Grudgebearer (2 page)

“If?” Wylant's mouth had dropped open. “He. Can. Read? Highness, be reasonable. At least discuss it with King Grivek—”

If the Aern could read, Dolvek supposed Wylant would know. He'd heard that Wylant had been . . . involved . . . with the leader of the Aern back at the time of the Sundering. Ancient history, as far as Dolvek was concerned, since she'd fought on the side of her people. Still, her past history probably affected her present judgment. And she was, after all, a woman.

“Discuss the king's surprise present with the king, Wylant?” Dolvek had sighed. “No. Nor shall you. I forbid it. Thank you again for your diligence and desire to protect the kingdom and my royal person. You are dismissed.”

She could strut about with her little cadre of malformed knights in their drab metal armor and their wretched elemental foci all she wanted as a precaution against the Zaur and the Aern and their supposed magical resistance . . . but Dolvek felt forced to draw the line at Wylant's interference in affairs of state. She was an old general only and not of royal blood at all. What, he wondered, did his father see in her?

Smiling at the memory, Dolvek gestured, and the globe of fire floated closer, illuminating the armor more intently. If the breastplate was impressive, the helm was more so. Carved in the likeness of an irkanth, a horned lion—the so-called king of the Eldren Plains—its mane was crimson and unfaded, the crystals set into its eyes seeming to glow from within, its mouth gaping open in an angry roar. An obvious trick of the light.
Magical flame does seem to favor dramatic touches
, the prince thought.
Perhaps I should have some plain candles brought in.

“Bran,” Prince Dolvek called. “Get your men. I want to mark the ones I need moved to the royal museum for the special exhibit. And bring some candles.”

Bran did not answer.

“Oh, of all the superstitious—”

What did I expect? They are only humans
, he reminded himself.
Did I expect bravery and courage? Loyalty? Reliability? Yes. Well, I had hoped. I'll look around first and then hire some more humans in the square.

The globe of fire drifted after him, and he walked down the rows, marveling at the weapons of a different time. On either side he was greeted by row upon row of glowing crystal eyes set into the helms of the Aernese warsuits.

“Magnificent.”

*

While Prince Dolvek's seemingly innocent actions doomed his people, the implement of their destruction was asleep at home, eyes closed and dreaming. His bunk, if one could call it such, was little more than a shelf of stone carved in the barrack wall of South Number Nine, the current capital of the Great Dwarven-Aernese Collective. The berth he occupied ran twenty-one hands long, seven hands deep, and another seven hands from the slab of one berth to the bunk above it. Dwarves often sighed at the sight. “Like bees in a hive,” Glinfolgo was fond of saying.

Kholster smiled in his sleep, the grin lending a predatory cast to his features (even at rest) as it revealed the doubled upper and lower canines so distinctive to Aern.

The light caught him by surprise.

Eyes snapped open in the dark, jade irises shuttering into thin circles, bound by the black sclera of his eyes, as the amber pupils dilated wider to capture and enhance the available light, then narrowed to pinpoints as his vision wavered, registering the switch to thermal imaging—the base of his eyes growing cold. He felt the other Aern around him, waking wordlessly, making the same questing looks in the dark, searching for the source of the unexpected luminescence.

“Light?” he asked, his voiced clipped and professional.

“Not here,” Vander answered.

“Where?”

“Close your eyes,” Vander instructed.

Trust an Overwatch like Vander to pick up on it first of all, while even the warsuits themselves are still confused.
Kholster closed his eyes and frowned as the light returned and he saw a pale-skinned Oathbreaker peering down at Bloodmane, Kholster's warsuit.

Bloodmane, what's going on?

An Oathbreaker has unsealed the command barracks
,
rang a voice in Kholster's head.

Seeing through the eyes of his armor, Kholster saw Eyes of Vengeance, Vander's warsuit, standing across the hall, its helm fashioned in the likeness of a sea hawk, its hooked beak and fierce eyes ablaze with the light of candles being put in place by human workmen.

“What the hells are they up to?”
Vander asked.

He said something about a museum exhibit
, Bloodmane told Kholster.

A what?

An exhibit. Must I attack them?

Give me a moment.
Kholster slid out of his berth and ran a hand across his face, the stubble rough under his fingertips.
I like to take a candlemark or two to mull things over before committing genocide.

Of course.

Of course
, Kholster snorted, hiding a grin. As if he'd asked for a few more moments to ponder the menu selection at one of those strange Hulsite eateries with all the options. He shook his head as he watched through Bloodmane's eyes the humans scurrying about their work in an effort to please their Eldrennai masters, but with exaggerated care, some of them apologizing directly to the warsuits each time they drew too close or feared they might bump up against one.

That was the right attitude, the one the Oathbreaker himself should have had. Kholster sneered at the fool giving orders when he came back into view. A human with a piece of colored chalk followed behind him making “x's” on the floor in front of warsuits the Oathbreaker indicated. The idiot had the stamp of Zillek and Grivek all over his face, the pale skin, the short ears with barely a point to them at all, and the dull black pupils of his eyes . . . beady, like a rat dropping stuck in a mound of bird squirt.

“No, I said to mark the armor itself,” the Oathbreaker hissed, “not the floor in front of it.”

It didn't seem right to laugh, but Kholster marveled at how anyone, even an Oathbreaker prince, could be stupid enough to risk the wrath of the Aern over something as unimportant as—

A museum exhibit?
he asked Bloodmane.

Yes.

On what? Do they have a new “beings-we-created-and-enslaved-and-then-almost-got-killed-by-when-we-freed-them-by-breaking-an-oath” wing of the Royal Museum?

Bloodmane didn't answer.

Surprised by an inward sense of movement, like the phantom sway he often felt when sleeping on land after a time at sea, Kholster clutched the stone edge of his berth to steady himself. Bloodmane was in motion.

Closing his eyes again, Kholster was treated to a view of the ceiling as four humans carried Bloodmane out of the barracks as they might carry a wounded king on a stretcher between them.

“So they aren't moving our armor,” Kholster muttered. “They're making humans do it.”

“Can they do that?” Vander asked.

Kholster looked down the room and saw that same question echoed on the faces of the other ten Aern who shared this billet. More than that, though, he sensed a growing clamor of conversation going on among his Armored, the five thousand exiles he'd brought with him out of Port Ammond after the Sundering. After the Vael had negotiated a peace between the Aern and the Oathbreakers. Words filled his mind, the edge of conversations relayed from Aern to warsuit, warsuit to Aern.

Thousands of miles away, crystalline eyes flashed bright, then dim, then bright again as the warsuits relayed the chatter of Kholster's army.

“They are doing it,” Kholster answered.

“But are you going to allow it?” Vander asked.

I don't know yet
, he thought directly to Vander.

Bloodmane
, he thought, addressing his warsuit.
Tell the One Hundred to meet me at the Laundry.

Sir?

We're going to wash clothes and discuss this . . . loophole.

Yes, Maker.

Kholster, old friend
, Kholster thought back.
We've been through this more times than one can count. Call me Kholster.

CHAPTER 2

ELEVEN

“But two-nine-two is an Even day, not a Prime day,” complained Glinfolgo, the rightfully elected High Foreman of the Dwarven-Aernese Collective, as he watched scattered groups of male and female Dwarves bustling with great purpose toward the laundry of South Number Nine. “The One Hundred only do community work on the Primes. This is day two hundred and ninety-two.”

He sat along one edge of the table inset into the stone wall of the main mess near the foreman's office. On the table in front of him, bowls containing felspar and vegetables sat alongside a small tray of raw bacon. Nine other stools sat empty, shoved up against the edge of the table, abandoned by the gray-skinned Dwarf's dining companions.

Glinfolgo grimaced at the tray of bacon and shook his head before seizing a nugget of felspar from a breakfast bowl and crunching it furiously, eyes widening further as he spotted Ordunni, one of his most respected foremen, on her way to the laundry as well.

“One would think she had never seen a half-naked Aern before,” Glinfolgo muttered between chews.

Watching from a distance, Rae'en smirked. It irked her uncle, the effect the Aern and their lack of cultural nudity taboos had on young Dwarves. Rae'en saw the softness in her uncle's eyes when Ordunni laughed at something a Dwarf next to her whispered as they walked.

“You should ask her,” Rae'en announced as she snuck up behind Glinfolgo's stool and kissed him on the top of the head. At eleven, she was already as tall as her uncle and still growing. By twelve, she hoped to reach a full eighteen hands like her father.

“Ask who what?”

“Ordunni,” Rae'en said, the black sclera of her Aernese eyes making the rings of jade around her amber pupils seem to glow. “You should ask her to share a meal or a shift. Of course, from the way you look at her, maybe you should jump straight to a mining contract.”

“Rae'en!” Glinfolgo exclaimed, slapping his palms down on the table in embarrassment.

“Rocks for breakfast?” She pointed at the untouched roots, vegetables, and mushrooms on the table next to him. “Just because you can survive by only eating minerals doesn't mean it's healthy.”

Glinfolgo smiled brightly for a moment before mustering a scowl as Rae'en walked around to stand beside the inset table at which he sat.

“I like felspar,” he complained.

“Just keep saying that when your joints begin to stiffen up. Do you really want to lay there in agony while we take turns chewing up vegetables and drooling them into your mouth?” She smiled, baring her doubled canines. “Or is that part of your plan? Were you hoping Ordunni would do that for you?”

Her uncle shrugged that off with a growl, but he did reach for a handful of steamed new potatoes and mushrooms.

“In armor already?” he asked.

Rae'en nodded, snatching up a piece of bacon and chewing it thoughtfully. Technically she wouldn't need to eat for another few days, but she knew it was bad Dwarven manners to talk at someone's table without taking a token sampling of hospitality from his sideboard.

“I donned a mail shirt first thing after Vander's runner,” she said between chews, “got to me with news of an unscheduled Chore Day for the One Hundred. Something's up.” She flushed brightly as she caught her uncle eyeing the gray tunic peeking out from the edges of her chain shirt.

“Still a little soft-skinned?” Glinfolgo observed when he realized he'd been caught noticing. “I wouldn't worry about it. Your brother had to wear a tunic under his mail until he was fourteen. Sometimes it takes a while for an Aern's integumentary system to sort out the right level of suppleness, smoothness, and toughness.”

“Irka,” Rae'en said with a laugh. “I love him, but he's soul bonded to a musical instrument and a quill. He could have stayed soft-skinned and it would never have mattered.”

Glinfolgo reached out and touched his niece's red hair. “No hood?”

“I haven't finished the hood yet.”

He looked down her trousers and frowned. “What about the boiled leather we—”

“I'm an Eleven, Uncle Glin, not a baby fresh out of the bucket,” Rae'en said, cutting him off. “I can't wear leather armor anymore. I—”

All know
, Rae'en heard her father's voice in her mind, her amber pupils glowing brightly at the contact.
Rae'en, by Kholster out of Helg, shall kholster the patrol scheduled to intercept and, if oath requires, arvash a patrol between South Number Nine and South East Number Six. The following Elevens will join her . . .

Rae'en concentrated on each name of the thirty Kholster listed, picturing each face in her head as she echoed his orders aloud for Glinfolgo's benefit. In the distance, she heard the soft echo of other Aern doing the same for Dwarves near them.