Veiled Empire (7 page)

“What’s going on?”

Masri nearly growled. “It’s the voltensus. Someone . . . destroyed it.”

“
What?
How is that possible?”

The general looked searchingly at Hezraas, who flopped down onto his cushioned throne. The prefect fidgeted with his embroidered silk pants. He grumbled under his breath for a few moments, rage evident in his eyes. “We don’t know,” he said at last.

Mevon frowned. The voltensus was a crucial part of Mevon’s job, for without it, there was no reliable way to detect sorcerers who were casting without a legally purchased Sanction. Of more immediate concern, though, was the fact that he thought the things were indestructible.

Clearly not.

“I see,” Mevon said eventually.

“It gets worse,” said Masri. “We sent almost two full battalions in to contain matters, but over the course of two days, we lost contact with my field commanders.”

“All of them?”

Masri’s face went blank, a sign, Mevon knew, that she was struggling to rein in her fury. “Every last one.”

“I’m sending most of our remaining forces,” Hezraas said. “The bastards will find themselves in an ever-tightening cage.” He pounded a fist on the arm of his throne. “They will not escape us!”

Mevon frowned at the prefect for his childish display.
Feeling the pressure from Mecrithos, are we?

“Also,” Masri said, “we’re fairly certain these insurgents have a cadre of powerful sorcerers with them. So, we’ll need you to—”

“You presume to give me orders, daeloth?” said Mevon.

The general’s eyes widened as she casually dropped a hand to the shortsword at her hip.

“This is
my
order,” said the prefect. “And you’d better deliver. Both of you. All eyes are on us, and if either of you screw it up . . .” Hezraas hissed, spraying spittle through gritted teeth. “Just know that whatever price I pay will be magnified tenfold to you.”

Mevon eyed Masri coolly, a look she returned, but they both provided Hezraas with an expected nod of understanding and obedience.

“If I am to go,” Mevon said, “then I take it the rumors concerning my peers are true?”

“What have you heard?” asked the prefect.

“Only that they’re missing. What’s happened to them?”

Masri and Hezraas shared a silent glance. Slowly, they turned back to face Mevon, and for the second time he heard those infuriating words: “We don’t know.”

Mevon clenched his jaw.
Too much coincidence. All of this reeks of a guiding hand. Someone has been planning these events for a long time.
He felt his eyes instinctively drawn down and behind him.
She
couldn’t
have had anything to do with it, right?

“What do we know about our enemy, then?” he asked.

“Next to nothing,” said Masri. “But I did receive a brief commune from a lieutenant. He died only moments after beginning his message, but he did manage to scream something about assassins and made a brief mention of a ‘midnight sun,’ whatever that means.”

“So basically, we’re in the dark,” Hezraas said. “That’s why I need you. I’m giving you free rein, Daere. Bring me the heads of the leaders and scatter the corpses of any who follow them.”

Mevon smiled. “As you will.”
Oh, the reckoning that will come.
He began to savor his inevitable triumph and the river of blood that would surely flow.

The prefect’s eyes moved at last to Jasside. “And who is this?”

“Oh.” Mevon turned to her. “This is my . . .”

The word “prisoner” died before reaching his lips. It was her expression: Jasside’s face was . . . aglow. The look she bore was unmistakable. Inexplicable.

Pride.

Then, like pieces of a blacksmith’s puzzle sliding into place, it all made sense.

A powerful force destroys the voltensus, presumably with efficacious sorcery.

The only other Hardohl in the vicinity vanish without a trace.

A mysterious girl confronts me, doing the impossible, which captures my attention as surely as snow in winter. And, from the beginning, she knows my name.

You
knew
me! You were
sent
for me!

A blade of ice shot up his spine.
Oh . . . gods. . .

Why?

He became aware of alarmed stares from both the general and the prefect. “ . . . informant,” he finally said. “My informant. I believe she knows something about what’s going on.”

“Good.” Hezraas rose, smiling hungrily. “Very good. I’ll question her myself.”

“No! I mean,” he said, seeing Hezraas’s strained expression, “that I’ll need to keep her with me. If she’s in as deep as I think she is, I must have her close to answer any questions that arise.”

“Hmm. All right. I can see your need.” Hezraas sat down again. “You’d better not disappoint me, Daere.”

“Have I ever?”

The prefect grinned.

Mevon turned to Jasside, a new heat rising in him, and her smug face only stoked its flames. He grabbed her arm, lifting her to stand, and began marching out.

Mevon whispered in her ear, “Whoever sent you
will
have answers, and they had better be good.”

She smiled up at him. “Oh, Mevon, you have no idea . . .”

G
ILSHAMED
STEPPED
TO
the edge of the outcropping. He peered down on the crowd gathered below. His followers ringed the edges of the clearing, and in the center stood the prisoners. A combination of awe and terror had kept them from putting up a fight, but now, as they continued their march up into the Rashunem Hills, they were becoming restless. Gilshamed’s troops could no longer manage so large a burden.

By day’s end, they would be prisoners no more. One way or another.

All eyes clung to him, waiting for his declarations. He decided not to bring out his wings again. No bright lights. No booming voice from the sky. He had used such tactics once before and knew they would lose efficacy if attempted again. No, they needed something different now. Something to make them feel as if Gilshamed were truly one of them. Something . . . heartfelt.

Gilshamed smiled to himself.
I can do heartfelt when I need to.
He cleared his throat.

“Soldiers of the empire,” he began in tones loud enough for all to hear, “look around you, and tell me what you see.”

He allowed a moment for them to swing necks left and right, minds searching for the answer Gilshamed desired. He did not let them flounder. “I will tell you,” he continued. “I see farmers and shepherds, bakers and butchers and blacksmiths, former soldiers and former whores. All citizens of your same empire. But all fighting for
me
.

“None of you ask
why
they are fighting. I can see, though, hidden within your eyes, that you already know.”

No few number of heads dropped at this. Shame, after all, was a powerful tool. But Gilshamed did not mean to use it exclusively. These people did not need reminders about friends and family who have been hauled away to toil endlessly in the mines and tunnels, or made playthings of the mierothi and their bastard-spawn daeloth, or those who had become virtual slaves to the great merchant families that squeeze human flesh dry to line their own pockets, all without a breath of regulation.

No, what they needed was a cause to call their own.

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this continent for years, observing life among its people. Wherever I went, the story was the same. Every man, woman, and child feels utterly powerless.

“That is why you put on the empire’s uniform, take up your swords and shields, and stand your walls. It is the only way, even as small and empty as it is, for you to reclaim some sense of power, some notion that you are not being constantly ground underfoot by forces so much greater than yourselves.”

Gilshamed shook his head, sighing. “For this, I do not blame you.”

Drooped heads shot back up again. Bodies leaned forward, ears straining to catch his words. The small rustling and whispers that accompanied any crowd ceased, blanketing the clearing in utter silence.

Gilshamed drew a breath. “BUT WHAT DOES IT MATTER!”

The crowd rocked back on their heels.

“Surely,” he continued, beginning to pace back and forth along the edge of the outcropping, “our cause is doomed. What chance do a few thousand have against a million-man army that can descend on us like an avalanche? What chance against the sorcery of the mierothi themselves, which makes that avalanche seem but a snowflake?”

He stopped, turned to the crowd, and lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “Then again, what good are a million men if they are in the wrong place? What good a measured response, when our hidden allies strike from the shadows? What good the mierothi’s potent sorcery, when we will have means of negating it?”

Excited chatter erupted from his audience’s former silence. Such a promise had never before been delivered, never dared to be dreamed. Gilshamed knew that he had them now. He raised his hands, silencing them once more.

“So I offer you this. If any of you wish to leave, to go back to your empty life of servitude to an empire that cares for you naught, I will not stop you.

“But if you wish for the remainder of your days upon this world to have meaning, if you wish to fight for a worthy cause, if you wish to feel truly powerless no more, then pledge yourself to this revolution.” He cast one last, long glance over the crowd. “You have until the end of the day to decide.”

Gilshamed pivoted away, descending the back side of the rock outcropping. He kept a smile on his face as he treaded down the short path to the waiting command tent.

Even before he pushed aside the flap to enter, the thick aroma of alcohol hit his nose. Yandumar was sunken into a chair, his feet propped on another. A pewter mug filled with ale was in his hand. Half of its contents seemed to be dripping down the man’s beard.

Gilshamed raised an eyebrow. “Celebrating something, Yan?”

Yandumar’s glossy-green eyes eventually managed to settle on Gilshamed’s face. He chuckled but did not smile, and raised his mug. “To our new recruits!”

“And how exactly do you know that my speech achieved the desired effect?”

Yandumar drained the rest of his ale in one long gulp, then belched. “It’s the great Gilshamed we’re talkin’ ’bout here. You could convince a pig to eat bacon, even after ’splaining what it was.”

A freshly tapped cask rested on a table near the entrance. Gilshamed nudged it gently, easily determining that it was over half-empty. He frowned over at his friend. “Yan, do you remember where we met?”

“You mean that dusty tavern in the middle of nowhere? What about it?”

“You were well into your cups that day, and have been many a day since. But I have never once seen you this drunk before. What is going on?”

Yandumar sighed. “Today is the thirty-third of Sepuris.”

Gilshamed’s eyes flared. “Your family . . .” Today was the anniversary of their deaths. “I had not realized.”

Yandumar waved the sentiment away. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. I’ve always tried to keep these little pity parties to myself but couldn’t manage it this year. Not now that we’ve kicked things off. I’m afraid we’ll be keeping even less from each other than before.”

Gilshamed stepped over to his friend. He touched his hand upon Yandumar’s shoulder. “Either way, I am truly sorry for what happened to them. If there is anything I may do for you, please do not hesitate to ask, my friend.”

Yandumar nodded. Gilshamed remained by him, offering his support and comfort.

So often, words expressed were actually the least appropriate thing in the world. Times like this reminded Gilshamed of that. Despite both of their propensities for the superfluous, this stillness, this silence, it fit them, filling the empty spaces in their souls with that which naught else could.

Yandumar peered down into his empty mug, then tossed it to the side. “It is good, though,” he said, straightening in his chair, “to be reminded of why you fight.”

“Indeed it is.”

“And you know,” Yandumar said, a bit of his old self already starting to return, “this road we’re on feels good, don’t it?”

Gilshamed marveled at the resiliency displayed by Yandumar, which, at times, put his own to shame. Without such an attribute, he doubted any of their success thus far would have been possible. “Treading the path of justice often grants such feelings, especially while rectifying an evil so pernicious as this.”

“Gotta be careful, though. The line between justice and revenge is thin, especially when you’ve lost a loved one.”

“Yes . . .”

The words sent Gilshamed plunging into distant memories. Not a flood of images this time, but rather a single frame, holding the likeness of a valynkar woman. She had hair of violet and a smile that melted glaciers. The woman he loved. The woman he lost. The woman he had not spoken of to anyone, nor dared to allow his thoughts to dwell upon. This solitary window was all he had left of her, all he could allow himself to keep locked inside, for the pain of her loss still ached like a hammerblow to his soul.

And with pain came the rage. The rage he felt towards the one responsible for her fate.

Gilshamed flinched as Yandumar’s hand came down on his shoulder. “Who was she, Gil?”

A protest of ignorance sprang onto his tongue, but he clamped his lips shut. It was no use. “Am I really so transparent?”

“Only when you think of old things. Old, painful things. Your face looks like I feel when I think of my wife and children.”

With solemnity, Gilshamed closed the window, sighing as the image of his one and only love faded away into oblivion. “She was my life-mate. I do not . . . that is . . . I suppose I should have told you before now.”

Yandumar let loose a warm chuckle, the kind Gilshamed knew meant that all was well. “I understand why you didn’t. Still, we need to keep an eye on each other. Now especially, since things are in motion that we have little hope to control, we must keep our motivations in check. I know you’ll be there for me. I just wanted to let you know that I am also here for you.”