“Well?”
Luke lowered the small pewter tankard from his lips. He swallowed, then grimaced. “It’s very bitter. I think… I think I hate this.”
“That just means it’s working.” Argent made a thumbs up, leaning forward in his wing chair. “Take it from someone who’s traveled the length and breadth of Asundria. The Rixatori know their tea, and charela is some of the best there is.”
His head swam. Not from the tea.
“Cut another thread,” he said quietly.
“You’re sure?”
Luke nodded and tried to focus only on the aroma of the charela. He looked up at the cabin roof and steeled himself. A sharp crack of emotion struck him, as if someone had lobbed a jellyfish at his brain. Fresh tears flowed down dried tracks, and he suddenly found it impossible to breathe out. Images and voices from a dusty abandoned town flashed by.
Raum Nixus… I killed him.
Levian Vega standing over him, thunderflute drawn, smiling.
Panic gripped him like a hundred ice-cold fingers wrapped around his shoulders. He felt a terrible heat on his back and knew right there and then that it wasn’t real. His mind was trying to torment him, and he wasn’t about to let it win. He dug deep and found the strength to exhale.
He thought it had already ended. Thought the nightmare was over when he woke up. But his father and brother… the nightmare never really ended for them, did it?
He resisted the impulse to reach for Red, clutch it and hold it tight like a child and a blanket. It was just going to hurt him again. He’d tried several times throughout the day to no avail. This was so ridiculous. So stupid. How could it be wrong to feel angry about that monster? What did the colors want from him?
“Too much?” Argent asked.
“No.” He wiped across his face with one sleeve. “Well, yes. I’m trying to think about what happened. Face it.”
“May I ask a question, then?”
“Go ahead.”
“Your brother,” Argent said. He waited a moment before continuing. “I must say, the two of you look quite alike. I would be interested to know his name. Not the false title they gave him at the onset of imperial service, but his original birth name.”
Luke hopped off the bed, set the tea aside and paced to the door. He swung it open and stepped into the cold night air. Argent followed him out, no doubt concerned or at least curious.
He took a few steps, then stopped and looked skyward. A full white moon hanging in the sky gazed back at him through shimmering clusters of clouds. Just what he’d hoped. A tiny smile crept onto his face. There was no such thing as a bad night with such a beautiful sight.
“Sorry, I…”
“No, I understand.” Argent was watching the clouds, too, through those mysterious golden eyes of his. “I’ve always loved the moon.”
Calmer, Luke felt ready to answer.
“My brother’s name is James. When I knew him, he was my hero.”
“And now? If it’s any consolation, I don’t think James is dead. Pardon the bluntness of this, but Levian isn’t the type to throw away a good pawn on a whim.”
“Now… I don’t know what Levian Vega has done to him, but I think there’s still a part of the old James in there. His head’s all twisted, but that’s nothing new.” His smile broadened. “That’s my older brother.”
“James.” Argent nodded. “I’ll remember it. Thank you.”
“I wonder how the battle at Ulciscor is going,” he said softly.
“It hasn’t started. The Daevans won’t make a move on the city until the early hours of the twenty-second. That’s still just a little over a full day away.”
Luke shook his head. “James thought that too, but I think you’re both wrong. Levian said Mammon Rigel was already inside the city. The Guard won’t go down without a fight. Maybe they were able to—”
Argent stumbled back, slamming a bandaged hand on the cabin door to steady himself. The noise rattled Luke out of what he was saying.
“Mammon Rigel, you said?” The man’s voice was still distorted, but it sounded unsteady. Unbalanced. As if his concentration on the winds was shaken. “Flocks.”
“That’s what he said.” His smile slipped. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, now. Hopefully.” Argent laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry Luke, but I won’t be able to tutor you out here as long as I’d have liked. I wanted to get into elemental properties with you first, but I have to leave for Ulciscor first thing tomorrow morning. I have to get there before the sun sets. I’ll drop you off in a nearby town with some supplies to stay a while until I get back. Or enough to travel, if you wish. I have plenty to spare.”
“Wait,” Luke said, forestalling the man with a hand. “What are you talking about? Before sunset? You can’t get to Ulciscor in that kind of time.”
“You have a lot to learn about Weaving.”
“Even if that’s true, you’re the one that said we can’t do anything about the fighting. We’re not invincible, right? You can’t stop a war.”
“I can stop a slaughter.”
“Is Mammon Rigel really that terrifying? I don’t know much about him, other than the fact that he’s the most secretive of the Elites. Don’t tell me he can Weave or something.”
“No. He’s no Weaver. If he was, it’d be easy to find him. You can’t pass by someone who can Weave on the street without sensing exactly what they are.” He considered for a moment, hand raised to his chin as if to rub it. “Let’s head back inside. You still have to finish your tea. And if you’re willing to face it, I’ll tell you about Mammon.”
He heard the cabin door close behind him, but stayed outside a moment longer to give the moon one last glance.
———
“So good of you to join us, Ty,” Levian said as he entered the former upstairs office of the Castitas mayor.
The room was mostly barren now, just a few cabinets, chairs, and a desk with his master’s boots crossed on top, the man himself leaning back in a comfortable armchair he must have pilfered from one of the locals. The man called Calliphlox stood dutifully at his master’s side as if he’d been doing it all his life. Whether he showed himself because there was no longer need for the charade or because they wanted Typhos to know he was mistrusted was anyone’s guess. He didn’t really care.
Oh. That’s an interesting little party trick.
What? Typhos asked the gourd— the Raven, it called itself.
You wouldn’t get it.
“What kept you?” Levian asked.
“Apologies, Master Vega.” Typhos fell to one knee by rote. “I was in… contemplation.”
“Yes, we heard your contemplation all the way up here,” Levian said. He rested a fist on a smug cheek. “Up. Come on, up. You don’t have to put on a show. There you go. Good boy.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The Second Elite flicked his free wrist back, and Calliphlox took the gesture as a cue to begin speaking.
“You have performed your role as Ace impeccably for years without incident. We are willing to overlook your vulgar display of indiscretion on one condition.”
“What’s the condition?”
“You will capture the Third Ace and bring him to me,” Levian said. “Tomorrow night. And you will kill anybody who gets in the way, save for the man himself. Drag him here by his feet if you must.”
“Rixator? Why?”
“That is privileged information,” Calliphlox said. “Follow your orders and you will return to the fold proper.”
“Because of his uncle?” he asked his master. “This could break the Second and the Third apart.”
“You’re growing quite a beak,” Levian said coldly. “I don’t like it.”
Once, a threatening tone like that from his master would have rooted his feet to the floor in fear. Now he just didn’t care. He acted it out, but he didn’t feel it. Feeling anything was so difficult.
His master demanded an answer. Which was it? Did he want the familiarity of subservience or the alluring but unproven offer of the Raven’s freedom? Would he just be trading one master for another?
Thinking along those lines, the path ahead became obvious.
“Very well,” he said. “When?”
“After sunset.”
“Am I to work alone? His quarters will be heavily guarded.”
“You will work with our best, Grendelle and Kudlak. One of them will approach you with the finer details. Don’t bother slinking around yourself. They know your face. Oh yes, Niya will be joining you as well. She is eager to prove herself. Kill her if you find her to be a hindrance.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“It will be done.”
As he spun to make his exit, the Raven whispered in his ear.
This Rixator. They plan to kill him, I take it?
Seems that way.
You’d really consign a man— a stalwart ally, by the sound of it— to his death on nothing but the word of another?
Nothing I haven’t done before. I do as my master requests.
He’d made his choice.
———
“It was the final days of the Asundrian Union, before Mirastelle and the Terra Daeva Empire were names put to pen and Altair still stretched to the Buteo-Aquila Basin, when Commander Dalezen Altair’s forces met with the Vegai lance directed by Matriarch Vienna herself. Have you heard of this conflict?”
Luke nodded and sipped his charela tea. If there was one thing that could hold his attention in Snare’s studies, it was subject of the war. The great and terrible struggle of nations that broke apart Asundria’s unity and placed Amon Munitio on a throne above all others. It interested him if only to try and learn— to understand— why it all happened.
What Argent spoke of was the conflict in the Proxima corridor, a nickname for the narrow passageway that ran from Vega to Mintaka, bordered on its sides by the awe-inspiring Sheer Sea and the grand southwestern-bound rivers and jagged rock formations that constituted the natural barrier between Vega and land that once represented Altair. Crossing the corridor was the only feasible way of pushing soldiers north to take Mintaka, the stronghold of Munitio’s foes. And so in spite of the Proximan queen’s desperate pleas for peace, her country became a battlefield, its people and economy devastated even into the present day.
To read of it was one thing, but when Luke journeyed from Aetas Origo to Ulciscor, the path took him through the corridor and he saw the damage firsthand. As he walked, he passed mass graves, abandoned village after abandoned village, and a people bereft of hope. Proxima was no more, now merely a piece of Terra Daeva, but its pain remained.
Dalezen Altair fought for the royalists, for the system of nobility that Amon Munitio claimed was rotten and corrupt to the core. Opposite the corridor he faced the recently-unified Vegai faction. The Munitiod faction had gone south to handle another front, so the two countries were left to their own devices. Nearly equal in strength, it was a bloody affair in which the day’s gains and losses were measured in inches.
“They say in the history books that Altair and Vega were evenly matched,” Luke said. “That nothing should have happened until the emperor came back with reinforcements. Yet Altair suffered a major loss. A full retreat from the corridor. Dalezen disappeared from the command tent, but no one knows why. All of his guards swore no assassin breached the command grounds.”
“That’s because the assassins were inside the command grounds from the very beginning,” Argent said. “Historians and scholars don’t understand this. Most of Dalezen’s guard, who fought and bled and died by his side for years, consisted of Mammon Rigel and his cronies. They concealed Dalezen’s death, organized the retreat, and went on with their lives for years telling the same lies about what happened that day until vanishing one by one without a trace just before the Purge.”
“How do you know this?”
Argent flicked his golden eyes away.
“Let’s just say I had a journalistic interest in the truth and took matters into my own hands. Did my own investigation. Dalezen was not the type to up and run, but an assassin who made off with the body made no sense either. Almost, I thought it was the work of a Weaver. Then I started to track down Dalezen’s old comrades and found the same story again and again. Every single one I could locate the residence of turned out to be gone without so much as a whisper, leaving behind confused families or scrambling retirement home workers. Some of them lived alone, of course. For those, I relied on admittedly tenuous observations from their neighbors. They all disappeared around the same time, within the span of two or three weeks.”
“Sounds like it was an assassin. The same one that got the Altairan commander. What makes you think they did it themselves?”
“The Flocks.”
Luke raised an eyebrow and took another sip of tea. Still bad.
“Every man and woman in Dalezen’s old guard who disappeared believed in a specific Flock. They were a mixed lot, nationally speaking. Not all Altairan like you might think. Now, I’m not saying there can’t be a Capellan-blooded Altairan citizen who worships Cygnus first and foremost, but it’s improbable. Someone like that, you’d expect a preference for Lophostrix or Phaethon. Curiously, after extensive interviews with family members, I found them all to be staunch believers of Tapera, the Rigelese Flock. They were not outwardly religious people, not a single one. Only their closest loved ones knew this. And yet, upon each individual investigation I would inevitably find a clue, like a Tapera-carved ring hidden in the back of a dusty drawer or an art scroll rolled away deep in a closet. It struck me as odd— this furtive adoration of one of the Twelve Flocks they all shared.”
Rigel, yet another Province of Terra Daeva. He’d never been there. It was far to the south, boasting a massive population despite its small size. According to his studies with Snare, the soil of Rigel was so poor that almost nothing can grow there, and it is said that what few things do are devoid of heart. As a result, Rigel was known as a nation of cities and concrete.
“That is weird. Before you go any further, I have a question.”
“Honestly, I don’t have much more to say. Go ahead.”
“Mammon Rigel is a Rigelese noble, isn’t he? I’ve never understood why the emperor promoted so many as Elites and Aces.”
Argent scoffed, the sound distorted by the wind effect.
“It was part of his supposed benevolence regarding the old ways of the world. He promoted those of the royal bloodlines who performed the greatest deeds in service of his cause. The Elites chose their Aces on the condition that a pureblooded noble of a previously-promoted family can never be chosen again. The Sword circumvented this rule by promoting his adopted niece. I wonder if the others will follow suit.”
“I see, so the Elites picked their Aces…”
Argent nodded. “Some of them took years to make a decision. May I continue? You actually mentioned something intriguing.”
“Sure.”
“The deeds in service of Amon,” Argent said. “I’m sure you know at least a few of them. The Right Hand, the Shield. Some of them are of a more private nature. Mammon Rigel’s deed is completely unknown. No one knows what he did for Munitio. It’s deliberately oblique.”
“Nobody even knows what he looks like.”
“That’s true. At this point, I doubt even the other Elites do. I do have an advantage over them, however.”
“And what’s that?”
“I know what Dalezen’s old crew looks like. If I can find one of them in Ulciscor, everything should fall into place. I fear there isn’t much time, though. I think I know what their plan is.”
“Their plan… repeating what they did in the corridor!” Luke said, struck suddenly by the realization. “It’s the exact same situation!”
“It is. That’s why I have to get to Ulciscor with as much time as possible. I need as much time as possible to investigate before the Daevans invade. I have a bad feeling they’re not going to meet much resistance. The city will already be lost to chaos by the time they arrive.”
Luke lifted the tankard to his lips, then downed the rest of the charela tea and set it aside. Awful stuff. Just awful.
“Bitter, but really clears your head, doesn’t it?”
He closed his eyes and steeled his heart.
“Take me with you.”
The bandaged man fell silent and laced his fingers.
“I don’t know how in Asundria you’re gonna get there, but please, take me with you.”
Their eyes met and he put on the bravest face he could muster.
“Do you think you could still ask that question if I removed the rest of the threads wrapped around your adrenal glands?”
Those golden eyes measured him, tested him. The prospect of getting hit with all that pain like before made his stomach do a somersault. He could just stay here and leave it to Argent. Shady and mysterious as he was, he saved Luke from certain death and taught him about Weaving.
He trusted Argent. That surprised him, but that wasn’t this was about. No. There was a man who risked everything so he could see his brother’s face again. He owed Deen Daniels a debt several times over.
“Let’s find out.”
It was time to repay it.