The prayer mirrors showed many pictures of the world: enemy soldiers battering the King’s door, the General pierced through the stomach by a lance, hordes of White Star troops boiling over the castle ramparts, and the cavalry colonel, free, cutting a House Guard’s throat with his saber. These were not images of the future, such as diviners see—but true impressions of the present moment.
“Your world,” Jane said, “was built by paranoids. They built eyes everywhere, and in each eye, they placed a tiny spear.”
She spoke a word, and the White Stars began to die.
The troops within the castle fell first, holes burned through their helmets. The colonel’s heart cooked in his chest. House Guards found their enemies dead in mid-stroke. Battering rams fell, and bodies followed.
The deaths moved out from the castle to the camps. We all saw the horror: a swarm of long, sharp insects rising from the earth, shaking off the dust of centuries to train themselves upon their victims. The White Stars tried to run.
“Stop,” the Princess Martial said. “It’s done. Let the others go.”
“They are your enemies. Isn’t that the way you all think, you and your General and Rathland? Save the ones on your side, and to hell with the rest?” Jane’s voice cracked. Her eyes were red with god-light. “With this power, I could make you all obey. I could impose peace.”
“Will you kill them just to prove a point?”
Jane caught her breath, and lowered her staff.
The eyes closed, and the prayer mirrors dimmed.
Jane knelt for a while, beneath the earth, in silence, until the Princess Martial lifted her up, and together they left that place of impossible emptiness, and impossible fires.
* * *
We suffered casualties. We mended and wept. We loaded wagons high with corpses and burnt them downwind and downriver, but even so the smell of seared meat reached us. In the diviners’ well, Jane and the Princess Martial had done brutal and effective work, or caused it to be done, but someone always cleans up after.
The day came when the Scholast was to leave us. “Someone will follow after me, to teach.”
“Not you?”
“I am not a gifted teacher, and we are rarely sent to the same place twice.”
“Partiality,” the Princess Martial said, with bitter humor.
“Yes. And besides, as you’ve seen, I still have much to learn.”
“The teacher they send will teach your doctrine of universal love. Perhaps I’ll learn, and join you out among the stars.”
“You care for this ground too much. At any moment the paths might close, and leave you stranded on a distant star.”
“I would leave, and learn to love the universe in general, because I care for you in particular.”
“A fine paradox.” Jane smiled a secret smile. “Don’t tell the teacher. She may not understand.” The drums began, and Bel Mei waited by the arch. She had asked the honor of ushering the Scholast out. She wore mourning white.
“One question before you go,” the Princess asked.
“I’ll answer, if I can.”
“The world was built, you said. There was awe in your voice, and you never spoke with awe of the diviners’ gods. Who, then, built it? The titans?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” the Scholast said. “We did. One day we’ll remember how.”
She kissed the Princess Martial’s hand, then took Bel Mei’s and walked with her toward the arch, and under, but not through. In her last moment, as in her first, we who watched her saw many things, and fruitlessly compared them after. The Princess never told us what she saw. That one truth she would not yield us during composition, though she herself ordered us to write this true and exact chronicle of the Scholast’s stay in the Low Waters Kingdom. What the Princess Martial saw, she will take with her to the stars.
About the Author
MAX GLADSTONE went to Yale, where he wrote a short story that became a finalist in the Writers of the Future competition. He is the author of Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Max Gladstone
Art copyright © 2017 by Micah Epstein
The Scholast in the Low Waters Kingdom Page 3