I severed the connection, and the tent went dark. Outside, the fire had been extinguished, and whatever moon and stars hung above us did not cast enough light to penetrate the canvas. I could not even see Khanaarre’s silhouette.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
I waited for her to ask what seemed like the obvious questions.
“I don’t think we need to wake Elana up for that,” she asked instead. “Do you?”
“No.”
A pregnant silence followed. I kept waiting for her to make the inevitable accusations. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, again, and I could pick out the edges of her features.
“Fuck,” she said again. Then she giggled. “I can’t believe the first thing he asked about was your hair.”
I chuckled, too, running my hand over my skull and the barely-a-week’s-worth of fuzz I had accumulated since leaving Hrodna, then struggled not to remember his hands in my hair – and hers.
“I started growing it out when I first left Starview just because shaving in the wilderness was too much work,” I said. “But then I got to Handar, and Namora, and saw all their beautiful long hair, and … well, it became a point of vanity.”
Khanaarre reached out and ran her strong, slender fingers across my fuzz. I tried not to flinch or shudder. I could not stop myself from leaning into her touch.
“It was glorious,” she said. “Will you grow it back?”
“I’m never cutting it again!”
We both laughed.
Neither of us had any desire to open the tent and let the cold back in, so we tucked my crystal ball and its protective box as safely out of the way as possible, in the corner by where we laid our heads. I did not sleep well, that night. I don’t believe that she did, either.
In the morning we reported to Elana.
“I believe that Urassarrain will pass along our message,” Khanaarre concluded, “but for obvious reasons, I am reluctant to seek confirmation.”
Elana nodded. She looked troubled, and rightly so.
“Should we worry about another unit of Heart’s Guard appearing?” she asked at last.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Finding my mind while using my crystal ball is not the same as finding me in physical space. And even if he does, somehow, know exactly where we are … we are four, five, maybe six times the distance from Vencar City that So’renner is, which would make the task of sending anyone or anything here without a physical anchor exponentially more difficult.”
Of course, between the syphon and the Rorgoth Throne, it might still be possible. And after everything else, I could no longer trust him to stick to any part of the plan we had agreed on in the year before storming the imperial palace.
“With that said,” I went on, “perhaps we should break camp as soon as possible.”
And so we did. Rennin and I focused our efforts on taking down the tents. Khanaarre and Elana distributed some of the dry food stores from her wizard’s chests to our backpacks. When everything was stowed, we all checked each other’s harnesses, and set out south and east.
I couldn’t help but dwell on Aemillian’s intrusion into our scrying. I had been supposed to contact him, yes. It was perfectly typical that he would not wait for me to do so, yes. But how had he sprung upon us so quickly? Even if he had some enchantment set up to alert him when I scried, it should have taken him longer to extract himself from whatever he was doing and go to his own crystal ball. Had he coincidentally been scrying, as well, when we went searching for Urassarrain? Had he somehow divined when we would return and when I would next use my orb? Or was something stranger still going on?
I had, at this point, almost completely lost control of the situation. It was only pure luck that Aemillian’s first taunts, before I could end the scrying, hadn’t given away the whole game to Khanaarre. As it was, there were obvious questions to be asked and easy conclusions to be drawn. I could only assume that she was taking her time to work through all the possible angles before saying anything.
A few days or weeks of intense divination might be able to clarify things for me. I had, in fact, attempted just that back in Ghol Vidar, after Khanaarre and I had repaired the damage to my crystal ball and its enchantments. But some combination of the veils between worlds and Aemillian’s magical protections had clouded my vision almost completely. And now, high in the mountains, early enough in spring that the weather might do anything at any time, and with the whole party now aware that their enemy could appear in my visions at will, it would be impossible to convince them that it was worth the risk – because it absolutely fucking wasn’t.
All I had to go on was the vision I had been given by the Oracle in Ghol Vidar.
===
The Oracles’ chief purpose is to divine whether an unborn rhu xian child will live, and – if so – whether they will pose a danger to the Empire. This ritual is of such vital importance to the rhu xian that the Oracle is available at any hour of day or night. But it is not such a common need that the Oracles and their visions are not also available to others who need guidance.
Each Oracle’s grotto is unique. There are some similarities. Each has three priestesses who serve as Seers, usually one of the Stars, and one of the Mother, and one of the Storm – not always those three, but always priestesses, never sorcerers or exiles. Each has a central chamber where the petitioner approaches the Seer for a vision. And each is underground. There, though, all sureties end.
The Oracle at Ghol Vidar was high on the mountain, but not as high as the observatory. It was, in a sense, my ultimate objective when I left the others in the house of Vol Mak Khan. First I sought out the priestesses of the Flame, where I was scourged and cleansed and purified. Then I ascended to the Observatory, where I renewed my vows to Ün, the Star-serpent, the Maker, and was taken back into his mysteries. Then, at last, mere hours before word came of the first great winter storm, I approached the Oracle.
The path was narrow, and dangerous, and could only be traversed on foot. Pregnant priestesses had fallen to their deaths, here. The cave entrance was a rough fissure, tall and tapering, that seemed to squeeze in on you as you passed through it, before opening into a wide cavern. A trio of spindly-looking thrones, each twice as tall as I and flanked by a pair of ever-burning braziers, sat around a glowing crystal rock formation as wide as my outstretched arms and almost as tall as the thrones. A fourth chair, little more than a stool, completed the circle.
I sat on the stool. I could not see any of the Seers in that moment, but one was always nearby, ready to take her throne and to do her duty. A bell and a blade lay on the ground at my feet. I rang the bell.
The Seer who emerged from the shadows was young, lovely, with a serene face and a gentle smile. Her features were unusually dark, her face and hands almost steely gray, and her eyes the muted yellow of old gold. Her robes were pale gray, embroidered with key-like patterns reserved for Seers. She swept clockwise around the circle, crossing behind me to stand beside the throne at my left.
“Welcome, Yma Rinlo,” she said. I had not made specific arrangements to come on this day and hour, but I had petitioned for an audience and I was not surprised to be recognized. “I am Saana Tyra, priestess of the Storm.”
“I am honored to hear your name, Seer.”
“What brings you to the Oracle of Ghol Vidar?”
“I have a choice to make,” I said. “I must choose between two emperors, and I betray the other and myself with either choice.”
Saana Tyra nodded slowly.
“Then spill your blood upon the stone, and we will see what we will see.”
I took up the knife at my feet – an archaic, leaf-bladed thing of bronze – and stood. I cut open my thumb with the practiced ease of a wizard, and pressed the bleeding wound to the massive rock formation. I sat quickly, while the crystal began to hum.
The Oracle is the work of the Seers. Whatever magics they possess, most priestesses do not share the vision, whether they have come as mothers or for more exotic purposes. But some do, sometimes. That day, I did.
I saw the Rorgoth Throne. In the vision, as in life, it was a massive block of intricately carved obsidian, every surface thickly encrusted with magical writing, most of which had never been deciphered. I could feel the immense antiquity of the Throne, ancient beyond mortal words. The vision conveyed what Aemillian and I had always suspected, that the Rorgoth Throne was not a relic of the Heroic Ages at the dawn of this world, but of the Elder World that came before. And then the vision split into two visions: one in which Aemillian sat the throne; one in which Elana did.
In the vision of Emperor Aemillian, he sat tall and straight upon the throne in his signature black and red robes. There was a darkness in him. It had always been there. I had seen it when he first sponsored my research. I had seen it when he lay beside me. I had seen it when he set his sights on rule. The syphon he had made, tapping into the Shadow Realm, had deepened that darkness; I could see that now, as I could not, then. Now, the Rorgoth Throne amplified that darkness, even as it amplified his power.
In the vision of Emperor Elana, she sat the throne in regal splendor, draped in the fashions of High Imperial Vencar. She smiled beatifically, but there was a hardness to her heart. The road to the throne had taken something from her, and – like her grandfather before her – she had filled that hole with the rigid structure of the Triumvirate mysteries. She still carried her ideals, but her notion of justice had become calcified to her need for stability.
The Emperor Aemillian Solirius ruled with precision and authority. The darkness in his heart dimmed the light in every room he entered. His will and awareness spread like a stain, an oily shadow cast over the palace, then the City, then the entire nation. From the Rorgoth Throne, there was nowhere in Vencar that he could not see, and almost nowhere in the Compact that he could not reach.
The Emperor Elana Traiana ruled as well and as wisely as she was able. She surrounded herself with priests and wizards and advisors, scholars and sages famed for knowledge and understanding, experts in their fields. The recovery from back-to-back civil wars was slow, but steady. The woman withered on the throne, but the nation thrived.
Aemillian’s vision of his rule had always included conquest. With his rule unquestioned, it was only a matter of time before he moved on Naal. Pretext came in the form of monsters from the desert: strange automatons in the image of relics from ancient a’Rasyr; alien abominations, unlike anything ever seen before; and, in their wake, the dead rose, restless. But Aemillian did not send his armies straight into the Sacred Desert and the apparently open tombs of the Rasyri kings. He sent them to Arthago, overthrowing the parliament and claiming the libraries for his own.
Elana lived and died. Her children and grandchildren followed her in orderly succession. The Traianum Dynasty was unremarkable save for its longevity, and in many ways this was good for the nation. In other ways, though, it was a slow decline. Without a conflict in which to demonstrate their own authority, they looked to their predecessors for inspiration. One by one, the old Traianum Reforms were reinstated. Shadows gathered in corners, and the small cults – the rivals of the Triumvirate – were blamed. When monsters poured out of the south, they saw not tragedy but opportunity, and rushed to seize the Old Rasyri Highlands for Vencar in the name of the common good. That did not stop the dead from rising.
Everything grew faint after the rise of that threat from ancient a’Rasyr. In one vision, Aemillian lived on and on, darkening and hardening, and the world darkening around him. In the other, generations passed, the Traianum Dynasty fell and was succeeded by some other house, who fell in turn – I could see countless possibilities, some glorious, some agonizing, none certain enough to pick out clearly from the rest.
The Seer and I came out of the trance together.
“You have seen what I have seen,” she said. It was only grammatically a question.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you have the answer to your question?”
“No,” I said. “Only the knowledge that the stakes are higher than I had guessed.”
===
For the first two days we were high enough that, barring the reappearance of the dragons we had seen guarding the gate back from the Holy Land, we had little to worry about but our footing and a change in the weather. The Great Ice Wall loomed over us, impossibly tall. Rather than vanishing, like the transition from the Holy Lands to the Lightning Plains, the Wall first seemed to become obscured by mist, then faded from view like a desert mirage, eventually revealing snowcapped mountain peaks even taller than our own, but still of a mortal scale.
The air was sharp, and dry, and thin. Even going downhill – which we did mostly, but not exclusively – every step we took was twice as hard as it should have been. We had to stop often to rest, and though we did not go through water like we had in the sweltering heat of the Holy Lands, we needed more than we had anticipated.
We all heaved sighs of relief when we crossed the tree line. The branches of the evergreens sheltered us from sun and wind and the roots broke up the rocks so that, even covered in snow and ice, we felt like we had more to hang onto. With the trees came hardy scrub brush that grew between them, and with that came signs of mountain goats and sheep. And with the prey animals – for which we watched carefully and hopefully, ever cognizant that our stores, while prodigious, were limited – came signs of predators. Bears would still be hibernating. Cougars and mountain lions would not.
“Legend has it that this is ogre territory,” Rennin said on our second afternoon in the high mountain forest, probably less than half idly.
“Yes,” I said. “At least, some of the ranges north of Tanirinaal and Mashandosaar are ogre territory. I don’t know if these mountains are, but better to keep watch than not.”
“What do you know about ogres?” asked Khannaarre, her tone high and airy.
I chuckled. I deserved it.
“Not as much as I’d like,” I admitted, “now that we’re moving through these mountains.”
I took a moment to gather my thoughts. Not only was the question well-deserved, it was relevant. I hadn’t thought about it until Rennin asked, but there was a nonzero chance of passing through an ogre tribe’s hunting grounds on our way to dwarven territory.
“I know that the course of human history was set by the two great ogre hordes,” I said. “The first came while the elves were still living on the slopes of Holy Mount Kashrin. Humans lived at the foot of the mountain, and whatever it was that Es and Dal did to protect their peoples from the horde … that protection was not afforded to the djuunan. Some of us fled south, riding the currents of the River Venn and floating across the great crystal lake until finally settling in modern Naal and eventually building the nations of a’Rasyr. Some of us fled west, sheltering under the protection of the Rivers Ilus and Gyyr.”
And, I suspected, still others – forgotten by history – had fled southwest, settling in the hills and highlands to become the ancientmost ancestors of the Namoran clans. But that was not widely accepted, or relevant to Rennin’s and Khanaarre’s questions.
“The second horde came out of the mountains a few generations later – no one is certain precisely when. What we do know is that the Prophets of Shiithaia and Astennuu came to the people of the Gyyr and Ilus rivers a year or two in advance of that, offering guidance and protection, and effectively founded the nation of Illustria.” I paused to take a drink of water. “Some historians think that it was that same horde of ogres that fell on the people of a’Rasyr and prompted the coming of the Prophet of Althaeruh – though, others say it was sand trolls, or demons from deep in the Sacred Desert.”
My lecture was broader than was called for, and rambling, but the fact of the matter was that we were all bored and tired. We stopped for breaks every hour or so – snacking and hydrating and taking our weight off of our beyond-abused feet. It was not enough. It might never be enough. This was easily the hardest terrain we had encountered on our entire journey, and, even after several days, we were none of us fully acclimated to the thin mountain air. Even I, fully enjoying the benefits of magical youth and vigor imparted by my syphon, and Rennin, the most experienced campaigner of us who remained, were wrecks.
“Myself, I doubt that the horde made it that far south. The first hundred years of Illustrian history is a list of battles against ogres. I struggle to believe that there were enough ogres to plague both nascent human civilizations.”
“I know that there are ogre tribes east of here,” I went on, “because they skirmish with the dwarves every few years. It’s not a serious war, but it’s been going on for so long that the affected dwarven cities just take it for granted.”
“But what about actual ogres,” Rennin said when it was clear that I’d come to my end. “What can you tell us about the creatures, themselves?”
I shrugged.
“Only what everyone knows. They’re big. They’re strong. They live in the mountains. A few Illustrian illustrations survive, but some of them are … fanciful. Beyond that, I can only speculate wildly.”
“So speculate!”
I laughed.
“I speculate that the ogres were driven out of the Holy Empire when the Jor began establishing their freeholds, after they rebelled against the rhu xian. I speculate that each wave of ogre hordes was preceded by a wave of Jor expansion. I speculate that, if the wild variety of descriptions of ogres in Illustrian and dwarven stories are all true, then ogres must be creatures of incredible physical magic, mutating constantly.”
“Please stop speculating,” said Elana. “None of these thoughts are helpful or comforting.”
We all laughed at that. We also all kept a sharper lookout while we hiked. That night we started keeping watches.
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