Near-Forgotten Histories

Getting through the Teeth slowed them down, but not by much. A few sling salvos broke Kashmar's gate across the highway. The two hundred guards were easily run off, and they only caught a glimpse of a two-car train painted bright red tearing through their checkpoint. Taylor wasn't worried about them reporting the incursion: the Nexus train was pulled by an enhanced gurantor, and they would travel faster than the news of their arrival. Once they were well into Kashmar's territory, they stopped during the night and peeled away the bright red film from the cars (one for passengers, the other for appalons and cargo) to reveal a more common, beat-up, yellow-ochre layer of paint. Half the trains in Tenobre were painted that color, so Taylor hoped it would misdirect any pursuers.

The cadre's train traveled fastest at night and when they were far from other travelers when nobody could see them. When they rested they did so during the day. They changed their clothes from desert wear to dresses for women and breeches and tailed coats for men, comfortable but expensive wear the sons and daughters of wealthy merchants might wear for travel. Most of the bulwarks kept their brigandine but removed visible religious symbols so they looked like standard guards. Two of them, Milo and Mila, went without weapons or armor to pose as attendants. Taylor changed his hair to white and had Milo cut it short to resemble fur. It was customary for travelers who crossed each other on the highway to exchange news, and the cadre bound for Nexus had to appear as normal as possible. Rocketing past every other train would have attracted attention, but a brief exchange of news kept them inconspicuous as long as they weren't too friendly.

Everyone asked for "news from the south" by which they meant "news about the war." Their answer was always the same: if the Tyrant had any news from the desert he was keeping it to himself. Kashmar's populace looked forward to the victory parade and the day of feasting to come with it. It had only been a few weeks since Princeps Zaid took his army past the Teeth, so no news should be good news. When asked where they were from, they claimed (somewhat honestly) to hail from Lavradio, now separated from their homeland by conflict.

Books and papers arrived in multiple shipments via the ancient box. It was a clever device capable of gathering ambient spirit and storing it up to power itself, but one could also push spirit into it and use it as frequently as desired. Gonzo was already hard at work designing a Nexus equivalent and, with only minimal prodding from Taylor, thinking about how exchanged objects could be copied, intercepted, or blocked. Taylor wouldn't wait for someone outside of Nexus to figure it out first, but he wasn't ready to hand out easy answers to Gonzo just yet. It was good for the little genius to tackle challenges on his own, and there was always the chance he'd think of something original.

The loose papers and reports were mostly unhelpful. Taylor had a copy of the latest Shadow Council meeting (in a doubly-sealed envelope for his eyes only) wherein they mostly concerned themselves with threatening gem dealers in hopes they would stop buying Nexus gems. News from the battlefield was expected to be slow, but the complete lack of any news at all had rattled them. So, they changed their meetings from monthly to semi-monthly, to hear regular updates from Guardians Maia and Phrenos and a Grand Company representative, none of whom had enough to say to placate the firsts. Enclave disciples couldn't report in, not even by prayer, because they were all dead. The Grand Company's fleeing soldiers were too far away for news to have reached Kashmar, let alone anyone in Dace.

Still, one must leave room for surprises. The mercenaries could have another ancient communicator besides the one they got from Enclave, and Enclave still had its Hierarch. Just to keep everyone guessing, that week's sounding board broadcast featured an update on the state of the war. Bitter Spring had fallen and was destroyed. The Kashmari advance on Pashtuk was mired in desert fighting. The Grand Company had been seen in the western desert. All of it was true but vastly undersold the invasion's consummated failure.

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Kashmar's war against the Calique was still raging. Not even Lavradian royals knew the invaders had been smashed, and they were Anisca's family. Taylor wanted to strike at Enclave while they were still ignorant. Given the arrogance on display in the Shadow Council's transcripts, it wouldn't yet occur to the Firsts that Nexus could touch them.

Now who's being arrogant? Warned a voice in Taylor's head. These people aren't foolish. You have bags of tricks that let you fight them asymmetrically. What happens when you run out of ways to surprise them?

The historical texts gathered by Rector Mika were more interesting. The first was a memoir by Prelate Wenzolod of Grezable, which used to be an independent country but was ravaged by war during the era described by Scripture in the book Disciples and then annexed by its neighbor. Wenzolod had fought with and against his friend Bahram in various conflicts, long before Bahram was ever called a saint. Back then, disciples were prone to getting sucked into political conflicts. According to church lore, that was the chief reason Bahram centralized the church and decreed it wouldn't get involved in cross-border conflicts. No disciple should ever have to kill another.

According to Wenzolod, the real cause of those fights was access to underground cities. Some countries had ancient installations as dead as Sessimbra's, their reactor cores fully encased by failsafe glass. Other cities claimed their ancient facilities remained viable. Those with working reactors had no intention of sharing their limited space during the next peak cycle. By this time, there were fewer monsters, and life on the surface was bountiful. The generation who called themselves The Emergents was dying out, but they still retained political power. Those without working ancient facilities sought to capture one for the sake of their many-times-great-grandchildren.

Wenzolod believed the stories about active reactor cores to be a lie, designed to attract much-needed labor to their domains. He claimed that every ancient refuge was dead, the legacy of the ancients was spent, and the well of their benevolence had run dry. Tenobre's people would need to stand alone against the burning sun, without the ancients' help.

And that was why Bahram set a policy to confiscate, bury, or destroy every trace of ancient technology Enclave could lay its hands on. Better to force the world to invent new solutions for the next cycle than depend on technology nobody can understand or replicate. At the time, most of the world went along with his plan because the violence had to end. There was a brief period when Enclave took research seriously and tried to build up their knowledge from first principles. Bahram hid away some of the confiscated books in the hope that someday when later generations had enough knowledge of their own, they could be understood. There was even a Guardian Subcommittee to curate the collection.

Then came disaster: dementia. Bahram's mental decline set in suddenly and progressed rapidly. He refused to step down even as he missed meetings, forgot people's names, read the same page for an hour, and fell asleep during religious services. It escaped exactly nobody's notice he wasn't fit for anything most of the day, so they chose a minder to speak for his intent when the great man was sundowning. They chose his trusted, long-time friend Wenzolod, and started a tradition that would mutate in strange ways.

Wenzolod's memoir filled in a lot of gaps about the church's history and Bahram's true intent, but there was nothing about mandates, wardens, or origins. He liked to write about people, and he wasn't a practitioner.

The other book Taylor received was incomplete and never published: A History by Guardian Emory, who was promoted to Leadership under the second Hierarch, Bahram's successor. He saw firsthand how isolated the Hierarch became when they weren't allowed to talk directly to anyone. (Exactly why anyone thought it was a good idea to turn Bahram's need for an interlocutor into a stable tradition was never explained.) That isolation made it easy for an ambitious dean named Pinagar to seize many reins of power. After reading Emory's book, Taylor felt much of what went wrong with Enclave started with Dean Pinagar.

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As a practitioner, Pinagar had massive talent and took it upon himself to change the canon, adding prayers designed to control his fellow disciples. That implied he had access to the origin, yet Emory said nothing directly about what the origin was or where it might be hidden.

When the second Hierarch died, Dean Pinagar got his own spirit-rich candidate elected. Before the third Hierarch, Deans and their students handled the mandates under the Hierarch's supervision. The original four mandates were full-blown rituals that maintained Bahram's buildings, each in its own ceremony in its own season. By promoting a strong practitioner to Hierarch and making the Hierarch solely responsible for all the mandates, Pinagar contained a potential rival and offloaded some of his own work, in a single stroke.

Dean Pinagar and his puppet Hierarch were the people who set Enclave onto its more zealous course, persecuting shape-shifters, destroying Bahram's secret knowledge of the ancients, and taking a hard stance on adoption into the Five Families. About the only good thing to come out of the Pinagar era was the Alignment, the formal treaty that codified international norms and kept the peace. It surprised Taylor he had never heard of Dean Pinagar before, but the man seemed like the type to hide his hands while instigating massacres. Emory's book stopped suddenly and without explanation. Either he abandoned his project, or he died suddenly.

Pinagar also instituted the Wardens, but Emory didn't have much to say about them. Some of the loose papers Taylor received were excerpts from books that mentioned Warden Helen by name. The same woman might have been Warden since Pinagar's time, though the source of her long life wasn't explained. She led a small force that protected their Hierarch (or imprisoned her, depending on how you looked at it), enforced rules on Enclave grounds, and controlled the two gates segregating Enclave from the surrounding city.

There were a lot of rumors about the wardens having special powers, especially Warden Helen, but there wasn't one shred of evidence for any of it except the gatekeepers' uncanny ability to know the name of any practitioner who crossed through the gates, even if they had never met. When Taylor had passed through the gates for the first time, they had known him right away, even though he'd never set foot in Enclave. At the time, he thought they had been watching the Luminous Histories and had seen his entry. "Phillip the Younger was anointed a disciple on this day, in the wild, by Dean Garsharp, Sister Leila, and Brother Mobeen." He assumed they inferred his name from the fact he was a disciple whom they didn't recognize. But, he couldn't rule out some hidden abilty. If the wardens' power (if there was one) only applied to those passing through the gates, he didn't have a problem. But if they always knew the full roster of living practitioners, then they knew all of Enclave's disciples were dead, how many healers had defected, and they might be preparing for an attack. Taylor might be in for an actual fight.

There was a little more about the mandates, but not much. There used to be four of them in Bahram's time, expanded to six during Pinagar's, and now might be as high as twelve.

Maps of Enclave and its main buildings were near the bottom of the pile, drawn from memory by Vice-Rector Kasryn and other Enclave veterans who defected to Nexus. Some areas were known to exist but were missing details. Stairs went down into the Library's sub-basement, but nothing else was known about it, not even its general dimensions. The size and shape of Her Holiness's residence were known, as were the guard station and ground floor meeting rooms, but the interior spaces of her quarters were blank. Lecture Hall One (once known as the Phrontistery) was a maze of classrooms and other spaces for educating practitioners, but it was entirely well known. The basilica was also well-described except for a blank space between the Prelate's office and the temple's library. Nearby, in the paper's margin, Kasryn's pen had left a curious note. "It's an open secret this corridor is much longer than the adjacent rooms."

Taylor gave his fellow travelers a chance to read whatever interested them before he returned most of it to Red Tower, bundled with a note of thanks. He kept the maps and one last item of interest, a letter from Vice-Rector Kasryn to Guardian Maia. Kasryn thought Maia could still be brought to their side because she didn't know Maia was involved with the Shadow Council. That was still a secret to everyone except Rector Mika, Anisca, and the scribes in the Quiet Room.

In the hours remaining before they arrived in Unity City, Taylor contemplated Bahram's decisions that bugged him more and more the longer he thought about it. Why did he design the four most important buildings of his institution to require large infusions of spirit, just to keep them standing? Mistress Manu, his elderly Lector of Architecture, would have had a fit. If it wasn't sheer hubris or stupidity, then Bahram must have had a purpose. Whatever his failings, Bahram was intentional. He didn't do things just because. Maybe it was about the ritual of it all: four buildings, four mandates, four seasons, four reminders Enclave would only stand for as long as they nurtured their spirit and applied it for the common good. As institutional rituals went, it made sense. But the institution couldn't survive having so many lies baked into its foundation.

The other obvious insanity was the way Bahram restricted his practitioners. He intentionally limited the number of disciples by claiming the Five Families had a monopoly on strong spirit. He hamstrung his practitioner corps by creating a 'healer' class that restrained their power and access to prayers. It might not have mattered back when cursed monsters were extinct, but Bahram knew the future would be different. He had to know he was creating a future shortage of disciples.

When he wasn't reading or sleeping, Taylor spent his time filling gems, recovering spirit, and filling gems again. He felt lucky they brought along the emerald rod, the one he emptied to harness a haboob and march lightning over the Princeps' army (best not to think about the circle of dead) because his spirit was growing fast, and his body couldn't keep up. He filled the twenty gems in only two days, and if he didn't have the massive emerald he'd have nowhere to put it all. He could compress his spirit, cram it into the small volume of his body, but that made his spirit volatile whenever his emotions ran high. Peshmera had done something to him when they summoned him.

But that wasn't the only time his spirit had grown out of control, was it? He had a lot of problems in the months after he was assassinated, but at the time he'd assumed it was post-traumatic stress and puberty. He never considered it might be a side-effect of resurrection. He added it to his list of topics for research in case it was more than a mere coincidence. What if he could replicate the effect without calling people over vast distances or killing off disciples who first read Sandim's Return? There might be a way to power up disciples, but he doubted it would be safe. And there were ethical issues. Unearned power was more corrosive than power earned.

Those who traveled to Unity City from the south, including nearly every foreign traveler, got their first view of it from afar, on a road that came over the Lamia Hills before descending onto the plains around the city. Some enterprising person had built a rest stop on that last hill, with a roadhouse for the foot weary, complete with table service at the perfect spot from which to observe the distant city. It was a full day's walk from there to Unity City, but Enclave's architecture was so grand that even from such a distance one could identify specific domed buildings tiled in vivid blue, rows of white rectangular edifices roofed in red clay shingle, and a sprawling park. Those central features formed a perfect circle bounded by the wall separating Enclave from the city. By comparison, the remainder of Unity City was constructed of children's toys spilled around for miles in all directions. Through Nexus goggles, Taylor could tell sections of the city appeared well-planned while others were a jumble of irregular streets and blocks.

First-time visitors took hot jota on the tavern's chilly but stunning overlook. If they were lucky enough to travel by gurantor train, their caravans gave them just enough time to browse a small store of snacks and commemorative pottery stamped with Pandosia View, the road house's name, and an image of Enclave's great basilica. It was a classic tourist trap: to not capitalize on such a location would go against human nature. Many souvenirs were on sale, including a painted saucer (again depicting Bahram's Basilica) with words embossed and painted around the rim.

"My parents visited Unity City," declared the script, "and all I got was a painted plate."