by Hal Emerson
“That’s impossible, though,” Raven said, remembering his own encounter with the eldest of the Elders; a feeble man, shrunken in on himself, with so many memories locked away inside his head that he had been driven mad. He’d lost even the ability to feed himself; he simply sat staring out his sitting room window over Vale, day after day, answering what questions he could from those who came to ask him. As the Elder of History he held thousands upon thousands of memories in his sambolin, along with hundreds of prophecies, and to do so he had sacrificed what was left of his life.
“So we all thought,” Crane said. “But apparently something was set into motion that Iliad felt all the way in Vale. He said it was something the Empress has done before, but not in nearly a thousand years, something he fears she plans to do again, something that may already have happened in a number of Imperial cities.”
“The sacrifices,” Leah said, stepping forward. “You know?”
“Spader and Ishmael filled us in with their reports,” Crane said quickly. “I think that was indeed what Iliad feared – and more than that.”
“Me,” Raven said simply. “He felt what I became when I slaughtered Dysuna’s army at Banelyn.”
“Just so,” Crane confirmed, watching him carefully. “All those deaths … they cause ripples. They cause pain, and they tear at the world in ways many cannot understand.”
“The Visigony will be on us at any minute,” Autmaran reminded them, his eyes flashing white as he reached unconsciously for his Aspect. “We cannot leave the men undefended – they need direction. They need us!”
“For now,” Crane said, “they have the Elders and General Dunhold, who, while generally thick, could hold a mountain pass if he were outnumbered five times over. We can wait – we need to talk about something that concerns you all, and the fact that, unless I miss my guess –”
Crane looked up into the sky, toward the setting sun. Raven realized the day was almost over, and panic kicked him in the gut, hard and fast.
“ – a task that must be completed in the next twelve hours,” he finished.
“Then we should go,” Tomaz rumbled. “Storm the city ourselves – maybe one of us makes it through alive.”
“Not until you know the story as I’ve come to understand it,” he said quickly. “Everyone knows that Aemon and the Empress came to this land together, somehow. The details are unclear, but that is unimportant. What matters is that they had a falling out, and Aemon chose to flee with our ancestors to the lands in the south. The Empress followed, eventually caught him, and tried to take the Aspect of Life by force.”
“We know this, Elder,” Autmaran said, “now is not the time for a history lesson!”
“Right,” Raven said, “that’s when she took the Aspect of Life and turned it into the Talisman I now have.”
“But that is just what I’m trying to tell you: she didn’t take it from him,” Crane said slowly, watching them carefully with his cool blue eyes and wise, lined face.
“Of course she did,” Davydd protested, “everyone knows she did.”
“Not quite,” Crane said, stepping forward and holding out a hand toward Raven. “May I see your sword, please?”
For a moment Raven didn’t understand what he was asking, so foreign was the idea of lending anyone Aemon’s Blade. It would be a strange enough request given the time and place, but it was stranger still since anyone who touched the Blade was likely to go flying through the nearest tree as soon as the metal touched their skin.
“I understand your hesitation,” Crane said, seeing the confusion in his eyes, “but if I am correct, then I should not be hurt.”
Raven nodded slowly and reached to his side. He untied the sword from his belt, still scabbarded, and handed it over, watching carefully in case he did end up needing to grab it back.
Crane grabbed it easily, with long, graceful fingers, touching only the sheath and staying away from the hilt. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. The sheathed sambolin around his neck began to glow with opal light, and everyone else took a wary step back, until the light faded away and Crane opened his eyes again.
“Just as I thought,” he said, an unmistakable tinge of excitement shot through his reedy tenor voice like a vein of gold. “I can’t understand why none of the Elders ever tried that before.”
“What did you do?” Raven asked as the Elder handed the Blade back to him.
“The reason this is no ordinary sword, not even an ordinary Spellblade sword, is that the final act of the man who carried it was an enchantment of its own. I have seen it happen before, but never suspected Aemon’s Blade was the same.”
“How is it possible for an action to enchant something unintentionally?”
“This gets to the root of what I came here to tell you,” Crane said quickly, “and why we came here as one when Elder Iliad told us what he’d felt. There are places in the world that are thin. The metaphor of the Veil is applicable here, but not in the strict mythological sense the Kindred use. Each myth has a root, and I think we’ve found the root of this one.”
“The myth says that this world is separated from death by a Veil, so thin and sheer that you cannot see or touch it. However, if one knew just how to move, just how to turn, it is possible to lift that Veil and cross into the realm of death. The reality is that the Veil is a term used to describe the rules of the world. And certain events, to continue the metaphor, make the Veil thin, fraying it around the edges, bending the rules. One of these events is death: every murder changes the place in which it is performed. And that, I believe, is why the Empress brought you here.”
Silence followed this pronouncement, and everyone turned slowly to look at Raven.
“Please tell me this is where you had a Mother-son picnic or something.” Davydd said.
“This is where I found him,” Tomaz said suddenly, looking around him with wide eyes. He turned back to Raven and saw that his young friend had already recognized the place. He nodded slowly.
“This is where she took you to have you killed,” he rumbled.
Raven swallowed and didn’t respond.
“And why did She take you here?” Crane asked, watching him carefully. “Why on earth would she take you to this place, these mountains? Much more convenient to kill you in the Fortress, where she reigns supreme. Much easier to simply kill you with her own hand, and take the Raven Talisman in full force that way, don’t you think?”
Raven opened his mouth to respond, but then slowly shut it, realizing for the first time how truly bizarre the assassination attempt seemed. Why had he been brought so far afield? Why on earth would she delegate the responsibility to others?
“Wait,” Leah said, as always thinking much faster than the rest of them. “The Empress tried to take it from others, didn’t she?”
“Indeed,” Crane said. “In the early years, when we could still infiltrate Lucien, we learned that she tried over and over to give it to others and then take it from them the same way she took the other Talismans. Guardians, Seekers, even one of the illegitimate children she bore that failed the Visigony’s inspection.”
“And none of it worked, right?”
“That is what we suspect,” Crane said with a nod, watching her closely with eyes that missed nothing.
She looked up at the misted mountains and began to nod.
“This is where she did it,” she whispered softly, almost so low that Raven couldn’t hear. “She killed the others here, the ones who had the other Talismans. The other Heirs of Theron Isdiel that Geofred couldn’t find record of, the ones that always baffled him. She killed them and used their bodies to complete the ritual, binding the Talismans to her, changing them through Dark Bloodmagic from Aspects to the corrupted form she wanted, the ones that she could take and use even though she hadn’t been given them.”
Leah turned to face Crane.
“And you think Aemon broke that pattern – you think Aemon killed himself, meaning she never took the Aspect from him, he
surrendered it. And she thought that by bringing Raven here, killing him at the spot she killed the others, she would be able to finish what she started a thousand years ago.”
“I think so indeed,” Crane said. “The pieces fall together that way. I’ve come upon no other solution that fits so precisely.”
“But why should the place matter?” rumbled Tomaz. “Why would she want to do it here? If it didn’t work elsewhere, what’s special about this place besides simple correlation?”
“Crane is right,” Raven said slowly before faltering. His throat was dry, though for what reason he couldn’t be sure. “There are places where the world is … thin.” His mind flashed to the Bloodmage rituals performed in secret caverns beneath the city of Lucien. “Where Bloodmagic has been done with great frequency, or with great power … something is lost. The deaths, the transfers … they burn something out of the world. It’s like scraping off a layer of skin with a flaying knife. The amount is small, barely noticeable really, but if it is done over and over in the same spot, the pain caused … it becomes unbearable for any but the Bloodmages.”
He fell silent and he could feel the others watching him, though his eyes were fixed on the forest floor. The sounds of the remnants of their army gathering at the foot of the mountain came to them on a sudden breeze. There were the sounds of the Elders too, shouting out words that crackled with power, and the distant roar of what could only be Daemons.
It all seemed to be happening in another world.
“What makes these places special, Raven?” Leah asked quickly. She was close enough to touch him now, though she didn’t, for which he was grateful. His mind was somewhere dark.
“Killing done in one of those spots is easier to do,” he said simply. “It’s like a void, where what you think you knew no longer matters. Rules are easier to change. Moral rules as well as physical.”
“Physical?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “It’s where the Bloodmages gather their power to put into their Soul Catchers, the ones they wear around their necks. Each one is made by the slaughter of an innocent, pulled from their heart after they are tortured and sacrificed. It’s … the Soul Catchers are voids, they’re negative spaces. They’re little pieces of that darkness that comes from killing, augmented by the power of the thin spots centuries of killing have created. Anything is possible in one of those spaces if you have the power for it. If you killed enough people there, harvested their energy in a crystal large enough, with an incantation long enough … you could remake everything. Change the world, rewrite laws the way you want them.”
“That’s what happened in Lerne,” Tomaz rumbled softly. “And that’s why the sky above Lucien is always black. The Empress has made the whole city into one of those thin spots, hasn’t she?”
Raven nodded.
“The city is ringed by Bloodmage circles that feed power to her crown. With the right enchantments, anyone who dies inside the walls gives her power. The crown … it’s the first Soul Catcher. She made it from the bodies of her fallen enemies.”
“Her fallen siblings,” Crane said softly. “The other Heirs of Theron Isdiel. Which brings us back to this place … back to this thin spot. She brought you here hoping the ritual would work where it had worked before. She brought you here and removed herself from the equation in case it needed to be done by another’s hand. What happens when the one wearing a Talisman dies of natural causes?”
“It has never happened before, at least to my knowledge. But I would assume it would return to the Diamond Crown, where the actual Talismans are kept.”
“So she brought you here,” rumbled Tomaz slowly, piecing everything together, “after drugging you and putting you through the ritual in the city. She poisons you, and leaves you for dead, hoping that the Talisman will then return to her with full power, since she sacrificed a Child, in the same place she’d sacrificed her brothers and sisters.”
“But then how does that help her with the Return?” Tym chimed in from where he stood awkwardly to the side. Silent until now, he was there almost as an afterthought, but Raven knew he was a part of this, tied up as tightly as the rest of them. His new height still looked wrong on him, but he was slowly growing into it, and he was assuming the stature of what would turn out to be quite a beautiful young man.
“I don’t know,” Crane said. “My only guess would be that with all of the Talismans together finally under her full control, she might then attempt whatever ritual would allow it.”
“We may never know, but it doesn’t matter,” rumbled Tomaz, sounding uncharacteristically grave. “All of this is good to know, I suppose, but it doesn’t help our current problem. We have an army approaching us, and we need to find a way to meet it, and drive it back.”
“No,” Raven said quietly, breaking into the circle, standing at the center, and turning slowly to look at them all. They were all here, all seven, plus Crane, Spader, and Ishmael.
“We’re going to fight her. And we’re going to do it with a weapon of our own.”
“A weapon?” asked Tym, his neck and nose and eyes glowing temporarily green as he unconsciously brushed the Talisman with his mind. “What does that mean? We have Aemon’s Blade, is that what you mean?”
“Aemon’s Blade is part of it, yes. But not the whole thing.” He turned again, scanning the circle, before finally landing on Elder Crane, catching those bright, intelligent eyes. “I need the other Elders, or as many as can be spared. And I need all of you,” he motioned, arms wide, to the rest of the circle, “and your Anchors. We have the place, here, where the world is thin and malleable. Beyond that, we’ll have to make it up as we go.”
“Is that all?” Lorna asked, watching him in a strange confusion.
“Not all,” he said. “We also need a sambolin.”
“A – what? Why do we need a sambolin?” asked Davydd, thrown. “We can’t ask Crane to give up his, we would need –“
He cut off and his eyes went suddenly big and round in a comical look of surprise as he put it all together.
“The sambolin Spader has. The one he wanted to send south – the one Tiffenal stole from Goldwyn and we got back in Formaux.”
Raven nodded.
“But – we were going to have the Elders rededicate it,” Lorna said. “We were going to bind it to a new Elder of State so that the enchantment that makes the illusions around the Kindred lands would be reactivated.”
“With at least three Elders present,” Crane broke in, “we can do the rededication here. Though I am not sure I understand what your plan is – the memories themselves are valuable, and a little wisdom can take you a long way, but you will not be able to defeat the Empress with memories.”
“I don’t need them – if I’m right, then I only need the sambolin.”
“What happens to the memories then?”
“If all goes well,” Raven said, “the memories will go to you, Spader, and Ishmael when you activate the enchantments.”
“But – what are you going to do with the dagger itself?”
Raven took a deep breath and readied himself.
“If I’m right, then the sambolin is very similar to a Soul Catcher, the crystal medallion into which Bloodmages pour the lives of the men and women they kill. It is the source of their power and bears a number of similarities to the sambolin – specifically that they catch the essence of a person and hold it inside the instrument, to be used at a later time for a specific effect. What is important to remember, however, about the Soul Catchers, is that they are based on a very important design – the Diamond Crown the Empress wears, the one that holds the power of all the seven Talismans.
“Now consider the sambolin – each new Elder is bound to it by blood, like a Soul Catcher, and when they die, their life is placed into the dagger. The only difference is that one act, that of the sambolin, is voluntary. All pure Bloodmagic is, in fact, voluntary, and it is the act of giving the Talismans that turns them pure again and makes them Aspects.”<
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“So … you’re planning to turn the sambolin into a Soul Catcher?”
“No! No, no, nothing like that – if we turn the pure Bloodmagic of the sambolin into the corrupted Bloodmagic of the Soul Catcher, then all of this is for nothing. No, what we have to do is something else entirely, something much more difficult. What I want to do … “
He paused and watched them all with a careful, critical eye. He had to know what their honest response to this was – he couldn’t have a single one of them unwilling to cooperate, or the whole ritual might be ruined.
“The Empress still holds us to her,” Raven said, “because each of us, through the Aspects and Talismans we wear, still owes allegiance to the Diamond Crown, where the physical Talismans themselves are kept. We have already begun the process of breaking away from it, turning the Talismans back to Aspects – but we need to finish it.
“We need a Crown of our own – a Crown of Aspects.”
Chapter Twenty: A New Light
It took a moment for the words to sink in, but after it did, Leah and Tomaz seemed intrigued, while Tym looked confused; Autmaran looked wary, as if they had just trespassed on some forbidden ground and what Raven was suggesting was a step too far, a move that broke some taboo; Davydd wore his excitement plain and open on his face, both the burned left side and the handsome right side creasing and breaking into a manic smile; Lorna’s shoulders tightened, and she stood up straighter, but otherwise made no move, not even batting an eye.
“I know Prince of the Veil is a ceremonial title,” he continued, “and if you are uncomfortable with me wearing the Crown, then we can give it to another, even Elder Crane since he is here – but what matters is that we make it. Right now, all of our Talismans, even though by technicality they are pure again, owe allegiance to a corrupted throne. As long as the Empress holds the stones themselves, the physical Talismans, then we will lose. But if we make something new – if we create a new crown, with Aspects instead of Talismans, and if we make that crown using Aemon’s Blade, tying it to your Anchors, making it a Valerium crown, and use it to unite us … then we truly owe no allegiance to the Empress. And what she has done to this world, the ways she has broken it … we can begin to repair them. Just the act of breaking the Talismans in two, making two sets, one of Talismans and one of Aspects, halves her power. I know it’s a long shot; the enchantment will have to be precise, and I’ll have to help the Elders modify the original circle with a few Bloodmage runes, but I think that if we pull this off –”
