The Heretic Kings by Paul Kearney Read Free Book Online

bodies of their warhorses and warning shots from their matchlocks. Inside the carriage Macrobius III, High Pontiff of the Western World, sat with blind patience clutching the Saint’s symbol of silver and lapis lazuli General Martellus had given him. Nowhere in Ormann Dyke could there be found material of the right shade to clothe a Pontiff, so instead of purple Macrobius wore robes of black. Perhaps it was an omen, Corfe thought. Perhaps he would not be recognized as Pontiff again, now that Himerius had been elected to the position by the Prelates and the Colleges of Bishops in Charibon. Macrobius himself did not seem to care whether he was Pontiff or not. The Merduks had carved something vital out of his spirit when they gouged the eyes from his head in Aekir.
    Unbidden, her face was in Corfe’s mind again, as clear as lamplight. That raven-dark hair, and the way one corner of her mouth had tilted upward when she smiled. His Heria was dead, a burnt corpse in Aekir. That part of him, the part which had loved her, was nothing but ash now also. Perhaps the Merduks had carved something out of his own spirit when they had taken the Holy City: something of the capacity for laughter and loving. But that hardly mattered now.
    And yet, and yet. He found himself scanning the face of every woman in the teeming multitude, hoping and praying despite himself that he might see her. That she might have survived by some miracle. He knew it was the merest foolishness; the Merduks had snatched the youngest and most presentable of Aekir’s female population on the city’s fall to be reserved for their field brothels. Corfe’s Heria had died in the great conflagration which had engulfed the stricken city.
    Sweet blood of the holy Saint, he hoped she had died.
    The outrider Corfe had dispatched an hour before came cantering back up the side of the road, scattering trudging refugees like a wolf exploding a flock of sheep. He reined in his exhausted horse and flung a hurried salute, his vambrace clanging against the breast of his cuirass in the age-old gesture.
    “Torunn is just over the hill, Colonel. Barely a league to the outskirts.”
    “Are we expected?” Corfe asked.
    “Yes. There is a small reception party outside the walls, though they’re having a hell of a time with the refugees.”
    “Very good,” Corfe said curtly. “Get back in the ranks, Surian, and go easier on your mount next time.”
    “Yes, sir.” Abashed, the youthful trooper rode on down the line. Corfe followed him until he had reached the bumping carriage.
    “Holiness.”
    The curtains twitched back. “Yes, my son?”
    “We’ll be in Torunn within the hour. I thought you might like to know.”
    The mutilated face of Macrobius stared blindly up at Corfe. He did not seem to relish the prospect.
    “It starts again, then,” he said, his voice barely audible over the creak and thump of the moving carriage, the hoofbeats of horses on the paved road.
    “What do you mean?”
    Macrobius smiled. “The great game, Corfe. For a time I was off the board, but now I find myself being moved on it again.”
    “Then it is God’s will, Father.”
    “No. God does not move the pieces; the game is an invention of man alone.”
    Corfe straightened in the saddle. “We do what we must, Holy Father. We do our duty.”
    “Which means that we do as we are told, my son.”
    The wreck of a smile once more. Then the curtain fell back into place.
    T ORUNNA was one of the later-founded provinces of the Fimbrian Empire. Six centuries previously, it had consisted of a string of fortified towns along the western coast of the Kardian Sea, all of them virtually isolated from one another by the wild Felimbric tribesmen of the interior. As the tribes became pacified Torunn itself, built athwart the Torrin river, became an important port and a major fortress against the marauding steppe nomads who infested the lands about the Kardian Gulf. Eventually the Fimbrians settled the land between