The Conqueror's Shadow (6 page)

Tolliver blanched and offered a swift sign against evil. “I wish you'd not speak those names aloud, Cerris. No point in tempting fate, is there?”

“My apologies, Tolliver. For my slip, and for my children's actions.”

The other man smiled good-naturedly. “Well, they're hardly as bad
as the Children of Apocalypse, for all that. Truth to tell, Cerris, the water's as welcome as anything else. I haven't felt this cool since I left my house this morning.”

“Is there any particular reason,” Tyannon asked from a nearby chair as they passed over the threshold, “you're dripping so profusely on my floor?”

“Tiniest cloudburst in history,” her husband told her with a straight face. “Damnedest thing I've ever seen.”

Tyannon smiled, rising to her feet. “And how are you today, Tolliver?”

“Oh, I can't complain, Tyannon. Well, I could, actually. It's bloody hot out there. But it wouldn't do a one of us any good, so I'll pass.”

She brought towels, and the three of them sat down around the table with mugs of ale and a platter containing a heavy wedge of cheese and a variety of vegetables.

Tolliver looked around him, taking it all in as he did each time he visited. The house was the same on the inside as it was without: plain and simple, homey in a way that his own much larger dwelling could never be. Wooden cabinets lined the walls in the kitchen, simple but comfortable chairs surrounded the thick table at which they sat. This was a place of peace; a family could be quite happy here.

It was Tyannon who broke the meaningless small talk that filled the first few moments of their repast. “Tolliver, you're always welcome here, and it is a joy to visit with you. But I'm afraid I don't quite believe you're here for entirely social reasons.”

Tolliver's lip quirked. “Am I that transparent, Tyannon?”

“Oh, no,” Corvis said, hiding his grin behind an upraised mug. “Many things, Tolliver, but not
transparent.”

But this time Tolliver didn't rise to the bait. “I fear you're quite right, Tyannon. The truth is, I'm here to invite the both of you to a town meeting tonight.”

Corvis and Tyannon frowned as one. Chelenshire held town gatherings on a regular basis to discuss policies or changes in local law, problems with crops, that sort of thing. But …

“This month's meeting isn't for another two weeks,” Corvis observed. “Who called this one?”

“I did, actually.”

“Why?” Tyannon asked, the slightest catch in her voice.

Tolliver sighed. “Audriss struck again a few nights back.”

Despite the blazing heat outside, the room grew chill. This man calling himself Audriss had appeared some few months before, a great army at his back. Since then, several towns and even a pair of small cities had fallen to his relentless advance. So far, Duke Lorum was either unable or unwilling to send his own armies to meet them.

Corvis himself felt a shiver of fear trace its way slowly, caressingly down his spine. He knew which cities and towns had fallen; he knew, more than any other man alive, what their significance was.

He was fairly certain, too, that he knew what news Tolliver was about to deliver. For the first time in years, he found himself praying: praying, in this case, that he was wrong.

“Is he moving in this direction?” Tyannon asked quietly.

“No, not that we know. It's just … he's never done anything of this magnitude before.”

Corvis closed his eyes. He wasn't wrong. He could have spoken along with Tolliver, word for word.

“Denathere has fallen.

“Again.”

“We've breached the gates, my lord.” The triumph in Valescienn's voice was layered with a thick coating of contempt, like a morning frost that refused to melt away beneath the feeble sun. “If you want to
call
them gates. Denathere is ours.”

Corvis Rebaine, the Terror of the East, grunted softly and nodded—both acknowledgments utterly lost within the confines of his death's-head helm.
For
long moments he stood atop a small hillock and stared, almost mesmerized by the columns of smoke that reached tentatively upward as though uncertain how best to reach the clouds above. The screams of the city reverberated in his mind, echoed within his helm. He knew the scent of blood and burning couldn't possibly have reached him yet; he must be imagining it, remembering its like from a dozen prior cities.

He wondered if anticipating it now was worse than the day it had stopped bothering him entirely.

“My lord?” Valescienn prompted. “This is it, Lord Rebaine. Can I assume that your intricate plans and strategies call for more than standing here staring at it? Because I've got to tell you, we could've done that without fighting first.”

The expressionless skull turned coldly toward one of the few
men undisturbed by its gaze. “How long would you estimate before Lorum's armies reach us?”

“Well, he's
finally
got the Guilds whipped into line, and they knew we were headed this way. Probably no more than a couple of days, and possibly less than one.”

“Then we'd better make every minute count. Get the men to start searching. And Valescienn?”

“Yes, lord?”

Inwardly, Corvis sighed. “We can't afford to waste any time on heroes and patriots. Put up the usual deterrents.”

Valescienn grinned, tossed a casual salute, and was gone. And for many moments more, Corvis watched as the heads and the bodies of the dead were hoisted high, raining gore down upon the streets in a foul monsoon, to hang as a warning to any who might yet be inclined to resist.

THEY DID INDEED ATTEND
the town meeting, though there was, as Corvis glumly predicted, a great deal of fear and shouting and little in the way of meaningful results. Frankly, he didn't even hear much of it, for his mind was so thickly swaddled in the stifling blanket of old, uncomfortable memories. Tolliver, his face and voice calm, moderated the gathering, keeping as much order as he could. It wasn't much, but he tried.

“How could this happen?” one hysterical voice in the crowd asked him.

“According to a few who escaped,” Tolliver told them, “Audriss slipped some of his men into the city during the celebration. They took the walls from the inside.” He didn't feel the need to point out the irony involved: The celebration that opened the door to the city's conquerors marked the anniversary of a previous invader's defeat.

“This Audriss is as bad as Rebaine ever was!” someone shouted.

“Maybe it
is
Rebaine!” suggested a third voice. “How would we know?”

I know
, Corvis thought to himself.
But somehow, I don't think you want to hear
how
I know
.

In the end, the consensus was to wait, to keep an eye on which way the invaders turned from Denathere, and to prepare. The same thing they'd decided after the previous meeting, and the one before that. The same thing the rest of Imphallion was doing.

Corvis remained silent throughout the meeting and during the walk back home. They shared a late supper, put the children—who'd escaped with only a brief scolding for their stunt with the water bucket—to bed, and Corvis and Tyannon retired as well. And still, he said nothing.

“Sweetheart,” Tyannon whispered to him, some moments after he thought she must have fallen asleep, “what troubles you?”

He actually smiled, then. “The news is not bad enough? I need more to disturb me?”

“Need? No. But I know you, Corvis. Something
is
bothering you.”

He sighed, rolling over to face her. “You're right.” He shook his head faintly. “I'll tell you if you ask, Tyannon. But it means talking about … then.”

She frowned. “I hate thinking of Corvis Rebaine, Terror of the East, but I haven't forgotten him. Tell me.”

“All right. When I was first planning my campaign, I couldn't know exactly when the Guilds would grow frightened enough to push Lorum into action. I knew I had to fight my way to Denathere—”

“Why?” she asked quickly; it was, after all this time, the one secret he'd never told her. What could he possibly have been seeking in that city that could inspire him to make the worst tactical decision of his career, and lose his army in the process?

As he'd done so often before, he ignored the question. “But I wasn't entirely certain how I'd get there. It's not exactly easy moving an army across hostile territory, even without organized opposition. I had to be prepared to alter course if Lorum's forces mustered before I was ready.”

“Yes?”

“I mapped out two specific plans, Tyannon. Two campaigns, two routes for my armies to take from our mustering point beyond Imphallion's
borders all the way to Denathere. What I did, almost two decades ago, was in line with one of those plans.”

Tyannon's voice dropped to less than a whisper, as though her throat were choked with ice. “Are you saying—”

Corvis nodded. “Audriss followed the other. Somehow, this man got hold of the maps and plans I created twenty years ago. The plan he followed to get his army to Denathere was mine.”

She lay back, goose bumps peppering her arms and shoulders. “So what will he do next?”

“I don't know, Tyannon.” Corvis, too, lay back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. “All my plans culminated at Denathere; whatever he does next is his own.”

WITH THE TOWN'S DECISION MADE
—if “wait and see” could be called a decision—the inhabitants of Chelenshire did just that. Terrifying as the news of Audriss's depredations might be, there was the sense, prevalent in all isolated communities, that it affected them only peripherally. Regardless of which of Imphallion's major cities was next—even if Mecepheum itself was the warlord's ultimate goal—there should be no need to involve Chelenshire directly; there were many routes from Denathere to the other major cities, and Chelenshire was quite some distance from any of them. Certainly, if the rightful government of regent and Guilds was overthrown, there would be consequences for everyone, but the citizens of the village could see no
immediate
threat.

Corvis was rather less complacent. The details of Audriss's plan—of
his
plan—nagged at him, the final clinging pains of a hangover he couldn't shake. He'd possessed but a single copy of his targets and strategies for the war he waged two decades past: one lonely document, penned in his own hand. The idea that it could somehow have made its way to a complete stranger, so many years later, was disturbing in the extreme.

But this alone was not the whole of his concerns. What bothered
him beyond the “how” of the entire situation was the “why.” Tactically, taking Denathere was a piss-poor move. Corvis himself took the risk in search of a goal far more precious than the city itself, and it was a gamble he paid for with the scattering of his armies and the complete collapse of his plans. Anyone with so much as a student's understanding of warfare could have looked at the details of his campaigns and rejected their end result as militarily unsound.

Audriss had already proved he was no stranger to the ways of battle, no incompetent tactician. Therefore, for him to have chosen to follow the plan despite its tactical flaws implied one of three things, none of which made Corvis feel any better.

One, the man was utterly insane.

Two, he knew far more about Corvis's true objective than any man alive should possibly know. Even his closest lieutenants hadn't been told what he sought in those tunnels beneath the city.

Or three, the warlord was sending a deliberate and personal message to Corvis himself.

All in all, not a one of them was a pleasant prospect.

But for all his questions, he could do little enough about it. And though he was distant and distracted for several days, slowly the routine of everyday life lulled him back into the same sense—of comfort, if not of complacency—that he and Tyannon had found in Chelenshire. And so he, too, merely watched and waited, for almost two weeks.