> “Now we come to the Nornfey, or ‘hag elves’ of the Gûl Nornacha, the Cronewood on the Craenen earthmote of Manaar. No other group of elves is quite so shrouded in mystery or fear, and for good reason. Try as I might, I could not find a single instance of anyone claiming to have met or spoken with them, though I have read survivor’s accounts from their attacks, and seen detailed sketches of an autopsy. What both reveal is that there is something disturbingly Shade-like about these twisted elves, and an unthinking violence to shame even the most bloodthirsty Supremacist Set. Avoid them at all costs. —Denrick Roth, Elves
UP ON THE HALL’S ROOF
The Thundering Hall, Stórsteinn 09.06.03.10.03
Someone had been watching them from the moment they first arrived, and it was driving Mouse as distracted as a piece of grit in his shoe that he could neither tip out nor find with his fingertips.
Minds were big things. Through his extra sense of them granted by the Word, they extended some way outside the heads they supposedly lived in. They played across the walls and floor and scenery like searchlights, lit each other up by thinking about and communicating with each other, drew attention to things by paying attention to them. Every mind he’d yet encountered was a constant strobing dance of focus and awareness, which unconsciously diverted around him unless he took the effort to be noticed.
But the particular mind he’d been hunting since disembarking from the Cavalier Queen was…small. Quiet. Dim, somehow. There was somebody spying on the goings-on around the Thundering Hall, but the illumination of their attention was a faint flicker, almost colorless. The effect was so feeble as to almost make Mouse question whether he was sensing it at all.
Almost.
Fortunately, the Thundering Hall was attended by what must be a platoon of roofers permanently engaged in the work of keeping its beams, cladding and shingles in good order, and they had left boards, ladders and ropes all over the Hall’s roof. To Mouse, an experienced burglar, it was…well. He’d walked down more awkward streets. An experienced second-storey man who bribed the roofers would be able to live full-time on a building like this, in any other city. There was certainly no shortage of hiding places.
And that cut both ways, when dealing with an attention that seemed so…rarified. Mouse was worried that it wouldn’t miss a trick, even his tricks. So, rather than rely on the Word, he fell back on a lifetime of thievery and skulking, and hunted.
The quarry’s spoor was incredibly subtle. It wasn’t anything so overt as a footprint or a scrap of fabric snagged on a splinter. Instead, Mouse tracked them by the sense of what they were looking at, the way the ‘searchlight’ of their attention highlighted some things often, and some other things never. That narrowed down the sightlines. That narrowed down the hiding places. That narrowed down the—
He paused, then slipped sideways into the protection of a dormer. A moment later, the strongest scrutiny he’d yet sensed from his quarry swept over where he’d just been standing, followed a moment later by the softest of thuds as a figure emerged from a window right above him.
It was an elf. A naked elf. Their skin was not just white, but translucent enough to see the veins, and stained black from fingertip to elbow, toetip to knee, scalp to collarbone. Nothing Mouse could see from his angle gave away any clue as to the figure’s gender, and in any case that wasn’t an important concern right now. It had a blowpipe in one hand, and was packing in the tufted end of a dart with the other.
Mouse willed himself to fade into the background. I am not here. There is nothing worth looking at over here. I am just a pattern in the stucco…
It worked. The elf’s expression didn’t change at all, but they lowered their blowdart and relaxed somewhat. They turned, reached back through the window, and retrieved a satchel.
Mouse knew that if he let the elf go, he’d never catch or track it. Elves could run at speeds an airship would struggle to match, even over the very roughest terrain.
He darted forward.
The elf somehow sensed him coming and tried to turn, tried to lash out with a fighting knife, but Mouse had the surprise, the momentum, and Mind on his side. His will flashed out like a fist in an alleyway brawl, stunning the elf so badly they dropped the knife, an instant before his actual fist cracked into their jaw.
Elves were dangerous, but not tough, and the blow was as sweet as honeyed tea. The elf lost their footing and went tumbling and sliding down the shingles in a nasty series of crunches and breaking noises, leaving Mouse triumphant up on the rooftop with the satchel in his hand.
He slipped back in through the window before anyone could come investigate and look up. Then, on the grounds that where there was one elf there might well be a second, he darted away through stacks and shelves crammed tight with small books, jinking left and right at random. He’d probably get lost in the maze-like shelving, but the nice thing about being lost was, it’d probably help him lose any pursuit, too.
As it happened, though, he felt no further brush of attention or intent of pursuit. So eventually, he found a reading nook he deemed suitably private, threw himself onto a cushioned bench, and went digging through the satchel.
“Alright friend…let’s see what you were trying to steal…” he muttered.
Moments later, he had a very interesting answer.
----------------------------------------
> “As anyone knows, a library is not just a pile of books. After all, what good is knowledge if nobody can access it, read it, and use it? A library is organized, structured and filed for reading, and offers rooms to read in. So it stands to reason that the Thundering Hall, the greatest library in the world, would have some of the greatest reading rooms. And indeed, the grand reading galleries are a sight worth traveling the worlds for all by themselves. But for my money, the smaller side rooms, warmed by crystal magestone hearths and lit by the Herald’s own will and power, are better. A thinking man could spend the rest of his days reading in these tiny, cozy kingdoms, and it would be a life well spent.” —Prince Ruber of Valai, My Travels
UP TO DATE
The Thundering Hall, Stórsteinn 09.06.03.10.03
“And that was it. I pulled time back, and here we are.”
Derghan drained his tankard of mead and grunted uncomfortably. “You know…I’m starting to not like the idea that branches of my life have happened and, uh, un-happened.”
“Two branches, so far.”
“Only two, eh?” Derghan wiped his mouth. “Well, that’s comforting.”
Jerl conceded his sarcasm with a small shrug. “A lot of people died. It was a pretty vicious assault.”
“Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I can’t argue with using your powers to save lives. But it still freaks me the fuck out,” Derghan rose from the couch to pour himself another mead.
“I’m more concerned by these four fallen Heralds,” Amir mused. He frowned at Sin. “You must have seen them on the First Day?”
Sin’s expression throughout Jerl’s recounting had been inscrutable, especially during the bit about the jubilee celebration and her—Bekhil’s—performance in the Blood Spiral. Now, she shrugged at Amir. “The First Day was…very confusing. We only stood in that arena for a few minutes, and then we were scattered all over the worlds. And frankly, the other heralds were a little overshadowed by Yngmir and Dragon.”
“I guess they would be,” Derghan said, sitting next to her.
“True…” Amir mused.
Jerl shrugged. “From what Haust told me, they’re not Heralds any more. They’re mortal now, just…very, very learned and powerful mortals who know more about magic than the entire Thundering Hall and Observatory combined. That makes them dangerous and worth thinking about, but what I’m wondering is, why send Civorage here? What was he after?”
“And did he find it?” Amir asked.
“And why attack?” Sinikka added. “Why slaughter? For the fun of it?”
“It’s his style. Civorage may talk a big and impressive line about the ‘Peace of the Circle’ and all that shite, but his go-to option for dealing with adversity is to kill rather than capture. He burned the Hall the first go-around, too. Assaulted it all-out with his fleet,” Jerl recalled.
“Hmmm…” Amir twisted his goatee thoughtfully between thumb and fingers.
“Steel for your thoughts?” Jerl asked him.
“Well…the thought I’m chewing on goes something like…the only reason to destroy a library is to destroy the knowledge that’s held there. And the only reason to destroy knowledge rather than steal it is because you already know it and, you want to be sure nobody else learns it.”
The rest of them glanced at each other.
“…And a large chunk of the knowledge here is in people’s heads,” Sin mused. “But that’s all the more reason to Encircle them, I’d say.”
“I don’t even know if he can, here. To people under Yngmir’s protection.” Amir said. “The heralds can shield minds, I daresay. But they can’t raise the dead.”
“…Hm.”
“Sounds right to me” Derghan opined. “Remember the witch-thaign’s curse? Shit goes wrong for him, but dead folks can’t pull off an upset. Could be, murder’s the safest option for ‘im.”
They frowned, but none of them spoke up to object to that line of reasoning.
“Well at least going to the trouble to attack confirms there’s something important here, nay?” Sin offered at length.
Amir shook his head grimly. “Unfortunately…that’s not necessarily the case. Civorage is driven enough that he might just burn and slaughter this place in case it contains what he fears. The attack is not necessarily proof that what he’s afraid of is actually here.”
“But if he’s that desperate to be certain, why abort the raid when we strengthened the watch?”
Derghan groaned and stood again. “Red Lady’s arse,” he grumbled, going to pour himself another drink. “This shit’s way outside my fuckin’ wheelhouse…plans and schemes and feints and gambits and what-the-fuck-ever…”
“You’d rather have a problem we could shoot, rakkan?” Sin asked him, looking amused.
“Wouldn’t you?” Deghan shrugged as he uncorked the bottle. “Whole thing feels like an engine with no gasket. We’re missing a vital component, somewhere. And Civorage ain’t dumb enough to let us know what it is, one way or the other.”
“True, yeah. Even if he’s played his hand, we still have no idea what his cards are,” Sin agreed.
“Still, we’re here until the Eclipse is over,” Jerl pointed out. “We have time to think. Maybe if we go digging, something will turn up.”
“Or maybe not.” Derghan swigged straight from the bottle and turned around. “What happens if not? What’s our next move? Keep lookin’ for the Words? Without knowing shit about them?”
Jerl, whose arms were folded, drummed his right hand’s fingers against his left elbow a moment in thought. “Maybe,” he said eventually, with a shrug. “And we do have one lead: the caves of Haptar Getesh.”
“Is that a premonition?” Amir asked.
“I wouldn’t even call it a hunch.” Jerl shrugged again. “I seem to be in a doldrum of sorts right now. As if…like Time is waiting for things to line up. But we may as well stick to the plan, and Haptar Getesh is the closest thing I’ve yet seen to a lead. But we’ve got time to search. Could be there’s something else in here worth finding.”
“I shall certainly look,” Amir agreed. Somebody knocked on the door mid-sentence, then opened it before Jerl could say ‘come in.’
Mouse gave him a little smirk and placed a couple of books—small, slim volumes rather than heavy incunabula or manuscripts—on the low table.
“You found what they were after?” Jerl asked, leaning over to hover his fingers over them. The books didn’t even have any text on the cover, just plain leather bindings.
“I’ve had this feeling of being watched ever since we got here,” Mouse explained. “Caught a hag elf in the middle of stealing these.”
Jerl grinned at him. “Fuck, you’re amazing.”
Mouse smirked back. “I know. But wait until you’ve read it, yeah?”
“What are they?” Amir asked, learning forward. “Journals?”
“I think the one on the left is. This one—” Mouse tapped the one on the right, “—I can’t make head or tails of. It looks like navigator stuff.”
Amir arched an eyebrow at him, then opened the second book with interest. “…Summer’s beard. I haven’t seen one of these since I studied at the observatory.”
“What is it?” Mouse asked.
“It’s a rutter. The precursor to modern navigation charts. Back when people had to get around via wandering isles, there were navigators who helped them get where they were going using books full of these charts and schedules. It took considerable intelligence to plot any serious trip.” Amir shook his head admiringly. “Modern navigation is much less of a headache.”
Jerl meanwhile had picked up the journal. What he found in its pages left him frowning. There were many writing systems across the earthmotes, of course, though most of them shared a mixed common ancestry in Feydh lettering, and an educated man could often muddle through reading a foreign language. But there was one human society in particular who had, very consciously, scrubbed absolutely everything elvish from their culture, often going so far as to near-literally reinvent the wheel. They’d certainly reinvented writing.
He’d seen Yunei characters before, of course. Especially the forehead brand of exiles like Ju-Wi. And he’d even seen Yunei documents, which were printed neatly in orderly columns of a uniform squareness. He could, if pressed, recall the meanings of maybe…five or six?
This was Yunei handwriting, done with quite a small and delicate brush. There was a certain elegance and flourish to it, but he may as well have been looking at a floral dish towel for all the information he could glean.
“So…we have the annals of, what? A Yunei traveler?”
“Going back to before airships, and therefore before the Empire closed its borders,” Amir said. “And our hag elf friends were after it…”
Jerl nodded. “Does anyone around here read Yunei?”
“We’re in the Thundering Hall. If not here, where else?” Amir stood up. “I’ll find somebody.”
“Thanks. The rest of us should probably set up a watch, just in case Civorage hasn’t entirely abandoned his plans to assault the place.”
Derghan and Sin nodded at that, and rose in unison. Jerl tried not to smile. The two were clearly actually acting on their mutual feelings (at long last) but nobody was willing to actually say it out loud, lest it burst the bag. But it was obvious, to anyone who knew them.
Now all he had to do was find somebody for Amir, though that project was greatly impeded by Amir’s apparent lack of romantic or sexual interest in anyone at all. Even Lady Palasarli had failed to draw his attention.
Oh well.
“What about us?” Mouse asked.
Jerl dusted his hands off and rose to his feet. He was suddenly feeling quite energized.
“…Show me where the elf stole these from,” he said.
----------------------------------------
INTERLUDE: WATCHING HELPLESSLY
Crownspouse’s guest wing, Sayf’s Oasis 09.06.03.10.05
It was a mark of how distracted Ellaenie was that she didn’t even notice Palasarli’s approach until a warm, tender hand slipped up around her shoulder to cuddle her, accompanied by a concerned kiss on the cheek. Pal was not the least bit inhibited about showing her affection with touch and lips…and Ellaenie needed it, right now. If Adrey was the older sister she’d never had, then Pal was the more experienced friend everyone needed. She’d been one of the rocks on which Ellaenie had built her new life these past eight years.
“How is she?”
They were looking in through a section of wall that Ellaenie had turned transparent, but only in one direction. From the other side, it was just an ordinary wall, decorated with the mosaic tiles Sayf loved so much. Just one of the many miracles her Word could achieve. Inside the room, Lisze was asleep, or perhaps unconscious. She didn’t seem able to stay awake for long. Being awake seemed to exhaust and traumatize her. She’d just curl up in a tense, tight little ball and whimper until protectively shutting down again.
Ellaenie shook her head miserably. “Broken. Utterly broken.”
Pal’s hand moved, giving her a sympathetic stroke on the arm. “Utterly?”
“…I hope not. I hope there’s something—I hope she’s still left in there. Enough to fix. But…”
“You’ve only just started, Ellie.” Pal gave her a squeeze. “It’s too early for despair.”
“You never knew her before, Pal. She was…” Ellaenie paused to wipe away a tear. “She had spirit! Adrey used to love to tease her, and she was easily shocked, but she’d always laugh, and she had a perfect mind for fashion and how to dress for any occasion…and some pretty strong opinions about how we could play and push the limits and move the fashion in our own direction. The Lisze I knew would have retched at the thought of being a man’s favorite breeding slave.”
She sighed, and looked at the curled-up, shivering figure of her friend on the other side of the transparency. “This isn’t Lisze. There’s hardly a fragment left of her. You might as well ask me to put back together a vase that was stuck in a barrel and rolled down a mountain.”
Pal stood with her in silence and let her grieve for a minute. Then, she reached up and toyed with one of her favorite pendants, worrying it between thumb and forefinger for a moment before speaking carefully.
“I’m reminded of something my mother told me.”
Ellaenie frowned at her. “…What’s that?”
“I was…twelve or thirteen, I believe. A tricky age, when one is the daughter of a prostitute and growing up in a brothel. That was about the time I began to realize that people were starting to look forward to putting me on the menu, like a cut of tender young veal. After a little while, I started to enjoy the thought myself. It made me the center of attention, after all.”
She worried her pendant a little more, then flashed a smile at Ellaenie’s expression of restrained horror and discomfort. “Girls that age are impressionable and foolish. Thankfully, my mother would have none of it. She told me I was better than that. That I was worth more than any man could pay. And she also told me something important about people. She said that if I sold away my virginity in a second-rank brothel, I’d forever be a second-rank whore. No matter where I went or what I did afterwards, people would hold on to that knowledge. It wouldn’t matter how much I grew or changed after that point, because people would always look at me and remember.”
She smiled ruefully. “I said that wasn’t fair. She said ‘fairness is the most dangerous delusion.’ She told me that all we have is a decisions, the choice to be practical and deal with what is, or be foolish and deal with what we wish could be.”
She turned to Ellaenie, quite serious now. “It’s not fair that your friend has been shattered. But giving in to despair because you’re grieving for who she was is doing nothing for who she is, or who she could be. She won’t ever again be the Lisze you remember, but she can still be someone, darling. You can still make something of that broken vase, and if you set your mind to it, you can help her be beautiful. Not the same. But beautiful nonetheless.”
Ellaenie blinked back tears, feeling unexpectedly ashamed and stupid. But she nodded.
Pal was a walking avatar of kindly sympathy, though. She smiled, and gave Ellaenie a squeeze. “I wish you could just have your friend back, too,” she added.
“Another in the long list of things Civorage will pay for.”
“In the fullness of time, he will,” Pal said. “I’m sure of it. But here and now…”
Ellaenie nodded, gave Pal a squeeze of her own by way of a thank-you, and started to think properly for the first time since coming back from Auldenheigh. Now that her refusal to see what was in front of her had been laid bare, she could plan appropriately. She could start making the right decisions on how to proceed with Lisze’s care.
And she was fairly sure she knew where to begin.
It began with love.
----------------------------------------
> “Among the many peculiar places I have visited, The Gate stands out for its bleakness, despite the grandness of the edifice for which it is named. It is through the eponymous gate that Yunei exiles are ceremoniously ejected from their homeland to languish among the lowest of the low—foreigners. Where they go thence, the Yunei care not. For centuries, foreign diplomats have sat on the doorstep awaiting an embassy, and I suspect they shall be waiting forever. For them, it too is a form of exile: a career cubby hole where the incompetent are sent so they can do no real harm. This is, nevertheless, the only glimpse of the Yunei kingdom that a foreigner can realistically expect to see. If your intent is to visit every land, this is your destination. I cannot otherwise call it a worthy one.“ —Prince Ruber of Valai, My Travels
NURSING A HEADACHE
The Thundering Hall, Stórsteinn 09.06.03.10.08
Jerl…was not a scholar.
He was no idiot, he liked to think. Decently intelligent, sure, or at least enough so to captain a successful freemerchant. But you had to have a certain kind of mind for the work of digging through books and translations and piecing together the information therein. Amir had that sort of mind, and was humming softly to himself, almost inaudibly but enough to let it be known that he was thoroughly enjoying himself. This was his element.
Jerl, on the other hand, had started to feel like his head was being packed with wool within minutes of beginning their studies of the stolen book, and the problem had only gotten worse. After days of it, he felt uncomfortably like somebody had managed to cram an entire goat into his cranium, and it was no happier to be there than he was to host it.
In theory, translating the Yunei language wasn’t that difficult: each symbol had a very specific meaning, and there was a deeply rational approach to the way it had been constructed. According to Amir, when the first Transcendent Emperor had declared the creation of a system of writing entirely new and distinct from the elfish mode, one of his stipulations had been that it should be strictly and rigidly ordered.
That was the Yunei through-and-through, from what Jerl knew of them. Everything properly ordered and set in its place. But in this case, it had worked beautifully. Each symbol was carefully designed to be its own reference code. Once you understood the system, you could look up the meaning in seconds if you had a properly sorted index…which of course, the Thundering Hall did.
Too bad the effort to leave behind any hint of elvish influence had also resulted in a language that was backwards and upside-down.
“…Transcendent…fourth…and third…and second…the Emperor…uh…ideal? No, perfect. Came…to him…the hand…and third…and first…of…years—”
“In the thirty-sixth year of the fourteenth Perfect Emperor’s reign,” Amir translated, scratching it down.
“Wh—? How—?”
“Yunei count on their right hand, palm toward you, starting from the thumb. Each finger is worth two of the one beside it. So the fourth-and-third-and-second is eight-plus-four-plus-two: fourteen. A whole hand is thirty-one.” Amir paused, and blinked at the look they all were giving him. “It’s actually a very elegant system, once you understand it.”
“A base thirty-one counting system is elegant? Hmmph.” Derghan grunted, poring over his own excerpt from the book.
“Technically, it’s a binary counting system.” Amir shrugged, and sipped his tea. “It works for the Yunei, anyway. Carry on, Jerl?”
Jerl concentrated, flipping back and forth through the dictionary they’d found and sketching down the direct word-for-word translation. “Uh…fifth-and-first?”
“—Seventeen—”
“Seventeen…bee meadows?” He double-checked, but it seemed to be accurate. “…Yeah. Seventeen bee meadows, the belonging-to rune…earthmote…come—no, arrive at…here’s his name again…did…on the…the day, third-and-first many hands and third-and-second.”
“—On the hundred and sixtieth day of the thirty-sixth year of the fourteenth Perfect Emperor’s reign, Yung-Fah Le arrived at the Earthmote of Seventeen Bee Meadows,” Amir clarified, writing down the translation.
“Ugh, Winter’s tits…” Derghan muttered, shaking his head. Jerl couldn’t quite tell if he was impressed by Amir, annoyed at the Yunei, or just in pain at this point.
“Seventeen Bee Meadows…” Sin traced a finger over their maps and charts. “…Uh…gimme a minute…”
“Take your time. Go on, Jerl.”
The translation had been going on in this painstaking vein for a couple of hours by now. They were reading the memoirs of Yung-Fah Le, an Imperial official of some sort—a Magistrate, Amir guessed—who’d gone on an extended tour of the outlying territories for the purposes of excise and a display of Imperial presence. The memoir had clearly not actually been written by Yung-Fah Le himself, but rather by an attending scribe, to judge by the extreme formality and third-person perspective. They’d already got sick of reading out the man’s full name and titles, which included such glowing epithets as ‘The Judicious, Greatly Esteemed and Right-Thinking.”
Then again, Jerl remembered, in formal contexts, Ellaenie would rightly be “Her Grace the Duchess of Enerlend, Ellaenie of House Banmor, Crownspouse, Earl of Vathelan, Earl of the Heighlands, Baron of the Old City, Warden of the Unworn Crown, Guardian of the Vacant Throne, Steward of the Dukesmoot, Dame Most Learned of the most excellent Order of the Veil.” Pomp was hardly a uniquely Yunei invention.
So far, nothing exciting had fallen out of it. But there had to be a reason the hag elf had tried to steal this particular document…
“Hmm..hold on.”
Jerl looked up at Derghan. “What?”
Derghan stretched his back, then spun Jerl’s reference book around with a finger and flipped through a few pages. “…Here…gimme a…” his pen scribbled and scratched, and his tongue poked out the side of his mouth as he worked with his ruddy brows coming together in furious concentration.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
“The great blahblahblah Yun-Fah Le, for tribute the blahblahblah Emperor…received, I think…yeah, received.” he held up a hand to stop Amir’s unnecessary clarification and delved on. “Ain’t important. The words standin’ out to me here are…script…light….box.”
“Let me see that.” Amir moved around the table to peer around his shoulder. He frowned, took his own pen, scribbled a bit on Derghan’s parchment, then straightened.
“Huh…’He received from the people of the Earthmote, as was due, much suitable tribute for the Emperor’ —mostly grain, soldiers and pigs, it looks like—*’and also treasures of great value and wonder. Among these’…*eh, gold and silks and suchlike, but…yeah, here. ‘A box adorned with script of light, that no man could open, which was an’….I think this word effectively means ‘heirloom’ of the…well. A regional noble. Quite a high-ranking one.”
“When was this?” Jerl asked.
“Oh, uh…fortunately, about the only thing the Yunei ever bother to communicate to the outside world is the ascension of new emperors, and emperors are the foundation of their calendar system…” Amir consulted a small reference book he was compiling on his corner of the table. “Uh…let’s see…we’re on the…third Transcendent Emperor, now. I imagine there was a civil war they never bothered to tell us about, and a dynasty change…”
“So…?” Mouse prompted.
“One second, I have to look up the dates…” Amir flipped back and forth a few times, consulted yet another book, twisted his goatee thoughtfully between thumb and index finger, then nodded. “This was…about a hundred and eighty, maybe a hundred eighty-two years ago.”
“So there’s a Word in the Yunei imperial palace.”
“Possibly. We should read the rest of the memoir to be certain—”
“Oh, Crowns. I can’t take any more,” Jerl shook his head. “I need to clear my head and get something to eat.”
Amir paused then nodded, a touch sheepishly. Jerl almost laughed: it would be just like him to feel invigorated by all this, rather than drained. “Ah. Yes. Good idea. We can come back to it with fresh eyes.”
“You’re gonna stay here, aren’t you?” Mouse noted, drily.
“I…” Amir paused, then laughed at his own foolishness. “I suppose I should take a walk and find something to eat,” he admitted. “Ah, how long do we have until the eclipse is over?”
Sin laughed, and gestured to the window behind him: clean, bright daylight was sleeting through the glass. “Any second now, nay?”
“…Ah.”
“Yeah.” Jerl patted him affectionately on the shoulder and straightened up. “Time for some fresh air and sunlight, I think. And I guess the Herald’s gonna want a conversation now that he’s free.”
“That’d make life easier. He can prob’ly read this damn journal at a glance,” Derghan grumbled.
“Mm. He won’t, though,” Jerl shrugged. “I think I’m starting to get a read on Crowns and Heralds, and how they think. They’ll give us only what we can’t figure out for ourselves.”
They filed out of the room. Sure enough, out in the Hall itself, the great doors were open, allowing the chill but fresh breeze to swirl in and blow out five days of stale air. Jerl sighed happily at the feel of it. Part of him was getting antsy to be back on the ship and sailing somewhere. If only they had somewhere to go.
He gave voice to his thoughts as they strolled toward the doors. “The problem I have is…okay, so the Yunei have a Word vault. So what? They’re an entirely closed culture, it’s not like we could just stroll into the Forbidden City and ask for one of the Imperial treasures.”
“If that’s even where the vault is,” Amir pointed out. “We haven’t read the whole book yet, and it was written a hundred and eighty years ago. A lot can happen in that time.”
“Hmm. Civorage must be pretty desperate if that’s the angle he’s playing…” Derghan mused.
“Or arrogant.”
“Or he just knows that he could stride into the Palace, tell the guards to ignore him, order the Emperor to give him passage and the vault, and walk out again,” Mouse pointed out.
“…Ah. Yes.”
“Mhm,” Jerl nodded. “Words change the rules. I daresay Mouse and I could pull off a heist from the Palace if we really wanted to.”
”If, indeed, that is where the Word is,” Amir repeated.
“Right, right. Point made…come on, let’s take an actual break rather than just work in a different room.”
The wandered into the Hall’s kitchens where, as the Herald’s guests, a selection of cold-cuts, cheese and bread was conjured up for them, to be washed down by a kind of tea flavored with the meadow flowers that grew around the Hall during its high months. They supped on a terrace out in the fresh air, surrounded by the sounds of the town airing out their rooms after days of confinement.
No summons from Yngmir was apparent, and Jerl felt it would be impolite to hassle the Herald, so they returned to their work with clearer heads. There was still a lot to read and translate.
But at least, at last, they had a lead.
----------------------------------------
FITFUL SLEEP
Crownspouse’s suites, the Oasis 09.06.03.10.08
Ellaenie walks the streets of Auldenheigh, but they’re different enough for her to instantly know she is dreaming. All the bricks and cobbles are circles, all the architecture is white and plain and smooth, all the lighting is hidden and indirect. The familiar skyline has been further corrupted by Civorage’s aesthetic.
This lucidity has happened before. According to Rheannach, it’s all part and parcel of a witch’s talents. Dreams are just a theatre for the mind, a way for the subconscious to say what it must. A good witch listens to her dreams, and even when aware that she is dreaming, she steps back and lets the dream play out as it will.
She walks through the rain, toward the Circle by the river. But instead of approaching it, she turns aside at the Armory Bridge.
There is a figure waiting there for her. A woman, remarkably tall and dark of hair, with healthy caramel skin and her hair drawn into a single centerline plait. When she turns, her face is staggeringly, impossibly beautiful, but her eyes are familiar: Wide, and as green as fresh olives. Ellaenie sees those eyes every time she looks in a mirror.
As is the way of dreams, she does not speak. She could, but there is no speech in dreams, no legible writing, no clear communication. Everything is form and sign, innuendo and image. The language of the subconscious is unspoken…but unsubtle, once one understands it. This is Saoirse Sayfs-Child, Ellaenie’s daughter, as she will grow up to be, perhaps. Delicate, slender, fragile…and immensely powerful. She turns, and points toward the Circle.
When Ellaenie looks, the building is gone. Instead, there is a suppurating, festering wound. The city is Lisze, the ragged gouge where the Circle was is a terrible injury on her friend’s body, on the cusp of turning septic and killing her. The warning of her subconscious is clear: Danger, danger, DANGER—!
“Mummy?”
Ellaenie jerked, and for a moment the dream and real life were one and the same. Little Saoirse’s face was inches from her own, and the little girl’s green eyes were wide and worried with concern beyond her years.
“…Mmm?”
“I had a bad dream.”
Ellaenie relaxed. “So did I, Pickle.” She scooted aside to make room in the bed for Saoirse to join her, the way she always did, but Saoirse shook her head and took a step back. Her little face was bunched in oddly mature concentration.
“But it wasn’t a dream. It was me…” Saoirse frowned at herself, in the cute way she did when she was recalling when somebody had told her something and she was being asked to recall it afterwards. “I said…I said ‘go to her.’”
Something lurched in Ellaenie’s gut. “…Pickle—”
Saoirse’s eyes widened. She looked scared.
“Mummy, you have to go to her. Right now.”
Ellaenie blinked.
Then she was out of bed and sprinting.
She barely, barely made it in time. The door to Lisze’s room was locked, but mere wood and metal couldn’t stop her, couldn’t have stopped her right now even without the Word. She burst through it, saw what Lisze was doing, thrust out a hand, shrieked “No!” and the shard of broken vase in Lisze’s hand fell apart in a shower of brown grit just as it broke skin, leaving behind only a shallow bleeding mark on the delicate skin of Lizzy’s left wrist.
Lisze turned hollow, empty, despairing eyes her way, and the unspoken question that, to the Sight, was as good as screaming, struck Ellaenie like a slap in the face: Why? Why can’t you even let me die? I was so happy, and you’ve taken that away from me, so let me be dead instead…
Ellaenie rushed to her friend, threw her arms around her and held her tight. It was like hugging a statue. She couldn’t even fool herself that the statue softened after a second.
Adrey joined them a second later, led by little Saoirse, who let go of her hand and lurked in the doorway with wide, confused eyes, until Sayf came along and took her away.
The next couple of hours were a blur. There was a long, difficult conversation that Ellaenie remembered little of, as it consisted of the same assurances over and over again. Promises of friendship, loyalty, safety, love…
Perhaps it made a difference. More likely it was the sleeping draught she brewed that got Lisze to finally put her head down and sleep Adrey promised to stay and watch over her, but that was only a temporary solution, they both knew. Adrey had to go back to Auldenheigh, soon, if the war to reclaim the city, the duchy and the earthmote was going to make any progress.
Ellaenie would have taken the duty herself, but she had the mystery of her daughter to investigate.
She found her husband and their child sitting outside in the koi garden. They were sitting on the pool’s walled edge and chatting in an oddly…adult way.
Still, there was nothing adult about the way Saoirse beamed, bounced to her feet, and ran over to be scooped up and held. “Mummy!”
“Hi, Pickle.” Ellaenie gave her a squeeze.
“Is Miss Liz okay?”
“She is. Thanks to you, my clever little wonder…how did you know?”
Saoirse blinked at her. “I told me.”
“…That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, Pickle.”
“I was dreaming, and I saw me, and I said to come wake you. So I did.”
Ellaenie looked to her husband for help with this, only to catch him chuckling to himself. “Clearly I’m missing something here,” she said.
“Did you really think any child of ours wouldn’t manifest some interesting talents sooner rather than later?” Sayf asked, clearly pleased. “Jerl could have told you more. He sensed it on her instantly.”
“…Something to do with Time? I dreamed of…” Ellaenie looked her daughter in the eye. Her own olive green eyes set in Sayf’s caramel skin. “I dreamed of you all grown up.”
“Yeah!” Saoirse nodded.
“Do you dream about yourself all grown up…a lot?”
“Uh-huh!”
Ellaenie turned to Sayf and frowned. “…Time? Could it be she speaks the Word herself, sometime in the future?”
Sayf shook his head. “Time is linear, and the future doesn’t exist. If Time could allow retroactive influence from potential futures, then worse things than even Civorage would have come to pass long ago.”
“So, what—?”
“You’ll find out in due course, my heart.” Sayf gave Saoirse a shining smile. He loved all his children, Ellaenie knew…but from the moment Saoirse had been born, she’d sensed there was something about her in particular that made him deeply, deeply happy.
“…Oh, alright. Keep your secrets. But you, my beautiful clever girl, need more sleep. I know I do.”
Saoirse didn’t fight it. “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
Ellaenie gave her a squeeze. “Of course you can, Pickle.”
“I’ll stay up and take over for Adrey,” Sayf said. “She needs her sleep as well.”
Ellaenie nodded her gratitude, transferred Saoirse onto her hip, and went back to bed. Saoirse was already basically asleep by the time Ellaenie set her down. Ellaenie tucked her in carefully, then snuggled into bed as well, sighed, took a deep breath and exercised some tricks of the Craft to empty her head. She knew all too well how easy it would be to lie there and fret over how close that had been, how much pain Lisze was in, and this new weirdness.
That could wait for daylight. Rest now, and let the sleeping mind do its work. She rolled over, kissed Saoirse’s forehead, tucked a little errant hair out of the little girl’s face, then put her own head down, and gave herself gladly to sleep
She dreams of her daughter as an adult again. But this time, those wide green eyes are creased in a smile.
----------------------------------------
> “Of course, there are other exits from the Empire than the Gate. One of the main reasons a Yunei might be exiled is for participating in the illegal trade of foreign goods, or selling of Yunei goods to foreigners and exiles. Being no smuggler myself, I could not say how these meetings and exchanges are arranged. But constantly throughout the year, by roundabout channels, a shipment of Yunei goods arrives on Garanhir, and sell at an exquisite rate. I can only presume the trade is profitable enough to be worth the risk. I hasten to add: do not think to use these smuggling routes as a way into the country. The Yunei have made it plain that the penalty for a trespassing foreigner is an instant prejudicial execution. Nobody visits the Empire from outside save the Crowns and Heralds.” —Prince Ruber of Valai, My Travels
FINALLY DONE
Reading room, the Thundering Hall, Stórsteinn 09.06.03.10.13
“Annd…that’s it!” Amir stabbed his pen down in a full stop, then sat back with a grin. “Crowns. We just translated a Yunei memoir. That’s not something I ever imagined I’d do.”
“Me either…” Derghan rumbled. “And here’s hoping I never have to do it again.”
Sin, Jerl and Mouse uttered a loose chorus of “Hear, hear.” They’d been at the translation work for five days since learning about the Word Vault, and had quickly decided to just finish the work before seeking any further clues.
Amir tutted, fondly. “Brutes.”
“Engineer,” Derghan corrected him. “You’d be feeling about the same way if I’d had you strip and rebuild one of the engines.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Sin disagreed. “I don’t think there’s anything Amir can’t find fascinating, nay?”
Amir nodded fervently, causing a quartet of tired chuckles.
“Alright, well don’t keep us in suspense,” Jerl prompted. “I’m pretty sure we got some more about this heirloom word vault, right?”
“We most certainly did!” Amir flipped through his notes. “It’s…very political, from what I can tell.”
“This Sho-An Nu fella, right?” That name had started popping up about halfway through the book, in…well, it was hard to tell, given how unfailingly decorous and flattering the scribe had been about his betters, but the language concerning Sho-An Nu had somehow seemed to Jerl to have a whiff of irony about them. Though, he couldn’t quite put his finger on what exactly was giving him that impression.
From what Jerl could tell, Sho-An Nu and Yun-Fah Le were equals in rank and importance, and thus rivals with their eyes set on the same promotion, winner takes all. Indeed, a major part of the reason behind Yun-Fah Le’s tour of the empire and collection of excise had been to one-up his rival.
By the end of the trip, both men had endured a suspicious number of near-misses from various hazards and mishaps. Bandit activity, a rabid dog getting loose in the camp, an unexpected raid by elves, the wrong kind of mushroom finding its way into the soup…
“Indeed….here’s an interesting point. The final list of the tribute Yun-Fah Le delivered to the Emperor. Notice anything missing?”
“Huh.” They leaned in. Sure enough, there was no mention of any box, glowing text or anything that might be the Word Vault.
“Where’d it go, then?” Sin asked.
Amir grinned. “I suspect the scribe stole it.”
There was a chuckle from the door, deep and low and relaxed. “Oh, yes. Very good. Just as exemplary as I remember…”
They turned. It took Jerl a second to recognize Yngmir, who was not his usual titanic size. He had shrunk himself down to a “mere” eight foot tall so as to visit them in the reading room, but was showing his wings to compensate for his reduced stature. Two vast striped and speckled owl’s wings tucked themselves tight to his back as he squeezed through the doorframe.
Everyone in the room straightened out of respect, and Amir bowed to him, still grinning. “Thank you, Lord Herald.”
Yngmir’s full, sprawling beard twitched as he returned the smile, and he ambled forward to pick up the book they’d spent the last week translating. He set it in the air next to him and let it hover, the pages turning on their own at about the rate of a ticking clock as he scanned them with an idle expression. “What gave the thief away?” he asked.
“Well…’stole’ and ‘thief’ might be a little more than is warranted. See….ah. The sixty-second entry. Our scribe clearly spent some time poisoning the well with regards to the quality of the gift, stating that he had advised Yun-Fah Le that a small box no-one could open might well be an interesting curiosity, but it was surely not worthy of the Emperor. And Yun-Fah Le seems to have agreed.”
“Hmm. How wonderfully subtle.”
“Meaning…the Vault isn’t in the Forbidden CIty after all. Huh.” Jerl frowned. “Who was this scribe?”
Amir produced another piece of paper with a flourish. “Deng-Hao On-Le. And that’s a name that snaged my memory, of course.”
Yngmir smiled ever wider, while the other four just glanced at each other. “…Of…course…” Sin ventured after a second.
“Haven’t you read Prince Ruber of Valai?”
“’Course I have, but we don’t all have your memory, nay?”
“You’re a bloody showman when you’re pleased with yourself, mate,” Jerl pointed out. “Get to the point.”
Amir just smiled at him and pushed a bookmarked copy of My Travels across the table. Jerl opened it at the marked page, and read, muttering a vague nonsense **to himself as he tracked down the page looking for the bit Amir wanted him to see. “’…initially met with some difficulty, as the prevailing Yunei attitude is that even a foreign prince is inferior to the most wretched Yunei peasant. Still, my efforts eventually yielded the rare privilege of an audience with the Gate’s administrator, one Deng-Li On.’ Huh.”
Amir nodded eagerly. “You have to understand some subtleties about Yunei culture of course, but that name reveals two important facts. First, the man Prince Ruber spoke to is a direct male-line descendant of our scribe. And secondly, the family was promoted. They’re no longer subservient to the Le family, and that’s reinforced by the fact that the Gate’s administrator could be nothing less than a nobleman of the fourth class.”
“…You think the Word is at The Gate,” Mouse realized.
“Exactly! It’s…only a guess of course, but if Deng-Hao, this Deng-Li’s great great grandfather, persuaded Yung-Fah Le to let him keep the Vault for himself, it’ll be among the On family’s heirlooms in their estate on the Yunei side of the wall.”
“A most intriguing hypothesis,” Yngmir told him, with a twinkle in his eye that all but explicitly confirmed it. Jerl almost chuckled to himself. That was a Herald’s response, alright: let them do all the legwork and figure it out, then gently confirm what they’d figured out using a deniable turn of phrase.
“Sounds a damnsight more doable than the Imperial Palace,” Sin mused.
“I daresay it is….” Yngmir set the book down, and unrolled a map for them. Jerl blinked: the document seemed to have sprung out of thin air even as he laid it out for them. “Though, to what degree, I could not say. I myself am no expert on skullduggery, being…hmm…of a generally unsubtle disposition*,* yes?”
There were laughs, and everyone leaned in to inspect the map.
“As Herald, I am one of few privileged with access to the Empire. And seeing as there was no way you could have acquired a map such as this for yourselves…” He flashed a knowing smile. “I am not normally one for bending the rules, but I am inclined to heed Lady Haust’s suggestions.”
The map continued the Yunei habit of xenophobia, in that outside the gate, the foreign quarters was left blank. The mapmakers clearly didn’t care one jot to know (or more likely would have been severely punished for learning) how the foreigners and exiles had organized their side of town, though there were vaguely noted scribbles here and there, especially toward the bottom of the map where a series of wide lines and some terse script suggested the location of the airship docks.
On the Yunei side, though, it was exquisite. Every street, alleyway, decorative feature, tree and bush was painstakingly recorded in its exact dimensions.
“How recent is this?” Jerl asked.
“Two years,” Yngmir said with some satisfaction. “I do not visit the Empire myself, as a gesture of opprobrium for their insularity, but I do have people who procure documents such as these for me. To facilitate observation. A foresighted policy, as it now transpires, hmm?”
“Very,” Jerl agreed with a nod. “Thank you.”
“All I ask is that you please do try to acheive your heist with an appropriate minimum of temporal revision. It’s quite an unpleasant sensation.”
“We, uh…haven’t actually decided on doing a heist, yet,” Jerl pointed out.
“You have another lead on a Word that I was unaware of?”
“Well, uh…no. Not as such.”
“Well, perhaps if you continue to look you shall find one. There are a great many secrets hidden away in this library of mine.” Yngmir stepped back and turned to go, his eyes sparkling with amusement. “A body could look for a lifetime and be lucky to find one thing…”
“…Thank you, lord Herald.”
Yngmir gave a satisfied nod, and made his exit. “Good fortune to you.”
The five of them looked at each other. Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Then Sin sighed and pushed herself back from the table.
“I’ll go check our provisions and round up the lads,” she said.
“Aye, I’ll give the engines their pre-flight,” Derghan added.
“I’ll calculate a course, if Mouse can copy the map?” Amir suggested.
“See if you can reasonably take us via Haptar Getesh on the way,” Jerl said.
“Premonition?” Mouse asked.
“No, just intuition. But I still want to visit, unless it’s completely out of our way.”
“Fair enough,” Amir nodded amiably and started packing things away. Mouse shrugged, and set to the work of tracing the map
Another Word. Which one could it be? And who were they going to give it to?
Well…don’t count the money before the sale. There was still the matter of getting it first. And that, Jerl intuited, was going to be much easier said than done. But he was vindicated: the choice to come to the Thundering Hall had been the right one, and had given them a lead after all. Perhaps more than one!
Time would tell.
----------------------------------------
> “In the years since the invention of Keeghan’s Patent Lift Gas, airships have undergone many changes in the shape of their lifting bags. The very first Keeghan models were held aloft by simple spherical balloons, and these still have their place for aerial buoys and sky-stations that are not intended to move from their anchor. But mobile ships nowadays exhibit a variety of different bag shapes and designs. Sausage, Onion Net, Piscine, Slack Bag Bullet, Rigid Frame Bullet, Flat-Wide, Tri-Stack…The list is exhaustive, and the illustrations below represent only the most commonly seen varieties. Each has its merits, and downsides, and there is not yet a clearly superior and dominant design. Some attempt has been made to build airships with protected bags built inside the hull, but this has so far met with limited success due to weight concerns leading to poor buoyancy. Still, as the airship industry matures, it is to be expected that lighter and stronger materials will one day bring the much-pursued ‘Bagless’ hull to the skies. And there remains, of course, the fantasy of one day constructing an entirely bagless heavier-than-air vehicle that can fly as the birds do. One can only imagine what sky travel will look like should such a machine ever come to market.” —Leli Emeris, Airships: A Beginner’s Guide.
AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
Crownspouse suites, Sayf’s Oasis. 09.06.03.10.13
Morning followed its normal routine, somehow. Saoirse, still a child after all, bounced out of bed bright and early and wanted to Do Stuff, no matter how much mummy might want another hour or two in bed.
If only there was some magical device for entertaining children…alas.
Still. Breakfast was welcome, and Ellaenie had come to appreciate the ritual of making her own rather than having it sent up from the kitchens and waiting for her in the morning. There was something more wholesome about cooking for yourself.
Today, though, she’d barely got the ingredients together before thin, cautious voice from the door ventured: “You…should…let me do that.”
She looked up and blinked. Lisze was dithering on the threshold, her fingers trying to tie knots in her skirt, and her gaze looking anywhere that wasn’t a face. She looked wretched, timid, anxious and a shadow of her old self…but also as infinitely more than she had been yesterday as one was more than zero.
Ellaenie was about to protest and say otherwise, but her Sight and thoughts and training caught her. What did Lisze need?
“…If you want to,” she said, after a second.
Lisze nodded tremulously, and almost stumbled toward the hearth, though her movements gained a strength and certainty as she gathered ingredients and utensils.
“Mummy was gonna cook eggs an’ salmon,” Saoirse told her, nearly causing Ellaenie to giggle: she had, in fact, planned something else, but that was Saoirse's favourite breakfast, and she would not miss an opportunity to claim it. Lisze didn't notice: she nodded, not absently but with a sudden focus, and set to work.
Ellaenie watched her work. Part of her was expecting overdone rubbery scrambled eggs, but instead Lisze deftly delivered a trio of perfect, buttery, silken Urstoin omelettes, even throwing on a little handful of shredded fresh herbs. She sat opposite Ellaenie as Saoirse tucked in, and for the first time since the rescue, the two of them met, and held, each others’ gaze.
After a second, Lisze sniffed a bit. “I…”
When she trailed off, Ellaenie leaned across the table and squeezed her hand. It seemed to work. Lisze took a deep breath, swallowed, and squeezed back. There was still a small bandage on her arm from last night’s suicide attempt.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, Liz. You’re hurting. You don’t have to—”
“I do, Ellie. I was so…I didn’t think how much it would hurt you, Ellie. I nearly…I tried to…” Lisze shut her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them again she was steeled, somehow. Stronger. “I know you saved me. I know I should be grateful. I know all the happiness and love and warmth in the Circle was a lie to control me, but, but it still…aches. More than I can stand.”
“You seem better today,” Ellaenie pointed out.
“Your husband took care of me last night. He’s…a good listener.”
“He really is,” Ellaenie agreed.
There was no smile. But Lisze extracted her hand, picked up her fork and ate a little of her omelette. It was the first morsel she’d eaten unaided since the raid.
“Never again,” she promised after a while. “I won’t try that again. Or anything like it.”
“Oh, Lizzy!” Ellaenie’s heart broke a little, and she abandoned her breakfast to scoot her chair around and hug her. Lisze gasped, but hugged her back.
They didn’t actually say anything else as they ate breakfast. Ellaenie got the impression that Lisze wanted to say things she didn’t want a little girl to hear, so their conversation was put on hold until Saoirse’s tutor, Mister Pola, arrived to collect her and take her away for lessons.
Once she was gone, Lizzy opened up fully. Every pain, every pang, every longing. For hours they walked the perimeter of the Oasis’ gardens, and Ellaenie listened as her friend thought aloud. Sometimes, she said a word or two to steer Lisze away from the black pits in her path, but for the most part she was just there, listening. Being a friend, and a sister.
Eventually, Lisze retreated to bed, citing exhaustion. They traded hugs, Lisze promised to send for her if she felt overwhelmed, and Ellaenie went to find her husband.
She found Sayf in his pottery workshop. It was a funny thing for someone who could spin matter out of nothing and transmute the very air itself into clay, but Sayf preferred to work with his hands and with real materials. He imported the very finest sculpting clay and would take days producing delicate, scintillating works of the utmost delicacy and exquisite beauty.
Today, though, he was doing something different. He had a large bowl in front of him, and jars of—Ellaenie closed her eyes and practiced with her Word for a second to get a sense of the substances within. Fine wood powder, lacquer sap, wheat flour, vegetable oil, powdered gold, pure ethanol.
She recognized the bowl. It was one of Cerida’s favorites, wide and shallow and a deep, lustrous green. Usually it sat full of potpourri atop the dresser at the end of her bed. Right now, though, it was in several pieces.
“…Mending a broken thing with gold lacquer, so it comes out beautiful in a new way.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “How very subtle you are, my love.”
He laughed. “Coincidence, I swear it.”
“Good. I’d hate to think you believe I’m so obtuse as to need such a heavy-handed metaphor.”
“Oh, no more than I am. We’re all obtuse from time to time.” He set his work aside for the moment and turned to face her. “You look happier.”
“She’s better today. Thank you for talking with her.”
He sighed. “Truthfully, I did more than talk. I…wish it could have been otherwise, but some patients require surgery or they’ll never even start to heal.”
Ellaenie nodded. She’d guessed as much. “She has a long road ahead of her I think, but at least she’s on it, now. I know messing with the mind and free will makes you uncomfortable.”
“It can be the deepest sin there is. You need to have very good reasons to go there, and it’s all too easy to mistake good intentions for good reasons. But…I think soothing the worst of the harm done to her by somebody else is probably, on balance, more good than evil.”
Ellaenie couldn’t help but snort softly as she sat beside him. “So cautious. I never would have guessed it about you, before I knew you.”
He shrugged. “Everyone’s careful when holding their baby in their arms. And the whole world is our baby.”
“So, what are these troubles we’re going through right now with the Words and everything? Teething? Growing pains? Teenage rebellion?”
“Mm…imagine if Saoirse started going through her teenage rebellious phase right now, at the age of five. An expected event, but much too early.” He shrugged. “It is how it is. What’s your next move?”
“We only smashed one Circle in Auldenheigh. As a proof, it was a success…as a strategy, it’s nothing. We need to free the dukes.”
“Civorage will see that coming.”
“And the people of Auldenheigh saw us strike a Circle and get away with it. For years, the Circles have seemed invincible. In recovering Lisze, we corrected that. Seeing us coming won’t do him any good if we’re a landslide that’ll sweep him away no matter what.”
“You’re sounding overconfident, beloved,” Sayf warned. “He still has a lot of factors on his side of the scales. More than you have on yours.”
Ellaenie frowned at him. “…You think we’re not ready?”
“You could whip the populace up into a frenzy against him, and all he’d have to do is stand in front of them and instruct them to go home. You’d need a lake of your potion to innoculate against that.” Sayf shook his head. “You want a battle. Goodness knows, I want a battle too. But this war isn’t ripe enough for that, yet. For the time being, you still have to play the game of sabotage and small gains. But I think you’re right about the need to do something more than a proof of concept. The time has come to hit him somewhere he’ll find painful, rather than soothe your own pain.”
Ellaenie considered that. Then she smiled.
“…I think…” she said slowly, “I may know exactly the right target.”
----------------------------------------
INTERLUDE: JOLTING AWAKE
The Gate, Yonguitang Earthmote 09.06.03.10.13
Deng-Nah On opened his eyes with a snort and a gasp, and needed several seconds to get his breathing under control. Beside him, his mistress Sumi stirred and made a small mew of displeasure at the disturbance, but she fell asleep again in seconds without properly waking up.
Rather than disturb her further by trying and failing to sleep, Nah rolled aside and extracted himself gracefully from the futon, before padding gently across the room, retrieving his robe, sliding the door aside, and stepping out onto the veranda outside his bedroom. It was still deep in the night, perhaps a little past halfway through. Above the ornamental garden and its carefully placed and carved stones, he could see the inferior earthmotes gleaming in the light of distant day.
The same dream, again. The same strange, foreign faces. Nah had never even seen a foreigner before, but somehow his sleep these past three nights had been interrupted by the clear images of them. So clearly, he could picture them still.
Three days without a full restful night, despite Sumi’s wonderful attentions, was starting to wear on him. He sighed, and folded his robe about himself. Perhaps…perhaps if he painted the faces from his dreams, he’d drive them out of his head?
It seemed dubious, but in the absence of a more credible idea…why not?
Fortunately, there were always servants awake at every hour in his father’s house. There were always lightstones to charge, floors to scrub, clothes to launder and all the other tasks of keeping the place properly ordered and seemly. He sent one of the floor-scrubbing girls away to retrieve brushes, paint and paper, and one of the lightstone boys to fetch his writing tray. Minutes later, he was sitting on the lawn under one of the juniper trees, sketching in the basic shapes by the light of the lanterns hung therein.
It was the first restful thing he’d done in days. In minutes, he was completely lost in the task and didn’t notice at all as the night wore on. He glanced up briefly when day came and changed the quality of the light, but other than that, he painted and the ghostly faces that had so rudely interrupted his nights took shape.
He’d never seen a man with red hair or skin as pale as paper, and he hardly understood how skin could be marked with bolts of lightning in bright blue, but there he was. The same went for the strange skinny one with pointed ears, eyes like opals and hair like beech bark. There was a brute with skin as bronzed as a farmer’s and a black beard, and a slim man as dark as lacquered walnut wood with a small pointed beard and a lavishly embroidered hat.
Those four, he achieved with ease. The fifth was…elusive. He caught flashes of impressions, of hair as yellow as antique silver and of a level, watchful gaze, but their face refused to come into focus. He couldn’t even decide if they were a man or a woman.
And the sixth was truly bizarre. In his dream, she was simultaneously a child, an adult, a venerable elder and a timeless ancient, but in all incarnations her skin was the hue of caramel, her eyes as green as jade, her face beautiful enough to derange his heart even though she was an outsider. If the brushmanship existed to properly capture such a staggering presence, the gift was not Deng-Nah’s.
He sighed, washed his brush, and sat back to try and make sense of things.
“Foreigners, Deng-Nah? When did you ever see foreigners to paint them so?”
Nah stiffened. He’d been so absorbed, he hadn’t noticed anyone approaching him. He pushed the tray forward, turned and stood. “Father. You move with quiet grace.”
“Or, you were not paying attention,” Deng-Li reprimanded him, though not unkindly. “You seem…distracted.”
“I have not slept well.” Nah gestured to the paintings. “These faces have haunted my dreams.”
“Dreaming of foreigners? Most inappropriate, my son.” Deng-Li picked up one of the paintings. “But I must ask again, when did you ever lay eyes on foreigners, to have painted them so…accurately?”
“Only in my dreams.”
Deng-Li shuffled the papers. “…This one is an elf.”
“How can you tell?”
“The ears, my son. And the unnatural hue of her skin.”
“Elves…” Deng-Nah took the paper back and stared in fascination and mounting wonder. “These…must be more than mere dreams, then. How else could I see so clearly to paint them?”
“Hmm.” Deng-Li considered the paintings a moment longer, then gathered them up. “Let us hope,” he said, “that you have exorcised these visions. This is an improper subject, Deng-Nah. Foreigners and elves are beneath your consideration, and visions and soothsaying are unworthy magic. Put it all from your mind.”
“What if the dreams continue?”
“You will exercise discipline.”
“Father, I haven’t slept properly in three days! I need to—”
Deng-Li raised a hand, silencing him instantly. “Deng-Nah. Your tone verges on disrespect.”
Deng-Nah took a deep breath, then bowed, planting his hands on his knees. “Thank you for telling me so; your guidance points me toward greater perfection,” he said. It was a suitably proper apology, and Deng-Li softened, inasmuch as a man of his stature ever could. He was quite a tender and gentle man, really, to the limits granted him by his station.
“I find I sleep easier after a cup of orange blossom tea,” he suggested.
“Thank you. I shall mention it to Sumi, though her attentiveness and care in that regard has been exemplary,” Nah assured him. “I am quite well taken care-of, father. I am simply…plagued. By visions I do not understand, of things I should not know. Would it not be appropriate for me to deduce their significance?”
“Many an exile has justified the path they walked as an attempt to behave appropriately. Nothing proper comes from foreigners and elves, Deng-Nah. I have taught you this.”
“Yes, father.”
Deng-Li nodded, again not unkindly, and patted his son on the shoulder. “You should return to your bed and rest. Lack of sleep will harm you in body and soul.”
In that regard, at least, Deng-Nah had no doubts that Deng-Li was correct. “Yes, father. I will.”
“Good. Remember, orange blossom tea and only a light meal.”
“Yes, father.”
Satisfied, Deng-Li rolled the paintings in his hand, they exchanged polite bows, and parted ways. Nah saw his father throw the paintings into the burning brazier by the garden gate as he went.
Well…perhaps that was truly the proper thing. He yawned and turned back toward his bedroom, gesturing for a servant who had been hovering discreetly nearby to fetch Sumi and explain his need. And indeed, quite soon he enjoyed a light snack and a cup of orange blossom tea, and settled down with his head in Sumi’s lap while she stroked his hair and hummed him off to sleep.
It didn’t work. He dreamed of the faces again.
And this time, he felt sure they were trying to speak to him.
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