The Second Empire

Paul Kearney

The Second Empire

For John McLaughlin

WHAT WENT BEFORE…

F IVE centuries ago two great religious faiths arose which were to dominate the entire known world. They were founded on the teachings of two men: in the west, St. Ramusio; in the east, the Prophet Ahrimuz.

The Ramusian faith arose at the same time that the great continent-wide empire of the Fimbrians was coming apart. The greatest soldiers the world had ever seen, the Fimbrians had become embroiled in a vicious civil war which enabled their conquered provinces to break away one by one and become the Seven Kingdoms. Fimbria dwindled to a shadow of her former self, her troops still formidable, but her concerns confined exclusively to the problems within the borders of the homeland. And the Seven Kingdoms went from strength to strength—until, that is, the first hosts of the Merduks began pouring over the Jafrar mountains, quickly reducing their numbers to five.

Thus began the great struggle between the Ramusians of the west and the Merduks of the east, a sporadic and brutal war carried on for generations which, by the sixth century of Ramusian reckoning, was finally reaching its climax.

For Aekir, greatest city of the west and seat of the Ramusian Pontiff, finally fell to the eastern invaders in the year 551. Out of its sack escaped two men whose survival was to have the greatest possible consequences for future history. One of them was the Pontiff himself, Macrobius—thought dead by the rest of the Ramusian Kingdoms and by the remainder of the Church hierarchy. The other was Corfe Cear-Inaf, a lowly ensign of cavalry, who deserted his post in despair after the loss of his wife in the tumult of the city’s fall.

But the Ramusian Church had already elected another Pontiff, Himerius, who was set upon purging the Five Kingdoms of any remnant of the Dweomer-Folk, the practitioners of magic. The purge caused Hebrion’s young king, Abeleyn, to accept a desperate expedition into the uttermost west to seek the fabled Western Continent, an expedition led by his ruthlessly ambitious cousin, Lord Murad of Galiapeno. Murad blackmailed a master mariner, one Richard Hawkwood, into leading the voyage, and as passengers and would-be colonists they took along some of the refugee Dweomer-Folk of Hebrion, including one Bardolin of Carreirida. But when they finally reached the fabled west, they found that a colony of lycanthropes and mages had already existed there for centuries under the aegis of an immortal arch-mage, Aruan. Their exploratory party was wiped out, with only Murad, Hawkwood and Bardolin surviving.

Back in Norma

As Abeleyn lay senseless, administered to by his faithful wizard Golophin, a power struggle began. His mistress Jemilla strove to set up a Regency to govern the kingdom, which would recognise the right of her unborn child—nominally, the King’s—to succeed to the throne. Golophin and Isolla, Abeleyn’s Astaran fiancée, worked in their turn to curb Jemilla’s ambitions. After the weary Golophin’s sorcerous powers were restored by the unexpected intervention of Aruan from the West, Abeleyn was roused from his coma, his missing legs replaced by magical limbs of wood.

All across the continent, the Monarchies of God were in a state of violent flux. In Almark, the dying King Haukir bequeathed his kingdom to the Himerian Church, transforming it overnight into a great temporal power. The man at its head, Himerius, was in fact a puppet of the Western sorcerer Aruan, and after a strange and agonising initiation, he had become a lycanthrope like his master.

And in Charibon two of his humbler fellow-clerics, Albrec and Avila, stumbled upon an ancient document, a biography of St Ramusio which stated that he was one and the same as the Merduk Prophet Ahrimuz. The two monks, guilty of heresy, fled Charibon, but not before a macabre encounter with the chief librarian of the monastery city, who also turned out to be a werewolf. They ran into the teeth of a midwinter blizzard, and would have died in the snow had they not been rescued by a passing Fimbrian army, which was on its way east to support the Toru

Further east, the great Toru

The Merduks finally abandoned their costly frontal assaults and outflanked Orma

Lofantyr led the entire remaining Toru

The year 551 had ended, and another chapter in Norma

PROLOGUE

T HE makeshift tiller bucked under their hands, bruising ribs. Hawkwood gripped it tighter to his sore chest along with the others, teeth set, his mind a flare of foul curses—a helpless fury which damned the wind, the ship, the sea itself, and the vast, uncaring world upon which they raced in mad career.

The wind backed a point—he could feel it spike into his right ear, heavy with chill rain. He unclenched his jaws long enough to shriek forward over the lashing gale.