After perhaps a sixth of a league they came upon the wreck of a nearly intact algar tumbled into the right hand drainage ditch. The vehicle was heavily damaged but not so much so that it was inconceivable that its crew might have survived.
His initial inclination was to pass the wreck by, but he stopped when he realized that the Salients, though they would say nothing, would think the lesser of him for it. One of their many uncodified traditions was that they would not abandon any of their own.
"Brother Khimech, send two of the brethren into the algar to discover whether any of the crew might lay injured inside."
The officer showed no reaction, but several of the Salients made the sign of the Tripartite and Whorlyr knew that he had chosen correctly.
When only bodies were found within, Whorlyr proclaimed, "The Work!"
"The Duty!" replied the Salients in hushed voices.
"The Restoration!"
Half an hour after leaving the wreck, they arrived at a point no more than a hundred paces off the river and within sight of the still standing bridge. With the Salients spreading out and going to ground, Whorlyr, Zsii, and Khimech crawled forward to the remains of a Shrike that had plowed into a small rise. The ruptured earth and blackened metal formed a bulwark high enough to allow the trio to stand with cover as they observed the bridge. Strangely, the structure had suffered little if any damage while all around it had been burned to ash.
At this distance, it was impossible to determine if any of the small objects on the bridge lane were living people.
"We will have to get closer," Whorlyr told the other two.
"Try this, brother." Khimech took a boxy device from a pouch and passed it over. "This is the first production copy of a Holy Relic that gives a man the eyes of a hawk."
Whorlyr brought the device to his eyes but saw only a blur.
"The raised knob corrects the focus. Just tap it with a finger." the Salient indicated.
Whorlyr did so, and by quick stages his view steadied until it seemed as if he were standing on the approach ramp.
"Something is moving on the bridge," he told the other two.
THIRTY-THREE
The sorcerer woke with the complex dream still fresh in his mind.
Buried under a span of old quilts and threadbare blankets with just enough of his face exposed to breathe, his body was warm and snug, but his joints ached and his eyeballs hurt as they did nearly every morning because of his bad eyesight. During the night, the fire in the hearth that he had improvised from stacked stone had burned down to an ash-covered pile of coals and he knew that the floor of the drafty chamber would be painfully cold.
"You have to get up," Waleck said. "It won't get any warmer in here until you build up the fire."
"I had a dream last night," the sorcerer said, ignoring the prompt. "My dreams have resumed in full measure."
"It was just a dream," Waleck challenged. "Some abstract rehash of everyday experience aggravated by an undigested bit of that pork gristle that you had yesterday."
"No, I saw the future."
"Whose future?"
"That is one secret that I can still keep from you."
"It was clouded and uncertain like the other prophecies."
"No, this one had perfect clarity."
Waleck grunted. "You still have to get up and walk across the cold floor."
The sorcerer did get up, but ignored the lukewarm hearth and the empty wood rack beside it as he threw on his clothes to combat the instant full body shiver brought on by the chill. As soon as he had pulled on his thin boots, he moved toward the irregular hole in the floor on the left side of the chamber.
"Where are you going?" Waleck demanded. "You should have breakfast first."
"I can get by without another bowl of unsavory gruel," the sorcerer contended. "I know where one is and I am going to go get it."
"The dream revealed it?"
"Yes. The dream revealed many things." The sorcerer went to the hanging rope that would let him down to the next floor in place of the long collapsed stair and began to shinny down it.
"It will be like the other two. It will not function."
"This one will. I have foreseen it. It was part of my dream." The sorcerer began to work his way down the broken treads of the remains of the spiraling stair. He felt the structure of the spire sway slightly as the roar of the wind outside picked up. "The foundations are going to give way in four days and the entire thing is going to come down."
"Then you will have to find some other uninhabitable part of the ruin to live in."
"No, I will not. This is the last day that I am going to spend here."
"You cannot continue with your plan. Mar is out of your reach."
"In that, you are entirely wrong."
"How so?"
The sorcerer shook his head and changed the subject lest Waleck find a way to steal the foreknowledge that the dream had provided. "I have remembered my name. I am nhBreen."
"You have been many people."
"But I was Knight-Commander nhBreen first and that is who I am now."
"nhBreen died and was buried long ago."
nhBreen ignored this. "I was Commander of the Bastion and responsible for the defense of the City. I was a master sorcerer of the eighth rank and much admired and respected. I was proud and I was strong and I was brave."
"And then you betrayed your City by allowing it to be incinerated by its enemies."
"The City could not be saved. I preserved what I could."
"You disobeyed orders and violated your duty."
"I did what had to be done."
"And for that you suffered a ghoulish existence for five millennia and are now insane."
"It was a fit punishment for my crimes and sanity is not necessarily a desirable condition. I would not change what I did even if I could. Every person alive today that has any magical talent at all is a descendant of those that I saved."
"Mar is not."
"But his children with Telriy will be and they would not be who they are destined to be without the magically talented lineage that I preserved. Be quiet for a few minutes. This part of the descent is treacherous and I need to focus. I do not want to fall as I did last week."
Waleck complied without comment or his customary complaint, and the silence caused nhBreen to wonder at what devious plot the old man worked.
At the bottom of the spire, nhBreen stopped to retrieve his shovel, then exited through a more or less intact archway onto the shattered platform that circled the spire. Here he stopped again to rub the aches that the climb down had generated in both knees. For once, the sky had cleared and no rain fell. Compared to the other days that he had spent here, today would be a more or less pleasant one.
"You could have used the port bracelet," Waleck complained.
"Its flux reserve is nearly exhausted. There remains only enough for the trips that I must make."
"Mar is gone. Your plans are come to nothing."
"Wrong on both counts."
nhBreen made his way across the jumbled courtyard, following the weaving path that he had cleared through the mounds of lichen covered stone.
"He has returned?"
"Yes."
"You cannot know that. You smashed the skry tablet."
"I do not need the tablet any longer. My dreams will guide me."
nhBreen reached the pile that had been the acropolis' main gate, turned right and went to a gap in a length of standing head-high wall, passed through, and moved down a slope covered in brambles and browned grass.
"The wind is picking up," Waleck said. "You should have put on more clothes."
"I am curious," nhBreen said. "How is it that someone so thoroughly averse to physical discomfort could have crossed back and forth across the world for thousands of years as you have done?"
"As we have done."
nhBreen shrugged. "Stop whining."
When he came to a nearly buried access road, he turned left and walke
d briskly until he came to a much weathered pylon, advanced back up the slope for a count of forty-seven steps, and then started to dig.
"There is a grave a full manheight down," he informed the old man. "He was a warrior of the Ssteri and a direct descendant of Sari, an officer in the Covert Command of the Republic. By odd chance, she survived the destruction of the city of Theram with her equipment intact and lived to give birth to ten sons. With the weapon and her sons, she took control of these lands hereabout and founded a dynasty that lasted a thousand years. Though the ammunition ran out before her death, the legend of the weapon's power gave her warrior descendants heart, which was often all that was necessary to achieve victory in their primitive combats."
"It has been under the soil for a few thousand years?" Waleck asked. "This is a waste of effort. With no magic to preserve it, it will have decayed to nothing. You would be better off cutting wood for the fire."
"It was sealed in a lead jar. The Ssteri considered it a powerful totem."
"Even if it is intact, you have already stated that there will be no ammunition with it."
"Indeed I did, but I also know the location of thirteen full clips. We will have to use the bracelet to get to the spot, but that trip is included in my calculations. The cache is in the wreck of a Republican flyer on the side of a high mountain on the Northwestern Shore. It crashed six months before the end of the world and was not recovered."
"If it is exposed on the side of a mountain, it will have also decayed."
"The wreck is enclosed in a block of ice many armlengths thick. It will take me half a day to chip it out."
"Your dream was unusually detailed."
"It was more specific and unclouded than any that I have ever had."
Waleck fell silent again as nhBreen settled into a steady rhythm of pressing the shovel blade into the rocky but dry earth, prying it free, and leveraging the long handle to catapult it out of his hole. It took him a good two hours to dig down to the bones of the Ssteri warrior, whose name his dream had not seen fit to reveal, and retrieve the lead jar that nestled between his scattered ribs.
When he cracked the seal and pulled the weapon out, he found it just as he had foreseen -- unmarred by time, but with its loading port empty. Knowing his course and anxious to follow it, he secured the weapon in a pocket, left the hole open and the warrior's bones exposed to the wolves that would scatter them before the fortnight was out, abandoned the shovel and lead jar beside the hole, and hurried back to make the strenuous climb to the upper chamber of the spire.
Waleck spoke up finally as nhBreen began to pack his knapsack.
"So you are going to the Western Shore to hack at a glacier. Surely there is another store of ammunition somewhere warm, say the northern coast of Szillarn."
"You will be happy to know," nhBreen allowed, "that the mountainside is my last stop save one. First, we shall visit Mhevyr."
"Traeleon may not be very happy to see you."
"He does not know that I engineered the attempted assassination by the Cadre of the Restorer and their allied lunatics."
"But he does know that you did not warn him of it."
"As I expected, he survived and the slaughter of the Conclave left him with much tighter personal control of the Brotherhood. He is smart enough to have already determined this for himself."
"He is not the sort of man that feels gratitude."
"But he is the sort of man that can readily recognize opportunity."
nhBreen strapped on the port bracelet and gave the chamber one final look. The discarded non-functional magical devices and his reams of handwritten notes would be well buried when the spire fell and he had no need to worry with them. The household goods -- his pot, mug, bedding, flints, and so on -- were not worth bringing along.
He tapped a code into the bracelet and appeared on a wooded hill forty-five leagues north of Yhmghaegnor, a little more than half way to his destination. Another port and the consequent reduction in the flux reserve module would be required to reach Mhevyr. The bracelet, an experimental model of Republican Manufacture with a range that surpassed that of the devices that had been in common use in the ancient world by a hundred fold, had been a very fortunate find that had enabled him to cross the continent at will. Drawn to it by the cloudy remnants of an unremembered dream, he had pilfered it from a barbarian hovel in the lands of the Khelmuldurii. How it had come to be in the hovel and its provenance prior to that were mysteries that did not concern him.
Before he keyed the port the second time, he cast glamours to conceal his presence, both from eyes and ears. He arrived on the orphaned terrace that was all that remained of the demolished palace of the now extinguished Mhevyrii princedom. Overlooking the cratered and rubble-heaped plaza that previously had been named Victory, the height of the terrace allowed him to look all the way up the wide Prince Remahl March -- or whatever the Phaelle'n had renamed it to -- toward the triumphal arch.
No wheeled traffic traversed the boulevard and none of the common street commerce that would be expected in a city this large -- food vendors, craftsmen hawking small wares, farmers selling vegetables from carts -- were present, indicating that the inhabitants had not yet acclimated to their new masters. Some hooded monks were going and coming and small contingents of armored Salients were positioned at regular intervals, but the Mhevyrii were clearly keeping to their homes.
After descending a stair abbreviated by a sizable crater, he proceeded across the Plaza and up the center of the March. Not having yet encoded a location for the Plythtwaelndt Fortress, he would be unable to use the port and would have to get there by mundane means. While this would save a small pittance of the flux reserve, it would take as much as two hours to reach the Phaelle'n bastion.
"The day is warm here," Waleck said. "The walk will be good for your knees."
The old man normally never spoke aloud when others were about, but the glamours would conceal his voice.
"If I had the equipment required to instruct the sprites, my knees would be in perfect shape. The devices maintain my body in the state recorded at the moment the Bastion fell -- bad knees and all."
"You would have a better chance of finding any surviving medical equipment if you were to actively search for it instead of continuing to pursue your efforts against Mar."
"Mar is not my major concern at this time."
"Oh? Then who is?"
Knowing that the phantom in his head would use the information in further attempts to thwart his efforts, he did not reply.
Near the far end of the March, he encountered of a gang of a dozen stout monks led by a Brohivii with a shaved head and the newly inked cranial tattoos of a zealot. His bare torso, also branded with fresh designs that suggested a particularly virulent strain of the sect, had a rawhide flail wrapped from left shoulder to right waist. It was apparent from the wheals that decorated the man's back that he had seen fit to express his zeal by self-flagellation.
The gang had spread across the promenade and part way onto the pavement on the left side of the boulevard to confront a gray-haired man and a young woman. Both wore the fine clothing of the affluent and both looked terrified.
These matters beneath his notice, nhBreen would normally have continued on, but on a whim he stopped to discover what transpired. He had arrived in the middle of the confrontation, but it was easy to see by the zealot's flushed face that he had been haranguing the two Mhevyrii.
"... and the Great Phaelle has brought the true message of Magic to this benighted world!" The Brohivii gave a start as his eyes tracked over the young woman, locking on a cameo affixed to the buckle of the belt of her skirt, and his arm shot out to point in accusation. "Worship of false gods is an affront to the majesty of the Great Phaelle!"
The cowering young woman gasped. "I didn't realize...it's only a cameo..."
Drawn by curiosity, nhBreen moved between two of the screening monks to a spot adjacent to the zealot so that he could get a closer look at the cameo. The p
rofile depicted on the overlarge decoration had obviously been derived from the large nosed and flower crowned icon normally associated with Phisitia, Benefactor of the Kind.
nhBreen had a flash of a vision of the monks seizing the two Mhevyrii, tying them to a nearby iron hitching post, and stripping both to the waist. While chanting verses in praise of Great Phaelle to keep time, the strident zealot would then apply his flail to their backs and flanks until he drew blood. The old man would grit his teeth and endure, but the girl would scream continuously until she lost consciousness.
He drew his belt knife, reversed it to hold it by the blade, then swiftly swung it so that the brass handle struck the zealot hard in the temple. Stunned, the man collapsed and shook as if seized by a spasm. As the other Phaelle'n rushed to their leader's aid, nhBreen stepped closer to the old man and adjusted his glamour to allow his voice to carry to the Mhevyrii.
"Leave this place now."
The old man jumped at the voice emerging from nothing, but grabbed the young woman's hand and raced away from the distracted monks.
As nhBreen moved away in the wake of the departing Mhevyrii, he felt that he should provide some justification for his intervention.
"nhBreen would have intervened, so I did. He was a champion of the weak."
The phantom made no comment.
THIRTY-FOUR
17th Year of the Phaelle’n Ascension, 348th Day of Glorious Work
Year One of the New Age of Magic
(Eleventhday, Waning, 3rd Springmoon, 1645 After the Founding of the Empire)
Plythtwaelndt Fortress, north of Mhevyr
As he watched Bhrucherra, at the table across the room that accommodated the skryers and far talking disk operators, receive the long awaited scouting report, Traeleon ate his breakfast with mechanical efficiency at his own small table. During the grinding night in the operations room, he had taken very little sleep on the lounge that Bhrucherra had had brought in, but the meal was an unavoidable concession to necessity if he were to continue to function at his normal effectiveness. Though the First Inquisitor left the Archivists after only another three minutes, Traeleon had already finished his eggs, bread, potatoes, and beans.
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