Flame's Shadow

by Anna Eluvae

  The artifact kept making its sound into the enforced silence of the courtyard. That was a nice bit of showmanship. Dravus could have silenced it, but it underscored the point, that each of those was the sound of someone's domain being taken from them. It was an exaggeration, of course, since most of the links Lexari had held belonged to commoners from the village below, but to those who could understand what was being signified, it would be powerful.

  "We will have a third revolution," said Dravus with his amplified voice, just as the crowd began to stir again. "The Allunio were driven by ideals that could never withstand the pressures of the real world. Lexari was driven by lust, both for power and attention, thinking only of himself. The Iron Kingdom must now take a third path. It must rebuild."

  There were murmurs in the crowd now, murmurs that Dravus was letting through. When people realized they could talk again, the murmurs grew to full arguments. Some had left already, fleeing the moment Dravus had won, but more of them had stayed. A sizable fraction were creeping slowly around Dravus now, not with any seeming intent to fight and kill him, but merely as a precaution. Dravus slipped his hand into the artifact so deftly that few people would have caught it, but it made no noise; there was no sense in Dravus revealing himself to be a hypocrite so early. Nemm felt a small pang at seeing Lexari's power slip from her grasp, but they had already agreed that it would go to Dravus, if only because otherwise they'd have to defend the artifact from everyone who wanted to steal it.

  "We're going to write a constitution," Nemm shouted to the crowd. Dravus was watching her, focusing on her words and helping her be heard, but not quite snuffing out the conversations around them. "We want to ensure that the kingdom can continue. If you want to have a say in what we decide, we will converse on the matter in the throne room. You are otherwise free to leave." Nemm laid eyes on every person of importance she could see. Lexari would simply have turned and walked back into the castle without looking behind him to see who would follow, but Nemm had been witness to more than enough dramatics for one day.

  "What's important is that the Iron Kingdom remains intact," said the Minister of Agriculture. She was not much past twenty years old, a successor to the successor of the man that originally occupied the position. Her hair had been done up with bits of wheat decorating her braid. She was young, ambitious, and exactly the sort of person who would seize on the opportunity.

  "The Whore of Abalon has no rightful claim to the throne," said a tall man in purple clothing with white trim. He was a duke, whose duchy lay to the north, bordering the Highlands. The Iron King's rule had not been kind to the nobility; those who remained in control of their lands were tough and lean. But the duke wasn't attacking, which was something.

  "I am the Queen of Geswein," said Nemm. "I have no interest in joining the two countries in personal union. I have no interest in ruling. Yet after a hard-fought war, along with the need to put down an old friend who had gone mad, I find that I cannot leave this kingdom to its own devices. Dravus and I will oversee the writing of the constitution. We will lend whatever aid is needed in negotiating what is best for the country. But we will not stay, nor will we try to take any power for ourselves."

  "She's right that the Iron Kingdom needs unity," said the Minister of Legends. If he thought poorly of Nemm for slitting his predecessor's throat, or for the damage they'd done to the Ministry of Legends some two months prior, he didn't show it. "The Highlands threaten revolt, Torland must certainly see our weakness, and the gears of trade have stopped turning." He nodded to another man, the Minister of Trade, who nodded gravely. "Lightscour is right as well. We must hammer out a new path."

  The duke who had spoken up shifted slightly. "We will have to reach some accommodations," he said. "Those of us with land and resources will wish compensation, or a say in the direction this kingdom will take."

  That decided it, more or less. There was no one to lead an opposition, no one with a vested interest in sowing chaos. They would split into factions when it came time to write a governing document, and they would squabble about treaties and tariffs, veto powers and quorums, but unless the process of negotiation fell through, they would have a country at the end of it.

  * * *

  "I thought they would be more upset about Lexari dying," said Dravus. He sat with Nemm on the roof of Castle Launtine, where the legend said he'd tried to betray Lexari. He had sat there experimenting with his new powers, looking out at the horizon with eyes that seemed to see everything now. Lexari had taken a large amount of power for himself; now it was Dravus's. There was so much of it that he almost didn't know what to do with it. Nemm had come up after a few hours of overseeing negotiation to sit next to him.

  "The commoners will hate you," said Nemm. "Even if we managed to get out ahead of it with the right story, one that showed Lexari as an absolute villain, many of them would refuse to believe it. You would still be the villain in their eyes, and he would still be the hero. Some of them will hate you for the rest of your life." She let out a sigh. "But those people down there, they're possessed of some basic savvy. I'm not sure you realize how brutally we fought the Allunio … how brutally I fought them. The Iron Kingdom has been deprived of too many illustrati now, but anyone with an ounce of sense sees that there's room for new flowers to blossom."

  "The artifacts are going to be a problem," said Dravus. "Maybe it would have been possible for people to move in after a purge, in the old days, but now? It's going to end with one person holding all the power."

  "Maybe," said Nemm. "I think I've done enough for one day though. We can wait a bit before we start worrying about a tyrant taking all the power for himself. Speaking of which, how is Lexari's collection treating you?"

  "It's odd," said Dravus. "There are so many senses available it seems like my head shouldn't be able to contain them all. But the wind on my cheeks, the light of the stars, the feel of the flagstones beneath me, sounds and shadows, metals and insects in the air … I feel like I could run a million miles. Maybe later tonight I'll cut loose and test the limits of what I can do."

  "Be careful," said Nemm. "You're still no good with a sword."

  "I know," said Dravus.

  The air was still and silent around them, but if Dravus pushed the domain of sound, he could hear people talking far below them, both conversations wafting up from the bedrooms and what sounded like revelry from one of the storerooms that had contained the Iron King's supply of wine.

  "I need to go see the Zenith," said Nemm. "Last I checked it was held in port, but that was a month ago. I wouldn't blame the crew if they'd taken the ship for their own, but if they haven't, I need to see about getting them paid again, however we're going to manage that." She paused. Dravus could hear her swallow. The sun was setting, but he could see her face in crystal clarity, with every emotion that was etched there. "I mean, however I'm going to manage that."

  They hadn't talked that much about what was going to come after this gambit. Nemm had kept saying there was a good chance that both of them would be dead. They needed to spend their time planning and practicing, trying to figure out what they would do if Lexari didn't behave as they'd expected him too, trying to work on the proper wording of what Dravus would say. What would happen after had been sketched, not painted, with none of the details that a true plan needed. They were in uncharted waters now.

  "I'm going back to Genthric," said Dravus. "At least for long enough to see my friends and family. The links are going to make me a target for anyone who has an artifact. I don't know that I want to put my sister in harm's way by being around her for long. I can't really pick up where I left off either, even if I wanted to."

  She could have offered him passage aboard the Zenith. He could have asked her. The silence stretched on though.

  "I have a favor to ask," said Nemm. "Before you go."

  "Yeah?" asked Dravus.

  "There's a man I need brought back to life," said Nemm.

  * * *

  They stared a
t the body of Lothaire, watching him breathe. He was in a small cell, laid out on the mattress in a position that was clearly posed. His hands were folded together over his chest and his feet were together and pointed straight at the ceiling.

  "Wenaru put him out," said Nemm. "Afterward, he claimed that something had gone wrong. He said he wasn't able to bring Lothaire back out of it. The deception involved a lot of terminology that I didn't listen too closely to. It was obvious that he was lying and that Lexari was complicit in it, even if he didn't outright order it. You have the domain of flesh, I need him revived so that I can get the answers to a few pressing questions."

  Dravus touched the body. He could feel the domains of flesh and blood, the former as relaxed fibers and sheets of fat, the latter as a constantly-moving fluid moving from the heart to the extremities and back. The body wasn't healthy, that much was clear just from looking a the man, but there was something wrong with the muscles as well, something that Dravus's domain intuition didn't quite tell him how to fix.

  "What did Wenaru do?" asked Dravus.

  "Something to do with blood," said Nemm. "If blood pressure drops, people pass out, but it's not the drop in blood pressure that actually causes it, it's something somewhere in the neck. He told me once, but I listened less than I should have. There's a … a nerve, something that tells the body blood pressure is low."

  Dravus closed his eyes and tried to feel the domains again. The neck had too many muscles in it. He tried to use the domain of flesh to feel his own neck, so that he could compare it with Lothaire's, but that didn't help much either. "How did Wenaru even figure this out in the first place?" asked Dravus.

  "Vivisecting hundreds of people," said Nemm. "Not something you could learn on short notice. I'm sure that there's a book somewhere that describes exactly what to do to which muscle group in order to alter a very specific nerve in some particular way."

  "What do you need from him?" asked Dravus. He looked down at Lothaire, who was breathing shallowly. The man was old, seemingly untouched by the healing that illustrati could provide. It was hard to imagine him as the leader of the Allunio.

  "He knows things," said Nemm. She touched a piece of her armor, where a bulb of glass parted for her. She pulled out a ring that immediately announced itself in the mind. It was a Harbinger artifact, one taken from Lexari's body when they'd carried him into the castle. "The artifacts are a problem. Lothaire is the one who uncovered them, or at least knows their provenance. If there are more … what the artifact does is very specific, but if the Harbingers could do one thing, we need to allow for the possibility that they can do others. If Lothaire knows, we need to know too."

  "He said something about your father," said Dravus.

  "I don't care about my father," said Nemm. "I might have been able to forgive everything else, but he sold me, like … like I was something he owned and no longer wanted. I don't care what happened to him. I don't care what triumph or tragedy Lexari was covering up."

  Dravus focused on Lothaire's body and the shape of its muscles. Something somewhere in the neck was being squeezed. Dravus first tried relaxing all the muscles there, then when that had no apparent effect, he started shrinking the muscles. They seemed to melt beneath his touch. Lothaire stirred and opened his eyes.

  "You're not Wenaru," he said slowly. He tried to move for a moment, then paused. "I can't move my neck."

  "Sorry," said Dravus. "I'll try to fix it, but there are too many complicated things there that I don't understand. I can't promise I wouldn't pinch another nerve. But for now, we need answers."

  "What does the ring do?" asked Nemm. She held it up to his view.

  "I need food," said Lothaire. "The Red Angel told me that the body begins to cannibalize itself after long enough without food. He found no problem in simply adding more flesh to my bones rather than going through the work of feeding me."

  "Later," said Nemm. "Answer my question."

  "It's a question I've been asked before," said Lothaire. "I take it something has happened to Lexari then? Am I seeing the moment before a betrayal or the moment after?"

  "After," said Nemm. "Tell me what the ring does."

  "When I told him that I didn't know, Lexari didn't believe me," said Lothaire. "I doubt you will either."

  Dravus worked at repairing Lothaire's body. It wasn't inconceivable that Nemm would want him alive at the end of their conversation.

  "Where was it found?" asked Nemm.

  "A cave," said Lothaire. "More of a subterranean structure, in truth." He licked his lips. "If not food, then water?"

  "I can do that," said Dravus. Water was one of his stronger domains; he conjured a single drop onto his palm, then expanded it until it filled his palm. With his other hand, he touched a piece of metal on his armor and formed it into a cup. He slipped the water into the cup and handed it to Lothaire.

  "How many do you have?" asked Lothaire as he took the cup. His hands were trembling.

  "I don't know," said Dravus.

  "Where was this cave?" asked Nemm. "What else was in it?"

  "Harbinger things," answered Lothaire after taking a long drink of water. "Everything we touched was branded by them, its identity delivered to the mind directly. Nothing else though. The cylinders were the only ones with any obvious effect. We tested everything else, but there was never any change, whether it be good or bad."

  "I'd have to see it all myself," said Nemm.

  "We need to negotiate," said Lothaire. "What can I give you that would ensure my life? The location of the cave, certainly. I already told Lexari as much as I knew about the locations, identities, and movements of my compatriots. That matter seems to have resolved itself."

  "You sent assassins after us," said Nemm. "After me."

  "I knew that Lexari would come, sooner rather than later," said Lothaire. "I feared him. Perhaps you wouldn't have done the same in my shoes. Perhaps you would have acted with a decade of training and accomplished your goals. We were thinkers and dreamers, not the sort of people who were trained in death. I do write some beautiful agreements though. I doubt you'd accept the offer, but if Lexari is dead, you might need someone to ensure the continuity of this kingdom."

  "It's taken care of," said Nemm. "Even if it weren't, you're right that I would reject your help."

  "Very well," said Lothaire. "Is there anything else you'd like to know before you kill me?" He seemed calm, despite the words.

  "Can I ask a question, for my own curiosity?" asked Dravus.

  Nemm nodded.

  "You were in Genthric, the day that Zerstor attacked," said Dravus. "Wealdwood described you coming to him. I don't understand why you were there."

  "It was always about more than the Iron Kingdom," said Lothaire. "We wanted to change the world. The Zenith was in Genthric to spread legends and manage finances. We were there to see how much it would take to turn the Sovento States. Those plans are stillborn now, it seems. Perhaps if I'm allowed to go free, I'll write a book on what went wrong."

  "I can save you the trouble," said Nemm. "Weakness was part of your ideology. If you'd stacked domains into a single person, you could have torn through any opposition with ease. You doomed yourself to failure from the start. You should have picked some better way of thinking, something equally seductive that would hamper you less."

  "Do you think it was for show?" asked Lothaire. "Do you think I chose the difficult path because I was trying to arrange a pleasant scene? I am not an illustrati. As one of the king's advisers, I had only enough fame to know my domain, nothing more. I never dealt in narratives, never spent effort on pursuing appearances. We chose not to make one man into a titan because we thought that path would lead to ruin."

  "And now it all lays in ruin anyway," said Nemm. "If you don't win, then your ideals don't have much meaning to anyone."

  Lothaire had no response to that.

  "I have one more question," said Dravus. "What happened to Nemm's father?" Nemm shot him a dark look, but Dravus only
shrugged. She could pretend as much as she wanted, but he didn't see what she had to gain from presenting disinterest.

  "Your father became an illustrati," Lothaire said to Nemm. "He took his own power from the stories about you. There were only scraps to go on, but in Geswein they invented tales about him."

  "I don't care," said Nemm. Her face was perfectly blank, so much that it had to have been a mask she was presenting.

  "He parlayed that into greater fame, under an assumed name," said Lothaire. "He called himself Ursi. He wore a bear's pelt. He was a villain, but a minor one, useful enough that no one was in any great hurry to put him down. He spoke of you to no one except his closest friends and then only when drunk. He got better, as the years passed. You might call it a redemption arc, but I believe it was true redemption. He was never terribly pleasant, but he became a hero in his own right, if a minor one. Four years ago, he made it known that he was trying to track down the Zenith. That was the last that anyone heard of him."