Black Harvest

  Black Harvest

  ALSO BY M. C. PLANCK

  Sword of the Bright Lady (World of Prime, Book 1)

  Gold Throne in Shadow (World of Prime, Book 2)

  Judgment at Verdant Court (World of Prime, Book 3)

  Verdict on Crimson Fields (World of Prime, Book 4)

  BLACK HARVEST

  WORLD OF PRIME BOOK FIVE

  M. C. PLANCK

  Published 2019 by Pyr®

  Black Harvest. Copyright © 2019 by m. C. Planck. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover illustration © Shutterstock.

  Cover design by Jennifer Do

  Cover Design © Start Science Fiction

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Inquiries should be addressed to

  Start Science Fiction

  101 Hudson Street, 37th floor, Suite 3705

  Jersey City, New Jersey 07302

  PHONE: 212-431-5455

  WWW.PYSF.COM

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63388-558-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63388-559-2

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  1. Gone Girl

  2. Arbitrary Value

  3. Welcome to Graceland

  4. Burning Ring of Fire

  5. Journey to the Center of the Earth

  6. A Rising Tide

  7. Tea Time with the Queen

  8. Playing Doctor

  9. Game Theory

  10. The Bridge

  11. Winter of Discontent

  12. A Dish Best Served Cold

  13. Ghosts

  14. Elves

  15. Show and a Dinner

  16. Should Old Acquaintance Be forgotten

  17. Under the Dome

  18. Fire and Fury

  19. Goodbye

  20. Hello, Hello, Hello

  21. Au Revoir

  22. Call of the Falcon

  23. Party of Four

  24. Road Trip from Hell

  25. Exit Stage Left

  26. You Can Never Go Home Again

  27. Favors

  28. HMS Vigilant

  29. Scandalous

  30. Earth, Wind, and Fire

  31. Fin

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  GONE GIRL

  He caught her with a word.

  A single, elegant syllable, an orchestra of chimes in a gentle wind, and the woman paused in a movement that did not end. A waitress, serving afternoon ale in a quiet tavern; her dark hair loose around her shoulders, softening the hard cast of her face; the old and faded dress worn nonetheless with a sense of style. The spell held her as still as a statue, leaving only her eyes under her control. It was an artistic tableau, save for those eyes.

  Eyes that burned in fury, hatred, and . . . fear.

  The first two Christopher expected. The last settled on him like a weight.

  He had spent a year murdering seven-foot-tall dog men at the point of a sword. A bloody and horrifying business, that, especially when their cubs bit as fiercely at his ankles as their females did at his throat. He had destroyed their entire civilization, broken the remnants to servitude, and then accidentally delivered them into the hands of goblins, who treated them even worse. The ulvenmen had fought with insane bravery to defend their way of life. Since that way of life included slavery, cannibalism, and regular attempts to commit genocide against the human realm, Christopher had met them on equal terms. Yet they had never shown fear. Even as they bled out at his feet, they had broken their fangs on his blade in glorious rage.

  The goblins had hated, deceived, and betrayed him at the first opportunity. If they had been frightened at any point, it had been thoroughly masked by their sneering contempt.

  He had dethroned and destroyed a king without ever piercing the man’s arrogance.

  None of them had been afraid. Only he had trembled in those encounters, his Earth-borne birth a poor preparation for this world of unrelenting violence.

  In retrospect, he could see all of that had been the easier part of his task.

  On the other side of the room, Lalania pulled off her wig. Her natural hair, golden and wavy, spilled around her shoulders. It didn’t matter that there was not enough space under the short black cap for all that blonde glory; her disguises were mostly magical these days. The bard walked through the nearly empty tavern, silencing the questioning looks of the handful of customers by ignoring them. The tavern owner, who had paused in the act of washing a pitcher, now paused in the act of asking a question, leaving him standing almost as still as the woman held in magical stasis.

  The blonde girl studied the frozen one carefully. With relief so subtle Christopher doubted anyone else could see it, she spoke. “I don’t know her.”

  They had discussed the possibility that this woman might have once been a student of the College.

  He had to stop thinking of her as a woman. Use her real name, her real title. Assassin.

  The woman—the assassin—had tried several times to kill Christopher. Arguably, she had succeeded at least once, as he had left her company as a corpse, although by his own hand. This had been her only mistake. Of all those she had killed, only Christopher had come back. She had been more careful with the others.

  Some by the simple expedient of obscurity. He had no idea who all her victims were. Many by the clever stratagem of making them his enemies, so they died on his blade or at the hands of his allies, where naturally revival would not be extended.

  And two by learning the rules of magic, its provisions and limits, faster than he had. First had been a child in Carrhill. Revival did not work on the exceedingly young, as he had been horrified to discover.

  Second had been the old man. Revival did not work on the exceedingly old, as he had been grieved to discover. For two long years, his greatest triumph had been tainted by unexpected sorrow; the man who had done the most to prepare him for greatness had died before seeing him on the throne. The guilt was doubled because Christopher had not merely been too busy to travel out to see his friend and mentor in those first few months after the final battle, he had actively been avoiding Pater Svengusta, afraid of what he would see in the old man’s eyes. The first casualty of Christopher’s war had been Saint Krellyan, beloved leader of Svengusta’s church. So much fear and sadness in a world where magic could banish sickness, madness, and even death.

  Within limits.

  Christopher pulled off his own wig, dissolving the illusion Lalania had laid over him. Several of the customers choked on their ale to see their ruler and liege lord in a tavern of such low repute. The room emptied quickly as the guests fled, fearing whatever justice he had come to dispense might rub off on them. The tavern keeper dropped his pitcher and opened his mouth. Lalania cut him off with a peremptory gesture. He bent down behind the counter to pick up the jug and then quite sensibly stayed there, out of sight.

  The assassin did not react. Of course not, because she was paralyzed, but her eyes showed no change. She had known who he was from the word.

  She had not known him when he had entered the room, dressed like a common workman. She had not known him when he grunted incoherently and raised a thumb to order a mug of ale. Lalania had not trusted him to speak despite all h
er coaching. She had not known him until the spell.

  He had not known her, had not been able to confirm Lalania’s suspicion, until she placed the mug of ale on the table. Once before she had done that and then stabbed him in the neck with paralytic darts. The face she wore now was foreign to him; she was at least two inches taller than the last time he’d seen her; her voice was not one he had ever heard before. But the simple act had revealed her. The overt flirtation of her too-close stance, the female vulnerability hidden in plain sight like a false lure, the contempt underlying the whole performance—those he instantly recognized. Those he would never forget.

  Lalania had found the woman. She and her peers from the College had tracked the woman—the assassin—to this town. They had singled out one suspicious barmaid in a kingdom of barmaids through careful and keen observation, two long years of work. There were spells he could have used that would have been faster, but magic was quite literal. It would have found his target and nothing else. Lalania wanted to pluck this thread gently to see whether it could lead them to their greatest enemy. In the end, the bards had concluded the trail stopped at the Gold Throne. There was no lead here to drag the hidden foe into the light.

  Now she was just a murderess pretending to be a barmaid, not an enemy of the state serving powers of ultimate darkness. His realm was full of people who had killed at someone else’s command. He punished them as slowly as he could, hoping that given time they would see the value of a new way of doing things. Only the worst had to die, and most of them had already done so on the battlefield beside the Gold Apostle, who had worked at the behest of another, the dark and hideous hjerne-spica. who had run the kingdom from the shadows. Feudalism was not unmade in a day. He was kind of hoping for a decade, but even that looked optimistic.

  Time had run out for the assassin. It remained to be seen whether she had learned anything new.

  “Let me bind and search her,” Lalania said. “Then we can send for the local watch and have her transported.”

  “No,” Christopher said. “I’ll do it here.”

  He stood and drew his sword. There was no reason for delay. Her fear was a burden he did not want to carry another step.

  The words of another spell rang in the air. He leaned forward, holding the sword between them, its killing point aimed at the ground, the hilt shared against both their foreheads. A token of his god, a promise of justice, and a binding on both of them. The naked edge was an honest symbol; the power of the atonement spell would bind him as much as it bound her.

  He was in a different place now. He stood beside her, a mere shadow, while she crept through a dark and quiet village. Not just a memory; she spoke over her shoulder to him, narrating without affecting the action, like the director’s commentary on a movie.

  “This is what you wanted to see, I presume.”

  He did not answer because he could not lie. As much as he wanted to avoid what she would show him here, there were worse things she could have chosen. Such as the child.

  The details were unimportant. Only she cared about the skill with which she entered through a locked window on the second floor, glided noiselessly down a creaky wooden hall, and slipped unknown into an old man’s bedroom. She stood over the white-haired sleeper for a moment and then struck, the dagger sinking fast and true through the scraggly beard and into his throat.

  The old man was a priest, merely first rank, but that still granted him inhuman vitality. He opened his eyes and struggled. She held him down, his voice silenced by steel. He could not call for help, either mundane or divine.

  She had learned, after all, from her mistake with Christopher.

  The old man looked up into his killer’s eyes. Recognition dawned; although he had never seen her, still he knew who she must be. Here there was neither fear nor anger. Only sadness. And something else—a crinkle of smile, at the very end, before the light faded altogether.

  Christopher felt tears running down his face. A remarkable feat for a man who was merely shadow at the moment but no more remarkable than the old man’s wisdom. He had guessed, then, that someday Christopher would be standing here, watching through his killer’s eyes. He had deduced, through sheer faith, that she would be caught and Christopher would extend the chance of atonement. He had done all of this while silently bleeding to death. And taken the chance to say goodbye.

  “Goodbye, old friend,” Christopher whispered to the fading face. Svengusta had been the first ally Christopher had made in this world. He had saved Christopher’s life, invited Christopher into his home and family, sheltered Christopher from missteps, and invested gold and hope in Christopher’s revolution.

  And not lived to see it with his own eyes. Because of this woman.

  “He can’t hear you,” she said.

  “I know.” Christopher felt weary, already drained to the bottom. “He didn’t have to. He knew what I would say. He knew I would see this. You understand that, right?”

  “Next you will tell me he begged for my redemption with his last breath.”

  There were no lies here. Christopher could only speak the truth. “He did.”

  She sprang up from the body, throwing her shoulders back. The memory froze as she railed off-script. “And will you grant it? Will you give me my freedom, after all of this?”

  “Only if you will take it.”

  “I bow and I scrape, I grovel and promise to behave, and off I go as free as a bird?” She cloaked her words in mockery, which was as close to falsehood as she could get in this place.

  “You know it is not that simple.”

  “Oh, my lord, how exalted your wisdom! Explain it to me, a simple peasant girl, a foolish child, a lost and stray lamb. Show me the path I should tread to please your mewling gods.”

  “You can’t hide behind bravado here. I know you know the truth when you see it. You were the first to tell me the ugly ones.” When he had lain in a dungeon, bound and broken, at her nonexistent mercy.

  “I did that to hurt you,” she said unnecessarily. Both of them already knew that.

  “But it was truth all the same. And it helped me. It set me on this path.”

  “Don’t you dare,” she hissed, struck to the core. “Don’t you dare redeem me against my will. I did what I did for your pain, and if it rebounded to your profit, it was entirely unanticipated and undesired. You cannot take my agency from me.”

  Given all the extraplanar beings that had manipulated Christopher’s career so far, he was not entirely sure the concept of agency was as clear as she suggested. That was too abstract a point to raise at the moment.

  “Nonetheless, we are here. I can redeem you, if you let me. I will, for the sake of an old man.”

  She spat in his face. “You will for the sake of your vanity. You sit on that throne, handing out judgment like beggars’ coins. This one for life, that one for the noose, as you will. You dress up your whimsy in fine clothes and call it justice, and yet at the end of the day, the gallows still bears its heavy fruit. Now you extend mercy to your most hated foe, the wickedest woman in the kingdom, solely so you can wear your virtue like a crown. As if it will wash away the sea of blood you have guzzled.”

  As always, her words were true enough to cut. But he already knew these truths. He already bled from them daily.

  He shook his head gently. “Is that why you did it? Just to climb to the top of my enemy’s list? Did you think I would hate you more for a dear friend than for an innocent child? Did you think I would ever fear you more than a hjerne-spica? Is all this wickedness merely for your vanity?”

  Her fist passed through him, insubstantial as a shadow.

  “How dare you!” The shriek cut through his anger and tore at his heart. Any creature in pain is still in pain, even if it is a wicked, dangerous thing.

  She turned and fled, running through memories like backstage sets, old and musty. He followed behind, a ghost over her shoulder, bound to her without choice.

  So many memories, each hastily throw
n together from backdrops, only to crumble away as she tore through them, fleeing what could never be outrun.

  In the end, they ended where they had to end. Together they stood over a terrible scene, while a terrible man did terrible things to a child. Christopher would have been sick if he had a stomach in this form; he would have been enraged if he did not know these events were already done and dusted years ago. He would have been moved to pity if not for the knowledge of what she had done to a child even younger and more helpless.

  “Give me a name,” he said, “and if he still lives, I will give him a measure of my justice.”

  “You are too late,” she said. “He was my third kill. When I was eleven, I found a dagger and hid it beneath a loose floorboard. It was my dolly, my secret friend, my first lover. When I was twelve, I stabbed a younger boy to prove myself to a traveling mummer. He was impressed; he finished the boy off and took me on. Two years later, we passed through the same village again. I was experienced enough to do it on my own this time. Despite the drink, he was still too strong for me to toy with, so I had to make it quick. The event was not as satisfying as I had hoped.” Simple facts she recited in a calm, measured tone.

  “Have any of them been?”

  “No.” She was thinning, turning translucent, as if the absence of spite were dissolving her form. “I murdered and robbed and loved, and yet this moment never changed.”

  “I cannot change it either. Nothing can undo the past. But I can take it from you. I can build a cage around it so that it will no longer poison you. Or I can erase it from your mind.”

  “No,” she said. “No vessel could contain this bile. Nor can you pluck it from my soul, for what would be left? This moment has cast its burning light over the whole of my life, coloring every hope before it and every choice after it. I am what it has made me. What I would be without it I cannot imagine. Some poor, guileless creature, merely waiting for another tragedy. I would rather the mercy I gave that child in Carrhill. She will never grow up to be someone else’s plaything. She will never succumb to the fire and cast it out to burn others, over and over again without surcease.”