The Broken (The Lost Words: Volume 2) (36 page)

“Sit there.” He pointed at a single stool roughly in the center of the chamber. “C’mon. Sit there.”

The fat kid sat on the stool, his breeches squelching. He was trembling visibly. On the floor, near the stool, there was an earthen jar, filled with honey cakes.

“Sir?” he mumbled.

“What is it?” Calemore went into the room corner. There was a desk covered in a sheet of linen. A bulge of items lay hidden beneath a swath of cloth.

“Can I have a cookie, sir?” the orphan croaked, his sense of hunger overtaking his sense of danger.

Calemore grinned. “But of course. These are for you. Go ahead. Eat as many as you like.”

Hesitantly, the child bent down and reached for the cakes. His pudgy fingers dug into the bowl.

The White Witch unfurled the bundle and started setting up. He would need a few minutes anyway. Besides, the cakes would calm the child, exactly what he needed. A panicky orphan would be bad. He preferred them docile.

“Now, child, listen to me,” he spoke.

Buna stopped chewing. There were crumbs on his cheeks, pasted by tears and oily grime. He looked at the terrifying man in the white clothes, wondering what would happen next. The child did not really comprehend everything, but his primitive soul cringed.

“Listen carefully. Whatever I do now, you don’t move. Do you understand? You stay still, and you don’t move. You don’t fret; you don’t make a sound. If you do, I’ll wallop you on the ears. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded.

“Good. Now stay still.”

With that, Calemore propped a large easel in the center of the room, leaned a canvas on its sill, and started painting. He used oil paints, expensive mixtures with flakes of gold and silver and bronze that added special gleam to the colors. They had cost a fair sum, but money had never been a problem for him. Creating art was beyond magic, though.

The fat urchin sat on the stool, staring at the wall, his face locked with boredom and his muscles shackled with fear. Calemore worked the brush gently against the white canvas, dabbing on paint in tiny, careful strokes. An hour passed, and he had merely finished the boy’s filthy mouse-gray scalp. And then, he had to stop so the paint could dry.

“You can eat more cakes now,” he told the boy.

Buna exhaled deeply, letting out pent-up fear and exhaustion. He was still terrified, but less than before. The filthy hands dove into the jar, gripping the cakes with frenzy.

Calemore wished the oil paints could dry quickly enough to capture moments such as these. But he had to settle for static portraits. He could have used magic to speed up the drying, but it would ruin the beauty of his art.

He loved painting. It made him feel relaxed and serene. It made him feel more than just a perfect equation in the hands of gods. Painting let his brain exercise its hidden depths, create things his makers could not have thought about. It was his liberation from perfection.

The White Witch sighed. He might never finish the painting, though. It could take weeks. By then, the boy could be rat food, become someone’s slave, die in a fight, or just disappear. And there was the other, more pressing matter to attend to. He didn’t know when Damian might finish his tasks, but as soon as he did, he would need to leave Tamora. Even so, he would keep the painting, like thousands of others he had made. He never threw them away. He kept them wrapped in sealskins buried in salt mines so they would last forever. Art was priceless.

“Enough. Sit still,” he ordered. The boy squirmed back onto the stool. “Like before. Fold your hands. That’s it. Don’t move.” Calemore resumed painting.

CHAPTER 23

S
ergei should have been elated. Sergei should have been happy. Instead, he felt angry. And the air around him stank.

His military campaign had been a tremendous success so far. He had swept across Athesia like wildfire, decimating the defending forces, swallowing huge chunks of territory in a relentless march day and night. He had utterly and completely destroyed the Athesian legions, with minimal casualties on his side.

And yet, Roalas stood unconquered, teasing him.

The three-pronged attack had been executed with pinpoint precision, despite being coordinated across hundreds of leagues of terrain, with forces from several lands timing their attacks flawlessly. First, the Pum’be had struck, killing the army commanders, leaving the defenders headless. Some might call his act of assassination cowardly and without honor, but he called it smart. How many Parusite lives had been saved because they fought a confused enemy without leadership? Was there no honor in that? When Emperor Adam had murdered fifty thousand of his kin, had there been any honor in that?

Following the killings, wave upon wave of hungry, fierce, and bold Parusite troops had stormed across the border, plunging into the soft, exposed belly of the defending forces, tearing them apart. The Red Caps in the west; his own army, aided by mercenaries and their terrible olifaunts in the south; Oth Danesh pirates in the east. Perfect timing, round-the-clock attacks against the enemy, leaving the Athesians no time to recuperate, no time to regroup, and most importantly, no time to send an early warning of the attack back home.

The tide of the war had arrived along with the invaders. Weary messengers riding their horses to death had stumbled into the capital with the grave news of their shameful defeat, with Parusite cavalry hot on their heels. No one had ever done anything so daring or spectacular in five hundred years of written history.

And yet, Roalas had survived, scarred and battered, but very much alive.

Sergei snorted. He sipped some more mulled wine, staring at the city’s siege walls through a haze of soot, smoke, and early morning haze. Amalia had been saved by riffraff. Lucky fool.

Like any large, prosperous city, Roalas had its most unsavory districts spill outside the walls in a sprawl of mold and mildew and rot and rickety shacks that housed the poor, the unwanted, and the refugees. The circle of misery thinned out eventually, blending into the surrounding grain fields, but it formed a huge, pulsating, almost-natural barrier against intrusion. Once the fires had started, the slums had become an impregnable defense shield.

Sergei had not given orders to burn the slums, but burned they had. The blazes had spread quickly, devouring the paper-thin houses and their dirty inhabitants, not before creating a massive debris field of death and destruction that no army could pass easily. Even now, days later, smoke rose from the ruins. Many thousands had perished in the conflagration, but many more had survived. They lived in the cellars and charred skeletons of razed buildings, hungry, desperate, and mad, with boiled skin and bloodshot eyes, preying on anything that moved. Even the Athesians kept away.

They called it Inferno.

History taught a bitter lesson. The few books that documented the Feoran blasphemy in the Territories two decades earlier spoke of a similar battle in the city of Talmath. Faced with overwhelming odds, the defenders had set fire to the poor quarters to check the enemy advance. It had not helped them in the end. The same would happen here, he thought. Roalas may have gained a few precious moments of respite, but it would fall. Still, he should have considered the possibility and prepared for it.

One of his scout units had returned from a city patrol with half their men and horses missing. Ambushed in the maze of rubble and shriveled bodies, they had been beaten to a pulp with rocks and bare hands. A lucky survivor had sworn to have seen one of his comrades being eaten alive. Sergei had put the man to death, but the rumor lived on. Now, his forces were not so keen on scouting in that no-man’s-land. In between potshots from catapults and archers on the walls, killing parties of Athesian defenders prowling the slums, the masses of hungry animals, and the thick, acrid smoke that seared the throat and hid lethal surprises under a veil of confusion, the Parusite soldiers did not fancy storming Roalas. No one wanted their lives claimed by Inferno. No one wanted their dead bodies desecrated and their souls condemned to eternal agony in the Abyss.

Clearing the rubble would take a long time. Unfortunately, his men would have to do that, and he hadn’t planned for this eventuality. Siege engines were out of range and needed to come closer. Any massive charge would require a clear swath of ground to concentrate the force. For now, all he could do was send slow, snaking columns of men toward an almost certain, humiliating death.

Amalia had earned herself several days of an accidental cease-fire, allowing her to regroup and assign new commanders to decimated units, recruit more soldiers, and prepare her defenses. It was inevitable. The black bodies of the refugees and flea-infested rabble had saved the empress.

But the debris was only part of his problem. His troops craved blood. After the magnificent victory, they were cocky and wild and wanted more of it. They were elated and restless. The night camps shook with random, wanton violence. Discipline was strict, but there was just no containing the sheer, pulsating gore fest.

Sergei maneuvered his efforts as best as he could, trying to minimize anarchy. This war was not about obliterating Athesia. It was about destroying its image, but not its people. He would need the hundreds of thousands of former Eracians and Caytoreans to work the land and pay taxes after Athesia officially became a Parusite duchy. He could not afford genocide as a sport.

His royal decree promised slow death to any soldier who raped civilians. Women and children were to be allowed safe passage, no matter what. Any Athesian man willing to walk away from the conflict would be spared. He made sure his proclamations were heard far and wide, especially inside Roalas. The defenders needed to have that desperate hope. It would make their struggle so much more difficult. No one really wanted to die if they did not have to.

Remember Adam
, he thought.
He gave you hope. I give you hope
.

Of course, the men would be rallied to special holding camps so there would no sudden pockets of resistance blooming to life behind enemy lines. But he truly intended to give the nation a chance. But not its empress. She had to be destroyed.

He sipped more wine.

Still, his success was not without blemish. In the east, the Oth Danesh were causing too much trouble. He had already received a dozen official complaints from Caytorean mayors who claimed their cities and towns had been harassed by the pirates—ships attacked and boarded, caravans sacked, villages burned and raped, and small folk carried off as war trophies.

Sergei was not pleased. He might have to put some of the pirate captains to death as a lesson. He could not afford to have the Caytoreans step into the conflict as his enemies. Not now, anyway.

Behind him, the riverfront bustled. Soldiers were hard at work repairing bridges, clearing the fields of dead bodies, setting up the defense perimeter; half a dozen lookout towers already stood erect above the endless field of tents, stabbing at the sky like brown, chipped fangs.

On the river itself, an arrested dory that belonged to some local fishermen was circling a scuttled barge, men on its deck scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to get it dislodged from the muddy bottom. In their desperation, the Athesian defenders had sunk a pair of larger boats at the narrow points of the streambed to keep the attackers from being able to ferry troops upriver. Not that it had helped them. On the far bank, carpenters were busy assembling rafts to help with the crossing of forces.

Noise was everywhere. But most of it belonged to trade.

Foreign convoys traveling to Roalas were not allowed into the city. But rather than being turned away or having their goods plundered, the merchants had been surprised to learn their commerce would be bought by the Parusite forces, paid for in full in silver and gold. It was a not-so-subtle hint at Sergei’s future intentions of establishing more active, more prosperous relations with the other realms.

Roalas was fully and completely encircled. Sasha held the position to the north and west. If the surviving enemy legions in the north tried to join the city defenders or lift the siege, they would have to get past the Red Caps. His mainstay held the south. The pirates blockaded the east border and the seaports.

But there was a galling rumor of an entire Athesian legion lurking somewhere in Caytor, now effectively cut off from their realm, with no clear orders what to do. He was not sure how strong and skilled the force was, but it was a thorn in his side. The notion of having to strengthen one of his flanks frustrated him; it drained his resources from focusing the full brunt against the capital.

His momentum had been stalled. From a glorious day-and-night pursuit to a slow siege. It was not what he had hoped for, even though he had conquered a third of the realm in just a week. But now, there was a lot of work to be done.

Bridges needed to be repaired so fresh supplies could be brought in. He wanted the city’s lush, untouched fields harvested; no reason to let it all go to waste before the winter. His troops needed huge amounts of supplies, his mounted forces were short on fodder, and the countryside was already plucked clean. The fleeing mob had taken away everything. What few people still remained in the abandoned villages watched the invaders with wary, frightened eyes, stayed indoors, and refused to go out. When foraging parties came their way, they waved their empty hands and spat behind their backs.