Kingshelm (Renegade Druid Cycle Book 1) (30 page)

Mithrandrates pointed to the ground with his open hand and repeated the word. He instantly learned it and its translation: ground.
 

The double pointed to the sky, and said another word. This Mithrandrates repeated: sky.
 

The Emperor stood before his seated double and learned the new language one word, one concept, one grammatical transformation at a time. The sky and the ground yielded no changing light nor moving shadows to mark the time thus spent. It could have been hours, or it could have been decades. Mithrandrates was not be sure which.
 

Hours or years later, when he mastered the language, the Emperor repeated his message to the seated man in the new tongue. “I would advance through your empire in peace.”
 

The man on the throne nodded, leaned forward, and answered slowly and solemnly, “No horse, no wife, no mustache.” He then sat erect in his throne, tilted his head back and guffawed triumphantly. The laughter filled the entire plain and echoed off the distant walls of the city.
 

Now it was Mithrandrates’ turn to scowl. “You ignorant ass,” he replied in the mystic language, then walked past the throne toward the tower-studded city.
 

The seated emperor’s laughter followed Mithrandrates across the plain until he reached the outer works of the city. A door opened in one of the towers along the wall, and he stepped through only to find himself back inside the Empty Tower in a room identical to the one he had left, but with a larger sphere of blue light hovering at chest level above the center of the circular floor.
 

The Emperor looked behind him through the door and saw a stone corridor curve away from him to the left. He guessed that he was in the second tower in the outer ring, then approached the glowing sphere. This time he did not need to summon the
vir
. He felt its power absorb into him as he drew closer to the sphere, his hand tingling and heart surging as he reached out to touch it.
 

Now he was transported to the palace garden where he spent many happy summer days in his childhood.

“I found you!” shouted a young Micharis, his best friend. Mithrandrates vaguely remembered that Micharis was now his most trusted general, but the knowledge faded. They were both eight years old now, and Mithrandrates knew only that his wily friend had discovered his hiding place yet again.

“I’m tired of hide-and-seek,” young Mithrandrates said. “Let’s play war!”
 

“You only want to play war because you’re good at it!”

“You only like hide-and-seek because you’re good at that!”

“No, you’re just a bad hider. Anybody can play hide-and-seek,” Micharis said. “Just one more round, then we can play war.”
 

Mithrandrates liked that compromise, so he closed his eyes and counted 100 while Micharis ran off to find a hiding spot in the labyrinthine garden. When he finished counting, Mithrandrates opened his eyes and explored the garden to find his friend. He found a great cypress tree surrounded by a pool with little fountains shooting water in the air. He stopped and put his hand in one of the streams of water gushing from the surface of the pool.
 

“You can stay here forever,” came a gentle, ethereal woman’s voice behind him. “No more school, no more bed time. You never have to grow up here.”

Young Mithrandrates turned toward the voice. A smiling woman with dark hair, kind eyes and giant butterfly wings hovered inches off the ground. She was clothed in a rainbow-colored, iridescent gown whose colors changed as the gentle breeze toyed with the wondrous garment.
 

“I cannot,” he said. “I am to be Emperor when I grow up. Father expects me to finish his work.”
 

The woman smiled and touched the boy’s head. “Such a wise young man.”
 

A flash of multicolored light, and Mithrandrates was back in the Empty Tower standing in a curved stone hallway in front of a door to the third outer tower. This tower and the next transported him to even stranger and more abstract planes. Whereas the first two towers seemed to be puzzles or tests, the next two were pure endurance challenges in which the objective was to keep his corporeal body intact and confined to only three dimensions.
 

“I am not a polyhedron,” Mithrandrates whispered to himself. “I am a man. I am not a polyhedron.”
 

The universe split into 17 dimensions and five time streams. The Emperor felt a real danger of slipping into one of them and coming out in another world, another universe.
 

“I am not a polyhedron. I am a man.”
 

Are you sure?

“Yes.”

Really sure?

“Yes! The gods damn you! Yes! I am a man, not a polyhedron!”

But could you not be a parallelogram?

Mithrandrates teased out a path between the strange, multifaceted dimensions and proceeded to the central tower. It was identical to the others save for a horned stone altar in the middle of the circular room. The horns sprouted from the sides of the altar and rose ten feet above the floor. The air between the great horns of the altar glowed a faint blue, and Mithrandrates gazed into the luminous air.
 

He started. Time and space were simultaneously apprehensible, as if the past, present and future were all represented in a single but raucously busy painting forming between the upraised horns.
 

He saw the Empire unified and the events necessary to make it so. Battles from past, present and future raged and abated simultaneously. Mithrandrates also saw the Mergovan Empire’s final destruction, but his mind worked frantically to deduce how to put off that calamity as long as possible. It would be the work of 20 emperors. But the unification would only be the work of two, and he was certain for the first time that he was one of them.

The vision disappeared, and a section of the wall slid away to reveal the exit. Mithrandrates mentally drafted the dispatch he would need to write as he strode through the straight corridor toward the starry night awaiting him.

“What did you see?” asked the hooded man who had escorted him to the Empty Tower.

“That,” Emperor Mithrandrates replied, “is a state secret. I must return to the Citadel at once.”
 

Marek had received no dispatches from Rufus and his sellswords for two days.

The main body of Marek’s battle was less than four days’ march from the Oak Ridge, and Marek with his mounted vanguard were a day’s ride to the right flank of them. He had left Lord Aramand in charge of the main body while Marek and 300 mounted knights and men-at-arms rode to discover what had happened to Rufus and his condottiere. And, as Marek was never one to waste time, they had sacked a village and put the military-aged men to the sword.
 

Inexperienced fighters perhaps wondered why the villagers stayed put when they surely knew of the savagery the invaders were inflicting on their neighbors, but Marek knew. The peasants depended on their land for shelter and survival; to abandon them was to flee straight into the jaws of starvation. All who could shelter behind the walls of their lords’ castles had done so before Marek had arrived.

No, Marek knew, it was safer for the peasants to stay where they were knowing that he and his men could not be everywhere at once. Choosing one town or village to burn meant sparing ten others in the area that were not in the path of destruction.
 

Nevertheless, Marek’s tactics halted production, travel and commerce in the border reaches and put pressure on the local nobility’s treasuries and credibility—the two places it hurt most. Important work, to be sure, but Marek had grown bored of the tedium of spilling peasant blood and was spoiling for another real battle.
 

And that, Marek reflected as he and his detachment rode nearly perpendicular to his forces’ previous line of advance, is why he was leading this enormous reconnaissance force himself instead of delegating the task to one of his lieutenants. He knew they must be a few days—maybe only a few hours—away from a true battle. He was sick of the wearisome, repetitive task of killing civilians.
 

Of the several possible explanations to the mystery at hand, Marek reckoned two were most likely, and both would find their ultimate resolution with the singing of steel. The free companies could have left their posts—mutinied, turned coat or simply deserted—in which case Marek would need to crush the traitors before they could be turned against him.
 

The second, more troubling possibility was that Rufus and his sellswords ran into the maw of an opposing force sent to outflank the invaders and were defeated. In that case, Marek would attack the counterattackers and either destroy them outright or harass them until he could bring the rest of his army to bear and finish the job.
 

And then a half-dozen riders approaching from a fortified village in a shallow valley appeared before Marek as he and his men crested a ridge in the rolling plains. The riders were haphazardly armed and carried a white flag of truce.
 

Marek halted his force and approached them with his squire and four other riders.
 

“Hail, Lord Marek of Relfast!” the lead rider said as the two groups converged in the plain. “The people of Berengal offer you greetings and friendship.”
 

Marek regarded the six riders in silence, studying their arms, armor and mannerisms. The lead rider was clad in a maille hauberk, a dented breastplate and simple steel cap. The others’ combined armor barely surpassed what the leader wore, but what they lacked in equipment they made up for in stern countenance. Marek cocked his head, nodded and smiled. “Your wisdom has led you to surrender before I take your people by force and set fire to your town?”

“No, my lord,” the leader said. “We come to pledge our loyalty to your graceful self and to the Dominion of Relfast. Would you burn your own town?”
 

“And if I refuse?”
 

“Then we will die together, and Berengal will have been the shortest-lived freehold of all history,” the leader said. “I am Captain Basilio Sarnan, master of the assembled militias of Berengal. You should at least know this much about me before you waste your men’s lives attacking an ally.”
 

“And why should you join me, a man who has butchered his way through your dominion?”
 

“Our nobles cower in the safety of Oak Ridge while we commoners fend for ourselves,” Basilio said. “You are here, and they are not. And when the war is over, it will not matter a sheep’s cunt whose banners fly over our village. We will toil and tithe and pay our taxes to whomever sits in the castle, just as we have since Mahurin lit the sun. But our loyalty, now, that is a different matter. That goes to those who defend us.”

 
Marek kept his face passive, almost stony, and with pure will kept it from betraying the plan quickly forming in his mind. “Spoken like a member of the noblesse. But what security can you offer me as a token of your sincere goodwill?”
 

“Information,” Basilio said. “Your mercenaries ran headlong into the Black Swan Company three days ago, and the survivors have scattered like a covey of quail. The Swans will let the rest of your army pass them as it drives toward Oak Ridge, then hit you from behind.”
 

“And you know this how?”
 

“They intend to resupply in Berengal,” the captain said. “They should arrive tomorrow or the next day.”
 

“How many are you?” Marek asked.
 

“Fifteen hundred,” Basilio said.

Marek took a banner from one of his riders and walked his horse toward Basilio. “Can you hold Berengal long enough for the rest of my army to arrive?”
 

Basilio tossed the white flag to the ground and took the banner of Relfast from Marek. “We shall, lord.”
 

“My men will camp outside of Berengal so as to not to deprive yours of their billets,” Marek said.
And so your men can’t knife mine as they sleep, if this is all a ruse.

“Very good, my lord,” Basilio replied. “My lieutenants and I will meet you in your command post when it is established. Until then, we will await your word.”
 

Basilio and his men turned their mounts and rode for the town, and Marek led his followers back to the detachment. He chose four of his quickest riders to summon the rest of the army, then gave the order to set up camp behind the town.
 

That leaves me 596
, he thought.
And perhaps 1,500 infantry, if the people of Berengal aren’t trying to fuck me.

“Lord Marek?” his squire asked.

“Yes?”
 

“Why don’t we leave a part of our force with Berengal to lead the defense and take the rest back to the main body of the army?” It was a genuine question, Marek knew, for his squire wished to emulate what he believed to be his lord’s military genius.
 

Marek grunted magnanimously and smiled. “We want to show both our new allies and the Black Swan Company that we are serious about fighting the Swans here at Berengal.”

“And if it’s a trap?”
 

“Dear cousin,” Marek said, “That is for me to worry about, not you. Your task is but to watch me and learn.”
 

And run like hell if your suspicions are correct.
 

There would be no rest, no resupply, in Berengal tonight.
 

Word had filtered back to the marching infantry that the Black Swan Company’s mounted vanguard had been attacked by Lord Marek’s riders as they approached the town, the banners of Relfast flying over its newly constructed trenches and wooden palisades.