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

Twenty-Two

Tali

Verden, Karhes

1st of Tantus

It turned out that what passed for the Shifting City's ruling council—the elected heads of the families who lived here—maintained the Fensidium safehouse even when it wasn't occupied. They treated both Heller and Shira with reverence, going as far as offering servants to tend to them during their stay.

For the next week and a half, they settled into a mundane routine. Had it not been for the unending rocking of the city beneath them, and the never-changing backdrop of the Karhes's rolling plains, Tali might've convinced herself she remained at Alzikanem, rolling through the motions of an ordinary existence.

Every morning, Shira woke her for combat training, having requisitioned a couple of training blades the Fensidium kept stored in a backroom. Always, Tali allowed myriad distractions to hinder her, and Shira's frayed nerves frayed further. And every evening, nightmares plagued Tali. Unlike conventional dreams, she'd wake with them clear in her mind, and the terror remained fresh for the rest of the day, usurped only by the next night's horrors.

Just last night, the Shaeviren monster had presented her not with her father, but with Uncle Heller, strapped down and undergoing torture. She'd denied and refused everything the monster had whispered into her ear, until eventually it made her slit her uncle's throat, slashing her arm out against her control. The nightmare lingered on his paling face and the fountain of lifeblood spewing from the wound she'd carved into his neck. She'd only awoken after watching him succumb, and hadn't settled until she'd seen Heller, hale and alive, after her morning training session.

The flat of Shira's blade smacked her forearm, startling her from her memories.

"You're hopeless," Shira said.

"I can't focus," she replied. "I'm sorry."

Compounding the nightmares, Heller's explanation of her Valhir nature stagnated at the back of her mind, growing more tainted with every passing day she ignored it. She couldn't confront those realities, though, not yet, because she understood nothing and remained at the mercy of everyone around her. But still, the knowledge existed, and it unsettled her just as much as her nightmares did.

Shira looked over Tali's shoulder, then let her sword fall to her side with a heavy frown. Tali knew without looking that Heller stood there, and her heart sank at the prospect of seeing her two parental figures argue again. For the sake of avoiding a fight, they'd kept out of each other's way for the past week. Tali sensed it was something more than just their recent predicament, some deeper disagreement from a time before Shira had gone to Alzikanem with her.

"We need to decide where we're going," her uncle said.

Shira lifted her sword and rested it on her shoulder. "Wherever Verden takes us."

"After that."

"I assume you have a plan?"

Heller nodded. "Sudarium gave me instructions for when I found you," he said. "I think we should discuss them."

Tali tapped her own blade against her leg but said nothing. It rankled to have her fate already decided by someone she'd never met, but she'd already proven herself incapable of defending her own interests.

"He wants her aasiurmancy trained," Heller said into Shira's silence.

"So that she can be used."

Tali recalled something the Novhar had said to her about Sudarium being her master and using her to start a war. The memory prompted her to speak. "Someone told me Sudarium is trying to re-enact the Cataclysm. Is that why he wants me? Is that why Indro opposes him?"

Heller cocked his head, probably trying to decide how to answer. Tali had seen such an expression before, on her father's face whenever she asked about her mother. Endarion had usually offered one non-answer or another, trying to shepherd her onto another, less sensitive topic. She didn't doubt Heller would try that now.

"I deserve to know," she insisted.

"Okay," her uncle conceded with a short nod. He certainly took less convincing than her stubborn father. "There're rumours in the Empire of a Thousand Kings that the Fensidium is trying to orchestrate another Cataclysm. That Sudarium is a disciple of Erdohan and wants to reopen the Abyss. This isn't true. Sudarium doesn't want to end the world. The Fensidium has only ever been interested in the safety of mages and the monitoring of the Karhes."

"Who is Erdohan?" Tali asked.

"A Novhar, long dead now," Heller replied. "Apparently, he opened the Abyss, let it flood into the Vast Infinite. It got as far as just north of Drasken before he was killed, and the gateway closed. That's what the Cataclysm was." He spared a brief glance for Shira. "What you heard Indro say in Sinnis suggests there'll be a crusade against Drasken, and the Fensidium as well. If he can convince people mages want another Cataclysm, the Thousand Kings won't hesitate to eradicate them."

Tali nodded and took an experimental swing of her blade, imagining all her confusions and fears and vulnerabilities at the end of it, as easy to cut down as any mortal foe. Heller's answers only deepened her confusion, only made her more aware how out of her depth she was.

"Who can train me? Sudarium?"

It was Shira who responded. "The Novhar can track you. You'd lead him right to Sudarium, and then the Fensidium would topple, Drasken not long after." She shifted her attention to Heller. "He wants her taken to Drasken, doesn't he? Right where the enemy wants to strike."

Her uncle's shoulders bounced in a shrug. "The Jalin can protect her," he said. "We both know that. He's not openly tied to Sudarium, so there's no reason the Novhar would go after him."

"Except Indro named the Varkommer specifically as an enemy," Shira replied. "And the Jalin's a politician as much as a mage. What's to say he won't just use Tali for his own ends."

"He mentored me, Shira. Just as I mentored you. I know him as you know me. He's not like that."

Anger stoked in the pit of Tali's gut as she watched them discuss her as if she wasn't there. She threw her sword to the ground with a clang and clapped her hands, knowing she looked like a petulant child but not caring.

"If I can have the floor for a moment?" she said, voice raised. "Maybe we could run this by me. Me, being the one this affects, that is. Someone please tell me who the Jalin is and why I should go and train with him."

Shira sank to her knees and retrieved Tali's sword, then rose with a fighter's grace. She offered it hilt-first, but Tali turned her away. "He trained your uncle, when he first fled the Imperium."

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Heller scoffed, presumably at the suggestion he'd 'fled'. All three of them knew the truth behind the claims her uncle had killed his parents before setting the family estate on Alzikanem on fire. The true culprit was her own father, who'd had an altercation with Asterion Boratorren and accidentally started the blaze. Rather than let Endarion take the blame and face whatever punishments were in place for parricide, Heller had taken responsibility, giving him the much-needed motivation to escape the Imperium and its barbaric restrictions on mages. As a youth newly awakened to aasiurmancy at the time, he'd had nothing but a life of enslavement to look forward to, prior to leaving.

Her uncle frowned, as if remembering the circumstances surrounding this escape. "The Jalin's one of the most powerful modern aasiurmancers. He's also married to the Drasken Keizerin and is a member of the Varkommer, Drasken's ruling council. In other words, untouchable."

"He'd protect me?"

"If I asked him, yes," Heller said. "He'd teach you far more of aasiurmancy than anyone else could. If I told him Sudarium wanted you trained, he'd ask no questions."

Tali folded her arms across her chest. "So, he wouldn't pry into my being half-Novhar? That wouldn't warrant some questions?"

"We wouldn't tell him," Shira replied before Heller could open his mouth. She raised a silencing hand to him. "I don't trust him as you do, Heller. If we're taking Tali to him, we should at least keep this information back from him. Less chance of him using her, that way."

Heller snorted. "So, we expect him to believe Tali's skill is pure, random chance? He understands aasiurmancy at the deepest level, Shira. He'd know Tali's not just an anomaly."

"We say her mother was Arisen," Shira suggested. "A hidden survivor from the days of the Theocracies. She had a child with your brother to try to blend in, but was uncovered by another Arisen, maybe. It would explain Katrin's assassination. We say Tali awoke to her aasiurmancy on Alzikanem, and Endarion sent her to you."

Her uncle shrugged again, conceding the point. He looked Tali's way, the smile he offered conspiratorial. "What do you think?"

"Does my opinion matter?"

He stepped towards her and took her by the shoulders. She noticed he lowered his posture slightly, to better look her in the eyes, like he might do for a young child. "This is what's best," he said.

"My father thought keeping me secluded on Alzikanem was best."

"And it was, for a time," Heller said. He opened his mouth to continue, but whatever he'd been about to say withered away when the ground jolted beneath them. They jarred sideways, Tali only saved from falling by Heller's steadying grip.

"What was that?" Shira asked as she regained her footing.

The entire building groaned as if assaulted by a violent storm and then settled with a grating commotion.

"We've stopped," Heller said. "Suddenly."

Given the size of the Shifting City, any halt needed to be gradual. In the past week, Verden had stopped at a trading outpost only once, but it'd taken a full hour for its Surrekan engine to power down. The Fensidium safehouse was reinforced, positioned towards the peak of the city, and not resting beneath the weight of overlapping architecture. Further down, Tali suspected the unannounced halt had caused notable damage.

Tali snatched her sword from Shira, her first instinct that the Novhar had found them again. What good a length of sharpened metal would do against a creature that could dismantle a city, she didn't know, but it seemed better than going unarmed.

They rushed out of the bland, unadorned room they used for training and towards the nearest open, front-facing balcony. Tali tensed as she stepped out into open air, expecting to see fireballs whipping across the sky and striking Verden's unprotected expanse. Expecting the Novhar to be violently tearing the Shifting City asunder as he had Sinnis and Alzikanem.

Ahead, squatting in a shallow valley between two rising waves of grassland, lay another Shifting City. Far smaller than Verden and strewn across the valley like so much discarded offal. Thick columns of faded smoke rose from it like ghosts from corpses, and guttering fires speckled the remains. The crest of the valley had concealed it from view, explaining the unannounced stop.

"What did that?" Shira asked.

Heller waved towards the ruins. "Take one guess."

At first, Tali assumed he meant the Novhar. But then she squinted and looked beyond the murdered city, to the valley beyond and around it. She'd never seen an army, nor experienced a battle, but she guessed the trampled ground and churned up mud spoke of the frantic movement of a large force.

"Indro," Heller murmured. "His crusade develops faster than I anticipated."

"How did a grounded force catch a Shifting City?" Shira asked. "They move faster than any man can run."

Her uncle's answer was immediate, as if he'd already considered it. "The mercenary fleets. Indro must've allied with them."

Shira swore under her breath. "That's not good for Drasken," she said. "Their Sky Fleet is only so big."

They spent the next half hour weaving their way through the city's confused masses, passing, every now and again, a building completely razed by their unannounced stop.

Verden, like most Shifting Cities, was composed of families and small communities who'd banded together. Before the Cities had been mounted on their wheel tracks, before their Surrekan engines were installed, the inhabitants had been wandering nomads, following the trade routes on foot, carving out a primitive existence living from the land. Tali remembered this as they passed, understanding that these citizens were family, that each loss had wider implications than they would have in a place like Sinnis. The organisation of the family units also meant no real government existed within Verden, and it showed in the chaos that arose now. Had they been anywhere else, Tali would've suspected an imminent riot or mass panic.

It took a long time to dismount the city. They had to reach the lowest rungs of its layout, then descend a series of hairpin stairways built into the sheerness of Verden's flank. What passed for the city's guard—selected members of the families given military training and rudimentary weapons—already gathered at the city's base.

Tali's entire experience of Verden so far had been conducted towards its summit, and to stand now in its monstrous shadow on the spongy ground of the plains, she started to appreciate its true size. It loomed with the weight of a cliff face, so large it might pull her into its orbit. So large she, craning her neck to take it in, felt small enough to barely exist. So large, she struggled to understand how something of its calibre had been constructed by mortal hands. It stretched high enough skywards that her stomach flipped, and she could scarcely imagine the fall from its greatest heights.

Heller moved among the guards, calling out orders in their tongue, receiving the compliance one would expect of a general addressing his troops. To them, the dark, red-chased Fensidium greatcoat he wore was a uniform they could rally behind, his authority something to be respected. He turned back to Shira and Tali. "Wait here," he said. "I'm going to see if any attackers remain."

"Not a fucking chance," Shira replied. "You're not much good on your own."

"I seem to have coped okay in the last four years," Heller sniped back. "Besides, you need to look out for Tali."

Tali stepped forward. "No one needs to look out for me. I fought a Novhar."

"And then promptly fainted," Heller replied. His gaze softened when he saw he'd caused offence, and he turned away. "Fine, come on."

Tali, her training blade still in hand, followed, Shira at her side. Verden's city guard, having accepted Heller as their superior in this situation, moved up to flank the three of them.

They soon discovered there were no survivors left in the wreckage. Just ruined bodies peppering the landscape of ruined buildings. Though she wanted to close her eyes or look away, or even prove herself a coward and turn back for Verden, Tali forced herself to focus on every carcass she passed. She'd no doubt created enough bodies during her brief fight with the Novhar in Sinnis, however inadvertent that had been.

These were the realities of the world she now lived in, and she owed it to anyone she'd accidentally killed or injured to look upon what she was capable of without flinching.

The slaughter was indiscriminate, but complete. She'd never seen the aftermath of a city's murder before, but her father's descriptions painted a picture eerily like this. The citizens, he'd said, were no longer considered human when the enemy stormed a city; they were instead chattel, to be treated with the same dignity you'd afford an animal you were butchering.

Bodies had been flung without care, and with no real design. Tali noted, as she stepped around them, most had been killed by what looked like single sword thrusts, or cut throats, or head wounds. The scene lacked the frenzy she expected, the rampant bloodthirstiness. Even the dismantling of the city itself and the buildings comprising it seemed more methodical now she walked among the carcass, rather than the chaotic wreck she'd spied from afar.

She stopped by the remnants of a wooden wall, pushed flat to the ground, its edges splintered where it had been torn away. It was the largest intact piece of debris she'd come across so far, and the reason for its preservation became apparent when she inspected it closer.

Words were scratched onto the surface in dark red ink.

"That's blood," she said to herself, then repeated it louder, drawing her uncle's attention.

He moved in front of her, as if he could shield her from harmless words scrawled amid a killing field.

"What does it say?" she asked.

He didn't answer, but she knew he could read it.

"Uncle, what does it say?"

He inhaled heavily. "It says, 'this city and all its inhabitants defied the will of Indro and will serve as an example of what happens to dissenters'."

Without realising she mimicked him, Tali drew in a deep breath and held it for a moment. "This is what they want to do to Drasken?"

"What they will do," her uncle replied. "Indro's crusade has already started, and we can't outrun it."