The Office of Shadow (68 page)

Mauritane's company reached the gate and dispatched the terrified guardsthose who remained, anyway. Many of them fled back into the city.

Outside, the Unseelie troops, now cut off from their escape route into
Elenth, began to retreat to the east, away from the city and away from the
reinforcements that were hurrying to join them from the southwest. The
battle had turned, and with it, the war. It all depended on the Einswrath now.
It all hung on that.

An odd silence came over the battlefield. One of the odd lulls that sometimes occurred, when every combatant was silent: falling, or gathering
breath, or swinging.

Something small and dark flew up into the sky. Mauritane watched it arc
and begin to fall. It was headed straight for him.

He closed his eyes and said a prayer to Aba. Why not?

A horse whinnied in the distance. Mauritane opened his eyes. A black blob
the size of an orange had landed on the ground twenty feet away from him.

The fighting had ceased. Everyone knew what it was; they had all heard
the stories. Einswrath. They all waited to die.

But the thing just lay there. After a moment it began to sizzle, then
shudder, then it melted into a black puddle and soaked into the ground.

Mauritane offered the remaining Unseelie soldiers the opportunity to
surrender and they happily obliged.

An hour later, the Seelie flag hung over Elenth.

Just before sunset, while the dead were being cleared away, Mauritane
walked through the field, deep in thought, looking.

It took him almost an hour to find Baron Glennet. He would have found
the body sooner, but a horse had fallen on top of it. Mauritane's sword was on
the ground next to him, bloody but unbroken.

Mauritane called out to a nearby private. "Have someone send a message
sprite to the City Emerald." Mauritane wiped the blood from his sword in the
grass. He wondered whose life Glennet had managed to take, and whether
the Unseelie soldier he'd killed knew how lucky he'd been.

"Tell them that Baron Glennet led the charge at the battle of Elenth, and
that he died a hero of the Seelie Kingdom."

Immortality is a predicate only in the abstract.

-Prae Benesile,
Thaumatical History of the Chthonic Religion

❑ce Elenth was taken, the other landed Unseelie cities soon fell against
the combined forces of the Seelie and the Annwni. Now unable to land
troops, the Unseelie had attempted to bring one of their cities to bear above
Mauritane, but Mauritane had dispatched it with one of the missiles he'd
brought for that purpose. After that, the Unseelie had been forced to concede
defeat. General Ma-Hora of the Unseelie Army and Mauritane signed the
Treaty of Elenth two days later. The treaty ceded all three landed Unseelie
cities to Queen Titania, extending the border roughly eighty miles north to
the base of the Tyl mountains.

Silverdun learned all this en route to Elenth, with Ironfoot and Faella.
The knowledge that the Einswrath had failed, that Sela had succeeded at
whatever she'd done, was heartening, but none of them felt much like celebrating. They were exhausted and in pain, both physically and emotionally.
The act of folding them back to the Chthonic temple had shattered the cynosure, meaning that they now had no way to return for Sela. Not that any of
them were physically up to the task, or that any of them truly believed that
Sela had survived.

Still, Silverdun had no intention of giving up on her. It was fortunate for
many reasons that the war had gone as it did. To their immediate purpose, it
was critical; the nearest Metropolitan Chthonic temple was located in Elenth.
According to Prae Benesile, each Metropolitan maintained its own cynosure.

When they arrived in Elenth, they went directly to Mauritane's temporary headquarters in the Elenth City Building. Mauritane must have been
surprised to see Faella, whom he knew only as the ingenue daughter of a mestine he'd met two years earlier, but he was as impossible to read as ever, and
greeted her without comment. When their brief congratulations had ended,
and they told him what had happened at Prythme, however, he did in fact
raise an eyebrow. And when they explained why they were in Elenth, he grew
visibly chagrined.

"That won't be easy," he said. "The Chthonics have been extremely
accommodating to us since our arrival, and have done much to smooth relations between us and the Unseelie populace. I'm loath to ask them to allow
you to go mucking around in their temple."

"Understandable," said Silverdun. "Consider, however, that we have no
idea what happened after we folded away. For all we know, these bound gods
are dusting off their lightning bolts and preparing to annihilate all of Faerie."

"No course in the academy on how to handle a situation like this, is
there, General?" said Ironfoot.

"I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt," said Mauritane. "In
fact, it would be best if the cynosure were destroyed entirely, if it does what
you say it does."

"We won't make any friends doing that," said Ironfoot.

"I didn't come to Elenth to make friends," said Mauritane, sighing.

By nightfall, Ironfoot was ready. His modifications to the cynosure proceeded more quickly than the first time, and he'd been able to use what he'd
learned from the first journey in order to ensure a smoother trip.

The Chthonic priestess had, of course, been furious at the idea. But she
also realized that at the moment she needed Mauritane far more than he
needed her, and ultimately acquiesced.

"Are you sure you're up for this?" Silverdun asked Faella.

"She loved you, you know," said Faella, as if this answered her question.

"I know," said Silverdun. "I think we owe her this much."

Faella folded them, not only directly into the chamber of the gods this time,
but directly onto the silver disc she'd created to protect Ironfoot and Sela.

It was dark. And silent.

Silverdun flared witchlight, and the room erupted in white light. Ein
was gone, his platform empty. The other gods were silent, unmoving.

"Sela!" called Ironfoot.

Ironfoot channeled Motion and they floated throughout the chamber
looking, but Sela was gone. The only sign of her they discovered was the
silver-coated iron band that she'd always worn. The Accursed Object, she'd
called it. Ironfoot plucked it gently from the ground, his hand wrapped in
his cloak.

They returned to the temple in Elenth without incident. As soon as they
arrived, Silverdun snatched the cynosure off of its pedestal, hurled it to the
ground, and smashed it to pieces.

Seelie Army drinking song

aron Glennet's memorial service was a lavish affair, held at a special session of Corpus. His bier was laid before the speaker's podium, adorned
with garlands of blue and yellow flowers. Silverdun watched with mostly
hidden disgust as lords and guildsmen ascended the podium and delivered
long-winded paeans to the man who had attempted to start a war for his own
personal profit.

Lord Everess delivered one of the most touching eulogies, praising
Glennet's years of service to the Seelie Kingdom, restating his many contributions to Corpus and to his peers, and calling him one of the great heroes of
the realm and an exemplar of the Seelie Heart.

Very few in Corpus were fooled by the official explanation for Glennet's
demise. Most assumed that he'd ridden into battle in an attempt to end his
life in dignity after falling into financial ruin. If any of his coconspirators in
the House of Guilds-either his creditors or those with whom he'd invested
-suspected the truth, they were wisely keeping it to themselves.

To add to the insult, when Silverdun had arrived in Corpus he'd discovered that Lord Ames had been using his chair as an impromptu liquor cabinet for years. Granted, Silverdun had only sat in it once in his entire life prior to today, but it was the principle of the thing. He made a show of polishing off one of Ames's finer bottles of whiskey during the proceedings.

Well, Ames could have the damn chair. Silverdun would never sit in it
again after today.

Afterward, Silverdun met Ironfoot, Paet, and Everess at a cafe on the
Promenade. They raised an ironic toast to Baron Glennet and then sat in
silence for a while.