The Queen of Lies

by Michael J. Bode

  Expressionless, Heath stared at the fire. “No. I don’t feel good about what we do. You didn’t see what I saw up there. Those children—they turned them into unholy things. And all I could think was that I can make triple the bounty fetching artifacts. This is bullshit.”

  “Been saying that for years,” Sword said, “although I did just rescue myself, so…I may have a different perspective on the work we do.”

  “Daphne could have sent anyone.” Heath’s gaze didn’t leave the fire. “This nest was a cakewalk. She sent me because she thinks I’m weak—that because I prefer to talk my way out of things, I won’t make hard choices.”

  “She’s grooming you to take her place, love,” Sword said, admiring the blaze. “Bloodthirsty zealots are a dime a dozen these days. Give them a license to kill and they’re happy, but the best soldiers don’t always make the best generals…unless you’re Patrean—then it’s all the same.”

  “I don’t want her position.”

  A crowd of villagers was gathering at one end of the road. Some carried buckets, others weapons. There was shouting. A few of the town guard came running to the front, including their portly Patrean constable.

  “You know what the real tragedy is?” Sword mused. “Besides the obvious, of course, it’s that most of those kids had parents living here, in this very town, who were too ashamed to raise bastards. Hell of a thing. Well, that’s what Harrowers do, I suppose. They show us at our absolute worst. Hold up…Who’s that?”

  Sword peered at a figure standing against one of the buildings. She didn’t recognize him, and she knew pretty much everyone in town. Someone’s father perhaps? He was gaunt and ancient, leaning on a crooked staff like a shepherd might carry. An odd thing to see in a Lowland fishing village. And his eyes were so cloudy they were nearly white, yet they were somehow familiar.

  Heath grunted. “You think he’s a warlock?”

  Sword shrugged. More people were spilling onto the street, huddled in their oiled cloaks against the rain as they jockeyed to see the source of the commotion.

  “Halt!” the constable yelled to Heath and Sword, waving a blade. He was trotting quickly for a man of his impressive girth. Some of the village men behind him were literally carrying pitchforks, bless their little hearts.

  “Evening, Barney.” Sword sighed as she cracked her knuckles. It felt good to finally be the one doing all the talking.

  TODAY…

  “Evening, Barney,” Heath muttered as Sword’s memories disintegrated and he found himself lying on the docks.

  Sword straddled him, smacking his cheek, his scarred Patrean face etched with worry. “Wake up, mate.”

  Heath rolled over and vomited hard against the boardwalk behind the Mage’s Flask. He clutched his stomach and channeled his Light, but it did nothing to abate the nausea.

  “The fuck did that shit do to you?” Sword gently rubbed Heath’s back.

  Heath caught his breath. “It showed me your memories back when you became Catherine. I know where we need to go.”

  TWENTY

  Minas Creagoria

  MADDOX

  DON’T GET ME wrong, diary—I love that Maddox is a part of our little family, but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say I wish he’d spend more time alive than dead. I know he’s got important experiments, and we need him to make the drugs and whatnot. But I miss me old buddy always teasing me in the playful way he does it. Like a big brother to me, he is.

  Well, I were right pissed to find out Themis and Theril was helping themselves to me best friend’s leg meat. But I seen it for meself—every morning the seal lights up for a quick sec, and he’s right as rain again. So no harm done, I figure, and the boys get to eat human flesh any time they fancy without someone turning up missing.

  It got me thinking, though…the leg bone they cut off was still there, along with the foot. Figured we could get some more parts off him, you know? There’s a brisk market for hearts and brains, and Gran doesn’t need them to make her revvies. Besides we got Falco working the other alchemy station anyhow and no shortage of new bodies coming in to cover the work.

  So then I had me another idea—could Gran make a revvie out of parts she stitched together patchwork-like if they was all from the same body? Her eyes lit up like fireworks, and she says to me, “Charlie, you’re a genius! We’re going to be published for this!” So I got my own personal Maddox to pal around with.

  He don’t talk or nothing, but he lets me boss him around and lugs heavy shit out of the houses. He’s got the seals on his chest, but they’re just tattoos near as I can figure. Every morning I sort of hope he’ll wake up and say to me something cheeky, like, “Riley, you fucking idiot, what am I doing here?” or “I’m going to kill you for this, Riley.” You know, like Maddox says all the time.

  I miss the days when things was easy.

  —page from Riley’s journal

  A WOMAN SAT on a nearby marble bench, watching. Her hair was golden and wavy. She bore traces of a smile and a patient expression as she studied him. She wore long white robes.

  Maddox looked up from his seal. His hands were black with charcoal. “I’m dreaming again, aren’t I?”

  She nodded. “If you have to ask, the answer is usually yes.”

  He stood and wiped the charcoal on his brown britches. The ground around him was littered with drawings and designs of various sigils and emblems. He looked at them intently, trying to commit them to his memory.

  The woman stood and walked toward him. Her hand rested on his shoulder. “The Grand Design can only be learned in parts. You’ve seen all you’re going to on this voyage.”

  “I just need to remember more.” Each time he was resurrected, the lore was purged from his mind, although he retained fragments and memories.

  “I want to show you something,” she said, pulling him gently.

  He didn’t want to go, but almost without transition, the scene shifted to a long walkway, bordered on either side by rows of flowery trees with boughs that formed an arch overhead.

  “I need to learn that seal,” Maddox insisted, but when he looked around, the drawings were nowhere to be found.

  A young couple sat on a bench, feeding each other softly glowing red fruits out of a golden bowl. Everyone in the park looked youthful and healthy. They wore loose clothing or sometimes nothing at all, their perfect sculpted bodies bare to the balmy air.

  She explained, “This is what Minas Creagoria used to look like.”

  “It’s pretty,” Maddox said, admiring the scenery. The path they walked was both a park and a street. Monolithic buildings with gentle edges and inviting arches flanked the edges of the wide thoroughfare.

  They reached an intersection of treelined streets. A central fountain bubbled as helixes of water floated around the statue of a woman. She headed left, and Maddox followed her.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t understand your question.”

  Maddox rolled his eyes. “Look, every time I’m about to die, I have a dream. You’re always here, telling me information I would have no way of knowing. Am I completely imagining you, or are you something else?”

  “Both.” She continued to walk. “But I think the answer you’re looking for is why I’m here.”

  “Okay, that would be helpful information,” Maddox acknowledged.

  “You asked what I am, and that question is unanswerable. I am, have been, and will be many things. We’ve been called Guides, and our purpose in this instance is to teach and reveal truths, as we did for your kind when they arrived in this place. But we’ve been called other things as well.”

  “Which Guide are you? Sephariel?”

  “If you like, but your names have no meaning to us,” the Guide corrected. “When our actions please you, you call us gods, and when our actions displease you, we’re named demons. Who’s the person you see in front of you, the form of this woman who guides you?”

  Maddox chuckled. “You look like my aunt Ca
ra. About twenty years ago, when she first came to stay with us.”

  “Was she kind to you?”

  “Sort of. I lived with her and my father till I was five. When dad came up from the distillery in our basement, drunk on whatever alchemical mixture he’d concocted that day, sometimes he’d hit me. She never stopped him, but after—”

  The Guide was smiling at him, but her expression conveyed deep sadness and remorse.

  “Afterward she’d comfort me. She’d say my dad loved me, but seeing me reminded him of my mother, and that was why he was always sad. She’d give me a potion to help with the pain, and when the time came, she got me an apprenticeship through Magus Tertius.” He didn’t know why he was telling her this, but the dream was taking its own course.

  “Magus Tertius practically raised me,” Maddox continued. “I never went back home. I’d see Dad sometimes on Alchemists’ Row or Aunt Cara doing the shopping in the marketplace. We never exchanged more than a few words. She looked tired.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” the Guide said.

  It made sense. Cara had been there at a time in his life when he felt afraid and abandoned.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she said, as tears formed in her eyes. “You didn’t deserve any of it, and I should have protected you.”

  “Stop it,” Maddox whispered. His eyes stung with sadness and the fresh pain of reopened wounds. He knew dream magic now; he knew how not to get pulled into the story.

  “I’m not asking for forgiveness.” A tear fell down her cheek. “I just want you to know that it wasn’t your fault. I was afraid of your father, but I should have been afraid for you. Instead I lied to you. I betrayed your trust by telling you that man loved you.”

  “You’re not her.” Maddox grabbed her shoulders gently. “You want to make up for her mistakes? Then help me. Help me finish the Grand Design. At the very least, tell me what it does.”

  The Guide straightened her posture and returned to her poised demeanor. She regarded him quizzically.

  She continued on the pathway. The scene shifted more rapidly through other parts of the city. They passed an open plaza arranged like a marketplace with tables of wares piled high, yet there seemed to be no merchants. People took what they wanted.

  They followed another street. The trees were older and blotted out more of the sun.

  “Once you start down that path, you can’t stop,” the Guide said, brushing her hands against the trunk of a great tree. “The Grand Design gives complete and accurate knowledge of all things to come. It sees all possible outcomes and what must be done to achieve them. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Can I change the future that it reveals?” That was an important caveat. Of the thirteen evils Achelon the Corrupter had unleashed, the final one was hopelessness—knowing the inevitable. Even it was too dangerous for the mad king, so he contained it while the other twelve roamed across Creation.

  “There would be nothing to stop you,” she said after a time, “but you no longer would have your freedom to decide.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “If I offered you a choice between a pleasant fragrance and an eternity of senseless torment, which would you choose?”

  “Fragrance, obviously.”

  “Would you ever choose the other?”

  “No.”

  “Now imagine I’ve placed each outcome behind a door—one green, one red. Which would you choose?”

  “Neither,” Maddox scoffed. “There’s nothing worth an eternity of torment, especially if all I get out of it is a lousy whiff of something sweet.”

  “Even in the simple scenario, you made a decision outside the ones I offered. You exercised freedom. Now imagine if I told you the green door holds eternal torment, and you knew that to be absolutely certain. Which door would you choose?”

  “I still might not choose either—you really need to come up with a better incentive.”

  “The fragrance comes from the bloom of the century orchid, at the very moment of its hundred-year blossoming. No living creature but you could ever appreciate its beauty.”

  Maddox looked at her. “Because it’s instantly fatal. Yeah, okay, I might check that out.”

  “The Grand Design lets you see through the doors, and all the doors that follow. You’d never make a mistake or misjudge a situation. The right choice always would be apparent, so you’d always choose the best possible path. So is that a future you would want to change?”

  “But if I made those decisions, I would be changing my future—but to something I wanted.”

  “You assume that what you want is the best possible outcome. If you were armed with the knowledge of all things to come, and with your illusions about the world shattered by the truth of clear perception, who’s to say you would even still care about your desires? Perhaps you would wish to end mankind’s suffering only to learn that the best choice for humanity is to allow suffering.

  “You may see the only course of action is to continue bumbling through life in solitude and anonymity because the full and true account of things is disastrous knowledge. I can’t say for certain. But we’ve tarried long enough. I wish to enlighten you further.”

  The Guide walked toward the side of one of the buildings, where Maddox saw a narrow alley filled with grass and wildflowers rather than pavement. Stepping-stones led to a stairwell to some kind of a cellar.

  The stairwell was dark. Whereas the architecture of the city had seemed soft and inviting, the stone here felt oppressive. At the bottom was a massive iron door, scribed with green sigils of protection.

  “You have to open it,” the Guide said.

  “A green door? It’s not eternal torment, is it?” He smirked at her, but she remained impassive. The door flew open; the sounds of screams and sobs filled the stairwell.

  When Maddox and the Guide walked in, they found a large square room with tunnels branching off each of the walls. In the center stood a tank of heavy crystal with motes of light swimming through a briny green liquid. Around the edges of the wall, cots were set up with women chained to them. They were naked and ghostly white, with large pregnant bellies.

  A hairless man in white robes glided from cot to cot, serene and oblivious to the shrieks of pain and terror. One of the women cried out in pain as her body pressed against the cot. She looked ready to give birth. The other women babbled incoherently and sobbed.

  “Is this some sort of slave pen?” Maddox asked.

  “Worse than slaves. They never learned to speak,” the Guide whispered in his ear. “They live their entire lives down here like animals.”

  “What the fuck, Cara?” Maddox recoiled in horror. “What is this place?”

  “In the late Second Era, this is how your people used our gifts. They didn’t need their slaves in any great numbers because theurgy provided for all their comfort. But they still needed living sentient beings to power their theurgy. Look there.”

  She pointed to the robed man as he bent over the woman about to give birth. He placed his hand on her head and another on her stomach. Golden Light flooded into her pregnant belly. Then, with practiced quickness, he reached his hand through the wall of her abdomen as if digging through a jar for cookies. The woman kicked and shouted, but after a moment, he yanked a screaming infant from her.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Imagine the horror of this times a hundred. Times a thousand. Times a million. Times a billion. In every city, save for Archea.”

  The robed man waved his free hand, and the umbilical cord dissolved into particles of golden sunlight. He took the child toward the tank, and while it was still screaming, he cracked its neck. The infant’s lifeless body exploded in a burst of luminance and coalesced into a pulsating speck of energy that flowed into the tank. It was brighter than the rest. Maddox noticed many more dim specks of light whirling through the liquid.

  He couldn’t speak.

  “Would you put an end to this if you had the power?
”

  “Definitely.”

  “Would you punish the people responsible?”

  “I mean, shit…this is totally fucked. Yes.”

  “And if you could feel their pain and their cruelty as if it were your own, would it drive you to utter madness to know this was all part of the Grand Design?”

  “How?” Maddox demanded. “How is this shit even applicable to…aw fuck!”

  He clenched his fists in anger as the scene around him dissolved. He was so close to learning something that he could taste it, but his body was failing, drawing him into the oblivion of death.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Growing Pains

  JESSA

  ALL MODALITIES OF magic, Stormlord Heritage excepted, incorporate the concept of an initiation. For alchemists it’s a grueling practicum, while glyphomancers must discover their True Name. Blood-magic initiation, whether practiced in Thrycea or abroad, is perhaps the most curious.

  One can only hear the “blood song” once one has contracted the blood fever from another blood mage (or sage, as they’re called in the Dominance). The disease causes debilitating pyrexia, which lasts three to seven days, during which there’s delirium and a strong aversion to bright light of any kind.

  Death is entirely possible but rare. Initiates are carefully screened for viability, and healers are retained to arrest the process should it progress to dangerous territory. Mages who survive the trial become immune to the symptoms of the illness but remain carriers for the rest of their lives. Once the body accepts the illness, it can’t be healed, unless the humor is fully exsanguinated.

  It’s both an affliction and a source of power. For every use of their power, they must consume their own vital humors and replenish them from others. Patrean blood is especially nourishing—which leads me to wonder whether that wasn’t the original intent of the mages who created them.

  —INITIATION: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE IN COMPARATIVE MODALITIES, RESEARCH NOTES OF DEAN TERTIUS OF THE RIVERN LYCEUM