The Powterosian War (Book 5) (20 page)

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Memlatec had followed and knew well the history of the Powterosian Empire and its decay. Chatra Rakmar had sent official requests for assistance as Saxthor ordered, but the calls went without response, worrying the wizard as well as the king and the chatra. When the warnings about the border closing came from Neuyokkasin’s southern border with the empire, the wizard consulted with the chatra. They sent word to Saxthor as to their concerns. Then came the report of his brother’s marriage and death. The chatra and court wizard sent another report, but Saxthor stubbornly insisted the emperor, his cousin, was his ally. He waited for the emperor to respond as the war approached the kingdom’s borders. Finally, Chatra Rakmar received reports from the south and rode to Memlatec’s tower in a state of panic.

Behind closed doors, Rakmar stood before Memlatec in the library of the wizard’s tower with a wad of reports quivering in his hand.

“Calm yourself, Rakmar” Memlatec insisted. “What has you in such a state?”

“The Grand Imperial Army is approaching the border!” the chatra said. His voice was shaky and his lips trembled on his flushed face.

For a moment, Memlatec stared incredulously at the chatra, then took the reports and read them quickly, thrusting one after another to the back of the stack. He slumped back against his desk, still clutching the reports, though one slipped and floated in a spin to the floor.

“What shall we do?” Rakmar asked, breaking the silence. “We’ve no means of feeding such an army or quartering them on such short notice. I’m sure the king will be pleased that the emperor has finally come to his aid, but why didn’t his imperial highness give us advance warning. I’ve sent for the rest of the ministers so we can do whatever can be done to accommodate the army. We must receive the emperor in style, but this will create such a drain on the already taxed economy and people with such short notice.”

Memlatec still stared at the chatra.

“Come to the king’s aid you say?”

Rakmar stuffed his hand in his pockets, searching left then right for something and pulled out an official parchment. Memlatec first noted the imperial purple seal; it was from Engwan himself.

“Well the emperor says here, in this letter, that he comes to the aid of his cousin with all the might of the empire.” He thrust the supporting document toward the wizard.

Memlatec shook his head. Without taking the parchment, he went around the desk and sat down, his head wilting into his hands.

“Well, how will we quarter so many imperial soldiers here as they cross the kingdom on the way to the front?”

Memlatec jerked his head up and stared at the chatra. “How did you ever get to be a chatra?” the wizard asked.

The chatra stepped back with his mouth open. “You’ve never liked me, have you?”

“We’ve both been fools,” Memlatec said. He threw the imperial document across the room.

“What do you mean?”

Memlatec rose, feeling the rare heat of anger surge through his face and goose bumps form on his arms. Realization after realization fell into place. Rakmar stepped back, his lip quivering again.

“The emperor is sending his Grand Imperial Army not to Saxthor’s aid but to seize Neuyokkasin for himself. Can’t you see that?”

“You can’t mean it!”

“You’ve seen they closed the border without notice or explanation. There has been no official word of Prince Augusteros’ marriage or death or that the army was coming to the king’s aid. Why else the secrecy? Greed, the curse of mankind, has overtaken the emperor.”

Rakmar was first stunned, then protested. “The emperor has no need for more territory. His wealth is without end.”

“Stop denying the unthinkable and look at the facts. The emperor didn’t want Neuyokkasin until he realized, in the power struggle, if Neuyokkasin falls, the king of Dreaddrac will absorb all the peninsula’s kingdoms and proclaim himself emperor of a new northern empire. That new empire will then rival and challenge the Powterosian Empire in a death struggle. Emperor Engwan has decided to snatch Neuyokkasin before the Dark Lord can, or he made a deal with the Dark Lord to divide the kingdom between them. That’s why the Dark Lord has abandoned the final drive to destroy Botahar and is now massing his forces in southern Sengenwha on our border. Now it’s a race to see who can seize Neuyokkasin first.”

Rakmar stumbled backward, grabbing the arm of the chair at his side. He gasped but was unable to speak. He flopped into the chair, his white face locked in a stare at Memlatec.

The wizard faced the chatra. “Don’t you see? Saxthor has no direct heir. When the emperor realized Prince Augusteros’ accident would be fatal, he realized Graushdem’s Queen Nonee would become heir to Neuyokkasin’s throne if Saxthor dies in the war. Should Saxthor die without issue, the consolidation of Neuyokkasin and Graushdem would create a power the emperor will not allow. He must have been in a panic. He married Augusteros to the Princess Imperial, putting her in line for the succession. Then he had Nonee assassinated to remove her and her child from the succession.”

“Queen Nonee killed! No, it can’t be. She bled to death from a miscarriage.”

“We’ve looked at everything evil as coming from the north. We never thought of such treachery from the king’s cousin. The Dark Lord never will have a legal claim to the throne. He intends to openly crush and seize Neuyokkasin. Queen Nonee’s claim would make no difference in event of his conquest. No one suspected him of assassinating the queen. They made the assassination look like a natural disaster so no one would suspect murder; I see that now. She was assassinated. If Saxthor dies, the Princess Imperial becomes Queen of Neuyokkasin; and through her the empire would absorbed Neuyokkasin.”

“But the Grand Imperial Army…” Rakmar gasped.

“With his claim to the throne legitimized, the emperor is going to seize Neuyokkasin or divide it with Dreaddrac through some treaty that’s been arranged between the two powers.”

“Then the Grand Imperial Army isn’t coming to aid Saxthor, but to occupy Neuyokkasin before Saxthor can even bring an army to resist the invasion.”

“You’re a slow learner, Rakmar, but you do get things in the end.”

“What can we do? The king is at Hoya at the far tip of the kingdom. The army is spread along the northern frontier. There’s no way Saxthor could bring an army to resist an invasion from the empire now. Even if he could assemble an army, they couldn’t reach the southern border in time to resist the might of the empire.”

“Well, first we must get word to Saxthor, the generals Socockensmek and Sekkarian, and Admiral Agros as well, in case an imperial fleet puts to sea to occupy Olnak too.” Memlatec rushed back around to sit at his desk and began making notes.

“I’ll send the fastest royal couriers with such messages to the men you noted,” Rakmar said. He left the workroom as Memlatec wrote feverishly.

“You do that, Rakmar,” Memlatec mumbled, barely glancing up to see the chatra go.

When Rakmar was gone and Memlatec heard the state coach roll away he hesitated a moment. There’s no time for couriers to get the word to Saxthor, he thought. I’ll have to risk discovery. He pulled material from the locked bottom drawer of the desk and wrote out the news for Saxthor. He used the ancient incantation to dissolve the letter into its energy component and sent the ornsmak out the window to the king, the shimmering energy reflecting an instantaneous flash of sun back at the wizard.

Memlatec rose and went to the dusty storage room in the tower’s attic. He hunted through crates of old books, coughing as the dust billowed up from the disturbance of eons. In frustration, the wizard extended his hand and arm out over the room in an arc, closed his eyes and concentrated. He searched for an ancient book on the Occintoc Empire, not opened since before the Wizard Wars. A tingle and warmth in his left ring finger led him to the book. Memlatec scratched through the crate tossing out other books to get to the
History of the Occintoc Empire
. The wizard hurried back down the stairs, bumping his head on the overhead landing to the workroom below. At his desk, he flipped through the dry, musty pages toward the end where the book expounded on the imperial fortifications. Memlatec read the book until daylight from the window died and he read on under the blue wizard-fire flame on his fingertip.

“There it is, as I suspected. I could barely remember hearing about it,” he mumbled, his slender, knobby finger tapping the paragraph next to the picture.

* * *

Emperor Engwan IV sat slouched on his throne in Ossenkosk Palace, the grand imperial palace of Engwaniria, the city of marble. The vast audience hall was the largest open room on the continent. It had five hundred fluted and polished columns with gilded capitals and bases. The columns along the three central vaulted aisles were of malachite, the rest of deep red marble veined with gold. They rose from the elaborate patterned marble floors to where the vaulted ceiling arches transformed as tree branches across the ceiling. The central aisle alone, as vast as most other continental throne rooms, displayed the map of the empire in provinces of different colored marbles. To the left and right of the three central aisles, the most exquisite carpets of intricately fine knotting covered each of the three additional side aisles marble floors. The carpets in each aisle displayed sequential accomplishments of a former great emperor’s reign. The massive windows, twenty eight feet high, terminated in pointed arches. They ran from the height of a man’s head to the clearstory above. They displayed the most fabulous colored glass depictions of the seven emperors that built the palace on the left and their empresses on the hall’s right side windows. The clearstories above, those were a virtual lace of stone. A third story of windows above that illuminated the brilliant blue sky with clouds and mythical birds on the tree-branched arches across the ceiling some sixty feet above.

Elaborate elfin-wrought, gilded candle stands, like bronze trees with branches entwined, held countless thousands of lights between the rows of columns. More light blazed from massive crystal chandeliers that hung from the ceiling on golden chains. Courtiers in multiple layered arrays of velvets, brocades, and silks, supporting masses of embroidered jewels vied for attention with still more jewels dangling in necklaces and infesting fingers and tiaras.

This sea of the finest luxury imaginable in endless venues spread out before the massive golden dais and throne of the emperor who was dwarfed by the background display. To dazzle in the center of this golden exhibit, the emperor wore a massive royal purple robe, sparkling with intricate golden leaves sewn by their petioles to dangle, flashing light like flames at any movement. This robe flared brilliantly at the center of the golden backdrop and over the emperor’s scarlet attire beneath it. The emperor’s sword, encrusted with massive jewels from hilt to point of the scabbard, rested on a stand to his left. The golden imperial scepter and diamond encrusted orb, topped with the continent’s largest and most famous ruby, rested on a golden stand to his right. The most jaded royals and nobles to visit the court would stand breathless at the sight when guards first opened the great gilded and carved hall doors, unfolding the dazzling sight.

The imperial chatra stood by the emperor, as did the chamberlain. The emperor read his dispatches before a thousand courtiers who crouched prostrate on the floor with petitions or stood in the side aisles in attendance.

“We don’t wish to read all this,” Engwan IV said, tossing the scroll to the chatra. “What’s the gist of it?”

“Your Imperial Majesty,” the chatra said, bowing. “The generals have marched the Grand Imperial Army to within a single province of the Neuyokkasinian border without detection.”

“Excellent,” the emperor said. “We shall snatch the kingdom right out from under that vile sorcerer-king in Dreaddrac. He’ll be livid, of course. You’re quite sure our court wizard is locked up and unable to correspond with Dreaddrac’s king, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty,” the chatra said, bowing with each response.

“Ever since Dreaddrac wrote, suggesting an alliance, that we divide Neuyokkasin between us we’ve been suspicious our wizard might be in collaboration with that presumptuous upstart.”

“It was most clever of Your Magnificence to see the advantage to the empire for you to seize the whole kingdom and not share it with such a common and inferior man, no matter what his abilities as a wizard.”

“An alliance with such a nobody would be unthinkable,” Engwan said. “If he should conquer Sengenwha and Graushdem he’ll proclaim himself emperor we suppose. It’s unimaginable we should have dealings with such an individual, much less allow him to take that august title.”

“Your Majesty is all knowing.”

“How long before our generals can cross the border and seize Konnotan? King Saxthor can hardly bring an army to oppose us now. Hopefully the encouragement we sent Dreaddrac, promising not to oppose their seizure of the two upper kingdoms, will result in Saxthor’s untimely death there. It will relieve us of having to expense the army battling to seize the Neuyokkasinian throne.”

“Hopefully King Saxthor is embroiled in his brother-in-law’s battle to save Graushdem right now,” the chatra said with a sly smile. The emperor smirked, reflecting his pleasure at the thought.

“Send word to the generals; there must be no delay. They must move quickly to seize Konnotan before the king can organize resistance. Burn the capital if necessary, but we must have it in our hands before the fall of Graushdem frees up Dreaddrac’s forces. We must occupy all Neuyokkasin before the Dark Lord can march his armies south and challenge our possession of it.”