12th Illost, 998 NE
When Zakimel told everyone to run, Perri was prepared. She and Irimar had discussed the obvious facts of the mission long before they agreed to put the plan into action. The Magisterium was going to attempt to get a large number of champions killed, that much was plain to read. Not all of them, but a fair few. Mistress Henthae wouldn’t stop until the Gathering was under her control, and the way Emrelet Reyd had been moved into position was a clumsy-enough play that even Starsight had asked about it. Zakimel would do his best to ensure a slaughter. Her own vision of the arch-magister was thin, watery, flimsy… she couldn’t grasp him the way Irimar could. But Irimar had seen it all: the way he’d eventually give them away to the powers dwelling in the centre of the city by flying high, something they knew from previous expeditions was an almost sure-fire way of getting yourself hunted down. The way he’d try to break the group’s cohesion, separate them all, while his magisters were under orders to slip away if all should go awry and, chance permitting, return secretly through the Winter Door.
No, this would not be a day for any Magisterium official to display the courage of their convictions, and Irimar knew as much even when he gave them his nervous speech.
Still, when she heard Zakimel’s cry, saw his flight with her own eyes, she couldn’t help but be surprised. It seemed so out-of-character for him, even given his secret motives.
Timesnatcher’s response was to allow it to happen.
Just as Irimar had said to her, Zakimel couldn’t help but get it out of the way early. Too early. He should’ve waited for champions to start falling before splitting the group, should’ve let the panic become terror before he set them loose in Zadhal. That would’ve resulted in a huge amount of deaths. But no, he’d waited only for the first serious opposition, the deathknights. He wasn’t going to risk any arch-magisters’ lives, even of those few he’d brought with him, which she knew represented at best half of their actual force.
No, Zakimel had carried out his own plan and ruined it in so doing, none the wiser. Unless he really meant for this to be some kind of empty gesture, some veiled declaration of war…
Not that he’d ever wanted the mission to succeed, really. The Arrealbord and the Magisterium couldn’t afford to let the truth about Zadhal surface. Irimar had let her know as many of the details as he’d been able to glean, or so he said. There were doubtless more fragments of the whole to be uncovered today.
Now Irimar took her arm politely and slipped away south with her, letting Zakimel rush off into the pale sky, doing nothing to stop him even though Perri had little doubt he’d have been capable of it. He’d drawn only one of his green-glittering daggers with which to cut through the odd deathknight.
“Faster,” he murmured – they were already hundreds of yards from the melee – this speed scared her; it would’ve brought them back to the Winter Door themselves in seconds, if Timesnatcher so chose.
She noted the way his breath didn’t mist on the air when they travelled like this. Were they going too fast for the link?
Why are you talking like that? she thought at him, then heard the alarming lack of echo –
There was no psychic echo, but the future-echoes born of her own power – those she could hear. Lay claim to. Process faster than thought.
Alandrica…!
She looked through the slits in his mask, into his eyes, the eyes of her lover, the eyes of the man she had never truly been able to trust.
He killed my friend?
“What’s going on, Irimar?” she asked him.
She was so fast unsheathing her blades, using them, resheathing them, most people wouldn’t even see her move if she beheaded someone right in front of them – they’d just see the head fall.
Irimar wasn’t most people. To him, she might draw her blades like a swimmer in water, sluggishly, striking weakly…
“If you thought Zakimel was acting strange – my darling… Rosedawn had been breaking some of the waywatchers’ minds.”
“What? That was her?”
He smiled grimly. “You saw it too?”
She shivered. “You thought I didn’t, that’s why you didn’t mention it… I didn’t – I never understand you, Irimar.”
He shook his head. “Not at all. I didn’t say anything to you because I thought it was her. I knew she was…” He bit his lip, then said in a sombre tone: “Listen to me now and listen well. Did you ever look at her? Her past?”
“I saw that you’d meddled with her! I saw –“
“No. Not me.”
It took her only a fraction of a second to realise what he meant, and the way they were moving through the rays of light towards the future, it was a fraction of a fraction. She’d been an arch-diviner long enough to know that she had time to formulate her response.
“So this is part of your Feychilde game,” she said at last.
“Feychilde?” He looked surprised. “No, Feychilde has nothing to do with this –“
“He’s going to help you end Duskdown, though, isn’t he? That’s what you’re… grooming him for?”
She tried her best to keep her disgust from her voice, but she only managed to catch half of it before it spilled out of her mouth.
“Yes and no – that will be his decision, Perri!” He sounded exasperated.
This wasn’t Alandrica’s decision, she thought.
“It’s not that Feychilde is involved with this – it’s Duskdown, it’s always Duskdown!” Irimar hung his head. “Every plan, it all leads to this! To him! Don’t you see it? They became archmages together; he and Rosedawn, they were in love! Their souls were united in her past, wouldn’t you agree? You remember what the lacuna looked like? She was going to destroy the Maginox. I had to –“
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“I understand your reasoning,” she cut him off. “And you know I disagree. I’ve told you before, things like this could’ve been Everseer!“
He snorted, which as always made her seethe.
“Alandrica… a manipulator of the higher echelons of the Magisterium? How? How, Irimar?”
He didn’t reply, but their speed slowed significantly.
“Where are we going, Irimar?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Timesnatcher?”
Perri’s heart leapt into her throat.
I could respond. I could save her –
A million rainbow avenues opened up before her sightless eyes –
Irimar’s polite grip on her forearm tightened suddenly.
She heard the enchantress’s voice for what she knew to be the last time:
“Lightblind?”
Before she could open the link at her end, a process that ought to have been instantaneous, and reverse the psychic channel bearing her message back to the enchantress, Irimar snatched –
– the –
– time –
– away from her in such a surge of exponential speed it brought her previous fright to an apex of terror, leaving her cringing, crying, even as he still bore her away, out of Rosedawn’s range, her ability to link.
But she knew it for a fact – it was too late to save the enchantress now, even for her.
When she managed to twist her arm away from his grip she took a thousandth of a second to note the direction she had to travel, informed more by the position of future-Perri than by the position of the sun or some other such mundane means –
“Perrinthe…”
She ignored him, and thrust herself through the brightest path she could see, letting the winds of time direct her course –
The Winter Door.
Home.
I’m going to go home.
She sensed it the moment he gave up his pursuit – he could’ve caught her, but he knew there was nothing he could do with her now. She’d made up her mind to leave him, and she would do it – unless he stopped her. And there was only one way to do that, really.
He let her go.
She only slowed down at the portal, knowing that to travel through too quickly would risk complete evaporation. Just like the gateways between planes, going through the immaterial journey that was represented in Materium by this vast, blue curtain could be risky at top power. Full speed on the outside would mean she was experiencing vast swathes of time on the inside. Her essence could be lost, dissipated in time and space.
She barely spared a glare for the magisters as she emerged from the crackling, sorcerous portal – she saw a couple of them raise their hands in a half-hearted attempt to stop her, but none of them were fast enough to track her across the sky as she covered the short distance towards home.
She’d only been living with Irimar for a matter of five, almost six months now, but the house they shared was already home to her. She couldn’t go back to Father’s – she couldn’t face him, not anymore, not since finding out what he was really like. He had always been gentle, almost overbearingly-so, whenever he was in her presence. Her powers had, however, revealed to her a man complicit with the power-structures that kept the poor poor and the rich rich. His money was invested in, came from, the lucrative slave trade that took the ill-kept youth off Mund’s streets and promised them a better life, in Rhedal or Shagat or some other far-flung province. The truth was that, once outside the waters and territories of the Mundic Realm, these pitiful street-children with no parents or protectors, no surnames or skills, would be clapped in chains and sold to the highest bidder.
When she’d confronted him over it he merely spoke to her in the tone he always used, like she was still that good little girl, waiting for him on the steps of the bank. He denied everything, acted like she was confused, like she couldn’t possibly come close to understanding the reality of how the world worked.
The truth was that he was the one who didn’t understand the way the world worked. What the slave felt. The cruelty of the master displayed on his face as the whip fell on bare backs and legs. Even she couldn’t understand it, not really. But at least she knew this about herself, recognised her limitations. Perri pretended to the outside world to be a philanthropist with a few private investors, secretly using Lightblind’s bounties to fund her projects. It was her way of giving back, her way of making herself feel good.
She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t give away her identity without cutting ties with Father completely; and she did still love him, for his foolish kindness, the naivety of his trust in the structures that had allowed him to stay wealthy, become wealthier. No, if she exposed herself as a powerful magic-user he would attempt to monetise her abilities, insist on her investing her proceeds from her work as a champion in his own projects, and she would end up saying many things she’d later come to regret. She knew this for a fact, inescapable. Whether she coolly manipulated him or just screamed at him, she would come to regret it.
Because it would mean she would have to act. She would have to oppose him, fully, with all her might as an adult. And she couldn’t do that.
Not when he only had eight years left.
Irimar always chuckled at the way she still worried about what Father thought of her. He said humanity was one big family, that she had bigger concerns now. But the truth was that, in spite of all her incomprehensibly-vast powers, she was still scared of Father. She could never look down those avenues where he was disappointed in her. He’d done everything for her when she was a child, cared for her in a way many men in his position found impossible.
No, it was better this way. She’d asked him for independence, and he’d granted it. She’d made a point out of refusing to take a single servant from Father’s household, and instead hired her own maid, paying the close-lipped, hard-working girl, Savarre, with her own (relatively) clean money.
She lived with Irimar, and things were good, peaceful, between the intense moments of frenzied violence.
Yes, she still loved Father. She would bring him around to her way of thinking, some day… But not tonight. After the argument with her boyfriend – what had it been about again? – she wanted her own bed, the solitude of her thoughts.
No one was in – she’d given Savarre the day off for Zadhal-related reasons. Even with the residual effects of someone’s wizardry still coursing through her veins, she could feel that the cold morning was giving way to a cold afternoon. She went around stoking the fireplaces with emberwood that burnt for hours, so she wouldn’t have to get back up again. She might’ve been relatively nice and warm inside her skin, but that was no reason the house itself had to suffer – she could already see the way the banister’s future had improved just by lighting the first of the hearths… Plus, she’d certainly be cold by the time she next got out from under the covers.
Once she was done she went to the bedroom and undressed, found her warmest bedclothes and burrowed under the quilt, pulling the blankets up to her neck so that only her head upon the pillows was exposed. After a couple of minutes the almost clammy-feeling clothes and covers began to warm up, and the delicious feeling of peace stole over her.
It took conscious effort to follow the lines back, remember she’d just left Zadhal… left her lover, her friends, left them to…
She sat bolt upright.
What am I doing?
Someone had… someone had died… Rosedawn. Alandrica!
Perri went to swing her legs out of bed but before she finished the motion she cut it off, ending up twisting the blankets around herself. What had she been about to do?
It was because of him. Irimar. He had – he had killed –
No, not Irimar. Not the funny, clever young man she’d fallen for.
This was Timesnatcher‘s doing. The cold one. The one who saw it all and said nothing.
Her sense of propriety burned deep within her. She had to return to the fight. She had to.
It was only after the fourteenth failed attempt to get out of bed that Perri’s thoughts fell on the amulet she wore against her breast. She never took it off for fear of a subtle manipulation from a far-off enchanter – not when she bathed, not when she slept…
I’m enchanted, she realised. The thought came through first as though she’d comprehended something marvellous, and she felt the genuine smile of joy play across her lips.
That slowly became a frown.
I’m… enchanted?
She raised her hands to her neck to remove Lovebright’s chain, then rubbed the tight muscles there, and found a knot that sent her into paroxysms of bliss when she pressed it.
Irimar’s turn to do me when he gets home, she thought, feeling smug. It was always nice when it was your turn for the next back-rub.
* * *