Authors: Usman Ijaz
“What are you talking about?” Alexis asked.
Owain grunted. “Look around you, boy, they’re
all practically throwing themselves at your feet.”
Alexis looked around the common room and at the
maids that kept glancing towards their table. “I don’t think so.”
“He’s addled in the brain,” Owain said to Hamar,
and they both laughed. “If I wasn’t married, I’d grow my hair out as well, and
then you’d be left all alone.”
The three men enjoyed a small laugh. Adrian
didn’t pay much attention to them. He had ears only for the soft music that
rang throughout the room.
The party ate in near silence, and afterwards
Hamar and Owain lit their pipes and they all sat listening to the music. Adrian
attempted to make conversation with Connor by asking him if he liked the music,
but Connor only stared towards the singer, deaf to anything he had to say.
At last they retired to their rooms. The room
that Adrian shared with Alexis and Connor was small, made smaller by the
addition of another bed. Alexis hung his gun belt on his headboard where it was
close at hand before lying down, the guns gleaming in the moonlight filtering
through the shuttered windows. They were all soon asleep, tired from the day’s
endless traveling.
3
Adrian rose early the next morning with the rest
of the small party, while most of the inn was still asleep and even the cooks
were just waking. They breakfasted on goat cheese and fresh baked bread in the
empty common room. Hamar paid their fares, and they were on the move once more.
They left the small rural town behind and joined the Great Road, due east once
more. Adrian looked at the town they left behind, realizing that he had never
been this far from home. They’d sometimes gone a ways north to visit Connor’s
mother’s family, but they had never gone this far east. It made him think the
world ahead was to be unlike anything he expected. But he quickly learned that
wasn’t the case. Farms of the sort they had passed the previous morning stood
besides fields of wheat and barley, and sometimes the land still held that
barren look. Nothing looked different.
“How do you become a Legionnaire?” Connor asked
Alexis, who rode beside the boys.
“Through hard training,” Hamar grunted from the
front.
Connor wanted to know how long it took.
Alexis answered. “A long time.”
“How long? Years? Months?”
“Keep your damn chatter up and I’ll drag you
back to Grandal to be used as target practice,” Owain growled, turning in his
saddle to give them all a cold stare.
“He must not have any children at all,” Connor muttered.
“On the contrary,” said Alexis. “He has
several.”
“And Hamar?”
“Two small boys.”
“And I can only pray that they don’t grow up to
be half as annoying as you two,” Hamar called back over his shoulder.
“How long was your
training?” Connor
asked Alexis. It was more than curiosity Adrian heard in his cousin’s voice;
Connor really did want to know.
“A few years.”
“How old were you when you went to Grandal?”
“I was sixteen.”
“What was it like?”
“It was hard and grueling. Why all the
questions, Connor? Do you wish to join the Legion yourself?”
Connor shrugged. “Maybe.”
Adrian stared at his cousin in stunned silence,
though he didn’t know why he should be surprised. Connor had always held
Legionnaires in high respect, and had at times said he wanted to be one, but
when he’d said these things it had been with the air of one who knows that it’s
nothing but a whimsical dream. Perhaps now that he was in the company of actual
Legionnaires, the dream was beginning to seem more plausible.
They rode in silence for a mile. Alexis began
whistling, a bright and lively tune that carried Adrian’s mind across the
plains. He thought of what his uncle had told him of his parents, and wished
that he could have met them, even if only for a moment. He shouldn’t have to
remember his mother as he had seen her in his dreams; no one deserved to
remember another in such a state.
“Stop that infernal noise!” Owain called over
his shoulder.
Alexis stopped his whistling with a smile. “Is
something the matter, Adrian?” he asked.
Adrian looked at him, awakened from his
thoughts. “No, simply thinking.”
“About?”
Adrian thought on whether or not he should
discuss the run of his mind, then decided that it couldn’t hurt. “Alexis, why
did the Ascillians die? Why did the people hate them so?”
Alexis sighed and looked to the Legionnaires at
the front, as though expecting them to answer. They remained silent. At last he
said, “The people were scared. They are still scared.”
“But of what? It’s hard to believe that they
killed them all out of fear.”
“Ignorance is more like it,” Alexis muttered.
“Nero despised the Ascillians. He saw their powers as an insult to Lycios, the
God of the east. He loathed them, and he was never known to be completely sane.
I read that he once led his army down to the beach and had them spend the
afternoon picking seashells for him. He inspired in everyone around him the
same hatred for the Ascillians that he shared. They were used as scapegoats.
Whenever there were crop failures or disasters of any kind, they were the first
to be put the blame upon. They were blamed for starting wars that they had
nothing to do with, for diseases that spread throughout the land. Do you begin
to understand?” Adrian nodded.
“The people ... they knew that the Ascillians
possessed odd abilities, but beyond that they knew nothing of them. They were a
mystery to the rest of the world,” explained Alexis. “The Ascillians had a
capital of their own, called Asgar, but now all that is said to remain of it is
a burned ruin. The people were already reeling close to madness in those days,
but the Mad Emperor started the true slaughter. He pushed his countries into
civil wars that lasted for over a decade, all because his hate fueled him and
blinded him. He couldn‘t see that he was literally tearing his empire apart.”
“Didn’t the Ascillians try to fight back
though?” asked Adrian.
“They fought back when they realized that what
they were facing was more than a misunderstanding. But they were outnumbered
from the beginning,” Alexis said sadly. “You have to understand that the
Ascillians were a small race to begin with. Nero had his armies searching every
town and city within his Empire, killing and burning all those he thought might
be Ascillian. Wars emerged from this senseless slaughter, his own countries
rebelling or fighting with their neighbors. When the Mad Emperor led his armies
upon the Ascillian capital of Asgar, it wasn’t long before the ancient city
fell, and there the blood loss was the heaviest.” Alexis emitted a bitter
sound. “Asgar was Martin’s gift to the Ascillians when the first settlers came
from Naban, and Nero took it back. I’ve read in some books that after Asgar fell
the skies turned black for a fortnight, roaring with thunder with never a rest.
The Prophet in the east claims that it was the dying curse of the Ascillians,
and the western priests will tell you that it was God himself voicing his
displeasure at our ignorance.”
Alexis fell silent then.
“That’s all?” Adrian asked, staring at the
reigns in his hands. The wind whipped back his sandy-blond hair and stung his
eyes.
“I told it to you as simply as I could,” Alexis
told him solemnly.
Adrian noticed the sudden quietness in the small
company, no one spoke, but he could imagine their somber faces all too clearly.
Suddenly, he asked, “What about Grandal’s Legion? Was it involved in the
slaughter too?” He realized his tone was harsh and accusing, but he didn’t
care.
He looked to Alexis but it was Owain who
answered. “Grandal fought against the Mad Emperor. Nearly all of the mid-west
marched on Arath Dar to put an end to the Mad Emperor’s reign. Some of Nero’s
own countries - Teihr, Kumai - rebelled as well. In the end he was murdered by
someone close to him and his armies broken. His Empire was split among those
still standing, though some will to this day contest their boundaries.”
“It’s in the past,” said Hamar. “Things have
changed now.”
“Nothing’s changed!” Adrian shouted. “Do you
really mean to tell me that if I were to walk into the next town and declare
that I’m an Ascillian, that I would walk out alive?” Silence answered him, and
he grew infuriated, at himself, at the others, at everything. He dug his heels
into Wind’s sides and briskly rode past Hamar and Owain.
“Adrian!” Alexis called out after him.
He had no intention of running away, he knew
that it was impossible, but at the moment he simply wanted to be alone. He
slowed down his pace a little farther down the road. The rest, perhaps
satisfied with having him in their sight, did not come up to him.
He felt infuriated. He’d been taken from his
home, from the only family he had ever known, so that he could save the lives
of a people that despised his kind. His cousin would not even talk to him now
because of what he was. He looked towards the plains by the road, and held
himself back from kicking Wind into a fast run and breaking away from the party
behind him.
I hate them
, he
thought
. I despise them all.
He had seen firsthand, in a manner of
speaking, what they were capable of, and he found it difficult to understand
why such people deserved saving, when others were murdered for their peaceful
nature.
He rode alone, an odd stew of emotions brewing inside
him.
1
The halls of the dead are black.
The words occurred to Logan Abarrai as he strode
through the corridors. He could not tell where they came from. He only knew
they fit the palace perfectly.
The wind blowing in through the open balconies whipped
his hair back from his brow and sent a chill through him.
The halls of the
dead are cold, as well
, Logan thought.
Blue eyes stared out from a hard face and
watched the few servants going about, giving him as wide a berth as they could.
He was a tall man, in his mid-thirties, his blond hair fading year by year. He
held himself with a self-confidence that at one time had bordered on the edge
of arrogance, exuding an air of one who believed himself to be untouchable, and
to this many would have credited that Jonas’s Captain truly was untouchable.
That arrogance had been washed away over the years, beaten back by humility.
However, whispers of his past still followed him wherever he went, and the guns
at his hips did not help. They marked him out, for anyone who knew what they
meant. At times Logan felt like casting the guns away as well, as he had cast
away his old life. What stopped him was the same thought that had stopped him
all the previous times. He had fought for the guns, he had earned the guns.
They belonged to him now, not to Grandal.
He came to the heavy doors to Jonas’s chambers
and knocked loudly. A voice bid him enter and he obeyed. His eyes assessed the
scene before him as he walked to stand before Jonas Mahry, lord of Hanna, and
his son Mordred. The two had been in mid-conversation when he entered. Now they
stood watching him, two still pairs of brown marble eyes regarding him as he
approached. Both father and son seemed cut from the same black cloth. Where
Jonas’s hair was long and streaked with gray, Mordred’s was short, unruly, and
as black as coal.
“I take it you have some news to report, Logan,
or you would not be here?” Jonas asked.
“I received a message this morning from Amon.”
“And what did it say?” Mordred asked, sneering
as he always was, at some private joke that the rest of the world would never
know.
The boy was all of sixteen, if that, and Logan
hated deferring to a mere child, but his suspicions of the boy held him in
check. “‘
The sparrows fly east
’.”
“Is that it?” Mordred asked, his face turning
sour. “What are we supposed to make of th--”
“Be quiet,” ordered Jonas quietly. Mordred
stared at him, sullen eyes burning. “These assassins of yours, Logan, are you
sure they are capable of what needs to be done?” There was a hunger in the old
man’s eyes. A desperateness.
It was in that moment that Logan recognized what
he saw in Jonas’s eyes. He should have seen it earlier, for he saw it in the
mirror whenever he stared at his own reflection. A deep burning desire for
retribution. It was that need to prove to others that he had survived what they
put him through, that he still lived, that need to depart them of any sense of
victory that fueled them both, he saw.
“They’re among the best in Cahrad. They won’t
fail us easily.”
2
“Why do we even need the little brat?” Mordred
asked as the doors closed behind Logan.