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

Twenty-Nine

Tali

Above the Karhes

13th of Tantus

Tali waited in relative comfort, her hands bound flat against her chest, as the city of Verden faded to ash and bones beneath her. The mercenaries had been thorough in combing the ruins, but especially diligent in their killing and enslavement. Many of their prizes they shepherded aboard the stormking, and Tali bristled knowing that, somewhere on this same craft, citizens were locked together like cattle as their murderers treated her as a guest.

When she and Shira had first been forced aboard the stormking and the monster lumbered into the sky, Tali had seen the full scope of the assault for the first time. Butchers swarmed the city's corpse and threaded through its toppled layers like writhing maggots. Ranks of attackers churned up the mud surrounding the felled city, converging on the carcass with the fervour of starved scavengers. Every now and again, a thundership would dip down onto the plains and swallow a group of unfortunate citizens. Tali, who had no personal experience of armies and couldn't put numbers to such forces with just a glance, judged them infinite.

The room she currently waited in resembled an office, though was equipped with a table in place of a desk. Maps were scattered across it, and Tali studied them, finding nothing familiar in the detailed rendering of the Karhes. If she'd hoped to glean sensitive information from these documents, she was disappointed; the annotations and labels were written in a variety of Karspeech she'd never encountered.

As unmappable as the plains supposedly were, whoever led this fleet seemed to know their way around; they'd certainly known where on Verden's route it was most vulnerable to attack.

Beyond the table was a wide window of thick, smeared glass, and beyond the window an expanse of dark sky that bled clean into the horizon. When Tali looked down, she saw fires guttering as Verden died. When she looked up, the dark shapes of the other thunderships blotted out the stars. The buzzing commotion of the stormking's engine and the aasiurmantic electricity required to power it thrummed through the craft's bones like a heartbeat. It evoked the constant rocking of the Shifting City and prickled the skin on Tali's forearms.

She wondered then what had happened to Shira, who'd been separated from her as soon as they'd been conveyed aboard. Now she had a moment to contemplate, she also fixated on her uncle's fate, though didn't see how he could've survived both the collapse of the street and the bloody ministrations of the mercenaries in the aftermath.

Fear for Heller and Shira kept fear for herself at bay, though she knew she should worry for her life.

Every time her thoughts veered towards that final heartbeat before her uncle had vanished into the bombed street, her gut curdled and the stony lump in her throat expanded. It took great effort to steady her breathing, and only by creating fingernailed-shaped divots in her palm was she able to ground herself, to childishly convince herself Heller had somehow survived the fall and was even now clambering free of the wreckage to come for her and Shira.

He's not dead. He's not dead. He's not dead.

A mantra her whirlwind of a mind hinged upon.

He's not dead, but I soon might be.

She and Shira had been brought here for a reason. Treated like guests, rather than newly captured slaves, for a reason. She knew it had something to do with the thundership-killing fireball she'd thrown at one of the cloudskimmers. It seemed possible the fleet's commander wanted to make an example of her and only treated her well now to blind her to her impending fate.

She thought of the mage prisoner in Sinnis. The stumps of his wrists. The sadistic way the executioner had sawn into his neck.

The office door opened with a wooden groan and Tali startled.

The woman who entered wasn't physically imposing, neither tall nor wide nor well-muscled, but an aura of threat preceded her. She'd squared her shoulders for a fight, and the tattered greatcoat she wore lapped at her shins in ghostly ripples. Her face was battered and bruised, her nose recently broken and poorly reset, several white scars shining on her sun-darkened skin. Her eyes seemed older than her face suggested, like those of an elder set into the features of someone in their prime. Beneath the dirty mask, the woman looked aristocratic, with the fine structure of noble breeding.

"You're the one who blasted my ship?" the woman asked as she kicked the door shut behind her and paced towards the table.

It took Tali a second to register the woman hadn't spoken in the plains' tongue, but rather in fluent Drasken, close enough to the Imperium's own to give her pause. She nodded slowly, expecting punishment.

The woman surprised her by slapping her hands together in an exaggerated clap. "Fucking good job, that was. I haven't seen aasiurmancy like that in years." She cocked her head and stroked her chin. "How rude of me to not offer you a seat." She swept her hands at the chairs arrayed around the table. "Please, avail yourself. I'd like to have a conversation before I decide what to do with you."

Tali sat reluctantly. She felt, as she moved closer to her captor, that she approached a dangerous animal.

"I am Katja, captain of this fine vessel," the woman said as she sank into her own seat across the table. "Formerly Westervelt, though I don't wear that filthy name any longer. Tell me, child, do you hail from a Varkommer family?"

"No," Tali replied. Fear of this strange woman made her want to elaborate, to tell as much of the truth as she knew. "I'm a bastard, from the Imperium."

Katja raised a hand to her head and tapped her temples. "I didn't think the Imperium permitted half-breeds."

Having briefly forgotten about her bound hands, Tali made to copy the woman's movement and graze the stunted horns she'd found too easy to forget in the past weeks. "They're not. Hence the 'bastard' part of my heritage."

The woman laughed, a strangely deep and sonorous sound unsuited to her slim frame. "If you'd been born in Drasken, you'd be honoured and exalted. Aasiurmancy like yours is championed."

"Is that where you come from?" Tali asked.

"Came from." Katja's broken face twisted as if to spit. "I was born there, but the cursed place did nothing but destroy me." She threw herself back in her chair, propped it up on its back legs. "As much as I make it sound a wonderful place for mages like you, don't ever go to Drasken, girl. It will gut you and slit your throat and defile your corpse."

The venom in the older woman's tone almost made her flinch. "It's the only place I'll be safe."

Katja scoffed. "Don't let the Jalin get his hands on you, then."

Tali recalled her uncle and Shira's plans to have the Jalin train her and protect her. Though she'd supported it in the end, Shira had made it clear she thought of the Jalin as a devious politician who'd use Tali for his own ends.

"Why?" Tali asked.

The woman's soft brows lowered. Her next words were spoken with vitriol, as if each one was poison on her tongue. "Fellan van Ìsdonder Drakaaren. A demon wearing the skin of a man." Her hand bunched into a fist, crunching a map in her grip. "He killed almost every member of my family for no better reason than we were powerful enough to pose a threat to his."

This much, at least, Tali understood. On the rare occasions her father deigned to share details of his family with her, he spoke of them being targeted by the Caetoran. His long-dead wife, a noblewoman named Aemilia, had been killed because of the threat her alliance with the Iron Wolf posed to the Imperium's ruling family. An old lover of his, an arch-general named Elerius, had been driven from the Imperium for similar reasons. And wasn't Tali herself forced into exile on Alzikanem because of her father's power, and the implications that arose from his siring of her, a half-Dontili bastard?

"I saw my mother die, and my older brother," Katja continued. Her eyes became distant, and she looked over Tali's shoulder. "I saw the knife go into her throat. I saw the blood come out. Saw my brother try to fight back and earn a blade in the stomach as his reward." She snapped her head back to Tali and released her grip on the paper. "The perfect white marble floor of our estate was so red it glistened."

"I'm sorry," Tali said. There was nothing else to say, was there?

"You didn't order the killings," Katja said, waving away the apology. "I know exactly who did, and every night I dream of his death. I've already killed him in a thousand different ways. When I catch him, I hope he lives long enough for me to try out a few in reality."

Katja considered the map she'd scrunched up, then threw it over her shoulder.

"You said almost all of your family," Tali said, her eyes fixed on the discarded paper.

"My father survived and saved me. We fled, were picked up by some mercenaries at the edge of the Karhes. Here I am now, in command of a whole cluster of ships. I believe it's called a squadron back in Drasken. Funny, because I never had any flying experience back home."

"Where is your father?"

Katja's eyes narrowed and the predatory cast to her posture intensified. By impulse, Tali gripped the arms of her chair and prepared to leap out of it.

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

"Gone." Katja ground the word out. "The bastard stole my daughter, killed my partner, then fled. I heard he'd returned to Drasken." She lurched to her feet, the chair slamming to the ground behind her with a heavy thud. "He crawled on hands and knees before the very demon who killed our family and begged for a second chance. He debased himself and my child and prostrated himself in service to Fellan fucking Drakaaren." The table creaked under Katja's weight as she braced her hands against it. Tali saw violence in her eyes, read it in the set of her shoulders and the clenching of her jaw. "Do me a favour, girl. You ever come across a man named Maze Westervelt in your travels, you give him a nice red smile from me." As if her words needed illustrating, she slid a forefinger across her throat.

Tali had no ready reply. The sparkling madness in Katja's eyes suggested her father had been wise to take her daughter and escape, but she knew better than to say that.

"He was a powerful aasiurmancer, before he stopped practising. I never got very far with it myself. The mercenaries don't like magic. If we wanted to stay, we had to give it up." She ran a hand across her face. "I reckon I'll start aging again in a decade or two. I probably look older than my father by now." Katja laughed, but it rang false and empty. She narrowed her eyes as she regarded Tali. "You, though. You look the same age as my daughter. Perhaps fate brought you here, onto my ship."

Was that why Katja hadn't ordered her and Shira killed? The sheer chance of her being the same age as this woman's absconded child?

"Indro wants to kill the Jalin," Tali said before the woman could press the comparison. "Is that why you joined him?"

Katja shrugged and stuck her bottom lip out in a childish expression. "He promised my father to me, if we capture him. My daughter too. That's reason enough for me right now."

The silence that followed was thick and suffocating. Tali looked between her captor and the door, though abandoned any ideas of escape. She'd have a whole ship to get through, and Shira to find besides. She might as well fling herself out of the window and save herself the trouble.

"My father abandoned me, too." Tali whispered the words, scared of voicing them. She judged Katja to be at least a little mad and decided presenting common ground with her might spare her any violent death the woman might wish to enact. Her father's own bouts of madness needed to be navigated in a similar manner, with soft words and gentle affirmations.

Katja said nothing, so Tali continued. "Not all at once," she elaborated. "After my mother was killed, he took me to the island he grew up on. It's remote, far away from everything. He told me I'd be safe. I thought he was just trying to escape the responsibility of caring for me, that I was never at risk, because who would want to hurt me?" She didn't voice the brutal irony of that statement but felt a cynical smile tug at her mouth. "I was stuck on that island, and he only returned occasionally. He brought pictures with him of the places he'd been. He probably thought he was doing me a kindness, but really it felt like he was taunting me."

When she looked up, Katja was staring at her, unblinking. The skin on Tali's forearms prickled again and her heart missed a beat at the intense scrutiny.

"Sorry," she mumbled. "I didn't mean to suggest my suffering is equal to yours."

Katja leaned forward and reached out the same hand that had ruined the map. Tali forced herself not to flinch as the woman set it atop her shoulder, almost maternal. "Never apologise," Katja said. "I felt so alone before talking to you. I can't talk to anyone under my command for fear they'd see me as weak. But you understand. You hate your father like I do. Want to kill him, too."

At first Tali swallowed the urge to deny the words because of the fervency with which they'd been spoken. Katja had latched onto what she believed they shared and assumed Tali wanted her father dead because Katja desired the same for hers. Then, when she thought about it, she realised she couldn't spout outright denial anyway. She remembered the Shaeviren monster presenting her tortured father to her, having her perform the mutilations on him. How much of that was Erun manipulating her dreams, and how much was her innate desires, discovered and utilised by the monster? Katja had already admitted to dreaming of killing her own father. What were Tali's experiences on Erun's sun-blasted hellscape if not dreams of patricide?

But she didn't want to kill her father. She didn't want to kill anyone. Fate had forced her hand in Sinnis, and again in Verden when she'd downed the thundership. She hadn't wanted to kill those people.

Had she?

She hadn't thought twice about it, though. Wouldn't think twice in the future. There was a certain amount of pride to be had in witnessing the effect of her magic, the raw power of what she was capable of.

"I can see it in your eyes," Katja said. "You want it, but you hesitate. Killing isn't a bad thing, girl, if the ones you're killing deserve it. You do the world a service to cull the deserving." The grip on her hand hardened as Katja squeezed. "If you want, after I've killed my father, we can find yours. You can kill him. I'll show you the best way." The woman extracted her hand and Tali almost sighed in relief. "Indro won't stop at Drasken. He'll turn his sights south, on Kalduran and the Imperium soon enough. If I ask, I'm sure he'll give you your father."

Katja's eyes danced with glee, but all Tali could see was a broken woman. The Jalin had shattered her when he'd killed her family. Her father had broken her when he'd fled with his granddaughter. Her loneliness, stripped of all family as she now was, had seized the broken pieces of her and broken her further, until there was no reconstructing her.

The Drasken Empire had done this to Katja, and yet Heller and Shira were confident Tali would be safest there. With a man who murdered entire families because they challenged his power.

Tali understood then why Katja had brought her here, meaning only to talk. A mercenary captain of her calibre couldn't afford something as feeble as doubt or emotions in the face of her dark work. Who better to unburden herself with than a young aasiurmancer who evoked her daughter, whose magic evoked her past in the Drasken Empire?

If Tali wanted to survive her stay aboard this ship, she needed to foster this strange connection. Convince the captain she was a decent substitute.

"I'm a mage," Tali said instead of the myriad other things she wanted to say. "Your people will want me dead. Indro will want to execute me."

Indro, who was likely allied to the Novhar who still hunted her. Indro, who had seen her in Sinnis and seemed to know her. Indro, who helmed a crusade to annihilate mages. Tali suspected she wouldn't live long past her first proper meeting with Katja's master.

"I'm a mage as well," Katja insisted. "Indro might ask you to stop using your aasiurmancy, but once he sees what you can do, he might want to use you. We still need magic, after all. You might be his weapon, his best weapon."

Or the Jalin's, if she ever made it to Drasken.

This was her fate, then. She was to be an instrument for one of two men on opposing sides of a flourishing war. Or she was an immortal's quarry.

"The woman I was with. What about her? Will she be allowed to live?" The lie sprang unbidden. "She's not an aasiurmancer." Shira hadn't utilised her magic during the fight with the mercenaries, had she? Then again, even if she had, the chaos of the fight would've shielded her particular brand of subtle aasiurmancy.

Katja raised her brows, her bloodthirsty glitter deadened by the sudden tangent. "Of course, child. She hasn't been harmed. I only kept her separate because I wanted to talk to you alone."

Foolish, childish hope seized Tali's chest as she chose her next words. "I was with a man in Verden as well. My uncle. He got into a fight with some of your men and the street collapsed. Have you found him? Very tall, black haired and green-eyed, with a beard. He speaks Imperial as well as Karspeech." She paused, rolling her tongue against her teeth as she considered how much to say. Damn it; Heller was likely dead anyway and asking couldn't hurt him further. "He's a shadowmancer, if anyone noticed that."

The older woman's jaw clenched but she shook her head. "We killed any mages we came across, apart from you. I've had no reports of a shadowmancer in particular and seen no men matching that description."

Though it'd been a pointless inquiry, Tali still deflated. Her uncle truly was dead, then. She'd need to accept that, and deal with it however she could.

"I'm sorry, child," Katja said, her features softening. Though the scars were sill stark and the broken nose still eye-catching, she looked less a warrior and more a lost daughter. "Indro told us not to discriminate in our slaughter."

Unable to shape words, she shook her head and ducked her eyes away. She tried to inspire enough anger to imagine pouring her wrathful fire over this woman for what she'd done, but she couldn't. She was exhausted, mind and body. Besides, with her palms still lashed to her own chest, she'd incinerate herself first. Hardly a worthy death.

The mercenary reached out her hand again and shook Tali's shoulder gently. "You can have one of the guest cabins for your stay. Your friend as well. You'll be untied, and I suggest you go and get some sleep, and we can talk more in the morning."

Tali nodded, feeling empty. As empty, she imagined, as Katja was.

―

The hellscape of Shaeviren wasn't what greeted her when her fitful slumber slid into a nightmare. It was the same blank void as at the very beginning of her encounters with Erun, though now the monster stood alongside her, wearing its tangible human form.

"What does 'Father' mean?" Erun asked. Its hands were clasped behind its back, and when she looked up to its face, the features shifted. One moment it wore Endarion's harsh, frowning visage. The next, nomadic-looking Heller and his easy smile.

"You have a father, surely" Tali replied, glancing away.

Erun's face returned, as androgynous as Tali remembered. "Father, father, father." The words danced on its lips. "I do not understand."

"The man who sired you."

"Man? Another strange word. And sired?"

Impatience made her roll her eyes as if this demonic monster was a halfwit child. Erun had appeared to her almost as soon as she'd drifted asleep, and its presence was unwelcome. Here she sat, held captive on a madwoman's ship with her fate uncertain and her uncle probably dead, an inhuman creature now hounding her sleeping hours, where she'd hoped for some respite. She hadn't wanted to face Erun and its strangeness tonight. "You were born, right? A man and a woman, your mother and father, conceived you. Progenitors, to use your word."

"I was made," Erun said. It flashed a wide smile, and Tali noticed sharpened incisors. "Not conceived. Constructed, you might say. Shaped from the aether. We all were."

"Made? Like a statue?"

"Our creators knitted us together using strands from the Abyss. They gave us form, and what a magnificent form it was. Far too impressive for your mortal mind to comprehend, and much too large to contain within this mindscape of yours."

Tali folded her arms across her chest. "I think I preferred you when you were a bodiless voice taunting me with torture."

At once, Erun's face became Heller's again, though the throat gaped open in the most macabre second smile. "We can return to that, if you prefer."

She turned away, trying to banish the image of her deceased uncle from her mind. "No, thanks."

She strode across the blank blackness, her feet making no sound, the ground non-existent beneath her but still firm enough to walk upon. Erun followed, its breath whispering across the back of her neck. When she looked over her shoulder, it was gone, and she was alone.

Its voice wafted in her ear like a biting breeze. "I find your thoughts depressing. The one called Katja spoke of murdering her progenitor, and now you ponder the demise of your own. I gave you the opportunity to exact your rage on him, yet I had to move you myself for you to do anything. Why not act, instead of ponder?" When she said nothing, the creature continued. "Your progenitor feels the effects of your ministrations. Your dreams are not so inconsequential."

"What do you mean?"

"He dreams of his captivity as you do. When I direct your hand and cut him apart, he feels the echo of his original pain as he sleeps. Does this please you?"

She clamped her jaws against her outrage. "Why would it please me? I don't want to hurt him."

The idea she could interfere with her father's own nightmares through hers was chilling, and not something she wanted to even consider, let alone abuse.

"I was of the impression you disliked your kin."

"I do dislike him. Doesn't mean I want to hurt him." Tali huffed, calling to mind Katja's brokenness even as she remembered the woman's glee at the prospect of murdering her own father. "You're lucky to have no family. No father to abandon you. No mother to be just a vague memory and dreams of what-ifs. No half-siblings who don't even know you exist. No uncle to die and leave you alone."

"We are never alone," Erun hissed. "We are always together, and united."

Tali nodded. "Whole."

"Yes. Whole."

Maybe she wanted to be whole. Whatever it meant. She wouldn't have to worry about losing her family or clinging to the remnants of it. Wouldn't have to serve and train under a killer in Drasken and become his weapon. Wouldn't have to flee the Novhar, or Indro. Wouldn't have to face her grief at Heller's death or accept the anger she felt at him for dying and leaving her.

Maybe she would be free.