Vol.6, Ch.2, P.8
“Myrd?” gasped the princess at her impassioned legate. There he stood: the man Myrd in all his menace, his eyes red with rage.
“Bickering, barking, babbling!” he berated us all. “You lot’ve squabbled on o’erlong!”
“Becalm thyself, Lord Myrd,” the princess bade him, but to no avail.
“’Tis Her Mightiness who more deserves the leash, my Princess!” protested Myrd. “Have you not harked her wild words!? A storm of insolence, banging at the windows!”
Fair enough. Emilie had indeed declared clear a discontent for her office, having evidently never desired the mantles of mareschal nor hero-dame. An impropriety, to be sure, though one the princess herself had yet to admonish—the mercy whereof this Myrd seemed ill-content to stomach any longer.
“Thund’ring, thrashing welkins!” continued his screaming. “Ne’er would aught come of this fool council! So’ve I said till the clouds did break! And now am I not proved wise, Highness!? Wise!”
“Peace your spasms, Man,” rumbled Alban in rebuke, with bulging arms yet folded; a portrait of impenetrability even as his officials fretted beside him whence they sat. “This parley so far is fruitful enough,” he debated, “for the setting-free of the enslaved it weighs, and the correcting of your cruel creeds against our kind besides. These we would buy with armistice and your fiefdoms remitted. Now these be terms most mete, deem I. Or?”
But Myrd withstood none of it. “Mete? Bah!” he spat and brayed at the jarl. “And what of our terms? Of the clemency offered to thy sicarius!? Matrimony, marquisate, and weight-of-word to await him! All from the sheer grace of Her Royal Highness! And yet these thou hast dared refuse—and now forget!”
“This, too, was worded clear,” replied Alban, “that seek you more to snatch from us our war-chief unchallenged, to weaken our war-might. No armistice may come of this.”
“Why, I should warn thee,” Myrd hissed back, “that thy ‘war-might’ be yet as a worm to the lusty lion that is Londosius! Or hast thou forgotten again in thine arrogance? Taking recent tailwinds to be storms bent to thy benefice? O! the shame upon thine head! Flagrant, flapping shame!”
Like an immovable mountain and a pealing tempest Alban and Myrd seemed, sparks cackling betwixt them as they contested. But at that moment, with his red-dark face twisting all the more, Myrd erupted into a rush around the table and right to our side. Yet no sooner had he thrown forth his arms to grab at one of our officials than did the princess spring from her seat.
“Myrd!” she cried.
The legate halted and turned to her. “My Princess!” he said stubbornly. “These… persons’sve spat upon your prerogative, they’ve done! Words’re as wind to them!”
Alban himself had arisen also, and having plucked his officials from their seats, now sheltered them in his shadow. And then, down upon a menacing Myrd he glowered. “You take us awrong, Man amoil,” he said to him sternly. “We do commend the strong-strum’d determination of your princess, and that of your meritious mareschal besides, though accept this you may not.”
Met once more with barring words, Myrd quaked whence he stood. Yet no matter how volcanic his rancour became, afore him did Alban deign not in the slightest to assuage him. Why, the jarl even grimmed his voice to that of a tiger’s growl as he then declared:
“Yet our will wavers not; for to bend the knee to another is but a peace pretended—and a ‘reconciliation’ ill-wrought.”
“…”
All stood still. And then—shhing!—a flash. From its sheathe shone now a silver blade. No longer did Myrd seem content to scream ever and on, but to instead let silent wrath possess his wit and weapon both. And though a high legate of Central he was, a military bureaucrat that’d given up the battlefield for the desk, it well-appeared that he’d let his warring hand wither little; for with fine flourish had he drawn his blade—and also a speed to surprise.
Weapon swiftly poised, Myrd brandished unto Alban a bright blade—only for a hand of his to fly free from its wrist. Indeed, stamping and springing from my seat, I’d lunged past the legate, along the way letting loose my own blade before ever he could bring down his.
“Gwaa—agh!?” shrieked Myrd. Convulsing, he crumpled to his knees and, failing to hold it any longer, let fall his sword from his remaining hand. Off to the side, I espied the princess astood in speechless horror, her hands quivering as they cupped her mouth.
“Highness!” came a cry. The chamber doors then whipped open, and in barged Björn, who’d been standing guard outside. He gasped at the scene. “How comes this!?”
“Look and know!” Alban quickly exclaimed at him, and indeed, at all the Londosians here. “The crime—it is clear!”
The crime of baring and brandishing a blade upon a peaceable parley; and worse still, unto an official both defenceless and of the highest standing: Alban, the head of all the Himmel. This was, without mistake, unforgivable, but all the more so because of the prior transgressions of Emilie and Björn both. And had the jarl himself not said it? That “one more ‘discourtesy’, and these talks are killed”? By that, things had undoubtedly turned dire for Londosius, borne with all blame as it now was.
“Crime!?” barked the chancellor as he himself lurched from his chair. “A crime tempted by…!” But there, seeming to catch himself, he ceased his words with a grudging groan.
“Björn!” next cried the princess. “Myrd is maimed! Pray bring help!”
“At once!”
The Praetorian captain disappeared forthwith, whilst Her Highness hurried over to Myrd. And not troubling aught about the blood that might stain her samites, she bent down beside the injured legate.
“Lord Myrd!” the princess called to him, before gasping and paling at his gruesome wound. “Heavens…! It must be stanched… swift!” And there, groping through her garment, she clutched a flounce of tissue. “Till come the surgiens,” she said to Myrd, “my silks must serve…” But just as she was to tear a tourniquet from her dress, her hands stopped—
“Hah… hhahaha…”
“…Myrd?”
—for from the maimed man, there emitted a lilting laughter. By pain and pouring blood had he become delirious, maybe, but for an inscrutable smile found now upon his face. Nay, this was not some bout of delirium—it was a strain of madness instead, one he let take hold of his body whole.
“Hahahhh…” his laughter wheezed to a stop, only to succeed to a senseless and rising hiss. “…I ssee. It has come to it, has it? Yess, ah! Gloriouss! How gloriouss! The gleamm… of Dutyy!”
Across the table, the chancellor trembled in disbelief. “What… what’re you on about…?” he muttered, but was soon outsounded by a screaming moan from Myrd.
“Aaah! G-g-gloriousss!!”
And with a frenzied hand, the legate ripped open the face of his doublet, unveiling beneath a confusion of oaken canisters strapped all around his torso. Manifold they were—too many to count, even. And their long and narrow forms… in an instant, my mind flew back to the mines of Godrika, where I’d espied such shapes littering the dark corners. No mistake, then: Myrd had come armed with explosives—the same sort employed to blast the bowels of mountains.
Many things next ensued.
“Eahh!?” yelped the princess as I quickly clutched her collar from behind and threw her aback from Myrd. In the same second, I kicked and uphove the hefty table, toppling it to its side. Behind it did Alban and his officials then run and couch. Meanwhile, more swiftly than could be seen, Lise sprang upon Myrd and brandished her two longdaggers.
—Vrassh!
Blood seethed and sprayed; the man’s throat had been slashed open—and his death dealt in an instant. How he had intended to detonate his explosives I could not guess, but it mattered no more.
Or so I thought.
A wicked and wintry shiver shot down my back, screaming to me of a peril yet unperished.
“Lise!!” I cried, to which without stall the jarl-daughter bounded aback. The head of Myrd’s fresh corpse, connected now to its neck by but a flap of flesh, was left to droop back and stare at the vaults above. But ever as it did, its eyes writhed to life, rolling this way and that, before fixing themselves down upon us.
The warning bells in my bosom blared. All things seemed then to slow to a crawl.
“What… what evil…!” I heard the princess uttering to herself as Emilie came quickly to her aid. “How becometh this a cartaphilus!?”
Strange, that so clearly should her voice and words carry into my ears from behind—even as I now shot straightway unto Myrd and kicked his corpse square in the belly. The dead deserve better, it’s rightly said, but this was nary the time to consider discourtesy; aback the body flew, rolling across the floor and reaching a far wall. And then—
—boom!
A howl of heat, a blast of laughter. Yes: the sick and sinister cackle of one repulsed by Peace—of one too jealous to unhand the reins of History.
And so, aflood with heat, light, and laughter, the steeple tower which housed us all hurtled unto ruin.
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