“We got him, my Lord.” Natan looked up from the scroll he’d been handed at the Lord Dmitriy, Destroyer of Worlds. Dmitriy did not look especially happy at the news.
“How?”
“According to this, a troop of seven was attacked by a man with a staff as they passed through a ravine; he disabled three of them, but was stabbed to death. His body was quartered and posted; his rampage has ended and he’ll serve as a warning to others.”
“And this man was…?”
Natan shrugged. “We’re not sure, my Lord. There were claims that he was a hermit, a man named Jaboc, of the Butrins.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have allowed any Butrins to live, Natan. Curse my pity. I should have killed the last tenth as well. Their abilities at harvest are not worth even this trouble.”
“Yes, my Lord,” Natan said, his eyes shadowed, and turned to more reports.
Natan took the scroll much as one would accept a poisonous snake. The courier’s body language spoke volumes: this was not going to be pleasant news.
Reading, he thought it was less positive than he’d feared. This wasn’t poison: this was volcanic.
Jaboc was alive.
“My Lord,” he said slowly. “It seems our reports were in error. We slew Jaboc, but… we apparently slew him again.”
“What are you talking about, Natan? Be clear. You said we posted a body. Did we not, then, post a body?”
“We did, my Lord, but… I don’t know. This report says that we slew the same man. He attacked a tax collector in the presence of a Reaper, and slew both of them with an axe; the Praetor called for his century and .. well.. they were successful in capturing and slaying this Jaboc person, but his wounds were grievous and Praetor Justinus says that the man is definitely dead, beyond all question.”
The Destroyer of Worlds growled under his breath. “Beyond all question, Justinus says. But is he making the right query? … It does not matter. Send out the edict: Butrins shall die. All of them. Man, woman, child, cattle. All of them.”
“Justinus is dead, my Lord.”
“Is he, now. What happened to that preening fool?”
“He was oppressing the Butrins as you asked; this report describes suppression in great detail. But even he must sleep, and his soldiers found him six days ago in his tent, stabbed through the throat with his own sword. A single letter - ‘J’ - was written in blood on his cloak.”
Dmitriy stood up, shaking in fury. “I’m surprised those Butrins even know how to write,” he shouted. “And they dare - wait, ‘J?’ Like ‘Jaboc?’ This fool demands our power, like a peacock strutting in the field before a lion, Natan. A lion!”
“It’s a fool we’ve tried to slay three times now, my Lord.”
“And we need to find those who claim to have killed him and punish them; have each of those failures strung up in a public square. If you’re going to tell me you’ve killed Jaboc, you’d best have killed Jaboc for true, or pay.”
“Yes, my Lord. I will send your command,” and Natan turned away.
Ten days later, Natan was in his own chambers when a courier delivered yet another treasonous scroll. Most communiques were innocuous, but these were becoming common enough that every courier was met with dread.
This one was, perhaps, a little better - it was delivered with a bag. Sighing, Natan picked it and a blanket up - holding the bag away from his body, and breathing shallow breaths - and carried them to Dmitriy’s offices.
“Jaboc, again, my Lord,” Natan said. “But I expect better results this time.”
Dmitriy raised an eyebrow. “And why is that?”
“My Lord, forgive me, but I issued an edict to brand every citizen where Butrin used to be, with their name. We found no Jabocs, although there were some variants - that’s not surprising, because the name itself smacks of terror and resistance now. But we had agents confirm the names as much as we were able, and the brands were placed on their foreheads. We know who everyone claims to be, now.”
“Ah, that’s a good idea, Natan. We should repeat that through the empire. But surely there’s more.”
“Yes, my Lord.” He placed the blanket on the floor and dumped out the contents of the bag - a badly mangled head of a man who looked like he might have been in his mid-twenties. On the man’s forehead - what was left of it - was an incompletely healed brand, one of the names they’d forced into every citizen’s skin, the letters “Ja-“ visible despite the wound that killed him.
“Well, well,” Dmitriy said, settling into his chair. “This is difficult to argue with.”
“It is, my Lord,” Natan replied, hoping that this was the last he’d ever hear of Jaboc, or Janoc, or Jafok, or anyone like that.
It was not.
Six days later he held a letter in his hands, delivered by a messenger who he worried would wet himself - and Natan’s floor - in fear. The letter itself was indeed problematic. It was written very well in Zaclan script, as if by a trained scribe, and was an utter threat, pure defiance against Dmitriy, “the Owner of Nothing,” and signed with a blunt Butrini word: “Jaboc.”
Dmitriy raged at its words: “This is not defiance, Natan. This is rebellion. Kill them all. Kill the Butrins. Kill them now, each of them.”
“We’ve already slain all of them that we can find, my Lord, but we’ll keep looking.”
“Don’t just look, sla- … Natan,” hesitating slightly before he uttered the name. “Use artillery. Pound the region into dust. Leave nothing.”
“It’s harvest-time, Lord-“
“I DO NOT CARE,” Dmitriy, Destroyer of Worlds, shouted.
Natan, his mouth tasting of iron, turned away to deliver the order.
Natan, High Commander of the Army of Zaclan, looked grimly at the general who stood before him. The man was at attention - despite the relatively informal surroundings - and had a stoic expression, not looking directly at Natan as he gave his report.
The bombardment had been a success - little of Butrin remained. Any caves in the rolling hills had been pounded shut, the fields had been burned and mauled as well, the cities flattened and emptied. The region that had been Butrin was prepared for any name its claimants might want - but there was nothing there worth naming.
Natan considered. This general had been effective, but … looking carefully at him, he saw a hesitance in the man, like his will had been made brittle somehow. Brittle iron could break in the moment you needed it most. This man was no longer ready for the exigencies of war, but as far as Natan could tell, deserved no punishment; he had not failed.
Natan sighed. “Consider yourself retired, with Zaclan’s gratitude, Harfur. When you desire to return for duty, we will be ready for you. I’m promoting… Surtur to your position in the meantime.”
“Surtur, sir? But I don’t think she’s quite-“
“She will have to do. You deserve respite. Take it. This is not a choice.”
Natan was only slightly surprised when Surtur was found murdered two months later, with a ragged “I live” carved into her brigandine… and even less surprised when a messenger reported that Harfur had been found dead by his own hand.
Dmitriy was not pleased. It had been a year; his mages were unable to explain how Jaboc had survived, and survived, and survived, and survived. Body-walking was possible, they said, but vastly dangerous, and if Jaboc had been able to switch souls between a dozen bodies as they’d surmised, he was a master of the craft beyond any that history had recorded.
The archmage was unable to look at Dmitriy. “My Lord,” he said without courage, “We have sought. We cannot find the source of this magic. We can easily detect when we cast the greater spells amongst each other - magic casts ripples in the aether - and we have felt nothing of Jaboc. Nothing at all, my Lord, and we have searched. This man is beyond us. He seems to cast a body-walk much as we cast a minor candle, and with even less effect in the aether. We might be powerless before this man.”
Dmitriy looked down at his hands. “I,” he said. “I am the destroyer. I am the destroyer of worlds. If your magic is…” With that, he looked at Natan. “High Commander,” Dmitriy said. “Tell me the process we use for finding potential mages for these cretins to train.”
Natan jerked. “My Lord? You … we… you said to go through the countryside to find young men and women, ostensibly to cull the population for the army, but with a mage to detect their power in the ‘aether,’ so they don’t know to hide their skill, if any-“
“Yes. And you, Archmage, how long does this ‘body walk’ take to put into effect?”
“I’ve never cast it myself, my Lord, but it should take hours and ritual. It is not a simple thing, to transfer soul and will to another body, and it is a great evil, as the-“
“I don’t care. Hours. Natan, cull the populace. Start with Butrin, where it was. If you find a mage, kill them. Slay them where they stand.”
The Archmage started. “My Lord, magery is commuted from parent to child. This will destroy the future of magic.”
Dmitriy, lips wet, looked at the Archmage, his eyes alight. “Well, my friend, this is your chance and permit - and command - to spread your seed far and wide, is it not.”
Natan sat in his command chair, exhausted, as the Archmage entered and slouched in a chaise. The mage sighed, and looked sadly at Natan.
“We’ve destroyed m-magic for the next few decades, Natan. You know that.”
“Yes,” Natan said simply.
“And I myself… my God, Natan. Those poor girls.”
“You were commanded, Aelfyr. This is part of their punishment, and their children will serve to commute their sentences.”
“Natan… I cannot. No more. Three of my children will be born out of prisons now, and I have shed more tears than they, and Dmitriy demands more?”
“He commands, Aelfyr. We obey. The Lord Dmitriy has ordered it, and we are sworn to him.”
“In this, too?”
“Even so. Consider, Aelfyr: you struggle to do something so simple, while I must communicate the order to destroy lands and peoples. Who among us is better than the other?”
Aelfyr had a haunted look as he stared at Natan. Resolution came into his eyes, and his jaw set underneath his beard. Natan grabbed the knife on his desk and embedded it into the mage’s throat before anything else could happen, and Aelfyr’s last expression was one of fury, as he tried to say one last word: Natan was concerned that it had been “Jaboc.”
“It’s a pity we don’t know how to communicate with Jaboc,” Dmitriy said to Natan, alone in the command room. It had been tried; the mages had been commanded to do a Sending, but it had dissipated with no specific target. Their diminished numbers had made their order effectively useless; their children, such that they might be, were not going to have effective tutors. The best mages had chosen poorly, and their lines and lives had ended as punishment for their failure.
“Yes, my Lord,” Natan said quietly.
“I would have complimented him, were I able, right before I slashed his throat and drank his blood, I think.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
“He’s really marvelously inventive. He uses staves, swords, daggers in the night, fire, flood, and now poison in our wheat stores. Perhaps razing Butrin was an oversight, Natan. Fear not, my friend. It was mine, not yours.”
Slightly gratified, Natan nodded. “Yes, my Lord.”
Dmitriy sighed. “No matter. We must redouble our efforts. We must find this man and kill him - or convert him utterly to our cause. A weapon like this would be a lever against the whole world, Natan. Even without an army, Natan. The whole world.”
“The whole world, my Lord.”
The world ended in the summer.
Natan had been waiting for Dmitriy to enter the command hall, and noticed a glint of light, a reflection, on a balcony, where he thought none should be - the hall was supposed to be empty. He went up to try to find out if the guard rotation was off, or something - and found a woman, one of his own logistics officers, crouching with a heavy crossbow. He called to her, and she rose with the crossbow, and snarled as she fired it at him.
Natan felt like he was looking into his own grave.
But the bolt glanced off of his ribs, deflected just enough by his armor - the pain was blinding, but not what it would have been had the quarrel punched through his lungs. In agony and terror, he bolted toward her and struck her with the butt of his sword.
She collapsed. Natan looked down from her vantage point, and at the crossbow… and realized that a child could have slain Dmitriy from here. Even an earthquake wouldn’t have shaken the angle enough to make it anything but a trivial shot. He had found the assassin.
He had found Jaboc.
He carefully dismantled the crossbow, using the cord to bind her hands as she lay unconscious. He didn’t do a very good job and knew it - his ribs were more bloody than painful, but they still hurt as much as any pain he could recall. He couldn’t pick her up - every movement left more of his blood on the floor - but he could drag her. He wrapped her in his sodden cloak and dragged her down the stairs.
She started coming to as Dmitriy finally entered, moving towards his chair as he always did - but looked with shock as the Lord Commander of his armies, bloody and pale, was dragging a muffled, screaming woman across the floor.
“I found her, my Lord. I found Jaboc.”
“What?” Dmitriy was almost shouting himself. Jaboc… here… in his home? And Natan had captured him? - No, her. Her! No wonder they’d struggled so mightily to capture… but no, Natan was injured.
Dmitriy rushed over to his friend and confidante. He looked down at Jaboc - Zaclani features, in one of his uniforms… she was one of his officers?
Natan sat, still holding Jaboc in place as she began to struggle. “She was up there, my Lord,” nodding toward the balcony. “She had a crossbow, and was going to kill you in your seat.”
“Yet fortune favors us as always,” Dmitriy muttered, his anger now growing since the threat had passed. He drew his dagger and poked at Jaboc through the cloak now wet with blood - both hers and Natan’s. “I thought you’d be… taller.”
Her eyes opened, shimmering with hate and fury. “You are dead,” she spat through bloody teeth. “I will always resist, I will find a way,” she growled. “I have come at you with axe, with sword, with staff, with fire, with-“
“Yes, yes, I was there,” Dmitriy smiled grimly.
“Your greatest threat was a brand, you monster,” she said, the veins standing out on her throat. “And you destroyed your Nothing for it, for the sake of one woman. You will end, cretin, and I will remain beyond you and all you imagine, I will stand on your unmarked grave and lau-“
Dmitriy cuffed her, and she fell silent once again, unconscious. He called the guards, and as they picked up her body, Dmitriy looked at Natan. “Jaboc is finished,” he said. “Bury her alive, let her scream in her mausoleum until even her ghosts tire of her.”
Natan stood up, and grunted in assent and pain. “It shall surely be done, Lord.”
Dmitriy turned away and looked at the body of the doomed woman. “One of our own… I’d never have imagined, Natan.”
Natan stared at the guards carrying the woman to her doom. How many had he consigned to death, others just like her - even the brandings she’d decried had been his. He suddenly saw himself as a tool, a machine that enacted evil at the behest of another, and he’d had enough. Jaboc might be dead or dying soon enough… but he could stand in Jaboc’s place.
“I could not imagine, myself, my Lord,” Natan said as he struck the killing blow, his dagger slashing through the Destroyer of Worlds’ neck.