The Warrior King: Book Three of the Seer King Trilogy (49 page)

He came up, driving hard in a full lunge, but I wasn’t there, but to his side, hard in my own thrust, and it took him in his side, opposite his heart, and my blade came out half a span on his other side.

His body contorted, his face turned to me, wizened in pain, hatred, and fear, and he opened his mouth to curse me, but nothing came, and he sagged.

I pulled my sword out, and he fell.

I heard a scream, but more than a scream, a howl of defeat, of the very fabric of this world being torn, and the ground shook under my feet. Or perhaps my mind told me that was what should happen when the greatest of all wizards dies.

Tenedos lay on his side, completely still, but I was not sure, kicked him over on his back, drew Yonge’s dagger and drove it up under his rib cage, into his heart.

His eyes were empty, gone, but I remembered how he’d been reported dead once. Without his head, there could be no doubts.

But the air thickened around me before I could strike, and I heard the whirring of wings, and I stepped back.

I’m not sure I believe in gods anymore, at least not in the form we worship them in.

But what I saw was very real. Hanging in the air, for just a moment, was a woman’s face and shoulders, hair wild and uncombed, eyes glaring in abandon. I couldn’t see her bare breasts, but she wore a necklace, a necklace of skulls.

Perhaps it was a hallucination, perhaps not.

Then Saionji’s image vanished.

The body of Laish Tenedos lay motionless. This time I knew he was gone, that there would be no returning, and I need take no further precautions.

I saw Cymea crouched in the doorway. She got up slowly, rubbing her stomach.

“That gods-damned rock knocked the wind out of me. It took a while to get my breath back.”

Before she finished I was holding her, wanting to crush her close, but forcing gentleness, cautious of bruised ribs, feeling life come back to me.

I held her, listening. The city was almost silent outside. The awful destruction, the smashing and roar of the demon was gone.

The creature must have vanished when his master died, when he realized the bargain he’d struck would never be fulfilled. I hope Tenedos’s death destroyed him as well, but know not what rules the lives of demons.

Cymea said she could stand, and so I knelt over Svalbard. His eyes opened slowly, then snapped wide, and he rolled to his feet, grabbing for the sword beside him. Then he saw Tenedos’s body.

“Oh,” was all he said and sheathed his blade.

I looked at Kutulu’s body. The strange smile he’d carried in the last days was still on his face. I hope it was there because Saionji had granted him the gift of knowing his onetime master had finally met doom.

Cymea and I walked outside, onto the bridge. Below us, in the courtyard, three men in motley attire, my skirmishers, rested on their swords, the other men I’d brought lying dead or wounded around them. The monstrous guards they’d fought had vanished, and there were bodies of men, women, children scattered on the paving stones. Another of Tenedos’s evils had vanished with his death.

One of the men was Yonge. He saw me, shouted up.

“Cimabuan! I think it is over!”

It
was
over.

The blood-drenched reign of the seer king, the demon king, was finally ended.

But nothing ever ends neatly, except in the romances.

Most of Tenedos’s army surrendered or just fled, discarding their uniforms as they did, trying to submerge themselves back into the people. There were still some stubborn soldiers who fought on, and they had to be winkled out and slain.

Gojjam, Tenedos’s wizard, was never seen again, and we have hopes he died with his master or was taken by the demon.

Trerice hid for some days, then tried to flee by night, although where he planned to go is unknown. He made it to one of the ferry landings on the Latane, hoping to take a boat across the next day. Probably he discarded his uniform for some disguise.

But someone recognized him, for when the sun came up, his body was sprawled on the bathing steps, naked except for the yellow silk cord that had strangled him. As for the rest of us:

We implored Linerges to stay on as general of the armies, but he refused, saying his shops needed him, and he needed his wife, Guiana, and so the quiet man who’d served his country well gave it up and went back to the country town he’d come from.

Sinait had, indeed, died fighting the demon, and great were her funeral ceremonies, and the pyre could be seen for leagues around, and long will her memory be celebrated.

There was another, sadder funeral, for Kutulu, the Snake Who Never Slept. The pyre was small, and the ceremony held in a small death ground not far from the palace. In contrast to the thousands at Sinait’s funeral there were, besides a priest, only four people present: Cymea, myself, and Bridei dKeu, a beautiful, if a trifle vapid society woman who’d an affair with Kutulu that lasted for perhaps a night, perhaps longer. No one knows.

The last mourner was a rather plain woman, simply dressed, neither rich nor poor, her age impossible to tell. She stood to one side while the priest chanted, face still and calm. She remained until the pyre’s last ember burnt out, then left, without speaking to anyone. Who she was — wife, lover, sister, possibly even mother to Kutulu — no one knows, and so the little man took his last mystery with him to the Wheel.

Cymea and I will be wed within the month, and she swears she’s pregnant and has decided the babe will be named Devra if it’s a girl; or, as I promised myself years ago, Athelny if it’s a boy, after the commander of my Red Lancers who died so bravely in Maisir.

There are other problems, though.

My country is in ruins. Numantia has known little but death and ruin since Tenedos and I came back from Kait. It’ll take a generation or longer for the torn land to come back, and even then there will be whole districts barren and empty.

At least we finally have peace, and there are seed and water, and the seers predict a mild winter and gentle spring.

Numantia
will
recover.

Cymea and other wizards managed to reignite Nicias’s gas supply, so once again it’s the City of Lights, Numantia still exists, so another legend goes down into the dust.

There are great problems.

The first is the Tovieti. No one knows what they’ll do, whether they’ll remain above ground and help put their country back together in return for a share in the power; or slip away, back into darkness, back into murder and robbery, back into the old thinking that only they deserve to rule, and there can be no compromise.

But even that isn’t the most pressing issue.

The worst dilemma is Numantia’s government.

Simply, there is none, and nothing presents itself.

No one wants to return to the vacillations of the Rule of Ten or the corruption of the Grand Council.

Perhaps each town, each city, each state, should nominate worthy leaders, men, and why not women as well, commoners as well as noblemen, who could somehow remain responsible to the people who chose them to rule and not become bloody tyrants.

I don’t know how such a government might be formed, nor does anyone else, not even the Tovieti.

There appears to be one popular choice:

To name me as king of Numantia.

I shudder at the thought, at the idea. I’ve seen what happens to men when they take the throne, when gold circles their brow.

There are worse things than the vacillating, incompetent Rule of Ten.

There’s the oppression of monarchs, the evil they willingly fall, leap joyously into.

I remember King Bairan of Maisir and how little he cared for his people, both great and small. I remember how he permitted the Dalriada, nothing more than the slavery of women under a fancy name. I remember how he ordered me to murder my friend and servant, Karjan, a man who’d done him no wrong, merely to test a spell, other obscene crimes his predecessors wreaked on the people of Maisir.

I remember Laish Tenedos, once my closest friend, a man who wished to rule wisely and well, a man I served proudly. How long did it take for him to change, or did he actually change at all? Was his benevolence before I crowned him a pretense, and the mad demon within always within? Was that what drove him to the throne, instead of letting him become a quiet, prosperous island sorcerer?

I can’t believe I was a complete fool to believe in him, nor that everyone around me was equally taken in. But still …

No. I cannot be a king.

Who, then,
will
rule my beloved Numantia?

Who’ll be willing to try to solve our many problems?

These big problems are obvious, but there’re others that grate at me. Lynton Barda, if she lives, is still a whore, and her family, who served the country well, still in poverty’s depths. The bandits on the roads, but also the wandering men, some ex-soldiers, looking for they know not what; villagers like Gunett and her people, although they’re far more fortunate than some I remember, having at least a good leader.

What of all these people who have come into my mind, as clearly, sharply as if I’d just left their company, people I knew years ago, people I saw this day, people I knew well, strangers glimpsed in passing? Who shall rule them?

I remember my family motto:

We Hold True.

But no one has the right to ask me to wear the crown. I’ve given enough to my country. All I want is to be left alone, perhaps in Cimabue, perhaps in Nicias, perhaps as a rover, a wandering Negaret, across the border in Maisir. Cymea had said she’d like such a life.

Late this afternoon, Yonge came and said a delegation of the highest surviving noblemen of Numantia had assembled in Nicias.

Tomorrow, he said, they will call on me and insist I be crowned king.

Yonge thinks it’s very funny.

I talked until midnight with Cymea, then let her go to bed and came, alone, to this great chapel in the palace, where kings and other rulers of Numantia beyond memory have prayed to the gods.

I, too, have prayed.

But no answer has come, not from Irisu, not from Saionji, not from Cimabue’s wise monkey god Vachan, not from my family’s own godling, Tanis.

The dark reaches of the chapel send back only the rustling of my clothes, my breath, my footsteps as I pace back and forth.

And the question remains:

What now, Damastes a Cimabue?

This edition published by
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Text Copyright © 1999 by Chris Bunch
All rights reserved.

Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting

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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-5359-9
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5359-2