By all the rights of melodrama, the scene should have looked quite different. She should have been wearing heels that made a staccato clack on marble tiles. The noise should have echoed down stark stone halls abandoned in a twilight gloom. Ominous darkness should have pressed in on her, an atmosphere commensurate with the gravity of the times.
Instead, Tatiana found herself walking through the back halls of the royal palace just after the morning meal. Her slippers slipped soundlessly over lush carpets in halls bedecked with tapestries from throughout the Kingdom and artifacts from lands beyond, and before, their own. Smiling servants greeted her, and guards nodded genially on their routine patrols. The palace hummed with life, purpose, vigor and cheer. The sun shone through windows set high in the walls, the winter’s cool bite kept at bay but still lending a clean smell to the air. Meanwhile, the mage’s own mind was in turmoil. None of the palace attendants knew it, but today was not a normal day of business.
An emergency meeting of the Royal Cabinet had been called. The Kingdom of Dagva faced a crossroads that many of its citizens lived blissfully unaware of. Across the Hundred Continents, wars had raged between a faction of void mages and the local governments that had once ruled those lands. In many of them, the void mages had triumphed over the local rulers and established themselves as a new government. Just such a confrontation was playing out in the Kingdom of Gault to the northeast. Gault was not a neighbor of Dagva, being on a different continent across the Savage Sea, but it was not a distant land either. The void mages of Gault had risen against their king, claiming oppression and undue taxation. Many who paid attention to the grand sweep of politics, especially in other countries, saw only the ambition of the void mages to be the ones in charge.
Tatiana had never understood how many people could so thoroughly ignore world events and go about their own lives. Her own ambitions had propelled her, driven to escape the life of drudgery for which she had been born. They had taken her from her parent’s farm to the outpost of a mage academy to be tested for magic. Even if she had failed, she would have had a better life serving the mages than serving the cattle. Fortunately, her magic awoke to the tester’s probe and a new, better life had opened up for her. In the decades since, she had gone to several mage academies throughout the Kingdom, rising to the attention of the Diamond Tower, the home of void mages in Dagva, and from there to the Royal Cabinet as a magical advisor. That so many were willing to just accept their lot in life was too alien to her own experiences.
A pair of guards stood ceremoniously outside the Cabinet’s conference room. They recognized Tatiana and nodded her through. Of course, they weren’t the real last line of defense for the King and other government ministers. An enchantment wound its way around the doorframe that would dispel any illusions as someone passed through it; this had caught more than one spy or troublemaker who had sought to sneak into the chambers and secondary enchantments had punished them harshly. Even though she had been invited to the meeting, Tatiana felt her shoulders tense as she walked underneath the ward. She had seen what it could do to enemies of the king.
Tatiana was not the last to arrive, so she had a few moments to waste on greeting the others. While not all the various potentates would be present for an emergency session, those in the capital, government ministers and advisors to the king, would be expected to attend. She was one of three magical advisors, a mage who had personally earned the respect of the King and so warranted a seat on the Cabinet without other responsibilities. The others were a nature mage named Yuri (he styled himself a druid, but the term was meaningless to outsiders), and a battlemage named Grigor. The two of them were huddled in conference with each other when she came in, but she had been repeatedly made aware that she was not welcome to join them. Instead, she made her way over to a friend of hers, the economic minister, Simon.
“Good morning, Mage.” He nodded to her, his jowls flexing but held still by a tightly clenched jaw. “Have you seen the latest reports?”
“Simon, Simon,” she smiled as she patted him on the shoulder with false joviality. “There will be enough time for business when the Cabinet is in session. Why don’t we talk of more pleasant things in these last moments?”
The third member of their conversation chuckled. “Not used to you not wanting to talk shop, Tatiana.” The Kingdom’s chief tax collector, Theobald, smiled at her while he wrung his hands. On anybody else, this would have been seen as a nervous tick, but for Theobald, it was just the way he was. The man was pretty much always in motion. “Nervous then?”
Tatiana gave a half-smile in response. She didn’t like Theobald, she didn’t think anybody really did, but he was good at his job. “Perhaps a little. That it is others like me who are acting up does put something of an onus on me. I’m sure those who would rather I not be in the room will make that plain enough.” She jerked a thumb over at the other two mage advisors, who had never made secret their disdain for her branch of magic, no matter how useful to the Kingdom it was. While it wasn’t her strongest affinity, she was a powerful void mage. Void magic’s primary use was as transportation, and its spatial rifts had enabled her to provide some time sensitive services to the Kingdom which had earned her a place in the room. The classic mages disdained something as utilitarian as transportation; she could not lay waste to armies like Grigor nor sustain them like Yuri. Unfortunately for them, the King had seen her services as worthy of respect.
Void mages were defined by ambition. All magical elements, of which void was one, were fueled by some emotion or mindset. The base elements were fairly straightforward: earth was fueled by a sturdy disposition, water by tranquility, air by a freedom-seeking mentality and fire by rage. Some others seemed tangential: nature magic fed off loneliness and corrosion magic off bitterness. Others seemed frankly random. As educated as she was in magic, Tatiana did not understand why the ability to make spatial rifts or teleport had anything to do with ambition, nor why death magic fed off a strong sense of order. But the more prevalent any of the emotions or ideas were in a mage’s personality, the stronger their affinity for the associated element and the more effectively they could use it.
Most mages who sought training developed a half-dozen or so of these affinities, training in both the arcane knowledge of the magic and cultivating the personality traits. Tatiana herself was first an air mage, which was fueled by her need for freedom and followed that with void magic. Her magic had been shaped by the need to escape the trap of her family, and then to be seen, heard and respected. She had fought hard to get where she had gotten, and she wasn’t about to let it go. She looked around the room at the various other royal ministers and debated whether any of them would have been an ally in different times. As things were, they were all justly afraid of void mages.
The last two people to join the room were the King himself, in the company of his spymaster. Tatiana narrowed her eyes. Seeing the two of them in company with each other was always worrisome. The spymaster’s paranoia was unpredictable, but Tatiana had done enough favors for the other woman in the past to generally be seen as an ally. If she had been in private conference with the King, it meant that something important, and probably catastrophic had happened.
With the royal arrival, the Cabinet gathered around its table. Only the advisors and true ministers were present. The various high noblemen who rounded out the group were in their own domains for winter. After an opening invocation by the royal chaplain, the King began with the heavy news. “Gault has fallen.” The announcement was met with only one gasp, from the Minister of Arts. When Tatiana looked over at him, she saw that his face was in pain. After a moment of confusion, she remembered that he was from Gault and was probably worried about some family member or other. The rest of the room remained silent, awaiting further information. “The local void mages have announced that they’ll keep the name, but they’re calling it a Republic now. From the sounds of it, they needed to work through some politicians to muster the support for Gault’s ‘liberation’ and will install them as a face.”
The spymaster coughed politely. “Your Majesty, before we continue any further, could I please ask Mage Tatiana to make this a more private affair.”
At the King’s nod, Tatiana gathered herself and reached for the river of magical energies that flowed through her body. As an air mage, she had the ability to influence sound. As such, this was a common thing for her to be asked to do and she started to lay out the runic formation for a privacy ward for the room. She had developed her own unique spell circle, with several layers of runes centered not just around air but also around light. She wasn’t a strong light mage, but it did not take much strength for her to weave into the runic circle a few variations that would prevent others from seeing in through the windows or the shine of magical spellcasting within the room. As was often the case, the other two mages in the room watched her work.
Yuri watched the spell forming, his eyes evaluating the spell. Grigor just glared impatiently at her, annoyed at how she took longer to form the spell than he would have – if he could have at all. As a battlemage, he trained first and foremost for speed in his casting, whereas Tatiana was trying to be precise and efficient. By the time she was done, the runic circle in front of her was about two feet in diameter and glowed with the strange, pulsing clear energy of air magic, accented by a few strains of light magic’s white. The circle pulsed and a web of energy flared out, conforming to the walls, floor, and ceiling of the room as Tatiana nodded back at the spymaster that the conversation was now private. As she leaned back in her chair, she allowed one hand to drape over the armrests and point down at the floor. Tendrils of magical energy reached down for the floor and started to draw a second spell, hidden by the light-dampening effect of the first.
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Poison magic was a very rare specialty. It fed off the mentality of enjoying the pain of others. True masters of poison magic were employed as assassins and torturers. Tatiana’s affinity for poison magic was not high, it was barely past the threshold whereby mages considered an affinity as moderate. This stretch was what made the spell she was working on so challenging. But by stewing in her hatred of several of the other Cabinet members and remembering the hurts that had been inflicted on her in the past, she was able to power through the difficulties and focus on the spell crafting. The spell itself was a novel piece of work that she was very proud of. She had tested it thoroughly on a variety of animals to work out the full package before testing it on a whore in a brothel in the poor part of a distant town (being an expert in transportation magic definitely helped to hide the footsteps of wrongdoing).
The high general took the privacy ward going into effect as a signal to pound his fist on the desk and yell. “Enough is enough! This is the just the most recent of the outrages. How many more kingdoms need to fall before we identify the threat for what it is! Void mages are tearing down territories all over the Hundred Continents and making them their own fiefs!”
“Precisely.” Grigor’s tone was clipped and vaguely annoyed, as if the business of government was beneath him. Tatiana thought sarcastically that he was never satisfied unless he was blasting something. “Their ambition is too thirsty for glory. They should never have been placed in any kind of positions of authority.”
“The beast of ambition must be shackled to the yoke of civic duty.” The divine chaplain added in, with typical cryptic phrasing. Tatiana was perhaps lucky that she had to focus on the second spell, or else she would have laughed with derision at the holy woman’s way of speaking.
“If the desire for glory was disqualifying, most of the people in this room wouldn’t be able to be here.” The Minister of Justice remarked with a stony face. He had come up through the ranks of the judiciary and had little patience for pretense and demagoguery in Cabinet meetings. “That being said, there are patterns of behavior here that cannot be ignored.” He didn’t see himself as an ally of anybody on the Cabinet, insisting that Justice needed to stand ready to be meted out to anybody who trespassed. His integrity could be an annoying hurdle that Tatiana would be happy to remove.
“If we are looking for patterns, Ministers,” Tatiana began, her voice tight under strain, “perhaps you should look in the records of battlemages.” She looked at the mousey Minister of Records, who served as a court historian. She had always thought that his position was frankly useless and would be happy to demote it from a full minister position. “Even with the current spate, what is the comparative count of countries overthrown by void mages and those overthrown by battlemages? I can certainly recall from my own schooling several prominent examples of the latter.”
“How dare you!” Grigor exploded to his feet. “You fling outrageous accusations around and think the king’s favor would protect you from the repercussions! The king’s law does not protect you from the consequences of your base libels!” A small rune started to form in front of him. His usual speed with battle magic was hampered by the light bending effects of the privacy spell that Tatiana had cast. It muted the light of his spell circle, so things did not look quite right to the battlemage, and it took him longer to get his spell as he wanted it. Long enough, fortunately, for a wave of raw arcane force from Yuri to destabilize the spell circle and force him to abandon his attack.
“Calm yourself, Grigor,” the other mage said with a smile on his face. “She’s trying to bait you to distract from the misdeeds of her colleagues.”
Tatiana was spared from having to respond by the Minister of Foreign Affairs sighing. “Rather successfully distracting you too, Grigor.” Her eyes narrowed. “You should not be seated on this council if you are that easy to goad. His Majesty allowed your company of battlemages to send their own representative, but I do not understand why they chose you.”
Grigor faced the powerful minister and squared his shoulders. “They value my judgment, as does His Majesty, minister.” He loaded her title with venom, a reminder that she had failed to progress as a mage herself and so had to find a different path in life. It was a long-running feud between the two of them.
Before she could respond and set off another round of argument, the king intervened. “Enough of this, you two. That is not why I called you here. The question is how we respond to the fall of Gault.”
“Destroy the Diamond Tower.” The high general said immediately. His counterpart in the navy nodded her head strongly – she frequently echoed his sentiments.
“Why?” Tatiana’s voice came out a little more strained, but she tried to hold it under tight control. The amount of magic pouring into her second spell was distracting her mind as she had to wrestle to keep into under control. This was made the more difficult because she couldn’t actually watch the spell form and so had to keep a picture of it in her head mentally. Non-standard casting formations were always a challenge, but they were very useful.
“Are you alright?” The spymaster leaned forward. “You sound strained.”
Tatiana gave the other woman a tense smile. “I am just trying to keep a lid on myself. I have been warned that displaying excessive emotion doesn’t help my arguments.” She flicked her eyes over at Grigor and saw him glowering and pouting in his chair.
Simon coughed to bring attention to himself. “Yes, well, Tatiana does bring up a good point. Why should we destroy the Diamond Tower? The void mages are still our best link to the other Continents. Their network has been invaluable to our economic development and tax revenue.” The Minister of the Economy continued, “the fall of Gault is certainly a development, but it bears little direct relevance to us. We sell them seal blubber through the void mage’s network, and our traders won’t really care about the change in government. They’ll buy and sell there just as happily as before.”
The high general continued to press his point. “You blithering idiot! Can’t you see how they’ll come for us next? It’s been ten years, how do you not see the pattern? A dozen countries, and that’s just on the nearest Continents, with their governments overthrown by conspiracies of void mages. Another handful have seen the mages defeated in their ambition.”
“And dozens more where they’ve done nothing of the sort.” Foreign Affairs cut in. “Nor have we seen anything like cooperation between the void mages in one of those countries versus others. This isn’t some world-wide conspiracy.”
“No, just a whole bunch of local conspiracies whose actors all seem to be related to each other.” Yuri scoffed, the druid may not want to come to blows in the chamber, but he was no friend of Tatiana’s either. “The void mages are a cancer.”
“Do you have evidence of any such conspiracy here?” The spymaster asked. “My sources haven’t picked up anything.”
Of course they haven’t. Tatiana thought to herself. After all, the Tower knows exactly who those sources are. Her spell was almost complete, and she let her disdain for the fools around her color her thoughts. The magic of her spell took her full focus for a moment as the spellcasting came to a head and she missed a few rounds of the argument. It didn’t matter, she had heard it all before. This was the third country in their cluster of the Hundred Continents to fall to a void mage-sponsored coup and the debate had been the same each time. Initially, it had just been the two other mages arguing that the void mage enclave at the Diamond Tower should be destroyed in order to prevent the void mages from rising to power here. The rest argued that the benefits of the void mages and their intercontinental network of portals should not be cast aside out of fear. After all, there was no proof that the Diamond Tower was moving against the Kingdom of Dagva, and it seemed premature to start the conflict themselves. As more kingdoms fell, some of the cabinet ministers had started to shift sides and take the void mage threat more seriously. But not seriously enough to have acted before it was too late.
Her work in sound and light magic had shown her just how much people relied on those two senses to tell them that anything was wrong. So, a poison cloud that was colorless, soundless, and also odorless, would never be spotted. The targets would happily breathe it in, say as they were drawing deep breaths in order to shout at each other. Once in their lungs, the toxin got to work, destroying lung tissue and ruining the body. One by one, the ministers of the room coughed, blood falling down their faces and over their chests. The king himself was one of the last to succumb, looking around the room in horror at the ministers clutching at their chests suddenly afflicted by wracking coughs. His eyes landed on Tatiana, who was sitting in her chair calmly.
With the spell actually released, Tatiana felt all the tension in her body flow away and she looked around the room. She saw the king looking at her, his own face being taken over by the pain of the poison and she shrugged nonchalantly. He was already dead, they all were, it would just take a few more moments. The one thing she hadn’t been able to do was make the toxin instant, but she decided that the spell was good enough. Besides, she was now past caring about what the king, or anybody else in the room, thought. After all, for most of them, the time for thinking was past.
But not for Tatiana. She’d taken an antidote for this exact poison that morning with her breakfast – a poisoner who poisoned herself was quite useless – so she had to get moving now. She brushed the arm of Simon’s corpse off her armrest where it had fallen in Simon’s death throes and stood up from the table of the dead. She threw together two small spells, simple now that she could watch them form in front of her hands, one with void magic to open a small portal out over the open ocean and the second of an air sweep that would round up the poison gas and push it out the portal; it wouldn’t do to poison the entire castle after all. When the portal shut with a snap, she rolled her shoulders to release the last of the tension and turned for the door.
The guards outside hadn’t been able to hear anything of what went on inside, but they still knew what was supposed to happen. The Diamond Tower’s coin had been well spent figuring out who in the palace guard could be suborned to their cause and posted here today. Tatiana looked at the two of them and offered a smile, a cold thing untouched by the morning sun. “Fetch the Crown Prince, we must prepare him for his coronation.”