Chapter Nine: The Ambush
The last test of a man is not how he lived. It is how he ends.
The city of Carthenmoor was the largest city in the southern territories, built on the site of what had once been the capital of a proud independent kingdom. The kingdom's royal family had been deposed three decades ago during the second campaigns, offered generous terms — exile rather than imprisonment, assets rather than confiscation — and had taken those terms and dispersed across the world.
Most of them had lived out their lives in what came, eventually, to resemble contentment.
A few had not.
Aurelion arrived in Carthenmoor on a warm autumn evening and was received in the city hall by the governor, a capable woman named Issa who had been educated at the Fifth Academy and who had transformed the city's agricultural hinterland through careful irrigation reform. They dined together. She showed him the city's development reports, which were impressive. He asked about the academy enrollment numbers, which were lower than they should have been, and they talked about why and what might be done.
It was a good evening. It was the kind of evening he had been having for six months — substantive and warm and full of evidence that things were working.
He retired to the rooms they had prepared for him in the governor's residence.
He woke at the second hour of the night.
He was not sure what woke him. A sound, perhaps — something slightly wrong in the texture of the night's quiet. He had spent too many years in field camps and on campaign not to have that instinct, and it had not left him even in decades of relative peace.
He was sitting up before he was fully conscious, and his hand found the sword he kept beside the bed by the same instinct.
The first of them came through the window.
— ✦ —
There were many.
They had come over the wall in the hour after midnight, having killed the outer sentries with the quiet efficiency of people who had been planning this for a long time. They were not ordinary assassins. They moved like soldiers. They carried the kind of weapons that soldiers carry.
Later, the investigation would establish who they were: the remnants of the old royal faction of the southern kingdoms, men and women who had spent thirty years cultivating their grievance in the comfortable exile that Aurelion had offered, who had never forgiven the loss of what they'd had, and who had chosen this moment — the retired emperor, traveling without his full guard, moving without announcement — as the moment to settle what they considered unfinished.
None of this mattered in the moment.
In the moment there was only the room, and the window, and the door, and the figures moving through both, and the sword.
He was sixty-five years old. He had not fought in fifteen years. His body was not what it had been at thirty or twenty.
It was still the body of a man who had mastered the sword — who had spent his life in motion, who understood conflict at the level of instinct and principle both, who had trained not for the energy of youth but for the economy of the truly skilled: the efficient movement, the minimal action that achieves the maximum result, the refusal to waste.
He did not waste.
The room was dark but he fought in darkness the same way he had fought in daylight — by sense and sound and the knowledge of where bodies would move, what they would attempt, where they would be when the sword arrived.
He fought them room by room as they came.
He was bleeding by the fourth one — a cut across his side that was bad enough that he registered it and filed it under later and kept moving. He was bleeding from his arm by the eighth. He was fighting by pure controlled force of will by the last of them, and the last of them he killed in the doorway, sword through the chest, clean.
Then he was alone.
The hallway was very quiet.
He leaned against the doorframe and breathed.
He could hear, now, the sounds of alarm from the rest of the residence — shouting, running feet, the crash of guards arriving too late. His attendants. His retinue. They were coming.
He pushed himself upright and walked, carefully, down the hall toward the stairs, and when they found him he was moving under his own power, which he considered important.
— ✦ —
The physician said immediately, with the honesty that Aurelion had always required from his healers: "The cut on your side has gone deep. You have lost considerable blood. If we can get you to a proper facility within the hour —"
Aurelion said: "How long."
The physician looked at him. He had known the emperor for thirty years. He understood what was being asked.
"Hours," he said. "Not days."
Aurelion nodded.
He turned to the young general who served as his personal guard. He said: "I want to be outside. There is a hill at the eastern edge of the city with an oak tree on it. I remember it from when we were here thirty years ago. I want to be there."
The general said: "That is not —" and then stopped, because this was the emperor, and the emperor was telling him what would happen.
"I want my children with me," Aurelion said. "The ones who traveled here. And the people of the city, those who want to come. Word will spread quickly enough."
They brought him.
— ✦ —