“I know that desertion from the Legions is a capital offense,” Claudja said. “I know that none of you are ever going to be able to go home again.”
Ty looked at Claudja with smoldering hostility, and the sandy-haired fellow called Rickard pushed himself up to his elbows to glare at her as well.
“Can we not gag her Highness?” he asked the Sarge, but the Gweiyerman looked faintly amused. He waved his men to silence with his mangled hand.
“What is your point, Duchess?” he asked indulgently. “I can’t imagine you just want to make conversation with a bunch of commoners.”
“How much do any of you really know about Ayzantium?” she asked. “About the kind of men you were conspiring with in Camp Town?”
The Sarge shrugged. “What’s to know? They have plenty of coin, and they’ll shell it out liberally in exchange for you. Horayachus was very clear on that point.”
“Who is he, their leader? A Destroyer of Ayon?”
“Some sort of Red Priest, right up until a burning inn fell on his head.” The Sarge grinned. “I suppose that is the Burning Man’s idea of irony.”
“So, you are acting now on the word of a dead priest of Ayon? A minion of the god known as the Oath- breaker?”
The Sarge spread his hands. “All the Ennead have a lot of names. Besides Oath-breaker and the Burning Man, they call Ayon the Destroyer, the Stormking, the All Killer…doesn’t sound like a god I’d care to cross.”
“There is no need to cross Ayon to draw his fury,” Claudja said, looking at each of the men in turn, including Phinneas. The young Circle Wizard’s brow was furrowed in that confounded way of his that made Claudja doubt him profoundly. She sighed, though not out loud.
“Say you do get me to Ayzantu City. With no Red Priest to speak for you, why in the world would you think the Ayonites will give you coin instead of just bending the lot of you backwards over a sacrificial altar?”
Ty and Rickard looked over at their Sarge, who frowned grimly at Claudja.
“Are you going to suggest we take you home again, Duchess? We’ve been through that once.”
“No.” Claudja shook her head, though the brush of her dirty hair across the back of her neck made her want to cringe. “You were quite right, Sergeant. My father’s lands are menaced by Ayzantium and at present we have not the means to reward you sufficiently for my safe return.”
“Then you don’t have much to offer, do you?”
“But Chengdea was only the starting point of my journey. How much did your friend Horayachus tell you of the purpose for my mission?”
Their blank looks confirmed for Claudja that the Ayonite had told his hirelings little if anything.
“You were headed for Galdeez, and the Empire,” the Sarge said flatly.
“To meet with the Emperor himself, Albert of Beoshore,” Claudia said.
The legionnaires and Phinneas widened their eyes. Claudja lied in an easy, breezy tone.
“His August Majesty expects my coming, and I am certain he would be willing to reward those who would help me on my way. Monetarily, of course, and even to the extent of forgiving past transgressions against his Imperial authority.” Claudja looked at each of the legionnaires in turn. “I could have you pardoned for deserting the Legions, and you could return to your homes again.”
Ty and Rickard exchanged a look, but the Sarge continued to glare at Claudja. He shook his head.
“I’ve been in the Legions for sixteen years, Duchess. I know more than most that the Emperor’s munificence is not nearly so boundless as it’s made out to be.”
“But would you not count on it more that you would the words of a dead priest of the Oath-breaker?”
Ty and Rickard both looked at the Sarge. He met the eyes of his men and when he saw the hope that Claudja’s words had kindled there, his lips pulled back in an ugly sneer.
“You’re lying,” he growled at her. “You’d say anything to avoid going to Ayzantium. If the Emperor really expected you, there would have been real legionnaires waiting for you in Camp Town. Not us and a bunch of Ayonites.”
“There probably were,” Claudja said. “I just had the bad fortune of running into you first.”
The Sarge snorted and shook his head. “Nonsense,” he said, but did not seem able to come up with a specific denial. He changed tactics. “Besides, you’d never put a good word in for us with the imperial authorities. Probably just smile while we were all strung-up from gibbets.”
“I have not been unduly mistreated in your custody,” Claudia said.
“No? Well, what about your old knight friend that we gutted like a pig?”
Claudja jerked as though she had been slapped. Her spirits had tentatively begun to climb as it had seemed her words were having an effect, but now hope plummeted to the pit of her stomach. Had she not been sitting down she may have swooned.
“You did what?” she asked dully, feeling cold all over.
“Eviscerated, your Highness,” the Sarge laughed. “What did you think happened to him? The old boy was very determined to protect you. Did you think we had talked him out of it? Horayachus told us not to kill the Jobian, probably to avoid a holy war or something, but that old Daul knight? Him we did in most emphatically.”
Claudja stared at the man’s sneering face and all her being was flooded in a desire to hurt him, to kill him, to tear out his eyes and cut him into pieces. All her pain and rage at Lukas’s death, now his father was gone, too. Her homeland on the brink of invasion, and herself a prisoner in a demon-infested city. Everything that had once been good in Claudja’s life was being taken from her, and ground into dust.
“You still willing to beg the Emperor’s mercy on our behalf?” the Sarge grinned.
“I will see you dead,” Claudja heard her voice say beyond her ability to stop it.
“That’s about what I figured,” the Sarge said. He turned to Ty and Rickard, who no longer looked hopeful. “I don’t think we’ll be needing a gag. I have a feeling her Highness will keep her mouth shut from here on out.”
Claudja could stand to look at them no longer. She turned her parched eyes away, met the gaze of Phinneas Phoarty, and saw there only sympathy and feeling. Claudja believed he had not known what had happened to Sir Towsan. He was a good man, or at least not a bad one, here with this human filth by accident. Claudja’s life, her mission, and the fate of her father’s lands were most likely all in his hands now. His pale, long-fingered hands, with the green and blue Tullish tattoos about the knuckles.
They left their resting place and proceeded in silence down the most southerly street. Everyone’s mind was elsewhere, and so none noticed the white-robed figures creeping along in their wake, peering after them from behind corners, then scrabbling ahead on clawed feet.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Heggenauer swallowed a bite of food and shook his head.
“They were not demons,” he said. “Those were devils.”
Tilda and the others looked at him. The party had found another barracks or armory near enough in its lay- out to the one in which they had spent their first night in Vod’Adia that the place seemed almost homey. This one had been as thoroughly looted as had the first, though many of the other buildings in the neighborhood they now found themselves in showed no sign of having yet been disturbed at earlier Openings. Amatesu had again warmed a decent meal over a small fire in the courtyard, and the party had settled around their packs and bedrolls in a second floor gallery to eat, sitting in a circle with a lantern in the middle. Uriako Shikashe ate while standing, free from most of his elaborate armor but with his two swords still at his waist. He watched the dark street outside through arrow slits.
“There is a difference?” John Deskata asked. His voice was irritated and he had a bandage around his right hand, for the back of it had been scraped bloody on the wiry beard of a devil during the fight. Neither Amatesu nor Heggenauer’s magic had fully healed the stinging wound.
Heggenauer nodded, and gave a grim frown. “Under the Code, the priests of List have the responsibility to deal with such malevolent beings. But from the little I know, demons are monstrous beasts, twisted and evil but not particularly intelligent. Devils however are in their way even more dangerous. They are cunning, even
