The Chaoswar Saga: A Kingdom Besieged, A Crown Imperilled, Magician’s End

SANDREENA SPRINTED.

Not for the first time in her life she was thankful for the rigorous training her order had inflicted on her. Her ability to move suddenly and rapidly while wearing heavy mail armour, holding a sword and shield, had saved her life more than once.

Her opponent was obviously unprepared for just how fast she closed the distance, and when she drove her shoulder into him, he flew backwards as if struck by a battering ram. The man was wearing a buff-coloured coat over jack armour – a rough suede vest over a thick, quilted singlet – effective for arrows that didn’t strike full on and glancing blows from swords. For a fully armoured Sergeant Knight-Adamant slamming into him, he might as well be naked. He lay sprawled out for a moment, then tried to move, but collapsed backwards with a groan of pain, his eyes going in and out of focus.

Sandreena gave him a quick glance and decided she might have broken a few ribs as well as having stunned him. Levelling her sword at his throat, she waited until he either passed out or regained consciousness.

He passed out. She sighed as she put up her sword. She looked around to make sure he had been alone, but if he had had confederates, they were making good their escape. She knelt to check that the man wasn’t shamming. A firm poke into ribs that were at the very least bruised if not broken brought no response. She knew he was not engaging in any sort of mummery. It was a lucky thing for her assailant that she had been leading her horse up the trail; had she been on horseback, she’d have ridden him down and he’d be in even worse shape.

She took one minute to circle around the ambush spot: it was hard to believe this idiot would have taken on a Knight-Adamant of the Order of the Shield of the Weak alone. She saw he was armed with a short bow that might have caused her injury if he had been a good enough archer to strike at one of the tiny openings in her armour. It was highly unlikely though: the loop chain she wore would keep all but the sharpest broad-head arrows launched by the most powerful longbows from doing anything more than irritate her. He didn’t even have a sword, just a dirk and a buckler, which told her he was first and foremost an archer, since it was the shield of choice among bowmen. Some of the really practised archers could fire their bows while wearing a buckler on their forearms, already in place if the bow needed to be dropped in hand-to-hand combat.

Sandreena sat on a rock next to the unconscious attacker and took a long breath. It had been a hard day. In fact, it had been a hard month.

The Grand Master of her Order had given her free rein to hunt down any remnants of a group known to her as the Black Caps. Five years earlier they had almost killed her, but that wasn’t her only reason for wanting to ferret out any last enclave of the murdering scum.

A mixture of fanatic believers and hired mercenaries who had come under the control of the mad magician, Belasco, they had aided in the summoning of a Demon King, Dahun, into this realm. Only the quick action of Pug and his Conclave along with Sandreena and her former lover, Amirantha the Warlock, had balked their plan.

But rather than any sense of triumph, everyone had come away with a sense of foreboding. For every answer they had uncovered, they had been left with more questions.

Hours of long discussion had followed the events in the abandoned fortress in that portion of Kesh known as the Valley of Lost Men, between Amirantha and another demon-summoner, an elf named Gulamendis, Pug and Magnus and the other magic-users. They examined all manner of theories as to what was occurring in the demon realm that would cause a Demon King to attempt to possess a human and enter the world of Midkemia undetected. They even consulted a book they had purloined from the archives of the Island Kingdom of Queg, and pored over it endlessly.

Sandreena’s experience with demons was far more prosaic. She saw a demon; she killed it. Or, using her clerical magic, banished it back to whence it came. Even so, she recognized there were bigger problems in play now, and she was content to let the Grand Master, the Demon Masters and the magicians worry about that, content for her task to be out in the world seeking information for them.

She just wished it didn’t always involve this much tedium.

Rumours had surfaced lately that a group of men was gathering near the south-eastern foothills of the Peaks of the Quor. They sounded a great deal like the thugs who had almost killed her in her first encounter with them. Beaten, raped, then thrown off a cliff onto the rocks below, she had survived only by the Goddess’s mercy. In her final battle at the Demon Gate, she had taken an additional measure of revenge against those murderous dogs.

She regarded her unconscious companion and vowed that if he was another of those bastards he’d soon be joining them, even though her Order had strictures on what was and was not acceptable behaviour in a Knight-Adamant, and murder out of hand, even if it was labelled ‘execution’, was not permitted. She knew she’d dispatch any member of that gang without hesitation then petition the Goddess for forgiveness later.

She had been frustrated to find the rumours unfounded; but one small item of information had caught her attention: a demand for more fish than usual from traders heading south. The local fishing villages along that rocky stretch of coast had sold off their excess catch for years to passing traders. Salted properly, the fish was standard fare on long-haul shipping out of the deepwater ports heading across the sea to Novindus, or south around the landmass, to the western coast of the Empire or even up to the Bitter Sea.

But a chance remark in a tavern from a fisherman about how his newfound wealth would allow him to buy a second boat so his sons could expand the family trade got her to wondering, and after some investigation, she’d uncovered a pattern: everyone along the long, usually impoverished, coast of the peninsula below the Peaks of the Quor was enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Her interest was doubly piqued when she found a village making weapons. The local smith had been an armourer for the Empire until his army service of twenty years was over, and he had retired to this forlorn coast in the hope of some quiet. He had made his living fashioning iron fittings for wagons, making and repairing farm tools, and hardware for fishing boats. Then had come an order for a dozen short swords, of the fashion employed by Kesh’s army of Dog Soldiers.

She had tracked that shipment down to Hansulé where she found an incredible number of ships coming and going. She continued to pick up rumours and by the time she’d been in that city for a week, she was certain something important was coming together. She had reported to the local shrine of Dala in the city asking for word to be passed back to her Order in Rillanon, then continued nosing around.

Another shipment heading south caught her notice. It was a very odd mix of farm equipment and livestock gear, traces, halters, wagon reins, and other leather goods. It was heading south. Kesh did little trading with the people in the subject regions of the Keshian Confederacy and the annual tribute from the South barely covered the expense of collecting it. Only enough trade goods headed south to keep the region pacified, but it was a trickle.

Until recently. Now it was a flood.

After a week of watching, listening, and occasionally taking off her armour and arms, donning the trappings of her earlier trade as a brothel denizen, she had amassed enough information from enough different sources to come to the conclusion that her first instincts were correct, and something big was underway.

Ships were now coming in to Hansulé, and not just coasters. Deep-water vessels were anchored off the coast, and warships of all sorts were coming by in squadrons. And those that departed, all went south.

So she did, too.

Now she found herself in very cold hill country just a few miles from the southern coast of Triagia. The Confederacy was unlike anywhere she had visited before. South of the Girdle of Kesh she had been viewed with suspicion, even hostility, in the villages and towns where she had stopped. Only her heavy arms and obvious ability to use them, as well as her clear identification with a temple Order kept the harassment to a minimum.

There was only one minor temple of Dala in this region, where even those monks and priests viewed her arrival with some concern. No Knight-Adamant of the Order of the Shield of the Weak had visited that temple within the memory of the oldest member of the Order.

She asked that messages be sent back to the mother temple in Rillanon. The head priest was polite but vague. She had a suspicion that Grand Master Creegan would be reading her report a few years after whatever mystery she was chasing was found, identified, and resolved.

She was thankful the Conclave had other agents throughout Kesh, for she was sure something this big would attract notice. It would be a tragedy if Pug and the others were solely dependent on her for intelligence.

She kept an eye on the unconscious man before her as she recounted her travels. First to one town, then another, as a pattern began to emerge. Empty hovels on farmsteads, towns with half the buildings abandoned, tiny villages deserted. There had been no signs of sickness, no plague, no famine, though food was always scarce in this region. Sandreena had seen such places after war, but there was no sign of any destruction. It was as if people had just picked up their belongings and left. It was early autumn south of the equator, and rain was falling frequently. The trails were muddy and washed out, but she could see signs of movement, many people on foot, wagons, and livestock, all moving south.

Where were they going?

She had been following such a trail when she had reached a village an hour’s ride to the north of where she sat now. As she had cared for her horse, she had seen half a dozen heavily-laden wagons followed by one obviously occupied by a family: father and mother, three children and a dog that happily ran after the wagon but didn’t trouble the horses. The children were fractious, the women looked haggard, and the men suspicious.

Sandreena had fed and watered her mount, had a quick bite and a mug of bitter ale at what passed for a tavern in this area, then set off after them.

She had been keeping her distance, falling back out of sight, then trotting forward to the top of a rise or turn in the road to ensure she didn’t lose them.

Then came that irritating itch which meant she was being summoned to a meeting of the Conclave. She weighed her choice of actions and decided that her duty lay first in finding the reason for all the troublesome things she had witnessed. She was loath to quit when she was so close to uncovering the truth. So she had turned off the little orb, placed it in her boot and returned her attention to the wagons ahead. She was catching up with them when her ambusher had surprised her with an arrow that had sped past her head, missing her face by less than an inch.

The man on the ground began to stir. Sandreena got up from the rock. When the man’s eyes opened, he found Sandreena’s sword point at his throat.

‘Oi,’ he said as his eyes focused on the lethal blade. ‘Let’s have none of that now, sister.’ He was speaking the local Keshian dialect, Lower Delkian.

She tilted her head slightly as she stepped back and said, ‘Slowly.’

He got gingerly to his feet, obviously still dazed. ‘Can’t say as I expected you to charge,’ he said. He grinned and said, ‘Right near did me in.’

‘Bodie,’ she said.

His eyebrows rose and he switched to the King’s Tongue. ‘Good ear.’ To her it sounded like ‘Gud ar’. ‘Not too many in these parts would catch the accent.’

‘Hard not to miss that mangling of the King’s Tongue, or any other language apparently.’

He leaned forward, hands on his knees. ‘Bit wobbly, still,’ he said. ‘You clopped me a good one to the side of me head.’

‘You’re fortunate that’s all you got. I’m usually less forgiving with people trying to kill me.’

‘Kill you?’ he said and laughed, then winced at the pain that brought him ‘Sister, if I’d wanted to kill you, you’d have not seen the arrow in your throat. I’m hardly modest when it comes to my bow skills. I’ve not met my better with one.’

‘Hardly modest, indeed.’ She looked at him. Slender, about her age, perhaps, dark hair that was little more than a shaggy thatch, a few days’ growth of beard and clothes that were not quite filthy. Glancing at the bow on the ground, she saw that it was perfectly maintained. ‘If you weren’t trying to kill me, what were you doing?’

‘Trying to slow you down a bit, that’s all. Man up in Darmin,’ which was the town where she had begun following the wagons, ‘paid me some coin to follow some wagons for an hour, then slow down anyone who might be following. Didn’t say a thing about killing, else I’d have asked for a lot more.’ He glanced at the angle of the sun and said, ‘Looks like I was gone an hour or so.’

‘About that.’

‘Well,’ he said with a broad smile, ‘seems like I’ve stalled you long enough, sister, so I’ll be on my way now.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Sandreena. To emphasize the point, she extended her sword blade, making a barrier between them.

‘Yes?’

‘You expect me to let you walk away?’