by Tim Stead
“STOP!” She had put everything into the word, and it was louder than she had intended. It was painful to the ear. She lessened the power she had used. “Stop fighting and withdraw!”
The startled, shaken combatants obeyed, and Pascha felt a delicious thrill. This is what it is like to have power, to be feared. As soon as there was clear ground between them she raised an invisible wall to hold them apart. Now she had control.
She sought the chief of the Bren Morain among their numbers, and quickly found him, still perched on the lip of one of the exposed tunnels. She seized him and a moment later he appeared at her side, alone.
The Bren surged to see their leader taken, but came up against the invisible wall and broke like a wave.
“A good trick, I grant you,” the Bren said. He was still not cowed. “You cannot defend them all,” he said. “Not always.”
Narak appeared at her side. He was holding the box she had seen before, and now she understood what it was: Pelion’s Star, The Pity Stone, the conscience of dragons. This was the reason he had travelled north. He meant to use it on the Bren.
Pascha knew about the stone. Pelion had explained its creation, and he had explained what it had done. It was a device of great power and it was indiscriminate. It acted upon anybody who looked upon it, anybody who touched it. In truth she feared the thing. She did not want to be changed.
“Narak, no.”
He looked at her, and she could see that he was puzzled. “No?”
“Do not use the stone.”
“I must,” he replied.
“I can stop them.”
“This is the only thing that will stop them forever,” Narak insisted. It was true. As little as Pascha wanted to see the stone she knew that it should change the Bren for ever, change what they were and how they thought so that they could never try to do this again.
“I am afraid,” she said. She could not have said the words to anyone else. Nobody else would have understood. Narak turned to her, ignoring the Bren Morain.
“No one should fear their own conscience, Pascha,” he said. “least of all a god.”
“It will change me,” she replied.
“It will do you no harm,” he said. He made to take her hand in his but she pulled away.
“It destroyed Pelion,” she protested. “He was a shadow of the thing he was.”
“He was a shadow of the evil he was,” Narak said. “Pelion needed to be destroyed. You know this.”
“But what if I am the same, Narak? What if it destroys me?”
“If I can survive it,” Narak shrugged, “how can you not?”
She looked at him, perhaps for the first time seeing herself through his eyes. It was a vision that disturbed her.
He thought that she was better than him.
If she had not been so afraid she might have laughed. The Narak she knew, had lived with for centuries, was honest, compassionate, dutiful, a repository of every virtue. He had no vanity. It was that purity that had driven her away. In contrast Pascha knew that she had shirked her own duty, deceived people, acted selfishly, and in every way epitomised a delinquent god. He was impulsive, and he had a temper, and so his only weakness was his strength, but he was never petty.
If she could have given her gift to Narak at that moment she would have done. She would have been free again, the burden lifted.
Narak opened the box he had brought with him.
“Narak.”
He smiled at her. “It will be all right,” he said.
Inside the box was a mass of white cloth and Narak reached in. Pascha wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t. A rat faced with a snake had more choice. This was an ordeal she had to endure. It would show her what she was. The pity stone would judge her as it had judged Pelion, as it had judged the dragons. She had almost forgotten the Bren Morain that stood before them.
She forced her eyes closed for a moment, then had to open them again. Narak was holding the stone in the palm of his hand.
It was beautiful.
Pascha was fond of jewels. She had treasured them as gifts when she had lived among men, but she had never seen the like of this. The Pity Stone was almost the size of an apple, and it glittered as brightly as any cut gem. She took it for a diamond at first, but its depths held hints of colour, blood red and leaf green. It glowed softly.
The appearance was no more than bait, she realised. Who could resist such beauty? All who looked upon the stone would stare, and while staring they would be judged. Pascha could feel it. She could not move her eyes, could not even blink. She had become fixed upon it, and inside her head she could feel an alien presence. Her mind was bathed in warmth, the heat creeping into every part, examining, testing her life. It was like living it all over. Fifteen centuries of imperfection hung up before her for inspection, and there was no part of it that she could look at without feeling how it might have been done better.
It was not, she realised, that the pity stone was judging her. It was forcing her to judge herself. She saw every mistake and every consequence of her actions through its prism. She saw everything with a clarity she had never known, and she knew her errors. Pascha learned. Where there were lies she saw truth, and excuses were replaced with reasons. The stone’s gift to her was not judgement, but understanding.
It was painful. Within herself there was nowhere to hide. Being stripped in a roomful of strangers would have been less traumatic. It was not what other people thought of you that mattered, she learned, but what you thought of yourself once you saw yourself revealed, and the pity stone was the brightest of lights. It left no shadows. Every pointless, petty, stupid thing she had ever done was dragged out into the sun, every cruelty, every harsh word repeated over and over.
As quickly as it had begun it was over. She felt like a bell that had been rung, and the world seemed to ring with her.
She was changed, but the change was not drastic. She was still Pascha. It was her illusions that had been taken from her, the things that she hid behind.
But the stone had not been revealed for her benefit, and as she recovered her wits she turned and looked at the Bren Morain. The creature was staring at the stone, but there was something wrong. All she could read on its face was scorn.
The Bren were immune to the pity stone. The thought hit her like a thunderbolt. Had Pelion done this deliberately? He had not told her so, and she was sure that he would have if the immunity had been intentional. Pelion had known what Narak was trying to do with the Pity Stone, and he had said nothing. Pascha believed that Pelion thought Narak would succeed.
So how could they be unaffected?
Perhaps it was the stone itself that gave her the answer, or perhaps the change it her made it obvious in some other way, but it came to her at once.
The pity stone only affected mankind. Pelion had made a thing to combat the dragons and it should not have worked. Dragon’s, too, should have been immune to its power. The answer to that puzzle was also obvious. Pelion had made the Bren out of ants, ants and other creatures that were quite different, and so their minds were different.
Cobran had started with men.
Dragons were not lizards or snakes remade by magic, they were men.
“Am I supposed to fear this pretty rock?” the Bren Morain demanded.
It took Narak longer to recover from the surprise, But his reaction was pure Narak. His blades were in his hands in a moment and inches from the Bren’s neck.
“You will stop the slaughter,” he said. “Now.”
Pascha thought there was something different about him, even though he was so much the same. He seemed faster, and the blades were different, too.
“I do not fear death,” the Bren Morain said. “We are one.”
“Trust me,” Narak said. “You cannot outbreed my anger. I will kill you all.”
The Bren did not believe this. Pascha could see it. But she did. She sensed a strength in Narak that went beyond anything he had possessed before. If he did
this, if he attacked the Bren, it would be something else he would regret, another burden, and it would not save the Seth Yarra.
She put a hand on his arm. It was like touching warm steel. He flinched at the contact.
“Let me do this my way,” she said. “I can stop them.”
Narak looked at her. He blinked. “You can stop them?”
“I can.” She knew that whatever power Narak had, she had more. She was a god mage. The world was subject to her will. She turned to the Bren Morain. “I am Pelion’s true heir,” she said. “You will stop. You will withdraw to your own realm.”
“We are Pelion’s children,” the Bren replied. “We owe you no allegiance.”
“Did you bring Pelion’s Crown as I asked?”
She could have sworn the thing smiled, though she knew of no way to tell.
“No.”
“You are right to fear me,” she told the Bren. “I know the crown, and I know its secret. It will reveal Pelion’s will. It will show you who is the true heir and who is not. You know this.” The Bren remained silent. It thought that by refusing to bring the crown it had avoided the issue, but it was mistaken. Pascha reached out with her hand and the world obeyed her. She closed her fingers and the crown was there in her hand.
It was a simple thing. Three strands of metal, copper, silver and gold, each as thick as her smallest finger, had been woven into a circlet. Onto that seven gems had been set. The largest of these was at the front of the crown, a pear shaped ruby that pointed upwards, flanked by two smaller emeralds.
The Bren snatched at it, but Pascha did not allow it to grasp the crown. Instead she offered it to Narak. “Put this on your head,” she said.
“Me?”
“It is not the crown,” the Bren said. “The crown is hidden.”
“Not from me,” she said. “Put it on, Narak.”
Narak sheathed his blades and took the crown in both hands. He lifted it above his head and placed it there carefully. It was a good fit. For a few seconds nothing happened. The Bren seemed about to speak, but before it could utter a word a dull glow kindled in the heart of the ruby. It grew and spread to the emeralds on either side.
“It feels warm,” Narak said.
“This is a lie,” the Bren said. “It is a trick. We examined him.”
“No,” Pascha said. She held out her hand and Narak gave the circlet back to her, the stones dimming again. She put the crown on her own head, and again it was a perfect fit. She knew that magic made it so.
She could not see the stones, but she saw them reflected in the Bren’s black eyes. The red light from the ruby bathed the ground around her. It did not glow. It shone brightly.
“You never understood this thing,” she said. “You thought it would choose one of you, but that was always impossible. Pelion’s crown was always destined for his heirs. Did you think that the Benetheon was chosen at random? Pelion was afraid of his own kin, terrified that they would become what he had been before the pity stone changed him, and so he sought them out. He sought us out. He could have killed us, but that would have piled an even greater burden on his shoulders.
“He made us sterile, an ending of his line, and he hoped that the talent would never emerge again. But it did,” she said. “In me. I am Pelion’s true heir.”
The Bren looked furious, but it did not speak.
“It is true?” Narak asked. “We are all Pelion’s kin?”
“All of us,” she confirmed. “All of us that remain.” She turned back to the Bren. It could not deny her now, and even if it did it would change nothing. She did not have to kill the Bren to defeat them. She could simply undo them, as she had once undone a tree. She knew how they were made, and it would be akin to pulling a thread to undo a knot. They would become again what they had once been: ants.
“You will stop,” she said to the Bren Morain. “You will return to your realm beneath the ground.”
“We will stop,” the Bren said. The words seemed dragged from it, slow, reluctant, defeated. “We will return beneath the ground.”
Almost at once the Bren began to withdraw from the field. She saw them flow back towards their caves and she knew that in that other place, the land that the Seth Yarra called home, the same thing would be happening. Thousands dead, she thought, but millions saved.
Now only the Seth Yarra army remained. She turned and looked at them, a mass of frightened men. She judged that they were ready to go home. Most of them were not dedicated as the cleansers were, and even the ranks of the black clad warriors were riven with doubt.
Pascha was only twenty paces from the table. She walked back to it, the crown still shining on her head. She took her seat.
“Peace,” she said. “Let us have peace.” She released the Seth Yarra general so that he could speak and move again, but he seemed too frightened to talk. It was Kalik that answered her.
“Yes,” he said. “Peace.” He turned to the others of his kind at the table. “I say that this war is over, whether we wish it or not. Having seen what we have seen, heard what we have heard, we cannot fight on. Our cause as it was told to us is a lie, and we are overmatched. Do any dissent?”
One of the other cleansers spoke. “Kalik, you are not the senior officer here. You have been held apart from us for two years. We no longer know your mind.”
“He talks sense, though,” Leras interrupted. The giant leaned forwards. “If you set yourselves against Eran Pascha you will lose. If she wished the mountains to fall on your army and crush it, they would do so.”
The cleansers looked uneasily at the peaks above them.
“Do any dissent?” Kalik asked again. Heads around the table shook. The cleansers were ready to surrender.
“Terms,” the general found his voice at last. “There must be terms,” he said.
“This is not a surrender,” Pascha told them. “We do not want your weapons. Just go to your ships and sail them back to your home. Don’t come back.”
“I disagree.” It was Quinnial who spoke. All heads turned to the Avilian duke.
“You disagree?” Pascha enquired. “What terms do you want?”
“I want a treaty,” Duke Quinnial said. “I want a temple to Seth Yarra built at Bas Erinor. I want to be able to buy their windships. I want trade. There are a thousand things I want.”
Quinnial was little more than a boy compared to Pascha, but he was no fool. He sought to bind Seth Yarra to the Kingdoms, to erode their isolation, but she did not see how trade could work. The Seth Yarra were particular about everything.
“I agree with Duke Quinnial,” Hestia said. “And there must be reparations.”
“Reparations?” the Afaeli king said. “You were bitten by the snake you coddled. You cannot expect to gain from that.”
“You may ask for what you will,” Kalik said. “But we are soldiers. Our words do not bind the homeland.”
“Then you may carry a message for us,” Pascha said.
“That we can do,” Kalik agreed.
“We must agree on the contents of the message,” Prince Havil said. “And so must they.” He nodded in the direction of the watchful dragons.
History was being played out again. The Kingdoms were arguing among themselves, but at least they were arguing towards something.
In spite of her misgivings, Pascha recognised that it was a beginning. They talked around the table for the rest of the day, and eventually even the Seth Yarra general entered into the spirit of the thing. Everyone did, except Narak. Pascha noticed quite quickly that the Wolf was sitting silently, not really listening. She suspected that he was brooding.
Towards evening they abandoned the table and the Seth Yarra returned to their own camp while the Pascha and her allies withdrew behind the wall. She was half way to the gate before she realised that Narak was not with them.
She turned. He was still sitting at the table, alone. The dragons were watching him, all nine of them, unnaturally alert. She walked back to him.
; “Narak?”
He did not answer. She saw that he was holding the pity stone again, rolling it in his fingers and staring into it. She put a hand gently on his shoulder.
“Narak, the day is over,” she said.
“Not yet,” he said. “I made a promise. I will keep it.”
Pascha did not understand what he meant, but it was apparent that the dragons expected something. They stared with unblinking eyes so that she felt a mouse before nine cats, a snowflake before a bonfire. The air was thick with expectation.