Blood of the Redd Guard - Part One (4 page)

Keen looked the man up and down, muttering under his breath, a habit that Adar had picked up on the first time he'd met Keen. It was said that Keen had been a thief and had been caught carrying away gold from the Napael army treasury. As the story went, it was his muttering that had given him away
.

General Gardison had given the man the normal options of either going to the city dungeons or taking the oath for life. If the rumor about him was true, it made Adar wonder how he'd ever been entrusted with guard duty, let alone made the captain of the guard. While it was true that men could change, in Adar's experience it was a rare occurrence, especially when forced into a decision with a choice like that.

He searched Keen’s face as he approached; wondering if this was his spy. Keen had a half smile on his face and looked a little distracted but did not appear to be anxious. If Adar was hoping to pick up on a reason to suspect the man further, he was disappointed.

Whatever Keen’s story was, he had a good memory and Adar did trust him to know who was on the wanted posters. If Adar's captive was wanted by somebody else, they might have first claim and Adar would have to turn him over to the other party. Adar would have one day before he had to give notice. He wouldn't be able to afford the luxury to take his time with the interrogation and it would have to start right away. He grunted, that wasn’t how he preferred to handle these things.

Keen stopped before the captive and took him in from head to toe, Keen’s eyes hovered on the Stingeel earring, but he had a look of curiosity not recognition.

“If he's wanted,” Keen said, “he's not on any of the posters I've seen.”

Adar nodded. “Lucas, take him back to the dungeon. No food, but give him a little water, enough to keep his tongue wet. Keep him on his feet and walking around. Switch out fresh guards every couple of hours. I'll be by in the morning for a conversation with him.”

Lucas nodded, handed his horse off to another and called for several to accompany him before heading off.

“What news has there been in our absence?” Tere asked of Keen. Adar paid attention long enough to learn that nothing noteworthy had happened and strolled into the Outer Wall door, leading Slasher behind him.

General Helam Morgol looked through the tall Rarbon Palace windows of the central tower as the sun made its way down the western sky and kept his hands behind his back so that he wouldn’t wring the neck of the man standing beside him. Helam could have done without the interruption and he could have done without the extra attention Lieutenant Vaen Briggs had drawn to him when he had burst into the room. It was no longer a good idea for Helam to remain here in the Palace archives hoping for a conversation with Janathan Charr, the master archivist.

It was supposed to have been an innocuous meeting, but the disturbance now removed that as a possibility because of all the people that had now taken notice of Helam’s presence here.

He grasped his hands as he imagined throttling Briggs; he would now have to find another way to get a report on who his wife Elaire had been meeting with while browsing the shelves of the archives. She never met with the same person and Helam had been able to develop quite the list over the last several years.

He should have been more cautious and not told Briggs where to find him. He had felt a sense of impending doom throughout the day. That feeling had been at odds with the clear blue sky of the morning and afternoon but was now coming more into harmony as the sunset turned it a bloody red.

Expelling a breath, he took another, all the while not bothering to look at Briggs who stood to the side and was doing his best to cover up his anxiety. Sweat covered Briggs’ angular face and Helam was certain the man had run through the palace corridors to get to him. How many people had noticed? Was there anybody in the Palace that didn’t know where Helam was at the moment?

He clenched his fists. Elaire had been on her way out of the Palace earlier; hopefully she hadn’t seen Briggs running like a Hunwei was chasing after him. If she had, she was bound to ask Helam some uncomfortable questions when he saw her later in the evening.

The last thing Helam needed right now was for her to have another reason to suspect that he was keeping tabs on who she was talking to. It would have been far better if Briggs had taken his time, or better yet not come at all and handled the situation himself. Helam would talk with him about his mistake, but it would have to wait.

“How long ago did this happen?” Helam asked, focusing on the news that Briggs had brought with him.

“No more than an hour, they had just finished
when I left.” Briggs swallowed. “Adar did the first one himself.”

Helam repressed a sigh. Not only had the man rushed through the palace, he had to have killed a horse to get here in so little time.

It was the little things like this that made Helam wish that he had somebody more unflappable than Briggs to depend on. The man was loyal, but he didn’t take the time to think through his actions.

Briggs was also too impressed by Adar and there was an element of respect for Adar in his tone that wasn’t healthy, but Helam didn’t know what he could do about it. He found that a lot of his trusted men held Adar in similar regard.

“It’s customary for the one in charge to handle the first execution,” Helam said, Briggs didn’t know enough to challenge his assertion. When Briggs nodded, Helam stifled another sigh. All of Helam’s other Lieutenant Generals would have taken issue with the statement but not Briggs. Why was it that the only man Helam could trust couldn’t think for himself?

If Helam had been able to trust Weker Stonne with this plan, that would have been useful indeed. Stonne wouldn’t have even bothered to bring this issue to Helam and would have handled the clean up required and sought out Helam once everything had been taken care of.

Helam glanced at Briggs and narrowed his eyes. It was a shame that Helam couldn’t be certain about trusting his own son Molach with this, anybody would have been better than the uncertain pudgy man that stood before him.

Briggs had caught up to him and his four guards while he had been waiting for the master archivist. When Briggs had burst into the room and seen Helam, he had started to talk without regard to the other occupants. Helam had looked up from the book that he’d been pretending to read while he was reviewing his list of suspected Kopal members. He had cut Briggs off, motioning to where Semal Bray sat several tables away with a faraway look on his face. The old professor hadn’t noticed the intrusion, but his scribe who was walking among the bookshelves had looked up when Briggs had entered.

She’d stared at them while Helam had led Briggs over behind a bookcase on the other side of the large room so they would be out of earshot. The scribe had the look about her of a woman that would pester you with questions until she got the answers she wanted to know. Briggs sudden appearance and outburst had no doubt sowed a question in her mind; Helam didn’t need her overhearing something that would cause that seed to sprout and take hold.

He made a mental note to keep an eye on her. An inquisitive person like that would be a good addition to his own group of scribes and he’d be able to pay her more than Semal could afford. With the future of their world at stake, it made sense to recruit the best and pay them well.

“You’re certain you weren’t seen?”
Except for those who witnessed your mad dash here,
he thought but didn’t say.

Briggs nodded. “Positive. I watched it all unfold through a telescope.”

“There is that to be grateful for I suppose.” The report that Briggs had whispered to Helam had been disconcerting. It was almost as if Adar knew what Helam was planning and had taken steps to interfere. Could it be possible that Adar had a spy planted close to him?

His first inclination was to dismiss the thought because Adar had just come back from an assignment that had kept him away from Rarbon for the better part of a year. Shortly after that Adar had been made the general of Napael army. He had quite enough to do that it seemed unlikely he would have been able to recruit a spy at the same time. It was possible that someone had been turned before Adar had left. Helam would have to give that further thought; he resolved to be more careful and create tests for his closest confidantes.

“What are your orders?” Briggs asked. “Do we need Birgemat back or can we just kill him?”

Helam didn’t answer as he stared down at the gardens many flights below and frowned. Once again Adar was forcing him to react.

Adar’s first task after he’d been made general had been to clean up Napael’s base and the firebreak. His actions had motivated the other generals to do the same.

Even Helam had been forced to relent and give orders to his men to clear out the worst of the overgrown foliage in Paroke’s firebreak. It galled him, not because it was cleaner, but because he’d felt like Adar had manipulated him into doing something he hadn’t been inclined to do.

There was talk among some of the other generals that Adar would be the
first Rahid in five hundred years to pass the test and become Ghar. They’d been excited at the prospect and Helam had played his part of a dutiful anxious supporter because it was best to avoid suspicion.

Several new beads of sweat were rolling down Brigg’s pale face when Helam glanced over at him. Melyah. If Adar was having this effect on men sworn to Helam; before too long, people would start thinking of Adar as a great hero. If Helam didn’t act swiftly, he was going to lose his window of opportunity.

“How many men were captured?”

“I don’t remember for sure, fourteen or fifteen, no more than that. We have enough to continue.”

“You speak of the dead as if they’re easy to replace. We have too few that I trust and even fewer that are competent.” It was all enough to make a man grind his teeth and Helam locked his jaw to keep from doing it.

A man in haste made mistakes but there was little else for him to do as he watched the setting sun and pushed aside his growing frustration at yet another day passing without him being one step closer to obtaining entrance into the Rarbon Portal or learning what his traitorous wife was up to.

Helam could feel the Portal calling to him from its location in the catacombs below the Rarbon Palace central tower. It was a temptation for him to go down to have a look at the guarded doors, but he knew the Redd Guard took note of people that made frequent visits.

His last visit had been a year and a half ago. The double metal doors that stood behind the row of ten guards had taunted him and he’d thought about what it would take to force his way in. Even ten of the famous Redd Guard would fall if they had too many soldiers to fight.

Ten men. That was all that had stood between him and the weapons his people needed to fight the Hunwei when they returned. Once he’d cut down those men, he could hold the Portal and deal with the other Redd Guard as they came at him.

He’d have to ramp up his recruiting. There were less than fifty men that Helam would trust to that particular task today. He’d want at least two hundred. As near as he could figure there were about one hundred in the Redd Guard. Two hundred would give him the ability to swarm them.

Recruiting that many men was a tall order. Each man had to be vetted and tried. He had considered more than four hundred men to get to the ones he’d already recruited and sworn to his cause. If he waited for Adar Rahid to pass the Rarbon Council’s ridiculous tests in order to become Ghar and finally gain access, it would be too late.

“Sir, there’s something else. I had to lock up a guard.”

This caught Helam’s attention. “Why?”

Briggs looked away. “Your wife. The guard overheard her…” He trailed off and Helam didn’t need to hear the rest. Elaire seemed to think it was funny sometimes to talk about the Kopal as if they weren’t a hidden conspiracy. “You must do something about her. If word of who she is gets around… Bloody Melyah! I don’t like to think about it.”

“I manage my personal affairs. I don’t need help.” If the brash actions of Helam’s wife were any indication, the Kopal believed that the Hunwei were close to returning. His wife wasn’t alone in the uptick of her activity; other people for whom Helam knew with a certainty were Kopal had become far more active in the last year. Sometimes at night, Helam would lay awake, fear keeping him from sleeping. What if he didn’t get into the Rarbon Portal in time? What if his wife killed him in his sleep because an order had come down from one of her superiors? It had been years since they’d shared a room but Elaire refused to allow any of his personal guards into the house and Helam had been reluctant to argue the point.

As much as he hated to admit it, there was a certain benefit to having discovered that his wife was a member of the Kopal. He would never know what it was that had caused her to join a group that believed the Hunwei would bring with them salvation. She hadn’t revealed much about them and was becoming bolder in her threats. Several months back he had considered having his wife followed, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had focused on the master archivist instead
, but was beginning to rethink that decision.

While things had never been worse between him and his wife, the high level of tension in their marriage combined with her increasing unexplained disappearances made him see something in the shadows wherever he turned. He had wondered on multiple occasions if the Kopal had some way of knowing that the Hunwei were about to return.

If the Hunwei were close, then he might have to move sooner than he’d planned. The Rarbon Portal, even though Helam and his scribes hadn’t been able to pinpoint what was inside, was the best hope they had of being able to defend themselves against the Hunwei and their formidable technology when they came.

It was the utter height of insanity that the council hadn’t already let a Rahid open the portal, but since they hadn’t and it didn’t look like it would happen soon—the challenges Adar was up against would take years for him to pass—Helam had long ago made
plans to go around the system.