As the latest cycle progressed, Mirian released more seeds of chaos and continued to monitor the newspapers, while Lecne used his contacts in the black markets to keep an ear out. Sulvorath had stopped getting his contacts to deploy ‘wanted’ posters and was keeping his search more subtle, but he was clearly still searching. Lecne was able to learn that a description that matched her normal appearance was being circulated among certain criminal elements, along with a promise for a reward. Another priest found her name and description in the office of the Arcane Praetorians, with the charges of ‘practicing unlicensed magic’ and ‘assault of a teacher.’ The first charge was technically true, but Mirian wondered who on the Academy staff had been cajoled into committing perjury by filing false charges. Probably Professor Eld, she thought. Never much liked him.
Priestess Arenthia was both a poor and good teacher, and for the same reason. Her knowledge of soul magic and its history was comprehensive, and so she would go on and on about anything and everything. She also confirmed something else Mirian had realized: that the Department of Public Security was unofficially authorized to evade the necromancy ban.
“It creates institutional power,” Arenthia explained one evening. “Because the organization has access to otherwise irresistible magic, and a deal with the Luminates to have anyone they mark turned over, they act as a check to the Arcane Praetorians and army, while the Praetorians act as a check to the various arcanist guilds and academies.”
“And who acts as a check on the Deeps?” Mirian asked.
Arenthia just smiled, teeth showing.
Purely by accident, Mirian was furthering her knowledge of the conspiracy that stretched from Vadriach to Palendurio. The problem was, the Deeps was the one of two organizations she had no chance of infiltrating. Both they and the Luminate Order would be on the lookout for soul magic, and with Sulvorath still searching for her, she could neither use her transformed identity or her real identity.
But it also seemed that the Deeps was clearly involved in whatever was happening. Not that she had anything like the kind of evidence she needed to convince people or stop it. Arenthia also talked freely of how the Deeps would work with the Akanan Republic Intelligence Division.
“But why would either of them want to provoke war between the two countries, then? I still don’t understand that part.”
“People don’t think like countries,” Arenthia told her. “They think like people. Ask yourself who gains from such a war, and what they would gain.”
Mirian wrinkled her nose. “Nicolus said it had to do with the control of key resources. Crystals. Fossilized myrvite. And now, the Divine Monuments, assuming there’s more than one.”
“That reminds me, I’ve been thinking,” the priestess said, rising from her seat so she could pace about again. “You’ve complained about nothing following you through the cycles. And that’s true—sort of. Nothing human made could do it. But the Elder Gods left us their legacy. I’ve never actually told someone that going into the Labyrinth was a good idea—but for you, it actually might be. The Deeps were obsessed with some of the things they found down there, but they could never replicate them, and they certainly couldn’t reliably get teams to come back alive.”
This was the second time someone had mentioned the Labyrinth. It was already something she planned to investigate, but at a lower priority. But perhaps it shouldn’t be. “I know about the myrvites down there, and special materials… but what else is down there?”
“That’s just in the upper layers,” Arenthia said, waving a dismissive hand. “The ones the Guild of Expeditions can reach with relative safety. You start talking even third level down and people start salivating at the money they think they’ll make from it. There’s antimagic fields. Golems that can reassemble themselves. Wards and spellwork more complex than anything we have invented. Glyphs scribed so miniscule some wizards still think it’s technically impossible. And the holy artifacts—the things that the field of artifice was named after. I’m fairly certain it’s where the first orichalcum came from, and deeper still, there’s beasts of legend that produce untested magichemicals, or have catalysts far more potent than anything on the surface. People think the Gods share their grace with us, but the creatures down there burn with Their light.” Arenthia cackled at that, a sound Mirian had never expected to hear from anyone not playing the villain in a poor drama, never mind from a respected priestess, then said, “The problem is, it’s certain death. You heard of the Expedition of Archmagi?”
“They all died, didn’t they?”
“Oh yes. Trying to breach the fourth level. Three archmagi. Ten support arcanists. Twenty of the army’s best soldiers. No survivors. The Deeps knew it was a problem of intelligence. Can’t prepare for something you don’t know about, see? Reconfiguring rooms, undetectable traps, and divination suppressors everywhere. Met a unit head that was obsessed with it. Never did get anyone back from that fourth level, though. Gone. Vanished.” She snapped her fingers.
Mirian thought back to her Arcane History class. At least one of the lessons had piqued her interest. “Wasn’t there some guy who made it back from the fifth level?”
Arenthia cackled again. “Yes, and who was he?”
Mirian closed her eyes. Right. Yeah. “The Fourth Prophet.”
“And what did he find?”
“Instructions from the Gods, written on holy pages from the deep vaults.”
“The best translation I can come up with is, ‘And thou shalt see the will of the Gods, for the pages of this manuscript are bound to their souls and none but they can change what is written.’ Then, in the Ninth Verse, he’s quoted as saying to his lieutenants, ‘My blade cannot be taken from me, for it is the same stuff as my soul.’ I’d always read it as a metaphor.”
Mirian’s mouth grew dry. “Oh shit. You think there’s stuff down there made of soulstuff? And if there is—that’s the thing that goes back. If it’s incorporable….”
“I reread the holy scriptures, then read them again in the original archaic Friian and another in Old Adamic. It’d be easy to miss, and I’m sure I could have a right proper scholarly argument with Lecne about it because the translation plays havoc with the terminology, but—yes.”
For a time they were quiet, and even priestess Arenthia was still for once. Then the silence was broken by the sound of glass shattering in the kitchen, and then they could both hear Pelnu swearing in two different languages for what had to be a solid three minutes.
“I can probably fix it,” Mirian said.
“Oh, so can he,” said Arenthia. “Sometimes you just need to get it all out. So what are you thinking about now?”
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Mirian let her gaze wander to the painting of the corpse-God. “Does the Luminate Order still have those holy pages? Or the sword?”
“LECNE!” Arenthia shouted, making Mirian start.
Lecne, who judging by his lethargic pace making it down into the chamber was used to this sort of call, came down. “Should have let them execute you,” he muttered as he joined them, though he still smiled when he saw her.
“Too charming to die,” Arenthia said. “Do the Luminates still have the Holy Pages and Sword of the Fourth Prophet still stashed away in their vaults?”
Lecne tapped his chin. “Dunno. Never made it that far in the circles of secrecy. They claim to have them all stashed away in the Grand Sanctum, but there used to be rumor back when I was an acolyte that some of them are fakes and the Church of the Ominian ran off with some of the holy artifacts during the split. If they did, you can bet the Order is still steamed about it.”
Both Arenthia and Mirian lapsed back into thought, so Lecne followed up with, “We done here? I need to pick up some more incense from the market, and then I need to help Palnu with his soup. Cairnmouth is still a hungry city.”
“I’ll help with the soup,” Arenthia said.
“Yes, the people have been clambering for ‘more salt,’” Lecne said, rolling his eyes.
As they left, bickering happily, Mirian fell back into contemplation.
That night, she dreamed of a nicely dressed corpse walking around her house, only it seemed normal. Then she found herself wandering a desert, looking at the Southern Range, but from the south. Only, she’d never been to Persama, so even though the dreams seemed more grounded in reality than what she usually experienced, she assumed the Ominian was trying to communicate to her again.
She woke and stared at the ceiling, listening to the breathing of the priests as they slept, a bit tired of having to share a room. The dreams were important, Mirian knew, but she couldn’t understand what they were trying to say. Again and again, she’d seen the Cataclysm and that wall of starfire approaching the Ominian. Again and again, she’d seen the Mausoleum, empty except for that colossal statue. She’d wandered the lands with the Ominian at her side. She’d floated through the Labyrinth, climbed the great tree that had half its branches burning, and she’d watched the sky rain down with anchors that churned up the ocean. Now there was this.
Did the Ominian need her to go to Persama? Like Akana Praediar, it was barred to her. Some member of the Dawn’s Peace there would have an iron grip on the region, just like Sulvorath had made Akana Praediar impassible for her. And what was there for her? Moonfall would be somewhere out in the desert, but she’d checked the maps, and there was nothing out there.
No, she needed to better understand the works of the Elder Gods, and that meant the Labyrinth. Too many signs pointed towards it.
She started her research the next morning.
***
She spent five more cycles on soul magic, saving Arenthia each time. She used the ridiculous wealth from her counterfeit ingots to contract the Syndicate for live myrvites. Numo, as it turned out, used his knowledge of wards and forgeries primarily to smuggle myrvites, so she found herself working again with him after the Arenthia operation.
While he wasn’t able to get her anything as nasty as a bog lion, he could get her various chimeras, young drakes, scarabites, cockatrice, lightning scorpions, and any number of the smaller, less deadly myrvites she requested.
With the knowledge that nothing that happened would be permanent, the Cult of Zomalator was perfectly happy to have either Arenthia or Lecne join Mirian in a warehouse by the docks that they rented from one of the Syndicate’s criminal contacts. There, Numo would have a myrvite ready for them while Mirian practiced what was unambiguously ‘necromancy,’ at this point; she’d stopped trying to deny that. Of course, she’d always thought necromancers were weird perverts who liked corpses too much, but maybe that had been all those spy novels she’d read, which come to think of it, had necromancers as the villains quite a bit.
Near the end of that fifth cycle, Mirian found herself in the warehouse again, with Lecne, Arenthia and Numo.
“Form the binding,” Arenthia instructed her. “Second binding. Good. Third binding. Very nice, how many cycles did you say you’ve been practicing? Sorry, said I’d stop asking that. Fourth binding, make sure you’re tying it tight, so to speak. Wonderful. Numo, kill the drake please,”
Numo did so, with about the same emotional affect as a factory worker adjusting rivets. The crates had a big guillotine attached to them, and it made short work of the young drake.
And then Mirian felt the power flowing through her as the bound soul was hers to siphon. It felt natural to guide it, in the same way that the instinctual flow of movement in a rapier duel felt natural to her. By now, she was splitting soul energy. The rune she needed to create only took part of the siphoned energy; the rest, she practiced channeling into a repository.
“Good. Very good!” Arenthia said. “Scribed that quick, didn’t you? Remember not to rush things. Let me check your rune. Hmm. No spalling on the edges. Nice psuedocrystal formation. Could use a bit of adjustment on the second mark, but that’s a one degree change, nothing to fret over. Binding to the material—looks nice. Well cemented. Lecne, what’s the repository looking like?”
“She got it in there,” he said, touching his focus, and Mirian beamed.
“I want to work on fine spirit control next,” she said, thinking of the minuscule curse hiding in her soul still. Then she thought back to the theories on maximizing spellpower that Archmage Luspire had taught her. “And I want to know more about soul-aura interactions. When my soul was cursed, my control of my aura was impeded. That implies it can go the other direction—changing the soul to strengthen an aura. Do you have any texts on that?”
“I’m afraid you’re getting outside our area of expertise, which is healing magic,” Lecne said.
“Would that work?” Numo said, for once interjecting himself into the conversation. He usually stayed out of it. “All of a sudden, I’m interested in necromancy.”
Mirian said, “Theoretically. Souls have a natural current, but compare it to a river. Just because the water has shaped the path it naturally takes doesn’t mean that’s the most efficient path. Dredge it, build a canal, and you can get a river running faster, and then it settles into that natural shape. It’s not just a helpful figurative comparison,” she said, seeing Numo’s skeptical look. “Luspire did some qualitative aura comparisons in his early research and found that arcanists who perceived their aura as flowing ‘faster’ had more mana reserves. I know there’s as many papers trashing his research as supporting it, but when you look at his spellpower, I think he was on to something.”
Lecne shrugged. “None of us are arcanists. Except Pelnu, but I don’t think you want his advice.”
Mirian thought. “I wish I could talk to someone like Atroxcidi and ask how he did it. He was a necromancer and arcanist, right? Someone like him would know.”
Arenthia and Numo shared a glance at each other. “No you don’t,” Numo said. “That guy’s bad news.”
Arenthia said, “Well, keep in mind the historical sources have a bias towards the victors of the Unification War. But, ah, Numo’s right.”
Mirian blinked. “Wait, Atroxcidi’s still alive? Look, I’m not great at history, but wasn’t that war like, over a hundred years ago?”
“‘Alive’ might be a strong word for it,” Numo said. “I can tell you the Arcane Praetorians are still hunting him, and I don’t know why they’d be doing that if he wasn’t still around though.”
A chill ran through Mirian. So the most powerful necromancer in recorded history was still out there. Despite what she’d just said, it seemed like a terrible idea to seek him out. To the contrary, that was yet another person she needed to stay hidden from. There was no telling what someone like him could do to her soul. “Huh. I had no idea,” she said. “It wasn’t a serious thought anyways. I guess I’ll experiment with the aura stuff on my own. Fine spirit control next?”
“Sure. After I’ve had a nap,” Arenthia said. “How many days until the world ends, again?”
“Two,” Mirian said.
Numo started. “Wait, what?”
“Don’t worry about it!” Mirian called to him as they left.
That night, after the high priestess’s nap and a few final lessons, Mirian cast a few persistent light spells in one of the empty sanctums and read more about the Labyrinth. She’d decided to go with Ravantha’s suggestion. Frostland’s Gate was one of the few villages north of Torrviol, and she doubted Sulvorath would think to look there.
There was another reason: she already had a contact there. Lily’s sister worked up in the village.
It would be good to see Beatrice again.