From Across the Clouded Range (51 page)

Beyond the bloodied guards, the hall
was empty, so he pushed himself through the doors that would lead
to the palace. The hall was windowless, but a series of lamps hung
from the ceiling to illuminate the smooth stone floor and yellow
carpet that ran down its expanse. The carpet was old and worn but
fine. Now it was ruined by the blood that had soaked through it
from the two figures laid haphazardly upon it.

The men were dressed in the ceremonial
armor of the imperial guards with long spears still clutched in
their hands, but their breastplates were covered in the same dark
blood that was soaking through the carpet and running under the
door. A quick inspection showed that their throats had been neatly
cut from ear to ear. The assassins clearly knew their work, but
they were rushing. A set of bloody tracks marked a brown path down
the yellow rug.

Jaret followed them at a sprint. From
the blood soaking through the carpet, he estimated that it had been
fifteen minutes since the attackers had passed; he did not have
time to lose.

At the end of the hall, another set of
doors – the twins to the first – waited. These provided access to
the palace and were obstructed only by the bodies of two more
imperial guards, each with an arrow protruding from his throat. The
halls to either side of those doors were barren, so Jaret followed
the tracks into the Palace of the Dawn.

As he ran, Jaret started wondering
what was happening. This could only be an attack on the Emperor, an
assassination attempt, but who could be behind it, and how did they
expect to succeed? The assassins had come through the heart of the
Great Chamber to reach the palace. The Chamber was patrolled by the
well-trained chamber guards, and no one but those men, the
legionnaires, and Jaret’s officers were allowed to carry weapons in
the fortress. The doors he had passed through were on the very
middle floor of the Chamber, in the heavily guarded military wing.
He calculated. The assassins would have to pass no less than six
guard posts to reach those doors from the closest gate.

He almost stopped his
pursuit. It was inconceivable that a large group of men could make
it that deeply into the heart of the Chamber without sounding an
alarm. The only possible answer was that he was pursuing a small
number of men, probably less than five. But how could any small
group expect to reach and kill the Emperor, one of the most heavily
guarded men in the world, with the sun still up, the palace alive
with activity, and blood on their boots? It was a preposterous
idea.
Too preposterous
, he thought.
No one would be crazy
enough to try it, especially anyone capable of getting this
far.

Then other bits of information began
to filter through. Among them was the fact that the halls of the
palace were not alive with activity. He had not seen another living
person since he entered the building. Somehow, the people who lived
and worked here knew to hide. A small number of men would not
create that kind of fear. The tracks he followed were also widely
spaced. The man with blood on his boots was running. A small band
of assassins would not run. They could not afford such reckless
abandon; stealth would be their only weapon.

Jaret came to the end of the first
long hall, rounded the corner, and saw all the evidence he needed
to end his mental debate. A dozen bodies in the armor of imperial
guards were strewn about the wide hall. Most still held their
spears. All were dead. A few of the guards had been hit by arrows –
one each, perfectly tucked into the area exposed by the lack of a
faceguard on their helms – but most seemed to have been cut down
almost off-handedly, as if they were mere annoyance to their
attackers. Despite that, the kills were clean, surgical. The
assassins did not waste a single stroke in dispatching their
enemies. This was not the work of five men. The imperial guards
existed primarily for show, but it was still not easy to kill
twelve heavily armored men in a tight space without getting bogged
down. He guessed that it would take twenty men, all extraordinarily
well-trained, to have done this.

Jaret hurdled over and around the
crumpled shapes, trying to avoid the sticky blood that generously
covered the delicate tiles as real fear built in him for the first
time. He followed another series of bloody prints around a corner
and saw a final guard lying face down with a single arrow jutting
from his back – the thirteenth man in the traditional palace
patrol, the one who was sent to raise the alarm. These men were
very good indeed, Jaret thought as he admired the efficiency of
their work. There was no doubt now. The Emperor was in real danger,
probably the most real in a thousand years.

#

The halls down which Jaret ran were
brightly lit by immaculate stained-glass windows, great crystal
chandeliers, or intricate lanterns of silver and gold. Any of those
light sources could feed a family for a generation. Some had
existed for hundreds of years, and all were so extravagant that he
found his attention continuously drifting to them despite the
urgency of his trip. In turn, the light they generated revealed
walls covered with marvelous tapestries, extravagant paintings, and
intricate sculptures. They depicted the glory of the Empire,
history, and mythology in miraculous detail that would best all but
the finest craftsmen.

Despite those wonders, the seemingly
utilitarian floor was a marvel beyond. It was made of tiny tiles
the size of a ladybug that had been laid to form rune-like designs
in reds and bright-blue. The magnificence of the floor was not in
its beauty or the craftsmanship with which the tiles had been laid,
but rather with the tiles themselves. Those same tiles had been in
the palace since before the creation of the Empire, and despite
their eons of age, they never wore, faded, or cracked no matter how
many feet strode across them or how much abuse was dealt them.
Today, as every day, they shone as if with an inner light beyond
what should have been possible with any amount of polish; it was a
wondrous art of a forgotten age.

From those mysterious tiles the last
of the bloody prints had faded several strides before, forcing
Jaret to rack his brain for the quickest route to the throne room.
Over the ages, the various emperors had made so many additions to
the palace that it had become an enormous labyrinthine shrine to
extravagance. For someone like Jaret, the Palace of the Dawn was a
spider’s web of dangers, the one place where the Emperor’s whims
were still followed with deadly authority, and he avoided it as
virulently as the wisest of flies. When he did venture into the
heart of the Empire, he made sure he was accompanied by those who
knew their way not only through the halls but also the political
webs that stretched across them. As a result, he had paid far too
little attention to where he was going on those trips. Now, as he
passed one fabulously ordained hall after another, he cursed
himself for his lack of attention.

He turned onto an especially long,
window-lined corridor heading south then came to a large
intersection with another long hallway running back to the east.
The throne room was in the eastern-most part of the palace, so he
veered down the wide hall. A fine rug padded the pounding of his
feet. Chandeliers in the shapes of flying cranes lit the space from
above while multi-colored glass lamps modeled after flowers were
spaced along the walls between delicately carved wooden doors and
oil paintings. Jaret allowed himself to marvel at the magnificent
decorations as he ran and wondered how he had not noticed the
chandeliers before. The answer, he knew was that there was nothing
to distract him from the antiquities. Normally, these halls were
thick with maids, bustling with couriers, and clogged by nobles.
Today, there was not another living being.

The realization gave him another jolt
of anxious energy, and he sprinted down the halls around one turn
and another until the passages all began to look alike. He stumbled
upon another pile of bodies where a second patrol had been ambushed
and followed another set of bloody prints. The freshness of the
blood told him that he was getting close.

Suddenly, he wondered what he would do
against a force that butchered armored guards without losing a
single man. He did not have much of a chance, he admitted, but if
he could just get to the throne room before the assassins, he could
rally the Emperor’s bodyguards, could buy time for the Emperor to
escape. It was not much of a hope, but he had pledged his life to
the task, and it was a promise he was prepared to keep.

Around another corner, Jaret saw his
goal. The huge doors leading to the Emperor’s rooms were marked by
the bodies of the half-dozen men who guarded them. Each man had an
arrow protruding from his face or throat – Jaret made a mental note
to be careful of those archers. An examination of the guards showed
that he was very close. One of them was still breathing, and from
the location of the arrow, he could not have been hit long
ago.

Passed the colossal golden doors,
which thankfully stood open, the hall continued on straight for a
hundred paces to another set of equally mammoth doors. Those doors
led to the throne room, to the very seat of imperial power, and
they were tightly closed.

Jaret’s heart sank. He was
too late. The doors were closed for the first time in his memory,
but more disturbing than that were the two men who stood outside
them. They wore black pants with red shirts. Over the shirts were
black leather vests with an embroidered red sun that just peeked
out from the steel rings that covered it. Their faces were obscured
by the haze of black veils, but Jaret did not need to see them. He
knew those uniforms well. His heart sank. He nearly dropped to the
floor.
What have I done? I have brought
this on myself. This is all my fault.

With a deep breath, Jaret dismissed
his agony and ran down the hall. The guards saw him and ran to meet
him. They pulled bows as they came, brought arrows to the ready,
and fired.

Jaret grabbed a shield from one of the
guards at his feet and brought it up just in time to catch the
arrows. He held it in front of his face, ducked behind it, and kept
running. An arrow rang off the bronze of the shield. Another
clipped his shin, sending a pang through him. He ignored it. The
men were close now. He threw the shield at the one to his right and
followed it with his sword.

“
Traitors!” he yelled as
his sword split leather and chains driving through the assassin’s
chest nearly to the hilt. He abandoned the blade and rolled away
from the swing of the other guard. The tip of the blade found his
shoulder, scoring his vest but failing to find his flesh. He sprang
to his feet and spun but had only his dirk left. It would be
enough.

He spun and unleashed his most potent
weapon. He stood so that the man could see his face. The assassin
froze. His sword in mid-swing fell to his side. “Lord. . . .” was
as much of Jaret’s title as he could say before the dirk sank into
his chest. His eyes popped and he gurgled quietly as Jaret eased
him to the ground.

“
I am no longer your
commander,” he whispered. “I was sworn to defend the Emperor and so
were all those I command.” Retrieving his dirk, Jaret wiped the
blood on his pants and grabbed the assassin’s sword.

He did not need to but he looked at
the blade as he ran toward the doors. He still did not want to
believe it, but the symbol etched there only confirmed what he
already knew. The two swords crossed over a rising sun perfectly
matched the etching on his own blade. It was the symbol that he had
created and commissioned imprinted on the swords that he sparingly
presented to the men that he personally selected to be the most
sacred protectors of the Empire, the Legion of the Rising
Sun.

Chapter 24

Ipid’s shovel bit deep into the hard
sod of the Gurney Bluff village green. With a grunt, he pushed the
handle down and pried the sod from the ground. His weary back
shouted, but he did not hesitate before moving a foot to his left
and repeating the process. A boy following close behind pulled up
the chunk of sod, and another lad used an inadequately short knife
to cut away the roots so that the grass came up in a long
strip.

Other boys, about thirty
in all, worked in similar teams to transform the Gurney Bluff
village green into the mass grave that would house its residents.
Those residents – twisted, shattered, and buzzing with flies –
stared from all angles, supervised the work with blank, lifeless
eyes. The boys and Ipid tried with all their might to avoid those
dead eyes, keeping their own inexorably fixed on the ground, on the
dirt they were fighting to reveal. Still the boys shook. Tears
marked their cheeks in muddy streaks. Their hands trembled, barely
able to grasp their tools.
But it’s
something
, Ipid told himself.
They are still alive. For a while longer, they
will live.

A few minutes before, that outcome had
been very much in doubt. Warriors had surrounded the boys, weapons
waving, screaming, screaming Arin’s orders, “Clean up this mess.”
The boys could not understand what was being asked, could only
imagine that they would be added to the pile before them, and even
the most hearty had fallen to the ground in defeat.