Chapter 35: Johanne

General Johanne de Mascione strode past the entrance to the Great Hall of the Westfall Castle and further down the gallery. Lord Arnias was holding court with the wealthy sycophants who supported his economic bleeding of the lower classes, and the General would normally be in attendance to keep abreast of the consequences of Arnias’ greed, but he would need to miss this one. He had been summoned, like a peasant, to a different room, for a different reason.

The message had come for him early in the morning, just after first light. His extremely well-trained squire had served it to him, along with the relevant intelligence reports which had been collated by his many informants from around the city. Yet, it had not been much.
But what it was deeply concerned him.

He pushed open a door, still reading the papers in front of him, and entered an extravagantly decorated chamber, with gilded ceilings and walls painted with murals. The overwhelming opulence of the velvet cushions on hand-carved oak furniture, the imported spider-silk tapestry and the solid silver dinnerware was almost offensive to his militaristic, minimalist tastes, but he had long since learned to hide his disdain for the Lord’s interior design. He could tell, or more accurately he knew, that his opinion was shared by two of the most intimidating men in Westfall, who were both currently dominating the disgustingly ornate room and both of whom he wished were somewhere else. It was not because he feared them; he was confident that their combined sense of honour would prevent any unpleasantness. Together, however, Watch Captain Danel Bralli and Commander Penaton Thorpe constituted the largest hindrance to his long-term plans for Westfall.

Still, at least he could respect their professionalism, he conceded, which was more than he could say for the third figure in the room.

“What do you mean, CUT IN HALF?” Chamberlain Harrold Reginald exclaimed in rage as the General joined the conference, bringing the number to four.

Captain Bralli dropped a report on the polished hardwood table, similar to the one that Johanne had in his hand.

“Sir, I mean what I said: three men executed with precision strikes to the heart. Two men killed by extreme injuries. One of those was cut cleanly in half from shoulder to hip. His sword was found in two pieces.”

General Mascione tossed his dossier on the table with Bralli’s. “I have a similar report. We had a man look at the bodies. This was handed to me as I entered the castle. The cutting implement passed through the bone without resistance. The bone didn’t even crack. The metal of the sword was similarly rent in two. Stranger still, there was a corresponding cut in the stone where whatever blade carried through had left a deep mark.” He looked to the towering men as he stood between them. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

The Chamberlain, however, he ignored. The snivelling man had the audacity to summon him as if he were a subordinate? He could go straight to Darask.

“Where’s Sir Drao?” he asked, eyebrow raised. “It’s his men, after all.”

“Dead,” replied Sir Reginald bitterly. “He was with his men when they were brutally slaughtered.”

This stopped the General short. The Knights’ leader, Sir Drao, was a fierce combatant, with exceptional skill in the sword. But the astonishment that he was killed in this attack quickly gave way to a grim satisfaction. He was a competent piece who had been removed from the board without any effort on his part. This was good luck.

“What about you, Commander?” snapped the Chamberlain with an accusatory tone. “Bralli has informed me that your men were supposed to be patrolling that route?”

The General saw that Sir Reginald had his back to Danel Bralli, and the Watch Captain took advantage of this to roll his eyes in frustration. In contrast, the Commander of the Mondarin company dropped his eyes to the floor. There was real sadness there, and the General frowned in recognition; it was well known to Johanne that Commander Thorpe led from the front. He valued each of his men highly, and the General had seen this same sadness every time the Commander lost a man in battle; the news was not good.

“I lost a man as well.”

Danel snapped his attention to the Commander. “Who?” he asked, worried.

“Copper Blade, Brendon Otieno.”

Bralli’s eyes widened in shock and he immediately sighed sympathetically. “Shit. I’m sorry, Penaton. Fuck!” The man turned from them and swore again, taking a moment to process the news.

General Mascione, too, furrowed his brow in concentration. He knew the name. “Otieno, Otieno…” He thought through the recent operations in which they had worked with the Blades. “Night-skinned? Happy man? Smile that boosts morale? Has a sister in the unit as well?”

He noted that Bralli nodded sadly in sympathy with the Commander. “Yeah.”

General Mascione drew himself up with gravitas, stepped forward and placed a hand on the Commander’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Penaton. Otieno was a good man. I saw him work during the gate checks. I would have been proud to have a soldier like him in my command.”

The Commander gave him a quick nod of gratitude.

Johanne was sincere. He had seen Otieno’s work, on multiple occasions. The man had a bright career, now cut short, and paying his respects to the Commander was a matter of honour. But the Lord’s Chamberlain was staring at him like he had lost his mind. He knew Sir Reginald had no love for the Blades of Mondarin, that they stood in the way of both their plans. The Chamberlain was probably wondering why he’d show sympathy for the loss of a mere mercenary. But this wasn’t about that.

He’s never commanded men in the field. He doesn’t have any honour.

Johanne knew that one day he might even have to draw swords against this hulking man he’d just commiserated with. He knew that Thorpe would almost certainly oppose the designs he had for Westfall and Grixoninia, but that didn’t matter at the moment because, men like Bralli, Thorpe and himself lived by a different code, one that honoured a man who fell valiantly in battle, regardless of which side he was on.

Johanne brought out a hip flask and borrowed three ridiculously ornate liquor glasses from a nearby occasional table. Quickly pouring, he raised the toast. “They fell so we can stand. Their example guides us forward.”

The three men toasted and drank silently, and Johanne was surprised to observe that Sir Reginald had the self-control to wait until they were finished before he exploded.

“This is very touching, but what about the other men you had on the street? Surely you didn’t field one pathetic Copper Blade on his own?”

You really are a foolish, petty man, he thought.

Penaton Thorpe slowly set his empty glass on the table next to the dossiers and turned his massive frame towards Sir Reginald with a slow, deliberate motion. The Chamberlain recoiled, and Johanne would have given even odds that Sir Reginald was about to die. Then again, if the Chamberlain ever made such a comment about one of his fallen men, Johanne wouldn’t hesitate to liberate the man’s head from his shoulders. After a statement like that, he wasn’t even sure that the loyal Watch Captain would intervene… and it was quite possible that any effort to do so would be in vain. Indeed, Captain Bralli’s disgust for the Chamberlain, usually hidden behind the professional façade of duty, had slipped into view, and Bralli could have been reprimanded for the way he was now staring at Sir Reginald.

The older officer didn’t move. It occurred to him that it would be advantageous if the Commander killed the parasitic worm of a man here and now. The Commander would be arrested, and the Chamberlain would be out of the way. It would be tidy… efficient. But he couldn’t move a muscle to show his support either way. To speak in support of the Commander would be seditious. To speak in support of the Chamberlain might stop the giant from ripping the Lord’s adviser into visceral confetti.

As it was, Johanne ended up disappointed. The Commander took a step back and turned to face a window as he swallowed his rage, took a breath and answered the Chamberlain.

“I lost Otieno. His body was carried back to the Arena by a White Blade Initiate who was knocked unconscious during the slaughter. I have another Silver Blade who is still unaccounted for. From the report of the Initiate, which I will admit is brief at this stage, my men were talking with off-duty Athnian Knights, introducing the new recruit to the men so that he was able to recognise them in the future. The White Blade described being knocked off his feet by a blast of bright light. He remembers a pain in his head and nothing thereafter. He woke up later, underneath the lifeless body of my man Otieno, and found the scene as described by your informants. He believes Otieno must have protected him whilst he was unconscious, and died in the process.”

This was more information than Johanne had received. An eyewitness account was exactly what they needed! He eagerly looked over the page that Thorpe had added to the others on the table, and when he lifted his eyes from the parchment, the Blade Commander had turned back from the window and was staring at him.

“You were right. There is a wild mage in the city. And he killed one of my men.”

The Chamberlain blustered and shook with barely contained rage. Johanne smirked. He knew that the Commander’s assessment undermined the Chamberlain’s disdain for the Iron Shield’s mandate in Westfall. Arnias hated mages, and the Chamberlain was jealous of the power the Iron Shield wielded. Thorpe had just handed him a gift. He should be overjoyed. An attack on the Lord’s personal knights by a wild mage, corroborated by the Blades of Mondarin, no less, was guaranteed to give him unprecedented jurisdiction to hunt down the offender. Any interference by the Chamberlain would be political suicide. And he could manipulate that power into taking over law and order in Westfall once and for all. Commander Thorpe was so enraged by the loss of his man that he was willing to hand a profound political victory to the Iron Shield. It was almost perfect.

Almost.

But something didn’t sit right.

As much as he wanted it to be true…

It wasn’t.

The Commander’s words were convincing, delivered with conviction and cold rage, but something in his tone made the line just a little too good to be true.

He was lost in thought. Bralli was asking, tactfully, about the accuracy of the Initiate’s report, but Johanne didn’t care about that. The boy was probably scared out of his mind. Yes, the Blades had one of the longest training periods before sending men into the field, but even then, this Blade wouldn’t have been more than three or four months into the job. The kid’s report, naturally, would be wildly unreliable. It wasn’t his fault, of course; he was just green.
No, something else was wrong. One man had his chest opened by a vicious cut, but it wasn’t supernatural. Perfectly normal for someone armed with an axe…

…or a halberd. All Blades field them on patrols.

Another man had his leg removed. Again, a halberd would do that with ease. The only supernatural element in this fight was the way one man had been cut in two. The only other unanswered question, of course, was why an uninjured knight would allow himself to be stabbed through the heart. It was completely possible, though, for a wild mage to paralyse a man with magic, or make himself invisible… or any number of vile options.
He rose from his thoughts as Bralli finished asking another delicate question, catching only the Commander’s reply.
“He suffered a penetrating injury to his chest in between the plates, but that’s not what killed him. His throat had been slashed open with multiple cuts, which I believe were intended to cause extreme and rapid blood loss.”

Why? he thought. Why open up a Copper Blade’s throat like an animal but use precise strikes on the Knights? Why leave a White Blade alive? Where is the Silver Blade? Was he captured? Taken somewhere? That wouldn’t make sense.

Then there was the knowledge that there were actually two threats in the city, and that, ironically, the wild mage was the lesser of the two. A teenage girl with arcane potential who had probably never cast a spell in her life was nothing compared to the Imperial Divine Knight who he knew was probably responsible for this massacre.

Another possibility occurred to him, and for a moment it seemed almost too obvious: the missing Silver Blade was the answer. The Blades of Mondarin fielded halberds on patrol. A trained man with a halberd could account for most of the wounds. If that man had also been concealing wild magic, or divine magic, then the impossible cut through bone and stone might be explained as well. Could the boy from Copperwise be hiding amongst the Blades?

He knew how morally bankrupt Lord Arnias’ knights were. He could see a group of drunken Athnian Knights trying to throw their weight around and the Blades of Mondarin then trying to protect whoever was the victim. Probably some poor girl. The General could easily envision the Lord’s personal guard being arrogant enough to assume they could fight a trio of Penaton’s men, especially when one of them was a White Blade.

The fight begins. Otieno gets stabbed and then the Knight finishes him off on the ground. The ‘Silver Blade’, aka Mathew, loses his cool and starts using his divine magic. The fight goes exactly the way that it did for Revenant Company. They were arrogant, unprepared and overwhelmed. Thorpe invents a story around the White Blade being knocked unconscious and the young soldier will follow orders and repeat it because of course he will.

But that theory collapsed under its own weight almost as soon as he formed it.

Thorpe would never knowingly field a wild mage, divine knight or otherwise. The Commander was honourable to a fault, naïve in certain political matters, but he was not an idiot. And if he had discovered such a thing within his company, he would have hidden the man in a cellar before even considering allowing him onto a city patrol. The man would never see actual service if the Commander had known. But, would he have known?

Yes. The Commander lived and breathed for his men. He would know.

No. The supernatural actor was not one of Thorpe’s Blades.

Which brought him back to the boy named Mathew.

The one from Copperwise. The one Gregory had described. The one that slaughtered Revenant Company. The report from James Brook. An outsider. Not a Blade of Mondarin. Not Watch. Not one of Arnias’ thugs. Something else entirely.

He had to concede that Thorpe’s report fit the evidence. Worse, it fit evidence Thorpe should not have been able to account for. Not completely. Not unless he knew more than he had said.

That was the part Johanne could not ignore.

What if Commander Thorpe was responsible for hiding the man who butchered his men in Copperwise Forest? What if, after the battle, the missing Silver Blade wasn’t missing at all, but now helping Mathew escape the city? The thought made his blood boil.

“What about this Silver Blade of yours, Thorpe?” he suddenly asked. “Who is he?”

The Commander looked at him as if he wanted to avoid the question, and Johanne scowled inwardly as he saw the discomfort.

Yes… you ARE protecting him.

But the General wasn’t prepared for the answer and, to his knowledge, there was no lie in the Commander’s eyes.

“Blade Warden Cort.”

“Cort?”

It was their drill instructor. General Mascione had, more than once, credited the Mondarin Company’s success on the battlefield to Cort’s unit tactics. The man knew how formations operated at a subconscious level. He was a master tactician, exceptional as a swordsman and, like the General, didn’t accept weakness in his unit.

But… but he’s no friend of mages.

That was well established. It was tried and tested. Cort even shared some of the First Shield’s more practical “philosophies”.

“Yes,” the Commander continued, “the man is presumed dead. We don’t see why he would be taken alive.”

Bralli spoke carefully. “He could have made a deal in exchange for his life. Perhaps he convinced the wild mage he was on their side. He could be planning to then make an escape later with information on their whereabouts.”

The General thought that this was certainly within Cort’s capacity, but the Commander looked unconvinced.

“I don’t have anything to support that theory.” The Commander looked to the pair of military leaders in front of him, and Johanne noted that, like Bralli and himself, the Commander was only acknowledging the Chamberlain when the weasel-faced man spoke to him. Other than that, all strategic discussion had ignored him completely.

Then the weasel spoke again. “He probably ran away in fear…”

The mood of all three men darkened.

Really? No sense of self-preservation?

Bralli recovered first and subtly shifted his position to place himself in front of the Chamberlain. He looked as if his honour had to physically pull him between the two men. But the Commander apparently had decided that the Chamberlain could live, for now.

The General smiled to himself as Thorpe continued.

“I’ll let you know if we find Cort. I’m hoping to have an answer by the time I get back to the Arena, but it’s a faint hope at best.” The Commander shook hands with them both, glared at the Chamberlain, and left the hideously ornate room; the loss of his huge frame made the room seem bigger somehow.

Johanne de Mascione tried to reconcile all the evidence around him. He knew there was a wild mage in the city, a girl, by his nephew’s account. He knew that she would be accompanied by the boy named ‘Mathew’, who was almost certainly a divine warrior and a member of the Imperial Order of the Shroud from the Shadowspine Plains. What an Imperial Knight would be doing in Grixoninia, so far from the Mascian Empire, was a question that plagued him. How this boy could be using divine magic when the Gods were dead was something that had kept Johanne up at night. The General was well-educated and prided himself on being exceptionally well-read, but even he didn’t know which of the Gods the Shroud Knights drew power from. And whilst the report from James Brook claimed that one of the elves spoke with the voice of Bambinae, who was relatively harmless, some of the dead Gods had reputations that were horrifying even by his standards.

He didn’t have enough data. He was almost certain that the boy Mathew was responsible for the supernatural deaths of Arnias’ men, and he suspected that Otieno was responsible for at least one of the others. Yet there was still something about the situation he was missing. Commander Thorpe was hiding something… Johanne just couldn’t place what it was.

I need more information.

Johanne realised he’d been deep in thought after Bralli turned to face him, pulling his attention back to the two remaining men in front of him. “Our longstanding disagreements aside, I’ll be liaising with your Knights to coordinate our efforts to find this mage. Otieno deserves justice.”

At this, and probably because he had been ignored for most of the meeting, Reginald blustered, “The Athnian Knights deserve retribution! You seem to only care about the fucking Copper Blade. Your job is to serve your Lord, not some mercenary company with dreams above their station! Maybe if that Copper Blade had done his job properly, we wouldn’t be in this situation!”

The General smiled secretly. The Chamberlain had broken. The cursing was well below his station and his lack of decorum was a sign of his loss of control. He was ready to be given a solution and Johanne had one for him.

The General smirked and spoke to Bralli in an officious tone. “I imagine we’ll need to make it clear to all Blades of Mondarin units that they are expected to protect any Athnian Knights they encounter whilst on patrol?”

The Captain nodded shrewdly, matching the General’s smirk. “I’ll follow up with Commander Thorpe and let him know that the Athnian Knights require protection when they are in the city. Sir Reginald, I assume Lord Arnias will be happy to finance an escort for any off-duty Knights when they leave the safety of the castle?”

The General had only meant his comment as a snipe at the Chamberlain, but Johanne was silently impressed at the quick wit of the frustrated Captain. In a single sentence, he had backed the General’s snipe that the Athnian Knights needed protecting and trapped the Chamberlain within his own words. If Sir Reginald accepted, the Athnian Knights would be chaperoned and would have to rein in their behaviour. If he refused, he absolved the Watch and the Blades of any responsibility for their safety. It was a brilliant twist of the knife.

So, Bralli, you do have a spine after all.

Sir Reginald bristled with self-important outrage, but neither of the men had done anything but agree with the trussed-up noble, and so his anger was forced to simmer impotently.

Eventually, he spoke through gritted teeth. “No. That will not be necessary. I’m sure that we will find a resolution to this problem before long. Won’t we, General?”

Johanne struck, the opportunity finally ripe for the plucking. “If so, I’ll need Lord Arnias’ permission to have my Knights act with the same authority as the City Watch. With no disrespect intended to the Captain here, he hasn’t run a witch hunt like this before.”

The Captain nodded at his assessment. “It’s true. This is your area of expertise. And I’ll support it. But…” He met Johanne’s gaze with defiant eyes. “…your men can get overzealous, General. I need your assurance that we bring them in alive and that they stand trial. The man or woman who killed Otieno needs to die; just make sure that we get the right one.”

The General mustered as much sincerity as he could bring to bear. “Of course.” Then he finally looked to Sir Reginald, who had the air of a man who was trying to claw back some semblance of control.

“Well? Can my Knights act with the Lord’s authority inside the Westfall walls to catch this wild mage?”

There was a tense moment when Johanne believed that Sir Reginald was almost going to counter or delay, but in the end, he needn’t have worried.

“You have the Lord’s blessing.”

General Mascione inclined his head slightly in thanks, inwardly celebrating in triumph.

Magnificent.