The sharp downward step threw him off-balance and he barely avoided falling over. The body of Wyntakata, now host to Leso Varen, was troubled by a lameness that the magician found annoying. But until he could establish a safe location where he could begin to fashion his dark and murderous magic and create the means to possess another body, he was confined to this one. He smiled at the screaming and carnage. He smiled to see valiant Tsurani rulers die like so many children as the Dasati guards of the TeKarana killed every human they saw. He waved his hand slightly and employed a spell of seeming, so that no Dasati would mistake him for a target. He was certain that no matter his arrangement with the Deathpriests he had contacted on Omadrabar it was unlikely that any of these warriors had been told, ‘Oh, by the way, don’t kill the slightly decrepit, lame fellow in the black robe’.
As often as death was his chosen means to power and the heart of his black arts, Varen was certainly no stranger to blood and pain, but he found this wholesale murder far less entertaining than would have been the case had humans invaded the Tsurani palace. The alarm had sounded and more Imperial Guards, among the finest warriors in the Empire, came rushing in to die like kittens attacking a lion. It just wasn’t fair, Varen thought. In this realm the Dasati were simply too powerful. Yet, he noticed with interest, some of the first to arrive were already showing signs of that odd intoxication he had noticed the first time he had encountered the little simulacrum who had been their first explorer into this realm. That delightful little creature had burst into flames after being in the sunlight of this world too long. He wondered if he would ever understand that aspect of the realms, the different levels of life and heat and light, the heart of energy-magic that so many of these Great Ones delighted in learning. That type of magic had never interested him very much, except for the life aspect, and that only when he was taking it in order to capture the dying energies. He paused for a moment to consider how useful fanatics could be. The Tsurani would, to a man or woman, die to defend the Emperor who, he assumed, was somewhere far from here. And the Dasati, personal guards of the TeKarana, were already doomed to die for the Dark God and their master, for those who survived this slaughter would succumb to the excess of energy in this world. He wondered if they would just fall over and die, or if they would burst into flames like that little creature did. Too bad he couldn’t linger to observe.
Varen looked around the hall, now reduced to an abattoir with blood bathing every stone. He noted with amusement that some of the blood was orange, so despite their decided advantage in strength and power, it seemed the Dasati were taking some damage as they destroyed the leadership of the Tsurani Empire.
Imperial soldiers were still flooding into the room, and Varen was getting bored with watching other people killing one another, so he turned and ambled back down the hallway to the administrative wing of the palace. As he passed the first door into a suite of offices used by functionaries who worked on behalf of the Imperial First Advisor, he glanced inside to admire the scene of his own handiwork. A dozen officers of the court lay in contorted poses, several clawing at their own faces from the pain that had killed them mere minutes before. Now that, he thought, was death as art!
He whistled a meaningless ditty as he strolled down the hall, past another half a dozen offices littered with bodies. Grinning, he thought that killing off the leaders of every great house was amusing and would certainly cause the Tsurani a lot of problems, but it would be hard for the boy emperor to try and run his Empire without a bureaucracy!
Martuch hurried down the ladder to the hideout and said, ‘Word has reached the palace of the TeKarana, and we now know what the muster yesterday was about.’
Pug, Magnus and Hirea sat on cots and all looked at the old warrior.
‘At the Dark One’s bidding, the TeKarana sent two legions, the Third and Fifth, ten thousand warriors, through what they are calling portals, into your realm.’ He spoke to Pug and Magnus.
‘Where?’ asked Pug.
‘The Tsurani world. I do not know the details, but the rumour is that each warrior was told to prepare his death legacy.’
‘Death legacy?’ asked Magnus.
Hirea said, ‘Each warrior in the service of the TeKarana or one of the Karanas has a box within which he places any items he might wish to have passed back to his house or society. It can be personal items, messages to fathers or mentors, or anything the warrior wishes to leave as a legacy.’
‘It means,’ Martuch added, ‘that every warrior was being sent to his death. This was both a murder raid and a suicide raid. The warriors were being told they were to die for His Darkness.’
Hirea shook his head in disbelief. ‘Two legions,’ he said softly. To Martuch he said, ‘You know Astamon of the Hingalara’s oldest son served with the Fifth.’
‘I liked Astamon, even though House Hingalara were Salmodi.’ He looked at Pug and Magnus. ‘The Salmodi and Sadharin almost always end up on opposite sides of any dispute. But there are some good men in every society.’
‘What does this mean?’ asked Pug. ‘Why the suicide raid?’
‘It means a lot of Tsurani are now dead, and the Dark One doesn’t care how many of us he kills accomplishing that end.’ Martuch sighed. ‘So much of what I have come to reject is accepted as normal among my people, but even the most die-hard of us would have trouble accepting the loss often thousand lives merely to bloody a foe. We are conquerors,’ he added, ‘not chattak to be slaughtered at a whim!’
Magnus said, ‘I don’t understand.’