INTERLUDE 9C:
SIGNIFICANT LOSSES, PART I
“Open your mind. You have already seen magic enacted, in every second of your waking life. What, you think there could be a world devoid of magic? You know not of what you speak.”
– from ‘The Last Words of Lordimer’, pg. 3
“Come on, you scratters!” he hollerred up the stairs. “Last one down’s a floppin’ fish!”
His younger brother and sisters and cousins – all five of them – came stampeding down in a single, ten-legged shape, shrilling and clawing each other back –
“Sestreya – you were last!” He pointed at the seven-year-old. “You’re a fish!”
“Ewwww!” the others cried, holding their noses and fleeing her.
“I ain’t never!” she retorted, chasing her eight-year-old sister, her closest companion. “Get back here!”
He led the exodus out the front door, then waited while three of them went back for their shoes. Waving farewell to his uncle and elder brother, he locked up and headed out into the streets.
The massive townhouse he’d purchased his family was in Jinglebridge, one of Oldtown’s quaintest areas, a riddle of canals, old trees and older ruins, just south-east of Firenight Square. His mum, uncle and aunts still hadn’t gotten used to the change of scenery, but the kids loved it. They thought he’d won a sizeable sum by gambling, a belief he’d carefully sculpted with both spoken word and hidden spell. This was the best excuse to give them, as it required only the gentlest suggestion to get them to leave the matter well alone – his elder relatives resented him for his newfound wealth, of course, but he could put up with that. They couldn’t know of his true profession, of course. He’d have to erase swathes of their memories, set commands in their minds preventing them from revealing the truth to the wrong person. That just wouldn’t do, especially given the added scrutiny he was under as an arch-enchanter. Henthae herself had inspected his family on one occasion. He had little doubt he could out-magic the supple crone if he had to, but that would just bring disaster down on his head in the end anyway. Better to play the safe game. Keep his family out of the loop altogether, conceal his identity by the most mundane of means.
Lies.
Their cousins sprinted ahead of the other youngsters, sometimes stopping to hide behind a tree. Nebbert and Larrika ignored them – they found sticks and started duelling as they strafed up the path beside the road, facing each other and swinging wildly as they loped along. Borasir increased his pace, striding to keep up. It was alright – his legs were plenty long-enough to make up the difference.
Not like the kids would let him live it down, if they knew. He was famous. He heard his name crop up in conversation five times a day, and a hundred times a day it went through someone’s head near him. Not his real name, of course. But Spiritwhisper? It was popular. He was popular. His warning-sense, catching a reference to him in a passer-by’s mind, had never once triggered on something threatening. One hundred percent admiration.
It went to his head, naturally, but the head was his speciality. He could manage.
You might be a master of lies but your problem, Borasir, is you’re too honest.
He sighed to himself. He knew most people in his position would bend the rules. Use their powers to get ahead in life – in love… Some changes were too subtle to be tracked, the books kept on reminding him… But right from the get-go he’d thrown himself head-first into the chaos of the champion’s life. The sheer appeal of it – dressing up as a masked hero and fighting the bad guys – was simply irresistible. The claws it sank into you – the trauma, the shared experiences – made it inescapable for the truest. Once a champion, always a champion. Only darkness and death released his kind from their oaths. He would choose the latter, and not until it came to claim him. Even still, Vaahn could suck it and swivel. He was Celestium-bound, if anyone was.
But that’s what everyone tells themselves, he reminded himself, and frowned a bit as he walked. There’d been a night, a cold night walking home from the tavern, and she’d pulled back on their linked arms… almost pulling his hand out of his pocket…
They splash together in their high leather boots through the frosty puddles, and she leans away, regarding him archly.
“… reckon we’ll get palaces up there, for doin’ this.”
“For what?” She eyes him in that infuriating way. “Playing fortify? Playing fortify badly?”
“Shut up!”
Her smile eats his heart, and he loses another piece of himself.
“No, for – you know… all the things we get up to. Zadhal…”
“Oi! I did come to Zadhal, if you recall – in fact, I’m pretty sure I saved your big collective behind, with the wheelbarrow stunt…”
He steps up onto a kerb that runs next to a street-gutter, and she steps up with him, her liquid speed preventing him from dragging her through the detritus.
“You know what I mean,” he says surlily; “for bein’ good.”
“If you get a nice place in the Twelve Heavens for being a good boy, were you really being good?”
Her question confuses him. She pulls herself close to him once more, and he can smell her hair again. He feels tempted to enter her mind, not for the first or ten-thousandth time, and resists by rote.
“What you mean?” he asks after a minute.
“If you know you’re going to be rewarded for doing something, you aren’t doing it unselfishly, are you? You’re doing it for selfish reasons.”
“I guess I just don’t see it that way.”
“When your kid brother cleans his room –“
“He ain’t ever cleanin’ that place!”
“I know – gods, I know – but humour me. If your mum tells your brother to clean his room and he’ll get a new ball for it, is he being good?”
“Yeah?”
“Really?”
“Why not?”
“And a man who gets paid to work for a company – can we say he loves his company as much as a man who doesn’t, but still does the work?”
“No one works for nothin’.”
“It’s a thought-experiment.”
“It’s a somethin’-experiment, alright.”
“Gods, aren’t we grumpy today?”
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“’We’ aren’t anythin’. We’re all people. We’re all everythin’.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“And I’m supposed to take your word for that, am I? You forget what I am?” He smiles at her, puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her even closer. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s this: people ain’t simple. No one’s bein’ good for no reason. That guy, in your somethin’-experiment? The one who ain’t gettin’ paid? He might love the work less, but gain somethin’ else.”
“Like what?”
“Like prestige? Fame? The admiration of his colleagues? A future position in an even-more lucrative role? Do you think I’m stupid just cause of my talkin’?”
“Alright –“
“And you’re damn right Nebbert’s being a good boy when he cleans his room for a new ball. Of course it’s good. Why would me mum suggest it as a reward if she wasn’t tryin’ to get him to do it? Why would she want him to do it, if it wasn’t good?”
“Remember this,” she says.
He remembered every inflection, every synchronised step.
It still hurt.
By the time he’d herded his flock of kids to Firenight Square, he could tell they were already opening the arena gates for general admissions – he was tall, and despite the ridiculous morning crowds he could see that a horde of people were crushing in about the gates’ opening, moving through into the building. He hurried the youngsters along through the teeming masses of square-goers; a single incisive thought was weapon-enough to stop wayward idiots from jostling him or the members of his little group. He joined the queue, as much as it could’ve been called a queue, and, thanks to the odd little tickle of enchantment, his wards lined up nice and neatly behind him.
Their voices went back and forth, an incessant prattle his power only sometimes helped him ignore.
“… think we’ll see the Dragonslayer.”
“Cor, yeah.”
“He’s the best!”
“No he ain’t! Lorgno the Lifestealer, she’s top!”
Bor laughed a little to himself. They knew they wouldn’t be seeing any of the big acts, not in the morning games – the early tickets went for cheap, and with good reason. The morning games were the most suitable for kids, anyway. The fighters were less skilled, the encounters less brutal, their antics more amusing. Not one of the little clods had seen Phanar or Lorgno in combat, but they’d all heard the rumours, followed the stories that spread through the streets. There was little doubt in Bor’s mind that Phanar had become the city’s premier gladiator.
It was funny; to talk to the man, you’d have never placed him for being such a showman. The last time Bor ran into the foreigner he was shopping in Hightown with Kanthyre, for shoes, of all things. If Bor hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the warrior a golem – stoic and impassive were descriptors that didn’t even scratch the reality of the man.
If only they opened up their memories to proper inspection. The stories that could be told…
He still hadn’t had opportunity to delve into the greatest duel of a generation, the fabled meeting of Redgate and Ord Ylon. No one had offered, and he’d learnt long ago that an enchanter could never ask. No one with a brain worth perusing ever let him actually read their mind, even if they felt it would be a good idea – they immediately fell into blaming him for their own compulsions, suspecting him of persuading them it wasn’t such a bad notion, infiltrating opinion by spell rather than speech…
It was a fine line to walk, for the mind-mage whose intent it was to retain the appearance of trustworthiness. He had to be more careful than a surgeon cutting away at a tumour – half the time he felt as though that was exactly what he was doing. Brain-surgery, as ludicrous as that sounded.
When they reached the front of the ‘line’, a young man in official arena green-and-black demanded their tickets. Bor produced his handful of little tokens, and they were waved through into the grounds. He led the kids into the structure, up the sunlit stairwells, and out onto the seats.
Their spot for today’s games was pretty good. Eastern side, so the rising sun wouldn’t get in their eyes. He could’ve easily afforded one of the highborn booths, of course, commanding a perfect view of the action, servants on hand with plates and jugs of delicacies – but that just wouldn’t do, not with the kids in tow or without them. The best commoner seats were near the front, just twenty feet above the floor of the grounds – and Bor’s tickets were for seats merely three rows back from the front. He scooted the kids along the smooth stone step serving as a bench and settled them down, letting them swap positions several times until they finally seemed at ease with their neighbours. At last he dared place his own backside down, at one of the ends so as not to upset the delicate balance of their seating arrangements.
They’d traded places at least two more times by the point he’d retrieved the water-bottles from his bag, an action that could’ve taken no more than ten seconds.
It was a bright, clear morning, the skies of unbroken blue glass stretching off into the distance, but Kaile had turned down yesterday’s unbearable heat. In fact, it was pleasantly cool. The opposite side of the arena, cursed with the sun’s glare, was starting to fill up. All about the ring, bloodthirsty children were dragging their guardians to their seats. The place was big-enough to seat tens of thousands, and it was hard to find more than a couple of empty places between the groups of families and friends knotted about the stands.
He looked down and out into the oval, the sand glimmering like an oasis of pearl, and imagined what was to come. The struggle. The violence. All of it carefully tempered for the morning crowd, events staged and scripted so as to provide suitable entertainment for its attention-span challenged audience.
No. There would be no real struggle, no real violence on the sands this morning. Certainly nothing that could compare to the contents of Bor’s own mind, a million milling images and snatches of spine-tingling sounds which, if he let them, could overtake his conscious thoughts, send him broken-winged and plummeting into a pit of half-remembered nightmare.
The heretics had fallen silent. Even the demons had stopped coming. Many took it for a sign of the end-times; those rich-enough or fearful-enough to do so had already fled Mund, and, in the wake left by their absence, darkness had crept into the city. A darkness unlike anything he’d seen before. It didn’t come from the outside, from spell-books and fiends. It came from inside men’s hearts, producing the same vile effects.
Inkatra. It had been a fireball waiting to explode, and they let it go too long, let it erupt right in their foolish faces.
If there’d been a moment of clarity, reflection, the arch-diviners would’ve realised just how effectively the drug masked their foresight. Just how badly they’d miscalculated. But they relied on their power for everything. And now it was too late. Eight weeks ago the proportion of inkatra-addicts in Mund had been estimated at nought-point-nought-two percent. Well within controllable territory, Starsight had said. Four weeks ago it had reached nought-point-two. Bor was planning on quizzing the human abacus on the latest figure in a few nights’ time, in front of everyone left at the Gathering, and at last, perhaps, the remaining champions would see sense.
If Tanra let them.
She had a hold over the protectors of Mund that Lovebright might’ve envied. All without setting a foot near the Ceryad. Without even entering the chamber. By proxy she ruled Mund’s greatest heroes. By her influence over Timesnatcher.
One day, I’ll catch her, he promised himself once more. Catch her, in a working. Get that necklace off her. Figure her out.
Figure it all out.
He was certain it was her. Ninety-nine percent certain.
He no longer cared about Heresy; Everseer put paid to any hopes of staying pure in that regard. He didn’t care about the dragons – if they came, he’d help defeat them, of course, but that was inconsequential in his mind. The real struggle would be getting to the bottom of his ex-girlfriend’s warped mind. Fixing her.
Fixing everything, just like she’d always said.
What made someone a heretic? Why would Tanra and Kas and Theor fall prey to such a wicked, pointless philosophy? Why had the apocalyptic news changed her so much?
Did it have something to do with her dreams?
Buried beneath the nightmare-fragments, ground to dust but still present, never quite fading – the memories of he still had of Tanra, memories he wished would leave him forever. The first time he met her, showing up late to net a traitor. The time she pushed a priest through the frozen ruins of Zadhal to save them all from the madness of a death-god… a death-god she’d ended up worshipping.
The three times she’d kissed him, playful and teasing.
The one time she’d let him kiss her. The sudden chasteness of her lips.
The memory was dust but it was glass-dust, brittle and bright, filling his eyes, his mind, a cup of red pain thrown on hot coals.
He blinked away the image of her endlessly-appealing face, replacing it in his mind with the two times he’d spotted Nightfell. Glimpses from afar of the bow-slinging killer, the one who killed Killstop, replacing her not just in mind but in reality. It was as though Killstop had never existed. The months of pacifism, of bringing criminals in for questioning, for punishment and incarceration – that was just a phase, a labour-pain finally giving way to Nightfell’s birth. And now she was out, there was no aborting this dreadful creature, no reverting her back. The old Tanra wouldn’t be able to face the truth of what she’d done since donning the black garment. The old Tanra – she could never exist in the same way again. He knew people, knew how they worked inside. Bor recognised that, even if he could eventually get through to her, the process of recovery would be a long and painful one, reintegrating the various aspects of her personhood… perils would be lurking along the route, threatening to undo all the work that had already been accomplished.
How many years would it take? What would she become, moulded by his hands?
Still – it had to be attempted. His conscience permitted no less.
What was it, Tanra? What did Kastyr do to you to make you like this?
There were no answers – never would be, unless she gave them him herself. Feychilde was dead, or soon would be, in Zyger.
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