Emperor Forged Read online

  I had asked to be given the oni’s military and had known I would likely be saddled with the humans of my former territory. This was far beyond that. What were the oni mothers doing?

  Miyasa looked a little troubled at the question written across my face, given it was a subtle jab at the leaders of her race. “These are not from the mothers.”

  “They’re not? Aren’t they in charge of the clan?”

  “They provide guidance and leadership but there are more leaders within the clan. Until recently, I was responsible for most of that. Now…”

  I nodded slowly, catching on. A vacuum created by Miyasa leaving was being filled. At the same time, the oni had dedicated decades to war. Now there was so much more to deal with and too little experience.

  Hence the mess of questions and issues from the oni, as well as the same thing sometimes asked in different ways. The Deridh clan was expanding and testing its current power structure. Right now, I, through Miyasa, was something firm they could grasp onto during a sea of change. I was also not a political opponent, which was a troubling thought. My advice could greatly affect the internal politics of the oni and the way they developed. I was in no way experienced in this.

  “If it’s advice, then I think you can answer most of them,” I said, utilizing the almighty power of delegation. “If it’s something you don’t know, try Ilsa. Her position is that of strategist. Aaron can also help if it relates to logistics. Come to me only if the three of you are stumped.”

  Miyasa smiled. “So we are your trusted subordinates then?”

  “You said you wanted to be mine, didn’t you?”

  Glowing bright red in the face, Miyasa turned away. Vasi or somebody else had explained exactly what she had inadvertently meant when asking to serve me as a general, and it was not pleasing to her. She lacked the dirty mind of the oni girls from earlier.

  As I looked at her embarrassed face, it occurred to me that I knew very little about why Miyasa was here or how she would answer those questions. She was the herald and I needed to trust her as the representative of the oni, but she was a warrior and a general. Quite a few of these questions were on farming, which made sense, given the oni were interested in feeding themselves. After a century stuck in the marsh, the opportunity to grow as much food as they desired and therefore have a population as large as they wanted was within reach.

  Passing the work off to Miyasa like this seemed like a missed opportunity.

  “Why don’t we have a look at a nearby village to help you with some of the requests?” I asked Miyasa, gesturing toward the stables.

  Chapter 5

  We rode a pair of horses to the village. It wasn’t far, although it would likely be sundown by the time we returned. Overgrown grassland surrounded the roads we traveled, countless seeds beginning to sprout with the coming of spring. I saw a forest in the distance. After a century of human inactivity, the trees slowly made their return.

  “I would have thought there would be more farms here,” Miyasa said, breaking the silence that had overcome us during our ride. “I had thought this was prime farmland for the Empire.”

  “It was,” I admitted, thinking carefully about how much to say as our horses trundled on.

  “Ah.”

  Miyasa wasn’t a stupid woman. My two words said everything. I decided to give her the details rather than leave them to her imagination. People tended to be their own worst enemies, after all.

  “A century ago, I believe this was heavily worked land. Of course, the Nahaum Mountains didn’t exist then, and the Empire was expanding farther east to the very edges of the badlands,” I explained.

  “Then we came,” Miyasa said, staring out at the empty fields.

  “Ha, well, a lot more than the oni came. The demons came, too. Truthfully, you were the least of our worries.”

  I remembered the first of the demonic onslaughts. The darkness of the halls in the capital. Riots in the streets, as city after city fell before an unending horde of monsters that seemed to spread the taint of the badlands with every step they took. It was the only time I remembered worrying about food and needing to beg for every scrap. A pall had hung over the entire world.

  I sighed, then continued. “The real damage came after Nahaum constructed his mountain range. It helped keep the demons out. It was a natural barrier to fight them from, as well as a foundation to erect magical wards on. The fact that the oni started traveling down the new Nahaum Pass at the same time was unfortunate, as it meant you were lumped together.”

  “So the people fled to escape us that long ago,” Miyasa muttered. “Then you and Bulwark Matthew kept us locked up in the pass all this time with your raw power and skill.”

  Bulwark Matthew, huh? I hadn’t known the oni respected Magister-General Tornfrost so much. Next time I visited the old man, I would add the title to his memorial. The Bulwark itself might be named after me, but he still held the title in the hearts of the oni he fought.

  “They didn’t all flee. The Imperial military made people feel safe. It wasn’t until Fenhaven was razed that the Nahaum Pass truly became home to only soldiers,” I said. “Although that’s changed in the last couple of decades.”

  Miyasa winced, then looked away from me. We rode in silence for some time.

  Fields came into view ahead. They were bare dirt for now but would soon bear the food that would fuel my armies in the coming months. A large cluster of huts sat in the center of the neatly fenced fields. Dirt paths broke off from the grandiose highway and led to the fronts of those same huts. I didn’t know the name of this place, but it looked like any typical village in the Empire. A hundred or so residents. Thirty-acre plots broken up by fence lines. Smaller herb and vegetable gardens next to every building. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  As the duke, I held claim to a portion of what was grown in the fields, but everything else in the village belonged to the residents. In exchange, I protected the village and was supposed to manage all the services of the duchy. In practice, the farmers did their thing, and I left the duchy to others while the Empire supplied my military.

  The days when I could sit back and pretend that the people of the land were an amorphous mass that I protected were gone now. My ambitions required an engine of war and these fields would supply the fuel for it. There would be no more crates of rations delivered due to filling out forms. If I took too much from these fields, the people would starve or leave.

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose as I held back a sigh. “Thinking about how reliant we are on each individual village is worrisome. Still, these villages should be a good model for the oni. You can even see an agriwizard at work now. They’re the key to the Empire’s harvests.”

  “Agriwizard?” Miyasa asked.

  “Hedge wizards or retired mages, usually. They use basic sorcery to support the crops in the villages. Provide water in drier seasons, help deal with pests, help the crops produce better. I don’t know the specifics, as it’s a very hands-on field of magic, but I imagine you would have something similar.”

  Shaking her head, Miyasa stared out at the old man drawing a magic circle in the middle of a field. He looked to be well over fifty years old and carried a wooden staff longer than he was tall. He used it to support himself as he walked. Given his advanced age and physical weakness, I suspected he was a hedge wizard—a sorcerer without the capability to gain entry into a mage tower. That didn’t make him incompetent, as saying that would be insulting almost every battlemage in my army. However, he would almost certainly be either self-taught or would rely on knowledge passed on by a mentor or other agriwizards.

  “Our shamans provide what little magic they can for our crops, but it is usually to water them if we fear drought. Such a thing greatly exhausts them, and we have far too few shamans to expend their power lightly,” Miyasa said, her voice full of awe. “Is your domain so powerful that you can afford sorcerers like this?”

  I held back a snort. “There’s hardly a village in the Empire
that doesn’t have an agriwizard who visits it regularly. Some even have several competing over territory. Hmm, I guess that’s because we use different types of magic. We’ll need to talk to the agriwizards about supporting the oni villages then.”

  Miyasa nodded, a bright smile on her face. “Thank you, Mykah. This means a lot to us.”

  The ride around the rest of the village took a few more hours. I pointed out what I knew of agricultural practices in the Empire, although it was incredibly superficial, consisting of things as basic as crop rotation and the supply chain. Calling on knowledge from my childhood like this felt nostalgic.

  For Miyasa, it seemed the opposite. She had long since stopped smiling, her expression darkening with each passing minute.

  I pulled our horses onto a hill that overlooked the village. On the opposite side was another village, this one with far fewer fields but occupying as much space—an oni village. The sun was beginning its descent, its rays changing color and signaling the need for us to return to Tornfrost Watch. There was a conversation I needed to have before we returned, however. Two, perhaps.

  “You haven’t always been herald, have you?” I asked Miyasa.

  “There is only one herald. We all held out hope that the current one would be the last. That hope has finally been borne out,” she said, smiling bitterly as she stared down at the back of her horse’s neck.

  My next words felt almost like I was speaking a taboo, but I spoke them anyway, “You are no longer herald. You can go back to your people. They’re asking you all of those questions for good reason, after all.”

  “No!” she snapped, her face whipping up to look at mine. “I am still the Herald of the Oni, at least in the way that matters. So long as we serve as the military protecting the future of the oni, the hope of a future we are beginning to claim here, I am needed. Under you, that is what I am. I merely… remembered things from the past. The leaders of the oni are all taught how to manage farmland, logistics, and supplies within the marsh. It’s what I did for a few years, whenever I was not perfecting myself for when I may be needed on the front lines.”

  Well, that made me feel a little foolish. It sounded like Miyasa had already been taught everything I had told her. I decided to stick to teaching people about things I actually had experience in, not things I was taught countless decades ago and had never used.

  Miyasa let out a sharp bark of laughter, the self-deprecation almost oozing from it. “This future was claimed with so much blood, and here you are, talking to me as if it never happened.”

  Ah, there it was: the other conversation we needed to have.

  “We have a common cause here, Miyasa,” I said, looking down the hill at the two villages. “The Empire occupies the land you need to survive just as it occupies the throne I want to save from the conspirators. I help you build your future. You give me a military. We all live happily ever after with an empire that will better suit us both.” Or perhaps one that wouldn’t exist after I was done with it.

  The wind blew past us, growing colder with the setting sun.

  “Why don’t you hate us, Mykah?” She laced her question with too many emotions to even begin to pick them apart.

  It was a question I had forced myself to answer back when Matthew Tornfrost had fallen to the oni. “I am—was—the magister-general responsible for the protection of Nahaum Pass. Hate would blind me to what is important. It would cause me to underestimate you. To make mistakes. Then, eventually, I would have failed against you. Failure was never an option. It should never have been an option for the rest of the Empire, but here we are.”

  Licking her lips, Miyasa looked satisfied. Or maybe she was simply thinking about what to say next. Yet no words came as we sat up here, watching the two villages in silence as the sun slowly descended.

  “We should head back,” I said.

  Not long after we began our ride back, I spotted a figure heading toward us. It looked familiar. A mage’s uniform, ponytail, female—yes, it was Ilsa. What was she doing out here?

  She waved us down with a bright smile and pulled her horse around. Trotting along with us as we returned to the fortress now, it was clear she had come out here to meet us.

  “Bad news?” I asked her. If so, surely she would have sent a messenger on a fast horse. This was a bad time to have forgotten to bring a larger magetalk device, I realized.

  I made a mental note to bring one of the magetalk devices in the future when I left the fortress. Although I was far from a fan of the devices, which could project magical images and audio across the world, they did allow for instantaneous communication. We had a variety of the things in the fortress, from smaller disks that enabled communications over a mile to the man-sized devices that worked across the breadth of the Empire.

  “If you count the two highest-ranking officers of the fortress randomly vanishing in the middle of the day without telling anybody, then yes,” Ilsa said. That bright smile of hers suddenly looked very strained. Was that jealousy I detected in her as her gaze flitted between me and Miyasa?

  “Technically, I did tell the gate guards that we were popping out to visit a local village,” I said, stroking my beard.

  “Yes, because that’s exactly who the ruler of the castle tells when they vanish without warning,” Ilsa said. “The fortress is going to be talking about your midday rendezvous for the rest of the month, now.”

  Definitely jealousy. Ilsa had spat “rendezvous” at me like it was acid, and she was inspecting our clothes a little too closely. I felt that if they were even the slightest bit askew we would be walking back to the fortress.

  “My apologies, Captain Mayer,” Miyasa said, nearly falling off her horse as she attempted to bow while riding. “Mykah was showing me the nearby village so I would have more information with which to assist the oni in their own farming.”

  Ilsa cocked an eyebrow at that. “That’s the sort of thing Aaron can do. And call me Ilsa. The soldiers call me Captain Mayer, and even that feels too stuffy for me.”

  “Yes, the original idea was for you, Armsmaster Saruse, and myself to solve the many queries of the oni leaders before we go to Mykah with them. However, it seemed best if I had additional knowledge about how such an important aspect of daily life worked,” Miyasa said.

  Internally, I was cheering for Miyasa while keeping my face blank. Ilsa’s expression had softened while she listened to Miyasa explain how agriwizards might help the oni avoid the food shortages that had troubled them in the past. Such problems were no doubt new to Ilsa. Famine in the Empire was almost unheard of, caused solely by war and destruction. Magic had long since done away with “bad years” in which crops produced too little food to feed the Empire.

  “I see,” Ilsa said, giving me an odd look when Miyasa finished. “Why don’t we set up a standing meeting with the three of us to go through these requests? That way, you don’t need to worry about them piling up. We just knock them all out at once and dump the remainder on Mykah.”

  “Hey,” I objected.

  “You can’t delegate everything,” Ilsa said primly.

  “I can damn well try.”

  Miyasa giggled. Ilsa gave me a look of triumph, which I admitted was deserved. This was the first time Miyasa had reacted like that. I wished she did so more often.

  The rest of the ride back was uneventful, filled by Ilsa explaining what she knew of farming and trying to help with the other requests that Miyasa could remember. The walls of the keep were dyed red by the sun as we strode inside and found our beds.

  Come morning, I found the mage tower occupied by my three officers, all deep in discussion. Miyasa’s clipboards were piled high, the three working through them steadily. That left me to my own devices.

  I found myself down at the stables, admiring the griffins. They cawed at me softly as I stroked the feathers of one. At the far end, I noticed a new arrival: a towering beast with beautiful black feathers. It was clearly built for battle. Years ago, I knew one very similar: my old
partner, Ein. I still missed him, even if his passing had been the best an old warrior could have hoped for.

  This black-feathered wingless griffin was female, from what I could tell. She stared down at me. Her bulk rippled with muscles great enough to shred through steel plate if she used her vicious front claws. Bowing to her, I found in her the same respect that was common in many other tamed griffins. They were all soft-hearted in the stables, melting in my arms as I rubbed at their feathers and they cawed in my ears.

  “Ah, I see you have found her,” Miyasa said from behind me.

  I turned around, hands still buried in the griffin’s neck. Before I could open my mouth to respond, I saw a messenger sprinting toward us from the keep.

  “General! Report from the front,” the messenger shouted before coming to a stop, breathing rapidly and doubling over. “Yasno reports a large army with black and gold standards from the west. He’s moving to engage.”

  Black and gold were the colors of Taranth, the Empire’s province immediately to our west. The dragons were on the move.

  Chapter 6

  Barreling across the terrain on the back of a griffin was an experience I had almost forgotten the joy of. I gripped the griffin’s black feathers, hugged her bulk tightly, and watched the world fly by. My old bird, Ein, had given me this joy for decades before his valiant death in battle years ago. Now I experienced it through a new griffin, Zwei.

  “I take it you like your gift,” Miyasa called out to me. “I’m glad you met her at the stables earlier. This isn’t how I wanted to introduce you.”

  “There is no better occasion than battle to meet a new partner,” I shouted back.

  The air whistling past us was loud enough to nearly make conversation impossible. The sheer speed at which wingless griffins could move across the terrain wore at my body. Without training and experience, I would have fallen off long ago. Griffins were phantasmal beasts formed of magical energy, so they did not understand fatigue. It was like riding a horse that could gallop all night and day without rest.