The Sword of Retribution

Fort Battleaxe - Part 1

     Tragius looked up hopefully. “Yes!” he said excitedly. “Paulonia owes me a favour, he’ll let me use Galtion's Claw for a day, and as head of a school, I have access to the fifth room of the library.”

     “That’s the spirit!”

     A shadow of doubt passed over Tragius’s face. “Do you really think we can do it?” he asked. "Steal a rak's ark? Blackmail Malefactos himself?"

     “We can damned well try!” replied Adantus.

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     As Tragius and Adantus made their plans, Fort Battleaxe was still surrounded and under full attack by the Shadowarmies, who had now pushed nearly a hundred miles into Ilandia. The city’s commanders were almost ready to abandon the outer circle of the city and order a retreat to the second wall where, hopefully, the power of the Orb of Proofing would greatly aid in their defence. They thought the outer wall would hold a little longer, though, and so long as the enemy was suffering a higher rate of casualties than they were, they wanted to hold it for as long as possible. They weren’t going to yield so much as a single inch if they could possibly avoid it.

     Most of the city's priests were on the wall, in the thick of the fighting, but one, named Vasta, was hurrying through the corridors of Battleaxe Tower towards the temple, a look of worried uncertainty on his face that had nothing to do with events in or around this city. Arriving, he went straight in and strode over to where Resalintas was down on one knee with his head bowed in front of the altar. His hands were resting on the hilt of his sword, standing point down in front of him, and his helmet rested on the ground beside him as he mumbled prayers of praise and devotion to the God of War.

     He was looking tired and wan. The tremendous quantities of holy power he’d been channeling recently to blast the enemy and heal the injured had added a few more lines to his granite face. On top of that, he had been physically active as he battled the enemy with sword and spear and even the old priest himself had lost count of the number of enemies who had fallen to his mundane fighting skills, mundane meaning non-magical in this context. There was certainly nothing ordinary about his purely physical abilities.

     Resalintas had been spending almost all his time on the battlefield since the war started, only returning to the tower for a few hours a day to eat, sleep, meditate and pray to the God of War before returning to the fray. He went to a different part of the wall every day, his mere presence reviving flagging spirits and raising morale, and when the enemy learned that he was there, they would flee in wild panic, making it necessary to open one of the city gates and go out to fight them in the field. If we had a dozen like him, thought Vasta, we could retake the whole of eastern Ilandia and drive them all the way back to the Shadow, but unfortunately not even he could be in more than one place at a time, and while he was putting the fear of Samnos into the enemy on one side of the city, things were going badly everywhere else.

     Priests never wasted time on preamble and so Vasta got right to the point. “Davress doesn’t have the Sword,” he said. “We just got word back from Samnia, and the Sword of Retribution definitely isn’t anywhere in the theocracy.”

     Resalintas nodded, almost as if he’d expected the news. He’d had a strange, nagging feeling ever since Pronias’s death, a feeling that the Sword wasn’t where it should be, and so, just for his own peace of mind, he’d told Vasta to get in touch with Davress to make sure it had arrived safely. He now suspected that the nagging feeling had been sent by Samnos precisely for this purpose, and the conviction came over him that it was vitally important to find the Sword and make sure that it was where it was needed most.

     “Another priest somewhere must have surpassed Davress in power,” he said thoughtfully. “Get in touch with all of them in turn, find out who’s got it.”

     “I’ve already tried, Sir,” replied Vasta. “I asked Minras to get in touch with twenty high ranking priests around the world with his scrying network. None of them had it. What’s more, I asked each of them for a list of all the priests they thought might have it, in case there was anyone I missed, and every list was identical to mine, except that they had your name on it. You haven’t seen any strange Swords lying around, have you?”

     Resalintas ignored the attempt at humour. “This is very strange,” he said. “The Sword always goes to the most powerful, actively fighting priest in the world. There’s only one possible explanation. The priest who has it must have risen to power in some remote corner of the world, far away from civilisation, so that no-one else knows of his existence. If that’s so, then he probably doesn’t know that we’re at war and is using the Sword in some utterly trivial campaign against an insignificant enemy. We must get in touch with him immediately and ask him to return here as soon as possible, so that he can use it against the real enemy.”

     “A convocation?” asked Vasta.

     “Yes. Get every priest in the city here as soon as possible. Doesn’t matter what they’re doing, this is more important.”

     “Yes, Sir,” replied Vasta, who marched off to obey.

     An hour later, they were all gathered around the altar. Nine of them. There had been thirteen but four had already fallen to the enemy. Two of the surviving priests had to be carried in on stretchers, being badly wounded and not yet having had a chance to heal themselves, and they were gently laid out on a couple of benches that were dragged over for the purpose. The other priests formed a circle around Resalintas and the altar, much as they had when Drake had been awarded the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ a few weeks before. The young priest was frowning, being able to sense that this was a much more serious occasion. Deadly serious in fact, and that instead of being the centre of attention, he was now just one more participant. He looked around at the other priests, studying them for a clue as to what was going on.