Once more, I found myself flung helplessly to the ground, but at least this time, the ice surrounding me actually cushioned my fall, and I was able to look around. I was back in the ritual room I’d seen before, and a quick glance downward showed me that the heltharvis had been busy indeed. The ritual I lay in the center of had been heavily altered, and now hazy close spirits hovered above it, tethered to the ritual, no doubt to provide extra power—and to shield the heltharvis’ mind in case I somehow resisted it again. I reached out to one tentatively, seeing if I could grab it and draw it into myself, but my thoughts and will hit an invisible wall surrounding me as a circle buried in the ritual lit up. I pushed at it and thought that I might be able to get through it with a little bit of time—not that the heltharvis was going to give that to me. At least, not judging from the hard expression on her face as she walked into the room and stopped outside the diagram.
“I’m not certain how you managed to escape my spirit’s grasp,” she said succinctly, lifting her hands out to her sides, “but I’m certain that you could do the same to the ice spirits holding you with a little time. Fortunately, that’s something you no longer have.”
Power flared in her hands, and I lay there helplessly as her ritual ignited. Energy rolled within it, draining out of the close spirits and flowing through the lines and curves, drawing inexorably closer to me. Pain flared inside me as the light reached me, and something slid into me. If the ritual before had been a scalpel, slicing away my spirits, this was a dagger, hacking painfully into me. I gritted my teeth, but a groan slipped from me as the ritual carved into me and cut out the spirit of Larlauga. The blade sank in again, and the hunk of energy I’d taken from the spirit of Aldhyor flowed out of me, chopped free by the ungentle blade. A moment later, the ritual’s power ebbed and faded, and the woman lowered her hands with a triumphant grin.
“I would apologize for the pain,” she said, “but not only don’t I care, it’s your own fault. Had you simply complied earlier, it would have been far easier for you—for us both.” She waved a hand at me, and the ice holding me shattered, while the stone filling my mouth flowed away, leaving me spitting but at least able to breathe and talk.
She took a deep breath and lifted one hand, and I saw a shimmer of silver float into a ball above her palm as she summoned the spirit of Lerlauga. “So much trouble just for this,” she said with a contented sigh before looking over at me and speaking in the language I’d learned from her before. “I repeat what I said before: this has been interesting. I’d forgotten how resourceful our kind are, even one as obviously inexperienced as you.”
“You’ve met other Inquisitors?” I asked in the same tongue, pushing myself to a sitting position. “I would have thought that in an infinite Doorverse, the odds of running into one are beyond tiny.”
“A naïve and incorrect application of the relevant statistics,” she smiled at me thinly. “While the number of Doorworlds may be countably infinite, most of those hold no interest for the Powers. They’re either already under dominion, too stable to affect, or lack the power to be worth an Inquisitor’s time. That means that only a relatively small number of worlds and short periods of time on those worlds matter, so it’s not uncommon to run into another Inquisitor trying to steer the world into their patron’s grasp.”
“Is that what you’re doing here?” I asked, rising slowly to my feet. My legs trembled and shook, and my whole body felt weak. “How does draining a big chunk of the spirits of this world and kicking them all out into the void help your Power, exactly?”
She gazed at me with a sudden expression of respect. “You deciphered my intent—or your SARA did. Interesting.” She paused for a moment, then shrugged. “Yes, you are correct. The summoning will draw every spirit in the Haelendi, including the one to which the Great Bargain is tied, and bind them into the flawless crystal. Then, I’ll cast them into Enverthen.”
“Okay, but why? What do you get out of it?”
“Personally? I get to leave this miserable, ice-ridden world by completing my mission. My patron, on the other hand, gets what every Power wants: souls.” She gave me another thin smile. “You see, Inquisitor, this world is somewhat—cut off from the Powers. Thanks to their great spirits, at least, or First Spirits, or whatever you want to call them shielding the world from outside influence. As it stands, when a person dies on this world, the great spirits claim their soul, feeding on it to grow stronger and using that power to strengthen the barrier, this Enverthen that shrouds them. I will overload that barrier and pierce it, allowing the Powers to claim souls from it once more.”
“And what happens to the world when you suck that much magic from it?” I asked dryly. “You know that outer circle can’t be intact. In fact, I destroyed one of the ships meant to lay it out myself. I’m pretty sure that whole section of the circle never got done, despite what the patriarch thinks.”
“Oh? How interesting,” she said curiously. “That never made it into the reports.” She snorted contemptuously. “Not that I would expect it to. That society punishes failure quite severely, especially at the higher ranks. It’s all part of their belief in contention and conflict.”
“With that circle broken, the focusing array will keep drawing power,” I pointed out. “You’ll drain the energy and spirits from half this continent, maybe more.”
“Irrelevant to my mission. My task is to pierce the Enverthen barrier, and I’ll do that. What happens afterward is none of my concern.” She tapped her lower lip thoughtfully. “However, the circle being breached is an opportunity that’s hard to ignore. With all that power and the ojaini as a focus, I could unleash a ritual of chaining that would spread across a large part of their nation. It would obliterate their ability to use magic and destroy their technology.”
“You could what?” I asked in disbelief.
“Oh, yes. It’s a simple matter of sympathetic bonds that I’m sure your SARA can explain to you. The point is, it would cripple Oikithikiim technology. Without that, they would have no ability to wage war on the Menskallin, no matter what their perverse culture of conflict might demand.”
“Have you every used that ritual on an Okithikiim?” I asked calmly despite the sudden wave of nausea in my stomach, one that had nothing at all to do with my Sense Imbalance ability.
“Not yet, no. I was thinking of performing it on that idiot patriarch for the way he’s treated me. I take it you have?”
“I’ve seen it done, yes. It doesn’t cut the spirits away from them; it kills them. Painfully. I watched it happen on that beach by the Northern Sea.”
“Truly? How interesting!” Her eyes lit up. “Then that will be a perfect solution, Inquisitor. I strip the Menskallin of their spirits and valskabs, forcing them to develop actual technologies to survive, and rid them of their enemy at the same time. Thank you for the suggestion!”
“You’ll kill an entire species when you don’t even care about the result?” I asked disbelievingly.
“Call it vengeance of sorts for the treatment I suffered while learning Henguki from the Oikithikiim. They treat their ‘Redeemed Elders’ as little more than slaves, you know. They lock them away, forbid them to touch the spirits, strip them of their offspring to keep them from forming familial ties, and prevent them from traveling, owning property, or making any decisions about their own welfare.” Her eyes flashed angrily as she spoke. “The years I spent there, learning the secrets of their magic, were very unpleasant. Life in a gilded cage is still life in a cage, after all. I consider this fair payment for that.”
She waved a hand in the air. “None of that matters, though. For all I care, the ceremony could cause a chain reaction that destroys all the spirits in this world, leaving it a dead husk. It won’t affect the success of my mission.”
“You think your patron will be happy with that?” I chuckled. “They want a world of souls, not a lifeless ball of rock.”
“That’s even more irrelevant,” she said flatly. She must have caught the surprised look on my face because her smile turned colder. “What, you think that we Inquisitors all blindly support our patrons? Not in the least. I complete my missions for the power it grants me, nothing more.”
“You spent decades in this world, just to accumulate a little extra power?” I asked dubiously.
“More than a little, but essentially, yes. What are decades to me? To any of us?” She shrugged again. “I’ve seen your sigil. You’ve been one of our number for, what? Thirty or forty years, to have completed the number of missions you have. I’ve roamed the Doorverse for well over a century, and each success brings me closer to my ultimate goal.”
“Which is?”
She straightened. “This conversation is boring me. You performed your service for me well, Inquisitor, bringing me the spirit I needed. I might have had to convince the damned Oikithikiim to wait another year without it, and I hate dealing with them. For that service, I’ll spare your life.” She stepped back away from me, and a glowing barrier suddenly sprang up at the edge of the circle.
“You’re imprisoning me here?” I asked curiously.
“Yes. And yes, I know that you can probably escape this, but without spirits, it will take you days. I suggest you not waste your time or effort. It’s powered by the energy of the valskab, and once my summoning is complete, that energy will vanish, freeing you.” She smiled coldly again. “At that point, you’ll probably want to flee this place before the guards decide to take out their frustrations on you—or before the loss of the volcano’s spirit causes this place to erupt at long last. Again, though, that’s none of my concern. Goodbye, Inquisitor. We won’t meet again.”
She turned and strode from the room, leaving behind a pair of guards to watch me. I sat down in the circle, closed my eyes, and turned my thoughts inward.
“Sara, how hard will it be to break out of this when we need to?” I asked.
“Not very, John. She’s powering it with the valskab’s spirits, not the high spirit, so you should be able to breach it with no problem.”
“Good.”
“Why aren’t you escaping?” Kadonsel demanded. “You need to stop this!”
“It’s not time yet,” I replied.
“Not time? What are you talking about?”
I sighed silently. “Kadonsel, if I escape now, the heltharvis will just hunt me down again—and this time, she’ll probably kill me. I’m alive because she thinks I’m harmless.” I glanced upward. “Sara, what time is it?”
“Still an hour to nightfall, John.”
“Then we’ve got a bit of waiting to do.”
“Waiting? You have to stop her!” Kadonsel raged silently. “To kill her!”
“How?” I asked bluntly. “She’s stronger than me, Kadonsel, and she’s probably surrounded herself with guards just in case I do get free. I might be able to kill her with a lucky shot if I take her by surprise, but then, every guard in this place will hunt me down. I want to stop her, but I’d prefer not to die doing it.”
“She’s going to kill my people,” the ojain whispered softly. “So many of them—maybe all of them. Do—do you even care?”
“Of course,” I replied a little snippily, then forced myself to take a deep breath. The spirit was worried for her people, and I didn’t blame her. “Kadonsel, I intend to save your people. If I just wanted them dead, why would I have left some of them alive back in the crystal chamber?”
I felt the confusion flow up from her as she considered my words. “I—I don’t know. Why did you?”
“Because like it or not, this is an opportunity,” I said. “This patriarch may be greedy and self-serving, but he also sees an advantage in stopping this war, and according to you, he has the political clout to maybe actually make that happen. I think that without this Bargain, all the Oikithikiim have to do is leave the Menskallin alone, and the war will simply end. At least, that’s my hope…”
I fell silent as I heard someone enter the room, and I opened my eyes to see Fifa walk up to the two guards, staring at them both for a moment. I quickly activated Silent Communion, but the circle around me seemed to block the ability, so I could only watch as the three stared at one another for long moments. After nearly a minute of silence, the two guards straightened, and to my shock, they walked out of the room, leaving me alone with the letharvisa.
As I stared at the woman, I admit that I felt a temptation to take advantage of the guards’ absence. I had a plan to deal with them, but it would be a hell of a lot easier to handle Fifa. I could have my spear in hand in a second, and one quick throw empowered with a Channeled Strike would end her, no matter her spirits. Fifa was talented, but she wasn’t a fighter, and her combat skills were honestly pretty crappy. She’d never react in time, and once I killed her, I could add her spirit to my collection, plus all the spirits she possessed. She also had her valskab crystal, which she’d hidden from me before and used to entomb me in ice, and I could see a definite use for that, assuming that Sara and Kadonsel could figure out a way to tap it.
I felt myself tensing in preparation to attack the woman, and I forced my body to relax. It was still too early to escape, and killing Fifa would definitely bring the guards down hard on me. Plus, there wasn’t much point to it. Her death wouldn’t undo anything, and it wouldn’t even make me feel better. Giving in to anger would be stupid and useless.
“Go away, Fifa,” I said tiredly.
She turned and looked at me, biting the bottom of her lip nervously. “Freyd,” she said softly. “I—I just wanted to…”
“I said, go away,” I cut her off. “I don’t really care what you want.” Okay, so maybe I gave into my anger a little bit.
“You don’t understand,” she said, straightening with some of the fire returning to her eyes. “You don’t know this is all about, Freyd!”
“And you’re going to explain it to me?” I snorted.
“Yes, I am. I—I want you to understand that’s happening. I want you to know why we had to deliver you to the heltharvis.” Her eyes flashed angrily. “I promised you that I’d tell you our history, Freyd. Well, you haven’t heard even a part of it, and you need to hear it.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “Explain to your heart’s content. It won’t change anything.”
“Maybe not. I don’t expect you to agree with me. I just want you to understand that everything I’ve done—we did—is for our people.” She fell silent and took a deep breath.
“The things I’m going to tell you—they’re secrets, not just of the valskab but of the rashi itself,” she said. “Things that my elders hid from me and Aeld’s from him, things that our people don’t know and can’t know. If my elders knew that I knew these things, they’d cast me out of the valskab, maybe even put me through the Ritual of Chaining.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I admit, that got my attention, and I sat up a little straighter as she continued speaking.
“First, Aeld says he told you about the Great Bargain. Did he tell you that it’s killing us?”
“No,” I said slowly. “I thought it protected you.”
“It did, once. We were on the verge of extinction, Freyd, and we made a terrible deal, one that we never would have had there been any other choice, one that we never really thought through. We thought we were exchanging the lives and souls of our enemies for protection, but that wasn’t it. The Bargain continued on, and it demanded more.”
“The war. Aeld told me that you fight it to feed the Bargain.”
“We don’t just fight it, Freyd,” she laughed darkly. “We instigate it. We keep it going. We send spirits to sink their ships. We send plagues to their cities. We set fire to their forests and drive beasts mad to attack them.”
“It’s true,” Kadonsel whispered angrily in my head. “Everything that we hear about them, about the deaths they inflict on us—it’s all true? Those—those treacherous…”
“And we make sure they know it,” the letharvis continued. “We have spies among the ones they call ‘Redeemed Elders’, and we send spirits to tell them when we’ve hit them. We want them to be angry and seek reprisals, after all.”
“To keep the Bargain going,” I sighed, rubbing my forehead.
“No, Freyd, the Bargain will continue no matter what,” she corrected in a numb voice. “That’s the part of the deal that we never considered, you see. The Bargain binds us as long as we remain in the Haelendi. It wants its due, so we provoke the four-legs into attacking us. They send their expendables against us, we destroy them, and the Bargain is fed.
“At first, that was fine, but as the years passed, our spies reported that the Oikithikiim were losing their taste for the war. They turned their focus inward, to their own internal struggles. Some of their people even broke away from them and formed Mellung, a nation of Oikithikiim who call themselves friendly to us. Every year, they send fewer and fewer soldiers against us and have been mostly content to keep us contained, and now, even with the atrocities we inflict on them, the numbers they send against us aren’t sufficient to power the Bargain. And that leaves only one source of spirits for it to feed on.”
“Yours,” I said quietly.
“Yes.” Anger flared in her eyes as she spoke, anger and pain. “But not directly, Freyd. The Bargain doesn’t ask for volunteers. It doesn’t choose the old, the sick, the dying. No, it’s far more insidious than that. It steals our children. Each year, more of our females deliver stillborn babies. Our infants die suddenly in their sleep. Our children develop a wasting sickness that devours them from within as the Bargain steals their spirits. It takes our future, Freyd.”
I stared at her, slightly aghast at what I’d just learned, and apparently, I wasn’t the only one.
“Their children?” Kadonsel gasped. “It—it takes their infants? The unborn? How horrible!”
“I take it your people don’t know about it,” I said dryly.
“Of course not,” she snapped. “Oh, they know that more of our children die each year, but they don’t know why. The elders make noises about fate, and the will of the spirits, and how they’re being reborn—they even blame the Oikithikiim, and people like Bregg foolishly believe them—but it’s all lies.”
“I thought you couldn’t lie to one another?” I said with a raised eyebrow. “Isn’t that part of your valskab’s communication?”
“The elders control the valskab and its spirits, Freyd,” she said bitterly. “Do you really think they haven’t learned how to conceal their hearts? How to lie? Every letharvis learns it as part of the secrets we’re required to keep.” She snorted. “How do you think Aeld and I were so good at concealing our intentions from you? We’ve learned to bury the truth deep down and cover it with a layer of belief, one strong enough to shield our true thoughts from even our own people.”
“That explains how they beat your Detect Deception ability,” Sara mused quietly. “I was wondering about that.”
“How do you know all this, then, if the elders were keeping it from you?”
“A year ago, the heltharvis came to me,” she said somewhat woodenly. “She told me that I was one of the most talented letharvisa of my generation, that I was destined to join the rashi one day, and that because of that, she wished to share a secret with me—one that my elders had hidden from me. She told me all this.”
“And you believed her?” I asked. “I mean, if you know that elders can lie to you…”
“She—she showed me, Freyd,” the girl whispered. “She showed me little Kakto, stricken with fever, dying of the wasting illness, and then, when he died…” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “She showed me how his spirit went to join the spirit lights in the sky, how it was bound to keep vigil over the Haelendi forever. She told me that those lights are the bound, twisted spirits of our young, the ones who died for no reason…” Tears streamed down the woman’s face as she spoke, and she didn’t bother to wipe them.
“After that—after seeing that, I was furious, Freyd. The elders knew about all this, and they’d never done anything to stop it. They were too comfortable, too set in their ways, too happy with the power they had. Too afraid to try and unmake the Bargain.” She glared at me. “I wasn’t. I knew then that the Bargain had to end, and I vowed that I would help her do so any way possible.”
“I assume she did the same for Aeld?” I asked.
“Yes. She found one letharvis from each valskab, one who was talented, young, and still believed in right and wrong, and she showed them the truth. She showed us all how the elders betray us, and how they’ve done it since the very beginning of this stupid war.”
“The beginning?”
She took another deep breath. “When I told you about the Great Change, Freyd—when the cold world of our ancestors began to warm—I lied to you, something that’s much easier . I told you we don’t know why, but we do. At least, the elders and the rashi do. The Oikithikiim did it.”
“What?” Kadonsel half-shouted in my mind. “Why—she—we would never!”
“How could you know that?” I asked skeptically, ignoring the ojain. I felt pretty sure that someone like the patriarch would, in fact, do something like that if he saw benefit in it, and I doubted her people had changed all that much over time.
“When they came here, they brought their own spirits with them. Ojaini can’t talk to spirits, so they didn’t know that we could and that our letharvisa interrogated those spirits as fully as possible about our new guests before accepting them. The spirits didn’t know why the four-legs did what they did, but they knew that a night came when the Oikithikiim offered many of their kind to the First Spirits and asked for their land to be warmer, and the spirits answered them.”
She chuckled, wiping her eyes. “Of course, they didn’t give the four-legs what they wanted, any more than they did us. Their land warmed, but their rains also stopped. Their rivers dried up, and drought struck. They tried to use their spirits to bring water, but they failed and were forced to flee to our shores.”
“Could that be true, Kadonsel?” I asked.
“I—it…” She fell silent for a moment. “It’s possible,” she admitted. “Our teachings tell us that entreating the great spirits leads to disaster, but they don’t say how we know that, and if you ask, they just tell you it’s the spirits’ wisdom. Plus, we have stories of the Flight, and they say that we lost the great spirits’ favor, and they turned our home into a wasteland in return. It—it would make sense.”
“Don’t you see, Freyd?” Fifa said when the silence stretched for several seconds. “Our elders knew then that the Oikithikiim were dangerous. They could have turned them away, but they didn’t. They told them to adopt our ways and forget their old ones—but of course, they didn’t.
“When it became clear that the warming was affecting our lands, as well,” she continued bitterly, “they could have expelled the four-legs. They didn’t; instead, we gave up land to them and retreated to the north. When the Oikithikiim made war on us, we could have counterattacked and slaughtered them—we’ve always been stronger, both physically and with the spirits, and their technology wasn’t what it is today. Instead, we fled from them.
“Even when our entire species was on the verge of extinction,” she laughed darkly, “and the elders were desperate enough to call on the First Spirits, rather than asking for a way to defeat our enemies, we asked to be sheltered from them. Our elders sealed us all to this Bargain, one that would eventually steal the lives of our children, and do you know why, Freyd?”
“Fear,” I said quietly.
She blinked in sudden surprise. “Y-yes. Exactly. Fear. How did you know?”
I couldn’t help but let out a low laugh. “I’m something of an expert on fear,” I said. “I recognize it in others. Fear makes you want to hide, to avoid conflicts, and to hold what you have rather than trying to gain more.”
“Yes! That’s it! The elders are so afraid of losing their power and authority that they don’t care what happens to our people. They refused back then to take the risks they needed to secure our safety, and now, they refuse to do what’s necessary to save our future! The heltharvis sees this—that’s why she had to remove the rest of the rashi. They were too afraid to do what’s necessary to preserve our people!”
She took another step closer to the barrier, her eyes fierce. “Aeld and I aren’t afraid, Freyd—but we needed your help and the spirit that you claimed. That’s why Aeld taught you secrets of the valskab that his elders would be furious he shared, to bind you to him and keep you from going off on your own path. It’s why I ignored my own elders to teach you, as well.” She paused, and when she spoke, her voice was quieter. “And it’s why I brought you to Lerlauga—after waking up its high spirit.”
“I wondered about that,” I said in a flat voice. “High spirits sleep, after all. Waking one is hard. My call shouldn’t have done it.”
“It didn’t. I woke it before I brought you. It’s one reason I agreed to teach you our history: I needed the time to rouse the spirit without alerting the elders.”
“And you were the reason it could sense us through the circle,” I sighed. “You were telling it where we were, weren’t you?” Her expression answered that question, and I felt a flash of anger fill me. “That thing nearly killed us, Fifa!”
“I warned the heltharvis that it might, but Aeld said that you were uniquely gifted in spiritual combat, and the heltharvis agreed that you’d probably defeat it. She said that your kind always find a way, whatever that means.” She straightened. “I wouldn’t have let anyone die, though. I would have stopped channeling to it if it looked like anyone was going to be badly hurt.”
“And the pool?” I asked. “When you wanted to join me bathing? Let me guess: the heltharvis hoped that it would encourage me to stay with you, right?”
She looked away, her face stricken. “Aeld told her about my condition, and how you were affecting it,” she said quietly. “She instructed me to spend time close to you.” She sighed and wrapped her arms about herself, looking down. “Look, Freyd, I won’t apologize for bringing you here, and I’m not sorry. I’m trying to save my people from a slow extinction, and one person or their feelings can’t matter in that.”
I simply watched her for long seconds. Honestly, I wasn’t all that angry anymore. From her point of view, she was right. The Bargain needed to go. Without it, the Menskies wouldn’t need to antagonize the Oikies anymore, and the Oikies would probably be content to just leave them alone. The war would end, and babies would stop dying. She was trying to save her people’s kids; who the fuck was I compared to that? The only problem was that it wasn’t that simple—and she needed to know what the real outcome of the calling would be.
I rose to my feet and walked toward the woman. “I wouldn’t ask you to apologize,” I told her. “I can understand why you did what you did, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. The problem is, you’re still wrong.”
Her eyes narrowed sharply, and her head snapped up toward me. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “You think it’s fine for our children to die, Freyd? For our elders to hide like cowards, just to preserve their power?”
“No,” I cut her off. “You’re wrong to trust the heltharvis. She’s not going to do what you think she will, Fifa.”
“What are you talking about?” she snorted. “You’ve barely learned any of the skills of a letharvis, and you think that you know better than the heltharvis?”
“Better? Probably not. Do I know what she’s doing? Yes. Aeld said that I have unique gift for spiritual combat, and to some extent, he’s right. That’s not the only place I’m gifted, though. See this ritual?” I asked, pointing to the diagram at my feet. “Do you know what it does?”
“Yes,” she sighed, deflating slightly. “It—it cuts the ties between the victim and their spirits. Freyd…”
“No, I mean, do you know exactly how it works? What each part does?” I walked to a spot close to her. “This is the start of it. You add the intent of your spell here.” I pointed to the left. “This is refinement. It hones that intent, giving form to the blade being used.” I pointed to the right. “This wraps that blade in a layer of will, allowing it to be controlled.” I went through the ritual, describing each part of it to her while she stared at me with eyes growing steadily wider.
“How—how do you know all that?” she asked in a hoarse voice after I finished. “I don’t even recognize half of this ritual! How did you do that?”
“I told you. I’ve got some rather unique gifts.” Technically, I only had one, Sara, but she was plenty, and there was no way I was explaining that to Fifa. “Thanks to those, I also understand exactly what the heltharvis is doing—probably much better than you or Aeld.”
“Freyd, I…”
“Those Henguki crystals that the Oikithikiim placed are set up to draw in power,” I cut her off. “Not just a little power, though. They’ll suck in power from all over the Haelendi and focus it on the heltharvis. Every spirit, from the smallest land spirit to the spirit of the Haelendi itself, will get pulled here, where the heltharvis will trap them in that flawless crystal.” I gave her a wry look. “Something I think you and Aeld have both called ‘profane’ a few times, as I recall.”
“How did you know that?” she asked, her eyes wide and her expression stunned. “I didn’t even until the heltharvis just explained it to me!”
“I told you. I understand these things. Not that it matters.” I waved her protest away. “Because you think that with all that energy, she’s going to dominate the spirit of the Haelendi and force it to release the Bargain, freeing your people, right?”
“Y-yes. With that much power, she could command the high spirit and compel it to shatter the Bargain.”
“She could, but she won’t. She’s going to toss it and every spirit in that crystal into Enverthen.”
Fifa gasped, her eyes going wide. “That—that’s not possible!”
“You know that it is. I’ve seen Aeld do it before; it’s not even all that hard once you’ve dominated a spirit. It just takes power, and she’ll have plenty of that.” I snorted. “And if the outer circle of this calling were intact, that would be the end of it—but it’s not.”
“The reports from the Oikithikiim say that it is,” she protested.
“Do you really think they’d report otherwise?” I chuckled. “What captain is going to risk their career—or their life—to tell a patriarch that they screwed up and left a gap? Besides, you know that a circle’s more about will and intent than the actual circle itself. Whose will is holding that one? The ship crews and soldiers guarding it? The heltharvis, even though she’s never actually seen the circle so can’t envision it? No, she had the circle placed to make the Oikithikiim feel safer about cooperating with her, and maybe she hopes it’ll work, but it’s not going to do anything.
“Which means that this calling will keep drawing spirits, sucking them into that crystal where she can hurl them out into Enverthen. It’ll break the Great Bargain, to be sure, but it’ll also strip most of the spirits from this continent, destroy the Oikithikiim technology, and leave all the letharvisa without any power. Who knows what it’ll do to the world to lose all those spirits, but it probably won’t be good.” I shrugged.
“How—you can’t know that!” she spluttered.
“But I do, and if you think about it, it makes perfect sense,” I shrugged, pulling on Sara and Kadonsel’s knowledge as I spoke. “Think of those crystals as—as an underground spring feeding a pool. If the water keeps coming, eventually, the pool will flood, or it’ll get so full that the spring can’t push more water inside. The same thing should happen here. Eventually, the power being drawn will either overflow or just stop coming in, long before the entire spirit of the Haelendi is brought here.
“Of course, if there’s an outflow in that pool, then everything’s fine. Same here. If the heltharvis sends the spirits elsewhere, then more can keep being drawn in, until the whole spirit of the Haelendi is captured. The problem is, that inward flow will keep her from just tossing the spirits out of the way to make room for more, so—where else can they go?”
She stared at me, her eyes wide and her lower lip trembling. “She wouldn’t do that!”
“Why not? It certainly solves everyone’s problems. Think about it, Fifa. The biggest danger in this is that the Oikithikiim don’t just leave your people alone once the Bargain’s gone. Without that protection, their technology and superior numbers will eventually overwhelm you, and they’ll conquer your people. The other danger is that when the bonds of a valskab break, the elder spirits there attack the people living in it in retribution for being bound the way they are. We’ve both seen that.
“If the heltharvis tosses all those spirits into the void, though, then both dangers are gone,” I chuckled darkly. “Without their technology, the Oikithikiim will be too busy trying to survive to make war, and those elder spirits can’t kill your people if they’re locked out of this world. Plus, those elder letharvisa you hate so much will lose all their power and actually have to answer for what they’ve done. Sure, without those spirits, the land might not produce as well, the weather and climate might change, and your people will have to adopt new technologies just to survive, but in the short term, it’ll solve a lot of problems.”
I walked closer to her, placing my hand on the barrier between us. “Of course, people will still die,” I said softly. “Mostly, though, they’ll be Oikithikiim. Without their technology, a whole lot of them will die of disease, injury, or even starvation. They have children, too, you know, and those will probably be the first to go since they’re the weakest. You’ll be responsible for doing exactly what you’re trying to stop, Fifa: killing thousands upon thousands of children. They won’t be your people, but they’ll still die because of what you did.”
“N-no,” she stammered. “That can’t be possible. Y-you’re wrong! You aren’t part of the valskab; you could be lying!”
“You just told me that being part of the valskab doesn’t mean you can’t lie,” I snorted. “The question is, Fifa, why would I lie about something like that? What do I have to gain? The heltharvis already took my spirits from me. You and Aeld have already turned on me. If all this ceremony was meant to do was break the Great Bargain, then really, the smartest thing for me to do would be to let it happen. I don’t want your children to die, after all.”
“I…”
“You don’t have to believe me, Fifa. But go talk to Aeld about it. Consider what happens if I’m right.” I shrugged. “And why I would tell you this if it weren’t true.”
She stared at me, her eyes wide, then took a step closer to me. “It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, her voice hoarse. “Even if you’re right—Aeld and I can’t do anything. We both vowed to help the heltharvis. I—I just have to hope that you’re wrong, Freyd.” She reached forward, her hand shimmering in a sheath of energy as it slid through the barrier, her palm meeting mine. “Or that if you’re right, something stops it.” She stepped back and turned away, walking swiftly out of the room.
I didn’t notice. I was too busy staring at the crystal in my hand, a crystal that glowed with power and tingled in my grip. Fifa’s valskab crystal, which she’d just palmed me when she took my hand.
“You clever little woman,” I chuckled as I gripped the crystal, enclosing it in my fist. “Sara, can we use this?”
“I think I can work it out with enough time, John.”
“Well, we’ve got an hour. Let’s see what we can come up with