by D M Wozniak
“Master voider,” he says levelly. “Are you aware of what’s happening?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s your submaster.”
My heart tightens.
“Tell me.”
“I stopped by a halfbell ago. To discuss our report to the king. I thought you would have been there.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, I could see that Mander was not himself. He was annoyed with my presence. He said he was busy.” His eyes dart from left to right, as if recalling the events. “We got into an argument.”
“About what?”
“He wanted me to leave. He ordered me to leave, actually. Which he has no right to do, of course. Then he just...”
He shakes his head.
“What?”
Reddles puts his hand up to his mouth. “He used voidance against me. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Like the air was pushed inside.”
“He’s the traitor, commander. The man we’re looking for.”
Reddles looks down the road toward the half-obscured estate, as if he can see Mander from this far way. Then he turns back to me and nods.
“I feared as much. Standing there in the Celestium, unable to breathe...” His brow furrows. “I trusted him. You trusted him. You thought he—”
“I thought many things. But they are all wrong.”
He fingers his star.
“Did you see my friends?” I ask.
He looks distantly past the sheer cliff and open sky, then shakes his head. “No.”
Then where in Temberlain’s Ashes are they?
“I’m headed there now—to get my friends to safety. Why don’t you come with me?”
“What?”
“I can’t do this alone. We need to take down Mander. Right now.”
Reddles points to the estate. “I am not going back in there.”
His fear surprises me.
“Gather your men, then. The ones you trust with your life. We can take him down together.”
He shakes his head. “I am sorry, but there is nothing swords can do against that man.”
He bites his lip and blinks his blue eyes rapidly. I can tell that he’s torn. He knows he is abandoning me, and his guilt is as obvious as bearing the king’s banner.
“Master voider, I have ridden into battle surrounded by the enemy. With the scorching sun beating down on me, my body drenched with sweat, blinding my eyes behind my helmet. The scent of blood everywhere, making my steed tremble under my legs. There is no battlefield that I fear.” He swallows. “But this is not a battle of steel. There is no strategy to be had. That man raised a single finger to his stone, and I was powerless.”
“I will protect you and your men.”
He shakes his head as he walks away from me, and I run my hand through my hair.
Reddles climbs back atop his horse, the leather saddle creaking.
“The truth is, you are the only person in Winter’s Baiou that can stop him,” he says. “And if you fail, we’re all doomed.”
“Where are you going, then?”
“I need to warn the king.”
The horse stomps its feet and moves slightly about in anticipation, whipping its tail. Reddles looks around warily in all directions, as if he doesn’t trust a single thing left in this world. Then he turns back to me.
“May the Unnamed or luck be on your side. Because I don’t know what else is.”
The enervated are.
With a kick, he gallops away.
For a moment, I watch the billowing dust cloud he leaves behind. Then I turn and begin my long approach to Mander’s estate.
Along the way, as the breeze off the sea hits me, I keep thinking of what Reddles said.
If you fail, we’re all doomed.
I can’t argue with his logic. It’s just that I don’t feel it.
I’m not thinking of everyone else.
I’m only thinking of Chimeline.
A quarterbell later, the patches of white have grown into a full facade. The vanishing point has become a front door as red as blood. But I don’t go in.
Reddles mentioned a Celestium.
Instead, I take a narrow set of stone stairs nestled in-between hedgerows. It curves gracefully upwards around a fountain, up to a southern-exposed terrace lined with onyx statues of dead Xian heroes and potted tongues of fire.
A pair of glass-paned doors are spread open on the north side of the terrace.
He must be expecting me.
Cautiously, I step through into a massive, empty ballroom lined with windows and mirrors. But I don’t see any sign of voidance.
It’s dimmer than outside, but not by much. My boots let out a single squeak on the parquet floor, which is so glossy that it looks wet.
Next, the ceiling draws my attention. The entire expanse is painted a deep shade of something not quite green and not quite blue. It reminds me of an emerald ring that Marine would sometimes wear.
Against this field, the ceiling glitters with countless, goldleaf stars. In truth, I have never seen anything like it.
“Welcome to my Celestium,” says an echoing voice, as the doors behind me close.
The Celestium
I bring my gaze back down from the lofty, star-studded ceiling.
Mander stands all the way against the far western wall of the Celestium—at least one hundred feet from me. Maintaining the lie which has existed for as long as I’ve known him, he wears his cursed wig, but not his flaxen cloak. Instead, he has on a silken shirt and pants—nearly the same vibrant blue-green color as the ceiling. He’s barefoot, and a voidstone on a thick gold chain hangs around his neck.
My three friends are in front of him. Colu, Chimeline, and Blythe all sit motionless on simple wooden chairs, spaced about ten feet apart from one another. Their hands are behind their backs, presumably tied. Their faces are raised, and I can see the whites of their wide eyes. Their mouths look gagged.
In front of all of them—about a quarter of the way into the room from the western edge—a subtlety-shimmering membrane extends wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling.
“Star painter,” Mander says loudly, his voice echoing. “Leave us.”
At first, I don’t know who he’s speaking to, but then I hear creaking above me.
Bamboo scaffolding in the northeast corner rises thirty feet into the air. At the top, a wiry man with a paintbrush in his teeth looks down at us. The area above him is not emerald, but a faded yellow—apparently the original plaster ceiling of this converted ballroom.
The painter descends with ease as I check my rising anger.
I can only surmise that Mander is theatrically displaying the three in a bound state on purpose. Everything in front of me seems calculated. Perhaps to elicit my emotions, or to prove that he is smarter than me. Even though I had the enervated’s help, he somehow found a way. He identified my only weakness, and then exploited it.
The desire to call out to my friends overwhelms me. To calm them, to say that everything is alright would quell the emotion burning in my chest. Especially Chimeline. But this would only prove to Mander that his plan is working, which I refuse to allow.
Mander paces back and forth, one hand scratching his wig, the other in his pants pocket. I try to read his body language as he waits for privacy. Is he scared or confident? It’s impossible to tell.
The voidstone hangs heavily upon my neck, reminding me of my options.
I don’t fear him. The scene in the park is proof enough. But I fear what he could do to the others. There is no guarantee that the enervated will help Colu, Chimeline, or Blythe. They let the effulgent in the bell tower fall to her death. I don’t know the rules to this macabre game.
The painter reaches the parquet floor. He quickly shuffles past me, and I breathe in the pungent smell of fresh paint that accompanies him. Departing through the same door in the southeast corner that I came through, he closes it behind himself with an echoing thud.
“I have to be honest with you,”
Mander says the moment the painter leaves, walking casually between Chimeline and Colu. He approaches his side of the membrane, both hands now in his pockets. “When I found out that the whore failed, and that you somehow trailed me south, I was shocked, to say the least. But now I understand. I should have foreseen your doggedness. This is you, Dem. This is all so very you.”
As he speaks, something doesn’t seem quite right, but I can’t place my finger on it, and I look around instead. My eyes follow the silver edges of his membrane.
It’s possible that I could destroy it, but this would take precious time—time Mander could spend killing Colu, Chimeline, and Blythe.
And there is always the chance that I can simply walk right through it.
Too many unknowns.
I focus on the southern wall, to my left.
The door which the painter went through is not the only one. There are at least ten sets built into the southern wall, along the span of one hundred feet. Their bronze handles and hinges repeat against the white-painted trim. Each of them leads out to the terrace, but they are all closed.
In-between all these doors are more windows. My view of the terrace is almost as clear as if I were standing outside.
Past a cluster of potted tongues of fire and right up against the bronze statuary-filled edge of the terrace, where the cliff drops to the shores of Xi Bay, something catches my attention.
A large, cylindrical device rests on a brass tripod. Glittering in the strong sun, it looks identical to the one in the rogue laboratory.
“It’s beautiful, is it not?” says Mander.
I turn back to him. He must have noticed my gaze.
“I call it my starglass,” he continues. “It took me years to perfect the lenses. You wouldn’t believe how meticulous a task it was. Even with voidance.”
I refuse to reply, despite my curiosity.
“Don’t you want to know what it does?” he asks me, playfully.
I don’t answer.
“Of course, you do, Dem. Your inquisitiveness is only outmatched by your stubbornness. Do not fear, I will tell you without you having to stoop so low.”
He takes a deep breath and looks upwards. “It helps me find my way home.”
I raise my head to the ceiling. It’s a map of the night sky.
“You’re a fool,” I tell him as I walk across the pristine, parquet floor. “Your home is here, not somewhere across the stars.”
He smiles. “Ah, you know part of the truth, then. But knowing part of the truth is more dangerous than knowing nothing at all.”
“I know more than a part.”
“Really.”
I nod. “You are a descendant of the empowered.”
He narrows his eyes. “How do you know that?”
“Is that what all of this is about?” I ask, approaching the center of the room while I reflect upon everything that Blythe has told me. How he must have been born to an effulgent parent, and somehow learned that he had the gift of voidance. He began speaking with the enervated in the void, but then something changed. A dark seed was planted before I ever laid eyes on him.
“You have lived a life of constant lies,” I say as the full realization comes over me. “Pretended to be one of us, studied at the university, became a submaster.” I glance left as I walk, past the windows and terrace and toward the ring of ships barely visible in the glistening waters. “You created a war in order to raise the stone underneath Xi Bay. All just to get home?” I ask incredulously.
“No, Dem. Home is coming to me.”
By the time I realize that he’s not going to reveal more, my footsteps become softened as I tread onto a circular, handwoven rug. It’s Xian-made—angular patterns and striking, contrasting colors, most of it in black-and-white.
A massive, unlit chandelier hangs from the ceiling above me. An impressive desk with dozens of haphazard rolls of parchments and one large tome lies before me. Numerous candlestands. A brown leather chair. More sheets of parchment on the floor, weighed down by finial weights.
Glancing at the writings and running my fingers over a parchment, I realize that they are not in the common or Xian languages. They’ve been written in a script I do not recognize.
The effulgency language.
“What are your plans with the Axiondrive?” I ask, looking up.
His face is emotionless. “You answer my questions, and I’ll answer yours.”
“Alright,” I answer. “What do you want to know?”
“For starters, how do you know all of these things?”
I press my lips together tightly, and then look at Blythe. I nod in his direction.
“The graycloak?” Mander asks, his voice raising in surprise.
He spins and addresses Blythe. “You divulged secrets from the sacred texts?”
Behind the membrane, Mander walks over to him while shaking his head. “I am shocked, graycloak. This is not on the way of unwanting. Not at all.”
Blythe raises up his head as Mander approaches, but he does not say anything—something seems to be stuffed in his mouth.
“Oh, that’s right,” Mander adds theatrically. “You’re incapable of rebuttal at the present moment.”
I take a few steps around the desk to get a better view.
No ordinary gag is in his mouth.
The same is true for the other two.
What immediately comes to mind are the black garden spiders in the hedgerows outside of the royal house. I can always see their webs in the early morning dew. They’re built on a level plane, and from this surface, descend into the dark greenery in the shape of a cone, where the hunter waits for its prey.
I step closer.
The sunlight coming through the windows interferes, causing a subtle radiance. A ripple of light. Only when I move, I can see its design.
Directly in front of each of my friends, the vertical surface of the membrane curves inward, like a massive cone whose point terminates in their open mouths.
Momentarily closing my eyes, I take a deep breath and tell myself not to fall into his trap. I will not be the prey to this spider.
Mander turns away from Blythe and faces me again.
“What else did he tell you?” he asks, his voice strong and level.
“Your people have been imprisoning the enervated for generations,” I answer.
He brings a hand up to his curly hair, scratching it while cocking his head to the side. “Imprisoning is the wrong term. It’s too...” he scratches his hair furiously. “Over-dramatic.”
“What term would you use?”
He purses his lips and then hunches his shoulders. “They are soulservants, Dem. It’s their place in the nature of things. Our kind could not have crossed the stars without them.”
“But to trap—”
“They’re not trapped,” he says, cutting me off. “They’re preserved.”
I fight the urge to laugh at his ridiculous statement. “Preserved?”
He nods. “The body is a cage. When the cage dies, we save what’s inside before it has a chance to disappear. If anything, the enervated should be thanking us. We give them something close to immortality.”
He sighs, perhaps with impatience to my silence. “If given the chance, Dem, what would you choose? To help a great people do great things forever, or to become nothing?”
Flashes of eleutheria enter my mind. The spheres passing through me. A child playing on the beach. Two suns over the horizon. Her mother laughing, a red pail in her hands.
When we briefly became one, I had the sense that they were going home.
“They don’t become nothing,” I answer.
He lets out a sharp laugh. “You sound like an effulgent.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
Mander groans in annoyance. He scratches his curly wig again, more forcefully this time, before suddenly ripping it off. He plucks off his eyebrows.
“My, that feels better,” he says.
One hand still grasping th
e wig, he rubs his suddenly bald head with the other. It’s redder than the rest of his body. I see flakes—presumably dried glue—catch the sunlight as they flicker away onto the wooden floor.
I’m too shocked with his sudden chance of appearance to say anything.
Mander walks between Chimeline and Blythe. He approaches the only other piece of furniture in the room, which is behind the membrane and pushed up against the north wall. It’s an ornate vanity—something of the sort Marine has in her bedchamber. Various bottles and supplies rest upon its marbled surface.
He flings the wig and eyelashes onto the table and grasps his voidstone. Almost instantly, steam rises out of a white bowl resting on the surface.
He picks up a nearby white towel, dips it into the bowl, and then wrings it out, as the sound of dripping water fills the room.
“You don’t know how good it feels to be myself again. After all this time. This ludicrous wig and stammer. I don’t know which was worse.”
Stammer.
That’s what was off this entire time. It’s Mander’s speech. The words come out of his mouth fast and clear. His charade was fuller than I ever imagined.
While he’s busy wiping his head with the damp towel, I step forward and study each of my friends.
It’s amazing what their eyes convey. From Blythe, I pick up nothing. He is relaxed, taking even breaths and not even looking at me. Chimeline looks petrified, her eyes reddened with tears. Colu’s facial muscles ripple under his skin and he blinks constantly. He’s furious.
Mander neatly folds up the towel and places it on the table.
“Alright,” he says, walking back up to the membrane. “Time for more questions and answers. This is why we’re here, is it not?”
I mirror him, until I am inches away from my side of the membrane.
“It’s my turn,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
He smiles. “Restoring things.”
“How?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”
On the other side of the shimmering curtain, Mander looks both oddly familiar and utterly alien. An overwhelming desire comes over me to reach out, through the membrane, and choke him to death.
