“I still don’t know what you want of me,” I said as we stepped out of the street and back onto the walkway, and traffic resumed behind us. I listened to the rattle of wagon wheels on the pavement, stared at the smooth perfection of the carpentry here, and then followed Chavoron into the building that he’d led me to.
We stepped into a sweeping foyer, the walls as smooth as the exterior, all stone, all shedding a silent glow. There were more guards here, who came to attention as we entered. Chavoron saluted and continued past them, working his way over to a staircase that spiraled around the exterior wall of the tower. He took each step with vigor. I followed him, awaiting his reply. He waited until we were some ways up before answering.
“I am caught between two sides,” he said. “Two sides I see the arguments of, two sides I listen to, two sides, each with some merit that the other does not see. I have my own plans, plans to advance an agenda that guarantees neither will much like me, which means I will garner little support from either.”
I blinked at that. “And so …?”
“I need help,” he said mildly, looking back at me. “I need your help, to be specific.”
“To …” I raised a hand. “To destroy your enemies?”
He laughed lightly. “If I have to destroy my enemies, I will have truly failed.”
“Then I don’t know what use I can be to you,” I said.
“You,” he said, pausing in the middle of our climb to put a hand on my shoulder the way he’d done to that woman on the street. “You will be my greatest help. You see this sort of problem as solved by a war, as a fight to be won, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “And—”
“No ‘and,’” he said, and started up the stairs again. I looked up and wondered how far this went. We were passing doors, and within them were circular rooms with people inside, doing—well, I wasn’t sure what they were doing, I was passing so quickly. Some of them seemed to be writing, others reading, others just moving around. “It is not truly a war, you see. There must be no death, no killing. It is not the way of our people to kill one another. My cause is to convince the people around me that the middle path, the path of compromise, is the shrewdest. The problem is that in their current positions, both sides are poised to hate this. And why would they not? They do not get their way, after all. But my intention is to win their approval, to get them to understand that this is the best way—to change the empire without destroying its foundations and plunging us into utter chaos. To free your people and the others without causing your folk to be despised and slaughtered in the streets in some counter-reaction to our application of violent change. But to do this, I must convince people. I must win their hearts and minds.”
I stared at him in disbelief for at least two floors as we went upward in silence. I already felt my breath fading, but he pointed a glowing finger at me, filling me with that same sudden sense of reinvigoration that I’d felt in the bed when I’d awoken. I could have climbed twenty more floors then, but instead I just used the breath to express my idiot opinion. “That sounds difficult.”
“If it were easy, everyone would rule this way,” Chavoron said with a faint smile. “Instead, they want to cram their opinions down the throats of their opposition because it’s right—at least in their view. But ignoring the consequences of that will bring a different sort of peril.” There were windows spaced every so often in the wall, leading outside, and we passed one now which lit Chavoron’s strong features in bright sunshine.
I was utterly lost now. “What sort of peril?”
Chavoron’s face darkened as he passed into shadow again. “There are twin perils, of course—order and chaos. Push too hard in either direction, and you find yourself under the auspices of a tyrant, who, starting with good intentions, is given enough power to ‘make right the wrongs.’ But what is ‘wrong’ becomes a creeping, moving thing, alive with the possibility, sliding gradually toward the day when it has become something very different, and far less reasonable, than where it started.
“Then of course, there is the other peril. A society wrapped in the cloak of injustice, one that seeps from every pore of its being, loses order in its own way because the people and subjects under its tent do not recognize its authority as righteous any longer. That authority must either swell to counter that movement, or else see itself knocked flat, never to rise again. Of course, it could be replaced by something better … but more likely it will be replaced by those seeking … to ‘make right the wrongs’ as they see them, from the opposite side. Ah, here we are.”
I still followed along in silence, my head squeezed tight trying to catch everything he’d thrown at me in the last few minutes. In retrospect, it was the most heavily philosophical conversation I’d had in my entire short life; I’d come from a kingdom where we ruled on high, and our people listened because we held the power.
In a mere ten minutes, Chavoron had dumped hundreds of years of Protanian philosophy and theories of governance upon me, my country’s undisputed heir to the throne, whose choice of defining words clearly reflected the makings of a tyrant. I understood the need for order, and little else. I had listened to him because he had power, and it had caused me to take him seriously, but everything he’d said …
Sadly, little of it made sense at the time, not to the eighteen year-old princeling turned slave turned gladiator.
Apparently sensing my confusion, Chavoron stopped in front of a door. “It is all right if you didn’t understand all that. My people have studied philosophy for thousands of years and still struggle with the concepts I’ve run through. I didn’t even get around to the idea of the rights of sentients, which is a separate argument—”
“I don’t …” I closed my eyes, trying to cut through the confusion. “What help do you want from me?”
“I want your help changing minds,” he said. “I want your help convincing my people that your people are equal in value to our own, and should have the right to pursue their own aspirations rather than being slaves to ours.”
“How—how am I supposed to do that?” I asked.
“By being yourself,” he said, and he pushed through the door into a large room. It was empty, and at the far end, I could see another staircase. He passed through and we went up, onward and onward, past another hallway, doors on either side. We passed on, and up another staircase, but smaller this time. It seemed to be leading to a final door.
“I—I don’t—”
“I know,” he said, sounding a little disappointed. “I will try to keep explaining it, a little at a time. Sometimes I forget that a lifetime of my thoughts and study are difficult to condense into so short an explanation.” We drew to the top of the stair. “You have been taken unjustly from your home and brought to this land, where you were treated poorly and made to fight. I would like to apologize for that.”
“All … right,” I said, not sure how to take that.
“I don’t know if you ever heard at the beginning of all this,” he said, standing before the door, “but when you are brought to these lands, our society takes away your last name. Your house name, I suppose you call it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yours was Garrick, yes?” he asked, peering at me with those red eyes.
“Yes.”
He opened the door behind him, and I saw stairs just past a small landing on the other side. He stepped through. I followed at his invitation, and he shut the door behind me. He beckoned me up, and I climbed the last few stairs to find myself in a tower room with four sweeping balconies that looked over the city. The doors were open and I could see nothing but the tall, stone buildings on all sides, reminding me of a time when I’d lain on my side in the grass and stared over the blades. They looked like that, like a field of grass stretching out before me, but they were massive buildings, tower after tower, and filled with these people with these powers, beyond number …
“I cannot restore your old name to you,” Chavoron said as I drifted toward the n
earest balcony, staring out in wonder over the waist-high railing, apparently designed to keep me from stepping off in a moment of unthinking awe. “Your house is not recognized in our insular empire, you see. Someday, perhaps, but not this day. Change must come first.”
I looked back at him, frowning. What care did I have for a name? I was standing in the midst of people so powerful they could build towers twenty times the size of anything we in Luukessia could produce. They could stir the four elements in their defense with a few words and the wave of a hand.
In short, they had power. They had strength.
“I want you to join me,” Chavoron said. “I want you to join my house, to take up my name, to join my cause—and help me free your people and preserve this empire. Help me guide it into a new day, where your people and mine can walk hand in hand, and receive the blessings of this place, and all the promise my people currently enjoy—together.”
I stared at him, frowning. Join him? Humans walking aside the blue men? “How … would that happen?” I asked in sincere disbelief.
“Only with great effort,” he said. “By both of us.”
I pondered the alternatives, not daring to ask him about them—I could go back to sleep, I could go back to the Coliseum … I doubted he’d let me go back to Luukessia, and I wasn’t ready to go back in any case. To leave now, with only a few basic spells at my command, would mean I was going back with less strength than could be had.
But if I stayed … if I learned … if I became this symbol he wanted me to be … “I’ll have to learn more magic, won’t I?” I asked, trying to disguise my hunger. “To … change minds? To become whatever example you want me to be of … humanity?”
I thought he saw through me anyway, but I didn’t know whether he assumed he’d change me given time, or if perhaps he just didn’t care what I did when I returned home, so long as I helped him make his changes first. “You will,” he said, feeding the fire in me.
“I’ll do it,” I said, nodding once, and then letting my eyes fall back to the horizon, and all those towers before me. I stood in a land of giants, and I was about to learn to grow as tall as them. “I’ll help you.”
“Very good,” he said. “Then in my capacity of head of my family, I welcome you to the House of Garaunt.”
33.
Cyrus
Cyrus approached the fallen tower of ice and its cracking, creaking pieces as something pried its way out of the depths. It sounded like rubble was shifting under the sound of the howling, frigid wind. A brick of ice the size of a wagon rattled and fell from a pile at the heights of the wreckage as Cyrus advanced slowly.
“Shouldn’t we charge up there and start decapitating the moment a head pops out?” Terian asked, his words speeding up with his axe in his hand.
“Hey!” Calene called. “Mind talking a little slower for the benefit of those of us without godly weapons? You sounded like a squirrel chittering.”
Terian rolled his eyes. “Why aren’t we setting up an ambush?” he said, drawing out every syllable in exaggeration.
“Oh,” Calene said, now that she’d heard. “That’s a good question.”
“Because charging up the pieces of a fallen and settling tower carries a danger of its own,” Cyrus said, coming to a stop about twenty feet away from the wreckage. Shattered chips of ice as big as a human were scattered along the snow bank before them. Cyrus stood there, waiting. Zarnn eased up behind him, breathing more quickly than the troll usually did, presumably due to the presence of Rodanthar in his hand.
Another block was forced aside, and an icy hand extended above them, roughly twice the size of a troll’s. Cyrus watched it wave toward the aurora’s glow above as Aurous, the God of Winter, tried to extricate himself from the frozen rubble. A grunt echoed through the holes in the ruin, strong, but lacking the fury of an angry god … and carrying just a hint of fear, Cyrus thought.
The icy arm climbed further out of the wreckage, but it was already starting to shrink as it moved aside another block, causing a small avalanche that forced Cyrus to take a step back to avoid the cascade of rubble. He pushed Calene back with him, and she grimaced in surprise, not quite as fast on her feet as he was. “Thanks,” she said as a frosty shard rolled to a stop where she’d been standing, sharp end pointed right where her abdomen had been.
“Remember what happened to Nyad, people,” Cyrus said quietly. He closed his eyes and remembered the wizard, frozen in the breath of an angry dragon and smashed to slivers, beyond resurrection. “I think we can expect the same here.”
“We can somewhat counter that, I think,” Quinneria offered. She gestured toward the hand snaking its way further out of the rubble now.
“How?” Terian asked. Quinneria did not answer with words, but sparked a small fire in the palm of her hand that burned for a moment before she snuffed it out wordlessly. “Oh,” Terian said. “Duh. So … no cessation spell?”
“It won’t stop his ability to generate ice,” Quinneria said. “That’s part of his transformation.” When everyone stared at her in curiosity, she said, “Like Malpravus with the skeleton form.”
“And how does that work?” Longwell asked, eyes squinted against the hard, blowing cold. “Beyond magic?”
“I’m more than willing to explain, but perhaps some other time,” she said as a head appeared in the rubble of the tower. She pointed, drawing all their attention back to what was going on in the ruin.
Aurous stared down at them. He had a beard and hair of solid ice, jagged and pointed at the tips like icicles had formed in a row beneath his large, lantern jaw. He had a broad chest, what of it Cyrus could see, bare and sticking above the rubble to the bottom of his pectoral muscles. His skin glowed whitely and blue veins spiderwebbed beneath the surface like the legs of an old man Cyrus had known at the Society. Ice-blue blood had frozen on Aurous’s upper lip, crystallized over his icicle beard, and he stared down at the force below with something akin to consternation.
“Hail, Cyrus Davidon,” Aurous said, sounding almost embarrassed, “any chance I could get a little assistance here?”
A long silence fell over Cyrus’s party, down below the wreckage on the blustery tundra. “Well,” Aisling said, “that was unexpected.”
“I know you’re here to kill me,” Aurous said, “and I’m sure you’ll finish me in a wonderful fight as soon as I’m out of this wreck, but …” He shrugged expansively. “Would you mind helping me out so I can die on my feet instead of buried to my neck in the ruin of my home?”
Cyrus stared at the cold blue eyes of the God of Winter, who looked almost apologetic. “You’re saying you can’t get out, then? On your own? Because we could wait while you free yourself …”
“I think my foot is stuck in a collapsed archway,” Aurous said, peering down. “Now, I might be able to pull it out, but …” He screwed up his face in concentration, and the sound of something shifting in the tower dislodged some of the wreckage piled on the side, forcing Cyrus and the others to move back once again. Aurous shrugged once more. “You see? I think it might bring down the rest of the wreckage on me, since I’m trapped.”
“Mmhmm,” Cyrus said, not taking his eyes off the god.
“So … any chance you’d care to be a good sport and help me out?” Aurous asked, wheedling. “We could have a wonderful, final battle here on the snow-shrouded tundra if you want. I know you’ve got a score you want to settle, and I’m perfectly happy to oblige, seeing as I’m supposed to kill you …” He shrugged.
“By Bellarum’s order, right?” Cyrus asked, watching Aurous through narrowed eyes.
“Aye, you’ve got the right of it,” Aurous said. “So if you can just … help me?”
“Or, alternatively, we could kill him while he’s trapped and be on our merry way …?” Aisling asked, frowning deeply.
“Well, that smacks of dishonor,” Aurous said with a frown of his own. “That’s not the Sanctuary way at all.”
“Maybe you could just answer a
question before we get to debating whether to let you out or kill you where you are,” Cyrus said, still watching him. “Why are you following Bellarum’s orders?”
Aurous let out a light laugh. “Do you really not know? He said he came to you when he killed your wife. Said you spoke.”
“I have suspicions,” Cyrus said. “I want to hear it from you, though.”
Aurous took a deep breath then let it out slowly so that it fogged the air above him. “Well, I assume you remember the ancients?” He paused, frowning. “Well, I suppose you don’t actually remember them yourself, seeing as you’ve lived for about ten minutes and they were alive ten thousand years ago …”
“I’m familiar with them,” Cyrus said with a hint of impatience.
“Right, well, you probably know what happened to them,” Aurous said, then paused. “Sure you won’t let me out before I delve into this?” He waved a hand idly.
“Pretty sure I’m not going to give up the only leverage I have on you right now, no,” Cyrus said. “Talk, maybe you get out, maybe you die. Don’t talk, maybe you die right now.”
“Right, then,” Aurous said. “Cheerful choice.” He scratched his forehead with his freed hand. “So … you know what happened to them, then?”
“You killed them,” Quinneria said before Cyrus could. “Wiped them off the face of Arkaria.”
“Precisely,” Aurous said. “Do you know why?”
“Because they killed some of you,” Cyrus said. “And because the Guildmaster of Requiem killed Eruditia.”
“There was a little more to it than that,” Aurous said, “but that’s a good enough summary. They did kill some of us, indeed. They crossed us, see. And they had the power to do … terrible things.” He shook his frigid beard, which crackled and shed flakes of snow. “So we did, we killed them. Scourged them from the land. Started anew, letting your peoples rise on their old lands under our protection and guidance.”
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