Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 859

Chapter 859: Change over change(1)

“Never thought I’d see the old ghost warming his bones with wine,” a young man’s voice muttered from the doorway, dark and sardonic. “One would think a man whose favorite weapon is poison would be more mindful of what he drinks.”

The door closed behind him with a muted click. He crossed the chamber without ceremony, black hair hanging loose and unkempt, his gaze drifting lazily toward the garden below the high window.

It was true what they said: the darkest place lies beneath the candle.

Tiberius wondered, not for the first time, if the order for his capture still lingered, smoldering beneath the new regime. The bitch-empress had despised him with every fiber of her body, for he was the living stain of her husband’s weakness.

But her son? The young Emperor? He might not carry that same venom, he remembered him as a kind boy. Perhaps he would be practical enough to let him vanish quietly into the countryside, forgotten and unthreatening. A better fate than most bastards received. Especially those of royal blood.

The old ghost of Arlania, Julian, raised his gaze from the rim of his cup, his one good eye fixing on Tiberius with its familiar, cutting chill. For a moment, the young man felt as though he were a stranger, not someone who had been sharing these halls for five years.

Or was it four? The days bled together here, each one so alike that time itself felt irrelevant, like sand on the beach.

But whatever idle thoughts he nursed evaporated the instant Julian’s eye passed over him. That stare was enough to strip him bare, to remind him of the truth: whatever loyalty or affection Julian bore him, it would never outweigh the man’s designs for the empire.

Tiberius had no doubt that if he ever became a hindrance, he’d be found lifeless before the day was done.

“You’d think I were the only one living in this house,” Julian said at last, his voice gravelly, a thin smile tugging at his lips. “Were it not for the servants, I might believe you’d forgotten me entirely. When was the last time you stepped into this office?”

“When was the last time you gave me news about the only matter I truly care for?” Tiberius shot back, his tone sharp enough to cut.

Julian’s smile vanished like mist burned away by the sun. The old mask slipped, leaving only that empty, pitiless eye.

“Things have been… stale these last years,” he replied coolly. “We’ve no trace of her. None worth chasing.”

“I am sure you are doing your best,” Tiberius said smoothly.

But the words were a lie, and both men knew it. He could feel it in the pit of his gut,the effort was hollow, a charade. Julian was lying to him. And whatever reason the old ghost had for keeping the truth buried, Tiberius was certain it was nothing good.

Before Tiberius could arrange the right shape of fear in his face, the old lord had already poured. A fresh cup materialized in front of him as if summoned by the very quiet of the room.

“Come. Drink with me,” Julian ordered, not a request so much as a pull. His hand was steady as the cup found Tiberius’s palm.

Tiberius stared.

The old man belonged to a world that had made him nervous since boyhood when had first seen him: linen pressed like a blade, voice like a bone rasped smooth. And yet he obeyed.

He took the cup because refusing would be the sort of petty rebellion that got you killed.

“The last thing we shared was a laugh,” Tiberius said, bitter-sweet, eyes flashing with spite. “When the red-bitch was expelled. I never understood why she was spared. I would have liked to hang her skull over my cabinet.” He smiled without humor. “She craved power as if hunger were a sin. All she ever was a woman who forgot to be grateful for what a man gave her. My father gave her everything she had by railing at her in bed each night, and she believed she’d earned the world for it.

The fool”

Julian’s single good eye tracked him.

He knew how much Tiberius wanted her dead, he always preached to him never to cut a flower that can still bloom, only because he dislikes the colour.

The old man’s face did not move much; it was a map of folded lines, he was getting old. “This is not a night for plays,” he said.

“We are not swapping insults like in theater.”

Tiberius shrugged, “So why call me here, then? To remind me you can still make me drink from your hands?”

“It is not a joyful thing.” Julian’s voice dropped into a rougher register. “We are toasting a man dying. The old lion of Romelia, has died.”

Tiberius felt the floor tilt beneath him; the world outside their chamber must be rearranging itself by degrees. Marthio’s death was not a private grief. It was a recalibration.

Lords who feared him would shift their steps; ministers would pry at seams; alliances would bloom and curdle overnight.

Julian’s lids lowered. He did not offer false sorrow; the man’s grief was political as much as private. “To you, my old friend,” he said then, and raised his cup a fraction.

Tiberius blinked. “You….were friends?”

“We were once useful and amiable to each other.” Julian’s mouth moved a little, as if tasting the memory and spitting out the rot. “Time does what time does. It strips men of delicacies. I always suspected he had ambitions corrosive enough to burn the Empire down. I hesitated. I refused the blade when the moment came.” He let the confession fall between them, and in it a small, ugly shame.

Tiberius watched the old man as one watches a clock tick too loudly in a quiet room. “You should have killed him, then,” the younger said at last, easier now, the cruelty worn like a cloak.

“Saved us the mess.”

Julian’s face did something very small, closer to the rustle of pages than to any human expression. “I did not because of love,though I did” he said flatly. “Because even hatred is complicated when it is grown from years. I did not want to be the one to haul the carcass into the daylight, to be the first to betray what was once shared.

And now—” He swallowed, the sound a hinge. “Now history will say what it will. We are left with the ledger and the ashes. It will be the duty of the next generation to pick up our slack and the mess we made of our time.”

They emptied their cups. The clink of wood against cup sounded too loud, like an accusation.

Julian’s one eye, the pale moon in its socket, grew distant as he watched the wine absorb into the table grain. For the first time since Tiberius had known him, the old lord looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with years: tired as if a man had been asked to hold a ruin up with his own spine until the ruin fell away and left him standing there alone, and broken.

“History won’t remember him kindly,” Julian said, and the sentence sat heavy as a stone. “So it falls to us to do the remembering honestly. Or to lie. We decide, Tiberius, what story we will tell the children.”

Tiberius curled his fingers around the empty cup and felt the echo of its shape in his palm. Outside, the garden lay fat and indifferent in the late light. Inside the chamber, the two men listened to the quiet between them like it was the beginning of an account to be settled.

“For five years you’ve had me locked in this mausoleum,” Tiberius said, the smirk on his lips thin”Five years sweeping dust and listening to your riddles. Got anything to show for it? The world shifts around us, and yet you have not moved a piece on the board.”

The old ghost of Arlania leaned back in his chair, his good eye half-lidded, his ruined one dull as stone. His smile was the sort that turned blood cold, a thin sliver cut into his weathered face.

“Patience,” he said slowly, “is the strongest weapon of weak men.”

Tiberius sneered, but Julian’s words carried the weight of an executioner’s axe.

“Time,” the old lord continued, “gives to some what it strips from others. It rots empires, fattens worms, and gnaws at even the brightest steel. The man too foolish to wait dies in the rush of his own hunger. My best chance, boy, is not hope. It is certainty. And certainty demands preparation.”

His hand moved, casual and deliberate, to the desk. Fingers, stiff with age but steady, tapped once, twice, upon a folded sheet of parchment.

“For years I have trained the unseen hands, sharpened the knives that smile, hidden my agents on each rung of the ladder. From merchant stalls to noble halls, from city guard to governors, the steps are set.

And now..” his voice hardened, the old bones of it rattling like armor “at last the world chooses a side. And so shall we.”

For the first time, Tiberius realized the paper had always been there, nestled beneath Julian’s palm like a secret hatching in silence. Had it been there when he entered? Or had the old man drawn it from some unseen recess when the boy’s eyes were elsewhere?

He couldn’t tell. The thought chilled him.

Julian’s smile cut wider, though no warmth reached his eye. Slowly, he slid the paper forward, the parchment whispering across the wood. Tiberius’s gaze followed it, reluctant yet compelled, as though the thing itself were alive and breathing.

The bastard son of the late Emperor did not reach for it, not yet.

For within those cramped lines and inked symbols lay the final step that would drag him from the shadows into the furnace of power.

The war that had stagnated, lingering like a carcass in the sun, was about to be gutted open. The pieces that refused to move were about to be swept violently from the board.

And Tiberius, whether he wished it or not, would soon be forced to claim his square among them.

The world was stirring again, and this time, it would not wait.