The Undying Emperor [Grand Conquest Fantasy]

I wonder if all my time with Aisha had more of an effect on me than I realized. Ever the storyteller, perhaps she inadvertently cultivated a certain theatric flair in me that now wars with the mundane task of chronicling. Her stories were never for me, but she had her hand in crafting the legends of Lucius both for the public and for the young ones. She makes the bards of today pale in comparison, but perhaps I hold these cheery folk to too high a standard as they fill their caps just to cover the night's stay.

In a sense, there is dreadfully little to say of Lucius' flight from Forum and any detail I give it plays with the dramatic tension of the near disaster he soon faced in the south. What's more, the revolutionary fervor in the capital is what's of historical heft. The tides of power were changing in Vassermark and once more I must dredge up the analogy of a ship captain amid a storm. To command the wind was not his aim, only to secure safe harbor and emerge during the ensuing calm.

He took unto him his allies, delegating to his employees within the Wavefront Corporation to settle his financial affairs. Word reached Theo Montem of his intent. Haste made it unavoidable as he pulled Felicia and Kajsa from their homes and assembled a small convoy to journey with. Golden he unchained and released to the capital, aware that he was my full accomplice in the underhanded, but the matter of Aria vi Solhart had to be sorted and there was no further time to tarry. He nearly had to leave the city without his doctor friend. The apothecary was in none of his usual haunts because the Lynnfield girl had been called back by her order to help with the disarray of the capital. Together, they took mountainous backroads, skirting the far side of the Ashfall mountains in their journey to Rackvidd where his new estate was under construction, flush with the king's own coin.

Word had to be sent to the far flung wastelanders. The cannibals were savage no more, tempered by civilization yet still holding their edge. Their diaspora had defused much of the tension of Lucius having his own army and all with power knew it would take months or more to recall them if they answered his call at all. It proved true that many never did return to his banner, but those hundreds that undertook the journey brought with them more friends and allies to pledge their allegiance to the greatest commander in their half of the world.

None proved to have the freedom to stop him from recalling the wastelanders, not with riots in every street. Nearly as fast as true riots spread, rumors of Gallows Night spread too. Rather than come together, the aristocracy shrank away and shut themselves up in their meager castles.

The commonfolk did not march upon the palace and demand justice from the king. Those gates were already packed with a more sophisticated breed. Merchants and guild leaders clutched their own petitions in hand, hoping to pile them up in the throne room and overwhelm the king peacefully.

It was a more short sighted breed of man which looked at where they were, the face of their problems, and a single, bloody path between. While Lucius fled from the Warden Blades, they shoved down the gates of the Montisferro estate. The personal guard were overwhelmed long before the city guard could so much as muster at the edges of the mob. A few ringleaders had determined Caroline of Cups was within the manor and they set about uprooting one of the oldest families of Vassermark to get at her.

What the bombastic blonde was doing there that night is impossible to say. It might have been nothing more than exchanging barbed words with two of the city's most notable gossips, or she might have had a true agenda. The Montisferro mercantile network was splintering apart. Distant offices ignored letters and commands. At least two mercantile ships went the way of brigandry. And most problematically, the ladies were failing to settle their debts because they only had the king's newly minted, and depreciated, silver.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

When the commotion began, the old sisters failed to imagine the danger they were in. They thought perhaps a few servants had begun a fight and not once did the peer from a window that might have shown them the expanse of shadowy figures roiling in the streets. The time they might have spent fleeing to security was wasted as they marched directly toward their main hall.

The crowd fell upon them the way rats fall upon dropped bread.

The ringleaders did little to control their bloody mob. Tempers were high and several men had already been killed. As the women were seized and jewelry ripped from their bodies, the ringleaders questioned them about Caroline. With little more than panic as an answer, they took a cadre and rushed the drawing room Caroline had been in, but the girl was nothing if not crafty in her impulsive way. She was no palace flower to wilt at a torch's approach and had already fled in the opposite direction. She evaded their grasp perhaps by as little as a finger's length clutching at her skirt as she jumped from a window, but that is likely nothing more than the aggrandizing of an injured ego. What is certain is that she was safe with the king by morning's rise.

The same could not be said of the Montisferro ladies. Their bodies were thrown off a third story balcony and their necks snapped by ropes meant to merely draw back the curtains of their windows.

A crushing weight fell upon the soul of the guard captain who had an angry mob between him and the noble victims. Visions of a thousand bloody nights assaulted him as the mob cheered, seeing not who they were but only the gloss of silk dresses. He gave his orders so quietly his officers had to beg him repeat himself. He ordered the mob be cut down, and so the cannons were brought forth.

Those stone mouths of death created nuclei of panic among the mob even before the hammers were struck. Men screamed, pushing into the distracted mob and compressing bodies together as they tried to flee. "Strike! Strike them down!" the captain bellowed and the hammers swung. Ley jolted within the weapons and grapeshot shrapnel belched forth. Death pierced the crowd and practiced hands drove in fresh salvos. Another volley shredded the rioters before the shieldwall could be pressed.

The ley rods were soon spent and while the artillerymen swapped their munitions, the captain ordered that the mercy of steel be given to the rioters. Guardsmen looked upon the Montisferro women, hanging by their necks, and obliged his order. Swords plunged into gasping chests, stabbing and stabbing again like they were sowing a field of blood.

The corpses were taken down well after word of the gruesome night had escaped upon the lips of a thousand discontents. And so that night came to be known as Gallows Night and those revolutionaries with enough wits to be dangerous understood that it was the force of the crown that had to be overcome: the king's guards.

All this happened while the Troll Blade and the Gorgon Blade attempted to trail behind the Solhart caravan, relying on loyal trackers of questionable efficacy. Theo had deduced by pure instinct that there was some connection between Lucius and crows, although he suspected the work of a stigmata rather than more nuanced magic. Through pure effort of elimination, he had convinced himself that Aisha was capable of such spying feats. They were thus obligated to keep their identities hidden, even at night, and that precaution made them difficult to summon, though it would have done no good regardless.

When Lucius made his move against them, he was as swift and decisive as a viper's strike. A masterstroke of intrigue, he struck precisely where he needed to, tempered by the indulgence of a youth's need for visceral satisfaction but without exposing himself to danger. There was no pretense, no luring the man to a secluded room. He did it before a dozen witnesses, where he thought the presence of a public eye would stay the boy's hand. It caused a shock, of course, but their hosts for the evening were an insipid lot of low class mountain men who knew well what hand fed them. They were rich by Lucius' hand, not just from his removal of greater forces during the attack on Rackvidd years prior, but by mercantile arteries facilitated by the Wavefront corporation passing on to Jeameaux. Those hand-wringing hosts never even thought of stopping Lucius as he drove his fist through Samuel's nose.