The False Martyr (110 page)

By the time Cary made it
to the room where they’d left their weapons when they arrived, he
knew that he did not have enough time. Even if he beat the men to
the outside, what then? Morgs were legendary runners. He was not.
They’d be on him before he’d made it a hundred paces – if they
didn’t just shoot him in the back with an arrow. Unfortunately,
there were no bolts on any of the doors, no mechanisms to bar them,
nothing to keep the men from following right behind. A clatter rose
from the baths as one of the Morgs had the same encounter with the
bucket that Cary had. It gave him a few extra seconds, but not
nearly enough as he stood looking at the door that would soon burst
open.

The answer was at the
corner of his eye. He could barely lift the great axe, but it was
the closest weapon in the small room full of such things. Dragging
it the few feet required, he positioned the broad handle against
the door latch and stomped down on the butt, driving the blade into
the wooden floor. One more stomp was all he managed before the door
nearly burst. The latch clicked and a body hit it with enough force
to make the racks of weapons clatter in the room to his side, but
the door held and the blow drove the axe blade farther into the
floor as the stout handle caught and held on the metal
latch.

Praying to the Order that
it hold, Cary ran into the cloakroom, the final room before he was
out onto the plains. His pack, boots, chaps were exactly where he
had left them on the ill-fated day that had started all this. He
pulled on his boots, hefted the pack, and left the chaps. The sound
from the previous room started to change as Cary ran to the final
door. The men were making progress, were driving the axe away,
forcing an opening. It wasn’t going to be enough.

Where he got the strength,
Cary would never know, but he somehow managed to push an entire
rack the few paces required to block the cloakroom door. With the
last of that strength, he toppled it, leaving a ten-foot rack and a
hundred fur cloaks to block his escape. Finally, he threw open the
final door and ran into the blinding light of the
plains.

Blinking against the sun,
Cary nearly went to the ground as the black shape dove toward him.
He ducked beneath it, but he had not been its target. He looked
back and found what was left of Ambassador Chulters and the
rangers. Ten feet off the ground, a dozen naked bodies had been
nailed to the wooden beams of the lodge and left to the crows and
flies that swarmed them in such a multitude that the bodies were
barely visible. Diverting his eyes, Cary tried to keep the contents
of his last meal in his stomach. He failed. Vomit spewed from his
mouth as he ran, hit his boots and splattered across his
pants.

My
fault
, he told himself.
They didn’t do anything wrong, but they’re dead
and I’m alive. How could the Order be so cruel?
It wasn’t the Order, Cary knew, at least not any Order he
knew. It was Juhn. And even he was now dead. There was no one left
to blame but himself. And he would soon be joining them. Even if it
took the men an hour to get outside, Cary had no chance of
outrunning them. He was already panting. His side felt like a knife
had been driven into it. He was limping where he’d fallen on his
knee, and his legs were about to give out. He’d never make it to
the trees, much less out of the Fells. He was only delaying the
inevitable.

Still, he ran as best he
could until he came to the top of a small ridge and looked down at
his salvation. Thanking the Order with every stride, he sprinted
down the hill so fast that he nearly spooked the waiting
horse.

Chapter 62

The
48
^th
Day of Summer

“
Dorington has fallen,”
Kian announced as he burst into Dasen’s room. He slammed the door
behind him and pounded his hand on it.

“
Please, Kian, the Lady
Esther is sleeping,” Valati Lareno scolded. “She very nearly died
on Teaching Day and borders still on death. She needs quiet to
recover.”

“
Are you listening to me?”
Kian fumed but lowered his voice. “The courier just arrived, but
already word is spreading. Bairn is dead. The Chancellor popped out
of nowhere right into the middle of the directorate hall with an
army of knights, invaders, and wizards. They massacred everyone
then hung Bairn and his entire family all the way to the
grandchildren. That’s who we’re dealing with, and now they’re
heading here. They pulled every man from the garrison, the border
outposts, the patrols. Add in the men from Denton and Aldon and
we’ll be swimming in soldiers in a few days.”

“
What?” Dasen managed to
ask. “My father is coming here?” Not wearing a scrap of his
costume, he had nearly toppled his chair backward when Kian stormed
through the door. Now, he nearly fell again as he tried to rise and
was struck by what he had just heard. He knew that he should have
been more disturbed by the news that his father had led a massacre,
that he had hung his rival and his entire family, but his mind had
long ago given up on trying to reconcile the father he knew with
the man who perpetrated such crimes. They were almost two separate
people to him now, as if the Chancellor were somehow holding his
father prisoner as he masqueraded as the renowned industrialist.
Thus it was that he did not know if the emotion in his question was
elation at the possibility of seeing his father or fear at facing
the monster his father had become.

“
Calm down, both of you.”
Valati Lareno caught Dasen’s arm and steadied him as he came around
the small table to face Kian. He had arrived only a few minutes
before Kian under the auspices of sitting with Lady Esther as he
asked the Order to restore her health.

Two days ago, when Deena
Esther’s latest miracle had been complete, when the last of the
loaded bags had come through the doors, when enough food had been
delivered to feed the city for days, when all those people were in
the thrall of a miracle that a precocious ten-year-old should have
been able to discredit, Dasen had again fainted right on cue.
Though, it was only from standing in the sweltering patch of
sunlight, Lareno had declared him on the edge of death, had
announced to the entire city that Lady Esther had pushed herself
too far in service of the Order, that she was barely breathing,
that her heartbeat could barely be found. While the people marveled
at the cost of their miracle, the acolytes had loaded Dasen into a
wagon and carried him to his room. He had remained there the past
two days while his alter ego “bordered on death.”

“
Calm down?” Kian barely
kept himself from bellowing. “With all those soldiers here, there
will be nothing to stop the governor from rounding up every one of
us, including your precious saint. She . . . I mean he . . . will
go off to help the invaders, and we’ll get hemp necklaces just like
Bairn.”

“
Nothing has changed.”
Valati Lareno held out his hands to calm his raging comrade. “All
of this has been accounted for. What did you expect? The Chancellor
could not allow the largest city in the South to skirt his command.
You already knew he would respond, and you knew he would use the
Exiles to do it. This was all expected. It changes
nothing.”

“
And my father?” Dasen
managed to ask. He had given up on trying to rise and just watched
the diminutive valati face down the powerful soldier. Kian still
wore the uniform of the city garrison, with the bars of a sergeant
now sewn above the city crest.

“
The Chancellor is not
coming here,” Lareno assured Dasen then Kian. “He has far more to
do than accompany soldiers on the march. That is what officers are
for, and if nothing else, he has shown that he knows how to
delegate responsibility.”

“
Then why is every soldier
south of Alyesford coming here?” Kian asked. He seemed unwilling to
accept that the events in Dorington were not directly related to
their activities in Gorin West.

Lareno dismissed the
concern with the wave of his hand. “You are right that we will be
swimming in soldiers in a few days, but it has nothing to do with
us. Even if the city were in full revolt, we wouldn’t warrant the
treatment that Dorington received. Dorington is a large, important
city. Gorin West is only as important as its docks and roads. The
only reason an army comes here is because it is on the way to
somewhere else.”

“
They’re going to
Liandria,” Dasen supplied. He was seeing it all come together now.
“The invaders are not content with capturing the Unified Kingdoms.
They want to invade Liandria and are forcing the Kingdoms to help.
That’s why the revolt works. The army’s going to take Governor
Colmar’s men with them. They’ll leave us as defenseless as
Dorington.”

“
Yes,” Lareno confirmed.
“We just need a catalyst and the proper timing. Armies travel ahead
of their supplies. If we time it properly, the soldiers will be
gone, but their food and weapons will be ours for the
taking.”

Kian seemed to think about
that. He nodded several times as if calculating. “A week, huh? But
your saint is near death, and the governor’s expected back
tomorrow. He’s not going to fall for your tricks like the common
people do. He’s going to put an end to this.”

“
You’re right, my friend,
but Colmar is no fool. He sees the same things we do. He knows that
Deena Esther is too powerful a figure now. He can’t just get rid of
her.”

“
But he’s not going to let
this continue. Even his own men are abuzz about what happened on
Teaching Day. Most of them think they saw an honest-to-goodness
miracle. Much more and the whole city’ll come unglued.”

“
That’s why we had to slow
things down. The Teaching Day miracle made Deena Esther a saint not
only to those in the camp but to everyone in Gorin West. Far more
than the food, people want to be part of history. They want to say
that they witnessed the miraculous. We could have shown them the
food in the meditation room. As long as someone yelled the word,
‘miracle,’ they’d call it one because that makes them part of it.
They’re hooked now, every one of them. They want nothing more than
to see it happen again, to tell their grandchildren that they were
there. But devotion is the most dangerous thing in the world, so we
have to be very careful with how we use it.”

Dasen gulped. He was
seeing all the machinations now, could truly appreciate how the
valati had managed every element. “I go back out tomorrow, don’t
I?”

“
Yes,” the valati leapt.
“Deena Esther will give them one more miracle, but she also knows
that the end is near. You will still be resolute, but distant,
almost sad. That will give the people a sense of foreboding. The
governor will justify that sense. Once he hears how things have
escalated, he’ll resolve to put an end to it.”

“
But we need more time,”
Kian interrupted. “If he arrests Lady Esther tomorrow, the town
will go into full revolt just in time for an army to arrive and
crush it. Shouldn’t we keep him up here until we’re
ready?”

“
No,” Dasen answered.
“We’ll lose too much momentum. The people will feel like their
saint has abandoned them. They’ll forget what they felt, why they
believed. So what do we do?”

Lareno sighed but could
not hide his smile. “As I said, the governor is savvy. He will want
you someplace safe, someplace where he can discover your secret
without confronting the mobs in the street. He’ll ask you to
dinner.”

Dasen felt panic rise for
the first time. “I can’t . . . he’ll . . . surely . . .
.”

“
You will decline the
offer most vociferously,” the valati assured. “You will denounce
him in front of the common room of the city’s largest
inn.”

“
But . . . but that will
just . . . .”

“
Give him an excuse to
have you arrested? Yes. But he knows better than to lock you in a
cell or send you to the camp. He needs you off the street without
creating a ruckus about it.”

“
He’ll confine me to my
room.”

“
Exactly. But that won’t
stop your followers. We’ll go out without you.”

“
And without me there will
be no miracle.”

“
No. The miracle will be
that the people of Gorin West will truly unite. They will pour from
their houses with food – the same food we just gave them. They will
fill our wagons every bit as much as the days of your
miracles.”

“
I’ve been around Colmar
enough to know that he won’t stand for that,” Kian jumped in this
time. “He can’t have mobs of people out in the street collecting
food when the army arrives.”

“
And he won’t,” Valati
Lareno explained. “He will demand that the collections stop. He
will lock the city down. No one will be allowed outside expect to
report to a work crew. No groups larger than three will be allowed
to congregate.”

“
Obviously we won’t be
following that,” Kian said.

“
We’ll stir the pot a bit,
but as we’ve already established, the real end comes after most of
the army has gone. The city will be an angry hive by then. And Lady
Esther’s martyrdom will be the bear that shakes it.” He looked at
his co-conspirators, but they were both silent. Kian appeared
stunned by the complexity of it all while Dasen marveled at its
genius. Certainly, there were places for it to go wrong, but the
pieces had been so meticulously positioned that the governor had
almost no escape.