The Arcanist (55 page)

Chapter Fifty Seven

Edouard stood in the dungeon under the castle and wished he was anywhere else but there. It was a place that he had never wanted to come back to. But it was a place he had to be. Because it was here – or actually in the castle above – that he knew Vesar would be. And if he could kill him then the war would hopefully go a lot more smoothly. It was here too that he hoped to find Kyriel. If she was still alive. If she'd been captured and not killed he guessed Vesar would have imprisoned her here. And if she'd survived and was free she'd probably also come here with the same idea as him. Kill Vesar and end the war quickly.

He was running out of hope though. Hope that she was alive or that if she was he would find her. He was running out of everything. Edouard was cold and tired. More than tired. At some point he had gone through exhaustion and come out the other side only to discover it was even worse. But by then an endless number of days had seemed to go by while he'd waded through the sewers. It had taken everything from him.

His life had become one of snatching moments of sleep here and there coupled with hunger and fear. It was the fear that kept him going. But even it couldn't power him forever. Sooner or later he feared he was going to be caught. He would collapse somewhere he shouldn't, and the veiled soldiers would catch him. They wouldn't lock him up. He knew that. If they caught him they would kill him immediately and with extreme malice. They had good reason to want him dead.

Still, it was necessary. He had emptied out dozens of makeshift prisons over the previous days. Every one that he could find and reach from the sewers. And while there were likely hundreds more scattered around Theria, he knew that none of them would be large. The rock gnomes had settled on using lots of smaller houses as prisons for some reason, each with only a few guards.

This dungeon however, wasn't one of them. It was empty. It probably hadn't been used since his previous escape, no doubt owing to the tunnel leading straight out of it into the sewers and freedom beyond. It wouldn't have been very secure. Standing there in the darkness with the only light coming from the window in the main door, Edouard was completely alone. But he wasn't surprised by that. Disappointed perhaps, but not surprised. It wasn't the first time he had been disappointed.

Edouard had hoped that the typhoon gate would be another large prison filled with people needing rescue. But it hadn't turned out that way. When he'd finally reached the temple he’d found nothing. No temple being built, no gate, no nothing. Just a huge flat expanse of rubble piles and torn up ground. Simon's sabotage had completely destroyed it and despite all their fears the rock gnomes hadn't started rebuilding it.

When he'd seen it, peering out at it from the broken window of a nearby shop, Edouard had finally realised why the rock gnomes were keeping the people locked up. It was all they could do for the moment. They couldn't build their typhoon gate anymore. Not there. Not without hundreds or thousands of labourers and years of work. The ground was little more than a crater and there were no intact building supplies. Even the stone blocks weren't blocks any more. Vesar's dreams had died almost completely with that explosion.

His plans had presumably changed with the temple's destruction. Before then he had presumably planned on completing the temple and then using it to build his armies of demon machines while wiping out all those with magic who could oppose him. It would have been a decisive victory for him. Now, instead of building the temple, he had to concentrate on winning the war first with whatever resources he could lay his hands on. If he won, then and only then, could he start regrouping. Bringing in more people to work for him – though the surrounding lands were now deserted. Rebuilding some of the city's infrastructure and in particular restoring food and water to the people. Only then could he start work on the temple again.

It was a strange thing to realise, but even though he'd only done it out of spite, anger and the need to cover his escape, Simon had actually saved Therion when he'd blown the temple up. Of course, he had also undoubtedly killed hundreds or thousands of people and destroyed half the city in doing so. And now he was eternally beyond the ability of anyone to exact revenge upon.

So Vesar had had the civilians locked away in whatever prisons he could find for them. He hadn't fed them well if at all since then for the simple reason that he couldn't. The granaries had been destroyed and most of the other food stores as well. He had put every effort he had into rebuilding the walls, however crudely. Then he had prepared for the siege and the subsequent attack. An attack that Edouard was certain had to be coming today.

The south west wall was almost completely down. It was just rubble and the occasional isolated section of wall for as far as the eye could see. And with it and the ramparts behind it gone, the defenders were huddled in small encampments among the buildings behind it, preparing to face the assault of ten thousand men. Their chances seemed poor. They were badly outnumbered. Marcus had ten thousand soldiers. Edouard would have guessed that there were only two thousand rock gnomes left. How many of the demon machines Vesar could add to their numbers he didn't know. But he was sure it wouldn't be enough.

If they'd had the walls the defenders could have withstood the assault. But they were gone and the cannon were still firing. Breaking down the rubble so that it could be more easily scaled by the men coming through; knocking down houses, buildings and anything else inside the city that they could use as defensive positions. There weren't many left.

The rock gnomes' only hope now lay in Vesar. In his creating another portal and bringing another army through. Which was why he had to die – if Edouard could find him.

Edouard had very little time. If he was going to find and kill Vesar, he probably only had a matter of hours at most. It was early morning, the sun was barely up, and Edouard couldn't imagine that Marcus would keep pounding the walls beyond midday. He also had to contend with the fact that the Cabal wizard probably still had a stone of silence somewhere in the castle above, which was why the first thing he had done was clean and reload his pistols. He couldn't feel any drain or restriction on his magic yet. But he wanted to be prepared if and when it happened.

Once he was ready – or as ready as he could be – Edouard headed for the main door to the dungeon, acutely aware that it was the same door he had once been desperate to walk through but couldn't. This time however, there was no gaoler sitting at a table in the centre of the room and no soldiers stationed outside it. So, after listening very carefully at the door, he opened it and headed into the hallway beyond and then up the stairs.

Two flights later he found himself on the landing just to the side of the main hall of the castle barracks. It was there that those of the royal guard assigned to security detail in the castle would stay. And by a twist of fate it was the only barracks in the city that was still intact. The mammoths so long ago had destroyed most of the rest.

Save for two guards left there to watch over things, the hall was empty. The rest he assumed were out there somewhere in the city, preparing to meet Marcus' army head on. These two didn't pose much of a threat to Edouard as they were both staring out of the window and into the courtyard beyond. It was there he guessed that they expected trouble to come from. They fell to his cutting finger of fire in seconds without ever knowing what had happened, and the hall was his a moment later.

Seconds later he walked cautiously out into the barracks hall, feeling distinctly uncomfortable at being out in the open in such a big space. He hated the sewers. The feel of the dark, foetid water on his skin. The stench, and the ever-present worry about disease. But at least in them he felt safe. Protected by heavy stone walls. And most of all, alone. Here anyone could be watching him.

Above him he knew were the bed chambers in which other royal guards might even now be resting. Behind him were the kitchens and dining hall where they could be eating – assuming there was any food left in the city. But he couldn't have just stayed on the landing at the top of the dungeon stairs forever. It would have been easier if he could have listened for the sound of the soldiers around him, but any chance of that was drowned out by the thunder of the cannon as they tore down the distant walls. They were the song of the city these days.

Edouard walked out across the large wooden floor and despite his fears no one came running down from above or from the back rooms. He crossed the room without incident, but stopped before he reached the hallway at the far end, his attention caught by the two dead guards. They didn't have their veils on. Then again, why would they in their own barracks?

He'd been told what they looked like of course. He'd heard the stories. And he'd seen them as well. They weren't all wearing veils these days. But this was the first time he'd seen them in daylight at close range, and he found himself fascinated. It wasn't the tusks or the wrinkles though that got to him. Trolls were far uglier and more frightening and he'd seen them up close very recently. Too close. The rock gnomes were different. It was the strange pallor of their skins. They weren't pale as the stories had said. They were grey. The colour of stone. What sort of people had grey skin? There was something deeply disturbing in that.

But he couldn't just stand and stare. The castle lay ahead, and somewhere within it he assumed, Vesar. So he left them and headed across to the hallway. Then, after again checking carefully, he started down it.

It was a nerve wrecking journey. On one side of the hallway were the huge windows looking out into the courtyard, and he had to check each of them before walking by to make sure there were no more veiled soldiers there. On the other side were doorways leading to rooms he'd never even known existed. As he passed each one he had to open them a crack and peek inside. It would be bad if soldiers were on the other side waiting to come rushing out.

They turned out to be meeting rooms and private quarters for the most part. Places where the senior officers of the royal guards presumably lived and worked. They were also empty. But one thing did surprise him about them; the dust. These rooms had obviously not been used or cleaned since the coup.

Another thing caught him by surprise too, but not until he risked venturing into some of them and peering out of the windows. What he saw through them transfixed him with horror. Beyond them lay the royal gardens. The entire rear of the castle was a park and orchard in which the king and his family might play and the servants might tend to the trees and gather food for the royal table. But not anymore.

The trees had been cut down – he couldn't even begin to imagine why – and in their place had been planted poles. Hundreds, maybe thousands of poles, and on each one of them was a head. This was the field of heads he'd heard stories of.

It was a truly gruesome spectacle. And doubtless it had to look much worse from on high. But that was where it was meant to be viewed from he guessed. Because the royal bed chambers were at the back of the castle, several stories up, and he remembered hearing that they had a huge balcony overlooking the gardens. From there Edouard guessed, Simon had greeted each new day as king, looking down over his kingdom. Because this was actually his brother's doing, not Vesar's.

Edouard knew that because he had been told of Simon's reign by the survivors. The relentless cycle of executions. The hangings and beheadings of anyone who had either failed him or opposed him. But until just then those had all been stories. Suddenly they were real. So real that he could almost reach out and touch them.

What sort of insanity could have possessed his brother? What utter lunacy? A garden of heads! The heads of other nobles, people he had grown up with. People he had known all his life. The heads of soldiers too. Those whose task it had been to protect the king and the kingdom.

The only blessing that Edouard could see in the entire nightmare was that he couldn't recognise any of the faces. They were too badly decomposed for that, or at least the ones nearest to him were. Obviously the beheadings, or at least the planting of heads on poles had ended after Simon had fled. It seemed that while Vesar might be a dangerous enemy and possibly even a Cabal wizard he didn't have the same blood lust his brother did. Or had had.

What did that say about the man his older brother had been? That even a Cabal wizard could not match him for sheer barbarism? What sort of demons had dwelt within Simon? Edouard didn't know. But he did understand that Tyrel's punishment of Simon was actually the most merciful she could have given him.

In time Edouard managed to tear his eyes away from the sight and carried on.

At the end of the hallway the doors opened on to the atrium of the castle and there Edouard had to stop. Partly to take in the sheer grandeur of the massive chamber; but also because he could see more soldiers ahead.