Meuric (23 page)

Valens turned and left passing a large ornate mirror of Kel'akh design. It faced directly opposite the Chieftain's study and it was obviously of excellent quality. Gazing upon it made Bradán miss his homeland even more. He glanced at the senator whose eyes seemed to be lingering over it, his greedy eyes alight. He had been away for some time but even he recognised the magickal symbols placed there by the Kel'akh Men of Art at each corner of the mirror. After a few moments of barking orders to the men outside, the Decurion returned.

“It is done, my Lord,” he reported.

Tacitus turned to Rainier. “Have your War Band keep the inevitable crowds back. I am sure that you would not want to lose any of your people or see Rabi'a razed if an incident were to occur.”

He turned and strode from the room, allowing the threat to hang in the air. Quirinus and Urbanus followed. Bradán watched them go but he himself hung back. A part of him was craving to stay in the company of Kel'akh people, no matter how they saw him, and away from the Roz'eli citizens that he was slowly but surely coming to learn to despise.

Theirn sat back in his chair and let out a deep sigh. “What is it that you want here, hand-over?” He was unable to even look at the Kel'akh warrior.

Bradán flinched at the word. “I am not with them. I have no love for Roz'eli but this senator has aligned himself with my Lord. My orders are to go with him and assist him in all ways.”

“Even if that means the murder of a child?” asked Rainier. Bradán nodded saying nothing. “You disgust me!”

“Do not judge me, Rainier,” snapped Bradán, angry now but keeping it in check. “You have no right. I saw your tattoos. What orders did the two of you ever turn down when fighting as Federate Mercenaries? What atrocities did you commit as a Free Archer?”

Rainer slammed his hand down on the Chieftain's table. “It was all for the greater good and for Nah'cho!” He stopped, suddenly afraid that something was about to slip out. “I never went against my own people!”

“You keep telling yourself that,” sneered the Druid Legion Captain. “I am sure that such sentiments aid the families of the lives you helped destroy and eases your sleep at night when those voices of the dead whisper in your dreams.” He needed to defuse the situation before it became more volatile. This was not what he wanted. Bradán's voice softened. “Nor have I ever gone against my own, Rainier. I would hope to have the strength to refuse if that order ever came. The child and the others are from the far side of the Empire though. Please forgive me.” He looked at Theirn. “I have no right to speak in such a fashion when in your home. Roz'eli arrogance is as astonishing as their cruelty. I have spent too long in the shadow of these people.”

The Chieftain nodded. “I understand. We all live in dangerous times, surrounded by even more dangerous enemies. We all must do whatever we must to survive even if those orders mean that we spend the rest of eternity in the Pits of the Otherworld. Our people; our ways. That is what is important.”

The Chieftain stood and made a step to leave the room when Rainier grabbed his friend's arm and held him tight. “This isn't right, Theirn. He is only a boy! Quirinus was correct in what he said. Did you notice that they did not produce any proof concerning the orders? I doubt that the Emperor even knows about this no matter what seal he carries.”

“I know that,” spat Theirn angrily, staring at Bradán. He turned to his friend. “What is it that you want me to do? Are you the one who is going to stop him? Personally I do not want to see any of my family or any from this village flayed alive in front of me! Now that they know we have been hiding the boy and his family we will be lucky if it is only the two of us who get punished.”

Bradán looked at the two men suddenly feeling sympathy for both of them. He knew that Theirn was no coward. His tattoos proved that without even knowing the man. But the threat to his family and to every family within Rabi'a was very real. The Druid Captain watched how Rainier slowly lowered his head in defeat as he followed his Chieftain out into the bright summer day.

Silently Bradán followed behind.

XXXII

“Are you sure that you want to hear about this, my Lord?” asked the man. “You say that you knew these people.”

Meuric nodded even as the sickness in the pit of his stomach grew. He sat in the Travelers' Inn in a town of the Ah'dah people that bordered the Daw'ra tribal region. The shadow in the corner of where he sat complemented the darkening mood that he was in. The man that he was speaking to was a merchant of wool and tin and so had travelled a great deal. He even spoke of how he traded within the Roz'eli Empire.

Meuric had just completed his training as a Knight Protector after three years away. He had arrived in central Kel'akh and set himself up as a man of means. He wore good quality clothes, bought a large home with some land along with three servants and a horse he called Paden for the first time as a joke against the elderly Oak Seer. Once settled and his new identity was implanted with the locals he had sent one of his servants to Gla'es with messages for Colton, Paden and his beloved Dervla.

He returned only with tales of its destruction.

Meuric wailed with the thought of losing Dervla and his boys. He packed his horse and immediately set off. Two days later he found himself sitting in this Travelers' Inn opposite a merchant.

“Tell me,” growled Meuric.

“I did not see them myself you understand,” began the merchant hesitantly. He could almost sense how dangerous the man before him was and certainly did not want to get on his wrong side. “Stories spoke of a huge raiding party, warriors of the type not seen before or since. They attacked Gla'es early in the morning, shortly before dawn. Somehow they had managed to cross the water that surrounded the isle without being seen. Rumours were that they were Roz'eli Men-of-the-Legion but that has since been disproved.

“It is also said that although they were taken by surprise, the people of Gla'es had fought back with a tenacity that the Bards must sing of. A nearby Daw'ra hamlet witnessed the incident from distance. Runners were sent to neighbouring villages and towns but by the time they roused the War Band it was all over.

“They say that many of the enemy were killed but Gla'es had been attacked on all sides all at once with no help or hope. In the end it was magick that was the deciding factor. The menfolk, those who had not died protecting all that they had known, were taken prisoner, rounded into a pen and shot down with arrows. The women, children and the elderly were placed into the Great Hall and burned alive. There were no survivors.”

Meuric opened and closed his fist. Anger and grief threatened to overwhelm him but he managed to quell it.

Through gritted teeth he managed to ask, “There was no sign of rape or pillage?”

The merchant shook his head. “Nothing was taken. Neither goods nor slaves. It was a mission of execution.”

“Do the people still lie there?”

The merchant nodded. “So I have been told. Since magick was discovered at the scene people have been too afraid to return.”

Within Kel'akh, superstition dictated that in a place such as that the spirits of the dead now dwelled waiting for the chance to possess a new body. Such a belief would have kept potential human scavengers away.

He left early the next morning ensuring that he avoided any settlements now that he was in Daw'ra land once again. The new Knight Protector almost fell from his horse as he dismounted when he first glimpsed his old home from a nearby hilltop. He fell to his knees and wept. With a heavy heart and heavier footsteps, Meuric led the horse Paden as he made his way down to the water's edge. He could feel the presence of magick alright. It was powerful and raw as if its wielder was not used to such strength. Here he used his Gifts of Feather Light and flew to the isle landing gently on his feet.

Bodies of everyone he had ever known littered the ground. By now they were decomposing badly, having been equally feasted upon by animals, maggots and carrion birds. Many of the dead lay where they fell, weapons still in their hands.

Buildings lay in either ruins or in ash. The whole site had been torched. He had found the nail scratches of those who had attempted to claw their way out of the Great Hall on the inside of a scorched doorway frame. He had found Colton and his wife, Farrah, both dead at the foot of his throne in the Chieftain's Chamber. Too much
dried blood layered the floor around the two of them to be from the rulers alone. Their three youngest children, a girl of maybe six months and two boys aged five and seven respectively, lay on the floor next to them, their throats slit in the ritual style of Kel'akh. Meuric removed a glove and touched the blood.

In his mind's eye he could see the children drugged, their eyes glazed by the use of well-known local herbs, as Colton put a ceremonial blade to their throats. Behind him lay Farrah, already dead from an overdose of the same drug. The newly made Knight Protector could only guess at what it had cost the Chieftain to kill his children before the horde of faceless warriors did. Would the gods ever forgive him such a crime? Meuric had no way of knowing but he hoped they understood.

He had later found Paden's decapitated body lying outside the Oak Seer's Hall, a sword still gripped in his dead hand. The Knight Protector was unable to ever find his head. Even to this day he could not recall the sight of seeing the body of his beloved wife or his son. Some things he was still grateful for. He would learn later that his second son survived. He was the only one.

It took Meuric a week of working tirelessly to gather up and burn all the corpses in a large pyre. On that last day he turned his back on the Knight Protectors, the Conclave and its Council, blaming them all for what had happened. The Link that united all Knight Protectors with the Council had been blocked. For reasons of their own they had allowed him to keep his Gifts. For years after, the former Knight had searched for the raiders, tracking down all possible leads. As hard as he tried he never did find out those who had carried out the killings and so much time had now passed he knew that he never would.

He woke.

Meuric sat up. His body was shivering from sweat. His breathing was ragged. Taking his flask of water he drank deeply before stripping off all his clothes and replacing them with fresh ones, including undergarments. He did not remember falling asleep.

He had just stripped down his horse, Paden, off his saddle and harness before sitting down to eat a lunch of salted beef with bread covered with honey, washed down with water from a flask. He had only lain down to rest for a moment and must have immediately drifted off. A sudden feeling of unease began to settle over him. He slowed his breathing as he began to focus his mind. Abruptly a vision entered his mind.

It was a picture of four men on horseback riding two-by-two. Three of them looked like soldiers of Roz'eli ilk though they were all dressed as Kel'akh warriors. There was something about the way they carried themselves on horseback, the positioning of their weapons and their style of dress. The fourth man, the eldest by some decades, looked more like a hireling, battle-hardened and proud. He looked to them all with his Spirit Eyes, a form of clairvoyance that allowed the aura of a person to be shown.

A dark shadow hung over the three that Meuric marked as professional soldiers. One of them, riding next to the old man, was especially cruel and eager to kill. He had the darkest shadow surrounding him. He looked closer at the elderly hireling. With that one there seemed to be no black cloud lingering about him. A myriad of colours surrounded him as it did with every other living person only around that spectrum of light a greyness enveloped the colours. It marked him as touched by the darkness but it had yet to claim his soul. He watched fascinated as his aura pulsated against the darkness, keeping it at bay.

The warrior retreated from the Spirit Eyes and focused further and saw that all the men's clothes were made of the highest quality, clean, yet well-worn. It was the same with the many weapons they carried. Only the two men to the rear bore Kel'akh-styled tattoos. On a casual inspection he would have classed them as hirelings but three of them definitely had a military feel to them. The young man to the front carried the look and arrogance of a Roz'eli though he had the bone structure of an E'del man. Was it all a coincidence so soon after Ah'mos? So close to Radha losing her Link? He doubted it. The older man's hairstyle and weapons also marked him as a man from E'del. Somehow he knew that they were tracking him.

Meuric hastily saddled Paden and sat upon his horse. He cantered out from under the trees and stopped dead centre on the trail, turning his horse to face the oncoming warriors. He looked to each weapon on hand. His double-bolt crossbow he loaded and set across his lap. He removed the thongs that kept two small throwing knives reversed and up the inside of his leather vambraces. He knew that he could control Paden, a trained warhorse, by his thighs alone, if need be.

He slowed his breathing, relaxed his mind and sat patiently. He decided not to change into the uniform of a Knight Protector in case he was wrong and it was not him they sought. Meuric only had to wait for some moments to pass for the four warriors to round the bend. The Daw'ra man took more than a little pleasure in
seeing that three of the disguised soldiers seemed to be more than a little disconcerted to find a Kel'akh warrior sitting upon his horse waiting for them.

The fourth man, the elderly hireling, simply smiled.

XXXIII

Bradán breathed in deeply, relishing the various scents he could define, glad all of a sudden that he was alive. He frowned at the thought, wondering why he should feel with such intensity. Everything seemed clear and bright and his eyes seemed to encompass everything that he saw in minute detail, leaving a lasting impression of the Rabi'a village in his mind. It was a sensation that he had come to know extremely well. It happened just before the start of every battle in which he ever partook. But what skirmish? There was no rational reason to presume that a fight was about to begin. He was part of the superior force. The people that he had been searching for had been caught and secured.

And yet he felt tense.

He looked to his right. Theirn and Rainier were standing next to him, motionless and silent. Both had those faraway looks in their eyes he had seen a hundred times before on the eve of a battle. It was a look that men carried whenever they had to come to terms with their own mortality. They had to live with the decisions that they had made in life, rightly or wrongly.

He had seen men write letters home to their parents or loved ones, those of course who could write, or ask a trusted friend to correspond in their stead. More than once he had witnessed soldiers, who by profession were known to be extremely superstitious, remove icons of the gods that they worshipped and spend a short time praying in solitude. Others sought out a prēost and asked forgiveness for the sins that they had committed in life. Others still had cried quietly to themselves in dark corners so as not to spark fear in the troops. Even in the Dark Druid's Legion Bradán had observed such sights.

Laughter caught his ears and the Kel'akh warrior watched several children of the town playing mindlessly around the buildings a short distance away, chasing each other, oblivious to the drama that was taking place. Further distant he could see men toiling under the midday sun as they built new homes for extra families who were moving into the area, or extensions on their own homesteads. Soon the protective stone wall that
surrounded Rabi'a would need to be extended. Those women who did not have the responsibility of a young family also worked with the menfolk. Though he knew that the Roz'eli would scowl deeply at such a sight, in the Kel'akh culture men and women were considered equal in all things. It was one of the few traits that the Roz'eli could not extinguish from their way of life.

Bradán gazed at Rainier who was staring hard at the Roz'eli troops, unable to hide the venom in his eyes. The original order was the capture of Abram and to bring him before his master, but somewhere along the line Tacitus had decided to kill the child instead. He could guess what the War Band Commander was feeling, and Theirn too, though he seemed to be in more control of his emotions. He in fact felt it himself.

For them, for all of them, the murder of the child and his retinue was an evil act and Bradán could almost imagine the blackness of the deed reaching out and clutching at their souls, his own included. As Free Archers, Theirn and Rainier would have been asked to commit such butcheries that regular Men-of-the-Legion would never have been asked to do. The fear was it would forever tarnish that Legion, and the standing and reputation of their armies in the future. Their military hierarchy thought of everything when it came to the conquering and occupation of lands.

Between the children playing and where the Roz'eli Men-of-the-Legion readied themselves, Bradán watched several of Rabi'a's War Band approach and stop just short of their commander. They were led by a woman, which again surprised the Druid Captain. In his opinion, she was most likely to be Rainier's second-in-command. She was tall and lean and carried herself well. Her hair was shockingly red and Bradán reasoned that she must be a descendant from the tribes far to the north in Kel'akh. They were well reputed for their fiery coloured hair and their equally fierce tempers.

“Who is she?” asked Bradán, indicating the red-haired woman.

“My Lieutenant, Ysolt,” responded Rainier. The tone was short, precise, and with no embellishments. It was clear to Bradán that the War Band Commander could only tolerate her at best.

Bradán looked at Theirn. In a quiet voice he asked, “How is it that you have a War Band? You hold only a village. Are you not too small for such a force?”

The Rabi'a man looked hard at the Druid Legion Captain. “Everyone in Rabi'a is a member of the War Band.”

Although the Kel'akh warrior could now see about a dozen members of the War Band milling about casually a short distance away, he caught a glimpse of others surrounding them at a discreet distance. Whether that was to keep the citizens of Rabi'a away from the executions or to keep the Roz'eli troops, and him, ring-fenced remained to be seen. Looking at the War Band, Bradán could tell without any doubt that Rainier's warriors seemed none too happy about the killings either. He could not but help notice that they were all fully equipped with sword, shield, spear and bow.

They were too well armed.

Bradán allowed himself a quick glance to confirm that his way was clear to the building behind. No one had silently come up to the rear of him and blocked his way. If this was truly an ambush, he would lead his men to the Chieftain's Chamber and barricade them in. From there he would hope to negotiate a truce for himself and his men or defend themselves long enough so that his Lord and Master would spirit them away with magick. It was not much of a plan but it was a plan.

To Bradán's left, half of the Emperor's troops had dismounted and had gathered their bows with a single arrow. Those who were taking part in the firing squad handed their pila to their companions for safe keeping.

Casually Bradán stepped closer to the Druid's Legion's Chosen Man. “Stand ready. I fear that there may be more going on here than meets the eye.”

The man, suddenly fearful, nodded and quietly passed the word along to the remainder of the Druid's men. Bradán watched Theirn wave over the woman with red hair. Ysolt immediately jogged over, holding onto the grip of her sword. She rattled with the amount of weaponry she bore. Her face was a mask of disgust when she noticed the Roz'eli archers. When she stopped she looked Bradán up and down, sizing him up. Her face never relinquished that look of disgust.

“Ignore him,” said Rainier to the woman. He was indicating the Druid Captain. “He may not be one of us but he has no love for Roz'eli either. Is everyone here?”

“For the most part,” answered Ysolt. “Some are on guard and I have sent out a roaming patrol to secure the perimeter. Your sons are still to return though.” In hushed tones she added, “Are we really going to allow this? Even if Wyeth returns with Oak Seer Ulrich now,” she cast Bradán a furtive glance, “it is too late. The Roz'eli would surely kill us all if they find out about your friend.”

Bradán almost nodded in agreement with them, but caught himself just before he did so. The Oak Seers were outlawed throughout Roz'eli territories that formerly belonged in the Kel'akh Nation, so great was the fear the Empire had of that sect. Even to know one by association could mean death. The Empire had every reason to worry about them.

The Oak Seers possessed not only very powerful magick but they also carried the law of the land with them. They were a symbol to the people that encouraged unity and valour. No one in Kel'akh would refuse an Oak Seer. If they asked for you to lay down your life you would do it, so great was your faith and trust in them. Bradán knew that one day they would have to kill them all if they wanted any chance to conquer the remainder of the Kel'akh Nation.

The Druid Captain looked at Rainier and saw the despondency in his face. “I was hoping that Ulrich would have been here first but since he is constantly moving his hiding places it makes it more and more difficult to find him. We have no choice for the moment but to obey and before you argue I've already had it out with Theirn. He fears for the village and he has good reason to.”

Seeing that his Lieutenant was about to speak Rainier added, “Just remember that if you are ever to make Chieftain your first loyalty is to your people. Have the War Band make a half-circle around the Emperor's men, but facing outward. If the townsfolk are in any way feeling like us we will have a riot on our hands very soon. Make certain that every other man carries a baton, a knife and a shield. The remaining warriors are to carry bows with an arrow nocked at the ready.”

Ysolt gave a crisp salute and wandered over to Rabi'a's waiting warriors. Quietly she began implementing her commander's orders.