Respectant

by Florian Armaselu

  “The Wraith knows how to play his game. From what we saw in the Eagle’s Nest, he may even become our Duke. Peyris will be safe.” Emich did not see the pain in Costa’s eyes, and raised his glass again.

  ***

  Albert’s convoy left Peyris early in the morning, with the speed of hunted men, even when they had no idea how close Codrin and Nicolas were to learning of their escape. Five hundred soldiers, Octavian and Reymont accompanied him. The Sages would return after the Duke was settled in Amiuns. The Duke also wrote to his Spatar and ordered him to move the second part of the army back from the border with Loxburg, and closer to the Duke’s refuge. The Sages did not want to leave with him, but Albert insisted, and they could not get round it. The trip to Amiuns and back to Peyris would hopefully take less than five days. They would be back in time to prepare the surrender of Peyris to Loxburg. Even the fat Duke rode a horse, something he had not tried for some years. After a two-hour ride, Albert almost fell from his horse, and even his panic could not keep him in the saddle. They had to wait almost an hour for the carriage.

  Amiuns became a crowded town with so many soldiers and servants pouring in. And the castle was small. They arrived in the morning, and a day later Albert was still complaining.

  “How could you bring me to such a place? This is not a castle fit for a Duke.” He pointed angrily at Reymont and Octavian with his fat forefinger.

  I have to bear this toad for a while, Octavian thought. Hopefully not for long. “My Duke, we all share your discomfort, but an uncomfortable castle is preferable to a luxurious grave. Don’t you think?”

  Albert opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and closed it again.

  Toad, or fish; it’s all the same. “I am glad that we are in agreement.” Octavian smiled and left the Duke’s small suite, followed by Reymont. “You have no idea how that creature rattles my nerves.”

  “What? Only five days with him and you are rattled?” Reymont grinned.

  “You are used to it. Anyway, we will leave tomorrow for Peyris. It is time to open the gates for Loxburg. At least he is a real Duke.”

  “Won’t you reconsider Cleyre’s role?” Reymont asked, tentatively.

  “I’ve already told you that we are under the agreement with Manuc, and that you will move to the King’s court when the time is right.”

  The Sages left Amiuns the same day Codrin attacked Peyris.

  Chapter 17 – Siena

  Siena burst into Nard’s room, and she started to speak before he could recover from the intrusion. “This is it,” she said, elated, tapping the old book in her other hand. “The Sanctuary, a place where the Talants preserved things, some of them so powerful that it’s difficult to imagine them. Magic. Magical things.” She shook the old book vigorously, barely missing his head.

  Since Sybille, the Third Light of the Frankis Wanderers, had given her the Talant dictionary, Siena had spent most of her time studying it, without telling anyone except Nard, who had become her lover. Even her sister, Amelie, didn’t know. There were some similarities between Aron’s third son and Bucur; both knew how to court a woman. Nard had been a prisoner in Poenari since Codrin conquered Aron’s stronghold, Seged, but he was not confined to a cell. Sensing that Nard was not as bad as Aron and his other son, Codrin allowed him to move freely inside the fortress.

  “What kind of magic?” Nard asked. He had started to learn Talant language, but he was well behind Siena.

  “All kinds of magic.” Siena smiled, a feeling of power sweeping through her. “I am glad that Sybille gave me the dictionary, not Codrin.” She chose to forget that her cousin had given her the manuscript for Codrin. It belonged to Dochia, and Ada, the Second Light of the Arenian Wanderers, had received a Vision that Codrin needed to learn the language and find the Sanctuary of Hispeyne. Siena convinced Sybille that Codrin did not deserve the dictionary, that he could not be trusted, though this was not about the manuscript; it was more a rebellious reaction, because she resented his takeover of Poenari.

  “Look what he did to Mara,” she said to Sybille during her previous visit. “He let her fall pregnant and refused to marry her.” That day, Sybille was in a hurry to return her Hive, and she left the manuscript with Siena until she could learn more about Codrin. The Wanderer didn’t understand what had happened between Mara and Codrin and wanted more time before deciding about the dictionary. From the Alba Hive, Sybille was sent by Drusila, the First Light of the Frankis Wanderers, to Litvonia, so she could not visit Poenari again for a while.

  “Do you really think that magic exists? Nard asked, half skeptical, half willing to believe.

  “How do you think the Wanderers can see the future? They use the White Light. That’s powerful magic too. I am going to see Grandfather. I have a surprise for him. I know now what Poenari was, four thousand years ago. It was not built to be a fortress. I will leave you to guess. I already gave you some clues.” She smiled and stormed out of the room, leaving him alone, beset with weird thoughts.

  Siena burst into her grandfather’s office with the same exuberance and enthusiasm; Bernart did not react as Nard had. He had more composure and a poor sense of hearing. “Yes, Siena,” he smiled at her.

  “Grandfather, I know what Poenari was during the Talant Empire.”

  “So you have learned that it was not a fortress.”

  “You knew?”

  “I was not sure, and my idea was so strange that I did not dare tell anyone. Let’s see if we have come up with the same explanation.” He stood up and went to a small library shelf containing long thin tubes of paper, and took one of them out, followed by Siena’s questioning eyes – she already knew everything that was hidden there: Poenari’s most secret documents. Some of them many hundreds of years old, some even older. He opened the tube and extracted a roll of paper.

  “Help me,” Bernart asked Siena and unrolled the paper with great care; it was fragile. The sheet was large and looked like a sort of map. She used four small objects to pin the corners of the map to the desk. “This is Poenari,” he pointed at the map. “The map is very old; it was drawn long before the Alban Empire crumbled. This is the main wall.” His finger moved in a semi-circle on the map. “These are the basalt ridges that form our eastern and western defense walls. From the valley, they look like towers. The Albans built the top of the wall and the city, but the main wall was built by the Talants. You know all this; I mention it only to give you some perspective. So what was Poenari built for?”

  “It was a dam.” A smile settled on her lips, and Bernart ruffled her hair. “All the dams in Frankis put together are smaller than this one. But there are plenty of lakes for fishing and not much cultivable land in the area. Why make such a large dam? Even in Alban times there was no need for such a thing. Why did they build it?”

  “More than a thousand years ago, someone translated an old Talant document that contains an answer. I don’t understand much of it. The dam was built to create magic. A kind of ghosts. The Talants used them as servants.”

  “Ghosts?” Siena asked, confused.

  “From what we could infer, the ghosts were able to make light or could move carts without the need for animals.”

  “Well.” That was all Siena could say, then she suddenly remembered what she had learned about the Sanctuary in Hispeyne. “You are right, Grandfather. This is magic. Something similar to the White Light of the Wanderers. The Talants used a lot of magic for transport, weapons, and Fate knows what else.”

  “That may be,” Bernart agreed. “The walls here look like they grew from the ground in one piece. There are no stones and no mortar in them, only that strange material, resembling stone and iron. Tomorrow, show me where you read about the dam. But let’s play a game now,” he said with a mischievous smile. “Close your eyes, and imagine yourself on the wall. Can you see the lake and how things were when the Talant Empire was still here?”

  “How can I do that?”

  “Maybe this can help.” Bernart smiled gen
tly, understanding the confusion in her mind. A long time ago, when he had learned about the dam and what it could produce, the same confusion ruled his own mind. It was troubling to learn that such powerful things existed, and he rejected the idea at first. He had seen paintings of carts that were as large as a small house. They were not pulled by horses, but from the painting it was clear that they were moving; their wheels were as wide as a man’s height. Maybe Siena is right, and this about magic, not ghosts.

  The old man brought another tube from which he extracted another sheet, which was different from anything else in the library, and she knew most of their archive by heart. It was a very old painting, but in some places the colors were still vivid. Involuntarily, Siena touched it, and remembered, from previous experience, that it was not paper at all. While it was flexible, it had a much harder consistency than paper, and in the places where the painting had faded, the thing was translucent. She rubbed gently at a colored patch and felt no paint there at all; the thing was flat, like printed paper.

  With her new understanding, she looked at the painting: Poenari did not yet have the small wall on top of the dam, and behind it, there was a long lake, narrowing into the distance. “It’s so hard to comprehend how large it is,” Siena whispered, trying to understand. Everything looked like the painter had viewed the dam from the top of a very tall mountain, but there was no such mountain around Poenari. “This part, with all those hillocks; that’s missing now.” Her finger moved across the painting, from the wall toward the end of the lake, and she felt pleasure touching the smooth material.

  “Something destroyed the hillocks, leaving only the ridges that are now the eastern and western mountain walls of Poenari. The small river, which filled the dam, now flows five miles from the wall. Lerin River is here now,” he tapped the map in an area were no river was painted.

  “What could destroy such a large ridge?” Siena muttered.

  “We don’t know, but in the document I mentioned it’s written that it was blown up during the White Salt invasion that destroyed the Talant Empire.”

  “Only magic could do this. Very strong magic.” Was it magic that destroyed the Talant Empire? Are there such strong weapons in the Sanctuary? They can help me.

  “I can’t wait to tell Codrin everything.”

  The smile left Siena’s lips. “Maybe we should not tell him everything.”

  “He is the Seigneur of Poenari. In fact, he is a Grand Seigneur now. And he is a man of quality. I don’t think we should hide such important things from him. We are fair people, here.”

  “Yes, Grandfather,” Siena said meekly.

  The picture of the dam made her even more eager to learn everything about the Talants, or at least everything she could learn from the few books in their hidden library, to which only Bernart, Siena, her sister, Amelie, and Codrin had access. Only I know the Talant language. Nard has just started to learn it too. Should I tell Grandfather? No, I will wait until I learn more and surprise him. I know where the Sanctuary is, and I don’t know. The place is described in the book, but without a map… She closed her eyes, searching for a solution. How stupid I am. We have old maps, we just have to learn how to read them. Those maps were indeed different, colored and covered with many strange symbols. She ran to the hidden library, then she ran back to Bernart’s office to pick the key. The old man was no longer there, so she did not need to explain herself.

  The maps, which she had first seen a long time ago, were still there, and judging by the dust, no one had touched them for some years. There were only six maps; she quickly found the one marked Hispeyne, and unrolled it on the floor, in front of the window. For all her knowledge, she still scratched her head. It did not help that the colors were now faint and that in places the writing had disappeared. Reading the names of places, or at least what she thought were names, told her nothing; they were all too strange.

  She went out and returned with some scraps of paper. She copied all the words written in a rectangle in the left upper corner of the map. One by one, she wrote the Talant words and their equivalents from the dictionary: Legend, city, river, lake. She extracted more than thirty words. Once again, it surprised her how many words were similar in both languages: city, which they called satul, river was riul, mountain was munty and lake was lac. The list of similarities was quite long. There were words for which she could find no equivalent, words which she really struggled to pronounce and could not guess at the meaning of.

  That night it took her a long time to fell asleep; the magic able to move carts swirled in her mind. What about weapons? What could we do with magic weapons?

  Alone, hidden even from Nard, she spent most of the week trying to find every passage about weapons in the old Talant books. Fortunately, there were only thirty-two such books in their library, so she was able to read through them relatively fast. Some of them she had to leave aside; while the letters were the same, she could not understand even one word. The Talants must have had several languages, she thought. Unfortunately, only two of them described weapons, and they were too strange, and most of them were too large to be carried by a man or woman. What could she do with a weapon that looked larger than a cart or a house? When she felt confident enough, Siena went to Nard again.

  “I know more about the magic weapons,” she said, and opened the book at a picture. They were alone in his room, late in the evening. “This one uses a sort of … Red Fire. It throws a bolt of fire that kills several men at once, even when they have armor. And it fires at a faster frequency than a bow.”

  “But if we don’t have magic…”

  “I have some White Light. But they wrote here,” she tapped the book, “that the magic is already suffused in the weapon. You need only to open it. With two such weapons we could destroy any army that laid siege to Poenari. No one would take Poenari from us.” Siena still dreamt of great balls being given in the large hall, and imagined herself the Signora of Poenari, giving the starting signal, dressed in a sumptuous light blue dress.

  Nard knew what she really meant. “Codrin is not that weak.”

  “What could he do against such weapons? Nothing. Think, Nard. Think. We can be the masters of Poenari, not just prisoners.”

  “You are not a prisoner,” Nard said. He needed more time to think. He was indeed a prisoner, one lucky enough to walk free in the fortress. Things could change, though, and while Siena was dreaming, he knew that few men could stand against Codrin.

  “I am,” she said firmly, and laced her arms around his neck. “Don’t be afraid, Nard. Those weapons will bring us freedom.” Pulling his head closer, she kissed him, and that stopped Nard’s thoughts. At least for a while. Then she caressed him, and his thoughts took a longer pause.

  “We will leave in one week. I will sneak you out through the tunnel. We need to take provisions for a few weeks, and I will take a hundred galbeni from the Visterie. No one will know. At least not straightaway,” Siena said, early in the morning, while she was dressing. “I must go now. Our little plan must remain secret.” She kissed him once more, ready to leave.

  “Wouldn’t be better to leave next spring?” Nard asked, thinking of the winter ahead.

  “Sybille told me that it’s much warmer in Hispeyne. They don’t really have winters there. Well, they have, but it looks like spring here; no snow and no ice.

  I don’t think I like this, Nard thought, watching her leave. If Codrin captures me again… But perhaps she is right about the weapons. And if she is not right? We could stay in Castis, in the Pirenes Mountains. Mother had a fortified house there. It was supposed to be mine. Third sons get almost nothing. Even when Raul died, everything went to Bucur. Raul was different… We got on well together. We both took after Mother. Bucur took after Father, that’s why neither of them likes me. Let’s hope Codrin doesn’t catch me. Even if we get the magic weapons, we still can settle in Castis. Or perhaps she will give up.

  Siena was determined, and three days later, she came into his room again. �
��Look,” she said, her eyes glinting. Swiftly, she emptied her bag on the bed. A string of metallic sounds followed and gold glittered in the low light of the candle. “Ninety-two galbeni and fifty silvers. We are rich. We leave in two days, through the secret tunnel.” She kissed Nard, before he could say anything, and left the room in a hurry. Nard was in an even greater hurry to hide the coins before someone came in and saw them.

  The evening before the night of their escape, Siena went to see her grandfather. She found him dreaming, his eyes open.

  “I had a Vision,” he said, “Codrin is going to Peyris.”

  “So what?” she said, and her dark eyes glittered with derision. “He does what he likes without asking us. We should do the same.”

  “Siena,” Bernart said sharply. “Codrin is our Seigneur, and he has restored some of Poenari’s past glory.”

  “I will restore even more of it,” she said, irritated, and left the room, followed by her grandfather’s sad smile. Seeing his smile, for the first time she thought about how her departure would upset him. I will leave him a letter. And he will be happy when I return Poenari to him. Yet his sad smile haunted her, when she arrived in her room. He will change his mind after I make him the Seigneur of Poenari. She shook her head to convince herself. Opening one of the old books she would take with her, she moved her finger over the drawing of the weapon she hoped to find in the Sanctuary. That strengthened her resolve. On my way back, I will contact Maud. She is against Codrin, and our magic weapons will enhance my status. What if I convince her to replace Bucur with Nard? They are brothers after all. Maybe I can be more than Signora of Poenari.

  A little after midnight, Siena and Nard entered the secret tunnel, which no one had used for more than forty years and, with the first light of the morning, they left Poenari.

  Chapter 18 – Codrin