Irmina opened her mouth, but Trucida touched her arm. After a deep breath, Irmina nodded.
Ancel drew on the Forms and Flows. Snow piled before his feet, spreading into the replica of a miniature barge. He stepped up onto it. With his next Forge, he sent his creation scooting over the snow and ice toward the spire.
When he reached the structure he saw that what he had thought to be odd colored stone that made up the spire was instead massive ice blocks. Trapped within the surface were the bodies of men and creatures, shadelings included, all whole and fully garbed. Ancel remained a good distance from the structure.
“You know I’m here,” he said. “You can let me in, or I can find my own way.”
Nothing but the wind’s moans.
He circled the spire, seeking an opening. All sides were the same, closed, beasts and men preserved in ice.
“I can only assume this is a test.” He delved into the Eye. A ball of flame burst into existence around his fist. Throwing his hand out, he flung the fire at the spire. It dissipated with a hiss.
“Definitely a test.”
He touched Prima, calling forth heat essences from his Etchings. This time the fireball penetrated at least a foot deep into the ice before it stopped. The hole closed up with a crackling sound.
One answer remained. Eyes closed Ancel said, “Heat to balance cold. Heat to evoke passion. Passion is unrelenting.”
The air split around him, portals opening up, the smell of burning pitch seeping out. Ferezen’s massive snakes of flame swept out from them, each with eyes that glowed brighter than the fires themselves. They hissed when they met the cold. He directed them to the spire. Together, they struck, burrowing into and through the ice. Dismissing the sentient, Ancel strode through the opening into the darkness beyond.
Inside the spire was odorless. As he waited for his sight to adjust to the dark, lightstones flickered on, revealing the walls that housed them. The luminance multiplied too many times to count, but his Matersense told him there were only ten lightstones. He glanced down to images of himself in semitransparent, glassy ice before he surveyed the rest of his surroundings.
Four columns stood at the structure’s center, a spiral staircase winding around their exterior. Both stairs and pillars disappeared some thirty feet up into a ceiling from which he could see himself. Carved from the same icy blocks as everything else, the columns sparkled, and reflected a million distorted images.
Intricate carvings decorated each pillar. Certain they were Etchings, he reached a gloved hand out and touched them. Frigid cold radiated beneath his fingers. When he tried to ease away to touch another section his hand stuck against the surface. He yanked harder, to no avail. Forging, he drew on the heat essences stored within his Etchings. The pillar absorbed them. Another attempt at a Forge proved similarly futile.
The cold seeped up his arm, the limb growing numb. Ancel reached to his waist, removed his knife, and proceeded to cut the laces on his gloves. Once he freed his wrist, he worked his hand from the glove. A crackling echoed above his heavy breathing as the ice claimed the glove with a transparent coat.
Frowning, he strode around the pillars to a point where the stairs curved high enough from him to peer up into the squared hollow they formed. The structures seemed to stretch up forever. A visual illusion, he realized, from the infinite reflections.
He made his way back to the steps. Etchings also adorned them. Rather than risk his boots, he removed his other glove, bent, and touched it on the first step. It froze in place. He snatched his hand away before the ice claimed it.
Left with only his swords, armor, knife, cloak, and boots, he pondered his next course of action. Regardless of what decision he made, he had to ascend. The pull from the Eztezian said as much.
Ancel removed his knife from the sheath on his belt, undid his cloak by its clasp, and sheared the material in half. The upper bit he refastened around his neck. He took the lower half and threw it at the second step. In the count of five it became ice.
Careful not to allow any part of his body to touch the step he leaned forward as far as he could and tapped the knife on the third step. Near instant crackling. So fast he barely managed to be quick enough in removing his hand. The knife never fell. The weapon froze standing up.
Grunting his frustration, he considered another Forge, but concluded it would have the same effect as before. Left with few options he made to venture outside and question Irmina and Trucida.
A wall of ice and Etchings covered the opening through which he’d entered.
Ancel faced the stairs once more. He mulled over the problem, pacing back and forth while stroking the bush under his chin. A part of him said the solution stared him in the face, but he simply couldn’t see it. Annoyance growing, he sat on the floor.
People he loved would continue to suffer if he couldn’t get past this. People who relied on him. His mother and father dominated his mind. Without this step chances were slim that he’d see either one of them alive again. Particularly, Stefan. The pain his father must be enduring echoed to him, a weight in the pendant around his neck. Stefan’s essences had called to him from the southwest, a distinct difference from the charm in Benez.
Thinking of his father conjured images of the years spent training and learning the Disciplines. Memories of Galiana also rose to the forefront. Ancel continued to stare at the stairs while the flood of old memories, most pleasurable, flashed through his mind.
The most straightforward and simple approach is often the solution to a complex problem. Father loved that one Discipline. Ancel recalled hearing the same from Ryne.
Mind a buzz, he wondered what Galiana would have thought about everything that happened so far. He could see the old woman admonishing him, telling him he should’ve expected some of it. Not that he hadn’t. Since losing her, he’d been applying one of her core teachings to all he did: the idea that coincidence didn’t exist. Every event was part of some plan.
The ideas repeated in his head and with them the spark of a solution, one that seemed too great a risk to take. Yet it was simplicity itself. Ignoring it for the moment he wracked his brains for a different angle, an action that would not mean his life if he failed. None came. Another Discipline repeated to him instead. In every stratagem, regardless of how sound, or how infallible, there is risk. Expecting to war without risk is to already accept defeat.
With those words as his guide he slipped off his boots. The cold floor was a distant touch at the back of his mind. Dread crawled in his gut as he stood, a tight thing balled and ready to spring. He allowed it to thrive instead of forcing it down with the Eye. Fear made him feel alive. He drew in a deep breath, exhaled, and stepped onto the first stair.
The steps felt as if he walked on Eldanhill’s sun-warmed cobbles in the middle of summer. Cracking a smile, he headed up.
Round and round the flights wound, the lack of bannisters a scary proposition until he found himself above the ceiling in the spire’s heart, surrounded by ice walls and a multitude of self-images. He lost track of time. When he finally stepped up through an opening and onto the final landing, his chest was heaving, and his legs burned.
The last flight opened onto a square with the four pillars at its corners. In the middle of it sat a lone, naked, hairless figure, skin the color of snow. Etchings covered his body and became one with the floor.
“I began to doubt if you’d make it.” The voice was male, old, raspy, and weary. “Being able to reach me means you possess the necessary Tenets.”
“I do,” Ancel said.
The man’s eyes opened. They were the purest gold. “I have waited a long time for one such as you. So long in fact that I forget what time means.”
“How did you know I’d come?”
“Not you per se. I knew someone had to come. Eventually. It was inevitable.”
“How so?”
The Eztezian smiled. “If a place exists and can be reached, won’t someone go there?”
“
Um.”
A chuckle echoed through the room.
“Whatever made you come to this place, or choose this place?” Ancel asked.
“I was tired of the wars, the constant fighting. So I built all of this.” The man gestured around him with frail, spindly arms. “From it my power courses out into Ostania, touching here, touching there, making me aware of all that happens. Eventually it spans the entire world.”
Ancel frowned. “The storms?”
The Eztezian nodded. “And the zyphyl.”
“Who are you?”
“A man, a godling,” the old man said, shrugging, “even I am uncertain.”
“Do you have a name? Something I can call you?”
“It matters not. Like Ryne or Thanairen, I’ve had countless. None that could be remembered today.” The hairless man paused, seemingly deep in thought. “Except perhaps the last due to a long forgotten line of descendants or a city dead and gone. I doubt even they would know their origins. Log ago, when I was just a man, they called me Jenoah Merinian, the First Chronicler, the First Beasttamer.”
Ancel gasped.
“Ah, it still means something.”
“The city of Jenoah died during a battle among the gods, or so my dreams say,” Ancel answered. “And the Chroniclers are still revered to this day for their ability to tell the future.” He considered mentioning Galiana and Irmina, but a part of him said Merinian knew of them.
“The future’s many paths,” Merinian corrected. “Paths divined by me and passed on through the zyphyls. And your dreams have the right of it. What else do they say?”
“Not much besides reminding me of Antonjur.”
“Then you must seek it out.”
The words were more command than suggestion. Ancel felt a strange need to obey. “The old homes of the gods?” he asked. “Why?”
“It’s where they live.”
“Who?”
Merinian gave Ancel a blank stare. As realization dawned, Ancel’s mouth formed an ‘O’.
“Before you can do so, you need cold and the shade’s Tenets,” Merinian said.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Really? I thought perhaps you came because you loved the frigid, empty wasteland where nothing but my creations live.” Merinian chuckled again. He climbed to his feet. His chest and genitals were absolutely flat, featureless. “When I first saw into the Planes of If and passed the message of the creator’s bane and the Aegis, I myself did not quite know what I was seeing. It was simply a message delivered by things beyond my grasp, possibly by the very gods who we helped to lock themselves away. But, no matter how many different possibilities revealed themselves to me, there was one constant …”
Prima flared around Merinian, his aura growing to reach the ceiling. A gold and silver nimbus surrounded his body.
Ancel tensed.
“In order to pass cold’s Tenet to you, we would need to do battle. I would have to be defeated.” Merinian’s voice echoed from every direction.
A lump caught in Ancel’s throat, fear threatening to choke him. His heart pounded.
“And in every scenario you lost,” Merinian said, voice even, flat, a simple statement of fact.
Ancel prepared to recite his Tenets in his mind.
“Do you know why?” Merinian stared him down, the golden eyes seeming to penetrate to Ancel’s core.
Mouth like chalk, Ancel could offer no answer.
“Because this is my domain, my stronghold, and even if heat and cold balance each other, nothing of heat that I couldn’t snuff out can enter this place.”
Something about the man’s proclamation, about his demeanor, said he didn’t wish to fight, that he was doing as he’d seen from his zyphyls, from his connections to the Planes of If. The words also gave Ancel an idea.
Without a second thought he snatched the sword at his hip and stabbed it into the ground, igniting its Etchings. The blade sliced into the ice like a sharp knife parting silk. He called upon heat’s Tenet.
The portals opened, the fiery sentient shot through. Ancel drove its power into the weapon, his divya. Prima Materium tore through the building, spreading in a golden glow, lighting up every Etching along the way.
“Cold to balance heat. Cold to evoke temperance. Temperance is all encompassing,” Merinian screamed.
The spire shifted. A heartbeat thudded. Ice blocks transformed, the entire structure roiling and rumbling. It took only an instant for Ancel to realize they were inside Merinian’s sentient.
The man had maintained this Forge for millennia.
Forming a seal of air essences around his divya, Ancel yanked his cloak from his back, dropped it beneath his feet, and kneeled upon it. Ice crackled. Cold shot up his knees. And then he became numb.
Encased in a cocoon of ice and air, he watched Merinian’s eyes grow wild. The man’s aura burst apart. Sela flew, shooting across the room. In the same instant, the Eztezian pointed to Ancel.
Innumerable colors flooded Ancel’s vision. The pleasure of transfer took his mind and body.
Merinian crumpled, and the spire with him.
Ancel fell too far to judge. When he struck the bottom an eternity later, it was into something soft and powdery. He activated the heat compiled within his blade. The icy prison melted.
After gathering his bearings, he Forged another barge of snow and returned to where Irmina and Trucida waited.
Face a mask of concern, Irmina asked, “What happened?”
“I couldn’t beat him, so he beat himself.” He didn’t know whether to feel triumphant or sad about his proclamation.
“So what now?” Irmina was peering toward the sky and the numerous zyphyls that had become visible. Their croon filled the air, a melancholy song. The storm clouds were slowly dissipating.
“Now, I have someone to save.”
Chapter 43
Irmina waited in the dark, dank Netherwood along with Trucida, Charra, two leaders from the Seifer and Nema, and a collection of the forest’s animals. Beyond the trees waited a vast army upon the plains, the Lightstorm standard flying high above it. Rank upon rank of Matii massed, colors representing the Iluminus’ sects. All but the shade. Apparently some things still had to remain secret.
At her feet lay a female Dagodin covered in blood to match her armor, one hand over a gash at her throat. The air was thick with the smell of it. Red dribbled between the soldier’s fingers and bubbled from her mouth.
“I have a mender on the way,” Irmina said.
Relief washed across the woman’s features before she arched her back. Shuddering, the soldier moaned. In the next few moments her face drained of color, her body of life. After the last death throes Irmina knelt at the soldier’s side and drew her hands down over staring eyes.
In the process of removing the woman’s armor, Irmina asked, “How many times have they tried to breach the woods?”
“Seven,” Hortin replied. Large even for a mountain man, the Seifer leader’s accent was still thick despite the time spent among Eldanhill folk.
“And they failed every time,” bragged Kazneer. Green and black paint covered the Nema chieftain in stripes, making him appear almost one with the trees and brush. “Not one of their Matii got past the Nema and our daggerpaws. Not even when they wear shrouds.”
Hortin spat to one side and growled under his breath.
“You two stop it,” Trucida ordered. “This is not a competition for who has the best hunting skills. Keep that in mind.”
The two men bowed.
Irmina stripped down to her small clothes without regard for the two men who were leering at her. She gave them a frosty smile. After a bit of maneuvering she had the armor adjusted to appear good enough to pass for her own.
“The messengers from Benez,” she asked, “have you allowed any to pass?”
“None.” Kazneer gestured with his head toward the forest’s deeper sections. “We are keeping them there.”
“Good. Of the Tribunals a
rmy, how many prisoners have you taken?”
“A hundred or more.” Hortin puffed up his chest.
“And the dead?”
“We placed their bodies outside the Netherwood for them to collect.” Kazneer nodded in the direction of the army.
“Release the prisoners to them also, but first I need one of you to hit me.”
The two men gaped at each other before they protested in a prattle of half-finished sentences.
She eyed them, gaze steely. “I need to look as if I’ve taken a beating.” Irmina shrugged. “You don’t expect me to saunter into their camp unharmed, do you?”
“But—” began Hortin.
“Ah, be quiet,” Trucida said. “Men.” She shook her head in annoyance. Turning to Irmina, she added, “They act as if they are tough when in fact they are all soft inside. And then they swear we are tender like them. You cannot expect them to understand what needs doing.” Grumbling, the old woman shuffled toward a set of low hanging tree limbs.
Irmina allowed herself a little smile before speaking to the two clansmen once more. “Bring the prisoners to the forest’s edge. I’ll send word by daggerpaw to start their release. I want them all freed at the same time. If any resist have the animals reinforce the idea.”
The men bowed before heading into the woods.
Trucida returned with a stick that appeared too big for the old woman, carrying it in her wizened hands as if it were weightless.
Arching her eyebrow, Irmina said, “You could’ve simply Forged.”
“And waste a good chance to give you a beating like your parents should have long ago?” Trucida’s lips split in a mischievous grin.
Irmina rolled her eyes. “Fine. Do what you must.” She braced herself for the first blow.
She’d expected Trucida to swing away like a woman possessed, a simple act of inflicting pain. Instead, when the Exalted moved she did so with a fighter’s grace. The flow of steps extended from the basics into the patterns of Styles and Stances, each strike precise. And each sent a white-hot lance of pain through Irmina. When Trucida struck her face it took all of Irmina’s resolve and the Eye not to lash out.
Embers of a Broken Throne Page 30