Chapter 74

The room was cold, the fine hairs that covered Corrine’s arms stood on end. She desperately looked for a way to escape, to fight back, but a wall of soldiers stood guard outside the door, and the the only other route of escape would lead to her bones being splattered across the stoney courtyard nearly one hundred feet below their tower room.

Her eyes strayed to the dagger that lay on the stone pedestal that laid in center of the dimmed room.

Edrian had drawn the crimson curtains and ignited a ring of large candles that sputtered their flames, giving the room an eery wavering glow that looked demonic. The double tone in Evrain’s voice solidified the hellish aura of the small room.

What was the man doing?

She strained to reach for Cillia, but the restraints they had placed on her had been fastened too tightly. The metal from the cuffs was biting into her skin and she felt small rivulets of blood dripping from the bottom of her wrists onto the floor, wetting her cramping hands.

Still she fought against them. Maybe if she bled enough, it would slick her wrists and she could slip out of her bonds

Evrain began to disrobe. His skin had an inhuman pallor to it. It was as white as the snow capped mountains that stood guard over Vealand’s capital city of Fiell. Emperor Evrian looked towards Corrine and stared at her as he pulled off his garments. He grinned at her discomfort until she averted her eyes.

He chuckled. The sound was not human.

The smell of acrid smoke mixed with refuse and human viscera rose from the city below and assaulted Corrine’s senses. The cries of those losing their lives and possessions in the fires his soldiers had started mingled with the those of the men who died at the edge of the sword.

With each death rattle drifting up from below, the man seemed less and less human. The evil inside him was growing.

It was feasting on the chaos below.

Corrine strained against her bonds. She had no clue what the Emperor had planned for the young girl who’s near comatose body had been laid out on a smaller pedestal that mirrored the one on which the knife lay, but her heart was filled with terror for Cillia.

Whatever Emperor Evrain was planning for the girl would be evil. She knew that the girl would be better off dead than corrupted under whatever the monster’s touch might do to her.

Now stripped naked, the Emperor circuited the room, his chanting took a rumbling tone to it. What Corrine had suspected had just been her imagination in hearing the two tones to the man’s voice had been proven more than just a suspicion.

Now she could clearly hear two different voices coming from the man. One was human, and not quite the same as she’d heard when she’d been ushered into the room, but it was still coming from the same body. The other however, had a gravelly tone to it. It rumbled and hissed like the voice of a man who drank acid and ate broken glass for all their meals. It was eerie and otherworldly. It was as if his voice were coming from a different universe.

Corrine’s skin crawled.

She could feel the goosebumps rising on her skin.

As he chanted a thin, near transparent layer of steam started to rise off of him. At first it looked like every other steam, a slight distortion of the air around the skin rising off his body in waves, but the deeper Emperor Evrain’s chanting got, the darker the layer of steam turned.

At first Corrine thought she was crazy, then she thought that she was seeing something that had risen from the battlefield and had invaded the air in the tower, turning it the brownish gray that she’d become all too familiar with in the last few months, as she’d watched swarths of the city she’d called home as long as she could remember burn to ashes.

No, what she was seeing wasn’t smoke though.

It was something else. It was as if the steam flowing from the naked Emperor’s body had turned into gaseous tar. His skin was leaking black steam. It was as if the evil in him had personified and was overflowing from his treacherous body.

His chanting grew ever more gravelly and louder.

Why isn’t Aris here yet? Corrine’s mind screamed at her. He should have been here by now!

He was supposed to come to save her and he hadn’t yet! She hated Aris for not coming. He had left her in that cell.

He had left her alone.

Would he abandon her just like he’d abandoned her first husband —his brother— Van?

Corrine quelled that thought. Aris had done nothing to deserve her hatred. The screams that soaked the air and rose up over the Emperor’s loud chanting meant that he had come.

He was here. He had to be.

But had he been killed?

Had he been caught in the middle of the battle and felled by a crossbow bolt? Had an errant blade taken his head from his shoulders? The thought terrified her even more than the madman circuiting the room in front of her.

She banished that line of thought. Aris was a survivor. He was a warrior. He was the strongest man she’d ever known. He wouldn’t allow himself to die until he found her. He could be pierced through with arrows and he would still find his way to her.

*****

The battle raged below, the noise from it brought an odd sense of silence to the keep, drowning out the screams rising from outside.

Aris had had Kestrel and Sephira hang back. The young man had done so reluctantly, and only out of a desire to protect the General’s niece. Otherwise he would have forced himself to the front of the line.

As it was though, Aris and Wallace tasked the two to stay behind and guard their backs, killing any that may make it past the duo, or any that may have survived the initial battle in the hallways and hid to ambush them later.

No-one ambushed them, but after the bodies started falling, Three of the guards made it past Aris and Wallace, who danced through Evrain’s men in a whirling dervish of death.

The first one fell on Sephira with a fury. She raised the knife she’d grabbed from one of the fallen bodies and fought back. Her uncle had trained her well, but she was no match for a highly trained soldier. It was by pure luck that he misplaced his footing and she was able to capitalize it by slamming her foot into the man’s calf, making him overcorrect and sending him tumbling face first into the wall and then down the large stairwell they had climbed up.

The slushy crumpling sound that came from him as he fell assured her that she wouldn’t have to deal with him again.

It would be a miracle if he survived the fall.

She looked to Kestrel, he was moving like a mountain panther as he navigated the steps, fending off two of the men who’d broken free from her Uncle and Wallace’s dance of death. Kestrel only moved when he needed, waiting until the last second to step aside from a flurry of oncoming blows or parry a slashing curve of the guard’s Kukri.

Sephira wanted to throw her knife and bury it into the back of the attackers, but they were moving too much. She didn’t trust herself not to kill the man she loved, Kestrel, in the process.

She got her break when Kestrel sidestepped one of the men and slammed a dagger into the side of the his thigh. He twisted away in agony and the blade was wrenched from Kestrel’s grasp, still buried in the meat of the man’s thigh. He twisted right into Sephira’s lunging blade. Her eyes were nearly as wide as his when they both saw the blade sticking from his chest.

Kestrel, unprotected now, danced away from a large slash from the last of the soldiers who were guarding the tower door where Aris had guessed they’d find the mad Emperor along with his wife and whatever poor sacrifice the man would take for a host body.

The attacker stabbed at Kestrel. He turned, but the blade scored his side. Kestrel winced, but the slash didn’t stop him from trapping the man’s arm to his side and twisting the man into and expert Falis disarming throw that sent the man tumbling down the stairs in a painful fall that put him out of commission.

They turned their attention to the duo at the top of the staircase. The landing was filled with fallen bodies. There were seventeen men there. Had the two of them really killed the whole company by themselves? The blood that soaked Wallace and Aris was answer enough. They looked like the Wendig monsters that the two had fought, covered in blood and viscera, panting heavily from the exertion of the short battle.

“Wow,” Kestrel said as he surveyed the scene.

Wallace grinned evilly. Kestrel had known the old man had been a soldier, a man born and bred in the battlefield.

He had seen the whirlwind of fury he’d been when Aris’ mansion had been attacked and burned to the ground, still that barely compared to the crimson stained old man standing in front of him.

Just how fearsome had he been on the battlefield? That he’d stood and fought against Wendig and had defeated them finally cemented itself in his mind.

Sure he had seen the memories. He’d seen the Mountain Campaigns what had to have been thousands of times when he peered into the old man’s recollections during his training in Memory Magic, but seeing blood soaked memories couldn’t compare to the sight of the man standing in front of him, the blood of others soaking through his clothes until they were a sodden mess.

Aris didn’t spare them a second look. He was busy attacking the doors with a sword that sprayed viscera with every vicious swing. The ringing sound was familiar. The doors were made out of the same wood as the metalvines. The General was never going to get them open by pounding on them. It would take hours to dig even an inch through the reinforced door.

Emperor Evrain had been wise in his choosing.

Sephira desperately searched for a way to help her uncle, but she couldn’t find the slightest seam in the in the heavy tower door to slip her blade through and hopefully catch an exposed hinge. She gave up before the rest of the battle hungry men.

She put her hand to her Uncle Aris’ shoulder. Before she knew what was happening he whirled around, snatched her by the neck, his iron fingers digging into her throat like the talons of a Stone Eagle’s, and the tip of his blade hung a centimeter from plunging into her eye.

It took a less than half a second for him to come back to himself and release her from his life-taking grip.

Sephira dropped to the ground and let out a hacking cough. Though it’d been but a split second, her skin was already bruising where her Uncle’s fingers had tore into the flesh around her wind pipe. Had he held on for but a few seconds, he might have crushed her throat and killed her right then.

“I’m sorry!” Aris’ gurgling voice sounded thick in his throat. It rang like it was coming from another person. Did it always have that heavy timbre to it? “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to!” his eyes pleaded for forgiveness from his niece. It had been a long time since the battle craze had taken him. Years. But he had almost killed her now and the shocked look on Kestrel’s face and the rigid fear that pulled every muscle in Sephira’s body taught would haunt him for the rest of his life, he knew it.

He had hidden that part of him, kept it repressed for nearly a decade. He thought he had rid himself of it, but the cries of horror and death that rang from the grounds below coupled with the crackling of the fires and smoke that rose with them made a horrible trio of musicians that sang a grizzly, murderous tune that only served to accent Aris rage and terror at the prospect of losing his wife to the madman who stood behind those impenetrable doors.

Sephira massaged her throat and was about to respond when the all too familiar clatter of metal alerted her. She turned her eyes from her Uncle Aris and they twisted with fear when they saw a detachment of twenty heavily armed guards marching their way up the narrow set of stairs.

They were too many, too close together. Too densely packed to attack and break through to find a new escape.

Short swords stood at arms in the front with crossbowmen behind them, pressing forward, their weapons ready to impale the quartet of wearied warriors.

“Surrender!” Aris recognized the shouting captain.

He had been one of Edrian Woll’s men. He had the same greed, the same lust for power and haughty attitude that his fallen General had had, he had the potential to be nearly as dangerous as the dead Minister of Defense once had been.

They pushed forward, disregarding the blades that nearly stuck into Aris and his trio. Soon the tiny group found their backs pressed against the door.

It was warm to the touch. Aris hadn’t noticed that before.

The blades kept pressing forwards.

So they were going to do this slow.

They would walk them down until the killed them all, blades slowly but surely digging through their bodies.

There was no option for surrender in the men’s eyes. Aris’ group had murdered their leader and they needed to pay, and they would die slowly.

So be it.

Aris’ hand relaxed its grip on his Kukri. He hadn’t realized how tightly he’d been holding the blade until he forced the rictus of his fingers to release their grip so he could hurl it at the leader of the group and hope for a miraculous death from the captain.

They pressed closer to the door. Its heat had only grown.

Aris and Wallace pushed forward pressing the two younger ones behind them. The end of the blades bit into them, but every second given to the younger two was a second longer of a chance at living.

*****

The door behind the group creaked. The low rumble of chanting that nobody had noticed until it was gone had stopped. Now all that they could hear were the echoing cries of violence outside and the creaking of the metal and leather armor of the guardsmen.

From the silence, a low heavy scraping sound came.

It was the sound of wood rubbing against wood. What was happening behind them? Was someone opening the door? Had they found an unknown savior?

The sound of locks releasing from their catches and slamming back into their nooks inside their wooden housing soon followed and the doors were flung open with surprising ease.

Kestrel’s eyes went wide at the sight that greeted him. There, right in front of him was the Emperor of Vealand, standing stark naked and welcoming him into the chamber with a sweet voice that resounded and echoed as if it were two people speaking at once and one of the two ate rocks daily and carried the sweetness of a predator about to eat the prey that it had been toying with.