Phoenix Rising (7 page)

Marek Tyll marched into the tavern. Two huge men, who each bore wooden clubs the size of a man’s arm, flanked him. At least a dozen more, all armed, followed behind. He was dressed in the same tattered clothing that he'd worn when he preached to the crowd near Bezel Square. It looked even more threadbare and worn than it had. The man’s beard had grown long and scraggly. He looked every bit the prophet of the gods that he claimed to be.

“General!” Conlan grasped Martius’s shoulder. “That’s Marek Tyll!” As he spoke, he searched Tyll’s face.
Did I fight alongside you at Sothlind? Were you a sword brother like poor, dead, Jon Gyren? Like Dylon?
But the man remained a stranger, just as before.

The inn erupted into chaos.
 

Those customers that remained, either recognising Tyll or spotting the weapons that his followers bore, scrambled towards the back door, climbing over tables and each other in their eagerness to escape.

A lack of movement amongst the chaos drew Conlan’s attention to a pair of cloaked and hooded drinkers. They sat at a small table in the opposite corner of the room. Their eyes gleamed at him from under their deep cowls. The smaller of the two stood, as she did, her hood slipped and revealed her hair—blood red, the colour of death.

Syke!
 

The sight of her shook Conlan like a blow. “Syke!” The shout ripped from his lungs and echoed across the tavern.

She glanced towards him and their eyes locked for one sweet moment. He lost sight of her as a crush of patrons sought the exit. When they had passed, she was gone, like a phantom conjured from the depths of his subconscious to taunt him. Just as she had in his dreams since Sothlind.

Jhan Guttel raised his chin and thrust his shoulders back. His eyes gleamed dangerously. “My men were following you, General, but only because goodman Marek Tyll here paid me, and –”

“Where is my god?” Marek Tyll thundered at Martius as he approached. “You will tell me now, for I am his voice on Earth!”

Conlan thought he spotted a glimmer of indecision in Martius’s eyes.

“You saw them!” Tyll continued. “You saw them too… Why have you not spoken out? Tell me. Tell me now!” Then more quietly, plaintively almost. “Do you know where they are?”

Jhan Guttel slowly backed away. He shrugged his shoulders as if absolving himself of any involvement. He smiled, but he could not hide the relief in his eyes. “Master Tyll,” he addressed the ragged prophet, “my men and I have business elsewhere…”

“Aye, begone.” Tyll waved a hand in casual dismissal.
 

“No hard feelings I hope, General?” Jhan Guttel smirked, then turned and quickly departed with his men.
 

The tavern stood all but deserted beyond the ragged half-circle of zealots.

Conlan counted twenty-one men with Marek Tyll.
Four against one.
Not odds that they were likely to beat, even with swords. He was glad of Jhan Guttel’s departure though; his nine would have turned a difficult task impossible.
There will be time to track that one down... If we survive.

Martius cocked his head to one side and glared at Tyll, his eyes unblinking. After a long moment he spoke. “Are you a deserter?” His voice was soft, almost gentle.

Tyll did not seem to notice. He pointed a crooked finger at Martius. “You have seen the gods. They have returned.” His face turned crimson. “Why would you deny them?”

Martius pursed his lips. “I asked you a question.” His voice was pitched low now, but commanding nonetheless. “Are you a deserter?”

“Sir?” Conlan touched Martius’s arm.
What in all the hells is he doing?
Marek Tyll was clearly beyond reason. Trapped, perhaps, in some warped world of his own making. A deserter, maybe, but he might have been driven mad by the bloody insanity of battle itself.
 

Conlan glanced towards the corner of the room to where Syke – or the phantom of her – had appeared, but there was no trace of the crimson goddess. The hawk had flown.

Marek Tyll’s eyes took on a lucid cast; just for a moment, they shone bright with the light of understanding. “Pah!” he spat. “Heretic!” Then he turned and walked away, flanked by his two giant bodyguards.

The rest of Tyll’s men charged in a mad scramble to reach the heretics before them. In his eagerness, one man tripped bringing two more down with him.

Martius drew his sword. “Back to back!” he barked.

Conlan needed no further instruction. His blade squeaked against the wood of his scabbard as he drew it. For a heart-stopping moment he thought it had jammed, then it pulled free.

A man swiped a meat cleaver at Conlan’s head. He ducked the blow and sliced his blade into the man’s groin. It was an automatic riposte, drilled into him through years of training. Martius had said that he did not want unnecessary death, but Conlan’s body was trained to slaughter. Now, after weeks of frustration, it jumped eagerly to its task. The man screamed and fell to the floor, his life pumping away onto the dusty planks.

“We cannot hold, sir.” Conlan kicked an attacker’s kneecap; the man howled and leaned forward. Conlan brained him with the pommel of his sword.
He, at least, may survive.

“We don’t seem…” Martius dodged a knife blade and ripped his short-sword up in a tight arc. The blade sliced through the attacker’s shoulder and he fell back with a scream. “… to have much choice.” He stabbed forward, his eyes shining with fury or joy and another zealot fell back.

Is he still enjoying it? How can he smile at a time like this?
 

Conlan barely blocked a club. It grazed his shoulder and glanced off the site of his injury from Sothlind. The old wound twinged. A shock of pain coursed down his arm. For a moment, the vista before him morphed and he was back in the valley battling the horde once more.

However, this rabble of zealots were no warriors. They were not heedless of their own safety as the Wicklanders had been.

A flash of silver caught his eye. A wickedly curved knife aimed at his left side. He turned instinctively, but he knew he could not stop it.

An image of Syke flashed through his mind, her eyes blazing with power and death. He wondered if he would meet her in the afterlife.

A short sword slammed down into the knife wielder, the hand and knife sheared clean off. Darcus didn’t pause. He swept his blade up and severed the zealot’s carotid, dispatching him with cold precision.

Six men lay dead or wounded on the floor. The rabble held back. Some picked up Marek Tyll’s last word and shouted it like a war chant. “Heretic!” They sought to find a gap in the legionaries’ defences.

“It seems this man Tyll is more of a threat than we suspected,” Martius said.

“A fair assessment, sir.” Conlan replied. He turned briefly to Darcus and nodded his thanks.
I owe you my life,
he wanted to say.

Darcus simply shrugged and returned his attention to the zealots.

“Sir, do you have a plan?”
Are we going to die here?
It seemed ironic, perhaps, to die in a bar brawl after surviving the horror of Sothlind.

“Always, Father Conlan. A good leader
always
has a plan.”
 

“Is the plan for us to die in ignominy?” The words came out before he could stop them.
He is your commanding officer!
the legionary in him chided.

Martius laughed. “I certainly hope not.”

A whistle blew. The sound of running feet smothered the insane chanting of the zealots.

Conlan saw a red plumed helmet first as dozens of city militiamen poured into the tavern.

“Lay down your weapons!” the captain of the militia shouted over the heads of the rabble. “You are surrounded.”

“Ah,” Martius said. “The reinforcements have arrived.”

Grudgingly, one by one at first, and then en masse, the zealots dropped their weapons.
 

The innkeeper, who had entered the tavern with the militia, saluted Martius from across the room.

Martius returned the salute. “My thanks to you, brother!”

The innkeeper snapped to attention, revealing something of the soldier that he had once been. His face beamed with pride. “As you command, General.”

“You planned this?” Conlan gasped for breath, sweat dripped from his forehead and down his back.
I am out of condition… weak.
Daily drill would begin again tomorrow.
You need to be prepared for anything.
A walk in the park had reminded him of that today.

Martius raised an eyebrow. “Well, perhaps not so much planned as
adapted
.”

“You mean you made it up as you went along?”
You really should think before you speak.
A door to a new world of possibilities had opened for Conlan at Sothlind, but the Hole had served as a painful reminder that, in the Empire, free speech was not always the best course of action.

Martius turned to face him, his eyes black and unfathomable, like the very pits of the netherworld. He did not speak for a long time; finally he said, “A fair assessment, Father Conlan... Such a shame Marek Tyll escaped...”

METROTIS STARED HARD AT the figure before him. The man was just over six feet tall; lithe but muscular, his glossy black hair was cropped close, thick and lustrous like fur. His eyes were golden brown, a dark ring around the outside giving an illusion of depth that really was quite disconcerting.
 

You
could lose his soul in those eyes,
Metrotis thought.
 

The man did not have a single blemish on his skin: no spot, scar, freckle or bump marred his features. Metrotis knew that beneath the plain white smock the man wore, the same was true of his entire body. He bore no sign of imperfection. He was perfectly proportioned, as if he had been sculpted rather than born, every muscle clearly defined. Outwardly, he appeared to be about thirty years of age; the only clue to this was in the masculinity of his features and the maturity of his physique. It was clear to anyone who looked that he was not fresh from adolescence, but a man in the prime of his life.

Metrotis had observed the man before him in this manner for weeks, and remained deeply frustrated by his lack of progress with the subject. Whereas the barbarian, Wulf – held captive just down the corridor – was now verbose to the point of irritation, through his translator. Metrotis considered that if he had to hear of Wulf’s prowess in battle
–
or indeed the bedroom –
one more time, his head would split.
 

In stark contrast to Wulf, this prisoner often did not even appear to be
present
in the true sense of the word. He ate; he slept, although very little. He urinated and defecated where he was supposed to, once he had been shown what to do, and he was capable of following simple directions and gestures. Other than that, the image of masculine perfection seemed an empty and barren husk.
 

It was a puzzle to Metrotis. He had always loved solving puzzles. At first, he had believed his uncle Martius’s assertion that the man was a soldier who had received a blow to the head during the battle at Sothlind, but the man showed no obvious signs of trauma.
 

In consternation, Metrotis had consulted the physicians at the healer’s temple: they told him it was not unheard of for a man to lose his memory at times of great trauma or stress, even without a severe head wound. Metrotis considered that a battlefield must be really quite stressful, and so had resolved that this man had suffered a head trauma of sorts, just one that couldn’t be seen, a mental trauma so severe that it rendered him into an almost childlike state.

Metrotis stood up and began to pace up and down the room. He found this helped him to think and distracted from the bottomless brown eyes that had taken to following him everywhere he walked.
 

He heard a rustle and turned to see the man had stood too, not for the first time mimicking the actions of his gaoler. Metrotis looked down at his arms and saw his hairs were standing on end. It was a reaction he was becoming accustomed to when sharing a room with the strange and perfect man.

He shivered despite the warmth of the room and looked again at the immaculate man whose eyes were curiously lifeless, but chilling nonetheless.
 

He remembered the first time the man had looked at him. For days, he had shown no sign of life, no sign that he understood or even witnessed events in the world, just staring into space as if locked within his own mind. It was a day like every other, where Metrotis had paced and sat and spoken and observed. He had been frustrated as usual right up until, with no provocation, in a moment of calm and silence, he turned to see those eyes looking back at him. There was something predatory in the gaze that had sparked an ancestral fear within Metrotis, so that his bowels turned to water. There was something in the look, he thought.
Such as a lion gives its prey just before it pounces to make the kill.
 

His uncle Martius had put his mind to rest that evening. “Nothing to worry about,” he had said. “This is good news, he must be recovering some of his faculties. Keep trying.”
 

Then Metrotis had asked the obvious question. “Uncle, why, if he is a war hero, is he chained to a wall and locked in a room in your town house?”

The general had given him a curious look before sighing deeply. “You are right, nephew, you are right. It is not fair to keep a hero in this manner. Truth be told, I was concerned for you… You do not know how to fight, and if he had truly lost his mind… Yes, I know I assured you he was not harmful. I will leave the decision to you. If you wish, you can have the chains removed.”

Metrotis was left unsure if his uncle meant him harm or was concerned for his safety. From that moment on, two housemen, clearly legionary veterans by their tattoos, stood guard outside the door to the man’s cell at all times.
 

A week later Metrotis had asked the guards to remove the man’s chains.