Always inconspicuous, he thought as the wind tugged Horace’s thick brown hair, as average as any. He wore a slightly wrinkled tunic the color of the deep sea, and trousers neither perfect nor ragged. He kept his beard short but not neatly trimmed.
Horace closed the doors and approached with purpose. “Oriana decided to join me on the journey back.” Horace dragged a distant rocking chair close to Bastion’s. He sighed happily as he sat and stretched his hands behind him. “One step closer to our ultimate goal.”
Bastion eyed the last airy, frothy head of his ale. This would have been a day to get drunk, to take as many overfilled mugs to the face as possible—if he wasn’t on the precipice of losing everything he had so diligently worked for these past seven months.
“Tell me,” Bastion said, rocking slowly, hands cupped around his mug, “is it indeed your ultimate goal? To serve as the king’s adviser?”
“I’ve told you before, old boy. I would serve as his jester if it meant a prosperous Avestas. I care about this world, perhaps more than anyone.”
And that is precisely what makes you so dangerous. That silent avowal might have been accurate, but what was Bastion trying to do here? Asking weak questions like the one he’d just tossed out at Horace… he was getting sloppy. He desperately wanted to see Horace flinch, just once—offer Bastion a tell that, as of yet, he had not been able to draw from the cunning spymaster.
But of course, Horace wouldn’t be undone so easily. Bastion wondered if he’d ever come undone, if rather than a spool of thread he was a tangled, knotted ball of string that would forever hold its labyrinthine shape.
Or maybe Horace was telling the truth. His actions thus far didn’t betray his eagerness for a better world. Bastion had simply never met anyone who truly wanted to change the world; everyone always, always had ulterior motives.
Bastion peered out over the uneven rim of his mug, into the great spiral of Haeglin below. From there he could see the third and fourth rungs—two of the four disc-shaped plateaus that formed the spire. The first and second rungs were almost directly below the third and fourth, concealed from his vantage point.
“You seem troubled,” Horace said, pushing off with his foot and giving himself a good rock in the sturdy chair.
A great bustling grasped the third rung, streets filled with eager buyers pouring in from all over Avestas to take part in the semiannual Purge the Merchants. Carts and stalls walled in the streets, merchants from the North and South, East and West all hawking wares that were otherwise confined to their own parts of the world.
“There are rumors down there, Horace. Maybe they haven’t reached the third rung yet, but they will.” He turned to the spymaster, lips tight, eyes swollen and dark. “I underestimated the people’s love for Oriana Gravendeer.” He cast a downward glance at his thighs, reconsidered and said, “Or I underestimated their hatred for her sister. They say she’s here to reclaim the throne.”
“She’s here to die,” Horace said.
“And how will the people feel about that? This is not a passive populace. They’re armed. Raegon urged every citizen in his kingdom to not only swing a sword but be proficient with one.” He stood, grasped the banister and sighed. “The king is nothing without his people, Horace. I do hope we’re making the right decision.”
Give me a reaction, you bastard, Bastion thought. Let me see your eye twitch. Let me see you swallow. Move your hand in a way you’ve never done before. Give me something.
“I’ve a proposal,” Horace said, his voice calm and even. “A small dinner—you, Olyssi, Oriana, and myself. A dash of Ruchael poison and some luck ends this all without suspicion, without a heavy-handed assassination.”
Ruchael poison—a toxin named after the infamous alchemist, Ruchael Adease. It was a lighter poison than most, and only deadly half the time, so its use had fallen out of favor long ago. It mimicked the foul sickness of eating a bad meal of rot and uncleanliness. It wouldn’t guarantee Oriana’s death, but it would make her ill and weak and susceptible to a follow-up plot.
“It would still raise suspicions,” Bastion pointed out.
“Food sickness is common enough,” Horace noted. “Slight suspicions, yes. But will it motivate the people to take up arms? Unless you give them another reason, no.”
Bastion thought about it. Maybe his pegging of Horace as disloyal was inaccurate. The suggestion of a small dinner—Bastion could stuff as many Jackals as he could in there, have eyes on Horace the entire time. The spymaster had to have known this, understood that foul play would be impossible.
Someone else, then, had stirred the pot and spread the rumors of Oriana’s claim and Olyssi’s manipulation of her father’s will. Uncovering the perpetrator wasn’t so immediatey vital anymore—not if the dinner could happen tonight. Not if Oriana was dead before her claim could ever be realized.
“Work on getting Oriana to believe the dinner is a gesture of goodwill,” Bastion said. “And I’ll work on getting the feast started.” He patted the spymaster’s shoulder. “Good man, Horace. And a smart one.”
The tell that Bastion had been waiting for finally arrived on Horace’s lips in the form of a smile. It was too bad for the former king that he had already departed the balcony when it came.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lusilia seemed to skate across the floor, each step graceful and effortless. Her airy white dress flowed behind and swirled around her. She brought a pewter teapot to the table.
“I don’t understand,” Lavery said, hands on the frozen table. “Why am I not cold?” He looked to the walls, made from bricks of ice. “Why is this table not cold?”
Lusilia tilted teapot over a cup of pure ice, filling it with a liquid the color of summer green. Steam warmed Lavery’s nostrils, and the smell of a hundred wildflowers filled his lungs. He felt that he was sitting in a fine meadow—the finest meadow in all of creation—and bees were buzzing about, excavating nectar and pollinating buds.
“Cold and warm are merely states, Lavery,” Lusilia said, filling her own cup. “A state can be mutated. It can be altered. Drink, it will make you feel good.”
She had told him what mutations were, and while Lavery found the subject fascinating, he also thought it dreadful. It seemed to him that mutations were… well, an act of playing the role of gods. He didn’t know if he agreed with their use, although Lusilia told him they had long ago been lost, so at least no one could ever use them again.
A milky froth formed on the surface of the liquid inside his cup. “What is this?”
“Ageless Tea,” she said, lifting the rim of her cup to her lips. “It’s made of old herbs.”
“How old?”
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
Lusilia smiled. “Older than you and everyone you’ve ever known—put together.”
Lavery lifted his brow suspiciously. “I knew a very old person. His name was Baern. Some called him the Keeper. He was six hundred years old, at least.”
“That’s quite young,” Lusilia said. Her soft, receptive expression turned serious. She sat her cup down and watched it as if it might fly away.
“Is something wrong?” Lavery asked.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t even acknowledge him.
“Why are—” He felt it. The slightest of trembles quivering in his feet. The tea inside his cup rippled outward against its pewter walls. “What was that?”
“An avalanche,” she said morosely. She pushed out a smile that seemed to have taken the same effort as kneading frozen dough. “They happen frequently… and they last for a long time.”
That satisfied Lavery’s curiosity. These were the Ancient Lands, after all. He’d seen enough oddities here that he didn’t question enduring avalanches. “Tell me more about my mom. I want to know everything about her.”
Lusilia rubbed the curved handle of her cup uneasily. “She discovered the first mutation and all the ones thereafter. She was a brilliant woman, unrivaled in her in
telligence, unmatched in her passion.” A mournful undercurrent in her voice belied those compliments.
Lavery couldn’t see Lusilia’s eyes; they seemed buried in her cup, cast at such a downward angle that only her brows were visible.
“How are mutations made?” he asked.
Lusilia finally lifted her eyes to meet Lavery’s. They were dry, sheenless. “A combination of many things. Your mother never told anyone the exact recipes, but we know that she siphoned from people… their innards, for lack of a better word.”
Lavery scrunched his nose up in disgust. “Their guts? Is that what you mean?”
“No. Deeper than that, deep as you can possibly go—where the individual is made. Where the things that make us… us exist. Things that make it so you have black hair or blond, so that you’re tall or short, man or woman, crippled or not.
“She combined them with metals and elements, some boiled, some melted—some fused together to make new alloys and creations. There were other ingredients too. Blood and tissue, sometimes bits of the mind. And then she’d test her new formula on—” Lusilia struggled with the next word.
“On what?” Lavery pressed.
“On people,” she said. “Slaves.”
“Did it hurt them?”
“Sometimes,” she said, nodding.
Lavery didn’t like that revelation about his mother. Hurting someone, much less innocent slaves who didn’t deserve it, was never okay. But what if she was the victim of the times? He wondered if she’d grown up to think of slaves as less than people; if so, she couldn’t be blamed for what she did, could she? The fault would have to lie with her parents.
“She founded over eighty mutations,” Lusilia said. “With them, she created us—the Children.”
“She created you?”
“Not from scratch,” Lusilia clarified. “She offered us the mutations and promised us a life we would never otherwise attain. How could we say no? We were to live forever, one blessing of many from her mutations.
“A new world was opened to us. We could move mountains and birth seas. We could look into the future and venture into the past. There were realms from which we could pull the elements—fire and ice, wind and lightning—realms that shielded us from harm, and indeed a realm where the dead go to be at peace, and one from which life itself is hatched.”
Lavery swallowed. Mutations had sounded intriguing when Lusilia had first explained them, but now? He wondered if maybe his mother had stumbled upon something no living person ever should.
“That sounds—” Lavery paused, considering his words carefully. He couldn’t tell if Lusilia was proud of her place as a Child, or anguished by it. He didn’t want to offend her. “I mean no offense, but it sounds like you were playing the role of gods.”
A subtle backhanded tap from Lusilia sent her mug skating across the table. She hefted her arms up and leaned in toward Lavery, taking up far more space than her petite frame suggested she could.
Don’t cower, Lavery told himself. He fought against the inclination to back away, to shrink.
“Is that a role man should not play?” Lusilia asked with a slight tilt of her head. She parted her lips a smidgen and creased her eyes. “What do you think, Lavery Opsillian?”
You must tell me the truth. I will know if you’re lying. Those words echoed in his mind, becoming louder with each bounce off the inside of his skull. Lusilia had said those exact words when he had woken in the small chamber, tied to a bed.
Lavery never had considered himself a good liar.
“It’s a role only gods should play,” Lavery said. He wished he could have sounded cocksure and strong, but his voice was limp and feeble. Still, a lamely articulated truth was better than a convincing lie. At least he hoped so.
“Gods,” Lusilia said, straightening her posture, “do not exist. And if they do, they long ago learned what I did when these lands—my home—became a dreadful relic of a better time: time is the greatest gift of all, but it does not exist if you are eternal. Know this, Lavery—absolute power is a curse and eternity is its muse.
“Eventuality comes for us all. It came even for the Children, but in the form of madness rather than death. Each Child thought they were a god and more deserving of the title than the other. They fought wars, desecrated these lands. They still survive, those who were not brutally murdered by one another. But they slink in their caves and dwell as hermits, for though their bodies may endure forever, their minds died long ago.”
Lavery tried taking this all in, but he felt overwhelmed. “You don’t seem mad. What about my mother?”
“A few Children discovered the antidote to madness. Every few centuries we kill ourselves—one at a time—and another brings us back, breathes life into our corpse. It serves as a reconditioning of sorts.” Lusilia combed away her luscious hazel hair from her eyes. “I should embrace death as I am meant to. But… I cannot.”
“And my mother? She does the same? She dies and is reborn? Where is she now?”
Lusilia dragged her chest and arms off the table, reclining in her chair once more. She covered her cup with her palm, closed her eyes and moved it closer. Steam swirled from inside, as if her touch had boiled the liquid. She sipped slowly, seemingly checked out.
Lavery was unsure if he should speak up. Had she not heard him? He thought that unlikely, since he’d asked four separate questions and hadn’t been meek about it. A few more moments, he told himself, giving her time to finish her tea.
He looked around the room, fingers interlocked in his lap. The blue flames must be mutations, too. I wonder if everything in here is a mutation. Coraen didn’t feel quite as impressive as when he’d first laid eyes on it. Its architectural charm had faded in light of Lavery learning about mutations.
“Your mother,” Lusilia said, breaking her long silence, “bore responsibility for what happened to the Children. To her Children. She fled when some of us sought justice. For hundreds of years, we chased her—into the past and future, through the present too. It was only twelve years ago that we finally caught her. She came to us, begged for forgiveness but understood that we could not grant it. Twelve years ago,” she repeated.
Curiosity wiggled across Lavery’s brows. “That’s when I was born. She had me, and then—” He shook his head. “Did she want me to carry on her name?”
“Possibly,” Lusilia said. “Or possibly she knew that she could not run forever. If she bore a child—a true child—she could send for you to thwart those—us—who would punish her. I think that is the likely scenario.”
Lavery shifted in his chair. Though the ice frame was not cold, it was stiff and unkind to sit on. His back ached. “If you mean Haren—my uncle, you said—was the one who she sent, I don’t think so. Unless he lied and there is no Wraith Walker Order to restore.”
Lusilia lifted her thin brows suggestively.
Lavery bowed his head, struck with the pang of… well, about every unpleasant emotion that existed. He realized that he knew absolutely nothing of the world. And because of this, he was a fool. A very gullible, very naive fool. Everyone he’d ever trusted, from his father to Baern to Elaya, had misled him or outright lied.
His father had never told him he was a bastard. Baern—he’d killed himself with the very item he’d sent Lavery to retrieve. Nothing more to say about that. And Elaya… well, he couldn’t find too much fault with Elaya in terms of deceit. But he was sure there was something he wasn’t aware of.
Maybe he was being misled again. Probably Lusilia withheld some morsels of the truth from him, or maybe every word out of her mouth was a fabrication. He didn’t know. He’d never know, because he was stupid.
Lavery had thought the world was good and people were kind and honest. Wrong. The world was—what? What was the world? He couldn’t say. He knew nothing about it.
“Lavery,” Lusilia said, reaching over and curling a nail under his chin. He didn’t look up. “Do something for me, and I will reward you. Your mother took with
her into the past a stockpile of mutations. It is likely she wishes for you to take those mutations and continue her legacy. She is currently imprisoned in the past.
“I will take you to her. You will speak with her, inquire about the mutations, do what you must to locate them. Find them, bring them to me, and let us destroy them—let us allow no one else ever to play the role of gods.”
“I don’t care,” Lavery said dully.
“You should care, because—”
“I mean, fine. I don’t care about doing it. It doesn’t bother me.” Lavery figured Lusilia’s request had some sort of risk to it. What kind of risk, he didn’t know, but if he was lucky… death. He didn’t care about this world anymore. He didn’t care about life anymore.
Lusilia placed her hand atop his. “Do this for me, Lavery Opsillian, and I will take you into the future and the past. I will show you anything and everything you’ve ever wanted to know.”
That sounded good, but Lavery doubted her promise. If it happened, so be it. If it didn’t, it would be par for the course.
“Hold my hand,” Lusilia said. “Are you ready to Walk the past, Lavery?”
He shrugged. Life, Lavery realized, was a joke—and he hadn’t gotten it until now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Early in the evening, when the yellows of a descending sun and the shadows of an approaching night coalesced into pinks and dark blues, Oriana stood at the stone edging of the fifth rung, in a turquoise dress with a plunging neckline. The hem tapered off at her shins. It was similar to a dress she often wore when strolling through the city, though not quite as soft. One of Olyssi’s handmaidens had brought it to her.
The faint smell of burning pine wafted through the air.
Smoke billowed like gray, wispy pillars from the West, rising over the Gape and vanishing into a puff of clouds. She’d never seen a fire across the Gape before, not from Haeglin.
I wonder if the tempers of Valios and Wrokklen have finally come to a head. Only a siege or wildfire could explain the great swells of smoke from so far away. The latter would be preferable, for the former would make the first days of queenship all the harder and would aid more chaos to the world.
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 27