Sendra
But Ilmoth had seemed a signal that he wouldn’t have to run anymore. That maybe it was someone else’s turn. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, even the Regent of Lannesite might be moved to pick up her skirts and flee. He, the lord of monsters.
He had never been the lord of monsters. They had been gifted to him by Ilmoth Elder, the girl from the mound. And taken away by the Regent’s pet wizard.
They were sitting out at a cave in the forest. Not the product of the natural earth.
One of those weird structures the ancients had built, just slabs fitting together.
You could see grooves in the walls like serpent tracks.
Under other circumstances he might have asked Ilmoth, and received some incomprehensible lecture in reply.
Right now, nobody was interested in a history lesson.
Blennardt was binding a gash on Kaille’s arm, left by a piece of ruptured monster. She looked over at their fourth. So much, that look said, for magic.
Ilmoth was sitting at the mouth of the artificial cave. It was dark out there, raining, a manifestation of the exact way Sendra felt right now. He’d had such ambitions. A new Enclave, towns flocking to him. A land he could be regent of, where he’d set the rules and decide what was right or wrong.
Ilmoth said nothing. Just stared.
Sendra should feel angry, honestly—either at Lannesite’s wizard or his own—but he just felt hollow.
The Elder hadn’t even chased them. Looking back, Sendra had seen him just standing with the woman, Lynesse Second Sister.
Nyrgoth’s apprentice, by a rumour that Sendra was absolutely in a position to confirm.
That was another throw of the dice lost, too. Because for the kin of Daimlesse Regent, Lynesse had seemed almost reasonable. Interested, willing to talk. If he’d had a chance to sit properly with her …
She was just better at hiding the rot. That was what they taught you in Ceryon Enclave. That kind of power always rotted you from within. But she’d seemed … someone he could have talked to.
The other brigands hadn’t become lost. He knew that.
Even Irkon, so good at losing his way. When your sovereignty was over opportunists, outlaws and thieves, you had them at your back only so long as you won.
They’d seen his power dismantled almost casually by a single man.
The Elder, horned inhuman, had destroyed all his poor monsters.
He was expecting it, when Blennardt stood.
She had her cloak about her, and her fancy gutbow tied up in its waxed bag.
“Well-so,” she said. She did him the favour of meeting his eyes.
“The privilege, it was,” she told him. “An adventure. But…” Then Kaille was standing, too.
Shouldering the half-empty pack she’d salvaged.
“No,” said Sendra, because Kaille had been with him since the start.
“It’s over,” she said flatly. “You saw. It doesn’t matter what we have.
They’ll always swat us, the moment they hear us buzz.
” Her face was ugly, vicious, defeated. Sendra watched the pair of them, knowing his eyes were begging, and that it only made him weaker.
Watched them skirt round Ilmoth and head out into the night, where a good pair of legs might put distance between them and Lannesite’s reprisal.
He found his own legs standing him up. “Right,” he said, and knew that he was going to run after them. Be just one more troublemaker in a world of trouble, until they stretched his neck for it. Be nothing, in a world that didn’t know his name.
“No,” said Ilmoth. She had turned from the darkness and her face was coldly savage. “It’s not over.”
It looked pretty damn over to Sendra. He couldn’t even muster a spark of hope at her words.
Her eyes sought his, and he was shocked to see pleading there.
She was not someone who begged. She was Ilmoth Elder, mother of monsters.
Except right now her children were dead and Ilmoth needed him.
The bridge between her uncanny power and the world of human things.
“All right then,” Sendra said, making his voice as casual as he could. Wringing it dry of defeat and the destruction of his monsters. “Speak.”
“It’s not over between me and the Elder,” Ilmoth said.
“It looked over,” Sendra said tiredly. “He beat you, Ilmoth. No slight to you. He’s the Elder who brought down Ulmoth, thirty Storm-seasons ago. He’s been alive since the ancient times. He was always going to come and kick down whatever we built. Lannesite is jealous of its magic. But speak.”
“It’s not magic,” Ilmoth said flatly. One of those remarks she made, so evidently contradicted by everything she was or did.
“He’s just the heir to a people who gifted him with toys.
Toys outside and in. I know him. He is just an old man.
A scholar.” And then some other words for what the Elder was, in that language she’d used speaking to him, the tongue of magicians.
“I am as old as he,” she said. “And I have not grown old. I can beat him.”
He could find more followers, start gnawing at the edges of Lannesite’s power, but without monsters, without magic, he would only ever be a bandit.
Not even enough to draw the ire of Nyrgoth Elder.
Not enough to bring the Regent’s youngest sister to negotiate.
He could already feel the Lannesite historians putting the final punctuation to his story, a man who would never rise to trouble their pages again.
“Speak,” he said a third time. There was power in that, wasn’t there? Commanding a wizard thrice, some such nonsense.
Ilmoth’s eyes gleamed, and he saw something move beneath her skin, below her collarbone. A knotted lump shifting there, like a fist pressing outwards. Not the first time he’d seen the trick; not something anyone could look on with equanimity.
“I have it,” she said. “Go with me and we will destroy the power of the Elder. More, I shall give you such gifts as no sorcerer ever had, Sendra.” There was a hunger in her voice. “I am going to claim my inheritance, and those who stand with me shall be lords of the world.”