias got to his feet and added his applause and hoots to the ovation.

Only Vinas Solamnus was left sitting. He listened in mute dread to what he heard.

These men would slay anyone I ask them to, he thought miserably. Even the emperor himself.

Meus Pater [my father]

I have come to personify everything that is wrong with this empire. My followers invent fictions about me to fill the gap between what I am and what I ought to be.

Just today, a murder I committed was recast by my followers as swift and righteous vengeance. Even in the act of lying to themselves and each other, they believed the lie. Only I—and perhaps Gaias—remember the truth. The murder.

What have I become?

For so long, Father, I considered you a weak man. You were once a believer, but in time settled into the posture of constant contradiction and compromise. What I did not understand is that no posture could be more difficult. The man who can bargain with corruption and death on all sides and yet remain committed to something higher, that man is truly great.

Part III:
Justice

Interlude

One Month Hence, 14 Sirrimont, 1199 Age of Light

Naked, Phrygia huddled in the lich’s scrying cauldron. Her living flesh and bone and blood would be the conduits for Caitiff’s darkest, most powerful casting yet.

He stood above her, stripped of robe and magical guises. Even his dead flesh was gone. Only bones remained. His skeletal form pulsed with bright red fire. Words of ancient necromancy were hissed from his fleshless teeth. The flames that danced across his bones deepened from scarlet to crimson to azure. They gathered, swirled around his pelvis, rose up his spine and ribs, and spun in a sorcerous crown around his skull.

His incantation became an ecstatic shout. With each word, a tongue of fire formed in his mouth, shot through his maggot-scoured teeth, and lashed out at the empress.

The flames darted into her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Phrygia cried out in shock and pain. A pulse of lavender fire awakened in her chest. More flames struck and the lavender light grew brighter. It shone from her heart.

It was her passion that would send this evil spell across the miles to Vinas. It was her lust to corrupt him and dominate him utterly that would at last accomplish the task. Empowered by an ancient elvish lich, she would convert him to her side and together they would rule all of Ansalon, all of Krynn.

When the casting was complete, sorcerous power would rush out from Phrygia and vault halfway across Ansalon. It would enter the heart of a commander who had already been seduced by evil. This moment of ecstasy would transform him forever, making him an instrument of evil. It would make Vinas Solamnus forever hers.

And he would not even realize the change had occurred.

IX

That Night, 14 Sirrimont, 1199 Age of Light

“We will crush them,” Commander Solamnus predicted.

He loomed over the map table. His shadow fell across the schematic of Vingaard Keep and all of northern Ansalon. His eyes narrowed to slits. “It is the only humane thing. If I came upon a dog in as wretched a state as we have heard is the case in Vingaard, I hope to the gods I would have the compassion and nerve to stamp its skull into the ground.”

He looked around the room at the grim faces of his colonels and the captains of his special forces. No one replied.

“We will crush them with one terrific blow. Then, if there remains anything to save—anything or anyone—we will save it,” Vinas said. He raised the amber liquid in the glass before him and flung back the drink.

“Weren’t we to bring them back into Ergoth, Commander?” asked Chancellor Titus.

“Let their deaths be the price of saving all the other border states that are poised to break away. If we destroy Vingaard, the rest will fall in line.”

While he spoke, Vinas’s eyes were fastened, unblinking, on the jagged red schematic where the map depicted Vingaard Keep. At last he looked levelly into the eyes of the priest. “Does the Temple of Paladine object to my plan?”

Titus looked like a wounded boy. “No, Commander.”

“Good,” replied Vinas. “This action will be merciful only if it is swift and sure. Genocide cannot suffer doubts or half measures; otherwise it is only cruelty and torture.” He paused to suck in a breath. The room was so silent that everyone there heard the deep, long inhalation. “I have heard many of you boast about the army here in Solanthus, as well you should. These companies—heavy horse, griffon cavalry, heavy infantry, war wizardry—form the most formidable single army Ansalon has seen in a thousand years. But, even though this army comprises sixty elite companies, it is only one third the force under my command.”

He paused, waiting for the whistles of admiration to taper off.

“That is a secret that, until now, was known only by the emperor and myself, as well as the commanders of my two other divisions. I share the secret with you, trusting you to keep it. Tell anyone beyond this room, and I will hang you on the curtain wall of Vingaard Keep.”

The amazed murmuring stopped. Vinas continued. “We want Vingaard to watch us, to be terrorized by our audacious advance. We want them to be certain that this division can and will slay them, drink their blood, and grind their bones into meal—all in the space of days.”

Chancellor Titus spoke up again. “Won’t that convince them they have nothing to lose, make them fight to the death?”

“No,” replied Vinas sternly. “Only dreamers fight to the death. There are only a handful of such fools in the world. All others surrender and hope they will not be beaten too often by their new masters.”

The chuckles that greeted that dark assessment were nervous and dry.

“I have tried your way, Paladine’s way, Chancellor. It leads only to greater suffering and longer war. Every foe we defeat with rumor and terror we will not have to defeat with the sword. Let them learn to love us once we are standing on their necks.”

He paused, gathering his thoughts. “My other two armies have been busy. Let me tell you what mischief they are up to… .”

General Ventrus hunkered down beside a tree trunk. The man’s Qualinesti cloak blended into the twilight grays of the bark. Behind him, his platoon similarly blended in. He thought he had seen something ahead. Gray-grizzled eyebrows lowered over intense eyes of blue. He blinked. He had seen something: the edge of the Hylo Forest.

Ventrus smiled grimly. His jaw clenched. This had been the worst hundred miles he’d marched. The forest was rotten with kender. The curious little critters were like mosquitoes—always buzzing nearby, ready to stick it to you, suck you dry, and flit away. Perhaps that explained the stern orders from Commander Solamnus: “Pass through Hylo, but avoid kender contact at all cost.”

Thankfully, Ventrus’s platoon hadn’t run afoul of any of the creatures. He’d taken every precaution to avoid that possibility. His army of six thousand soldiers—II Redroth—had been broken down into platoons of twenty, each of which moved separately and stealthily through the woods. They all wore Qualinesti cloaks, dampened their armor with balled-up rags, and even donned soft leather shoes. If the other platoons had done as well as Ventrus’s, the kender were completely unaware of their passage. Now, they were almost out of kender country.

Ventrus scanned the area ahead. The coast seemed clear. He rose from his crouch and stalked slowly toward the forest’s edge. In two hundred more paces, he would no longer need to concern himself with the second half of Commander Solamnus’s orders… .

“What ya got there?” piped a shrill voice behind him.

Ventrus jumped straight up, and whirled around. In the dark, he saw a pair of avid, childlike eyes hovering above a keen little smile and a lithe form.

“You’ve been walking for three days and never touched it,” the kender observed. He pointed beneath the general’s cloak, where a short length of steel cable dangled from his belt. Wooden handles hung at either end of the cable. “What is it? What’s it for? May I take a look-see? Maybe it’s loose.”

The second half of the orders from Commander Solamnus…

The general reached for the garrotte, but discovered it absent from his belt, already in the hands of the young kender. He took a quick swipe at it, but the creature yanked the weapon away.

“You dropped it,” the kender said in defense. “What’s it called? What’s it for? Is this a spare? It looks like one I once had. I just can’t remember what it’s called.”

“It’s… it’s a magic collar,” the general said, coughing into his hand. “You wear it around your neck.”

“Oh, yes. A magic collar. I had a whole bag of these once.” The kender flipped the thing over the back of his neck and held onto the handles. “You wear it like this, right?”

General Ventrus shook his head. He reached toward the kender. “No. Here, let me show you.”

With all the trust of a child, the kender let go of the handles. General Ventrus gently took hold of them and pivoted around behind him.

“Oh, so you wear the cable across the front of your neck—” began the kender. His breath was suddenly cut off. He struggled, but was no match for the muscular man.

The ogres ran directly into the swarms of arrows. Already their huge gray forms bristled with shafts. Still they came. Their eyes shone with a dazed blue light, a glow not of frenzy but of sorcerous enslavement. Someone was driving these brutes into a hail of Solanthian arrows.

But who?

There was no time for such questions. Already the defenders’ quivers were nearly empty. Already the archers’ fingers bled.

Then the ogres gained the hilltop where the Solanthian scouts had decided to make their stand. The monsters were gigantic. Their gray limbs swung enormously.

They clambered fearlessly over the granite outcrop. They smashed human heads to puddings or struck them clear of their shoulders. Solanthian livery turned scarlet beneath stomping ogre feet. None would survive. None.

And who drove these mad ogres?

“So, there is no chance for the kender to report to Redroth, nor any possibility of Solanthian scouts surviving the tide of ogres sweeping their way. The six thousand soldiers of III Caergoth are advancing behind that tide of mesmerized ogres,” Commander Solamnus concluded. “Colonel Luccia, tell the council what you have told me of the positions of our troops and our enemies.”

Luccia nodded. She, like all the others, wore her full dress uniform for this war council. In it she looked as proud and lethal as a falcon. “Vingaard is digging in, all along the main road. They show no sign of additional earthworks or stockades to the west or east. It is apparent they hope for a battle of attrition, whittling our army down as we approach the keep, and then trusting in the moat, curtain wall, and magical defenses to keep us at bay once we have arrived.

“The first major trench work is at the ford of the Vingaard River fifty miles north of here. It is rocky and shallow, but has rapids that rise over a man’s head during spring runoff. We will arrive there in the first of Argon. By then, the deepest points should be only three feet. The crossing is wide and chilly, and the wagons will need to be lashed fore and aft to mounted escorts. We will be sitting targets while we make that crossing, and the rebels know it. They are building catapults and ballistae, and have been logging heavily in the woods upstream.”

“Log jams,” said Gaias at a whisper. “They’re going to try to sweep us away.”

Luccia went on. “They will make us pay for each forward stride. Then they will fall back to trenches in the granite hills beyond and drop us from hiding.”

Vinas watched the soldiers and advisors, looking for hints of fear or weakness. These were the brutal facts of the march ahead. Anyone who would flinch at them without hearing his strategies was a person of ill judgment. So far, none had blinked.

“Once we win past that point, we will be fighting a running battle for the next forty miles, all the while climbing a shallow grade toward the uplands just south of Vingaard. There, the ground becomes impassibly wet, and the road descends into a gorge carved by the Vingaard River. It is in this rock sarcophagus that the second line of redoubts will be.”

A young officer rose, and straightened his jacket. “How many troops does Vingaard have?”

Luccia looked up at him. “Troops? They have very few trained troops, only about fifteen hundred. But they have mustered every farmhand and fishwife in a thousand miles, for a rabble army close to twenty thousand.”

Gaias looked grave. “Twenty thousand, double entrenchments, and a castle,” he said, considering. “Too bad for them they do not have Vinas Solamnus.”

For the first time in hours, the commander smiled. It was not his old, cocksure grin, though. This smile was more like a determined gritting of teeth.

“Yes, Gaias. Too bad for them. And now, let me tell you why… .”

Sixteen Days Hence, 1 Reorxmont, 1199 Age of Light

On the brow of a short hill that overlooked the Vingaard River, Vinas reined Courage to a halt. His personal guard drew up beside him.

Gaias was nearest to hand, as always these days. He sat his battle-armored roan like the grizzled ghost of every second who ever quietly followed his commander unto doom.

Titus, beside him, stood. He had walked most of the four hundred miles from Daltigoth. He said it was because his legs were as long as any horse’s and at least as strong. Of course, the inspiring vision of a ten-foot-tall man of Paladine walking on his own two feet might have influenced his decision, too.

Luccia guided Terraton to the hilltop. The griffon folded his wings and headed for a jutting rock on one side of the summit. There, he crouched, elevated and separated from the others, but in a fine pounce position in case any of the skittish and delicious horses came near. The rest of Luccia’s voracious cavalry had already been dispatched with orders. If she had read the sun right, they would have already crossed the river. They would be digging beaks and talons into flesh even now.

The Vingaard River was wide, shallow, and fast-running. On any other day, its expanse would have mesmerized the soldiers. The jabbering conversation of water over rocks, or of wind through vallenwoods, would have made any listener feel a sudden longing for wild and lonely places.

Today, though, the river would be anything but lonely. In addition to six thousand imperial troops, four hundred horses, and a provision train of eighty-three wagons, there would be spears, ballista shots, boulders, and rapids-borne logs. Once the soldiers fought past those, they would enter the deep forest where those attacks had originated and meet the hands that sent the deadly barrage their way.

Torrential water was the worst battlefield. Not only did it grab at the feet and clothing and numb the legs, but anyone who fell in the crossing—whether from arrow or slippery stone—would be swept away immediately. Armor and currents would conspire to take such soldiers to the blackest depths. There they would thrash until the river buried them.

Luccia looked up from the rolling rapids and into the face of the imperial commander. His flesh was cold and drawn, as though somewhere along the line he had already drowned in the icy depths.

“Are the war wizards in place?” Vinas asked blankly.

Gaias nodded. “Yes. They begin on your mark, Commander.”

“Mark,” said Vinas softly, still looking at the river.

Gaias made a small hand sign that was relayed down the silent line of soldiers and out to the mages poised on the river bank.

There came no fireworks, no hum or crackle of power. Nothing seemed to change.

“Wait here for me,” Vinas said quietly. It was a command to all of them, though after he spoke it, he turned and stared pointedly at Luccia.

With a nudge of his heels, he started Courage forward at a casual trot. The horse pranced for a moment as Vinas’s stern hand on the reins kept the creature firmly and smoothly under control. Sitting bolt upright, Vinas rode down into the river. Black hooves sent up white ridges of foam. Soon, the river rose above fetlocks to hocks to finally slap coldly along the horse’s flanks. Vinas’s boots were submerged.

“He’s almost within bow shot,” Luccia murmured to herself.

Gaias overheard and nodded solemnly.

Titus, whose muttered devotions had begun the moment Courage had entered the river, now dropped to one knee. In that posture, he was still almost the same height as the rest of the army.

The commander rode onward. Courage’s legs churned the white flood. Vinas took a long, deep breath and began to speak. The words, as they left his lips, roared outward. His voice had been magically augmented by Titus to be heard clearly five miles in any direction. Courage shied for a moment from the deafening noise, but Vinas held him steady.

“I am Commander Vinas Solamnus of Daltigoth. Surrender to me, or die. You are fairly warned.”

A slim figure emerged from the woods, an elven long-bowman. His green-gray tunic and breeches made him seem to wink in and out of the tree line. He nocked an arrow and sighted directly, levelly, at Vinas. Then he drew back the string and loosed.

The arrow darted faster than Vinas’s eye could follow. He heard the thrum of the bowstring only an instant before the razor head struck his eye. He felt nothing, neither the punch of the blade through the socket and into his brain, nor even the jolt of impact.

It was as though his eye were diamond-hard. The arrow pinged off, fluttered weakly away, and plunged into the torrid tide. Vinas allowed himself a small sigh of relief, though the magical amplification made it sound like an irritated snort. Just as well. The defensive enchantments had worked. Now he would test the offensive ones.

“You were warned,” Vinas said, his voice booming.

Vinas raised a hand toward the stunned, unmoving elf and splayed his fingers as if casting a spell. An illusory orange light gathered at his fingertips and then arced between him and the elf.

The archer was struck. His bow jolted from suddenly nerveless hands. His faced seemed to glow, and then his hair and clothes spontaneously caught fire. He appeared to deflate, becoming at last only gray cinders that sifted down from his vacant form like sand through an hourglass.

Just as suddenly, it was over. Only the ceaseless river remained. The magic had worked flawlessly. Nothing could harm the commander or his mount.

A deep rumble sounded in the forest beyond the river. Foliage crackled violently. A ballista bolt, large as a small tree, climbed free of the branches and soared up into the sky. It dragged along a severed twig of leaves that flapped in the wind.

Vinas held Courage steady beneath him and, as the bolt reached the apex of its flight and began descending directly toward them, he managed to proclaim, “Surrender to me, or die.”

The bolt hit, taking Vinas firmly in the chest. The sharpened end of the log splintered on impact and peeled back in whimsical curls. The bolt seemed to hover there a moment before splashing to the water.

Again Vinas lifted his hand and spread his fingers, almost casually this time. Orange sparks coalesced and sped outward, tracing the exact arc of the ballista bolt back to its source. The energy disappeared for a moment in the thick woodlands. Then came a pop and a roar. Flames leapt up above the treetops, flinging one hapless engineer from the ballista he had manned. The man plunged back to earth, burning, and crashed to the ground, among other flaming forms.

On marched Courage. A boulder was the next item to take flight. It turned, slow and massive, in its tumbling path, before it struck Vinas, and rolled easily off his back. Even as the water splashed up over him, Vinas flung his hand forward, and the magic of the sorcerers in the woods destroyed another war instrument.

The scatter shot flung from another catapult missed entirely. Either the engineers had not enough time to test the range, or they were terrified by the approaching commander. Vinas proudly thought it the latter. The point was moot as they and their machine burst into consuming fire.

Vinas was almost across now—one man and one horse routing the entrenched rebels. They gave away their positions with each frantic response. Their attacks were in vain. Each was answered by deadly magefire.

Courage climbed patiently up the rocky bed, rising until only his hooves were still in the water. Cold water sheeted off the horse’s sides. Feeling his own boots slosh, Vinas wondered how he would ever get the eighty-three wagons across. First things first.

Courage climbed the bank, snorting happily to be out of the frigid waters. Two more arrows flashed toward Vinas, only to ping off the horse’s hide and flip away harmlessly. The bowmen responsible were soon exterminated.

“I say again, surrender to me or die. You have seen I cannot be harmed, and that I can certainly harm. Heed my words and live!”

Another archer decided otherwise, and didn’t have time to regret his choice. He blazed away into nothingness.

As Courage trotted up among the trees, Vinas had to remind himself he was not truly invincible. The moment he was beyond the sight of the war wizards, they could no longer work their magic through him. And, as soon as he actually struck with sword or fist, his protections would be gone. He was a straw hero, as it were, intended merely to scare the daylights out of the attackers and flush them from hiding.

Vinas reined Courage to a halt, still within sight of the opposite bank. With an unconcerned air, he stood in the saddle and looked about. This invitation brought more attacks, as he had hoped. To each he raised a hand. Soon, the blazing rebel victims lit the underside of the forest.

Vinas knew he could not flush them all out. His ploy depended upon deception and fear. He must keep moving. Clenching his jaw, he rode forward. The last lines of sight between Vinas and his wizards disappeared.

“How many of you must I kill today?” It was the signal for the rest of the army to begin crossing, but Vinas spoke the words with true regret. Now, though, was no time for regrets.

“Surrender, all of you, or today you will die.”

“… must I kill today?”

Luccia turned to Gaias. “There’s the signal,” she said. “Good luck.”

Without another word, she touched Terraton’s flank. He lifted in a soundless rush into the crisp wind above the rapids. A second surge of wings, a third, and the tawny blur of muscle and feather climbed above the treetops, into an achingly bright sky.

A sudden storm of arrows pelted past her. Feathers flew. Squawking, Terraton reeled higher. Luccia glimpsed a pair of secondary wing feathers tumbling toward the waters. The wound was not severe. Even now Terraton struggled against the wind and rose above the black hail that peppered the water below.

Gaias would not have an easy time of it, not with elven archers lining the bank. Vinas may have destroyed the war machines, but the elves could reek havoc with the army.

Shrieking defiantly, Terraton topped the rise. Well above bow shot, he flew over the forest.

Luccia looked straight down among the trees. She saw, beneath the thin leaves of summer, the running rebels. They were as thick and busy as ants.

No, Gaias would not have an easy time of it. Not at all.

She tugged on Terraton’s reins, directing him upstream. A mile north of the crossing, the main share of the griffon cavalry would be swooping on its prey. She intended to join them.

Luccia sent the griffon down in a long, soaring dive. His speed doubled and redoubled until the treetops flashed past. Miles were meaningless for creatures that could cross half of a realm in a day.

The clearing lay just ahead. The rebels had felled plenty of trees to make their logjam; they had razed a patch of forest large enough to construct a castle. Finding the spot had been easy for Luccia. It was pinpointed by Terraton hours before the Ergothian army had reached the riverbank.

The present task was proving equally easy. Scores of griffons and their riders dived into the clearing and rose again with talons holding wriggling, wingless forms—elves and men. The rebels were borne high into the air before being dropped. They hit the ground amid the stumps and rocks and bodies that littered the clearing. The griffons then dived again. When they came up, their wings shed red mists, a blood baptism that united their new victims with their old ones.

Anticipation riffled Terraton’s golden hide. He needlessly pumped his wings twice more before he went literally screaming into the fray.

The rim of trees rushed past as Terraton plunged.

Luccia had but a moment to glimpse the clearing—tangled bodies, crossbows glinting from cover, half-chopped trees, axes and saws spotted with blood, eagle-lions slamming to the ground and rending with beaks and claws.

Terraton snatched up a loose log and dropped it atop one archer. His hooked beak snapped the neck of a second. A maiming and a kill.

Eagle wings carried them in pursuit of a third soldier, fleeing. Talons gripped the man’s head. Terraton rose, the soldier thrashing below.

Luccia slapped the creature’s side. “Quick, not cruel,” she admonished. Her words were answered by a crunching sound, and stillness below. The griffon dived after another victim.

Victim, yes, Luccia realized. That’s what they are. Victims, not warriors.

She banished the thought. Vinas had forbidden such ideas. As Terraton dipped to snag another rebel, Luccia realized that victory over Vingaard could well cost all of them their souls.

Another flock of black-fletched arrows vaulted into the sky.

Gaias watched them come. He rode midstream with the fording forces. There was a moment left to glare toward the war wizards. Would they summon the flaming cloud in time? The shafts cut through gray air, turned, and rained down toward the laboring army. As the arrows began to descend, Gaias raised his shield and gritted his teeth.

“Shields!” shouted the veteran. “Shields!”

Overhead, a blue flash of lightning lit the sky. Orange motes in the blue field marked spots where arrows struck and sizzled away. As before, though, white-hot arrowheads tumbled through the field and hailed onto the troops. Above even the roar of the rapids came the sharp spack and hiss of hot rock against wet metal.

Most of the arrowheads bounced to one side or traced black brands along a horse’s stifle before plunging to dance in the turgid waters. Some, though, squarely struck flesh and burned inward, steaming blood away as they penetrated.

Damned mages, thought Gaias. Worthless protections, craven cowards, striking from safety.

As the sheet of lightning vanished and the last arrowheads cracked against shields, three more horses fell. They dragged their riders off the ford and into the depths. A cavalryman slumped from his horse. The triangular hole in his temple steamed as he plunged into the white waters. Another rider had fallen and gotten tangled in his stirrups. The man’s horse galloped frantically toward the far side, dragging the limp doll that had been its rider.

That horse had the idea. The sooner the first wave of cavalry struck land, the sooner they could bring steel against those fey archers.

“Forward, full-out!” cried Gaias.

He dropped his shield to his side and urged his mount to a trot. The others needed no encouragement. All of them wanted out of the icy sluice. The trot quickened as the bed grew shallow and the company of riders galloped toward the far shore.

More arrows leapt toward them. More sheets of lightning magic flashed into existence. The riders paid these little mind. One horse lost its footing and slid into a churning bowl of water. Two others fell to arrowheads or lucky shafts. Gaias’s squad was still ninety-some strong, though, and the main body climbed the far bank.

The mounts gratefully charged up the bank and away from the water. They fanned out into the dense brush. Cavalrymen hacked their swords through brush and elves alike. The bow fire faltered. Shafts darted among the trees, striking as many rebels as imperial soldiers.

“Cleanse the banks!” cried Gaias as his sword plunged among the trees. He hardly knew whether a given swipe slew an elf or struck a bush. The forest was too thick, and the archers’s disguises too expert. Moans and shouts and gouts of blood told him he crippled or killed plenty.

The other soldiers were doing at least as well. As elves fell dead to the ground, they became visible. Already they lay as numerous as boughs blown down in a storm.

Gaias felt a sting in his shoulder. He whirled, his blade cutting in half a rebel warrior who had stabbed him from behind. Silent in defeat, the climber crumpled beside Gaias’s horse. Gaias looked about, seeing other forms as sinewy as snakes making their way up the trees.

“They are climbing! Beware the trees!” shouted Gaias as he finished off another rebel.

His latest foe crashed to the ground and thrashed there, a leaf-shaped dagger clutched in his hand. The elf could have hamstrung his horse in the fall—Gaias would have—but elves respected horses… nature in general.

Gaias blinked grimly. They did not try to hobble the horses. He wondered, not for the first or last time, why in hell he fought for Ergoth.

Vinas had been right about such thoughts. Pointless. Destructive.

Jabbing another two elves, Gaias wheeled his steed to see how the infantry fared. Between the black-boled hawthorns, he glimpsed wave upon wave of foot soldiers, grimacing as they labored through the waist-deep, algid current. They dragged their shields beside them, unharried by further bow fire.

Gaias whirled away as he felt a slash to the jaw. It would have opened his throat if he had not glimpsed the blade in time to feint. His spiked elbow piece caught the elf’s face and sent him spinning flat toward the ground. Gaias cursed and spat, taking a moment to tamp his beard into the wound. Once this fight was done, he’d better shave.

At least we’ve stopped the bow fire, he thought as his horse stomped atop the crawling undergrowth. The infantry will arrive at any moment. They’ll take these bastards hand to hand, and free us to sweep inward, after Commander Solamnus.

The thought made him suddenly wonder what had become of their leader.

With a rattling crack, a ballista bolt tore through the canopy above. Gaias watched its arc. It trailed leaves as it plunged into the wading ranks of foot soldiers. The wide shaft impaled two men, and swept three others with them into the unforgiving current.

Gaias didn’t know where the commander was now, but knew where he would soon be.

In fury, Vinas dug his heels into Courage. The stallion trampled the man who had triggered the ballista. The spell of invulnerability would be gone from him now, but he no longer cared. Vinas leapt from the saddle onto the second rebel there. His sword flashed. It caught the man in the gut and pushed out the other side.

Rage welling, Vinas lifted the impaled rebel above his head and shouted, “I said kneel in surrender, or die!”

The four other rebel soldiers dropped immediately to their knees. Their blood-smudged faces implored Vinas. They stared with horror at the limp man who hung on his upraised sword.

This might have been just another calculated audacity, but Vinas knew it was not. He held the man aloft not to cow the rebels before him, but for the cruel pleasure of it. That realization disgusted him.

Vinas flung his arm downward. The rebel slid from his crimson blade and flopped on the ground. One of the survivors bent to retch. Vinas had to stay his sword from tasting that man’s flesh, too.

Before he could gather his thoughts to issue commands, the forest around was alive with stamping and snorting horses. Vinas blinked. It took him two breaths to recognize the blood-drenched livery of Ergoth. After a third, he noticed Gaias reining in before him.

Vinas planted the bloody tip of his blade in the ground and asked, “What news, Gaias?”

“All good, Commander,” said the veteran. One scarlet hand clutched a long wound along his jaw. “The infantry have taken the shoreline and are poking their swords into anything that moves. There will not be an elf left alive in fifty miles once this is done.”

“What of the losses?”

“Forty-some men, at my last count, and twelve horses. Of course I cannot guess how Luccia fares.”

“Well enough, I’m sure,” said Vinas. “Have these four taken prisoner and held for questioning. Then you and your best men come with me. We’ve a roadway to secure.”

“I need to oversee the rest of the crossing.”

“Yes,” agreed Vinas, “but let me have your best men.”

Gaias nodded. “The griffons should be freed up soon to bring the mages over.”

Vinas dragged his befouled blade across the ground as he returned to Courage. He mounted up. “Luce and hers will be there. Don’t worry.”

Luccia was sick to death of the slaughter. The rebels had had no chance. Yes, five griffons lay dead, and twice that many riders, but the rebel dead numbered in the hundreds.

She glanced one last time at the killing grounds. The only movement came from the sixty griffons perched among the bodies, waiting for her next orders. Some had been feeding at the end of the battle, but Luccia quickly stopped that. These were rebels, yes, but countrymen—humans and elves—all the same.

The battle was over.

“Colonel!” came a shout from the edge of the clearing. Luccia turned to see a cavalryman struggling to keep his rearing, foaming horse from throwing him to the ground. “The enemy is in rout. Commander Solamnus orders you to pursue those who flee.”

“Pursue, or engage?” she shouted.

The horse wheeled, trying to bolt, but the man wrenched brutally on the reins, turning it in frantic circles. “Harry them. Kill half of them mercilessly. Let the others witness your deeds.”

“That’s what he said?” she asked in amazement.

“Word for word!” the man replied. He let his mount flee from the squadron of horse-eating monsters.

Luccia spat virulently, then shouted to her griffon-riders. “You heard what he said. Follow me. The killing’s not done yet.”

Erasmas lay wedged among the logs. He was numb from the chest down. Broken back, he realized calmly.

He hadn’t expected it to be like this—death, that is. He had thought it would be quick and hot and glorious. He had not thought he would lie among the frigid tide, one more useless log. Death was proving to be a terrific disappointment.

But war was worse. Much worse. He thought there would be honor in it. He thought he would stand with his side on one end of a field and await the enemy. He thought the two opponents would rush together almost as if to embrace, but instead to engage each other hand to hand, sword to sword. It was not supposed to be like this—chopping trees and hiding like plainsmen and getting tossed about by a bunch of eagle-lions.

He had believed in war, but father was right. War was nothing to be believed in.

There was the rebellion, too, of course. He’d believed in that once, hadn’t he?

Now, it was all gone. Now he’d die here in the shallows, cold and alone, among these logs. He hadn’t been afraid to die, but not this way, not without meaning.

Then he saw the wedge that held the logs in place. If that wedge were pulled out, he would be crushed by tons of wood as it rolled into the river.

But what of the damned imperials? What would happen to them?

In the center of the river, Gaias sat his horse. Beside him, the main share of the army’s eighty-three provisions wagons labored tediously across the stream.

The wagons were up to their buckboards in the white-devil flow. Some of the lighter ones had actually begun to float between the horse teams that anchored them. The progress was jolting and unnerving. Rocks that the horses stepped over would tip a wagon onto two wheels. If the handlers weren’t watchful, the wagon would capsize. They’d already lost three that way, eleven horses and four men with them.

“At this rate,” Gaias muttered to himself as he studied the chalky glow of the dying day, “the last wagons’ll roll through after dark.”

There was no threat now but the river itself. The woods had been purged of elves. The human rebels had been slaughtered except for some fifty, spared to regale their comrades with stories of Commander Solamnus’s horrific methods. Only the river and the failing day held any threat.

“What’s that—in the water?” shouted someone over the din of the current. “Oh, no! Move, damned horses! Move!”

Gaias wearily glanced toward the speaker. He followed the fingers pointing upstream. A school of large black fish bobbed excitedly among the rapids. Gaias blinked as he realized what the black fish truly were.

“Double time! Move!” he shouted to the teams in the center of the stream. Then he turned toward the southern bank. “Back! Get back!”

The words were needless. Many of the drivers had already seen the logs that rushed toward them. They lashed reins in the water and shouted harangues to their horse teams or to the other wagons blocking their way.

The first log lanced in, fast as a missile. It punched through the side of a wagon. The conveyance flipped. Its driver and cargo went with it. The wagon disappeared, but wrenched the log up out of the flood. Horses screamed, dragged down by their traces. Hooves churned in the froth. Only the log itself showed above the water. Then it, too, slid downstream into a deep spiral and was gone.

Gaias spurred his mount toward the spot, but was too late.

More logs crashed into the wagons, into the horses. Shrieks and thrashings, splintered wood and bone, wagons and men… . A wagon turned up on end, burying its driver before it flipped atop the lead horse team. A set of hooves rolled over in the tumbling waters. A log surged and struck the head from a man, then rested on his vacant shoulders.

All was suddenly cold and white. Gaias’s mount dropped beneath him. He went under.

Gaias gasped, sucking in a mouthful of water. His boots snagged the bottom, and he thrust himself up. The horse struggled against a tangle of wood and leather. A log swiped the beast sideways and flung it away.

Gaias stood. The water flowed past him as though he were some monolith. He held his own and watched as the main host of Ergoth’s supply train was smashed beneath a thousand hammer blows and borne away in splinters and broken bodies.

His own log came, finally. He knew it would. There was no escaping this terrible onslaught. It caught him in the side. He felt his ribs snap as it drove him into the rolling rapids.

He no longer fought against his fate. He watched the white bubbles float around him like sprites in some vast, innocuous dance. Even when the light gave way to deeps and darknesses, the bubbles did not seem malicious, only capricious. Great logs jumbled above him.

The bubbles tickled his broken ribs and his old fish belly. He let his last breath go in a hearty laugh.

Meus Pater [my father]

I obliterated them today, Father. Historians will look back at the Crossing, as it will henceforward be known, and recount how the elves lay like humus across the forest floor and the human rebels fled like hares before a pack of dogs. They will say that two thousand traitors were slain today, ten times the honored dead of Ergoth. I have learned enough about how histories are written to know what they will say.

Even my greatest loss—sixty-four of my eighty-three supply wagons—will be seen as a necessary chastening of the young Ergothian commander. It will be told how Vinas Solamnus addressed his division, saying he had not accepted the loss of the wagons and had decided it was their duty to take back from the land of Vingaard tenfold what that land had stolen from them.

That’s what the histories will say. They will speak of the glorious victory at the Crossing.

These small losses have given me the tool by which to turn my division into a gods-justified pillaging machine. We will despoil Vingaard and bring it to its knees before the castle walls are even in sight.

But what of that which has been lost? What of nobility and purpose? What of honest valor and innocence?

I impaled a man today and held him aloft on the end of my sword. I enjoyed watching him die.

How silly of me to think I would need to exaggerate the brutality of this force and its commander. If Vingaard learns only a quarter of our true depravity, they will surrender immediately.

I have lost everything in this victory. Even Gaias lies in a half-drowned stupor among the other wounded. Had Luccia not recognized his tunic, floating among the jam of logs, he would have been lost entirely. Titus does not know if the colonel will ever awaken.

Now, all that remains for me is the empty hope that I can end this brutal business as quickly as possible. I pray the slaughter will be atrocious enough that it will not be allowed to continue, one way or another.

My soul aches to lie in the grave, or if not that, to defeat these people so that then, under the auspices of victory and civil government, we can save them.

And save ourselves.

X

One Month Hence, 9 Hiddumont, 1199 Age of Light

They moved like a locust plague across the land. The fruits of summer were tom from tender branches. Bean pods were snatched up by handfuls. Cabbage heads were crunched raw or stowed in sacks or merely kicked loose to provide a moment’s diversion along the road. Corralled pigs were shot with Ergoth’s finest arrows, gutted and cleaned on the spot, and hung to swing beneath bending poles.

Vinas let the soldiers provision themselves—“glean” as the senators in Daltigoth would call it—but he didn’t let them turn into a mob. He kept them marching twenty abreast, letting them reap the adjacent farm fields without breaking ranks. The longer, more difficult tasks such as slaughtering livestock or securing “tributes” of bread and jerkied meats from farmers, were assigned to select teams. Vinas also made certain that the village women gathered were willing and well paid for their services. No one was personally harmed—Vinas saw to that.

As to their livelihoods, well… the army was a lethal monster, and monsters must be fed, must be mollified until it is time again to fight.

In fact, his army had never stopped fighting. Each mile of this nowhere place gave them a new fight. After a three-week encampment while those who would heal did, the army had set out. They had marched more for lack of supplies than for any pressing need to advance. The advance had come slowly and with cost.

Not five miles north of the Crossing, which now saw little daylight owing to the clouds of carrion creatures that filled the sky, a platoon of scouts had run afoul of a hobgoblin nation. The scouts were in stew pots before Ergoth’s main army had reached the camp. Vinas had razed it to the ground. Some of the men now carried purses made of bugbear ears.

There had also been skirmishes at each town. Pitchfork militias would capture an outrider and ask questions and demand answers until the ground started shaking with twelve thousand feet. Those tongues that once wagged in rebellion now greeted the Ergothians gladly. The gifts of food and wine were readily accepted, along with the wagons the gifts had come in, and the horses that drew the wagons.

Occasionally, too, scouts would encounter the works of true rebels. Trees had been felled across the road. Slogans and threats had been scratched into the sides of barns. Traps had been hidden in potholes. For each handful the scouts caught and hanged along the way, there were many more making havoc ahead.

So went the petty battles of the advance. Sixteen soldiers lost their lives, as well as one horse maimed by a trap. The attrition was acceptable, given the decimated hobgoblin nation and the crowded gibbets that dotted the land.

Such were not really battles. The time for true fighting was coming again.

“Gather up,” Vinas said quietly as he directed Courage back onto the dirt track that served as a road.

Gaias, beside him, did not relay the message. His voice was still raspy from his near drowning. Another colonel nearby called out, “Gather up!”

The columns sharpened, moving out of the fields and onto the road. The whole snaking procession—two hundred rows of infantry with outriders to either side and scouts sweeping the land in a broad crescent—stretched for a mile.

Vinas looked ahead. The sloping farmlands gave way suddenly to gray thrusts of eroded stone. Ahead lay a canyon, where the second great battle would be fought.

“Gaias,” Commander Solamnus said softly.

“Yes, Commander,” Gaias rasped.

“I will ride ahead to that ridge. Bring the men to me there. Bring them to the bowl of land beneath the ridge. I want to speak to them.”

He did not wait for acknowledgment of his orders, knowing it would come, but would likely be too strangled to be understood. Instead, Vinas slapped the reins once against Courage’s neck and charged away like a comet of dust.

Afternoon had graduated to evening before the whole division of Daltigoth could be gathered in the bowl to hear Vinas. He would need to speak quickly, forcefully, and then get them up from that death trap to the high, defensible ground.

The men looked savage in their strictly ordered ranks on the desolate bowl of land. They looked like a newly needled tattoo in a concavity of dying flesh. The sun westered behind the army, already beginning its veil-dance of setting. Gossamer garments and ribbons of fuchsia and lavender spun slowly about its swollen heat. Behind Vinas, a curtain of indigo rose to fill the sky. Not a star showed in it.

Vinas drew a deep breath. He stepped to the edge of the precipice. Behind him, Gaias tensed. There came the subtle stirrings of magic as a war wizard cast the spell for vocal augmentation.

Ergoth, I speak to you. You—soldiers and cavalrymen, griffon-riders and scouts, war wizards and colonels—you are Ergoth. We are Ergoth. We are the best and bravest. We are the fighting arm of our nation. Before us is the task of defending, of avenging, the mind and heart of Ergoth. If we fail in this terrific task, whether we fail in might or nerve, our Ergoth will fail. If, though, we triumph, Ergoth will triumph.

The nation lies not in Daltigoth, not in the heartlands or the plains beside the Turbidus Sea. Ergoth stands before me.

A cheer went up, signaled by Chancellor Titus, who directed the six-thousand-throated cry like a trumpet marshal signaling heralds. As quickly as it had started, the cheer died. For some time, its ghost echoed down the canyon.

And Ergoth faces its greatest threat yet. It lies there, ahead of us.

He gestured to the dark rift. The Vingaard River had carved it through stone over the millennia. Vinas considered how old that desolate place was, how the basin where his division stood was, some centuries ago, the bottom of an inland sea.

The scouts who went in on foot have not returned. The griffon scouts that flew above the rift say it is miles and miles long, that no other way leads through these badlands, and that the vermin of Vingaard could hide like goblins in a thousand thousand bolt holes.

And they do hide. It is not law or civilization that they champion. It is chaos and squalid tribalism. They disdain the blind eyes and fair hands of Justice, preferring despotism and the tyranny of tiny men.

There is no more heavy infantry, light infantry. There is no more infantry and cavalry. There is no more horse and griffon. There is only Ergoth. No more shall we fight as separate weapons in separate hands, but now as a single weapons master.

Ergoth will march through this death trap, we, all together. The scouts will march atop the plateaus, watching for enemies. If danger approaches, they will shoot a flaming arrow straight into the air to warn us all.

The griffon-riders and war wizards will patrol the rims, within sight of the scouts and the army below. Should attack come from the plateau or from the caves, the griffon-mounted wizards will rain fire and lightning down upon the heads of our enemy.

The cavalry will surround the infantry, marching at the head and tail and flanks of the division. Where possible, they will ride up the foothills of the canyon and cleanse the caves there of man or beast.

The infantry will march in the center of the company, shields ready and swords sheathed.

And when they bring us this fight, which surely they shall, we will fight like Ergothians, and they will die like dogs.

Titus did not need to direct the ovation that answered that proclamation, and if any rebels were encamped within the deceptive folds of that canyon, they no doubt heard the stirring words.

That night, Vinas summoned his advisors to the command tent. By turns, they arrived out of the watchful darkness of sleeping soldiers and bivouacs. Each advisor arrived sober-faced and sleepy, wondering what new gravity awaited them. Each was met at the tent flap by a giddy young man whom, only after blinking a couple of times, they recognized as their commander.

“Come in, come in,” Vinas said to each newcomer.

Instead of the road-stale armor, Ergothian tunic and tabard, he now wore a clean white tunic and homespun breeches. These were the greatest of extravagances on the road, especially given that most of the spare clothes had been swept away with the wagons.

“What are you doing, crusted in dirt and wearing your armor?” he asked, incredulous. “I’ve called you here to celebrate!”

“Celebrate what?” they each had responded.

“Celebrate the end of all things,” he replied, his voice loud and joyous. “When, tomorrow, we march through that cleft, we will either be slain—each last one of us—or we will emerge from the other side, victorious. Either way, all the old things will be gone!”

After listening to Vinas’s litany, Gaias blinked uncomprehendingly at his commander and said, “You, Sir, are drunk.”

Titus asked jovially, “You’ve been hiding brandy from the priesthood again, haven’t you? Where is it?”

Vinas gave his greeting to the perpetually befuddled war wizard Duece, and the man responded, “What sort of nonsense is this for the middle of the night?”

The scout Destrias merely shrugged and said, “I couldn’t sleep, anyway.”

Even Barnabas and Anistas, the young man from Hellas’s ill-fated troop and the healer who had set him aright, were invited. “We thought we heard a party,” they said in unison.

And, finally Vinas greeted Luccia, who only looked in stunned puzzlement at him.

“Here,” he said to her, “let me help you with that armor.”

His hands, large yet always dexterous, worked free a shoulder guard, revealing a line of brown grit across the freckled shoulder beneath. He studied the line, then drew a finger across it, leaving a bare streak of skin.

“Luce! No wonder I didn’t recognize you,” he said, gazing into her eyes, “you looked so tan.” Laughter came from the other revelers, who were readily sampling the commander’s private stock of libations.

Luccia ignored them. She returned Vinas’s searching look, though her eyes were not lit with the same merriment. “I’ve had trouble recognizing you, too, of late.”

Vinas nodded once and smiled thinly.

He broke contact and drifted back among the others. His figure was as lithe and graceful as it had been eighteen years before, in the alley behind his father’s estate. With his tousled hair, twinkling eyes, and insistent smile, this older Vinas was looking much like the younger one.

“Join us, Colonel,” he said to Luccia. “We were just trying to decide whether to invite the rebels in for a drink.”

She lifted the shoulder guard and began to fasten it back in place. “I’m glad to be just ahead of them on the guest list,” she said.

Vinas gestured her toward a seat that, right then, did look clean and comfortable. Precious little looked that way anymore.

As she passed him and took the proffered camp chair, Vinas said, “We are trying to decide whether it would be faster and less expensive to lure Vingaard back with festivals, or smash it with arms.”

Titus, who looked a bit unpriestly with his red nose and wet smile, lifted a partially drained glass. “I lean toward the festivals,” the gigantic priest said. “To pay eighteen thousand men, or the widows and families of eighteen thousand men, is no small expense. Wouldn’t the money be better spent on a great celebration? And we are not just paying these men, but clothing them and feeding them and provisioning them. Take that money and use it to make Ergoth the loveliest empire in Ansalon, not the cruelest, and Vingaard and everyone else will be climbing over each other to join.” The word “loveliest” was said a little too lushly, and it brought a laugh from the other guests. “So, if you agree with me—if you smile like me instead of frowning like our more warmongering companions—come sit here and help me argue.”

Luccia regarded the grand man of the church. Titus looked now more like a tame bear than ever before. “Your argument is at least pleasant,” she observed, not moving from her seat.

Barnabas, the sniper youth rescued from Hellas’s band, said, “Don’t be fooled by his simpleton smirk. The fact is that Ergoth feeds and clothes and pays and provisions these men whether or not they fight. The money is not sitting there for this world festival of his. The emperor would have to dismiss us all and dissolve his armies to hold such a feast.”

“Not all his armies,” objected Titus loudly, then added under his breath, “not those of us who can cook.”

More laughter. It was a musical sound on that savage plateau.

Even laconic Gaias was getting into the spirit; the spirits reciprocated. “A festival would reward treachery.”

The others turned to him.

Vinas, reflective behind a chalice, said, “How do you mean?”

Gaias swallowed. “Vingaard has rebelled. If you throw a feast for anyone who rebels, everyone will.”

Titus responded, “Perhaps. Perhaps it is too late for Vingaard. But if the empire were a wondrous thing to belong to, who would ever leave it?”

“In other words, who willingly stays in a prison?” Vinas said. “And who willingly leaves a feast?”

“Precisely,” said Titus, raising his glass to toast Vinas’s words. “And I would imagine it takes more money to guard, feed, clothe, and shelter prisoners than it would to throw a feast for the same folk.”

“And no one gets killed at a feast,” said Luccia quietly.

“Well,” Anistas observed, “not if the food is good.”

Amidst the chuckling, Gaias said, “But Vingaard has committed treason. We must be punitive. If we do not punish them for leaving, others will follow.”

“And who could blame them?” burst Titus. “Daltigoth is five hundred miles away on foot, two thousand miles by sea and five hundred thousand as far as any peasant can determine. They are taxed into starvation, into extinction; their food is stolen from them and sold back to them at a dear ransom; the senate and the emperor are deaf to their pleas; and ogres and bugbears only cease their pillaging when tax armies come marching by. We—the rich and priestly elite—have harvested the peasants as though they were wheat, whacking off their heads with the certainty that more will grow back to replace the ones we eat, and we dare call it treason when they stand up and say, ‘No more’?”

Titus had said too much. He knew it and so did everyone else. The silence in the wake of his rant was broken only when the priest himself swallowed the last of his spirits. He struggled to stand. “Well, I suppose I should be going. I don’t want to ruin the night for the rest of you.” He wobbled toward the tent flap, stopping only long enough to lay a massive hand on Vinas’s shoulder. “Lovely party, Commander. We’ll have to have another one like it in Vingaard Keep.”

Then, the giant was out of the tent.

The forced lightheartedness had left with the bombastic priest. Even Vinas Solamnus looked old again, his shoulders perceptibly sunken. His skin was lined and dull in the lantern light.

The others departed soon after, more sober than when they had arrived. At last it was only Luccia and Vinas, sitting silently across from each other, staring into distances far beyond the tent’s walls.

Luccia said, “I should be going. It’s an early start tomorrow.”

“Don’t,” said Vinas simply, his gaze lifting to meet her eyes for the first time since she had entered. “Not yet. Sit awhile more.”

Her brow beetled. “We aren’t even talking, Vinas.”

“I know,” he said with a nod. “But stay, anyway, Luce, for old times.”

After the night of whimsy came a grim morning. Rank on rank, the soldiers filed down into the basin and took their posts. Colonels and captains rode among the soldiers and gave orders. Spells, arrows, rocks, even bodies would be raining down upon them soon.

Banners snapping, the army was arrayed. Cavalry formed a long, thin envelope around the infantry. Beyond the cavalry, griffons flexed their wings, orange and flame-bright in the early morning air. Half the scouts were already in place, atop the eastern ridges and plotting their trail across the broken and forbidding terrain. The other half were climbing up the eastern edge of the canyon. They would no sooner top the rise than they would set out at a run to keep pace with the advancing lines.

As usual, Commander Solamnus had asked Chancellor Titus to bear his standard, and Colonel Luccia to remain close at hand, ostensibly to relay his orders.

“He wants you here to save him,” Chancellor Titus joked with Luccia as she mounted her steed next to him.

“If I know Vinas,” she returned, “he wants me here so he can save me.”

“Or, perhaps, kiss you,” the priest replied.

It was just then that Vinas rode up. Courage shifted nervously beneath him. The commander’s eyes were sharp, staring into the distance, checking his troops. Something caught his eye. Just before he charged away, he said, “If we reach the other side today, Titus, I’d kiss even you.”

Then with a rumble of hooves, he and Courage sped away. In a breath, the horse was kicking up dust along a distant line of infantry, and Vinas was barking orders.

“He does love you,” Titus murmured.

“What?” asked Luccia irritably.

“He does love you,” the priest repeated. “He’s just become too much of a warrior to know how to show it.”

She breathed deeply, untangling the reins from Terraton’s mane. “He’ll have to learn,” she replied, then nudged the griffon’s side with her heels. There was a great surge of wings, and they lifted away.

The swirling dust had not yet settled when Vinas, all clanking armor, halted Courage next to Titus. Through gritted teeth, the commander asked, “Where’s Luce? I ordered her to stay close.”

“Ah,” said Titus, gently mocking, “so that’s the problem.”

Vinas glared at his longtime friend and said, “The road has certainly loosened your tongue, Priest.”

“Yes,” agreed Titus. “Strange that it has tightened yours.”

Instead of responding, Vinas tilted his head back and shaded his eyes from the robin’s egg sky. He glimpsed Luccia, a darting flame of orange in the distance.

“She’ll be back. I’ve no time to wait.”

Under his breath, Titus said, “That seems to be the problem in a nutshell.”

“Forward!” commanded Vinas.

“Forward!” cried Gaias, his voice ragged.

“Forward!” The shout rang down the lines. The wide and anxious eyes of the men then drew into determined slits as they took their first steps into the chasm.

Luccia had not returned. She had not reported in. She had sent other griffon riders periodically down to tell Vinas what they had encountered—nothing—but she had not bothered to come herself.

It riled Vinas. Perhaps she was fulfilling the letter of his order—to provide him with updates from the ridge—but he had meant that she do it personally, not send lackeys. Already, the division had marched three miles into the chasm. No attacks had come in that nail-biting hour, but every soldier was on edge, especially the commander.

“Another five miles to go, Commander,” said the latest lad dispatched by Luccia. He looked no older than fourteen as he sat astride his flapping steed. “I’m pleased to report we have sighted none of the enemy.”

“Thank you,” said Vinas distractedly.

The lad kept his griffon hovering beside a fidgeting Courage.

Vinas barked, “Well, away with you!”

No sooner had the messenger arrowed steeply away than Vinas rounded a comer to see an army.

The army of Vingaard.

They were a mile ahead, a slowly marching rabble in mismatched and filthy armor. Their war-horses were little more than plow pullers, but they were there, and by the thousands.

“You see them, don’t you?” Vinas hissed to Gaias and Titus as he signaled a halt.

The soundless signal passed back among the ranks, and the war worm slowly compressed to a stop.

Gaias said, “Preserve me, but I do.”

Titus shook his head in disbelief. “Why didn’t the scouts see them?”

“Enemy war wizards,” Gaias offered, “I suspect.”

“What are they doing here in such force? On the march? Why aren’t they dug in?” Vinas wondered aloud.

“They’re invading,” Gaias answered quietly.

Vinas was dumbfounded. “Invading? They have the gall to break away from Ergoth and then send an invasion force across the border?”

“So it would seem,” Gaias commented.

“Heavy horses—bring them,” Vinas ordered a young colonel beside him. “Bring a company of them. I will lead them myself.”

The colonel spurred his steed to rush back among the lines.

“Let the colonel lead,” Titus said. “We’re still weeks out of Vingaard Keep. There’ll be more important charges.”

“No, friend,” Vinas responded. “This time you are wrong. If we lose this battle, we lose the war. If we lose, they will march straight to Daltigoth. Besides, I’ve a feeling a determined corps of lancers could smash through them as though they were made of paper.”

“Remember our straw man attack at the Crossing?” Titus asked. “This could be the same trap.”

Vinas laughed. “You give them too much credit. Ah, here are my lancers now.”

He rode Courage out to meet the heavy horse company that thundered up between the main army and the river. Vinas reined in, staring at them with excitement in his eyes.

“There they are, men,” he said. “The warriors of Vingaard. I’d not thought we’d ever get a true charge of heavy horse. I thought they’d be hiding in caves or in the keep itself, but here they are and here we are.

“A lance!” he called. One of the riders handed his over. Vinas tested its heft, looked at it admiringly, and set its butt against his hip. “I myself will lead you in this charge. We’ll rip the belly out of that division with the first blow. Drive in with lances and continue on with swords. The infantry will follow at a run. We’ll not stop until we tear through their ranks.”

A cheer went up. Vinas wheeled Courage about and gave a bloodcurdling whoop. Courage leapt into the charge and the other mounts responded in kind. Dust rose thick behind the company. The horses formed into a V-shaped line of attack. At the apex of that wedge, Commander Solamnus drove Courage.

The cavalry crossed beds of packed earth, clattered over shelves of shale scree, splashed through little black pools, and vaulted the brush that clung here and there to the shadowed stones. Hooves sparking, the horses dropped down again onto an embankment of packed ground that was flat between the sheer wall and the tumbling Vingaard River.

An enemy charge was lumbering out to meet them. Shoeless horses thumped beneath toothless bumpkins. Half of them wielded flails and rakes instead of spears or lances.

They will splinter and drift away on the wind, these scarecrow soldiers, thought Vinas, his heart drumming in his chest.

He lowered his lance. The other riders followed suit.

Genocide. Quick, not cruel. That was the kindest way to describe it.

An orange comet roared by overhead. Vinas looked up just in time to see Luccia and Terraton dive to attack the infantry. Good. Her cavalry would harass them from the skies, too.

No more time for watching. One heartbeat, two… The ranks closed.

Impact. Vinas’s lance caught a man in the chest, ripped through him, and flung him backward atop a farmer. Vinas loosed the cracked wood, won free, and drew steel.

Before his sword cleared its scabbard, more lances struck home. One impaled a man’s head like a plump melon. Another slid beneath a horse’s barding and cut a wide, messy hole through its shoulder and into its flank. With every lance, there came a scream from man or beast, a splintering crack from the lance, and the inevitable throes of death.

All Vinas’s men were still mounted. All had forsaken lances for swords. All waded in, hacking and hewing. Limbs and heads flew, bodies fountained, torsos flopped to the ground. The shouts of the Ergothians and screams of their foes mixed in a high, haunting skirl, like the devil song of pipes.

Vinas had downed three already—yokels, these. His sword sliced through the haft of an axe meant for him. The axe head spun past like a taloned bird. He split the man down the middle. Giving no quarter, Vinas drove Courage into the man’s brown plow horse, shouldered past the panicked beast, and knocked a dying farmer to the ground.

Beyond were more potential victims. The whole swale was packed with them, from the dispassionate cliffs to the turbid Vin. They had come to die. They had come, these amateurs, against overwhelming forces and weapons, and why? Why? Because Vinas was invading their home.

He brought his sword clattering down. It met a blade. The notch-toothed warrior who wielded the weapon had muscle to him, bulk and power. Vinas parried a well-aimed attack, the first time he had needed to exert himself in this battle. Sword met sword and ground together like troubled teeth. Three more blows and blocks. Vinas saw the tide of rebel footmen—the treasonous vermin—sweeping in behind the thinning line of cavalry. He glanced in the other direction and saw his own troops arriving at perhaps twice the pace.

He felt a sting at his neck and with it the warmth of blood. Vinas whirled in a fury and lopped the warrior’s bearded head from his shoulders.

Gaias will be here in moments, he thought, and waded into the crimson fray.

Gaias cantered his mount, leading the infantry toward the fight. They came down a slope of shattered shale, heading for the hoof-marked flats where the two sides clashed. Soon, the foot soldiers would meet, too, and the fighting would be man-to-man.

It seemed strange to the old soldier to ride into battle rather than walk. Stranger still—to ride so slowly.

He led the charge because Vinas was already lost in the fighting. The commander was forever placing himself in the greatest danger, and leaving his colonels and lieutenants to make sure of the troops. It was bad leadership, Gaias would have said, except that it had always worked. Vinas was the greatest leader he had ever known.

They came upon a portion of packed ground and jogged on toward the hoof-torn soil of the cavalry fight.

“Charge!” shouted Gaias, raising his sword in the air.

Those men who had not yet drawn steel did so now. The six thousand upraised swords gleamed like cold, blue stars fallen from heaven. The charge neared the battle line. Gaias wished he was standing on his own feet. Too late for regrets.

With a racket like the blows of a thousand hammers on a thousand anvils, the warriors converged.

Gaias and his mount lunged among the trampled dead and the similarly trampled living. At first, the only work to be done was pushing past the milling remnants of cavalry battle. Gaias charged among the thin crop of whirling Ergothian swords, ducked beneath a broken lance wedged in a fallen horse, vaulted the central midden and shattered bone and blood where the first and most had fallen. Then he was among the rabble soldiers.

The horse struck ground atop a mob, killing two with hooves alone. But those two had their revenge. A crack came, like splitting wood. The horse shrieked and toppled over its broken leg, bearing Gaias atop it.

He was flung from the saddle and bowled into the putrid mob. He landed, and slew two beneath him as he levered himself to his feet. He had enough presence of mind to clamber over his foundering, rolling horse. His blade swept a silver arc, and the beast stilled atop crushed warriors.

Gaias whirled. He chopped a wedge from one blond-haired wretch. As his sword pulled free of the falling form and he set his feet to repel another foe, Gaias thought, I should not be given a third horse.

Griffons shrieked through the skies. They flew down to engage the aerial squads of Vingaard.

Vingaard’s armored, black-swathed villains sat astride red, flying fiends. The fiend bodies were the size of a man’s, but their arms were spread in wings of skin that could easily shadow a dozen horses. The heads of the creatures were birdlike, with scaly craniums that reached back in long spikes toward their riders. Their attenuated, toothy beaks released the most otherworldly and bone-chilling cries the riders had ever heard.

“Pteradons” was the name one man had muttered.

Bodies rained down from the sky battle—tawny eagle-lions, black-robed pteradon-riders, reeling Ergothians, and the unholy red flesh of the monstrosities, too. And when bodies fell, they landed on more bodies, dead or otherwise.

The canyon was quickly becoming a slaughterhouse. It seemed not a soul would survive.

“Come over here,” insisted Jerome, a young, red-robed apprentice. “The ground over here sounds hollow.” He stamped his foot again on the rocky escarpment.

“You ever heard of hollow granite?” chided one of his companions, a mage with at least six month’s seniority. He stood a stone’s throw away. He and the other war wizards avidly showered the enemy with lightning bolts, magic missiles, and whatever else they could conjure. “There’s a full-scale battle going on down there, and you’re worried about hollow rocks.”

Jerome waited until his companion had turned around before sneering. He was worried about the battle. Granite wasn’t hollow, but this ground was. So, this ground obviously wasn’t granite. If it wasn’t granite, what was it?

Jerome had very few spells but he knew one that could dispel magic and might just do the trick. Cracking his knuckles, Jerome made the requisite gestures, directed his casting toward the hollow-seeming ground, and spoke a word of power. In a flash, the cloaking spell vanished. Granite disappeared beneath him. A chasm opened up in its place—a deep chasm that intersected the one where the battle was taking place. Its bottom was lined with white-robed mages.

Mages!

That was all Jerome had time to see before he tumbled, head over heels. He let out a scream. His featherfall spell kicked in, and he went from plummeting to wafting. A very nice spell. As well as saving his life, it gave him a chance to see what the white-robed wizards were doing.

They were linked together in a long chain, their arms intertwined. Mouths moved in a rhythmic chant, and something that looked like quicksilver sweated from their pores. The liquid flowed over their bodies, streaming toward the main chasm. Halfway down the line, the wizards were completely covered in the liquid so that they looked like polished statues instead of men. Three quarters of the way down the line, the mercuric magic streamed up from the mages, forming into a wall that cut across the canyon.

“A mirror,” Jerome realized suddenly. “Some kind of magic mirror.” He wasn’t sure what the mirror had to do with the battle, but he knew what he ought to do to get rid of it: break the mages’ concentration. He began the gestures of a spell.

They’d not laugh at Jerome when they found out he single-handedly won the battle of the chasm by his clever use of a stinking cloud. Oh, the ribbing he’d received for learning that one!

Vinas had just driven his sword into the heart of a pitchfork-swinging farmer when the man transformed before his eyes. Where once there had been ratty, befouled sackcloth, now there was a tabard bearing the insignia of Ergoth. Where once there had been a bloated, stubbled face, now there was a young, beardless visage with dead eyes so blue they seemed to be white.

Vinas stared in surprise and drew back. Courage trampled bodies beneath. Those bodies, too, wore the livery of Ergoth’s army. He spun in the saddle, eyes sweeping across the battlefield. Not a Solanthian was in sight. Ergothian fought Ergothian, each swinging blindly, savagely, at the other.

Then, in an all-too-slow wave, the fighting faltered and stopped. The survivors stood, still and silent. They gaped at the ruin of their comrades, at the piled bodies of Ergoth’s dead. Pteradons had transformed into griffons, Solanthian colors into the red and black of Ergoth, slain foes into murdered friends.

As though slain himself, Vinas slumped from Courage and fell among the dead.

Meus Pater [my father]

I know her hand was in this—Phrygia’s hand. I know somehow she contrived, between the royal mage of Ergoth and some rebel sorcerer, to make my army destroy itself. Even so, the blame is not hers. The blame is all ours, all mine.

We battled only ourselves. How apt.

Whom do I fight for? The people of Ergoth? Certainly not. They are starving. They are suffocating beneath the boot on their necks, my boot. All the people of Ergoth wish for is the deliverance that Vingaard has claimed for itself, a deliverance I will be taking away from them.

I do not fight for the people of Ergoth, but for the Quisling Imperial Dynasty. No, not even that. The empress herself fights against me.

So, all that is left is Emann Quisling himself. That is who I fight for. Once I fought against him, in the bread troubles of Solanthus. Once I saved him from assassins. Had I only been slower that day, there would have been no battle today.

Two thousand men died today. Another two thousand are wounded, and why? Because they fight for Emann, one man against the people of Ansalon.

How strange that we war and die in a dispute that could be ended by one quick, sharp blade… .

I do not pray to any god. Still, this night, as we survivors camp just beyond the rift, I have found myself over and over imploring Chemosh that those assassins might return and finish what they failed to do so many years ago. Such things would be so easy for the gods.

Still, while Emann lives, I serve him.

We will remain here as long as the scouts call it safe. We will repair and heal and muster. Then, it will be time to advance to the walls of Vingaard—not just this division of four thousand, but II Redroth’s six thousand and III Caergoth’s six thousand.

We will take Vingaard however it proves necessary—whole, if it surrenders, or in fragments of soot and bone and dust if it does not.

Father, I trust myself now to the pragmatism that served you so well. I only hope that at the end of this road of skulls, I will find one tenth the wisdom you had.

XI

Two Weeks Hence, 23 Hiddumont, 1199. Age of Light

The healing was done, and Vinas’s army marched north toward Vingaard Keep. No enemies had been sighted since the mirror battle. The scouts espied only farmers and millers, priests and children. For a land under attack by three separate armies from the most powerful empire in the world, Vingaard looked strangely oblivious. Bucolic, even.

Even in these northern climes, though, summer was ending. That was as much a reason for marching as any. There was no more time for napping in indolent heat and tramping to the nearby lake to fish and swim. Already, such pastimes had softened the soldiers, made them more like farm boys than conquerors.

Vinas led Courage along the straight, flat rows of wheat, letting the proud steed occasionally snap a few grains to crunch as they passed. Gaias limped along next to him without a mount. Despite a wounded hamstring, the man refused to ride a horse—unwilling to “condemn another noble beast to death.” Nor would he quit the front ranks to ride in a wagon. He wanted to remain beside his commander, providing counsel.

“I don’t like it,” muttered Vinas. He gestured about at the countryside of early autumn.

“What don’t you like about it?” Gaias asked, a twinkle beneath gray eyebrows. “Are the fields too lush? Is the sky too blue? Is the sun too bright?”

Vinas glanced upward at the cloudless sky, occupied by only a friendly summer sun and the flocks of Ergothian griffons, watching for enemies.

“All of that, and more,” Vinas said. “I feel like we’ve passed into some fairy realm. We are being lulled by a beautiful and lethal dream. Look at the men. Look at them!”

Gaias didn’t—he was too busy hobbling along—but Vinas did.

The soldiers did not march in columns or rows, but in an undisciplined mass. One of the colonels with a gifted voice had started leading his boys in marching songs. When those ran out, he had switched to tavern tunes, and the company careered across the road as if drunk. Others whistled. Half the men had stems of grass hanging from their teeth. Some even walked barefoot on the soft, cool grass.

Vinas snarled, “They aren’t ready to fight. Not one of them has got a killing heart left.”

“Well,” volunteered Titus unhelpfully, strolling along behind the warriors, “it’s your job to put hatred and fear in them. Go back and take one of the barefoot ones, one of the singers and one of the whistlers, and hang them. That’ll whip the others into line.”

Vinas shook his head. “Exactly. That’s what I’d have to do.”

Titus strode up beside them, taking one step for each of their two. “Why whip them in line? There’s not an army between here and the castle. Let them stroll awhile. We’ll have plenty of fear and hatred up the road a little.”

“Even if there was a less drastic way, I’m not sure I’d do anything right now,” Vinas said, “I just don’t have the heart for it anymore… .”

“Or, maybe, you do have the heart, once again,” Titus observed.

As they neared the end of a tall field of wheat, Vinas noticed a farmer leaning on a fieldstone wall. The man smoked a pipe and squinted at them in the bright sun. He seemed to be interested in the army, amused even, but not the slightest bit afraid.

“Ho, there!” Vinas called, his hand ready beside his sword. “What news?”

The farmer’s face, the color and texture of supple leather, quirked for a moment. He thoughtfully spit and said, “Wheat’s done good this year.”

Vinas and Gaias traded incredulous glances. They had almost reached the man, whose gray-streaked black hair looked glossy like a horse’s tail. Vinas said, “Do you know who we are?”

The farmer tapped out the bowl of his pipe and used a chestnut-colored fingertip to tamp some more tobacco in place. “I suspect you’re that army everybody’s been saying is coming.”

With a hand signal, Vinas halted the army. The soldiers, singing or talking or chewing, were slow to respond. They bunched up as though all four thousand of them were listening in on the conversation.

“We’re from Ergoth,” Vinas explained. “We’ve come to take back the keep.”

The farmer spent a moment relighting his pipe, then said, “I figured you boys’d be coming. Too good to last.”

Seizing on this first hint of animosity, if not treason, Vinas said, “So, you would rather we’d stayed away?”

The farmer blinked as he pondered that statement. He let out two big bluish puffs of smoke, and said, “If you mean would I rather feed my family than starve them, yes, I suppose I would.”

Despite a warning look from Gaias, and despite the strong sense that in fact all four thousand men were listening, Vinas pressed, “And the other farmers hereabouts—they also would rather be ruled from Vingaard than from Daltigoth?”

“Look, Captain—”

“Commander,” Vinas corrected.

“—we don’t care who’s ruling us as long as we get a fair shake, as long as we aren’t getting robbed and cheated and sold and taxed and stomped every which way to Gileadai. I don’t know nothing about rulers and armies and all that. I know just about raising wheat and pigs and sons and daughters, and all I know is this season, ever since the ones in the castle said we’re free, all that raising has been going lots better.”

The response poised on Vinas’s tongue dissolved away into a bitter powder. He only stood there, mouth hanging open.

“Now, you’re the one who knows about rulers and armies, which is why you’re here, and why you’re going to take back that keep. That’s all fine. You’ve got to do what you know about. All I’m saying is I hope when it’s you on that throne or whatever they have in there, that my wheat’s not going to be burned away or stolen from me and my kids aren’t going to be out poaching on royal lands and shot to death just because they are tired of being hungry all the time. That’s all.”

Vinas was barely able to prevent himself from doing a double take in front of his men. That, in some small way, was a victory. So was closing his mouth with a little dignity. Without another word, he signaled his army to proceed with the march.

As the troops filed quietly by, more than one of the soldiers gave the farmer a polite nod. He, stolidly smoking his pipe, returned the gesture.

One Week Hence, 30 Hiddumont, 1199 Age of Light

One fine, cold autumn morning, the three armies of Ergoth marched onto the plains that surrounded Vingaard Keep.

There had been a few scuffles en route; not all the residents were as obliging as the first farmer. The attacks, though, had amounted to no more than sporadic ambushes by tiny militia groups. These “patriots” now adorned gibbets on the river roads leading to the keep.

The fortification was more than a single keep. It included a garrison of one thousand men; the oldest chapel to Mishakal in western Ansalon; the largest grain mill in the area; a stockyard, abattoir, and smokehouse (which locals claimed held one hundred and fifty sides of beef and two hundred head of living cattle); a winery; and the palace residence of Vingaard’s current ruler—Antonias Leprus, scion of a long and unremarkable senatorial family. Put simply, the place was well-defended, and even better stocked.

“King” Antonias had apparently decided against sending even a single one of his thousand warriors out to parley with Commander Solamnus and his sixteen thousand. It was just as well. Ergoth would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender, and Commander Solamnus felt in the mood for a good execution. Antonias seemed to sense all of this. Though not a military man, he knew enough to let his walls keep the enemy out, while his own men were safely sequestered within.

The futile annoyance of militia attacks ceased once the castle was in sight. From there on, the soldiers had marched in grim, silent menace down the main thoroughfares, past shuttered windows and barred and bolted doors. In keeping with the old saying, each man in Vingaard treated his home as a castle. As long as the keep stood, the houses—public and private—would need to be captured one by one.

There would be time for that. Vinas planned a siege, not a storming. Not yet. He would send word to Daltigoth that the rebels were surrounded, and ask whether to starve them out, assault the defenses, or both. Until he had verifiable word back from the emperor, he would only wait. As he had said to Gaias, he had the heart for nothing else. As Gaias did not say back, neither did his men.

In time, the armies entirely encircled the keep, save for the rivers, of course, which were lined with marksmen. It was then that Antonias chose to address Vinas from the wall.

“Greetings, Countryman!” shouted the rebel lord, as though in welcome. He had long, dark hair that fell in ringlets about his head and a chiseled mustache and beard, worn in the style of the distant Istarians. He was a freethinking dandy, a rebel in more ways than one. “What brings you to Vingaard?”

“High treason,” Vinas responded.

“Oh,” said Antonias, and he paused for a sip from the wineglass he held, “that.”

“Yes, that, Senator,” Vinas said evenly.

Antonias smiled. “I always liked the sound of that title—senator. It’s so republican. Still, lately the folk hereabouts have been calling me king.”

“That, too, will be corrected,” Vinas said ominously.

Antonias sniffed. “It’s going to be a siege, then, is it?”

“Until men are coming up from holes in your cellars and climbing ladders over your battlements and rushing through breaches caused by siege engines—yes, until then, you can consider this a siege.”

“Well, then,” Antonias said, resuming his former tone of cheer, “settle in. You’ll find this a gracious land, not nearly as frigid in winter as your Daltigoth. If you ask nicely and promise to pay the standard fares, you may even coax some of the better pubs and inns to open. I’m afraid all the ransomable persons are already in the castle, here, along with the very best drama and dance troupes in Ansalon. The town of Vingaard, however, has plenty of folk musicians who might entertain—”

“The keep of Vingaard has plenty of gall to act so unconcerned in the face of sixteen thousand troops, including a company of griffon riders and another of war wizards, as well as an elite division of escalade forces—”

“It is no act,” interrupted Antonias lightly. “We are unconcerned. We have enough provisions to keep us comfortable for five years. We have our own war wizards, whose spells will keep you and your eagle-lions well enough away for that same period of time. And sapping into granite is hard work, I assure you. You see, we have more than enough time to wait for you to decide that the conquest on which you are bent is ill-considered, at best, and perhaps even demonic.”

He paused for a response, but Vinas said nothing.

“Thank you for this parley,” said Antonias. “I must admit I have heard some amazing stories about the ruthless brutality of the great Vinas Solamnus, and so far, you have lived up to my expectations.”

With that, the so-called king turned and disappeared among the battlements, leaving Vinas standing and staring toward a darkening sky.

That night, Commander Solamnus did not host a lighthearted gathering of his advisors. His staffers did not assemble to discuss the imperial favors sure to be granted.

Despite the hubbub among the fighting men, the tent of Commander Solamnus was quiet. The only sound in it came from the scratch of a pen on vellum. The commander himself sat beside the map table and labored over a message to the emperor.

Vinas glanced away from the page and the twisted black lines that coiled across it. He seemed to stare straight through the slowly wafting canvas of the tent, eyes focused on some distant, unattainable object.

The camp chair creaked as he leaned heavily back into it. Lifting the letter up to his eyes, he read what he had written so far:

From Vinas Solamnus,
Commander of the Armies of Ergoth,

To His Majesty, Emann Quisling,
Emperor of Ergoth.

Greetings,
We have them. I write to you from our encampment surrounding Vingaard Keep. We have won this position with the loss of two thousand of our troops. The remaining sixteen thousand will be more than enough to hold this siege, even to win a storming escalade of the walls. Given the possibility of the latter, I will assign teams of engineers to build siege engines. I await your orders to attack.

That’s where he had stopped writing. He did not need orders to attack. Vinas had been granted full discretion with the army. If he had commanded it, his armies would have thrown themselves against the walls the moment they gained the Vingaard plains. Perhaps this very night then, he would have been writing a very different letter from the blood-drenched throne of the self-styled king. It would have been a costly offensive, but by sheer force of numbers he could have taken the keep.

Such a precipitous attack would have been very wasteful of men. It was a good enough excuse to delay. In fact, Commander Solamnus hoped not to attack now or ever.

A sudden memory took hold of him:

He sat in the velvet safety of his father’s lap, a gilded storybook lying open on his own knees. Father’s voice, deep and mystical, tolled like a carillon in his ears. He heard no words, only felt the deep resonances of the illuminated manuscript: gold, red, blue, and green figures climbing the trellis of sentences.

There, in a margin the exact width of his father’s thumb, was a whole forest. The forest held a noble huntsman in a rose-colored cape. He stood, his feet pinned by the thumb, his hands patiently and expertly fitting a final arrow into his bow.

The rest of the huntsman’s arrows were deep in a wild boar. The beast was cornered at last. He could barely stand to charge. The huntsman had chased him through a riot of pages already, a trail Vinas saw again with a mere riffle of his child’s hand.

The boy’s other hand clamped down over his father’s thumb. “Enough,” Vinas said.

This was where the story ended. Only once had his father read what followed, how the boar with his last breath revealed himself to be the Enchanter of Gherigoth, the sorcerer whose spells had guarded the wondrous city of old; how the huntsman stayed his last arrow for a moment before knowing pity for the dying sorcerer; how the last arrow met the last breath and the boar perished, taking enchanted Gherigoth down into the underworld.

Vinas clutched his father’s thumb. The tolling of words faded away to silence. The boy drew the page closed.

The child wondered again, as he had so many times before, how a great huntsman could slay the ancient sorcerer. “How can a man so quickly and accidentally become a villain?”

“The fact that you even wonder means you are not a villain,” came a voice. The sound was so gentle and familiar, so natural, it seemed a part of Vinas’s remembrance.

Suddenly, he noticed Luccia sitting across the table from him. Her freckled face was mud-smudged and young in the dim glow of his lantern, as it had looked when first they had tried to join this damnable army. “At least not yet, Commander.” Luccia tried out a smile, but the truth of these last words soured her expression.

“Would you like to come in, Colonel Luccia?” he chided.

“When does the victory celebration begin?” she asked uncomfortably.

He tossed the vellum aside. “As soon as we have won,” he replied. “Perhaps never.”

At that, she laughed, a genuine laugh. “You’re Vinas Solamnus. You can’t help winning this battle.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I will win, even if it costs me everything.”

Luccia breathed deeply. “I didn’t come here to talk about Vingaard—”

“Then, what?” he asked. “What else is there?”

She looked down, and seemed about to leave. After a visible exertion of will, she said, “There is one long siege you have never chosen to end, one fortress you have always held but never stormed.” She looked meaningfully at him. “And, I must say, you’ve starved me out. I’d like to discuss terms of surrender.”

He didn’t seem to hear. His sight was again upon that distant, unattainable goal.

Luccia shrugged, her confession bringing a flush to her face. Hoping to chase the embarrassment away, she bluffed, “I just thought seeing as we suddenly have so much time on our hands—”

“Luce, I’m sorry,” Vinas broke in distractedly. “I’m not going to be good company tonight. I guess I’d just rather be alone right now.”

She nodded, pursed her lips, then nodded again.

“You can be alone as long as you want. Perhaps forever.”

And she was gone.

Four Months Hence, 12 Rannmont, 1200 Age of Light

The scene was nearly the same. Commander Solamnus was slouched in the same camp chair, before the same map table. In the depths of the snowy winter, he wore a wolf pelt bunched up around cold-reddened ears. Vinas’s breath ghosted out golden from his full brown beard.

That golden mist merged with Luccia’s breaths. She sat beside him now, for sake of warmth.

The letter Vinas perused this time was not his own, but came from the emperor:

From His Highness, Emann Quisling,
Emperor of Ergoth,

To Vinas Solamnus,
Commander of the Armies of Ergoth.

Greetings,
I am pleased with the progress of the siege. With two feet of snow and frost down to three feet, I’m sure the buggers have no idea you are so near to sapping beneath the moat. The war wizard spells should make quick work of the granite bedrock. The towers should do well crossing the frozen moat. Your planning has been perfect to the last detail.

Be sure to bring me the head of that traitorous “King Antonias.” Have one of the wizards preserve it. Perhaps, it could even be kept magically alive. I’ve planned to have it stuffed and mounted among my other hunting trophies, but how much more fun if it is alive and gagged for eternity, eyes darting hatefully at me whenever I enter the room!

As to provisions, you’ve had more than enough. Let the men buy their own food in the taverns. Which brings me to the latest pay caravan. I’ve sent full pay only to the engineers, sappers, and officers. They are the only ones working. If the rest haven’t enough money to buy food, let them wash dishes for it. They’ve got the time to.

On a related note, do not discourage the rank and file from getting children with these Vingaard wenches. A woman can rule a man if all that joins them is their mutual appetite. Once a child is made, though, it is the man that rules. Then the woman needs him. What better way to win the peasants back to the empire than by plowing their women with our seed?

Keep your colonels, officers, and staff away from the native breeding stock, though. Among them, one strong-minded woman could mean treason.

“The pig,” said Luccia vehemently.

“I sense Phrygia’s hand in this, too,” Vinas said. He gazed for a moment at the closing lines of the letter, then folded it and shoved it into a satchel containing five other such uncompromising missives.

Luccia touched Vinas’s bearded chin and turned his face toward her. “You give too much thought to her. It makes me jealous.”

“Jealous of what?” asked Vinas. “I hate that woman. I hate her with a passion.”

“Passion, yes,” she replied. “You have more passion for her than for anyone else. What about me?”

Vinas stood and moved around the table to a small stove that smoldered in the corner of the tent. He rubbed his hands before the weak heat. “I don’t have to be obsessed with you. We’re friends. I’m sure of you.”

She crouched behind him, her hands on his shoulders. “Are you? Are you so sure?” she asked. “Let’s put it this way: when will you finally know this land is yours?”

He paused, an animal sensing a trap but unable to resist the bait. “When I sit in Antonias’s throne and watch the axeman behead him.”

“If you do that, this land will never be yours. You may rule it by might and law, but you will never command the heart of its people. They will rise again. They will eventually put you to the block. You might conquer the land, but you’d never own it.”

He turned, his cheeks reddened by the warmth of the stove. “What has this to do with my being sure of you?”

“Do you really know my heart? Do you really know your own heart?” she asked. She leaned swiftly in, kissed his lips, then drew back, her eyes studying his. “Well?”

Vinas’s face was red from more than just the fire. “You kissed me,” he said stupidly.

Luccia’s eyes were wide beneath a wry expression. “Recognition. It’s a start.” She kissed him again, more slowly, more passionately. “Is this what you are so sure of from me?”

“I’m s-suddenly not sure of anything,” he stammered.

She laughed. “You’re not even sure how it makes you feel?”

“My feelings and I are not on speaking terms. How else could I march up here to kill a—”

Luccia tenderly cradled his jaw. He leaned gently toward her, and their lips met. The third kiss was the longest.

When it was done, Vinas drew back from her and, with a solemnity that was almost comical, said, “I’ve always loved you. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, sliding against the warmth of his chest and wrapping arms around him. “Yes, I did. It’s about time you figured that out, too.”

One Month Hence, 15 Mishamont, 1200 Age of Light

When the ground was still frozen but the snow had thinned, the scene again was almost the same: same camp chair, same map table, same wolfskin—though now it wrapped both Vinas and Luccia.

The letter was not from Vinas or the emperor, but from Antonias, “king” of Vingaard. The note had arrived via an arrow shot from the battlements. It read, simply:

Let us parley, Vinas Solamnus. I invite you and ten of those you trust to dine with me this night in the keep. I, of course, swear upon my honor and the honor and soul of Vingaard that you and yours will be safe. If you accept this invitation, I will take it to mean that you swear likewise.

Tonight, at sixth watch, approach the castle along the southern road. Bring your ten and whatever personal weaponry you feel you must. Dinner will be served as soon as you arrive.

The letter was signed in the florid hand of Antonias, and it bore the seal of Vingaard. When the note was arrowed to him, Antonias himself had been standing upon the battlements, flanked by a pair of trumpeters, smiling.

Vinas’s arm went tighter around Luccia as he placed the vellum before them on the table.

It settled atop an elevation map that showed where the four sets of sappers had dug to within ten feet of breaking into the castle. Beside the note were other scraps of parchment—sketches of the nine siege towers waiting just out of view on each of the three roads that converged on the keep. There were also estimates of what damage had been done by the catapults and trebuchets that had been battering the curtain wall and smashing buildings within. Now, amid all that attack and destruction lay a simple invitation to dinner.

“I don’t know,” said Luccia, pressing up against Vinas. “He must know how close we are to breaking through, so he might hope to surrender without more casualties… or he might hope to kill you outright to delay the escalade.”

Vinas shook his head. A slow smile was creeping across his face. He’d shaved his beard except for a long, drooping mustache. “Killing me would delay nothing. He knows that. Gaias would be all the more ruthless in storming the place.”

“A ransom, though,” Luccia speculated, “that would make sense.”

Vinas shrugged. It would make sense, yes, but in the last month, he had become reacquainted with his deeper instincts. Luccia was the reason for that. He had learned to trust his gut feelings over any logical argument. “I’m going. It feels right. Emperor Emann would cut the throat of a guest, yes, but not this man. Not Antonias.”

“Are you sure?”

“You said it yourself. I’ll not win the hearts of Vingaard by smashing their chosen lord to the floor. I might, however, win them over by dining with them.” He sighed and shook his head ruefully, remembering once again the story of the noble huntsman sinking his final arrow into the magic boar. “How was it, Luce, that we so quickly became the villains in this war?”

Meus Pater [my father]

Father, you used to read me a story about a noble huntsman and a boar. Let me now tell you a story.

Once there was a young man who inherited three treasures from his father—three treasures in three locked chests.

The first chest was large and very heavy. It was marked “TALENTS,” and it was filled with gold and platinum and electrum coins, a fortune that could buy him the world.

The second chest was larger and heavier still. It was marked “COMPASSION,” and it was filled with countless magic rings. Each ring let the wearer feel the emotions of one person or creature in the world.

The third chest was the largest and heaviest of all. It was marked “HONOR,” and what it held, not even the young man knew.

You see, the young man had two keys, one for the box marked “TALENTS,” and the other for the box marked “COMPASSION.” But his father had not given him a key to the box marked “HONOR.” His father had said that talents were meant to be used, and compassion was something meant always to be at hand and available in plenty. But honor was a thing too easily squandered. To have it, the young man must find his own key to open the box.

The young man took the large, heavy treasure chest of talents and carefully, wisely, spent it. For each talent he spent, he received title to a man’s parcel of land. In so doing, he came to possess the world.

Then, the young man took the larger, heavier chest of compassion. One at a time, he placed each ring upon his finger so he could understand the hopes and fears of all the people and creatures in his world. When he was done, he loved them all, and became a great ruler, a champion of justice.

He went out into his world, then, taking the final box with him and searching for a key to open it. Wherever he went, he commanded his people to bring every key they had and to try each in the lock. Many people offered to break the box open for him, but the young man refused, for violence could not be the key to honor. In ten years, he crossed the whole world but did not find the key to honor.

He thought, they are hiding it from me. I will find it yet.

He went out into his world again, this time taking also his chest of compassion. When his people brought to him more keys, he found a ring for each person and slipped it on his finger, searching their hearts to see if they hid a special key from him. Many offered again to break the box open, but the aging man refused. In twenty years, he crossed his whole world twice but he did not find the key to honor.

He thought, I own the world, and I own the hearts of all who dwell in it, and still I cannot find the key to honor? How can a man with no honor rule a world and all its hearts?

So he went out into his world again, this time taking along also his chest of talents, full of deeds. He called his people to him, one by one, and gave each of them the deed to a parcel of land and the ring to each of their hearts. And he said to them, “I have not found the key to honor, and I cannot rule this world or the hearts of her people if I have no honor.” Many offered again to break the box open, but the old man refused. In forty years, he had gone through all the world three times, and by now was a very, very old man. Now, he had only the three chests, two of which were empty, and the other, which could not be opened.

He thought, once the world was mine, and all the creatures in it. Now, my talents are gone, my compassion spent, and I have nothing to give my son except this box I cannot open.

But when his hand touched the box it sprung open, and he saw that it held two locked chests, one marked “TALENTS” and the other “COMPASSION,” and a key for each chest.

He thought, now I understand. Honor is not something to be spent or used, but to be kept. The key to honor is to keep it, always, and pass it on as a heritage to one’s son. How glad I am I never tired of the burden and broke the chest open!

He carefully lifted out the large, heavy chest marked “TALENTS” and the larger, heavier chest marked “COMPASSION,” so that the largest chest of all, “HONOR,” was empty and terribly light. But when he closed the lid and locked it again, the chest was once again the heaviest of them all.

Then he called his son and said to him, “Son, I am very old, and I want you to have these three treasures… .”

XII

That Night, 15 Mishamont, 1200 Age of Light

Vinas and Luccia, side by side, led a mounted procession up the road toward the castle.

The two wore their finest silks and brocades, with chain mail secreted beneath. Their long capes of red velvet gathered snowflakes as the evening sky gathered stars. They wore also their normal complement of weapons—a sword, a belt knife, and a boot dagger.

Behind them rode five others, including two bodyguards, whom Luccia had insisted on. The guards were garbed in the black of their station. They bore an arsenal of weaponry, though Vinas had instructed them not to draw first blood. He had also insisted they wash any poisons from their blades.

Behind the two guards rode Chancellor Titus and his highly regarded acolyte, Anistas. Last of all was Anistas’s beloved, Barnabas, who had been among the attackers outside Caergoth. Vinas had invited the young man because he could attest to the commander’s strict but fair treatment of the vanquished.

Seven was a large enough company for Vinas, though he could have brought ten.

“We’ll get to eat the others’ portions,” Titus had said in approval.

The seven rode in silence. Their horses seemed the only solid things in a world of snow, twinkling starlight, and lazy, distant campfires. The castle ahead was the gray-blue shade of twilight, and it seemed to recede into the night. The portcullis hung open, just high enough that the riders wouldn’t have to duck or dismount to pass within. The huge double door beyond was also open. Ten guardsmen stood on either side of the gate, their faces grave in the fierce light of their torches.

Vinas thought briefly of crossbow fire, target holes, and boiling water, but dismissed such things. There would be a million ways to die tonight. Already the sharpshooters could have killed them all. If Antonias had planned death for them, it would come later.

The Ergothians trotted onto a very solid drawbridge, and on across to the short platform where the warriors stood. Without slowing, Vinas and Luccia passed among the soldiers.

“Good evening, warriors. We are here for a dinner parley.”

The guard captain needlessly waved them through. The moment the visitors were within, the guards withdrew into the arched gate, and the portcullis began its rattling descent.

Vinas rode on through the open doors and into a stony courtyard. The small space, edged with guard houses and a curved stable, would have been quaint except for the signs of recent bombardment. What had once been a livery beside the stable was now a mess of splintered and charred wood. The boulder that had destroyed the spot lay shattered atop the remains. Another strike had pulverized the ancient mosaic set in the center of the courtyard.

“May I take your horses?” asked a stableman.

“Certainly,” Vinas replied, pulling Courage to a halt and dismounting while the rest of his party did likewise.

Vinas studied the castle, it was as the maps had depicted it. A huge central keep dominated the site. The keep was sided by barracks and practice grounds. The armory lay beneath the castle.

There were five other towers. The shortest and shabbiest was the abode of the archwizard, a structure huddling in eccentric disrepair near the keep. The other four stood along the curtain, marking the cardinal directions. The dark, long shed behind the keep was the winery, and the ancient chapel of Mishakal should stand right…

There. A pile of snow-choked rubble lay in the spot that should have held the oldest chapel to Mishakal in western Ansalon.

Vinas had a bitter taste in his mouth as he said to the stableman, “Show us where we might find Antonias Leprus.”

“You have found him,” said the man.

Only then did Vinas look over to see that the smallish, black-haired man was in fact the traitor, himself. After a moment’s shocked stare, Vinas recovered, saying, “Forgive me—”

“We don’t stand on ceremony here, Commander Solamnus,” said Antonias, “much the reason I was glad to be cast out of the senate and made duke of this fringe land.”

“Duke? I thought you would prefer to call yourself king,” said Vinas, sounding more combative than he felt.

The black-bearded man shrugged in dismissal. “We do not stand on ceremony. Call me Antonias.”

“Well,” Vinas replied, “as long as we are giving introductions, this is Colonel Luccia—”

“Ah, yes,” said Antonias, “of the famed Ergothian griffon company.” He shook her hand, equal to equal. “We detected your scouts only a month before your ground forces arrived. I imagine they were here much sooner.”

She colored slightly. When he dropped her hand, she curtsied before she could restrain herself. “Thank you for the compliment.”

Antonias was not finished, “And this must be Chancellor Titus, who helped you foil that assassination all those years ago.”

Titus took the man’s hand and heartily shook it. Standing this close, Titus could almost stare straight down at the man. “So good to meet the one man in Ansalon who would stand against Emperor Emann!”

Vinas coughed into his hand, and said, “Priests of Paladine are forgiven treason more easily than us.”

Antonias laughed at that. He reached up and slapped Titus on the side—he couldn’t stretch to reach the giant’s back. “Perhaps I should convert.”

Titus laughed heartily, too, as though he and the self-styled king were longtime friends.

Vinas, unsettled by the turn of events, introduced Anistas and Barnabas and his bodyguards. He then glanced at the dark sky. “Now, what about this famous Castle Vingaard fare? I must admit to being famished.”

“Follow me,” said Antonias. He turned his back upon the armed company. It occurred to Vinas that the man had no personal guard with him, and that his nearest soldiers were a good thirty paces away.

If I were a certain sort of man, Vinas thought, I might have harvested that dark head. He smiled to himself. Until about a month ago, until a certain kiss from a certain longtime friend, I was in danger of becoming that sort of man.

He walked up beside Antonias. “What sort of kingdom are you running here? You rebel against the most powerful empire the world has ever known, and yet you put up little fight when we march in to surround your castle. You then tell us to make ourselves at home and avail ourselves of the local pubs and inns. Last of all, you invite us into your own castle, meet us as if you were a stableman, and turn your back on our daggers and swords.”

Antonias didn’t even turn around. He continued leading the group toward the keep. “I suppose I don’t know what kind of kingdom this is, or what kind of king I am,” he confessed. “I suppose I thought that if my people were happy, I wouldn’t need to work so hard to keep them from harming each other.”

“True,” Vinas said, “but you forgot about all the unhappy people from all the unhappy nations in the rest of this unhappy world. Can you afford not to safeguard yourself when you live in a world of violence and evil?”

Antonias came to an arched door in the side of the keep. He turned a key in the large, iron lock, and swung the door wide to reveal a stairway. “You seem to forget. I tried the killing way at the battle of the Crossing. All that got me was a field of dead countrymen and slain elven allies. Oh, and, yes, a months-long poisoning of these very waters with the dead horses of your wagons. It was a grave, grave error for us to try to equal Ergoth in killing might. That is why I withdrew my troops from the canyon. That is why we did not resist you as you came down our roads and killed our pigs and stripped our orchards.”

Vinas followed the king up a long, winding set of stairs. “So, you chose not to fight. But what of your beautiful kingdom? Ergoth has already taken back every inch of it, except this castle.”

Sadly, Antonias said, “‘The peaceable kingdom will be taken by violent men, and the violent bear it away.’”

“Exactly,” Vinas echoed. “You can’t remain forever locked away in this citadel. Your mill will run out of grains to grind, your winery will be depleted of grapes, your stockyards of cattle, your men of patience. Perhaps tomorrow I will order it all expropriate and all of your followers slain and every wall razed so that not a stone stands upon another, so that all those who ever pass this spot will shake their heads and know the folly of defying Ergoth.”

The black-haired man paused in his ascent. Vinas had been goading him, taking Antonias’s measure before any true bargaining would begin. What the king said next showed that Vinas had utterly underestimated the man.

“It is never folly to defy evil. If you must rape and kill and destroy, then nothing I do can change what will inevitably happen.”

Antonias strode up the last few steps to another door and swung it open. Beyond lay a high, beautiful great hall filled with wide windows. The sky glittered with stars, and the land with fangs of fire.

“Let us not ruin our wonderful meal with such brutal talk.”

Antonias ushered them in and offered them seats at a long table resplendent with silver and porcelain and candles.

Luccia took an ornately carved chair. “What a beautiful place. You must feel like you are dining in heaven, up here among the stars.”

“Thank you,” said Antonias genuinely.

He gestured the others to their seats, and then moved around the table to the head position. Beside it stood a young warrior who wore armor that gleamed as brightly as the silverware. The young man had a clean-shaven face in the Ergothian style, and short brown hair. He stood, statuesque and stern, until the others took their seats. Then he himself was seated, at the right hand of Antonias.

No sooner had the chairs finished scudding on the smooth stone floor, than a flock of servants in white appeared. They drifted weightlessly along with their silver platters, breadbaskets, and trenchers, like doves among stars. Each new item set upon the table steamed mysteriously beneath a shining cover or caught firelight in cut crystal. Moments later, the meal was fully set, and the silent servants were gone.

Antonias looked up from his bare plate. “Chancellor Titus, I believe you are the ranking priest here. Would you provide us with a blessing on the occasion of this repast, and favorably anoint the discussion that will come with it?”

“Certainly,” said Titus broadly. He stood, extended his arms, and intoned, “Great Paladine, Father of Good and Master of Law, bless this feast set before us and guide the hearts here to an accord that will bring true peace to our lands. So let it be.”

“So let it be,” chorused the others.

As Titus sat, there came a sigh from all of them. Then two stewards began serving the items brought to the banquet table. In silent anticipation, guests and hosts alike watched the succulent roasted pheasant and miniature potatoes, the fat leeks and buttery rolls and peach preserves finding their way to the plates.

Vinas was first to break the silence. “We were invited tonight to parley,” he said matter-of-factly. An edge of menace showed through his smile. “Parley typically means a discussion leading to surrender.”

Antonias allowed Vinas’s words to drift away like smoke. At last, he answered.

“You are a hard man, Commander Solamnus. It has not always been so.” His remarks ceased. He seemed only then to hear and respond to Vinas’s earlier comment. “Yes, I suppose if this evening goes well, resolution of our differences is possible.”

Vinas took his napkin, unfolded it, and laid it disinterestedly across his lap. “It would be unfair for me to lead you astray. The empire will accept no terms but unconditional surrender, with you marched off in chains to Daltigoth.”

“Oh, Vinas,” said Luccia reprovingly. “Don’t be a boor. Let’s hear what he has to say.”

Without acknowledging either of their remarks, Antonias went on. “There was a time when you and I were very much alike, Commander. Perhaps you do not remember me—meek junior senator in Daltigoth—but I remember you. Everyone remembers you. Even your dear father, bless him—who should have been famous for his philanthropy—became infamous because of his audacious son. You were a living folk hero for some of us young nobles.”

Vinas, at long last, was speechless. Titus, to one side of him, and Luccia to the other, gave him identical curious glances.

Antonias continued. “I was there that day at the proving grounds, when you and Luccia climbed the standing tree, a hundred feet up, with only a shirt and a couple of belts. I saw when you were impaled, and hung there, and let Luccia escape to ground.”

Luccia drew her eyes away from Vinas’s and dropped her head at the sudden painful memory.

“That day changed my life,” said Antonias. “It defined our generation: dreamers who would choose sacrifice over social status. It showed me that I could make and dwell in a perfect world, but to do so I must not bargain with evil, or vulgarity, or death.”

Vinas shook his head bitterly. “I have learned the opposite, that to live—to even draw breath—is to bargain with evil, vulgarity, and death. Dreamers don’t live very long.”

Antonias looked him square in the eye. “What about the bread riots—when you dressed as a plainsman to take food through a blizzard to starving people?”

“My father saved me then. He saved me too many times,” Vinas broke in. “The last time, it cost him his life. He was poisoned instead of Emperor Emann.”

“Yes. A dreamer at heart. Do you see what I mean? It is in your blood, Vinas. Your father gave it to you. No matter how you deny it or oppose it, that spirit of sacrifice is with you.”

A snort came from the commander. “We came here to talk about terms of surrender, not about my life story.”

The touch of Luccia’s small hand on his wrist stayed him. “Listen to him,” she implored, her eyes searching his. “Listen.”

Antonias raised a glass of ruby-red wine. “So, I toast you, Vinas Solamnus. It was because I followed your early example that I was thrown out of the senate and assigned a troubled border state. It was because I believed in your example of vision and sacrifice that I could make this land the envy of all Ergoth. It is because of you, sir, that we sit here now in pleasant parley.” He swung his glass, ringing it against that of the brooding soldier to his right.

“Hear, hear,” responded the others, Titus most heartily of all.

The king closed his eyes, savoring the flavor of the wine, and eased back in his chair. “Strange the things fate has in store for each of us. Anyone who had seen our youths would think that you would have wound up the rebel pariah, and I the great general of the empire.”

“Yes,” said Vinas. “Well, I suppose one of us outgrew childhood fancies.” Beneath the table, Luccia dealt his knee an indignant slap.

“Please,” said Antonias, gesturing, “eat, and enjoy.”

The next moments were filled with the scrape of knives and forks against ceramic, the murmur of diners uncertain about Vingaard etiquette, and the first sounds of savor, most notably from Titus. Luccia put in a good effort at enjoying her food, making the first compliments on the pheasant.

Wanting to take another stab at serious discussion, Vinas tried a different approach. “Antonias, you seem well acquainted with my life’s story, and I yours, but we have yet to meet your bodyguard,” he said, indicating the brown-haired young man.

Antonias hurried to swallow the food he was chewing. “Forgive me. My mind is elsewhere. This is Iohas, not so much a bodyguard—though he has saved my skin countless times—but a longtime friend.”

Titus lifted his glass. “Good friends are the anchors of a wayward soul!”

He delivered the toast with such verve that Vinas nodded, clinked his glass, and sipped his wine before he realized whose soul, by implication, had gone wayward.

“Look,” Vinas said evenly, “though once I was ruled by bright visions, I quickly learned that the world is hostile to such whimsy. My father sheltered me from the cruelties of life, and I grew up to believe that castles could float in the air, and cities could be built without need of prisons or cemeteries. Well, once my father died, I found out they can’t. I was wrong.

“You are wrong, too. You’ve been sheltered from realities here in your dining chamber among the stars. It is my less-than-pleasant task to bring reality into your heaven. No matter how happy your peasants are, no matter how luscious your wine, no matter how diverting your plays, this land belongs to the empire. You have stolen it. You are no better than any other pillager, who takes what is not his and fritters it away in a great, long orgy of appetites. The dream is ending, Antonias. One way or another, I will wake you and this entire land from its delusional slumber. At least let me try to make the waking less jarring, less brutal.”

Antonias blinked at his wine, then nodded. “You speak bluntly, as though there were no hope for my people, for the beautiful, peaceable kingdom we have here. Tell me, what must I do to save them?”

“As of tonight, I take control of your rule; I sit in your seat; I command your castle; I rule your people.” Vinas listed his demands flatly.

Antonias breathed. That soft sound seemed to fill the great chamber. “Knowing the man your father was, and the man you once were and still must be, I could choose no foe I would rather have sitting my seat.”

“You will pen proclamations to be copied and posted throughout the castle and the town, saying you have willingly turned over full power to me, and that it is your wish that those once loyal to you should now be loyal to the empire.”

“You may not believe this,” said Antonias, “but I have already done so, and the copies are already made.”

“Your personal staff and officers, as well as your thousand men, will be stripped of weaponry and imprisoned in their own barracks until such time as they may be marched to Daltigoth, where they will face charges of treason.”

“They were not the treasonous ones,” Antonias objected. “They obeyed their duke, as they were trained to do.”

Vinas shook his head. “I can grant no conditions to you. Your officers and soldiers will be disciplined for their crimes against the empire.”

For the first time that night, Antonias looked resolute, almost angry. “This I will not agree to. If you want to shackle my men and march them into Daltigoth to endure gauntlets, mock trials, and torturous public executions, you will do so at the cost of thousands of your own men. Just see how many can crawl up through your tunnels when burning oil is poured down them. Just see how many men fall, spine-broken, as my defenders fling back the escalade teams. And, even then, you will take no one alive, for every one will fight to the death.”

Vinas grinned sharkishly. “So much for your being above killing. So much for your moral superiority to us warriors.”

Antonias replied, “I did not claim to be above killing, only above the ruthless, heartless, honorless killing you represent. I would fight and kill for this heavenly place, yes, with my last breath.”

“Perhaps there is another way to placate the emperor,” said Vinas. “Perhaps we might even win the disarmed, disbarred freedom of your troops.”

“How? Whatever the way, I will do it.”

“The emperor wants your head delivered to him. If he had that one plaything, he might forget about other spoils.” This time Vinas ignored the nudges from Luccia. “There, you have it. Dreamer, awake.”

Antonias looked down at the half-finished feast set before him. He seemed almost to be sleeping, slumped there. Breath stole slowly in and out of his lungs. A deathly silence entered the chamber among the stars, and no one, not even Vinas, ventured a word. At last, Antonias looked up at the vault above, his eyes roaming across the white ribs of stone.

He spoke in a whisper. “If I am delivered up, my soldiers may be spared?”

Vinas spoke, his eyes clear and bright. “I will do all that is in my power to assure it.”

Without looking down, the black-bearded monarch nodded. It was as if he stood in a deep pit, and was straining to see the small circle of light at the top. He closed his eyes and slowly rose. “Then, we have an agreement. You will sit upon my throne, command my castle, rule my people, and do all that is in your power to shield my officers and soldiers and folk from the emperor’s wrath. In return, I will surrender to you all of these things without a fight. You may have my head, as requested.”

Vinas stood, his face almost ashen in its solemnity. The other diners watched, as though they were artists intent on memorizing every shadow and nuance of the moment.

“Yes,” said Commander Solamnus. “It is agreed.”

In a rush of silk and kingly robes, Antonias Leprus strode across the chamber to Vinas and clasped his forearm. More slowly, Antonias’s bodyguard and friend moved up behind his king. Tears formed in the warrior’s eyes.

Luccia likewise rose to stand behind Vinas. She, too, felt tears materialize—tears of relief.

King and commander stood face to face, staring into each others’ eyes. “Believe it or not, I had anticipated this very resolution,” said Antonias guilelessly. “I am glad it has come to pass.”

“I believe you,” said Vinas. “I, too, am glad.”

“And so,” Antonias said with a joyous smile, “I ask my dear friend Iohas here, to be the first soldier dedicated to the new peace in our lands.”

Iohas, his cheeks now streaming with tears, lifted his left hand in a greeting, and then laced his fingers in the black curls of his king. His right hand flashed. There was a glint of starlight.

Vinas and Luccia recoiled instinctually as the brown-haired man brought his blade singing through the neck of his friend, the once-king of Vingaard.

Meus Pater [my father]

I think you would have liked Antonias, Father. He was the man I was supposed to be.

Part IV:
Wisdom

Interlude

One Day Hence, 16 Mishamont, 1200 Age of Light

Phrygia gloated as she examined herself in her vanity mirror. It was done. Vinas Solamnus had spurned her, had marched away from her, thinking he would be free. Instead, he fell for trap after trap that she had set, became the man she wanted him to be, and even captured far Vingaard on her behalf.

Now, she needed merely to bring him back.

Phrygia leaned over the vanity and clutched a small, enameled jewel box. It held the broken fragments of the five soul-gems Caitiff had hidden around the palace. Twenty years of searching had turned up every last one. She’d gathered them and crushed them herself. The fragments remained in the box. She shook it brusquely.

“Oh, Caitiff. Wake up. I have a job for you,” she purred.

There came a sullen stirring in the urn beside the vanity. A thousand tiny rattles sounded as the old lich assembled himself from bone chips and ash.

How satisfying it had been to bum his bones and pour them into that vase!

In moments, a rickety skeleton stood before her, its once-proud elven skull bowing in pathetic subservience. “Yes, my lady. What is your bidding?”

“Vinas Solamnus has succeeded. It is time to bring him back.”

“Shall I teleport him here?” the skeleton asked.

“No,” she replied. “He must fight for every inch of his return. How else will I know he loves me? And at the end of the fight, he must slay my husband, to be worthy to share my bed.”

“Yes, Mistress,” the skeleton hissed, “but what is your bidding?”

“You will raise for me an army that will make Vinas Solamnus’s return a great triumph, indeed.”

For the first time in months, the skeleton seemed pleased with the task set before him.

Phrygia was little concerned that these two assassins had once tried to kill her husband. Nor did she care that the man who had saved her husband was the very man she now paid them to kill.

“Kill him or die in the attempt. He must overcome both of you before he proves himself worthy of my love,” she said. The coin bag landed heavily on the table. “There. Five more of those when he is dead.”

XIII

Three Months Hence, 10 Corij, 1200 Age of Light

All had been accomplished.

Vinas sat upon the throne of Vingaard. A thousand of his handpicked troops occupied the castle. The head of Antonias was on its way to Daltigoth, along with a message telling of Vingaard’s unconditional surrender. This parcel was borne by an elite messenger accompanied by thirty heavy cavalry units.

As to the warriors and officers of Antonias, they were officially dead.

Thrice a day for a month, Vinas had summarily tried and convicted them, sent them marching to the dungeon, and proclaimed their execution and cremation. The foul black smoke that rose morning, noon, and night from the dungeon’s huge incinerator was actually produced by wood, coal, and cow remains. Meanwhile, Gaias gave the men aliases and new clothes and led them out the longest siege tunnel into a nearby forest. The men went their separate ways and then gradually returned to their elated families and friends—whether in the town of Vingaard or one of the hundred nearby villages. According to Gaias’s instructions, they swore their loved ones to secrecy about the Ergothian lord’s “Vingaard sympathies.”

Among the townsfolk, the “executions” had become an open lie. The peasants enjoyed amplifying the story. Some engaged in maudlin displays of grief each time black smoke rose from the castle. Others told of harrowing visitations by the ghosts of their lost loves. A few even had gravestones carved and placed conspicuously in their gardens, saying things such as:

Though Jacobas went away,
We’ll meet again some better day.

Vinas was no small benefactor of this death campaign. He had written to Emperor Emann, describing in loving detail the ruthless trials, executions, and cremations, as well as the despondency of the people. The emperor would doubtless applaud his zeal, even if he would have preferred to keep the officers alive for questioning.

These “executions” were enacted before the emperor could object—no bodies were left for his necromancers. Vinas thus had won the emperor’s favor with the same act that made him popular with the people.

Vingaard had been returned to the empire, the rebels had been shielded, and Vinas had even requested to permanently oversee the border state. Despite his better sense, he hoped he and his friends could continue the charade that made this impossible paradise possible.

Vinas sat alone in his chambers. He could no longer think of these rooms, this castle, or this country as Antonias’s, Although the castle’s appointments—the otherworldly paintings and tapestries of dragons, the mahogany furnishings and bronze fixtures—were just as they had been when Antonias lived, Vinas felt they were his, that he had always lived in Vingaard Keep.

Only the doorknob exposed that lie. It bore a bright left-handprint of the former king. Already, though, the print was tarnishing green, replaced by Vinas’s larger, right-hand mark. In half a year, even that vestige of Antonias would be gone.

In all ways, Vinas was inheriting the life of this other man. He sat in Antonias’s seat, slept in his bed, ate at his table, commanded his people… all of it felt natural to Vinas. All of it had a rightness.

It is this way with fate, he thought as he had every hour of the last month. I made the wrong choice when I agreed to take the appointment as head of the imperial guard. Since then, I have been defending all the wrong things and have been shaped by the evil I defended. This life, here, among these good people, this is what was destined for me. Fate made another man live through the part of my life I have thrown away, and then brought me here to take Antonias’s place.

Taking Antonias’s place… even now, he felt a fraud. How could Vinas, a warrior, ever take the place of Antonias, a visionary, a man of peace?

A knock came at the door. Vinas did not stir from the desk, but only said, “Come in.”

The door swung inward. It was followed by a thin, tousle-haired young man in the impeccable livery of the emperor. “A message to you, Commander, from His Highness, Emperor Emann Quisling of Ergoth.”

Without turning around, Vinas signaled for the document. His fingertips tingled in anticipation. It was light—mere paper—though he knew what was written on that paper had the weight of the empire behind it:

From His Highness, Emann Quisling,
Emperor of Ergoth,

To Vinas Solamnus,
Commander of the Armies of Ergoth.

Greetings,
I am pleased with the head of “King” Antonias Leprus. Your mage did a fine job preserving it, eyes open in that beatific attitude. I do wish it had still been animate, but because you had to behead him during a treaty talk, I understand. By the way, what a stroke of brilliance, to fool him into letting you into the keep to parley!

I am pleased also by your executions of his men. Your thorough and unflinching actions are to be commended. I will remind you that Antonias likely had agents among the townsfolk. Immediately upon receiving this missive, begin an inquisition among the villagers. I expect you’ll have to schedule another thousand executions in the next month, and a few hundred more before your replacement arrives.

I regret I must deny your request to be permanently assigned the post. As my darling Phrygia pointed out, now that the uprising is crushed, we need you back in Daltigoth to end other local insurrections.

Don’t worry, Vingaard will be in excellent hands. I am sending my grand nephew, Terriatas. He is more than your match in ruthless cruelty, and he has a perverse twist as well. Those you executed will seem lucky once Terriatas takes over. He has a few last matters to conclude before he will be available, but should arrive in two springs.

Until then, keep up the iron grip. I’m still waiting for last year’s back taxes, as well as those of this year, and the double punitive assessment. You’ve four months to gather them. Think of these taxes as another weapon, it’ll break the backs of the honest folk and flush the last rebels out of hiding.

I’m counting on you. Excellent work.

The messenger was gone, the door closed, when Vinas let the missive drift down from his hand and come to rest upon the bronze bootjack Antonias had used every night to remove… the very boots Vinas now wore.

One Month Hence, 14 Argon, 1200 Age of Light

In the upper dining hall, among the stars, Vinas met with Gaias, Luccia, Titus, and the sixteen division generals of his armies in Vingaard. They filled the ornate table, and were in good humor, as victors always are. One of the sixteen unknowingly sat where Antonias’s body had fallen. The blood had been scrubbed meticulously away.

It was the same dining hall among the blue stars, except that the ghosts of old Vingaard seemed forever banished from the place. Ergothian banners filled the air. The candelabra bore medallions of the empire. The servant whites had been replaced by the black garb of Ergothian domesticity. The war was irrevocably concluded, and the victors feasted on the food of the fallen, in the very seats where their predecessors reigned.

Vinas rose to address the group. He was white-faced and grave. “Friends, I have decided a new course for Vingaard. An old course, actually.” He focused a smoldering gaze on the group before him, searching their hearts. “I plan to renew the treason of Antonias.”

Someone guffawed before realizing the commander was not jesting.

Vinas was kind enough not to look at the man, and continued, “You all have realized we are the villains here. You can see there is nothing to gain in taxing this prosperous place into poverty. It is sheer wickedness to slay anyone else in the name of the empire.”

He paused, brooding. “Here are the emperor’s orders. Read them for yourselves.” He tossed the seal-broken paper onto the table. None dared snatch it up. “It talks of an inquisition among the peasants. It talks of another thousand slain this next month, and more thereafter. It talks of Vingaard being given to Terriatas, grand-nephew to Emann and a man both ruthless and cruel. I must either follow these dictates or defy them.”

A general muttered through his auburn beard, “What folly!”

Vinas turned toward him. “It is never folly to defy evil.” The words felt so natural coming from his mouth; they seemed his own. “To defend what is right and good, reform what is corrupt, and destroy what is evil… . That is my intention.”

“Commander,” interrupted a mustachioed general, “the rebellion is crushed. Let it remain so.”

“What has been crushed?” Vinas shot back. “Not a rebellion, but rebels. People have been crushed.” Color was returning to his face. “The folk of Vingaard have been and continue to be crushed—beneath the boot of Ergoth and her corrupt rulers. I have seen the wickedness of that oppression. I have embodied it, myself, embodied it and advanced it. I can do so no longer. If I must fight, I choose the better fight.”

“This is madness,” hissed the man with the auburn beard. “You are only one man.”

“Emann, too, is only one man. All this while, the battle was between two men, Emann and Antonias,” Vinas said quietly. “Now I have taken up Antonias’s sword.

“Antonias fell, but he withdrew from the fight. I will not. I will fight on the principles of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom—the four corners of honor. They were the hallmarks of my father, and of Antonias. They will be mine. I, and however many soldiers will rally to me, will march under the banner of honor.”

“Commander,” the mustachioed man said, “all warriors say they fight with honor. What is different about you?”

“My soldiers and I will convert those we can and slay only those we must. We will fight bravely and wisely. We will fight justly, sword to sword and dagger to dagger. We will grant quarter whenever it is asked. We will heal when we are able. We will save Vingaard and all other people who cleave to these ideals.”

“Yes, ideals,” said the bearded man. “That is all they are—fluffy words floating around, meaningless. Wars are not won with ideals, but with soldiers and savageries.”

“I am a soldier,” said Luccia, standing, “and I will fight for these ideals.”

“I, as well,” came Gaias’s calm voice.

Titus stood, too, his massive figure outlined against the stars. “I am not a warrior, but I will fight beside you. Let me say, I for one am glad to see your old, reckless, starry-eyed self back in the land of the living!”

Amid the nervous laughter that followed, two other men and three women stood, adding their assent.

“Before you join me,” Vinas said, “know what awaits you. We will face deprivation, starvation, ostracization. I will not pillage the countryside for shelter and food. We will only accept what is freely given to us. There will be ten foes for each one of us, ten who will fight with cruelty and self-serving brutality. We will be fighting the sorts of warriors we ourselves have been these past years. This will be no quick affair, either, but will take the patient work of the main portion of our lives.”

Three more soldiers pledged themselves.

“Do not fear to refuse this battle. I will not harm those who wish to return to Daltigoth and fight for the empire. They will be allowed to go.”

Six more added their assent, and the only two who remained were the warrior with the auburn beard and the mustachioed man.

The first of these said, “I will not fight for you. You are the worst traitor of all.”

The second, more quietly, said, “I will resign my post. It has been a privilege to serve under you.”

“You both are welcome to leave,” Vinas said, gesturing toward the door. “You have my word of honor, you will not be harmed if you leave now, quickly and quietly.”

The mustachioed man drew the pin of office from his cloak, laid it on the table, and walked from the room. The other man watched him suspiciously, and when he heard no sounds of struggle on the stairs outside, did likewise.

When they were gone, Luccia asked, “Commander, don’t you fear they will make trouble among the troops?”

“There will be no time for that,”, Vinas replied. “In moments, the horns will sound, and I will address the armies, myself. They will each have the same choice you have had.” He looked around the table.

Luccia was fearful but smiling. Gaias looked grim and determined. Titus beamed proudly. The others wore looks of hopeful resolve.

“A fine group of officers, I have,” he said. He raised a wine goblet to them. “Here is to the rebirth of honor in Ansalon. Here’s to a free Vingaard!”

The shouts of “Hear! hear!” echoed among the stars.

Meus Pater [my father]

How strange it is, Father, to stand before three armies of gathered warriors—whose lives and deaths have been in your hands—and tell them you were wrong.

The priests of Gilean tell us that all our deeds and misdeeds are written in one great book that shall be read to all creatures at the end of the world. Perhaps.

Stranger, though, is the forgiveness of the people. It is as though, in my admitting my error, I have at last become one of them. Perhaps, before, I had the power to command them. Now, when they know what failings I myself must overcome, now I can inspire them.

XIV

Five Months Hence, 14 Phoenix, 1200 Age of Light

The midday sky was a blue-black depth charged with gray swarms of ice. Snow came down thickly on the bundled backs of the laboring wagons. It mounded on the horses’ croups and withers, occasionally sloughing to the ground in sheets.

A mantle of cold gray snow draped Titus’s shoulders. The drivers followed his dim, lumbering figure as though pursuing a shade through the underworld.

“It should be up here, soon enough,” Titus shouted back through the blizzard.

He paused in his march, waving the first wagon past. Rubbing ice out of his eyebrows, he unfolded a crumpled, amateurishly rendered map. Its lines were indistinguishable from the folds. He rubbed the side of the wagon passing him, clearing snow from the emblem painted on it: a plainsman with a golden halo of wheat.

Stuffing the scrap back into his vest, Titus bounded to the head of the line, telling the lead driver, “I could have sworn it would be here.”

“Who’s out there?” came a suspicious voice from the storm.

Titus looked about, seeing no speaker. He shouted into the blizzard, “Chancellor Titus, priest of Paladine.”

“We don’t need any blessings,” the craggy words came.

Titus laughed deeply, a sound that sent the snow cascading from his back. “Not even the blessing of bread? Of food?”

Only the anxious wind answered for some time, and then, “Who sent you? The emperor?”

Again the laugh. “Oh, no. If we were from the emperor, we would be extorting bread out of you. No, we represent Commander Solamnus.”

“Commander Solamnus? Vinas Solamnus?”

“The same. Though you might not recognize him these days. He’s grown a great drooping mustache and has ceased dressing like a plainsman when he wants to dole out food.”

In the darkness, a sliver of light grew up to the height of a man—a door opening. From it emerged a frail creature, sexless and ageless. As that withered figure approached, she—for it was a woman—grew in solidity. She seemed to be packed together out of the snow. Two more forms appeared in the open doorway, small bodies with eyes that glowed wide with the queer light of the storm.

“Get back in there!” the old woman shouted, head turned over her shoulder. The children vanished into the golden glow. “And close the door.” That, too, was done.

When she turned back around, she paused, eyes level with Titus’s belt buckle. Without the slightest hint of fear, she leaned her head back until she could see the black bulk of Titus’s head, high above. “How can Commander Solamnus afford to feed you and still dole out bread?”

He knelt, bringing his toothy smile even with her face. “He’s a dreamer. Dreamers can do anything.”

She spat into the storm. “You men are going to die in this storm, tonight.”

“No, ma’am,” Titus replied. “We’ve strict orders against it. We don’t want to be dead without leave.”

She nodded seriously and turned, strolling toward the shadows of the food wagon. Flipping back a loose corner of tarp, she saw open-topped boxes full of venison, hard breads, jerkied beef, frozen haunches of pork, bottles of wine. “What other miracles does this Vinas Solamnus have planned?” she asked.

Without moving from the front of the line, Titus said, “Well, currently he’s marching with a ragtag army of volunteers, hoping to conquer Ergoth. He seems to think it would be better for everyone involved if peasants could actually feed themselves with the food they raise, could actually clothe and shelter themselves. Taxes, currently, make that virtually impossible. I know, I know, it sounds unrealistic…”

“It sounds ideal,” the woman said. With no apparent effort, she hoisted a frozen ham to her shoulder and began walking back to her hovel. “We’ll tell the neighbors once I get my pick. Oh, and, Chancellor, see if you can’t grab a few loaves of rye and a bottle of wine.”

Four Months Hence, 2 Mishamont, 1201 Age of Light

Luccia banked atop Terraton. The griffon’s claws brushed the naked crown of a vallenwood tree. Luccia glanced back, seeing the fast-flitting shadows of her company flying low above the treetops. The beasts were silent as falcons at the hunt, their feathers mere flashes of spring gold in the wind-stirred forest. Their wings followed the contour of the trees, aerial valleys and rills.

“Just a bit lower,” Luccia urged Terraton. The spirited beast slipped down a narrow cleft that led to a clearing, where smoke rose in jagged columns.

“That’s it.”

One more nudge from her heels and Terraton shot from the cleft into the sparkling air above a small Ergothian outpost. The others followed. Terraton released a fierce griffon scream as he ripped past the stockaded wall of the fortress. The rest of the cavalry voiced their own shrieks.

The horrifying cacophony… the lightning-fast silhouettes… the flaming arrows that pelted down onto walls and guard towers and set them alight… the claws that ripped mounted crossbows from the walls and could do worse to bones and flesh… all of it convinced the ten defenders to heed the better part of valor.

They ran.

As Luccia and her cavalry sped by overhead, she cried, “Tell Emann that justice is coming!”

She and her riders pursued the fleeing troops awhile before doubling back to the fortress. This time they approached casualty. The ground team had reached the fortress. Even now, five horsemen were dismounting and stood with hands placed on hips, appraising their new station.

“Do you need us any longer, lieutenants?” Luccia called down to them as Terraton made a long, looping pass around the perimeter of the clearing.

“No, Colonel. Thanks,” said a young man, waving them onward. “I think I hear your next team.”

Just then, five more horsemen plunged at a gallop into and out of the clearing. Marking their speed and direction, Luccia sent Terraton roaring out after them.

Twelve remote Ergothian fortresses had been captured so far this month, each of them bloodlessly. Twenty-eight more, and the road to Solanthus would be secured, ready for the main force.

There would be blood at Solanthus. That much was a certainty. There would be a long siege and, at last, blood.

Luccia’s jaw clamped grimly. She guided Terraton toward the next columns of smoke rising on the far horizon.

Two Months Hence, 24 Bran, 1201 Age of Light

Gaias marched through long green grass, lifting his boots high to keep from getting tangled.

The kender weren’t being so careful. They seemed to enjoy falling down. The novelty first had been discovered by Pitty Stingtail, who had been strumming his whippik and singing when he went down. His whoop of surprise and the boooiiing sound of the whippik as he landed made interesting improvisations in the song. The thirty-some others laughed heartily, and then joined in singing, taking every opportunity to fall on their instruments to see what new sounds would be made.

“Noisiest invasion I ever led,” Gaias grumbled to himself.

The Qualinesti Forest stood just ahead. They would have heard the party from twenty miles back and seen them from ten. It was just as well. Harmless, hapless, and apparently happy kender were a fearsome invasion force, to be sure, but not one that elves would shoot on sight. Dwarves, on the other hand…

The kender, on a long wanderlust, had run across the armies of Solamnus just north of the Crossing. Despite Vinas’s misgivings, the kender had cleaved to the army, wanting desperately “to help.”

After two weeks of kender help, when many useful items had gone missing and many useless items appeared in their places, Commander Solamnus devised a way in which their help couldn’t hurt. They were named First-Class Ambassadors to the Elves of Qualinesti with a Special Emphasis upon Remote Operations. Simply put, they were assigned to stay far away.

It was more than that. Otherwise Gaias would not be along. Vinas truly hoped the band of ambassadors could establish an alliance with the elves—at least a pact of nonaggression, though perhaps even a pledge of elven aid and free movement through elven territories.

“Stop!” came a voice from the woods. Whether the imperative was meant to stop Gaias from advancing or to stop the kender from singing, it accomplished both. Gaias was grateful for the latter, at least. The voice warned, “Enter the realm of elves at your peril!”

Gaias squinted toward the woods, his eyes darting among the gray trunks and the slowly swaying boughs. He saw no sign of the speaker. Raising a hand to shield his eyes, Gaias called out, “We are ambassadors to your sovereign kingdom.”

“Ambassadors from where?” came the suspicious reply.

“We are from Vingaard, patriots of the true Ergoth. We still honor the Swordsheath Scroll,” Gaias responded. “We have come to speak with your king. We seek alliance.”

“Alliance to what end?”

Gaias grimaced, dropping his hand. He’d had this speech worked out on a scrap of paper. He fished through his pockets, his hands coming up empty.

“Look what I found!” piped a voice beside him. “We, the patriots of Ergoth—”

“Give me that!” Gaias growled, trying to snatch the rumpled paper from the kender’s intractable grasp.

“You dropped it. I found it. It’s mine,” the kender reasoned.

The tearing sound that quickly followed demonstrated that it was no one’s anymore. Gaias stared in a rage at the tattered fragment. The kender, triumphant, began reciting his half of the page:

“We, the patriots of
terrible atrocities
abjure the elves to
evil purposes. In our
world domination, we
torment you. If we can—”

The kender got no further. Gaias snatched that fragment, too, and tore both halves of the speech to shreds.

“Forgive us, sir elf. Our cause is good. Ask anybody but the tyrant, Emperor Emann. Alliance between us would strengthen both of our nations.”

Still the elf did not reveal himself. “Turn back. You are forbidden entry.”

Gaias put his hands out to his sides and slowly stepped forward. “I trust to your fair treatment of peaceful ambassadors. You will not shoot me in cold blood.”

“You are forbidden entry,” the voice responded worriedly.

Gaias kept walking. The kender tiptoed close behind him. “You will have to take us prisoners, for we will not stop.”

“I won’t take you prisoners!” the elf replied, indignant. “You have kender with you.”

“Then take us to Qualinost and your king,” said Gaias. “Better for you to escort us into your land than have us wander on our own.”

With a sigh, the elf appeared, separating himself from one green-black trunk and waving them forward. A shaft was nocked on his short bow. “If you must come, come, but be quick,” he said impatiently.

Three Months Hence, 4 Sirrimont, 1201 Age of Light

“He’s doing what?” Emperor Emann asked, incredulous, as he paced before the roaring blaze of his stateroom’s hearth.

Commander Julias Erasmus, acting head of the imperial war council in the absence of Commander Solamnus, said, “He’s sent kender to the Qualinesti. Something about renegotiating the Swordsheath Scroll.”

The emperor’s expression deepened into a scowl. “Renegotiate. Clever. He is as audacious and unorthodox as he is cunning.”

Julias frowned, running a fidgety hand through his gray hair. “I don’t understand. Kender wouldn’t be capable of convincing a rock to lie still. Why do you think the elves will listen?”

“The Swordsheath Scroll is a fragile enough peace. Any tampering will likely shatter it, bringing the elves out in a regular holy war,” Emann said.

“That is not all,” said Julias. “He has been distributing food among the peasants ever since the winter set in.”

“Bribing them. He’s made a duke’s power struggle into a full-blown peasant rebellion.”

“The peasants of Vingaard are under the impression that this has been their struggle from the beginning,” Julius pointed out. “Our spies say that sentiment for Vinas Solamnus is strong in the lower classes—not just in Vingaard, but everywhere.”

The emperor glared at his chief advisor. “All this is prelude to telling me we cannot send more troops to Solanthus?”

“With all due respect, Your Highness, Vinas Solamnus commands half of Ergoth’s armies—the better half. The men are already triple-bunked inside Solanthus, sleeping in strict shifts. To have so many men in a castle about to be besieged—”

“If Solanthus stands, Ergoth stands.”

“—not to mention the hundreds of loyal warriors that are sifting in from Vingaard and the plains outposts—the stocks will be depleted in months instead of years,” Julius said. “Of course, if you sent even two thirds of those men out to meet Vinas in the field, they would last only hours, not days or months or years.”

“If he has only half of our forces,” the emperor wondered aloud, counting armies on his fingers, “why can he field a force in excess of three armies—counting the bread crews and kender—while all we can scrape up are three thousand?”

Julias had always responded poorly to whining. “How many of your hundred-person black watch would you spare. Fifty? Seventy-five? Add those to the hundred men you could barely afford to pull from the elven border lands, the thanoi tundra, the pirate coast of Turbidus, the gnome-riddled island of Sancrist, the edge of kender county in the north, and you’ve a total of six or seven hundred soldiers. Then, perhaps we should thin by half the home guards of every province in an empire on the brink of popular rebellion, and we could add, say, four thousand men. Perhaps by some miracle, five thousand newly gathered troops could stand with the three thousand at Solanthus, making a force almost half of Solamnus’s. Perhaps we could hold Solanthus, but surely then the outlying provinces would rebel. Then we would have a war with ten fronts instead of one.”

Emann had long since slumped into a soft chair. “Why must you be so bleak?”

“Better that I deceive you?”

Emann’s jaw flexed beneath stringy flesh. “Conscript more.”

“The imperial treasury couldn’t pay them for longer than a year, and it will take months to gather, train, and equip them.”

“Do it,” Emann ordered bitterly. “Deplete the treasury. If we lose the battle of Solanthus, we lose everything, and the empty treasury will be someone else’s worry” He paused, glancing toward the shadowed ceiling.

“Adrenas, your son seems intent on bringing me down.”

Five Months Hence, 17 Aelmont, 1202 Age of Light

Solanthus was ready and waiting. They had made good use of the year it took Vinas to marshall his volunteer forces and make careful, bloodless headway down from Vingaard.

Ergoth had fully stocked Solanthus and garrisoned it with three thousand troops. Captain Erghas had received a field promotion to become General Erghas, which placed him in charge of the castle. He had stepped up the refortification, which was now nearly complete. Despite the early snows this year, war wizards had kept the quarries thawed, kept the stone coming for the curtain wall.

The army of Vingaard Keep approached.

Even as Vinas marched his freezing troops along the roadway, they followed a sporadic trail of stones dumped from sledges only an hour before. The freshly cut cubes lay like toppled ruins in the desolation of snow.

Beyond, light gray and solid in the brilliant daylight, the castle stood. It’s curtain was complete, save for a course without battlements. The tops of the walls bristled with guardsmen and war wizards, staring in anger and apprehension at the long snake of Vinas’s army.

Fourteen thousand soldiers followed Vinas in this main company. Twelve of those fourteen wore polished Ergothian livery and bore the banner of Vinas Solamnus. They styled themselves patriots, fighting for the liberation of their homeland from dictatorial rule. Roughly two thousand more wore the tabards and chemises of Antonias’s army and bore his banners. Many of these were from the one thousand warriors “executed” by Vinas. The remainder were young enlistees with three months of training and not a minute of experience in battle. Whatever their stripe and color, they marched in a glorious panoply, bright as a feathered serpent against the bleak snow.

But these troops were only part of Vinas’s force. He also had a company of peasant envoys—common folk of Vingaard and the plains of eastern Ergoth. Originally, this group of twenty-six hundred had sought to join the fighting army, bringing pitchforks and scythes with them. Not wanting hapless innocents underfoot in battle, Vinas had created a civilian corps, placed Titus at its head, and charged them with relief measures for the beleaguered poor. Under Titus’s tireless guidance, the corps only grew in manpower. As happened with all people, noble or peasant—where the stomach led, the heart and mind followed.

There was also a kender contingent, thirty-some of them. After deciding to join the army, they had proved to be unshakably committed. The kender were tenacious, and their leader, Pitty Stingtail, at last convinced Vinas to let them stay by pointing out that the nation of Hylo wanted “to be as liberated as everybody else.”

The kender corps of diplomats to Qualinesti had settled the issue. Gaias had bravely taken the role of lead envoy, and apparently was meeting with some success—at least in keeping the kender away from the main army.

And last, of course, were the griffon cavalry and the scouts. Luccia and her eagle-lion riders had cleared imperial forces from all strongholds north and east of Solanthus, as well as those within twenty five miles south and west. She and her cavalry carried war wizards to harry reinforcement troops, driving them away from points of siege. The work was not hard, for the best and brightest of Ergoth’s army were stationed in Solanthus, and the winter made further muster impractical if not impossible.

If Solanthus stood, Ergoth stood. If Solanthus fell, Vinas and his troops would sweep Thelgaard away as though it were deserted, then push past the ghost-haunted Caergoth, and lay siege to Daltigoth, itself.

Vinas sat tall in the saddle. Courage stomped snow from his hooves as he led the way. A terrible loneliness had settled over him. His companions—Luccia, Gaias, Titus—were for the first time missing from his side as he marched into grave jeopardy. Those he had so often turned to were scattered across half of Ansalon. They led others in battle. They, too, fought for the first time without him.

There would be no battle today, he knew. General Erghas was a skilled leader. He would not have worked so hard to complete the curtain wall if he meant merely to sally forth into the teeth of a fresh army. No, today the armies would play the game of surrounding the fortress, setting pickets, and shouting threats. Perhaps a few bows would be fired to set ranges, but that was all.

Vinas drew in the icy air, sharp and sweet in his lungs. This would be a hard victory for a pragmatic commander, harder still for a dreamer, and hardest of all for the empire’s favorite son returned as rebel.

As he began the circling maneuver, a magic-augmented voice came to Vinas from the walls: So, the peasants you once slew, you now champion, Vinas Solamnus? And the nobles you once served, you now betray?

The voice of General Erghas. From the puzzled, startled look on the faces of his troops, Vinas knew that they all heard it. Every last one.

I hear you have traded self-serving treachery for effete honor. I applaud such improvements. However, I have yet to see your virtues in action. Your griffon-riders raid our outposts, your priests bribe the peasants with bread, your second even leads kender into Qualinost to stir up dissention and trouble, to break the ancient peace of the Swordsheath Scroll. Strange that you make peace when it suits you, and, otherwise, war.

As Vinas continued the maneuver around the castle, he cast a glare back at his wizard corps, who, in their sleds, struggled to nullify the voice spell. Vinas faced forward and rode stolidly onward, listening to the ravings of his foe.

He thought of Luccia, and wondered if he would live to see her again. A single tear came, whether from sun or wind or cold or dread, he could not say. It streamed down his cheek and fell from his jawline, turning to ice before it struck his cloak.

“How long?” he asked himself beneath his breath, “how long will this war of ice tears last?”

He had circled half of the fortress before, at last, the wizards were able to negate the spell. The unsettled expressions of Vinas’s troops were obvious. His own face looked no different.

Let them doubt, he thought. Let me doubt, too. I will not answer Erghas in kind, nastily and prematurely.

He had fully circled the fortress and drawn his noose of warriors, just as sun and horizon merged into twilight. Only then did he signal the war wizards to reverse the spell, sending his quiet voice to everyone within the castle.

Hello, Compatriots. I am Commander Vinas Solamnus. My folk and I have yon safely contained. Call it a siege, if you wish, though you will soon enough see how inaccurate that term is.

In a siege, an army surrounds a fortification and seeks surrender of those within, using starvation, dehydration, restlessness, and madness to win their ends.

I do not wish such things on my worst enemies. You, warriors of Solanthus—you are my countrymen. We isolate you not to deprive you of anything you need, but to give you time to heal, to think. We isolate you to protect the rest of Ergoth from the violent delusions you are under.

Every day, therefore, we will send to you a provisions wagon, of the exact variety we provide to the deprived villages in the countryside all around. The wagon will hold enough food to feed all your troops for a day.

Also, I have taken the liberty of asking a war wizard of mine to cast a spell of plenty on your wells, so you should not want for water. Both the food and the water will have been blessed by priests of Paladine, so they will fortify not only bodies but also souls. The water may be used as holy water, for purposes of purification and ritual.

Nor am I forgetting the needs of the mind. My war wizards have created some splendid devices to this end. We have ten enchanted chess boards that, when set up among my men, will appear mystically at points along your wall. Your men will discover they can touch the pieces and move them. It is harmless and wholesome entertainment for soldiers who must spend long hours watching an army that has no intention of attacking.

Also, the evening hours will feature the most-acclaimed bards and balladeers, singing and reciting to you. Some nights, troupes of jugglers, acrobats, dancers, and actors will perform on an enchanted stage. Their images will appear in the center of your courtyard. You shall not want for fine entertainment and pleasant diversion.

Do not fear. None of these diversions will be calculated to distract guards from their duties or cause any other harm. We have no attention of attacking, and will fight only if attacked. Otherwise, enjoy the best we have to offer in food, drink, and diversion.

The reason for this siege, as I have said before, is to give you time to heal and think, all the while keeping the rest of Ergoth safe from you. Yes, you are patients of a sort, in an enforced convalescence. I must admit, my motives are not purely altruistic. I want you whole and hale because I know, in time, you will be healed, and then I would like the aid of your strong minds and backs and stomachs, to help in our cause.

When I say I want you whole, I mean not only your physical, mental, and spiritual health, but also your social health. I neither welcome nor will accept deserters from your ranks. General Erghas is an honorable warrior, and deserves your loyalty. I will win none of you over until I win all of you over, until General Erghas himself decides to join me in this cause.

And what is that cause? Freedom and justice for all the people of Ergoth!

Meus Pater [my father]

Father, the treasure of honor you bore was at least this heavy, I know. Still, it is only now that I realize it is the very weight of the burden that makes laughter and grace so necessary. Otherwise, honor could crush a man alive.

You would be pleased with what my army is doing now. We have Solanthus surrounded, and yet we treat those within as honored guests instead of dishonored foes. I wonder how they will oppose such charity. It is, quite honestly, the most powerful weapon I can imagine—not slaying foes but transforming them into friends.

XV

One Day Hence, 18 Aelmont, 1202 Age of Light

Vinas stood beside the loaded provisions wagon. Its wheels were caked with snow. He looked to the young warrior sitting atop the buckboard, slim wrists extending from the fat sleeves of his cloak as he clutched the horse’s reins.

“Are you sure, Barnabas?” Vinas asked. “This is the most dangerous detail in the army.”

“Therefore the most glorious,” said the cocky soldier. “Just think, all eyes in both armies will be on me.”

Vinas crossed arms over his chest and leaned back. “The eyes of Anistas, too. She knows you volunteered, right?”

He smiled brightly. “She’s the reason I volunteered.”

A deep sigh. Vinas said, “I’m sure we could get the wizards to figure a way of getting the wagon to the gate without a driver. Or perhaps they could cast a globe of protection around you.”

Barnabas waved away those ideas. “Then it would seem we didn’t trust them. This gesture is important—a single, unarmed driver bridging the no-man’s-land between us.”

Vinas’s mouth flattened into a hard, determined line. “I can learn something from your courage.”

Barnabas shrugged. “I’m getting cold. I’d like to get this over with so I can head back to the fire.”

Vinas only nodded.

Barnabas slapped the reins against, the horses’ flanks, and the snow-choked wheels lurched into motion. He gave one last wave, then confidently guided the horses onto the road that led toward Solanthus’s gate.

Commander Solamnus was suddenly acutely aware that the whole plain had gone silent. He looked down the uneven clusters of soldiers. Conversations had died away, reports had been cut short, jokes had stopped in mid-telling and laughs had been choked to silence. It was the same way on the walls above. Guards watched warily as the wagon pulled within arrow range. The Ergothians moved in slow, black clumps toward the gate.

There was a war wizard near Vinas, and he snagged the woman’s thick robe. “Augment my voice. I want them to hear me on the wall.” With a gesture, it was done, and Vinas addressed the whole silent throng, inside the castle and out.

We send the first provisions wagon. The driver is unarmed. The wagon is full of food and drink. Please, give safe passage to this soldier, and enjoy what he brings you.

Puffs of gray breath drifted up from the horses as they labored, drawing Barnabas and the food after them. The guards on the wall did not raise their bows, but only stood and stared at the strange spectacle.

“Who’s the brave soul?” came a voice beside Vinas.

He turned and saw it was the priestess Anistas.

To his look of surprise, she responded, “I know, I know. It’s colder than I like out here, but Barnabas asked me to meet him here. He said it was important.”

Vinas took hold of her shoulders and stared solemnly into her eyes. “Anistas, that is Barnabas.”

Her face went as white as the snow, and he tried to steady her. She pulled free and pushed past him, onto the road. Vinas pursued, grabbing her arm and holding her back.

“Stay here. If you go, too, the Ergothians will wonder what trick we’re up to, and Barnabas would be in even greater danger.”

Anistas struggled to break free, but couldn’t. She turned her head to stare down the road.

Barnabas was halfway to the castle, well within range for even a mediocre marksman. Still, the guards made no move to stop him. The wind swirled in white eddies, like ghosts dancing on a cloud. As the horses drew closer, the wagon looked small against the massive wall.

“I thought they just might accept the token,” Vinas muttered to himself with a cautious smile. “If they wanted to attack, they would have done so by now.”

The horses had reached the moat. Barnabas reined them to a stop. He stared forward at the thick, iron-banded drawbridge that tightly sealed the entrance to the castle. The underside of the bridge was draped with dead moss that had accumulated over the years when the bridge was rarely if ever lifted.

For a moment, Vinas’s heart caught in his throat. If they won’t lower the bridge, he thought, they won’t take the supplies, and if they don’t take the supplies, Barnabas is a deadman.

Suddenly, the drawbridge lurched downward. It caught short, then spooled slowly toward the ground. The clangor of metal links rolling from the capstan came a moment later, a sound so welcome that it brought a great, spontaneous cheer from the troops of Vingaard.

The drawbridge set to ground. Barnabas waved his thanks to the men on the wall, who returned the gesture. Barnabas flapped the reins, and the wagon shuddered into motion. The bridge was little wider than the wagon, and it held no rails to prevent a fifty-foot plunge into a moat of ice. Barnabas guided the wagon slowly out along the bridge, at last reaching the closed portcullis.

There came another moment of anxiety. Then the portcullis began its clanking path upward. The army cheered again, and festival songs broke out here and there among Vinas’s men.

The portcullis rose the height of the wagon rails and stopped. From beneath it came ten armored men, who walked warily to the wagon. The officer of the group stopped to talk to Barnabas while the rest lined up beside the wagon, pulling back the tarp, and gazing within. When they seemed satisfied, they went to the opposite side of the conveyance, checking what lay there. As heads began to nod in satisfaction beside the wagon, the officer finished his conversation with Barnabas and joined the others.

Vinas’s hold on Anistas eased. He then let go of her entirely. “You see? They are accepting the token.”

No sooner had he said this than the ten men heaved on the side of the wagon. The wagon rolled off the drawbridge, taking Barnabas and the horses with it. His shriek came first, and then the horrible sound of horse screams, the clatter of hooves and knees on frozen wood, and a terrific crash as food, wagon, driver, and horses impacted upon the ice below.

Vinas reached out to grab Anistas and hold her, but already she was running up the road, already almost within arrow range. He bolted after her. If only she would slip and stumble, he found himself thinking. If only she would not cross that line.

It was too late. Vinas himself had already crossed into arrow range. What looked like a flock of starlings took flight from the castle. But they flew too fast, too straight, to be birds. The first black arrow caught her thigh and felled her. By the time Vinas reached her, the first shafts were spent, four of them embedded in Anistas. Yet she still breathed.

Vinas tenderly lifted her into his arms, turned around, and walked out of range. The twang of another set of missiles came behind them, but Vinas did not hurry. He walked slowly, reverently, back toward his armies as arrows struck the ground all around them, breaking midshaft upon the frozen earth.

“For pity’s sake—” Vinas shouted to his troops “—for honor’s sake, bring a priest!”

The word honor left a bitter, bitter taste in his mouth.

Four Months Hence, 2 Bran, 1202 Age of Light

“How goes it?” came a resonant voice on the grassy hillside.

Crouched intently over a rock that held one of the enchanted chessboards, Jerome started and sat straight up atop his camp stool. “Paladine’s puke! You scared me, sneaking up like that.”

He glanced irritably over his shoulder and saw the large, silhouette of Commander Solamnus. The soldier leapt to his feet, upsetting the camp stool and almost wiping clean the chess board.

The commander himself reached down and steadied the board. “Are you coaxing anyone into playing?”

Jerome was too busy standing at attention to realize he needed to respond.

“I said—relax, soldier—have you gotten anyone to play?”

“No, sir,” said Jerome nervously. “Not any response for quite a while. At first all they would do was knock the pieces off the board every time I set it up. Now, they’re just ignoring it.”

Commander Solamnus stooped, righted the man’s chair, and gestured him into it. Stiffly, Jerome took the seat. The commander said, “It’s the same story down the line. They must have been ordered not to touch the boards. But it looks to me like you’ve got a good game going.”

The man shrugged, reddening beneath his salt-and-pepper hair. “Once they stopped clearing the boards, I figured it wouldn’t do any harm for me to play a match—both sides, I mean.”

Vinas nodded. “It’s a good idea. Even if they’ve been ordered not to touch the boards, they could still watch a game. It’s a start. Good thinking.”

“Oh, ah, yes. Thanks,” said Jerome.

The commander nodded toward the pieces. “Continue.”

“Yes, sir,” Jerome replied, as though it had been an order. He reached out slowly, then drew his hand back from the white queen. “I was just trying to make sure of a checkmate. White will have the game if I move the queen to bishop four—if she can’t be taken there.” He and the commander studied the board in silence for a moment, looking for jeopardy for the queen. Then, without either of them lifting a hand, the white queen moved into position.

Jerome stared in disbelief. “Someone’s playing. Someone’s finally playing!”

Commander Solamnus peered toward the wall. “Good work, soldier. Continue.”

Six Months Hence, 28 H’rarmont, 1202 Age of Light

Titus was standing beside the half-empty wagon, lashing down its tarp, when he felt something on his back—something even sharper than the early winter wind. Actually, the sword tip poked at him from somewhere lower than his back.

Raising his hands to his sides, the giant slowly pivoted to see who threatened him. He looked down to see a boy who could have been no more than twelve.

The kid’s helmet was a few sizes too large, and he had to crane his neck back to keep it from sliding down over his eyes. His shoulder guards stood out from his neck like the fronds of a palm. With both arms over his head, he held up a very grown-up sword.

“Hold still, or I’ll stick you through the heart,” said the kid.

“That’s the long way to the heart,” Titus observed, but he held dutifully still.

“I congratulate this wagon for the army of Daltigoth,” the boy declared.

Another voice came, this one craggy and old, but no more imposing than the child’s. “That’s confiscate, not congratulate,” an old man said.

Despite the warning, Titus decided his heart was out of immediate danger. He twisted around to see the boy’s comrade. The old man had a three-day stubble, with a gray mustache and eyebrows that stood out like cat whiskers. His chest was even narrower than the boy’s, though his potbelly made up for the deficiency. His legs were birdlike—scrawny and covered in ragged scale mail.

“Let the arse of that priest alone, son,” the old man advised. “Paladine’s posterior ain’t a good thing to be poking.”

“I captured him and his cart,” the boy explained, not moving the sword.

Two more voices, young and savage, came in the distance. They both talked excitedly, neither heeding the other. As the speakers reached a ring of winter-bare trees at the edge of the clearing, their duologue suddenly stopped and they broke into a run.

“A priest, finally!” one of the young men said. “Run!”

They both skidded to a halt beside Titus. They were filthy as polecats living in a chimney. Their eyes blinked brightly in their dirty faces.

The nearer one said, “I got a wart that won’t go away even if I cut at it, and last time I cut at it I had to walk funny for a week, which is how I got this blister beside the wart”—he slipped off one ragged boot and lifted a bad-smelling foot above his head to show his wart and blister—“and so I want both healed.”

With a single motion of one hand, Titus pushed the noisome foot away and healed it. “Who are you people?”

There came the sound of three young chests puffing out with pride—and that of one decidedly older chest just plain puffing. The boy with the sword said, “We’re the new recruits for Ergoth’s army.”

Titus could no longer help it. He stepped away from the sword. Its tip unsupported, the sword clattered to the ground. The noise startled the group, which leapt back like frightened rabbits.

“Look out!” one of the grubby fellows said, “he’s got a sword!”

“Way to go, Filbas,” the other piped.

“Forget swords,” the old man said, his eyes wide, “look at those hands. He could smash our heads like grapes.” He made a comical pretense of dodging blows.

“Filbert can have his sword back,” said Titus, kicking the blade back to them. They leapt away from it. “I just want answers to some questions.”

“Whatever he asks, don’t answer, or he won’t need you anymore, and he’ll kill you,” advised the one whose foot had been healed.

“Shut up,” advised the other.

Titus ignored them. “Are you really soldiers for Ergoth?”

“Of course we are,” they chorused, indignant.

“Why aren’t you in Solanthus, then?”

Filbas answered, “I said we’re new recruits. And what we’re doing here is getting ready to attack the rebels.”

“You four are going to attack Vinas Solamnus’s eighteen thousand?” Titus asked, incredulous.

“We’re building up to it.” Filbas quirked his mouth. “We used to be in a company, but the colonel had a bad cough and, well, he didn’t make it. So, we split up. Besides, there’s more than four.”

As though these last words were a signal, another twenty-five ragtag soldiers came over the hill. Their eyes lit with excitement as they saw the wagon and the prisoner, and they ran to help surround Titus.

“Looks like the shoe is on the other foot, priest!” sneered Wart. “Now we ask the questions. Who are you?”

“I am Chancellor Titus, priest of Paladine, and one of the rebel leaders,” said Titus without pause.

“Whoa! Without even trying we nabbed a big one!” said the other grubber.

“I was trying,” Filbas put in.

“I say we torture war secrets out of him,” suggested Wart.

“You won’t have to torture me,” Titus said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Commander Solamnus has no war secrets.”

“If the priest ain’t got secrets, let’s hang him,” said the other grubber. A cheer went up from the scrofulous crowd. “At least we could have some fun.”

The speaker suddenly had a very similar experience to the one Titus had had moments before: he felt a jab in his back. Not one, actually, but four.

He turned his head to see a severe-looking farmer pressing a severe-looking pitchfork against his back. “You’ll do no such thing. Now, you brigands be running along.”

Spitting venom, the grubber said, “Who’s going to make us. You and what army?”

“This army,” said the farmer.

The surrounders were now surrounded by a hundred villagers who now had full pantries, thanks to Titus.

The farmer said, “I’m sorry you had to run into this lot, Titus. We’ve been trying to keep them out of your hair, but they’re as thick as fleas in these woods. Thick as fleas, but no more dangerous.”

Titus waved away the apology. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

“As far as we’re concerned,” the farmer said matter-of-factly, “these folk are the invaders. We’re part of Solamnia.”

Sixteen Months Hence, 13 Chislmont, 1204 Age of Light

After Barnabas’s death, every provisions wagon sent to the castle was propelled by magical means—without horses or driver. The safety measures proved wise. For the first three months of the siege, every wagon that rolled to the drawbridge of the castle was flung unceremoniously into the moat.

The armies of Solamnus had been grieved to see such waste—ninety-two wagons before it was done, and tons of food wasted. So much lay in the moat at the end of those three months that it was said an attack could be made across a bridge of pork shanks and flank steaks. Many advisors had begged Vinas to end the daily ritual, but he had been adamant.

On the thirteenth of Chislmont, though, two years back, the first wagon was accepted into the castle. Since that time, not a single wagon had been tossed away, and one year ago to the day, the wagons had started coming back empty, to be reused. Vinas’s overworked wheelwrights had breathed a sigh of relief at that.

Commander Solamnus had made it known to his troops that on the anniversary of the auspicious date, he wanted to send another horse team and rider, and was looking for volunteers. Though he had many to choose from, one volunteer was especially insistent.

“Are you certain about this, Anistas?” Vinas asked her, standing in the very spot where he had once asked Barnabas the same question.

She nodded, fingers twisting the reins of her horses. “Just the way he did it. I want it all to be the same.”

“All but the ending,” Vinas said, his voice a mixture of concern and reproof.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Of course.”

“Well,” Vinas said, “I need someone to brave this path for all of us. You are among the bravest folk I know.”

She nodded, her eyes already steely and fixed on the castle looming ahead.

“Paladine be with you,” said Vinas.

With that, she touched a spot beside her heart, where an arrow had once nearly taken her life. It was a gesture that always gave her strength.

She slapped the reins. The horses pulled forward. The wagon jolted onto the road.

The huge ring of Vingaard’s warriors—grown to twenty-five thousand over these two years—fell silent.

Despite the slow trot of the horses, Anistas felt an impulse to leap off the wagon, as though it were careening out of control toward a cliff. She squelched the desire, purposefully keeping the reins loose and even in her grip.

The road curved muddily away behind her. The horses trudged up an embankment greening with spring. Anistas sat straight and tall. The augmented voice of Commander Solamnus rose all around her.

I am sending in an unarmed woman with a wagon of provisions. Please let this priestess arrive unharmed, and receive the gift she offers.

She was in arrow range now, but no shafts took to the air. They hadn’t fired at Barnabas, either—and he was dead, all the same.

The castle loomed ahead, growing impossibly large. Anistas realized she hadn’t breathed in what felt like minutes. What if this is my last moment? she wondered. What if this blue-gray sky and these tender first shoots of grass are the last things I ever see?

Before she knew it, she reined the horses to a stop at the moat. There, she waited. The guards atop the wall stared down at her, but as yet their weapons were not raised.

A loud clatter began. Anistas started. The guards laughed. She saw that the drawbridge had begun its descent, heavy chain unspooling from capstans high above. The massive bridge cranked downward slowly, patiently, and finally settled into place.

Taking a deep breath, Anistas urged the horses forward, across the bridge. The wheels moaned, as though in terror of what was to come. She guided the wagon along the narrow drawbridge and to the closed portcullis. Again, she waited.

More clanking was heard as the portcullis rose slowly upward. When it had cleared the height of the wagon rails, nine soldiers emerged. They were haggard and drawn, their faces hard. They did not look at Anistas, only filed past her, going to one side of the wagon and flipping back the tarp to examine the cargo. Anistas held her breath, refusing to look over her shoulder, trying to convince herself it would be better to be dragged into the pit than to be captured by these heartless men.

“Mmmm,” one of them said, his voice raspy, “dates.”

The men had begun shifting over to the other side of the wagon when Anistas caught sight of a sinister figure lurking in the shadowy arch beyond the raised portcullis.

Not lurking, but approaching.

Light fell on the face of the man. He had a haunted look to him. The flesh of his face clung to his skull, showing its sockets and cavities. The man’s eyes were keen, as though he had spent the last two years honing them like a pair of knives.

General Erghas.

He edged toward Anistas. She did not move. He stopped beside her and set one thin hand upon the rein hitch and the other on the buckboard. He spoke in a soft, intense voice.

“Do you have a good memory?” he asked.

Anistas was puzzled as well as startled. She replied, “Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “I hadn’t time to write this down. I want you to take a message to Commander Solamnus.”

She nodded.

“Listen carefully: Commander, you have fed my men and I longer than the emperor has. Were it not for your blasted honor, we would have been starved out two years ago. Thank you, also, for the entertainments, the games, the songs. All have helped us pass the time in this infuriating stalemate. You have proved your honor to be more than dreamy chatter, and proved Emann’s tyranny to be less than omnipotent.

“Even so, I am still his man. I will not turn traitor. Therefore, let us end this stalemate with a battle of knights. I will have a document drawn up for us to sign and seal, that you and I will engage in an honorable duel, sword to sword and dagger to dagger, as you are so fond of putting it. The winner will take over the loser’s troops and provisions, to do with as he will. The loser, of course, will be forfeit his life.”

He blinked and looked down. “Do you have that all?”

“I think so,” said Anistas, nodding. “I know I do.”

“Good,” the man said again.

Suddenly there was in his hand a sword that Anistas had not seen him draw. She flinched away as he brought it whirring down. With one neat stroke, he sliced one of the horses free from the wagon, and brought it around by its severed reins.

“Here,” he said gruffly, though his gesture was graceful, “let this noble beast speed you on your return.”

Anistas sat for a moment, then leapt from the buck-board to the bare back of the mount. She made a clicking sound and eased the horse past the wagon.

As she did so, one of the soldiers asked General Erghas what he planned to do with the other horse. She did not wait for the reply, kicking her mount to a gallop. But some corner of her mind thought she had heard the words, “Eat it.”

Meus Pater [my father]

At last, Father, this long, dreary siege is ending. Had I inflicted starvation and madness in order to gain surrender, this siege would have been done long ago. But such ends are not honorable for warriors to suffer, and less so for warriors to inflict.

This siege has been long because I conducted it honorably. I refused to be drawn into a brawl. I refused to pile ten soldiers atop every two of the foe. My patience at last has paid off. An honorable fight has been granted me. Best of all, this clash of armies will be resolved with a single death instead of a multitude of them.

It has been so long since I have killed in cold blood. I wonder if I am still able.

XVI

Two Weeks Hence, 27 Chislmont, 1204 Age of Light

The day of the duel dawned with a carnival atmosphere, Colorful tents luffed on opposite ends of the parade ground. Bright pennons snapped above them, and the standards of Vinas and Erghas marked out the opposing camps.

The field to the east of the castle had been converted into a jousting yard, complete with guide poles and packed-sand lanes. The black earth also held a sand circle for wrestling, should things progress that far, and on the castle side of the field loomed a gallows, where the loser would be hanged on display.

Under a temporary truce, the three thousand soldiers of Ergoth were free to mingle with the twenty-five thousand of Vingaard stationed at the site. Mingle they did. Armies liveried in Vinas’s blue and white or Antonias’s gray and green were mixed with those in Erghas’s red and orange, Ergoth’s black and red, and other divisional combinations. The only obvious difference between the rebels and the imperials was the thinness of the latter. Clearly, Erghas’s troops had not received the wagons until they had absolutely needed them.

Chess partners and tournament players met, clasped arms, and exchanged words. Ergothian chefs sought out the hunters and curers among Vinas’s troops. Ergothian sentries spoke with the bards and actors that had kept them entertained on their long, late watches atop the tower.

The soldiery slowly sifted into spectator ranks—sitting, kneeling or standing along either side of the field. Even then, they mingled. It seemed to all of them that they had little quarrel. The war was not theirs, but their leaders’.

Just now, those two men sat in separate tents on separate ends of the field. They donned the last of their armor, drew whetstones one final time across their swords, and finished the round of charms and prayers their priests had forced upon them.

Titus leaned on a pile of pillows near one wall of the commander’s small tent. Sitting down, he was still as tall as Luccia and Vinas, who were in the center of the tent struggling with a broken shoulder strap.

In the attitude of an Istarian pasha, Titus dictated to Vinas a cycle of prayer. “One last time, recite the warrior’s dedication: Unto Paladine—the Dragon’s Lord, Father of Good, and Master of Law—I dedicate my heart. Unto his first son Kiri-Jolith—Sword of Justice, Heart of Honor, and Bringer of Righteous War—I dedicate the weapons of my hands. And unto his younger brother, Habbakuk—Fisher King—”

“I hope he is lord of shoulder straps,” interrupted Vinas irritably, flinging the loose epaulet away.

Luccia watched him, concerned, “Why don’t you wear your regular armor? This dress stuff is hardly broken in.”

“I must shine today,” Vinas said. “I must look worthy to be the avatar of justice, honor, and rebirth. I must shine.”

“You must survive,” Luccia said reprovingly. “You’d do better at that with familiar and proven armor.”

“You’d do better at that with a few more prayers under your belt,” added Titus.

Vinas lifted his gaze from the scattered mess of armor polish and rags around him. He fixed on his beloved with a look, and then turned to his best friend. “If I’d wanted to survive, I’d have given up Vingaard to the emperor and returned to be his under table dog. I can’t go into this battle with survival as my first goal. If I survive through unfair advantage, dishonorable blow, or aid from friends in the stands, thousands will die today—thousands instead of one.”

Luccia and Titus both stared a long while at Vinas before the giant said, “You’re right. You’ve got more creed than ten priests—and more honor than a hundred.” He smiled sadly. “Hand me the shoulder strap.”

Luccia did, and the priest began fiddling with it.

Vinas asked, “How’s Courage doing?”

“Fine,” Luccia assured. “The barding is already in place. The stableman’s gotten a girl to do the final tail brushing. Courage will shine just like you.”

As she brushed out its tail, the young, doll-eyed woman cooed softly to the great black horse. “You are going to run fast and smooth for the commander, aren’t you? Fast and smooth. You must, or he will not win.” She looked about her, but no one was near the stall. “Fast, like you are running on a field of fire,” she said, lifting one of Courage’s rear hoofs and pouring a thin liquid from a small vial onto the frog of the foot. “And smooth, like you’re running on butter.” She lifted the other rear hoof and let liquid fail onto the flesh.

As she moved to the front of the horse, intent on repeating the process, she said, “It’s not fire or butter, really, but a kind of poison. Once it sinks in, you’ll be ready to run like fire. But just like fire, you’ll burn up fast, and your muscles will melt into butter—”

A boy rounded the comer, a bucket of water in either hand. He smiled a greeting at the young woman with the tail comb, then sloshed the contents of the buckets into a trough at Courage’s head. “One last drink before the joust!” he said excitedly.

“Yes,” the childlike woman replied as she slipped away. “One last drink.”

Fully armored, General Erghas sat alone in his small, flapping tent. He looked like an old raven, gray with years, gaunt, patient, and wise. He had heard that Commander Solamnus was doing his best to look the white knight. Such charades did not impress Erghas. He wanted his people and the rebels—particularly the rebels—to see him as he was: fierce, embittered, practical, fearless. Vinas’s white raiments wouldn’t look so splendid when he bled through them.

“Your sword, Sir,” said a middle-aged man at the tent flap. He extended the sword, hilt first, toward the general. “It’s sharpened and ready.”

“Good work,” General Erghas said dispassionately. He gestured for the weaponsmith or blacksmith—or whatever the man was—to lean the scabbarded sword near the tent flap and go.

“The tip is especially sharp,” the man said, rubbing his forehead, which was crossed by a deep, nasty-looking scar. “Strike with it, and the kill is sure. But don’t cut yourself with it.”

The man was gone before Erghas could get a second look at him.

Waiting statuelike, General Erghas sat his gray mare. Only the pennon at the tip of his lance moved in the spring breeze.

The crowds had cheered the general when he first appeared. Oblivious, he had mounted up and sat still. The throng had watched him closely for the first long minutes. When he did no more, only sat with lance cradled, their eyes began to wander the parade grounds in search of Commander Solamnus.

He was there, behind a line of tents at the other end of the field. Erghas recognized Solamnus’s pennon, dangling from an upright lance. The crowd watched that slender banner, too, uncertain if it was borne by a squire or by the man himself.

Erghas knew it was he, Vinas Solamnus. The flag moved less with the fickle breeze than with the stamping and prancing of the stallion he rode—what was its name? Stoutheart?

With a sudden violent motion, the lance edged slightly forward and bounded along the tent top. It brought after it the magnificent black stallion, draped in dazzling white. But the silken beast was dull compared to Solamnus. He was resplendent in silver, as though clothed in lightning.

A thunderous ovation followed his appearance.

The black stallion stomped and pranced, but the commander himself was still. He too did not acknowledge the applause. When Vinas stood in his stirrups, it was to touch a fist to his chest in salute of his opponent. General Erghas stood and returned the gesture. The gestures only raised the cries from the soldiers.

The shouts and cheers were still building when the opponents guided their mounts to the heads of the jousting lanes. There, they solemnly lowered their helmet visors. The sound of the crowd collapsed in upon itself, ending in a troubled hush.

Then came the eager thuds of hooves, digging into the hard-packed sand of the lane. Rectangles of bone and sinew leaned into triangles of motion, and from triangles into streaking shafts. The terrific acceleration stretched time, as though such mass could not so quickly achieve such speed.

The horses thundered toward each other. The lances tilted forward and leveled. Caught between the flash of steel and the roar of hoof, the two men rushed toward impact.

General Erghas smiled within his helmet. That triangle, there, between the commander’s shield and his arm—that’s where his heart is.

They came together with the speed of falcons. Erghas’s lance tip held steady. A muscle in his arm pulled. The tip moved a fraction of an inch and dove toward the triangle.

Solamnus’s shield was suddenly there. The lance glanced off it, raking the shield up over the commander’s shoulder.

Erghas felt the tearing of leather, perhaps tendon—and, surely, muscle. Where had Solamnus’s lance tip struck him? He could not feel it.

He felt all the weight of the world crashing into his back and flipping him, bruisingly, end over end. The lance followed him for one of those turns before it slipped from where it had been lodged. Sand and blood traced circles in the air. Erghas tumbled over and over. At last, the world ceased its spinning, and he was still.

There, on the edge of Erghas’s sight, Vinas Solamnus drifted, placid and unhurt, atop that midnight steed of his. On the other side of the knife-thin world, there were thrashing forms rushing up—two eager squires.

Squires, Erghas thought irritably, and he sat up before they could reach him. The first arrived, smocked and shawled in red and black, and tried to ease Erghas back down.

“Give yourself a moment, General,” he said.

With one arm, Erghas flung the young man aside and rose to a knee. “If I lie down,” he hissed, “Ergoth lies down.”

The other squire was smart enough to learn from his companion, and endeavored to help the general stand. Only then, as deafening applause rose from both armies, did Erghas realize that the roar he had heard before was blood in his ears.

Erghas gave an understated wave to his warriors. He took a moment to glance at the inward-splayed belly armor, and the dark blood that oozed from it.

“Let’s plug this up,” he rasped to the squire. He hobbled toward Solamnus’s fallen lance, bent stiffly, ripped the Solamnian pennon from its end, and jammed the rag into his own belly wound.

With a flippant gesture toward the lance, he told the squire, “Give it back to the commander.”

The young man complied.

Erghas whistled for his horse. She came. He patted her fondly and vaulted up into the saddle. The mare bowed her head, tossed her mane, and cantered proudly toward the far end of the jousting grounds. Good. She had not been injured. The straps that would have kept him in the saddle were torn now, loose flaps on his legs and the horse’s gear. No matter.

Erghas reached his starting marker and turned the mare, her hooves stamping in the same marks she had made only moments before. He allowed himself to lift the visor and spit a glob of blood into the sand, then made sure it got trampled well in.

The squire who had been upbraided dragged Erghas’s lance through the sand toward him. Solamnus—damn him—already sat with his own lance, tall and steady. That black stallion of his stomped and fidgeted, as though a carnivore eager for blood.

“Here, General,” the squire said, handing him the end of the lance and helping him set it in the hilt cradle.

Erghas suddenly remembered his own days as a squire, and he said to the shaken lad, “Get ready to help the commander lie down this time.”

The young man flashed a smile, but then seemed to think it inappropriate and wiped it into a solemn expression. “Yes, General.”

Had the boy not known enough to withdraw then, Erghas would have kicked him away. Luckily for him, the squire got clear. Vinas was standing and making his silly salute. Not interested in standing again—not for about three days—Erghas merely lowered his visor and charged.

Vinas Solamnus came on, too. That horse of his had a devil glow in its red eyes. Its hooves tore at the ground as though it was digging a trench as it passed. A trench or a grave.

Erghas leveled his lance and tried to steady the bouncing point of it. His arm wouldn’t do what he wanted it to. He shouted, feeling sinews tear near his elbow as he brought the wicked end to bear on the black comet soaring toward him.

Then suddenly, Vinas’s stallion dove headfirst to ground. Courage—Courage was his name. The ebony head of the beast dropped to the sand, dragging Solamnus down. Courage rolled over. There came a cracking of bone and a shrieking moan of armor plates. Then Solamnus, too, was gone, borne beneath the vast black bulk of the horse.

Erghas flashed past. Just before he turned his mare outward, he glimpsed the broken forelegs of Courage, flopping pitifully against the sand as the stallion rolled off of Vinas Solamnus.

Erghas brought his mount around and cantered toward the strange sight. He let the lance fall from his grip. There would be no more jousting, not on a leg-broken horse.

It was as though Courage had been tripped by a wire. Never had Erghas seen a mount of such breeding and training go down like that. He rode toward the spot, wondering if he would need to dispatch the suffering creature.

Impossibly, though, Vinas rose from the blood-sand that caked him. The man moved as though in great pain, but did not stagger. He walked with sure step to the horse, drew his sword, and brought it down through the beast’s neck. Then he dropped to his knees, yanked off his helmet, and embraced Courage, as though mourning a longtime friend.

So, thought General Erghas. It is to be swords.

He swung down from the saddle and smacked his mare on the rump, sending her away. Then he drew steel. Solamnus had sword in hand. Erghas tossed his helmet aside so that they were equally armored. It was just as well. Boarshead helmets were more harm than good in a close sword fight.

He approached the fallen horse and the kneeling rider. Erghas regretted the provisions that forbade backstabs and slaying a man who was down. He regretted them if only because he could otherwise end this now. His every muscle demanded that he sit down. The regret was only momentary, though. Solamnus was nothing if not a soldier of honor. He deserved an honorable fight and an honorable death.

“Ready for another go?” Erghas asked, his voice sounding more hearty than he felt.

The commander rose to his feet. The man was imposingly tall. He turned slowly, his light-blue eyes all the more dazzling over blood-painted cheeks. Vinas nodded.

“Clean your sword,” Erghas said. It was not a suggestion. “If I’ve got to die today, I don’t want to do it with horse blood in me.”

Solamnus looked down at the crimson blade. He carefully drew the flat of it across the shoulder of his mount. After wiping both sides, he lifted the blade, showing it to be clean.

“He was a good horse,” the commander said.

“I imagine,” replied Erghas.

He backed away to a wide spot of dry grass with solid footing. His feet planted in preparation. His knees and lower back ached, but he held the posture all the same. Solamnus arrived, saluted once more, and assumed a similar stance.

The rebel lunged first, huge like a charging bull, sword poised to block or thrust. Erghas stepped into the charge. Steel clashed on steel. The weight behind that first lunge was deadly. Erghas deflected the sword and spun away, letting Solamnus barge past him. The blades scraped loose, each notched by its counterpart. Erghas made a weak backlash to the head. The man, though, was out of reach, stomping upon the grass and pivoting, teeth bared, for the next attack.

It came from Erghas. He danced in lightly. His blade darted to the right, then shifted in tight beneath the man’s sword arm and nicked armor. Vinas was surprised by that move. He tried to fall back, to regroup. Erghas pressed, bringing the blade hammerlike onto one shoulder. The silver epaulet dented beneath the strike and slid sullenly off.

Erghas disengaged, breathing hard, considering the next attack. The man had weight and speed, but he was not graceful with a sword. He’d learned to butcher with it, but never to finesse it, to be its lover. Erghas had him in that. A worse weakness, though, was the man’s heart. It was as large as a barn door, and just as red.

No more time for thought, only retreat as Vinas pushed him back. The force of each strike, once again, was incredible, though the blows were sloppy. Erghas deflected each with a well-angled blade and much less energy. The commander would not relent, the attack would not cease. Erghas at last sidestepped the thrusts, once again letting Solamnus plunge past him.

This time, Erghas’s whirling strike to the head caught flesh—but only just. The tip clipped Vinas’s earlobe and drew a thin line on it. Erghas remembered the weapon-smith’s words: “The tip is especially sharp. Strike with it, and the kill is sure.”

Not when I strike the earlobe, he thought irritably.

Solamnus whirled, pressing again. His blade flashed. Sparks flew where it struck. The rebel’s sword this time seemed a spell field around him. The razor edge was in three places at once, flinging Erghas’s blade aside.

It was as though that tiny earlobe scratch had enraged Solamnus.

Sword edges grated, rang, looped, crashed, hammered. At last, a shallow strike got through. The tip of the commander’s blade reached out of the cloud of steel. Erghas felt the jab like a bee sting. There was suddenly warm blood on his leg and on the sword tip before him.

Erghas fell off a step as he sliced with his sword, driving Vinas back.

He glanced down at the wound—shallow, not into gut, but it was bleeding. He would need to end this quickly, or the blood loss might prove lethal.

Erghas looked toward his foe. The big man stood unevenly, as though he had been made dizzy by his own furious assault. He staggered a moment before lifting his sword and rushing the general.

Erghas easily sidestepped this drunken charge and tripped Solamnus as he went by. The man flopped roughly to the ground, the wind knocked from him. He rolled over, panting, and struggled to his feet.

Simple fatigue? Erghas wondered. Or injury? Having a horse roll over his head might have done it. When Solamnus charged again, Erghas stepped toward him, knocked his sword free, and stabbed him in the side.

Vinas collapsed to the ground.

What was happening? Erghas walked up to stand victorious over the panting man. The wound to the side couldn’t have done this, and certainly not the cut on the ear.

Vinas Solamnus was not dead, judging by the spasms of his body, but neither would he be fighting anymore. Once again, Erghas regretted that he could not end his downed opponent’s misery.

Two squires were suddenly on the scene—a girl and a middle-aged man. They bore with them a noose, which they slipped around the commander’s head and tightened. Then, smiling to each other, the man and woman dragged the fallen Commander across the field, toward the gallows.

Erghas stood, stunned, watching them go. He could sit down now. He should sit down now.

Solamnus’s boots bounced roughly over tufts of grass. He was limp, his face red. Occasionally he gave out a gasp of pain when some stump or rock scraped across his body.

Erghas walked slowly in the wake of the man, not even thinking to sheath his sword. He heard the rumble of the soldiers, all suddenly on their feet and rushing after him, toward the gibbet. In moments, they would pass Erghas. Still, walking was the only thing he could do.

I’ve won, Erghas thought. I have won this war. His troops are now sworn to me. Those blue and white tabards flashing past—those are my people. Vingaard is defenseless.

All of it rang emptily in his ears. There was something else here—a stumbling war-horse… an unmade commander?

The two squires had reached the gibbet. They flung the end of the noose over the hangman’s arm and unceremoniously hoisted the commander aloft.

Hanging, Erghas remembered vaguely, that’s what we said would happen to the loser.

Erghas lurched up to the gallows. Only when he stood just beneath the uplifted figure did Erghas stop. He looked at the warrior, massive in his armor and hanging by his neck. The commander’s face was blue. His hands swelled with blood.

I’ve won, Erghas repeated to himself. The thought only made him sick.

“You’ve cut yourself, General,” said the squire with the hatchet-scar on his brow.

Erghas looked down and saw that he had. The tip of his sword had jabbed the soft flesh just above his ankle.

Then it all came together—the hatchet-scar, the tip that would surely kill, the horse that pranced in a hot rage just before falling—

A similar rage was welling in Erghas. He lifted the sword that had poisoned Solamnus and then himself, and thrust it—tip and shaft—into the belly of the hatchet man.

The assassin’s mouth became a red fountain.

In a haze from the poison, Erghas saw his own foot lift to the man’s chest. He kicked the assassin off his sword and whirled.

The female assassin began to scream. Steel intervened. Her head popped free of her body. The two fell grotesquely side by side.

As the crowd recoiled from the mad general, Erghas launched himself for the gibbet and shimmied up the post. The soldiers flooded forward, grabbing for his heels. Already he was too high for them to reach. His sword flashed once more, severing the rope that held Solamnus in the air. The commander fell onto the uplifted hands of the confused crowd.

“Don’t just gape!” shouted Erghas from above. The energy was suddenly leaving him. His limbs were turning to butter. He tossed his sword away. Just before he lost hold and fell, he cried, “Get a priest! We’ve been poisoned!”

Meus Pater [my father]

We were almost killed, both of us, Father. The assassins had been sent for me expressly—that was confirmed by the priests, who reached into death to interrogate them. If their poison had not accidentally infected Erghas as well, I would be dead now, and the rebellion over.

These two—Hatchet-Head and Lissel—were the same two who killed you and tried to kill the emperor. Their latest employer was Empress Phrygia at Daltigoth.

Though Erghas could easily have claimed victory, he said he was sick to death of defending a royal family as treacherous and weak as the Quislings. He threw his lot in with ours.

Now, as we lie in adjacent infirmary cots, our colonels and lieutenants are melding our forces into one great army.

Gaias, too, has sent word from Qualinesti. He will return in a month or so, bringing with him some pleasant additions to our armies.

It will take time for Erghas and I to mend. Once we do, though, we will march to Thelgaard to speak with Maslas. I have a feeling he will want to join this party.

There is much to do, and little time for all of it. Before the end of the year, I hope to be marching upon Daltigoth itself.

XVII

One Month Hence, 4 Corij, 1204 Age of Light

Empress Phrygia glared at the floor beneath her pacing feet. Across the drawing room her husband sat, staring at her in bleak hopelessness.

“I should have known better,” Phrygia raged. “Those buffoons couldn’t kill you. How could they ever kill Vinas Solamnus?”

Emperor Emann looked up, hurt. “You speak as though he is a god.”

“Isn’t he?” she growled. She stopped pacing and stood in the orange glare of the hearth fire. “Isn’t he? He leads a thousand men out the east road and returns with thirty thousand. He does not slay his enemies, but converts them. Don’t you see? He rules the heart of anyone he desires.”

Emann had turned into a weak drunkard since the War of Ice Tears had begun, four years back. But the duller his eyes, the sharper his tongue. “He rules the hearts even of those he doesn’t desire.”

“Get out!” snarled Phrygia. “Worthless lush. You have lost the empire already, an empire that couldn’t be lost by generation upon generation of your perverse, idiotic and inbred lineage. You lost it by giving it to a real man. Out!”

When he was slow to respond, she snatched up a cut-crystal brandy bottle and hurled it at him. The emperor scurried away.

Phrygia fingered the locket at her neck, summoning Caitiff. She ruled this empire now, letting her sot of a husband remain as a figurehead just to avoid the irritation of an overt coup.

The mage—a foul gray cloud of ash and bone chips—arrived swiftly. He assembled himself and stood before the impatient empress.

“My lady,” the skeleton said, bowing low, “what service—?”

“Vinas Solamnus. His twenty-five thousand men are even now marching toward Daltigoth,” interrupted Phrygia.

“Unpleasant,” noted the mage.

“Worse than unpleasant. General Erghas not only surrendered to Solamnus, but actually joined the man. He adds three thousand to the total.”

“Foul business.”

“And Vinas’s second has marshaled a company of elven archers and dwarven sappers to break the Sword-sheath Scroll with Ergoth and join the march on our city.”

“Deplorable.”

She began again to pace. “What, then? What do we do? Solamnus has every available Ergothian soldier at his command, has won the sympathies of every peasant in the empire, and marches with elves, dwarves, and kender. Who could we even send against them?”

The skeleton seemed to shrug. “How about an army of the dead?”

“Yes,” Phrygia replied with quiet resolve. “Let the honored dead of Ergoth defend their empire.

“It will take time,” the skeleton noted. “Time, and the talents of the best—and darkest—mages of the realm.”

“Of course, dear Caitiff. Of course.”

Six Months Hence, 25 Phoenix, 1204 Age of Light

Commander Vinas Solamnus had dealt with the likes of the empress enough times to know how she thought, what she would do next.

So he wasn’t surprised by the undead. She raised the very warriors she had slain at Caergoth.

For three weeks, Vinas’s army had been ready to march, but he had held them back, suspecting just this sort of shambling attack. He had waited for a solid ground freeze so that the graves would be sealed for the season.

The empress was too canny for that, though. Word came to Daltigoth that Vinas and his Swordsheath Army—Vingaardians, Ergothians (including Maslas and his troops), kender, elves, and dwarves—were on their way south from their staging grounds at Solanthus. She then ordered every grave piled with wood and set ablaze.

The ground thawed. The necromancers worked their foul arts. Phrygia’s ghastly armies rose from grave soil and ashes. Caergoth, itself a graveyard, burned on the western horizon that morning. Its hellish flames forged a second sun there.

Silhouetted against that sun were atrocities of flesh and bone, rising and swelling. The ground sprouted them as thickly as a field sprouts com.

Many were long dead. Time and worms had gnawed them to mere skeletons, rigid and hoary.

Others were ancient dead. Their bones had been so masticated by flesh-eating earth that their bodies were merely mud puddles charged with flakes of bone and muscle. Men of clay They oozed up from the ground and formed putrid bodies of men and women, ogres and hobgoblins. At times, they merged with each other into titanic monstrosities—giants, hydras, remorhaz, dragons.

Most, though were the recent dead. Pallid skin… eyes rippled or shrunk to raisins in decaying sockets… mud-caked clothing… skin splotched with lividity… the reek of rot… the roil of maggots hard at work. In most who died violently, the cause of death was writ on their wretched forms—immolated skulls, lacerated throats, cleft brains, punctured lungs, dangling viscera, slashed wrists, crushed pelvises, lopped-off legs.

All of the dead erupted from the burning and wounded ground and began a furious march toward the army of Commander Solamnus.

He was ready.

Titus and his unit of priests led the forces of life. The chancellor, at the head of the wedge of holy men, lifted high a staff. The walking stick held no especial power, but the wielder certainly did.

“Paladine, Father of Good, Master of Law, Dragon’s Lord—I call you today. I do not merely call upon you, merely invoke your aid, but I call you, evoke you to march with us now, strike with our arms, and lay the dead again to rest! Bless these weapons of ours. We raise them high to you!”

On that command, the thirty thousand souls of Vinas’s army raised their swords and maces and clubs overhead. From a cerulean sky came a flash of lightning that rolled down like an uncoiling spring. With a shout of thunder, blue power struck that simple wooden staff of Titus’s. A sparkling wave of godfire flowed back from it. Wherever that wave struck an upraised weapon or fist, power engulfed it and scintillated along it and blessed it to strike the armies of death.

Then, with a roar born in the instant of thunder, the army of Vinas Solamnus rushed to meet the onslaught of the dead.

As the lines converged, priests raised aspergillums of holy water and whirled them overhead like bullroarers. The water flung a sacred mist around them.

The first staggering wretch lunged toward Titus, but when the mist struck, it seared through pus and rot and bone.

A tusked horror and three bow-legged hobgoblins were next to attack. Their claws and fangs reached out for soft necks. None landed a blow. Claws splintered on the holy cloud as though it were steel. Bones ground away into gray dust.

Other priests hurled blasts of red power into the horrid fray. Each crimson bolt struck a corpse where its heart had once been, cooked whatever organ remained in its place, and dropped the dead body to death once more. If the power was not used up in consuming one creature, the bolt would arc to another, and another.

Some of Titus’s priests were armed only with sacred texts. They strode fearlessly into battle, reading in a great, stentorian chorus. The dead dropped in heaps before them. With each word from each chanting mouth, a spirit sword emerged. These swords cut through the living without harm, but unmade the dead.

Despite their blessings and fantastical powers, the priests were falling, too.

A rapacious ooze had materialized beneath the holy cloud. It now took enormous shape—a twenty-armed kraken. The mud creature rose amid the ranks and absorbed a dozen acolytes. Their thrashing hands and feet jabbed from within the muscular body of the thing. In another moment, twelve more priests were gone, caught up in tentacular arms… then seventeen more.

The warriors charging behind the beast hewed and hacked its awful limbs. With each strike of a blessed weapon, rotten flesh dropped to the ground and stayed there. With each attack of a normal weapon, the severed flesh slid, quicksilver quick, to join again with the main body.

Priests turned on the creature. Some flung their half-full aspergillums at the grappling, man-eating beast. Where the pierced metal landed and seeped holy water, the creature was dissolved away. It shrieked and flailed, pinned to ground by the holy implements sinking through its flesh.

Elsewhere, a pair of hobgoblin dead hammered priest heads into red pulps. The bodies mounded up around them—seven, eight, nine.

A soldier snatched up the ceramic aspergillum of a fallen priest. He laved the water over his spear and hurled it at the hobgoblins. The spear bit through one maggot-riddled gut, tore out the creature’s back, and into the belly of the next one. They fought on, transfixed, though the spear hissed in their flesh and sent up white steam. In moments, it cut through their pelvises, and the two went down, hammers still swinging.

Nearby, a clutch of skeletons—warriors with tattered armor that hung like tarnished bones on their shoulders—engaged Vinas. He fought afoot. Since Courage’s death, he’d not had the heart to ride another horse. Now he paid for it, pressed on all sides by the skeletal warriors.

With one great swipe, he leveled three of them. Their spines cracked like dry twigs, and they fell in piles of metal and bone. Four more surged in atop their remains.

Vinas jabbed. His sword jammed in an eye socket. Struggling to pull the blade free, he wrenched the skull from its neck. With no time to clear his blade, he flung the cranium around to knock the head from his other attacker.

A sword caught him between his shoulder and back plates. He whirled, dislodging the point of the blade and facing down three new skeletons. One held a sword tipped with blood—his blood.

That one first.

Vinas’s steel lanced out. His sword slid harmlessly between ribs. If the thing had had a heart, it would have been dead then. He twisted the blade. It caught in the ribs. Then, with one hand, he lifted the warrior over his head and smashed him down atop another undead monster. Both disintegrated.

Three more scrambled into the fray.

I am the scorpion who will be pulled apart by a swarm of ants, thought Vinas.

His sword lashed into the cluster of skeletons. Now there were five, and now six, crowding-past each other to tangle their swords with his.

And then, none. The center pair were crushed beneath the golden breast of a descending griffon. The next two were skull-shattered by the griffon’s blessed talons. The final two were unmade by its wings. All this happened in a breath.

The six skeletons were replaced by Terraton, who flapped his massive wings out of reach of singing steel. Luccia’s beautiful face appeared over his shoulder.

She shouted to him, “Get on! We’ve found the necromancers controlling them!” Despite the stem rage on her features, she was, indeed, a beautiful sight.

Bounding up behind her, Vinas said, “I could kiss you!”

“Do,” she commanded.

As he complied, bending to her slender neck, she set heels to the eagle-lion’s flanks. Terraton launched them up into the roaring sky.

His wings surged. A flight of red-fletched arrows—Qualinesti standards—streaked narrowly past. They sank into a rising mound of animate mud and deflated it. Shrieking an imprecation at the elves, Terraton climbed higher. With each massive stroke of his wings, the fetid weight of death and battle slipped below.

Terraton banked above the treetops and flung himself along a frozen creek bed.

“Up there,” said Luccia, pointing.

Vinas looked. He first saw only flashes of gold as the rest of her twenty-five fliers dropped from the skies into formation beside her. Then, beyond the auric band, he saw a bald-topped knoll, rising just above the frost-glistening treetops. Upon the outcrop, black-robed figures swarmed. Their hands gesticulated downward, and fingers of magic rooted up the dead.

“Good work, Luce,” Vinas shouted, kissing her without warning or command. “What’s your plan?”

He felt her brief laugh but could not hear it for the wind. “Kill them.”

A blue-white bolt of lightning arced out from the knoll and danced along the treetops. The incandescent surge made its jagged way toward the riders.

“Up, Terraton!” cried Luccia, urging him higher. “Up!”

The griffon wasted no time. Terraton wrenched his way straight up. Had Luccia and Vinas not already been clinging tightly to the creature, they would have been flung away.

The other riders followed in tight formation. The wind from their combined wing movement battered the treetops. The blue bolt cracked deafeningly below them, and then shot upward.

In a mordant flash, the trailing griffon and rider were transfixed on the jagged shaft of power. For a moment, its wings were outlined in scintillating lightning. Then, rider and beast were gone. White smoke hung in their place, and then came a rain of black soot.

Vinas turned his eyes away. He felt a tightness in Luccia’s stomach—she was shouting something. “… have to go back to get our own wizards. We can’t get any closer.”

“No,” said Vinas. “Not enough time. Down. Take us down.”

“What? Into that spell storm?”

“There!” he said, pointing to a deadfall of large white boulders.

She knew immediately what he intended, and sent Terraton banking toward the spot.

Below, the wizards glared upward with dark satisfaction to see their foes turning in retreat.

A ring of treetops slid past. Terraton dropped into the rockfall. His talons raked over the embankment. He sought a certain size and weight of stone.

“This’ll help,” said Vinas.

He leapt off the griffon’s back and raced to a boulder. “What are you doing?” Luccia asked in disbelief. Terraton began to work it free. “The woods are full of wizards.”

“I’m just increasing Terraton’s payload by about fourteen stone. As to the wizards, we’ll see how many are left when we’re done.”

The boulder rocked a little. Vinas gave orders to Terraton. “Get. You’ve got stones to throw. I’ll do what I can down here.” He whacked the eagle-lion’s golden flank.

With a warning snarl, it leapt into the air, dragging the boulder in its talons. Luccia looked small and frustrated atop the griffon. Her face was hidden in a rush of shimmering wings as Terraton labored upward.

Vinas watched them disappear. He allowed himself a cocky smile and a brief prayer for her safety. Turning, he hurried across the rocky incline toward the summit of the hill. He clambered from the rockfall into a thick stand of pine. He reached a bald hilltop and, through the trees of a narrow valley, saw the necromancers moving on the adjacent hill.

Already, flecks of gold circled above the scene, out of spell reach. Already their white boulders hailed downward from the sky onto the heads of the wizards. Shouts and confused roars came from the mages.

“Good, but not enough,” Vinas said to himself.

He darted down between the trees, edging sideways to keep from slipping on the carpet of dry needles. At the bottom of the steep valley ran a small stream. He vaulted it and climbed up the hillside beyond.

Incantations and shouts sifted down from the hilltop. In moments, Vinas saw the black robes, white hands gesticulating in foul spells, red blood spattering the tree trunks—The mages were distracted by the assaults from above. They were too busy to notice one out-of-place man.

Vinas reached the hilltop and studied the spectacle.

Many sorcerers lay dead beneath shattered boulders. Many more contrived to chant, their hair standing wildly on end and their bones dancing weirdly around their feet. Some of these enchanters were long dead—liches with husk-dry flesh and rot-riddled fingers. Even as Vinas watched, a lich that had been crushed by a boulder struggled free, its body a mere jangle of bone fragments. In retribution, it conjured a fireball, which it sent roaring up into the welkin heights.

Vinas noticed six warlocks standing in a circle at the center of the clearing. From their upraised fingertips, a green-gray field of magic formed a vault. When a boulder plunged from the sky and cracked against this magical umbrella, the shield proved adamantine. The boulder splintered and fell in fragments to the ground. One large chunk, he noted with satisfaction, crashed atop an unwatchful sorcerer.

What is the shield protecting? Vinas wondered.

Then he saw it: an obsidian sphere held aloft by a tall pedestal. The orb emitted some sort of power, its invisible waves of energy pushing the robes of the six mages outward from it.

It’s powering their spells, Vinas realized, channeling or synchronizing them somehow. It is the heart of this undead army.

He glanced toward the sky, seeing another cascade of stones coming. The huge stones crushed several warlocks. This was his chance. No more stones would fall for the next several seconds.

He rose and entered the chaotic circle. His sword remained scabbarded. He didn’t even make a swipe at the astonished warlocks. In five bold strides, he penetrated the inner ring of warlocks. In seven, he reached the pedestal, and gave it a mighty shove.

It tipped with slow, massive motion. The orb stuck obstinately atop the tipping tower. With unstoppable grace, the pillar and orb tilted and crashed to the ground.

The sphere imploded. With a blinding flash, it vanished. The mystical hole that remained sucked chunks of pillar and bone and flesh into it.

Vinas felt his robe whip around his legs, drawn toward the implosion. Even as he fell back, two more boulders cracked against the sorcerous vault overhead. The debris was drawn quickly and violently down into the vacuum.

The overhead shield faded and fizzled. Vinas was momentarily stunned. A stone struck near him and buried itself completely. Turning, Vinas lurched away.

Boulders and warlocks fell all around him. Hands flailed in hopeless final spells or in the last throes of terror.

As he walked in a daze, Vinas drew his sword and cleaved the head of a lich. The head fell away like the halves of a chopped cabbage. The dead thing, tumbleweed-light, rolled back toward the depthless hole.

By the time Vinas gained the first line of trees, the force of the hole had become a howling wind—four howling winds, converging from the corners of the world. He had to pull himself into the woods and struggle down the hillside as the trees tossed furiously.

It must be a gate to some evil place, some place of negative energies, he thought in the dim recesses of his consciousness. He clutched a tangle of roots and pulled himself down toward the misting stream. The Pit, perhaps, or the Infernal Realms—bottomless places in the Abyss. Perhaps, with one simple push, I’ve destroyed all of Ergoth. Destroyed it while trying to save it.

The ground grew wet. He looked down to see water running in rivulets uphill past him.

Hold on. Hold on, then. That was all there was to do as the world turned upside down and the sky drew him up to its inexorable brightness. Hold on.

Then with a shivering thunder-crack, it was done. The hillside seemed to shrug and sigh. The trees groaned tiredly as they ceased swaying. The rivulets that had flowed up now turned and trickled down his leggings. He tumbled, head over heels, into the slowly filling banks of the stream.

All the world emitted a long breath of relief. In that moment, Vinas knew the undead monsters were settling to putrid ruin atop their own footprints. He knew his army would live to fight again.

As if in confirmation of his thoughts, he heard the distant, ferocious roar of twenty-five thousand defiant throats.

Six Months Hence, 5 Corij, 1205 Age of Light

The army surrounded Daltigoth in a day. They marched unopposed. The emperor fielded not so much as a war dog on the plains around the city. It was like Vingaard all over again.

Except that this walled city was seventeen times the size of Vingaard. Despite its size, Emann had scrounged up enough guards to blacken the battlements.

“I didn’t think there were that many people in the city,” Gaias observed laconically. He stood with Commander Solamnus atop an observation platform.

Vinas said, “There aren’t.”

“What are you talking about?” asked the grizzled old warrior. “I see them with my own eyes.”

“More undead. Luccia’s scouts say so,” Vinas replied flatly. “Emann’s lost all his living warriors to our side. Only the dead will defend him now.”

Both men spent some moments staring toward the city. It was truly a necropolis.

At last, Gaias broke the silence. “Commander, perhaps I should have asked this sooner, but how do we starve out an army of the dead?”

Meus Pater [my father]

Well, Father, I am laying siege to Daltigoth, our city, our home. How strange to return to these familiar walls, an enemy to all that raised me.

No, not to all. Not to you, Father.

It is time that Daltigoth got ’sieged and sacked. I think we both know that. We also both know this will be no easy victory. My priests could, perhaps, turn one sixth of Emann’s undead army, while those left tear my men apart.

I hope only that you are not among those he raised.

XVIII

One Year Hence, 23 Corij, 1206 Age of Light

“This note was recovered by a scout,” said Gaias. He stood at the mouth of Vinas’s tent.

“I said come in,” Vinas repeated. He was studying maps of Daltigoth. Seven black lines showed where sappers had burrowed to within fifty feet of the walls. Another year, and they would be under. As Gaias entered the tent, Vinas shook his head to clear his senses. “What do you mean, it was recovered?”

“It was tied to an arrow shot into no-man’s-land,” Gaias replied.

Vinas looked up, curiosity breaking through the grim mask he wore during this long, grueling siege. “The last time we got such a thing, it was an invitation to dinner.”

“This is no such hospitable gesture.” Gaias passed the wrinkled paper to his commander, who flattened it as best he could and held it up to lantern light. It read:

To the noble Commander Vinas Solamnus,
From the people of Daltigoth.

Greetings,

We thank you for your efforts on our behalf. We know you mean only to free us from the tyranny of Emperor Emann and Empress Phrygia. Even here, word reaches us of the freedom you have won for the rest of the empire.

But your siege does not kill Emann. It kills us. We are his hostages. The emperor keeps all the food in Daltigoth in the royal storehouses. Once our personal pantries were emptied, we began to starve. We can buy food only from black marketeers, who sell a loaf of bread for the price of a home, a cut of meat for the price of a man’s life. And whenever one of us dies, whether from starvation or from black marketeers or from the emperor’s diligence patrols, the body is raised by Emann’s necromancers to fight for him.

So, we implore you, end this siege. It only slays us and makes Emann’s army all the stronger.

Vinas looked up from the page, which rattled faintly in his trembling grasp. He breathed once deeply. “Gather up my advisors. Immediately.”

Gaias blinked. “You aren’t considering surrender?”

“No,” said the commander. His face held an iron-hard expression that verged on a smile. “I want to discuss the possibility of another bread war.”

One Week Hence, 1 Argon, 1206 Age of Light

It was deep night, just past second watch, when Commander Solamnus’s escalade forces landed beside the Ergothian Royal Granary.

The warriors arrived in squadrons of ten. Each squad was flown into position by five silent griffons draped in black, and therefore was invisible against the night sky. They had flown to great heights before passing over the city walls, and then spiraling downward in tight, dizzy circles. One by one, they came to land beside the granary.

As yet, no alarm had been sounded.

Before the strike teams and wagon teams set to ground in alleys below, the two roof squads descended. They had the unenviable task of landing on the gabled and iron-festooned roof of the granary and silencing the twenty guards there.

Vinas and Luccia were part of this crew. Beneath them, Terraton glided downward, a harsh black silhouette against the glowing windows of the city.

“Is your crossbow ready?” asked Vinas over Luccia’s shoulder.

“For the third time, yes,” she whispered.

“On the next circle, then,” he said.

She nodded, and lifted her crossbow to one side of the griffon. Vinas raised his to the other side. They steadied their weapons, waiting for the griffon to bank along the southern gables where they would land. First, of course, they would have to clear the landing spot.

“Now,” Vinas said quietly.

Two thrumming sounds followed as they triggered the crossbows. Bolts hissed away and thudded in quick succession into victims. From shadowed nooks beside two of the gables, bodies tumbled limply onto the iron balustrade that sided the roof.

Terraton glided swiftly into the vacated position and clamped claws into place. Vinas and Luccia dismounted and crouched beside the panting beast. They listened for any other sounds—other guards falling, or the attack teams landing.

“Four more, six more…”—Vinas counted them—“that’s ten… there’s sixteen…” The cracks and groans and thuds made too much commotion, though.

“Alert! Invaders! Alert!” came a cry.

The warning was cut off by the shriek of a griffon as it landed with a heavy thump. More crossbows fired. The last guards stumbling from hiding went down screaming as they fell to the street.

“Go, Terraton,” Luccia said, slapping the beast’s flank. The griffon shrieked as it launched itself into the air.

So did the thirty-nine other eagle-lions. They took wing in a flight calculated to draw all eyes upward. Let them look at the pretty birds. Let them look away from the gray-garbed warriors converging around the granary.

Dying cries of surprise at the building’s base testified to the success of this tactic. After these sounds came the clatter of wagons rolling to the main doors.

“Let’s go,” said Luccia. She pulled the grating from the gable where they stood and uncoiled a rope down among the dark crates.

“Go ahead,” Vinas said. “I have already fought my bread war.”

“What are you talking about?” Luccia asked. Beyond her shoulder, the forms of other warriors slid down ropes into the granary. “We go together.”

“I have a score to settle,” said Vinas gravely.

“Then I go with you,” Luccia replied.

He set a hand on her shoulder, restraining her. “No. This is a personal matter, a fool’s errand.”

“Just as I said, we go togeth—”

“No, I order you to see this action through. I order you to survive this night and fly on out of here with the rest of the warriors.”

“And what about you?” she asked, her scowl visible even in the darkness. “Who can order you to survive?”

“No one,” he responded evenly. Then he kissed her, a gentle farewell.

“Do not come looking for me,” he said, and he slipped away over the rooftop.

She stared after him, stunned and fearful. To the night, with its crashes and shouts and rolling wheels, she said, “I will always come looking for you.”

Treading lightly as a cat, she padded in his wake, up over the rooftop.

The empress lay abed when Vinas swung lightly through her open window.

Her apartments were, of course, opulent. Carved plaster adorned the ceilings. Tapestries covered the walls. Silks lined the windows and bed. The rooms were not shared by her philandering husband. In early days, this was at his insistence; now it was at her command.

Vinas landed softly on the thick carpet. He crouched, listening for her breathing. He needn’t have bothered.

Phrygia sat up in bed and let her legs drop over the side. Her feet slid into narrow slippers on the floor. With deliberate calm, she stood and drew a robe over her shoulders, as though she hadn’t noticed Vinas’s presence.

That possibility was dismissed moments later when she walked from her bedside and straight toward Vinas. A flick of her hand awoke magical fire atop a candle she had picked up. The red wax immediately flowed down the shaft to dribble on her small, pale fingers.

“Hello, Vinas,” she said in a low voice. “I have been waiting for you… all these years.”

Those years had not been kind to her. Instead of youthful, country-girl charm, she now had an icy, embittered mien. Her eyes were wide and humorless. Her mouth was a thin scar that had never quite healed.

“Hello, Phrygia.” He gestured toward the candle. “I see your warlock has taught you a few trifles of magic.”

“I hear,” she countered, “my husband has taught you a few trifles of warfare.” Her eyes narrowed to hateful slits. “It seems both roses have gone to thorns.”

“Oh, no, Your Majesty,” Vinas replied. “War has taught me many things: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom—the foundation stones of honor. What has magic taught you: self-pity, betrayal, bitterness, spite?”

“I would gladly pit my trifles against yours,” Phrygia said, “in a duel unto death.”

“That’s precisely what I had in mind.” Vinas drew his sword. “Challenge gladly accepted.” He backed up, assuming a defensive posture.

Phrygia regally ran a hand up her form. A green, sparkling screen rose to envelope her. “There,” she said. “Until I attack you, I am protected by this magic. Do your damnedest with that sword of yours.”

Vinas watched her, waiting for whatever trick she had in mind. “I will not attack an unarmed woman.”

She spread her hands. “You make a grave mistake to think me unarmed. I am a pupil of magic—trained by a lich. That is what you have made me. I could kill you with a single thought, should I so desire. But there are better desires than murderous revenge.”

Phrygia strolled languidly toward him.

“Back, or I will strike,” warned Vinas.

She did not slow. “I learned this from you. Embrace your foe to death. Isn’t that what you did to Antonias, to Erghas? Isn’t that what you would do to Emann, to me?”

He brought his blade down. The sword bounced away, ringing.

She was almost upon him. “How about your bread wars? The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. You used bread to seduce Ergoth away from my husband. Very wise. You’re more lover than warrior, aren’t you?”

Vinas stepped back, and tried to strike again. His sword rebounded. He staggered against the wall. “How like a Quisling to think feeding the hungry is a seduction.”

Phrygia lunged. Vinas jammed the sword into the scintillating field of energy. The magic repelled the blade, flinging his arm violently to one side.

She pressed him to the wall. Her hands grappled his face. Her lips vengefully sought his… .

Luccia crept to the window where Vinas had disappeared. There was noise from within. She looked past the sill.

Heart catching in her throat, Luccia drew back.

“A personal matter… don’t seek me out… .”

It all made sense.

Her tears caused the world to blur as she staggered back from the window and across the treacherous rooftop.

With one hand, Vinas managed to thrust her away. Phrygia’s fingernails traced scratches across his jaw as she fell back. With the other, he brought his sword up against the magic shield.

Only it wasn’t there. The blade sank through Phrygia as though through water, and tore its way out the back of her robes. She slumped to the floor, the look on her face not one of pain or dread, but of triumph. “You said… you would not strike… an unarmed woman.”

Vinas was white as he fell to his knees before her. “But the shield. What of the shield?”

“I told you… it would remain… until I attacked.”

He tried to pull the sword out of her, but she clutched the hilt, her hands bloodying his.

“Let me draw out the sword,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I wanted you… . Now I have you. We are united…”

“But I can heal you.”

“No,” she replied. Blood rimmed her lips. “Only paladins can heal. You are no such thing… anymore.”

“Why?” he asked. “Why have you done this?”

“I go before you to prepare a place… . I will bring you… to be with me… at my right hand. If you think me powerful now… wait until I rise… until we rise. The deathless rulers… of a deathless empire!”

Stunned, Vinas sat back on his heels. For a moment, he could see only the lacings of blood across his fingers. Then, in the comer of his eye, he saw motion.

An figure stood in the doorway, guards flanking him. “You have murdered her. You have murdered my wife!”

Six Months Hence, 1 Aelmont, 1207 Age of Light

With the “aid” of the court mage, Caitiff, Emperor Emann Quisling personally handled the prosecution of Commander Vinas Solamnus.

The emperor was acting according to the detailed instructions left by his wife. Emann followed her instructions to the letter, orchestrating a public trial of the traitor, six months of ritualistic torture, and a brutal execution.

The public trial had occupied the first month. With Emperor Emann as judge and Caitiff as prosecuting counsel, the trial was a regular festival. In addition to treason and murder, Vinas Solamnus was charged with three hundred and thirteen other crimes, including disturbing the peace, cruelty to animals, vandalism, populism, landing without permit, and blasphemy. On his head, too, were heaped false accusations against his father and the house of Solamnus.

The black-robed and prune-fingered Caitiff provided plenty of witnesses, of course. Many were inspired by cold, hard silver. A few others were reanimated from the dead and coached through their roles in the proceedings. The most damning witness was Adrenas Solamnus, dredged up from the crypt of Paladine’s temple. Though the old noble tried to resist, Caitiff did elicit one phrase, which he made Adrenas repeat over and over:

“You would be dead. You would be hanged… .

“You would be dead. You would be hanged… .

“You would be dead. You would be hanged… .”

Ever clever, Caitiff impelled Adrenas Solamnus to deliver his own son’s sentence.

Vinas was found guilty on all counts. He was condemned to be executed on the first of the year. He would run the gauntlet to the gibbet and there would be hanged. According to Phrygia’s directions, Judge Emann ordered that until that time, the traitor should undergo five months of “purifications.”

Among the cleansing rites prescribed by the late empress were conventional methods such as the scourge, the brand, the salt bath, the rack, and the bone maul. Her instructions referred to such tortures as “preparing the body.” As to what Phrygia was preparing the body for, she did not say—and Emann feared to dispute. Phrygia also had left explicit directions for preparing the traitor’s soul. He was to be burned alive while wearing a collar of regeneration, to be eaten from the inside by his kidneys magically transformed into rats, and to be slowly solidified by sorcery that changed his blood into stone. Whenever these tortures threatened to kill the traitor—and that happened at least twice a day—he was brought back from the brink of death by the sorceries of Caitiff.

Never did Vinas cry for mercy Never did he renounce the cause of revolution or betray secrets of the rebellion.

Nor did his army betray him. During those six terrible months, they had made a number of rescue attempts, none of which could win past the vast protections Caitiff had placed around the dungeon. The armies had also stormed the walls five times. Beneath rains of arrows and boiling water, they died in their thousands. Their dead, then, were scavenged by Emann’s “recruiters”—necromancers in search of fresh meat. With each failed attack, the rebels grew weaker and Daltigoth stronger. In time, the attacks ceased. All the world held its breath for the first of the year.

On 1 Aelmont, 1207 Age of Light, a living skeleton stumbled from the dungeon into that bright winter day. He bore little resemblance to the man who had once been commander of the armies of Ergoth. He wore only a loincloth, despite the ice-choked streets and snow-clogged windows. His flesh was covered with wounds and scars, and it was grayer than that of the dead.

A comparison was close at hand. The dead lined both sides of the King’s Way. They swayed stupidly on their decaying legs and goggled at him with dull, staring sockets. Each scabrous hand bore a maul or club or flail. Each throat let out a putrid bellow of excitement.

Behind the dead crowded the living, the red-chafed faces that had been fed by Vinas’s bread war, six months back. They were peasants, mostly, the people he had always championed. They stood now in mute witness behind the lines of the dead.

At the end of the street stood the gallows. There, he would die. And what had Phrygia planned for him afterward?

Vinas staggered in the brightness and dropped to his knees. He could barely feel the pebbly ground under him. Perhaps he would barely feel the clubs and mauls and flails.

With that realization, fear sloughed from him like a cape. Emann and his brutal empire might kill Vinas’s flesh, but they would not destroy his honor. They would not end his rebellion and the hope he had given the world.

Hot, fleshy fingers took hold of Vinas’s atrophied arms and lifted him back to his feet.

“Get going!” one of the guards growled.

Cold, withered, and naked, Vinas was thrust out between the lines of dead. He took a step, a second, a third.

The nearest deadman reached a hoary claw out toward him and swiped clumsily at the air. Vinas instinctually shied away. A sound like laughter came from the throats of the dead. The lumbering clumsiness of their own kind amused even them. Vinas took the moment to plod forward, his own legs feeling as dry and brittle as sticks.

Ducking more artless blows, he proceeded toward the gibbet.

Perhaps when I am hanged, Luccia will descend from the sky and whisk me away… .

A great block of wood smashed his chest and sent him sprawling back—back the five steps he had managed. He landed on shoulder blades and elbows, and for a moment the bright sky was dark.

When his sight returned, one of the dead loomed over him. Half its skull had been sheared away. The rest of the face drew up in a graveyard grin. A bloodied block hung from a chain in its skeletal hand, and a long, punctured wheeze came from its dry lungs. It waited, waited with the others for its frail quarry to rise again and walk.

Vinas breathed once, twice. He would rise. He would be slain today, yes, but not in such a manner.

The block whirled and came down again. Ribs snapped beneath its weight and flesh tore free. They were not Vinas’s ribs or his flesh, for the block whirled in a different hand.

Luccia swung the maul again. The rest of the dead man’s head snapped sideways and hung limply from a tom neck.

She had sneaked in among the peasants. She had come to die with him.

Vinas tried to grab an axe held by a dead man. The axe clattered to the ground before he could grasp it, and it was soon buried beneath the unmade form of its bearer.

Vinas looked up to see Gaias draw back a sword from the pile of bone and flesh. The commander was about to say something when a giant erupted from a nearby curtain, his brazen voice quelling the cries of the crowd.

In the name of Paladine, begone to your graves, dead ones!

The dead could not fall fast enough. Bones and flesh became ashy soot and crumbled to the cobbles. Where moments before had stood two rows of dead there now lay twin trails of ash.

But living soldiers quickly took their places, surrounding Luccia, Gaias, Titus, and Vinas. The commander’s three friends held their weapons out, keeping at bay the growing crowd of soldiers. There would be no escaping this.

Then, the mob of soldiers began to thin… .

With inexpressible joy, Vinas saw the peasants converging. Their canes and rolling pins brought down the soldiers. The people of Daltigoth were climbing the city walls, too, and tearing to pieces the black tangle of dead. Ergoth was breaking through the unholy armies that had kept it captive these hundred years.

Red peasant faces. They had been red with more than cold. They had been red with hope and excitement.

The war was ending. The forces of the emperor were falling. The dead were dispersing, in the mouths of the victorious people rose a chant that, like a word of unprecedented power, drove back the armies of darkness.

“Solamnus… Solamnus… Solamnus!”

Two Months Hence, 1 Mishamont, 1207 Age of Light

In the two months following the peasant uprising, an exhausted Vinas Solamnus did his best to bring about a calm and beneficial close to the tumultuous events that had nearly destroyed the city.

The emperor (as always, fearing for his life) had temporarily fled Daltigoth, and Vinas negotiated for Emann’s surrender. Many felt such arbitration was unnecessary, given that Vinas was now residing in Castle Daltigoth. It was indeed a comfortable position from which to make demands, but Vinas knew that Ergoth would remain a sovereign entity and that there would be many more emperors to come. He intended to use his advantage to secure the right of self-determination for each province (in order that each could choose to assert their independence or remain loyal to the empire) and wanted to do so in the most honorable and civil manner possible.

Of course, Vinas couldn’t help but make a few “improvements” during the emperor’s conspicuous absence.

First, the dead were buried again, with proper rites that would keep them from rising. Caitiff was singled out for special disposal, his shattered soul-gems, bones, and ashes ground to a fine dust that was stirred into holy water. With his dissolution, Phrygia, too, would not rise. Just to be certain, though, Titus and his platoon of priests made the rounds of the castle and the city, casting out any additional evil spirits that lingered in the place. The harsh and haunted air of the city was dispersed with that housecleaning, and Vinas sent out a proclamation of sorts that asked that such a priestly sweep be made again each year.

Having laid the dead to rest, Vinas also took compassionate measures. The commander dispatched a corps to burn the gibbets in the city and eventually, those across the land. Bread wagons began to depart regularly from the castle. Luccia, Titus and Gaias combed the streets and the nearby countryside to ensure that inhabitants’ basic needs were being met and when, inevitably, they were not, Vinas received a written report. Though the stacks of vellum grew in size and number, the commander insisted on reading each one. He often had to be creative when it came to requests for provisions—more than one shivering farm lad found himself suddenly swathed in an opulent yet functional used Ergothian Empire soldier’s uniform.

Commander Vinas Solamnus had done much, and he was justifiably tired.

Sitting at a window in the tower where Caitiff had once kept his evil laboratory, Vinas gazed out at Daltigoth. He had worked ceaselessly for years for the good of all folk in the empire. Now, he needed to work for his own good. There were certain matters he wished to attend to… .

The knock at the door was brief—small knuckles on hard wood.

“Come in, my love,” Vinas said without turning.

Luccia entered, gliding quietly up behind him. She waited, sensing his thoughtful mood. She knew him so well.

He turned to face her. She wore a look of concern. “This came,” she said softly, handing him a folded dispatch.

Vinas looked at it darkly. The seal, whatever it had been, was broken. “You opened it?”

“It was the seal of Emperor Emann,” she said. “I didn’t want to bother you with it if it was some ruse.”

“It is not a ruse?” Vinas asked, turning the letter over.

“Read it,” Luccia replied.

He did:

To the Usurper, Vinas Solamnus,

Greetings,

I send you this missive in order to hasten your departure from my empire. I sue for peace, that my head no longer be hunted for bounty, and I surrender, that my land be returned to me. The other provinces can have their independence, but I assure you that many of those close to Daltigoth will remain loyal to the empire. The northeastern nations and blasted Hylo are free to destroy themselves.

The fact that you and your rabble have ensconced yourselves in my castle is of no import. You, sir, know nothing of being an emperor and are ill-equipped to handle the political machinations of the job, to say nothing of the breeding required. When you depart Daltigoth, take the formerly royal linens with you. Anything you have touched will be burned, and I suspect you will be in need of charity soon.

Emann Quisling
Emperor of Ergoth

“Our countryfolk will be sleeping on the emperor’s sheets,” said Vinas, smiling. His face suddenly grew grave. “Is this his signature?” he asked Luccia.

“Yes,” said Luccia. “I’ve had it verified three times.”

He sighed. She thought of everything. His mind was whirling. The emperor had surrendered and Vinas had won freedom for his people, after all of this time. “What do I do now?” he wondered aloud.

“Before we leave, we’ll need to eat. Dinner is ready Come down, or it will be cold,” said Luccia.

He smiled at her. She had a way of making things so simple. “You’ll be there, won’t you?” he asked, trying to make eye contact with her as she took him by the hand and led him toward the door.

“It’s getting cold,” she repeated. There was a mock sternness in her voice. He could see the corner of her mouth turning up in a smile.

“Whatever I do next, you’ll be there, won’t you?” he asked, leaning back, using his weight to slow their progress toward the door.

“No,” Luccia said. She let go of his hand, and Vinas almost fell backward onto the floor. She turned to face him, hands on hips. “Whatever we do next… .”

Vinas laughed aloud. His heart felt suddenly light. Luccia’s hand, small and insistent, grasped his once again as she pulled him through the door of the chamber and onto the stairs. He said, “Luce, spring is a nice time of year for a wedding—”

The door closed on his joyous words.

Meus Pater [my father]

I never thought I would say this, but I am glad you are here, in this dank crypt beneath the temple. I’m glad we’ve laid you to rest again. It is my bath that while I live, Father, you will remain here in a long, deserved rest.

All of us, at one time or another, stand above a grave and wish we could bring back the one who lies within it. We are fools. Why bring back a body ravaged by the cold ground?

It is better to meet you in memory and honor, to embrace not the corruptible flesh but the incorruptible spirit. It is the greatest inheritance a father can provide.

Postlude

Sixteen Years Hence, 2,3 Corij, 1225 Age of Light

Vinas Solamnus, praetor emeritus of eastern and northern central Ansalon, was far from his home. He was lost and starving. He looked as ragged and worn as the storm-torn island around him.

The old commander fetched up beside a monolith of black granite—a strange, strange rock. It had seemed strange the first day he had arrived, and it seemed even stranger now, three nights later.

Three days and nights of fasting and prayer.

“I never was good at praying,” he muttered. His stomach rumbled. “Nor fasting, either.”

Vinas clutched the rock. He had no more breath for prayers. He panted into the stiff wind.

The sky above was clearing for the first time since he had arrived. The constellations watched him with bemusement. Beneath them the wind roared like a ravenous beast.

Vinas rested until he had drawn enough breath to laugh. Then he did laugh—not at the wind or the constellations, but at himself. His father had once said that all great men can laugh at themselves. If that was true, Vinas was great, indeed.

He had spent sixteen years struggling to be the best ruler and husband and father he could be. Perhaps he had not succeeded in these tilings, but he had developed one of the best senses of humor in Ansalon.

His son, Elias Solamnus, had in that time become a man. He waved a sword at anything that moved. Waved was not the right word, for Elias had become the finest swordsman in Solamnia. Still, he was only sixteen, and was the son of the old commander—a true handicap. Elias was neither the right age nor the right cut for the general infantry, but darn it if that kid hadn’t tried to enlist three times already. Like father, like son.

That expression came very close to summing up why Vinas Solamnus was out here on Sancrist Isle, wind-tossed and wayward. He wanted to find a way to pass honor to his son, and to his grandson, and to his great grandson.

The Quest for Honor was what Vinas had called it when, in simple clothes, he had donned a rucksack and set out from Vingaard Keep. Luccia shook her head after him and clucked. She would be worrying every night, too.

Vinas looked down at his tattered clothes and mud-filthy body, and he laughed again. She had every reason to worry.

“What kind of damned idealistic flaw brought me out here?” he wondered aloud. He chastened himself. This was a holy place, this weird wedge of black granite, and he ought to keep a reverent—

And then, from a clear sky, lightning flashed. Vinas ducked instinctually.

High overhead, three constellations shone brightly down upon him—the Dragon’s Lord, Paladine; the bison-headed Kiri-Jolith; and the kingfisher of Habbakuk. They glared at him. In his head he heard ethereal music.

He heard the grand justice of Paladine in well-ordered chords, the unflagging courage of Kiri-Jolith in enduring themes, and the temperance of Habbakuk in balanced counterpoint.

Then he heard wisdom—wisdom resonating in his own soul.

A knighthood. He would establish a knighthood to embody honor, to live it day by day. There would be three orders, the highest for Paladine, championing justice. The second for Kiri-Jolith, preserving courage. And the third for temperate Habbakuk, personifying loyalty and obedience.

“Knights of the Rose… of the Sword… of the Crown,” whispered Vinas in awe. “They will preserve honor, and pass it, unsullied, generation to generation.”

Suddenly, the great lights of the heavens glowed in the very stone beneath his fingers. The black granite had been transformed into white crystal, and it shone like a chunk of star grounded on Ansalon.

“Honor,” said Vinas. “They shall live and die by honor. My own Elias will do so. And so will I.

“My honor is my life.”

Back Cover

Vinas Solamnus.

Soldier, Nobleman, Priest.

Vinas Solamnus.

Rebel, Commander, Conqueror.

Vinas Solamnus.

Author of The Oath and the Measure and founder of the Solamnic Knights.

No knight was ever nobler, more spiritual, more idealistic than Vinas Solamnus… but he wasn’t always that way. The story of his early years, his education, and his crucible is truly one of the most famous…

Lost Legends of Krynn