The Seer King: Book One of the Seer King Trilogy (49 page)

But there was no other choice.

Then the idea struck. For the first time, and one of the few times thereafter, I used a trust dishonestly. And by the gods I’m glad I was brave enough to do it. I felt that then, and I feel it now, even knowing what came later. If I had unlimited powers, by Jaen I was now going to use, or rather misuse, them.

“But you aren’t going back to that mansion,” I said firmly.

“Then where?”

“You are going to live in a nice, safe tower, surrounded by men who’ll do anything to ensure you’re safe. With me. That is, if you wish.”

Marán looked at me, and again I fell into the dark, warm depths of her eyes.

“I wish,” she whispered. “Oh, Damastes, how I wish.”

• • •

“This is most irregular,” Tenedos said. “But I can see your point. I don’t think you could be blackmailed even if the countess were a hostage, but there is no point in taking the chance.”

“Thank you, sir.” I was vastly relieved.

Tenedos shrugged.

“Since it’s already done, it would look even stranger if I countermanded your orders.”

“Might I suggest you consider doing the same with Baroness Rasenna? There’s more than enough room.”

“No,” Tenedos said firmly. “First, because at the moment I have no time for anything personal. Secondly, she is in no danger whatsoever.”

“Are you sure?”

“If it makes you feel better, know that I cast a certain spell using, among other things, some of my own blood. Rasenna is very safe, very invisible, even if Thak himself came seeking her. Now, please remove your long Cimabuan nose from my business!”

“Yes, sir.”

• • •

Two weeks passed, and we’d heard no word about the reinforcing units upriver. Worse, the Palace of War informed us that heliograph stations along the river were not answering signals.

Where was the army?

• • •

It was ugly riding the streets of Nicias. There was no more open violence, but only because no soldier or member of the government rode alone, but with a full escort. Bodies were still found in the streets at dawn.

It looked as if there were only two classes left in the capital: the commoners, who held the streets in sullen anger, and the gentry, who huddled in their enclaves. The merchants, clerks, traders — all the middle levels of Nicias — seemed to have either vanished or joined the lower classes, waiting for something to happen.

• • •

I started awake, hearing the chanting of many voices. Torchlight flared into my open window, and I rolled out of bed, naked, fully awake, reaching for the sword hanging from its sheath on the bedstead.

Marán sat up, sleep-dazed.

“What is it?”

I didn’t know, but I hurried to the window and peered out. Our rooms were on the third level of the tower, looking toward the city, away from the Palace of War.

The night was a sea of bobbing torches, the streets alive with marching men and women. I could hear bits of what they were chanting, but no more than a word here, a word there: “Bread … peace … down with the Rule … voice of … people. Numantia … bum or live …” and through it a thin chorus: “Saionji … Saionji … Saionji …”

Marán was beside me, wearing only the thin shift she’d been wearing when I came to bed, exhausted from work, hours after she’d retired. She leaned out the window, elbows on the sill, fascinated.

“Can you feel it, Damastes?” she whispered. “Can you feel it? The goddess is calling.”

It was just the roar of the crowd, but then it came to me,
she
came to me, the goddess, the destroyer, the Creator calling to my blood, and it stirred.

Powerful magic was abroad this night, and it moved me, and I wanted to go out, to be down there, amid the crowd, ready to rend and tear, then, from the ashes, to build a new realm, a realm of absolute freedom, where all that could be wanted was there for the taking.

Marán turned, and I saw her eyes gleam in the torchlight.

“It’s like Tenedos said,” she whispered. “A new world. A new time. I can feel it, Damastes, I can feel it like the Wheel turns. Can’t you?”

I could indeed, and it gripped me, seized me by the throat, and all the dark passions rose high, and now there might have been drums out there in the night, or it might have been my pulse, but then it changed, and it was not Saionji’s manifestation of Isa, six-headed war god, but rather Jaen, and my cock rose hard, throbbing, painful.

I was behind Marán, pulling her shift up above her waist, forcing her legs apart, and then I impaled her on my cock, burying it in one thrust, and she whimpered and Jaen took her as well, and she thrust back against me and cried out.

I pulled back, until the head of my cock was at her inner lips, then rammed forward, my hands finding her breasts, pulling her against me, and she screamed, scream buried in the crowd-roar outside, and again and again, each time thrusting deeper, reaching, tearing deeper into her body, into her soul, and I shouted as I came, gushing hot, hot as the fires inside the earth that made Thak.

After a time, time came back, and I realized I was lying half-out the window across Marán, crushing her against the sill.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “Just … give me a little warning next time. So I can put a pillow down.”

I slipped out of her, took her in my arms, and we stumbled back to the bed.

“I have the feeling,” she murmured, after we’d calmed, “I’ll be a little sore tomorrow.”

She stroked my chest.

“I think, my love, that what we just did is what I’ve heard called sex-magic. Amiel loaned me a book about it once.”

Darkness touched me for a second. “Sex-magic for who?” I asked. “Who called it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’ve never felt anything like it. And I don’t know if I want to ever again. I feel like … like we were, not used, but part of somebody that’s not us. No, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we were no more than someone’s vassal.”

The Tovieti’s sorcerers? Thak himself?

Or — and the thought made me shudder — Saionji herself? Was the goddess of destruction out there, hanging over Nicias, smiling as she saw the order that had always been tremble?

I don’t know if sex-magic was cast that night, if others were grabbed and shaken by a spell, or if it was just Marán’s and my own sudden lust.

But the next day Nicias shattered into chaos.

T
HE
F
IRES OF
N
ICIAS

There are many tales of what caused the riots. Some say a peasant’s child was ridden down by a nobleman’s carriage, others that a young girl was brutally beaten by the wardens, others that it began in a drunken bar fight between some government clerks and some carters.

I don’t doubt any of them, but I don’t believe the city erupted over a single incident — the madness spread too rapidly. There’d been too many years of the poor being neglected and downtrodden, too many years with their leaders not leading, too many years of instability, and so the city was like a pile of dry wood that a burning ember is touched to there … there … there … and the wildfire explodes.

The commoners ran rampant, burning, looting, beating, killing, and raping when they encountered an enemy, or simply someone who looked better off than they were.

The wardens fled to their stations and barricaded themselves in; the soldiers hid in the barracks; the rich cowered in their mansions; while the Rule of Ten and the Nicias Council met in emergency session and did nothing.

Again the disorders struck home. Rask, one of the Rule of Ten, Farel’s comrade, simply disappeared, and no one knows what became of him to this day. A mob sacked the Council Hall, happened on four of the city councilors, and tore them apart.

Scopas came to the tower to consult with Tenedos, and the seer told me what their conversation had been. Tenedos made the same suggestions he had before, and once again Scopas weaseled on taking such drastic steps. Perhaps, he said, since the commoners are mostly looting their own quarters, they should be let alone until their frenzy dies away.

Surprisingly, Tenedos agreed with what was happening, at least partially. “Let the poor burn their tenements and slums,” he told me. “When this is over, we’ll be able to rebuild Nicias as it is supposed to look.” That callousness shocked me, but I think I was able to hide my reaction. “But anyone who thinks this rising will run out of combustibles is a fool. The Tovieti, and Chardin Sher’s agents, will make sure that will not happen.”

The insanity grew worse and worse.

Days passed, and there was still no sign, nor word, of the soldiers who’d been summoned from the Frontiers. Tenedos tried casting a spell, but said nothing happened. It was, he said, like trying to peer through a dense fog. He said this could mean only one thing — sorcery, which meant the Tovieti were keeping the troops from the capital.

I’d had Tenedos use his emergency powers to move the Golden Helms, the Nineteenth Foot, and two other of the parade regiments into tents in Hyder Park, equidistant from our tower, the Palace of War, and the Rule of Ten’s palace, for security and as an immediate reaction force. They whined about having to forsake their comfortable brick barracks. I suspected if the rioters left them alone, they’d be quite content to sit there polishing brass and practicing empty roundelays on the parade ground until all Nicias was ashes around them. Instead, they rode, and walked, guard; and made short patrols through the city’s major thoroughfares, complaining all the while. Terrible soldiers, but they were the only game in town. At least, I wryly thought, I probably didn’t have to worry about any of the complainers being Tovieti — those would be most grateful for any chance to get close to Tenedos, the Rule of Ten, or the army staff.

It was a terrible time, and there were terrible sights.

I saw a screaming, drunken woman run into the middle of a square just as a column of the Helms rode into it. She was waving something I couldn’t distinguish. But another soldier could, and a horseman spurred his horse into a gallop, his lance dropped into position, and the woman went spinning away, blood spattering the cobbles.

The soldier pulled his lance free, and came back to us, and by that time I had my sword out, and at his throat.

“Tell me one reason,” I said, “you should not die for murder, you bastard!”

“Sir … you didn’t see what she had in her hand. Sir, it was a man’s jewels … cock an’ all!” Paying no heed to my blade, he vomited suddenly. I could not kill him, but at least I told Troop Guide Karjan to deal with him later. Perhaps I should have slain the man. I don’t know.

I told Marán some of what I saw in my daily rounds, but not about the emasculator. No woman of her youth should know about such evil. I just considered that thought, and realize how foolish it is. No one of
any
age or
any
sex should be subjected to what we went through in those days.

After a week, the city was paralyzed. But that was not enough. Now the Tovieti moved out, smoothly taking command of the mob.

They didn’t bum their own hovels anymore, but rather sent raiding expeditions into the rich parts of Nicias. Stores miles from the slums were ripped apart and fired. There was no doubt as to who was leading the rabble — bodies would be carefully left for the patrols to find, always with the yellow silk cord around their throats.

Next signs appeared, scrawled huge on walls demarcating certain districts like Chicherin. Sometimes they held messages:

Or sometimes it was simpler, just a scrawled, twisting line in yellow.

“Quite interesting,” Tenedos observed. “The Tovieti’s progress would make an excellent case study. First chaos, then strike directly against the enemy, then delineate your own territory, where you’ll make the laws and customs. They’ll keep the pressure on us, making sure the Rule of Ten never have a chance to take a deep breath, let alone think or listen to what I’m trying to tell them. As the days pass the Tovieti will gain recruits, since all mankind flocks to join a winner. When they think they’re strong enough, then they’ll come for us. Fascinating.

“What puzzles me is who was the mastermind of this plan? It isn’t Thak — no demon, no matter how powerful, could be expected to understand the affairs of man so closely. Nor would it be Chardin Sher or his errand boy Malebranche.

“It could only be that unknown being who first summoned Thak to carry out his dreams for mankind.

“It is a pity Thak slew him, for now I know that must be the case, or he would have resurfaced and tried to bring his juggernaut under control.

“I wish I’d known the man, for his ideas are most interesting.”

I rather hoped Thak had spent a long time enjoying himself with his master before letting him return to the Wheel, and that it would be many tuntings before Irisu allowed him to reincarnate as anything above a slime-worm.

The nobility were almost as insane with terror as the mob was with blood lust. They would hire, and pay any amount, for the services of a man who owned a sword and promised to keep them alive. Naturally, some of these men, and I heard of a few women as well, were phonies or, worse, thieves who used this trust for opportunity. And some of them were Tovieti.

Mahal, hurrying home to his lustful young wife, was pulled from his carriage and strangled by his own bodyguard. The man was cut down by Mahal’s driver, but the Rule of Ten was now seven strong.

No one had much time to mourn Mahal. In the predawn hours of the next morning the rabble formed around the barracks of the Second Heavy Cavalry, whose domina had refused to deploy them closer to the palace. The sentries were silenced, and men with torches, pikes, and strangling cords slid into the compound.

The unit woke to screams, flame, and death. Perhaps one or two of the 700 men of the Second Cavalry managed to escape. If so, none of them ever returned to the army. In less than three hours, an entire regiment of the Numantian Army was obliterated. This had never happened in all the army’s proud history, at least not for the last thousand years records had been kept.