The Warrior King (Book 4) (29 page)

“So Marialla and I would marry?” Daniel cast a sympathetic glance at the princess, who had taken all this in through narrowed eyes.

“Yes,” Chantmer said.

“A political expediency,” Roghan said. The mage rubbed at a recent tattoo on his forearm. “Your mages can put down dissent, but you will greatly help us if you rule with a light touch. And if the princess uses her charm and cunning to rule the palace while you rule the city and its lands.”

“A light touch won’t be a problem—I was never an oppressive monarch like my father,” Daniel said. “But is this fair to the princess? To be maneuvered about like a piece on an al-shatranj board?”

“Do you think I wanted to marry that ugly toad?” Marialla said. “To be his fifth wife or his twentieth concubine? If I would do that for my sister, for Balsalom, then why wouldn’t I marry you? Because you’re a barbarian?” She let out a little laugh. “As if that matters to me. By the Brothers, surely you’ll be better than Mufashe, won’t you?” She nodded. “Of course I’ll accept the wizard’s offer if it will put me on the throne of Marrabat.”

“You wouldn’t have to marry me,” Daniel said. “I would still lead your armies as your general.”

“You know little about the sultanates, my friend,” she said. “They are proud people, with many traditions. These wizards can never lead the city—that would never be allowed—and a foreign pasha will never be allowed to lead their armies. Fortunately, the word
foreigner
is rather loosely defined in these parts. And the husband of the sultana would be considered a Marrabatti.” 

Chantmer smiled at her cunning assessment of the political situation, which was completely accurate. He would need to keep an eye on this one—she was nobody’s figurehead.

“Well,” Daniel said, his brow furrowing. He was no fool, either, but the restrictive rules of the brotherhood would be weighing heavily on his mind. All that nonsense about right behavior. “I would be warring in the east, and I wouldn’t try to force myself into your bed. I would be your husband in name only.”

Marialla laughed again, a high, charming sound. She rested a hand on Daniel’s wrist, her russet skin contrasting with his paler color. “What chivalrous nonsense. Of course you will come to my bed. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Unless . . . ” Her expression darkened. “You don’t share Mufashe’s obscene tastes, do you?”

“Of course not.” Daniel sounded horrified.

“Good. My sister seems to be fond of her barbarian husband. I don’t see why I shouldn’t enjoy my own. You are more than sufficiently handsome, and I’m the most beautiful woman in Marrabat, or so they say.” She said this with enough irony in her tone that it came across as playful and not boasting. “So long as you do not seek to oppress or dominate me, then we will come to an understanding. Both inside the marriage chamber and without.”

Daniel blushed, but at the same time, his eyebrow raised. “Perhaps some additional courting is in order before we take that step, but I am open to the possibility.”

“Court away, but do not be too long at it. I suspect you’ll be on the road with your armies soon, a warrior king like your brother, and I intend to see you off as is befitting a wife to her husband.”

“Fine, fine,” Chantmer said, impatient with their sexual banter. What animal lusts these people suffered, that they could think of such things at a time like this, when so many great and epic wheels had been set in motion. “Then it is settled. Roghan, when can it be done?”

The mage chewed at his lower lip. “We’ll need a day or two to seek out and cleanse the palace of enemies. Another day or two to spread the word in Marrabat, then we’ll marry them quickly and publicly. After that, there will be a good deal of maneuvering to bring our forces to bear.”

There was a slight emphasis in how he said
maneuvering.
Chantmer thought back to their conversation upon his arrival in Marrabat. Roghan had proposed that wizards take power, as they were the true masters of Mithyl, with the ability to see across centuries. They would be the rulers and the stewards of the world, and would take their rightful place at its head. For now, they would need these sultans, kings, and khalifs, but the time would come to sweep away all pretense. 

“For now, the two of you should retreat to your chambers,” Chantmer told Marialla and Daniel. “Set an armed guard and let nobody enter unless it is either myself or one of Roghan’s mages. I cannot protect you personally—I have too much to do.”

“It would be safer still for us to share a single chamber,” the princess said. “The mages can concentrate their protective spells on a smaller space.”

“We’re not married yet,” Daniel said. “People will talk.”

“I surely hope so.” Marialla rose and tugged on his hand. “Come, let’s do some of this
courting
you proposed. I know several techniques I’d be happy to teach you.” 

Daniel, so strong-willed and powerful, seemed helpless to resist Marialla Saffa as she led him from the room. Two of Roghan’s mages met them at the doors and escorted them back toward the Balsalomian apartments.

Roghan watched them go with an amused expression. When he turned back around, Chantmer met his gaze with a scowl.

“It’s harmless,” Roghan said. “And to those of us for whom such pleasures are denied, it warms the heart to witness others take their enjoyment from life.”

Chantmer grunted at this, not gaining any such enjoyment himself. “Well,” he said at last, rising to his feet. “Best they purge it from their systems while we prepare the way for Marialla’s ascension to the throne. After the wedding, there will be no time for it.”

“Will they survive the war, do you think?” Roghan asked.

Chantmer gave an indifferent shrug. “I wouldn’t place a wager either way.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

King Toth ordered fifty prisoners dragged to the heights of the Dark Citadel. They were a collection of bruised and battered refugees from a ship that had set out from the harbor of Veyre, trying to escape the combined armies of Balsalom and the Free Kingdoms before they tightened their siege. Traitors and defeatists. Their captain had confessed under torture that he had taken two hundred dinarii a head to transport them to the Nisour Isles where they intended to wait out the war.

Toth had already tortured some of them to feed his growing power, but the survivors—men, women, children—now clung to each other as a chill, briny mist blew off the bay. A heavy squall was coming ashore, and the wind drove towering waves that rolled in from the sea to slam against the seawall. The wind tossed Toth’s ships in the harbor as if they were a child’s playthings. Some of the sea’s nervous, restless energy had come from the dark wizard’s own rage.

Last night, when he’d sat upon the throne, sending his magic west to aid his ravagers, he had sensed complete victory. Roderick and his men had gained the castle walls. His ravagers only needed to put down Whelan, steal Soultrup, and then battle back toward Pasha Ismail’s force. With the loss of their king, the enemy forces would fall back in confusion and disarray, allowing Ismail’s army to escape.

Instead, Markal, that cunning worm, had crushed the ravagers beneath the rubble of the collapsing gate towers. Toth had not known his enemy was with the king, having received word from the wights that Markal was passing through the Desolation on his way to Marrabat. Otherwise, he would have ordered the ravagers to kill him too.

Toth paced up and down the stone walkway that encircled the uppermost platform of the Dark Citadel. As he walked, he stared back at the prisoners through smoldering eyes. They cringed and wailed whenever he fixed them with his gaze, and he drew strength from their terror. He had almost enough to finish the business he’d begun far to the west, but not quite, not yet. And time was growing short. With Whelan marching on Veyre, he could no longer afford patience.

“Please, my lord,” a woman begged. “We were only trying to save our children. We meant no harm to the war.”

The woman clutched a boy of ten or eleven, who clung to her waist with his face buried in her robes. Toth put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and the child trembled.

“This one,” he said to his guards.

The woman wailed as the guards tore the child away from her. They pitched his flailing, screaming body over the edge of the tower. He fell two hundred feet and landed with a thud against the flagstones below. A surge of power flowed into Toth’s body, and he opened his mouth in a sigh at the pleasure of it. More power came from the screaming prisoners, their terror like wine on his lips, intoxicating and warming.

King Toth could not remember the time before he had become the dark wizard, and in truth, he was so much more than one person, he was the amalgamation of all of the wizards and warriors that had housed his soul throughout the ages, most recently Cragyn of the Order of the Wounded Hand, whose dabbling in necromancy had awakened Toth once again. He could feel their voices arguing within, vying for control of his body. But if he couldn’t remember what he had been, he knew what he must become: a god. The equal and even master of the Brothers, the one to find and defeat the Harvester himself.

He found his next victim. It was a young man, with a long, sorrowful expression. He was holding hands with a young woman with deep, brown eyes, a look of such pain in her expression that Toth could see that she had already suffered great loss. He could instinctively tell that she had lost a child or parent, and that the young man was her brother, and her only surviving family.

“This man is next,” he told the guards.

They seized the young man and dragged him from his sister, who begged and pleaded, offering the dark wizard anything he wished if he would only spare her brother. Toth was pitiless. The young man’s body soon lay broken and dead on the flagstones next to the child.

More power surged through Toth’s body. So close.

“I do this not out of cruelty,” he told the people when the screams had died into whimpers, “but out of love for my people. I will have the power to defeat death itself. There will be no disease, no famine, no bloodshed. The Harvester will be banished from the land, and all shall live forever. But first, I must defeat these enemies from the west. You and each of you must lend me what strength you are able. It is a terrible sacrifice, but I have no choice.”

He must have more power!

Whelan frightened him, as did the wizard Markal and his allies. Even Chantmer the Tall, who had turned against his order, was out there vying for power, not so much an enemy as a potential rival. Given time, Toth might have come to some understanding with the tall, arrogant wizard. But he had no time left. The khalifa of Balsalom, Kallia Saffa, carried his offspring, and though he had done his best to quicken its arrival and bring him a younger, stronger vessel, that would take more time still.

Then he had raised a mighty dragon in the mountains, only to see the griffin riders wound it and drive it into the desert. The dragon was now awakening, but could it both defeat the griffins and devastate Whelan’s army at the same time? Perhaps. But maybe not.

“I need more,” he said.

“My lord?” one of the guards asked.

“More pain. More suffering. I must have it all if I am to accomplish this terrible task.” He pointed. “Take that woman. And the old man with her. The baby there.”

More bodies pitched over the edge, one by one. The pain of the dying mingled with the terror of the diminishing number of survivors to fill him with power. He was wasting much of what they could give him—they could surrender so much more if brought into the throne room to slowly roast alive—but he needed power, and he needed it now.

As the pain of his victims surged into him, the Dark Citadel served the purpose for which it had been constructed. It focused his power and his reach, and he could feel across the Tothian Way. His gaze crossed the city gates, flew west over the remnant army of Pasha Ismail, trying to reach the safety of Veyre. He could have strengthened the weary men and horses to keep them out of Whelan’s grasp, but he couldn’t waste his precious strength.

His reach extended to Chalfea, Saltopolis, Effina, Kyf, Starnod, Ter, Balsalom. And then west, into the Desolation of Toth itself. Here lay the scene of Toth’s greatest victories—the murder of Memnet the Great and the destruction of Aristonia—but also the site of his most bitter defeats.

He could feel the blasted land all around him now, the ruins and the soil, once so fertile, but now dead and poisoned. He heard the voices of thousands upon thousands of wights, those lost souls who had been mindlessly wandering the desolation for four hundred years.

That remaining part of his consciousness that stood atop the Dark Citadel could hear the screams as his guards hurled one person after another to their deaths. Power flowed into him, greater and greater, so intoxicating that it made him swoon. The last of the fifty prisoners fell to his death, and the air was quiet except for the howling wind and the thunder of the waves crashing into the seawall.

Now. They have given me everything. It is time.

Atop the Dark Citadel, King Toth lifted his hands. “
Suscitum mortuos. Educ illos iterum.
” —Raise the dead. Bring them forth again. 

The magic that had flowed into him these past minutes and weeks now gushed out like a spout of blood from a severed artery. It raced west to where his will lingered. And there his magic fell over that blasted, blighted land, where so many mindless spirits wandered in confusion.