Five Hundred Years After (Phoenix Guards) Read online

  At the same time, one of Aerich’s opponents, startled, dropped her guard for an instant—and an instant later her head was swept from her body, which motion, in turn, distracted one of those fighting Pel, who paid for this error with a wound in the thigh that caused him to fall to the ground, holding his leg. Tazendra’s opponents both stepped back, watching.

  Grita, taking Greycat’s hand in hers, screamed again, and then began sobbing noisily.

  Tazendra took a quick look around, and said, “Your leader has fallen, but you are still five to four; come, what do you say? Shall we have at it? Ah, you are useless,” this last because the five of them, as if by consensus, turned and followed Theen, the one of Khaavren’s enemies who, if the reader recalls, had been allowed to run. At about this time, the brigand who had been kneeling during the entire contest at last sighed and pitched forward onto his face.

  Khaavren’s friends gathered around the Captain, who stood, panting and watching Greycat and Grita. Not a word was spoken among them, but Khaavren was made to sit while Tazendra poured water into his mouth and Pel bound up his hand.

  Aerich cleaned his weapons and sheathed them, then knelt next to Grita, who was now crying silently, and said, “Your father?”

  She nodded.

  “You are a half-breed, aren’t you? He was a Tsalmoth; of what House is your mother?”

  She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to; when she glanced up at the Lyorn, he was able to see. “A Dzurlord,” he remarked.

  “How!” said Tazendra, standing up and approaching them. “Her mother a Dzurlord?”

  “Look at her chin, at her eyebrows, at her ears.”

  Grita said nothing.

  “Who?” said Tazendra. “Who is your mother?”

  Grita did not speak.

  Greycat, or, if the reader prefers, Garland, opened his mouth as if to say something, but only blood came forth. He then glanced at Khaavren, giving him a look of hatred impossible to describe, looked up at Grita, and, after coughing for a moment, took his last bloody breath and died.

  Grita dropped his hand, stood up slowly, gave a long, slow, careful look, as full of hatred as her father’s had been, and then turned and walked away. She took one of the horses upon which Khaavren and his friends had arrived, untethered it, mounted, and rode quickly away in the same direction as the brigands.

  Tazendra took a step toward her, but Aerich held out his hand. “We don’t need them; let her go.”

  Tazendra shrugged. “Very well,” she said.

  “Khaavren, can you walk?” said Pel.

  The Tiassa took a deep breath and rose shakily to his feet. “Yes,” he announced. “Of course I can walk. I have an arrest to make.”

  Chapter the Thirty-third

  Which Treats, Once Again, of Regicide,

  With Special Emphasis on Its Consequences.

  THE READER OUGHT TO UNDERSTAND that the entire battle took less time in the event than it takes to read it—and, indeed, far, far less time than it took the historian to set it down; all of which is to say that it was but a quarter of an hour after the tenth hour of the morning, which is when we should, once again, look in upon His Majesty.

  Tortaalik set about his business with a high hand, first rejecting yet another entreaty to meet with a representative of the citizens, then ordering the representative, Hithaguard, summarily thrown into the prison of the lorich Wing; and he had given orders for the Guard to be issued flashstones to use against any gathering of citizens.

  When Jurabin attempted to dissuade him, he ordered Jurabin from the hall. When Sethra attempted to speak on Jurabin’s behalf, she was also told to leave. Even as she stormed out of the Hall of Portraits, Brudik, the Lord of Chimes, intoned, in one breath, “Messenger from Lord Guinn the jailer,” and, “Messenger from Baroness Stonemover.”

  “Ah, ah,” remarked His Majesty. “What is all this? Out of room in the prisons to the right, and another defeat for my Guard to the left? Well, bring them both in anyway, and we shall hear yet more messages, and may they bring better news than we have heard hitherto.”

  The first messenger was dressed in the colors of the lorich Prison Guards; the second, a man in the cloak of the White Sash Battalion, looked as if he had seen battle that day. Each, upon showing his respective safe-conduct, was admitted in to the presence of His Majesty.

  From his position in front of the gate and just behind the front lines, Lord Rollondar e’Drien sat upon his horse and directed another cavalry division to attempt to breach Adron’s line of defense, noting that, while his pike-man had been cut to pieces, and each infantry division he engaged seemed to break almost at once, the Lavodes were having some success on their own in escorting Nyleth ever closer to the spell-wagon.

  “It is taking too long,” he murmured, and studied the battlefield, his ears deaf to the clash of steel, the discharge of flashstones, and the cries of the wounded.

  Roila Lavode had spent most of the time too busy to think—spell, counter-spell, thrust, cut, parry; indeed, it was undeniable that Sethra had created the Lavodes, taking the name from a Serioli word that meant “versatile,” or, pronounced slightly differently, “of mountains,” for just such occasions as this. Yet Roila and her comrades were unused to being checked; the more effectively her efforts were resisted, the more convinced she was that the entire battle had been arranged by Adron with nothing more in mind than to keep wizards and warriors away from his spell-wagon. This thought, as the reader can readily understand, filled her with fear about what the wagon might contain, and this fear, in turn, redoubled her urgency to reach the wagon at all cost. When a chance breathing space in the fray allowed her to look at the tent, she wondered if she had erred in not accepting Sethra’s suggestion to accompany them; if Sethra had been there, surely they would have reached it by now. She wondered what Gyorg would have done, then, cursing herself for vacillating, discharged another ferocious spell of the sort that only the Lavodes knew, hefted her blade once more, cried to her comrades, and continued.

  She pressed on, often over bodies; as she did so, she tried not to dwell on the fact that sometimes they were the bodies of Lavodes.

  Close enough now to see Roila and her compatriots fighting, Khaavren, Aerich, Tazendra, and Pel watched events unfold, and waited.

  “Stay low,” said Khaavren.

  “Bah,” said Tazendra. “This sneaking around is—”

  “Necessary,” interrupted Pel. “Did you not see that even the Lavodes were not able to penetrate? And yet, they have the same destination that we do. If we are seen—”

  “I know, I know,” grumbled Tazendra. “Yes, yes, I shall crawl. But still—”

  “How are you, Khaavren?” asked Aerich gently.

  “I shall not slow us down,” said Khaavren, though his voice sounded weak.

  “And your hand, how is it?”

  . “It is not bleeding as much.” “So much the better,” said Pel.

  “I should like another flashstone,” remarked Khaavren. “For then we could quickly remove that annoying fellow who seems to be the only one watching in this direction.”

  “But,” said Tazendra, “the sentry would be spotted as he fell.”

  “Indeed,” said the Tiassa. “Yet, while the sentry was being replaced, there would be nearly a minute during which a path from there, to, do you see? there, would not be observed; a minute, then, during which we could cross this last cursed forty yards that separates us from the line, and once inside the line, well, we can simply walk to the spell-wagon.”

  “The noise would attract others,” said Pel.

  Tazendra said, “What have you been saying? I cannot hear for this battle.”

  “I said—but it is of no moment,” amended Pel. “Come, Aerich, they must know you, can you convince them to let us past?”

  Aerich looked at him, but gave no other answer.

  Pel shrugged, “Have it so, then. But I wonder—look!”

  None of them required this suggestion; a cha
nce spell from Roila Lavode, of what sort none could say, had caught the sentry, who was flung backward, and lay—senseless or dead—on the ground. Now Adron was not careless in anything he did; he was certainly not careless in the placing of sentries; each could be seen from two other positions, and the instant one fell, another was dispatched to take his place. But it would take a certain amount of time for the new sentry to reach the proper position, and, during that time, by working from rock to tree to gully, they could make it.

  Without a word needing to be spoken, then, the four of them raced across the open ground, past a line of riderless horses, and found they were within the perimeters of Adron’s defenses. “It is as well,” remarked Khaavren, gasping, “that Rollondar did not attempt to surround them, or we should never have gotten through.”

  “Come,” said Aerich, and indicated the way to the spell-wagon.

  In an instant they were behind the wagon, and only two Dragonlords stood guard there to watch against exactly such attacks. Their eyes fell on Aerich, and for an instant they hesitated; an instant was all they had, for Pel dispatched one with a good thrust, while Tazendra’s blade nearly split the other’s head. Aerich looked unhappy, but said nothing as they assisted Khaavren onto the bed of the wagon. Khaavren gasped, teetered, and nodded.

  Pel drew his poniard and, with three quick slashes, had opened up the back of the tent. Khaavren entered first, sword in hand, followed at once by the others.

  Adron, hands outstretched, was before the array of purple stones that Aerich had seen so many times, only now the stones were glowing, and lights were rippling back and forth among them. As they entered, Adron turned, and his eyes seemed to gleam to match the stones, and dance in time to the flickering lights that raced among them—indeed, it seemed to Khaavren, who was faint and befuddled, that the glow originated within Adron, rather than from the board.

  Khaavren paused only a moment, before stepping forward and laying his hand, still leaking blood despite the bandages, lightly on Adron’s shoulder. He spoke carefully and distinctly, saying, “Your Highness, I have the honor to arrest you in the name of His Majesty; please give me your sword and come with me.”

  Tazendra, who knew no little about sorcery, gazed at the board with growing understanding, accompanied by growing horror. Adron smiled, and his eyes gleamed even more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You have, no doubt, performed heroically, and your project was as well conceived as it was, I am certain, brilliantly executed.”

  “Well?” said Khaavren, staring at him fixedly.

  Adron shrugged, attempting—and we say it to his credit—to conceal some of the triumph he felt. “But you are two minutes too late; the spell has taken effect.”

  The Orb told them, and any who thought to ask, that in ten minutes the eleventh hour of the morning would be upon them.

  Strictly speaking, Adron was not telling the truth. That is, the spell had begun its work, but it had not finished. Indeed, there was nothing any of them could have done to have interrupted its working, which is what Adron meant; the spell would continue shaping itself for twenty or thirty minutes, and, when ready, it would, without warning, strike out over the leagues the separated the spell-wagon from the Imperial Palace and seize the Orb, wrest it out of His Majesty’s control, and put it under the control of Adron—this would happen, whether Adron or anyone else now wished it. But, for the moment, the Orb still responded to His Majesty’s commands; in fact, there was as yet nothing outside of Adron’s tent affected in any way, wherefore we can say that the spell had not, in reality, “taken effect.”

  The Orb, then, entirely unaware of the powers about to be directed against it, still circled His Majesty’s head, and was emitting an icy blue as His Majesty heard, now an arrogant demand from the “Provisional Government” headquartered at the University of Pamlar (by which, be it understood, we mean the old Pamlar University, in Dragaera, not our fine institution of the same name in Adrilankha), now a report of the undecided battle outside of the Dragon Gate, and now word of another district of the city into which the Guard dared not go.

  We should say, for the sake of completeness, that the Provisional Government, while failing to impress Baroness Stonemover or Rollondar with its legitimacy (Stonemover had arrested the messengers and Rollondar had refused to even accept the message), it had, in its own name, arranged for certain shipments of wheat to enter the city (once the gates were reopened) and was speaking to a representative from Elde Island on the subject of permitting certain ships to pass freely; moreover, the Provisional Government had created up its own militia, which militia had re-established order in the Morning Green district and the Clubfoot area—neither of which Stonemover had been able to do, and all of which, as the reader can no doubt understand, exasperated His Majesty more than Stonemover’s failure to quell the disturbances in the rest of the city—Tortaalik did not understand why the rioters were still not either dead or imprisoned.

  His Majesty, then, looked upon these latest messengers—from Guinn and from Stonemover—with a barely concealed scowl, wondering what fresh annoyance he would have to contend with. The messengers advanced together, the jailer nervous, eyes averted, the guardsman humble, head bowed.

  “You first, jailer,” said the Emperor.

  “Sire, it grieves us to report an escaped prisoner.”

  “What?” he said, wide-eyed. “Who has escaped?”

  “The Lady Aliera, so please Your Majesty.”

  “Aliera!” cried the Emperor, springing out of his chair, and nearly turning white. “Aliera? It does not please me. Where is Guinn? Why did he not come himself, rather than send a messenger? That such a thing should happen to-day, why, it is enough to …” he did not finish his sentence, but merely sat down again.

  “Sire, Guinn is injured, for he was wounded during the escape. The Iorich Wing, the Dragon Wing, the Athyra Wing, and the Imperial Wing have been sealed so that none can escape, and—”

  “That was what I was told about the assassin,” said the Emperor bitterly. “Come, how did it happen?”

  “I do not know, Sire. Guinn could only say two words to send to Your Majesty; it is doubted that he will live through the day, and—”

  “Never mind,” said His Majesty. “We must find her, that is all. Let me hear the rest of the bad news first.”

  He addressed this to the other messenger, who had not moved from his bowed position, kneeling before the throne. “Well, what is it?” snapped His Majesty. “I haven’t an eternity to wait.”

  Something fell from the messenger’s hand, which His Majesty at first thought to be the message. He glared at the messenger in the uniform of a guardsman, who was no longer bowing his head, but, rather, was now staring into His Majesty’s eyes with an expression of cold ferocity.

  The Emperor recognized the assassin, even as the glass broke and, before the Emperor had time to speak, a thick, grey mist filled the room, flooding the chamber with energy, flooding the Orb with energy, and breaking, for a moment, the Orb’s connection with His Majesty. And yet, as quickly as the mist filled the room, something happened even more quickly—so fast, in point of fact, that every courtier was able to see it: the Orb lost all of its color and became a plain, clear, crystalline globe; and at the same time, it fell to the floor, hitting with a sharp, dreadful crack that sounded through the room and in the heart of every guardsman and courtier present.

  And in that instant, Mario struck—the first thrust from his needle-sharp poniard went directly into the Emperor’s heart; the next, an instant later, cut his throat. Only a second passed before the last assault, which afterward became known as the “blow to the Orb,” a phrase used so extensively that its origin has been all but forgotten—the third and final knife wound, this time the edge of a heavy woodsman’s knife to the back of Tortaalik’s neck, severing his spine.

  It was, perhaps, fortunate for Roila that she was not engaged in combat in the instant when Mario’s spell took effect in the Palace—for, though she did no
t know what it was, she knew that something was very wrong, somewhere. She tried to ignore the clamor in her brain and continue pressing forward to the tent, afraid that she was already too late.

  Sethra Lavode, standing, furious, outside the Hall of Portraits, turned and ran back. She saw the area around the throne filled with thick mist, but did not at first understand its significance—did not understand that it was her own careless words which had told the assassin how to strike.

  In the tent, Tazendra and Adron jumped at the same moment, each crying, “What was that?”

  Then Tazendra looked at Adron; and Adron, looking back, said, “It was none of my doing.”

  Seconds passed like an eternity. Sethra gazed around the room, seeing nothing but grey, but surrounded by inconceivable amounts of energy—energy filling the room, covering the Orb … .

  The Orb!

  In an instant, then, she realized what had happened. With a cry she ran to the throne, but, at that moment, His Majesty Tortaalik the First, Eighteenth Phoenix Emperor, died. Sethra looked around for the assassin, and as the mist began to dissipate, as suddenly as it had occurred, she caught a glimpse of Mario even as he slipped out of the room. Into her hand she took her dagger, Iceflame, and though no doubt many of the courtiers thought that it was she who had filled the room with fog for her own purposes, and some of them, who were even now screaming at the sight of His Dead and Bloody Majesty must have thought her guilty of his murder, none dared step before her—she was Sethra Lavode, the Enchantress of Dzur Mountain, and Iceflame was in her hand like vengeance personified; the living embodiment of the mysterious, terrible power of that mysterious, terrible mountain whence she came.