by Janet Morris
Sereth and Chayin have sought, assiduously, in endless evenings of debate, some way to unify those lands which between them they hold. And they have forged, I think some basis upon which such a dream might be built. Upon the crell system, and the fate of chaldless in the north, they have shared much thought. No, they have not wasted this peaceful interlude, and in time all of Silistra will taste of its fruit.
In no respect has it been an uneventful journey, but those whim-spawned attacks of nature have tithed from us no life. We have seen no other ship, nor sign of man.
Where the currents run warm, not here, surely, the sea abounds with life. There is a beast, slitsalike, that we have named sinetra-e’stet (night shiner). They travel in groups hundreds strong. One full-moon night, Sereth called me up to see them. Their rubbings against the boat had not prepared me. They were as glowing waves upon the sea. One could have walked upon them, so thick were they, their coils shimmering unnamed hues over the waves. They average thrice the length of a man. Their fanged heads seem all jaws and streamers. We caught a small one. The streamers, a fringe around the head and upon the dorsal side, look silken soft. They are barbed and poisonous. I was well relieved when we passed from their domain, and glad all that time for the stra plating of the Aknet’s hull and her warship’s protection. Less glad I am for the likeness of uritheria at her prow.
Here it is cold, and the snow lies thick and deep. We will sail the coast south, seeking a more clement port. But they had to behold the rock, to stand there, that they might hear its soundings. Winter solstice is two days gone. We will not hunt M’ksakkans until spring.
At night the sky is alive with light, behind the Keening Rock of Fai-Teraer Moyhe. This far north, Sereth has assured me, such displays are not unusual. He and Chayin are as children, eager to tramp the woods and find what lives within. And beyond.
Last night, tiring of the night sky’s festival, he came to me, earlier than has become his custom.
“Cold chase you in?” I said, putting down the work I had in hand. I had known by the step upon the stairs. I pulled the brist pelt around me.
“No,” he said, ducking his head in the narrow stairwell. Even bundled in heavy cloak and fur-lined boots, his movements flowed like fast brook water. Stooping lest he bang his head upon the crossbeams, he threw off the cloak and cautiously, with a glance upward, straightened up, his hand at the small of his back. “I came to get you out from here, and away from your accursed reminiscences. When the world freezes as cold as Fai-Teraer Mohye, you will be still at it. And forever left at it, hunched over your scribbling. Had I known, when I took you from Khys, of this more insidious rival, I might not have bothered.” This last he grunted as he lifted me bodily from where I sat. His fingers upon my arms were icy shards.
Still holding me against him, he plucked a page at random from my pile. I wriggled, away from him and his chill leathers. “Is this, truly, what you think of me?” he demanded.
“Let me see it,” I said, feeling the flush crawl up my cheeks. “Yes,” I admitted. Not before had he taken interest, muttering that as long as I did what he required of me, my free time was my own. And little enough he allows me. Daily I must face him, and often Chayin, with what weapons they choose. Under their tutelage, I have become much improved. And dhara-san, also does he require of me, that toning of the body which I have long neglected. “Yes,” I repeated.
Not releasing me, he put down the page and took up another. Humor tugged at the corners of his mouth.
The ship rode a deep swell, setting the oil lamps depending from the beams aswing.
He pulled me with him down upon the slab that serves us for couch in our cramped cabin.
“You said all of this,” he accused, while the scattering shadows steadied, “yet you have not said what is important. Child of owkahen, am I? Of my mother and father, so they swore while they lived.” He relinquished the page and lay back, his hands under his head.
“And what is important that I have not said?” I asked, twisting upon the narrow pallet. “I have spoken of Se’keroth. I have not left it out.”
He groaned as if in agony, and put one hand over his eyes. After a time he spread his fingers and stared through them.
“Se’keroth, yet. That, little one, was a tale spun of danne and kifra, the maunderings of two men between battles. That is all. Come here.”
Fitting to him, my cheek upon his shoulder, I felt it, beneath the thin cushion that makes pallet of two unyielding boards. “Yet you keep it,” I said of the blade secreted there. I well recalled it, that stra straight-blade; its hilt, inlaid with titrium wire, carved from a single fire gem; its length and scabbard chased with the Shaper’s seal. And it bears, also, engraved into the blade, a legend in Mi’ysten. And I recollected that moment I had first looked upon it; and that refrain I had been humming when I closed my fingers upon its hilt, come to me, unbidden: Se’keroth.
He shrugged. “I kept your couchbond chald. Those two things are little enough to take, from such wealth as rests at the Lake of Horns.” He rose up on one elbow. His lips touched my closed lids, then my temples.
“And what, then, have I not said? What is important?” I whispered, locking my arms around his neck. His eyes saw deep within me, took pleasure there.
“That such moments as these are made precious,” said he, solemn, his breath hardly a breeze upon my cheek, “by what we spend to acquire them. Without suffering and adversity, how would it go? Where would be the sweetness? And whence would come triumph, but out of loss? We create them, ci’ves. The only injustice is that, too often, we forget what we have done.”
“I think I have said that,” I whispered, pulling myself up to meet his lips. “But I would gladly add any words of yours.”
“Say, then, that we are all bound, the highest no less than the meanest.”
So I say it to you, as he said it to me, from the shores of which none are empowered to speak.
—first third Orsai, 25,698
Appendix 1
The quotations made by Estri, and by the cahndor and dharen, come from the third ors of Se’keroth, or what is called the arcane cycle. It is in the final section of this work that the line “Thrice denied and thrice delivered” signals Laore’s passage from the factual to the allegorical, a journey which was to subsequently cost him his life. The application of current events to such a critically obscure and castigating document was as inevitable a development then as it still remains; in such a work, where a mirror bright and clear is created by the author, that the self of the reader may shine forth, interpretation remains in the mind, potential of the reader, ever transmutable, evanescent, a primary example of Laore’s postulated “Differentiating Unfixed.”
It is not the author’s purpose here to attempt to determine the validity of the Se’keroth legend, nor to put forth any new theories as to what allegorical meanings are contained therein. Too many similar projects have been undertaken, and the resultant confusion from such a large number of theses (each redolent with biases and politicized to serve its creator’s particular postulates) no more needs another fragmentizing interpretation than the fathers’ fire needs oxygen to burn. The intent here is only to outline the legend as Laore propounded it; and thusly as Khys believed it, that we may consider the extent to which the dharen’s actions were affected, indeed at times dictated by and predicated on this belief,
The kernel of the Se’keroth legend is thus: the sword was created from the substance of Silistra by a Superior Entity, presumably an agent of the fathers, in the dawning age of toolmaker-man. (The primary Se’keroth legend was rendered in the tongue ascribed to the seed-sowers, Silistra’s first written language.)
Se’keroth’s magical nature ensures its possession by those chosen catalytic personalities that shape each ensuing age, all of whom undergo rigorous purification before the sword falls into their hands, at which time the blade is “retempered and quenched in ice.” He who wields Se’keroth is himself that weapon, is himself wielde
d by the same power which transmutes the gross into fine. Se’keroth, or the artifact believed to be this fabled blade, has been clutched in the grasp of every man who has catalyzed a “change of ages.” It has drunk the life of those visionaries responsible for Silistra’s three principal spiritual schools: “by their death gifting them with life.” The blade has been borne into every Silistran civilization’s history by one hero or another, even managing to insinuate itself into the mechanist wars under the aegis of the dharen Khys.
It was precisely this cyclical manifestation that so concerned Laore, and motivated him to chronicle in his four-volume epic the momentous changes, spanning nearly the whole of Silistran prehistory, that the various agents of Se’keroth had wrought; and to predict the exactitudes of a projected cycle extending ten times as far into the ages to come, even including those long periods of dormancy upon which Khys based his macrocosmic approach in his own work on Se’keroth.
Knowing so intimately the work of Laore (it was Khys who initially created a schism in the Laonan church by his reinterpretation of the great adept’s teachings, and who subsequently shaped the Stothric priesthood into the force it was destined to become), it is no wonder that Khys structured the impending change of ages in such a way as to make Se’keroth both the instrument of his own death and projected martyrdom and to ensure its reception by Sereth crill Tyris, his chosen successor not only to know Silistra but also to those shores of which none were heretofore empowered to speak.
The similarity between Khys’s death and Laore’s cannot be denied, but it is Khys’s conscious effort to evoke congruency which bears the greatest import. Laore predicted his own death by Se’keroth, “at the hand of one who will by this act seek to discredit me,” and true to his word, the manner of his execution was decreed primarily to cast upon him and his teachings a taint of evil. Se’keroth in its best understood function being designated as the inculpator of iniquity, it was thought by the tribunal that its use as the weapon of Laore’s execution would disprove his claim of sonship; instead, it raised him to a pinnacle of veneration never equaled by any other Silistran individual. Khys explored at great length in his papers the influence Se’keroth held in his decision-making. He was not unaware. In his own annotated Ors Yristera are various assignments of the prophecies contained therein to specific individuals, dates, and occurrences. Among these are interleaved much more detailed prophecies, often with mathematics appended, and one concerning the mode of his passing and what significance might be derived therefrom. Beside that page there are three dates, one being Brinar third fourth, 25,697, the actual date of his demise.
Appendix 2
A biographical sketch of the dharen Khys, born Khys Enmies, pre-hide year 2831, presents certain problems, not the least of these being the sheer volume of noteworthy accomplishments with which he is credited, coupled with the fact that most of the fertile periods of the dharen’s life have been elsewhere chronicled to a depth not even to be attempted in this brief sketch.
His birth, 760 years after the demise of Laore at Fai Teraer-Moyhe and 738 years from the publication of that one’s Forewarnings, was the source of great tribulation and scandal to the prestigious Enmies family. Khys’s mother, Ismarah, after enduring ten years of psychiatric treatment (demanded by her spouse, Braese, and ceded him by the courts after an interview with the lady in question, during which she refused to recant her insupportable position that the son she bore was not Braese’s, but rather of supernatural siring), was remanded into the care of the Stoth priesthood, whose dogma she embraced with ever-increasing fervor until her suicide in 2149, on the day following Khys’s eighteenth birthday. Khys’s father, twice respoused since the judgment of incurable insanity against his first mate, at that time applied considerable political pressure to regain custody of his son from the Stothric church, but to no avail. Ismarah, though adjudged unsound of mind, had delayed her life’s termination until the boy had reached the age of consent, until, in fact, she had witnessed Khys’s assumption of his Laonan vows and his consecration as a Stoth neophyte.
It was possibly this attempt upon Braese’s part to “secularize” his firstborn and force the boy into assuming the responsibilities of the Enmies fortune that resulted in Khys’s dramatic assignment of his considerable inheritance to the Stothric priesthood upon his lay-father’s death, which occurred in a sudden and catastrophic yachting accident that killed not only Braese but all other claimants to the Enmies wealth exactly five years after Khys’s mother’s passing.
It was at this point in time, Cetet, 2154, that the youthful Stoth initiate made the acquaintance of the Darsti-trained Gyneth Frein and her brother Wialer, the former to become, six passes later, his life mate, and the latter his coexperimenter and confidant during those years of Khys’s absorption with the life sciences that laid the foundations for their joint discovery of the Silistran serums just prior to Haroun-Vhass.
Upon that discovery, the Stoth priest, now fully confirmed and entered into his adeptship, went before the Mechanist Union with a proposal to distribute the drug, which retards deterioration of cell generations and extends the number of such replications per organism as well as conferring extensive immunities, throughout the thirty-seven nations. The Union, caught up in its wars and facing seemingly endless famines and profligate overpopulation, not only refused to embrace the project but pressed through an injunction against private distribution of the serums outside of the Stoth hierarchy itself, allowing this exemption for two reasons: firstly, the serums had already been distributed within the Stoth priesthood, which was to a great extent a static, nonreproducing population (the schism of the Laonan faith, though already pronounced, had been contained by those concerned; the replicating priests had been neither excommunicated nor denounced, and by such time as this move was contemplated, Haroun-Vhass aborted its completion); and secondly, the Union feared the power of the Stoths, who had not declined to infiltrate the power structures of the Mechanist Nations.
In all things, the Laonan faith had retained sovereignty over itself and its doings; if she had not done so, I would not write this today. Exempt from secular law and court proceedings, freed of all tithing obligations to state, bolstered by such economic bestowals as Khys’s own gift of the Enmies’ transnational cartels, it was the Stoth brotherhood which conceived and constructed the hide system. None else could have accomplished it, gained the waivers of right-of-way, claimed the exemptions to tax that made the project economically feasible, and coordinated such a gargantuan undertaking. Left to any secular force, the underground life-support complexes would have aborted, lain fallow under miles of factionalism and profit-loss, perhaps languishing half-completed, a final mute memorial to the race of man, untenanted, while Haroun-Vhass destroyed us all.
During that period of intense and single-minded concentration, Khys and his mate grew distant. Gyneth, childless by choice, had not chosen to embrace Khys’s reinterpretation of Laore’s teachings; she clung to the old ways, the celibacy, the fatalism, of the conservative Laonans; though Stoth and eligible, she refused the serums, and by so doing refuted the work of both her brother and her life mate. Thus it came to be that she stood on the one side of the schism and they on the other. Because it would have been a repudiation of her own faith to break the life-mate bond, she did not dissassociate herself from Khys, nor seek quarters elsewhere, but their relationship grew greatly strained, disintegrating entirely when Khys and Wialer together contrived to surreptitiously administer the longevity serums to her. From that time onward, though she lived in close contact with her brother and cohabited Khys’s bed, she spoke no word to them other than those simple exchanges necessary to maintain civility—indeed, up until the onslaught of the Final Passes, when Khys set off with Wialer and some few others to regain Se’keroth from across the sea, she kept her silence.
Upon their return, triumphant, they found a note ceding her hide place, to which was appended a short and heartfelt prayer for their erring spirits. She took nothi
ng, she left no trace, she merely disappeared among the multitudinous doomed.
Khys from that time ongoing took no woman in couchbond until the advent of Estri, choosing instead to instigate the common-holding practice, by which means he produced close to a hundred children.
His treatment of Estri, though harsh by Silistran secular standards, was neither unusual nor unconscionable by the pre-hide Laonan doctrines into which he was born, but rather an attempt on his part (despite her unknowing state) to enter her into the Eleventh Embrasure of dhara-san, that transcendent sexual ritualization that Estri refers to as the “hermaphroditic match,” and to which, perhaps understandably, she failed to respond. His notes upon this subject are extensive. He felt that by this means alone could he elude the fathers who so assiduously stalked him. His predictions as to the results should he fail to achieve such a match were borne out to the letter. Among these was Meditation on the Nature of Death, from which comes the following quote:
... the violence of expulsion from the womb, the first blow that attends the drawing of breath—how may we know these things? What is thought, while wombbound, of the terrors soon to be faced: the beginnings of life? Perhaps there is a correlate here; the violent entry into flesh, and the precipitous evacuation of it, might these seemings truly be only a diversity of expression of the same principle? For myself, I must conceive it not as the Final mystery, but the penultimate. Come early, come late; come with expectation and preparation; come empty-handed and guileless like a child; all come to the abyss, therein to partake of the definition of life, the catalyst death (.) which ends one sentence even as it signifies the beginnings of the next. And if, perchance, some will adjudge me overanxious, then let it be so. Those answers I seek can no longer be found in this flesh that trundles me about like some faithful beast of burden; and like that fleshbeast, though it might at first resent idleness enforced and run the length of its pasture peering over the fence at the young beasts come laboring down the road, thinking all the while of its years of service rendered, craving the feel of harness once more chafing its hide, it knows, in its heart of hearts, that strength spent is irretrievable but as interest accrued in memory. And might he not then turn his head from that road, and sniff with white-haired muzzle along his own joints, worn past renewal, and wonder at it all: that which has gone and that still to come, and therein find a road whose twists are never-ending and whose boundaries elude the vision free of fence and gate? I shall see.