By Rook, Wrath, and Ruin (Solo)
Prologue
Present Day
Berevar, Ahyark Pass
There are not many places on Althanas where a woman can truly find peace. There are many where she may find respite, a brief glimpse of solitude, but never absolute, indefinite security of the mind. There are always people, places and callings to tend to. There are always errors to correct and lives to save. The eternal demand on the altruism and patience of a woman is both the driving force of her success, as well as her downfall.
Lady Clarissa Montague was the one exception.
Since a young age she had refused to let anyone rule her actions. People were her currency, and she traded their lives to keep them distant. In her vicious mercantile selfishness, she had carved out a sanctuary all of her own. She was by all measure of merit a highly successful woman. Her business, her political prowess, and her domineering spirit had driven her there and she had not relied on any other to reach her station.
She had relied on nobody, except one man.
“Leopold Winchester…” The incitement of her age old adversary came with a lack of observing his proper title. “What the devil are you up to now?” she whispered, a pensive thought falling from her lips into the howling winds of Berevar’s tallest peaks.
From her vantage point on the small cliff overlooking the pass, Clarissa counted the number of wagons trundling through the deep snow drift. After she reached eight, she stopped caring. She was not here to take the cargo; she was here for the drivers and the horses. They, in Berevar’s harsh tundra, were worth more than their weight in gold.
“Jackson, I think we can begin.” She glanced over her shoulder at the huddled members of her Brigade. Her face remained expressionless as she counted them too. When she reached only eight, she vowed to account for the loss of one of the mercenaries at a later date, and to offer one of her slaves an opportunity to ‘further’ their career within her household. The snow of the wild lands had taken another investment from her.
“Yes, my lady,” the moustached man jittered. He tightened the hood of his cloak over his head and unsheathed a cruel looking short sword. In the dusk light it reflected the moon that loomed ominously over the distant snow-capped peaks. The ring of steel thrilled him, and Lady Montague finally smiled at the prospect of striking a blow to her bitter rival’s enterprise.
“See to it that you come from the rear, and have your associate Mr Whalen perform one of his…tricks from the outcrop to the east.” Without waiting to see the man’s enthusiasm for departing she looked back down the cliff.
For three weeks the Montague Brigade had followed the caravans of the Winchester Rose Trading Company through the broken Salvar landscape. They had scattered in Knife’s Edge to watch from the side-lines, sneaking through the junket bazaars with eyes firmly set on their target. When the caravan had departed the city on the north side, to advance into the Ahyark Mountains, the Brigade had reformed and vanished into the cliffside maze that lined the flanks of the enclosed pass.
Now, they were ready to put their burgeoning frustration to good measure. Clarissa had learnt that Thomas Jackson was anything but a patient man. She had subsequently learned how to exploit the mercenaries’ peculiar talents by plying anxiety to every waking moment of his life. He had become an excellent tool in her armoury in no time at all.
As the Brigade shuffled along the cliff face, clinging to the iced granite for dear lives, their benefactor checked her bandoleer. Satisfied that she had brought enough vials for the poison she required to ply to her betrayers’ lips, she adjusted the spider silk of her gloves and flicked her hair back behind her ears. The blonde strands shone with a charismatic and spurious glamour in the moonlight.
“<Salshan minnari!>” she roared.
The power in the syllables of her words shot across the canyon with the force of a thunderbolt.
“Whatever it is my old friend,” she said, dropping her eyes from the distant peaks to the wagon at the head of the caravan. She remained deep in thought for several prolonged and awkward moments before she cleared her mind. “It will not save you from my wrath.”
When the echo of her incantation returned to the cliff face, bouncing off the distance rock wall of the pass, she smiled.
The members of the Montague Brigade had come to fear two things in the service of Lady Clarissa. The first was her wrath. When she was angered you ran, pure and simple. The last man to test her patience had ended up suspended from the walls of St. Denebriel’s Cathedral. This was made all the more endearing by the fact he was naked and suspended by his genitals and his feet. People had spoken about that particular incident for months.
The second thing to fear was the rook that kept itself to the rafters and rooftops of the Montague residence. Its eyes, its beak and its feathers were totems for paranoia. They were portent and doom to anyone who dared to try and claim more than their fair share of the Brigade’s fortunes. They said that the rook had a mind of its own, that it knew if you were stealing.
Lady Clarissa spread her arms when she felt a swell of power rise from the pit of her stomach to the temple of her highbrow. A cry left her lips as her spine elongated and her eyes sharpened in the twilight. The delayed reaction of her metamorphosis made her doubt her ability to act quickly in the blasted chill. It was long rumoured that what the rook saw, Montague saw.
She fell forwards into the dark, the howl of the wind drowning out the last notes of a melodic shriek. Just as the Brigade and Jackson screamed out from the swirl of heavy snow and assaulted the rear of the caravan, from above, a great black rook descended.