Ardent

by Florian Armas

  How? My lips moved soundlessly again.

  “Why are you asking? You know already.”

  Do I? I inhaled, and counted to ten. Cold, the air rasped through my nose, through my gorge. A window must be open. I exhaled. I inhaled, counted, exhaled, repeated the pattern. The air is indeed cold. It’s winter. Where am I? My inner cogitations were giving me a sensation of being alive. Am I? I inhaled. Meditation trance. I counted and exhaled. Is it?

  “You are almost there,” the no woman no man voice encouraged me.

  Where?

  “Drink this.” A gentle hand raised my head, and something bitter slipped through my lips. “You may not like it.”

  No, I don’t like it. “Who” ...are you?

  “You have to ask properly.”

  I can’t. “Who” ...am I?

  “Who? Who? Who?” the voice mocked me. “I thought you were human. It may be that I was wrong. Are you a parrot? A poor fluffy thing repeating words which have no meaning in its mind? Is that what you want to be?”

  “Shut” ...up!

  “Did you say something, parrot?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Let’s try again. Who am I?”

  “I don’t” ...know.

  “That’s not an answer. Again. Who am I?” That hand pressed gently on my left temple. “Tell me,” the no woman no man whispered in my ear, and I felt its warm breath on me. “Tell me, Fourth Light of the Wanderers.”

  “Someone I know?”

  “You’ve started think. And who are you?”

  The Fourth Light. Who is the Fourth Light? I am, but who I really am? Anger rose inside me, and I felt my fingers flexing slightly, when all I wanted was to crush something. I… I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t… Doc… Doc… Dochia. I am Dochia. Who is Dochia? “I am … Dochia.”

  “Welcome back, Dochia.”

  “Who is Dochia?”

  “You.” The no woman no man touched my temple.

  “Me … but who is Dochia?”

  “That’s enough for today. Sleep now, Dochia.”

  I slept, or I thought that I slept, and I dreamt, or I thought that I dreamt, of a young girl running barefoot on the grass under a bright sun in the mountains. It smelled of wind and unknown flowers. And I ran, and ran, eyeing the birds in the sky. It was too late when I saw the precipice; I was already falling. “Nooooo!” My too-large clothes were fluttering in the wind. I was still falling, and the water below came closer and closer. It was cold when I splashed into the water. With a last effort I breathed, then submerged. From lack of air I gasped, and cold water filled my mouth.

  I opened my eyes, trying to find a way out.

  “Did you dream?” the woman sitting close to my bed asked.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “What happened to me?”

  “You dreamt,” she smiled.

  “And before that?”

  “You are not so young, so many things happened before that,” she laughed.

  “Ada?”

  “Who else?”

  “I was wounded.” My hand touched my ribs; there was a bandage under my nightshirt.

  “Nothing to worry about there. Your main wound was inside your head.”

  “Meriaduk.”

  “I heard you speaking that name in your dreams.”

  “The Great Priest of the Serpent. Where is the Maletera?”

  “What is a Maletera?”

  “That warm stone that Dorian gave me. Did I kill him?” I suddenly remembered.

  “Almost.”

  “Do not touch that stone. It bonds your mind to Meriaduk, and...”

  “And?”

  “He asked me to obey.” I breathed hard, trying to remember. “He forced me to become a Serpentist. It was like he was taking over my mind.”

  “Did he?” Ada was speaking calmly, but her eyes were fixed on me intently.

  Did he? “I think not.” I tried to calm my breath and to remember. “He asked me to help Dorian put the Maletera in your hand to convert you too.”

  “You helped him,” Ada grinned.

  What?

  “You put a knife in Dorian’s eye. It improved the situation a lot. We did not fare too well,” she sighed.

  “Was it my fault?”

  “Your fault? Without you, my dear, I would have been a Serpentist now. A great fault indeed. But for most of our sisters, it was too late,” she whispered.

  “Are they Serpentists now?”

  “Poor sisters, they did not survive.” Her voice trembled for a moment, and she breathed deeply. “Only the Second Light of Silvania escaped alive, but Ana’s wound was not so light. She will live, though.” Ada touched my hand. “I think it’s time for you to eat something.”

  “I feel weak,” I complained and felt like a child.

  “Of course, my dear. You’ve stayed two weeks in that bed. Let me help you.” She lent me her arm, and I walked hesitantly to the table.

  A hot soup was waiting for me there. I breathed deeply, and the broth’s aroma filled my nostrils. “I almost forgot how good a soup can be.” Trembling a little, my hand brought the spoon to my mouth and I fought hard not to gulp. I was hungry. Ada let me eat in silence; her eyes not leaving me alone, not even for a moment. “I don’t know if I dreamt it or it really happened,” I said, when I finished the soup, “but in my last vision, two more Assassins entered the room where we were fighting.” I am still hungry...

  “You did not dream it.” Ada smiled bitterly. “A second Assassin Triangle visited us. Our guards were about to kill them, but they came to warn us that Dorian was no longer part of them. He became a Serpentist, like one third of the Assassins. And they did not become Serpentists because Meriaduk used the Maletera on them. It was of their own will. The Timurid branch of the nomads was formed by some Assassin deserters three hundred years ago, something that we’ve learned a little late. Baraki’s ancestor was one of them, and that may complicate things that are already too complicated.”

  “Baraki may have the Blue Light.”

  “And Baraki may have the White Light too,” Ada sighed. “We have another contender for the Seer.”

  Baraki, the Seer... I breathed deeply, to calm my mind, then stood up like an old woman, and went to the window, and for a while, I let my body enjoy the warmth coming through the glass. It was sunny, as only in the high mountains it could be, and I opened the window. The sky was a vivid blue, with no traces of clouds, and frigid air flowed in the room. The sun was going down behind the peaks. The cold was refreshing. If Baraki becomes the Seer... I still hope for Codrin. I became too attached to him. Baraki is strong, but Codrin maybe even stronger. He accomplished more than Baraki did at his age. And he was mostly alone. Very few people knew the things Codrin stirred in Frankis to save Severin and get Saliné. If Orban would know who started the last year war. Is Cantemir aware? I don’t think so. I am now in Silvania... Frankis can wait.

  “What happened to the Maletera?” I turned toward Ada, who seemed unperturbed by my wandering mind.

  “The Assassins told us that it was a Talant artifact. From them, the more you go east, the more Talant things survived. I wished to know this earlier; there are two ruins I know east of Arenia. I will send an expedition there, in spring. From Dorian, there is even a larger Maletera in the Prainos, the most sacred part of the Temple Doom in Nerval where Meriaduk prays. That big thing controls the smaller ones that Meriaduk sends around. Or so it seems.”

  “What happened to the Maletera?” I repeated.

  “We’ve destroyed it,” Ada sighed. “How much I desired to keep and study the thing, it was too dangerous. We know nothing about its functioning apart that it can transfer thoughts at distance.” She remained silent, her black eyes staring at me.

  “Good,” I sighed too. “I ... I was afraid.”

  “Yes, you had reasons to be,” she said gently, but everything past now.

  “It was not the transferring thoughts that I feared. It was the way Meriaduk tried to control my mi
nd. He almost succeeded.”

  “I know it is painful to you.” Ada came to the window too, and placed a hand on my shoulder. “But we need to know more about that. How did you ... survive?”

  “I don’t really know. I did not fight. It was... It was the first thing that came to me: don’t test the stone; pretend that it accomplished its task. How much power is in that stone? And how that it’s still working after four thousand years?”

  “We don’t know,” Ada stated simply. “Dorian did not know, or he refused to tell us. Yet, he revealed some things.” She smiled, and I stared at her, the Assassins could not be coerced by force. “Dorian is a proud man, and willing to spread knowledge about the Serpent powers. Too much pride opens even the tightest mouths,” she laughed. “Even half blind, he still tried to convert us. Not that we know too much, but I do know that you need some more rest. You are so pale, my dear,” she touched my face. “Don’t worry; I will still bother you with more questions about that cursed Maletera. Go and rest now.”

  “It baffles me, how these new gods are born from naught,” I said, staring through the window at the myriad stars filling the night sky. It was the third day after becoming conscious again, and my mind was already healed, or at least I hoped that. Ada was right; the wound in my ribs was not a real issue; I had worse injuries in the past. With all my hopes, and lack of visible effects, my mind still was a concern for me and for everybody in the Hive; there was no way to foresee what hidden effects the Maletera could have on one’s mind. No one told me that plainly, but I guessed it in their glances, in the uneasy gestures they tried to hide from me. So many stars, I struggled to reign on my worries. They were always more numerous when looking up in the mountains than in the plain. Because we are closer? Or because the sky is clearer? “We had Fate for four thousand years and now the Serpent is sneaking into our world.”

  “No god is born these days. There is only one nameless God, born at the beginning of time, spread everywhere. Take it with a grain of salt, as with everything else we know about our gods. It is present in that table, the mountain behind the house, the eagle in the sky, even inside us. Its name is only a human convention. Fate, Serpent, The Mother, The Red Eye, whatever; a long row of names from the dawn of the civilization. We need to humanize it, to speak with it. You can’t speak to ... whatever, my dear.” Ada gestured loosely. “Through the history, all the gods wanted the same from us: be good, don’t steal, don’t kill... I wish we could be like they want us to be. Like we were meant to be.”

  “The name,” I said, thoughtfully. “The name must have a meaning.”

  “It has. The Serpent constellation is also named Helix. Look there,” she pointed east to the constellation. “It’s a spiral, and you name it to your own taste. I heard that far in the south it is called the Worm. What good brings to name your god the Worm? The nomads have chosen the Serpent and that choice will drive their future. If they win, it will mark us too. The serpent means a slippery path driven by the desire to conquer and rule. Violence and wisdom. The wrong type of wisdom, rising from the dark side of our minds. Helix would mean evolution. This is something we have to fight for: to name the new god Helix.”

  “And Fate?”

  “Fate means resignation. That’s why we did not develop much, and it ruled us for almost four thousand years, two full cycles. The Alban Empire was a paltry child of the Talant, but there may be a meaning in all this. After the Great Salt invasion, most of the land became uninhabitable, and we needed stability and survival more than evolution. We are not really able to comprehend the Talant books. We know the writing, but some things go beyond our understanding. For forty years I tried and tried. I always have a Talant book with me,” Ada shrugged.

  “May I see it?” I asked, eagerly. “I don’t know their language,” I added quickly. “Just curiosity.”

  “There it is.” Ada pointed to an old book sitting on the other side of the table, and I walked around the table to examine it.

  It did not look too differently from ours, and my hand touched it timidly. Nothing happened, and that disappointed me. My fingers slid further over the delicate cover. Even after four thousand years it was still pleasant to touch. “What kind of leather is this?”

  “We don’t know. It belongs to a strange animal. In the Talant books, it is called ... ‘chemist’. Don’t ask me what kind of animal that is; there is no picture of it, and no one saw it, but apart from animals nothing can grow leather, so it must be an animal. An animal larger than a whale; maybe one of those which left behind bones the size of an elephant. The chemist produced many things that we don’t understand. Like milk of different colors, used for different purposes. And even stranger, the chemist fed on oleum. Do you know that black tar that bursts out from the ground in some places? We use it to grease the inner part of a chariot wheel.”

  “That’s poisonous.”

  “For us, yes. The chemists flourished on it.”

  “Strange animals,” I shrugged.

  I opened the book, still hoping for some kind of revelation. Inside, the pages were made of paper. Almost white and dense, even now, delicate and strong at the same time, but paper nevertheless. The printed letters were not much different from ours, only their quality was better. It could be just fashion... We had periods with flowery letters, other were more austere. I could read, but the sense of the words eluded me. “The letters are similar.”

  “Cerves wrote a book nine hundred years ago. He said that both our language and writing come from the Talants. And it seems that language changes faster than writing. He may be right, but we will know it only after a hundred or more generations,” Ada laughed.

  “How many Talant books do you have in Alba?”

  “Just two hundred and twelve,” Ada sighed. “Half of them are incomplete. I have read most of them, and some made my mind spin helplessly.”

  “Did you translate them?”

  “We are not allowed.”

  “By whom?” I asked, surprised.

  “By nobody,” Ada shrugged. “A long time ago, you could have been burned just for possessing such books; they were considered evil.”

  What? I frowned, staring at Ada.

  “There is some sense to it. The Talant Empire used powerful weapons that could wipe out a large city, and their cities were much larger. Not just destroyed, more than that. Razed from the ground. People, wood, stones, just vanishing without trace into a column of white smoke going deep into the sky, taking the shape of a huge mushroom. That kind of knowledge may be dangerous.”

  “The White Salt invaders.”

  “We thought the same, but there is no one still alive to confirm that. The White Salt warriors used such powerful weapons and destroyed many places on our continent. The Talants cursed them for using those weapons, and called it ‘genocide’, whatever that means, but employed them too with no shame. We are not sure, but from some old pictures, those weapons were large arrows able to fly very far. We have no idea what bows they used. If we can believe what Meldonius wrote in his Hidden History, more than one thousand years ago, the arrows left a trail behind, like a shooting star. He even said that the Zarand Mountains in Frankis – where your Alba Hive is built – were born when such weapons hit the ground and started some volcanoes. It’s so difficult to understand.”

  “Magic?” I frowned.

  “Magic?” Ada frowned too. “Magic doesn’t exist, my dear. It’s just a fancy name uninitiated people give to things they can’t explain. For us they are just unknown things, and one day we may be able to understand more.”

  Is it really true? I liked stories about magic. “I would like to learn the language.” Half ashamed, I swept my thumb over the delicate leather of the book, and my desire grew even more.

  “We have a full winter for that, my dear. A full winter and not much to do, but I warn you: this is a novel,” she tapped the book with her finger. “One of the weirdest I have ever read. The main character travels back in time. I’d never thought about
that until I read it. He uses a ‘machine’, a kind of chariot, I suppose; there is no picture. Not that I’m certain I would understand it better,” Ada laughed. “There are books with pictures. Some show people or animals, some show things that look meaningless to us.”

  “That would be interesting,” I said thoughtfully. “You could solve many problems by going back in time. Like Baraki, or the Serpentists.”

  “And who decides wrong from right, my dear? You, or Baraki? I am halfway through the novel, and I have understood less than a tenth of it. You may go back in time to ‘solve’ the young Baraki before he is able to do much harm, but solve him and his children would vanish too. Would that be a fair thing?”

  “It was just a thought,” I shrugged. “This mochine...”

  “Machine.”

  “This machine is as true as the flying horse of Pander, or the burning sword of Badun.”

  “It may be as true as your flying horse, my dear. It may be. But it may be like that chemist animal. Who knows? Ready for the first lesson?”

  “Yes.” I smiled thinly, mostly because my mind had become somehow nebulous.

  It was the last day of the winter, a sunny one. Through the window, the sun was warming, a pleasant drowsiness flowing inside me. I was sitting on the large sash of the window reading Ada’s Talant book. It was bending my mind. The language itself was not hard to learn. There was some similarity with our language and Ada was a good teacher. The dictionary and grammar book, printed some one thousand years ago, helped too. Even the name of the book was strange: Some Enjoy it Twice. The novel was about a man traveling back in time using a strange type of chariot named a machine. It was a common word, like we have carts and phaetons, not something named ‘Machine’. He traveled only to enjoy seeing things from the past. While I could understand his desire, I would have preferred to fix some things that had gone wrong. There were many wrong things in the Talant Empire. Some I understood, some I supposed. The Talants were more civilized than us, but sometimes that only meant more sophisticated weapons to kill more people. Some weapons resembled a crossbow, so small they could fit in your hand. They threw a small bolt made of lead to a distance I could only dream off.