Free What Remains of Heroes by David Benem Page A

man grimly. “Not by you, it seems.”
    The man choked back a sob. “Why do you do this? For the High King? For the Necrists?”
    “No, lad. For a few hundred coins.”
    The man shuddered and sobbed. Karnag took a tall step over him and strode into the light of the campfire, Gravemaker before him.
    There were a few who yet stood.
     

4
    The Absurdity of Having Hoped

    Z andrachus Bale hunched over a candlelit desk in the darkest corner of the Abbey’s library, lost in thought. What had been requested of him was daunting, and he felt profoundly inadequate.
    I am too weak an instrument .
    He pulled a long strand of graying hair from his eyes and tucked it behind his ear. He folded the scullery maid’s note into a tight, tiny triangle, as though he could make it disappear. Then he unfolded it, as though the words could change. He reckoned he’d done this a few dozen times, and the parchment frayed at the folds.
    Repetition grants comfort to the troubled mind .
    He rubbed away a dribble of snot from his overlarge nose and read the note again, slowly and deliberately. Not surprisingly, the message still read the same. He chuckled at the absurdity of having hoped it would be different, somehow.
    “ The King is being poisoned . That’s why he’s gone mad, and why he ’s making no babies. He is in grave danger . Beware of the chamberlain. He speaks much with a man whose face is made of stitches .”
    He thought for a long moment on that last sentence. He’d studied in the library’s darkest depths, and had read accounts of an ancient sect of necromancers loyal to Yrghul the Lord of Nightmares. Necrists, whose faces were said to be stitched together from the flesh of their sacrifices.
    Could she have been referring to a Necrist?
    Nonsense , he thought. The Sanctum’s scholars held that the Necrists had been defeated long ago. They were now widely regarded to be as much myth as anything else, and the thought of one communing with Rune’s chamberlain inside the very walls of Ironmoor was ridiculous.
    The woman’s likely cracked in the head .
    Nevertheless, Bale admired the scullery maid’s pluck. She’d risked her life in delivering the note, and under the very nose of Chamberlain Alamis! Bale knew he could never have been so courageous. He held a deep dislike for the chamberlain—he disliked most if not all people—but to act so directly against the man required something wholly more, something he simply lacked.
    Bale reckoned the woman’s courage deserved to be rewarded, somehow, and he thought of taking the note to his superiors. But then he thought of Prefect Kreer laughing nasally in his face, and knew he’d be best served to gather more compelling evidence before taking things further.
    But must I do that? To protect the High King?
    The Faith instructed that the line of the High King of Rune was sacred and the Sanctum was bound to protect it. Bale was a skeptic when it came to most things. He would never place his trust in people, and he knew people—people in power most of all—were given to twisting the truth to serve their own ends.
    He did, however, believe in such things as goodness and righteousness. He knew implicitly there were truths greater than the truths of men, and it was only in the pursuit of such truths that the betterment of men could be found.
    He believed also in Illienne the Light Eternal, or at least in the idea of her. He believed in the notion of eternal goodness, and believed there was something of her that survived her descent into oblivion a millennium before. Not necessarily a power or an influence, but an ideal that inspired the hearts of men in their darkest hours. Not many folk believed such notions, but Bale knew them to be true.
    The Faith held that Illienne blessed the first High King of Rune, Deranthol, and the Kingdom’s seven greatest heroes—known now as the Sentinels—with measures of her divinity. It was through this blessing the dark god Yrghul, Lord of Nightmares,