Hungerblade

Part Fifteen: A Sword Unsheathed

Hemwold stared at Hungerblade. The blade itself was a simple, narrow one, devoid of the ornament that marked its sweeping hilt. Nonetheless, it possessed a mesmerizing quality.

“You’d better get yourself a weapon,” Jacques told the troll. With the sword exposed, Jacques’ stance had lost its birdlike awkwardness. He stood straight and still. The hesitancies characteristic of his speech had given way to a hard, cool, calm.

Breaking from his reverie, Hemwold fumbled for his cudgel, which he kept strapped to his back. He gripped it tightly and rose up to his full height. Where a human would drop into a defensive crouch, this was the ideal fighting posture for a nine-foot combatant; it placed his head and heart out of his opponent’s reach.

Gardien glanced down at the girl’s corpse as he stepped reverently over it. Hemwold took advantage of the apparent lapse, surging at him with cudgel swinging. Jacques skirted the blow as if walking through it. This move led imperceptibly to the next: a reaching slash to Hemwold’s weapon arm. Although the sword’s tip seemed to barely graze the troll, it opened a ferocious wound, ripping through his leather sleeves and separating flesh from bone. Screaming and clutching at his ruined arm, Hemwold doubled over. Jacques directed an almost casual swipe at the brigand exposed neck and edged back to let the body fall. Hemwold’s head dropped from his shoulders. His decapitated body toppled down onto it.

A cold wind blew in from the coast, blowing Jacques’ pesky forelock out of his face.

The assembled mercenaries, who had moved back to give the combatants a wide berth, goggled in amazement. Then they surged in two directions. The bolder men came at Jacques. Others, seized by primal terror, hurtled themselves out of the fray.

Four men flew at the Doturi messenger. Four men died. Jacques moved over their twitching bodies like a stork on the hunt.

“Listen to me,” he called, his voice booming off the palace walls. “If you come at me, you will die. If I have a quarrel with you, I will come at you, and you will die. If I have no quarrel with you, you may flee, and live. This is your only warning. Take heed of it.”

A dwarf, outfitted in clanking scale mail forged in a distant fjord, barreled at him from the side. Froth jetted from the Thulean’s furry jaws. He screeched in his shwooshing tongue, slashing with a rune-covered double axe. Jacques sidestepped him, sending him tumbling into the unpaved roadway. He rolled to his feet, axe ready, then looked down at the diagonal line Hungerblade had drawn from his right hip to his left shoulder. It had cut open the Thulean’s armor and incised a red wound across his torso. Blood gushed from it in a sudden torrent. The dwarf sank to his knees, bleated out the traditional Thulean cry of demise, and was dead before he hit the ground.

The circle of men tightened around Jacques, but wherever he feinted at them, they fell back. A Visigi woman clad in the leathers of the mountain hill tribes jumped at him, a curved knife in each hand. He ran her through; she slumped into the dirt, Hungerblade protruding from her back. Jacques grunted, struggling to yank it from her dying body. Emboldened, three local ruffians ran at him. The first knocked him down; the second piled on the first, and the third completed the tangle of pressing bodies.

Finding a knife on the belt of his first tackler, Jacques drew it and jabbed it toward his face. The man squirmed to avoid the blow, giving Jacques the leeway to slide out from under him. He planted the knife in the neck of the ruffian on top of the pile.

Another mercenary, a swarthy Russkan, was fumbling to free Hungerblade from the body of the Visigi mountain woman, the soles of his tall boots finding purchase against her ribs. Jacques placed his hands on either side of the Russkan’s sweating head and twisted, snapping his neck. He reclaimed his sword in time to spear it through the weapon hand of a lithe, blond-haired young man wearing a patchwork of different armor styles. Moaning in surprise, he dropped his gladius. The wound in his palm began as a small puncture, but continued to grow, even as Jacques turned to hack his way through the throng of hired soldiers. The hole spread, eating the man’s hand from the inside out, then moved up his arm. He clutched at his chest and died, his heart exploding from the shock of the injury.

“Stand aside!” Jacques shouted. The mercenaries obeyed, either throwing up their hands in a gesture of abjection, or fleeing across the plateau or down the roadway. Their rout proved contagious, sending ever-increasing numbers of men into panicked flight.

Wherever Jacques pointed his dripping blade, the crowd of routing men parted further. Stray arrows flew into the throng. Some of the brigands, once they’d put what seemed to be a safe distance between themselves and Jacques, had halted to pepper the scene with missile fire. The barrage intensified until a bare-chested Romari, wielding a gladiator’s trident, went down, an arrow in his neck. Other arrows struck fellow mercenaries. Those bowmen who did not give up after seeing their comrades hit turned tail when Jacques strode a few paces toward them, blade feinted at them like a javelin. Satisfied that the arrows were quelled, at least for the moment, Jacques resumed his previous march.

Ahead he saw Nero desperately stumbling for gates of his palace. Not a man accustomed to physical exertion, he ran poorly, already winded. His eunuchs struggled to match his enervated pace; it would not do to beat their master to safety. Nero’s gilded litter lay overturned on the road. One of the cyclopean bearers stumbled out of the way clutching the feathers of an arrow that was all but buried in his side. Another sank to his knees, hands clasped in supplication as Jacques approached.

Wigandus tottered into his path, fists out and trembling. His round head, quivering with rage, reminded Jacques of an angry beet.

“You fool!” he cried, expelling a cloud of spittle. “What are you doing? You have ruined everything! Everything!”

“As a grandee of the North Coast League, you deserve a measure of deference,” said Jacques, his words drained of emotion. “So say whatever you wish to say.”

“Can you not see the larger import of this? The secrets of magnetism and construction magic are worth more to Dotur than the life of one worthless Romari girl.”

“You could have kept her as an additional hostage. Imprisoned her. Sold her into slavery, even. That you choose gratuitously to murder her tells me something essential about the nature of your enterprise.”

A drop of blood gathered on the tip of Jacques’ sword. It fell onto the petals of a yellow wildflower.

Wigandus watched it land. “Nero demanded it, so what choice did we have but to satisfy him?” His pores opened, dotting his face with gobbets of sweat. “She was a spy, and a lowly one at that. People need to be taught lessons, Gardien. They need to respect power. Listen, I am prepared to negotiate. I will compensate her family. Extravagantly.”

“She was an orphan.”

“Well, that is so very sad, Gardien. Hear yourself! Think for a moment of what Emperor Guntram will say when he hears of this. The prize I stand to gain for him—it is worth more to us than the life of an orphan girl. Than a hundred such girls! It is worth any amount of blood Nero will spill, when we restore him.”

“There is a cold logic to what you say, Wigandus, if I believed you or if I trusted Nero.” Hungerblade’s tip continued to redden the flowers below it. “Had Guntram wanted a calculating man for this mission, there are others he would have chosen. But instead he sent me. And when he did so, he knew what he was getting.”

“And what is that?”

“This,” said Jacques, plunging the sword into the merchant’s gut.

Despite all that he had seen and heard, Wigandus seemed surprised to see the blade piercing his flesh. His lips pursed together, as he worked to piece together an objection, to put forward another argument. Jacques pulled the sword out, pushing the merchant away from him. Wigandus teetered circuitously, then sat himself down in the damp grass. Weakening, he lay back among the golden blossoms. His last words were, “Listen, we can still reach an arrangement.”

Jacques moved on.

He found Nero in the forecourt of his palace, surrounded by six soldiers of his personal bodyguard. “Take him!” the emperor yowled, running up a set of limestone steps. Jacques guessed that these led to the imperial suite.

Dressed in lavish ceremonial armor, the six men faced him with long swords at the ready. Jacques did not insult them by warning them against Hungerblade, and telling them they were free to take flight. Honor bound these men to their duty, which would not be to Nero the man, but to the tradition he represented. It was sad that they would die for an abstraction, and more unfortunate still that it was Jacques who would have to bring this about.

They were smart fighters, and knew not to come at him all at once, where they would get in each other’s way. They lost their lives singly, confident that they faced death’s long sleep with their oaths fulfilled.

Nero had stopped midway up the stairs, frozen by the carnage below him. He spun and fled into his apartment. Jacques picked his way methodically up the steps to the threshold of the apartment. He saw the emperor pressed up against the archway, a knife clutched in his hand. Faking a move inside, he waited until Nero lunged, and then tripped him. Nero stumbled into a side table, smacking his head against it. The knife slid across the floor. Jacques kicked it into a corner. Nero faced him, cowering.

“You can’t kill me! You can’t!” It was not a command, but exclamation of disbelief.

“You’re right,” said Jacques. “You may be cruel, and a lamentably inept ruler, but you are still an Emperor. So I cannot kill you despite what you have done.” Nero’s closed fist still held the locus. Jacques reached for it and pried his fingers open. The emperor fought him, whining piteously, until the increasing pressure on his fingers became too great to bear. “You symbolize authority yet cannot be trusted to wield it. So I sentence you to a life of servile obedience.” He held out the locus. “If this is destroyed, the geas that restrains you remains in effect forever.” Using Hungerblade, he severed the thin filament that comprised its chain. He placed the ruined locus in his doublet; later he would throw it in a forge.

Nero fell at his feet, burbling.

He left, walking slowly down the steps, through the forecourt, and out of the palace, ready to take on any foolish stragglers who dared to obstruct him. Once on the grounds, Jacques picked up his pace, to get to Isabelle as quickly as possible. She was still alone on the road, where any of the escaping brigands could have at her. He’d trained her in the fighting rudiments, but she was scarcely a hardened warrior.

The dead littered the road, and the grassy spaces to either side of it. A few wounded men groaned among the field of corpses. No one who’d been touched by Hungerblade still survived; these had been hurt accidentally, by their own comrades.

In the distance, at the road’s first bend, Isabelle stepped onto the roadway.

The low grasses of the palace grounds ended at a crumbled stone gate; on the other side of it lay a tangled forest of encroaching trees. Lying in a break in the wall was Hemwold’s partner, Berchtold. The brigand’s leg jutted out at an alarming angle. He’d been trampled, Jacques presumed, in the rush to get away from him and his sword.

Berchtold noticed him and began to beg. “Please don’t . . . I saw what you did to the others . . . I tried to get away, really I did . . . I told Hemwold not to show you the girl. I told him!”

Jacques stopped. “Did you tell him not to kill her?”

“What?”

Jacques stepped past him. Hungerblade leapt out, slitting Berchtold’s throat in a single backhand swipe. Jacques kept walking.

***

It took several days to arrange a caravan out of Romulus, which would head north to Dotur. Isabelle had chosen to return north with Jacques, accepting an invitation to attend Guntram at court.

A distinguished senatorial delegation met at Isabelle’s domus to bid them a formal farewell. Circe wore an enchanted robe; it surrounded her in a subtle mist of miniature stars. Orientius brought chests laden with gifts for the Emperor. They contained wines, spices, incense, and jars of salted snails. An additional chest was designated as a token of appreciation for Jacques, who was trying to think of someone back home who would like the snails. “It is not a ritual grimoire, but will have to do,” said Orientius. When he saw that his attempt at levity had fallen flat, he added, sotto voce, “Nero would never have given them to you.”

Jacques nodded, but it offered little comfort.

Julius Laminus wore a mourning toga of unadorned black wool. He brought no gifts, made only pro forma remarks, and shook Jacques’ hand with studied reluctance.

Circe’s gift was a chaste kiss on the cheek. “You should have given the locus back to me,” she whispered.

“It seems to me that your Empire is better off with the three of you forced to accommodate one another, and compete for the favor of the people,” Jacques observed. “All is arranged?”

“Yes.”

Jacques had arranged for the retrieval of Giovanna’s body. A senate declaration had made her a posthumous member of the curia class. Circe and Orientius had funded a stately funeral procession, bearing her body to the funeral pyre. Nine days hence, the urn would be placed, with all due pomp, in the crypt holding the remains of the worthiest servants of Circe’s family.

“Thank you,” he said. “Also, it is the official position of the Doturi Empire that we would not like to see the three of you kill each other off.”

Circe was distracted by the sight of death in Jacques’ eyes. It had been there all along, but she had failed to see it. Succumbing to sudden impulse, she pulled him closer, for a more passionate and unplanned kiss. Then she pushed him back. “Your remark on what is best for Roma is presumptuous, foreigner.”

“Yes, of course, senator.”

He broke from her to join Isabelle, who again seemed abruptly displeased with him, in the carriage that would take them along the roads of Roma. Before he heaved himself up on its running board, he reflexively checked, as he habitually did, to ensure that his sword was still safely in its scabbard.

— END –