by Jean Johnson
This time, the sound-masking spell was needed to hide his hearty laughter from the rest of the building.
FOURTEEN
Nothing seemed able to ruin his good mood, come morning. Not the drizzling rain on the way from Heiastowne to the dam, and not the information that his scrying spies had found no recording of what the Patriarch’s right-hand man wanted from his fellow ex-priests in this corner of the land. Not even the frowns his mother gave him when he went down to the dining level to get something to eat at mid-morning could spoil his happy mood.
His brother Dolon came close to puncturing Alonnen’s ebullient attitude. Having invaded the dining hall of the inner circle for much the same reason—oven-baked flatbread topped with slivers of onion and scattered with cheese—Dolon ate slowly, frowning several times at his older brother. Toward the end of the snack, he finally smiled. Grinned, rather, with the predatory look of a sibling who had figured something out.
“Why, Alonnen, I didn’t know you liked men,” Dolon teased slyly.
Alonnen frowned in confusion. “What? Since when?”
“Since, oh, last night? When you took Master Rexei into town . . . and came home this morning sporting that unbelievably silly grin?” his brother said, pointing at Alonnen’s lips. “You haven’t done that since the last time you got to piston someone . . . or was he pistoning you? All those protests to the contrary . . . what a smoke screen! You should be nominated for an apprenticeship to the Actors Guild.”
For a long moment, Alonnen did not feel like smiling. His brother’s comments were crude, rude, and . . . well, typical hazing from a brother. This wasn’t the first time either of them had tormented the other verbally. But it wasn’t the teasing that bothered him; it was that as much as Alonnen wanted to correct his sibling’s mistaken impression, he didn’t know if he had the right to correct Dolon’s view of Rexei as a male.
“Rexei” was not an unusual name for both boys and girls; just about any name ending in ei was gender neutral in Mekhana. Many parents used it to ensure a casual conversation would not give away a child’s gender identity whenever a priest was around. His own name wasn’t gender neutral, nor was Dolon’s, but then their parents had raised them and their siblings mostly within the protections of the Vortex. But naming conventions were not the same as permission to speak.
Sighing, he settled on a different tactic. “Does it really matter whether or not the person I love is a male, a female, or . . . or some weird gender the Gods Themselves haven’t yet invented?”
“Oh-ho!” Dolon crowed, distracted as Alonnen had planned for him to be. “So my middle brother is in love, is he?”
Alonnen narrowed his eyes and peered over the top of the green-lensed spectacles he had not bothered to remove. “Are you going to keep giving me grief about being in love, or are you going to go do something more productive, like actually work?”
Dolon mock swept his strawberry blond curls back from his face, lifting his hawkish nose into the air. “I’ll have you know I’m quite competent at doing both.”
Alonnen relaxed. This was just typical teasing. “You have a low threshold for competency, I see.” He started to say more, but the talker-box rang. He rose to go answer it, but Dolon beat him to the machine. “I was going to get that. It’s probably for me.”
“Hello, you’ve reached the inner dining hall,” Dolon offered into the speaking cone, lifting the matching earpiece to his head. “What? . . . He’s right here. I’ll let him know.”
The way his brother hung up the ear-cone, ending the conversation instead of offering the cable-connected device, annoyed Alonnen. “I could’ve spoke to them myself, you know.”
“Yeah, but you’d just hear the exact same thing, and this’ll get you upstairs faster,” Dolon told him, shrugging. “The Guardians have called a conference, and they need you up there, since it’s apparently about you.”
Glad he had finished his flatbread snack, Alonnen pointed back at the table they had used, and the dirty dishes still sitting on the age-worn surface. “Just for that, you can take care of my cup and plate. Since it’ll get me upstairs faster.”
Ignoring the dirty look his younger sibling sent him, Alonnen headed for the stairs. It didn’t take long to reach the top. Debating a moment, he touched the doorknob, chanted a brief set of spells to change the illusions cloaking his office, then stepped inside. What should have been a room with four or five people in it, examining the images captured by the spying roaches, had turned into an empty chamber with a single mirror on the wall.
Alonnen didn’t understand how it worked; his magical education wasn’t up to the task and wouldn’t be for a long, long time even if he had a competent teacher who did understand. But he knew that he wasn’t going to run over someone turned invisible, but not intangible, by some spell. The way Millanei had described it, this whole floor acted more like his office formed a giant ring around the heart of the Vortex, and he had simply spun the floor like a cogwheel, accessing a gear-tooth version that had no one currently in it. Or perhaps it was the others he had shifted out of his office into an alternate version somewhere around the ring.
Donning cap and scarf to augment his green-tinted, identity-hiding lenses, he touched the frame, shifting it from a pulsing blue field to a set of squares filled with faces. Given the number of Guardians assembled, this was to be a very important meeting. He recognized nearly every face, but two of the mirror-windows were different. Both Pelai and Tipa’thia occupied the same scrying frame, one with her tattoos creased and crinkled into near-illegibility by her age-lined face, the other with her smooth-inked features framed by dark hair instead of white. In the other frame, not one, not two, but five faces peered at the others.
In the center, in a window that occupied the span of four of the others, Guardian Kerric nodded a greeting for their newest conference member. “I’m very glad you could join us, Guardian Alonnen, because we have come up with a solution for your problem.”
“A temporary solution,” Guardian Tipa’thia interjected firmly. “The spells will only last about two years, then they won’t be able to be reapplied for ten years. Keep that in mind, Guardians.”
Amber eyes rolled, and a suntanned hand tugged on a pale blonde braid. Alonnen quirked a brow at Serina’s image. She looked like she was not at all happy with whatever solution Kerric and Tipa’thia had in mind—irritated with it, even—but she didn’t say anything. She just stood there next to Guardian Dominor, her husband. Witch-Knight Orana Niel stood to Serina’s right, looking as calm and patient as ever.
To the left of Dominor stood some young man with ash-blond hair and aquamarine eyes. He was a bit thinner than Dominor but had the look of a kinsman to the dark-haired mage. To his left stood a woman with hair just a few shades lighter than Alonnen’s own and a curious look in her eyes; those eyes were the same shade as the young man’s, but other than that, the two had nothing in common regarding their looks. Certainly she didn’t have the slightly slanted, almond-shaped eyes of a Katani. What she lacked in ethnic nationality, Alonnen realized was made up in the crown she wore: delicate-looking, it had been fashioned out of slender gold wires bent and joined together to look almost like a set of mountain peaks.
Given the location of the Fountain which Dominor guarded, Alonnen could guess who the crown wearer might be. “I take it you, milady, are the new ruler of Nightfall? If so, congratulations.”
“Queen Kelly of Nightfall, hi there. Forgive me for barging into this, but after reading the prophecies in question, I realized I might be of some help, even if I’m no mage,” she stated bluntly. “I also figured, given how secretive you Guardian types are of your magical whatsit-wells, it might help for you to have a front man, so to speak. You know, someone whom everyone could point to and say, ‘She ordered it!’ and thus send the stampede of questioners and complainers my way, to distract everyone from the truth and keep them from interrupting or inte
rfering with your work.”
Her blunt forthrightness made some of the others blink. For a moment, Alonnen couldn’t think of why; her forthrightness simply reminded him of several other Guild Masters . . . and that was the reason why. For a queen, this Kelly woman did not act at all how the tales of outkingdom queens were reported to act. She even looked like a fellow ex-Mekhanan . . . like a Guildaran, given her buttoned shirt. Alonnen liked her immediately based on that. He suspected from Ilaiea’s impatient look and Keleseth’s frown that not everyone did.
“I think that’s a good idea,” he stated, before anyone else could speak. He might not know nearly as many spells as the other men and women in this scrycast conference, but Alonnen was not stupid. He had given all the information gathered over the last few months a lot of thought. “Given the prophecies in question seem to suggest the Convocation is somehow involved, the queen of its host nation would indeed make a logical ‘target’ for all inquiring outsiders. And the ‘Synod Gone’ prophecy by the, uh . . . Seer Howpunay?”
“Howpanayah,” the ash-blond man pronounced. “Only the Seer Haupanea goes by ‘Hope’ now . . . and she’ll be joining us as soon as she gets out of the refreshing room.”
“Uh . . . right,” Alonnen said, thrown off-balance a little by the other man’s assertion that a centuries-old Seer would be joining them in a few moments. He dragged the conversation back to the point he wanted to make. “That prophecy does say, ‘Gone, all gone, the synod gone, brought back by exiled might; By second try, the fiends must die, uncovered by the blight.’ If the Synod is indeed the restored Convocation, as we suspect, then whatever is required to end the impending demonic invasion will happen within the kingdom of Nightfall, or at the very least, at the same time as your second Convocation ceremony, Guild Master Kelly . . . uh, sorry, is it Highness? I’m not used to addressing royalty.”
“Just call me Kelly,” the redhead soothed. “I don’t stand on formality when it’s not a formal occasion. I don’t even sit on formality, unless there’s an extra cushion or two,” she added, as the men and women sharing Guardian Dominor’s frame with her smiled in humor. So did some of the others, Sheren, Migel, Kelezam, Pelai, even the two stuffy Guardians of the Fountains in Fortuna. “And you had the very same thought I did, reading those two lines. Whatever happens, it will involve the Convocation in some way.
“The more I know right away on what your plans are, the more I can ensure that they get incorporated into my own plans for hosting the next Convocation. Which will be in four years, since that seems to be the long-standing tradition, and I won’t object to the wait, since we still have a long way to go before Nightfall is fully functional as a kingdom and a hosting site. But enough about me; I’ll just listen in and take notes while you get on with the solution you found. Serina?”
“Ughh,” the younger of the two pale blonde women in view groaned, tugging again on her braid. “I don’t like this . . .”
“Stop whining, love, and get it over with,” Guardian Dominor told his wife.
“Fine. Okay, as many of you know, I’ve been working on the problem of the old mass Portals that used to span both continents and oceans, and how the Shattering of Aiar not only destroyed the heart of the old Empire up north and ended the last set of Convocations of Gods and Man, but it also shattered the aether, allowing said Portals to span the world. Well, between my efforts with the Fountain which Mother Naima has been sharing Guardianship of with me and the efforts of Priestess Saleria”—Serina nodded to the blonde priestess with the almond-shaped eyes and golden curls, who dipped her head in return—“we’ve managed to quell a strip of aether running from the center of Western Katan and the Fountain of the Grove all the way up to a stretch of kingdoms to the east of your, well, ex-kingdom and the region governed by Guardian Callaia.”
“Sorry about that,” Kelly muttered under her breath, giving Alonnen a somewhat guilty, apologetic wince.
“Don’t be,” he murmured back, wondering what the redhead had to do with the loss of Mekha. He returned his attention to Serina. “What does the restoration of Portal abilities have to do with the threat of a demonic invasion?”
Nose wrinkled in disgust, Guardian Ilaiea scoffed, “Are you really that ignorant, boy? Who in the name of the Netherhells made you a Guardian, if you’re so stupid?”
Alonnen narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me for being uneducated, but if you haven’t noticed, Mekhana has been a death trap for mages for the last four centuries, with damn few mages able to get in or out without getting captured. Forgive us for most of our highly educated mages having their will suppressed by magical shackles and the weight of an uncaring, ever-hungering False God, who destroyed their minds and drained their magics to the very last drop. Forgive us for losing a lot of knowledge over the centuries under the oppressive rule of a False God who was just two steps away from being a Netherhell demon. Forgive us for—”
“Wow. You have a temper worse than mine,” Queen Kelly interjected, her brows lifted and her tone light, if pointed.
Forcing himself to relax, Alonnen muttered a very grudging, “Sorry.”
It was a bit angry, but it did smooth over the moment. It helped that Tipa’thia spoke up, seizing the awkward silence. “Regardless of how well-trained you and your local mages might be, Guardian Alonnen, it would not matter. This will be a new spell for everyone . . . and we will all have to learn how to apply it. Half of it was researched by my apprentice, Pelai, from forgotten knowledge culled from scores of ancient grimoires. Half of it has been updated and integrated into the aether-cleansing magics which Guardian Serina has been tirelessly researching and striving to enact.”
“Unfortunately, this will put back that aether quelling by at least two full years!” Serina argued.
Lost, Alonnen opened his mouth to ask what the two were talking about. Guardian Kerric got to it first, raising his hand. “Ladies, please. Guardian Serina, please cut through the side discussions and just outline what needs to be done and why, so that we all understand the necessity of it.”
She tugged on her long braid again, then released it with a heavy sigh and a brief mutter. “I need more vases . . . As I was saying, instead of calming the aether to reestablish our ability to create Portals, we shall instead temporarily agitate the aether. The resonances of normal, world-crossing Portals are very similar to, but not exactly the same as, the resonance frequencies used by the shorter, merely region-crossing mirror-Gates which are still usable in most kingdoms.
“By the same token, if you push things up higher, you reach the resonance frequencies not only in the local aether, but in what we call the Veil between Worlds. Depending upon the exact resonances, you can pierce the Veil into other universes entirely, where the rules might be slightly different . . . or you can pierce the Veil into the region of the Netherhells,” Serina explained. “Blood-based, violence-infused magic assists in piercing the Veil to the Netherhells, creating Portals to and from that realm. Mages can also use these resonances to summon and bind demons, which is what these ex-Mekhanan priests are attempting to do.”
Alonnen nodded, glad he was able to follow along in spite of his . . . lack of a perfect magical education. He really did not like Ilaiea. He did like Serina, however, even though both women looked very similar to each other. Serina paused before continuing, glancing to her right. A curly haired woman with richly tanned skin moved into the scrying mirror’s view, and the man with the ash-blond hair motioned for her to join him; when she did, he tucked his arm around her hourglass curves, snugging her against his side. For a moment, Alonnen wished Rexei were here instead of in town, meeting with her long-lost half brother, but this was more important than any spark of envy or undoubtedly misplaced mistrust.
“Everyone, this is Hope, my newest and last sister-in-law, who just married Morganen, there,” Serina stated, introducing the newcomer. “Two hundred years ago, she was the Duchess Haupanea of Nightfall, a Ho
ly Seer of Katan, but the destruction of the last Convocation caused a tear in the Veil between Worlds, which caused her to be cast into another universe at a different point in time. She met Kelly in that world, who came across to join us in this one in accordance with a series of prophecies made by several Seers, not just herself. Hope, these are some of the various Guardians of the world.”
Hope raised a hand and fluttered it. Like Kelly, she was wearing an almost Guildaran-style buttoned shirt instead of the more commonly seen tunic, robes, or dress of the others, albeit in a cheerful shade of pink that contrasted pleasantly with Kelly’s light blue. “I was a poetic Seer, and according to the Gods of the Convocation, I’ll still continue to be a Seer, so we’re in the process of assigning a set of scribes to follow me around in case I start spouting pertinent bits of doggerel again. Based on what I’ve learned of recent history and what I found when I went through my old prophecy scrolls, it looks like there’s at least seven or eight prophecies of mine alone which tie into this whole Netherhells mess . . . which scares the willies out of me, as Kelly’s old people would say. But whatever the Gods send for me to say about this whole mess, I’ll make sure you know it.”
Alonnen decided he liked her, too.
“Welcome, Holy Seer,” Guardian Marton of Fortune’s Hall stated dryly. “I’m glad we have a scapegoat and a mouthpiece, but I want to know what, exactly, Guardian Serina has in mind regarding the resonances of the Veil and the Portals, and how it ties into thwarting the demonic invasion.”
“Well, you’re not going to like it,” Serina returned bluntly. “I don’t like it, either, since it sets back my work two-plus years. But we are going to have to agitate the layers of resonances involved in the deeper stretches of the Veil, where the borders between this world and the various Netherhells exists . . . and that will have an impact on the Portals that span the curve of this world.”