by Scott Rhine
At the last word, the tip of the lash caressed his hip, but drew no blood. “How can I know?”
“You can’t, not without entering the viper’s nest. But once there, you can be prepared to take revenge if treachery is discovered. Perhaps you could carry a small vial of poison in a locket around your neck, or a concealed dagger of some sort. As for the alleged sheriff’s identity, I know of no spell to force a man to speak the truth. However, we were able to find the lineage of his sword of Honor. These are in the reports Navara sent you. If this mercenary was the blade’s true owner, then he’ll recite the lineage from memory in a heartbeat. An impostor would have no clue.”
Humi nodded at the suggestions but asked, “Whatever happened to the other survivor of the raid, the smith who carried away the Sword of Miracles?”
Tumberlin opened his mouth to say something, but decided on a more politic answer. “We have extensive information about the fugitive, milady. We’ve taken his fiancée into custody—a slave girl named Anna. We’re also monitoring his family and all known contacts from Innisport. When this man Baran Togg surfaces again, we’ll have him. There are rumors in certain academic circles that the sword may be the fabled Great Defender itself.”
“Such a sword would be a fitting reward to the man who brings me the head of King Zandar.”
Tumberlin gave a pathetic attempt at a smile. “As well as a great symbolic contribution to the new emperor. Alas, Navara was the head of that particular investigation, and we’ve made little progress since his reassignment.”
Having reached a dead end, she returned to an earlier comment. “You said that the sheriff was one example. How else have you and the general found me lacking?”
“Your move on the throne of Zanzibos is ill-considered.”
Her eyes warned him again. “I’ll succeed, have no doubt.”
“Taking and keeping are two different things. You’ve declared yourself an Imperial and thus cannot sit on the throne directly. You can overcome their military, but their peasants, aristocrats, and bureaucrats would rebel. Navara has a plan to circumvent this unpleasantness and control the kingdom legally.”
“You have my attention.”
“Holding the king himselfhostage won’t work. Indeed, you’ll probably have to kill Zandar and his oldest son during the ‘confusion’ of the battle. However, he has fourteen children. I doubt even you could kill all of them before they got to a safe haven. Instead, make a point of not wanting to rule Zanzibos. Appoint a suitable regent through the Royal Council to take care of the kingdom until the next heir reaches majority. That’ll buy you years of influence and time to fasten a leash on the next monarch.”
“How do I force the counsel’s choice?”
Tumberlin’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, there is hope, yet. That was the discussion Navara and I were having before you so rudely returned me to this heap of festering meat. Tradition for the royal house is to pick a regent from the succession line, but not the first ten or so. That presents too much danger of a permanent occupation. An honest noble from a weaker family will help keep the others at bay without taking too much for himself. In times of war, the regent always has military experience and usually a medal of bravery or two. Finally, they prefer to promote a regional governor.”
“How many such suitable candidates are there?” she asked idly.
“Three. One of them is the practical young man we installed as governor in Barnham recently, the one who signed a non-aggression pact against your house. Another candidate, Lord Zorn, is an older statesman near Innisport who returned to his country estates for the sake of his health. The third is fond of hunting desert lions. It doesn’t take much imagination in this scenario to arrange a favorable selection, but it’ll take weeks to be sure without being overtly obvious.”
She nodded. “Navara is a wise teacher. I grow weary of your unkempt look and the smells of your blood and waste. I’ll have one of my maids clean you and dress you in new linens.”
Tumberlin gestured with the sign for “You are too kind.” All the while, he was plotting what he could do to Humi and her ship during the free time he had each day. He couldn’t kill her directly, but he could weaken protections on The Beauty and arrange a few unfortunate circumstances that might be exploited for further gain. More than anything, he imagined clapping her in chains and sucking the life out of her as she squirmed in pain, begging in that schoolgirl voice. He was drooling happily when the maid came in after sunrise.
Chapter 7 – Question Two
Tashi felt disoriented. Once again he stood on the plateau in the City of the Gods. He could see faint outlines of objects in the dim, silvery-blue light coming from the top of the staircase. Archanon now stood to his right. Sensing his confusion, the archfiend, in the form of his mercenary friend, explained, “One answer per day. I’m asked to remind you that, at any time you wish, you can elect to leave the Mountain.” He seemed colder, more reserved.
“What aren’t you telling me?” asked Tashi.
“Quite a lot,” remarked Archanon. “Most of it would melt your brain.”
“By my calculations there should be at least two more kingdoms. What happened to them?” said Tashi.
“Is that your second question?”
HNo. But you didn’t specify your crime. Its nature would be highly relevant to my ability to trust you. I was wondering if it had anything to do with killing off all the people in those kingdoms.”
“Why should gods care about killing humans?”
“You claimed to be our friend. I’m just checking the consistency of your answers. The two concepts don’t jibe,” Tashi pressed.
“You’ve no idea what Eutheron did to them, the forbidden biological experiments she performed. Some would count my actions a mercy.”
“But what did killing her kingdom do to the immortal?” Tashi asked.
“Limited certain higher functions,” the archfiend said, clearly uncomfortable. “Do you wish to select another representative from the Council?”
“No,” the sheriff said immediately. “What does a mortal care what gods inflict on each other?”
They sat in tense silence while Tashi pondered. The necessity for indirection hampered him. His mind kept returning to what he learned from his encounter with the goddess Semenos. He wanted to find out more about why Kiateros had been allowed to ascend.
Archanon squirmed uneasily as the sheriff thought. As if compelled by another, the archfiend said, “The stairway before you, as you must have guessed, leads to the other realm.” He looked at the silvery light for a moment and added. “If you stop now, the gods will allow you to cross the threshold and reside with them as one of the lesser Ascended. You’d have no need to ask about what you could see plainly for yourself.”
Tashi shook his head. “I’ve gone too far to turn back now.”
Had the fiend answered his unspoken question about the service performed by Kiateros? Had the dwarf artificer built the Stairs? Could the fiend hear his very thoughts?
Archanon paused until the last question and replied, “Precisely.”
The clarity of the reply startled Tashi. He struggled to make sense of previous word choices in this context. What did the shape-shifter want him to see for himself? How could the silent communication channel be used to his advantage?
After a dizzying examination of the possible wheels-within-wheels, he decided to put his fate in Archanon’s hands. If this didn’t work out, Tashi still had one more question. “My master has long suspected that the Traveler’s kept a secret from us about his own origins. Question two: tell me everything you think I need to know about why and how Calligrose is different from the other immortals.”
The archfiend pretended to examine a hangnail as he replied. “Calligrose’s told you all he wishes you to know in his writings. The rest is probably both personal and irrelevant.”
Tashi warmed to the game. There was something obscure in the sacred writings, a clue. “I’m a religious zealot; we thrive on
the personal and irrelevant.”
“Calligrose has loved and protected your kind more than any of the Dawn race. To us, he is unique because of his incredible instinct for the flow of mana. He can detect it, disrupt it, harness it like no other. One day, Calligrose let slip as a casual observation that when Osos made the first gate, he accidentally created all the others as well.”
“I see,” said the sheriff.
“Do you really? It took us 150 years to get the math right.”
Tashi thought he saw where the fiend was leading him. The first gate was the Stairs, constructed by the dwarf. They no doubt used it in a time of war to escape the religious pogroms. However, they used the mechanism before it was fully understood.
“This natural instinct for metaphysics irritated Osos because Calligrose was conceived between Osos’s wife and his chief political rival. Osos took her as a means toward power, but I don’t think he really loved her. Osos loved himself first and foremost. Ironically, Calligrose took that from him, too.”
Tashi stopped him. “Conceived?” Archanon nodded without elaborating.
Tashi looked for other clues, other stray words like bread crumbs to follow. “I know about the formation of the Compass Star. But what do you mean ‘too’?”
“What has your master told you happens when you pass through the Doors of Eternity?”
Tashi repeated what he had learned. “Roughly speaking, the Halls are where we go when we dream. It’s a common region between the world of the gods and ours. Passing the threshold, you transcend the mere physical. Master Jotham calls the process translation and tried to explain what it felt like to me once. He said that there is something that ties us to this plane called the silver cord, much like a newborn’s umbilical cord. To pass the threshold, you must travel backward up this silver cord, passing back through every moment of your life like a tunnel. The experience was so horrible for him that it turned his hair prematurely gray.”
Archanon held two hands apart and then joined them. The disjoint concepts linked in Tashi’s mind. “A pregnant woman translated. The Traveler was born on the other side! The child had nowhere to go but through her. The act would have been instinctive, like floating to the surface of a lake to breathe. The birth trauma must have killed her. How horrible! Let me guess; you made laws preventing that disaster from happening again. Calligrose was the first and only one born in the Halls between worlds. This makes him unique, the god of borders.”
“There are many other ways he’s different.”
Tashi was still churning with the information. “Calligrose accidentally killed Osos’s wife. That’s what started the feud. I’m sure Osos’s rival was dead or left behind. That meant that Calligrose has no mother or father. That’s why he’s the god of orphans. I’m guessing the whole community must have raised and trained him. This is how he collected the teachings from the gods that became the six-fold way.” The phrasing of certain earlier comments struck Tashi. Was the Traveler technically even a member of the Dawn race? What loopholes did this lack of membership open up in the Rules?
However, Tashi couldn’t stop to examine this small detail; his thoughts about the nature of the Traveler had gained momentum like rocks rolling down a hill. “But it wasn’t the same as having a family. No one else in your world was the same as him. No one else would ever be. He helped us, studied us, and walked beside us. Yet he didn’t fit into this world either. He must have been a stranger in every place, alone in any crowd.”
Shards of memory blurred with the suppositions. Tashi’s breathing became more rapid as he fought sympathetic vibrations from his own past. The rocks rolling downhill had started a landslide.
“Excellent reasoning, but are we talking about him, or you?”
Tashi grabbed his forehead. There was no single revelation that the fiend wished to trigger; rather, his aim had been to demonstrate how such disjointed riddles could be assembled when one knew about the connection. He viewed everything spoken by the gods through this lens. Thoughts and education from a dozen lifetimes from the abbots in his amulet connected and collided at the threshold of his epileptic seizure. A single brilliant flash burst into his mind.
“Calligrose has already told you everything he wishes you to know.”
This was what the Traveler had wanted since he founded the Way. It was like the way the Brotherhood hid the higher secrets, in pieces that had to be dovetailed together. Each of the Six Paths held a single piece of the mystery. A single human had to master each of the paths and hold the fragments in his mind. Only then would the true secret be revealed, a secret even gods and archfiends could not speak of.
The moment passed. Uncontrollable shaking overcame the sheriff as the landslide of thoughts buried him. His second question answered, another day passed in the world beyond the City of the Gods.
Chapter 8 – The Walls of Sleep
The group of Kiaterans who Tashi had freed from the dungeons called themselves the Stone Monkeys. They were slightly shorter and wider than most people on the shore of the Inner Sea and had to remain hidden to avoid re-imprisonment. Their names also spoke of their northern heritage: Sven, Olaf, Bjorn, and Ekvar. Taking turns watching the Temple of Sleep from the hills, they used a linen cloak as a giant drawing board to record their observations. Artisans and artificers by trade, they first sketched the round temple that resembled a sports arena or theater. The temple was almost three stories tall at the peak of the dome, the tallest structure in the ramshackle town. All main roads were spokes off of this central hub of the temple. All buildings ringed around them like the layers of a giant onion, with the most important and best-constructed ones closest to the center. The huts on the outermost rings looked more like wood mushrooms attached to the sides of existing structures than buildings in their own right.
“We go in through the dead quarter, north of the temple,” Bjorn ordered the scouts.
“See. There are no patrols through here,” he bragged after they belly-crawled over the last hill.
“That’s because there are no roads,” complained Sven, wading through a rice field. “I have to take off my boots, and the cuffs of my pants reek of animal manure.”
“It’s not all from animals,” Olaf pointed out.
“Thanks,” replied Sven trying not to step in the thicker mud.
“The smell will get better once we get closer to town,” promised Bjorn.
It didn’t.
Immediately to the north of the temple lay the extensive and still-growing city dump. The mounds of waste weren’t well-organized or even covered with dirt in most cases, so the intense odor kept the entire wedge of the onion depopulated.
height="0" width="29">They discovered that guards inside the city worked in twelve-hour shifts, changing at sunup and sundown. After listening to all their reports before the tiny peat fire that night, Jotham the Tenor commented in his high, lilting voice, “We know about the sentries and daily work schedules but nothing about what goes on inside. Several times, I’ve noticed that the handmaidens of Zariah walk among the people without being seen.” “But we see them just fine,” countered Bjorn, the thin-bearded spokesman for the Stone Monkeys.
“You’ve never been guided through sleep by one of the handmaidens,” explained Jotham. “It’d be a simple suggestion to plant. They’re not invisible, merely ignored. Think of how nobles fail to notice servants in their bathhouse or beggars in the street.”
The Monkeys grudgingly admitted that this was the sort of trickery that the crone Zariah often practiced. “It’d make spying on her own followers easier. But sometimes the people do see the handmaidens at the entrance to the Temple.”
As the High Priest of the Traveler, Jotham was the accepted expert on mysteries. He had one brown eye from his Mandibosian side and one blue from his Imperial. His hair had also been turned prematurely white from passing through one of the Doorways, making him look twice his age. “Sometimes the trigger for a suggestion can be very simple, like a blue spot on the forehea
d.”
“That wouldn’t work if she were turned away from them,” said Brent, his twelve-year-old apprentice. The boy had dark eyes and curly, black hair.
“It could be anything: a visual cue in the veils covering their faces, an audible cue, or even the smell of incense preceding them. We’ll never guess it from this distance. Do handmaidens ever travel alone that you’ve noticed?”
The thin-bearded Northman answered, “Aye. Just before dawn, one of the handmaidens comes out and carries away the sleepers who have died in the night. With too much indulgence, and too little food or exercise, it happens a lot to the older addicts. When the others awake, they assume that the departed went home to get more money or moved on to a closer circle.”
Brent winced. “That doesn’t sound like a very pleasant job.”
The Stone Monkey shrugged. “It’s probably a punishment duty. I’ve no doubt that this culling makes the sheep easier to handle. I’d bet it’s also the time when traitors are eliminated.”
Jotham turned to the Stone Monkey with the broken jaw. “Ekvar, I need you to do me a favor. Pick one of your compatriots and bring me back the priestess who carries away the dead. This must be done in silence, and she must be alive and intact when she reaches me.”
Ekvar rubbed his hands in anticipation.
****
After dark, Zariah received messengers in her private office. Most of the Amphitheater of Dreams was of wooden construction. However, the region directly behind the Door to Eternity was not conducive to the vivid dreams worshipers desired. It corresponded perfectly to that region known to the scouts as the dead quarter. In a normal theater, the area behind the stage would be used to hold props, spare scenery, and actors waiting for their cues. Since no followers wanted to sleep in this mundane region, it’d long ago been chosen to house the priesthood. This section of the temple was a solid fortress of stone. Zariah’s offie was immediately behind the Great Eye in the center of the Holy of Holies.