by David Hair
Despite his hurt, Valdyr could appreciate her grace and wit before such a gathering and at such a time. He watched the others: the Javonesi, Tarita, was nodding appreciatively, as if she recognised spunk when she saw it. Sensini was clearly similarly impressed, smiling wryly as he exchanged a glance with the more strait-laced Korion.
Waqar, however, was not happy. ‘I won’t confer with those who launched Crusades.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Lyra evenly. ‘That was my predecessor. And I understand, Prince Waqar, that you have a certain potential? It’s one we share.’
Waqar’s eyes bulged. He shot a glance at Valdyr and finally understood. ‘You’re Nara of whom Valdyr spoke?’ He put his hand to his mouth and then his forehead. ‘Ahm on High. And you’re here because of Jehana?’
‘We are.’
Waqar set his jaw and then made a courtly gesture, full of graceful swirling hands. ‘Then I apologise, Majesty,’ he said in subdued tones. ‘I am at your service.’
*
Lyra gazed around the table, struck again by how unique this gathering was: men and women, West and East, magi and dwymancers; all working together despite so many past wrongs.
Outside, the daemon-possessed attackers remained sullenly encamped, so at no stage was General Korion called away. They were all able to give Naxius their full attention, but it was a long day.
Ogre spoke first, repeating for the newcomers what he’d learned in the Daemonicon di Naxius, after which his conclusions were dissected at length. The construct spoke well, handling the questions with patience and real intellect, and Lyra noticed that whenever he floundered, he would look at the diminutive Tarita and she would murmur something that grounded him again.
Hobokin and Glymahart, Lyra thought again. He’s Earth, she’s Air, and it’ll end in tears.
After Ogre finished, they all reported their own encounters with Naxius’ Masked Cabal, then came the difficult discussion about dwymancy – not everyone present knew of it, and there were long discussions about its nature, its status under Church Law and what it could and couldn’t do. Lyra was proud to declare her power, and Valdyr too, but Waqar was reluctant to discuss his own potential, or that of his captive sister.
Then Salim told them of the dying words of Rashid Mubarak, of how he’d let his own son, Xoredh, be infected by some new kind of ichor to gain power in the East: a daemon’s bargain, if ever there was one. They spoke of the Masks and all they’d done, and Ramon Sensini described his long battles against the so-called Lord of Rym, who they’d only recently discovered to have been another of Naxius’ pawns.
‘Naxius deliberately destabilised both Yuros and Ahmedhassa and launched us all onto a collision course,’ Dirklan concluded. ‘Masked cabalists with unrivalled gnostic power, daemonic ichor spreading through the veins of our peoples – and all of it traceable back to Naxius himself.’
‘And thanks to Ogre, we now know what Naxius wants,’ Tarita piped up. ‘Let’s stop him.’
Lyra glanced at Valdyr, still wishing she’d managed to tell him the truth sooner, but he seemed to have forgiven her, at least partially, and that mattered more than she’d thought.
‘I’m convinced by what I’ve heard,’ Seth told them. ‘I believe we must aid your mission, your Majesty. If dwymancers are required to prevent Naxius from using Jehana Mubarak for his foul purpose, then we must speed you on your way with whatever support we can give you. I will place magi at your disposal, if you wish. But we must still defend Norostein, I deem. We have tens of thousands of refugees, and Xoredh’s army is still formidable.’
‘And for my part, any man of mine you need is yours,’ Salim told Lyra.
Lyra glanced at Dirklan; they had discussed this at some length. ‘Thank you, your Majesty, my lords. It is indeed our purpose to hunt down Naxius; but to do so we will have to rely on speed and stealth. We must leave Norostein unseen and find Naxius without our approach being detected, so we can’t be a large group. Valdyr and I must be there.’ She glanced at Valdyr and was pleased that he was nodding firmly. ‘I’m unable to dissuade Lord Setallius from coming, and Rhune and Sarunia tell me they’re indispensable.’
‘We are,’ the Ventians chorused drily.
‘You lot have power to burn, but you can’t make camp, tend animals or cook to save yourselves,’ Sarunia added in a sultry drawl.
‘Those are the only people I can speak for,’ Lyra concluded. She turned to Ogre. ‘I have no right, but—’
‘The Master made me,’ he rumbled. ‘I know him.’
‘And I’m coming too,’ Tarita put in. ‘I’ve been on the trail of these damned Masks from the first. And I’m a Merozain, so try and stop me,’ she added, with a cocky smirk.
No one contradicted her, but they all looked at Waqar.
The Keshi prince grimaced and threw a rueful look at himself. ‘I’m told that any kind of exertion could kill me. I badly want to come, but—’
‘But he can’t, and that’s that,’ piped up the healer-mage, sitting against the back wall. Her voice brooked no argument. ‘He’s operating on one lung. I refuse to let him out of my care.’
‘We’ll find her for you,’ Tarita said, and Waqar nodded gloomily.
Seth turned to Ramon. ‘My friend, you know I’d rather you were here, but it’s your call.’
Waqar scowled. ‘Why him?’
‘Because I’m an Ascendant mage,’ the Silacian capitano replied casually. He tapped his fingers on the table thoughtfully while the room digested that little nugget. These days Ascendant magi were almost unheard of outside the Merozain brotherhood. Since the demise of the Keepers, there were none in Pallas.
Finally, Ramon turned apologetically to Lyra and said, ‘Majesty, we still don’t know what the enemy will do next, and everyone I care about is here. My lads have marched with me for five years on a losing campaign against the Lord of Rym. I can’t abandon them. They’re my family.’
Lyra had formed an opinion of the young Silacian as someone with more craft than will, but the gravity in his voice belied that. ‘I honour your decision,’ she told him, while reflecting that another Ascendant mage would have been a godsend on their quest. But at least they had Tarita.
There was nothing else to decide. ‘Then we have our party,’ she sighed. ‘Just a handful to find and destroy Naxius and save Jehana.’ She put her head in her hands, already exhausted from the long road to this moment.
The room fell silent, then Seth Korion asked Lyra, ‘Majesty, from your tale, you have experience against what we face. Silver, argenstael . . . we can work with those things, but is there aught else you can do to aid us?’
Lyra glanced at Valdyr, then at her father. She knew both well enough by now to know how to reply. ‘Sunlight gradually purifies the body of those lightly infected. They can all be saved. But if we do anything here, our presence will be revealed . . .’ Her voice trailed away and she looked at Valdyr. ‘Perhaps . . .’
They all fell silent, then he and she shared a smile. Yes, she thought, we can do that.
Dirklan spoke up. ‘Then we must rest, but not for long. We’ll leave tomorrow morning, to give ourselves daylight to cross the Alps. The possessed men have better night sight, so we’ve higher odds of evading them during the day. We can’t spare any more time – indeed,’ he added gloomily, ‘we may already be too late.’
Rym, Rimoni
Ervyn Naxius took his seat opposite Jehana, studying her with admiration. His slaves had pampered her, washing her hair and skin, grooming her until her bone-white hair was lustrous and gleaming, then dressing her in a silken shift of scarlet, form-hugging and revealing. He’d outgrown lust, by and large, but an aesthetically pleasing woman was always an ornament. He’d preserved the bodies of all his past concubines in his private quarters, each posed as if still living; their souls had been imprisoned in the bodies for him to talk to.
Jehana’s upper face was hidden by the skull-mask of Glamortha but her expression was clear: she was suicidal, just as
he desired.
A window showed the ruins of Rym, painted in jagged silver and deep shadow by the waxing moon: a stark, beautiful outlook that spoke of the futility of existence and the passing of all things.
Naxius took a sip of wine and asked, ‘Jehana, do you understand all that I’ve told you?’
She responded slowly, her voice hollow, distant, as if she thought this conversation might be just another vision inflicted by Abraxas. ‘You say that life engenders energy that binds bodies and rocks and plants and water and animals, flame and sunlight. That this energy creates a self-renewing cycle, like a tree whose branches are joined to the roots.’
‘A tree, yes. Some call it the “Elétfa”, the Tree of Life – but others see veins circulating around a heart, or waters flowing from rivers to oceans to clouds to rain and around again.’
‘But what’s it for?’ she asked dully.
He didn’t mock the question: philosophers had been asking it since the dawn of time. ‘Life isn’t for anything, Jehana. It means nothing except what we chose it to mean. There’s no cosmic lesson, no Creator putting us to the test or Evil Lord trying to corrupt us. Nobody waits to punish us for our sins or reward our good deeds. There’s only the void.’
‘The void,’ she echoed with a shudder. ‘But the void isn’t empty.’
He leaned forward. ‘No, indeed. When we die, there is a part of us that detaches from the body, which decays and is fed back into the energy flow – the Elétfa. The part that detaches is our “soul” or “spirit”. It flows out from the system, if we have the self-awareness to cling to sentience. It goes out into the void.’
‘It goes to Paradise,’ the girl breathed, more in hope than belief, by her tone of voice.
‘It goes straight down the throat of the daemons: the already-dead souls, waiting in the aether to swallow others, to prey on their energy and vicariously live other lives.’
She clutched her chest. Naxius could almost smell her heart-blood. ‘Abraxas . . .’
‘Yes, Abraxas is one of them – one of the Great Ones, a prince of his kind. There are many others, just as mighty. However, Abraxas was the first one visionary enough to ally himself to me.’
‘I see you,’ she breathed. ‘You have shadows all round you.’
‘You see the daemons linked to my aura, feeding me their power and perceptions,’ he boasted. ‘They don’t possess me – I possess them. You see, dear Jehana, by liberating myself from morality I have become the most powerful man alive. There is nothing I will not do to perpetuate myself, and that frees me: heart and soul, body and mind.’ He reached across and enclosed her limp hand in his. ‘You can do the same.’
She didn’t wrench her hand away, which suggested he had succeeded. He was strangely moved to realise that this was the closest thing he’d had to a consensual relationship.
‘If we’re going to be future daemons, Jehana, isn’t it better to be lords of their kind? Why accept domination when you can dominate? Become what I am, help me destroy the Elétfa, and we – you and I – will rule Eternity.’
‘But you say the dwyma and the daemonic are inimical,’ Jehana murmured, ‘so I don’t understand how this can be.’
He studied her masked face. Was it possible that this was an act, that she was feigning subservience to try to find a weakness in his plans? But he doubted she had the guile, and her time inside Abraxas’ mind had clearly broken something. It took a very special mind to emerge unscathed from such ceaseless sensory overload – he hadn’t.
‘I spoke truly – the dwyma is the essence of life, and daemons are the embodiment of death. When Alyssa Dulayne tried to contain them both within her, she was destroyed, consumed by that which she sought to control. But you could do it: by taking on both together, in a controlled way. Because life is part of death, and death of life: when we die we just become another form of life, like bricks taken from a ruined building to build another. Alyssa sought to gobble everything at once and she couldn’t contain and control that contradiction – but with my guidance, you can be the one to reconcile the daemonic to the dwyma, the one to embrace both and ease the return of the daemons to Urte.’
She shuddered. ‘Embrace them . . . dear Ahm, you don’t know what they’re like . . .’
‘Oh, I do, my girl, I do indeed. There’s nothing you’ve endured that I haven’t gone through myself.’
For pleasure.
She finally looked at him then, her eyes going wide. ‘Oh my . . .’
Sympathy . . . She thinks I’m some kind of victim . . .
It was almost enough to make him laugh, but he overcame that urge. ‘I have gazed upon the Void, Jehana. I know what you’ve been through.’
She looked stricken.
It really was too funny to bear, but it did at least confirm the key to breaking Jehana was empathy, which shone inside her, despite her royal upbringing and brittle imperiousness.
‘The daemons aren’t evil,’ he told her now, relishing his own cleverness, ‘they’re in pain – insane with it – because they once had life. They circle us in desperation, wanting to rejoin us. They succumb to envy and hate, but a true daemonist could heal them. She could bring them surcease and return them to life, create a new paradigm of existence in which nothing dies and we all live in harmony.’ He leaned forward. ‘Think of it, Jehana: a Paradise on Urte, where all beings are immortal. When one’s body dies, we simply create a new one for our soul. No one need ever suffer or die.’
Hilarious.
He rose and left, leaving her to contemplate that without having her captor in front of her.
She’s coming round.
*
Naxius returned to his own chambers, his awareness pricked by a gnostic sending, but the identity was masked. That was in itself puzzling, but he picked up a relay-stave and conjured a field of energy in the midst of a gnostic circle. Inside it, a translucent, shimmering image appeared of a man in the robes of a Kore monk, but over his face was a mask . . . Macharo.
Macharo is dead . . . I felt Brylion Fasterius die . . .
‘Who are you?’ he demanded.
The man pulled the mask away to reveal a blandly handsome, tonsured blond man. ‘My name is Germane. I served Ostevan Pontifex.’ Then his eyes turned black with ichor. ‘And now I serve you.’
Naxius blinked, then reached into the hive-mind of Abraxas and found the connection . . . This man had been flitting in and around the royal courts, meddling on Ostevan’s behalf. ‘How did you learn my contact sigil? And where did you get that Mask?’
And how come you to have the ichor . . .
Germane smiled smugly. ‘When Brylion Fasterius died, they didn’t realise what he was, or what was lodged inside his chest. But I did. I joined the burial party and found what I sought.
He took the daemon-spawn into himself . . . Naxius licked his lips, impressed by the man’s determination to pollute himself in the name of power. And this means I still have an agent in the north after all.
‘What news?’ he asked hungrily.
Germane spoke swiftly, concisely. ‘Solon Takwyth has seized power, arriving on the battlefield and attacking the Sacrecour army, joining his forces to those of the queen, but usurping control. He now has her and he marches upon Pallas. Word is the city is now divided – many desire to open the gates, but as many fear him.’
‘He’s taken the queen? Lyra is his?’
‘Yes, my Lord,’ Germane replied unctuously.
‘Will he use her?’ Naxius demanded.
‘Most thoroughly, I am sure.’ Germane smirked.
‘No, I mean, will he harness her dwyma for himself?’ Naxius asked, then he realised that this Germane probably had no idea of the queen’s true nature.
But that was instantly disproved. ‘I have no doubt that having a pet dwymancer will be very much to his liking,’ the priest drawled.
Ah: then Lyra might swing Takwyth to her side, so there is still danger to my plans. ‘Get close to them,’ he ordered, ‘and
kill her.’
‘That’s not so simple,’ Germane replied. ‘I’m an outlaw now. Of course, with my new skills, that’s not a big impediment, but I’m unsure what I face . . .?’ He paused meaningfully.
He wants something, Naxius’ temper rose, but he said carefully, ‘I can aid you.’
Germane’s face took on a slightly martyred aspect. ‘Ostevan confided in me that he believed there was some great matter in train, something the death of the queen might prevent. He, of course, thought to use her to place himself above you, but I am not so ambitious. All I seek is a place at your side.’
‘Not so ambitious’ . . . amusing fellow. But he could be vital. ‘Kill the queen and then we’ll talk.’
Germane smiled. ‘Of course . . . Master.’
The contact went dead.
Naxius sat back, both perturbed and exhilarated by this latest development. Though the Masks had never been more than pieces in his private tabula game, their deaths had left him without agents in key locations, so if this Germane could fill part of that gap, well and good.
But now Jehana was very nearly ready, perhaps only hours from complete breakdown, so soon he would have nothing at all to fear. As long as the dwymancers remained distant and ignorant, they were no threat.
A day or two more and this filthy, random world will be purged and set to rights – and I shall be its first real god.
27
Sunlight Through Glass
The Fourth Dwymancer
Dameta was, with Eloy, Lanthea and Amantius, one of the four early dwymancers who engendered great panic in the early Rondian Empire, when Emperor Sertain feared them as potential rivals. He feigned friendship and then destroyed Eloy; the other three fled. Amantius was subsequently slain, but the fate of the two women was never truly determined, for they simply vanished. They say Lanthea went native in Sydia, but Dameta was rumoured to haunt the Veronese Alps for centuries after.
ORDO COSTRUO COLLEGIATE, PONTUS 738