It was late in the evening on the 11th
day of Wintersdyb, and Karrick was practicing his knife-throwing when Valaista returned from the
College. He’d been at it for some
hours. One of the long, exquisitely-polished
oak tables that decorated the Ambassador’s library had been badly damaged by
whomever (or whatever, he reminded himself) had attacked the Embassy. Karrick had propped the thing up against a
bookshelf and was amusing himself trying to spell his name in knife-holes on
its lacquered surface. He’d managed
“K-A-R” before running out of horizontal space, and was just beginning on the
second “R” a little further down when the dragon-girl thundered in.
Her cheeks were flushed with the
cold that had reasserted itself over the course of the day. Snow had blown in from the north, and flakes
of it were caught in her white-blonde hair.
She looked a little like a fairy princess, if fairy princesses wore
chainmail and carried swords.
To Karrick’s surprise, she had someone in tow. Although the figure following her was hooded
and cloaked, Karrick spotted it instantly for an elf; the newcomer was a good
head shorter than both the girl and himself, and correspondingly more lightly
built. He couldn’t see any weapons – or
at least, not any obvious ones – and as he already had a dagger in his right
hand and two more, held carefully by their points, in his left, he didn’t feel
especially worried.
“Karrick,” Valaista began, “this
is…”
“Moment,” he interrupted. With a quick motion of his wrist, he buried
one knife in the table; then, with an underhanded flick, sent the other pair of
blades after it. Both thudded into the
wood a hand-span a part, a foot or so below the first.
“Well done,” Valaista said
approvingly.
“It’s all in the reflexes,” the
warrior shrugged. “Who’s this?”
The newcomer brushed back its
hood. It was indeed, as he had surmised,
another elf, and not surprisingly, a son of the Third House, marked by the customary
emerald eyes and midnight hair. To Karrick’s
surprise, however, this elf’s mane, rather than being long and straight or
arranged in some sort of elaborate coiffure, had been cut short, protruding no
more than a finger’s width from his scalp.
The elf bowed. “Ka-Mai, of House Domodekia.”
Karrick bowed back, trying to mimic
his visitor’s graceful posture, and failing miserably. It was small consolation that Valaista didn’t
do any better. “Welcome to the embassy of
the Empire,” he replied.
“Or what’s left of it, anyway,” he added morosely. At least the bodies of the two thieves were
gone; Valaista had brought a labourer by with a hand-cart at first light that
morning and, after a more detailed search of their persons, the fellow had
trucked them away to wherever the elves took unwanted corpses. Karrick had tipped the workman generously. He had a strong stomach, but he had been
getting tired of the smell.
“I thank you,” the elf replied gravely. “May I express my regret, on behalf of my
mistress, for the wrong you have suffered?
We place a high premium on treating our guests well. And especially our allies.”
“Are you from the palace, then?” Karrick asked,
surprised.
“No, no!” the elf averred, holding out his hands in a
gesture of mock horror. “Perish the
thought! No, I serve the Magistatrix
Zola Nephys at the College. She asked me
to answer your request for assistance.”
“She’s the head of the conjuration department,”
Valaista interjected helpfully. “I got
her name from the scribes at the information counter.”
Karrick nodded.
“And she agreed to help us out?”
“No, she wasn’t there,” the girl admitted. “But Ka-Mai, here, was. The Master told me to find a conjurer, make a
bargain, and bring him here. Ka-Mai is
the most senior conjurer in residence right now.”
The elf cocked his head. “I am Magistatrix Zola’s deputy,” he
said. “She is travelling.”
Karrick nodded.
“It’s damned kind of you to come.”
The elf grinned.
“Kindness has nothing to do with it, my dear fellow. Even were I disinclined to accede to the
young lady’s request, Kalestayne himself has commanded the Magisters to give
you whatever aid we can. The Master
Magister’s good will is coin in this city.
“And besides,” he added with a roguish grin before the
warrior could speak, “your apprentice is so pretty that I would happily burn my
own house down for her, if she were but to flutter her eyelashes in my
direction.”
Karrick felt a momentary flash of irritation. It vanished, though, when Valaista’s response
to the fellow’s absurd flattery proved to be nothing more than a frown of
puzzlement.
Suddenly, though, her face cleared, as if she had
remembered something. Looking the elf in
the eyes, she said clearly, “Curator ab
tuas conloquor.”
To Karrick’s astonishment, the wizard froze. After a pause, he blinked, and said, “You
told me that you had a poor command of our language, my dear!”
“I’ve picked up a few useful phrases, here and there,”
she shrugged.
“Ah. And is
this, then, your guardian?” Ka-Mai asked, nodding at Karrick, who had no idea
what was going on.
“No,” Valaista replied with the sweetest of
smiles. “My guardian is Chiliarch Thanos
Mastigo, a warmage of the Imperial Army.”
Ka-Mai said nothing for a long moment. At last, he cleared his throat and turned
back to Karrick. “To the business at
hand, sir?”
“Surely,” the warrior nodded. “Did she tell you about our problem?”
“A vault door, gone mysteriously missing,” the elf
replied, shooting a nervous glance back at the girl. “Broken doors I can understand, but missing
ones? A little unusual.”
“Stick around.
Things tend to get a little unusual around us,” Karrick muttered. “Can you fix it? Temporarily, at least?”
“That depends,” Ka-Mai replied, lapsing into sudden
seriousness. “How often do you need to
gain access to it?”
“Dunno,” Karrick shrugged. “Couple o’times a day, I suppose.”
“And will you replace the door at some point?”
“That’s the plan.”
The elf scratched his chin. “Well,” he said at last, “I have a temporary
solution for you, I suppose. Where is
this vault, then?”
By way of response, Karrick pushed aside the table he
had been using as a knife target. It
fell to the floor with a thunderous clatter.
He slid back the book-case that he had shoved in front of the vacant
door-way, and bowed.
The elf’s eyes widened. “Well,” he said nonchalantly, crossing his
arms and grinning drolly at his host. “There’s your problem!”
“And you’ve got a fix, do you?” the warrior chuckled.
Ka-Mai threw Karrick and Valaista a conspiratorial
wink. “There’s a magical solution to
every dilemma,” he grinned. Facing the
gap where the vault door had once been, he raised his hands and whispered “Luoda seinä kivestä!”
Karrick couldn’t feel the strands of the flux bunch
and gather, but Valaista could. It felt
as though ants were crawling all over her body.
And she knew, too, what his words had meant.
When the elf released the concentrated might, she
started a little; it felt as though she were falling backward. In fact, her sense of motion was illusory; it
was the gap that was getting smaller.
The stone all around the empty portal began to flow
and merge. Grey rock oozed from the
floor, the walls, the stone ceiling overhead, flowing like syrup under the wizard’s
hands, sliding and slipping together.
Humming lightly to himself, Ka-Mai waved and swirled
his hands like a free-style painter, working and smoothing the flowstone until
it joined in the centre of the gap, closing over the hole just before his face.
His brow furrowed for a moment, and he said, “Laajentuneessa!” Valaista shuddered as another burst of arcane
power echoed through the room.
Finally, the wizard lowered his hands and stepped
back. The stone where the door had once
stood was smooth and featureless. To
Karrick’s astonishment, it was all but indistinguishable from the rock around
it. It even had grout lines worked into
it, mimicking the carefully cut stone of the embassy’s foundation walls.
“I doubled it, for good measure. It’s about a foot thick,” Ka-Mai grunted.
“Ought to keep out anybody who doesn’t bring a Mattock of the Titans, a
bulette, or…” he grinned broadly “an impatient Ekhani warcaster.”
Karrick shot an amused glance at the girl. “Been telling tales out of school, have we?”
Valaista giggled.
The elf stepped back from the wall, put his hands on
his hips, and regarded his handiwork with a satisfied nod. “What do you think?”
“Very nice,” Karrick said dubiously. “But…er…it’s a lot more wall-ish than
door-ish, if you know what I mean. Sort
of makes it less useful as a vault, no.?”
The elf rolled his eyes. “I meant the artistry,” he sighed. “Look!
Chisel marks! And I even aged the
stone, so it looks like the surrounding material!”
Uncertain what to say, Karrick applauded slowly. Valaista joined in.
Ka-Mai shook his head sadly. “You people need to learn to take the time to
appreciate the little things in life.”
“The artistry’s fine,” Karrick reassured the
mage. “Let me put it another way. We’re out here, and everything we need –” he
pointed at the blank, featureless wall “- is in there.”
The elf shot a pitying glance at Valaista. “We’re among barbarians,” he said
tragically. “Honestly, my dear, I don’t
know what you see in him!”
“He kills things that annoy me,” the dragon-girl said
without expression.
The elf blinked.
“Ah. Well, yes, I can see how
that might come in handy.”
"Yes, it does." Valaista pointed at the door. “Now what?
With the vault, I mean?”
Ka-Mai regarded her for a long
moment. He seemed to be doing something
with his eyebrows. When she neither
smiled nor frowned, he sighed heavily.
“That usually works with the ladies.”
He turned back to Karrick. “Which of you will be using it the most?”
“Neither,” Karrick grunted, a little
concerned that he hadn’t understood the byplay.
“It’ll be Father Shields. At
least, until he’s got Colonel Cornu warmed-up and vertical again.”
“Excellent. Where is he?”
Karrick frowned. “Who?
Shields? He’s busy right
now.” The priest, he knew, was praying. Having endured two failed Raisings in the
past two days, he was taking no chances with his preparations for the morrow’s
ceremony.
“If you want him to be able to get
into the vault,” the elf said with exaggerated patience, “then I need him. Or at least, I need something of his.”
Valaista’s eyes lit up. “Just a minute!” She bolted from the office.
The elf watched her go, with obvious
admiration. “Quite the feline temptress,
your young lady,” he murmured when she was out of earshot.
Karrick laughed. “I’m not sure ‘feline’ is the word I’d use.”
“She’s obviously well-born,” Ka-Mai
mused to himself, almost as if the warrior weren’t there, “but young. Too young?”
He glanced up at Karrick. “Has
she passed without the walls yet? Is she
of age, I mean?”
“Dunno,” the warrior shrugged. “What’s ‘of age’ mean to you folk?”
“Six-score summers,” Ka-Mai replied.
Karrick snickered. “She’s got a year or two to go,” he
dead-panned.
“Shame,” the wizard lamented. “I like the feisty ones. I’ll bet her bark is worse than her bite,
though, eh?”
The warrior’s struggles to contain
his laughter turned his face red.
Even the oblivious
wizard noticed that. “What?” he asked.
The warrior patted the elf on the
shoulder. “You wizzies like
experimenting, right?” he snorted, grinning broadly. “Why not ask her to bite you, and find out?”
Before Ka-Mai could reply, Valaista
trotted back into the library. In one
hand she was carrying Father Shields’ heavy spiked mace. “This is his,” she said. “Will it do?”
Ka-Mai beckoned impatiently to
her. With one hand, she tossed the
weapon to him lightly. When he caught
it, its weight nearly knocked him off his feet.
Karrick had to put out a hand to steady the little man.
Wincing, the wizard tucked the mace
under one arm and massaged his wrist with his free hand. “Strong, too,” he muttered to himself.
“You have no idea,” Karrick
replied. He dropped an elaborate wink at
Valaista. The girl grinned, showing her
teeth.
“Pity you couldn’t’ve found
something lighter,” the mage grunted.
Holding the mace in both hands, he turned to face the blank stone
wall. Glancing over his shoulder at
Karrick, he said, “And this Shields fellow; his full name is…?”
“Father Armand Shields, Priest of
Vorwenna,” Karrick replied, wondering what the little wizard was up to.
Ka-Mai nodded. He appeared to settle himself, muttering
something under his breath for a heart-beat or two. Then he raised his voice, and cried “Luoda varjo oven käytön Armand Shields, Isä!”
Karrick neither saw nor heard any effect. Not so Valaista; the sudden release of
magical energy staggered her, and she stumbled against the warrior, who caught
her instinctively and held her upright.
He glanced over at her,
concerned. “You okay?”
The dragon-girl swallowed heavily
and nodded. “Äidin kuori!” the girl swore.
“That was…gods above and below!” she finished weakly.
“Powerful?” he asked sotto voce.
“As powerful as the Master, or
nearly,” she whispered.
“You don’t get blown over when the Boss
cuts loose with the flashy stuff,” Karrick frowned, still feeling a little
worried about the girl’s reaction. “What
gives?”
“I’m used to him, now.” She shook her head to clear it. “This is a different type of magic, I guess,”
she shrugged.
“What’d he do?”
“I made a door,” Ka-Mai announced. He had shifted the mace to one hand and was
running the other over the newly-created stone.
“I don’t see any door,” Karrick
replied, as he knew he was expected to do.
“And you won’t,” the wizard
laughed. “But it’s there. Give it a try.”
One eyebrow cocked sceptically,
Karrick put his hand on the stone and pushed.
Nothing. “You keyed it to
Shields,” he said. “Right?”
The elf looked surprised. “Yes, that is right. Your Father Shields is the only one who will
be able to pass through.”
“Does he have to be holding the mace
when he uses it?”
Ka-Mai shook his head. “I just used this to build the imprint of his
essence into the spell.” With both hands
he passed the weapon back to Valaista.
She gave it a quick spin between her fingers before depositing it on the
sofa.
“But,” the wizard added, eyeing her
speculatively, “he can make only eight transits – that is, four entries, and
four exits – before I must renew the spell.
And if he takes anyone with him, that counts as an additional transit. So it is possible to become trapped
inside. Ensure he knows this, please.”
“I’ll pass the message on,” Karrick
replied. “What about you?”
The wizard’s eyebrows went up. “Me?”
“Can’t you use the portal, too?”
Ka-Mai grinned. “You know your magic, young man!”
“I’ve spent a lot of time ‘round
wizzies,” Karrick replied. “Answer the
question.”
“The answer is ‘yes’,” the elf
nodded. “But I promise not to rob you
blind. On one condition.”
“And that is?”
He nodded his head towards
Valaista. “You give my name to her
guardian, and tell him that I would like to speak with him.”
Karrick shrugged. “Sure.
No problem.”
“Excellent. Then, I shall be off.” He bowed deeply to Valaista. “Anon, my lady.” Then he raised one hand. “Fare–”
“Whoa, whoa!” Karrick cried. “Wait!
What do I…I mean, what does the Ambassador owe you?”
“No charge,” the elf replied. “I’m
going back right now to report that I did precisely what the Master Magister
asked us all to do. As I said, doing
Kalestayne’s bidding has its rewards.
“And besides,” he added with an
impish grin, “I like having the Empire in my debt. That might come in handy when I speak with
your master.”
Karrick frowned at that. “You got somebody you need invaded?”
“One never knows, does one?” the elf
replied gaily. “Farewell! Hypätä
tai–” With a pop, the wizard disappeared, his words cut off in mid-phrase.
Karrick glanced at Valaista. “What was all that about? The 'speaking to your guardian' cac?”
“Bertanya taught me that phrase,”
she replied with a frown. “In
Eldisle. It’s supposed to discourage
would-be suitors.”
“He didn’t seem discouraged,”
Karrick rumbled.
“I just don’t understand elves,” the
dragon-girl said helplessly.
“Girlie, you said it.” He made a fist, cracking his knuckles
ominously. “I can always try some traditional
discouragement, if necessary.”
“We’ll see,” she replied.
Together, they turned to stare at the blank stone wall
where the vault door once had been.
“Pretty impressive,” the warrior said after a moment.
“Yes,” Valaista agreed. “If it works.”
“I know what you mean,” the warrior
nodded. “I’m partial to bronze, steel
and keys myself.”
He strode over to his table-target
and retrieved his knives. “So, the boss
is still face-down in the parchment, is he?”
“Still,” the girl nodded. She looked a little exasperated. “He dined at the Lady’s house, and then went
straight back to the College, with me in tow.”
The warrior cocked an eyebrow. “So that’s why you were late! What’d he want?”
Valaista dropped heavily down onto
the sofa. “Translation. There’s a section of books he’s interested
in, but it’s mostly in Draconic, and he didn’t recognize some of the
runes. He was having a hard time going
through the catalogue.”
Karrick frowned. “I thought the boss could speak and read your
tongue.”
“He can. Just not Harkittu.”
The warrior looked puzzled. “Doesn’t that mean ‘planning’?”
“No, that’s ‘harkitta’,” the girl replied.
“More or less. Harkittu means ‘deliberate’. You know, like harkittusti means ‘deliberately’?”
“If you say so,” the man shrugged. “So he doesn’t know ‘deliberate’? What’s that
supposed to mean?”
Valaista chuckled to herself. “I’m beginning to see why you drive the poor
man mad,” she said, smiling to take the sting out of her words. “ ‘Harkittu’
is a dialect, Karrick. But a written
one, not a spoken one. Very, very few
non-dragons know it.”
“It’s another script, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
He rolled his eyes. “Why have two different languages? Written ones, anyway?”
“Because our tongue is so complicated,”
she said. “The version we speak, and
even the one that we write, is a…a…” She closed her eyes and thought hard for a
long moment. “A patois. A doggerel, almost. It is for ease of communication, nothing
more. It is swift, and it is simple. But it is so very limited.”
“Doesn’t sound easy to me,” he
grumped. “I’m still trying to pronounce
that word the boss was screaming back in Novy-potsticker. What was it again? Peräsuolikanssakäy–”
“Stop, stop!”
Valaista cried, flushing until her cheeks matched the blood-red hangings along
the walls. “For the love of Holy Miros,
sir, I beg you – don’t ever speak
that word! Not where any dragon can
hear!”
“Tell me what it
means,” Karrick winked solemnly, “and you’ll never hear it from my lips again. That’s a promise!”
The girl crossed
her arms and glared daggers at him, her jaw clenched firmly shut.
“Suit yourself,”
the warrior sighed. “So…what’s with this
harkatitty, then?”
“Harkittu,” Valaista growled, “is what we
use when we wish to express our thoughts not swiftly, but beautifully, and in
fullness. When we are writing not merely
for the day’s demands, but for the ages.”
That certainly sounds like a dragon thing,
he thought to himself. “And it’s hard to
use?”
“Harder than you
could imagine,” she sniffed. “The
symbology alone takes years to learn, and decades to master. One must study with a lore-giver to attain
even the tenth part of the tongue. And
it is said that no dragon, save perhaps Oroprimus himself, knows every one of
the thousand, thousand symbols. Only the
ancient bard and loremaster Ryskankanakis even came close.”
Karrick
blinked. “When you left home, you were,
what, a month old? How do you know all
this?”
“We are hatched
with m-”
“ ‘With much
knowledge’,” he finished, interrupting her.
“Yeah, I remember. Go on.”
Valaista regarded
him narrowly. “Are you certain you want
to hear the rest? Would it perhaps not
be more enjoyable to insult my people and my birth?”
“Ease off,
girlie,” Karrick sighed. “I apologize. Now, come on! What’s so tough about this
script of yours?”
Valaista stared
at him stonily. “Do you know where our
common script comes from?”
“No idea.”
The girl stood
and walked over to the table he had been using as a target. With her right index finger, she traced a
trio of straight, intersecting lines, like an off-centre, elongated
triangle. To Karrick’s surprise, her
fingernail cut through the heavy lacquer and into the wood like a chisel.
“This,” she said,
tapping the board for emphasis, “is the character for ‘dragon’. I have written it in the vernacular script,
which we call ‘Hätäinen’.”
“ ‘Hasty’,” he
translated. “Right?”
“Just so. It is meant to indicate a dragon’s head,
looking to the right. See here, the
snout, and at the left side, the elongated upper stroke, indicating the horns?”
“I suppose,”
Karrick shrugged again.
“All right. This…” she scratched another pair of lines to
the left of the first figure “…means ‘iron dragon’.”
“You?”
She held up a
finger. “Not quite.” She scratched another trio of lines to the
right of the dragon symbol, then another pair to the right of that, then four
more in a rough trapezoid, then five in what looked like a crooked star. Tapping her finger on each of the symbols in
turn, she said, “Iron – dragon – hatchling – shining – spike. That’s
me. Notice anything about the
characters?”
She looked at him
expectantly. He looked back, baffled.
Valaista
sighed. “They’re all made up of straight
lines, Karrick.” She held up her index
finger, flicking a few chips of lacquer from the nail. “When Bardan stole Speech from the Kindred
and gave it to us, he forgot to steal the thing that made your kind such
prolific writers.”
He spread his
hands. “And that was…?”
“Thumbs,” she
laughed. “Our tongues are capable of
wondrous subtlety, but our written language is the language of the claw, scored
into stone. It’s swift, and it’s
serviceable, but it’s hardly elegant.”
“So you invented
harka…harkonnen…”
“Harkittu. Yes.
Although no one wyrm ‘invented it’; it simply…grew.” She turned back to the table. Biting her tongue in concentration, she
stabbed her fingernail into the wood and drew it in a broad curve. To this she added hooked strokes, a sweeping
oval, and a spray of intersecting wavy lines.
Then she dug her nail here and there to make small dotted circles, and
finished the whole with a magnificent, curving ornament that reminded Karrick
of clouds.
She stepped
back. “There!” she said happily. Beads of sweat were actually standing out on
her forehead. “That’s me, too!”
Karrick shook his
head in wonder. “That took you ten times
as long, and you’re dripping like you just ran a foot-race.”
“It’s hard,” she
snorted. “You really have to concentrate
to do it right!” She crossed her arms
again. “And it’s still messy. I rushed.
What do you think?”
“It’s…well, it
looks like artwork, not language,” he said hesitantly. Actually, it looked like an unintelligible
scrawl.
“It’s more
impressive in stone,” she said, wounded.
“I’ll bet,” he
muttered. “Why on earth would you use
it?”
“Because it’s beautiful,” she said sullenly. “And difficult. And because it conveys so much more than Hätäinen possibly can.
“Look here!” she
cried, tapping one part of the symbol.
“That’s ‘Valaistanaulata, wyrm of iron’.”
She tapped
another part. “ ‘Child of Anachromin and
Gloriana Ferrous’.” Another tap.
‘Hatched in Jule, near Elder Delvin, in the Year of the Shell 8891’.” Another tap.
“‘Apprenticed to Thanos, Son of Esu, a soldier-mage of Empire’.”
“What part says
‘pain in Karrick’s ass’?” the warrior deadpanned.
Valaista looked
outraged for a moment before she realized that he was joking. “That’s the only symbol-set I know how to
write,” she chuckled. “As with Hätäinen, we’re born with the ability to
puzzle out Harkittu. But we have to learn how to write it. And
to learn, we have to study with a loremaster.
One who has spent centuries mastering the symbols.”
The warrior nodded. “And that’s why the boss wanted you at the
College. To puzzle out some Harkittu symbols.”
“Yes,” Valaista replied. She returned to the couch and resumed her
seat.
“Dragon spells?”
She laughed. “Mostly dragon poetry, actually. And song.”
Thanos’s eyes widened. “You sing?”
“In our true forms, we sing,” she
confirmed. “We sing magnificently.”
“You’ll have to show me some time,”
he said, interested. He’d never heard of
a singing dragon.
He glanced over at the solid stone
wall that had replaced the empty door-hole.
“If, that is, we ever get this door fixed so I can get out of here.”
“That’s my next task,” the girl
replied. She sounded pensive. “The Master told me to wait until the wizard
Ka-Mai had blocked the entrance. Now you
can go back to the House and get some rest.
I need to go find the Artisans’ Guild, so we can call on them first
thing in the morning.”
“I’ll do that,” Karrick
commanded. “I’ve dealt with gnomes
before. And I’ll do it now. If I know the little buggers, they’ll still
be up, building stuff.”
She shook her head. “The Master ordered me to –”
“I’m changing his orders,” Karrick
said firmly. “Go back to the House and
get some sleep. I need some
exercise. I’ll go find the guild
tonight, and hit it at first light in the morning. You glue yourself to the Lady. See her back here, to the chapel, and make
certain that she and Reticia make it back to the House.” He frowned.
“And bring some healing potions.
This thing you told me, about the rings…”
The dragon-girl’s eyes widened. “I would
like to see the raising!” she exclaimed happily.
“I figured,” the warrior snorted. “It’s something else, let me tell you. So that’s how we’ll do it.”
“It’s not what the Master ordered,”
she warned.
“If he’s busy trying to puzzle out
dragon poetry,” Karrick replied, shaking his head in wonder, “then he’s got
bigger problems than worrying about what we’re
up to.”
♦♦♦
“I was wondering when you’d finally
find your way in here.”
Thanos’s head jerked up. He had been poring over a heavy volume of
impenetrably eloquent verse in the obscure (but, he was learning, remarkably
expressive) Draconic dialect that Valaista had called Harkittu. Evidently it had been so expressive that he
had fallen asleep.
He blinked,
trying to clear the fogginess from his eyes, and distant memories of arcane
theory lectures from his brain. A girl
swam into view. She was standing on the
opposite side of the table at which he was reading. Green eyes, delicately pointed ears, fair
features, a tumbled mass of golden hair bundled atop her head in a tight coiffure
held in place by a jewelled coronet…
…and a
high-collared, long white gown.
He recognized that, at least. “You’re one
of the Ancillulae,” he said
drunkenly.
“Yes,” the girl
nodded. She waited politely, hands
folded demurely into her sleeves.
Thanos, realizing
what a lout he must seem, climbed unsteadily to his feet, struggling to banish
sleep and gather his wits. Every year,
it got harder to wake up swiftly. When he
could manage to get to sleep at all.
As his senses
cleared, he realized that he recognized her.
“You’re Ara,” he said. “Ara
Latentra. The Queen’s…er…” What was it
called again? “The Prima.”
“Yes,” the girl
nodded again. There was a tiny smile on
her lips.
“And you’re a
gold dragon,” Thanos sighed, feeling like an idiot as the memory of their
interview in the Queen’s private lounge returned with a skull-shaking thud.
“There it is!” the girl said
happily. She dropped an elegant
curtsey. “Mahanirion Manastalorian, at
your service.”
Thanos bowed
automatically. “Thanos Mastigo,
Chiliarch and Warmage of the Imperial Army, at yours.” Striding around the table, he pulled out one
of the straight, high-backed chairs.
“I thank
you.” The girl gathered her skirts
beneath her and sat.
The warcaster
resumed his own seat. “To what do I owe
the pleasure, madam?” he said politely.
The girl rolled
her eyes. “This is going to be a
problem, isn’t it? Damn this shape!”
Thanos
blinked. “Excuse me? What’s wrong with
your shape?”
“I’m male, remember?”
The warcaster
snorted a laugh. The funny thing was, he
did remember Breygon telling them
that. After the fact, of course; Thanos
wasn’t sure he could tell a male gold dragon from a female one. “Not from where I’m sitting!” he said as gallantly
as the circumstances allowed.
“I mean, in my
natural form,” the girl huffed.
“Kindred! You probably can’t
smell the difference, can you?”
He took a
cautious sniff. All he could smell was
soap, a hint of spicy perfume, and girl.
Definitely girl.
Ara waited. “Well?” she said at last.
Thanos spread his
hands helplessly. “Sorry. You smell wonderful. That’s it.”
“Your comrade
spotted me right from the off, you know,” she said frostily. “The half-elf, I mean.”
“Yes. Well,” Thanos sighed, “Breygon has a problem
with dragons.”
“Does he?” the
girl said, cocking a shapely eyebrow.
“It’s just as well she asked me to speak to you, then.”
“ ‘She’?”
“The Queen.”
That jerked him
upright in his seat. “The Queen? What does she want with me?”
“With you, nothing yet, at least as far
as I know. But for you…” Ara shook her head.
“She knows what you are, bellerus. That’s what the Third House calls your kind,
you know – ‘Lords of War’.
“They hold you in awe,” the girl went
on. “The elves bring magic to battle,
true, and they do so well enough – but when they do fight with magic, their magi fight alone, however they see
fit. They organize poorly. Dragons see it. We know good tactics. It is only your kind, only the Sons of Esu, and the sons of the Imperium in
particular, who bring discipline to the magic of battle. To the elves, war is song and sculpture,
tragedy in art. To your kind, though, it is reason, logic and design. Planning.
Engineering. Science.
“The elves see how you fight; they respect
it. But they don’t understand it. Most of them would ignore you; most of the
rest would want to study you. The
Queen…she sees more than they see. She
wants to help you.”
Thanos
frowned. He knew how the elves fought;
their wars were the subject of interminable study at the College of Steel
And their magi
were justly feared. But he had to admit
that the girl (boy, he reminded
himself, boy!) had a point. The elves, more often than not, used their
magi like mobile strong points. A single
powerful wizard surrounded by elite troops would move rapidly and majestically
across the battlefield, engaging and destroying single targets. Priests, more often than not, remained in the
rear, at established hospitals, and the wounded were brought to them.
Ekhani battle tactics were different. In the Imperium, it was the soldiers who did
the fighting. Magi were support. The junior lads, the light troops –
skirmishers, javelin infantry, hussars – they found the enemy and fixed him in
place. Hopefully, they could do so long
enough for the archers to be brought up to whittle the formations down, before
the veterans – the spearmen, the huscarls, the dragoons and the knights – could
be flung in to do the hard work of killing.
Healers accompanied the troops, riding or marching with them, fighting
alongside them when they had to, but always on hand to tend to the
wounded. And the magi – even the most
powerful ones – were right alongside the men, protected by only their scutator and maybe a handful of personal
troops, ready to lend their fire in support of the immediate objective. And closer to the front, too, so as to be
able to concentrate their power should an overwhelming enemy appear to threaten
the men, or a transitory, valuable target of opportunity open up.
Our
way works better, he
thought to himself. For us, anyway. It wasn’t
racial pride; it was cold, hard reasoning based on a lifetime of experience
coupled with all-too-intimate memories of the men he’d lost and the horrors
he’d seen. But it’s only better because of how we fight. It wouldn’t work
for the elves. They fought too fluidly,
moved too fast. They swept in and swept
out, slashing at the flanks of a superior force, picking an enemy off here, and
another there; never committing to an assault, not until the foe had already
been carved down to the bone, and fleeing, or about to. No great charges, no sundered spears, no
clash of shields on shields. No final,
desperate assaults. The elves hated
blood; they hailed victory when the foe had been knocked back a step. The men of the Empire were not content until
the last head had rolled, the pyres were alight, and the enemy’s lord had been
sent back to Norkhan, either festooned with chains, or packed in sawdust.
Thanos had studied war, with a focus and
ferocity no elf could ever know. He knew
the secret of Duncala; but it was a secret that he would take to his grave
before trying to explain it to any of the fair folk. He knew why the Third House had suffered so
terribly against the Hand Knights, why it had taken so awfully long for the
elite forces of the High Guard to defeat a small, starved and demoralized band
of human fanatics. And he knew why it
had taken the arrival of the Vendicar, riding under the banner of the Western
divisions, hastily gathered from Veldt and Chant and the Tamal Krak, to finally
put an end to the interminable battle, and to the terrible menace of the Hand.
The problem had been that the elves
wouldn’t stand. It wasn’t how they fought. When the Knights charged, in their rusty,
blood-stained armour, wielding bent and blunted swords atop their exhausted
destriers, the elves fell back. They
always fell back, into the trees and hills, ceding the plains to the men. The Knights hadn’t been able to pursue them,
true; not without risking clouds of shafts from beneath the leafy green. But the elves’ tactics ceded the ground – and
the towns, and their farms, and the river fords, and the castles – to the
enemy. And control of those things was
what mattered. The Knights couldn’t hope to face the elves
on their home ground, but they hadn’t wanted the elves’ home ground. They wanted the fields and the cities. And when the elves tried to face the Knights
there, they died.
Duncala had begun as a fluid action – a
meeting engagement – but it had quickly disintegrated into a stalemate, with
the elves hiding in the woods along the southern end of their line, and, most
reluctantly, dug in around the Priory at the north end. That, Thanos knew, was where the bitterest
fighting had occurred; where Kaltas and Sylloallen and Lallakentan and all the
others had fought back to back. The
Knights couldn’t dig them out; the elven archers were too deadly. But the elves couldn’t escape, because to do
so, they would have had to charge the Knights, and defeat them shield to shield. And that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. It was a travesty. Landioryn’s force had outnumbered the Knights
five to one, but could not defeat them, because even the worst fanatics of the
Hand weren’t stupid enough to charge a line of longbowmen. Instead, they went in at night, heavily armed
and heavily armoured, concentrating their blows at small sections of the elven
lines, killing a few here, a few there, and fading back into the darkness. It was dangerous, to be sure – no human could
see as far as an elf at night – but for every mage on Landioryn’s side, there
had been three priests of the Hand supporting the humans, calling fire down
from the sky and hungry shadows out of the earth whenever the battle went
poorly.
In the end, it had taken the Vendicar’s
arrival to save the elves. Eyelas
Wartack – a one-armed, one-eyed veteran with eighty-nine summers beneath his
beard – had shown Landioryn the answer.
And the answer had been so terribly simple.
Wartack had marched the Western divisions
into the field, north and slightly west of the Priory, straddling the Great
Caravan Route, cutting the Knights off from their escape to their temporary
base of operations in Bylkor and threatening their last open supply line. That had proven a strategic victory, placing
the enemy in check. Equally important, though, was its tactical effect: it gave
the Knights a line of spears and shields to aim at. It posed a challenge to their valour that
they were accustomed to, and that they could not possibly refuse.
The Knights charged at dawn on the third
day of the battle outside the Priory.
Wartack had known that they would; he had been laying traps for the Hand
since his youth in the mountains south and east of Chant, and to him they were
as predictable as the tides. Eschewing
normal doctrine, he had held his unseasoned troops, his slingers and
skirmishers, in the rear, and had filled his front ranks with veterans, halving
the length of his line in order to double its depth, and promising a sovereign
to every man who came out with blood on his sword – and ten for every crested
helm.
He had been in touch, too, with the elves’
leader, the Grand Duke Landioryn, and with General Nascio, commander of the
High Guard. When the charge of the Hand
Knights struck the Ekhani lines, they buckled; but thanks to the presence of so
many hard-bitten, gold-hungry long-service troopers, they held. They held long enough for the elves to erupt
from the woods, showering the enemy ranks with arrow-shafts; for the Ekhani
skirmishers to swarm the valley and seal the Knights’ retreat; and for Wartack
to send his own cavalry in from the Western hills, taking the Knights in the
flank, and rolling up their line like an old rug.
It was over by noon. Wartack had ordered mercy, but after two
hundred and fifty years of interregnum, terror, brandings, burnings and
bloody-fisted persecution, very few of the men of Ekhan, and not a single one
of the elves, had been of a mind to offer it.
Even those Knights who fell wounded were denied the merciful coup of a
dagger through their slits of their beavor; instead, bands of enraged soldiers
wandered over the battlefield, the magi with spells upon their lips, the men
with skins of oil and armloads of wood.
Every armoured form had been burnt – and no one had been too concerned
about making certain that the Knights were dead before the fires were lit.
The
elves can tell themselves whatever tales of valour they need to in order to
assuage their wounded pride,
Thanos mused to himself. But in the end, it took real troops, with real discipline, to end the Hand.
Enough reverie. Ara was staring at him expectantly. “I know a little bit about bringing
discipline to the art of war,” Thanos said carefully. “What exactly does her Majesty think I need?”
“Help. My help.
To find what you’re looking for,” the girl – boy – replied.
“And that’s why
you’re here?”
Ara nodded. “I’m…er…uniquely equipped, I guess is the way
to put it. To help you unravel the
mysteries you’re liable to get caught up in.”
“How so?” Thanos asked. “Are you also a mage?”
“Less than most
of my kind,” the girl replied, waggling her hand diffidently. “I’m more of a sneak, really. I’m pretty good at ferreting things out. Secrets, and so forth. It’s why I was assigned to watch over the
Queen.
“Well,” she
amended immediately, before Thanos could speak, “it’s one of the reasons, anyway.”
“What are the
others?” the warmage asked. “And who,
precisely, ‘assigned’ you to keep an eye on Ælyndarka?”
The girl
dimpled. “I’d thought you’d’ve figured
that out by now. Venastargenta gave me
this post. I moved in a few months ago,
to replace his grand-daughter Cymballargenta, after she went missing.”
Thanos’s jaw
dropped onto his chest. “Really?” he
blurted.
Ara nodded. “He wanted me to find out what I could, but
she didn’t leave a single clue; she just up and vanished. Svarda – that’s her father, Svardargenta of
Cloudspire – he let it go for a little while.
But after she hadn’t reported in for a couple of weeks, he got worried.
About his daughter, of course, but about the Queen, too. There’s always
a dragon guarding the Queen. For
hundreds of years, now; ever since she married Duke Percorian. Svarda couldn’t leave the position vacant,
but he didn’t have any other candidates.
His second daughter, Nitoris – she’s busy somewhere to the east.”
“I’ve met her,”
Thanos muttered, remembering dark eyes, black hair, and a snug-fitting dress of
red velvet. And – he grinned – the way
Xeros had reacted to her.
“And the youngest one, Anatora,” Ara
went on, “she’s still too young. She’s with her grandfather in Silverstair,
studying to become a priestess of Miros.
That’s where I was, too, when Venasta ordered me to take up the post.”
“ ‘Silverstair’?” Thanos
exclaimed. “You mean, in Dracosedes?”
The girl nodded. “Dracosedes, yes, but not Silverstair. I was in Brazenhault. Silverstair, though, is where Venasta is
lord. Has been, for thousands of
years. He’s like a mountain, or a
forest. Eternal, unchanging.”
“I thought he was dying,” Thanos
said bleakly.
The girl’s face went white. “Who told you that?” she whispered.
“Never mind,” the warcaster said
bleakly. “It’s true, isn’t it?”
She nodded, aghast. “Yes, it’s true. But it’s supposed to be a secret! None other than his family have been told!”
“And his successor upon the Stone of
Ages,” Thanos murmured. “The next most
powerful dragon in the Universe. Yes?”
“That is the custom,” Ara nodded,
astonished at the extent of his knowledge.
“And so, he passed word to Jyrinaja
Autuus, Thundering Glory, who –”
“Who could not be found,” Thanos
interrupted. “And so, Karventää will sit
astride the Stone on Bræa’s Dawn.”
“Yes,” Ara whispered. “Holy Mother!
How do you know –”
“Except she won’t,” Thanos
interrupted again. “Lady Deathscorch has
ceded the Stone to the next in line after her, which could be either
Azurbellakarian for the blues, or Lorrinkanastexan for the greens. And all the stars, it seems, are aligning
behind Lorrin.”
The girl put her hands over her
mouth.
Thanos smiled grimly.
“Nothing to say?”
The girl’s eyes were wild. It was a long moment before she could speak
again. “Holy Miros be praised!” she
squeaked at last.
That made the warcaster sit up straight. “Excuse me?”
“Azurbel is mad,” the girl whispered. “Mad, and cruel beyond reckoning. If he held the Stone, the Council would
certainly fail, and all the dragons would be at war before the next
sunrise.
“But even he,” she went on, her voice barely audible,
“would be preferable to Karventää! She
is a monster of terror and darkness, a trafficker with fiends, and a true
acolyte of the Dark Queen! If she were to control the Council…”
“So I gather,” Thanos said drily. “So, you’re happy then? That it’s going to be Lorrin?”
“Of course not!” the girl snapped. “The dragons of darkness have never held the Stone! There’s no telling what sort of horror might
lie in store! But at least
Lorrinkanastexan…”
She paused, taking a deep, calming breath. “Lorrin, at least, can be reasoned with. She’s a mage, a brilliant one, and a deep
thinker. She lays plots within plots,
true, and schemes as elaborately as any of us…but she’s always been a creature
of order. She has nothing to gain by
allowing the Council to dissolve into anarchy and murder. We are fortunate in that, at least, if in no other wise.”
“If you say so,” Thanos shrugged. “What puzzles me, though, is why you didn’t
know any of this. My colleagues and I –
we’ve known for months. And we passed it all on to Svardargenta,
through Cymballa and Nitoris.”
The girl shrugged.
“In my position,” she said sternly, “I am sometimes compromised by the
fact that Cloudspire does not always
tell me everything!”
Thanos blew out his breath in an explosive
chuckle. “Kept in the dark by your
superiors!” he said with feeling. “How
unusual.”
He leaned back in his chair. “So…where does that leave you and me?”
The girl did likewise.
She still looked a little wild-eyed from his many revelations, but she
forged on bravely. “It leaves me
following Venasta’s orders, I guess.
Which means that I have to follow the Queen’s orders. Which means that it leaves me helping you.” She chuckled wryly. “So…what do you really need help with?”
“Translation,” he replied immediately. “This Harkittu
of yours is a nightmare. Can you read
and write it?”
“Assuredly,” she nodded. “I learned the art from Venasta himself. He’s renowned throughout the outer realms as
a master rhetorician and poet.”
“ ‘Rhetorician’?” Thanos repeated, incredulous. “Really?”
“Really,” the girl chuckled. “Don’t be so surprised. Priests often become excellent speakers, do
they not?”
Thanos blinked.
“Venastargenta is a priest?”
The girl laughed helplessly. “He is Grand Master of the Sacred Warders of
Miros. You didn’t know that?”
“How could I?” the warmage asked crossly. “I’ve never met the man! Er, or the dragon, I suppose!”
“We’ll have to amend that,” Ara laughed. Her face fell suddenly, becoming more
serious. “And soon. The Dawn fast approaches. As one of his apprentices, I intend to be at
the Vale, to honour him when he cedes his life, and moves on to the glories of
the world beyond the world.
“By the way,” she added softly, “you’re forbidden from
mentioning Venasta’s Departure to anyone in the Elf-Realm. Absolutely forbidden!”
“Oh?” Thanos’s eyebrows shot up. “And why is that?”
“Because Venasta forbade it,” she said ominously. “That’s reason enough for me. Tell your colleagues, would you? This must be kept in the strictest
confidence. No one can be allowed to
know.”
Thanos nodded.
It wasn’t the sort of information it seemed wise to spread around in any
case.
“So,” Ara went on, glancing around at the piled books
and the copious notes he had taken.
“What exactly are you looking for, anyway?”
The warcaster sighed.
“Information. On an obscure group
of arcane sages. They’re somehow related
to draconic magic, and yet they’re only mentioned in a few places. Literary references, mostly. Obscure paeans to their otherworldly
sagacity…that sort of thing.”
He tapped a pile of heavily-bound volumes. “And so far, for my sins, I’ve only been able
to find them in books written in that wretched Harkittu script.” He slapped
one of the massive tomes in irritation.
“I can’t even read the damned things!
I’ve just managed to puzzle out the symbol for the sect, so I can pick
it out of the text!”
“This sect…what are they called?” Ara asked, suddenly
curious.
“Viisaus johtaja
lohikäärmalta,” Thanos said, pronouncing the words carefully. “The ‘Dragonlore Masters’.”
To his astonishment, Ara burst out laughing.
“What?” he asked, perplexed.
The girl wiped her streaming eyes. “Well,” she said at last, once her tittering
had died down, “at least now I understand why the Queen sent me to help you!”
Thanos leaned back in his chair. “You know of them?”
“I should say so!” the girl chuckled. “My father was one of them. And my
mother still serves the Alku.”
“The who?”
the warmage exclaimed. Thanos had never
heard the term before. Alku, in the wyrm’s tongue, meant
‘origin’.
“The Alku,” the girl replied. “He
is the Source. The grandest master of
all draconic magic; the descendent, in wisdom if not in flesh, of Holy
Miros. My mother is one of the twelve Sijainen – the Adjuncts, in your
tongue. The wyrm-born masters of
magic. Those who serve the Source.”
“He is to be found in Dracosedes, I
presume?” Thanos asked, enthralled. “At
the Supreme Sanctum?”
“No,” Ara said, shaking her
head. “For all that it stands in
Dragonhome – or rather, above and beyond it – the Supreme Sanctum is still a
focus of Kindred magic. Alku, and the twelve Adjuncts, and the
one hundred and four and forty Avustaja
– they make their home upon the endless reaches of Vatnhugr, the heavenly flood that touches upon all of the noblest
of the outermost planes. Its waters wash
a thousand celestial shores – including Kohta
Kohtauri, the Meeting Place . The great, shining, wind-swept capital of
Dracosedes.”
The warcaster blinked. “The Source – your ‘Alku’, and his adjuncts
and assistants – they live at sea?
Truly?”
“Both upon the sea, and within it,”
she replied. Her eyes took on a dreamy
cast. “Alku is a title. But he is
neither brass nor bronze, nor red nor green nor white. He is a creature of the outer reaches,
ancient and unfathomable. His true name
– his ancient wyrm’s name – is Merimies
Merillä Kohtalo. In the traveler’s
speech, he is called ‘The Sailor on the Seas of Fate’. For so he has spent the thousands upon
thousands of years of his wisdom.
“His keep, the seat of that wisdom,”
she went on, mesmerized by some vision that Thanos couldn’t see “is Korallinna – the Castle of Coral
“And you’ve seen it?” the warmage
asked.
The girl shook herself. “Once only.
I visited my mother some years ago.
Svarda brought me into his father Venasta’s service, and helped me to
travel to Silverstair, to meet his revered sire. From Silverstair, I journeyed to Kohta
Kohtauri, and thence to Brazenhault, the city of fire and life, which I
thereafter took as my home.” She smiled
happily. “It is a wondrous place, for
creatures such as myself.”
“Dragons, you mean?”
“For all beings,” she corrected,
“whose hearts beat with unquenchable flame.
My mother met me there, and took me to the Korallinna. I saw her new
home – the only home she has known ever since my father went to wind – and
there I met the Sailor.”
“What was he like?” Thanos breathed.
She shook her head. “Wondrous.
I would call him the apotheosis of dragonkind, were that title not
reserved for Oroprimus. And…and of course,
Vanhimalla. Nidhoggr, the…the eater of the slain.”
Thanos shuddered at that final,
dread name. But her words jarred
something in his memory. “A moment,” he
said, holding up a hand, and struggling to figure out what had taken him by
surprise.
Ara waited politely. When he nodded to himself, she said, “Yes?”
“Your father,” the warmage
murmured. “You said he ‘went to wind’.”
“I did.”
“That’s a peculiar way to put it,”
Thanos said bluntly. “It’s an elvish
expression, is it not? I thought that
dragons ‘departed’, or ‘sought the Vale of Skulls’, or ‘went to the side of
Holy Miros’?”
“You are observant,” the girl
sighed. “And you are correct. I did not misspeak. My father…he was an elf. A man of the Third House. A wizard.”
“And yet,” the warcaster pressed,
“you, yourself, are a full-blooded true dragon.
Are you not?”
“I am.”
Thanos nodded. “And how in all the hells,” he asked
intently, “did your parents manage that?”
Ara shrugged. “My parents were magi,” she replied. “And I was an…experiment.”
♦♦♦
“Can
you see it yet?”
The words were clear, and yet they had not been spoken
aloud. She was not using words.
Without opening his eyes, Joraz glanced to the
right. Lööspelian was still seated
there, in the same place – the same posture, even – she had occupied for the
past two days. There were subtle changes
in her surroundings, to be sure. The
snow that had been falling for the past day had made no impression on her. She seemed to be untouched by heat or cold,
as if discomfort had no meaning for her.
In a wide circle around her, for a distance of two paces, maybe, the
snow was gone, and earth of the garden was dark and moist. Tiny shoots of green – the first of the
spring flowers, crocuses maybe – were pushing through the soil like verdant
lance-tips. And the massive morbannon
tree that she had been staring at…the side that faced her was festooned with
buds.
Breygon would
be fascinated by this, the monk
thought lazily. If he didn’t have so many other things on his mind.
The one-time fiend hadn’t so much as moved when
Amorda’s servants had come out to offer her food and drink. When she hadn’t responded, they’d draped a
blanket over her shoulders and retired, muttering, to the warmth of the
House. Nor, later that night, had she so
much as stirred a finger when the forest maidens – the sylphs and the dryad,
the pixies and fairies and sprites, and even the nymph who had come to petition
Lewat for the Benison – had gently
removed the blanket and taken it away.
They did not know what Lööspelian was doing; but they recognized
exaltation, a bright and shining emanation of kesatuan, when they saw it.
Somehow they knew that whatever she was trying to achieve, whatever
pinnacle of consciousness she was struggling to attain, material goods – even
so poor a comfort as a damp and scratchy woollen blanket – would only interfere
with it.
Joraz was beginning to understand. He had come to a similar conclusion
himself. The veil of mystery that had
lain before him for months now, obscuring his path, cloaking the way ahead in
impenetrable darkness, seemed to be thinning somewhat…wearing away, shredding
into nothingness before the growing certainty of his new purpose.
But purpose alone wasn’t enough. Not yet.
He knew that the fiend-woman was looking at something, something that
only she, so far, could see. He couldn’t
see it himself. But he could feel it.
He knew it was there. It was just a matter of…of reaching…
His shoulders sagged.
“No. I can’t see it. Not yet,” he answered, speaking aloud. He could hear her thoughts within his sieulu, his spirit; but he was not yet
capable of responding in the same way.
A soft wave of comforting warmth emanated from
her. It was not heat; not a physical
manifestation of a change of temperature.
It was reassurance, consolation; a caress, from her spirit to his. It was comradeship. He was grateful for it. The chill of the winter air still penetrated
him, despite the depth of his concentration.
He was astonished that Lööspelian had the strength not only to keep it
at bay, but to spare power to ward him, too.
What
marvellous fire must burn within her!
he thought, wondering.
He knew better than to ask her for aid. Better than even he had realized, Tyrellus
had prepared him to walk this road. The
Master’s response to any plea for answers had always been the same: Knowledge could be gained from others; but
understanding was a gift that came only from one’s-self. Enlightenment, the old man had taught
them, could only come from within.
That, Joraz knew now, had always been the innermost
secret of the threefold lore of his inscrutable master. He knew it now, knew it in his bones. Before, he had had to study the Books to gain
their secrets; had had to pore over them, like a wizard over his scrolls and
mysteries, reading and re-reading every word, absorbing every letter, even the
tiniest marks of punctuation. But no
more. Tyrellus’ secrets were a part of
him now; the knowledge that the Books had held in trust had become one with his
being, woven into his sieulu until
the two, the Mastery and his spirit, were a single, inseparable whole. The Books meant nothing anymore; they were
only ink and parchment. The wisdom he
had sought was enshrined within.
He, Joraz, was the Master now. Not as Tyrellus had been; not of an
order. Only of himself. Tyrellus had sought followers, students to
teach, acolytes who would learn to carry on his Way. Joraz had gone far beyond that need. The Way, he understood at last, had been
there before him, and it would still be there after he had passed to the Long
Halls. The Way had always been there, whether anyone was following it or not. Joraz had found it, now; he needed followers,
students, worshippers and slaves no more than he needed the Books
themselves. Such things were the dross
of a mortal existence. They – and the
mortal existence that they sustained – no longer held any meaning for him.
He wouldn’t throw the Books away, of course; even if
he no longer needed them, they still held sentimental meaning for him. And they were dangerous, too; there was
always the chance that some unscrupulous fellow, some failed master, some rogue
with a little learning and a surfeit of larceny or blood-lust in his soul,
might stumble upon them, and recognize what they contained, and turn his old
master’s teachings to evil, or use it to hasten the Unbinding. That would be a tragedy. No, he would find someone…some worthy child,
perhaps, with small skill but great promise.
He would find a worthy repository for the Books and the knowledge they
contained. And if such a one also found
the Way within himself…why, that was all to the good, was it not?
As his spirit made a final peace with that decision,
forging a pact between the shadowy nothingness of existence and the bright and
shining promise of the Way, a sudden light burst within him, blinding and
unbearable. Colours exploded behind his
eyes. Sound assaulted his ears; speech
and birdsong, the rattle of wagon wheels, the clatter of hooves, voices and
screams and shouts, the rushing of the waters of the Lymphus beyond the garden
walls, the gentle scraping the cricket’s legs.
The scents of the green exploded through him like bolts of skyfire, a
cacophony of earth-grass-rose-pine-hazel-hickory-savoury…
He coughed, overwhelmed. Lööspelian felt it, too. Her eyes were still closed; but when she
turned her face toward him, the light that shone from within her was like the
Lantern’s beneficent glare. And more; a
thousand times a thousand times greater than the light of the sun. And yet, basking in the glory of her gaze, he
did not burn.
Joraz looked back at her, and understood. He closed his own eyes…and gasped in wonder
at what he saw. He could still see; but not the world. That had grown dim and insubstantial, a grey,
misty irrelevance washed out by the light of the wondrous being sitting at his
side.
He looked up, down and around. Other lights there were, too; the birds in
the sky, the worms struggling through the winter-hardened earth beneath him,
even the bushes and the flowers all held their tiny spark. With no great surprise, he saw a warm, solid
glow emanating from the heartwood of the mighty morbannon tree that stood next
to the fiend-woman, and Joraz realized at last why she had been staring so
intently at it for so many days. It had
been her focus; she had seen its light, the spark of its sieulu, and, wondering at its source, had watched it until its
secrets had been laid bare before her.
She had found it at last.
She’s found
her answer, he realized, turning his
inner eye upon her at last. Her spark
was the strongest of all; a great, shimmering light, a lamp-of-all-colours,
glowing and leaping before him, like a starburst flammifer wind-whipped in
ecstasy, motionless and yet dancing in joyous exaltation.
“Welcome,”
she said wordlessly.
“You’re
beautiful,” he replied in the same way, in a tone choked with wonder.
“As are you.”
He looked down at his own form, and gasped again; like
her, the grey, insubstantial cloak of flesh that he wore had faded away before
his othersight, merging with the nondescript clay of the world, overwhelmed by
the shifting, multihued glory of his inner light.
“What is this?”
he asked, mesmerized by the incomparable glory of this new vision.
“It is our
Sielii,” she replied. “This is the inner light that you see. The light that all living beings share.” There was a whole world of joyful contentment
in her voice.
“Yet some are
dim, and some are bright,” he asked, puzzled. “I am
but a living thing, as your tree is. Why
do I outshine him?”
“You perceive
the difference, my friend,” Lööspelian replied gently, “between the Sielii forged by the Holy Mother
and the Dark Ender, for all things in the world – and the Sielii that she
crafted for her Children, when the Brahiri, the Kindred, were first made. This light –” she indicated herself, and
then him “- is what it looks like when
the spark of the World Made is bound inextricably into the shard of the Void
that she placed within all of you.”
The monk frowned.
“Your light,” he said slowly,
“is as bright as mine!”
Lööspelian’s smile was like the dawn. “It is.”
Joraz laughed aloud.
“And you were worried,” he
thought, “that your many sacrifices had
failed to win a you mortal soul!”
“I am somewhat relieved,” she replied with a
smile. Then the smile vanished, and she
nodded past him. “Have you felt it yet?”
“Felt what?”
Joraz asked. But of course, as soon as
he thought the words, he did feel it;
a coldness, an emptiness at his back.
He turned slowly. Somehow he knew that the thing she spoke of
would not be visible to his mortal eyes, and so he did not open them.
A few paces behind him, hovering perhaps a foot above
one of the paths that meandered aimlessly through the flowerbeds, stood a blot
of shadow. It looked at first like a
cloud; a thin, wispy, insubstantial thing, little more than a roiling patch of
fog. But it was more than that; he knew
it, could feel it deep within his newly-awakened spirit. There was something there.
“What is it?”
he asked, stunned into a mental whisper.
“It is
Possibility,” Lööspelian replied.
Her thought-speech was ghostly too, like a high, winter wind that passed
overhead without rattling the shutters.
“It is a nexus of destiny.
“I have
watched these things appear and disappear, shrink and grow, brighten and
darken. I have seen hundreds of them
over the past two days. Our friend
Breygon is surrounded by them; Thanos, too.
These things swarm after them, flocking to their sielii like flies to
fresh meat.”
“What do they…what
do they do?”
“They demand,”
she replied distantly. “They are a fork in the road of fate. The unenlightened cannot see them, but they
can feel them. They can feel when a choice must be made…and
when it is made, whether they enter the nexus or pass it by, many possibilities
become only one, and the nexus collapses.
And, often, a new one forms.”
She nodded at the blot. “This one caught my attention. It appeared two days ago, just after I first
became aware of them. When we were
speaking.”
“And what choice
does it pose to you?” he asked, curious and astonished at the same time.
“None,” she
replied. “I think that this nexus is for you.”
That made him start.
He stared at the blot for a long time, fascinated by its shifting hues,
its languorous undulations. “What do I do?”
“Enter it,”
she said blandly, “or pass it by. There is no other choice.”
“And what
happens if I enter it?” he asked.
There was no fear in him now, no worry; only curiosity. And reason.
And…he couldn’t deny it. Anticipation.
“I cannot know,”
Lööspelian replied. “It is your fate that stands at a crossroads, not mine. One path leads through the shadow, to the
destiny you cannot know until you have chosen to follow it. The other path leads past the shadow, to
whatever lies beyond.”
Joraz looked past the shimmering, silent blot. The world beyond his sight was all one colour
now, all grey; a formless, featureless, indistinct mass. The garden, the flowers and the trees, and
the House itself…they had all vanished into the haze. All he could see were his own magnificent
spark, and Lööspelian’s; and the few feeble, floating soul-fires of the bushes
and the trees, like fading fireflies in the dawn. And the nexus. The shadow.
He tried to look beyond it…and a great, heavy sigh
welled up in his soul. The path…the
shadow…and naught but emptiness beyond it.
He had seen this vision before; he knew it, as intimately as he knew his
own hands. It was the vision of ending,
of despair, that had tormented him for months now.
“This is Moktavayaa,”
he whispered aloud, knowing that he was right.
Relief washed over him, through him, like a cleansing
flood. He laughed aloud.
“The
‘slaughter-ground’?” the fiend-woman asked, alarmed.
“Perhaps,”
Joraz replied, speaking the language of souls again, and smiling inanely as he
did so. “But it is also more. Much more!”
The words of his vision came back to him. “It is
the locked gate, and the open path,” he explained, feeling the heat of understanding
writhe and build within him. “The closed mind, and the unfettered
spirit. The barrier, and the wide road.”
“ ‘Moktavayaa’ means ‘the place of death’,” Lööspelian whispered.
“And
the place of life beyond death,” Joraz nodded. “I
understand at last. This is the
duality. The nexus of destiny. There can be no gate without a path. No closed mind, without an unfettered spirit
to be locked within it. No fence without
a field.
“No
death,” he exclaimed happily, “without
life.”
He flowed smoothly to his feet, more
as an act of will than one of muscle. “A division of fate becomes destiny. How?” he asked her. Before she could answer, he continued in a
rush. “Duality becomes singularity.
How? The gate is opened, the
fence leapt, the mind freed…how?”
“How?”
she asked, mesmerized by his sudden passion, the limitless joy of
understanding.
He turned to face the shadow. “Choice.”
Lööspelian said nothing. But she looked at him quizzically.
“The path leads
into darkness,” he explained. “Into the nexus. Unless I follow it – unless I choose, and
collapse the duality into the singularity of whatever destiny awaits me – there
is nothing else.”
“One path is not
choice,” she said, frowning. “A fork between fate and oblivion is not a
nexus.”
“It is for me,”
he replied with a happy smile. “And even if it were not…it is one more path
than I saw this morning.”
“I do not
understand,” Lööspelian sighed.
Joraz took a deep breath. He didn’t have to; he suddenly realized that
he hadn’t breathed in nearly half an hour.
But he wanted to. He wanted to taste the world one last time,
before stepping forward into the unknown.
“For so long now,” he said,
struggling to find the words to explain the glory, the incandescence, of his
newfound comprehension, “I have been
stayed. I have been at a…an impasse of
the soul. I have seen no way beyond it.” He nodded at the blot. “This
can only be the way out that I sought.”
“You do not know
where following this path will take you,” she said. There was neither warning nor fear in her
voice; simply curiosity. And concern, he
realized; concern for his well-being.
She had not entirely let go of the world, he knew; and he would not,
either.
“It is a path,”
he replied. “It will take me beyond Moktavayaa.
That is all that I ask. To a man
lost in the forest, Lööspelian, any
path is better than none.”
“This path may
lead you off a cliff,” she said worriedly.
Joraz smiled serenely.
“Then I will fly.”
Spreading his arms wide, he opened his spirit to the
Universe. Its limitless wonder washed
into him, through him, filling him with exaltation and bearing him up. His feet left the rude earth, and as he
became one with the wind the spark of his sieulu,
Holy Bræa’s gift to all her children, exploded into a carillon of glory,
gleaming like the fire of distant stars against the black silk of midnight.
“Will I see you
again?” Lööspelian cried, watching his ascent with sudden alarm.
“There are
always…possibilities,” the monk replied.
Knowledge comes
from the world around us, he
thought. But enlightenment – true
understanding – can come only from within.
Tyrellus had given him the truth, and Lööspelian had
shown him the way. Without their aid, he
would have surely failed. He loved and
blessed them for it. But in the end,
only he could touch the nexus, and
collapse the duality of possibility into the singularity of fate. In the end, the choice was his. Only his.
Destiny beckoned.
Guided by the certain wisdom of his newfound othersight, he flew towards
it, with an open spirit, and a glad heart.
“Good luck,
brother,” the fiend-woman murmured, staring after him, looking up at the
skyfire brightness of his spirit against the night sky. She was still seated amid the snow and trees,
but her heart – her mortal, Kindred heart – flew with him. “May
you find what you seek!”
“And you also,
beloved sister,” Joraz cried, his voice silent, and yet ringing against the
stillness of the night.
Floating like an autumn leaf on the wind, he raised a
hand in farewell. Then he turned to the
blot of shadow. It had followed him, as
he knew it would; for it was his nexus, his choice, and none other’s.
He chose…and the shadow heard. It flowed swiftly toward him, bringing with
it the nexus – the crossroads, the promise of possibility, and the path that he
had struggled so hard and so long to find.
He took a final breath, tasting existence, perhaps for
the last time; and, embracing the glory of all, he grasped his fate in his two
fists, stepped within himself…
…and was gone.
♦♦♦
