Chapter Forty-Six

  Dominic was right. The road continued to be as it was, quiet, peaceful, his indiscretion unremarked upon by any of the soldiers who met them at various checkpoints. But Cenna nonetheless kept his hand closed and ready on his spear. Gifted as he was, the Cardinal of Wind was no Godkin, and the Black Scripture Captain’s stern warning was not lost on him.

  ‘I feel more like a jailer than a bodyguard.’ Cenna kept that grumble in his head, as he had no doubt that if Dominic heard it, the fool would initiate combat again just to prove he could do as he liked. But the words Dominic gave to him were not forgotten.

  ‘There are ways to combat both.’ The words echoed in the Captain’s head. ‘What does that mean? What ways?’ Cenna tried to think of every weapon in their arsenal, and only one came to mind. ‘Downfall of Castle and Country… it worked on that vampire, not that it saved Lady Kaire. But even so… what if it fails?’

  That got under Cenna’s skin, not even that the Cardinal was already considering a war, but that he seemed so smugly certain that his country could and would win, and not just win, but easily. ‘Are there other weapons besides that one? Ones we haven’t used before? Zesshi would know…’ Cenna had to suppress his frustration.

  The horses were slowed for the moment and he could enjoy the scenery, the wide open air, the endless horizon, the forests were almost boundless in this part of the Draconic Kingdom. In a way, it reminded him of his favorite hidden hunts within the Abelion Hills, where he would sneak away on his vacations to take naps beneath the Peace Trees and chew wild sweetbark.

  In places like this, it was easy to forget that war even existed at all.

  Most of the time.

  Dominic ruined that. Out of all the Cardinals, this was the only one Cenna held in genuine contempt. War hungry and with a near fetish for violence, a seeming addiction to his own anger that would make the worst black dust user look sober and sound of mind, the Cardinal of Wind revealed something else that Cenna did not realize.

  ‘If he feels as he does about the Draconic Queen, and she’s mostly human, what does he really think of Zesshi Zetsumei?’ Cenna asked himself, and thought of the heterochromatic half-elf. The question was rhetorical, and he knew it.

  ‘He’s ready to go to war against a centuries old ally, and when he feels safe, expressing disgust for her as a mixed breed. What will happen to Zesshi when he feels we no longer need her…?’ That rubbed the Captain raw.

  She was a fixture in the Black Scripture, every single one of them had been thrown around like ragdolls by her own hands, up to and including Cardinal Raymond, the only human she would take orders from. Stowed away in the treasury as a secret weapon in her own right, now for the first time he wondered, ‘Is it also because of what she is, how she was born?’

  The girl was overwhelmingly powerful, but also shockingly naive, having no interest in anything but killing her father, having strong children, and occasionally drilling into the Black Scripture members thick skulls that they are not as strong as they think.

  As they crested the hill, the capital finally came into view, it wasn’t as large as Kami Miyako, but it was still a mighty example of human potential which had long outgrown its oldest walls. A centuries old Kingdom built by human hands, even if ruled by someone bearing dragon’s blood. Even Dominic managed to smile when he saw it.

  The walls were of great age, and the castle even moreso, built on ruins that were from far more mythic times, the city was a bustling place with travelers streaming in and out of the distant gates. But it also highlighted something else, something that dawned slower on Dominic’s mind than Cenna’s.

  ‘Nobody is traveling ‘west’. They’re going east. Putting themselves ‘closer’ to the beastmen rather than farther away.’ Cenna swiftly began to conduct a ‘field count’ in which he estimated numbers and likely materials based on the known road dimensions and the density of traffic. ‘Count forty-one wagons, and more importantly they’re in clusters, so these are different organized groups…’ Cenna focused more on what supplies he could see, it included hoes, mattocks, sacks of seeds, and other various vital tools of a farming community. But it was missing something else.

  “Where are their soldiers?” Dominic asked. “Where are their soldiers?!’ He asked again, stronger, almost demanding an answer.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Cenna felt a little smile spread across his lips. There was only one answer.

  “They don’t have any, they don’t need them.” The Captain said and straightened up a little on his horse.

  “Don’t need them?” Dominic asked and glanced at Cenna with a mix of horror and relief on his own face.

  “They won. The beastmen are completely, totally, broken. Whatever this ‘Game Changer’ or whatever he calls himself, has done… it’s over. They don’t need an escort of soldiers when there’s nobody to fight. I wonder if there are any beastmen left?” Cenna pondered, the prospect of their extermination was an idle curiosity, he couldn’t find it in himself to care that the devourers of humanity might no longer exist, they were in his mind, a pestilence. Clever, yes. Intelligent, also yes. But all that meant was that they were a clever and intelligent pestilence.

  The Beastman Kingdom was half again the size of the Draconic Kingdom, for one figure to have brought that to heel… “Could they be just thinning out their numbers?” Dominic asked.

  “If they were doing that, I doubt they’d be sending out grain, animals, or other things they could use here.” Cenna observed. “They won. They had to have.”

  “No. I need to hear it for myself. I have to, nothing else will do.” Dominic snarled.

  “Fine,” Cenna shrugged, “but you raise that sword again and my spear won’t save you. Keep on your best behavior.”

  Dominic spat into the dirt between their horses, said nothing, and then spurred his mount forward.

  Cenna clenched the reins tight in his hand, rolled his eyes, and followed swiftly after the Cardinal of Wind, and heading directly toward the city that may well be the birthplace of a whole new human empire.

  Torald poked at the spot on his armor where the sword penetrated, the fact that the spot was there was a bother, no, worse, ‘It’s a blemish.’ He thought. Like all knights, he was proud of his equipment as much as he was of his weaponlike body. The scar over his heart would require some explanation later, but then again, it was a necessary sacrifice. It was far from his first time surviving mortal wounds. ‘I’ll be a while trying to regain my old strength… but as long as I don’t have to worry about a war in the near future…’ As he looked in the direction of the Slane Theocracy though, he doubted his own thoughts.

  And he thought of all those refugees, ‘How many traveled so far to escape, only to find they couldn’t get over the border without who knew what, happening to them…’ The area was thick with refugees, bandits, and refugees turned bandit just to survive. ‘We’ll need a general amnesty just to settle things down.’

  That thought was in its own way as unpalatable as having beastmen neighbors again. A general amnesty would mean that those who took lives, goods, traded in the sale of peasants and even young children, as Cerebrate was known to have benefited from, would just go back to their normal lives.

  ‘Can we go back to that, to life… just like nothing ever happened?’ Torald wondered about that a lot more than he wondered about the dangers of the nation that had just stabbed him in the heart only a few days before. Time and again they’d done exactly that… the beastmen would raid, take some villages, many would flee, and the storm would pass.

  Then the survivors would return home, fix the doors on their otherwise intact homes, and the cities would round up landless vagrants and send them to farm villages to replace the dead.

  Life would go on.

  ‘But this is different.’ Torald thought as he watched the outpost come into view, its spiked wooden wall wasn’t worth much but buying time, but as an installation it was a useful place to store goods, shelter travelers, and process the endless paperwork that kept the whole kingdom going.

  The evident attempt at erasing their entire kingdom had cost half the population, with another one third worth being refugees and survivors, and who knew how many carried off into the lands of the beastmen to whatever horrific fate befell those unfortunates.

  ‘Life going on’ would mean a generation of replacements, it would be an entire population having lived through near extermination, it would mean rebuilding whole cities with stones stained with the blood of the dead. In a way, Torald envied the men-at-arms who died so recently, even if they were strangers to him, he could read their haunted expressions.

  He’d seen it before on those who ventured too close to beastmen occupied cities and could hear and smell the horrific feasts of beastmen consuming the men, women, and children that had seen the walls meant to protect them, become cages of stone and an inescapable hell.

  ‘Nobody even knows how to mourn anymore…’ He closed his eyes and shook his head, then as he rode his horse through the gate to go requisition a message scroll and inform the Queen of the attack on his person he thought, ‘On the other hand, if the Slane Theocracy does make a fight over our choice of Emperor… is there any people in the world as accustomed to the hardship of war as we are?’

  None came to mind, and by the time he hitched his horse up outside the little wooden building with the Draconic Kingdom’s insignia painted on the center of the door, he felt… pretty good.