Esar, Age 14

23 Years Ago

"By the time I found out my mother was alive, she was already dead."

It was the first time Esar had seen any mention of Triana's mother, but he soon understood why. Triana had known next to nothing of her mother until she was an adult. All she had known was that the Tresuan Lida had been smuggled to Norana and given birth to a daughter, then died from the stress of the journey and birth. In eloquent, tragic prose, Triana recorded the truth that she'd discovered.

Lida had survived the birth, but she'd tried to smother her daughter at the earliest opportunity. The healers decided she was mad, unfit to care for her child, and she spent the rest of her life in the hospital. No treatments could restore her mind; the methods that they used in Bhadrat to push the Tresuan's powers to their fullest had done terrible, irreparable damage.

"That is why I believe it was compassion, not madness, that drove her to such desperate action. She never could believe that she was free—could never truly be free, after what had been done to her. And she thought that if she smothered me in my cradle, at least that would spare me the same sort of suffering that she had endured all her life."

"Are you finished?" Alzyn asked. She stood over Esar as he absorbed the words he'd just read.

"Yes," he said softly.

"Good. Let's go."

It was still early in the day, and Esar hadn't expected their research to come to an end so soon.

"Go where?" he asked, already following his mother up the stairs.

"You'll see."

His mother seemed so mysterious to those who didn't know her as well as Esar did. They thought her evasive answers concealed weighty secrets that they weren't ready to know. But her son knew better. What his mother truly wanted to hide was just how little she really knew.

Alzyn was indeed one of the best Tresuan in generations, perhaps even the strongest since Triana herself. But there was still only so much that even she could see and control. His mother was excellent at acting like she'd known something all along, but she was seldom as certain about anything as she claimed to be. Her knowledge of the future always had gaps, and her intuition wasn't perfect.

Esar followed her all the way to the garden. They hurried along the familiar paths, through the woods where he'd met the boy yesterday, to a small fountain that he'd barely noticed in passing before.

"This is it," Alzyn said.

"This is what?"

Why had she brought him to this place? The plaza was in a state of picturesque ruin. The forest had crept up to surround it in the years since it had been constructed, and moss bubbled up through the cracks in the stone floor. The fountain at its center poured into a basin stained green by algae.

His mother didn't answer, of course. She just poked around and started peeling the moss off the fountain frame.

"Um, I don't think you're supposed to—"

"Come and help me with this. There could be inscriptions underneath." Alzyn kept on digging at the moss with her fingers, making little progress.

"There has to be a better way to do this," Esar said. He tried to pry up the whole layer of moss instead of just scraping at it, and his mother copied his method. It worked in places, where the moss peeled off like a mat, but was stubbornly difficult in others.

"I found something," Esar announced. He and his mother cleared the stone around the marking, but there was only a single symbol. It was a numeral, stylized but recognizable: the number four.

"So there must be at least four," Alzyn said.

"Other fountains?" Esar asked.

"It's not just a fountain, it's a door. I think that Vas was trying to build their own network of gates, like the ones the Asprai use to travel between enclaves. They've got number one at the university, but where are the other two? Or more, if they're out there? Were they ever functional?"

While his mother continued to clear away moss, Esar took a few steps back to look at the whole fountain once more. There were carvings on the face of it, too, but it was hard to see more than that with the water running over them.

"What does this have to do with the constructs awakening?" Esar asked.

"I don't know yet, exactly. But I know that this matters."

Another one of her hunches. Esar could barely manage a proper dream, but his mother would just get a feeling about something, and she was almost always right.

Esar squinted at the patterns. They didn't look the same as the ones in the book with all the seals, but there were some similarities.

"It's not a seal, is it?"

"All the seals are documented. None as far south as Norana."

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"Why don't you have them turn the water off, and get someone who knows channel patterns to take a look at it."

"Already been done. I've seen the diagram of the channel patterns and talked to Dacrine about them. They don't make any sense. There are pieces or real patterns, but they don't add up to anything we know of. It's not ceram, either, just stone. It's an enigma, something we've forgotten. Something amazing. Oh!"

Alzyn had been kneeling at the back of the fountain, examining something. Esar circled around to see what had made her exclaim—the tops of a few letters, scratched into the stone just at the ground level. His mother scraped away more dirt with her fingers until the inscription was legible.

It was the same sort of archaic script that he'd been reading in the archival documents, so he could read it well enough. But it didn't make sense.

" 'Chebret was here?' Did somebody vandalize it?"

"Chebret's not a name, it's an honorific. It means 'honored ancestor' and they only used it for the deceased. In Bhadrat, not Vas." Alzyn laughed. "So this was her gravestone!"

"Whose gravestone?" Esar asked. He knew she wasn't talking about Triana; they'd been to her gravesite already.

"Lida. They reburied her with Triana, but her original burial was here. And everyone has been digging up the wrong grave."

Esar shivered. His mother sounded far too gleeful about such a macabre subject.

"You're not going to try to dig this up with your hands, are you?" he asked.

Alzyn looked at her grubby hands and wrinkled her nose. "Of course not. Don't be stupid. We'll go get shovels—and help."

A short time later, Esar was turning over the earth behind the fountain with a shovel, along with his mother and a couple of bewildered-looking students she'd commandeered into joining them. To her credit, Alzyn rolled up her sleeves and worked just as hard as the rest of them, but the progress was still slow, and came to a halt completely when a woman in a devoted belt ran out to confront them.

"What is the meaning of this?" The red-faced woman directed her ire at the Tresuan.

"Ah, Rachild, you received my message?" Alzyn replied cordially. "I believe we are on the brink of an incredible discovery."

"You're about to discover what happens when someone defaces Sanctuary property. I ought to have you escorted from the premises. And you two ought to know better," she added, addressing the students that Alzyn had bullied into helping them. They now seemed to be trying to disappear into the foliage.

Alzyn replied with perfect serenity. "I believe that an artifact that belonged to my ancestors has been concealed here. My intent is only to retrieve it, and then return the ground to its previous state."

"Are you an idiot? Look at the damage you've done already! Do you think you can fix it just by lumping the dirt back into the hole? And look what you've done to the moss!"

Esar folded his hands on top of his shovel and leaned against them to hide his mouth, so his smile wouldn't be so obvious. He couldn't talk back to his mother, but it felt good to see someone else do so.

Now cracks were beginning to show in Alzyn's patience. "Madame Gardener, let me assure you that I have made a donation to this Sanctuary that will more than cover the cost of repairs to any of your precious dirt."

"Oh, yes, Madame Tresuan." Rachild mocked her exalted tone. "You would be the sort who thinks every problem will disappear if you just throw enough money at it. No respect for the time and effort and hard work that goes into maintaining a garden of this scale."

"At least half of that hard work, I'm sure, goes into maintaining this tiny patch here, hidden behind a grubby old fountain."

"If you had sent me a proper request for permission, instead of a mere declaration of your intent, I probably would have granted it. Instead, you come into my domain and start destroying—"

"I have leave from the Abbess to seek what I came to find," Alzyn interrupted with a toss of her hand.

"Yes, and the Abbess has to make nice with every rich pile of manure who tosses a few coins into the offering box. Thank Rith I am not required to grovel." She smoothed her frizzy brown hair and sneered at the hole where Esar stood. "You've done your damage, and I know you won't quit until you have your way, so dig. But you won't make these students an accessory to this desecration. Dig on your own, Madame Tresuan."

The students hesitated, looking to the master gardener as if they expected a scolding.

"Drop your shovels and you won't be punished."

The shovels clattered to the ground and the students made a hasty departure. Esar wished he could do the same, but there was no such easy escape for him.

He worked in silence while his mother fumed.

"Such a peaceful place, Norana. Such a lovely place. Away from the world. No constructs can reach you there. You can pretend nothing has changed. Forget your worries and find peace in the Sanctuary. Do they really think they're safe here? This is just the beginning. They won't be able to hide here forever . . ."

Eventually she ran out of complaints, or at least breath to spare. Esar drew on vitricity to keep his muscles going as his body's natural strength waned. Vitricity couldn't spare him the discomfort of the midday heat, or prevent his clothing from becoming soaked with sweat. He lost track of time, lost track of everything except for shovelful after shovelful of thick, heavy dirt.

Perhaps it was exhaustion, or the deep monotony of the work, but Esar began seeing things. There was a little flash or spark of light at the edge of his vision. It vanished when he tried to look straight at it, but it would be back a moment later, never appearing in quite the same place.

His mother placed a bottle of water in his hand. Esar hadn't noticed her leave to retrieve it, but he drained it gratefully in a few gulps. With better hydration, he could think again. He and his mother worked side-by-side in the hole they'd dug for themselves, as they had since coming to Norana. Sometimes he tried to tell himself that he wasn't at all like his mother, but that was a lie. When it came down to it, they were both cut from the same cloth. Self-absorbed, selfish people with an exaggerated idea of their own importance. The only difference was that Esar could see the truth of the matter more clearly than she did.

Unfortunately that knowledge didn't give him any insight into how to correct it. I wouldn't be any better as a parent than she is, Esar realized. Maybe even worse.

Still turning over nothing but dirt, they widened their pit. At least they hadn't come across a coffin, or—even worse—a skeleton. Supposedly, the body had been moved long ago, and they wouldn't find any human remains here. But the fact remained that they were digging up a grave.

A chill swept through Esar, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw his mother, swathed in morning gray, flickering like one of the sparks that had been taunting him.

"It's a cenotaph. An empty grave. Nothing remains."

The vision consumed him so completely that he didn't even realize that his shovel had struck something solid. His mother noticed first, and rushed over—in her sweat-soaked, grimy clothing, not the gray robes of a mourner—to begin digging with just her fingers again. She uncovered something flat and black, the top of a box about as long as Esar's foot.

"This is it! It was all worth it. At last . . ." His mother babbled on, overflowing with excitement. Esar watched her dully, unable to retain what she said. He didn't even care what was concealed in that box. He only hoped that what he'd experienced wasn't a premonition of his own death.