Oathbreaker ch. 10.15 - Calerus (Patreon)

I often wonder if I am a fool.

No, that is prevarication. I am a fool, or at least I can be. I spent years as the chosen instrument of the spirits of Heavensreach, who were the closest things I’d ever known to gods. I was their executioner, their axeman, their Headsman, charged with delivering sentences of death to those guilty of breaking the Heir of Onsolem’s laws. I was never passionate about this work. At first it was a penance, or even a purgatory, one I chose because I felt deserving of such an inglorious labor. It wasn’t until I’d already taken a score or more heads at the behest of the Choir that I began to see clear enough through my own misery to question their motives. They were forbidden from taking mortal lives, so they used me to kill instead, a hypocrisy that would taste ever more bitter over time.

Yet who was I to know better? A red-handed soldier who’d made his name serving a red-handed queen in a time of war and strife. My own father thought I was a useful oaf from the time I’d grown big enough to pick up a sword, and part of me always believed that as well. But I’ve come to realize that simply accepting the superiority and righteousness of those you deem wiser while you unquestioningly carry out their will is a coward’s path. At best it makes you a useful dupe, and at worst a cog in a monstrous machine.

I will always love Rosanna and view her as my queen, the woman and monarch who made me a knight, but I will never blindly serve her again. I’ve seen too much of the world and know too many dark truths to be the devoted sword, even as I do not trust the Choir enough to ever become the implacable weapon it meant to make me.

But it’s not easy, listening to one’s own heart over the voices of monarchs and angels. Angels, like kings, can speak hard truth when it serves them to do so.

Every time I make a choice — and it is always my choice — to take or spare a life, I question it. There are times I’ve killed to survive or protect someone else, but I never forget that I placed myself in that position, that I chose to live by the sword. I don’t remember every life I’ve taken, and that in itself weighs on me sometimes, how easy it is to kill. When I take my weapon up, the fact that I may smear it with the gore of another living being is ever in my thoughts. It’s the same when I do not kill, and accept the fact that mercy itself might lead to more evil.

It’s easy to say that the wrong choice was made in hindsight. Time is always moving forward, save for in my own restless thoughts, where it fragments into moments and choices. I live them all the time, those fragments. Almost every time I dream, I remember driving a sword through the heart of the woman I loved. She looked like a monster at the time, and her claws were searing their shape into my skin, and yet every day since I have wondered.

Did I make the wrong choice?

Would it have been better to be a demon’s pet than an angel’s weapon?

That question had sat with me for so long, subconscious, a possibility I’d not allowed myself to ponder. I’d explored the idea with Catrin, albeit reluctantly, even as I’d allowed her to indulge her more monstrous appetites on my Alder-strengthened body. We were both using each other in our own ways, though I like to believe that the affection we shared was real and I regret how things ended between us.

In both cases, I was left with what ifs and wondering. And I’d often wondered, and wondered again as I approached the chamber where he waited, if I’d made the right choice in sparing Calerus Vyke.

Though he’d surrendered to the Emperor after Issachar’s raid, Calerus was still viewed across the Accorded Realms as the accursed son of the mad Hasur Vyke, Lord of the Recusants. He was heir to that legacy, and both feared and abhorred for it.

No wonder then that, even wounded and in obvious desperation, he’d been sequestered into one of the most abandoned and easily sealed portions of the palace and placed under heavy guard.

It was, I realized, the very same wing that I’d found Darsus in when he’d been taken by his ghoul hunger. No servants or guests slept in these dilapidated halls, and my echoing steps were answered only by the susurrous murmurs of old ghosts. They gathered along the seams of the walls like insects or rats, tailing me, drawn by the warmth they sensed hidden beneath my skin. They would obey my will, so long as I offered either some of my own spiritual sustenance or the blood of an enemy in recompense. I hoped that would not be necessary.

The guards at the door shuffled in discomfort as I approached. I didn’t wear my red cloak or black armor, but they felt the supernatural cold that surrounded me, and the more magically sensitive could sense the liquid quality to the shadows that I passed.

“Is he awake?” I asked them. There were four, all heavily armored palace veterans.

“We think so, Ser. He’s been talking to himself.” The sergeant was a serious woman in her early thirties, with the elegant height and dark hair almost ubiquitous in Karlesians. All of the guards wore the black-and-white checkered cotes favored by Silvering regulars, and each had elfstones hung from their belts. The rocks were imbued with phantasms they could hurl or rub into their weaponry. Rosanna wasn’t taking chances.

“Talking to himself?” I frowned and stepped close to the door to listen. There was a voice inside, muffled by the thick door. It spoke in a ceaseless, almost manic torrent, too fast and low for me to tell what was being said.

I opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind me and leaving the guards in the hall. The room was spacious and clean, probably given a sweep by the servants before its current occupant had been interred within. There was a bed and a desk, some other luxuries, and a small window too narrow for even a child to fit through.

Calerus sat on the bed. He faced the window, dressed only in a shirt and simple leggings. His armor and weapons had been taken from him when he’d been brought into the palace. Clean and shorn of his accessories, he looked less like the ghoulish wastrel I’d seen on the street the night before. He was still prematurely aged, with gray in his brown hair and an unhealthy pallor to his skin, but I could better see the youth I’d met in Garihelm.

He looked at me as the door shut, bracing his hands on his knees as he turned from the window. It was dusk outside, the hint of sky tinted red and fast darkening. The room only contained a single lamp, mundane instead of the alchecraft lights popular in the northern realms in recent years. The shadows were deep and oppressive.

“And here you are,” Calerus said in his rasping, throat-sore voice. “My judge.”

I paced a moment before I replied. The hearth had been stacked with fresh wood, but Calerus hadn’t bothered to light it. The room was cold. I knelt by the fireplace, putting my back to the king.

“I’m not your judge,” I said as I reached out and laid my hand on the logs. “In these walls, that’s Rosanna Silvering. You are presently her guest.”

I sent a surge of will through my fingertips and set the wood in the fireplace ablaze. The flash of light started pale gold, but darkened to yellow and red as auratic power converted to simple heat. I recalled a conversation between Lias and I from a lifetime ago, and felt a smile tug at the corner of my lip.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

It’s just fire, I’d said.

Lias had scoffed. Even now, with the magics of immortals burning in your blood, you play the simpleton. Fine, I’ll indulge you. That light you’re summoning isn’t light — it isn’t real. It’s the manifestation of an idea, an echo of the Hyperfabric.

The hyper what now?

Never mind. What you’re doing is tricking reality into accepting a new paradigm. You’ve just used your soul — something that should otherwise be intangible and immaterial — to create the idea of fire, its impression. Our material universe senses the intrusion and quenches it almost immediately, it’s why phantasms are usually so short-lived, but the fire now burning on those logs? That’s real, so the cosmos doesn’t correct it.

In that case, I’d asked, shouldn’t the logs have known my fire wasn’t real? Why did they start burning?

That’s just it! I said the falseness was corrected almost immediately. Your own belief, your will, made the ethereal fire materialize just long enough to create something real in our world — in this case, normal fire — before the correction occurred. It’s why wounds made by phantasm remain even after the spell itself has dematerialized. The consequences remain even if the vector that caused them does not. Do you see?

I think so.

It’s all about the longevity of the thing. The longer an auratic construct remains in our reality, the more our reality adjusts to its presence. Eventually, it might even become permanent, a perfect union of realities. I often wonder how much of our world was made this way, Al. How much of our existence did we dream into being?

I’d thought on that conversation many times since. I remembered it then, as I did the simplest thing my powers were capable of and made fire while Calerus chewed on my words.

“I see that I’m a prisoner,” Calerus said, and snickered. “Should have expected that.”

“You’re not exactly a prisoner.” I stood and turned to face him. “For one thing, we don’t know why you’re here. But no one really trusts you, Vyke, so we’re being cautious.”

He didn’t react to my words. His dark brown eyes held a mixture of weariness and amusement. The weakness that’d knocked him out the previous night hadn’t left him, and he slumped where he sat. He looked weak. Wasted. Once again the sight seemed familiar.

“You’ve been starving yourself,” I said. When his eyes widened in surprise, I explained, “I knew a dhampir once who would fast. She looked just like you after a few weeks without blood.”

He nodded slowly. “Catrin of Ergoth. Your lover. Hyperia used to talk about her, said she was twice as dangerous as you.”

“Your sister was well informed,” I noted.

He laughed again, a low throaty sound with little genuine amusement in it. He’d laughed that same way while watching Siriks Sontae blind the dwarf giant Nimryd at the Emperor’s tournament. “She was dedicated to winning. We studied all our enemies. I’ll admit, we didn’t expect you to be the one to foul us in the end. It was Yith who was obsessed with destroying you. Hyperia underestimated you, Headsman.” He fell quiet a moment, turning his attention back to the window and the setting sun. “At least it’s not a dungeon.”

“Why are you here, Calerus?”

I watched the fingers of his left hand curl into a fist. He was missing two of them, I realized, something I hadn’t noted while he’d been in armor. They looked like they’d been chewed off.

“Been wondering that myself since I woke up,” he admitted. “Been wondering a lot of things for a long time now. It used to be I’d let Hyperia do all the thinking for me. I preferred acting. Fighting is easy, but she was the one with all the plans and the schemes and the ambitions. But now she’s gone, and there’s an empty place where she used to be.”

“Are you here for revenge?” I asked.

Something ugly passed over his face, but it vanished quickly and his head bobbed. “Nah. Won’t deny I’ve thought about it, but you’re not the one who killed my twin, Headsman. That was her pet demon. I even warned her it might happen!”

It had been Catrin who’d killed Hyperia Vyke in the end. She’d done it because Yith had filled her head with fear and turned her undead body against itself, but it had still been her hand holding the knife. I didn’t feel the need to correct him.

I paced to stand more in his sightline. “If not revenge, then why? Why are Reynard’s demons after you? You’re a long ways from the Gastmount.”

Calerus grimaced. “Don’t call it that hideous name. My family’s home is known as the Peak of Lilies inside Talsyn.”

“That’s a pretty name for what it is,” I said without hiding my derision. “Your father turned it into a vault of horrors.”

Calerus looked like he might argue, but stopped himself and shrugged. “That’s true.”

“And you’re dodging me,” I added impatiently. “We had to fight off two demons last night, and took wounds for it. Right now, the only information we have is that you brought them here.”

The young king laced his fingers together. “Daobog and Shyora. Reynard’s right and left hands now.”

“You know them?” I asked sharply. That was not a point in his favor.

He nodded. “Shyora I met a handful of times when I was a boy, when Reynard was my father’s mentor. Daobog was recently released from a Briar prison in the deep south. He’s an old enemy of the elves. Smarter than he looks and strong. I guess I should be flattered those two were sent after me. I must have angered the old jester.”

He snickered again. Before I could say anything else, there was a knock at the door and it opened. Kaia came in, her hand on her sword and her eyes hard, and then Rosanna swept into the room. She wore a gown of black trimmed in silver, and her silver-and-gold crown of office over a veil.

Calerus did not stand. “Ah, here she is. I was wondering if I’d see you.”

“You are presently an unwelcome guest in my homeland,” Rosanna said with unmasked coldness. “Of course you would see me, Your Highness. I apologize that you have not been received with the proper ceremony.”

The King of Talsyn shrugged. “Well, since I’m not really dressed for the occasion, I’ll let it slide this time.”

Rosanna lifted her chin. Her regal panoply was almost an indictment of the other monarch’s drab appearance.

Calerus made a show of glancing around the room, even tilting his head to look past the Empress. “I don’t see the young prince clinging to your skirts. I do hope the boy’s well, under the circumstances.”

Rosanna’s eyes narrowed, the gemstone-green irises seeming to shine behind the lids. That was the only indication of the rage that I knew must be boiling underneath her stony countenance. Calerus had been there the night that Darsus was inflicted with the ghoul curse. While Issachar had commanded his Mistwalkers, the Vyke also suffered from the same curse. Both of us had wondered more than once, without ever speaking the idea aloud, whether it might have been Calerus who’d fed a fistful of tainted meat to my godson.

The Vyke made a show of shivering and held up his hands in mock surrender. “My, I just felt a chill! Let’s be civil, friends. I’m of no danger to any of you. You’ve taken my armaments and I could barely stand right now, let alone fight an Alder Knight.”

Why is he trying to get a rise out of us? I wondered. I knew Rosanna was thinking the same thing, judging by her calculating look. She moved to stand nearer to the window, while Kaia watched the Vyke closely and kept a hand on the ivory pommel of her sword.

“You’re scared,” I said aloud as I realized the truth. “You goad and mock when you’re nervous, don’t you?”

He glanced at me. His grin seemed a touch more forced. “Maybe. I’m not in friendly company right now, so you’ll have to forgive me my nerves.”

“I have forgiven you for very little,” Rosanna said with glacial calm as she peered through the window, refusing to look at the Vyke. “However, you are presently my ally and peer underneath the Accord of the Ardent Bough as well as a guest in my house. That status protects you until I have determined your motives.”

Calerus sniffed. “My father always thought Markham Forger was his greatest enemy. Hyperia thought you were the more likely mastermind behind the Bough. I’m still on the fence, but you seem a smart and scary lady, so I’ll be level with you. I’m not here to threaten your family or cause you any trouble. Only reason I came all the way to the Dales was because I heard a rumor that the Headsman was in the south, and I figured it was a good bet he’d be with his old mistress. Glad to know my instincts were right.”

“You’re here for me?” I asked.

“I am.” His eyes, a dull and listless brown that had always made me think of death and dead things, seemed to flash with the first sign of true vitality I’d seen in the ghoul. He leaned forward and bared large teeth the color of old ivory. “You owe a debt to me, Alken Hewer. The night my sister died and our father’s ambition with her, I threw my sword at your feet and took an oath from you. Do you remember that?”

The room suddenly seemed very cold despite the fire I’d lit. “I do remember,” I said in half a whisper.

Calerus stood straight then, his fatigue giving way before whatever this new energy was. He seemed animated now, fully awake and without any of the cruel humor with which he seemed to always treat the world. “I fled from Talsyn because the wizard, Reynard, has taken ownership the Peak of Lilies. You swore that you would exorcise my family’s castle of all its ghosts, Headsman. Now our enemy sits on the throne of my forefathers and I call on you to fulfill your oath.”

The young king spoke in a low, angry growl, almost seething. His face formed a rictus, his smile a death mask without an ounce of mirth. “You told me that you would banish all of my family’s demons. Well, time to follow through.”