The lake was greedy. It swallowed everything. Or almost. Melyobar came to himself in the murderously cold water. An object nudged him. It was King Narbetton’s glass sepulchre, floating serenely by. The look of inscrutability on his father’s face was the last thing the Prince saw before the water took him.
A head broke the surface.
Andar Talgorian took great gulps of air, his lungs burning. He was so numb from the cold that he couldn’t feel his body except as pain. Somehow, the bonds tying his wrists had broken.
He didn’t imagine surviving for more than a couple of minutes in this cold. The irony of escaping death twice in succession, only to fall at the last hurdle, was not lost on him. Perhaps the gods were set on him dying.
It was getting harder to keep afloat, or even to think straight. His stamina was draining away, and his limbs were growing weaker. The cold was beyond cold, and seeping into his very bones. What he found amazing was that the equivalent of a sizeable town had just dropped into the lake and you wouldn’t know it. He couldn’t see anyone or anything else.
Then he heard a sound. Or thought he did; his ears might have been cut off for all the feeling he had in them. There it was again. A voice. Correction, voices. Shouting. He saw nothing the way he was facing. So laboriously, painfully, he turned himself about.
Something was coming towards him. He couldn’t make out what it was. As it got nearer it began to look like two figures walking on the water. Crouching, more like, the closer they got. They were calling and waving. They hauled him out. He lay gasping on their makeshift raft, the hangman’s rope still about his neck. One of his rescuers put a pocket flask to his lips. The fiery alcohol brought back some feeling as it burned its way through his system. As his senses returned, he realised that the sodden clothes the two men wore were uniforms.
‘Nechen and Welst, Palace Guard Auxiliary,’ one of them said. ‘How are you, sir?’
‘Thank…you,’ Talgorian managed.
‘Glad to share our good fortune, sir,’ the other told him. ‘Why, if it hadn’t been for this piece of wreckage, we wouldn’t be here ourselves.’
Talgorian focused on the slab of wood supporting them. It was the trapdoor from the gallows.
Many stories were told about the day destruction swept the empires and their many protectorates. Some would become legends.
One concerned a notorious pirate chief who threw in his lot with the empires against the fledgling rebel state.
It was said that on that fateful day a man came seeking an accounting with the pirate, a man terribly wronged and ill-treated by him. He came not by sea, but through the air, riding a wondrous flying disc. Alone he overcame the pirate’s band, raining down magic from above that blasted and seared, until at last only the pirate captain himself stood against him.
The release of the magic caused great convulsions, in many ways. One was uproar in the balance of nature. Many disasters were triggered, and there were earthquakes as the world accommodated itself to the loss. Where these happened at sea, their offspring was tidal waves.
As the pirate and his foe battled to the death, a cluster of breakers as tall as mountains swept their way. They crushed the buccaneer’s armada, sinking every ship bar his. It was taken by the biggest wave and flung into a portside hamlet on the Diamond Isle, giving the pirate the island he coveted, though not in a way he had intended.
Many believed the avenger perished too, paying the ultimate price for bringing his enemy’s predations to an end.
And then there was the way things ended on the Diamond Isle itself.
The island suffered its own upheavals, but the redoubt was comparatively untouched. Being too impoverished to have much in the way of magic was an asset for once.
Initially, the islanders were unclear as to what was happening in a wider sense. Being in the middle of an invasion, that was understandable; and they had enough remarkable things happening to keep them stretched as it was.
As the disturbances began to subside, there was a tense lull in which to prepare for the final onslaught.
Serrah and Reeth volunteered for lookout duty, and found themselves stationed on one of the redoubt’s battlements. It was the first time in many hours that they were able to be alone. Across the plain, the empires’ combined armies had gathered in even greater numbers.
‘They could just walk in here any time they like,’ Caldason reckoned, ‘and we couldn’t do a thing about it, other than making them pay a price in blood. So why are they holding back?’
‘It was you, Reeth. You did them some real damage.’
‘Only enough to slow them down. Whatever stopped me did it before I could finish the job.’
‘Finish? You’re not seriously saying you could have defeated a horde like that single-handed, are you?’
‘I don’t know what I was capable of in that condition. But I do know that it felt…It’s difficult to explain, Serrah. It felt as though I could do anything. The potential, the power…it’s why the Founders have fought over me for so long, and why some of them wanted me dead.’
‘But you’ve not been able to do it again.’
‘I’ve only tried once. But it was like there was nothing there.’
‘Maybe you need to recuperate, build up your strength or…I don’t know. There’s too much going on, Reeth. It overwhelms you after a while.’
‘Doesn’t it just? And this thing about Tanalvah, it…beggars belief.’
‘That’s what I thought, at first.’
‘There’s no doubt?’
‘I don’t think so. It was a deathbed confession. And I believed her. You would have too, if you’d been there.’
‘What would make her do something like that?’
‘She thought she was saving Kinsel. She did it out of love.’
‘I sometimes think as much evil’s done in the name of love as hate.’
‘That sounds cynical.’
‘It’s not supposed to; it’s just an observation.’
‘Well, let’s be sure our love never generates evil, shall we?’
‘It couldn’t.’ He put an arm around her, and they kissed.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I can’t think of Tanalvah as evil. Sounds crazy, I know, after what she did, but I still don’t see her as bad.’
‘It’s about potential again, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘We’re all capable of being righteous or wicked. Sometimes both. The seeds of good and evil are in us, just waiting for something to set them off.’
‘You think we’re all capable of murder?’
‘That’s a strange question for you and me, isn’t it? It was your profession, and I’ve done more than my share.’
‘That wasn’t murder, any more than taking an enemy life in this siege would be murder. The people we killed were bad.’
‘A pacifist, like Kinsel, would say that was trying to justify it.’
‘Sometimes you have to defend those who are weaker, or protect your own life, or-’
‘You don’t have to convince me. I’m a Qalochian. Well, half of one, anyway, and you don’t get much more martial in outlook than that. But we’d be offended to be called murderers. I’m just saying that given the right conditions, enough of a shove, anybody could be a murderer. A killer in that bad sense.
According to Praltor, even the paladins were noble once.’
‘Does it bother you that Tan was a Qalochian?’
‘Bother me? You mean like letting the side down or something?’
‘I suppose I do.’
‘Being of the Qaloch didn’t make her any better than anybody else. We’re not saints.’
‘You never really got on with her.’
‘And you think what she did confirmed my opinion? Actually, it wasn’t my opinion; it was more a case of her not favouring me too much. Though I admit I think I made her uneasy, reminding her of our heritage.’
‘She had that heritage taken away from her. You of all people should understand that. She grew up in Rintarah; it was natural she’d take on their customs.’
‘I wonder how the funeral’s going to be.’
‘What kind of service, you mean? It’ll be presided over by a priest of the Iparrater sect. Kinsel’s quite keen on that, actually.’