Westhaven by Rowan Erlking (best sci fi novels of all time TXT) 📕

“Because of you, I could hardly remember who I was,” his former slave said. “When Kleston found me, he named me Key. But I remember who I am now.”

Key walked to where he saw his father’s sword in one of the guard’s hands. He took it from him and pointed it straight at the general.

“You killed my father. My grandfather. You took me captive and burned my village.”

Gailert closed his eyes, bracing for the blow.

But Key kept talking. “You had beaten me and tortured me more times than I can count—with no mercy or reason. I’ve seen you rape and torture countless women; murdered men, women and children, and burned their villages to the ground. A swift death is too light a punishment for you.”

Several around the council table murmured, though a good portion of their words and murmuring was in agreement. The rest was in wonder at what wild suggestion Key would make next.

“Tiler, do you have those irons?” Key asked.

The Herra man hobbled over, nodding, and took off his pack. He opened it right there, drawing out two leg irons that had been practically pried apart by someone’s obvious magic touch.

“Lanona, if you would please do one more favor for me.” Key looked to the beautiful young woman who sat next to the Sundri man.

She leapt up, jogging to get to his side.

His old slave set the irons in her hands. “Put them on his ankles so that he can never take them off.”

She gave a pert nod and grabbed at Gailert’s ankles.

“How dare you!” Gailert shouted, trying to kick at her. But Tiler and Key both grabbed his legs to hold them still.

Key leaned in and hissed as his piercing eyes bore holes into Gailert’s face. “I’ve seen her seal men’s mouths shut. So unless you want to starve to death also, I suggest you don’t move.”

The young woman called Lanona smirked, blushing, yet obligingly followed through with Key’s request. Gailert felt the iron fold over his skin, squeezing tight around each ankle. She then took up the remaining links and made them join in a chain, molding them as if the iron were merely clay in her fingers. When she let go, she kissed Key on the cheek and reluctantly walked back to her seat, swishing her skirts with a flirtatious smile, all for that man.

Gailert seethed where he was, now watching Key rise and turn to face the others.

“I have only one request,” Key said with a strong voice, as if he had saved it up in his silent captivity for this moment, turning his gaze to all of those in the council. “That he be kept alive, but put on display in a public place, preferably Roan or Barnid where the people can express their regards for this demon.”

“How long must we keep him alive?” the swarthy man, Pattron asked, his teeth almost clenched.

The man of the Southwest Corner also glared with a decidedly contrary look. Though, the lake men rested with their elbows on the table as if considering their fellow’s words with personal understanding.

Key gave the southerner a glance as he said, “He has hurt no one worse than me. The longer he suffers, the more he will feel the pain and damage he has done to others. I’m suggesting you keep him alive as long as you can.”

“How…?” Gailert muttered, now shaking his head.

Turning to look at him, Key’s normally intelligent eyes reflected puzzlement.

“How is it that you, of all people are the notorious Key?” Gailert then hung his head in a low moan. “It is impossible! I broke you! I broke you!”

Key strode back to him then said in a grave voice, “Broke me?”

Gailert looked up. His eyes flashed angrily. He shouted at his former slave, spit flying from his mouth. “You were nothing! You could barely even hold your head up! You hardly spoke! You can’t be the same boy! You can’t!”

Exhaling, Key pulled at the laces of his shirt then slipped it over his head and dropping it to the floor. Gailert saw the scars on his slave’s back and arms. He recognized the branding on his shoulder that declared him a traitor’s son with the tattoo that marked him as his property. But Key only pointed to the square burn mark on the center of his chest. “I never forgot that day, the day you murdered my father.

“You ask me how I, that boy struggling to survive who escaped you during the battle at Foreston, am now putting you where I was? You are supposed to be the great General Gailert Winstrong, the man with the military mind. Did you not even think that I was listening as you and Captain Welsin, or Captain Huron, or any of the other captains and lieutenants were talking, discussing matters in the land? You shouted at me and had me beaten for just looking at that map in the Roan military post. Did you not realize that I did not just learn things from what I read, but also what I heard? You set me at your feet and read to me from your books of philosophy and military strategy—and you have the audacity to ask me how I became who I am now?”

Key huffed and pulled his shirt back on. Straightening it, he gave Gailert a dirty look. “You made me who I am now. Before you picked me up, I was merely the heir to the Bekir Smithy. A common man with a good memory. In a way, I am more like your blue-eyed Sky Child than you are. Since the moment of my captivity, I have remembered everything I saw and heard.”

“Everything?” Gailert murmured, feeling his empty stomach twist with a sick feeling.

He had done it. He was the cause for his nation’s fall. His foolish idealism. His blind ambition. He had done it. They had been right about his birth after all. He was an ill omen, the sign of the end of everything.

Seeing that Gailert was silenced, Key turned once more and addressed the council. “So, are we agreed?”

The entire council murmured with nods. Lady Sadena gave Key the official approval, lowering her head gracefully.

Key gestured for the guards to take the general away, or at least out of his sight.

As they detached the general from off the chair and dragged him out of the room, Gailert saw the lake men greet Key—calling him Kemdin, patting him on the back, offering a seat within the council, and making room for that Herra man as well.

When he was taken from the room, Gailert began to sob, hanging his head and murmuring, “When I was born they said I was a bad omen. They were right.”

The guards heaved him up, as he could no longer walk on his own, the irons pinching tight.

“They were right.”

It was said that General Winstrong died in Roan, though others swear it happened in Barnid. Whichever version was true only mattered to a few. The agreed upon portion of the story was that he had died in the stocks as Key had ordered, murmuring over and over again something about him being a bad omen. Though some people claimed a passerby had actually thrown a rock at the former general, which split open his skull and he bled to death. However, the version the guards told Key was that he expired after a really cold night, only a week after he had been locked up. His body was burned and his ashes were dumped where he could be neither recognized nor remembered.

As for the nation the war council had started to form that day in Danslik, it took many more meetings and several more votes before an actual governing system and constitution could be drawn up. Key left Danslik during the middle of those meetings. His commoner friends departed with him, including the wizard from Sundri and the witch Edman. Since then, Edman had taken it upon himself to learn magician craft also, combining both herbalist and magician skills together into a new study of practical magic he called magisterial work. He intended it for the use of defense against demons. Most of Key’s friends returned to the Herra Hills and the lakes, though this time they settled on the western shore of Bekir, establishing a small village while abandoning the peninsula for good.

It was said, in the years after that, the Bekir swordsmith continued to supply weapons for the standing Army of Man that General Dalis Holbruk maintained at his original campground. They could also be purchased for a price from the smithy himself who raised a family of three sons and two daughters—his wife uncommonly beautiful and not a woman anyone dared cross. None of their children were wizards though, as that was not the way of magic in their world.

As for the nation itself, Westhaven was renamed Brein Amon after the old language to mean the Land of Man. The elected head patriarch retained a council of thirteen aristocrats that came from each of the cities to represent the nation as a whole. The elected patriarch ended up being that dignified former porter, Mikal from Mistrim, who had retained the respect of most of the council during the entire war. The other patriarchs and important men and women returned to their cities and towns to put things back in order.

With Sky Child technology now in their hands, the education of their past experiences with the demons, and the threat of another invasion on both their borders to take their land from them, the Brein Amon government immediately set up military posts of their own to make sure their land would remain within human hands. This time, the brown-eyeds were their slaves. They did this as punishment for their presumption to rule over human kind. This is not to say that Brein Amon remained a land of peace. Nor does it mean that they people of Brein Amon achieved peace and equity for all. But that if any inequity did occur, it was by human hands and no demon could be blamed.

Well, almost none.

In the decades to come, when the memory of the war was written in the history books, and twisted to the views of some who lived it and by some who imagined what it was like—or passed on from Cordril to Cordril with a different, yet still warped understanding of what had happened—demons of all kinds rose up again. Until somewhere in the northwest of Brein Amon, a boy was born, who had to face another set of inequities and injustices that had to be righted. A boy named Jonis.

But that is another story.