by Jim Butcher
“For tradition’s sake,” interrupted Valerius, “we ought to needlessly throw away the lives of our fighting men. Is that what you’re saying, Senator?”
Theoginus faced Valerius squarely. “Half of our Realm is gone, sir. Lives beyond counting have been lost. Alera Imperia herself has fallen and been devoured by earth and fire. But most of what is left of the Realm is beyond the reach of any foe. It is carved into the intangible bedrock of the mind and heart—the law. It is within the good steel of those Legions outside the city walls, ready to give their lives in Alera’s defense. It flows within the veins of her Citizenry, called to arms and ready to face whatever foe should try to harm her people.” He swept his hand in a dramatic gesture, to the west. “And it is out there, in the living monument of the House that has guided the Realm since time immemorial. It is in Gaius Octavian.”
True silence had fallen on the amphitheater. Theoginus knew how to speak to a crowd. He knew how to draw upon their emotions—and the constant hum of low fear that permeated all of Alera in these desperate months left them primed for just such an approach.
Theoginus’s eyes raked the gathered Senate again. “Remember that, when you vote. Remember the oaths you have sworn. Remember the simple truth—that Sextus’s lawful heir is coming to defend our lands and our peoples. Turn aside from the law, from what the Realm has always been, and Alera will be no more. Whether we stand, whether we fall, Alera will be gone. And we here will have murdered her: murdered her with quiet words, loud speeches, and raised hands. Remember.”
Theoginus gave the Senator Callidus a glare that might have set the man on fire. Then he took his seat once more and folded his arms.
Valerius stared at his opponent for a long, silent moment. Then he gazed at the rest of the Senate. Amara could practically read his thoughts. Theoginus had employed a dangerous gambit. One could never be sure that an impassioned speech would move an audience in the intended direction—but the Ceresian senator had spoken well. The power of his words still resonated in the room. Any opposition Valerius raised, at this point, would earn him nothing but angry glares. His best course of action was almost certainly to move ahead and count upon the support he’d gathered in the days previous to this confrontation. It was a close vote. He might already have done enough to tip the scales.
Valerius nodded slowly and raised his voice. “I call the vote of the Senate upon the issue of the legitimacy of Gaius Septimus’s alleged marriage to one freeman Isana of the Calderon Valley. A vote of yes will confirm the legal status of the marriage. A vote of no will deny it.”
Amara found herself holding her breath.
“All those who would vote no?” Valerius asked.
Hands began to rise, scattered throughout the seated Senators. Amara found herself counting them furiously.
“How many?” Bernard whispered.
“They need thirty-six,” she replied, still counting. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four.
Valerius added his hands to those raised.
“Thirty-five,” she hissed.
“Those who would vote yes?” Valerius asked.
Hands began to rise—and trumpets began to howl.
A wave of worried whispers washed up around Amara. Heads began to turn. One distant trumpet was joined by another, and another, and another. The whispers became a murmur.
“What is that?” asked a matron seated behind Amara of her husband. “The signal?”
The old gentleman patted her arm. “I’m not sure, dear.”
Amara turned to Bernard, her eyes grave. He met her gaze, his own face calm but resigned. He recognized the standard Legion trumpet call just as well as she did.
The Legions outside the southern wall of the city of Riva were sounding a call to arms.
“They can’t be here,” Amara said. “Not already.”
Bernard gave her a half smile and rose. Around her, other Citizens were doing the same thing, moving with brisk, worried efficiency toward the amphitheater’s exits, the matter before the Senate forgotten. “They seem to have formed a habit of surprising us. Let’s prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
She took his hand and rose. They were just leaving the theater when a young woman came rushing toward them through the crowd, being jostled roughly several times in her haste. She was a slender young woman, with a long, rather serious face and long, cobweb-fine hair of pale gold. “Count Calderon!” Lady Veradis called. “Count Calderon!”
Bernard caught sight of her waving hand and waded through the crowd, moving through it easily enough by dint of pure mass. Amara stayed close to him, in his wake, avoiding the minor collisions that would otherwise have rattled her.
“Veradis!” Bernard called. He took the girl by the shoulders, a supportive, steadying gesture. She was clearly shaken, her face pale, her eyes wide. “What happened?”
“The First Lady, Count,” she sobbed. “It’s chaos over there, and I can’t find the Placidas, and I don’t know whom to trust.”
Bernard looked around for a moment, and followed Amara’s pointed finger to an alley between two buildings, an eddy in the stream of humanity flowing around them. Bernard moved them over into the relatively quiet space, and said, “Slow down, Veradis. Slow down. What happened?”
The girl gained control of herself with a visible effort, and Amara remembered that Veradis was an extremely gifted watercrafter. The emotions of the frightened crowd were probably an ongoing torment to her. “Your sister, sir,” she said, her voice steady. “Your sister’s been taken. Araris, too.”
“Taken,” Amara asked sharply. “Taken by who?”
The horn signals continued to blow, growing louder and more numerous.
“I don’t know,” Veradis said. “When I got back to her chamber, the door had been broken down. There was blood—probably not enough of it to have killed anyone. And they were gone.”
Amara heard, among the other calls, the trumpets of High Lord Riva’s Legion sounding the assembly, from deeper in the city. As Citizens in service to Riva, Bernard and Amara had been assigned to the support of the First Rivan Legion. Bernard glanced up. He’d heard the sound, too. “I’ll go,” he said. “See what you can find out.”
Amara bit her lip but nodded and turned back to Veradis. “Lady, can you fly?”
“Of course.”
Amara turned back to her husband, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. He returned it with brief, fierce intensity. When they broke off the kiss, he touched her cheek with the back of one hand, then turned and vanished into the crowds.
Amara nodded to Lady Veradis. “Show me,” she said.
The two of them lifted off into the night, two small shapes among many who were flitting through the skies over Riva, while the Legion horns continued to blare.
CHAPTER 11
“You have no idea of the potential for destruction in the forces you are tampering with,” Alera said calmly. “None whatsoever.”
Tavi stood in his command tent, looking down at a large map of the Realm spread out across an entire tabletop, its corners weighted with small white stones. The air hummed with the tension of a windcrafting that would prevent their voices from carrying outside. His dress-uniform tunic was folded neatly on the cot in the corner, ready for his dinner with Kitai. “Then perhaps you should educate me,” he murmured.
Alera looked as she always did—serene, remote, lovely, garbed in grey, her eyes shimmering through one metallic or gemstone hue after the next. “It would be difficult to truly explain, even to you. Not in the time that remains.”
Tavi arched an eyebrow at that remark and studied Alera more closely. The human-appearing fury folded her hands before her, the posture of a proper Aleran matron. Had they been trembling? Did the nails look . . . uneven? Ragged, as if she’d been chewing upon them?
Something, Tavi decided, was definitely off about the fury tonight.
“If it isn’t too much trouble, perhaps you could explain what sorts of problems I might be
letting myself in for if I go through with the plan.”
“I don’t see why,” Alera responded. “You’re going to do it in any case.”
“Perhaps.”
She shook her head. “What you are asking is going to set certain cycles into motion. The ultimate result of those cycles could be the slow freezing of the world. Glaciers that grow and grow each year, slowly devouring all the land before them.”
Tavi had just picked up a glass of watered wine and taken a drink. He half choked on it. “Bloody crows,” he croaked. “When?”
“Not in your lifetime,” Alera said. “Or in the lifetimes of your children, or their children. Perhaps not in the lifetime of your entire people. Almost certainly, beyond the length of time your written memory will survive you. A thousand years, or two thousands, or three or twenty. But it will come.”
“If I do not act,” Tavi said, “the vord will destroy my people before the snow flies this year.” He shook his head. “The Alerans of thousands of years in the future will never have the chance to exist—and you’ll never get to tell anyone that you told them so. The theoretical Alerans of tomorrow will have to look out for themselves.”
He half expected her to smile at his commentary. It was the sort of quiet, cerebral humor that the fury seemed to appreciate. She did not respond.
“You’ll help us?” he asked.
She inclined her head slowly. “Of course.”
Tavi stepped closer to her abruptly, reached down to her folded hands, and lifted them. His heart went up into his throat as he did. The fury before him was a being of almost unthinkable power. If she took exception to his actions . . .
But she only stood there regarding him with a calm expression. He moved his eyes from hers to her fingertips.
They looked ragged, the material of them frayed, somehow, chewed. Tavi had once seen the bodies of soldiers who had fallen into a river during a battle. The men had drowned, and their remains had not been recovered for more than a day. The fish and other creatures of the river had been at them, biting and snipping off tiny bits of flesh. The wounds had not bled. They had remained cold, inert, grey, as if the bodies had somehow become sculptures of soft clay.
Alera’s fingers looked like that—like a wax sculpture an industrious mouse had been nibbling upon.
“What is this?” he asked her quietly.
“Inevitability,” the fury replied. “Dissolution.”
He frowned for a moment, both at her hands and at her reply. The meaning sunk in a few seconds later. He looked up at her, and whispered, “You’re dying.”
Alera gave him a very calm, very warm smile. “A simplistic way to view what is happening,” she replied. “But I suppose that from your perspective it does share certain superficial similarities.”
“I don’t understand,” Tavi said.
Alera considered her hands in his for a moment. Then she gestured down the length of her body, and said, “Know you how this form came to be? Why it is that I speak to your family’s bloodline?”
Tavi shook his head. “No.”
She gave him a chiding glance. “But you have conjectured.”
Tavi inclined his head to her. “I hypothesized that it had something to do with the mural in the First Lord’s meditation chamber.”
“Excellent,” Alera said, nodding. “The mosaic in the chamber floor is made from pieces of stone brought there from all over the Realm. Through those pieces, the original Gaius Primus was able to communicate with and command furies all across the land to bring him information, allow him glimpses of places far away, and to do his will.” She pursed her lips. “That was when I first began to become aware of myself, as a discrete entity. Over Primus’s lifetime, I continued to . . . congeal, I suppose, would be the best word for it. He sensed my presence and, in time, I understood how to speak with him and how to manifest a material form.” She smiled, her eyes distant. “The first words I remember actually hearing with my own ears were Primus’s: Bother, I’ve gone mad.”
Tavi let out a short, choking laugh.
She smiled at him. “The mosaic was the focus upon which this form was predicated. It was what drew thousands upon thousands of furies with no individual identity into something more.” She put a hand flat to her own chest. “Into Alera.”
“And when my grandfather destroyed Alera Imperia, the mosaic was destroyed with it,” Tavi said.
“Unavoidable, from Sextus’s perspective. Had it remained intact, the vord Queen would have possessed it. She would almost certainly have understood what it meant and attempted to control me through it. She might even have succeeded.”
“And that’s why the First Lords never spoke of you to anyone,” Tavi said quietly. “Why there’s not a word of you in any of the histories.”
“No foes of the House of Gaius could attempt to usurp control of me if they did not know of me.”
“But they could kill you,” Tavi said quietly.
“Indeed.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “In a very real sense, I have been killed by the vord invasion—but it took a certain length of time for me to form. It will likewise take time for me to return to my original state.”
“I hadn’t . . . I didn’t realize,” Tavi said. “I’m so sorry.”
She arched an eyebrow. “But why? I do not fear what is to come, young Gaius. I will feel neither loss nor pain. My time in this form is almost done. All things must come to an end. It is the way of the universe.”
“After so long helping my family and the Realm, you deserve better.”
“In what way is that relevant? What one deserves and what one experiences are seldom congruent.”
“When they are, it is called ‘justice,’ ” Tavi said. “It’s one of the things I’m supposed to help provide, as I understand the office.”
Alera’s smile took on a bitter undertone. “Bear in mind that I have not always helped your family or your people. I am unwilling to place any creature before any other. And every action I take mandates a reaction, a balance. When Sextus wished me to moderate prevailing weather in the Vale, it would cause half a dozen furystorms elsewhere in the Realm. When he would ask me to lend strength to the great currents of wind, it would spin off cyclones hundreds of miles away. Until the vord came, I and my kin had killed more Alerans than any foe your folk had ever faced.” Her eyes glinted with something savage and cold. “The argument could be made, young Gaius, that what is happening to me is justice.”
Tavi took that in for a moment, mulling it over in his mind. “When you are gone . . . Things will change.”
Her eyes went unreadable. “Yes.”
“What things?”
“Everything,” she said calmly. “For a time. The forces so long bound up in this form must settle out to a balance once more. The countryside of all the Realm will become more active with wild furies, more turbulent, and more dangerous. Weather patterns will shift and change. Animals will behave oddly. Plants will grow at unnatural rates, or wither for no apparent reason. Furycrafting itself will be unstable, unpredictable.”
Tavi shuddered, imagining the chaos that would grow from such an environment. “Is there no way to prevent it?”
Alera looked at him with something almost like compassion. “None, young Gaius.”
Tavi sank down onto a camp stool and put his elbows on his knees, his head bowed. “Nothing. You’re sure.”
“All things end, young Gaius. One day, you will, too.”
Tavi’s back hurt. Some motion during the fight with the Canim assassins had pulled a muscle. It would be simple to ease the pain in a tub, a mild watercrafting. Even if he didn’t have a tub, the discomfort was minor enough to alleviate with a few moments of intense focus. But at the moment, he wasn’t sure he was capable of that. His back hurt.
“You’re telling me,” he said, “that even if we somehow overcome the vord, it won’t be over. Someday soon, the land itself is going to turn against us. We might overcome this nightmare only to dr
own in chaos.”
“Yes.”
“That’s . . . a lot to have in front of me.”
“Life is unfair, uncaring, and painful, young Gaius,” Alera said. “Only a madman struggles against the tide.”
She didn’t make a whisper of sound, but Tavi lifted his eyes to find Alera kneeling, facing him, her face level with his. She reached out and touched his cheek with her frayed fingertips. “I have always found the particular madness of the House of Gaius singularly intriguing. It has fought the tides for more than a thousand years. It has often failed to attain victory. But it has never conceded the struggle.”
“Has it ever faced something like this?” he asked quietly.
“When the first Alerans came here, perhaps,” Alera said, her eyes distant. “My memories of it are very distant. It would be centuries before I knew your people. But they were few. So very few. Eleven thousand lives, perhaps.”
“About the same size as a Legion and its followers,” Tavi said.
She smiled. “And so it was. A Legion from another place, lost, and come here to my lands.” She gestured toward the entrance to the tent. “The Canim, the Marat, the Icemen. All lost travelers.” She shook her head sadly. “The others, too. Those that your people exterminated, over the centuries. So much lost to fear and necessity.”
“When they came here, they had no furycrafting?” Tavi asked.
“Not for years.”
“Then how did they do it?” he asked. “How did they survive?”
“With savagery. Skill. Discipline. They came from a place where they were unrivaled masters of war and death. Their enemies here had never seen anything like them. Your forebears could not return whence they had come. They were trapped here, and only victory gave them survival. So they became victors—no matter the cost.”
She met his eyes calmly. “They did things you would scarcely believe. They committed the most monstrous and heroic deeds. The generations of your people in that time became a single, savage mind, death incarnate—and when they ran short of foes, they practiced their skills upon one another.”