War of Shadows (33 page)

He shrugged. “I brought it to give to you, but it can’t work in the presence of these amulets,” he said, as if that settled the matter. “It must be attuned to you, something that can only be
done in your presence.” He paused. “It’s of no consequence. I can take it back with me.”

Carensa could almost hear Lysander’s internal struggle. Greed glinted in his eyes, and she knew Quintrel had been cagey enough to determine what Lysander would find irresistible. After a moment, Lysander nodded.

“You may remove your amulets,” Lysander said, and Carensa guessed that caution had lost out to avarice. Once again, Carensa thought she saw the barest glimmer of the
divi
orb, but it was gone as soon as she blinked.

Carensa felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from her chest as she removed the amulet and set it aside. Guran also wasted no time removing the talisman, nor did Quintrel. Lysander’s guards felt compelled to move a step closer from their stations along the walls, but the warlord motioned for them to stand down.

“Show me,” Lysander rumbled.

Quintrel reached inside his coat and withdrew a velvet pouch with elaborate, arcane embroidery in golden thread. “Quite literally, a gift worthy of a king,” Quintrel said, holding it aloft.

“Just think: the power of Randuvil the Destroyer, for you,” he said, staring at the pouch in awe.

I’ll give him credit: Quintrel’s a showman
, Carensa thought. Quintrel was reeling in Lysander like an expert fisherman, and from the naked desire in the warlord’s eyes, the bait was working.

“Mage! Your assistance is required.” Lysander’s voice brought Hastins to the forefront. “Test this item with your magic. Tell me what you find.”

Carensa held her breath. If Hastins had parted faith with Quintrel, there was no way a mage of any power could help but sense the
divi
’s presence. Hastins’s betrayal would mean certain death for her and for Quintrel.

Hastins looked bored, even slightly contemptuous, as he reached out to take the pouch from Quintrel. He weighed the velvet pouch in his hand, passing his other palm above it, then closed his eyes, as if focusing his magic. After a moment of silence, Hastins looked to Lysander.

“He speaks the truth,” Hastins said. “The amulet is as he has told you. I sense no ill intent.” Hastins handed the pouch back to Quintrel as if it were of little interest.

“Give it to me.” Lysander’s voice was husky with hunger.

“As you wish,” Quintrel said, making a shallow bow. Somehow he managed to keep his glee from showing in his face. Lysander was falling for it, just as Quintrel knew he would. And Hastins was in on it, Carensa realized, Quintrel’s man on the inside.

Of course
, she thought.
Hastins was Quintrel’s infiltrator. He’s working with Quintrel to make Lysander trust the orb, and he lied about the amulet being safe because Quintrel told him to lie. That’s also how Quintrel could make a
divi
orb tied to Lysander—Hastins supplied him with something of Lysander’s in order to bind him
.

Quintrel withdrew a small crystal orb much like his own
divi
sphere. This orb was much smaller, its surface etched with sigils and runes. Carensa could read the magical language. The markings would bend the sphere’s wearer to Quintrel’s will. Instead of a leather strap, the new orb was on a length of braided silken cord.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Quintrel said with a sigh, as if he were looking on the face of a lover. Lysander’s gaze fixed on the orb, which as of yet showed none of the
divi
’s spark.

“My lord Lysander,” Quintrel said, presenting the orb and its pouch with a flourish.

“Just imagine, m’lord,” Quintrel continued. “You will become Randuvil’s heir. Generations will celebrate your victories. Your name will be legend.”

Lysander lifted the small orb and peered at it. “I see nothing extraordinary,” he said, giving Quintrel a piercing look.

“That’s because it must be activated to your personal energies,” Quintrel replied with a smile. “It will attune itself once you wear it.”

For a moment, Lysander looked conflicted, as if some inner warning fought with his desire for immortality. Greed won, and Lysander slipped the silken cord around his neck. The small orb lay on his breastbone, and after a few breaths, a yellow light flickered from its depths. At the same instant, Carensa saw an answering glimmer from the
divi
orb beneath Quintrel’s tunic.

“The orb is your protector,” Quintrel advised. “Never remove it. It will not only extend your life and give you luck, it will guide your decisions and visit your dreams with secrets that will allow you to rule over other men.”

And it will worm its way into your brain and your soul, putting you entirely under the control of Vigus Quintrel
, Carensa thought. From the unabashed avarice in Lysander’s eyes, she concluded he was a man who had made more than one Raka’s bargain in his life.

“A royal gift indeed,” Lysander replied as one hand absently stroked the orb. The
divi
had begun its work. He looked to Quintrel, and the hardened glint came back to his black eyes. “What boon do you ask in exchange?”

Always ask the cost first
, Carensa thought, though she did not think Lysander worth her pity.
Never trust a mage’s gifts
.

“A place at the table, m’lord,” Quintrel said, playing to Lysander’s self-importance. Carensa marveled that Quintrel
could set aside his own grand opinion of himself long enough to be someone else’s lickspittle, but she guessed the mage had decided the outcome was worth the temporary abasement.

“When you come into your power, dominating the other warlords, I ask that you name mages to your council. We would advise and protect you, and in return, be protected by your power,” Quintrel asked with such a convincing show of humility that Carensa thought she might retch.

“And what of Rostivan?” Lysander asked, a canny look coming into his black eyes.

“Surely you will need clever proxies to wield your power and subdue dissent,” Quintrel replied. “Lord Rostivan and I discussed such matters before my party set out. He acknowledges your primacy, and wishes to serve in the role to which he is best suited: as a military man enforcing order.”

“And Rostivan would accept that?” Lysander said shrewdly. “He fights hard for a man who doesn’t want to be king himself.”

Quintrel did not hesitate. “There are many ways to wield power,” he answered. “Rostivan is a man born to do battle. He has no love for administration, for council meetings and court ceremonies. Honor him as your foremost general, and he will have the power and prestige he desires.”

Clever
, Carensa thought.
Quintrel sets Lysander up as the would-be king without saying so, and positions Rostivan as his right-hand military commander and himself as the king’s left hand
. As much as Carensa had grown to dislike Quintrel, she could not deny his brilliance.

“And if I decide to accept your gift, and deny your request?” Lysander asked, growing suspicious too late in the process.

Quintrel gave his most unassuming smile. “You’re not the kind of man who makes a misstep like that,” he said mildly. “Together, we are invincible. You’ve gained your power by
choosing your allies wisely. This alliance will make you the supreme power in Donderath—a kingdom to shape to your liking,” he added. “I assure you, m’lord, you will gain the victory you so richly deserve,” Quintrel said confidently.

Funny
, Carensa thought,
Lysander believes that’s a good thing
. But she had a suspicion that the reality of Lysander’s victory would be exactly, and mercilessly, what he deserved.

B
RING THOSE HORSES AROUND!” VEDRAN POLLARD
shouted above the din of battle. It felt good to swing a sword again, to be back in the thick of the fight. Battle made him feel alive, unlike the slow administrative death of overseeing Solsiden.

Soldiers reined in their mounts to comply, and the line shifted as Pollard pressed the Arkala forces for ground. Rostivan had weakened the Arkalas, and Pollard had mustered his troops quickly, so that before the weary and bloodied Arkala forces could return to their fortifications, they found an army standing in their path.

Pollard brought his sword down hard. His blade bit through the foot soldier’s leather armor and into the sinew and tendon of his shoulder. He fell to the side, his blood soaking the dry winter grass.

Pollard’s soldiers cut their way through the Arkala front line, leaving a wake of corpses and severed limbs behind them.

This is where I belong
, Pollard thought, though his muscles ached with every jarring blow. All of his disappointment with Reese found its way into the honed steel blade.
Insufferable
talishte
son of a bitch, leaves me to clean up his mess
, he ranted to himself as his sword rose and fell, splattering his cloak with blood.

Reese left me to take the fall, to handle the war he started, to deal with his sorry brood
. Anger coursed through Pollard’s blood, winning out over fatigue, over pain.
And then his damn bond curses me to feel his wounds
, Pollard’s mental tirade continued as he slashed his way through the infantry.
I did not fight this hard to be some biter’s lackey!

Perhaps the best of the Arkala troops had fallen in their battle with Rostivan. That would be a charitable excuse for the poor showing the soldiers made, and the slaughter Pollard’s forces dealt out. Pollard soldiers were intent on making an example of the Arkala troops, giving no quarter.

Pollard’s body knew the rhythm of battle. His sword rose and fell, like a scythe winnowing the harvest. Being on horseback in the thick of the fight, awash in the battlefield smell of blood and offal, surrounded by the cacophony of steel on steel and men’s death cries, this was what Pollard had missed in those gray weeks at Solsiden.

“Don’t let them get past you!” he shouted, rallying his men when the line left too much room between riders.

He had brought only a portion of his army, and still they outnumbered the Arkala forces. The doomed men fought with valor. Few tried to run, and Pollard’s men rode those cowards down, trampling them with their warhorses’ heavy iron shoes. The other soldiers fought with fury.
Hopeless pawns
, he thought, watching as line after line of advancing troops fell to the sword.

“Bring me the Arkala twins!” Pollard thundered.

In the distance, he heard trumpets sound retreat, but for the press of soldiers already committed to battle, the reprieve
sounded too late. As the men behind them ran for their lives, the men in the front lines knew they could die fighting or die fleeing. They hurled themselves at Pollard and his men, slashing wildly with their blades, tearing at the horses and their bridles with bloodied hands, their faces twisted in rage.

Pollard’s horse shied as one of the enemy soldiers dove toward it, sword upraised. Pollard reined in his mount, veering sharply, and thrust with his sword, using the soldier’s own momentum to gut him like a fish. The man’s entrails spilled onto his boots, steaming in the cold spring air, and his sword clattered from his hand as the soldier grabbed for his guts, pressing them against his slit belly, his mouth opening and closing as he fell to his knees.

Another soldier came at Pollard from the left, shouting obscenities. Pollard pivoted his horse, angling his sword to take the running man through the slit of his visor, feeling the bite as steel connected with bone. He had barely yanked his blade free as the man tumbled to the ground, jerking spasmodically.

Pollard brought his horse up onto its hind legs, then let it plunge down, heavy hooves crushing the dying man, sending a spray of gore that coated the horse’s underbelly and sent gobbets sliding down Pollard’s slick black boots.

“A gold piece and a cask of ale for anyone who brings me the Arkala twins!” Pollard shouted, his voice raw. Gold had little worth in the wreckage that was Donderath, but ale held its value. The challenge seemed to inspire the troops, who left off trampling the abandoned front line and sent their horses charging after the retreating troops.

Poor dumb bastards
, Pollard thought as he watched the fleeing army. Hennoch’s troops waited just beyond the rise, poised to cut them down. Pollard smiled grimly. He had sent Hennoch
and his men in a flanking maneuver two days before provoking the battle. According to his spies, three thousand Arkala troops had gone against Rostivan’s troops and Quintrel’s mages. Fifteen hundred had limped away, burned and bloodied. Pollard was ready to finish the battle.

Arkala commanders shouted orders above the chaos, but their men were too panicked to respond. Some threw down their weapons and fled. Pollard watched them run, knowing what awaited them.

After today, the Arkala brothers will no longer pose a threat
.

Pollard left it to his own foot soldiers to work their way among dead and dying enemy soldiers, slitting throats and looting bodies. His horse picked its way among the corpses as if the stench of death offended it.

Some of the Arkala troops fled east. Pollard let them run. A few of Pollard’s soldiers made a sport of chasing after the terrified foot soldiers, herding them back and forth between their horses like cattle, letting them gain ground and then closing the gap. They rode up behind the terrified soldiers, jabbing them with the point of their swords before riding the hapless bastards down. The last hopes of the desperate retreat were dashed by the solid line of Hennoch’s fresh troops, armed and mounted, ready to mete out judgment.

“Bring me the twins, and it will go that much easier on the rest of you,” Pollard shouted.

Some of the Arkala troops, seeing a fresh army before them, sank to their knees in surrender. Others launched a suicide attack, unwilling to go down without a fight. In the center of the fray, still surrounded by their doomed troops, were two dark-haired soldiers fighting with a skill and intensity that set them apart. It was impossible to dismiss them as mere conscripts.

“Take them!” Pollard bellowed. “I want the Arkala twins alive!”

Pollard’s troops converged on the two men, who were battling for their lives. The Arkala loyalists rallied around their commanders, fighting in vain to hold off wave upon wave of enemies, only to fall beneath the flash of swords and axes. The Arkalas were fighting back-to-back, massively outnumbered.

Pollard signaled impatiently to one of the mages who had ridden up behind him. “Those two,” he said, pointing. “I want them.”

It would be like the willful twins to deny him his victory by cutting each other down
, Pollard thought. He was not about to be denied. The mage went still, his brow furrowed in concentration, and brought his outstretched hands in a loud clap. Across the battlefield, the Arkala twins fell as if poleaxed.

“Bring them to me!” Pollard’s ragged voice carried across the distance.

Soldiers piled onto the downed warlords, binding their hands behind their back. Two guards dragged the Arkala twins roughly to their feet as the others kept the last desperate enemy soldiers at bay as their leaders were dragged away.

Pollard watched the two captives with little sense of triumph.
A turn of fortune, and the roles could be reversed
, he thought. At this point, nearing his fifth decade, Pollard had few illusions left.
We’re all captives of one sort or another
.

At sword’s point, the twins fell to their knees, defiance clear in their faces. “We do not yield to you,” the twin on the left snarled. Birth made them identical; war distinguished them. The twin who spoke had a flattened nose and a scar that cut across his left eyebrow. The other twin had lost part of an ear
and had a deep cleft in his cheek that was the reminder of a long-ago sword stroke.

“It matters nothing to me whether you yield or not,” Pollard replied. “Your forces are dead or dying. And soon, you will join them in the Unseen Realm.”

“Go to Raka,” the second twin growled. “Death in battle carries no shame.”

Pollard stared at his captives, debating the question he had mulled throughout the battle.
I could drag them back to Solsiden in chains, break their bodies, perhaps even have
talishte
turn them. Could their spirits be broken? In time, all can. But is there an advantage to it greater than slaughtering them here? Either way, they become martyrs. And either way, they’re dead
.

“You’ve failed,” Pollard said, his voice as cold as the harsh wind. “Your men are dead. Those who ran like cowards met General Hennoch over the next rise. No army will survive you, no one will be left to sing your praises or venerate your name. It ends here.”

He swung his sword for the twin on the right, and the blade bit into the man’s neck, jerking as it encountered the bone and tendon. Pollard did not strike again, and the prisoner fell to one side, blood darkening his armor, body quivering, denied a quick and painless death.

The other Arkala twin paled, but his expression remained defiant. “I am not afraid to die.”

“Good,” Pollard remarked. He swung again, angling the sword so that it hit the spine at the base of the skull but did not cut through the throat. The last Arkala brother toppled slowly. His spine was severed where it would paralyze his body from the throat down, stopping his breath and stilling his heart. But it would take a bit for the realization to reach his mind, which
would be the last to go. Pollard saw a range of emotions flicker in the dying man’s eyes. Rage, at being cut down. Defiance, even now. Mortal terror of the darkness that lay beyond the light vanishing from his eyes.

“Take the bodies,” Pollard ordered, cleaning his sword on the cloak of one of the dead men. “Post them in gibbets outside Solsiden. It’s cold enough, they’ll keep for quite a while, I think.” With that, he turned his back and swung up on his horse.

Back in camp, Pollard walked to his tent, cheered by his men for their victory over the Arkala forces. Pollard acknowledged their cheers with a distracted wave, intent on reaching his tent before he collapsed.

A guard parted the flaps for him, and Pollard nodded his thanks. Once the flaps dropped, hiding him from the view of outsiders, Pollard staggered. Kerr rushed to him, getting under his shoulder and helping him to his campaign chair near the brazier in the center of the tent.

“M’lord, are you injured?” Kerr’s concern was clear in his face.

Pollard gasped in pain as Kerr rushed to remove his armor. The wounds he had taken in battle did not warrant more than the requisite attention. Pollard had long grown accustomed to the sting and ache of battle damage. But as Kerr lifted his cuirass and then removed his tunic, it was plain that his chest and arms were a seeping mass of boils, with the raw wound over his chest now festering.

“Oh, m’lord,” Kerr moaned, voicing the anguish Pollard’s pride would not let him articulate.

“Whiskey,” Pollard groaned. Kerr went to the side table and
filled a glass four fingers full, then returned and pressed it into Pollard’s hand. Pollard knocked it back in two gulps, gasping as the raw liquor burned down his throat.

“I can get you the healer—” Kerr began.

Pollard shook his head. “There’s no cure for this, save Reese’s escape,” he said, his voice gravelly from the damp and the whiskey. “Even magic won’t help.” Pollard had broken down and allowed one of the healers to try. But even the magic could not heal or help his sympathetic wounds from Reese.

“Let me see what I can do,” Kerr said, and he began to bustle around the tent, removing the items from the trunk at the foot of Pollard’s cot that he would need to make the poultice. Before a candlemark was gone, Kerr had applied an unguent and bound up all of the affected skin, then helped Pollard slip into a loose tunic that would neither aggravate his wounds nor reveal them to an onlooker.

“How long can this go on?” Kerr asked, pressing a fresh glass into Pollard’s hand.

“Fifty years,” Pollard replied matter-of-factly. “Or until we can find a way to free my… master.” He hated the word, but there was none other that would suffice. When the bond of thralldom was cinched so tightly that to wound one was to scar the other, it was time to forgo euphemisms.

“Eat,” Kerr chided. “To survive this, you must remain strong.”

Kerr ducked his head out of the tent for a moment and spoke a word to the soldiers, then returned. “They’ll have a hot trencher for you as quickly as a runner can retrieve it,” he said, fussing like a mother hen.

Pollard let him fuss. He was too exhausted to object, and his body was wounded more than his pride. Although he had not taken serious damage in the fight, his joints and muscles ached
in ways they had not when he was a younger man. Armor had blocked the worst of the strikes, but the bruises from those blows would blossom in shades of blue and purple, aching to the bone for weeks. Even riding, something he had loved ever since he could sit a horse, now meant that he would fight stiffness in his legs for days.
There’s a reason warriors die young
, he thought.