Which mattered. This war wasn’t just going to fizzle out. Karris saw that now. The White King was making smart moves in his conquered lands, preparing to hold and keep them, to generate wealth that he could draw from to take all the satrapies.
Vengeance is yours, Orholam.
It’ll have to be.
“Promachos,” Karris said. “When you lock shields with the man next to you in a battle line, you don’t first ask his opinion on the Manichean dichotomy. I don’t intend to challenge your position or your power, so long as I feel we’re fighting on the same side. The Color Prince has gone from a regional problem to an existential crisis. I can’t fight you and him at the same time. But if I need to fight you before the satrapies can fight him, I’ll throw everything against you—and I will fight you until one of us is annihilated. I can’t do half measures, and I won’t accept them from you. So, war. Together. Are you in, or out?” And this was where it was important he see her as a zealot.
“In.” He said it with no hesitation.
“Then start talking. What happened at the execution? What was that thing? Why haven’t I heard about any of this before?”
Karris hadn’t slept well since the execution. She didn’t know if she’d ever sleep well again. Seeing that monster tear out of that spy’s skin had been the single most frightening experience of her life. In all her battles, even hunting down wights—those she’d fought had been men at core. This was something else.
For the first time Karris had ever seen, Andross Guile looked somewhat daunted, as if he didn’t know what to say, or perhaps where to start. “Have you heard of the Thousand Worlds?”
I’m not interested in fairy stories, Karris wanted to say. But Andross Guile rarely went on tangents without good reason. “The premise that there are many worlds like ours?”
“Not exactly like ours,” Andross said. “The idea being that Orholam, being a creator, wouldn’t necessarily stop after making one world. Maybe he’d make twenty, or a thousand or a million. Who knows? I was ambivalent about the hypothesis. The unmasking of Nabiros has changed my thinking.”
“That thing. Delara Orange swore it wasn’t a will-casting or a hex.”
“I believe her. Nabiros was real.” He rested his piercing eyes on her. “The Chromeria and the Magisterium don’t actually teach some of the things that they believe, for fear that weaker souls will be led astray. Regardless, I’ve been piecing together truths and making leaps of intuition for many years, but this is the truth as well as I know. Will you cry heresy if I say things you don’t like?”
It wasn’t a real question. What it was, Karris saw, was a plea to have his efforts recognized. Doubtless Felia had always given him assurances of his genius. But the old man’s wife was gone now, and he wanted someone to appreciate his intellectual heavy lifting.
So instead of mocking him as her heart desired, Karris chose compassion: he’s lost his wife, for Orholam’s sake, be kind.
By the grace of Orholam alone, she painted rapt attention on her features. “Caveats accepted. What have you learned?”
He stared hard at her, looking for mockery, and here she saw him as human again. With weaknesses. Seeking approval and praise. Not venally, but simply as part of the normal human exchange—a person does something excellent and useful, and they wish it to be recognized.
But then he accepted her interest and took it as his due, the momentary chink in his arrogance covered again.
“It was told to me as a creation story, transcribed from an old Tiru wise man in the Parian highlands, but I’ve no gift for stories. Mine is a mind that tears things asunder and examines the pieces. What matters for us is that before time, Orholam created six hundred immortals—or possibly six hundred legions, but let’s not complicate things. Two hundred of those rejected him and sought his throne. They lost, are losing, will lose. In the meantime, they seek to ruin every joy Orholam might have of his creations, and taste every dark pleasure they may. If they may not rule all the celestial realms, they desire to rule a world. They will possess the bodies of the willing to taste what it is like to wear flesh. They will sire children. They will murder, steal, crush, and rape. They will defile any goodness they find. They will wage war and bring ruin wherever they can in their fury at losing the home that was free to them and is now forbidden forever. For rage burns hottest against a punishment deserved.”
This was nothing new, except for the specificity of the numbers. What was new was Andross’s treating it as real. Karris had to guess there was some spin into heresy coming soon.
“The salient fact, though, is that these immortals are neither omniscient nor omnipresent. Here.” He reached into his pockets and pulled out a number of short scrolls, one after the other. Karris could commiserate. They were both always getting reports, and always on scrolls of uniform size, which made them stack better, but also led to the waste of having entire sheets of lambskin with only the words ‘Arrived safely’ or something similarly concise on them. Many of the reports were deemed too sensitive for the parchments to be scraped and reused, too.
He unrolled half a dozen scrolls and laid them atop each other on Karris’s desk. “Imagine this scroll is the history of our world, beginning here to end over here. This one? Another world’s history. And another’s.”
Andross stacked the papers and drew his belt knife. He laid the point against the skin.
“We experience time like this.” He dragged the knife lightly forward.
“An immortal, on the other hand, may enter any world of its choosing.” He flipped a different scroll onto the top of the pile.
“It may enter at any location it desires. Any kingdom, satrapy, or city.” He moved the knife left and right.
“But once it enters, it moves in time as we do, until it leaves.” He stabbed the knife all the way through all of the scrolls. “They aren’t omnipresent, so if they choose to be in Ru all Sun Day, they may not ever be in Tyrea on the same day.” He grabbed a quill, dipped it, and crossed out everything to the left and right of the point where the knife had stabbed.
Then he cut forward. Then he lifted the knife out of the skins. “So if our immortal stays a year in Ru, say, being worshipped as the goddess Atirat, that is a year denied her elsewhere.” With the quill, he crossed out all the area left and right of his cut.
“But why the stack?” Karris asked.
“Because there are many worlds, but only one time.” He flipped a different scroll onto the top of the stack. He crossed out the entire area left and right of the cut there, too. “So Atirat is denied that time everywhere else. An immortal has all eternity, but they have only a finite number of chances to interact with us mortals. Thus, paradoxically, with all eternity available to them, a single day becomes incredibly precious to immortals. So, were I immortal, I would only visit when my presence would matter most. Perhaps on my holy days, or more likely in times of war, where I might claim or lose an entire world.”
Karris did not like where this was suddenly going. Tingles prickled along her skin. “An immortal like Nabiros?”
Andross looked at her and licked dry lips. She swore she saw a flicker of fear in his eyes. “We’ve entered a time that immortals find interesting enough to visit personally, and because of some fluke or perhaps some very carefully prescribed and maintained traditions that neither you nor I were aware of, we have just done exactly what we needed to do to kill one of them. I think it would be an insane level of optimism not to expect the full fury of their vengeance.”
It was as if the floor had dropped out from under her. Karris’s problems had looked daunting when they’d been human. She buried her face in her hands, and felt her gorge rising.
It was too much for her. She was the wrong person for all this. She was going to fail everyone, and now that failure wouldn’t just mean the dissolution of the kingdom.
Breathe, Karris.
She pulled herself together and suddenly thought of something. “We aren’t alone in this. This is Orho
lam’s fight. We didn’t kill Nabiros by sheer luck. Those traditions weren’t just stumbled upon. Someone taught our ancestors those. And that we followed them well enough that they worked? That wasn’t luck—it must have been Orholam’s immortals intervening on our side.” And suddenly she could breathe again. Things were harmoniously blue and orderly again. Orholam would take care of the immortals, and she’d take care of her lists. That, that made sense.
Then Andross shit all over her peace. As he did. “Let us not mistake their side and ours. This is one battlefield among a hundred thousand for them. Perhaps their victory is complete now that one of the two hundred rebels is banished. Or perhaps by drawing the vengeance of his fellows, they get a dozen of the rebels to waste days or even mere hours here that are critically important to a battle on some other world that they believe is more important.”
“You’re telling me we could just be a distraction?” Karris asked.
“How did the old story put it? ‘When the king sends a ship of grain to his ally, he worries not about the comfort of the rats in the hold.’ Our lives are nothing to the universe, High Lady.”
“This is where your great intellect fails you for a lack of imagination and faith, Andross Guile. You think that to be concerned with the great tides of history means that one must lose track of one little fish. Or that by caring for one son, you can not care equally for another.”
“You wish to compare how well we have loved our sons?” Andross asked.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, flushing. She didn’t want to talk about Zymun. He made her uncomfortable, still. Though that was surely her own guilt speaking. But he was always touching her. Always wanting to be with her. “I meant that Orholam sees and hears and cares and—”
“And saves, yes, I know the old prayer. I’m simply not convinced by it. Tell me, Karris, have you ever prayed for something that you thought you needed more than breath itself?”
“Gavin is still missing. How dare you ask me that?”
“Ah, Gavin, yes. A man of singular gifts indeed. A man who would be of immense help in this war of ours, wouldn’t he?”
She said nothing, certain some cruelty would come out of Andross Guile’s mouth next.
“And where is he? And where is the Orholam who saves, who sees, who cares?”
Karris had no answer.
“We’re in a battle alone. And of the immortals, only one side has shown up, and it wasn’t Orholam’s.”
“What would you have us do?” Karris said.
“First, understand the stakes. We aren’t only fighting rebels now. We fight against the gods themselves. Should they win, this whole world will fall into their hands, perhaps until the end of time. We’ve killed one. In his time, Lucidonius killed nine. Depending on which translation is correct, that leaves us to face either twelve hundred thousand—minus ten—or a hundred and ninety. The good news or bad is that they come in ranks. Nabiros or Cerberos is a low-ranking immortal.”
“Naturally,” Karris said. Holy shit.
“I don’t know what happens if the strongest ones come. It was said during the reign of one particularly old and powerful Atirat that it was impossible to draft green anywhere in Blood Forest without his permission. Scholars since have interpreted that to mean drafting green in Blood Forest was illegal. I think they really meant impossible.”
“Like what we felt at Ru,” Karris said. At the end, greens there had lost control of their bodies, been unable to move. “The greens felt the bane from many leagues away, but it was only crippling within—what? A league or two? But how do they do it? And what determines their power?”
Andross hesitated. “The point is—”
“No, wait. What was that? You were just going to say something. Tell me.”
Andross thought for a moment, studying her. “That—how they do what they do and what determines their power—is what I sent Zymun to find out. It’s why I ordered him to infiltrate the Color Prince’s ranks. He didn’t learn much, unfortunately, before he had to flee. He’d failed the Color Prince twice—in assassinating Gavin, and in holding Ruic Head. Truth is, I’m not entirely certain he meant to fail at either.”
But Karris didn’t even hear the last biting words. Of course Andross would try to soil her joy. Karris hadn’t been able to get straight answers out of Zymun about when he’d tried to ‘hurt’ Gavin, she’d said, couching it gently. No wonder! His grandfather was to blame for all that, and he was trying to keep it secret because he was being loyal to Andross—the one person in his family he’d known for years.
And Andross, the cold bastard, had put Zymun in a place where he’d needed to publicly fail at an assassination attempt—but appear to really be trying—in order to obey his grandfather and keep his position near the Color Prince.
Confront Zymun about trying to assassinate Gavin and kill Kip.
Thank Orholam.
“The point is,” Andross said, exasperated, “perhaps Orholam sees us as an acceptable sacrifice in a greater war. I do not. High Lady, I wish you to pick up your knives. If we’re to survive this, we must be harder and smarter and stronger and crueler than the gods themselves.”
He regarded her for a long moment, and she shelved her sudden hope that maybe now things would feel more natural with Zymun, now that those awful things were explained away.
Andross said, “I ordered those men to beat you, because I saw what Orea was doing, how she was grooming you, giving you all these different assignments so you could learn her work. And I didn’t think you were equal to it. I remembered that sniveling girl you were, pretty and thoughtless. I wanted to see what you were made of—if you could even find out it was me, and if so, how you would come at me. I thought you were unwilling to fight back, or that when you did, you’d do it recklessly and stupidly. I was wrong about you then… and later, too.”
“Later? You mean when you stacked the election to White against me?” And tried to have me killed?! she didn’t say aloud.
“You will need all your strength for this fight,” he said. “And that streak of insanity or faith you show, whether it’s real or feigned.”
To say she was baffled would have been understating the matter. Had he just admitted to trying to have her killed? What was that? Why?
Perhaps it was as close to an apology as he was capable of. He got up and walked to the door. She simply stared after him, speechless.
“Oh,” he said, turning, “in case it wasn’t clear enough: Zymun is one of my knives. Sharp and imbalanced, but very predictable once you understand what he is. In normal times, I should not… but these are not normal times, are they? Let me offer you this: Guilt is a poor counselor. Guilt oft conspires to make two victims where there was only one. If it comes to trusting your gut or trusting your son, make a wise choice, High Lady.”
Chapter 41
Liv walked through the abandoned orange groves silently, clouds of superviolet billowing from her with every step. Drafting was as easy as breathing now, and the many-fingered clouds spread a hundred paces and more from her in every direction. She patted the fallen statue of the Broken Man, remnant of the long-dead old Tyrean Empire.
She didn’t go to the burnt-out buildings and rubble of Rekton. She didn’t go to her old home. She was here for something important.
She crossed the river, appearing to walk on water, small geysers of superviolet rising to support her feet at each step. She arrived at the old battlefield, long overgrown with low plants, mostly brown this late in the summer. Craters were still visible from artillery and magic both, eighteen years on, but now rain lilies and haemanthus huddled in those shady, watered places, beauty flourishing over ugliness, new life sprouting from rot.
Uncertain what her full powers might do here among the dead, she withdrew most of them into herself. Sundered Rock beckoned her, and she climbed it.
“Beliol,” she summoned, and a moment later her ring sparkled. Her nameless servant hadn’t remained nameless for long after she h
ad broken the halo. He’d seemed surprised that she had known what his name meant. Beliol meant ‘yokeless,’ so different from Belial—‘worthless.’
‘Yokeless?’ she’d asked. ‘And yet you serve me.’
‘One needs no yoke to be compelled to serve when one believes in the one whom one is serving.’ She’d been flattered, but of course, he’d meant it to be flattering.
“The chained one comes, Mistress,” Beliol said. “Five hundred paces, moving slowly so as not to give alarm, I believe.”
The approaching Mot was attended by only two guards, both blue wights, and thus fully under her control. Her full retinue was half a league away. They reached the base of the opposite side of the cracked dome that was Sundered Rock, and she began to climb it alone.
Samila Sayeh had been a hero of the Prisms’ War and later the lover of Usef Tep, her former enemy. They had come to Tyrea together to submit to the Freeing.
Finding war threatening once more, Samila had intended to die fighting against the Color Prince at Garriston. Usef Tep had done so, but she’d lived, and now she served the man responsible for her lover’s death. Funny how war makes villains of heroes and slaves of the free.
Liv had narrowly missed meeting the legend in Tyrea, but had later met her in Ru, when the mousy genius had figured out in moments a calibration problem with the Great Mirror of Ru that had stumped Liv and others for hours.
If anyone was going to figure out what Liv was really doing, it was she. But did Samila even remember what she’d done at the Great Mirror? Did she remember those coordinates she’d translated in an instant?
In a few minutes, the middle-aged woman had climbed the opposite side of Sundered Rock, allowing the gulf to sit between them. The duolith itself, shaped like a cracked egg, lay partially submerged. It was hundreds of feet tall, and lay gray in the sun, with scorch marks faded by nearly two decades’ passage but not gone. A few withered tufts of grass clung to its overhanging halves, and there was an opening below, as if the egg, broken in halves, had spilled its innards.