Nemesis

CHAPTER 6

With Volrath gone, the empty throne lent an air of uncertainty to every activity in the Stronghold. Crovax stepped into this maelstrom of confusion and doubt. Armed with Belbe's commission to strike at the rebels, he threw himself into the task. Troops of the Royal Army were marched out of the Stronghold and mustered on the plain by companies. Battalions of moggs, less disciplined and less intelligent, massed behind the soldiers and awaited their new commander. Crovax disdained the elaborate military ceremonies favored by Volrath and went on foot among his troops, followed by his newly formed personal guard, the Corps of Sergeants.

The one thing missing from this gathering of martial might was Greven il-Vec. Since Crovax did not ask him to join the expedition against Eladamri, the erstwhile commander of all Rathi forces chose not to appear on the plain with the army. He remained in the Citadel, overseeing the extensive repairs being made to Predator,

Crovax, hand on his sword hilt, approached the Corps of

Sergeants. Nasser stepped out of line and saluted.

"The army is mustered as ordered, sir."

"Very good. Do you have the list?" asked Crovax.

Nasser slipped a hand under his breastplate and pulled out a folded slip of parchment. Crovax studied it briefly, then walked to a spot in full view of the massed troops. He closed his eyes and extended his hands, fingers spread. The flowstone substrate humped up. A murmur went through the soldiery.

The hump became a rectangular stage six feet wide and ten feet long. Crovax raised his hands, and the platform bulked higher. When the stage was a full six feet off the ground, he lowered his hands. Just before his boots touched the side of the platform, steps indented themselves, allowing Crovax to easily climb to the top.

Only the front ranks had seen Crovax command the flowstone, but word filtered back through the assembled troops. They stirred restlessly, arms and armor clanking as they fidgeted and stretched to get a glimpse of their new leader. Far in the back, the moggs grunted and hooted and climbed on each other's backs to see Crovax.

"Soldiers of Rath!" he exclaimed.

One hundred companies of 200 soldiers each snapped to attention in unison. The moggs quieted.

"I am Crovax of Urborg. The emissary of the overlords has appointed me to command an expedition against the enemy, the rebel Skyshroud elves. We will shortly undertake this expedition, but first I have some things to tell you.

"An aerial vehicle came to Rath from a far-off place and lent support to an attack by the rebel leader Eladamri." He did not mention he came to Rath aboard that same vehicle. "The enemy airship has been dealt with and will not be a factor in our fight."

More muttering rippled through the ranks. Crovax let them talk for a few moments, then held up his hands for silence.

"Our own ship, Predator, is under repair and will soon be flying again. The rebels believe we don't dare move against them without our airship. They're wrong. Starting today, I will lead this force against the home village of Eladamri, whose location our spies have made known to us."

He paused, expecting cheers. When none came, Crovax glowered. Nasser and the sergeants raised a shout, and the soldiers half-heartedly joined in. Crovax waved for quiet.

"We will exact revenge for the defeat the elves dealt Greven il-Vec. But first I have another task, a solemn and sacred warrior's duty." He unfolded the parchment Nasser had given him. "When I read the following names, I want the officers named to come to me."

He cleared his throat. "From the First Company, Captain Thayer il-Vec; from the Third Company, Captain Ulan il-Dal; from the Seventh Company, Lieutenant Shirzod il-Vec…" The list grew until eighteen officers, all company commanders, stood nervously at Crovax's feet.

"You commanded companies during the recent fight with the elf rebels," Crovax said. "All of you were either outfought or out-thought by your foes. Because of your dereliction of duty, cowardice, and incompetence in the face of the enemy, for your abject failure as commanders and as soldiers, you are hereby condemned to death."

The officers milled around in shock. They had no place to run; on the right they were hemmed in by the Corps of Sergeants, and on the left by a band of moggs who'd been summoned by Crovax for just such an eventuality. Several of the officers fell to their knees and raised open hands to Crovax, who stood above them glowering.

"Mercy, mercy, Great Lord! The fault was not ours!" they cried.

With a nod, Crovax set the moggs on the pleading men. The shambling creatures dragged six screaming officers from the crowd and dispatched them with their heavy clubs. It was considered a great disgrace to be killed by a mogg, and the surviving twelve officers closed ranks and drew their swords, ready to slay any mogg that approached them.

"Hold," said Crovax. The moggs lowered their bloody clubs. Crovax turned to the surviving officers. "For your last soldierly action, I've decided to suspend your sentences. You are reduced in rank to common soldiers and assigned to the scout battalion. You will lead our column into the Skyshroud Forest. If you distinguish yourselves in combat, you may yet be restored in rank."

Again Crovax wanted hurrahs, but the troops were uniformly silent. The spectacle of six Rathi officers bludgeoned to death by moggs did not encourage anyone to cheer.

Irritated, Crovax dismissed the men. "The designated companies will muster on the plain for the expedition in six intervals!" he shouted.

The stage sank back into the ground. Nasser and the sergeants assembled in front of him.

"Worthless rabble," Crovax said. "Did you see their faces? They were sickened by those cowards' deaths! No wonder they lost their last fight. What can be done with such weaklings?"

"They will recover once they taste victory," Nasser said.

"They'll win if I have to whip them all the way to the Skyshroud!"

"About the route, sir. Have you given any thought to what part-?"

The smell of freshly spilt blood teased Crovax's nostrils. His attention kept wandering to the slain officers. Finally the lure proved too strong, and he walked away, losing Nasser's question in mid-sentence.

The six men lay in a heap, their skulls crushed. Not one man drew so much as a dagger to defend himself. Crovax could not understand it. He announced their deaths, and still they didn't fight. Spineless worms.

There was one among the slain officers who hadn't quite surrendered his life. Crovax could sense it. His hands and face tingled, and the strange hunger awoke inside him. He kicked aside two corpses to uncover the one who was still alive. The soldier's face was white, and his chest barely moved to draw breath. Crovax knelt in the gore and gently turned the man's face to him. A faint current of life-force played over Crovax's fingers. Just a feather touch, but it was there.

The jar Kirril had given him in the Dream Halls had contained a primitive life taken from some animal. The remembered thrill of absorbing the glowing orb made Crovax shudder. By the time he'd mastered himself again, the officer was about to expire. Crovax pressed his hand to the dying man's face, ignoring the crushed bone and purplish blood clotted there. Yes, he had it. Invisible by daylight, the escaping life-force of the soldier was snared by the tidal pull of Crovax's appetite. Though it was but the last gasp of a dying man, it was far sweeter than the crude sample he'd taken from Kirril's jar. What delight, what ecstasy he endured. He felt uplifted, ennobled, enriched. Here indeed must be the food of the gods…

He heard his name being called, distantly, over and over. Gradually he became aware of a hand on his shoulder. In a sudden burst of action, Crovax leaped up, scattering Nasser and two other sergeants who'd been standing over him.

"My lord, you were in a trance," Nasser said.

"So? If it was my trance, why do you presume to interrupt it?"

"Uh, my lord, it's been a full hour since you dismissed the army. There are preparations to be made."

Crovax looked wildly at the sky. Time had passed. The pile of gray clouds, which earlier had been stationary in the sky, were now billowing on a brisk northern wind.

"It was only a moment," Crovax whispered.

"My lord?"

"Never mind. Carry on with the preparations. Send a squad of moggs to clear the bodies away-"

"-and burn them?" Nasser finished. Cremation was the custom on Rath.

"No," Crovax said. "Have the moggs set up a gibbet by the causeway and hang the bodies from it. I want the whole expedition to march past them. It will motivate them, don't you agree?"

"As you say, my lord."

Supported by two somber guards and accompanied by Belbe, Ertai was ushered into a small chamber within a large tower outside the main Citadel. It was an unsettling place, filled to the ceiling with vats, vessels, and urns of unknown purpose. Some tanks held rank solutions that bubbled and seethed, even though no fire burned beneath them. Here and there flowbots continued in tasks Volrath had set for them. One rotated an hourglass-shaped flask at precise two-minute intervals. A muddy brown solution drained endlessly from one half of the flask to the other. Another long, insectlike arm switched bowls of red and yellow gelatin from under a device emitting colored rays.

Ertai could feel the air was alive with power. Most of it was destructive energy, the forces of corruption and decay. It was so strong, he reasoned there must be a powerstone somewhere in the laboratory-a very large powerstone.

"What is this place?" he asked, thinking he'd been better off in his cell.

"Volrath's laboratory," Belbe said. "He did considerable work with animals here. I understand his collection of artificial creatures is quite fascinating. Would you like to see them?"

"No, thank you!"

She shrugged. "Perhaps later. Here's what we came for."

In the center of the room, almost obscured by other apparatus, was a large circular slab of crystal. The flat top was grooved with five concentric rings, the sides were lined with narrow vertical flutes. Made of some smoky, transparent mineral, the slab was sited under an elaborate metal tripod fifteen feet high. Rendered in the skeletal, organic style of the fortress itself, the tripod supported a second faceted crystal, about half the diameter of the slab below it. Wires were attached to the smaller crystal, running off to all parts of the laboratory.

Here was the source of the power Ertai had sensed since entering the room. Both crystals were saturated with it.

"Help him onto the device," Belbe told the guards.

"Wait a minute," Ertai protested. "You're not putting me on that thing! Do you know what it is?"

Belbe crossed her arms. "You want to be well, don't you? This machine can alleviate all your injuries in a few minutes. Otherwise, you'll have to be confined to bed for days, maybe weeks. Even then, your hands may not heal properly."

Ertai tried not to look at his ruined hands. Greven had allowed his moggs to crush his fingers with thumbscrews after he'd outlasted the branding irons.

"Crovax is leaving this day with a force to destroy the rebels," Belbe went on. "If he succeeds, I must name him evincar. Once that happens, I can do nothing else for you."

"He'll have me killed," Ertai said. He looked up at the tall soldier holding his left arm. "Wouldn't you think so?" The guard nodded.

Why was he hesitating? So he got an infusion of negative energy-so what? He'd handled amounts of such power before, on an experimental basis. It was distasteful, but he'd suffered no ill effects from it. Power was power. Only stumpwater witches and country bumpkins still believed types of power were "good" or "bad."

He had no illusions about becoming Evincar of Rath. So absurd was the whole idea, his first response after Belbe proposed it was to laugh in her face. The laughter quickly died, smothered by the fire in his tormented flesh and the look of disappointment on Belbe's face. When she offered the option of rapid healing and a far more comfortable existence than either a barren cell or a headsman's ax, he chose to play along for a while. Once he regained his strength, he might be able to escape to Portal Canyon, open a gateway to Dominaria, and get back home. At least there was a chance

… the loss of such a talented wizard would be an infamous crime, a terrible loss to civilization.

"What do you say?" Belbe asked, breaking in on his reverie. "The choice is yours."

"I suppose I can handle a little," he said.

"Good." Belbe smiled. Ertai found himself feeling glad he'd pleased her.

The soldiers hoisted the young wizard onto the crystal slab. Belbe ordered them back. She fiddled with the alignment of the upper focusing crystal, centering the stream of power on Ertai's chest.

"Don't overdo it," Ertai said, trying to sound nonchalant.

She didn't answer but went to the shielded control station to make a few adjustments. "Volrath used this infuser to heal experimental animals after he'd surgically altered them. On higher settings, it can mutate living creatures into drastically different forms."

Belbe clicked over several switches. "I'm using a lower setting in this case," she announced. "Beginning now-"

With a loud crack, sparks flew from the array of wires above the focal crystal. Ertai, helpless because of his injuries, could do nothing but watch the fireworks overhead.

"Stand by," Belbe shouted over the throb of the machinery. "I'm diverting power from the laboratory flowbots."

One by one, the automatic mechanisms in the lab shut down. Jars fell to the floor and smashed, spilling their unnatural contents. Horrible odors wafted through the room.

Ertai noticed the focal crystal had begun to glow darkly. It was an odd concept, a dark glow, but there was no better way to describe the presence of negative energy. He expected to see a beam emerge from the stone and touch him, but it never did. Instead, the glow got wider and darker, gradually blotting out everything else in sight.

Unlike the power he'd tapped to bring Predator in for a crash landing, Ertai discovered this dark energy, in its pure form, felt cold. His body felt flooded by ice, and the cold spread rapidly through his chest and down his legs. It did blot out the pain of his injuries, and for that he was grateful.

With a snap, the surge of power ceased. Ertai pushed up on one elbow and saw the laboratory was hip deep in mist. Each breath he exhaled made sparkling ice crystals in the air.

Belbe appeared, swimming out of the fog. She looked disheveled, her hair awry.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Wonderful." Ertai flexed his hands, formerly crumpled like a bundle of broken reeds. "I feel like new-no, better than new."

He hopped off the slab and patted himself all over. His burns were gone. His ribs were healed. Even the bruises from the beating Predator's sailors had given him were gone.

What about his mind?

He held up a finger on his right hand, and a tiny flame appeared at the tip. Ertai extended the next finger and made the little flame leap to it, and then the next finger, and so on. It was an elementary magical exercise, one he could do since he was a small child.

By the time the flame had jumped to his fourth finger, it flickered and turned orange, then red. It dropped down to his pinkie and became purple. When Ertai transferred the violet flicker to the thumb of his left hand, the tiny flame went jet black.

He stared at the black flame.

Belbe watched him. "Are you all right?"

Ertai snuffed the flame with his other hand. "It's nothing," he said. He'd never seen the finger flame change color before. He was suffused with dark energy, true, but he'd created a yellow flame and not willed it to change. That it did so by itself was disturbing.

Belbe gently pulled his hands apart. "Come, it's time you had a proper bath, clean clothes, and food."

She led him by the hand through the misty lab. On his way out, he saw two empty suits of armor standing near the door. The men inside, the two guards who'd brought him there, were gone.

"Where are the soldiers?" he said.

In answer to his own question, Ertai's foot snagged something soft. Behind the shelves was a five-foot-long gray slug, oozing a trail of iridescent slime across the floor. Another monster slug nudged at the base of one of the suits of armor.

"Perhaps I used too high a setting after all," Belbe said mildly.

The Skyshroud Expeditionary Force tramped down the long causeway from the Stronghold, their faces wrapped in scarves to keep out the swirling dust. The wind had picked up in the past few hours. A Hub reversal was nigh, and that always unsettled Rath's weather. The massive device atop the Stronghold periodically rotated itself to equalize the wear on its energy-focusing apparatus. When the Hub turned, rapidly changing winds scoured the surface of Rath.

Crovax raised another flowstone reviewing stand from which to watch his troops march out. He had a total of fifty companies, ten thousand men, and ten thousand moggs acting as porters, carrying supplies for a sixteen-day campaign. Two-thirds of his force was infantry, while the other thirty-five hundred men were Rathi cavalry. They rode mutant two-legged beasts called kerls, created by Volrath as cavalry mounts. It was a powerful force, far larger than any sent out by any previous evincar.

Soldiers marched down the causeway to the plain, passing the six corpses twirling in the Hub wind. Moggs had stripped the bodies of anything of value, leaving the dishonored officers clad only in rags. Confronted by this sobering display, the Skyshroud Expeditionary Force marched out in total silence.

Crovax fumed as the long column of men and moggs slogged by. The troops had no spirit. On Dominaria, an army left home singing, with pipes and drums playing martial tunes. The army of Rath was a dull, sullen force compared to the warriors Crovax remembered.

When half the column was past his reviewing stand, Crovax dissolved the platform and mounted his kerl. He took the reins from a mogg who'd held them patiently. Crovax spurred his mount, bowling over the mogg and sending him rolling in the dust.

In the vanguard of the army were the twelve condemned officers acting as scouts. Behind them rode Crovax's orderlies from the Corps of Sergeants. Each orderly had a percher on his shoulder. These were another of Volrath's creations-pigeon-sized flying creatures with leathery blue wings and flaring, trumpet-shaped mouths. Perchers understood simple commands and could repeat short messages verbatim. They flew back and forth over the army, relaying orders.

Before nightfall the scouts had reached the outpost of Chireef. This was a two-story blockhouse situated on the edge of a flowstone "sea", a basin consisting of miles and miles of flowstone frozen in motionless waves like the surface of an ocean. The garrison of Chireef stood ready to receive Crovax and his force.

Crovax and his aides galloped up to the blockhouse in a flurry of jingling arms and flapping banners. The commander of Chireef, Gunder il-Dal, was plainly stunned by the size of the army Crovax brought with him.

"My lord," he said. "Where are you going with so vast a force?"

"Where I will," Crovax replied curtly. "How are conditions between here and the Skyshroud Forest?"

"Quiet as the grave, my lord." Gunder il-Dal mopped his brow, pushing his helmet back to get to his generous forehead. "No rebel would dare get so close to the Stronghold."

"Yes, yes. The cavalry needs water for their mounts. After they've had their fill, let the moggs drink what they can." He reined his black-spotted beast around.

"Will you be staying the night, gracious lord? I can offer what accommodation our humble outpost affords."

"The column marches all night," Crovax replied. "If in two days' time any rebels come your way, I want you to stop them. They'll be fleeing their defeat, and I don't want any to escape."

Gunder looked puzzled. "Defeat, my lord?"

"Yes, the defeat I shall inflict on them."

The first company of cavalry lined up by a row of spouts set high on the walls of the blockhouse. Crovax rode by and mentally commanded the valves to open. Out gushed fresh water from the blockhouse cisterns. Kerls pushed their fleshy faces into stone troughs and lapped the cascading water with their flat black tongues. Only yards away, thirsty moggs, weighed down by almost two hundred pounds of supplies each, licked dry lips and anxiously awaited their turn at the troughs.

Gunder slowly walked down the line of his troops, eyeing them carefully. Chireef had only a normal garrison of fortyeight soldiers. Fifty-five were mustered on the plain, and that made Gunder nervous. Suppose someone noticed?

Crovax and his leading elements swept on, and Gunder ordered his men back inside. Once the metal door was closed and barred, he pulled off his helmet and poured a pitcher of cold water over his profusely sweating head.

"Wine!" he shouted. "Can someone find me wine?"

"What's the matter?" asked Eladamri, emerging from the shadows. "You should be pleased, Darsett. You've met this new warlord Crovax face to face, and he didn't see through you or your men."

Darsett and his Dal followers shed their helmets and heaved a collective sigh of relief. Eladamri's raiders had taken Chireef by stealth only hours before. They were about to set fire to the place when they spotted the huge dust cloud raised by Crovax's oncoming army. Rather than be caught in the open by a vastly superior force, Eladamri kept his warriors inside and sent Darsett out disguised as the late commander of the outpost.

"What do we do now?" Darsett said, peeking through an arrow slit to spy on the troops passing by outside.

"Wait until they're gone," said Eladamri. "Then we'll proceed as planned."

Gallan, who had wrapped his elven hair and ears with a scarf to pose as a Dal soldier, said anxiously, "We know where they're going, Eladamri!"

The elf leader nodded. His snakehide armor was freckled with blood. He dipped a rag in an open barrel of water and dabbed at the stains.

"Crovax is heading for the forest. He thinks he can destroy us by destroying our homes," he said calmly.

"Are we going to let him?" Gallan demanded.

"He's welcome to try. Evincars as far back as my grandfather's day have tried to impose their rule on us. This Crovax seems no wiser than they. In fact, so far he shows less wit than the departed Volrath. Our late evincar used infiltrators and the airship to hunt us down. His tactics were very dangerous, as our losses in the past year show." He paused in his scrubbing. "Even my daughter wasn't safe in my own house, but we have little to fear from a big, blundering mass like that. Where they go, we'll fade away, and when they're tired and low on food and water, we'll strike."

He stooped to pick up Gunder il-Dal's helmet, tossed on the floor by the nervous Darsett. Upon seeing the grim visage of Volrath on the brow of the helmet, Eladamri's face darkened with implacable hatred.