“I think that’s Phaedor’s point,” she noted, frowning.
The High Lord set his empty goblet down on a table and turned in a slowly deliberate manner to face her. “If we know it’s a trap, then we prepare for it. We bring our entire force to bear—”
“The very act he’s expecting,” Phaedor remarked.
Marius spun and slammed his hands on the table between himself and the zanthyr. “What would you have us do? Speak plainly or speak not at all!”
The zanthyr emerged from the corner like Night taking form. “I would have you remember who you are.”
Marius’s fingers tightened against the wood. Anger simmered in his gaze. “Meaning?”
The zanthyr began strolling the lengthy shadows beyond the reach of lamps and firelight. “If Valentina’s Sight eludes her, if the currents are muddled, then you both must use other perceptions. Mortals have fifty-two, but a wielder’s depth and scope of perception is limited only by the Eleventh Esoteric.”
The High Lord straightened from the table, his expression drawn in long, deep lines.
“Ansgar is but one of many pikes aimed against you.” The zanthyr’s emerald gaze closed the distance between himself and the High Lord. “Each pike is long enough to keep your attention focused on the spear at its tip, rather than on the enemy wielding the shaft. Should you ever look far enough down the length of any of these pikes, you would discover this truth yourself.”
“Malorin’athgul.” Marius tracked the zanthyr’s progress around the room with his gaze. “A name only, lacking proof.”
The zanthyr turned him a critical stare. “The proof is carried upon the unreadable currents flooding out of the north, as I warned.”
“Yes, your many warnings,” the High Lord’s tone stung with asperity, “shouting of alarm, signifying nothing.”
“So long you’ve delayed causative action against the one who works against you that he stands now within arm’s length of the Diamond Throne.”
At this remark, the High Lord looked very much like he was grinding an unspoken curse between his teeth.
Tanis had told Felix that the zanthyr acted as a mirror. That it was a game of his to reflect back at people whatever attitude they directed towards him. In dealing with Felix, the zanthyr’s manner became flippant and droll; towards the High Lord, severe and relentlessly practical.
“He has lived beneath your banner,” the zanthyr continued, eyeing Marius through the spill of his wavy hair. “He’s studied you; he’s studied your literature, your sacred works, your magic. He knows your methods, and he has observed the ebb and flow of your politics. This man knows you, High Lord of Agasan, even though you don’t know him. Trust that he has well predicted your decisions and already made plans to outmaneuver you. He is an opponent quite beyond your ken.”
Marius straightened in defiance of this challenge, and his gaze hardened. “Reverse this scene and stand in my place if you dare: your kingdom has been invaded, your daughter and heir taken—”
“Nadia’s absence will be remedied shortly.”
The High Lord looked like he was ready to explode. “—your people witnessing impossible feats that even your best scholarly minds cannot explain; and here comes another, who claims—if not foreknowledge, at least an arcane understanding, but instead of offering clarity, this stranger of questionable loyalties simply dangles tantalizing morsels of truth. He offers no real advice. He tells you nothing, yet implies that he knows all.”
The zanthyr caught his dagger by the point and aimed the hilt at Marius. “What I know is inconsequential, Marius di L'Arlesé. It is what you know, and what you choose to do with that knowledge, that changes the pattern on the tapestry.”
The High Lord stared at him, clearly at a loss for words.
The Empress shifted in her chair. “Are you advising us to move against the Danes or not, Phaedor?”
The zanthyr flipped his dagger. “All the answers to this mystery will be found in Kjvngherad. You must seek your proof there.”
Marius bristled. “You just said we shouldn’t—”
Phaedor speared a look at him. “I just said you mustn’t do what he expects you to do. You’ve no choice but to go to Kjvngherad. It is the manner by which you will proceed there that must be carefully…” but the zanthyr’s words faded as his attention seemed to shift…
He ran for the doors.
They flew open before his approach, and he passed the startled Praetorians in a blur, a dark arrow of intent.
Felix automatically launched up to follow but stopped himself when he saw that no one else was moving. The High Lord’s Caladrians appeared just beyond the doorway, their gazes inquiring, awaiting command.
“But…” Felix turned a fervent look around. “Shouldn’t we follow him?” He searched the many pairs of eyes staring at him. “Don’t you see? He clearly meant for us to follow him or he would’ve just disappeared.”
Felix turned to the High Lord rather desperately, knowing better than to leave without being given leave, but feeling the zanthyr getting farther ahead with every breath of delay. “Your Grace, don’t you remember what he said just now?” His eyes beseeched Marius’s understanding. “Why else would he—”
“Get after him!” Marius flung the order, and his Caladrians scrambled to obey.
Felix darted after them without waiting for further permission. He soon overtook the stockier Giancarlo and found himself neck and neck with Vincenzé, who seemed very indignant at the idea of letting an upstart youth like Felix get the better of him in a footrace.
The zanthyr led the chase through the personal apartments of the imperial family, down long marble passages and across galleries shadowed by night, and finally outside into the moonlight and across the family’s private grounds. Felix lost sight of him for a time but finally spotted him again at the bottom of a terraced hill, a darker shadow poised before a large fountain. The latter’s waters had been stilled for the night, but the silver-dark pool reflected the zanthyr’s form back against the starry sky.
Vincenzé came to a panting halt near the zanthyr and shoved hands onto his knees. “What…?” but the rest of his words went by the boards while he caught his breath.
Felix saw the slight tightening around the zanthyr’s eyes, so he found a seat on the fountain’s edge and kept his mouth shut.
Giancarlo came jogging up. He pushed hands on his hips, threw back his head, and sucked heaving gulps of air loudly into his lungs.
Far in his wake came the High Lord, leading a wedge of Praetorians whose armor gleamed darkly in the moonlight.
Felix was just thinking this had better be good or the zanthyr was surely done for, when the night rippled and…split—Felix didn’t know how else to put description to it—and a darkness unlike anything Felix had ever seen carved a jagged scar down through the air.
He jumped to his feet.
The High Lord arrived just as the scar was forming the shape of a door.
Hissing an oath, Vincenzé threw himself in front of the High Lord and drew his sword—
Which the zanthyr grabbed by the blade and ripped from his hand—
Whereupon three figures stumbled out of the darkness.
One man collapsed to his knees and hung his head.
A second, taller figure toppled and was caught by the zanthyr, who promptly vanished with him.
The third inhaled a desperate gasp and threw herself into the High Lord’s arms.
The Princess Nadia was home.
Forty-five
“Hell offers better company.”
–The Adept truthreader Thrace Weyland, on the Temple of Tambarré
Ean roused to the taste of dirt in his mouth and throbbing pain pretty much everywhere else…which, looking at things optimistically, seemed to indicate he was probably still alive.
Towards the end of his fall, his descent had somehow slowed to a few degrees shy of terminal, and the slate roof he’d careened down had managed the rest. Ean remembered scrapi
ng down sharp tiles, bouncing off a ledge and flipping haphazardly over an open yard…crashing through a thatched barn roof and down past several bales of hay, and finally splashing into the muck of a horse’s stall—thankfully sans occupant—where he remained, many hours later.
That he woke with his mind within his own control meant the link with Darshan had been severed by his unconsciousness. With any luck, the Malorin’athgul thought him dead.
Get up, Ean. Get up—get up—get up—
He did finally get up. It was a fundamentally joyless experience.
So was walking, and thinking…breathing…being.
Ean staggered out of the barn rubbing his neck and looked up at the sheer eastern edge of the acropolis, which towered over the steep-roofed manor and the adjoining farmstead that had so kindly broken his fall. He couldn’t see much of Darshan’s temple from that angle. He was looking forward to seeing much less of it as soon as possible.
Ean oriented himself to the city and headed off, exhausted, aching, reeking of manure and too tired to care about anything but finding a safe place to sleep. He carefully refrained from calling the lifeforce. He hoped the intervening hours had repaired the tiff he’d caused between elae and himself, because he wouldn’t last long in Darshan’s city without the use of his talents.
By the time he reached the inn where he’d secured a room the day before, the sun was setting amid boiling flame in the west and another storm was blowing in from the south, darkening the horizon.
Ean lifted a shaking hand to open the gate but then paused with his fingers on the high handle and hung his head. Had it really only been less than a day’s time since he’d walked out of that selfsame gate, sure purpose and possibility were guiding him true? He could barely separate the days from the nights anymore, only counting the unclocked hours of sleep by the depth of the ache behind his eyes.
With a great effort of will, Ean pushed through the gate and wound his exhausted way among the high-walled gardens. The inn’s doors stood open to the storm’s cooling breeze, so he let himself inside, waved a haggard hello to the startled innkeeper, and tromped wearily upstairs to his room.
One of the stewards caught up with him at the second floor landing.
“Rabb’an, good evening…”
He kept talking, but Ean’s ears were past listening, his brain past understanding any words other than sleep. He let the older man lead him to his rooms and then sat slouched in a chair while two chambermaids drew a bath for him. He must’ve dozed in that state, because when he came aware again, he was alone and water was steaming in the copper tub. The room smelled of lavender, which was a far cry fairer than himself.
The next half hour became a blur of heat and drowsy half-awareness. He had the wherewithal to put a warding on the room—fiery, searing pain in his skull!—that he might sleep undisturbed. Then he wrapped himself in the robe they’d left for him, staggered—still dripping—over to the bed, and collapsed onto it, asleep even before his body hit the mattress.
*—*
Arion turned a page in his journal and wrote on the new line,
I think there is a hidden solution to the understanding of all Patterning in this thing we call Absolute Being. The more we strategize T’khendar’s creation, the more this becomes apparent to me.
The First Esoteric tells us Absolute Being is ‘the entire concept of actuality,’ while the Twenty-first Esoteric instructs that ‘Actuality is monitored by the wielder’s point of view; reality is monitored by collective thought agreement.’
For any wielder of elae, understanding the distinction between actuality and reality cannot be underestimated—
“It is a great tragedy of our time that we have an incomparable day birthed for our appreciation and Arion can’t keep his nose out of that journal of his.”
Arion looked up to see Cristien Tagliaferro grinning at him. The truthreader usually seemed the brooding poet, with that curling auburn forelock ever falling into his eyes and his sensual mouth and cleft chin—that is, when he wasn’t engaged in some taunt of Arion.
They were sprawled in the grass on a hillside overlooking a deep blue lake framed by emerald hills, with the jutting crags of the Navárrel forming an impressive white and charcoal backdrop. It was the kind of view an artist would’ve given his left hand to paint, yet just one of many offered at the Palazzo di Adonnai.
Would that they’d had more time to appreciate the villa’s luxuries and diversions, but they’d been holed up in Björn’s study for over a month, working round the clock to strategize what could only be called a desperate gamble—all their brilliant plans for which had come to a screaming halt when they’d tried to isolate a focal point for the working.
It was the Seventeenth Law: ‘The use of talismans must focus force without limiting scope.’ No talisman known to man would be capable of focusing the force necessary to create an entire world, whole cloth, out of Alorin’s aether. To wield a talisman of such capability, they would have to craft it first, an undertaking which would be nearly as arduous as the primary working in question. Thus their frustrating stalemate.
The sunny day was providing a much needed respite; time to regroup, reconsider, renew; time to let their minds wander, to think through all they’d discussed and potentially find new avenues of approach.
Arion smiled and looked back to his journal. “We each take our respites in different ways, Cristien.”
Reclining on the blanket opposite Arion tending a large basket of food and wine, the Nodefinder Parsifal d’Marre cast Cristien his satyr’s grin. “Cristien would be enjoying himself much more if a certain Vestal had also been invited to Björn’s council.”
Cristien made some kind of retort, but Arion had already set his pen back to his page and was drawing upon elae’s fifth and third strands—the faintest pattern of permanence, he barely noticed it—to continue writing in this magical ink,
—in importance. As reality depends upon the agreement of others, reality then has already disappeared from a wielder’s purview, per the First Law; for reality lies on the scale of causation below the line between cause and effect. Verily, if something requires another’s agreement to be so, that is the level of effect, not the level of cause.
Actuality, then, is determined by the wielder’s point of view; thus actuality is the only level of causative interest to the wielder, for this is the level at which one becomes the point of causation, the point of origin, the place from which anything in the wielder’s imagination can—
“Nonetheless, Cristien does have a point.” Parsifal nudged Arion’s leg with his boot to gain his attention. “What is it that you're always writing in those journals of yours, Arion? Share it with us, since it’s captured your interest so completely as to deny all else the blessing of your notice.”
Arion closed his pen inside his journal and raised his gaze to meet Parsifal’s. “Originally my journals were a repository for the patterns I was experimenting with,” he shifted his attention between Parsifal and an attentive Cristien, “…but now I think I will leave them for my son.”
Parsifal’s eyebrows shot up, resembling fuzzy caterpillars inching to touch one another. “You have no son.”
Arion smiled softly down at the leather journal and laid his right hand, each finger bound by two Sormitáge rings, across the cover. “One day I might.”
A dubious grunt echoed from overhead. Arion turned his head to see Markal Morrelaine standing behind him. Dressed all in black, and with his mane of white hair, he stood out like an iron post against the blue sky.
Arion’s welcoming smile hinted of challenge. “You doubt my virility, Maestro?”
“I merely doubt you’ll live long enough to procreate, the way you go about things.”
Arion grinned at him. “That’s why I have more rings than you—because of the way I go about things.”
Markal came and settled himself dead center in their midst, forcing both Parsifal and Cristien to change positions to accommodate his b
road frame. The effect was somewhat like a bear choosing a raccoon den for his rest and ousting the raccoons in the process.
Markal accepted a goblet of wine from an offering Parsifal and settled his scrutinizing gaze on Arion. “Having more rings than me doesn’t make you wiser, Arion. Only bolder.”
Arion rolled onto his back and clasped hands behind his head. The sky above really was an impossible shade of blue. “Boldness and wisdom rarely walk hand in hand, Maestro. That’s why I keep you around—to wisely remind me of all the things I’m not supposed to be able to do.”
The Nodefinder Anglar Tempest and the truthreader Voss di Alera came striding down the grand staircase from the palazzo, mid some heated debate. Arion couldn’t remember a time when the two of them weren’t mid some debate. Those two were like vinegar and baking soda: ever in a froth when combined.
“Ah, perfect!” The heavily bearded Anglar extended a hand to the group on the lawn and turned his bright blue eyes on Voss. “Who better to provide us with a definitive answer?”
Voss cast them all a taunting grin, wide and sharp on his jester’s face. “Yes, but we should ask Arion, for I’d like our question answered this century, and the maestro couldn’t find brevity if it was chained ’round his neck.”
“Nor you, prudence, Voss di Alera,” Markal rumbled.
Voss threw himself down beside Arion. “Prudence is overrated, Maestro.”
“So is impudence, Voss.”
“Maestro, we would be honored to gain your wisdom in the resolution of our debate.” Anglar took a seat beside Parsifal, who was just then pouring wine for the two newcomers. Anglar pushed his dark hair back from his forehead and then accepted the wine. “So…” he extended his goblet towards Markal, “the Thirteenth Law says ‘intention monitors solidity, solidity monitors structure.’”
“But the Seventh Esoteric says, ‘solidity is monitored by Absolute Being,’” Voss inserted, “which implies that within the bounds of Absolute Being you could have any structure, regardless of solidity—”
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