Enclave's Origin (IV)

They had to wait, receiving updates by link. First, for the explosion at the Pinnacle. Then, Thalia had to deliver Taylor's message to one of the Guardians. Maia needed time to travel to Enclave and arrive at the Residence. During that long interval, Hypha discovered the deceased Katerina's secret trove of banned books, piled them into tall columns, and had Darius "rescue" them with a summoning.

"Isn't this a little too convenient?" Darius asked over the link. They could hear the metallic clink of disks as he pulled the right one from the pile. "I feel like nobody will have to take long trips by train, ever again."

Hypha was obviously pleased she didn't have to cart a hundred kilos of books across Enclave without being seen. "If they have the spirit to spend, why would they? This solves our biggest Game of Prelates problem, too!"

"That's right! In the game, it should be a free action instead of costing movement!"

"There still has to be a resource tax to account for spirit spent," Taylor reminded them.

Darius laughed. "Compared to moving you between worlds, it's cheap."

As soon as Taylor proved the circle was safe to use, even across unimaginable distances, Darius and Hypha demanded medallions for themselves. Plus spares. Taylor had guidelines for those kinds of requests.

Don't do for others what you can teach them to do in under an hour.

Don't teach beginners what can be ably taught by seniors.

Since they were perfectly capable of mixing and shaping metals with their disciple abilities, Taylor taught them about inscriptions and made them create tokens for themselves. Darius was stuck managing the circle and a stack of medallions, but he didn't seem to mind. Watching tall stacks of books appear out of nowhere had a special appeal all its own.

Noora's token was perched on a modified sounding board in Darius' warehouse, so they could hear what passed between her and Maia. The disciples all heard the conversation about Trueheart's book, and Maia's misunderstanding of the day's events. Meanwhile, Darius moved the circle (it was easier than moving all the books) so it was clear. Finally, they heard the words they were waiting for.

"We are ready."

"Moving Noora's token to summoning circle," said Darius, cutting off audio from the Residence, "and transporting in three … two … one … " There was a whoosh of arrival, followed by the Voice's question.

"Where is Phillip?"

"Hold on," said Darius. There was random noise while he laid his link on the sounding board and switched it to conference mode. "Your Holiness, Her Holiness is here."

"Good afternoon," Taylor said through the link, intentionally omitting their titles.

"Her Holiness requests you not do anything destructive for at least half an hour. If you're doing what she thinks you are, the central buildings will collapse. Maia is evacuating them as we speak. Please give her time." Taylor knew this already, but he didn't see a reason to confess to his spying.

"Hypha, find a rooftop and watch the evacuation's progress. We can give them more time if they need it."

"Yes, Your Holiness!" Everyone was being more formal with outsiders included in the conversation. Having two Holinesses would get old fast, but Noora's tenure was about to end. One of Noora's options was to remain in Enclave and rebuild the church — without practitioners. As long as she didn't make war on Nexus and stopped calling them heretics, Taylor wouldn't interfere. By choosing escape, she was giving up all hope of that. But Taylor informed his people to keep calling Noora by her title until the origin was destroyed or she said otherwise. They were bringing down her world, but they could be courteous about it.

"Your Holiness, the keys." Alice rattled the head priest's ring of keys in her hand. "They'll come looking if they're not where they belong. And the novice …" Right. An evacuation meant the temple would be searched. The novice should be staged by the 'drunken' clerics, splashed with wine, and the keys returned. The searchers would encounter the locked scriptorium, see the keys in the priest's possession, and assume the room was empty. Taylor willed the Sanctuary prayer to end so Alice could get in and out.

"Take care of it." To Mialta and Noora he said, "I'm glad we can prevent unnecessary bloodshed." He paused, unsure how to phrase his next warning. It seemed Noora didn't want to say the word 'origin' out loud. "Have you considered that, if this works, it will break the link between you?"

"We love each other like sisters. But we have been in each other's pockets for long enough."

The first step to destroying the origin was to stop feeding it. The origin's main room was like a pump drawing spirit from Enclave's territory. The spirit was compressed until its density was high enough to soak into the wizard stone. There was an equilibrium at work: as the origin expended its energy, it was willing to absorb spirit at a lower density. As the origin became fuller, a higher density of spirit was required to keep filling it. When Bahram could count his practitioners in hundreds instead of dozens, the main chamber would have been hazardous to humans, and the stone would be mostly filled. Now, with so few practitioners in Enclave, Taylor's best estimate was the origin was a quarter full. (Maybe less, but it was hard to tell when he was reluctant to touch the substance directly.)

Milo produced the portable inscription kit, which featured grease pencils laced with mana-reactive powders. Taylor drew two inscriptions: one was a circle around the origin, while the other was a line of symbols that flowed into a branching tree-like network connected to the circle. The circle's many glyphs created a barrier to block spirit from reaching the origin, while the outer inscription stole ambient spirit from the room to power the circle. When Taylor willed the paired inscriptions into life, the silver fire floating everywhere in the chamber retreated from the wizard stone.

A careful search revealed the source of the spirit-pumping action was prayers engraved on the vault's ribs, scratched in very small letters. Taylor had experimented with that idea, back when he belonged to Enclave, but never with any success. He concluded at the time, it wasn't supported by Enclave's system. But the origin's chamber was telling him otherwise. Maybe he didn't have the necessary rank, or engraving only worked with certain prayers. Certainly, what he was reading in the stone arches wasn't from the Book of Prayers or any other part of the Unity bible. It wasn't in the openly published prayers, or a cryptic prayer hidden in other parts of scripture. It was an entirely new text, a total secret from Enclave's practitioners.

As interesting as it was, soon it wouldn't matter. Taylor used the room's energy for his own purposes: drilling holes into the floor, deep enough to reach into bedrock. He hardened the stone walls of his narrow shafts and left the spoil in piles around the origin's chamber. The mysterious room became a hazardous construction zone with piles of broken rocks and dirt beside holes wide enough to drop a foot into.

"I can hear them moving around outside," said Alice. "Someone's clearing the building." Everything would be fine, so long as the priest and his juniors remained asleep. When the searchers were done with the temple, they could move the Warden's body outside, away from Inez's tomb.

It took much longer than half an hour to assemble all of Enclave. Apparently, the senior staff didn't like being summoned. Students and servitors tried to sneak out of the gates and skip the meeting. This gave Taylor the gift of extra time to study Enclave's origin, one hand held a few centimeters above it, reading the intent of its maker. At the origin, where Bahram had carved his ideas into the fabric of the world, a skilled practitioner could properly plumb his meaning.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The prayer aspects weren't that different from the Nexus Book of Prayers, except for Vow of Obedience and its related prayers. On the other hand, the institutional magic was interesting. Bahram lacked any grounding in physics or information theory beyond what his intuition told him, but he nonetheless built up the necessary layers put a ring around Enclave, and draw its ambient spirit to this room. There were other powers, too. The Hierarch could know the name and location of any practitioner, no matter where they were on the continent. The foundation maintained the existence of the four main buildings and the outer wall, but not the auxiliary features of each one. Somewhere, a stone tablet displayed a roster of names: every soul within Enclave's walls. But the tablet was missing, long lost by a previous Hierarch. However, instructions for creating a new roster were embedded in the foundation. The warden's powers were enumerated also, and included resistance to great pain and injury so they could fight beyond human endurance. Taylor saw the Warden position was currently empty, and resisted the temptation to appoint himself. There were oaths involved, and Taylor hoped to shed some of his responsibilities instead of gaining new ones.

He could also kill anyone inside Enclave's wall with a few words. Taylor wouldn't even need to spend his spirit to carry out such an assassination. He only had to say some words and Enclave's foundation would take care of the rest. His target's ending would be flashy, painful, and a message to anyone who defied him.

There is a lot here. I need more time to study it.

But there wasn't time. Nexus needed to leave before word of Pinnacle's destruction spread too widely. Anyone who followed the smoke would have encountered survivors by now and were returning to Unity City at top speed. Nexus had already lingered for longer than it should.

I can undermine the foundation without destroying it. Collapse the buildings, evict Noora as Hierarch, bury the foundation, and return another day to study it in detail. Let them think the origin is destroyed. Nobody has to know. Precious few people would even know to look.

All of that was true, but there wasn't anything astonishing in the foundation. It was somewhat lacking in structure and could benefit from better theoretical concepts at its roots, similar to the Inscription Arts. The only amazing thing about it was the hazardous quantity of wizard stone Bahram had employed. The only mystery was where he got it from. Sadly, the origin didn't keep history. It only twisted reality.

Still, aren't I repeating his mistake by destroying the past? How many lies will I have to tell to cover this up? Kettle, meet pot.

Why should he cover up anything? Once the origin was gone, he could take full credit for destroying it. Enclave's war of extermination against Nexus wasn't a secret, and neither was the Nexus resistance. Enclave had to end and destroying its origin was the only permanent solution.

It's an irreversible act. It deserves careful consideration, not a mad rush to the finale.

Was it a rush, though? Taylor had been aiming for this moment for months. Nothing so major had changed that he needed to reconsider his decisions. With Enclave gone, Nexus would take its place and guide the future of Tenobre.

Ambitious, much? I bet Bahram told himself the same thing.

Nexus didn't deny cursed monsters, the population decline, the sun cycle, or the ancient failing retreats. Enclave couldn't meet the future while keeping Bahram's idiotic secrets.

Bahram had his own circumstances. Is it right to be so hard on him?

Those circumstances didn't absolve him of his mistakes any more than Taylor's would be excused by his many inheritors.

There goes that ego again, filling the future with grateful descendants. Maybe they'll build statues of me, too. Am I sure I'm not Bahram reincarnated? He tore down everything in his way, too.

These are not my thoughts.

No, they aren't. But I almost had you!

One thing Bahram understood very well was the human mind. He knew how to bend a person's thoughts toward a desired goal. Why negotiate with someone when their pride, doubts, and intellect could do the hard work of convincing them for you?

Taylor opened his eyes and looked around him at the waiting bulwarks, tall piles of earth beside narrow shafts plunging deep into bedrock, the shrouded figure of Inez nearby, the foundation sitting silently in its starry mystery.

"Bring me the Warden's sword."

We can still think of more reasons not to do this. Shouldn't we exhaust all possibilities before committing such a destructive act? We don't know all the consequences.

There is poison at the root truth of Enclave, and you're part of it: Bahram's secrets and the myth of Five Families.

The Warden's sword was in Taylor's hands. It was longer than his own, but all its weight was in the hilt. The blade weighed practically nothing at all. As he pushed spirit through the hilt, its blade changed, becoming less of a physical object and more like a separate plane of existence, a hole inside reality. Words were written on the cross-guard. "Never shall rejoin what I have sundered." He raised it high above his head.

Wait! We just thought of a five-point plan for rehabilitating Enclave. It would only take a few years, and you won't have to re-negotiate the Alignment!

Not a chance. This conversation is over.

He put his fully enhanced strength and speed behind the blow. The blade's first contact with the origin creased it but did not cut, defacing the top and causing it to bulge at the sides. Taylor sharpened his intent for his next blow. It wasn't enough to strike. He had to cut.

The next stroke cleaved into the gold-flecked surface like it was gelatin, and time slowed to a crawl while strands of old intents and long-practiced prayers came undone, snapping and cracking through his extended senses. Three centuries of ties binding healers, practitioners, Hierarchs, all the words of all the prayers (open, cryptic, and secret), and the land Enclave encircled as its own, split under the Warden's blade. Hawsers of reality became ten thousand sundered strands of idle notions, their thready existences no more meaningful than desert flies who took wing for a day to mate and die.

The origin's intents ran deep, as any origin must, and Taylor's time-slowed swing hewed until it found doubt near the center of Bahram's work. Even that old saint wasn't sure his church was for the best, just the best he could conceive of. He knew his work was flawed, but the flaws made it work. His church would keep the peace during the long nadir of the sun, when living was so easy that nations thought to wage wars for trivial gains in territory and gold.

Taylor continued to follow through. He kept cutting beyond those doubts where lay the heart: Fate. It squatted in the center of Enclave's origin, an alien larva warping the world around it. Fate. Taylor's least favorite magic. Enclave would serve its purpose and then come to an end. For that purpose, a weapon was made and set to find the hand destined to wield it at the end.

Angry now, Taylor's swing drove toward the Fate that brought him there, to cut it with a personal vengeance. Everything that happened to him, everything he'd done, all of it was warped by Fate. Every decision he'd ever made since the day he was born into this life was suspect. Could he even say his life was his own, to do with as he pleased? Fury he had never known (not in this life) drove the Warden's blade to cut the knot of Fate, ending in the ground.

Taylor stood before the cubic stone, now split in half, its stars extinguished, as time began to flow again. The weapon in his hand was nothing more than a length of greenish steel, its purpose fulfilled. The rock before him was raw wizard stone.

"Give this to Inez." He handed off the dis-enchanted blade and took up his own to finish the work. With mighty strokes of bronze and magic, he cut the cube into four-sided rods. When he ran low on spirit, he drew it in from his surroundings. The bulwarks wore gloves as they hauled the sections away and dropped them into the prepared shafts, then backfilled the holes. As they worked, the building above them groaned with ominous complaints. Taylor shaped the floor to look like it hadn't been touched.

Should some future explorer or archaeologist find their way down to the origin's chamber, they would find a well-proportioned burial chamber for a single warrior, her weapons, and the sword of her conquered enemy. They would find tokens on her body, too. A metal flask of spirits from Otavio. A pouch of jota from Milo. Her favorite travel rations from Mila. A fine whetstone from Alice.

Inez had once told them a story about her days as a young knight when she wanted, more than anything, a medal signifying her valor. She craved recognition and dreamt of silver devices hanging from white and purple ribbons around her neck. Time and again she put her life on the line for her kingdom, only to see her king gift the much-desired awards to better-born knights of lesser ability. One day, she climbed the Central Palace steps to confront her superiors over the injustice. Instead of a medal, she received a promotion and acceptance into the Royal Guard. She joked that all her valor brought her was more work, and never the medal she so craved.

Taylor made one for her now, from a gold and silver amalgam called electrum, shaped into curving antlers that formed a circle with four stars in the center, each with seven points. Milo handed him a length of white and purple braided string, hastily made from his sewing kit, and Taylor gently fastened the honor around her neck. He had to look at her to do it, and the tears threatened to flood his vision again, but it looked good on her. Like it always belonged there.

They left the underground tomb behind them, and Taylor collapsed the spiral stairway. As they exited the temple, its groans grew louder but it didn't fall, not until Taylor pointed at a section of external wall that should be bearing much of the dome's extraordinary weight, and had Otavio cave it in. Otavio took a running start, charged at the wall, and shouldered it like a battering ram. The wall shattered, and the dome above it started to crumble as Otavio skipped back. The dome came down first, starting from one side, and the tons of pressure, shifting and twisting, broke the teetering structure from one end to the other until Bahram's Basilica was a pile of stone.