“Of bloody course it is.”
Lovely. Precisely what she needed right now. Her body was sore enough to have been riding for days, her eyelids heavier than an hour’s midday nap could hope to cure. But then, she’d put Marquand to the task of divining the creature’s secrets. Too much to hope he might have taken longer to do it.
“I’ll be quick, Colonel,” she said, sparing a nod to acknowledge Omera. The Bhakal man still hadn’t said a word, only watched her as she strode the rest of the way into the inner chamber.
The exchange with Vassail took the better part of an hour. All they concluded was that the enemy’s forts made little tactical sense, which made them a part of some strategy neither she nor Vassail understood. Whatever Paendurion intended, it began with throwing away thousands of his troops solely to slow her down. She knew from the last campaign that Paendurion wouldn’t balk at such sacrifices—and worse, worse by far—but for now it meant hedging while maintaining a strong front line to her advance. By the time Vassail left they’d laid the groundwork for the next phase of the campaign, though it would fall to the remainder of her staff to flesh out the broad strokes of her plan.
“Colonel Marquand and Master Omera to see you, High Commander,” Essily said after Vassail departed. “Shall I send them in, or will you be retiring for the afternoon?”
“Send them in, Captain,” she said.
Marquand strode through her door quietly, stopping to stand briefly at attention while Omera came and stood beside him. She couldn’t help but brace for the inevitable storm of cursing, or at least a muted effort to still himself for her benefit. Instead he kept his features smooth, staying in place without a hint of his usual insubordination.
“Sit,” she said, gesturing toward her couches. “Now, what news from our prisoner?”
Once again she expected Marquand to show signs of cracking under the weight of her forced etiquette. He didn’t. His eyes were gaunt, with a look of fatigue she hadn’t noticed in the foyer, and his hands trembled; signs of withdrawal from a man accustomed to drink, perhaps, but paired with the seriousness in his expression they suggested something else. Fear.
Omera startled her by speaking first. “The creature Fei Zan is a thing born of lies,” he said. His voice was touched with an unfamiliar accent, though he handled the words of the Sarresant tongue cleanly enough. “We know of his kind, in the Bhakal countries. You would do well to learn from what he is, not what he says.”
“All right,” she said. “Care to start a few steps earlier? What brought this on?”
“He’s … not a binder,” Marquand said. “Or at least, not susceptible to any of the usual tests. I tried binding through him, leaving the tether open. I tried watching the leylines while he performed his … trick. Nothing.”
She nodded, waiting for more.
“He’s not a bloody binder,” Marquand finished. “But he can do magic, sure as I can shit myself watching it.”
“And what’s the significance of that?” she said. “The leylines are far from the only sources of power in this world. The Skovan have their folk-magic, the New World tribes have theirs, the Bhakal have at least three different kinds on record, bound up in their herblore …” She nodded toward Omera for the last. He only watched her, unmoving and calm.
“I’m not a fucking idiot, d’Arrent,” Marquand said. “And neither am I some ignorant schoolboy. I studied the basics of every type of magic there is, at the academy. The point isn’t that Voren, Fei Zan, or whatever the fuck he is can change his face without a binding, the point is that he can do it at all. It isn’t something recognized in any school, anywhere in the world.”
“Omera just said—”
“Let him tell you the whole of it,” Marquand said.
They both turned to the Bhakal servant.
“It is not a thing of the West,” Omera said. “But the West is not the world.”
“Go on,” Marquand said. “Tell her where Voren’s power is from.”
“Fei Zan told the truth on this,” Omera said. “He is a man of the Jun, the great power beyond the Divide. How he came here, I cannot guess. But he is here for evil, of this you can be certain.”
Erris weighed Omera’s words without understanding. “Explain,” she said. “What precisely did the prisoner claim?”
Marquand stood and went to a globe on a stand in the corner; it had come with the office furnishings, so far as she knew.
“It means our maps are wrong,” Marquand said, spinning the globe to indicate the far side of the world. All blue, between where the Skovan reaches ended on the far coasts of the Old World and the best guesses of the cartographers supposing where the end would be of the new one. An older style; some of the newer maps and globes would show black for unmapped territory rather than permit the mapmakers to guess. “It means there’s something out there, something our best explorers never found. Or maybe those were the ones who didn’t come back, Nameless take me if I know the difference. Ask Voren yourself, if you doubt it. He claimed to be from the people on the far side of the world, and I believe it. He spoke tongues you’ve never heard, recited place names and ranks and titles that might as well come from some invented folk-tale.”
She spared another glance for Omera. There was more to the Bhakal man’s understanding of this than he was revealing; Marquand had reacted with shock, while Omera kept a cool composure no servant’s training could explain. Omera had known something of this before Voren’s revelation, and unless she misjudged, it meant the Bhakal people had kept secrets, even in the face of the Empires of the Old World.
“Why are you revealing this now?” Erris asked, directing the question to Omera. “Your people knew of it before, didn’t they?”
“It is not a secret, High Commander d’Arrent,” Omera said. “It is the way the world is.”
“That isn’t the half of it,” Marquand said. “Though you’ll need to hear the rest from Voren himself. He claims the Thellan campaign is doomed to fail, that the enemy—Paendurion, he calls the man by name—is trying to snare you there while he completes the conquests required for ‘ascension.’ He said this ‘ascension’ has already happened, with the man called Reyne d’Agarre. And he says if we don’t stop Paendurion, it will mean the Divide between our two halves of the world will collapse.”
She leveled a look of skepticism at him.
“I know,” he continued. “I know, it sounds absurd. But I half believe him, Gods damn me for a fool. You need to hear it from him personally, High Commander. I’m bloody well sorry to have to drag you into it. I know you have enough on your back without my adding more, but I wouldn’t have brought it to you if I didn’t think it was worth hearing him out.”
Fatigue burned behind her eyes. She had a campaign to manage, with the strings of political power in the Republic sapping any strength she tried to keep in reserve. But Marquand wasn’t the kind to jump at shadows. She’d given him this command. She owed it to him to take him at his word.
“All right,” she said, rising from her chair and buttoning her coat. “Let’s hear what Voren has to say.”
Marquand led the way, though she kept Omera between them as they descended steps past the first basement and into the second. Warm carpets and tapestries gave way to cold stone. Soldiers in uniform still paced the halls, with sign of work being done in every corner, every space that might be utilized, no matter how remote from the main levels. It seemed more fitting for a dungeon than an office, and all the more so when they reached a steel-plated door, for which Marquand reached into his coat to produce a key.
A soft light greeted them as they stepped inside, with a crosshatch cast on the floor from iron bars covering the window well. So, a dungeon in truth, then. And a prisoner, though where her mind’s eye had expected the wiry frame and weathered skin of the man she’d known as Anselm Voren, instead something, and someone, else stood in his place.
The prisoner’s features were strange: a broad, flat nose, skin a dark honey color that
might have marked him as a Sardian or northern Bhakal, if not for the face. Cuts and bruises marked the rest of him, starting above his cheekbones and winding down his naked back, where lash marks and welts crisscrossed down below the waist of his trousers, the only clothing he’d been allowed. He stood firm in spite of it, with a soldier’s tightly muscled form that gave no sign he was in pain.
“It’s you, High Commander,” the prisoner said in an unfamiliar voice. “At last, you’ve come.”
“She’s here for what you told us,” Marquand said.
The prisoner turned, rattling the chains attached to the manacled cuffs fixed around his wrists and ankles as he met her head-on.
“I never acted other than in your interest,” he said. “I swear it, High Commander d’Arrent. I swear it on the four winds, on the Trithetic Gods, on any other symbol you require.”
“You lie,” Omera said.
“No,” the prisoner said. “I came here to aid her, not to—”
“Enough,” Erris said.
Both men fell silent.
“I’m here for answers,” she continued. “Swift and clear, without evasions. Give an indirect answer, or tell me a lie, and I will leave, and you will be executed. Am I understood?”
“Yes.” The prisoner said it crisply, and fell into a relaxed pose that remained firmly upright. The look of a man prepared to die.
“You were the man I knew as Marquis-General Anselm Voren.”
“I was,” he said, “and am.”
“You possess some magic, some trickery, that allowed you to take his form.”
“I do.”
She almost flinched at the admission, but he made it boldly, with no sign of caution.
“Had I ever met the real man, before you took his place?”
“I can’t be sure,” the prisoner replied. “I believe you may have met him once or twice in passing, between his arrival from the Old World and your promotion to command the First Division. But I murdered him and took his place after the Battle of Villecours. I was behind your promotion, and all the affairs and planning that have gone between us since.”
Her hand might have shook if she held it up, but otherwise she gave no sign of the rage coursing through her.
“What is your true name?” she asked. “Where are you from, and why have you come to New Sarresant?”
“I am Fei Zan, Grandmaster of the Great and Noble House of the Fox. My Lord guided me to the breach in the Divide created when your Goddess made her pact to be reborn. I am here to guide you to ascension, to uphold the pact between Life and Death, and to depose the treacherous Three, who have perverted the cycles of the Soul of the World since their first and only honorable victory.”
“Cryptic words are as good as an evasion,” Erris said, and made a show of turning to go.
“Wait, High Commander,” Marquand said, at the same moment the prisoner—Fei Zan—pleaded, “It’s true, every word. I swear it.”
“Then explain,” she said. “No more chances. Make it clear, now.”
The man who had been Voren took a deep breath. It was impossible not to see it, now: the slightest similarities, in the angle of his head, the way he looked at her, the way he stood. It was as though this man had been a puppeteer in Voren’s body, with the curtain now torn away to reveal the player’s hand.
“Our world is divided,” the prisoner began. “Sarresant mathematicians have proved the world is round, yes? And yet every globe is marked black on the far side. Sailors on the eastern oceans have reported reaching the end of the world—a towering shadow, through which nothing can pass.”
“Sailors have reported dragons and merfolk living beneath the waves,” Erris said. “It doesn’t mean any of it is true.”
“The Divide is real, High Commander,” Fei Zan said, as Omera nodded in time with his words. “I have passed through it, where a seam was torn by the Goddess—your Veil—in her haste to be reborn.”
“You expect me to believe the literal truth of the Gods and Goddesses, too? Even the staunchest priests deny they ever walked among us, no matter the parables in the Holy Virtues.”
“They are wrong, then!” Fei Zan said. “Yes, High Commander. The Gods are real. I have seen mine, spoken to him as clear as you speak to me now.”
She eyed him with an eyebrow raised. He was earnest in the telling, but then, she’d believed he was a seventy-year-old soldier for too long to feel anything but a fool at his behest.
“It is truth, Commander d’Arrent,” Omera said. “This Divide falls in the ocean, for your people. But for mine, it is a shadow that cleaves my country in two.”
She turned to the Bhakal man. “Your people are split by this … Divide?”
“They are,” Omera said. “Though only our oldest stories speak of what happens when it falls, and none with any surety.”
A silence fell between them. Half the world, bound up by Gods and Goddesses. Too much to be believed.
“There is also the matter of my gift,” Fei Zan said. “You must acknowledge I have a magic unknown in your half of the world. Surely that counts for something?”
“Likelier by far that you’ve discovered a new binding, and thought to use it to gain power.”
“No!” Fei Zan said. “I sought to manipulate you, but only toward your greatness. The Three—Paendurion, Axerian, Ad-Shi—they have commandeered the natural order. You had to be strong enough to challenge Paendurion, before the time of ascension. Already we are close to the moment of choosing, too close. If he succeeds again, and takes up the mantle of Order, my Lord has made clear he intends to shatter the pact, to invade at his full strength. It means no more champions, no more epochs of peace. There will be only war, to the last, to decide the fate of the Soul.”
This time she pivoted toward the door.
“I said no more cryptic evasions,” she said. “I’m finished here.”
“Please,” Fei Zan said. “No. You can’t.”
“You can make him prove it,” Marquand said.
“Prove what?” she said.
“Need,” Marquand said. “If he’s truly loyal to you, you can bind him and have done with questioning it.”
For a moment Fei Zan’s eyes went wide. Then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes! Tether it through me, and you will see.”
Erris glanced back toward him. “A trick?”
“It isn’t. I swear it. I’ve served your cause more faithfully than any of your soldiers. If you think my gift to be no more than a new binding, bond me as a vessel and see.”
She nodded slowly. Need required loyalty for a first binding. Unfeigned, true loyalty—else what was to prevent her enemy from using it to subvert her commanders? If it could be done, Paendurion would have done it.
Her eyes snapped shut, and a font of gold appeared in front of her. Always before her connections had been mere figments, tiny flakes that flowed into the leystream. This creature oozed golden light, as though she’d pierced an artery of hope and desperation.
The connection snapped into place, and she saw the now-familiar sight of herself through foreign eyes. A flick of the eyelids revealed a gray and lifeless grid beneath the room, the inert sight of a vessel without the gift to touch the leylines.
It was true. Fei Zan’s gift had no connection to the leylines. And he was bound to her now, as sure as any of her other vessels, with all the surety that entailed. She released Need as soon as it was clear.
“You see,” Fei Zan said. “I am loyal to your cause, and have ever been. Allow me to explain in detail, before time grows too late.”
“Too late for what?” she asked.
“Ascension. The moment will be on us soon. You will hear its promptings, and be judged. We must be sure you are the one to ascend, and not Paendurion.”
“And what precisely does that mean? I’ve already discerned that Paendurion is in command of Thellan’s armies in its colonies, and ordered my soldiers south.”
Fei Zan shook his head. “Not just Thellan, High Comm
ander. Ascension will be granted to the one who commands the greatest empire, the one who blankets your side of the world with loyalty, and control. Paendurion has tried to snare you here in the New World, but to challenge him, you must contest his holdings across the sea. You must conquer Thellan’s colonies swiftly, then sail for the Old World, and prepare for war upon its shores.”
46
ARAK’JUR
Eras’Ana’Tyat
Eratani Land
NO.
The spirits’ sending crashed into him with the force of a storm, and he felt himself pushed back.
YOU HAVE HAD OUR GIFT ALREADY, SON OF THE SINARI. IT IS NOT YOUR PLACE TO COME TO US AGAIN.
He tried forming an image of himself victorious, a proud hunter standing over a kill. Ad-Shi had insisted the spirits would bend to him, if he applied enough force. Yet if this was strength, it was a strength beyond his understanding.
Vision Spirits, he thought to them. I have need of knowledge. The Goddess’s choosing approaches. I would know what path I might take, to prove myself worthy to ascend.
This, too, Ad-Shi had told him to say. But scorn filled his mind as soon as he’d formed the words, a sensation of indifference and spite.
YOU ARE NO CHOSEN OF OURS. GO.
Once more he attempted to fill himself with pride, and felt it falter, the blackness of the spirits’ void shimmering around him. Color leaked through where reality seemed to twist, and he saw images of the trees grown together in a dark thicket, where he’d stood before entering the Eratani sacred place.
GO. DO NOT COME AGAIN.
The void shattered, and color flooded to fill his vision. He coughed and staggered back, sucking wind into his lungs as Ad-Shi caught him and kept him on his feet.
A black haze pulsed at the edges of his vision as he tried to take his bearing. He was outside the sacred place, standing among the trees. Its opening loomed ahead, but he was on solid ground, surrounded by thick branches, grass, and fallen leaves.
Ad-Shi took a step back, watching him as he recovered his breath.
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