TODAY IS TOO LATE (2 page)

Tyrus hoped Lael was the stronger warrior. He wanted to be the underdog again, to rely on his wits and skills to survive because his runes gave him unnatural powers. Fights felt one sided, as though he slaughtered children, and he was sick of being Tyrus the Damned. Just once, he wished, let the other man stand a little taller, hit a little harder. The danger might make him feel human.

Lael slashed down like he was cutting wood, his full weight behind the attack, but Tyrus blocked. His blade struck the axe shaft, and Lael tried to rake it away, using the blade to hook and drag. Tyrus countered, pulling the axe forward, and saw Lael’s eyes behind his visor. A moment of panic—the king was surprised. Tyrus forced the axe blade away and down, feeling Lael resisting, but the king lacked the strength to fight back.

Tyrus had hoped for a stronger opponent. He shouldered Lael backward and responded with his own overhand attack. Lael blocked but almost had his axe torn away. He stumbled. Tyrus raised his sword, advancing.

Their duel felt like hours of work. Tyrus could have killed him but chose to wear him down, to take him prisoner. He beat him into submission and dragged him out of Shinar. Azmon’s students, the bone lords, had said capturing the famed hero was impossible, but Tyrus proved them wrong. He had delivered Lael as a gift to the emperor, a feat no bone beast could match.

As Tyrus watched the atrocity in the arena, Lael screaming while the beast mauled him, he wished he had killed the man. A king deserved better. What had the Roshan Empire become, to feed a great hero to a pair of monsters? He turned away.

Azmon asked, “You do not like the spectacle?”

“He was a worthy opponent.”

“No. He was a poor imitation of you. I had hoped he might see reason and we could avoid this mess.”

“Not him. He would never join us.”

“Such a waste. There are so few who can endure the etchings anymore. I might have taken his runes further.”

Tyrus thought of his own runes. Was he less human than Lael? Had Azmon taken his runes too far? He flexed his hand. His grip was strong again, as if he had never been hurt. Even among Etched Men, Tyrus healed fast.

Azmon called off the beast. Lael twitched on the ground. The axman claimed his head, and soldiers tossed the body with the others. Long before that, the audience had stopped watching, pretending to cough or wipe at their eyes. Dozens of bone lords wore black robes and averted their gaze, but Tyrus wanted to force them to watch. He had fought beside their beasts and knew their brutality. The lords replaced a tradition of heroes with monsters. This was the new empire. No more honor or service or dignity, only claws and fangs.

Above the arena a star burst, a bluish light bright enough to compete with the midday sun. The beast in the arena, covered with blood, gazed at the heavens, and the bone lords gasped.

Tyrus reached for his sword. “A bad omen?”

“Hard to say.” Azmon shielded his eyes. “Would be easier to place the constellation at night, but I believe that is the Spear of Abdiel. The angelic hosts of the Seven Heavens have taken an interest in our victory.”

“Seraphim?”

“Perhaps they pay homage to their great king.”

“What does it mean?”

Azmon waited with everyone else. A divine sign was rare, and Tyrus wondered if a visitation would follow, or one of the older stories made flesh: warriors with white wings, raining down fire, brimstone, and holy vengeance. Tyrus had never seen the seraphim before, but he had met more than a few demons. Would the angels avenge Shinar? The air of the arena became expectant, tense.

Nothing happened.

“Strange.” Azmon stood and glanced at the star again before collecting his white robes. “Escort these turncoats to the palace. Keep them separated and guarded. Tyrus, see to the city. I want the fires put out. The less we have to rebuild, the better.”

“As you wish.”

“And I want an accounting of what stands, their losses and ours. I’ll await your report in my quarters.”

Columns of smoke marred the skyline of Shinar. The legendary white walls, taller than towers, still impressed Tyrus as he surveyed the smoldering ruins from the arena stairs. All of creation spoke of Jethlah’s Walls, and it felt strange to have humbled them. History would remember him as the man who broke a thing of beauty. A few towers stood, but many had toppled. Rubble and debris choked the streets. Blood stained gutters. Fires raged. Dust and smoke clung to the city, and the haze obscured things, giving the city a ghostly appearance.

When night fell, the temperature would drop, and the armor that boiled Tyrus would soon freeze him. He headed to his tent at the heart of Shinar and saw the blue star hanging in the sky but tried to avoid staring. Too many of his swordsmen, pointing and gossiping, looked to him for leadership. The Damned could not fret over blue light.

He wondered why the omen picked that moment to appear. The Roshan Empire had conquered a dozen cities in their march west. They had left their own continent, invaded this one, and destroyed all who opposed them. Tyrus remembered Azmon creating the first beasts years ago. No stars had shone. Was it an honor for the dead or a warning for the living? What did it mean?

Tyrus had more pressing work. The emperor wanted an accounting, and their supply lines struggled to find new homes within the ruins of the city.

Messengers waited outside his tent, a dozen young men, lightly armored, runners and riders. He had divided the city into quadrants and given each to one of his generals, who subdivided their own sections. Cavalry, spearmen, swordsmen, archers, and a shrinking knighthood—more and more nobles studied runes to become bone lords—all tallied, roughly thirty thousand fighting men reported to him. More than thrice that if you counted engineers, craftsmen, cooks, apothecaries, and surgeons. The emperor tasked him with moving this small city from battlefield to battlefield.

At some point, and he struggled to remember when, he had morphed from a champion of Rosh to a scribe. He wrote orders. The messengers perked at his arrival and rushed to him.

“My Lord Marshal—”

Tyrus raised a hand for silence and entered the tent. He had no interest in a mob of requests. The interior of the tent resembled a cave after the midday sun. The stuffiness, the dimness, washed over him—smell of flax, parchment, old carpets, and dust—before his eyes adjusted and what seemed a confined space looked large enough for a dozen people, tables of tallies and scrolls.

The emperor wanted all that parchment to make sense. Tyrus pushed down a wave of nausea. Before they had conquered creation, he had been a swordsman. Rank came with so many unwanted things.

Elmar, his master clerk, never rested, an ancient face with beady eyes, a man who had scratched his scalp bare. He read reports as two men unbuckled Tyrus’s armor and another toweled his face. Tyrus found a drink in his hand, a cool lead mug, sweating, with a sweet wine that washed the taste of the arena out of his mouth. Elmar had broken out the good stuff, a Habiri Pale that was sugary, and pieces of fruit floated in it, citrus of some kind, sugary and delicious.

Tyrus savored the small cup of civilization. It washed the taste of smoke from his mouth. How had Elmar chilled his mug? No time to dwell on it. Elmar had said something about tunnels.

“Tunnels?”

“In old Shinar, near the river. No good estimates on numbers, but that is the last of the fighting. The beasts are little help. They do not fit underground.”

“They’re still fighting?”

“The fiercest resistance. They say there is a city under the city.”

“Dwarves?”

Elmar checked a scroll. “I don’t believe so.”

Tyrus drank his wine. The coolness soothed his throat, radiated outward, chilling his stomach, and gave him a moment of peace.

He enjoyed reports of the beasts’ failures, but it meant he would lose men. This was the old debate that bothered him still. He had always thought of the beasts as walking siege engines, a rationale that blinded him to their monstrosity. They were the worst kind of weapon. He wanted to use them because it meant fewer of his men died, but they committed such horrid acts of violence. Feeding the enemy to hungry bears would be more honorable.

“Early reports, the Great Library is lost.”

“Lost? Entirely lost?”

“It burned, milord.”

A metallic moan cut through the bustle of the tent. Clerks turned to look. He had done it again. Crushed another glass in his hand. Damn these runes. Elmar took the ruined cup from him. Wine had spilt all over, leaving his hand wet and sticky. The emperor wanted the great library taken whole. Generations of scrolls, priceless knowledge, priceless, Azmon had said.

“Bring me Lady Lilith.”

Elmar sent a runner.

The reports continued, and Tyrus issued orders. According to ancient myths, Shinar had grown from a small fortification to a sprawling city of two million people, but without an elaborate series of aqueducts providing water and an empire shipping goods to the city, it never would have grown so vast. The bone lords smashed the ducts first. The city collapsed on itself, breeding disease and famine. Tyrus had not wanted to destroy the ducts, only to divert their water, but Azmon used the beasts, creating another mess for Tyrus to clean.

He thought Shinar had fallen days ago, but as he learned more, he found that the city was a dozen smaller cities wrapped in one. Most of the resistance came from private nobles with their own small armies guarding villas the size of castles.

“What progress with the casualty lists?”

“The Shinari numbers, milord, trying to count what the beasts left behind…”

Tyrus sympathized. He had watched the monsters do their work, but the emperor would erect a triumphant arch to celebrate his victory. The monoliths stood over a hundred feet tall with details of the victory carved into marble. Azmon loved his numbers. He wanted a full accounting and would engrave his legacy in stone.

“I need to know how many we defeated.”

“Between the conscriptions, the famine, the beasts devouring defenders, there might have been three hundred thousand, or there might have been thirty thousand.”

Tyrus didn’t like either number. They didn’t feel historic. An army of three hundred thousand would have sortied and destroyed the invaders. Not really—most would know they were civilians with no training, but the historians loved scandals. The numbers must protect Azmon’s legacy. They needed a probable number, impressive without becoming absurd.

“Can you count helms or swords?”

“Same problem as the fall of Hurr: the men take trophies.”

“I will commission a sculpture made from Shinari swords and issue a bounty for the blades.” Tyrus waved his hand, a signal for Elmar to work out the pricing. “We’ll place it on the emperor’s arch, my gift to him. Like we did with Hurr.”

“An expensive gift, milord.”

“But fitting for the first man to break Jethlah’s Walls.”

“As you wish.”

“Prepare an estimate of the conscriptions. Call them irregulars. Make it twice the swordsmen if you must.”

“Of course.”

A decent estimate of the hardened veterans they overcame, and some fanciful numbers of irregular troops they disposed of afterward. That felt truthful, like something Tyrus might read in a history of one of the great emperors.

A wash of sunlight bleached the tent. Tyrus squinted and blinked for a moment. Few people would march in unannounced. He grimaced at a woman in black robes, Lady Lilith.

Unlike most of the nobles, she had never taken runes to make herself appear young, and she did not dye her hair to imitate the emperor. No blonde curls for her. She looked her age, mid-forties, skin weathered from a long campaign, brown hair with strands of gray. Compared to Azmon, the Eternal Youth, she seemed matronly. Around her shoulders, she wore a large gold chain with talismans that signified her rank: the most powerful of the bone lords, Azmon’s greatest student, and the third in command of the Imperial Army. She left the soldiers to Tyrus, and he left the beasts to her.

“Lady Lilith.”

“My Lord Marshal.”

“I’m told the library burned.”

The frosty attitude melted, but only just. He had known her long enough to read her well. The smugness of sorcery faded, but she would not admit her mistake.

“The emperor wanted the library intact. You assured me your beasts would protect the scrolls.”

“There was a fight in the library. I thought I had cornered the Red Sorceress. She fired the scrolls rather than let us have them.”

“The Red Sorceress has been sighted all over Shinar. We’ve been chasing her ghost for days. She is currently leading a resistance in the tunnels near the river. Anytime something goes wrong, it is the Red Sorceress.” Tyrus would not accuse her of lying. He implied it and watched her bristle. “Did you see her, Lilith?”

“One of her students for sure, Larz Kedar. We dueled with runes, but it set off their trap—casks of oil in the library. I lost four beasts to the blaze. They had no intention of letting Azmon take the scrolls.”

That sounded good. He would use that detail in his report. The acolytes burned their treasures rather than leave them to the bone lords. Tyrus knew Azmon would be furious and wondered if he should have secured the library himself. He had fought King Lael instead.