The Storm King

“Thank you,” Lucius said, turning a couple pages in his thick stack of papers. “Let’s continue with something else…”

For a moment, Leon contemplated making some kind of quip about how many papers the man had, but he decided that after the questions he’d just gotten about Tiberias he wasn’t going to press his luck.

“If possible, I’d like to discuss a few things in your military record,” Lucius said.

“The Legions are outside of the Arbiter’s jurisdiction,” Leon replied with a stony glare.

“So you don’t want to answer any questions we have about these matters?” Lucius asked, returning Leon’s glare with the probing look he’d been giving since the younger knight had first sat down.

Leon thought about it for a moment, keeping in mind the implications if he were to refuse to answer questions. Lucius had given him the ability to back out of this before in favor of an interview with a lawyer present, but Leon also knew that doing that wouldn’t reflect well on him if he were to suddenly bail after talking about Tiberias.

In the end, he decided not to take that right; he’d answer what he could. Were he completely innocent in everything, backing out might’ve just been his decision, instead. It would’ve been smart and completely understandable, but Leon didn’t want anyone looking any deeper into any potential connections he had with Tiberias. If he had to suffer through a few more questions to ensure that, then suffer he would.

“I’ll answer what I can, but don’t expect me to tell you everything you might want to know,” Leon warned, regretting his decision to not make use of a lawyer’s services beforehand, as it left him stuck without one.

“Just getting a few of these confusions cleared up will be more than enough, I assure you, Sir Leon,” the investigator replied.

He made a show of shuffling around a few more papers before finally jumping back into it.

“For the record, please state the location you were sent to following your time in the Knight Academy and the name of the knight you were assigned to squire for.”

“Fort 127 in the Northern Territories, I was to squire for Sir Samuel.”

“How long were you there before the warlord Hakon attempted his invasion?”

“I believe it was technically a raid,” Leon pointed out, a brief smile on his lips at being so pedantic. “I was there for about a week, as I recall. It’s been a while, so my memory’s a bit fuzzy.”

“Right. And it says here that it was during your first supply run that you ran into an advance group of Valeman soldiers-“

“Warriors, not soldiers,” Leon corrected again, to the annoyance of Lucius.

“Warriors. It was during your first supply run that you ran into a group of Valeman warriors, and only four of your squad managed to survive, not including your assigned knight?”

“Correct,” Leon confirmed.

“Following this encounter, you took charge of the remains of the squad and led them back to the Fort, activating a flare in a nearby tower to warn them of the approaching danger yet losing two more of your subordinates along the way. Is all this accurate?”

“It is,” Leon confirmed.

“Did you have any prior relationship with this warlord who led the attack? This ‘Hakon Fire-Beard’?”

Leon blinked in surprise, but he quickly and unhesitatingly responded, “No I did not.”

“He was a powerful warlord and you were a promising young fighter. I can’t imagine it would’ve been too strange if you two knew each other before this raid began…”

“I’m from the Brown Bear Tribe, we’re a long way away from Hakon’s home territory!” Leon shot back. “I knew of the man before the raid, let’s be clear about that, but I had never met him before, and I only knew his name because it was on the lips of the refugees who fled from his conquests into other Vales!”

“So you say, but don’t you think it’s a bit suspicious that a Valeman raid just so happened to begin a matter of days after you arrived at the Fort? What was more, somehow one of the more powerful and respected knights in the entire Fort was killed leading you beyond the fort’s wall, and you got nearly all the rest of the soldiers in that squad killed. Can we both agree that this sequence of events might raise a few eyebrows?”

“Perhaps it might be suspicious to some,” Leon said in an ambiguous tone. “Is there something you wish to accuse me of, Sir Lucius?”

“There are no accusations being made here, Sir Leon,” Lucius said, smiling at him. “At least, not yet.

“So, Fort 127 fell to the warriors of Hakon Fire-Beard, and you and a handful of survivors holed up in a tower and waited them out until Sir Clovis, Consul of the Northern Territories retook it from the barbarians.”

Leon patiently waited for the man to get to his point. From the way he was speaking, it didn’t even seem like he wanted Leon’s input.

Perhaps seeing Leon’s look of impatience and mild disdain, Lucius smiled a bit and brought his narration to a close. Or, at least a pausing point.

“Tell me, Sir Ursus, would it seem at all strange to you that in a fort of about five hundred trained soldiers, the only survivors were a handful of people and you, a kinsman of those who had attacked the fort in the first place?”

“First,” Leon venomously began, “if you had ever been to Fort 127, you’d know that it was hardly staffed with qualified people. Second, I and those who stood with me survived because we holed up in a strong defensive position and we fought like demons of war. That I happened to come from the Northern Vales is coincidental.”

“Funny you should bring up demons, because Sir Clovis had a few experts in demonology among his retinue, and they reported signs of demonic power being utilized during the assault.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Leon said fast enough that even he was a bit taken aback. After the questions about Tiberias, Leon had readied himself for further bombshells and probing questions. The unstated question was clearly meant to throw him off, and Lucius with his smug grin and staring eyes seemed to revel in trying to chip away at Leon’s stoic exterior. However, even with this ‘revelation’ of demonic power being detected, Leon remained externally unshaken, though within he was a bit of a mess.

He calmed down a little when he felt the attention of Xaphan welling up from his soul realm. The demon didn’t take any sarcastic cracks at Leon, he simply said, [I’m with you if you need me, boy,] and kept quiet. If Leon needed the demon’s power for any reason, Xaphan was ready to be called upon.

[Thanks,] Leon whispered back.

“Why is it not surprising?” the investigator asked when Leon didn’t verbally follow up.

“They brought a werewolf with them when they attacked, is it really that much of a shock that they might bring a demon worshipper as well?”

Lucius didn’t respond, which encouraged Leon quite a bit. He also didn’t seem to have much information from the rest of the survivors from Fort 127, as he wasn’t asking Leon about why he was able to use fire magic below the fifth-tier.

“Is that sort of degeneracy common up there?” Lucius asked with a condescending look as if he were looking at a pig rolling around in the mud and taking it as proof that he was superior.

“In some places,” Leon said. “I’ve only heard stories, I had never seen a demon worshipper before I came south, let alone a full-blown vampire.”

Lucius paused for a moment as he stared at Leon, his grin unmoving. It felt a bit like he expected Leon to simply melt away before him and immediately confess to whatever it was that he might be guilty of.

But Leon’s face remained impassive. He gave away nothing that Lucius might be able to use against him.

“Is this it?” Leon asked after a long moment spent waiting.

“You seem to have a history of defying orders, Sir Ursus,” Lucius stated. “First when you endangered the peace talks with the stone giants, and then when you left on a solo mission behind enemy lines during the war with Talfar.”

“I was both pardoned and punished for both of those incidents,” Leon pointed out.

“Of course, and we’re not about to try and subject you to double jeopardy, but a case could be made to remove you from the Royal Legions with that kind of track record…”

Again, Lucius paused to see if he could get more of a reaction out of Leon with that veiled threat, but again, Leon seemed not to care. In fact, Leon gave the investigator a slight shrug, as if to say that he didn’t care that much.

“Sir Ursus,” the investigator began, leaning forward and finally taking his eyes off the younger knight, “there are a lot of people who don’t think that you deserve to be here. In fact, they want you gone. You don’t respect authority, and you don’t have the breeding to walk among us as an equal. Your reckless actions, even if they have worked out in the end, are those befitting of a savage, not of a knight in the service of the noble Bull King.

“So, Sir Ursus, is there anything you want to say to defend your conduct?”

Leon almost smiled at the man’s obvious provocation. “I thought this was an interview, not an interrogation, and certainly not a trial. What need have I to prove my worth or justify my place to someone like you?”

“And what do you mean by that?”

Leon began to release his aura and a slight hint of his killing intent, but even that was enough to send a shiver down the spine of the investigator, and the poor transcriber completely froze in fear, the ink from her quill leaving a large blotch on the page.

“You’re weak,” Leon said, leaving it at that. He could’ve said a lot more; Lucius was disconnected from Leon in almost every way, and the only power over him that Lucius had was in this investigation. Even then, the questions had been vague enough that, by now, Leon knew they had nothing solid on him—at least, not yet. Had they enough to go after him, Leon knew he’d probably be in prison by now, not politely asked to answer a few questions.

The man’s power to harm Leon was, by his own admission, limited. No conclusive evidence pinning him to Tiberias’ death, no evidence pointing to Xaphan’s presence, and no strong leverage from his own mistakes. Leon may not have had the backing of Prince Trajan anymore, but that didn’t mean he was going to fear some fourth-tier bureaucrat sent by the Arbiters, who hold no sway over Legion matters anyway.

In other words, Lucius’ personal opinions were essentially worthless in Leon’s eyes, and it took extraordinary willpower for Leon not to throw that in his face. His common sense won out on that front, at least, but Leon hoped that the slight upturn in his lips conveyed his cocky contempt well enough.

After shaking off the effects of Leon’s aura, Lucius quickly composed himself and decided that Leon wasn’t worth getting angry at for that little show of force. He and his fellow investigators had many more people to question in the coming days, and he had more questions for Leon, anyway.

“So!” Lucius practically shouted in his attempt to show that he wasn’t as shaken as he was, “After Prince Trajan demoted you for your reckless solo attack on the Talfar forces, did you hold any resentment toward him?”

“None.”

“None at all? He busted you down from Tribune to no rank at all. That had to have hurt your finances.”

“It did. But it was justified. My actions were reckless, and I begrudge Prince Trajan none for punishing me as he did. In fact, given the circumstances, His Highness’ punishment was rather lenient; he could’ve had me sent to the headsman’s block if he were so inclined.”

‘A shame he didn’t,’ Lucius uncharitably thought as he finally got to his final and most important few questions.

“Sir Ursus, it’s no secret that Prince Trajan was close to Prince August and that you were close with Prince Trajan. Did you ever see or hear anything outside of the public eye that might have indicated their relationship wasn’t so cordial?”

“I neither heard nor saw anything of the sort,” Leon stated.

“Never? Prince Trajan wasn’t angry with Prince August? Prince August was never frustrated or resentful of Prince Trajan’s prominent place in the Royal Palace?”

“Not that I ever saw,” Leon replied. If anything, Leon figured, August was probably loyal to Trajan even in death. Trajan awakened August’s blood, after all.

“And did you ever see anything that might have indicated that Prince Trajan and Prince August might have been collaborating on any secret projects?”

“No.”

Lucius went back to staring at Leon. He could keep pushing, but Leon’s face indicated that the young knight wasn’t going to say what Lucius wanted him to.

‘No matter, someone else will say them…’ Lucius thought as he broke eye contact with Leon.

The investigator was quietly relieved in his decision to stop questioning Leon. The barbarian’s killing intent made it clear enough that Leon truly deserved that appellation, but that didn’t make Lucius any more comfortable when Leon was releasing it. He was ready to go.

“I think we’ll call this round of questioning to a close, then.”

“We’re done, then?” Leon asked as he began to stand up, not even waiting for Lucius to confirm it.

“We are,” Lucius said, barely stopping Leon from walking to the door, “but we’re likely to have more questions in the future. Do us all a favor and don’t leave the city.”

Leon grunted in acknowledgment, and then swiftly departed, finally giving Lucius and his scribe a reprieve from his potent killing intent.

Outside, Leon didn’t stick around. He was in a foyer that branched into several dozen small rooms just like the one he had just left, and there was an investigator from the High Arbiter in each one of them, questioning a member of Trajan’s retinue. As Leon walked out of his room, another knight that he vaguely recognized walked in behind him.

Leon didn’t stick around to talk to anyone, though. All he wanted to do was to return to Minerva, tell her that he was done for the day, and then go home. That interrogation, for that was what it had felt like to Leon, had put him in a terrible mood.

Unfortunately, his plans were not to come to fruition, for he was barely out of the foyer when he spotted Prince August walking down the corridor towards him, flanked by Roland and half a dozen attendants, and a full dozen other guards.

“Sir Ursus!” August said with mild familiarity as soon as they spotted each other, preventing Leon from ducking through a nearby doorway or doubling back the way he came.

“… Your Highness…” Leon muttered as he made a slight bow to August.

“You’re just the man I was looking for, I was wondering if I could have a few minutes of your time?”

Leon clenched his jaw in minor frustration, but he couldn’t easily refuse such a blatant invitation. His curiosity, at the very least, wouldn’t allow it, even if his frustration demanded that he go home and unwind.

“I can spare a few minutes for Your Highness,” Leon replied through his clenched teeth.

His general reluctance and poor mood weren’t lost on August, but the Prince clearly didn’t think it mattered or that his business was more important, for he smiled at Leon and said, “Wonderful! Why don’t you accompany me back to my office?”