Authors: Antoine Rouaud
He halted before the double doors without understanding quite what had led him here. He pushed them open with all his might, unsure what grim spectacle he was about to discover within. Or what purpose was currently guiding him . . .
And what bitterness struck him when he glimpsed the twisted silhouette draped in the black cape, the shining mask resting a few inches from the inert hand. The emperor was lying stretched out on the floor, silent, the flickering light of the flames outlining the contours of his body. Behind it, the net curtains rippled as they were consumed by the flames, moving to the echo of the raging battle. No birds sang in the tree tops that brushed up against the marble balcony.
Dun-Cadal knelt beside the body. He covered the face, now gone forever rigid, with the golden mask.
He almost left the room at that point, wallowing in his rancour. He had almost fled without even giving it a thought. But it could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the rebels, it represented so much. So he had taken it with him, crossing the remnants of an Empire in flames . . . Eraëd left the Emperor’s belt and had travelled with Dun-Cadal to this port city. It had passed through the former Kingdoms as they gradually settled back into a state of peace. Until it reached Masalia . . .
*
‘This statue . . . it’s one of those that were erected to mark the proclamation of the Republic,’ Viola observed.
He reopened his eyes slowly. The monument was now haloed by an orange light, gentle and warm. Much less harsh than crackling flames.
‘That’s right,’ he acknowledged, adding to himself: ‘It’s ironic when you think about it.’
The young woman did not immediately respond to his remark, watching him move around the base while darting brief glances at the houses on the street corners. She frowned.
‘What’s ironic?’ she asked finally.
He stopped short, his face seeming to harden at the sight of an iron gate slightly hidden within a recess of the fence. More ivy fell there, in a curtain.
‘What I hid beneath it,’ murmured Dun-Cadal as he approached, looking preoccupied.
‘You mean . . . ?’ Viola gasped.
She looked back, desperately seeking some sign of the Nâaga. Paying her no heed, Dun-Cadal was already busy opening the gate, both hands gripping the bars to pull it towards him. He had to try several times before he succeeded in loosening it with a strident grating noise. It had been ten years since he had last crossed over the threshold.
‘You hid it here?’ Viola finally realised, looking thunderstruck. ‘Right here in Masalia?’
It was quite obvious that she was not prepared for this. When they’d first met, he’d mentioned the Eastern territories. The same location he’d mentioned when, completely drunk, he had recounted the fall of the Empire to others. And everyone had believed him . . . that he’d hidden Eraëd in the Eastern territories, not far from the Vershan mountains. Dun-Cadal just restrained his mocking grin.
‘I talk too much when I’m drunk, as you well know. Just think of all those treasure hunters out there, roaming the Vershan region . . .’ he remarked blithely, plucking a match from the pocket of his vest.
He passed through the gate, disappearing into the darkness of a steep stairwell. An astonishing stink rose up into the square, pungent and salty. Viola grimaced in disgust before entering in her turn, taking care to check that Rogant was just a few feet behind her.
Upon the stairs below, Dun-Cadal lit a torch and was using it to ignite others fixed to the wall.
The steps gleamed in the combined light of the sun passing through the fence and that of the flames. The staircase led downward in a spiral before reaching an underground tunnel through which fetid waters ran. In addition to the filthy wastes borne by the current there were also rats as big as cats.
‘How exquisite . . .’ Viola sighed.
Dun-Cadal was waiting at the edge of the channel, the torchlight flickering over the contours of his stern face. He completely ignored the rodents as long as his forearm that were slipping between his legs. Unlike Viola, who took carefully measured steps, instinctively lifting the hem of her dress with trembling hands.
‘. . . exquisite and also swarming with vermin,’ she added in a murmur.
She did not retreat, although she walked cautiously and with a sick look on her face, but she was determined not to lose sight of the general. Dun-Cadal was encouraged by this. Perhaps he was making the right choice after all, rather than giving in to sheer impulse. Whatever the reasons for Logrid coming to Masalia, and for the murders of the two councillors, everything seemed to point to Eraëd. If Logrid knew that Dun-Cadal had hidden it, perhaps he had also deduced that the sword was here, somewhere in the southern city. Better Viola than him. The old general was resolved to hand the rapier over to the young woman. In a certain sense, she had earned it.
He followed the channel to a wide chamber where its waters joined that of three more furrows emerging from other tunnels. Their currents met around a broad octagonal platform bathed by sunlight. Above them, the drainage gratings bordering the statue formed odd shutters smeared with black filth. Viola dropped her skirts, ill at ease. Carrying them had been slowing her down, and now she hurried to rejoin Dun-Cadal, stifling a cry when a rodent brushed past her calf. As she came up to the general, he gave her a brief glance which she answered with a sickly grimace. She should have cursed him for bringing her down here, into the city’s excrement.
He had buried the ultimate symbol of the Empire in the putrid sewers . . . It was an astonishing act from someone who felt the Empire’s passing so deeply and still believed it was the only acceptable regime. He crossed the chamber, walked over the platform and halted
at the corner of a tunnel after counting the others by eye.
‘So why did you say it was in the Eastern territories?’ asked Viola as she watched him kneel and search around a crevice in the wall.
She gagged as she saw him push away the rats with the back of his hand. Then he stuck his entire arm into the hole.
‘Why not?’ muttered Dun-Cadal.
‘I think I know the reason,’ the young woman declared. ‘If you’re going to claim you hid a legendary item, it might as well be at the highest place in the world. Am I right?’
Years could have passed safely by until Eraëd and its location passed into myth and no one dared, or had an interest, in hunting for it. The Vershan mountains were reputed to be dangerous.
Dun-Cadal withdrew his arm from the cavity, holding a long object wrapped in thick brown cloth. And as he moved back to the centre of the platform, he started to remove the wrapping. Little by little he revealed a blade whose gleam had in no way been dulled by time, clear and smooth up to the twisted guard that spiralled around a finely sculpted hilt. Its perfection was so evident that no one could have regarded it as anything less than a divine creation.
‘There it is,’ Dun-Cadal sighed. ‘Eraëd.’
He held it respectfully, lying across the flat of his palms, reluctant to grasp it by the hilt.
‘Why?’ Viola ventured to ask timidly, narrowing her eyes with an air of suspicion.
‘It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’ Dun-Cadal replied brusquely. ‘Eraëd. Here it is.’
He extended his arms to present her the rapier.
‘Take it. It’s the sword of the last Emperor, it must be worth something in your museum of the Republic. Take it.’
She hesitated, coming slowly around the platform, her gaze wavering between the sword and the expression on the general’s face. It was the sole physical object which linked him to what he had once been. And he was prepared to relinquish it without any ceremony.
‘Why?’ Viola insisted on knowing.
‘Because it deserves another setting than this one,’ the general replied without conviction. ‘And perhaps I think you are capable of protecting it.’
‘Protecting it? From what?’ she immediately asked.
‘From whom, rather . . .’ he said.
She clasped her hands behind her back, without managing to conceal their shaking. Dun-Cadal looked down at the blade, knowing she’d understood him.
‘Someone else asked you for the sword.’
‘Logrid,’ he admitted with a sigh. ‘Logrid wants it too.’
She did her best to hide her relief. But it was obvious that the general was too absorbed in admiring the perfect blade to pay her close notice.
‘You helped me,’ Dun-Cadal said in a terribly low voice. ‘You listened to me . . .’
His sad eyes turned towards her, plunging into her gaze as if he were trying to cling to something there. Until now, she had only relied on the scent of lavender to win the old man over. Her tenacity and her humour, along with her youth, had done the rest. Dun-Cadal liked her.
‘You earned it . . .’ he said. ‘You wanted it, so take it.’
Once again he offered the sword to her, presenting it with a certain deference.
‘It has never been of much use to me,’ he explained. ‘It belongs in a museum . . .’
‘Why change your mind?’ asked Viola, curious.
“Why?’ he laughed nervously. ‘It’s only a rapier.’
‘It’s magical.’
He shook his head, smiling slyly.
‘You don’t understand—’
‘It survived the great dynasties of this world!’
‘It’s not magical,’ he murmured.
‘It was forged in ancient times, and enchanted, it’s capable of—’
‘What do you know about it?’ he said, losing his temper. ‘You don’t understand! It’s just a sword. Do you think it saved Asham Ivani Reyes?’
His face twisted in anger. In the corner of his eyes, tears swelled. But standing before him, Viola was unperturbed. The Nâaga’s massive silhouette was slowly coming into view behind the old general.
‘Do you think it changed anything at all?’ Dun-Cadal continued. ‘The Empire fell . . . and I fell with it. So tell me, where did this alleged magic go? I never even saw the blade unsheathed. All those things that are said about it are twaddle. It served many Emperors, but it failed to protect them in the end.’
He saw himself again, bent over the still-warm corpse of the Emperor. An inert body lying at the heart of a palace in flames . . .
‘Perhaps that’s not what its magic is meant to do.’
‘It isn’t magical!’ he insisted. ‘It’s only a symbol! Don’t you understand?’
His anger turned to bitterness and his voice faded into a sigh.
‘Eraëd has never been more than a symbol,’ he said.
But he still could not bring himself, even for an instant, to touch the hilt, preferring to hold it like a precious object on the palms of his hands.
‘And who but Dun-Cadal Daermon could have attached so much importance to a symbol?’
Dun-Cadal froze, as if petrified. That voice. He knew it even though it had become deeper with age. It had the same diction, the same weight given to each word. Emerging from a tunnel, the man approached with a feline grace, his face masked by the shadow of his hood. The torches projected a halo around the outlines of his broad green cape and gilded the edges of his leather boots and gloves with a fine luminous tracing. His hand rested on the pommel of a sword hanging at his belt.
‘But . . . but . . .’ stammered Viola, turning pale.
‘A symbol you took such care not to leave behind in Emeris. It’s hardly surprising that a man who spent his entire life serving the Empire, who gave so much to it, would wish to take a piece of it with him . . . before everything burned.’
Dun-Cadal remained completely still, his heart pounding fit to burst. His face had gone pale too. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Nâaga detach himself from the darkness of another tunnel.
‘This was not the plan,’ Viola finally managed to say. ‘This—’
‘The plan . . .’ repeated Dun-Cadal in a murmur.
The man halted a few feet from the platform.
‘I wanted to see it, Viola. And nothing could have stopped me,’ he said in a flat voice.
The Nâaga was visibly unhappy about this surprise but merely crossed his arms, leaning against the curved wall of the chamber. With a kick of his boot, he sent a passing rat flying.
‘I know who you are . . .’ Dun-Cadal started to say, his throat horribly dry.
The man acknowledged his words with a slow nod of the head.
Dun-Cadal could have sworn he was smiling. The general did not dare move a muscle, and with Eraëd still resting on his palms, he could not look away. He no longer had the strength to do so.
‘I thought you were Logrid,’ he confessed, a hint of sadness in his voice. ‘But why . . . why all this . . . ?’
‘This isn’t a good idea, you should leave now,’ said Viola, taking the man in the green cape by the arm. ‘We wanted the sword, and now we have it. This serves no purpose.’
But the man ignored her.
‘There are so many things you did not wish to see,’ he said accusingly to Dun-Cadal. ‘You have no idea what I’ve lived through. None at all.’
‘Stop this while there’s still time,’ the young woman pleaded, squeezing his arm.
This time, he pushed her gently away.
‘If you knew how lost I became when I was with you, how I hated you, how I hated myself.’
‘. . . sometimes, I hate you . . .’
‘Your old friends betrayed the Empire and now it’s the Republic they are trying to subvert. Isn’t it astounding that, in order to save it, we need the last Emperor’s sword? The irony of fate . . .’
There were so many questions burning the old general’s lips, but which should he ask first, which would soothe the dull pain rising within him? As he stood there, wearing Logrid’s cape, Dun-Cadal did not recognise him.
‘And now . . . now they want to destroy my father’s dream,’ the man said with the greatest calm. ‘They shall not trample what remains of him. We need the sword—’
‘Your father . . . ?’
A whole section of Dun-Cadal’s life suddenly fell apart. He tried to reassemble the pieces, but nothing formed a coherent whole any more. The man nodded briefly before lowering his hood, finally revealing a face that Dun-Cadal had believed he would never see again.
‘I lost myself, Wader. They even stole my name from me, for years. I chose my path. And I know it will not please you.’