Tessili Revenge

by Robin Stephen

  ◈

  Jey walked through the entry hatch, carrying an armful of firewood. As the narrow hallway opened into the large chamber, she marveled at how the large space had changed.

  The floor was no longer covered in grit. Holdam had applied himself to helping Lokim. All the old, dead brillbane bushes had been pulled out of the ground along the far wall. Fresh soil had been hauled in and turned to mix with the old. Now, Holdam stood next to Lokim, holding a pouch of brillbane seeds and watching as Lokim set them into the damp earth one by one, closed his eyes, and caused them to sprout.

  It would be several months before the plants were mature, of course, but they had instructions from the Tessilari to do all they could to prepare this place for occupation. If things went according to plan, this shelter would be a back-up. If things didn’t, it might end up being the central hub of everything.

  Jey walked into the vast space, watching her shadow track her as she moved. She added her load to the long stack of wood, sorting and arranging the pieces based on size. Off in the distance, she heard Elle and Biala speaking in low voices. The child, whose name was Marim, was asleep. She’d been asleep since she’d arrived. Her tessila had not come back through the stitchring, but the girl lived on. So he must as well.

  Three days had passed since they’d taken their message to the King and Queen. Three days of waiting, not knowing whether they needed to prepare to defend themselves against Masidon and the diod both, or if they would have an ally. Jey found waiting intolerable. She’d busied herself as best she could. Fortunately, there were an endless number of tasks to keep her occupied around this place.

  Jey was not entirely convinced the Tessilari had done the right thing. To her, it seemed they’d played their hand too aggressively, leaving nothing in reserve. She also felt they’d forgiven too much. They’d revealed their own existence and the existence of the academy all in one go. Jey’s biggest fear was the repercussions for the students behind the school’s walls. What if the King and Queen decided the High Priest’s little secret posed too big a threat and sent the army to destroy the place? And what about justice? The Tessilari’s treaty offered forgiveness, a promise to let the horrors of the past go unaccounted for. It had not stipulated what should become of the High Priest or the handlers who had enslaved Jey and her peers. Were his crimes, then, to go unaccounted for?

  Jey had seen the list of demands before it had been handed over. It had been short but comprehensive. First, the Tessilari wanted full control of the academy, as well as all texts and students. Second, they wanted a new law enacted, one that would make the killing of brillbane, tessili, or any human showing aptitude for magics into a capital crime.

  In return, the Tessilari would forgive the people of Masidon for their betrayal, for the way they had murdered or enslaved anyone of magical talent for generations. Additionally, they would stand with Masidon against the diod.

  Jey knew they faced a crisis. She knew asking for too much could tip the balance and cause the King and Queen to reject the treaty. Still, the thought of Nylan walking free ate at her heart like an infected wound.

  Jey set the last of her wood on the stack and turned, her eyes searching the shadows that clung to the edges of the chamber. Treyam was not in evidence. He spent most of his time by the fire these last days, scribing furiously to keep up with the flood of communication being sent their way from the Valley of Mist.

  Jey walked slowly across the clean floor and crouched by the sleeping child’s head. Biala had found clean clothing for the girl, brushed and rebraided her long hair, cleaned her of mud and grime, and otherwise done all that could be done to make her comfortable. But the girl’s condition was shocking. She was pitifully thin. Worse than that was her neck. When Jey had first seen her, a metal collar had hung there. It had chafed badly for the entire time she’d worn it, which must have been weeks. Scabs had formed only to tear open again. Several areas had been infected, oozing pale yellow puss. Treyam had healed her, but even healing magic could only undo so much damage. The girl would bear a pale silver scar around her throat for the rest of her life.

  Looking at the child in the shifting sunlight, Jey rubbed at her own inner arm. This girl didn’t bear the scars of hundreds of needle pricks, at least, because she was too young to have begun to go on opportunities.

  Jey touched the child’s forehead. It was neither warm nor cool – a good sign, she supposed. Then, with a frustrated sigh, Jey straightened and headed towards the sound of Elle and Biala’s voices.

  She was halfway across the chamber when footsteps sounded in the entry hatch, moving in rapid staccato. Jey turned, and Treyam swept in, his long coat flaring out behind him. His face was pale, and he held a sheet of parchment in his hand. He saw Jey, and walked to her. There was something electric but unreadable in his amber eyes.

  She accepted the paper. It was an announcement, hastily printed on cheap stock, the letters slightly misaligned, the ink smeared. Jey read the headline, then looked at Treyam. He spoke, his voice a strange mix of sadness and hope. “News just reached Deramor. The diod has taken an entire village.”

  Jey blinked at the words, not quite able to comprehend. An entire village? Dead? In one day?

  Treyam continued, voice grim. “If this doesn’t sway the King and Queen in our favor, nothing will.”

  Jey handed the paper back to Treyam, not wanting to look at the words any longer. She finally asked a question she should have asked days before but hadn’t due to a reluctance to reveal her own ignorance. “Treyam,” she said, voice low, “what is a diod?”

  Treyam, eyes troubled, looked away towards the fire. He blinked and shrugged. “No one really knows,” he said. “So much knowledge was lost in the Two Wars.” He paused, fiddling with one of the buttons on his coat. Jey waited, knowing silence was the best way to draw him out. Finally, with a sigh, he continued. “Some among the Tessilari believe they were an accident – a work of magic gone wrong. Others believe they are a weapon sent against us by another people. Whatever the case, one thing is certain. Their only purpose is destruction. Unchecked, this diod will ravage the land until there is nothing left to kill.”

  ◈

  Nylan no longer walked with a limp. His body moved with mechanical ease as he strode down the narrow lane between the rows of small houses. His knee, which had never recovered from the crushing blow Elle had dealt him the night she and Jey had escaped from the academy, worked with a smooth action.

  Had Nylan been curious about this, he might have stopped to examine himself. He might have rolled up his pant leg and observe how his knee had changed. Where before his right leg had been made of flesh, just like his left leg, now it was something else entirely. The area around the ruined joint had gone hard and solid. Blood no longer pumped through veins. From just above the knee down, Nylan’s leg was solid as stone and nearly as indestructible. So too was a portion of his right shoulder, where the diod’s clawlike hand had gripped him moments after it emerged from its prison of centuries. There were several other hard spots on his body as well. There was a place on his left wrist where he’d been stabbed by the young woman he’d carried back to be the diod’s first meal in centuries. There was a place on his ribs where the squirming boy who’d been its second had landed a hard kick before Nylan had subdued him.

  Nylan hadn’t noticed the changes. He didn’t notice much of anything anymore. His head was full of the whispering thoughts of the diod. He heard them constantly. They filled him with information – ancient secrets he almost, but not quite, understood. On the surface of the thoughts were desires. These desires had become Nylan’s sole focus.

  Generations of Tessilari scholars had debated the question of whether people taken by the diod were dead or alive. Nylan’s heart still beat in his chest, and he moved freely through the world. But he no longer needed to eat. He no longer felt pain. As parts of his body ceased to function, whether through injury or lack of nutrition, they would harden, turning solid like his leg. Eve
ntually he would become what the Tessilari called a hardened man – a creature of incredible strength, only made stronger by injury, nearly impossible to kill.

  Nylan wasn’t worried about these distinctions. The song of the diod was enough for him. His own thoughts, if they still existed at all, were drowned out by the constant whisper. The diod had work for him. The diod would have work for him for the rest of his days. He would work for the diod because the thought of doing anything else would never occur to him.

  Right now, more than anything, the diod was hungry. It had shown incredible foresight and restraint, using the bulk of its meagre energy stores to convert Nylan instead of merely consuming him outright. For the first two days, the diod had only been able to move at a sluggish pace, drifting through the forest in its severely weakened state. But each meal Nylan provided made it stronger. Finally, it was beginning to store enough vitality to make some real progress.

  They’d arrived in the first village in the middle of the night, Nylan walking, the diod stalking behind on withered legs, a creature of shadows and purple light.

  They’d reached the center of the village and the diod’s dark light had grown stronger. It had sent out a pulse that had locked the sleeping people around them in their slumber. From there, it had been child’s play. Nylan had only to walk into each home, collect the village occupants from their beds, and carry them back to the diod.

  It had taken a full day for the creature to consume the people of the first village. Then it had stumbled into the forest and woven a strange black case for itself, spitting strands of fiber from its hollow mouth, smoothing them into a solid layer with brittle hands. Nylan, crouching at his ease nearby, had waited. Two days later, the cocoon had cracked, spilling purple light into the dawn. The diod had emerged again, smoother, stronger, and hungry. So hungry.

  So they had come to this second village. Now Nylan moved smoothly, working his systematic way from house to house, pulling sleeping people from their beds and carrying their heavy, inert bodies to the moonlit town square, where he piled them in heaps to await the diod’s attention.

  He no longer felt fear, hunger, anger, pain, joy, or compassion, though this last had been a rare enough emotion in Nylan even before he’d been turned. He was a machine, and he worked with the single-minded efficiency of an ant carrying grass seeds back to the hive.

  ◈

  There was panic in the streets of Deramor. Two villages, now, had been found empty, their occupants dead, left to rot in a heap in the town square. The bodies, it was said, were uncanny. The skin was gray, the eyes and fingernails black, the hair of even children gone stark white.

  Rumors were flying on every street corner. Word had leaked out that the King and Queen had been warned over a week ago that this would start to happen and had refused an offer of aid brought before them.

  Jey, Elle, Lokim, and Treyam were doing their part to fuel these rumors. They made frequent, brief trips into town, visiting shops, stopping to share news with anyone they could engage. They were not the only strangers in on the streets. Already, a steady stream of people trickled in from the nearest of the outlying settlements. Right now, the travelers were mostly those affluent enough to keep homes in town as well as their country estates. In time, if panic continued to spread, common people would begin to flee their homes and descend upon the capital.

  All of this was happening, and still, the King and Queen had not responded to the offer Elle had delivered.

  Jey was nearly mad with the waiting. When it was her turn to watch the decaying ruins of what had once been a traveler’s checkpoint on the road that led out of Deramor to the west, where the King and Queen were to send a messenger with a reply, she could hardly sit still. She found herself staring down at the broken road that carried travelers towards the capital, as restless as the shifting forest light.

  People were scared, and they had reason to be. The things Treyam had told Jey about the diod sounded like impossible horrors, myths made up to frighten unruly children. He’d told her any number of impossible things. A diod could trap a human in slumber. It could take a man’s soul and turn him into a machine. It could drain the living of vitality, using what it took to grow ever stronger, ever faster, ever more full of dark magic.

  Also, it could not be killed – not by conventional methods, at least. No weapon could land on its shadowy body. Only magic could do it any harm.

  Which was why, without the Tessilari, the people of Masidon were doomed.

  Jey paced around a tree and forced herself to sit, settling onto the fallen trunk that gave her a vantage of the ruined waypoint. The waypoint, like the road, was little more than a jumble of stones now, a relic of some forgotten past. What must Deramor have been like when the Tessilari had lived here as well? Great magics had once been woven into the city itself, making it almost a living thing. But those days of glory were long gone.

  There was movement along the ruined road. Phril, who’d been off flying loops through the trees, returned to her suddenly, alighting on her shoulder and folding his wings, then stalking around her neck for a better view.

  A mounted party was moving along the road, a long line of horses and men in armor. It was the first group Jey had seen all day that was moving away from Deramor rather than towards it. Horses snorted and pranced. Pendants hung off long poles, the colors of Masidon streaming in the mild breeze. Phril half raised his wings and let out a low, soft cry of a kind Jey had never heard him make before.

  Jey rose to her feet, keeping well back in the shadows. What was this? Surely not a party sent after the diod. The settlements that had been taken lay to the north.

  Jey felt her mouth go dry as the mounted men reached the crossroads. She counted quickly. The horses moved two abreast along the neglected road, but there were quite a few of them. Fifty knights, she thought, all in armor, all armed with long, glittering swords.

  Understanding washed over Jey in a sick wave. The King and Queen were rejecting the offer of an alliance. This force was their answer, an attack on the Tessilari – a violent, angry denial of the peace offering.

  Jey, heart heavy, turned to go. She would need to warn the others, and they would have to decide how to respond. She took one step further into the shadows, the news she now bore weighing like a stone in her chest.

  But then, a fresh splash of color caught her eye. Two horses appeared from beyond the trees, each bearing a man who did not wear armor. These men flew not the colors of Masidon, but two different crests.

  First, Jey recognized the crest of the King’s house, the blue and white of the House of Laws. Beside that streamed the Queen’s house, the green and yellow of the House of Goods. Jey strained, looking, but did not see the red and black banner of the High Priest’s house, the House of Prayers, anywhere.

  Hope sprouted in Jey’s heart, shouldering the heavy feeling aside. She stared in disbelief, unable to trust her eyes. For behind the men bearing the house banners rode the King and Queen themselves.

  Jey watched as the mounted knights separated, pivoting their mounts and backing them partly into the trees to open a path wide enough for the men bearing the banners and the King and Queen to ride though single file. Then, the escort waited. The King and Queen rode unaccompanied to the decaying waypoint.

  Jey stood in immobile disbelief for a single moment. Then, energized by nervous hope, she hurried down the slope to hear what the two most powerful people in Masidon had come out into these quiet woods to say.

  ◈

  For the first time in 384 years, First Mage Otha let go of the mists. The spell, so long held at the edges of her consciousness, was difficult to release. Her mind had kinked around that spot like her fingers sometimes hardened around her cane. She had to pry herself free of that old, old magic, and let it go.

  The mists would not fade, of course. There were younger, more agile minds to take up that work. Not all the Tessilari would leave the Valley of Mist. The alliance with Masidon was too new, too tenuous, fo
r that.

  But the Tessilari were mobilizing. All through the hidden valley, there was activity the likes of which Otha hadn’t seen in ages. Old weapons were removed from storage, belongings sorted and packed or stowed away. Houses were battened down, prepared to stand empty. Perhaps forever.

  The others hadn’t wanted Otha to go. She was too old, they said. The journey would be too difficult. The world out there wasn’t safe. It was true, the King and Queen of Masidon had signed the treaty. Magic was no longer a crime. Tessili and brillbane would no longer be hunted and destroyed. But all the Tessilari knew how good the word of this country was. They had been allies before. They could not assume this war would have an ending any different from the last.

  Laws were easy to change, but the hearts of men were not.

  Beyond that, news was slow to spread. While most of Masidon’s population was concentrated around the capital, there were outlying settlements – places where the people may not have heard the news. The Tessilari would need to be prepared to defend themselves from the angry and the ignorant alike.

  All the more reason, Otha had argued, that she leave the valley. She was, after all, the only one among them who had real combat experience.

  So, at last, the younger Tessilari had conceded the point. Otha was leaving. She had surveyed the belongings in her comfortable home and been surprised at how few she wanted to take with her. As the days passed while preparations were made, she felt an escalating desire to leave. It seemed to her it had been a long time since she’d been this interested in anything.

  Grip was responding to her energy, spending less time asleep and more time following her from room to room as she packed the small bag she would carry with her.

  When at last Otha’s party was ready to go, the last thing she’d needed to let go of was that old spell. When she did, she would no longer be the one to decide who could come and go from the valley. She was turned loose, on old woman unmoored in a strange world.