The Crown of the Usurper Read Online Free PDF

confronted by a slew of memories as he looked across the barren lands, and none of them particularly happy. There had been a short time when the Thirteenth had been stationed in the city, before the big thrust towards Carantathi, when he had been amongst friends and family, and there had been laughter and drink and comfort.
      In all, Magilnada had become a place of misery. It had been built by dissidents to rival Askh, but the Askhans had long memories and the Salphors had coveted the prize, so that the city had a bloody history. Now all of that was ended. No chieftain would ever rule Magilnada again, and no children would run through its streets. The ghosts of the dead haunted this place, and the good spirits shunned it.
      Two hundred years of life and death, politics and culture, brought to ruin by the decision of one man.
      That man, King Ullsaard, sat astride his ailur a short distance away, gazing to dawnwards. The rest of the guard company, one hundred legionnaires including Third Captain Gelthius, was breaking the night's camp. Their trek across Salphoria had been swift, and Gelthius' early departure from Carantathi had been a disappointment. After nearly fifty years, he had finally seen the capital of his former king – albeit as an Askhan legionnaire rather than a Salphor – and he had been chosen amongst those who would leave just two days later.
      Carantathi had been a bit of a letdown, in reality. After seeing the cities of Greater Askhor, including glorious Askh itself, the wood and stone huts of Aegenuis' city had seemed rather ordinary. It was a nice enough place, set high in the mountains that gave unrivalled views of the surrounding landscape, but Gelthius knew that within a year it would look no different from the dozens of Askhan towns he had passed through in his travels. Building by building, thatched roofs would give way to tiles, and crudely hewn stone would be replaced by painted brick. The wall itself, the labour of thousands of Salphors, would be pulled down and a new, higher, stronger barricade built.
      The same would be happening all over Salphoria, Gelthius realised; at least to those towns and villages that had survived the invasion. He was a trailblazer of sorts, he concluded; one of the first of a new generation of Salphor-Askhans. The Ersuans and Nalanorians and Enrairians and Anairians and Maasrites and Okharans had all gone through the same painful inclusion into the empire, and now it was Salphoria's turn.
      He had made third captain without trying, and it would not be long until a Salphor was made first captain, perhaps even before he died, if the spirits granted him enough years.
      He chastised himself for thinking of the spirits. He had been careful not to talk about them with his legion comrades, but it still rankled at Gelthius that the Askhans destroyed the spirits wherever they went. They called it superstition, a distraction from the civic duties of the people. The Brotherhood espoused dedication to the empire above all other things, and to pledge money and time to bodiless entities that – they insisted – did not exist was considered foolish.
      Nobody had ever told Gelthius outright that the spirits did not exist, and as far as he could tell there were no laws, legion or otherwise, that said a man could not offer praise or appeasement to them. There was just an assumption that the spirits did not exist and any man who thought otherwise was not right in the head and likely to be shunned.
      The men he had sent out to draw water from the nearby river were returning and Gelthius would have to go back to the camp. A small, rebellious part of him did not want to go back. None of his men paid any heed to the notion that Gelthius might have feelings about the occupation of Salphoria. In a way it was good that they saw him only as Third Captain Gelthius, bringing him into the faceless homogeny of the legions. On the other hand, their crude jokes about