None of Fitzuki’s words had appeased Sesako’s anger against the other.
Anger was easier than grief and self-loathing.
The Great One would die.
That was now inevitable. And the other, in those minutes he’d spoken with the emperor, had tried to convince him to be a better man after he’d killed the Great One, and forced Yatamo to submit its bleeding neck to his sword once more.
That damned, damnable traitor, coward. He was a stinking pile of refuse. He was the shit of a dog.
No, he was the shit that one dog shat, and then another dog ate. He was that pile of shit after the second dog had digested the shit once more. He was a pile of twice shat shit.
If only I had wanted to kill the emperor and win more than he had wanted to live.
Sesako had failed.
He had sworn himself to the Great Ones, to Yatamo, and to a cause beyond himself, and he had failed to achieve it.
Useless, damned, useless creature: You reached high. You pushed yourself endlessly all your life. And now, now when you at last reached the point of victory, you let — yes — You let him take the control. You let the sword be stripped from your hand by that worthless, spineless, fake moralizing scholar artisan who only wished beyond everything else to save his own useless hide.
It was only when he saw Hinete that Sesako felt anything but loathing.
The Yatamo were famed, among other skills, as foremost amongst the world's miners.
The high mountains of the island were rich with thick ores, iron, steel, silver, gold, copper, lead. For thousands of years the ships floating away from the shores of Yatamo were stuffed heavy with these metals, refined into the finest alloys, and beaten into swords and plowshares.
Over the many generations the cultivators had honed their arts and become the foremost miners in all of the world. All of the mountains were crossed and crisscrossed with old mines, natural caverns, tubes left by magma flows, and the tunnels which had been purposely built for times of war.
The clans of the island had not always acted as a unified force, and especially in the century before the imperial conquest there had been constant warfare over the best harbors, farmlands, mines and fishing grounds.
A simple way for a weaker force to survive to fight another day was to flee into prepared tunnels, thickly runed with defenses that would stop enemies from attacking.
More than one band had cleverly found a refuge in the tunnels but been killed by poisoned gasses or simply time when their enemies had blocked off all of the ventilation.
Tunnel complexes that were larger, with more entrances that were spread widely apart, were mostly proof against that failure, at the cost of having many more entrances that must be guarded to prevent entry.
The old days of clan warfare had occurred in a time when purified cores were still rarely developed, and when there were only a few cultivators with a profound soul born anywhere in each generation. As a result, the use of stones that were powerful enough to easily bury the entrances to tunnel complexes was not yet a concern.
Even today, it was still easy to dig deeply enough to ignore the direct attacks from stones.
Following the rising, many of the ancient mine systems and tunnels had been refitted with a vastly increased number of ventilation shafts, and additional bracing so that they would not collapse if the surface hundreds of feet above them was directly hit with a heavy stone.
It had been easy to hide all of the population with weak fighting abilities away.
In the mountains directly above the city, several large towers protected the entrance to the biggest of these tunnel complexes. The tunnels were wide enough that ten thousand people an hour could enter and begin the journey through to the outlets that were more than a hundred miles away.
Another set of exits from these tunnels went into a valley that pointed towards the dragon’s perches.
Hinete had not been involved in the battle at all. She had the militia training everyone who developed their golden core was required to go through, but she was not a specialist in war, and in any case a mere golden core could make no difference in a great field of battle
But Hinete’s talents as an enchanter were far beyond the ordinary. She had been part of the column that had fled the city underground in the days before they launched their great battle. Most of the population of the city had scattered into the countryside. However, Hinete was part of a group of thousands of artisans who would support the ongoing campaign to slow the emperor's march towards the perches of the dragons.
The mine shafts near Kyit had long been exhausted, and most of the mining had moved to other peaks deeper in the range, but centuries before Sesako was born, tens of thousands of men had labored here endlessly. Most of the workers had been men who had a foundation but no golden core, who would make giant circles carrying to the surface huge bags of ore weighing thousands of pounds. Others spent their days hacking away with their mighty strength at the wall of the caverns with their pickaxes.
Dozens of golden cores had been employed generating winds that carried sufficient air to the miners deepest in the tunnels. Other golden cores drilled deep into the rock faces with their chi, and then fragmented the rocks to open up new tunnels. The mines would have employed a few purified cores who spent most of their time in the relaxation rooms at the top of the mines. However, they were available for difficult specialist jobs that required more magical force applied in one location than the golden cores could manage, and they could be called upon in the case of a collapse to rescue any miners who survived.
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Sesako found Hinete in one of those rooms near the top of the mine complex.
Her head was bent over a piece of paper that she drew on with a piece of charcoal, so the marks could be easily rubbed away. Five other enchanters sat around the table, all of them were older than her, but each listened respectfully as Hinete drew, gestured and spoke.
After the battle of the day, Sesako’s mind refused to concentrate on her words to try to decipher exactly what idea she was explaining.
Even though he enjoyed making musical enchantments, Hinete had passed far ahead of him in enchanting, and that in that field she depended upon her other mentors to give her pointers.
And in some ways, she was beyond them.
Enchanting was like poetry, and sometimes the youngest simply saw in a way better than an older master.
Her voice was soft and clear. And he closed his eyes to just listen to the confidence and certainty in how she spoke.
He’d nearly died.
He still had meant to die, but some little part of him that was as much a traitor as the other was, was glad that he had not died. After all, if nothing else, there were things he could still do, that he would not have been able to ever do if he’d destroyed the island and blown up with the emperor.
The group around Hinete was planning how to repair a piece of dragon scale armor that had been damaged in the fight. From the appearance of the piece that was laid out on the table, though pushed aside to make room for the paper they were drawing with, it actually was Dairuke’s armor, that he’d been wearing when his arm had been shattered by a purified core.
The conversation suddenly stopped. Hinete’s chair scraped as she pushed it back. Sesako opened his eyes again, and he smiled at her as she ran up to him and threw herself in his arms.
“You really are alive! I heard! I’d heard that you’d returned! But —”
He kissed her forehead. “Hinete, we failed.”
“That isn’t important. You can try again, and —”
“We cannot. We lost.”
She pulled in a sharp breath and looked at him. Her dark eyes studied him. “You never say such things.”
“They were never true before.”
The other enchanters who had been seated around Hinete rose and gathered around. One who Sesako knew well because he had designed Sesako’s own armor, bowed his head, “Profound Sesako — wait, is it true that you have become a celestial?”
“I think so.” Sesako’s voice sounded hollow and odd in his own ears.
He was on the verge of shaking. He felt a deep nausea. He was trapped under billions of tons of rocks. No breath, no ability to move.
“What happened today, everyone went out —”
“We failed. We were beaten. I lost control. I am — do not ask me! I have no answers. Nothing to say! Go out and ask another. I have reported upon my failings, and their source. All of you out.”
They looked between each other.
“Out!!!”
The glass around the candle holder shattered.
The others left, and Sesako slammed the door behind the last of them with a telekinetic burst of crimson magic.
He was rather surprised that the door didn’t shatter.
Hinete stared at him with wide eyes.
She took his hand and led him to sit down. Sesako didn’t resist at all when she pushed him down into the chair. “Oh, my dear, dear, dear…” She pressed her lips tightly together and looked at him with eyes glistening with emotion.
Sesako had a sudden urge to kiss her, but he pushed that thought away, as unworthy of himself.
No, no, no.
No thoughts of anything now. Not now, not while Kisiko lies dead.
“What happened?”
Hinete sat next to him, and she picked up his hand and held it with her own. “Tell me.”
Sesako did, the whole story. The tension before the battle. The success of their infiltration. The long sweaty descent down the throat of the volcano, the way that they absorbed that form of wrongness which poisoned the fish of the bay.
And then… then the emperor was there.
Hinete gasped and pressed her hand against her mouth at that revelation. But she nodded for him to go on. But Sesako’s words became slower.
He slowly repeated Kisiko's conversation with the emperor. Kisiko had asked the emperor if he had a reason which he could respect.
Sesako had been sure that Kisiko would betray them when the emperor lied.
It had been unworthy. All of his thoughts upon Kisiko’s cowardice, and his untrustworthiness — every thought about him that Sesako had ever had was unworthy.
Except, Sesako realized as he told Hinete, that it had not been.
“He would have, he really would have betrayed us if the emperor had told him that he had a good reason. That was all the emperor would have needed to do — tell Kisiko to trust him, that he had a worthy reason.” There was a sort of odd wonder in Sesako’s voice. “He wouldn’t do that. Why didn’t the emperor lie?”
Hinete just squeezed his hand.
“How can he be wholly evil and yet — I do not even respect his choice. Surely a man who will destroy creatures of such beauty as the dragons for what he freely admits is a selfish reason — how can such a man not lie when it will bring him something he wants?”
“Perhaps —” Hinete stopped herself from speaking.
Her fingers were soft and warm around his hand. Sesako felt sick and ill, shaky and feverish. He could not remember ever feeling ill in this way since he had opened the second dantian.
He nearly threw up.
“I wish he had lied. Then… then Kisiko would have lived, and we simply would have lost.”
“What happened then?”
“When the emperor told Kisiko that he had no just reason… or that is not what he said. He said that he could have found a better solution… then Kisiko simply, without any todo about it — he must have practiced the motions to the extent he could. He pulled the blue third core out, and attempted to attack the emperor with it, but unlike when my father struck him, the emperor was alert for such an attack. And then… in those twenty, thirty… I don’t know. I had a chance. I struck towards the great heat producing field of metal, and then… the other feared. He believed that if I compressed the cylinders in heat producing center sufficiently, they would explode with sufficient force to destroy the island, and kill all of us, and hopefully cause the rest to explode, and —”
“But you would have died!”
“Such a cost would have been well worth it. You know I would freely spill my blood to save the Great Ones. To save you. To save us all from this — oh God. It was not him! It was me.”
Sesako pulled at his hair, jerking so hard that he pulled a great bloody clump out, while Hinete tried to control his hands.
He stared at the file of hair and skin in his hand. The pain was just a prick on the side of his scalp, already healing over.
“I could have finished this whole war.” Sesako glared at his hair, his bloody hand. “I let him. I let him take control of my body. The coward refused to die. He refused to fight and win and — his passion for his worthless life was greater than my love for Yatamo, and my love for the Great Ones. His cowardice was stronger than even my hatred for the emperor.”
“That is what happened?” Hinete’s voice sounded odd.
“I ought to kill myself. I deserve to die after this. If I could make him let me, I would. I would murder myself now, in shame. If I could destroy myself, dissolve into nothingness, and leave him with this worthless body, this worthless, loathsome, parasitic flesh. Perhaps I can, perhaps I still can —”
Hinete slapped him hard across the face.
The crack did not hurt him. She did not have the force in her hands to injure him, such was the difference of two levels that was now becoming three. And she had not struck him hard enough to hurt her hand, just to startle him out of his speech.
Hinete placed her hands on both his shoulders and pressed him against the back of the chair. She stood over him, fierce, almost raging. “You are better than this.”
“I —”
“Shut up. Shut up. I will never, never, never permit you to say you wish you were dead again. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.”
He stared at her for a long time.
And then to his own shock, Sesako started sobbing.
Hinete embraced him, and he wept on her shoulder for a long time.
It was only when the sobs finally ceased after a time that seemed immense in duration that Sesako realized that he had never cried, not once since his family had all been brutally killed in one day.