And burying, too, the closest thing to eternal love this world would ever see.
“If I may say so,” Havarren offered, “now was not the most opportune time for this sort of governmental upheaval.”
Very slowly, the Charnel King raised his head from the map he'd been studying. He carefully rolled the parchment and returned it to its ivory scroll case. Only when that process was complete did he rise to his feet, turning to address his impertinent lieutenant.
“Do you think so?” he asked simply.
Anyone else would have been cowed into silence, and possibly into catatonia, by that icy tone. But this was the first chance Havarren had had to speak directly to his lord in the days since Castle Eldritch fell, and he'd been looking forward to it with sadistic glee. It was a rare opportunity, and the gaunt wizard was damned if he was going to let it pass.
Of course, he was pretty much damned regardless, being what he was, but that was beside the point.
“Indeed,” Havarren said, his voice as calm as though they'd been discussing something utterly insignificant, such as the weather or the execution of a thousand elves. “With this war coming up, we need stability. Not to mention the fact that we must now do without one of our most powerful spellcasters.” He was careful to keep his grin modest, rather than letting it spread ear to ear as it wished, when he added, “The next time you feel the need to murder your wife, perhaps you might consult with your advisors first. One of us might have suggested an alternative.”
The scroll case in Morthûl's right hand shattered into slivers. Still he said nothing.
“Did the entire squad survive?” the mage asked curiously. “I would have thought—”
“The squad survived. Their trainer did not.”
“Shreckt? Pity. He had potential. Of course, had Anne completed her spell, he would have died anyway, so I suppose there was no help for it.”
And then the Charnel King smiled. “Yes, Shreckt would have died. As talented as my wife was, I fear her thinking was still bound by certain conventional beliefs. Everyone who attempts that rite seems to believe that the demon's death is required in order to bind its soul as part of the spell. You and I learned better ages ago, didn't we, Havarren?”
The wizard's smirk fell so abruptly that it almost made an audible thump as it hit the floor and skittered away into the corner. “Do not,” the Dark Lord said in a voice barely above a whisper, “seek to taunt me about Anne's death. I may need you alive, but we both know what sort of agony I can inflict upon you at a whim. I own you; you are a part of me, for all time. Forget that again, and I will make your next thousand centuries a living…” He paused, considering. “Heaven,” he concluded with a faint chuckle.
“Now,” he continued, turning back to the desk. Carefully, he laid the map out once again and began brushing shards of ivory from its surface, taking care not to rip the parchment. “I assume you had reasons for seeking an audience other than your desire to make foolish comments about my queen.”
“I did,” Havarren said, shaking off his growing rage. His circumstances had been thus for hundreds of years; throwing a tantrum about it now would accomplish nothing. “There are several issues at hand, actually.
“First, Dororam's forces have ambushed another of our patrols.”
Morthûl scowled. Ever since the foe had begun assaulting the new guard posts that were supposed to have been secret, General Falchion had become obsessed with outmaneuvering Dororam and had begun assigning wandering patrols to the passes. This was the fourth of his teams ambushed in the two weeks since the demise of Queen Anne.
“We have a spy, Havarren,” the Dark Lord said, offhandedly examining a jagged sliver of ivory between his thumb and forefinger.
“I'd come to much the same conclusion.”
“I was certain you would have. I assume we can rule out a leak at the top?”
Havarren paused for a moment. “I believe so. General Falchion and I are special cases, of course, and your other generals know what methods you would employ in questioning them were you to suspect treason. No price could make them risk it.”
“Agreed. Someone of lower rank, then.”
The mage nodded. “Someone who feels that he need not fear discovery, because he's not liable to deal with you or me personally.” He smiled, though there was no humor in the expression. “Of course, that only narrows it down to about the entire army.”
“Get on it, Havarren. These raids are…inconvenient. They're unlikely to matter in the long run, but let's not take chances. I want the spy found.”
“Consider it done, my lord.”
“No. When you hand me the traitor, I'll consider it done.” Morthûl absently tossed the sliver of ivory to the floor. “You said there were several issues?”
“I did.” For the first time in ages, Havarren sounded unsure of how to proceed. “We, umm. We seem to have lost Darsus.”
“Lost it? The town's dying, Havarren, but I hardly think it's shrunk to the point where you might easily misplace it.”
“As you say, it's dying. Most travelers on the highway bypass it outright. So we didn't learn of this immediately.”
“You're stalling, Havarren.”
“Sabryen took it. As best we can tell, every man, woman, and child in the town has been, well, wormed.”
“Wormed?”
“So to speak, my lord.”
“The whole town?”
“It wasn't that big a town, my lord.”
“Why wasn't this news the first thing out of your mouth when you walked through that door?”
Havarren might have felt better if the Charnel King had screamed at him. The whole “calm and quiet” bit rarely boded well. “I knew it would consume all your attentions, and I wanted to make sure I had the chance to tell you of the spy.”
“And take the opportunity to taunt me, of course.” The Charnel King shook his head, sending a few stray beetles plunging to the floor. “I should have killed him,” he muttered to himself.
“King Sabryen? Why didn't you?”
“I was young, Havarren. Relatively, anyway. I still maintained relations with others in the wizards’ community, and curses were all the rage at the time…” Another head shake. “Ah, well. You know how it is.” Skeletal fingers drummed on the desk with an idle clacking. “The timing on this is suspicious, at best. Sabryen just happens to awaken now, with sufficient power to spread beyond his tomb? I think not. I sense an outside hand stirring this particular pot.”
“DuMark?” Havarren asked.
“Who else? I have to admit, it's clever. He forces me to split my attentions, waste my energies, without putting himself at risk. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were to learn that he's responsible for our spy as well, and probably half a dozen other little inconveniences we haven't even noticed.
“Well, we'll have to deal with it. I didn't kill Sabryen then, but I certainly don't object to killing him now. Especially if he's chosen this moment to move against me, with or without duMark's prodding.”
“Perhaps he hopes to take back his kingdom,” Havarren suggested.
“No. Sabryen is no longer in any condition to rule; not a kingdom of men, anyway. He may be mad enough to turn the entire population into those creatures of his, though. In either case, he's a nuisance that I'd best rid myself of now—before the war, and before he grows into something much more than a nuisance.”
“And you have a plan?”
“Havarren, haven't you learned by now? I always have a plan.”
Cræosh slumped against the nearest vertical surface—the side of a coach, in this particular instance—and sank slowly to his knees, gasping for breath. He was exhausted, he was coated in blood (albeit mostly other people's), and his ribs ached from where they'd cracked against Queen Anne's shelving. He felt as though he'd started running then—as the tower came down around them, shaken apart by the wrath of the Charnel King—and hadn't stopped since.
Gork's plan of escape, he'd been force
d to admit, had been a good one. Rather than try to race the collapse all the way to the bottom, he'd led them down a single flight, back to Queen Anne's bedchamber—and the mystical door to her Majesty's carriage. Whether it was designed to function despite the wards, or Morthûl's arrival had shattered those barriers, the Demon Squad neither knew nor cared. The fact that it worked, that it got them outside, was enough. Even then, though, it had been a near thing; with the queen's death, her magics had faded as well. Cræosh had just staggered from the carriage, falling prone in the royal stables, when the enchantments inside the vehicle collapsed. The interior instantly shrunk to its normal size, crushing the furniture and everything else within.
The goblins had remained within those stables for a time, mostly because Cræosh refused to move. They'd watched from across the wide courtyard as the people gawped in horror at the crumbling central tower, which took much of the keep proper with it. A few random stones had bounced as far as the stables, ringing loudly against the walls, but even that wasn't enough to entice Cræosh to get up, and the danger was sufficiently slight that the others chose not to abandon him.
A swift flash of sickly yellow light had blinded them, sending the already-skittish horses into a near panic, and Belrotha was there, hunched to avoid driving her skull through the ceiling.
“Uh…king say him not sure what to do with us just now,” she'd reported. “Him say we work for General Falcon until him say different.”
“General Falchion?” Gimmol corrected, climbing out of the haystack into which he'd dived when the light first flared and moving to hug Belrotha's calf.
“Um, yeah,” she said, patting the goblin (very, very carefully) on the head. “Him too.”
Thus they'd spent the past days dashing madly across the length and breadth of Kirol Syrreth, alongside the steel-enclosed figure who stood at the head of Morthûl's armies. Inspecting this outpost, reassigning that garrison, collecting reports from those messengers, Falchion performed the sundry tasks necessary to prepare for the coming war. The Demon Squad, apparently out of favor for the nonce—Right, like it's our fault Queen Anne was a fucking loony, Cræosh seethed—had become little more than glorified bodyguards, a small fragment of Falchion's larger escort. The horses they'd been provided made the constant travel a little easier, but Cræosh still cursed King Morthûl—silently, of course—every evening before collapsing into his bedroll.
(The horse wasn't born that could carry Belrotha, and as the armies of Kirol Syrreth had apparently run short of elephants, the ogre had to walk. So far, however, she'd had no difficulties keeping up, and in fact she was a lot less sore than the riders every evening.)
Falchion, too, had proved something other than expected. During his years of military service, Cræosh had always heard the general described as a gruff loudmouth, tolerated only by the powers that be because he was damn good at his job. The orc had seen none of this for himself, though; during the twelve days they'd traveled together, Falchion barely spoke at all, save when necessary to growl his orders. His voice was hoarse, gravelly, not at all the bellow of a man accustomed to making himself heard across the battlefield. Most peculiarly of all, he never removed his bloodred mail, nor his jagged bucket helm, not even to sleep. Cræosh kept meaning to bring it up, ask his squadmates what they thought, but when evening came, he was always too tired, too sore, and frankly too uninterested in making casual conversation with any of them.
The attack came about an hour before noon on the twelfth day. The squad had been riding near the column's head, so Cræosh overheard Falchion launch into an uncharacteristic cursing streak. A messenger on a fast horse, both of them lathered and sweating despite the winter chill, had caught up with the column moments before, and it was pretty obvious that the news he brought was not good. Cræosh glanced over at Katim and Gork, both of whom were riding to his left.
“Something about some secret…patrols being ambushed,” Katim rasped, her powerful ears swiveled toward their commander. “Dororam's men knew exactly where…to find them.”
For reasons Cræosh couldn't begin to guess, Gork flinched.
The orc opened his mouth to say something, and that's when they were hit. A rain of arrows arced from a nearby copse of trees, and only the fact that they were mounted saved the three of them from becoming inverse porcupines. Reflexes honed by years of combat—or, in Gork's case, years of constructive cowardice—prompted them to drop beneath their horses. The unfortunate animals had taken the arrows in their stead, squealing and thrashing their death throes as they toppled.
Even as the next flight of arrows darkened the sky, the goblins surged from behind the fallen animals and charged, the surviving members of the column close on their heels. Abandoning their bows, the ambushers moved to meet them.
They wore no uniforms, no insignias, but Cræosh thought it bloody obvious that these were Dororam's men. With a sinking feeling in his gut, he realized that this suicide squad—for they must surely have known there could be no escape from the Charnel King's forces once they penetrated the Brimstone Mountains—would not have attacked just any random caravan. They had to have known exactly who they were waiting for.
Someone tipped them off to General Falchion's itinerary.
Falchion himself led the counterattack, slashing furiously with his curved blade. He seemed oblivious to any danger, taking blows on his armor that should have knocked a normal man off his feet if not broken bones and ruptured organs, but he never balked, never slowed.
In the end they won, but at a fearsome cost. In addition to the Demon Squad and Falchion himself, their column had originally consisted of sixty men. When the last of the attackers fell, his face split wide by Katim's axe, only eight of those men remained on their feet, and only seven of the ones who had fallen could be saved. The ambushers had planned perfectly; fully half of Falchion's men went down in the first rain of missiles.
Leaning against the provision-and-supply wagon, having finally caught his wind, Cræosh scanned the battlefield. For better or worse, the entire squad had survived relatively unscathed. Say what you will about us, but we're some tough bastards, aren't we? He actually felt proud.
Grass crunched beneath a heavy tread, and Cræosh snapped to attention, ignoring the twinge of protest in his ribs. His jaw opened—ready to offer some report or salute or whatever happened to emerge—and stayed open, hanging as loose as when Queen Anne had nearly broken it.
General Falchion didn't seem to have noticed, but a swath of chain had been ripped from his hauberk in the battle, and what lay beneath looked to have been scraped off a stove. “Burned” was woefully inadequate; the flesh was charred black, save for a few glistening cracks where it had split to reveal the muscle beneath. Even worse, there was a smoothness to it. It looked, Cræosh realized with a lurch, as though it had been literally melted and then allowed to jell into a form almost matching what it had held before. He could see, too, where rivulets of viscous flesh had oozed between the links of chain before hardening. Falchion never removed his armor because he couldn't.
Following the orc's gaze to the rent in his armor, Falchion shook his head. The movement was scarcely visible, causing the great helm to rotate only a bit. “I'll have to find a competent blacksmith in the next town,” he said. “Unless…You're a smith yourself, aren't you, soldier?”
“Um, passingly, sir. But ah, I’m not sure I'd dare. Wouldn't I have to work on it while, um…?”
“While I wore it, yes.”
“Wouldn't that fucking hurt?” Probably not the proper language for addressing the general, but Cræosh was, well, Cræosh.
“What is pain to me now?” Falchion lifted a stray arrow from the grass at his feet and plunged it into the flesh exposed by the severed links. He didn't flinch, and no blood emerged—only a puff of fetid air, as though he'd punctured a pocket trapped somewhere within.
“Is everyone running this country already dead?” Cræosh demanded. Then, “Um, sir,” he added. He'd heard rumors that the ge
neral had been badly injured recently—something about an incursion into the Iron Keep itself—but he'd never believed, never imagined…
“King Morthûl,” Falchion said dully, “takes our oaths of fealty very seriously. You might do well to remember that yourself.”
“I…Oh.” Then, “I, uh, should probably see to gathering all the salvageable equipment off the field, sir.”
“Splendid idea, soldier. Why don't you do that?”
Some few dozen yards away, Gork wandered from corpse to corpse, happily looting. He took only small items that wouldn't be missed—money and ornamental jewelry, for the most part—and he stole indiscriminately, regardless of which side the dead man had served. This was the part that made such skirmishes worthwhile, and the kobold found himself humming.
Until a hand yanked him off his feet and tossed him against the nearest tree. The breath exploded from Gork's lungs; his head rang like a drunken church bell, and the treasures he'd just collected slid to the ground from loosened fists. Gork looked up to see a trio of trolls, their features black, silhouetted by the noonday sun. He blinked, willing his eyes to uncross, and the trio of Katims merged back into one.
“What the hell was that for?” Gork mumbled, wincing as his own voice poked and prodded at the pounding in his head.
Katim bent down, putting her face inches from his. Gork fought the instinct to recoil from the troll's rancid breath. “Don't you think that this…has gone just about far…enough?”
The kobold focused past the pain to scrunch his face into a look of pure innocence. “What do you mean?”
The troll snarled, and Gork smacked his own head against the tree again as he flinched. “Don't play stupid with me, little…thief. You know damn well what…I’m talking about.”
“It's a coincidence,” Gork insisted.
“You told him about the…patrols. The ones that were…later ambushed.”
“I only mentioned that I'd heard they were out there. I didn't know exactly where, so how could I have told him?”