Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Eleven

Tali

Sinnis, Northwest Indaver

8th of Tournus

As they approached, the city reared up against the horizon like a misshapen behemoth. At first, Tali mistook it for an unusual mountain range with drooping peaks and unnatural lines. But, as it stood starker against the clear spring day, it distinguished itself instead as the most chaotic arrangement of buildings she'd ever seen. True, she'd only known her father's island, but even in the sketches he sometimes sent her and the books she'd read, nothing compared to the city state of Sinnis.

"How do you know it's Sinnis?" Tali asked not long after they'd found a flattened dirt road winding towards the city. Everything around them was farmland, punctuated by small clusters of slender-trunked pine trees. The progression between wild steppe and heaving urban heartland had proved sudden and jarring, the farmland and thickening of the trail into a road the only indicators that they wound towards a metropolis. That metropolis had been visible for miles.

Shira pointed at the city's skyline, close enough now for Tali to see in more detail. "See that hill?"

It was a blunt mass, almost as wide at the tip as at the base, with structures jutting out along its heights. There were six more like it scattered throughout the city, and Tali assumed Sinnis had been constructed around them the same way Kalduran supposedly encompassed its own hills.

"It's not a hill, neither are the others," Shira said. "It's a building. Houses stacked on houses built around houses."

Tali squinted, noting with an intake of breath that her mentor was right. Though no architectural expert, even she knew the hills should crumple from such an absurd design.

Yet there they were, dominating the landscape.

"The city needs the surrounding farmland to feed the population, but the population's grown beyond the original boundaries. Can't build on the farmland, so they build on what's already there." Shira looked away from the city. "There's a tower in Empyria like this, but that's Novhar-built. This is all modern man."

Tali halted and slashed her arms out. "Hold on. Where exactly is Sinnis?" By which she meant, where exactly were they?

"It's part of the self-named Empire of a Thousand Kings," Shira replied steadily. "It borders the westernmost extent of the Karhes."

Tali whistled to cover her shock.

The plains of the Karhes were immense, encompassing the centre of the continent of Indaver and larger in size than any of the nations established around it. The Imperium was south-east of the plains, about as far away from where they now walked as one could get. She didn't know how big Indaver truly was beyond the impressions she'd gleaned from her father's maps, but to have ended up on the other side of it was more than she could comprehend. It must've been thousands of miles from home.

Then again, hadn't she first catapulted them to another planet altogether? Sinnis, by comparison, should've been as easy as breathing.

After their foray into Shaeviren and their violent arrival here, Tali had collapsed as if dead. When she'd woken, every sorry inch of her aching with the pain of a severe beating, she'd found herself wrapped in Shira's coat, the woman herself standing guard over a makeshift camp. It had been dead night, and Tali supposed she'd been unconscious for the entire day.

They'd not spoken of her home island's destruction, not even the following morning as Shira had disassembled the camp, made an inventory of the paltry supplies in Tali's kayaking bag, and set off in the direction of the looming city. Because Tali hadn't thought to pack any food for what she'd planned to be a short kayaking trip, and because neither of them possessed any weapons to hunt with, they'd marched on empty stomachs. Sickness gnawed at Tali's innards, supressing any desire for food she might've otherwise experienced.

Shira's silence exacerbated the situation's strangeness for how calm and accepting she seemed in the face of catastrophic upheaval. From her reaction, Tali was almost certain Shira had known her young student possessed aasiurmancy. More to the point, their arrival on the other side of the continent, maybe thousands of miles away from where they belonged, hadn't greatly surprised the older woman. Or, if it had, Shira controlled herself well.

The city gates they approached were thrown wide, clots of people moving chaotically through. A patchwork wall made of stone and wood seemingly rammed together in an unfinished puzzle surrounded the city, twenty feet high in most places. Even to Tali's inexperienced mind, it didn't look able to withstand even the most half-hearted of sieges. She pointed this out to Shira.

"No one would risk attacking Sinnis," her mentor replied as she steered them into the swollen crowds. "It's the empire's trading hub."

The Empire of a Thousand Kings, Shira told her, was a jumbled arrangement of city states, kingdoms, and duchies, bound together under the single loosely applied title of empire, but with no overall ruler. They had all allied because they'd apparently already tried conquering one another, and the ever-shifting factions and ongoing campaigns had bred disorder and famine and genocide. It served them better to foster tenuous peace than to pointlessly squabble.

Tali, whose knowledge of the Imperium's history included all its myriad conflicts with its neighbours and itself over the centuries, struggled to understand how so many separate countries could refrain from fighting for any length of time.

Peace, after all, was desirable only so long as you were more powerful than your fellows. Uncle Heller had claimed this was why the Imperium was addicted to war, and why Kalduran and Drasken had long been the targets of its petty violence.

A mess of excited conversations washed over her, the language nonsense to her ignorant ears. When she tore her eyes from the domineering architecture around her and focused on the inhabitants, she was shocked to find inhuman figures in the rabble.

Her first sighting of a Dontili, tall and horned and grey-skinned, inspired a dislocated kind of yearning. For just a moment, the presence of her own stunted horns and pointed ears—concealed even now by the cut of her hair—and the sickly pallor to her skin, didn't seem debilitating or shameful. She watched the Dontili, a bearded male with a warrior's wide-set shoulders, match the flow of the crowd around him as if he belonged, as if he didn't fear persecution. He didn't hide because of what he was, and yet she feared for her life for being only half of him.

She also spied members of the canid, bipedal Vasipan race in the press, noticeable with their oddly jointed hind legs, swooping tails, and elongated faces. There were other Dontili, too, the curve of their horns as varied as hairstyles, their frequency enough to suggest a thriving population in Sinnis.

In her dazed wonderment, she veered away from her mentor and almost lost herself. Shira seized her elbow and dragged her to the side of the street, stopping them up against the uneven face of a ramshackle shop.

"This is unreal," Tali muttered, more to herself.

"This is dangerous," Shira countered. She peered out across the sea of tangled bodies and frowned. "It would've been better if you'd taken us to Drasken."

Tali shrugged, Shira's fear undercutting her amazement. "I'll keep that in mind, next time I accidentally slingshot us across the universe."

Her mentor cocked a brow at the sarcasm and shepherded her back out into the street, where the crowd's flow snatched them up again. Everyone streamed in one direction, deeper into Sinnis. Shira seemed content to follow.

"Don't talk. Don't look at anyone," Shira whispered into her ear. "We don't belong here."

The street, full almost to bursting, opened into a wide square, fronted on three sides by walls of wood-and-stone buildings. Tali imagined on any other day it would be a market. Today, though, there was only a wooden platform at the centre, ringed by uniformed soldiers. The crowd surrounded it, driven here with intent. Looking up at the platform and the masked man waiting there, Tali could guess that intent.

When another figure ascended, this one dressed in a colourful robe and wearing on his head a circlet of painted metal, the crowd stilled. He addressed the crowd, his words barked with the deep boom of a voice accustomed to command. The speech was short, sharp, and military, though the words meant nothing to her. Her uncle had taught her the language of the Drasken Empire, as well as a small amount of Karspeech, the shared tongue natives of the Karhes used, but she'd never encountered any tongue further afield than that.

Shira leaned towards her and said out of the side of her mouth, "They're executing a prisoner now. He was caught using magic. A fair trial—which here means no trial at all—decided he should die. Some lord named Indro is responsible for this, sounds like."

Tali had no time to digest the words before a shambling form was forced up onto the platform, each arm clasped by a uniformed soldier. The prisoner's hunched, wincing posture made it clear he'd been tortured prior to this display. His rough manhandling had reopened scabbed wounds that seeped blood onto his ragged shirt. When Tali looked to his hands, expecting them to be bound and rubbed raw, she almost gasped.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He had no hands.

They'd been lopped off and, judging by the messy wounds of the stumps, inexpertly cauterized. A punishment inflicted on imprisoned mages, to ensure they couldn't use their aasiurmancy against their captors. Uncle Heller had told her that in Drasken the hands of mage prisoners were tied against their own chests or encased in a metal box to avoid the need for something as severe as amputation. Sinnis, it seemed, had no qualms about irreversibly mutilating its captives.

The two soldiers kicked the prisoner to his knees, then retreated. The robed speaker looked down at the mage with clear distaste, then gestured to his masked companion. As the masked man approached, the robed man spoke again. His caustic tone sharpened his words, the sneer on his face ugly and malicious.

"He said the same fate awaits any other aasiurmancers who are found," Shira supplied, "and that the Drasken Empire's influence will be purged from these lands."

The masked man unsheathed a short blade. A spear of sunlight caught its wicked curve as it descended in a vicious arc towards the prisoner, too quick for the eye to follow. With a slicing motion he pulled his arm back and then, with his free hand, grasped the prisoner's hair.

A red fountain spilled from the prisoner's throat. Close as she was to the platform, she saw the fading flicker of life in the prisoner's eyes, watched with horror as his mouth flapped as he tried to breath around his severed windpipe. The blood kept flowing, painting his front scarlet and mixing with the brown of old bloodstains, pooling onto the platform and dripping between the wooden planks.

Even as he struggled in his undignified final moment, even as he tried to raise tortured stumps to his fatal second smile, even as his dying eyes flashed with base fear, the masked executioner snapped his head to one side and pushed the blade deep into the side of his neck. The masked man sawed through flesh and muscle with a vigour Tali had never seen applied to such a macabre task; he ignored the weakening struggles of his victim, ignored even the blood that splashed his hands and wetted his clothes.

Cutting through the spine took longer, though thankfully the prisoner was dead by then, held upright only by the executioner's uncaring grip. The head, when the body toppled free of it, was held aloft and met with thunderous cheers.

The executioner let the head drop to his feet with a meaty thud, then re-sheathed his blade without bothering to wipe away the blood. He offered a deep nod to the robed man, then descended the platform into the protection of the soldiers guarding it. The robed man delivered another short speech, and though Shira whispered a covert translation, Tali didn't hear. She couldn't tear her eyes from the aasiurmancer's slack-jawed, dead-eyed, bodiless head. Couldn't stop the moment of his execution from replaying in an infinite loop in her mind, clouding her thoughts with its visceral cruelty.

To stumble into the aftermath of her massacred home on Alizkanem and see the already dead butchered bodies of the islanders was one thing. To stand here and watch the vicious snuffing of a life in a welter of fresh lifeblood quite another.

She was reminded again of the stare of the monster on Shaeviren and the aura of violence it had ejected in waves at her. A monster, like the executioner, to derive pleasure from such a destructive act. Like the creature that had sundered Alzikanem and slaughtered its people.

Shira must have seen the glassiness of her eyes and the way she swayed, for the last thing she remembered was being tugged back the way they'd come, the crowd pressing close and savage around them.

―

A few hours later, Shira managed to exchange some of Tali's kayaking supplies for what served as currency in Sinnis; small, circular coins stamped with a man's profile. They used most of what they'd gained paying for a room in a dank inn off one of the many side streets encircling the market square. It squatted in the shadows cast by one of Sinnis's seven towering hills.

Rather than share dinner with the other guests, Shira had their food brought to their room. There was only a single bed, the mattress thin and stained, and a chair with one arm splintered off. Shira took the chair and Tali, more alert now they'd left the execution behind, stood at the window and watched people meander about their evening below.

It was so ordinary here, so like the mundane life back on Alzikanem. Normal people doing normal things, living in a city that, to them, was normal. Execution was probably normal here too. If she'd expected something more exciting and alien from a place so far beyond what she'd always known, she was disappointed.

Shira held their remaining coins in her palm, tapping a forefinger against them, her mouth a flat line. "This man on the coins is the Lord Indro the man in the square spoke of."

Tali turned at her words, then leaned back against the window. "Does he rule the city?"

Her mentor shook her head. "Last I knew, a small council ruled Sinnis. The robed man in the square is one of them." Her lips twisted and her jaw jutted out; Shira in deep thought always looked angry. "I heard snatches of conversation on the streets, and in the square. It's troubling me."

"What is it?" Tali asked. Her unfamiliarity with any language outside of Imperial, Drasken, and the fluid Karhes dialect left her feeling vulnerable and useless.

"Indro doesn't rule Sinnis, but it sounds like he's united some of the Thousand King nations, inasmuch as they can be united. Not proclaimed himself anything just yet, but people speak of him as if he's an emperor or soon will be." She huffed a sigh and pocketed the coins. "That business in the square with the execution doesn't bode well."

Tali clasped her hands together, squeezed her fingers. She knew where Shira's mind had gone. "If anyone found out we were aasiurmancers?"

Shira nodded gravely. "Public execution." She closed her eyes for a moment. "Fuck."

In that single curse, Tali heard the threads of Shira's nerves creak with the threat of breaking. So she was maintaining a calm façade after all.

Tali took a seat at the edge of hard and unforgiving bed. "What happened to me?"

"Worldstriding," Shira replied when she opened her eyes. "It's a powerful form of aasiurmancy, something mages tend to learn last, if they learn it at all."

"How does it work?"

"It's like my idomancy," Shira said. "To move short distances, I fold reality so that I can blink in and out of existence at two overlapping points. But I need to see both points. You, on the other hand, can go wherever you like, however far away, as long as you know the destination."

"Can't I worldstride us back?"

"Not with the cost it inflicts on you, and not without training. You could destroy us just as easily as land us somewhere safe. It's a miracle you did it twice and we're both still alive." Shira scratched at her tensed jaw. "You shouldn't have been able to worldstride at all, actually. All the 'striders I've encountered need to have already been to their destination, to know exactly where they're going."

Tali remembered, in her moment of panic as the monster on Alzikanem moved to strike them down, calling to mind the sketch her father had done of the tower he'd been tortured in. And then on Shaeviren, as she buckled beneath the focus of that unknowable horror, she'd thought desperately of the safety her uncle represented. Her uncle, who she knew to wander the Karhes even now. Had those thoughts, meaningless in the moment, flung her first to another planet, and then to Sinnis, on the other side of the Karhes? Tali lowered her eyes, considered.

"Is this aasiurmancy why I was kept hidden? Why my mother was killed?"

Her mentor seemed to assess her for a moment. "I don't know the full story, but yes. Your mother was an aasiurmancer, and it seems you inherited it. She was killed by people who feared her power, who feared what her power and your father's influence combined might do."

A shiver rippled along Tali's spine at the word 'mother'. A mythical creature to her, Mother was a memory blurred to uselessness. A formless concept. An unknowable entity developed in small shreds by her father's stories.

Not a person, though. And certainly not an aasiurmancer.

"Does my father know?" It would explain, at least, why he'd kept her hidden.

"No. He knows less than I do. To him, your mother was a simple soldier, and you are only in danger because the Imperium still considers her people enemies."

Tali canted her head. "Why do you know more about my mother than my father does?"

Her mentor grimaced, perhaps at her own error. "Doesn't matter."

No, it probably didn't. Not right then, anyway.

Tali returned to her post at the window and sighed. "What do we do now, then?"

Something hot and angry curdled in her gut even as she waited for Shira's answer. Like her lack of knowledge of Sinnis's language, her inability to utilise her aasiurmancy for fear of hurting herself was just another reason she remained worthless. She'd had something powerful and unpredictable thrust upon her, used only in deathly panic. And what had she done with it? Taken herself and her mentor to a place where even possessing such a skill warranted a death sentence.

Die in the Imperium because she was half-Dontili. Die in Sinnis because she was an aasiurmancer.

Was there anywhere her mere existence didn't merit her death?

"We'll wait here for a few days, make sure the creature that attacked you on Alzikanem hasn't followed your aasiurmantic trail. After, we leave, head for the Karhes. The Fensidium have safehouses scattered around. We'll find the nearest, wait for your uncle to find us."

How her uncle's organisation of renegade mages was supposed to know where Tali and Shira were, she didn't know. Still, she didn't challenge Shira's plan.

Tali rubbed at her face and glanced out the window again. Though she'd left Shaeviren far behind and abandoned whatever remained of Alzikanem, she still somehow expected to see the crumbled ruins of her father's estate or the blasted desert of a demonic planet instead of a mundane city street.

"What was it that attacked us?" she asked. "I've never seen anything like it."

Shira's hesitation spoke of reluctance rather than ignorance.

"Please, I deserve to know."

Her mentor chewed at her lower lip, a gesture that made her look younger than her thirty years. "Didn't sign up for this," she muttered under her breath. Then, louder, spoken with firm certainty: "It was a Novhar."

The words didn't immediately invoke a reaction. It took a moment to sift through her memories until Tali recalled its mention, several years ago now, during one of Shira's more interesting lessons. According to the tome Shira had used to guide the lesson, the Novhar were the creators of humanity, having ruled an empire that spanned not only the known world, but all the planets out in the Vast Infinite—the known universe—as well.

"They're extinct," Tali said with a certainty she hoped matched Shira's.

Long extinct, according to Shira's lessons, their empire toppled untold millennia ago, their fate sealed irrevocably by the Cataclysm ten thousand years ago. And the world better for it, given the tyrannical mastery the race had once enjoyed and their careless enslavement of all other living beings. Some texts even implied the Novhar had created humanity as a food source, the reminder of which now made Tali cringe.

"Believed extinct."

"For ten thousand years, you told me," Tali said. "That's a long time for a whole race to have vanished and not reappeared." A disbelieving laugh slipped out. "You're suggesting an immortal is after me? As if I'm that important? Why?"

Shira palmed a hand over her face. "I don't know. I really don't fucking know."

Tali couldn't hope to make sense of such a revelation, so she set aside the mention of the Novhar and steered her focus towards the next pressing question. "And the thing on Shaeviren? Another Novhar? Or one of those monsters that tortured my father?"

"I don't know what that was," Shira said with a troubled frown. "Something else entirely."

Tali felt herself deflate and turned to face the window again.

She'd seen the Novhar, almost been killed by his fireball as he'd torn her island apart. She'd suffered under the penetrating gaze of the Shaeviren monster and knew it wanted to end her. She'd thrown herself and Shira across the continent and landed them in a place where aasiurmancers—which she'd just found herself to be—were executed.

And still, she couldn't quite believe it was happening.

After a few more minutes standing silent sentinel at the window, wondering why an immortal who should've died ten millennia ago had tried to kill her, she climbed onto the bed and fell into a fitful sleep.

As strange as it might've once seemed, she hoped, when she woke up, she'd be back on Alzikanem.