by Jeff Seymour
As Cole left, he felt Lentry’s eyes on him all the way.
***
An hour later, Cole was talking to a woman as different from Lord Lentry as stone was from mud. Lady Allenbee a’Feldglen, head of the Violet School and called the Violet Lady by many in the Cityhall, wore a plain purple robe and held herself tall. Her hair, light brown laced with gray, was combed straight back into a ponytail. Her school controlled a lot of land in eastern Nutharion, including a large swath near the Knife’s Edge and the Broken Lands, from which Allenbee herself hailed. Willem had said her home was a hard, brown region where little grew and outlaws ran rampant. Allenbee, a frowning, spectacled woman who looked strong enough to whip Litnig in a wrestling match, seemed born to govern such a place.
She too was backing Quay’s plan, but she hadn’t told Cole why.
After Willem announced him and let him in, Cole sat on a wire chair before the Violet Lady, surrounded by books and maps in the center of a wood-paneled study. He wiped a little sweat from his forehead. He’d gotten more sidelong glances from servants and aides in the halls that morning than he had all week.
They probably know I’m meeting with the Magister, he thought. It seemed to be a rare honor for a foreigner.
For several minutes, he watched Allenbee scribble something on a parchment without so much as looking at him.
She had a habit of making him wait before she spoke. The first time, it had irritated him. By their third interview, he’d begun to understand that that was the point. After a month, he’d come to expect it.
“Writing your memoirs?” he asked. The sarcasm felt bloodless and weak on his tongue, but it was better than just sitting there.
Allenbee looked up, pushed a pair of golden spectacles down her nose, and sighed.
“No, Mr. Jin, I am not.”
She blew gently across the page, then folded it tightly and tucked it up a voluminous violet sleeve.
“The Aleani have had word from Maegan Heramsun,” she said.
Cole kept his face as stony as he did when he was playing King’s Conundrum or the card game Thief’s Penny. That sentence, coming from that woman, was certainly meant to generate a reaction. He didn’t intend to give her one.
After a moment, she stood up and walked to a window opposite her desk.
“Tell me again, Mr. Jin,” she continued. “What happened underneath the City of the Dragon, after Sherduan was summoned?” The golden light of the Nutharian afternoon drifted through the window on motes of dust that hung softly before her face. The day was as hot as Cole had expected it to be. He’d been sweating like a plow ox for hours.
At the thought of Sherduan, his skin froze nonetheless.
“The Duennin turned on their friends. I watched Crixine the Whitesword kill D’Orin Threi Heramsun. I saw Eshan Eshati shove his sword through someone’s guts. Then I ran.”
Allenbee tsked. A tiny spider, dropping from the ceiling on a line of silk, crossed in front of her face. She crushed it crisply between two fingers.
“So says your friend, but I wonder.”
Cole felt the blood rush to his face.
“Call me a liar if you like, but—”
Allenbee’s head snapped toward him. “I was planning no such thing, Mr. Jin. But the Aleani tell us that one of the Duennin’s compatriots survived the betrayal you describe, so I must ask myself which is more likely—that you are mistaken, that the message from Maegan Heramsun is a fake, that this necromancer’s claims are false, or that one of a hundred other possibilities is true.”
Cole swallowed. The anxiety in his guts clambered up around his heart and squeezed. He remembered Lentry and the paper, Willem and his warning.
“Lady Allenbee, what’s going on today?”
The Violet Lady smirked. “You’ve noticed. Or Willem told you.” She returned to her writing desk and sat. “Since your arrival, there has been a quiet push from several members of the council to have you and Ms. Lonecliff removed from the Cityhall and jailed.”
The anxiety’s bony hand grew stronger.
“Their reasoning runs that the dragon and its servants would not have let you live unless it served their purposes to do so. Ipso facto, you are an enemy, whether you are aware of it or not.” She withdrew a parchment from her sleeve and waved it at them. “There are some, of course, who believe worse rumors about you as well.” The parchment slid back into her sleeve.
Cole took a deep breath. “Hence the meeting with the Magister.”
Lady Allenbee raised an eyebrow.
“You’ve been deciding what to do with us, and the decision has gone as high as it can go, and now she’s going to choose who to believe.”
Allenbee smiled. It wasn’t a warm look.
“Which one?” Cole asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Which one does the letter say survived?”
He remembered Eshan’s and Crixine’s companions leering in the unsteady glow of the Sh’ma’s weapons. They haunted his nightmares sometimes, along with the face of the dragon itself.
Lady Allenbee drew another parchment from her sleeve and squinted at it.
“Soren Goldguard. The one you spoke of as being present when the Heart Dragons of Aleana were broken.”
“The one who nearly killed my brother.”
Allenbee’s eyes flicked from the parchment to Cole. “Yes.”
Cole pressed a hand to his head.
“He’s lying,” he muttered. “Whatever he’s telling the Sh’ma, he’s lying.”
“It is quite a story,” Allenbee said, holding the letter up against the golden light and reading as she spoke. “He claims the Duennin plan to free their people from the barrier and return to lay waste to the continent. That they’ve spoken of ‘wiping clean’ the spoiled people who have inherited the world.”
“Bullshit,” Cole murmured. “If they could break the barrier they’d have done it already, and the Sh’ma would know.”
“I agree,” Lady Allenbee said. “I cannot imagine they would let that man live unless they mean him to mislead us. But then again, if they let him live…” Her eyes landed meaningfully on Cole.
Cole sighed and leaned his head against one hand. “What do you think the Magister will do with us?”
Allenbee folded the letter and returned it to her sleeve. “Pyell will ask you some questions. Then she will decide.”
And Quay thought it would be safe for us here, Cole thought.
The Violet Lady smiled again, but it was different this time. It looked real and warm, and as natural as her scowls. She seemed a different woman, a farmer worn old early through hard work and sweat.
“For what it’s worth, Mr. Jin, I think that while Sherduan may have let you live for some purpose of its own, it may also have made a mistake in doing so. Even the dragon is not infallible.” Her eyes drifted to a small, ticking clock that sat on the edge of her desk, and then she began to write again. “Answer Pyell honestly, and I think all will be well.”
A knock came at the door. Willem’s voice drifted through.
“Lunch will be served in ten minutes, Ambassador.”
Cole stood and took a deep breath. His heart began to beat faster.
Allenbee didn’t even look up from her parchment.
“The truth, Cole Jin,” she said. “Give her the truth.”
TWENTY-TWO
Fifty days before the destruction of Nutharion City
Dil felt like she was melting in the summer heat.
She sat in an overstuffed chair at the top of a thin tower. The tresses of her hair were getting heavy and her neck was sore. The glass beads on her dress’s bust chafed against her collar bone. And to top it all off, her undergarments had gotten bunched up in places they had no business being, and she wouldn’t get a chance to remove them for hours.
She would be very glad when her days of getting puffed up like a popinjay every morning were over.
But in the meantime she was a guest in Nutharion, and h
er grandfather had taught her that when you were a guest you did what was expected of you.
Even if that meant feeling like you were becoming a creature more of lies than of truths.
Next to her, Cole glistened with sweat, and the goop that Willem had been slathering on his head all morning was losing its grip. His hair stuck out at crazy angles she knew and loved and missed. They were hundreds of feet above the highest level of Nutharion City, in a small round room open to the air. White pillars spaced every few feet held up the roof, which was painted black and dotted with constellations of diamonds that mimicked the stars. Shelves, pillows, and blankets were scattered around the floor. The furniture was rich, like everything in the Cityhall, but well used at the same time—not rich for the sake of displaying wealth, but rich because it had been made that way.
At a black, lacquered writing table in the center of it all sat a girl.
She was tall, broad-shouldered, and she held herself like a man of forty-five. Rigid and heavy, as if her body weighed two hundred pounds. Her hair, a blond that bordered on dishwater, was cropped at neck length but hung over her eyes. Her hands were tented under her chin, and her forehead drew over her eyebrows in wrinkles as thick as her skin could bear. She looked immensely focused, sharp as a razor and pointed as a rapier.
Not a girl, Dil thought. Not just.
She was Pyell Mehedrichsani, and she wore the rainbow robe of the Magister of Nutharion.
The wind blew in from the north and brought Dil the girl’s scent. Pyell was sweating, and she gave off the clean crispness of a girl mixed with the deep musk of a man and maybe, Dil thought, a hint of the tang of womanhood.
Cole cleared his throat and shifted. They’d hiked up spiraling stairs within Pyell’s tower for fifteen minutes to reach her. On the way up, Cole had gone over his meeting with Lady Allenbee.
The thought of prison made Dil’s stomach swim.
Animal! Get it! Catch her!
She pushed the thoughts aside. It’ll be fine, she told herself. She won’t send us to prison. She won’t.
Pyell’s eyes came up.
“You are Wilderleng,” she said. Her voice was as deep as a full-grown woman’s, and it resonated, as though the world ran around and through her when she spoke.
The words startled Dil. Her heart beat faster. A bead of sweat trickled down the crevice behind her ear.
Pyell turned to Cole.
The rumors were wrong about her, Dil thought. She’s much more than just a girl. She made deeper echoes in the Second River than Leramis, or Ryse, or even Tsu’min.
“And you,” Pyell said to Cole, “are much more important than you realize.”
Cole paled.
The Magister frowned at both of them, then took a deep breath and stood. The wrinkles on her forehead smoothed. Her heaviness dissipated. She looked relaxed, a little tired, and like a very confident teenager rather than an adult. She stepped around the writing table and gestured toward the edge of her sanctum.
“I apologize for that. Please, relax.” Her voice had grown higher and sweeter, and the world no longer seemed to shape itself around her when she talked. She stepped briskly over the colored pillows at her feet. “I want to ask you two questions.”
Dil followed her. Cole did the same.
Pyell’s face wrinkled again. A few inches beyond her feet, the marble tiles of the floor ended in a dizzying drop to the Cityhall’s flat roof. Farther out, the lumpy silhouettes of western Nutharion’s hills squatted on the horizon. Pyell peered at the hazy country as if it held the answers to the world’s greatest questions.
“I’ve heard the story of your journey from Eldan City to Sherdu’il. The Duennin who released the dragon took unusual interest in you and your friends. That interest is no longer apparent. Can you tell me why?”
Dil frowned.
It was Litnig, she thought. They aren’t interested in us because Litnig isn’t with us anymore.
“No,” said Cole, but the tendons tensed in his hand. He knew the reason as well as she did.
Truths and lies, she thought. This whole place is made of them.
Pyell smiled at the clouds.
“Mm,” she said. A small bird and a hawk dueled in the distance, high over the outermost rings of Nutharion City. Pyell tracked the fight with her eyes. “The Duennin who released the dragon,” she said, “are working for it, whether they know it or not.”
There was something otherworldly about her eyes. The darkness in her pupils reminded Dil of the crystal wall beneath Sherdu’il. Fathomless. Unbending. A hole punched through the fabric of the world and into the void behind it.
“We know that the dragon’s object is the destruction of all life,” she continued, “but not how it means to attain it. So long as its handlers live, it will have difficulty doing so. It is bound to them as surely as they are bound to it, and as much as it may dominate their wills, I do not believe it can subsume them entirely.”
Pyell paused again, looking at them as if she expected them to respond. Cole coughed. Dil had just started to clear her throat when the Magister went on.
“There is more than one will that animates this world.” Pyell’s eyes left Dil and focused on Cole. “Sherduan’s counterpart guides events as surely and as quietly as Sherduan does. That is worth remembering, always.” She smiled. It was a bright look, a true one. “I believe we can trust this defector in Soultholenash.”
Cole coughed again. “I don’t think—”
Pyell held a hand up and shook her head.
The two of them stared at one another, the taller and the smaller, the darker and the lighter, and Dil discovered a similarity between them she hadn’t expected. Some shared influence not of blood but of something deeper and more fundamental.
Chosen, she thought.
It was a frightening realization for no reason she could understand, as if the layers of ornament obscuring the deeper machinery of the world had been peeled back and for a moment she could see the dizzying complexity of creation.
The moment passed.
“My second question is a deeper one. If it was your enemies who set in motion the events that brought you together, can you trust your feelings for one another?”
Dil flushed. So did Cole. Her stomach wrenched itself briefly into a knot.
Truth be told, she’d asked herself that question more than once, in the darkest hours of the night when Cole was safely asleep and it couldn’t hurt him.
She had yet to find an answer.
Cole clutched her hand. A breeze blew through the top of the tower. It picked at Dil’s hair, her dress, the silly train that trailed behind her. It picked at Pyell’s robe and the mop of hair on her head. It picked at the shoulders of Cole’s jacket.
Dil’s answer to the Magister’s question didn’t feel as if it came from her mind or her heart. It passed through from someplace deeper than her, and she trembled as it did.
“If we don’t,” she whispered, “we lose everything.”
You will wake the world, Zahayr had said, with your life.
She wanted to cry.
Pyell smiled. A strand of Dil’s hair had broken loose, and the Magister pressed her thumb to it and pushed it behind her ear. Her fingers felt light and warm. Gently, Pyell grabbed Dil by the temples and pulled her down to kiss her forehead.
Cole stiffened.
Pyell repeated the gesture with Cole, then returned to her writing table. She sat and began shuffling through the papers scattered across her desk, which had been left unmolested by the drafts that sailed through the chamber.
“You’ve heard the rumors, I’m sure, about what some of the heads of school want to do with you. I’m going to overrule them. I doubt you’re doing Sherduan’s will, or at least not solely Sherduan’s will, even if the dragon might think you are.”
Dil let out a long, heavy breath.
“Still,” she said, “regarding your friend the prince’s plan—Nutharion will not abandon this city.” She dug paper, qu
ill, and ink from a cabinet in her desk. “We’ll evacuate as many civilians as we can convince to leave, but the schools will gather here. We’ll draw Sherduan to us, so that we can encounter it and learn its mind. And by learning its mind, perhaps we’ll gain an advantage over it.”
Pyell’s eyes flicked back over Dil and Cole.
“Your friends, I hope, will gather here as well. I’m dispatching letters to Eldan, Aleana, Menatar, and Soultholenash asking them to come as quickly as possible. The dragon took an interest in you once. It may do so again.” Her hand scribbled furiously, then reached for wax that melted as she grabbed it. Her forehead buried itself in wrinkles again, and her voice grew deep and frightening. “We must learn the mind of the dragon,” she rumbled. “We must.”
Dil wanted to ask why.
“What if it kills us?” Cole asked instead.
The Magister looked up. The brightness and youth had gone from her face. It was all cold, sharp angles once more. “Then whoever survives will learn that you weren’t important to it after all.”
She looked back down. Cole’s grip on Dil’s hand tightened.
The Magister didn’t speak again.
***
Dil returned to her room that afternoon feeling exhausted and sickened. Partly it was the heat, but mostly it was the conversation with Pyell. The questions she’d asked. The way Cole had been silent and stone-faced as they walked through the Cityhall’s airy corridors afterward.
The shadowy coolness of her suite was a welcome thing. A breeze was blowing, and if she closed her eyes and blocked out the blueness of the place—blue curtains, blue bedsheets, blue furniture and tiles and carpets and ceiling—she could almost pretend she was back home. The sound of the curtains against the window sills became the sound of leaves tickling the forest floor. A fountain burbling in the courtyard below turned into a babbling brook. All was well. She smelled—
A person.
Her eyes snapped open. There was a woman seated near the archway that led to the washroom, reading a parchment in an upholstered chair.
Dil’s heart jumped into her throat. “Lady Allenbee,” she said.
The woman was unmistakable. They’d met several times at meals and functions, and on each occasion, the head of the Violet School had made a point of talking to Dil before leaving with a cryptic, amused smile on her face.