Sungui led them in the meditation once again. The imbibed power settled in their stomachs and spread throughout their limbs, becoming less than noticeable. His voice guided them through the depths of forgotten ages, back into the formless void that gave birth to all things, back to the source of their common essence. Back to the days when even Zyung himself was simply One of Many, and the deep cosmos was their playground.
Now the listeners emerged from the trance, and Sungui saw it flickering in their eyes. He did not mistake it for the glow of Mahaavar’s faded essence. This was another fire. The fire of memory. The flames of outrage and epiphany. Now they remembered exactly what they used to be. They would remember for days, some even for weeks. During this time, their secret resentment would fester, and the Almighty’s rule would weigh on them like a bronze yoke.
They would realize the similarities between themselves and the humans that were so expendable. Like Sungui, they would recognize the shape of their own slavery. Yes, even the High Seraphim were but slaves in the blinding glare of His Holiness. Now they remembered this fact.
Yet they would soon forget. Zyung’s power over them always reasserted itself.
So it had been for millennia.
“Now is the time,” Sungui spoke. He met each of their gleaming eyes. “While memory lives fresh in your minds, while Zyung’s dreams of western conquest command his attention. His ambition is our opportunity. While he is distracted, we can rise up and take it all. We can end our bondage and claim his empire for our own. Join me in this, and we will be again what we were. Not Gods… but greater than Gods.”
The faces of Those Who Listen were placid pools hiding untold depths of memory and experience. Johaar looked to Mezviit, and Mezviit turned to Aldreka. In the end they all turned to lovely Lavanyia.
Lavanyia offered a smile of infuriating kindness.
Sungui’s male loins ached.
I will have her, if it takes a century.
“Sweet Sungui,” said Lavanyia. Her jeweled fingers rose to caress the muscles of his chest, not daring to plunge beneath the silvery satin, yet warm through the thin fabric. “You are well named Sungui the Venomous by those who fear you. Your ambition rivals that of His Holiness. Yet you are but a mote set to spinning about his bright sun. So are we all. Planets fixed in the gravity of his grand order. What you suggest–what you dream–is not possible.”
Sungui frowned.
How have I lost them so soon?
“We are Diminished in his presence now for ten thousand years,” said Lavanyia. “To live as a bright spark in the shadow of his divinity is far better than the darkness of annihilation. We must remain Diminished.”
“You fear him,” said Sungui. His voice was broken gravel. Anger gnawed at his heart.
“Of course we fear him,” said Damodar. “We listen… we remember… but we are not fools. If you believe this invasion will weaken him, or enable your treason in any way, you are very much mistaken.”
“Perhaps the fate of Mahaavar lies too heavy on your soul,” offered Darisha.
The salty remains lingered on Sungui’s tongue. “No!” he spat. “Let me show you more. Let me share another vision of our former greatness. You will see that he is no greater than any of us. And all of us together—”
“Would stand no chance,” said Durangshara. His beefy hands rose in a dismissive gesture. “His will made us what we are. His will can unmake us. All talk of rebellion must be forgotten, scoured from our mind as the remains of Mahaavar shall be washed from this floor.”
“They why did you come here?” Sungui faced the fat one, defying his arrogance with a puffed chest. “Why listen to me at all?”
Silence ruled the chamber. The crackling of flames in the sconces.
It was Myrinhama the Golden who finally answered. Her voice was honey and sunlight.
“We listen because we must remember,” she said, “as an adult remembers the joys of childhood… the time of innocencewhen the boundaries of reality did not yet exist. We listen to honor what we once were, and what we are now. Yet the grown woman does not seek to become a girl-child again. Children have no power, and they are meant to grow… to become. There is no going back, Sungui.”
How could he make them see past this conditioning? This was the earth working its magic on them. Zyung’s order took its power from the cycles of nature. Birth, Death, and Rebirth. These cycles did not apply to the Old Breed. They never had. Until Zyung had chained their kind to this world and so made them part of it.
The others nodded at the perceived wisdom of Myrinhama’s words.
“You are all fools,” Sungui said.
Durangshara chuckled. “There is only one fool among us here. We indulge you, Sungui. Yet consider what we have said today. You cannot hide your true self from His Holiness forever. Before he discovers your ambition, we will ourselves send you to salt.”
Sungui picked up the black dagger, stained with the pale residue of Mahaavar. He whirled to face the fat Seraphim once again, thrusting his chin forward.
“There is no threat within you,” Sungui growled.
Durangshara leaned back only a hair’s breadth. His glinting eyes followed the salty blade.
Lavanyia spoke again, her voice calm as night. “Durangshara means only that you must forget this treason, Sungui. You will not find peace until you do so.”
Sungui sheathed the dagger in the sleeve of his robe. The eyes of Those Who Listen followed him as he walked toward the arched exit.
They listened, yes. But they did not hear.
He would have offered some final word of defiance, but the chance was stolen from him.
The gray brick walls began to tremble. A rain of dust and pebbles fell from the ceiling, and the waters of the cooled bath grew confused with ripples and splashing. A torch fell from its sconce and extinguished itself in the bathwater.
Above the trembling of rock and soil and water, a tremendous note rang clear and powerful. The peal of the Great Horn, the voice of Zyung himself, giving at last the signal that was fifty years in coming. For a generation now, sons of the empire had labored to fulfill their fathers’ dreams of the coming conquest. The Holy Armada had been expanded and the ranks of the Almighty’s armies had swollen. The preparations for this westward expansion had captured the attention of the Inner and Outer Provinces for as long as any living man could remember.
Now it had come, on this night of all nights. The night of Mahaavar’s consumption.
The Almighty’s horn cast its thunderous knell across the Divine Province, and its din would roll on the evening currents into the lands beyond, igniting the cities where his flame-eyed visage loomed over Kings and Caliphs alike.
The time had come.
The Great Horn called them all to war.
The Invasion of the West was begun.
With a fleeting glance at the resigned listeners, Sungui ran from the chamber, leaping the prostrate forms of wailing slaves. Rising from the catacombs, he entered a courtyard and bounded up the heart-spiral of a tower, toward a series of arched stone bridges. This high route would bring him quickly to the dreadnought landing bay.
Again his designs Diminish me.
There is no escape from it.
No time to convince Those Who Listen that Lavanyia is wrong.
No time for treason.
Today there was only time to serve Zyung.
The Holy Armada would sail the wind.
2
The Shaper
What is time?
A series of curtains rippling and waving, each one a doorway into past or future. There are many futures. Often I reach for the nearest curtain and pull aside its gossamer fabric, gazing into one of these possible futures. Yet there are so many curtains exactly like this one, shrouds against futures that might be, or will be, or should never be.
At times I fail to pierce the veil of the future, and then I can only stand at the curtain and listen to the echoes of what has not yet come to pass.
> What is space?
An infinite void sparkling with the energies of creation. An ocean of glimmering stardust spread across the gulf, taking on shape and form, spilling into comets and spheres and nameless singularities. Endless patterns, spinning through infinity. There are many worlds, worlds within worlds, and yet there is only the one in which I sit and contemplate the angles of possibility. This is the world I chose long ago to inhabit, revere, and sculpt into something greater.
This is my world.
Men call me the Shaper.
Yet there is another world on the other side of this one. In fact, the two worlds are one and the same, two halves of a whole. Yet in many ways they could not be more different. Until yesterday the Kings of Men and Giants did not know that another Shaper exists. I have also shown them the true shape of their world… a sphere… and given them a vision of what is to come. Yet I fear that they will not be able to withstand it.
The Old Breed came into this world when it was young. Our home was the vastness between the stars. Even I cannot remember what drove us from the infinite into the bosom of this tiny mote. We fell as thundering tempests, raging winds, and flaming meteors into the primal seas. We crafted continents and raised up the basest of organisms, birthing sentient races to worship our greatness. We toyed with these early species, casting them into terrible wars, smiling at the grim temples they erected in our honor, laughing at the mortal doom which inevitably came. The curse of Blood and Fire and Suffering. It fascinated us, this mortal delicacy, this predilection for pain and death. Sometimes we slaughtered entire empires and rebuilt them, as a child plays with stones. We reigned over an Age of Chaos.
We strode across the world as its dark Emperors, weaving histories and legends, watching them fade in the mists of time, and we grew bored. Some of us returned to the vastness of the starry gulfs, while others Diminished into the world itself. We became seas, mountain ranges, glaciers, volcanoes, and ceaseless winds. Others fell lower, taking on the forms of those we had created for our own amusement; we exploited our status as monarchs and holy beings among the young races. Tired of playing with the world and its peoples as separate entities, we became them.
And we began to forget ourselves.
Now we forged nations and empires from inside the menagerie we had built. We walked in the bodies of those who came before Men, and each time the red plague of war came and struck us low. We warred among ourselves to prove whose creations were superior. We warred out of boredom and fickle emotions. We lost ourselves in the pain and pleasure of a small existence. Now we were tied to this tiny world, and so we destroyed and rebuilt it again and again.
Now we had learned too much of mortal existence. It had changed us as surely as we had manipulated it throughout the ancient epochs. We began to forget one another, to find our own solitary places to sit and dream away eternity. But not all of us slept.
In the wake of a great slaughter, the one I call my brother came to me. We were no more true brothers than we were true Men, yet there is no other word to express our common origins. He called together the last of the Old Breed who lingered among the mortal realms. A thousand of us gathered like clouds above the plain of blood and bones where the ravens feasted.
The time has come, said my brother. Soon he would take the name of Zyung. The Earthborn have arisen, and they are not of our making. The time of chaos and destruction must end. Now it is plain to me what must be done: This world must be tamed so the Earthborn might prosper. A lasting order must be built. An ultimate domain that cannot fall, a Living Empire that will bring an end to strife and warfare. On this day I will begin shaping this world into an eternal paradise. Who will join me in the pursuit of this great dream?
These are only my memories.
They sometimes fade like night vapors in the light of dawn.
It might have happened differently.
Most of my brothers and sisters chose to serve Zyung. His Living Empire grew across the great continent. He pruned the tribes of Men as a gardener prunes a vine. His shadows cast by his bright light fell across realm after realm. Men called him their God; they conquered and slaughtered in his name.
As the Living Empire grew, I witnessed the death of free will, the elimination of curiosity, the stamping out of higher thought among the Earthborn. Zyung’s everlasting peace could only be gained by enduring a long age of death and domination. I saw proud peoples become little more than slaves, choosing servitude over annihilation. Always the same choice he offered them, and always the dead outnumbered the living.
One day there would be no more death, no more conflict. There would be only Zyung, who would be the world itself, and all those within the world would be Zyung as well.
So I faced my brother and denied him. A handful of the Old Breed joined me in this. Some were eager to shirk the chains of obedience, while others dreamed of forging their own empires as they had done in past ages. There were not many of us, and so we could not stand long against the growing power of Zyung. We built a fleet of ships and gathered a host of Earthborn from the last of the free nations. We led our people across the Cryptic Sea and found a lesser continent on the other side of the world. The tribes we had saved were free to roam its interior and build their own kingdoms.
Yet our new home was haunted by the great Serpents of old. So I raised up the race of Giants from the stones of the earth and set them to slaying the Old Wyrms. Once this was done, our transplanted tribes flourished, eventually giving birth to five great city-states. I will not describe the long ages of each kingdom’s birth and evolution, yet all the while Zyung’s empire grew and grew across the trackless ocean.
A thousand years ago Zyung conquered the last of the lands on the far side of the world. The ancestral lands of the peoples known as Uurzians, Yaskathans, Mumbazans, Sharrians, and Khyreins were now gone, replaced by the homogeneity of the Living Empire. Yet the descendants of these five noble tribes have long forgotten their true origins. To them, the Land of the Five Cities is the entirety of the world itself.
For such a long time I labored to keep them ignorant of the truth.
Now that truth can no longer be denied.
In his quest to build a paradise that encompasses the earth itself, Zyung is coming.
Now the Kings of this land are united at last. Now they must face the Living Empire and I must face my brother. I do fear the greatness of his power. Yet I knew that one day this conflict would fall upon me. For a time I gave up on saving the Land of the Five Cities from Zyung’s dominion. For so very long I had tried and failed to rid mankind of its lust for war. I nearly lost the hope of ever doing so.
Man was doomed to struggle, bleed, and die. There was no hope of changing his essential nature, which was that of a warrior, a direct manifestation of his predatory instinct. I had grown weary of trying to change the Earthborn.
It was the heart of a single brave girl who gave me the strength to try again.
Sharadza.
I clutch at my stray thoughts now and force them back toward Zyung.
I love her.
Now is not the time for such illusions.
The gray-green ocean simmers beneath a scattering of stars. A bank of stormclouds hides the sinking sun, harbinger of the darkness to come. War is a storm that clouds the affairs of Men as well as those who are more than Men. There will be great suffering.
I hover, legs folded, above a crag overlooking the Golden Sea. The evening winds whip at my robes and make the blue flame upon my chest flicker. The black city of Khyrei smokes with ten thousand feast-fires behind me. Its people celebrate their liberation at the hands of Tong the Avenger, a slave who became a revolutionary. As their new monarch, Tong sits restless upon his throne. He must rebuild a fractured kingdom into something better and stronger, a nation freed from the ancient grip of Ianthe the Claw.
Ianthe had crossed the world with me long ago, fleeing Zyung’s power. I was a fool for her charms, which blinded me to her wicked nature. In many ways, she
was far worse than Zyung, yet I had set her loose upon the new continent to stoke the fires of the Earthborn’s worst qualities. She became a conqueror, a parasite, a tyrant. To rid the world of her was as difficult as changing the essence of the Earthborn. Yet now her dark kingdom has at last been stolen away from her, and she has left it behind.
I see it now, clear as the rising moon: Ianthe has returned to Zyung, taking Gammir with her. They will feed him many secrets about my half of the world. Ianthe, who built kingdoms and destroyed them on a whim; who revels in the blood of innocents; whose pattern was blended with that of the predator. And Gammir, who was once perhaps her equal, but now is only her slave. Yet both of them will be little more than slaves in Zyung’s world. There is no room for anything else there.
In the Khyrein harbor the double fleet prepares for a morning launch. I might weep for the fools who are doomed to die beneath those sails, but I do not have the luxury. The regal swanships of Mumbaza sit alongside the Yaskathan triremes, an impressive assembly of no less than seven hundred warships. Tong has pledged another hundred Khyrein reavers, newly liberated and pledged into his service. This brings the total close to one thousand vessels.
The Southern Kings think their combined fleets invincible. They are good men, but they are fools. Even after I split the veil of the future and showed them the Hordes of Zyung only days from landfall, they still deny the truth of their weakness.
When those ships sail in the morning, each man on board will be sailing to his death.
One can bring a Council of Kings together, yet still fail to make them listen.
So I sit above the darkening sea, striving to peer deeper into the corridor of the future. Which veil hides the truth from me? I must offer these brave Kings something more before they sail off to die. For the first time, I wonder exactly how much I have Diminished, living among the Earthborn for so long. Perhaps that single glance of what is to come, the golden cloud vision that I offered them, is all that I am capable of giving. Still I must try.
Seven Sorcerers: Book Three of the Books of the Shaper Page 3