“Father, where are we?” Morgan asked, as always pitching her voice low, to a more masculine tenor.
“I do not know,” he murmured, trying to see something, anything in the light of the ship’s lantern that had miraculously stayed on its hook. Crewmen were stumbling up on the deck, shouting in fear that they’d rammed something and might be sinking, only to find absolute darkness around them, and the ship completely motionless.
“Silence!” Theophilus snarled, and the inane chatter from down below shut down as men clamped their mouths, waved around lanterns, and tried to see what was going on about them.
There were sounds. Metallic, moving slightly, like shifting steel out in the dark. With no visible source, the quiet clatters and clinks that were not part of the creaking and groaning of the motionless Rosa were clearly unnerving the men.
“Cap’n?” Constanto, still in his nightshirt, called out, a lantern in one hand and his cutlass in the other.
Theophilus elected not to tell any of them of the Skull that had devoured the ship. He was about to reply when the darkness all around peeled away, and was replaced by light.
Constant, magical light, from all directions, tearing through the darkness and pinning all of them in place, open and exposed on the deck of the Rosa.
He could not see anything but shadows for a moment, and then the lights came on OVERHEAD, far above the Rosa, and everything was visible.
The blood of Theophilus Peginar went icy cold as he looked around himself, wide-eyed.
They were in some manner of pool, one shaped like a narrow wedge which the momentum of the Rosa had driven the ship into, fixing her immovably in place and giving access to her deck from all sides. Overhead arched a great roof of slated stone, scores of feet in the air, with lights mounted upon it hanging down and illuminating everything clearly beneath them.
They were INSIDE a great shed, as large as any Theophilus had ever seen…
From a man’s height above the railings, the ship was surrounded on all sides by soldiers… soldiers clad in the livery of the knights of the Church of Iberon, all of whom had crossbows out and aimed at all the members of the crew there.
Directly in front of the mermaid figurehead that so resembled Theo’s dead wife, Morgan’s mother, stood a thin and ascetic man in fine white robes over armor, a miter on his head of green and gold that could signify only one person in all the lands of the North.
The Great Jordie, Archbishop of Darkmoor himself, was present and staring at him with an expression that promised little but damnation for the captain and his crew.
“Theophilus Eduardino Peginar of Gullport,” the archbishop stated, stepping up to stare at him over the figurehead, his voice trembling with suppressed fury and a grim delight that indicated very bad tidings indeed for the captured ship and crew. “We have it on excellent knowledge that you provided transportation for a team of Khirifi murderers who attacked Torford Abbey, slaughtered the monks present there, and fed their souls to a demon.”
Constanto himself could not remain on his feet under the condemnation in that stare. Theo had only taken the most loyal of his crew on that particular trip for just this reason. He had not known what was going to happen, but he had known that if word got out once he realized what had been done, their lives were forfeit.
Somehow, word had gotten out…
“Father?” Morgan asked, her face ashen as she realized what was confronting them.
“The lives of me and the crew are likely forfeit,” he murmured softly to her, letting his sword fall from his hands as well with a muted clatter to the wooden deck. Any hint of resistance and they’d only die all the quicker. “If I cooperate, they may spare you. Tell them whatever they want to know, hold nothing back, and if you live through this with nothing but the clothes on your back, you will be the luckiest young woman alive.”
Morgan swallowed as she stared at the rows of crossbows, particularly as some men moved aside, and burly knights with equally nasty expressions swung over the stone sides and dropped directly to the deck of the pinned Rosa.
There was no fighting.
The Sim I had stationed in Darkmoor City kept me appraised of events there, her spell power also available for the king, his Council, and for hire, as it were. She couldn’t walk around and make big things out of stone, but she could Summon in huge stone blocks and mold those things around as needed as part of the spell Stone Curtain, and was using it now to improve the harbor and the docks bit by bit. I could speed things along next time I came back, but the simple fact she was willing to conjure up a huge volume of stone and then render it down into bricks or beams was proving to be highly desired by local farmers wanting to build fences, if nothing else.
The Regent of the Halls’ willful breaking of the peace treaty he had negotiated painfully himself had forced a new look at the dwarves across the North, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. From a race known for keeping their word in the face of adversity to have a ruler who just threw a treaty away like that, even if it was a hated enemy, well, that had consequences for every treaty that they had signed.
The Regent wasn’t a bad dwarf, but whether he managed to hold his seat when his kin paid off the anthroids was a toss-up.
Me, I was going west.
The ship captain had sung like a canary, as had all of his crew, all for the sole purpose of allowing his daughter to live. Not being tortured to death was probably also part of it, as the rage of the Church of the massacre at the Abbey, and finding out their souls had been devoured, was apoplectic, and the men knew they weren’t getting out of this alive.
Some used it as an opportunity to unburden their souls of things they’d done, deeds they’d seen, and to direct a few wrathful fingers at people they’d worked with who they didn’t really like anyway.
The girl, Morgan, didn’t get away clean, either. She was Geased to serve well and honorably in the navy of Darkmoor, and if she did so, she would be released from her Geas and her debt would be paid.
Her face and name were also changed, because her father was going to take the blame of the outraged faithful and die with his crew, and she wasn’t going to be associated with him.
She would start with little but her knowledge of the sea, but at least she wasn’t dead… and we knew who had done it all.
That’s why I was heading west, into the Duchy of Elb.
The Khirifi were a dark-skinned, lean and tall people who had inhabited mountain territories hundreds of miles west of Darkmoor. Then one day their Patron Immortal, Gulguz, Patron of Fire and Ice, had woken up, decided that His worshipers were too boring to just have sitting around, and commanded them to go east, find the fertile fields of the Empire of Iberon, and conquer everything in their way.
Without any hesitation, the entire tribe of over a hundred thousand souls had done just that.
Numbers had allowed them to overcome the hillfolk living in the valleys in their way, and then grim determination and lessons learned had advanced them across the plains occupied by the scattered clans of the Korshwa nomad tribes, forts and seized horses driving them slowly across the plains, until they ran into the free Duchy of Elb and its disparate rulers.
The Duchy’s forces might have beaten them, except they weren’t expecting the pure stubbornness of the Khirifi, the skill of their troops, and their learned discipline gained from all those they’d conquered on the way. Instead of gathering in forces under a single command and banner, the Duchy’s forces lost their first key battles, then scattered and fled into towns and castles that were slowly ground down over months and years, until the last of them was seized and shattered Elb became another province of the conquering Khirifi.
Flushed with success, they’d crossed the Tenagua River, certain that the northwesternmost province of the Empire of Iberon, the Northern Marches, would soon be theirs!
Antius the Black and the people of the Marches had other ideas.
Living in a land that generated monsters all the time, and coming off a full rebellion from the Empire that wouldn’t give them any help in dealing with their many enemies, the soldiers of the Northern Marches proved to have high morale, great fighting spirit, and came to the aid of one another, despite having plead for and received no imperial reinforcements to stand against the invaders for long years.
The Khirifi were mauled badly and driven back across the borders of the Duchy… and the barons who had won the day for the North were pronounced outlaws and rebels by Iberon, to be arrested for treason!
From there had come battles against the forces of Iberon, who tried to throw down those fighting against the invaders at the will of a demented Emperor, and in the end, peace could not be found. Antius raised his banner and was crowned king and regent of the new Kingdom of Darkmoor, and in war and in peace had led his land for most of a decade now, finding much of the former and precious little of the latter.
The conquered peoples under the Khirifi were little better than slaves, not allowed to bear arms and useful only as peasant labor. Naturally there were revolutionary movements in their lands, the Korshwa were always harrying them if they could, and Iberon alternately traded with them and harassed them in turn, depending on the mood of the political winds.
The Khirifi’s triumphant march to Iberon had been stopped cold, however. It seemed Gulguz didn’t really like that, because now he was having his people make something nasty, and it involved soul eaters.
And very, very amusingly, the thing they were making could only be taken down by those with unborn souls.
Which was absolutely hilarious when you knew some time travelers born in the far future, ‘not yet born’.
I tracked the members of the raiding force down to a place they called Mon Burromos, a formerly extinct volcano that seemed to have been roused to life to serve as the center of whatever they were doing there.
I followed the Road of Wars westward towards the border with Elb, passing through the hynfolk lands of Guub and the low mountain range named for them, past the harbor city of Norturn, and then along the rough stone road that had conveyed many armies to battles against the Korsh horseman and barbarians when Iberon ruled these lands. It now hustled the mounts of Darkmoor along to face the Khirifi in Elb as needed.
The Tenagua River was the main boundary on Darkmoor’s west, over a mile of waters with no bridge and easy way to pass over, resulting in a laborious need to shuffle over invading armies, who then had a lot of road and later swamp to get through before they reached any city worth the taking on this side, all of it home to hostile Darkmoor folk who knew the land very well indeed, and weren’t scared of these dark-skinned invaders.
I wasn’t scared of them either, and I didn’t need a boat to cross the river, nor did I need to be visible to do it.
I would have liked to butcher my way across the country after seeing the way the Khirifi treated their conquered peoples, and I definitely could have made a terrifying splash. A hundred thousand people or more? What did that mean to me? I had memories of fighting millions of undead that could hand these warriors their heads. If and when I moved against them, I was going to be a terrifying force of nature… and against their bastard of an Immortal Patron who used soul eaters, too!
I was definitely going to do something about these people, once I totally messed up whatever demonic scheme they were unleashing. In the meantime, I listed every cruel blow, casual killing, insulting sneer, and contemptuous kick and beating doled out by these invaders and their arse of an Immortal, and promised them that they were going to get what was coming to them.