Foundation of Smoke and Steel

Chapter 199

Kaelus RennThe note reached Kaelus eighteen minutes after the second lantern flick from the wall walk.

He had been standing his position along the south wall of the great hall, three paces back from the line of his wardens, far enough not to crowd them, close enough to read the room over their shoulders. The reception was working. He could see it working. A warrior commander at his level had learned to recognize the quality of a working room with the same accuracy he used for the battlefield. Kaelus wasn't exactly political, but even he could tell the young Master Zhou was something special. How old was the kid again? Twenty? Unbelievable.

A junior watch officer reached him at the side of the hall and made the small specific gesture that meant not urgent enough to interrupt, but pay attention. Kaelus turned without changing his posture.

The note was short. Solenn's replacement was overdue. The runner sent to verify had not returned. The change-of-watch sergeant had logged the gap with the careful annotation that meant follow up.

Kaelus read it twice.

Two missing men did not, by themselves, require an alarm. Two missing men on a night when the fortress was hosting a foreign delegation and an imperial delegation simultaneously did. Kaelus had spent the last three days arranging his perimeter for exactly the kind of opportunity an enemy with patience might exploit, and the kind of enemy who would take this opportunity was the kind who understood the value of going quiet first.

He folded the note.

"Send Davir up the rampart stair," he said to the junior officer. "Quiet. I don't want to cause an alarm if there's none to be caused. Tell him to find Solenn first and the runner second. If he finds either of them dead, I want to activate the Pack and let everybody know."

"Yes, Commander."

"And tell the lower position with the help of the Li, Zhou, and Wang cultivators to double-check the inner courtyard guards. Discreet. I want a confirmation direct within the next five minutes."

The officer left.

Kaelus turned back toward the room and let his face settle into the same neutral attention it had been wearing all evening. He waited on signaling his wardens. Letting everyone know what was happening, as of right now, would be too much. He needed to wait. The room was full of people watching for signals, and he would let them know when action was required.

He counted his wardens instead. Eight along the inner walls, six at the doors, two with Rowan in the upper gallery, two guarding the side corridor to the war room, the rest patrolling the walls with the contingent. The numbers held. Whatever was happening with Solenn was nowhere near the real festivities tonight. That was a good sign, for now.

He shifted his weight and watched the High Fang.

Grauth Vorlak had finished the strange Orcish exchange with Master Zhou ten minutes ago, and the room had settled around him in a way that was strongly reminiscent of when highly dangerous predators visited a watering hole. He couldn't understand why the Iron Tide was here making deals with the Empire. Even his own people, the Serans, trod lightly with the Imperial cultivators. They were the most numerous and the most versatile. The orcs were the most brutal, the Murai the most isolationist, the Serans the most structured, though their numbers were small enough that they could not really affect the larger populations. Theirs was a dying breed, unfortunately.

Still, for the life of him, he couldn't understand why the Iron Tide had gone out of their way to seek the Empire, and in such an aggressive fashion that it had almost started a full-scale conflict, when, apparently, their only goal was to seek an alliance. He did not need to understand it. He understood that Master Zhou was trying to accomplish something significant. He also understood that the Iron Tide wanted to be a part of it. He just had no idea what that could possibly be.

Though if he was being absolutely honest with himself, the Empire seeking an alliance and the Iron Tide wanting to be a part of it, well, in Kaelus's experience, that could only mean one thing.

War.

The Empire was going to war with somebody, and the Iron Tide were planning to be part of it.

But with who? Why on earth would the Empire need an admittedly difficult alliance with one of the more brutal peoples of power users? They could have gone to the Serans. They could have gone to the dwarves, the elves, the Oath-Bound. Hell, they could have gone to the Murai. They might have been isolationists, but they weren't stupid. If the situation was desperate enough to warrant an alliance with the Iron Tide, then the cultivators and probably the upper tiers of the Iron Tide knew something he didn't.

And that was the kicker. Kaelus didn't know any of that. What he did know was that there was something special about the young Master Zhou, and Kaelus planned to stick around and find out what it was, even if it was just to give his own people an idea of what was happening.

After the work of hammering out what must have been the fastest alliance in modern political history, everyone, even the orcs, seemed to be in a good mood. Entertainment, food, and drink had been laid out in the great hall of Crescent Hyr. Now it was time to revel, to deepen connections, to act silly in Kaelus's calculation, but who was he to judge?

The political work was not his job tonight. The political work was someone else's job. His job was the room.

And that's when he felt the wrongness creeping across his skin.

He did not know yet how it was wrong. He knew that two of his men were missing and that the night had been arranged with protection in mind. So maybe it was that heightened sense of importance that came through, but something was definitely amiss.

He moved at an even pace, hoping not to attract any attention. He walked the inner perimeter of the great hall, the slow deliberate circuit he had used for over thirty years as a member of the Warden Core. He knew when to pace himself, so he did just that. He walked past the imperial delegation. Past the lower tables. Past the kitchens corridor. Past the connecting corridor that led from the great hall to the war room.

He paused at the connecting corridor.

Through their resting Resonance he could feel that the two wardens stationed there were in position. Their posture was correct. Their attention was correct. Their senses were on point. Behind them, the corridor stretched twenty paces back toward the war room door, lit by a single mana lamp at the midpoint, the rest of the stone soft with shadow.

The shadow was the thing.

Kaelus stood on the outskirts, concern prickling his senses. The mana lamp at the midpoint was burning at the same steady output it had been burning at all evening. The cold draft flowed down the corridor, invading the atmosphere.

He simply couldn't pinpoint what was bothering him.

A Warden Core commander did not require evidence to act on the wrongness of a situation. A Warden Core commander was paid to act on concern and account for himself afterward.

Kaelus engaged the Resonance. It hummed faintly around his body as his senses sharpened and strength invaded his province. He let the Resonance interact with him, the sixth sense that came with mastery spreading out amongst the people, the Resonance targeting the ward lattice of the dwarven stone.

Yes, something was definitely wrong.

Kaelus didn't seem to be the only one noticing. He looked at Nathan, Gavin, and Lucas Li, their expressions suddenly going troubled. The faces of the orcs changed too. He didn't read their kind very well. Even though they were humanoid, the emotions plastered across their faces were harder to read, especially with the tusks that protruded. But a face was a face, even if it was orcish, and they too looked, maybe not alarmed, but aware.

He walked back toward his second-in-command, Lieutenant Marrek, who was standing by the south wall with the small cup of tea he had been holding for the last hour.

"Marrek."

"Commander."

Kaelus spoke in a soft voice. "I want a full sweep. Cover the connecting corridors and the doors of the main hall. Send four to reinforce each. Quiet rotation, not a drill. And get me Rowan's attention, and inform Chiron Zhou to make sure the Li, Zhou, and Wang cultivators are on alert."

Marrek's expression did not change. "Trouble?"

"Probably. I do not yet know what kind."

"Should I call upon the Pack and inform the brothers?"

"Yes. Quietly."

Marrek inclined his head and moved off.

Kaelus glanced up toward the gallery. Rowan Hale was already looking at him. He should have known the Bowcaster would have sensed the concern. Rowan had been watching him, probably using that unique mana sense that Bowcasters used because of their connection to the Heartline bow. Clearly he had read and understood Kaelus's concern, or close enough to it. Rowan's hand moved to the bow at his hip, a small adjustment that anyone in the hall who was not specifically watching for it would not have caught. Then his attention shifted to overview, and the three Bowcasters behind him made the same shift in the same heartbeat, and the upper gallery had become a different kind of object than it had been ten seconds before.

Kaelus exhaled once.

He had perhaps two minutes before whatever was in the corridor decided that the room had registered its presence. He did not have two minutes. He had whatever the thing in the corridor was willing to give him, which was likely less.

He looked at the dais.

Master Zhou was standing where he had been standing all evening, the cup of something warm he was not drinking still in his hand, his attention apparently moving across the room in the same slow sweep he had been performing all night. But Kaelus had cataloged Master Zhou over the last few days, and he knew the man's posture, and that posture had changed. Master Zhou was not relaxed anymore. He had not been relaxed for the last forty seconds, since approximately the moment Kaelus had paused and expressed his own concern.

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Master Zhou had felt it too.

Kaelus did not know how. The man was a cultivator and an inventor, and the precise nature of his sensitivity to disturbances, magical or otherwise, was a complete unknown to him. He didn't know enough about the man to really understand him. The only thing Kaelus knew was that Master Zhou seemed to understand things instinctively. His weight had shifted. His non-drinking hand had moved closer to his belt where the clearly magical sword called Qinglan's Silence hung. Princess Sophie, behind his shoulder, had registered Master Zhou's change before Kaelus had, and her own posture had sharpened to match.

Vivian Li, across the hall, had stopped circulating. She was at the side wall with one hand resting against a banner pole, her stillness also evident.

Lu Anmei was already moving toward the dais, slowly, a drink in her hand, as though she were drifting.

The room had registered. Most of the room had not, and would not until the moment came. But the people who needed to had registered, and they were doing what they had been trained to do, which was nothing visible.

Kaelus stepped toward the dais himself, slowly, in the same drifting register Anmei was using.

He reached the foot of the dais and inclined his head in the small formal motion that meant with permission.

"Master Zhou. A word."

Ethan did not turn his head. "I assume you're feeling something as well."

"Possibly very. It's too quiet. The Resonance is telling me there's something amiss."

"When did you notice?"

"Only the last couple of moments. Rowan seems to understand, and I've alerted my people as well as Chiron. I have not roused the perimeter."

"Don't."

"That was my read. If you have a different one, give it now."

Ethan's eyes moved across the room without his head turning. Kaelus watched him take in the imperial delegation, the orcs, his family at the side wall, his pregnant sister-in-law at the back, the children behind Robert Zhou. Kaelus watched the calculation happen.

"Hold the perimeter," Ethan said. "Get Margaret and Salli moved toward the kitchens corridor. Quietly. Tell Caleb. Have Rowan target the corridor mouth, not the room. If something comes through, we want it funneled."

"Understood."

"Any idea what we're up against."

"No, but I have a strange feeling it's related to what we're already dealing with. The demon-touched orcs of legend appeared periodically in the histories over the last few hundred years. Most people thought they were an exaggeration. Clearly, that was not the case."

Ethan was quiet for a fraction of a second. "You think it's demon-related."

"I think that's a good assumption," Kaelus said. "If the situation hasn't been normal or matched expectations, I think it's a good idea to assume the worst."

"You know, for a straight-laced military man, Kaelus, I find you surprisingly astute."

Kaelus gave him a small smile. "I live to surprise people, Master Zhou."

Ethan gave him a tight smile. "Any idea who could be attacking us?"

Kaelus shook his head. "Probably not even relevant at this point. I simply assume the worst."

Ethan inclined his head a fraction. "Practical as always. Take operational command, Kaelus."

Kaelus gave a slight bow and moved.

He drifted across the floor toward the side wall the way Anmei had drifted toward the dais. He passed Caleb on the way. He did not stop. He spoke without slowing or turning his head.

"Master Caleb Zhou. Get your mother and wife toward the back. Now. Slowly."

Caleb raised an eyebrow and was about to protest, but then looked over at his brother, who raised an eyebrow in return. Caleb Zhou nodded. He turned and began the same drifting walk toward Margaret Zhou.

Kaelus reached the south wall and let his hand rest on the hilt at his hip without drawing. Marrek was at his shoulder a heartbeat later.

"Commander."

"Flare the Resonance. We have incoming."

"If we have incoming, won't that alert them to our preparation?"

"Better to alert them to our preparation than to be unprepared for theirs. Do it. I want the entire squad to descend on me."

"Commander, you know that makes you a target."

"That's the way it's always been. Warden, do so now."

Marrek did as he was bid. He activated his Resonance Shroud and reached out to his brethren through the Pack.

The cultivators in the room definitely noticed what was going on. The Imperial advisors, excluding perhaps Prince Alaric, had not registered any of it. Verath was still mid-conversation with Karguk. Tobin's lute had not slowed. Two retainers were laughing about something at one of the lower tables. Most of the room was still standing inside the reception that had been working an hour ago and would not be working in another minute.

Kaelus felt the wrongness sharpen. It was no longer the absence of movement in the corridors. It was the presence of something deciding to stop pretending.

He drew a slow breath.

The torches dimmed with all the subtlety and ominousness of the Ghost Lands in the Valley of the Forgotten.

The flames along the south wall guttered first, then the chandelier above the dais, then the brackets along the east. A third of the hall's light receded into amber as though something were drinking it from the air, and the temperature in the room dropped enough that breath fogged in front of two of the Iron Tide warriors who had been laughing a moment before.

The shadows lengthened.

Where the torchlight should have fallen short and stopped, instead it failed forward, the dark reaching across the floor toward the dais in lines that did not match the geometry of the lamps. The stone underfoot was suddenly cold. Tobin's lute went silent. Someone at the far end of the hall said what in a voice that did not understand it had spoken aloud.

Then the side corridor doors burst inward, literally blown. They came off their hinges, and the dwarven stone frame held but the iron banding tore free, and the doors slammed flat against the inside walls of the great hall with a sound that put every conversation in the room on the floor in the same heartbeat.

The first thing through was not a man. It was a shape, man-sized, made of the same lengthening shadow that had spread across the floor a moment before. It moved like a man, but the eye could not track which part of it was moving at any given moment, because the shape did not have parts. It crossed twenty feet of stone in two heartbeats and took one of Kaelus's wardens at the corridor wall by the throat with a hand that had no fingers Kaelus could count.

The warden fell. The shape passed over him and kept moving.

Two more came through behind it. Then a fourth.

These were not the things Kaelus had been counting on. These were like living shadow, something created of evil and intent. He understood the distinction in his bones the way a soldier understood the difference between a thrown spear and a charging man, and he understood it in time to give exactly one order before the next wave came through.

"Spread!" he shouted. "Don't bunch on the dais. Force-spread."

His line held. They had been drilled for this kind of correction in the southern campaigns. His wardens split their formation by half a step in three different directions, and the next wave of shadows that came through the doorway found no concentrated target to charge.

The shadows kept coming.

And behind them, walking, came the others. These were a different variety of evil. They walked at human speed but did not move like men. Their hands and feet found the ground without checking that the ground was there. Their faces were calm in the specific way that nothing alive expressed or understood emotion. There were six of them, and the six moved as a unit, and where they moved the air went cold in a different register than the shadows had brought, the cold of bodies that had once been living, breathing things.

Kaelus's wardens at the corridor wall engaged the prepared things first. The first warden cut clean through one of them at the waist, a Resonance-edged strike that should have ended the engagement, and the upper half of the prepared thing kept moving on its hands while the lower half stayed where it had fallen.

The Resonance hummed wrong under Kaelus's feet. The dwarven stone did not want to carry whatever was in those bodies. He felt the floor reject the wrongness and push the wrongness back up into the air.

In the gallery, Rowan loosed.

The first volley went into the prepared things. Three of them folded under impact. Two of those three got back up. The pieces that did not get back up still moved, dragging themselves along the stone with the indifference of things that did not understand that injury was supposed to stop them.

Rowan called out. "Kaelus, they are Deathwalkers. You have to use overwhelming power. They regenerate."

Kaelus turned to respond, but before he could the second corridor door went. The east entrance corridor. Two shadows came through, then two more of the prepared things. Three of Kaelus's wardens who had been holding that wall hit the ground in the same heartbeat, and Kaelus did not see how. He saw their bodies fall. He did not see the strike that put them down.

And somewhere above, the gallery stair burst as well. Kaelus heard the door go before he saw the engagement. Rowan's voice cut through the noise from above, pitched the specific way he pitched it when he wanted his Bowcasters to know which direction the threat was coming from. Then the shouting changed quality, and Kaelus knew the gallery was holding its own line and would not be coming down to help.

The hall was full now. Shadows moved in the spaces the torchlight no longer covered. The prepared things pressed forward from both corridors. Imperial advisors had pulled back behind the cluster of Iron Tide warriors at the lower tables. Verath was on his feet with a knife he had no business knowing how to hold, but holding it the right way anyway. Alaric had pulled Sophie back two paces and put himself in front of her, which was the first useful thing the prince had done all evening.

Vivian Li had moved to a position three paces from Master Zhou and her mana shroud had come up silver-cold across her shoulders. Her first sword strike took two shadows out of the air in a single arc, and where her ice touched them the shadows stopped, frozen mid-motion, and Lu Anmei's flame flashed the frozen pieces into nothing.

Ice and fire. They had found it inside ten seconds. They were going to need to keep finding it.

Karguk had pulled Grauth back to the dais and stepped between his father and the engagement with his Pulse condensed around his forearms. Grauth had not protested because Grauth was already drawing power inward in a way that made the air around the High Fang harder to breathe. The Iron Tide warriors at the lower tables had come up as one, weapons drawn, Pulse rising through the bodies of twenty angry warriors as the rage of beings that respected life saw a living being twisted into something ugly and wrong.

Kaelus's line held. Three more of his were down. The dais was the strongpoint. The kitchens corridor was open, and the high family had moved through it without panic, Margaret Zhou pushing the children ahead of her and Caleb at the rear with Claire, and Robert Zhou had pulled Salli Lin back with a hand at her elbow that she did not refuse.

Then the bolts began. They were black light, shadow-mass condensed into something solid, and they came from somewhere deeper in the war room corridor, beyond what Kaelus could see, lances of dark energy that traveled fast enough that the eye registered them only as afterimages. The first bolt struck a warden at the dais wall and the man did not fall normally. He hung for a moment, suspended, and then crumpled inward as if something had been pulled out of him.

A second bolt. Master Zhou deflected it with something Kaelus did not recognize, a flare of mana that bent the dark light sideways into the dwarven stone of the wall, where it hissed and went out.

A third bolt. Anmei caught this one with a wall of fire that consumed it, and her stance staggered with the cost.

The bolts kept coming, and behind the bolts, the cold deepened.

Kaelus's hand at his hip was bleeding. He had not been struck. He looked down and saw the small cut on his palm where he had gripped the hilt too hard, and he saw the blood on the leather come away cold to the touch instead of warm. He was paler than he had been a minute ago. He had not been wounded. The room was wounding him simply by holding him in it.

This was not a fight where defenders bled while attackers exhausted themselves. It was a fight where the defenders bled into the attacker. Every drop of blood the room lost fed what was coming through the corridor.

Behind the bolts, finally, came the man casting them.

He stepped through the war room doorway in a long dark robe and the shadows in the great hall bent toward him as he walked, every length of darkness in the room reaching for the source the way water reached for the lowest point. He did not run. He cast the next bolt without raising his hand higher than his hip, the gesture of a man performing routine work. Three more shadow constructs peeled off his coat as he advanced and raced into the room ahead of him as expendable wave units. He was tall. His eyes were dark and unfocused and looking at all of them at once. The cold deepened to the temperature of standing water in winter.

He looked toward Master Zhou on the dais.

He smiled.

Then, behind him, more figures stepped through the war room doorway. They were not part of the swarm. They walked upright. They wore Seran blue. Their armor was lacquered in the precise pattern of the wardens Kaelus had drilled himself, and Kaelus knew the faces.

Solenn from the wall walk. Two from the rampart stair. The runner. Six men he had counted in his perimeter check less than ten minutes ago.

Their eyes were black, edge to edge, the way a window looked at midnight when the room behind it was empty. Their skin had the matte stillness of meat. Solenn's chest had been opened and closed again, the seam visible at the throat where the lacquered collar did not quite cover it.

They had not been Solenn for some time.

Solenn raised his sword. The lacquered Resonance-blue blade came up the way Kaelus had taught him to bring it up, the small specific lift and angle that Kaelus had drilled into the boy when the boy was sixteen and could not yet hold a guard for a full minute.

Kaelus felt the line he had been holding inside himself for thirty years shift in a way it had not shifted since the southern campaigns.

"Commander," Marrek said, beside him, very quietly. "Commander, those are ours."

"They were," Kaelus said.

The man in the dark robe smiled wider.

The dead wardens walked into the great hall, and Kaelus's living wardens stepped forward to meet them.