Oathbreaker, Book 1: The Knight's Tale - Colin McComb

ours are also subtle and deep. The captain has called for the executions of certain high-placed
suspects. The king is not yet so addled that he’ll agree to this, and I don’t think the captain
expects it to happen. I’m sure he and his second have assassins who are ready to strike at a word
but have no idea where. Like all under his command, if he is not involved, I’m sure the captain
longs for direct action and chafes when he is denied. The knights are full of powerful emotion,
though they deny it to themselves, and that hidden passion drives them to excellence and fierce
duty.
I share their frustration. I believe it may be one of the few emotions we do share. The
knights are either more than human, or less. They lack something that drives the rest of us.
Perhaps it is beaten out of them in their merciless training. Perhaps it is inculcated in them in
place of honest human feeling. I know that I have seen innocent boys turned into blank-faced but
burning killers, trained to become masters of any weapon I might care to name—though they
prefer the humming weapons made by the Archmagus for each individual on the occasion of his
knighting, and I do not blame them, for those magical blades are the finest I have seen men or
women carry.
I am constantly amazed that mere humans would dare stand against the knights and their
weapons. The knightly initiation, under the aegis of the Archmagus and his apprentices, trades a
portion of their humanity for the blessings of strength and speed. After their three-day initiation,
they emerge from their cloister wrapped in bloodstained bandages, and they have become
inhuman. Though their training takes them far down the roads of experience all men know, it is
the secret of their initiation that puts them beyond the boundaries of ordinary human knowledge.
It is this flaw that keeps them from the command of our armies. They are weapons
themselves, and one does not trust a weapon to wage war, for it is a weapon’s nature to seek
blood and give no quarter. They are under the direct command of the king, whom they are trained
to adore, whose life they guard with their own, the living embodiment of the Empire they serve.
When on campaign, they are under the direct command of the senior general and exist side by
side with the ordinary chain of rule, but they are strong-minded individuals, and if they were not
so valuable in combat, they would have been disestablished long ago. In fact, they report mainly
to their direct leaders, the commander and his captains, taking no order from any but him or me.
They act as cavalry, as scouts, as infantry—in any warlike function possible. It takes a strong
general to keep them in line, for they are willful and cruel.
It is good, then, that many of our generals are willful and cruel as well. They have to be,
in order to prosecute the endless minor wars of the Empire. The Empire looks always outward,
and it does so not only for its own glory but also to keep itself from looking inward. Should the
Colin McComb Oathbreaker, Book 1: The Knight's Tale
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