by Marc Secchia
The woman came to the door. In her arms she held an infant of perhaps two anna. I saw that her legs were twisted, too. Clubfoot, and more. Helya must have peered out just in time to see her husband cartwheel over my shoulder and land flush upon his back in the dirt.
“Oh, Termar,” she sighed. And there was a world of hurt and history in that sigh.
Dusting my hands, I rose and greeted her in proper Roymerian fashion.
“What do you want here, stranger?” she asked, rather more gently than her husband, who wheezed helplessly in the dirt behind me.
Before I spoke, I righted Laydon’s chair. I helped him into the seat and settled him as he had been before. The boy looked at me askance.
“Who are you?” he asked. “What is your name?”
I met his gaze directly. “Do you trust me?”
“I should not,” he replied at length, “but my quoph tells me I should. Why is that?”
“I’ll show you, Laydon.”
“The hearth must be this end … somewhere,” said Termar, folding his powerful forearms across his chest as he eyed the site of Janos’ old house thoughtfully. “The old place was burned out many anna before we moved in. Hardly a stone left upon another. We decided to start afresh. Truly told, the forge was hardly touched, but the house … ay.”
I wondered if Jyla had ripped the place apart, searching for Janos’ secrets. My neck itched. My fervent hope was that Jyla tarried a thousand leagues away, because the ghosts in this place–the ghosts of my memory–perturbed my quoph most unpleasantly. The Smith Termar had unwittingly echoed Jyla’s words to me those many anna before, ‘Clear off, stranger!’ From then until now, the creeping of my neck had not stopped. Why? Was there truly something of import hidden here?
“I think I remember the hearth being … great Mata! Would you look at that, El Shashi?”
Peeping out from beneath a sathic bush, I saw a living flame of a bird, with long, trailing tail feathers that winked back the sunlight in the facets of a thousand tiny jewels. It whistled a cheerful, trilling little melody, and cocked its head at us as though to indicate we were quite the most ridiculous beings on two legs.
I whispered, “A yarabi bird!”
The bird darted away so quickly my head snapped around to follow it. With a cheeky flash of ruby, it dived into a thick patch of brambles and vanished.
“My lack of faith shames me,” said the Smith. “And my temper too. To attack a man like you! I don’t know what overcame me.”
“Anna upon anna of pain and frustrated hopes overcame you,” I replied. “I cannot imagine what you must felt when you saw your newborn daughter’s feet. By my grephe, Termar, that must have been an ill day.”
“I thought I had contained the anger over my son,” he said. “But I blamed Helya for … Mata forgive me. I dug into my quoph nought but a well to fill with poison.”
“I might look like a Brother, but I’m not very religious.” I smiled at him. “But I can tell you this, as a man who lost his family–well, I see in you the courage to walk a new road. Make the most of every makh, Smith Termar. Be the father you know before Mata you should be.”
He startled me by grabbing me in a great, rib-wrenching hug. Truly told, that was word enough. If for no other reason, now I knew why Mata had led me hence.
By unspoken consent, we dug beneath the bush where we had seen the yarabi bird.
We quarried through ash and charcoal and picked out a layer of dressed stone. At the depth of a man’s waist, we found a metal box. Inside was a plain scroll wrapped in a double layer of treated leather.
“I’ve work to attend to in the forge,” said the Smith, and left me standing beside the open box. A thrill of grephe trickled down my spine. Did I dare touch the scroll within?
Son of my Hearth,
I have foreseen you will one day read this letter. Let us assume therefore that the race is run, the pursuers have found me, and I am probably dead. I wish there might have been another way. Believe me. But the secrets I hold, which today are cradled within you, are of such grave import that I mark these measures as obligatory.
First: to you, Arlak. I wish you could have been my son. I could never father a child. But it is Mata’s grace you were given into my care for these too-brief anna. I see in you such great potential. I have dreamed the Dreams of Anon. I have chosen you as the receptacle of a great and terrible fate, without your knowledge or consent. Forgive me.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered your heritage! You, Arlak, are the son of Orik, Master of Telmak Lodge, and the Eldrik Warlock Alannah, daughter of Senbo and Syialla. Syialla was the secret daughter of Sherilla by Lucan, perhaps the greatest, and the most infamous, of all Eldrik Sorcerers. Magic runs thick in your blood. Lucan it was who created the Banishment, with my help. I believe it is your destiny to undo the Banishment.
What is the Banishment? A crime beyond pale or belief.
Long ago, the doctrine that came to be known as Lucanism, was conceived in Eldoran. The Eldrik believed that only by purification of the gyael-irfa would they be led into knowledge of the great mysteries. For purification, they had to remove the tainted, the unnecessary, the unwelcome, and the discordant notes in that great community of Eldrik minds. Rather than embracing diversity, they dreamed of a perfect unity. What they achieved was perfect uniformity, and the stagnation of an entire race.
What they wrought was an annihilation of their own kind. The excoriation of their very souls.
I designed the Banishment to be impervious, unbreakable, and unchangeable, except by a certain key. People believe Lucan created it so. Mark this well, Arlak: it was Talan, son of Lucan, who at the crucial moment cast an interruptive spell, which cancelled exactly that part of the great orchestration, and only that part–the working of the key. Talan’s magic it was that changed the Banishment; he made it immutable. When he realised what had been done, Lucan gave up his spirit. His suicide was for shame. In the gyael-irfa, nought is hidden. His shame would have been paraded before all, known to all, for all time.
Talan Dissembled. He aimed the finger of suspicion at Lucan–unfairly. Meantime, he tried to have me assassinated.
‘Why?’ you ask. That brings me to my second point. I am not of the Eldrik. I am Armittalese. The people of Armittal are most downtrodden and underestimated of the races, Arlak. But what makes me special is that I was the result of one of many experiments by Lucan’s cronies and predecessors–experiments that sought to catalogue the effects of different forms of magic upon human foetal development. Of course no Eldrik woman was chosen, only the women of slaves. The vast majority of foetuses died before term. Of those which survived, most were freaks, mad, or highly dangerous, and terminated by the Sorcerers when they began to show their true abilities. But I survived.
I survived by being a Dissembler from birth. My abilities came to light late on, during my fortieth anna–for we Armittalese live long, Arlak, longer even than the Eldrik–and our spirits are not as strongly bound to flesh as the Umarite or Eldrik races. By then I had learned the secret of the guardtower will. I have an eidetic memory and a perfect recall of texts, events, conversations … everything. Nor do I merely own perfect recall, but I am a Synthesizer also. I can take what I learn and turn it by introspection and reflection and speculation into new, testable knowledge. The design of the Banishment, broken into 327 discrete and individually complex parts for the different Sorcerers and Warlocks who participated in its initiation, I conceived and held in its entirety in my mind.
I was there when Lucan cast the fateful spell. I was there when Talan spoke his piece. And I know the result–perfect disaster. That is why I was, and am, being hunted. Talan and his faction fear me.
That is why, before I am found, I will secrete all this inside of you. I will conceal my knowledge where Talan and his cronies will never find it. Inside your brain, Arlak, I will archive all of my knowledge and learning and experience and memory. I can do this because I am unique. I am as Mata made me: th
e unwanted by-product of a massacre of innocents.
Again, I must beg your forgiveness. Not only did I do this without your consent, but further, I cut you off from the gyael-irfa, assuming that should your presence become known to the Eldrik, they would quickly hunt you down as they did all the others who fled Eldoran during the First and Second Purges. To my everlasting sorrow, that is what happened to your mother Alannah. She loved you, Arlak. She loved you more than her own life.
I will write little more upon this history, for what I know is in you. I am in you.
Talan is utterly ruthless in his ambition, and is surrounded by many like-minded Sorcerers. But his own daughter Aulynni opposes him, as does the young Sorcerer Eliyan, who I believe shows great promise. I heard not long ago a strange and wondrous thing, a tale of a Sorceress returned from Birial, from the Dark Isle of the Banishment. I would have believed it impossible. Perhaps your next task should be to seek out Eliyan and Aulynni in Eldoran. If this Sorceress escaped from within, then perhaps the Banishment can be broken from within, in the same way.
I wonder if you ask, ‘Why, Janos? Why did you participate in the creation of this Banishment?’ Because, with my cool, rational intellect, I convinced myself that such a course could be a tool for good, that it could uplift a people, that its use would be honourable and just, for example, in putting aside criminals. By selecting the best we would leave behind the dross that drags down a race. We would reach toward a higher, greater, more beautiful humanity. In short, I was an idiot. An almighty fool. I deceived myself. I thought no further than the cleverness of my own creation. The perfect jail. The perfect vehicle for cleansing. And when I saw what it became … the inevitable consequences … words fail me. I gave inhumanity rule and reign over the Eldrik. Mata will judge my part in creating that cesspit of evil.
Nobody, mark my words, hates the Banishment more than I.
It remains then, solûm tï mik, to give you the key to the guardtower inside of your mind. Open it, delve within, and achieve the destiny I have Dreamed for you. Be not afraid to seek help in Eldoran. Eliyan is good. Aulynni is brilliant, but as fragile as a delicate crystal. Treat warily with her. And yes, in my Dreams of Anon I remember I saw two more who will come to your aid: Aulynni’s daughter Amal, who resembled you most uncannily as a child, and a blind Armittalese slave-girl whose name I never learned.
You have but to speak the word aloud and it will be unlocked for you. The word is ‘Benethar’–my name amongst the Eldrik. We Armittalese all have a secret name. Mine you will know once you speak this word aloud.
Such a change of fate, such things of which I have spoken: My son, these things would terrify any sane man. But I would urge and encourage you. Before you lies the opportunity to right a great wrong. Take your courage into your hands, Arlak Sorlakson. Test your mettle. Nothing would please me more. Nought else would grant my soul its final rest. And most important of all, you would be doing your people, the Eldrik, what I believe is the greatest service in their history–restoring to them their humanity.
Begging your forgiveness, and undeserving of your love, he who was given the privilege of being your surrogate father,
Janos (Benethar) of Armittal
I have never been a weepy sort of man. But after reading Janos’ letter, I wept up such a wealth of tears that any mountain squall worth the name would have been hard-pressed to keep up.
I wept for Janos, the wonderful, unique product of horrific experimentation by the Sorcerer-elites of Eldoran. Janos, who had learned, seen, and hidden so much. Creative Janos. Brilliant Janos. Janos, who had been father to me when I had none. Janos, who I betrayed as though he meant nought to me.
Janos had foreseen a great many things–that my fate should take me to enlightenment in Eldoran, albeit via the fell tortures of the Inquisitors, that his guardtower will should defeat their every artifice, and even that I should meet Amal, and P’dáronï, the Armittalese slave who had defended Janos so ably. She whose depths I clearly understood only in a small part. But his timing was wrong. He clearly intended that I should have read his letter many anna ago, before my sojourn in Eldoran. Perhaps his visions were wrong, too?
Now, more than ever, I was convinced that Aulynni and Jyla were one and the same person. But how could it be that one who was so set against her father Talan, the true shaper of the Banishment, should become a vile murderess? For what reason had she tortured and killed Janos–did they not both desire the same end? This I could not fathom. No dint of puzzling at this problem would turn it toward any kind of sense.
“Dinner!” Helya called from the kitchen door. I looked up. She held her daughter by the hand. Sherillya was learning to walk for the first time.
Beautiful.
I turned to face the mountains, my gaze misted by surging emotions. I whispered, “Benethar.”
But nothing happened. No bolt of lightning, no mental epiphany, no walls tumbled down; all I heard was the wind sighing around the cabin’s eaves, and the faraway hoot of a hunting mouse-owl.
“I believe you’re with me, Benethar. I know you are.” My laughter made an unholy gargle in my throat. “And if anyone needs forgiveness, it is I.”
Scrolleaf the Fourth
Being an account of loss and restoration, and the emergence of the Great Wurm on a fateful day; the world-shaping, mighty Wurm; the restless, unsleeping power shaking the very foundations of the earth.
Rise, El Shashi, and seize your destiny!
Chapter 31: My Father’s Last Wish
When an old man’s grephe comes strongly upon him,
He knows his time is nigh.
Listen then to his wisdom, my son,
Fill your cups while his well is high.
Oldik Laymarson, Verses Beyond the Rumik, Scrolleaf the First
I entered his receiving-chamber afeared, truly told, of approaching a man who in my lifetime I had barely known a few makh. It was a room set for business. I saw the walls were panelled in bragazzar wood, the floor space was dominated by a dark desk, and the musty odour of old scrolls and ink tickled my nostrils; for a moment, an echo of my chamber in the Mystic Library of Herliki. But my gaze was drawn irresistibly to the man behind the desk.
Upon my entry, my father rose and said, “I’ve been waiting for you, son.”
“How–”
“A report came to my ears. A great disturbance upon the northern road. A mighty Wurm, goes the tale, did make merry with the ferry at the Ry-Breen Crossing.” Orik chuckled wheezily at his own joke. “The man saved the jatha at the cost of his own skin. That, I knew, had to be my son. Now hear me. I have packed my bags. A man needs little for his last journey.”
“But, father, I–”
Orik wagged his cane beneath my nose. “I will entertain no argument, you striploose youngling. Being over a hundred anna has its advantages. Be you eighty anna or none, you’re still my boy.”
I stared at the ancient, wrinkled creature before me, still standing as upright as a sapling straining for the welkin above, with the inclusion of a small concession–his cane–and saw his eyes twinkle, as before. “You will be taking an old man to meet his family. I’ve seen it in my grephe. I have readied a cart, ordered jatha bought, briefed my staff, and put my affairs in order. I stand ready. This very makh.”
I could but shake my head. Perhaps it was from him that I inherited my will to survive! “You are a hundred and ten anna if a day, father!”
“And? What of it? It is you who made me hale and hearty, my son. Is the journey far?”
“Nine or ten days,” I admitted. “But it is deep Rains.”
“All the better to spend Alldark Week with my long-lost daughter,” said he, “and to meet my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
“You’re a strip of stubborn old jatha-hide!”
Orik stiffened his jaw, but tempered his curt words with a smile. “I’ve thought this through, Arlak. I ordered a covered cart complete with a built-in stove beneath the canopy, where an old man m
ay rest and warm his limbs. You will warm my quoph with tales of your days, and I will regale you as an ulule with stories of the sea and of Eldoran, and your mother.”
Ay, truly told, I knew my cause was lost. “I will tell you of the Eldrik, father,” I returned, with a sullen curl of my lip. “You will tell me why there lives in Eldoran a woman called Amal who appears to be my very twin.”
To my surprise, Orik gave reign to the kind of wicked chuckle that better belonged in the corridors of a brothel. “Oh, is there? Now there’s a tale for the telling, my son!”
Frankly, I stared at him.
“A tale for the road,” said he. Taking up a small gavel that sat upon his desk, Orik tapped a lever set into a small panel of levers behind him. I heard a bell jingle elsewhere in the house. Shortly, a manservant entered the room. “It is time, Frathik. Ready my cart. Bring us … Hakooi spiced chai?” He waggled an eyebrow at me.
“I’m agreeable.”
“Chai as a libation to Mata,” said Orik. “This is a most auspicious day. So, Arlak, did you find what you were hunting for in the mountains?”
I raised my cup three times to Mata, and sipped thrice too. “Father, in your misspent youth, were you even more indiscreet than I?”
He threw back his head and laughed.
That was when I knew, deep in my quoph, it was going to be a good journey.
Is it not said that where a son spits, a father spits twice as far?
I cannot attest to the truth of that old proverb, but the more I learned of Orik Sorlakson during our journey together, the more I saw of myself in his eyes and in his days.
The servants and staff of Telmak Lodge gave the old Master a rousing, tear-strewn send-off. They had covered the entire courtyard in green stalks of moxi grain, symbolising health, wealth, and happiness, and it was upon this stage that they stamped and danced and clapped, making of a simple walk from House to cart a makh’s celebration. Riotous fun! What I saw in their faces moved me. I had always known the Master Telmak held respect due to his position, but their response went far beyond a master-servant relationship, at least as I imagined it. Many had been born into his service. It was as though in leaving, he took a part of their quoph with him.
