To my right, Sondra streaked after one group, golden hair streaming, looking like a lioness running down her hapless prey. Her warriors followed, ululating their terrible glee. If the soldiers surrendered in time, they might be given a chance. A single opportunity to convert.
I took a moment to assess the positions of my people and theirs. Calling out the orders, the shout grating painfully in my throat, I sent units to run down the soldiers fleeing for the woods. The ones hoping for protection of the city walls would be taken care of soon enough. They’d neatly trapped themselves for us.
The wind shifted, bringing the tang of vurgsten in billows of sulfurous yellow, thick with the grit of exploded rock. My scarred lungs spasmed at the searing contact. I hated the accursed stuff. And not only for the way it made my chest tighten and my lungs labor to draw air. Even after all these months out of the mines, the smell reminded me of slow suffocation in the close tunnels, body aching in every joint from the hard labor. Still, I made myself inhale it, sucking in its foulness as if breathing the sweetest of perfumes, letting it fuel my rage and resolve.
After all, how delicious that we used the emperor’s vurgsten—his own secret weapon that he’d nearly killed us to mine for him—to fight the war to destroy him forever. He who controls vurgsten controls the empire. Not one of the wizard’s mystical bits of obscure advice, but my own hard-won insight.
Anure had controlled us with his vile rock. Now we’d destroy him with it. Nothing like taking the arrow meant for you and sending it back on your assassin. Anure had orchestrated his own demise. The false emperor made me into his slave and his enemy when I was only a child. He bestowed on me the brutal training that forged my body into the weapon that would bring down the empire. He’d forced us all to mine the toxic rocks, thinking to use and discard the children of the nobles he’d crushed. But we were a tool that turned in Anure’s hand. We became his doom.
Another boom, rolling out and thundering back. Right on schedule. The walls should be down now. I climbed a small hill, legs pumping with strain after battling since before dawn, and squinted into the lowering sun that glanced off the sea beyond Keiost. The walled city stood in silhouette, dark and stolid amid the green coastal marshes. Its famed golden tower gleamed against the sky. As poetic in reality as in the songs and paintings, the Tower of Simitthu speared like a ray of sunlight beaming out of the squat stone castle beneath it.
Most of the city hid behind its high walls, once a nearly perfect circle. But there, on one side, the line broke, the neat architecture crumbling as if impacted by a giant rock hammer swung by Sawehl Himself. Not at the well-defended, grand entrance, but on the poor side. The Slave Gate.
One more way to use imperial blindness against them.
A third boom, and the rest of the wall fell. Where the gate had been, a hole gaped as wide as a toothless mouth. Led by General Kara, our reserve army rose from the mudflats, lethal weeds sprouting from the tall grasses, and poured through the opening to take the city. Below me, the soldiers our battalions had drawn away from the city’s defense—the ones who hadn’t already fled to the woods in terror—turned in response to the shouted commands of their leaders. They broke into a run, hurrying to defend walls that were no longer theirs.
Yes, the vurgsten fumes smelled sweet, indeed. I inhaled, savoring the burn.
Then I raised my hammer for all to see, calling the charge to chase the hapless troops. With a roar, my army surged past, racing for the final kill. The imperial forces in front of the main gates moved, but sluggishly. Too late. They tried to cross the bridge over the brackish moat, to escape the lethal pincer we brought down on them. Loosing the last chains on my restraint, I charged downhill, leading all those we’d recruited to share in vengeance to smash the city’s defenders. We became the hammer that crushed the soldiers, pinning them between their erstwhile servants and the no-longer-friendly walls.
I spotted my own people on the parapets, dropping vurgsten charges on the soldiers below. Those too close to the explosions died outright, while those who tried to flee found themselves mired in the moat embedded with more vurgsten planted with subtlety in the quiet of the nights before.
Our curse and cure in one, the vurgsten rocks enabled us to destroy the imperial forces wherever they posed any challenge. We’d started small, as we’d been few—but far from weak. Toughened by years of hard labor and emptied of compassion, we conquered and took over first one deteriorating estate. Then another. After that we conquered poor villages, then barely more prosperous towns, one by one. Guile in one hand, might in the other, we created our own empire of revenge.
In truth, it had been easier than I’d ever expected. Far more than the initial rebellion and escape. Doing that had been ascending the mountain, and we’d fully expected to die in the effort. After that, each new target had been a risk, and we’d been just as glad to perish. Better to die free than live in prison. No one had been more surprised than I that we kept winning.
Now we hurtled downhill, an avalanche of rage and revenge that none could slow, much less halt. Not that we met many obstacles worth the name anymore.
In his confidence—his megalomaniacal complaisance—Anure had let his forces in the outlying countryside thin to the point of fragility amid the broken scattering of the kingdoms he’d consumed and virtually discarded once he bled them dry. In his paranoia, he refused to stock them with vurgsten, hoarding it all for himself at his citadel in Yekpehr. Complacent and greedy, he cared only for the goods his vassals tithed. In that forgetting, he’d made yet another mistake.
A man who took loyalty, who manipulated, tricked, and forced it from people, had acquired a worthless commodity indeed. People’s memories were short for being intimidated, and long on the bitterness from the horrors of conquest. Even the imperial soldiers had little to motivate them. Most of those soldiers—often conscripts to begin with—had been exiled for poor attitudes or worse performance, then also forgotten. Corrupt, incompetent, or disloyal, they either threw in with the rebels or died at the hands of those they’d brutalized.
Before I could count them, my group grew from less than a dozen desperate escaped fugitives to a small, committed army. Even the greater defenses at the minor seaports of Esaq, Irst, and Hertaq fell quickly to our determination and the judicious use of vurgsten. Once I possessed a navy of fishing vessels and sailors more than willing to try for bigger fish, I figured it was time to do something truly ambitious.
And lo! There fell the walls of Keiost, the golden city by the sea, struck down by our hands. The imperial governor for this entire region would be squatting somewhere inside, a tender morsel to be plucked from the bones. He who controls vurgsten controls the empire. I sent a prayer to my father’s spirit, the victory missing only his presence. Vurgsten killed him and now became my own weapon.
How he’d laugh at that. All I could do, however, was send his restless spirit more blood. More men to die for all those of lost and forgotten Oriel who’d followed their king to their doom.
I swung the rock hammer, mining more of Anure’s men to pay for all the horrors they’d wrought. The wolf prince had grown up and broken his chains, thirsty for vengeance. One day it would be Anure himself, and then it would be enough.
As much as anything ever could be.