“But you’re not,” said Lastleaf, turning on him. “You are no longer a king. You are no one.”
“Well that’s a bit mean,” Moog grumbled beneath a furrowed brow.
“Though you raise a valid point,” the druin admitted. “The courts may decide I am a threat after all, in which case the destruction of Castia can serve my purpose just as well. Those who survive the city’s fall—” he bared his teeth in a mirthless grin “—and I will ensure there are one or two who do survive—will return to Grandual as stricken souls, bearing word of atrocities you could scarcely imagine. If my offer of friendship, or the threats I made to the council, does not lull the courts to inaction, then let the Republic’s fate serve as an example to those who make of me an enemy.”
Matrick bristled, his back rigid with righteous pride. He might even have pulled off “regal” but for the wine stains on his shirt and the vaguely phallic-shaped pillow he’d wedged between his legs. “And just what did the innocent people of Castia do to make of you an enemy?” he asked, mimicking the druin’s archaic manner of speaking. “I assume you just flipped a coin, no? Heads for east, tails for west. Or did you fear the kingdoms of Grandual would prove too worthy a foe, and so decided to pick on the Republic first?”
Lastleaf looked genuinely bewildered. “The innocent people of Castia?” he sneered. “Do you know how the innocent people of Castia went about building their glorious Republic?” He took a threatening step toward Matrick, who involuntarily clenched his legs, which in turn forced the pillow between them to spring upright—incongruous, but easy enough to ignore as the druin went on, incensed.
“Four centuries ago, when your ousted Emperor and the exiled remnants of the Imperial court arrived in Endland, they found it already inhabited by what you humans so broadly refer to as monsters. They fought with the cathiil over lands they wished to settle, and when the cathiil elected to migrate further west the innocent people of Castia hunted them to extinction.”
In his periphery Clay saw Moog just dying to ask what a cathiil was, but the druin’s burgeoning rage stifled even the wizard’s curiosity.
“They traded food and fur with the mountain folk for the ore with which to build their vaunted walls, but before long the innocent people of Castia decided to claim the mines for themselves. Whole clans were enslaved, worked to death in the very mines they’d once called home. The innocent people of Castia bribed urskin chieftains with precious gemstones and then drained the swampland to power their ravenous mills. They massacred ixil villagers who refused to relocate at their whim. They culled the great herds of the Orgone Plain and drove the centaurs from their ancestral lands into the forest. They poisoned the wells of gnoll settlements, and those hearty enough to survive the plague that followed were taken to Castia and made to fight in the Crucible.”
Lastleaf’s long ears quivered. He’d turned his back on the painting now, the death throes of ancient Kaladar providing an eerily suitable backdrop for his mounting anger.
“Or did you think all these grand arenas of yours were a novelty?” he asked. “The Crucible precedes them all, and in the warrens below that place entire generations of fell creatures have been born and bred in darkness, suffered to live only until they are deemed fit to die in sunlight, and shame, while the innocent people of Castia look on and cheer.”
Matrick scowled down at his empty bowl, doubtless wishing it would suddenly, magically, refill itself so he could at least enjoy a drink while he suffered the druin’s tirade.
Clay, meanwhile, shifted uncomfortably on his stool. If Lastleaf despised the Republic for the way they’d treated monsters in the past, then the druin would surely take issue with the decades-long rise to prominence of Grandual’s mercenary bands, who made a living killing creatures of every kind and were celebrated for it. Even Clay found himself wary of the latest trend—arenas springing up in every city, monsters held in captivity, waiting to be killed for nothing more than a crowd’s diversion. He remembered the expression on Gabriel’s face as he’d gazed at the Maxithon after learning that Fender’s wife had been taken there to die—a mix of fearful awe and wary bemusement, like a plainsman stepping out of his yurt to find a sixty-oar galleon stranded on the grass.
There was something about the arenas that didn’t sit well with Clay. He lacked the capacity, even in his own mind, to frame it. Moog could have done so, and probably Matrick after a cup or two of wine (but not after three). It wasn’t as if mercenary tradition was especially wholesome—far from it, in fact. Often you hunted monsters to their lairs and killed everything inside, even the young. If you were lucky, whatever you intended to kill was sound asleep, or eating, or drunk. Hells, Clay had once put a single spear through two rutting trolls. Pressed to describe the difference between slaying a creature in the wild versus doing so on an arena floor, he might have said that the former seemed, to his mind at least, more honest.
Not better, since killing was killing. But yeah … honest.
“For more than seven centuries I skulked and hid in the Heartwyld,” Lastleaf was saying now, “side by side with what your fledgling civilization calls monsters. After my father’s death I was free to roam at will, and so I went myself to Castia, where I hoped to intercede on behalf of those who had suffered for so long beneath the Republic’s heel. And do you know what the ‘noble’ senate did? They called me a monster. They put me in chains and confined me to the dungeon beneath the Crucible. For three years I was held prisoner, forced to fight in the arena, with no choice but to kill at the whim of my captors. Until the day I found Ashatan.”
Ashatan? Clay racked his brain to recollect where he’d heard that name before now, but Moog—clever Moog—beat him to it.
“The wyvern matriarch.”
The druin wet his lips. His odd-coloured eyes narrowed as he continued, as though he were squinting at the now-distant memory of that day. “She was locked in a room so small she could barely spread her wings. She was heavily sedated, of course. Her neck was shackled to the floor. They’d been breeding her for years, using her offspring as fodder in the arena above. I could sense the rage in her. I could feel it like heat rolling off a fire, and so I set her free. I set them all free—every wretched thing imprisoned there—and together we drowned the Crucible in the blood of ten thousand Castians.”
“The Red Sands,” Matrick said, shuddering visibly. “I heard about that.”
Clay had heard no such thing, but grim tidings (like modern plumbing and court couriers) had a way of getting lost on the way to Coverdale. Come to think of it, he was surprised word of the Heartwyld Horde had reached him before Gabriel did.
“The Red Sands was just the beginning,” said Lastleaf. His anger had changed, somehow—like a molten blade drawn from the forge, it had cooled into something sharp, dark and deadly. “What happens to Castia when I breach its walls will be far worse. It will be a massacre, the scale of which has not been seen since …”
Lastleaf glanced over his shoulder at the painting of Kaladar besieged, falling, fallen, and for a surreal moment Clay wondered if the druin, this forsaken prince of the Dominion, had long ago stood witness while his city—his entire civilization—was devoured by a monstrous Horde.
Time is a circle, he remembered Lastleaf saying at Lindmoor, in twilight. History a turning wheel.
And here it is, Clay thought wryly, turning and turning, grinding us all to dust.
Chapter Twenty
The Soul in the Stone
“I don’t care about Castia,” lied Gabriel. “I came here for Ganelon.”
Lastleaf’s long ears perked inquisitively.