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

Twenty-Seven

Tali

Verden, Karhes

12th of Tantus

This time, the nightmare was different. She didn't witness her father's torture, nor kill her uncle with the Shaeviren monster in control. She wasn't trapped within the bowels of the stone tower, but rather stood atop it, on the bare plateau of its peak.

Contrary to what she'd expected, the harsh desert winds didn't menace the skies and whip up storms from the dust and sand below. Instead, it was unnaturally peaceful up here. Silent. Stretching into the horizon, the dead planet was as still as the ocean on a windless day. If she didn't know better, she might've assumed Shaeviren barren and uninhabited, a planet fossilised in its moment of abject emptiness.

A figure coalesced across from her, forming from threads of sentient darkness caught in the air currents. The threads fused together, an amalgamation of snake-like strands that at first evoked a writhing nest of insectoids before gaining the more significant mass of some larger lifeform. In a matter of heartbeats, the intruder manifested directly from the accumulating slivers of blackness and stood before her, complete.

She knew this to be the monster who stalked her sleeping hours, though she hadn't pictured it and so wasn't prepared. Its presence had been menacing precisely because it was bodiless, a malicious entity lingering at the very edges of perception, a monster as depthless as her imagination allowed it to be. This figure appeared human. Almost disappointingly so, though she knew this couldn't be its true form; its natural appearance pulsed beneath the mortal veneer it had crafted for her benefit. It appeared sexless, its long dark hair and chiselled but delicate facial features sitting firmly between male and female, its body lithe and strong. Even its clothes were ambiguous; a flickering robe, loose enough to conceal female curves or male flatness.

Its eyes, outwardly human, gleamed crimson as it assessed her.

"Who are you?" she asked, a mundane question to smother her fear.

The creature curled its lip into a predatory smile, exposing gleaming white canines behind full pink lips. "It would take several days for me to pronounce it in a tongue you would understand."

Tali clenched her hands, steeling herself. "If you're going to become a frequent visitor, I need to be able to call you something," she replied.

It clasped its hands behind its back in a gesture she suspected it might've stolen from her father; when he wanted to appear in command of a situation, Endarion stood in such a way. Perhaps, when this creature had torn his mind apart, it had requisitioned parts of him for itself. Devouring his personality like an ethereal cannibal.

The thought made her shudder.

"Erun," the creature said in its bottomless voice. "The first two syllables of my designation will suffice."

Tali nodded, turning the word around in her mind. It seemed wrong to pin this creature down with any name, let alone one it would consider a shortened version, a nickname. Naming it gave it misplaced humanity.

"Why are you hounding me?" she asked.

The creature unclasped its arms and held up one hand as if to examine it. Tali noticed it sported wickedly curved claws in place of fingernails. The flash of skin beneath its robe gleamed awfully pale, the near-white of polished bone.

"I find myself unable to abandon you," it answered in its smooth, unaccented cadence. "The trace of your progenitor, tragically lost to me, is strong in you. For you to arrive at the very place where he was made whole is fortuitous."

"Made whole?" Tali scoffed.

"All others lack where we are whole," Erun said, red eyes narrowing. "Even the exalted Novhar, who consider themselves flawless, are empty. Only we are complete."

"We?"

Erun cocked its head, the gesture too human. "We. Us. My brethren."

"What are you?"

"I am myself."

"What race?" she pressed. "Or species?"

Its fine brow, as perfect and sculpted as any imperious statue, creased in the echo of a frown. "We are no race. No species. We are not incomplete, or un-whole."

Tali gritted her teeth and swallowed a sigh. Clearly this creature was too unlike her to understand the label of 'race', not if something as simple as a name was long enough to require days dedicated to pronouncing it.

"What do you want with me?" she asked.

"To make you whole."

She recalled the maddened state her father devolved into on the frequent occasions his memories of Shaeviren overcame him. To think of such a condition as 'whole', and to know Erun wanted to replicate Endarion's torture with her, made her fists clench and her shoulders tense.

"I don't want to be whole."

Erun stepped closer, shadowy tendrils shimmering around its silhouette. Its face, though human on the surface, now lacked anything resembling emotion. It possessed an ancient, primordial stare; it wasn't like looking into the eyes of an uncaring animal, but rather like glancing into the blinding glare of the sun. To look was to damage oneself, to be naked in the presence of an unrivalled force of nature.

"There is nothing else to be," it said, extending a clawed hand towards her.

She stepped back, her foot finding nothing and toppling over the edge. The rest of her followed, sailing over the plateau. Her stomach flipped and her chest heaved with a surprised breath as she fell and, though she knew she was dreaming, the sensation proved as toxic and frightening as the real plummet.

All at once the tower and its sandstorm and its hellish denizen were ripped away, replaced with her darkened room on Verden. She surged upright, the breath she'd gulped inflating her chest, caught in her lungs. She struggled to release it even as the hands that had jolted her awake shook her into lucidity.

"Get up, now. We need to leave." Her uncle's voice, panicked. A moment later, his grimacing face came into focus. He looked eerily like her father for a heartbeat.

"What?"

"The city's being attacked," Heller said, stepping back. "We need to go. Get dressed. Now."

Tali flung herself from her bed, her legs still trembling with the shock of her fall from the tower, and pulled her clothes on over the shirt she'd slept in. Heller waited by the door, Shira just behind him with her requisitioned blade bared. Her uncle wore a knee-length black coat lined with bright red and had slung a bandolier of throwing knives across his chest, helping to pin the garment in place. Shira had found a similar coat in the safehouse's storeroom and donned it over the tunic she'd been wearing since Alzikanem. Though not a uniform—for the Fensidium preferred anonymity—she'd been told a greatcoat's red trim was a way for agents to recognise each other in the field.

Heller offered Tali an arming sword, its edge too sharp for a sparring blade. "Only if you have to," he said.

She secured it to her belt as they hurried through the building she'd called home for the last week. It wasn't until they'd burst out into the early morning that she realised the city no longer trundled idly along.

"Verden surrendered," Shira clarified, moving up behind her and hurrying her along. "They're attacking anyway."

The sky flashed brightly, drowning out the reddened stains of the rising sun on the horizon and splashing the city in luminous colours. The ground rumbled with violent impacts and, when Tali raised confused eyes upwards, it took a second for her mind to register what she saw.

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Thunderships, at least ten of them, dancing on the air currents. She recognised a couple as cloudskimmers, small craft as nimble in flight as a falcon, and used by both the Drasken Sky Fleet and the Karhes mercenaries as scouts. Their undersides sparkled with the electrical energy required to power them, and bursts erupted along their sleek, oval flanks as their aasiur-canons fired. They peppered the city's pelt with metal shots as big as boulders, and Tali flinched on instinct with every fresh onslaught.

Hovering among the flock, the largest by far and cumbersome for it, hung a bulbous beast more than twice the size of her father's ruined estate. A stormking, she guessed, recalling an earlier lesson with Shira. A craft designed for carrying troops, a fortified stronghold lumbering through the clouds. So colossal it, unlike its brethren, sported a row of reinforced wings on either flank to aid in its lift and manoeuvrability. According to what Heller had told her years ago when she'd first encountered a thundership, stormkings required entire companies of aasiurmancers to power their hulking Surrekan engines.

Had she not been thrust into a killing field, she might've laughed at the irony; Indro required the very thing he orated against to fuel and ferry his forces.

"Do you recognise that ship?" Shira called above the chaos, stabbing a hand in the stormking's direction.

After a moment of study, Heller nodded his head gravely. Before he could elaborate, the street they entered exploded into a frenzy. Verden's denizens streamed around them, fleeing up the street, back towards where they'd come. Tali looked towards what they ran from and lowered a hand to the hilt of her sword.

Men and women in tattered clothing, arrayed with the loose organisation of an undisciplined unit, marched towards them, pausing only to cut down innocents who stumbled blindly into their path. Tali guessed them to be the mercenaries allied to Indro, having boarded the city in the distraction served by the attacking thunderships. If these were the ones who'd razed the fallen Shifting City they'd come across before, there would be a veritable army of them swarming Verden right now.

Heller splayed his hands at his sides and Tali spied the tell-tale shimmer of shadows licking at his palms as he summoned his aasiurmancy. Shira echoed his movements, pushing Tali behind them and taking her accustomed place at his side.

"You should take Tali and run," Heller hissed as their opponents neared.

"You're not half as magnificent as you think you are," Shira replied just as sharply. "You need me."

Heller barked a laugh. As the first of the mercenaries drew within striking distance, he extended one arm in a sudden punch. The shadows pooled around his fingers and, under his complete thrall now, lashed out with him. Though he was too far away for his blow to land, the shadows splashed against his target, wrapping around the brute's face with the liquid quality of a thin scarf. It blinded and deafened the mercenary, covering his mouth as if to smother him. His attack faltered as he tore at his head with one hand, trying to grasp the shadows that, to anyone other than Heller, were untouchable.

Shira leapt into the merc's hesitation and ripped her short-sword across the throat of the one beside Heller's victim, then buried it deep in the chest of the shadow-covered man. As the rest of them roused, Heller slipped around the carnage Shira had caused and exchanged blows with the first two fighters to meet his attack. He used the shadows in feints, wrapping them around his arms as easily as he'd pull on a coat and then punching out, only to follow up split seconds later with a flashing dagger the mercenaries weren't prepared to block.

Tali's own aasiur called out to her, its voice as ghostly and vague as Erun's. She wanted to draw on it, if only to help her uncle and Shira as they carved through their enemies, but knew she'd leave herself too vulnerable. Or maybe, she considered with a shiver, she'd be unable to distinguish between friend and foe, and whatever explosion she caused would destroy Heller and Shira alongside their opponents.

Heller moved further forward, his attacks flourishing and practiced, a rictus grin of elation plastered across his blood-splattered features. Shira lingered behind, dispatching her kills with more care. She jarred from place to place rarely, conserving her idomancy as much as Heller abused his shadowmancy.

Her uncle had strayed almost to the end of the street, and most of the way through his assailants, when the canon fire found them. It punctured a building on its journey, then punched into the street between Shira and Heller with a devastating crack of sundered wood. The platform comprising this particular rung on Verden's ladder collapsed beneath the damage, the street curving inwards and spilling into its own guts even as the ruined building beyond swayed on broken foundations and came crashing down upon Heller and his remaining combatants. The gargantuan groan of a toppled titan split the air, and then the world ceased to know sound as Tali looked on, frozen, paralysed, helpless, as her uncle disappeared into the splintered debris of the canon-blasted building. With a yawning bellow Tali felt rather than heard, the street, already bisected by its collapse, opened its maw wider and swallowed the entire scene, her uncle included.

She lurched forward, intending to leap after him, but instead tumbled to unfeeling knees. Shira, thrown backwards by the impact, found her feet and limped towards her, arms outstretched and mouth agape in what Tali assumed was a scream.

Something huge, something insistent and malevolent and dangerous, expanded within Tali as she stared unblinking at the spot where her uncle had just been. Where he should've been. Where he should appear now, miraculously. He was her uncle, her father figure, her mentor. He couldn't die. He couldn't. The universe had no right to take him from her, just as it had no right to have given her existence in the first place. No right for any of them to be here now, fleeing an immortal craving Tali's death, fleeing a warlord whose cause she didn't understand, fleeing enemies who would find her no matter where or how far or how fast she fled.

She bellowed wordlessly, a throat-ripping scream, and threw her hands up, palms splayed. She remembered Erun's notion of wholeness even now, in the very abyss of her own fear and grief.

What use was it to be whole, anyway, if those she loved were snatched from her? How could one such as her be whole when all she did was destroy?

She didn't feel the inferno consume her, nor did she feel it stream from her hands. She saw dimly, through hazed vision, a cloudskimmer set ablaze as suddenly as an unlit torch touched to one already aflame. The sight of it falling, a glowing hunk as luminous as the setting sun, tore her back to reality, gave her the brief moment of control needed to slam shut the aasiurmantic currents roiling within her before they bled her dry.

She gasped a breath as the magic ebbed. Shira hauled her to her feet, shouted soundless words into her ears, tried to shove her bodily back the way they'd come, but she was insensate to it all.

Her display didn't scour her raw, as it had before. Stopping it prematurely had spared her unconsciousness, but it still left her hollow and blind.

Beyond, the ship impacted with the plains in a beautiful flower of fire. Verden rocked with its death.

Tali could do nothing as a second wave of mercenaries approached, picking their way cautiously across the twisted remnants of the fallen street, and surrounded them. Shira, blade bloodied, breath still laboured from her exertions, slapped an arm across Tali's chest and held her back.

From the rapid gestures and angered shouts the mercenaries threw at one another, Tali assumed they'd realised she'd flung the fireball. They knew she was an aasiurmancer, so they'd kill her now.

Should she care? Could she?

They surrounded her and Shira, though weapons hadn't been freed from sheaths and hands were raised in placating gestures rather than fisted for violence. Shira hesitated, perhaps assessing her chances, before deciding she was too outnumbered, too outmatched without Heller to support her.

She threw her blade at their feet and nodded for Tali to do the same. "Put your palms on your chest. They're worried you might use your magic again."

Confusion made her movements rigid and jittery. It occurred to her that their thunderships still required aasiurmancers, and maybe these mercenaries thought to take both her and Shira, to enslave them and take advantage of their skills. The prospect was hardly better than death, but she followed Shira's lead, nonetheless.

Their cautious captors directed them through Verden's smoking corpse, their escorting neither cruel nor insistent. Guilt spiked Tali, to be following these mercenaries who hadn't hurt them as, all around, similar mercenaries cut down innocent civilians. She'd killed an entire ship's worth of their men, yet she was rewarded with an honour guard.

"What's going on?" she whispered to Shira when she regained her voice.

"I don't know," Shira replied. "We may be prisoners. Don't do anything drastic. I think we're going to see their captain."

"I can burn a few of them," Tali suggested. Even as she finished speaking, her gut roiled and her brain thumped inside her skull.

Shira shook her head. "You can't take them all out. One of them will cut us down." Her mentor narrowed her eyes and dipped her head Tali's way. "Are you okay?"

She nodded. "I stopped it before it could drain me." She opened her mouth to say more, faltered, pressed on. "Did Uncle… did you see what happened to him? Is he… is he gone?" Clawing for false hope, especially right now, seemed foolish, but she needed to know.

Shira clenched her jaw, her eyes gleaming. "I think he's gone, Tali. We both saw him fall. No one could survive falling into Verden's foundations like that." A lone tear trickled down from Shira's eye and fell unremarked from her chin, and the defined bunching of her cheek muscles was testament to the strain of holding the rest back.

Tali grappled with the blossoming void in her chest, tried to claw it away. It would do her no good to think on her uncle's fate now, with her and Shira almost certainly about to join him. Find out if these mercenaries had a darker purpose for them, then decide how to react to her uncle's fall, if she was still alive to do so.

She hauled in a huge breath and tried to prevent herself from crumpling, tried to swallow the tide of impending tears. Adrenaline surged and waned in cruel pulses, numbing her.

He's not dead. He's not dead. He's not dead. Shira said I think. Not I know. He's not dead.

Only that vain, naïve mantra prevented her collapse.

They encountered other companies on their way out of Verden, but no one challenged them. Most were busy with their slaughter, though some had lined citizens up, kicked them to their knees, and bellowed proclamations at them as they executed them. It reminded Tali of the aasiurmancer in the square at Sinnis.

"What are they saying?"

Shira glanced warily at their escort and swiped her forearm across her face, blotting away fresh tears. When no punishment at their whispering was offered, she answered. "Indro wants them to know that surrender means nothing, that it's weak and the weak need to be culled."

Tali curled her lips in disgust, allowing it to usurp grief for her uncle. "The destroyed city we saw a while back didn't surrender. It fought. Same result."

Her mentor mirrored Tali's expression. "I don't think it matters, in the end. They'll take some captives here, as they did there. They'll kill most of the rest, but they'll spare some, to spread the story. Every Shifting City he takes, every wandering tribe he overcomes, will only elevate his reputation." Shira skimmed her dark gaze at the convulsive final stages of Verden's death playing out around them. "By the time Indro reaches Drasken, there'll be enough who fear him that toppling the empire won't be a challenge."