After the Battle of Tall Tree Pool (as it came to be known), Saul and his friends set about using their magic to help the confused and wounded people.
They were, as Saul had expected, none other than the townsfolk of Jillin, who had been caught in the meshes of the curse and had been controlled by Graxel, the Jorogumo that had possessed him, and ultimately by the unidentified ancient spirit contained in the yellow spirit stone that they had found after the battle.
The curse, among its other effects, had also seeped into the minds and souls of the townspeople and turned them into virtually a small private army under the control of the person they had thought of as Graxel.
It explained the bandit raids around the roads, and also what had happened to the disappeared townsfolk of Jillin.
Though the experience of having been caught within the web of magic and lies woven by Graxel was, of course, unpleasant, it also came with the advantage of wiping most of the memories of that time from the minds of its victims.
Saul was content with this. It would have been nice to know more about the curse spell from those directly affected by it, but not at the cost of the villagers’ distress.
As it was, the townsfolk were able to shake off the influence of the dark time they had been subjected to and return to work and life in Jillin much more quickly than Saul had thought would be possible.
The folk moved back in, repopulated their little town, and set to work to rebuild what had fallen into disrepair and improve what had not.
* * *
Within a few weeks of the battle, Jillin was visibly changing for the better. For a start, it gained a new nickname. When the people of the town returned to their homes, they jokingly called it Saultown.
As for Saul and his friends, they moved into the abandoned Thane’s tower and concentrated on helping the townsfolk to rebuild.
Zorea seemed more satisfied with this than Brand. She was, after all, the more patient and the older of the two.
Brand was, in particular, all on fire to go and find Baraz Karak. Saul had told his friends about the new development as soon as he’d returned, and Brand found it incredibly exciting to think that the emperor was out there, equipped with a System like Saul’s, and also——they had to assume——working to try and change the world and avert the disastrous timeline that had developed into the Faction Wars.
Saul, however, advised caution.
They did not know where Baraz was or what he looked like, and Saul wanted time to see what happened next. Jillin was as good a place as any from which to do that observing, and Saul’s intuition told him he needed to give fate a little time to breathe.
He had opened new chains of consequence, and he could not predict how they would unfold.
In Jillin, Saul could use his magic to aid the townsfolk in their rebuilding, he could gather news, and he could watch. There was more to all this than he’d ever thought, that much was plain.
And at the back of it all was the land of El-Alun, over the western sea.
The thread of El-Alun ran through all the events that had occurred in Xorn since Saul had arrived, but more than this, there ran the thread of Old World magic.
El-Alun was where the creature called Graxel had originated. The Jorogumo was a demon of the ancient world, but such things were said to exist in El-Alun in a way that they did not in Keldor. Saul had always thought the Old Magics had been lost to the world, but apparently, he had been wrong.
After all, even Zorea and her wonderful Soulstone sword were living proof of that.
As time passed, and they were able to piece together the different parts of the story, they learned that Graxel had been in the Queen’s court for well over a year.
He’d arrived as an ambassador, and he’d brought gifts from the Satrap of El-Alun, as well as offers of trading treaties and favorable rates on mercenary contracts. He’d brought a message from the El-Alun Satraps saying that they wanted to be closer allies with Xorn, and that they wanted closer connection and intelligence sharing as well.
All this was a lie, of course.
Graxel’s only goal had been to infiltrate the court and make himself indispensable. He’d cast the curse over Jillin, and framed Reznak of Styllin, the blue-skinned mage, to do it.
Reznak had been used by Graxel as a template for a magical apparition that had haunted the village of Jillin. The creation of this apparition had also acted as an anchor for the curse that had overtaken the land.
Why had he targeted Jillin, and why had he tried to frame Reznak, who had been, as far as they could tell, a perfectly harmless individual?
Those questions remained unanswered, but Saul’s best guess at the first was probably that the town was out of the way enough that Graxel could experiment with the dark magic and see how well it would work.
Presumably, if it had continued to work, he would have scaled it up to other villages nearby.
The role that the Jorogumo had played was also unclear. What was this creature?
It had been occupying Graxel’s body, but for how long?
Had Graxel known and been under its control? Or had they both been under the control of the being in the spirit stone?
Was the whole thing—Graxel, the Jorogumo, the Spirit Stone—all some kind of creature created by someone else to sow discord?
There was no way of answering these questions.
The spirit stone sat innocuously on a stand in Saul’s work room in the Thane’s tower. It was a pleasing enough object to look at, and Zorea, who knew a bit about these devices, assured him there was no chance that the spirit inside the stone could have any power of its own.
“They need a body,” she said, “and to get a body, they have to be deliberately placed in one by someone else. Without that, they cannot see or hear, or take any action of their own.”
The people who had fought Saul at the end were the villagers themselves. It had been thought they had drifted away from Jillin over time but in fact, they had been taken out of their homes and had been existing in a kind of unconscious half-life.
The magic was akin to the control spells of the warlocks, though there was no evidence of Sigils being involved.
Still, their likeness was too close for Saul’s taste.
There seemed to be an unhealthy similarity between the two magics, and again there was the running theme of El-Alun involvement. There was the desire in both cases to enslave innocents, using magic to make them become fighters for a controlling power.
There was the attempt to turn Xornian villages into bases that could become outposts from which destabilizing attacks could be launched, and there was the fact that both were happening at the same time, but with very different approaches.
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Harkin’s Holdfast had been subject to an all-out assault at the far north of the realm, and Jillin to an insidious undermining in the south, and both had been going on steadily over the last three or four years.
Saul might not be in charge of great armies anymore, but he was still the same man inside. He knew a pincer move when he saw one, and he saw one here. Subtle, yes, but it was there all the same.
Jillin and Harkin’s Holdfast felt like test cases, like some hidden power probing Xorn’s weaknesses, trying different approaches to disruption and infiltration. And at the back of both cases, was El-Alun involvement.
After having seen what had happened here at Jillin, Saul had no doubt that in his old timeline, an infiltrator from El-Alun had caused the discontent in the border villages.
Unchecked, the influence had spread into the rest of Xorn, and combined with the so-called warlock Rebellion, had led to disintegration of the realm’s power structures, chaos, and the death of the queen and the fall of Xorn.
The Faction Wars, the Years of Strife, the Thin Years… All of it was taking on a new color now. In Saul’s old life, he had known the story of the events that had brought about the war, but he had not had any sense of the context.
In that timeline, the agents of El-Alun had succeeded in causing war to erupt in Xorn, and then in the wider continent of Keldor. Their subverting influence had never been discovered.
Back when he had been the general of Baraz Karak’s imperial armies, Saul had only ever thought of El-Alun as a distant kingdom, a source of mercenary fighters for the Riverlands, but little else.
He’d never suspected they had instigated the chaos and bloodshed that had engulfed Keldor. Foreign agents, mages and demons under the control of a foreign power, destabilizing and undermining Keldor; it had never crossed his mind.
What had El-Alun gained from that dastardly work? It was hard to know, but it must be worth a lot to someone out there. After all, they had gone to a lot of effort to make it happen.
Now that he was present and living through events as they unfolded, he was able to see them more clearly. Someone from El-Alun, he guessed, had been resourcing the warlocks that had attacked Harkin’s Holdfast. That same someone had supplied the warlocks with the terrible controlled warriors, the Zombie fighters of El-Alun, and with the Tracking Dervishes, an incredibly expensive piece of El-Alun technology.
Was Graxel the Possessed the only one behind all this? Saul found that hard to believe. Though clearly, he had played an instrumental part, it seemed most likely that he was operating on behalf of other masters, and it was possible that he had this whole time been not human at all, but a monster in a human form, driven by an ancient spirit whose motives and desires were unknown.
In addition to the attempted destabilization of Xorn, recent events had tried to cause strife and discord between Xorn and the kingdom of Styllin in the far north, a perfectly peaceful alliance. Reznak, the Styllin mage, was a harmless individual without much power, but Graxel had used him as a tool and tried to make it seem that he was at the heart of the trouble, not El-Alun.
After the battle, it was found that Reznak had died in his bed one night. He was a perfectly healthy man, and it was said that the queen suspected poison.
Of course, while all of this played out, the thought of seeing his old friend Baraz again was a constant undercurrent in Saul’s mind and thoughts.
Questions plagued him.
Did Baraz know that Saul was out here in the world too? He’d been given a System, but did he know why? And above all, who had designed and given Baraz a System?
Whenever they discussed the issue, Brand urged that they should go out and look for the emperor immediately, but Saul always found himself coming down on the side of caution.
“We don’t know where Karak is, or even what he looks like,” Saul said as they sat together on the flat rooftop of the Thane’s Tower, looking out over the industrious work proceeding at a steady pace in Jillin. “Don’t forget that I was born into an entirely new body, and Sarkur said that he was too. And Baraz was never a particularly formidable mage. He would not mind me saying so——I was the magic worker between the two of us——but I wonder how well he is doing with his System, or whether it’s even similar to mine. Might it not be totally different, giving some power that’s more suited to his talents and personality?”
“He must have been given the System for a reason,” Zorea said. “There must be more to it than just creating another one of you.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Saul said. “Sarkur didn’t give any details about what the nature of the System that Baraz has been given, except to say that it worked on similar principles to mine. I don’t know what it will do.
“Perhaps it will give him the power to command men in the way he did before? Perhaps it will give him some kind of magic that is more appropriate to his talent for politics and nation building? How can I tell?
“But I will not just set out at random and hope that I find him. No, I don’t know where he is or why he’s been sent back, so I will keep going as I have been for now, and I want you two to stick with me. Are you prepared to do that?”
“Of course,” Zorea said.
Brand looked a bit uncertain but shrugged. “You’re the one who knows the territory. I just want to know why Baraz Karak is here, and why he’s been given a System too. And I want to meet him!”
“I want that too,” Saul said. “If what Sarkur says is true, though I confess I do not entirely trust him, then Baraz went through a similar process as I did to end up being put into the world. Sarkur said that Baraz went to get the Sigil after I was exiled, that the gods exiled him just as they did me, and that ‘someone’ then pulled him out of exile and gave him a System, just like Sarkur did me.
“The only reason I can think of for that to happen is for Baraz to behave as a rival for me, someone who can make it harder for me to succeed. The very presence of Baraz makes it harder already, as it reduces the time we have to master the System and get to the point of defeating the gods. So, we need to link up and combine our powers, as Sarkur said, if we want to defeat the gods.”
“But why would anyone want to make it harder for you to succeed?” Brand protested. “Surely the destruction of the universe and everything in it is not something anyone wants, not even a god?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Saul said with a shrug. “But, you see, I don’t think the destruction of the universe includes the gods. I think there are probably some deities—perhaps even Sarkur himself—who would relish the opportunity to wipe the universe clean and start again.
“Maybe they would be able to have some more power if that happened? If that were true—and I think it may well be—then there is even a believable motive for Sarkur himself to be the one who has given Baraz the System. After all, it was Sarkur who came up with the design for the System in the first place. That actually fits the facts better than any other scenario, knowing what we do.”
“Yes, it’s certainly the most logical possibility,” Brand said. “Sarkur might actually want you to fail, so that he can play a part in creating a new universe after the destruction of this one. Though you’d have to be totally mad to think that was a good way to go about things.”
“Sarkur did not seem the most stable person I’d ever met,” Saul pointed out dryly. “Yes, I could see him being prepared to cause the total destruction of the universe and everything in it just to get himself the opportunity to have more power the next time round.”
“And if he did that,” Zorea said, “he could use you and Baraz as a catalyst for that destruction. I can’t imagine that the total destruction of the universe would be a particularly easy thing to bring about, even for a being like Sarkur. So, if he creates the timeline clash to cause the destruction, then he can say it wasn’t him that did it, exactly. It becomes a win-win situation for him.
“If you fail, the universe is destroyed, and he gets to have a go at being in charge of the next one. But if you succeed, then you destroy the Seven Elemental Gods, leaving the path clear for him to have more power in this universe. In either of those scenarios, it makes sense for him to place Baraz back into the world with you!”
“But it doesn’t make sense for us,” Brand said gloomily. “It’s not a win-win for us or for the world at all. Yet I can see how that would work for Sarkur. From his point of view, it’s actually a pretty good plan. You really think he’s mad enough for that to seem like a good idea, Saul?”
Saul didn’t have to think for long. He recalled Sarkur’s wild eyes as the Trickster God had stared down at him that first time, and his forgetfulness, manic cackling, and sudden changes of mood during their last encounter.
“Yeah,” Saul said. “I’m certain he is mad enough. But there’s an element to all this, I think, that even he has not foreseen.”
“What’s that?” Brand asked.
“He has underestimated the power of the System,” Saul said. “I don’t think he fully understands what it is that he’s given to me. The more time passes, the more I realize that the System is very much mine, and that there are ways I can use it that do not depend on any inbuilt design.”
“You mean that you can do things he is not expecting?”
“Exactly. Sarkur has put me out into the world with this goal of defeating the gods on his behalf or wiping the slate clean if I fail, and he’s given me this System to allow me to do that, but things like the Anvil, the portals, and even the Squad magic all seem to demonstrate that the System has more potential than just that which was inbuilt.
“The key is that I can create new things with the System. I’m starting to see that. If I can learn to create new things with the System, then so can Baraz, and there’s nothing Sarkur can do to stop us. I must say, it strikes me that at the end of all this, Sarkur may find that the best approach is for me and Baraz to be eliminated once we’ve served our purpose.”
Saul looked south, out over the town, and beyond, to where the sun glinted on the blue waters of the Dragon River, the border with the great continent of Keldor beyond.
“He’s created me, but he does not, I think, fully understand the full potential of what I will become when I master this magic.”
“What will you become?” Zorea asked.
He smiled at her. “I will become a being that can defeat gods in battle. But if I do that, there will be something of a power vacuum to be filled. I believe that if I defeat the Elementals, I will take their place. If I defeat the gods, I will become a god myself. Mastery of the System will allow me, in the end, to become the ultimate ruler of the universe!”