The Barther Family (1)

An unusually chill morning.

A dusky blue light hung over the streets, and the dew that had settled through the night had not yet had time to burn off. Metal knocked against metal, and beneath it ran the talk of a good many voices.

Some two hundred armed mercenaries, and some five hundred of Siltrein’s regular army.

For a civil war inside one small domain, was that not far too great a number? And yet. Was it not, rather, far too few? Could we fight a mage at all with no more than this?

That thought was written on the faces of everyone gathered in Siltrein’s square.

“…”

The raw reek of metal rode in on the damp of the dawn and spread.

The smell of a battlefield. Familiar by now, and sickening for being familiar, it had come to this place again today without fail.

From far off came hoofbeats. The administrator, armored like everyone else, appeared in the square with soldiers in attendance.

“Do not be afraid!”

The administrator’s speech began.

Siltrein’s revolt against Esmartin was, on paper, the administrator’s own arbitrary doing. We knew who the real traitor standing behind them was, and so did the other side.

Rodrik Barther was nowhere in sight. By now he would be wedged in somewhere among the mercenaries, watching the administrator rattle on and on.

He is not an easy man to read. On the surface he cries for the liberation of Erbern and the purge of the viscount’s house, but whether that was his real aim was not a thing I could say for certain. If Siltrein’s treason succeeds and the viscount’s house is purged, then is not the one who stands to gain most Rodrik Barther, the man who becomes the new lord of Erbern?

There is no result in this world without a cause.

“…We will take back our own domain!”

Amid a great many stray thoughts and misgivings, the administrator’s speech came to an end.

Siltrein’s walls swung slowly open. A cold wind came in from somewhere.

For soldiers marching out to a battle, there were no women shedding tears, no parents praying for a safe return. Morale could not run high in men who had, quite literally, raised the flag of treason. Still less when the whole thing had begun in the scheming of one man with a dream of an ideal.

The column moved slowly, bending gradually south, or more precisely, southwest, angled a touch further toward the west. The river the dam had been raised on lay in that direction.

The soldiers do not know the details of how any of this came about. They do not know why Siltrein is safe from the undead, or how the army could abandon the work it exists to do, so perhaps it was only natural that morale should be at rock bottom.

Rodrik Barther, uneasy about it, had wanted Lilian’s authority made known to them, but she refused and so did I, and nothing came of it. Soldiers who had left family behind in the city might have broken from the column at any moment out of that unease, and it would not have been strange if they had. No such thing happened.

Every commander who could in practice have led them back had been assassinated by my hand.

Is that not the sort of thing a human being is, to begin with? If no one steps out first, no one steps out at all. The soldiers might be uneasy, but so far at least, nobody was giving the unease a voice.

“There’s a pack of undead!”

The head of the column had run into undead. Lilian’s authority guards the city; it does not guard soldiers, so in effect this had been settled in advance. There was no need for me, standing at the rear, to step forward.

The march halted, and all but the men swinging spears and blades scanned every direction, on guard against more undead.

Thick fog breeds fear. What on earth is lurking out beyond that gray? Will some corpse that walks not come bursting out of it this very moment and throw itself at us?

Around the time someone’s terrified breathing was turning steadily rougher.

“Moving out again!”

The word came from the front, which had dealt with the undead, and the march resumed. Apart from that one pack, nothing much happened before we reached the dam.

We walked along the course of the river to reach it, and the dam was a small, crude thing. Men with ropes tied about their waists lowered themselves into the running water, so the current would not sweep them off when it swelled all at once at the breaking. They set to prying loose the planks laid across the top. It was crude work, and the gap the water escaped through widened in no time at all.

— RRRUMBLE!

Before long, with a great noise, the dam gave way. The water that had stood penned up behind it tore off in a rush, like a bull charging in a rage.

There is no expecting this water to bring Esmartin down. At the very most it was the signal flare of a war, meant to throw the city into confusion and slow its answer to the surprise attack.

“Pull them up, quickly!”

The soldiers who had gone into the water were hauled out, and the column started moving at once. From here on it was a war of speed. We have to strike Esmartin before it can deal with the flooding river.

The nightmare of a week ago plays itself out again in Esmartin. The day Siltrein went under a record downpour and people went missing. Esmartin’s circumstances would have been much the same. People have not yet forgotten the terror of rising water.

After the river had run away downstream, and time had passed.

The march went on into the afternoon. The plain, filled with gray, took back a little of its light from the sun. We had met undead a number of times along the way, but so far not one soldier had been gravely wounded.

At this rate, might there not be hope after all? Does even the bright sunlight not seem to be showing us our future, the one in which we come back safe?

It was just as that mood was spreading, little by little, among the soldiers.

Abruptly the head of the column stopped.

It was not like the moments when undead turned up, as they always did. Afternoon had come, the fog had thinned, and this was open plain. Had there been undead, we would have seen them coming.

Something in the air was not ordinary, so I pushed through the press of bodies and worked my way forward. Bit by bit the figures standing at the head of the column came into view.

The administrator and a few bodyguards. And beside them, Rodrik and the mercenaries?

Going further still, I saw an old man standing far off, past the end of our own column.

An old man, standing in the very middle of the Erbern plateau. And alone, at that.

Even a newborn infant could have grasped that he was no ordinary figure. All the more so when Rodrik Barther, of all men, had gone this tense.

“Morten Barther! Your filthy, hideous crimes end as of today!”

Morten Barther. Was he not Rodrik Barther’s father, and the lord of Erbern?

…So we were too late.

Scale aside, there is a force standing there waiting for us. That meant our strategy of flooding the river, sowing confusion, and only then striking had failed. Their response is abnormally fast. In an ordinary city it would have been something to rack their brains over for a day at the least.

“So the son who left home has come back.”

From that distance his voice came through as vividly as if he stood speaking beside us. He had carried his voice on magical power and sent it across.

“Have you thrown Siltrein away? I went to the trouble of leaving it in your hands, and you have dragged out every last soldier.”
“Has the old man gone senile? You’re spouting nonsense.”
“I even came out to meet you, and this is how coldly you treat me. Raise your brats and there’s not a bit of use in it.”

An obvious ploy.

He means to expose Tairen Beloa’s identity and throw the soldiers into confusion. An obvious ploy, and being obvious only made it harder to answer. The seed of suspicion had already been sown, and it was only a matter of time before the soldiers’ distrust grew.

“Nonsense not even worth hearing out. Surrender now and I’ll spare your life.”

Morten Barther is a mage. Mages work as many different miracles as there are mages, but one thing bound every one of them together.

Their magic is a natural disaster.

“Spare me? Don’t you all know it already, you and them both? The one doing the sparing is me.”

The strong have no need to bend their opinion before the weak, which was why the popular image of a mage had settled into that of a stiff-necked old man.

“You bluster too much. Did you think I wouldn’t know you burned through your magical power dealing with the river coming down on you?”
“It was hard labor. You used your head rather well.”
“Baring a weakness to the enemy army. You haven’t even got the basics down.”
“Well, now. Did that sound like a weakness to you?”

The wind blew. It came steeped in a chill and in a foreboding as deep as the one that had swept Siltrein’s square. No, past any comparison with that at all.

Morten Barther merely stood there, not moving.

“Rodrik. A weakness is a thing that puts me at a disadvantage, is it not?”

One mercenary in front of me was so tense that their whole body was shaking. Not good. A little tension helps in a fight, but shaking that badly does nothing but trip a man up. I took hold of their shoulder to check on them.

“As for that scrap of magical power—”

At the same moment, their neck turned round at a grotesque angle.

“—however far it runs down, it will never become a weakness.”

— KRAAAAA!

“Uwaaaaaah! S-save me!”

“Agh! Aaagh!”

All through the column, beast-cries and soldiers’ screams broke out everywhere at once. A formation of seven hundred came apart entirely in no more than an instant.

I shoved down the mercenary that came at me with its neck snapped, and cut its throat with my sword to end its breathing.

“Everyone scatter!”

The order the administrator threw out in a fluster did not carry far. The bodyguards who had been standing around them had all turned undead. The horse’s belly was torn open and its entrails spilled out, and the administrator went down from the saddle. A scream came, but it too was soon buried under countless other screams.

There had been no sign, no clue of any kind. A comrade standing at a man’s side until seconds before turned undead and tore the flesh off him.

…Of all things, the filthiest kind there is.

If it had been honest magic, a fireball or the like, Rodrik Barther would have blocked it somehow or other. As things stood, there was no way left but to put down every one of them that had turned.

“Anyone who has not turned undead, kill the undead! Do not lose your heads! The undead are still few!”

Far off I could see Rodrik Barther weaving between the soldiers. With undead and soldiers tangled together, he seemed to have taken up a sword instead of magic. The mercenaries would come back to themselves soon enough at the sight of their hero, Tairen Beloa.

The problem is the regular army.

Most of them had still not come out of the shock of watching a comrade eat a human being. I went in among them and swept away, one after another, whatever undead had fastened onto a soldier.

So there is magic even I am seeing for the first time.

The living cannot become undead. A man has to be dead first, does he not, before he can be raised again? But Morten Barther had turned living human beings straight into undead, with no process in between at all.

There was no knowing how many of the seven hundred had turned, so I could not gauge the power of the magic exactly. Going by that fact alone, though, no mage alive surpassed him in a large-scale battle.

“Hiiiik!”

One of the undead, its neck run through by a spear, was dragging at the leg of a soldier crawling along the ground. I put a foot on its back, took hold of the shaft jutting out of it, and caught the thing by the head with my other hand.

— GRRRK!

I put my strength into it and pulled the head loose, and only then did the thing stop moving.

“Rather than stabbing with a spear, cut the neck with a sword. They keep moving as long as the head doesn’t come off.”
“Ah, y-yes. Yes.”

The soldier called me back as I made to move on.

“Um, er, I don’t have a sword.”
“Aren’t there swords lying all over in front of you?”

I pried the sword loose from the hand of a slumped undead corpse and threw it to the soldier.