Shadows of Ivory

by T L Greylock

  It was not a question Manon could answer—or wished to. Though her own Carrier talents paled in comparison, she had, since childhood, harbored conflicting feelings about the dynasty. The horrors and atrocities committed at their hands or on their orders were to be condemned. Of course. But Manon also knew the history that followed—the persecution of Carriers, driven by fear and a need to lash out at anything that bore resemblance to the hated despots who had ruled with cruelty in their left hands and insatiable hunger in their right. Even by Manon’s lifetime, three centuries after the death of the last Alescuan ruler, those who Carried were often mistrusted, vilified, even sometimes forced to flee from homes their families had lived in since before the name of Alescu blackened the gift.

  Manon had been fortunate. Her family’s position and wealth, though recently acquired, and the cultured nature of the city of Arconia offered her a normal childhood. But she remembered listening at the door to her father’s library, late at night, her ear pressed to the keyhole, and hearing of yet another attack in a small village, where superstition and ignorance could spark anger.

  Manon shook off the silence. “Come. We might as well get this over with.”

  She urged her horse forward and crossed the final distance to Elysium, Luca trailing just behind.

  “I still don’t understand how your Archduke thinks there can be anything of value left here,” Luca said when they dismounted in the middle of one of the large plazas. He looped his horse’s reins over the branch of a thin, gnarled tree. “Looters would have stripped it bare long ago.”

  Manon shrugged. “I don’t disagree with your theory. But I have my orders.” She waited for him to start the argument—they’d had it once already on the journey from Arconia—about Manon’s subservience to the Archduke. She had yet to mention her father to him, which left a gaping hole in any explanation she tried to form. But to her relief, Luca merely raised an eyebrow, more focused, Manon guessed, on the strange connection he was feeling to the ruins.

  Manon, for her part, was trying—and failing—to determine the best way to start her search for the reliquary the Archduke believed to be somewhere in the ruins. “She would have known where to look,” Manon muttered.

  She had been unable to shake Eska de Caraval’s face from her head since their brief, strained, and entirely unlooked for meeting at the Varadome—a fact that was just as irritating as the meeting itself had been.

  “Who?”

  “A self-centered bitch with more money than anyone ought to have,” Manon spat. “Not to mention the ability to pull strings to get her hands on anything.” Luca raised an eyebrow again, but this time the look lingered. Manon sighed. “We crossed paths at the Varadome. Whenever I see her, I can’t decide if I would rather burn her hair off or never set eyes on her again.”

  Luca smirked. “And yet you’d like her help right now.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Manon snapped. “Besides, she’d refuse.”

  “How do you know?” Luca asked the question softly.

  Manon turned her back and began to stride across the shattered plaza, aiming toward the bulk of the remaining foundation—the throne room, or so the Archduke had said. Broken pillars wrapped in vines stretched no higher than Manon’s head, crippled giants that had once reached to the sky and supported a ceiling of painted glass and slender, soaring arches of stone. Manon wondered if even a single shard of that famous glass survived in Elysium, buried under the weeds, or if every last piece had been taken by looters hoping for coin in exchange for something the Alescus had once touched—not that the kings and queens had raised so much as a finger to build their palace. It was said that all the slaves who labored over the palace for years, those that survived, that is, were slaughtered on the day of its completion.

  Manon shook her head as though she could shake free the thoughts of the Alescuan kings and queens. They were dead, long dead, and there was no space for them, not when she had the Archduke laying a path before her feet, a path she couldn’t see and a destination she didn’t know.

  And then there was Perrin. She had taken some solace in the Archduke’s news and knowing Perrin was no longer in custody in Toridium—but what she longed to know the Archduke could not tell her. She tried to picture him, happy and carefree as he had once been, but always his face came to her as she had last seen it. And so his face joined the others—her father, Victor, even her mother—a silent host accompanying Manon everywhere.

  The only indication the throne room had once deserved its name was the dais. It rose above the rest of the foundation, but only a step and a half survived. The rest was rubble, blocks of black stone veined with white. Manon closed her eyes and imagined the destruction—the dust, the noise, the angry triumph of those wielding two-handed hammers and driving long picks into the stones that had held the hated Alescus above everyone, above the world. Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes and began an ordered search—not because she thought the care would yield a result but because it kept her from thinking of other things.

  Luca joined her in silence but after a time the hunter stopped and straightened. He turned to the left and right, stretching his back muscles, and watched her. Manon could feel his gaze, but didn’t look up and acknowledge him for fear it would spark further questions about Eska de Caraval.

  “Manon,” he said at length. She kept pulling up the tangle of vines in the northwest corner of the throne room. “Manon,” he said again, louder the second time. “If you were Varin II and if you knew the rebellion was coming for you, what would you do?”

  Frowning, Manon stopped pulling on the vines. She stood and glanced over at Luca, using one hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “He was waiting for them in the throne room. Everyone knows that.”

  “But why was he waiting here?”

  Manon squinted at Luca. “Because he knew his forces were defeated. Because he wanted to die as a king on his throne?”

  “You’re a Carrier.” Luca began to walk toward her. “Imagine you’re Varin. You have powers most of us would never believe possible. You might know you’ll die eventually, but your heart is full of wrath. What would you want to do?”

  “I’d want to kill as many of them as possible before I died.”

  Luca came to a halt in front of her. He nodded slightly. “And would you choose the throne room as your last stand?”

  Manon thought for a moment, trying to imagine the palace as it once had been. She couldn’t, of course, not really. “I’d want to find high ground. Somewhere I could rain fire down on them like a storm of hail.”

  Luca nodded again. “Would anything prevent you from doing that?”

  “No,” she said, hesitating. “Unless it was more important that I protect something than kill a few weak enemies.”

  Luca smiled a little. “So you confront your enemy here, in this throne room, this place with no escape, with no cover, with no strategic importance. Because--”

  “Because you don’t want the enemy to go looking for you,” Manon finished. “Because you don’t want to risk them stumbling across something important.”

  The hunter’s smile grew. “Exactly. We shouldn’t be looking in here. If Varin had the reliquary when he died and if it was as important as your Archduke believes it was, it wouldn’t be anywhere near his throne.”

  Manon gestured around them. “That still leaves us a lot of ground to cover.”

  Luca shrugged. “It would help if we knew more about the palace. And I wouldn’t mind knowing what was so important to an Alescuan king that he would give up his chance to fight. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know either of those things.”

  Something in Luca’s words flickered in Manon’s mind, like a memory of a flame illuminating something important—but like a star in the night sky, the harder she looked for it, the faster it vanished. Shaking her head, Manon scanned the ruins around them. She had no desire to ponder the whims of dead kings. “I suppose we might as well start by looking on the outskirts of the ruins.
We know the Tribunes and the rebel army approached from the west, just like we did. Varin would have seen them coming and the cliff might have offered a hiding place.” She watched Luca’s face for confirmation, knowing she was grasping at air.

  “East, then,” he said. “It’s something.”

  The trudged through the ruins, weaving among walls no higher than their knees, dry fountains with the mosaics chiseled away, and endless piles of broken stone shrouded in moss and vines and small purple flowers. The mist grew heavier as they moved closer to the waterfall and Manon welcomed the cool water on her skin. The roar of the waterfall soon drowned out all hope of speech, so Manon and Luca communicated with gestures. As they reached the eastern-most edge of the ruins, where the walls had abutted the cliff, they separated, Luca heading north, Manon south toward the waterfall.

  She wandered, abandoning the precision she had adopted in the throne room—but then, what really was she even looking for? A trap door in the stone? A cave in the cliff? What could she possible see that had escaped the countless feet crossing the same stones in search of treasure for hundreds of years?

  What she saw was another person.

  A faint outline in the mist, nothing more than a shape that might have been a head with shoulders below it. The drifting spray swirled and Manon frowned, trying to decide if she had imagined it.

  And then the mist parted, as though by an invisible hand, and Manon’s heart stopped for a moment.

  “Perrin?”

  He appeared not to hear. He stood in profile to Manon, still as a statue. The waterfall spray gusted between them, threatening to swallow him from view. Manon took two hurried steps forward, but then hesitated, the memory of their last moments in Toridium wedging into the empty space between them.

  “Perrin?” she tried again, but her voice was lost in the waterfall—or perhaps that was just the blood rushing in her own ears. He began to walk, his movement strangely uncoordinated, like a man still half asleep or hampered by injury. Manon hurried after him, calling his name repeatedly to no response. Stepping nimbly over a fallen pillar, she caught him quickly and reached a hand out to touch his shoulder.

  He flinched at her touch but turned slowly, and his expression was guarded as he faced Manon, his eyes not quite meeting hers.

  “Perrin? Are you all right?” Manon asked. Then the words that had sat like a stone in her heart since that day in Toridium tumbled forth. “I was trying to protect you. Please. Forgive me.” He said nothing. Indeed, he didn’t seem to have heard her. “Perrin, I know you’re angry,” Manon went on, but her voice failed against the force of his empty expression. He turned away and continued walking in the same direction.

  Not guarded, Manon realized. Not angry. Her brother wasn’t avoiding her, wasn’t punishing her. He didn’t know her.

  ***

  They had been following Perrin all afternoon. He wandered aimlessly through the ruins of Elysium, never stopping, never acknowledging their presence. He appeared to have traveled on foot without supplies, and his clothes were stained with sweat and dirt. Manon had not seen Perrin look so disheveled since he was a small boy.

  Luca came to a halt and propped one foot up on a block of stone, his eyes following Perrin, who was circling a large pile of rubble for the fifth time.

  “You’re sure he wasn’t wounded?” It was not the first time Luca had posed the question.

  Manon didn’t answer. She’d already answered it three times. The truth was she didn’t know. There was no outward appearance of injury, no head wound. And though he hadn’t met her gaze, Perrin hadn’t appeared to be suffering from addled vision. And yet she could think of no other reason for his behavior.

  “What do you want to do?” Luca asked.

  That was a new question, but not one Manon wanted to answer, either. She certainly didn’t want to leave Perrin there, but neither did she want to forcibly seize him. If he resisted, Luca was strong enough to inadvertently hurt him. If he was frightened, she feared they would only make it worse.

  “I don’t think he’s lost,” Luca said. “He might not be himself, but he knows where he is.”

  Manon glanced sharply at the hunter. “Why do you say that? He’s never been here in his life.”

  Luca shifted his boot on the stone, that crease Manon was beginning to know so well forming between his eyes. He seemed reluctant to speak.

  Manon folded her arms across her chest. “Tell me.”

  He sighed. “It reminds me of an animal whose home has been disturbed. A bird, maybe. I’ve seen it plenty of times. They’ll fly from tree to tree, circling around the destroyed nest. I think they’re looking for the baby birds. Or for signs of a predator. Or just trying to understand what happened.” Luca glanced at Manon. “Foxes will do it, too.”

  “He’s never been here,” Manon repeated, more sharply than she intended. Luca stepped off the stone and held up both hands, as though warding off the anger that threatened to spill over.

  “As you say.” The mildness in his voice, the careful tone, was somehow worse than if he had taken offense. Luca nodded in Perrin’s direction. “He’s on the move.”

  They continued the strange game of follow the leader through the waning hours of the day. Manon only made one more attempt to interact with her brother, to reach him through whatever haze shrouded his mind. She approached as he studied the cracks in a small plaza that might have once been a courtyard—but that time the gentle touch on his arm earned her something other than a blank expression. He snapped his head around to look at her and Manon recoiled against the fury flashing in his eyes. It vanished almost immediately and the blank emptiness returned as his gaze slid beyond her, but Manon could not keep from trembling as she watched him walk away. Perrin’s eyes had always been green, the irises ringed with a golden yellow. The savage rage she had seen in those eyes that ought to have been her brother’s had burned in a sea of brilliant blue.

  She had cried then, the tears rolling silently down her cheeks. Luca, who had watched her attempt at communication from a discreet distance, came close but stopped just out of reach, hovering, waiting.

  “It’s not him,” she said at last. Her voice broke, but the words were like a barricade wrestled into place to stem the tears. She took a deep breath. Not to reach for calm or composure—the look in her brother’s eyes had just pushed calm and composure off a cliff, leaving Manon teetering precariously close to the same fate. She took that breath to curse her father, to channel her fear and her pain into something she could blame. Julian Barca was an easy—and oft-used—target.

  She didn’t have the chance to get the words out.

  A blinding flash of light streaked to the earth, a bolt of white fire from the sky. Manon looked away just as it struck somewhere deep in the ruins of Elysium—and sent a thunderous wave of air surging out in a perfect circle from the point of impact.

  She never saw it coming.

  The wave hit Manon and Luca, sending them flying through the air with such speed and force that they were thrown clear of the ruins of the palace—except there were no more ruins. Manon struck the ground, skidding through dirt and grass, her disoriented vision glimpsing the emptiness that had been Elysium. Every pillar, every wall, every stone had disintegrated to dust that still fell like dry rain. Gone. Nothing was left.

  Nothing, that is, except the lone figure standing precisely where the bolt of fire had struck the earth.

  Manon blinked, her mind a maelstrom of apprehension and pain. And then she slipped into that place between death and dreams.

  Interlude 18

  Excerpt from a decoded military report, now considered one of the keys to the Alescuan defeat, sent from a spy in the Alescu palace of Elysium to Titianus, Tribune of Vienisi, during the last days of the Great Rising—the spy’s true name and fate are unknown

  The prisoner has agreed to help. I have accepted her terms, as instructed, though I ask the good god Oru nightly how we shall make right on our part of the bargain. You k
now, Tribune, of my reticence and my concern that allowing her everything she asks for will only see our moment of victory turn to ash—but I suppose we are far past reticence and concern. It is done and I shall not look back or falter.

  In addition to the Trueblade, I have at last discovered the location of the prisoners from the battles at Montalois and Anavairre. Those that have not been slaughtered for sport or for experimentation are being kept in an underground compound east of Elysium and I understand that more than two-thirds are still alive. You know as well as I do that these numbers could mean the difference between victory and defeat. I have included a map of sorts, which I trust you can decipher. Our time of opportunity is limited, however, as the prisoners are due to be moved to another location before the end of summer. You know how suspicious Varin is—this information was not easily obtained and I think it unlikely I’ll be able to do so again after the move is made, not without drawing too much attention.

  I have also, when time allows, been working on stockpiling the items requested by the Tribunes. Despite placing this message under code, I dare not write the location at this time. Trust that you will know where to find them when the time comes—when you are ready to storm the walls of Elysium.

  May the strong arm of Oru protect you and all our noble Tribunes. Though I know you do not share my faith, I hope you will allow me to beseech my god for your preservation. Elysium is a dark, mind-fouling place and I find myself in deep need of his presence. May our warriors remain stout of heart and mind. May the Seven Cities know freedom from tyranny.

  Yours in all good faith,

  Zachaire, Varin’s Bane

  Chapter Forty

  “I refuse to believe an evangelist has swayed you from your palace of knowledge.”