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

Fourteen

Endarion

Dujaro, Tharghest-Kalduran border

9th of Tournus

Endarion slumped at his desk. As absurd as it was, he felt a small pinprick of relief pierce the tightness in his chest and dissipate the heated smog of ardour she'd inspired in him; a part of him feared Estrid really had come to kill him when she appeared in the doorway, no matter what he'd said to her. That same part of him would've let her, had she gone for his dagger.

He still felt her kiss burning on his mouth and the ghost of her hands grasping his head. He hadn't been kissed like that in a long time, much less by Estrid. His hand rose to his mouth as if to press the spectre of her contact in place, preserve it, savour it.

He turned back to the idle sketches he'd been doing for his daughter Tali—still trapped on Alzikanem and no doubt hating him—then stacked the papers and set them aside.

"Fucking halfwit," he cursed, resting his head in his hands and gripping the hair at his temples hard enough to hurt.

Estrid's arrival made the price of his betrayal at the Conclave obvious. Informing Nazhira of her rescue had only worsened the imminent conflict and painted her and Aladar as guilty. Instead of convincing the Imperium he'd severed ties with her, he'd turned Estrid into an authentic enemy.

In the grips of growing despair, an idea struck him hard as any gut punch, and he released his head and lurched to his feet, his knee straining to take the sudden weight. If he simply removed himself from the conflict altogether, no one could call him a traitor. He'd be labelled a coward and a deserter, but he was already being called worse, often to his face.

Estrid had been gone two minutes. If he left now, he could intercept her. Join her. Escape with her, as he should have done when she'd asked four years ago.

The door slammed open as he reached for it, the wood smacking into his wrist. In the time it took him to recoil, a blade flashed at his stomach. He stumbled clear, adrenaline keeping him upright where panic threatened to fell him. For a brief heartbeat, he assessed his attacker.

They wore slim-fitting black leather armour and held a small dagger, nondescript, in a firm grip meant for stabbing. What most unnerved him about his would-be-assassin, however, was the way the shadows draped them in concealing waves; they snaked around the assassin's head, obscuring their identity in a dark grey veil that tricked his eyes. Rather than darken the figure, as natural shadows would, these shadows seemed almost to render parts of his attacker invisible. As if the assassin could don the shadows as garments.

A shadowmancer, then.

The assassin sprang, their magic and the room's dimness rendering them a nightmarish demon, and he dodged sideways. He threw himself across the bed, thankful his right flank took the full brunt, and found his footing on the other side. He reached under the mattress and retrieved another of his daggers, hidden there as his most basic precaution.

Damn his thoughtlessness, but he'd not left himself a longer blade on the bedside cabinet, as was his standard protocol, only the one abandoned on his desk, out of reach now.

The assassin leapt onto the bed and bore down on him, making to impale his skull. Endarion caught their attack and thrust it aside, then dodged around the end of the bed, grunting when his crippled knee took his weight. He steadied himself on the other side and brought his blade up in a defensive stance as the assassin's darkness massed at his side and made to strike him. Their weapons collided and, before Endarion could flick the dagger aside and wound his enemy, the shadows curled away.

As few exchanges as there had been, Endarion felt his limbs weakening, his left knee protesting loudest of all. Without his sword and the brace to support him, he was as vulnerable to attack as a man who'd never held a weapon in his life. Especially against such obvious magical prowess.

He dedicated himself to a flurry of suicidal parries that brought him under the enemy's guard. The shadows wafted their viscous tentacles around him, laying weightless on his skin. His dagger met brief resistance and emerged from the shadows blooded, but he had no time to enjoy his scant victory, as the world suddenly tipped sideways and the harsh stone floor crashed into the side of his head.

Or rather, he crashed into it.

Only when pain erupted in his ruined knee did he realise his assassin had slashed him at his weakest point. The joint had buckled of its own accord, his body following.

The pain brought him right back to his torture. On the surface: the sharp-cold stinging, indicating where the dagger had pierced his skin. But beneath that existed something much worse: the trauma of muscles being filleted from bone, of tendons being severed with blunt instruments, of skin being peeled away strip by agonising strip. It was a pain of fundamental wrongness, of an atrocity committed upon a body made irreversibly incomplete.

And eerily like the feeling of the hammer being driven over and over into his kneecap, pummelling split skin and fractured bone until an unidentifiable mess remained.

His eyes watered and his ears rang as he dug his fingers into the thigh of his injured leg and tried to abate the pain by creating new, smaller pains. Though vaguely aware of his killer looming closer, death was negligible when compared to the enraged throbbing of his knee.

The shadowmancer bent down by his side and grabbed his hair, yanking his pounding head close "Estrid sends her apologies," the assassin said, lacking an accent by which to place them. "She didn't want it to end this way, but you betrayed her too many times."

Just as their dagger was poised to enter Endarion's chest, they were thrown backwards by invisible hands and burst into flames.

Even in his reduced state, he had to avert his eyes from the brief, flaring brightness and hold his breath against the irresistible waft of a wildfire's heat.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The assassin didn't have time to scream before the flames were extinguished with such finality it could only be magic. When the charred figure fell to their knees, Endarion glimpsed a body wholly blackened by fire. Smoke fluttered from their seared skin, and the sickly scent of burning meat assailed his nostrils with enough force to make him retch.

The shadowmancer raised their head. One eyeball had sizzled and burst in its socket, but the other was intact, and fixed on something on the doorway beyond Endarion.

"Sudarium's Blade," they muttered.

Whatever else they might have said was cut off when the figure behind Endarion stole forward and slit the assassin's burnt throat, the gushing blood obscenely bright against their cooked flesh and black attire.

His saviour bent down at his side and prised his hands from his leg. "Are you hurt?" Cavalry-General Palla Hasund asked as she looked over the wound.

"Fucked up's the term I'd use," Endarion grunted. "They might've been working with Novissa's assassin. I could've questioned them."

"Hardly," Palla replied. She found the tear in his trousers made by the dagger and ripped it open. "I incapacitated them, but they could have killed us both in the time it took to secure them." She pressed on the skin above his knee, eliciting a cry of pain.

"How are you a pyromancer as well as a worldstrider? You never said."

Palla looked at him for a second, expression unreadable, depthless eyes assessing him. "No one was supposed to know."

"That you've mastered multiple branches of aasiurmancy?" he asked.

She nodded but said nothing else. "Why keep it hidden from us?" he pressed. "Why are you serving as a cavalry-general in the Imperium when you could be in Drasken, using your skills?"

The question had bothered him from the first moment her ability to worldstride had been revealed, four years ago now. He hadn't minded having a powerful aasiurmancer as a senior officer, though the fact she'd kept her abilities hidden and served in a nation where magic was despised had always seemed odd to him. Why live in fear of punishment in the Imperium when she could be thriving in Drasken? Now, to witness a display of powerful pyromancy as well, deepened his suspicions.

"I won't let this go, Palla," he said as she remained silent.

She sighed and chewed on her lower lip, the most expressive gesture he'd ever seen her execute. "I'm here to protect you," she said.

"From the assassin?"

"From everything," she replied. "There are powerful people looking after you. They want you kept alive. I am here, in your army, to fulfil that task."

"Why? I'm not important."

She offered no reply, her jaw tense where she'd clamped it shut.

Endarion huffed. "Pick any other person in this cesspit of an empire and you'll have someone worthier of protection." He hissed as she moved his leg, testing the knee, gripping him harder than necessary. "Who's Sudarium?"

"One of those powerful people," she said reluctantly.

"You work for them?"

She gave a small nod.

He glanced over at the smoking mess of the assassin. The mage had been afire for barely a second and yet they were thoroughly roasted; Palla's fire had been powerful indeed. More than powerful enough, he decided, to have subdued the assassin, rather than killing them. Perhaps she'd wanted to silence the shadowmancer before they could elaborate on their Sudarium's Blade comment, which meant the murder had been for Endarion's benefit. Or his detriment, to keep sensitive information from him.

He opened his mouth to question Palla further, but she chose that moment to prod his knee. The pain was enough to constrict his throat, and he suspected she'd done it deliberately.

―

When Palla returned from her room, she came bearing supplies Endarion associated with a camp medic. She'd intercepted Daria on her way back, and his daughter burst into his room dressed for a fight. She took one look at the assassin's mangled body, and then his knee, now exposed by Palla's ministrations, and leaped to the most obvious conclusion.

"It was Khian," Daria said, riled up. "I bet he wanted to save face from that punch, the feeble bastard."

Between them, Palla and Daria managed to lift him up onto the edge of the bed. He winced when Palla wound the first roll of bandages around his knee. "I don't think it was him."

"But Palla said it was a shadowmancer," Daria replied. "Probably the same one who killed Novissa. Imagine it: Paramount-General murdered during a negotiation on neutral ground. The Caetoran gets his war, and he gets rid of you at the same time. Maybe that's the reason neither side had soldiers allowed in Dujaro, to make it easier to get to you."

He sighed, measuring his next words carefully. In the time it had taken Palla to return, his mind had driven itself halfway to insanity and back as he recalled the fight and, more importantly, the confrontation with Estrid before it. The assassin might've been playing on his paranoia, but they'd not only named Estrid, they'd quoted her exact words. I never wanted it to end this way.

He and Estrid had been separated for more than twelve years now, and in that time, she had fully dedicated herself to life as a Kaldurani general. The image he held of her, built upon a foundation of treasured and romanticised memories, was outdated, and neither of them were the people they'd once been. The people they'd once known each other to be. It was possible, even likely, that she no longer viewed him as anything but a potential enemy, their former closeness as distant as it was irrelevant.

And there had been an undeniable finality to the way Estrid had spoken. A powerful vehemence in her claims of hatred. Even that kiss, something that had disarmed him so effectively, had been like a farewell kiss. A last kiss.

And she'd looked down at his discarded dagger after telling him she should kill him, after admitting that his death would aid Kalduran, even as she'd spoken of bedding him.

"I think it was Estrid."

"You cannot be serious," Daria said, moving towards him as if to jab him in the chest or slap some sense into him. "She's probably the only one here who doesn't want us dead. She's one of us."

"No," Endarion said, encasing his words in steel. "She's been Kaldurani for twelve years. We don't know her anymore. She is our enemy." Repeat it enough times, and maybe it would become truth.

"Your proof?" Daria demanded.

His daughter had always considered Estrid a maternal figure. During his time courting her, he'd encouraged it. Daria's lack of a mother hadn't seemed to affect her, and her memories of Aemilia Calerus, her birth mother, were scant enough that she didn't mourn the woman beyond the idea of her. But Estrid had introduced the fabled concept of maternal love into Daria's life. If things had turned out differently, Daria would've been Estrid's daughter by blood, too.

"She came to me a short while ago," he said. "To confront me. To tell me how she truly felt about me."

"And?" Daria prompted.

"She's conflicted," he said. "She hates me for abandoning and betraying her. I think she came here to analyse my room and see how best to have her assassin kill me. She knew her presence would leave me confused and mentally unprepared for a fight. She also knew my weakness." He gestured down to his bloodied, bandaged leg. "She had a motive, too: I know their tactics. The Baltanos would need me removed. I suppose I should just be thankful she apparently couldn't kill me herself and had to use an assassin."

In truth, a small part of him wished Estrid had stuck the dagger in him; he deserved her hatred and whatever retribution she saw fit to deliver. Death at her hand would almost be poetic justice, and a far worthier end than skewered on the blade of a meaningless stranger.

Would you stop me, if I stabbed you, Estrid had said, as if trying to convince herself. And he'd challenged her, not then understanding the true direction of her thoughts, thinking she perhaps tried to rationalise her feelings for him even as he reeled from the force of her closeness. A part of him had even wondered if she'd been seducing him, her flirtation as violent as everything else in their lives.

"But the Caetoran has just as much to gain from killing you," Daria protested.

"If I am killed, you take my place," he replied. "He achieves nothing more than a premature transition of power."

Daria deflated visibly. "If Estrid sent this assassin, it means she may've sent the one who killed Novissa. Maybe Sephara will confirm that with her investigation."

He nodded gravely. They both knew the implications. Before he could allow his feelings on the matter to take precedence, he turned to Palla and said, "You need to tell Valerian and Sephara of this. Iana as well, if you get the chance."

"What are you going to do?" Daria asked.

Endarion shifted his leg, testing his weight and finding it no less painful. "I don't know," he admitted.