The Black Tower (8 page)

“A Sending?” he said.  “Some of my people are in the Bonelands, but that may be too far to telepathically transmit a message.  Maybe Granger would be better, or the group on the River Grey...”

“You choose,” Ijanna said.  “For all we know the Dawn Knights will detect it as soon as we even try.”  It was unlikely they’d be granted a quick death if they were caught in the act of trying to summon help, not that she expected anything else.  Fear seized her chest.  She breathed in ice, and the bundle of life in her arms watched her innocently, his big brown eyes and thick curly locks the most beautiful sights she’d ever beheld. 

“Ijanna...” Malath said.  “You don’t have to do this.”

She was crying when she answered. 

“Yes I do,” she said.  “I can’t just wait, and do nothing.  I’ve done that all my life.”  She held Sammael tight.  The screams grew louder, and the sky was full with thunder.  Shadows pressed in around her, and she felt a shiver race down her spine like someone had pressed a blade against her back.  She felt her son’s heartbeat against her chest, the shudder of his breathing, his tiny soft fingers curled around her own. 

She would do anything to remove him from that hell.  He had to live.

Ijanna set her baby aside, and she and Malath clasped hands.  With eyes locked on the night sky, they Breathed.

Ijanna saw Dane’s memories.  She saw his pride when he became a Dawn Knight, when he’d finally become something his father could be proud of.  Dane was so eager to better himself, to be more.

As a Dawn Knight, Azander Dane served his Empress with bravery and distinction.  He and his fellow Knights battled Tuscars deep in the mountains, hunted criminals across the deadly wilderness, chased renegade Veilwardens to the Moon Sea and locked horns with horrifying wastelands beasts like Mirror Men and the Sundered.  He was liked by his fellow soldiers but never forced his way into their good graces, just worked hard and did as he was told, believing, as many had before him, that the powers he served were the
right
powers, that they were good and just and had the interests of Jlantria’s people in mind.

Dane was neither a cruel or naturally violent man, though he never shied from doing harm to others in the name of his Empress, who he loved with all of his heart.  Ijanna sensed the regret he felt when he killed.  The longer he served in the ranks of the White Dragon elite the more he came to understand the Empire he’d grown up believing in was tainted.  He never said it out loud, but after a year spent as a Dawn Knight Azander started to lose faith.  Jlantria was falling apart, and it wasn’t nearly as powerful or eternal as its leaders would have the people think.  The city-states were held in check by fear, and Jlantria’s borders were far less secure than anyone dared believe.  People were hungry and poor, and more lived in fear of Empress Azaean’s wrath than truly loved her.  The further from Ral Tanneth he traveled the more he saw the truth. 

Corruption was rampant, and the hypocrisy of its rulers became more apparent by the day.  Using the Veil killed Malzaria one piece at a time, yet the Empress and her servants did so with abandon. 

The world was ugly, and it scraped away at Dane’s soul.  His hopes eroded like wood gone to rot.  Jlantria was a place of lies, turmoil and poverty, and it sickened his heart that his home was dying, and that he was dying with it.  Dane would have done anything to heal the Empire, to transform it back into what he so desperately needed it to be.

It was impossible to watch what he’d done there in the camps, yet impossible to look away.  Ijanna had a strong stomach, and she’d lived through that carnage and brutality first hand – even then, nothing prepared her for seeing it through the eyes of one of the perpetrators. 

Azander Dane had grown up an eager and earnest young man, a bit shy but hardworking.  He’d had parents, had been a child himself, and yet there in the camps he’d turned into something inhuman, something born of nightmares. 

Some of the people he killed were young, so young, and while he didn’t revel in their pain the way some of the other Knights did he still wasn’t quick, wasn’t merciful, for that was not how these Bloodspeakers were meant to be treated, not how they
deserved
to be treated.  They were responsible, he believed, for all of that was tainted and foul in the place he called home, for the disappearance of all the good things he’d known as a child, for the world turning rancid and diseased.  It was them, their fault, and even though some vestige of his rational mind knew that wasn’t true the part of him in control
wanted
it to be.  He wanted everything wrong with his world to have a face, a tangible physical presence he could lash out at, a focus for his rage.  And there was so much rage.

It seemed unnatural that this was the same young man…that one who’d worked so hard to become such a shining example of good could have turned so murderous and cruel.  So blind.

Ijanna watched him work, and her soul froze from the rancid black chill around his heart.  He flayed and beat and scourged and drowned and maimed and crushed.  She hated him, hated him more than any of those other Dawn Knights.  Just as Bloodspeakers had become his demon, he became hers, the personification of all of that cruelty, the singular embodiment of all the ignorant brutality and abject barbarism Ijanna had witnessed over the course of her entire life.

Like the worse kind of killer, Azander Dane believed he was right.  Even then, some shred of doubt and humanity remained, enough for Ijanna to discern that it was he who’d started the coup that brought the camps to an end.

She remembered him, not through this strange bond they shared as they tumbled endlessly through the void, but from the camps themselves.  A spark of memory brought light to her mind. 

They’d met later on the same morning she and Malath had decided to link their abilities to summon the Red Hand with a thaumaturgic missive.  The magical dampeners the Dawn Knights had erected around the camps to keep the captive Bloodspeakers in check would prevent a
cutgate
from being opened there, but Malath was certain his people would find a way.  Neither of them knew how long it would take for the Red Hand to arrive or if they even got the message, and Ijanna was so drained afterward she doubted they’d be able to make another attempt, at least not for a while. 

The sun was low against the dark trees, gold light like dirty blades.  The screams of a few who’d been impaled and slowly slid to their deaths rang through the otherwise still air.  Ijanna smelled blood and excrement, tasted the mud and salt of her own tears.  She held Sammael close. 

Three Dawn Knights came to the cage where she and Malath sat with a few others.  Soot and blood covered their skin.  Their eyes were sunken, almost blank, and their faces bore no expression, like masks of flesh.  It seemed they never slept.

They entered the cage with mechanical authority.  The people inside were rigid, and their sallow and pale skin was riddled with wounds, dirt, piss and sweat.  Cold mud curled between Ijanna’s toes as she slowly backed away. 

It was an oddly muted scene.  There were no cries of protest from the prisoners, nor any commands or malevolent words from the jailors.  All of them, victims and persecutors alike, seemed resigned to the fact that someone had to punish, and someone had to suffer, and there was no need to consider anything else. 

The Knights selected a young man and an older woman, both of them mostly nude save for some torn rags, and then another man, and another, until they had twelve, all of whom they lined up outside and bound together with leather cords.  The condemned were barely reflections of human beings, without will, hope, or the power to resist.  They were dead already – it was just a matter of how much pain they’d endure before their time came.

Azander Dane had been one of those three Knights.  He’d walked around the cage with the others, stepped through folds of mud and vomit and the stink of utter hopelessness.  He looked at the prisoners with mirror-like eyes.  No one turned from his gaze, and no one showed any fear.  His boots slurped in and out the mud with wet shucking sounds, and for a few moments that was the only thing Ijanna heard.  The sky was as blue as bruised flesh.  Thick raindrops struck the crumbling roof and splashed to the ground outside.  The trees surrounded them like the bars of a vast cage.

Dane stopped and regarded Ijanna and Sammael, who sat quiet in her arms, nearly asleep.  Dane might have been a handsome man if not for the glaze over his eyes and the bloody grime that clung to him like a second layer of skin.  The bladed hilt of his
vra’taar
was just visible over his shoulder, and his gauntlets creaked with dried flakes of blood. 

He didn’t look like a cruel man...if anything, he looked afraid.  He said nothing, just stood there, silent and still, watching her, waiting, though she didn’t know for what.  She saw ghosts in his eyes, the ghosts of those he’d killed, and had yet to kill.

“Well?” she said.  It seemed her voice was the loudest thing in the forest.  The other Knights looked at her.  She felt Malath tense beside her, but she kept watching the man she’d later learn was Azander Dane.  “Is it my time, or not?”

He watched her.  His eyes dropped to the bundle in her arms, and he blinked.  He seemed lost, like he’d just woken from a dream. 

“Are you eager to die?” he asked her quietly. 

“It’s why you brought us here,” she said.  “Isn’t it?

“Yes,” he said.

“Then what does it matter if I’m ready or not?” she asked. 

He looked up at her as if seeing her for the first time.  Sammael reached forward for the Knight and giggled, and the sound was so out of place even Dane smiled.

“Don’t be in such a hurry,” he said to her.  “Take what time you have.  You never know when it will be gone.”

She breathed deep, trying to contain her anger.

“Is that what you would do?” she asked.  “Take more time so you could live in fear?”

“No,” he said after a moment.  He spoke slow, sluggish, like he was drugged.  “But I’d take that time to be with my child.”  He smiled at Sammael.  “I don’t have children, and never will,” he said.  “But if I did, maybe that would occur to me.”  His eyes locked on hers.  “But that choice is yours.  It doesn’t matter what I think, because I’m already dead.”

And Dane left Ijanna and her son alone. 

That moment strengthened her resolve.  She and Malath tried to reach the Red Hand again, fought past their exhaustion and didn’t care that they might be discovered.  They were going to die either way – best to do so on their feet.

Ijanna and Malath linked hands while the people who’d been taken from the cage were put to the torch in a bed of thorns.  Her chest rattled with fear.  She shook so badly she could barely see straight. 

Sammael was at her side, asleep at last.  Malath sat across from her, there in the darkest shadow they could find in the collapsing cage. 

She Breathed, and Malath Breathed, and what little magic they managed to summon oozed between them like a cloud of blood.  Malath was the focus – only he knew where his people were, so it made sense he’d issue the Sending – and as Ijanna’s power flowed from her body she felt herself deflate with exhaustion, like the wind had been squeezed from her lungs.  She was dizzy and her hands were numb, and for a terrible moment she sensed the coldness of death inside her.  She put a trembling hand on Sammael while Malath concentrated on his task.  Her child sensed something was wrong and woke, crying.  Her heart pounded hard in her chest.

The moment passed.  Nausea welled in her stomach.  Sammael kept crying, so she took him in her arms and held him tight, cooed into his ear.

“Be ready,” Malath said, not just to her but to the others in the cage.  “It’s time for us to act.”

His words had the desired effect, as they always did.  Maybe he infused the Veil into his voice, or maybe it was just his dominant persona, that sense of authority he conveyed without even trying; whatever it was, eyes that had been blank with exhaustion and hopelessness snapped wide open, and people rose to their feet. 

Malath took Ijanna and hauled her up by her arms, careful to protect Sammael as he did so.  He looked at a young man who was nearby. 

“Get those scraps of cloth,” he told him.  Malath looked at Ijanna.  “The Red Hand will be here soon, but the Knights know what we’ve done.  We have to get you and your son ready to move.  I know you’re exhausted, Ijanna, but you’re going to have to run.”

“But...”

“I owe you everything,” he said.  “No matter what happens, I want you to know I’ll never forget this.”

They used the cloth to craft a primitive pack and secure Sammael to her back.  The crude sling put his face at the back of her head, and once they had him fastened tight Ijanna felt her son’s breath on her ear. 

The other Bloodspeakers did what they could to pull themselves together.  They had no magic – many of them never had – but they would make up for that with courage.  They would be victims no longer. 

Sammael giggled as Malath finished setting him in place.  He grabbed Ijanna’s ears and hair, and she bit down at the pain and smiled, happy to have him so close. 

There was no question they’d been discovered, for soon the Dawn Knights came for them, up the hill and to the cage, their silhouettes lit by torches.  The soldiers let loose with flaming arrows and bolts which tore through the creased walls and punched into bodies.  Prisoners caught alight.  Each cage held between twenty and thirty captive Bloodspeakers, but they were packed so tight that one catching fire immediately spread flames to the others.  Soon the cages were filled with burning bodies, smoldering and smoking people who screamed horribly as the flesh melted from their bones. 

More bolts came.  Metal pierced burning skin.  Cries were cut short by gurgling moans of pain.

A flaming crossbow bolt flew past Ijanna and into the wall; another struck a young man who threw himself in front of her, and he fell to the ground choking on his own blood.  Ijanna stumbled back and would have fallen if not for Malath catching her. 

A blast of fire and frost ripped through the night from the edge of the forest.  The air burned with the cold heat of an icy sun.  Rolling waves of power tore through the Dawn Knight’s ranks and brought them to the ground.  Fingers froze and snapped off around the hilts of their weapons like ice drops, and men burned without even being touched by flames.  Blasts of force threw Jlantrians against the walls of their own cages, snapping their necks and spraying blood across their black-and-gold armor.

The air was alive with motion and noise.  Prisoners pushed against the bounds of their crude iron and wood prisons, which they rocked with such desperation the structures started to collapse.  People were smothered in the escape, Bloodspeakers and Dawn Knights alike.