and glared back at Skeln.
“Because he hasn’t told you a single truth.”
“How would you know that?” Redzyn caught sight of Emeck before continuing. “Your assistant tell you that?”
“No, Colonel Redzyn, meet my son Skeln.” Skeln was the hardest hit by the revelation. He fell to his knees and gaped at the unhooded Urake.
“Damn, he definitely took after your side of the family and took me for a fool. Explains why he reminded me of Skeln. Soldier, get that blasted rock and there had better not be a single scratch on it!” The sentry addressed sprang into action leaving his companion nervously seeking an excuse to escape.
Chapter Five: Intrigue
Events had not been following the plans that Reigns had set in motion. The King’s untimely death had come as a surprise. The Princess’ subsequent disappearance had only disrupted the plans more. As Reigns sat in his study looking at the array of intelligence reports on the table before him, his mood steadily soured. Crein had promised that the Princess would be dead, but had then reported that a group of his best assassins had been found dead along the road to the Outlands. They had apparently met their ends in a brief pitched fight at the hands of dozens of men.
Reigns cursed the fact that Balinor had managed the escape right under his nose. A couple of the city guards that had been on duty that night languished in the dungeons and could rot there as far as he was concerned. Ten more were already in the prison graveyard. The rest of the guards had been part of the plot. They were the ones that Reigns wanted to torture the most. These guards had quietly finished their guard shift before disappearing, presumably to join Balinor’s rebellion.
Reigns called it Balinor’s Rebellion because he could not picture Em’risi as anything in the way of a leader, let alone sitting at the helm of a rebellion. She was merely there to give Balinor a claim to power and probably to inspire the men to his cause with an actual Royal to swear loyalty to. It would be crushed soon enough, royal or no.
The documents on the table were all the intelligence reports gathered concerning soldier movement. Reigns like to keep redundancies in place in case he were to find himself in these very same circumstances. The military reported on the people and Reigns’ personal spy network reported on the military. A portion of each group overlapped the other as was evident with the high ranking military officials that belonged to Reigns’ spy network. Now that he was reviewing the documents, he realized the signs had been present for months as the plans fell into place. If Reigns hadn’t been so distracted chasing after the Asgare and the rumored Dragon Lords, he would have noticed the telltale discrepancies. Ranking officers that had stopped giving precise reports but instead began giving generalized reports of troop movements before having gone missing in action. The new officers that had been left in command were inept and failed to report that the absent officer had taken a sizable amount of troops with him. There had been defections all over the Braebach Empire.
Where they had gone was the question. This was not difficult to ascertain. The only troop movements besides the ones that Reigns himself had ordered were all moving north or east, but mostly north. Since there was no army assembled outside Shienhin, then it was safe to assume that they were likely to be somewhere else. It did not take much to guess that the rebels were massing in the Outlands because the assassins had been found dead along the only road into that region.
Grinding his teeth in annoyance, Reigns stood and walked to the window. The rebel’s couldn’t have chosen a better place to hold, if that is what they meant to do. The Garoche Heights were impenetrable to an army. The Badlands were unpredictable while the Sand Sea was dry as a bone and filled with ever shifting sand. Both of those options might be viable for a moderate fighting force to move through although each had their own unique problems. Only infantry could make it through the Badlands because of the broken terrain meaning that they would be too slow of a force to manage a surprise attack. Calvary could make the journey through the Sand Sea, but long gone were the hardy breeds of desert horses that the sand tribes used to breed. The big