Disorder & Theft
Chapter Nine
Pollock
The model of the city sits before me—the bordering towns, every street and tower rendered with precise detail.
It also encompasses the surrounding The Felled Forest, the parts with life brimming anew, as well as the parts lying in ruin, leading to endless fields of wasteland, The Ravaged Plains.
Smaller replicas of the remaining territories stand on pedestals around the chamber, but this one occupies the center table.
The artist I commissioned went to great lengths to provide exact miniatures of the territory I now rule over, which is what concerns me at present.
The three men I selected for my council stand nearby, each proposing strategies to handle the crises we’re currently facing—chief among them, the swelling number of desperate and homeless people.
With new humans arriving daily from other parts of the world, we’re unable to rebuild fast enough, and we’re running out of places to house them.
Though most remain under my thrall, hunger erodes obedience faster than rebellion ever could. Crime has escalated in recent months. There is a dire need to train more guards and deploy them throughout the city to maintain law and order, especially now that the prison sits at maximum capacity.
It isn’t that we lack the means to grow crops.
We have seeds—thanks to old government emergency contingency plans and the numerous secret silos of dried reserves we uncovered in underground bunkers.
It’s the land that fails us. It has only partially recovered from the destruction wrought on this region of the world.
What fields we do have struggle to produce a healthy harvest. The soil yields thinly, grudgingly.
It is a major problem and growing more pressing by the day.
Kahill’s excitement as he approaches is another. He’s amassed an army numbered in the thousands. An enormous force of able-bodied men and women of all ages, all emboldened and ripe with the need to commit violence. And I can sense Kahill’s pride in this.
However, their arrival will further destabilize the city. My ability to subdue and instill calm and hope will be tried more than ever.
Kahill was meant to slowly withdraw his influence and temper his power over the course of their long journey.
Yet even now, I can feel he has not done so.
The emotions pouring off the horde approaching us gather in my mind like a red-black haze.
A kicked hornet’s nest. It thrums at the base of my skull.
I believe he’s testing me to see how long it will take me to subdue the wrath he’s stirred up within them.
That is one possibility.
The other is that he has given in to the beast residing within him—the one content to wreak havoc, sow strife, maim, and kill.
It’s part of his nature that resurfaces from time to time when he goes unchecked by my brothers and me, and usually, when this happens, mayhem follows. I do not yet know how far gone he is, but this does not bode well for me—or for the fragile order I have managed to hold here.
Arthur Lennox, my most trusted adviser, leans forward and moves the small cast-iron pieces positioned south of the city, in the dead part of the region labeled The Felled Forest. They represent contingents of the war camp.
The large red horse head marks Kahill. Small red markers denote his inner circle of warlords.
Tents and training yards have been carefully arranged.
Flags indicate divisions of his army. Markers designate supplies, latrines, cooking areas, and gathering spaces.
Lennox has placed Kahill and his circle closest to the wall and the city’s main gate, so he and his men can both protect the city or stand against his army should any of them choose to revolt.
It is done with forethought, in case Kahill loses control of his soldiers at any point.
Not that I believe that’s likely.
But these men are human, and they think like humans.
They do not realize the safest place for Kahill to be once they reach our borders is far from his soldiers—not among them.
It would be wiser to station him on the border of The Ravage Plains, unless I can compel him to behave and shut down the madness brewing among those following him.
Shouting in the hallway draws the attention of every man in the room.
Within moments, the door to the chamber is thrown wide, and a half dozen of my best guards enter, carrying a man from the stables. One Calixis has taken a particular dislike to. Not that she likes many besides me, but this one she particularly detests.
Dread promptly floods me at the sight of him.
“Sir, she’s gone. She’s been taken,” he mutters, struggling to force the confession past his lips as Toroc, head of the guard, drives him hard to his knees.
When I stride forward, the stable hand flinches and throws up an arm to shield himself, as though I might strike him. “Taken? By whom?”
“A woman. She was masked, so I didn’t see her face, but she had white hair and—”
Oh, ho ho. No. Please tell me that little witch did not steal my fucking horse. But as I search inward, I sense her—Calixis—and she is not where she should be. She is outside the stable.
There’s a sense of reprieve from escaping her confinement, but also a sense of ire at the unskilled creature riding her who is coarsely attempting to guide her movements. I feel her confusion. Her agitation. The unfamiliar weight on her back.
Cali, show me where you are.
Instantly, jagged flashes rip through my mind—rough streets, narrow alleys, lantern light whipping past as Calixis races through the back arteries of the city.
The rest of his words are disregarded as I turn sharply and stride from the chamber. I kick open my bedroom double doors with enough force that they slam against the wall. “Deal with him however you see fit,” I call over my shoulder. “I’m going after her.”
I strap on my sword belt, grab my great blade, and head to my closet, where I begin sliding my knives into place. Metal kisses leather. Buckles snap tight. Within seconds, I am armed to the teeth.
Then I’m moving again.
Minutes later, I am in the stables, hauling one of Mardoch’s offspring from his stall.
Tíarnach’s mount is the fastest among the four Aetherions, the celestial beasts crafted by god to be our bonded allies in this task, and since Mardoch is the only one who can truly outrun Calixis, he’s the best choice.
He’s a half-breed—lean, long-legged, quick—but he may have just enough speed and agility to get me close before she clears the outer territory.
I vault into the saddle and drive him forward.
We burst from the stables, and guided by Calixis’s sight, I orient myself to their position.
The stallion is trained but still carries a wild edge, untested in battle and ill at ease under my demand for speed.
His muscles bunch beneath me as we tear through tight turns.
I ease his mind as much as I’m able, influencing his desire to push himself beyond his known limits.
Ahead, Calixis and the woman fly through the gates of the city.
Cali nearly runs down those too slow to leap aside.
She is not giving everything she has, though.
I feel it—her stride subtly shortening, her pace just slightly tempered.
Buying me time, perhaps. Concealing it from the woman tugging at her mane and driving her heels into her flank.
They clear the city and enter the livelier parts of The Felled Forest, the section still in the earliest stages of regrowth, where patches of green have begun to reclaim the land.
I yank the reins and pivot the stallion west.
There is a straightaway through the lower district and another gate that will cut the distance in half if she continues in the direction she’s heading. So I lean forward and press my heels into his sides.
Before I can reach the gate, I check back in with Cali. Most of the trees she races past stand dead or rotting, skeletal trunks no more than spindly graveyards, stretched out for miles under clear skies.
As we approach the smaller gate, I wave my arm and shout, “Move! Make room—move out of the way!”
The crowd scatters just in time. Bodies press against stone. Hands yank children clear. We burst through and nearly collide with a family on the other side.
A man clutches a small body to his chest. A woman grips another child’s hand.
There’s no time.
I close my eyes and wrench the reins hard to the right, trusting instinct and prayer alike. The stallion turns on a knife’s edge, muscles straining, hooves skidding for half a breath before finding purchase.
The father reacts just as quickly. He grabs the woman’s arm and hurls her and the child to the ground as the stallion launches past them in a blur of motion.
It’s a near miss. We clear them by inches, and I mutter a grateful prayer to the heavens under my breath as we race forward.
When we reach the tree line, and I’m sure we’re beyond the sight of those at the city’s border, I let some of the fragile mask of humanity slip away.
Most of my true form remains hidden, but my sight shifts and my senses improve. The stallion’s panic spikes beneath me because he feels the shift.
I push deeper into his mind and calm his frightened state. Then I resume my hunt.
I track the woman and Cali through the devastated forest as best as I can.
Cali breaks into a thinner stretch of dead woodland. The Ravage Plains lie just ahead. There’s a large crack in the earth that she jumps and clears. Upon landing, her knees lock up, her hooves sink deep into unstable soil, and the force pitches the rider clean over her head.
She flies forward in a tangle of white hair and dark fabric, lands hard, and rolls through brush and dried branches. She continues to tumble until her body slams against a massive tree trunk with a final thud.
She does not rise.
For a heartbeat, I wonder if the impact killed her.
Calixis keeps her distance, ears pinned, watching.
As I break through the last of the trees, the woman groans. Her fingers drag through dirt. She pushes herself up onto her hands and knees, shoulders trembling.
Then she throws back her hood. For the first time, I see her. Not all of her, but more than ever before.
White hair spills free—wild, ghostlike. Her green eyes flash with fury as she glares at Calixis and spits, “You horrible beast. You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”
My attention fractures for half a second at the sight of her.
Enough so that in my distracted state, I nearly get taken out, impaled by a jagged branch spearing toward my chest. I twist in the saddle just in time, bark scraping against my armor.
In the nick of time, too, as the stallion lunges over a fallen trunk soon after.
Dead limbs whip across my shoulders and strike my cloak, snapping in the air behind me.
I refocus and search with my true sight now.
The woman calls my horse a few more choice words. My awareness of it is all I allow myself as I look across the forest for them. While fisting the reins tightly, I imagine it’s the woman’s neck under my grip. She may not be dead from that fall. But by God, when I get my hands on her, she will be.