An Echo of Things to Come

by James Islington

  Asha took a deep breath, then stepped into the vortex.

  Chapter 39

  Wirr stared at the Oathstone as he lay on his bed, holding it above his head and turning it over absently as he thought about the day ahead.

  Today he was addressing the entire leadership of Administration—his last such opportunity before the vote in three days’ time. This was likely the meeting that would decide whether he’d be allowed to continue in his father’s footsteps, or be relegated to little more than a spectator as his mother took control of the organization. The consequences of the latter he could still barely comprehend, could barely stand to think about.

  In the last couple of days, around the many hours he’d spent with his uncle seeking advice, he’d had to fake more friendly words and force more smiles than during the past two months combined. He’d bargained, cajoled, pleaded. He’d been charming, he’d been strong, and he’d dealt with the veiled insults—and some not-so-veiled—as best he could in each situation.

  But he’d done it all without the Oathstone, and he knew that it hadn’t been enough.

  He stared idly at that small black stone for a while longer, considering how easy it would be to just put it in his pocket and take it to the meeting today. A couple of quick instructions, and every high-ranking official in Administration would be voting for him—and telling others to vote for him—even if they didn’t understand why.

  He gritted his teeth, then rolled to his feet and shoved the Oathstone back inside the safe. He’d meant what he’d said to Taeris.

  He dressed, then flinched at a sharp, urgent knock at his door. Frowning—it was still very early—he walked over and peered out.

  For a long moment he didn’t recognize the young blond woman standing in the lamp-lit hallway outside.

  Then his breath caught.

  “Ash?” he said, stunned.

  He opened the door wide and allowed himself to be wrapped in a hug, dazedly returning the embrace. Over Asha’s shoulder he could see an exhausted-looking Laiman Kardai, the man’s face drawn and his gaze bleary. The king’s adviser gave Wirr a vaguely rueful nod of acknowledgment as he caught his glance.

  “Sorry to do this to you, Wirr,” said Asha as she stepped back again, giving him a tired smile.

  “But we need to talk.”

  Wirr leaned back, dazed, as Asha finished her recounting of events since she’d left.

  He shook his head as he tried to take it all in. Caeden at Deilannis. The other Gifted in the group dead, as well as Breshada. Nethgalla—Nethgalla, someone who he’d assumed was only a tale—revealing herself to have been both Breshada and the Shadraehin.

  And Asha cured. Friends or not, if she wasn’t so self-evidently no longer a Shadow, he wasn’t certain that he’d have believed any of it.

  He glanced across at Laiman, expression hardening. The man hadn’t said a word since Asha had begun, not even when she had described his hesitation on the bridge.

  “Now,” Wirr said grimly. “I would like to hear exactly who you are.”

  Laiman met his gaze. “I can explain, Sire,” he said calmly, “but first I would like … assurances.”

  Wirr felt his expression darken; he opened his mouth to respond, only to be stopped by a voice from the doorway.

  “There’s no need for that, Laiman.”

  Wirr turned, surprised to see Taeris standing at the entrance. He frowned. “How did you know we were here?”

  “I made certain that I would know immediately when Master Kardai returned.” Taeris’s gaze never left the king’s adviser as he spoke. “It’s all right, Laiman. If anyone had to find out, these two are probably the best we could have hoped for.” He hesitated. “And … Prince Torin has uncovered information about Jakarris that you need to hear, too. It changes things.”

  Wirr’s frown deepened. Jakarris—the man who had betrayed the other Augurs, who had helped start the war?

  Laiman stared at Taeris for a long moment, brow furrowed.

  “You’re sure?” he asked softly.

  Taeris just nodded.

  Laiman said nothing for a while longer, then let his shoulders sag. He nodded reluctantly, waiting for Taeris to shut the door and take a seat, then gazing at the floor as he spoke.

  “So. My name is Thell Taranor,” he said softly, as if barely believing that the words were passing his lips. The mere statement made him look like he wanted to throw up.

  Wirr and Asha exchanged a glance, and from Asha’s expression, the name meant as little to her as it did to Wirr.

  “Who are you, then? Why hide your identity?” Wirr asked.

  “The Council has sentenced Thell to death,” explained Taeris.

  “Why?” asked Wirr again, this time with irritated forcefulness.

  Laiman glanced again at Taeris, who nodded grimly.

  “They know this much,” said Taeris quietly.

  Laiman sighed in acknowledgment. “It’s complicated,” he explained to Wirr and Asha, “but the foremost reason is that I am the one responsible for creating the sha’teth.”

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  “You created them?” asked Wirr eventually in disbelief, not sure he had heard correctly. “How? Why? Aren’t they … old?”

  Laiman gave him a wry smile. “Yes. And no,” he said quietly. “It’s difficult to explain. They are old—ancient, in fact—but most of their existence has been spent … elsewhere. I only brought them here, into this world, just before the war began. Criminality amongst the Gifted was out of control, and the Council desperately needed a way to track down and stop the worst of those responsible. The Augurs were in disarray, so …” He gestured wearily, as if suddenly tired of the excuses. “That was my solution.”

  Wirr frowned. “So if you gave the Council what they wanted, why do they want you dead?”

  “The problem was how I did it,” said Laiman quietly. “The sha’teth are not human, but they need hosts. To be what they are, to have the powers that they have, they needed living bodies. Gifted bodies.”

  Wirr felt his stomach churn.

  “You killed people to create them?” asked Asha.

  “Not exactly—there are traces of them still in the sha’teth, but … yes. To all intents and purposes, those people are gone.”

  “So the Council wants you dead more to cover up their secret than to mete out punishment,” Wirr said flatly.

  “In part,” acceded Laiman. He still spoke hesitantly, as if the words were being dragged from him. “But the Gifted that I used were also from amongst the most powerful that we had—all members of the Council back then. They volunteered, but only because I thought that they would still be themselves after the process. And nobody knew that they had volunteered, because I was trying to keep the entire thing hidden from the Augurs. I was … using knowledge that I shouldn’t have had.” He sighed heavily. “I tried to explain that to the rest of the Council, after it was over, but it didn’t make a difference. As far as they were concerned, I’d forced five of their most popular members to become monsters.”

  Wirr said nothing for a moment, trying to take it all in.

  “But you’re not Gifted,” said Asha to Laiman suddenly, voicing the most obvious oddity a split second ahead of Wirr. “You can’t be. Surely someone would have realized by now.”

  “And you deal with Tol Athian all the time,” added Wirr. “Are you saying that no one from the Council has recognized you, in all these years?” He frowned. “And, wait—didn’t you meet my uncle during the war?”

  Laiman held up his hand, giving Taeris a weary look before continuing.

  “I was Gifted,” he said quietly. “When the Council condemned me, I went to one of the Augurs—a man whom you apparently know about. Jakarris. He … changed me. I still don’t understand how, but he took away my Reserve, changed my face and body. Gave me this identity as Laiman Kardai.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Wirr.

  “I’m telling you that it is,”
said Laiman steadily. “It was El-cursed painful, too.”

  Wirr glanced across at Taeris, who nodded slightly.

  Wirr grimaced; even with Taeris’s confirmation, he was finding this difficult to believe. “Assuming that we take your word for it,” he said eventually, shaking his head, “why would an Augur help you?”

  “Jakarris helped me because of what I know—and it’s also why I need to stay away from the Council’s notice. Why I need to stay hidden at any cost.” He hesitated, glancing at Asha guiltily.

  Taeris coughed.

  “I can explain this part,” he said quietly. He shifted, meeting Wirr’s gaze. “Before the war, I was studying at Tol Athian. I wasn’t much past twenty and not really anyone of note: always competent enough, but far from amongst the brightest or strongest at the Tol. I’d started to research the Boundary—purely an academic pursuit at that stage. One day there was a knock on my door, and Augur Jakarris was on the other side.”

  Wirr felt his eyebrows raise a little. “You knew the old Augurs?”

  “Knew them? Goodness no,” said Taeris with a small smile. “Nobody did, really—especially nobody at my level in the Tol—which is why Jakarris being there was so strange.

  “Once I let him in, he just … started talking. Told me that of all the people in the Tol, I was one of the few that he felt he could trust. He was offering me the opportunity to rapidly advance through the ranks of the Gifted—for a price.”

  “Which was?” asked Asha.

  “Becoming a memory proxy,” Taeris said quietly.

  Wirr cocked his head to the side, frowning. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “It’s not something that the Augurs really made public,” said Taeris drily. “They had the ability to connect directly to other people’s minds, and they often used that ability to pass information to one another—to impart instantaneous knowledge, without the receiver needing to take the time to learn it. It was the easiest way to quickly educate new Augurs. But it also, somewhat more rarely, let them use other people’s minds to store information.”

  He took a breath. “That day, when we first met, Jakarris was furious. Someone—he didn’t say who, but I’m fairly sure he suspected one of the other Augurs—had sneaked into his quarters and destroyed every scrap of research that he’d gathered over the course of thirty years. He didn’t tell me what that research was all about, at the time, but it wasn’t hard to see that it was important. He said that the only place in which the knowledge now remained was his mind, and that there was far too much of it for him to simply go about trying to record it all again.”

  Wirr felt his eyebrows raising; to his left, he saw Asha leaning forward. “So … you volunteered to have an Augur store information in you?” she asked in disbelief.

  “He asked, and I agreed to it,” corrected Taeris quietly. “I was very good at Shielding myself, and he’d decided that I could be trusted—especially, as it turned out, because he saw how critically I was examining the situation at the Boundary. He knew that I’d understand the importance of at least some of what he gave to me straight away. So I saw some of his visions. I learned some of the things that he’d studied, texts of histories that were forbidden even to the Gifted back then. It was … enlightening, to say the least.”

  Wirr leaned back, stunned. Now he understood why Taeris seemed to know so much more about the Boundary, about its history and the potential threat behind it, than anyone else at the Tols.

  “So you have all this information still stored in your head?” Asha asked, looking as dazed as Wirr felt.

  Taeris shook his head. “Not all. There was too much of it to simply expunge into someone, and Jakarris didn’t want to risk it all in one place anyway. A third went to me, and the rest to two other Gifted.”

  He glanced across at Laiman.

  “You were one of the others,” Wirr realized softly to the king’s adviser.

  Laiman inclined his head, albeit reluctantly. “Yes.” He grimaced. “And some of it—such as how to create or control the sha’teth, for example—is far too dangerous to simply write down. Taeris knows as much as I could explain to him, but ultimately? If I die, that information dies with me.”

  Wirr just stared for a few moments, trying to decide if he really believed everything that the two men were telling him. It did explain a lot. Not that it excused Laiman’s hesitation on the bridge, of course—but it at least made a little more sense now.

  “This is also the main reason that the Council is so mistrustful of me,” added Taeris, with an apologetic look at Asha as he did so. “They’ve been wary of me for decades, ever since the sha’teth. I told them that Thell had been killed by the creatures, but I couldn’t produce a body, and they knew that we were friends. And then …”

  He rubbed his forehead. “With the knowledge that Jakarris had given to me, combined with my observations at the Boundary over the past decade, I knew that there was something terrible coming. Or at least strongly suspected it. But when I tried to talk to the Council about it, they wouldn’t listen to me. Whether it was because of their suspicions over Thell and the sha’teth, or because they simply couldn’t believe what I was telling them without corroboration, I don’t know.” He grimaced. “So five years ago, I got desperate. I lied. I lied about things that I’d found, falsified evidence in order to try and explain away how I had the information that I did. And they caught me. They said that at best, I was insane—and at worst, was trying to destroy the Tol. It managed to sharpen their suspicion that I’d had something to do with the sha’teth all those years ago, too.” He laughed bitterly. “Hard to regain trust after something like that.”

  There was a long silence as Wirr and Asha processed the information. It was a lot to take in, and Wirr found his mind racing with questions.

  Before he could ask one, though, Laiman spoke up again.

  “So what is this new information about Jakarris?” he asked quietly, brow furrowed as he looked from Wirr to Taeris and back again.

  “Prince Torin found a notebook of his father’s. Notarized,” Taeris added quietly. “It says that Jakarris was the one who betrayed the Augurs twenty years ago.”

  Laiman paled. “That’s not possible.”

  Taeris grunted. “There’s more. Scyner—the Augur who was working with the Shadraehin here—was the one who directed Prince Torin to the notebook. And from what Ashalia has told me previously, he also claims to have killed all the other Augurs.” Taeris’s expression was grim. “I think it’s entirely possible that Jakarris is still alive.”

  Laiman just stared at Taeris in steadily growing horror.

  The next several minutes passed in a blur as the four of them slowly, carefully untangled what each of them knew. If Jakarris had hidden his old identity behind a new name—which seemed likely, as everyone would have recognized the name of one of the old Augurs—did that mean that Nethgalla was then the woman who had provided the weapons to the rebellion? She’d set herself up as the Shadraehin, had seemingly engineered the creation of the Shadows. It made sense.

  “So Jakarris thought that the Augurs’ existence was some kind of threat,” said Wirr slowly, eventually trying to summarize what they had learned. “He worked with Nethgalla to organize the rebellion. When it started, he killed the other Augurs and then … went into hiding, I suppose, down in the Sanctuary. Nethgalla provided the rebellion with the ability to create Shadows, which gradually gave her more and more power over the years.”

  “Right up until she gave it all over to me,” said Asha quietly. “She wanted someone who was able to seal the Boundary, even if Caeden failed to strike a deal with the Lyth—but she didn’t want to be the one who did it.” She swallowed, nodding at Taeris’s mildly skeptical expression. “There is a lot of Essence there. I didn’t think that there would be so much, but I suppose with the Reserve of every Shadow from the past fifteen years combined …” She frowned, shaking her head. “I’m still confused about Scyner, though. If he really is th
is Jakarris, then he had the opportunity to kill the other Augurs, too, not just Kol. But he said that he wanted their help.”

  “Perhaps they don’t pose the same threat as the ones from twenty years ago,” suggested Wirr.

  Before anyone could say anything more, there was a sharp rap on the door. Taeris opened it with a frown, and Wirr’s heart dropped as he saw Administrator Myles standing outside.

  “They’re expecting you soon, Sire,” he said, peering in at Wirr.

  Wirr swallowed, nodding. “Give them my apologies, Administrator. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  He took a deep breath as the door shut again, shrugging at the looks of Asha and Laiman. “It’s … a meeting that I can’t miss,” he said wryly, not feeling like going into detail.

  “Sire,” said Taeris quickly, “are you going to …?”

  “No.” Wirr met Taeris’s gaze steadily.

  Taeris grimaced, his disappointment evident.

  Wirr glared at him for a few seconds, then turned to Laiman. “I have to leave, but first, I need to know—have you actually killed anyone to hide who you really are?”

  Laiman shook his head firmly. “Nobody else has ever come close to finding out. Ashalia was the first.”

  “What happened with the sha’teth … it was a different time, Torin,” chimed in Taeris quickly. “A desperate time. And those who ultimately became the sha’teth did agree to it.”

  Wirr closed his eyes.

  “Perhaps,” he said quietly. He glanced across at Asha, who had been largely quiet. “I haven’t entirely decided what to do, yet, but regardless—we’re not going to tell the Tol. Not if they’re going to want him executed.”

  Asha inclined her head in agreement, and Laiman audibly exhaled with relief.

  Then he swallowed, leaning forward and looking earnestly into Asha’s eyes.

  “About the bridge. I … need to apologize,” he said quietly. “I truly did not want harm to come to you, but in the heat of the moment …” He grimaced, shaking his head. “I am ashamed that the thought even crossed my mind, but it did.”