Rodrik Barther (1)

I have to turn back for Siltrein this instant.

Someone stepped into my path as I hurried away, leaving Morten Barther behind me, his life cut short.

“Let’s settle down first, friend.”

Rodrik Barther.

The blood sliding down his sword was strikingly vivid.

“He was right. If Lashar made for Siltrein, it’s already all over.”

“…So you’re telling me not to go? If it isn’t too late, I stop him. If it is, I take the place back.”

“You can’t be thinking you could manage that alone.”
“Isn’t Siltrein your lot’s base? Set everything else aside, that place needs retaking. We turn the army around.”

My head is ringing and my sight is blurred. If Lilian had been here she would have laid a hand on my forehead.

“Information has no power at all until it’s known, friend.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“The soldiers still don’t know Siltrein has been attacked. Until they know it, Siltrein has not been attacked.”

However it had come about, we had killed the enemy’s head and got past the worst of it, so the soldiers’ morale would have risen. Tell them what was happening in Siltrein, on the other hand, and it would hit the floor.

“You mean to cover up the truth?”
“There are times when knowing is poison. That’s how it goes.”

Right now I needed to think coolly and carefully.

Instead of leading the soldiers back to Siltrein, hide the information altogether and press on to Esmartin as we are. Is that something that ought to take priority over retaking our own base? Is tearing the Barther viscount’s house up by the roots really better than defending a city, a home?

Reason it out coldly and the answer is yes. To win the war, we should march on Esmartin and not Siltrein.

I knew it too, in my head.

“I’ll go alone.”

But accepting a thing with the head is not the same as accepting it with the heart. Siltrein is in danger, and Lilian is in Siltrein.

On that alone I would turn back, a hundred times out of a hundred. Even if what waited in Esmartin were not the Barther viscount’s house but Lucseon himself.

“Alone, friend?”
“One man like me missing won’t matter. Strike Esmartin as you are.”
“I don’t think that will do.”
“Why not?”
“Because you aren’t just one more mercenary, friend. Most of the soldiers are already following you. If you vanish all at once they’ll know something is wrong straight away.”

Now that I had come to hold sway over the soldiers, I could not simply pull myself out as I pleased. Unless I stopped caring what became of the war and went back regardless, the only move open to me, however I turned it over, was to press on to Esmartin.

In the worst case I may end up fighting Rodrik right here.

I had meant to make for Siltrein prepared to stand against Rodrik Barther.

“You may not need to go at all, for that matter.”

“…What do you mean by that?”

“On the premise that Miss Lilian is in Siltrein and that Lashar is the one who invaded it, Siltrein cannot be anything but safe. In all of Erbern the only one who can put a mage down is Miss Lilian.”

Morten, who did not know Lilian existed, sent his eldest son to Siltrein. And precisely because of that, the city will be safe. The force he sent is one that Lilian, and Lilian alone, can stop.

“How far along is she?”
“Far enough that if she handled magical power instead of holy power, Esmartin would already have fallen by now.”

Would Lilian really be all right? There was nothing I could know from where I stood, but every circumstance said she was safe. I turned it over a long while.

One day she will have to face an enemy Rodrik’s brother does not begin to compare with. Perhaps now was the time to trust Lilian.

In the end I spoke, low.

“…I’ll put my trust in her.”

I swung the sword to shake the blood off and slid it back into its scabbard. I had decided to go on, and there was no time left to hesitate.

Rodrik went over to the soldiers, who had cleared away the last of the undead, and shouted.

“Soldiers, see where the head of that arrogant enemy lies! His wicked and malignant blood soaks the plateau, and his soul has fallen into the pit of hell! With our own hands we have cut the neck of Viscount Morten, who made rotting corpses of our comrades, our parents, our children! Later ages will remember this day, this plateau, and the heroes who won their freedom!”

The speech was impassioned, as though meant to move the soldiers’ hearts. Those who knew him all seemed to have no objection to his becoming commander in place of the dead administrator. The uneasy eyes that followed him, though, and the mood that had settled flat for all that we had won the battle, were another matter entirely.

By now they know it too. The man standing in front of them is, in the end, a monster.

A monster no different from Morten, lying over there to rot.

What makes the soldiers accept Rodrik as their commander is not the virtue and good name he has built up.

“Lift your heads, heroes! Lift your heads and see where the evil is! The time has come to drive out the enemy occupying our land! The time has come to take back Esmartin, and true freedom, for our children’s children!”

An overwhelming terror.

The soldiers simply do not dare resist the terror in front of them. So what chance is there of that impassioned speech reaching their ears?

Contrary to Rodrik’s expectation, the soldiers’ morale did not rise, for all that the news from Siltrein had been kept from them.

It merely did not hit the floor.

We cleared the corpses away roughly, took a short spell for repairs and a meal, and the slow column started up again. The soldiers moved their legs slowly, without even knowing what it was they were doing.

It was when we had come far enough that the dead soldiers and Morten’s body were out of sight.

“Rodrik Barther. What is it you want.”
“That’s an abrupt question to be asking now.”
“No, it’s a question I’m asking because it is now. I need to know what you’re after.”

Rodrik shut his mouth for a while at that. He did not open it again until we had walked far enough that the place was out of sight once more.

“I want to make Erbern a good place to live.”

“…If you were me, do you think you’d believe that?”

“There’s no bigger load of rubbish, is there.”

More time passed. The afternoon light had thinned and the air had turned a good deal colder by then.

“There was a woman, once, a long time ago.”

Rodrik’s tone was as level as when he had laid out his house’s disgrace.

“Really, honestly, there was nothing special about her.”

Yet somehow the end of his voice seemed to shake, far more than it had then.

“Somehow I ended up in love with her. And one day she said to me that Erbern was hell. That this place buried under fog, and I myself, were so revolting they had sickened her to the core. That was how she put it.”

The true shape of the resolve that had dragged Rodrik this far.

It was not a thirst for freedom to liberate Erbern, nor a sense of justice to strike down the viscount’s house, but simply love for one woman.

“Did you know? In the house of Barther the parents pick out a child’s spouse. Can you picture it? The moment you’re old enough to read, they push a relative at you and call it your marriage partner.”

As a rule the child of a mage cannot become a mage. A human born with an Arcane Heart is, when it comes down to it, no more than a freak of birth. And isn’t that what makes it possible to grant a position to every mage there is?

The Barther viscount’s house, though, had made incest hereditary and turned every one of its members into a freak of birth. At the price of being cut off from the world, it had become the one and only house to carry the line of the Arcane Heart unbroken.

“It’s a wonder the line hasn’t been wiped out before now.”
“Because to hide that fact they turned the whole domain into a field of corpses.”

History has not been without mad mages who tried to build their house’s power by the forbidden method of incest. Such mages generally met one of two ends. Put down by the neighbouring lords, or put down by the imperial house in the capital.

In the empire’s history, incest was sickening enough to make even the imperial house, notorious for how slow it was to stir, put together a punitive force.

“I had no wish to carry the house on by that filthy business.”
“So all of this comes down to being able to marry the one you love? Deflating.”
“There are few stories in this world that aren’t deflating.”

To make a world in which he could marry one woman, he had raised a war and killed his father. A reason I felt I could understand, and one that still left me uneasy somewhere I could not name.

The next day.

Perhaps because they had made camp once and taken a rest, the soldiers looked a good deal better than the day before. Only by comparison, of course. The faces were still the faces of dying men, and that had not changed.

At the end of a march that had stretched out a full day, the outline of Esmartin came dimly into view. The dawn dew on our armor had not yet dried, and the bright sun had not yet lifted its head fully over the horizon.

Spears and shields shifted in fresh grips, helm straps were hauled tight, and the ring of metal filled the broad plain. Each of them was killing time: some with hands shaking from tension, some with eyes narrowed against the sunlight, some yawning with fatigue, some despairing at a future they could not see through.

“How’s the body holding up, friend? You’re short of words at the best of times, so I can’t tell whether you’re nervous or not.”
“Well enough. The one this siege turns on is you, isn’t it?”
“It would be a lie to say I’m not nervous myself.”

In a battle where army meets army, whether a mage stands on the field decides who wins and who loses. More than that, we were the side attacking a wall, and even I could not easily picture the scale of the fighting Rodrik would have to carry.

“How many mages are there in Esmartin?”
“Several, but not one of them is worth counting as a fighting force. Most of the house has to keep the magic circle maintained.”

A magic the house of Barther has fed magical power to and maintained, generation after generation. That would be what the mist off the water covering Erbern really was.

A mage, I had heard long ago, ordinarily recites the incantation inwardly. When the magic has to be set off with magical power alone and no incantation, the mage draws something like a magic circle instead. Of course no two mages are the same breed, so there is no settling it as true of all of them.

I had even met a mage with magic circles carved into the body, working several spells at once.

No idea what that one is up to these days.

I did not have to look to know. Shut away somewhere, no doubt, studying some outlandish magic.

“Let’s get started.”

Once we had closed to a certain distance from the wall, Rodrik gave the signal and the archers nocked their arrows as one.

No grand speech, no shout to lift the morale. War simply begins in silence.

Esmartin’s troops had spotted us, and I could see them hurrying out through the gate. Rodrik watched them without expression and gave the order in a voice neither low nor loud.

“Loose.”

The arrows left the soldiers’ hands and embroidered the sky. A mass past counting blocked the light, and the plain went dark in an instant.

A moment later, and then.

— SHWAAAAK!

The rain of steel that had put even the storm to sleep began to fall on Esmartin.