Tenebroum PLUS Ch. 124-125 (Patreon)

Ch. 124 - The Greater Good

When the ebony carriage rolled through the gates while the last sun was still high in the sky, no one thought to stop it or inquire as to the business of the vehicle’s sole occupant. Why should they? The undead forces that assailed the land were utterly inhuman, and they only ever struck in the dark of night. They didn’t ride into town in an elaborate carriage pulled by four pale horses.

Tenebroum had worked hard to make the masses of humanity believe that any light at all was enough to keep them safe, but the thin blue light of the first sun's dawn and the pale white of the fourth sun was only enough to keep the shadows, and other fragile, slender abominations at bay, and this creature had been custom-built to endure the light and all the scrutiny that came with it.

The carriage had been lacquered until its deep black surfaces were practically a mirror, and its gilded ornaments were almost enough to make it look like a cheerful affair. The aura of wealth that it gave off was second only to the aura of fear that radiated from it. Though it was not obviously evil in any way, everyone gave the coach and the team that pulled it wide berth, and neither man nor beast could bear to bar its path for long.

The animals that might have given the citizens of the city early warning were in short supply, though. The dogs had long been eaten or released into the wild to forage for themselves, and other horses and oxen were already in short supply. Because of the grinding war of attrition that was being waged to the northwest, they’d already been seized by the military.

Only those with the sight might have been able to glimpse what the thing truly was and see the plume of ashen darkness that it left in its wake. The only old woman who did glimpse that shocking sight died of a heart attack before she could warn anyone. No matter how polished and pretty evil was made, it was still evil, and nothing could hide that fact.

When it pulled up in front of the palace steps, most people were still largely unaware of the danger that they faced. They didn’t know that the horses had rusted skeletons beneath the immaculately bleached hides or that inside their mouths were the charred teeth of dire wolves and that the souls that occupied them longed to be let off the chain more than anything. They also didn’t know that both the bland-faced footman and the sole occupant had breathed their last breaths months before.

All anyone might say, beyond the feeling of disquiet that everyone felt, was that the whole thing had a strange odor, which was equal part alchemical preservatives and pleasantly scented substances designed to mask the decay.

The coachman descended stiffly from his perch atop the carriage. That wasn’t its fault. It was because the subdermal armor plating and the extra pair of arms folded under the rib cage to make it seem like nothing but a bear-human under its loose, rubbery skin made movement difficult.

If it was forced to shed that illusion of normalcy to defend its charge, it would take only moments for its extra limbs to unfold and for its retracted claws to extend. Only then would it become the nightmarish reaper it had been created to be. That wouldn’t happen until the Lich’s very kind offer was rejected, though, and its latest emissary had been spurned.

The Voice of Reason was by far the most beautiful construct the Lich’s minions had ever built, and as she exited the door, hiked her black skirts, and began to walk toward the front door, the only hints that she might be anything besides a beautiful woman was the strange perfume she left in her wake, and her weight.

The Voice weighed twice as much as a strong man due to the alloys that strengthened her construction and the large amount of porcelain that made up her body. That porcelain was harvested from the thick clay layer of what had once been the swamp, so she would belong to it more than perhaps any other servant it had ever crafted.

The glamors that made that perfect porcelain skin of her hands and face look like anything other than a beautiful woman flickered slightly in direct sunlight before stabilizing. Even if they had failed, though, she would still have been an inhuman beauty.

Tenebroum did not understand desire or attraction, but it had servants who did, and each of them swore she was as perfect as a wind-up doll could get. With a perfectly symmetrical figure, carefully polished sapphire eyes, and hair of literal spun gold, she was a storybook creature, and she was here with a simple message: surrender and swear fealty to the darkness encroaching on your lands or die screaming.

. . .

She wouldn’t put it in quite so many words, of course. She would never do anything so impolitic. She smiled slightly, blushed when appropriate, and curtsied whenever necessary as she spoke first with the doorman, then the chamberlain, and finally the guards. Conversation by conversation, she slowly worked her way into court, where the runes on the throne flashed a warning before she even got close to the ornaments that had been installed into the gilded wood so long ago that people almost forgotten their meaning when they flared to violent red life.

With the smallest gesture, King Borum's honor guard stepped between her and the throne and leveled their halberds at the slight woman, and his court wizard tried not to cower too much behind the imposing chair while he whispered into his King’s ear.

The Voice stopped just shy of the polearms and smiled. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, your Majesty,” she said, curtsying so deeply that the spike on the closest weapon was only inches from her eye.

She was not made for combat, but depending on how powerful the wizard was, she could probably have killed the King. That would have been unspeakably rude, though. Instead, she stood there full of poise in the face of steel and looked around the room. The grand hall of the King’s Court was an impressive thing, with standing room for hundreds.

On the walls above the heads of both the King and onlookers were venerable war trophies from all the Kingdom of Hallen’s victories of ages past. Torn banners and broken shields competed for places of honor with shattered lances, and even the preserved heads of monsters made their appearance here and there.

Those details only added to the atmosphere of the whispering nobles and the tense warriors just ahead of her.

“There’s no need for violence,” the Voice said, “I have come here merely to give you an offer from my Lord.”

“And who is your Lord?” King Borum asked with a voice that was almost completely free of any quavering.

“Why, you already know that, your Majesty,” she smiled, “I serve the darkness, and so can you, if you like.”

A hush fell over the room with those simple words, and several noblewomen lining the gallery fainted.

“All of you can,” she pledged in a cheery voice. “Let us end this constant bloodshed together and find a solution that all of us will benefit from.”

“And if I prefer to take your life instead?” The King demanded, raising his voice. “We’ve heard the cost that comes with your peace. What makes you think you want any part of it?”

“Because the vast army you raise is full of husbands and fathers?” she answered his question with a question. “Do all of them really need to die? Do all of you really need to die for nothing when there are so many other lives that—”

“Is that a threat?” King Borum tried to sound wrathful there. It might have worked if he hadn’t squeaked at the beginning.

“My Lord does not make threats,” she said sweetly. “He offers deals that benefit both parties. You know well that some of your neighbors have spared themselves bloody battles already.”

As she spoke, she produced a scroll seemingly from nowhere, almost getting stabbed for the effort as one of the guards almost attacked her because he thought she was drawing a weapon. “This lays out the specifics of the proposal,” the Voice of Reason said in a strained tone as she struggled to avoid the near act of war that had just happened. Any of the Lich’s other servants would have ripped the man’s head off by now, and part of her wanted to, but she resisted. “But the short answer is this: you have too many people and not enough food to survive this winter, so make a trade with us and spare yourself the cost of a bloody war on top of all the rest. We will take the beggars than clog your streets and the thieves that fill your prisons, and all we ask in return is that—”

“You ask us to sacrifice our subject for a coward's peace,” the King shouted. This time, there was real fire in his voice. “But, for the sake of amenity and as governed by the rules of hospitality, I will read your proposal and discuss it with my privy council before we make any official ruling on such a thing.”

She smiled ruefully at that while the courtier came forward to collect the parchment, and the guards in front of her lowered their weapons a touch. As long as there was talking, things were not likely to escalate, which was to the good as far as she was concerned.

Hedging his bets was as close as she’d expected him to come to saying yes anyway. To give into the demands at the very first contact would seem like cowardice, and it would not sit well with the nobles to seem afraid of what was coming, especially when you were terrified.

“As you say, your Majesty. My Lord has bid me to give you a fortnight to speak of such things. I shall return then for your answer.” She said, giving the throne another deep curtsy. “Thank you for granting me such a speedy audience. I look forward to a fruitful relationship in our future.”

Then she whirled and began to retreat from the room, and the only sound of her departure was the clicking of her heels against tiles as she left the room. No one standing there failed to notice that she didn’t get permission to leave, and no one tried to stop her either.

She already had one, though. If they accepted the darkness’s offer, then the last large human Kingdom in the region would be defanged, leaving its forces free to pursue other targets. If they rejected them, then they would spend the next winter squabbling amongst themselves while they slowly starved to death.

In time, all would belong to the darkness whether they wanted to or not, but for now, it would be helpful to continue to make inroads among the living. As far as she was concerned, that had many advantages.

“They… did not hurt you?” the coachman asked, slurring his words.

“No,” she said, noting the disappointment on its otherwise emotionless face.

That was the biggest shame of this trip, she decided. The Lich paired two servants together with mutually exclusive goals. Her protector could only ever become what he was meant to be if she failed in her mission, in the same way, that the toxic, infectious bomb that sat under the seat of her carriage would only ever detonate and unleash a new plague on this city when they were attacked.

As they began to ride toward the front gate in the growing darkness, she wondered if the nobles who watched her speak realized how close they’d come to meeting their own messy ends.

Would more of them drown in their own blood or their own phlegm? She wondered for a moment before deciding it didn’t matter. The loyal would live, and the disloyal would die and be put to better use.

Ch. 125 - For the Best Reasons

He’d done them the kindness of meeting with them before his meeting with the Dukes and Earls later that evening. Princess Trianna should have been grateful for that, but she knew that he’d already made up his mind and that the decision was the wrong one.

There was nothing that said he had to meet with his wife and daughters to explain the grave news to them. Oh, he tried to put a brave face on it. “This will avoid the war we’ve been building toward for some time,” he assured them as he gestured to the scroll he’d just explained to them. She wouldn’t have the chance to read it, of course, but she didn’t want to. She might not have the sight, but she could feel the evil radiating from that hateful treaty. “Tens of thousands of lives will be saved, and—”

“And thousands of souls will be damned!” her mother blurted out, unable to suppress the outrage anymore. “Honestly, Henry, if you try to round up the beggars, they’ll burn the whole city down beneath us! Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”

Her father, King Borum, was used to these sorts of interruptions and only sighed. Though her mother never said anything to embarrass the King in public, in private, they argued frequently about a whole range of issues. Sometimes, she would even succeed in changing his mind, but the Princess could see by the twitching muscles of his clenched jaw that today would not be one of those days.

“There’s an army of death marching toward us, Glorena,” he sighed. “At first, I didn’t believe it, either. Not when my best spies reported it. Not even after the sun shattered, but it’s true. The dead are marching, the Gods have turned their backs on us, and there are precious few fortresses between here and the enemy. What would you have me do?”

“Well, at least you’re being honest about it now,” her mother growled. She hated being lied to, and the King had lied to all of them for months. The first rumors had begun to circulate more than half a year ago, but in each instance, her father had downplayed them.

‘No, there’s not a war coming.’

‘Yes, there’s a war in the west, but there’s no need to raise an army.’

‘Yes, I’m raising an army, but it's only a small one, and we shouldn’t need to field it.’

‘War is unavoidable, but it’s against flesh and blood. We’ll be fighting the men of Harrow and Kellor, not fiends from the pit.’

At every step, he’d lied to them and to the people, admitting as little as he could reasonably expect to get away with while he and his generals had whispered and planned: the dead had risen and were marching across the world, scourging whole kingdoms in their path.

There were some disputes about where this started. Some said they come from a backwater county in the South and that Siddrimar had been the first casualty. Others insisted they came from the West in the low kingdoms. Both options were equally nonsensical, of course; nothing ever happened in the South, and the West was full of fractious feuding lords that warred with each other.

“If we do as they say, and we send them those men, father,” Princess Trianna said finally in a lul in the conversation. “What’s to stop them from asking for more and more after that?”

“The steel of our blades and the strength of our walls,” he said firmly. She knew that was a lie, though. Everyone did. Constantinal had fallen. The Undefeated City had been defeated.

If they fell, then what chance do we have? She wondered to herself. Princess Trianna said nothing, though. She was rarely given the same latitude that her mother was. A wife might criticize a husband if done correctly, but it was a daughter’s role to be dutiful and supportive.

While her father explained why this was the only way to her mother for the third time to try to get a blessing that simply wasn’t going to come, she sat there, growing cold as she realized the truth: a few hundred beggars and criminals might buy peace for a season, or a year, but such a price would have to be paid whenever it was demanded of them. They would starve just as the beggars were now, and when they were too weak to defend themselves, the rest of them that sheltered behind the walls of Rahkin would join the rest of their fellows who had long since been given away in an attempt to secure peace.

She didn’t imagine that anything good would happen to anyone who ended up in the hands of their enemy, be they beggars or kings, and slowly, her heart hardened.

It’s just like my dreams, she told herself as the thought slowly dawned on her.

The Princess might be sitting there smiling blandly and nodding at appropriate moments like her brothers, but in her head, she was a thousand miles away. She could see her father sitting there on his throne, plump and comfortable, as he traded every citizen and every brick for one more day of life and comfort.

It chilled her to the bone and froze her smile in place even more than the evil scroll that sat in her father’s lap. Would he trade them away, too? Would he feed his own wife and daughters to the darkness, hoping that it would sate the darkness?

This was a terrifying question that ate at her all afternoon, long after their little family meeting had ended. In the end, it was that, even more than her concern for her subjects, that made her act. Her father said that she got her impetuousness from her mother, but today, Princess Trianna had no complaints about that. She got her sense of right and wrong from her, too, it would seem.

“We’ve gone from ‘there’s no war coming’ to ‘it's only the beggars and the criminals’ in less than a year,” she sighed as she clutched the beat-up old doll on her lap. She would have preferred to have her cat to stroke, but Poppet had gone missing months ago, and though she would love to blame her father for her disappearance as well, it was just as likely that she’d met the wrong man while she’d been out hunting rats. “Where will we be by next year and the year after? It’s only the Garden District? It’s only your sisters?”

Looking around the threadbare thing that her life had become, it was hard to believe that her choice would be more of this. Her clothes were patched, her windows were perpetually shuttered, and there were almost never fresh flowers to brighten the place up. Somehow, in spite of that, though, she would rather live the rest of her life like this than see a return to prosperity if the price was measured in lives.

Paradoxically, that meant that her father was going to have to die by her hand. Her brothers, too.

Does that make me just the same as him? She wondered. She had no answers. She prayed to Lunaris about it but received neither wisdom nor peace as she contemplated murder. So, reluctantly, she pulled the small bottle of liquor she’d hidden under her bed and stared at it.

By all appearances, it was just an amber bottle of plum brandy, but she knew exactly how adulterated and toxic it was. She should. She’d made it herself when things had started to get bad this past summer. Given the growing rat problem in the city, poison was one of the few substances that was still easy to come by. It was certainly easier to gather a few poison fruits from the corners of the dining hall than it was to get deserts or enough cloth to make a new dress.

She’d intended for it to be a peaceful way for her to escape the worst if the rumors of the living dead proved to be true. Now, it was a strychnine-laced death sentence for any who would drink it, and she was sure that in the planned meeting, drinks would flow freely as those men struggled with the terrible things they were about to do.

Just as she struggled with her own terrible deeds, she considered wryly. More than anything, Trianna wanted to put this off for another day or another year, but she couldn’t. Realistically, she only had an hour or two left to act. After that, the die would be cast, and they would find themselves in alliance with the devils of the pit.

“This is what the Gods would want,” she whispered herself. “Siddrim taught us this. All who seek to ally with evil or placate them are evil themselves.”

It was with those words that she finally forced herself to move. The Princess made no attempt to sneak or skulk; that would have only attracted more attention. Instead, she secreted the bottle in a handbag and then began to wander around the castle, saying hello to every guard and servant she came across and asking them about their day.

During all that time, no one noticed her little side trip into her father’s study, and no one was there to see it when she placed that bottle in the top drawer of his desk. She would pray that her brothers were spared the terrible fate she’d just created, but if they were not, she knew they would be casualties in a righteous cause.

“The light is worth dying for,” she whispered to herself that night like a mantra as she lay sleeplessly in bed until the screams started just before dinner.

. . .

“Any rumors that my husband planned to ally with these fiends is nothing but pure slander,” her mother said at the funeral. Her face was tear-streaked, but her voice was stronger than it had any right to be. “The evil that we fight knew that he would never bend, and they wormed some agent of darkness into the very heart of our Kingdom, but we shall root it out!”

There was a cheer at that, forcing Queen Borum to stop speaking for a moment as she addressed the masses from the balcony.

“My husband didn’t deserve this end,” she said finally when the crowd died down before she went on to name a long list of honors and achievements that he did.

Her mother went on to lionize her father at length, calling him “A hero who would never bend the knee to the dark,” even though they both knew he wasn’t and that “the army would bring them all the vengeance they craved soon.”

Princess Trianna stood there at her right hand but said nothing. Her mother would never find the culprit because she wasn’t even looking at her daughter. They were questioning the maids and torturing likely suspects, but not one person had so much as asked Trianna if she’d done this terrible thing.

If they had, she might have confessed on the spot. Despite the fact that she was certain it was the right thing to do, the whole ordeal ate at her. Fourteen people were dead, and though the healers had been called swiftly, there was little they’d been able to do. The King, his Lord General, both of her brothers and ten different Dukes and Earls. It had been a horrific discovery, and the entire Kingdom was in mourning.

It was only once all that was done that she announced that she would be assuming the throne and was already searching amongst the nobility for the right man to be the new Lord General. There had been Queens who ruled before, but they knew that would not be a popular move. In time, she would be forced by the gentry to remarry, but for now, during the mourning period, everyone would give her a free hand where vengeance and defense were concerned.

Tears cascaded silently down Princess Trianna’s cheeks as she looked at the blue-skinned bodies that had been laid in state beneath them, just inside the gates of the castle so that the people could see what had become of their King. It was terrible, and she couldn’t stop the tears from coming, even as she reminded herself that it was better than the alternative. Fourteen souls would be interred in peace instead of hundreds that would have been devoured and made to serve the dark.

She would just have to find some way to deal with it because as awful as all this was, it was still better than the deal they’d been offered.