Location: The Hedge Maze, Fubar Palace Grounds
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
There is a particular satisfaction in watching a creature of my own making corner himself on purpose, believing all the while that he holds every advantage in the exchange. I confess I did not expect to find myself rooting, in this particular instance, for the mortals rather than the Viperz — but Ramssee, whatever cunning I built into him, was never quite so clever as he believed himself to be. Few of my creations ever are. It is, perhaps, my own fault for making them in a fashion so recognizably like their maker.
Into the Garden
Returning to Fubar’s palace grounds should have been madness, and all three of them knew it. Yet Holms’s old service passages, once memorized, proved just as useful the second time as the first, and three days of careful watching from the tree line had taught them something Ramssee’s household apparently hadn’t thought to guard against: the Steward-turned-Emperor kept a private habit of walking his hedge maze alone each evening, unescorted, as though even a man who ruled by fear needed some small corner of his life where no one watched him rule at all.
They slipped over the garden’s outer wall at dusk, Barkla’s new armor blackened with soot and ash to dull its shine, and found the maze exactly as their scouting had promised — tall, ancient hedgerows grown thick enough to swallow sound, a private labyrinth Ramssee had clearly claimed as his alone.
They found him at its heart, standing before a small stone fountain gone dry and cracked with neglect, his back to the entrance they approached from.
“You’ve come back,” Ramssee said, without turning, before any of them had made a sound at all. “How considerate of you. I confess I’d begun to think you’d simply run.”
Emcorae’s katana was already bare. “Turn around, Steward. Slowly.”
Ramssee turned, and there was nothing on his face that resembled fear — only a thin, knowing smile, and eyes that catalogued each of them in turn with the calm curiosity of a man reviewing pieces on a board rather than facing three armed enemies who’d already humiliated his entire household once.
“Emperor, if you please,” he said mildly. “Though I suppose titles matter little to people who’ve already proven they can walk in and out of my dungeons at will.” His gaze settled on Barkla, and something almost like amusement flickered there. “And you’ve reclaimed your pretty armor, I see. I did wonder if you’d come back for it eventually. Dwarves are so predictably sentimental about their trinkets.”
Barkla’s grip on NeckBiter’s haft tightened audibly. “You have five heartbeats to explain why I shouldn’t take your head for keeping it.”
“Because,” Ramssee said, entirely unbothered, “I am about to tell you something considerably more valuable than an axe you’ve already recovered on your own. Kill me first, and you’ll never learn it.”
“Talk, then,” Nathily said, falchia leveled, though some old wariness in her kept her half a step back from the fountain’s edge — enough distance, she hoped, to matter if he shifted shape without warning.
“You want Diked,” Ramssee said, folding his hands with the unhurried air of a man settling in to enjoy himself. “And you—” a nod toward Barkla, “—want Kaoz’s throat, quite understandably, given what he did to your brother. I find I have no attachment to either man whatsoever, and considerable reason to want them both gone from my life permanently. So let us be plain with one another. I will give you what you need. In exchange, you do what I lack the stomach — or, let us be honest, the physical means, whatever shape I currently wear — to accomplish myself.”
It was somewhere in the unhurried cadence of that speech that Nathily first noticed his eyes had begun to change.
Not dramatically — nothing so crude as a flash of light or a sudden inhuman glow — only a slow, subtle spinning at the center of each iris, threads of yellow and black and green turning lazily against each other like oil spreading across still water. She found herself watching that motion rather than his mouth, found the tightness in her own shoulders easing by degrees she hadn’t consciously chosen to allow, found — distantly, as though the thought belonged to someone standing a little apart from her own body — that his offer sounded rather more reasonable with every passing heartbeat than it had when he’d first proposed it.
“You want us to kill them for you,” Emcorae said, and even his voice had lost its earlier edge, gone flat and oddly agreeable, his katana still raised but no longer quite so certain in his grip.
I feel obliged to note, since neither Azoras were in any position to appreciate the irony themselves, that the particular gift spinning so prettily behind Ramssee’s eyes was one I had given him myself, in what now strikes me as a regrettable fit of generosity. The Power of Persuasion has never worked on everyone — the truly pure of heart slip through its net entirely, a flaw I discovered rather too late to correct — but pure hearts are rare currency in this world, and neither Emcorae nor Nathily, whatever their virtues, qualified for that particular exemption. Ramssee, meanwhile, had grown considerably more skilled with my gift than I’d ever intended him to become.
“I want them dead, and I care remarkably little whose blade accomplishes it.” Ramssee spread his hands, his eyes still turning, turning, drawing both Azoras a half-step closer without either of them quite noticing they’d moved. “Everybody wins, as I see it. You get your vengeance. I get an empire free of a mad puppet-king and a monster I never wanted in my household to begin with. Where is the treachery in an arrangement that suits every party equally?”
“And if we don’t trust—” Nathily began, and then simply stopped, the thought unraveling somewhere behind her own eyes before she could finish it, some fog settling over the wariness she’d carried into this garden until it no longer felt worth the effort of holding onto.
It was Barkla who noticed what neither Azora could.
The dwarf felt the Power’s pull as well — a low, insistent tug at the edges of his own thoughts, urging him toward the same easy agreement already claiming his companions — but where it found soft purchase in Emcorae and Nathily, it met something else entirely in Barkla: a sudden, searing heat blooming across his scalp beneath the Helm of Hacktor, as though the ancient iron had woken to a threat it recognized from centuries before Ramssee had ever drawn breath. Rhokkii’s fury, however faded and however borrowed by a mortal skull, wanted no part of another god’s spell working through his household, and the Helm’s ward burned that resistance straight down into Barkla’s own will like a brand.
He watched, with mounting horror, as Emcorae’s grip on his katana loosened by degrees, as Nathily’s raised falchia drifted toward the ground, both Azoras’ faces gone slack and unguarded and utterly unlike themselves.
“Enough,” Barkla snarled — not at Ramssee, not yet, but at whatever was happening to the two people he’d sworn himself to since the Ninth Ward.
“I did not come back to this cursed garden,” the dwarf roared, “to watch a snake steal my companions’ minds while their bodies still stood breathing!” And he surged forward before either entranced Azora could so much as register the danger, NeckBiter already rising for a killing stroke.
Ramssee’s shape came apart before the blade could land — flesh folding into scale in that same sickening, liquid rush they’d witnessed once before, a man collapsing into a thick, fleeing serpent that poured itself away from the fountain’s edge with terrifying speed. But Barkla, unlike Emcorae’s first stunned encounter with the transformation, had been waiting for exactly this trick, and his axe was already moving before the change had fully completed.
NeckBiter’s edge caught the very tip of the fleeing serpent’s tail in a glancing, brutal chop.
The snake shrieked — an impossible, human sound from a creature that should have had no voice for it at all — and vanished into the hedge’s thick roots before Barkla could press the advantage further, leaving behind only a scattering of dark blood and a severed inch of scale and tail flesh twitching uselessly in the grass.
The spell broke with him. Emcorae staggered as though someone had struck him, blinking hard, his katana suddenly a foreign weight in a hand he didn’t quite remember raising. Beside him, Nathily pressed the heel of her palm against her temple, gasping as though she’d surfaced from deep water.
“What—” Emcorae’s voice came out hoarse, disoriented. “What just happened? We were talking, and then—” He cut himself off, the confusion burning away almost at once into belated fury as his eyes found the blood in the grass and understood, at least in outline, what he’d nearly been made to agree to. “After him!” he shouted, but the hedges swallowed any trace of the wounded creature within seconds, and a long, furious silence was the only answer any of them received.
“He’s gone,” Nathily said finally, still breathing hard, falchia raised now toward hedgerows that had gone entirely, uselessly still — though her hand shook with something closer to violation than simple adrenaline. “Barkla — what did you see? I remember agreeing with him. I remember thinking his offer sounded sensible. Alyssa help me, I don’t even remember deciding to think that.”
“He was working some manner of charm on you both,” Barkla said grimly. “Spinning eyes, honeyed words — I felt it reaching for me too, but the Helm turned it aside. Whatever god blessed this iron did not care to share a mortal’s will with a jumped-up snake.” He stared down at the severed fragment of tail cooling in the grass, and something grim and satisfied settled over his scarred features despite the escape. “Gone, perhaps. Whole, no longer.” He nudged the fragment with his boot. “Whatever shape that creature wears from this day forward, I’d wager he carries a limp to remember me by — and be glad it’s only a limp, after what he tried on the two of you.”
Emcorae’s jaw tightened, some new and uglier anger settling in behind his eyes at the thought of having been so easily turned pliant in his own enemy’s garden. “Everything he told us — Ramos, the Crux road, all of it. If he could bend our minds that easily, how do we know any of it was true and not simply whatever lie he wanted us walking away believing?”
“We don’t,” Barkla admitted. “But I heard every word clearly enough myself, spell or no spell, and nothing in what he said felt like invention to me — men don’t usually bother enchanting their victims into believing a lie they could simply have spoken plainly instead. He wanted you agreeable, not misinformed. There’s a difference, and I think it matters here.”
Onto the Road
They did not linger to test whether Ramssee’s household would come searching for the source of that scream. They were over the garden wall and moving hard through the dark within minutes, putting as much distance between themselves and Fubar’s walls as the failing light allowed, none of them speaking until the palace’s black silhouette had shrunk to little more than a smudge against the horizon behind them.
“Do we trust him?” Nathily asked at last, once they’d slowed to catch their breath at the tree line where Garf waited with the horses, her voice still carrying an unfamiliar unsteadiness that had nothing to do with the run.
“I trust that he wants Diked and Kaoz dead badly enough to hand us the means of doing it,” Emcorae said. “Whether the rest of what he told us holds true, we won’t know until we’re standing on the Crux road ourselves. But I’ll tell you this much — I don’t intend to stand within arm’s reach of that creature’s eyes again unarmed, or unwarned.”
“Then that’s where we go,” Barkla said, already swinging up behind Nathily onto Mossflower’s broad back, NeckBiter settled once more across his shoulder where it belonged. “A queen. A dagger. A murderer who still owes me a debt older than this whole miserable kingdom.” His voice, beneath the armor and the fury, carried something almost like grim satisfaction. “Ramos is a long way south. Let us not waste what lead we’ve bought ourselves standing here talking about it.”
Emcorae swung up onto Joanne, Garf falling into an easy lope alongside them, and as the four companions and two horses turned south toward roads none of them had ever traveled, Nathily allowed herself, for the first time in days, something close to hope — however fragile, however uncertain the word of a snake-tongued emperor might prove to be, and however unsettled she remained by how easily her own mind had nearly been made a stranger to her.
Whatever waited for them on the road to Crux, and beyond it to whatever lay further south still, they would meet it together, or not at all.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 