The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4)

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The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 71

by H. Anthe Davis


  Scryer Yrsian planted her hands on her hips and straightened to the limits of her diminutive height. “Excuse me? I am not just his ex-lover, I am Makoura Jaedani Yrsian, scryer and mentalist of the Yrsian clan, gestalter, innovator, the backbone of this company—”

  “Yes, well, we were never properly introduced, but Kelturin liked you so that's fine.” The Archmagus looked away from the fuming scryer, back to the ogre-blooded woman. “Drakisa Rhiniharsla, called Snowfoot; Makoura Yrsian; Revek Voorkei; Presh; and...Lark, I believe. Do play nice.”

  Sarovy caught Scryer Yrsian muttering imprecations under her breath, but she and the rest of the mages nodded to each other respectfully. He couldn't move on so easily. Even after these weeks of absorbing the truth of what had been done to him and his men, it left a bitter taste in his mouth to hear it spoken so bluntly.

  As did this man, Enkhaelen. He was not the canonized Maker the other specialists revered, nor was he the figure from his vision, enigmatic and benevolent. He was just some wretch of a mage, high-handed and arrogant, more concerned with his work than its impact.

  Looking away, he caught the Enforcer's eyes on him and quickly schooled his expression. It wouldn't do to show his disappointment. If she'd noticed, her face gave no indication; she just nodded slightly as if to thank him for her inclusion.

  The Archmagus cleared his throat for attention. “I made this contact primarily for Presh, but I suppose others of you might know something I don't. The basic facts are these. One: no matter his claims, the Emperor was not the sun. Two: the Emperor was let in by the Portal. Three: when the Portal closed, the sun vanished, despite not being the Emperor.

  “I have several speculations. Unfortunately I was not free to witness much of what transpired between the Portal's opening and the founding of the Empire, but I believe something happened during the Long Darkness that eclipsed the true sun and set a false one in its place. What that thing could be, I don't know, but it coincides with the declaration of the Astronomers' Heresy—does it not, Presh?”

  The Padrastan mage straightened in his seat, nodding slowly. “Archmagus, yes. Our work was banned by the priests of the Sun Father just after the Long Darkness, and the research of earlier ages was burned or locked away. My mistress and her predecessors kept a cache, though, and my studies showed that the historical data did not agree with my own observations and calculations—even when adjusted for several centuries' drift. As I tried to tell my people, the sun that hung in our sky does not match that ancient sun; it does not follow the same path, does not radiate the same energy, and...when observed by telescope through sufficient filters, is clearly not as far away as it should be. It was a facsimile, Archmagus. I tried to tell you, but—“

  “I stopped you. Yes. You were practically at the Emperor's feet, speaking of an anomaly in the Light. If I'd let you go on, you would have been executed, and if I'd listened to you in private, the mentalists would have picked it from my mind.” Enkhaelen sighed. “It sounds ridiculous, but clearly there is something to it.”

  “Ve also have not veen allowed to study the sky,” said Magus Voorkei through his tusks. “Vhile there are those who do so in secret, they are often found dead. It is one of the long-standing fhoints of tension vetveen us and hyour Enfhire, and the reason I vas sent to ovserve hyour Crinson Claw. To learn avout hyour sfhecialists, to see if they are the assassins.”

  “All our records were destroyed during the Long Darkness too,” Drakisa added. “And the old astronomers and their students perished soon after, usually through 'accidents'.”

  Over steepled fingers, Scryer Yrsian said, “Presh, do you still have your data?”

  Presh shook his head. “They tore up my papers when I tried to present them to the Emperor. I have tried to reconstitute them, but with no telescope...”

  “I don't think we need the specifics,” said Enkhaelen. “It's enough to confirm that what we saw as the sun was not, in fact, the sun. I admit I...noticed a change in the quality of the light between when I was locked up and when I was finally let out, but I assumed it was the passage of time. Presh, you say it wasn't far enough away?”

  “Yes, Archmagus. Like there was a hole in the sky that a piece of the sun peeked through, close by, rather than the whole of it visible across a properly vast distance.”

  In the mirror, the ragged Archmagus blinked. “A hole. A what—a second Portal? That's not possible. The world was all but Sealed. I held the Portal in my piking chest, I would have—“

  Some thought struck him then, and he went silent, staring at nothing. Sarovy glanced at his officers, wondering how well they absorbed what was being said. Since being assigned to Bahlaer, they had encountered horror after horror, but this was by far the strangest thing he'd heard, and the most unsettling. They had followed an interloping sun which had blotted out the true Light? But to his comfort, they looked either worried or confused, not frightened.

  Slowly, cautiously, Enkhaelen intoned, “The Portal. I remember them tinkering with it a few times. Trying to pull it out of me. I couldn't see what they did—they never uncovered my face—but I felt them picking at the magic. Could they have duplicated it? No, the output never changed...”

  Scryer Yrsian leaned in for attention. “There wouldn't need to be two Portals, not of the same magnitude. If there was already one that let the...the Emperor through the Seals, then you could send his light onward with just a normal portal. Refract it. It would play merry havoc with physical space, but...”

  “Not a problem for wraiths,” Enkhaelen continued distantly. “They warp space through their very nature. And the Palace was always so molten with energy that an actual spatial distortion wouldn't be noticeable even to me. Flaming pikes, so we're saying they bent the Outsider's radiance through another portal that they pinned to the sky like a sun?”

  “It is possible,” Presh conceded, “but it must have been extremely large. Hundreds of miles across.”

  “Dimensional warping. Not beyond the wraiths' abilities—certainly not with the Outsider's energy to power it. Fire and strife, I should have realized something was wrong. If the Portal had been blazing at full strength, it should have vaporized everything in the throne-room—but no, it just singed, because the majority of its power was being funneled away!” The Archmagus exhaled through his teeth. “Well. Does this piking misery of a theory make sense to everyone?”

  A general murmur of assent went through the mages.

  “Then that still leaves us with the main question. Where is the piking sun?”

  “Locked out?” hazarded Voorkei.

  “Not possible, otherwise it would have happened when the Seals were first placed.”

  “But you locked the Outsider out,” said Scryer Yrsian. “If the real sun is beyond the Seals like this seems to indicate, why wasn't it locked out too?”

  “The moons aren't either, nor the stars.”

  “Why?”

  “Hold on.” The Archmagus looked past the frame as if to someone beyond it—then his face clenched. “What? Are you kidding me? That can't be— No, I know you— What were you thinking?” An angry silence, still staring off-scry, then Enkhaelen fixed his gaze again on the crowd. “Kuthra says the Seals were made to block out absolutely everything. The sun, the moons, the stars. It's a closed system. But the effort was coordinated with those powers'...terrestrial shards, I suppose you could say, to let them bridge the Seals by having half of themselves on each side. Shade Mother and Tatska the Night Wind, Sun Father and Iroliyale the Traveler, the child moon and stars shared between them. Tatska and Iroliyale became the conduits through which sunlight and moonlight could reach us—their avatars within the Seals.

  “So. When we ask where the sun has gone, we mean...where is Iroliyale?”

  Another silence fell, the mages looking to each other helplessly, the soldiers murmuring their unease. Sarovy felt a heat kindle in his chest: a low-burning rage at those long-gone conspirators, made worse by the fact that there was nothing he could d
o. Vanished gods, world-encompassing barriers, endless darkness… No soldier's business. No way to fight.

  Enforcer Ardent cleared her throat, then said, “Unfortunately we've never had much contact with Iroliyale's priesthood. We can search, though.”

  “Would you have heard if he'd gone missing?”

  “He can't be missing,” blurted Lark, then crossed her arms self-consciously over her orange robe as all eyes turned to her. “I mean, I've stayed in two of his blessed shelters in the past two months. One of them showed up right in front of us in the middle of the wilderness. That has to be a god's work, right?”

  The Enforcer frowned. “Was it daylight or dark? If he's gone, Tatska might have taken up his role.”

  Lark's shoulders slumped. “Dark. Both times.”

  “Can we contact Tatska?” prompted Enkhaelen.

  The Enforcer shook her head. “We can ask her followers to call to her, but there's no guarantee she'll come. And if she knows what happened to him, they would have told us. At least, I hope they would. We haven't heard anything from the Shadow Lord either, but he hasn't been back to the realm in a while. Perhaps he's searching… They were good friends.”

  “Could the wraiths have captured him?” mused Drakisa through the mirror. “I know they once chained and murdered spirits, but a god...”

  “Imagining they did, where would they put him?” said Enkhaelen. “In one of their spires? It could perhaps refract him enough to keep him caged, but the power he channels must be immense; any spire that held him would resonate with his presence. If Tatska or Morgwi have been seeking him, they couldn't miss that. And since only the haelhene were on the Emperor's side, that leaves only two spires sufficiently isolated to hide him. Ahnvanir on the White Isle, or Liunaitheia, in the Nightmare God's realm.”

  “I thought the Nightmare God was the enemy of all wraiths,” said Drakisa.

  “Yes, but he holds a spire and he is definitely involved.”

  “Can you drag a god into another god's realm?”

  “Inside a spire? It's possible.”

  As the other mages began to comment, Sarovy closed his eyes. Something about the situation itched at him. An imprisoned light, a resonance—

  —the floor unraveling beneath his feet, the tendrils hooked around his legs, the descent, drowning in honey, in amniotic fluid, the hive-walls rushing by all filled with fetal shadows, the dissolving rags of his clothes, his flesh—

  —the light from below—

  The star in chains. He saw it all at once, buried there in the heart of the Palace beneath the honeycombed cells that held the newly-converted. His first glimpse of it had awakened him to the knowledge that he'd been lied to, used—and then he'd been pulled back up and swallowed by the sarisigi. Nearly digested, nearly annihilated.

  He'd forgotten.

  “I know where it is,” he rasped.

  Opening his eyes, he found the crowd silent, watching. “I saw it when I was drawn into the conversion pit, before I was changed. It is there at the bottom, trapped. I didn't… I couldn't understand it then, nor did I when I first remembered. But it was asking for help, and I...”

  A hand touched his arm, lightly. He didn't have to look to know it was the Enforcer's. She stood at his side, a dark anchor, and he managed to swallow his guilt, if only barely. His fingers clenched around the hilt of his heirloom sword as if the broken blade could lend him strength. “That was the sun,” he managed. “I'm certain of it.”

  Enkhaelen's expression tightened. "The Palace. Why am I not surprised? Worse, how could I not— Festering rot, did I just accept it as part of Aradys' energies?” His frustration showed clearly through the mirror, electricity crackling between the fingers of his clenched fist. “So now we send a team to free him. I can handle any mages or wraiths they've set on guard; his very presence should empower me. A small force as backup—“

  “Excuse me,” said Lark. “I don't think it'll be that easy.”

  The Archmagus' pale gaze slanted to her. “Why?”

  “The wraiths moved their spire into the Palace. The big red one, Hlacaasteia. I saw it fly over and seat itself in the ruins.”

  Enkhaelen's eyes flared, and he lashed out at the image, which shook furiously then turned reflective as the scry broke. Only Drakisa's circle remained, the Gejaran woman blinking in surprise. Scryer Yrsian swore and rose to wipe out and redraw a few sigils, but the spell did not reengage.

  “I'm sorry about him,” came Drakisa's voice. “He's always been volatile, and I think he's, ah, sampled too much energy.”

  “Oh, don't apologize, he's clearly a natural asshole,” said the scryer.

  Murmuring started: soldiers and agents and mages filling the pause with commentary, some anxious, some excited. Hands clasped behind his back, Sarovy tried to keep his gaze trained on the mirror, but his reflection troubled him. From this distance, he didn't quite look like himself, and the more he squinted, the less he recognized it. Was that really…?

  “Captain?” murmured the Enforcer. He cast her a glance, hiding his relief, and found her watching him sidelong with those near-black eyes. Her hand had left his arm, but she still stood close enough that their shoulders nearly touched—a grounding presence.

  “I don't like this,” he answered. “Stolen suns, wraith involvement, gods? Bad enough when it was us against the rest of the Crimson Army. What can we possibly do now?”

  Ardent grimaced. “Think about how I feel. Anything involving magic, we can't touch; the eiyets and the metals and our realm's own nature won't let us. So...”

  “That leaves this Iroliyale in his hands?”

  “Not a comforting prospect, I agree.”

  “Oh! Here we go!” said Scryer Yrsian, and Sarovy glanced back to see the mirror fizzing with lights and colors that slowly resolved into the Archmagus again. Enkhaelen looked chastened somewhat, though still clearly angry, his pale eyes glittering like hard crystal.

  “So. Hlacaasteia,” he echoed. “Then we're piked. Caernahon and his lackeys won't let us get to Iroliyale. They'll expand the spire to cover him, if not drag him inside, and nothing can penetrate those when they're armored. Only one has ever been destroyed, and it was just a transport, not a flagship.”

  “There are no friendly wraiths we can reach out to?” said Yrsian.

  “Some. But they're not likely to assault the haelhene, not for our sake.” A thought seemed to occur to him, drawing a frown; after a moment, he said, “Prince Kelturin could influence them, perhaps—or at least give them pause. He used to carry Hlacaasteia's key-shard and can absorb their energies. Between the two of us, plus whoever we could scrounge from the Haarakash or the luuihene or the tiiahene… Pity your friend Ilshenrir went back to his kind, Cob.”

  The dusky young man glared at him from the far corner of the mirror.

  Ignoring it, the Archmagus continued, “I'll speak with the tiiahene—I'm headed that way next. Drakisa, the luuihene, if you know any that will work with us. And ask the Senivaten for aid for Blaze Company, please—coordinate that with Magus Voorkei, he can give you a lot of intel they should find persuasive. We need Prince Kelturin, wherever he is, and if that means crushing Rackmar in the Crimson camp, then so be it. Captain, madam Enforcer, I'm told you've been working together against Rackmar's interests, so I need you to push him too. Locate and spring the Crown Prince and get him back in command—and secure the Varaku area for me. I'll join you there. Then we can hit Hlacaasteia and free the sun.”

  “I can roust a bit of help from Kanrodi and Taradzur, perhaps further south, but that will take some negotiation,” Enforcer Ardent supplied. “But we have metals and goblins right here.”

  The Archmagus nodded. “Good, I'll take all we can get. Anyone have anything else to say? Questions, comments, accusations—no? Then best of luck.”

  A tap of the mirror, and the image dispersed.

  Mouth open to ask more, Sarovy slowly closed it and tried to keep his pinched expression from becoming a snarl. At the end o
f the mirror, Drakisa spread her hands apologetically before diving into a Gheshvan conversation with Magus Voorkei.

  “So. Rescue a prince?” Ardent prompted, amused.

  He took a deep breath, then nodded. “Yes. He was our commander before Field Marshal Rackmar took over, and as little as I liked his policies… I think I understand them now. And the Throne is his by right. If Rackmar has him captive, we must free him and return him to command. He will cooperate with your organization—he has done so in the past.”

  “The only reason we didn't drop the axe on you folk after the riots in Fellen,” Ardent agreed. “Well, good. Can't get assassins in at this Field Marshal, can we?”

  “Doubtful. He will be protected by mages, specialists, perhaps priests—and we cannot move on the camp with this force. A few hundred against his ten thousand freesoldiers and twenty thousand slaves...”

  “So we draw him here,” she said as if finishing his thought. “Deal with Seething Brigade, then take on the next thing he sends, and the next, until he comes to visit. And if he won't, we work on the camp itself. Those twenty thousand slaves are more our allies than his.”

  Sarovy frowned. “If they still remain. He wanted the armies converted—for all of us to become like me, or Rallant, or Vrallek. Empowered by the Light but also controlled by it. If he was sending slaves to the Palace like he sent my men...”

  “I'll see if we can get eyes on it. Count the campfires if nothing else. And if we press them here, and Kanrodi and Taradzur press from the south, we should have him in no time. I just need to talk to my contacts.”

  He gave her a wary look. “We besieged Kanrodi for months. You think it can still bring enough force to bear to make Rackmar feel threatened?”

  She smirked in response. “Captain, I like you, so I'll tell you plainly: Kanrodi could have wiped your camp out at any time. The reasons it isn't a smoking ruin are those twenty thousand slaves, your Prince's deal-making, and the fact that destroying you would just have made your Empire send another army—as ill-warded and ill-fated as the first. Kanrodi is not a militant city-state, nor is Taradzur, nor any of the Pajhrasthani federation. They would rather bottle you up than smite you.”

 

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