Part III:
The Kuna-shi Battles Demons
While the Rizalt Runs Aground
Prelude to Part III:
Excerpt from Wise Man Tellorin’s
The Updated Histories of House Dorsa
In the months leading up to the great battle that became known as the Empress’s Last Stand, there was nothing to suggest that doom awaited the Empress’s military campaign. If anything, it was quite the opposite: As the Empress led her forces steadily eastward from Birsid towards Pellon, she followed the effective, if somewhat morally dubious strategy, to wage war as the mountain men had for years – she raided a weak target, conquered it, then raided the next weak target. Battle by battle, mile by mile, the army took back ever-larger Eastern villages and towns that had been occupied by the Quanca Carin since the treaty brokered by the false Regent Norix. Thousands of Easterners were liberated from enslavement by the tribesmen, and the new rune-marked blades carried by every tenth soldier quickly proved themselves well-worth the extraordinary expense and effort of having them made. Shadow-infections stopped spreading within the Imperial Army, and on the battlefield, the mountain men could no longer rely upon their stronger and faster shadow-infected warriors to neutralize the advantages of the Imperial Army’s numbers, equipment, and battle discipline.
Despite winning victory after victory, some scholars argue that Empress Natasia should have recognized that danger brewed just over the horizon. But I am not alone amongst historians who vehemently refute such an argument. Indeed, instead of asking, How could the Empress have missed what was coming? I prefer to ask, How could she have seen it? There is absolutely no indication in any of the primary sources that the Empress, the Commander of the Palace Guard, or any of her other senior officers had reason to suspect that trouble was afoot.
Wise Man Follarin, in his short text The Great Failure of Empress Natasia I, suggests that the Empress and Commander Joslyn of Terinto, who functioned as the Empress’s unofficial military advisor, were well aware that a problem brewed within their own ranks. Follarin asserts that a chambermaid in the House of Tergos found a bloodied uniform of an Imperial soldier hidden in the room where the Empress and her guards slept during their stay in Tergos. Contrary to official reports of the incident, the chambermaid claimed that the would-be assassin in Tergos was not a mountain man but an Imperial foot soldier. Follarin goes on to suggest that the Empress and the Commander intentionally misled senior military officers as to the nature of the attack in Tergos, a decision which set them on an inevitable course to disaster.
However, Wise Man Follarin’s dubious argument seems designed primarily to support those who would criticize Empress Natasia’s legacy. Besides the young chambermaid, no one else in the House of Tergos ever verified that the accouterments of an Imperial soldier were found in the guest quarters occupied by the Empress and her guards. In fact, the chambermaid, whose name is lost to history, was dismissed from her position when the Wise Man chamberlain of the House of Tergos heard the rumors she was spreading. He suspected her then, as I suspect her now, of simply trying to leverage the Empress’s most recent brush with death to gain notoriety for herself. Historians such as Wise Man Follarin would do well to resist the temptation to interpret past events, obscured by the darkness of the passage of time, by using the illumination of present-day knowledge.