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

Twenty-Five

Estrid

Central Tharghest

8th of Otanus

It surprised no one when Kaldurani soldiers began deserting.

The first handful disappeared into Tharghest's rolling wilderness, but the second—a group of six—botched their flight and accidentally alerted the sentries posted around Elek's half of Kaldurani Prime. They were quickly apprehended and confined to a tent in the camp's centre, to await the judgement of their kandras.

Elek had wanted to spare them. "Boratorren's gone. He was the one who wanted this fight. You can't blame my men for thinking this whole ordeal pointless in his absence."

"We promised our aid," Aladar had countered. "A soldier who cannot follow a superior's orders is of no use to me."

Though Elek held command over the captive men, Aladar had pulled rank and decided the would-be deserters should be punished as all soldiers who abandoned their posts were.

And so Estrid found herself, a day after the deserters had been caught, standing in a clearing about to watch their execution. A space in amongst the sea of Kaldurani tents had been opened, and the ranking officers of both halves of Kaldurani Prime and Estrid's own Dasjurans arranged themselves around the edges. There were no Imperials present today, this being a purely Kaldurani affair.

Her eyes fell on Elek as she waited for the prisoners to arrive. He wore his formal silver-trimmed red coat, his arms clasped firmly behind his back to look stony and unmoved. His face was hard and grim, though the flaring of his nostrils and the harsh angle of his drawn brows betrayed his anger. His fists were no doubt clenched behind his back, and she imagined he viewed today's spectacle as a direct undermining of his authority as kandras. When he noticed her looking, his frown deepened. There was something accusatory about the way he regarded her, as if he thought her responsible for the fate of his men.

His senior officers were arrayed around him like a wary wolf pack, their eyes flicking between Elek and the rest of the crowd.

Borso stood at her side, as he always did. Since the discovery of the savaged bodies in Aukruna a week ago, he'd been a mostly silent and stoic presence, though she could see the path of his thoughts clearly enough in his expressions. He worried, she knew, about what awaited them when they finally crossed the border into the Imperium. If the nation's own Warmaster could treat his countrymen with such dehumanising cruelty, what would he do to his enemies, if he captured them? Khian had already expressed a desire to publicly torture and execute Estrid, after all.

A cluster of her own senior officers surrounded them both, men and women Estrid knew from the removed distance of her rank. Though she'd been Dasjuran Kandras for more than a decade now, her officers still struggled to accept her command and would more willingly follow Borso than her. She suspected only her friendship with Borso kept them obedient, though had hoped her appointment as Aladar's heir would ingratiate her to her soldiers. She couldn't help but wonder if they viewed her with the same contempt as Elek, and if they suspected, like him, that she was an Imperial spy interested only in championing her ex-lover's cause.

Aladar stood separate from the rest of them, a noticeable space around him into which no one dared trespass. Since their brief conversation in Aukruna, and his threatening suggestion she no longer talk about his fits, she hadn't seen cause to speak with him.

The circle parted to allow for the half dozen soldiers to be roughly manhandled in and kicked to their knees. They'd been stripped of their uniforms and left only in plain shirts and trousers, as if a lack of colours would make the spectators forget they killed their own. Though the treatment by the soldiers currently overseeing them was less than gentle, the deserters hadn't been beaten.

Estrid felt a cloud of nausea curl around her as she watched the guards take up an intimidating position behind the six kneeling men. She remembered with sharp clarity the day her family had been executed. The arena they'd been killed in had been larger than this paltry clearing, and the audience many thousands stronger, but the atmosphere was identical. She was about to watch people die, just as she'd been forced to watch her parents and siblings die, thirty years ago.

She'd been helpless back then. Penned within the royal box above the seating at Traian's Arena, her family bound and kneeling below, the Caetoran's men lurking behind them in preparation for their dark work. She'd wanted to throw herself from the box and into the seating, vault over the barrier and cut down the guards who meant to slaughter the people she loved, but she'd had her own compliment of guards watching her, ensuring she sat, passive, and witnessed. By that point, she'd already earned herself several beatings in her resistance, when her family had first been arrested. Her jaw was freshly broken, her nose in a similar state, promise of worse if she did anything more than sit and watch.

As her family was cut down, methodically, one by one, she'd been trapped in her own body, a prisoner bound to her own bones. Her mind had retreated far behind her eyes, though not far enough to spare her the grisly sight of the end of her family line. So heavy had the scrutiny been on her in the royal box, even her shattered jaw hadn't been able to unclench to release a scream.

An elbow dug into her flank and jolted her back to reality. "You okay?" Borso whispered.

She shook her head, more to clear it of her memories than in answer to her masantra's question.

Before Borso could say anything else, Aladar clapped his hands. "Before we begin," he said, "I would offer the condemned the opportunity to speak their final words."

Five of the half-dozen deserters refused to meet his gaze, but the sixth, a grizzled old veteran, raised his head. "We stopped fighting for Kalduran as soon as we agreed to help the Iron Wolf," he growled. "He's gone, and that means we should return to our own borders and protect our own nation."

Aladar inclined his head. "Anyone else?"

The veteran spoke again, louder. "This isn't our fight, Baltanos. Let the Imperium destroy itself. Our care should be for our own people."

Aladar raised a hand and gestured to the guards behind the prisoners.

"My men and I only wanted to return home," the veteran continued, shouting now. "Thirty years of my life I've given to you, and this is my reward! You are a dishonourable dog, a—."

His cries were cut off by a length of wire pulled tight around his throat. On either side of him, his five fellow deserters were similarly strangled, their protestations becoming gurgled moans as they struggled. The veteran raised his hands to his throat and tried, in vain, to pry the wire loose, but the guard securing him proved stronger.

Strangulation offered perhaps the most prolonged form of execution Estrid had beheld, but it was the cleanest. Commanders used it to dispatch deserting soldiers because of the belief that the lack of shed blood allowed the victims to retain a scrap of dignity, a belief Kalduran shared with the Imperium. But she saw nothing dignified in the bloated, discoloured faces, the flapping mouths gasping for breath, the scrabbling hands and legs thrashing in panic. She felt her own breathing turn shallow as veins protruded and eyes flushed red, as the struggles started to fade and limbs slumped limply.

There was nothing dignified in the way the six deserters toppled boneless into the dirt. Nothing dignified in the way their killers discarded their wire and moved away. Nothing dignified in the way Aladar watched over it all, expression unmoved.

Elek stepped forward and paced towards his fallen men as if he meant to kneel beside them. Instead, he veered around them and went for the Baltanos.

"That was needless," he hissed, stopping several metres short of Aladar. "And barbaric."

"The punishment for desertion has always been strangulation, Kandras Danukos. Don't blame me, blame the one who first decreed it."

"They wanted to go home," Elek continued. He swung his hand in a wide arc, gesturing to those around him. "We all want to go home!"

The Baltanos was as dead-faced as Estrid had ever seen him. "We have an empire to topple before we can go home, Elek."

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"The man who wants to topple the Imperium is gone. He's already dead, so let's just accept it." Elek aimed his attention at her, twisting around to glare at her. "Your fucking pet cripple is dead, Elerius. Let us go home and leave this all behind. He isn't worth this. The Imperium isn't worth this."

"The Caetoran won't just let us live in peace," Estrid replied calmly.

"Fearmongering," Elek countered. "That's what that is. The Caetoran doesn't want us. He just wants your lamed lover and his family. He wants you. He doesn't care about the rest of us."

"You going to give me to him, then?" she challenged.

He raised his hands in mock surrender. "Oh, I can't touch you, Elerius. You're the favoured one, after all." He switched his attention back to Aladar. "My men were right to try and escape. Their only crime was in being caught."

"You make it sound like you wish to desert yourself, Elek." Aladar's countenance had become as frozen as the snow-carpeted tundra of Drasken's far north. "Do not think I would shy away from punishing you in the same manner."

"Strangle me, Baltanos," Elek spat, "and you will lose the loyalty of almost all the soldiers under your command."

Perhaps the argument might've devolved into a physical altercation. Perhaps Elek might've pushed Aladar into punishing him. Perhaps, for all the anger curdling in the air between the two men, they might've even diffused their tempers and turned away from each other.

Instead, Aladar's eyes grew distant, and his jaw slackened in a gesture Estrid had already become unfortunately familiar with. He was about to suffer a fit, here in front of his senior officers.

She swept forward, shouldering Elek out of the way. Careful not to brush her bare skin against his, she took Aladar's shoulder and steered him away from the clearing and its fresh corpses. She drove him back into the labyrinth of Prime's temporary camp, finding him a meek, pliable passenger. Officers muttered as she passed, but she waved them away with her free hand and bade them disperse. Worried someone might think she coerced her superior, she adjusted her grip on Aladar, moving her hand down to his forearm and guiding him in companionable fashion.

"He's taken ill," she called vaguely over her shoulder.

"What of the bodies?" one of the men from Aladar's half of the army inquired.

"Bury them on the camp outskirts," she replied. "Mark the graves if you want."

Aladar was passive and unresisting under her power as she aimed him at a nearby tent and angrily harassed the occupants out. The Baltanos stumbled through the tent flaps like a man possessed by drink, his mouth flapping but producing no noise. He grappled with the tent's field desk when Estrid released him, his nails scraping against the wood, the exposed muscles in his forearms and neck bunching up with his straining.

"I'm sorry, but I have to," she murmured, moving up behind him. She wrapped her palm around the back of his neck, the contact of their skin immediately ripping her from the world and depositing her elsewhere.

Rather than being thrust through a yawning void, she slammed straight into solid ground with her legs trembling beneath her. She cast a wild glance around, finding a rolling landscape of fertile grassland studded with the occasional copse of trees. Though this could've been any patch of untamed Kaldurani wilderness, she knew, somehow, it wasn't. The air seemed to settle differently on her shoulders, the breeze tasted foreign, the grass just a little too verdant and the sun a little too fat in the sky.

She stood on another world.

And there was Aladar beside her, as serene as he'd ever been. However violently he fitted back in the real world, here he remained as immovable and emotionless as a statue.

"Do you know how much power it takes to kill a planet?" he asked as he surveyed their surroundings.

She shrunk away from him, his presence a foul taint on this otherwise flawless tapestry of nature.

"I don't mean the genocide of its inhabitants, or the spoiling of its vistas," he continued, seemingly unaware of her discomfort. "I mean the planet itself is butchered like a carcass. Its core extinguished, its atmosphere diseased, every scrap of life stripped away until nothing can ever draw breath here again."

He turned his head slowly, menacingly towards her.

"It does not take even a fraction of the effort you might imagine."

She quelled the urge to bolt. "Where are we?"

"This?" He spread his arms out wide, almost as if he meant to embrace the world around him. "This is Incáraï. Was, I should say."

She murmured the strange word, the word that had triggered Aladar's last fit. As vehemently as Tanas claimed it was a meaningless term dreamed up by Aladar's fevered mind, she'd known it held significance.

"Incáraï is a planet," she mused to herself.

"Was," Aladar said with an extended forefinger.

"I've never heard of it."

"You wouldn't," he replied. "It was ten thousand years dead when you were born." His eyes flitted to the horizon. "It was a quaint world, smaller than your Eld. An Atlas Gate in Drasken, now long destroyed, joined it to Eld. It was the first planet the Ravessi touched down upon when they escaped the Abyss. The first planet they killed. Had they not been stopped, it would have been the first of many."

She remembered what he'd uttered when he'd suffered a fit after learning of the razing of Dykumas, more than two months ago. I didn't kill Incáraï. I didn't even help.

"Are you a Ravessi?" she asked, feeling absurd even as the words fled her mouth.

Was her superior, a man she'd known for twelve years—who she considered friend and mentor and brother—a demonic monster torn straight from the annals of ancient history? She knew little about the Ravessi, aside from their involvement in the Cataclysm, but to think Aladar belonged among their number was so irrational she almost laughed out loud. He was, after all, just a mortal man, and plain with it.

But then, hadn't he unmade a table just by touching it? And weren't these visions unlike anything she'd ever heard of before?

"No, I am not Ravessi. I am mad," he said, his face perfectly sane.

"This is more than madness."

He nodded as if he agreed. "Feign madness for too long and the act becomes a suffocating mask fixed to your soul." His eyes clouded, as if with memory. "I used to pretend to hear voices and rage at things unseen. I can hear them now, a figment of my imagination made concrete. And the rage is all too real."

As if directed by his words, the horizon curdled, the sky collapsing in on itself with the explosive anger of a thunderstorm. Estrid fell to her knees with her arms wrapped around her head as the noise of a thousand cavalry charges slammed into her, loud enough to deafen, sudden enough to make her heart spasm and her chest seize. Aladar towered over her, unmoved.

"The enemy of life is death. The enemy of existence is oblivion," he bellowed, voice rising above the tumult of the apocalypse he seemed to be conducting. "All that surrounds us is the Abyss, an endless nothingness constructed around the greatest accumulation of life to have ever existed." He clicked his fingers, and Estrid heard the mundane noise even through the throbbing of her senseless mind. "Just like that, life dies. Just like that, a planet ceases to exist."

The trembling of the ground beneath her crested, became unbearable. Wind lashed at her cowering form, threatening to flay her skin from her bones and dash her bones to dust and fling her dust out into the nothingness. But then, just as she felt the ominous creaking of her body on the verge of breaking, just as her blood primed to boil in her veins and her lungs crush themselves beneath an irresistible pressure, she was relinquished. Flung, ragdoll-like, back into Aladar's pavilion with her feet under her and her hand still gripping his bare neck. His right hand rested on hers, holding her in place for a painful moment before he shrugged her off.

Her voice trembled when she spoke. "What the fuck's wrong with you?"

He waved a hand in dismissal, then fell into the chair behind the field desk. Like with his previous fit, he seemed to have emerged from this one lucid, aware. "I told you not to concern yourself with me."

"Tell me, please," she pressed. "Maybe I can help."

He considered her with a frown, chewing absently on his lower lip. With a roll of his eyes, he seemed to decide to answer her. "I fell from a horse when I was a child. Took a blow to the back of the head that knocked me out for several days." He raised his hand to the back of his skull, but the movement seemed practised, not instinctive. "It scrambled my mind enough that I had to learn how to read and talk all over again. I've suffered from fits ever since, but the stress of these recent campaigns has made them more frequent and debilitating."

An empty story, and she wasted no effort believing it. "And Incáraï? The Cataclysm?"

He shrugged. "Simple," he said. "Around the time of my accident, I had been reading about these things. They stuck in my head, I suppose, and became the focus of my fits."

"Not simple." She sliced her hand in the air between them. "A blow to the head and a child's history book don't give you the ability to force visions on people. Not to mention what you did to your old table."

"What do you want me to say?" he asked, an exasperated edge sharpening his tone.

"The truth. I need to know what you are and what's happening to you. It could be anything, especially after learning about the Arisen in the Imperium."

The Baltanos surged to his feet and planted his fists onto the desk's surface. "What I am?" he snapped. "I am your superior. I am your friend and your mentor. I saved your life when you came crawling on hands and knees into my nation. I do all this for you, raise you as high as I am able, and you repay me with questions and doubts and suggestions that I am something strange, something monstrous?"

"You are both," she replied, matching his anger. "I can't ignore what's happening to you. If you endanger others…"

Aladar prompted her. "What will you do? Will you boldly stand up to me like Elek? Will you turn against me like Boratorren did his own masters?" He cocked his head, a red gleam in his gaze. "Will you kill me?"

"I would never—."

He cut her off with a wordless snarl. "If you continue to interfere, woman, I will be forced to unmake you as I unmade my table. It will be easy, and there will be nothing left of you with which to point the blame at me." He clapped his hands together, as if crushing something between them. "You will disappear completely, and no one will ever know what happened to you."

His voice rumbled, animalistic in its menace. She'd heard this tone from him back in Varanos, before the Imperium had first invaded. He'd been at his estate, standing beneath a statue of Godking Skiron, arguing with himself. One side of his argument had been acted out by the voice she heard now, a voice she knew didn't belong to her old friend.

"What will happen then?" he continued, his lips skinned back from his teeth in an ugly sneer. "In your absence I will be forced to turn back to Kalduran and forget this insipid venture. Your poor crippled paramour will meet his deserved fate at the hand of his Imperial overseers. You will both be two more pointless deaths in an endless history of them, and no one will shed a tear for either of you."

She recoiled as he rose and reached a clawed hand for her, almost stumbling through the flaps of the tent. At her fearful gasp, he seemed to snap himself awake, his eyes clearing from their maddened haze. He looked down at his hand, still extended for her, then up to her face.

"What… what just happened?" he asked, slurring. "What did I do?"

"I don't know," she muttered. He made to approach, but she pushed herself away. "Don't fucking touch me." She flung herself into the still summer air beyond the tent and lost herself to the writhing war camp, fleeing from her superior as a prey animal from an accomplished predator.