Last Life

Book 7: Chapter 21

MY PLAN TO GET TO CONTERNE within ten days didn’t end up panning out. The Royal track was quite a bit different from the Imperial one. There were more villages along this road, and when we arrived at them we were greeted not as enemies, but as liberators. Strange as it may sound, this slowed our progress down considerably.

The people in charge of these villages often wanted to meet me and talk with me. People wanted to know what the future held. Who would win the war? The Vestonians or the Atalians?

All these meetings made one thing very clear to me. Namely, the fact that the Bergonians didn’t want to end up under Atalian rule. Mainly, this was because of the Scarlets.

At one such meeting, the headman of the relatively-large village of Montelago (home to thirty households) summarized the prevailing opinion for me. Basically, he said that conflict between nobles was one thing. For the common people, it just meant waiting to see which group of aristocrats would come out on top. And when all was said and done, the common folk didn’t really care where their taxes ended up. Mainly, they were just anxious to be left alone as much as possible. It was an entirely different story, however, when fanatical priests from the Scarlet Temple rolled in and started perpetrating all sorts of outrages. The peasantry might be able to live with the burning of a witch or two. Let them burn... In fact, sometimes it was even a good thing. Nobody liked witches, after all. But when they started destroying local temples and forbidding people from praying to the Forefather and the Most Luminous Mother... Well, the Bergonians had no intention of tolerating that.

Basically, the locals were predisposed to be loyal to Vestonia. Sure, Vestonian troops might commit the occasional outrage, but they never messed with the people’s temples or their faith. And when it came to MY forces, at least half of which had been recruited from Bergonia itself (albeit from the mountain regions), the locals basically treated them like their own.

Therefore, when scattered units of Atalians had started to appear along the Royal tract after fleeing from the Battle of the Miroir River, news of my army’s success started to spread like fire in a dry prairie.

None of them doubted that my forces would soon link up with the army of the Vestonian Prince to deliver a one-two punch that would finish off the Golden Lion and his legions once and for all.

Montelago, by the way, was the first village we stopped at on our march. Rather than fleeing into the forests with the town’s residents, the headman came out to meet us with an embassy comprising the most respected residents of the town. More than that, they actually brought a few wagon loads of provisions with them.

After I received them graciously, listened to what they had to say, and guaranteed their safety (and, last but not least, paid them well for the provisions they had brought), we started receiving similar embassies from other towns almost on a daily basis.

At some point during the third day of our march along the Royal track, small units of armed locals started swarming in to join us; in the end, this gave us an additional 1,500 men.

Among them were plenty of simple Bergonian peasants and townsfolk, who came armed with whatever they happened to have on hand and therefore needed re-equipping from our stock of arms and armor (thankfully, the wagons were still full of trophies, so this wasn’t a problem), as well as a number of petty nobles who arrived with their own small units of men. The latter came better equipped, and most of them were mounted.

As the Bergonian nobles started to appear, Marquis de Gondy and the other aristocrats in his entourage started actively trying to entice them to join the unit under his command.

Vaira, who served as my ears throughout the entire camp, reported that the representatives of the Dukes de Bauffremont and de Gondy were hard at work, showering the newcomers with promises of the choicest pieces of land in Bergonia in exchange for their allegiance in the coming factional struggle. And I have to admit, the Counts did their work pretty well.

For obvious reasons, many of the Bergonian aristocrats perceived me as an upstart bastard who had simply had a surprising run of good luck. And luck, as we all know, is a notoriously fickle friend. She might smile on you today, and turn her back on you tomorrow as if she had never met you at all.

Sure, they all understood that I was powerful, that I was gifted, and that my entire ragtag force was deeply devoted to me. But the Houses de Gondy and de Bauffremont were the most ancient and influential families in Vestonia — and quite possibly in all of Mainland. The chance to become an ally to such powerful families didn’t normally come around more than once in a person’s lifetime. Previously, the Ducal families wouldn’t even have turned their heads to glance at such petty mountain nobles. Suddenly, however, the Dukes’ representatives were coming to THEM, practically falling over themselves in an effort to gain their allegiance.

In the end, therefore, it wasn’t really surprising that many of the Bergonian nobles believed these promises, and soon the Marquis de Gondy’s unit had swelled to about 250 mounted riders. It had almost reached 300 by the tenth day of our march, when our army was joined by Count Robert de Lacquert and forty of his soldiers. So far, they had been sitting out the war in their castle, somewhere in the eastern part of the country.

The Count and I got off to a bad start almost immediately. It turned out that we had seen one another before. In Northland. True, I didn’t remember his face. He had been there as part of his maternal relative Étienne de Mornay’s entourage.

As such, the man wasn’t exactly filled with a desire to campaign alongside me. And that was putting it mildly. That said, he was also a cunning and very cautious man, so he was extremely punctilious and polite with me.

I wasn’t at all surprised when he and his unit joined up with Marquis de Gondy. It was funny to watch both Dukes’ representatives as they zipped straight over to him with their chorus of flattery and promises.

Once the size of his force reached 300 men, Marquis de Gondy seemed to regain some of his original boldness, and he tried to dictate terms to me. He wasn’t pleased with the speed with which my forces were moving, and he also didn’t like my plan to establish local control in all the settlements on the route of our march.

More than anything, however, he was opposed to the idea of besieging a city as large and well-defended as Conterne. In his opinion, we should have been hurrying to link up with his father’s army as fast as we possibly could, so that together we could wipe out the Golden Lion once and for all. Once we had actually defeated the Atalian legions, he concluded, we would have plenty of time to think about besieging cities.

I didn’t bother trying to explain the unacceptability of leaving such a massive city as Conterne unconquered in our rear. My time was simply too valuable, and I had a lot of other, much more important business to take care of. So I simply informed the Marquis that the siege of Conterne would be taking place as planned, whether he wanted it to or not.

De Gondy was about to object, but before he could do so I reminded him (yet again) that if he was really in such a hurry, he had my permission to set off with his own unit to meet up with his heroic daddy. My forces, however, would proceed with the original plan, from which I had not the slightest intention of deviating. Especially since the plan had the full approval and continued support of both the Marshal de Clairmont and the Count de Leval.

The latter, by the way, had transferred to me and accepted command of the legionaries in my forces, which made my life (and that of Samuel Kroner) a whole hell of a lot easier. After all, it meant he didn’t have to deal with the captains of the other legionary cohorts, who considered themselves his equals and resented his being assigned to command them.

At first, the old general wanted to stay at the Marshal’s side and ride back to the Sapphire Citadel with him, but the Duke de Clairmont encouraged him to help me and see the campaign through to its logical finale.

After my first, very open conversation with Marshal de Clairmont, the rest of our conversations prior to his departure had to do with the coming battle against the Golden Lion.

The Duke was present at all our councils of war, which (at least at first) made things very awkward for my commanders. Not long before, they had all been simply cohort captains, but now the Marshal de Clairmont himself was listening attentively to their proposals without interrupting them once. And — miracle of miracles! Sometimes he actually agreed with them.

In reality, the old man made these councils quite a bit easier for me; furthermore, without even realizing it himself, he opened my eyes to quite a lot. Most importantly, the potential moves of all the main players in the drama: Carl III, Alfonso V, the Dukes de Bauffremont and de Gondy, and — last but not least — the Golden Lion.

I should also point out that the Marshal’s attitude toward me had changed a little bit by that point. Not fundamentally, but the change was definitely noticeable. I no longer felt the same aura of cold dislike that always seemed to radiate from him at our previous meetings. He didn’t show any external sign of this, but my senses were far too sharp to miss the subtle differences.

Something had most definitely changed. I concluded that it had to do with the first conversation we had after his recovery. The old man hadn’t been lying; the fact that I could no longer feel the former aura of enmity was proof enough of that. In its place, I detected what might best be described as a mixture of curiosity and interest. Many times, I noticed him looking at me with a pensive expression on his face. At those moments, the impression was almost that he was seeing me for the first time.

More generally, the Duke de Clairmont had changed quite a bit. And that wasn’t at all surprising, given his crushing defeat, followed by his nearly-fatal wound. Later on, the Count de Leval gloomily informed me that the Marshal could expect nothing good when he got back to the capital. Most likely, the King would exile the Duke de Clairmont from court and send him off to one of his numerous lands. In practice, this would amount to exile. To be fair, if the King failed to react to the Marshal’s defeat in the expected manner, the rest of the aristocracy would be utterly confused.

That said, I had already realized for myself that the Duke de Clairmont’s welcome in the capital would be anything but warm. It was obvious in the way that Marquis de Gondy and his hangers-on treated the old man. The disdainful looks, the almost-universal ignoring... An uninitiated observer would never have guessed that the Vestonian Marshal had a long string of victories to his credit to balance out his recent defeat. I have to give him his due, though: the Duke de Clairmont responded to these nobles in kind.

Before he left, the old man wished me luck, and also invited me to come visit him in his domains when it was all over. In doing so, he mentioned that his wife would undoubtedly be very glad for the chance to thank her husband’s savior in person. On that very pleasant note, we said our goodbyes. As the cart carrying the reclining Duke rumbled off into the distance, I could sense that his piercing, pensive eyes remained locked on me for quite a while...

* * *

Only after fifteen days of marching did we finally reach the walls of Bergonia’s third-largest city.

As I already knew, Conterne was the large, strategically-vital economic center of a whole section of the country, and it had a population of about 20,000. Admittedly, this was all pre-war information. On the day of our arrival, there might have been 8,000-10,000 people in the city at most. And those were mainly women, children, and the elderly.

Prior to the war, Conterne had been famous for its lively markets, where one could find goods from all across the Kingdom, as well as exotic imports from far beyond its borders. The city was surrounded by high stone walls and guard towers. In its center, there was a huge keep that had once been magnificent and majestic, but was now reduced to a lamentable, semi-ruined state. It had once served as the burgomeister’s residence and the command point for the city’s garrison.

The closer we got to them, the less impressive the walls and guard towers began to look. Conterne had been through a number of assaults over the preceding year, and as a result its fortifications were badly damaged. Its residents weren’t in much better condition, either.

The delegation from Conterne, which consisted of several dozen leaders from the city’s main guilds, met us about a day’s journey from the city walls. After the standard formalities, where I promised the citizens that no harm would come to them, I received the symbolic keys to the city. So when we arrived, we found the gates open wide, with a big, diverse, overjoyed crowd of citizens there to greet us.

Women and children with smiles on their faces held up pine branches along our route, which created a sort of living corridor down which our delegation passed. Meanwhile, the army set up camp at the base of the city walls. I had decided to give my people three days of rest before the final march.

We moved through a genuinely-ecstatic crowd and out into the city’s main square, where our eyes fell upon the sight of a tall gallows. Several bodies were swinging from it; soon, I was informed that these were the officers of the small Atalian garrison that had been in the city prior to our arrival.

The corpses were surrounded by swarms of flies and crows, and they were already beginning to stink. The disgusting stench had already spread around the entire square.

I realized that the heads of the guilds, who had orchestrated the uprising against the Atalian garrison and taken power into their own hands, had deliberately left these bodies hanging as graphic proof of their loyalty to us. In other words, they were taking total responsibility for their own actions, while simultaneously declaring to every observer that the city was now in the hands of the guilds, rather than those of the nobility.

Some of the latter, by the way, were hanging there next to the Atalians. The city’s new leaders told us that the executed Bergonian nobles had been collaborators, who had lent their full support to the Scarlets and their regime.

Marquis de Gondy and his entourage were outraged to see Bergonian aristocrats hanging there on the gallows. Some of them let out loud streams of curses and reached for their swords; after all, some of those corpses belonged to men they had known very well.

On the one hand, I could understand their reaction: it was practically unheard of for commoners to execute noblemen, and it would have shocked people of all social ranks. Especially given the shameful manner of the execution. Such an action ran counter to the entire social order. If the Marquis de Gondy had been in command of our army, the city would already have been in flames by that point, and the leaders of the guilds would have been swinging there instead of the executed Bergonian noblemen. And it wouldn’t have mattered whether the citizenry supported the Atalians or the Vestonians. Commoners simply DID NOT get to decide the fate of noblemen.

I could understand the noblemen’s outrage, but I didn’t share it. To my mind, the citizens were the real masters of Conterne, and it made perfect sense for them to execute all the traitors — all those who had supported the Atalians, and their fanatical priests who had spent the last year making a mockery of the city’s traditions.

The nobles’ outrage didn’t escape the citizens’ attention, either, and armed men from the city’s militia slowly began to move out to surround our delegation.

The situation was getting heated. An evening of celebration was threatening to snowball into a bloodbath. I have to point out that the city’s leaders dropped the ball at that point. Apparently, they hadn’t been expecting their very public demonstration of the gallows to provoke conflict at all. On the contrary, it was quite obvious that it had taken them completely by surprise; after all, if the crowd decided to throw itself on our small delegation and rip us to bits, the army outside the gates would flood the streets with civilian blood in a matter of hours.

I jumped up onto a walkway next to the gallows and delivered a fiery, impromptu speech. The entire square fell silent in order to listen. I didn’t justify the citizens’ decision to execute the nobles, but I didn’t voice support for the nobles and their fit of pique either. Instead, I emphasized that we had a common enemy, who had come to Bergonia, and that we couldn’t possibly hope to defeat the invaders unless we worked together.

In particular, I mentioned the priests of the Scarlet Temple and their vile cult; I spiced this part of the speech up with some vivid descriptions of their evil deeds. I spoke loudly, confidently, and (perhaps most importantly) for a long time. To be honest, I hadn’t imagined giving anywhere near as long a speech as I eventually gave. Unlike my native world, the people of this one weren’t at all used to spectacles like this. Even in my native world, though, a powerful orator who could juggle facts, deductions, and propagandistic theses with enough skill could usually be counted on for some effective brainwashing. By the time I finished speaking and looked attentively around at the silent crowd, even the nobles had calmed down and taken their hands off their swords.

At the end of my speech, I suggested that we take down the corpses and bury them according to local tradition. Long story short, conflict was averted. At least for the time being. I knew, of course, that the nobles certainly wouldn’t forgive the people of Conterne for killing their aristocrats. But that wouldn’t be my problem.

The night passed without any further conflict, and in the morning me and my people were escorted to Chateau de Vertmar, a small castle near Conterne that had served as the Golden Lion’s temporary headquarters.

The small Atalian garrison had fled as soon as things started getting hot, taking everything of value with them. For the time being, therefore, Chateau de Vertmar was empty. The citizens had already been through the place and taken everything the Atalians had left behind.

The only area left untouched was the dungeon, whose entrance had been magically sealed. After a careful inspection, I came to the conclusion that the anonymous artificer responsible for this had created a sort of central mana-lock. More or less analogous to electronic locks in my native world.

The golden parasite quickly sucked the mana out of the lock’s energy channels, which gave us access to everything Marshal di Lorenzo had hidden in the dungeon.

The first thing that hit us when the door opened was the disgusting stench of filth, unwashed human bodies, and rotting flesh.

After descending a stone spiral staircase, we found ourselves in a long dungeon, whose walls were lined with cages with human beings locked inside them. The heavy stench of rotting flesh and lifeless energy systems indicated that a lot of them were probably dead already.

As I walked slowly past the rows of barred doors, my people started smashing off locks and dragging the half-dead prisoners out into the hallway. Upon reaching the farthest cage, I stopped and looked carefully into the thin, gray face of one of the prisoners inside it. The poor bastard was still alive. He was lying on the floor next to the wall, wreathed in a mass of half-rotted rags and paying careful attention to every step I took.

His rough facial features, dry lips, the dull look in his dark-brown eyes, and his bizarrely-long nose... I knew only one person with a nose like that.

At my command, one of my soldiers smashed the lock and opened the cage, whereupon I walked inside and crouched down just a step away from the prisoner. A flash of recognition seemed to flit across his eyes. They widened, and he tried to move.

Unseen by anyone else, I generated a scarlet web, aimed it at the prisoner, and then exclaimed with a smile:

“The Viscount d’Angland, in the flesh! Who would ever have thought fate would bring us together again, let alone in a place like this?”