The matriarch watched him from her place among the crowd gathered in the meeting room, her citrine gaze bright with a disdain she couldn’t or didn’t bother to hide. Brishen didn’t care what her opinion of him was, only that she did not plan murder or sedition while at Saggara. She considered him weak, despite his triumph over the galla. For now, her contempt worked in his favor.
“Welcome to Saggara,” he told the group. “I trust your journeys were easy and uneventful.”
“It’s an honor to receive your invitation, Your Majesty.” Cephren Emelyin winced and corrected himself. “Herceges.”
While Brishen disliked Vesetshen as much as Ildiko did, he possessed equal—if opposing—feelings for this justiciar. Cephren Emelyin had been one of his staunchest allies during those dark days of the galla invasion, even sacrificing great swathes of his valuable dream flower fields to protect Kai farmsteads from the demonic onslaught. It was his cleverdaughter’s idea to flood those fields that had sparked the plans he intended to share today.
An uneasy murmur wove through the crowd when Vesetshen said, “You mistake the meaning of the Khaskem’s message, Lord Emelyin. Just as he is no longer a king but merely a regent, that was a summons, not an invitation.”
As Brishen predicted, the matriarch wasted no time in throwing down the gauntlet. He left it where it lay—for now—and ignored her. “Feel free to define my missive in whatever way you choose,” he told the crowd. “The important thing is you’re here, and we’ve work to do.” He nodded to the waiting servant. “Lay out the maps.”
With Mertok’s help, the servant unrolled the large scrolls to reveal two maps and spread them across the table set in the middle of the room. River stones held down the corners and edges while feeble light from a few sconces set in the walls highlighted the detailed work of the mapmakers and surveyors Brishen had sent to the old capital in the spring.
He stood at the room’s perimeter, watching as his vicegerents and councilors lined one side of the table, three deep, for a look at the maps. Most would say he was a patient man, and he exercised that trait now, using it to observe the reactions of puzzlement, suspicion, and even grief, that crossed the many faces of the Kai gathered here. It was an ephemeral moment of somber peace, one guaranteed a swift death once he returned the predictable volley of questions with hard, unwelcomed answers.
One of the vicegerents with an estate neighboring Saggara tapped a finger on one of the maps. “I recognize this map, Herceges. Haradis before she fell. I remember when your father commissioned his cartographers to update it when the last neighborhoods of the new town were built.” His gaze moved to the adjacent map. “This is Haradis as well but outside thecity walls with—” He paused, then glanced up at Brishen. “An extensive addition of earthworks, canals, and dams.”
He left the obvious question unspoken. Why?
Brishen turned his thoughts to the several sleepless days he’d spent in the past week contemplating the best way to deliver news of his plan: one sharp blow or several gentler swats? The end result would be equally painful.
“What would you do in my place?” he’d asked Ildiko as they lay in bed during one of those days.
She didn’t answer for the longest time, and he shifted to see if she’d fallen asleep. Instead, she stared at the bed’s canopy above them, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip.
“I know you’re inclined to ease them into the idea of what you plan to do.” She lifted his hand where it rested beneath her breast and brought it to her mouth for a quick kiss before returning it to her midriff. “You’ve always been thoughtful in that way, but thoughtfulness may be a detriment in this instance. Some might see it as manipulative for spooling out the information in a slow line instead of just telling them outright.” She offered a small smile. “A few of them act like children at times, Brishen, but they’re all adults in positions of leadership. There’s no need to play nursemaid to them.”
Brishen always valued his wife’s advice. “I plan to drown Haradis,” he told the Kai delegation.
The silence was like that of a still lake right before someone tossed a rock into the water, and the splash that followed akin to a crack of thunder. The chamber erupted into gasps and shouted protests as the shocked Kai surged toward their regent, brought up short by the large table between him and them. Mertok and the two sentries just inside the doorway made to pull their swords, only halting at a wordless gesture from Brishen to stand down. He waited, silent, until the cacophony died away.
“Why would you do this, Herceges?” The grief of a kingdom resided in Cephren’s anguished question.
A vicegerent spoke up before Brishen could answer. “Haradis is the Kai capital, the heart of Bast-Haradis. Have we not suffered enough with the loss of our magic? Must we help the galla complete the destruction of our heritage?”
Their questions were valid. He’d pondered each one himself during the bright hours when Ildiko slept beside him, and he’d stared—wide-eyed and wide-awake—at the bed canopy above him and listened to the echo of Megiddo’s last word before the galla dragged his eidolon into the breach.
“Farewell.”
The monk’s awful fate would haunt Brishen every moment he breathed as he searched for a way to save his brother-in-arms from that demonic prison and unite his spirit with his body. But that was a task for another day. This one was monumental enough on its own and would incite a battle of wills, if not weapons, in this very room.
“My greatest wish,” he told his audience, “is to go back to a time before the galla, when we had our magic and Haradis was a living, thriving city full of Kai, but that is a gift for gods, not monarchs or regents.”
No one in this room had been a refugee from Haradis. They lived on country estates in the remote prefectures under Saggara’s governance, lower-ranking gentry who would have never received a royal invitation to mingle among the upper echelons of Kai nobility and had little reason to visit the capital. He wondered if any of them realized what blessings such a shunning had bestowed upon them.
“Haradis is not the heart of our kingdom—our people are,” he said. “None of you have been there since the galla invaded. I have.” Plagued by dark dreams and darker memories, Brishen usually tried not to dwell on the images seared into hismind when he first entered Haradis as an eidolon. Now, he purposefully recalled them and shared their torment. “The city is nothing more than a ruin, not even a mass grave.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “When the galla kill, they consume. Everything. There are no corpses to bury or cremate, no bones to shrive.” The memory of riding through puddles of sludge that had once been living Kai still made his soul shudder. “There’s a reason why we had relatively few orphans and widowed spouses who fled here from Haradis.”
Entire families and clans—including all but two of the royal line—wiped out in a single night and the future of the Kai changed forever.
“Can we not rebuild it, Herceges? As you say, we can’t recapture what was lost, but can we not remake it into something new?” One young justiciar stared at him with eyes that glittered with shades of hope and desperation. He wished he could tell her yes on both counts. Instead, he shook his head.
“No, unfortunately not. Haradis may be dead, but it isn’t abandoned. A galla has been seen roaming the ruins.”
Unlike the response to his declaration that he’d drown Haradis, the crowd froze, gave a collective inhalation and paled to a Kai. Every face wore the twin expressions of horror and terror. Brishen was certain he’d worn the same look when Anhuset described her close call with the galla when she’d scouted the city against his orders four months earlier.
“Then you and your human comrades failed.” Vesetshen Senemset practically spat out the words, each one coated with the venom of contempt. “King Djedor would never have allowed this to happen or allowed you to further destroy his city.”
Brishen might have ignored her a second time, even disregarded the—no doubt—intentional lack of honorific when she addressed him. Her opinion mattered nothing to him. She had, however, cast her disdain wide to include men who’d riddeninto battle with him to save a people not their own and at the terrible cost of a soul.
