Chapter 219: Night After the Treachery and Brief Midnight Assurance
It was a few hours past sun down, just when the majority of the army’s men were huddled around roaring fires, eagerly, but silently, scarfing down their dinner after a long day of saddening toil, digging graves for brothers and sisters slain by the enemy’s treacherous blade and pyre.
There was none of the usual cheer and festivities in them that you would’ve ordinarily seen after battle and bloodshed, for it was no true battle at all, but merely craven carnage, wholly without honour and glory, stripped clean of simple dignity that could never be put to song. Well, with the exception of a depressing dirge or a wrathful, vengeful war chant, as how could these warriors ever forgive or forget such a deceitful affront.
For a true warrior does not shy away from death, and knows that it would one day come to him on the keen edge of a finer foe, but never would they even think it would be delivered on the steel of one they called friend. Even if war was inherently a lawless beast, one that favoured the cunning more often than not, there still remained rules that governed it, borders that limited it and clear paths it could not cross, just like everything else made by man; and in the eyes of the three imperial armies, their disgraceful adversaries were as guilty as sin.
Doubly so, when the men hailing from the Blistering Deserts, the heartlands of the Eclipse Empire, heard that their foes had dared target their beloved emperor, the one who brought them sweet victory wherever he led them, the one who bathed them in two triumphant returns to the capital, the one who made their families lift their heads up high whenever their names were mentioned, the one who restored their homeland’s prestige and power to the apex of it’s time.
Even the Murathicus men who still felt more attachment to their people and customs than those of the Eclipse Empire felt disgust and anger at the act of blatant treachery their southern brethren had done.
Yet as all of them continued to stew in these feelings, they remained utterly unknowing that the invisible hands of their monarch were the one’s carefully stirring and fuelling the aggrieving fire under their roiling selves, carefully twisting certain truths and obfuscating other facts to better position their sides on opposing, but far more importantly, on competing ends of justice’s scales.
For if the tyrant had learned anything in his eons of endless wars, it was that hate and an unflinching, fanatic belief in their own righteousness were by far the most nutritious fodder to fatten the brutality and ruthlessness of his warriors; something he desired for the encroaching conflict.
But while all this was happening, there was one who was wholly uninterested in the honour bound rituals of warriors or the machinations of emperors, as she quietly sat inside a tent pungent with the scent of medicinal herbs and elixirs, carefully combing through the hair of the man she had remained by the bedside of since she left her sovereigns war council.
"Pardon me, my lady, but the Grand Marshal is asking for an audience." Suddenly the voice of her most trusted subordinated echoed out from beyond the tent’s entrance, asking as she failed to mask the faltering of her courage at his presence.
"Yes, of course." The duchess of Enkada answered a moment later, her fingers subtly reaching to dab her eyes, just before the ancient demon entered her tent.
"Good evening, Tessiphina." He spoke with his usual calm voice, as he entered the tent not in his fearsome spiked armour, but dressed in casual attire and robes that did very little to blunt the man’s war forged physique and presence, that all but filled the space around them to such an extent that the tent almost seemed too small for them both to be in at once.
"My lord." She replied, saluting as she stood a moment later.
"At ease." He raised his hand, palm open in a stopping motion, telling her to not bother with the decorum tonight, as he came to her side.
Tessiphina slightly relaxed her stance, but did not retake her seat, opting to remain standing as he calmly stared at her wounded boy.
"How is he?" He coolly asked, his tone betraying nothing of his true thoughts.
"He still slumbers." Tessiphina emotionlessly replied, but she could not halt nor hide the fisting of her palms, as her knuckles grew pale white due to her excessive clenching. "The wounds have all but healed, but the poison’s grip is strong, and none of the healers have yet to even identify the thing." She finished her words, while she unconsciously twisted her heroic face into a chilling scowl of hate and hurt, as she stared at the frozen form of her precious child; it was a look that would have petrified many a lesser men than Hamilcar had they been present.
"For you." He uttered a moment later, as he pulled from his regal robes a simple scroll.
Tessiphina curiously took it from his grasp, wondering what this was about, as Hamilcar returned his gaze to the bedridden boy.
A moment later, he heard her voice cry out joyously over the muffled sounds of an armoured knee striking the carpeted earth below "Thank you!"
Sighing, he said "I thought I told you not to bother with the dramatics."
Yet despite his words, she uncharacteristically ignored him, not raising her head as she maintained her kneeling posture, for her gratitude was not born from something simple, such as plain appreciation or indebtedness, but from the raw might of a desperate mother’s relief, mixed with the grim understanding of it’s weight and ramifications.
For she knew, more than most, despite her brief time by his side, what manner of nightmarish horror Alexander’s skin and flesh hid behind their thin veneer, and so she realized that such a decree, written and stamped by his hand, that could spell life and treatment for her beloved boy, was not the product of her own or her son’s merits, for they had very little to bargain with as of now, and nor was it the spawn of a sudden bout of mercy from such a monster, that caused even she to shy away from.
No, this miraculous intervention was undoubtedly the fruit of Hamilcar’s petitioning words, for only they, she believed, could convince that creature of such a thing.
"By dawn, a convoy will be ready to take him back to Emperor’s Reach, where the finest alchemists and doctors in the empire would be waiting for him." He told her, his tone remaining unchanged.
"I swear my lord, that this favour will not be forgotten, nor will it be left unpaid. Even if it cost me my life, I will see your grace returned." She earnestly said with an unflinching, iron conviction, that promised to offer her all in recompense.
"Save your gratitude, Tessiphina." Hamilcar calmly said, still not turning to look at her. "It was the effort of a few simple words and his majesty appreciates his most potent weapons, it is barely worth mentioning."
The duchess of Enkada obviously knew this, after all she had not spent the last three years sitting on her laurels, as she had used much of her time leveraging her knew title and position to slowly investigate the wider world, where these monstrous invaders had come from, something that would’ve been impossible under the past isolationist policies of her people.
And so she had long since come to realize just how much power rested in the hands of that monster everyone called their monarch, but that didn’t mean her maternal feelings of almost endless gratitude were any lesser, and if anything they only swelled in magnitudes after his words, for that only served to remind her that in their sphere, nothing came for cheap, even if they were, as Hamilcar said, a few effortless words.
Seeing that she had no interest in standing back up, Hamilcar’s lips twitched in an imperceptibly thin, successful smile, as he then said, almost conversationally "I also managed to secure you a gift. Complete with his majesty’s regards."
With the landing of his words on Tessiphina’s ears, she finally looked up from the floor, just in time to see several men dragging no less than four, chained and shackled prisoners, with the faces of those she had all but seared into her mind, as she would never allow herself to forget them when she first beheld them a few hours before, in that monster’s war council.
"The emperor took the liberty to rid their mouths of the company of their tongues, he hopes you wouldn’t mind." Hamilcar calmly stated, at last looking back to her, calmly gauging her expression, and she did not disappoint.
Her once frozen features, curled into a cruel and wicked smile, one that stretched so long across her beautifully heroic features, that they caused her eyes to turn into narrow slits, much to the horror of the downtrodden men, who all looked at her with silent terror, their mouths opening and closing continuously, uttering senseless sounds that sounded like nothing more than fearful moans, but it couldn’t have been all the more clearer to the vengeful mother’s ears, who deciphered their nonsensical wails and grunts as desperate pleas of mercy.
Music to her ears.
Hamilcar said nothing more, as Tessiphina bowed to him one last time as he made his way out.
So delighted she was by all the happenings this night, that she didn’t even question why Alexander would slice off the tongues of these prisoners when he’d never done something so wasteful before, or even consider the fact that he might have done so in precaution of one of them saying that they had nothing to do with her son’s current state, since the one who did it was unknown even to them.
