Sweep in Peace (Innkeeper Chronicles Book 2) (32 page)

“When?”

George arched his eyebrows. “When what?”

“When did you suggest that to Robart?”

“On the second day of the peace summit.”

I stared at him.

“It was the kind of seed that needed to be planted in advance. Robart is a sensitive man, possessing an unfortunate combination of nobility of spirit and certain inborn belief in the fairness of the world. His instincts tell him that if only he does the right thing and makes sure that everyone around him does the right thing, life will respond in kind and reward him for his efforts. He is a more sophisticated version of the proverbial knight in shining armor who believes that if he slays the evil dragon, he will rescue a beautiful princess who will love him forever and they will live happily ever after in their castle. He worked so hard, he had fought his way past the dragon, but his princess is dead and his castle stands hollow and empty. He’s come to learn that life is a bitter bitch. She is inherently unfair. She took his happy future and crushed it, grinding it into dust. That realization is too much for him; he is emotionally volatile, swinging from one extreme to the other. A man in that emotional condition isn’t able to make quick, reasoned decisions. I had to give him time to process the nudge, until his emotions finished churning. Meanwhile, the interaction with his opponents began to foster some sympathy in him. He had come here with the desire to burn everyone and everything to the ground, and yet here he was, feeling compassion toward his enemy. This created a conflict within him, one he wasn’t capable of resolving, so he did what I suspected he would do – he reached out to his allies, hoping that they would assess the situation and point him in the right direction, eliminating his doubts. He came to the inevitable conclusion that the Meer should witness the summit for themselves.”

He couldn’t possibly be human. No human being could calculate the odds that far in advance.

“The rest fell into place,” George said. “The poisoning was a wild card, but it worked in our favor. Given a choice, I wouldn’t have poisoned you, Dina. It was too risky. I need you for the final act to this drama and I am genuinely fond of you. For all of my ruthlessness, my friends are very dear to me. That’s why I have so few. I try not to form friendships.”

“Because you might have to kill people you know?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

A thick root slid out of the opening in the floor, wrapped in a network of thinner shoots. I let it rise about three feet and opened the bag. A round white jewel sat inside, as big as a soccer ball and rippling with all the fire of a diamond. The thinner roots bent toward it, scooped the gem, and pulled it to the main shoot, wrapping tightly around it, forming a cocoon. The psy-booster was in place. Hopefully Gertrude Hunt would bond with it in the next few hours.

“I understand the Khanum, Robart, and Nuan Cee.” I shook my head. “I still don’t understand you.”

George sighed, his handsome face resigned. “Very well. I owe you that much.”

He raised his walking stick and gently tapped it on the floor. A huge projection burst out of the top of the cane, curving in front of us, taking up almost the entire half of the ballroom. Jagged mountains thrust through the barren brown and green soil, their yellow cliffs reflecting the light of a green sickly sun, puncturing the sky like an infected wound. Nexus. Hot during the day, cold at night, ugly at all times, yet hiding immense mineral wealth just beneath its crust.

“I was five when my grandfather died,” George said. His voice was hollow. “He was a pirate, a swordsman, and a vagabond. He told the best stories. He was the best grandfather a child could have. Our mother was dead, our father had abandoned us, so it was just my older sister and my grandparents. So when he died, I was very sad.”

On the screen George walked into the desolation of Nexus. He wore plain pants and a simple white shirt. His loose blond hair streamed around him. His face was serene and so beautiful… He was almost angelic, a strange haunting mirage conjured up by a planet wishing for something other than a wasteland.

George’s voice was soft, intimate, the kind of voice that reached deep into your soul. “I was so sad, that I called him back to life.”

The other George kept walking. The jagged cliffs parted and a vast valley, its floor rough and uneven, stretched before him.

“Everyone thinks the dead rise as mindless monsters. It is always that way for necromancers. The dead rise without the burdens of their past lives, without mind, and without pain.”

I sensed what was coming and braced myself.

“The thing that came back wasn’t my grandfather. It had claws and fangs. It devoured stray dogs. But it could speak and it knew my name.”

On the projection George stopped. His blue eyes blazed with a pure white light. He raised his right hand, his fingers pointing up like claws. A wind stirred his hair.

“It remembered me,” George said. “It remembered how the man it used to be died. It remembered the pain of his passing and it mourned the love he had lost.”

The ground broke around George’s feet, as if the dry crust of Nexus’ desert turned liquid. Bodies rose, some rotting, some skeletal, but all reaching to him, hundreds and hundreds of corpses, their limbs held out, as if pleading, and then I heard it, a muted, desperate wail, coming from hundreds of creatures at once, so terrible, I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and run.

“They say the dead have no memories and know no pain.” George’s voice was barely above whisper, but somehow it was louder than the pleas of the corpses. “It’s not that way for me.”

The dead cried out, louder and louder, grabbing at George’s clothes, begging. George stood in the center of this maelstrom, his eyes brimming with pain. Tears wet his face. He wept and the dead cried with him. White lightning tore out of him. The corpses fell as one. He stood alone.

The real George, the one next to me, touched his cane and the projection vanished.

“The war on Nexus has to stop,” he said. “It won’t be ended by noble means, because if good intentions, compassion, and meaningful dialogue could’ve solved this, peace would’ve been reached already. Sometimes to stop something this terrible, you have to do something equally terrible in return at a great personal cost, and that terrible thing can’t be done by one of the principals in this conflict. They must be able to walk away clean, united and guiltless or the peace won’t last. Someone must bear the blame and the rage. I am that someone. I take the full responsibility for tomorrow. I am the one responsible. I forced it to happen. I’m sorry that you must also be involved. It is unfair that I used you. Nobody will ever know what you have done or what it cost you. Your name and mine will be forgotten quickly, but we will both know and remember what we have done and why it had to be done. The psy-booster runs on magic. I will fuel it for you tomorrow.”

He turned and walked away, leaving me alone on the mosaic floor.

A while ago I told Sophie that George was merciless. She told me that he was compassionate and merciless at once, a contradiction. I understood now. There was no contradiction. George was merciless to himself. At the end of this, everyone, including me, would look for someone to blame for the pain and the suffering that lay ahead. He made sure that he was that someone. He took it all on himself, because the dead wept on Nexus when he returned their memories. He would take all of the guilt and carry it away with him, absolving me, because he had forced my hand. He had even done it a moment ago, when he told me he had used me.

I would have to watch him very carefully tomorrow. He would give as much of himself to the psy-booster as he could. I didn’t want George to die.

I stood just beyond the door, watching the grand ballroom through a one way window the inn had made for me. The hall shone tonight, the constellations on its ceiling bright, the floor all but glowing. The Holy Anocracy stood on the right, in full armor, shoulder to shoulder, like a phalanx of ancient warriors using their bodies as shields. Across from them the Horde stood grim-faced, arranged in a wedge formation with the Khanum in front, a huge basher on her left, and Dagorkun on her right. Clan Nuan crowded on the left as well, some distance from the otrokari, shielding their matriarch with their bodies. Turan Adin in full armor stood between them and the Horde.

The wagons were circled, the weapons were primed, and the faces were grim. They eyed each other, ready for the violence to erupt, and they glanced at the four foot high bud growing from the center of the floor. The bud’s thick green sepals remained firmly shut.

My parents would be ashamed of me. Here were the guests of my inn. They had stayed at Gertrude Hunt for almost two weeks, a place where they were supposed to be protected and safe, yet they expected to be attacked at any moment. If the Innkeeper assembly ever saw this, Gertrude Hunt would lose all of her stars. There was no helping it now.

George stood by the bud, his handsome face solemn. The gold embroidery on his soft brown vest, the color of whiskey, glinted weakly in the light. His people had taken positions behind each of the factions: Jack stood behind the vampires, Sophie behind the Horde, and Gaston behind the merchants. He had discussed it with me prior to the meeting, and when I asked for his reasoning, he told me that Gaston had natural resistance to poisons, Sophie had a strong psychological impact on the Horde and Jack apparently had a lot of practice fighting soldiers in armor.

I ran through my mental checklist: Beast and the cat securely locked in my bedroom and the inn wouldn’t let them out, the sound dampeners activated, the street-facing facade reinforced. Yes, that was everything. You could set off an explosion in the grand ballroom now, and nobody outside the inn would hear a single sound.

A rustle of fabric announced Her Grace’s arrival to the bottom of the stairs. She wore a dark green dress with a silk-like sheen, cinched to one side at her waist with a jeweled clasp and spilling down into a long skirt with a train embellished by glittering embroidery. Long matching gloves covered her hands and arms. A luxurious fur collar, dark hunter green with individual hairs gradually changing color to blood red at their tips, framed her shoulders. Black and green eight-inch spikes protruded from the collar, biological weapons of some long-dead alien predator. Matching small spikes decorated her elaborate bejeweled hair brooch. A necklace of emeralds, each the size of my thumbnail and framed in small fiery diamonds, graced her neck. She looked every inch exactly what she was: a ruthless, cunning animal of prey, armed with razor-sharp intelligence and unhindered by morals.

Caldenia saw my robe. Her eyebrows crept up.

Under ordinary circumstances, an innkeeper was an unobtrusive shadow, readily identifiable if the guests looked for her yet drawing no attention to herself. Our robes reflected that: grey, brown, dark blue, or hunter green, they served as our uniform. We had no need to impress. A bit of embroidery along the hem was as far as embellishment went. Yet once in a while, an occasion required that the full extent of our power had to be communicated. Today was that kind of day. I wore my judgment robe. Solid black, it swallowed the light. It pulled you in and if you looked directly at it for too long, you would get a strange sensation that you were plunging into a bottomless dark well, as if someone had reached deep into the abyss, scooped out primordial darkness, then spun and woven it into a fabric. Lightweight and voluminous, the material of the robe was so thin that the slightest air current stirred it, and even now, in a draftless hallway, its hem moved and shifted as if some mystic power fanned it. The robe was impenetrable. No matter what sophisticated scanner a being might employ to augment their vision, I would appear the same, a specter, a chilling cousin of the Grim Reaper, my face hidden by my hood so only my mouth and chin remained visible. The broom in my hand had turned into a staff, its shaft the color of obsidian.

There were few universal principles in this world. That most water-based lifeforms drank tea was one. That we fear what we cannot see was the other. They would look at my robe, trying to discern the contours of my body, and when the abyss forced them to look away, they would search for my eyes trying to convince themselves I wasn’t a threat. They would find no reassurance.

“Well,” Caldenia said. “This should prove interesting.”

“Stay by my side, Your Grace.”

“I shall, my dear.”

The wall parted before me and I strode into my ballroom. They all had their show. It was time for mine.

The weak murmurs died. Silence claimed the hall and within it I glided across the floor without a sound. As I moved, darkness rolled across the floor, walls, and ceiling, a menacing shadow of my power. The light dimmed. The constellations died, snuffed out by my presence.
Watch me as I end your universe.

I reached the bulb. George didn’t step back, but he thought about it, because he unconsciously leaned back, trying to widen the distance between me and him. The darkness rolled behind me and remained there, an anti-sunrise blocking out the stars. Caldenia took a spot behind me on my left.