It had taken a day and a night of hard fighting to win the city, Frentis leading the infantry in a slow but inexorable advance towards the docks whilst Lekran and Ivelda took charge of the surviving rebels. They had been obliged to fight from street to street, their opponents a mix of Free Swords and townsmen, capable of furious resistance now their homes faced destruction. But they were too few and too badly organised to prevail, their barricades ramshackle constructions crafted by hands unused to work. Frentis soon evolved a tactic of seizing the surrounding rooftops and assailing the defenders from above, forcing them back whilst the barricades were torn down. They had made a final stand of sorts at the docks, a few hundred sheltered behind stacked barrels and crates, refusing all calls for surrender. It was Weaver’s freed Varitai who finished it, simply pushing the barrels over and storming in to club down the defenders.
What was left of the governor had been roped to the base of the pole; unlike Varek his face was truly unrecognisable. The man had been a general before entering politics, choosing to meet his end on the steps of the governor’s mansion with a few loyal guards. Unfortunately his heroics hadn’t secured him a speedy end, the great mob of slaves sweeping aside all resistance as they stormed the mansion in the final attack, but possessing enough presence of mind to ensure the governor was taken alive. Having witnessed the horrors wrought by the governor’s attempts to cull the slave population Frentis felt no inclination to interfere in his protracted, and inventive, punishment.
“The Empress is a monster,” the Deputy Treasurer added, a faint, hopeful ingratiation in his tone.
“She is Volarian,” Frentis replied. “As the only Imperial official left in this city, I require you to act as liaison to the surviving free populace. You will find them quartered under guard at the docks. Inform them that, as free subjects of the Unified Realm, they are afforded the protection of the Crown and I personally guarantee the safety of all those innocent of any part in the atrocities committed here. However, all property formerly owned is forfeit to the Crown as spoils of war. By the Queen’s Word slavery is now outlawed in this province and any found to be engaged in it subject to summary execution.”
He walked away as Draker led the black-clad towards the docks. “Don’t sniffle now, there’s a good fellow. Don’t you know how lucky you are to greet a new dawn in the Greater Unified Realm?”
Picking his way through the streets, all strewn with bodies and the myriad wreckage of a shattered city, Frentis found himself recalling a dream, or what he now understood to be the beginning of his connection with a soul the Deputy Treasurer thought monstrous. I would have been terrible, she had said as they gazed on a shoreline awash in corpses. But terrible as fate would make me, I am not him.
He paused at the sight of a mother and child, crumpled in death outside a baker’s shop. The little girl’s eyes were open, her head lying close to her mother’s, the mouth slightly agape as if frozen in some unheard final question. Seeing the wounds on the mother’s arms, earned no doubt as she tried to shield the girl from the frenzy of blades that killed them, he couldn’t suppress the notion that he and the Empress were conspiring to make that sea of death a reality.
“Brother?” It was Illian, regarding him with an expression that bordered on amazement. He felt the dampness on his cheeks and quickly wiped the tears away.
“What is it, sister?”
“The Garisai found a few hundred grey-clads hiding in the vaults beneath the merchants’ quarter. The city slaves are clamouring to get at them. It could turn ugly.” She forced an uncertain smile, eyes still lingering on his. Frentis’s gaze went to the cut on her forehead. Thirty-Four had done a typically precise job of stitching it closed but the scar would be deep, and long. “Stopped itching, at least,” she said, her fingers going to the wound.
No uncertainty in her, he surmised. All this death and she remains undaunted. She was right, the Order is the best place for her.
“I’ll be there directly,” he said. “Tell Draker to form the free folk into a working party to clear these bodies. They’ll be paid in bread, we shouldn’t expect them to work for nothing.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lyrna
They soon began calling it the Mud March, a name Lyrna somehow knew would persist into the history of this campaign, should there be any scholars left to write it. The rain started the day they began the inland march and didn’t let up for the following two weeks, turning every track into soft, clinging mud, trapping feet, hooves and cart-wheels until the army ground to a halt having covered less than a hundred miles.
“The price, Highness,” Aspect Caenis explained at the council of captains. “The crafting of such a storm created a great imbalance in the elements.”
“How long will it last?” Lyrna asked.
“Until the balance is restored. A day, or a month. There is no way to tell.”
“Is there none in your Order who can assist us?”
He gave a helpless shrug. “The girl from the Reaches was the only soul I ever met who held such a gift.”
Lyrna ignored the pointed implication in his words, knowing he still chafed over her refusal to compel the Gifted from the Reaches to join his Order. In some ways she was finding Aspect Caenis just as unyielding as the unmourned Tendris.