The Autumn Republic

Tamas’s pistol jerked in his hand, and the bullet took her between the eyes. He breathed shallowly for several moments, inhaling the powder smoke, waiting to see if her fallen body would stir. It did not.

He removed the handkerchief from his pocket and shoved it into his wound. It was bleeding too much, the wound too wide. He could barely move that arm, and he was sure that the ice had chipped a bone. Slowly he straightened, feeling his strength wane, and let his eyes wander over the bodies of his men. Not a single one still drew breath.

The door to the Answering Hall swung ponderously at his touch, and Tamas stepped inside the cavernous room, still lit by Privileged sorcery long after the deaths of the men who weaved the spells.

A raised altar draped in velvet dominated the center of the room, upon which Kresimir’s body had been laid out. Lord Claremonte knelt before the altar, his back to Tamas. He was dressed in a fine suit with tails, his hat and cane on the ground beside him.

“Good afternoon, Field Marshal,” Claremonte said. “I’m sorry about all this.”

“No you’re not.”

“A little. Come in. Would you like to know how to kill a god?”

Taniel and Ka-poel rushed through winding corridors, back rooms, secret passages, and servants’ halls.

He could sense the power up ahead of them and he charged forward, with Ka-poel leading their way through the maze of rooms. They passed through small apartments and dark hallways, cutting across marble floors littered with Brudanian and Adran bodies and rooms that had been destroyed by sorcery. He could hear the triumphant yells of the Adran soldiers as they gained ground, but he soon left all sounds of battle behind him.

They entered the cabal’s wing of the palace, marked by ancient runes on the doorposts. This part of the building seemed deserted. They passed a dozen rooms, ascending to the third floor and then going back down to the second before Ka-poel finally slowed in a long hallway that ended in a large, well-lit room.

Taniel could hear voices coming from the room ahead of them. They crept to the end of the hallway and then across to a banister to find themselves looking down into the Answering Room.

Kresimir lay on an altar in the middle of the room and Tamas, holding one blood-soaked shoulder, stood in the doorway. Between him and the altar was Lord Claremonte, and he was speaking in the low, pleasant tone of a man discussing the weather over tea.

Taniel tightened his grip on his bayonet.

Claremonte stood and faced Tamas. He held something in his hand, and Tamas squinted through his pain to make out a piece of sharp flint.

“First of all,” Claremonte said, “we’re not really gods. No more than you are. We’re just very, very old. We were the very first Privileged to walk this planet, back when men had only just begun to live in mud huts. Kresimir used to say we were the first humans, brought into existence by some kind of mysterious maker, but I know that’s bullshit. I remember my parents.”

Claremonte tossed the stone up in the air and caught it. “I remember when Kresimir killed them. He made them scream for hours. Afterward, he said that their deaths were necessary because they wouldn’t let me go with him. That they wouldn’t let him teach me how to wield this great power inside of me. Once again, bullshit. He did it because he liked to see lesser creatures suffer.”

“I thought you were brothers.” Tamas’s strength had fled him. He was weak with loss of blood, and he fumbled with a powder charge, lifting it to his mouth, only to drop it.

“Brothers in sorcery alone,” Claremonte said. “My other half, the one you call Cheris. She was my twin, conjoined at the hip. By all rights we should have been exposed to the elements, left to die after birth. But our parents loved us and kept us. Kresimir killed our parents and then he separated us with sorcery. We mourned for months. We clung to each other until he pulled us apart by force. Without him, we would have always been one, as we were meant to be.”

Claremonte looked behind him, frowning up at the second-floor balcony.

“What was I saying? Oh yes. Killing a god takes either raw sorcery, like when Kresimir killed Adom’s mortal form a couple of months ago, or it takes something like this.” He held up the sharp stone again. “This bit of flint is tens of thousands of years old. It was struck in a land far from here, long since swallowed by the sea. Kresimir cut himself on it when he was a child and that blood will be his undoing.”

“That’s no sorcery I’ve ever heard of.” Tamas’s vision grew hazy. He tried to press his hand harder to the wound in his shoulder. It must be far worse than he thought.

“The blood loss is getting to you, Tamas. Of course you’ve heard of this kind of sorcery. It’s magic long lost to this part of the world, older than me or Kresimir, and never really understood by any of us. But it exists, and is still used today in a land halfway across the world.”

“Dynize.”