But perhaps she had not meant material rewards. Could she mean the Rite of Transition? he wondered, experiencing the same mixed feelings he had felt when Maradith had ‘nominated’ him for it. Whatever its cash value, or lack of, it would be hard to argue that this would indeed constitute a queenly gift. On reflection, though, he dismissed that theory. In order for the Queen to win her concessions, Kasimir had to retain his credibility as an impartial mediator. Whereas if I return to Lyssagrad as an Alvere, I’ve kind of a hunch the Senate will suspect they were hard done by … Then again, who really knew what was in the Queen’s mind, except for that nazarlyk she always wore? Curse the lucky little bugger.
But would I even take the Rite if she offered it? he asked himself. That was a hard question to answer. Kasimir had been fascinated with the Alvere ever since he was old enough to read a storybook, which in his case had been a precocious two and a half years. He had soon developed a sense of kinship for these beautiful, mysterious, ethereal spell-weavers, since he had also quickly worked out that his natural inclination for telepathy was neither something normal, nor something that was likely to endear him to anyone. It even put his close family ill at ease, and made his imagination cleave all the more to the idea that maybe he belonged in the magical world of the books after all.
When he was finally of an age to encounter real Alvere – generally as railroad porters, bootblacks, and chimney-sweeps – they were at first a grave disappointment, but young Elwin was patient as well as precocious. Telepathy came mostly in random, frustrating flashes in those days before he had learned how to control it, but it offered him tantalising glimpses behind the beaten, dusty exteriors of the Alvere citizens, to their fierce inner sense of pride and nobility, and their yearning for a time and a place that was, if by no means exactly like the storybooks, a fair basis for those pure fantasies. For most of the Alvere this ‘golden age’ was mere imagination, but a few of the elders actually remembered it, and they ‘shared’ with him visions of stately palaces grown from the earth itself; black-robed adepts with pyrochite rings entertaining elf-children with images of dragons, alerions, and salamanders, cast out of pure flame; and Shadow Guards marching in thousand-strong formations, or sparring in unarmed combat that was so fast and dynamic, the fighters no more than dark blurs, that it was easy to see how their order had got its name.
All this, but I never saw the Rite of Transition, he thought, as he climbed the stairs to the first floor. Still, from what Saskia had told him, this was hardly surprising. It seemed that the Alvere priests had been almost as controlling and secretive of the Rite back then as the Senate now was. Even for most Alvere, the legend of Azelia, Ydril, and Lathnyn was no more than that, although the first Alvere Kasimir had heard it from – a six-hundred year old matriarch from Gallowside whose great-great-great-great-grandson was the janitor in his junior school – had seemed confident the legend would one day be realised. With great enthusiasm – her own family probably having long grown weary of the tale – she had told young Elwin how Azelia would one day soon return to claim her own, and that his telepathy was a sure sign that the goddess had chosen him for great things in the regenerated world to come. At the age of eight, that prospect had seemed indescribably exciting.
At what point did the excitement stop? he asked himself, wistfully, pausing at the top of the stairs. Learning to control his telepathy must have been part of it. From that point, fitting in with his fellow students had become comparatively easy, and his increased social activities and workload had left him with little time for idle fantasies. Also, he had soon grown to appreciate the wonders that science had wrought in Lucinia, without benefit of magic, and he had even become embarrassed of what then seemed only a quaint little mental quirk. Still, the Queen’s a scientist, he reminded himself, and I wonder what she would do if she had my ‘quirk.’ She’d probably invent something to amplify its effect so that she could read every mind in the world and get the advantage over the lot of us. Like the Brython heat weapons, that was the sort of magic that completely failed to awaken any warm sense of nostalgia in his breast.
Sighing, he continued down the corridor to his room. Of course, he reflected, there never was a true golden age, even for the Alvere. Saskia herself admitted as much. Even if some things had been better back then, it was ridiculous to believe that Gloriana, for all her visionary genius, could somehow remake it in a laboratory. I wouldn’t put it past her to try, but I don’t think I’d like to be on her team when she does, he decided, finally answering his question about the Rite. It seemed anticlimactic, but that was a feeling he had long learned to deal with in the course of doing the right thing under difficult circumstances. Although he now saw most of his reforms as disappointing in their scope, and a poor recompense for the sense of childhood wonder the Alvere had inspired in him, that did not alter the fact that the Queen’s reckless idealism was likely to do more harm than good. First the border-lands, then where? She means well, but she unleashes things she can’t control. He took no pleasure in confirming that his early instincts about her had been more or less correct, but the desire to throw her in the sea was long past. If there was any possibility that a real peace could be established here, she could still live to do great things, as she had been meant to, but it all hinged on what she was really up to.
And if we find out, could I kill her then? Could Maradith? he thought, pessimistically, as he entered his room and sat down on the freshly-made bed. If it came to that dread pass after all, and he was faced with the unappealing choices of returning home a traitor, pleading asylum of the Queen, or of murder, there was only one obvious winner. However, he was not entirely hopeful that she would be sympathetic if he confessed to her that he had been sent as a possible but now-repentant assassin. As he was mulling over the ways this conversation might run, many of them finishing in variations of ‘off with his head,’ Maradith entered the room, looking tired but extremely satisfied, with a bundle of papers under her left arm, while she saluted him with her right.
“It’s done, Lord Citizen,” she announced, her voice dry but proud. “The hardest job I ever did and no mistake, but I think you’ll be pleased. I picked up from where it went off track yesterday, and I got all the way through without losing my focus. May I have permission to lose it now and crash out in my room before I do so on your floor, sir?”
“You may, Delator,” he replied, taking the papers from her and hastily flicking through them. Unlike the first batch, which had become increasingly spidery and eventually illegible towards the end, these ones did indeed seem to preserve their coherence throughout. “Thank you for this. I don’t know that we’d have had any success at all if you hadn’t come along.”
“Another bad meeting, sir?” she asked, with great sympathy in spite of her tiredness. “At least it didn’t seem to take you very long.”
“Only because I had to cough up an emergency bribe for our Brython chums … to stop them from getting their finest lads massacred by ours, if you can believe it.” Having said that, twenty million marks and a few flush toilets was no exorbitant price if it saved the army the cost of a bloody campaign in the border-lands, and lifting the trade embargo had been on the cards anyway. At all events, things had seemingly gone a lot better for him today than they had for Lord Lycon. The heart bleeds … Yet in spite of this he was more troubled than he could well express, and he could only hold onto the hope that Maradith’s papers would contain some relief, or at least clarification. If I’m going to be on edge all the time, it would at least be nice to know about what.
“I’m sure whatever it was, you did the right thing,” said Maradith, her simple and sincere trust managing to raise his spirits a little. “Anyway, if you’ll pardon me … I hope you find something helpful in there,” she added, as she turned to leave.
“Thank you, Maradith. Sleep well.” As she left, closing the door behind her, he ignited the small gas lantern on the table, since the daylight was waning and he had a long read ahead of him. Spre
ading the papers out, he could see amongst the reams of Gloriana’s small, careless handwriting several diagrams which were far more carefully traced. There’s that bloody magic circle again. It was a curious device, with an inner and an outer ring, and sinuous Alvere runes written in the space between. The centre of the circle was occupied by four stars, surrounding a diamond-shaped symbol, and above the circle was a figure like a triangle, except with its upper point missing, giving it a flat top from which a series of short, parallel lines descended to its lower edge. He had a vague notion that he had seen something like this design in some old tome in the Lyceum’s modestly-stocked esoteric library, but it stirred no coherent memories in him, so he turned instead to the text for enlightenment.
Picking up from where he had left off, he soon learned more about Gloriana’s hybrid inventions, and confirmed that the flying ships followed the same basic principles as the heat weapons. Since time immemorial, practitioners of magic and especially the Alvere had used crystals to focus and augment their skills, and certain crystals seemed to lend themselves better to producing or manipulating different types of energy. Pyrochites, for example, produced heat and flame, while ærolian quartz enhanced telekinetic abilities, and so it formed the cores of the flying ships’ repellers. Coming low on most amateur occult geologists’ lists of interest were ydrillites: those little green crystals that produced no instantly spectacular effects, but which Kasimir himself was rather fond of, as they were reputed to be the only tools ancient Alvere artisans had used when they coaxed forests and rivers to grow and form into their wondrous dwelling-places.
The crystals are the keys to nature, she wrote, though themselves not natural: the perfection of their form and the exact repeatability of experiments involving them confirms that they are made objects. Yet even at their cultural apex the Alvere could not have crafted with such meticulous precision. Nevertheless, the crystals are only conduits and relays. They channel and refine the fundamental forces, but they neither control nor generate them. This realisation was what led me to consider them as components of a greater system, and even at the earliest stage of my research I could see the potential in that, and the terror: a power over life and death almost beyond imagining.
This was ominous enough, but as Kasimir soldiered on through the following pages, in increasing disbelief at what he was reading, he began to wonder if he had not been hasty to dismiss the option of throwing the Queen into the sea.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN – THE INVOCATION
“Well, Amoxtli?” asked Sir Necalli, as the pochtecatl carefully scrutinised the undergrowth for further signs of their quarry. “Don’t keep us all in suspense. Are all those branches and fallen leaves telling you something, or are you just entranced by the beauties of nature?”
I wish, thought Amoxtli, but the signs were too clear to allow him the luxury of self-delusion. The Men of the East were being cautious and clever, avoiding the well-trodden trade routes and sticking instead to the wilderness, or to the long-disused and overgrown routes that had once been used by the Axoyatl Alliance’s armies. That meant they had left few complete footprints, but it was impossible for such a large group of men to traverse the jungle without leaving any signs, and there were few men more likely to spot them than Amoxtli. It helped considerably that the easterners’ footwear was completely unlike the woven reed sandals of the locals, which only ever left light criss-cross prints. Theirs were clearly of a heavier make, and left well-defined grooves and indentations, which were distinctive even as partial prints or as transfers of mud and sand where the strangers’ feet had crossed hard surfaces such as fallen trees and stepping-stones. Then there were the clumps of recently-pulverised mushrooms, the squashed cocoxochitl flowers, and the snapped branches to take into consideration, all of which delineated a subtle but unmistakable trail of destruction to the north-west, and we all know what lies there, curse their interfering alien hides.
He briefly considered lying to the search party. After all, night would fall soon enough, and if a bunch of nosy foreigners wanted to serve themselves up as tasty morsels for the tzitzimitleh, who was he to discourage them? On the other hand, there was still the awful possibility that they would only invigorate rather than sate the demons’ lust for human flesh, and Amoxtli was in any case unsure whether he could lie convincingly to a whole platoon of Quauhtli Knights and Shorn Ones. He certainly did not care to know what they might do to him if they suspected him of it. With a deep, resigned sigh, he gave the truth to Necalli.
“They’ve turned north-west … to Teohuayotli,” he announced, to general dismay. The Quauhtli Knights’ faces were mostly shaded by the beaks of their bird-head helmets, but their agitated muttering conveyed their unhappiness eloquently enough. The Shorn Ones were mostly silent beneath their skull-shaped wooden helmets, that matched their bone-white suits of quilted armour. However, their frowns deepened and they gripped their bows, leather shields, and obsidian-edged swords even more tightly. For all the sodding good that’s likely to do, thought Amoxtli, miserably. Even Sir Necalli was affected, as a fleeting paleness and a spasm of revulsion momentarily twisted his face into a much closer resemblance of his true age. Only Xochitla barely reacted, merely closing her eyes, although her expression had hardly been sanguine in the first place. She knew all along. She never even dared to hope it would be otherwise. When the shock had died down, Sir Tlacelel, head of the Quauhtli order, was the first to speak.
“The dead city … and night will have fallen by the time we can reach there. Are you certain this course is wise, Tlacateccatl?”
“Don’t call me that,” replied Necalli, irritably. “We have the High Priestess to protect us. What more certainty could you want?” he asked, although the tone of his question conveyed more loyalty than actual confidence. This was fair enough, as Xochitla’s own air was hardly uplifting, but as she stepped forwards and spoke, she made an effort to look and sound more resolute.
“Day or night makes no difference, Sir Tlacelel. The tzitzimitleh do not attack the blessed, but if these unblessed Men of the East have any knowledge of them – which they must have, to have survived this long – then they will not attempt to travel further after dark, nor to enter the dead city before dawn. More probably they will make camp and protect themselves however they may. This could even be our best chance to intercept them.”
“Is that all fact, or guesswork?” asked Tlacelel, with grave dissatisfaction. “My men don’t fear a fight with these strangers, but to become thralls of the Lord of Death, forever condemned to do his–”
“You dare to doubt Xochitla?” snapped Necalli, vehemently. “You and I would both be his thralls already, but for her, and it’s only thanks to her that we have a chance to prevent further sacrilege in these damn near teotl-forsaken lands. I will not throw that chance away, but if you mean to turn coward on us.”
“Enough, gentlemen!” interrupted Xochitla, sternly. “The Blessing was not given to us that we should continue to commit violence amongst each other. I’d have thought you of all people would have had your fill of those days, Sir Necalli, or do the vows you have taken since then mean nothing to you?”
“Your Holiness is right to rebuke me,” answered Necalli, with deep remorse, which did not prevent him from immediate rallying his sense of urgency. “However, I still say we cannot afford to waste this chance. If we let them reach the city–”
“I agree, but I can hardly fault Sir Tlacelel for being hesitant to lead his men into that accursed place. Citlacoatl knows, I was reluctant enough to come myself until you persuaded me. If the Quauhtli Knights wish to turn back, then I think we must allow them–”
“I never said that,” protested Tlacalel, offended even though Amoxtli knew that Xochitla had been completely candid, not that there was any inoffensive way to cast aspersions on a Quauhtli Knight’s bravery. “I just thought … but if Your Holiness truly believes that these Men of the East will have made camp between here and the city, and we stand a chance of capturing them b
efore they reach it … At any rate, we are yours to command.”
“Glad to hear it,” replied Necalli, stonily. “In that case, get your men ready to march, Sir. Bring up the rear, if you please. Go with him, Xochitla,” he asked, more gently. “I’d sooner have you in the middle of the column, for now. Unless these Men of the East are wizards themselves, we’re not likely to need spiritual protection so much as our best bowmen taking the lead.”
“Let us pray they are not,” she declared, apprehensively, and with a hint of reluctance, as she cast a sad glance at Amoxtli. She had been keeping him in her sight the whole journey so far, and would clearly have preferred to have kept on doing so. For his part, he was less reluctant to know that his beloved would be continuing in the safest part of the column, but not exactly overjoyed to think that this might be the last he would ever see of her. That’s the spirit, he thought, sarcastically, but self-reproach did nothing to raise his spirits, no more than the two archers whom Sir Necalli detailed to take point with him. The fact that he carried his own sword and flatbow was of even less consolation. By all means, let’s pretend I could shoot the great pyramid at ten paces …
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