Lord of the Silent Kingdom (2 page)

Rault grunted, gave the signal. The result would stain his soul indelibly. But he knew that soul would return for another turn around the wheel. He did not hesitate to greet evil with unexpected evil. He had learned that from Count Raymone Garete.

Archers sprang up and let fly. Backe’s standard bearer and herald fell from their horses, as did two priests in dun cassocks. A third priest, of substance because he wore armor, survived the hail but had to extricate himself from his wounded mount.

Haiden Backe flung a hand into the path of an arrow streaking toward his face. Which exposed the gap in armor under his arm. An arrow found it, broke as its head hit a rib, and turned. It failed to reach his heart.

A companion snatched the reins of Backe’s horse. The remaining raiders galloped away, pursued by missiles. A ballista shaft slammed through one, deep into the neck of his mount.

Only the armored priest escaped unscathed.

Brock’s sister Socia, just sixteen, observed, “Sublime will use this against us.”

“Of course he will. But these men, who don’t work for the Patriarch, were here already, without just cause. They mean to steal our lives, our fortunes, and our good names. What else can their not-employer take away?”

Thurm sneered, “He could always excommunicate us.”

Everyone in earshot laughed.

Brock said, “None of those people appear to have perished. Let’s help them get to this heaven they’re determined to force upon us.”

Even the fallen priests were disinclined to meet their God today. One volunteered to renounce Sublime V

in favor of the Anti-Patriarch, Immaculate II.

Brock let that one inscribe a letter confessing the Brothen Church’s Grolsacher connections. He had the rest bound to stakes and left to the mercy of their deity. Within easy bowshot. Should their fellows be overwhelmed by an impulse to rescue them.

The mercenary force surrounded Caron ande Lette.

“Wow!” Socia said. Fearfully. “There’s a lot of them.”

“But in disarray,” Brock replied. “They don’t know what to do now. And Haiden Backe can’t tell them.”

That situation persisted for three days. Backe’s underlings launched several clumsy attacks. Each failed.

Haiden Backe lost his struggle with fever and sepsis. The Bishop of Strang, the Grolsacher priest who could afford armor, declared himself Backe’s successor. The mercenaries quickly expressed their confidence in the Bishop and the aims of the Brothen Patriarch. That night more than thirty resigned under cover of darkness.

Morcant Farfog, Bishop of Strang, was one of countless corrupt, incompetent bishops associated with the Brothen Patriarchy. Sublime had found that he could ease his fiscal woes by selling new bishoprics.

A rudimentary bureaucracy meant to raise funds through sales of livings, pardons, bequests, and indulgences was in its formative stage.

Sublime needed the money.

The Anti-Patriarch, Immaculate, at Viscesment, moaned and carried on but never really seized the moral opportunity. He was close to abandoning the struggle against the Usurpers of the Mother City.

The mercenaries besieging Caron ande Lette had little to recommend them. But most were not stupid.

Few failed to see through Bishop Farfog’s bluster. He was supremely incompetent, completely self-involved, and certain to cause fatalities amongst those dim enough to remain in his vicinity.

Desertions continued apace.

***

TWO HOURS OF BRISK HIKING TOOK BROTHER CANDLE TO Artlan ande Brith. Seuir Lanne Tuldse was a skeletal, elderly Maysalean knight. Seuir Lanne had kept faith with Khaurene. He had observed the letter of Duke Tormond’s proclamation against erecting fortifications.

“Come,” Seuir Lanne told the Perfect Master. “We’ll go up to the house. From there you’ll be able to see the smoke if they fire Caron ande Lette.”

“The house” was a stone manor balanced precariously atop a tall, bristling outcrop of weathered limestone. Not, strictly, a fortress. But difficult to enter if the inhabitants preferred that you stay out.

Fifteen minutes after the Perfect Master’s arrival Lanne Tuldse’s grandson galloped south toward Antieux. He would raise alarms along the way.

The boy ran into one of Count Raymone’s patrols. They led him to an encampment on the Old Brothen military highway, the Inland Road, which followed the western bank of the Dechear River. Here the river marked the traditional boundary between the End of Connec and Ormienden, a hodgepodge of counties and minuscule principalities of mixed and varied allegiance, some to the Grail Empire, some to the Patriarchy, some to kingdoms in nearby Firaldia. A few, by marriage, even owed fealty to the ruling houses of Arnhand and Santerin. The harsh vistas of Grolsach lay only eight leagues away, beyond a tongue of Ormienden occupied by entities called Imp and Manu. Count Raymone meant to confront would-be invaders who chose to use the Inland Road. That being the route selected by previous invaders from Arnhand. He felt compelled to resist vigorously. Occupation of the Connec’s eastern marches would isolate the rest of the province from the assistance of the Empire.

The Count’s spies in Grolsach had learned the truth about Sublime’s secret letters of marque. Raymone meant to smash anyone who took them up before they reached the cities of the eastern Connec.

Antieux was a magnet for invaders. Antieux had delivered embarrassments to several forces trying to perpetrate the Patriarch’s villainies.

Count Raymone did not have the blessing of Duke Tormond. The Duke clung tenaciously to the illusion that Sublime would keep promises he had made in exchange for Connecten support in his crusade against Calzir. Tormond could not understand that Sublime did not feel obligated to keep faith with heretics. Lying was no sin when you lied to Unbelievers.

Count Raymone moved as soon as he received word. He reached Artlan ande Brith two days later.

While the Count’s soldiers made camp Brother Candle responded to a summons from the hotheaded, headstrong lord of Antieux.

Count Raymone greeted him warmly. “Desperate hours bring us together again, eh, Master?”

“Existence consists of cycles and convergences,” Brother Candle replied. “Even in the upwelling of wickedness. Not to mention demands upon our respective professions.”

“Tell me about these Grolsachers.”

“I can’t.”

“Won’t?” Count Raymone was accustomed to the vagaries of the Maysalean conscience. Some were determined io remain pacifist, whatever befell them.

“Cannot. The young seuir hustled me out the back door as soon as he recognized the threat.”

“Brock Rault is the perfect knight. He fought well against the Arnhanders. He’d have done well in Shippen if the damned Calzirans had bothered to fight back.”

“Just as well they didn’t. The inevitable would have devoured them.”

“Good for us, too.” Because Connectens had served in the Calziran Crusade they had established certain rights. Though they had won no honors from the Patriarch, they had helped deliver vast new territories into the realm of Peter, King of Navaya. King Peter, whose queen was Duke Tormond’s sister, was now a protector of the Connec.

“Yes. So?”

“Are you going to preach to me, Master?” Count Raymone was intimidating. He was tall, lean, dark, and seemed older than his twenty-four and a half years. He had a long scar over his left eye that made him look more ferocious than he was. Swollen and discolored, it was still healing.

Brother Candle raised a brushy gray eyebrow. “I’d rather you call me Brother.”

“I have Maysalean evangelists in my family, Brother. I recognize the light in your eye that means a bout of holy instruction is due to begin.” The Count was known for his sardonic sense of humor.

Brother Candle’s other eyebrow jumped up. Then he chuckled.

“That won’t work, either, Brother. I feel no need to be your pal. You people are transparent manipulators.”

“Then I bow to youth’s need to make its own mistakes.”

“Transparent.”

Brother Candle gave up. Count Raymone would give him no foothold. It was too late, anyway. Hell’s tendrils had been creeping into the End of Connec for years. Illtempered time had begotten evil pups.

He was wasting it trying to stem the cruel tide. His obligation now was to preserve and cherish what little he could.

He snorted. A Seeker After Light, a Perfect, did not entertain such conceits as Hell. Hell existed only in the Episcopal mind. The more primitive Chaldarean cults, on the far reaches of the world, believed in an Adversary but not in a Pit of Eternal Torment. Brother Candle did not know how the Hell concept had crept into the western form of Chaldareanism. In other strains, as was the case in the ancestral Devedian and Dainshau religions, all punishment and reward happened right here, right now, in this world.

The Deves and Dainshaus should have had the wickedness hammered out of them by now. Their God and the Chaldareans had been punishing them forever. “You are amused, Master?”

“Brother. My thoughts veered to the plight of those who reject the Path. These days they must believe their gods particularly spiteful and callous.”

“And no less do they deserve, bending their knees to the Tyranny of the Night.”

And there lay the paradox of the world.

God was real, if long unseen. All gods were real. Sometimes they reached into the mortal world. Every demon, devil, and sprite ever imagined was real, somewhere. Spirits of tree and river and stone were real. Things that lay in wait in the dark were painfully real and still found even in lands where the ruling faith officially denied them. Even in the End of Connec, which had been acclaimed as tame since the days of the Old Empire, night things were hidden away. The little ones remained where they’d always been, in the forests, in the mountains, in ancient stone circles ignorant people thought had been erected by giants.

They avoided notice because in the End of Connec they were far from any source of power. They would never grow into anything more terrible than what they were. They avoided notice because whenever their presence became obvious Episcopal spirit hunters came to destroy them.

Bigger things of the Night were bound into statues or stones and buried beneath crossroads, or into magical swords or enchanted rings seldom used because they were inherently treacherous, or into the tombstones and gateway arches of old-time pagan cemeteries. Such few as had survived the cleansing unleashed by the sorcerer-captains of the Old Brothen Empire.

Once there had been those powerful enough to be accounted gods or godlings. Those were dead or their power and being had been scattered in a thousand fragments of broken stone by the conquering world-tamers of old. The world preferred them scattered and harmless if they could not be permanently destroyed.

Permanent was difficult when belief could quicken the most lost from any stray wisps of power.

There were individuals who could pull them back together. Sorcerers hungry for power. Though in the west no man had become that powerful for more than a dozen centuries. Here, men of talent were, inevitably, drawn into the Collegium. Where they endured constant monitoring by others like themselves.

Or they perished.

Brother Candle said, “My creed won’t let me bless what you do, Count Raymone. And yet, what you do, however ruthless, has to be done to stem the tide of darkness.”

Where darkness and the Night were real forces, not personifications of evil. They could not be that.

They were neither good nor evil. Not till someone decided and painted the label on, like a caste mark on the forehead. Or until someone used them to evil purpose.

Brother Candle was at peace with his conscience. He had done all that he could do. But he was troubled, even so. More was wakening than just the rage, greed, and lust of mortal men.

***

TWO DOZEN SOLDIERS DEMONSTRATED SOUTH OF CARON ande Lette, drawing the attention of the mercenaries. Bishop Farfog moved to confront them, contemptuous of their numbers.

The villains who remained with him were not bright enough to worry about a handful of men who seemed determined to bait them.

The Bishop himself did not see that — though he was
supposed
to think these few wanted to lead him into a trap. Count Raymone Garete’s clever strategy nearly foundered because his enemy was too stupid to be suspicious.

Inertia and laziness kept the Grolsachers from charging. Plus a dim fear that the defenders of Caron ande Lette, all twenty-two, might fall on them from behind.

While the few demonstrated and the Raults waited, Count Raymone’s troops slipped past, out of sight, to the west, taking care to raise no dust. A few passed to the east, too, filtering through the trees along the river’s edge. The demonstrators withdrew. The Grolsachers resumed taunting the besieged and dodging the occasional arrow.

The demonstrators reappeared next morning. With two hundred friends. When some mercenaries considered following the example of friends smart enough to take off earlier, they discovered Connecten companies behind them. They watched their pathetic camp be overrun.

There was not much of a fight. The Grolsachers scattered, suffering their casualties on the run.

The Connectens only pursued those who did not flee in the direction they wanted. Back along the river, toward home. Where they found themselves ambushed, pinned down by archers, then set upon by heavy infantry.

That left the river. The Connectens let them be once they entered the water.

Bishop Farfog was one of the few who swam well enough to reach the far bank. Having abandoned his armor and plunder.

Brother Candle arrived while Count Raymone’s men were burying the mercenary dead, some of whom had not yet stopped breathing. They had no need to lay down any of their own. The rabble had scattered before the Connectens suffered any damage.

The Perfect Master saw no one who had died of wounds from the front. Many looked like they had been murdered after their capture. Few prisoners had been retained.

Which fit Count Raymone’s character. The Count believed that the best way to discourage attacks on the Connec was to obliterate anyone inclined to attack, leaving the corpses to the scavengers.