by Jeff Grubb
“Yes,” said Urza, patting a small stack of papers. “And I must say you were fortunate. The storms of the southeast have shattered boats and sent good men to the bottom. Both your mother and your wife were beside themselves with worry. I trust you have seen them and reassured them.”
“I sent word to them, Father, but came here first,” said Harbin.
Urza looked at the young man, surprised, then nodded. “You found something beyond the storms,” he said.
“An island,” said Harbin. “More than an island, a huge landmass to the south and east of Korlis. Heavily forested, but I noted from aloft there were huge mountains as well, as big as the Kher Ridges. I kept multiple sightings on my return, and even given the storms I think we can find it again.”
Urza said nothing but merely ground his palms together slowly.
“There’s enough lumber there to launch an armada of ornithopters against the enemy and enough ore within those mountains to make new legions of avengers,” continued Harbin. The young man’s face was alight with possibilities. “This is the chance to tip the battle in our favor for once.”
Urza held his silence, and his eyebrows furrowed. Harbin said, “Sir, have I said something wrong?”
Urza’s eyebrows rose, and he shook his head. Harbin wondered where his father’s thoughts were while he talked. Instead Urza said, “Harbin, what was it like flying back to Penregon?”
Harbin thought for a moment. “It was unremarkable, sir.”
“What did you see of the land while you were aloft?” asked the older man.
Harbin shrugged. “Mines, factories, farms, towers, outposts. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Hmmm,” said Urza. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Argive was once a land of rolling hills and manor-house estates. Did you know that?”
“I know the histories, sir,” said Harbin.
“Histories that I was alive for. Korlis was covered with forests, though now not a tree stands between its capital and the coast. Yotia was an open territory of fertile fields. Now its fields are barren, and the Sword Marches is a plain of blackened glass.”
“That is because of Mishra’s inventions,” said Harbin quickly. “His ground-breakers and armageddon clocks. He would rather destroy the land than to give it up to you.”
“Yes, those are the qadir’s inventions,” said Urza, not even speaking his brother’s name. “But have I been any better with my creations? The land has been ripped asunder in our pursuit of resources to fight this war. There are reports from among the surviving Sardian dwarves that burning rain falls from the sky into their land, searing the flesh and corroding any exposed mechanism. The qadir has plundered nation after nation. Have I been any less effective in my own work?”
Harbin was silent for a moment, then said, “This is unlike you, sir. Is there other news I should know of?”
Urza let loose a small smile. “Why is it everyone knows when I am troubled except me?” he said and turned back toward his desk. “I’ve been going through Richlau’s old papers. You knew him?”
Harbin said, “He was the Master of Apprentices at the Artificer’s School.” Then he paused and added, “I didn’t know he was dead. I am sorry.”
“Happened while you were away,” said Urza. “I knew him when we were very young. He died of natural causes in his library. But still, his death has troubled me.”
Harbin said nothing. They had both become immured to the continual losses of the war, both of manpower and machines, but the passing from simple old age was something that Harbin had a hard time considering. If Richlau had been older than his father, then he must have been very old indeed.
“In any event, I’ve been going through his personal papers, and found correspondence with another old friend, named Loran.” Urza tapped a thick pile of letters. “She was another scholar and went to Terisia City to study when you were very young.”
Harbin thought he understood. Terisia City had fallen to enemy forces and been sacked. Since then it had been taken and retaken several times. If Loran was there, she was probably dead as well.
“Loran writes of some meditative techniques they were developing in the city,” continued his father. “They allowed the user to manipulate matter and living things. To fly. To jump great distances. To shatter objects. What do you think of that?”
“I would find such a claim…dubious,” said Harbin. It was the kindest phrase he could think of.
“Dubious?” said Urza, catching the halt in Harbin’s voice. “How so?”
“I find the existence of such things unlikely,” said Harbin. “Flying without an ornithopter. Have you ever encountered something like this?”
Urza was quiet for a moment, and Harbin wondered, not for the first time, what he was thinking. The older man’s hand reached for the amulet that always hung around his neck. “No. Not exactly. Sometimes when I am starting on a new device, there is a spark, a feeling that I get, when everything falls into place. But no, nothing that would allow me to fly without an ornithopter.”
“Well, then,” said Harbin, “if you did not think of it, it probably does not exist. Sir.”
Urza smiled broadly. Harbin relaxed, and for the first time since he was a child he felt comfortable with the older man. “You think too highly of me,” the artificer said.
“As any good son should,” said Harbin. Urza’s face clouded for a moment, and the younger man felt at once he had gone too far. Quickly he added, “If this meditative technique was valid, it didn’t work against the enemy, did it? Terisia City was sacked and burned, and all the meditation in the world did not prevent that.”
Urza said, “Well reasoned.”
Harbin replied with a small nod, and Urza picked up the pile of letters, then set them back down. “Before your return,” he said, “I was wondering how to continue protecting ourselves from the qadir and his machines. We have almost emptied the land and have little to show for it. We stand, more than ever, on the edge of a blade, poised between salvation and defeat. Perhaps, I thought, if our devices could be developed to work off this meditative energy, this mana…”
Harbin was silent, unsure if his father was truly speaking to him or not.
Urza sighed deeply. “No, you’re right. There is too much unknown, even if there is some grain of truth at the heart of this. It would take years to discover what the ivory-towered scholars had come up with, and all their work is now among the qadir’s plunder.”
Urza looked up at Harbin, and his face was stern and self-assured, as it normally was. “But this new discovery, this new land, is an opportunity to finally gain the advantage over my…over the qadir. You’ve done very well, Harbin.”
“Thank you, Father,” said Harbin. “I’ve already started plans for securing the island.”
“You?” said Urza, and blinked. “Just because you were fortunate to get past the storms once—”
“I should lead any expedition that returns there,” rejoined Harbin. “It is a well-reasoned argument.” The younger man folded his arms.
“Your mother will not hear of this,” said Urza.
“Which is why I came to you first,” said Harbin, “instead of talking to her, or to Uncle Tawnos. If you say yes, they will not argue with you.”
Urza pulled the glasses from his face and pinched the brow of his nose. “Then you leave me no choice,” he said at last. “You will lead the expedition to this new land.”
Harbin had expected more of an argument, or at least more fire in the Lord Protector’s voice. Instead there was just exhaustion.
Urza rubbed his chin. “Harbin?” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Do you dream?” asked Urza.
The question caught the younger man by surprise. “Dream? I suppose everyone dreams.”
Urza held up his glasses, and the muddied sunlight caught them. “I dreamed I had made a set of lenses that let me look into the human heart. To see to the core of its being. I used them to look at my brother, and there
was only darkness. Only darkness in my brother’s heart.”
“Sir?”
“Only darkness,” repeated Urza, and sighed. “That is why we are going to bring this new island of yours into the war. Because we need to beat back that darkness.”
* * *
—
“Bunk! Bunk and camel droppings!” bellowed Mishra, throwing the book against the far wall of his workshop. The offending tome fluttered end over end before its covers spread like a bird’s wings and it smashed, spine first, against the far wall. Hajar quietly walked over to the jettisoned book, straightened its pages back into a semblance of order, closed it, and placed it on a growing pile.
“Most Revered One,” said Hajar simply, “even among the dross there may be accidental gems.”
“Gems? Gems?” snapped Mishra. “There are no more gems among those convoluted daydreams than there is grass in the Suwwardi Marches, these days!”
Hajar started to say, “The Scholars of the Ivory Towers held our forces at bay for—” but Mishra waved a hand at him.
“They had stout walls and good weapons,” the qadir rapped out. “This mystic effluence had nothing to do with their success.”
“The generals who oversaw the siege and later sacking would disagree,” said Hajar.
“Those generals were looking for an excuse for their own incompetence,” snarled Mishra. “They found it in the nonsense of those scholars. A dragon engine goes missing, and they blame witches and pixies!”
He might have said more, but his words were already being garbled by the phlegm in his throat. The Artifice Qadir of the Fallaji Empire bent almost double in a long, wheezing fit of coughing.
Hajar waited for the attack to abate. Mishra had grown heavy over the years, and sometimes it hurt his lungs to breathe. The thick yellowing smoke that hung night and day over Tomakul did little to abate his illness. Hajar had recommended Mishra retreat to the clearer desert air, but as in most matters these days, the bodyguard’s advice was ignored.
The fit was a short one, and Mishra pulled a silk scarf from his pocket to wipe the sprayed spittle from his lips. “Scholars,” he snarled, picking up where he left off. “Mystic energy within the land itself. Tapping into that energy through memorization and meditation. Hokum! We drove the charlatans out of Zegon, and they all fled to Terisia. And I thought there was knowledge there!”
Hajar said, “Even among the dross there—”
“Is more dross!” shouted Mishra. “There is no more truth in those books than in the ‘true sight’ of some old Fallaji wise woman sitting in the square, trading rose-colored visions for brass coins.”
Hajar stiffened at the slur against the Fallaji, but Mishra ignored it. “I hoped there would be some great weapon, some master artifice that could finally defeat my brother,” he wheezed. “But all that is here are campfire tales and petty mystics!” Another coughing fit rose to his lungs, and Hajar walked over and stoked the coals, then poured a ladle of water over the red-hot embers. Heat and steam seemed to help His Most Revered One’s breathing.
Mishra needed something to help him, and Hajar had hoped it would be among the books looted from Terisia City’s ivory towers. Hajar believed the generals when they said the scholars had some sort of raki powers that allowed them to defeat the dragon engines and transmogrants and to keep the Fallaji at bay for so long.
As Mishra searched, the empire crumbled. They were reduced in the east to skirmishing and petty raids across the Kher Ridges. In the south Yotia was a lawless frontier, at least those parts that had not been turned to glass by Mishra’s inventions. The descendants of the ground-breakers, the armegeddon clocks, had fused huge sections of the land to black glass, denying the enemy any use of it. Elsewhere huge plows churned through the dying land in desperate attempts to pull something useful from the earth’s bosom. To the west was untamed and barren wilderness, already plundered to keep the war machines going.
The pieces were beginning to fall apart now. There was civil war in conquered Almaaz and revolution in Sarinth. Many of the tribes of the Fallaji were now raiding fellow tribesmen, and discipline was breaking down.
Ashnod, gone these many years, was to blame, Hajar felt. Without her to argue and plot, without her for the generals and war captains to fear and conspire against, the various factions within the empire were turning against each other. Urza was the continual enemy, but he was far away. It was Ashnod everyone hated and feared.
She had been spotted in Sumifa, said one report. No, in the Colekgan Mountains, said another. No, she was seen in Yotia and was going to sell her secrets to Urza, said a third. Nay, said a fourth, she was dead from her own diabolic devices. Whatever the truth, Hajar knew the empire suffered without her.
Mishra’s coughing fit subsided, and the qadir again dabbed at the corners of his mouth with his kerchief, an automatic gesture these days. “It is hard for you to understand, Hajar, but know that all of my devices are rooted in some basic principles.”
“If you insist, Most Puissant One,” said Hajar.
“And this”—Mishra motioned at the ever-growing pile of books—“this school of fools acts as if those basic principles do not exist! You don’t need wings to fly or a transmogrant to build an army! All you need is thought and land, and you can wish things into being!” He slapped another book, and a fountain of dust shot out from between its covers. “Pah!”
Mishra raised his kerchief to his mouth and retreated to his throne. He lowered his large bulk into the chair and said, “Call for the Gixians.”
Hajar bowed but did not move. “The Gixians?”
“They’ve been playing with Ashnod’s works for years,” snapped Mishra. “Perhaps they have some trick I can use against my brother.”
“With respect, most honorable one,” said Hajar, “there are those who say you rely on the Gixians far too much.”
Mishra’s forehead creased and he growled, “There are those who also say I rely too much on you, Hajar. Now fetch me those accursed priests.”
Within the hour three of the priests were brought before Mishra. Hajar had not liked the priests when they first arrived, and he liked them less with every passing year. They had slowly infiltrated the bureaucracy and made themselves invaluable to the empire. Since Ashnod’s desertion (no mind that she had been banished; if she had been loyal, she would have remained), they had taken over that woman’s laboratories and slaughterhouses. And they had taken over Mishra’s own mild attempts at training young Fallaji in artifice, turning the schools into mere extensions of their priesthood.
A pair of young Fallaji men accompanied the head priest as they approached the throne. Perhaps the Gixians saw this as tribute to Mishra, but Hajar thought of it as an abomination. These young men should have been warriors. Instead they were chanters for a foreign religion.
Worse yet, within the last ten years the Brotherhood of Gix had taken to modifying their own bodies in their worship of the machine. Flesh was woven with links of chain and metal scales, and even limbs were replaced with clunky mechanical devices. They mutilated themselves and declared themselves more holy for their efforts.
The lead priest was such an abomination. He had no eyes; rather a plate of curved metal covered his eye sockets, polished to a mirror’s brightness. The plate had been bolted to the priest’s face at the temples, and occasionally a trickle of blood would drip down alongside one of the bolts. The priest was dressed in heavy robes, and Hajar wondered what other parts of his body he had modified in the name of his machine god. Hajar suppressed a shudder and decided he did not want to know.
The lead priest bowed, the two Fallaji acolytes following his motions like puppets on a string. “Most Wise, Most Thoughtful, Most Powerful Qadir,” said the lead Gixian, “we offer whatever help we may give in your illustrious name.”
Mishra rested both hands on his belly, templing his fingers and tapping them softly. “You said Terisia City held great knowledge.”
The priest bowed again. “Tha
t is so. My fellow brothers walked among their scholars and learned much.”
Mishra continued, “I have reviewed much of the material that we have recovered and determined it to be without merit.”
Again the priest bowed. “If that is what you determine, that must be correct,” he said smoothly. Hajar wondered that the man’s spine did not snap from changing opinions so quickly.
“Yet you said they had great power,” said Mishra.
Yet another bow. “They may have hidden their true strengths from us or cloaked them in mysticism, assuming that we would respect their beliefs,” said the priest. He cocked his steel-shod head and added, “We are industrious but not all-seeing.”
“But we have nothing useful from Terisia City, save the traditional plunder,” said Mishra, his voice sounding thick again as the fluids began to settle in his lungs. Hajar automatically moved to the hot coals and scooped another ladle of water onto them. Mishra began another long cough, and the priests and Hajar waited for him to finish.
“Most Illustrious One,” said the lead priest, “there are some things we have learned.”
“Such as?” prompted Mishra.
“Mysteries of the human body,” said the mirror-plated Gixian. “We have studied much of Ashnod’s work, and we believe that we have…” He paused for a moment and then continued, “…improved it.”
Mishra leaned forward now, his bulk shifting beneath him. “Improved it? How?”
“Ashnod thought of the body as a resource,” said the Gixian. “We believe the body is a machine and should be able to be improved like a machine, thereby made more holy. And more powerful.”
“More powerful?” rasped Mishra. “How? Can it be used as a weapon?”
The lead priest turned toward Hajar, though how the monk could see without eyes confounded the older Fallaji. “We can talk to you of this,” said the Gixian, “away from prying ears.”
Mishra nodded. “Hajar, leave us.”
Hajar set down the ladle. “Most Revered One, I—”
“I said, leave us,” said Mishra again. “I want to hear what the good monks have to say of the matter. Away from prying ears.”
