Arts of Dark and Light: Book 01 - A Throne of Bones (104 page)

He heard Silvertree saying something in a shocked and angry voice, and he guessed the high elf was cursing in his native tongue. “You can feel it too, magician?”

Theuderic nodded, unable to speak. The sensation wasn’t painful, but it felt distressingly like being pinned under a heavy wool blanket, running out of air as the heat rapidly rose around you. The harder he tried to call upon his power, the more the stifling, heavy weight seemed to press upon him. He wondered if the elf had it worse, or if his greater power allowed him to resist the priestly anti-magic more strongly.

“What can I do, my lord?” Lithriel rushed to the high elf’s side and was helping him stand.

“I can’t maintain them,” Silvertree gasped. “I never thought…Bessarias once said…it is too much!”

He doubled over, and a severe coughing fit racked him.

Theuderic winced and wouldn’t have been surprised to see blood on his lips when it ended.

“Let it go,” he urged the elf. “Are you still trying to hold up the wards?”

The elf nodded, his face uncharacteristically suffused with red and twisted with the strain of his effort.

“Let it go! You have to drop them! The more you fight it, the more the spell grips you tighter.”

“Not a spell,” the elf hissed. “Not possible!”

“Please, my lord, do as he says,” Lithriel begged. “If you die, the wards will fall anyway and then your king will remain in ignorance of what these strange priests can do.”

Pride warred with duty in the ambassador’s strange green eyes, until finally he sank to his knees and lowered his head.

Barely a moment later, the terrible pressure disappeared so unexpectedly that Theuderic nearly lost his balance. Overcome with relief, he could do little more than place his hands on his knees and breathe deeply, a little of his strength returning to him with every breath he took.

“I see you have lowered your wards, my lord ambassador,” the captain called up to the high elf. “Will you now permit us entry, or will you come out to us?”

Silvertree looked at him, and Theuderic swallowed. They both knew there wasn’t anything more they could do.

“I’ll go out,” Theuderic said. “Without magic, we can’t hold them off. They’re too many, and they can easily send for more. Perhaps they’ll be content to take me first and come back later for you and the others.”

“They won’t accept that. We can try to delay them, of course, but I doubt we will be able to put them off until nightfall.”

“There’s no point,” Theuderic said regretfully. “If they’d come late in the day perhaps it would be worth trying, but even if we destroyed the roof access, they’d have ladders here before the next bell. Or maybe even ballistrae, depending upon how much we irritated them. Who would have known those damned priests could play such a trick?”

He walked to the edge of the roof and looked down. Hundreds of expectant faces looked back at him, but only one was of any real import.

“The Comte de Thoneaux, I presume?” the guard captain said. Theuderic noted with reluctant approval that the man was too professional to allow any hint of sarcasm or irritation to be heard in his voice. “If you would be so kind as to descend, my lord, it will be my privilege to escort you, your companions, and the elven ambassador to the palace.”

“We shall be with you shortly, Captain,” Theuderic said. It was pointless to resist. He couldn’t help but feel how ridiculous it was that, after surviving more than one dangerous infiltration into enemy lands, usually on his own, it might be an open and well-escorted royal embassy that would prove to be his ultimate undoing.

CORVUS

Corvus had never seriously thought he would ever become consul himself, though the thought of what it would be like occasionally crossed his mind. Especially after the first time Magnus had been elected consul civitas. Magnus always wore the title lightly, as if it were merely another honor he’d accrued and not a responsibility. And his brother not only enjoyed being consul, he was good at it too, or he would not have been elected with such ease each of the three subsequent times he’d stood for the office.

He, on the other hand, was beginning to wonder if he would ever be regarded as anything but a complete failure. In his defense, he supposed it was probably a lot easier to serve as the consul aquilae if you knew how many of your legions would acknowledge your orders—and that none of them happened to be engaged in open rebellion against the Senate. He looked down at the map on his desk, and the little pieces of wood that served to represent Amorr’s legions, both loyal and disloyal, then at the numbers on the waxed tablet representing their respective numbers.

He sighed, wishing that circumstances were different and that he could talk to his brother about the daunting challenges he now faced. Especially since, as head of House Valerius, it was Magnus, not Corvus, who was formally responsible for the legions that Corvus had been commanding for the last year. But Magnus barely even knew the generals, let alone the tribunes, of the three legions. He hadn’t shown much interest in them since his second term as consul aquilae five years ago. And, except for approving the necessary funds, he hadn’t even had any involvement in the formation of the House’s newest legion.

The thought of Legio XVII reminded him of its present commander, and he reached out again for the much-creased letter from Marcus. It was short, and the news it contained was almost uniformly bad, but he took comfort in the certain knowledge that his younger son was well. But the death of Marcus Saturnius was a tremendous blow, both to him and to Amorr, particularly at this dangerous juncture. Losing Saturnius now felt like losing his right arm. It was so rare to have a subordinate who was both supremely competent and completely trustworthy, and the fact that the groundwork for his assassination had been planned nearly a year in advance was chilling. Combined with the death of Corvinus, about whom he could still barely permit himself to think, it was very nearly more than he could bear.

He knew that as a tribune, Marcus had likely been targeted for assassination too, but he refused to permit the thought to cross his mind. There were always risks to an officer, although they usually came more in the form of disease and enemy artillery than daggers in the night.

So many deaths and in such a short time! It seemed almost as if God had withdrawn His protection from His own consecrated city and thrown Amorr to the wolves of chaos. But then, Corvus had been spared and his son had been spared. Perhaps they had been spared for a reason. He desperately wished he could travel to Vallyrium and relieve Marcus of a command for which he was not nearly ready, but he was honor-bound to stand for consul in a week’s time. The assassination of Severus Patronus, combined with rumors about the rebellion growing throughout the empire, had thrown the entire city into a state of chaos, and his allies in the Senate strongly felt that as proper consul, Corvus would serve as an important stabilizing force in helping restore a sense of order.

And there was no question that one was needed. He felt a little guilty about the consular order he and Torquatus had jointly issued three days after Severus’s death, forcing all non-citizens to leave the city within three days on pain of having their wealth seized and being forcibly expelled, but there was no question it had been necessary.

The People had reacted to the news of Patronus’s plans to enlarge his clientele with no less rage and considerably more violence than the Senate had, and more than two hundred, most of them provincials, had died in the various riots and massacres that had begun the night of his funeral. Even with the full support of the Sanctiff and the military orders, Torquatus simply didn’t have enough armed men to quell the rising tide of violence.

It was a real shock to learn how many foreigners had settled in Amorr over the years. Nearly one in twelve of the city’s residents had been non-citizens, and it had been difficult to watch the long line of merchants and laborers, many of them accompanied by wives and children, trudging reluctantly toward the city gates and the long roads that would lead them away from the only home that many of them had ever known. How many of them would die on those harsh, wintry roads, or be waylaid and lose everything to bandits en route to the ancestral lands where they rightly belonged? Far fewer than would die before the fury of the People died down, especially if any of the rebellious provinces followed through on their threat to march on Amorr.

He and Torquatus both knew that, if a provincial army managed to fight its way past whatever legions remained loyal, it would take a miracle to save even a tenth of the resident provincials from the outraged wrath of a frightened People.

They had done what they could to protect the expelled, of course. The entire body of the Redeemed, some two-hundred strong, reinforced by the Petrines and the Jeremiads, were given the task of patrolling the four major roads leading out from the city. On his own authority, Torquatus had given all three groups the right of high justice for the duration of the expulsions, permitting the execution on the spot of anyone caught molesting an expelled traveler, and they had already received reports of twenty such executions.

But Corvus was under no illusion that they were doing more than putting a dent in the number of predations taking place up and down the roads, and they simply couldn’t afford to devote any more mounted soldiers to the patrols, not with the city in such an unsettled state. And, he reminded himself, there had been only two more mid-sized riots and one massacre of about twenty Trivicii merchants after the announcement of the expulsions. Deprived of its natural focal point, the lethal anger of the city had rapidly dissipated and been replaced by simple fear.

Both consuls well understood that, for a city, the fear of the people was the glowing coals of their fury, and any sufficiently strong rumors arriving on the wind could easily stoke those embers into another raging fire.

Corvus returned his attention to the map. There were twenty-four legions nominally under his command, twenty-seven if the three retired ones were counted. That meant somewhere between one hundred forty-four thousand and one hundred sixty-two thousand soldiers to be accounted for. Of them, he could be certain of less than thirty thousand. Another twenty thousand were very likely to remain loyal.

He’d gone over the makeup of each legion with a member of the House Martial that supposedly controlled it. Any legion with more than six in ten Amorrans, he’d counted as likely loyal. Those with more than eight in ten citizens, he assumed would be fully trustworthy. He was a little ashamed to realize that only one of the three Valerian legions qualified as likely to be loyal by that metric. But House Valerius had always relied heavily on the broad-shouldered Vallyrian peasantry to man their legions, and they’d never been given cause to regret it.

We should have seen this day coming, he berated himself and his ancestors alike. Only one true city legion? How did we ever think one would be enough? We were too proud, too jealous of our prerogatives, too fearful of our rivals, and most of all, too concerned of giving the Senate the ability to make war on its own behalf. But how was it any wiser to hand even greater power over to the very people we ruled?

Severus Patronus had been right to worry about the fate of the empire, he realized. The man’s diagnosis had been correct, even if his prescription was as dangerous as it was self-serving.

“What’s wrong, my love?” Romilia was standing in the doorway. “You are shaking your head.”

“Am I?” He hadn’t noticed. “Nothing. Or rather, everything, but nothing new. I’m finding myself tempted to resign from the Senate and leave this mess up to Declama and Pansa. How am I supposed to plan a war when I don’t know which are my soldiers and which belong to the enemy? And when I don’t know what allies will remain loyal and which have already raised their banners against us?”

“You can’t resign!” She sounded genuinely distressed. “You’re twice the general of any of them. Three times!”

“No, I suppose I can’t.” He sighed. “I never thought I’d be facing a challenge of this magnitude, and I certainly never thought I’d be doing so without the help of either Magnus or Marcus Saturnius. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

She nodded, her lips pressed firmly together. It would not have escaped her that their only remaining son might well have died in the attack that had killed his general and most of the legion’s officer. They still didn’t know how Marcus had escaped the fate of the others, but as far as Romilia was concerned, it was only by the grace of God, and Corvus had heard her murmuring prayers of heartfelt thanksgiving throughout the day ever since Marcus’s letter had arrived.

At least the prayers were better than the sobbing that too often filled her nights of late. He knew she blamed herself for the fact that Corvinus had been in the city, no matter how many times he assured her that was not the case.

“I’m going to go to Marcus as soon as I can, my dear. In the meantime, he should be safer than you or me. Even with my fascitors and the household guards, we don’t have six thousand battle-tested men surrounding us on every side at all times.”