Oathbreaker: The Knight's Tale (7 page)

I waited a few moments after he departed. By the gods! Where were the Imperial spies in this? Where were the High Houses? Where, indeed, were the Lesser Houses? Athedon had been thorough indeed. How long had he been planning this, truly? It must have been well before the king began his dotage. I could not help but think that he had been plotting his treason for at least a decade to have so many of these pieces in place. There was nothing honorable in this. His concern for the Empire was a cover. Thus decided, I rose to stretch.

As I did, I felt a presence behind me. I cursed inwardly and scrabbled for my blade, trying to turn quickly enough to dodge the inevitable killing blow. Of course Athedon had taken even this small delay as refusal! Even as I turned, I imagined the knife slicing my throat open.

Instead I saw one of the younger Knights Elite standing back, his gauntleted hands held before him, empty. “My apologies for surprising you, sir, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t draw your weapon on me. My conditioning might kill you.”

My reflexes were fast enough to loose the hilt before the sword was halfway from its sheath, and it slid, hissing, back into the scabbard. “Sir Knight, you gave me a hell of a scare.” I thought, at first, he might be a witness, that he could help me to expose this plot.

“Pelagir, sir. Knight of the Order Elite, Class of the Crown.” I studied him. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Strong, lean frame. Formal armor. And, of course, the cool, dead eyes and dispassionate voice of the Knights Elite.

“Of course. I have seen you guarding the king. What can I do for you?”

With his order’s bluntness, he said, “Accept his offer.”

“What?”

“I said to accept the duke’s offer. It may not be too late. You have my utmost respect, General Glasyin, but if you do not accept his offer now, you will be dead before the sun rises tomorrow.”

I chuckled. “So the king is still watching, is he? And he wants an agent in the duke’s camp?”

“The king is not watching. The king is as good as dead. The focus of his spies is scattered, like light through a prism. They have no direction. The duke’s plan is the Empire’s only hope.”

I was shocked to the core. “I thought the oaths of the knights were unbreakable!”

“The oath I took in initiation is to the security of the Empire. I have seen the king’s fallibility.”

“How did they turn you?”

He frowned. “I have not turned. I have seen that there is no loyalty to us from above. Without loyalty above, there can be no true service below. General, I have no more time to talk to you. Great events are in the making. You can stand with us at the wheel of history, or you can be crushed by it. Your time is running out. I hope you will make the wiser choice.” He turned and moved quickly toward the palace doors.

I returned immediately to my room and gathered my most important effects: papers and money, for my seals will be useless and my clothes will scream my identity. I have found this inn, and I have been writing all day. I intend to depart tonight, cloaked and disguised, and will entrust these pages to a friend in the city if I am certain I have not been followed. I must ready myself for the journey I have put off for too long. I shall leave Terona, most likely for the last time. They will have noticed my absence in the palace, but will likely have put it down to conferring with advisors and preparing the transition of command. No one knows where I am now.

I do not believe Terona will survive the storm that rides on the heels of this autumn rain. After a life of decision, I am presented with a dilemma that I cannot break. I cannot betray my friend as he has betrayed me. I do not know if I could alter events even if I chose to. I cannot make this decision, not even for the sake of the Empire. I cannot make it for Athedon, a blandly ambitious man who would lie to my face for his own gain. After the sudden shock of having my command stripped and my identity as a leader torn apart in a single night, I do not have it in me. I hope that others will resist him better than I can.

I flee for my life and for my honor, but in truth, I am weary of the endless politicking, the lies and slanders, the needless outrages so that one faction may gain a slight advantage over another. When betrayal is the grease that keeps the wheel of Empire turning, I can no longer remain within its cycles. Our Empire is sick. I know the cancer that lies at its heart. I do not believe we will recover.

The time is past midnight now.

There is a knocking at my door. It must be a word from one of my lieutenants. I had not thought they would come so quickly.

They have underestimated me. It is certainly not the first time. Let us hope it is not the last. My assassin is dead and I live, though with a wound that will take some time to heal. Athedon did not even respect me enough to send one of his traitor knights for me. Who was that man? He was barely at the level of a household guard. Their mistake, and my blessing. Once again, I am glad of my wrist knife. I suppose I should also be grateful for having thought to bandage myself to escape the dance. They must have thought I’d move more slowly than I did. Sometimes, I suppose, the little details in our lives mean the most.

Was I tracked to this place? Who betrayed me? Was it Hargrave? Westkitt? M’Cray? All my dreams of mustering a resistance to this coup are dust. If I cannot trust even those three, who will follow me? Whom shall I lead? No. I must flee the city and slink into exile.

There can be no hope for the king. I pray that his children will survive. I do not think there is any hope, but I pray that I am wrong.

I bid you farewell, my home. I weep for you. The storm outside howls its grief with me.

Interlude: Out of the City

Pelagir bent low across the neck of his steed and whispered into its steel ear. The machine leapt forward, streaking across the farmland. He shot a glance behind him and saw the city in flames. His doing, he thought, and perhaps his undoing. But then … he looked down at his bundle, the baby girl, and his jaw hardened. He had made his choices. He carried the future. He bore the princess Caitrona, by now surely the last of her line. He was headed for the King’s Forest. Miles of countryside and farms stretched ahead of him, interrupted here and there by towns and hamlets: Knollside, Warsend, Colm, Highridge Glen, and more, strung like drab jewels along the roads. The sun settled ahead of him as the city burned behind.

Year 1 – CY 578

Pelagir’s first year of training was not turning out as he thought it might.

The freedom of which he had dreamed during nights in bed at home had been replaced with a harsher discipline. He lay in the darkness of the high-ceilinged dormitory with the west wind overturning the peace of the night outside, and he thought of the endless days ahead of him echoing the days he had left behind: days of standing motionless under the hot sun and cold rain, days of menial chores, days of backbreaking weapons work, days and days and days and days. This was not freedom. This was slavery, and toward what goal? Service. Service to fat men making stupid decisions, and he would be expected to rectify their mistakes with blood. He had sold himself to death at an enemy’s hand, or at the executioner’s, or the little death of disgrace. He had traded his father for the people who had created his father.

He thought he had buried his heart long ago, but now he discovered it bleeding on the pillow beside him, and he wept bitter tears—bitter but quiet, because showing emotion was punishable by a morning whipping.

When he awoke, his pillow was wet, and they took him to the courtyard and whipped him in front of the other students. And then they sent him to stand in heavy armor in the hot sun for the day.

It was one day among hundreds. The trainers drove their students mercilessly, and this first year was constant marching, drills, hand-to-hand exercises, and training in basic weapons. Those who complained or broke were beaten, as Pelagir had been, and some of them died between the whipping posts. No one was allowed to mourn the dead.

Year 2 – CY 579

Pelagir’s second year of training was little better. The discipline was harsher, his instructors less forgiving, and his training more dangerous than the year before. He bore scars from lashings for failure to obey—or remember—the rules or the Code. It was better for him than for many of his compatriots. Two thousand youths had been gathered from all the reaches of the Empire, and half of them had been expelled for one reason or another. Some of them had died. They were fourteen years of age.

Those who remained were harder, stronger. They studied harder and learned faster. They understood that it was not their bodies and minds being tested but their dedication. Most of them would fail and fall into a lesser position in the military. Some would serve in the High House to which their family swore loyalty. Others might become mercenaries. They would be tougher than many of their conventionally trained counterparts, but they would live with the knowledge that they had failed the knighthood. Some, armed with this insight, took their own lives.

Pelagir didn’t have time to give them a second thought. He was trying to survive.

This year, amid the constant training in arms of all shapes and sizes, he learned Imperial history: the mythical Golden Age, an age of casual miracles and everyday wonders, and its fall. The horrific and destructive war, and the wonder-workers called “scientists” who fled to strong men for protection from the rabble who blamed deep knowledge for the destruction of the Age. This was the Great Uprising. More war, and the terrors of wizardry truly unleashed as the mages worked to save their lords from their enemies, earning a greater place in the nightmares of the common folk. Generations of struggle as small men fought with one another to make large their dreams, and from these small men at last rose a great man: Martyn Strangaers, our first king, who had the charisma, wit, and will necessary to bring the warring lords under his control. He established a central government in the hilly town of Terona, his birthplace, and with his warlords at his side and his pet wizard at his back, he began to subjugate the lands around his hometown. By the time of his death, he sat on the throne of empire and had rebuilt civilization, dragging it screaming from the dark age that had settled upon the land.

As a broad stroke, this was all essentially correct. It was in the details that this history was wrong, but it was wrong for a purpose: it helped fill the young knights with devotion for the Empire they were sworn to defend.

That devotion came with the Code, ritually repeated, used as a marching cadence, as a breathing exercise, fit into every corner and cranny of their waking minds. At first they hated the Code, but they grew to rely on it as the sole touchstone in their training that never changed. They could recite it in their sleep.

“Honor is strength. Honor is integrity. Honor is dedication. My life is my honor, my honor my life. I value my honor more highly.”

And another oath, as well:

“I am the stone on which my order rests. My order is the stone on which the knighthood rests. The knighthood is the stone on which the realm rests. I am stone, and when I stand fast, so too does the realm. If I fail, the realm fails. I am its defender. My commitment never dies.

“I am the steel of my country. I do not bend. I will not break.”

Year 3 – CY 580

By his third year, three hundred of his classmates remained. Half of them would go on to the Knights Lesser. Many of the remainder would go to the ranks of the Knights Faithful. A select handful would achieve the honor of Knight Elite. Only ten such slots were available per year, and they were not filled if too few candidates were suitable. The competition was fierce. Though the students had been trained against desire, they sought honor, and the greatest honor and glory would belong to those who belonged in turn to the Empire, body and soul.

Pelagir had learned to crush his expectations and deal with immediate necessity. He could forecast, anticipate, and plan for eventualities, and he had one of the finest minds among the students of his year—indeed, of any class in the school that year. Further, the lessons they had taught him in this year had been successful in driving hope from his spirit. He planned, he improvised, and he did not hope. He trusted to his training and his ability to carry him through, but he shed no tears if he failed. This culling of his spirit, his native intelligence, and his stoicism in the face of pain and humiliation made him eligible for the rank of Elite.

This also made Pelagir a target of his classmates. Though the students were forbidden to kill or maim one another, their instructors tacitly encouraged the harshest possible competition. They believed that the smarter and stronger students would be best served by cultivating paranoia, remaining wary for traps and betrayals at all times, and that the lesser students would learn to work together to bring down the leaders. Their traps fell into a variety of categories, but these physical and mental gambits often were complete failures and occasionally were disasters. The other candidates, male or female, though intelligent, were not in the class of their superiors, and their efforts sometimes rebounded on them, with deadly results. When at last they realized they were completely outmatched by the better students, the lesser students rejected all contact with them, and this was the most effective betrayal of all.

Worse yet, the best candidates couldn’t trust one another. They were in competition for the ten Elite slots, so they met with their peers only on the practice field and in the classrooms, where they struggled to prove themselves in the eyes of instructors. They were otherwise in almost total isolation.

This, too, was planned. It had been the custom for hundreds of years.

Year 4 – CY 581

Two hundred students. Of the hundred missing, twenty-six had died. Sixty-one had tested out early to squirehood in the Knights Lesser. Thirteen had been withdrawn by their families—though difficult, it was possible, especially in the case of students with no prospects in the knighthood. Those thirteen might do well in the regular armed forces, but they would always recognize their failure to enter the knighthood.

One hundred seventy-three of the remainder were destined for the Knights Faithful, and their work now determined their rank within the order on graduation. The last twenty-seven were in competition for the ten Elite spots, and nobles from the great families came to watch them in training. The candidates who failed to achieve Elite status were automatically part of the high ranks of the Knights Faithful, valuable recruits, and the Houses of the Empire paid well for their services. The Knights Elite were answerable only to the king and those he chose to speak for him, performing the tasks necessary to maintain the Empire, but the other orders traveled among the Houses, every two years delivered by dirigible to those who had asked for their aid. They returned to Terona at the end of their term for training in the rugged terrain to the north of the city, and as long as the Houses paid their leases, the Houses retained the services of highly trained and most deadly warriors. The knights’ loyalty was to the Empire first, to their brotherhood second, and to their adopted Houses last, so when no external threats materialized, they fought against one another in the many internecine battles between Houses great and small.

This mattered little to the young men and women who sought the slots. The knighthood’s regimen had driven ordinary ambition and emotion from them. They struggled now against one another, a competition among near-equals, for their place in legend. They believed that if they could achieve Elite, their struggles would be against the heroes of the past. For now, though, they trained, they studied, they marched hard miles under the blazing sun and under the torrential mountain rains. They fought in muddy trenches, across fields strewn with mountains of dirt and shreds of metal. They trained with swords and spears, bows and siege engines, and other, more esoteric devices created by the Archmagus and his acolytes. They spent a month alone in the wilderness, living off nothing but their wits.