16. Dimitri
16
DIMITRI
D imitri and his associates’ work had been a little too effective. Riots had erupted daily in the city of Tournai over the past week. The king’s curfew barely held, and it took the combined effort of the Kingsguard and Winged Kingsguard to keep a seething order—of sorts. The common folk protested the king’s rising tithes, as well as the class divides between more privileged elves and less privileged mortals. In turn, the court, struck down by the mystery affliction that tore through the city and spared few of magical blood, stirred up tensions yet more, with ruthless edicts and district-wide lockdowns.
The mortals of the city took advantage of their ruler’s infirmities. Shops were looted. Homes and buildings vandalised. Those of elven blood set upon and beaten—or worse. Hate toward the elves from the mortals, who had been little better than chattel to them over the centuries, ran deeper than Dimitri realised.
Rumours of instability in the king’s court only fuelled the divide and the fighting. Rumours of farther afield from traders arriving in the city, of the goblin uprising sowed fear amongst the populace, fear that had been contained to the guilds so far. It seemed the goblins had already taken the roads between the dwarven cities.
No one knew fact from fiction, but caravans had started going missing at an alarming rate on the now impassable trade routes and scouting patrols simply vanished, never to return. By all accounts, a dark, brooding stain upon the dwarven lands of Valtivar was spreading. Too close to Pelenor, all whispered. Too close for comfort.
Dimitri was thrilled in a way. Here was the sum of all his machinations now fruiting into open spoils. He had barely needed to try—they roused themselves to desperate action. It seemed that Toroth had indeed grown his own hostile army, one that would eventually cast him down. The spymaster enjoyed reassuring the king whilst sowing rumours throughout Pelenor of Saradon’s return in Valtivar. Before he knew it, trouble had spread through most of Pelenor, with looting and riots in all the cities, uprisings against the king, and fearful panic with the looming threat of the cursed one’s return. Meanwhile, he kept his own allies as close as he could, though many had fled to their own estates and lands in fear of the mystery sickness creeping through the court of Tournai.
Instinctively, whilst the country descended into chaos, Dimitri knew it was not yet time to act. To remove Toroth would only create a power void he could not fill. Yet. But it was time to finally hint at what was to come. The mystery illness was already being called, albeit in hushed whispers, Saradon’s Curse, thanks to insidious hints from Dimitri’s associates. His own father and brothers dithered, desperate to flee to their own lands, but Dimitri commanded them to remain. To their growing frustration, he would tell them nothing of his plans or what he knew, only ordering them to trust him to see them through the ruin that was to come. Damir, his cowardly father, did not like being blind to the threat. Dimitri could not have cared less. There was no love or loyalty toward them. They were another tool, nothing more. And he would use them all to the bitter end.