That is No Country for Old Men

The bluff of Emperor Valens I, founder of the Lyrios dynasty, had been called; he would see his dynasty end.

A battering ram beat on the doors to the throne room. Valens stood in the center of a shield wall with his palace guards. The armaments he had taken up from a dead soldier felt strange in his hands: a tall kite shield and a short one-handed spear; nothing at all like the greatswords and heavy-bladed polearms he had favored in simpler days, when he had been a nameless monster-hunter in the wild frontier provinces of the Empire.

Boom.

The doors flexed inward, and gold leaf fluttered down from the inlaid engravings on the throne room’s ceiling. Through their psychic tether, Valens could feel his junior co-emperor, Petrus, squirm on his silver throne behind them. His nephew’s brains were the only reason they had kept power for almost two years, but Petrus was not a fighting man like his uncle.

Boom.

Splinters flew over their heads. Arios, his Prefect of the Guard, caught a thumb-sized piece of wood on his helm’s noseguard without so much as blinking. The man had been in this palace longer than Valens, but had been appointed to his current office only when Valens had vacated it, to seize the throne when Euphemios III had died without an heir. Had Euphemios made the sensible choice– promoted the career soldier ahead of his pet adventurer– their places may now be reversed, or this damned fool situation may have been avoided entirely.

CRACK.

The doors fell aside off their hinges, and the usurper’s men were on them. Valens only had to consider his first move of the fight– raising his shield to block an overhead axe-swing while in the same motion plunging his spear into the axeman’s loins– and the rest flowed like a river, each thrust leading into a block, each block into a step forward or back, and then once more to plunging his spear into flesh. When his shield fell split from his arm, he deflected blades using the broad golden bangles on his wrist. When his spear broke between the plates of an officer's lamellar armor, he pulled a long dagger from that same officer's belt and kept stabbing, here through a wrist, there into an armpit, until he broke free from a grapple with a dying spearman to find there was no other man left standing, friend or foe, in all that hall.

Thirty-three guards had stayed alive and loyal long enough to make their emperor’s last stand along with him; all now lay killed or wounded, tangled with twice as many or more of the enemy. The usurper’s forces were pulling back into the courtyard they had broken in from– not in haphazard retreat, but opening up a line of sight to two ranks of crossbowmen, arrayed with their bolts leveled on Valens.

There was no time to grasp for a shield, none to dive among the corpses; their fingers were already on their triggers. A volley was loosed, and Valens could do nothing but send up a wordless prayer to the King on High for a merciful judgment.

Two dozen points of light sundered the air in front of him, and two dozen bolts slipped from their flights into oblivion, leaving only ripples of air to brush his face and tug at his cape. Through their psychic link, Petrus’ exhausted mind writhed under the strain of the spell. Valens had no talent at all for the Celestial Disciplines of magic– forming his telepathic link to his nephew was the only time he had even tried to use the Lunar Discipline– but Petrus had used over a hundred such connections to relay orders directly into the heads of agents and officers across the Empire. Before and during the usurper’s assault on the capital, almost all of those mental threads had been painfully sundered as loyalist leaders were killed or turned their coats.

Then Valens felt currents of air tug at him again, and not so gently this time. One of the two magical Disciplines the emperor had some aptitude for was Earth, and he drew up slabs from the throne room’s marble floors to encase his legs and keep himself standing in the face of this attack with Air. His nephew was not the only one starting to falter under the strain of their doomed resistance, however, and Valens released his magical hold on the stone as he searched for the source of the attack.

This was the last misplay of his reign.

The cracked sheets of marble running up his shins fell away, while the ones shoring up his calves slammed into the backs of his knees, forcing him to the ground. From the ranks of soldiers, two figures stepped forward, one in gold-plated armor and a mantle treasonously colored with the imperial purple, the other in the red-and-gold vestments of a Patriarch of the Church, hand clenched in a Sign of Command from the Earth Discipline.

“See how the upstart’s young accomplice openly embraces the Western Heresy in his use of unclean magics.” said Ioannes Nikaphoros, the excommunicated Patriarch of Shar-al-Qaddim. “I am sure the upstart himself would also be using such tricks, had he the education to grasp the pagan grimoires. This peasant’s short tenure has created long work for us, restoring orthodoxy to the Church.”

The heretical prelate’s self-righteousness stoked fire in Valens’ blood. A little over a year ago, the man had offered to repent of his opposition to the most recent Church Council, if only Valens paid a handsome bribe. He would’ve paid gladly, too, if only he had found the hidden entrance to the imperial treasury.

Having those funds– or even maintaining the illusion of having them, awhile longer– could have averted this whole civil war. But that secret had been guarded a little too well, for even the men charged with carrying wealth in and out of it had been made to go much of the way blindfolded. Always, they had been guided either by Euphemios himself, or by his treasurer. Euphemios had been too frail of mind, at the end, to say clearly where the treasury was, and the treasurer had been filled with arrows while trying to defect to Hypatios.

“The House of the King on High will be made pure in time, Patriarch.” Valens had never parlayed face to face with General Hypatios in the course of their war, and it had been many years since the two had spoken. Despite how the general had aged, he still had the same nasally whine in his voice. “First, we must set this house in order.”

“As the last legitimate Patriarch of the Church, I cannot expressly recommend you kill both of these blasphemers; however, it would be within your rights as Emperor. The King on High would not hold it against you.”

“No. The young one is too clever to waste, and the pretender too popular with the masses to be made a martyr. I will simply invalidate them as rival claimants; they can have their lives.”

“As the King on High is perfect, so the ruler of His people must be unblemished; as He is father of all, the defender of His Church must be fruitful. As you say, the young heretic is clever; whatever mutilations you deem fit, you would do well to carry them out here and now, before he devises a plan to escape.”

No indignity that Valens ever suffered, even the act itself, stung so hard as the order being given in Hypatios’ insufferable voice. His nephew’s face was left intact; two soldiers held him down, a third pulled down his trousers, and a battlefield physician came forward with forceps and a sharp knife. This grotesque scene was the last thing Valens saw, before another soldier’s dagger slid across his eyes.